Chapter 29
Somehow they were no longer sitting on the log but on the cold sand with their backs against it, legs and feet touching. Both were silent for a moment before Ennis answered.
“ ‘m glad you did. Came ta the wedding, I mean.”
“You aren’t gettin’ a very good bargain.”
“I didn’t come here lookin’ for that.”
“You didn’t come lookin’ for what happened in the kitchen today either, that’s for sure,” David said. “But you came lookin’ for me out here, and I owe ya an explanation.
“Three days after the funeral, I checked into a motel and just hid. First day I tried to hide from myself at a bar down the street, all that did was give me a hangover, so the rest of the time I just tried to sort it out and not think about goin’ back to Macon. You ever had anybody close to you who killed themselves?”
“Not that I know of.” Not surprisin’, there had been so few people he’d been close to.
“Well, somebody once said a suicide kills at least two people, and they were close to right. It’s not like any other kind of death.
“There’s so many questions you can’t answer and you can’t get away from. I kept thinkin’, maybe my mom was right, I was responsible - oh, not the way she meant it, but maybe I set somethin’ up just by always being there. Around the time I’d decided to come out I did start to think, how long are we gonna go on like this? Are we gonna be 30, 40, 50 and still meetin’ on weekends, him pretendin’ to be straight the rest of the time and me goin’ home to an empty apartment? And I knew he wouldn’t be the one to change anything - it’d have to be me, I’d have to give him a choice and walk away if he didn’t choose me. If I’d done that - who knows, he was always bein’ pulled in two directions and couldn’t go in either one because I was always there, and that might’ve put him in a spot where he couldn’t go in either direction, couldn’t stay and couldn’t run.
“Could’ve, would’ve, might’ve - I just kept going over everything I could remember again and again but I was gunning an engine in a stuck car and the wheels were goin’ around and around and not gettin’ anywhere but deeper. And there were a few things I couldn’t quite look at but knew were there. I’d thought more’n once about confronting him and I had all kinds of reasons worked out for why I didn’t - but the real reason was, what would I do if I walked away and he didn’t follow? Nathan was at the center of my life as far back as I could remember, having him disappear out of my life - just couldn’t face that.”
He glanced over at Ennis and gave a brief, soundless laugh. “But of course, in the end that was what happened.” They were both shivering by now, and Ennis could hear the other man’s teeth chattering slightly.
“There were other things I still haven’t got hold of. Mainly that I would’ve given anything to have Nathan back but at the same time I was just so pissed off at him. Throwin’ everything away, not just the night he died but all the years before that, he had everything in the world and never did a damn thing with it. And I wondered why he couldn’t have made it look like an accident. After all, everybody knew Nathan had drinkin’ and drug problems. . . But that just made me start wonderin’ if I’d totally misread that guy being at my place when I came home. What if Nathan had planned to do just that, and my blowin’ up pushed him over the edge?
“But even that wasn’t the worst of it. The day after I made that trip to Atlanta, I went over to Michael’s place and crashed for about 18 hours. When I woke up. . . . well, in one way it was like havin’ a toothache that hurts even while you’re asleep. But part of me just felt so relieved. For years it’d been up and down, up and down, always thinking things hafta be different next year and next year nothing had changed - all that was resolved now. And there was a kind of relief.”
He looked toward Ennis, who had to make an effort not to look away from the freshly-opened wound behind the other man’s eyes. “How could that be? I loved that man - Nathan was some of everything to me: brother, buddy, lover. . . What kind of man am I that I could feel relieved?”
Ennis forced out a reply. “You’d had a rough time. Guess that’d be kinda natural.” He mentally stomped on the loathsome stinging insect of a thought before it even made it to the surface: the memory of that whisper in his mind’s ear, now nobody'll know.
“Maybe so, but that’s been the worst part of it to sort out. . . . After three days o’ that, I had to see somebody or go outta my mind. Michael was in town and I went over to his place - he didn’t know the whole story about Nathan but enough. He was a bit older, came of age in the really bad old days and he knew all about the ways people hide. We ended up in bed together - not the first time, I’ll admit that - and nothin’ happened. I stayed on a few more things, same thing happened every time. ‘Dave,’ he finally told me, ‘you’ve just had your life ripped apart and you need to work with that.’ So then I did what I knew I’d have to do sooner or later: went back to Macon and my apartment with so much of Nathan’s stuff still there.
