Jack. Baby, it’s okay to move on with your life.
Jack felt his face crumpling, and he sucked in a wet, rough breath. I’m not ever letting you go, he thought.
I’m not ever letting you leave, the ghost whispered, and Jack put a hand over his tear-streaked face, trying desperately to hold himself together. I’ll always be with you, Jack. You don’t have to hold on so tight.
His chest was on fire, now. He felt Gabriel shift and knew that he’d turned his head, knew that he was looking at him. After a few seconds, he felt Gabriel’s hand on his wrist, felt him drawing his arm up until he was holding Jack’s hand clutched to his chest; Jack could feel the steady beat of Gabriel’s heart against the back of his hand, could feel the warm strength of Gabriel’s fingers wrapped around his.
I can’t, Jack thought.
Yes you can. I know you’re scared but you’re not a coward, Jack.
He managed to draw an uneven breath but it immediately lodged itself in his chest, unable to find a home. His fingers and thumb were digging into the outer corners of his eyes. His head was spinning from lack of air. He could feel Gabriel holding his hand, rubbing a thumb on his wrist, but the feeling was distant, a million miles away.
If you’d known you were going to lose me, would you do things differently? Would you turn away from my smile in the club? Pull away from me in the morning? Or would you love me anyway?
A sob escaped him, and he barely recognized the sound as his own. Always love, he thought.
Always choose love, baby, his mind whispered.
Jack was clutching Gabriel’s fingers, his grip tight enough to be painful, but Gabriel was simply holding his hand, stroking his wrist, waiting. Jack could pull away, and Gabriel would let him go.
Jack rolled toward the other man, snaking his other arm over Gabriel and burying his face into his t-shirt. Gabriel released his hand and wrapped his arms around him; his fingers slipped into Jack’s hair, rubbing lightly at his scalp, and his other hand traced gentle circles on his back.
And Jack felt the dam inside of him break, and the pain bubbled up within him, filling him, overflowing him, and he cried into Gabriel’s chest, soaking the shirt with tears and snot and saliva. He cried as he hadn’t cried in nearly a year, since those first long and lonely nights after Jeff was gone when he’d muffled his sobs in his pillow so that Alex wouldn’t hear him.
Gabriel held him, stroking his hair and his back, and Jack had no sense of time. Eventually he became aware of the pins and needles in his hand; his arm was pinned between their bodies, and he slowly drew it back from Gabriel’s chest to find a more comfortable position. His other arm was still over Gabriel’s body, his fingers curled against the teacher’s ribs.
Jack’s eyes and nose and throat burned, and his head was thudding dully, but his breaths were finally coming normally. He pressed his cheek against the damp cotton of Gabriel’s shirt, feeling the steady rise and fall of his chest.
“After Jeff…was gone, I didn’t let anyone see me like this,” he finally said in a low voice thick with tears. “I couldn’t. I had to hold myself together or I’d just…crumble to dust. I cried with Alex. How could I not? I couldn’t—I wouldn’t—hide my pain from him, but I couldn’t let him see all of it, either. I needed him to believe that things would be okay and if he saw inside of me, saw that I wasn’t sure anything would ever be okay again…” He drew a breath and let it out, pressing closer against Gabriel’s warmth.
“It’s like I’ve been saying goodbye to him, to our life together, a little bit at a time. These things sneak up on me, you know? I suddenly realize that he’ll never see Alex graduate or start a family, and the pain hits me and I…have to let go of the idea of sitting beside him while our son gets his diploma. Or I hear a joke and while I’m laughing I suddenly remember that he’ll never hear it, or laugh at anything…” Jack sniffed as tears leaked from the corners of his swollen eyes. “Or I hear a song—You know that Damn Yankees song, ‘High Enough?’ I heard it on the radio the day of the service, and I can’t ever hear it without crying, now.
