Can Something that Never Was Come to an End?
I suppose that's a question best left to philosophers or physicists.
Part 9
By the time graduation rolled around, it all felt right-leaving home, starting something totally new and totally different. I wasn't feeling anxious anymore, just excited.
Or maybe I was fraught with anxiety and looking for the slightest little thing so I could blow a gasket and let off steam. Who the fuck knows.
I just know I was totally floored by my father telling me *he* was the one who decided against the surgery that would have let Justin see again. He dropped his little bombshell about falling to his knees and begging Justin not to do it, and I just couldn't believe it.
I sort of sagged against the car and just stood there gaping at him for a really long time. "But why?" I must have repeated the question three times before my dad finally answered me. Barely.
"Leave it," he said shortly.
"No!" I said, trailing after him and tugging his arm to get him to quit walking. "Tell me why! Why would you do that?"
My dad stopped in his tracks, glaring dangerously as he rushed me, stopping only when our noses were almost touching. "If you think I am going to explain myself to my 18 year old kid, you're fucked. Not gonna happen."
"Fuck you! Someone needs to stand up for Justin if he won't stand up for himself! You tell me why!" I knew I'd hit a nerve, because even though he turned around and started to go inside the house, he couldn't stop himself from turning around and marching right back over to me.
"The 'procedure' as they so antiseptically put it, had been done less than a hundred times. It worked four times. Twenty-eight times that it didn't work, the fucker on the table died. The odds were unacceptable."
"But he was an artist!"
My dad shrugged so carelessly it just floored me. "So now he paints with words. Same difference."
"It's not the same and you know it!" I said. "God, what gives you the right to make a decision like that! Who are you to decide what odd are acceptable and what aren't? Christ, this is so fucking typical with you! You had no right to do that!"
My dad sneered at that. "I spend half my fucking life fighting off the unsolicited opinions of people who know fuck all about me and even less about Justin, who, I might add, is the only one whose opinion matters to me. If he wants to tell me I fucked up so be it."
"Yeah, that's easy for you to say 'cause he's the one person who never would," I scoffed.
"Hmm, yeah. How 'bout that?" my dad said, lifting a single eyebrow, then cruising off to the kitchen to get a drink.
We spent the next few minutes warily circling one another, but it was chaotic enough that I didn't think anyone would notice. Of course, Justin did.
"What's going on with you two?" he asked, when I came into the kitchen, and my dad promptly announced he was going to check the grill. "What did you talk about on the way over?"
I guess maybe I could have eased into the conversation a little, but subtly had never been much of a trademark with me. "How could you let him talk you out of having that surgery?" I asked, kind of shocked by the tears that suddenly stung my eyes. "Jesus, you'd be able to see now, and you just let him...you just gave in to him? How could you do that?"
Justin spread his arms out in a gesture of helplessness. "What is it with you Kinney men and parties?" he asked. "Three or more people gather together and share cake, and you have to have some big drama princess moment or it's just not fucking festive enough?"
"I remember when they were talking about it. You would have been able to see! God, I can't believe he could be so fucking selfish... so fucking cold that he wouldn't let you do the one thing that would help! That would fix everything!"
"Let me?" Justin echoed, sounding amused.
"Oh, he didn't say that," I admitted. "He was all, 'Oh I begged him not to on my hands and knees, pleading and crying!'"
"Is that what he said happened?" Justin scoffed. "You know him-he has a hangnail, and he demands to see a specialist, and then he'll tell you they almost had to amputate his arm. You can't believe his version of anything."
That's totally true, of course, but I knew that look in my dad's eyes, and I knew that tone of voice and I knew that walk of his as he came toward me, daring me to believe what he was saying. He wasn't embellishing anything.
"Justin," I said, and he didn't have to see my face to know I was saying, 'Don't dick with me.'
Justin sighed and shrugged. "He probably said 'please.' That is begging and pleading and making a big scene to him, all right?"
He made it sound like such a total non-event. My dad paints this picture of some queened out, movie-of-the-week scene, and Justin acts like it was a passing conversation over tea and crumpets. I sighed and shook my head. I guess it really wasn't any of my business, and what would I do if I got the real story anyway? Justin would still be blind, and I was never ever going to figure my father out in a million years anyway, so what would it prove?
