The Rebuilding Year (11 page)

Embryology droned on. His classmates snored. Ryan’s brain ran round in circles, imagining scenarios, wondering what John would do, would say. Sometimes in his imagination, John tried to kiss him again. Ryan shied violently away from the picture that made, back to the beginning again.
Go in the door, say, John, I’m really glad we’re friends but…

By the time he walked in the actual front door, he’d reworked his speech a dozen times. Two dozen. Because he wanted to do this right. He didn’t want to hurt John’s feelings or make him feel bad. But he had to put on the brakes, unmistakably.

John was in the kitchen, playing with a plate of microwave glop. He looked up as Ryan came in. “Hi.”

“Hey, John.” Ryan slid into the other seat and stretched his aching leg out.
Just say it.

Before he could get the first word out, John said, “I wanted to talk to you about this morning. Because it was weird. I don’t know what happened. I mean, I’m not gay, and you’re not either. I guess we just… When you talk about tough stuff like that you want someone to hold on to, to make it feel better. And there we were, and no one else was available. So…that happened. And it was my fault. But I want to go back to being friends, okay?”

Ryan blinked.
He cribbed my speech.
“Yeah. I mean, I want that too.”

“I really hope I didn’t make you think about moving out. I hate living alone. I mean, if the alternative is living with you. I like having you living here and I’d hate to see you leave. I’ve never been interested in guys, and I won’t do anything like that again. I hope I didn’t freak you out too much.”

“No,” Ryan said slowly. “I don’t want to leave.”

“Good,” John said firmly. “I mean, are we good now?”

“Sure. We’re fine.”

John stood up abruptly, dumped his plate in the sink, and then stuck it in the dishwasher. “Great. I have some work to do, so I’m going to go and…work.”

Ryan was left staring at his retreating back. He wasn’t sure why he felt slightly let down. Clearly they were on the same page. Things were back to normal. So why was he disappointed that his wonderful speech letting John down gently hadn’t had to be uttered?
 

Chapter Seven

Ryan found himself looking at everyone on campus differently. Two guys would come into class together, hair ruffled by the wind, and he would wonder if there was anything there except friendship. He found himself looking at the women, trailing his gaze over butts and boobs, checking his level of interest like some weird sex-o-meter. And it was a relief every time a woman’s body caused his hormones to rise. And yet it was all hypothetical, like
yeah, big tits still turn me on.
He had no interest at all in taking it beyond a glance. He didn’t want to flirt with the women. He certainly didn’t want to get mixed up with dating one.

Dating was a hassle anyway, the small talk, the adaptations you had to make to fit someone else into your routines. Women expected conversation, and flowers and attention. You couldn’t grunt at them that you were busy and expect to get by without a hurt look and a pout. They were soft and they smelled good, but they were work.

He found himself looking at men too. He’d never done that before. He’d never bothered to check out whether a guy had big arms or a tight butt. He was only doing it now to confirm that he really had no interest in such things. And he didn’t. His body didn’t react to the cute young guys around him. So he wasn’t gay.

But he still kept catching himself looking, thinking that this one wasn’t as muscled up as John, or that one didn’t move with the same grace. It was like probing the space where a tooth had been pulled. He knew it wasn’t there, but he kept testing his reactions, kept pulling up images of John next to these guys. And remembering that kiss.

Talk about zero to sixty in two seconds flat. He’d always liked kissing. He’d never been one to fuck a woman’s body like the rest of her didn’t exist. But he’d also never had a first kiss work like that. Like someone poured liquid heat between his lips and took over his breath and his heart and his groin, until all he could think about was getting more.

John had obviously put it behind him. Ryan had started out being really careful. He’d avoided being around John for anything too comfortable, too emotional. At the same time, he’d tried to act like nothing had changed.

Thanksgiving dinner had been weird. By some unspoken mutual consent they’d bought all the fixings, chicken and stuffing and pie, and shared it at the small polished table. But no cooking together, no wine, nothing that put them side by side in the kitchen. The meal had been pretty silent.

