Recoil

by Evelyn Drake

  “What can I get you to drink?” Kyle asked, putting the bottle on the counter. “Wine?”

  “No, I’d better stick to tea or soda. Water would do, too.”

  Kyle fixed him a glass of ginger ale and orange juice over ice and handed it over.

  “This is nice!” Tobias said after taking a sip, earning himself another smile from Kyle. “Your home is beautiful.” It wasn’t an empty compliment. Their home—with crown molding accents and dark woods against cream walls—was gorgeous.

  “I got lucky. The previous owner cut me a deal when I explained that I was buying it because I wanted to move Monica in with me.”

  Kyle’s brows went up, interested in the story, and he waited patiently for it to continue.

  “The owner just had to put her mother into a nursing home, and this had been her mother’s house. So, when I told her that I was buying this place because Monica’s niece and nephew were taking court action to force her into a retirement home just because she was turning eighty, the daughter gave me a super good deal on the house.”

  “How old is Monica now?”

  “She’ll be ninety in a few months,” Kyle said, getting back to work cutting vegetables.

  “No way! That woman?” He motioned behind him.

  Kyle laughed. “I know. Trust me, I don’t take care of her. She takes care of me.” He grew somber a moment and then shrugged and added without looking up from his work. “She’s family.”

  Tobias didn’t know what to say. He knew better than anyone what it was that Kyle had lost—because he’d lost it, too.

  “You think Monica would be willing to talk to me… about stuff from the past?”

  “Yeah, I told her to answer anything you want to know,” Kyle said, stepping back from the cutting board and wiping his hands on his apron. “Here,” he said, opening the refrigerator door, “take this and go on out to sit with her.”

  Tobias eyed the platter of delicious morsels as he took it in hand. “What is it?”

  “Zucchini fritters with tzatziki sauce,” Kyle answered, smiling. “Another specialty of Monica’s. Hell, everything’s her specialty,” he laughed. “Why she became a social worker instead of a chef, I’ll never know.”

  Tobias took the platter and headed out the kitchen’s swinging door into the dining room just beyond. From there, he could see the foyer and beyond that sat Monica writing in a small, paperback booklet.

  Monica looked up as he approached and gave him a genuine smile, and Tobias thought to himself that the woman probably never did anything disingenuously. Everything she did, she meant.

  “Where should I put this?” Tobias asked, giving a small lift to the platter.

  “The coffee table will do,” she said, pointing a finger to the low lying table in front of the sofa. The booklet she was working on was a Sudoku puzzle book. She lifted it up and gave him a wink. “Helps to keep the noggin cranking.”

  “I never was any good at those,” Tobias said, taking a seat on the sofa catty-corner to her. At her feet, Tobias saw the small nose of a whiskered dog adjust how he was resting his head atop Monica’s foot.

  “I wasn’t either for about the first year I did them. But there’s strategies to them that you figure out.” She crossed her dog-free leg and laid her work in her lap as she sat back in her chair.

  “Kyle said it was okay if I asked you some questions about his past,” Tobias said, somewhere between question and statement.

  “Oh yes, but then I suspect you could tell me just about as much about him that I don’t know. But he did tell me ahead of time to answer everything you want to know.”

  Tobias sat forward on his seat so that he could lean toward her. He cleared his throat and asked his first question, one that was a surprise to even him. “He knew I was alive? For how long?” Every since he’d discovered that Kyle was alive, it had been a source of pain for Tobias that he’d let Tobias go on thinking that Kyle was dead.

  “Well,”—Monica’s eyes shifted to look at the ceiling as if seeing through past memories—“I was assigned as his social worker when he was fifteen. It was several months before he told me of your existence and I had to confirm with child services that you had been placed with another family.” Her face scrunched then. “I’m sorry about the way things went for you. I know that you didn’t have it easy either after you were changed to another placement after having been with the Rivers for so long.”

  Tobias shook his head and waved his hand in dismissal. They were difficult times, to be sure, but he had long ago made peace with what life had brought his way after being kicked out by the people he had considered his parents.

  “Well,” Monica continued, “Kyle had told me that you had been hunted down by the government and killed when they caught you providing sexual favors to someone in an alley.” Monica’s expression didn’t show an ounce of shock associated to the information that she was relaying, and Tobias realized that he could probably only imagine the atrocities of human nature that she had seen during her years as a social worker.

  Just like a cop…

  “I tracked down what had actually happened to you—that you had been placed in a new home before being moved to an group home—and then I told Kyle what I had learned.” She shrugged her head to the side and gave a sympathetic eye squint. “It took several months of me talking about how things were going for you before he believed me. I even showed him some photos that your case worker had taken, but he wouldn’t budge, saying they were fakes. But I eventually got through to him.”

  “Where was he during that time?”

  “He was in the Bordston Mental Health facility. He stayed there from the time he was rescued from the Rivers’ home until the time he turned eighteen.”

  “What happened when he turned eighteen?”

  “He was simply released as an adult under his own care. But I timed my retirement to coincide with his release, and he stayed with me for awhile until he found his bearings and figured out what he wanted to do with himself.”

