by Anna Martin
My mind kept asking questions I didn’t want to answer: What would you do without Will? Could you cope? Will you be with him long enough to have to deal with one of you dying first? What if you had to live without him? What if you leave him on his own?
It wasn’t helpful. Then again, a sense of our own mortality is what separates humans from the beasts, so it wasn’t like I was the first person who’d had to deal with this internal self-flagellation. It was all the worse because Will wasn’t around.
I took Baby for the long walk through a small forest a couple of miles away. By the time we were done and heading back to the car, she was exhausted and I took pity on her, carrying her the last few hundred yards. She was asleep before I pulled out of the parking lot, and snoring by the time I hit the highway.
Chapter 2
FOR THE first few days after Will left, it was weird. We exchanged texts a few times a day and called each other fairly regularly. His absence highlighted how much we had all relied on him while he was here.
Neither I, my sister, nor Dad had managed to settle into any kind of routine. I wasn’t sleeping well and assumed from their tired eyes they weren’t, either. It had only been a couple of weeks since Mama passed, and although I was coming to terms with the fact she was gone, I was having a hard time accepting she’d hidden her illness from us for so long.
I hadn’t lived in Georgia since I was a young teenager, so being back was strange. It was a different way of life from Seattle, that much was certain. There was a much stronger sense of community, of people knowing each other, of interactions with neighbors.
Will and I lived in a nice house on Capitol Hill, the “gay district” of Seattle. Even so, we only knew a few people from the area, and a few more to nod to in passing. Here, everyone knew my family, and by extension, me. It was a little unnerving.
It also meant everyone knew I was gay.
As far as coming out was concerned, I’d done that years ago when I’d taken Will to my cousin’s wedding as my date. That was when he’d met all my family and anyone who wanted to get a good look at the local gays got their chance. That we were still together all these years later seemed to surprise people. Well, fuck them. I really didn’t care what they were saying behind my back.
Jennifer was trying to get Dad to do stuff—go fishing or hunting or anything that got him out of the house. He wasn’t really resisting her, more like she was in his way and completely unable to figure out what best to do. We’d likely pushed her back to work quicker than she was ready, neither Will, Dad, nor I able to put up with her fussing. We weren’t men who liked to be fussed over.
Fussing seemed to be the order, not just of the day. The neighborhood women had taken it on themselves to be an almost constant presence, coming over with cake or cookies or tea and sympathy. I didn’t blame my dad for being sick of it, and told Jennifer I knew where he was when he disappeared when really I had no idea. The man needed space and time, like the rest of us.
I picked up the domestic stuff. Jennifer didn’t really have time to do it when she got home from work, even though she was only doing a few shifts a week. I didn’t want to put any pressure on her to clean or cook when she got in.
Will and I were a pretty egalitarian couple. I didn’t mind vacuuming or shoving laundry in the washer or doing dishes, though he was better at ironing shirts and making dinner and remembering what we needed to get from the supermarket. Taking over completely, not just looking after myself, but my Dad and sister too, felt like a lot of responsibility.
“Where you off to?” I asked as my dad wandered through the house loaded up with a backpack.
“Thought I’d go out on the lake,” he said. He looked at me funny for a moment, then cocked his head to the side. “Wanna come?”
I nodded mutely. He hadn’t asked me before.
“I’ll go change.”
“Okay.”
It didn’t take long to swap my jeans for cargo shorts and sneakers for more sturdy boots. Dad had a little motorized boat docked down on the lake, and I guessed he spent a lot of time out on it when he wasn’t at home. It was more overcast today; the weathergirl was predicting rain later for the first time in what felt like months. We hadn’t even been around for that long, and I was already missing the rain.
Dad was waiting by the door.
“Packed a couple more sandwiches,” he said as I tossed a few things into a bag of my own. “And a couple bottles of that tea y’all like.”
“Thanks.”
The drive to the lake only took about twenty minutes, mostly because we didn’t pass another car the whole way there. Being back in the country was weird.
I was a kid the last time I helped my dad out on the boat. Still, some things you didn’t forget, and this was one of them: while Dad checked over the motor and the structure of the boat to make sure it wasn’t damaged, I packed our stuff in tightly and found the lifejackets.
There was just about room in the old thing for two adults, and it wasn’t the most comfortable thing in the world. I knew my dad had upgraded it a few times over the years; Mama had always complained about how much time he spent out here tinkering with it.
“Ready?”
“Yessir.”
“Come on, then.”
The engine choked, then spluttered to life, then Dad maneuvered out of the little marina and onto the lake.
Strangely, there seemed to be more traffic here than there was on the roads. We passed a few other boats as we ambled along, Dad lifting his hand in greeting to all of them as we went by. I didn’t recognize anyone. These weren’t people who had come to the house after Mama had passed. They must have been people who hadn’t known her. Or maybe they didn’t know she’d died. My dad wasn’t exactly the type of guy to talk about his feelings. It was entirely possible no one who knew him had heard about his wife.
The idea made me irrationally sad.
