by G. D. Cox
But he has to do it. He has to. If his own parents can't love him, all of him, who else will?
He goes to Ma first, waiting for Pa to go to the garage to mess around with the family's still very cherry red 1970 Chevrolet Chevelle LS6 after a homemade lunch of spaghetti and meatballs. He helps her wash the utensils and dishes. Dries them while she stores them back in their respective cupboards. He stands at the sink with almost five feet of space between them, his arms crossed over his chest, his gaze cast down at the slate-tiled kitchen floor before taking the plunge.
It feels a lot more like tightening a noose around his neck.
It's inexplicable and crazy, all right, that he'd rather face down a loaded gun right now than his own mom. But a loaded gun is something he's been trained to a fault to handle, to defend himself from someone wielding one. There's no handbook on how to handle a future where your parents who you love so much may hate your guts and wish you were never born for being anything other than straight.
"Phelan?" she asks as she folds a kitchen towel, her slim hands going still when he doesn't reply. "Is something wrong?"
He doesn't quite know what slips from his numb mouth, what exactly it is he says to his mother while early afternoon sunlight cascades in through the open kitchen window and gilds them in balmy gold. He knows they're words. He knows Ma's heard them, from the way her whole body goes still along with her hands, the way her blue eyes widen as they stare up at him.
He finds the courage to stare back, to look her in the eye with his arms lowered to his sides and his shoulders squared. If she's going to hit him, he should at least accept it like a man.
Ma does no such thing.
Silently, she goes up to him and wraps her arms around him, just like she would when he was a little boy and he would run up to her for a hug just because he wanted one. He's much taller than she is now, her head reaching up to his collarbones. Her head rests upon his chest, her ear over his heart that had beat for the very first time in her womb over twenty-four years ago.
He's so shocked at not being struck in the face that he's frozen in place. He gapes down at his mother, unable to comprehend that the whole world hasn't died on him yet. He's still mute when she gradually draws back, her hands now on his forearms as she stares up at him with such open, warm eyes and a delicate smile.
"Well, look at that. I'm still your Ma," she says, only a slight crack in her dulcet, familiar voice betraying her emotions. "And you're still my son."
And yeah, Cole understands how a man can smile and yet still have shiny, wet eyes, how someone can cry even when they're happy. It's not weird, not at all.
He goes to Pa next, after Ma hugs him again and he hugs her back with all he's got and she tells him to go be with his dad. Pa's still in the garage, sitting on a rolling stool and applying what smells like acetone to a small area on the car's front passenger door with a white, clean cloth. There's probably a scratch there that Pa is trying to remove.
There's another rolling stool next to Pa, and he sits on it, unaware of his thumb and forefinger tapping each other repeatedly until he glances down at his hands on his lap. He flattens his hands on his thighs, but he knows it's too late. He knows Pa's seen the tell although Pa has yet to look away from the car door, still sedately applying acetone to a scratch now detectable to Cole's eyes.
He stares forward at the rear passenger door. He feels like such a goddamn coward, incapable of looking his dad in the eye for this, for two words. But this is his dad. This is the man who's loved him before he was even born, who cried when he was born and held him in strong, muscle-corded arms and promised to always take care of him and protect him.
The man who has no idea that his son isn't and will never be straight.
"Pa."
He senses Pa's unfaltering, mellow gaze on his face. He knows Pa is seeing his pink and swollen eyes, knows that Pa must be wondering what happened in the house before he came here to the garage. His hands grit into fists on his lap. He stares on at the rear passenger door in front of him and it's crazy, it's crazy that he'd rather face down a hundred loaded guns right now than his own dad. Sure, Ma's fine with him the way he is. Ma's accepted him. But that's no guarantee that Pa will. Pa's a man. Pa was born in the late 1940s and grew up in an age when there were authorized witch hunts and mass firings of homosexuals working for the government, when bars frequented by gay people were targeted by the authorities for shutdown, when homosexuality - and any other non-heterosexuality - was generally considered and really believed to be some pernicious sickness.
