by Cooper Davis
“Until you really accepted this,” I begin, choosing my words carefully. “Well, accepted this about yourself, you were kind of shut off. You couldn’t really be the guy you’re supposed to be, Maxwell. But when you stopped fighting, it was like you opened up inside.”
“Yes, that’s it.” His eyes widen in amazement that I really do understand what he feels, that I can put it into words for him.
And I feel damned good that these mysteries his family can’t seem to fathom aren’t remotely lost on me.
“Like Bruno’s kiss,” I add softly. “The way it was for you.”
Then he smiles, such a perfect thing, and he’s just beautiful to me. “You remembered.”
“Yeah, course I did, Maxwell,” I say, inexplicably shy all of a sudden. “Because that’s how I felt the first time you kissed me.” I brush at my hair, just kind of stealing glances at him for a moment.
He steps close again, a look of innocent wonder on his face. “It doesn’t bother you or make you feel weird? Knowing that I was into guys for a long time?” I guess he’s thinking of my own very recent conversion, and that he’s the one who brought me over to his side of things.
“Maxwell, just get over it, man.” I roll my eyes in exasperation. “You’re queer as hell, so why am I going to start holding that against you now?”
For a moment, he looks shocked and his golden cheeks turn deep crimson. But then he bursts into a gentle roll of laughter, his eyes dancing. “Good point. Seeing as how I’m wearing your ring and all.”
“No shit. Besides I’ve gone all pink triangle now, too. Thanks to you, babylove.”
“Babylove?” He coughs as I grab the cigar off the bed. “Sorry, but that one doesn’t make the cut, Willis.”
“How about jailbait?” I kiss him full on the mouth. “You naughty little seductress. Should be illegal, the way you look at me.”
“Excuse me, but my recollection is that you stole my virginity.”
“Stole it, my ass,” I growl, cupping his bottom for good measure as I tease him. “That was a giveaway, thank you very much.”
He gives me a little shove toward the door. “Go smoke your cigar.”
“Go take your shower.”
And with that, we part ways for the night.
Opening the door to their backyard, I step onto the dew-soaked lawn, and I’m all slouchy in my jeans and T-shirt. The first thing I notice is that I’m not alone; someone else is smoking out here, too, and it sure as hell isn’t a cigar.
The arc of light from the kitchen falls over the yard, illuminating the lawn and the glider, and I see Leah quickly stamping out what looks to be a cigarette.
So we’re not the only ones who’ve been keeping our share of secrets in this family. Interesting.
“Don’t mean to interrupt.” I step across the lawn toward the long glider that she sits on.
“You’re not.” She stares away from me, into the yard, as she folds her arms across her chest. Like me, she’s taken off the formal wear, and as I settle beside her, I see the words “West Winchester High” on her shorts. Looks to be old gym clothes, even after all this time. She follows my gaze and fingers the hem with a soft laugh, “They were in my bedroom drawer. Can you believe it?”
“Hey, you’re probably just lucky they still fit.”
She glances up at me in surprise. Maybe because I can laugh with her, I’m not really sure. “Actually, you’re right.”
I withdraw Max’s Zippo lighter from my jeans pocket and tap it against my open palm for a moment. “You mind?” I indicate the cigar, and again she laughs.
“You probably don’t realize that John has a terrible cigar habit,” she explains. “He’d be out here with you if he knew you were smoking.”
I nod toward the ground, where she stamped out her own smoke. “He know about the cigarettes?”
She looks suddenly self-conscious. “He thinks I’ve totally quit, but I still sneak one now and then.”
We fall silent for a while as I light the cigar and give it several long drags.
After a few quiet moments, she turns to me. “You make him happy. That much is obvious.”
I hesitate, not sure how to talk to her. “I’m glad you can see that.” Seems like a safe choice for now.
“Oh, Max is definitely happy with you.” She doesn’t smile at all.
“But you’re not happy with Max.”
“I think he’s making a terrible choice with his life.” Max’s words from just moments earlier ring in my ears, and I cringe at how right he really was.
“There’s no choice about it.” I fold my arms over my chest. “He’s gay, Leah, and that’s the way it is.”
“But he’s choosing this lifestyle, this thing of being with you. Whatever.” She waves her hand in the air for emphasis and turns her mouth up in distaste.
“You’re wrong.”
“No, I don’t think so.”
“I suppose just talking to Max would be too much, huh? Letting him tell you how it feels to him?”
“Listen, I’ve known Max a lot longer than you have—”
“Yeah, and you’ve hurt him a hell of a lot more than I ever have, too.”
For a moment, she just blinks, a little stunned. “He told you that? That I hurt him?”
“He doesn’t have to tell me a freaking thing. I can see it every time you’re together, every time you give him a goddamned phone call.”
“Oh.” She kind of crumples right before me, and I actually regret that I’ve been so hard on her. I mean, in a strange way, she’s a part of Max, even looks a little like him when the light hits the right way.
“It’s not just this thing with Max and me,” I ask gently. “It’s deeper than that, isn’t it?”
