Chapter Twelve

EARLY SATURDAY MORNING, Isaac rolled over in John’s bed to find himself alone. The empty space at his side wasn’t warm, even though Isaac’s glowing cell phone read only 5:30 a.m. He sat up and listened, house quiet. From somewhere far away, he thought he heard the clunk of a coffee mug. He wrapped himself in an afghan and lumbered into the hall.

He smelled coffee immediately. A light was indeed on in the kitchen, but the unmistakable scent of sweet smoke floated from the direction of the front foyer. Hazily illuminated by dim office light, Isaac followed the cloud. As soon as he stepped inside, next to the bookcase, he shivered.

“John, it’s freezing in here.”

John’s head popped up at the sound of Isaac’s voice, curls bouncing. Isaac swept past and closed the open window, but it did not escape his notice that John slammed his laptop shut. Coffee and a half-smoked clove languished near his elbow.

“What are you doing?” Isaac asked.

“Uh…” John’s entire face wrinkled up as he tried to hide a smile. “Watching porn?”

“You don’t watch porn.”

He leaned his elbows on the desk, folded his hands, and hid his mouth behind his fists.

“John?”

“Look, I didn’t want to tell you yet, because it’s early days.” He leaned back in the expensive, aged leather chair Isaac knew was more comfortable than any furniture at Hambden. It had been John’s since his time as a graduate student.

“Hey, Conlon. I don’t play mind games before seven a.m.”

John smiled up at him.

“Wait,” Isaac said. “Are you writing again?”

“I…might be?”

Isaac tingled from his fingers to his toes. “Oh, my God!”

John spun the chair and stood. “No freaking out. I do not want you freaking out right now. It’s only a couple chapters, and I don’t know if it’s any good.”

“It’ll be brilliant. You know it’ll be brilliant.” Isaac grabbed John’s face and gave him a smooch. He’d already finished reading everything of John’s—everything—every novel, short story, and academic treatise. Isaac had consumed every word, and with every word, he’d fallen more in love.

“You can’t tell anyone.”

“No.” Isaac shook his head. “Okay.”

“I don’t want people to know yet.” He turned away and paced to the window and back. “I don’t know, it feels like too much pressure if people know I’m writing again. They’ll want to know what it’s about, and—”

Isaac’s eyes widened.

“No. I don’t talk about projects until they’re done. I need my safe little creative vacuum.”

“Yes. Sure.”

John stared up at him and eventually laughed. “You look ridiculous.”

“I’m sorry. I’m just really excited. Can I ask what brought this on? I know you haven’t written since June. Is it the literary magazine, reading submissions?”

He shrugged, and they leaned against the desk, hip to hip. “Maybe.” He cleared his throat. “Or maybe because I cut back on my meds recently.”

“Oh. Your therapist’s idea?”

“No.”

“Oh.” Isaac didn’t want to say it, but he thought that might be bad. Isaac wasn’t sure of the specific diagnosis, but John seemed to be doing well on the meds. He needed them, especially during panic attacks, so cutting back…

John nudged Isaac’s arm. “Stop worrying. I just played with my dosage a little. Monday actually.” He didn’t say it but the day Simon showed up throwing fists. Isaac’s face still wasn’t completely healed.

Simon had left Lothos Thursday morning with nothing more than a final farewell text that Isaac had received while wrapped around a still-sleeping John. He was gone for good.

A big group had gone to dinner Thursday night to remember Demi’s birthday, and although Janelle had gotten a bit drunk, she hadn’t screamed at anyone. She and Anthony were back to playfully picking at each other.

Tommy and Isaac still weren’t talking. Any camaraderie they’d once shared would have to be rebuilt. Isaac didn’t blame him. How could he forgive someone who’d almost broken his best friend’s heart? However, according to John, he’d argued a strong case in Isaac’s defense—ironic since Simon was the lawyer. John had said something, had said enough, to keep Tommy from outright hating Isaac. It was a start at least.

“The drugs are good,” John continued. “They help. I mean, I haven’t had a nightmare in months. But I used to tell myself stories all the time. I’d be walking around campus, running dialogue or outlining scenes. It was how I’d put myself to sleep, too, the stories.”

“Boring stories.”