He swallows hard. Sucks in a deep breath that tremors at the very end.
"Pa," he rasps, saying to his father the same two words he said to his mother, "I'm bisexual."
He feels that noose around his neck again, tightening so much that he can't breathe. His head feels groggy. His insides feel like they're churning into an acidic, ice-cold mush threatening to expel from his mouth and onto the garage's cement floor. His skin shivers with goosebumps from the shrouding chill that exudes from his roiling belly.
Somehow, he finds the courage to turn his head towards Pa too, to look him in the eye and not look away. Pa is gazing at him with those genial, blue eyes that are so much like his. Pa's expression is inscrutable.
"You planning on hurting good people?" Pa asks him quietly.
It takes several moments for the question to sink in for Cole. When it does, his breath hitches in his throat. His eyes go round and stark with shock, and he almost rears back from Pa, his insides churning even more nauseatingly.
"What?" Cole gasps, shaking his head from side to side, his lower lip quivering. "No, Pa. No."
Pa gazes on at his face with those genial, blue eyes, calm and collected as ever.
"You planning on staying a good man?" Pa asks him with that low, resonant, kind voice, that used to hum lullabies to him before he fell asleep under thick, comfy blankets in his childhood bedroom. "You planning on continuing to make the world a better place with other good people?"
And then, then it sinks in for Cole that he'd been such a fool to ever doubt his father's love for him for a second, to assume that Pa could ever be anything but a good guy. The best guy, one who is the sum of his own choices and not that of the times he was born and grew up in.
"Yeah, Pa," he replies, barely above a whisper.
Pa nods at him.
"All right," Pa says, then turns back to the front passenger door with the acetone-soaked cloth in hand, his left knee touching Cole's right. "Pass me the rubbing compound, son. It's on the workbench."
He sees the opening for what it is, and it only humbles him more, that thing in the left side of his chest swelling beyond comprehension with a warmth that he knows so many people in this world will never receive and have in their lifetime. He stands up slowly and shuffles over on wobbly legs to the workbench behind them. Just like Pa said, the white, plastic bottle of rubbing compound is on the workbench, and he picks it up, his back turned to Pa while he swipes his eyes with the back of his free hand.
When he's sitting on the rolling stool next to Pa once more, his eyes are still red but they're also dry. His right knee is touching Pa's left again, and Pa doesn't move his leg away. He sits and watches Pa apply the rubbing compound to the stubborn scratch. They don't say anything to each other, not until Ma shows up at the open garage door to let them know she's brewing some tea and has set out some home-baked carrot cake with cream cheese frosting on the kitchen table, but that's okay. Sometimes, there are some things that need to be said, and sometimes, there are some things that don't need to be, not with words.
In twelve years' time, two years after meeting Clyde in Nate's office in GATF headquarters, Cole will be reminded again that he is one of the very fortunate few in this vast, unfair, unpredictable, senseless world to be so simply accepted and loved by his parents. He will learn that Clyde is most certainly not one of the few like him, when Clyde tells him - with that flat, lifeless tone that he can't stand coming fr
om someone as spirited as Clyde - about his absolute monster of a father who'd been the opposite of Cole's in almost every way, who would have murdered Clyde if Clyde had ever come out to him.
"When Pop had too much beer, even for him," Clyde says, sitting on the burgundy couch in his office at HQ and staring off into the distance with half-lidded, blank eyes, "he liked to make Mom sit in the kitchen while he stomped around and threw things against the wall and screamed at her about everything she did wrong that day. I'd huddle up at the top of the stairs, next to the banister, and I'd hear Mom sniffling, trying to keep as quiet as possible. Just like me. When Pop got that way, a lotta times he'd come upstairs and go after me and Danny too.
"Danny tried to stop him whenever he came after me. Danny was older and bigger than me, but Pop was even bigger. And stronger. He knew how to use that belt buckle. Or baseball bat, when he was really mad. Sometimes, Danny would run and hide somewhere in the house, and I'd be too slow and Pop would catch me. That's when he'd really whale on me, calling me a little fag and yelling about how he wanted to kill all the perverted, vile faggots in the world and send them to hell and hey, why not start with me?"