“It was mostly clothes, shaving stuff, ordinary things. I couldn’t bring myself to throw any of it away, just boxed it up. The last thing I looked at was the side room where he’d been painting - it was a big barn of an old house with bay windows here and there and he’d said he liked the light there. There was just one painting, still sitting on the easel but wrapped up in brown paper like he was gonna mail it someplace, and he’d written “to David” on it. That was all. I unwrapped it and before I even got the paper off, I guessed what it was, Rose Hill like we both remembered it. That was the little bit of. . . grace I was looking for. I’ve kept everything Nathan left at my place but hangin’ those two paintings of his up was the first thing I did when Maggie and I started moving into the house.
“Right after that Maggie came down to visit. I’d called her right after Nathan died but she was outta town and didn’t get back till after the funeral, and she felt bad about that. I’d already decided I didn’t want to stay in Georgia anymore, but I couldn’t think of anyplace I wanted to go, and she offered me a place to stay. I’ll always owe her for that. So I told her go on home, I’ve got the business to dispose of before I leave. Nathan’s will went through by then, and whatever his family thought of ours nobody disputed it. We all got a chunk o’ money that Nathan had left ‘way back when he was 18; my mom got a double amount because she got what my Dad woulda got. So I met with her an’ Dean and told them I was selling the family business. Doug, that was my assistant manager, he’d managed to buy a quarter-share and in a way, I wished he could buy all of it. But I told my mom and Dean they had a choice: use Nathan’s money to buy me out and live on the income from the store or they were on their own. I wouldn’t be supportin’ them anymore.”
The harsh words were undercut by the sadness in David’s voice. “You know, that was one of the worst parts of it,” he added, “how it destroyed the past. There’d been good memories. Holidays, especially Christmas, cookouts we all had when Tom and Sheila were alive, all those camping trips with my Dad - he was such a sweet guy, Ennis, never stood up to Mother, though. I still miss him but I’m glad he was gone before all this happened. And there we were, sitting across a table in a law office, signing the papers and not even looking at each other.
“Anyway, it ended up taking a month or two before I got all that tied up. I went to see Michael a few more times - same thing happened. After that I tried a few times with strangers, guys I met in bars, same thing. And every time, it got tougher to tell myself it’d be better next time, so since then I haven’t been with anybody except myself.
“By the time Gramma Alex called and asked me to come to that wedding, though, things had got better. I could think of Nathan like he was when we were growin’ up, when we had such good times together in college. And I’d made a pretty good life here, got a business, a home, made some friends. That included Vic, I was tellin’ you the truth that we’d never been together, though he was sure interested for awhile. I’ve wondered now and then if Nathan might’ve turned out like Vic if. . . . well, no need to waste time with any more ‘ifs’. But I didn’t mean to lead you on, Ennis, I’m a damaged man but the way we seemed to know each other right away. . . I’d think ‘it’s gonna be different now’ but every time we got close I’d get cold feet again.”
“You don’t seem so bad ta me,” Ennis managed. “Seemed like you did the best you could.”
“Maybe I did, maybe I just told myself it did. But whichever, it wasn’t enough.”
It was now, Ennis knew, or never again that he’d have the nerve to tell David the truth. “Thought I’d done the best I could too,” he ventured. “I'd told ya before, me an’ Jack couldn't manage ta live together -- wasn't really us that couldn't. He wanted us ta get a ranch, said it'd be a sweet life. I told him it couldn't be that way. Told him it was dangerous and it was, but. . . . He had a plan for us ta build a cabin at his folks' ranch up in Lightning Flat, that's way up near the Montana line. Help run the place. I didn't know about it till I visited his folks after he was gone and his dad told me. The old man was a real sonofabitch, but it could a worked. But Jack never told me, and I know why. He just got tired a me turning him down, hearin me say it ain’t gonna be that way.”
Each gave the other a cautious, questioning look, half-hopeful, half-wary. “Then you did your best too,” David said. “Maybe we can… let off…” It tapered off in a half-coherent murmur, and Ennis thought he heard tears in David’s voice, but a close look told him differently. David was now visibly shivering; his face was pale and his voice slightly slurred; and years of working outdoors in severe weather had taught Ennis to recognize the warming signs of hypothermia, which could invisibly wrap itself around a human body and chill the life out of it.
