by Gregory Ashe
Sun in his face, Shaw slammed the door behind him. The light dazzled him. He had to blink his eyes clear, the summer day wrapping itself around him. Blue sky, zoysia, asphalt. Where the teardrop drive narrowed, North and Will were standing chest to chest, fingers in each other’s faces, screaming.
“—I know you did it, I know you did, and I’m going to put your ass behind bars for it!”
“Yeah, I lied. So what? It’s none of your fucking business when I got here. You walked in off the street. You broke into my parents’ house—twice! Why should I tell you anything?”
“You lied about when you got here. You lied about seeing your father. You lied about everything, as far as I can tell.” Red-faced under the sun, North leaned in, the narrow space between him and Will shrinking even further. “You carried all that Daddy shit around, all those years, hating yourself for being a fag because Daddy hated you for being a fag, and then you show up and presto chango, Daddy’s a fag, and you couldn’t handle that. What the fuck was that blackmail video about? All that self-hate, now it had somewhere else to go. So you waited, and you found a way to frame Tucker, and you—”
“How? How? Answer me. How? I don’t know that guy. What did I do to him to make it look like he killed my dad?” Will’s voice broke at the end. Shaking his head, he stepped back. “I loved my dad. Yeah, I came back because…because I wanted a change. But I couldn’t come home. I couldn’t. We ran into each other at the club. We argued. And yeah, that was—that was something, seeing him there, realizing why he’d treated me the way he had. But then we got together again, and we gave each other hell. And the next time we got together, it was just me giving him hell. He sat there, and he told me he was sorry. So we were making things right. It wasn’t perfect, but we were trying. I loved him. I really loved him.”
The silence that followed had a dog-day weariness to it. Then North spat on the asphalt and said, “Bullshit.”
“North,” Shaw said.
“That is fucking bullshit, and I’m not going to buy that fucking sob story no matter who else does. You killed him, and I know you killed him, and I’m going to prove it.”
Will gathered himself, his whole body contracting and tightening, as though he might launch himself at North. But then he turned and shot toward the house.
“Run, motherfucker,” North shouted, taking a step after him and stopping only when Shaw planted a hand on his chest. “I’m going to hunt your ass down.”
“Stop it,” Shaw whispered.
“Get off me.”
“People can hear you. Jadon can hear you.”
“I don’t care—”
“Because you’re being stupid,” Shaw said, and he shook North by the shirt. “Because you’re not thinking that he could still file harassment charges or stalking or God, I don’t know. What is going on with you?”
“He’s lying.”
“Ok, fine, but we don’t know that—”
“Yes. We do.” North pulled himself free, but he didn’t make a move toward the house. “He can stand there spouting off about making things right with his dad and all that bullshit, but that’s all it is: bullshit. People don’t change. And you can’t fix a relationship, not when it’s that badly damaged. He hated his old man, and he’s always going to hate him, and that’s why he clubbed him to death. Do you know what my dad did when I went over to talk to him about my feelings last night, Shaw? He beat the shit out of me. People. Don’t. Change.”
“People do it all the time, North. People change all the time. They make themselves better. They learn how to forgive. They find ways to communicate—”
“Don’t start.”
“—they find ways to break bad patterns—”
“I said don’t fucking start. What do you not understand about that? Why can’t you shut the fuck up when I tell you to? Why can’t you just drop it with all this fucking stuff? You go on and on. Why can’t you fucking drop it?”
“Because I’m trying to fix you, you idiot! Because I’m trying to fix us! I know I screwed up, but if you can’t make things better with Tucker, you’re never going to be able to make things better with me, and I love you so much that I feel like I’m dying sometimes. What is so fucking hard for you to understand about that?”
In the ragged caesura that followed, the only sounds were Shaw’s breathing and the front door to the Slooves’ house clicking shut. The heat made the world shimmer like a sheet of foil being shaken.