John seemed a little depressed. He’d made one or two comments, but seemed to drift off into staring in space again and again. Ryan figured he had to be thinking about how different this was from family holidays in the past. He’d have had his wife, his kids, maybe some relatives or in-laws. Old traditions, old arguments, who knew?

Ryan had dug around on the remains of the chicken for a few more morsels and then worked the wishbone free. He sucked it clean and laughed. “At least you only had two kids. Four of us at home and one wishbone made for epic arguments. One year Mom made two turkeys, just so there would be two wishbones. We ate leftover turkey for a month.”

John seemed to come back from wherever his thoughts had been. He gave a crooked smile and then reached out to take one end of the wishbone. Ryan shifted his grip to the other end. For a second they eyed each other. John’s hazel eyes were shaded to grey, giving nothing away. He glanced down for a second, and then wrenched on the small bone. It snapped cleanly, with the bigger half in Ryan’s hand.

John’s smile became warmer. “Yours. Don’t tell me what you wished for or it won’t come true.”

Ryan looked blankly at the stub of bone in his hand. Somehow, he’d forgotten to make a wish. Did it still count if he made it now? He could wish for things to go back the way they were. He could ask for this new uncomfortable awareness of John to disappear. Hell, he could wish for his leg to be healed while he was at it, if he wanted to pretend it was
that
magic.
I wish I knew what I wanted.

Two weeks later and he still didn’t know. Because he missed the easy way they had been together before…
before he kissed me.
Except that was unfair, because even if John had made the first move, Ryan could still feel the slip of the man’s silky hair in his fingers, the press of his hard body against Ryan’s. And the way Ryan had responded. The way he’d kissed John back
.

And he thought that if someone offered to turn back the clock and give him a do-over he would probably take it. Except…except he’d never felt as alive as he had the past two weeks. Sounds were louder, lights were brighter. It wasn’t just the girls, and the guys, that he was noticing more. He saw the lace of frost on a window in the morning, the way the curls of ice spread in fractal patterns across the glass. He heard the drum of a woodpecker on the dead tree down the street, in syncopated time. Coffee…God, coffee tasted like heaven.

It was like someone turned the amplifier on his life up a notch. The smell of a bakery as they passed filled his mind with donuts. The smell of formaldehyde was sharp in his nose. He could identify his lab partner at ten feet by her floral perfume, and other women in the class even farther from the hit of their heavy chosen scents, as they walked past with perfume set on stun. He could smell John’s shampoo and clean skin down the hall in the evening, after the man showered.

Ryan shook his head and stepped out the door of Bradford Hall, into the clean cold outdoors. The air promised snow. A hint of smoke hovered, like a touch of autumn past. He had been there three months. And somehow, he was a different man from the one who sat in that welcome-to-med-school lecture, so short a time ago.

Late December meant that there was less outdoor work on campus, at least until the snow came. John was down to the two permanent members of his crew. The campus plantings were put to bed, the hardiest annuals dug up and mulched, now that a hard freeze had come and gone. They were erecting a few snow fences where the wind might cause drifting. And planning for next spring.

John lengthened his stride down the hill. He was pleased that he was breathing easily, despite the climb up the back of the ridge. He was getting into amazing shape.
Yeah, running away from your problems will do that.
Although mostly he was just trying to wear his problems out.

He and Ryan had fallen back into their routines. Ryan still got up first and started the coffee. John still gave him a lift to campus most mornings. They still shared meals sometimes. They’d even managed a kind of Thanksgiving dinner with a roast chicken from the supermarket. For a few days, Ryan had retreated to the parlor to study in the evenings. But now without comment he had returned to spreading his books out on the kitchen table. John made a point of wandering through at the end of the evening, and grabbing a drink or a snack. Ryan would give him a nod or a smile. He’d give Ryan a hard time about whatever wimpy caffeine-free beverage the guy was drinking after ten p.m.