I plopped down at the kitchen table, unsure why it all bugged me so much. Justin sat down next to me and said, "How hard do you think it was to be talked out of doing something that had a better chance of killing me than helping me, huh? Believe me, there wasn't a hell of a lot of arm-twisting involved."
"You cover for him all the time," I said, still shaking my head.
Justin sighed and didn't say anything for a minute, and I figured that's all I was going to get on the subject. He lifted his head and just listened for a second, almost like an animal sensing the area. Then he said, "You wouldn't remember, but it's not like I went to see a doctor one day, and he said, 'Oh by the way, you're going to be blind in a few years,' and I said, 'Really? Shit. Too bad then.' That's not how it happened. Accepting what was happening to me and dealing with it and surviving it... sometimes that was a full time job. And sometimes when I wasn't accepting it or dealing with it and barely surviving it, it was your dad's full time job. And *he* could have quit. He probably wanted to often enough. But he didn't."
"So Dad doesn't, like, take off on you, and you just don't have the surgery because he doesn't want you to? How is that fair?"
Justin cocked his head in that measuring way of his. "Who said 'the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge'?"
"Martin Luther King," I dutifully answered.
Justin smiled, proud of my quick response, I guess. "During times of 'challenge,' your dad is as fucking upstanding as any man will ever be. And that's a lot rarer than you'd think. A lot of people...well, when things get really shitty, they bail. They look for the easy out, and they just fuckin' let go. But that's not who your father is. So yeah, he's gets a lot of points from me for sticking with me, but it's more than that." He leaned forward and spoke in this soft voice that was so full of conviction. "You think of my blindness as something that happened to me, but it happened to both of us, me and your dad."
I made a huffing sound of disbelief, but Justin just kept on like he hadn't heard it. "Sometimes, I'd go through these...phases where I was convinced that the doctors were wrong, and your dad... fuck, I know he thought I was nuts. I was nuts. And he knew every time it happened that I was gonna slam into a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour. And I did, and then I was so fucking depressed and pissed and lost that I could barely get out bed. Sometimes I wouldn't for days at a time, until your dad marched in and kicked my ass out of there."
"How?" I asked.
Justin laughed. "He yelled at me or laughed at me. Anything he could think of. Reasoned with me, ached for me, bargained with me." Justin got up and moved effortlessly from the kitchen table over to the refrigerator. He reached in and pulled out a bottle of water. We always kept them in the top right corner of the fridge so he could find them without hunting around, but it struck me, for some reason, that someone watching for the first time probably wouldn't even realize he couldn't see.
Justin sat back down at the table and continued talking. "But mostly, he just walked the whole fucking way right there with me. Every step, Gus. Every miserable, terrifying, agonizing step, all I had to do was put my hand out, and he was right there. And it might not sound like much to you, but it was every-fucking-thing."
"What are you saying?" I whined. "Why are you telling me all this?" Which I suppose is a little ironic because I brought the whole thing up, but felt like I was missing the lesson I was being taught.
"I'm just saying this happened to both of us, so any decisions to be made were made together." He shrugged and bumped my shoulder with his. "Hey, I can stand your thinking I'm such a pansy-assed little fairy that your dad could actually keep me from doing something I really wanted to do, but I can't stand your thinking your dad is some selfish bastard who would prevent me from seeing again if there was anything in the world that could be done, okay?"
"Yeah, okay," I said, feeling a little ashamed at how quickly I'd jumped to conclusions about my dad.
"Now get out of here," Justin said. "If your dad catches us talking about 'the measure of a man," he'll be forced to make some awful dick joke, and then your mothers will be all out of sorts, and Gran will start yelling and Michael will have to leap to his defense and Ben will have to try and calm everybody down..."
"Yeah, then it'd be like a regular Sunday night dinner and we're going for special here, right?"
Justin laughed but the look on his face was kind of soft and pensive. "You're an upstanding man too, Gus," he said, tossing his head back and defiantly lifting his chin, as if I was going to disagree or something. "I'm really proud of you."
I felt my face turn beet red. "Yeah?" I said, kind of shrugging. "I'm..." I wanted to tell Justin I was proud of him too, because, I mean, I totally am, and I didn't want him to think I really thought he was some pansy-assed fairy because I didn't. But the words sounded really dumb in my head. "Well, you know, me too," I finally mumbled.
Justin smiled hugely-Gran calls it his 'Sunshine' smile. "Oh my God, if I didn't know better I'd think you were Brian Kinney's son!" he said. Then he jumped up and, like, tried to totally smother me to death.
