Chapter Getting in Love with Him
Getting in Love with Him
Dane, my man, this is a lot.
This is a lot.
This is a lot.
“Stop,” Dane whispered to his reflection in the bathroom mirror. “No more.”
No more, Diane said. Put your thoughts down.
Round and round his mind went, hares chasing hares across the hinterlands. Another triskele of them whirled in his chest, running the opposite way. Each needing to run down what the other had.
My man, this is a lot.
This is a lot.
Dane rested hands on the vanity, dropped his chin between hunched shoulders and wept. For what, he had no idea. For himself, for Liko, for Fred, for everything. For the fucking goddamn lot of it.
“You know what this is,” he mumbled into a hand towel.
“Being intensely connected and then abruptly disconnected is upsetting. Triggering. You don’t have to stand here and suffer.
Go knock on his door and ask for a little more time.
Or a little more contact. Or reach out to someone else.
You need a hit of connection to settle you down.
It’s no big deal. You have community. Call on them. ”
He picked up his phone and texted Saskia. Hey, kiddo. Having some really deep conversations about parenting and fatherhood lately. Feeling mushy and just wanted to say I love you so much. Miss you rotten. XO.
Bless that child’s heart, she replied almost right away. Aww, Deddy! I love u2. At a party right now but your mush made my night. I’ll try to come see u soon. New season of Drag Race dropped, we’ll make popcorn and binge-watch. XOXOXO.
It was a little. But it wasn’t enough.
Dane, my man, this is a lot.
He texted Fred. Hey, my friend. Was thinking about you. Everything good?
No reply, but no surprise. Fred had much better screen management skills and not only shut their phone off an hour before going to bed, they left it charging in the kitchen.
You’re probably asleep, Dane typed. I was just saying hi. Catch up later.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered over the sent words. “I’m still so sorry.”
Sinister memories flickered at the edges of his mind.
The feel of the scratchy carpet in Dr. Porto’s office, rough against his kneecaps.
The smooth-skinned plane of Fred’s back (Erica’s back.) The ponytail of dark hair at their (her) nape because he (her)(no, them, it’s them), was forced to be a girl.
The sound of leather striking skin. Fred (Erica) muffling cries into (her) elbow until (they) couldn’t anymore.
Dane was better at staying silent. He’d been through this too many times.
Dr. Porto’s Victorian-era tawse had nothing on Ivelaw Strong’s weightlifting belt.
The blows hurt. It was humiliating. But Dane knew how to disassociate.
Fred(erica) had never been hit in his life. (Their life).
“Stop,” Dane said to the bathroom mirror.
Stop, Diane echoed behind his left eye.
(“Stop,” FredErica cried. “Stop, please stop…”)
Dane tried one more text, this time to his sister: If the world is my oyster, who is my pearl?
After a minute, Maisie replied, Meeeeeeeeee with a bunch of hearts and a kissy face.
Goodnight, he wrote. Love you.
Goodnight, my Great Dane. Love you more.
And a minute after that: Huff says goodnight, dipshit. With a winking face.
Sleep badly, asshole, Dane replied.
He sat down on the edge of his bed, practicing mindful gratitude. He was blessed with pipple. He was loved. Valued. Cherished.
And so fucking lonely.
Perched on Nomi’s old side of the mattress, his hand stroked up and down the pillow, pretending it was her body while a catalog of delicious sexual memories fanned its pages, enticing him to choose, buy, order. Free shipping. Own it now.
Except he’d never own it again.
He leaned, curled, dropped his face into the pillow and breathed in the ghost of Nomi’s scent, as if she’d left the room two seconds ago and not two years.
He closed his eyes. Turning pages. Remembering.
God, they’d fucked so good. Even their sloppiest, laziest, bare minimum grapple on an exhausted Tuesday night was terrific.
“Good enough?” he liked to ask after such half-ass sessions.
“Thoroughly adequate,” she’d answer. And they’d laugh and laugh.
Dane sighed, remembering all the encounters with school parents and soccer fathers and even well-meaning friends. They talked around the subject, but Dane could see it in their eyes. The question dying to be asked:
So who fucks who?
Come on, Strong, spill the tea. Who exactly is fucking who?
Who’s the top? Who’s the bottom? Who’s in the middle?
Who rides bitch on the cuddle train? Do you keep a schedule?
