Bombora (41 page)

How quickly word could spread, and how quickly I found myself summoned to New York to explain myself. In the end, it was a short conversation: my father asked if it was true, if his only son was really a faggot like the society papers claimed, and an adulterer and home wrecker, no less. I was too tired and miserable to deny my sexuality any longer, and confessed to everything.

Funny, but I always expected that conversation to be a lot more explosive, whereas in reality it was such a controlled thing, such a simple dismissal. My family very quietly withdrew their acknowledgement of me at the same time they withdrew their financial support and their love. Perhaps the two had ever been indistinguishable. I was asked to pack up my offices in Chicago and Columbus, and others were hired in my stead. Mr. Carpenter’s son was promoted to my old position. I didn’t dare approach my father, but for three weeks I left messages and begged my mother to pick up the phone and talk to me, to no avail. Considering how I’d first refused to acknowledge Emilia, my mother’s response seemed a cruel irony. Eventually even Aurelia called to say she had to sever contact, citing threats of disownment from my father if she continued to associate with me. She cried as she said it, but sever contact she did.

Pausing, I sighed and met Willa’s gaze, surprised to find myself dry-eyed at a memory I hadn’t been able to summon for months, not without feeling my stomach flip or the unpleasant churn of anxiety or my ears ringing with the force of an impending panic attack. In a way I almost missed it, since at least those things were concrete, definite, better than the weird void in which I now existed. “You know all the rest. Does that satisfy your curiosity?”

Seeming to understand my exhaustion, Willa reached out and took my hand. “I’m sorry, Phel. Thank you for telling me. You should be proud for facing this chapter of your history so bravely; I don’t think you thought you could do it.”

“I didn’t,” I admitted, “but it’s behind me now.” The answer sounded lame and unsatisfactory, but I had none better to give.

Though she nodded, Willa cocked her head. “If I can say so, Phel, you seem far less… hostile than you did a couple days ago. About Nate or any of this.”

I grimaced, thinking of the way I stormed out of our last session with all the grace and entitlement of a four-year-old drama queen. Not one of my finer moments, to be sure, and I felt the blush that heated my cheeks. “I apologize for what I said to you. That was unnecessary and unfair. I didn’t want to admit you were right, though in retrospect I wouldn’t have been so angry if what you said wasn’t true.”

“I’ve heard worse,” answered Willa, shrugging, but then she flashed a smile. “Thank you for the apology, though.” I didn’t always understand her, and it still made me uncomfortable to think she knew so much about me without the favor being returned in kind, but all things considered, I rather liked this woman. After hesitating, she added, “Am I to take it that your feelings toward your relationship with Nate have changed?”

It was the question I’d been dreading, as much from Willa as myself or anyone. “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m just so damn tired, Willa. Too tired to be angry with anyone, including Nate, but that doesn’t mean I know how I feel about any of it. I just….” A juddering breath escaped me. “It doesn’t matter now. He’s gone.”

Unwilling to let me leave it at that, Willa straightened and set her mouth into a determined line. “Keep going, Phel,” she urged, reading my tendency to shy away from difficult admissions.

Frustrated, I sighed. “I feel like I laid down this giant minefield between Nate and myself,” I began, still uncertain as to where I was going with this. “It seemed like the only way to keep myself safe was to keep him at a distance—by any means necessary. I don’t know half of what was going through my head. But somehow Nate still managed to find his way through all that without acknowledging the personal danger to himself.”

I wondered, then, if Nate really felt as uncertain as he acted around me, tiptoeing across eggshells like I was the very mine he might trip at any moment. I knew how full of uncertainty he was at times.

“He just kept getting closer and closer and, finally, when he decided to come out to Hugh, I thought, ‘This is it. He’s going to destroy everything for sure this time, starting with himself.’ I couldn’t let that happen, when it came down to it; I couldn’t handle the idea of Nate coming out unsupported or, worse, me trying to force him to stay closeted. So I tried to push him out of harm’s way and wound up hurting myself more. But that’s….” I paused, starting to lose the tail end of the analogy even though it felt right in my head. “That’s why Nate was always so dangerous,” I concluded. “He made me forget how to protect myself.”

