“Adam, don’t do this.”
He turned back and shoved me hard in the chest. “I didn’t do this, Nate,” he shouted in my face. “YOU DID.” His face contorted. He was trying not to cry, and failing. “You did!” His voice broke and he turned again.
“You fucking coward!” I shouted at him. I grabbed his arm again. “Scream at me. Hit me. Make me pay. I don’t care what you do to me, just don’t leave.” He tried to shake me off, but I moved in front of him and grabbed him by both arms, my face close to his. “Adam. I can’t live without you.”
He swiped at the tears on his face. “We both know that’s not true. I wish to God it were. At least it might give me something to hold on to, some reason to stay.”
I realized in that moment that he was right. I did know. This wasn’t about needing anymore. This wasn’t about surviving. This was about choosing.
“I want you.”
“You don’t know what you want.”
He was wrong about that.
“This is not over between us,” I said, echoing his words.
When he spoke, his voice was calm and cold. “It is for me. I’m going to Austin, and I’m not coming back.” He pushed past me. His cell phone fell out of my pocket and thudded onto the carpet. He bumped it with his foot, then bent over, set down one of his bags, and picked it up, looked at it for a moment, and then flung it against the wall. The back snapped off and the battery popped out on impact. Then he pulled the leather strap from around his neck and locked eyes with me as he wadded it up in his hand along with the pendant bearing my name. He held his fist up to my face, then opened his fingers and let the pendant drop at his feet, as if my name didn’t even warrant a good throw. He picked up the bag again, and without another word, opened his door and headed down the hallway.
I stepped into the hallway, barely registering his mom on the landing, drawn to our fight like a bug to a zapper. “Go ahead,” I sneered after him. “Run away. Forever had a pretty fucking short run, didn’t it? You and your stupid Sharpie and your stupid heart.”
He spun around and in two long strides was back. And that’s when he decked me. I stumbled into the door frame and went down hard on my ass.
I wiped the blood off my nose and watched him go.
Chapter 52
Ten years later
He had a megaphone gripped in his hand and wore glasses now. And he seemed taller. But the blond hair peeking out from the baseball cap was unmistakable.
He put the megaphone to his mouth. “Woodwinds! Your dance moves are just okay.” A chorus of boos rang out from the kids in the lower half of the stands. He held up his hands and shrugged before putting the megaphone back to his mouth. “Brass! Your dance moves are ex-cellent.” The kids in the top half of the stands shouted and shook their instruments in the air. Someone blew a random note.
I smiled to myself. Luke held up a ringed flip-book so the kids could see the next song.
The drum majors counted off the beat. As the band played, he climbed the steps, stopping to dance with the clarinets, then moving up to percussion and then the trumpets. A trombone waved his horn in the air. “Mr. Chesser, over here!” Luke waved back and continued making his way up the steps.
He still had those boyish good looks, and it made me happy to see that the kids loved him. I had to resist the urge to run down the steps and touch him to be sure he was real.
The darkening sky gave way to fat raindrops. Luke and a woman I assumed was the head band director hurried the kids out of the stands and into the area below. I followed.
By the time they all got down there, the brass players, who were the last to get to cover, were damp and steamy, but that didn’t dampen their fun. It was loud under the stands. The drummers kept the party going with cadence after cadence, while the kids jumped and spun and shouted out chants. I tried to remember if I’d had that much energy when I was a teenager.
Luke was talking to the other band director when an amorphous group of kids surrounded them, shouting and dancing. One kid in particular shimmied right up against Luke, so close it tweaked my gaydar. At first Luke ignored them and continued his conversation with the other band director. But then abruptly he threw his arms in the air and bounced with the kids for a few seconds. I grinned to myself and made my way through the crowd toward him.
I grabbed him by the elbow. He held up a finger behind him to indicate he needed just a minute to finish whatever he was saying. Then he turned to me, clearly expecting a student, but finding instead a twenty-eight-year-old man. He looked at me curiously for a moment and then he caught his breath. “Nate?”
