by G. D. Cox
No one points how Clyde's smile wobbles for a moment, or how Clyde's eyes glisten under the warm lamp hanging above the dining table. Pa nods again.
"All right," Pa says, then chews on another savory choco pie. Ma passes Clyde the last one with a pat on Clyde's hand. Without a second thought, Clyde divides it in half and passes one half to Cole who, unlike Clyde, notices the approbative gleam of his parents' eyes.
It's hilarious, really, that Cole only starts to feel jittery after everyone's retired for the night and he and Clyde are alone in the guest bedroom. Clyde had no objections about referring to his parents as Ma and Pa too ... but what if it's because Clyde didn't want to offend them? What if Clyde had felt pressured to do so?
"Clyde," Cole murmurs as he strips down to his dark gray boxer-briefs by the bed, "I should have told you. I'm sorry."
Sitting against the cushioned headboard, already naked and under the covers, Clyde gazes at him with a doting expression that takes any edge off his reply.
"Seriously? You're apologizing for not telling me about being the only person you've brought home to meet your parents? Ya think I'd be upset about that?"
Cole shrugs and folds his clothes into a neat stack that he places into a small laundry basket next to the dressing table facing the bed. He's avoiding eye contact with Clyde, and Clyde is no fool. Clyde's eyes follow him around the room, unwilling to let him off the hook.
"I just - I forgot. It doesn't mean anything, I'm not pressuring you into -" Cole sucks in his lower lip, then sighs. "I'm just saying you're not obligated to anything, and you don't have to call my parents Ma and Pa if you don't want to -"
"Phelan."
Cole glances at Clyde and finally looks him in the eye, and okay, he feels kind of stupid when he sees that Clyde really isn't upset, that Clyde still has that doting expression that says, you're a dumbass but you're my dumbass and I love you just the way you are.
"C'mere, babe," Clyde murmurs, beckoning him to the bed with one outstretched hand.
He goes to the bed and clambers onto it and into Clyde's arms. Clyde switches off the nightstand lamp and plunges the room into a cozy darkness. They lay themselves down on their sides facing each other under the covers, their legs tangling, their foreheads grazing.
"Thank you," Clyde rasps into his lips, "for sharing your home and your family with me."
He caresses the generous, firm swells of Clyde's arms and buttocks under the covers. He hears Clyde hum low, feels Clyde's hands skimming down his chest, his sides to his hips. He nuzzles his nose against Clyde's bristly cheek and breathes in Clyde's spicy, darkly sweet scent, like a flowery smoke mingling with honey. He presses a long, chaste kiss to Clyde's lips.
"It's your home, too. They're your family, too," he rasps in return.
Clyde doesn't say anything, but then there are some things that don't have to be said, not with words. Some things can only be said with a kiss or a hundred, with burly arms enfolding Cole and holding their scar-scattered, resilient torsos as close as they can be without merging into each other. Some things can only be said with two toothbrushes in a glass by the sink, with clothes packed into the same luggage, with a piece of dessert split into two to be shared, with warm breaths, warm bodies sharing the same space and not knowing where one ends and the other begins.
XXII.
COLE'S TOOTHBRUSH MIGRATES to the kitchen double sink. He doesn't move it to the second bathroom that's next to the guest bedroom, the one that Ma and Pa use whenever they're visiting. He feels like he'll lose a battle if he does so. He has to procure a new tube of toothpaste since he and Clyde share ... used to share one tube, which will be where it usually is next to the round, porcelain sink in the master bedroom's en suite bathroom. It'll be standing upright on its flat, plastic cover like it usually does on the marble vanity next to the glass that holds ... held their toothbrushes within easy reach.
Clyde has the tendency to squeeze a dollop of toothpaste out onto his brush. Cole is more liberal when it's his turn, squeezing out a thick trail of it across the white and blue bristles of his brush. Right now, curled up like he is on the black, leather-bound couch in the semi-darkness of the living room, he can clearly see in his mind Clyde standing in front of that round, porcelain sink and squeezing out that little dollop of toothpaste onto white bristles. He can clearly see Clyde in dark red boxer-briefs and nothing else, see Clyde's golden, short hair mussed and soft without gel spiking it up. See all the scars, old and new, scattered across Clyde's chest and back. Scars that would speak to him and tell him their secrets and no one else.
