Bombora (36 page)

So when he called, I came, and remembered the time he came to find me in Mount Vernon. For all intents and purposes, that was one hell of a perfect day, at least before Emilia caught us doing the dirty deed and it all went tits up. In the present, though, I don’t think either of us said a damn word when I turned up at his door all sweaty and hot from my run; he just pulled me inside and kissed away anything it wouldn’t have occurred to me to say anyhow. Clothes, few of them though there were, came off between the front door and the bedroom, and then it was all naked skin and joy.

There was a bit more foreplay this time, me sucking Phel so deep into my mouth that I wanted to smile at the noisy gasp he made, his head tipping back against the mattress as he tried to rein in the bucking of his hips. His hands were tight in my hair, but to hold on, not to control, and I made him come like that, taking my time and making him writhe around like a live wire. I still didn’t know whether we were at a place where I could go further without Phel getting uptight about it—the rules on this thing kept changing—and I considered bringing myself off with my hand until he drew me closer for a long kiss.

“Please fuck me,” he whispered, and he kept alternately locking eyes with me and letting his gaze flit away like he was embarrassed. The words made me go quiet, confused, but of course I didn’t say no.

The only struggle was when he wriggled onto his stomach when I would have preferred him on his back and looking up at me. In the end, we settled on a kind of compromise; as I slowed my thrusts into him, I twisted Phel around so his torso was mostly turned toward me, and by then I could tell he was too far gone to argue or resist holding eye contact. In fact, he was clutching his hand in my hair again so
I
couldn’t look away. He was so goddamn beautiful when he let me see his pleasure and the need in his eyes. Though it’d been months since I’d seen him like that, I shuddered at the familiar way it made my stomach drop and my chest clench tight. When Hugh broke in on us, I couldn’t say whether I was more upset to have that connection ruined or my orgasm swept out from under my feet.

Lost again in that moment, which seems a million years ago now, I miss part of what Phel is saying to me, his voice low and worried close to my hear. “Huh?” I ask, then flush guiltily when he gives me a pissy look. “Sorry, man, thirty seconds ago I was inside you. Give me a minute.”

Phel sighs. “You need to focus, Nate.”

Trying hard not to roll my eyes, I say, “Thanks, Phel, but unless you can tell me what part of this I should be focusing
on
, no deal. I’m pretty sure we’re fucked either way.”

He shifts to sit beside me and levels me with a stare. “I lied to your brother point-blank over the phone this morning.”

“I know. I was there.”

His expression pinches. “I wish I hadn’t done that.”

Deciding to risk it, I reach out and take Phel’s hand, which he allows, to my continuing shock. I hide it pretty well. “Trust me, Phel, right now Hugh is busy calculating exactly how long we’ve both been lying to cover this up. He’s thinking of all the possible opportunities we could have had to sneak around under his nose, and wondering how the hell he didn’t see it. One more lie you told him over the phone ain’t gonna be much more than a drop in the bucket at this stage.”

“You seem awfully sure of that.”

Well, I am. Kind of. “I know how my brother thinks. Hell, I don’t think much differently myself.”

I want to add that I went through this exact process when I figured it out about Hugh’s year making friends with Colombian snow, putting all the pieces together in painful hindsight. By the same token, I know Hugh won’t let his righteous indignation run away on him before he realizes the similarities between our two predicaments, the Fessenden tendency to lie to each other as much as ourselves about the stuff that’s staring us in the eyes. We think it’s because we’re protecting each other, when really we’re just trying to pretend we aren’t covering our own asses.

But I know Phel isn’t in the loop about that slice of Hugh’s past, so I don’t mention it, though I’m sure he could use some reassurance right about now. Hugh is an honest guy when it comes to taking stock of his own faults and failures, which Phel gets. It’ll have to be enough. Not that I’m thinking about how I can use this as a bargaining chip to take the focus off what we’ve done, or use it to excuse my own behavior; we aren’t that kind of family. Instead I think it’ll be relatively easy to skip the blame game portion of today’s events and get right at what’s really bothering Hugh: the lies he’ll see as symptomatic of something bigger.