She nods, and I take a long drag on my cigar while I wait for her to speak.
“It’s all my fault,” she finally says, her voice edged with pain.
“What is?”
“That he’s gay.”
“What?” What the hell is this chick even talking about? I have to suppress a spasm of coughing behind my hand; it’s partly the cigar, but partly the insanity of her remark.
“It’s because he spent too much time with me. Because I couldn’t approve of his relationship with Louisa,” she begins in a rush of words that barely make any sense to me at all. “If I hadn’t smothered him all through school, if I’d just encouraged him when he and Louisa got together, instead of fighting that…if, if I’d just let him make the male friends he needed without always being around…”
I raise my hand, making a time out sign. “Leah, wait.”
“I mean, obviously he loved Louisa,” she continues, and that’s when I realize that she’s not really talking to me. She’s talking, in some strange, twisted way, to her twin brother. Even though he’s in the house, in the shower, without a clue about what’s going down in the backyard.
“And he should have married her. It’s Louisa he should be marrying, not you.” Then, she does seem to notice me again, because she turns to me, making a little scrunching expression with her nose. “I mean he shouldn’t be marrying another man, for crying out loud!”
I ignore her jab, and instead go for the hard truth. “What did you tell him about Louisa?”
Silence falls over us for a moment, and she chews on her lip thoughtfully. That is, until it begins to tremble and tears well within her large eyes. “That marrying Louisa would be like marrying his sister.”
Oh, holy shit. Now we’re on to something here.
“I see.”
She glances at me, wiping at her eyes. “Yeah, so he broke up with her about two weeks after that. He told me later that I saved him years of heartache, of trying to understand what wasn’t working with her. That he finally understood himself then.”
That’s when it all comes rushing ho
me for me—his big revelation of gayness came out of his conversation with Leah. I can’t believe it. No wonder she’s freaking out. No wonder she thinks it’s all her goddamned fault.
But what she doesn’t know is all that he just told me. That he spent his whole life trying to be something other than what he really is. A beautiful, proud gay man. The one I want to marry in just a few more months.
“Leah,” I begin as gingerly as possible. “Max is finally happy. If you did anything, well, you freed him up.”
“No, no I didn’t,” she disagrees firmly, brushing at her neat ponytail. She hesitates a moment, then quietly says, “And then there was Eric.”
With that one name, a name I’ve never heard before, the ugly jealousy rears its head once again. “Eric?” I manage, but my heart begins to thunder like a wild fucker.
“His college roommate. Didn’t he tell you?”
I shake my head, swallowing hard, and finally manage a thin, “No.”
“Oh, he and Eric were just,” she hesitates, reaching for my cigar. I pass it to her mindlessly. “Inseparable. It was so incredibly…weird. I knew something was wrong even way back then.”
I’m spiraling into a category five panic. Eric? He’s never told me about Eric. Who the hell is Eric?
“What happened?” I manage in a thick voice.
“They did everything together,” she explains, dragging on the cigar. I guess she and John have shared a few secret habits. Come to think of it, secrets seem to wind their way all through this family that I’m marrying into. “Until senior year, and then…” She sighs heavily, staring into the darkness.
“And then what?” I growl possessively, not even trying to restrain my wild jealousy anymore. Hell, maybe Bruno wasn’t even the first kiss.
“Until Eric got a girlfriend, and then something seemed to really just separate them.”
“I see.”
“I tried asking Max, because that’s when I first suspected something was wrong with him. Something with his, you know, sexuality.”
That’s it. I’m just done here. Eric isn’t a threat, never was. The only threat comes from right within our own camp, Maxwell’s own beloved family.
“Look, Leah, nothing is fucking wrong with your brother,” I bark, my voice furious in its pitch. “This is what he is. He’s gay. He’s gay and he’s with me, and if you want to really lose him, then keep at this shit.”
With those words I rise, and I’m just shaking all over. Except, while she may be cool and calculating, Leah is still somehow her brother’s twin.
“Hunter, wait,” she calls after me, her voice much softer than a moment before.
“Look, let’s just do this later.” I storm toward the door with an angry stride.
“No, I want to talk to you, Hunter. Tonight.”
I stop in my tracks, surprised to find the cigar has broken within my angry grasp. So I let it fall to the ground, and grind it beneath the heel of my hiking boot, kicking at it for good measure.
I stand right where I am, my back to her. “Okay.”
“Come back,” she urges, and I rake my hands through my hair. Everything is so damned fuzzy. The martinis and whiskey, the cigar…it’s all left me in something of a bleary fog, and I’m a little unsure of what she’s after. I was certain of what I wanted to say, but not so confident now in how it’s all playing out.
I slink back to the glider and settle onto it with a decided scowl. Hell, this was her idea, to keep talking.
“You make him happy,” she says again, only this time around, her voice breaks like fine china.
I nod wordlessly and tears fill my own eyes, burning and unbidden.
“You make him happy.” She draws in an audible breath. “And…I think I want to understand that.”
