by TJ Baer
He probably could’ve pretended not to know what I was getting at, but he didn’t.
“I don’t know,” he said. “But we won’t find out if we quit now, right?”
“I said nothing about quitting,” I said in a rush. “I just said it was weird. But I’m good with weird. Long live weird.”
He grinned and turned back to the coffeemaker. “Good. Because I think I like this. Us.”
“Oh?” I asked cautiously.
“Yeah. I’ve never done anything like this before. It’s all...new and different. And I like it. A lot.”
I frowned a little, but managed to be smiling by the time he turned around to look at me. “So,” I said brightly, master of smooth transitions, “what’s for breakfast?”
Chapter Five
When the car door opened, I was sitting with my head planted on the steering wheel, alternately groaning and muttering to myself. I heard Thomas slide into the seat next to me, but somehow couldn’t find the will to lift my head.
“Morning,” I said in a zombie monotone.
“Are you gonna drive like that?” Thomas asked as he shut the door. He sounded a little too interested in this prospect, actually.
“I might,” I mumbled. My forehead was getting cold in a prickly, painful sort of way, and I was starting to wonder if maybe it was frozen there. I’d sit up and there’d be a painful rip and I’d go into school with a big red splotch on my forehead. That would be attractive.
Thomas, being Thomas, sat patiently beside me as the seconds ticked by, humming to himself and waiting me out. Finally, I sighed and sat up—thankfully without losing any layers of skin in the process.
“Okay,” I said. “Everything’s gone to hell. What say we skip school and work and head for the Canadian border instead? Start a new life. Raise some... what do people raise in Canada? Moose?”
Thomas considered this for a moment. “Today’s chicken over biscuits day,” he said.
I nodded seriously. Thomas had been known to fight his way through near-pneumonia for the cafeteria’s chicken over biscuits. “Gotcha. What about tomorrow?”
“Hmm, I don’t know, I think we’re having tacos.”
“They probably have tacos in Canada.”
“We could go to Mexico instead?”
I grinned and started the car. “No good, I don’t know any Spanish.”
“England?”
“Too hard to drive over water.”
He shook his head sadly. “They should really build a bridge or something.”
“What, over the ocean?”
“Yeah.”
“Nothing like a few days of driving over shark-infested seawater.”
“Nah, it’d be fun. And you could stop and fish off the side of the road if you got hungry.”
“Perfect. When you rule the world, make it happen.”
Thomas flashed me a grin and turned to look out the window for a few beats. “So, what happened?”
I tightened my grip on the steering wheel and felt that sick clenching sensation in my stomach again. “You’re not eighteen yet, right?”
“Not for another year and two months. But,” he went on in a calm, wise voice, “my mental age is much older.”
“Oh, yeah? How old?”
“Eighty-two.”
“Really.”
“Yep.” He squinted at me, his lips pursing into a wizened smile. “So go ahead, sonny, tell Grandpa Tommy all about your problems.”
“You’re a weird, weird kid. But okay, I’ll give you the PG version. So, you know David?”
“You slept with David?”
I stared at him, which thankfully didn’t put us in mortal danger since we’d come to a stop at a red light. “How’d you know that?”
“You learn a lot in eighty-two years.” He cleared his throat pointedly. “And just so you know, Jessie, many sixteen-year-olds do in fact know about sex. Like, firsthand.”
“I know that. But I prefer to live in a fantasy world where my little brother has never heard of such things.”
“Hey, I get it. Fantasy worlds are seriously underrated. For instance, sometimes I like to pretend that a hive of alien fuzz monsters lives under my bed. It makes for a great excuse when Mom starts bugging me for not vacuuming under there.”
“Does that actually work?”
“Yep. It’s all in the puppy eyes, bro.” He folded his hands in his lap and twiddled his thumbs for a few seconds. “So, you slept with David. What’s the problem? I thought you liked David.”
