Don't Let Me Go

by J. H. Trumble

  I hooked my fingers around the edge of the bracelet and tugged it over my hand. What would Nate do? It had been my reminder and my talisman for all these months. I looked at it a moment, then held the rubber ring over the leather folder and let it drop.

  Adam appeared behind me and placed his hands on my shoulders “Ready?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m ready.”

  I considered telling Danial about that evening, but it seemed wrong somehow. This moment belonged to his loss, not mine.

  Danial handed me the joint. I carefully drew in a deep lungful and held it as long as I could. He gestured toward the telescope.

  “Go on. Look.”

  My heart was breaking for him, but I looked through the eyepiece again. “Saturn,” I said softly.

  “You’re looking at something eight hundred, nine hundred million miles away.”

  “Wow. It really does have rings.”

  He laughed. “Yeah. They weren’t just making that up.”

  I took my eye away from the telescope again and looked at the black sky, trying to figure out which pinpoint of light was Saturn.

  “It’s that one,” Danial said, close behind me. “It’s pretty bright, kind of yellowish, about thirty degrees off the horizon. Do you see it?”

  There were so many stars out tonight. The sky never looked like this in my neighborhood. Too many lights. It was darker here. I easily picked out the light he pointed to.

  “If we stayed out here a couple more hours, you’d see Jupiter rise in the east. Now that’s an impressive planet. The brightest thing in the sky outside of the moon and the sun.”

  I looked through the eyepiece again. “Does Saturn have a moon?”

  “Can you see it? Cool. That’s probably Titan. Some books say Saturn has eighteen moons, but it’s actually more like sixty-one, plus some moonlets that have their own rings. Titan is the biggest. It’s kind of weird, isn’t it? No matter how many pictures I see of Saturn, it’s still kind of startling to look through a telescope and realize it really exists, rings and all.”

  It was so clear. I felt like I could almost reach out and touch it. The telescope was amazing. Not the kind of thing you’d run down and pick up at Best Buy. When I asked Danial about it, he told me his dad was an astrophysicist. He’d worked at NASA until his brother was killed. After that, they left Clear Lake and bought this house. His dad retired from NASA and took a job teaching at the community college.

  “I’ll never understand why some people can’t just let others live their lives, you know,” Danial said. “You don’t have to understand. You don’t have to agree. Just leave people alone. When I look at the moon and planets and stars, all that narrow-mindedness and hate seem so petty. The universe is such a big place. One hundred thousand light years just from one end of the Milky Way to the other. One hundred. Thousand. Light years. In the time it’s taken for light to travel from one end of our galaxy to the other, thousands of generations have passed. It really makes you realize how small we are, doesn’t it? How short our time on earth is.”

  He stepped back to the telescope and handed me the joint again. I made room for him, but just barely, and took another drag. “Let me show you something else,” he said.

  His hip brushed against mine as he adjusted the scope. I thought about what he’d said. How short our time on earth was. I reached out and laid my hand on his back. He had taken off his dress shirt before we came out. He was warm through his white T-shirt. I’d never noticed just how broad his back was before. I let my hand slide down along his spine, pressing my fingers in to feel the ridges of each vertebra. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump. Bump.

  He looked over his shoulder. “Nate, get your hand off my ass.”

  I smiled to myself.

  Danial straightened up and turned to me. When I fuzzed out my eyes, I could almost believe he was Adam. I kissed him. His mouth was hard and needed some softening up, so I kissed him again.

  Danial cleared his throat. “Uh, Nate. I’m not kissing you back.”

  I pressed into him and slid my hand down the front of his jeans.

  “Okay,” he said, grabbing my wrist. “Now you’ve got your hand on my dick.”

  “You like it. You can’t hide that.”

  “Oh, please. I’m a guy. My dick gets hard in a stiff wind.”

  He was lying. There wasn’t even a breeze tonight. I tried to free my wrist and get my mouth on his again, but he was playing hard to get, or at least hard to get to. “I’m not kissing you, Nate. You are stoned, man, and you’re totally going to regret this in the morning.”

