CHAPTER NINETEEN #2
“I just think it’s worth talking this out with a professional.”
“Have you ever been?”
“No,” Scott admitted. “I’m talking out my ass.”
“You probably don’t need it,” Carver said, and then he lay down in the grass, staring at the leaves overhead and the night sky that peeked between them. “You seem pretty well-adjusted.”
“Maybe not as much lately,” Scott said, surprising him. “Work’s been… I don’t know. Sometimes I’m kind of a misanthrope.”
“Really? I thought you just kept your own counsel.”
“I do, but sometimes I run out of road and I can’t keep going around people or past them, I just have to deal with how selfish and short-sighted and stupid they are, and I actually get pretty fucking angry. I think you’d be surprised.”
Carver was less surprised than he was delighted. “That’s natural,” he said. “That’s human.”
“But I don’t want to feel like that. I want to be like water. When I have to deal with this shit I feel parts of myself calcifying into something I don’t like.”
“Yeah, I know what you mean.”
“Anyway,” Scott said, lying down beside him in the grass. From here they could hear the distant sound of people dining on the restaurant’s patio: indistinct conversation, clinking silverware. “We didn’t come here to talk about me.”
“Didn’t we?”
“I thought you wanted to talk about your wife.”
Carver noticed that he didn’t seem to want to say Lillian’s name. “Uh… so, we’re agreed on all the major points, and I’m going to try to call some lawyers tomorrow.”
“Good,” Scott said.
“And I’m gonna take some time off. I’m taking this next week, and then I’ll go back for all of June, but after that I lined up some leave.”
“Also good.”
“I’d like to see you,” Carver ventured. “Next week.”
“Sure,” Scott said. His voice sounded modulated toward thoughtful caginess, the same way it had earlier. “You want to meet in the city?”
“I could come out to Jersey.”
Scott reached out to touch his shoulder through his shirt, and Carver lit up inside. “Look… I don’t want to rush you.”
“Right. But you want to see me, right?”
“I do.”
“Okay, so?”
“I just mean, uh…” Scott rose up onto his side, leaning on his elbow, and picked at the grass.
“Your wife got in my head, honestly. I’m worried she’s right, that I’m trying to run in to save you, which is a stupid impulse.
What am I gonna save you from? You know your own world way better than I ever will. ”
“I’m part of this too, dude.”
“I know, I know.”
“And I’m not just using you as an excuse to get out of my life. Jesus. I almost wish I was.” Carver found himself humming with nervous energy and yanked up some grass, tearing it out at the root. “That would be easier. Then I wouldn’t give a shit what you think about anything.”
Scott laughed.
“Remember we didn’t just meet on Thursday. You know that, I know that.”
“I do know that.”
“You made me happy,” Carver said, swallowing. “When we were kids. You made shit feel real.”
Scott cleared his throat and said, “We’re a long way out from that.”
“But I’m telling you this ‘cause I never said it at the time.”
“I knew. I felt it.”
“But I need you to know I knew. I didn’t just stuff it all down. I was there, I was feeling it. I missed you, when —” He broke off and cleared his own throat. “Like, when I got to Duke. I missed being able to talk to you.”
Scott nodded. Carver thought his eyes might be glowing with tears, but it was hard to tell in the scraps of ambient light they were seeing by. “It’s good to hear,” he said quietly.
Carver felt a stab of affection for him, and immense guilt along with it. “And I’ve been wanting to apologize for, uh — when we broke up, when I said you’d fail out there, or whatever it was.”
Scott took a moment to absorb this, like he hadn’t expected it. “That’s okay,” he said, and cleared his throat again.
“No, it was shitty. I was just trying to get at you.”
“Hey, it’s fine. I said — I basically said the same thing to you.”
“Yeah,” Carver said with a rueful smile. “But you were right about me, weren’t you? I’m the one who wasted almost twenty years of my life.”
Scott hit him with a level stare. “Knock that shit off,” he said, his voice hard.
Carver laughed in surprise, feeling a horny thrill. “Knock what off?”
“This self-deprecating flagellating shit. You didn’t waste anything, you can’t think about it like that. Knock it off, I’m serious.”
“Okay,” Carver said obediently, smiling in a more genuine way now, his face and chest warm.
Scott squinted at him. “Okay?”
“Yeah, okay.”
“Like, if it’s an order I’m giving you, you’ll actually do it?”
Carver shrugged. “I’ll try, at least.”
“Okay. Then consider it an order.”
“I will.”
Scott diverted his gaze, looking out at the water with a complicated expression on his face.
He didn’t like telling people what to do any more than he liked being told what to do, Carver knew this, but he also knew that he wasn’t trying to submit out of blind obedience.
