by Mal Peters
It shouldn’t surprise me that Nate’s thoughts are running along similar lines. “It’d be over if he knew. All this, what we’ve been doing.” Meeting my eyes, he asks the one thing I could stand here all night wishing he wouldn’t, begging him with my silence, willing it with every fiber I possess: “Do you not want it to be over?”
Suddenly my blood is pumping fast, a sharp surge past my ears like the knee-jerk response to a hand placed on a hot element, contradictory desires striking through me to flee, to scream and lash out and hurt. I refuse to run, legs sore and lungs exhausted from how far I’ve fled already. This isn’t like that time on the beach, when I was still so petrified and weak. “Fuck you,” I choke out and launch myself at him. Seemingly of its own accord, a fist swings out that nearly catches him in the jaw before he grabs my hand in midair.
“Phel, what the fuck?”
As I’ve proven before, I’m not much of a fighter, and this time I don’t have the element of surprise; Nate’s body shifts to simultaneously avoid the blow and curl itself around mine, his arms and legs snaking around my limbs as he rolls me onto my back. The ice pack rattles between us and then falls to the carpet. I land with all the grace of a sack of potatoes, grunting with indignant, impotent anger despite the thrill of excitement that rushes through me. Our bodies press flush, heavy and breathing hard.
Nate feels it, too, his cheeks going scarlet, and his mouth drops open in a near gasp. “Stop it,” he orders, hands tightening painfully around my wrists. “Stop fucking doing this, you’re like a goddamn child—hitting me because you don’t know what to say.”
I fight the urge to spit at him. “I have nothing to say,” I growl. My voice comes out breathy and choked from his weight on top of me. “I’ve been telling you, Nate, there’s nothing left to this goddamned conversation you insist on trying to drag out. Why can’t we just fuck and have it not mean anything?”
Nate’s jaw clenches. “Because that’s what you want, not me—even if it’s like trying to put a square fucking peg in a round hole, but who am I to tell you otherwise? You obviously don’t give a shit what I have to say, or if it means anything to someone other than yourself. I’m trying to make things right.”
“You can’t.”
“I didn’t just say for you.” Hesitating, Nate lets go of my wrists and sits back a little. “I’m coming out to Hugh for me, because it’s the right goddamn thing to do.”
I reach out to grab him before he can withdraw too far and wrap my arms around his torso. “Nate, leave it alone,” I beg him, disgusted by the tremor in my own voice and the fact that I’m proving him right the more I try to fight against him, answering his question with a “no” so resounding I might as well shout it out loud. I don’t want it to be over, damn it, but neither do I want him to know how badly the thought shakes me. “Just leave it alone. Fuck me and stop trying to ruin it.”
I snake my fingers into his hair and pull him to me. Our lips crash together as I kiss silent whatever he might have said in response, licking the denial right out of his mouth. Tumbling us over so he’s once again on his back, I drag my hand down to the crotch of his jeans and squeeze at his half-hard cock, making him moan into me and reluctantly arch for more. With us it’s always more and more until we’re scraping the bone with nothing left to give. I flick the button fly open and work my fingers inside, grasping at skin and the first few drops of wetness from the tip of his shaft.
“Fuck me,” I say again, hopefully this time. I pull away and hold his eyes as I skin out of my shorts and turn my body on the couch, laying myself out on my stomach beneath his gaze. Glancing back over my shoulder from where I’ve pushed up onto my elbows, I let my legs fall open in blatant invitation. I close my eyes and moan softly at the audible hitch in Nate’s breath as he looks at me, then push my tongue out to lick at lips that have suddenly gone dry. “I want you to. I want it so badly.”
“Phel,” Nate chastises. I can hear the resistance in his tone, but he crawls toward me, crouches on his hands and knees over my legs and dips his head to nuzzle into the small of my back. It’s a bit forceful—he knows what I’m trying to do, and doesn’t like being manipulated. Nor does he like his own acquiescence to so obvious a play for his silence.
