What It Takes

by Jude Sierra

  “So can I call you?” Dex asked an hour later, after shrugging back into his clothes.

  “We’ll see each other around,” Andrew answered. Casual had always been good. Well, at least comfortable. Dex shrugged good-naturedly, smiled like as if he knew a secret, and kissed Andrew’s cheek.

  Three weeks later, this time in Andrew’s bed, he asked again. “But we’re friends now, right?”

  “I don’t do friends,” Andrew joked from the doorway by the bathroom. He remembers forcing himself to smile through the pang that rose as soon as the words came out.

  “You don’t make them, or do them?” Dex lobbed back. Crawling into bed and breathing out old pains, Andrew whispered something dirty about making him and the conversation was forgotten. Until it wasn’t. Until friendship felt natural, not anything he’d planned, but something… nice.

  “Eventually… we became friends.”

  “And then more?” Milo says. They both fidget a little.

  “It took a while.” Andrew can’t help but smile, because the day he finally caved to the obvious, when he thought through and dismissed every irrational and lingering fear with honesty he had rarely afforded himself, he felt lit with happiness in Dex’s arms, and Dex’s smile meant he felt the same. “But it did. It just…did. And it was amazing.”

  “That’s really nice,” Milo says quietly. “I don’t know that I’ve ever really had that.”

  “What, a boyfriend?” Andrew teases, trying to pick through the undercurrent.

  “No. A boyfriend who’s also a friend. Like that.” Milo looks away, and Andrew sucks in a breath. It’s sad—the words make him ache. And it’s not because they are talking around old, painful wounds they’re picking at without acknowledging, but because he wishes Milo had had that. Has that.

  “We’re still young,” he offers. It’s a dumb thing to say.

  “I know. Don’t look at me like that.” He laughs. “I’m fine. I’ve been fine. I’ve had a lot of good things, you know.”

  “Tell me about them,” Andrew says. He very much wants to understand the years he wasn’t with Milo, to feel the happiness he wasn’t there to see. “Have you been in love?”

  “Yeah.” Milo bites his lip and looks into Andrew’s eyes. “It was wonderful, for a while. But it wasn’t… it. You know?”

  Andrew nods.

  “But it was nice; it didn’t end badly. We were together for about two years. With Patrick… I think we both eventually knew it would never be quite what we hoped, and it was right, us breaking up. We were both searching for that something… more.”

  I know what you mean. Andrew averts his eyes, picks up the folder with the bill and concentrates on pulling out his wallet and ignoring the words resonating inside.

  °

  In bed that night, Andrew is honest with himself. Being friends with Milo hasn’t helped heal old wounds as much as he hoped. Instead, he’s sleepless and aching, remembering a longing so desperate it took his breath, and the bitter tang of heartbreak, the taste of ash from that bonfire on his tongue. Loving Milo was the most selfless, even if not the healthiest, act of his life.

  Finally understanding the limitations of their friendship, despite everything else, was a gift. They both needed healing, but especially Milo, whose love and fear had matched each other and paralyzed him. They’d loved each other as boys, but in the moment they confessed that with naked honesty, Andrew knew they would never grow into the men they wanted to be if they were together. Being with him would hold Milo back forever.

  Reluctantly, Andrew wonders if that was foolish.

  °

  “My mom called me today,” Andrew says.

  “Well, hello to you too,” Milo replies. Raucous background noise almost obscures his voice.

  “Sorry, hi. Hello, how are you this fine day?” Andrew says, facetious and sassy. The background noise suddenly disappears.

  “Great. Sorry, we’re all pitching in to clean; we have a last minute guest coming and Mom is just...”

  “Is she okay?”

  “Yeah. The radiation seems to be hitting her hard this week. She’s very tired and nauseated. We’ve all come together to make her rest and stop worrying about guests, because she refuses to close down.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help? Should I let you go?”

  “No, we’re pretty much done. What’s up? I’m assuming you didn’t call to update me on your family correspondence.”

  “Ooh,” Andrew says. “You’re hilarious.”

