Dreams of Terrible Brightness by Amy Lane
Oh God, it came so fast. From diagnosis to home hospice in less than a year. And he’d tried to spend that year well, he really had. He’d visited family, spent time with his nieces, took his boyfriend to every goddamned family function from Christmas to Arbor Day, and still… still… it had flown by. From a little bit of inconvenient pain, being winded on the treadmill, saying, “Hey, doc—this is a little weird, canyalookitthismaybe?” to saying, “Jimmy, baby, I need you to pull yourself together so I can write out my living will,” in a matter of months.
And now, here they were. Autumn. Leaves were showering in a purple/brown scatter, the sky was interminable blue, and his body was crumbling, decaying from the inside out. With every pump of his heart, his blood carried flawed cells, little mini-assassins to every vital organ, and his body was about as strong as a leaf-bare tree with brittle limbs.
And the drugs weren’t even good.”
“Hereyago,” Jimmy murmured, standing by the alien bed in the middle of their living room. “I’m sorry, baby—I didn’t realize we’d gone so long after our last dose.”
Connor grunted. He’d tried not to make any noise, or suggest that he needed more morphine. “s’no fair,” he said, trying to be clear, but the morphine was whitewashing his blood stream, and it was SOOOOO lovely after the terrible, suffocating pain that was, quite literally, bone and lymph node deep.
“What’s not fair?” Jimmy pulled a stool up next to the bed, and Connor looked at him gratefully. He had things to do—he was working from home now, to take care of Connor through the end, but he’d been on the computer all morning.
“So little time left… don’t want to spend it out in the clouds.”
Jimmy’s smile was… broken. He took Connor’s hand, purple from the nearly constant IV, and frail. It didn’t used to be frail. Connor had worked construction jobs through college—it used to be thick and battered and tough. Even though he’d been working as a computer tech for the last ten years, he’d been proud of his bruiser hands, and Jimmy had always found them sort of sexy too.
“At least tell me the dreams are good, baby. You’re doing all the drugs—tell me you’ve got some kick-ass dreams,yanno?”
Connor grimaced and tried not to be a big, dying baby about it. “The dreams ss…sssuck,” he confessed. “They’re… they’re boring. Every day. This morning I dreamed of… of...” What was he saying again? Oh yeah… “I dreamed of doing the dishes.”
Jimmy laughed a little. “I could fill that one in for you,” he murmured suggestively. “Remember that one time? You remember… you were all tense from work, and you’d just about ripped my head off for… shit. I don’t even know.”
“Doing the dishes,” Connor supplied with a small laugh. He remembered. “You didn’t do the dishes, and I wanted to cook dinner and… Jesus!” He was suddenly tearful, and felt like a pussy, but he felt it deep inside where he couldn’t say it, because not much of his deep insides made it up to his mouth right now. “Jesus, I was such a bitch,” he confessed, regretting the moment acutely.
“You weren’t in the end,” Jimmy said, grinning. Jimmy had one of those grins that pushed his apple cheeks up and made his dimples pop. He was so damned cute he was almost nauseating, and Connor… well, Connor had always been a sucker for brown eyes and dimples.
“Yes I was,” Connor said now, hoping the drugs were letting him be lascivious.
“You’re always a sweet bitch when you bottom,” Jimmy told him, reading his intent. Connor wanted to cry again. Damn, Jimmy—God bless you. Not only did you stick with me to the end, but you learned to read my mind too.
“I learned from the best,” Connor managed back, and Jimmy’s smile was heated.
“Yeah… that day, you learned real good. You remember?”
“Mmm…” He did remember. He remembered Jimmy coming up behind him, in spite of his snarling bitchiness. Jimmy wasn’t usually the type to confront someone when they were pissy—Connor would never know why this day was different. But it was.
Jimmy’s body, stringy, hard, bony, and hot, had ranged itself behind Connor, and Jimmy had dug that sharp little fox-point of a chin into Connor’s shoulder, and then nuzzled his ear…
Connor went boneless, liquid, his arms going stiff against the counter’s edge to just hold him up, because his knees weren’t doing the job. Jimmy’s hands didn’t fuck around, either—one hand went straight down under the back of Connor’s jeans, and Connor managed a grunt and a wiggle to help it, cool skinned and sinuous, cup his ass. The other hand was out of sight—Jimmy’s shoulder was tilted backward, and Connor thought he might have had something in that hand, but he was suddenly so hot he didn’t care what it could be.
“You want me to ‘fucking get something done’?” Jimmy purred, echoing Connor’s words, and Connor made sound like a cross between a whimper and a sigh.
“Sorry about that,” he muttered, not sure whether to push his ass into Jimmy’s hand so he could squeeze it, or spread his legs and bend over the counter so he could squeeze other things.
“Don’t be,” Jimmy said softly. “Unbutton your jeans.”
“Mmm… was going to cook you dinner!” Because that’s what started the whole thing in the first place. Jimmy had asked him to make stroganoff the night before, and Connor said, “Fine, but you need to clean the kitchen!” and Jimmy had forgotten. Connor got home with a grocery bag full of ingredients, and the cat was on the counter, eating yesterday’s hummus!
“You were going to take care of me.” Jimmy flickered a tongue out to tease Connor’s earlobe, and he found he was arching his hips to try to brush the front of his jeans on the countertop, because, hot damn! Was his cock hard! “You always take care of me. Let me take care of you. Now,” and Jimmy’s voice firmed up with command, “I said unbutton your jeans!”
Connor’s hands were wet and soapy, and he didn’t argue, not once. His jeans were unbuttoned in a quick second, and Jimmy helped him shuck them down to his ankles in a little less time. Jimmy stood up then and moved his other hand to Connor’s ass. His hand was slick with lube, and there was a plug caught between his fingers.
Connor gasped at the coolness of the plug as it pushed between his cheeks, and Jimmy spoke in his ear again. “Just hold this for a minute, princess, while I get things ready, ‘kay?”
And then he thrust it, quickly, right into Connor’s entrance, and it was so slick with lube—and Connor was so begging for it—that it went right in…
Connor was jerked out of the dream of the past by the present. He remembered that day—oh, God, he remembered. But the sensations, the feeling of being bent over the counter and just… just fucked until his body was weak and liquid, and come spattered on the cabinets in front of him, that was, well…
His eyes wandered to the colostomy bag that took over when all things south stopped functioning.
“You know what I remember from that day?” Jimmy asked, not seeing Connor’s embarrassed, angry glance at the ugly truth of what was left of his life now.
“Fucking me senseless?” Connor joked weakly, and Jimmy rolled his eyes.
“I remember knowing I wasn’t going to leave. Ever. There I was, all afraid of commitment, afraid of being locked in a little cubicle of hell for the duration, and I realized that, you know… you could come in and chew my face off, and I could change that. You loved me enough to let me change that.” Jimmy shrugged, and to Connor’s blurry vision, it looked like he had wings. “Most powerful goddamned thing in my life.”
It was like magic. Transformation—a grim, ugly fact of his life was washed away in the glow of what the moment had meant. Connor blinked, as entranced by the changing color of his thoughts as a child would be at a light show. Suddenly the sex didn’t matter—or it mattered, but it was irrelevant to why they had it, and what it had meant.
The months before that moment, the tension fraught ones, where Connor was afraid, afraid of making plans with his family, in case he woke up, expecting to take his nieces to the zoo and found Jimmy gone. Those were the months when he was afraid to breathe the air in the hollow of his lover’s neck, in case he could scent another man’s breath, and they melted away as though they had never been. Connor felt a moment of regret, because with the lightness in his chest now, he thought maybe they should have been the first things to go—hell, before the bowel function, at the very least—but he was so grateful that they didn’t exist anymore, that he refused to complain.
