Tell Me It's Real

by T. J. Klune

  “Paul,” he said sharply. “Look at me.” He didn’t move. He didn’t force me with his hands to do so.

  I took a deep breath. And looked up at him.

  “What were you going to say?”

  Fuck. “You… you mean a lot to me, okay? I don’t know when that happened or why or how or what the fuck I’m doing, but I just want to make you happy. All the time, I want you happy. That’s all I want. I don’t know what you’re doing to me, but I don’t want it to stop and I just want… fuck. I just want you, okay?”

  The smile he gave me was beautiful. He moved forward, and while the kiss he gave me then wasn’t as ferocious as the ones before, I felt it all the more because of the sweetness it held.

  “This doesn’t mean I’m going on bike rides with you,” I warned him when he pulled away.

  Vince just laughed.

  THE rest of dinner went okay. Nana smirked at the two of us when we went back inside, asking me with a sparkle in her eye what had happened to my lips? I told her that I couldn’t possibly know what she was talking about, that Vince had just needed to show me the tread on his tires to see if I thought he needed to get new ones so he wouldn’t pop a tire on the freeway, flip his car, and die in a fiery explosion. My grandmother assured me she didn’t understand the euphemisms of today’s youth, but if I was going to be treading tires, I’d better make sure I was careful and wrapped up my tire gauge. We both gaped at her as she cackled.

  The thing that stood out the most was how comfortable the rest of dinner went, aside from Johnny Depp screeching, “Pretty, pretty,” from the living room, trying to call Vince back in so that he could show off his plumage. I told Vince this, and he said that I did the same thing to him. I scowled at him as my parents laughed at me.

  But… the weirdness never came. The nervousness that I’d felt previously didn’t return. My family was attempting to be on their best behavior, though a few things slipped through that I would have rather Vince never learned about me for as long as we lived (“When he was six, he told us he wanted to grow up to be a Charlie’s Angel” and “Larry, tell Vince about the time you caught Paul practicing kissing with his stuffed bear. You’ll like this, Vince. Paul was seventeen at the time….”). But aside from those few excruciating moments, the thing that stuck out the most was the bright-eyed look on his face when my parents asked him questions, when they included him in on conversations that were about our family. I was dreading the moment when any of them would bring up his family, but for some reason, it didn’t happen, which confused the fuck out of me. Normally, Mom, Dad, and Nana are so fucking nosy that it was awkward, but none of them took the obvious ins I would have expected.

  Toward the end is when it sort of went downhill.

  “So how did you two meet?” Vince asked my mom and dad.

  Of course, I was sipping a glass of wine right at that moment and proceeded to choke on that and my tongue. Mom and Dad smiled fondly at each other while I did a great imitation of someone dying from lack of oxygen. Vince, however, knew of my propensity to choke in his general vicinity and got up immediately to try and put me in another Heimlich maneuver. I shook my head at him as I gasped in air, hoping my face wasn’t as purple as I expected it was.

  “You okay?” he asked me worriedly.

  I nodded. “Just fine.”

  “I saved Paul’s life the other day,” he told my family, and I almost started choking again. “It gets me a bit worried when he starts hacking like that.”

  Six eyebrows went up. “You did what?” my mother asked.

  “He was choking to death in a restaurant,” Vince explained.

  “I was not!” I said.

  “On like a burrito or something.”

  “It was spinach.”

  “Anyway, he would have died had I not done the hemorrhoid maneuver.”

  “Heimlich. It’s Heimlich.”

  He waved his hand at me. “It’s all the same thing.”

  “You almost died?” Dad said, sounding astonished.

  I rolled my eyes. “No. Vince is being overdramatic. I was fine.” I knew what my parents were thinking about, and I didn’t want them to say a damn word.

  “He wasn’t breathing,” Vince told them. “So I maneuvered him and he spat the burrito onto Sandy’s face. And then he could breathe again. Then I asked him out on a date and he said no.”

  “I had just almost died,” I said. “You just shocked me, is all.”

  “I thought he was being overdramatic,” Nana said.