"God, let me go!" I said in a strangled voice.
My dad moseyed in the kitchen a few seconds later and untangled the two of us. "God, let him go," he said. "I've never seen such a boatload of sentimental crap in my life." My dad motioned at the door with the barest nod of his head. "Go on out back. Between your mothers, Deb and Michael, I've had all the blubbering I can stand for one afternoon."
I had to walk past Dad to get out to the porch, and as I walked by I felt the weirdest surge of...something, so I hugged him, shrugging my apology to him.
My dad sighed like his life was unbearably hard, but he hugged me back. "Jesus Christ, I count on you not to go soft," he said finally, shoving me off him.
I laughed and sauntered slowly out of the kitchen. "That's funny. Chloe Wiseman said those exact words to me just the other night."
Justin groaned, and I looked over my shoulder just in time to see my dad grab a big old handful of cake off Justin's plate. He threw it at me, and it hit the backdoor with a loud thwap!
"Mel's gonna shit!" Justin said, turning and feeling around the counters for a towel.
I got another hamburger and sat down next to Mom and pretended not to be totally dorked out as everyone traded their favorite baby Gus story.
I could see in a kitchen window, and Justin was draped around my dad. He was smiling up at him and rubbing my dad's stomach, and I could tell by the look on my dad's face that Justin was feeding his already over-inflated ego. 'Typical,' I thought fleetingly. I find out my dad practically single-handedly kept Justin from trying to get his sight back, and somehow Justin is the one fawning all over him like he's some amazing deal.
Justin said something that made my dad throw his head back and laugh, and that's when Justin reached up and lightly touched his fingers to my dad's mouth, gently tracing the curve of his upturned lips. Dad let him "see" his smile for a few seconds, then he grabbed Justin's hand, kissed his fingers and brought the hand down to cup his balls. Justin just laughed and shoved him away.
Days later-well, okay, a couple of hours later--the party finally started breaking up. I had just enough time to shower then head over to Moog's house to pick him up for Chewy's party. We were staying out all night, and if I played my cards right, I might get lucky with Jane *and* Chloe, which would be a total record for us.
I stood at the door and was hugged and kissed and congratulated all over again until just Justin and my dad were left.
"Have fun tonight," my dad said. "Don't be stupid. Well, don't be as stupid as you four have the potential to be."
"Doh, okay Dad," I said, using the most moronic voice I could.
He just rolled his eyes at me. "And I don't want you driving tonight. You're taking one of my drivers."
"Dad!" I said. "Come on! I already told the guys I was driving" Shit! How fucking lame was that-and just springing it on me at the last second was so him.
Dad just shook his head. "I'm not getting out of bed at three in the morning to ID your body at the morgue."
"Dad!"
"Don't 'Dad' me. The four of you are idiots. And when you're together, the idiot quotient exponentially increases."
"This is so lame," I huffed.
My dad just lifted an eyebrow at me. "Gus, I didn't ask you how two and a half bikinis became lodged in the pool's filtering system, I just paid the $5,000 to get it fixed. But don't take my silence to mean I don't think you're all idiots, okay?"
"Fine! Can we have a limo?"
My dad rolled his eyes again as he pulled out his phone and made the call, while I stood behind him, hissing, "Stretch! Get the stretch! Can we have the stretch?"
When he got off the phone (Score! We got the stretch!), he said, "If any of you lightweights puke in my limo, I will haul your asses out of bed at 5:30 Saturday morning, and you will clean every last car in the garage, inside and out, do you understand?"
Like my dad would get out of bed at 5:30 for anything! Still, I could see him making Justin do it, so I simply said, "Dad, what are you talking about? We're not old enough to drink!"
I jogged upstairs, calling Moog as I went to let him know we'd be stylin' in a stretch limo that night.
I looked out the window in my bedroom and watched my dad walk Justin to the car door. He opened the door, but instead of getting in, Justin grabbed him, and they started necking there in the driveway.
Snickering, I opened the window. Dad must have heard, because he stopped what he was doing and looked toward the house. He caught my eye, and his brow lifted in challenge.
There was something comforting in being so predictable. I leaned out and yelled, as expected, "Dad! God!"
Dad and Justin both laughed, and then my father reacted in typical Brian Kinney fashion.
