“Yes, it does look good, but your lips look even better,” Forrest remarked. Without hesitation he leaned forward, claiming Mica’s lips with his own. It started out tender, sweet, slowly melting into the hunger of desire. Mica moaned and Forrest drew back. “I suspect there will be time enough for that later. Let’s have a taste of your hard work.”
Forrest bit into the strawberry, savoring the sugary treat, a bit of juice dribbling down his chin. As Mica settled against his side once again, they gazed upon the vast sky, lucky to witness a brave star as it raced across the heavens.
“Did you make a wish?” Mica asked, polishing off a strawberry.
“Yes.”
“What?”
With his arm around Mica he planted a kiss on the top of his husband’s head. “That you’ll always be mine.”
* * * *
ABOUT KASSANDRA LEA
Kassandra Lea’s stories have appeared in a number of anthologies. She lives in southern Wisconsin. For more information, visit facebook.com/leakassie.
Forrest and Mica first appear in the short story “Wild Ride,” in the Cowboy Roundup anthology published by JMS Books. Readers may also follow their romance in the short story, “The Perfect Tree,” also available from JMS Books.
He Ain’t Heavy by W.S. Long
I looked at the clock ticking away against the wall. If we left now, we’d be at the airport in thirty minutes. Forty minutes tops. But Mom wanted to wait until Bruce, my stepdad, came home. She thinks it’d be great to welcome Emerson back as a family just like we were before Emerson, lured by the GI Bill, took off for the military. But I know it’s a lie that my mom is telling herself to avoid the ugly truth. Emerson, my stepbrother, isn’t the same. The bomb damaged him, inside and out. And it changed all of us, too. No one wanted to talk about it except me. Since his injury, it’s like we closed our eyes to what happened. Iraq apparently did all this to him, but no one wanted to talk about it.
In the Lively household I learned that it’s much easier to ignore something if we never talk about it. But ignoring things and not saying things was killing me.
* * * *
I sighed.
“Stop sighing,” My mom glared at me, her lips pursed. She’s dressed ready to go, too. She’s wearing blue jeans, and a blue and white blouse. Her shoes are right near the door, just a few feet away from us as I linger in the kitchen watching my mom checking on the sweet potato casserole she made for Emerson. She moved the honey-baked ham that was defrosting on the side. She placed the green bean casserole she made earlier in the refrigerator, waiting our arrival back from the airport. All of this for Emerson’s homecoming. She even made a little hand-written sign to welcome him home. The cake she ordered from Publix sat in the fridge decorated with a yellow ribbon. Buttercream icing on top of chocolate cake.
I opened the soda she handed me after dusting off the tab. “Shouldn’t Bruce be here by now?”
“He’s on his way, honey. Have some patience.”
Bruce should’ve been home minutes ago. I can’t help but start tapping my fingers on the table.
“Stop, Kade. You’re making me anxious. Go watch some TV. Don’t you have homework? You’ve got to keep those grades up for the college scholarship.”
“I already finished my homework for English Comp. The rest of it I already did on campus. When did Bruce text you? He’s probably stuck in traffic in Tampa. You know how it gets at four on a Friday evening. Interstate must be fucked up.”
“Your language, Kade Shiloh Jones!” She shook her head as she ignored me while she checked the green bean casserole—the second casserole—that baked in the oven.
“Seriously, Mom, we shouldn’t be late to the airport.”
“Oh my God. You need to cool it.” She threw the oven mittens to the side. “If he doesn’t show up in the next ten, you and I will go. I’m not going to call Bruce again. It’ll just piss him off and make him more stressed.”
“You would think Bruce would be home by now. Why couldn’t he be off today?”
“He had to work, honey. Construction’s only beginning to pick up. We’re just slowly catching up on bills. If Bruce could have taken off, he would. Emerson’s his only child. Emerson will understand if his dad is a little late.” She opened the cupboard. “Come here, Kade, tell me if you can see the hot cocoa mix in this cupboard.”
