CHAPTER 21
Vaughn
After a casual breakfast of cereal and Entenmann’s coffee cake, I found my attention split between wondering what we’d do for two entire days at the Foxes’ house, and trying to figure out if the dismal state of my hair was due to the way William had slept with his fingers tangled in it or the Foxes’ unfortunate hard water.
We watched the news for an hour or so, William and Charlotte cursing the state of the world, their parents largely silent, and then Charlotte went to her room to return some phone calls. Karen started to clean, and Will and Henry began restlessly attempting to fix a sticky drawer on the television console. It seemed no one was quite sure how to spend the time together.
I watched as William and Henry performed a tango of competency. Each new project—rehanging a crooked picture, sanding out a burn in the kitchen table, recaulking around the downstairs toilet—was a microcosm of father-son competition. Henry had clearly taught Will to do these things and, over time, Will had developed his own methods. Each time William did something as Henry had taught him, Henry was quiet, proud, relieved. Each time he questioned, or proposed an alternative, Henry was defensive, judgmental, and—when Will’s suggestions turned out to work—embarrassed.
William had been right when he’d said his father wasn’t mean. Henry wasn’t in any way nasty or conniving; to the contrary, he struck me as a thoroughly straightforward and staunchly ethical man. Much like Will.
But unlike Will, Henry seemed to lack creativity and empathy. His beliefs, his ethics, his standards, and his expectations were all deeply rooted in his own limited experience. His world was blinkered, and thus so was his capacity to understand anything that fell outside his scope. Including his son.
William was clearly used to their dynamic—aware, but resigned. Seeing them together gave me a whole new admiration for my lover, who had taken the oppositional values his parents had instilled, and used them as the foundation for his understanding of the world, rather than as limits.
I hadn’t even done any of the work, but I was mentally exhausted by early afternoon, when Karen interrupted the Home and Garden Channel weekend fix-it-up show starring William and Henry.
“Will, dear, could you and Amory go pick up the trays from the grocery store? Your aunt and uncle will be here in a few hours and the basement is still a mess. Your sister is apparently incapable of taking a single day off. She’s been on the phone for hours.”
William’s mouth quirked, and I wondered if he was generally amused by his mother or if he had some inside information that Charlotte might be on the phone with someone not strictly work-related.
“I didn’t know your aunt and uncle were coming,” I told Will as he backed his mother’s Toyota Camry out of the driveway.
“Oh, I guess I forgot to tell you. They always come. It’s my mom’s sister, Lisa, and her husband, Gary. Their kids—my cousins—used to come. There are three of them. But I think only Megan is coming. Rick lives in Arizona and Jana just moved to…maybe Florida? So I think it was too far. Megan’s the youngest. She’s always been all right to me, but she irritates the hell out of Charlie.”
“Oh? How come?”
“She’s a bit…” I could see him searching for a descriptor that wasn’t too mean. “Superficial,” he settled on finally.
We pulled into the parking lot of a Kroger, and I realized it was the first time William and I had ever been grocery shopping together. I appreciated the cheerful domesticity of it, though supermarkets were something I usually avoided at all cost. Seeing a throng of harried shoppers stuffing their carts with flats of juice boxes, bags of Doritos, and family-sized boxes of sugary cereal made subsequently enjoying a meal difficult. Give me the dignity of a specialty market any day.
Will was clearly familiar with the layout of the store and went right to the deli section, peering down at trays of cold cuts encased in plastic domes. Rolls and lines of sliced meats, chunks of artificially orange cheeses, and dry-looking baby carrots made my nose twitch in distaste. Will piled three of them into a shopping cart the size of his mother’s car and walked to the bread.
I breathed in deeply through my nose and out through my mouth to distance myself from this awful place, but quickly regretted it when breathing in through my nose resulted in smelling the chemical tang of plastic mixed with meat. So I breathed shallowly through my mouth, and pictured myself in a better place. On the beach, with William sprawled in the chaise longue beside me, his sleek chest gleaming with oil in the tropical sun.
“Oh Vaughn, with all this travel stuff, I completely forgot to tell you that Brett Lawson got transferred,” Will said, and I opened my eyes. We were still in the fluorescent-lit hellscape of the supermarket. “Jodie told me he got transferred to Springfield. Bet he wasn’t pleased about that.” Will smirked.
“Good, good,” I said. “I didn’t like how he spoke to you at all.”
William was off, and I trailed after him, attempting not to look at anything, or breathe. He piled the groceries on the checkout counter, still talking about Lawson as a tired-looking woman rang us up.
“I swear, he got exactly what he deserved too. Remember that crack he made about the Midwest when we were in Durham? And they say people don’t get what they deserve.” He grinned as we walked to the car, handing me a bag.
“Yes, I’m so glad you agree it was the right thing,” I said absently, forcing my shoulders to relax as I could finally draw a breath that didn’t smell like processed food and desperation.
“Well, it was certainly good for—wait, what do you mean the right thing?”
“What? Nothing. What were you saying?” Oh dear.
William stopped outside the car and whipped around to look at me, eyes narrowed. “Did you have something to do with Lawson’s transfer?”
“Why on earth would the FBI take anything I had to say into consideration?” I said, damning all supermarkets to the darkest corners of hell for getting me so out of sorts that I’d walked right into that one. This was not a thing that I did.
“Amory.” Will’s voice was low and threatening. “Did you have something to do with it?”
