Kissing Boys After Dark

Chapter 1

Shane

“Are you going to go with him?”

Melody Henson’s long nails click against her wine glass as she sits next to me on the sofa.

I’ve peeled off the label on my beer into shreds that lie like a paper massacre on the coffee table. One shred flutters to the floor as Melody crosses her legs and her sunflower-print skirt brushes against it.

“I don’t know.” I take a long sip of my beer and watch Matt and Jess spin around in a chair while Matt points a camcorder toward them, laughing.

“I think it’s really sweet what he’s doing,” Melody says softly. “It’s a long drive to do by yourself, though. Port Leyden, all the way to…Where’s he going again?”

I press my knuckles into my thighs and watch Jess fall off Matt’s lap, and the camcorder clatters onto the floor.

There are drunken exclamations and an attempt to check the thing to see if it’s still taping or broken.

I wish I’d thought to bring my camera. I would’ve gotten some interesting pictures tonight.

But I hardly think about cameras or taking photos anymore.

“I dunno,” I lie, drinking more beer.

From somewhere, a bong gets passed to us. Melody takes a hit off it, but I pass. She exhales and nearly coughs her lungs out. Then she looks solemn. She puts a hand on my arm. “And I’m sorry about Everett.”

I’m surprised by the sharp sting in my eyes and the swell in my throat.

I don’t know the proper or average mourning period for your high school buddy.

Everett Sawyer’s funeral was two weeks ago, and I was late that day.

Gina and I had to find someone to watch Mikayla.

We showed up at the graveside service and stood in the back.

There was quite a crowd. Pretty much everyone from high school showed up, since Everett had been popular.

I caught a glimpse of Everett’s family. I couldn’t see all of them from where Gina and I stood, but I knew through that sea of black clothing that Ethan was there.

For a few brief seconds, I wanted to go speak to him, to give him my condolences.

Give him my sympathies for losing his big brother and maybe offer him a shoulder to cry on.

I thought maybe—maybe—in all this sadness and mourning, Ethan Sawyer might accept my offerings.

But I was fooling myself. He hates me and he should. I one hundred percent deserve it.

“You should go.” Melody’s voice cuts into my thoughts, her tone implying she’s suddenly wise beyond her years. “I think Ev would want you to.”

I look over at her. Her eyes are getting red from the weed, and her mascara is smudged.

I don’t know if she knows that Ev and I, as close as we were in high school, so much that our names were practically said as one word—ShaneandEv or EvandShane—I don’t know if she knows or even noticed that Everett Sawyer and I haven’t been close at all since then.

The last time I saw him was months ago at the Arby’s in Lowville when he came up from Utica to visit his folks.

I don’t think he saw me, and if he did, he ignored me.

And I can’t blame him at all.

I look down at my scuffed-up work boots with paint stains and fraying laces. I set down my beer next to the shredded label, my stomach starting to ache.

“Think I’m gonna get going.” I stand and gather up the paper massacre on the coffee table.

“If you see Ethan tomorrow,” Melody says, looking up at me with her mascara-smudged eyes. “Will you tell him I’m thinking about him?”

“Yeah, sure.” I reply.

I make my way through a knot of people into the kitchen to throw away my trash.

I put on my coat and gloves and stamp through three feet of packed snow to my truck.

It’s a clear night and there are clumps of snow in the tall trees surrounding the house.

It’s beautiful. It’s lonely. It’s scenes like these that make me miss taking pictures.

I used to capture moments to always remember.

Now they all seem to just slip on by unnoticed.

On my way home, I tell myself I’ll be different. I’ll pay more attention to things, like the sky tonight. I gaze intently up at the stars through the windshield as I drive along the snow-packed road. I’ll stop wishing for my camera and actually have it with me, if I can remember where I put it.

And I’ll stop being such a fucking coward.

I impulsively change direction at a stop sign and go left instead of right. I pull up at the apartment building off Quarry Street. There’s yellow lamplight glowing through the venetian blinds in the bottom left apartment. I glance at the radio clock and see it’s just after ten.

