Strays and Lovers

by John Inman

  “I don’t want you to go,” Eddie said. “Not now. Not when the cast comes off. Not ever. I mean….” Eddie lost his momentum. He flailed around for a way to finish what he was trying to say. “I mean, unless you really don’t want to be here anymore.” He tripped over the words, unhappy with the way they sounded, and only after he’d said them did he realize they didn’t even come close to the way he truly felt.

  How could he be talking about leaving? Eddie asked himself. We were so happy this morning. What suddenly happened to make him want to go? Have I been fooling myself all along, thinking we were growing close? Thinking Gray might even be starting to… care about me?

  Before Gray could answer, Eddie knew he had to get away. He lifted his hand from Gray’s. Tears were building. He could feel them burning. The last thing he wanted was to let Gray see him like this. He nudged a few cats out of the way and rose to his feet on watery legs.

  “I’ll be in the house,” he said. “Paperwork,” he added senselessly. Looking at everything but Gray. He crossed the run, wading through a sea of cats. With shaky fingers he unlatched the gate and stepped out into the yard, making sure no cats escaped when he did.

  He didn’t look back as he walked toward the house.

  Apparently he didn’t need to. Behind him, Gray’s silence told him everything he needed to know.

  So there it was. The time he knew would eventually come had finally arrived. Out of the blue. With no warning whatsoever, Gray was calling it quits between them. Gray wanted to get away.

  Just as Eddie always knew he would.

  The rising tears had spilled onto Eddie’s cheeks by the time he stepped through the back door and into the kitchen. A heavy sadness settled over him like an iron weight. His hand still trembled as he pulled a beer from the fridge and wearily trudged up the stairs to the bedroom. Instead of collapsing on the bed, he stepped to the window and looked out on the sun-soaked afternoon sky. His old yellow tabby, Chester, lay snoozing on the sill. He twiddled the sleeping cat’s ears and shifted his eyes to gaze down at the compound below. Gray still sat there, half-naked, propped against the cat hut, the most beautiful man Eddie had ever seen. And the man Eddie had fallen hardest for in all his years of being gay. Gray still had the garbage bag wrapped around his cast. He wasn’t doing anything. He was simply staring off into the distance while the cats happily swarmed all over him.

  Eddie sighed and pulled the curtains shut. Closing himself in. Shutting the world out. He switched on the fan and stood directly in front of it. Unbuttoning his shirt, he let the breeze cool his chest. Unfortunately the breeze didn’t reach inside to soothe the burning in his heart.

  Glancing at the dresser mirror, he studied his wavering reflection through a film of tears. “You’re too old for this,” he said, angrily wiping his vision clear, trying to get hold of himself.

  Turning from his reflection, he plopped his ass down on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes. He was exhausted.

  The beer rested forgotten in his hand. Finally, he set it aside, switched off the fan, and with a heavy heart, headed back down the stairs. He hadn’t been lying when he told Gray there was paperwork to be done. There was indeed. No matter what miseries assailed his private life, his business still needed constant attention, or it would fail. Then what would happen to him? And more importantly, what would happen to the dozens of animals in his care?

  Life goes on after all. What else can it do?

  AN HOUR later, he heard the squeak of the screen door. A moment passed before he sensed Gray standing quietly behind him. Eddie was sitting at the kitchen table. He had the books and receipts for the refuge spread out in front of him. If nothing else, it was something he could bury himself in without thinking too much about other stuff.

  Like Gray leaving. Like Eddie going back to spending his life alone.

  “Did you want something?” he asked without turning.

  “Yes,” Gray said from a distance. He still stood barely inside the room, as if he wasn’t sure of the reception he would get if he stepped farther inside. In fact, his back was probably right up against the door. Eddie didn’t have the heart to turn around and see.

  Before Gray had a chance to explain, if that’s what he intended to do, Eddie had to ask the one basic question that kept circling in his head. He did not accuse, he merely asked. Politely. Sadly. “What happened? What made you suddenly want to leave?”

  There was a heartbeat of silence before Gray answered. “You don’t understand.”

