The Complete Veterans Affairs Romances: Gay Military Romances

by A. E. Wasp

  He cried for the aching loneliness he’d felt in the luxury rehab his father’s money had bought him a bed in. Sick in mind, body, and soul from detox, he’d spent hours and days and weeks as isolated as the therapist would let him be, sketching on napkins with the soft-charcoals that were all they would let him have.

  The tears for Toby he had cried a million times already, they lived in his painting now.

  Angel dropped a kiss on the top of his head and wrapped her arm around him as he struggled to breathe through his sobs. “Hey, hey, niño. It’s okay. Just breathe, it’s okay to cry, but you gotta breathe, too, baby. Shh, shh.”

  Her kindness broke the last wall in his head, and finally, finally, he felt safe enough in the present to cry for the lonely boy he had been and the childhood that had been stolen from him by a cruel combination of excess and neglect.

  He felt the storm of emotion winding down. The flood passed, leaving the wreckage of his inadequate defenses behind it. His body was limp, completely wrung dry like he had been earlier today with Jay-Cee, but his mind felt different. Empty but not at peace. That was something Angel could give him.

  “Sana, sana, colita de tana, si no sana hoy, sanará mañana,” she sang in a soft voice, and wiped his tears with the edge of a blanket. When his sobs quieted to hiccups, she gently pushed him up so he could lean against the pillows propped against the side of the truck. She dug a water bottle out of the cooler, opened it, and handed it to him.

  Grateful, he took a sip, then another. The icy water felt good on his tear-burned throat.

  “Feel better?” she asked kindly.

  “Yeah,” he answered. “What were you singing?”

  She looked a little embarrassed. “It’s something my mama used to sing to me when I was little and I hurt myself. It mean ‘heal, heal, little frog tail, if it doesn’t heal today it will heal tomorrow.’ It’s just nonsense.”

  “So she wasn’t all bad, your mom?”

  “People seldom are,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Thanks for letting me have a breakdown on you. I guess we have to be friends now, right?”

  “Definitely. Crying is how my people bond.” She opened a bottle of water for herself. “But I gotta tell you, you are like the whitest white boy I’ve ever seen. That’s been building for a while, hasn’t it?”

  “Years,” Chris admitted.

  Angel shook her head. “You’ve got to stop holding your emotions in. Let them out. It’s not healthy to sit on all that shit.”

  He raised his eyebrows and gave her a wry grin. “Yeah, well, if I had good coping mechanisms, I wouldn’t be a junkie.”

  She tipped her water bottle at him. “Excellent point.”

  Chris tilted his head up to watch the silver clouds race across the black sky. “Do you think feelings can be so big they kill you? Just wipe you out?”

  Angel lay down next to Chris, crossing her arms behind her head. “We’re not talking depression, right?” Chris shook his head. “Then I don’t think so if you learn to let them go. Just kind of move through them, like a wave, you know? Dmitri’s parents took us to the ocean once, and we played in the waves. Did you ever do that?”

  Chris had when he was little. He remembered summer weekends on the Sound or visiting friends of his parents out in the Hamptons in giant houses full of strangers. The waves pounded ceaselessly against the shore like a heartbeat, and Chris stood at the edge of the water and tried to comprehend the vast immensity of the sea.

  Looking up at the blackness of a Rocky Mountain night felt the same way. “Yeah. I remember playing in the waves,” he answered Angel.

  “So you know. Sometimes the best thing to do when you see a big wave coming at you, and you know it’s going to break on top of you, and you don’t have time to ride it, the best thing to do is dive deep under it.”

  “Sometimes I think I’m going to drown,” Chris admitted. “It’s like I can’t leave the past behind, you know?”

  “Yeah, you can’t dwell. That shit will kill you. Accept your mistakes, mourn the losses, remember the good stuff, and move on.” Angel sounded like she had had experience with all of that.

  “How? How do you move on?”

  “Oh, that’s easy. The secret is to know when to stop remembering.”

  It sounded so easy when she said it. God knows enough therapists had told him similar things. He had been hanging on to everything, afraid that he would lose part of himself if he let it go.

