“I want you to sleep over. I want to wake up next to you. I want to cook you breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
He cocks his head to the side, watching me.
“After this crazy week, I’ve learned a lot about myself.”
“Like what?” he asks.
I sit up straighter, reaching my hands across the table. “Who I am. What I want from life.”
“Who are you, Jack? And what do you want?”
I pull in a ragged breath. “A lonely man searching for happiness. Something I lost a long time ago.”
“Nobody will be able to make you happy but yourself,” he says.
“I don’t believe that.”
“It’s true.”
“You make me happy, Steve. You make me laugh.”
“What’s changed you?”
“Everything. Work. Death. My past.”
He takes a sip of his drink.
I say, “So let’s start. Right now. Will you stay? I’ll cook dinner. We can watch a movie on Netflix. Anything you want.” I push back my chair and stand.
I amble around the small table to Steve and drop down to one knee. He glances at me, one of his eyebrows arching into question. “I thought we were taking things slowly.”
“I am. I mean, we are.”
“Then why are you proposing?”
I look down at my kneeling stance with my hand on his, and start to laugh.
He throws his head back, laughing harder.
“This is not what it looks like,” I say, feeling lightheaded and happy and woozy in love. “Please stay, Steve.”
“There’s a lot we need to discuss,” he says.
“I want to be with you.”
He nods.
“I know I’ve got some stuff to figure out,” I say. “My anxieties, my past. But I want you with me so we can work on life’s challenges together.”
“Let’s take it slowly and see where it leads us.”
* * * *
I don’t have any recollection of my father hugging me or telling me he loved me. Not the way my mother loved me before breast cancer took her away from me at an early age.
Returning to my father’s grave the next day at Black Falls Cemetery rehashes old memories I wish I could forget. He was arguably the most wretched human being, with the disposition of an old mule.
Hatred bubbles to the surface of my thoughts, and I don’t know why I’ve come back to this awful place.
Maybe I’ve come to kneel and pray and embrace my mother’s small tombstone. I unwrap the bouquet of purple and white lilies from the cellophane I’ve bought for her, and place them across her grave.
I loom over my parents’ marble headstones that are chipped and weathered by the bare elements. The second R in my father’s name Barry has deteriorated and is barely legible.
Teresa, my mother’s name, is intact and illuminated by the stunning sunlight winking through the foliage overhead.
I bend down and brush leaves off the headstone, placing my hand across the embossed letters of her name. Tears swell in the corner of my eyes.
“I miss you, Mom.”
A late summer breeze rustles elm trees around me, and I notice I am the only person in the graveyard on this late August morning.
I crinkle the cellophane into my coat pocket, and stand.
When I start to leave, I whisper to my mother that I’ll be back tomorrow.
As I head down the dirt path toward my car where I parked it near the wrought-iron gates, I notice a tall figure dressed in a black trench coat and hat leaning against a tree half a mile across the graveyard.
I get an uneasy, familiar feeling that he is watching me.
My interest piqued, I set off at a light jog, picking up pace along the windy dirt trail.
He turns and heads in the other direction, but I yell for him to stop, my voice strangled by the afternoon wind as it is carried through the tops of the rustling trees. I am out of shape, and I have to stop running to catch my breath.
I watch the man get behind the wheel of his car and drive away, churning up a cloud of dust as he peels away, tires screeching.
The make of the car is the exact same model as my ex-boyfriend Sheridan’s.
* * * *
That evening, I am sautéing chicken stir-fry for Steve, and waiting for him to arrive.
It is six o’ clock, and the day’s light is waning and disappearing behind the treetops in the front yard. A soft rain taps the sliding glass doors.
Fifteen minutes later, a knock on the apartment door announces his arrival. Steve is holding a pricey bottle of sweet Sauvignon Blanc. “Business at the club has been good,” he says, raising the wine.
I wink at him and hold his head in my hands, pulling him toward me so our lips are touching.
I hear my neighbor’s apartment door opening from across the hallway, and I notice Miles watching us from the doorway.
“Evening, Miles,” I say, wrapping my arm around Steve’s shoulder.
“I thought I heard voices,” Miles says, his owl-stare darting in Steve’s direction, then back at me.
“It’s just us,” I say, motioning Steve into my apartment and turning to Miles. “Do you need anything?”
He shakes his head. “I’m jumpy, that’s all. Even after the arrest of the police chief, I can’t sleep.”