“Come on.” I arch and shift back onto my knees, pushing my ass into him so he’s forced to take my hips to avoid being shoved off-balance. The feel of his palms grabbing hot and rough against my skin makes me groan in genuine need, and I drop to my chest against the sofa, hips still thrust in the air. My actions are a bit selfishly motivated, I admit—I’m essentially trying to buy Nate’s obedience and an end to this topic of conversation, but the hot flush of desire for him is never forced, never reluctant. If anything it’s like a brush fire, whooshing out of control if I so much as bring a match within sparking distance, devastation just waiting to catch.
Two fingers slip down the crease between my buttocks, dragging hard over my opening—they’re wet, Nate seemingly having slipped them into his mouth when I glanced away, and one presses inside me so easily we both cry out, me perhaps the more raggedly. A soft “Oh, oh, oh” falls from my lips as he works in and out, the second finger joining the first and making me sob when he presses into my prostate, rushes of fireworks licking through my whole body. He withdraws. Nate unfastens his jeans the rest of the way and pushes them to midthigh; I feel the brush of his erection like velvet against my exposed hole as he rocks into me, rides my crease for a second and sighs.
“Baby,” he says and presses against my body until his hips are flush against my ass and I’m groaning nonsense, trying to rock into him. He keens, “Baby,” again, and I’m not even coherent or sane enough anymore to reject the endearment.
“Isn’t it so much better this way?” I gasp. Nate’s teeth bite down on the flesh between my neck and shoulder, and I feel him shaking, tremors that match the ones in my arms. I rub my face into the smooth leather beneath my cheek. “So much better this way, Nate, when you fuck me.” Echoing my thought from earlier, almost deliriously at this stage, I tell him, “Don’t spoil it, please don’t spoil it again.”
The movement stalls, Nate’s whole body going tense and still above me while I try to arch and thrust back into him, a deep whine pulling from my throat. Just when I expect him to stop teasing and fuck me deep, or think maybe he’s just getting a hold of himself, Nate, impossibly, withdraws, pushing himself up and off me.
“What are you doing?” I demand. My stomach churns with unpleasantness as I roll to my side and see Nate rise from the couch on unsteady legs, pulling up his jeans. The flagging erection he tucks away with trembling fingers, wincing in discomfort, but for a moment he doesn’t say anything, doesn’t even look at me from the spot on the carpet he’s studying so intently. “Nate! Come back here.”
Green eyes drag up to meet mine, and I know that look, Nate’s soft, broken little-boy face that says he might be dying on the inside, but isn’t going to budge an inch.
Body still thrumming with arousal like an overwarm engine, I shiver and swing my legs underneath me, sitting up but not trusting myself to stand. Sudden pressure against the place Nate’s fingers so recently vacated makes me squirm, makes me ache and want to pull him to me, my mouth already open to beg him back. How can I beg, though, when he promised to do whatever I ask? How the hell can he get up and leave when for once I am trying to give something to him?
With shocking coldness, I shudder at the thought that Willa’s prediction is coming true, and Nate is starting to realize he’s not so powerless against me after all, not even if he wants to be. He can say no; he is saying no.
“You’re leaving,” I splutter. Scooting closer, I catch his hand before he can back away. “I don’t—I don’t understand. I’m not the one who—you said you would do—”
“What, whatever it took? Yeah.” Nate curls his fingers around mine briefly but ultimately withdraws, looking no happier for it. “I’m sorry, Phel. You don’t even know what you’re asking, but t
urns out I can’t do that.”
“You can’t fuck me all of a sudden?”
Brow furrowed, he shakes his head. “No—hide. ’Cause when it comes down to it, that’s what this is about. Hiding. I’m finally ready to come out of the closet to my brother, tell him the whole reason I left Emilia and Liam in the first place, and here you wanna drag me back in there with you because it’s safe. You’re fucking scared, Phel, but I don’t have that problem. I’m not afraid of who the hell I am, not like you are. Not anymore.”
“Hugh knows who I am,” I answer, pulling back. Miraculously, I keep my voice steady despite feeling like my insides are crumbling. “He’s known all along. What you and I do in private has nothing to do with him.”
