Hard Line

by Sidney Bell

  As he spoke, he lifted a hand to try to straighten his hair, because he no doubt had sex hair, and Sullivan... Sullivan flinched.

  Tobias dropped his hand. It took a full five seconds for his brain to come up with “It was really good,” but he said it with far too much vehemence, because he was suddenly furious at that stupid flinch. He tried to soften it by adding, “I’m good if you are.” He cleared his throat. “I didn’t realize I needed that.”

  Perhaps not the most graceful postcoital compliments possible, but at least Sullivan didn’t look like he was anticipating a punch anymore. He mostly looked sort of startled, and Tobias’s mouth was still running on without his permission. “Thanks for being decent. I mean, you don’t have any reason to like me, and I know casual things don’t come with a lot of expectations, so it could’ve been...but you were good to me, and thanks.”

  Something flickered in Sullivan’s expression, something that Tobias began to interpret as annoyance, but then it shifted, lightning-quick and impossible to parse, and finally Sullivan’s features settled into a mask of distance. Tobias wasn’t sure why at first, but then realized that he’d basically implied that he would’ve expected Sullivan to be a crappy human being rather than a decent one, and he belatedly added, “Sorry.”

  “For?” Sullivan asked, still distant, and this had gotten awful and awkward, and Tobias would’ve pushed, maybe, if he had time for it, and maybe if Sullivan didn’t look quite so much like Tobias was a complete stranger he’d bumped into on the street instead of someone he’d had sex with half an hour ago. But he didn’t have time, and Sullivan didn’t seem to want to hear it anyway, so he didn’t push.

  He muttered, “Never mind. Look, uh, I know it’s inconvenient, but I’d really appreciate a ride to the motel so I can get my car.”

  Nothing on Sullivan’s face changed, but he grabbed his own keys and his wallet and headed for the door, and Tobias thought forget it then.

  * * *

  Tobias arrived at Boettcher Concert Hall with dripping wet hair, a damp collar, a small bouquet of roses, and a healthy amount of dread brewing in his belly, but showing up at the last second had one perk—there was no opportunity for small talk with his family. He snuck into the auditorium out of breath, just before the doors closed, and barely had time to exchange some nods of hello. After a brief intro from the conductor and the obligatory tuning of instruments by the orchestra, the first guest soloist began.

  Unfortunately, he couldn’t avoid intermission the same way. The concert was a showcase of young talent, and since Ruby hadn’t played yet, they didn’t even have the topic of her performance to discuss.

  In a lobby humming with the polite conversation of well-dressed patrons in line for wine at the bar, Tobias shook his papa’s hand, kissed Mirlande and his manman on the cheek and gave Guy a not-too-hard shoulder bump. “Where are Marie and Darlin?”

  “Darlin’s got one of his migraines, so Marie stayed home with him.” Manman was wearing the emerald green dress she’d worn to Tobias’s high school graduation. She joked sometimes that it was her proud parent dress, because she’d noticed one day that by sheer coincidence she’d worn it in four photographs of various school events. “They’ll be sorry they missed seeing you.”

  “Yeah, me too.” Tobias shifted his weight as he considered what other safe subjects he could bring up.

  “When are you coming home?” Guy asked, and when Mirlande kicked him—not subtly—in the shin, he said, “What? I didn’t promise I wouldn’t ask. I said I’d think about it.”

  “Nice,” Mirlande hissed under her breath.

  “Please,” Manman said, in the voice she used when she was not to be disobeyed. “Not here and not now.”

  “Sorry,” Mirlande and Guy said immediately.

  “How are your classes proceeding, Tobias?” Papa asked, mercifully before Tobias could be expected to answer Guy’s question, not that Papa’s was easier.

  He couldn’t say that it’d been days since he’d gotten through more than a paragraph in his textbooks without wanting to tear his face off, could he? “They’re fine, thank you.”

  After a minute of incredibly uncomfortable silence, Tobias asked, “Did anyone else recognize the girl who went first? We’ve heard her before, haven’t we?”