  “How do you feel now?” Angel asked, turning to face him. “Any better?”

  Chris stared at the stars peeking out between the clouds and shrugged. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. Scared most of the time. Confused the rest. Like I’m an imposter, some kind of fake person. I have to watch other people around me to see how they feel, how they act.”

  “Oh, niño,” she said again and rolled onto her side to hug him.

  Chris had always been a tactile person. He needed human touch to keep him grounded, to keep him alive. Angel was an excellent hugger. And she had one big advantage over everyone else. Angel was older than Chris. She had her act together, and she didn’t need Chris to be strong or perfect for her to keep going. His breakdowns wouldn’t affect her.

  That’s what Jay-Cee had been offering, Chris realized. It hit him like a blow to the head. He had been offering Chris compassion, understanding, and a safe place to fall apart, and Chris had rejected him. Not only that, when Jay-Cee had trusted Chris enough to cry in front of him, Chris had recoiled.

  But then, instead of writing Chris off as a lost cause, Jay-Cee had figured out how to give Chris what he needed in a way in which he would accept. And Chris had grabbed it with both hands, finding comfort in someone else’s arms. He had trusted Angel in a way he didn’t trust Jay-Cee. I’m an asshole, Chris thought. He must have hurt Jay-Cee so much.

  “Jay-Cee was trying to help me,” he blurted out to Angel. “He helps me feel like a normal person. Lets me feel what I feel, need what I need, want what I want, and he tells me it’s okay, whatever it is. He doesn’t judge.”

  “Sounds great,” Angel answered.

  “But I judged him, didn’t I? I didn’t let him feel what he needed because I was scared.”

  Angel sat up, pulling a blanket around her shoulders. She pulled a plastic grocery bag towards her and dug through it, coming up with a box of waxy Zebra cakes. “Want one?”

  “Are they good?”

  “No. They’re disgusting. Nothing but sugar and polyunsaturated fat.”

  “Sure.” Chris stretched out a hand. Eyeing it cautiously, he freed the black and white striped cake-thing from its plastic prison and took a bite. It wasn’t good, and yet somehow compelling. He took a second bite.

  “Look,” Angel said. “Obviously I don’t know what went down between you two. I didn’t even know you guys were a thing until like right this second. How old is he anyway?”

  Chris froze with a mouthful of cheap sponge cake.

  Angel waves the question away. “Never mind. None of my business. He’s smoking hot, and you don’t strike me as an idiot. You get down with your bad self. I’m totally Team Chris.”

  “You don’t really know me either.” He drank some water to force the remains of the cake down. Angel held out the box, and he slid another one out of it.

  “So tell me about yourself, then.”

  To his surprise, Chris did. He gave her the broad strokes, none of the details. For the first time, he seemed to be able to get a little distance from his past. It still hurt, but the pain had receded the tiniest bit, become something that had happened to him, not something that was still happening.

  She nodded as he talked, strong eyebrows drawn together in a frown, but didn’t interrupt. “So you’ve really had no good adults in your life for a long time,” she said when he finished. “No one to model how to be a human being.”

  Chris had never thought of it exactly in those terms, but it made sense. No wonder he studied
other people so intently. It’s not like he had anyone directly showing him how to be in the world.

  “I’ve heard your emotional development stops when you start using and then doesn’t really start back up again until you give up the drugs. Is that true?”

  Chris had heard that a dozen times and he kind of thought it was bullshit. “Well, it’s not untrue. It’s just a facile explanation of what happens, very over-simplified. It’s more like you develop a lot of skills that are only useful in the underworld. In real life, they’re seen as impediments. But if you want to learn how to survive as a junkie and keep a steady supply of drugs, then lying, cheating, hiding, stealing, and whoring are pretty handy skills to have.”

  Angel chewed on her Zebra cake and contemplated what Chris had said. “I don’t know how much you know about me; about Dmitri and me.”

  “Not a lot. You guys seem really close though, like brother and sister.”