Although Willa acknowledged this with a nod, I knew she wasn’t going to come out and agree with me. Not because I was automatically wrong, but because agreement was too easy and didn’t do much by way of forcing me to grow. “Did it ever occur to you you’re protecting yourself from the wrong things?” she asked.

In spite of myself, I laughed, the irony making it a hard, joyless sound. “I think it’s pretty clear by now the only thing I need saving from is myself,” I told her.

Myself, maybe, and a few other people that needed saving from me as well. Nate never came out and said I was the reason he left, not really, but he and I both knew I’m what pushed him to it, me with my anger and my spite and the need to wound, so strong that I was half-mad with it. In that much, Willa was right—I would never have felt so angry if I didn’t still have feelings for him. If I didn’t still love him. It’s a shame that while I could have been trying to fix our relationship, I was set on punishing us both. And it hurt, more than I thought it could, since we’d been through this once already and I should have known what to expect. But just like the first time, the reality of not having Nate was a shock. Despite everything, I don’t think I ever truly expected to be without him, even now. Like someone who has lost a limb, Nate’s absence gave me the sensation of waking up from a dream of being whole, only to find a space where there was once an arm. Whatever my fervent longings, I knew I would never get it back again, and a replacement would never do.

A solid rap on the door of my cabin jerks me out of my daydreaming, and when I turn, I see Hugh standing there at the bedroom door, having let himself in. In his arms are several broken-down cardboard boxes and a roll of packing tape.

“Hey,” he says, and the wide-eyed look on my face must speak volumes, since he adds, “I thought you could use some company, maybe some help packing up your stuff. Today’s moving day, right?”

I nod. “Yes.” I want to add that I’m not sure where I’m moving
to
, but that Hugh is here at all makes my knees weak with surprise and relief. The last thing I want to do is spoil it with my complaining. I’m a grown man, after all, and presumably if I’ve survived this long, I should be able to accomplish finding myself a place to live without help. “There isn’t much to do,” I tell him, “but thank you for coming.”

Hugh smiles and sets the boxes down on the bed, then comes to stand beside me to survey my closet. “I would have thought there’d be more,” he says. After a pause, he chuckles. “No offense, but I always kind of got the sense you were a bit of a….”

“What?”

“A label queen.” Hugh shrugged. “I thought I’d find a closet full of designer jeans and custom suits. Instead your wardrobe looks about the same as Nate’s.” He sucks in a sharp breath at that, realizing his mistake, but I just smirk and shake my head to let him know it’s alright, and hold back on mentioning half the clothes in here could very well have belonged to Nate at some point, considering the amount of wardrobe migration that seemed to occur while we were together. Not a lot, but some; in any event, I was spared having to go hunting around for many T-shirts and casual clothes when I arrived in Cardiff. Not for the first time, I wonder if Nate suddenly found himself digging up pocket squares and cuff links among his things after we broke up. The first time.

Putting that out of my mind, I resist the urge to put my hands on my hips in a way that would only give Hugh more ammunition to tease me. “I
am
a label queen,” I assure him, sassing up my tone a little for his entertainment. “Or was. I had considerably more to pack up when I left the Midwest than I brought with me.”

“What’d you do with it all?” he asks curiously. Hugh doesn’t have what I’d call impeccable style. I don’t always appreciate the volume of the patterns he chooses in his shirts, but I must respect his taste in designers, if nothing else. He has an eye for quality Nate could never quite bring himself to give a shit about. It isn’t as though Hugh could ever make use of my old clothing, given the considerable difference in size between us, but I know he’d be appalled to learn I’d thrown anything out.

“I no longer had use for any of it,” I explain. “Much as I appreciated a well-cut suit or a fine silk shirt, it would have been rather superfluous to drag all the trappings of my old life with me out here. I sold most of it or gave it away.”

Hoping to get on with it, I resume emptying my closet into the suitcase I brought with me, and a moment later Hugh starts to pitch in, using the boxes for the odds and ends scattered about that don’t really belong next to my jeans. We work in silence for a little while, and then he asks, still sounding perplexed, “What if you need it all back again?”

I stop to look at him, holding a pair of Nate’s old sweatpants I never had the heart to get rid of, since they were softer and more comfortable than my most expensive cashmere sweater and never lost their scent of him even after dozens of washes. “I think that if I end up needing those things again,” I say, “I’m doing something wrong. I don’t want to go back to that life.”

