Dex in Blue

by Amy Lane

  There was no answer, just the lonely wind under the big sky. There were mountains on three sides of the ranch, and David could name them all, but at this moment, this ridge over the slight valley of his father’s farm felt like the palm of God.

  Dex shuddered and stroked the headstone again. “Bye, Dexter,” he said softly. He wasn’t sure what was going to happen when he got home—and he certainly wouldn’t have predicted what did happen—but he was pretty sure this was the last time he’d be visiting this place for a while. Maybe even forever. It was important, that was all, that Dexter Williams got to know his memory was treasured, even while David said good-bye.

  THE wind had pushed them up the hill, so that meant they could ride down the hill like the sailboard was just a big hard-to-steer sled. This was good, because tacking wasn’t easy in a sailboard, and they had to do that for the last mile or so.

  By the time they got back, Dex’s back, neck, arms, core, thighs, and calves were all complaining from the strain, and he practically fell off the damned board as they pulled into the little windless area left by the house and the two barns.

  Kane laughed and unfolded himself and then stood and stretched with Dex. They’d both done enough extensive workouts to know that a few yoga stretches would put paid to a lot of pain later. Twilight was darkening to night, and the temperature was about to become unlivable. Dex was glad it wasn’t snowing, because he could tilt his head back and see stars.

  “Look,” he said, and he watched as Kane did the same thing. They stood there, hands laced behind them as they stretched out their chests and arms, and watched the simplicity of the stars, with a full moon cresting over the animal barn.

  “Think the guys are in already?” Kane asked after a moment. They couldn’t stretch too long or the cold would start to set into their bones.

  “Yeah—probably long before this. Not too much to do in the winter. Milk the few cows, muck the stalls, feed everybody. If they were riding out to fix fences, they would have finished that up after lunch.”

  Kane kept his head tilted up. It was such a simple sky—deep, thick, syrupy velvet black and clean, sparkling, crystalline white. Then Kane had to make one of those simple observations that messed up everything Dex had been thinking because it was profound too.

  “So clear here, you can see the reds and the blues in the stars,” Kane said. “You can see the moon like a little planet, with sand and stuff on the surface and not like just a glowing light in the sky. It’s funny how you get rid of all the weird city stuff and you can see things for what they are.”

  Dex turned his head, saw Kane’s face lit up by the moon. “Yeah,” he said softly. It was like he’d hung the moon there just so Kane could look at it and be enchanted. He’d do anything to give that sort of wonder to Kane.

  But it was getting cold, so they finished their stretch and clomped in, passing through the threshold into a surprisingly silent house. Dex looked around as he and Kane took off their coats and unlaced their boots.

  “Where is everybody?” Kane asked, and Dex shrugged. Come to think of it, the driveway, which had a cover big enough to accommodate four vehicles, had been missing some cars too.

  “I wonder if they went out to eat. It’s a little late notice—”

  “They’re at my house,” Travis said, coming out of the kitchen quickly enough to startle Dex. “And don’t get comfortable.”

  “We’re going to your house?” Kane asked in confusion, but Dex took one look at his older brother, that square jaw grim and those lowered eyebrows even grimmer, and shook his head.

  “No, baby. We’re going home.”

  Except it was never that simple, was it? Dex was all for making it simple. He walked into the kitchen and there was Dad, his eyebrows and forehead as grim as Travis’s and his mouth pinched in and sour, and there was Mom, her eyes all red and puffy and her mouth open and vulnerable.

  Dex walked in there, sock-footed because he’d taken his boots off, and looked at them both. “How’d you know?” he asked, and his father scowled.

  “Greg Williams called me up. Said a couple of faggots was necking on his son’s grave. I didn’t know what the hell it had to do with me until he told me one of them was you!”

  Dex wrinkled his nose. “Weird. I didn’t see him out there at all!” He looked at Kane. “You?”

  Kane shook his head no, and then they both looked expectantly at Dex’s father. In that moment, that shared movement, it was like they were in their own little bubble, their own little Dex-and-Kane planet, like the moon. Yeah, they could see changes on the Earth’s surface, but they were cold changes, far away, and had nothing to do with planet Dex-and-Kane, which would weather all those changes with equanimity. Dex wasn’t startled or even surprised when Kane grasped his hand and moved closer, shoulder to shoulder, as his family ties were savaged and mutilated in one painful moment.

