by G. D. Cox
Everybody leaves me, Phelan. Eventually.
Well, Clyde is definitely wrong about that. Definitely wrong about him ever doing that.
"Oh, I see how it is," Cole says, deadpan, still grasping Clyde's hand.
Just like he expected, the self-deprecating expression on Clyde's face is quickly replaced by one of bewilderment.
"Wha?"
"Would you like me to list all the incredible, wonderful things about you in alphabetical order? I can do that. We can color-code it too, and print it out and pin it on the fridge. And maybe mass email it to the rest of the agency."
It's a testament of how dazed Clyde must be by his proposition (and of how persuasive his deadpan face is) that Clyde thinks he's serious about the last statement. His lips twitch momentarily and yes, there it is, that beguiling smile that lights up Clyde's whole face and there's that exaggerated eye roll that usually precedes a smack or an elbow or a foot to some portion of his limb or body.
"Oh, fuck you," Clyde says with a low laugh, nudging Cole's arm with his right elbow.
Cole maintains his deadpan face and says, "Yes, I do hope that happens tonight. More than once."
And yes, there it is again, that heat in Clyde's crinkled eyes. Clyde leans forward and kisses him once more, sucking on his lower lip, stroking the insides of his mouth with that versatile tongue.
When Clyde reluctantly draws back after a multitude of kisses, just enough that the tips of their noses are still brushing, Cole murmurs, "When I wake up before you do, I like to watch the sunshine spill across your body and light up your hair."
Clyde's lips part in what Cole knows is going to be a protest and Cole presses the pads of his right fingers on them, shushing his lover, his partner.
"I like to watch the rise and fall of your chest, the way you sprawl so freely across our bed, trusting me to be there for you. I wear clothes that are red or one of its darker shades whenever I can because it's your favorite color. I make your coffee black on work days but with sugar and cream when we get to stay in because that's the way you like it. I like that you're ambidextrous although everyone assumes you're left-handed. I like it when you walk into the bathroom in the morning grumpy and messy, scratching your belly and yawning and completely unaware of how beautiful you are even then.
"I like that you have a soft spot for dogs, especially strays, and that you generously donate to local animal shelters and shelters for the homeless, thinking nobody knows. I like that you also have a soft spot for romantic songs from the '60s and '70s, especially 'Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye'. I like the ticklish spot behind your left knee, the one that always makes you laugh when I scratch it or kiss it. And I like that you never cease to surprise me every day, whether we're GATF agents out there doing what we can or we're just Phelan and Clyde, two guys who share an apartment in Brooklyn and laze in front of the TV with pizza and kisses and great sex."
Clyde is quiet for a long while afterward, not once looking away from his eyes, throat working in one long, visible swallow. Clyde blinks once, twice.
"That wasn't in alphabetical order. And that doesn't even come close to everything incredible and wonderful about me."
They ignore how husky Clyde's voice is, how it cracks just a little at the end.
"My apologies," Cole murmurs, his expression as deadpan as ever, and they also ignore how hoarse his voice is. "I'll be sure to do much better next time, sweetheart."
Once more, that beguiling smile is gracing Clyde's face. Clyde shakes his head from side to side once. Then Clyde cups Cole's cheeks with both hands and kisses him sweetly yet again and no, no, he can't imagine a day when he will become weary of Clyde's lips forging to his, speaking their own language of gratitude and fondness and love.
"I'm thinking Bora Bora," Clyde says later, while they share a healthy slice of coffee walnut cake for dessert.
"Bora Bora?"
"Yeah. I read somewhere that you can swim with the sting rays and even feed and play with them there. Pretty cool spot for a honeymoon, right?"
Clyde is gazing down at the cake on its rectangular, white plate while he slices a section of it with a fork, and so misses the soft smile that lifts Cole's lips and eyes.
"I know the ceremony itself probably has to be in secret and somebody we can trust has gotta be the witness and all that," Clyde continues, "but that doesn't matter to me. A honeymoon would be just the two of us. We could be far away from here, and we wouldn't have to worry about the others seeing us in public. We could be just ... us."