“All these little things, all these little pieces of a future I thought we had together,” he said, his voice cracking, and Gabriel’s arms tightened around him. “But this…” He pulled in a shuddery breath, sliding his palm over Gabriel’s heart. “This was…a big piece. It feels like saying goodbye to him all over again, only this time it was my choice. And I’m not sorry, Gabe,” he said, clutching at the other man’s shirt. “I’m not sorry, it just hurts. I loved him, but he’s gone. He’s gone and I have to face the rest of my life without him. I’ve been going along day to day, surviving. And then you came along and made me want to start living again.
“So I choose living over surviving, and…feeling over numbness and love over bitterness. I’m sorry, Gabe, I didn’t mean to…break down like this, I don’t want you to think—”
Gabriel tucked his fingers under Jack’s chin, gently tipping his face up, and their eyes met. Gabriel had tears in his eyes, too—tears for Jack and for Jeff and for Alex. He bent his head down and pressed his lips to Jack’s forehead.
“It wasn’t fair, what happened to Jeff,” he said in a low voice. “Cancer is never fair, but Jeff was a good man, a good father…If I could give him back to Alex, and to you, I would do anything to make that possible.”
Jack sighed. “You’re right, it isn’t fair. But I’m thankful I had him for as long as I did. It’s because of him that I know what kind of love is possible.” He paused. “And…it’s because of you that I know it might be possible again,” he said. “I’m sorry,” he repeated. “Last night was supposed to be about you, and I don’t—”
“Last night was about us,” Gabriel countered softly, rubbing a thumb along Jack’s rough chin, studying his face in the gray light of early morning. “Last night was…intimate.”
Jack smiled. “Yeah?” he asked, managing to arch an eyebrow.
“You haven’t been with anyone like that since Jeff, it’s natural you’d feel—”
“Like that?” Jack interrupted. “Nobody except him,” he said, barely audible. He searched Gabriel’s face. “Before him, there was sex, sometimes sort of…sweet, you know, but never anything like what I shared with him from the very first night. Or with you.” He paused, gathering his thoughts, and looked at his own hand resting on Gabriel’s chest. “It’s funny, I…never thought about romance or relationships as a kid. All my friends started dating or talking about girls, well I wasn’t interested in any girls but I never really thought about being interested in boys, either. Maybe I was a late-bloomer, you know, or maybe I was just oblivious. I thought I was gonna be a priest, for a while there, and maybe that was part of it, too. I wasn’t imagining any sort of future with…marriage and family…”
“When did things change?” Gabriel prompted gently.
Jack met his eyes. “It’s not a happy story,” he said.
Gabriel offered a sad smile in response. “They rarely are,” he murmured.
Jack sighed and rolled onto his back. He put out his arm, and Gabriel shifted closer, settling his head onto Jack’s shoulder. Jack curved his arm around him, stroking absently at Gabriel’s bicep as he searched for the words to tell his story.
“So my cousins and I, we grew up together, as altar boys, right?” he finally said. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment, listening to the rain pattering the windowpane. “We were going to be priests, four of us. I mean, there was no question we were all supposed to go to seminary and take vows, and I thought I had my whole life planned out. I didn’t give it much thought at all, actually. Nothing had ever made me question it. Then one day, I was fourteen, everything changed. I got jumped by these three guys on my way back from the store, they smashed my groceries and just started wailing on me, right? I didn’t even try to fight back, I was this scrawny kid, and I just sort of rolled up and waited for it to be over.
“Then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, this kid appears, and he’s got a stick held like a b
aseball bat,” he said, holding his hand up in facsimile, “and he just goes to town on these guys ‘til some people finally intervene and break it all up. Meanwhile, I’m sitting on the sidewalk, bleeding, probably crying, but just in awe of this kid’s fearlessness.
“After the other guys ran off, he came over and gave me his hand to pull me up, and…I don’t know how else to say it, but…he was just the most beautiful person I’d ever seen. He took my breath away. That had never happened. I didn’t even think it was something that did happen in real life. At first, he was still angry, at what they’d done to me, but then he smiled at me, and…I didn’t understand what I was feeling but I knew that I wasn’t supposed to be feeling it. And he knew. He looked at me and he understood my confusion.
