Entry #06 - "Coda" (1 of 2)
Title: Coda
Written By: a_short_detour
Timeline: Post Season 5
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: None
Genre A little Angst, a little Romance, a little tying up of loose ends
Coda, part 1
I. Prelude
Hunter gives Brian five days. Lays his twenty on the diner table, then crosses his arms and leans back against the green vinyl cushioning his booth. Michael disagrees, says that Brian and Justin haven’t broken up this time, that Brian’s not going to run to New York because there’s no reason for him to do that.
Sometimes Hunter wonders whether Michael has ever actually met Brian.
“Two weeks,” Emmett says, dropping his twenty atop Hunter’s. “Absolute maximum.”
Ted regards both of them thoughtfully, then reaches into his back pocket for his wallet. “Considering all there is for him to do here, I doubt he’ll be leaving town soon. Three weeks.”
“Fine,” says Michael. He shoves a hand into the front pocket of his jeans and, after some shimmying, extracts his own contribution to the growing pot. “Five weeks.”
Debbie appears from nowhere--for being a large woman with red hair, she’s got the stealth gig down--and snaps her gum disapprovingly. “Thought we were through betting against their happiness,” she says.
Grinning, Hunter says, “We are. We’re betting for it.”
He meets her eyes for a long moment, and decides that if he ever, you know, decided to get a mom, he’d want Debbie. He figures that if she raised Brian, and Jesus, look how he turned out, then raising an ex-hustler-turned-high-schooler should be right up her alley. For a heartbeat, Hunter swears he sees tears forming in Debbie’s eyes, but then she grins at him and reaches out with red-tipped fingers to pinch his cheek. “Of course you’re betting for them, sweetie,” she says before he manages to squirm away. “So.” The ubiquitous pad and pen appear in her hands. “So, what’ll it be?”
II. The Boy from New York City
It’s a jungle out there. People, ten stories down, like termites gnawing at the silence, leaving little piles of sawdust morning behind. Blue sky infused with pink-tinged murk along the skyline, puffs of steam spreading, fingers out, blending into the smog. Heat rippling the drafts through the half-open window. Two stories down, a balcony: four chairs, a table, bamboo screening, a plastic owl. Three rooftops away: men in grey pitch a trash bag bulging with construction debris over the edge, then peer over after it, waiting for it to hit. One raises his hand, clenched but for his pointer and pinky; they turn back to their work, scraping another bagful off the roof with shovels that grate against the concrete. Fire escapes cling jagged like ric rac against the regular parallels of brick, and it all comes as a rush, in strobelight flashes, a desperate, human high.
Justin loves it. Fucking loves it.
His room here is--and he’s still working on whether this is scientifically possible--worse than the one he called home in Pittsburgh. The light gutters in through one clouded window; the sink gargles and hacks out a dribble of rust-colored water whenever he turns the tap. A strange scent emanates from one of the walls, mostly towards the top. Mildew, maybe? He doesn’t know, just knows that whatever it is, it’s going to have to stand up to a gallon of bleach before it earns the right to share his home. In his head, he’s named it the Scum of Manhattan. Which he will never admit to anyone, because seriously, who the fuck names colonies of mold?
He figures he can get away with a single mattress (not a dark wood platform with a new duvet and kind cloud-filtered Pittsburgh sun, no) and maybe a crate for his clothing. It might have been a good idea to think this all through before he left for the city, but if he’s learned anything about himself in the past years, it’s that his planning skills, while magnificent in the short term, tend to fall short over longer timelines.
Through no fault of his own, he’s still alive. That’s got to mean something.
Suddenly, it hits him--the move, the leaving home, the leaving Brian which is the same as leaving home only more specific, the fact that he almost got fucking married and then took off--and he drops onto the grimy floorboards, fingers scrabbling for his cell phone.
His hands tremble with energy that he imagines might start to shoot out from under his fingernails if he doesn’t talk to someone, so he presses one, holds it down until it connects.
Two rings. Three. Then a sleepy, “’lo?”
“Brian,” Justin says. “Brian, I.... You told me to call when I got in.”
“Christ,” Brian says, and Justin imagines him slowly waking up, the sheets tangled around his legs after his unsteady grab for the telephone. Imagines his hair flattened on one side, his face imprinted with the wrinkles of the pillow, one eye drifting open even as the other tries its best to drag back down.
“It’s amazing,” says Justin, hearing his own wonder out loud for the first time. “It’s incredible. There’s this...God, there’s this energy here, like nothing I’ve ever.... It’s too much. I can’t fucking finish my sentences.”
Brian’s voice smiles lazily. “Told you you’d like it once you got there.”
“I’ve been here before, you know.”
“Yeah,” Brian laughs. “Last time, I distinctly remember having to haul your runaway ass back home.”
“Like you’d ever regret coming after my ass. And you definitely went out of your way to reclaim it.”
“Unfortunate side effect of fucking a go-go boy. All roads lead to Chelsea.”
Justin lies back, props his feet up on his discarded backpack. “I miss you,” he says. He hates the way it sounds, needy and yearning, not the voice of a man who left everything he knew on the offchance that his dream might pan out.
A long silence stretches from the other end of the line. Finally, Brian says, “Get out. Meet people. Do something. I’m going to need recommendations when I get there.”
“I always knew you were just using me for my fantastic public relations skills.”