I walked a few feet and stood on toes and saw the Hershey’s cocoa, right above my mother’s head and handed it to her. My mother had pinned her hair back with hairpins. In the last couple of years, more gray hair appeared on the sides. She didn’t seem to care about it though. At least not in my presence. Emerson’s biological father, Bruce, didn’t apparently care either. The walls of our small house were paper-thin and I could hear them sometimes if my music wasn’t turned up loud, carrying on like nasty teenagers.
I guess I couldn’t blame Bruce. My mom was a looker. Still is, even though she’s forty-two to his forty-three. She kept her dark brown hair shoulder length. She had smile lines around her lips and eyes. When my mom smiled, her hazel eyes sparkled. Everyone said I had my mother’s eyes and people said how I easily resembled her.
I’m not sure what my mom saw in Bruce. At six feet, he stood two or three inches taller than her. He had a constant five o’clock shadow. His blue eyes always seemed tired and weary: as if the world crushed his dreams and he had to work odd construction jobs. He snored at night, too and I was unfortunate to hear that, too after Bruce and my mom stopped acting like alley cats. I figured the beer belly he carried around his mid-line didn’t help reduce his snoring either.
Emerson though was something else.
My stepbrother stood six foot one, heavily muscled with his left arm decorated in a long dragon tattoo. He had been in track as a sophomore, wrestling as a freshman and by the time he graduated played varsity basketball for two years straight. He had blue eyes, too: but unlike Bruce’s soul-weary countenance, Emerson’s always burned fierce. When I met him for the first time, when I was fourteen, and he was sixteen, I knew I had never seen anyone more focused in life. And when I told Emerson I was gay at fifteen, shortly after my mom married his dad, his eyes told me that he didn’t care.
I should tell you by this point that Emerson is very good looking. Too good looking. But as good looking as he is, looks couldn’t pay for college. Bruce couldn’t send Emerson to college. Even though Emerson had good grades, money woes due to the economy in the home building business prevented Bruce from sending his only son to college.
Now, Emerson’s coming back from Iraq.
I wished I told Emerson how I felt about him before he left for Iraq. I tried to tell him though. In letters. Lots of letters. I’m sure Mom knew that I had a crush on Emerson though I’m not sure if she told Bruce.
Why didn’t I tell Emerson? I didn’t want to destroy our relationship. Emerson deserved better. I knew that. He deserved someone else, just not me. He probably still sees me as that pimply-faced teenager who bugged him, tried to borrow his clothes and wanted to hang out with him and his friends to the point of annoyance.
But I knew him more than anyone in this house. Bruce treated Emerson like a child; even after Emerson left for overseas. And Mom? She let Bruce raise Emerson while she “kept me in line,” as she said, over and over.
I knew I had it bad when I turned sixteen and all the guys I met I compared to Emerson. Of course, the guys in high school were douche bags. They all acted like they were studs and banging girls. One of Emerson’s senior friends, when I was a sophomore, kept pestering me behind Emerson’s back even though he bragged he was a ladies’ man. When Emerson found out, he put a stop to it.
That confused me.
Was Emerson trying to act like a protective stepbrother? Or was he jealous about something else? I never asked him. Because once you joined the Lively household, you don’t ask direct questions.
The good thing about Emerson and me was that our relationship was not stepbrother to stepbrother, where w
e competed against each other. It was more like friends, best friends. Our beds just a few feet apart provided us late night discussions about stupid things like which was better DC Comics or Marvel Comics? Could Batman really have a chance against Superman? What if there was a Wonder Man to a Wonder Woman?
In the end, he told me first (not Mom, not Bruce) that he was signing up for the military. He told me why he broke up with Jen before anyone else knew they broke it off.
When he told me he liked boys as well as girls and was tired of fighting his attraction to other guys, he told me that no one else knew and to keep it a secret. He broke up with Jen because she wanted more and he wasn’t ready to commit to a ring, marriage, and babies. Shit, he was twenty and I just turned eighteen when he told me he thought he was bi.
