In the Middle of Somewhere (17 page)

“Uh, fine. What did you need?”

“Damn, Colin, I don’t need anything. I just wanted to say hey. Christ.” And just like that, my temper’s fried. Something about Colin triggers it every time. Sam treats me like a dumb kid sometimes and Brian’s almost always an idiot, teasing me about everything from my sexuality to the way I talk. But Colin’s nasty. He’s not teasing when he gives me shit. I don’t remember him being like that when we were kids, but I guess I don’t remember a whole lot from then, anyway. I just know that he looks at me like I disgust him and he speaks to me as little as possible.

“Well, hey, then. I’m gonna get back to work.”

And shit, that pisses me off.

“Oh, yeah, got to go get some hearts and flowers tattooed to match your manly butterfly?” I say, unable to stop myself. Ooh, Ginger is going to kill me.

“Fuck you, you little bitch,” he says, his voice ice cold, and the line goes dead.

Damn.

I splash some water on my face and force myself not to think about what Colin said. I should’ve known better than to tease him and expect anything else. Colin teases; Colin does not get teased.

I finish getting ready and grab my jacket. After the snowstorm, which was apparently a fluke, the weather settled back into something more familiar for October. Good thing, too, since I’m at least a paycheck away from buying a coat.

As I’m walking to the restaurant, my phone buzzes with a text. It’s Colin. As the only other time I can remember him texting me was last Thanksgiving to tell me to get more beer, I know it’s not going to be good.

Keep yr fucking mouth shut.
I shake my head. I’m just about to text Ginger to apologize in advance in case Colin gives her shit for telling me when another text from him comes through.
I’m fucking serious, you little shit.
Apparently Colin didn’t get Ginger’s memo about cursing. I don’t text back. Figure I’ll let him sweat a little. Asshole.

Rex already has a table when I get to the restaurant. He starts to stand up from the circular booth and I put my hand out to shake at the same time, resulting in an awkward collision where Rex grabs my shoulder to keep me from knocking into the table, and I kind of slither into the booth.

“Hey,” I say.

He smiles at me. That slow, warm smile that wrinkles his eyes and shows that twisted tooth.

“Hey.”

“Daniel?” Standing next to our booth is an unfamiliar man of about forty or forty-five. He’s on the short side, with pumped-up arms to compensate, a blond crew cut, and nearly invisible blond eyebrows over light blue eyes.

“Uh, yeah.”

He sticks out a beefy hand and I can see the grease ground deep into his nail beds.

“Hey, tiger, it
was
the spark plugs!” His voice is deafening, and his clap on the back almost slams me into the edge of the table.

“Um, Mark?” I guess.

“Can’t lie, bud, woulda never thought a gay teacher’d know about cars.” He chuckles, the kind of well-meaning, jovial chuckle that lets me know there’s no threat behind his words. “Oh, uh, hey, Rex,” he says, his grin fading. Rex looks stormy, his brows furrowed and his chin out. “Didn’t mean nothing. I’ll leave you gents to it, then.”

“What the….” I say, shaking my head.

“Spark plugs?” Rex asks, relaxing again.

“Oh, um, outside Sludge the other day, I helped Marjorie with her car. Her son tried to start it and it backfired. The car, I mean.”

The waiter comes over and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen her around campus. Small goddamned town. Rex asks me to choose the wine and I try really hard not to have flashbacks to Richard telling me I ordered the wrong one. Apparently, I’m still distracted by that and the whole Colin thing because when Rex orders the special pasta I realize I didn’t hear her tell us the specials at all, and I just order the first thing my eye lands on—chicken marsala, which I don’t much care for.

Rex has just asked me how my day was when my goddamned phone buzzes again.

“Shit,” I say, “sorry.” I go to turn it to silent, but catch the text from Colin before I do.
Not a fucking word, Daniel
. Jesus Christ, Colin!

“What’s wrong?” Rex asks.

I shake my head. “Just my fucking brother,” I say. Then I remember Ginger’s admonition, realizing I’ve said, like, four words and half of them have been swear words. I guess I really do swear a lot.

