by Tom Collins
“Aye. Is yer Oliver no young? I’d the impression—”
“What? No, he’s young, but how did you know I’m dating a man?”
“A wee birdie whispered it in me ear.”
“Erin,” I accused.
“No, t’was yer brother’s Jillian I acquired the information from, since you were keepin’ all close to yer vest like.”
“Looks like we’re going to have a talk tonight, she and I.”
“Why? Are you ashamed of him?”
“No! Never! Oliver’s perfect.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“I just wanted to keep it quiet until I was sure. I mean…I didn’t see any point in broadcasting it to the whole family when I had no idea what—if anything—would come of it.”
“You appear to have made up your mind.” She indicated the ring declaring my state of being and I smiled, Oliver washing across my vision.
“Yeah, Okay. You got me there.”
“It’s settled then. Granda and I will expect the two o’ye for tea tomorrow night; seven sharp.” She turned to continue her rounds of the pub.
“What? No, Gram, I can’t spring my grandparents on him without notice.”
“It wouldna’ be wi’out notice if ye’d be tellin’ him tonight,” she replied from over her shoulder.
I tried protesting one last time. “But my folks haven’t even met him yet.”
“Oh, aye? Good catch, there. I’ll be sure they come along as well,” she countered airily.
Crap! I’d just made it worse. Oliver wasn’t used to big families and mine wasn’t anything like normal. “That’s not what I meant, Gram!”
“Boyo, I’m knowin’ what yer meanin’ and I’ll say n’more on’t.” Her brow was furrowing and her accent was becoming thicker. I knew it was time to leave off or she’d get pissed. The matriarch of our clan rarely took no for an answer unless it was the one she wanted.
The place was hopping from about an hour before Private Dancer was due to play. People were coming early to make sure they got a place to sit and it was a good thing they did. We hit standing room only before the trio even got up on the makeshift stage to tune up and do one last sound check. The crowd kept my sister Molly, back from the Emerald Isle a few days before, and I hopping with orders for Guinness, fish and chips. Dad was here to see Brendan perform anyway, so Aunt Rose drafted him to help in the kitchen since Erin was on stage. The two of them could barely keep up with the orders.
For all that, it was great. The miserable humidity that had plagued the city had passed at last, replaced by a perfect summer’s eve. Sunset colored light filtered in through the pub’s open windows, golden and orange. The band was rockin’ and so was the crowd. So was I. All the energy that had been sapped out of me earlier in the week came slamming back with the music Brendan, Erin and Jill played. I was in my kilt, and I let it swing and flip as I danced between tables.
The customers loved it.
About an hour in, however, things took an unexpected turn. Brendan had just finished the band’s Irish Rock set and was settling into what I called the mandolin tunes; he was adjusting his instrument, joking with the crowd; I was at a far corner table depositing a trio of beers with a flourish and a grin.
“We-he-he-he-hell,” I heard my twin crow through the sound system, “if it isn’t Ollie-Ollie-oxidant-free.”
I whipped around to look in the direction of the door and saw Oliver staring at Bren with a strange expression on his face, almost like resignation. I didn’t known he was coming tonight. Apprehension tightened my chest. The jig was up, as my Gram would say. Not only might Oliver be pissed at me for hiding a twin, but Brendan was up to no good. I could feel it in my bones. I turned toward the stage to glare at him. He sat on his stool, mandolin in his lap, giving me our patented, “this is gonna be fun, you’ll see,” grin, the one from which my first fairy dragon came. My heart sank. This was going to be bad.
*Oliver*
The week after I lost control with Liam did not go well for me. He got up to see me off that morning, smiling and kissing me as he sleepily puttered around the kitchen making coffee. But I noticed how stiffly he moved, and I felt awful. I wanted to wrap my arms around him and promise I’d never mess up like that again, but every time those dreamy, green eyes turned my way I felt like crawling under a rock.
To make matters worse, a late July heat wave hit, complete with humidity. Work was nuts. More accidents happen during the summer than at any other time during the year, and temperatures like that make the pot boil over. Gabe and I were hardly able to check our rig before we were out and crossing the city. We’d let the dispatcher know we were finished with one call and she’d sent us on another.
