by Mary Calmes
He nodded.
“So maybe we could go see your folks. What do you think?”
“Okay,” he agreed after a moment of thought.
“And if it’s bad, we’ll leave and just go get a hotel room on the strip and order room service and watch porn.”
He rolled his head to look at me, reaching out, hand over my heart, over the L for his name. “I’m sorry, okay?”
“Nothing to be sorry for; I knew you weren’t going anywhere,” I assured him, brushing the hair out of his eyes. “You threaten me, but you’d never fuck around on me.”
“No.”
“I know.” I smiled at him, my eyes fluttering, so tired I was barely conscious.
“I shouldn’t threaten you, though. It’s stupid.”
“It’s human,” I told him, admiring his cute little upturned nose and his long gold eyelashes even as I fought to stay awake.
He sighed deeply. “I’m okay. Go to sleep. I’ll clean you up, tuck you under the covers, and lie down beside you and watch TV. I won’t leave—why would I want to?”
“You promise?”
“I promise,” he said breathlessly. “I’ll never leave you. Without you I don’t even know who the fuck I am.”
“Yes, you do. You’re okay.”
“Only because you say so.”
I really need to think about fixing that, I thought before my eyes fluttered closed.
I WOKE in the night to fingertips being trailed slowly, sensuously, up and then down my spine from the nape of my neck, following the groove that ran the length of my back, to the divots above the swell of my ass. The motion was delicate, reverent, the touch enjoyed, savored, and when lips made the same journey, I sighed deeply.
“Don’t wake up,” he whispered, fingers back, stroking so light, so infinitely gentle. “I just need to say that I’m sorry, so sorry. I was selfish today, and I didn’t mean to be. It’s just sometimes I think something, something bad, and then I get stuck there, in that place, and I can’t get out. I want to, but I just can’t.”
I knew that.
He pressed his lips to the small of my back before he turned his head, and I felt his weight settle over me as he used my ass for a pillow.
My sigh was deep.
“I love you,” he said, his voice trembling.
“Me too,” I whispered back.
The kiss on my right cheek made me smile. The bite made me giggle.
“Go to sleep,” he chided me.
I whined under him. “Maybe I could get laid first?”
He grunted like it was a hardship. “Roll over.”
“Not if you’re gonna be like—”
“Now.”
I rolled over.
Chapter 5
WE WERE sitting in the boarding area, and I was looking across the terminal at Landry as he stood in line at Starbuck’s. When Chris had appeared the following morning, Landry had given him the good news that we would go to Vegas with him. He had grabbed his brother and then me, repeating over and over how much he appreciated it. I told him that touching me a lot was not the way to endear himself to Landry. When Chris saw his face, the glare, the clenched jaw, the corded muscles in his neck, he understood. “Possessive” was an understatement where Landry was concerned.
I had called my friend Donna, who was a travel agent, and she did some wheeling and dealing and got the three of us coach seats together on the left side of a 747.
Landry packed because as OCD as he was, you could not ask for better. He never forgot anything. We could be lost at sea and be okay the way the man accounted for every possibility.
So early the following morning, right around five thirty, I was sitting in the chairs watching him stand in line to get drinks for the flight and fiddle with his iPod at the same time. As usual, Landry had surprised me. I had thought he’d be a mess, be scared or worried, but he wasn’t. He was a rock. His voice had changed to matter-of-fact, and he had politely refused his brother’s offer to buy our plane tickets, busting out his American Express and telling him that we would take care of it. And that was Landry. He could be a complete and utter basket case and then flip and become the epitome of a cool, calm yuppie businessman. Chris kept looking at him, waiting for some kind of psychotic break.
On the plane, I got the window because that was where Landry wanted me. He took the middle seat, and Chris got the aisle. Once we were in the air, Landry lifted the armrest between us and snuggled into my side, head on my shoulder, thigh wedged next to mine. I was still tired, so I succumbed fast, military cap down over my eyes, my fingers buried in Landry’s thick hair, massaging his head as I listened to his breath even out. I woke up two hours later when we hit some choppy air and the flight attendant wanted to check if Landry was buckled in. I moved the blanket so she could see and then showed her mine.
“Thank you so much,” she whispered to me, smiling. “Some people get so annoyed.”
“My Aunt Anita.” I smiled at her. “She’s a flight attendant at Continental. She tells me great stories all the time.”
She nodded. “Well thank you for understanding. Go back to sleep.”
I nodded.
“Your boyfriend?”
“Yes.”
“He’s very handsome,” she told me.
And I agreed. I realized, after a minute, that Chris was gone, probably in the bathroom or something, but since I didn’t really care where he was, I went back to sleep.
The rest of the flight passed unnoticed, and I woke back up around nine thirty in the morning Detroit time, which meant that it was six thirty in the morning in Vegas. We had just another half an hour to go so I got up; since most everyone else was asleep, there was no wait to get into the bathroom. When I got back, I climbed over Chris, and when I sat down, Landry sat up, bleary, hair sticking up, looking confused.
“Morning, baby.” I smiled at him.
