by A. Nybo
“Fun?” Henri thought for a moment, before he waved down his length like a game-show prize presenter. “This is it. I’m having it.”
“Granted, playing hide-and-seek with a psycho is a lot of fun. I know I’m enjoying the fuck out of it, but I was thinking more along the lines of something enjoyable that doesn’t involve getting hurt.”
Henri’s eyes flashed with amusement, and his mouth quirked. “So skiing is out, then?”
“Since you seem to think it’s potentially painful, I would have to think it’s out, yes.” When Henri remained silent, Birch tried to prompt him. “Besides sitting in the sunshine, what else do you enjoy?”
Setting his elbow on the arm of the chair, Henri framed the near side of his face with his hand, obscuring Birch’s view of his expression. “Not a lot.” Henri’s monotone was softly spoken.
“Hey,” said Birch as he leaned over and patted Henri’s arm, “it’s….”
Henri exploded from the chair so fast Birch barely had time to throw his hands up protectively. When there was no further movement, Birch peeked around his raised hands to see Henri standing on the other side of the chair, eyes wide, chest heaving.
In that moment, Birch saw something he’d seen a thousand times in abused horses—the fear that touch would turn to pain. Birch took a calming breath and lowered his hands. “It’s all right, Henri,” he soothed. “I won’t touch you. Sorry, I didn’t know it was an issue.”
Henri stood, an indecisive look on his face, the rapid rise and fall of his chest starting to slow.
“Just sit, Henri. We don’t have to talk.”
Henri sat down, and over the next hour, Birch kept a furtive eye on the leg jiggling as it faded to chair rocking that eventually came to a standstill. Mystifying as it was, Birch experienced some pleasure that Henri could relax in his presence.
At one point, Birch glimpsed profound sadness in Henri’s features, but it was fleeting, and its disappearance coincided with him swallowing. The action drew his eyes to Henri’s Adam’s apple, buried deep between the muscles of a strong neck. Realizing he was staring, Birch reluctantly looked away.
Resting his head against the back of the chair, he closed his eyes and listened to the trills and warbling of distant larks. The sound of traffic interfered with what he would have otherwise considered a peaceful morning.
“What happened to your forehead?” Henri asked.
Birch didn’t open his eyes or move. “Got attacked in an alleyway by some big Australian balloon animal.”
Hearing the door, Birch cracked an eye open, but instead of seeing someone coming out, he caught a glimpse of Henri disappearing inside. The guy got weirder every time they spoke. Maybe he was ill. Or perhaps he thought Birch was having a go at him being Australian.
The thought prompted him to follow Henri inside. He wasn’t in the kitchen with Nate or the great room, so Birch went and knocked on Henri’s bedroom door. There was no answer, and he was considering whether to knock again when the door finally opened.
“Are you all right? I thought you must be sick the way you ran off.”
“I’m fine.” Henri kept his eyes averted. He moved back and closed the door, but not before Birch glimpsed the moisture gathering on Henri’s lower eyelids.
Being upset would explain Henri’s abrupt disappearance and the hurried way he closed the door, leaving Birch with an intimate view of the paintwork, but it didn’t hint as to what had upset him.
Since Henri clearly wanted to be alone, Birch went to his own room and began thinking through Henri’s extreme moods with his newfound understanding. Since Jason, Nate, and Geoff were willing to overlook some of Henri’s infuriating mood swings and behaviours, he decided they must have knowledge of whatever the problem was.
The way Henri had rocketed from the chair when Birch touched him made it clear that he needed to approach Henri with far more care and tolerance. The harsh sarcasm and needling he’d witnessed at the police station was worlds apart from the fearful man he’d seen in the café and on the porch. It made sense that the version of Henri he’d witnessed at the station involved the projection of a defence mechanism.
Birch was still trying to identify patterns in Henri’s erratic behaviour when there was a knock at his door. “Yeah?”
