Drawing Closer (23 page)

"Like I give a fuck about that," Gray snarled, sitting up straight and slamming his beer bottle down on the coffee table. "Like I ever have. Stop saying you were thinking about me. You

weren't. Just you. Always about you, isn't it? You manipulative
loser
. I can't -- God, I can't even look at you--"

"No," Carl said softly, staring down at his hands. "You haven't looked at me for a long time, Gray. Or you'd have seen--"

"What?" Gray demanded. "If this is more of that crap about you being gay, you can save it, okay? You're not. I'd know. You're not even close."

"No." Carl smiled at him, the kind of smile which broke your fucking heart, if you'd let it. "I love you, but I don't want to fuck you. I'd let you do me, though, if it was what you wanted."

"That's just sick, man," Gray protested. "Listen to yourself, will you?"

Drawing Closer - 145

"No. It's true. Anything you want, Gray. You're like -- it'd be like jerking off, we're that close."

"We're
not
that close," Gray said, feeling smothered, suffocated. "No one is. And this is fucking insane, Carl. You can't screw up my relationships and do this psycho-shit and expect me to be

cool with it because we've known each other for years. It doesn't work like that."

Except, for Carl, it did. Gray was beginning to see that they'd been working their way toward this

moment for years. Since the start in grade school, when Carl had put his body, bulky even then,

between anyone and anything that threatened Gray -- no, that threatened to take Gray away

from him. The way when they'd been put in separate classes one year, after three weeks, Carl

had transferred over, all smiles, after coming close to getting suspended for the way he'd been

behaving in class. Gray had been happy but baffled; that just didn't happen. Carl had grinned,

looking mysterious; it'd been years later, Gray found out that Carl's parents had bribed the

principal in a socially acceptable way, donating a new van from Carl's father's car dealership to

take the football team to away games.

Carl and Gray hadn't been separated in class again.

And the way Carl had reacted when he'd heard Gray was going to Europe and no, didn't want

company….

"You'd be bored, Carl. You'd hate the museums, the galleries; you'd want to spend the whole time
getting drunk and laid and I'm not going there for that." He'd smiled. "Well, not just that."

"You don't want me to come? Man, I've got my passport, bag packed and waiting."

He'd thought Carl had been joking about that. Maybe not.

The arguments had gone on and on until Gray, evading rather than solving the problem, had

changed his ticket, bringing his flight forward a month, and left without telling Carl.

He'd felt a sense of relief stepping off the plane in London, alone, relief that had never quite left

him, even though there'd been plenty of times that he'd missed Carl. He'd written to him,

scrawled notes and postcards, emails whenever he could get to an internet café, not expecting a

reply, and finally, after a month or so, Carl had emailed back.

Gray had wondered at the time what had prompted Carl to relent and worked out that it was

probably the letter in which Gray had told Carl about Luke. He'd thought at the time that Carl

had wanted the chance to get on his case about the whole boyfriend thing but--

Oh, shit. He'd been jealous, hadn't he? Someone -- another man -- giving Gray something Carl

couldn't. Girls didn't count, not for Carl. He loved fucking them, liked having them around, but

they weren't friends to Carl, weren't in any way equals.

Drawing Closer - 146

Or rivals.

"I'm just something you decided you wanted, aren't I? Like the new bike you had to have, even

when you hadn't outgrown your old one. And once you'd picked me, you weren't going to admit

you'd made a mistake, even when I never showed any interest in what you thought was

important."

Gray knew that he'd been popular at school and college. He was funny, bright, good-looking; he'd

gotten away in high school with not playing a sport by being the one who drew a weekly cartoon

about the jocks, one that got posted on the notice board, unsigned, but it was an open secret he

wrote it and Carl passed on the gossip that made it hit home. The jocks had loved it as much as

the rest of the school; Gray was never malicious and he'd played fair with them. One game when

they'd been cheated out of an important win by some lousy decisions by the umpire, and an

opposing team who'd been brutally efficient, leaving one man with a broken collarbone, another

concussed, he'd done a single, poster-size page, showing the locker room afterwards, silent, dazed

faces, mud-streaked, blood-streaked.

