by A. C. Katt
“Thanks.”
“Drink your soda. Conchita also made some chicken soup. I’ve got it in the microwave, warming for you. I even have Ritz crackers. The mac and cheese may be too heavy for your stomach”
Liam smiled and laughed out loud in pleasure for the first time in six years. “Oh my God, I can’t believe you remembered.”
“I remember everything about you. I love you. How could I forget?”
Liam slowly turned to Milo, a single tear rolling down his cheek.
“You never said it. You only used the L-word when we made love. It was as if I had to draw it out of you with your orgasm.”
“It’s what I’ve been trying to tell you since you arrived. It’s my fault. I never told you often enough,” Milo answered.
“You never told me at all.”
“I guess I didn’t.” Milo hung his head in shame.
Liam had only one word. It came out in a soft cry. “Why?”
Milo went to the fridge, took out another Coke for himself, and went under the sink to where he knew Conchita kept a bottle of rum for her brother’s coffee. He poured himself a double and followed the rum with the Coke and ice.
Liam waited until Milo settled and then continued. “I thought you would never want me after what I did. I wanted your attention, Milo. I was as rotten as I could conceive of being. Even after the hospital, I gave it one more shot. I found myself waking up, beaten, in an alley. Sam hushed it up. I never tried to get your attention again. I cleaned up my act and tried to soldier on without you. But Milo, I needed you so.”
“I haven’t slept well since I last slept with you. I told myself I could forgive you anything to wake up with you in my arms again.”
“Can you really forgive me for the other men? Forgive it without ever throwing it in my face? It only took one false accusation for your love to evaporate.”
“I already have. They were nothing but blips on the sonar. Danny was different. I thought you had a long and continuous love affair with Danny. If I could forgive you loving someone other than me, then fucking someone else is nothing. Liam, I fucked my way to your age of consent. If you don’t remember, I do. It didn’t help. It didn’t stop me from wanting you, even though I felt guilty about those desires for years. But it kept me from taking you. You forgave me all the partners I had before you.”
Liam got off the stool and walked around the counter. He turned and faced Milo and laid his head on his chest. “To be honest, I never even gave those women a thought. I knew they meant nothing to you. Although at the time I wasn’t quite as understanding. You never loved them.”
Milo pulled Liam into his arms. “Yeah, baby, that’s my point. You didn’t love those guys you fucked either. It was my fault anyway, but even if it hadn’t been, I would still have been able to forgive you. You didn’t love them. I couldn’t take the idea of you loving someone else, like Danny. That was what grabbed me by the throat. Do you believe me? Can you understand what I felt? I know now I behaved horribly, but I still loved you.”
“I understand a little better. I thought you loved Bart.”
“Bart? Like I said, I threw Bart out of the band after you left. At the press conference, he tried to sidle up to me. I blew and kicked him out. Sam took the skins for the last tour. Rick didn’t tell you?”
“Rick told me you went to the mountains with Bart. It’s why I made the snarky remark about the garden when I showed up today. I got letters with updates on your activities in graphic detail.”
“I am but a beggar at your table, baby. I desperately need to hear you tell me you’ll give me another chance even though I know I don’t deserve one. You are the only true innocent in this whole mess. I’ll blame myself for my gross stupidity for the rest of my days.”
Liam snuggled closer into Milo’s warmth. “I’m glad you know the truth now. I forgive you, how could I not? I love you. But can we build a bridge back to trusting each other? There’s a lot of resentment and old hurt bottled up inside both of us.”
Milo frowned. “I know, baby. And we have to find out why Bart and Rick hurt us so they can’t do it again. We can talk to Rick and Sam as soon as they arrive. But I desperately want us to try. Please, let’s try. We can start by just holding each other again and sleeping side-by-side. I’ll do a make-shift arrangement on this floor if being upstairs in my room would bother you.”
