By Any Other Name (17 page)

The rest of the car ride was strained and silent. As soon as they parked in the driveway, Skye was out of the car and taking the bags from the back seat. Dru walked to the door and opened it, waiting for Skye to go through. He was nervous, his breath was coming in gasps, and he could feel his heart beating faster and faster.

He watched as Skye dropped the shopping bags next to the stairs and continued straight to the living room, heading for the couch. Dru kicked off his shoes and walked after Skye, his steps somehow slowing down one by one until he was standing next to the couch and looking at Skye, who wasn’t exactly looking at him. He was waiting.

Dru sat down on the end of the couch gracefully, carefully, instead of plopping down on the cushions like he normally did.

“Okay, so…,” he started, swallowing nervously again and running his fingers through his hair. He had to close his eyes for a moment. There was no telling how Skye would feel; he’d given no hints at all. It was different to know he was gay now than to know he had been gay all along, almost from the beginning of their friendship.

He felt Skye shift, and suddenly there was warmth next to him and a hand on his thigh.

“Dru? Look at me,” Skye said, and Dru opened his eyes again, looking at his friend with confusion. “It’s going to be okay. No matter what you tell me, we’re going to be okay. You never hurt me, that’s the most important thing. Everyone else I knew in my teens ended up hurting me in some way, but you never did. That’s why I’m here, because you’re my one good memory. Nothing will change that.”

Dru nodded and closed his eyes again. He felt Skye stay where he was, and it comforted him as much as it made him scared. Would his friend pull away from him when the truth was out?

Only one way to find out.

“I…. One night we were sleeping in the tent.” He opened his eyes briefly to see Skye nod that he still remembered. “I woke up for some reason. It took me a while, but I realized you were having a very nice dream….” Dru felt Skye tense next to him.

“It was normal, I suppose. Hell, we all have those dreams while we’re growing up. Anyway, there I was, feeling like a weirdo for listening to his best friend having a private moment like that….” He sighed and leaned forward, elbows on his knees and his face buried in his hands.

Skye pulled his hand away from Dru’s thigh but placed another one on his back, his fingers moving a bit in circles that were meant to be soothing.

“I wanted to bolt out of the tent, but I was afraid you’d wake up. You were dry-humping your mattress and all, it was… it was so…
hot
.”

The fingers stopped.

“I… I realized I was hard. Just out of the blue, I was hard, and it was because I was listening in on you having a dream. That’s when I got out of the tent and ran inside until I calmed down,” Dru said, his voice becoming quieter and quieter. “That’s when I knew I wasn’t like other boys. Then I went to my dad’s study at home and did some research, thought things out. Went to the library when school started again. After some time I think I just knew.”

After an agonizing minute or two, the fingers began to move again, and Dru let out a stuttering breath.

“Why didn’t you tell me? Even if not… exactly… but that you were gay?” Skye asked quietly.

“Because you would have eventually asked how I knew. When I never dated girls, how could I know? You were an inquisitive kid.” It was the truth, sort of. “And I wasn’t ready to lose you, if you had freaked out. If I had lost you, I wouldn’t have had much to live for.”

Now it was Skye who leaned back and closed his eyes.

“And then it happened anyway,” Skye said in a mumble that barely reached Dru right next to him.

“No… it was… you didn’t do it on purpose. You didn’t
do
anything,” Dru said quickly and turned around to look at Skye. His knee was touching Skye’s thigh, and he wasn’t worried about the reaction, not anymore. This conversation was turning into something heavier now; they both needed some comfort.

“No, but I left. I shouldn’t have left. I should have… fought to stay. So many things would have been different.” Skye spoke in a tone of self-loathing that just about broke Dru’s heart.

Dru had a choice here: he could either downplay everything or be honest and tell Skye the whole truth.

He chose honesty. “After… after I was sure you wouldn’t contact me, things went to hell for me too. Different hell, but one nonetheless. I started to drink. I got into fights. I pissed off my parents, but they couldn’t do anything as long as I was a minor. As soon as I was eighteen, they kicked me out to the apartment they own in town. When I was twenty-one, they told me to move out of Rowan Falls and gave me the trust fund my grandpa left me. That was pretty much it. I see them once a year if I have to. I’d rather not, but Thom believes that I should make an effort.”

Suddenly Skye’s arms were around him. “I’m so sorry. I never meant to hurt you,” Skye whispered into his neck and held him tightly to his bigger body.

“It’s okay… you’re here now. Just… just don’t go away anymore,” Dru heard himself say and hoped that it didn’t sound too needy.

“I’ll be here as long as you and Thom both want me here,” Skye said.

