Best Gay Romance 2014

by R. D. Cochrane

May I have this life with you-oo?

  Let me take you by the hand…

  The gushing of the cold water on my finger wasn’t enough to drown out the ancient crackly male voice.

  Shouting and hollering about my wound would create a diversion but something stopped me.

  …It’s a life just made for two-oo…

  Now Kenneth was actually singing along, shoe-brushing to the rhythm.

  And then Ethel Merman’s abrasive voice poured out relief upon me as the engineers did a clever thing, seamlessly merging “May I Have This Life With You?” into “The Hostess With The Mostest.” A comet out of nowhere had missed the earth by a hairsbreadth and was now on its way back to outer space.

  I mean, he knew the words but he didn’t say he’d recognized them as what I’d written in my card, did he? So I don’t have to think he did.

  “You know,” Kenneth said, gathering up the shoe-cleaning stuff, “I don’t know why, but I could quite get to like musicals, somehow. Christ, what have you done?”

  I don’t know why, but I’ve gone off musicals, somehow. Yes, what he said echoed what I’d said, but so what? It’s well known that couples unconsciously influence each other.

  “Give me your hand,” he said. “Let me take you by the hand. May I perform first aid upon you?” he said, dabbing and pressing my bloody finger with sheets of kitchen towel until the blood stopped flowing. He fetched and attached a plaster. It was grubbied by a fingerprint of shoe polish because he’d been too caught up in alarm about me to wash his hands first.

  “All mended,” he said.

  “Well…”

  “No problemo. No problem at all.”

  So the chance event of this radio program has opened the way to a scenario that saves the situation. I can choose in all honesty to believe that Kenneth has forgotten I quoted the lyric in my card; meanwhile, he gets to really like musicals, which allows me to discover that actually I like them after all (I don’t know why, but I’ve gone onto musicals again, somehow), which means we start buying lots of show music CDs (It’s much nicer to have the physical object than just to download them), which allows me gradually to slip in among the ones on our open shelves the ones from the locked drawer, which means I prevent the shameful revelation after I am dead that I lied about going off musicals, which lie was to prevent him discovering the lie about the lyric I told thirty-three years ago. The world survives, renews itself, and Kenneth’s love continues to protect me from bad things breaking in, although, of course, because of his love nothing was ever really at risk anyway.

  SIGHT

  Jordan Taylor

  Archer’s voice mingled with rushing waves and biting wind as he spoke into my ear. “There’s a ship. State ferry, car and passenger, white and green. Seagulls catching rides in the wake.”

  Sunlight soaked my left side. Archer stood against my right. A mix of musty, salty odors swirled through the breeze amidst a cacophony of waves. Dead crabs, live fish, decomposing seaweed, rotting driftwood, all churned through ocean brine that haunted the nose like a brilliant flash haunts the eyes. And wet dog. Luath leaned against my left leg. Even off duty, I carried her harness and she would hardly leave my side.

  “Can you get Luath to chase the birds? She’s not having much fun.”

  “She won’t listen to me.”

  “You tease her.”

  “The gulls moved on.” A pause as Archer’s head turned beside mine. “Crows on driftwood up the beach behind us. Luath, look, go get the birds.”

  I felt him fling out his arm to point for her.

  Luath didn’t move, her warm presence shielding my legs from wind.

  “Sometimes I think she doesn’t trust me,” Archer said, his lips brushing my ear.

  Wasn’t he self-conscious on the public beach, his arm across my waist? He used to be stressed about those things. I could hear only waves, wind, a few birds, Luath panting by my knee, though I knew we stood not far from campsites.

  “I don’t blame her,” I said.

  “No? You trust her more than me?”

  “I’ve learned from experience to second guess your directions more than hers. Human errand. Nothing personal.”

  Another pause; only wind twisted past. Then Archer said, “You mean, ‘human error’?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “You said ‘errand.’”

  “Close enough.”

  “What dictionary are you using?”

