Freestyle Love

by Marcus Lopes

  Jeremy was the first to glance away, and said, “You have a beautiful home,” surveying the room.

  “Right,” Cole said and sat down on the sofa. After tasting his wine, he added, “This is the first time you’ve been here. I like it.”

  “Does he like it?”

  “I think so.” There was a silence.

  Jeremy took three steps towards the sofa and looked down at Cole. “I’ve been thinking about us a lot lately.”

  “Us?” Cole swallowed hard. “What do you mean by ‘us’?”

  “I mean, us. Before you met —”

  “Jeremy, let’s not do this tonight.”

  Jeremy lowered himself onto the sofa next to Cole. “Don’t you ever think about —”

  “No.” Cole fixed his gaze on the floor. “That was a long time ago, and I was a different person then.”

  “You haven’t changed, Cole.” Jeremy placed his hand on Cole’s thigh. “Believe me, you haven’t changed.”

  Cole lifted his gaze to Jeremy’s, and they stared intently at each other until Cole laughed with disbelief. Cole sipped his wine and then set his wineglass down on the coffee table. As he went to stand, Jeremy held his hand firmly to Cole’s thigh while at the same time placing his wineglass next to Cole’s on the coffee table. They were held again in a hypnotic stare, and Jeremy smiled as he leaned forward and pressed his lips to Cole’s. There was resistance, Cole tightly gripping Jeremy’s shoulders and trying to push him away, but Jeremy managed to hold the kiss, and straddled Cole’s lap. Cole’s grip loosened. Cole could not get enough of Jeremy’s tongue stabbing at the back of his throat.

  Cole pulled out of the kiss and said, “Stop,” with desperation, and pushed Jeremy off of him. Cole breathed deeply, trying to recalibrate himself, get his bearings. He remembered how, during the conference, he and Jeremy had ended up in his hotel room drinking scotch. It was late, after the late-night schmooze fests that they readily participated in, roaming from one hotel room to the next. Cole, despite being a wine aficionado, had a low tolerance for alcohol. When liquored up, Cole talked non-stop — about anything. There were no boundaries, no sense of restraint. For Jeremy to be this bold, this daring, Cole knew that he had said something about the tension between him and Malachi, and the lack of sex. Jeremy must have also overheard Cole’s call to Malachi from the plane. Was that why Jeremy had offered to drive Cole home from the airport? Was Jeremy really the type to take advantage of Cole at a time when he was vulnerable?

  Jeremy placed his hand under Cole’s chin, and lifted Cole’s head until their gazes met. He said, “We had something powerful before he came along.” Jeremy dragged his thumb across Cole’s lower lip. “Do you remember that?”

  “I remember,” Cole whispered, half-smiling.

  When Cole closed his eyes, Jeremy kissed him again. Jeremy slid his hand down Cole’s body to his crotch, rubbing Cole’s hard-on through his pants. Jeremy loved the way Cole tasted, the way Cole jabbed his tongue deep into his mouth, and Cole’s smooth hands cupped to the back of his head keeping them locked in a passionate kiss. Jeremy unbuttoned Cole’s shirt and kissed his way down to Cole’s smooth toned chest. He covered Cole’s left nipple with his mouth and sucked on it until it became hard, sometimes biting, sometimes circling it with his tongue. Cole moaned with pleasure, his head arching backwards and then down to the right. Jeremy found Cole’s mouth and covered it with his. The kiss was wet, sloppy, deep, and sent shivers down his spine. Jeremy was pushing Cole’s shirt off his shoulders, his eyes half-open, when he froze.

  Cole, positioned on the sofa with his back to the living room entryway, looked curiously at Jeremy, whose gaze was fixed past him. Cole turned his head to the right and bounced off the sofa just as Malachi walked out of the room. “Christ!” he spat, and pulled on his shirt, struggling to button it up. His hands were shaking. He started to go after Malachi but doubled back to the living room. “Get out of here.” Cole felt sick. “Just go!” he said, with emphasis, as Jeremy went to touch him.

  Jeremy stood and tucked in his shirt. He went into the front hall, picked up his shoes and exited the house in his sock feet, closing the door quietly behind him.