Do you have assigned nights? A monthly orgy?
Do you get jealous? And when you take a break from your exhaustive sex and constant jealousy, who does the laundry?
Sometimes, Dane had to admit, he wanted to smash the teapot and let it all spill. In detail. Tell them Ethan was neither top nor bottom, but a side.
“One day I’ll write an autobiographical novel,” Ethan said. “It’ll be called The Sider House Rules.”
“You mean The Sider House Laws,” Dane said, laughing and tackling him.
The questions were casual but the answers had no middle ground between pedantic and crass. Dane’s choices were We don’t penetrate each other during intercourse, or Sorry, no dicks in asses at Schoenfeld’s. Try Kulleseid’s Orchards. They get pretty wild.
Your choices were truth or silence, Diane said. You wrote the laws that kept peace.
Dane gathered the pillows to his chest and stomach, spooning an invisible body, electric with memory and wanting so bad it hurt.
Nomi was the top. No question. Not just in bed but in their entire existence. If life was a pyramid, then Schoenfeld’s was the base, the sides were Dane, Ethan and Saskia, and Nomi was the gold-capped pinnacle. Perched above her empire, cloud pine broom in hand, the Dusk Tiara on her head.
In bed, though… God, in bed. Tears flooded Dane’s eyes as he poured tea all over his catalog.
The encounters taking up a full-page spread were all from when Nomi took charge of him, took him in hand, took control.
When she not only got on top but held him down.
Told him what to do. To her, to himself.
Told him he could come now. Told him he couldn’t come yet.
Or when she had him kneel on the bed, then came around from behind and jerked him off.
Or in the shower—she loved to soap him up then turn him away and slide arms around his waist. As her hands stroked, she’d grind right up into his butt in a manner that left nothing to the imagination. She was topping him.
He loved it.
Ethan would never take him that way. Dane accepted it and while he had no reservations about letting Ethan know all his thoughts, his feelings, his desires, his fantasies, Dane perfectly understood Ethan’s asexual nature.
He knew while it would ebb, flow, spike and retract, it would never change.
At the end of the day, wasn’t that the essence of unconditional love?
Recognizing your partner’s basic human nature and not treating it as a challenge, a thing you could fix or alter or change?
The infrequency of Ethan’s sex was what rendered it precious. When Ethan came to Dane, it meant something.
He and Ethan always made love.
He and Nomi did, too, but holy hell they could fuck. Nomi gave him the obliteration he craved. She knew him the way she knew the location of every seedling and weed on this farm, and some nights, she just harvested his ass.
I want you, he begged. I want you back. I want to go back to bed with you. I want to make love so bad. I hate it here. I want what I had before. Bring it back. I want it inside me. I want…
It was no good. It was a lot. It was too much for this room.
He went downstairs on silent feet. Through the living room and into the kitchen where Salma curled in her bed. Dane slipped past her and out the back door. He left the pool lights turned off. He slid out of his clothes and into the water.
Nomi, he thought, crouched on the bottom of the deep end, hands reaching out in all directions. Nomi, it’s so hard tonight.
Through the cool drink, she came to him. Her short dark hair undulating. The plum and lavender wisteria tattooed all over her body. Her strong hands twining with Dane’s and her green eyes looking into his.
I am Nomi.
You know me.
Speak my name to the stars.
Dane surfaced, breathing hard. “O mister anima I,” he said to the sky.
O mister anima I, Nomi said from beneath, holding him up.
It was Ethan who separated the hated epithet Mister from Naomi Misteria, and immediately recognized anima in the remaining letters.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s right here. Anima. Carl Jung. The inner feminine side of men.”
“The related Greek word anemos means wind,” John Schoenberg said. “And the Latin derivation means soul.”
Nomi’s eyes filled with tears and she turned away to the window in John’s study. Outside, a soulful wind was blowing the copper spinner, making the three hares chase each other.
John looked up from a book. “Jung said, ‘Anima is the archetype of life itself.’”
“O mister anima I,” Ethan said, putting gentle hands on Nomi’s shoulders. One day he’d create a love letter for the hares within his most famous video game, and he’d use wind to precipitate clues.
Hands gripping his own shoulders, Dane spoke his wife’s name and anagram to the skies, then sank beneath the water again. She caught him. Cradled him to her strong, hard body.