  “He almost died,” Vince said again. “So his life became mine, because once you save someone’s life, they belong to you.”

  Dad nodded. “It’s an old Chinese proverb.”

  “In Asia,” Vince agreed. “Then Paul hit me with his car.”

  “What?” they all said.

  “I didn’t hit him with my car,” I said. “He ran into my door on his bike.”

  “And flipped over the door and landed on my back,” he said. “Then he saved my life by pretending to give me mouth-to-mouth, but really he was just making out with me.”

  “He wasn’t breathing and you were trying to give him tongue?” my mom asked me. “Paul, I taught you better than that.” She shook her head as if disappointed in me.

  “I was not! I thought he was dead!”

  “Were you wearing a helmet?” Dad asked him sternly.

  “Yes, sir. I always ride with one.”

  “Good. So Paul hit you with a car and made out with you afterwards? What happened then?”

  “Oh, for fuck sakes,” I muttered.

  “Language,” Dad said.

  “Well, my back hurt pretty bad,” Vince explained. “Paul must have been so worried about me because he called an ambulance after he got done making out with me and I had to go to the hospital.”

  “You poor dear,” Nana said, patting his hand and shooting me a glare.

  “I didn’t do it on purpose!” I snapped at her.

  “Paul’s a butt pirate!” Johnny Depp screamed.

  “It’s okay, Johnny Depp,” Vince called out.

  “Pretty. Pretty!”

  “So I had to go the hospital, where they told me I had a concussion and bruises, and even the doctor thought Paul should go out with me.”

  “Well, if the doctor said so,” Nana said. “I know I always do what my doctor says. They do go to medical school for, like, sixteen years.”

  “So then Paul took me back to his house and kept me there and took care of me.”

  “I should hope so,” Mom said. “He did hit you with his car.”

  “It’s like I’m not even here,” I said into my hands.

  “So he saved my life and I saved his, and I sort of figured we belonged to each other,” Vince said, smiling fondly at me as if I hadn’t said a single thing.

  “You weren’t dying,” I told him.

  “You thought I was. Otherwise, your tongue probably wouldn’t have been in my mouth.”

  “You put your tongue in my mouth.”

  He shrugged. “Does it matter who did what where? What matters is that I got you.”

  “Aww,” Nana said.

  “It was meant to be,” Mom said, eyes brimming.

  “That’s pretty swell,” Dad said gruffly. “So Paul didn’t tell you how me and his mom met? That’s surprising, given the similarities.”

  “Who wants pie?” I asked loudly. “Seems like a perfect time for pie! I couldn’t imagine an even better time to have everyone except for Vince go into the kitchen, where we will not be raising our voices in any way, shape, or form. Just a normal family discussion about pie.”

  “Pie can wait,” Mom said absently.

  “Similarities?” Vince asked.

  “I have an announcement to make,” I said desperately. “I have decided to become a Wiccan and you should now all call me Heaven Moonstorm.”

  No one even blinked. I put my face in my hands and waited for it to be over.

  “A little over thirty-fi
ve years ago,” Dad said as he reached out and grabbed Mom’s hand, “I was seated at a restaurant in what used to be downtown Tucson. I was there with some buddies from school. I was a freshman at the U of A then.”

  “A very handsome one,” Mom said, smiling at him, as she always did when he reached this part.

  From there, I’m sure you can figure out the rest. It’s actually deceptively simple yet decisively beautiful. It’s also so completely unrealistic and illogical that it doesn’t seem like real life, like something that would really work.

  Dad’s eating with friends and inhales something wrong and starts to choke. Mom just happens to be passing by at the time and stops him from choking by performing this new trick she’d heard about on the news, the Heimlich maneuver. Dad lives, all is well. They smile at each other, instantly enamored. But then Mom has to go, she can’t be late, and he doesn’t get her name. She’s a student, he knows, just the same as he, but he doesn’t know where to start looking. No one seems to know her name.

