by Sean Kennedy
“I don’t want him lashing out at you. Or my friends.”
“Coby’s a friend again?” Dec asked, trying to catch my eye.
“Don’t change the subject.”
He kissed me. This time I let him stay close, and he pulled me down to lie beside him, although it wasn’t as romantic as it sounded as I was practically buried in his armpit. “I’ll be fine. If you think Micah was bad tonight, you should have seen him a few months ago.”
“You really think that will make me feel better?”
“By the end of the night, I think he even had some grudging admiration for you.”
“What, even though I’m not a tough sporty athlete like the two of you, just the fairy film producer? Still doesn’t make me feel better.”
“Hey, don’t you ever call yourself that,” he warned. “Not even as a joke.”
“Why not? It’s what people like Micah think.”
“Simon,” he sighed, but he didn’t have anything to counter the argument.
“But it’s fine, Dec. You help him, be noble.”
I leaned across him, my elbow in his stomach, and switched his lamp off. As I turned my back on him, I could feel Dec still lying in the same position before he wordlessly rolled away as well.
It was, in all truth, the first night we had ever gone to sleep angry at each other. Arguments were always sorted out in the bedroom before sleep.
Dec wasn’t snoring, so I think he was lying awake as long as I was. But neither of us said a word to each other.
Second Quarter
Chapter 6
DECLAN WAS still asleep, or at least pretending to be, as I got ready for work. I heard the toilet flush as I was getting my bag together, and I ran out the door before any more confrontation could occur.
I should have stayed; we should have talked. But there was an evil, unstoppable, part of me that wanted to punish him a little. I knew Dec’s overuse of nobility also extended to me—we’re talking about the notoriously shy man who paraded himself on morning television to make sure the humiliation over my midnight dunk with Jasper Brunswick in the Yarra died down. This time I wanted him to use his nobility for himself, and as always, he refused.
Coby, unable to sense that I was not in the mood to talk, cornered me as soon as I got into work.
Before he could say anything, I began to sing the chorus to “Young Boys Are My Weakness.”
He immediately paled. “You think that’s funny?”
“Well, Kate Ceberano is known more for her singing talents than her comedy.” At the expression on his face, I relented. “Just trying to break the ice.”
“Well, good job, you arsehole. Is it all fixed?”
I threw my bag at my desk. “No.”
“What? Why the hell not?”
“Because Dec is an idiot!” I sank into my chair.
Coby’s eyes widened. He had heard me say Dec was an idiot plenty of times, or call myself an idiot at times, but he had never heard me mean it—about Dec, at least.
“Sir Declan Tyler, of the Knights Nobler,” I said, hating myself for criticising him but it came bursting out of my mouth before I could stop it.
“He’s on that little shit’s side?”
Now I really regretted saying anything. That didn’t stop me from expounding upon it. “He’s troubled, Coby. So we should all drop the soap and take it.”
“I doubt Declan said that.”
“He may as well have.”
“Are you guys okay?” He honestly looked concerned.
It was strange to be talking to each other properly again even though we really hadn’t sorted anything out—we just had new dramas to replace the old ones. “We’re fine.”
Coby, of course, didn’t believe me.
“Okay, we’re kind of not talking at the moment. In fact, I fled the house before he got up this morning so I wouldn’t have to talk to him.”
“You guys can’t fight!”
“We can, and we do sometimes.”
“This is my fault.”
“No, it isn’t.” But, to be fair, a little part of me did blame him. And Jasper Brunswick. Mostly Jasper Brunswick.
“Yes, it is.”
“I would be happy to blame it all on you and Jasper. But it’s not just you guys. Life is a series of events which involve a lot of people and….” I trailed off. “I really don’t know what I’m getting at.”
“You’re off your game,” Coby agreed.
“WHAT EXACTLY happened in the Lounge?”
Coby didn’t seem to relish the prospect of reliving those events, but he took a deep breath. “I was at the bar getting a drink, and this guy—who I now know is a boy, not a guy—started chatting me up. And although I wouldn’t have done anything, it was just nice, you know? Being flirted with.”
“I’m sure you’re not hard up for flirting.”
“You’d be surprised. I’m getting old.”
“You’re twenty-six, you idiot.”
“Twenty-seven in two months.”
“Fine, you’re twenty-seven.”
“Yeah, but that’s like forty in gay world. It’s gay old.”
I shook my head. “I’m surrounded by numpties.” A thought occurred to me. “What’s thirty-two then?”
“Fifty.”
“Fuck off.”
“Hey, you asked.”
“And this is written in the gay handbook, I suppose?”
“It’s unwritten, but pretty well known.”
“I guess it’s lucky for you that Jasper came along. Otherwise you would have been reduced to sitting on your front porch waiting for gentleman callers who would never come.”
“Yeah.” He looked too ill to even rise to the bait. “Is that kid going to do what he said he would? Accuse me of getting blown by him? How am I going to tell Jasper?”
“I think he said you blew him.”
“Thanks for bringing that up again.”
“Sorry. Won’t Jasper believe you?”