“You don’t have to go to those lengths, hon,” Liam told him. “I’ll sleep with you. If the temptation proves too much, I’ll go back to my room for the rest of the night. I want to work it out between us.” He reached his hand out and brushed the hair from Milo’s forehead. “If we can’t move our love forward, than the bastards succeeded. We can’t let them succeed, now when we have a second chance. Oh Milo, it feels so good to call you hon again. You were always the golden man in my eyes, the gold of pure and rare honey. My golden man. You do love me, Milo?”
* * * *
Milo studied his ex-lover’s face. “Yes, more than anything else in this world.” He found new lines there he hadn’t seen before. A man of twenty-seven shouldn’t look that weathered. Stray white hairs blended with the massive curtain of ebony. Grey hair always started underneath, Milo knew. He harbored a few himself, but he remained vain enough to color his hair. Yet Liam looked lighter, less troubled than he did when he arrived.
Milo felt quite a bit lighter himself.
He caught the tail end of what Liam said. “I don’t know if I can sleep yet. Let’s get some brandy. We can sit on the large brown leather sofa over there in the living area and cuddle and talk some more. We need to share what happened in our lives the past six years.” Holding hands, they moved to the sofa and sat, side by side.
“You know, I didn’t hide my homosexuality because I was ashamed of you. I did it because of fear of my father. It’s not a good excuse for hiding our love, but it’s the only one I have.”
“I wish you’d told me. I know I was young then, but it would have made things clearer. I thought you were ashamed of me.”
“No, baby, never ashamed, so proud of you, I could hardly keep it inside. I said nothing because I didn’t want it to look as if I took credit for who you turned out to be. Lily made you the man you became.”
“We’ve wasted years.”
“Yes, we have. But maybe we’ve grown, matured in the time we spent apart. I never realized how empty my life would be without you until I tried living it. I took a long, hard look at myself, baby, and I didn’t like some of what I saw. I needed to become worthy of you.”
Liam got up from the sofa. “I think we both had to make that journey. Maybe if it didn’t happen the way it did, it would have happened some other way. But now, seeing clearly for the first time how it happened, I love you. If that didn’t change in the past six years, it never will.”
“I love you too, baby,” Milo answered as he brought Liam closer for a kiss. The kiss turned wild and hungry. “Come on. Let’s go back upstairs. You need to sleep, even if you fall asleep talking. I promise, I’ll hold you all night long.”
Milo decided to do the unexpected, in honor of the memory of their first time. He slipped his arms under Liam’s knees and shoulders, and after kissing him, he carried him up the stairs. He whispered, “Don’t worry, love. I have brandy and candle warmers in my room.”
Milo carried Liam into his room and settled him on the leather chaise. He grabbed a soft oversized chenille throw from a pile of pillows, along with a two-sided down coverlet, and tucked it around Liam’s body. The room felt chilly. He lit a fire in the double-sided fireplace, then grabbed and poured a finger of Remy Martin XO into each of two brandy snifters. Milo heated the cognac over a candle warmer and brought the glasses over to the chaise. He snuggled under the throw and relaxed against the soft leather.
Liam took a sip. “You broke out the good stuff.”
“A toast to us. May we never again be apart.”
They clinked glasses, and the two men drew close under the covers, enjoy
ing each other’s warm bodies, the brandy, and the fire.
Chapter 16
Love gives you the power to heal
But love unspoken is not real
It undermines love and trust
And can turn love from rock to dust
Why did I not believe?
Torment myself that you’d deceive
I think it was the words unspoken
The ones I kept hidden until broken
I say them now, and forever
I love you, my darling and I’ll leave you never.
No more secrets, No more lies
No more hiding, No more goodbyes
—Milo Stamis, “Talk to Me”
* * * *
“Milo, who told you I screwed Danny? You never objected to me spending time with him before. We played video games together when we toured. How did he become an issue?”