He shook his head. “No, it’s just how my brain relaxes—by imagining things. I could erase the concerns of the day by disappearing into characters that weren’t me, conflicts that weren’t mine. Then, after the shooting, I could only see that day in June, over and over. The curse of a vivid imagination.” He reached for the clove cigarette that had burned out and used a match to relight it. He took a long inhale and blew smoke toward the ceiling. “Hence, the drugs.”

“What are the drugs for exactly? PTSD?”

“Mm-hmm.” He tapped the clove on the ashtray. “For a while there, I couldn’t leave the house. Like, at all. You know I still have episodes. I’m not good with loud noises or big crowds. Sometimes, I swear I hear Chris’s voice on College Green. It’s fucked up.”

Isaac rested a hand over his. “I can’t imagine how hard it was for you to come back here.”

He shrugged. “I couldn’t hide forever.”

“Thank God.” He gave John’s hand a squeeze. “I want to know about this stuff. Your mental health. Is that okay? You’ll let me know if you’re having a bad day?”

John nodded and stubbed out his smoke.

“I can’t believe you didn’t tell me you were writing again.”

John stood and opened the window, waving smoke out into the late October cold. “I knew you’d fanboy, and what if this is just a fluke? What if I’m permanently broken?” He put on a fantastic horror movie face, hands to his cheeks. “What if I’m nothing more than a college professor for the rest of my life?”

Isaac chuckled. “Shut it.”

“Teaching comp to business majors. Oh, my God!” Laughing, he leaned his chest on Isaac’s and melted. Isaac had to wrap his arms around him to keep him from sliding to the floor. “You should go back to bed.” He spoke against Isaac’s blanketed body.

“Only if you promise to write some more.”

“Deal.”

“But it seriously is an icebox in here.” He tilted them both to standing and wrapped the big afghan around John’s shoulders. “Take this.”

John pulled the fabric over his head like a babushka, grasped it tightly under his chin, and yawned. “What time is Cleo’s Halloween party?”

“Seven.”

“I’ll nap this afternoon.” He circled the desk and sat, embraced by his blanket. After he opened his computer, he glared up at Isaac—the ire of which was greatly dwindled by his resemblance to a small Russian woman. “If you even try to sneak a peek, I will cut you off from sex for…two days.”

Isaac scoffed. “You can’t last that long.”

“Don’t test me.”

He rolled his eyes—a habit he’d picked up from John—and shivered as he walked back through the house in nothing but boxers. He shimmied under the warm covers and pulled them up to his chin before falling into a blessedly dreamless sleep.

 

CLEO LIVED IN a little one-story house up a different hill than John. Isaac had to pass about three million costumed college students—and their visiting friends—on the way up there. Apparently, unbeknownst to Isaac, Hambden University was famous for its Halloween party, overshadowed by only Wisconsin, John’s alma mater. All of Union Street closed down for a massive street party that would soon be underway, which meant Isaac was definitely sleeping at John’s. The ruckus downtown might never end.

Cleo being Cleo had decorated her porch with purple lights. A couple homemade tombstones built a tiny cemetery in the front yard. “The Time Warp” played on the stereo inside, where Isaac had earlier greeted some of his coworkers while politely ignoring everyone else. He wasn’t there to mingle but to make Cleo happy. The hostess was dressed as a witch. Well, she wore a witch’s hat, at least. It wasn’t a costume party—more a celebration of a spooky night in which all of Lothos drowned under the combined weight of tourists, alcohol, and childish pranks. Speaking of, a university-wide email had gone out earlier that week: no one was to dress like Chris Frank. Anyone who did would be arrested and expelled.

Isaac and Tommy stood silently against the wall with pumpkin beers, watching a few people dance in the living room—a living room covered in vintage movie posters. Although the party music played from a stereo, Cleo’s turntable sat where a TV might be, and a massive vinyl collection took the place of books.

John had been gone for a while, Cleo having kidnapped him and taken him to her bedroom—which might have been scandalous if it were anyone else. Instead, it was just John and Cleo, Cleo and John.

Tommy, although standing right next to Isaac, had yet to say a word until…

“This is the one night of the year when I feel like a dirty, old man,” Tommy said.

“Sorry?”

“Later, John will drag us down the hill to Union Street because he likes seeing all the costumes, and I hate running into students dressed as slutty…cats, or whatever. It’s ‘slutty’ everything down there, I swear, and it makes me feel like a filthy, old man.” He shook his head and took another sip of beer.