Cole, sitting behind his desk with his forearms on its burnished, mahogany surface, silently contends yet again with the urge to demand that R&D figure out how to resurrect the dead so he can kill Tobias Barnett with his bare hands. Or run him over with a car. Or a container truck. Maybe ten times.
"That's when Mom would fight back. Those were the only times she would, ya know, when Pop threatened outright to kill me. She'd distract him and lead him away from me, and once they were locked up in their bedroom, I'd be there on the floor, bleeding and trying not to cry and hating myself for being this fag my dad kept calling me. I was just seven years old so I had no idea what the hell he was talking about." Clyde's lips twist into a caricature of a smile, one fraught with a bitterness ancient and deep-seated. "I knew, though, when I got older. I knew exactly what a fag was and I was pretty fucking sure I wasn't one and Pop was wrong about me. He was wrong."
Clyde whispers the last sentence. Trails into a taut silence.
Cole gazes at Clyde, at that waning caricature of a smile that he wants to supplant with a true one, one worthy to be on Clyde's appealing face.
"But talk about ironic, right, Cole?" Clyde is staring down at the carpeted floor now. "I hated that he was such a coward. I hated him for never admitting his fuck-ups and for taking things out on us because he couldn't handle any responsibility, any reality. I hated his damn guts. I hated everything about him ... and I turned out just like him."
Cole's body seems to move on its volition, standing up in one movement behind the desk, spine ramrod straight.
"You are nothing like him," Cole says quietly and distinctly, his hands in fists at his sides, fists he wishes could pummel Tobias Barnett's face to a bloody pulp.
The smile on Clyde's face now is even more harrowing than the one before, one that's brimming with self-hatred and something almost like guilt. Right now, Cole doesn't understand why the guilt is there, but in a few months, in Clyde's assigned lodgings here in HQ, he will when Clyde describes how tight his hands had been around that stranger's neck in that bar, how much Clyde had wanted to squeeze until the man was dead for calling him a fag. And Clyde's eyes will be pink and wet and swollen around the edges, and Cole will brush the damp skin beneath them with his thumbs and murmur, you're not him, Clyde, you're not your father.
But right now, he walks over to the couch and sits beside Clyde, with no space between them at all.
"I would gladly rid the world of everyone who hurt you, if it was in my power to do so," he murmurs, cradling Clyde's left cheek with his right hand, watching Clyde's large, vivid eyes widen with surprise and no small amount of feeling.
"Phelan," Clyde rasps, and yes, Cole thinks he can get very used to hearing Clyde call him that instead.
Long after he kisses Clyde on the couch that evening, he remembers what he said to Clyde. He'd meant it. Every word. He remembers when Nate had made a similar promise to him and also meant every word of it, two years after he came out to his parents. Nate had worded it far more differently and platonically. It happened to be on Valentine's Day, which in hindsight, was probably not the best day for Cole to come out to Nate without accidentally implying some things that weren't there to begin with.
To Nate's credit, Nate just stared at him with a deadpan expression before saying, "Phelan. I know I am a handsome, irresistible muthafucker that everyone on this god-forsaken Earth wants to marry. I know, man, but I sincerely regret to inform you that my cold, dead heart is unavailable to a handsome, irresistible muthafucker like yourself."
Jesus, Nate definitely tested his deadpan face with that. Nate hadn't been joking about his unavailable heart since Nate was in a long-term, long-distance relationship with a lovely woman called Victoria (who Nate would eventually marry and have children with).
Later, while they sat side by side with their backs against a low, steel fence on cropped grass in front of their dorm-style Ranger barracks under the mingling orange, gold and purple hues of a setting sun, Nate said to him, "My dad was a cheating fuckwad."
The nonchalant words got his attention good. He gazed at Nate's profile while Nate stared ahead across a paved lane at the barracks, expressionless.