“I could always dream about that,” he murmured, not wanting to tell his lover that it wasn’t the sex that mattered. When you weren’t inches away from death, the sex should matter, because, he was starting to think now, it’s one of the things that made life sweet. It wasn’t Jimmy’s fault you couldn’t carry it with you, like candy in your pocket, now was it?
“You could always dream about that day at the beach instead,” Jimmy told him out of the blue.
Connor managed to squint at him, which cost him, because he knew he was fading out for the moment. “You mean the day that it rained?”
Jimmy laughed, and for a man who always claimed to live in the ‘now’ (and hence the little problem with fidelity at the beginning of the relationship) the noise was laden with nostalgia. “Yeah—and we ran for the car, and we were all wet, but we didn’t want to leave the beach and you ended up giving me the world’s most awkward hummer in the front seat of the car!”
Connor groaned—this time in memory, and not pain. “Oh Christ… and then the cop came knocking on the window—“
“And they were all steamed up, and then I rolled down the window—“
“And you were still fastening your pants, and I was wiping my mouth and you said—“
They finished the story together, “Keep your shirt on, officer—all things considered, we should have just gone walking in the rain!”
They hadn’t though. The cop had left, and they’d turned on the engine to defrog the windows and just sat there, talking, watching the great gray waves coast in and wreck against the sand in an explosion of froth. It had been a few weeks after Jimmy made washing the dishes a pornographic sport, and they’d played a Dave Matthews album on the iPod while the fan was running, and held hands without thinking much about it.
Connor’s laughter faded, and then his consciousness, and then he was back in that car with Jimmy again, just talking…
…and then Jimmy got out of the car, and started racing down the beach, hopping on one foot to pull off his tennis-shoes. The jeans went next, and then the hooded sweatshirt in hideous San Francisco Giants orange, and then the ring-collared T-shirt underneath, and then the boxers, and there he was, naked, and running full force into the surf, his hands fisted over his hands and he jumped up and down, shouting, exuberant, and triumphant.
Connor was stuck in the car. He kept trying to open it, but the latch slipped out of his hand, or the door fumbled closed, or his legs got caught on the steering wheel, and at one point, a gust of wind blew the door back into his thigh which ached and ached, and he was stuck, pressing his hands against the condensation on the windows, watching his lover shriek naked in the rain…
He came to abruptly, surprised that the autumn blue that marked time through the bay window in their living room had turned to purple/black.
“Shit,” he mumbled. “How long was I out?”
Jimmy was sitting on the couch, asleep, and he startled, jerking his head off of his fist and jumping to his feet abruptly.
“Wha?” Jimmy asked, all frowzy from sleep, and Connor managed a dusty chuckle.
“How long was I out?” The sky was dark. Had he slept through the afternoon?
“Twelve hours,” Jimmy yawned. “It’s ass-crack-of-the-a.m., my darling. You want anything to eat?” It was a courtesy, mostly. Connor had been eating broth and mushed noodles for weeks.
“Mmm… water,” he begged, feeling piteous.
Jimmy was there though, and Connor sipped from the big icy thermos gratefully.
“Better, baby?”
Connor grunted—talking seemed to be hard, so hard, but he wanted to say something important. What was it? Oh yeah. “I dreamed of you,” he croaked. “You were… naked, at the ocean. You were free. Free enough to dance in the rain.”
Jimmy shivered, and perched himself on the edge of the couch again, so he and Connor could talk closely. “Sounds cold,” he murmured.
“Yeah, but you were free,” Connor said insistently. He’d wanted to be free at the beginning, and Connor had given him that. It had been painful, and there had been nights when he hadn’t come home, and Connor had howled bile into the pillow. But that bitterness was truly gone. Now all that remained was a desire to see Jimmy happy, shrieking glee into the stormy waters of a life without him.
Jimmy’s laugh was humorless. “After five years with you, baby, what on earth makes you think I want to be free?”
“No?” Connor asked a little sadly.
“No.” Jimmy kissed that limp, sickly hand. “Like I said, Con, it sounds cold.”
“Maybe warm rain, then,” Connor said, willing himself to adjust the dream, fix it, so it would be perfect. If he only had a few dreams left with Jimmy, he wanted them to be right. “Warm, like August, when the clouds are so heavy, and the sky is suffocating and hangs in the mouth like wet wool…” His lungs weren’t working well. When did that become a perk? He tried to take a breath and couldn’t, and Jimmy stood up with frightening alacrity.
“Not yet,” Jimmy breathed. “Dammit, not yet. Connor, your mom’s coming, okay?”
“Why…” would his mother come? He couldn’t remember inviting her, and the place looked like shit.
Jimmy stood up and spoke quickly, rifling through the drugs on the stainless steel tray with shaking hands. “Remember, baby? It was part of that fucking will. You said you wanted your mom to come.”
Well, yeah, but only at the end… oh fuck, wait. “Not yet,” Connor told him through a clogged chest.
“Damned straight!” Jimmy muttered. “Here. Here. Holy shit, it’s here.” Whatever he came up with, Connor was glad it made him glad. His chest felt like a thousand pounds of wet laundry, and he thought, maybe, if he closed his eyes for a minute, just stopped trying so hard, the breath would come, the breath would come… but first, but first, he wanted to make that dream perfect for Jimmy. Jimmy who had clipped his own wings to settle into Connor’s little nest, and shelter Connor in the soft down under his chirpy, sharp-beaked, tough-little-chickie exterior. Jimmy, who didn’t want to fly anymore. There was an incremental decrease in the pressure in his chest, and he took a breath and closed his eyes, and…
This time it was Jimmy doing the dishes. This time it was Jimmy who was hurt, because Connor hadn’t believed him. This time Connor came up behind Jimmy, planting his square chin hard on Jimmy’s narrow shoulder. Connor pulled Jimmy back against his swollen groin and swiveled his hips, and Jimmy’s hands on his were warm and soapy. They danced there, without any music but the beating of their hearts, and Connor closed his eyes, feeling Jimmy in his arms, secure, not flying away, simply nestled there, making sated, grunting noises as their bodies locked together in rhythm.
Something wet hit Connor’s face, and again, and again, and when he looked up, he and Jimmy were outside, their bodies still swaying and the heavens opening up above them into the heart of a bright gray sky. The water droplets were warm and fat, and they started out plopping one at a time and ended up deluging, full and heavy until Connor caught them on his face, on his neck, on his shaggy, sand-colored hair, plopping in such quantity that he was covered, surrounded by water, barely able to breathe in the rainstorm. It filled his mouth and his nose and permeated his skin with heat, until he began to moan, uncomfortably, and Jimmy, who seemed oblivious to the danger of drowning in the rain simply danced on.
Connor fought for breath and began squirming in the heart of what was running under his skin, and Jimmy danced on. He began shedding his clothes, slowly, sinuously, stretching his shirt over the stringy muscles of his back and shoulders, grabbing his jeans at the knees and sliding them off his lean hips. Connor actually found breathing superfluous for a moment—who needed breathing when your lover was naked, his nipples pebbled and purple in the air, his cock semi-erect, every stretch of his shoulders and swivel of his hips pure invitation to something only the living could do.
But that heat, that uncomfortable heat was still flooding him, and eventually it began to tingle under his skin, and he gasped, dragging in a furnace blast of air that seemed to freeze his lungs. He gasped again, and again and…
“Oh thank God.”
Connor’s chest was on fire, and Jimmy was standing over his bed, weeping, hot tears falling onto Connor’s hand.
“Wha’ happened?”
Jimmy wiped his eyes with his sleeve. His face was all crumpled and he looked like hell. Pretty Jimmy, who had always been so vain, especially before that day doing dishes, and he was crying ugly, just for Connor.
“You made me promise,” Jimmy mumbled. “I know it hurt to come back, baby, but you made me promise you’d get a chance to say good bye to your mom, so I had to give you the Lacex to ease up the pressure on your lungs. Your mom’s on her way—but you can’t leave until she gets here.”