I smiled and he threw his arms around me. I laughed into his ear. “It’s been a long time.” He pushed me away and looked at me. “I can’t believe it’s you!” The drummers had picked up a new beat and he had to shout to be heard. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m here visiting Mom and my grandmother. Juliet told me you were the new assistant band director.”
“Weird, huh?” He grinned and mussed my hair. “You got shorter.”
I shook my head and laughed lightly. “I think you got a little taller.”
He grinned again, then looked around him. “I have got to run to the bathroom. Here, hold this.” He lifted the megaphone from across his shoulder and handed it to me. “I’ll be right back.” He hesitated a moment, then winked at me. “You want to come?”
Oh, what the hell. I went with him.
With everyone just killing time until the rain stopped, the men’s room was especially busy and there was no opportunity to catch up until we left. But I really just wanted to look at him. All those years of worrying about him, not knowing what had happened. He never called. Not once. He caught me looking at him in the bathroom mirror as he washed his hands. I didn’t bother looking away. I handed him a paper towel and we walked out together.
“Are you happy?” he asked, taking the megaphone from me.
I nodded.
As we stood there looking at each other, a handsome young man slipped his arm around Luke’s waist and kissed him on the cheek. The gesture wasn’t lost on the band kids. Those who saw hooted and wolf whistled. Luke laughed and kissed him back on the lips. “Go, Mr. Chesser,” someone shouted and then whistled again. A drummer struck up another beat and the frenzy started all over.
The newcomer had a megaphone draped over his shoulder too. I could see in Luke’s eyes that this was someone special.
“Nate, I want you to meet my chief nemesis, keeper of my secrets, and, uh”—he glanced around, then leaned in closer and finished in a low voice—“the guy I wake up with every morning.” He winked at megaphone guy. “This is Curtis. He’s the band director for those goons on the other side.”
“Yeah? Well, those goons are gonna make your little band of misfits look like a junior high kazoo club,” Curtis said playfully, yanking down the bill of Luke’s cap.
“We’ll see about that,” Luke said, reseating his cap and clearly enjoying the banter. He looked at me sheepishly. “Curtis was the drum major of our university band my freshman year. I actually met him two years before that. He was a field tech for the band. We’ve been together ever since. We’re, um, getting married over Christmas.” He held the back of his hand up to me and wiggled his fingers, showing off a shiny gold band. I watched Luke’s eyes go all melty when he looked at Curtis and remembered a time when they went all melty over me. I was glad they had each other.
Curtis sized me up, then reached out his hand. “So, you’re Nate.” He gripped my hand, a smile on his face, but his hand tightened around mine in a knuckle-crushing warning. I met his eyes, my own smile faltering. It struck me that this right here, this small act of possession, was exactly the kind of thing I’d wanted from Adam all those years ago. I glanced at Luke, but he was still watching Curtis, and I could practically see little red Hallmark hearts springing from his eyes and floating into the steamy air. Curtis released my hand with a “Hmph.”
The rain had st
opped and the head band director was shepherding the kids back into the stands. “Showtime,” Curtis said. He smacked Luke on the butt and glared at me before heading back to the other side of the stadium and his band.
Luke watched him go with obvious pride. “I have to go back up,” he said.
My nose burned and my eyes stung. I hadn’t expected to cry. But through the years I had thought about him, worried about him, even though I had resisted the sometimes painful urge to look him up. And now, seeing that he’d not just survived, but thrived, it was like someone had loosed a tight cord binding my heart and the muscle released in one great heave. I looked up at the concrete bottoms of the bleachers and swiped at my eyes with my fist.
“I know,” he said quietly, understanding my sudden emotion. “It was better this way. You couldn’t save me. And I couldn’t destroy you.” He squeezed my hand and I squeezed back. “Can we get together later? I’d really like you to get to know Curtis.”
“Sure,” I said, sniffing back the snot.
He grinned again, excited now. “Are you here alone?”
I shook my head.
“Come to the band hall after the game?”
I nodded and he bounded up the stairs after the kids.
