Bombora

by Mal Peters

  “I probably knew since a while before then,” Nate corrects. “Not much happened before he—you know. But he was the first person who really made it stop being easy to pretend I didn’t want what I did. He was—he was a good man. Didn’t push me into anything. Actually, I’m kinda the one who pushed him. No way he deserved to go to jail for some fucking blowjob in the park.”

  “You got scared after that,” I supply. The pieces are starting to come together so quickly now, it’s like I’d already put half the puzzle together years ago but chose instead to bury it in the attic and forgot about it when the jigsaw got too difficult or confusing. When I realized the picture was a lot more frightening than the one I’d anticipated. “That’s why you dropped out, isn’t it? Why you started up with that stupid Casanova shit?”

  “Pretty much.” Although I didn’t realize my vision had gone out of focus with the force of my memories—which now feel like discoveries all over again—the image of Nate crying at the other end of the table makes the present come back to me with a clarity that’s pretty dizzying. “I didn’t want to end up like him, Hugh. I thought about what you or Dad would do if I ever got caught like Jay did, went to jail because of something I couldn’t fix about myself. It seemed easier to try and change it, or at least make it so that no one would ever question otherwise.”

  “You’ve been lying to me for twelve fucking years,” I whisper. “Longer, even. I’m your goddamned brother, and this whole time—” Nate cuts me off with something that sounds like don’t start that, but I ignore him and force the rest out like a bitter pill coming up instead of going down, and each word emerges progressively louder until I’m all but shouting. I know I’m being unfair, I know it. But for a second I’m seven years old again, a kid whose only brother is all the family he’s got, and is terrified of losing that too. “This whole damn time I haven’t had the first clue who you even are. Like I don’t fucking know you at all.”

  Whatever Nate could possibly say in response is cut off by Callie rushing up from under the table—somehow I managed not to notice her under there this whole time—and running to the front door with her tail going a mile a minute. Sitting with his back to the door, Nate turns to look in that direction, too, since apparently neither one of us heard it close. A second later, Phel is standing in the kitchen doorway with sleepless rings dark as bruises beneath his eyes. Aside from that, he looks nice today, like he took extra care in dressing himself in a neat waistcoat buttoned over a crisp striped shirt and dark jeans. Planning went into that outfit, and I think about how Nate was already fully dressed when I came down this morning too, none of it accidental.

  Phel looks at Nate for a long second before his gaze flicks over to me. Whatever tension is floating around in this room must be strong enough that he feels it, since he doesn’t even say hello.

  “Phel,” I say instead, voice like gravel. “This isn’t a good time, man, sorry. Nate and I are kind of in the—”

  “I already told him,” Nate interrupts, the startling iciness in his voice directed not at me, but at Phel. He has to tilt his head back a little to look up at Phelan’s face, but it doesn’t diminish the authority in his posture. I realize, with a jolt, that Phel is getting told. “If that’s why you showed up here, then Hugh’s right—you might as well just go back home, because it’s already done. Nothing you can say to change that now.” That Phel registers the words with hardly more than a blink makes my eyebrows climb my forehead all over again; I may have a hard time coaxing them back down to their normal place if there are any more surprises this morning.

  Nodding, Phelan lets that—whatever that is—sink in before he casts a ponderous look down at his feet, which are scuffing at the kitchen tile like he’s an embarrassed teenager. “That’s not why I came,” he says eventually, to Nate.

  Nate’s jaw clenches. “Then what?”

  “I thought you could use a little moral support.” Phel hesitates, which is a lot reminiscent of how he was when I first met him, but startling all the same because I feel like it’s been weeks since I’ve seen that guy. He seems to be winding up to something really big, though after the bombshells that have been dropped so far in this kitchen, I haven’t a clue what the hell that could be. “I realized something important last night,” he begins, “that, a year ago, I never would have condoned the idea of forcing someone to hide who they are because of what another person might think. Considering I’ve had to hide my sexuality for most of my life, I know firsthand how awful that feeling is.” As I look between him and Nate, I can see their gazes are locked and holding steady. “I should have never tried to stop you from speaking up, Nate, on account of how Hugh might react. That was wrong of me, and I apologize. You’re not the coward I thought you were.” Awkwardly, he reaches out to pat Nate on the shoulder. “I suppose that dubious honor belongs to me.”