  “A born comedian,” Milo replies; this time Andrew actually laughs.

  “Anyway, my mother called and is insisting you come over for dinner sometime soon.”

  A silence that lasts too long trips Andrew’s nerves.

  “That sounds great,” Milo says.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, of course. Only if she makes macaroons.”

  “Of course. Baked goods are her M.O. for enticing me into family dinners.”

  ° ° °

  THURSDAY AFTERNOON brings a sudden onslaught of worry.

  “What is your deal?” Dex asks when Andrew changes his shirt for the fourth time and bemoans his choice of wine.

  “Nothing, I’m fine.”

  “Drew—“

  “It’s fine,” Andrew snaps, then closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I’m nervous.”

  “Why? We have dinner at your parents’ all the time.”

  Andrew smooths his shirt, evaluates himself in the mirror again and wonders how to explain this to Dex.

  “Listen, I haven’t really told you Milo’s story—because it’s his to tell—”

  “Okay…?”

  “But... look, he had a really hard life here when we were kids. A hard time. I worry about things that might remind him of that.”

  “Like going to your parents’?”

  “Yeah.” Andrew turns to Dex, puts his hands on his shoulders and kisses him fleetingly. “He was with us a lot, over at our house. It was a good place for him then, but I don’t want him to have to re-live some of the stuff that drove him there in the first place.”

  Dex looks a little sad and a little drawn. “Did he seem worried when you invited him?”

  Andrew thinks of that pause, the split second when Milo’s hesitation resonated like the clang of a bell. Maybe it was something no one else would have noticed, and nothing he could really explain to Dex.

  “Andrew, he’s a big boy,” Dex continues. Andrew bristles. “If it upsets him, I believe he knows how to ask for support, right? He seems to have himself together with what’s happening with his mother.”

  Andrew considers Dex’s words. He does make a good point. “Yeah. I guess I’m still used to the way things were.” He tries not to wince, worried Dex might take that the wrong way.

  “Come on, honey. Good food, good wine and good company are waiting for us.”

  Andrew smiles because Dex is right. He grabs the wine and a light sweater and tries to leave his worries behind.

  °

  “Sweetheart.” Dex pulls Andrew aside in the kitchen where Andrew’s been scraping the remains of dinner from plates into the garbage. “It’s late, and I have to work tomorrow. Do you think we can make dessert quick?”

  Andrew stacks the last dish carefully and doesn’t look at Dex. It is late—everyone lingered over dinner. Milo fits so seamlessly in a room with his family; no awkwardness popped up, and when his parents and Milo reminisced, it was about good things. It’s a warm, wonderful feeling, not just because of Milo, but because he missed his own family when he was gone.

  “I’m enjoying this,” he says to Dex. “What if you go home, and I’ll get a ride and come later? I don’t want you to be too tired tomorrow.”

  Dex sighs, setting off both annoyance and chagrin inside Andrew. He’s talked about missing his family before; what seemed to both of them like a checkmark in the ‘pro’ column for coming home now seems like evidence that things aren’t quite right
. Every reason Andrew wants to stay is a reminder that Dex isn’t happy here. He doesn’t want to ask Dex to be kinder, because he’s scared they’ll leave soon and he’ll be going without his family again.

  “Please?” Andrew reaches out to squeeze Dex’s hand.

  “Sure,” Dex says. He doesn’t look happy, exactly, but he doesn’t seem upset either.

  °

  “You seem a little down,” Milo observes later. They’re sitting in the family room sharing the last of the wine. Andrew’s parents begged off and went to bed half an hour ago. Andrew knows he’ll be tired tomorrow too, but his job is flexible enough that he’ll manage an extra hour or two of sleep.

  “I’m fine,” Andrew brushes him off. He’s already confessed more of his problems with Dex than he wants to admit. Milo holds his gaze, then shrugs.

  “Wanna go for a walk? Get some fresh air?”

  “Milo, it’s midnight.”