He could still remember the hands pressing down briefly on his shoulders as he'd walked down

the corridor the next day, approving, grateful pats on the back from just about everyone who

counted at the school.

He'd have felt guilty about buying popularity if he hadn't been sincere in his sympathy. He still

had the poster somewhere, tattered around the edges, rolled into a loose cylinder and stored with

the rest of his school stuff.

Yes, Carl had never taken much heat for befriending a geek.

"You're one fucked-up son of a bitch, you know that?"

And then he stopped, because Carl was crying, silent tears trickling down his face, and Carl never

cried, not when his ankle was snapped, not when he lost the nail on his big toe, not when the dog

he'd gotten for his seventh birthday had been run over.

And somehow that made it easy to go to him, easy to hug him and hold him and tell him it was

going to be okay, even if it wasn't, and Gray didn't see how it could be.

Made it easy to lie.

Drawing Closer - 147

Raking leaves was an exercise in futility, Charles decided, as a gust of wind snatched at the heap

he'd created on the small lawn in front of his house and sent it flying. He supposed he could

invest in a leaf blower but no one else on the street had one and he could just picture Rudegar's

reaction if the cat was hidden in a bush nearby when Charles turned it on.

And Beatrice would probably stalk up the street, steel-grey hair all spikes, eyes flashing, and

complain. She'd been furious with him when she'd learned that he and Gray had split up, not

because she accepted Gray's version of events, but because, as far as she was concerned, Charles

had both given up too easily and upset her grandson -- equally unforgivable.

Bad Charles. No shortbread.

He held open the tall yard waste bag, the stiff paper rustling as he tried to keep a grip on it with

one hand and scoop the leaves into it with the other. It wasn't working very well; the bag was

getting filled so slowly it'd be spring before he'd finished at this rate.

"I could hold it for you."

The bag tore as he turned quickly to meet Gray's tentative smile, the small sound lost in the

louder noise of a passing car with a souped-up engine, the windows open wide to let out a blare

of music.

Charles used the moment before the noise level dropped to take control of his reaction to seeing

Gray again so unexpectedly, clamping down on it before there was time for the rush of happiness

to sour when he remembered they weren't together.

"Thanks, but it's starting to rain. I was about to give up for the day."

Gray shivered, rubbing his hands together absently, the long fingers pale with cold. "Rain? Feels

more like it might snow."

"It's not forecast," Charles said automatically, too English not to respond to a conversation about the weather. He folded the top of the bag over and glanced at the house, wondering if Gray would

take it as a hint or an invitation. Gray settled matters by picking up the rake and they walked

around to the back of the house, Gray putting the rake in the small garden shed and clicking the

padlock closed, while Charles put the bag of leaves beside the composter he'd bought in an

Drawing Closer - 148

ecologically sound frame of mind a few years earlier and never used much.

Gray came up to him and held out the shed key, silent now, his dark blue eyes almost navy

against the pallor of his skin.

"You want to talk to me."

Gray nodded. "If you'll let me. I want to apologize."

"It was Carl?"

Gray gave him a look of pure misery and Charles sighed, feeling no surprise, because, really, who

else could it have been? The rain began to patter down, a soft, determined downpour that

promised hours of wetness to come.

"Come inside; I'll listen, but I'm damned if I'll get soaked when I do it."

***

he hadn't slept properly for days and was managing to function at a basic level, ticking over, no

more.

Not hard to recognize something he saw every time he looked in a mirror.

"What did you do with him?"

Gray shrugged. "Not much I could do. I'd like to say breaking down like that did him good --

think it did -- but it -- it scared me. It just wasn't like him, you know?"

