Chapter 9
NOEL
We lay there for a long time after the fact, together in Luca’s bed.
I can ignore the fact that there’s lube and come drying in various unflattering places and that it’s not the most comfortable thing in the world, because he’s got me in his arms and that’s all that really matters in the moment.
For the first time in ages my mind has gone almost totally quiet, not worrying about anything and everything like a dog with a bone.
Not trying to keep my terrible thoughts at constant bay.
I am safe here, at least for now.
There’s a breeze coming in through the window, and on it is the faint smell of the sea.
The sun’s gone down and what I can see of the sky is finally darkening.
I snuggle close to Luca’s side and enjoy this feeling while it lasts, the quiescence and stillness, and the sound of his heartbeat in my ear.
Every once in a while I’ll touch my lips to his chest and he returns the gesture to the top of my head, and I breathe in that earthy and vanilla scent of his I’ve missed so much.
I’m totally sated too, and that’s new. New since we’ve been apart, anyway, because I haven’t been able to get off at all in the interim and I was starting to feel like that was going to be a permanent side effect unless I go off my meds—dangerous little catch-22, there—but of course Luca makes it look so easy.
He knows my body like the back of his hand and the intervening months haven’t changed that.
Man, it feels good to be here again, touching and smelling him, kissing him, having him in and all around me.
For the first time in a long time I feel complete at last. Being together should be easy.
For us. We’re meant for each other, we just fit.
I’m not completely crazy; I know this in my heart, and I know he knows it too.
So why aren’t we?
Of course once that poisonous thought seeps into my mind, it’s over.
Every good feeling I have here with him is steadily and insidiously overwritten.
Luca’s not mine, not really, and this isn’t just his house I’m in, but the pregnant wife’s, too.
Her stamp obvious and unmistakable everywhere I look.
From the pictures of her over the fireplace to the more subtle things, furniture and decorations that I know aren’t really Luca’s taste, the Monet and Renoir framed on the walls and the minimalism in places where her husband’s cozy clutter has been banished.
And I have no place here at all.
Just like that, my head’s a bad and loud place again. I throw the blanket off and sit up, turning to face Luca. “What are we doing?” I ask him.
He blinks at me. I think he was dozing off. “Sorry?”
“What was all of this?” I say, gesturing between us. “Is this…like, was this just a fling? Ex sex or something? Are you going to kick me out?”
“What are you talking about?” He sits up too, the sheets puddling at his waist. “Did that look like I was kicking you out?”
“I mean—now. After that.” I’m already heightened and I’ve gone and ruined this for myself, shattered the spell between us.
I can’t stop thinking about us, this, whatever it is that’s going on with him and his wife, and the fact that all this pain could’ve been avoided if he’d just kept me the way I’d begged him to.
If he’d just listened to me. I’m beginning to feel that crazed kind of anguish that threatens to sweep me up against the invisible walls of my box in its furious current and I’m treading water furiously.
No, I don’t want to be cast aside already, I don’t want this to be over again. I can’t take it.
Luca reaches for me and I flinch backwards. “Hey.” His voice is soothing, cajoling, beckoning me back to a harbor that was once safe and now lies in ruin, docks all smashed and boats capsized. “No one’s going anywhere. Come here.”
There’s a thin keening sound and it’s coming from me. “I don’t understand. I don’t get it.”
“What don’t you get?”
“Any of this. Why you brought me here. Why we fucked.”
“Because I love you,” he says. He drops his hands to his lap, palms turned up and open. “Because I want you.”
“Then why did you leave?” And the full force of my despair—as much as I can access—goes into that word, leave. I’m trying like hell not to cry like I always do, but it’s fucking hard. My throat burns from the sheer effort of resisting. “What was it all for, Luca? Just to hurt me?”
“Noel, no. I would never, ever hurt you on purpose.” He captures me with those brilliant and beautiful eyes of his. His hands fall into his lap. “I just—I wanted to be a good dad, and—”
His voice cracks on the final word and it lances me through the chest. “But why does that exclude me? Why can’t you be both?”
