December 1994 - ItalyIt's a beautiful day, sunny and on the warm side of cool, reminding Jack of how close it is to being time to go back home and back to the kids, freshly rambunctious from their Christmas holidays. He's just started getting to know these new ones. New ones he'll consider his own by the time they move on ( Read more... )

January 1, 1995 - Italy

Jack isn't sure if the fireworks are in his ears or in the air, but he hears the echo of voices counting down and then cheering loudly, so it must be the New Year after all. He smiles against Johnny's back and applies a thorough lick along the angle of a shoulder blade. His tongue (like his head) still fizzles from the

Current day.Jack wakes up somewhere over the Atlantic, legs uncomfortably folded against the table-tray, neck stiff against the pocket-size pillow. Groggy, he glances at the layers of clouds below, bits of shimmering ocean here and there. For a moment, Jack almost forgets how much he hates flying ( Read more... )

Every week, after his Thursday night at the pub with his brothers, Patrick spends the night. Patrick is a smart and funny and handsome and good in bed. Jack met Patrick at a dinner party. A friend of the host's sister. He and Jack got on right away and the next week Jack took Patrick to a play followed by a proper dinner, just the two of them ( Read more... )

May 1994

Jack loves to take the kids out so close to the end of the year, when they're so excitable. The girls have formed primped little perfumed groups, paying little attention to the colourful please touch! displays depicting the insides of active volcanoes and layers of the planet. The boys, looking disturbingly like young men at fourteen, ( Read more... )

He hasn't done it in a handful of years, four of five maybe, perhaps more. Jack wakes up well before his alarm sounds and reaches for him. He hasn't been there, next to him, for years, but his presence lingers and Jack, in the groggy inbetween, can swear the warmth on the wrinkled sheet, on the empty side of the bed, is not from the early-morning ( Read more... )