“We’ve only been seeing each other for four months. What if he doesn’t trust me completely, yet?”
“I thought you loved him?”
Coby bit at his nails. “I do.”
“Doesn’t he love you?”
“We’ve never actually said it to each other.”
I refrained from pointing out that maybe Jasper wasn’t at that point yet. As much as I was hurt by Coby right then, I didn’t want to wound him back.
“I’m your witness, remember? I’ll tell him if it comes to it.”
He looked apologetic. “Please don’t take offense, but Jasper wouldn’t believe a word you said.”
“What the fuck? He’s the one—”
Doing the Supremes move, Coby raised his hand. “I can’t deal with the Jasper Brunswick and Simon Murray Hour of Powerful Hate right now.”
I was still smarting. It was okay for Jasper to get away with saying things; Coby always had an excuse ready. That benefit wasn’t extended to me. “Don’t worry about Micah. Declan will sort him out. It seems to be he’s the only person who can.”
“I hope so.”
“Coby, you obviously can’t believe a word I say—”
He shot me a look, which I ignored.
“—but you trust Declan, right?”
He nodded.
“Then you know Declan will fix it. I told you not to worry. Micah’s just a kid who is going through some shit and lashes out against everybody. He’s all talk.”
“Yeah, it’s the talk I’m worried about.”
I was, too. But I wasn’t going to let Coby know that.
LUCKILY FOR Coby’s sanity, but not for my own, Declan dropped by later that afternoon. We hadn’t talked all day, which was rare for us. The weirdness hung between us like a cloud as we exchanged greetings but didn’t touch each other. That was also rare.
“Micah’s been talked to,” he told me. “He’s not going to do anything stupid. It was an empty threat.”
“Are you sure?”
“Micah knows I have enough on him.”
“You threatened a seventeen-year-old?” I couldn’t help but feel pleased.
Dec, however, looked horrified. “No! I just pointed out that this was how adults behaved.”
“And he accepted that?”
“Every teenager wants to be an adult. Fuck knows why. You want to be a kid again as soon as you’re older.”
I didn’t. But then, Dec and I had had very different adolescences. Declan was a golden child, but he kept a big secret. Everybody thought they knew mine and acted accordingly, even though I never confirmed it until uni.
However, Micah was Declan, with the same level of adoration and admiration for his sporting prowess—except his secret was exposed. There was no opportunity to go back into the closet for him, not that Dec had any chance to either once the genie had gotten out of the bottle.
And if Micah wasn’t such a shit I would be more apt to feel sorry for him.
“But you both know that it isn’t true,” I said, finally.
“What?”
“Adults act like that all the time, being shitty, in the real world. Humans can be absolutely horrible.”
“There are good people along with the bad.”
“And I never understood why Anne Frank, of all people, still believed that.”
“You’re going off on a tangent.” Normally it would be a gentle dig, but there was a hardness there that made everything off-kilter.
Thankfully there was a knock at the door, and Coby stuck his head in. He still hadn’t lost that green pallor.
“It’s all sorted, Cobes,” Dec said.
“Really?” His colour seemed to lift a little.
“Yep.”
“See, I told you he’d sort it all!” I said.
Coby rushed across the room and hugged Dec fiercely. Dec gave me a bemused look, but hugged him back. It was the first sense of camaraderie I felt from him since last night.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Coby said as the hug continued. And continued.
“Okay, that’s long enough,” I said. I resented that I hadn’t gotten one when Dec first came in, but Coby was now monopolising them.
“Sorry,” Coby said, pulling away. “You’re like a rock, Dec. And warm. Really warm. Wow.”
“You’ve hugged him before,” I reminded him.
“It just feels different today.”
“You’ve been in enough trouble this week,” I reminded him. “WWJD?”
Coby looked at me blankly. “What would Jesus do?”
“No, Jasper.”
“You just compared Jasper to Jesus,” Dec said. “He’d love that.”
I pointed a finger at Coby. “You tell him this, and I’ll tell him all about your recent shenanigans.”
Coby pursed his lips and mimed throwing away a key. “My lips are sealed.” He turned to Dec. “Can I have another hug?”
Dec did so, and Coby once again relished it.
“Walk me out?” Dec asked me.
“WHERE ARE you parked?” I asked.
We had ridden the lift in silence, as four of my work colleagues shared it with us. Once we were on the ground floor, it broke.
“In your car park. Like I always do.”
I headed for the stairs rather than wait for the lift again. “Oh. Well, I guess that would be the most logical place to park. You’re not going to park anywhere else in the city, especially as I gave you a pass and that pass permits you to free parking. I mean, do you know how expensive parking is now? The cheapest is twenty-five dollars a day and—”
At the bottom of the stairs Dec held open the door for me. “You’re babbling.”
“Yep.”
“Good to know some things never change.”
“How long are we going to keep this up for?” The smell of trapped car fumes hit us as we entered the underground car park; I was sick of us sniping at each other.
“We’re not,” he said. We reached the car, and he leaned against it.
“Oh. Good. Okay, I’ll see you later tonight.”
“Come here.” He pulled me back.
