Autumn: A Crow City Side Story

by Cole McCade

  But somewhere distant he heard laughter, children playing. The Nests might be falling, but it wasn’t ashes, ashes, we all fall down just yet.

  Wally smiled to himself, but lifted his head when Joseph spoke.

  “Can I ask one thing, though?”

  “Hm, darling dear?”

  “Are your thoughts unhappy thoughts?”

  Wally looked up into troubled brown eyes, and everything inside him went soft as he realized Joseph…Joseph was worried for him. Worried about making him unhappy. He pushed himself up enough to kiss him, catching his lower lip to taste it, keeping it prisoner with delicate bites that let him savor how firm and full Joseph’s lips truly were. He traced the pronounced, dipping hollow beneath his lower lip with the tip of his tongue, followed its sweep up to the fullest swell of his mouth, and bit down a little harder before letting go. Satisfaction rushed through him at the dazed glitter in Joseph’s eyes, and he grinned.

  “Do I seem so unhappy, love?”

  “Brat.” Joseph pinched his hip lightly. “I’m being serious. You don’t seem unhappy right now, but…sometimes. Sometimes you look as if you’re seeing things you’d give anything to run away from. There’s a darkness in you, underneath everything.” He brushed the hollow beneath one of Wally’s eyes gently, as if showing him where that darkness lived. “Like you try to be so bright, to shine a light on the shadows inside.”

  “You’re not the first to say so.” And yet it pained him that Joseph had seen such things in him, when Wally never wanted to be anything but bright for him. “Memories. Nothing more. Mere memories, those shadows. That’s all they’ve ever been.”

  “Do you remember such terrible things?” Joseph asked, and gathered him closer.

  “Sometimes.” Wally curled against the shelter Joseph offered and closed his eyes—but that made it worse. With his eyes closed he saw not what was now, but what had been, those memories rising up to paint fresh, vivid colors over what had tattered and faded. “I remember…senseless death. People and animals alike, drowning. Swept away, just beyond the reach of my grasping hands. Hurricane Katrina destroyed my circus. The home I had created with my own sweat and love and labor—and for so long, I asked myself why.” He rubbed at his chest, where pain welled as though his sternum had sharpened to a knife’s edge, and the pressure only made it cut deeper. “When you see so many people die for no reason, something changes in you. You stop believing in right and wrong, and start to look at things on a larger scale. The senselessness of it, this strange combination of causality and chance. That moment when hundreds of years of human bad decisions and neglect…meet the impassive violence and havoc of nature.”

  He waited for Joseph to say something, then. Useless condolences, because that was all anyone could ever offer in such uncomfortable situations—when it was considered socially mandatory to say something, something properly empathetic and polite, all while trying not to show how uneasy they were with others’ misfortune, loss, emotions.

  But Joseph said nothing. Nothing at all. There was only those warm arms cradling him, a hand stroking against the side of his throat…lips against his hair.

  I’m listening, Joseph was saying.

  And that was all he needed to say, in the end.

  Wally curled his fingers against Joseph’s shoulders, clinging hard for the strength to open his mouth, to form words again when every word was a nail in the coffin of a life long dead, and the people who had been a part of it. “I do try to be objective about it. I tell myself that even nature itself isn’t senseless, and what we see as an act of destruction is, to the world at large, an act of birth. The evolution of the earth, and its ways. Changing beneath us, while we try so desperately to stay the same.” And he was trying to believe that, but it wasn’t working, it wasn’t working and that old pain was in the back of his throat and the backs of his eyes… “It…creates a strange perspective, to broaden the scope of things. To stop thinking in terms of right and wrong, when what is cataclysmic for us tiny little mortals may be nothing more than a minor adjustment on the cosmic scale. And so I…I…”

  “Walford…?” Joseph prompted gently into the silence.

