Halfway Home (25 page)

"No. Dammit."

"Me neither. More's the pity. Happily for you, however, the U.S. Navy has just landed." With that I wriggled down and grabbed at his belt. He made as if to protest, hands moving to shield his crotch. The last modest man! "Excuse me," I said, batting his hands away, "if this is going to get serious, I need to check out the equipment."

He laughed by way of surrender, pillowing his arms behind his head. I went to work in earnest, undoing the belt and then the button fly, one by one. I was playing more than anything. This didn't even seem like sex, in the past such a grim inexorable procedure of getting down to business. For underwear he sported dun-green boxers, army surplus, which struck me at the moment as more endearing than erotic.

I slipped a hand through the opening, groped about and got a gentle grip around him. He gave a soft hiss. The member in hand was half-swollen and pretty hefty as I lifted it out. Uncut. "Well, well," I murmured. "Good for that old pioneer stock. Leaving the wild in its natural state." I squeezed and stroked it, pulling the lip of the foreskin back. With my other hand I tugged out his balls. Then I bent and licked the head. He groaned and stretched, his dick pulsing harder. It was getting to feel like sex after all. My mouth moved down and took him full in.

"Wait," he whispered, his hand reaching into my hair, not quite pulling it. "I need a shower."

I came up off him. "Tastes great to me," I mumbled, prepared to dive right back.

But he lifted my head with his hands, forcing me to look at him. His forehead was creased with trouble, so that I had a sudden pang that I was giving a lousy blow job. "Please," he said fretfully, "I don't want you getting any germs."

I mean really, what a world. "Hey, it's good honest blue-collar sweat," I protested, resisting with every fiber the notion of living my life in a bubble. I hadn't had so much as a taste in two years, in part to avoid these grisly negotiations. "I won't let you come in my mouth, I promise. Do I have to suck it through a zip-lock bag?"

"Am I more afraid than you are?"

"That I'll get sick? I think it's probably fifty-fifty."

And I bent once more and touched the head with my tongue, but no thought now of the full maneuver. I didn't feel annoyed that he'd interrupted the flow. On the contrary, the whole occasion seemed to go just the way it was meant to, and felt no less that we were making love. My lips lingered a moment longer, nothing urgent here, nothing to prove. We'd do a better job of it in a bed, I thought. But I wasn't sorry the scene in the cave had veered from carnal to intimate. We needed to go by degrees—next time, let him undress me. Let it go back and forth, so no one got lost in the shuffle.

Was it a flash of color that made me turn my head? I certainly wasn't startled—just lazily swiveled my head to look out, my lips still grazing the tip, even as the muscle relaxed. I saw Susan an instant before she saw us. She was moving past the mouth of the hollow toward the stairs, bundled up in a motheaten cardigan she'd borrowed from Cora's closet. Her blond hair blew about her head, lavishly sensual for once. She turned her face from the wind and looked directly in my eyes.

And froze, her cheeks blazing up with a mix of horror and embarrassment. She was hardly five feet away. Truly I must be shameless, for my first impulse was to laugh at her rotten luck—but I swear, it wouldn't have been a cruel laugh. The next instant she was out of there, before I had even raised my head, moving around to the foot of the steps and hurrying up.

I realized Gray hadn't seen her, stretched out as he was toward the back of the hollow, and the roar of the surf drowning out her footsteps. The laughter spilled out of me, helpless, to think I had just set back the evolution of Susan's tolerance by at least a decade. That look in her face, as if she had stared into the bowels of hell.

And we weren't even having sex! It was all too twisted, requiring the convening of Vatican III. Gasping at the absurdity, I squirmed up next to Gray in the sand.

I think he thought I was crying even then, for he threw his arms about me and held me close. I don't know what tipped it, frankly, maybe just the swift unqualified protection of his embrace, but now I was crying for real. No noise, and not even much in the way of tears, like the rain out there that would not stick. I suppose I was crying for Daniel's sake, so many years to go before he could escape the bad deal of his blasted family. Crying for Gray and me, starting out already scared, no handle on time. Crying mostly with relief, because I didn't have to come up with a reason. Gray was going to hold me, no matter what.

