Bombora (32 page)

“Because it was never your business,” answers Phel at the same time Nate says, “That’s called a fucking coincidence, man,” like it’s every day this kind of drama unfolds independently in the lives of people I happen to know.

Both Phel and I ignore him, since for some reason I feel like this conversation is between us, not between me and Nate. Maybe because Nate has already admitted to lying to me once today, I know if I try to take his word for anything right now, it might not stick. Heeding what Phel said earlier, about how his sexuality doesn’t involve me, I do my best to maintain a sense of goodwill toward him. It’s hard, and obviously a large part of why I’m so riled up right now, but I think even if I’d known he was queer all along, the thought of him and Phel going behind my back this whole time would still make me crazy.

Like he knows it, Phel softens a little, tries to pull back on his obvious irritation for the sake of… I don’t know. Putting himself in my shoes, maybe, which Phel was always pretty good at. Never quick to anger or judge, always ready to take a breath and think something through before flying off the handle. Not like Nate; hell, not even like me, not really. Ever genteel, that’s our Phel. Do I feel bad, knowing I’m testing him? Of course I do—but I also want to draw it out, see what it’ll take to crumble that restraint and make him
mad
. I’ve never witnessed it personally, but something tells me an angry Phelan is a pretty fearsome thing to behold, wrathful in the manner of someone not used to giving his emotions free rein. “I told you when Nate came here, Hugh, that your brother’s situation was reminiscent of my own,” he reminds me. “That’s why his presence upset me at first, because I saw the similarities of what we’d been through even from opposite ends of the spectrum. It’s not because—”

I cut him off with a grunt. “What, not because you’re the one he was fucking behind Emilia’s back?”

At this, Nate starts forward but is once again halted by Phel’s hand on his arm. When Phel first showed up here this morning, it was as Nate’s bulldog, but now it starts to look like it’s the other way around: Nate agitated and ready to attack his own brother, Phel pulling him back with a firm, gentle hand on the collar.

And yeah, okay, I know I’m talking in pretty crude terms here, but I get this really awful sense that isn’t even the worst of it, the stuff I’m accusing them of. In my mind it all seems to click into place: why I’ve sensed something else going on since Nate got here; why, instead of bringing us closer, Nate’s arrival made me feel shut out of both my relationship with my best friend and my relationship with my brother, as if there was something between them that didn’t and would never include me—like the family I’d wanted to build with the three of us was over before it ever started. It tightens my chest to think that, an indescribable dark feeling that eats away at my insides like a cancer, a tight knot of fear I get over the thought of them leaving me alone again. Now I’ve latched on to it, I can’t seem to let go, not even at the expense of this thin veneer of patience Phelan has scraped together for my benefit; and I can see, from the hard glint in his eye, a veneer is all it is, easily shattered.

Kind of like a house of cards, it’ll only take one hard nudge to shake those flimsy foundations loose, and I’ll have my answer. So I go for it. “Have you been fucking behind my back this whole time too?”

Phel drops his hand from Nate’s arm, not even looking over at my brother, who’s gone mysteriously silent except for the expression on his face that screams,
Who the fuck
are
you?
I know that look, having seen it a few times before I went to rehab, sure as I know what it means when Phel makes that pinched face like he’s just been slapped and he stares at me without blinking. Part of me expects him to launch into a panic attack any second now. He’s holding it together remarkably well, though the rigidity of his spine lets me know this façade of control doesn’t come to him easily—he’s genuinely furious and struggling to get a grip. He was almost in the clear before I went and pushed him over the edge like the caveman Nate frequently accuses me of being.

“I don’t need to listen to this,” Phel bites out. He brushes off his waistcoat in a clear sign he’s done with this conversation—brushing
me
off, I suppose—and the hardness of his eyes is startling. I’ve never been on the receiving end of a look that venomous, not from Phel or anyone. It… doesn’t feel great. “This bullshit, Hugh,” he says, “this pettiness? It’s beneath you. Be upset at yourself for failing to recognize who your brother’s really been all these years, but don’t take it out on me or turn it into something it’s not. While you’re at it, though, you can go fuck yourself.”

With that, he leaves the kitchen, and a second later the front door slams, hard enough that we not only hear it, but we three who remain—me, Nate, and Callie—flinch.