  “She was good,” Mirlande said, and heroically carried the conversation for several minutes. He squeezed her forearm in gratitude.

  Eventually the chime rang to let people know that intermission was over, and they trooped back to their seats to watch another boy perform with his cello before finally it was Ruby’s turn.

  Tobias would never be half as good at anything as his sister was at the violin, and as proud of her as he was, Tobias worried too. Ruby had an entire global music community breathing down her neck. Conductors and music directors and recording companies from around the world called after hearing her play. Her teachers talked about her career in terms of decades, about her responsibilities to her gift like she’d been touched by the finger of God.

  The very idea made Tobias’s throat want to close up.

  She started with one of Paganini’s Caprices, an excruciatingly difficult piece that would satisfy even the most discerning doubter of her talent and a piece which had driven the entire family mad over the months it’d taken her to master it. Her second choice was Sarasate’s majestic and unnerving Zigeunerweisen, one of Tobias’s favorite pieces of music.

  He closed his eyes and let the notes take him away.

  * * *

  After flowers and congratulations and autograph signings, Ruby was finally free to leave, and the family made a plan to get ice cream to celebrate. Night had fallen, warm and blue and breezy, and Tobias drove with Ruby in the back seat watching him in the rearview mirror and Guy in the front, fiddling with the radio on low volume.

  “So?” Guy asked. “When are you coming home?”

  “I’m not,” Tobias said.

  “I knew it,” Ruby muttered.

  “I’m twenty-four. I can’t live at home forever.”

  “It saves school money,” she argued.

  “I have enough saved up,” Tobias lied, because living in a motel was the worst way possible to maintain a savings account. “It’s time for me to be more independent.”

  “It’s because you had a fight with Manman and Papa.” She gave him an I see through your bullshit look in the mirror.

  “The fight doesn’t matter. As an adult, sometimes you need more breathing space, that’s all.”

  “He means he doesn’t want to be single anymore.” Guy’s gaze tracked the scenery as his thumb flicked through channels. “Men have needs.”

  “Oh, who cares?” Ruby rolled her eyes so hard they nearly popped out of her skull. “Women do too and you don’t hear us whining about it all the time.”

  Guy twisted around in his seat to snap at her, and Tobias said quickly, “Everybody has needs and everybody whines, except when they don’t. Okay? You’re both right.”

  They gave him matching dubious looks but settled down.

  After a minute, Ruby said, “Are you lonely? Is that why you want a boyfriend?”

  He was absolutely not going to think about Sullivan or kinky sex while in a car with his little brother and sister. “I don’t want a boyfriend. I want—” Hell, he wasn’t sure what he wanted. He just didn’t want what he’d had. “That’s not the point. This doesn’t mean I’m not going to see you guys. When I get a place and I’m all set up, you can come hang out any time you want. And we can still talk on the phone or text.”

  Guy asked, “Did they do something wrong? Or was it you?”

  Tobias wasn’t touching that with a ten-foot pole. “It’s complicated.”

  “That’s what adults say when they think you’re too stupid to understand,” Guy intoned, and Ruby snorted.

  Tobias sighed. “That’s w
hat adults say when they don’t want you to be depressed about how hard life can be sometimes. Or when we don’t want to give you ideas that might get you screwing up your own lives. Or when we’re being stupid jerks and we don’t want to admit it to kids because it’s embarrassing and you’ll bring it up later as evidence for why you shouldn’t have to listen to us.”

  They were both looking at him again, this time with matching, satisfying expressions of whoa. He found himself curiously unmotivated to take any of it back, either.

  At the ice cream shop, when everyone had gotten their cones, they filed over to the small picnic tables, where their parents and Guy sat separately because Ruby claimed “star’s rights” and commandeered Mirlande and Tobias at another.

  “You were amazing,” Mirlande told Ruby. “The caprice sounded perfect.”

  She ducked her head, her smile pleased and shy. “It was okay.”