A couple started dancing—for real—around the center of the floor, because of course they did. Of course, Cleo’s friends would know how to ballroom dance. Maybe she’d met them when she and John had taken classes of their own.

“Huh,” Isaac said. “Wonder what my equivalent would be to slutty cats.”

Tommy pushed his glasses farther up his nose. “A guy dressed like Freddie Mercury?” He pulled on the collar of his shirt. “I’m still pissed at you. So you know.”

“I deserve that.”

“Yeah, you fucking do.” He lowered his voice, which made Isaac lean closer to hear over the music. “John put in a good word, said you treat him right. Except for the whole ex-boyfriend bullshit.”

“I’m really sorry, Tommy.”

“Yes. You are. But maybe we can be friends again, eventually, all right? Just give me time.” He held up his beer, and Isaac clinked his against it immediately.

John moonwalked out of the kitchen, spun, and presented jazz hands. His big, green eyes were always soulful, but now, the effect was greatly intensified by smoky makeup. His cheekbones shimmered.

“Jesus,” Isaac whispered. Every atom in his body directed him to toss John over his shoulder, carry him home, and tear him to shreds.

“He finally let me do his makeup!” Cleo crooned. “Just look at his eyelashes!”

Tommy smirked. “Of course you could pull off women’s makeup.”

“Want some?” John asked. He made kissy faces at Tommy until Tommy laughed and literally shoved him away by the face.

“Don’t touch my masterpiece!” Cleo said. She handed John a red Solo cup filled with what she’d earlier called “Hairy Buffalo”—some deadly mix of grain alcohol, punch, and fruit—and disappeared back the way she’d come.

John eyed the room. Under a flannel button-down, he wore a T-shirt that read, This is my Halloween T-shirt. “So did anyone do anything drunk and embarrassing yet?”

“Well, you do have makeup on,” Tommy said.

“Come on, man, she’s been begging to do that for years.”

Tommy yelled at Isaac over the music. “Apparently, he has ‘perfect bone structure.’” Both John and Tommy made the shape of quotations marks with their fingers at the same time.

A purple-haired woman in a gothic baby-doll dress shimmied into their conversation and grabbed Tommy by the hand. “Come on, four-eyes, dance with me!”

Tommy didn’t fight her one bit.

John nudged Isaac with his elbow. “You like the makeup.”

He hoped his pants didn’t show how much. He leaned a little closer to be heard by John but no one else. “What have you done to me? You’ve made lung cancer hot, and now this? Cleo’s right about the eyelashes; when you blink, I feel a breeze.”

“Well, I promise you can mess it all up later.”

“I am going to fuck the hell out of you later.”

John coughed on his drink.

Cleo bopped up next to them. “Come on, John, let’s dance!” She grabbed his cup and chugged.

People made room. Tommy did his best to keep up with the purple-haired lady while Cleo and John floated and spun like ballroom champs. It was amazing that such a lanky guy could be so graceful, but he knew all the steps, and he was a strong lead. Where he led, Cleo followed. He said something that made her laugh, and she leaned her face right against his neck, her hand sliding down around his waist.

Cleo loved John. Isaac wasn’t sure in what way, but it was obvious in how she touched him and sought his attentions. Theirs was a friendship, obviously, but Isaac wondered if Cleo secretly yearned for what she couldn’t have.

When an old swing standard started up, half the room cheered. Yes, these were Cleo’s people—but maybe they could be Isaac’s too? He didn’t know how to dance, but…

He walked up to John and Cleo, midstep. For a second, he almost asked Cleo if he could cut in and mentally slapped himself. Instead, he asked John, thank goodness.

“But I don’t know how to dance,” he clarified. “Cleo, I was wondering if you could show me?”

John beamed up at him, and Cleo clapped her hands. “Yes! I would love to!”

Isaac tried to listen, focus, and not step on her toes, but John stood right there, smiling with his eyeliner and flashy cheekbones. He wanted to have John’s hand in his and John’s voice in his ear counting the steps.

The unfamiliar need to make a lovesick pronouncement rattled Isaac’s spine, and it wasn’t the first time. Just that morning, after he’d gone back to sleep, when John had roused him at eight with his famous coffee—looking all writing ruffled and brilliant—Isaac had wanted to open the front door and shout down the hill, “This man! Do you see him? He’s beautiful and amazing and brave, and he’s all mine!”

