31. It Wasn’t Just a Sandwich
IT WASN’T JUST A SANDWICH
Standing here on the asphalt by his car, looking at Connor, Jonathan felt like a statue that had tumbled from a pedestal and broken into separate pieces on the ground: a hand here, an arm there, and a heart crushed into sharpened chips of stone.
“Jonathan, please. I’ll tell you.” Instead of completing his offer, Connor shoved both hands into his hair and bent at the waist, rocking.
He should nod and agree, say something out loud, because Connor was still looking at the ground and couldn’t see his shrug, but his throat was clogged.
Ah, shit, his eyes weren’t. Stupid, foolish eyes.
He dashed his forearm across his face and hoped that he’d used a part of his sleeve hadn’t been kittened, but at this point it didn’t fucking matter, did it.
He blinked hard and focused on the frame of his car and that grimy black seal around the door opening.
It was a crappy piece of rubber no better than a bike inner tube, and if that kept rain out of his car, then what component of himself would do the job of sealing up these feelings tomorrow when he’d have to go to work.
He needed a shitty piece of rubber to wrap around his chest.
Connor spoke to the ground, “I lied. I’m sorry. So sorry.”
Facing things head on was kind of its own description, so that’s what he had to do, zip the cat carrier closed and then turn his head the fraction that let him look at Connor. Look at Connor’s face. See him.
“Why.” That word was the limit of his ability to not croak.
Connor straightened, and instead of pulling at his hair, he wrapped his arms around himself low on his stomach. Dirty streaks marked his cheeks where tear tracks and field dust mixed into a blotchy mess. “I know you hate lying, and I lied, but I didn’t…I didn’t hook up.”
It seemed they were going to do this here, in a softball field parking lot, like a second-rate network television cliche.
While they didn’t have an audience yet, he’d parked close to the field gates and eventually people would exit this direction.
They should at least move their emotional splatter somewhere quieter, like the bus shelter.
He grabbed Kitten’s carrier and closed his car door. “Over there.”
Connor followed.
The bench was constructed of that weird plastic lumber, but at least it wasn’t dirty. He sat at one end and put Kitten’s portable palace next to him, forcing Connor to sit at the other end.
The shelter’s three plexiglass sides gave the illusion of privacy but trapped the air inside. He was hot. His shirt stuck to his back. The low angle of the sun hit his cheeks and eyes, and he was so thirsty.
Someone should say something.
Even though his mouth was dry, his chest felt close to popping like a water-filled blister and he was going to ooze all over the bench if someone didn’t say something.
“Can you hold my hand?”
“I can.” He heard his own condescending tone, that familiar shield he used to keep people away because he’d rather be judged to be a snob than to be unwanted, and writhed with the knowledge of how unworthy of an important relationship talk it sounded.
But fuck if it wasn’t more comfortable to be inside that shell than poking at this gaping wound.
Connor blinked rapidly, and the corners of his lips wobbled before a tiny wisp of a word slipped out. “Grumpy.”
“Don’t.” His eyes felt so hot and scratchy and he lifted his hands to his face so he wouldn’t have to see Connor. For a brief and sweet time, they had been soft and squishy together, their two less-than-perfect selves perfect for each other.
“Why didn’t you tell me he’d visited you?” His question sounded like a thread, so thin and breakable that it couldn’t possibly hold the weight of an answer and stitch them back together.
When the bench vibrated, he lowered his hands and saw that Connor had fisted the hair above his forehead so that his wrists covered his face as he rocked forward and backward. His elbows were gathered in tight to his chest, like he was making himself smaller. “I don’t know. I don’t know.”
A man who looked like that didn’t need to confess something, he needed to be comforted, maybe even be protected.
What the fuck had happened yesterday?
He didn’t think about it, just swapped places with Kitten’s carrier until he was inches from Connor, who continued to rock on the bench. Kitten mewed, but he’d do best in his safe space. Right now, Connor needed Jonathan more. “What happened.”
“I lied but I didn’t cheat, I didn’t, and I’m so sorry that I lied. It was…”
A tiny bit of Jonathan, the old, hurt, howling-deep-inside bit that he wanted to exorcise, begged to erupt, You know I hate lying. And you know why. Tell me why you lied!
But that part wasn’t looking at Connor like he was, wasn’t touching Connor’s shaking shoulder and feeling tentacles of scary dark worry tighten in his gut.