Without a word he got up and hauled David to his feet, noting as they moved away from the shoreline that the cold-fire eyes were still visible, watching them a little further off in the fog. The houses along the beach had become all but invisible, and he sensibly headed inland until the ground began to slope upward and then turned right, arriving at the foot of the steps.
It seemed to take forever to get up to the house, and then up the stairs. Ennis had to struggle to maneuver David to keep moving, as David was getting groggy and kept pulling away from him, muttering irritably. Ennis knew that to be a bad sign; and he persisted, feeling as if he was dragging a wounded comrade off a battlefield to a place of safety.
For a moment or two during the interminable climb, he thought of the ramshackle house in Sage, the hazy memory of it being a zone of safety and security, and of the people in it being set apart from the rest of the world in that they knew, and were intimately known, by everyone else. That began to dissolve after he was about four years old, when his mother’s fear of his father became noticeable and when he started getting slaps and bruises, “ta make you hear good”, for childish offenses. That feeling of refuge had returned briefly in the early years of his marriage, at least during the intervals he wasn’t thinking much about Jack. The house whose lighted windows his eyes were now fixed on was the first place he’d lived since then that was more than a place to eat and sleep, and it was the man he was pulling along with him that had made it that way. He would not let David vanish out of his life the way Jack had, and his parents, and his daughters’ childhoods: ain’t gonna be that way.
By the time they’d reached the second-story entrance of the house, Ennis was shaking with both tension and exhaustion as much as cold. Finally in David’s bedroom, he was relieved that they were now out of the mists’ reach but knew that the danger to David was far from past. He glanced toward the bathroom but discarded the idea of a hot shower as soon as he thought of it. That would deal with a simple chill, but here it could cause a fatal rush of the blood to the surface of the skin; and he knew that the body could not survive without an alert brain and a warm heart.
The best way to get any warmth into David was to give him his own. He pulled down the bed covers and stripped off first David’s damp clothes and then his. David neither resisted nor responded as Ennis helped him lie down and stretched out beside him, pulling the thick comforter over both of them and partially covering their heads.
For more than an hour they lay naked and clasped together in the improvised grotto, each with the other’s breath whispering in one ear, nipples and bellies and groins fitted together and legs entwined. David’s body gradually stopped shaking, although he was seized with a few of the jerky shudders that often overcome people while warming up from a severe chill. Ennis discovered that his head had been spinning only when it steadied, and David’s shallow breathing began to deepen.
Only half-aware he was doing so, Ennis slid one foot up David’s ankle at the same time that he ran one hand up David’s back and back down to his waist, first rubbing lightly to warm up the still chilled skin. It wandered up over the cold-hardened nipples, his body’s memory noting the silky chest hair, more abundant than Jack’s, and the shorter waist. As if learning David’s body by sense of touch alone, his hand then glided down one arm, seeming to feel each hair separately, tracing the veins on the back of the hand and the fingers, shorter and a little wider than Jack’s.
Different from Jack’s, but feeling the same in a mysterious way. The slight roughness of a man’s skin, the broad chest that sloped down to the waist, the hips that flared out slightly instead of curving, the more angular jaw line that his lips were suddenly tracing - there was a completeness in it for him that had never been there with Alma or Cassie, not unlike the satisfaction of a meal that not only filled the belly but had exactly the nutrition the body craved.
David’s hands slid up to grip his shoulders. “God. . . .” he whispered, “mercy. . .” The spell was broken briefly when one of his feet brushed against Ennis’ calf and Ennis gave an involuntary yelp. “Still cold. . . . I’ll take care of that,” and he slid down toward the end of the bed, pushing the comforter on his side out of the way. He rubbed both feet lightly, then his mouth moved up the instep with tiny exploratory nibbles and progressed leisurely up the ankle and muscular curve just above it. He ran his tongue over the tender flesh on the back of one knee, and heard David groan as his legs parted slightly. They were both slipping into an erotic trance: Ennis caught up in exploring David’s body inch by inch and David’s whole universe narrowing, for the time being, to Ennis’ right hand as it slipped up the back of his thigh to stroke the half-hidden, exquisitely sensitive region at the intersection of leg and buttock.