  Cole’s head spun. He paced the living room, biting down on his lower lip and running his hands through his full mane. “What were you thinking?” he said to himself and crashed his fists into the sides of his head three times. He wanted to scream. He wanted to close his eyes and wish the last twenty minutes of his life away. He drew in a deep breath and blew it out through his nose and, after a time of simply staring at the hardwood floor, made his way to the kitchen.

  Malachi was leaning up against the counter, his hands shoved in his pockets, his gaze held to the floor. He lifted his gaze when Cole entered the room, looking at him coolly, his eyes narrowing as he scrunched his eyebrows.

  “Malachi,” Cole said, almost pleadingly, “hear me out.”

  Malachi, teary-eyed, shook his head. “There’s nothing you could say right now that’s going to change how I feel.” He stepped to the right when Cole went to touch him. “Don’t!” Malachi’s brown eyes widened, and it seemed like he wasn’t blinking. His glare penetrated Cole, cut through him. When Cole looked away, Malachi left the room.

  Cole gasped at the slamming shut of a door a short time later. He had been weak, given in to lust and now his whole life hung in the balance. Cole loved Malachi. That had not changed. Or had it? Why had he let Jeremy…? I can’t blame him. This is my mess, my fucking problem. He marched into the foyer and mounted the staircase and stopped. What could I possibly say to him now? I’ll talk to him in the morning.

  It was about eight-thirty when Cole woke up, his head heavy with despair. He had been awake most of the night, assessing the consequences of his actions, but had finally fallen asleep on the sofa around five o’clock. During the night he had tried a couple of more times to go into the bedroom and talk to Malachi but he lacked the courage, and words. It was when Cole went into the kitchen that morning that he found Malachi’s note, and tore about the house searching for Malachi, who was gone.

  It was now the end of July, late in the afternoon, and the sun had already crossed the backyard and left it shaded. More than three weeks had passed since Cole had found Malachi’s note in the kitchen. He held a crumpled envelope in his hand, and the letter — another short missive from Malachi — lay on the round glass-topped table next to him. Stretched out on one of the wooden loungers, the backs of his tanned, hairy legs warm against the blue cushion with a flowery design, Cole closed his eyes. He tightened his grip on the envelope, and then hurled it across the yard. It landed in the pool. He opened his eyes and reached for the half-empty glass of lemonade. He sat up and gulped his drink until it was finished and set the glass back down on the table with a hard clunk. He stared at the letter. When Cole had first seen the envelope with Malachi’s scrawling handwriting, he had a feeling of something foreboding, unjust. “I don’t think he’s coming back,” Cole thought of Malachi’s simple, choice words: I need more time to try and make sense of this. Please try to understand. No Cole, or Dear Cole at that. No How are you? No real signature except a little mark under the text that sort of resembled the letter M. Cole wanted to change the past, somehow reinvent it, but he knew he could not and that caused him grievous pain.

  He lifted himself off the lounger, collected the letter and the empty glass, and made his way into the house. In the kitchen, he placed the glass and letter on the counter before retrieving the jug of lemonade from the fridge and the vodka from the cupboard above the fridge. He filled his glass two-thirds full with lemonade and topped it up with vodka. Exhausted, he had taken time off work because he was not sleeping, and usually neat in appearance, he looked dishevelled, unkempt.

  He was set to return to the backyard when the dingdong of the doorbell bounced off the listless walls. He made his way to the front hall, opened the door wide and there stood Shane Martin, whom he gestured into the house.

  Shane spok
e with an edge in his voice. “Is Malachi here?”

  “No, he’s not,” Cole said bluntly.

  “Where is he?”

  “He’s away.”

  “Well, how can I contact him?”

  Cole shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “That’s right. I don’t know.” Cole was almost yelling. He ran his left hand through his hair and glanced away. “Malachi’s not here,” he said somewhat ruefully. “I’ll tell him that you stopped by.”

  Shane shook his head. “Not good enough. I want to know what’s going on.”

  “It’s none of your business.”

