Life on Pause

by Erin McLellan

  Niles nodded and caressed the hand Rusty still had on his opposite elbow. It was just a spidery whisper of touch across Rusty’s broad bones and dry knuckles, but Rusty’s stomach jumped to his throat. He started to turn his hand toward Niles’s, like magnets snapping into place, like gravity was pulling them together, like he desperately, violently wanted to hold hands, but Niles slipped away too quickly. And then he was out of reach, throwing a smile over his shoulder as he stumbled to his Mazda.

  Rusty’s up-cycled, refurbished apartment was straight out of Architectural Digest. Or maybe Fixer Upper. Someone had Joanna Gaines-ed the shit out of this place. Modern lines and exposed beams and brick mixed with retro appliances and stylish rustic furniture. It made Niles embarrassed of the pleather sofa and corduroy love seat in his parents’ home—in his home.

  Everything was perfect here. Everything from the coffee table books—who actually puts coffee table books on a coffee table?—to the beautiful man now wearing a T-shirt and gray sweats. Gray sweats were definitely Niles’s kryptonite.

  Niles focused on the flawlessness of the apartment so as not to freak the fuck out over being here. On a date. With a man who was not a total jerk.

  Niles hadn’t dated much—read, never—and the pressure was definitely getting to him.

  And why would Russell—

  “What’s your last name?”

  “Adams,” Rusty responded.

  —Adams be interested in the likes of him?

  Niles wasn’t dateable. He was weird and antisocial and super inexperienced and kind of awkward. He gave good head, but Rusty didn’t know that!

  This was all a little much. Would Rusty try to stop him if he bolted?

  “Want to sit down?” Rusty asked gently. Niles dropped onto the eggshell-colored couch, and the soft cushions tipped him back until his feet left the floor. He barely managed to save the food bag from spilling.

  Did real people have white couches? Jesus Christ.

  Rusty took the food from him and placed it out of harm’s way before sitting on the coffee table directly in front of Niles. Then Rusty rested his elbows on his knees and steepled his hands like he was about to deliver really bad news. The I’m-sorry-but-I-have-to-terminate-our-relationship-with-you type of bad news.

  “Tell me something that you’ve never told anyone else before,” Rusty said.

  Niles stared at Rusty in stupid shock. “Huh?”

  “I want to get to know you. So I’m leveraging your dinner against little tidbits of information about yourself. Like collateral. Once you tell me, I’ll give you your burger.”

  Niles sucked his lips between his teeth to prevent a goofy smile from blooming on his face and sighed as if he were incredibly put out. “I don’t like HGTV, but I watch it every day. I keep hoping it will guilt me into better taste.”

  A disbelieving laugh shot out of Rusty, and he shook his head. “That’s not enough, gorgeous. Give me a good one.”

  Stubbornness crept up on Niles. Why should he have to lay bare his secrets? And it wasn’t fair for Rusty to call him things like “gorgeous.” It made his brain mushy. “You first.”

  “Deal.” Rusty took a deep breath. “I’ve never voted.”

  “You’ve never voted!” Niles screeched. “Ohmigod, Russell. You monster! How could you have never voted? It’s so important. Donald Trump was elected president.”

  “I know! I’ve literally never told another soul that. I would be so snubbed by all of my friends from college if they found out. But I always feel so disheartened by politics. It doesn’t matter who I vote for—Oklahoma will go red, and the state legislature will embarrass us. If I don’t vote, it doesn’t hurt as much when things don’t go the way I want them to. I’m such a bad person.”

  Niles reached out to grab Rusty’s shoulders, impassioned suddenly. Rusty’s privilege was definitely showing.

  “Rusty, you’re a teacher. You need to vote. Oklahoma fucks over its teachers. It fucks over the LGBTQIA community. It fucks over people of color. And Native Americans. And women. And the only way to change that is to use your voice.”

  Rusty worried his lip a little, but in an odd way, like he was biting the join of the top and bottom lips.

  “You hate me now, don’t you?”

  “Yes!” Niles rolled his eyes. “Okay, no, of course I don’t hate you. But I am going to become the poltergeist that haunts you to the polls, you atrocious citizen!”