Even when we did get a chance to return to the barn, we hadn’t time to do anything more than change into a fresh uniform and hand the sweat-soaked, dirty ones over to the laundry.
It seemed the city was full of mishaps: kids out of school and getting into all sorts of situations, legal and illegal, tourists in trouble, and those who, because of their health or advanced age, couldn’t handle the broiling heat. There were the expected cases of sunstroke, chest pains and food poisoning from potato salad left out too long in the sun. There were boating accidents on the lake, near-drownings in swimming pools. There were hiking, biking and skateboard mishaps, wasps, yellow jackets and fire ants.
And, as always, the eternal traffic accidents made worse by flaring tempers.
On the one hand, it kept me fully occupied. Wacked it may have been, but I did love my work. I could never get enough of the multi-tasking adrenaline rush of dealing with an emergency. On the other hand, it left me exhausted and unable to do more than eat whatever was waiting in the refrigerator when I got home, strip off my clothes and crash.
I woke to find Liam in bed with me Monday morning. He tried hard to wake up with me, but some mornings he didn’t manage it and this was one of those mornings. From the scattering of colored pencils and half-finished sketches on the couch it was clear why.
I’d never been friends with an artist before, let alone known one intimately, and so their habits were new to me, and strange. Seems artists were in the habit of getting up in the middle of the night with ideas for pictures, ideas they had to draw then and there. I found this odd because I’m the sort who sleeps right through the night; I almost never wake up until a few minutes before my five a.m. alarm is due to go off. I didn’t understand coming out of a good sleep to sketch.
I did a quick clean up of the scattered pictures, obsessively arranging Liam’s watercolor pencils—taking care to set them far from liquids. I wouldn’t make that mistake again. I folded up his discarded clothing and put on the uniform I’d worn home yesterday. It was wrinkled and didn’t smell too good. I’d change into a fresh one when I got to the barn and give this one to laundry.
In the refrigerator I found a brown bag. Liam had taken exception to my monotonous breakfast sandwiches and started making me everything from lox and bagels to croissants with turkey bacon and cheddar cheese. I never quite knew what I was going to get, but they were delicious and the little drawings, of the Lone Ranger or Liam’s signature “Fairy dragon” on the brown bag were wonderful as well—even if they had gotten me some ribbing at work.
Gabe had threatened to write back a note on one: “Liam, stop embarrassing my partner!” But I’d stopped him. The breakfast bags reminded me of how Sandy had made school lunches for me. The first time she’d done it, and I’d had a lunch like all the other kids—not something I’d had to make myself with whatever I could scrape together—I’d nearly cried.
Damn. I was too soft. And too attached. Can’t get used to this, Oliver, I reprimanded myself. He’s going to outgrow you…if you don’t scare him off first.
I leaned in to kiss Liam on his unshaven jaw on the way out. His left hand, the one weighed down by that silver ring he’d been wearing since the Fourth of July, was resting on the pillow, and it clutched as I did so, as if trying
to keep hold of me.
Monday was a copy of Sunday in craziness. Liam and I played phone tag, and when I finally got a hold of him he dropped the bomb. He had go with his parents and brother Tuesday morning to pick up his sister from the airport, and as for Tuesday afternoon and evening, two waiters at the pub had come down with the flu. He wouldn’t be back with me until the wee hours of the morning. He sounded crushed. I didn’t know how to feel. For the first time since the water park we weren’t going to have our sacred Tuesday and I hated the thought, but I still didn’t know how to face Liam over my Saturday night loss of control.
He hadn’t mentioned it; in fact, he acted as if it had never happened. But it had, and I needed to be a man about it and talk to him.
I spent Tuesday alone, frantically cleaning, running into Liam’s pencils hidden under the bed and in the couch cushions. He’d left socks on the floor. When there was no more vacuuming and polishing to do, when our toothbrushes were neatly in place and the tube—which Liam squeezed at the middle—adjusted, I went to the gym and worked out. Then I went home, ate a lonely dinner and settled into a lonely bed.
