by Rhys Ford
“Husband,” Kane corrected, putting the bags and drinks down on the picnic table. “And no worries. It’ll keep.”
“We’re almost done.” Jessica gifted Kane with a motherly look, followed by a more interested perusal of his shoulders. “Mr. Sinjun’s agreed to one more photo.”
“Just Sinjun, Mom.” The blond boy shook his head, shrugging at his friend. “And yeah, we should let them eat. Thanks for talking to us. Seriously, it was cool meeting you.”
Kane waited until everyone said their final goodbyes, then leaned over to capture Miki’s mouth in a firm kiss. “Ready for some food? Or are you going to be signing autographs all afternoon.”
“Fuck you,” Miki murmured back. “They were cool about it. Their mom’s a trip. She could give Brigid a run for her money. Dad’s nice. He wanted to make sure they weren’t being assholes about anything. World could use more of him. What’s for lunch?”
“Everything. But if you want elote, we’ve got to get it from the stalls.” Kane began to unpack the food, setting it out next to where Miki was sitting. “Looked it up and it’s near where we parked, so we can grab some on the way out.”
“Because you want to get lucky.” Miki opened up the bag of fries he’d been handed and sniffed at them.
“Plan to get lucky my whole life. That’s why I married you,” he retorted. “Now sit down on the bench so we can have lunch.”
“How about you sit up on the table and we can just eat?” Miki countered. “We’ll wipe it down when we’re done. You’ve got a serious hang-up about chairs.”
“Funny. I was just thinking the same thing about you and tables.” He handed Miki the container of pickled sprouts, opening his mouth for one when Miki popped the lid off. “Sprout toll. Payment for going to get the food.”
“You only went to get the food because you were scared of what I was going to bring back.” A dripping solid sprout covered in chili flakes and garlic pinched between Miki’s fingers eventually made its way from the container to Kane’s lips. “The sushi burrito scared you, didn’t it.”
“Not going to lie about that.” He’d certainly contemplated it for a moment before smelling the grilled burgers from the next stall over. “They just look like really big nori maki rolls. Although they had one with fried jalapenos and crispy rice that sounded decent. The rest of it was avocado and cream cheese everywhere.”
“Dude.”
There was a lot of judgment in that one word, laced with past arguments and firm opinions of the presence of cream cheese in sushi. Avocado was barely a passable addition in Miki’s world, and only because California rolls were pretty cheap and easy to get when he’d dragged himself up with Damie during the band’s lean days. For someone who ate raw ramen and drank the flavor packets with hot water like it was tea, Miki had a lot of opinions about some of his foods.
“You ever get used to that kind of stuff?” Kane asked, helping himself to another pickled sprout. The burger was good, but the spicy bite seemed to be hitting the spot more.
“Used to what?” Miki looked down at his fries. “Kimchee?”
“No. Sorry. I mean people coming up to you. Kids, their parents,” Kane said, gesturing to the world in general. “Damie seems to love it. So does Rafe, but both of them are pretty much egos in sneakers. Forest always looks like he’s been caught stealing flowers from some old lady’s garden when someone asks him for an autograph, but I always figured you sucked it up and just worked through it.”
Miki chewed on a fry, staring off into the concourse with its river of people, noise and bright colors. Pursing his lips, he dragged a bit of kimchee through a dollop of spicy mayo, working the cabbage through the sauce. “I don’t really think about it happening to me. I mean, it’s me, but it’s a part of the job. I guess? I just want people to not walk away thinking I’m a dick. Because I’ve met some guys I used to admire, but they were really hard-core assholes to me, so that makes it all shitty. Hard to separate out the music from the guy who pretty much spat in your face when you went over to say thanks for writing that song or trying to share how much a lyric meant to you.”
“No one can be perfect,” Kane pointed out. “You can have shitty days sometimes.”