Every time he plants a kiss on the long one marking Clyde's left scapula, Clyde will wriggle and playfully elbow him and grumble with a mouth filled with white foam about touchy-feely people and their touchy-feelings. Then Clyde will lean over the sink to rinse his mouth, and that's Cole's hint to, without ceasing for a moment, plant a kiss on the scar just below Clyde's nape because Clyde is not touchy-feely people with touchy-feelings who asks for touchy-feely things like kisses on scars. And then Clyde, his Clyde, will angle his head to one side for Cole to nuzzle his neck, those full lips trying not to arch up and ruin the mock glower Clyde's aiming at him in the vanity-to-ceiling, rectangular mirror above the sink.
But the man in the en suite bathroom of the master bedroom right now isn't his Clyde. The man wears Clyde's face and body but isn't Clyde.
Cole hasn't touched Clyde in any way for eight days now. He can't endure seeing that expression of dread on Clyde's visage again. That expression, when he'd walked into the bathroom without thinking about it and caught Clyde unawares six nights ago, so accustomed to doing that while his husband is there brushing his teeth and getting ready for bed. That expression, that warned him of how close Clyde had come to attacking him just for carelessly brushing his fingers on Clyde's shoulder.
Cole hasn't changed clothes in the walk-in closet with Clyde for eight days now. He has to wait until Clyde is dressed and coming out of the bedroom before going in there himself. He has to wait until he's shut the door to run a hand along Clyde's folded up clothes, to pick up the clothes that Clyde's worn and taken off and left in the laundry basket by the door. To press them to his face, leaving dark, damp splotches on them that he ignores.
Cole hasn't slept in the master bedroom for eight days now, since the night Clyde awoke with no memories whatsoever of him. He'd taken the covers from the bed to the couch and he's still using them. There's a ready, made-up bed in the guest bedroom but he can't bring himself to sleep in there. He feels like he'll lose a war, like something will abandon him (them) if he does so. He sleeps on the couch while Clyde sleeps in their bed. He sleeps with the covers they'd last slumbered together in, and he burrows his face into them, breathing in Clyde's spicy, darkly sweet, familiar scent while it still lingers. He fists his hands in them to tug them tightly around his cold, solitary body.
And he's glad, damn glad that Clyde shuts the bedroom door every night, and can't see or hear him come apart at his own seams.
XXIII.
COLE KNOWS THAT CLYDE is still awake despite the exhausting, very satisfying sex they had an hour earlier. He draws Clyde close to him with one arm around Clyde's midriff, Clyde's back to his chest. Clyde nestles himself in the cocoon of Cole's arms and legs, tugging both of his husband's arms around him, slipping one long and lean leg between Cole's. Clyde lets out a noiseless sigh as Cole presses his cheek to the side of Clyde's bared neck and feels the stable, abiding pulse of Clyde's heart beneath its smooth skin.
"I almost told Rajah today," Clyde murmurs into the cozy, curtained darkness of their bedroom. "About me. Us."
Cole rubs Clyde's chest idly with his palm, gently pulling at its light dusting of blond curls, at the chain necklace and the luxurious platinum, court-shaped wedding ring that hangs from it. His mind supplies him with the image of a gangly, athletic Indian man a few years older than Clyde, with short, black hair and an aquiline nose and jaunty, brown eyes and a droll grin. Ah, Agent Rajah Chowdhury. One o
f Clyde's closest friends in the GATF. Chowdhury had joined the agency the same time as Clyde, selected by Nate and Bhargava for his capture of a savage serial killer who was terrorizing the East Coast and targeting the homeless and prostitutes when Chowdhury was an NYPD detective. According to Clyde, he and Chowdhury had met during orientation week, bonding over the 'fucking insane torture games just to amuse Fabry', as Clyde so eloquently described the orientation's physical fitness tests designed to cull the rookies down to the absolute cream of the crop.
(Cole had undergone the same tests with Nate when they joined the agency. What he has yet to tell Clyde is that he and Nate did increase the difficulty of the tests after their turn, undergoing these enhanced versions themselves first before setting the rookies on them. They've upgraded the tests at least twice by now and well, Clyde is far from the only agent to have described them as 'fucking insane'. Nate won't approve anything less, not if the GATF is to maintain its distinguished reputation and success with missions.)
