Mason's Run

by Mellanie Rourke

  “I’m glad she’s doing better, LizzieB,” I said. Lizzie’s mom was a sweetheart. She’d raised Lizzie as a single mother and the two were very close. We’d spent many college weekends at their townhouse in Seattle.

  I’d shared an apartment with Lizzie for most of our college years, but she had finally gotten her own place once she graduated. I’m sure that me walking in on Lizzie and her boyfriend, Everett, having sex in the living room one morning had nothing to do with that decision… Right…

  We chatted for a few more minutes, but I knew she had to be at work soon, though it was only 11 a.m. my time. Time zones were a bitch.

  Lizzie worked for Crowe International Talent Management in Seattle. She represented a number of artists, writers and performers, though she always insisted I was her favorite…

  We finally said goodbye and I decided I needed to get some work done. The next few hours were spent working on my upcoming graphic novel. Dark Angel II introduced a lot of new characters and I was a little behind on completing character profiles and sketches.

  I took my things out to the kitchen, powered up my laptop, and went to work. Every now and again I was distracted by some random animal wandering across the backyard. So far, I’d seen squirrels, both black and brown, birds of all colors, and some little mini squirrel-like creatures running over the deck. This whole place was so different from anything I’d ever experienced before – I really had thought that nature shows and whatnot were bullshit, but after watching all the critters today and listening to the tiny squirrels chitter and yell at the birds, it made me smile.

  A long time later, I came out of the fog that usually descended on me when I worked. My stomach was growling, and a glance at the clock told me it was almost 5 p.m. I smiled down at the pictures I’d drawn and the outline I’d completed. I’d gotten a lot of work accomplished today.

  Lee’s note said he’d be home at 6 p.m. Maybe I could make dinner by way of apology? I took a look at the contents of his refrigerator and the cupboards. I spied some ground beef, pasta, and tomato sauce. Spaghetti, maybe? It was one of the few meals I really knew how to cook. I got the ground beef out of the refrigerator and started it cooking. I found bread in the pantry and was delighted to discover a whole lazy Susan full of spices. Not that I knew what to do with anything except cinnamon or garlic, but still…

  Within a few minutes, the house started to smell amazing. The pasta was boiling on the stove and I'd just got done brushing the garlic butter I’d made on the bread and putting it into the oven to toast when I heard the door to the front of the house open.

  I’d successfully managed to avoid thinking about what I was going to say to Lee all day. Guess my reprieve was over.

  13

  Lee

  Longest. Day. Ever.

  I’d taken a number of my regulars out and about today, which always made me feel good. While I’d really rather have stayed home, I hadn’t been ready to face Mason this morning when my alarm went off, so I figured I might as well get some work done.

  I’d just dropped a couple of my regulars, Vivian and Sarah, off at their house. They were teenagers who attended a charter school for kids on the autism spectrum. Both of them were smart as whips, but had struggled in the public school system.

  Their current school had much smaller classes and teachers specially trained in helping kids learn to manage their education. The state paid for the charter school, but didn’t provide busing, when the kids lived in a different county. Their parents needed someone to pick them up most days, and that person had become me.

  Vivian, as always, had her nose buried in her phone. Sarah, the much more outgoing of the two, kept up a constant chatter about school all the way home.

  I'd just dropped them off when my phone beeped with an incoming message.

  KAINE: Hey slacker! Whatcha’ up to?

  ME: Just dropping off some kids. Why?

  KAINE: You want lunch?

  ME: Dude, it’s 3 o’clock!

  KAINE: So? I just got up. Be glad I didn’t call it breakfast.

  I laughed. Kaine was going to school days and working nights at a gay bar downtown called The Belt.

  ME: I could do coffee, if nothing else.

  KAINE: Swing by the ‘rents?

  ME: See you in 10.

  I pulled up outside my parents’ house a few minutes later. Kaine was sitting on the front steps. The crackle of the gravel under the Jeep’s tires caught his attention and a big grin lit his face. I couldn’t help but grin back. Kaine was one of those people that, when they smiled, everyone around them did, too. His whole face just lit up like a Christmas tree.

