Bombora

by Mal Peters

  Although Willa acknowledged this with a nod, I knew she wasn’t going to come out and agree with me. Not because I was automatically wrong, but because agreement was too easy and didn’t do much by way of forcing me to grow. “Did it ever occur to you you’re protecting yourself from the wrong things?” she asked.

  In spite of myself, I laughed, the irony making it a hard, joyless sound. “I think it’s pretty clear by now the only thing I need saving from is myself,” I told her.

  Myself, maybe, and a few other people that needed saving from me as well. Nate never came out and said I was the reason he left, not really, but he and I both knew I’m what pushed him to it, me with my anger and my spite and the need to wound, so strong that I was half-mad with it. In that much, Willa was right—I would never have felt so angry if I didn’t still have feelings for him. If I didn’t still love him. It’s a shame that while I could have been trying to fix our relationship, I was set on punishing us both. And it hurt, more than I thought it could, since we’d been through this once already and I should have known what to expect. But just like the first time, the reality of not having Nate was a shock. Despite everything, I don’t think I ever truly expected to be without him, even now. Like someone who has lost a limb, Nate’s absence gave me the sensation of waking up from a dream of being whole, only to find a space where there was once an arm. Whatever my fervent longings, I knew I would never get it back again, and a replacement would never do.

  A solid rap on the door of my cabin jerks me out of my daydreaming, and when I turn, I see Hugh standing there at the bedroom door, having let himself in. In his arms are several broken-down cardboard boxes and a roll of packing tape.

  “Hey,” he says, and the wide-eyed look on my face must speak volumes, since he adds, “I thought you could use some company, maybe some help packing up your stuff. Today’s moving day, right?”

  I nod. “Yes.” I want to add that I’m not sure where I’m moving to, but that Hugh is here at all makes my knees weak with surprise and relief. The last thing I want to do is spoil it with my complaining. I’m a grown man, after all, and presumably if I’ve survived this long, I should be able to accomplish finding myself a place to live without help. “There isn’t much to do,” I tell him, “but thank you for coming.”

  Hugh smiles and sets the boxes down on the bed, then comes to stand beside me to survey my closet. “I would have thought there’d be more,” he says. After a pause, he chuckles. “No offense, but I always kind of got the sense you were a bit of a….”

  “What?”

  “A label queen.” Hugh shrugged. “I thought I’d find a closet full of designer jeans and custom suits. Instead your wardrobe looks about the same as Nate’s.” He sucks in a sharp breath at that, realizing his mistake, but I just smirk and shake my head to let him know it’s alright, and hold back on mentioning half the clothes in here could very well have belonged to Nate at some point, considering the amount of wardrobe migration that seemed to occur while we were together. Not a lot, but some; in any event, I was spared having to go hunting around for many T-shirts and casual clothes when I arrived in Cardiff. Not for the first time, I wonder if Nate suddenly found himself digging up pocket squares and cuff links among his things after we broke up. The first time.

  Putting that out of my mind, I resist the urge to put my hands on my hips in a way that would only give Hugh more ammunition to tease me. “I am a label queen,” I assure him, sassing up my tone a little for his entertainment. “Or was. I had considerably more to pack up when I left the Midwest than I brought with me.”

  “What’d you do with it all?” he asks curiously. Hugh doesn’t have what I’d call impeccable style. I don’t always appreciate the volume of the patterns he chooses in his shirts, but I must respect his taste in designers, if nothing else. He has an eye for quality Nate could never quite bring himself to give a shit about. It isn’t as though Hugh could ever make use of my old clothing, given the considerable difference in size between us, but I know he’d be appalled to learn I’d thrown anything out.

  “I no longer had use for any of it,” I explain. “Much as I appreciated a well-cut suit or a fine silk shirt, it would have been rather superfluous to drag all the trappings of my old life with me out here. I sold most of it or gave it away.”

  Hoping to get on with it, I resume emptying my closet into the suitcase I brought with me, and a moment later Hugh starts to pitch in, using the boxes for the odds and ends scattered about that don’t really belong next to my jeans. We work in silence for a little while, and then he asks, still sounding perplexed, “What if you need it all back again?”