  I looked off into the night sky, the muscles in my chin twitching.

  “Dammit, Nate.” He wrapped his big arms around me and held me tight. “My brother was gay. But I’m not. You’re like a brother to me now, kiddo. And besides, I’m not the one you really want.”

  We stayed that way for a while. I sniffed, and then Danial sniffed, and that made me sniff again.

  “I’m so sorry about your brother,” I said.

  “I think you would have liked each other.”

  If he was anything like Danial, I knew I would have too.

  “Hungry?” he said.

  “Like a fox.”

  “I’ll make some popcorn and we’ll eat it under the stars.” He put his mouth close to my ear. “It’ll give you something to do with your mouth besides slobber all over me.”

  I shoved him away, but he just laughed and promised to take me home when he was sober enough.

  Chapter 34

  Danial and I lay on our backs in the dark and tossed popcorn kernels into the air and tried to catch them in our mouths—a little trick I couldn’t have accomplished in broad daylight, my brain was so sluggish. Pleasantly so, but sluggish all the same.

  When my cell phone rang a while later, I ignored it.

  “You gonna answer that?” Danial asked. And I said, “Nope,” and he said, “Why not?” and I giggled and said, “I don’t know,” and he said, “Is it Adam?” and I said, “Probably.”

  The ringing stopped. A moment later it started again.

  Danial rolled over and reached for the phone in my pocket. “Give me that.”

  “No,” I said, still giggling. We wrestled for the phone, but he managed to grab it and push the answer button on the last ring.

  I stared at the pinpricks of light in the black sky.

  “Yeah, this is Danial,” he said into the phone. “He’s right here.” He handed me the phone, but I tucked my hands under my back. He put his thumb over the microphone hole. “Take the damn phone and talk to your boyfriend.”

  Instead, I got up and walked off down the fairway.

  I could hear him behind me, talking in a low voice, but I couldn’t make out the words. I fought the urge to just lie down again and close my eyes. I focused, instead, on placing one foot in front of the other.

  Left. Right.

  Left. Right.

  Left.

  Left.

  Left my wife

  with forty-nine kids

  at home in bed

  with nothing to eat

  but a can of sardines.

  I giggled again. I could see the green just ahead. I hated golf. Golf was for sedentary, middle-aged men. Like Mr. Stanford, my seventh grade social studies teacher. I wasn’t sure he even played golf, but he was the type. I always hated the way he sat on the edge of his desk, one leg hiked up, his dick clearly outlined down the right side of his leg. That thing was massive and those polyester pants did nothing to disguise it. The sight was almost enough to knock the gay out of me. Almost.

  Left. Right.

  Didn’t the president play golf? He was middle-aged, true. But not the sedentary type. He really did look good without his shirt. He was a basketball jock. I wondered if Adam had ever played basketball? He wasn’t a jock type. More of a dancer. But, oh, that body.

  Right. Left.

  I thought about the first time we were together, the way he’d let me just look at him.
All the shame from years of wanting something others said I shouldn’t want dissolving in one perfect evening. God, he was so beautiful. And then I remembered that somebody else was looking at that body now.

  Danial caught up with me and matched his steps to mine. I stumbled and he caught me by the arm and just held on. “He seems like a pretty decent guy,” he said after a while. “What’s he like? Is he a flamer?”

  “Adam? A flamer?” I huffed. “Adam a flamer.” I laughed at the idea. We had polished each other’s toenails one time. I smiled at the memory. God, I missed being with him.

  Last December 8th

  The second time

  We couldn’t get our clothes off fast enough this time. Coming out to Adam’s parents had its disadvantages—no more pretending we were just hanging out in his room when we closed the door, which, of course, we were no longer allowed to do. We hadn’t dared try my house, and parking was out of the question. It had been a week and a half, and we were crazy for each other.

