Chapter Fourteen
January
JUST PAST five o’clock on a Sunday and the craving for a smoke hit me so hard I talked myself into getting up and going to the store for cigarettes. I was ready to fork up the twelve bucks for a pack, accepting that I was about to become a smoker again with something akin to relief. Getting dressed and walking three blocks to the bodega was a task I wasn’t sure I could accomplish after two weeks of existing in a daze. I wondered if Raymond would brave the arctic January wind so I wouldn’t have to leave the house.
When I ventured out of my room, the floorboards were cold against my bare feet. The house had always been drafty, but this winter was phenomenally cold. Rubbing my hands together, I jogged down the stairs and called out for my brother.
As soon as I spoke, I regretted it. There were people in the kitchen, and I’d just outed myself as being awake and in their proximity.
“Michael, ven acá.”
What the hell was Aida doing here?
I took a step backward, ready to flee, but I froze at the familiar rumble of a deep voice.
Nunzio.
Wariness turned into irritation. I charged into the kitchen and found them all huddled around the counter. Aida, John, Jackie, and Nunzio. My weasel of a little brother hovered in the back doorway, looking like he was ready to bolt from his own party.
“What the hell is going on?”
Nunzio took a step away from the rest of my family and looked at the floor. When Jackie had a similar reaction, my suspicions heightened.
“¿Qué está pasando aquí?” I speared Raymond with a vicious look. “Is this some kind of intervention? Are you serious, Ray?”
“No. I don’t know.”
“Then what the fuck are they doing here?”
“Cálmate, Michael,” John said in a warning voice.
“Why are they here?” I jutted my chin at Nunzio. “And you had to drag him into this too for ultimate humiliation?”
Nunzio stopped studying his sneakers and met my accusatory glare.
“Don’t get pissed at Ray,” he said, tone sharp where I’d expected him to sound contrite. “He just doesn’t know what to do.”
“Maybe he should grow the hell up and figure it out without calling in the damn cavalry.”
Raymond reddened. “I’ve been trying to talk to you, but you don’t even be coming downstairs for a couple days at a time. For all I know, you’re up there planning to fucking kill yourself.” The last bit came out shaky. He crossed his arms over his chest. “If I thought you cared about my opinion, I wouldn’t need no cavalry.”
I didn’t know if I wanted to sigh in disgust or shake him. His self-esteem had to be nonexistent if he thought I’d listen to John before him.
“You know what, Raymond? Maybe you wouldn’t think that if you’d acted like an adult before both our parents died.”
Raymond recoiled, and I cursed myself.
“Michael!”
Jackie grabbed Raymond’s hand to console him, and Aida nailed me with the kind of glare that, as a child, would have had me scampering around a corner to dodge a flying chancleta. We were long past those days, but I could practically hear her powering up for a lecture.
“This is bullshit,” I said. “Where was the intervention when you were all pouring the drinks while my father sautéed his liver?”
“You are not your father.” Aida moved around the side of the counter. “It was too late for him—”
“Too late?” I demanded, incredulous. “He spent every year of my life sweating out alcohol. And it wasn’t like he was a functioning alcoholic. You people had plenty of time to intervene. So I don’t understand why that was acceptable, but you want to break my fucking balls when I’m the only one in this family who has ever made anything of themselves.”
“That’s why we want to help you,” Jackie said, still hanging on to Raymond, even though he was clearly trying to escape. “You’re so smart and ambitious—”
“Obviously not if I’m in this situation.”
Jackie clammed up. Like Raymond, her face lapsed into a whipped puppy expression, but this time I felt no compassion.
“You know what? Fine.” I grabbed a barstool from the counter and sat down. I waved my hand. “Empieza con la mierda.”
John heaved a disgusted sigh. I wondered why he’d even come. After his initial show of compassion at the hospital, he’d wasted no time adopting his usual contempt for me.
“Mijito—”
I cut Aida off before she could go any further. “No soy tu hijito.”
“Okay.” Aida marched up to me and jabbed a finger into my face. “You cannot go on the way you are. The alcohol and drugs are out of control.”