Connor didn’t want to leave period, but then, he was pretty sure he’d made that position clear when he was diagnosed as terminal. What do you mean, “die”? Jimmy needs me—I can’t just up and “die”!
“Mom…” Oh no. Connor was leaving his mother, too. “Jimmy, you gotta take care of my mom.”
Connor’s mom, as they were eating lunch in the family kitchen when Connor was sixteen, had teared up just a little.
“I’m sorry I’m a disappointment to you,” Connor had mumbled, heartbroken. It was a lie—all that literature that said coming out would make him feel better, and now his mother didn’t love him anymore.
Celia had shaken her head and wiped her eyes, then covered his hand with hers. “Not a disappointment, Connor,” she sniffled. “Never a disappointment. I…” she smiled then, brilliantly through her tears. “You bastard—I have to rely on your sister to give me grandchildren now, and she’s only twelve! I was really hoping for a few before I was fifty, you know?”
Connor got a little sniffly himself. “Well, maybe she’ll make up for it in quantity.”
Connor’s mom’s smile had gone a little crooked. “You really are a sweet boy to say it. Now do we need to have the talk about condoms now, or can it wait until we’re done with lunch.”
Connor had blanched. “If I tell you I’ve already bought some, can it wait forever?”
She’d let him finish lunch first.
And Joyce had done her share since, having four beautiful daughters after she graduated from college. Celia adored them all, but when the fourth (and last) one had been born, she’d looked at Connor bittersweetly over Miranda’s downy little head.
“I was hoping for at least one boy,” she’d said, her expression much like it had been that day during lunch. “But then, I should have known there’s only be one you.”
And now his mother was coming to say goodbye, and he worried, worried, worried, because he was going and Jimmy…
“You promise?” he asked insistently, coming out of the memory of his mother’s face. “You promise you’ll look after her, Jimmy?”
Jimmy pulled in a long, clogged breath, and Connor saw him, hovering right over the bed like people in medical dramas. His face was rumpled and baggy, like a pink frog’s, and his hair—always perfectly moussed and gelled and what-the-hell-ever was greasy and slicked back to his head in clumps.
“Not to make you feel guilty or anything, Con,” Jimmy said deliberately, “but I think I’m gonna need her to look after me, you feel me?”
Connor raised his hand, and was appalled at how badly it shook and how it went flopping toward Jimmy’s face like a bruised and pale fish. Jimmy took it in mid-air and pressed it against his face.
“I’m sorry I’m leaving,” he said after a moment.
“You should be, you bastard!” Jimmy snapped, and he wasn’t kidding, not even a little. “One man on the planet that can make me settle down and nest, and now you’re taking off without me? Real fucking bad form, I’m telling you.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve, like a five year old, but Connor wasn’t going to give him shit about it.
“I keep… I keep dreaming of you, free,” he said painfully.
“I don’t want to be free,” Jimmy gasped, falling to his knees next to the bed. “All I want is you.”
Connor clenched that weak hand in Jimmy’s hair for a while as his lover cried, and fell asleep wishing for a dream, somehow, to fix this.
The little boy looked just like Jimmy, only at, about, six or seven—the age when the front teeth fell out, and were replaced with oddly sized, oddly spaced adult teeth, that did not pay rent or drive. He had apple cheeks and sparkling brown eyes, and dimples and a divot in his chin. He came up to Connor and grinned, and then turned abruptly away, pattering on bare feet, his cut-offs a blur of darkness on his pale brown body.
It was twilight, in a big field, and the boy was headed for an oak tree twenty-yards off, and the tree was a dark void in the golden summer light, and tall, so tall. There were flickering, crane-like shadows, and the echoes of older boys in the tree, and Connor felt a frisson of fear.
“Wait! Jimmy, wait! Not alone! Don’t go alone!” Connor was running toward him, running, but his body wasn’t working, his hands were flopping, limp as fish, and his chest was pounding like surf. The boy disappeared, swallowed by the tree, and a star arced across the sky above it. The tree turned to gold for a moment, and was full of boys, all of them with hands extended toward the sky, trying to catch that brilliant star.
Connor took a step toward that tree, and another, but someone was holding his arm. He almost jerked away, almost, because that boy was in the tree, and Connor was terrified for him. What if he caught that star? He would be jerked out of this world, cast into the heavens, and what if they were cold? But Connor looked, and stopped his motion because…
“Connor? Sweetheart, are you still with us?”
Connor’s mom was still beautiful, even at sixty. Connor wasn’t sure if she was actually beautiful right now, because his vision was dim, and his mother stood out like she was backlit, and she was fuzzy with nimbus. She was beautiful, but more like a beautiful angel, and not like his beautiful mother with her tired warm eyes and lined, kindly face.
“Sure, mom,” Connor said, feeling loopy. “I was gonna go climb trees, but, yanno, decided to stay here instead.”
Celia nodded, and her cool hand on his sore one grounded her. She still looked gloriana-bright, but she felt right and human, here on sweating, struggling, harsh-breathed earth.
“Well, Connor, you let me know when you’re up for climbing that tree. I’ll be at the bottom, rooting you on.”
She used to do that for him. She was terrified when he tried though. He remembered her pale, anxious face, and that over-tight smile, the one that said she was worried but she didn’t want to say anything. She’d worn that face when he climbed trees, or played Pop Warner, or when he’d come out at high school. It was funny that she wore that frightened expression when he was in danger, but when he fell down and broke his wrist, or got a concussion, or someone spray-painted FAG across his locker, her face relaxed, and she looked like mom again. It was like, once the worst had happened, she could deal with it, but the fear of it… the absolute fear--that was the worst part.
He wished he could see her face clearly. He wanted the relaxed, “I can do this” mommy, not the terrified, “Don’t hurt my baby” mommy. That one scared him, even when he was climbing the tree or playing Pop Warner or wearing his rainbow button during the day of silence.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, thinking of that kid, running off to climb that tree. He was worried about that kid—he was terrifiedfor that kid. He needed to go check on him, back in the gold-lit twilight, but mom was here, and the house was a mess, and Jimmy was crying... “Mom, you gotta take care of Jimmy, okay? He’s not ready to fly.” Would Jimmy be in that tree?
“Jimmy’s going to be fine,” Jimmy said, but his voice sounded muffled, and he seemed to be standing in a dark corner. The sky outside had lightened, become a glorious, dark cosmic blue, and Connor stared at it, wondering when it would become licorice shadows and gold-spangled dusty-taffy shaped light.
“Jimmy sounds sad,” Connor said, wanting more dreams. Could he dream Jimmy dancing in the rain again? Could he dream him shouting gleefully at the beach? He couldn’t remember the shape of his cock or the sheen of his skin after sex, but maybe he could watch that terrible brightness of Jimmy’s spirit, shrieking, laughing, dancing at the elements and feel, maybe, Jimmy would be all right.
“Jimmy’s going to be sad,” Jimmy murmured, coming out of the shadows. “I’m sorry, Con—I know I made all sorts of promises about going on and celebrating your life and being strong, but… but I’m going to be sad. But you gotta know that’s okay. I wouldn’t be sad if you hadn’t become my wings, right?”
Jimmy had wings? Jimmy was free?
“’Kay,” Connor nodded. “Mom, remember when I used to climb trees?”
“Yeah, honey. You loved them. You would go up and hide—your father and I could never find you. One night, right after your father died, you disappeared for hours—we called the police, the whole neighborhood was out there looking for you and you know where you were?”
“In a tree,” Connor managed. The words were harder to say. Jimmy was free? Their love had made Jimmy free?
“Yeah.” There was something hot on the back of Connor’s hand, and Celia was holding it next to her face. “You were in a tree. You were huddling in there, shaking, and when we found you, you said you were reaching for Daddy in heaven, but he told you to stay behind.”