  And then an opportunity had presented itself. It was the night of Natalie’s Christmas party, even though it was still two and a half weeks until Christmas. Mom had taken Grandma to visit her sister. The house was empty.

  “Wait,” Adam had said, already breathless. From the pocket of his crumpled jeans just inside the front door, he fished out two small packets.

  “Condoms?”

  He chuckled. “A little gift from Mom.”

  “Why don’t you just kill me now?”

  He tore a packet open and draped the condom over his forefinger, wiggling it to make it spin. “Just think of it as playing dress up.”

  I groaned.

  Some time later, after the pounding in my chest slowed, I rolled into Adam and propped up on my elbow. My fingers traced a line through the light sheen of sweat on his smooth chest, down his hard, slick belly, and then over the softer areas. He shivered. “You’ve got goose bumps,” I said.

  He smiled. “I like you touching me.”

  I smiled back. “Good, because I plan on doing a lot more of it.”

  “Could you do it in your room? I’m freezing.”

  It was the first time he’d been in my room. I wasn’t sure what he would think. I leaned against my headboard, shirtless, the top button of my jeans still undone, and nervously watched him scout around.

  He stopped to look at a movie poster. “Walk the Line, huh?” He glanced over at me, an amused glint in his eyes. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a Johnny Cash fan.”

  I rolled my eyes. “My mom. She totally digs that movie. She liked the whole guitar-slung-over-the-back thing. She wanted me to hang it on my wall for inspiration.” I chuckled. “I don’t know how inspiring Johnny Cash is, but, you know, I have to admit Joaquin Phoenix is kind of cute, or at least he was until he went all wacko with that weird rap persona.”

  He flashed a grin my direction, then trailed his fingers along my desk. “No books?” he said, looking at my sparse bookshelf.

  “No books. Public library.”

  I took a book from the drawer in my bedside table and tossed it to him. He caught it one-handed—nice reflexes—and studied the cover, then turned the book over and scanned the description on the back, shaking his head. “I’m shocked, Mr. Schaper,” he said with mock severity. “Does your mom know you read gay literature?”

  “There are a lot of things my mom doesn’t know about me.”

  He flashed me another grin, then became thoughtful and placed the book on a shelf, facedown. He continued his exploration, examining each framed photo, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He picked up last year’s football picture. In it, I was down on one knee, a football tucked under my arm, number seventy-seven emblazoned on my jersey, the pads making me look much bigger and tougher than I really was. “Cute,” he said. “Can I keep this?”

  I rolled my eyes.

  He tucked it under his arm and continued around the room.

  “Juliet told me you played,” he said, setting down the picture and picking up my guitar.

  I shrugged.

  He handed it to me and stretched out on his stomach at my feet, his cheek resting on his folded arms. I strummed some chords, stopping here and there to correct the tuning.

  “Tell me about your parents,” he said after a while.

  “There’s not much to tell. They divorced when I was six and my mom’s raised me ever since.”

  “Do you see your dad much?”

  “Used to. Not so much anymore.”

  I picked out a tune on the strings. “When I was, like, twelve, I wanted to take piano lessons. He and my mom had this huge fight. I was at his house—it was his weekend—and I told him about the lessons. I was really stoked.” I shook my head, remembering. “He totally freaked out. He called my mom and started yelling at her. He said he was sick of her trying to turn me into a sissy. After he hung up on her, he came into my room and gave me this big lecture about becoming a man and how I needed to act tougher and a bunch of crap like that.” I played a short, hard riff, then stilled the strings with the palm of my hand. “Anyway, he finally agreed to let me take lessons, but in return I had to play football.”

  He grinned. “I’d never pictured myself dating a football player.”

  I looked up at him and smiled. “Sorry to disappoint you. I quit. I only played because I had to. And then I realized I was selling out every time I put on that uniform. I decided I wasn’t doing it anymore.”

  “How did your dad take it?”

  I bit my lip and sucked in a deep breath. “Not so good. We haven’t really talked since. He’s been pretty unavailable.”