Cole brushes his fingers down the length of Clyde's relaxed spine. He obediently opens his mouth for a forkful of cake.
"We should look up vacation plans for Bora Bora then. How about ... six months from now?"
Cole makes no mention of the constant and very real possibility that either of them may not be alive by then. Their next mission may well be their last one. If they survive it, the Russian roulette begins anew with the next mission, and the next, and the next. Always another throw of dices with no way of knowing how they'll land. They know this down to the very marrow of their flinty bones by now, know the severely high risks of mortality of their jobs. He'd, after all, just endured being stabbed clean through by a kukri.
But he'll be damned if he's going to allow fear to stop him from planning a future, a life with Clyde. He's earned at least that much, he thinks, after all these years of putting himself in the line of fire for the sake of a safer, better world.
Clyde's eyes glimmer with anticipation. After chewing on a mouthful of cake himself, he replies, "Yeah. That sounds good. I know you have a crap ton of leave left, and so do I. But we're gonna have to sync. And I dunno if Fabry will let us off duty at the same time for more than a week. Will Fabry approve that?"
Cole narrows his eyes and thins his lips in a mock expression of sternness, which makes Clyde's lips tremor with mirth.
"The asshole had better," Cole growls. "It's his fault we met."
"Amen to that," Clyde says, grinning anyway before he kisses Cole on the cheek and huffs a contented laugh against it.
XII.
ON THE EVENING OF THEIR wedding day, Cole and Clyde had stayed in their apartment, unwilling to share each other with the rest of the world.
After yet another fervid bout of lovemaking in their bedroom - with Clyde riding him hard, slamming that gorgeous, plump ass onto his lap, burying the hard length of his cock in its tight heat and wrenching out chest-deep cries and groans from both of them - they'd made themselves a simple dinner of turkey and avocado club sandwiches in just their sweatpants. Clyde wanted to remain naked but Cole had vetoed that plan with the very sensible opinion that they would never get any food in their bellies at that rate because they'd just end up fucking in the kitchen (again). When Clyde's belly rumbled aloud, even Clyde had to yield to such invincible logic.
"I wanna dance with you," Clyde said afterward, offering his hands for Cole to grasp.
"And where's the music?" Cole asked, taking Clyde's hands in his and tugging his husband (his husband!) close to him.
"Me," Clyde simply replied, and Cole had kissed a smiling Clyde on the lips several times, knowing how rare it was to listen to Clyde sing with that sensual, low and raspy voice, even when it was just the two of them.
They had slow danced in the spacious, cherry-wood area between the open living room and kitchen lit by warm candlelight, enfolding each other with their arms, their stubbly cheeks pressed together while Clyde crooned melodiously into his ear about farewells and love in spring and larks singing when he's near. He'd smiled, his eyes shut and crinkled. He'd thought, there's no finer lark than you, sweetheart and there won't be any goodbyes between us, not for a long, long time.
Two years later, Clyde is gone with a single email sent to his GATF comm pad, and he's in what was once their bedroom but is now his again, packing everything that belongs - belonged, belonged - to Clyde or bears any intimation of Clyde at all. He has the digital music player placed on the ornate dre
ssing table and switched on because the dense, suffocating silence permeating the entire place (and him, and him) was beginning to drive him mad. (And isn't it hilarious, him thinking he isn't already mad?)
It isn't packing up Clyde's sweaters and crisp shirts in the walk-in closet that makes the fragile dam in him shatter again. It isn't putting away the framed photos Nate had secretly shot of him and Clyde at their wedding ceremony in Nate's office, of their first kiss as husbands and him smiling like an idiot and Clyde laughing like one too, that does it. It's when, from the music player's connected speakers, the mellow, timeless voice of Tony Bennett starts to sing about farewells and gods who think so little of lovers in love that does it.
It's his favorite rendition of the song, a much more forlorn version that Clyde doesn't like very much.
He sounds like his lover's already gone, Clyde had said to him, wrinkling his nose and itching to change it to either Ella Fitzgerald's rendition (which is Clyde's favorite) or Natalie Cole's (which is favored by both of them). He sounds like he's singing to a lover who's already dead and never coming back.
