Bombora

by Mal Peters

  “I know. I was there.”

  His expression pinches. “I wish I hadn’t done that.”

  Deciding to risk it, I reach out and take Phel’s hand, which he allows, to my continuing shock. I hide it pretty well. “Trust me, Phel, right now Hugh is busy calculating exactly how long we’ve both been lying to cover this up. He’s thinking of all the possible opportunities we could have had to sneak around under his nose, and wondering how the hell he didn’t see it. One more lie you told him over the phone ain’t gonna be much more than a drop in the bucket at this stage.”

  “You seem awfully sure of that.”

  Well, I am. Kind of. “I know how my brother thinks. Hell, I don’t think much differently myself.”

  I want to add that I went through this exact process when I figured it out about Hugh’s year making friends with Colombian snow, putting all the pieces together in painful hindsight. By the same token, I know Hugh won’t let his righteous indignation run away on him before he realizes the similarities between our two predicaments, the Fessenden tendency to lie to each other as much as ourselves about the stuff that’s staring us in the eyes. We think it’s because we’re protecting each other, when really we’re just trying to pretend we aren’t covering our own asses.

  But I know Phel isn’t in the loop about that slice of Hugh’s past, so I don’t mention it, though I’m sure he could use some reassurance right about now. Hugh is an honest guy when it comes to taking stock of his own faults and failures, which Phel gets. It’ll have to be enough. Not that I’m thinking about how I can use this as a bargaining chip to take the focus off what we’ve done, or use it to excuse my own behavior; we aren’t that kind of family. Instead I think it’ll be relatively easy to skip the blame game portion of today’s events and get right at what’s really bothering Hugh: the lies he’ll see as symptomatic of something bigger.

  Namely, his fear that Phel and I will fuck off and leave him alone. Sure, it’s an awfully codependent way to think, but that’s the kind of childhood we had, waiting for one person after another to leave until there was no one left. Anyone would have abandonment issues with that kind of background. I can’t sit here and say the same fears haven’t occurred to me from time to time over the years, especially after Hugh went off to school and got himself a new life. Having Emilia and Liam, and then Phel, helped with that for a long time. But I’d seen for myself how fast it could all be taken away.

  “What are you thinking?” Phel asks me. Guess I let the silence stretch out too long again.

  I shrug. “Hugh’s gonna be hurt and pissed and probably inclined to say some not-so-nice things to both of us,” I answer. “Totally deserved, yeah. But if I know that kid, mostly he’s going to push and push until one of us announces the bad news.”

  “Which is?”

  “That we’re gonna leave him here by himself.”

  “How do you know?”

  I release Phel’s hand and get off the bed, looking down at him for a moment. He seems small and taut with worry, a mouse caught between darting for freedom and trying to make itself disappear. That makes me nervous. Rather than letting myself evaluate the odds of Phel running out on me again—is Hugh finding us out enough to erase whatever headway we’ve made towards reconciliation?—I force my mind back to the subject of my brother. “Because it’s what I would do. To him, the fact that we lied about all this only means we were trying to put off the inevitability of telling him.”

  Phel wrinkles his nose, but pauses. Slowly, he says, “But that’s not why. The lie was because I thought he might want me to leave—”

  “—when he found out,” I finish for him. “I know.” Swallowing, I then add, “He’s a bright kid, but he obviously don’t see it that way. It’s the same reason I never told you ’bout Emilia. Same reason we were both afraid of coming out to our families. The people who fuck up are rarely the ones who leave by choice.”

  Phel meets my eyes and doesn’t say anything. From that look alone, I know he doesn’t agree, but for once I don’t stop and think maybe he’s right and I’m wrong. Not that Phel is a hypocrite, but sometimes he holds his own actions in such a different light from everything else that he genuinely believes the forces that govern other people’s decisions don’t touch him. In this case, it’s fear. I know that in Phel’s head, his fear of telling Hugh about us is different from me not telling him about Emilia in a million ways.

  Sure enough, he says, “It’s not quite the same.”