  “So? You’ll navigate; I know you’d never get us lost.” Milo points at the ceiling, as if they can see the stars from here. Andrew smiles, but it’s bittersweet—Milo remembering Andrew’s silly notions as a kid that he could make his own constellations from the stars, that they could navigate new adventures with secret maps.

  “All right,” he says. He’s pleasantly loose from the wine and too many macaroons. They pull their shoes on at the door, and Andrew has to steady himself against Milo when he loses his balance.

  “You all right, sailor?” Milo rights him.

  “I’m fine. Smaller than you; pretty sure I had more wine.”

  “You’re such a lush,” Milo jokes, pulling open the door. Andrew thinks of himself a few years ago.

  “If only you knew,” he says under his breath. He locks the door and, when Milo offers, links their arms and lets Milo steady him on the gravel drive.

  “All right captain, where to?” Milo says. When Andrew looks up, the sky is a covered with a dizzying blanket of stars.

  °

  “Can I ask you a question?” Andrew says out of nowhere. They’ve been walking in silence—Andrew’s led them to Chickopee Beach. Milo hasn’t been here since he’s been back, but he doesn’t tell Andrew. Many years ago, they met here. Milo isn’t sure if Andrew is leading them here for a purpose, or if it’s habit.

  “Sure,” Milo says. Andrew doesn’t say anything; Milo elbows him a little. “You in there?”

  “Yeah. It’s just…personal. More than we’ve—”

  “Oh,” Milo says. This dance they’ve been in, on the edge of too-much-but-not-enough, is one he’s been wishing away without knowing how. “Yeah. Anything.”

  It’s too dark to read Andrew’s face, but the moon is huge and bright, and he can at least see that he is watching him.

  “When did you forgive your mother?” Andrew asks. Milo tightens his hold on Andrew’s arm to steady him, and takes a deep breath; the scent of the water is sharp and clean and bracing.

  “Oh, well…” The sand ripples in front of them, valleys of shadow, but peaked in light, brightly reflecting the moon’s glow. It’s otherworldly and beautiful.

  “You have, right? You seem like it.”

  “Yeah,” Milo says. “I have.” He walks with Andrew to the edge of the water, then toes his shoes off; the water lapping at his feet is cold. Andrew fumbles and so Milo helps him with his shoes; it’s startlingly intimate.

  “How? I remember…”

  “You remember?” Milo prompts.

  “You were so angry, and so… I don’t—I mean. Betrayed?”

  “Yeah.” Milo stands still, and lets the suck and pull of the waves bury his feet in sand. “You know, all that negative stuff…god, it was so much to carry. I had so much shit I was lugging around with me. And that anger, with her and with life and with—”

  Milo cuts himself off before he admits how angry he was when Andrew severed the last of their ties, months after their goodbye. He blocked him on social media, changed his number and took the last of himself from Milo’s life. Even if all he had then were small scraps and tiny, fogged windows into Andrew’s life… they had been enough to keep him going. It’s not the time for that conversation—maybe it won’t ever be. “I had to move on,” he says instead, gently. “And I couldn’t when I was drowning in it.”

  “So… it’s just gone? All of your anger?”

  “No… I, I wouldn’t say that. I’m still angry about a lot of shit. But her?” Milo shakes his head. “I tried for a long time to forgive her, but I couldn’t. Because she was an adult and I was a kid: inherently helpless. She had options I didn’t. She could have left or protected me, you know? So yeah, I was furious.”

  “But now you’re not?”

  “There was a day about four years ago, maybe? She called, and needed help with something—not anything big, just something I could walk her through over the phone? I can’t remember. But I do remember talking to her and feeling more and more annoyed and short tempered. There really wasn’t a reason for my response on that call.”

  “Just built-up anger, then?”

  “Yeah. I barely got off the phone with her before I lost it. I threw my phone against the wall. Shattered the screen and everything.”

  “Wow.”

  Milo notices that Andrew is shivering a little. “You forgot your sweater,” he says, then takes his off.

  “No, no don’t—”

  “It’s fine. I’m not cold at all.” He drapes it over Andrew’s shoulders and leads them away from the water. They walk a little way until they’ve crossed from the resident stretch of beach into the tourist one, then finds a bench for them to sit on.