  Rusty smiled at that, and Niles glanced down, a little embarrassed by his fervor.

  “Your turn,” Rusty said softly.

  They were sharing secrets, like schoolgirls. Or lovers. Niles and Rusty were neither, but Rusty had opened himself up. How could Niles turn his nose up at that?

  “The teenage volunteers at the Homestead—we call them docents—they make fun of me. Call me West Niles behind my back. I know it’s stupid, and the names they could call me are a kazillion times worse, but it hurts my feelings. And the Facilities Manager is a guy I graduated with, and he has tormented me since the third grade. He hears the docents say stuff like that, and he encourages them, laughs with them. It makes me feel so … ugh, I don’t know. Small, I guess? Stupid and small.”

  “Oh, Niles, that’s not stupid.” Rusty grabbed Niles’s hands, and Niles’s heart jumped into his throat. “You’re allowed to be hurt when people are mean. Don’t ever feel bad for feeling.”

  The conversation dropped off after that, and normally Niles would have filled the silence with awkward chatter, but this time he didn’t. He just smiled and stared at Rusty, who gazed right back, like he was drinking in the silence and companionship and was hungry for human connection. Hungry for something more.

  “We should eat our food,” Rusty said. “Yours is probably cold by now.”

  “I don’t mind,” Niles said, breathless and scorched from the way Rusty’s eyes traveled down his throat, but then Rusty shattered the moment by handing Niles his food.

  They ate on the sofa with their to-go boxes on their laps, and Niles had to concentrate so hard on not spilling a single crumb of his juicy burger on Rusty’s perfect furniture that he didn’t try to talk. Rusty had turned on a real record player, like with vinyl records and everything, and a man’s smooth voice was floating through the apartment.

  “Who is this?” Niles finally asked, once he was done with the burger and down to his fries, which were less messy and required less focus.

  “Eddy Arnold. He sang pop and country music in the ’40s and ’50s. I’ve always liked his voice—it’s so smooth and perfect. His music is pretty sugary, but sometimes I’m in the mood for sugar, you know?”

  Niles’s mouth watered. Listening to Rusty talk about music, talk about a topic he was passionate about, was a turn on, even without the dessert references. “Keep going,” Niles said without really thinking.

  “Huh?” Rusty mumbled around a big bite of salad.

  “Talking about music. I like listening to you.”

  That was probably a really weird thing to say.

  After another bout of intense eye contact, which Niles eventually broke because he was way too inexperienced to be making eyes at someone over greasy fries, Rusty complied.

  Rusty talked about his favorite musicians and how he sang to his niece. He talked about his dad, who he evidently wasn’t close to but who had passed down his love of Johnny Cash. He talked about his choir kids with pride and slight exasperation, using phrases like “head voice,” “vibrato,” and “second soprano,” as if Niles knew what they meant.

  And Niles couldn’t stop watching Rusty’s mouth. He had thick, mobile lips that would almost certainly be soft and pliant. Victor would have called them blowjob lips. But Niles simply wanted to see them sing.

  “Niles!” Rusty said loudly, like he had been forced to say it more than once. Niles tore his gaze away from Rusty’s mouth and met his eyes.

  “Yes?”

  “I said that my high school is doing folk songs for the Fall Concert, and I
wondered what I needed to do to sign them up to sing at the Bluestem Bluegrass Festival at Bushyhead Homestead. I know folk and bluegrass aren’t exactly the same thing, but they come from the same general family, and I thought it might be mutually—”

  “Are you using me for my connections?” Niles asked jokingly, and Rusty laughed.

  Having the high school choir sing at the festival was a really good idea. Like, a brilliant idea. Niles would probably claim it was his when he presented it to Janice.

  “I’ll talk to my boss on Monday, and we’ll figure it out. I think that would be awesome,” he said.

  “Of course it is. I’m a teacher. I’m full of good ideas,” Rusty said. He reached out and brushed a lock of Niles’s hair off his forehead. “I have another one.”

  “Another one what?” Niles stammered, scared because Rusty was suddenly much closer to him on the couch. And touching him. He could smell Rusty’s cologne and see the red in his stubble.

  “Another good idea.”