He flipped me off and went right back to kissing Justin.
End
Part 9
By the time graduation rolled around, it all felt right-leaving home, starting something totally new and totally different. I wasn't feeling anxious anymore, just excited.
Or maybe I was fraught with anxiety and looking for the slightest little thing so I could blow a gasket and let off steam. Who the fuck knows.
I just know I was totally floored by my father telling me *he* was the one who decided against the surgery that would have let Justin see again. He dropped his little bombshell about falling to his knees and begging Justin not to do it, and I just couldn't believe it.
I sort of sagged against the car and just stood there gaping at him for a really long time. "But why?" I must have repeated the question three times before my dad finally answered me. Barely.
"Leave it," he said shortly.
"No!" I said, trailing after him and tugging his arm to get him to quit walking. "Tell me why! Why would you do that?"
My dad stopped in his tracks, glaring dangerously as he rushed me, stopping only when our noses were almost touching. "If you think I am going to explain myself to my 18 year old kid, you're fucked. Not gonna happen."
"Fuck you! Someone needs to stand up for Justin if he won't stand up for himself! You tell me why!" I knew I'd hit a nerve, because even though he turned around and started to go inside the house, he couldn't stop himself from turning around and marching right back over to me.
"The 'procedure' as they so antiseptically put it, had been done less than a hundred times. It worked four times. Twenty-eight times that it didn't work, the fucker on the table died. The odds were unacceptable."
"But he was an artist!"
My dad shrugged so carelessly it just floored me. "So now he paints with words. Same difference."
"It's not the same and you know it!" I said. "God, what gives you the right to make a decision like that! Who are you to decide what odd are acceptable and what aren't? Christ, this is so fucking typical with you! You had no right to do that!"
My dad sneered at that. "I spend half my fucking life fighting off the unsolicited opinions of people who know fuck all about me and even less about Justin, who, I might add, is the only one whose opinion matters to me. If he wants to tell me I fucked up so be it."
"Yeah, that's easy for you to say 'cause he's the one person who never would," I scoffed.
"Hmm, yeah. How 'bout that?" my dad said, lifting a single eyebrow, then cruising off to the kitchen to get a drink.
We spent the next few minutes warily circling one another, but it was chaotic enough that I didn't think anyone would notice. Of course, Justin did.
"What's going on with you two?" he asked, when I came into the kitchen, and my dad promptly announced he was going to check the grill. "What did you talk about on the way over?"
I guess maybe I could have eased into the conversation a little, but subtly had never been much of a trademark with me. "How could you let him talk you out of having that surgery?" I asked, kind of shocked by the tears that suddenly stung my eyes. "Jesus, you'd be able to see now, and you just let him...you just gave in to him? How could you do that?"
Justin spread his arms out in a gesture of helplessness. "What is it with you Kinney men and parties?" he asked. "Three or more people gather together and share cake, and you have to have some big drama princess moment or it's just not fucking festive enough?"
"I remember when they were talking about it. You would have been able to see! God, I can't believe he could be so fucking selfish... so fucking cold that he wouldn't let you do the one thing that would help! That would fix everything!"
"Let me?" Justin echoed, sounding amused.
"Oh, he didn't say that," I admitted. "He was all, 'Oh I begged him not to on my hands and knees, pleading and crying!'"
"Is that what he said happened?" Justin scoffed. "You know him-he has a hangnail, and he demands to see a specialist, and then he'll tell you they almost had to amputate his arm. You can't believe his version of anything."
That's totally true, of course, but I knew that look in my dad's eyes, and I knew that tone of voice and I knew that walk of his as he came toward me, daring me to believe what he was saying. He wasn't embellishing anything.
"Justin," I said, and he didn't have to see my face to know I was saying, 'Don't dick with me.'
Justin sighed and shrugged. "He probably said 'please.' That is begging and pleading and making a big scene to him, all right?"
He made it sound like such a total non-event. My dad paints this picture of some queened out, movie-of-the-week scene, and Justin acts like it was a passing conversation over tea and crumpets. I sighed and shook my head. I guess it really wasn't any of my business, and what would I do if I got the real story anyway? Justin would still be blind, and I was never ever going to figure my father out in a million years anyway, so what would it prove?
I plopped down at the kitchen table, unsure why it all bugged me so much. Justin sat down next to me and said, "How hard do you think it was to be talked out of doing something that had a better chance of killing me than helping me, huh? Believe me, there wasn't a hell of a lot of arm-twisting involved."
