Paul and the interviewer were staring at him in complete confusion, which was understandable, since Chase appeared to be experiencing the kind of raw human emotion that was banned from all such press junkets. “I can’t take it any more,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t keep saying everything is awesome and wonderful, because it’s not. It’s fucked. It’s awful.”
They bleeped the ‘fucked’, but I knew what he was saying. I’d felt the same myself over the past eleven days. I could hear a murmur behind the camera and knew that everyone back there was in that state of subdued panic that occurs when someone decides to go wildly off script. My heart was beating so hard I thought I’d pass out. Was he really about to say what I thought he was about to say, or had I just gone so far in fantasizing that I no longer understood what was real any more?
“I’m not supposed to talk about this,” said Chase, with tears in his eyes. “But I can’t…I won’t do this longer. You can only keep banging your head against a brick wall so long, and I’m done. Seriously.” He took a breath. I think I did, too. “I…I love someone.”
“Oh my God,” Ivy murmured, grabbing my wrist.
“And it’s killing me,” said Chase. “That in 2017 I can’t say that out loud, because somehow me being in love with a man would hurt the box office. Yes, that’s what I was told. And it’s bullshit.” He shook his head. “I’m sorry if I’m torpedoing your movie or whatever, but this is my life. My only life. And I’m (bleeped) if I’m going to live it without love because of money.” He fiddled with his microphone. “Excuse me. I have to…excuse me…thank you.”
They cut back to the studio and the screen where the red carpet reporter was mugging earnestly at the camera. “Brave words, there, from Chase Morrow, who is expected to arrive here shortly for the midnight London premiere…”
I couldn’t see the screen any more. My eyes were too full of tears. The wine shook in its plastic cup.
“You have to call him,” said Ivy. “Call him. Tell him.”
“I know. I know.” My hands were shaking so hard that I had to put the cup down.
“That’s so romantic. I can’t believe he did that.” She paused. “Wait, he was talking about you, right?”
I managed to laugh through all my snot and tears. “He’d better be,” I said. “Otherwise I’m going to fucking kill him.”
The phone rang. And rang. And kept ringing.
He didn’t show up to the premiere either, and the whole panic machine went into action again. Had he filled his pockets with rocks and taken a dive to the bottom of the Thames? Now that everyone knew what was going on with him they were twice as concerned.
Only I wasn’t, because sometime at whatever-the-hell-o-clock it was over there, he’d taken a moment to text me. Two words.
coming home xxx
We finished the wine. And we finished the jigsaw. When Ivy got a cab I stepped over the Golden Gate Bridge – I couldn’t bring myself to break it up right away – and floated up my apartment on a cloud of booze and fatigue.
That unreal feeling had crept back. Maybe I’d hallucinated him saying all those brave, amazing things. Maybe I’d been wanting to hear them for so many days that my mind had finally snapped.
I turned at the top of the stairs, just for old times sake.
From here I was looking directly down onto the pool cabana, and the shrubs beside it. It was dark, but the pool lights were on, and I stood there for a moment, just waiting.
The bushes rustled.
He stepped out, pale as a ghost in the dark. Once again I thought my mind was playing some kind of cruel trick on me, but then he looked up and saw me, and he came running up the stairs into my arms.
I was crying again before he even kissed me. “You asshole,” I said.
“What? What did I do this time?”
I laughed and cried and kissed him all at once. “You caught me half drunk. And weepy.” He reached up and ran his fingers through my hair, his own eyes wet. I could still hardly believe that he was here. “You did it,” I said. “I can’t believe you did it.”
He took another step upwards so that we were both standing on the landing. As he pressed me against the wall and kissed me I caught a faint trace of Scotch on his tongue. A little something he’d tipped down his throat on his way back over the ocean, maybe wondering if he’d done the right thing after all.
“I would burn every fucking bridge on earth for you,” he said. “That’s how much I love you.”