“See, you can’t.” Miki shook his head, finally munching down on the drenched kimchee. “I mean, you could, but that’s not who I want to be. My bad mood or screwed-up head is pissing on someone else’s life. And that’s not fair. You’ve sold someone a part of yourself, and you’ve got to at least give them a bit of your time too. Doesn’t take that much to not be a dick, but it’ll be forever before someone forgets you were one. I know I’m not a great person. Not by a long shot, but I don’t want anyone to hurt after meeting me. Because that’s all kinds of fucked-up.”
“You weren’t all that nice to me when I first met you,” he teased. “Hey, flipping me off in front of kids isn’t nice.”
“You were mean to a dog when I first met you.” Miki shoved his hair back from his face, bits of sunlight working through the trees around them touching the rise of his cheek. “What kind of asshole is mean to a dog?”
“He’s was a thief. Still is one.” Kane helped himself to a bit of Miki’s kimchee. “Takes up a lot of our bed for something smaller than a Thanksgiving turkey.”
“Only because you guys roast ostriches for Thanksgiving.” He set his food down, then leaned back on his hands, stretching his legs out gingerly enough to make Kane wonder if Miki’s knee was holding up. “You ever meet someone you really liked when you were a kid? Were they nice to you?”
“Couple of times. When Con and I were really young we were into wrestling.” Kane picked through Miki’s food, helping himself to a few choice bits. “Quinn hated it. I mean, we knew it wasn’t real, but that didn’t matter. It was fun, and we got really into it, but he hated even hearing about it.”
“Probably because he felt like it was a lie,” Miki offered up. “He’s not good with anything staged. TV shows are one thing, but he likes reality to stay over on its side of the line.”
“You’re not wrong there,” he admitted with a chuckle. “So Con and I got to watch wrestling on the TV in Dad’s study and it was, like, something really special. Like a secret club.”
“That Brigid could close the door on and not hear you two screaming and jumping around?”
“Probably.” Kane thought about his mother cheerfully wishing them to enjoy their show before shutting them into the study. “Okay, yeah. But they made us feel special about it. To make things even, Quinn got to watch some science or history thing without us in there, but I think that was just so everything was equal. Mom’s big on equal. Kind of blew the whole thing apart because Quinn wanted us to watch it with him, so there the three of us were, taking up the couch and watching shit about the Loch Ness monster or Egyptian pyramids. Not really even.”
“So you met a wrestler or the Loch Ness monster?”
“Fuck, Quinn would shit a brick if we’d met Nessie without him,” Kane snorted. “Nope. A wrestler. He was one of the bad guys. Black Bart. One of my favorites. ’Course, looking back now, he looked more like one of the Village People than a badass, but hey, when you’re a kid, the vibe of it was all you needed.”
“You liked a bad guy?” Miki eyed him. “Dude, you’re all apple pie, Batman, and Lady Justice. Really?”
“Wrestling was very black and white,” he explained. “Black Bart was the first sort of not-quite-bad guy introduced to the arena. He was on the bad guys’ team, but he played by a firm set of rules. You didn’t hit a guy when he was down and you didn’t hit someone when they weren’t looking. I think I was maybe six or seven, and in one match, one of the white hats was punched down to the mat and he stopped his own partner from whaling on the guy because it wasn’t fair. I liked that he was fair.
“Then one day Con and I were over at Dad’s station because Mom had to do something with Quinn, something came up. It wasn’t serious, but she wasn’t going to trust us to stay home alone for
some reason. Could have been because Con burnt up a frying pan a couple of days before trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich.” Kane flared his nostrils, remembering the rancid odor of bitter burnt metal and flaming cheese bread smells filling their kitchen. “So she dropped us off at the police station because Dad was getting off work soon, and while we were sitting at the end of the bullpen, in walked Black Bart.”
“Did you lose your shit?” Miki grinned. “I can see you losing your freaking mind over seeing him.”
“I lost my shit. I lost Con’s shit. Lost shit from people I didn’t even know but were just near me,” he admitted with a hearty laugh. “It was like seeing God, except God turned out to be a cousin of one of the detectives Dad worked with. The guy must have thought, hey, going to stop in at San Francisco to visit family and have some lunch with my cousin, and fucking hell, here’s this little kid screaming his damned head off. It wasn’t like he was a big-name wrestler. We’re talking local circuit they showed on the indie station, but here he was, Black Bart. Man was fucking huge, but I think I scared the hell out of him.”
