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“I wanted you to know that you were missed.”
Mort sighed, though he did not need to breathe. This was another of his father’s games.
“Go back to your mortal,” his father said. “You are what you are. He is what he is, and what will be, will be. I will not send demons to pursue you. The boy you have chosen contains multitudes of his own.”
Mort felt a cold, creeping sense of inevitability as he returned to the mortal realm. His father was never wrong. About anything.
Hope had been drained by the paternal visit. He wondered what he was going back to. More suicidal behavior, either deliberate or shaded in the clothing of accidents. More hopeless struggling against the inevitability of what Tristan seemed to want more than he wanted anything else.
He needed to understand Tristan’s pain so he could understand how to help him, not to mention why he was drawn to him. There was a connection between them, a thread that had drawn Mort inexorably the moment he laid down the burden of his purpose. He needed to understand that too.
As he came up the porch stairs and stepped in through the screen door, he found the house filled with light from the bright desert afternoon. Tristan was standing with a pan in hand. The kitchen was coated in a fine white powder.
What have you done now? The thought ran through Mort’s head, as he made the assumption that once again things were going wrong. When he saw Tristan and a mess, he braced himself for unpleasantness.
The air smelled sweet, not sickly, but pleasantly so. There was a sound too, a sizzling. Was he cooking?
“You’re back!” Tristan seemed excited about that. “I made pancakes. I was hungry. Haven’t felt hungry in a long time. I think it’s not drinking. Makes all the other body systems sort of get active, you know?”
Mort did not know, but he felt some of the cold of the underworld melt from his bones. The dreadful prophecy felt much less real now in the face of Tristan’s energy. His father did not know everything. He knew what had happened, not what would yet happen. He was a creature of history, not of the future.
Tristan smiled at Mort, or at least attempted to with his face stitched up, his eyes bright and clear.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said. And you’re right. I’ve got this life, I might as well start living it. I mean, I was living it. But…” He looked into Mort’s eyes. “It’s different with you around.”
“The demons won’t be coming anymore,” Mort said. That felt like an important piece of news to impart.
“So you told your dad where to go? Good for you, man. Good for you.”
Tris flipped a pancake onto a plate and offered it to Mort.
Mort ate it, savoring the experience of consuming something Tristan had made for him.
“I wanted to ask you something,” Tristan said, smearing his hands on his jeans.
“Oh?”
Mort wanted to ask Tristan many things, but he didn’t let that be known. He made space for the bright mortal before him, whose very presence chased shadows away.
“So. Uhm. Are you. Into me?”
The way Tristan asked the question, so uncertain, yet so brave, made Mort melt. He leaned against the kitchen counter and looked into Tristan’s eyes as much as he could. Tristan was trying to hide again behind an increasingly long shock of shaggy hair.
“I told you I love you,” he reminded him.
“Yeah. I know. But like, my mom loved me. She wasn’t into me. Which was a good thing, but I’m asking you… are you……”
“Into you,” Mort finished his sentence when it had hung on too long.
“Sexually,” Tristan clarified, brave in the face of awkwardness.
“Yes,” Mort said, putting him out of his misery, as he had been designed to do. “I am into you. Sexually.”
“Cool. Cool. So uh, we haven’t…”
“It hasn’t been… appropriate. I found you trying to do something so destructive you would not have survived it.”
“Sure, I was in a bad way, but I’m better now.”
Mort smiled at Tristan’s impatience. Barely twenty-four hours ago he had been getting his face sewn back together.
“You haven’t had time to recover from anything.”
“Really? Feels like long enough.”
“In a matter of days you have tried to kill yourself and almost been killed by a demon. Intimacy of the kind you and I desire is not… appropriate.”
“Because I am damaged?” Tristan immediately made it about his shortcomings, as Mort knew he would. Tristan made an escape from the stove to the kitchen table, carrying a stack of pancakes on a bright yellow plate. Mort turned to follow him.
“Because I want to be careful with you,” he said as Tristan sat down.
“Aw,” Tristan said, leaning the good side of his face on his hand and smiling at Mort. He was charming when he wanted to be, and also sometimes when he didn’t want to be.