Ears burning, I look toward Nate, who still hasn’t said anything since Phel and I stole the floor from him. I wouldn’t say his expression is outraged, exactly, but he looks as though someone kicked his dog, and then kicked him in the nuts too for good measure: pained, but also shocked. I can’t begin to figure out what it means, and whether it’s in response to my words or Phel’s reaction or both. Somehow, though, I know enough to feel embarrassed and mortified and deeply ashamed.

“Well?” I ask him lowly. “You got any choice words for me too?”

Spreading his hands, Nate struggles to say anything for a moment, his lips eventually closing and pressing into a thin, disapproving line. Then he asks, “What the hell would be the point, man? You seem to think you’ve got it all figured out.”

“I just want you to tell me the fucking truth!” I shoot back.

“And is that more important than letting your best friend walk out that door?” challenges Nate. “Jesus, Hugh, but you’re a fucking idiot sometimes.” He starts to leave too.

“Where the hell are you going?” I demand, rising to go after him. I reach out and grab his shoulder. “Why is what Phel thinks suddenly so important to you, if I’m totally off the mark?”

Slapping my hand away, Nate then grabs the front of my T-shirt and tugs me forward so our faces are close, pulling hard enough that I have to lean forward or risk ripping the shirt altogether. “I’m not the one who expects anything from Phel,” Nate growls at me. “
You
are. Even I’m not so fucking stupid not to realize you’re way out of line, and if I don’t speak up for your ass now, you can sure as hell count on him not coming back here. Ever.”

Then he’s gone, running out the door to try to catch Phelan before he gets too far, probably.

It occurs to me my brother had his boots on this whole time, maybe because he expected to have to get up and leave at any point during this conversation. Get up and walk out of his own house like he was no longer welcome.

It also occurs to me, hard enough that I stumble back into my chair, that he wound up being right.

N
ATE
comes back a short while later. I hear the beep of the security system as the front door opens and closes behind him, but otherwise I’m not really around to see what state he’s in, having grabbed a fifty of Jack and locked myself in my study. After how our conversation ended and the way I left things with Phel, it seemed an attractive prospect, so inappropriate and wonderful, to get stinking drunk before noon and let the rest of the day bleed out like a severed artery until I passed out or it was time for bed.

Before I snuck away to hide—yes, hide, because there’s no other word for what I’m now doing—I caught a glimpse of Nate and Phel arguing out in the street from the front window of my house, which I ran to in the hopes of seeing whether Nate managed to catch him up. He did, as it turns out, and maybe “arguing” is a bit strong; certainly there was some kind of an intense discussion going on, and Nate gripped Phel’s shoulders hard as if to keep him from running away again. I admit Phel has a talent for exiting stage left after he’s said something particularly wounding, a sniper with deadly sharp aim who doesn’t stick around to see whether or not he’s hit his mark. So I stood there at the window, shadowed by the curtain, waiting for them to hug or kiss each other or
something
, because that’s obviously what lovers do in a quarrel with no negative outcome. I guess I was still waiting for proof there was truly something else going on, having not sufficiently learned my lesson in the preceding argument. But the kiss never happened, not even the hug. Nate just cupped the back of Phelan’s head and stared at him until eventually Phel nodded and they parted ways.

That’s it.

I felt like I might be sick.

No way could I face Nate when he came back inside, so I disappeared myself in the hopes he’d assume I’d gone to write. He didn’t come to find me either, his own escape upstairs evidenced by the slamming door I heard from within the safety of my cave. The sound made me sigh, because—fuck. I’d really gone and screwed the pooch, hadn’t I? This whole time I’ve wanted my best friend and brother to forge a bond, and instead I basically drove them to forge one that didn’t include me, even if it wasn’t the sordid affair I got around to envisioning in the heat of what I admit was a very stupid, very illogical moment on my part.

