callum
SEVEN
NOW
Damien was gone before I could compose myself.
Before I could help Mom and Dad back to the car, back to their too big, too quiet house.
I was sure mom thought that by now she’d have tons of grandkids running around.
But Sam never had kids as far as I knew, and the kind of sex I generally participated in wasn’t typically known to produce offspring, despite repeated attempts.
But I digress.
Damien was gone, almost like he was never there. Were it not for the fact that Mom and Dad saw him too, I might have believed I’d hallucinated him.
When I lifted my gaze in that church and saw him sitting in the back, his expression was blank at first. Then the flash of recognition as our eyes met made me flinch. The paper with my speech crumpled under my spasming hand, and I pressed my hands against the top of the pulpit to steady myself.
I hadn’t expected him to come back, although I had no idea why I thought that. My life was divided into before and after, and Damien belonged solidly in the before category. He was a memory I got to visit sometimes when I wanted to torture myself. He was a ghost.
But he wasn’t. Damien was still very real and very alive, and I was the worst brother in the world because all I wanted to do was find him and make him talk to me.
Make him look at me, even though I’d been too chicken to say anything to him earlier.
I’d said nothing for fear of saying too much.
I hadn’t reached for him because I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to let go.
“Did you want me to heat something up for dinner?” I asked my parents.
They’d changed out of their funeral clothes and were sitting at the kitchen table, staring into empty space.
They hadn’t wanted the big gathering after the service, and I was glad for it because if I had to thank one more person for their condolences, I was going to scream.
“No thanks, dear. I think… I think I’m going to go to bed.” Mom forced herself to her feet and Dad followed. They were in their own private hell, and I hated that there was nothing I could do to help.
Dad clapped me on the shoulder on the way past. He paused and looked at me. “Are you going to be all right?”
“I’m going to go for a walk. I need some air.”
Dad nodded and headed up the stairs. I’d decided to take the guest room on the ground floor, opting to stay away from my childhood bedroom and the memories it contained. Sam’s room was right next to mine, and I hadn’t been able to make myself go up there yet.
I changed out of my suit and idly considered just tossing it in the trash.
It wasn’t like I wanted to keep it. It would forever be tainted with memories of this day.
I brought the jacket close to my face and thought about sniffing it to see if any of Damien’s Tom Ford cologne had wafted close enough to cling to the fabric, but decided that I was being stupid.
I stepped into a pair of dark jeans and pulled a light gray sweater over my head. The weather was turning colder, so I rummaged in the hall closet for a pair of gloves and let myself out of the house.
I took a right at the end of the driveway and just walked.
Mom and Dad lived in a suburb that wasn’t too far from the city center, but in the dark and the wind, the twenty minute walk felt a lot longer than it was.
The town would be gearing up for Christmas soon, but right now everything was bleak.
The trees were leafless and the sun had already set, plunging the world into an early darkness.
I hadn’t eaten all day, and my stomach didn’t feel particularly capable of holding a lot of food, but I stopped at a little cafe and ordered a bowl of soup, a coffee, and a couple slices of toast. I managed half before my stomach clenched, and I had to stop.
Suddenly sick of looking at the food, I pulled a few bills from my wallet, enough to cover the meal and a tip.
I tucked them under the edge of the coffee cup and got up from the table.
I practically stumbled my way out of the cafe and into the fresh evening air.
What the fuck was wrong with me? I scraped a hand down my face and sucked in a deep breath.
And then I started to walk again. Aimlessly this time.
First I walked up to where the high school used to sit.
They’d built a new one a few years ago and had torn down the old one.
It was just an empty lot now. Nothing more than a field of dying grass stood in front of me, though I could still picture the building if I thought about it.
The brick facade. The tall windows of the library. The music room on the top floor.
I turned away and headed for one place that I knew would never change.
The shitty dive bar that sat on a hill above the river was one of the constants in town.
A woman named Ginny ran it, and you stayed on Ginny’s good side or she ran you out of it.
Her bar might not be highbrow, but they kept the minors and the troublemakers out.
It wasn’t an official gay bar, but most of the clientele was some flavor of the rainbow or another.