He squinted at me and tried to push Chris off of his shoulder.
“Quit that,” I chided, chuckling. “He’s asleep; that’s mean.”
“I don’t care. He has to get up anyway, and he’s fuckin’ drooling on me.” He squinted and put his finger on Chris’s forehead, pushing him away, moving as far into me as possible.
“You’re such an ass.”
He turned to look at me, and the smile was the one I really liked, wicked and confident, eyes glittering. He was beautiful.
“Leave him alone,” I said, taking my cap off, rubbing my buzzed to the scalp hair that I never let grow out, and smiling at him. “Gimme a kiss.”
“All these orders this morning.” He sighed and leaned in, his lips sliding over mine, fitting, as always, like they had been custom made for me.
“God, I gotta pee,” he said when he leaned back.
“By all means,” I teased him.
“Get up,” he snapped at his brother as he climbed over him.
Chris straightened in his seat, looking worse than both Landry and me. “Did you get up?”
“Yeah.”
“So I guess you weren’t, like, a total shit like he just was.”
I squinted at him.
After a few minutes he took a breath. “Sorry. I just… you can’t possibly understand, but this is huge for me, for my whole family. We’ve all been living without Landry for the past eight years, and every time we get happy or take a family picture or spend a holiday, it’s always not what it could be because he’s not there.”
I nodded.
“I was fourteen when he left,” he said, eyes on me, “and I missed him.”
It hit me then, what Chris was seeing when he looked at my boyfriend—a piece of his past.
“He was my older brother, and he was there my whole life, and then suddenly he wasn’t, and I remember asking my folks, ‘Where is he? When’s he coming back?’ And you know—” He swallowed hard. “—at first it was, ‘he’ll be back at the end of the summer’, and then when he wasn’t, they were certain they’d hear from him once school started.”
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I stared at him, into his eyes, which were a piercing blue, pretty in their own right but not heart-stopping because they were missing the green that made me go weak in the knees.
“I guess my parents hired a private detective when he first left, so they knew where he was,” he told me. “They’ve always known, and they could have reached out, but they were mad, I guess, and so was he, and all this time, no one wrote or sent a Christmas card or anything. It’s just nuts, you know, and what started as, like, this small hurdle or whatever has become this fortified fuckin’ wall, and when I found out what really happened I—”
“What do you mean?”
He squinted at me. “What do you mean what do I mean?”
I leaned back in my seat, not sure what we were talking about. “Your folks threw Landry out because he was gay,” I told him.
“No,” he told me, “they didn’t.”
“What do you mean they didn’t?”
“They threw him out because of the drugs, because of the stealing and the lies. They threw him out because he was diagnosed as having a severe bipolar disorder, where he’s manic one day and severely depressed the next. He takes medicine, doesn’t he?”
And that fast my whole world flipped upside down, because somebody was lying.
“Trevan?”
I leaned back in my seat and just stared at him.
“What’s wrong?”
“Your folks hate Landry because he’s gay.”
“No. They’ve known he was gay since he was, like, sixteen, maybe fifteen, why would they care if he was gay?”
Shit.
“Wait.” He was processing. “Is that why he—I mean, the other day when he said that my mother hated him I thought he just meant ’cause they’ve had no contact for the last eight years, but he doesn’t actually think that… he hasn’t actually convinced himself that they threw him out because he was gay, has he? That’s not what he really believes, is it?”
“That’s exactly what he believes.”
He exhaled fast, looking like I’d hit him. “No no no….” He put up a hand. “That… Trevan, he was supposed to go into this really good program and this private clinic in New York, and my mother rented this apartment in town so she could be close to him and… ohmygod….” He closed his eyes, face in his hands, just reeling. “Jesus Christ, he’s completely delusional.”
My eyes narrowed as I looked at him.
“Trevan,” he gasped, swallowing hard, his fingers raking through his hair. “You gotta believe me. My folks didn’t give a shit about Landry being gay. I mean, they found him in the stables with their best friend’s son, you know, and he, Will, got sent to some conversion therapy, reparative therapy, reorientation whatever place, and his parents made him go, but my folks, they never even considered that for Landry because who were they to tell him how to live his life. His orientation had nothing to do with them, but his illness… that was the problem, nothing else.”
There was nothing that led me to believe that he was lying to me. He seemed completely and utterly stunned.
“Ohmygod, I thought he was… I thought how he was acting, how angry he seems at me… I thought that was because I didn’t have the balls to look for him. I mean….” His eyes lifted to mine. “I’ve missed him…. I… my mother’s expecting him to be mad, but she’s not thinking that he didn’t get help. She figured he—”
“Not much of a detective your parents hired if they never knew that he never got help.”
“No. All they heard was where he was, that he was alive and well.”
Remembering two years ago, when he and I had just begun, I wondered what the private detective’s idea of “well” was. “So your folks just let Landry walk out of their lives even though he was sick?”
He cleared his throat. “You don’t know how it was. Just to have him gone for a while, it was such a relief. He stole from them—money, my mother’s jewelry, my father’s old coins. Did he tell you about his cocaine habit? Do you know about that?”