  I stop to look at him, holding a pair of Nate’s old sweatpants I never had the heart to get rid of, since they were softer and more comfortable than my most expensive cashmere sweater and never lost their scent of him even after dozens of washes. “I think that if I end up needing those things again,” I say, “I’m doing something wrong. I don’t want to go back to that life.”

  Saying no more, Hugh and I finish packing up the rest of my belongings in silence, and in less than an hour’s time, the closets are empty and the dressers are bare. The last thing to disappear into my suitcase is the leather journal I’ve kept for a long time, since before meeting Nate, though the entries became rather few and far between when our affair took up again. I suppose I couldn’t afford the level of self-reflection that required, knowing what I’d find, but I think I’d like to start writing in it again.

  I want to comment on how utterly unnecessary it was for Hugh to offer me assistance in this task, since I completed it the first time around on my own. But all I say is “I appreciate your help, Hugh.” There are two suitcases and three boxes, which Hugh hefts on his own without looking remotely inconvenienced by it.

  “No problem,” he answers, then jerks his chin at the door. “How about we get this stuff loaded up into my truck and hit the waves for a bit?” I hesitate, and he catches my reluctance. “Come on. It’s a nice day out. I’ll even let you buy me lunch.”

  I snort at that, but can’t argue. Surfing sounds like the perfect way to put everything else out of my mind and give me the bit of Zen I’ve been craving for days. Then I remember my surfboard is still currently sitting in pieces in Hugh’s garage. “I don’t have a board,” I remind him.

  “There’s an extra one at the house,” he says. “Don’t worry about it, let’s just go.”

  As if he knows how much I’m dying to question the vagueness of his plans, Hugh doesn’t give me much opportunity to argue as we go, first herding me into his Range Rover, then shoving a surfboard—Nate’s, I recognize immediately—into my hands and telling me to change for the beach. This little reprieve from thinking has me grateful, in a way, not just because I begin to feel more secure that things might actually stand a chance of working out between me and Hugh, but because for once it feels wonderful not to know what’s going to happen next and be denied the opportunity to fret. Ironically, I recognize this as yet another missing element in my recent affair with Nate. Rather than embracing the sacrifice of control or, alternately, the complete trust that was placed in me, I spent the whole time worrying about how it might be turned on its head. I don’t know how Nate ever let himself go enough to trust that I wouldn’t hurt him when I so badly wanted to. In the end, I couldn’t give either of us what we wanted, because it wasn’t a true give and take—it was simply losing, and losing, and losing.

  But. The objective here is not to think, and already I’m spectacularly missing the point. We go to the beach, bare feet padding across the warm asphalt as we make our way through the streets of Cardiff, and true to Hugh’s word, the waves look nothing but succulent from the shore, rolling out in a wash of white-tipped blue and green, the water dotted with wetsuit-clad bodies and brighter splashes of color off their surfboards. We struggle into our wetsuits, the wind bordering on chill, and clip the leads on our boards to our ankles before heading into the water.

  Eagerness ha
s me dashing straight into the waves, paddling out with furious strokes of my arms that Hugh seems to match without the slightest quickening of his breath, his long limbs sluicing easily through the water. Hugh might be the more natural athlete among us, but not the most daring surfer. His big body is unfailingly confident as he drops in and out of waves, but perhaps also because of his size, he is more likely to dither before rushing out into a swell that could pose an unexpected challenge.

  I don’t share his hesitation. I go for the first one I see, trusting the subtle lift of the hairs on the back of my neck as though it’s possible to sense which wave will follow through on its faint promise of greatness. Unlike when I started, the swells no longer intimidate me, not even the big ones. I crave the moment of free-falling and the sudden lurch of my stomach that follows, same as whenever Nate’s lips met mine, when he held my body still and showed me how it could sing.