Saying no more, Hugh and I finish packing up the rest of my belongings in silence, and in less than an hour’s time, the closets are empty and the dressers are bare. The last thing to disappear into my suitcase is the leather journal I’ve kept for a long time, since before meeting Nate, though the entries became rather few and far between when our affair took up again. I suppose I couldn’t afford the level of self-reflection that required, knowing what I’d find, but I think I’d like to start writing in it again.

I want to comment on how utterly unnecessary it was for Hugh to offer me assistance in this task, since I completed it the first time around on my own. But all I say is “I appreciate your help, Hugh.” There are two suitcases and three boxes, which Hugh hefts on his own without looking remotely inconvenienced by it.

“No problem,” he answers, then jerks his chin at the door. “How about we get this stuff loaded up into my truck and hit the waves for a bit?” I hesitate, and he catches my reluctance. “Come on. It’s a nice day out. I’ll even let you buy me lunch.”

I snort at that, but can’t argue. Surfing sounds like the perfect way to put everything else out of my mind and give me the bit of Zen I’ve been craving for days. Then I remember my surfboard is still currently sitting in pieces in Hugh’s garage. “I don’t have a board,” I remind him.

“There’s an extra one at the house,” he says. “Don’t worry about it, let’s just go.”

As if he knows how much I’m dying to question the vagueness of his plans, Hugh doesn’t give me much opportunity to argue as we go, first herding me into his Range Rover, then shoving a surfboard—Nate’s, I recognize immediately—into my hands and telling me to change for the beach. This little reprieve from thinking has me grateful, in a way, not just because I begin to feel more secure that things might actually stand a chance of working out between me and Hugh, but because for once it feels wonderful not to know what’s going to happen next and be denied the opportunity to fret. Ironically, I recognize this as yet another missing element in my recent affair with Nate. Rather than embracing the sacrifice of control or, alternately, the complete trust that was placed in me, I spent the whole time worrying about how it might be turned on its head. I don’t know how Nate ever let himself go enough to trust that I wouldn’t hurt him when I so badly wanted to. In the end, I couldn’t give either of us what we wanted, because it wasn’t a true give and take—it was simply losing, and losing, and losing.

But. The objective here is not to think, and already I’m spectacularly missing the point. We go to the beach, bare feet padding across the warm asphalt as we make our way through the streets of Cardiff, and true to Hugh’s word, the waves look nothing but succulent from the shore, rolling out in a wash of white-tipped blue and green, the water dotted with wetsuit-clad bodies and brighter splashes of color off their surfboards. We struggle into our wetsuits, the wind bordering on chill, and clip the leads on our boards to our ankles before heading into the water.

Eagerness has me dashing straight into the waves, paddling out with furious strokes of my arms that Hugh seems to match without the slightest quickening of his breath, his long limbs sluicing easily through the water. Hugh might be the more natural athlete among us, but not the most daring surfer. His big body is unfailingly confident as he drops in and out of waves, but perhaps also because of his size, he is more likely to dither before rushing out into a swell that could pose an unexpected challenge.

I don’t share his hesitation. I go for the first one I see, trusting the subtle lift of the hairs on the back of my neck as though it’s possible to sense which wave will follow through on its faint promise of greatness. Unlike when I started, the swells no longer intimidate me, not even the big ones. I crave the moment of free-falling and the sudden lurch of my stomach that follows, same as whenever Nate’s lips met mine, when he held my body still and showed me how it could sing.

The tide shifts and clashes faster with its constant ebb and flow. I catch another ride and am forced to bail before it can tumble me on my ass. Hugh finds a few more waves, but I can tell that he, along with the few other surfers out here in the lineup, is growing impatient with the inconsistency of the waves. Sure enough, they turn back one by one to head for home or a more reliable section of the reef, like the Suckouts. That leaves Hugh and me sitting out in the middle of the water alone, perched on our boards with not much choice other than to catch our breath and maybe talk. I don’t mind. It doesn’t feel like we’ve been avoiding it, exactly, but when Hugh looks at me I’m momentarily stricken and don’t know what to say. He saves me the trouble, as usual.