  “We basically are. My family is pretty shitty. Not because we’re poor, I know plenty of poor people who are not assholes. I think my parents were born mean. Their parents were mean, and probably all the way back to whatever caveman started the line. I was destined to be a son of a bitch, too. But then, when I started middle school, I ended up in the class with this really pretty white boy. I didn’t know why at the time, but there was something about him that attracted me. He felt the same way, and we became best friends by the third day.”

  “Pre-teen gaydar?” Chris guessed. In Chris’s experience, the gay kids almost always found each other in any group situation. They gravitated to each other before they could articulate the attraction.

  “You know it,” Angel confirmed. “So anyway, pretty soon, I was spending most of my time at Dmitri’s house. I’m fairly sure his parents figured out my situation early on. And God knows my parents didn’t miss me.”

  Chris settled deeper into the pile of pillows behind him and tugged the blankets around his legs. The night was growing colder.

  “My family fought and screamed,” Angel continued. “Lots of shoving and yelling. So did most of the other parents in my neighborhood. I thought it was normal. I thought Dmitri’s parents were hiding it from me, and I kept waiting for them to crack. We’d do something bad, kid stuff. Break a glass, leave the fridge open, and I would be so scared. But Dimmy? He was never afraid of his parents. And they never yelled or hit him. Not once.

  “If we’d accidentally broken something, he’d apologize, and they’d say, ‘it’s okay.’ If we did something stupid they’d be disappointed, and maybe he’d get grounded, but that was it. They didn’t scream at him and tell him he was stupid and a waste of space. They didn’t bring up every other bad thing in his life.

  “Then one day we came in the house from whatever we had been doing, and his parents were arguing. I was like, ‘oh shit, we need to hide.’ Why? Dmitri asks me. They’re fighting, I say, and I don’t want to be here when the yelling and the hitting and the throwing things starts.” She shook her head.

  27 – You can’t keep the sky from falling anyway

  “Let me guess,” Chris said. “They never started.”

  “He looked at me like I was a crazy person.”

  “That was when I started to relax a little. They were the first grownups I ever trusted. I studied them and Dmitri’s brothers and sisters harder than any of my classes. I learned how to be a decent human being from the Wellingtons. They’re more my parents than anyone.”

  She let the tears fall from her eyes, then wiped them away. “So yeah, I don’t know you exactly. But I know kids like you, and I know what it’s like to be lost. Look at me, I’m a 30-year-old glorified waitress with a loosely-committed girlfriend.”

  “I think you’re amazing,” Chris said, grabbing her hand. “Really, truly fabulous.” Gaining Angel’s friendship was another good thing he owed to Jay-Cee and Benny.

  “Thanks. You’re pretty cool, too.”

  They sat in silence for a little while, both lost in thoughts of the past. The wind moaned in the aspen and pine trees lining the edges of the field. Every now and then, a strong gust would blow, flattening the tops of the pine trees with the sound of the rolling tide.

  “So how do you know you’re doing the right thing?” Chris asked. “Making the right choices?”

  Angel zipped up the black sweatshirt she had pulled on. It said ‘I <3 Fat Doobies’ on the front of it. “You don’t always know. You listen to your heart, that still small voice in your head. But you need to find the quiet to hear it. Quiet in your mind, know what I mean. I drive up here sometimes. Where is your mind still?”

  “In my art,” Chris said without hesitation. “When I’m lost in a drawing or a painting. And sometimes when I’m with Jay-Cee. When he’s not doing my head in,” he added with a soft laugh.

  “That’s a good thing,” Angel said. “Ultimately, though, you can poll your friends, check your horoscope or whatever, but basically you have to decide what’s best for you.”

  “I don’t think I trust my judgment,” Chris admitted.

  Angel dropped an arm heavily across his shoulders. “I’ll tell you a secret, baby. We’re all just making it up. No one knows what they are doing. How can you? You can’t see the future.”

  “Too bad.” A flash of light across the sky caught Chris’s eye. “Ooh! Was that one? I think I saw a falling star!” He pointed, finger tracing the path of the meteor.