“I don’t need fixing,” North said. “You’re trying to make things better? That’s rich. You’re doing the same fucking thing you always do: you push and push and push until you get what you want, and fuck what I want or how I feel or what it costs me. And I don’t need this psychobabble bullshit you keep pushing on me. All you want is for people to sweep everything under the rug and smile and talk and talk and talk and pretend things have changed and are better. I’m not going to do it. And fuck you, Shaw,” his voice quavered on the name, “for trying to make me.”
“North, I—”
North took off down the drive, stride brisk, shoulders back. But he kept bringing one hand up to his eyes. He got into the GTO, and tires squealed as he gunned it. Sunlight flowed along steel until it hit the right angle and the whole car caught fire. And then North turned the corner and was gone.
Chapter 26
NORTH COULDN’T GO HOME, not anywhere or in any way that meant anything to him, so he drove in circles and ended up in a strip mall. It was a classy strip mall. The Ladue version of the Pestalozzi Street Shopping Plaza, with red brick and gingerbread trim painted white and black wrought-iron railings. It had a Shake Shack, so he bought himself a chocolate shake. The first sip gave him the heaves, and he spent fifteen minutes hunched over a trash can, stomach clenching while sweat soaked through the back of his shirt.
Then he walked down to a store with blue vinyl script in the window: RICHARD HEAP, DRUGGIST. The old guy inside had shriveled up under his white coat, and he spoke quietly and moved slowly and carefully. The rustle of the lab coat sounded like bone crumbling to powder. They didn’t sell American Spirits. They didn’t have any good shit, actually, but they had Marlboro Smooths, and so North paid and had to pick up a lighter when he realized he didn’t have one, and by then Richard Heap, Druggist, was looking at him like a dog that had dragged itself in off the street. So, to be a shit, North sat on the bench right under the blue vinyl script and smoked. The menthol made him feel like a nervy white lady who’d run out of Valium, but there was something about the sensation of sucking down ice that was nice. Kind of like his whole chest was seizing up. That kind of nice.
He sat. He smoked some more. The sun was huge and heavy; the sky was blueish white, full of light like a Vermeer painting. Shaw had taken him to a Vermeer exhibit freshman year. Somehow he must have known that North wanted to go, even when North didn’t know himself, even when North wouldn’t have been able to say he’d wanted to go even if he’d known. He’d been barely eighteen, out of his depths in a world he wanted desperately to belong to. He hadn’t known how to admit to himself what he wanted because he was so busy convincing himself he already had something else, something everybody else seemed to think he ought to have. So what’s new, right? He smoked a little more. Shaw had been a member of the Art Museum. He had taken the card out of a hemp coin purse. North had never known someone who didn’t just do the free stuff in Forest Park. For that matter, he’d never known a guy with a coin purse.
His phone buzzed, a number he didn’t recognize, and he answered.
“Hello, North.”
“Ronnie, you motherfucker. Where are you? I’ve got something for you.”
Heavy breathing.
“You ever call my dad or Shaw again, I will make it my life mission to put you down like a dog.”
The giggle was high pitched. Obscene. “See you soon, North.”
The call disconnected. North tried the number, but it rang until he ended the call.
Pocketi
ng the phone, North took a deep drag, and the cigarette trembled between his fingers. He smoked until his hands steadied. When the ember was almost at the filter, North butted it out on the bench, the paint blistering. Then he eyed the ashtray, flicked the cigarette butt straight in front of Richard Heap, Druggist’s front door, and got to his feet.
He had the car pointed toward the big house in Webster Groves when his phone rang.
It was Dick Laguerre. “We heard from the circuit attorney’s office. They’re dropping the charges against Tucker.”
“That’s great, Dick.”
“We’re celebrating. The family.”
“I’m glad.”
“North, please come.”
He turned the GTO around.
The redbrick house had a slate roof and gave the general impression of slouching, but in a genteel way that suggested the English countryside and, hell, maybe we’ll go fox hunting. Two-point-one (that point one was important) acres, with privacy hedges and tree lines—pin oak, white pine, alder, haw—to reinforce the rural illusion. What North remembered from his first visit was the size of the rooms, the sound of his steps echoing against the cathedral ceiling and getting lost in the dark timber of exposed beams, wanting to squeeze Tucker’s hand but knowing that Tucker would make a face or shake his head or, worse, give him that look, like this North, the one who needed a squeeze back, was new to him and needed some serious consideration. But then Dick had started swearing in the next room about a wedge, and Cathy had crawled backward out of a hallway, grousing about a dropped earing, and North had been home.
