It's Not Shakespeare (16 page)

People cleared out, and Sophie came up and said, “He’s already waiting at the car. His friend took off, so you’re good.”

“You go first,” he said nervously.

“Don’t be a pussy. He’s not going to run from you now!”

Sophie had parked in the overflow lot, so they had to cross Rocklin Road to get there. Marlowe, finding himself in the exact opposite area of where he usually went to get in the big magic box that took him to the dog park, looked around with interest as they crossed at the walk, but once he saw it was just another parking lot, he turned around and gave James a reproachful look. James looked back at him stubbornly, and they approached the car. It was parked on the other side of a truly appalling lime-green Gremlin with a giant black bat primer painted on the hood, and James had a moment to think that sometimes college students really were aces at making the best of a bad thing. Then he quit stalling and looked for Rafael by the Charger. The car’s hood was up, so they couldn’t see him as he bent double and poked and prodded at the magic, mysterious inner workings of his car, but they all heard Rafael’s voice, muffled by the car itself, as he started cursing at it.

“Jesus, heifer, I don’t see no bullshit wrong. What the fuck did you do to my car?”

Marlowe, hearing him for the first time in almost a week, gave an excited bark and went trotting across the pavement with enough force to pull the lead out of James’s hand. He arrived at Rafael’s pant leg, jumping up and down with excitement, and James saw the reluctant joy on Rafael’s face as he bent down and picked the little guy up.

“Hey, Marlowe,” he said, his voice resigned. He looked around the hood and glared at the two of them. “Was this a fucking setup?”

Sophie snorted. “Well if you weren’t so stupid, bitch, I wouldn’t have to fucking lie to you!”

Rafael rolled his eyes, but it was clear his heart wasn’t in the insult extravaganza that was their usual banter. “Sophie, maybe when you’re all growed up and everything, you’ll—”

James put a hand on her shoulder, and she went and got Marlowe from Rafael while he started to talk. “What about me, Rafael—am I ‘growed up’ enough for you?”

“Yeah, man,” Rafael sighed, his shoulders slumped. “That’s the problem, you know. You think you too growed up for love at first sight. You know when I fell for you?”

James shook his head. “Not a clue.”

“That first day, the day all you could do was stare at me and say ‘uhm’, and then I said you had a nice dog. You said ‘thanks’, and it was like a little kid getting his trading card signed or something. I was like…
gone,
man. So gone. Sophie setting us up? That was icing. I was going to hit on you anyway—you have to know that, right?”

James shook his head. He hadn’t. He’d had no idea—but it didn’t matter.

He looked at Rafael again, smudges of dirt on his perfect, snubbed nose from working on cars all day—something he clearly loved—and smudges of sleeplessness under those lovely eyes, and thought that he really had to do right by this man. He had to. You only got so many chances, and this one mattered.

“You know when I fell for you?” he asked, his voice dry, and Rafael shook his head, a wry smile on his face. “It was when you came and sat in my car, and you told Marlowe that you were co-daddy—and then let him sit in your—”

“Professor Richards, can I have a word with you?”

James and Rafael both whipped their heads sideways in time to see Lee Cresswell disembarking from his gi-fucking-normous douche-mobile, and Rafael groaned.

“Goddammit, most romantic moment in my fucking life, and this douche-nozzle got to come fuck it up?”

James turned back to him, smiling hopefully. “It was good?” he asked. “I mean… it was true, but… but I’m not used to groveling. It had to be good.”

Rafael grinned then, still tired, but true, and opened his mouth to speak when Lee said, “Now, please?”

James growled under his breath in irritation and held up his hand to Rafael. “One moment, okay? If you were thinking about taking me back, hold that thought. Seriously—hold it. I need you right back there, okay?”

Rafael nodded encouragingly and then looked at Sophie, who was on the other side of the lime-green Gremlin. She shrugged and was walking toward Rafael when James turned around and tried to take care of all his unfinished business at the same time.

“Lee…?” He made an exasperated motion with his hands. “Honestly! I’m not dating a student, and Jesus if I don’t get a personal life, right?”

Lee scowled and moved closer, all the better to hiss in James’s face. “Look—I’m just trying to look out for you, you know? I thought we could have a thing three years ago, but you threw that back in my face, and yeah, I was pissed—but this…!” He gestured to Rafael with a hushed exasperation, and James squinted at him and tried to get to the root of all this weird evil.