  “So you don’t deny it? You went up to… to what? To deface your best friend’s grave with this bullshit?”

  Dex swallowed. “Leave Dexter out of it,” he said quietly. “I was there to say good-bye.”

  “To Dexter?” his mom asked, confused. “You were going to say good-bye to Dexter by… by being perverted with this… this…?”

  Oh shit. Suddenly his moon was way too close to planet earth, because he’d thought he wouldn’t have to talk about this, but now it seems he would.

  “He’s my boyfriend,” seemed like the first matter of business, mostly so his mother wouldn’t swallow her tongue. “He’s the first person I’ve really loved since Dexter—”

  His father stood up so fast Dex didn’t even have a chance to step back, and the crack across his face shocked his breath away. “That boy’s not even here to defend himself!”

  “From what?” Dex asked, hearing a child’s tears in his voice and wanting to be back on the moon. His face stung, was bruising, his cheekbone throbbing because it had been the sort of open-palmed smack that would have bruised a slab of frozen beef. “From falling in love? We were in—”

  His father’s hand went up again, and suddenly Kane was there in front of Dex, catching Paul Worral’s stringy arm in his own strong hand. “You hit him again and I will end you,” Kane said, his voice as steady and even as a snake’s.

  “Carlos—”

  “We’re done here, David,” Kane said. His other arm was bent behind his back, because he’d never released Dex’s hand, and now he gave it a squeeze. “We’re done. Whether we stay here and do this scene ugly or leave now and let them wallow in it alone, they’re going to ask you to leave. We’re going to leave now, before he gets a chance to hit you again and I have to lay him out.”

  Dex took a breath, and he wasn’t proud of the next thing he said. “Mom?” Oh God. Growing up, his father had always been the hand of God, but Mom? She’d been the mercy of the goddess, the gentle supporter, the voice of kindness.

  “David, is it true? Are you and this boy…? Did he make you…?”

  “Gay?” Dex said, and hearing it out loud should not have been such a shock. He’d been in gay porn for nine years. He’d been fucking guys for money for seven of them. Why, then, would the word gay sound obscene when uttered once, while holding his lover’s hand, in his mother’s kitchen and under his father’s roof? “He didn’t make me gay. God made me gay. Dex made me realize it wasn’t a bad thing.”

  “And this boy?” his mother asked, like Kane wasn’t still holding on to Dex’s old man’s wrist with a grip of steel while Paul Worral’s arm trembled with exertion as he tried to follow through on that blow. “Who is this boy to you?”

  Dex squeezed Kane’s hand back. “He’s the first good relationship I’ve had since Dex Williams died. He’s the first person to accept me for me since we hit that damned deer in the road.” His voice rose, and he felt that whole useless year yearning for Scott fading away, all those failed relationships with girls while he fucked men for money disappearing like one of those pixelated pictures of stuff disappearing one sma
ll photoelectron at a time. “Are you really going to kick us out because he’s not who you thought I’d want?”

  “Oh, honey.” Dex’s mother was crying, and she wasn’t looking at him. “You know how strongly we believe this is wrong!”

  “Yeah,” Dex said. He remembered lying in the hospital, needing someone to understand so badly, being so afraid that they wouldn’t that he’d made plans to bail from his entire home state before he could find out. For the first time since he’d done it, that felt like a good plan. “I just thought… I still hoped that maybe you could love me more than you loved your damned beliefs. C’mon, Kane—you’re gonna break his arm.”

  Dex’s father was sweating by now, his whole body shaking, and Kane simply let go and stepped back. Dex’s dad lost his balance, had to windmill his arms to keep upright, and he glared at Kane and spat, “No goddamned idiot faggot’s gonna touch me in my own house!”

  And suddenly the moon was far away, and Dex was there in the ugly, and the ugly had made him, and he was wearing it like skin. “Faggot?” he said, his voice thin and a little shrill. “Faggot? You want to know how I made it through school, Dad?”