  He ran around to the passenger’s side and opened the door.

  “Is this seat taken?” he asked, with a suspiciously low voice.

  “Are you on ‘roids again?” I laughed.

  “Fuck no! You know I don’t do that shit. This body is one-hundred percent au naturel!” he said, dramatically waving his hands over his fit body as he fastened his seatbelt.

  “Pity the same can’t be said for your hair…” I quipped, pulling us into a three-point turn.

  “Hey!” he said, the mock outrage raising his voice back up into its normal range. “No fair! Lay off the locks!” He patted his hair affectionately.

  Kaine’s first boyfriend, Vinnie Avery, had dumped him right after school started in ninth grade, telling him he wasn’t good enough for him, that he never cared about his appearance, and he couldn’t figure out how someone so gay could be so ugly. He’d provided Kaine with a complete critique of the supposed flaws in his appearance, from his weight to his “shit brown” hair, and the list had devastated my brother.

  I know, sounded like first world problems, right? But Kaine had struggled with feeling unwanted since he was a kid. His parents had abandoned him when he was only ten. Like, literally, he woke up one morning alone in a rental house.

  No one knew how long he was alone in the house, not even Kaine, I thought. One of the neighbors had finally called the police, because she’d noticed there hadn’t been any adults around in a few weeks, and she’d spotted Kaine stealing a box of stale cereal out of her trash.

  Kaine had told me he thought maybe she had known he was alone a long time before she called the police, because he remembered finding food conveniently cleanly packaged and placed on top of the trash bin. They were always things it was easy for a young kid to eat and keep fresh, even after the electricity to the house had been turned off.

  The cops had turned him over to Child Protective Services and he’d bounced around a couple of foster homes until my moms had taken him in. They’d adopted him once the legal wrangling had terminated his parents’ rights.

  To be rejected by someone he loved again, in addition to his biological parents had left Kaine feeling like there was something wrong with him that made him unlovable. I couldn’t stand how devastated Kaine had been afterward. He’d refused to go to school for over a week and just hid in his bedroom. His devastation had my moms at their wits’ end. They both thought he should just brush it off and move on, not really understanding why he would care so much about the opinion of someone who was obviously shallow.

  Kaine and I were close in age and had been close growing up, and his devastation had hit me hard. After waking up in the middle of the night to sounds of him sobbing in his bedroom, I knew I'd to do something.

  That next morning I’d skipped school and walked the three miles to the nearest drug store, then spent most of my allowance on a home highlighting kit. I snuck back to the house and had proceeded to thoroughly fry his hair with it. By the time we were done, he probably would have been better off to just shave it off, but it did look fantastic, if I did say so myself. He walked into school the following Monday with more than just a new hair color - he had a whole new attitude.

  When his douche of an ex had tried to suck up to him and get back into his good graces, Kaine had pretended like he couldn’t even see the guy. Within a few weeks he had a
new boyfriend, Nicki, a kid who had been his best friend before Vinnie came along. The kid had come out of the closet because of his feelings for Kaine, and they’d been together until Nicki’s parents had moved away their junior year. A move that reopened all his feelings of abandonment.

  By that point I'd finished basic training and been deployed overseas and so hadn’t been around for the fallout from Nicki’s departure, but I knew it had hit Kaine hard.

  “So where to?” I asked as we pulled to the end of the driveway.

  “How about Wally Waffle?” he asked. “They just opened their new place on Tallmadge Circle,” he finished.

  I groaned.

  “You just want to get me killed on the Circle,” I said. Tallmadge Circle was a historic area in a nearby suburb. There was literally a circle of land that had an old church on it and some old school house historical spot. It was a tiny bit of green space, and on its own wasn’t an issue, it was the traffic around it. There were at least eight streets that led on and off and navigating them all safely was a challenge. You took your life in your own hands when you drove there.

  “Dude, you have lived here your whole life,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “How could you not know how to drive the Circle?”