“Good question, baby. It crept up on me, as I remember. After you and I became lovers, Bart kept stoking my coals. He joked about me being an old man in comparison to you and that I would soon need Viagra to keep up with you. As I explained earlier, I felt I stood on shaky moral ground as it was. His constant teasing made it so much worse. I spent most of the night after I found the drugs drinking with Bart. I just arrived at the studio the next day and the first thing I saw was you and Danny leaving together with your arm around him. Bart said he’d seen you two in even more compromising circumstances, but didn’t want to tell me.”
“And there was proof right in front of your eyes.”
“Yeah,” Milo countered. “It looked real enough at the time, with the Devil whispering in my ear. It was a very bad time for me. I felt as if I were being torn apart. Things became better between us, and all of a sudden, there was Danny. Bart kept pushing at me. Saying I should give you back a little of your own treatment. He suggested I use him as the means, but I wouldn’t touch him and it pissed him off.”
“I always hated him, the rat bastard,” Liam snarled. “Right from the time he joined the band he went out of his way to make me miserable.”
“What did he do to you? And why didn’t you tell Rick or Sam if you felt awkward telling me?” Milo sounded gruffer than he meant to.
“He picked his moments, waiting until no one else was around. He accused me of being a leech. If I ratted, I felt like I would just reinforce the image. I wanted to impress you with my maturity, to me it meant handling him by myself. He also had me convinced that no one would believe me, especially since he went out of his way to be nice to me when you and Sam were around,” Liam answered.
“Didn’t you trust me to look after you, baby?” Milo asked as he pulled Liam closer to his chest.
“He told me I stood in the way of the group’s success, an albatross hanging around your neck and choking you to death. I was young, naïve, and very jealous because you gave him a part of you I couldn’t get.” Liam’s voice sounded soft.
“What part are you talking about, Liam? You had everything I could give. I had no parts left over for anyone else,” grumbled Milo.
“No, hon, you’re wrong. He became your confidant. After Sam left, you turned to Bart, not Rick, and certainly not to me. He may not have made band decisions, but he had input. Rick got hung out in the cold, and you treated me like a baby despite the fact we fucked every night.”
“I don’t know. I guess you’re right. Rick always acted like a flake and I wanted to protect you. I couldn’t take you out for a drink and Rick took off elsewhere. The band became pretty isolated because Sam insisted on such tight security. If I went out alone, it seemed I felt surrounded by people who couldn’t speak to me. I took Bart along to have someone to talk to.”
“Why didn’t you talk to me, Milo? I wanted to help you and I sat there waiting for you to ask,” Liam said in a hushed voice resting his hand over Milo’s heart. “I thought it so stupid that you wouldn’t let me sit in a bar with you. We played the clubs since I was twelve. I could have ordered a Coke.”
“You don’t understand. I wanted you, but I couldn’t have you at first. Half of the time I went nuts with guilt, the other half I wanted to throw you on the bed and beat you until you bled for flaunting yourself in front of me. You epitomized temptation itself, and I wasn’t Christ. I made promises, both to Lily and to myself. The closer it got to your eighteenth birthday, the worse I felt. You drove me crazy by just being in the same room, baby. How could I tell you?”
“Milo, I was blissful after we made love. You took me into your bed and heart, and I was never happier than in those years. I felt such peace. We wrote our music, performed with our band, and then came back to our home. Yet Bart’s litany continued. He said I was only a mercy fuck for you and you stayed with me because of the bad publicity you’d get if you dumped me or if I jumped ship. On the nights when you went out with him for a drink, I went home heartsick, afraid he would convince you I was a complete waste of your time. He hated me and I never knew why. I was never nasty to him. I only wanted to help. Yet in front of the band he treated me so decently that when I did finally complain, no one would listen.”
“I talked to Bart instead of a shrink, yet every time I mentioned you, he spoke about how much he liked you, while at the same time, he reminded me how young you were,” Milo muttered. “It drove me nuts. He made me see myself as having robbed the cradle and you not loving me. I knew you had never experienced another man. He made me feel like I’d taken away all your options for my own selfish needs.” Milo shook in remembrance of Bart’s reference to pedophilia. That thought still brought him some guilt and discomfort.
