“Why did you call me to come over?” he asks, pulling his hand away to pour a generous amount of pinot grigio into his glass, overfilling it and leaning forward to slurp the drink before it spills over the top. “Tell me.”
I finger a hangnail on my right thumb, pulling at the tag of skin gently, wincing as a spume of blood fizzes to the surface. I dab at the cut with my paper napkin and look up to find Steve waiting for an answer.
So I tell him.
I tell him how much I’ve missed him and that I’ve done some serious thinking about us following the days after the arrest of the department’s police chief and a looming lawsuit against the local college and police department. “You’re the only thing that makes me want to get out of bed,” I say. I tell him that he is the only person who makes me happy these days and I want to spend more time with him.
“I want you to sleep over. I want to wake up next to you. I want to cook you breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
He cocks his head to the side, watching me.
“After this crazy week, I’ve learned a lot about myself.”
“Like what?” he asks.
I sit up straighter, reaching my hands across the table. “Who I am. What I want from life.”
“Who are you, Jack? And what do you want?”
I pull in a ragged breath. “A lonely man searching for happiness. Something I lost a long time ago.”
“Nobody will be able to make you happy but yourself,” he says.
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true.”
“You make me happy, Steve. You make me laugh.”
“What’s changed you?”
“Everything. Work. Death. My past.”
He takes a sip of his drink.
I say, “So let’s start. Right now. Will you stay? I’ll cook dinner. We can watch a movie on Netflix. Anything you want.” I push back my chair and stand.
I amble around the small table to Steve and drop down to one knee. He glances at me, one of his eyebrows arching into question. “I thought we were taking things slowly.”
“I am. I mean, we are.”
“Then why are you proposing?”
I look down at my kneeling stance with my hand on his, and start to laugh.
He throws his head back, laughing harder.
“This is not what it looks like,” I say, feeling lightheaded and happy and woozy in love. “Please stay, Steve.”
“There’s a lot we need to discuss,” he says.
“I want to be with you.”
He nods.
“I know I’ve got some stuff to figure out,” I say. “My anxieties, my past. But I want you with me so we can work on life’s challenges together.”
“Let’s take it slowly and see where it leads us.”
* * * *
I don’t have any recollection of my father hugging me or telling me he loved me. Not the way my mother loved me before breast cancer took her away from me at an early age.
Returning to my father’s grave the next day at Black Falls Cemetery rehashes old memories I wish I could forget. He was arguably the most wretched human being, with the disposition of an old mule.
Hatred bubbles to the surface of my thoughts, and I don’t know why I’ve come back to this awful place.
Maybe I’ve come to kneel and pray and embrace my mother’s small tombstone. I unwrap the bouquet of purple and white lilies from the cellophane I’ve bought for her, and place them across her grave.
I loom over my parents’ marble headstones that are chipped and weathered by the bare elements. The second R in my father’s name Barry has deteriorated and is barely legible.
Teresa, my mother’s name, is intact and illuminated by the stunning sunlight winking through the foliage overhead.
I bend down and brush leaves off the headstone, placing my hand across the embossed letters of her name. Tears swell in the corner of my eyes.
“I miss you, Mom.”
A late summer breeze rustles elm trees around me, and I notice I am the only person in the graveyard on this late August morning.
I crinkle the cellophane into my coat pocket, and stand.
When I start to leave, I whisper to my mother that I’ll be back tomorrow.
As I head down the dirt path toward my car where I parked it near the wrought-iron gates, I notice a tall figure dressed in a black trench coat and hat leaning against a tree half a mile across the graveyard.
I get an uneasy, familiar feeling that he is watching me.
My interest piqued, I set off at a light jog, picking up pace along the windy dirt trail.
He turns and heads in the other direction, but I yell for him to stop, my voice strangled by the afternoon wind as it is carried through the tops of the rustling trees. I am out of shape, and I have to stop running to catch my breath.