  “I know how to drive it,” I said a bit peevishly. “It’s all the other idiots in the world who don’t know how to drive it. Did you hear they have so many accidents there they’ve turned it into a ‘no fault’ area? You get in an accident there and the cops won’t even ticket you.”

  “Is that what you and all your Uber driver friends talk about? What areas you can have an accident and not get in trouble for?” he teased.

  “No, we sit around and talk about our asshole passengers,” I said, eyeing him pointedly as he sat in my passenger seat.

  “Fucker,” he laughed. “Good thing you’re driving. Otherwise I might have to hurt you for that.”

  “As if you could,” I snorted.

  He eyed me and grinned. “You really think you could take me, old man?”

  We were stopped at a red light that I knew was extremely long, so I slipped into park and my arm flew around my brother’s neck, pulling him into a headlock. He struggled for a minute, but there was no way he was getting free.

  “Uncle! Uncle!” he cried finally, tapping the armrest in surrender.

  I laughed, releasing him.

  “Guess you’re buying lunch,” I said.

  “Joke’s on you,” he grumbled. “I was planning to, anyway.”

  “Yeah, right…” I said in disbelief. My brother was a notorious cheapskate – always had been. “I can’t remember the last time you paid when we went out.”

  “That’s different,” he said, one hand running through his hair as he checked his reflection in the sunshade mirror. “I act as your wingman when we go out. Can’t have our nation’s veterans go too long without getting laid.”

  “I so don’t need your help in that department,” I growled, as we pulled up to the Circle.

  “Really? Then when was the last time you got laid?” he smirked at me.

  “None of your goddamn business,” I said, merging into traffic.

  “That long, huh?” He said, pityingly. “Poor baby.”

  “Fuck you,” I said, but without much conviction.

  “Nah, even if I wasn’t your brother, you’re not my type,” he teased, looking me up and down appraisingly. “Though you are in pretty good shape for an old guy.”

  “Again, fuck you.” I growled as I turned on my blinker.

  We parked at the restaurant and walked in. There wasn’t much business at this time of day. They were primarily a breakfast place, so were at their busiest first thing in the morning. The hostess seated us, took our drink orders and gave us menus, then told us our server would be with us shortly.

  Kaine studied me as I looked over the menu.

  “So, how are you doing?” he asked. “For real, I mean,” he added.

  “I’m fine,” I said. “How have you been doing?”

  “Uh uh. This talk isn’t about me, it’s about you,” he said.

  “This ‘talk’?” I asked. “Who said we were having a ‘talk’?”

  “Um, well…” He squirmed a little uncomfortably in his seat. “Mama D might or might not have asked me to get in touch with you today…” he said sheepishly.

  “Uh oh,” I said and sighed. “What now?”

  He eyed me from across the table, his normally laughing grey eyes serious for once.

  “Mom’s worried about you. She thinks you aren’t sleeping,” he said.

  I sighed. I loved my parents, but they were a little too perceptive at times.

  “…And she wanted me to ask you what’s going on with this guy, Mason,” he added.

  I glanced at him sharply. Fuck. The last thing I wanted to do was discuss Mason with my baby brother.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” I lied through my teeth.

  “I call bullshit,” he fixed his gaze on mine. “You know exactly what I mean. The whole fam saw the way you guys looked at each other last night. It was hot enough in that room to start a fire,” he laughed, fanning himself with the menu.

  I sighed.

  “Nothing is going on between me and Mason,” I repeated. “The twins screwed up his hotel room, so he’s staying with me while he’s in town. That’s all.”

  Kaine’s ears perked up at that.

  “Oh, I see,” he said facetiously. “You just happen to meet this smart, funny, talented guy, not to mention rich, who also has an ass you could bounce quarters off and he, coincidentally, doesn’t have anyplace to stay and has to sleep in your secluded cabin in the woods? Yep, sounds legit to me.”