"Why didn't you?" Cole murmurs, his breath warming a patch of skin on Clyde's slumped shoulder.
Clyde takes his time answering him. He feels Clyde's fingers idly scratch at his forearm, feels Clyde's chest rise and fall steadily within the cradle of his arms.
"Jimmy and Rosetta."
Cole's hand on Clyde's chest goes motionless. It's been years since he's heard that pair of names, years since the agency was rocked by the news of the two agents - Agents Jimmy and Rosetta Collins, married for only a year, with Rosetta being Jimmy's handler for at least four years by then - having been kidnapped and sadistically tortured by Islamic terrorists in Afghanistan after their deep cover mission blew up in their faces and they attempted to flee the country. Nate had dispatched a rescue team as soon as Rosetta sent out the SOS to HQ, but they were too late.
Rosetta had barely survived. She will live the rest of her days missing her left eye, forearm and hand. Jimmy had died a mere hour before the rescue team found them, beheaded with a pesh-kabz in front of Rosetta after hours of being electrocuted and cut open all over his body.
It took Rosetta weeks to talk at all about what happened, and what she said was, "We said nothing. But they knew. Someone must have told them. And they hurt him. And when they killed him, they killed me too."
Rosetta resigned twelve days after that. Nate had arranged everything for her, from Jimmy's funeral to obtaining a new residence (one that didn't have Jimmy's ghost permeating everything) to the most advanced prosthetics R&D could develop at the time. No one's heard from her since she left, but Cole is certain that Nate is keeping in touch with her. Mere days after Rosetta was rescued, Nate had flown to the war-ravaged country with select specialist agents, and upon his return to HQ a week later, had simply said to Cole who'd just returned from another mission with Clyde, "Wiped the fucking slate clean."
Rosetta will, at least, also live the rest of her days knowing her partner, her husband had been avenged.
"Sometimes ... sometimes, I still wonder if it woulda made any difference if they'd kept their relationship a secret from everyone too," Clyde says. "Whether things woulda turned out so fucked up if nobody knew they could be used against each other like that."
Cole tightens his arms around Clyde's torso, slotting their bodies from chest to thighs.
"But sometimes, I also wonder if it would make any difference if we tell some of the others about us. Just those we trust," Clyde says on. "You know?"
"I know," Cole says into Clyde's shoulder.
"Sometimes, I really want to," Clyde whispers. "Then I think about Jimmy and Rosetta, and I think about what this world would be like without you in it and I think, I might as well not exist anymore either. And I almost found out what that was like, Phelan, when I saw that kukri go through you."
Cole shuts his eyes, and the dark eats at him. His eyes remain shut until Clyde rolls over to face him.
"Everybody knows how important you are to Fabry. But nobody knows how important you are to me, babe."
At this, Cole cracks a tiny, affectionate smile. In the curtained dimness, it's hidden in the shadowed planes of his face, felt by Clyde's thumb stroking the length of his lower lip.
"Well, I do. And Nate. And Ma, and Pa," he replies, injecting some levity into the solemn conversation. "And the neighbors, especially when you get loud."
"Nice, I make a heartfelt declaration and you complain about me being too noisy while we fuck."
Cole doesn't need any light to know Clyde is grinning at him, Clyde's eyes bluish, cut jewels of effervescent voltage. He snorts in amusement.
"I wasn't complaining," he murmurs, running a soothing hand down Clyde's flank to an ample buttock, then squeezing it. Clyde's naked body is relaxed and opening up to him once more, Clyde's thigh sliding over his hip so that he can shift into the hot, welcoming cusp of his husband's legs.
"Good, because last I recall," Clyde rasps into his mouth, already gripping his rapidly hardening cock and nudging its head against that slick, loosened hole that's aching to be filled again, "you told me you like me screaming your name while you fuck me with your big, delicious dick."
This time tonight, Clyde does, although it's muffled by a pillow while Cole plunges slow and heavy into him with a force that seems to claw at both their hearts. Cole tightens his hands around Clyde's raised legs. Groans at Clyde's body arching and twisting helplessly in response to his determined thrusts. Murmurs Clyde's name while Clyde stares up at him with eyes shining from pleasure, from love.
