It’s how I think about cars sometimes. That I have a hand in something that someone is going to drive far away, into another life.
Rafe’s arms slide around my waist from behind and he rests his chin on my shoulder, squeezing me. For a moment, I think the rushing in my ears is a sign I’m feeling woozy, but it’s just the waves outside, ever-present, even with Rafe’s breath in my ear.
“How are you doing?” Rafe asks softly, and the sympathy in his voice is almost painful.
I shrug and his arms tighten around me, holding me up when I sag back into him.
“COLIN! COLIN!
God damn it!”
I’m wrenched around and yanked against Rafe’s chest. He’s squeezing my wrists hard enough to bruise but I don’t even feel it.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Rafe shakes me, looking down into my face fiercely.
“I—I’m—nothing.”
The lightening sky is white and the ocean is gray, the world like a black-and-white picture.
Rafe shakes his head, teeth gritted and jaw clenched. He drops his forehead down on my shoulder, shaking.
“Come in. It’s freezing out here.”
The sand coats my wet feet as we walk out of the ocean and up the beach onto the deck. I’m shaking with cold, my feet and legs numb. Rafe tries to brush the wet sand off of them but only succeeds in getting it all over his hands.
Finally, he just pulls me inside and upstairs, stripping off my underwear and T-shirt and shoving me into the shower. He takes off his coat and the flannel pants and T-shirt he was sleeping in, and steps under the water with me. If I close my eyes, I can almost pretend that the too-hot water pouring down on me is the too-cold water I was wading into. Rafe’s arms are wrapped around me and he’s murmuring something in my ear, but I can’t hear it because the shower is even louder than the ocean.
He dries me off like I’m a kid or a stray dog and wraps me in the bedclothes. The ceiling is that weird stucco that looks like someone bounced a ball into it while it was wet, leaving little smacks of texture. We lie there in silence for I don’t know how long.
When Rafe finally speaks, his voice is tight, weary.
“You could’ve died,” he says to the ceiling.
I shake my head, the sound of my hair scratching the pillow almost deafening.
“Oh, you don’t think so?” Rafe goes up on one elbow and turns to look at me. “You walked into the ocean in December in your fucking underwear, Colin!”
He smacks the bed with his palm and slumps back onto the bed, hands fisted over his eyes.
“Is that what you want?” he asks softly.
“Hm?”
“To kill yourself. Is that where we are? Because that’s something I need to know.”
I laugh nervously.
In the month after Maya and her father came to Pop’s house and they all agreed we’d get married because of the baby, I tried to kill myself twice. Kind of. Is there a word for just not trying very hard to avoid ceasing to exist? It was more like that. The life I could imagine for myself, Maya, and a kid, was just a yawning blackness, so I may as well have wandered into another kind of blackness. An easier one. One without responsibilities and expectations that filled me with hopeless panic. There were the nights I walked alone in places I knew I shouldn’t, or went to parties and drank so much I blacked out, or shoved down my throat or up my nose whatever pill, paper, or powder was passed to me.
Then there were the other times.
There was the time I walked along the train tracks after football practice, still shaky from running sprints, and stood with my back to an oncoming train, the shudder of the rails growing stronger and stronger through the soles of my sneakers, the whistle finally startling me off the track almost against my will, where I stumbled down the rocky slope and retched.
There was the time I looped Brian’s ratty Eagles scarf over the bar in my closet and tied it around my neck. When Pop asked how the bar broke, I told him I was trying to do chin-ups, and he smacked me for thinking it would hold my weight.
WHEN I
wake up, it’s dark. I find Rafe in the kitchen staring out the glass door at the beach, a bowl of cooked spaghetti next to an unopened jar of sauce on the counter.
“Pop used to always make spaghetti when we were kids,” I say as I pour the cold sauce on the noodles.
Rafe fills his own bowl and sits on the stool next to mine, but he doesn’t touch the food. “The night we met,” he says. “That wasn’t the first time I saw you at The Cellar.”
I eat without tasting the food.
“People talked about you, you know.”
“What?”
“The pretty guy who wanted to get the shit beaten out of him. They said they thought you got off on it. Like a fantasy of getting jumped or something.”
I shake my head. Everything feels fuzzy and confused, and that damn ocean sound, like the rushing in my ears, makes everything feel unreal.