“Twat,” Brian says, chuckling, except it’s like one of those cartoons where one character is saying something and the other one is hearing something else, and to Justin it sounds a whole lot like I love you.
“I love you,” Justin says in response, though he knows that no matter how many times he voices the words, they will always send Brian flinching away.
Sure enough, Brian is retreating, mumbling something about the hour and how some people are gainfully employed. “Take care of yourself,” he says. “And don’t go out after dark in that fucking shitty neighborhood.”
Justin thinks about reminding Brian of his phase as an amateur street fighter, about the fact that he wandered less savory neighborhoods in Pittsburgh while mentally and physically impaired by a variety of substances without repercussion. He thinks better of it, though, and instead grins and promises he’ll be careful.
--
There’s a young man standing in his doorway. He’s not tall--no taller than Justin--and has small, well-balanced features set below shaggy light brown hair. If he disregards the man’s terribly inflexible straightness, Justin can almost think of him as attractive.
He is monumentally stoned, and leans against the doorframe with a lopsided smile lighting his face.
“’m Aaron,” he says, extending a hand. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
Justin smiles despite himself, shakes the proffered hand, and gestures toward his as-yet empty apartment. “Justin Taylor,” he says. “I’d offer you a seat and a drink, but I don’t exactly have either one at the moment.”
“’sokay,” Aaron slurs. “Done with the drinking tonight, I think.”
Justin cocks his head to one side and takes in Aaron’s dilated pupils, the nervous twitch in his left arm, the fact that he doesn’t seem quite able to hold himself upright. “Which room’s yours?” he asks.
“That one,” Aaron says, making an expansive sweeping gesture that manages to indicate much of the rest of the building.
“Oh.” Justin shakes his head an swears to his dignity that he will never introduce himself to new neighbors while under the influence of more than one substance. “Listen, Aaron, I really kind of need to get to sleep, get up tomorrow, you know. Find a job.”
“Should eat breakfast my place,” says Aaron from his slouch against the door. “We can finish off the last crackers, sayonara base of the food pyramid.”
Remembering floor picnics from another lifetime, Justin grins through the pang of regret and says, “If you remember this conversation tomorrow, come and get me.”
“Sounds good.” Aaron pushes himself off the door and staggers before righting himself and saluting disjointedly. “Tomorrow, Justin Taylor.” He giggles. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time.”
Justin’s not sure what to do with someone who barges into his room, invites him for breakfast, and then starts quoting Shakespeare. So when Aaron begins his stumble down the hall toward what Justin assumes is his room, Justin shrugs at nothing in particular, closes his door, unrolls his sleeping bag, curls up, and tries to sleep.
--
When he wakes up, he has cramps in places he didn’t know had muscles, the back of his throat itches, and he wants to yell at Brian for changing the sheets again when they only changed them yesterday. And then he hears the noise outside, so much more distant than the noise that comes through Brian’s windows in the middle of the day, and he remembers.
Shit, he thinks, sitting up, what time is it? He unzips his duffel bag, rummages for his alarm clock, and finds, to his relief, that he has not slept the day away. He’s halfway through contemplating whether to take a shower or whether he wants to track down a mattress first when the knock comes on his door, startling him. For a moment, he’s heart-wrenchingly sure it’s Brian and he hops to his feet with every intention of flinging the door open and wrapping himself around the man standing outside.
“Justin?” asks a voice before the knocking begins again. “Yo, new boy. Bagels await.”
And that would be Aaron, who, despite his massive ingestion of intoxicants the day before, seems no worse for the wear. Smiling, Justin opens the door.
“Buongiorno, principessa!” Aaron says, one hand occupied with a paper bag bulging with bagels and the other still raised to knock. “It’s another smog-filled Manhattan morning.” He points at the bag. “These, my friend, are Murray’s bagels. The best bread on the island, two bucks to get them slathered with cream cheese. Much better relationship between the ratio of dollars to calories than Ramen and as an added bonus they don’t taste like flavored seawater.”
Justin doesn’t think he’s said more than two consecutive sentences to this boy, but he likes him. “Murray’s?”
“Little hole in the wall, best fucking lentil soup on the planet.”
“Sounds like a nice place.”
Aaron nods, his eyes casting about. “Like your minimalist decór here, Taylor. Mind if I call you Taylor? I know another Justin, known him for a while actually--it’d be easier to remember that way.”
“Sure,” says Justin, a little overwhelmed by the constant stream of information. For a second, he imagines Aaron as a sort of puppet, controlled by higher beings who took great pleasure in jerking his strings randomly, making him dance. Might be an interesting for Rage to find himself in. “And yeah, I haven’t had time to find furniture yet.”
“We’ll see if we can’t hook you up,” says Aaron. “Meantime, sir, pray break fast with me, preferably in my room because it’s already gotten through the strange smells phase and I just purchased a few of these crazy new inventions called chairs.”
Grinning, Justin says, “This is just a temporary arrangement until my sugar daddy arrives to whisk me uptown.”
Aaron cocks an eyebrow. “Sugar daddy, eh? Can you hook me up?”
Justin doesn’t know how to answer that. Maybe, at one point, he would simply have known how to say what needed to be said, would have said “Brian Kinney doesn’t do boyfriends” and left it at that. But that was then, and Justin doesn’t know who he and Brian are to each other anymore.
