Chapter 12 #2
The lunch ended. Tom hugged him in the parking lot—a real hug, longer than usual, tighter than usual, the kind of hug Tom gave when he was feeling emotional and didn't know how to say it with words.
Jamie held his father and closed his eyes and pressed his face into Tom's shoulder and breathed the drugstore aftershave and thought: I'm going to break your heart.
I'm already breaking it. You just can't hear the sound yet.
"I love you, kid," Tom said.
"I love you too, Dad."
Jamie got in his car. Drove back to the house. Walked inside. Went upstairs. Entered the guest room bathroom.
Closed the door. Locked it. Gripped the edge of the sink with both hands and stared at his reflection.
He looked the same. That was the obscenity of it—he looked the same as he'd looked three weeks ago, before the garage, before the condo, before any of it.
Same dark curls. Same green eyes. Same angular jaw and tongue piercing and expression of studied nonchalance.
The betrayal wasn't visible. It didn't mark the face.
It marked the body—specifically, the collarbone, where a bruise the size of a thumbprint sat just below the collar line, dark purple fading to green at the edges, left by Marcus's mouth two nights ago at the condo when he'd sucked too hard and Jamie had gasped and Marcus had pulled back and said sorry, above the line and Jamie had pulled him back and said I don't care and Marcus had bitten down harder.
Jamie pulled his shirt collar up. Then down.
The bruise was below the line—barely. Half an inch lower and it would have been invisible.
Half an inch higher and it would have been in full view at the lunch table, and Tom would have seen it, and Tom would have asked, and Jamie would have had to produce a lie about bumping into something or sleeping wrong, and the lie would have been one more brick in the wall he was building between himself and his father with materials provided by his father's fiancé.
He stared at the bruise. Pressed it. The pain was familiar now—a ritual, a reality check, the physical confirmation that the thing happening in his life was actually happening and not a fever dream produced by proximity and loneliness and the unresolved wreckage of a year spent on his knees for a man in a mask.
I just want you two to be close. You're going to be family.
Jamie turned on the faucet. Splashed cold water on his face. Dried it with the guest towel that matched the guest soap that matched the guest room that Tom had decorated specifically to make his son feel welcome in a house Jamie was systematically defiling.
He sat on the guest bed. Picked up his phone. Called Sasha.
"It's two PM on a Wednesday," Sasha said. "You only call me during business hours when something's on fire."
"Something's on fire."
"Scale of one to—"
"Sasha. It's still happening."
Silence. A long, heavy silence that Jamie felt in his sternum. Then: "Define still happening."
"The condo. We've been going—he makes up excuses and we drive to Stamford and we—it's been a few times. More than a few."
"Jamie."
"I know."
"You told me it wouldn't happen again. After the garage, you said—"
"I know what I said."
"And now you're telling me it's been more than a few times. What does that mean? Are you—is this a regular—Jesus, Jamie, are you in a relationship with your father's fiancé?"
The word relationship hung in the air between Brooklyn and Westport, buzzing in the cellular connection like a live wire.
Jamie wanted to say no. Wanted to say it was just sex, just the arrangement, just the old dynamic reasserting itself in a new context.
But the lie wouldn't form. Not after the bolognese.
Not after the documentary and the architecture debate and the midnight coffee and the sketchbook full of hands.
Not after lying in Marcus's bed and watching him trace the tattoo and hearing him say I should have asked you that three years ago in a voice that held, within its careful syllables, every regret of a man who had finally found the thing he'd been looking for and found it in the one place he couldn't keep it.
"Yes," Jamie said. "I think I am."
Sasha exhaled. It was the sound of someone recalibrating—adjusting their expectations, their advice, their level of alarm—in real time. "Okay. Okay. And Tom?"
"Doesn't know."
"How can he not know?"
"Because we're careful. Because Marcus has rules.
Because my father is the most trusting person on the planet and it would never in a million years occur to him that the two people he loves most are—" Jamie's voice broke.
Not dramatically—a small fracture, a catch in the throat, immediately repaired.
"He took me to lunch today. He told me he's writing his vows.
He told me he wants Marcus and me to be close. He used the word family."
"Jamie."
"I know."
"You're going to destroy him."
"I know."
"And yourself. And Marcus. This isn't a love triangle, Jamie. It's a demolition site. Someone is going to be standing in the wreckage, and it's going to be your father, and he's not going to understand how the building came down because he didn't even know there was a crack in the foundation."
Jamie closed his eyes. Marcus's metaphor. The void in the northeast corner. The loose gravel pretending to be aggregate. The whole structure settling unevenly while the occupant went about his life, trusting the walls, trusting the floor, trusting the roof to hold.
"I can't stop," Jamie said. Small. Honest. The voice of a man at the bottom of something he'd dug himself into with both hands.
"Because the sex is good?"
"It's not just sex."
Sasha was quiet. When they spoke again, their voice was different—not angry, not exasperated, but sad. The kind of sad that came from loving someone and watching them walk toward a cliff and knowing that no amount of shouting would change their trajectory.
"Then it's worse," Sasha said. "If it were just sex, you could stop. If it were just the kink, you could find another club. But you're telling me you're in love with him, and he's in love with you, and neither of you can stop, and the wedding is in three weeks, and your father is writing vows."
"I didn't say I was in love with him."
"You didn't have to. You said relationship. You've never used that word about anyone. Not in the entire time I've known you."
Jamie opened his mouth to argue. Closed it.
"What are you going to do?" Sasha asked.
"I don't know."
"That's not good enough. You need a plan. You need to either tell your father or end it. Those are the two options. Everything else is just—"
"I know what everything else is."
"—cruelty. It's cruelty, Jamie. Not to you, not to Marcus. To your dad. The longer this goes, the worse it gets. And the wedding is a deadline. If this thing explodes after the wedding, it takes Tom's marriage with it. If it explodes before, at least he has the chance to—"
"To what? To cancel his wedding because his son is sleeping with his fiancé? That's not giving him a chance, Sasha. That's detonating his life."
"His life is already detonated. He just doesn't know it yet."
Jamie pressed his free hand against his eyes. The conversation had arrived at the place all their conversations arrived at now—the wall, the impasse, the point where the options narrowed to two and both of them involved destruction.
"I'll figure it out," Jamie said.
"When?"
"Soon."
"Jamie—"
"I have to go."
"Don't hang up on me."
"I love you. I'll call you tomorrow."
"Jamie—"
He hung up. Set the phone on the nightstand.
Lay back on the guest bed and stared at the ceiling and listened to the house: the refrigerator humming, the central air cycling, and from the garage, the distant, rhythmic sound of sandpaper on wood.
Marcus, working on the island. Building something beautiful for a man who trusted him.
Sanding and measuring and shaping something permanent while everything around it rotted.
Jamie pressed the bruise on his collarbone.
The pain was sharp and clarifying and did nothing to solve the problem, which was not a problem at all but a slow-motion catastrophe that Jamie was both perpetrating and experiencing, simultaneously the architect and the occupant of a structure that was coming down.
Three weeks until the wedding.
Three weeks until the rules said it ended.
Three weeks until Jamie was supposed to drive back to Brooklyn and close the door and pretend that the best thing that had ever happened to him was something he could survive losing.
He closed his eyes and thought about his father writing vows in bed, in the dark, trying to fit a person into words.
Jamie couldn't fit Marcus into words either. But he could fit him into a condo in Stamford and a set of rules and a countdown clock that was ticking toward detonation, and the only question left was whether the explosion would be controlled or catastrophic.
He suspected he already knew the answer.