SANCTUARY: Beards & Bondage

by Rebekah Weatherspoon

  I see him nod out of the corner of my eye. “Yeah I might have an idea of what you’re talking about.”

  “It’s irrational. My friends care. My sister cares. Scott—Scott cares, but I feel like I’ve created this version of myself—I don’t know what I’m trying to say. I can’t articulate it,” I say as I stop myself. I’m being ridiculous. I have people who care and people who would have me hiding out in their homes if I’d let them. “I think I try so hard to protect other people that I’ve made it impossible for anyone to try to protect me.”

  “Eh.”

  I look up at him. The weird sound he made is halfway to calling my bullshit. “What?” I ask.

  “Nothing.”

  “No, say it.”

  “It just doesn’t make sense to me.” He shrugs and takes another sip of his coffee. “We barely know each other and I want to do more than protect you.”

  “What’s more than hiding me in your home?” I ask.

  “Not sure, but I’d do it.”

  “Why?”

  He stares at me. “We’re talking about you.”

  I roll my eyes, then hand him my mug. “Put that up, please,” I tell him and then I shuffle a little closer to him. “You know, more than one person insinuated it wasn’t a big deal that a guy told me he was going to kill me with his bare hands because I’m apparently big enough to fight a dude. Like it wasn’t a big deal that I was attacked ’cause I’m some corn-fed she-beast.”

  His brows pull together as he frowns. “I mean you’re tall, but you’re not an MMA fighter. What the fuck does your size have to do with anything?”

  “That’s a good question.” I look down at the sheet covering his abs. “I get how important money is to people like David Dorrit and all his satanic offspring, but… someone sat down and planned my murder. I can’t imagine actually wanting someone to die. I can’t imagine thinking so little of someone that I think their death wouldn’t matter or that their death is deserved.” Saying those words out loud does the trick. I feel that snag in my chest finally give and tears just running down my cheeks.

  Silas puts down his own coffee and opens his arms for me. “Come here.” I slide over and find myself clinging to him.

  “I worked so hard on that case. I worked so fucking hard for that piece of shit and his piece of shit daughter. And this is the thanks I get. I don’t know how I go back.”

  “Back to work?” he asks.

  I nod and wipe my face. “I had a plan. I was going to bust my ass and one day, probably at a different firm ’cause I really hate Murrell a lot, I was going to make partner. But like, how the hell do I do that if one of my own clients tries to kill me first? I don’t know what I’m doing.” A hiccup slips out of me and I cry even harder. My eyes shut tight when I feel his lips brush my forehead.

  “I’m not using you,” I tell him. “I’m not using you to run away from this.”

  “I didn’t think that you were. Running comes with a lot more lying. And you didn’t even want to come here in the first place,” he says.

  “That’s true, but I’m glad that I did.”

  “I don’t want you to leave.”

  I almost tell him that I don’t want to leave either, but I keep that to myself. We both know that I can’t stay.

  I cry myself out and even though we’ve both had a half cup of pretty strong coffee, we fall back asleep for a few hours. I wake up to the sounds of dogs barking. A second later there’s a loud knock on the front door.

  “Lemme get that,” Silas says as he gently nudges me off his chest. I watch him as he throws on a pair of basketball shorts and a t-shirt. “That’s our food.” I curl back in the sheets and wait for him to come back, but the waiting game doesn’t last long. I hear him call my name.

  “Ebie!”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you put on pants? Mason wants to look at you for a minute.”

  “Eh! Fuck off man,” I hear Mason say.

  “I’ll be right out,” I call back. I make myself presentable and head down the hallway. Honeycrisp follows me. I find Mason and Silas standing in the front doorway. Hank and Morty are sniffing around the huge bag of food in Silas’s hand. I spot Joe Namath in the dining room. He looks dead until his tail starts moving.

  “Hi Mason,” I say with a teasing smile. He immediately turns bright red and starts scratching the back of his head under his Yankees hat.