He pulled up to an area with overhanging trees, protecting us from some of the heat of the sun, and started to arrange his fishing stuff.
“You want a rod? I got a spare one.”
“No, thanks,” I said, kicking back into a more comfortable position. “I brought a book. I think I’m just gonna read.”
He grunted in reply.
It really was peaceful out here—not quiet, exactly, although quieter after the chug of the engine had cooled down. I kicked my boots off and dangled my feet over the side of the boat, dipping my toes into the cool water.
“You’ll scare all the fish off doing that.”
“You never catch any fish anyway.”
“Not the point.” He didn’t tell me to move, though.
There wasn’t an awkward silence between us, more like we were just two guys who won’t talk unless we’ve got something to say. Idle chitchat was definitely not my dad’s thing. For an hour or so, he fished, I read, and neither of us said a word.
Then: “Have you heard from Will?”
I looked up and covered my eyes against the sun. “Mm? Not today, no. We spoke last night. How come?”
“No reason. Just askin’. How’s he doing?”
“Good, I think,” I said, laying the book down on my chest. It was rare for Dad to instigate a conversation. I was going to make sure I was involved in it. “I know he’s got meetings booked over the next few days, but he won’t tell me what they’re about. A lot of his work is like that, though.”
“What about your job?”
“What about it?”
“Do they mind that you’re here?”
“I took a leave of absence, Dad. I told you that.”
He frowned. “You can’t do that forever, though.”
“I know. We’ll work something out, I’m sure.”
“Are you…. At work, I mean, do they know… about Will?”
“Yeah,” I said with a little smile. “He’s kinda hard to hide, you know? Especially since we’ve been together for so long.”
“And they don’t mind?”
“No, not at all.”
“Oh.”
I reached for the cool bag and grabbed one of the bottles of peach tea. The sun was starting to get hotter now. We wouldn’t be able to stay out all day in this. I sipped and waited.
“So help me, Jesse, I’m trying to understand,” Dad said, looking way too anguished for my liking. “I don’t want to hurt you, or offend you, but God knows I just don’t get it.”
“I know, Dad,” I said as gently as I could. He was a good man. I’d known that since I was a child. And he’d dealt with my coming out with little more than a shrug and a nod, all the while living in a community where being homosexual was still taboo.
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
He huffed at that, mumbled something under his breath, and looked away. I let him come back in his own time, sipped my tea, and waited.
“You went with girls when you were in high school,” he said. “And after.”
“Yeah.”
“Were you just pretending? Making out you liked them when really you liked boys?”
“No… no. I liked those girls. I liked Adele.”
“What about now?”
“To be honest,” I said, fiddling with the label on the bottle, “I don’t pay attention to anyone else anymore. I mean, sure, I look… and Will knows I look at girls too. It doesn’t bother him. I can’t imagine ever meeting someone who would turn my head away from him.”
“You look at guys and girls?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sorta.”
“Just curious,” he said, not looking at me. “Not judging.”
“I know.” And I did. “Did I ever tell you how Will and I met?”
“No.”
Well, I wasn’t going to give him the whole story. We’d met when my Mistress at the time got pregnant, and she wanted another Dom to take over so I still had someone to submit to, someone who would take good care of me. I’d balked at first at the idea of submitting to a man, but it all clicked into place with Will.
He was my Master first, then my lover, then my boyfriend, then my whole world. I found a better way to describe it to my father, though.
“We met through mutual friends when I was still dating Adele,” I said. “We just clicked with each other, and he became a good buddy. I never had any intention of taking our relationship further. It was just… just a friendship, at first.”
“You knew he was gay?”
“Yessir. He didn’t hide it from me, but it wasn’t like he came on to me or anything. After some time, I realized I had feelings for him beyond our friendship, and he felt the same way. That’s when I broke it off with Adele.”
Again, not strictly true. Will had been flogging and fucking me for months before I called time on my relationship. It got to a point, though, when I knew I was starting to fall in love with him. Physically cheating was one thing, and I found a way to justify it to myself: Adele could never do the things to me that Will did. She couldn’t meet those needs, to give me pain, punishment, reward. Falling in love with someone was another matter entirely.
“How many years is it now?”
“Six,” I told him. “Nearly seven.”
“I thought—”
“What?”
“No.”
“I don’t mind.”
“I thought gay men don’t do long-term relationships.”
I couldn’t blame him for that attitude. He was a product of society, just as much as the rest of us.
“Well, Will and I do.”
“Are you really gay, though? Is it because you still like women too, that you can do the whole long-term thing?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, picking my words carefully. “There are some gay men who have been together for twenty, thirty years, or more, Dad. A lot of gay men have families now. I get that back in the day there was a stereotype all gay men fucked around and couldn’t commit to relationships and were flighty, but it’s not like that anymore.”
“You, um, you don’t….”
“Fuck around? No.”
“Good. I don’t want you getting AIDS.”
“Jesus, Dad.”