The order was a kind one. He trusted Scott’s reasons for giving it.
“I didn’t really think you would fail,” Carver said. “But I’ll admit that I didn’t like the idea of you making it big without me.”
Scott smiled. “I had the same fear.”
“You worried about making it big?”
“No, I worried about you making it big and never thinking about me again. And then as far as I could tell, that was exactly what happened.”
Carver laughed. “And yet, here we are.”
“Yeah.”
They were quiet for a moment.
“So, you missed me at Duke?” Scott said, still smiling.
“Yeah. I kept listening to that mix CD you gave me right before we broke up. I told myself it was fine because they weren’t your songs, or anything.”
“No shit?”
“Yeah.”
“I assumed you threw that away, or something.”
“No, I listened to it ‘til it broke.”
Scott looked pleased. “Really?”
“Yeah,” Carver said with a tinge of embarrassment.
“Was this in between listening to Slipknot?”
“Fuck you,” he said, laughing, and Scott grinned. “I said my roommate was into Slipknot.”
“Right, sorry. What were you into?”
“System of a Down, Slayer, Lamb of God, plus some random shit I found on Napster. I never really got good at finding new music, I always felt out of place when I went in a record store.”
Scott glanced away with a wistful expression and said, “I wish I could have helped you out.”
“I mean, you did a little, with the CD. Like, it helped to have this list of good bands you’d put together. I got credit from people for knowing who The Band was.”
“What of theirs did I put on there?”
“Atlantic City.”
“I remember that, actually,” Scott said, nodding.
“Great cover. Um… this is kind of a fucked up story, but years ago I was playing a show at a casino in Atlantic City, and we were doing a cover of that song, and a guy in the audience keeled over. Some paramedics got there fast and took him away, but apparently he was already gone when they got there.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. It kind of fucked me up to think about. Like, my voice was probably the last thing he heard. Or one of the last things.”
“There are worse ways to go,” Carver said with a smile.
“But it wasn’t even that good a show, is what fucked me up. I was getting over a cold. I felt guilty, afterwards, like this guy fucking died and I wasn’t even giving it my all. If I’d known, I would have, you know?”
“No shit. If only we all knew everything ahead of time.”
“Yeah.”
They were quiet for a moment, looking at each other, and the magnetism of their bodies began to pull them together in the darkness. Carver reached up to stroke Scott’s bearded cheek, ruffling the short coarse hair with his thumb, and Scott turned to nuzzle his lips against Carver’s palm.
“You’re going home tomorrow morning, you said?” Carver said.
“Yeah,” Scott murmured, reaching up to take him by the wrist and press a kiss to the location of his pulse. “Van’s loaded up, tow truck comes at nine-thirty, and then I’ll head out on the bike.”
“All the way back?”
“It’s only like an hour drive.”
“I guess I think of Jersey as farther away than it is.”
“City boy.”
“Yeah.”
Scott kissed his way up Carver’s hand, then kissed the tips of his fingers, then opened his mouth.
Carver, pleasantly surprised, pushed his middle and index fingers into Scott’s mouth until he hit warm tongue.
Scott started to lightly suck them and lifted his gaze, pinning Carver in place with his dark eyes.
After only a few seconds of this Scott glanced around and gently withdrew Carver from his mouth, turning his hand so he could kiss his bruised knuckles, then turning it again so he could kiss his scraped palm. Then he returned Carver’s hand to him.
Carver didn’t know what to do now. He was overflowing emotionally and had a little bit of a hard-on.
He didn’t want to part from Scott, but he was aware of how fragile this thing between them was.
He didn’t want to squeeze it to death in its first hours of life.
It wasn’t like all the other things he’d chosen for himself, all the lessers of two evils which necessitated furious and immediate commitment before he changed his mind.
He knew this, and he wanted Scott to know he knew it.
“I might come by tomorrow morning and say goodbye,” he said.
Scott nodded. “Okay.”
“And then later this week I’ll text you, I guess.”
“Sure. Sounds good. Where are you gonna be staying?”
“I was thinking I’d stay on our yacht… I work in Hudson Yards, and our marina’s only like three miles south.”
“On a yacht?” Scott said, raising his eyebrows. “Alone?”
Carver shrugged. “It’s a nice yacht.”
“I’m just saying like, you’ve had a big emotional shock. Do you want to be alone?”
“Uh… maybe, maybe not. I just don’t know what the alternative is.”
“Staying with a friend?”
Carver tried to think of a friend who would actually be emotionally helpful to him in this situation and came up blank. “My friends aren’t great with stuff like this,” he said.
“Family?”
“Chip and Conway don’t have room. I could keep staying with my parents —”