Reunion

by Michael Bailey

  “I’m sure that wasn’t the case,” I countered.

  He smiled weakly. “No, it wasn’t. But you know how grief and guilt work. They convince you that everything’s your fault, even the things that you have no control over. Like death.”

  “And she thought that because of the fighting she had done with your parents, and the fact she was so far away, that contributed to his heart attack.”

  “No one could convince her otherwise.”

  “Were there any warning signs?”

  “Not a single one. He’d just had a physical, and everything checked out. As far as anyone knew, he was healthy.”

  “She shouldn’t have blamed herself. There wasn’t anything anyone could do.”

  “Believe me, my mother and I tried to convince her of that. She came home the day before the funeral, but didn’t socialize with anyone. Except for the service, she stayed in her room, and left the day after.”

  “Doesn’t that seem kind of…selfish?” I asked, then rushed out, “I don’t mean to offend. She’s your sister after all. But all of you were going through a loss. Your mother had just her husband, and you and your sister had lost your father.”

  “I guess she didn’t see it that way. She couldn’t see past her own guilt. We thought things would get better. She went back to school and called regularly. She started to sound okay. But then my mother got a call that no mother should get.”

  Noah paused for a moment. He took a deep breath and held it while I sat transfixed, afraid to say anything and afraid of what was to come next.

  Finally, when he spoke, it was almost in a whisper. “Her roommate found her in her room, unconscious and unresponsive, with a syringe on the bed next to her. She’d overdosed.”

  He seemed lost for a moment in the memory. On instinct, despite all of the secrets he was now telling me, or maybe because of them, I reached out and laid a hand on his knee. I wanted him to have some grounding in reality, for him to know that I was there, that he could take his time. If I spoke, I was afraid I would say the wrong thing, so I stayed quiet.

  “When my sister was well enough to travel, my mother pulled her out of school and brought her home. She took her to a rehab facility here. She just wanted her daughter to be close after losing her husband. But that started this…cycle that we never seemed to get out of. My sister spent years in and out of rehab facilities. The toll it took on my mother was…something no parent should have to go through.”

  “This all happened while we were in high school?”

  He nodded. “Yes.”

  “Noah,” I whispered. “Why didn’t you tell anyone? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Tears ran down his face as he said, “Because I was ashamed. How do you tell people that your sister’s a drug addict? Here I was, a student athlete. Do you know how much pressure there is to keep up appearances? I know it sounds selfish, and I don’t mean it to be. But at the time, that’s how I felt. I was ashamed of my own sister.”

  “And now?”

  “I miss her. I’d like to think she and I would have gotten along. I’d like to think that she would have understood and accepted me. But as long as she was going through all of that, as long as my mother was dealing with having an addict for a daughter, I knew that I could never tell my mother who I was. I had to stay in the closet.”

  “‘Miss her’? Noah, what happened?”

  He sucked in a breath to calm himself. “Honestly, nothing. For a while. She finally got her life straightened out. She met a man named Martin and fell head over heels for him. They got married, had a baby boy. Things looked like they were finally up the upswing for her.

  “I was there, at the hospital, on the day Nicholas was born, pacing the waiting room like those expectant fathers you see in the old sitcoms. But I wasn’t, obviously. I was simply the uncle. What right did I have, really?

  “But Nicholas’s birth meant something. It meant that we were finally at the end of a long ordeal. Grace had been through hell and back and survived the experience. We could breathe. For the first time in years, we could actually breathe.”

  Noah paused again. His face contorted in obvious pain. He closed his eyes tight, fresh tears spilling. “Nicholas was two years old when we got the call. Grace and Martin had been found in their car in a dilapidated part of town. Martin was dead. Grace was unresponsive. And Nicholas…he was strapped in his car seat in the back.

  “All three were rushed to the hospital. They couldn’t do anything for Martin. They looked Nicholas over, and he seemed fine. But Grace was in and out. For two days. At one point, she was lucid enough to tell us what had happened. She died shortly after that.

  “What we didn’t know was that Martin had been a user, just like she had been. They’d met in rehab, although she told my mother and me that it was through a mutual friend. They’d both been clean and sober for a few years, and thought maybe one score wouldn’t do any damage, especially if they were together to keep an eye on each other. So they loaded up into the car, met up with a dealer, and shot up right there.”

  I squeezed his leg. “Noah, that’s just…I’m sorry, but that’s awful. Nicholas was in the back seat?”

  His voice sounded small when he answered, “Yes.”

  “Does he remember anything from it?”

