There's This Guy

by Rhys Ford

  A bit of sun struck Kevin’s gravestone, flashing on the mica specks in the black rock, and Dallas rested his elbows on his knees, cradling his beer between his legs, recalling his promise to always be there for Kevin despite everything between them. As Kevin’d promised to always be just a phone call away.

  Dallas never made that phone call.

  And now he was talking to a chunk of black stone, splattered with schoolwork and letters to a daddy who’d never, ever come home.

  “Kind of a lot’s happened since the last time, Kev.” Dallas picked at a corner of the bottle’s label, peeling back a bit of the top layer. “There’s this guy… I met. Catholic, I think. What is it with you Catholic boys, huh? So many jokes I could make right now, but… hell, you’d just get pissed off if I start talking about priests.”

  Kevin always had been touchy about priest jokes, but Dallas told them anyway, sometimes just to see if he could make the man smile.

  “His name’s Jake. Well, Jacques. His mom was Canadian, and you can hear it sometimes when he talks. Especially when he’s talking about her. Problem is, he’s… got issues, man. Like serious fucking issues, and sometimes I look at him and I just want to… hold on to him. Make it all better for him.” Dallas took another gulp of beer, hissing at its soft sting. “See, most people would think I come here to talk to you because, well, I’ve got a thing for you. Which I almost did. But we never got there, did we, Kev?”

  A car drove by, burdened with a pair of stern-faced women who stared straight ahead, their eyes pinned to the winding cemetery road. He watched the vehicle go by, wondering how many times they’d driven to the middle of Los Angeles in their angry silence. One of the lawn men rode a tractor mower up over the sloped curb a few hundred yards away, kicking on the blades once he hit grass. It was a peaceful, lazy afternoon, the heat buffered by the sprinklers going off across the way and the tree—Joyce’s tree—covering Dallas with its thick shade.

  “See, Kev, about a week and a half ago, this guy—this incredibly gorgeous, sweet guy—told me he was gay. And he’s scared and he hates being gay. Hates it with a passion because… well, I think for the same reasons you did. Someone made him feel dirty, fucked-up to the nth degree, and I’m so pissed off about it.” The beer was beginning to taste good, a sure sign he should stop drinking it quickly or he’d have to run through the sprinklers to get it out of his system before he got into his car. “I see the pain in his eyes, like you had when you told me you were married and needed to go play house. God, I wanted to save you. I wanted to tell you not to go back because….

  “This.” He slapped at the headstone, a hard, sharp sound, and his palm stung from the smack. “I can fucking feel this on him, and I’m fucking in love with the damned asshole. And I can’t….”

  Dallas’s chest shook with his shuddering gasp, his heart seizing under his ribs. The reality of his feelings toward Jake stunned him. It was a lost cause, a kamikaze mission into a darkness he might not survive, but Dallas wanted to plunge deep into Jake and stay there, burning away the poison his family forced him to drink.

  “I didn’t want to fall for him. Fuck, I’ve never been in love, Kev. This thing I have with Jake, how I feel? I question it, you know? Because really, who the hell knows what love really is?” He sighed, rubbing his face to scrub off the doubts he had under his skin. “I think that’s why I came here. To talk to you. Because you did something you didn’t want to do because you loved your kids. You fucking loved your kids, but this didn’t go away and….

  “I just want him to heal. Honestly. Even if he never even looks at me, even if he doesn’t want me—Lana thinks he does, but she’s… well… full of shit most of the time—I want him to be… okay.” Dallas shook his head, throat closing with his rising emotions. “Truth here, Kev, I just want him to start living. Because he’s… so fucking gorgeous inside. So goddamned beautiful, it makes me want to cry when I feel his soul flinch.

  “So that’s what’s going on, Kev. I’ve landed in some kind of fucked-up Wonderland, and my Mad Hatter is really fucking torn up inside.” He turned his head, drawn to the rattle of the mower coming closer. “I need to figure out how to make it work. How to help Jake not end up like you, Kev. I can’t come to another graveyard and talk to a damned stone. Not his stone. It would fucking kill me, and then we’d all be here, sharing a bench at the worst croquet game ever.”