I nearly laughed. If that was her opening, I couldn’t wait for the main argument.
“He doesn’t do drugs.”
“Oh?” Aida whipped around to stick her finger at Nunzio. “His brother says he takes pills.”
“Yeah, for anxiety. He isn’t—”
John scoffed. “Anxiety.”
“Yes.” Nunzio crossed his arms over his chest. “Anxiety.”
They stared each other down until Aida decided their standoff had interrupted her rant enough. The woman was like a runaway freight train once she got started.
“I know your life has not been easy, Michael. You lost both parents too soon, but you can’t go on like this. It’s dangerous and you should set a better example—”
“Titi, stop,” Jackie interrupted.
“No.” John’s lip was still curled, dark eyes still trained on Nunzio. “If he acts like a child, he can be treated like one.”
“Cada quién sufre a su manera,” Jackie insisted. “Stop being so negative!”
There was something to be said about the fact that my family couldn’t get their shit together long enough to stop bickering and focus on my intervention.
Aida took a breath and tried another tactic. “Michael. My point is this: you don’t need to drink. You don’t need to go on like this. Tu suerte cambiará. Tienes a tu familia.”
Her words sounded genuine, but I couldn’t stop watching as John looked between Nunzio and me, and the ugly curl of his mouth.
“Aparte de Raymond, no tengo familia. And he’s a grown man. I don’t need to set any examples for him that I haven’t tried and failed to set already.” I raised one shoulder in a tight shrug. “I appreciate what you’re trying to do, Titi, and you, Jackie, but it’s not going to work right now. And all of you sitting there judging me isn’t going to change anything, since I’m just keeping with the family tradition of drinking myself to death.”
This time it was John who spoke. “Tu madre estaría avergonzada.”
The Spanish seemed to translate for Nunzio. He winced, and out of the corner of my eye, I saw Raymond tense.
In the past I would have exploded, but this time I didn’t feel the rush of anger that would normally lead to fireworks. I stood up and leaned across the counter with my best impression of a Joseph Rodriguez razorblade smile.
“Maybe. But all of you, her included, would think a lot of things about my life are shameful. Like the fact that I never bring home women because I’m gay.”
Aida covered her mouth with her hand. Her expression was more startled than surprised. John, on the other hand, just smiled coldly.
“As if we didn’t know?”
“Or,” I added, leaning closer, “that I was sucking dick way before Nunzio. I started with your buddy Kevin the day of my junior high graduation. I swallowed his come while you were all outside grilling and dancing to salsa.”
John’s eyes went round, but before he could say anything, I grabbed the sides of his face and laid a sloppy kiss on his mouth. He threw himself backward with a horrified shout. Maybe he thought traces of Kevin were still on my lips.
“Maricón asqueroso,” he spat, jerking his forearm across his mouth.
“That’s right. I’m a disgusting faggot. Always have been, always will be. Now all of you can get the hell out of my house.”
It didn’t take them long. As the kitchen emptied, Aida would no longer make eye contact with me. Jackie offered a discreet wave, but her face lacked animation. It wasn’t surprising, considering I’d just accosted her father. He would probably have some kind of gay-stemmed PTSD for the rest of his life.
“Is that shit true about Kevin?” Raymond demanded when we were alone in the kitchen with Nunzio.
“Yeah.”
“So that dude is like a pedo?”
“I didn’t realize it at the time, but yeah, I guess so. I was only fourteen.”
As a teenager I’d fooled around with so many older men that I’d stopped thinking about it in terms of legality. It was a strange realization considering how protective I was of my students. If any of them behaved the way I had as a kid, I would have a fit.
Raymond shuddered. “That’s disgusting.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
I looked between him and Nunzio, wondering why I wasn’t angrier. I’d intended to ream them for setting me up, or at least not trying to talk to me alone before calling in the rest of the family, but the energy required to fuel additional outrage was already draining away.
“I’m going back to bed.”
“Mikey, wait.”