But how could that be? When I met him, there had been vices, addictions, but they had all been abandoned so quickly, so completely, so thoroughly, and never seen again. The man only drank socially, sometimes had wine or beer at home with me, but that was it. He never hid anything from me. I saw him every day, knew where he went and who he saw. There was more reason to doubt me.
“My folks think… I mean, I told them how good he looks, how amazing his business is, and all about you. They’re dying to meet you.”
I had not anticipated that.
“How is he?” he asked, and his breath was shaky. “I mean, how does he function?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I mean, he used to go into these rages and just… he came at me with a knife once. We were in the kitchen and I said something, and our maid was cooking, and he grabbed the chef’s knife, and if my father hadn’t been there… I mean, he came at me, do you understand?”
I understood what he was saying, but Landry’s intent was lost to me since I hadn’t been there.
“I went into his room one time and he was slicing up his arm, and I remember screaming for my mother, and everyone came running and they took away the knife and held him down and just…. Trevan, if he’s never gotten any help, then you’re living on borrowed time.” He said it earnestly, willing me to believe him. “I swear to God he could hurt you… more than hurt you.”
The concern was there, real, on his face.
Yes, Landry could be volatile, but so was I. And Landry was the guy with the balanced life now; mine was the scary one.
“Hey.”
We both looked up, and there he was, yawning, eyes watering as he looked down at me and Chris.
“Can you move so I can sit?” he asked his brother.
“Sure,” Chris said, getting up so Landry could push by him to retake his seat next to me.
Once he was down, Landry put on his seatbelt and offered me either the chocolate chip granola bar or the Power Bar from where he had stuffed them into the pocket in front of his seat.
“I’m not hungry,” I assured him.
“You sure?”
I nodded, and he reached up and touched the ten gauge hammered steel plug in my right ear. “What?”
“I got those red jade ones for you for Valentine’s Day, but you never wear them.”
“That’s because they’re red.” I smiled at him. “What do I own that goes with red?”
He smiled at me. “You need to try something new.”
I closed my eyes. “I don’t like change.”
“I know,” he said, and I felt his fingers tracing over my eyebrow.
“I like all those bracelets you make,” Chris told Landry.
“I have one for you, but I don’t know if you want it.”
Silence.
“You made me one?”
“I picked you one. I didn’t have time to make one from scratch, but I have one that I think fits with your vibe.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have it? I mean… I’d love it.” Chris was breathless, and no matter what he thought of his brother, about his brother, Landry doing anything for him flipped him inside out.
“Here,” he said, and I didn’t open my eyes to see. It wasn’t that important to me. What was important was that Landry had done something for his brother.
“Oh shit, Lan, this is awesome,” he breathed out. He was in awe, and it was good to hear.
“You like it?”
“I love it.”
“Good. Now the amber is supposed to ground you so you don’t go crazy,” he told him. “Trev always tells me that I should be draped in it.”
Chris sucked in his breath, and I started chuckling.
Landry let out a snort of laughter before his lips pressed to my jaw, his fingers grazing my throat. “Let’s get drunk tonight, okay?”
“Whatever you want.”
“Whatever I want?” he asked,
his voice almost a growl. “If I beg down on my knees, will you please tie me up?”
Sometimes Landry needed to be rendered completely helpless to allow his brain to just shut off. In the following moment of vulnerability, when there was no choice but to surrender to me and trust in me, everything could just stop. He was asking me now for the peace that only I could provide for him even as I recognized his desire for the reset even sooner.
“Yes,” I assured him.
He was instantly breathless. “Thank you.”
I could tell from the way his hands were clutching at me that he needed something else. The problem was that I had no idea what it was.
The landing, getting off the plane, getting our luggage, all of that was easy. It was when I told Chris that we were going to rent a car that he balked.
“My father sent our driver to pick us up; he’ll be at your disposal when we get home. You don’t need to get a car, Trevan.”
I cleared my throat. “We do.”
“I just—”
“If we need to leave, we need a car,” Landry said flatly, eyes leveled on his brother. “So let us rent the car or we’ll just get back on the plane. Your choice.”
Chris wasn’t happy. He told me, leaning in, whispering harshly over my shoulder, that he felt I was adding tension that had not even been necessary. I wasn’t going to argue; it was how I needed it to be. I had to have an escape route, and I was much too independent to ask for permission. If I wanted to go, I would go, and that was it.
“I’m starving,” Landry told me minutes later.
“I called Mom last night and told her when we would be in; she’s having breakfast catered this morning.”
I looked at Landry, surprised and a little intimidated. How rich was his family? Catered.
He shook his head, disgusted.
“What?”
“Typical.”
Typical?
Once we were in the silver Dodge Charger following the black Audi sedan, I asked what he meant.
“It’s just like I told you they were. They’re not like your mom or your aunts or your sister. Breakfast for me for the first time in eight years—catered.”
“It’s nice.” I shrugged. “I mean, this way no one has to get up. It’s like being at a restaurant, you can all just talk.”