  The lawn guy turned around, lining the mower up with a stretch of grass several rows up from where Kevin lay. He’d avoid the grave and Dallas; that much Dallas knew after visiting Kevin before. The man nodded, straightening the mower, then chugged down the lawn. He slowed when he drew abreast of Dallas, bringing the tractor to a stop, and pulled his headphones from his ears.

  “Hey, you the guy who keeps leaving beer here?” Shouting, the groundskeeper left the mower’s engine running, but the blades were stilled, vibrating in time with the motor’s rumbling.

  “Yeah,” Dallas replied, holding up what was left of his beer. “You the guy who keeps taking it?”

  “Maybe.” His smile could only be called shit eating where Dallas was from. “Just do me a favor. How about bringing round some normal beer instead? ’Cause it’s not like he’s going to drink it, and what you’ve been dropping off tastes like shit.”

  JAKE ROLLED his shoulders back, the slow ache forming in between his blades spreading out and grabbing his spine. His eyes hurt a bit, strained from chasing sparks and lines, but the twists of foraged aluminum and copper seemed to be holding. Brazing was difficult sometimes, and he tapped at the curls, waiting for the whole thing to tumble down to the ground.

  He’d left the workshop’s rolling doors open, hoping for any hint of a breeze to soften the heat trapped in the building, and there was a shift in the street noise as evening fell, the rumbling rasp of passing cars and foot traffic slowing down to a trickle, then silence, except for the occasional chug of an engine rumbling by. Light shifted around him, dimming as businesses around the fabrication shop closed, but the distant scrape of chairs and rattle of crockery kept him company as the twenty-four-hour coffee shop a few doors down kept up a brisk business on its patio, a busker serenading customers from a corner spot under an awning.

  It was late, probably heading around the hump of the night and curving up into double digits, and Jake hummed along with a tune coming from the musician’s acoustic guitar, walking around the sculpture he’d cobbled together from the shop’s scraps. The bin full of pieces had taunted him for a week, and Jake mentally calculated how much it would cost him to buy the cuttings before his boss kicked at the large container and told Jake in his thick Ukrainian accent to lock up when he was done fucking with whatever he cobbled out of the mess left for him.

  And when Raoul made sucking noises behind Jake’s back, Jake simply flipped him off and pocketed the shop’s keys.

  There were possibilities in the tangle of metal Evancho left for him, shapes teasing him with their long lines and liquid forms. It would be a woman’s shape, something barely hinted at perhaps and perfect for Bombshells’ reception area, or so he hoped.

  “Something right for the time period,” he murmured to himself, pulling up the shield on his mask so he could look at the form he’d tentatively built out. “And… drag queens. Definitely… drag queens.”

  It’d been a long, hard week. Shuffling between Dallas’s building during the day and a few hours at Evancho’s doing fine metalwork the boss didn’t trust anyone else to do. He’d finished the massive gate piece destined for a driveway no one would ever see, but the delicate rose-and-lily scrollwork was finally completed, and he’d done one last check to make sure both sides matched before leaving the twelve-foot-wide work for Evancho to inspect in the morning.

  A thin strain of slightly out-of-tune guitar strings chased down a few lines of a song, a young man’s unsteady voice valiantly fighting to hit the husky dive in one of Jake’s favorite songs. He winced when the strumming went wild, then sighed at a missed line in the
chorus. He hummed along anyway, filling in the words he knew and mumbling through the ones he—and the busker—couldn’t remember.

  “Probably one of their harder songs,” someone said behind him, and Jake nearly jumped out of his skin. “I can never tell if I’m supposed to be angry or sad listening to it.”

  “Jesus fucking Christ!” Jake spun about, one hand clenched tightly around a thick metal rod. Dallas stepped back, his hands raised defensively, and Jake lowered his arm. “Sorry…. Dallas. You just—”

  “Scared the shit out of you.” Dallas’s smile was a heartbreak waiting to happen. Up close, there were teeth and laughing eyes… and an artlessness to his disarming shrug. “Sorry. I came by to grab Celeste’s purse because she left it in the bathroom. Evancho’s got you working late here after dealing with my stuff all day?”