He hadn’t knocked in years, but he knocked now. Tucker answered the door, a Schlafly in one hand, the bottle jewel-bright with condensation. His eyes had that soft look of a few drinks, wading depth, exactly right. He kissed North on the cheek, and he smelled like beer and the cologne North had bought him on their anniversary.
“Thank you,” he said.
“Someone confessed. I didn’t do anything.”
“North,” he said, “thank you.”
Dick had lied about only family, but it had been a minor lie. Aside from Dick, Cathy, and Tucker, the only other guest was Biff, who—as Tucker’s attorney—probably had a decent reason for being there. Cathy had laid out a spread of cured meats, cheeses, dollar rolls, and all the fixings. There was a fruit salad, a green salad, some sort of chicken salad, watermelon, cold corn on the cob, potato salad, even a Jell-O salad that was the same mutant-ooze color from a kid’s TV show.
“I found the gelatin mold when I was cleaning out the cabinets last week,” Cathy said with an embarrassed smile. “I thought it’d be fun. I’m sorry this is all so thrown together.”
“Cathy could feed an army and apologize about it being thrown together,” Dick said, giving his wife a squeeze from behind that made her giggle like she was forty years younger. “Have you tried the chicken salad, North? That stuff is dynamite.”
“She’s hiding the croissants,” Biff said, sounding surprisingly jovial with a G&T in his hand, “but that’s the way to eat it. She always hides the croissants.”
“He hasn’t tried anything, Richard. Biff, don’t be awful. North.” She fixed him with a dangerously mothering look. “You must be hungry. Let me make you a plate.”
“No, Cathy—”
But it would have taken an army—presumably after they had recently been fed by Cathy—to stop her, so a few minutes later, North was standing with a plate in one hand. And it should have been awkward, for a million different reasons, but this was a family, and they had their own rhythm. Dick traded golf stories with Tucker and made dad jokes in the intervals, and Cathy asked Biff about his wife, who was in Sedona, and everyone tried to pull North into the conversation and was gracious when he refused to be pulled. This was the way people talked to each other when they loved each other. This was the way people existed around each other, moving through each other’s spaces, touching without thinking about it, responding to unspoken requests and unasked questions as though the second half of the party were taking place on a different frequency, and North had bad reception.
The party moved out to the deck. In one of those strange social low tides, North found himself alone with Dick, and to his surprise Dick pulled him into a hug, whispering his thanks again, and North was even more surprised to see Dick’s face wet when he pulled back. Then they had to talk about the Cardinals, about the three-game series that week, and whether the Cardinals were going to obliterate the Diamondbacks or just crush them. They listened to Tom Petty and Kansas and Aerosmith on the outdoor Bose. The social tide rose again, carrying Biff and Cathy and Tucker outside. Tucker touched the back of North’s neck when he passed, and North shivered. He drank more beer to cover it; he didn’t think Tucker had missed it, though.
When AC/DC came on, Dick sang to Cathy, telling her she shook him all night long and turning up the music until Cathy rolled her eyes and went inside. Then Dick lowered the volume and grinned at North, and for a moment, it was the two of them in on the joke, and North grinned back like a motherfucker. Tucker headed inside for another beer, and he touched North’s neck again. This time, North followed him with his eyes, and when Tucker looked back, and North knew he was busted, a slow heat uncoiled in his chest. The tension in his shoulders relaxed. That was the most wonderful and terrible part of all of it: the relief. The setting down of something indescribably heavy, and the weightlessness that came after. The fact that this was all, in some exceptional way, easy.
North was inside, getting a Schlafly out of the fridge, when arms closed around his waist. Tucker pressed his mouth to the side of North’s neck, and North’s finger slipped along the brown glass, which was barely fogging now as humidity gathered on it.
