Fenn felt that something new was happening, that his life was about to change significantly. It had seemed like this more and more since they had decided to get the house. But no, that wasn’t it. Not really. There was a shifting of the winds which made him feel something new was going to blow into what was old. His life was old. His life with Tom was old. He didn’t know how to explain it. Theirs wasn’t a bad life. But something was about to change.
When Bryant’s brother came to visit, Fenn invited them both over for dinner. He made etoufeé, and the boy, whose name was Sean and who was close to Todd’s age, said, “I don’t know anything about Creole cooking.”
“My mother’s family was Creole,” Fenn said. Then corrected: “Or is Creole. I can’t tell. I don’t feel very Creole,” he admitted. “At any rate, I suspect you can’t do any cooking at all. Come around the stove and I’ll teach you.”
Sean got up, and Bryant came with him.
“Can I watch?” Bryant asked.
“Of course.”
For some reason, Bryant couldn’t resist putting his chin over Fenn’s shoulder to watch. He couldn’t resist being around Fenn. He wasn’t even angry anymore at Tom’s love, which made perfect sense. Bryant himself was charmed by this gracious man, and he imagined that somehow, in some place this thing could work. Fenn would understand what was happening between Tom and Bryant when he wasn’t around.
“Some recipes start with a roux. Now that’s flour and oil that are stirred into a mixture that isn’t oily and isn’t floury. I don’t know how to master that. I imagine cornstarch would do the trick better. At any rate, when I do it I put olive oil straight in the skillet. Like this. And then I wait for it to boil. Sean, get me that whole bowl of shrimp.”
Sean moved over and said, “That’s a huge amount.”
“Well, yes. There’s no half assing Creole. And Bryant, get me the red pepper and the salt. Where’s the onion? Ah, right here.”
Bryant was handsome in khakis and a red dress shirt open a little at the collar.
“I can’t find it,” he said.
Tom came forward and said, “Right here,” pulling it out. They exchanged a comical look like brothers, or like… Fenn shook it away. He just kept thinking, Bryant’s a nice looking man. He’s nice to have around. If I wasn’t with Tom…
“Here you go,” Bryant set it down, still leaning against Fenn.
“You are incredibly close,” Fenn told him.
“Do you mind?”
“We both will in a minute,” Fenn said. “Back away. I need to put in the shrimp. When that happens, it’s really going to sizzle.”
“So,” Sean Babcock asked his brother when they were both sitting up in the same bed, the way they had as children, “which of them are you sleeping with?”
Instead of pretending to be insulted—he did feel a little insulted, though—Bryant, paying more attention to his nails than his brother, said, “Tom.”
“Then what the hell kind of game are you playing with Fenn?”
“I’m not playing any type of game.”
“You can’t stay away from him. You make yourself totally ingratiating to him. Are you trying to blindside that man? I can tell right now he’s very nice and all. But he’s not stupid.”
“I know he’s not stupid,” Bryant said, though that warning did strike him.
“And I’m not trying to… ingratiate myself to him. I just…”
“Oh, my God,” Sean whispered.
“What?” Bryant said.
“You’re in love with both of them.”
Bryant looked at his brother blankly.
“You started with Tom and now you have half a thing for Fenn!”
“I think it’s time for light’s out.”
“Cool,” Sean said, reaching up and pulling the chain, shutting off the light in the ceiling fan.
“But I want to know this?”
“If your must,” Bryant said. “I really don’t feel comfortable talking about this.”
“If you could have Tom to yourself, would you?”
“In my ideal world Tom would be with me, Fenn would understand and we would be friends too.”
“That is an ideal world,” Sean chuckled.
Bryant got up, suddenly turning on the light.
“What?”
“Look,” Bryant said, heatedly. “You’re a kid. You don’t know what it’s like to be in the place I am. One day I hope you figure it out. I hope you figure it out and you know what it feels like to be in love, deeply in love with a man who is with someone else, to be making love to someone who is going home to someone else. And that someone else is a someone you respect. He is someone you like, someone you like more and more but someone who…. When it all comes down to it—you would gladly take his lover from.
“I would,” Bryant said, heatedly. “I would take Tom and not bat an eyelash. I do it everyday. I don’t regret it when we’re together. I don’t regret lying to Fenn. That’s what I am. Maybe it’s what I always was. But there is a little part of me that looks at what I’ve become and thinks, Bryant Babcock, you’re a fucking monster.”
Sean put a hand on his brother’s shoulder. Bryant was bigger than him, but Bryant’s shoulder felt surprisingly narrow. He loved his brother. It was five years ago, when Sean began to think he might not be straight, that Bryant came out and told him the truth. To have a brother who was as gay as he was meant everything.