Luca takes a deep breath. “I was getting these things I’d thought I’d never get—a child, fatherhood—and I was terrified.
In the chaos I just defaulted to what was familiar and comfortable.
Keeping the status quo, carrying on the way I used to, and I didn’t know how to make you factor or fit into that.
So I took the selfish way out, the cowardly one. Trying to make you wait for me.”
We don't rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training. I don’t remember who said that or where I even read it in the first place, but it springs immediately to mind. “While you came back here.” My words come tremulously. “Alone and hiding while you’re here.”
“Because the only way I can stay as involved in my daughter’s life as possible is to be here.
Newborns are hard work for just one person.
I don’t want to miss any milestones, and Demi’s planning on breastfeeding for at least a year, so no chance of me getting custody, either.
” He pauses. “It was never meant to be permanent, Noel. I know that doesn’t make it better, but at the time, that’s what was going through my head. ”
I say nothing. I’m trying very hard to keep myself from falling apart completely.
“And Demi—she’s having a really rough pregnancy, too.
Hyperemesis gravidarum. Terrible morning sickness,” he adds, seeing the question on my face.
“Throwing up all day, all night, can’t keep anything down.
She was hospitalized a couple days for it a few weeks ago, it was so bad, to get her fluids back up.
It’s only gotten a little better lately. ”
I nod once. I’m clutching myself, nails digging into my arms.
“But to treat you the way I did, asking you to wait until some indeterminate time for me—months, maybe years—that was wrong of me.” Luca holds my gaze as he begins to rub at his wrist in an absent and nervous gesture.
His thumb digs hard into the base of his palm until it blanches.
“I was so selfish, Noel. I should’ve never, ever imposed that kind of ultimatum. ”
I avert my gaze and try to figure out what to say that’s civil. Have to keep myself from reaching across the bed and shaking him, screaming that I had told him all these things the night he went away from me. “What changed, then? How do you go from giving me up to wanting me again?”
“I missed you.” He is frank, steady. “I realized what an enormous, shitty mistake I made I never, ever stopped thinking about you or wanting you. I couldn’t get you out of my head and I couldn’t leave things the way they were.
It was unbearable. It was less than a month before I started looking all over for you.
You had me blocked me everywhere and I couldn’t find you anywhere else.
Didn’t see you on FetLife or anything like that—”
“I don’t go on there,” I interrupt. “I’ve never gone on there.”
“My point is that I was looking, Noel. And I never really gave up looking. I was so desperate to get in touch with you. But weeks went by, and you weren’t going out, and I couldn’t get ahold of you, and…
” His voice breaks in half, and I watch his throat work as he swallows hard.
He really has a magnificent throat with its vibrant lunar moth tattoo.
It’s one of my very favorite parts of him.
“And I guess that was wrong of me, too.”
But if he hadn’t looked, would I have ever seen him again? Unbearable thought, even in the midst of this.
He pushes his hair out of his face. “Okay, that’s not the whole truth. It’s not just about being a good dad. It’s…because I was ashamed.”
“Of me?” I’m ready to break apart all over again.
“No, not of you. Never of you.” He raises his eyes to mine and there is something in them that is so unflinching and desperate and wanting.
“Of myself, of being queer at all. Of life as a queer person, whatever that would even mean now. Scared of what all that change would look like if I took it to a real level. Those few weeks we were together, really together, I was so happy—and then when I was faced with actually living that way with my family, and fatherhood…I just choked. I went right back into the shitty cycle I’ve been living my whole life.
“Noel, I ruined everything and I’m sorry. I hurt you because I’m a selfish coward. I am really, really fucking sorry. All I can do is make it up to you. If—if you want me. Still. Or I can go away and leave you alone for good, if that’s what you really want.”
There is raw pain on his face, and his hands are burrowed in the blankets like he’s trying to resist the urge to touch me. I think he doesn’t want to see me flinch again.
“I really did look for you everywhere, stunt girl,” he says softly. “Everywhere. Every club. Every cafe and restaurant we ever went to. Your old apartment. Even your mother’s house.” My throat swiftly closes, and I shut my eyes against tears. “Some part of me never gave up on us.”