  “Fuck you,” I said, and threw a wadded-up napkin at him. He didn’t even have the decency to duck and it flew right past his ear to land on the booth seat. Something about the way he had talked about Mason had my blood boiling. He really didn’t need to be looking at him like that.

  “Again, with the no thank you,” he said, “…but if you keep bringing it up, I might just have to find you a blind date.”

  “I don’t need a blind date,” I said. “And you can tell the moms that I’m fine. Nothing a little sleep won’t solve.”

  I knew he was debating continuing the argument when our server walked up. I noticed, almost indifferently, that our harried server was a cute young guy with messy reddish-brown hair and a smattering of freckles across his cheeks. His eyes were bright blue and he looked strangely familiar to me.

  “I’m so sorry for the wait, guys, what can I get you?” he asked in a rushed, slightly out of breath voice.

  “Just coffee for me, please,” I said.

  Kaine was busy looking down at his menu. “I think I’d like the…” as he looked up his eyes caught on our server’s face, and Kaine’s normally tan face went white. “…Nicki?” He gasped, the name sighing out of his mouth as he locked eyes on the man’s face.

  My heart sank as I saw the man freeze. Sure enough, his name tag said “Dominic”, for all the world to see. What the hell?

  “Kaine,” the man whispered, his cheeks turning pink. I looked at my brother, who seemed frozen in shock. The last I'd heard Nicki had moved with his family to Florida or something. I must have made some kind of movement, because Nicki’s eyes flitted to me.

  “…Lee?” He asked, lifting an eyebrow in question. I stood, reaching my hand out to shake his, while I tried to cover for Kaine’s shock.

  “Good to see you, man! How’ve you been?” I asked.

  “Um, good, I guess?” He mumbled. Though he was talking to me, his eyes kept flitting nervously to Kaine who still sat in the booth dumbstruck.

  “When did you get back in town?” I asked, as I sat back down, real worry beginning to seize me as I looked at Kaine. He was still pale and frozen as he looked at his former friend in shock.

  “Um, a while now,” he said, nervously shifting from foot to foot.

  “What… What ca
n I get you guys?” he asked, looking around the restaurant nervously, but avoiding looking at Kaine.

  “Just coffee for me. Kaine, what did you want?”

  Kaine finally stirred when I said his name, his eyes dropping to his hands as they gripped the menu. His knuckles were white, and I saw the conscious effort he made to relax them and lay the menu down. We sat there for a few seconds.

  “Kaine?” I asked again softly.

  “I… I’m sorry. I can’t…” he paused, taking a deep breath. “I can’t do this.”

  He slid out of the booth suddenly and bolted for the door. I stood quickly and threw some cash on the table for the drinks and ran out after my brother.

  When I got outside, Kaine was standing on a stone wall that was halfway across the parking lot and separated it from the traffic on the Circle, his hands buried in his hair.

  “Kaine!” I yelled, and he finally stayed there, pacing back and forth so I could catch up with him. I reached my hand out to grip his shoulder gently.

  “I take it you didn’t know?”

  He just stood there and shook his head.

  “Nope,” he finally answered, his voice bitter. “Last I heard from him his family was living in Tampa. About a month after he moved, he—” his voice broke a moment, and I could hear the unshed tears in it. “He asked me to stop calling him. He said it would be… better… if we made a clean break.”

  “Fuck,” I said. I wrapped my arms around him and tugged him close. For a few minutes he just stood there, then I felt his chest heave and a sob tore loose from him.

  “He left me, Lee,” he said, his voice muffled against my shirt. “He left me. Like everyone leaves me.”

  I held onto him as he cried, trying to soothe him with nonsense words and phrases like I had when we were kids and he woke from a nightmare. He would always wake up crying, and then he’d have to go around to everyone’s room to make sure everyone was still there. It had taken years for the nightmares to stop.

  After a while, he calmed, and I watched as he started to rebuild the shell he showed the rest of the world.

  “Um,” he knuckled the last of tears from his eyes and took a deep breath. “Suddenly, I’m not that hungry. Mind if we head home?” he asked.