  “But, I don’t get it. Why was he there at all? Why wasn’t he just placed with a family and set up with an out-patient psychiatrist?”

  Monica gave a heavy sigh. “I’m sure you know what happened in the house after you left.”

  “The murders,” Tobias said, finishing in his head, of our parents.

  Monica nodded. “So, Kyle was a murder suspect, if not in the eyes of the law, well then, he was a suspect in the eyes of any facility or family I tried to get to take him.” Her face was pulled long with a weariness Tobias hadn’t seen in her before. “I wanted to get him out of there. Desperately. He went in there to start because he needed medical help. He was malnourished and he was… well, he was out of his mind for the first month and a half. He was at times catatonic and then he’d flip over into being wild.” She sighed again.

  Silence hung in the air and Tobias held back from interrupting it. He gave her time to gather her thoughts and sort through the past.

  “They wanted to keep him,” Monica said at last. “Kyle was young and hot headed, so if someone was trying to hurt him, he eventually got strong enough to put them on their ass. He wasn’t one to be silent about the wrongs done, and some of the staff even got fired because of it.”

  “He’d attack people?”

  “Well,” Monica said, shifting in her chair and lifting an eyebrow, “more like attacked those attacking him. He defended himself.” She shook her head, her eyes going up again, sorting through the past. “There are a lot of sick people in those types of places, and not all of them are the patients. People would expose themselves to Kyle or try to touch him. And, if someone took advantage of him being in restraints, he’d make them pay for it later.”

  Tobias’s blood ran cold. “He was raped?”

  “No, not that he’s ever told me, but there were inappropriate incidents nonetheless.” She took another deep breath. “After a while, Kyle gained a reputation as violent. On one hand, Kyle being there represented mone
y in the hospital’s pocket, so they had an incentive to keep him for as long as they could. On the other hand, Kyle—and myself—had caused some problems for some of the administration and staff, and there were some grudges. There were those there that fought very hard to get him committed to a violent offenders mental hospital such as would house the criminally insane. They wanted to make it happen when he turned eighteen, and it could have taken years—years—of work in the court system to gain his release once that happened. It would have been a trap that had no clear path out—ever.”

  Monica shifted in her chair again, switching how she had her legs crossed and leaning to the other side of the chair. This time her eyes stared straight forward and a little down as her memories turned to herself. “I’d been a social worker a long time,” she said, shifting her gaze then to look directly into Tobias’s eyes. “I’d managed to have a few favors owed me, and I called every one of them in to make sure that Kyle was released as a completely untethered man on his eighteenth birthday.”

  Tobias could see the stony determination in her, and he knew better than to ever bet against her.

  “He was free to go anywhere he chose, but I retired that same month and opened my doors to him. He stayed with me six or seven months and then moved on. Then, a few years after that when my family started making problems for me, Kyle opened his doors for me.” She beamed with pride. “And, that’s been that.”

  Tobias knew from having reviewed Kyle’s police records that he hadn’t had any run-ins with the law as an adult.

  “Do you think that Kyle killed Victoria?” Tobias asked, point blank, and he asked specifically about one of the murders instead of both in order to keep the question as simplistically direct as possible.

  He watched Monica carefully. He didn’t ask the question to find out what she would say with her words, he wanted to know what she would say with her face.

  “No,” Monica said simply. There was no posturing, no exaggeration. It was a simple statement of fact. Within her face, Tobias saw calm and absolutely belief.

  “Have you ever known him to be violent since leaving the mental hospital?”

  “Well, I’ve never known him to be a bully, but sometimes a young buck wants to come along to see if he can knock down the tallest tree,” she said with a smile. “So,”—she cocked her head sideways with lifted brows—“he’s seen his share of fights, but they were fights that other people had wanted.”

  Not a choir boy…

  Tobias mulled over all that he’d learned, and his stomach growled.

  “Somebody came ready to eat,” Monica said with a twinkle in her eye. Scooting forward to sit on the edge of her chair, she lifted the platter with a sure hand and offered him some. He picked up a fritter and spooned some of the sauce on top as he saw Kyle come out of the kitchen with a couple of bowls for the dining room table.

  Tobias gave him a warm smile and got one in return before taking a bite of the fritter. His eyebrows shot up.

  “Oh my God! This is delicious!”

  Monica smiled with pleasure from his compliment.

  Soon they were all gathered around the table. The succulent aromas had Tobias’s mouth watering even after already having a couple of fritters. Everything was beautiful and served in dishes that belonged on the cover of a culinary magazine.

  “This is amazing,” Tobias said, being careful to keep his eyes downcast on the food until the sudden wave of emotion that filled his eyes with unshed tears had subsided. This—dinner with family—it was beyond what Tobias now had in his life. He hadn’t had it for many, many years. Instead, he’d become a social nomad, transitioning from one group of friends to the next as people came and went from his life.

  Is that what Kyle will do? Will he drift away like everyone else? Tobias thought as he studied Kyle while he and Monica bantered with each other.

  You can’t be with him, you know… You can’t have him. He’s not ready.

  It was that other part of himself speaking, and the truth of the thought twisted a dagger in his gut.