Know me, Great Dane, she said.
I am a granddaughter of Ruta Skadi, queen of the Lake Lubana clan.
I wear the Dusk Tiara.
I am proud and pitiless.
I live in the Danelaw and I will go to war for your peace.
Dane came up. “I miss you so much,” he whispered into his palms.
He thrashed about in the water, kicking and fighting the heartbreak.
Sinking beneath until his lungs screamed and Nomi pushed him up again.
He spoke her name to the stars. He cried for her.
Begged for her back. Wanting to sink into her kiss, slide into her body, watch her grow things in the earth, feel her asleep in his arms, fall through the gap between her two front teeth and be forever inside her.
Dane, my man, this is a lot, Diane said. I’d erase myself from your memory if it would bring her back
His stomach seized, coiling around the terrible, Faustian lament of losing someone dear. The wild, desperate bargains offered to a cruel Universe: Anything. I’d do anything, give anything to get them back.
“I’d erase myself from your memory,” Dane said.
And then his heart and mind bubbled up and over in a murderous wail as he sank under the water again, where it was Ethan waiting for him.
Dane thrashed at him. Wanting to love him.
Wanting to kill him. Bubbles of I miss you colliding with I hate you, tangling up with anagrams and love notes and treasure hunts and little sketches left on pillows and taped to bathroom mirrors.
Ethan’s triangle smile, the apples of his cheeks fitting precisely into Dane’s palms. The golden glint of his eyes, like a sleepy lion.
How they squinted at a canvas beneath furrowed brows.
Then lit up when he stepped back from work, pleased.
The feel of the hair on his chest and arms and legs, all along Dane’s skin.
That beautiful body asleep in Dane’s arms even as his bright, beautiful mind went on spinning, spinning, spinning behind his closed eyelids.
And every so often, like a rare orchid blooming, he’d want to make love. And oddly, Nomi always picked up on it first.
“I need a night in my old cave,” she’d say casually. “You guys take the king tonight.”
In the huge bed, beneath the eye of Nomi with Dusk Tiara, Dane was the artist and Ethan the curious pupil.
The nervous model baring himself, letting the most private aspects of his soul be seen.
The courage and effort to take what was in his mind and put it into words for Dane.
Learning to start sentences with I want you to…
The even greater bravery to say No, let’s stop, let’s try something else, can I show you something else?
Can I tell you? Can I show you? I want you to…
“I want you to come back,” Dane whispered over the sloshing water of the pool, fists pressed to his salty eyes. He sank onto the concrete steps in the shallow end, furious and forlorn as an abandoned child.
“Where’s Ethan?” a teary, six-year-old Saskia demanded. “I’m getting in love with him.”
“What, hon?” Nomi said.
“Ethan’s in the city,” Dane said.
“But I want him home,” the girl said. “I’m getting in love with him.”
“Oh, sweetie,” Nomi said, smoothing Saskia’s hair. “You want to call him?”
“No.” Saskia stomped to the living room windows and flung aside the curtains, peering out at the driveway. “I’m getting in love with him and I want him to come home now.”
Dane looked up at the farmhouse windows, as if expecting to see a little girl’s woebegone face pressed to the panes, looking out.
I’d erase you from my memory if it would bring you back for Saskia.
He slipped once more under the water and then it was Nomi on one side, Ethan on the other. Dane in the middle. Lover to both. The fulcrum on which the other two balanced.
I will go to war for your peace, Nomi said.
Great Dane, Ethan whispered, because he knew Dane had a massive praise kink but hated to be called good boy.
They knew him.
Know me.
Nobody could ever know him like those two.
Ye then deign to know me.
I’d erase myself.
Stop, Diane said behind Dane’s blue eyes.
(“Stop,” FredErica begged, on their knees under Dane.)
I’m sorry.
I’m getting in love with you.
I want you to come home now.
My man, this is a lot.
My man.
I would go to war for your peace.
“Erase yourself from my memory,” Dane begged. “Please…”
This is the Danelaw and its mission is peace, Diane said in Nomi’s voice, a little green shining through the blue of her eyes.
Go to war for your peace, Great Dane.
You’re not alone. You’re loved and cherished and you can call for rescue. You have a family.
Don’t erase them from memory. Remember how you called them to arms...