Connor laughed, his brain looping. “Jimmy and Connor, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g…”
The bed moved, the world swam, and Jimmy was on Connor’s other side. His face was a blur of light against the pending darkness, and his lips were soft on Connor’s cracked, chapped lips. “Best tree I ever perched in,” Jimmy said. “Maybe your mom and I can hang here for a while, and you can go reach for heaven now, okay?”
Love you, I love you, I love you, I love you… He thought it. He thought it and tried to move his lips, but instead…
The little boy’s lips curved into a smile, and Connor was that little boy with the missing teeth and the apple cheeks and the crooked grin. He waved madly at the white faces, lit by the sun with the darkness at his back, and then turned toward the dark tree, the shadows of the other boys flickering in shade-on-shade as they climbed. His bare feet padded briskly in the dust, and the grass prickled his soles for a minute. He had to chicken-foot it to the rough bark of the trunk.
Trees always felt so good under his hands, so real. This one was no different. His knees scraped on the bark and his palms chafed up, became raw, and still he climbed. The others were in the top of the tree, and he wanted to catch up with them.
He got to the top, a magic branch holding him up as he stood to his waist in prickly, dusty-green leaves, and found he was alone. Those other bodies, the isolated, childish voices had faded, and it was him, reaching for the endless velvet of a sky just before the last of the light faded.
A star appeared, and another, and another, and then, just as the final gold ray was cut off at the curve of the horizon, a meteor streaked through the heavens, brilliant, burning silver, gold, and red, so close he thought he could catch it.
He extended his hand, higher, higher, here it comes, Jimmy, Jimmy, look—I’ll grab that star and go flying! You want to come flying with me? But Jimmy was a pale face on the ground, in the evening shadows, only his grief making him brilliant against the black.
Jimmy would follow, he thought confidently. Jimmy loved trees as much as he did.
Connor extended his hand just a little more, his fingers taut and trembling and the star flew into it. He shrieked and gasped and clutched it tight and swung his other arm high above his head. It was so easy, the exertion was a joy, and he clenched the star in both his hands, and it burned, cold, so coldly bright, that he almost let go, but couldn’t.
His feet lifted off of the magic branch, and he was lifted, lifted by that struggling star, and the cold began to burn through his limbs, through his lungs, and he laughed, because it tingled, and oh God! He felt so alive as that star began to zoom, resuming its hectic course across the night sky.
The wind flowed around his skin, balmy and sweet. His lungs pulled in great gasps of laughter as the world disappeared in darkness behind him, and the gold glowing from the star in his hands opened up before his eyes.
“Bye, Jimmy! You can catch the next one!”
It was supposed to be a celebration of Connor’s life—at least that’s what Connor had insisted upon when he’d written out that fucking will.
“I want a party,” Connor had insisted. “I want people so roaring drunk, they take pictures of each other to prove that they were really that shit-faced. I want the music cranked up so loud, the neighbors complain, okay?”
Most of the neighbors were in the backyard, getting roaring drunk with Connor’s coworkers, and his sister, and their other friends. The laughter was too loud, the music was too loud, and everyone was doing their damnedest to do Connor proud.
Everyone except Jimmy, who was in their room, holding Jimmy’s old pillow to his face, and trying to smell that last redwood, working-man, dusty computer-geek scent molecule, to prove to himself that no, in spite of the year of warning and Connor’s disgustingly healthy, ‘live-life-to-the-fullest’ attitude, Connor wasn’t really gone.
The door opened, and Jimmy didn’t need to look up to know that it was Celia. The bed depressed next to him, and an arm that was all mother looped around his shoulder. He sank into her like he’d never been able to sink into his real mother who didn’t like children, or hugging, or commitment, and she laid her head on his shoulder, tears soaking through his, “R.I.P. Connor” shirt, the one Connor had picked out when they’d first drafted the will.
They had taken care of each other, this last week, and when she had made noises about going back to her small apartment in the next city, Jimmy had mumbled, “Please don’t. Please don’t leave me,” and the next thing he knew, she’d canceled the lease and was staying in the guest bedroom, indefinitely.
Jimmy, flighty Jimmy, who would drop on a dime and fuck on a whim, thought he would give up sex forever, just to keep Connor’s mom there, being his mom too. Maybe that would change. Maybe someday, she would get another apartment, and he would move Connor’s shit out of the garage, but not now. Not now.
“The thing is,” he said out of the blue, his voice unapologetically clogged, “the thing is, he was no fun at parties whatsoever, you know?”
“No, I didn’t,” Celia said, using his shoulder to wipe her eyes. “Tell me.”
“See, we met at a party, and he was just hanging out in a corner, passing the joint, passing the beer—but never taking any of it. And I was pretty buzzed, and I thought, What is this total geek doing here? And I went over to ask him, right? And he started pointing out people—this one kept checking her hair, and she was hitting on a guy that he’d slept with a month ago, and he was wonder when she was going to figure out that the signals didn’t fly. This other one had just had a break-up, and he was drinking to forget. It was all about why people were there—he liked their stories, liked watching them play out. He really liked chatting with the drunk people as the party wound down.”
Jimmy’s mouth twitched. Connor hadn’t made it to the end of that party. Jimmy had gotten close enough to see those eyes—not remarkably colored, but kind, and crinkly at the corners, and Jimmy had hauled him to a back room for a one-off that had lasted six years.
Jimmy hadn’t wanted to commit at first, because he was sure he’d break Connor’s heart. He still felt a little angry that Connor had been the first one to leave.
“Mmm…” Celia murmured, and Jimmy liked the way she really thought about what he was saying. Connor hadn’t sprung from thin air—Jimmy had realized that this last year. “Why do you think he wanted a party for his funeral?”
“Don’t know,” Jimmy lied. “Don’t fucking care, either!” Sobs broke in his chest, and he was vaguely surprised. He’d held onto them for the last week, he’d been a grown up. He’d made all the arrangements, used Connor’s compulsively made checklists, just generally kept it all together, but not now.
Now, Celia held him as he sobbed into her lap, muttering “I fucking hate him, Mom—how could he fucking leave us like this!”
Celia weathered his storm. The sleeve of his shirt and the back of it were sodden by the time he was done, but she stayed solid and true, just like her son, as Jimmy said horrible, horrible things about the man they’d both loved.
She ignored them, and Jimmy remembered hearing her voice, shrill as it had never been shrill, as Connor broke the news that the cancer had spread, and the chemo wasn’t working, and it was time to plan the endgame.
You’re just going to fucking give up on me? ME? Don’t you have any goddamned respect, son? You’re not supposed to leave before I do. Oh, God… Connor… don’t leave me…
As Jimmy lay, finally still and quiescent, in Celia’s lap, he thought that maybe Celia had done this part already.
After some moments, heavy in the darkened room, Celia’s voice came as a welcome surprise, and was not shrill at all.
“Do you remember what he said?” she asked, and it was a rhetorical question. How did you not remember your dying lover’s last words?
“He said, ‘Bye Jimmy. You can catch the next star.’”
Celia nodded. “C’mon, sweetheart. It’s broad daylight outside—there’s not a star in sight. You can go star-catching later, okay?”
Jimmy pulled in a breath and shuddered it out, and stood and offered Celia an arm. She took his arm, and leaned her wet cheek on his sleeve (the other sleeve, so now he had a matched set) and they moved toward the brightened hallway. It was the full sunshine of late October outside, without even a hint of rain. God, Jimmy wanted a rain to fall, something that would wash away the grief and the lead roots that seemed to bind his heart to the ground.
Not yet, he thought, hearing the pained chatter from the back yard. Not yet.
The party was winding down, and it was time to listen. People would speak wisely now, and be truthful, and memories of Connor would be thick and real, and his presence would be as palpable as the fluid light from the autumn sun.