  Angel looked where he pointed. “Did you make a wish?”

  “I wish I knew what the fuck I was doing.”

  “Don’t we all.” They watched the sky together, waiting for the stars to fall. “So, you and Jay-Cee?” Angel glanced at Chris out of the corner of her eye. “What’s the story?”

  Chris made an inarticulate sound and threw his hands up. “I don’t even know where to start with that.”

  “Do you love him?”

  “Fuck if I know.” Chris closed his eyes and leaned his head against the pillow. “‘The weight of the world is love,’” he quoted. “‘Under the burden of solitude, under the burden of dissatisfaction the weight, the weight we carry is love.’”

  “Wow. Did you write that?” Angel looked at him impressed.

  Chris shook his head. “It’s Allen Ginsberg. I can’t write for shit. I’m just good at memorizing.”

  “Do you know a lot of poetry?” Angel sounded shy, and Chris turned his head to her.

  “Yeah, kind of. Do you like poetry?”

  She pulled the zipper of her sweatshirt up and down, staring at her hand moving. “I think I would. I mean, it’s like when you have a great bottle of wine, but next time you’re at the liquor store, you can’t remember the name of it. Every now and then I hear a poem, and I think, ‘oh I love that.’ But I can never remember the name of the poem or the poet. And I never know where to look. Where to start.” Angel looked as if she were waiting for him to make fun of her.

  Chris wanted to hug her now, but he didn’t want to come off at all patronizing. “I can make you a list of some I think you might like if you want. Can recommend some collections.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I would love it, actually.” He grabbed her hand. “And we could meet in beatnik coffee shops on half-deserted streets and drink espresso, talk about poetry and plot to bring down the patriarchy.”

  Her eyes sparkled. “Sounds perfect. Do you mean it?”

  “A thousand percent.” Giving into his urge, he threw his arms around her. “We are going to be such good friends!”

  She laughed and patted his back. “I’m glad we met.”

  “Me, too.”

  The wind blew the last of the clouds away and the moon sunk low behind the trees. Chris pulled on his sweatshirt and tucked a blanket back around his knees. “I don’t know if I love him,” he said, going back to Angel’s original question. “I might. I love how he makes me feel.”

  Angel gave a hum of agreement.

  “He sees me, I think. Like the real me that I don’t even know. And h
e gives me this space to be, to fall apart or to shine. And he thinks I’m brilliant. He says that a lot.” He couldn’t stop the smile spreading across his face, and his whole body flushed remembering Jay-Cee’s face looking down at him in awe.

  “You must know you’re gorgeous,” she said matter-of-factly.

  Chris shrugged, he’d been hearing that his whole life. Sometimes he hated it. It was another barrier between him and people, something else to keep him from making real connections. “I have generations of good genes and good dental coverage. It’s not an accomplishment, it’s nothing I did. But when Jay-Cee tells me I’m gorgeous, I feel like it’s who I am that he thinks is gorgeous, not just my face.”

  “So what do you give him?

  “Fuck if I know,” Chris frowned. “Nothing, I guess. A hot young guy in his bed?”

  “Maybe you should ask him,” Angel suggested.

  Chris shrunk away from the thought. “What if it’s nothing? What if he says I can’t give him anything, and I’m some sort of charity case for him? Or just an easy fuck?”

  She laughed loud in the still night. “M’ijo, I just met you, and even I know there is nothing easy about you. I’m sure you overthink everything and act impulsively. You got money, right?”

  He looked away and shrugged. Talking about money was his second least favorite thing to do. Like his physical beauty, it was something he hadn’t earned.

  Angel nudged her shoulder against him. “I’m not judging you for it. But I can smell it on you. So, you don’t have to worry about money, right? That makes it even easier for you to run, or not think about things. So you have to resist that impulse.

  “Look, I know you’ve had some shit go down, I’m not saying you haven’t. But life is hard, you know, for everyone. Sometimes you fuck stuff up. And sometimes you make mistakes and hurt people. And sometimes you let a good thing go because you are scared.”