39. EDDIE

Chapter thirty-nine

EDDIE

O nce everyone was gone, Jared and I finished tidying up the yard and took plates and glasses back into the kitchen to load the dishwasher. Soon, the last traces of the cookout were gone. The scene looked almost as if the whole thing hadn't happened. Only if you looked in the fridge would you find leftovers of barbecue and salad in plastic containers.

Jared sat at the kitchen table, munching his way through an opened, unfinished bag of Doritos. He looked like he had every intention of finishing them.

"Can you imagine if Uncle Frank came to visit us in New York?" he asked.

I laughed.

"I think he would go up in a puff of smoke if he spent more than a day there."

"Yeah!" Jared laughed. " We are the New Yorkers now."

Soon pretty much everything was done, and the two of us just hung there talking a little, Jared mainly just plowing through the chips.

"Tomorrow, we'll need to do some serious packing," I said. "Just finish up the year at school, and you can come whenever you want."

"I want to come as soon as possible."

I smiled. I was happy he was so open to the process.

"I'll arrange for our things to be transported to my apartment in New York. We can just UPS it in one go."

Jared nodded and sniffed. He was checking his phone a lot and somehow seemed to want to pretend that he wasn't doing that.

"Sounds good, Eddie. I can't wait to see my new place…"

With a chuckle, I replied,

"I don't have a huge amount of space in my apartment, so you can use this as an opportunity to throw some junk out."

Jared grinned mischievously.

"I only need space for my laptop and my Xbox," he said.

"And your eighty pairs of sneakers."

He laughed as he checked his phone again.

"We can rent the apartment next door for them."

"Why are you checking your phone all the time?" I asked.

He looked up at me.

"No reason. Just Chili."

"The food or the person?"

He laughed. Then there was a tap at the door. At this, Jared perked up. It was curious. I went to make my way to the door, and Jared said he would come, too.

"Why? It's probably just Frank or Julianne. They probably just left something behind."

"Yeah," he said. "Yeah, cool." But he still followed me out.

At the front door, through the screen, I recognized him at once: his height, his broad, muscular frame, that mop of dark curls, even how he stood, slightly hunched, but so powerful.

And then I looked at Jared, who was grinning.

"It's Max," he said. "I told him he had to come over."

My heart skipped a beat, and my skin felt weirdly hot and cold at the same time. Then, through the screen came his deep, slow voice.

"Are you gonna open up or not?"

I did as he asked. Max stood there, his expression a mix of severity and vulnerability. His presence filled the doorway, a silhouette against the honeyed light outside.

The whole world seemed to stand still as we locked eyes. His deep, sensitive eyes were on me, very directly. His lips were parted slightly. There was a musk to his body, and that made me so aware of his physicality. I cannot deny it. His presence itself made me feel aroused.

It was Jared's excitement that broke the moment.

"You came!" he exclaimed, his voice filled with genuine delight. Max offered him a tentative smile.

"Yeah," he said, "I came." Then he looked at me. "I had to."

I stood rooted to the spot, my mind racing. What did it mean that he was here?

Max cleared his throat.

"Well," he said, "are you asking me in?"

Sensing my hesitation, Jared intervened.

"Come in, Max. Come in." My nephew began to walk back through the living room as if he was now the host. "Do you want some leftover barbecue?"

Max stepped over the threshold of the door, close to me. I felt my pulse thudding in my throat, in my chest.

"No," he said, staring straight at me. "I'm good, thanks, buddy." He nodded towards me. "So… are you letting me inside?"

I blinked.

"Come in," I said.

I led him out to the back. Jared didn't follow us. I told him to give us ten minutes. Once outside in the back yard, I asked Max to sit down, and so we settled into the chairs on the porch. The late sunlight was streaming down on the back yard.

"It's looking good out here," he said. "I spent the whole day doing my place."

"Yeah," I replied. "I mean, we are moving out of here soon, so I hope I didn't waste your time."

He looked at me very directly.

"You didn't waste my time."

I felt my heart in my mouth. He looked back out over the yard. He cleared his throat. "So, you had a party?"

I nodded.

"Just a small family thing," I replied. "Frank, Rita, Julianne, a few others. I got back from New York today. I didn't know it was happening."

"Sounds nice," he said.

"Yeah, it was."

"How long are you back?"

"Just a couple of days."

Max's expression softened.

"I wanted to talk to you about us," he began. "I know things have been difficult between us, but I can't stop thinking about you, about us. I can't get over you saying I wasn't serious about this when…"

His voice faltered.

"When what?" I asked.

"When you are just about the only good, true person I have ever known in my life. I cannot believe that we had this chance, and I've blown it…"

I didn't know what to say to that. I felt overwhelmed by his words and his presence. I turned to look out from the porch, feeling I had to avoid those dark, penetrating eyes. He did the same.

As we gazed out over the sunset trees and bushes, I felt so vulnerable, and yet I had to get to the truth of what existed between us.

"What do you want, Max?" I asked.

Max was about to say something when, from nowhere, a great flock of starlings appeared and settled in the trees at the end of the yard. They made such a din that it was hard even to hear ourselves speak, and we both watched them for a moment.