  “I…” He forced his eyes open, forced the memories away, forced a smile, forced so many things. “I’m sorry. Lost myself there for a tad bit, didn’t I?” He looked up at Joseph, who watched him with that adorable line of fretful worry creased between his brows, completely undermining his scowl. Wally reached up to lightly trace his fingertip down that creased line, to the bridge of Joseph’s nose. “And that’s at once nothing to do with what you asked me, and everything. Yes, I do try to be bright to shine a light on my darkness. Every last little shadow inside me. But not to hide from them, Joseph. The better to see them with, my dear…so I never forget even one. And even as I tell myself ‘it is what it is’ and try to be objective…” He laughed at himself. “I’m a terrible liar. I’m a terrible liar, because I can never be objective about having everything I loved torn away from me. I don’t…even know how to mourn that. Maybe I never have, and I’ve been putting it off all this time. I only—I’m sorry. I’m sorry, God, I don’t even know what I’m saying.”

  “Don’t apologize.” And then Joseph was there: covering his face in soft kisses, little promises of understanding in each brush of lips to his brows, his cheeks, his jaw, his mouth. “I want to know you this way. I want to know your dark moments as much as your smiles and your silliness. I want to know the pain you carry with you, even if you don’t know how to put it down.”

  “I think you, more than anyone, know what it’s like to live with pain but refuse to hide from it.”

  “I don’t get the choice to hide from it, sometimes.”

  “I’m sorry. That wasn’t a fair comparison to make.”

  “It’s fine.” Joseph settled back against the bed, drawing Wally with him, until they leaned comfortably against the pillows. “I learned coping mechanisms, though. Sometimes those aren’t so different, no matter the kind of pain you’re talking about.”

  “I don’t know if I ever learned coping mechanisms so much as I simply…played pretend. And hoped with time and age, the sharp edges would dull until they no longer cut so deep.”

  “That’s called senility.”

  Wally blinked—then laughed, a great rushing thing that fell over him with the cool relief of rain, easing the quiet dull burn of remembered pain. “You asshole.”

  “Sorry,” Joseph said with an unrepentant grin. “Sometimes I don’t know what to say, so all I can do is make you laugh.”

  “I don’t mind it. But you’re still an asshole.”

  “Shut it, old man.”

  “I’m only a year older than you.” He prodded Joseph’s shoulder with a snort. “Forty-six versus forty-seven is not somehow the magical threshold between vibrant youth and decrepit age. And might I say, I believe I’ve aged into quite a graceful forty-seven.” And he couldn’t resist: he trailed his fingers down Joseph’s chest, stroking through that soft pelt that fascinated him so much, savoring the hard rise of muscle beneath and finding his way lower, onto the smooth flat lines of Joseph’s stomach. “Do you need another reminder of how young I feel?”

  “Time out.” Joseph laughed helplessly, catching his wrist and dragging his hand back up to rest on Joseph’s chest. “Let me get some electrolytes in me or something. God, when did I get to be forty-six?”

  “Strange how it happens when you’re not looking. But you were so young, when Miriam got pregnant. And things like that have a way of catapulting your life forward.”

  “Yeah.” Joseph shifted Wally’s captured hand to lace their fingers together, and turned his head to look at him, meeting his eyes with a lazy, contented smile. “That’s how I feel. Catapulted into a whirlwind. All this time I’ve been spinning in circles, but now…I don’t know. Maybe I’ve finally settled on a direction, a path. I can’t say I’m too unhappy with the road I’ve taken.” He smirked. “Even if I’m going to die if you turn out
to be some insatiable sex fiend.”

  “I am not insatiable!” Wally sputtered.

  “But you don’t deny sex fiend?”

  “…if you don’t stop that…” He narrowed his eyes. “Seriously, though…you’re all right?”

  “Eh.” Joseph shrugged. “I wouldn’t mind a nap.”

  “Rest for a little, then. Would you like to go out somewhere tonight?”

  “I would kill to get out of this house.” Joseph groaned. “Even if I spent most of the time unconscious, I can’t stand being cooped up and bedridden for over a week.”

  “A date, then.”