  Luath nudged the harness in my hand. I didn’t like this part; making judgments to say if your dog was better off doing the work she loved, or imposing freedom. At least she had managed some relaxation over the past few days in the San Juans.

  “No criticizing on vacation,” I said, opening buckles on the harness.

  “Don’t you mean, ‘No cannibalizing on vacation’? That would be close enough.”

  “God, Archer, you’re worse than my mother. It’s not a crime to get a word wrong.”

  “Maybe not, if you haven’t swallowed a library.”

  I bent to harness Luath. She licked my hands, wagging her whole rear against my legs.

  Archer chuckled. “Such a blonde.”

  “Now you’re cannibalizing my dog.”

  “Did you really just say that?”

  I stood up with the harness handle and short, leather leash to her collar in my left hand.

  “I’m not criticizing your dog.” I heard the grin in his voice as he put his arm around me once more, leaning into my right shoulder, kissing my ear. “I love your dog. I love you, Noah.”

  “Overcompensating.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Isn’t the sun setting? Should we start for camp?”

  “Camp?” His lips curved upward against my neck. “You mean the eight-bedroom, turreted, hillside Victorian B and B we’re staying in?”

  “Shall we go?”

  “It’s just before the show starts. The sky’s blinding, golden white, then bright blue.”

  A car engine sounded far off. Campers packing on Sunday evening after a weekend of Pacific Northwest sand and sun. Perhaps we were within sight of other tourists after all, yet Archer remained against me, talking into my ear about colors, waves, seabirds.

  I dropped the harness handle to reach for Luath’s silky head, resting my fingers across the curve of her skull.

  “It’s sinking,” Archer said.

  Good. Nearly time to go. For our last night here maybe Archer would humor me with carryout pizza or fish and chips so we didn’t have to eat in public.

  “Yellow, turning orange, turning pink,” Archer said. “There’s another ship. Looks like it’s plated in gold. The seagulls’ wings are flashing flames, slicing through the sky. Every wave catches the light as it turns and falls, like a dance with a million performers.”

  “How about the sand?” I asked.

  “Where it’s wet from receding tide, it catches light like glass. Like it’s been melted down in a forge.”

  He kissed me again, letting his lips linger on my skin so I felt his nose, chin, eyelashes, the warmth of his breath on my neck. And sudden tension in his body.

  I started to turn my head. “Archer?”

  “Noah, will you marry me?”

  Wind stopped roaring. Waves stopped crashing. Luath stopped panting. I felt her turn, shift in the harness to look up while my muscles grew rigid as driftwood, holding my breath. Smells vanished with sounds. Void. Empty. Nothing.

  “No.” I snapped the word, not like a refusal, but an order, a challenge, even a threat. I snatched Luath’s harness handle and wheeled away while my words to her were barely formed. “Luath, left. Forward.”

  We made an about turn, started up the beach toward the hillside Victorian a quarter of a mile away. Luath rushed across wet sand, pulling me with her faster than I would normally allow. As if we could outrun the question, leave it buried in the sand, never to be heard from again.

  I met Archer in our freshman year of high school, after his famil
y moved to Olympia in February. When not in class, he spent much of his time until summer break standing in any uninhabited nook of the grounds. No reading, talking, texting. He stood, waiting for the bell to ring, nearly invisible.

  To my later regret, I couldn’t remember details of the first moment I saw him. I did remember the first time I looked at him.

  Archer stood in the rain, one sneaker in beauty bark around a raised flowerbed, the other foot propped on the brick edge of the bed. His black hoodie drooped across his shoulders with the weight of rain, blue jeans turned navy by water, sticking to his legs like plastic wrap. He gazed at the ground, chin tipped down. Brown hair fell across his forehead, flattened, darkened and spiky from rain running through it, across his head, over his face, dripping off his pointed nose and chin in ribbons of icy water.

  I had never been in love, though I had a crush on a teacher in junior high and would have given my left arm to be Peter Parker’s sidekick—comic, movie, anywhere. So I wasn’t sure how I knew I’d fallen in love in five seconds. But I did.

