Bad Things (49 page)

“Carson. I meant it, when I told you I love you. I do. But we can’t do this.”

He had to be talking about just this. This moment, on the couch. This conversation. Not all of it. Not everything they had together.

Xavier caressed his face, and gave his lips a soft kiss. “We don’t work. As a couple. We can’t work.”

No. No no no
.

“
We do work.” Carson tried to stay calm. To get that pleading, desperate note out of his voice. “I’ve been happier with you, than I’ve ever been in my life.”

God, his smile was the saddest thing Carson had ever seen. “
Cariño
. That’s only because you haven’t lived.”

“
Don’t. That isn’t fair. Don’t punish me for not being braver sooner.”

“
I’m not punishing you. I’m being kind. I know this hurts, right now. But you have to trust me. Fuck, trust yourself. You know I’m right. You can’t just settle in with the first guy who ever kissed you and made you come. You have to date. Fuck. Play. You have at least a good ten years of self-denial to make up for.”

One of those sour laughs erupted from his chest. “Oh my God, Xavi. Who in hell is going to help me make up for lost time, better than you’ve been?”

“Only one way to find out.”

Maybe if he did that breathing thing Xavier always did, he wouldn’t start crying in frustration. Struggling not to fall apart, he heard how angry he sounded. “Did you know that before you caught me fucking with your computer, I…wanted you? Had feelings for you?”

His mocking grin, tinged with sadness and tenderness. “You weren’t very subtle.”

“
I don’t mean I was checking out your dick in those shorts while you worked out. I mean, I woke up on this couch in the morning, and instantly felt happy, because I knew you were going to come out of your bedroom, with your wild bedhead, your scent stronger than usual, because you would wait to shower until after you’d worked out. I’d lie there, and think about what to make you for breakfast, wondering how many other men had made you breakfast in the morning.

“
I wouldn’t in the morning, because I was afraid you’d catch me, but at night, I’d fantasize long, elaborate scenarios of us talking, or doing some normal thing, like walking Third Street Promenade, and I’d imagine you giving me that grin, and kissing me. I must have jerked off ten times in three days, thinking about you taking my virginity.”

Carson heard another sour laugh hiss out of his throat.

“So ridiculous. I pictured you touching me so gently. Slowly and carefully.”

Even though he could see how much those words hurt Xavier, Carson still felt embarrassed. Foolish.

“I know you’ll laugh. It’s okay. Go ahead. I laugh too, now. I imagined you being my boyfriend. Us walking around the city, holding hands, me photographing you everywhere. Going to bars and making out in public.

“
And then you caught me spying for Max.”

Xavier didn’t move, but he looked like he’d just been punched. Alert and defended. But then Carson watched him make himself soft and vulnerable. Like he wanted Carson to hurt him.

“I was a twenty-seven year-old dumb kid, crushing on you. Picturing, over and over, how you’d kiss me. How you’d touch me. How you’d make love to me the first time. And then I woke up in your basement, handcuffed.

“
You were so fucking scary. I wonder if you have any idea what it feels like to be so scared of someone. You were so fucking angry, under all your cruel games. Your grin. Your taunts. As soon as you started taking off my clothes, I thought you were going to rape me. And I could see how much you were enjoying my fear. That you were getting off on terrifying me.”

Every passing moment, Xavier was more and more pale, as if he were losing blood with every word.

“But maybe you didn’t notice how much it hurt me. I know how stupid it is. But don’t laugh at this part, okay? I had let myself start to love you, a little bit. Even though we didn’t know each other well enough. And I’d let myself daydream, for hours, that you liked me. That you were attracted to me. That if I could just spend enough time with you, because I had that dumb excuse Max had dreamed up, you might start to love me back.

“
And then, you had me chained to that post. And you were scaring and humiliating me. It fucking broke my heart. I know, I should have been worried about bigger things, like whether you were going to kill me, or not. And I was. But the sadness was actually worse, somehow.”

The look on Xavier’s face was hurting Carson, squeezing his lungs and throat, making it hard to breathe, hard to talk.

“But your cruelty rescued me.”

Derisive grin, set in an expression of utter heartbreak.

“And you knew it. I know it wasn’t why you were doing those things. But you knew it. Not just that you were getting me out from under Max’s whip. My dad’s, too—even if you didn’t know about him, you knew there was something inside of me, fucking me up. And you tore it apart, little by little. Starting in that basement. And even down there…”

He waited for Xavier to look at him again. Because as soon as he’d started exonerating him, Xavier’s face had started to look like that blank, smooth mask again.