Namely, his fear that Phel and I will fuck off and leave him alone. Sure, it’s an awfully codependent way to think, but that’s the kind of childhood we had, waiting for one person after another to leave until there was no one left. Anyone would have abandonment issues with that kind of background. I can’t sit here and say the same fears haven’t occurred to me from time to time over the years, especially after Hugh went off to school and got himself a new life. Having Emilia and Liam, and then Phel, helped with that for a long time. But I’d seen for myself how fast it could all be taken away.

“What are you thinking?” Phel asks me. Guess I let the silence stretch out too long again.

I shrug. “Hugh’s gonna be hurt and pissed and probably inclined to say some not-so-nice things to both of us,” I answer. “Totally deserved, yeah. But if I know that kid, mostly he’s going to push and push until one of us announces the bad news.”

“Which is?”

“That we’re gonna leave him here by himself.”

“How do you know?”

I release Phel’s hand and get off the bed, looking down at him for a moment. He seems small and taut with worry, a mouse caught between darting for freedom and trying to make itself disappear. That makes me nervous. Rather than letting myself evaluate the odds of Phel running out on me again—is Hugh finding us out enough to erase whatever headway we’ve made towards reconciliation?—I force my mind back to the subject of my brother. “Because it’s what I would do. To him, the fact that we lied about all this only means we were trying to put off the inevitability of telling him.”

Phel wrinkles his nose, but pauses. Slowly, he says, “But that’s not why. The lie was because I thought
he
might want me to leave—”

“—when he found out,” I finish for him. “I know.” Swallowing, I then add, “He’s a bright kid, but he obviously don’t see it that way. It’s the same reason I never told you ’bout Emilia. Same reason we were both afraid of coming out to our families. The people who fuck up are rarely the ones who leave by choice.”

Phel meets my eyes and doesn’t say anything. From that look alone, I know he doesn’t agree, but for once I don’t stop and think maybe he’s right and I’m wrong. Not that Phel is a hypocrite, but sometimes he holds his own actions in such a different light from everything else that he genuinely believes the forces that govern other people’s decisions don’t touch him. In this case, it’s fear. I know that in Phel’s head, his fear of telling Hugh about us is different from me not telling him about Emilia in a million ways.

Sure enough, he says, “It’s not quite the same.”

I grunt. “Yeah, it is. But we aren’t here to argue about that; we’re here to figure out what the hell to do next.” Silently, I promise myself the next step is to make sure Hugh doesn’t do anything stupid. It’s hard not to run after him right this second, but when he finished rehab and I spent a few months hovering over him like a suspicious prison warden, he made me promise to try to trust him to keep working the steps, keep himself from falling off the wagon. I do trust him, but then again, we haven’t had something this fucked up to deal with since he finished his twenty-eight days in this very institution.

Since there seems no end to the surprises this morning, Phel makes a weak attempt at a joke. “I don’t suppose we could brainwash him so he forgets this ever happened?”

“Be my guest,” I reply, snorting. “I’m sure Hugh would be just as happy to forget he ever laid eyes on us fucking.” He smiles weakly at that, and my heart breaks a little to see how afraid Phel still looks, his whole body drawn up tight even though he’s doing his best to remain seated normally on the bed. It hasn’t been my place for a while, but I think back to how he was there for me yesterday at the house, standing by my side and letting our skin touch in constant reminder of his presence.

All of a sudden, my mind’s decided for me: I don’t give a fuck what happened between us and how we’re supposed to act now. It’s clear what I have to do.

Offering a smile, I reach out and pull him against me, then turn gently so I’m pressing him back against the bed, crawling on top so he can’t escape. “Hey,” I tell him gently, “it’ll be okay. It’s a mess now, but things will work out.”

Phel glares at my placating tone, and it’s like he deepens his own in response just to prove his point. “Okay for whom?”

“Don’t pull that James Earl Jones shit with me,” I warn him. “I know you scream like a girl around centipedes or when I do that thing you like with my tongue.” Ignoring his scowl, I reach up and stroke his hair, amazed by how noncombative he’s being, even though I don’t know what it means. Unlike most people, I lack the instinct to respond to the unknown with uncertainty or fear; instead it makes me brave and stupid. “We’ll go talk to Hugh and we’ll explain why we didn’t tell him the truth, which I think is pretty straightforward. He’ll come around eventually, you’ll see. We were too surprised at findin’ each other here to do anything about it right away, especially since we both knew it would have meant one of us packing up and leaving. And he wouldn’t have wanted that, not any more than us.”