I watch the man get behind the wheel of his car and drive away, churning up a cloud of dust as he peels away, tires screeching.
The make of the car is the exact same model as my ex-boyfriend Sheridan’s.
* * * *
That evening, I am sautéing chicken stir-fry for Steve, and waiting for him to arrive.
It is six o’ clock, and the day’s light is waning and disappearing behind the treetops in the front yard. A soft rain taps the sliding glass doors.
Fifteen minutes later, a knock on the apartment door announces his arrival. Steve is holding a pricey bottle of sweet Sauvignon Blanc. “Business at the club has been good,” he says, raising the wine.
I wink at him and hold his head in my hands, pulling him toward me so our lips are touching.
I hear my neighbor’s apartment door opening from across the hallway, and I notice Miles watching us from the doorway.
“Evening, Miles,” I say, wrapping my arm around Steve’s shoulder.
“I thought I heard voices,” Miles says, his owl-stare darting in Steve’s direction, then back at me.
“It’s just us,” I say, motioning Steve into my apartment and turning to Miles. “Do you need anything?”
He shakes his head. “I’m jumpy, that’s all. Even after the arrest of the police chief, I can’t sleep.”
“You don’t have to worry about anything, Miles. I’ve got your back. Just like you have mine.”
Miles nods, and heads back into his apartment. He closes the door and fastens all three locks securely in place as I go back into my apartment and join Steve for dinner.
We sit at the small table I’ve set up by the sliding glass doors in the living room, and Steve asks, “How was the rest of your day?”
I reach for my coffee cup and take a sip, setting it back down before answering, “I ran a few errands.” I am struggling to talk, but I continue. “I went to see my parents’ graves this afternoon.”
He pushes herbed carrots around his plate with his fork, and looks up at me. “Are you all right?”
I nod. “My mother had a rough life with that beast of a man. I hated growing up in that house,” I say, shredding the napkin into pieces in my lap and looking up at Steve nodding at me in support. “He was unarguably the worst father. I hated him for what he did to my mother, and to me.” My hand is trembling as I reach for my coffee cup and take a gulp of the black liquid to help clear my throat. “I still have nightmares seeing him coming at me with a belt.”
Steve calls out my name, but I don’t hear him.
“I wanted my mother to be happy. I wanted to be free from that dark place.”
“Jack—”
“He loathed me for being gay, Steve. He hated me so much he wanted me dead. He made jokes with his male co-workers in front of me just to see how I’d react. He told me one night that I was not his son, and he didn’t want to be associated with a faggot in the family. He said that to my face when I was fifteen.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know how you feel when people laugh at you for being different, and for dressing colorfully. I get it.”
He squeezes my han
d.
“I like your company and we have a lot to share,” I say.
The tremors start in my shoulders, and the napkin falls from my lap when I push out my chair, stand, and walk over to Steve.
I don’t kneel this time, but straddle him on the chair, and feel his muffled laughter in the back of my throat through the vibrations of our mouths when I kiss him.
Carrying him to my bed five feet from where we sit, we remove each other’s shirts. He unstraps my belt and loosens my jeans, unzipping my fly. My hands fumble with the slim waistband of his tight drawstring slacks and I pop off two of the buttons on his shirt.
An hour later, we lie side-by-side, naked beneath the sheets.
“This doesn’t feel like we’re taking it slowly,” I say, my arm curled behind his neck, and his fingers playing in the brush pile of my wiry chest hair.
“But I like it,” he says.
“It feels like when you were here last. Lying in the dark, listening to the rain on the balcony doors.”
“Your heart is beating hard,” he says, lifting his head from my chest.
“I’m nervous.”
“You don’t have to be nervous. I’m not going anywhere.”
I hear him whispering to me not to be scared, but the words are echoing from Chief Barton’s mouth as I recall his last words to me before I cuffed his hands and led him like a lamb to the slaughter.
You’re making a big mistake, Ballinger.
Barton is due back in court the first week of September. I will be there to testify and bury this nightmare once and for all, and to bring justice to the deceased.