“Bro, stop—”
Nunzio and Raymond both moved forward simultaneously. I edged away from them with the wariness of a cornered animal.
“I just want to sleep. I understand that neither of you apparently know me well enough to have anticipated that shitshow, but I’m done talking about my failings as an adult.”
“No one thinks that,” Raymond said. “But you gotta look at it from my point of view. You think you’re the only one who’s fucked in the head right now? It’s bad enough that… that every night I think about how I stood there talking to Dad, not even realizing he was dead. I was being a dick, telling him to get his lazy ass up, and he was dead.”
I flinched. “I had no idea….”
“I know, because I didn’t tell nobody.” Raymond’s voice cracked on the last syllable, but he shrugged off Nunzio’s hand, turning away. “My point is that I get it. I know how you feel, but you can’t fucking die on me too. It’s not fair. And I don’t give a shit if you think that makes me sound like a dumbass kid.”
How was it possible that before this moment I had not realized how worn and frayed around the edges Raymond looked? At some point in the past few weeks he had lost weight and stopped sleeping enough for circles to darken his eyes, but I hadn’t noticed.
“I would never do that to you, Ray.”
“Yeah, maybe not on purpose, but you pop bars with vodka chasers. It’d be real easy for you to just not wake up one day.”
“I’ll be fine.”
“How the hell do you know? Pops thought he was invincible too, and look how that turned out.”
I had no defense for that argument.
“I’ll get it together soon.”
Raymond shook his head, still facing away.
“I have no choice. I go back to work in a week.”
“All right, man. Whatever.”
“Ray, I’m not going anywhere. I’m not going to die just because I’ve been on a two-week bender. I’m just….” All of a sudden it felt like I was talking through cotton. I cleared my throat and started again. “I’m done with everything. Just, everything. I tried really hard to be the good, successful son, but everything falls down around me anyway, so what’s the point? No matter how responsible I try to be and no matter how hard I tried not to be like Dad, I act just like him. And even knowing that, I can’t make myself stop. I don’t know what it is, but I can’t… care anymore. I just don’t want to think, Ray. That’s all. I want to stop thinking and be able to breathe, and lately that only happens when I drink.”
By the time the flow of words dried up, Raymond was silent and staring at the floor while Nunzio covered his face with his hand.
I ground my teeth together, wishing I’d said nothing. Trying to explain the mechanics of misery would never end with people nodding agreeably. They would either try to talk me out of feeling miserable or feel miserable themselves. Staying alone in my room was definitely the better option.
“Look, never mind. If you go to the store, can you pick up some cigarettes for me?”
I waited for Raymond to nod before fleeing the kitchen. I expected Nunzio to stay behind, but his quiet footsteps trailed up the stairs behind me. He hesitated in the attic doorway.
“Can I come in for a while?”
“Why?”
Nunzio took a step inside and closed the door behind him. “Just to talk.”
“If it’s to talk about how much of an alcoholic I am, you can forget it.”
I flopped on my bed, staring up at the ceiling. The sun had set in the time it had taken me to get rid of my family, and the room was dark. I welcomed it, knowing I looked like shit, but Nunzio turned on a lamp.
“I didn’t know your aunt and uncle were going to be here, Mikey. C’mon. Give me a little credit.”
“You didn’t give me a heads-up when Raymond suggested this intervention, though.”
“Oh really?” Nunzio tossed his phone on the bed next to me. “Take a look at your missed calls and messages, asshole. I’ve been trying to let you know all damn day, but your phone is either off or dead.”
He had me there. I didn’t even know where my phone was. Lost somewhere in the mounds of discarded clothing that had accrued in the past two weeks.
“I’m sorry.”
“You should be sorrier for your brother. He is genuinely terrified of losing you, and you didn’t have to treat him that way in front of your douche bag of an uncle.”
“I’ll talk to him later.”
“Will you really?”
“Yes,” I snapped. “I’ll handle it. I didn’t know….”