Liam came in long after I’d gone to sleep.
Some time after midnight, I woke to Liam tenting the covers, giving me a tired, but earnest, blowjob. He’d become quite an expert, and I shot a lot of tension and cream down his throat. He grinned up at me afterwards.
Was that worry in his eyes?
Off to work. I had to say, I was getting one hell of a master’s education from Gabe this week. I swear to God, I came close to calling him “Sensei” in sheer awe and respect. He could get between a belligerent trucker and a cop a heartbeat short of losing his cool and say quellingly, “Gentlemen, my partner is looking after the lady in the Camry, and I’m here to look after the two of you.” Next thing, they’d be leaning against the hood of the cop car, obediently drinking down bottled water and discussing the accident calmly.
“Were about to drop from dehydration, the two of them,” Gabe remarked to me as we got back in the rig, though how he’d known I couldn’t say. He was astonishing with kids as well. They screamed their heads off with me, but he caught their eye and made them watch him as he gently handled their broken wrists, or gave them shots of epinephrine to stop scary, allergic reactions to bee stings. He talked to them about things his son was interested in, and they listened.
Thursday was as exhausting as the rest of the week. One notable thing happened. I’d taken a quick shower after coming back to the barn, stained with blood and soaked in perspiration from a particularly harsh call—a knifing in an area not to far from my neighborhood. The heat brought out the barbarians, young men with too much time and too much testosterone. These assholes had attacked a quiet, middle-aged man who’d been walking his dog.
Fuckers! There are times when I hate my gender.
After cleaning up and changing into the fresh uniform the laundry had left me, I leaned in against my locker, resting for the first time in what felt like days. That’s when I saw it. A folded bit of pink paper. I didn’t remember putting it there, so it must have been in the pocket of one of my uniforms. Rapid Response provided us EMTs with a laundry dedicated to making sure we always had fresh uniforms waiting for us should we need them; I’d learned to resist the urge to clean my uniform on my day off. I wore it to work and either changed into a fresh one before heading out to the rig, or if it was still clean, wore it until it needed to be washed.
Evidently, the laundry had found this paper and left it in the locker for me, but I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember when. It might have been a while ago. I hadn’t spent time at my locker to do more than grab fresh uniforms and a change of socks. The paper was on the upper shelf, hidden in the shadows. If I hadn’t been leaning just so, I’d have missed it again.
I grabbed it and was about to open it when, “S.O.S.—” the dispatchers voice over the speakers called us.
Shit. I stuffed the paper into a pocket and ran for the rig.
I got home too tired to do more than eat the chicken salad sandwiches Liam had left for me, and then I stripped and crashed.
Friday, and Liam made breakfast. We ate quietly, me in my usual concentrated manner, him while sketching at the table. “Gotta help my brother this morning,” he reminded me. He’d said as much yesterday when we’d managed to catch each other for our daily phone chat. “But tomorrow, tomorrow we’re gonna spend the whole day together. Okay?”
He left and I cleaned up the kitchen. I wasn't used to spending my Friday morning and afternoon without Liam, but there were errands I might as well get done. Liam had been leaving me pointed cartoons of a longhaired elf with my face; I took the hint and started with a haircut. Then I stopped at the bank.
Next was a trip to the health food store where I stocked up for the week, which took a while as my groceries had doubled. Neither Liam nor I had slow metabolisms and between the voracious sex and the gym workouts, we consumed a lot. It’d made me sympathize with what Sandy had gone through during my teen years when I’d been eating whole casseroles. Six gallons of milk were going to have to fit in to my fridge, and those might not last the week. I got Liam the granola bars he liked, and some Bosc pears, his favorite fruit, as well as the deli meats and the different breads he’d demanded for my sandwiches.
I got everything home. It took me three trips to and from the garage to get it all up to the apartment. After everything was put away, I fixed myself lunch.
Hours and hours to go before the end of Liam's Friday night shift, I mused, finishing up the last of the brown rice. I made a fresh batch to put away, then I called up Sandy.
“How are things with Liam?” she asked.
