Tigers on the Run

by Sean Kennedy

  “Oh, yeah?” Micah sneered. “What do you know?”

  I was prohibited by answering as Dec chose that moment to make his appearance. “What the hell, Micah?”

  “Dad’s here,” Micah murmured, more resigned than anything.

  And Dec looked the part right then, with his hands on his hips and a scowl darkening his features.

  “Has he been drinking?” he demanded of me.

  I shrugged. “Ask Coby. He was the one trying to pick him up.”

  “I was not!”

  “I had one beer,” Micah said.

  Dec didn’t say anything.

  “Oh, all right, three.”

  I was impressed that for all the kid’s smart-alecness Dec obviously had some power of authority over him. But Dec had that ability to win people over, no matter how much people like Micah may have tried to resist.

  “And where did you get the ID?”

  “I plead the Fifth.”

  “Not going to work,” I said. “We’re not bloody Yanks.”

  “Don’t piss me off, Micah,” Dec said. “I can take a lot, but you’ve been pushing it lately.”

  This was an interesting side of Dec I didn’t get to see that often. I was hung on his every word.

  Micah had the sense to mumble something that may have been an apology.

  “We’ll take him back to our place,” Dec said to me. “I’ll call his parents from there.”

  “Do you have to?” Micah asked.

  “Really, Micah? You think I’d just let this go? You’re in training, for one, and you’ve broken the rules. Not to mention you’re drinking, underage, at a bar. What if someone had seen you and reported you?”

  “Yeah, my boyfriend’s Jasper Brunswick, don’t forget,” Coby said.

  “Believe me, I’m trying,” I replied.

  Declan shot us both a look. “See, Micah? Jasper Brunswick wouldn’t worry about the damage he could do by writing an article about this.”

  “Hey!” Coby protested.

  “And Dec should know, Jasper Brunswick wrote a whole bloody book about him.”

  “Technically it was about Greg Heyward,” Coby butted in.

  “That’s not helping your case,” Dec told him.

  He was on fire that night.

  “You can’t tell Jasper, Coby,” I said.

  “Do you and Dec keep secrets from each other?”

  “We’ve been together eight years! You haven’t even been with Jasper for eight months!”

  “If you tell him,” Micah said to Coby, “I’ll say you gave me a blow job in the dunnies.”

  Everybody erupted, but Declan yelled over the top of us all.

  “There will be no blackmailing! For fuck’s sake! Micah, come with us. Coby, go home.”

  “He better not say that shit,” Coby said, his finger pointing threateningly at Micah but also shaking slightly.

  I leaned in close to him, and pulled his arm down, holding on to him and calming him like the frightened animal he currently resembled. “Coby, relax. You know Declan. He’ll take care of this. And besides, I was there, remember?”

  “Shit sticks, Simon. You and Dec know better than anyone that once a story gets out, no matter how false it is, they all start to think it’s true.”

  Yeah, I did know that. But I couldn’t exactly point out to him that his boyfriend had played a huge role in doing that.

  Coby knew it, anyway. No matter how much he liked trying to forget it at the moment.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “You’re hardly Lindy Chamberlain. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  But he didn’t look happy.

  None of us did.

  “SIMON, GET him a drink, please. Nonalcoholic.”

  “Really? I was going to make mojitos.”

  Dec sighed, probably thinking I was just as annoying as his troublesome protégé, but disappeared into the bedroom to call Micah’s parents.

  “Nice digs,” Micah said.

  “Yeah, we like it.” I poured him a glass of iced water, and downed one myself before taking it over to him.

  “What is it you do, exactly?”

  “I produce television shows.”

  “Oh, so you do work.”

  “Yeah. It’s what we have to do to make a living.”

  “It’s just, I’ve seen you on the TV sometimes.”

  Oh gods, that was never going to be a good side of me.

  “I thought you were just a WAG. You know, lived off your man.”

  “Most WAGS also have jobs, you know.”

  He shrugged. “Have you really been together eight years?”

  This was like bloody Millionaire Hot Seat except I would actually rather have to deal with Eddie McGuire than the present company. “Yeah.”

  “That’s pretty long. You know, for queers.”

  Just one little word, used in such an offhand manner, turned my blood to ice. “You might want to rethink using that word, just saying.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it can sound pretty offensive.”

  “It does? But I’m a queer. You’re a queer. It’s what we are.”

  “It depends on context.”

  He looked at me, expressionless, and I knew I was sounding like a wanker.

  “Setting,” I said.

  “I know what context is. We study it in English.”

  Okay, I sounded like a condescending wanker.

  “I thought we could say that to each other, like black people say n—”

  “Let’s stop right there!”

  Micah grinned, and that was when I realised the kid already knew how to push my buttons.

  “You really don’t like me, do you?” he asked.

  “I don’t know you well enough to form a judgement yet.”

  “And I don’t think you even want to fuck me.”

  Well, that escalated quickly. What struck me was that he said it so casually, and it probably meant that he had had some experience with people sleazing onto him. I had to tread carefully, and I wished Dec were there. “As you are one, you should probably know that gay people don’t want to fuck everyone they see.”