Stop it, he thinks. Justin has noticed that the voice he imagines, which used to sound like the offspring of his mother and something Jiminy Cricket-esque, has been taking on Brian’s vocal characteristics. Get up, the voice continues. Also: get the fuck over yourself. And tell Aaron, who brought you bagels, that he’s welcome to stay and that if he wants a sugar daddy he should turn gay and lose the blindingly orange hoodie.
“It’s an art,” Justin says. “It requires great persistence, high alcohol tolerance, and some stalking skill.”
Aaron spreads his arms and turns in a slow circle. “Persistence, tolerance, and stalking are my middle names,” he says. “Those and Michael.”
Justin grins. It figures.
III. City of Blinding Lights
After eight months, Ted quietly returns the bet money.
Except Hunter’s.
“I’m not taking it back,” the kid says, ignoring the crisp bill Ted places beside his platter of greasy diner food. “So I was way off. Doesn’t mean Brian’s not going up there sometime, and if you give me back that money, it’s like it’s not going to happen.”
Sometimes Ted wonders when Hunter grew out of his crush on Brian and into a teenager who could make that sort of comment and then scarf down a half-dozen pancakes and what looks like an entire cow-turned-bacon.
“Gotta go,” Hunter mumbles around a mouthful of half-chewed food. He slides the twenty still lying on the table toward Ted and says, “Give it back to me when the asshole finally cracks.” Standing, he slings his backpack over one shoulder as public service announcements and concerned fathers have expressly instructed him not to, drops enough money to cover breakfast on the table, saunters out.
Brian almost runs into the kid on his way in. Hunter gives the pro forma leer that has become a part of his greeting, Brian nods, and they pass each other without further commentary. Ted watches their dance as he has every morning for months. Sometimes he imagines Hunter as Brian’s mystical mirror (yes, you’re still the fairest one of all) but this time all he can see are the wrinkles in Brian’s forehead, the way a few white hairs have crept down from his temples into his sideburns. Brian is aging gracefully, of course, and there is still nothing resembling fat anywhere on his body, but Ted expected....
He doesn’t know what he expected. Maybe he expected Brian to see the first white hair and pitch himself off a bridge, OD on a dance floor, hang himself with some sort of designer rope. He can’t envision Brian growing old like the rest of the mortals that inhabit his plane, can’t imagine him not defining his own fate, deciding one day that this was enough, he’d done enough, time to bow out. With style.
Instead, Brian, eyes tired and shoulders slightly slumped, comes into the diner and orders coffee.
Ted leaves the money for his breakfast on the table and wanders to the counter to sit next to Brian. “Morning,” he says. He leaves off the good.
Brian grunts something in greeting and pours enough sugar to melt tooth enamel into his coffee. Ted decides that the conversation is probably up to him.
“Isn’t it great about Michael?” he says.
“What about Michael?” Brian mumbles, stirs clockwise, counterclockwise, drags the spoon toward him and clinks it on the edge of his mug before setting it on the saucer.
“His store won that award. You know, most improved neighborhood business or something like that.”
Brian’s expression doesn’t change, but his shoulders straighten and he lifts his coffee cup towards his face and takes a sip. After a short stretch of silence, Ted realizes that Brian didn’t know about the award and tries to backpedal. “He just told me this morning,” he says. “I just thought--”
“Theodore,” Brian says, carefully enunciating each syllable. Ted pauses, but he knows it’s pointless. Once, Michael would have run to Brian with the news as soon as he learned of it, but now the latest events in his life filtered down through Ben and Hunter before even making it to his inner circle of friends. A circle, not a sort of strange pyramid with Brian at the tip and Emmett and Ted holding up the foundation.
“I’m sorry,” Ted says, not sure exactly what he’s apologizing for.
“Sorry’s bullshit,” Brian says as Ted thinks Sorry’s bullshit along with him.
Nothing is going to convince Brian to present a different face, so Ted nods and pretends to believe that Brian believes the catchphrases that fall from his mouth like broken afterthoughts. He likes to tell himself he’s seen a different side to Brian since beginning to work with him, a side that’s a lot less bluster and a lot more half-smiles and keep up the good works and look at me have I ever let you downs. He’d say Brian had mellowed, but he hasn’t. The man in question still appears from time to time to oversee Babylon and fuck someone who will whisper later about how he touched the legend who is Brian Kinney.
“I’d like to see you happy,” Ted says. Shit, he thinks even as the words emerge from his mouth. Shit, there goes my job. I’m gone. If I work quickly, maybe I can get Cynthia to weasel me a recommendation, cite awkward differences as my reason for leaving this one. He looks away, stares carefully at the counter.
Brian’s stillness draws sound and motion into itself until Ted feels like he’s skirting a black hole, rushing toward it as quickly as he makes his escape, a bug that doesn’t know it’s caught yet, its legs scrabbling for purchase. He doesn’t dare turn his head for fear he’ll see one of Brian’s hands toying with a toothpick, or a knee, or maybe a Prada-sheathed shoulder. Seeing it would make it real, and his frantic mental flight would fizzle and die. He’s aware the thought isn’t precisely what one would call rational, but that doesn’t make it go away.
“I’ve seen him,” Brian says, his voice so low Ted barely understands him.
