“That’ll do,” Gudmund said happily into Seth’s ear. “But seriously, though, why does there even have to be a problem? He survived and they caught the guy and Owen’s a nice kid.”
“He’s not the same, though,” Seth said. “There are neurological problems. He’s all1 . . . scattered now.”
“Can you really tell that about a four-year-old? That he was one way before and a different way after?”
“Yeah,” Seth said. “Yeah, you can.”
“Are you sure, because –?”
“It’s all right, Gudmund. You don’t have to fix it. I’m just telling you, okay? That’s all. I’m just saying it.”
There was a long silence as he felt Gudmund’s breath in his ear. He could tell Gudmund was thinking, working something out.
“You’ve never told anybody else, have you?” Gudmund asked.
“No,” Seth said. “Who could I tell?”
He felt Gudmund hold him tighter in acknowledgment of the importance of the moment.
“It’s nothing I can change, right?” Seth said. “But imagine there’s this thing that always sits there in the room with you. And everyone knows it’s there and no one will ever say a single goddamn word about it until it becomes like an extra person living in your house that you have to make room for. And if you bring it up, they pretend they don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“My parents found the wrong gender of p**n on my touchpad last year,” Gudmund said. “Guess how many times they’ve talked about it with me since?”
Seth turned to look at him. “I never knew that. I’ll bet they went ballistic.”
“You’d have thought so, but it was just a phase, wasn’t it? Nothing that churchgoing and pretending it never happened wouldn’t make go away.”
“Aren’t they suspicious about me coming over all the time?”
“Nah,” Gudmund said, grinning. “They think you’re a good influence. I tend to play up your athletic abilities.”
Seth laughed.
“So we’ve both got messed-up parents who just don’t want to know,” Gudmund said. “Though, I admit, yours are a bit worse.”
“It’s not anything, really, good or bad. It just is.”
“It’s enough of an anything to make you cry, Sethy,” Gudmund said softly. “And that’s not something that can be any good.” He squeezed Seth again. “Not something I like to see anyway.”
Seth didn’t say anything, didn’t feel like he could without his voice cracking just that second.
Gudmund let the silence linger for a moment, then he said, brightly, “At the very least, it made you guys move out here from England. And if you hadn’t, I’d never have learned about this.”
“Quit tugging on it,” Seth said, laughing. “You know what a foreskin is.”
“In theory,” Gudmund said. “But to think that I used to have one of these and someone had the nerve to chop it off without even asking –”
“Stop that,” Seth said, smacking Gudmund’s hand away again, still laughing.
“You sure?” Gudmund moved an arm underneath Seth and pulled him back into a full embrace, nuzzling his neck.
“Hold on,” Seth whispered suddenly.
Gudmund froze. “What?”
“Just that.”
“Just what?” Gudmund asked, still frozen.
But how could Seth explain it? Just what?
Just Gudmund’s arms around him, holding him there, holding him tightly and not letting him go. Holding him like it was the only place that could ever have existed.
Just that. Yes, just that.
“You’re a mystery, you are,” Gudmund whispered.
Seth felt Gudmund reach for something off the bed and turned to find Gudmund holding his phone up above them.
“I told you,” Seth said, “I’m not taking any pictures of my –”
“Not what I want,” Gudmund said, and he snapped a picture of the two of them from the shoulders up, just together, there on the bed.
“For me,” Gudmund said. “Just for me.”
He brought his face around to Seth’s and kissed him on the mouth, taking another picture.
Then he put down the phone, pulled Seth even closer, and kissed him again.
19
Seth opens his eyes on the settee and can barely breathe from the weight on his chest.
Oh, Jesus, he thinks. Oh, no, please.
Once more, it was so much bigger than a dream that he puts his hands to his face to see if the scent of Gudmund’s body is still there. That it isn’t – but that he can remember the smell, of salt and wood and flesh and something intensely private – makes the weight feel so much heavier.
“Shit,” he says, his voice cracking as he sits up. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.” He leans forward into himself and rocks slowly back and forth, trying to bear how bad it feels.
The ache of it. The ache of missing Gudmund is so great he can barely stand it. Of missing how safe being with him felt, how easy it was, how funny and relaxed. Of missing the physical stuff, of course, but more than that, the intimacy, the closeness. Of missing just being held like that, cared for.
Maybe loved.
But also the ache of missing something that was his own. His own private, secret thing that belonged to no one else, that was no part of the world of his parents or his brother or even his other friends.
Gone.
Isn’t dying once enough? he thinks. Am I going to have to keep doing it?
But then he thinks, No. Because you can die before you’re dead, too.
Oh, yes, you can.
So why not after?
He had been with Gudmund again. And waking feels like death, like a death worse than drowning.
I can’t take this, he thinks. I can’t take this.
He’s slept through the night again, it seems. The light around the blinds has the bluish tint of early dawn. He doesn’t want to get up, feels like he can’t, but the pressure on his bladder finally forces him up the stairs to the bathroom. Yesterday, after the episode of housebreaking and trying to avoid just exactly this kind of dream-filled sleep for as long as he could, he’d gotten the creaking pipes to work in the sink and shower. He’d then refilled the long dried-out toilet with glasses of water, and it had worked on the first flush, a victory that made him almost embarrassingly happy.
He goes to it now and does his morning business. Then he washes himself in the cold water of the shower, using the hardened block of dishwashing liquid from downstairs as a sticky bar of soap. He gasps as he sticks his face again and again into the brutal coldness of the water, trying to snap himself into wakefulness.