Jason pushed the door open and must have decided since Birch was lying on the bed fully clad, he wouldn’t mind if Jason came in. Perched on the edge of the bed, Jason locked big fingers around his raised knee and used it to balance himself. “The police want to come and take a statement from you about the other day. Are you up to it?”
“What happened to Henri?” Birch’s quiet tone belied the way he’d blurted it out.
Jason examined him with an unreadable expression and then looked away. He took a deep breath and held it for a moment before turning back and repeating, “The police want to come and take a statement from you about the other day. Are you up to it?”
Birch acknowledged the gentle but obvious rebuff with a nod. “Sure. When are they coming?”
“As soon as I ring them and tell them you’re ready. So I’d guess in an hour or two?”
“How do you come to have so much pull with the police that you can put them off trying to interview me until I feel ready, and then they’ll come when you call them?”
“It’s their job to come when people call them.”
“That was one of your poorer deflections.”
Jason chuckled as he stood. “Quite the student of behaviour, aren’t you?”
“And again.”
He walked to the door. “I’m going to call the police before you decide to conduct a full interrogation.” He began pulling the door shut but poked his head back in and smiled. “You’re all right, Birch.”
The police had come, taken his statement, and gone, all without Henri making a single appearance. Birch had heard his bedroom door open several times, but he’d never come out into the kitchen.
Although the exchange with Henri on the porch had been brief and prematurely ended, Birch had enjoyed the hour or so they’d sat together and not said a word. Henri’s presence somehow made him feel energized but comfortable. He wanted to try being with Henri more, despite the potential challenges that came with the prospect.
STARING AT the ceiling above his bed, Henri wondered how Birch had so easily mined some of those places inside him that hadn’t been touched for years. Maybe the missives from Russell were making him so emotionally raw that he was no longer responding to the messages themselves, but to everything and everyone around him.
He rolled onto his side and hugged the pillow to his chest like a pressure pad to help staunch his bleeding emotions. Everything was reeling out of control, and he struggled to keep up with any of it—Russell’s reappearance, Jason’s guilt, and now Birch.
Birch’s entire presence was one of calm warmth that hit Henri deep. Even when he’d been angry, there was nothing volatile about him. His anger had been level-headed and controlled, not that unpredictable, explosive rage Henri had been guilty of over the past few years.
Memories of sensations tried to break through defences he’d constructed so intuitively that he had no idea how to penetrate them, but in a few words, Birch had sliced through with ease. Maybe it wasn’t the words themselves but how Birch had spoken them. If Birch could wield tone with such grace, what could he do with touch? Just the thought was enough to send Henri’s skin hunger into overdrive.
Touch might have become unpleasant to his mind, but his body was yearning, begging, for contact with another person. God, he wished his mind and body would work on the same wavelength. Why couldn’t his body override its reactions to his ingrained fears or his emotions relinquish control enough to allow him to accept the touch of another?
He was conflicted over Birch’s presence—wishing, on the one hand, he hadn’t become involved but glad to have Birch around nonetheless.
Birch’s choice had been removed the moment Henri had gotten into his pickup. Ev
en though Russell hadn’t intended to kill them, Henri couldn’t deny Birch had saved his life. And wasn’t Birch’s injury a sacrifice at the altar of Henri’s remorse? A person had opted to help him, only to have his assistance repaid with violence heaped upon violence. Russell Andrews was a poison in his veins that he continued to bleed over everyone and infect them with.
Teetering on the precipice of the culpability cliff, Henri caught himself. Trying to bear the weight of Russell’s wrongdoings wasn’t just stupid, it was potentially fatal. He was such a hypocrite. What right did he have to speak of Jason’s guilt when he couldn’t bear his own?
Understanding that made it easier to cast aside all but the remnants of Russell’s actions, but somehow it made his own burden harder to tolerate. The responsibility of allowing the damage Russell had done to exclude him from reentering his own life—or any meaningful life at all—that was all on him, but he didn’t know how to remedy it. He was like a leafless tree in the dead of winter, naked fingers scratching at the window of his life, trying to get into where it was warm.