He hadn’t, of course, shouted. Instead, he’d wrestled John under the covers for an early morning make out. He’d swallowed John’s protests of “But your coffee will get cold,” with open-mouthed kisses, until John had melted into a soft, warm puddle of want.

Cleo chirped when he stepped on her high-heeled foot.

“Sorry! Sorry.”

“You’re getting better.” She smiled. “Just need to relax your shoulders. You look like Lurch from The Addams Family.”

John guffawed and walked over to Tommy, who’d taken a break in his own mad dancing to get another beer. When the next song had a salsa beat, Isaac pled ignorance and skulked toward the kitchen where he poured himself a single cup of “Hairy Buffalo” and realized how dangerous it probably was since he couldn’t taste a bit of booze.

An hour later, his head light, he followed the rest of the party down the hill into the heart of Lothos. Union Street had been transformed. Usually all brick roads and buildings, it was now a living, moving mass of merriment, decorated in orange twinkle lights and flickering jack-o’-lanterns. The air smelled of wet leaves and clove, especially as John and Cleo split a smoke on the walk down. Once they prepared to enter the melee, John slowed down and walked next to Isaac, their fingertips just barely brushing.

Immediately, Isaac understood what Tommy had been talking about. Anything could be “slutty,” even a police uniform, apparently. There were actual cops there, too, observing the crowd, probably watching for open containers. It had to be the Lothos jail’s busiest night of the year.

John apparently wasn’t interested in the slutty stuff. When he saw a bloody Pennywise on stilts, he grabbed Isaac’s hand and pointed. He actually squeaked when an impressive Edward Scissorhands ambled by. Isaac watched him, grinning so hard it almost hurt. So this was John, wide-eyed with wonder, looking like a giddy teenager on Union Street. This was John without the memory of Chris Frank—without the darkness that sometimes curled his shoulders forward and crinkled his eyes. John before June.

“Oh, my God, I found Waldo!” He pointed to a guy in a striped shirt.

Isaac laughed and tried not to pick John up and swing him around.

 

AFTER AN HOUR in downtown Lothos spent costume spotting, they all went back to Cleo’s. The bars were too packed to get inside, so drinking continued at her place until guests started making excuses. John and Isaac were careful to leave separately.

Isaac waited in John’s darkened foyer right by the front door, so when it slowly opened, he ducked behind to hide. Although the worst at hide-and-seek his entire life, even someone of Isaac’s height could find solace in shadow. When John crossed the threshold—and before he could even touch the lock—Isaac wrapped him in a bear hug from behind that made John startle and yelp. He gripped Isaac’s hands hard. “Shit, you scared me.”

“Well, it is Halloween. Maybe your house is haunted.” He made ghostly vowel sounds before spinning John around and pinning him to the wall with his hips.

In makeup, in the dark, John resembled a gorgeous ghoul. He stared up at Isaac from below eyelashes thick with mascara. “And what kind of spirit would you be? Maybe a big, buff Roman gladiator?”

He tilted John’s chin up. “Want to be my helpless slave boy?”

John snickered. “I’m never helpless.”

“No.” He leaned down and sucked John’s earlobe. “That’s true.” His hand snaked down John’s stomach and right into the front of his jeans.

John gripped Isaac’s elbows and sighed.

John wasn’t helpless, no, but he was a pliant, submissive lover whose ever-clasping hands denoted his need to be cared for, engulfed. Sometimes, he fucked in a way that made Isaac feel as though he consumed John—as if John wanted to be absorbed and erased into Isaac’s skin.

With no resistance, John allowed himself to be carried into the office and bent over the desk’s edge in memory of, or maybe in homage to, the writing he’d done that morning, words Isaac couldn’t wait to devour. He would, for now, devour the writer instead.

After making sure John was comfortable with his made-up face pressed to the desktop, Isaac pulled John’s jeans down over his slim hips and tsked. “Really?”

“What?” John asked, innocent as ever.

“No underwear.” He knelt behind John, and before John could make a snappy retort, Isaac spread his cheeks and licked into him.

“Oh!”

They hadn’t done that before, even if Isaac had wanted to. He hadn’t even thought to ask if it was something John wanted, so he pulled back and said, “Is this okay?”

John’s forehead smacked into the table twice. “Yes. Yes, please.”