  Kane turned toward him, horror on his face. “No… no, Dexter, no—not like this!”

  Dex shook his head. “No one calls you shit. No one. You think he’s an idiot faggot, Dad? You want to know what an idiot faggot I am? Guess. I dare you. Guess what I am.”

  Kane squeezed his hand hard. “David… David, baby, trust me—you can’t take this back.”

  “I don’t want to take it back. I don’t want to. They’re gonna kick us out? They’re gonna call you names?” He pitched his voice over Kane’s shoulder. “He’s the gentlest man in the world, do you know that? In the world. He gave his sister his own house so she could get away from her husband. He spent more money than you’ve made in ten years making sure her baby gets better from cancer. And you’re gonna call him that? You deserve to know everything. If you’re gonna give up on me, you need to know what you’re giving up on.”

  Dex’s mother was looking at him with absolute confusion in her eyes, and Travis, who had watched the whole thing dispassionately from the doorway, was suddenly curious. “All right, Davy. I give. What the hell did you do?”

  “Porn,” Dex said, feeling evil. He didn’t deserve to be clean like the moon. “Gay porn. Over a hundred movies. That’s what Johnnies is. That’s the modeling agency I’m working for. That’s the place that’s giving me a dick up in business. That whole time, those girls I was dating? They were the kind of girls who would know. You want to know why Kane calls me Dex? Because I missed Dex… I missed him so bad I became him. I became someone fearless, and when I was Dex, I could sleep with any guy I wanted, and I could look for someone to fill that place in me that was missing. Seven years. It took me seven years to figure out that Dex wasn’t the only man I could ever love. It took me seven years to figure out that he wasn’t a fluke, and that it wasn’t a woman who would make that ache in me feel better, and that sleeping with all the guys in the world was not going to make up for not having one to love.” He wasn’t crying. He was surprised. His voice was a little shaky, but he was going to do this. He had done this.

  His parents had no words, and he was still shaking, his chest heaving with the need to shriek at them, to rage, to scream, to be that little part of himself who had mourned to the heavens when he was eighteen years old and whom no one had heard. Suddenly Kane was there, and Dex was engulfed in a massive embrace.

  “Keep it together,” Kane murmured in his ear. “Keep it together. Shoes on. Jacket on. I’ll go get our shit. You take it out to the car. I’m driving. Little things, David Calvin. You can scream when we’re done.” Dex nodded into the hollow of his shoulders, and Kane rubbed their cheeks together. “You heard me?”

  “Shoes on,” Dex rasped, taking that lifeline and holding on with two hands. “Jacket on. You get our shit.”

  “I’ll be right down.”

  They separated, and his mother burst into sobs, and Dex turned away from the kitchen, from his parents, from that little pocket of the boy he used to be, the family he used to have, and into the truth he’d tried so hard not to face.

  Kane

  KANE could hear it, even though Dex was quiet.

  The roads had been cleared and it hadn’t snowed in a few days, but still, it was cold enough that there were nasty little patches of ice, and Kane couldn’t take his eyes off the road for any stretch to check on Dex. What he could see wasn’t reassuring.

  Dex was leaning against the window, the glow from the occasional streetlight blooming across his face with icy regularity. He didn’t even blink when that happened. His chest was still heaving in and out, and Kane remembered when Frances was a baby, back before she’d gotten sick and before Kane had told Lola about the porn in the misguided thought that knowing there was a steady source of income would comfort her when the leukemia was diagnosed. Frances had been playing with blocks and had smashed her finger against the coffee table—poor little sausage-shaped thing was black and blue for a week—and she hadn’t cried right away. No, no, she’d done that baby thing, that thing where they suck air for a couple of breaths and then just belt it out and deafen you.

  Kane had known it was coming. He’d held her and tried to calm her down, and still he’d felt her sucking the power out of life, getting ready to just rip it loose in a shriek that would melt skin and flay bone. Those moments, those breathless moments between knowing when it was coming and hearing it come, had been suffocating, horrible, agonizing things that had crawled by like turtles were supposed to. Turtles moved faster.

  Right now, this sound that Dex was making—it was the same thing.