“You don’t have to worry about anything, Miles. I’ve got your back. Just like you have mine.”
Miles nods, and heads back into his apartment. He closes the door and fastens all three locks securely in place as I go back into my apartment and join Steve for dinner.
We sit at the small table I’ve set up by the sliding glass doors in the living room, and Steve asks, “How was the rest of your day?”
I reach for my coffee cup and take a sip, setting it back down before answering, “I ran a few errands.” I am struggling to talk, but I continue. “I went to see my parents’ graves this afternoon.”
He pushes herbed carrots around his plate with his fork, and looks up at me. “Are you all right?”
I nod. “My mother had a rough life with that beast of a man. I hated growing up in that house,” I say, shredding the napkin into pieces in my lap and looking up at Steve nodding at me in support. “He was unarguably the worst father. I hated him for what he did to my mother, and to me.” My hand is trembling as I reach for my coffee cup and take a gulp of the black liquid to help clear my throat. “I still have nightmares seeing him coming at me with a belt.”
Steve calls out my name, but I don’t hear him.
“I wanted my mother to be happy. I wanted to be free from that dark place.”
“Jack—”
“He loathed me for being gay, Steve. He hated me so much he wanted me dead. He made jokes with his male co-workers in front of me just to see how I’d react. He told me one night that I was not his son, and he didn’t want to be associated with a faggot in the family. He said that to my face when I was fifteen.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know how you feel when people laugh at you for being different, and for dressing colorfully. I get it.”
He squeezes my hand.
“I like your company and we have a lot to share,” I say.
The tremors start in my shoulders, and the napkin falls from my lap when I push out my chair, stand, and walk over to Steve.
I don’t kneel this time, but straddle him on the chair, and feel his muffled laughter in the back of my throat through the vibrations of our mouths when I kiss him.
Carrying him to my bed five feet from where we sit, we remove each other’s shirts. He unstraps my belt and loosens my jeans, unzipping my fly. My hands fumble with the slim waistband of his tight drawstring slacks and I pop off two of the buttons on his shirt.
An hour later, we lie side-by-side, naked beneath the sheets.
“This doesn’t feel like we’re taking it slowly,” I say, my arm curled behind his neck, and his fingers playing in the brush pile of my wiry ches
t hair.
“But I like it,” he says.
“It feels like when you were here last. Lying in the dark, listening to the rain on the balcony doors.”
“Your heart is beating hard,” he says, lifting his head from my chest.
“I’m nervous.”
“You don’t have to be nervous. I’m not going anywhere.”
I hear him whispering to me not to be scared, but the words are echoing from Chief Barton’s mouth as I recall his last words to me before I cuffed his hands and led him like a lamb to the slaughter.
You’re making a big mistake, Ballinger.
Barton is due back in court the first week of September. I will be there to testify and bury this nightmare once and for all, and to bring justice to the deceased.
“What are you thinking about?” Steve asks. “You’ve got that serious look in your eye.”
I run my hand through his hair. “How all of this is going to shake out. What’s going to happen now?”
He reaches up to me and places his hand on my mouth. “Let’s worry about that tomorrow.”
I think about seeing Sheridan at the cemetery today, and watching him disappearing from my life again, hopefully for good this time.
In the chaos, I see and hear my father’s voice.
He is a black hole, a dark canvass of nothing, his voice getting quieter and quieter until I can’t hear it anymore.
Steve is smiling at me, telling me everything will be all right, his voice scaring away my nightmares into the shadows where they belong, far away from what I have now: the beginning of a new life.
THE END
ABOUT THOMAS GRANT BRUSO
Thomas Grant Bruso graduated from SUNY Plattsburgh in 2004 with a Bachelor’s in theatre performance and English writing. He knew at an early age he wanted to be a writer. He has been a voracious reader of genre fiction since he was a kid. His literary inspirations are Dean Koontz, Karin Fossum, Jeffery Deaver, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Connolly. He loves animals, book-reading, writing fiction, and prefers Sudoku to crossword puzzles. He writes book reviews for his hometown newspaper, The Press Republican. He lives in Plattsburgh with his husband, Paul, and their miniature pincher diva, Riley.
For more information, visit facebook.com/thomasgrantbruso.
ABOUT JMS BOOKS LLC
JMS Books LLC is a small queer press with competitive royalty rates publishing LGBT romance, erotic romance, and young adult fiction. Visit jms-books.com for our latest releases and submission guidelines!
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