  “No, thank God. He was too young. But for months after, he’d scream and cry for his mommy and daddy, and it would break our hearts. How do you tell a two-year-old that his parents aren’t coming back? How do you tell him that he’ll never see them again?”

  “I don’t know that you can,” I answered lamely. “I think you just have to make the best of the situation you’ve got, console them when they cry, hold them when they need it, and listen to them when they need to talk.”

  “You’re right. That’s what I did.”

  “You volunteered to take him?”

  He smiled, and for the first time since he started telling me his story, the smile was warm, loving, as if he was replaying a happy memory in the midst of all that misery. “Kind of. It was more a process of elimination. Martin’s parents were both dead and he had no siblings. My mom was too old at that point to take on a two-year-old. And I was not about to let my nephew be put into the foster care system.”

  I couldn’t help but smile at this. Deciding to raise a child was no easy choice. But I understood why he would want to.

  “But I also figured that if I was going to raise a child, I had to do it honestly. I’d come out to Thomas and Ethan in college, but I didn’t have the heart to tell my mom. Not with everything else she was going through. But I also realized that there would never be a ‘good time’ to tell her, and I didn’t want to raise Nicholas in an environment that condoned lies and half-truths. So, before I made my final decision, I sat her down and told her.”

  I cringed. I could only imagine how that conversation went. I didn’t know much about his parents, but what I did know made me fear for how she reacted.

  He apparently saw my reaction because he gave me a weak smile before saying, “It didn’t go the way I expected, believe me.”

  “Meaning?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to know the answer.

  “Meaning that she wasn’t completely accepting at first. But, in her words, she had buried her husband and her daughter. There was a small part of her that was angry with God for taking them from her. She knew that was unreasonable, but she said she couldn’t help it. She promised to work toward acceptance because she refused to lose another family member.”

  Since this whole conversation began, I’d had one question rattling around inside my head. One question that, after everything he had just told me, I needed an answer to. “Why?”

  He looked at me confused. “I don’t understand.”

  I guess the question was too broad, after all. Even to me. Because even within that one-word question were so many more. Why had he decided to come to this reunion? Why had he not told me about his sister when we were in school? Why did he feel the need to t
ackle all of that on his own? Instead, I settled on, “Why didn’t you tell me about Nicholas before?”

  He looked down at my hand still resting on his leg. Then he covered it with his own and looked me in the eye. “Because I was ashamed.”

  “Of what? Of Nicholas?”

  He snorted out a laugh. “No, not of him. Never of him. That kid is my world. I never, ever dreamed that one day I would be a father. But the moment he came into this world, long before Ethan helped me adopt him, I vowed that I would do everything for him I could. So, no, I’m not ashamed of him. I’m ashamed of me.”

  “But you haven’t done anything wrong,” I said, finding myself in the unusual position of defending him to himself.

  “That’s where you’re wrong. See, years ago, I was ashamed to have a drug addict for a sister. I did everything I could to keep her issues a secret from everyone else in my life. I was also scared that if my parents found out I was gay, they would hate me, or worse. I had to separate myself into three people in a way. One that dealt with my home life. One that dealt with school. And one that dealt with…with you.”

  “Me?”

  “Yes, you. Because whether you know it or not, even though I could never tell you why, you were my safe harbor. You were the one that allowed me to be my most authentic self. But I let the pressures of my other two selves ruin that. I should have never been ashamed of my sister, and I should have never kept you at arm’s length. And now that we’re here, I don’t want to. Yes, I should have told you about Nicholas from the start, but with all of the other baggage that came along with it, I was terrified. I wanted to see where this went first.”

  My heart hammered against my chest as I asked, “Where do you want this to go?”

  Gently, he cupped my cheeks in his hands, leaned in, and kissed me. Nothing forceful, nothing abrasive; more testing, tentative. As if he had just laid everything on the table and was gauging my reaction. He was scared. I could feel it in the quiver of his lips.

  I, however, was not. I wanted to do for him what I wasn’t able to all those years ago. He had called me his safe harbor, and I wanted to be that for him, to show him that, no matter what obstacles there would be, we would try to work through them together. He didn’t have to fight alone. He didn’t have to feel ashamed.

  Not anymore.

  I don’t know how long we kissed. What I do know is that when he pulled away, I felt the loss.

  “This won’t be easy,” he said. “I don’t know how you feel about kids, but you have to know that Nicholas has to come first.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less.”

  “I want you to meet him. You have to meet him. Because in my gut, I know, I know, you and I are worth it. I wouldn’t want to expose him to something like this without being absolutely sure.”

  “I want to. If you had any hand in raising him, he’s a part of you as much as you’re a part of him. And, Noah?”