  That night, I started a new comic while my parents went through their customary after-dinner shouting match downstairs and Shiloh danced in her room, listening to Kelly Clarkson. Though Shiloh was five years younger than me, I let her work on my comics. She had a genius for plot twists that went far beyond her years. I drew while she announced ideas.

  This time I closed my door, starting a new notebook of sketches that no one in my family would be allowed to see.

  I can still envision that first sketch: the gray, dull light; water sliding through his hair, down his temples; perfect shape of his nose and chin; curve and angle of his body against muted school grounds; low brick wall of the dead, dirt flowerbed; fixed stare into nothing.

  I approached Archer the next day. Confidence, like art, was a family trait. I’d hawked my mom’s handmade jewelry and paintings at art fairs for as long as I could remember, argued with my sister about the colors she chose to match—pink and orange were favorites—since she was old enough to dress herself, and learned to sneer at “imitators” by the age of ten.

  “Hey,” I said to Archer through the crowd as he closed his locker. “Want to hang out sometime? Do you play MMOGs?”

  He stared at me, hostile blue eyes sunken against dark circles. For the first time it occurred to me that he looked like someone who hadn’t had a proper night’s sleep—or meal—in weeks. He seemed about to curl his lip. Instead, he walked away. Not a word.

  Mouth open, I stood in the hallway like a moron while students flowed past. Perhaps he hadn’t heard properly in the commotion of the hall.

  Next time I tried, later that day after lunch, I abandoned the smile. “What’s your problem? Got some invisible friends here already?”

  He turned from dropping a sandwich bag in the trash and directed a cold stare at me. “Leave me alone.”

  Archer was an expert at cold stares, brows drawn close over blue eyes. I couldn’t get my breath, hands clenched into fists just to resist reaching for him, room whirling like a massive top.

  His expression changed. “You all right?”

  I still couldn’t breathe properly. “I’m—ssss—”

  “What?”

  “Sorry to bother you.”

  He turned away.

  “Wait!” Several people still eating looked around. “I didn’t mean sorry and we’re done. I meant sorry and could we start over?”

  “With what?” Though he glanced at me, he spoke through set teeth, as if he didn’t want anyone to notice he was talking to me.

  “I can’t remember your name.”

  He stood there.

  “Could you tell me?”

  “Archer.”

  “That’s a cool name.”

  Nothing.

  “I’m Noah.”

  He looked at the clock on the wall over the cafeteria doors.

  “Do you like comic books?”

  “No.”

  “Movies?”

  “No.”

  “You don’t like movies?”

  He shrugged. “I’ve got to go.”

  “The bell hasn’t rung. Computers?”

  He glanced at me.

  “We’ve got a new one—old one expired—and the new one’s a bitch. Can’t figure out half the software on it. My mom can’t stand it. I’m hoping for my own laptop for my birthday, but this is what we’ve got now.”

  He looked at me.

  The bell rang.

  “Can you come over after school? My mom picks me up. Stay for dinner and you can tell me how to work the desktop? If you’re there, my parents won’t shout at each other. We act like normal people when we have company.”

  It turned out Archer knew more about computers than Mom did about van Gogh—whose Wikipedia article she was always tweaking. He could take them apart, put them together, tell what everything did. He also programmed.

  Our friendship developed along with the game we made—me drawing animation, Archer programming characters to run, jump, shoot crossbows. Mom adored him—such a polite, quiet young man. Shiloh could hardly be in the same room with him without being red faced and tongue-tied.

  I never had to come out to my family. Which seemed lucky, though there was something to be said for an exchange of feelings. My father had appeared resigned from the day he tried to take me fishing. I vomited in the boat at the sight of his impaling a living worm on a silver hook. Then screamed like a toddler when he got me to grab a thrashing fish he swung aboard. I was thirteen. He invited Shiloh after that. Shiloh loved murdering fish, then frying them herself, eating hot, greasy flesh with her fingers like a barbarian. He never mentioned taking me again.

  My mother was slightly more direct, telling me, shortly after I started bringing Archer home, that she one-hundred-percent supported whoever I wished to be with as long as that person was positive for me. And had good taste.