  Shane took a step forward and studied Cole, wanting to get inside his mind. Shane had come to Cole to purposely interrogate him, to fully insert himself into the scene in order to find his best friend and rescue him. When Shane summoned up the courage to speak again, he said, “What happened?” as though it was some other force speaking through him.

  “I’m not having this conversation with you.” Cole moved to the front door and opened it. “Please go.” and then, harshly, “Don’t make me say it again.”

  They looked coolly at each other for a time, Shane in a stance of defiance. There was something about Cole’s eyes — the way they blinked, slid from side to side — that confirmed his worst suspicious. Malachi had been betrayed, and he had fled. “Why didn’t he come to me?” Shane wondered, and exhaled a sort of grunting sound. “Do you know how much he loves you? How could you have…”

  Cole grabbed Shane by the arm and pushed him out of the house, and slammed the door closed. Cole’s heart was racing, and he was certain that he would cry, but he did not. He went into the bathroom at the end of the hall, ran water in the sink and when it was hot splashed it on his face. He dried his face and then, slowly lowering the towel, his reflection in the mirror, he realized, at forty, he looked old. There was noticeable grey in his dark brown hair, and his eyes were visibly lined. He had not shaved in almost a week, and his short wild beard contained more grey than brown. His face was sallow, poised upon the terrible fear that the unwelcome end of he and Malachi had in fact arrived.

  He made his way to the living room and stood near the piano, and ran his hand back and forth across the polished ebony lid edge. He held his gaze to the picture of him and Malachi that was taken shortly after they had met. We were happy then, truly in love. Cole would sometimes stand there when Malachi was playing, startled by the way it aroused him, an unexpected aphrodisiac. There used to be music in the house all the time when Cole was growing up. His mother played the piano, and he used to sit on the sofa and applaud. He often wondered if music had been his mother’s true passion, and why she had become a lawyer. Something about it all seemed incredibly tragic to him. He loved coming home to find Malachi at the piano, to once again have music in the house, to feel at home in the world.

  He pounded his fist against the piano. “How could I have been so weak?” He cupped his hands to the back of his head, which lifted up his white T-shirt and exposed the crevice of his butt, his khaki shorts hanging low on his waist. He let his arms fall to his side and sighed. The ringing of the phone brought Cole out of his dream-like state. He answered it, sounding out of breath, hoping that it might have been Malachi, and slammed the phone down when the telemarketer started in on some spiel. Tears escaped his eyes and rolled down his face. He knew for certain that his life was unravelling. His parents were dead. He still had no contact with his siblings. There was no play-acting with Malachi. That’s what Cole liked. He could be himself, and not an illusion of what others wanted him to be. This was the concept of home — which he lacked for so long, which came to him when they had met — that he hoped would sustain him through this unexpected, unforeseen, mess.

  Thirteen

  The sky was a dark grey, the sun concealed behind the thick, dense fog that continued to blanket the city. The wet grass glistened as the sun occasionally burnt through the rolling sheets of fog. It was a few minutes past noon and Malachi, installed at his sister’s dining room table, was reviewing the galleys of the novel he had started during the time following Zach Brennan’s death. The dining room had been immediately transformed into Malachi’s writing space with his papers and books strewn across the mahogany table that had belonged to their parents. He remembered how his family — aunts, uncles, cousins — gathered around the large table at Christmas and Thanksgiving, and how it seemed like a much happier time in his life. Their mother’s death had left a mark from which they never recovered. The cancer had taken her so quickly, leaving behind old wounds and misunderstandings. That was why, when he left for university, it seemed natural for him not to return home.

  “I love days like this,” Sarah said as she came into the dining room. She carried a plate with two ham and havarti sandwiches on whole-wheat bread and a glass of orange juice. She liked to keep a neat and orderly house, and the sight of the dining room table cluttered with Malachi’s papers and books made her cringe. She sighed, and reached across the table and held out the plate and glass to her brother.

  Malachi, who had been staring at the raindrops on the dining room window when Sarah had come into the room, set his pen down on a pile of papers and took the plate and glass from her. He said, with a hint of annoyance, “You don’t have to cater to me, sis.” Sarah, like Malachi, was tall and slim. She had their mother’s fair complexion, and most people thought she was biracial, which of course she was not. He looked blankly at Sarah. Why did I come here? Maybe I should have stayed with Chad.