Cole ends up curled on the floor in a crushed ball, his forehead pressed to the taupe-colored carpet and his arms and legs twisted beneath his hunched torso. His torso does not appreciate the position, aching like it is from front to back, an old pain zigzagging along the mapped lines of the twin vertical scars on his chest and lower back like lightning. He doesn't care that his torso doesn't like the position. He doesn't care that he may be piling stress on a body that almost went down for good in a grimy alley in Rio Rancho nearly three years ago.
As the song progresses, he no longer hears Bennett's voice. He's hearing Clyde crooning into his ear once more, as if Clyde's right here, as if Clyde never left. And he hurts. He hurts like nothing he's ever felt before.
Unlike the last time, he doesn't make a sound when the dam in him shatters and releases its scorching deluge from his stinging eyes. He doesn't know how long he stays the way he is on the floor, a warm lake of damp taupe fibers spreading out from under his face. He doesn't care. He just ... doesn't care.
He's done.
The music player is silent by the time he struggles with jerky movements to a sitting position, slumped against the side of the disheveled, vacant bed. He blinks numerous times but his vision remains blurry and wet. His coarse breaths are deafening to his ears, his faltering heart even more so.
When he removes his wedding ring and its chain necklace from around his neck, he doesn't hear it beat anymore.
XIII.
COLE HAS KNOWN DR. Eugene Powell since joining the GATF fifteen years ago, after an agent he was acquainted with suffered a severe brain injury during a mission in São Paulo and unfortunately passed away later despite the tireless efforts of the agency's neurosurgical team. Eugene is a lanky, green-eyed man with wavy, salt-and-pepper hair who is the agency's head neurologist, one of the best in his field in the world, and Eugene has only crappy news to give him in Eugene's office in Medical.
"We have no idea what the fuck else to do for him, Phelan," Eugene says, looking him in the eye. "We've done multiple MRI and EEG scans, a CT scan with contrast, blood tests and a lumbar puncture to rule out cancers, weird antibodies and infections, and there is no physical evidence of any damage to his medial temporal lobe structures or to any other part of his brain. No trace whatsoever, if that device really is the cause of his memory loss. In fact, his brain is exactly like it was in previous scans we have on record: Normal, with no tumors, no calcifications, no hemorrhage, no lesions. No trauma. Nothing."
"Is it possible that this is an early symptom of something else?" Cole asks with an impassive face, calmly. So very calmly.
"If this is a neurological disease and not an abnormal condition induced by a terrorist device?" Eugene purses his lips and shakes his head once. "If it is, say, Huntington's? There would have been other signs long before memory loss as distinct as this, mental and physiological. The closest diagnosis I got right now is situation-specific retrograde amnesia, which can occur without any anatomical damage. But we have to take into account the specificity of the memory loss. He clearly and accurately remembers everything else."
"Except me, and whatever directly involves me."
In retrospect, months from now, Cole thinks he should have received an Oscar award for the acting talent he's portraying throughout this conversation. He's as calm and collected as he always appears, but inside, he's being tossed about in that raging ocean in the heart of a dire storm, sinking farther and farther into the icy darkness below.
He doesn't know if he can swim up to the surface again. He doesn't know if he wants to, if Clyde won't come back, if Clyde won't be there anymore.
"Yeah," Eugene says, gazing at him with sympathetic eyes that pierce him like a razor-sharp blade (and he knows what that feels like). "I can't even begin to treat him if I don't know what I'm looking at, what I'm looking for." Eugene throws his hands up in the air, then lowers them to his desk again. "We have to wait for more info from R&D, from Paowsong and her team. Have Sandra treat him with psychotherapy and EMDR, maybe, and hope his condition is temporary and that his memories will eventually return."
Neither of them mention anything about the possibility of Clyde's memories never returning. For Eugene, it's a matter of compassion for an old friend troubled over the unexplainable tampering of his asset's and friend's mind. For Cole, it's a matter of clinging onto his sanity while he still has it.
