Best Gay Romance 2013 (28 page)

No reply. Dropping the spatula into the pan of scrambled
eggs, I wipe my hands on a nearby towel and move toward the doorway as I try to keep the panic from my voice. “Jim, that you?”

Before I reach the hall, the door shuts quietly. When the lock latches, I let out a shaky breath and pray,
Thank you
. Then I see him at the foot of the stairs, thumbing through a small pile of mail I left stacked beside the phone. The way he lifts each envelope makes me sad, and I force a smile to combat the frown that furrows his wrinkled brow. “Bills,” I tell him. “Breakfast's almost done. Did you get the paper?”

He glances up at me with blank eyes and my heart lurches in my chest. Then recognition settles in and he smiles. “Henry,” he says, as if to remind himself who I am. I nod, encouraging. “The paper? No. Did you want me to?”

“Didn't you go out to get it?” I ask gently. At the confusion on his harried face, I shake my head. “Never mind. Go sit down, I'll get it for you.”

“I can—” he starts.

I pat his shoulder as I move around him toward the door. “I've got it. Have a seat.”

It's only when I'm on the stoop, digging the paper out of the roses, that I remember the stove is on. “Jim?” I holler as I shut the door behind me. I hate that I'm like this—I know I should trust him but I can't. If anything happens to him, it'll be my fault because I know I need to be more careful, he needs me to watch out for him. I imagine him by the stove, the sleeve of his robe brushing across the heating element, unnoticed flames eating along his side… “Jim, where—”

The kitchen is empty. The eggs sizzle in the pan where I left them and I turn the burner off before they get too hard. In the dining room, a chair scrapes across the floor: Jim sitting down. Without comment, I gather up the plates and silverware I had set out in the breakfast nook and carry them into the other room.
Jim sits at the head of the long, polished table where we rarely eat, but he gives me a smile when I hand over the newspaper, and as I place a plate in front of him, he catches me in a quick hug. He sighs my name into my belly, his arms tight around my waist, then rests his head against my stomach and wants to know, “What's for breakfast?”

I don't have the energy to tell him again. “It's almost ready,” I promise, extracting myself from his embrace.

 

My parents always called Jim
Betty's friend
, right up until the day she got married to someone else. By then the two of us had an apartment together, and at the reception my mother introduced us as simply, “Henry and Jim.” Not
friend
or
roommate
, just Jim—in those days, no one felt compelled to define us further. My mother treated him like one of the family when we visited, and that was all I wanted. Let her believe we slept in separate bedrooms, if that's what she needed to think to welcome him into her home.

We bought this house in '64; the market was good and the realtor didn't question both our names on the mortgage. Jim was in college at the time, working nights at the packing plant just to pay his half of the bills. We had plans for the house—I wanted a large garden and Jim loved to swim, but we didn't have the extra money to sink into landscaping yet; we couldn't afford the house most months, let alone flowers and an inground pool. I had a job in marketing and spent most of that first year in the house waiting for Jim to come home. Sometime after midnight he'd stagger through the door, weary from standing on his feet all evening, clothes and hands and face black with grime and soot. I hovered in the doorway of the bathroom, watching the dirt and soap swirl away down the drain as he washed up. Some nights he sat on the closed lid of the toilet seat, pressed the palms of his
freshly scrubbed hands against his eyes, and struggled not to cry from mere exhaustion. “I can't do this much longer, Henry,” he sobbed, my man reduced to a child by the weight of his world. I knelt on the floor and gathered him into my arms, ignoring the stench of sweat and oil that rose from his soiled clothing. He slid off the toilet and into my lap as he hugged me close. Hot tears burned my neck where he buried his face against me. “I can't,” he whispered, hands fisting in my clean shirt. “I just can't.”