"I've realized that in the last few years, I've withdrawn from life. I've wanted a connection but not had one, not knowing how to get one. When I do go out there, I'm confronted by people offering a version of me that I don't even recognize.

"I am stuck doing this work fixing up bikes and trucks in a city I don't even particularly like. I have a life, in the sense that I know people to go to a bar with, people who say hi in the supermarket, but what I don't have is a sense of purpose. What I don't have is that central person on whom I can depend, on whom I can base something."

Just as dramatically as they arrived, the starlings all lifted from the treetops and moved off into the sunset. With their departure, the world seemed pin-drop silent. Now, he looked at me very directly.

"The only person who has ever really accepted me as I am and made me feel accepted was you, Eddie," he said. "I didn't really ever connect it, but on the camping trip – no, actually, when I remembered the thing in my bedroom when I lived at your mom's house – I began to realize that I felt this desire for you, and only then did it all make sense.

"I haven't been hiding my true self all these years" – something which perhaps I had – "but I felt that desire, that connection, with you more intensely than I have…" He laughed. "I was going to say for a very long time, but I wonder if actually I mean ever."

Then he seemed done. He seemed to have nothing left to say, but then he asked me a question. "And what about you, Eddie? What do you want?"

The question hung in the air, and I had to search for what I wanted to say, what the truth even was.

"I want love," I said. "That's what I want: good, open, kind, passionate love." As I spoke, I was certain of what I had to say. "If we are to be together, I want us to be together, Max. I want us to be openly and happily together. All my life, I've felt some deep shame at being gay, and I've hidden myself from the world. I don't want to go through my thirties doing that.

"I want you to want to hold my hand in the street, or at least if I touch you, I don't want you to pull away. I don't want to feel you are ashamed or embarrassed. I want you to look at me out in the world the way you look at me in bed. And I want that for you too, because it is the greatest thing, the greatest gift, in life, not to feel ashamed any more.

"That's what I want, and if you can't give – and receive – that, it's fine. Well, maybe not fine, but I'll accept that and move on. But I don't want anything else. I want love, Max, and I am no longer ashamed of that. I want love and I want to live without shame. Do you want that, too?"

Max's expression was open, full of wonder.

"I want to be a different person to who I am now, to who I was and have been," he confessed, his voice very quiet. "I want to live my dreams, not just plod through life, accepting what I've ended up with. And yes, I want love, all you said, too."

I reached out to gently squeeze his hand, and he looked at me and smiled. Our hands intertwined, binding us together. I gazed into Max's eyes very deeply, nakedly.

"I can't make you a different person, and I don't even want to try," I said. "All I can do is try to make you happy and provide somewhere safe for you to be on your journey."

He lifted my hand to his lips and kissed my fingers. "Are you in love with me?" I asked.

"Yes," he replied. It didn't take him half a second to say it.

"How would you feel about a complete life change?"

"What do you mean?"

As I gazed into Max's eyes, his vulnerability mirrored my own. I reached over and cupped Max's face. His eyes, dark, mysterious, beautiful pools, held mine.

"Max," I whispered, "I love you. I have seen in you a future I want. But my future is in New York."

He blinked heavily.

"Yes, I know."

"And you hate this town, and you want to do something else. So why don't you move to New York with me and Jared?"

"What? How can I…?"

I shrugged.

"You do what I did when I was eighteen. You just leave. You just trust it's going to be alright."

"Do you want me to move with you?"

I laughed.

"Are you kidding?" I watched him thinking. "Of course I do. You can live with us. Maybe you can enroll in a film school."

He began to laugh.

"How could I afford that?"

"Sell your house here, or rent it out and live on the income."

"Are you serious?"

"You can have the life you want, Max. But you have to do the things that let you have it. You aren't going to have that life here without me. And I can't promise you what will happen in the future, but I do know that you and I have a real chance of being happy, and you will have lots of new chances in New York."

At that precise moment, Jared appeared at the back door of the house.

"Are you guys good?"

I looked at Max to imply that it was up to him to say.

"We're good," he said to Jared.

My nephew sniffed.

"Cool. Are you gonna come visit us in New York?"

"Well," I began, "Max and I have talked about it, and we've decided that Max will be coming with us to New York."

Jared's eyes widened with excitement.

"Oh, cool!" he cried.

"Are you okay with that, Jared?" Max asked. "Having me around all the time, I mean?"

Jared was grinning from year to year.

"Oh, man, it's gonna be immense !"

Jared glanced at each of us with that wide, wide grin on his face. But his phone bleeped, and he looked at the message, and he was fifteen again. "Now I'm heading over to Adam Chan's to get my Nintendo Switch back from him. I ain't letting him keep it like it was his all along." He ambled back into the kitchen. "See ya, Max," he said. "We're gonna have a blast in New York."

"Sure thing, buddy," Max called after him.

The front door slammed. With Jared's departure, Max and I found ourselves alone on the porch. As he drew me up from my chair to come and sit on his lap, and as I fell against him, his lips met mine in a tender kiss.

"You know we have the house to ourselves for an hour," Max said, his mouth having barely left mine.

"I know," I said.

"Then let's not waste a moment of it," he said, his eyes twinkling with desire for me. He stood up and took my hand, leading me toward the staircase.

At the last moment, he turned around and whispered in my ear: "I want to make love to you."