Chapter 5
Gray
“Jesus fucking Christ,” I say as I get out of the car. “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
Darnell passes me, carrying a load of boxes toward the moving truck. He’s already sweating, even though it’s early. He’s a big guy, so he sweats pretty easily anyway, but this is a work sweat; he’s probably been going for hours.
“Start with the stuff in the office,” Darnell says. “Coffee and donuts in the kitchen.”
Being awake at six AM on a Saturday should be a fucking crime, unless you’re still awake and working your way through a pile of twinks. Or something like that. I guess if you’re one of the twinks in the pile, that’s probably okay too. Equal opportunity and all that bullshit.
While Darnell takes another box to the truck, I head inside.
Coffee and donuts are right where he said they’d be.
I skip the donuts for now and help myself to the coffee.
It’s from the Casey’s, and weirdly, it’s some of the best coffee in town.
Not as good as what Darnell used to make.
Not that he was going to make coffee on the day he moved.
Everything was already packed up, and he had other stuff to do, and it wasn’t like we were still in that weird, toxic combo with him doing stuff for me all the time.
But, I think as I look around the kitchen, he does make good coffee.
I do a quick walkthrough. Aside from the boxes, which are stacked everywhere, and Darnell’s furniture, which is neatly wrapped, the house is empty.
The kitchen, of course. The bedroom I’d used—I couldn’t bring myself to call it my bedroom.
The bathroom. His bedroom, or I guess our bedroom. His office.
The house looks good. He’s repainted some of the rooms. He’s changed a couple of the light fixtures.
The old aluminum mini blinds in his office are gone, replaced by new, faux wood ones that are consistent with the rest of the house.
It takes me a moment to put my finger on something else that is different, and then I get it—the baseboards.
It shouldn’t make such a difference, but it does.
That’s the kind of thing responsible homeowners know, I guess.
Responsible people in general. What to paint and change and replace so that your house has sweat equity.
Fuck, for that matter, responsible people know how to buy and sell a house.
They have furniture, and they have—shit, I don’t know, lawnmowers.
They aren’t almost thirty years old, living in a tiny apartment, with a twin bed they got off one of those neighborhood apps.
If I lived here, I could invite the donors over, show them my baseboards, and say, Take a fucking look at that.
And then they’d give me shitloads of money, probably.
“What are you doing?” Darnell asks as he passes through the hall. “What’s wrong?”
“Huh?”
“You’ve been staring at the baseboards for five minutes.” He takes a step and tries to peer past me. “Is something wrong?”
I raise the coffee cup in salute. “Just admiring the handiwork.”
He’s got dark eyes, and he doesn’t miss much. Finally, he says, “Gray, boxes in the dining room.”
So, I start carrying boxes to the truck, and for a while, I don’t have to think about how in the fucking world I’m supposed to make myself respectable and responsible and a fucking pillar of the community and—fuck me—a family man.
Maybe I could become Emery’s live-in gimp.
Fuck, that’d probably be a step up from where I was now.
Okay, maybe I don’t stop thinking about it entirely.
After we clear the dining room, Darnell wants to get the big pieces of furniture loaded. So, we do that. Sofa. Beds. Desk. His face is red, and I think about telling him to go slow because he’s already had one heart attack.
“I’m fine,” he says before I can open my mouth.
“You’re sweating a lot.”
“Because I’m wearing clothes, Gray.”
I smirk at him over the back of the loveseat as we maneuver it down the steps. I mean, a bro-cut tee, shorty shorts, and the absolute sluttiest socks I could find are still clothes. But I know what he meant.
Then, back to the boxes.
If you asked me, I never would have said that Darnell was a hoarder. And I’d moved all my stuff out after we’d broken up. But there is a lot of shit, and even though we start at six, we aren’t done until almost noon, and by then I’m as dirty, sweaty, and exhausted as Darnell.
I sit on the truck’s tailgate, cooling down in the spring breeze, while Darnell does a final walkthrough of the house. When he comes back, he looks at me, and then he does that thing he does where he puts his hands on his hips.
I flap the bottom of my tee to get some cool air on my skin.
He rolls his eyes.
I stretch, arms behind my head. I’ve got great pits.
“Good God, Gray.”
For some reason, it makes me laugh.
“Do you ever stop?” he asks.
“Just keeping in practice.”
“Uh huh.” He’s still looking at me, though. And then he says, “What’s wrong?”
“What?”