“I did. I do. But...” I shifted uncomfortably, trying to ignore the general bizarreness of sharing intimate details with my little brother, who would forever be twelve years old in my mind. “I kind of get the feeling that maybe it didn’t mean as much to him as it did to me. Which I guess makes me the girl in this drama. Man, typecasting sucks.”
The light changed and we were off again. Thomas was quiet as we drove, and I actually found myself waiting intently to see what he would say, like the solution to all my problems might somehow miraculously come out of his mouth.
“So, what are you going to do?” he said at last.
I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. “I don’t know. I mean, he’s never been with a guy before. It’s all new and exciting for him, and that’s great, but I don’t want to be his experiment, you know? I want to be more than that. I want to be...” I gave Thomas a sideways glance. “How old did you say you were again?”
“Eighty-two,” he said in a creaky voice.
“Right. Well, then, here’s the thing, Gramps. I don’t want to be his experiment, I don’t want to be his fuck-buddy, and most of all, I don’t want to deal with that moment when he decides he’s done playing around and, I don’t know, goes running back to hetero-land or something.”
Thomas looked at me, and weird though it was, I really did feel like he was a hell of a lot older than sixteen when he spoke. “You really like him, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess I do.”
“Then maybe he likes you, too.”
“I don’t think it’s that simple.”
“Why not?”
“Because stuff like this never is. If it were, there wouldn’t be so many country-western songs.”
Thomas raised an eyebrow at me.
“You know, ‘I loved her but she took my truck and my dog and left me in the dust with our thirteen children...’”
“And you say I’m weird.”
I managed a grin and patted him on the shoulder. “Insanity runs in families, you know.”
My smile faded, my thoughts turning suddenly to Grandma. Dammit, with all this crap about David, I’d completely forgotten. And did Thomas even know? He had to know that something was going on if Mom had been camped out at Grandma’s for the last few nights, but...
“Dad told me about Grandma,” Thomas said quietly.
I gave him a wary glance and decided to ignore this instance of mind reading for the time being. “You seem to be taking it pretty well.”
“We’re still doing the séance tonight,” he said, a little too brightly, “so make sure you get all the stuff from that list I gave you.”
“Thomas...”
He looked at me, his expression more serious than I’d ever seen it before. “I can’t stop them from taking her away, Jessie. But I can at least make sure she gets to talk to Grandpa Jess before they do.”
I suddenly felt very, very tired. “Okay,” I said, giving up. “Sure. I’ll pick everything up on my lunch break.”
Thomas gave me a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes, then reached down to unfasten his seat belt—at which point I realized that I’d pulled us into a parking spot at his school without even realizing it. A+ for paying attention at the wheel.
“And don’t worry about David,” he said as he picked up his book bag and got the car door open. “I think it’ll be okay.”
I nodded like I believed him. “Have fun at school. Enjoy that chicken over biscuits.”
&nbs
p; Thomas gave me a thumbs-up and closed the door. I watched him go inside, then breathed a long sigh and headed on to work.
*
For all that David and I had already had our Moment of Awkwardness that morning in his kitchen, I was still struck by a crippling wave of stage fright as I stepped into the school building. I mean, relating to each other when half-naked in David’s apartment was one thing, but returning to the world of work and normal things while sexy-time memories still danced in our heads? It was bound to be weird.
But hey. I was an adult. I was a man, dammit, despite visual evidence to the contrary, and would a Real Man stand cowering in an elementary school hallway just because he and his longtime man-crush had finally consummated their bizarre, complicated relationship in said man-crush’s bedroom the night before?
No, sir, he would not.
Imagining a tumbleweed blowing by, I straightened my shoulders, held my head up high, and began the long, heroic walk to the music room.
“Hey,” said a familiar voice to my left, and like a Real Man, I let out a yelp and jumped several feet to the right.
David blinked at me, obviously not sure what to make of this sudden spasm, then tilted his head and gave me a puzzled smile. “You all right?”