  “See, she’s still here,” Silas says. “I didn’t scare her off.”

  “Now, I never said you did. I just wanted to say hello and give Ebie here a little warning.”

  “Warning about what?”

  “I got an email from my aunt this morning—his mum. She told me the three of you have a FaceTime date this afternoon. She's waiting for this one to call her.”

  My head whips in Silas’s direction. “Is that right?”

  “She did mention that yesterday.”

  “Best-a-luck.” Mason raises two fingers to the corner of his hat and backs out the front door.

  I turn back to Silas. “Should I be concerned? I've never had to talk to a mom before.”

  “I've never had a girlfriend talk to my mom so I guess we’ll find out together.” He hands me the bag of food and ushers me toward the TV room. “Let’s just call her first and then we can discuss how much fun it is to lie to my parents while we eat.”

  “I look like shit right now. This is not FaceTime with anyone presentable,” I say, motioning to my lack of makeup and my silk scarf wrapped hair.

  “I think you look beautiful, but if you need a moment, knock yourself out.” I look at him. He's doing that thing again, withdrawing, pushing me away. I tell myself I have to chalk this up to something between him and his mom. I set the food down on the table. “I'll be right back.”

  I think about washing up and putting on some lip gloss, but end up getting in the shower and putting on my other sundress and doing my ten minute makeup routine. Perfectly suitable for moms.

  Silas is right where I left him on the couch looking at his phone. “Ready?” he asks. He won't look at me again.

  “I am, but can you please look at me.” He does. “I kind of hate when you do that. It makes me feel rejected, like you honestly can't stand to look at me.”

  He blinks and keeps staring at me like he's working something out, then he licks his lips. “Sorry. I don't want to call my mom.”

  “Then let's not call her right now,” I say as I flop down on the couch beside him.

  “We have to. She’ll flip out if she doesn't hear from me by tonight and then she'll start harassing friends and neighbors until she gets a hold of us.”

  “Okay. Then let's rip the band-aid off and get it over with.”

  “Fine.”

  I sit by, trying not to chew a hole in the inside of my lip as he gets his mom on FaceTime. She answers pretty quickly. She can't see me the way Silas is holding the phone, but I see her clearly. Mrs. McInroy is a gorgeous Polynesian woman. She can't be any older than fifty. Immediately I can see where Scott and Silas got their lips and the shape of their faces.

  “Hi honey. Hold on, your dad’s coming.”

  “Here.” He turns the phone so we’re both in frame. “Mom, this is Ebie. My girlfriend the whole town was so happy to tell you about.”

  “Oh hi!” his mom says to me and then she glares at Silas. “You should have been happy to tell me about her too.” His dad pops into frame and the genetic picture is complete. The man is huge and bearded, with salt and pepper brown hair. He’s very serious looking.

  “Greetings, young people,” he says. And very Scottish.

  “We have full premium cable? Do you know anything about that?” Silas asks.

  “Yeah, I set up the auto-pay feature so I can watch my BBC when I come home and your mum still uses the apps on the account.”

  “Okay, well put it on my card. I stopped paying after football season because I figured it was a waste of money, but if you’re using it I’ll pay for it.
>
  I almost ask Silas how he didn’t notice that we’d both been using his wifi since I got there, but I keep my mouth shut. He’s so busy he’s probably too tired to notice when he gets home at night.

  We exchange pleasantries for a few minutes. Then the questions start. They ask where I'm from. I don't lie about living in the city. They’re fine with a general reference to the Upper West Side. They don’t ask me for cross-streets or anything. They ask what I do for a living. I don't lie about being in corporate litigation. They ask me where I work because of course they are both lawyers and their other son, who no one has mentioned, also lives in the city and does corporate litigation. That, I lie about.

  “I'm actually in between firms right now. Figured this was a good time to come visit Silas. I absolutely love the farm.”

  “Very happy to hear it,” Mrs. McInroy says, but now she has this weird twinge to her voice. She sounds like Silas when he's shutting down. Fuck. “Well you kids will have to excuse us,” she says suddenly. “We’re meeting your Uncle Michael for dinner to finalize some things.”