  “Maybe not. But I’m jailbait. Everybody likes jailbait.”

  Oh, fuck, this was getting worse. “Not everybody.”

  “Your friend was certainly up for it.”

  “I don’t think Coby would have gone there, even if you had tried. He’s in a relationship. And he certainly wouldn’t have done anything if he knew you were seventeen.”

  “But I’m still legal. And not everybody is like you and Saint Declan. But then, Declan’s no saint, either.”

  Man, he was good. “Oh, yeah?” I said casually. “You and Dec got a thing going on, have you?”

  He was taken aback at my reaction but recovered quickly. “Doesn’t mean he isn’t thinking it.”

  “Let me tell you something, sunshine. Dec spent quite a few years still in professional football when he was with me. He was surrounded by men in their prime, and then, in the general public, gay men in their primes tried to have a crack. If he didn’t do it then, what makes you think he’s now going to choose a seventeen-year-old snotty-nosed little prick?”

  For one brief moment, probably not even two seconds, I saw his mask falter again. Fuck, I had gone too far. But boom, the shields were back up again.

  “He seems to like snotty-nosed little pricks, doesn’t he? Must be his type.”

  Dec entered, phone in hand, and picked up on the tension immediately. “Everything okay here?”

  “Your boyfriend doesn’t like me.”

  “Simon?” Dec asked.

  “Pffft” was all I could get out.

  “He’s being sensitive because I said he was a queer.”

  I decided I wasn’t going to bring up the other shit that went down. “Look, mate,” I said with emphasis on the last word so he knew he was anything but. I wasn’t sure if it would sink in, however. “I don’t know you well enough for you to call me a queer.
Usually when I’ve been called that, it’s been by the least likely of mates.”

  “Micah,” sighed Dec, “we’ve been through this before.” He turned to me. “He doesn’t really mean it. He’s just trying to get a rise out of you.”

  “Well, fly in on a fighter jet and hang a ‘Mission Accomplished’ banner!”

  I knew I should be trying to act like the mature one, and set an example for the kid. But that fucking word still burned, unless it was being used in an academic sense, or—and this was a very rare or—I was using it to describe myself. I would never use it on someone I had just met, for precisely these reasons. I had heard it used against me too many times in my life, along with the even worse “f” word.

  The grin on the kid’s face further goaded me.

  “Look, I’ve faced far mouthier shits than you. I’ve been that mouthy shit. But it gets old, fucking fast. Especially as the only person who will really suffer in the end is you. Dec’s doing this for nothing, so it’s not like he’s going to get fired if you fuck this up.”

  “Simon,” Dec said, but Micah got in first.

  “I’m not fucking anything up. I just want to have fun.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but you keep going on about how you’re legal. You’re not legal to go to bars and drink there. And you may be ‘legal’ in the fucking sense, but having skeezy guys attracted to you only because of your age is reprehensible. You don’t need that shit in your life. Life is hard enough as is.”

  “What do you care? It’s none of your business.”

  “I have no vested interest in you, so I don’t care if you fuck it up or not.”

  “Simon,” Dec sighed again.

  “Let me finish,” I said, and I didn’t wait for any permission. “I have one more thing to say. I do care that I don’t want to see you chewed up and spat out by the press and public like Dec was at times. But when it comes down to it, I only care about Dec. I don’t want him to get fucked over because of you.”

  Quite frankly, I don’t think anyone had spoken that candidly to Micah in a long time. It was probably far more sugarcoated than it could have been, but it wasn’t working. Micah was on the skids. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure that out when he was threatening Coby with sexual blackmail.

  “Nothing more to say?” I asked.

  He shook his head.

  “In the end it’s up to you. So it’s up to you to grow up, especially if you want this chance. Most guys would shit themselves to have your opportunities.”

  And now we all stood in awkward, heavy silence.

  “Is it a long way up on that pedestal?” Micah turned to Dec. “He doesn’t look it, but he doesn’t take much shit, does he?”

  “I think we’ve reached the limit on the word shit right now,” Dec said, but with his back to his protégé he mouthed “thank you” at me.

  I wasn’t sure if he would be thanking me later.

  IN THE dark of our bedroom, long after Micah had been collected by his pissed-off parents (who didn’t seem that impressed that gay Micah had been discovered doing gay things by Declan’s gay partner), I poked Dec in the ribs.

  “I’ve got something to tell you.”

  “Why do you always start deep and meaningfuls when we should be sleeping?”

  What could I tell him? That it felt like the safest time? Because I didn’t like to show a vulnerable face when talking about things that upset me or I felt deeply about? He knew all that stuff, anyway.

  “It’s about Micah.”

  And then I couldn’t do it.

  “What about Micah?” Dec repeated.

  “Maggie didn’t like him.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s everything. Cats know, you know.”

  “Know what?”

  “Personalities. And she knew he was bad news. She wouldn’t even go near him.”

  “She’s getting old, Simon. She hardly ever leaves our bedroom.”

  It was true. Right now she was sleeping between our feet.

  “She was out for food.”