“What’d he do?”
“He sat down on the bench with me and Con, then spent the next hour talking to us about wrestling.” Kane sighed, stretching his own legs out. “I look back at it now and think, the guy didn’t have to do that. He could have just waved and gone to lunch, but instead, he took time out to chat about his work and warn us really seriously about not trying any wrestling moves on each other.”
“It was like he knew the two of you would get into some shit,” Miki murmured. “Probably could smell the trouble on you.”
“Well, we were little kids sitting in a police station. He found out later our dad was a cop. Maybe he thought we boosted a car or something,” he suggested, catching Miki’s pronounced eye roll. “Point is, I remembered it. Hell, I still remember it. Made me realize there were guys out there who are good people, even when they’re playing the bad guy. And I wonder how much they lose of their lives by spending that time or if they like it. Guess that’s what I wonder about you sometimes. If you’re okay with people coming up to you. Like those kids did.”
“Yeah, I think it’s what you’ve got to sign up for. I mean, I write songs and play music because I love it, but I like sharing those things too. People experience things differently, and I learn a lot about how people feel when they talk to me. ’Cause it’s not about me. It’s about them.” Miki studied Kane for a moment, his hazel eyes shadowed with emotion. “We don’t take anything with us when we meet people, you know? I mean, nothing tangible, but how we are is like a thread. We can either weave it soft or sharp. Doesn’t matter how you know someone. Shit, it can even be a stranger, but they’re going to wrap their threads around you and pull. So either it’s nice or they make you bleed. I’ve bled enough. I don’t want to anyone to bleed because of me. I don’t want someone to walk away from me, wondering why it hurt so much to talk to me.”
“’Cause you’re not an asshole.” Kane’s smirk was met with a shrug. “I love you. You’re not one.”
“Bullshit. I know I’m an asshole, but that doesn’t mean I have to go out of my way to be one to other people,” he refuted. “And I’m working on not being an asshole to myself too. That’s just a hell of a lot harder. Now, answer me something, because you were raised with all of these rules and regulations. I know you’ve got to wait half an hour after eating to swim, but how long do I have to wait before we can get on that spinning, whirling ride over there? Because that looks scary as shit and I want to try it.”
“YOU STILL look green.” Miki studied Kane closely, aware his husband’s frown deepened every second Miki touched Kane’s cheek. “Shouldn’t have had that hot dog.”
“No, what I shouldn’t have done was get on that spinning thing,” Kane grumbled back, grabbing at Miki’s fingers. “The things I let you talk me into.”
“Hey, no one said you had to come with me.” Night was beginning to chew on the day’s legs, sending it scurrying off toward the horizon, leaving the sky for the moon and the stars to dance in. Popcorn and other castoffs crunched beneath Miki’s boots as he strolled next to a still shaky-looking Kane. “Maybe we can find something for your stomach?”
“Actually, water sounds good.” Kane pressed his fingers against a spot along his stomach. “Or a good burp. And yeah, you’re right. I shouldn’t have eaten that hot dog, but it was damned good and I have no regrets.”
“That’s what you say now. Wait until it comes up your nose and then we’ll see,” Miki snorted. “I’ll grab you some water. Hold on.”
The water was easy enough to find, and after five minutes of standing in line Miki found himself holding a couple of bottles of nearly frozen water with Kane nowhere in sight. Going back to the popcorn pile he’d been standing on before, Miki scanned the top of the crowd, looking for the black-haired Irish cop he’d married.
Not so oddly enough, he spotted Kane leaning against a post of a shooting game, chatting with the barker, who seemed more interested in talking with Miki’s cop than actually bringing in customers. She glanced at Miki as he approached, giving him a smile clearly meant to move him along. Pretty in an overdone way, she’d teased her blond hair up around her face, spackling on glitter and shiny lip gloss bright enough to attract attention. The girl didn’t look old enough to drink, much less handle a firearm, but she seemed to be able to hold an interesting enough conversation to keep Kane company while Miki searched out water.
