3

by Jacob Z. Flores

  “You call that simple,” Spencer replied, looking at Dutch as if he were stupid. “There’s nothing simple about what you’re proposing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Are you serious? You can’t really be seriously asking me that question?”

  He stared into Spencer’s eyes, which no longer blazed with passion. Anger now threatened to spark. “I am,” he replied. Even though he knew his answer would fan the burning embers, he added, “I don’t think you’re seeing this logically.”

  Spencer snorted. “I’m the only one here who is. Your solution to live together in some homo commune is ridiculous. That’s not how relationships work!”

  “They can work that way,” he stated. “I’ve known several trios. I agree that they’re uncommon, but they’re not impossible.”

  “They’re not common because they’re insulting.” Spencer rose from the bed and proceeded to put his clothes back on. “They’re insulting to the millions of other couples who are capable of fidelity, who can commit themselves to only one other person for the rest of their lives. And I’m not about to prove all those Christian fundamentalists out there right.”

  “That’s what you’re worried about? The religious crackpots?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. You know what I’m talking about. I’m not going to be one of those stereotypical gay men who makes decisions solely on his dick getting hard.”

  “Is that all I am?” Dutch asked. “Someone who gets your dick hard? You just said you loved me. That you still love Justin. That certainly sounds like a trio to me already. I think you’re having difficulty with this because it shatters your fantasy about what a relationship looks like. You don’t have to be like everyone else, Spencer. We don’t have to be like everyone else.”

  Spencer didn’t respond. Instead, he finished putting on the rest of his clothes.

  “I know you, Spencer. You’re very resistant to change, to things that are unfamiliar to you. You avoided relationships out of fear of getting hurt. You told me that, remember? But Justin changed that. And look how happy he made you.”

  “Until he cheated,” Spencer replied, zipping up his jeans. “With you.”

  “Are we really going there?” he asked. “When you’re busy getting dressed after fucking around in my bed?”

  “You’re right,” Spencer responded. “I’m not better than the two of you. I used to be. Until you dragged me into your insane world.”

  “Dragged you?”

  “Yes, dragged me. I was perfectly happy with Justin. My life was coasting along just fine. Until he cheated. Until you set about seducing me. I wasn’t confused about what I wanted. I wanted my life with Justin back, but apparently that’s impossible. I see that now.”

  “Whoa!” Dutch replied, getting out of the bed. “When did you become the innocent victim here? You left Justin. Isn’t that what got this whole thing started? Plus, you flirted with me when you were supposedly working things out with him and almost had sex with me in my office. And now, well, now you’ve just finished cumming at least three times.” He crossed over to Spencer, still naked. “You need to take a good hard look at yourself.”

  “And you need to back up,” Spencer warned. “Don’t think you can intimidate me.” Spencer crossed the remaining distance between them, standing toe to toe with Dutch. “I’m not scared of you. Not. One. Bit.”

  “How the hell did we get here?” Dutch asked, backing away. He wasn’t trying to intimidate Spencer. He simply wanted him to calm down, to see how irrational he was being. They both needed to calm down, quickly. “We just had a beautiful evening together.”

  “Well, that’s over now,” commented Spencer. “Thanks for ruining it.”

  “I still don’t understand,” he said. “I don’t know what went wrong.”

  “What went wrong is that I realized what a fool I’ve been. This has never been about you and me or me and Justin. This has been about you and Justin the whole time.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “This is what you’ve both wanted the whole time, isn’t it? A way to assuage your guilt. To clear your consciences. Get me to agree to a trio so that you two get to have your cake and eat it too. You both get each other while I get whatever scraps the two of you are willing to dole out to me. I deserve better than that.”

  “That’s not it at all,” Dutch said. “I would never do that to you. I love you. That’s not how you treat someone you love.”

  “No,” he said. “It’s not. I realize that now more than ever.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked Spencer. He tried to pull Spencer into an embrace, but Spencer refused, crossing over to the bedroom door instead.