  The next day, he’s walking through a parking lot when she backs her old Volkswagen out of a parking space and up and over his foot, breaking three of his toes. She’s hysterical, apologizing profusely, but he doesn’t really hear it because even before he learns her name, he knows that he’s in love with her completely and fully in a way he never thought possible. He’s not a stupid man, nor is he a foolish one. He doesn’t have the propensity to daydream about things that could never happen. He’s rational. He’s solid. He’s sound.

  But all of that goes out the window when he says, “What’s your name?”

  “Matilda,” she says through her tears. “But everyone calls me Matty.”

  “Well, Matty,” he says with a grimace. “I’d appreciate a ride to the hospital, if you don’t mind. And I also think I might just be in love with you.”

  She’s shocked right out of her tears and laughs such a bright sound that my father’s heart is shredded.

  A week later, they were married.

  “Didn’t your parents freak out?” Vince asked when my dad finished.

  He shrugged. “A bit. They thought we were high.”

  “I figured they’d smoked some grass,” Nana agreed. “When Matty came to not only introduce a guy I’d never heard of before but also to tell me they were getting married, I figured they were stoned off their asses.”

  “Language,” my father said with a frown.

  “Were you?” Vince asked.

  “Not in the slightest,” Mom said.

  “That wasn’t until the honeymoon,” Dad said, eyebrows waggling.

  “You brought this on yourself,” I muttered to Vince.

  He ignored me. He seemed focused, solely focused, on the two of them with such intensity I didn’t think I wanted to know what was going on in his head. Though, from his expression, I had a pretty good idea. I didn’t know how I felt about that. “And you both knew?” he asked. “You just knew?”

  They nodded. “It hasn’t always been easy,” Mom said. “But nothing worth having ever really is.”

  And then Vince looked at me.

  And, of course, I looked away.

  WHEN someone says to you that they didn’t mean to eavesdrop, chances are they probably did.

  That being said, I totally didn’t mean to eavesdrop. Seriously.

  Vince was helping Mom in the kitchen while Dad and I sat with Nan in the backyard, shooting the shit. I protested initially, but Mom shooed us out of the kitchen, latching on to Vince and pulling him along with her. I looked to Dad for help, but he already had wrapped his arm around my neck and we trailed after Nana.

  I tried not to think about what my mother was saying to Vince, but I feared the worst. That, any minute now, he’d come outside and tell me that it was so over, that my family was fucking nuts and he didn’t know what he saw in me in the first place, and actually, he hadn’t seen anything, he was actually just Freddy Prinze Junioring me.

  I hate my imagination sometimes.

  So, after ten minutes, I made the excuse I had to use the restroom. Both Nana and Dad rolled their eyes, but no one tried to stop me. I really did have to piss, but I figured I could also intervene in case Mom was going a little overboard.

  But I shouldn’t have worried. When I entered the house, I heard them laughing and talking about nothing of consequence while they did the dishes and put the food away, and I didn’t want to disturb them if necessary, so I bypassed the kitchen and used the restroom at the other end of the house. It wasn’t until I came back that I stopped, only because my mother said my name.

  “Paul doesn’t know, does he?” she asked him.

  Ah hell.

  “Know what?” He sounded confused.

  “Who you are.”

  There was silence then, and it lasted long enough to become uncomfortable. I was about to walk into the kitchen when Vince spoke. “I don’t know what you’re… shit. You recognized me?”

  “Your name sounded familiar,” Mom said. “And you look like your dad. Larry met him once, a few years ago. When we met you yesterday, it wasn’t that hard to put it together.”

  “Ah. No. Paul doesn’t know.”

  “Okay.” After a moment: “I’m sorry about your mother.”

  He sighed. “Yeah. Me too.”

  “Is that why you moved back? So you could be near… when? You know what, forgive me for being so rude. It’s none of my business.”

  “It’s okay. I just… it feels… weird… to talk about it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I haven’t been good with my parents for a while.” He sounded angry, the first time I’d ever heard him like that. It tore at me, like little claws against my skin. “If you know who I am, then you know that my parents didn’t want anything to do with me back then. The election year is not the best time to come out when your father is a Republican running for office. Apparently it causes a disruption to the campaign.”