I didn’t know Raymond was so torn up about our father, because I hadn’t thought about his feelings enough to figure it out. My own drama had prevented us from having a real conversation since the funeral. Even now, I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to know. I could picture it too clearly as it was. Raymond being a smart-ass, heckling our father and trying to get him to go take out the trash or clean something up, getting impatient and then….
I bit the inside of my cheek and closed my eyes. The macabre image rotating in my head was sucking away my control, my breath, my ability to fight a welling of tears. I reached up to dash the dampness away from my cheeks.
The crying stage was supposed to be over. The sick feeling in the pit of my stomach was supposed to be numbed. Clearly I had been mistaken.
The bed sank when Nunzio sat beside me, but I didn’t look at him.
“I wish I knew what to do to help you. Both of you.”
I drew my forearm across my eyes and kept it there. “You can’t.”
“With your mom I knew what to say. I could figure out what you needed me to do.” Nunzio’s hand brushed my hair back from my forehead. “But now it’s like you’re falling apart.”
“Because it’s different now.”
“Why? I’m not trying to belittle your father, but I don’t understand. You were so much closer to your mom….” Nunzio trailed off and kept stroking my hair. “I guess I thought the situation with your dad was like the situation with me and my folks. You know? Besides the fact that I have their DNA, I don’t feel anything toward them anymore.”
“I thought so too.” I sniffed and dropped my arm to my side. “But it’s like… When you’re poor and you’re struggling, all you have is family. Even if your family isn’t the best, that’s who you have. I know you guys were just as poor, but your folks were always coldhearted. But mine?” I shook my head. “Even if we were dysfunctional and a fucking mess, deep down I always considered us a family. And my mom tried so hard to make it that way. She busted her ass working two jobs, sometimes three, just so we could live in a real house, but she died just as soon as she could cut back enough to enjoy it. Just as soon as she… she started fixing up the backyard and all that.”
So strange how that detail almost broke me. My chest was constricted and again my eyes throbbed with tears that I refused to let loose.
“And even if my father could be a monster when he drank, even if he didn’t help out, I never fucking hated him. I just wanted him to be better. And I know that doesn’t make sense to anyone else because he hit me and I used to be scared of him, and he made me fucking miserable, but he was still my father. He was just broken and everyone always told him he was broken, so he just accepted he was no good and that was his life. I couldn’t stand him because of that…. And I let him know. I made it crystal clear. But it frustrated me that he thought so low of himself, and I still wanted to help him. But I didn’t.”
My words jumbled together. I wasn’t positive that my point was coming across clear, or if I sounded like a brainwashed battered child abuse victim, but that didn’t change the things I’d always felt and never said.
“I know it sounds fucked-up. I tried to explain to Clive once, but he didn’t get it.”
“No, I get it,” Nunzio said, voice low. “And I get that you’re hurt because you never had a chance to tell him.”
“Yeah.” I savaged my lower lip to keep it from trembling. There was nothing I hated more than crying, but with Nunzio so close by, my body seemed to think it was safe to open the tear ducts. Like his presence made it safe to break down. “God, I hate this. Change the fucking subject.”
“Are you sure?”
I wiped my face with more vigor. He stopped smoothing back my hair, and I snuck a glance at him from my peripheral vision. Like Raymond, Nunzio’s face was drawn with weariness.
“I wanted to ask you about something else,” he said.
“What?”
“About us. Our situation.”
Four words and I wanted to skitter off and hide under the bed. “What about it?”
“Why are you avoiding me?”
“I’m not.”
“You haven’t returned a call or message in weeks.”
The conversation would have been easier with a cigarette burning between my lips. The constant inhale-exhale would calm my nerves and give me something to do with my increasingly nervous hands.
“I’ve just wanted to be alone. It’s not just you.”
A quiet laugh followed a beat of silence. “Since when am I lumped in with the masses?”
He lay down next to me, and my heart sped up. It was incredible how my body reacted to him now. I wanted to pull him close every time his hand brushed mine, and that was part of the problem. Too much was changing too fast with things that had once been constant in my life.
“I’m sorry.”
I looked at him. “For what?”