Eyes remarkably steady, Phel looks up at me and takes his time answering, as if mulling the thought over in his head. Despite his outward appearance of calm, the muscle in his cheek gives him away; I can see it jumping with all the intensity of a wild bird trying to escape a cage. “And what about now?”

“Now….” I find myself thinking about that quaint little fantasy Hugh managed to get us all in on, the idea of the three of us living together under one roof as friends and family. Christ, Phel let himself fall for it too, formulating ideas about that little surf shop on the beach, putting out tentative feelers in the hopes they might someday become roots. The most uncertain one out of all of us was me, since I’ve obviously got my kid back in Ohio, but as I told Hugh, that hasn’t stopped me from wanting to make the California dream work. Liam loves it here as much as I do. I still want it, as much as I want the guy lying in my arms. It’s been a rough road to get to this point, but for the first time in a long time, I think we’re finally getting back on track, back to where we’re supposed to be.

I lean in and kiss Phelan slowly, starting softly and hesitantly but getting deeper when he opens his mouth to me and lets our tongues flicker and touch. He moans in the back of his throat, a quiet sound that makes my cock twitch against his thigh, and from the answering jerk of his hips, I know he’s been on the knife’s edge of arousal since we were interrupted, no different than me. It can be so difficult to know what’s going through his mind, but in the absence of everything else, I know I can always trust this, the hot and violent electricity sparking between us when we so much as look at each other.

Although absolutely nothing has changed about our surroundings in the past hour, the whole act of pushing my body up against his, shifting until our cocks find that perfect angle to rub alongside each other, feels completely different. I try to put a finger on what it could be when the thought occurs to me I no longer have something to hide or act like I’m ashamed of, because the secret’s out, no taking it back. For the first time, I’m kissing Phel as a free man, and there isn’t a damned thing anyone can do to stop it.

“Hugh doesn’t have to worry about one of us leaving, baby,” I murmur against Phel’s mouth, then turn my face so I can bite into the hard bone of his jaw before working down to the sensitive skin of his throat. “It might take some time for him to trust us again, and I know that, but if he’s worried about us going somewhere… we don’t have to. We can just stay here and things will be just like this.”

I take one of my hands and reach between us to wrap around Phel’s dick. His legs open for me in a lazy sprawl so I can start stroking him in long, easy movements that make him pant and buck, my fingers tightening beneath the head of his cock on each upstroke and finding all his sweet spots. He keens unintelligibly.

“No more hiding, Phel,” I whisper in his ear, half promise, half revelation. “It’ll be perfect—what we’ve always wanted. We can be together and not give a fuck who knows or who sees. I love you, you asshole, and I’m not letting you go again.”

To my horror, Phel goes totally stiff beneath me and stays frozen for a second. Then he seems to think better of it and pushes against my chest. It’s not gentle, and as if to prove the point further, his dick starts to soften in my hand. “Get off,” he says, voice tight, and keeps shoving at me with increasing force until I let him go completely and back away.

Maybe calling him an asshole wasn’t the best move, whatever the affection behind it. “What?”

“Fuck you, Nate,” he spits, and the vehemence of the words manages to startle me good even if the sentiment is nothing new. Whatever anxiety was there before is gone, replaced by sheer fury and what to me looks like deep injury. My throat clenches at the sight, and I start to wonder whether the softness I saw in him earlier was a complete mirage or the product of wishful thinking. Phel seems to believe so.

“Nothing about this is perfect,” he grates out, sliding off the bed so he can start collecting clothing. I want to beg him to stop, but I can’t, watching a scene I’ve seen before and still don’t know how to stop from playing out. “We can’t be together because
I
still give a fuck, okay? This”—and he gestures between us with sharp movements of his hands—“is not what I always wanted. In fact, it’s about a million times worse, because at least before, I knew my best friend didn’t hate my guts. But what else is new? History really
has
repeated itself, because once again, you fuck up, and I’m the one who loses everything.”