18. Release The Professional Birthday Celebrant
RELEASE THE PROFESSIONAL BIRTHDAY CELEbrANT
By the middle of the week, Jonathan had his own phone charger on the table next to what had become his side of Connor’s bed, where he found himself with a frequency he didn’t disclose to Lily.
Every night they would have dinner and laugh like some cheerful couple in vacation ads, then he’d snuggle into Connor and dream of learning to skate, that first one-foot spin and the exhilaration thrumming in his legs as he took flight going clockwise, getting faster, the air lifting his hair.
Then switching to counter-clockwise. After the switch, the spin changed.
It defied physics, but he got faster and faster.
Too fast. He tried to raise his leg against the centripetal force, but it wouldn’t go. His skate lifted but wouldn’t cross over to the other side no matter how much he fought.
Every night he lost the fight. The air, that invisible opponent, would push until the blade would be compelled back. Back into his calf while he was still moving, slicing him, leaving a red trail on the white ice. He always ended falling forward but seeing the bloody path behind him.
He’d wake, gasping, before he hit the ice.
Not like that fun dream needed much interpretation each time he woke in the night. Also, not something he was disclosing.
But Connor’s body heat next to him helped, so Jonathan stayed, and tried not to dream.
This Wednesday morning was too bright when Jonathan’s phone chimed him awake despite his do not disturb setting rules.
Only two people had numbers that could break through. Jonathan didn’t know why he even maintained that courtesy for his parents, given how rarely they texted.
It was his mother, of course.
Julie Wilson Park (Mother)
Happy Birthday!
I miss you! When are you coming to see me?
We can go shopping or get our nails done!
So many pings, so little reality. He lived a thirteen-hour drive or a two-and-a-half-hour flight from Los Angeles, and he had a job, part of the long list of reasons shopping and nails hadn’t been in the cards for a long, long time. Not with her, at least.
“You’re awake?”
He’d missed Connor’s ascent to the second floor, because he doubted the other man had suddenly become a butterfly on the stairs.
“Regrettably.” His mother pinged again.
Julie Wilson Park (Mother)
Valentina is willing to coach you.
She doesn’t care about how things ended with Mikhail.
Because unlike Mikhail, you can’t basically pay her for sex.
Julie Wilson Park (Mother)
Wouldn’t that be great!
When had she become an exclamation mark user? Perhaps she was in a support group or taking pharmaceuticals that gave her enthusiasms beyond shopping, vodka, and manipulation.
She was also completely untethered from reality if she thought he would, or even could, return to skating after five years off. Five entire years.
“Where’s my go-bag? The first aid kit? Do we have enough water?”
“What are you rambling about?” Jonathan looked up and knew he must be frowning from Connor’s well-faked wide-eyed reaction.
“It’s the apocalypse. I’m holding out coffee and you’re ignoring it.”
“Oh.” The phone felt like it weighed enough to pull his arm toward the floor, and his attention with it.
He wanted to be stronger, but each ping drew his eyes. He knew she’d never change; she lived the lyrics of every bad song he’d ever heard, and she was unchangeable, unchanging, changeless. It was no use to expect anything else, or even to want it.
“It’s my mother.”
“Oh? Or should I say, oh.”
Jonathan wanted the coffee, so he placed his phone face down on the duvet and raised his hand. Today’s mug was, once again, the weird anteater duo. He knew Connor had not only plain white mugs, but also about ten other school-related mugs, so it was a deliberate choice to bring Jonathan this one.
The coffee was, as usual, excellent. It soothed him.
Connor was, also as usual, waiting for Jonathan’s answer.
For a guy who vibrated on his toes even more than his dog did, he was patient about letting others speak. “I think you should maybe say that’s shitty, Jonathan, and make me French toast.”
Connor’s brow developed a large, but not unattractive, furrow.
He would look distinguished when a few more years conferred wisdom wrinkles and solid laugh lines.
Given how much time he spent outside without a hat and wearing insufficient sunblock, that time would come for him well before it came for Jonathan.
“Everything okay with your family?”
“Everything’s as okay as usual. Which is to say, not much. She wanted to wish me happy birthday.”
“It’s your birthday? What the fuck?” Connor glared at him.
“It’s not my birthday.”
“Wait.” By this point, Connor was frowning deeply. “What the fuck, doubled down.”
“My birthday is tomorrow, but my parents used to compete with each other to be first, so the date has morphed into today, and I don’t know if they remember it’s actually tomorrow. I suppose it’s better than the years where she drunk-texted me at midnight.”