  “Okay. Well, we’ll talk to you later,” Silas says.

  “Ebie, how long are you with us?” his dad asks.

  “Till the end of the week,” I say. And I know then that it has to be the truth. I can't hide here forever. We say our goodbyes and Silas ends the call.

  “That was okay right?” I ask him as he leans back and lets out a deep breath. He sets his phone down on his thigh.

  “No. It wasn’t.” His phone starts ringing again. I see MOM INTERNATIONAL on the screen. “Shit. I’ll be right back.” He hops off the couch. “Yea, Ma,” he says as he walks out of the TV room. Then I hear the front door slam.

  He’s gone for so long I start picking at my food. I make more coffee and start an episode of Martha Stewart’s Cooking School and then another. When an episode of Antiques Roadshow is about to start, I figure I should at least go check on him. I risk walking out on the porch barefoot. Honeycrisp, Morty and Gala bum rush me when they see I'm going for the front door. I let them out and follow. I look around and find him sitting on the porch swing. Joe Namath is asleep at his feet. Silas is off the phone.

  As I get closer, he runs his fingers through his thick hair. I can see that his eyes are a little red. I know he knows I'm there, but he doesn't tell me to beat it so I walk to the swing and sit down beside him. He sits back and lets me take his hand. His phone is nowhere in sight.

  I don't say anything. We don't need to talk, not yet. I just want him to know I'm here.

  I look out across his property. It’s so quiet. The only sound is the bugs humming in the grass. The sky is still full of clouds, but the heat is rising again. I miss the city, a lot. Still, I don’t hate this. I do hate the emotions I can feel rolling off him, though. I wait. We can talk when he’s ready.

  “She knows who you are,” he says after a long while.

  “What do you mean? Your mom knows who I really am?”

  “Yeah.”

  “How?”

  “Scott.”

  “What?—that—”

  He looks at me then. His eyes are totally bloodshot and I can see the blotchiness of his cheeks. “What?”

  “Nothing, I just—Scott never talks about his family. Ever. He just doesn't mention you guys. It makes sense ’cause showing human emotion at our firm is like chumming the water, but even when it’s just the two of us. He knows about my sister, but he… I just can’t imagine him mentioning me to your parents.”

  “Apparently when you two met he fell really hard for you. He called my mom, asked he what he should do. You were coworkers and he didn't want to screw it up. He showed her pictures of you. She remembers faces real well. We both do.”

  I don't know what my face says, but this is genuinely news to me. And not good news for a whole host of reasons.

  “She thought that you found out about the farm and were trying to grift me out a bushel of peaches or some shit.”

  “What the fuck? Jesus.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What else did she say?”

  “After I explained everything she told me to tell her the whole truth.”

  “What did she mean by the whole truth?”

  “She wanted to know if I have feelings for you.”

  “What did you tell her?”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she handle that?”

  “She didn't love it.”

  “Because of Scott.”

  “Because she thought I knew about you too and she thought I was trying to get back at Scott. She thought I was trying to steal you from him.”

  “Does she understand that I was never his to begin with? Scott is a good friend to me, but I have never had feelings for him and he never told me that he had feelings me.” I close my eyes against the sick feeling in my stomach. I think about every conversation Scott and I have ever had. I think about the lengths he went to help me. How he brought me to his family farm in the middle of the night. I'm grateful but I…

  “This doesn't change the way I feel now,” I say slowly.

  “I didn't think it would.”

  We sit there in silence for a while and watch the dogs sniff around the yard. Morty spots something in the grass and bounds after it. Gala follows him. They take off out of sight, then come running back.

  “I’m pretty sure I’m on the spectrum.”

  That was not what I was expecting him to say next. I turn to him. “Have you… looked into talking to someone about a diagnosis?”

  He shakes his head. “I was like thirty-three when I finally figured it out and it seemed kind of pointless. I have a job. I have a home. I have friends.”

