Middle of Somewhere Series Box Set

by Roan Parrish

  “Well, who’s gonna do Rafe’s, then?” I say, and the smile on his face becomes slightly forced.

  “Me!” Mischa yells. “Please, me,” she says to Rafe. He nods at her and sinks down on the bench next to me.

  Of course, within five seconds all the kids are gathered around us, not doing anything but eating snacks while they watch me and Rafe get our nails painted.

  “Colin, your hands are so messed,” says Mikal.

  “What?” I say, mildly offended. My hands are spotless. “Dude, have you seen most mechanics’ hands? Mine are the cleanest you’ll ever find.”

  “Oh, um, right. No, sorry, Colin. They’re nice,” Mikal says, patting the back of my hand and shooting a look over my head. “There you are!”

  DeShawn walks over and nods at everyone, setting his white backpack down carefully in the corner of the gazebo. Anders creeps along at his side, his all-black outfit an almost comical inversion of DeShawn’s.

  “Happy birthday, Mikal,” DeShawn says, kissing him chastely on the cheek, and Anders follows suit.

  “DeShawn, I got white especially for you,” says Tynesha from the other side of the nail polish table.

  Once they have DeShawn and Anders settled at the table, Carlos says, “Hey, maybe Anders should get white and DeShawn should get black. Or you could mix them.”

  He winks at them both lewdly. DeShawn braces himself on the table and pushes himself off the bench slightly, leaning into Carlos’ space. I’ve never seen him the slightest bit aggressive before and everyone freezes. He keeps eye contact with Carlos, his expression never even changing. After about thirty seconds that feels like an eternity, he sits back down and picks up the white nail polish.

  “Sorry, bro,” Carlos mutters and DeShawn nods peacefully, placing the black nail polish in front of Anders.

  “Aaaanywaaay,” Mischa says. “So, I’m thinking of doing galaxies on Rafe. It’s awesome ’cause his hands are so big that I’ll be able to get really good detail. What do you think?”

  The table agrees, but I stopped listening the second she mentioned Rafe’s big hands because all I can think of is waking up to them all over me.

  Recently, he likes nothing better than to wake me up by slowly stroking me to an aching hardness and then going down on me the second I’m conscious enough to nod okay. It’s basically the hottest thing ever and suddenly I’m feeling extremely self-conscious to be sitting at a table full of teenagers. I shake my head to clear it and avoid eye contact with Rafe.

  When I tune back in, Rafe’s fully engaged in a conversation with Mischa about the intricacies of a galaxy manicure and DeShawn is weighing in about the relative scale of the cosmos. Mikal is pushing on the skin around my nails with something that looks terrifyingly like an instrument of dental torture, and has apparently selected a gray nail polish for me.

  “Dude,” I say, “you’re gonna paint my nails the color of a dirty floor?”

  “It’s avant-garde!” Mikal insists.

  “Whatever. The gray trend is saturated and over,” Mischa says.

  “No way!” Mikal insists, clutching the bottle to his chest.

  “Um, never mind,” I say. “It’s cool. It’s… uh… oh, it’s like um, rims—tire rims. It’s cool.”

  “Dirty rims,” Carlos mutters under his breath, but when I shoot him a look, he raises his hands in peace. “What should I do, Mikal?”

  Mikal looks Carlos over. “Um, neon green?”

  Carlos grins.

  “Hi.”

  I look to my right and Ricky’s standing a few feet away.

  “Hey, Ricky. How are you?”

  She looks at the floor and cocks her head.

  “I’ll be right back,” I tell Mikal.

  I’m very careful not to bring up anything personal when Ricky’s working at the shop. Rafe was the one who first mentioned it, and it quickly became clear that he was right. That Ricky just wants to work on the cars when she’s at the shop. That she can only focus on that one task and that if I try to ask her about other things, she gets flustered and upset. As a result, though, this is the first time I’ve seen her outside of the shop since she started working there. I crouch down so Ricky’s taller than me.

  “Hey,” I say. “You’re doing great at the shop. Really great. You liking it there okay?”