“Good,” I evaded, then, because I couldn’t quite lie to Sandy, “Mom, do you think…I’m right for him? I mean,” I added quickly because I didn’t want her to get the wrong idea, “I…care about him and I don’t want to hold him back or…or do anything wrong to him. He’s…young.”
“So are you, Kiddo,” I could almost hear her smile. “But I get what you’re saying. I was surprised when I first saw him because I always thought you’d go for someone older, and he’s very much a boy. Know what, though? I’m glad you didn’t resist his charms. Your dad robbed you of a childhood. You shouldn’t have had to be the mature one when you were a little, and you shouldn’t have had to feel like you needed to be the man of the house when you came to stay with me.”
“Mom—” I gulped. She’d taken me with her, a twelve year old who’d have ended up in foster care, no question, if she hadn’t. Dad would have dumped me on child services rather than continuing to take care of me, the lazy, irresponsible fuck. I’d probably have run away, and I was aware of what would have happened to me then, a gay, homeless kid out on the streets.
I still got sick to my stomach thinking about it.
There was no way I was ever going to be able to repay Sandy for what she’d done for me.
She didn’t let me say it. “For once in your life,” she told me firmly, like an order, “enjoy being your age, and let whatever’s going to develop from it develop. You don’t have to always be the responsible adult.”
We chatted for a little while longer then I went to the gym for a nice long session. I jogged for an hour around the track and lifted weights for another. I got a few inviting looks as usual, but I ignored them, thinking on what Sandy had said. I got back home and showered. Opening the closet, I saw that Liam had hung up my uniform, the one I’d only had the strength to fold up and set aside the night before.
He’d been trying to clean up, and I appreciated that, but it was hanging in the wrong place. I started to move it and that’s when I saw the pink bit of paper poking out of the pocket, the one I’d found in my locker.
I opened it, and with a jolt, remembered what it was. It was the flyer for Liam’s band: Private Dancer.
And they were playing at the pub tonight!
I hurried to get on jeans and linen shirt, anxious about missing it even
as I wondered why Liam had failed to mention anything. It occurred to me, as I strapped on my Lone Ranger watch, that Liam never brought over an instrument to practice on, and when did he find time to practice? Nor had he mentioned the band or his music. Surely it was as important to him as his art? Or maybe not. Gabe, I vaguely remembered, had said there were two nephews in the band. Maybe his brother? and the band was his brother’s baby even if Liam was the front man? Still—still. Wouldn’t Liam want me to see him on stage?
Maybe he thought I wouldn’t like the music or the crowd? I mused as I got myself downstairs and to the subway. That seemed likely. He’d been bending over backwards since we met to please me, and even though we’d talked about music he probably thought, funsucker that I was, that I hated concert scenes.
Well, I’d surprise him in more ways than one, I smiled. I actually liked concerts if the energy was high and the crowd was raucous enough. I especially liked slam dancing. I grinned at the thought, and was still grinning with a kind of nervous excitement when my stop came up. I took the stairs two at a time as I climbed to street level and walked the few blocks to the pub. I heard the thump-thump-thump of an electric guitar a block away.
The heat wave had finally tapered off, the humidity vanishing, leaving a warm, windy night. The summer sun was just beginning to sink in an orange glow and the lights from the pub blazed through the open windows. The outdoor tables were filled with chattering people and it looked even more crowded inside.
The Irish Eyes sign swung overhead as I entered. Every table was taken and cluttered with used beer glasses and baskets of appetizers and dessert plates, extra chairs pressed in to allow for more people. The mob at the bar was two deep. At the fireplace end of the pub was a makeshift stage. Liam was on it, front and center. I took one look and lost my breath. He had on those tight, white shorts he’d painted with a dragon; one I now realized was the band’s logo. Shorts I’d gotten him out of more than once in a frenzied heat to get at his sweet cock.
Beyond that, he wore only a dark green leather vest nicely displaying the gentle definition of his muscles and that soft pelt of black hair down the middle of his chest and belly. He grinned his most devilish grin, and swinging an electric guitar, sang out the lyrics pure and clear in that melting voice of his.