"You cover for him all the time," I said, still shaking my head.
Justin sighed and didn't say anything for a minute, and I figured that's all I was going to get on the subject. He lifted his head and just listened for a second, almost like an animal sensing the area. Then he said, "You wouldn't remember, but it's not like I went to see a doctor one day, and he said, 'Oh by the way, you're going to be blind in a few years,' and I said, 'Really? Shit. Too bad then.' That's not how it happened. Accepting what was happening to me and dealing with it and surviving it... sometimes that was a full time job. And sometimes when I wasn't accepting it or dealing with it and barely surviving it, it was your dad's full time job. And *he* could have quit. He probably wanted to often enough. But he didn't."
"So Dad doesn't, like, take off on you, and you just don't have the surgery because he doesn't want you to? How is that fair?"
Justin cocked his head in that measuring way of his. "Who said 'the ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort, but where he stands at times of challenge'?"
"Martin Luther King," I dutifully answered.
Justin smiled, proud of my quick response, I guess. "During times of 'challenge,' your dad is as fucking upstanding as any man will ever be. And that's a lot rarer than you'd think. A lot of people...well, when things get really shitty, they bail. They look for the easy out, and they just fuckin' let go. But that's not who your father is. So yeah, he's gets a lot of points from me for sticking with me, but it's more than that." He leaned forward and spoke in this soft voice that was so full of conviction. "You think of my blindness as something that happened to me, but it happened to both of us, me and your dad."
I made a huffing sound of disbelief, but Justin just kept on like he hadn't heard it. "Sometimes, I'd go through these...phases where I was convinced that the doctors were wrong, and your dad... fuck, I know he thought I was nuts. I was nuts. And he knew every time it happened that I was gonna slam into a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour. And I did, and then I was so fucking depressed and pissed and lost that I could barely get out bed. Sometimes I wouldn't for days at a time, until your dad marched in and kicked my ass out of there."
"How?" I asked.
Justin laughed. "He yelled at me or laughed at me. Anything he could think of. Reasoned with me, ached for me, bargained with me." Justin got up and moved effortlessly from the kitchen table over to the refrigerator. He reached in and pulled out a bottle of water. We always kept them in the top right corner of the fridge so he could find them without hunting around, but it struck me, for some reason, that someone watching for the first time probably wouldn't even realize he couldn't see.
Justin sat back down at the table and continued talking. "But mostly, he just walked the whole fucking way right there with me. Every step, Gus. Every miserable, terrifying, agonizing step, all I had to do was put my hand out, and he was right there. And it might not sound like much to you, but it was every-fucking-thing."
"What are you saying?" I whined. "Why are you telling me all this?" Which I suppose is a little ironic because I brought the whole thing up, but felt like I was missing the lesson I was being taught.
"I'm just saying this happened to both of us, so any decisions to be made were made together." He shrugged and bumped my shoulder with his. "Hey, I can stand your thinking I'm such a pansy-assed little fairy that your dad could actually keep me from doing something I really wanted to do, but I can't stand your thinking your dad is some selfish bastard who would prevent me from seeing again if there was anything in the world that could be done, okay?"
"Yeah, okay," I said, feeling a little ashamed at how quickly I'd jumped to conclusions about my dad.
"Now get out of here," Justin said. "If your dad catches us talking about 'the measure of a man," he'll be forced to make some awful dick joke, and then your mothers will be all out of sorts, and Gran will start yelling and Michael will have to leap to his defense and Ben will have to try and calm everybody down..."
"Yeah, then it'd be like a regular Sunday night dinner and we're going for special here, right?"
Justin laughed but the look on his face was kind of soft and pensive. "You're an upstanding man too, Gus," he said, tossing his head back and defiantly lifting his chin, as if I was going to disagree or something. "I'm really proud of you."
I felt my face turn beet red. "Yeah?" I said, kind of shrugging. "I'm..." I wanted to tell Justin I was proud of him too, because, I mean, I totally am, and I didn't want him to think I really thought he was some pansy-assed fairy because I didn't. But the words sounded really dumb in my head. "Well, you know, me too," I finally mumbled.
Justin smiled hugely-Gran calls it his 'Sunshine' smile. "Oh my God, if I didn't know better I'd think you were Brian Kinney's son!" he said. Then he jumped up and, like, tried to totally smother me to death.