  There was a little thermometer on the dash of the rental SUV: it said -10F. Kane wasn’t sure what people in Montana thought was cold—he’d been freezing his ass off for the last two nights in that bedroom—but he was pretty sure he couldn’t just roll down the window and let Dex scream his way into Butte in this weather.

  He thought if it had been just a little bit warmer—maybe without that minus in the number—he would have tried.

  But he knew that back about thirty miles was a small town—big enough to have a Costco and a Holiday Inn but not much bigger than that. He figured if he could hold on, keep Dex breathing in until they got there, he could deal with that scream on his own.

  An hour. It took an interminable hour to get to the Holiday Inn, and Kane told Dex to wait while he checked in. He took a room with a king-size bed and didn’t give a fuck that the kid looked at him funny. If he had to knock the entire staff of the Holiday Inn on its ass, he was going to get that boy alone and make him better.

  Kane didn’t have to knock anyone on their ass, but the thought made him feel better. He just kept remembering that crack across Dex’s face, the easy, careless way that muscle-knotted father had just taken his kid out. If Kane had to guess, he’d guess that those kids in that house had a few days from their childhoods where they couldn’t walk. If he had to guess, he’d guess there was a belt involved. It wasn’t like the guy threw violence around like popcorn, but he wasn’t afraid of it either.

  Kane tried very hard not to think of Dex alone in a hospital bed, mourning his first lover with a silent scream. It was easier to think of him getting knocked around a little as a kid—not a lot. Not enough to scar them all for life. Just enough to know that opening your mouth and screaming out of grief was not going to get you any sympathy. Just enough to make running to the ends of the fucking Earth the best option in the world.

  He got out to the SUV and opened Dex’s door, then started unloading the luggage.

  “Get the suitcases. Here’s the extra key.”

  Dex nodded, clearly on automatic, nobody home, everybody working on the great scream suppressor in Dex’s head.

  Yeah. Kane was going to take care of that.

  They got inside, shut the door, and Kane dropped the suitcases then bent down to unlace his boots. He shuck
ed his jacket, coat, gloves, hat, scarf, all that shit, and reached into his suitcase for something necessary while Dex shucked his winter crap off too. Dex sat down dispiritedly on the bed in his sweatshirt and jeans—the same wet jeans he’d worn when they’d been sailboarding—and Kane said “Stand up and take them off” in a crisp enough voice to make Dex comply.

  Kane was a little bit faster.

  By the time Dex had wiggled out of the jeans and the long underwear, Kane was in front of him, angry at his quiet, terrified of his complacence.

  “You all undressed now?” he asked gruffly, and Dex looked at him, those angel-blue eyes flat and dead, and nodded.

  Kane planted his wide-palmed hand on the back of Dex’s head and hauled him close. “C’mon, baby, scream,” he whispered and then hauled Dex in for a blazing, punishing kiss. He made it hard, hard enough to bruise, to draw blood maybe, and as Dex started to struggle against the pain, Kane came back and whispered, “C’mon, baby, scream.”

  “What in the fu—”

  And then he mashed them together again. He used his thumbs to force Dex’s mouth open, and wider, and Dex did, groaning as Kane invaded, welcoming Kane in. Kane plundered, kissed hard, long, deep, and took everything he wanted from the kiss because Dex needed it that way. Kane pulled back a little and peppered Dex’s closed eyes with hard, purposeful kisses.

  “You think you can keep that shit bottled up?” he said between kisses. “You think so? I don’t fuckin’ think so.” He kissed Dex hard again and this time shoved Dex’s underwear down while their lips were still locked, and Dex was sucking Kane in like Kane was water and Dex was a fucking camel. Kane stepped back long enough to haul Dex’s shirt and sweatshirt over his head, then dropped to his knees and took Dex’s erection into his mouth quick and hard, needing him aching and sensitized. He used his teeth lightly around the crown, listening for Dex’s groan. When he got it, he dropped lower, sucked Dex’s shaved balls into his mouth, and tugged on them a little roughly, waiting for the little pain sound before he let them go. He pulled back then and turned Dex around, grunting “Bend over” so Dex would bend over the bed and stick his taut little porn star ass in the air.