I helped when I could, but times were hard for us. Many nights we sat together on the floor of the bathroom, me smoothing my hand along his back as he railed against it all. It was college that held him back, Jim believed—if he could just drop the few classes he took, he could work full-time at the plant and make more money, but I wouldn't let him. In those days a degree guaranteed a good paying job, no matter what the field of study, and I knew Jim wanted to be more than a line worker the rest of his life. I wanted him to be something more—I wanted him at a day job and home in the evenings, in the bed beside me at night. He wanted it too, so he would cry himself out as I held him, but eventually he kissed my neck and whispered my name. “How are you feeling?” I'd want to know.

With a shaky sigh, he would admit, “Better.”

One evening I was in the kitchen, washing the dishes, when I heard him come in the front. “Jim?” I called out, raising my voice above the running tap. The slam of the bathroom door was his only reply. Shutting off the water, I dried my hands and glanced at the time—barely eight o'clock. My first thought was that he had managed to get off early somehow, but the slammed door made me worry. In the hallway, I knocked on the bathroom door. “Jim? You in there?”

“Be right out,” he promised.

Absently my hand strayed to the doorknob but when I tried
to turn it, I found it locked. That bothered me more than I cared to admit—there were no locked doors between us. “Jim?” I asked again, twisting the knob in a futile gesture. I wanted to watch him get cleaned up, to see the man emerge from beneath the sooty worker, to watch his strong hands smooth over one another to wash dirty suds away. It had become a nightly tradition of sorts, and I saw so little of him as it was. With my ear pressed against the door, I could hear water and Jim's low humming. “Open the door,” I told him and then, because that sounded too harsh, I added, “Are you all right?”

He hollered back, “Fine, Henry. I'll be right there.”

I couldn't shake the feeling that something was off, so I stood outside the bathroom door and ran through a dozen scenarios in my mind, reasons why Jim would refuse to let me see him before he got cleaned up, but none of them made any sense. I couldn't imagine what he might be hiding from me, why he needed to wash up alone; there was no reason for the impromptu shower I heard running on the other side of this locked door. Never one for waiting, I wedged myself against the doorjamb, knob gripped tight in my sweaty palm. As soon as the shower cut off, I started rattling the knob again. “Jim—” I started, but then the lock disengaged and the knob turned in my hand. “What's all this about?”

He wasn't standing on the other side of the door, so I eased it open and peered behind it. Jim leaned back against the counter by the sink, a bath towel around his shoulders that barely covered his crotch. His legs, damp and swirled with dark curlicues of wet hair, stretched out for miles beneath the towel. One corner of the towel was caught between his teeth, and he stared at me with wide eyes full of an anticipation that excited me. “Well?” I wanted to know. I tried hard to hang on to my sour mood but the sight of water beaded on so much bare skin
made it hard to remember what it was I might be angry about. “What's going on?”

Without replying, Jim scooted over. On the counter behind him sat a potted bush in full bloom. Salmon colored rosebuds peeked through thick green leaves, one or two in full bloom like bubblegum bubbles, their petals opening to a deep, gorgeous color that reminded me of hidden flesh. “Jim,” I started, but I couldn't think of anything else to say. I had done enough window-shopping at the local nursery to know the plant must've cost a pretty penny. I wanted to ask how he could afford it, with tuition on the rise and the bills we had piling up, but I tamped that down and took a tentative step toward the counter. “It's beautiful.”

“It's for you,” Jim said. His eyes flashed above an eager grin he hid behind the towel. Before I could thank him, he added, “You know why?”

I brushed my fingers across one velvet petal and shook my head. “I can't begin to imagine,” I murmured. My birthday was months away. Burying my nose into an open rose, I breathed deep the flower's heady perfume and sighed. “Did you get a raise? Did you graduate?” With a sidelong glance, I teased, “We didn't have a fight this morning, did we? Am I forgetting something?”

Jim laughed. “It's sort of our anniversary,” he said, watching me, waiting for it to click.

It didn't. “Which one?” I ticked them off on my hand, one finger for each occasion. “We got the apartment in August, bought the house in February, first had sex in June, first kissed in…” A slow smile spread across my face. “In May. This is the day we met, isn't it? God, how long as it been?”