I tell Rex about what happened with Colin and what Ginger told me. Then I find myself telling him about talking to him today.

“Colin’s just mean, man. He’s an asshole. ‘What do you need?’ Like I’m inconveniencing him by calling to say hi for the first time since I left. Not like he does anything other than fucking work anyway—oh shit, I’m not supposed to be swearing on a date.”

Rex looks amused. “Says who?”

“Ginger,” I mutter. Can’t believe I said that out loud.

Rex’s eyes go dark and he puts his hand on my thigh.

“So,” he says in that growl that raises the hairs on my arms, “you told Ginger you were going on a date with me, huh?”

“Um. Yeah.”

“Do you tell Ginger everything?”

“Um. No,” I say, completely lost in his eyes. He focuses on me like nothing I’ve ever experienced, like he’s reading every blink and breath.

He leans back, as if satisfied, and I fiddle with my phone. Colin might actually hate me. It’s a thought I’ve had before, but I always figured it was regular brotherly friction. The fact that it can still happen when we’re three states apart means he may actually,
actually
hate me.

“Fuck him,” I mutter, and I swear—not for the first time—that I won’t care what he thinks about me ever again. I won’t care the next time he calls me Danielle. I won’t care the next time he looks at me like I’m trash or laughs when I hurt myself. I won’t care the next time I see him around town and he pretends he doesn’t notice me. I just won’t care.

“Here you go, gentlemen,” the waiter says. “Artichoke ravioli and the chicken marsala.” She puts our plates down and pours the wine.

“That was the pasta special?” I say. “I didn’t even hear her say them or I totally would have gotten that too.”

“Do you want some?” Rex offers.

“Sure, want a bite of mine?” He nods.

“That’s really good,” Rex says.

I duck my head. “I actually don’t like marsala that much. I don’t know why I ordered it,” I say.

“I don’t like artichokes,” Rex says, and I burst out laughing. I guess we were both a little distracted.

“Wanna switch?” I say, and Rex has the plate out of my hand before he even nods. Damn, he can eat.

He’s wearing a plain black button-down and the dark color sets off the red in his brown hair. His table manners are perfect.

“Colin’s the one who first found out I was gay,” I find myself saying while Rex is distracted by the food.

“Did you tell him?”

“Oh fuck no,” I say. “I mean, uh, no. He walked in on me, um, sucking off this guy behind the auto shop.” It was one of the worst moments of my life. I was sixteen. Actually, it wasn’t long before I met Ginger. Buddy—the guy—picked up the occasional shift at the shop and was a friend of Colin’s from high school. I’d caught him looking at me a few times when I’d come through with a message for my dad or to borrow a car. I’m not even sure if he was gay, but apparently he could tell I was. He was kind of handsome, I suppose, in a blond football-player-gone-to-seed way, but I didn’t care about that. I just wanted to know if the pull I felt toward guys was real or if there was just something wrong with me and that’s why I didn’t care about girls at all.

There was someone at the auto shop that I’d had a stupid crush on for what felt like forever. His name was Truman and he was about as straight as they come. He was far too old for me, married, and would probably have detached my head from my shoulders if he so much as suspected any heat in the way I looked at him in his coveralls. He was a big, muscular black guy in his late-thirties who always wore a red bandana over his hair and had the cleanest fingernails I’d ever seen on a mechanic. He wore a signet ring on his right hand and a wedding ring on his left and he had a deep chuckle when he was amused and an incongruously high laugh when he was delighted—which I only ever heard in reaction to a victory by the Cleveland Browns (his hometown team) and his twin daughters.

Anyway, I’d taken Buddy out behind the shop expressly
because
I was concerned that Truman would be getting to work soon. He was the only one who came from the south and used the alley behind the shop. I never found out why Colin came through there that day.