"My mom was his second wife. Who the hell knows why, not even me, Boots, but she loved that man. Even after he fucked around on her with at least four other women. Even after he slammed her face into the kitchen counter and broke her nose and cheekbone because she didn't cook his breakfast fast enough. Even after he beat me up, after he threw me out of the house when I was fifteen and told me to never come back. She loved that man, and she was good and loyal to him to the very end."
Cole said nothing. He turned his head to also stare ahead expressionlessly at their barracks. Nate's words built a sobering vision of domestic abuse in his mind, something he couldn't imagine his own parents committing towards each other and him.
"See, he had this idea that a real man was somebody who wasn't afraid of getting whatever he wanted, anytime he wanted. A real man was somebody who didn't think twice about beating someone up, man or woman, to make his point. A real man fucked women and only women, 'cause once you've had cock in your mouth and up your ass, you ain't a real man, son."
Cole stares ahead and grits his teeth, a muscle in his lower jaw twitching.
"In the eyes of the world, my dad was a heterosexual, happily married, church-going, god-fearing man." Nate paused, then said with unmistakable disdain, "And he was a goddamn loser who abandoned all his wives and kids and gladly gave the finger to god's teachings if it didn't fit his ideals of a real man."
Again, Cole turned his head to gaze at Nate's profile.
"My point is, only a fucking idiot would judge a person's value based on their sexual orientation and whatever consensual sexual acts they choose to do with whoever the hell they want." Nate continued to stare forward. "Am I a fucking idiot, Phelan?"
Cole's lips tremored in his endeavor to not smile. He dipped his head and looked down at the grass between his legs.
"No, Nate. You're not."
He was ready for the hard smack to the back of his head. Okay, he deserved it. He did for assuming Nate was going to ridicule him and hate him, for grating out those two significant words like a challenge to war when he should have known better. But he'd been scared. Scared of losing his best friend. And Nate knew that too, and understood.
"That's right. You ever think that low of me again, and I really will punch you, best friend or not."
Cole gave up on restraining his smile and let it spread across his face. He nudged Nate's upper arm with the ball of his shoulder, still looking down at the grass.
"I would fucking mow down anyone stupid enough to try harming you! Asshole, you dare doubt me?!"
He was ready for Nate to grab him in a playful chokehold too, and he laughed even as Nate tightened the burly, s
teel-hard arm around his neck and shook him. Nate sometimes still grabs him in a playful chokehold like that, when they're in the privacy of Nate's office at HQ or at Nate's undisclosed, heavily guarded home where Victoria's and Nate's two young daughters, Siobhan and Melina, live.
Yeah, he really is one of the very fortunate few in this vast, unfair, unpredictable, senseless world, to be so simply accepted and loved by those dearest to him. He's come out to many other GATF agents since that evening in front of the Ranger barracks almost sixteen years ago, including Agents Angela Perez (with whom he's worked in at least ten missions), Don Stewart (who jumped in front of a bullet for him eleven years ago in Abidjan) and Henry Lim (who has a permanent spot in his good books for getting Clyde out of a really tough situation in Mombasa after Clyde was shot in the thigh).
The thing is, even they don't know that he and Clyde are in a sexual relationship, much less married. Even they think that he and Clyde are at most very close friends because the thing is, Clyde has yet to come out about being gay to anyone else apart from him, his parents, Nate and Dr. Fisher. In the eyes of so many other GATF agents, Clyde is an unmarried, straight man.
So in the two weeks after the mission in Croenia, when Clyde is seen flirting with and chatting up female GATF agents, no one else thinks anything much about it. Compared to how Clyde was in the first two years of being an agent, his behavior now is so low-key that it doesn't even make a blip on the gossip vine. When Clyde abruptly leaves the GATF to reconnect with a woman, a girlfriend from his past, though, there is so much buzz about it in its wake that Cole gets unsought earfuls about it even while he's cooped up in his office.
No one knows about the absence of something metallic around Cole's neck and upon his chest, of the vow it had once been. No one knows about the Clyde-shaped void in him that only grows and grows, until it is all there is of the second scariest muthafucker to walk the planet who no longer wishes to do so.