I couldn’t seem to stop smiling or crying or kissing him. “I’m sorry. I’m stupid. I will never lie to you ever again. I swear.”
“Shh. It doesn’t matter any more. I know you were only trying to protect me. And you made me stop lying to myself. You made me happy.”
“I love you,” I said, because there was nothing else to say. “I love you so much.”
Epilogue
One Year Later
Chase
Finn sleeps late.
There’s nothing quite like the dark nights and cool, piney air to reset the internal clock of even the most wired of Angelenos, although to tell the truth we always slept so well when we were together. It was one of the many things that made me know in the marrow of my bones that we were right for one another.
I remember when I came tearing back to LA to be with him. He was mortified. First time I ever shared his own bed with him, and I came back from the bathroom to find him out cold, one arm under the pillow, totally zonked. All the heartache of being apart had taken a bite out of his sleep schedule, he said later.
So, with my own circadian rhythms in no shape to protest, I’d taken off all my clothes and climbed in beside him. He didn’t startle, the way you would think someone used to sleeping alone might when an unfamiliar body settled on the mattress. Instead he pushed his ass into the curve of my lap, pulled my arm over him and pressed a semi-conscious kiss on the back of my hand. Like I was that familiar. Like we fit.
I love watching him sleep. He lies sprawled on back on one side of the big bed, his hair black against the white sheets and the morning sun shining a light on the faint remains of old childhood freckles. Black eyebrows. Long dark lashes. I’m a sucker for blue eyes, but especially when they’re framed the way his are.
The sheet stops just below his nipples. He sleeps with one thigh fallen to the side, so that I can clearly see the inviting little ridge there under the covers. I could crawl up underneath them between his ankles, push his knees apart with my body and wake him the way he likes best, with a kiss on each inner thigh, then on each hip bone, letting my breath draft gently over his cock as I go. At the first touch of my lips he always rears up to meet me. “Your mouth is insane,” he said, one time while he was running his fingers through my hair and I was licking and teasing him as he subsided from his orgasm. “It’s like it was designed knowing what to do to me.”
I could do that. Wake him up and coax him into an encore of last night, when we sixty-nined under the stars and he opened under my fingers, so that when he came I not only tasted it but felt it shudder all the way through his belly and balls, the ripples of his muscles squeezing my fingers tight.
I could, but there’s work to be done, so I kiss his shoulder, pull on a robe and go downstairs.
Of course, we had that conversation. That ‘Oh shit, did you just ruin your career for me?’ conversation, but the truth was that my meltdown had been coming for a while anyway. I’d never been that comfortable prancing around in a spandex suit. I got in acting because I wanted to act, and sure, we all dream of the big break and stardom, but when that happens – well…let’s just say I understood how fame all too often breaks people’s brains. Oscar Wilde famously said that the only thing worse than being talked about was not being talked about, but Oscar Wilde said a lot of stupid things that he probably later regretted when his horrible boyfriend’s equally horrible father was dragging him through the courts. There are few things worse than constant scrutiny. It steals your nerve, your sleep, your ab
ility to assess yourself in any way objectively.
“You’re just not mainstream,” Angie had said, when she was figuring out where we went from my inevitable superhero implosion. “Never have been, never will be. You look cookie-cutter enough, but the truth is you’re just a little too odd.”
“You mean gay,” I said.
“Also that. Not that we can’t make it work.”
“We’d better,” I said, thinking of Finn. He isn’t crazy about Angie. At one point he threatened to “send round an old priest and a young priest to brave the subzero temperatures and pea soup explosions it’s gonna take to send Angie’s ass back to the pit.”
But it’s all cool now. I’m producing, among other things. You might have caught it on Netflix – Conspiracy. Inspiring title, I know, but it does what it says on the tin, a docu-series about the weird things that people believe in their various vain attempts to make some sense of this batshit world.
We’ve been releasing it weekly for maximum water-cooler action. And the most recent episode to drop?
Bigfoot. Featuring yours truly.