  I grunt. “Yeah, it is. But we aren’t here to argue about that; we’re here to figure out what the hell to do next.” Silently, I promise myself the next step is to make sure Hugh doesn’t do anything stupid. It’s hard not to run after him right this second, but when he finished rehab and I spent a few months hovering over him like a suspicious prison warden, he made me promise to try to trust him to keep working the steps, keep himself from falling off the wagon. I do trust him, but then again, we haven’t had something this fucked up to deal with since he finished his twenty-eight days in this very institution.

  Since there seems no end to the surprises this morning, Phel makes a weak attempt at a joke. “I don’t suppose we could brainwash him so he forgets this ever happened?”

  “Be my guest,” I reply, snorting. “I’m sure Hugh would be just as happy to forget he ever laid eyes on us fucking.” He smiles weakly at that, and my heart breaks a little to see how afraid Phel still looks, his whole body drawn up tight even though he’s doing his best to remain seated normally on the bed. It hasn’t been my place for a while, but I think back to how he was there for me yesterday at the house, standing by my side and letting our skin touch in constant reminder of his presence.

  All of a sudden, my mind’s decided for me: I don’t give a fuck what happened between us and how we’re supposed to act now. It’s clear what I have to do.

  Offering a smile, I reach out and pull him against me, then turn gently so I’m pressing him back against the bed, crawling on top so he can’t escape. “Hey,” I tell him gently, “it’ll be okay. It’s a mess now, but things will work out.”

  Phel glares at my placating tone, and it’s like he deepens his own in response just to prove his point. “Okay for whom?”

  “Don’t pull that James Earl Jones shit with me,” I warn him. “I know you scream like a girl around centipedes or when I do that thing you like with my tongue.” Ignoring his scowl, I reach up and stroke his hair, amazed by how noncombative he’s being, even though I don’t know what it means. Unlike most people, I lack the instinct to respond to the unknown with uncertainty or fear; instead it makes me brave and stupid. “We’ll go talk to Hugh and we’ll explain why we didn’t tell him the truth, which I think is pretty straightforward. He’ll come around eventually, you’ll see. We were too surprised at findin’ each other here to do anything about it right away, especially since we both knew it would have meant one of us packing up and leaving. And he wouldn’t have wanted that, not any more than us.”

  Eyes remarkably steady, Phel looks up at me and takes his time answering, as if mulling the thought over in his head. Despite his outward appearance of calm, the muscle in his cheek gives him away; I can see it jumping with all the intensity of a wild bird trying to escape a cage. “And what about now?”

  “Now….” I find myself thinking about that quaint little fantasy Hugh managed to get us all in on, the idea of the three of us living together under one roof as friends and family. Christ, Phel let himself fall for it too, formulating ideas about that little surf shop on the beach, putting out tentative feelers in the hopes they might someday become roots. The most uncertain one out of all of us was me, since I’ve obviously got my kid back in Ohio, but as I told Hugh, that hasn’t stopped me from wanting to make the California dream work. Liam loves it here as much as I do. I still want it, as much as I want the guy lying in my arms. It’s been a rough road to get to this point, but for the first time in a long time, I think we’re finally getting back on track, back t
o where we’re supposed to be.

  I lean in and kiss Phelan slowly, starting softly and hesitantly but getting deeper when he opens his mouth to me and lets our tongues flicker and touch. He moans in the back of his throat, a quiet sound that makes my cock twitch against his thigh, and from the answering jerk of his hips, I know he’s been on the knife’s edge of arousal since we were interrupted, no different than me. It can be so difficult to know what’s going through his mind, but in the absence of everything else, I know I can always trust this, the hot and violent electricity sparking between us when we so much as look at each other.

  Although absolutely nothing has changed about our surroundings in the past hour, the whole act of pushing my body up against his, shifting until our cocks find that perfect angle to rub alongside each other, feels completely different. I try to put a finger on what it could be when the thought occurs to me I no longer have something to hide or act like I’m ashamed of, because the secret’s out, no taking it back. For the first time, I’m kissing Phel as a free man, and there isn’t a damned thing anyone can do to stop it.