  “Right…”

  “When we were kids, everyone just thought my parents got one of each, a shy twin and an outgoing twin. When I had to do anything that required me to talk, Scott would usually do the talking for me. When I was alone… I would pretend I was Scott.”

  “Hmm,” I reply. I’m trying to picture it. The two of them as they are now, but smaller versions trying to figure themselves out.

  “In junior high my ‘shyness’ or whatever the fuck you would call it got worse and I was fucking up in school. I felt like shit because my dad was always busy working and they would drag my mom in and she had this brown boy—I mean, you’ve seen a little bit of what’s going on around here. This place is pretty white.”

  “Yeah,” I say with a little laugh. “I did notice that.”

  “In, like, seventh grade, Scott sat me down and asked me what was wrong with me ’cause he knew sometimes I completely had my shit together. I told him what I’d been doing. He said he understood and just to keep doing whatever I was doing to get by. Then in high school, we both got into this prep school in New Hampshire, but I didn’t want to go.

  “He didn’t want to stay. I was all fucked up that he was leaving me behind and my parent were encouraging it ’cause they thought it would help me be more independent. The day before Scott left he told me to just pretend to be him. If I was even feeling off, just present his confidence. He’d take Silas off to boarding school and leave me with his confidence.”

  “Did it work?”

  “No, but I had a massive growth spurt the summer after freshman year and Coach Fortner was so excited to have me on the o-line that he didn’t give a shit if I had any social skills. Plus I did well in school. I just sucked at dealing with people.”

  “But you still missed Scott?”

  “No. He and some of his fellow pieces of shit accidentally killed a kid.”

  “What?!” My response is so loud I scare Gala out of the grass. She comes running back at the sound of my voice. “What happened?”

  “It was so damn stupid. Teenagers do stupid shit. I did stupid shit when he was away, but I was just pretending to be Scott in my head. By the time we were sixteen, I looked taller. He wasn’t playing sports so I was getting bigger. I started wearing a goatee. His school had a strict dress code so he had
to shave. He got a fake ID with my picture and name on it. They snuck off campus and got drunk and decided to play a prank on this kid and they killed him. When they got arrested, he gave them the fake ID. It clearly wasn’t him, at least I knew it wasn’t, but we’re fucking twins and even when they asked him, he insisted it was him.

  “My parents got him out of any major trouble. He got booted out of school and the judge gave him a slap on the wrist because it was an accident, I guess, but someone over in that county fucked up the paperwork and suddenly I had an adult record. It took me months to get that shit cleared up.”

  “That kid’s parents thought Silas McInroy had killed their kid,” I say. My voice feels hollow. He nods. “Yeah, I see how that would put a strain on your relationship.”

  “He also fucked me over with this farm.”

  “Jesus, Scott.” I drop my head into my hands. “What happened there?”

  “My parents got us this farm so we could have something. Developers forced my mom’s family off their place in Hawaii. My dad and my uncle are fighting their uncle to get some of their family property back right now. That’s why my parents are in Scotland. They wanted us to have something so they bought us this farm from the family that owned it before. I told Scott I didn’t want it. I was finishing my law degree. I’d been offered an official gig with the NFL. I wasn’t coming back. So he agreed. He told my parents to sign the paperwork and he’d be back the day after graduation.”

  “But he bailed.”

  “He bailed.”

  “Silas, you didn’t have to come back.”

  “Yeah I did. I don’t regret it now. I love this place and it suits me. People here know me. They know how I work. If I had gone to work for the NFL, I would have had to pretend to be Scott for the rest of my life. Too many new face to face interactions, but everyone here gets it. They get me.”

  “But—”

  “Who am I supposed to give this to? How do I keep this in the family when I can’t keep a woman? How do I keep this in the family? How do I grow this business, maybe even turn it into the start of generational wealth when I can’t make it through most first dates because the second I’m face to face with a woman I like, I know I can’t pretend anymore?”