And he told me how frustrated he was with Bruce treating him like a child. Maybe he wanted to fight for our country; maybe he wanted to find himself. I don’t know why he really wanted to do it. He told Bruce and my mom it was the GI college plan. I suspected there was more than one reason he left the house, and left me, but maybe it was also to figure out what was going on in his head.
I knew some of the things Emerson vented in our midnight tête-à-tête were teenage exaggerations because I did it, too. Complaining about Irene, my mom, was a pastime that I had perfected to a science by the time Emerson graduated from high school. When Emerson left for Iraq, I had no one to whom I could complain. He gave me his old cell phone to use since he couldn’t use it in the field. I carried it with me everywhere to remind myself about him.
He asked me to write him when he was overseas. Like actual letters. My first letter to Emerson after he arrived in Iraq took a day to write. You wouldn’t know it by looking at it. It was only twenty lines long. There were so many emotions running through me when I tried to write the first snail mail.
First and foremost, I wondered how to tell him that I loved him, and I didn’t mean in a brotherly way, without making him think, wow, this is gross. In the end, I never did. In the twice-weekly letters I sent, my initial goal was to tell him how my senior year went since he was missing it. He wanted me to tell him about my graduation and the senior stuff I was going through.
My letters later evolved into lengthy drivels of what happened at home, what happened at school, how graduation went, how Mom annoyed me and nagged me. I told him I didn’t have a date for senior prom and confided that I didn’t want to bring another guy to school. The teachers and counselors were cool with me being gay, but the other students? Not so much. There were a handful of homophobic bullies at school that I stayed away from. Emerson and his friends were not around to keep me safe, having graduated already, so I learned to keep within my own clique of nerds and geeks, and keep my head down, away from trouble.
Emerson must have thought I was a giddy little girl when I later bragged about getting a job after high school graduation at the local coffee shop. I told him there were cute guys who came in but I was too shy to ask any of them out. When a thirty-something customer flirted with me and asked me out, I told Emerson in a letter about it. I told him I was freaked out and I didn’t want to go out on a date with an older man.
I didn’t want my first time with a stranger.
I told him I thought I’d be a virgin all my life if my inability to come out of my shell kept up.
His letters, in turn, talked about life out in the desert. He missed Kentucky Fried Chicken, McDonalds, Coca Cola, and Breyers’ strawberry ice cream. He said the KFC nearby the post and the soda he drank there weren’t the same. He theorized that the sandy air made everything tasteless. Maybe what he was spewing was bullshit; maybe he just missed home.
His last letter before the bomb confused me. He told me to take it slow; that I would find the right guy, and that that special man may be closer than I thought and just around the corner. He told me it was okay to be a virgin and to stay that way. His letter almost begged me not to rush to have sex with anyone.
Then that call came in. A corpsman called from a joint military hospital, looking for Bruce. When Bruce finally connected with the military hospital, Bruce told Mom and me that Emerson was sent to Germany because an IED exploded a hundred feet away from where Emerson was doing patrols and a projectile from the explosion shattered his kneecap.
We wanted to fly to Landstuhl in Germany where he was sent to, where military doctors took care of him, and where they pieced his kneecap together with wire by doing a figure eight to keep his shattered patella together. We knew right there and then that the military would be discharging him. His knee would never be the same. At least in Germany, we were able to Skype with him.
Right before his rehab was done he got an iPhone from the local post-exchange to Face Time with us. He looked the same, other than the really short crew cut but he had dark circles underneath his eyes and they were a little puffy. He complained he had a hard time sleeping since he was sharing a room with another rehab patient. I sensed he was lying: that maybe he still dreamt about the moment when the explosion happened.
But no one wanted to ask him.
Does the Army provide PTSD counseling?
I wanted to ask questions about counseling. Mom told me Bruce would talk to Emerson when he returned about that. That was their business, not ours.
I wanted to call bullshit on that but I didn’t want my mom to slap me right there and then.
Luckily, when Emerson had finally figured out which parts of the hospital had good wi-fi, he would text me or call me using Face Time audio. During the Face Time calls I told him I missed him.