“What?” he said hotly, turning to me now. “You can’t blame me, Jesse. I can’t exactly go down to the library and check out a book to find this out for myself. And Jennifer tried to help me go on your Internet, and I don’t understand that, either. How am I supposed to know?”
“You’re not,” I said. “You’re not. I’m sorry. Will doesn’t have AIDS, Dad, and neither do I. And neither of us has sex with other people, so there’s no chance of us getting it.”
“Okay.”
We were both quiet then, watching the water and pointedly not looking at each other. In the grand scheme of things, this wasn’t so bad. I knew he was right, there was no way for him to get this information other than me or Fox News, and given a choice I knew which option I preferred.
He surprised me by talking again first.
“How do you know—I mean, how does it work…. How do you know who does what?”
“Is that a roundabout way of asking who’s the woman in the relationship?” I asked, teasing him just a little bit.
My dad huffed and blushed.
“There is no woman. We get to write our own rules. Imagine being in a relationship where there was no societal pressure to behave in a certain way. You could just do whatever feels right.”
“But those pressures, those are the foundations that built America.”
Fox News was back.
“To quote the great Bob Dylan, Dad, ‘The times, they are a-changing.’”
He laughed at that. “You got that right. Gotta admit, though, Jess, you’re pretty rough around the edges for a gay guy.”
For only a second or two, I held in an indignant snort of laughter, then it escaped and I had to hold my stomach to keep the giggles in.
“What?” Dad demanded.
“Shit,” I drawled. “Am I not gay enough for you now?”
“I’d have thought being with another man was gay enough,” he grunted.
“Sure is.” Then I reconsidered his words. “Are you asking me about sex? ’Cause if you are, that’s okay, but I’m not about to tell you unless you’re sure you wanna know.”
“No,” he said, but I could tell he’d thought about it. “I don’t wanna know about that.”
Good, I said silently. “A lot of parents wouldn’t be this cool with their only son being gay.”
“To quote the great Bob Dylan, Jesse….”
That made me laugh. “Yeah. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m happy things turned out like this, and not with you disowning me.”
“Fuck’s sake,” he said. “You’re my kid, aren’t you? Will makes you happy, just like Trent makes Jen happy. I worry for you because you’re my son. I might not understand it all, but it doesn’t stop me loving you.”
“Thanks, Dad.”
That was the end of the conversation. He went back to his rod, I picked up my book, and the quiet settled around us again.
Chapter 3
WILL TEXTED me to say things were taking longer than he’d expected at work, and he wouldn’t be able to get back as quickly as he thought. It stung, knowing we would already have been apart for over a week by the time he came back, but it wasn’t like there was anything I could do about it. So I sucked it up, straightened my spine, and got on with life.
It turned out keeping house for my family was a harder job than I’d anticipated. It wasn’t just Dad and Jen—I could handle them—it was all the aunts and cousins that came out of the woodwork and spent a few hours a day at the house. That meant constant tea, coffee, cookies, cake, pies…. Entertaining when I didn’t need or want to be entertained.
Neither Jen nor I wanted to cook, Dad couldn’t cook, and I kept refusing offers from those concerned aunts and cousins who wanted to make dinner for us every night. Will was the cook in our house, and we ended up ordering in more than was advisable. We didn’t part
icularly want to go out, either. If it had been up to me, I’d have lived on sandwiches and iced tea, and I guessed Dad and Jennifer were the same.
The three of us didn’t really socialize in the evenings, either. When I did sit in the family room, it always felt supremely awkward. Two men at opposite ends of the room, neither talking to the other, eyes glued on the TV for the duration of the show until I went to bed early to read, leaving him to whatever he wanted to do.
“Why are you here, Jess?” Dad asked in a commercial break, shattering the silence. “I don’t mean that in a bad way, but your Mama’s funeral was weeks ago now.”
I shifted in the recliner to look at him. “Do you want me to go?”
“That wasn’t what I asked.”
“I don’t know,” I said, trying to hold back the frustration in my voice. “It just feels like I should be here right now.”
“Me and your sister… well, you know Jen. She’ll be fine. And I’m all right too. You’ve got a whole life up in Seattle. I don’t like to think you’re missing out on anything.”
“I’m not missing out,” I said. “I promise. I want to be here. I can’t tell you all the reasons why. I’m not ready to go back and… and….”
“For it all to be real? She’s not coming back, no matter how much you or I wish she were.”
“I know that. I’m not a child, Dad.”
He smiled, the edges of his mouth tugging up though he tried to hide it.
“You don’t know how many times I’ve heard you say that. I know you’re not a child. Neither me or Jennifer is your responsibility, though.”
“Do you mind?” I asked. “Me being here?”
“I love that you’re here. I wish the circumstances were better, sure. I like that we get to hang out.”
It was my turn to smile. “Hang out?”
“All the cool kids are saying it.”
I laughed. “So, you’re not going to send me packing?”
“Of course not. No. Take your time.”
The conversation made me think, something I’d been trying to avoid doing wherever possible. There was a part of me that knew I was being stupid, that I should be getting on with my life, not trying to live someone else’s down here. Still….