  He’s not ready for me… might never be ready for me. He’s “not gay.”

  I’ve got to pull back. I’ve got to save my heart.

  Tobias knew that he couldn’t handle losing Kyle twice in one lifetime. To be friends, maybe even acquaintances… that would be safer. Maybe not easier, but definitely safer.

  That’s what I’ll do, Tobias vowed to himself. Friends, nothing more. He’ll never be able to love me like I love him. He’ll hate me as much as he’ll love me, and knowing that would be like burning alive. I can’t do it.

  He means too much to me to let him hate me.

  I’m not strong that way… so I’ll let him go.

  16

  Kyle

  Kyle stood to begin carrying dishes back into the kitchen just as Monica announced that she was tired and heading to bed.

  “I’ll help,” Tobias said, picking up the platter of leftover beef stroganoff and the now empty dish of what had been spiced poached pears served with honey sauce over flan.

  Kyle smiled when Tobias groaned the sound of someone who had eaten too much. “That’s what happens when you spend time around Monica,” he laughed.

  “How are you not five hundred pounds?” Tobias teased, following Kyle into the kitchen.

  Kyle set to work putting away leftovers and scraping plates into Jack’s food dish. The hearty Jack Russell and dachshund mix sat in front of his dish even as he pranced back and forth with his front feet.

  “He’s too cute,” Tobias said, bringing in another load of dishes.

  “A rescue,” Kyle said, smiling fondly at Jack and then giving him a head-ear rub before standing back up. Jack wasted no time tackling the scraps in his dish, scarfing down beef, noodles, and vegetables alike.

  Tobias leaned a hip against the counter. “You like rescues, huh?”

  “I’ve cared deeply for rescues for a long time,” Kyle said, not bothering to hide the inference. He couldn’t stop the smile that came to his lips when he saw the color of Tobias’s cheeks deepen in a blush.

  “I’ll get the rest of the plates,” Tobias said and disappeared out of the room again.

  Am I going to do this? Am I all in? Am I gay, if not gay then gay for Tobias? I know I love him. I know that being with him feels good.

  Living life with Monica had been among the best years of his life. They ranked right up there with the time spent with his own parents before everything had gone wrong. They had been loving people. They had been kind people… when Kyle had been who they had wanted him to be.

  But life with Monica felt safer. Even before he’d known just how badly his parents would react to finding out about him and Tobias, he had instinctively known to hide their love from them. With Monica, though, he’d never had the feeling that he had to hide anything of himself from her.

  He felt safe with her. Safe enough to follow his heart.

  Tobias came back in the kitchen again, his arms again loaded down.

  Kiss him… Kyle’s inner self encouraged as he bent over the kitchen sink to wash the dishes. His heart pounded with the same fiercely frantic beat likely if he’d been running for his life. And he supposed he was. Giving in—giving up the fight and surrendering—it was ending a part of himself that he’d been holding onto for years… that part of himself that was in line with who his parents had said he should be. To give in, to surrender, would put to death that part of himself that his parents had fought so hard to preserve.

  Can I do it? Kyle wondered, looking around his shoulder at where Tobias scraped more scraps into a very happy Jack’s dish.

  I can…

  Kyle turned off the water and dried his hands, waiting patiently for Tobias to finish loving on Jack and stand. When he did, Kyle stepped forward.

  He didn’t say anything, he just stood, and his very proximity as he stared into Tobias’s upturned face seemed to hold the smaller man frozen.

  Kyle’s heart went into double-time as he
lifted a hand to lay it flat on Tobias’s chest. He could feel the smaller man’s tone muscles beneath. Sliding his palm to the side, he let it move over Tobias’s pec.

  It felt different than a woman’s breast. Instead of molding itself to his touch, it stayed firm and strong, and Kyle thought he would melt.

  There were so many words that played through his head—words like “I’ve missed you,” “I love you,” “I’m only whole with you.” But he didn’t trust himself to get them right. Instead, he leaned in, lowering his lips to Tobias’s… but he got Tobias’s cheek.

  “It’s late,” Tobias said, giving Kyle a very non-sexual tap on his shoulder as he stepped aside.

  Kyle stayed frozen for a moment in his position, slightly bent and with his face tilted for a kiss. His entire sense of reality was shifting. His universe was rewriting itself. It was removing Tobias as someone who loved him or had ever loved him.

  Adrenaline poured through his body as Kyle turned and stared after Tobias dumbly. His brain had not yet begun to work, and there were no words in his head. Just feeling—gut-wrenching, soul-destroying feeling.

  He tried to speak but it came out as a grunt.

  “Tell Monica thanks for dinner,” Tobias said, moving this way and that as he continued to shift plates to sit next to the sink. “It was the best home cooked meal I’ve had in ages… okay, maybe the only home cooked meal I’ve had in ages,” he added in a mumble.

  Tobias turned and he must have seen something unnerving in Kyle’s expression because he took an involuntary step back. A part of Kyle’s mind told him that looking on raw anguish could do that to a person.

  “Well, I’ll see you,” Tobias said, the awkwardness between them now palpable.

  Kyle tried to speak again but still only managed a grunt.