  “That’s the common vernacular.”

  Wally sniffed. “Are you mocking me again?”

  Joseph leaned in and pressed their noses together. “Tiny bit,” he whispered, quite dramatically, and Wally shoved his chest.

  “Asshole.”

  “You know it.”

  Sinking back to the bed again, Joseph gathered Wally into him until they fit just so, tangled in that way that left Wally’s heart far too full, far too warm.

  “Sleep,” Joseph ordered gruffly.

  And Wally was far too happy to comply.

  * * *

  BUT THE MOMENT HE TRIED to drift off, Wally knew sleep would be a luxury hard to come by.

  One of the things he’d forgotten about having an active sex life was that it, quite frankly, left one’s nethers a touch sore. And while one tumble in the sheets might not qualify as active to most, it was plenty active enough when Wally was nearing fifty and not so very active himself.

  He’d kill for a few Ibuprofen, just enough to ease off the throbbing soreness and let him sleep. But Joseph was quiet and calm against him, his breaths steady, and Wally didn’t want to wake him by getting up. So he kept his eyes closed and let his thoughts drift whither and where they would, and breathed in the deep woody scent rising off Joseph, different now when Joseph still smelled like Joseph but also smelled as though he’d soaked in little bits of Wally here and there, permeated into his skin in the mingling of their sweat and every stroking touch.

  That scent alone would have been enough to lull him to sleep, given time—but as he started to drift, Joseph shifted against him. He cracked one eye open, a question on his lips, but Joseph wasn’t looking at him. Joseph reached over him with the kind of quiet, careful movements that said he thought Wally was asleep, careful not to jostle him, and curiosity kept Wally silent while Joseph stretched out, picked something up from the nightstand, then fell back to the bed and relaxed with that something pressed against his ear.

  His phone.

  Wally closed his eye again. If Joseph wanted to make a private phone call while he thought Wally to be asleep, Wally wouldn’t disturb him, and he’d do everything he could not to listen; he’d simply…tune him out, respect his privacy, and if he overheard a word or two, he’d have forgotten it by the time he woke anyway.

  There came a faint sound of tapping buttons on-screen, and then the faint trill of a ringtone, then an automated voice. Wally closed his thoughts and closed his ears and shut it out—until the sound of a familiar voice slapped him so hard he almost gave himself away, pain as sharp as needles digging under his skin.

  “Hi, Dad,” came out through the phone, muted and distant. “It’s me. Just wanted to let you know I’m on my way home.”

  Willow’s voice. Willow’s voice and that voicemail; Joseph was listening to it again, while he thought he was alone in his wakefulness. Alone, and holding fast to the Willow that had been because he couldn’t accept the Willow that now was, because everything about his daughter was a frightening unknown of loss and confusion and pain.

  An unknown that Wally could ease, if he would only tell the truth.

  When he was too much of a coward to even tell Joseph he was awake.

  I have so much to atone for, he thought. So much you can’t know.

  “Call me if you need me to get anything on the way,” Willow said, and under Wally’s cheek, Joseph’s shoulder jerked, his breaths loud and shuddering.

  Wally squeezed his eyes even tighter shut, but as Joseph hit the button to replay the message…

  He knew sleep would never come.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ALTHOUGH JOSEPH HATED THAT TECHNICALLY he was on bed rest, somehow he didn’t mind so much when his bed was filled with the tangled warmth of a strange, bizarre, completely confusing man who stretched against him like a sated cat and made Joseph’s heart a burning, heavy stone in his chest. They spent the rest of the afternoon and into the evening in bed, before Joseph let Wally drag him into the kitchen to teach him the intricacies of a proper chicken salad. Going out turned into staying in, and their date became quiet dinner over movies rented on pay-per-view, this thing as familiar as if they’d done it together for years, the TV on low and their bodies tucked together on the couch and the quiet clink of forks while Wally called him a degenerate when he caught Joseph wiping his fingers on the couch cushion.

