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“It’s okay, you don’t have to tell me,” says Elias. “I was just wondering. Seems important to you.”
“Tristan was my lover for twenty-six years.” Kyle chooses another rock, a small bluish-grey one, weighs it, throws it at the horizon. Again, he watches where it lands. Even farther than the first. “Allegedly, I was his only one, ever.”
“Allegedly?”
“Don’t know anymore. After he chose the sunrise over me, I started feeling like our paradise wasn’t what it seemed. All the cracks started to show. Maybe I was in a trance.” Kyle throws another rock. Even farther, it lands. “That’s how it happens. It works like a trance—paradise. You fall in love with it so much, you can’t see what’s wrong. I went along with everything he chose for us. I was so used to being invisible, to letting others run my life … couldn’t even tell he was running mine.”
The dry air blows at Kyle’s face, picking up his bangs.
Elias listens from behind, as still as the rock he sits on.
“I keep wondering … even to this day … if I would’ve been happier had we never met. I’d be in my forties by now, human, normal, beautifully boring. My younger brother, on the cusp of forty. He’d be on tour right now, touring the world with his violin. Maybe I’d even be great with my parents, inconceivably. Maybe in adulthood, I’d realize all I needed with them was time. They’d realize how they treated me, and I would’ve come to love them. I’d be settled into a simple career, maybe with a husband and a dog. We would all be happy, all of us.” Kyle picks up another rock, but he only stares at it, troubled. “If Kyle died twenty-seven years ago, and Henry died this morning … who does that make me right now? What’s even left?”
Elias drops the clothes and comes right up to Kyle. “You’re whoever the goddamned fuck you want to be, that’s who.”
Kyle turns to him. “You have to curse so fucking much?”
“You can be Kyle and Henry,” he says, “or someone else, someone new. Don’t get all tangled up and shit in the what-ifs. Everyone plays the what-if game. All you got is what is.” Elias takes hold of Kyle by his face and pulls it against his for a kiss, surprising him, then pulls away “If what you got isn’t enough, go for more. Take the whole fucking world. Keepsakes and shit, they just make us sad and bitter, hanging on to them. Look at me. I got nothing but the clothes on my back. You should see my trail of rings and letters I’ve let go of or lost, all the way through my pitiful life up to this point, to now … to you.”
Kyle gazes out at the desert, pensive. Without warning, he chucks the rock in his hand as hard as he can. This one travels so far away, he can’t even see where it lands.
Maybe that’s the point.
13.
Twofold.
—·—
Long after Elias falls asleep on the couch, Kyle sits at the piano bench, fully awake, staring at the curtains on the window in deep contemplation. Even when the sun rises, he studies the faint glow around the curtains, with little regard to the fatal rays they block. Over and over, he tastes Elias in his mouth, long after every drop of beautiful blood is gone. It lingers like a happy memory.
The happiest memory he’s had in years.
That’s when he makes the decision: “We can’t do it again.”
That night at the bar, Kyle stands aloof, sucking on the end of his finger in thought. Can he still taste Elias’s blood? Or is he imagining it? His foot taps impatiently on the floor as he keeps sucking on his finger, brooding.
Then he bites his finger suddenly, hisses in pain, and pulls it away. He reaffirms his decision. “We won’t do it again.”
Cade appears at the office door. “Do what?”
Kyle turns to her. “Uh, sorry. Talking to myself. Did you need something?”
“Sorry. Computer’s doing that thing it does. Can you …?”
Kyle nods. “I’ll see what I can do.” He heads to the office to help fix Cade’s decade-old computer, leaving the bar’s sole occupant—a mustached man from the auto shop—to stare at the sports game on TV like a zombie, munching on peanuts.
Having steeled himself the whole way home, Kyle comes through his front door, ready to have the talk.
Until his eyes fall upon Elias.
Elias, who stands there waiting like a strong, loyal friend, devoted and ready. Without prompt, he slowly pulls his shirt up over his head, pitches it aside. Kyle watches. Elias opens his pants next, lets them drop to the floor, his syrupy warm eyes on Kyle the whole time. Elias is naked in seconds, every inch of his beautiful body on display.