  At long last, Eddie turned to face Gray standing there in the doorway. “No,” he said. “I don’t understand. Please. Enlighten me. Tell me what happened between this morning and this afternoon to make you change like this. What did I do? I have to know, Gray. You have to explain it to me.”

  Gray stared down at the floor before him. With a visible shudder, he lifted his head and focused his gaze on Eddie sitting at the kitchen table. Eddie accepted his gaze fearlessly, or at least he hoped he gave that impression. To tell the truth, deep inside he was one big ache. The heavy sadness that had thundered through him earlier was still there, but he was determined not to let Gray sense it.

  Gray’s arms hung limp at his sides. His hands, anything but limp, clenched and unclenched as he spoke. “I don’t want to hurt you, Eddie. It’s just that you… scare me. You make me scared of myself. Scared of the chances I’m taking. Scared of how much I’m starting to need you.”

  Eddie’s chin trembled. He could feel it. He captured his voice before it could slip away from him completely. A tiny sliver of hope poked at his heart, and that frightened Eddie more than anything that had happened yet. Hope could easily kill him, and he damn well knew it. Weakly, he uttered, “You’re starting to need me?”

  Gray reached down to tug the too-large swimming trunks up past his hips before they slid off entirely. His answer was barely a chuffing of breath, a susurration of stuttered sound. A faint impression on the air like a tattoo that didn’t quite take. “You know I am, Eddie.”

  Eddie gripped the edge of the table and almost stood, but he forced himself back down on the chair. Forced the look of concern to melt from his face, trying desperately not to scare Gray any more than he apparently already had.

  “Talk to me,” Eddie said. “Make me understand what you’re feeling. Why do I scare you? And if you’re beginning to need me, why do you want to leave? Isn’t needing a good thing? I mean, between two people like us, isn’t needing just a step away from… other emotions?”

  With a clatter, Louie pushed through the doggie door behind Gray, causing both men to jump. Oblivious to the tension in the room, tongue lolling happily, he raced across the kitchen on skittering toenails and jumped into Eddie’s lap. Absentmindedly, Eddie accepted Louie into his space. But while he stroked Louie’s ear, not thinking about it, automatically doing what he knew Louie wanted him to do, he held his gaze on Gray. His eyes didn’t veer away from Gray’s face for a second. He stared and he waited. Waited to hear what he’d done wrong. How he’d managed to ruin the best thing that ever happened to him. Again, a sob clawed at his throat, but once more he swallowed it down.

  His breath caught when Gray began to speak. Slowly it dawned on him that Gray’s wanting to leave had nothing to do with Eddie’s actions at all. It was Gray’s fears that were holding their relationship ransom.

  “I’ve had enough pain in my life,” Gray said. He sounded weak, as if he had recently recovered from a long illness. There was no life in his voice. No energy or strength. He sounded tired and emotionally wrung out. “I guess that’s what it boils down to, Eddie. Pain. I learned a lot of stuff in prison, you know. And one of the biggest lessons I learned was not to let myself fall victim to what I thought someone else was feeling. That’s the shortest route to pain there is. Because I’m always wrong. Whenever I start to believe something, it always turns out to be a fantasy in my own head. I never read the signals right. Never.”

  Eddie’s pulse hammered in his temples like on
e of those gongs in a Buddhist temple. “But what does that have to do with us? Surely you know how I feel by now. God knows I’ve hinted at it often enough.”

  Desperation entered Gray’s voice. A sense of panic. “It’s because of the way I am, Eddie. Because I feel things so much. And like I said, because I’m always wrong. Always. When I open myself up to someone, it’s always flung back in my face. I’ve proven to myself over and over again, when I try to fool myself like that, I’m only imagining what I want to believe, that I’m only imagining I see the same feelings in the other person that I feel in myself. Don’t you understand? It’s all a lie, Eddie. A scam. A big self-induced con.”

  “No,” Eddie said. “You’re wrong. You can’t explain away your feelings like that. You can’t let yourself be afraid of your heart. It’s just an excuse. A cop-out. A self-perpetuating torment. You think being dumped is all you deserve, so you sabotage your feelings and make it happen.”