  “She wasn’t. I came in here as soon as we got home to call Micah’s parents. And Maggie never left the bed.”

  Bloody hell. Who needed Wallander around when Declan Tyler™ was here to solve every mystery and white lie?

  “Are you ever going to tell me what happened in the lounge?”

  I sighed. All this deception for nothing. “You knew?”

  “You looked gutted when I walked in. I know you, Simon. I also know not to push you, and to let you tell me when you’re ready.”

  “You just did.”

  “Well, maybe this one time I did. So, what happened?”

  “He’s a right little toxic shit, Dec, and I think you should cut ties with him.”

  Dec switched on his lamp and rolled over to face me. There went the hiding of emotions.

  “Are you crying?” he asked, concerned.

  “No!” I was just pissed off, and worried.

  “What the fuck happened?”

  “He basically implied you were fucking him.”

  I could see a whole gamut of emotions cross Dec’s face: disbelief, anger, incredulity, and then worry as he stared at me.

  “You believe him?”

  “No,” I said immediately so he would not think the worst. “Of course I don’t. But I’m really fucking worried about what could happen if he says shit like this to anyone else. He’s already threatened to do so with Coby—who’s to say he won’t do it with you?”

  “He knows better than that,” Dec growled.

  “He’s fucked-up, Dec. Let someone else be his mentor.”

  “You’re telling me to give up?”

  “No, I’m telling you to put yourself first for once. Why do you always have to be so fucking noble?”

  It was out before I could stop it. And now the hurt on his face was because of me.

  “Is that what you think I’m trying to be?

  “Dec, I’m sorry.”

  “Just answer me.”

  “It was a stupid thing to say.”

  “But you obviously think it.”

  “I think you are noble, and that’s one of many things I love about you. But sometimes….” I trailed off.

  “Sometimes what?” he asked, with an edge.

  “People take advantage of it.”

  “People like Micah?”

  “Maybe. And people like Heyward.”

  “Why did you have to bring him up?”

  “Because he knew exactly how to play you. You always try to do the right thing, even if it harms you. And I’m just saying I want you to do what’s best for you sometimes. It’s not being selfish. You’re actually the least selfish person I know.”

  “First you insult me, then you compliment me. You know how to keep me on my toes, Simon Murray.”

  “It’s because I love you.”

  He lifted my chin to properly look at me. “I know.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “What I always do.” He gave a wry smile. “The noble thing.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

  “Don’t be mad at me.”

  “I’m not mad. Just worried.” And maybe just a little mad as well.

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Easy for you to say.”

  “Look, you’ve only seen the front Micah puts on. When you’re around him long enough, you start to see what he really is. Does that sound at all familiar?”

  I ignored him. “And what is he, then?”

  “He’s a scared kid.”

  “You’re saying I’m a scared kid?”

  “Aren’t we all, in different ways?”

  “Spare me the philosophy lecture, professor.”

  “I’m not. He does remind me a bit of you, though. It’s like I can almost see back to what you were like in high school, putting up walls so nobody could get in.”

  Maybe there were similarities, but I had survived due to snarkiness and wi
t, not by threatening to report people to the police for sexual harassment. “Are you listening to yourself?”

  “He needs my help. And I think I can do it.”

  “Surely there could be someone else.” But as soon as I said it, I knew there wasn’t. Micah had obviously burnt too many bridges and was pushing anybody off who tried to make it across the blackened remains.

  Except my stupid, noble, lovable lunkhead of a partner.

  “Everyone else has given up on him.”

  “Gee, I wonder why.”

  “He’s troubled.”

  “Lindsay Lohan is troubled. Micah’s dangerous.”

  “I’m just asking you to have a little sympathy for him. We’ve all been there.”

  “I know what the closet is like. But Micah is poisonous. Even Heyward was only out for himself; he didn’t want to take everyone down with him.”

  “Stop mentioning Greg!” Dec yelled, then caught himself and softened. “This is different. And you’re jumping to a lot of conclusions on only knowing Micah for one night.”

  “I’ve dealt with him before, and you know that. Are you not worried at all by the fact that he said he would accuse Coby of blowing him, and insinuating that you had fucked him as well?”

  “Actually, I’m not. I told you, I’ll take care of it.”

  I was beginning to fume, and Dec could tell. He tried to pull me in for a hug, but I resisted. Dec wrapped his arms around his knees, and I sat with my arms folded, glaring out into the lights of the city through our window. Now Micah was coming between us.

  “He’s in that mercenary stage of being a teenager,” Dec finally said. “Sex is scary, and it’s a weapon, but it also has power. He’s too confused by it all to know what it’s all about.”

  “He seems oblivious to how much damage he could do by saying that shit.”

  “Simon, this is why I wanted to set up this foundation in the first place. So I could help kids get away from the destructive elements of the closet at an early age. So they wouldn’t have to go through what I went through. Micah is in the first wave. There’s bound to be some angst there—”

  I snorted.

  “Okay, angst isn’t strong enough a word for Micah. But he’s just trying to survive. He’s still at school, there’s some bullying, his parents are having trouble accepting him fully. He’s lashing out.”