“Even down there, I started to love you. The real you. Real love. And you started loving me, too. You already loved me, the first time you fucked me.”

“
We were each feeding the others’ needs. That’s not love,” Xavier said quietly.

“
Yes. That is love. That’s exactly what love is. Understanding another person so well, you know how to help them be what they need to be, and giving them that.

“
You’re the one who sees me and understands me, Xavi. No other man could have done what you’ve done for me. What your love has done for me.”

There was a moment, perfect, beautiful, where Xavier’s gaze was soft and open, like it was pulling Carson into a close, dark warmth where they would be safe and happy together. But the moment slipped past. Helpless, not understanding, Carson watched his gaze cool and harden.

But his voice was gentle. Quiet. “If you believe that, you’ll understand. Letting you go now, is me loving you. You don’t want it, right now. You can’t see that you need it. Just like you resisted everything in the basement. But I’m doing it, because I know it’s what you need.”

“
Xavi, no.”

“
Please. Carson. Don’t make me be even crueler. Give me what I need, too. Go.”

He was wrong. Xavier was fucking wrong. Wrecking everything for nothing. But Carson didn’t know what to say to convince him. And he was going to start crying. Any second. No way could he let that happen. Not for pride, but because he was terrified Xavier would back down, if he thought he was hurting him too much. And he wasn’t going to cling to him using emotional blackmail. Not even accidentally.

He didn’t want to be petulant, either. He wanted to be adult. Hug and kiss him goodbye. But the tears were rising up his throat, flooding his head, starting to burst through. He just barely managed to mumble, “All right,” and rush for the door.

Maybe because he was bowed down, trying to hide his face and his tears, he noticed the paper bag sitting by the front door, and even how the white T-shirt with FAG written in black marker was neatly folded at the bottom of it. What a sad, perfect souvenir of them. And it was his, wasn’t it? He snatched the bag as he left, pulling the door shut behind him as he fled. But he didn’t slam it, because he didn’t want to be that sad cliché of a jilted lover, and he never heard the click of the latch. But it didn’t matter. Xavier would close it.

Carson had been looking at that fucking bag for weeks. Every time he left to go grocery shopping, every time he came home from a shoot. He’d dropped it right next to his front door when he’d gotten home, and left it there. As if it was a magic charm that would let him invoke his final scene with Xavier, go through it again, say something different. Do something else, to make Xavier say, “You’re right. We fit. We’re in love. Let’s really be together. Not like Dario and Aidan, but like us.”

But if that fucking bag was a magic charm, Carson didn’t know how to make it work. Not sober. Not stoned. Not drunk on whiskey, or puking his guts out the next morning.

A stupid idea came to him. He laughed. And then he thought about how much it scared him, how much it would hurt. It sounded nice to feel scared and hurt—way fucking better than sitting in his depressing apartment aching for Xavier.

He peeled off the shirt he was wearing, snatched the T-shirt out of the bag, put it on, grabbed his keys, and left. Not even deciding where he was going, until he was in Venice, as if the magic of the T-shirt had been that it was a homing beacon, all along, and now it was taking him back to Xavier.

But he didn’t go to Xavier’s. He went to the beach. His heart was beating so hard, it triggered a nausea that was slowly creeping up through his guts and into his throat. Even that was a welcome change from the constant, hollow ache.

He got out of his car and headed down toward the promenade, walking by the occasional person as he descended the narrow residential side streets, and then merging into the cross-current of people streaming in both directions along the wide asphalt path bordering the sand. Fear and pride mingling, like a martyr he stared into as many faces as he could, waiting for each person to see the shirt. Read what it said. Look at him and judge him.

Two old ladies wearing identical I HEART Venice T-shirts. A pack of tweens in bikini tops and cutoff shorts so tiny that when he turned back, he saw ten tanned ass cheeks jiggling as they walked away. Three big burly frat types in sunglasses and board shorts. A family of tourists with Jersey accents: a dad, a mom, and three little boys that reminded him of his own family, the summer they’d come down to Disneyland.

Every time someone’s eyes shifted from his face, down to the word FAG in huge letters across his chest, then up again, he braced himself. But no one said anything to him. He didn’t hear any disapproving murmurs as people passed out of sight behind him. Not one look of reproach or disgust.

But he was getting stared at. Blatantly, embarrassingly checked out. A few of the guys were way too old for him, but it still felt nice. Really fucking nice. A few guys way too young for him, too. God, he couldn’t imagine kissing someone—or God forbid, dating someone—who was twenty or eighteen or however old some of these guys were.