Connor’s face was all squished and his eyebrows were not in their normal places, but Jonathan wasn’t going to decode those emotions. He had enough of his own, thank you.
“Hey, I’m still, what’s the word, miffed? Peeved? Annoyed?” He didn’t sound it. In fact, he sounded soft and cuddly.
He sat on the bed and rested a hand on the duvet over Jonathan’s thigh. “That’s it, I’m annoyed with you, Jonathan Park, because you didn’t tell me it was your birthday tomorrow.”
The weight of Connor’s hand was better than nice, maybe because it was here, not in California, and not inside his phone or his brain, but out here in the physical plane. “I’m supposed to just say it?”
“Yes.” That was a decisive nod. “About a week ago you should have told me. Or at least started dropping hints.”
“How? I should pose at the mirror looking for gray hair and then sigh dramatically?” That was something he’d seen her do, mutter to herself and then say, “Jonathan, I was beautiful before I had a baby. You gave me this gray hair. I was beautiful before I had you.”
Connor didn’t know any of that history, so he agreed. “Sure, or you could say, oh, I better not forget to check my driver’s license and see if it expires next week on my birthday. Oh, oops, no, it’s good for another four years. That would have worked too.”
He felt too brittle for this joking. Connor clearly didn’t understand what birthdays were like in a dysfunctional family. “That’s so smooth, why didn’t I think of it.”
His fragility must have been close enough to the surface for Connor to sense, because he set his own mug on the Ribby photo coaster and gathered Jonathan into his arms. “Hey, come here.”
The big hands put a comforting weight on his back and hip, pulling him into Connor’s solidity while simultaneously pushing his mother away.
If he nuzzled closer to the top of Connor’s shoulder, at a spot not quite halfway to his neck, the just-exercised dampness was lessened to a level that he didn’t mind. That, in fact, he maybe liked.
“I want breakfast. Then I have to go to work.”
“We’ll circle back to this birthday thing.”
“Must we?”
“I’m a professional birthday celebrant for people nearly as opinionated as you who have the manners of seven-year-olds because they are seven.
” Connor’s big hands stroked up and down Jonathan’s back.
“I do this in excess of twenty times a year, and I haven’t done the birthday song since June 5, so I’m suffering withdrawal.
My craft room has been underutilized for weeks, do you hear me? Weeks.”
“I’m screwed.”
Connor glanced at the retro analog clock on his bedside table. “I don’t think we have time to do that properly and also make French toast before you have to go to work.”
“I don’t mean like that.”
“You should always mean like that.”
“I mean you are going to fuck me over with awful glitter and balloons and…and…puffy paint markers or something, aren’t you?”
“I promise no glitter. On the décor.”
“Why does that sound dirty? You look so sweet with your fluffy curls and your big grin, and you make everything sound dirty.”
“It’s my skill.” He patted himself on the chest.
Of course he fully intended for Jonathan to look at his hand and his chest when he did, and weigh exactly where French toast and fucking fell on the needs/wants hierarchy.
“Fucking. I choose fucking.”
Connor inhaled and inflated that unreasonably over-sized chest. “Well, I think you need French toast and cuddles. You’ll have to wait ’til tonight for anything else.”
Jonathan’s workday was agonizingly slow, perhaps because he’d had a crappy wake-up, perhaps because it was New York amounts of humid outside, which everyone who’d lived here longer said was not normal for Oregon.
Also, he hated the underwear he was wearing and his left sock kept slipping into his shoe, casualties of the limited clothing choices he’d taken to Connor’s house.
“You’re way too twitchy, even for you. What gives?”
That was at least a new and interesting way for Lily to ask what was wrong with him, different from the previous times she’d confronted him since he’d arrived this morning.
Admittedly, that wasn’t really asking, it was more of a demand, but the earlier questions had been nicer, along the lines of “are you feeling alright,” and “whatever is wrong with you, I hope it’s not contagious. ”
“I’m fine.” The dinosaur display was coming together quickly.
Jonathan had advocated for a superhero display, Lily for invisible book day with empty display stands, and their boss had settled the dispute by choosing dinosaurs, so here they were, putting signs that said Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, and Ankylosaurus in front of appropriately silly books.
Jonathan had a secret sign that said Thesaurus and he was going to guerilla art the hell out of the display the moment Lily and Boss Becca turned their backs.
“Ah, I see. You were expecting a delivery.”