Juliet was drying off my seat with some paper towels she must have snatched from the bathroom. “Did you talk to him?” she asked.
I nodded and looked across her at Danial. “He’s good.” I smiled. “He’s really good. I met his fiancé.” Danial dropped his head back and offered up a word of thanks. “He wants to get together after the game. You guys up for it?”
I rubbed Juliet’s swollen belly.
“Hey, gay boy,” Danial said. “Get your paws off my wife.”
I laid a kiss on her inverted belly button. “Face it, Qasimi, she’s always going to love me best.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, and rolled his eyes. Juliet giggled and kissed her husband.
I smiled at them, my heart full.
“Sorry we’re late,” a voice said over my shoulder.
I turned and scooped a curly redheaded toddler into my lap, then turned my eyes on my fiercely handsome husband. Adam dropped down in the seat next to me and raised a curious eyebrow, then laughed softly. “Your eyes are doing that thing again,” he said and brushed my lips with his.
Danial cleared his throat. Loudly. “Come here, Lucy. Your daddies need a moment and I want a kiss from my best girl!”
Our daughter clamored over her mother and climbed into Danial’s lap. I watched her go, and felt my throat tighten. “Thank you,” I mouthed to Juliet for perhaps the thousandth time. Juliet winked. Lucy looked just like her mom, the same crazy red hair, the same spunky attitude, with just enough of me thrown in to make her unique. I was pretty sure it was my DNA in her cells, but we didn’t know for sure. We planned it that way. Juliet had offered to “do it” the natural way, kidding of course, but we assured her a turkey baster had sufficient capacity for a two-daddy contribution. One thing I could say with absolute conviction—Lucy was conceived in love. Mine for Adam and his for me. Ours for Juliet and hers for us.
Our Lucy.
People thought we’d named her after another famous redhead, but we knew better.
It was impossible to focus on the football game. The truth is, none of us cared a bit. Instead we soaked up each other’s company and watched Luke shine. Lucy ate her first pretzel and demonstrated that she had inherited some rhythm from someone, which made me question that whole DNA thing. At one point Luke looked around and saw us in the stands. Lucy was dancing, and Luke laughed and pointed at her, mimicking her moves with his own. She giggled and buried her head in my lap. Luke blew me a kiss and turned away.
Adam looked at me, eyes narrowed. I laughed—he tried so hard—and told him about Luke’s fiancé and wanting to get together after the game. He grabbed my chin and rubbed his thumb over my lips. “Just so long as we don’t stay out too late. We’re sleeping in my old room tonight. And I have plans.”
“Oh, brother,” Danial groaned.
We brought Luke and Curtis back to Adam’s parents’ house. Juliet and Danial met us there. Mea, sixteen now and stunning, had lit the tiki lamps before we got there and turned on the lights that were still strung throughout the branches. Then she disappeared upstairs with a handful of friends. My in-laws took their granddaughter inside for ice cream and a movie.
We sat around, two by two by two, and drank margaritas, and it was like we’d been doing this forever. Curtis took to Adam right away, and that seemed to soften his stance toward me. I smiled to myself. I was no more a threat to Curtis than Danial had been to Adam, but I did wonder how much he knew.
I was glad that Luke was still close to his little brother, Matt, whom he described as a raging heterosexual with gay proclivities. When I asked him what the hell that meant, he laughed and told me he had no idea.
One thing was absolutely clear. Luke was oozing with happiness, even as he told us about those awful first months—the isolation, the seething anger toward his dad, the lack of privacy. All he had was band. So he poured his energy and passion and pain into that. His story got a little fuzzy after that, but Curtis took over and told how they’d met Luke’s junior year at the high school he now directed for. Curtis said Luke stalked him for months before he finally gave in, and I thought that sounded about right. But something Curtis had said suddenly struck me and I looked at Luke.
“You came back?”
His eyes darted nervously to Curtis, then back to me. “Yeah. That summer. Different neighborhood. I was zoned to the other high school.”