He squeezed his eyes tight.
After Russell, he’d had psychologists and psychiatrists trying to help, teach him how to live again, but none of them managed to recapture the essence needed to make life worth living. He was tired of the hurt, the self-pity, the sympathy of others. If he could have his fears kissed away, even for moments at a time, it would be worth it. Would there ever be a time when it would happen, or would he continue to survive into old age and then die unfulfilled?
Knowing he couldn’t let himself get lost in the endless mire of whether life was worth living, he sat abruptly. The ending to this story was well-known, if not always so easy to find. Some looked on the razor’s edge, others from the top of a bridge. He’d sought it at the bottom of a pill bottle several times.
He knew what he needed! Well, it was probably the last thing he needed, but he sure as hell wanted it. He ripped clothes from his rucksack, throwing them over his shoulders as he searched for today’s saviour. A water bottle with two fingers of water left and a couple of empty plastic bags came to light. A cake of soap—Jesus, he should have put that in one of the plastic bags. Ah! There the little bugger was. He pulled the fifth of vodka from the sack, cracked the top, and took a massive slug. The burn he welcomed and summarily dealt with by means of a running contortion of bitter expressions.
The clothes now littering the floor were a reminder that he really did need to do some washing. Some of the clothes had been worn and stuffed into the bag wet. It was a bit hard to dry clothes when it rained, especially without access to mod cons such as electricity. If he hadn’t been afraid of losing them, he’d have shut them in the car windows so they could dry in the wind on the way to the safe house.
Now that his soggy, stinking laundry had escaped the confines of the rucksack, the stench permeated the room. He opened the window and then fortified himself with more vodka for his visit to the laundry to put his dirty washing in the machine. Chores, along with potential social interactions—like running into someone in the passage—were easier to handle with chemical assistance on board.
Henri conducted his visits to the laundry with great stealth to avoid the necessity of civility, and he fortified himself with vodka for each washing stage, which he likened to a concerto movement. He was so fortified by the time it came to hanging it all out, he was like a goddamn bulwarked castle. But now he thought about it, he hadn’t seen a clothesline in the backyard, so his bedroom became the new drying room.
The fresh-smelling clothes hanging from the doors of the cupboards, the headboard of the bed, and other furniture improved the atmosphere no end. And not having to spend time away from his room assisted his hugger-muggery.
Sometime later there was a knock at the door. “Grubs up,” called Jason.
“Okay.”
He didn’t feel like eating, but he was too experienced at this gig to dismiss it. Although practiced to near perfection at one point, his drinking skills had been neglected for a long time now, so he needed food. Past arguments he’d had with Jason about his drinking flashed through his mind. He looked at the remaining half-bottle of vodka and wondered if he could outwit Jason.
There had been a water bottle in his rucksack…. He looked around and spotted it on the floor near the bed. He tipped the water out the window and filled the small vessel with vodka. With the water bottle almost full, he took another swig from the original container and left the dregs for Jason to find when he decided he needed to relieve Henri of the alcohol. He grinned as he set the water-cum-vodka bottle outside the window and then closed it. He jammed the vodka bottle between the bed and the bedside table. If he left it in the open, Jason would suspect chicanery.
Before he opened the bedroom door, he straightened his clothes, finger-combed his hair, and with a grin piled it into a man-bun and tied it. He took a deep breath, donned a serious demeanour, and finally opened the door and walked from his room to the kitchen. He should have brushed his teeth. He’d just try to remember not to exhale in Jason’s direction.
His plate of food occupied the fourth place setting at the table. He slid into the unoccupied seat. “So what’s the plan?” asked Henri.
Jason waited until he finished his mouthful of food before answering. “The police are keeping Birch’s place under surveillance. They were watching your hotel until you did a bunk on them.”
Henri grunted. “I wonder how long it took them to figure out I was no longer there? Arsehole could have been and gone a dozen times before they even noticed.”