  “Loving someone means you don’t hurt them. What the three of us have been doing isn’t love. It’s some warped version of the real thing. Justin betrayed me. You betrayed me. We both betrayed Justin by lying to him and by fucking each other tonight. This isn’t love, Dutch. It’s three grown men acting like spoiled brats.”

  “You can’t believe that,” he argued. “Not after everything we’ve shared these past few months.”

  “I can and I do,” Spencer replied. “I’ve been deluding myself. Thinking that these feelings, whatever they are, are real. But they can’t be. I thought that Justin and I had something special. I thought you and I had something special. But when you brought up the idea of the three of us living together as a trio, I realized there’s nothing special about a fuck frenzy.”

  “The three of us aren’t a fuck frenzy,” Dutch pointed out, perturbed that Spencer was reducing their relationships to something so crude. “I’m in love with you.” Even though Spencer fought him, he wrapped his arms around him and held him close, refusing to let him view their shared love in any negative light. “This relationship the three of us have stopped being about any two of us a long time ago. And deep down inside you know that.”

  “Don’t tell me what I know,” Spencer argued while straining against his embrace.

  “We fell in love with each other,” he continued, ignoring Spencer’s curses and struggles. “While it might be scary and while it might be nontraditional, it doesn’t make it wrong. It doesn’t make us wrong.”

  Spencer wiggled in his arms, trying to force his way free. Dutch wouldn’t let him go. He was strong enough, both physically and emotionally, to keep Spencer from erecting those barriers that protected him. Even though Spencer didn’t know that was what he was doing, Dutch had finally put it together.

  Spencer’s reaction stemmed from fear, of how vulnerable he would be in a relationship with two men. He was almost destroyed by just one man. Two men had the potential to obliterate him completely. For all his bravado, there lived within Spencer a scared little boy searching desperately for the love and security his family never gave him.

  “You’re safe,” he told Spencer. “With the both of us. I promise you.”

  “You can’t promise me that. No one can,” Spencer replied. While his tone remained rigid, much of the fight left his body, almost as if he had given himself up to the hope that Dutch might be speaking the truth.

  “I can,” Dutch assured him. “And tomorrow, when we find Justin, he’ll make the same promise.”

  Spencer squeezed him tightly. The fight was gone. His need to fortify himself had passed. While his trembling body still told Dutch he was afraid of the possibility, his green eyes now mirrored hope, not fear. “We need to find him. We need to make him come home.”

  “We will,” he told Spencer. “In the morning, we’ll turn this city upside down. We’ll go to all your friends’ houses and make them tell us the truth if they know it. Together, we will make it happen. We can make anything happen.”

  JUSTIN sped down I-35, swerving between cars that traveled much too slowly for his agitated state. He had neither the patience nor the time to deal with their leisurely speeds. He had to get out of San Antonio as quickly as possible. There was nothing left for him here anymore.

  His futur
e now existed somewhere out there in the darkness, beyond the reach of the arcing headlights of his car. The road he had believed to be paved before him, the one that included Spencer and Dutch, cracked and crumbled, turning into an endless stretch of gravelly country road that led to no place in particular and certainly no place special.

  The lack of a clear path used to frighten him. He always needed a focus, a direction, to give him purpose, or he feared he might somehow drive off the road into the open air that waited to claim him just beyond the painted yellow lines.

  That need for control had sprung to life the moment his father walked away from him for no reason. He’d felt abandoned on the side of the road, left to find his way in a world that never heard the pleas or the tears of a frightened young boy who only wanted someone to rescue him and bring him home.

  That scared little boy no longer waited on the shoulder of life’s road. He now drove on the asphalt, passing by car after car, putting as much distance as he could between him and the people who’d hurt him far worse than his father ever had.