  She nods, but she unwraps her arms slightly, bouncing gently on her toes.

  “I’m gonna get ginger ale,” she says and walks over to the snack table, but I think I see the ghost of a smile.

  The kids paint nails peacefully for a while, trading friendly barbs and compliments like always as their music pumps in the background.

  “Holy…,” Rafe mutters, and his eyes are on his nails. Mischa has actually made them look like pictures I’ve seen of outer space. Black with swirls and clouds of white, stars that blaze yellow and blue, and smatterings of dusty particles. “That’s amazing,” he says to Mischa.

  “Dude,” Mikal says, “there are, like, a thousand tutorials on YouTube. Get a meme.”

  I smile at Rafe. I should’ve known that it wouldn’t matter if it was actual astronomy or nail polish technique. Rafe is captivated by anything that takes skill. I’m so distracted by how handsome he looks that I don’t notice my own nails until Mikal says, “All done!”

  He’s changed the color somehow. My fingernails look like broken glass, with white shattered over the gray.

  “What the…?”

  “You like?” Mikal asks.

  “Dude, that’s… kind of awesome. Looks like a broken windshield.”

  “Good call on the crackle topcoat!” Mikal calls to Dorothy.

  She salutes him, then says, “An announcement, then cake.”

  “Ooh, there’s cake?” Mikal asks, and she just shoots him an offended look that says You would dare to doubt me?

  Dorothy nods to DeShawn and everyone falls into a circle, their attention on him.

  “I wanted you all to be the first to know,” DeShawn says, but his gaze is split between Rafe and Anders. “I got into MIT. I just found out.”

  Rafe lets out a whoop and is across the gazebo in an instant. He grabs DeShawn and squeezes him in a hug so tight DeShawn’s feet come off the floor.

  “Dude, dude, you’re gonna get your galaxies all over his shirt!” Carlos yells.

  Rafe unhands DeShawn, but he’s grinning wide.

  “I’m so proud of you,” he says to DeShawn. “So damn proud.”

  DeShawn is nodding and looking at the ground, seemingly overcome. Anders is standing against the wall. He doesn’t look surprised, but he’s watching DeShawn intently and he has his arms wrapped around himself.

  All the kids are whooping and patting DeShawn on the back, carefully keeping their freshly painted nails away from his white clothing, and Rafe looks like he’s close to tears. His eyes are wide and unfocused, and his hands are shaking at his sides, galaxies vibrating.

  Finally, in all the jumping and yelling, Rafe’s eyes find mine and everything in him pulls at me.

  I don’t care that we’re in public, don’t care we’re in front of twenty teenagers and that god knows what bubble-gummy dance music is blaring in the background. Rafe needs me, so I take a step toward him and keep my eyes on his.

  “Colin,” he says, his voice shaky. I nod at him and he grabs my shoulder. DeShawn had a lot of trouble over the last few months. A bunch of family issues arose, and his uncle was concerned about his mental health and turned to Rafe for some support. Since DeShawn is eighteen, Rafe felt okay being involved, and they’d ended up talking a lot about DeShawn’s future, and what he hoped for if he got into MIT. Rafe’s pride in DeShawn is radiating from him. He’s practically glowing.

  He pulls me to him and buries his face in my neck. My arms come around him automatically and I hold him tight. Then he tilts my chin up gently and kisses me. Just a light brush of our lips, but his thumb strokes my cheekbone and he’s looking into my eyes like he doesn’t see anything else at all.
/>   And suddenly it goes dead quiet except for the pulsing backbeat from the stereo.

  “Um….”

  “Uh….”

  “So….”

  The kids who already knew about Rafe and me are grinning. The others are staring at us and looking around at each other.

  “Oh. My. God. I totally called it!”

  “Dude, me too—I knew it!”

  “Um, yeah, we all knew it.”

  “But—”

  “And—”

  Then it’s just more clapping and squealing and the kids are bouncing around us. Someone has thrown their arms around us in an excited hug. Someone has turned the music up and the kids are dancing. Someone has thrown glitter up in the air and it’s falling down on us like rain.