It’s my weekend with Mikayla. I’m pretty sure.

They sort of got knocked off schedule a couple weeks ago when Gina had to go out of town for work, and I had Mikayla for two weekends in a row, plus a few weekday evenings so Gina could pick up some shifts.

I go through it all in my head, figuring out the dates then shaming myself for not being more organized about this as I knock on the apartment door.

A handful of minutes pass before the door opens, the chain catching, and Gina’s tired brown eyes and curly bangs appear.

Her initial expression is annoyance, then it morphs into confusion.

“Hey,” she says softly. “I just put her to bed.”

I lean against the frame. “Thought you were coming to Matt’s?”

She shrugs. “My mom had bingo, and I didn’t feel like it anyway.”

“Could’ve paged me.”

She shrugs again.

“Can I talk to you for a minute?”

She shuts the door to remove the chain and lets me inside. Friends is on TV, and there are two overflowing laundry baskets on the floor in front of the sofa. Gina sits and resumes folding clothes. I sit next to her and reach into one of the baskets.

“What’s up?” she asks, her attention darting from the TV to the slacks in her hands and then to me.

“I just wanted to ask if it would be all right if you had Mikayla this weekend?” I fold one of the kid’s little frilly nightgowns that has a pink and purple unicorn on it.

She’s had this unicorn fixation for like a year now.

I don’t think there’s a single spot in her bedroom that doesn’t have a unicorn on it.

Gina lifts a shoulder. “I picked up a double tomorrow.” She pauses. “And I was going to meet up with someone on Sunday. Why?”

“Never mind then. It’s just, um…” I pull out a pink dress with a green unicorn on the front. “I was thinking about maybe, possibly, seeing if Ethan Sawyer wanted some company.”

She tears her gaze away from Ross and Rachel. “Really?”

“It’s like a twelve-hour drive or something, and, I don’t know.” I pause and look at the TV, but I’m not actually watching or listening. “I just thought, if you were cool keeping Mikayla, I might go with him.”

She’s quiet for a moment or two before she asks, “Where’s he going again?”

“Some place in West Virginia. It’s a camp they used to go to, him and Ev, when they were kids.”

Gina pauses folding up a sweater. “And that’s where Everett wanted his…”

“Yeah.”

Our town is ridiculously small, so it didn’t take long for it to get to me or to Gina, or to anyone for that matter, that Ethan Sawyer is driving to that camp to scatter Everett’s ashes.

Apparently, it was something Ev had wanted.

Ev was my age, only twenty-three, so he didn’t have like a will or anything.

He must have told Ethan one day—in a hypothetical way, probably.

Maybe even in a joking sort of way, like Ev used to do.

I can hear him saying it, laughing about it even. He never said anything like that to me.

After the funeral, Ethan went back to the city to take care of a few things, then came back home to get his brother’s ashes, to take this trip, and fulfill his brother’s wishes.

I haven’t spoken to Everett or Ethan in five years.

After high school Everett went to Syracuse for school.

I stayed here in Port Leyden—except for when I moved to Lyons Falls when Gina and I were trying to be together for Mikayla—and when Ev graduated, he moved to Utica.

Most of the details of his life I just heard from other people.

It was strange to hear about him in that way, distantly, and not from him directly.

I had his email address. He got a cell phone.

Our senior year, we’d planned for me to come visit him in Syracuse, go to concerts, go out to clubs.

We had all these plans, and it never seemed anything could change them; it never seemed we could possibly be anything but best friends.

But then I fucked it all up.

Gina sighs as she rolls up a towel. “Does Ethan know you want to go or…? Have you talked to him?”

“No.”

“Maybe he wants to go alone.”

“Maybe.” I pause, not knowing what to do with one of Gina’s bras. “I mean, I can show up and if he doesn’t want company, he can tell me to fuck off.”

Gina looks me over for a second. “Do you actually want to go, though?”

I think about that for a moment. Out of the two of them—Everett and Ethan—Ethan was the brainy one.

And Ethan is sort of a big deal around here because he moved to the city to go to Columbia University.