“What are you thinking about?” Steve asks. “You’ve got that serious look in your eye.”
I run my hand through his hair. “How all of this is going to shake out. What’s going to happen now?”
He reaches up to me and places his hand on my mouth. “Let’s worry about that tomorrow.”
I think about seeing Sheridan at the cemetery today, and watching him disappearing from my life again, hopefully for good this time.
In the chaos, I see and hear my father’s voice.
He is a black hole, a dark canvass of nothing, his voice getting quieter and quieter until I can’t hear it anymore.
Steve is smiling at me, telling me everything will be all right, his voice scaring away my nightmares into the shadows where they belong, far away from what I have now: the beginning of a new life.
* * * *
ABOUT THOMAS GRANT BRUSO
Thomas Grant Bruso knew at an early age he wanted to be a writer. He has been a voracious reader of genre fiction since he was a kid. He writes book reviews for his hometown newspaper, The Press Republican, and lives in Plattsburgh with his husband, Paul, and their miniature pincher diva, Riley. For more information, visit facebook.com/thomasgrantbruso.
Sudden Death by W.S. Long
To my husband, the man who introduced me to golfing: I will always want to golf with you on hot blistering Florida days, on cloudy, gloomy days, on any day we can play.
Chapter 1
Dimas Kanashiro eyed the fairway, blinking away the sweat that crept into a corner of his eyes. The blazing hot sun and few breezes in the Ponte Vedra golf course made the humidity more stifling.
Dimas played this same hole last year and double bogied it. That mistake pushed him from second place to a fourth place tie. Decent winnings for someone on the pro tour who’d been playing a little more than two years, but still a far cry from winning and holding the trophy and money purse for the champion.
He didn’t want that to happen again. Today, to get ahead and take the lead, he’d have to get a birdie. He’d have to hit to the ball to the left, not land in the water, and not have his ball fly too far. A par would maintain him in second place, behind Carl Dipshit Mullins. Ill-tempered, cigar-smoking, pot-bellied, boorish, rude, violent Carl Fucking Mullins.
There wasn’t any margin for error for Dimas.
If even screwed up a shot, Carl could catch up. Dimas didn’t want that, or to even up the strokes and then have to play a sudden death match play if they both tied.
He was only one shot behind Carl. If he made par for the seventeenth hole, he’d still be one shot behind.
He eyed his caddy. Joe filled in for his old caddy who retired two months ago. But Joe had never caddied in a PGA tour. Joe’s quiet demeanor was out of character for him when they arrived at Sawgrass. Normally Joe joked, sprinkled gossip he had heard at the clubhouse the night before, but so far on this tour, he was all business. He repeated facts: the slope, distances, and where other players were in standings. Joe was awed by Sawgrass and every day he seemed to be more awed by it. And Dimas couldn’t blame him.
Joe’s quiet bearing allowed Dimas to steal furtive looks at Carl’s hot caddy, Hunter Mullins, every chance he got. Everyone assumed that Hunter got the job because he was Carl’s stepson, and that was it. But, Hunter had been an outstanding collegiate golfer at Florida State. Dimas and Hunter had played on the same golf team. And not only did they become roommates and shared an apartment together in Tallahassee by sophomore year; they’d become lovers as soon as they’d moved in together.
Except many people didn’t know that.
Even Hunter’s stepfather didn’t know. At least, Dimas had no confirmation on this point.
And what most people also didn’t know was this: Hunter knew his shit. The only thing that kept Hunter from the pros was his long game. He had the best short game in all of collegiate golf. This guy, his boyfriend, could read greens like a psychic could read tealeaves in the bottom of a small cup.
The crowd clapped politely as Carl made the shot. The seventeenth hole was one hundred thirty seven yards from the tee, and yet it caused panic in every golf player since the small island green caused many players to overshoot and land the ball in water. It was more of a skill shot than a power swing. Sergio Garcia famously did a quadruple bogey a few years back, hitting his balls into the water, rather than landing them on the island green, resulting in the Tiger Woods win in the TPC Sawgrass tournament.