“Bryant,” Sean murmured, “You’re not a monster.”
Bryant turned off the light and lay back down in the bed.
“Yes I am,” he said in the dark.
Tara’s shoulder was aching. It had been a very long day. She was living with Yolanda, but this apartment was still a second home.
“I’ve got a great idea,” Tom said, sitting down beside her.
“Yes?”
“The four of us—I mean me and Fenn, you and Bryant—take a trip to Chicago. They’re doing the Carmina Burana at Symphony Hall on Michigan—”
“Oh, we haven’t been there in so long!” Tara said.
“I don’t really want to go to the symphony,” Fenn admitted.
“Me neither,” Tara said. “I was just saying it had been a long time.”
“Well, I’m not stupid,” Tom said. “Me and Bryant will go to Symphony Hall. He’s going to be conducting eventually, anyway. And you and Tara can run around.”
“On the North End,” Fenn finished the thought off.
“Absolutely,” said Tom.
“Oh man,” Tara stretched her sore arm out, and Fenn began to rub it for her. “When do we go?”
“I’m thinking next Wednesday,” Tom told them. “Can you get out of class?” He looked at Fenn.
“Did you really need to ask that?” Fenn said to him.
It was arranged. They went up the next week. They got off the train at Randolph Street and parted ways.
“You’re taking the El?” Bryant said.
“If we want to get anywhere,” Tara told him.
“But…. It’s under the ground.”
Tara looked at him incredulously, and Fenn just shook his head and pulled her down Randolph, past the library.
“You get used to him after a while,” Fenn said. “And then you get to like him.”
After they had crossed Wabash, though, Tom and Bryant looked at each other. Tom caught Bryant’s hand and pulled him in the opposite direction to Michigan Street. They were going toward Symphony Hall when a bus pulled up, and they got on. It rode down Michigan. It went past Symphony Hall. It went eight blocks further. It went in front of the Essex Inn, and they got off there. They entered the old hotel. Bryant raised an eyebrow and made sure not to touch anything. Tom leaned down across the desk and said, “We made reservations for a room a while ago.
“Giaccomo Tosca and,” he gestured to Bryant, “my good friend Tony Vivaldi.”
“Vivaldi?” Bryant mouthed.
“Here you are, sirs,” the young man at the desk said. He was Black, much darker than Fenn, Tom noted.
Tom signed for both of them, and then the young man handed over the key.
“You have until eleven a.m. tomorrow to check out.”
“That,” Tom decided, “will be perfect.”
“It’s a done deal,” Tom said as he signed the last of the papers and then pushed them toward Fenn.
Fenn watched his own hand sign Fenn L. Houghton, then. print as well. And then date. His hand froze over the date. He couldn’t remember. Tom told him and Fenn shrugged, signing.
So they owned the house on 4848 Versailles Street now.
Fenn kept waiting for something to happen. This was supposed to mean something, after all. His life was supposed to be starting with this. Right? He’d been having, for some time now, the feeling that his life was about to begin despite the fact that it had been going on for nearly thirty years. He was sure something was about to happen, and the something was this. Wasn’t it?
“We can move in some stuff today, and a little bit through the week,” Tom was saying in an animated voice. “And then next weekend, that’ll be the big day. When everyone’s going to help.”
“It’ll be just like when I was a kid and we had those big moving parties,” Fenn reminisced. “Start really early, and then in the middle of the day sit around and drink beer. I’ll do a nice gumbo later on. It’ll be something else.”
But the whole time Fenn spoke, a part of him was away from himself. He felt like an animated tongue, just trying to fill the space made by this strange emptiness.
“You wanna kid?” Tom said.
“Yes,” Fenn said. “A kid’s just what we need.”
As he said it, Fenn wondered how Tom could believe it.
When he came back to town after junior year it was with great relief. Only one more year left, and that would be a party. And then Mom was better. The cancer was gone. Kidneys still shot, but cancer gone. You couldn’t have everything. Todd knew that now.
When he got home Adele was there. He asked about Fenn and she told him that not much was going on. He was slouching through graduate school, but he and Tom had gone to Chicago a few weeks back.
“For the symphony,” Nell murmured, digging the dirt out of her fingernails. “I wish someone would take me to the symphony.”
“Well, can’t you take yourself to the symphony?” Todd said.
“That’s a good point,” Adele agreed. “But Tom and Fenn didn’t go together. Fenn and Tara went shopping and bar crawling, and Tom went with Bryant.”
“Who’s Bryant?”
“You met him.”
“I did?”