Since the injury to his knee, I stopped pretending. I would end our calls saying that I loved him. Then Emerson would just laugh and say with a smile in his voice, “Yeah, yeah, whatever.”
But his last text before he boarded the plane back to the states was simple and unexpected. Miss you, Kade. I know I haven’t said it out loud. Can’t wait to see you. And, I do love you.
Maybe I read too much into it but I stared at his text for the last eight hours since he sent it. I wanted it to be something more. Something more than words via text.
* * * *
“Honey, I hear the car. Bruce is home.”
I looked up from staring at Emerson’s text on my phone and watched my mom turn the oven off. “Well, I’m ready.”
“Tell Bruce I’ll be right out. Okay?” My mother brushed her hair and dabbed her forehead with a paper towel.
“Okay.” I walked out, got in the back seat of the car, and told Bruce that she would be right out. “How was work?” I asked.
“Busy as hell. I wish I had time to go and take a shower before we pick up Emerson but I don’t want him waiting in the airport.”
I didn’t say anything else and wished we were already there.
I’m not sure I really paid attention during the next few minutes, as Bruce talked further. I zoned out as my mother locked the house and joined us in the car and my mind further drifted in the half hour drive as I watched the traffic and the signs that led us to Orlando airport.
My mom brought that big sign with her that had Emerson’s name and yellow ribbons drawn in marker on each side.
I wanted to bring roses. Red roses. In the end, I just brought my anxious heart and sweaty hands.
* * * *
I didn’t know what to expect. Maybe I thought he’d be all sad and angry when we finally set eyes on him. Instead when we got to the airport, it didn’t take us long for him to come off the tram to the welcoming area near the airport’s Hyatt hotel. A skycap was wheeling him down in a wheelchair, his injured knee showcased in a rehabilitative brace over his uniform as he held his crutches with both hands, set across the wheelchair. Another traveler was carrying his carry-on. He was all smiles and laughing as he talked to the traveler and the skycap.
When he saw us, his wolf-like eyes lit up. “Dad! Irene!” he yelled. The skycap stopped and my mom and Bruce hugged Emerson. I moved closer, waiting for my turn when he signaled me to come cl
oser. As I leaned into hug him, he pulled my shirt close and kissed me, brushing his lips hard like time demanded it. I felt my heart leap from my chest and my breathing quickened. My ears burned red and I couldn’t move. I closed my eyes and kissed him back, marveling how he smelled of deodorant and pressed dry cleaning. Emerson’s lips were soft, and I didn’t mind the roughness of his face as it brushed mine.
I heard Bruce clear his throat. “Um, guys. You’re in the way of foot traffic here.”
“Bruce, stop it,” my mom interjected.
Emerson released his hold on my shirt and I straightened up. I didn’t know what to say. He must have sensed my confusion because he spoke.
“I’ve read your letters over and over.” Emerson glanced at his carry-on as he mentioned the letters. “They were the only thing that kept me sane. When I had a bad day doing patrols, I would focus on us. The family. You. I know you wanted to say you loved me before I left for Iraq. And I’m glad you finally did. I just wanted to say I love you in my own way.” His eyes teared up as he spoke. Yet Emerson smiled as his voice trembled. “I love you, Kade, and I hope you will accept my apology for not saying it sooner. I just had a lot of things to sort out.”
My knees shook as I stood there. My mouth and brain were working fast, faster than they had ever worked in my life. All I could say at that moment was quick and to the point. “I love you, too, Emerson.” I reached down and hugged him again and I felt Emerson kiss my cheek as he clutched me in his arms, returning my embrace.
“Come on, help me up,” he whispered in my ear. “I want to walk. I’m supposed to walk so I can get my knee used to some weight-bearing.”
The skycap held the wheelchair as Emerson stood and I held him, one arm across his mid-back as I placed a shoulder underneath his armpit while he put both crutches on.
“Am I heavy?” he asked.
Love Is Proud Page 27