  Rusty leaned toward Niles, and Niles leaned away like Rusty was a dog about to lick his face. But Rusty wasn’t a dog, for Christ’s sake. He was a hot man who was way out of Niles’s league. Who was so far out of his league it was like they weren’t playing the same fucking sport. Like, maybe he played croquet and Rusty hockey. Their sports weren’t even in the same season!

  “Whoa, it’s okay,” Rusty said, putting a hand on the side of Niles’s neck. “Don’t freak out. Message received, gorgeous. I’ll stop hitting on you.”

  And suddenly, Niles wanted to cry. He stared at his lap in case Rusty could read it in his eyes.

  Why couldn’t Niles let Rusty kiss him? It wasn’t like he didn’t want to be kissed. He wanted it. A lot. He had never been kissed by someone who wasn’t a stranger before, except Victor. In fact, his virgin lips had made it most of the way through college until he and Victor had gotten trashed one night and decided to take a shot at the friends-with-benefits thing. Talk about a swing and a miss there. They hadn’t been able to stop laughing. Then after Victor, Niles’s various hookups had often only involved his mouth, not the other party’s. And when he had gotten a kiss, it had been afterwards. Like a thank you for the good fuck in the bathroom of the club or the back of the car. He certainly had never gotten a kiss first. Or a kiss without the expectation that he’d be dropping his pants.

  Maybe that was what Rusty wanted. Maybe this whole dinner and music and getting to know one another was simply an elaborate ruse to get Niles to fuck. And then Rusty would leave him feeling as used up and empty and abandoned as every other guy, but this time, it would hurt more because Niles now knew that Rusty talked about music like it gave him life and he shared secrets and was nice to incompetent teenage waiters.

  “Hey. Look at me, Niles.” Niles almost fought it, but the kindness in Rusty’s voice made him lift his eyes. “It’s okay.”

  It wasn’t okay, but it was almost cute that Rusty thought it could be.

  “I should go,” Niles said.

  He needed to stop gazing into Rusty’s eyes like that. The long eye contact was sending mixed messages. What was it that Victor called that again? Eye-fucking. Right. But it didn’t feel like fucking, at least not the way Niles had ever done it. It was more like eye-longing, maybe. And he was probably reading too much into the emotion he saw in Rusty’s eyes, like he wanted the long stares to mean something when really Rusty was wondering what the heck was wrong with this inexperienced nerd he had found in his hipster apartment.

  “You don’t have to,” Rusty murmured. “We could watch Netflix and just—”

  “Chill?”

  “No, not chill.” Rusty laughed. “Hang, maybe? Netflix and veg?”

  “I could Netflix and veg,” Niles hedged.

  “I started Firefly a couple days ago. You seen it?”

  “Of course I’ve seen it! I’m not a total plebian.”

  “Well, I am a total plebian. I’m only on episode two. So want to watch it with me?”

  “Okay. Sure.”

  So they watched, and Niles relaxed because he had never not enjoyed an episode of Firefly.

  After they had watched three episodes, and drunk a handful of Dr Peppers apiece, Niles decided he should make himself scarce. It was getting late, and he didn’t make good decisions after midnight.

  But before he left, Rusty asked him if he wanted to keep watching the next night, and Niles agreed. Because it was Firefly. And it was Rusty, who might be just as good.

  Niles was the first one at the Administration meeting on the Monday following his non-date with Rusty, but Denny showed up a minute later, so it was going to be one of those Monday mornings.

  “Hi, princess,” Denny sneered.

  And Niles, for no reason he could fathom, blew Denny a kiss, which turned the stupid man red but also, inexplicably, made him shut up.

  That triumph carried him through the whole meeting until it was his turn to speak. He hated public speaking, unless he was in character. Well, he was in his work costume, but he wasn’t dispersing information about life in 1907, so speaking in the meeting made him hot and blushy.

  He ran through his normal programming plans and updates, none of which had changed since last week. Then he remembered to ask about having the Bison Hills High School Choir sing at the Bluestem Bluegrass Festival. Janice thought it was a good idea and agreed to waive the sign-up fee if Niles was able to see the choir’s set at least once before the Festival to ensure it was “appropriate,” which he doubted would be a problem.