  “Well, that’s some bullshit if you ask me,” Mom said fiercely.

  Vince snorted. “Language.”

  “So you moved back because she’s sick?”

  “Yeah. She’s… she’s in hospice care over at UMC. She was moved there a couple of weeks ago. It’s supposed to be all hush-hush, given that no one wants to read about something so depressing on the news.” The last part came out bitter.

  “When was the last time you saw her?”

  “Today.”

  Oh fucking hell, Vince.

  “How did that go?”

  “I told her and my dad about Paul.”

  My heart skipped a few beats in my chest.

  “Did you?” Mom sounded pleased. “And what did they say?”

  “That it’s not possible to fall for someone so quickly. That life doesn’t quite work that way.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “I don’t know,” he whispered. “I just….”

  “What?” Mom asked kindly.

  He was hesitant. “When you saw Larry for the first time… did you know?”

  “Know that I’d be spending the rest of my life with him?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No. No, I didn’t. It was unrealistic. It wasn’t possible. I forgot about him almost as soon as I’d left the restaurant.”

  “Oh.” It was such a disappointed sound that my breath caught in my throat.

  My mom continued: “But I knew the second time. When I ran over his foot.”

  “You did?” There was hope there, now.

  “I did. To be honest, I was so freaked out that I didn’t recognize him as the guy from the restaurant. All I could think about was how much Nana was going to kick my ass when she found out.”

  “But then?”

  “But then I got so close to his face that I saw him.” I could hear the smile in her voice. “I saw him for what he truly was. A beautiful, kind, loving man, and it took my breath away. So, while I may have not known then that it would be a lifetime, I at least knew I wanted it to be. Right
then, I knew.”

  “Paul’s….”

  “Paul’s not easy, Vince. He never has been. He’s never had the confidence you have. He’s never had the bravado. He’s always been quiet. And shy. And a bit of a loner. But he is brave. He is oh so brave. Even though we tried to stop it as much as we could, he still got picked on for how he looked. How he acted. How he dressed. Other than Sandy, no one really knew what to make of him. He was too gay for the straight boys, too quiet for the girls. Sandy came along, this fierce little diva of a boy, and took him under his wing. I don’t… I don’t know what would have happened to him without Sandy. As much as a mother wants to be there for her son, as much as she wants to take away all the little hurts until everything is better again, there’s no way I could have done it completely. Nor could his father. It took someone like Sandy to bring him out of his shell. He’s gotten better. So much better than he used to be.”

  “He’s the bravest person I know,” Vince said without a trace of irony. “And he’s kind. Do you know how kind your son is?”

  Mom laughed. “I might know a thing or two about that. But he’s humble about it, Vince. He doesn’t want people making a big deal out of those little acts that he does. He wants them to be known, but not necessarily acknowledged.”

  “Why doesn’t he know what he’s worth? Can’t he see he’s worth more than all the rest of us combined?”

  My eyes burned and I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. My feet felt stuck to the floor. He couldn’t have been talking about me. He couldn’t have been meaning me. He’d gotten me confused with someone else. He wasn’t thinking right. He couldn’t have meant me.

  “I don’t think he knows,” my mother said slowly, “because other than us, I don’t think there’s been anyone to tell him.”

  “I will. I promise. I promise I will. Every day.”

  “Vince?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you care for my son?”

  There was no hesitation. “With my whole heart.”

  “Why haven’t you told him about your parents?”

  He sighed again. “I didn’t want to freak him out. I didn’t want to have to lay all my crap on him all at once. There’s something… there’s something peaceful about being near him. It calms me down. It clears my head. With him, I don’t have to worry about all the other bullshit that’s going on. I don’t have to wonder why I’m not smart enough, or why I’m not good enough. Paul doesn’t care about that stuff. I’m not smart, Matty. I know that. I say dumb stuff sometimes, and most of the time, I don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t even understand what Paul says half the time, but it doesn’t matter to me because it doesn’t matter to him. I think he likes me just the way I am, and I’ve never had that before. Not really. I don’t have to be anyone else but myself with Paul, and I think that’s okay with him.”