Winter was coming. Stark branches, stark thought, bleak hearts, and the terrible void of Connor.
Maybe when spring returned, and the trees grew thick with leaves, Jimmy could perch in the nest he’d made with his mate, and think once again of flying.
And now, here they were. Autumn. Leaves were showering in a purple/brown scatter, the sky was interminable blue, and his body was crumbling, decaying from the inside out. With every pump of his heart, his blood carried flawed cells, little mini-assassins to every vital organ, and his body was about as strong as a leaf-bare tree with brittle limbs.
And the drugs weren’t even good.”
“Hereyago,” Jimmy murmured, standing by the alien bed in the middle of their living room. “I’m sorry, baby—I didn’t realize we’d gone so long after our last dose.”
Connor grunted. He’d tried not to make any noise, or suggest that he needed more morphine. “s’no fair,” he said, trying to be clear, but the morphine was whitewashing his blood stream, and it was SOOOOO lovely after the terrible, suffocating pain that was, quite literally, bone and lymph node deep.
“What’s not fair?” Jimmy pulled a stool up next to the bed, and Connor looked at him gratefully. He had things to do—he was working from home now, to take care of Connor through the end, but he’d been on the computer all morning.
“So little time left… don’t want to spend it out in the clouds.”
Jimmy’s smile was… broken. He took Connor’s hand, purple from the nearly constant IV, and frail. It didn’t used to be frail. Connor had worked construction jobs through college—it used to be thick and battered and tough. Even though he’d been working as a computer tech for the last ten years, he’d been proud of his bruiser hands, and Jimmy had always found them sort of sexy too.
“At least tell me the dreams are good, baby. You’re doing all the drugs—tell me you’ve got some kick-ass dreams,yanno?”
Connor grimaced and tried not to be a big, dying baby about it. “The dreams ss…sssuck,” he confessed. “They’re… they’re boring. Every day. This morning I dreamed of… of...” What was he saying again? Oh yeah… “I dreamed of doing the dishes.”
Jimmy laughed a little. “I could fill that one in for you,” he murmured suggestively. “Remember that one time? You remember… you were all tense from work, and you’d just about ripped my head off for… shit. I don’t even know.”
“Doing the dishes,” Connor supplied with a small laugh. He remembered. “You didn’t do the dishes, and I wanted to cook dinner and… Jesus!” He was suddenly tearful, and felt like a pussy, but he felt it deep inside where he couldn’t say it, because not much of his deep insides made it up to his mouth right now. “Jesus, I was such a bitch,” he confessed, regretting the moment acutely.
“You weren’t in the end,” Jimmy said, grinning. Jimmy had one of those grins that pushed his apple cheeks up and made his dimples pop. He was so damned cute he was almost nauseating, and Connor… well, Connor had always been a sucker for brown eyes and dimples.
“Yes I was,” Connor said now, hoping the drugs were letting him be lascivious.
“You’re always a sweet bitch when you bottom,” Jimmy told him, reading his intent. Connor wanted to cry again. Damn, Jimmy—God bless you. Not only did you stick with me to the end, but you learned to read my mind too.
“I learned from the best,” Connor managed back, and Jimmy’s smile was heated.
“Yeah… that day, you learned real good. You remember?”
“Mmm…” He did remember. He remembered Jimmy coming up behind him, in spite of his snarling bitchiness. Jimmy wasn’t usually the type to confront someone when they were pissy—Connor would never know why this day was different. But it was.
Jimmy’s body, stringy, hard, bony, and hot, had ranged itself behind Connor, and Jimmy had dug that sharp little fox-point of a chin into Connor’s shoulder, and then nuzzled his ear…
Connor went boneless, liquid, his arms going stiff against the counter’s edge to just hold him up, because his knees weren’t doing the job. Jimmy’s hands didn’t fuck around, either—one hand went straight down under the back of Connor’s jeans, and Connor managed a grunt and a wiggle to help it, cool skinned and sinuous, cup his ass. The other hand was out of sight—Jimmy’s shoulder was tilted backward, and Connor thought he might have had something in that hand, but he was suddenly so hot he didn’t care what it could be.
“You want me to ‘fucking get something done’?” Jimmy purred, echoing Connor’s words, and Connor made sound like a cross between a whimper and a sigh.
“Sorry about that,” he muttered, not sure whether to push his ass into Jimmy’s hand so he could squeeze it, or spread his legs and bend over the counter so he could squeeze other things.
“Don’t be,” Jimmy said softly. “Unbutton your jeans.”
“Mmm… was going to cook you dinner!” Because that’s what started the whole thing in the first place. Jimmy had asked him to make stroganoff the night before, and Connor said, “Fine, but you need to clean the kitchen!” and Jimmy had forgotten. Connor got home with a grocery bag full of ingredients, and the cat was on the counter, eating yesterday’s hummus!
“You were going to take care of me.” Jimmy flickered a tongue out to tease Connor’s earlobe, and he found he was arching his hips to try to brush the front of his jeans on the countertop, because, hot damn! Was his cock hard! “You always take care of me. Let me take care of you. Now,” and Jimmy’s voice firmed up with command, “I said unbutton your jeans!”
Connor’s hands were wet and soapy, and he didn’t argue, not once. His jeans were unbuttoned in a quick second, and Jimmy helped him shuck them down to his ankles in a little less time. Jimmy stood up then and moved his other hand to Connor’s ass. His hand was slick with lube, and there was a plug caught between his fingers.
Connor gasped at the coolness of the plug as it pushed between his cheeks, and Jimmy spoke in his ear again. “Just hold this for a minute, princess, while I get things ready, ‘kay?”
And then he thrust it, quickly, right into Connor’s entrance, and it was so slick with lube—and Connor was so begging for it—that it went right in…
Connor was jerked out of the dream of the past by the present. He remembered that day—oh, God, he remembered. But the sensations, the feeling of being bent over the counter and just… just fucked until his body was weak and liquid, and come spattered on the cabinets in front of him, that was, well…
His eyes wandered to the colostomy bag that took over when all things south stopped functioning.
“You know what I remember from that day?” Jimmy asked, not seeing Connor’s embarrassed, angry glance at the ugly truth of what was left of his life now.
“Fucking me senseless?” Connor joked weakly, and Jimmy rolled his eyes.
“I remember knowing I wasn’t going to leave. Ever. There I was, all afraid of commitment, afraid of being locked in a little cubicle of hell for the duration, and I realized that, you know… you could come in and chew my face off, and I could change that. You loved me enough to let me change that.” Jimmy shrugged, and to Connor’s blurry vision, it looked like he had wings. “Most powerful goddamned thing in my life.”
It was like magic. Transformation—a grim, ugly fact of his life was washed away in the glow of what the moment had meant. Connor blinked, as entranced by the changing color of his thoughts as a child would be at a light show. Suddenly the sex didn’t matter—or it mattered, but it was irrelevant to why they had it, and what it had meant.
The months before that moment, the tension fraught ones, where Connor was afraid, afraid of making plans with his family, in case he woke up, expecting to take his nieces to the zoo and found Jimmy gone. Those were the months when he was afraid to breathe the air in the hollow of his lover’s neck, in case he could scent another man’s breath, and they melted away as though they had never been. Connor felt a moment of regret, because with the lightness in his chest now, he thought maybe they should have been the first things to go—hell, before the bowel function, at the very least—but he was so grateful that they didn’t exist anymore, that he refused to complain.
“I could always dream about that,” he murmured, not wanting to tell his lover that it wasn’t the sex that mattered. When you weren’t inches away from death, the sex should matter, because, he was starting to think now, it’s one of the things that made life sweet. It wasn’t Jimmy’s fault you couldn’t carry it with you, like candy in your pocket, now was it?
“You could always dream about that day at the beach instead,” Jimmy told him out of the blue.