“For me. For the way I acted.”
The words didn’t bring clarity, so I frowned.
“You know what I mean,” he said. “With me pressuring you and being so jealous and angry. It was stupid, and I’m sorry if I made things awkward between us. I’m scared I messed everything up, and it won’t ever go back to normal. No matter how much I want you, nothing is worth losing you as my friend.”
I pushed myself up on my elbows and stared down at him, baffled. “You’re not losing me over anything. Especially that.”
“You sure?” Nunzio scoured my face, inches from his own. “I know your father passed right after we got into it about everything, but… I was afraid maybe you thought you couldn’t talk to me. Like I’d make you feel worse.”
“I didn’t want things to get complicated. It was just supposed to be fucking.” When Nunzio said nothing, I sat up fully. “Was it ever just fucking, Nunzio?”
“What do you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. Everything changed after that night with David.”
“Mikey….” The corner of Nunzio’s mouth turned up in a small smile. “I was into you way before July. Why do you think I jumped at the chance to be all up on you as soon as your boyfriend was out of the picture? I couldn’t keep my hands off you that night. I didn’t give two shits about David. Even he noticed. He called me on it later.”
I stared down at him. His usual confidence was replaced by guardedness.
“I just thought you were all over me because you were drunk and I was single.”
“Yeah, that was part of it. I never would have had the balls to put my hands on you if I was sober. I was too scared of freaking you out. But that night… you were so hot. And the way you kept looking at me gave me some hope that I had a shot.” Nunzio huffed out a breath. “But I should have known better. I always knew that if I got a taste, there would be no going back, and I was right.”
His voice pitched lower with every word, but I couldn’t tell if he was bashful or regretful about everything that had happened.
“Anyway, it doesn’t matter,” he said.
“It does matter.”
“Why? Who gives a damn?”
“I give a damn! Why didn’t you tell me you felt that way?” I thought back to all the times we’d screwed around in front of each other, all the times I’d brought a boyfriend along when we were supposed to hang out alone, and wondered if it had bothered him. If he’d been jealous the whole time and done such a good job at masking it that I had never noticed. Never even suspected. “I wouldn’t have been so—”
“Been so what?” The hushed confessional quality faded, and Nunzio was his brash, outspoken self again. “Don’t get the wrong idea. I’m not saying that I’ve been keeping a diary about my secret gay love since we were little kids. I’m not saying I went to sleep weeping all the nights that you went to bed with someone else. I’m saying I wanted you. Ever since the summer before twelfth grade when you came back from Puerto Rico looking like a man… I couldn’t help but enjoy the view, and you made quite a few appearances in my jack-off fantasies.”
“Are you serious?”
He had never acted any differently toward me. The closest he’d come to showing attraction in high school had been excessive tackling while playing football in PE.
“You remember that party we went to for graduation?”
I nodded. “That kid Kenny threw it at his grandmother’s house by Baisely Park because she was out of town.”
“Yeah. It was the first time we got completely shit-faced because people finally came through with something other than beer and wine coolers. By the end of the night I was wasted, and you’d gone off with Deante and Anthony.” Nunzio tilted back his head, his hair spreading across the white sheet in dark whorls. “I went to look for you later and walked in on them balling you. Taking turns.”
My mouth went dry. “You watched?”
“Yeah.”
“The whole time?”
“Long enough to realize what a slut you turn into when you want dick. Before that, we’d always talked about it, and I saw you making out with guys sometimes, but I’d never seen you beg to be pounded like that. I’d never heard your voice when you moaned or saw your face when you came. I started wondering if you’d ever be that way with me. I thought about it a lot.”
The idea of Nunzio watching me get railed by two guys, and the mental image of him possibly jerking off while watching, had me semihard. I dropped my hands into my lap, hoping to hide it, and looked away from his predatory stare.
“Did I live up to your expectations?” It wasn’t the question I’d meant to ask, but it came out anyway.
“Exceeded them.”