  Gray flicked his fingers through the air as if brushing Eddie’s argument aside. Eddie somehow understood that while Gray had refused to talk about this earlier, he now couldn’t keep the words down. He had to talk about it. Because maybe this time he didn’t want his insecurities to win.

  Or so Eddie hoped.

  “In prison you… you make connections, Eddie. It’s a lonely life if you don’t have someone to share it with. It’s not only lonely, it’s brutal. Guys come together not just for sex and companionship, but for protection too. More than once, I made the mistake of thinking that sort of relationship was more than what it really was.”

  Gently, Eddie prodded, “You’re talking about love, aren’t you? You’re talking about trust.”

  Gray didn’t speak. He simply nodded. His gaze continually caromed off every item in the room except Eddie’s face. Apparently that was the one object he couldn’t bring himself to look at. Eddie could see the fear burning in Gray’s eyes.

  Quietly, Eddie spoke around the growing lump in his throat. “And that’s what you think is happening here? How do you know this isn’t the one time that your feelings are actually right?”

  Gray shook his head, refusing to answer. Or maybe he didn’t know how to answer. There was such confusion on his face, Eddie almost felt sorry for him. If his own happiness hadn’t been hanging by a thread, he might have.

  Afraid of pushing too hard but desperate to get things out in the open, Eddie forced himself to remain calm. He held his desperation in check. Or tried to. “Do you want to know how I feel about you, Gray? Do you want to hear it from my own lips? I tried to tell you once before, and somehow we ended up making a game of it. Do you want to hear it from me now? Do you honestly want to know what I think about what’s happening between us? Do you want to know how I actually feel, instead of the way you think I feel?”

  “Y-yes,” Gray said, at long last settling his gaze on Eddie’s face. His eyes were pleading, broken. “Tell me.”

  Plucking Louie from his lap, Eddie rose. He went to Gray and, taking his hand, led him to the kitchen table. “Your leg’s hurting,” he said gently. “I can see it on your face. You need to sit.”

  He pulled his own chair up in front of Gray. The cast on Gray’s foot sat there between them like a granite boulder, but Eddie tried to ignore it, shifting his feet around out of the way to make them both more comfortable. He rested his hands on Gray’s knees and let himself fall headfirst into those pewter eyes that had mesmerized him from the very first time he saw them almost three months earlier at the back of the Spangle Hardware Store. They were eyes that, at the moment, were the saddest Eddie had ever seen. And still the most beautiful. He could feel himself tumbling into their depths all over again every time they were pointed in his direction.

  Yet somehow, at this moment, even their beauty and the sadness they harbored gave Eddie hope. Once again, he dredged up his voice from the ashes, not knowing if it would actually be there for him or not until he heard it with his own ears.

  “Before you came along, I had made my peace with being alone,” Eddie said, his mouth trying to settle on either a smile or a frown but never quite landing on either. He kneaded Gray’s thighs with strong fingers. Mainly because he loved the way they felt. Somehow their warmth and tautness anchored him. He tried to gather his thoughts. This was important. Perhaps the most important speech he would ever give in his life.

  He sucked in a deep breath and began. “At my age, you sort of figure you are where you are. If you haven’t made your fortune yet, you probably never will. If you haven’t found love yet, you might as well give up looking for it. Yet when I did dare to dream about someone coming along who would rescue me from being alone, I never imagined a twenty-five-year-old ex-con would be the one to pull me from the brink. I didn’t go out searching for a younger guy to spend my life with, Gray. I didn’t even want that. I wanted someone my own age. Or I thought I did. Mainly, I guess, because I never thought I’d find anybody anyway. If you’re facing the impossible, why try to make it even more impossible, right?”

  Gray tucked his fingers under Eddie’s hands. He stared down at their four hands clasped together. He gave his head a tiny shake. “I thought I was the only one who beat myself up over stuff like that.”

  Eddie almost laughed. “Hardly.”

  Gray’s eyes once again came to rest on Eddie’s face. He seemed less afraid of it now. “Do you believe in happiness, Eddie? Do you think it really exists for people like us?”

