Bombora (34 page)

“Phel is a popular guy today,” says Steph. He waves me on before I have a chance to ask what the hell that means. Having not seen the guest book, I can’t pinpoint who might have already signed in this morning, but to be honest, the second the words are out of his mouth, I sort of don’t have to.

There’s really only one other person in Cardiff I can think of who’d be here.

As I learned all those years ago after seeing Nate and Mr. Garrett together in that classroom, the human capacity for denial is so strong that, in some people, it’s practically a superpower. I guess for me it must be higher than average, since I make use of it so often. During the walk to Phel’s, I tell myself Nate has as much right to be here as me, especially since it’s clear he and Phel bonded a little bit over Nate being gay. Maybe Nate wanted to check up on him after yesterday’s fight, though the little voice in the back of my head reminds me Nate knew I planned on calling Phel this morning to apologize. Then again, Phel did mention he was fooling around with someone; maybe Nate isn’t there at all.

Still, all the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end as I climb the couple of steps to Phel’s front door. As usual, it’s unlocked. Although I always,
always
knock before entering someone else’s home, regardless of whether or not there’s a standing invitation—Phel has a free pass in my house because honestly, it’s so big I don’t hear him knocking half the time—today I give free rein to the tingling of whatever Spidey-sense I seem to have developed in the last ten minutes, hefting my little bag of groceries in one elbow as I silently push the door open with my free hand.

But here’s the thing about intuition: it’s only good if you let yourself pay attention to it. I constantly amaze myself with how perceptive I can be without realizing it. Quiet observations have served me pretty well in my writing and in developing characters. Maybe that’s my psych background coming through; who knows. In real life, though, I might as well be as dense as a sack of bricks for all I trust what my gut tells me. And my gut, if I level with myself for even a second, has been giving some pretty strong hints for weeks about the quiet developments taking place below the radar in my own life, within the small circle of people I call family. I knew something wasn’t quite right all along, and ignored it with every excuse I could find, like
I
was the one imagining things, my unfounded paranoia getting the better of me.

I think I knew, the second Nate met Phelan on my doorstep, I wasn’t imagining a damn thing. And my paranoia? Maybe not so unfounded after all.

I enter the cottage and immediately hear music playing from Phel’s bedroom at the back—it’s only a four-room dwelling, so it’s not difficult to pick out. I set my groceries down on the kitchen table and walk through to the bedroom in a daze.

I nudge open the half-closed door and stop there, throat choking off whatever surprised noise I might have made. They’re on the bed. With curtains still drawn, the room is shadowy but still bright enough for me to make out Nate and Phel’s faces. Good lighting isn’t necessary, since I’d probably recognize them anyway, by body type or even how they move. It’s a strange thing, really, to see two people so familiar to you in a completely unfamiliar situation, and I realize in that moment that I never really had a clear picture of this in my mind the whole time I accused them of sleeping together. First of all, gross—but secondly, I was a lot more clueless than I ever thought.

From the way their two bodies are angled sideways across the mattress, I can see Nate has Phel beneath him, body twisted half on his side and half on his back. One of Phel’s legs is tucked up to his chest, knee supported over the crook of Nate’s elbow, and this bizarre thought occurs to me that it’s a good thing Phel does all that yoga, or else it would probably be an uncomfortable position to maintain for very long.

More significant than how their bodies are arranged, however, or even the fact that Nate is obviously thrusting into him—even in a stupor, my eyes know to avoid settling on that whole area—is the way they’re looking at each other, the way their faces are so close, their lips almost touching. They each have a hand fisted in each other’s hair so they’re making eye contact and holding, and holding, and holding. The quick glance I get of Phelan’s expression shows a man who’s all but delirious, mouth slack and spilling obscene noises, but he doesn’t look away. Nate doesn’t either, whispering words I can’t quite make out, and what I can see of his face shows a look of sheer amazement. As surely as I knew what I’d find when I walked into the house, I see confirmation of another thing I’ve known all along: that Phel, for all his denials, never stopped being in love with the man who betrayed him, the same love Nate admitted to having for the person who compelled him to step outside his marriage. They’re expressions I haven’t seen on a person’s face since the last time I made love to Nell—the look of someone so totally in love that they’re transported.

It could be that the sound that escapes me is borne of shock as much as jealousy and anguish for what I’ve lost; shock that the two people I have left and love most in the world have been lying to my fucking face for
ages
; renewed jealousy and anguish that I’m never going to look at Nell that way again. I don’t think it truly matters, because the gut punch would feel the same, whatever the cause. Either way, it’s enough that my presence is revealed as reality reasserts itself and the surprise begins to ebb, startling me back to earth so violently that Nate and Phel can’t help but notice as well.

Very distinctly, I hear Phel’s cry go from feverish to alarmed, sharpening around my name, both heads swiveling toward me as Nate gasps, “Oh fuck!” There’s a tussle, the two of them scrambling to separate and cover themselves, but I don’t stick around longer than that to see what happens. I turn and slam my way past both the bedroom door and the entrance to Phel’s house. I don’t stop until my shaking hands close around the rails of a surfboard and I find my way into the churning sea.