  Archer was far better for me than I realized. I wasn’t sure if he’d always been a brooding introvert, but he’d been handed an extra helping of brooding before he moved to Olympia. His father, a cop, was killed working a nightshift the previous summer. Archer and his mother moved from Saint Paul to live with his grandparents until they could “get things worked out.” It would be two years before Archer said more to me about his father beyond the fact that he was dead.

  In the fall of our junior year, we sat at the computer for a typical programming session while Mom was out fetching Thai food and Shiloh talked on the phone upstairs. Archer typed, checking multiple screens, programming the game, sitting up straight in the desk chair as he worked on a high-jump for a humanoid cat character. I sat on a kitchen stool behind him, resting my chin on his shoulder. We had yet to progress beyond kisses. Archer, who viewed sitting near each other in a theater or school auditorium as tantamount to a public make-out session, made it clear things were already moving plenty fast.

  I blew gently in his ear to get a rise out of him.

  He opened the game screen and pointed. “That what you wanted?”

  “It’s perfect.”

  “You didn’t even look.”

  I leaned forward, my chest against his shoulder. Something blocked the screen, like mud around the edges. I blinked, rubbed my eyes, looked again. The screen appeared normal. The catman sprang onto a platform like our human hero never could have.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s incredulous.”

  “What? You mean ‘incredible’?”

  “Awesome, perfect, rhetorical.”

  “Rhetorical?” He shook his head, trying not to laugh. “What was that meant to be?”

  “You did a great job. Thank you.” I kissed his neck.

  He jumped away: Mom was unlocking the front door.

  If I’d been asked, I couldn’t have said what went wrong looking at the screen.

  When visual glitches persisted, I kept them to myself. My parents inched closer to divorce every month. At the same time, I was in the proce
ss of getting my license. If I sometimes couldn’t see my sketchbook or classroom perfectly, it wasn’t a big deal compared to driving and divorce.

  I might have gone longer in silence if not for the driving. I picked Shiloh up from school one day when our mom couldn’t make it. A few blocks from the crowded lot, Shiloh screamed.

  “Noah! What’s your problem?”

  “Don’t shout at me when I’m driving!”

  “Don’t run freaking stop signs then!”

  I glanced in the side mirror. My hands shook on the wheel and I took a slow breath.

  “We could’ve been hit,” she snapped. “Or arrested.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry. I didn’t see it.”

  “It’s a huge red sign, Noah.”

  Of course, Shiloh spilled the beans. I admitted to my mom that I’d had visual problems lately, though they hadn’t seemed like such a big deal.

  Driving privileges were suspended.

  The next day, I stood in the optometrist’s office, staring at everything. Drinking in the light through blinds making bars across the table of magazines, glossy and neatly arranged in rows. Water tank with tiny paper cups. Kids’ toys, red, yellow, blue, wood and plastic; an old, battered Etch A Sketch.

  There had never been so much to see. It was as if I’d grown up living inside a grocery store and only ever tried white bread and milk. Every art museum my mom ever dragged us to as kids, every school trip, every sketch and comic and movie. Every glance out the window. How could it be possible that I’d never really thought about sight?

  I imagined they wouldn’t know. They’d send me for tests, decide treatment. Worst case, they’d cut open my eyes with lasers and I’d have recovery time ahead and photophobia.

  But the doctor did know: worse, much worse than anything we could have imagined.

  Retinitis pigmentosa. A fancy name for a disease that eats the eyes. Incurable. Possibly leading to permanent and complete blindness within a year, or five, or ten.

  At home, bewildered, shocked, with my equally lost and shocked mother, I went to bed and stared at my sketch of Archer in the rain. And stared. As if I would never get another chance.

  Far from never seeing him again, Archer got me through the next years. My family was also there, more or less. But I never mentioned a lot of things to them. I never told them that by the time I was seventeen—seeing the world as dots in the center of my remaining field of vision—I’d made up my mind to kill myself. I told only Archer.