I hardly knew what to do with that bit of news. “Your dad?” I asked.
“He’s coming to the wedding,” he said.
I choked up. “That’s good, Luke. That’s really good.” And then I got up to top off my drink and compose myself. No one stopped me. My own dad had made some feeble attempts to come to grips with who I was, but ultimately he demanded I choose. So I had. I chose myself. It still hurt thinking how he’d deleted me from his life. He hadn’t responded to our wedding invitation. I thought having Lucy would change things. It hadn’t.
Luke didn’t ask what happened after that night, and I didn’t tell. It was a story Adam and I kept to ourselves. It belonged to us, and somehow I knew it needed to stay that way.
It was a memory we still talked about sometimes, a reminder of a place we never wanted to be again—me, bleeding on the carpet in his bedroom doorway, my nose fractured. It was his mom who’d taken me to the emergency room where a resident straightened my nose, gave me some Tylenol, and told me to go home and stay out of fights. I spent Christmas day alone in my room, devastated, depressed, bruised. I watched episode twelve of Family Affair over and over again, hating that little sap Jody, the prime rib Grandma brought me cold and untouched on my bedside table, the gifts I wouldn’t open still piled under the tree downstairs. I hadn’t bought a gift for Adam. I’d been so caught up in Luke’s plight that I hadn’t even thought about it.
I found out later that Adam had spent Christmas day alone too, in his new dorm room having busted the lock to get in. No phone, no sheets on the bed. Just a broken guy with two duffel bags stuffed with wrinkled clothes. His mom and Ben and Mea drove up the next day to move him in properly.
When the swelling went down, I made my first weekend trek to Austin, something I’d do weekly for many months to come. I came armed with only my computer, a book or two, my toothbrush, and a longing heart. I slept in the hallway outside his dorm room—technically against dorm rules, but none of the guys complained. Those first few weeks I saw little of him, just the occasional sighting when he stepped over me on his way out somewhere. Except for the time he accidentally on purpose kicked me, he acted like I didn’t exist. I wrote some and I read, but mostly I just waited. I didn’t know until much later the torment that he was going through on the other side of the door, the times he pressed his ear to the crack, listening to me breathe and thrash around. The fourth
weekend he opened the door long enough to hurl a blanket and a pillow at my head, then slammed it again. The fifth weekend he came out and sat in the hallway with me, his knees drawn to his chest, his elbows on his knees, and his forehead pressed into his fists. He didn’t say a word. And when I scooted closer to him, he got up and went back to his room.
Before I drove up the sixth weekend, I got my second tattoo.
He let me in that night, but he didn’t make it easy. In the weeks to come, he yelled a lot, and sometimes I yelled back. He called me a slut and a bleeding heart and some other pretty ugly names, and I called him a few. He told me my blog was banal and self-indulgent, which stung, but I didn’t think he really meant it. And that my nose was crooked, even though it wasn’t. And once when I caught him looking at his name inked on my bicep, he scoffed and told me it was unoriginal and that I’d find laser removal pretty painful. He made me sleep on the floor, even though his roommate went home on weekends and his bed was empty, and some mornings I’d wake up and he’d be curled up on the floor next to me, wrapped up like a burrito. He didn’t sleep well, and often he’d step on me accidentally on purpose in the middle of the night on his way to the bathroom.
But he didn’t throw me out, and he didn’t leave, and when I showed up again at his door each Friday night, even though he acted like I was some smelly rodent a cat had abandoned in the hallway, he let me in. And then one night near the end of the semester, he nudged me in the small of my back with his bare foot and woke me up. And when I rolled over, he told me to get my sorry self off the floor because he was sick of tripping over me. And when I did and asked him where he wanted me to sleep, he just broke down. I gathered him to me as he sagged to the floor and held tight. He cried, great soul-shattering sobs, and my heart broke for the last time. And somewhere in all that brokenness we found our way back to each other, and we talked finally of things that really mattered, of hurt, of fear, of need, of trust, of loyalty, of forgiveness, and of love.
Don't Let Me Go Page 32