“I know.” He does. He’s not sure whether anyone else knows how Brian claims a few days for business, turns off his cell phone, and flies to New York. All he knows is that when Brian returns, he has deep purple circles beneath his eyes and a new host of nervous tics, fingers tapping incessantly, one leg bouncing as if he has no control over it.
“He’s doing well for himself.”
Ted knows this too. He’s seen the clippings and postcards on the corkboard Debbie nailed to the diner wall beside Godiva’s. The huge capital letters across the top read SUNRISE in red and orange, and what used to be bare save a few clusters of pushpins is now covered with paper. He’s seen Brian’s file as well, all of this same information stored at the back of the bottom drawer of the cabinet, where Ted stumbled across it one day while looking for the Zarley account information.
Ted strongly suspects that this is information he will take to his grave. This is partially because he suspects just as strongly that if he were ever to reveal it, Brian would be responsible for his premature need for said grave. “You know,” Ted says slowly, because giving Brian advice on his personal life resembles nothing so much as walking through a minefield while snipers in the trees at the edges take potshots at you, “you know, you could go up there for a while. Check in. Kinnetik’ll run without you for a few weeks.”
A long silence, and then Brian shakes his head and stands. “I’ll think about it,” he says.
In Ted’s mind, Brian’s words translate roughly as no.
“I think he misses you,” says Ted, still unable to meet Brian’s eyes. “He’s got to be lonely in the city that never sleeps.”
Brian shrugs. “He’s brilliant,” he says. “They’re fighting over him. They all want him.”
And Ted understands. Brian’s logic has never been particularly, well, logical, but once he decides that someone is better off without him, the decision becomes irreversible.
“Whereas you’re just a washed-up old amazingly successful man who would drag him down into a horrible lifestyle that does not consist of cups of soup and mold-covered apartments and spending all earned income on art supplies and vitamin supplements.”
A tiny smile quirks the edge of Brian’s mouth as he says, “Something like that.”
“You know, if you want to take a few weeks off, Cynthia and I can handle it,” Ted says.
“The world’s going to Schmidt,” Brian murmurs, laughs quietly and without humor.
Ted smiles. “Whatever gets you going.”
“A good sucking off might do it. It’s certainly not going to be this coffee.”
“There aren’t any big presentations next week,” Ted says, opting to ignore Brian in favor of making a coherent point.
“Every presentation is a big presentation,” Brian responds before draining the rest of what must now be lukewarm coffee, leaving a five on the counter, nodding to Ted, and exiting.
Ted watches him until the door closes behind the elegant drape of Brian’s black suit. Sighing, he glances at his watch--he’s going to be later than the boss and hence late for work. Fuck it, he thinks, and orders a coffee, black.
--
The furniture has moved, Brian notices upon entering the house Michael shares with Ben and Hunter. And they’ve gotten a new dining room table, and the grey color of the wall has either mutated or been repainted with a slightly less green-tinged shade. He doesn’t know when that happened, tries to remember the last time he visited Mikey at home.
Weeks, at least. Perhaps months.
He sits down, on a couch he recalls vaguely from previous visits. He remembers when he knew where everything in Mikey’s room was, how he could tell if something had shifted or been replaced almost more quickly than the owner himself. He remembers when Mikey would ask him before moving things, wonder whether he should shift his bed so the headboard lay parallel to the wall or so that it ran lengthwise. When he was the first one to know anything of importance that happened.
He is no longer first.
This is not a surprising realization, but it’s one he’s been denying for months, perhaps years. And he knows with a slight twinge of guilt that Michael has not come first in his universe for some time. That his best friend status, as monolithic as it once seemed, was eclipsed a half-decade ago by a streetlamp encounter with a blonde boy and his beaming smile.
Mikey bustles into the room, brushing something from his hands. “Hey, Brian,” he says. “What’s happening?”
“I’m leaving,” Brian says. It’s not something he’s thought through, but the words sound right, so he nods to back them up.
Shrugging, Michael says, “I know. I’ve known that for a while. Was wondering what took you so long.”
“Tonight,” Brian says. “I’m leaving tonight.”
“Oh.”
“Tell your husband for me, would you?”
“Okay,” says Mikey. “You’re not...are you coming back, do you think?”
“I have things to finish up here.” Despite his best attempts at acquiring nothing he cannot leave behind, Brian has built a world with himself at its heart, a business that cannot live by Ted alone. A series of women who decided that he was their long-lost son. A circle of friends who danced with him, drank with him, ate with him, went to jail with him. A home he loves, a dance floor over which he lords his influence even after his concession of top fuck almost a year ago.
He can’t leave. And he has to. Tonight.
“Give him my best,” Michael says. “And buy him some real food--the last time he sent me an email, he told me that if he ate another pre-packaged meal that called for hot water he was going to throw himself from somewhere dramatic.”
“Sounds like him,” Brian says. “A drama queen at the best of times.”
“You’re doing the right thing,” Michael says.
Once, Brian thinks, that would have meant everything to him. When Mikey was the moral compass to his every move, when it was Mikey who drove him home after a tab of E and a mediocre blow job, when the bad shit that went down was somehow always Mikey’s business. Now, it’s just confirmation of what he already knows.
He stands, tugs Michael close to him, kisses him perfunctorily, whispers, “Love you,” and leaves. He’s got somewhere to be.