  They’d fallen asleep on the couch, that night—before Joseph had woken up and dragged Wally into his bed, ignoring the sleepy, slurred reminders that Wally had his own home and his own bed and really should go. He was strangely loath to let him go, as if once Wally walked out of the house they would reset to square one and lose everything that had come from these stolen days.

  And so he’d kept him close, and stripped him bare, and kissed him until Wally had sighed and drifted off in his arms. He didn’t need anything else. He didn’t want anything else, right now—but for the first time in a long time, he felt as though that was finally acceptable, normal. And if sex didn’t happen that night, or the next night or the next night or the next, Joseph was all right with that, too.

  Because that night, and the next night and the next night and the next…Wally kissed him as if he needed nothing else, until there was nothing left for hours but that drifting and dreamlike experience of exploring each other, one slow, delving kiss at a time.

  But he’d had to let Wally go, this morning. Wally still had his shop, and he’d left it unattended for nearly two weeks; Joseph wasn’t going to point out that he’d likely only missed two or three customers. Wally knew. And Joseph was beginning to understand that having the shop wasn’t about making money, or selling things, or even owning something.

  It was about indulging in something that brought Wally delight, and giving himself another bright place to ward off the darkness of memory and of loss.

  So while Wally tended to his shop—whatever he did in that sea of strange dresses—Joseph spent the morning in his workshop. He’d been nervous to, since Wally had unveiled it. He didn’t know what to do with himself in here anymore, when it was nothing but blank paper and possibility and he hadn’t created anything in so long. He wasn’t even sure if he could any longer; if the knowledge had fled his mind, or if his body would betray him when he tried to turn drawings and schematics into something physical and real.

  But like he’d told Wally: he would, while he could.

  He’d worry about when he couldn’t when that time came.

  He sat at the drafting desk, the ergonomic seat so comfortable he hardly felt the discomfort in his spine, his legs, and wondered how much Wally had spent on this, how much of that money had come from Devon West, if…

  Stop it.

  This wasn’t about his pride, about his stubborn difficulty accepting gifts, even about that West boy’s charity—even if one day, he needed to talk to Devon. For closure. For the boy’s own sake. He’d stayed out of Willow’s strange relationship of both distance and attachment with her half-brother, but the fact that Devon West was standing in the background of Joseph’s life, this silent shadow willing to play benefactor in so many ways, said everything Joseph needed to know about how much that boy was hurting with Willow’s loss.

  One day.

  He wasn’t ready for that today. Today wasn’t about Devon West.

  No, today was about…

  Fuck.

&nbs
p; He tapped his pencil against his desk and stared at the blank pad of drafting paper. Today, apparently, was about being completely creatively blocked. He dragged a hand over his face and laughed. This was ridiculous. He had free license to make anything he could find the materials for, and he was sitting here with his brain as empty as the page.

  Even if he never finished, he had to start something. And he thought of those wire structures, out in the construction lot. How even unfinished, they stood majestic and quiet and full of solemn longings and quiet memories, a testament to someone’s need to create something that captured everything beautiful inside them.

  Was anything beautiful left inside him? Anything but exhaustion and bitterness and loss? Did he even know how to create lovely things, anymore?

  Or had he forgotten that when he’d stopped believing he deserved to be as happy as anyone else?

  He didn’t know when he’d gone from fighting for acceptance and normalcy to thinking he wasn’t even worth the happiness and contentment others took for granted. Maybe after it had been reinforced in a thousand subtle actions over a thousand frustrated days, from strangers and friends and loved ones. Yet right now, looking at this page…

  He was as close to happy as he’d been in a long time, and he damned well knew he deserved it.

  So what would make him happy to create?

  He rested his chin in his hand, adjusted the angle of the gooseneck lamp over the desk, tapped the point of the pencil against the paper, and then sketched out a little arc. Then another, joining it into swooping points. More and more—little toothy scallops, branching lines, until a leaf took shape in the corner of the page, caught in mid-motion and tumbling, its edges tattered and curling.