I evaluated my options under Will’s glare. I didn’t like to lie to him. But I could already tell his feelings on the matter were not favorable. I decided to try one last attempt to simply shut this down, in the hopes that he would see it would be better for everyone if we simply drove back to his parents’ house so that everyone (who wasn’t me) could eat meat and cheese from these horrifying plastic sarcophagi and enjoy family togetherness at the holiday.
“Brett Lawson was a bigoted menace and I’m very glad that neither you nor anyone else will have to put up with his bullying and his prejudice. Surely we should get home before your mother worries.”
William’s face went cold, but he unlocked the car and we loaded the groceries in the back seat. This was not going to go well. Will had no sense of self-preservation in such things. His principles, much though I admired them in the abstract, prevented him from ever letting things go when it was easier to do so. Damn, damn, damn.
His jaw set and his nostrils flared, William drove out of the parking lot.
“Let me get this straight,” he bit off. “You yet again decided that you could determine the fate of things that have nothing to do with you, because you think you can just do whatever you want. No consequences, even when it’s playing with people’s lives.”
“You have something to do with me. I was protecting you.”
His laugh was a bark. “Yeah, I feel very protected, Vaughn. I definitely don’t feel humiliated because my boyfriend thinks I’m so incapable of dealing with a coworker that he has to go behind my back, to my boss’s boss, and no doubt wield some unholy combination of money and influence to get that coworker transferred out of the state. Who’s the bully now?”
“Hold on. I didn’t do it because I think you are incapable. You’re the most capable man I’ve ever met.”
“But you did do it.”
“Look, love,” I sighed. “The FBI reeks of systemic homophobia. Brett Lawson was never going to be appropriately dealt with when the organization itself doesn’t value the safety—”
“No. No, do not make this about the FBI. You did this. You chose this. You went behind my back and I don’t care why you did it. You lied to me. You managed me. You did what you always do, which is decide that you know what’s best and damn anyone who doesn’t agree. After you promised me you wouldn’t. This isn’t having the manager move a group of drunk diners, Vaughn. This is someone’s life.”
The words tore through me like bullets. Everything he’d said was true. And none of it was. How could I explain to him that the world wasn’t fair? That it was all rigged anyway, and I was only doing what I could to tip it in the favor of someone I loved. That there was no honor in playing by the rules of a rigged game.
“William, pull over,” I said softly.
I was sure he’d tell me to fuck myself since I’d just told him what to do, but apparently anger outweighed spite, because he pulled the car to the side of the road, and rocketed from his seat, slamming the door behind him, and I followed.
“I can’t believe you,” he ranted. “I honestly can’t. I thought…I thought we were past this! I thought we agreed.”
He was genuinely upset, and everything in me yearned to make it go away, if I only knew how. “I didn’t…I didn’t steal anything. I just—”
Will wheeled around and glared at me. “It’s the same thing, Vaughn. You did steal something. You stole Lawson’s right to his job, for one thing. My chance to handle my own problem, for another. People are not just chess pieces you get to manipulate! Or paintings you can shuffle around when the mood strikes you to redecorate. You—god, how dare you?”
I shut my mouth and I did what I rarely ever had to do. I forced myself to acknowledge that, from William’s perspective, I had behaved badly. If he cared more about the unfairness perpetrated upon Lawson than on the fact that Lawson deserved it, there was nothing I could say to change his mind. William wasn’t like me; he needed to trust the system. He needed to believe the rules and laws he worked to uphold every day meant something. Because if he stopped believing that, what would he have left? If I accepted Will as he was, I had to accept this about him too, no matter how much it hurt to see myself the way he saw me.
“I admit, I didn’t consider it from your perspective,” I said slowly. “I hear where you’re coming from. I apologize.”
I put my hand on his shoulder, wishing desperately that we could start the whole day over again. Return to the morning sun peeking through the window of William’s childhood bedroom and alighting on our intertwined bodies. To the minutes I’d spent watching him wake slowly, his face young in sleep, then irritated at the sun, then deeply, purely, almost heartbreakingly joyful when he opened his eyes and remembered that I was there. There was a softness to him at such moments that I stored deep inside, in a part of me no one had ever touched before. I wanted so desperately to take care of him. To make him happy. To give him everything.
If it were possible to create for him a world where things were fair and the rules did apply equally to people, I would have given up every scrap of wealth and comfort to do so. Tinkering behind the scenes to approximate one was all I could do. But I would give that up too, if it was what he wanted. If it would mean I could wake up with him like that every morning in the future.
“I need you to leave.” William’s tone was flat, his voice strangled.
“What?”
My heart began to pound and a vast emptiness opened where my stomach should be.
“I can’t have you here,” he said. “I can’t…it’s Thanksgiving, and my family, and—I need you to go because I can’t deal with this here.”
“William, I—”
He shook his head sharply and looked away, getting back in the car.
I stood for a moment, looking at the brown paper bags in the back seat. Suddenly, I was overcome with the desire to be forced into eating those cold cuts. I would have given anything for the chance to make a face at their slimy texture and processed taste, and hear William call me a snob, smiling at me.
I slid into the car and he began to drive before I even had my seat belt on.
He pulled into the driveway and turned to me. His expression was tortured, his eyes tired. “Now, please,” he said softly.
I reached out to cup his cheek and he didn’t pull away. He just closed his eyes as if it were too much.
“If that’s what you need,” I murmured, and he nodded once. Then he set his mouth, grabbed the bags from the back seat, and blundered into the house without looking back, leaving me in the passenger seat.