A slice of heat went through me, warring with the pitiful darkness that wanted to keep me anchored to the ground. I wanted to grasp on to that flame, but it flickered and blew out.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Because you didn’t see me that way. I could tell. And after college you almost always had a man. And it was always some guy who was everything I wasn’t and nothing I’d ever want to be.”
“Like Clive?”
A measured silence went by, but he didn’t drop his eyes. It occurred to me that I’d said the wrong thing, or asked the wrong question, too late. A muscle in his cheek ticked, and he shrugged.
“Yeah. And he rubbed it in my face every chance he got, because he knew I wanted you. He sniffed me out right away.”
“But I never noticed anything.”
“Because you were so used to the way I acted that you thought it was normal. And it’s not like I was pining every night, but he saw the way I would look at you sometimes. He noticed how I got uptight when he slobbered on you and called you baby, and all of that corny shit. And he knew I hated the idea of you ever moving in with him. That was what did it—the day that conversation came up.” Nunzio snorted softly. “You’d gone to the store and left me alone with his stupid ass, and he brought it up. I must have looked like someone had just ripped off my nuts, and from then on he had my number.”
“That shit was never going to happen.”
“True. But you were still serious with him. I’d been jealous in the past because of other guys, but it was always a sex thing. They could touch you, and I couldn’t. With Clive…. For a while it seemed permanent. It was just different.”
Staying quiet was better than saying the wrong thing again, so I didn’t reply. I could almost hear the building tension in his shoulders, so I squeezed his hand. It was supposed to be a brief touch, but I brought it to my mouth. I kissed the backside of his palm and the corner of his wrist. I felt his pulse against my lips. The rolling wave of lust licked at me again.
“I didn’t tell you that so you could give me a pity fuck.”
“It’s not—” I cleared my throat. “It’s not pity.”
Nunzio pushed himself up on his elbows. “Then tell me what it is.”
We were so close. Close enough for me to feel the heat of his body and inhale his scent, and for it to be torturous to not close the space between us and lick into his mouth. To push him back on the bed and wipe that uncertain look from his gorgeous face.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what’s real and what’s me reacting in the moment like I always do, so I can’t explain.”
“Try.”
“Nunzio, I don’t know.” I jerked my eyes away from his. “I can tell you that it would be so easy to kiss you right now, to beg you to make me feel anything other than what I’ve been feeling for the past few weeks. But that would be me using you, not me figuring out what the hell I’ve been feeling since we started this. And I don’t know what I’m feeling. I don’t know if it’s real or if I’m infatuated with the sex or if I just like the idea of you wanting me.”
“But what if I said I’d rather have you like that than not at all?”
I released an explosive sigh. “I can’t do that to you, niño.”
Nunzio dropped back on the bed. “I should have kept my fucking mouth shut.”
I shoved his knee. “No. It can’t be like that with us. You know it. We can’t do that casual thing.”
“We could try.” Nunzio’s intense gaze found mine again. “Maybe you don’t want me here—” He brushed his fingers over my heart. “But I know when we’re having sex, when I’m in you deep, you don’t want anyone else. It’s just you and me, and it’s fucking perfect, and you’re mine. That could be enough for me.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
I knew it wasn’t true, and I wasn’t going to agree to anything with every thought stained by eight shades of depression. Between work, my father, and all of the drinking, I had no confidence in any decisions I’d make now, or even the ones I’d been making in the past few months. Making a wrong move and losing Nunzio was far more terrifying than not getting to taste him anytime I wanted.
Nunzio didn’t respond, and we sat in silence.
It would have been easy to stretch out next to him, to burrow into his side and bury my face in the crook of his neck. To let him wrap his arms around me and fall asleep that way, warm and enveloped in the arms of someone who wanted me. Maybe loved me.
I wanted that. I wanted him. But I wasn’t going to keep using him for comfort when he knew exactly what he wanted and my own reasoning was lost in a dreary abyss of confusion, self-loathing, and cynicism.
Nunzio rolled off the bed and stood. “Call me if you need me.”
I knew I should speak, but he left the room before any words came to mind.