“He was sixteen, but his life had already been harder than I could even imagine then. His father’d kicked him out of the house, and he’d been doing what he had to—to survive. He was tough, he had to be. But he was sweet, too. For weeks, I followed him around, and he let me. He let me be his friend. We didn’t talk about the fact that I had a crush on him. Every night, I prayed about it, feeling guilty about my thoughts and feelings, thinking there must be something wrong with me. I’d never felt that way before. I’d never had a crush on anyone. It confused me—scared me. He knew that.
“We were friends, nothing more. But one day my cousins found us together. We were sitting on my bed, reading a comic book, when they walked in. Just sitting, our heads bent together. We were close, legs and shoulders touching. It was the most contact I’d ever allowed—Hell, I didn’t allow it, I initiated it, and he allowed it.
“And they walked in and I felt like I’d been caught doing something and they could tell by the look on my face. They started making jokes about him, about his hair and clothes, calling him names, and he looked at me. He looked at me, and I didn’t say anything. If I had, he would’ve stayed, but I just sat there. Silent. Like a coward. So, he left. Later that night, my uncle cornered me in the laundry, shoved me up against the wall and told me that I’d better straighten up or I was going straight to Hell, and I wasn’t taking any of his family with me.
“I was scared—But, you know what, Gabe? I was a good kid. I took care of my younger sisters. I did my chores, I did my schoolwork, I never talked back to adults—I was a good kid, I was an altar boy, I was baptized, I’d been planning my life around being a priest. I believed wholeheartedly in the goodness of God and faith. I’d been told my whole life that God loved me. And more importantly, I knew that Vinnie was a good person. He’d risked himself to help me, a stranger. He’d never been anything but nice. He’d never done anything to make me uncomfortable even when he knew I was thinking about it.
“That was the first time I think I’d ever really looked at my uncle and seen him as what he was, just a regular guy, angry about his job, who drank too much after church and sometimes hit his kids if they didn’t jump fast enough. And something inside of me changed. I can’t say it was good or bad, just different. Maybe it was just…growing up. But I knew that I wanted to find Vinnie and apologize for not defending him when I should have.
“He wasn’t hard to find. I thought he’d be mad at me, even avoiding me, but he wasn’t. He wasn’t mad, he was hurt. I said I was sorry and he forgave me, because that’s who he was. For a few days, we pretended like everything was back to normal. I knew my friends and family were whispering and angry, some of them didn’t bother whispering, but I didn’t care. I wanted to be with him, all the time. It just made me happy, and I knew that it couldn’t be wrong, it couldn’t be, not something that felt like that. He was like a light, you know? He was like this beautiful light, and I was a moth circling around him, constantly drawn to him.
“One day we were hanging out by the train tracks because we couldn’t go back to my place and he didn’t have anywhere to go, and we were talking and I looked at him and I just blurted out ‘I think I love you,’ and he looked at me and smiled, which was a relief because I was so nervous and we hadn’t even known each other that long. But he smiled and touched my arm, so I leaned in and kissed him. I’d never kissed anyone before, of course. I thought I’d be too afraid to try something like that.”
Jack paused.
Gabriel was watching him, silent, with sympathy in his expression. There was also worry, because he knew that this story wasn’t going to have a happy ending for Vinnie. He was afraid to hear how unhappy it might be.
“My cousins followed me out there. Not just them, there were six, my cousins and three other altar boys. They pulled us apart and my cousins held me while the other three started just…beating the crap out of him. He was fighting back, but he didn’t have a chance, and I was kicking and yelling but I couldn’t get to him. I don’t think my cousins knew how far it was gonna go, but I think Vinnie knew. He looked at me, his face covered in blood, and I could see the fear in his eyes. I couldn’t do anything to help him.
“They used a railroad spike and raped him right there in the dirt, and they were quoting scripture while he screamed. I was screaming, I screamed so hard that I could barely talk for days, but no one came to help. Eventually, they just let go of me, and I crawled over to him, and he was curled up on the ground. One of the boys started kicking me and the others pulled him back, I remember looking up and seeing these matching looks of horror on my cousins’ faces and thinking that God would never condone something like this in his name. Not the God I’d been taught about. We’d gone to the same Sunday school, the same services every week, how could our ideas of God be so different?
