Billy's Bones (12 page)

“I don’t know. It’s kind of vague. Mostly just thinking about you without your clothes on.”

Tom let out a long sigh and tried to find something in Kevin’s eyes that would give him a clue what all this meant. What he found there was longing. But longing for what exactly?

“What do you want?” Tom asked. “If it was entirely up to you, what would you want our relationship to be like?”

“I guess I’d pretty much want to keep it the way it is. I just want to be with you as much as possible.”

“Until you find a girlfriend.”

“I don’t want a girlfriend,” Kevin said adamantly. “I don’t want to be with anyone but you.”

That sounded a bit too much like Jake passionately declaring they would be friends forever and nothing—
nothing
!—would ever separate them. Teenagers were prone to that kind of hyperbole. But he and Kevin weren’t teenagers.

“I can’t think of any way to ask this,” Tom said, “without sounding like I think you’re five years old. So forgive me. But… you
can
tell the difference between platonic love and romantic love, can’t you?”

Kevin gave him that shy smile, and Tom knew he wouldn’t be able to keep up his resistance much longer. “It feels romantic to me, counselor.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Then are you saying you want to be my boyfriend?”

“If you can handle a boyfriend who can’t kiss or have sex….”

It did seem like a tall order. But Tom knew he couldn’t push Kevin away for that reason alone. “Well… for now, I think I can. But I certainly can’t be your boyfriend and your therapist at the same time. A therapist needs to maintain some professional distance, or he won’t be able to see clearly.”

Kevin was silent for a long time. At some point, the rain had started, and it was coming down in a torrent outside, making Tom feel as if they were isolated from the world, buried together beneath the warm blankets. He liked the feeling. And he liked the feeling that had welled up in his chest as they had toyed with the word “boyfriend.”

At last Kevin said, “Way back when I first came to see you, you said I could have Tracy come in with me. If I agree to see your friend, will you come in with me?”

“That’s usually only done for couples counseling.”

“So now we’re a couple, right?”

“It’s for couples who are having trouble with their relationship,” Tom amended.

“You’ll dump me if I don’t get my head together, right? That sounds like relationship trouble to me.”

“You’re being melodramatic. I’m still trying to wrap my head around the idea of you being interested in me romantically. I’m nowhere near thinking about dumping you.”

“It’s the only way I’ll do it,” Kevin said emphatically. “You’re the only one I trust enough to let you fuck around in there.” He raised a hand to tap the top of his head.

Tom sighed. “I’ll talk to her. Maybe she’ll be willing to do it.”

Kevin smiled at him and pulled the covers up over his shoulders, snuggling down into the blankets like a little kid. Tom found it ridiculously adorable. “Can we sleep now? My stomach has been in knots since last night, ’cause I thought you were going to tell me you didn’t want me around anymore. Now that you’ve decided I’m not completely hopeless, I’m just feeling warm and sleepy, and I feel like I could sleep for a week.”

Tom shook his head in amusement. “God, I wish there was a way I could kiss you.”

Kevin stuck his hand out of the blankets and gently pressed his palm against Tom’s lips. Tom kissed the palm and the tip of each finger in turn. Then, to his surprise, Kevin took Tom’s hand and brought it to his own lips. They felt warm and silky against Tom’s skin.

The rain pouring down around the house made it seem late in the day, though it was only about five in the afternoon, and Tom found himself feeling tired too. Resolving a major point of stress could do that to a person. So they slept.

Eleven

T
OM
woke to Kevin screaming.

He was wrenched out of a deep sleep to find Kevin sitting up in the dark, panting heavily. At first Tom couldn’t be certain he’d heard the scream. Perhaps he’d dreamt it? But then, why would Kevin be awake?

“Kevin?”

Kevin started at the sound of his voice. “It’s okay!” He didn’t sound okay. He sounded terrified.

“What’s okay?”

“Everything’s good. Everything’s fine.”

Tom reached over and fumbled with the reading lamp until he found the switch to turn it on. Kevin flinched when the light came on, even though it was fairly dim. His naked torso was completely covered in a fine sheen of sweat, and the sheets where he’d been sleeping were drenched with it.

“Are you all right, Kevin?”

Kevin was beginning to shiver, so Tom took the quilt that had been lying over them and draped it around Kevin’s shoulders, careful not to touch him directly, in case he was having an episode. The quilt was dry, at least. “Were you having a nightmare?”

“I don’t know,” Kevin said vaguely, as if still half-asleep.

“Do you remember what you were dreaming about?”

“Keeraylayzah.”

“What?” It sounded like gibberish, but maybe Kevin was just slurring it.

“No.”

“What did you just say, Kevin?”

“I wanna lie down.”

“Do you remember screaming?”

“I wanna lie down….”

Tom gave up and let him lie back on the mattress, still wrapped in the quilt. He would have liked to change the sheets, but Kevin was asleep almost as soon as his head hit the pillow. Tom got up and found another quilt in the closet. He spread it out across the bed to cover both of them, and then he climbed back in.

Frustrated that he couldn’t hold Kevin or even reach out to caress his back to reassure him that Tom would be there if he needed him, Tom lay there in the dark for almost half an hour, unable to sleep. When he was certain Kevin was sleeping peacefully, he got out of bed, found his bathrobe, and went down to the kitchen to make himself something to eat.

He made himself a cheese and mustard sandwich and sat down at his new kitchen table, listening to the rain outside while he ate. It was only about midnight. Normally, Tom wouldn’t even have gone to bed yet, but they’d fallen asleep so ridiculously early. He wasn’t sure he could sleep if he went back upstairs now.