  “Hugh doesn’t have to worry about one of us leaving, baby,” I murmur against Phel’s mouth, then turn my face so I can bite into the hard bone of his jaw before working down to the sensitive skin of his throat. “It might take some time for him to trust us again, and I know that, but if he’s worried about us going somewhere… we don’t have to. We can just stay here and things will be just like this.”

  I take one of my hands and reach between us to wrap around Phel’s dick. His legs open for me in a lazy sprawl so I can start stroking him in long, easy movements that make him pant and buck, my fingers tightening beneath the head of his cock on each upstroke and finding all his sweet spots. He keens unintelligibly.

  “No more hiding, Phel,” I whisper in his ear, half promise, half revelation. “It’ll be perfect—what we’ve always wanted. We can be together and not give a fuck who knows or who sees. I love you, you asshole, and I’m not letting you go again.”

  To my horror, Phel goes totally stiff beneath me and stays frozen for a second. Then he seems to think better of it and pushes against my chest. It’s not gentle, and as if to prove the point further, his dick starts to soften in my hand. “Get off,” he says, voice tight, and keeps shoving at me with increasing force until I let him go completely and back away.

  Maybe calling him an asshole wasn’t the best move, whatever the affection behind it. “What?”

  “Fuck you, Nate,” he spits, and the vehemence of the words manages to startle me good even if the sentiment is nothing new. Whatever anxiety was there before is gone, replaced by sheer fury and what to me looks like deep injury. My throat clenches at the sight, and I start to wonder whether the softness I saw in him earlier was a complete mirage or the product of wishful thinking. Phel seems to believe so.

  “Nothing about this is perfect,” he grates out, sliding off the bed so he can start collecting clothing. I want to beg him to stop, but I can’t, watching a scene I’ve seen before and still don’t know how to stop from playing out. “We can’t be together because I still give a fuck, okay? This”—and he gestures between us with sharp movements of his hands—“is not what I always wanted. In fact, it’s about a million times worse, because at least before, I knew my best friend didn’t hate my guts. But what else is new? History really has repeated itself, because once again, you fuck up, and I’m the one who loses everything.”

  For a moment I’m speechless as Phel makes moves to storm out of the bedroom, up and casting about for his pants, but then a stuttering protest finds its way past my lips. “You’re not the only one who’s lost everything.” Halfway to the exit already, he glares at me. As the door slams, I shout belatedly after him, “And I’m not the only one who’s fucked up around here these past few weeks either!”

  I’m left alone with my cheeks flaming and my stomach somewhere in the vicinity of my knees, while the rest of my organs try to force their way up into my throat. Another drive-by argument brought to you courtesy of Phelan Montague Price.

  For a while I continue to sit there, apprehensive of what I’ll face when I finally emerge from the bedroom, though I know Phel is probably no less afraid of having to look at me. I used to think he became so adept at running away midargument because he loved me and was scared I might say something true or hurtful that he was powerless to refute, like I’m leaving or I don’t love you anymore. He never realized I probably spent a fair bit of time terrified of hearing the same things from him, because a part of being in love is caring, more than you’ve ever cared about anything, what that other person thinks of you, and the possibility they might not always be around.

  But now I’m not so sure. Phel sure doesn’t seem too worried about my leaving; in fact, he seems hell-bent on proving that’s what he’s wanted since the second I showed up in Cardiff. He might have slammed the first door in my face, but I’m pretty sure I’ll find him holding the next one open for me on the other side, ready to dead bolt it behind me after I’m gone.

  MIRACULOUSLY—or not, depending on how you look at it—I don’t have to confront Phel on my way out of the house. He’s already gone. I doubt he made it very far in such a short time, but the message is clear that he doesn’t want me going after him or trying to resolve what we left unfinished in the bedroom. For once I’m not much inclined to try. Just how many damn people am I supposed to chase down this morning, huh? I gotta say, though, this is the first time I never felt it necessary to go after him with a million apologies at the ready. This is a fact that hits me with all the subtlety of a sack of bricks. As I was sitting in that bedroom, I felt a hundred miles farther away from Phel than ever before, farther even than when I thought I would never see him again.