  At the end of the meeting, Denny sidled up to Niles and said, conversationally and without sarcasm, “So it must be true that all gay guys stick together, huh?”

  “What do you mean?” Niles asked.

  “Well, the high school choir thing. You’ve obviously been talking to Todd. I assumed that’s how it came about.”

  “No. I’m friends with the teacher.” And wasn’t that exciting—to claim Rusty as a friend. “Who’s Todd?”

  Denny stared at him like he was insane. “Todd McGower? He graduated with us. He’s the piano person for the school. I figured you were screwing or whatever since you’re pretty much the only two gay dudes in town.”

  Niles fumbled all of the crap in his hands, and it scattered across the table in an angry fit of pencils and paper. He felt like he’d been slugged in the stomach.

  But Todd McGower? The Todd McGower?

  Niles and Todd had graduated together, but that was as far as their acquaintance went. Todd had been star of the football team, a musical dreamboat, and valedictorian, and then he’d gone away to college, gotten a music degree, and returned to town gay. It had caused a tiny stir at the time, but Todd had always been so golden that no one seemed to care. Not even Denny.

  And Niles was the biggest fucking idiot because he’d known that Todd was the accompanist at Bison Hills High School. Everyone knew that. So how had Niles not realized that the choir Todd accompanied was Rusty’s choir? And why did that feel so awful?

  Am I jealous?

  God, I must be.

  Niles covered his panic by arranging his papers and notepad. Denny was still watching him, but now with a gleeful gleam in his eyes.

  “So the choir director, huh? You hot for teacher, West Niles?”

  Niles didn’t answer that. He gathered up his shit and left the room with as much dignity as could be afforded a man dressed like Yosemite Sam.

  After his shift on Wednesday, Niles went to visit his dad at Honeydew Estates, which was a very sweet name for an old folks’ home. Niles knew that if Dad could speak he would have made jokes about deceiving names—Honeydew Estates was neither an estate, nor did it have melons. But Dad couldn’t speak, and the doctors were pretty sure he couldn’t understand much of the useless babble that came out of Niles’s mouth either.

  Muggy air wafted in through his dad’s open window, but Niles didn’t close it. That sad draft of air was the only piece of nature his dad now got to experience.

&nb
sp; “Hi, Dad,” Niles said when he entered the room. Dad was in his favorite recliner, which Niles had been able to move from home.

  Niles took his dad’s hand, but the man didn’t respond except to swallow a couple of times. The strokes had taken so much from him—his speech and mobility, his personality, his livelihood. He was deteriorating, according to his doctors. Earlier in the summer, Niles had been forced to move his father from the assisted living side of the complex into skilled care after a bout of MRSA. The heart disease didn’t exactly help either.

  Niles brushed his free hand over his thigh, trying to rub away his uneasiness. His dad’s eyes actually tracked Niles’s movement, which was better than most days. Then Niles did what he always did when he visited Honeydew Estates. He talked and talked and talked. He filled the stifling silence until his words were empty and meaningless.

  He told his dad about getting four new tires at the Tire Shop, and how Howard—Dad’s right-hand man who was managing the shop until … well, until something changed—was holding down the fort. He told him about the new chaps he’d bought online. And then he told him about Rusty.

  Niles imagined his dad calling their first meeting a “meet-cute.” Niles’s parents had had an adorable meet-cute that involved two-stepping at a Nitty Gritty Dirt Band concert, rain, and a misplaced umbrella, and Dad had loved talking about it. He’d always said that no self-respecting romantic could have a love story without a meet-cute.

  Not that he and Rusty were in love.

  Because they weren’t.

  They were friends who watched cancelled sci-fi television shows together.

  Niles and Rusty had finished Firefly in two nights and had made plans to start Battlestar Galactica, the remake, tomorrow. After less than a week of hanging out with Rusty, his crush on him was out of control, as was his jealousy. Niles tried not to think about Rusty spending every day with Todd. It wasn’t like he had any claim on him. In fact, Niles had rejected him. And, holy cow, why had he done that again? It was quickly starting to feel like the biggest mistake of his life. Rusty was so nice. He talked about music all the time and listened when Niles spoke, even if it was only fangirl chatter about Nathan Fillion.