“Nah, he doesn’t have the first clue.” Nate skims his knuckles across my cheekbone in a gesture that’s far gentler than his words, even though I can’t find any malice in his voice. “But I don’t think you do either, baby.”
At this, I snap, “I told you not to call me that.”
“Yeah, okay, Phel.” A brief touch to my lips and then the hand is curling around the back of my neck like Nate wants to pull me up for a kiss. I can’t deal with him when he’s being tender like this, because I know it takes infinitely more certainty on Nate’s part to show affection over anger. “I—I guess I get it. Believe me. It’s not my place to drag you into this when you obviously aren’t ready to admit it, which is why this ain’t about you. I’d like your support, but I know I pretty much squandered it the first time I had my chance.”
With a snort, I bat his hand away. “You don’t think Hugh’s going to put two and two together if you come out to him, Nate?” Finding my legs again is easier now, and I stand up so I can look him in the face, press in close and warm so he is sure to feel me, sure to meet my eyes when I turn his head toward me with my hands against his cheeks. “Everything you said about wanting me back? Well, don’t expect there to be much chance of that if everything’s out in the open. Look what happened the last time.”
He smiles and leans in to kiss me, so soft I almost lean away from it in confusion, the way Nate sometimes doesn’t know how to respond to my smiles. “There wasn’t much chance even now, man. I knew that going in. But if you were always gonna walk away again, doing things exactly the same way as last time wouldn’t change that.”
With that, Nate retrieves the bag of half-melted ice from the floor and hands it back to me, pressing it into my hands like I might still sit here babying my bruises. The room feels much quieter once he leaves, even the sounds from the television going mute as I try and fail to herd my thoughts into something resembling coherence. Tomorrow—or whenever Nate decides to talk to Hugh—everything will be completely changed, and I suppose I ought to feel relief I’ve already begun to think about where I’ll go after I leave Cardiff. Impossible to stay here now, with everything poised to shatter at a mere touch. We might as well have broken it ourselves.
The classical music from Hugh’s study continues to waft toward my ears as he writes on, oblivious for now, but not much longer.
8
Hugh
NATE dropped out of high school the year I started ninth grade. Not right away, mind you, but a couple of months before he was all set to graduate, he up and quit without any warning and no explanation except to say he had no intention of ever going back.
His GED arrived in the mail not long afterward, something else he did without telling me or our dad, and after that Nate kind of changed. Maybe not in so fundamental a way that I no longer recognized him after—he was still as cocky and carefree as ever—but little things were different.
He was more protective in some ways, more guarded in others, and it was around this time the womanizing and the drinking started in earnest. Nate was a little wild, but our dad was a cop and ran a strict household; anything major would have gotten Nate kicked out, and he once said that if that happened, there’d be no one left to look after me the way I needed. So he always watched himself and never did anything so crazy that it would land him in serious hot water. Even I was old enough to recognize that the stuff he started doing after that point wasn’t a danger to anyone but himself. Though he didn’t know it then, it’s absolutely what led to Emilia getting pregnant. Maybe everything would have gone differently if he’d never left school—it might have been a miracle that things eventually worked out, but it sure as hell wasn’t chance that made things fall apart. To this day, I never understood why he left when he was so close to the finish line.
When I say “to this day,” I literally mean until today. Because I think I get it now. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
About a month after Nate turned eighteen, I witnessed something that made so little sense at the time that the only logical explanation was I’d confused it for something else. Now, I know I wasn’t mistaken, but I also know I wasn’t meant to see what I did. I never spoke a word of it to anyone, not even Nate, which in retrospect was the smartest thing I could have done. Kids are easily confused at that age, or so I always thought, though as it turns out they’re a lot more perceptive than they’re given credit for—not by others, and certainly not by themselves.