Ginny, for example, was a gorgeous trans woman who ran the bar with part of her polycule. Her partners did other duties like the books, or sometimes they served a few drinks here and there, but Ginny was the face of the place.
Her eyes lit up when I walked in, and she nearly leapt over the bar to greet me. She towered over me in her heels and pulled me into a hug so tight it felt like my ribs cracked.
“You’re a right shit. You know that, Callum?” Ginny pulled away but kept her hands on my shoulders. She gave me a long onceover. “You look like shit,” she said, her voice softening with just a hint of sympathy.
“Thanks. I feel like it.”
“You need a drink.” She towed me up to the bar and made me sit in the corner, tucked away from most everyone. I was grateful for the space and for the beer she poured and slid across the counter to me.
“It’s good to see you, but I hate the reason you’re here. How are you holding up, kid?”
Ginny was the only one who got away with calling me kid, mostly because she called everyone kid. Even old man Wallace, who looked like he was three hundred years old.
I took a long pull of my beer, downing half of it before coming up for air.
“I’m holding up… okay, I guess.” I took a breath and let it out. “I’m actually a weird mixture of numb and sad and a little pissed off. I’m sure I’ll get a lot worse before I get better.”
“That’s the spirit.” Ginny pretended to slug me on the chin.
When I looked at her with obvious confusion, she just smiled at me, all soft and sweet like Ginny could be sometimes.
“You said ‘before it gets better.’ Which means you know it will get better. Eventually.”
I let out a long, hard breath. Logically, I knew that.
But everything was so fucked up right now.
My life was upside down and wrong feeling.
Until Damien climbed in that limo, and I’d been almost close enough to feel his body heat.
Close enough to smell his cologne and hear him breathing, but still light years away from him.
It had been a short reprieve, a welcome distraction from what was really going on around us. The reason for our impromptu reunion.
Ginny knew there was bad blood between Sam and me.
She didn’t know the whole story, but she knew enough to know that she’d been team Callum.
I doubted that had changed even given the current circumstances, and it felt nice to be somewhere that I could stop pretending.
My grief was real, but around Mom and Dad, it felt like a mask.
An act. Like I had to be a specific kind of sad, one with no room for anger that Sam had held a grudge for so long.
Or that he made it so fucking uncomfortable for me to come home that I’d stopped bothering most of the time.
The house was full of silence and memories of Sam and it didn’t feel like there was room for my grief there and the anger that came with it. One of Ginny’s partners came out from the back and slid in behind the bar, taking over.
Ginny grabbed a bottle off the shelf and a couple of glasses then stepped out from behind the bar. “Follow me,” she said, knocking her elbow against me as she passed.
If I didn’t, she’d come back and haul me over to her booth by my ear, so I did what I was told.
Honestly, it was nice to not have to think about what I was doing or where I was going.
I was following Ginny. I was going to sit at her table and drink with her and tomorrow…
tomorrow would come no matter what. Like it always did.
I slid into the seat across from her, my back to the door and the rest of the bar. It felt nice, kind of like it was just the two of us.
She poured a couple of fingers into each glass then raised hers. “To Sam, may his final journey be peaceful.”
I raised my glass, but Ginny continued, “And to those he left behind, may they find peace as well.”
My hand trembled as our glasses clinked together. The whiskey burned going down, but I relished the feeling. It was a sign that despite how numb I’d been for days now, there was still something in me that could feel things. Even if those things were anger and the satisfying burn of alcohol.
The door opened and the November wind howled into the bar, making my head turn.
And then I knew for sure I could feel because Damien had just walked into Ginny’s and my heart started to beat again.
The world spun to a stop as I watched Damien’s gaze drift around the room, noting where the bathrooms were, and the pool tables and the bar, and then farther to the right over to where I was sitting.
They say lightning never strikes the same place twice, but every time our eyes met, that’s what I felt. A jolt of electricity so powerful that it stole my breath. I gaped at him, watching him walk across the bar until he came up to the table.
“We should talk,” he said.
Even all these years later, I still fucking hated those three words.