  “After the number of hours you put into it, I think you can admit it was better than okay,” Mirlande said.

  “It was really hard,” Ruby admitted. She lowered her voice. “I threw my bow once when I was practicing. Don’t tell.”

  “Manman would’ve killed you if you needed a new one.” Mirlande gave Ruby an appraising, impressed look. “You would be dead right now. In the earth, child.”

  Ruby giggled. “I know. I almost peed my pants when I thought it might be broken. It was fine, though.”

  Tobias cleared his throat. “Is it worth it? This part, when everyone’s proud and we’re celebrating? Is it worth wanting to throw your bow?”

  “No.” She took a big lick of her ice cream. “Being on stage is, though.”

  “Oh. You—you still like performing?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s not frightening up there in front of all those people?” He could feel Mirlande watching him and tried to keep his face neutral, as if he were asking about the weather or something equally insignificant.

  “It’s...” Ruby stared off into the distance. “It’s like being on fire. In a good way.”

  “And that’s what makes all the awful parts okay?”

  She frowned. “It’s not awful.”

  “No, I mean...what do you do when you hate it?”

  “What are you talking about? I don’t hate it.”

  “I mean when you don’t want to play. I mean the moments when it’s hard and you’re frustrated and you kind of hate it.”

  “I never hate it. Even when I’m frustrated, I don’t hate it. I still love it. The hard parts I almost love more, because they’re like a buildup. They make it so that when I do get it right, it feels bigger.”

  “But you almost snapped your bow,” Tobias reminded her, a bit embarrassed by how hard it was to keep his voice down. “That’s—I can imagine what that feels like.”

  “But I love the hard parts too,” she repeated, her nose wrinkling as if she thought he was being stupid on purpose.

  “Because everyone’s proud when you work hard,” he told her. “That’s why.”

  “No, because they’re good.”

  “Tobias,” Mirlande started, but he shook his head and spoke over her.

  “But what makes them good? Like, what do you do to make them feel that way?”

  “I don’t know, they just are.” Ruby sighed hugely. “It’s like, why is ice cream good and spinach is nasty? They just are, Tobias.” She licked her ice cream, one eyebrow lifting in a look that reeked of Mirlande, judgmental and worried and about to be way too pushy on his behalf, and it didn’t help that Mirlande was right beside her with the exact same look on her face.

  “I’m fine,” he told them, trying to nip it in the bud.

  Ruby talked with her mouth full. “Guy says that when people try to tell you that your feelings are wrong it’s because they’re describing how their feelings are. He says he knows it because he’s deep.”

  “Well, there’s a reliable source.” Mirlande held out napkins. “Finish your bite before you speak.”

  For a split second, Tobias thought he’d gotten away clean, but Mirlande turned to him. “Are you doubting your career path?”

  “Guy is fourteen and not remotely deep,” he said. “He is the opposite of deep. He thinks nursery rhymes count as poetry.”

  Ruby asked, “What parts don’t you like?”

  All of them, he almost said, and nearly bit his tongue off trying to keep the sentence contained. “It’s fine. It’s hard right now, that’s all, but it’ll be fine.”

  “Because you’ll get back to the easy parts soon and then you’ll love it again,” she said uncertainly.

  I never loved it. “Right.”

  Mirlande was eyeing him with insulting sympathy.

  “I’m fine,” he insisted.

  “Oh, Tobias. You’re such a mess.” Mirlande shook her head and went back to eating her cone, and he tried not to look across the lot at his parents, both successful doctors who’d spent years in a high-pressure field taking care of the sick and the poor, flawless examples of everything he was supposed to be but wasn’t.

  Chapter Twelve

  Roughly four hours after Tobias ran out on him, Sullivan turned off the documentary about serial killers that he hadn’t been paying attention to anyway, and bit the bullet.

  She answered the phone by saying, “Caty’s House of Pain.”

  “I fucked up.”

  She hesitated. “Is there a body?”

  “What? No.”

  “Oh. Okay. What’d you do?”

  “Do you seriously think I would kill someone?”