In a minute the squall had passed, and I snuffled and ducked my face against his shoulder to dry my eyes. Only then did I realize I wasn't going to tell him about Susan's late appearance, because I wished to protect his modesty. Once more he smoothed my hair back from my forehead. "You think I can put on my pants again?" he asked playfully, as if the mood had never shifted down.

"Please—before you freeze your nuts." And while he put himself back together, tucking his shirt in all the way around, I added: "What if I fall in love with you very hard?"

He did up the buttons of his fly, tongue between his lips. Then the belt. Then he looked over, and the cave had grown so dark I could hardly see his eyes. "Don't worry," he said, "I can keep up with you."

I've never been much for declarations. It's been my experience that telling a man you love him is like a trapdoor in the middle of your living room floor. They disappear that fast. This casual openness of Gray's—to follow my heart wherever it led—was thus no less than a revelation. And I certainly wasn't going to jinx it now with further demands and codicils. Agreeing to love in principle, fair and equal as the laws of a just republic, was something I'd been waiting for all my life. Say no more.

I scrambled out of the shadows and knelt at the lip of the hollow, letting the wind buffet me. At the western rim, the day was guttering out in a swirl of mercury, the rest of the sky iron gray. It was drizzling now, though the shelter of the rocks above still kept us dry. I was mad with exhilaration as Gray moved up behind me and squeezed me in a bear hug, head on my shoulder. We watched the break of the waves in silence, the last white glow of force before the stormy night took all the power to itself. I think I could have stripped down and gone in even then, rolling in the shallows like a seal, because I was in the mood to dare the planet.

But I contented myself with shouting "Now!"

And the two of us, single-minded, leaped from the cave and chased around to the stairs. We ran up laughing, past the new construction, and I flashed on Susan, even now probably trudging into the house, chilled to the bone. Would she tell my brother what she saw? Oh, not that it mattered at all. I was so far past shame and discretion, tilting against my lover as we dashed around the midpoint landing, trying not to laugh so I'd save my breath.

But Susan—my bursting heart wanted to tell her how beautiful she looked, with the wind wild in her hair. And that she had so much to love, a man and a boy of her own, it couldn't help but turn out fine. They had all the time in the world. And right now I didn't begrudge them.

"Stop!" I gasped, panting with surrender as I slumped against the railing. Four steps ahead Gray spun about with a grin, his own breath heaving. For once there wasn't that ominous crease of worry between his eyes. My reeling from the sprint upstairs had nothing to do with AIDS, or at least we played it so.

"You look like Heathcliff," Gray observed, gliding down the railing toward me, face glistening.

I threw back my head in abandon, a very queenly Olivier, and bellowed at the lowering sky, "Cathy! Cathy!"

Gray reached a hand, and I clasped it, letting him draw me to him. We were really getting soaked now. He shook his head, as if hardly believing his eyes. "Every minute I'm with you," he said, "I'm making up for lost time. But it all goes awfully fast." He shrugged. Nothing to be done about it. "My life used to be so slow you couldn't even see it move."

I nodded, accepting the compliment, but suddenly needing to unburden me as well. "Gray, sometimes I have these—they're like blank spots. And I realize I've lost the last five minutes." Why was I telling this now, at the very moment we were free? Not surprising, the crease came furrowing down between his eyebrows. "It's like my brain's taking a station break."

"Now?"

"No. But yesterday, after you left. A few times. I suppose it's the virus." I had to look away from the aching intensity of his eyes, down the vertiginous slope of the bluff. "That's what I mean, about falling too hard. It's all very
Dark Victory."

Again he pulled me close, so that my mouth fell against his neck. It wouldn't take much, I realized, to become the boy who cried "Wolf!" around here, if you could always count on a hug like this. "Let's just keep living now," he declared, as if he'd thought it all through long since. "And we'll fall as far as we fall."

Is that a prince? Another prolonged embrace, as I arched him backward against the railing and smothered his mouth with mine. The seascape staggered beneath us, yielding up in that one moment of winter dusk—the gaudy expressionist angles of cliff and water, desolate, unrelenting—all the process shots of the wilder shores of passion. Sometimes nothing is wanting, no matter how long you've wanted it. Who noticed the cold and the wet, for the sheer quick of being dead center in love? Like Susan declaring the law of her Motherhood, written in stone, I seared it into my brain:
You will not forget this kiss.