  Through the backbeat and the nail polish and the goddamned glitter, Rafe puts his hands on my shoulders and my eyes find his. He holds me there, at arm’s length, like we’re kids at a middle school dance. But his smile is as warm as I’ve ever seen it. His dark hair falls around his face and his skin glows against the collar of his white T-shirt and he’s looking at me like I’m the only thing in the world.

  “Hey,” I say, “Rafe. Move in with me.”

  Rafe freezes for a moment, then relaxes. “I basically already live there,” he says over the music, his eyes dancing. I roll mine and look at him expectantly. He pulls me into a hug and I press my nose into his neck, breathing him in.

  “So? What do you say?”

  His laugh is pure joy. “Do we have nail polish remover at home?”

  THE END

  Something Permanent

  A Middle of Somewhere Bonus Story

  The world had become pink and red, white, and silver, and gold. Even the guy at the corner of Washington and 34th who sings to sell bottled water to drivers getting on the highway was upstaged by a temporary structure dipping halfway into the right turn lane that was hung with oversized white bears wearing red and pink hearts around their necks, wrapped in plastic against the car exhaust like the prizes at some janky State Fair booth.

  And every day since the influx of pinks and reds, at the back of my mind I’ve known I’d have to make a decision. The kind of decision that, even after more than a year of being with Rafe, still makes my breath hitch and my palms sweat:

  Was I supposed to make with this whole Valentine’s Day thing?

  I’d never even noticed the holiday before, beyond vaguely registering pink and red airplane bottles of that horrible cinnamon-flavored liquor in a pyramid on the checkout counter at the liquor store. Uh, not that I go to liquor stores anymore.

  Last year, I didn’t think about it and Rafe didn’t mention it. But was that because things were still so new between us, or because isn’t into it? I had no clue. He was kinda into holidays in general. Christmas and Thanksgiving and birthdays and all that shit. I guess with a family that celebrates them all and makes delicious food for you, why wouldn’t you be?

  But this year, I had noticed. And once it got in my head, I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Thinking about what it might be like to be a person who just got his boyfriend a Valentine’s card. And, yeah, the b-word still made me kind of cringe and smile simultaneously. Like a–a sminge. A crile? Whatever.

  I got up early this morning to run before Rafe was awake, and went right to the shop. In the process of my renovations over the past year, I put a shower in off the main office. Technically, it was a hazmat shower, designed to get chemicals and toxic materials off in case someone’s coolant reservoir explodes or something, but it was nice to be able to throw a change of clothes in my backpack and take a long run, ending up there and showering before starting on the cars. And it was very nice to be able to get home not stinking of oil and covered in grease because sometimes Rafe liked to pounce me as soon as I walked through the door. I mean, not that that’s the only reason I put in the shower. But it sure doesn’t hurt.

  I got myself another cup of coffee and texted my best friend, Xavier. He was married, so he should know about shit like this, right?

  Dude, I wrote, is val day like a THING. That I shd do.

  I sipped at the too-strong coffee for a minute, impatiently messing with my phone to see if he’d text back. When a minute passed with nothing, I sent another text. This one was to my brother, Daniel. Our relationship was … complicated, but since he and his partner Rex had moved back to Philly last year, we’d been trying to make shit work. I was still plagued by guilt for how crappy I’d been to him when he was younger, and how my fear that he’d end up getting hurt had led me to be a shit brother when I’d realized he was gay. Well, fine, fear that he’d get hurt and desperation that he never find out I was gay too.

  To Daniel, I wrote: Do you and rex do valentines day? Is that a thing gay dudes do? Should I get rafe sthing? Like … wtf should I get?

  I had just given up on either X or Daniel being of any use to me and was preparing to bury myself in a transmission rebuild, when my phone rang. Since the only people who ever called me were Rafe and Daniel, I grabbed it right away. It was Daniel, probably deciding he didn’t want to bother trying to coach me through this shit over text.