  There was a pause. “No.”

  “Jesus.”

  She laughed. “C’mon, I’m joking. When you avoid someone for weeks because you’re a big, ugly coward, you should expect some shit.”

  “Fair enough. I’m sorry about that, by the way.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “No, I’m not,” he agreed. “But I want to be sorry.”

  “No, you don’t.” She sounded downright amused by it.

  He grinned. This. This was why he adored her. “No, I don’t.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “I fucked someone I shouldn’t have fucked.”

  There was a tiny pause. “If you’re not here for dinner in twenty minutes, I will come over there and pull you out of that shit hole you live in by your hair.”

  Then she hung up on him.

  This was not why he adored her.

  * * *

  Caty and Lisbeth lived in a bungalow not far from his place, a charming slate-blue one-story with a yellow door, which opened before Sullivan had a chance to knock. Caty stood there in all her big-haired blonde beauty, her low-cut purple top revealing the upper swells of her large breasts, her black leather collar latched around her throat as usual. Her skirt was pink tweed and short enough to reveal the knee-high lace-up boots she was wearing.

  “Nice.” He nodded appreciatively, because good boys might be his kryptonite, but bad girls definitely had their charms too, and he knew Caty would take it as the compliment he meant it as. “It’s very Barbie Does Dallas.”

  “Get in here,” Caty snarled, yanking him inside by the wrist.

  “I missed you, too,” he said, unable to curb his smile.

  “You’ve been an uptight little non-boner for over a year—a year!—and you’ve been avoiding me for weeks—weeks!—just because I tried to get you to give someone new a chance post-fuckface, and out of the blue you’re all ‘oh, I fucked someone, oh, it’s so dramatic’ and now you’re trying to be chill about it? Fucker!”

  Lisbeth appeared at the far end of the hallway, small and brunette and slender in her quiet blouse and trousers, lovely in a sedate way. “Hello, Sullivan. How are you? Was it a pleasant drive?”

  “It’s hot as balls out here.” />
  “Classy,” Caty sneered, and smacked him on the back of his head.

  “I’m wearing a button-down.” He’d even taken a shower so he wouldn’t be all sweaty. “Ungrateful wench.”

  “We’re having rigatoni with a white wine sauce,” Lisbeth said serenely. “Does that suit you?”

  “Sounds delicious.” He followed the women into the kitchen, a bright, airy room thick with the scent of butter and herbs at the moment. “Smells delicious too.”

  “Thank you.” She stirred something in a pot and gave him a soft smile. “Caty mentioned you’ve been busy at work. Trouble with a case?”

  “I did not say he’s been busy at work,” Caty said hotly. “I said he was pretending to be busy at work to avoid me so he wouldn’t have to crawl out of that dank hole in the ground he’s squatting in.”

  Lisbeth nodded. “Oh, that’s right.” She added salt to the sauce. “What’s the pretend trouble at work?”

  “Oh, my God,” Caty groaned.

  “It’s actual trouble these days. Boss Lady finally gave me a case of my own.”

  Lisbeth smiled. “Congratulations.”

  “Thank you.”

  “How’d you con Raina into that one?” Caty asked.

  Sullivan nobly ignored that in favor of going to the fridge and peering inside. “I’m looking for a missing girl, and one of the leads I stumbled onto is a college guy who...” He stopped with his hand midair, reaching for string cheese. He wasn’t sure how to finish that sentence.

  “Context,” Caty demanded. “Now.”

  So he explained the whole mess, starting with the ineffectual blackmail and stumbling to a halt before he got any more specific about the sex than he already had. This wasn’t the kind of thing he would normally bite his tongue on—people in the kink community generally had very few boundaries when it came to discussing this sort of thing in a group—but something told him Tobias wouldn’t like it, so he kept his mouth shut.

  When he’d finished, Lisbeth made a humming sound. “You’re right. He’s an inappropriate person to sleep with.”

  “You’re telling me.” Sullivan licked a drop of wine from the lip of his glass.