Yet we pulled away from it as casual as ever, for we also knew how to keep it light, being men on whom no irony was lost. Darting across the landing and up the last flight, I announced with fierce insistence, "You're staying over. I don't care what the Catholics think."

"Stop choreographing," Gray protested.

"I have to. And now we have to get out of these clothes and drink hot chocolate. And a roaring fire."

We reached the top together, walking shoulder to shoulder. Now the night had fallen complete, but the way was clear through the cactus, shiny in the rain. As we reached the lawn, Gray dropped in a runner's crouch to tie his shoe. I stood and waited, watching the house—lights in the parlor and up in Cora's room. Then I saw Brian at the edge of the pergola, light streaming out from the parlor doors behind him. He was shaking something. His hand was waving. He was—

I started to run before I really saw it. I think I screamed "No," but maybe it wasn't out loud, for my brother didn't turn till I was almost on him. He held Daniel captive by one wrist, hoisting him up so the boy dangled a few inches above the ground. His pants were down to his knees, and Brian slapped at his bare butt. As I dashed toward them in the rain, a fury as old as the ocean roaring in my head, I heard the sharp crack of my brother's sick power, scoring the flesh of his child. Then I barreled in like a fullback, and Brian looked up in shock.

I smashed into his chest, reeling him back against a column. He dropped Daniel. His livid face, with its stupid Irish anger, couldn't quite seem to place me. I was flailing blows, pummeling at his shoulder, and for a moment he took it like a dazed bear. He was all armor. No way was I hurting him. But now I found my voice again, and it shrilled the air like a war cry.

"You want to break his arm? Is that what you're trying to do, bigshot? Just like your dad?"

I
saw
how the words knifed home, and I wanted to dance. Even as he snatched my wrist midair, and I only had one fist left to drum it in. "Easy, Tommy, easy," he grimaced, but he wasn't in charge and he knew it.

"You got a problem, babe," I sneered at him, shoving the heel of my hand against his shoulder and then again, taunting him like a bully. "You like to hurt people, don't you? Well, we don't allow that dirty little secret anymore. They take kids away from guys like you—"

Then Gray was grabbing me from behind, dragging me off him. A red heat flushed the cords of Brian's bull neck as his fury rose to meet my own, that I should dare to rob him of his son. But now I was twisting and yelling at Gray. "You hear what my old man did? He pulled my arm right out of the socket—just yanking me around one night. Remember that, Brian? Remember me screaming?" A ghoul's laugh erupted from me, as if I'd just gotten some cosmic joke. "No wonder I can't throw a fucking ball."

Gray held me tight around, but with no pressure to censor me. Brian slumped against the column, looking aghast and vaguely disgusted. Then my eyes lighted on Daniel, huddling back in the shadows, pants still around his knees. For his sake I swallowed my raving on the spot. But nobody spoke. The floor was still mine. My impulse was to reach out and hug him, help him get dressed, but that would only force him into taking sides, and I was not the solution here.

I still didn't know where the memory of my father came from, so buried was it until the trigger of the scene under the pergola. I only knew I hadn't dreamed it. A twinge in my shoulder had never quite forgotten. But if this much pain was blocked inside me—unremembered, shut like a final closet—there must be more. For the violent nights of my father were grim as clockwork.

"Daniel," I said gently, "put your pants on, and go on upstairs. Your father and I won't hurt each other, I promise."

The boy looked back at me gratefully, but shifted his eyes to his father, no move possible without a go from the top. My gaze held on my nephew, so I didn't know if Brian nodded yes or looked away in shame. Daniel hitched up his pint-sized Jockeys, then his jeans. He didn't appear embarrassed or even very interested in the charged air that crackled among the grown-ups. But then, I knew better than anyone how quick these things got buried. Kids like me and Daniel carried our own shovels.

Once he'd walked into the house, Gray released his grip. I looked at my brother, hands hanging heavy at his sides. There was definite shame here, the Catholic kind, wild for absolution. "Yes, I remember," he said with an odd dignity. "Mom and I took you to the emergency room." "Oh."