“Yeah, I didn’t think it was a fantasy.” He looks down at his hands, twisted together in his lap. “You looked so damned miserable. And now that I know you….” He leans toward me so I have to look at him. His brow is furrowed and his eyes are sympathetic. “I don’t expect you to be okay. But I need to know where you are. I can’t worry every time I close my eyes or leave to get food that I’m going to come back and find you dead. So if that’s where you are, I can handle it, but I need to know it.”
“I wasn’t—I didn’t mean…. I don’t know what happened. This morning. I didn’t—I just remember you being there, but I don’t know….”
“Okay.” After a long silence, he says, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
Which is ridiculous, because all he’s done since we met is help me. Here we are in this beach house, far away from the grime of the city, and he’s been helping me with everything. I gesture around us helplessly, trying to convey this, but Rafe catches my hand and holds it between his.
“You make it better,” I murmur, but I don’t meet his eyes. If I knew what would help—if I
ever
knew what would really help—I’d do it.
“Maybe you need a distraction.” He runs a hand up my neck and squeezes. “Just something to focus on.” His thumb brushes my mouth.
It would sound like a cheesy pickup line if Rafe weren’t looking at me like he’d turn himself inside out to make me feel better.
“Okay,” I say against his thumb.
“Leave that,” he says as I start to put my bowl in the sink.
Rafe runs a bath, tipping something into it that looks like the rock salt we use on the sidewalk outside the shop when it’s icy. He helps me ease into the steaming water. It’s warm and relaxing, but I feel silly with him just sitting on the closed toilet seat, watching me. He’s probably afraid I’ll try and drown myself in the bathtub or something if he leaves. I reach out a hand trying to indicate that he should get in, but it’s not really big enough.
He sits on the floor next to the tub, pulls off his sweater, and dips a hand into the bathwater, then trails his fingers up my arm. The only light comes from the lamp in the bedroom.
“Close your eyes. Just relax.”
I’m worried he’s going to leave, but he keeps his hand on my shoulder, and every time the water starts to cool a little, he lets some out and adds hot. I must doze off for a minute because when I wake up to the sound of the ocean and the sensation of water it takes Rafe’s hand sliding gently under my neck to figure out where I am.
“Ready to get out, or you want to stay a little longer?”
I shrug.
“Stay right there for a few minutes.”
I hear him moving around in the bedroom and then he’s back, holding a large towel open and helping me out of the tub. As Rafe helps me to the bed, my movements are so sluggish it feels like I’m still in the water.
Rafe kisses me slow and liquid, his hand on my hip. If he wants to distract me with sex, I’m happy to go with it, but when I try and pull him down on top of me to deepen the kiss, he eases back, just kissing me like we have all the time in the world.
I’m not even turned on, really. Just warm and relaxed, like after I’ve run until I can’t run anymore. Rafe lies down next to me, and I turn on my side to face him. His hair is a mess—tangled from the wind outside probably—and I work the knots out as he kisses me, leaving it soft around his face. It sticks in stubble I haven’t shaved since before the funeral.
Rafe’s jeans and T-shirt are rough against my water-softened skin, and I tug at them. He pulls his shirt off slowly, the lamplight behind him turning his torso into a sculpture. He comes back down to me naked and kisses me deeply.
“I love how you taste,” he says against my mouth.
“I probably taste like spaghetti sauce.”
He presses my shoulders back down to the mattress, and something warm and dark unspools in my gut. As long as Rafe’s in charge, I can’t fuck up.
“Just let me touch you,” he says. “I want to.” I nod. He kisses my ear, my neck, the hollow of my throat.
Then he has my hips tilted up and my thighs spread while I’m still lost in the feel of his tongue tracing my jaw.
He slides fingers down the crease of my ass and around my hole, watching me, then sliding inside. Every touch of his fingers inside me makes me crave more. When he leans in and kisses my open mouth, he looks mesmerized.
“You love this,” he says. “Me inside you. Filling you. Opening you up.”
I can’t speak for the sudden wave of lust that washes over me when he talks like that. Says out loud the things that I could never express. Would never say. And I don’t have to say anything because he just keeps kissing my mouth and my neck, his fingers trailing fire inside me.
Then he pulls away and my eyes fly open. “No!” I say, trying to grab his wrist.