It was just like it had been. Except it wasn’t. There was that edge of tension that never went away. In the past, he might have bumped up against Ryan, if both of them were going for the fridge at the same time. Or he would have put out a hand to the man’s elbow, if some move shifted Ryan’s weight onto the bad leg wrong. Because the fool refused to use his cane around the house. Now, though, there was a careful few inches of space between them at all times. And yet he was always aware of exactly where Ryan was. And of wanting him.

He’d thought about that kiss. Hell, he’d obsessed about it. All that first Tuesday before Thanksgiving, walking around campus, Ryan had been on his mind. And he’d decided not to lie to himself. It was no freak impulse, no one-time emotional overload that had put his mouth on Ryan’s. It had been a long time coming, as inevitable as the onset of winter.

Gay or not, he had been aware of the other man from the first day. He could remember everything from that day—the color of Ryan’s eyes as they blinked open when he lay on the steps in pained confusion, the softness of his hair as John’s fingertips cleaned his cut, the muscles of his arm, the bump of hip against hip. And every day since then, in growing intensity, he had turned to Ryan like steel to a magnet.

By the end of that Tuesday, he had worked himself up to a panic, wondering if he could persuade Ryan not to run away. He’d figured out his preemptive strike. Before Ryan could open his mouth to say,
maybe I should find another place to live,
John had taken it all back. He’d played the friendship card. The
I don’t know what happened but it will never happen again
card.

And it worked. Ryan was still there, in his house, in his life. All it took was pretending that he didn’t care.

He’d tried to make it true. He’d gone out a few evenings, and deliberately chatted up women. He’d immersed himself in soft flowing hair, and rounded curves and sweet perfume. And never taken it further than that, because it was empty. One thought of Ryan, and he came to attention, and the woman in his sights faded. And while he was willing to bend himself into pretzels lying to Ryan, he wasn’t fooling himself. So he stopped fighting it.

He admitted that all he wanted was Ryan. But he also decided half a loaf was better than none. To be comfortable again, Ryan needed John to back off, to be cool, to be a friend.

He could do it. He could ignore the way the man’s hair smelled when it was wet, the way his eyes lit up at a bad joke, the way he licked the excess butter off his fingers after preparing his morning bagel. Well, okay, maybe not ignore that. But he could wear loose shirts over his jeans and try not to watch. He could get himself so tired out that by evening he basically just wanted to crash. Because he wanted Ryan around as a friend most of all.

If there was ever going to be anything else, it would have to be Ryan doing the asking. Ry would have to make the first move. Probably it would never happen. Ryan seemed pretty certain of his heterosexuality. But every now and then, John thought there was a spark between them that wasn’t just in his mind. He’d catch Ryan’s eyes on him, lingering without reason. And so he hoped.

Wearing his body out had the side benefit of him getting to know the campus better than he ever had in the past two years. The property was big. There were parts of it he had never visited. Most of it was left wild, but he had plans for more hiking trails and paths. He’d found an amazing field of wild raspberry bushes, the fruit dried on the branch already, but worth a visit next summer. There was a stream that ran down the other side of this ridge in a series of steps, pretty pools with waterfalls between them. There were wild roses growing south of campus. And…

He paused, staring more closely. In a hollow near the bottom of the slope, there was a cluster of dead bushes. True, it was December. Most deciduous plants looked pretty dead anyway. But hell, he was a trained professional, and those bushes did not look natural.

Grabbing at the poplar trunks, he slid down the steep slope. By the time he reached the bottom, he could see the cut ends of the small trunks. Someone had brought a dozen scrubby little bushes and dumped them here. Which made no sense. He moved closer.

Whoever it was seemed to have tried to uproot them first. The ground had been dug out underneath. But then they had just cut and piled the brush. In the loose dirt he could see raccoon tracks. But no coon could do that to the bushes. He couldn’t think of a wild animal that would bother.