******
continued in part 2
Written By: a_short_detour
Timeline: Post Season 5
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: None
Genre A little Angst, a little Romance, a little tying up of loose ends
Coda, part 1
I. Prelude
Hunter gives Brian five days. Lays his twenty on the diner table, then crosses his arms and leans back against the green vinyl cushioning his booth. Michael disagrees, says that Brian and Justin haven’t broken up this time, that Brian’s not going to run to New York because there’s no reason for him to do that.
Sometimes Hunter wonders whether Michael has ever actually met Brian.
“Two weeks,” Emmett says, dropping his twenty atop Hunter’s. “Absolute maximum.”
Ted regards both of them thoughtfully, then reaches into his back pocket for his wallet. “Considering all there is for him to do here, I doubt he’ll be leaving town soon. Three weeks.”
“Fine,” says Michael. He shoves a hand into the front pocket of his jeans and, after some shimmying, extracts his own contribution to the growing pot. “Five weeks.”
Debbie appears from nowhere--for being a large woman with red hair, she’s got the stealth gig down--and snaps her gum disapprovingly. “Thought we were through betting against their happiness,” she says.
Grinning, Hunter says, “We are. We’re betting for it.”
He meets her eyes for a long moment, and decides that if he ever, you know, decided to get a mom, he’d want Debbie. He figures that if she raised Brian, and Jesus, look how he turned out, then raising an ex-hustler-turned-high-schooler should be right up her alley. For a heartbeat, Hunter swears he sees tears forming in Debbie’s eyes, but then she grins at him and reaches out with red-tipped fingers to pinch his cheek. “Of course you’re betting for them, sweetie,” she says before he manages to squirm away. “So.” The ubiquitous pad and pen appear in her hands. “So, what’ll it be?”
II. The Boy from New York City
It’s a jungle out there. People, ten stories down, like termites gnawing at the silence, leaving little piles of sawdust morning behind. Blue sky infused with pink-tinged murk along the skyline, puffs of steam spreading, fingers out, blending into the smog. Heat rippling the drafts through the half-open window. Two stories down, a balcony: four chairs, a table, bamboo screening, a plastic owl. Three rooftops away: men in grey pitch a trash bag bulging with construction debris over the edge, then peer over after it, waiting for it to hit. One raises his hand, clenched but for his pointer and pinky; they turn back to their work, scraping another bagful off the roof with shovels that grate against the concrete. Fire escapes cling jagged like ric rac against the regular parallels of brick, and it all comes as a rush, in strobelight flashes, a desperate, human high.
Justin loves it. Fucking loves it.
His room here is--and he’s still working on whether this is scientifically possible--worse than the one he called home in Pittsburgh. The light gutters in through one clouded window; the sink gargles and hacks out a dribble of rust-colored water whenever he turns the tap. A strange scent emanates from one of the walls, mostly towards the top. Mildew, maybe? He doesn’t know, just knows that whatever it is, it’s going to have to stand up to a gallon of bleach before it earns the right to share his home. In his head, he’s named it the Scum of Manhattan. Which he will never admit to anyone, because seriously, who the fuck names colonies of mold?
He figures he can get away with a single mattress (not a dark wood platform with a new duvet and kind cloud-filtered Pittsburgh sun, no) and maybe a crate for his clothing. It might have been a good idea to think this all through before he left for the city, but if he’s learned anything about himself in the past years, it’s that his planning skills, while magnificent in the short term, tend to fall short over longer timelines.
Through no fault of his own, he’s still alive. That’s got to mean something.
Suddenly, it hits him--the move, the leaving home, the leaving Brian which is the same as leaving home only more specific, the fact that he almost got fucking married and then took off--and he drops onto the grimy floorboards, fingers scrabbling for his cell phone.
His hands tremble with energy that he imagines might start to shoot out from under his fingernails if he doesn’t talk to someone, so he presses one, holds it down until it connects.
Two rings. Three. Then a sleepy, “’lo?”
“Brian,” Justin says. “Brian, I.... You told me to call when I got in.”
“Christ,” Brian says, and Justin imagines him slowly waking up, the sheets tangled around his legs after his unsteady grab for the telephone. Imagines his hair flattened on one side, his face imprinted with the wrinkles of the pillow, one eye drifting open even as the other tries its best to drag back down.
“It’s amazing,” says Justin, hearing his own wonder out loud for the first time. “It’s incredible. There’s this...God, there’s this energy here, like nothing I’ve ever.... It’s too much. I can’t fucking finish my sentences.”
Brian’s voice smiles lazily. “Told you you’d like it once you got there.”
“I’ve been here before, you know.”
“Yeah,” Brian laughs. “Last time, I distinctly remember having to haul your runaway ass back home.”
“Like you’d ever regret coming after my ass. And you definitely went out of your way to reclaim it.”
“Unfortunate side effect of fucking a go-go boy. All roads lead to Chelsea.”
Justin lies back, props his feet up on his discarded backpack. “I miss you,” he says. He hates the way it sounds, needy and yearning, not the voice of a man who left everything he knew on the offchance that his dream might pan out.
A long silence stretches from the other end of the line. Finally, Brian says, “Get out. Meet people. Do something. I’m going to need recommendations when I get there.”
“I always knew you were just using me for my fantastic public relations skills.”