Despite myself, at her simple confession I begin to cry like some lost, wandering child. And the weird thing is, she knows that I do, but I feel okay with that.
I feel okay, because she’s crying like a lost child, too. We’re crying together, and as we just rock there on the glider, I finally have hope that I’m going to find my place in this family.
And I finally have hope that Max is going to find his peace here in Winchester, Virginia.
That he’s going to find his place in this family too.
Chapter Six
“So, have you always been this gay?” Leah asks and I try not to flinch at her bluntness. Our tears have stopped, and it feels a little awkward between us, but at least we’re talking honestly now.
“You know…” I cough, wishing I still had that cigar to hide behind. “It’s not really a thing of how gay I am or not.”
“Well, you’re pretty sold out, thinking about marriage and all.”
“Not thinking about. It’s what we’re doing.” Why do I feel I’ve had this conversation a dozen or so times here in Winchester? It’s like some kind of bad fever dream, where I find myself repeating the same three phrases over and over to weird natives who don’t speak my language.
“Okay, so you’re marrying Max,” she agrees, rolling her eyes. “I understand that. But what I mean is whether you were always a homosexual.”
God, you know I hate the sound of that word in the hands of a raging homophobe, how it just gets kind of injected with paranoia and shame. I never would have felt that way six months ago, but things have definitely changed for me.
Yet her question hangs out there, a skydiving, adrenaline-rushing question on steroids. Got to answer it, but not sure exactly how just yet.
“Well, were you?” she persists.
“I’m gonna take a pass on that right now.” I just can’t go there yet. I don’t trust her enough, and I’m still feeling things out with her along the way. Besides, I’m not positive I hold the answer within my hands, even after all these months of loving her brother.
So, I’m surprised, and not a little bit grateful, when we grow silent and just kind of rock on the glider, listening to the midnight sounds of the Daniels’ backyard. Fall is supposedly here, but it sure doesn’t seem like it based on the sultry heat that threatens to choke the life out of everything around us.
“He was a groomsman in my wedding, you know,” she says suddenly, her voice kind of hushed. “Max was, I mean.”
“Yeah, I know. There’s a picture at our apartment.”
“Really?”
“A couple of them, sure.” I don’t tell her that they’re the only pictures of her that he displays, or that he has loads of his closest friends, Louisa and Veronica and Ben, all around his place. Even a few of me he managed to collect long before we got together.
“Oh, he was so handsome too. All my bridesmaids were just going nuts over him.” Her expression becomes melancholy as she remembers. “But he never seemed to notice any of them.”
“Clue number ten about your boy hero,” I offer helpfully, but she doesn’t laugh.
“We’d already begun to drift apart by then.” It doesn’t take much for me to do the math on that one—that would have been after the now ubiquitous Eric.
“Was Louisa at your wedding?”
She looks a little ashamed. “I didn’t ask her. They weren’t dating yet.”
“Yeah, but she was his best friend,” I remind her, wondering why she had so obviously turned her back on the one girl he ever spent real time with over the years.
Leah’s expression sours like day-old milk. “But they weren’t involved or anything. And that’s just it. He never dated. Only Louisa, maybe a couple of other random girls in high school.”
I’m still thinking about the wedding blow off when I say, “He loves Louisa, still does, even now.”
“Not like a man should love a woman, though.”
I decide to ignore her jab, and focus on the critical stuff. “Nope, you called that one right.”
“But why?” she cries, l
ooking at me with incredible sadness. “Louisa wasn’t the right choice, obviously. They were just friends, but why not find a girl he could really love? Instead of…”
“Hold up.” I silence her with my hand. “He didn’t need to find a girl because he was always gay, Leah.”
This shuts her down completely for a moment. Maybe she’s just trying to square my comment with the Max she’s loved her whole life. I mean, I’ve just explained a lot of things for her, but whether she’s willing to believe me is another matter.
“You know, I always pictured us raising our kids together,” she says, her voice getting kind of hushed. “Our families spending holidays with each other, maybe renting a big beach house every summer…growing old together, while our kids played in the sand. That’s what I wanted.”
It’s a bittersweet image, the thought of their children growing up that way, and I understand why it causes her voice to hitch when she says, “I’m never going to have that dream now, Hunter.”
“That’s not necessarily true. Max and I might adopt,” I offer, but even as I do, I think of all the stories I’ve heard, how tough it still is—even now—for gay couples to adopt.
She nails me with a hard, pain-filled gaze. “Might. It won’t be easy, you know?”
And with that, well, I have to agree. For a moment, I imagine the beautiful dark-haired children Max might have fathered, and I get a clear image of them playing with Leah’s golden-skinned toddlers. And yeah, I get exactly why it hurts her, and maybe even why she’s fought this thing in him so damn hard.
I get it because knowing that it might not happen for them, and even that Max and I could miss out on that dream ourselves, kind of kills me too.
“It breaks my heart, that our lives are taking these different paths,” she admits. “That I might never be an aunt. That Max and I won’t have the picket fence life…with predictable families, boringly normal ones.”
“But you and Max can still be close. Like you used to be,” I offer.