“Ten years today,” Jim admitted. To the roses, he said, “They say red means love but these were the prettiest ones they had. I thought you'd like them—”

“I love them,” I said simply, then gave him a smoldering look and added, “I love you. Come here.”

He stepped toward me, away from the counter, and my hand brushed his arm before slipping beneath the towel to smooth over warm, tight skin. The towel fell away; Jim fumbled with the zipper of my pants, his hands undressing me as my mouth closed over his. We held on to each other as we met in a heated clash of lust and desire—against the wall, on the counter, sprawled across the lid of the toilet seat before we fell to the floor, aching and hard and seeking release. “I love you,” I told him, again and again. I kissed the words into the hollow of his throat, the small of his back. I whispered them in his ear, then licked after them as he gave in to me.

 

Time has banked the fire that once burned so brightly between us. It still simmers just below the surface of our lives and occasionally flares at a word, a touch, a smile, but we are no longer the hot lovers we were before. When we make love now it's a gentle affair, languid and slow, the movements careful like turning the crumbling pages of an ancient book. Most evenings we settle for lying close together, Jim's arms around me, my body clutched tight against his. There will come a time when one or the other of us finally lies alone, maybe sooner than we care to think, and the thought of going on without him terrifies me. I've lived with him for so long now that I can't imagine anything else. So I smooth over his forgetfulness, these little spells that seem to come more frequently now, and I tell myself I can take care of us both. If ever the day comes when he wakes beside me and my name doesn't come to his lips, when that bewildered look in his eyes doesn't fade away, I'll remember for us both. I won't let him forget the life we built together. I won't let him go.

In the kitchen, I scrape the congealed eggs into a large bowl
and stir them up to keep them fresh. If we were eating in the breakfast nook like I had planned, I wouldn't have to make several trips to deposit everything onto the table, but Jim chose the dining room and I give him an encouraging smile when I set the bowl of eggs down in front of him. “Help yourself,” I say over my shoulder as I head back into the kitchen for coffee that's just beginning to perk. I busy myself with buttering toast, then rescue two overcooked sausages from the stove where I left them. When I bring the bread and meat out, I notice that Jim hasn't touched the eggs yet. “Everything okay?” I ask him.

He takes the plate of toast from me with one hand—the other is under the table, out of sight. I wonder if he's burned himself on the stove earlier while I retrieved the paper or maybe on the bowl of eggs; that ceramic gets pretty hot. But he gives me a quick grin and a flash of the boy I fell for peeks out through the face of the old man I love. “Everything's fine, Henry. You worry too much. You always have. Do I smell coffee?”

“Coming right up.” I hurry back to the kitchen to pour two steaming mugs, with a dash of milk and a spoonful of sugar in Jim's because that's the way he likes it. I take mine black. As I blow across his mug to cool it off, I wonder what the rest of the day will bring. Will it turn out all right in the end? Or will this be one of those bad days, with Jim locked in the past, unable to follow my conversations because he can't remember one moment to the next? Some days he's a different man, aged by forgetfulness that borders on something I'm afraid to admit, much older than me despite the fact that I'm five years his senior. Since the scare at the front door, I'm on guard, suspicious and cautious and hating myself for not being able to trust him.

Back in the dining room, Jim holds the newspaper open in front of him, hiding from me. I'm about to ask him to lower it when I see the single rose on my plate. The flower isn't in full
bloom yet, but all the thorns have been broken off and the long stem is ragged at the end, as if plucked in haste. Already the soft petals that peek through the green have that deep pink of young, forbidden skin. One of my roses…

My hands begin to tremble and I have to set the mugs down before I spill the coffee. It's May already, I should have remembered—when I close my eyes, we're both young again, awkward with sudden desire, each desperately waiting for the other to make the first move. In the darkness of my memory I recall that first fumbling kiss and the hot hands that held mine in his lap. The years between us peel away like the petals of a rose and the day we met is laid bare, the core around which we have built this life together. My vision blurs and I have to blink back an old man's tears as I finger the barely budding rose. “Jim,” I sigh.