“Twat,” Brian says, chuckling, except it’s like one of those cartoons where one character is saying something and the other one is hearing something else, and to Justin it sounds a whole lot like I love you.
“I love you,” Justin says in response, though he knows that no matter how many times he voices the words, they will always send Brian flinching away.
Sure enough, Brian is retreating, mumbling something about the hour and how some people are gainfully employed. “Take care of yourself,” he says. “And don’t go out after dark in that fucking shitty neighborhood.”
Justin thinks about reminding Brian of his phase as an amateur street fighter, about the fact that he wandered less savory neighborhoods in Pittsburgh while mentally and physically impaired by a variety of substances without repercussion. He thinks better of it, though, and instead grins and promises he’ll be careful.
--
There’s a young man standing in his doorway. He’s not tall--no taller than Justin--and has small, well-balanced features set below shaggy light brown hair. If he disregards the man’s terribly inflexible straightness, Justin can almost think of him as attractive.
He is monumentally stoned, and leans against the doorframe with a lopsided smile lighting his face.
“’m Aaron,” he says, extending a hand. “Welcome to the neighborhood.”
Justin smiles despite himself, shakes the proffered hand, and gestures toward his as-yet empty apartment. “Justin Taylor,” he says. “I’d offer you a seat and a drink, but I don’t exactly have either one at the moment.”
“’sokay,” Aaron slurs. “Done with the drinking tonight, I think.”
Justin cocks his head to one side and takes in Aaron’s dilated pupils, the nervous twitch in his left arm, the fact that he doesn’t seem quite able to hold himself upright. “Which room’s yours?” he asks.
“That one,” Aaron says, making an expansive sweeping gesture that manages to indicate much of the rest of the building.
“Oh.” Justin shakes his head an swears to his dignity that he will never introduce himself to new neighbors while under the influence of more than one substance. “Listen, Aaron, I really kind of need to get to sleep, get up tomorrow, you know. Find a job.”
“Should eat breakfast my place,” says Aaron from his slouch against the door. “We can finish off the last crackers, sayonara base of the food pyramid.”
Remembering floor picnics from another lifetime, Justin grins through the pang of regret and says, “If you remember this conversation tomorrow, come and get me.”
“Sounds good.” Aaron pushes himself off the door and staggers before righting himself and saluting disjointedly. “Tomorrow, Justin Taylor.” He giggles. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to day, to the last syllable of recorded time.”
Justin’s not sure what to do with someone who barges into his room, invites him for breakfast, and then starts quoting Shakespeare. So when Aaron begins his stumble down the hall toward what Justin assumes is his room, Justin shrugs at nothing in particular, closes his door, unrolls his sleeping bag, curls up, and tries to sleep.
--
When he wakes up, he has cramps in places he didn’t know had muscles, the back of his throat itches, and he wants to yell at Brian for changing the sheets again when they only changed them yesterday. And then he hears the noise outside, so much more distant than the noise that comes through Brian’s windows in the middle of the day, and he remembers.
Shit, he thinks, sitting up, what time is it? He unzips his duffel bag, rummages for his alarm clock, and finds, to his relief, that he has not slept the day away. He’s halfway through contemplating whether to take a shower or whether he wants to track down a mattress first when the knock comes on his door, startling him. For a moment, he’s heart-wrenchingly sure it’s Brian and he hops to his feet with every intention of flinging the door open and wrapping himself around the man standing outside.
“Justin?” asks a voice before the knocking begins again. “Yo, new boy. Bagels await.”
And that would be Aaron, who, despite his massive ingestion of intoxicants the day before, seems no worse for the wear. Smiling, Justin opens the door.
“Buongiorno, principessa!” Aaron says, one hand occupied with a paper bag bulging with bagels and the other still raised to knock. “It’s another smog-filled Manhattan morning.” He points at the bag. “These, my friend, are Murray’s bagels. The best bread on the island, two bucks to get them slathered with cream cheese. Much better relationship between the ratio of dollars to calories than Ramen and as an added bonus they don’t taste like flavored seawater.”
Justin doesn’t think he’s said more than two consecutive sentences to this boy, but he likes him. “Murray’s?”
“Little hole in the wall, best fucking lentil soup on the planet.”
“Sounds like a nice place.”
Aaron nods, his eyes casting about. “Like your minimalist decór here, Taylor. Mind if I call you Taylor? I know another Justin, known him for a while actually--it’d be easier to remember that way.”
“Sure,” says Justin, a little overwhelmed by the constant stream of information. For a second, he imagines Aaron as a sort of puppet, controlled by higher beings who took great pleasure in jerking his strings randomly, making him dance. Might be an interesting for Rage to find himself in. “And yeah, I haven’t had time to find furniture yet.”
“We’ll see if we can’t hook you up,” says Aaron. “Meantime, sir, pray break fast with me, preferably in my room because it’s already gotten through the strange smells phase and I just purchased a few of these crazy new inventions called chairs.”
Grinning, Justin says, “This is just a temporary arrangement until my sugar daddy arrives to whisk me uptown.”
Aaron cocks an eyebrow. “Sugar daddy, eh? Can you hook me up?”
Justin doesn’t know how to answer that. Maybe, at one point, he would simply have known how to say what needed to be said, would have said “Brian Kinney doesn’t do boyfriends” and left it at that. But that was then, and Justin doesn’t know who he and Brian are to each other anymore.