  Although I think it’s still too soon to attempt going back to the house to find Hugh—since, knowing him, he won’t be ready to look at me—I also think there’s a reasonable chance he’ll have escaped to the beach. Or at least I’d rather he be out blowing off some steam in the surf than the alternative; still don’t wanna think about it. Hugh is a get-out-and-find-something-to-take-your-mind-off-it kind of guy, rather than the type to sit around and brood, and I suspect he does a lot of his best thinking out on the waves. I wouldn’t mind it so much right now either, but to be honest, I don’t feel drawn to the ocean the same way Hugh and Phel do. I like being in the water, but I prefer to feel my own two feet on solid land or see it racing past me beneath the wheels of my bike, especially when it feels like everything else is falling away. So home it is. I can’t really think of where else to go.

  Except that when I trudge home and walk into the living room, I can’t bring myself to sit my ass down on the couch and count the minutes until Hugh comes home. A bit too much like counting down to the executioner’s axe, if you ask me. Part of me wants to pick up the phone and demand that Phel be here—no fucking way is he off the hook on account of his beef with me—but I’d also kind of prefer to gouge my own eye out with a toothpick. Whether that’s anger or embarrassment talking doesn’t matter. I won’t call him. But hanging around with a finger up my ass ain’t much my style either, so I recruit Callie, who’s been pretty much ignored all morning, poor girl, and decide to go spend some quality time with the other love of my life, the one who never talks back or kicks my ass to the curb.

  Being in Cardiff, where everything is just about within walking distance, I haven’t given Lucy the kind of TLC she deserves lately. She’s not particularly dirty, just dusty from sitting in the driveway all these weeks, but a little soap and water never hurt anyone, especially not with all the care I’ve put into her detailing. Besides, pampering my baby always manages to take my mind off everything from indigestion to the colossal fucking smoke show my life has recently become. Phel used to make fun of me for how much I babied my bike, but I didn’t give a shit then and don’t give a shit now. Hugh’s not the only one who uses escapism and diversion as a means of getting his shit sorted out, and this is
better than the way I used to handle stuff, which was to throw myself into as much sex and alcohol and women as I could get my hands on. While sex and alcohol don’t seem like such a bad deal right about now, part of the problem is I only want to fuck and drink if I can do it with Phel.

  I go wash the fucking bike.

  It’s a warm enough day out, if a bit windy and overcast, and within minutes of filling a bucket with water and soap and going to work on the pipes, I’m starting to sweat. I strip off my shirt, as much to stay cool as to avoid soaking myself through with the hose. I can already feel it working, the tension draining out of me, bringing me to that quiet place where I can think about where I am and what I have to do without feeling suffocated. Fuck meditation: give me a sponge and some quality Ducati time and I’m calmer than a Hindu cow. Well, almost.

  I’m maybe halfway through scrubbing the rims when Callie gets excited and starts running around with the goofiest of expressions on her face. I peer around the end of the bike and see my brother’s mile-long silhouette loping up the street. His surfboard is tucked protectively under one arm. I stop what I’m doing and get to my feet, balling up the rag in my hands and tossing it into the bucket so he can see I’m open and—what? Unarmed? If Hugh wanted to end me, he could clunk me over the head with the surfboard and that’d probably be it. I know he won’t, despite the fact that we’ve exchanged our share of punches over the years, but hopefully he’ll get the picture I’m ready for whatever he wants to dish out.

  Instead he just comes up and stares at me for about a minute before he scritches one hand behind Callie’s ears and disappears inside the house with her in tow, not even a word spoken. What the hell?

  When he doesn’t come back out again in the next few minutes, I try to throw off my growing sense of unease and go back to washing the motorcycle. Then I hear his voice from the front door.