“You want to be friends now?”
“More than friends.” He grinned, and it was nice to see it again.
“Maybe.”
“I seem to remember someone ducking out on me this morning before we had a chance to talk.”
“You were sleeping.”
“If I recall rightly, I was in the shower.”
I let him pull me in chest to chest. “Okay. I was avoiding you.”
“It’s okay. I avoided you all night.”
“We can be stupid when we want to be.”
I kissed him, and his stubble grazed my chin. He hadn’t shaved this morning. Probably too much in a rush to sort out Micah. I didn’t mind. I liked him with stubble.
“I know who you are, Declan Tyler,” I said. “And I wouldn’t want you any other way. But it doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like you to think of yourself first every now and again.”
“But then I wouldn’t be noble me,” he snarked.
They always say couples start to talk the same. Unfortunately, at that moment Dec sounded a lot like me. And that wasn’t him. He wasn’t meant to be cynical and self-deprecating. He had to leave that to the experts.
“You’re best at being Declan,” I said. “Just watch yourself with that kid. I wouldn’t trust him with my car, let alone my husband.”
“Your husband?”
“Practically.” I sniffed. “When I was upset with you, you were just my boyfriend.”
He laughed. “I like ‘husband’ better.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“So am I forgiven?”
“Am I?”
“I guess,” he shrugged.
“Yeah, I guess so, too.”
“Excellent. I really need to go back to work now.”
“No,” I protested. “Kiss me again.”
Like I even needed to ask.
“YOU HAVE pash rash,” Coby said.
I rubbed my chin self-consciously. “Do not.”
“I take it things are okay between you guys, then?”
“They’re on the up and up.”
“Really?” Coby asked.
“Everything’s fine, Coby,” I said. “Everything.”
“I hope so,” Coby said, and the name Micah didn’t pass between us for the rest of the day.
“AND SO, life returns to normal,” I said, as Dec and I puddled onto the couch after dinner. I think Dec needed a little bit of cuddling as he burrowed his head into my chest and kept it there.
“Let’s hope it stays that way for a while,” he said, muffled.
“Don’t jinx us.”
“You jinxed us in the first place by saying life was back to normal.”
“Ugh, I did, didn’t I?” I kissed his forehead.
“I think we’ll be fine.”
“You’re making the jinx worse, bud.”
“Bud? Earlier you were calling me husband. Did I get downgraded?”
“Never,” I said.
“I’m gonna hold you to that.”
“Deal.”
Chapter 7
“I’VE DECIDED I’m going to have a coffee with Jasper,” Dec announced from the couch, apropos of nothing as he ate his cereal and read the paper.
“What the hell?”
It was too early in the morning for me to deal with this kind of shit. I was blearily reading the headlines on my tablet, catching up with what had happened overnight in the world. Nothing as bizarre as the new development breaking in my living room, apparently.
“I just want to talk to him about everything.”
“Well, I’m coming, too.”
He held up his hand. “No, you’re not.”
“You can’t stop me!”
“Simon, peace. I need to have a conversation with him before you—”
“Charmingly bumble in?”
“I was going to say ride in like a
Valkyrie, but sure, let’s go with that.”
“Are you going to punch him like you did Heyward?” I asked hopefully.
Dec winced. “Don’t remind me. I can’t believe I did that.”
“You were standing up for your man. It was sweet.”
“Violence is sweet? You’re twisted. And no, I’m not going to punch Jasper. Just talk. The last thing he needs is a punch.”
“Your view and my own on what Jasper Brunswick needs are very different.”
“My love,” he said drily, “if you really thought that, you wouldn’t have ended up in the Yarra that night.”
“I didn’t say I was consistent.”
“That’s the last thing anybody would say about you.” He munched his Weet-Bix happily.
“Seriously, Dec, tell me why.”
Dec sighed, and put his spoon and newspaper down. Ever the traditionalist, he still liked reading the physical broadsheet on a Sunday morning. “You don’t think I have my own reasons for wanting to talk to the guy? In case you forgot, he wrote a lot of shit about me in cahoots with Heyward.”
I did have a tendency to be all me me me about Jasper Brunswick’s evil deeds. But it intrigued me that Dec felt he had to confront my nemesis as he was usually the one to just let things go, especially as he had told Coby that he would.
“Do you even think he’d turn up?” I asked.
Dec shrugged. “If Coby hears I want to do this, there is no way he’d let Jasper back out. He’s expecting us to be that way and not come to the party.”
“They’re having a party? Do we have to go?” At Dec’s withering look, I said, “Oh. The metaphorical party. Well, I don’t really want to go to that one either.”
“Tough. On both counts, because sooner or later there will be an actual party. Although I do love it when you pretend to be dense to get out of something.”
“Pretend?” I sighed. “Fine. I’m not taking a gift, though. That’s too much commitment, too soon.” I scooted over to where he was sprawled on the couch, pulled his bowl out of his hand, set it down and threw myself on his lap. He groaned, and I kissed him. “But, playing Coby like that? You’re being cunning. I love it when you do that. It’s so rare.”