  In a weird turn of events, at least for me, Nate’s hand comes up to cover the one Phelan has resting on his shoulder. Though Nate doesn’t say anything, the expression that flits over his features is one of relief, then gratitude. They both withdraw their hands after a moment, still silent, but I don’t miss the way Nate catches Phel’s wrist when it falls to his side, fingers encircling that slender joint and resting there, a little more manly than holding hands, I suppose, but with a similar effect. Phel glances down at it, too, as a slow blush spreads across his cheeks. There are probably a million different explanations for this little display, and I can’t figure out a single one of them.

  “Thanks,” Nate says eventually, voice leagues softer than when Phel first wandered into the kitchen, but also rough, like he’s about to start crying again. Nate is an emotional man, a fact I know in theory but right now still manages to catch me off guard, but the one person it doesn’t seem to affect is Phel, who looks at Nate like he knew exactly what his presence here would do to my brother. I file that away under “More Shit I Don’t Understand.” Offering a faint smile, Nate murmurs, “Coming from you, that means pretty much the most ever.”

  “It shouldn’t.”

  “Yeah, well.” Nate gives an offhand shrug. “I ain’t too bright. But I do know the fact you’re here proves you aren’t a coward either.”

  I can tell Nate and Phel could go on staring at each other for a while longer, playing out one of those interminable, silent conversations of theirs that is starting to make a hell of a lot more sense right now. So before that can happen, I catch myself spluttering something along the lines of “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” spreading my hands out like the presses need to come to a stop right the fuck now. Not unlike before Phel walked in, stuff is beginning to click into place so quickly that it agitates me. If this were a movie, I’d have missed the pivotal scene because the subtitles were moving too fast for me to read. “You seriously mean to tell me everyone knew about this before me? I’m the last schmuck on your list of people to call?”

  Looking away from Phel, Nate gives me a complicated look and swallows, which is pretty much a yes. “I came out to California to tell you,” he says. “You were supposed to be the first, after Emilia. But some overwhelming stuff was going on. I… lost my nerve.” Even though it’s partially hidden by the table, I know Nate’s grip just tightened on Phel’s wrist. “I’m telling you now, Hugh.”

  “I’m your fucking brother,” I remind him needlessly. My voice is too loud, but I can’t get it under control even when I see Callie’s little face take on that wide-eyed look common to dogs and children who aren’t sure whether they’ve done something wrong. Her tail goes between her legs and she glances nervously at Nate and Phel from over her shoulder, then starts dancing on her front paws like I either need to put her outside or shut the fuck up. I don’t do either one. “Phel is—you’ve been telling me this whole time how you guys can’t stand each other, but somehow you managed to spill your guts to him instead of me?”

  Naturally, Nate’s mouth opens to refute this statement, but to both our surprise it’s Phel who speaks. “Hugh,” he says quietly,
but with unbreakable calm, “I know about Nate’s sexuality crisis because it’s something we have in common, if nothing else. I advocated against telling you because I thought you would take it badly, and that was a huge mistake on my part. Personal feelings aside, I should have put myself in his shoes and considered how difficult this step would be without added drama. But this isn’t the issue here, and nor is who Nate did or did not tell before you. That he trusts you enough to tell you at all should be enough, so don’t make this out to be about you.”

  A strange kind of choking noise comes from Nate, as though Phel’s words have startled him and he’s only just remembered it’s his brother Phel is talking about. “Phel—” he starts, but Phelan just shakes his head.