“Yes,” I squeaked. Pause. Clear throat. Be a man. “Yes,” I repeated in a deeper voice. “Fine.” I thought about pausing to spit, but figured that might be overkill. “Um. How are you?”
David’s puzzled smile hadn’t gone away, but he looked more amused now than anything. “I’m fine,” he said. “Actually, I wanted to ask you something.”
Being very focused on exuding masculinity at this point, I certainly did not go into an inner monologue of, Oh, God, what does he want to ask me? There were so many possibilities, after all, from the ridiculously mundane—Can I borrow a pencil?—to the ludicrously not-mundane—Will you run away with me to Holland and be my man-bride?
David was frowning at me. As I had lapsed into a coma-like silence, it wasn’t hard to figure out why. “Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m great,” I said cheerily. “What’d you want to ask me?”
He frowned at me for another second, then shook his head and went on. “Well, I forgot to tell you, but I’m having some painters come in to redo the paint job in my apartment today and tomorrow.”
“Okay,” I said slowly. “Thanks for telling me...”
“And,” David continued, “I won’t be able to stay there tonight or tomorrow night because of the fumes. I was planning to stay with my parents, but, well, I was thinking...”
Ah. “You want to stay at my place?”
“If it’s not too much trouble,” he said in a rush, sounding a little worried all of a sudden. “It’s absolutely no trouble for me to stay with my parents, but I just thought that... Well, that it might be fun.” The last word came out in a soft, pleased-but-embarrassed tone that made my heart beat faster.
I considered the proposition for all of point-three seconds. “Sure,” I said. “Let’s do it.” Er. “I mean, you should come to my place. To stay. While the painters are...you know. Painting.”
David smiled and, after a quick hallway check to make sure no one was watching, he took my hand and squeezed it. “Thanks,” he murmured. It seemed like he was going to say something else, but the five-minute bell chose that moment to bong loudly through the halls, giving me my second coronary in approximately five minutes, and also causing David to let go of my hand with the speed of someone dropping a cold, wet fish. Goody.
“Okay,” he said with a note of finality, “well. Guess I’d better get to class.”
“Yep,” I said.
“Okay, then.”
“Yep.”
We turned and headed off in opposite directions, and for the second day in a row, I began my workday with a healing session of banging my head against my desk.
*
A few hours later, I was standing in front of the soda machine, pondering seriously over my selection of carbonated beverage. I reached into my pocket for some change...and came out instead with a crumpled piece of paper, onto which had been written things like, “10 candles, 10 smooth gray stones, 1 thorn from a rose bush, 2 flower petals (blue or yellow), 1 twig from a north-facing tree...”
Oh, crap.
Somehow, I’d completely forgotten that I’d promised Thomas I’d spend my lunch break hunting for exotic supplies for the night’s séance. Shit and damn and shit.
“So,” David said, coming down the stairs toward me with a grin on his face, “ready for lunch?”
I sighed. Deeply. “Actually, I forgot—I have to run some errands for Thomas.”
“Errands?”
“Séance supplies. You know, eye of newt and all that.”
“Ah.”
“Yeah. So…”
But before I could make my apologies and dash off, David said, “Well, it sounds like fun. Count me in.”
And so it was that I found myself on my hands and knees in the small wooded area behind the school, digging through a carpet of moldy leaves in search of smooth stones while David twirled around with a compass looking for twigs.
“Got one!” I shouted in triumph, holding up a smooth gray stone, which, as I held it up into the air, I realized was coated thickly on the underside with dirt, gunk, and the mushed up remains of a cicada. Wonderful. As Thomas’s instructions said nothing about cicada guts, I removed them via scraping the stone over some moss, which left a lovely smear of insect innards that made me glad I hadn’t bothered with lunch.
“How can a tree be north-facing, anyway?” David was asking, frowning at the compass.
“Maybe the twig has to be facing north?”
“That would be a north-facing twig, though.”