“Look, Lee? First of all, you need to do us both a favor and realize I don’t remember what happened that night. I was
drunk.
Not just a little bit drunk. I was pissing-in-your-soup drunk. I wasn’t sure that blow-job at the party was you until
right now,
okay?”

Lee blinked at him. “But… but… but I
told
you I was up for an affair! I
told
you that. And you said, ‘God, I’m so fucking horny!’ and so… you know….” He blushed. “And then, when I was done, you said, ‘Jesus, man—I didn’t mean
us.
I’m not such a scumbag that I’d sleep with someone’s
husband!’
”

James grunted.

“This surprises you?” Lee asked, incredulously.

“Well, honestly, it makes me come out a lot better than the way I remembered. I’m kind of impressed by my drunken moral fiber. But it doesn’t change the fact that I led you on—and I’m sorry. I really am. I had no business letting you do that, and it wasn’t very nice of me to just pretend it didn’t happen. I’m sorry. But why do you have to make such a big deal out of this?” James gestured to the Charger, and Rafael and Sophie, looking at their tense, gesture-riddled conversation with absolutely shameless curiosity.

“This?” Lee asked, his voice rising. “This? You throw me over for being married and now you’re… you’re parading around with this
hoodrat
and his
beard-- ouch!”

James wasn’t sure how it happened. One minute he was clearing the air and thinking he and Lee might be able to get along without James ending up being the designated English 1A teacher for the rest of his natural life, and the next minute there was a jarring pain across his knuckles, up his wrist, and in his shoulder. Lee staggered back a few feet, brought his hand up to his jaw, and looked at James in complete shock.

“You
hit
me!” he said, like he still couldn’t believe it.

Neither could James. “I did not!
Ouch! Fuck!
Jesus, what did you do to my hand?”

“Oh, did I hurt your precious hand while I was hitting it with my
face?
What the hell, James? I guess you really
do
hate this job!”

“Oh please,” James muttered, his vision going a little black from the adrenaline and the pain and the aching fury that still made every muscle in his body tremble. “You tell everyone that I hit you, and I get to tell them that you blew me in the university president’s back bedroom. We’re even, but you keep your mouth shut about Rafael and Sophie, you hear me?”

Suddenly Rafael was there, reaching for his battered right hand and murmuring, “C’mere, bruiser, let me see. What the hell, Jimmy-Jack, what set you off like that?”

James was too angry to be tactful. “He called you a hoodrat, Rafael—
I don’t even know what that means!
”

“Oh
I
do!” Sophie half laughed. She was still holding Marlowe, and James had the absurd hope that Marlowe hadn’t been watching when his co-daddy behaved so badly. Marlowe was wriggling to get out of Sophie’s arms, though, and she handed him off to James, who had a hard time taking him while Rafael was crooning over his sore hand. “I know
exactly
what ‘hoodrat’ means, Professor Cresswell, and it’s racist as fuck, and if you try to get Professor Richards fired, I’ll make sure the entire Hispanic community knows exactly what you think of them. Do you have
any
idea what percentage of our population is Hispanic, Professor?”

Lee shook his head blankly, and Sophie barreled on because, apparently, she was just fucking fearless that way.

“I do. And just because they don’t make it to college as much as they should, that doesn’t mean they don’t dream about it. You want to go on record as the guy who wants to kill all those dreams?”

Lee rubbed his sore jaw and glared at all of them. “Goddammit—that was just… you took that completely out of context!”

James grimaced. “That’s unlikely, since I still
don’t know what it means!”

Lee shook his head and backed up to his car. “You know what? Forget it. When you wake up to find your bank account cleaned out and your dog violated, you’ll remember that you could have had someone civilized, okay?”

Rafael and Sophie must have restrained him, because by the time James’s vision cleared, the Humvee was off in a cloud of dust and gas fumes and Marlowe was on the ground jumping up to put his front paws on James’s knee.

James came to himself and went a little limp and shook off their hands and grunted. “Jesus, what an asshole.”

Rafael laughed a little and threw an arm around James’s shoulder, pulling his head into Rafael’s chest, and suddenly Lee Cresswell and his ugly assumptions and James’s aching wrist all disappeared, and all he knew was that he was close to Rafael and it was
wonderful
and that it had been too long.