  “No, I finished up Evancho’s stuff a while back. I’m working on my own stuff now.” Jake lightly kicked the bin of scraps. “When the discard bin’s full, he usually lets me buy it to take home and work. I wanted to do something… heavier, so he told me I could have this corner of the shop for a couple of months, but I don’t know. I think I need to just take all this stuff home and hammer at it there.”

  “Couple of months seems like a long time to be working on something… said the man whose windows are going to take another three weeks. Still, seems… long.” He whistled softly, circling the bin, then looked up, the stark light from the shop’s overhead fluorescents marbling Dallas’s face with streaks of white and shadow. “I have no idea what you’re talking about or what I’m looking at. Clue me in, J.”

  “I do… sculptures sometimes, mostly at home. Just to play with. Nothing… major. Scrap metal because the shit’s expensive, but junkyards are a good place to get stuff.” He shrugged at Dallas’s appreciative smile. “Harder now because they’re paying people for scrap, so I’ve got to get there before someone cleans out a place. I know a few guys who’ll hold things for me until I get there to look through what someone dropped off. Evancho… I don’t know… he told me to just take what’s here, so….”

  “But you’re looking kind of confused.” Another circle, this time around the framing Jake’d thrown together so he could get an idea of how the piece would work. Sketches were all well and good, but he never knew how something would look from all angles until he did a scaffolding. “You don’t like this?”

  “It’s okay. It’s just so I can look at it and see how it flows in real life. How the angles work.” Nodding to the sheaf of curling papers on his workbench, he laughed. “Things can look great in pencil. Then when I pull things together, it goes shitty real fast. It’s like a three-dimensional rough sketch. That’s all.”

  “So you built this here and now want to take it home?” Dallas’s confused scowl twisted his mouth into a moue, and Jake forced his attention away from the man’s face and back to the form.

  “All of it, including the bin. I don’t feel….” It was hard to explain what he felt. There were too many complications with working at the shop, but Dallas looked like he was expecting more than what Jake was giving him. “It’s too… personal, you know? I think that’s the biggest reason. It’s not the only one, but definitely the biggest. And there’s other guys who work here, guys who don’t get special assignments or Evancho giving them free shit. I don’t want them to feel like—”

  “Like crap. No, no. I get it. Totally get that.” Any more of Dallas’s grins and Jake was sure something in him was going to burst. “You going to take this home now? I was going to see if you wanted to grab some food, but I can help you get this stuff moved if you want.”

  And suddenly there was panic.

  No, not panic, he decided after poking at the tightness in his belly and the freefall of his emotions before they turned into red-hot pinballs careening around inside of his chest. What he was feeling was something else, something darker or more exhilarating than panic. An anxiety of some sort chopped in with a desire to bring Dallas to the place he laid himself open to bleed or cry. It was asking for more than sex, especially not the mindless, body-purging fucking he’d had in the past. Dallas’s casual, nonchalant offer was a door to a part of Jake’s life he’d never shared with anyone before, and he wasn’t so certain he was ready for it now.

  Everything in Jake screamed at him to say no. His broken, fucked-up life was in that four-walled brick shithole. There was nothing there to offer, nothing Dallas would want behind that humidity-swollen door. He’d cowered there, marinating in his own sweat and fears, painting the apartment’s mortared walls with the reek of his existence, and Dallas simply wanted to walk in, carting with him metal offal Jake hoped to turn into something beautiful.

  He was frightened. No other way Jake could look at it. He was scared of… what Dallas would see, how he would be seen. It wasn’t about how run down the place was or how cobbled together he lived, it was about Dallas walking into the long stretch of space and seeing the thing Jake was pulling out of his depths and forming out of metal and captured lightning.

  “Hey, we don’t do anything you don’t want to do, J.” Dallas was nearer, reaching out for him, his fingertips on Jake’s shoulder. Again with the touching, forever with the tactile stroking, but Dallas’s skin on his felt… right, a drench of soothe over the heat rash of Jake’s panic. “No harm, no foul, okay?”