That part wasn’t in charge anymore, so he settled his hand on the juncture of Connor’s neck and shoulder and managed one calmly enunciated sentence. “You can tell me anything.”
Connor dropped his arms and turned. His eyes were red-rimmed and shiny with liquid and his eyelids looked puffy, and that was the moment when Jonathan knew, as certainly as he knew the letters of the alphabet or the months of the year, that he’d made a terrible mistake.
He wanted to pound the back of his own skull into the bus shelter wall and howl with how much he hated himself, because this was the face of a man who’d already been hurt badly and Jonathan, the boyfriend who should have been his goddamn pillar of support, had pushed him away and sniped at him and even tried to run.
“Tony showed up drunk.” Connor’s gaze dropped to his twisted hands and he bent forward again. “I refused to talk to him. I told him about you. I said I have a boyfriend. But I couldn’t let him drive away. He was drunk.”
Connor’s words were skittering out, almost too fast to follow, and his tone was flat. No joking, no up and down, nothing. Flat.
He wanted to rest more of his arm across Connor’s shoulders and let the weight settle him, but he didn’t know if he should, if Connor would welcome that.
“There’s kids all over the neighborhood, the park and the bike trail, I couldn’t let him go like that. I said he could come in for a sandwich.”
His insides were all shrunken tight around something really big and sharp, something that he knew was going to cut him on the way out of his throat if he pulled back the wrapper that kept it contained, but his own fear didn’t matter.
He had to peel calm-sounding words out of his chest; had to show Connor that he could continue.
Safely. That he’d be safe with Jonathan, because his gut was telling him all sorts of things that his head was struggling to process, but the main thing, the big thing, was that Connor was hanging on the edge of telling him something terrible.
And he’d been an asshole.
“A sandwich?”
“I thought he’d sober up and then I’d send him away. I was—I was—I was trying to be a good person.”
“You are good, Connor. You are.” That was a given. “But how did…”
The rest of his question was a scary leap without a tether, because he didn’t know the answer, and he didn’t like not knowing answers, didn’t like jump scare surprises. “How did the EMTs end up at your house? What happened?”
Connor bent forward until his chest was nearly touching his thighs and aimed his words at the ground.
“We were in the kitchen. I turned around and he was right there. Right there. I hadn’t heard him.
He grabbed me. I said no. I said I have a boyfriend, I told you about my boyfriend, but he pushed his tongue in my mouth and I said no, Jonathan, I said no! ”
Even before he finished processing what Connor said, his hands had moved to Connor’s back, stroking his spine and shoulders, and he was making all sorts of sounds like he made to Pawsley.
Now that he was a pet owner, he had the skills for touching and stroking and making tiny comforting noises all at once, and he was saying some version of it’s okay, meaning I’ll take care of you, I won’t leave you, and also is this okay, meaning can I touch you, can I hold you, will you let me after how I acted.
Touching Connor helped hold his own panic at bay, and maybe it helped Connor, too, because he shuddered and then Jonathan felt the expansion as he inhaled.
“I dropped the sandwich and then Ribby came and ate it, and he let go and then I said I’ll make another.”
Oh, thank you, thank heaven and lucky stars and thank everything, it was just a kiss.
He could see goosebumps on Connor’s shoulders where the neckline of his team shirt pulled away.
When Connor lifted his arms and crossed them behind his head, as if to protect himself, it snuffed the flare of relief that his story had ended at an unwanted, nonconsensual kiss, but not anything more…not something…not…
He shied away from finishing the thought.
“Why’d I say that? About the sandwich?”
He continued to press firmly on Connor’s back, alternating between stroking up and down the sides of his spine and making circles the way he knew Connor liked.
Although he had no idea what words he could offer, what of anything beyond the weight of his hand he could give Connor, he had to use his calm voice.
He couldn’t let this giant howl escape. He couldn’t scream or curse the world for hurting Connor.
“Why’d I do that?”
Connor needed him to be steady. “People do things when someone—”
“They tell people to eat sandwiches?” Connor shuddered.
“Shh, it’s okay.” He spread his fingers as wide as they would go so that he could cover the most space on Connor’s spine and pressed steadily through all his fingers and his palm. “Sometimes they try to be normal in scary situations. That’s what you were doing.”
“I wasn’t scared, I wasn’t.” He could feel Connor’s tremors through his hand.