I make myself a green tea with a slice of lemon, and go out onto the deck. Finn didn’t want to come back here at first, but I persuaded him that Charlotte and her family had had nothing to do with that paparazzo turning up here. I couldn’t not come back here, not now that I knew how beautiful it was.
The sky above the pines is a complex patchwork of gray, white and blue. Little clouds keep covering the sun, but only for a moment. The breeze blows them past. The treetops sway and sigh. I unfold the deck umbrella and carefully position it out of the wind before settling on a sun-lounger. My robe gapes as I sit down, and I can’t resist opening it a little. I love the sun on my skin, and everyone’s seen it all before anyway.
Besides, there’s no longer much of a market for nude candid shots of me. I got a lot of public sympathy for coming out as dramatically as I did, and nobody – not even the paparazzi – wanted to look like a total asshole by invading my privacy any further. There was that one guy who came up here, but I hear he’s getting some therapy. At least I hope he is. He sounds like needs it.
I shift deeper into the shade as I look up the YouTubers – Keri and Max - that everyone has come to rely on for commentary on the series. Adjusting the screen to reduce glare, I hit play.
“Okay,” says Max, looking right into camera. “You all know what I’m about to say, people. You saw it, I saw it. It’s time to talk about the elephant in the room. Or the sasquatch in the trash. Whichever.”
I brace myself.
“Look, I appreciate the guy’s a producer on the show and all,” says Max. “But really? Really, Chase?”
The camera pans out, revealing Keri, sat on the other end of the couch. She’s laughing.
“You expect us to buy that?” Max continues, still talking directly to me. “That you dressed up as Bigfoot in some convoluted, contorted scheme – which makes no sense at all – in order to make an eyewitness look like a lunatic on Twitter? Really?”
“Well, when you put it like that…” I say, and take a sip of tea to steady my stomach.
“Yeah, but it does fit the timeline,” says Keri, who’s often here to play devil’s advocate. “The tape dates from like…a week or so before he officially came out.”
“Sure, Keri. This Patty Chive woman walks in on Chase having dinner with his boyfriend, opens up her Twitter app to gossip about it–”
“–which she totally did. We have the tweets. It’s like, a matter of public record–”
“–which leads to Chase Morrow panicking and thinking ‘I know how to fix this! I’ll dress up as freakin’ Bigfoot!’ Who does that?”
Keri was still laughing and I could hardly blame her. We’d tried our best to come clean about the now infamous sasquatch footage, but in this case the truth was far more ridiculous than fiction.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps it made a crazy kind of sense to them on the spur of the moment.”
“Seriously? Occam’s razor, right? The simplest explanation–”
“–is the most likely. I know.”
“So what’s more likely, Keri? Chase Morrow faked a Bigfoot sighting to undermine the credibility of someone who was about to gossip about him being gay, or that Patty Chive looked out of her window and saw a sasquatch going through her trash?”
I hear Finn clear his throat behind me and look up. He’s already dressed in his running gear. “Whatcha doing?”
“Oh, nothing,” I say, closing the screen. “Just checking out reactions to last night.” My robe gapes further as I stretch my legs. “Airing out my taint.”
“I can see that,” he says, perching on the lounger beside me to lace his shoes. “Is there any part of your scrotum that you haven’t bared to the mountains yet?”
“Nope.”
“So? What was the verdict?” He nods to the tablet in my lap.
“Don’t have enough information yet,” I say. “But so far it looks like they don’t believe it.”
“Believe what? That you were a part-time sasquatch?”
“Yep. Apparently the truth is far too absurd for anyone to buy it.”
Finn appears to consider this. Bear in mind his version of ‘normal’ involves violence against pumpkins and sasquatch showing up at children’s’ birthday parties. “Yeah,” he says, after a short pause. “I can kind of see that.”
“So nobody believes I’m Bigfoot?”
He reaches out and pats my knee. “Take it as a compliment, baby. You were a very convincing sasquatch, if a little on the short side.”