  “No, it’s….” He quirked his mouth, debating what to say, then finally settled on the blunt, bald truth.

  This was Dallas. He was safe with Dallas, and for the first time in his life since that night, Jake was tired of hiding and worn-out from walling himself away. He wanted to breathe and to laugh and maybe, just maybe one day be kissed by another man. And God, he wanted that kiss to come from Dallas.

  “I’ve never had anyone over,” he murmured softly, startlingly aware of the drift of Dallas’s fingers over his shoulder and the flecks of cobalt in the other man’s gaze. “Ever. It’s where I—”

  “It’s where you’re actually you.” Dallas nodded. “I get that. I do.”

  He could study Dallas’s face forever, drinking in the play of emotions through the subtle shifts of his skin and flesh. It would be enough for him. Jake knew that even as he was too paralyzed by the shit in his brain to take the first step toward being someone other than Ron Moore’s disgusting, perverted little boy.

  “But you know, Dallas,” Jake continued, patting Dallas’s hand on his arm, “I’d like you to be the first.”

  Nine

  THERE WAS a glorious tumble of stars caught in a cosmic storm sitting right in the middle of Jake’s brick-walled apartment.

  It snagged Dallas as soon as he went through the door, hands full with a heavy bin of metal tidbits, and his attention more focused on Jake’s firm ass than anything else. The long, narrow main room—true to its industrial roots—was a step down from the street, and he tripped over his own expectation of an even surface, nearly face-planting into the sealed cement floor. He pulled the bin up against his chest right before it tumbled with him, then dropped it anyway when Jake’s flight of fancy grabbed him by the balls and stole his mind.

  He’d grown up around artists, or at least people his mother dragged home with slight inclinations toward ceramics, macramé, and sculpting. There was the odd musician, and once a man who made baby dolls out of shit—any kind of shit—which prompted Dallas’s dad to kick him off the ranch when he found the guy eyeball-deep in the old septic tank behind the barn.

  Much like her cooking, his mother’s tastes in artistic expression ran to the mediocre, where participation was as good as a masterpiece. He’d drawn the line at her friends’ projects decorating his room, especially after watching the trash-bag hammock installation put up in Austin’s bathroom as a protest to corporations’ misuse of public lands.

  Jake’s sculpture—his pouring of his soul into shapes and curves—would blow her mind.

  It towered over him by a few feet, swirling up toward the very high ceiling, and the room’s lights pl
ayed with the whorls’ edges, throwing rainbow dapples over Dallas as he walked around the piece. He couldn’t figure out what he was looking at, drawing deeper into the lines shaped out of what looked like silver but firmer and sharper in tone.

  The piece was definitely a storm, an epic battle of matter and void, balancing precariously on the edge of a twisted churn of metal. It was a slice of chaos, bursts of energy exploding outward to splatter the viewer with an unimaginable power except… for the cage around it.

  It took Dallas a good minute to realize why he felt so… disquieted by the structure. It was a celebration of expansion and energized motion, but instead it infused him with a sense of being contained. The longer he studied the work, the feeling of being trapped grew, raking a subtle prickle over his thoughts. He couldn’t shake the sensation, and he stepped back, trying to find the disconnect between himself and Jake’s sculpture when it hit him. The fine threads of silvery filament swirling around the upward fling of metal spurs and mesh storm formed a partially open net around the piece, subtly creating a barrier between the storm and the viewer.

  “Shit,” Dallas whispered, barely aware of a metallic clatter to his right. “Fuck me, it’s…. Jake.”

  The revelation struck him as hard as the piece itself. He now understood what Jake meant about intimate. The sculpture peeled apart Jake, exposing how he felt about life and the surging need to be free of the cage he’d been put in. Staring into the worked metal shapes discomforted him. Standing in front of Jake’s stark, hard mental prison beaten and forged into physical form dug into Dallas. It brought Jake’s torn soul to life and laid him out for all to see.

  Dallas was torn between covering the piece with a blanket so he wouldn’t have to share Jake or turning around and giving the man a fierce hug, then never letting him go.