Nate

F
OR
a couple of weeks following the fight we had after our trip to Chicago with Liam, Phel and I didn’t talk at all. Not a damn word. I begged my boss, Craig, not to send me on any business trips to Columbus, scared that I would break down and show up on Phelan’s doorstep like I did after that first weekend, as helpless to him now as on Day freaking One. It’s not that I avoided him because I was still angry (though I was), but because I knew Phel was right about everything. Whether or not my own accusations held any merit was unimportant; Phel wasn’t the one destroying our relationship from the inside out with lies and secrecy. No matter how much of a little bitch he acted like—and yeah, I didn’t have such hearts in my eyes that I couldn’t see Phel had the capacity to be one sometimes—I couldn’t help but feel all our problems came back to the elephant in the room, the one only I was aware of. The revelation that he wanted us to live together rocked me to my foundations. No one had ever
asked
me that before, and it made me realize we couldn’t keep moving forward if I kept on as I’d been doing.

Phel, on the other hand… he was beautiful. Golden. Blameless. On the drive home after that fight, it hit me that he’d intended some pretty powerful subtext along with his invitation to move in: he was prepared to come out to his family for me. Since the Prices had more money than God, there was no conceivable reason for Phel to share a living space with someone who wasn’t a partner. A lover. His family would have done the math eventually, and saying he wanted me there anyway was Phel’s way of saying he was willing to take the plunge, damn the consequences.

And I fucked it up.

If it’s any consolation, for those two weeks I was nothing but miserable. Couldn’t sleep, could barely eat, dodged the concerned questions of friends and family who could tell something was wrong. I’m sure Emilia thought I’d been diagnosed with a terminal illness, if the looks she kept shooting me across the dinner table and the constant inquiries about how I was feeling were anything to go by. In a sense, I
was
ill. Heartsick, even. Not only did it nauseate me to think about where things stood with my lover, I was sick with knowing what I had to do, the extent to which I’d started to seriously hate my own existence. I wanted to talk to my brother like crazy. I wanted to tell him everything, but I was a coward and didn’t know where to start. Hugh, having lost Nell not so long ago, would struggle to understand. I wanted to talk to Emilia even more, but couldn’t do that either. In other words, I was fucked.

The one person I did end up talking to was a divorce lawyer. Drastic, I know. I could have gone to Columbus and found some high-powered terrier to talk me up about how easy it would be to dissolve my marriage, but I realized I needed the advice of someone close to home, someone who knew who I was and, more importantly, knew Emilia and my family. What I needed was compassion and familiarity with my situation, sympathy to the fact that I didn’t want money or a generous settlement, that I was willing to pay any amount in alimony or child support to ensure Liam and Emilia were provided for.

I didn’t want to be an asshole, but neither did I want to embody the cliché of the married man who never ends up making a change. I always feel sorry for those poor schmucks as much as their spouses, because no matter how hard they try to pretend everything’s shiny, you can tell how unhappy everyone is. Emilia would be better off free of me than tangled up in that kind of mess for the rest of her life. At least she could finally find someone who could give her a proper marriage, and Liam wouldn’t have to watch his parents grow to hate each other. And me? My expectations for myself were pretty low. I just wanted to own up to the life I really wanted and do away with the bullshit charade that I was anything but a gay man and in love with someone incredible. Even if that was someone I probably didn’t deserve.

“Not to alarm you,” the lawyer had said, “but a lot of men in your position make it to the very point you’re at now, and no further. Perhaps it’s a smaller percentage seek to dissolve their marriage due to a sexuality crisis, but in essence, the problem remains the same: the marriage is no longer feasible. I suggest, therefore, that you sit down and have a conversation with your family first, and call me back once you’re ready to proceed from there. Divorce doesn’t have to be a nasty set of affairs, but it has to start somewhere. I don’t think you want Emilia to learn of your intentions as she’s being served papers.”

Obviously that was sound advice. But I knew I wasn’t ready for that yet, not before I had a chance to talk to Phel and tell him everything first. Maybe it was selfish of me to want a soft landing and assurances he’d still be around—I’m sure some people would have said it was closer to an air-to-air transfer than a soft landing, but that was unintentional on my part. Whatever the case, I didn’t think I had it in me to make the leap without knowing Phel would be there at the end of it all. Startling though it was, I realized I could envision my life without Emilia without much difficulty, whereas the thought of losing Phel practically sent me into fits of anxiety. I got the same way when I thought about not having Liam or Hugh around, which I suppose was my brain’s way of letting me know what was most important to me. Quite frankly, I realized I’d rather die than lose what I had, though a part of me knew it might already be too late.

I couldn’t not try, though. The week Liam went off to summer camp and Emilia allowed herself to spend a bit more time at the dance studio, teaching extra classes and giving her business a little TLC (she didn’t say anything, but I think she needed a break from the tension between us too), I threw back a few beers and picked up the phone. When my hand stopped shaking enough, I dialed the Columbus area code.

To my surprise, Phel picked up right away, his voice guarded but with an undertone of relief that, to me, sounded clear as a bell. The conversation itself was simple enough: I told Phel how much I’d missed him, how badly I wanted to apologize in person. I guess it’s a testament to how much he wanted to make things right between us that it took almost no convincing to get him to agree to drive to Mount Vernon. After all, our fight hadn’t erased his desire to see the side of my life he felt had been denied him. For my part, I was through denying him anything.

We made plans for him to visit a couple of days after that. I had the day off work and knew it’d be no trouble for Phel to get the time off as well; since he said he’d drive up in the morning, there was no chance of Emilia being around. Although it made me feel like scum to consider it—even more like scum, I mean—I would need no more than twenty minutes or so to hide away the wedding photos and anything that might point to me still being married, including odds and ends of Emilia’s left around the house. For whatever reason, I decided to call the master bedroom off limits; some belated attempt, maybe, to respect my wife’s place in our home, even as I was planning to bring my lover onto Emilia’s turf.