Connor managed to squint at him, which cost him, because he knew he was fading out for the moment. “You mean the day that it rained?”
Jimmy laughed, and for a man who always claimed to live in the ‘now’ (and hence the little problem with fidelity at the beginning of the relationship) the noise was laden with nostalgia. “Yeah—and we ran for the car, and we were all wet, but we didn’t want to leave the beach and you ended up giving me the world’s most awkward hummer in the front seat of the car!”
Connor groaned—this time in memory, and not pain. “Oh Christ… and then the cop came knocking on the window—“
“And they were all steamed up, and then I rolled down the window—“
“And you were still fastening your pants, and I was wiping my mouth and you said—“
They finished the story together, “Keep your shirt on, officer—all things considered, we should have just gone walking in the rain!”
They hadn’t though. The cop had left, and they’d turned on the engine to defrog the windows and just sat there, talking, watching the great gray waves coast in and wreck against the sand in an explosion of froth. It had been a few weeks after Jimmy made washing the dishes a pornographic sport, and they’d played a Dave Matthews album on the iPod while the fan was running, and held hands without thinking much about it.
Connor’s laughter faded, and then his consciousness, and then he was back in that car with Jimmy again, just talking…
…and then Jimmy got out of the car, and started racing down the beach, hopping on one foot to pull off his tennis-shoes. The jeans went next, and then the hooded sweatshirt in hideous San Francisco Giants orange, and then the ring-collared T-shirt underneath, and then the boxers, and there he was, naked, and running full force into the surf, his hands fisted over his hands and he jumped up and down, shouting, exuberant, and triumphant.
Connor was stuck in the car. He kept trying to open it, but the latch slipped out of his hand, or the door fumbled closed, or his legs got caught on the steering wheel, and at one point, a gust of wind blew the door back into his thigh which ached and ached, and he was stuck, pressing his hands against the condensation on the windows, watching his lover shriek naked in the rain…
He came to abruptly, surprised that the autumn blue that marked time through the bay window in their living room had turned to purple/black.
“Shit,” he mumbled. “How long was I out?”
Jimmy was sitting on the couch, asleep, and he startled, jerking his head off of his fist and jumping to his feet abruptly.
“Wha?” Jimmy asked, all frowzy from sleep, and Connor managed a dusty chuckle.
“How long was I out?” The sky was dark. Had he slept through the afternoon?
“Twelve hours,” Jimmy yawned. “It’s ass-crack-of-the-a.m., my darling. You want anything to eat?” It was a courtesy, mostly. Connor had been eating broth and mushed noodles for weeks.
“Mmm… water,” he begged, feeling piteous.
Jimmy was there though, and Connor sipped from the big icy thermos gratefully.
“Better, baby?”
Connor grunted—talking seemed to be hard, so hard, but he wanted to say something important. What was it? Oh yeah. “I dreamed of you,” he croaked. “You were… naked, at the ocean. You were free. Free enough to dance in the rain.”
Jimmy shivered, and perched himself on the edge of the couch again, so he and Connor could talk closely. “Sounds cold,” he murmured.
“Yeah, but you were free,” Connor said insistently. He’d wanted to be free at the beginning, and Connor had given him that. It had been painful, and there had been nights when he hadn’t come home, and Connor had howled bile into the pillow. But that bitterness was truly gone. Now all that remained was a desire to see Jimmy happy, shrieking glee into the stormy waters of a life without him.
Jimmy’s laugh was humorless. “After five years with you, baby, what on earth makes you think I want to be free?”
“No?” Connor asked a little sadly.
“No.” Jimmy kissed that limp, sickly hand. “Like I said, Con, it sounds cold.”
“Maybe warm rain, then,” Connor said, willing himself to adjust the dream, fix it, so it would be perfect. If he only had a few dreams left with Jimmy, he wanted them to be right. “Warm, like August, when the clouds are so heavy, and the sky is suffocating and hangs in the mouth like wet wool…” His lungs weren’t working well. When did that become a perk? He tried to take a breath and couldn’t, and Jimmy stood up with frightening alacrity.
“Not yet,” Jimmy breathed. “Dammit, not yet. Connor, your mom’s coming, okay?”
“Why…” would his mother come? He couldn’t remember inviting her, and the place looked like shit.
Jimmy stood up and spoke quickly, rifling through the drugs on the stainless steel tray with shaking hands. “Remember, baby? It was part of that fucking will. You said you wanted your mom to come.”
Well, yeah, but only at the end… oh fuck, wait. “Not yet,” Connor told him through a clogged chest.
“Damned straight!” Jimmy muttered. “Here. Here. Holy shit, it’s here.” Whatever he came up with, Connor was glad it made him glad. His chest felt like a thousand pounds of wet laundry, and he thought, maybe, if he closed his eyes for a minute, just stopped trying so hard, the breath would come, the breath would come… but first, but first, he wanted to make that dream perfect for Jimmy. Jimmy who had clipped his own wings to settle into Connor’s little nest, and shelter Connor in the soft down under his chirpy, sharp-beaked, tough-little-chickie exterior. Jimmy, who didn’t want to fly anymore. There was an incremental decrease in the pressure in his chest, and he took a breath and closed his eyes, and…
This time it was Jimmy doing the dishes. This time it was Jimmy who was hurt, because Connor hadn’t believed him. This time Connor came up behind Jimmy, planting his square chin hard on Jimmy’s narrow shoulder. Connor pulled Jimmy back against his swollen groin and swiveled his hips, and Jimmy’s hands on his were warm and soapy. They danced there, without any music but the beating of their hearts, and Connor closed his eyes, feeling Jimmy in his arms, secure, not flying away, simply nestled there, making sated, grunting noises as their bodies locked together in rhythm.
Something wet hit Connor’s face, and again, and again, and when he looked up, he and Jimmy were outside, their bodies still swaying and the heavens opening up above them into the heart of a bright gray sky. The water droplets were warm and fat, and they started out plopping one at a time and ended up deluging, full and heavy until Connor caught them on his face, on his neck, on his shaggy, sand-colored hair, plopping in such quantity that he was covered, surrounded by water, barely able to breathe in the rainstorm. It filled his mouth and his nose and permeated his skin with heat, until he began to moan, uncomfortably, and Jimmy, who seemed oblivious to the danger of drowning in the rain simply danced on.
Connor fought for breath and began squirming in the heart of what was running under his skin, and Jimmy danced on. He began shedding his clothes, slowly, sinuously, stretching his shirt over the stringy muscles of his back and shoulders, grabbing his jeans at the knees and sliding them off his lean hips. Connor actually found breathing superfluous for a moment—who needed breathing when your lover was naked, his nipples pebbled and purple in the air, his cock semi-erect, every stretch of his shoulders and swivel of his hips pure invitation to something only the living could do.
But that heat, that uncomfortable heat was still flooding him, and eventually it began to tingle under his skin, and he gasped, dragging in a furnace blast of air that seemed to freeze his lungs. He gasped again, and again and…
“Oh thank God.”
Connor’s chest was on fire, and Jimmy was standing over his bed, weeping, hot tears falling onto Connor’s hand.
“Wha’ happened?”
Jimmy wiped his eyes with his sleeve. His face was all crumpled and he looked like hell. Pretty Jimmy, who had always been so vain, especially before that day doing dishes, and he was crying ugly, just for Connor.
“You made me promise,” Jimmy mumbled. “I know it hurt to come back, baby, but you made me promise you’d get a chance to say good bye to your mom, so I had to give you the Lacex to ease up the pressure on your lungs. Your mom’s on her way—but you can’t leave until she gets here.”
Connor didn’t want to leave period, but then, he was pretty sure he’d made that position clear when he was diagnosed as terminal. What do you mean, “die”? Jimmy needs me—I can’t just up and “die”!