  “‘Is that a thing gay dudes do?’ Seriously?” Daniel was laughing at me. First I had the instinctive flash of irritation at being mocked, but I made myself to relax, forcing myself to remember that Daniel wasn’t the enemy anymore. “You do get that gay dudes are all different and some of them celebrate Valentine’s Day and some of them don’t, right?”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know, shut up.” He snorted. “But, so, do you?”

  “Uhh, well …” Daniel’s voice got that slight edge to it that usually signaled he was going to talk about Rex and felt self-consciously sappy about it. “Rex made me a bookstand. Like, a thing to keep books open on my desk so I could look at them while I was on my computer. It’s beautiful. This light wood that he sanded all soft. And there’s, like, a little tiny heart he carved in the bottom, but I can only see it if I flip it over; no one else can see. He had it sitting at my spot when we had breakfast. It’s … yeah.”

  His voice was dreamy. That was a pretty kick-ass present for someone with his nose constantly in a book. Rex was an amazing woodworker, so that made sense. I could’ve gone for the obvious tease that he and Rex apparently had breakfast together every morning like a couple of eighty-year-olds and wasn’t that just precious, but I needed info more than I needed the satisfaction of hearing Daniel get all blushy.

  “What’d you get him?” I asked.

  “I, uh, I kinda … I frgt,” Daniel mumbled.

  “What’d you say?”

  “Fuck. I forgot, okay? I didn’t know it was Valentine’s Day.”

  I laughed at that. Daniel was notorious for having no grasp of a calendar at all, unless he was staring directly at one.

  “Wow, you’re a terrible boyfriend,” I teased.

  “I know, right, I’m the fucking worst.”

  I could hear the clicks of his keyboard.

  “Do you need to go?”

  “What? Oh, no, I’m having office hours but no one’s here right now. I’m, like, googling Valentine’s Day presents. I kinda … uh, never mind.”

  “Speak.”

  “I might have, kinda told Rex that I had a present for him but I was gonna give it to him tonight.”

  “Bow chicka wha wha.”

  “Pshh, yeah right. I’m not seventeen.”

  “You used to promise to do dudes as a present when you were seventeen?”

  “Uh. Well, no. Anyway, I’ve got nothing.” He groaned. “I guess I could try and cook him dinner?”

  “Didn’t you basically burn the kitchen down when you tried that before?”

  One night, a few months ago, Rafe’s phone had dinged with a text and he’d immediately started cracking up. When I’d asked what it was, he’d turned his phone to show me a message from Rex that was a picture of their kitchen with the stove shooting flames two feet in the air, and Daniel’s face half out of the
photo, looking like that painting where the dude is screaming. Yeah, don’t get me started on how weird it is that Rafe and Rex are buds now.

  “I didn’t burn it down,” Daniel muttered. “It was just a grease fire or whatever. But, okay, yeah, maybe that’s not the best idea.”

  “It’s basically the worst idea.”

  “Yeah, yeah. Okay, so back to your last-minute ass. You’re trying to figure out what to get for Rafe?”

  “No, I’m trying to figure out if this dopey holiday is even a thing I should be celebrating. Like, I don’t give a shit, but how do I know if Rafe does?”

  “Uh, shooting from the hip here, but did you consider, like, asking him?”

  “Oh, now you’re all into the direct, honest communication thing, when six seconds ago you told me you lied to Rex’s face about him getting the best present ever tonight?”

  “Uh. Yeah, okay, fair. Well, but I know Rex cares about it, and I totally would’ve gotten him something. I just forgot it was today.”

  “Yeah, by all means make it a competition about who’s better at life.”

  “You texted me to ask about this, so you clearly know I’m better at life.”

  “Fuck off.”

  Daniel laughed.

  “Okay, well, we can figure this out. Does Rafe like holidays?”

  “Yeah. His family’s always all over that shit.”

  “Does he like getting presents or is he more of an activity dude?”

  “Huh?”

  “Like, would he rather go out to dinner and go … like … I don’t fucking know … ice skating or some shit? Or would he want an object you purchased at a store.”

  “I know what a fucking present is, bro.”

  “Pardon me forever for somehow getting the impression we were starting with the basics, asshole.”