There was a funny, exponential power to those looks he was getting. Because he’d probably been walking for more than half an hour before he got the first one. It made him blush. It made him smile. And less than five minutes later, the second guy was checking him out. And soon, it felt like he was a magnet for every gay guy in Venice.

Not that they were coming up to him and handing him their phone numbers, or following him, or trying to waylay him with flirty small-talk. They were just looks. Smiles. And one very flamboyant, “Oh yes, I would!” with a dramatic looking over, from head to toe, and up to his crotch.

Only one guy actually approached him, about half an hour after he’d stopped expecting to get spit on or yelled at, and fifteen minutes after he’d started wondering if he was actually, accidentally, advertising a desire to get picked up and fucked.

“
I like the home made effect,” the guy gestured toward his chest. “It’s got a certain flavor of authenticity, or something.”

The guy sat down next to Carson, where he’d parked himself while he nursed an iced coffee and switched into people-watching mode, slightly drained after an hour of trying to analyze what every passing person was thinking about him.

“Ryan,” the guy said, with a wide, easy, slightly artificial smile. Not like he was being fake. Just, a little too aware of exactly how he looked when he smiled like that, as if he’d made a study of exactly how to exploit his stereotypically Californian good looks. Shaggy blond hair that for some reason made Carson think he was a surfer: high cheek bones, straight white teeth, maybe a tad on the large side, but not out of proportion with his wide mouth. Lanky, tanned limbs.

“
Carson.”

“
So, how’s that working for you?”

“
How’s what working for me?”

“
The shirt. You’re getting cruised a ton, I bet.”

Carson laughed. Even if he’d read gay blogs and accumulated some vocabulary, it was funny to have someone casually throw the lingo at him.

“I’ve gotten a couple looks.”

“
Please. Modest, much? All this,” he gestured at Carson like a model displaying an item in an infomercial, “wrapped up in this?” He ran his finger across the letters, lightly grazing Carson’s nipple as he brushed past the G.

Instant rush of heat to Carson’s face. The second wave hit his balls.

Not sure if he was trying to make himself feel better, or worse, ten minutes later, Carson said yes when Ryan asked him if he wanted to walk the half mile to his studio apartment, and fuck. Carson had fretted the whole way there that he would freak out, the way he’d freaked out with Dario and Aidan, the way he’d freaked out with Xavier. But it was surprisingly easy, maybe because Ryan was so obviously taking for granted that it would be easy. The most natural thing in the world—two guys in their mid-twenties, fucking.

Playful, pleasurable kisses. Sensual touches. Eager sucking. A marathon of fucking, like you’d probably expect from an athletic guy in his prime. No soul-reading looks, no ravenous frenzy of tasting and clawing and claiming.

After, they exchanged numbers, even though Carson was pretty sure he’d have no interest in seeing Ryan again, and he was almost as sure that the conquest had satisfied Ryan’s interest in him. The post-fuck high lasted him the whole drive home.

But once he stepped into his apartment, he was swallowed up by a lonely emptiness almost as abysmal as the one he’d always felt after fucking a woman. Before, he’d always blamed the lying—lying to the woman, lying to himself.

Now what could he blame? Only that he knew that however much fun it had been writhing naked with a beautiful stranger, nothing in those hours had touched anything deeper than his body.

He missed Xavier. His chest ached with missing Xavier. His belly flipped and clenched with anxiety that he’d never see Xavier again, except maybe at some group thing with Dario and Aidan. Which would maybe be worse than not seeing him.

But he might as well give up on that fucking paper bag creating a magical portal back to the moment before he’d lost him. If it ever had mystical power, he’d surely gutted it, anyway, when he’d yanked the T-shirt out of it.

He snatched it from its place, stupidly feeling like he might start crying, because for some ridiculous reason getting rid of it felt like giving up on Xavier. Giving up on the strange, intense, dangerous love they’d barely started to share.

And he hadn’t. Every day, he hoped he’d get a text. A call. Or, God, God it made him unbearably, cruelly happy to imagine coming home and finding Xavier waiting for him, half hidden in the shadows, like he had been that night after Elena had let him out of the basement.

Any reasonable person trying to guard their sanity would have recycled the bag. Gotten it out of fucking sight and out of fucking mind for good. But Carson pretended he didn’t want to be wasteful, and started folding it to put away in a drawer. Because he was just so fucking environmentally friendly, like that. But the bag didn’t want to fold. Something inside.

A thin notebook. No. A sketchbook.