“I’m telling you, Jimmy-Jack, when you get pissed off, you got one hell of an accent—you know that, right?”

James looked up at him, hunched over but not caring. “Accent?” he asked dumbly.

“Yeah, you sound a little like those old videos of… who was that president, Sophie?”

“Kennedy,” Sophie said with confidence. Now she was the one looking at James’s wrist, and Rafael was just there, keeping him warm and safe and protected. “He’s got all this back east in his voice. It’s pretty fucking cool, actually.”

James squinted at her. “I don’t come from Boston,” he said, and then she moved his wrist and he felt a little woozy and she sighed.

“Wherever you come from, I hope you’ve got health insurance. Rafael, this thing is swelling like a motherfucker. I think he might need X-rays.”

They talked in the car on the way to the hospital, and they talked while they were waiting for X-rays and then while they were waiting for the plaster guy to come bandage James’s wrist. It
was
broken, and that just seemed to be icing on the weirdness cake for the entire encounter. Sophie had taken James’s keys and Marlowe’s lead and a couple of hurried directions and was probably making herself at home with James’s remote and the ice cream in the freezer for all James knew but it didn’t matter. James sat next to Rafael and waited for the doctor, a little bit goofy from the 1000 mg of ibuprofen Sophie had given him before she took off. Rafael had his arms around James’s shoulder and it was all golden.

“You never did finish that sentence,” Rafael had said in the car on the way. “When did you fall for me?”

“You put Marlowe on your lap and said you got to be co-daddy,” James mumbled, sure he’d been going to phrase that differently, with a little spin and panache, before that douche-nozzle Lee Cresswell had shown up. “It’s just… you were going to be a partner, not… I don’t know. Not a dependent. You were pretty and kind, and you were good to me and you liked my dog. It was kismet.”

Rafael chuckled. “Yeah? Well, I was prepared to wait a lot longer, you know. I thought, I waited my whole life for this guy, I could probably go for years if that’s what it took.”

James groaned. His wrist hurt, and all he wanted was to be snuggled on the couch having this conversation, not in Rafael’s car, heading for the hospital. “Years are for epic romances, like Shakespeare,” he said wryly. “We’re not Shakespeare.”

“The fuck we ain’t, Jimmy. I read
Romeo and Juliet
like every good high-school boy—those fools fell in love, married, and offed themselves all in the span of a week!”

James cradled his wrist and giggled for the rest of the trip to the hospital.

The doctor was obviously curious. A sweet-looking woman in her forties with a narrow face and a skeptical eyebrow, she took one look at James’s X-rays and asked, “Okay, so who’d you hit?”

“A real douchebag,” James told her, and Rafael sat next to him with a warm hand on his lower back and said, “Amen to that, brother.”

“Yeah? What’d this guy do?”

“Called my boyfriend a hoodrat,” James replied. He was starting to think he might know what it meant now, but he sure as hell wasn’t copping to it—not after bruising Lee Cresswell’s jaw.

The woman widened her eyes and took in Rafael. He was wearing an oversized brown plaid shirt today, with a matching ball cap, turned backward, and oversized brown jeans.

“Yeah?” she asked, that skeptical quirk to her eyebrow deepening. “Well, I hope the other guy looked worse than you do. You’ll be in a cast for most of the summer.”

“He’ll be fine,” James said in disgust.

Rafael patted his back. “Yeah,
papi,
but as grand romantic gestures go, you could have done worse.”

James brightened. “Yeah?” Rafael looked at him with a sweet smile, and James turned to the doctor, knowing he had a foolish grin on his own face and not caring. “So it was worth it,” he told the doc.

She laughed. “Okay, then, let’s get this puppy plastered!”

It wasn’t until the trip home, when he was even more stoned on even
better
painkillers, that he thought to mention the trip to his parents’.

“Mom e-mailed me the tickets yesterday,” he said, not sure how that was going to fit in with the “grand romantic gesture” theme he’d been working on. “I, uhm… I was going to ask you tonight, you know? But I had to hit someone.”

Rafael pulled in a hard breath and looked sideways at him. Abruptly, he said, “I’m starving. You starving? Let’s bring Sophie home some Adalberto’s, okay? She likes that. You ever had that?”