  “I was with Patrick then. Scared the shit out of him. I don’t know that I’d ever been that angry before—” Milo stops and backtracks. “Well, acted that angry. It was like everything boiled over; it was huge and I was out of control.”

  “Did this have to do with why things didn’t work out between you?”

  “No, but the way I freaked him out—it’s one of the reasons I went back to therapy. I’d tried it before, and it had helped, but I let it slide. I think I thought it had helped as much as it could, which wasn’t really a lot.”

  “So you went back,” Andrew says.

  “Yeah. It took a while. I had to find the right person, which isn’t something I’d thought about before—how important it would be to find someone I really could trust and connect with. I was with Janet for at least a year before her lessons really clicked.”

  “What was she teaching you?” Andrew asks.

  Milo stops to think about how to phrase this. “That I wasn’t my feelings.”

  “I… what?”

  “I wasn’t an angry person. I was a person who felt anger.”

  “No offense, but that sounds like the same thing to me.”

  “I know, right?” Milo smiles. “I’m telling you it took an age for me to really get it. What she meant was that I let my emotions control me. I was letting myself be helpless to them, and when we think we are our emotions, instead of our emotions being something we experience, or can let go of, or survive… they’re in control.”

  He stops while Andrew thinks this over. The rising wind picks up the sounds of the water. Milo buries his feet in the sand and tells himself it’s the cold that has him leaning into Andrew’s space. On the breeze he catches the scent of Andrew’s cologne. It’s new—to him at least—but lovely. “I sort of get that.” Andrew sounds dubious.

  “I remember the day I figured it out. It wasn’t as though she was saying it differently. We’d been covering it for a while, and she was very patient with me, but there was so much cluttering my head and fucking with me, I had to really persist, you know? And one day, Patrick and I got into this ridiculous fight.”

  “And?”

  “And I stormed off. There was a small part of me that knew I was being irrational, but I couldn’t help it, and I kept thinking, ‘This is my whole life; this is what it’s going to be like.’”

  “What was?”<
br />
  “Me, being angrier and angrier and more and more fucked up and never moving past anything,” Milo says. The despair he felt then leaks into his words. Andrew lays his hand on Milo’s forearm, gently, and Milo smiles. “I wish I could describe what that felt like, always thinking my life was going to be this hopeless mess. And then…”

  Milo looks up; the stars are brilliant and the night is heavy around them. Andrew waits patiently.

  “Patrick came and found me. He told me he was sorry, and he loved me, and there was this…I don’t know. Dichotomy? Between what I wanted in my life, and what I saw as the only life I was actually going to get.”

  “Ooh, now you’re breaking out the big words,” Andrew jokes.

  Milo smiles at him and appreciates the lessening of tension. “Just taking a page out of your book.”

  “So this dichotomy?”

  Milo looks back at the water and tries to collect his words so that they will make sense.

  “I guess… I lived all that time thinking happiness was out of reach. That it was something I had to wait for, passively. It was a beautiful idea that I didn’t really believe in. But you know what?” He turns to Andrew. In the warm light from the moon he can see that Andrew’s hair is falling and his eyes are intent on him. He knows he’s the sole recipient of Andrew’s attention; it’s a wordless language relearned with ease.

  “What?”

  “Happiness in our lives and future are things we can have. We can choose them. The things holding me back—they seemed so tangible. Like… I was carrying this huge bag of rocks. And I could see how holding on to them was holding me back. Each grief… one rock.”

  “One rock?”

  “Something I could take out of that bag and leave behind. Healing… isn’t something that exists in the future, waiting to find us randomly. It exists at our fingertips.”

  “Huh,” Andrew says.

  “Being mad at my mom… that was something I knew I could work on. Maybe even let go of. And it wasn’t immediate, but I could see how allowing myself be so angry was me holding on to things I could never change. I mean, I, I’ll never be angry or resentful or damaged enough to change what happened. And he’s not here anymore. But I am, and she is, and we both had to heal.”