  Eddie heaved a sigh that came all the way up from the soles of his feet. “I didn’t use to. Not for the longest time. I guess I wouldn’t let myself believe it. I always thought happiness—real happiness—was something you read about in books or watched unfold in a movie. Like fiction, you know? Imaginary. All made up. But now I’m starting to believe it might be real.”

  “What changed your mind?” Gray asked.

  And with that, Eddie’s mouth finally found its smile. “You. And it’s these last couple of miserable hours that really crystalized it for me. You want to know why?”

  Gray nodded, voiceless.

  “It’s because, Gray, if I can feel such pain on hearing you say you want to leave, then there must be an opposing emotion twisting in the air at the other end of the spectrum. Don’t you think? And the way I see it, the only emotion strong enough to oppose that threat of misery must be the possibility of happiness. Right? What else can it be?” A mist clouded Gray’s silver irises again. He glanced down, away from Eddie’s face, averting his gaze once more. When his words came, they came from a deep well of hurt hidden inside Gray that Eddie suddenly realized he had never sensed before, had never had the slightest inkling existed in the man in front of him.

  “You could do better than me,” Gray said.

  His hurt was real, and Eddie knew it. He knew it, and it tore him apart inside. That pain in Gray’s words, in Gray’s averted gaze, swept the smile from Eddie’s face in a heartbeat.

  “And you could most certainly do better than me,” he said, reaching out and tucking a finger under Gray’s chin to lift his face and force him to look at him. “Please don’t turn your head like that. I like it when your eyes are on me. Even when you’re breaking my heart.”

  Gray sucked in his breath. His teeth raked over his bottom lip as if to hold in his words while he considered them carefully. Finally, he let them go. They flew through the air like startled starlings. “Am I really breaking your heart, Eddie?”

  “Yes. You’re ripping it to shreds. But I think you know that.”

  A silence settled over them. Perhaps they were both stunned by how quickly and how forcefully Eddie had answered. Eddie watched from inside his own reclaimed silence as a tear formed on Gray’s lower eyelash, sparkled there for a second, then spilled out onto his cheek. With his fingertip, Eddie brushed it away.

  “Please don’t go because you’re afraid of being hurt,” Eddie softly said. “I’d rather have you stay because you think I’m worth the risk.”

  Gray reached up to wipe the r
emaining tears from his eyes with the butt of his hand. He laid that hand on Eddie’s cheek, still damp with his tears.

  “You need a shave,” he said.

  “I always need a shave,” Eddie answered.

  “My past…,” Gray began, but a hiccup silenced him. He looked almost embarrassed by the unexpected sound.

  “I know all I need to know about your past,” Eddie interrupted, ignoring the hiccup. And ignoring Gray’s upcoming explanation about his past as well. “It doesn’t matter, Gray. None of it matters. Don’t you understand that? I don’t care about what happened to you before I came along. I don’t care that there was sadness in your life. I only care that you find happiness in your life now. Here. With me. That’s the only thing that matters to me.”

  Gray inhaled a long shuddering breath. The tip of his tongue came out to moisten his lips. He was gathering his courage. Eddie could see it in those wounded eyes. Yet somehow the wounds didn’t seem so deep now. Was that a spark of hope Eddie saw burning in the depths of those marvelous pale eyes?

  “Do you really want me to love you, Eddie? Are you willing to let me do that?”

  “Yes, Gray. I’m willing to let you do that. I’m willing to do whatever you want. Just let me love you back. Let me make you trust me. That’s all I ask. I won’t hurt you. I swear. I’ll never do anything to hurt you.”

  At long last, a smile curved Gray’s mouth. Tentative at first, but quickly growing stronger, more assured. “It’s all I’ve ever wanted. Not to be hurt. To be really and truly loved. And to be able to let myself go and love somebody back.”

  “You’ve had that ability from the start. You just wouldn’t see it.”

  “I couldn’t make myself believe it. I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”

  “Do you believe it now, Gray? Do you believe I love you now?”

  Gray leaned forward and dropped his head to Eddie’s chest. His fingers slid warm across the back of Eddie’s neck. With a tiny intake of breath, he whispered into the shadow of Eddie’s shirt front, “Yes. I believe you love me.”