“And I talked to Danny. How could I tell you my problems when our relationship became the problem? You still went out drinking with him. I’m sure he took every opportunity he got to pour shit in your ear,” Liam said flatly.
“Yeah, I see your point, baby,” Milo reluctantly conceded. “He was not one of your friends.”
“No matter how hard I tried, I never did anything right according to Bart. He hated me from the first.” Liam sighed. “When he started dealing drugs to Rick, I told Rick and Bart that I planned to tell you. I knew how you felt about drugs in a band. Bart said if I didn’t keep my mouth shut, I’d be the one personally responsible for ruining your dream. I turned eighteen. We just began a more intimate relationship. I didn’t feel secure, and Bart fed on that. When Rick said I would break up the band, I caved. Who was I to take it all away from you? After a while, the music began to suffer. I found them snorting on the last night of the tour. The Sizzle article appeared the next morning.”
“You were an equal partner in the enterprise. Hell, baby, Lily’s money supported the band through the rough and lean times. She wanted it that way. Sam made sure we paid back every dime with interest, but you took even more of a risk than we did. If we failed, you had nowhere to go. That’s why Sam remained so adamant about law school. He wanted to make sure you would be okay no matter what. Sam loved you more than he loved his own brother.”
After a long pause, Liam finally said, “Bart began threatening me. I didn’t know about Lily’s money. Bart said that no one would believe me if I told them about the drugs. He said everyone liked him, but I was a pain in the ass kid who had no real hold on anyone except moral blackmail because I was so young. He intimated that the band would have dumped me much sooner if you and Sam hadn’t told Lily you would take care of me. I wouldn’t have cared if you dumped me from the band. I just didn’t want you and I to end. I backed off, not because of Bart, because of Rick. Rick said he would take care of it. He did, for a while.”
Liam paused and Milo pulled him tighter into the strong circle of his arms.
“I just closed my eyes to everything after that,” Liam admitted. “I was too happy. But it never stopped, they just became more discreet. Danny told me Bart got half of the roadies hooked, and those who didn’t use quit after each tour in disgust.
“Just after the last tour, I told you Bart became a creep and a bad influence on Rick, but you
didn’t listen to me. You still saw me as the ‘baby’ who didn’t know about that kind of shit. Milo, I knew better than you because you couldn’t see it, you had all you could do to manage the band without Sam.”
“Sam needed to pass the bar,” Milo countered. “Shattered Glass owed Sam for the time he took away from his life to help us. I knew he’d come back and be better than ever, but he needed the time and I promised to give it to him. I walked around with blinders on and became so pigheaded, I missed everything happening around me. I’m sorry. Sorrier then you’ll ever know.”
Milo stroked his fingers up and down Liam’s back in an old rhythmic motion he’d used to put him to sleep when he couldn’t relax. “There was another issue. Bart kept harping on your age and had me believing I was a pedophile. I never touched you until you turned eighteen, but that didn’t change the fact I wanted you for years. That secret shamed me. I couldn’t separate the wanting from the actual act. Now I know the fact that I waited, despite my desires, was what proved me innocent of that heinous accusation. Back then, I couldn’t be sure.”
“That perverted bastard! He called you a pedophile?” Liam gasped in anger.
“Yeah. He called you a man-whore, but said I was a sick, perverted bastard who preyed on young boys,” Milo whispered.
“I planned to tell you about the drugs and Rick. Before I got the chance to say anything, he turned you away from me.”
Suddenly they heard a loud crash, followed by the sound of the alarm system.
Milo went running down the stairs, with Liam right behind him. All of the outside lights were on and Milo spotted a dark figure running from the property. It looked as if a rock had bounced off the safety glass in the great room. The glass didn’t break, but it cracked in a sunburst pattern. The house phone and Milo’s cell rang at the same time. Milo pointed at the house phone and barked, “Answer that, it’s the alarm company. Tell them we need the police.”