“I’m just getting lube,” he says, but I shake my head and pull him back. He fucks me with his fingers, and every few thrusts he curls them and pleasure slams through me. “God, you’re so beautiful like this. The way your body just lets me in. Fuck,” he groans, dropping his head onto my chest, stilling for a moment while he takes a deep breath.
He kisses down my stomach and scrapes his teeth over my hipbone, and I curl into the sharpness of his mouth.
Rafe buries his face in my crotch, breathing me in, kissing and sucking at the crease where my thigh meets my groin and the base of my dick. Everything feels like it’s happening in slow motion. Like every minute his mouth is on me unfolds to hours and all I can do is lie here, caught perfectly between his hot mouth and his fingers inside me.
It should be impossible to be this relaxed and this turned on at the same time, but I keep spacing out even though I’m aware of the physical sensations.
One night, weeks ago now, Rafe and I woke in the middle of the night and brought each other off in the dark, both half-asleep, our legs entwined and his hair in my face. I feel almost like that now. Dreamy and liquid. This time, though, Rafe’s focus is intense and everything about him is urging me to be open to him. To let him do as he pleases. It’s a heady feeling and one that still makes me cringe if I think about it.
I let out a shaky sigh, and Rafe groans into the crease of my thigh. “I love this,” he murmurs.
“Don’t stop,” I choke out. “Please.” Rafe licks up my dick, swirling his tongue around the head. His hair tickles my stomach, and his mouth is a tease of heat I try to chase, pressing my hips up, desperate for more contact, craning my neck to watch my erection slide between Rafe’s lips. He looks at me, hair falling around his face, dark eyes soft, and it goes right to my gut.
Then he starts to move more quickly, and I drop back onto the bed, unable to focus on anything but his hot mouth and his fingers inside me and the bloom of pleasure that opens me up and breaks me apart. Little spasms start deep inside, where Rafe’s fingers stroke into me. Bolts of sensation zing from my balls to my dick. Then it’s huge, my entire body clenching. My mouth is locked open as the heat of orgasm washes through my groin, my belly, my thighs. Shudders of pleasure tear through me, and my ass contracts around Rafe’s fingers as I spill into his mouth.
Rafe moans, and I feel his muscles tighten as he jerks himself off.
Then his hand is on my cheek, his lips on mine. He whispers something but I don’t make sense of it because I’m too blitzed to think.
Everything else has melted away. The only problem in the whole world right now is that I’m cold and I want Rafe wrapped around me.
I try and lift my arm to pull him down, but I can’t coordinate the movement. Rafe’s thumb brushes the corners of my eyes and I can feel the moisture there.
“What’s wrong, sweetheart?”
It feels like I’m held in a cloud, everything soft and fuzzy. But it could evaporate at any moment, leaving me in free fall.
“Cold,” I finally get out.
We’re lying on top of the covers, but Rafe flips the edge of the blanket from the other side of the bed over us. We lie like that for a minute, Rafe stroking my face. Loneliness shoots through me even though he’s right there, and I start to shake. Then I start to cry. Then I’m sobbing and Rafe wraps himself around me, murmuring nonsense.
THE NEXT
week passes like a dream. We wander along the beach, nap, and eat. But something’s different. I feel calm in a way I never have before. Like the moment I’m in is bearable. I don’t know how long it will last, but I’m clinging to it while it does.
This morning when we woke up, Rafe told me my brothers have left me a bunch of voice mail messages. I didn’t notice that I hadn’t seen my phone in a while, but I guess he’s seen the calls come through.
I try to work up the nerve to listen to the messages. I bet Sam’s going to rip me a new one for missing Pop’s wake. And I can already hear Brian’s confused voice, hurt because he doesn’t know where I am. There are dozens of missed calls from both Sam and Brian and the messages I expected, Sam sounding increasingly irritated and Brian more and more hurt.
It never occurred to me that Rafe meant Daniel, too.
But after Sam’s and Brian’s are two messages I didn’t expect. From Daniel.
“Hi, Colin,” Daniel says as if he were actually talking to me instead of leaving a message. “I’m so angry with you because you cheated me out of a brother. I don’t understand why you never told me. I mean, I can think of lots of reasons, but I don’t know what yours was. No matter what it was, though, I think it sucks. I think it sucks that you let me think I was alone in this, when I wasn’t. I wasn’t, was I, Colin?”