He got some kind of academic scholarship.

People like to talk about him in a braggy sort of way.

And so I heard about Ethan coming back into town.

Ever since, I’ve had this urge to try to make things right.

I cut both of them out of my life, I ignored them for five years, acted like a complete and total asshole, and I had the gall to show up late to Ev’s funeral.

I have to do something. I could say a proper goodbye to my friend—the only best friend I’ve ever had—and hope that somewhere from the great beyond, he’ll see and he’ll forgive me.

And Ethan? I don’t even know what I could possibly say to Ethan that would make things right.

But I have to do something. Five years ago, I did something awful to him. It’s about time I stop being such a coward and face the thing I’d been so afraid of back then.

I don’t realize there are tears on my face until Gina’s pressing a tissue box into my hands. I push it away.

“I didn’t know this was upsetting you so much,” she says gently, rubbing a hand up and down my arm.

I wipe away a tear, fiddling with the buttons on a shirt. “I just want a chance to say goodbye. And not be such a chicken shit for once.”

“You’re not chicken shit.”

“Right. Tell that to Ethan.”

“You really want me to?”

More tears spill down my cheeks, and she pulls me into a hug, and I’m grateful for her warm body, her caring and kindness.

We’ve had to learn a lot of things together as young parents, things I’m sure all new parents have to learn, but the biggest lesson of all was that one night of weed and alcohol and an oh, why the hell not?

attitude, that one night is all it took to make a baby—even for a lesbian and a gay guy.

And that scenario, that life, won’t make things as interesting or as funny as a sitcom.

It was a confusing time for both of us and we were being delusional, honestly.

We tried to be as hetero as everyone else, to put on an act for others and offer Mikayla a stable home.

Gina was my cover story, and I was hers.

But Gina and I aren’t compatible that way, for the obvious reasons, and for the fact that we make great co-parents, just not a great couple.

So we split, told people that it just didn’t work out, and kept quiet about the real reasons. We’ve been pretty good at keeping our sexual preferences hidden from our little town where everyone knows everything about everybody.

Except what they don’t.

I pull out of Gina’s arms, and she gives me a sad smile. “Kay’s really gonna miss Daddy this weekend.”

I huff out a pathetic laugh. “I want to go look in on her for a minute.”

“Just don’t wake her up.”

“If I do,” I say, getting up to go to her bedroom, “I’ll get her back to sleep.”

“Promise?” Gina grins, continuing with the laundry.

I peek into Mikayla’s bedroom to see her curled up in her unicorn-printed sheets with the matching pillow shams and comforter.

Her little arms are hugging a white teddy bear with a pink bow.

Gina and I started letting her pick out things for her room, thinking she might not like all the overtly feminine stuff her grandparents keep giving her, but Mikayla is the girliest girl ever. And it’s absolutely adorable.

I carefully sit at the end of the bed, gently brushing a curly strand of hair from Mikayla’s face.

She mostly looks like Gina, which is a good thing, with her widow’s peak, golden-brown curls, and wide smile.

But she’s got my eyes—brown—and my frown when she’s grumpy.

I’m totally okay with my daughter only resembling me when she’s in a bad mood. It honestly seems fitting.

Mikayla sleeps like a rock, occasionally shifting under the blankets and cuddling her teddy bear closer.

For a second, I reconsider going. I hate missing time with her.

It flies by, and it’s scary how fast it can go, but that’s the thing.

That’s the exact thing with Ev and with Ethan—time passed, five years, and I had all that time to do something, to say something, to make amends, but I didn’t.

My gut twists, and I lean over to place a careful kiss on Mikayla’s head. “Daddy’s got something he needs to do this weekend, sweetie,” I whisper softly. “But I’ll come by to see you after. I promise.”

Mikayla doesn’t budge, still fast asleep. I guess she got being a heavy sleeper from me too.

I sit for a couple minutes longer, as if being near my daughter might help me gather up strength. Because tomorrow I’m going to be face-to-face with Ethan Sawyer for the first time in five long years.

And I’m terrified.