I thought about this very seriously for a moment, then remembered that the whole séance business was nuts anyway and thus probably any old twig would do. “Here,” I said, snapping off a twig from the nearest tree and handing it to David. “I get a very northy feeling from this twig.”
He grinned at me and reached for the twig, but somehow ended up holding my hand instead. “Thanks,” he said softly.
And just like that, my mind flashed, suddenly and obnoxiously, to the first time I’d seen David with his wife.
It’d been in the school parking lot, just a few days after I’d started my thrilling new life as an elementary school music teacher. I’d stepped outside into the late August heat, sweaty and tired and with my arms weighed down with songbooks, and had paused on the sidewalk for a second to try to remember where I’d parked. The tinny honk of a horn broke through my thoughts, though, and I looked up just in time to see a sporty little red car swing into a nearby parking spot. A second later, David was jogging over to meet it, even as the driver’s side door swung open and a pretty, long-legged brunette stepped out.
They met a few steps away from the car, and I couldn’t seem to tear my eyes away as David reached out and took her hand, the smile on his face so soft and loving that it made something twinge inside my chest. The woman smiled, too, but there was something brittle about her smile, something almost…wincing about the way her lips curved as she looked at him.
But God, the look on his face… Like everything he’d ever wanted was right there in front of him. I couldn’t help feeling a cold rush of foreboding, watching them, because it was all right there in front of me, so obvious: he loved her, he would always love her, and somehow that love gave him the ability to completely miss the fact that she’d stopped feeling the same way, or maybe had never felt that way in the first place.
“Jess?”
I blinked, coming back to the present with a start. “Sorry,” I mumbled, and found myself taking a reflexive step backward, then another, until a safe distance stood between myself and David. “Zoned out there for a second.”
I turned and got back to the business of hunting around the forest floor, though I couldn’t really remember what I was looking for. My face f
elt flushed, but there was a little knot of coldness in my chest, like an icy balled up fist. Like a mature adult, I decided to ignore it until it went away, and was hard at work on that when David’s voice sounded behind me.
“Jess,” he said, a wary note to his voice. “Is something bothering you?”
I flinched, glad my back was turned so he couldn’t see my face, and tried to answer in as casual a voice as possible. “Uh, no, why do you ask?”
“Well, it just seems like ever since last night, you’ve been a little off. And I guess I was just wondering if maybe… If maybe you were regretting what we did.”
It all came back to me in a rush, the heavy, heady feel of his body on mine, the heat of his hands on my skin, how incredible it had felt to finally, finally run my hands through his hair and kiss him…
“I don’t regret it,” I said. “Definitely, definitely don’t.”
There was a relieved sort of pause, during which I got to my feet and spent a moment wondering if I was about to make a huge, ridiculous mistake.
And then I said it anyway. “But maybe it wasn’t such a good idea.”
I squeezed my eyes shut as soon as I said it, resisting the urge to bang my head against the nearest tree. Seriously, what was wrong with me? So what if he was just experimenting and couldn’t possibly have any real feelings for me? Was that any reason to push away what promised to be a very, very pleasant time with a gorgeous, willing guy?
The answer came immediately, with lightning-quick certainty and embarrassing fervor: Yes, it’s a damn good reason. I want all of him or nothing at all.
Agh, what a mess.
Meanwhile, David had gone very still behind me, and it occurred to me that I should probably turn around and face him, as having this kind of conversation with my back turned was roughly equivalent to breakup via text message. I sighed and turned around, but still couldn’t quite bring myself to look him in the eye, and instead settled my gaze on a tree just slightly to his right. It left him a David-shaped blur in my peripheral vision.
“Look,” I said, “last night was great. More than great. But seriously, David, this isn’t you. I mean, think about it. This kind of thing might seem all easy and exciting when it’s just the two of us in your apartment, but what happens when we go outside? Are you seriously ready to make this your life? Introduce me to your friends, invite me home for dinner with the family?”