Damien
TWENTY-EIGHT
NOW
Without a word, Bowie set a coffee in front of me and then plopped down in the seat opposite my desk.
Bowie and I had gone into business together, opening up a small graphic design company while we were still in college.
We specialized in custom brand creation and web presence.
Bowie did the heavy lifting on the design work, and I took care of the website development end of things.
With the rise in AI use, it was getting harder to keep going.
“You’re a godsend.” I grabbed the coffee and took a sniff. Sometimes Bowie liked to bring me random drinks disguised as coffee. The pumpkin spice latte he’d brought to fuck with me once hadn’t been bad, but he could keep the London Fog. It wasn’t even coffee.
“Have you slept since you got back?”
“I’ve slept.” I also drove out of town one night for a fucking booty call and stayed awake most of the night, drove back to make it in time to work the other day and had been spiraling ever since.
Spiraling kept me up at night so, no, I wasn’t getting the most sleep.
But I’d survive. Coffee would help. Coffee never let me down.
“This week?”
“Shut up. I don’t look that bad.”
“No.” Bowie paused. “You look worse. I’m concerned about you.”
“There’s nothing to be concerned about.” That was a lie. Even I was concerned about me. Being with Callum again felt surreal, like I’d reached into my wildest dream and somehow made a shred of it come true.
And then I had to leave and the dream quickly faded. The truth was that Callum and I were kids when we fell in love. We had never had a real relationship. We’d hidden and fooled around and gotten caught, and we’d let that be the end of us. I stayed away out of guilt for what I did to Sam.
But maybe that wasn’t the only reason.
Maybe I’d been angry at Callum, too. Angry that he hadn’t fought harder for us.
Between the two of us, I had the most to lose because Sam and Callum and their parents were my family.
They were all I had. When that was gone, I had nothing and no one.
Even though Callum and Sam’s relationship never healed, Callum still had his family.
He still had people around who cared about him.
I’d had no one.
Until Bowie.
Bowie had been by my side for years. He’d heard about Callum and Sam and all the shit that went down. The things that cheap vodka could make me confess were actually quite numerous.
If anyone deserved the truth out of me, it was him.
“I went to see Callum the other night.”
Bowie’s eyebrows hit his hairline. “You… How?”
A deep breath wasn’t enough fortification to tell Bowie all the things I’d left out of my post-funeral wrap-up, but it would have to do.
I’d spent so much time alone in my head since the funeral, since the night I went to Callum’s after, that I was starting to drive myself insane with how much I was overthinking everything.
Every look, every touch, and every word had been turned over in my head until I couldn’t stand to think about it anymore. And then I’d think about us when we were kids and the cycle would start all over. Reminisce. Ruminate. Regret. Rinse. Repeat.
“Callum lives like a two-hour drive from here. He’s been there for years. Practically the whole time.”
“So you…” Bowie paused and took it all in. “Shit.”
“Everything feels so fucked. Sam cut me out of his life like I was a cancer and then pretended that he was still in touch with me. Just to keep Callum from reaching out, I guess.” I stopped and took a breath.
“Sam was one fucked-up dude.” Bowie always did cut right to the heart of the matter, which was one of the reasons I loved him and valued his friendship so much.
Bowie pushed his glasses up his nose, then leaned in, resting his elbows on my desk.
He propped his chin on his hands and stared at me silently for a beat or two.
“So tell me what’s got you all fucked up?
Because if Callum is close by, and you still care about him, then maybe the two of you could try again. ”
“I just… we were so young. And being with him again it was… God, Bowie. You know when you get a craving for something and you can’t stop thinking about it and you finally get it?”
“And it sucks?” Bowie smirked and the mood lifted a little.
“And it’s just as good as you imagined. And then it’s better.”
“Okay… now I’m very confused. If it was good, why do you look like someone killed Spike?”
What if it was a mirage? A figment of my imagination.
What if Callum hadn’t answered my texts because he wanted to be rid of me?
What if it wasn’t as good as I remembered it, and I was just delusional.
I tried to think back to when we were teens.
Our emotions and our hormones were so big and so important.
Everything was wonderful or devastating.
There was never a happy medium, and I worried now that Callum and I might have had great chemistry, but had we really known each other the way I remembered?
It was so long ago that I felt like I was a different person now, and it was hard to remember the version of myself I used to be.
But I didn’t know how to put any of that into words.