Thom

When
Thom came home an hour or so later, he found the shopping bags at the bottom of the stairs and Skye and Dru asleep on the couch. They were holding each other, Skye’s head was on Dru’s shoulder, and they looked peaceful.

Skye

“So what
you are saying is that you feel safe around Thom and he makes you feel something you don’t understand?” Dr. Patricia West asked.

“Yeah. I mean, of course it’s more than just…. I don’t even know what I’m talking about.” Skye threw his hands in the air and got up from the comfortable armchair he had been sitting in.

“Now what about what Dru told you last month about his sexual awakening? How does that make you feel?”

Skye walked to the windows and looked out at the view. Dr. West was a hardcore professional with this gorgeous office in the seventh floor of one of the high-rises in the city.

“I don’t know. He’s never hurt me. He’s still…
home
to me. But….” He sighed and leaned his forehead on the glass, not caring a bit if there was a mark for the cleaning crew left behind.

“Let’s do this one thing at the time. You say he’s home to you. What do you mean?” Pat, as Skye called her in his head, asked in her best “tell me
everything
” tone.

“That’s what he is. We moved a lot when I was a kid, as you know,” Skye started and turned to walk back to his chair. “Trailer trash, that’s what we were. And then, when I was thirteen, we ended up in Rowan Falls. One day this kid came up to me and wanted to be my friend. It made no sense. He was rich and I was poor, he was funny and attractive and I was neither. But he kept the bullies at bay and wanted to hang out with me. So I let him.” Skye shrugged after he sat down in his chair again.

“Then, after a while, I figured out he had done it out of curiosity. He hadn’t met anyone as poor as me before, and of course he wanted to piss off his uppity parents. And boy, were they pissed off for real.” He chuckled with little amusement.

“I suppose he got used to me being around. We became friends and were pretty much inseparable from when we were thirteen until I… moved. At some point in that time, I realized I felt at home in Rowan Falls, but not in our trailer or anywhere else specifically. Only when I was around Dru.” Skye looked at Patricia thoughtfully. “And now, as soon as I saw him at the airport, I felt at ease on some level I haven’t been since that day.”

The shrink nodded and scribbled something on her notepad and then looked at Skye again. “So, about the ‘but’ in what you were saying. You don’t believe Dru would hurt you, and he’s home to you. But… what?”

“It’s not like I’m… disgusted or anything. I think it’s part…. I think I feel a bit odd that he didn’t tell me back then, but I understand in a way. I wouldn’t have told him either. The main thing….” He sighed and pulled his feet up in the chair. “I’m thinking that maybe I had those feelings too, you know?”

“Maybe you had those feelings? You aren’t sure? Or are you trying to figure out if you did?”

“I don’t think I ever thought about it like that. It was just this… this feeling of being whole around him.” Skye let his chin lean on his crossed hands on top of his knees.

Patricia waited for him to continue, to complete the thought. He had no idea how the woman knew there was more when he himself didn’t know it.

“I suppose I felt some adolescent version of what I see between him and Thom now,” Skye said quietly, almost hesitantly.

“How do you feel about that?”

Skye wondered how many times he had been asked that in the last two years. “It feels wrong,” he said, his voice having transformed into some sort of shaking whisper.

“Why is that?” The woman didn’t look stressed about his changed demeanor at all.

“Because I’m thinking that maybe the man made me like this. Maybe I was straight and he turned me gay or… or questioning or whatever. Maybe the bad things that happened changed me, and maybe it’s wrong and….” Skye was quiet for a moment, trying to organize his jumbled thoughts a bit better.

And then it hit him. “Because… because I want to feel loved like that too. And I can’t. Not… not with them.”

There was a long silence that lasted until Skye looked up at Patricia. “What?” he asked, confused.

“Do you realize you just said ‘not with them’?”

“And?”

“Most people would say ‘not with him’.” The look she gave Skye annoyed him.

“So?” he asked, almost snapped at the woman.

“Have you considered the fact that you might not want it with Dru, but with both of them?”

He stood
at the curb in front of the high-rise and thought about everything they had talked about. It was… weird.

When the BMW stopped in front of him, it took him a few seconds to snap into motion again. He opened the door and stepped into the car. “Hi” was all he offered to Thom. He was still deep in thought.

“Hello.” Thom steered the car into the traffic, probably deciding to give him time to think.

The silence lasted all the way to home, and when they got out of the car, Skye walked straight around the house and to the spot in the backyard that was shaded by the trees.

Sitting down in the grass, he tried to figure out what to do. Obviously, if he could judge by the jumbled thoughts he now had, Patricia had made a valid point. He didn’t just want to be with Dru, he wanted both Dru and Thom. He wanted to be their third, as improbable as it was.