17 #2
Patrick kisses Nathaniel again, hard, then undoes both their belts.
He gets a hand under Nathaniel’s shirt, seeking out the hidden skin at the small of his back, just getting Nathaniel used to the idea of Patrick’s hands on him.
They’re just breathing into one another’s mouths, hardly kissing at all.
Patrick isn’t sure what the right move is here.
When he pulls Nathaniel out of his pants, he half expects Nathaniel to tell him to stop, but he just says Patrick’s name, again and again.
It’s nothing fancy—Patrick licks his palm and does what he’s done more times than he can count—but his gaze keeps flicking between what he’s doing with his hand and Nathaniel’s face.
When he slows down, Nathaniel makes an aggrieved sound, low and gratifying.
When he tightens his grip, Nathaniel pants into his mouth.
“Patrick,” Nathaniel says, warning.
“I’ve got you.”
Nathaniel’s perfectly quiet when he comes, nearly still, his eyes shut and his mouth half open, until he reaches into his shirt pocket and hands Patrick a handkerchief.
Patrick waits until Nathaniel’s eyes are open, then showily licks his hand clean before returning Nathaniel’s handkerchief to his pocket. Nathaniel looks like he might not be breathing.
“You,” Nathaniel says, reaching for Patrick, less articulate than Patrick’s ever seen him. “Let me. Show me.”
And so Patrick shows him.
* * *
“Well, well, well,” Susan says when Patrick and Nathaniel come over with a box of pizza for dinner. “What do we have here?” She sounds like the villain in a Saturday morning cartoon.
“What are you talking about?” Patrick asks, mainly to be difficult. It’s not like they were going to try to keep this from her, but how the hell did she know as soon as she opened the door?
“You don’t need to be a detective to figure this out, boys. Nathaniel, you look like somebody scrubbed your neck with steel wool. Patrick, you need to use hair conditioner in your beard.”
“Oh my god,” Patrick says, his hand going automatically to his beard.
“I’ll lend you a bottle,” Susan says cheerfully.
“I think we should play your song,” Nathaniel says after they’ve eaten.
They’re in what’s become their standard positions: Patrick with Eleanor on the floor, Nathaniel sprawled across the sofa, and Susan cross-legged in the armchair.
Walt is prowling around the edges of the apartment like he’s on security detail.
“What song?” Susan asks.
“‘Take Me Home.’” That’s the song you couldn’t walk down the street without hearing last summer. The one Susan hates down to her toes.
Patrick looks up from where he’s been trying to detach Eleanor’s jaw from his collar. She’s teething, and the only joy she has in life is gnawing on people’s clothes.
“It’s trash,” Susan says.
“You wrote it. I checked the liner notes. Forget the horn section and the—”
“The xylophone,” Susan says dolefully.
“Forget all that and look at the song you actually wrote.” Nathaniel sits up and reaches for Susan’s hand.
“It isn’t going away. You might as well make it yours again.
” He hasn’t said that he likes the song, or even that it’s any good.
But he’s right that the song isn’t going anywhere—it’s been a year since it came out, and radio stations aren’t playing it as often as they used to, but they play it enough that you’re never surprised to hear it.
Susan looks at him like she’s been betrayed, and Patrick thinks she has a point. “We don’t play love songs.” Her fingers are wrapped tight around Nathaniel’s.
The next afternoon, Patrick’s sulkily unpacking and inventorying one of the mountain of boxes on the second floor, because Nathaniel’s been bribing him with donuts every Sunday if he’s unpacked a box that week.
He’s deciding what to do with copies of Life magazine from the thirties when the opening chords of that song drift in from the stairwell.
Glad for an excuse to abandon the books, Patrick quietly climbs the stairs.
When he cracks open the door, he sees Nathaniel sitting on the sofa, Susan’s guitar in his lap, playing the song.
He’s slowed it down, about as slow as you can get and still call it music.
Patrick’s no expert but he thinks it’s in a different key, mellower but also a little unsettling. Patrick slips inside.
“A little faster, maybe,” Susan says. And then, a few minutes later, “You’re making it sound like something you’d play.
I mean, it feels like the murder ballads and those pieces we’ve been tinkering with.
” By tinkering, she means actual songwriting.
Patrick isn’t counting, but there are probably six original songs they wrote together.
“You wrote it,” Nathaniel says.
Susan lets out a shaky breath.
“Look,” Nathaniel says. “I’ll drop it if you want. But I’ve seen how you get when that song comes on and I want to help fix it before—”
“Before?” Susan asks. “You have somewhere to be?”
“There’s nowhere I’d rather be,” Nathaniel says, which is about ten times as earnest as he usually is. It’s also not an answer to Susan’s question.
The next morning, when Patrick stops by Susan’s to take Eleanor, he finds Susan already awake and Eleanor still asleep in her crib, slack-jawed and fat-cheeked. Susan’s eyes are bloodshot and puffy. Used tissues litter the bed.
“Stupid fucking song,” she says.
“If you ask him to back off, he will. Or I can ask. He doesn’t want you to be miserable.”
“Michael loved that song, you know. I mean, it’s sugary and has a catchy chorus, of course he loved it.” Susan’s never said outright that she wrote the song for Michael, but it was practically designed in a lab to appeal to him.
“He did love a chorus,” Patrick agrees.
“Never met a chorus he didn’t love.” She’s crying again, so he sits on the bed and puts an arm around her and lets her cry all over his shirt.
Patrick wants to know why, of the two and a half decades of memories he has of Michael, it’s the dumb, mundane, slightly embarrassing ones that hurt the most. The other night he’d dreamed that he and Michael were sitting around, Michael whining about an overcooked burger while he stole all Patrick’s fries.
“Pat. Pat . Are you listening to me? Patpatpat. It’s charcoal .
” He’d woken up, remembered, and the whole next day felt like he was unfolding that telegram for the first time.
How is a man supposed to sleep when he has that waiting for him?
He has an inkling that his grief might stay fresh if he keeps brushing aside every awful thought that occurs to him.
Maybe, if he made himself think about how much he misses his brother, and how he’d started missing his brother long before he went to Vietnam, then he’d be less torn up when that kind of thought shows up out of the blue.
But when he tries to think about it, everything in his mind slams shut.
Still. He can do something.
“Right before the two of you started dating,” he says, his voice steadier than he expects it to be, “he couldn’t shut up about you.
” At that point, Patrick knew what was going to happen, but had no idea if Susan and Michael knew.
They’d all been living in New York, Patrick on Astor Place, Susan on MacDougal Street, Michael finishing up at Columbia.
“Once, he said, ‘You know what I really like about Susan’s music? It’s just so catchy . ’”
Susan gasps and pulls away to stare at him. “He didn’t.”
“Hand on a bible,” Patrick says.
“You never told me!”
“I wanted you to keep liking him!”
“He had such a tin ear.”
“I think he wanted to say something nice about you, and catchy was legitimately the best compliment he could pay music.”
“Oh my god,” she says, incredulous. “What a dope.”
They both seem to realize, at the same time, that they won’t be able to mock Michael to his face.
Susan opens another box of tissues. It’s too much for Patrick to expect some kind of catharsis after telling one anecdote.
Nearly five months of stomping on practically every thought about Michael might have broken some part of him.
But now he can think about that one conversation, how open and hopeful and lovestruck Michael had been, how it had taken all Patrick’s self-control not to laugh in his face. He can hold that memory in his mind, and that has to be worth something.