Stop it, he thinks. Justin has noticed that the voice he imagines, which used to sound like the offspring of his mother and something Jiminy Cricket-esque, has been taking on Brian’s vocal characteristics. Get up, the voice continues. Also: get the fuck over yourself. And tell Aaron, who brought you bagels, that he’s welcome to stay and that if he wants a sugar daddy he should turn gay and lose the blindingly orange hoodie.
“It’s an art,” Justin says. “It requires great persistence, high alcohol tolerance, and some stalking skill.”
Aaron spreads his arms and turns in a slow circle. “Persistence, tolerance, and stalking are my middle names,” he says. “Those and Michael.”
Justin grins. It figures.
III. City of Blinding Lights
After eight months, Ted quietly returns the bet money.
Except Hunter’s.
“I’m not taking it back,” the kid says, ignoring the crisp bill Ted places beside his platter of greasy diner food. “So I was way off. Doesn’t mean Brian’s not going up there sometime, and if you give me back that money, it’s like it’s not going to happen.”
Sometimes Ted wonders when Hunter grew out of his crush on Brian and into a teenager who could make that sort of comment and then scarf down a half-dozen pancakes and what looks like an entire cow-turned-bacon.
“Gotta go,” Hunter mumbles around a mouthful of half-chewed food. He slides the twenty still lying on the table toward Ted and says, “Give it back to me when the asshole finally cracks.” Standing, he slings his backpack over one shoulder as public service announcements and concerned fathers have expressly instructed him not to, drops enough money to cover breakfast on the table, saunters out.
Brian almost runs into the kid on his way in. Hunter gives the pro forma leer that has become a part of his greeting, Brian nods, and they pass each other without further commentary. Ted watches their dance as he has every morning for months. Sometimes he imagines Hunter as Brian’s mystical mirror (yes, you’re still the fairest one of all) but this time all he can see are the wrinkles in Brian’s forehead, the way a few white hairs have crept down from his temples into his sideburns. Brian is aging gracefully, of course, and there is still nothing resembling fat anywhere on his body, but Ted expected....
He doesn’t know what he expected. Maybe he expected Brian to see the first white hair and pitch himself off a bridge, OD on a dance floor, hang himself with some sort of designer rope. He can’t envision Brian growing old like the rest of the mortals that inhabit his plane, can’t imagine him not defining his own fate, deciding one day that this was enough, he’d done enough, time to bow out. With style.
Instead, Brian, eyes tired and shoulders slightly slumped, comes into the diner and orders coffee.
Ted leaves the money for his breakfast on the table and wanders to the counter to sit next to Brian. “Morning,” he says. He leaves off the good.
Brian grunts something in greeting and pours enough sugar to melt tooth enamel into his coffee. Ted decides that the conversation is probably up to him.
“Isn’t it great about Michael?” he says.
“What about Michael?” Brian mumbles, stirs clockwise, counterclockwise, drags the spoon toward him and clinks it on the edge of his mug before setting it on the saucer.
“His store won that award. You know, most improved neighborhood business or something like that.”
Brian’s expression doesn’t change, but his shoulders straighten and he lifts his coffee cup towards his face and takes a sip. After a short stretch of silence, Ted realizes that Brian didn’t know about the award and tries to backpedal. “He just told me this morning,” he says. “I just thought--”
“Theodore,” Brian says, carefully enunciating each syllable. Ted pauses, but he knows it’s pointless. Once, Michael would have run to Brian with the news as soon as he learned of it, but now the latest events in his life filtered down through Ben and Hunter before even making it to his inner circle of friends. A circle, not a sort of strange pyramid with Brian at the tip and Emmett and Ted holding up the foundation.
“I’m sorry,” Ted says, not sure exactly what he’s apologizing for.
“Sorry’s bullshit,” Brian says as Ted thinks Sorry’s bullshit along with him.
Nothing is going to convince Brian to present a different face, so Ted nods and pretends to believe that Brian believes the catchphrases that fall from his mouth like broken afterthoughts. He likes to tell himself he’s seen a different side to Brian since beginning to work with him, a side that’s a lot less bluster and a lot more half-smiles and keep up the good works and look at me have I ever let you downs. He’d say Brian had mellowed, but he hasn’t. The man in question still appears from time to time to oversee Babylon and fuck someone who will whisper later about how he touched the legend who is Brian Kinney.
“I’d like to see you happy,” Ted says. Shit, he thinks even as the words emerge from his mouth. Shit, there goes my job. I’m gone. If I work quickly, maybe I can get Cynthia to weasel me a recommendation, cite awkward differences as my reason for leaving this one. He looks away, stares carefully at the counter.
Brian’s stillness draws sound and motion into itself until Ted feels like he’s skirting a black hole, rushing toward it as quickly as he makes his escape, a bug that doesn’t know it’s caught yet, its legs scrabbling for purchase. He doesn’t dare turn his head for fear he’ll see one of Brian’s hands toying with a toothpick, or a knee, or maybe a Prada-sheathed shoulder. Seeing it would make it real, and his frantic mental flight would fizzle and die. He’s aware the thought isn’t precisely what one would call rational, but that doesn’t make it go away.
“I’ve seen him,” Brian says, his voice so low Ted barely understands him.