  Spencer and Dutch had cured him of his need for control. They’d reminded him that control was an illusion, that permanence was fleeting, and that eventually everyone rejoined the traffic of lost souls, searching for a new home once the previous life kicked all to the curb without warning.

  That would never happen to him again. From now until the day he died, he would operate his life, like his car, as a single passenger. There would be neither need nor room for anyone else to occupy the second seat.

  The carpool lane in his life was closed down permanently, and that suited him fine.

  His days would forever be his own. Free from the ties of a relationship and the pain of heartbreak, he could sail through his remaining years on the open road without any baggage cluttering up the trunk of his existence.

  Life would now be one endless, carefree road trip.

  Unexpectedly, the Toyota Tundra to his right swerved into his lane. Justin steered his vehicle onto the far left side of the highway while at the same time pounding away on his horn. “Motherfucker!” he screamed at the driver. “Watch where the fuck you’re going!”

  In response, a hand suddenly appeared out of the driver’s side window and flipped him off.

  “Fuck that shit!” Justin yelled. He slammed his foot against the accelerator to match the now speeding truck. Once he drew parallel with the truck, he lowered the passenger side window and returned the hand gesture with his own. “Learn how to drive, cocksucker!” he bellowed as the two vehicles shot down the interstate.

  The driver of the truck shouted something back at him, but the high speeds and whipping wind made it impossible to comprehend. Now angry beyond reason that someone could drive so recklessly, without any regard for the safety of others on the road, Justin yanked his wheel to the right to prove a point. He wanted the other driver to experience what it felt like to have someone cross into his lane of traffic.

  The truck’s horn blared in response to Justin’s move, and the driver swerved right to avoid Justin, but in doing so, the driver overcorrected and lost control of his vehicle, smacking into the side rail.

  Sparks flew around the Toyota as metal scraped against the side rail before the truck came to a complete stop.

  Justin laughed and looked in the rearview mirror as the driver got out of his truck and ran after him, as if he had any hope of catching up to Justin as he sped away into the night.

  When Justin returned his eyes to the road, he had just enough time to register that he had come to a bend in the highway. The road directly in front of him no longer existed as the interstate snaked left. All that waited in front of him was the emptiness of the night sky.

  He slammed on the brakes, spinning the steering wheel to his left in an attempt to change his course, but his speed prevented such hasty correction. His car crashed through the guardrail and hung suspended for a few seconds in midair before plummeting to the ground below.

  SPENCER chased Justin down a winding road; the rocky ground below his feet made it difficult for him to close the gap, to get any closer to Justin, who sprinted ahead of him and refused to stop despite his many pleas.

  He had to reach Justin, who wasn’t looking where he was going. He didn’t seem to notice the sharp twists and turns of the path, or the fact that the road gave way to open air, which dropped down a very steep and dangerous hill.

  One misstep or one inopportune stumble might send him off the path and into the darkness beyond, where Spencer couldn’t reach him. No matter how hard he tried.

  “Justin!” he screamed again. His voice was course and strained. He had been yelling at Justin for what seemed like hours, trying to get him to listen, to understand what happened between him and Dutch.

  Still, Justin’s mad dash never slowed. He tripped and teetered close to the cliff’s edge, but then he found his footing and once again darted down the road, away from Spencer, who only wanted to keep him safe.

  Spencer pumped his legs faster, pouring every last bit of energy he had into his limbs and forcing them to reach speeds never before achieved in his life. But his legs grew increasingly heavier until they seemed made of stone instead of flesh and bone.

  His full-out run slowed to a trot and then to a jog before he finally collapsed onto the dusty ground, unable to move or get up.

  “Justin!” he screamed. “Please stop!”

  If he heard, Justin made no attempt to slow down. He ran wildly ahead, oblivious to the dangers around him until his feet carried him over the edge of the cliff and he dropped out of sight and into the darkness below.

  “Justin!” Spencer cried out as he sat up in bed, drenched in sweat. His heart thudded in his chest, and fear reached inside his gut and violently pulled on his stomach.