He moved up slightly, aware of the slight swelling and hardening between David’s legs but even more acutely conscious of the tightening and ache in his own loins. As often as he’d sweated over his fantasies of tantalizing Jack in exactly this way, he hadn’t anticipated either the perversely delicious pleasure of holding himself back nor the excruciating difficulty of it. He thought fleetingly that if it hadn’t been such a long, stressful day this would have already been over; but his speculations were forgotten as his tongue slowly surveyed the already hardening tips of David’s nipples and then moved up and over to nuzzle under one armpit.
By now the slight swelling he’d felt was unmistakably a solid, engorged cock pressing against his thigh. “Shit,” David gasped, “no more. Now. . .” He pulled Ennis’ hand down between his legs but Ennis eluded him and slid his hand around to massage the clenching buttock and thigh muscles.
David’s back arched slightly and he lifted his head, only to immediately jerk it back onto the pillow. In the dim light of the one lamp on the other side of the room, Ennis saw his face, almost gray when they’d started up from the beach, now flushed and his mouth now looking slightly inflamed. He locked his own mouth onto David’s his tongue slipping between David’s lips and brushing lightly over the roof of his mouth just inside his teeth. He withdrew his tongue when David tried to draw it further into his mouth, only to slide the tip tantalizingly in and out until David buried his fingers in Ennis hair and pulled his mouth forward.
Their breath mingled for a few moments, and again Ennis felt that same sense of wholeness, of being in exactly the place he was meant to be, with another man’s breath in his mouth and a man’s strong fingers buried in his hair and half-imprisoning his head. He felt his own cock pulsating urgently and knew he was close to the end of his endurance.
Pulling away, he slid back down and burrowed his head between David’s parted legs, inhaling a carnal, fleshy odor vaguely like rich, moist soil at the roots of a tree in a humid forest. As his lips closed around now rigid shaft, its tip already slick, and moved downward what he felt filling his mouth was something a firm but sensuous fruit, ripening at warp speed and swollen to bursting with pungent juice and burgeoning seeds.
He’d done this only a few times with Jack, but the memory of the erotic brew of scents was clear: the sharp odor of sweat mingled with fainter ones vaguely like damp leather and cheese. He pulled his head rapidly up and down to keep up with David’s thrusts, his hands now squeezing first the clenching and unclenching muscles in David’s ass. And that, too, fell naturally into place: another man’s muscles and power matched with his own. He heard David’s half-groan, half-shout a second before the thick, ammoniac liquor filled his mouth and spilled over.
For a few moments they both lay breathing raggedly, like two evenly-matched wrestlers. Then David slid slightly down and drew his legs up, pulling Ennis toward him.
“I want you inside me. Now,” he whispered hoarsely. Ennis rose and leaned over him and as David’s body received and embraced his, the release and relief were so intense as to be almost agonizing.
As they finally fell away from each other, the grueling and soul-exhausting day caught up with both of them and sleep came suddenly in a tangle of arms, legs, drying sweat and bedclothes. But each of them woke up during the following hours, and found the other also awake. Together they built walls of erotic tenderness around both remembered grief and recollections that were still too close and whose edges were still too sharp.
Before sleep overtook him for good, Ennis listened to the now-familiar sound of loons calling to each other across the water on the Lake. He was accustomed enough now to their voices to know that the fog had lifted.
Index to chapters:
Chapter 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/392.html
Chapter 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/523.html
Chapter 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1066.html
Chapter 4: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1485.html
Chapter 5: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/1704.html
Chapter 6: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2038.html
Chapter 7: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2358.html
Chapter 8: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2635.html
Chapter 9: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/2947.html
Chapter 10: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3130.html
Chapter 11: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3356.html
Chapter 12: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3655.html
Chapter 13: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/3934.html
Chapter 14: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4154.html
Chapter 15: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4591.html
Chapter 16: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/4685.html
Chapter 17: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5094.html
Chapter 18: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5140.html
Chapter 19: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/5546.html
Chapter 20: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6249.html
Chapter 21: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6434.html
Chapter 22: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/6843.html
Chapter 23: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7306.html
Chapter 24: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7646.html
Chapter 25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/7723.html
Summary, Chapters 1-25: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8106.html
Chapter 26 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8417.html
Chapter 26 Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8634.html
Chapter 27: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/8869.html
Chapter 28 Part 1: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9090.html
Chapter 28, Part 2: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9371.html
Chapter 28 Part 3: http://talkstocoyotes.livejournal.com/9498.html