  The tide shifts and clashes faster with its constant ebb and flow. I catch another ride and am forced to bail before it can tumble me on my ass. Hugh finds a few more waves, but I can tell that he, along with the few other surfers out here in the lineup, is growing impatient with the inconsistency of the waves. Sure enough, they turn back one by one to head for home or a more reliable section of the reef, like the Suckouts. That leaves Hugh and me sitting out in the middle of the water alone, perched on our boards with not much choice other than to catch our breath and maybe talk. I don’t mind. It doesn’t feel like we’ve been avoiding it, exactly, but when Hugh looks at me I’m momentarily stricken and don’t know what to say. He saves me the trouble, as usual.

  “Nate called this morning to say he arrived safely in Ohio,” he says, staring off in the direction of the horizon. He slicks his hair back away from his face. “Thought you might want to know.”

  Solemnly, I nod and fight off the sudden thickness in my throat. “Thanks. I’m… glad. I’m glad he’s safe. I was wondering about that. That damn bike of his—it was a long way to travel alone at this time of year.”

  My response makes Hugh sigh angrily, and I recoil slightly. Before I can ask, though, he says, “You still don’t have anything else to say about it? After everything?”

  “I don’t know what else there is to say,” I admit. “Nate was right in that much; sometimes it’s better to not say anything.”

  Hugh grunts, and I can’t tell whether it’s a noise of agreement or denial. “Well, I figure since I was going to ask you to come live with me, we should probably talk about it at some point.”

  I jerk in surprise. “You were going to—what?” Surely that offer got snatched off the table ages ago.

  He meets my eyes steadily. “You heard me, Phel. I know you’ve probably been thinking about where the hell you’re going to go after this, and, well… Nate was also right about what he said: you should stick around California. It’s good for you to be out here, and… it’s good for me for you to be out here too.” He pauses, and I have a hard time deciphering the look that flickers across his face. “Assuming, of course, you want to be.”

  There is so much wrapped up in these few sentences that I scarcely know where to start. Of course, I’ve been hoping against hope for Hugh to accept my apology and plea for forgiveness; I’m not so stupid as to think I don’t have work left to do in earning his trust back, but this is both such a significant step forward and a point of such confusion that for a moment I’m speechless. I don’t understand how Hugh still wants to be my friend after I betrayed his confidence and, ultimately, broke his brother’s heart. There’s no question that’s what I’ve done, on either count. I destroyed Hugh’s trust and inflicted upon Nate as bad a turn as I felt had been done to me. What stalls me is the suggestion that I could want anything other than to stay here.

  Enough time passes that Hugh seems to read my silence, for he gives a heavy sigh and splashes idly at the water near his knee. “Look,” he begins, “I’m not gonna deny I’m hurt by how you and Nate carried on behind my back, but this whole situation has been a fucking kaleidoscope of messed up. I don’t know if I’d have acted much differently if the roles were reversed.”

  I’m unable to resist the urge to fidget, even though the movement sends me listing a little to either side on my board. “That’s nice of you to say,” I answer. “But I don’t think you’re the kind of person who’d get yourself into that kind of mess to begin with.”

  There’s a low laugh that’s full of irony, and Hugh is back to pinning me with his stare. “That’s where you’re wrong, Phel. Maybe I don’t have many gay love affairs in my past, but I’m not exactly what you’d call squeaky clean. I’ve had my share of fuckups no one else knows about besides Nate and the counselors at Palermo.”

  “The counselors at—” I stop dead, hesitating for a moment even to let go of my breath, while Hugh, on the other hand, seems to have trouble finding enough air for a breath of his own.

  “Listen, Phel,” he says, and starts pulling at the neoprene on his thigh, “there’s obviously a lot of stuff you didn’t tell me when we became friends, and—well. As it so happens, there’s a lot of stuff I didn’t tell you either.” Catching the terrified expression on my face—what now?—he quickly holds a hand up. “It’s nothing, like… personal,” he explains in a rush. “Personal to me, okay, but not personal to you. I didn’t tell you because it was a while ago, and you didn’t have any real reason to know. But I think I should come clean now since we’re in a sharing mode.”