“Hey, here you go.” Holding out one of the bottles, he gave the girl a smile. “You want one? I can go get another.”
“No, I’m fine. Got a big bottle of soda right under there.” She nodded toward the back of the booth. “Did you want to shoot a game, or you just running water back and forth?”
With its flashing lights and spinning targets, the cramped space seemed to tighten around her with each second, red and yellow whirling disks ramping up into a frenzy, only to spin back down after a few revolutions. There were flat wooden ducks painted with silly faces bobbing and weaving up and down a line, the clank of a chain being pushed through gears audible over the carnival music set loud enough to make anyone’s ears bleed.
“Yeah, I don’t do guns,” Miki said, shaking his head. “He does, though.”
“How about it? Want me to win you a prize? Kind of a tradition for your boyfriend to win you something at the fair.” Kane grinned. “Or at least I can do my best. Used to be these things were rigged, but it’s still different than shooting a real gun, so I’m probably going to lose my shirt. I’d try to win you a goldfish, but I think those are illegal to give away now.”
“I’d just kill it anyway,” he murmured. “Only reason Dude’s still alive is because he ate out of the dog food bag when he was hungry. What’s the rules on husbands winning something?”
“You guys are married?” The girl’s eyes narrowed slightly, her nostrils flaring as she sighed. “Of course you are.”
“Yeah, a few months now,” Kane remarked, picking up one of the long rifles attached by a cable to the booth’s main counter. “Rules are the same, Mick. I shoot a few rounds, maybe get something tiny and ugly, and you ooh and aah over it.”
“How ugly?” Miki studied the plastic-wrapped stuffed animals clipped to the booth’s inner posts. “Because some of those are so scary.”
“Tradition,” Kane insisted, hefting the rifle, then doing something Morgan-ish by looking down its length. “Usually you end up spending more money playing the game than the prize is worth.”
“True,” the booth girl said loudly, raising her voice to be heard over the increasing noise. “Here’s a hint. Aim to the left a bit. After that, it’s all on you.”
“Here, hold my water,” Kane said, wiping his damp hand on his jeans. “And give me a kiss for good luck. These games suck.”
“Then why are you doing it?”
“Because I’d be a shitty husband if I didn’t at least try,” he replied, stealing a quick kiss fro
m Miki’s lips. “You’ve seen that ugly pink dog thing my mom has tucked into her china cabinet? Da won that for her when they were first stepping out. It’s one of the things you do. Like sharing french fries or walking on a pier together. You eat hot dogs, almost throw up in a garbage can, and one of you wins something hideous from a booth and you keep it forever because… you just do.”
“Well, try to win me something less ugly than what Brigid’s got.” Miki stepped back, shaking his head. “Because that thing she’s got gives me nightmares. I thought it was some kind of demon-summoning doll she picked up at an Irish witch shop and she just hasn’t figured out who to use it on yet.”
He tried to be nonchalant about the whole thing, but something in Kane’s eagerness tickled Miki. His cop wanted to do this, wanted to give Miki an experience he’d probably had countless times before and still was as entranced by the whole fair atmosphere as he’d been when he was a kid. Kane’s happiness was infectious, a freefall of delight Miki rarely let himself delve into. Standing in a surging sea of cotton candy perfume and crackling noise, it was easy to be caught up in the sheer brightness of it all, and for once, Miki simply let himself go, slipping into Kane’s normally difficult world with a surprising ease.
It was nice.
More than nice.
Outside of the band, Miki never felt like he belonged. Yet standing in front of a booth of stuffed animals, clanging ducks, and flashing lights with the guy he made room in his heart for, life felt really damned fucking good. It was a music he’d never heard before. Not really. It didn’t peel off layers of his skin or scratch an itch in his blood, but still there was something satisfying about just being with Kane and watching duck after duck squeal and squawk as they flipped back from being shot.
“How many do you have to shoot to win something?” Miki was careful not to lean in too close. It seemed like the gun was shooting large red BBs, and he picked one up from the small cup Kane had in front of him. “And how many did you get?”