“Maybe you didn’t,” Adele shook her head. “He teaches over at the college now. Anyway, he’s just like Tom only bigger.”
“Um,” Todd said in a tone that left no one uncertain of how the tall young man with the thick black hair felt about bigger versions of Tom.
“I should go and visit,” Todd decided. “Mom, you need anything before I go?”
Nadine was smaller and balder, and she shook her head. “I’m perfectly fine,” she told him. “Your sister’s taking great care of me.”
“Alright, then,” Todd said. He looked at his sister. “I can borrow your car tonight?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” she told him.
Todd nodded, swooped down and kissed her and then Nadine, and went down the hall for the keys on the table by the stairwell.
An hour later, Adele called her brother. They talked for a while, then she said, “I should let you go.”
“Why?”
Adele sounded surprised: “Because it’s rude to keep Todd waiting.”
“Oh, you’re with Todd?”
“No,” Adele said. “You are.”
Then, at the silence, she said, “You aren’t?”
“Nope,” Fenn said. “What’s going on?”
“I don’t know,” Adele told him.
She hung up the phone.
“What was that all about?” Nell asked her.
Adele thought it was best to say: “Nothing.”
Todd had not lied, not intentionally. He told himself that it would be best to go to Fenn’s, but in the end he kept driving north. He drove onto the highway and he went east. He went east for an hour and a half and pulled into a town that didn’t matter. He went down its main street, and then through an inside street to an apartment complex. He parked his car. His body was fevered now. He locked it, and, whistling and skipping, hands deep in his pockets, he crossed the parking lot, went up a flight of steps and tapped on a door.
Kevin Reardon opened it, his eyes dull on the other side of his glasses. He looked, honestly, like someone that everything had been taken away from.
“Come on in,” he said.
Todd did. He ducked his head and looked around the apartment. It was as sterile as the hotel room where he’d come to Kevin over a year ago.
“You thirsty?” Kevin said.
“I’ll take water.”
Todd never welcomed himself into Kevin’s apartment. He never made himself feel at home.
“You’re jumpy,” Kevin said as he returned with the water.
“I got a lot of stress in me. I got a lot to get out.”
Kevin pulled Todd to him. They were the same height and the same strength now.
“God, you’re such a man now,” Kevin’s voice contained a strange growl as his eyes began to burn. “You get a lot of sex over at that college of yours?”
Kevin’s hand reached into Todd’s shorts and now Kevin was firmly gripping his penis.
“Tell me about it,” Kevin commanded.
He pulled Todd, by his cock, to the sofa, and kept stroking him.
Kevin was different this way. It was like some weird, growling demon came out of him that needed to be fed on these stories.
“I…eh, went to Lafayette and fucked this guy who had been writing me for a long time.”
“Was it good?”
“It was.”
“Did you shoot inside of him?”
“No.”
“Where did you come?”
“I came on his face.”
“Nice,” Kevin said. “Did you have those cute little earrings on when you did it?”
“Yup. And there was this couple.”
“Gay or straight.”
“Gay. Two guys. They’d both really liked me.” Todd found himself building up to the climax, his penis becoming firmer and thicker in Kevin’s fist.
“I went to visit them. They were both on this bed and I climbed on top of both of them and rode them. They felt so good inside of me. It went on all night.”
“You want me inside of you?” Kevin demanded.
“Yeah,” Todd’s voice came out in a fragile breath.
“Tell me you want me to fuck you.”
“I want you to fuck me.”
“Say: Kevin, I want you to fuck me right now.”
“Kevin, I want you to fuck me right now.”
Kevin pushed Todd to the floor, and he lost his breath as Kevin yanked down his pants. He wanted this, didn’t he? This roughness. This is what he’d come for? Right?
There was the sound of Kevin hocking up phlegm. There was spit in his ass, being rubbed into his asshole and next he felt Kevin. It hurt so. It was just what he’d wanted. Kevin’s hands pressed on his shoulders, sharply. Kevin’s cock was deep in his ass, the tip of it pressing someplace he didn’t even know existed until Kevin was there. He opened his mouth and, half of his face pressed to the rough carpet, he gave into it. It was gentle for all of a few moments. And then it was rough.
“Take it!” Kevin grunted. “Take it. Take it you hot fucker.
“Take it you fucker…
“You little bitch. Take it, faggot.
“Faggot.
“Fuck!
“Take it.”
While Kevin slammed into him over and over again, his two hundred pounds crashing on Todd, the thickness of his penis pounding deep into him, Todd realized there was so much Kevin needed to get out. This was deep and mutual need, and he realized, as his body began to hurt, as the carpet burned his face, how much Kevin hated him, and how much he needed that hatred.