I break open the Jack. The first sip of whiskey has a pleasant burn but ultimately doesn’t do much more than make me feel guilty and even more ashamed of myself. This isn’t how I handle stressful situations anymore, I remind myself sharply, especially not ones of my own devising. I was always supposed to be the responsible one, the levelheaded brother, according to Nate and my dad and just about everyone else who ever met us standing side by side. Yet I’m not the one who manned the fuck up and decided to come walking out of the closet with my head held high. No, I’m the one who turned that courage into an absolute nightmare for my brother, offering not support or love or even a shred of human fucking decency, but the petty, wounded offensive you’d expect from the kid picked last for the team. Phel was right about that much. Even if drinking this whole bottle of Jack didn’t mean backsliding from the steps I fought so hard to master, I don’t deserve anything that will let me forget the colossal mess I’ve made.

Surprisingly, I do manage to accomplish some writing today, banging out a couple of chapters that may or may not prove useable when I go back to edit later. It helps get my mind off things a little, calm me down. The few trips out to the bathroom or kitchen I risk during the day are miraculously Nate-free, a blessing as I try to pull myself together and figure out what to say to the guy.
I’m sorry
will be a start, but after that I keep coming up empty. It’s hard to admit to someone how scared of being alone you are, especially when that person has been doing nothing but trying to get closer this whole time. By this I mean Nate, of course. I love Phel, but ours is the closeness of two solar systems that, while once totally separate, have bumped up against each other for a long period of time and eventually merged; unlike Nate, who has always been more like one of Jupiter’s ancient moons, sometimes distant but always faithful. I’ve no doubt he won’t hesitate to point out how determined I seemed to drive both him and Phel away this morning, though, so a lot of my anxiety has to do with feeling ashamed.

Sometime before midnight I wander out into the living room. I find Nate settled on the couch with Callie sprawled on top of him in her usual ladylike fashion. Nate flips through channels with the distracted air of someone who’s not paying attention to any of it. I don’t blame him. As I enter the room, Callie immediately jumps up and comes to say hello, but Nate just glances at me once and doesn’t say anything, though his jaw tightens some. We could sit here in silence and he wouldn’t try to leave or give me a hard time, but I know it’s up to me to get this conversation going, if I want it to happen.

“Hey,” I begin, hesitation strong in my voice. “I guess there’s no point beating around the bush here, so I’ll just come right out and say I’m sorry for this morning.”

Nate grunts.

Right. “And I’m sorry I was such a dickbag about how I handled your coming out to me. It wasn’t very mature, and I knew it at the time, I just….” I let my uncertainty hang there. “Something got hold of me and I lost my mind a little bit.”

“A little bit,” repeats Nate. He nods to himself like this is pure bullshit. “Okay.”

“Fine, a lot,” I clarify. All of a sudden I sound like I’m ten again, and Nate’s caught me messing around with our dad’s cop gear. Petulant, even though I know better. “I’m not proud of that.”

“Nor should you be,” Nate says. That muscle continues to go crazy in his jaw, and part of me wants to tell him to stop choosing his words carefully and just have out with whatever the hell he’s really thinking. I don’t, though, and he continues to struggle for the right words. “I’m sad to say I was fucking embarrassed for you today,” he eventually tells me. “I ain’t never felt that before, not even when I was showing up on your doorstep ready to cart you off to rehab.”

Ouch. But also, yeah, if the shoe fits, I guess. I can tell he’s winding up for a speech—maybe he’s been working on it all day too—and to give himself some time, he reaches over for the remote and turns off the TV, swinging his legs around so he’s sitting up to talk to me. As the television screen crackles a little with residual energy in the background, our eyes meet. I’m glad to see no anger in his, but he looks plenty exasperated.

“Honestly, though, I’m not the one you should be apologizing to. I’m prepared to accept your temporary insanity as an unfortunate reaction to finding out I’m gay—I know it’s because you were upset about hearing it so late, not the fact I like dick. So as far as I’m concerned, you’ve had your hissy fit now and that conversation is over; we’re good.” I nod, having no desire to reprise the topic either, but Nate’s not done. Far from it. “Hell,” he continues, getting wound up now, “I’ll even go so far as to accept that shit you said about me going behind Emilia’s back, because after all, that’s what I did. You won’t get no argument from me on that one. But Phel… he didn’t deserve that from you, Hugh. Even if you weren’t totally fucking off base in what you said, Phel never purposely set out to trouble anyone, not from the beginning. All he got was a world of hurt he never asked for. Despite all that, he’s been your friend, much as he can be with everything else going on, and today you went and flung that in his face.”