"God, let me go!" I said in a strangled voice.
My dad moseyed in the kitchen a few seconds later and untangled the two of us. "God, let him go," he said. "I've never seen such a boatload of sentimental crap in my life." My dad motioned at the door with the barest nod of his head. "Go on out back. Between your mothers, Deb and Michael, I've had all the blubbering I can stand for one afternoon."
I had to walk past Dad to get out to the porch, and as I walked by I felt the weirdest surge of...something, so I hugged him, shrugging my apology to him.
My dad sighed like his life was unbearably hard, but he hugged me back. "Jesus Christ, I count on you not to go soft," he said finally, shoving me off him.
I laughed and sauntered slowly out of the kitchen. "That's funny. Chloe Wiseman said those exact words to me just the other night."
Justin groaned, and I looked over my shoulder just in time to see my dad grab a big old handful of cake off Justin's plate. He threw it at me, and it hit the backdoor with a loud thwap!
"Mel's gonna shit!" Justin said, turning and feeling around the counters for a towel.
I got another hamburger and sat down next to Mom and pretended not to be totally dorked out as everyone traded their favorite baby Gus story.
I could see in a kitchen window, and Justin was draped around my dad. He was smiling up at him and rubbing my dad's stomach, and I could tell by the look on my dad's face that Justin was feeding his already over-inflated ego. 'Typical,' I thought fleetingly. I find out my dad practically single-handedly kept Justin from trying to get his sight back, and somehow Justin is the one fawning all over him like he's some amazing deal.
Justin said something that made my dad throw his head back and laugh, and that's when Justin reached up and lightly touched his fingers to my dad's mouth, gently tracing the curve of his upturned lips. Dad let him "see" his smile for a few seconds, then he grabbed Justin's hand, kissed his fingers and brought the hand down to cup his balls. Justin just laughed and shoved him away.
Days later-well, okay, a couple of hours later--the party finally started breaking up. I had just enough time to shower then head over to Moog's house to pick him up for Chewy's party. We were staying out all night, and if I played my cards right, I might get lucky with Jane *and* Chloe, which would be a total record for us.
I stood at the door and was hugged and kissed and congratulated all over again until just Justin and my dad were left.
"Have fun tonight," my dad said. "Don't be stupid. Well, don't be as stupid as you four have the potential to be."
"Doh, okay Dad," I said, using the most moronic voice I could.
He just rolled his eyes at me. "And I don't want you driving tonight. You're taking one of my drivers."
"Dad!" I said. "Come on! I already told the guys I was driving" Shit! How fucking lame was that-and just springing it on me at the last second was so him.
Dad just shook his head. "I'm not getting out of bed at three in the morning to ID your body at the morgue."
"Dad!"
"Don't 'Dad' me. The four of you are idiots. And when you're together, the idiot quotient exponentially increases."
"This is so lame," I huffed.
My dad just lifted an eyebrow at me. "Gus, I didn't ask you how two and a half bikinis became lodged in the pool's filtering system, I just paid the $5,000 to get it fixed. But don't take my silence to mean I don't think you're all idiots, okay?"
"Fine! Can we have a limo?"
My dad rolled his eyes again as he pulled out his phone and made the call, while I stood behind him, hissing, "Stretch! Get the stretch! Can we have the stretch?"
When he got off the phone (Score! We got the stretch!), he said, "If any of you lightweights puke in my limo, I will haul your asses out of bed at 5:30 Saturday morning, and you will clean every last car in the garage, inside and out, do you understand?"
Like my dad would get out of bed at 5:30 for anything! Still, I could see him making Justin do it, so I simply said, "Dad, what are you talking about? We're not old enough to drink!"
I jogged upstairs, calling Moog as I went to let him know we'd be stylin' in a stretch limo that night.
I looked out the window in my bedroom and watched my dad walk Justin to the car door. He opened the door, but instead of getting in, Justin grabbed him, and they started necking there in the driveway.
Snickering, I opened the window. Dad must have heard, because he stopped what he was doing and looked toward the house. He caught my eye, and his brow lifted in challenge.
There was something comforting in being so predictable. I leaned out and yelled, as expected, "Dad! God!"
Dad and Justin both laughed, and then my father reacted in typical Brian Kinney fashion.
He flipped me off and went right back to kissing Justin.
End