“You’ve been quiet all morning. You haven’t talked about some new porn star you found. You haven’t bragged about some eighteen-year-old you did a pile-drive on. You haven’t even mentioned any random boners.”
“Dude!”
He smiles.
It hasn’t always been easy like this. For a long time after the breakup, we didn’t see each other.
For a long time, he hated me. I guess he had a right to hate me.
I sure hated myself. But then one day, Darnell texted me out of the blue and wanted to get coffee, and let me tell you, that sent me into crazy-motherfucker overdrive.
When I finally got my shit together enough to, you know, contemplate a face-to-face conversation, it went a lot better than I thought.
I mean, it wasn’t easy. But he was working on some stuff.
And I was definitely working on some stuff.
And it was nice, seeing him again. Seeing that he was working on being happy.
The bullshit part they don’t tell you about patching things up with your ex, though, is that then you have to help him move if he asks.
“Spill it,” Darnell says.
So, I tell him about WISP and the colossal thunderfuck that’s coming my way. And when I finish, I say, “That’s why I think you should marry me and keep the house.”
“Okay,” Darnell says. “I’m going to ignore that.”
“Bro, it’s perfect. This house is, like, totally sensible and practical and shit. It’s like the fucking definition of a boner-killer. Donors would see this place and fucking quiver.”
“That house is not a boner-killer.”
“And you’d be like this butch, manly, stalwart presence to make sure nothing went wrong, you know? You could even tell them you’d spank me if I dipped into the piggy bank.”
“What’s the scenario here? Who are these donors?”
“I don’t know, bro. The main one, Fields, he sounds like a fucking lunatic. He wants a fucking family man? Dude, you know my family was super fucked up.”
He looks at me some more. Then he sits on the tailgate.
The truck settles on its suspension under the new weight, and then it’s quiet again.
I fan myself with my shirt some more, staring off down the street.
The daffodils are out in Mrs. Swenka’s yard, and it looks like somebody jumped the curb down the street and took out a mailbox.
“I feel like I shouldn’t have to say this,” Darnell says, “but I’m not marrying you.”
“Bro!”
He still gets me, though; that’s why he smiles. “And I’m selling this goddamn house.”
My eyebrows go up.
“Did I say that out loud?” Darnell mutters.
But I get it. “Yeah, I guess—I guess I hadn’t thought about that. A fresh start and stuff.”
“I guess.”
An old sedan rolls past us, a Honda so faded it’s not really any color at all anymore.
“I’m going to miss you,” I say.
“I’m moving across town.”
I shrug and grin.
Darnell’s silent, but it’s his thinking silence.
He’s a big guy, and I guess some people might look at him, with his beard and the linebacker shoulders and—God help me—the overalls, and they might get the wrong idea.
But Darnell’s not only smart. He’s smart and careful. And he’s being extra careful right now.
Finally he says, “Why do I do this to myself?”
“You’re going to do it? Bro, fuck yeah. We are going to be the best fucking married couple—”
“God, no. Absolutely not. That is seriously the worst idea I’ve heard in my entire life.” He takes a breath. “People don’t know you, Gray. Not the real you.”
“Uh, people have a pretty good idea.”
“They see what you let them see. All that big talk. But you keep a lot of yourself hidden away from people.” I open my mouth, and he holds up his hand.
“That’s not an accusation, and I’m not trying to pick a fight.
I’m trying to say that I think you’re a good guy, and other people would think that too if they knew you. ”
I don’t say anything for a few minutes. I can hear the air moving against the frame of the truck.
When I do manage to speak, my voice is tighter than I’d like.
“I have worked so fucking hard this last year to—to not be that guy. For nothing. For fucking zero. Jesus fucking Christ, who am I trying to kid? I mean, everybody saw a couple of strangers pissing on me in an alley. You don’t exactly get the keys to the city after that. ”
Darnell’s look is sharp. “I thought you got that taken down.”
I wave the words away. “I did. It’s—I don’t know. I’ve tried so fucking hard, bro. And it doesn’t matter.”
“Bullshit.”
“Dude, what is going on with you? That’s two swears in one day.”
“You have changed. And you’ve done a lot of good in the last year. I’m not only talking about your job, either. What you’ve done with WISP, what you’re doing there, that’s important, Gray. And nobody else was doing it.”
“Yeah, well, it’s not going to last much longer.”
“How about this? How about you stop feeling sorry for yourself, and you put in the work to convince these donors they’re wrong about you?”