“I know.” He does. He’s not sure whether anyone else knows how Brian claims a few days for business, turns off his cell phone, and flies to New York. All he knows is that when Brian returns, he has deep purple circles beneath his eyes and a new host of nervous tics, fingers tapping incessantly, one leg bouncing as if he has no control over it.
“He’s doing well for himself.”
Ted knows this too. He’s seen the clippings and postcards on the corkboard Debbie nailed to the diner wall beside Godiva’s. The huge capital letters across the top read SUNRISE in red and orange, and what used to be bare save a few clusters of pushpins is now covered with paper. He’s seen Brian’s file as well, all of this same information stored at the back of the bottom drawer of the cabinet, where Ted stumbled across it one day while looking for the Zarley account information.
Ted strongly suspects that this is information he will take to his grave. This is partially because he suspects just as strongly that if he were ever to reveal it, Brian would be responsible for his premature need for said grave. “You know,” Ted says slowly, because giving Brian advice on his personal life resembles nothing so much as walking through a minefield while snipers in the trees at the edges take potshots at you, “you know, you could go up there for a while. Check in. Kinnetik’ll run without you for a few weeks.”
A long silence, and then Brian shakes his head and stands. “I’ll think about it,” he says.
In Ted’s mind, Brian’s words translate roughly as no.
“I think he misses you,” says Ted, still unable to meet Brian’s eyes. “He’s got to be lonely in the city that never sleeps.”
Brian shrugs. “He’s brilliant,” he says. “They’re fighting over him. They all want him.”
And Ted understands. Brian’s logic has never been particularly, well, logical, but once he decides that someone is better off without him, the decision becomes irreversible.
“Whereas you’re just a washed-up old amazingly successful man who would drag him down into a horrible lifestyle that does not consist of cups of soup and mold-covered apartments and spending all earned income on art supplies and vitamin supplements.”
A tiny smile quirks the edge of Brian’s mouth as he says, “Something like that.”
“You know, if you want to take a few weeks off, Cynthia and I can handle it,” Ted says.
“The world’s going to Schmidt,” Brian murmurs, laughs quietly and without humor.
Ted smiles. “Whatever gets you going.”
“A good sucking off might do it. It’s certainly not going to be this coffee.”
“There aren’t any big presentations next week,” Ted says, opting to ignore Brian in favor of making a coherent point.
“Every presentation is a big presentation,” Brian responds before draining the rest of what must now be lukewarm coffee, leaving a five on the counter, nodding to Ted, and exiting.
Ted watches him until the door closes behind the elegant drape of Brian’s black suit. Sighing, he glances at his watch--he’s going to be later than the boss and hence late for work. Fuck it, he thinks, and orders a coffee, black.
--
The furniture has moved, Brian notices upon entering the house Michael shares with Ben and Hunter. And they’ve gotten a new dining room table, and the grey color of the wall has either mutated or been repainted with a slightly less green-tinged shade. He doesn’t know when that happened, tries to remember the last time he visited Mikey at home.
Weeks, at least. Perhaps months.
He sits down, on a couch he recalls vaguely from previous visits. He remembers when he knew where everything in Mikey’s room was, how he could tell if something had shifted or been replaced almost more quickly than the owner himself. He remembers when Mikey would ask him before moving things, wonder whether he should shift his bed so the headboard lay parallel to the wall or so that it ran lengthwise. When he was the first one to know anything of importance that happened.
He is no longer first.
This is not a surprising realization, but it’s one he’s been denying for months, perhaps years. And he knows with a slight twinge of guilt that Michael has not come first in his universe for some time. That his best friend status, as monolithic as it once seemed, was eclipsed a half-decade ago by a streetlamp encounter with a blonde boy and his beaming smile.
Mikey bustles into the room, brushing something from his hands. “Hey, Brian,” he says. “What’s happening?”
“I’m leaving,” Brian says. It’s not something he’s thought through, but the words sound right, so he nods to back them up.
Shrugging, Michael says, “I know. I’ve known that for a while. Was wondering what took you so long.”
“Tonight,” Brian says. “I’m leaving tonight.”
“Oh.”
“Tell your husband for me, would you?”
“Okay,” says Mikey. “You’re not...are you coming back, do you think?”
“I have things to finish up here.” Despite his best attempts at acquiring nothing he cannot leave behind, Brian has built a world with himself at its heart, a business that cannot live by Ted alone. A series of women who decided that he was their long-lost son. A circle of friends who danced with him, drank with him, ate with him, went to jail with him. A home he loves, a dance floor over which he lords his influence even after his concession of top fuck almost a year ago.
He can’t leave. And he has to. Tonight.
“Give him my best,” Michael says. “And buy him some real food--the last time he sent me an email, he told me that if he ate another pre-packaged meal that called for hot water he was going to throw himself from somewhere dramatic.”
“Sounds like him,” Brian says. “A drama queen at the best of times.”
“You’re doing the right thing,” Michael says.
Once, Brian thinks, that would have meant everything to him. When Mikey was the moral compass to his every move, when it was Mikey who drove him home after a tab of E and a mediocre blow job, when the bad shit that went down was somehow always Mikey’s business. Now, it’s just confirmation of what he already knows.
He stands, tugs Michael close to him, kisses him perfunctorily, whispers, “Love you,” and leaves. He’s got somewhere to be.
******
continued in part 2