  “Justin, no!” Dutch shouted, sitting straight up and scrambling out of the bed they’d both crawled back into together. His eyes were wide in fear as he looked around the room, searching for Justin in the darkness of the night and wanting to pull him within his ever-protective embrace.

  “He’s hurt,” Spencer announced.

  “I know,” replied Dutch. “Something’s wrong.”

  Spencer’s cell phone suddenly started blaring “Stop in the Name of Love” by Diana Ross and the Supremes, the ringtone he and Justin used for Justin’s mother Elena. He eyed the phone suspiciously, not wanting to answer it and knowing deep within his breaking heart that something was seriously wrong. Diana Ross’s crooning voice didn’t fool him. Nothing but bad news awaited him on the other end of the phone.

  Ignorant to the sense of dread, or perhaps choosing to ignore it, Dutch clambered naked over the bed to retrieve the phone. He answered it in one swipe while at the same time handing the phone over to Spencer.

  Shaking his head, Spencer refused the phone. He didn’t want to hear the news Elena wanted to share. If he didn’t hear what she had to say, it wouldn’t be real. Justin would still be okay. He wouldn’t be hurt. Or worse.

  No, it was better not to know. Anything was better than that.

  “Spencer?” He heard Elena’s voice come from the phone. She sounded awful, as if someone ripped her heart out of her chest and kicked it around like a soccer ball. “Spencer, are you there?”

  He backed away from the phone, putting more distance between the phone, Dutch’s outstretched hand, and himself, as if by increasing the gap he could further separate himself from the foreboding words waiting to spill from his mother-in-law’s lips.

  “Take it,” whispered Dutch, trying to keep his presence with Spencer this late at night from Justin’s mother. “We need to know.”

  Tentatively, Spencer reached for the phone. When he finally held it in his palm, the cool rubber casing sent icy chills shooting down his hand into his arm until they found his heart and mercilessly stabbed at it with careless abandon.

  He took a deep breath and hit the speaker button. He couldn’t handle hearing the news alone. Dutch needed to hear it too.


  “I’m here, Elena,” he finally replied.

  At the sound of his voice, she broke into heart-wrenching sobs. The agony in those tears ripped his already punctured heart to shreds, causing him to almost fall over. Dutch luckily reached his side in time to steady him. When he wrapped his arms around Spencer, his body quakes slowly became still and calm.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked. “What’s happened?”

  “It’s Justin,” she wailed. “He’s hurt so bad.”

  Spencer’s knees buckled, but Dutch caught him. The world around him spun out of control. He was in danger of blacking out, of shutting down so he wouldn’t have to deal with the truth, so he wouldn’t have to learn what had happened to the man he still loved so desperately.

  “Is he…?” he said, trying to suppress the rising panic straining his voice, but he couldn’t complete the question. His hand once again shook so violently he almost dropped the phone, but Dutch’s massive quivering hand reached out to steady him, and together, they were able to steady their shared tremors of dread.

  “The doctors…,” she began, fighting back the sobs that made it impossible for her to communicate. “Th-they say… oh, Spencer, I can’t say it. Just come. Please come,” she begged. “He’s at Methodist Hospital.”

  Spencer nodded. He couldn’t reply. His vocal chords refused to cooperate.

  “Come quickly,” she said before hanging up the phone.

  No longer able to hold it, the phone tumbled from Spencer’s grasp. It landed on its glass face and shattered. Tiny slivers of glass exploded outward, littering the floor with the pieces that had once made it whole.

  CHAPTER 47

  2011

  STARING at Justin’s broken body nearly sent Spencer over the edge.

  The blue plastic tubes inserted down his throat forced air into his lungs. Yards of medical bandages wrapped around his head, his chest, and his right leg. Justin’s left arm rested at a forty-five degree angle, enclosed in a cast from his palm to just below his elbow.