“Mom…” Oh no. Connor was leaving his mother, too. “Jimmy, you gotta take care of my mom.”
Connor’s mom, as they were eating lunch in the family kitchen when Connor was sixteen, had teared up just a little.
“I’m sorry I’m a disappointment to you,” Connor had mumbled, heartbroken. It was a lie—all that literature that said coming out would make him feel better, and now his mother didn’t love him anymore.
Celia had shaken her head and wiped her eyes, then covered his hand with hers. “Not a disappointment, Connor,” she sniffled. “Never a disappointment. I…” she smiled then, brilliantly through her tears. “You bastard—I have to rely on your sister to give me grandchildren now, and she’s only twelve! I was really hoping for a few before I was fifty, you know?”
Connor got a little sniffly himself. “Well, maybe she’ll make up for it in quantity.”
Connor’s mom’s smile had gone a little crooked. “You really are a sweet boy to say it. Now do we need to have the talk about condoms now, or can it wait until we’re done with lunch.”
Connor had blanched. “If I tell you I’ve already bought some, can it wait forever?”
She’d let him finish lunch first.
And Joyce had done her share since, having four beautiful daughters after she graduated from college. Celia adored them all, but when the fourth (and last) one had been born, she’d looked at Connor bittersweetly over Miranda’s downy little head.
“I was hoping for at least one boy,” she’d said, her expression much like it had been that day during lunch. “But then, I should have known there’s only be one you.”
And now his mother was coming to say goodbye, and he worried, worried, worried, because he was going and Jimmy…
“You promise?” he asked insistently, coming out of the memory of his mother’s face. “You promise you’ll look after her, Jimmy?”
Jimmy pulled in a long, clogged breath, and Connor saw him, hovering right over the bed like people in medical dramas. His face was rumpled and baggy, like a pink frog’s, and his hair—always perfectly moussed and gelled and what-the-hell-ever was greasy and slicked back to his head in clumps.
“Not to make you feel guilty or anything, Con,” Jimmy said deliberately, “but I think I’m gonna need her to look after me, you feel me?”
Connor raised his hand, and was appalled at how badly it shook and how it went flopping toward Jimmy’s face like a bruised and pale fish. Jimmy took it in mid-air and pressed it against his face.
“I’m sorry I’m leaving,” he said after a moment.
“You should be, you bastard!” Jimmy snapped, and he wasn’t kidding, not even a little. “One man on the planet that can make me settle down and nest, and now you’re taking off without me? Real fucking bad form, I’m telling you.” He wiped his nose on his sleeve, like a five year old, but Connor wasn’t going to give him shit about it.
“I keep… I keep dreaming of you, free,” he said painfully.
“I don’t want to be free,” Jimmy gasped, falling to his knees next to the bed. “All I want is you.”
Connor clenched that weak hand in Jimmy’s hair for a while as his lover cried, and fell asleep wishing for a dream, somehow, to fix this.
The little boy looked just like Jimmy, only at, about, six or seven—the age when the front teeth fell out, and were replaced with oddly sized, oddly spaced adult teeth, that did not pay rent or drive. He had apple cheeks and sparkling brown eyes, and dimples and a divot in his chin. He came up to Connor and grinned, and then turned abruptly away, pattering on bare feet, his cut-offs a blur of darkness on his pale brown body.
It was twilight, in a big field, and the boy was headed for an oak tree twenty-yards off, and the tree was a dark void in the golden summer light, and tall, so tall. There were flickering, crane-like shadows, and the echoes of older boys in the tree, and Connor felt a frisson of fear.
“Wait! Jimmy, wait! Not alone! Don’t go alone!” Connor was running toward him, running, but his body wasn’t working, his hands were flopping, limp as fish, and his chest was pounding like surf. The boy disappeared, swallowed by the tree, and a star arced across the sky above it. The tree turned to gold for a moment, and was full of boys, all of them with hands extended toward the sky, trying to catch that brilliant star.
Connor took a step toward that tree, and another, but someone was holding his arm. He almost jerked away, almost, because that boy was in the tree, and Connor was terrified for him. What if he caught that star? He would be jerked out of this world, cast into the heavens, and what if they were cold? But Connor looked, and stopped his motion because…
“Connor? Sweetheart, are you still with us?”
Connor’s mom was still beautiful, even at sixty. Connor wasn’t sure if she was actually beautiful right now, because his vision was dim, and his mother stood out like she was backlit, and she was fuzzy with nimbus. She was beautiful, but more like a beautiful angel, and not like his beautiful mother with her tired warm eyes and lined, kindly face.
“Sure, mom,” Connor said, feeling loopy. “I was gonna go climb trees, but, yanno, decided to stay here instead.”
Celia nodded, and her cool hand on his sore one grounded her. She still looked gloriana-bright, but she felt right and human, here on sweating, struggling, harsh-breathed earth.
“Well, Connor, you let me know when you’re up for climbing that tree. I’ll be at the bottom, rooting you on.”
She used to do that for him. She was terrified when he tried though. He remembered her pale, anxious face, and that over-tight smile, the one that said she was worried but she didn’t want to say anything. She’d worn that face when he climbed trees, or played Pop Warner, or when he’d come out at high school. It was funny that she wore that frightened expression when he was in danger, but when he fell down and broke his wrist, or got a concussion, or someone spray-painted FAG across his locker, her face relaxed, and she looked like mom again. It was like, once the worst had happened, she could deal with it, but the fear of it… the absolute fear--that was the worst part.
He wished he could see her face clearly. He wanted the relaxed, “I can do this” mommy, not the terrified, “Don’t hurt my baby” mommy. That one scared him, even when he was climbing the tree or playing Pop Warner or wearing his rainbow button during the day of silence.
“I’ll be fine,” he said, thinking of that kid, running off to climb that tree. He was worried about that kid—he was terrifiedfor that kid. He needed to go check on him, back in the gold-lit twilight, but mom was here, and the house was a mess, and Jimmy was crying... “Mom, you gotta take care of Jimmy, okay? He’s not ready to fly.” Would Jimmy be in that tree?
“Jimmy’s going to be fine,” Jimmy said, but his voice sounded muffled, and he seemed to be standing in a dark corner. The sky outside had lightened, become a glorious, dark cosmic blue, and Connor stared at it, wondering when it would become licorice shadows and gold-spangled dusty-taffy shaped light.
“Jimmy sounds sad,” Connor said, wanting more dreams. Could he dream Jimmy dancing in the rain again? Could he dream him shouting gleefully at the beach? He couldn’t remember the shape of his cock or the sheen of his skin after sex, but maybe he could watch that terrible brightness of Jimmy’s spirit, shrieking, laughing, dancing at the elements and feel, maybe, Jimmy would be all right.
“Jimmy’s going to be sad,” Jimmy murmured, coming out of the shadows. “I’m sorry, Con—I know I made all sorts of promises about going on and celebrating your life and being strong, but… but I’m going to be sad. But you gotta know that’s okay. I wouldn’t be sad if you hadn’t become my wings, right?”
Jimmy had wings? Jimmy was free?
“’Kay,” Connor nodded. “Mom, remember when I used to climb trees?”
“Yeah, honey. You loved them. You would go up and hide—your father and I could never find you. One night, right after your father died, you disappeared for hours—we called the police, the whole neighborhood was out there looking for you and you know where you were?”
“In a tree,” Connor managed. The words were harder to say. Jimmy was free? Their love had made Jimmy free?
“Yeah.” There was something hot on the back of Connor’s hand, and Celia was holding it next to her face. “You were in a tree. You were huddling in there, shaking, and when we found you, you said you were reaching for Daddy in heaven, but he told you to stay behind.”
Connor laughed, his brain looping. “Jimmy and Connor, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g…”
The bed moved, the world swam, and Jimmy was on Connor’s other side. His face was a blur of light against the pending darkness, and his lips were soft on Connor’s cracked, chapped lips. “Best tree I ever perched in,” Jimmy said. “Maybe your mom and I can hang here for a while, and you can go reach for heaven now, okay?”