  “You wouldn’t eat otherwise,” Sarah said, gently patting at her hair that clung to her round head. She had had her tight black curls relaxed and cut short. “Look at you now. Thin as a toothpick!” She disappeared into the kitchen and reappeared moments later with her own sandwich and drink. She cautiously cleared a place amongst the papers and books for her plate and glass, and sat down opposite Malachi.

  “You sound like Mom,” Malachi said, somewhat cutting, with his mouth full.

  Sarah bit into her sandwich and chewed slowly, looking all the time at her brother. When Malachi showed up on her doorstep, his black attaché in one hand and his suitcase in the other, she welcomed him into her home as if it were the natural thing to do. Was this her way of trying to undo the past? She sometimes thought that she had failed Malachi, deserted him when he needed someone the most. Unlike their parents, the queer thing was not so much an issue as a conundrum. She wanted to ask questions, questions that might have seemed ridiculous, but Malachi was, to use the French term, sensible growing up and she never dared to broach the subject. She thought that there would have been some attempt, no matter how meagre, at reconciliation after learning about their mother’s illness. But Malachi was like their mother, felt things strongly, and held firmly to his position. Sarah sometimes made the mistake of believing that she was weak like their father and that she should have done something. But she had her hands full with Joshua, was studying part-time, and was trying to save a marriage that she wasn’t sure needed saving. Was it her inaction that had kept them separated all these years? She was still studying her brother. He must know that I was in no position to help him then. I had to look after me, and Joshua, and that’s what I did. No regrets.

  “She looks so much like Dad,” Malachi thought, taking in Sarah’s large and wild brown eyes, and her nose, like his own, strong and sturdy. He knew their mother would not have approved of the fire engine red lipstick that covered the full lips that formed her round mouth and generous smile.

  When Sarah finished the second half of her sandwich, she asked, hesitantly, “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Talk about what?” Malachi asked before tossing the last piece of his sandwich into his mouth.

  “Whatever it was that brought you here.” Sarah gulped the last mouthful of her juice. She looked at Malachi and said, her voice growing animated, “I feel like I don’t really know you. What I do know I’ve learned from newspaper cl
ippings. I read in the Chronicle Herald that you had not only written a book, but that you were nominated for the Giller!” She sighed, and took a deep breath. “I’m sorry. I promised myself I wouldn’t bring that up. It’s just… I do love you, Mali —”

  “Oh, Sarah, don’t call me that. I’m not five years old.” Malachi sat back in his chair, and with his gaze on his plate, said, “I just had to get away.”

  Sarah stood. “If you don’t want to talk about it, just say so.”

  Malachi drew in a deep breath and blew it out forcefully, and as Sarah went to pick up her crumb-covered plate and empty glass, he said, “I had to get away from him.”

  “Does him have a name?”

  Malachi said, “Cole,” feeling a deep local pain.

  Sarah sat back down. “Is that the guy who sometimes answers the phone?”

  “Yes. We’re dating. Actually, we live together.”

  “I see.” Sarah’s eyes narrowed, and then, after a silence, “Do you love him?”

  Malachi swallowed hard. “I did. Christ, I don’t know.”

  Sarah had been through two husbands, and understood the feelings of loss and confusion that seemed to consume Malachi. With so much hope placed on love, on that love lasting, enduring, satisfying the cravings of desire, its ending — premature, strangling, irreversible — eats away at the foundation, and the home falls apart. Sarah was touched, in an odd way grateful, that Malachi had come to her, and she hoped that she could heal him, restore him, possibly even save him.

  “Malachi…” Sarah contemplated her brother, his surly face, his eyes skirting to avoid her gaze. “We all make mistakes. Granted, some mistakes are more difficult to forgive, but imagine a world without forgiveness. What would that world look like?” Sarah reached across the table and placed her warm hand on top of Malachi’s. “I don’t know what Cole’s done, nor do I need to know. Forgive him, don’t forgive him — that’s up to you. But if you were to imagine yourself in a world without forgiveness… Running away won’t…”