There was this teacher at the school, Jay Garrett, who started teaching English at Sidney Lanier High in Montgomery, Alabama, the same year I started there. I never had him because he taught mostly the upper-year students, but I know Nate was in a couple of his classes and complained about them far less than he did some others. Mr. Garrett was young: barely twenty-five and newly certified as a teacher, with shaggy dark hair and exotic eyes Nate said came from Japanese blood on his mother’s side. In retrospect, his inexperience and good looks probably should have gotten him eaten alive, but he was so easygoing and cool that he hardly got any trouble, not even from the kids like my brother who prided themselves on causing it on a regular basis. Word was, Garrett was funny and smart and had a knack for making his classes fun. Apart from the requisite number of crushes that developed almost immediately, he was well liked by everyone, faculty and student body alike. More importantly, he was well liked by Nate.
That day, I was waiting around after school for Nate to show up and drive us home. Over thirty minutes had passed without any sign of my brother. Usually he was pretty good about being punctual, or would let me know ahead of time if he had to stay behind in class for detention or to speak with a teacher. But he hadn’t said anything to me that morning other than “Meet you after school.” All my other friends had already gone home, picked up by their parents or the bus, and suffice to say I was getting a little impatient and cranky with hunger, the way only a fourteen-year-old can.
Nate’s last class of the day was English, so I got it into my head that maybe he’d stayed behind to talk to Mr. Garrett about something. He once introduced us on a similar occasion, calling me his “brat kid brother,” and the teacher seemed to like me enough; it didn’t seem like a big deal to stop by the classroom to see whether Nate was there. The only other thing I could think of was maybe he was off smoking behind the auditorium or something, but in the event I was wrong, I didn’t want to risk getting harassed by the older kids who also frequented the spot. Garrett’s class, it was.
By then all the hallways were deserted, and all the classrooms I passed on the way were dark and had their doors closed, teachers having packed up and gone home for the day. As I rounded the corner to Mr. Garrett’s room, the first thing I saw was that the light inside was on, even though the door was closed. I barely made it up onto my tiptoes—I hadn’t hit puberty yet—to peer through the door’s single porthole before I stopped dead, my throat closing up so abruptly I made a choked noise.
There inside the class was Nate and someone who looked a great deal like Mr. Garrett, judging by the trademark suede patches on his tweed jacket. Except instead of deep in conversation like I expected, they were pressed up against the chalkboard, my brother’s shoulders, familiar in his football jacket, bent toward Mr. Garrett, who was a few inches shorter than
Nate’s six-foot-three-inch frame. The teacher’s hands were in Nate’s hair, clutching at those dark-blond strands, and even though their faces were mostly turned away from me, they were either having some kind of quiet argument or making out, or else Nate had turned into a vampire. I could see the pale strip of skin on Mr. Garrett’s side where Nate’s hands had bunched up his jacket and shirt, the shiny flash of tongue between their mouths, an image I later did a damn good job of forgetting.
After that, I didn’t stick around; I ran home, although I paused for a while in the park to talk myself out of whatever I thought I saw. Due to my tarrying, I turned up late for dinner, to furious reprimands from both my father and Nate, who had arrived not long before me. Apologizing for a quickly invented homework study session at a friend’s house, I begged off from the rest of dinner with the excuse that I had a project to finish. Smartly, or so I thought, I tried to put that afternoon as far from my mind as possible. Even though I desperately wanted to figure out why the hell someone like my brother would be kissing another dude—Nate was popular with the senior girls and never without a Saturday-night date—it seemed easier and ultimately wiser to forget I was ever there.
For a while, I managed okay, even when Nate started having to stay behind after his English class most afternoons, during which time I did my homework in the empty cafeteria until he was done. I successfully ignored the few whispered phone conversations I heard late at night, convinced Nate was talking to one of his girlfriends even in the absence of his typical endearments of “baby” and “sweetheart” to whoever was on the other end of the line. I pretended the gray sedan that sometimes dropped him off after midnight—always when our dad was on duty, of course—belonged to a buddy from school. Much as I was able, I forgot anything out of the ordinary had ever happened. I even started to believe I had truly misunderstood what I’d seen that day.