Bowie stood up. “Okay. We’re done for the day. Get your coat. You’re coming with me.”
“Where are we going?”
I didn’t get my answer until he had stopped by his place and made me wait in the car. He went inside but was only gone for a couple of minutes, and when he came out he was carrying two small bags. He dropped them on my lap and buckled up.
I’d never told Bowie why I liked to swim, and I realized that I’d kept a million little details from him. The reason I liked to swim was that it reminded me of the summer Callum taught me how.
Instead of telling Bowie now, I simply held my tongue and let him take me to the pool at the gym he belonged to.
I didn’t have a membership there, but Bowie had brought me as a guest in the past. When I swam, I usually went to the local rec center.
Bowie preferred the adult-only experience that the gym’s pool offered, but I didn’t care where I swam.
The nice thing about the gym pool was that the whole thing was dedicated to lap lanes. Two were empty and they weren’t next to each other, but Bowie and I didn’t mind splitting up. It wasn’t as if we could have a conversation while swimming laps anyway.
The water was cold, but the minute I hit it, my body woke up, and I felt fully alert for the first time in days.
I closed my eyes and let myself enjoy the feeling of the water, the cool temperature on my skin.
The way other swimmers made the water move and lap against my body.
It made it seem like the water was alive and trying to coax me to enjoy it.
I started with a few laps of freestyle to work out my initial aggravation.
It’s what I liked best about swimming. The routine.
The method. The way I could slam my body into the water, hit it as hard as I could, and it would take it.
It absorbed every hit. It held me up as I tried to swim away from myself.
Water demanded nothing of me.
After a few laps of punishing freestyle, I took pity on my screaming lungs and flipped over onto my back.
My backstroke was slower than my freestyle, but it helped me get myself under control.
When I went back to freestyle a few laps later, I was calmer and more in control of myself.
I was no longer fighting the water like it was a stand-in for every injustice I’d ever faced.
It was my friend again. Holding me while I tried not to fall apart.
Sometime during my laps, the other lanes opened up and when I stopped for a rest, so did Bowie, who had been swimming next to me for the past couple laps.
“Feel better?” he asked.
I propped my arms on the edge of the pool and let my breath get steadier before I said anything.
“Callum taught me to swim.”
Bowie’s mouth twitched like he wanted to say something to that, but he never opened his mouth, so I kept talking.
“It was how I figured out I was bisexual. His family put a pool in and Callum was always in it. Shirtless. Wet. Gorgeous. And then one day he found out that I couldn’t swim because I went too deep and he had to save my ass.”
“Fuck me.”
“Yeah, that’s kind of what I thought after he hauled me out of the water.
Instead of being a dick about my near-death experience, he offered to teach me how to swim.
He never told anyone that he was doing it, or if he did, they kept it a secret.
But either way, no one except him knew that I was seventeen and couldn’t swim. ”
“I’m glad he saved your mopey ass.” Bowie splashed a little water at me, and I returned the gesture, keeping it tame so we didn’t draw any unnecessary tension.
“I’m not mopey.”
“Whatever you say, Eeyore.”
“Eeyore wasn’t mopey either. He was clinically depressed.”
Bowie’s carefully arched eyebrow spoke volumes about his opinion on that subject.
“Maybe I’m a little mopey,” I conceded, my body restless and eager to get a few more laps in.
“I’ll allow it. Just…” He chewed on his lower lip the way he did when he was thinking of how he wanted to say something. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”
That was sweet of him, but I was already hurt.
I’d been hurt when I realized my parents thought I was an inconvenience.
Like a needy plant they had to care for until it was socially acceptable to stop.
I’d been hurt when I realized that Callum was always going to choose his family over me.
I’d been hurt when his parents made me ride in the stupid limo and go to the stupid cemetery.
I couldn’t get the sight of Sam’s grave out of my head.
It had made everything so final. Sam was dead and he wasn’t coming back.
Sam was dead, and I was older and still in love with Callum.
I was still in love with Callum, and I didn’t know if we could make it work.
“I don’t want to get hurt either, but it feels like I have no good options. If I go back to ignoring Callum, that hurts. I have a fling with Callum and it ends again. That hurts. I feel like no matter what I do, I’m going to end up hurt. I don’t know what to do.”
Bowie held my gaze for a long moment. “Do you know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think you need to open that envelope and see what Sam had to say to you.”
I turned away and launched myself into another lap.
I hated it when he was right.