“They left us there, and I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to go to the hospital, but eventually he got up and sort of brushed himself off even though his face was covered in blood, and he told me to leave him alone. When he tried to walk away, I grabbed his arm, and he punched me in the face. It wasn’t that hard, he was a mess, but it did the trick. I didn’t know what else to do so I just let him leave. I fucking let him leave,” he said, his voice raw. His arm was tight around Gabriel, holding him close to his side.
“I went to the church. And I prayed, for forgiveness, for understanding, I begged God for some sort of sign about what I should do. And the monsignor came over to me, this man I’d known my whole life, who I’d always respected without question—this man had been honored by the Pope—and I start crying when I see him, right, and I start asking him for forgiveness, and he puts a finger under my chin to look at my face. My lip and nose are bleeding. And he says that asking forgiveness is a good place to start, and that he’ll give me penance, but I can’t serve on Sunday with cuts on my face.
“And he left me there, sitting there, and I knew, in that moment, I knew that I was never going to be a priest, that my whole life had shifted course in the blink of an eye.
“Vinnie was dead three days later. Hit by a train. It was dark, they said it might’ve been an accident, that maybe he tripped or misjudged while trying to play chicken, but it wasn’t an accident. After everything he’d been through, it was three altar boys who finally broke him.” Jack drew a shuddery breath. “They’re the reason I’m a cop. I told the police what they’d done, after Vinnie’s death, but nothing ever came of it. They were never held accountable. I barely talk to my cousins but I know they have guilt. I don’t really blame them, and the other three are long gone—one dead, one in prison, one in another state somewhere.
“About a week after Vinnie’s death, my mother walked into my bedroom. I’d barely been eating, or talking, I just wanted to sleep all the time. She walked in, and she looked at me, and she asked me what happened. Until then, I think she’d been too afraid to ask. The thing is, she’d heard what I told the cops—about what they’d done to him—but I hadn’t told anyone the reason. That it was because of me.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“No,” Jack agreed. “No, it wasn’t my fault, but it was still because of me. And my mother knew even though I hadn’t said it, and she saw it eating me up, and she asked me
, and…I told her that I’d loved him. Probably it wasn’t any noble decision to be honest and honor his memory or anything, it was just me being too tired and hurt to pretend. It wasn’t easy for her, or my dad, to wrap their heads around, but they did their best.
“And they loved Jeff like a son from the start, welcomed him into the family wholeheartedly. I couldn’t have asked for anything more, or for better grandparents for Alex. Without them, and my sisters, I never would’ve survived losing Jeff.
“I didn’t love Vinnie like I loved Jeff, of course. Maybe if we’d been given a chance, if he’d had a chance to live the life he deserved, it would’ve been more than a childhood infatuation. But childish or not, it was a pure love. He changed the course of my life, and he was good. Too good for this world.
“And I used to think that about Jeff, and it would scare me sometimes. He used to say…” His face crumpled, and he lifted his hand to his eyes, shaking his head on the pillow. He pulled in a wet, shaky breath. “He used to say that nothing was guaranteed in life and we couldn’t avoid loving something just because we were afraid we might lose it. When he got sick, he wanted to make sure that I didn’t shut down, he made me promise that I would love somebody again.
“I look at you, Gabe, and I think I could fall in love with you, that I might be already, and—” He stopped, his throat working for a moment as he struggled to swallow. He lowered his hand and turned his head to look at Gabriel. “And you’re good, too. Pure and honest and kind and too good for this world. I’m terrified of falling in love with you only to have you taken away from me, but…I’m not going to hold anything back. No matter what happens.” He bent his head and kissed Gabriel’s cheek.
“‘We live in a perpetually burning building, and what we must save from it, all the time, is love,’” Gabriel said.
“Mm,” Jack answered. “Tennessee Williams?” He smiled at Gabriel despite the tears still drying on his face.
Gabriel chewed his lip, fingering at the collar of Jack’s shirt as he debated the best way to share his own story. There were things he’d never said aloud—not even to Natalie—and it would be both difficult, and a relief, to release them into the world.
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