Instead, he dug a notepad and pen out of his briefcase and sat at the table, trying to make some kind of sense out of the man he’d just agreed to be in a romantic relationship with. He wrote down the header:
Things That Trigger Panic Attacks
.

Then under that, he wrote:

Being kissed

Being touched (in a sexual way)

Rubbing alcohol (the smell?)

A song on the radio?

Finding out his wife was pregnant?

Keeraylayzah?

Underneath that short and not terribly informative list, Tom wrote: “Despite an intense aversion to being touched sexually or kissed, he seems hypersexual. He enjoys being naked, looking at other naked men (or at least, me), masturbating and talking about masturbation, and he seemed to get an erotic charge out of describing the erection he had when he hung himself (naked). When he had a panic attack induced by kissing, he grew erect, and I’m pretty sure he had an erection when he panicked about the rubbing alcohol.”

Tom wasn’t very experienced with people who had suffered from sexual abuse as children, but all this seemed to point in that direction, including the fact that Kevin claimed to have very little memory of his childhood. Tom wished he could sit down and have a chat with Kevin’s mother, but obviously that couldn’t happen without Kevin’s permission. According to what Tracy had said, that seemed unlikely. It was also possible the woman didn’t know anything, or had blocked it from her mind just as Kevin had.

In cases of child sexual abuse, Tom knew, the abusers could be women, of course, but were most often male—on the order of 60 percent or more. Most victims knew their abusers. They were often members of the family or family friends. Combine that with the odd circumstance that Mr. Derocher committed suicide
after
his son had been sent to Hampton—not before—and Tom was beginning to have suspicions about just who that abuser might have been.

Kevin’s father.

I
N
THE
morning, Kevin claimed to have little memory of what had happened the night before. “I’m sorry I woke you up” was all he said when Tom asked him about it.

“That’s not a big deal. But you seemed terrified. You don’t remember anything about what you were dreaming?”

“No. I never do.”

Tom shooed him out of the bed so he could strip the sheets off it. They were still slightly damp on Kevin’s side, and there was no way Tom was going to leave them on the bed another night. “You said something when you were half-awake. I couldn’t quite make it out.”

The expression on Kevin’s face was guarded as he stood there naked, hugging himself in the cool morning air. “What?”

“It sounded like ‘keeraylayzah’.”

If Tom had turned away a split second earlier to toss the sheets on the floor, he might not have caught the way Kevin’s face blanched. As it was, he just caught it out of the corner of his eye. By the time he’d checked himself and turned back, Kevin had put up a mask of complete cluelessness again. “You recognize it, don’t you?” Tom said.

Kevin started to shake his head in denial, but Tom pressed, “I saw your face when I said it. You recognized it.”

“I don’t know what it means.”

“But you’ve heard it before.”

Kevin shifted uncomfortably from one foot to another and grabbed the quilt off the floor to wrap it around himself, but Tom waited through this little dance until Kevin finally answered him. “I hear it every time the radio plays.”

Tom went to the closet to retrieve some clean sheets. “A song?”

“No,” Kevin said. “I don’t mean I really hear it on the radio. I just hear it in my head whenever the radio’s playing, like I’m trying to remember something I heard once. It’s why I never listen to the radio.”

“Can you sing the melody?”

Kevin shook his head. “It’s just like two notes. Over and over. There’s no music—no musical instruments, I mean. It’s just some voices singing nonsense.”

It was clearly distressing him to talk about this, so Tom let it drop. He tossed the fitted sheet on the bed and started to spread it out. “Can you help me put this on the mattress?”

I
T
WAS
a Monday morning, but Tom had the day off, thanks to the holiday. He also had Tuesday off, for the same reason. What Kevin’s schedule was like, he had no idea, but the man hadn’t shown any sign of wanting to leave yet. Neither of them had showered, and it was already going on ten. The weather outside was still miserable—cold and drizzling—so going out wasn’t terribly appealing.

Tom decided omelets might be a good idea, if he had enough eggs and cheese, so he rummaged around in his refrigerator for a few minutes. Cheese wasn’t a problem. Kevin’s favorite food in the entire world being cheeseburgers, Tom had stocked up on sliced cheese, beef patties, and buns. Eggs were less of a given, but he found a half-full carton of them.

When he surfaced again, he realized he’d just made a big mistake: he’d left his notepad open on the kitchen table.

Kevin was sitting at the table, looking at the notes Tom had taken at midnight. Tom couldn’t even be annoyed with him for looking at them because there had been nothing covering up what he’d written. It had just been sitting there in plain sight.

Kevin sensed Tom was looking at him, and he glanced up. He didn’t seem angry at first—more embarrassed. He gave a little half laugh and said, “Boy, whoever you’re writing about sure sounds fucked up.”

“No—”

“That shit’s just totally fucking crazy, isn’t it? I mean, he sounds like a real loser.”

“Nothing there—”

“I thought you didn’t want to be my therapist?” Kevin’s anger was beginning to surface now. “But you’re keeping
notes
on me?”

Tom didn’t have a response for that. It hadn’t seemed like there was anything wrong with it at the time, but how would he feel if he discovered his boyfriend was keeping those kinds of notes on
him
?

“I thought you were okay with….” Kevin broke off, anger warring with hurt on his face. “But this sounds like you think I’m some kind of pervert, getting off on fucked-up shit like suicide, when you can’t even get a good fuck out of me!” His volume began to increase, and Tom knew they were in for a fight. Kevin shoved the notepad away from him so that it flew across the table and fell off onto the tile floor.