“Come upstairs,” Tucker whispered.
North set the beer back and let Tucker lead him upstairs.
Tucker’s childhood bedroom had been stripped down, converted to a guest room, with a big bed and pleasantly neutral watercolors and a window that looked out on a line of pin oaks like the edge of the known world. Tucker shut the door and kicked off his shoes. North opened his mouth.
But Tucker shook his head and got onto his knees. He undid North’s belt, unbuttoned his waistband, and worked the zipper down. Maybe it was the beer. Maybe it was the last week, or the last year, or something, but his touch, even through the cotton boxers, made goose bumps run up North’s arms. Gently, Tucker parted the opening and drew out North’s dick and balls.
“Tuck,” North said, surprised to hear the slur in his own voice.
Tucker bent and took him. At first, the movements were delicate, tentative. Tasting and savoring rather than gluttonous. The first noise came from deep in North’s chest. When he rolled his hips, Tucker coughed and pulled back.
“Sorry—” North started to say.
But Tucker was faster, and he began to bob up and down, fucking his face on North’s cock. From time to time he’d gag or cough, but he kept going, and the sounds were almost hotter than the actual feeling: the slick glide, the wet, tight heat and suction, and the sounds of Tucker’s total debauchery.
“Shit, Tuck, shit, shit, slow down.”
Tucker pulled off. Spit and precome glazed his cheeks, his mouth, his chin. His lips were swollen. His tongue darted out, tasting North on him. His hands were shaking slightly as he yanked on North’s jeans and boxers at the same time, dragging them down. Then he bent, fumbling with the laces on the Redwings, pausing every now and then to kiss North’s shins and knees.
When he tried to get the boot off, North overbalanced and half fell, half dropped onto the bed, and both of them ended up laughing. Tucker dragged the Redwings off and tossed them near the door. The pants and underwear next. Then North was naked except for the tee, and Tucker was still dressed in his pink shorts and his white polo, his long, golden legs corded with muscle.
“Get those fucking clothes off,” North said as he turned himself out of his shirt.
&n
bsp; Tucker shrugged the polo up and off. He’d lost weight and added muscle, every inch of him tight and shredded. He looked like he had when they were twenty. He looked better.
“Jesus Christ,” North said.
With a shy smile, Tucker said, “Working out is good for depression. That’s what the doctor tells me every time I ask him to up my meds, anyway.”
Propping himself on an elbow, North said, “Do you—you said you had to—”
“I already took one, Mick.” The shy smile got, if anything, shyer. “Right after you walked in the door.”
“That’s a little presumptuous.”
The tiny smile flared into a smirk. “Here we are, though.”
“Here we are.” North fell back, fingers laced behind his head. “Lose the shorts.”
Tucker dropped them and kicked them into a corner. He was naked and hard, his dick bobbing in front of him. He ducked into the bathroom, emerged a moment later, and tossed a bottle of lube on the bed. “Don’t get started without me.”
“I probably need to…” North made a vague gesture at the bathroom.
“God, Micks, don’t be dumb.”
He was in there for a few minutes, the water running, and when he came back his hair was wet and he smelled like cedar soap and warm skin. His mouth still tasted like North when he planted a kiss on him, and then he straddled North’s thighs and opened the lube.
“Condom,” North said.
“Mick, I’m clean.”
“Condom.”
Rolling his eyes, Tucker stretched across North to the nightstand. Muscle rippled under taut, tan skin, and North ran a hand across the expanse of Tucker’s chest. Then Tucker sat back, opened the condom, and rolled it down North. He applied lube, scooted forward, and sat back again.
“Whoa,” North said, cupping Tucker’s ass with one hand. “We can—”
“No,” Tucker panted, face tight as he sank slowly down. “I want it like this.”
Tucker should have gone slower; North should have helped him go slower. But this was so hot, watching Tucker, who was always in control and always in charge, take himself apart for North. It was another of those things that, in college, had convinced North this had been true love. And then North’s dick was fully seated, and Tucker’s eyes were half closed, his chest rising and falling rapidly.