  “Yes?”

  “I want that too. I want to see where this goes.

  “And you’re still in Detroit.”

  “For now.”

  “But I’d like to at least try.”

  I leaned forward and kissed him. “I’d like that too.”

  “What time is checkout?”

  I kissed him again. “Eleven.”

  “What time is it now?”

  I glanced over at the clock on the nightstand, then kissed him a third time. “Nine.”

  His lips broke out into a devilish grin. “Plenty of time.”

  Then he dove onto me like a man starved, leaving me breathless.

  The End…for now

  I also want to thank Annabella Michaels. Your friendship has meant so much to me. I don’t know that I will ever be able to repay you.

  Special thank you to my beta team, including Annabella Michaels, Jenn Gibson, Lori Greis, and my editor Allison Holzapfel were instrumental in helping to make the words flow better..

  Special thanks go to Morningstar Ashley of Designs by Morningstar for the absolutely beautiful cover.

  Thank you to Allison Holzapfel for an amazing job at editing this book.

  Also, thank you to Judy Zweifel from Judy’s Proofreading who made the words flow better, despite more punctuation errors than I can count. Maybe someday I’ll figure out how to use an M Dash.

  And, finally, I want to thank you, the reader. You embraced me and my stories in a way that has enriched my life. Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

  So, I tried to get away with a simple, “Hi, I’m Michael.” But, nnnnoooo, that wasn’t an option. So here we go.

  Before getting into M/M romance, I was a total nerd. Sci-Fi, fantasy (not THAT. Sword, sorcery, that kind of thing), comics, toys. You name it, if it screamed dork, I probably did it. I was a homodork, and proud.

  In addition to that, I’ve dreamed of writing since I was eleven years old when I wrote a truly awful Choose-Your-Own-Adventure. It sold exactly zero copies. My mother may have a copy lying around somewhere. Mothers keep that kind of thing. I also wrote fantasy (Yes, THAT kind: guy meets guy, they fall in love, have the white picket fence and live happily-ever-after)

  I would walk into a book store and peruse all two shelves of their gay selection, and would always come away disappointed. The books were depressing, nothing spoke to me about love and happiness.

  Then I read one book. I won’t tell you what book, but it had two handsome men and a dog on the cover. I read it in one sitting, and was hooked. I fell in love with the M/M genre to moment I read that first sentence, and I have been in love with it since.

  I am astounded at the limitless story potential within one genre. You can literally do anything within the genre, from comedy to paranormal, mystery to sci-fi, fantasy to straight out romance, and everything in between.

  Life took control, as it often does, and the dream of writing was put on hold. Then, in November of 2016, I took a leap of faith, and began writing my first novel as part of the National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) competition. The goal of the competition is to write a 50,000-word novel in a thirty-day period.

  I failed.

  However, on the advice of a friend, I “pushed through”. And so, in September of 2017, my first novel was published.

  I have always believed in the power of the written word, and the ability for one story to touch the reader in such a way that it can literally change the course of their life. This one book opened up a world of possibilities for a middle-aged guy from Toledo, Ohio, and is what ultimately led me here. And, I am happy to say, I never looked back.

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  Looking In

  David Barrows world fell apart at the age of eleven after his mother died. Years of physical and emotional abuse followed, leaving him scarred in body and mind, mired in the belief that he is unlovable. He spends his days working in a comic shop, and his nights alone wrestling with the ghosts of his past.

  As a Marine, Adam Duncan has sworn to protect and serve, and there is no one he is more protective of than his brother and nephew. When tragedy strikes, threatening the security of his family, his protective instincts kick in. But how can he fight an enemy he can’t see?

  David and Adam feel the connection between them, but David has built walls around his heart that no one has bothered to break through, until Adam. Adam can see what a special man David is, and is willing to do whatever it takes to break down those barriers. Can he make David see he doesn’t have to keep living his life…Looking In?

  Looking Forward

  Owen Hannity was nineteen when he lost almost everyone he thought he could trust. Each loss more painful than the last.

  With the unwavering support of his best friend, Andy, Owen put the pieces of his life back together. Now, more than two decades later, Owen owns and operates a successful comic shop. Despite his modicum of success, he st
ill feels like a shell of a man, carrying the emotional scars from his past.

  Without warning, Owen’s past returns. Secrets come to light. Secrets that could either destroy Owen or finally give him the strength to re-evaluate everything he thought he knew about Andy, himself, and the way in which he views the world.

  To see that he is truly worthy of loving himself and finally begin…

  …Looking Forward.