Dimas mumbled under his breath. Shit. He toed up to the shot, practice-pumped his club until he was ready, and then swung. Thwack. The ball made a quick, but silent arc as it hurled overhead more than one hundred yards, and landed three feet from the seventeenth hole.
The crowd grasped in unison. But the gasps were then followed by polite clapping again. Hunter lowered his head and tipped his baseball cap to Dimas. Hunter darted his eyes to the right and then scratched his left ear.
Dimas breathed in the humid air and scanned the crowd. He was finally going to redeem his loss a few weeks ago to Carl at the Bayhill Invitational in Orlando. Dimas had coveted winning the trophy at his adopted new hometown. Many spectators were rapt in the moment. He ignored the whispers about this being a battle between the ages. Him—the barely out of college pro, thin, olive-skinned, against an aging veteran in his early fifties, trying to earn a place in history next to Davis Love III and Sam Snead as one of the oldest players to win a major golf tournament. Dimas wasn’t the favorite on this course. Carl was. Carl was definitely the local celebrity and Dimas was the foreign interloper who came to America to play golf. The hours of playing golf, playing and winning some smaller tournaments were now paying off.
As the two leaders in the final tournament round, Dimas, his caddy, then Carl and Hunter walked to the seventeenth hole. The caddies stayed behind due to the small putting green area. Carl and Dimas both made their next shots on the seventeenth hole, walking off the island green as quickly as they both putted.
Unless Carl screwed up his shot on the eighteenth, Dimas would finish second. Not bad. Still good prize money, and points for the points’ cup, so he’d make some pretty dough this year. Not bad for an almost third year pro, right out of college. Still, winning the tournament would mean lots of Benjamins in endorsement, and then he could poach Hunter, and get him out of his indentured servitude to Carl.
The eight
eenth hole was another interesting challenge. Water was almost immediately straight ahead, curving to the left, and the fairway curved to the left. It was a mixture of skill and power to land this. Carl made his shot. His ball traveled over two hundred yards to cut the distance to the hole almost in half.
Dimas practice pumped again and hit the ball. The hard thwack signaled a long shot. The ball landed further than Carl’s. Dimas’ heart raced. This could be it. If he could make a birdie on this hole, he would tie. If he made par, he would be in second place.
He eyed Hunter who stood talking to Carl. Hunter handed some notes on the eighteenth to Carl and Carl shook his head. Hunter turned away from his stepdad and pursed his lips.
Dimas took off his cap, and took a handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his brow. He brushed his dark brown hair back under the baseball cap. Some spectators had signs for the golfers. He caught one fan’s poster board.
A tall striking redhead, who wasn’t afraid to show off her bountiful bosom, had a small but tasteful sign on a manila folder that said, “Brownie hair, and brownie eyes, what’s not to love about Dimey?” He shook his head. There were rules about fan conduct, but he suspected because she was pretty, some tour volunteers overlooked her small sign that easily folded up. He didn’t mind her sign carried his nickname, a name only a few close friends and family called him, but he didn’t want any distractions.
Dimas focused on the next play. He moved closer to Joe who reminded him about the slope and distance that he had to make. It had rained the other day and based on how the balls played today, the course was a little slow.
Hunter handed a club to Carl, who waved it off and chose a different club. After Carl swung, his ball sailed into a bunker on the right.
“Joe, what club did Hunter try to hand Carl?”
“A seven.”
Dimas nodded. “Hand me a seven.”
“Dimas, I also overheard Hunter tell Carl the wind is pushing off south to north so to try to slice to the left a little. Obviously, Carl thinks that was dumb because he tried to slice right on that shot.”
Dimas smiled. He glanced over at Hunter who caught him looking at him. Hunter placed his head down and tugged his left ear again. Hunter’s signal.
Just the Facts, Volume 1 Page 19