  “No. He either supports you or he doesn’t.” Phel meets my gaze, gesturing apologetically, and the look in his eyes is both conflicted and vehement. I know his stubborn streak well enough by now not to expect that to sway him away from his beliefs. “I’m sorry, Hugh, but this isn’t some deal your brother’s failed to follow through on, and it’s not a collaborative effort. Since it’s something that doesn’t affect or involve your life, not really, it shouldn’t even be up for discussion.”

  “Phel,” Nate says again, gently chastising. “This isn’t like your parents, okay?” He tugs on Phel’s wrist, pulls him closer so his shoulder nudges up against Phelan’s side.

  My stomach drops when I see that, and I can’t quite begin to understand why it would, or why it clenches when Nate’s hand slides up Phelan’s arm to the elbow and then back down, lower, so they’re now actually grasping hands, albeit loosely. Nate is a tactile person: he touches and clutches at people he trusts during emotional periods, I guess to remind himself there’s someone else there, and maybe now that he’s gay it’s perfectly normal for him to grab a dude’s hand, to let his fingers catch against another’s in a way that looks stark and intimate. But it’s Phelan letting him that throws me off most of all.

  My eyes rest on their touching hands as Nate speaks. “No one’s threatening to kick me out of the house or send me off to Bible camp, okay? I don’t question that Hugh will accept who I am, warts and all—it just needs time to sink in before I start marchin’ in any parades in a sparkly thong. Right, Hugh?”

  Still staring at their hands, my mind turns over and over and over like an engine about to catch. Nate reaches out across the table to grab my attention, nudging my shoulder once. “Hey,” he says. I drag my focus back up to his face. “You accept this, don’t you? My bein’ gay isn’t actually the issue here, right? You went to Berkeley, for crissakes.”

  “Nate….” One more turn, and I can feel the spark is going to catch. Sorting through months of information and vagaries ever since Phel showed up in California with a bad case of a broken heart and a duplicitous ex-boyfriend. Then Nate turned up not much later with all his secret skeletons in tow. Turning and turning, almost there.

  From his end, all Nate can see is my silence and none of my thoughts. He doesn’t know where I’ve drifted off to. “Listen, Hugh,” he begins, “the order in which I told people has absolutely nothing to do with anything, except maybe it got more difficult as I went.” He shakes his head, trying to meet my eyes as I stare off into space. “In one way or another, I’ve been wanting to tell you since I was eighteen years old, and it’s because of my personal hang-ups that I didn’t, not a reflection of how much I love you, or how you’ve been as a brother. Because you’re the best there ever was, and I mean that.”

  I look up at Phel. When he sees me watching their hands, he frowns and withdraws.

  Just like that. Ignition. It’s always in the act of pulling away that we see what’s really there, isn’t it? “You’re sleeping together,” I blurt. It all makes perfect sense. The overlap in their stories is so thick it almost makes me sick to realize how much I’ve failed to pick up on until now. “You and Phel—”

  Nate looks confused, but Phel is on the ball, his frown deepening at me as he takes a step forward. “No, Hugh,” he says, grave as ever.

  I think his tone clues Nate in to the sudden shift in conversation, because all of a sudden my brother is up and moving away from the table too, putting space between himself and my best friend. “Dude, what? Are you kidding me?” He sounds a lot less composed than Phel, which, right now, seems pretty damning to me.

  “Where in the Midwest did you say you’re from again, Phel?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady. Getting it now, Nate curses, trying to move in before Phel catches his arm and stops him. “You said it was the Midwest, right? Like Ohio, maybe?”

  “Chicago,” he corrects stiffly. I catch an edge of impatience from him, but he holds himself together, even seems to keep Nate from blowing a gasket at me with that hand on his arm. “Hugh, you’ve had a big shock today. But just because Nate and I are both gay doesn’t automatically mean—”

  Unable to help myself, I snort. “No, what means something is the fact that Nate cheated on his wife with a man for a year, while you were recently duped by a married guy. Same timeline, same part of the country—what are the odds? And how come you never told me his name, Phel?”

  “Because it was never your business,” answers Phel at the same time Nate says, “That’s called a fucking coincidence, man,” like it’s every day this kind of drama unfolds independently in the lives of people I happen to know.