  His face is so serious and pained that my mind immediately leaps to the worst possible scenario. “Did you kill someone?” I ask, half-joking but mostly not, and to my great relief Hugh blanches and barks out a laugh so relieved that it almost circles right back around to anxious.

  “Jesus, no,” he exclaims. “Is that what you think?”

  Feeling awkward, I try to shrug. “No, but when you give me an introduction like that… and your books are awfully violent….”

  “Okay, okay.”

  He still looks so nervous. I can’t not try to help him out in some way, though I still have no idea what he’s about to say. “You can tell me, Hugh,” I encourage. “By now there’s probably not a whole lot you can say that will shock or otherwise scandalize me.”

  “I know.” He sighs again. “It’s not that. I just… don’t talk to people about this. Ever.” Our eyes meet again before his gaze flickers away like a skittish bird’s. “After Nell died, I sort of went crazy.” Off my expression, he butts in, “Not crazy like that, but… I definitely got messed up in some stuff as I was trying to shut it all out.”

  “Stuff, as in….”

  “Drugs.” The word plunks between us like a dropped anvil; all that’s missing is the splash. “It wasn’t, like, super dramatic or anything, but it definitely would have gotten a whole lot worse if Nate hadn’t intervened. I was pissing away a lot of money on coke, and I guess the effects were pretty obvious to my family. I was a huge dick to everyone and impossible to be around. Nate flew out here to try and get me sorted out. That’s how I wound up in Cardiff, to get clean.” In a purely restless gesture, he lifts his hand to scrub through his hair again. “Mostly I’m pretty good; I have to pay attention, obviously, which is why I don’t drink all that much beyond a couple beers here and there, but sometimes… it’s hard.” Hugh bites his lip. “The last few days have been hard.”

  Unconsciously, I flinch. “Hugh—I’m so sorry,” I splutter, unable to come up with anything better or more adequate. “I had no—”

  “I know.” He attempts a smile. “That’s not your fault, and not really the point I’m trying to make. The thing is, Phel, it’s not my place to judge what people will do in a time of grief or when they hit rock bottom, because I know all about it.”

  The next breath I try to take comes out sounding more like a sob. “But you never hurt anyone,” I cry out, even though I don’t know for sure if this is true. In my gut, I feel it is, because Hugh’s more the type to hurt himself first before putting someone else in harm�
�s way. “I let my grief drive me to hurt Nate as well as myself, and there’s no excusing that.” Struggling to explain something I still don’t fully understand myself, I go on. “It’s like I’d lost a part of myself when I came here, the Phel who was confident and proud and alive. And then that Phel was gone, and I felt fucking afraid all the time, like my own shadow could jump out at any second and take away everything I had left to lose.”

  Aware my outburst isn’t close to being done, Hugh stays silent and continues to watch me, the atmosphere oddly calm with the gentle lapping of the waves around us and the calling of sea birds in the sky. “When Nate showed up, I felt this thing inside me that wanted to break away and be free again. And hurting Nate—subjecting him to every kind of cruelty and humiliation I could think of—was the only thing that made me feel like a shadow of my old self again. I wanted it so bad, Hugh, and I let myself be carried away with it. In trying to get back to the middle, I let myself get lost all over again. And hurt Nate in the process even worse than he hurt me, because I did it with my eyes open.”

  “Nate’s an adult, Phel,” Hugh reminds me gently. His hand comes out and covers my knee across the water. “If you’d really done anything so bad that he couldn’t take it, he would have just walked away.”

  “He did walk away,” I remind him. “He’s gone.”

  Hugh nods his acknowledgement. “And that’s why I’m trying to help you out, man,” he says. “I don’t want to judge you for that stuff you did or might have done—quite frankly, I don’t wanna know—because it won’t solve anything. Obviously it doesn’t sit right with you, so what’d be the point of me telling you what you already know? You fucked up; so did Nate. It happens, ’cause no one’s perfect. It’s more important for us to help each other get back up again. I sure as hell would be nothing and nowhere if Nate hadn’t done the same thing, helped me find another chance.”