"Carl's not allowed to have hidden depths?" Charles asked dryly. "Gray, I know superficially he seems to be the archetypal jock, but he really isn't. No jock would be seen dead with you, for a

start."

"Thanks. I think." Gray gave him a tentative smile that Charles didn't return. Not yet. Too soon.

"And his… fixation on you was blindingly obvious to everyone
but
you." Charles studied his feet, wondering how frank to be. Oh, the hell with it. He looked up and met Gray's eyes. "He

needs to get away from you for a bit. Cope without you."

"He's going," Gray said. He laughed hollowly. "All that effort to keep me here, and he's been offered an assistant coaching job on the other side of the country. I didn't even know he'd

applied. Not sure he would have taken it if I hadn't found out what he did."

Drawing Closer - 149

Charles felt a surge of relief at the news that Carl was leaving. Pity -- yes, he had a lot of that, but he wasn't a saint, and what Carl had done to Gray had been unforgivable. "And he's taking it?"

"Oh, yeah." Gray was squeezing his hands together in his lap. "Leaves in a couple of weeks. He's got some family out there, an aunt, I think, and he's staying with her for a while until he gets a

place of his own."

Wishing Carl was leaving even earlier wouldn't do much good. Charles settled for a nod and then

lapsed into silence.

"So--" Gray broke off and gave him a mutely beseeching look.

"Yes," Charles said without hesitation, filling in the blanks easily enough. "I do. Forgive you, I mean. I can see why you thought what you did and I certainly made it very easy for Carl to set

me up. I just hope you can forgive me for my initial reaction when I saw the painting."

"I do, sure I do--" Gray got up and came over to where Charles was sitting in the chair by the fire, crackling away busily, crouching down beside it. "Are we back together, then? Officially?

Because if I don't kiss you soon I'm going to--"

"Gray," Charles said as gently as he could, putting out his hand to stop Gray from getting any closer. "That's not what I meant. We can't just paper over what happened. The bottom line is

that you didn't trust me. Not even when I gave you my word. The relationship we have -- had --

was based on trust; it was at the heart of it. Not just the usual expectation that we'd be faithful --

every relationship has that; I'm talking about what we do. I can't go back to that if I'm not sure --

and I'm not. Not now. And I think we both know it wouldn't work between us without that

element."

"I've always trusted you there," Gray said vehemently. "Always. I'd have let you do anything to me, Charles, and never felt scared that you'd go too far."

"It goes two ways. And I'm not -- Gray, I'm not sure I trust myself. Not after what I almost did.

It's why I can't be angry with you, not really; I did pick up that knife intending to damage the

painting."

"You wouldn't have gone through with it."

"You think?" Charles eyed him. So sure.

Now.

"Yeah, I'm sure." Gray took a deep breath. "Charles, you can forget it. I'm not walking away from you. Not over something this fucking…" he hesitated, visibly searching for a word. "This

abstract
."

Drawing Closer - 150

Charles felt his mouth twitch in a smile. "It's an odd choice of word, but I know what you mean."

"Yeah." Gray folded himself into a cross-legged position that made Charles' knees ache to look at and nodded. "I knew you would. It's bullshit, Charles. I'm not going to let you talk yourself out

of being with me when I know you still want me and it's mutual."

"I don't get a say in it?"

"No." His expression must have shown just what he thought about that because Gray grinned,

the lines around his eyes smoothing out. "Do you really want me to give up? Walk away?"

He couldn't help it: he cupped Gray's face, feeling the warmth of skin against his palm, craving it,

as he had every day of the last few weeks. Gray sighed and nestled into his touch, his eyes

closing briefly.

"Feels good," Gray said softly.

"It shouldn't be this easy…" Charles brushed his thumb over Gray's lips, feeling them push

against it in a kiss.

"Why?" Gray seemed honestly confused. "Right is us being together; wrong is the fucked-up hell of not being together. Putting something right should be easy."