“Still taller than you. And do you think so?”
“Fuck, yeah. That clip’s been seen around the world. It’s been studied and analyzed and remixed and set to music and cut with that cartoon dinosaur saying ‘yee’. And people are still talking about it. It was a hell of a performance.”
I sigh. “My Mona Lisa.”
“Exactly.”
“But nobody knows I did it. And when I tell them I did it they don’t believe me.”
Finn gets up. “Maybe one day,” he says.
“I doubt it. It’s been over fifty years and does anyone know who was really wearing the monkey suit that time down in Bluff Creek?”
He shrugs. “Look at it this way. At least nobody is talking about your tits.”
“I guess.”
He holds out a hand. “Come on. Get up. Get dressed. Come run with me.”
“Ugh. Are you serious?”
“Do I look like I’m kidding? Come on. It’s cardio.”
“So is sex. Why don’t we do that instead?”
Finn gives me that ‘personal trainer’ look. The one that means there is no way I’m getting out of this without breaking a sweat. And not the fun kind.
But as usual he’s guessed what I need. Better I get out and run like hell than sit here watching YouTube, refreshing forums and worrying what people think of me. It doesn’t matter what strangers think of me. He loves me, and that’s all I need.
The forest is cool and green, the trails not too bad at this altitude. All the same I run carefully and urge him to do the same; that foot keeps bugging him, no matter how long I spend kneading out his arches whenever he shoves his feet in my lap. Downhill is worse somehow, because gravity keeps you accelerating no matter how many rocks or tree roots are in the way. Finn stops halfway down the hill, ahead of me, and I slow down with some difficulty.
“What’s up? You okay? You hurting?”
He stands there smiling in the middle of the trail. Maybe he stopped for the view. We’re looking down into the valley below. “Come here,” he says.
I do, and he kisses me, both hands on my face, his tongue darting out to lap the sweat from my upper lip.
“What are you doing?” I ask, my brain already half melted as he leads me to the side of the path and presses me against the broad bole of a moss covered tree.
“Kissing you.” He nibbles at the edge of my earlob
e. I can feel him hard against my thigh and I’m down with this, still vibrating from last night.
“I thought we were running?” I say, just to tease him. My ass settles against the tree trunk. Finn goes for my mouth again, the wet curl of his tongue against mine sending shivers through me.
He shakes his head, his hand snaking up under my shirt, fingers teasing my damp, sweaty skin. “I had this fantasy…” he says.
“I’m listening.”
His fingertips find my nipple and pinch gently. I moan and arch into his touch, my dick already swelled to one of those erections that are all the more delicious for being unexpected. He’s barely touched me and already I’m on fire. I would do just about anything he wanted of me right now.
“You remember that first night?” he says. “When we were pretending to be on our honeymoon?”
“I’ll never forget.” God, that first kiss. It was like a slow motion explosion in my brain. The way he touched my hand and we just kept on inching and inching closer until when we finally kissed it felt like every single cell in my body was sighing ‘yesss’ in unison.
“You said we’d be out in the forest a lot.”
“I don’t remember that part,” I say, rocking gently against him. “But go on.”
He smiles as his hand moves downwards. “Want me to show you where my mind went after that?”
His fingers slide under my waistband and I shudder as his practiced, clever fingers wrap around my cock. He teases me with a couple of strokes and then his smile is pure, perfect evil as he kneels. I forget how to breathe. We’re alone on the trail, for now, but if someone came by then we would be in full view. Finn reaches up and peels my pants down to my knees, so that my dick sticks out obscenely in the pale, windblown sunshine. He kisses my bared thighs – one after the other – and then I feel his tongue on me, licking from root to tip. I moan and push my fingers into his curls, but he’s being a bastard; this is just another tease.
Finn pushes my shirt up under my arms, so that I’m as naked as it’s possible to be without actually removing anything. I taste my own sweat in his kiss and once again his hand is on me, drawing gasps.
Going Sasquatch Page 16