  I stretched out my leg and rubbed my foot against the side of his face.

  He rolled back over onto his stomach and took my foot in his hands. He pressed his thumbs into the arch and slowly slid them up to my toes. “How do you think he’ll react when he finds out about me?” He moved his thumbs back down and repeated the slow slide.

  “It doesn’t matter what he thinks.”

  “It matters. I can see that in your eyes. But he’s the one missing out, Nate.” He stared at me until I met his eyes. “You’re a beautiful person just like you are.” He pressed his lips to my toes one at a time. “Some day he’ll figure that out.”

  His cell phone rang and he slid it from his pocket with a groan. “Mom,” he mouthed as he brought it to his ear. “Hi, Mom. Yeah, I’m a Nate’s. We’re doing our nails.”

  “What?” I mouthed.

  He grinned. “I’ll be home in a couple of hours. Yes, I will. All right, Mom. Bye.”

  “Doing our nails?” I said.

  “Should I have told her what we’ve really been doing?”

  We did polish each other’s toenails that night. Adam thought it was high time I flamed a little, embraced my inner queen, as he put it. But that simple act was almost as intimate as anything else we’d done together.

  We used to be so close. I fingered my tattoo through my dress shirt—Regret is forever.

  Danial knocked on my head with his free hand. “What?”

  “Where’d you go? I lost you for a few minutes there.”

  I grasped around my head for the thread of the conversation we were having. “Flamer. No. He’s just a regular guy. Except, there’s really nothing regular about him. He’s always been, I don’t know, amazing. Gorgeous, funny, playful, sweet, talented, smart—”

  “Okay, okay. Jeez. Almost sorry I asked.”

  I yanked my arm away from him. He let me go.

  “Okay, he’s cornered the market on all the good adjectives,” he said. “So what’s the problem?”

  I wanted to be a little pissed at Danial, but I couldn’t be. I leaned into him, and he wrapped an arm around my shoulder. “I feel like I’m losing him.”

  “We’re talking about the same guy, right? Mr. I-want-to-feel-you-inside-of-me?”

  He laughed, but his words just made me want to curl up in a ball and cry. He quit laughing and gripped me tighter.

/>   “You weren’t there for the late show,” I said. “It wasn’t pretty, and it damn sure wasn’t sexy. We got into this big fight.”

  “About?”

  “Nothing. Everything. I don’t even know anymore. Sometimes I feel like I’m ninety percent carbonation, and everything about his life there just shakes me up so when I talk to him I can’t help but spew. He’s just, I don’t know, different—his hair, he’s got this tattoo on his neck I didn’t know anything about. I mean, what the fuck is that? He gets a tattoo and doesn’t even tell me? He’s distracted. He’s out all the time. He’s living in a gay community with lots of beautiful men. I can’t compete with all that. I’m a fucking high school student living in Texas.”

  “Who says you have to compete?”

  “One of his roommates kissed him, Danial. More than once.”

  “Big deal. You kissed me. Not that I’m not flattered, but, you know, I didn’t exactly feel the earth move.”

  I pulled away from him and stumbled. He caught me and held on and I let him. “Look,” he said, “you either trust him or you don’t. Some things you just have to let go.”

  “He says I always think the worst of him. Then he hung up before we could, as he put it, say something we’d regret. We haven’t really spoken to each other since. He’s not even a little jealous about me being out with you tonight. It’s like he wants me to find someone else.”

  “Oh, you are mental. He wouldn’t be calling you and sounding worried half to death if he didn’t care about you.”

  “He thinks I’m fragile. He’s always been my protector. He was the one who held me together when everything fell apart. I couldn’t have done it without him. I tried not to be such a burden on him, Danial, but I just couldn’t help myself, you know. He was always the strong one. I wasn’t. I needed him. I still need him.”

  I wiped my eyes with the collar of my shirt and sniffed. “I can’t blame him. He deserves a whole person.”

  “You’re not the pathetic, needy person you’re making yourself out to be.”