Suddenly, Colin was there and he was screaming at Buddy, “Get the fuck off of my little brother, you fucking pervert.” I was afraid Colin was going to kill him. Smash his head into the cement wall. At the same moment, though, I registered that Colin coming to my defense, calling me his little brother, was the most intimate thing he’d done in years. I stood up and grabbed at Colin, yelling that it wasn’t Buddy’s fault. Buddy ran off down the alley and never came back to the shop. I’m not sure what ever happened to him. The second he was gone, Colin rounded on me. He looked like he was going to puke.

“You…. You….” Colin couldn’t even find words bad enough for what he wanted to say to me. I was terrified of him, but with Colin, you never let him know you were scared or he’d eat you alive.

“Um, so, I’m gay,” I said. I was going for levity, but my voice was scratchy and thin.

“Don’t you ever fucking say that!” Colin said, his voice low and intense, his nostrils flared. He came toward me like a bull, head lowered.

“It’s not a big deal—” I started to say, but that was all I got out before Colin hit me in the stomach. Then the mouth. I slid down the pocked concrete wall and retched on the ground, the vomit stinging my bloodied mouth. Colin turned and stalked back through the alley the way he’d come. So much for brotherly intimacy.

“He hit the guy so hard he knocked two of his teeth out,” I say to Rex. “And got in a couple hits on me. I told my dad and my other brothers I was gay later that night so they didn’t hear it from Colin. My dad’s not religious, but I think he was praying the ground would open up and swallow him so he didn’t have to say anything.”

Rex makes a strangled sound in the back of his throat and I look over to see that he’s squeezed his wine glass so hard the stem broke in his hand.

“Shit!” I say. “Are you okay?”

“I’m sorry,” Rex says, shaking his head. “I apologize,” he says to the waiter when she comes over to clean up the spilled wine and take away his broken glass.

He turns to me. “Listen,” he says. “Can we get out of here?”

“I—sure,” I say. “Did you want—” But he’s already standing up and throwing money onto the table. I fumble for my wallet as I stand, but he’s put down more than enough, and I jog after him.

His back is to me when I get out of the restaurant, shrugging my jacket on. His hand is on the back of his neck.

“Hey,” I say. “Did you cut yourself?” He shakes his head. I step in front of him, trying to look at his face, but his chin is on his chest. I reach out and squeeze his arm. “Are you okay?” I ask again. He nods, but still doesn’t look up.

“C’mere,” I tell him, and I tug on his shirt and start walking toward my apartment.

When I unlock the door, I sit him down at the kitchen table, since the only other place to sit is on my unmade bed. Got to add new sheets to my ever-expanding list of things I need to live in Michigan and interact with other human beings.

I look at his hand and see that he really didn’t cut himself. I’ve never seen someone break a glass like that, except in cartoons.

I pull up a chair in front of his and sit, leaning close to him.

“Rex, what’s going on?” I say.

He finally looks at me and his eyes look more uncertain than I’ve ever seen them. His jaw is clenched. Whatever he sees in my face makes his expression soften. He puts his hands on my knees.

“Sorry,” he says, shaking his head. “You didn’t even get to finish your food.”

“I don’t care about that,” I tell him.

“No, really,” he says, “I apologize.” He falls into this stilted, overly formal way of speaking sometimes. When he’s nervous? Or uncomfortable. I’m not sure. “I hate that your brother did that. I can’t stand violence.”

I almost laugh. The idea that Rex, who’s six foot four, built like a bodybuilder, held me up against a tree as he fingerfucked me, and could probably take apart any guy I’ve ever seen hates violence seems, well, laughable. But then I remember how he fixed Marilyn’s leg the night we met. How he looked at my bruises and binder-clipped my pants. How he warned me about the weather and got upset with me because sometimes people die in the snow. How he made sure I was wearing my seat belt and cooked for me and stretched me so carefully in bed when I said it had been a while. How he held me in sleep, his arms heavy, but never crushed me. How he washed my hair in the shower and put a hand over my brow so shampoo didn’t get in my eyes. How, at the diner the next morning, he winced when I burned the roof of my mouth on my coffee and silently pushed my water toward me even though I barely noticed because I do it all the time.