Just as Henri had ignored Jason’s censure over skipping out of the hotel room, Jason ignored his jibe at the local police’s inadequacies. “We need to make contingency plans and decide how soon we can move in case he locates us,” said Jason.
Feeling Jason’s eyes on him, Henri nodded and focused on getting the forkful of mash to his mouth.
“Do you need a few more days, Birch, or are you ready to move at any time?”
“Depends what you have in mind. I’m not up for strenuous exercise if that’s what you mean.”
“I don’t have anything in mind,” said Jason, “Just tell me how you’re feeling.”
Henri studied Birch’s high cheekbones and a nose that had the slightest hook.
“Still have a headache, and my shoulder is sore. Other than that, I’m okay.”
When he spoke and revealed a slightly overlapping incisor, a jab of yearning sparked deep in Henri’s chest. He turned his attention back to his food.
“Henri? How about you?”
“I’m ready whenever.”
“Okay. Nate, can you get supplies organized?”
Nate nodded. “Are you looking at going bush?”
“Depends on whether another address is available should this one be compromised. Just some interim supplies,” said Jason.
Although he was no longer listening, Henri could sense eyes on him but couldn’t make out whose, and he didn’t want to meet Jason’s gaze lest he start laughing.
He didn’t know why this cat-and-mouse game amused him so much. He had no shortage of such games at the moment. Maybe that was the whole point—to distract himself from the reality of his hell.
“Did the police find Russell’s car?” Henri asked.
“They found the SUV, but it was stolen,” said Nate.
“Still don’t know his latest identity?”
“No,” said Jason. “All we know so far is that he had somehow enlisted the help of someone in human resources at the justice department and managed to get himself ‘employed’ as a prison guard, complete with uniform, and his fingerprints were listed under the prison officer’s ID.”
“What the hell?” asked Birch. “How is that possible?”
Jason shrugged. “I don’t know who Russell’s contacts are, but I’m guessing he has some pretty powerful people on his books.”
“Why would anyone help someone as mad as this guy obviously is?”
“For exactly that reason. No one wants to be on the wrong side of Russell Andrews. It only takes one influential person to give in to him for some reason—blackmail, intimidation, friendship, revenge, money, whatever—and he has a way to manipulate others. It grows exponentially. Once he has one high-powered person in his pocket, they’ll have a few themselves, and so it goes.”
“They haven’t figured out how he duped the facial recognition at the Australian airport either,” said Nate. “But then, it wouldn’t be that hard to fool it into rejecting the biometrics so he had to go through the good old-fashioned way.”
“Or he could hack it and change the details to match a new ID, one he has a passport for,” suggested Henri. “Or maybe he didn’t use the airport.”
“How’s that?” Jason asked.
“Well, not the commercial airport anyway.” Henri shrugged. “I’m sure he’s got a pilot friend.”
There was a moment’s silence when Henri could feel Jason’s eyes burning into him. “You fucken prick! You’re on the turps again, aren’t you?”
Henri struggled to contain a smile. It must have been the slur that had given him away. As Jason thrust his chair back to stand, Henri broke into a titter.
“What’s going on?” Nate looked uncertainly at Henri as Jason stomped from the room.
“Henri’s pissed!” Jason yelled over his shoulder.
Henri’s grin threatened to break free. Nate sat shaking his head, trying not to smile. A small laugh escaped Henri as he imagined Jason hunting through his room. He looked up at Birch, and the man’s sparkling eyes filled Henri’s chest with happiness. Or maybe it was the alcohol. Yeah, must be the alcohol. He abandoned any attempt to control his expression and let his grin out full force.
Jason emerged several minutes later holding the bottle with not quite a centimetre left in it. “Did you drink all this?”
“No, I gave myself a vodka enema,” said Henri. “Us gays do that.”
“We do?” Birch asked.
Henri spun and stared, open-mouthed. “You’re gay?”