Love you, I love you, I love you, I love you… He thought it. He thought it and tried to move his lips, but instead…
The little boy’s lips curved into a smile, and Connor was that little boy with the missing teeth and the apple cheeks and the crooked grin. He waved madly at the white faces, lit by the sun with the darkness at his back, and then turned toward the dark tree, the shadows of the other boys flickering in shade-on-shade as they climbed. His bare feet padded briskly in the dust, and the grass prickled his soles for a minute. He had to chicken-foot it to the rough bark of the trunk.
Trees always felt so good under his hands, so real. This one was no different. His knees scraped on the bark and his palms chafed up, became raw, and still he climbed. The others were in the top of the tree, and he wanted to catch up with them.
He got to the top, a magic branch holding him up as he stood to his waist in prickly, dusty-green leaves, and found he was alone. Those other bodies, the isolated, childish voices had faded, and it was him, reaching for the endless velvet of a sky just before the last of the light faded.
A star appeared, and another, and another, and then, just as the final gold ray was cut off at the curve of the horizon, a meteor streaked through the heavens, brilliant, burning silver, gold, and red, so close he thought he could catch it.
He extended his hand, higher, higher, here it comes, Jimmy, Jimmy, look—I’ll grab that star and go flying! You want to come flying with me? But Jimmy was a pale face on the ground, in the evening shadows, only his grief making him brilliant against the black.
Jimmy would follow, he thought confidently. Jimmy loved trees as much as he did.
Connor extended his hand just a little more, his fingers taut and trembling and the star flew into it. He shrieked and gasped and clutched it tight and swung his other arm high above his head. It was so easy, the exertion was a joy, and he clenched the star in both his hands, and it burned, cold, so coldly bright, that he almost let go, but couldn’t.
His feet lifted off of the magic branch, and he was lifted, lifted by that struggling star, and the cold began to burn through his limbs, through his lungs, and he laughed, because it tingled, and oh God! He felt so alive as that star began to zoom, resuming its hectic course across the night sky.
The wind flowed around his skin, balmy and sweet. His lungs pulled in great gasps of laughter as the world disappeared in darkness behind him, and the gold glowing from the star in his hands opened up before his eyes.
“Bye, Jimmy! You can catch the next one!”
It was supposed to be a celebration of Connor’s life—at least that’s what Connor had insisted upon when he’d written out that fucking will.
“I want a party,” Connor had insisted. “I want people so roaring drunk, they take pictures of each other to prove that they were really that shit-faced. I want the music cranked up so loud, the neighbors complain, okay?”
Most of the neighbors were in the backyard, getting roaring drunk with Connor’s coworkers, and his sister, and their other friends. The laughter was too loud, the music was too loud, and everyone was doing their damnedest to do Connor proud.
Everyone except Jimmy, who was in their room, holding Jimmy’s old pillow to his face, and trying to smell that last redwood, working-man, dusty computer-geek scent molecule, to prove to himself that no, in spite of the year of warning and Connor’s disgustingly healthy, ‘live-life-to-the-fullest’ attitude, Connor wasn’t really gone.
The door opened, and Jimmy didn’t need to look up to know that it was Celia. The bed depressed next to him, and an arm that was all mother looped around his shoulder. He sank into her like he’d never been able to sink into his real mother who didn’t like children, or hugging, or commitment, and she laid her head on his shoulder, tears soaking through his, “R.I.P. Connor” shirt, the one Connor had picked out when they’d first drafted the will.
They had taken care of each other, this last week, and when she had made noises about going back to her small apartment in the next city, Jimmy had mumbled, “Please don’t. Please don’t leave me,” and the next thing he knew, she’d canceled the lease and was staying in the guest bedroom, indefinitely.
Jimmy, flighty Jimmy, who would drop on a dime and fuck on a whim, thought he would give up sex forever, just to keep Connor’s mom there, being his mom too. Maybe that would change. Maybe someday, she would get another apartment, and he would move Connor’s shit out of the garage, but not now. Not now.
“The thing is,” he said out of the blue, his voice unapologetically clogged, “the thing is, he was no fun at parties whatsoever, you know?”
“No, I didn’t,” Celia said, using his shoulder to wipe her eyes. “Tell me.”
“See, we met at a party, and he was just hanging out in a corner, passing the joint, passing the beer—but never taking any of it. And I was pretty buzzed, and I thought, What is this total geek doing here? And I went over to ask him, right? And he started pointing out people—this one kept checking her hair, and she was hitting on a guy that he’d slept with a month ago, and he was wonder when she was going to figure out that the signals didn’t fly. This other one had just had a break-up, and he was drinking to forget. It was all about why people were there—he liked their stories, liked watching them play out. He really liked chatting with the drunk people as the party wound down.”
Jimmy’s mouth twitched. Connor hadn’t made it to the end of that party. Jimmy had gotten close enough to see those eyes—not remarkably colored, but kind, and crinkly at the corners, and Jimmy had hauled him to a back room for a one-off that had lasted six years.
Jimmy hadn’t wanted to commit at first, because he was sure he’d break Connor’s heart. He still felt a little angry that Connor had been the first one to leave.
“Mmm…” Celia murmured, and Jimmy liked the way she really thought about what he was saying. Connor hadn’t sprung from thin air—Jimmy had realized that this last year. “Why do you think he wanted a party for his funeral?”
“Don’t know,” Jimmy lied. “Don’t fucking care, either!” Sobs broke in his chest, and he was vaguely surprised. He’d held onto them for the last week, he’d been a grown up. He’d made all the arrangements, used Connor’s compulsively made checklists, just generally kept it all together, but not now.
Now, Celia held him as he sobbed into her lap, muttering “I fucking hate him, Mom—how could he fucking leave us like this!”
Celia weathered his storm. The sleeve of his shirt and the back of it were sodden by the time he was done, but she stayed solid and true, just like her son, as Jimmy said horrible, horrible things about the man they’d both loved.
She ignored them, and Jimmy remembered hearing her voice, shrill as it had never been shrill, as Connor broke the news that the cancer had spread, and the chemo wasn’t working, and it was time to plan the endgame.
You’re just going to fucking give up on me? ME? Don’t you have any goddamned respect, son? You’re not supposed to leave before I do. Oh, God… Connor… don’t leave me…
As Jimmy lay, finally still and quiescent, in Celia’s lap, he thought that maybe Celia had done this part already.
After some moments, heavy in the darkened room, Celia’s voice came as a welcome surprise, and was not shrill at all.
“Do you remember what he said?” she asked, and it was a rhetorical question. How did you not remember your dying lover’s last words?
“He said, ‘Bye Jimmy. You can catch the next star.’”
Celia nodded. “C’mon, sweetheart. It’s broad daylight outside—there’s not a star in sight. You can go star-catching later, okay?”
Jimmy pulled in a breath and shuddered it out, and stood and offered Celia an arm. She took his arm, and leaned her wet cheek on his sleeve (the other sleeve, so now he had a matched set) and they moved toward the brightened hallway. It was the full sunshine of late October outside, without even a hint of rain. God, Jimmy wanted a rain to fall, something that would wash away the grief and the lead roots that seemed to bind his heart to the ground.
Not yet, he thought, hearing the pained chatter from the back yard. Not yet.
The party was winding down, and it was time to listen. People would speak wisely now, and be truthful, and memories of Connor would be thick and real, and his presence would be as palpable as the fluid light from the autumn sun.
Winter was coming. Stark branches, stark thought, bleak hearts, and the terrible void of Connor.
Maybe when spring returned, and the trees grew thick with leaves, Jimmy could perch in the nest he’d made with his mate, and think once again of flying.