  Both Phel and I ignore him, since for some reason I feel like this conversation is between us, not between me and Nate. Maybe because Nate has already admitted to lying to me once today, I know if I try to take his word for anything right now, it might not stick. Heeding what Phel said earlier, about how his sexuality doesn’t involve me, I do my best to maintain a sense of goodwill toward him. It’s hard, and obviously a large part of why I’m so riled up right now, but I think even if I’d known he was queer all along, the thought of him and Phel going behind my back this whole time would still make me crazy.

  Like he knows it, Phel softens a little, tries to pull back on his obvious irritation for the sake of… I don’t know. Putting himself in my shoes, maybe, which Phel was always pretty good at. Never quick to anger or judge, always ready to take a breath and think something through before flying off the handle. Not like Nate; hell, not even like me, not really. Ever genteel, that’s our Phel. Do I feel bad, knowing I’m testing him? Of course I do—but I also want to draw it out, see what it’ll take to crumble that restraint and make him mad. I’ve never witnessed it personally, but something tells me an angry Phelan is a pretty fearsome thing to behold, wrathful in the manner of someone not used to giving his emotions free rein. “I told you when Nate came here, Hugh, that your brother’s situation was reminiscent of my own,” he reminds me. “That’s why his presence upset me at first, because I saw the similarities of what we’d been through even from opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s not because—”

  I cut him off with a grunt. “What, not because you’re the one he was fucking behind Emilia’s back?”

  At this, Nate starts forward but is once again halted by Phel’s hand on his arm. When Phel first showed up here this morning, it was as Nate’s bulldog, but now it starts to look like it’s the other way around: Nate agitated and ready to attack his own brother, Phel pulling him back with a firm, gentle hand on the collar.

  And yeah, okay, I know I’m talking in pretty crude terms here, but I get this really awful sense that isn’t even the worst of it, the stuff I’m accusing them of. In my mind it all seems to click into place: why I’ve sensed something else going on since Nate got here; why, instead of bringing us closer, Nate’s arrival made me feel shut out of both my relationship with my best friend and my relationship with my brother, as if there was something between them that didn’t and would never include me—like the family I’d wanted to build with the three of us was over before it ever started. It tightens my chest to think that, an indescribable dark feeling that eats away at my insides like a cancer, a tight knot of fear I get over the thought of them
leaving me alone again. Now I’ve latched on to it, I can’t seem to let go, not even at the expense of this thin veneer of patience Phelan has scraped together for my benefit; and I can see, from the hard glint in his eye, a veneer is all it is, easily shattered.

  Kind of like a house of cards, it’ll only take one hard nudge to shake those flimsy foundations loose, and I’ll have my answer. So I go for it. “Have you been fucking behind my back this whole time too?”

  Phel drops his hand from Nate’s arm, not even looking over at my brother, who’s gone mysteriously silent except for the expression on his face that screams, Who the fuck are you? I know that look, having seen it a few times before I went to rehab, sure as I know what it means when Phel makes that pinched face like he’s just been slapped and he stares at me without blinking. Part of me expects him to launch into a panic attack any second now. He’s holding it together remarkably well, though the rigidity of his spine lets me know this façade of control doesn’t come to him easily—he’s genuinely furious and struggling to get a grip. He was almost in the clear before I went and pushed him over the edge like the caveman Nate frequently accuses me of being.

  “I don’t need to listen to this,” Phel bites out. He brushes off his waistcoat in a clear sign he’s done with this conversation—brushing me off, I suppose—and the hardness of his eyes is startling. I’ve never been on the receiving end of a look that venomous, not from Phel or anyone. It… doesn’t feel great. “This bullshit, Hugh,” he says, “this pettiness? It’s beneath you. Be upset at yourself for failing to recognize who your brother’s really been all these years, but don’t take it out on me or turn it into something it’s not. While you’re at it, though, you can go fuck yourself.”