Isaac continued his ministrations. He didn’t take pause until he noticed John’s thighs trembled, and he didn’t seem to be breathing. “John? You with me?”

“Fuck. Yeah, I’m going to come.”

Isaac, still on his knees, massaged John’s ass and gave a teasing kiss to each cheek. “I can’t wait to feel you on my tongue.”

Thirty seconds of deep licks later, John, usually so quiet in his orgasms, came with a resonant cry that arched his chest off the desk. Isaac stood slowly and wiped his face on the back of John’s shirt before kissing his neck.

John kept his face hidden against the desk. “Sorry. Wow, no one’s done that in a while.”

“What are you sorry for?” He leaned his front against John’s back. “That was incredible.”

John shimmied slightly, enough to wedge Isaac’s clothed erection right against his cleft. “Need you.” Even bent over and basically blind to his surroundings, he found the wherewithal to open the nearest desk drawer and pull out a condom.

“Do you keep condoms all over the house?”

A small smile flowered on his face, although he seemed to be drifting—either on sex or sleep.

Their fuck was slow and deep like a calm ocean undertow. John’s hands held to either side of the desk as Isaac rocked into him, deeper with every thrust until he basically remained fully seated, doing nothing more than moving his hips in small circles.

John cursed suddenly, and Isaac froze. “Am I hurting you?”

“There is no way I’m going to come again.” It wasn’t a statement of surety but a statement of awe.

Isaac reached below John where his hips pressed against the desk and found him hard. “Holy shit, yes, you are.”

He continued with the slow, deep tease. One of John’s hands flailed back, and his fingers curled in the short hair at Isaac’s nape. For a better grip, Isaac took hold of John’s waist, and his fingers almost touched, so small the frame of his panting lover. He could break him if he wanted.

“Harder.”

Isaac acquiesced.

“Hard—oh, fuck, right there. Right…” John’s deep voice crackled like static as his body clenched around Isaac. This time, John came silently.

Isaac felt his own orgasm down to his toes. With numb lips, he kissed at John’s curled shoulders and rubbed his nose behind his ear. “I love you.”

John, drunk on alcohol and endorphins, replied, “I don’t know why.”

 

HE HOPED A shower would help his hangover. Leaving a naked, makeup-covered John in bed, Isaac turned the water to scald and stepped beneath the merciless spray. Isaac rubbed John’s shampoo into his scalp—some outrageously expensive stuff that made his chocolate-brown hair shine like silk. Isaac gargled shower water and spit. He leaned his hands on the shower walls and let the water tumble over his shoulders and down his back.

“I don’t know why.”

In moments like that, Isaac wanted to shake John, but he’d let it go to retain the memory of a perfect night. He’d fallen asleep, only to be woken again later with John riding him, makeup a melted mess like a watercolor left in the rain.

He turned off the shower. Towel around his waist, he returned to the bedroom to find John awake and blinking up at him. “How scary do I look right now?”

“Well, that pillowcase might be ruined.”

He stretched, and the sheet slid, revealing the V of his hips. “Did you have fun last night?”

“Before or after we got home?”

John smiled. “Both?”

Isaac stood above him. “I had a very good time last night.”

John opened his mouth, and then closed it. He stared at the ceiling and bit his bottom lip, provoking a Pavlovian response that made Isaac clutch tighter to his towel.

“John, what is it?”

He traced a nonexistent pattern on the blankets. “What we have is really intense. Don’t you think?”

“I don’t know.” He did know. He knew exactly. Why was he lying?

“It scares you sometimes, what we have. I see it when you look at me and look away. You love me, but it’s more. You reach for me like you think I’m going to disappear.”

Isaac shrugged and removed the towel to dry his hair. “Everything else good has.” It was a statement of fact, not a request for pity.

John just nodded.

Isaac tossed the towel, sat, and touched John’s cheek. “Okay, I do love you, and it is intense, and I am scared.”

John smirked. “There. Was that so hard?”

“Yeah. It was. Now, go wash your face because you do, in fact, look like a horror movie character.”

He buried his cheek against the stained pillowcase. “Hey, it’s Halloween.”

“Not anymore. Let’s order pizza today and watch football.”

John sighed. “Fuck, I just got hard again.”

Isaac snorted and pulled his pajamas from the “Isaac drawer.” He made their coffee that morning, but it wasn’t nearly as good as John’s.