And breathless, as he comes inside Clyde, as the world shatters all around him, he thinks, I don't exist without you, either.
XXIV.
"SO, HEY. COLE. IT'S Don. I'm back with Rajah and Angie and Henry. Clyde's ... well, he finally told us everything. I don't know why you felt you had to hide your relationship, your marriage from us. But ... we would have respected your privacy if you'd told us. You know we would. But yeah, I ... I think you can imagine what we all felt after he told us about his Croenian gizmo-induced memory loss and that you two have been together for six years."
"I'm gonna kick Clyde's ass when he wakes up again. Seriously. I cannot believe the jerkwad hid all that from me. And that he just left without telling any of us!"
"Rajah, they hid it from all of us."
"Yeah, but I'm, you know, one of his best friends, okay! His bro! Bros-for-life! This is precisely the kind of shit bros-for-life tell each other."
"I, well ... I get why they did that. Remember the Collins?"
"Fuck, Henry, who doesn't?"
"That's my point. What happened to Jimmy and Rosetta. Imagine it happening to you."
"Yeah ... Yeah. Cole. Man, we get that, if that's why you and Clyde chose to be quiet about being married and all that. We get it. We just ... You're back and yet you're not. Clyde's a fucking mess. We just found out today that he's had to be sedated every night since we got you back from Croenia, just to make him drop and sleep instead of sitting here with you."
"I am gonna kick his ass."
"Powell still hasn't figured out why Cole's in a coma?"
"Nope. He and his team are doing everything they can, though."
"If this coma is because of that, well, gizmo -"
"Nobody knows whether the bastards used something similar on Cole or not. Scans are all clean, just like Clyde's. That's the latest word I got from Powell anyway."
"So what's happened to that Croenian?"
"I dunno, Angie. Creepy, gray-eyed bastard. Just sat in the holding cell smiling to himself. Once the Ark landed, Fabry hauled him out and, poof, he disappeared. So your guess is as good as mine."
"You guys saw the bruises on Clyde's hands, right?"
"Yeah. Yeah, they're - I didn't see them when I was on the Ark with him and the other guys. Even after Carter, Malik and I dragged him to the showers and got him cleaned up. Now that was fun."
"That's how you got that pretty shiner on your face, huh?"
"Yeah. And it was just a glancing bl
ow from his elbow."
"So is it true? That, you know, Clyde went all wackadoo in Croenia and was ... fucking bathed in blood or something by the end."
"It's true."
"Holy shit."
"This isn't the first time Cole's been laid up like this. Remember Rio Rancho?"
"That was a bad one too. You weren't on that one, were you, Don?"
"Nope. Was in Jakarta at the time."
"I heard that Clyde refused to leave the ICU in Rio Rancho. Not until Cole woke up. And that when Cole was transfered to the ICU here, Clyde refused to leave too."
"Gotta tell you guys, that was when I started to suspect something was going on between the two of them. Yeah, Clyde and Cole are close, everybody knows that. Even the nurses were going on and on about how sweet it was of Clyde to hang around so much and make sure his handler was okay or whatever, but ... one night I went to check on Clyde and I found him in Cole's ICU room. He was sleeping in a chair at Cole's bedside and ... he had one hand on Cole's on the bed."
"Aww. That is kinda sweet."
"Rajah, I am shocked that you didn't tease the shit outta Clyde later about that."
"Hah! I don't know, it just ... didn't feel right to do that, what with the bad shape Cole was in. If it wasn't accidental or something that Clyde put his hand on Cole's, the it was something I wasn't meant to see, you know? Something just between the two of them. Then again ... sometimes I had this hunch that he wanted to tell me what was going on. That he wanted to tell all of us. Like, do you guys remember that photo Clyde put on his comm pad?"
"Oh, that one. The one of him and Cole smiling at the camera?"
"Yeah. Remember how he was shoving his comm pad into our faces? In hindsight, dude was not being subtle."
"And yet, here we are, stunned over the fact that they've been lovers for six years."
"Well ... Clyde never really stopped flirting with women. It's nothing like how he was the first two years he was an agent, but ... you guys remember what he was like then, right?"