Xavier’s sketchbook, full of tattoo designs, each one an incredible work of art. Every one of them dark. Something sinister, something from the realm of nature, its continuous curves cruelly, violently integrated with, constrained and crushed by the brutal edges and angles of civilization. Almost the whole book was full. Near the end, the tattoo Xavier had put on his own thigh just days after they’d gotten back from Sacramento. The mystical squid, like something out of Greek mythology or H.P. Lovecraft, contained by a failing mechanism of steampunk aesthetic. And after that, seven pages of trees.

The seven trees were nothing like any of the other designs in the book. Surreal, otherworldly, mystical, yes. Dark and twisted, yes. But nothing man-made encroached on their organic curves, their gnarled roots and mangled trunks, their fractal proliferation of mutant branches and tortured leaves.

None of the seven was quite like the one before it. Like Xavier had been working through an idea, progressing from draft to draft. No similar progression of duplicates anywhere else in the book, as if all his other ideas emerged whole from his imagination, like Mozart’s symphonies. Unless he’d torn out the pages of rejects. But there were no remnant shreds of discarded pages.

But the tree was evolving. In its first incarnation, it was all grotesque malformation, the atrophied roots and sickly trunk sagging and bending, unable to support or feed the emaciated branches, all its leaves shriveled before they were formed.  Except one, as if every precious mineral and molecule of carbon had been diverted to this one leaf, which spread itself wide, its edges bright with reds and oranges and golds.

The third tree had evolved to bear fruit. But its fruit was small and shriveled and hard-looking.

Looking at the seventh tree, Carson felt strangely sad. People and animals provoked that kind of pity. But a plant? It felt like grief, looking at it. Grief, and a precarious, painful hope. Like the others, the tree was twisted and sickly, except that from among its tangle of mangled roots, one had burrowed far from the nest in the shallow hollow of a flat stone where the other roots were intertwining and choking each other. And from the thriving curves of this one root, almost seeming to undulate in its implied earth, a vibrant, luscious health rose up the entire height of the tree. A narrow section of its trunk and all the reaching limbs branching off from it thriving, rich, saturated shades of gold and red emanated from below and between the sick and rotting parts of the tree. And among the leaves, big and full and boldly hued, fat, heavy, ripe fruit.

Carson didn’t get stoned. He didn’t drink. Even though he never fell asleep that night.

He thought it would be hard. That he wouldn’t be able to step out his door, or that he’d sit in the car, too scared to start the engine. Or that he’d chicken out at the last second, and drive past his house without stopping.

But it was easy. Because he didn’t have a choice. He couldn’t let another day go by without seeing Xavier.

He felt strange, a bit like gravity was slowly letting go of him, and he was about to start floating, a giddy, nauseating sensation, as he crossed the street and walked up the cement driveway, past Xavier’s car, up the concrete steps, and rang the bell. His heart hammered harder, faster with every passing second. Maybe Xavier had seen him pull up, and wouldn’t come to the door. Maybe he’d open it, just to tell him he had to leave. That he had to leave him alone.

God. Oh God.
Maybe he wasn’t alone.

The unmistakable, memorized forever sound of Xavier’s steps. The metallic click of the lock unbolting. No surprise in Xavier’s face. As if he’d known he was coming, or really had seen him drive up and watched him walking up the drive. Which would mean the minute he’d made Carson wait, he’d been deciding whether or not to open the door. Or what to say. Or how to get rid of him.

Cryptic grin. Veiled eyes. “Hi Carson.”

“
Hi Xavi.”

There was no dramatic hesitation. Xavier just opened the door wide and stepped aside so Carson could come in.

“I didn’t text first, because I was afraid you wouldn’t let me come over,” Carson confessed.

Gaze still opaque, Xavier gave Carson a warm smile. “I’m always here for you, if you need me.”

Yes. I need you. Every day. All the time.

Carson handed Xavier his sketchbook. “I didn’t mean to take this when I left. I wanted to give it back to you.”

As Xavier took the book, his warm smile morphed into that familiar, exasperating, beloved mocking grin. And that was fine. Carson knew how flimsy a pretext it was. A few pregnant, silent moments crawled by, then Xavier arched an eyebrow, and Carson knew he had to say something more.

“
I miss you.”

The mocking grin disappeared, and the veil over his gaze seemed to thicken. Xavier didn’t answer right away. Finally, he said quietly, “I miss you, too.”

“Can we talk about this again?”

“
We can talk, if you want to. But I haven’t changed my mind.”

Carson had been pretty sure that was how this was going to go. Because if Xavier had changed his mind, he would have called. Fuck that. He would have come for him.

“Then, I want to ask you a favor.”

“
Okay.”