After leaving Eugene's office, Cole strides calmly to the nearest public restroom and into the first available stall. He vomits everything in his stomach in the porcelain bowl of the toilet, bracing himself on the tiled wall with one hand. He's alone when he exits the stall and washes his less-than-steady hands and rinses his mouth at the sink. He'd decided to consult Eugene in private, knowing Eugene would be more frank with him if Clyde was absent.
When he finds Clyde in the mess hall, Clyde is chatting with a young, female agent at one of the food bars. Clyde is standing next to her with a mere foot of space between them. Clyde is smiling at her like he would at him before a kiss or a caress of his face.
When he turns around and leaves calmly without looking back, Cole is very glad that he is already empty inside.
XIV.
"HAROLD HERNANDEZ CAME out of retirement and got on the next plane to NYC from Panama two hours after the word got back that you were missing. He still remembers you saving his ass from that car bomb in Tel Aviv in 2004. Adrian Carter dropped everything he was working on in our London branch and flew over an hour after Hernandez. Lucinda Kelly came out of deep cover in Bulgaria to join the search in Croenia. Amelia Kho and her branch in Hong Kong helped to decrypt the terrorist fuckers' comms and find out where they were imprisoning you."
Nate is speaking to him from far, far away, as if Nate is doing so into a tin can. It's surreal to hear Nate's voice echo and distort like that.
"Fifty more agents volunteered themselves upfront to me for your search and rescue mission. Less than twelve hours after you disappeared, there were over a hundred agents cooperating worldwide to find you and bring you back home."
There is a very long pause. Perhaps it's several seconds. Or a century. Cole can't really tell. He can't see anything either, or feel anything. He's numb from head to feet.
It's ... refreshing to not feel agony anymore, inside and out.
"Three days in, your husband flew back to HQ with me from Denver and joined the mission."
Cole would blink if he could, if his eyes aren't already shut.
His ... husband?
That's a peculiar thing for Nate to say. He has no husband, not anymore. He knows now what he should have known months ago when Clyde walked out the door of what was once their apartment and never looked back. His husband had died in Croenia, killed by a mind-fucking device invented by the very terrorist organization that had ... that had ... wait. He ... can't remember. He can't remember what's happened to him. Did they kidnap
him? Did they - did they do something to his body? His mind? What did they do to him?
He can't remember. Can't see. Can't feel.
Is he dead too?
"He's outside the room right now. He's trying to bring himself to walk in here to see you. He's scared shitless and looks like he's about to collapse. I'm not too sure myself if he's ready to see you like this, not after what he almost ..." Nate trails off into silence. When he speaks again, it's quieter. Softer. "You look like hell. You look like a goddamn human-shaped bruise in bandages. And Powell said that it's nothing short of a miracle that you don't have any bleeding in your brain and only mild cerebral contusions. He's concerned that they may have had a duplicate of the same device, that you may have been subjected to it too. That it's done something to your brain with no trace of it and -"
Again, there is a very long pause.
Then Nate murmurs, "I hope you know how much you're loved, Boots," and he knows that Nate isn't just talking about the other agents, about himself.
Then Nate says, "Now wake the fuck up from this coma so I can kick your ass for scaring me and your husband like that," and oh, Cole knows that he isn't dead.
XV.
CLYDE IS IN ONE OF the many break rooms in HQ with Stewart, Perez and Lim when his entire universe fully flips on its axis to never, ever come back down with one fateful comment from Stewart.
"I hear Cole's broken things off with that guy in Admin."
Stewart says it quietly to Perez who's waiting for a fresh pot of coffee to finish brewing, sipping from a tall mug decorated with smiling teddy bears. (Stewart's youngest child and daughter had given it to him for his thirty-eighth birthday last year.) They're standing in front of the stainless steel, fourteen-cup coffeemaker, adjacent to where Clyde is sitting with his legs stretched out, nursing his own mug of coffee at one end of the oval, wooden table in the center of the break room. Sitting at the other end, Lim - who is wearing a god-awful pale green-and-orange flannel shirt under a black blazer and has shaved his whole head again - is engrossed in typing something on his comm pad on the table and munching on what seems to be a smoked salmon and cream cheese bagel.