The Return of the Godfather: Entourage, Vince/Eric, PG-13
Title: The Return of the Godfather
Fandom: Entourage
Pairing: Vince/Eric
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: Some language. Serious angst. Likedancinbutterfly said, it's a "hell of a downer."
Author's Notes: Thanks for running the contest and for the swift beta/encouragement,dancinbutterfly !
Prompt: Eric Murphy is in love with some guy he’s only spoken to. Vince as a radio DJ.
"This is the Godfather on KLVW, the late night session. To all those lonely hearts out there, this one's for you."
Bruce Springsteen poured from the speakers, spilling out his hungry heart vocals on deaf ears. “Like a river that don’t know where it’s flowing, I took a wrong turn and just kept on going…”
Eric watched from the large windows of the neighborhood Sbarros (barely aware of the music swelling around him) as Jenny Miller, an employee of his working weekends to save up for college, walked out to her car. She was seventeen and utterly mortified when Eric offered to escort her to the beat up Toyota she inherited from her brother, John. He and Eric were high school friends, both on the wrestling team together, although they'd occupied polar opposite ends of the weight class spectrum.
That year hadn’t been easy, since his dad ran out with his much-younger secretary, and their life savings, when Eric was fourteen. His freshman year of high school had been a blur, an awful, depressing blur. But his mother never complained about her string of crappy jobs with temp agencies while wrangling with divorce attorneys just to get some goddamn alimony payments on time, for once. She’d sent her son to school in clean clothes with a full lunchbox every day, which was more than lots of other kids could say. She kept her son safe. John Miller, Eric’s best friend, fought with his dad after the lazy bastard had a few too many Miller Lites-the wrestling team accepted his excuses for his bruises without question and Eric made sure John had someplace to crash when his dad got violent. Eric’s mother always said John’s dad was a worthless drunk.
So they stuck it out together on the wrestling team. John kept the other guys from giving Eric too much of a hard time about his size-he was small, yeah, but scrappy. He’d spent that whole year proving himself to everyone he came across, fighting like it was more important than breathing. His mother understood, and paid all his wrestling expenses without question, even when he should have been working. And, even though it was John who got that full-ride scholarship to Iowa State (and left earlier that summer), Eric’s mother regretted none of the money she spent. Wrestling, she said, kept Eric sane that year, kept him from making any bad decisions. John Miller was the best friend any boy could have, she believed.
Thus, out of respect for his friend, Eric made sure to watch as Jenny left every night. The girl sketched a silent salute at her boss before getting in and driving away.
Although he would not have admitted such a thing, his mother's ideas about how people should be treated were deeply ingrained in his psyche. The rules were as natural as breathing. It was, Eric knew, the only part of her he had left. Well, other than her headstone in Juniper Grove Cemetery.
Springsteen’s dulcet tones faded as Eric scanned the Sbarros lobby and began cleaning up the night's recurrent mess.
Just as he bent over to pick up someone's carelessly discarded napkins (which were covered in pizza sauce and some sort of green goo Eric tried not to contemplate), "Oh, Mandy" poured through the tinny lobby speakers.
Eric groaned. Every night, the stupid deejay on KLVW played the damn song, letting Barry Manilow ruin Eric's normally quiet routine with his insipid, saccharine lyrics and whiny voice.
"Oh, fuck this," he said to the empty room, moving to the phone hanging on the wall behind the counters. Reaching for the phone book hidden underneath the register, Eric found the station's number and jabbed the phone's greasy keypad with insistent fingers. As the phone rang, Eric plugged his open ear with his free hand, diminishing Manilow's sugary-sweet voice.
"KLVW, Queens' finest radio station. You're on with the Godfather, so talk to me." The man's voice was smooth and somewhat high-pitched, but it wasn't unpleasant. I've heard this voice before, Eric thought as a strange wave of déjà vu washed over him.
"Is your daughter getting married today?" Eric asked.
"What?"
"I really need you to do something for me."
A pause. "Oh, you're asking me for a favor!"
Eric could hear the dawning comprehension in the man's voice.
"Well, this particular mob boss doesn't need a wedding as an excuse. So, what can I do for you?"
"Never, ever play Barry Manilow again."
The man let out an explosive laugh, long and hearty, and the sounds seemed to pour through the phone line like spun gold, pooling in Eric's mind like mellow amber.
"I can't promise to never play a song, especially if it's a request."
"What kind of a Godfather are you, anyway?" Eric sighed. "That sucks. 'Cause I hate that guy, I really do." He pinched the bridge of his nose, wincing against a sudden flare of pain.
For a moment, there was only the sound of the deejay's breathing on the other end of the line. "Is there anything I can do to make it up to you? 'Cause I hate having to play Barry almost as much as you hate listening to him."
"Just--play something decent. Something harder, some rock or something. No more girly, romantic bullshit."
"Anything in particular you'd like to hear?"
Eric surveyed the messy lobby, realizing that this call had already gone on too long. "You pick. I've got to get back to work."
"Oh, yeah? Where?"
For no reason Eric could discern, he was loath to tell this nameless deejay about his job. He'd never encountered the feeling before, because he still managed to bring home a decent paycheck every two weeks, and money was money, as far as Eric was concerned. So he shook off this unfamiliar reticence without analyzing it further. He was just tired.
"I'm the night manager at Sbarros," he said.
"Over on 23rd and Lexington?"
"Yeah."
Another pause which neither broke for several seconds.
When the deejay spoke again, his voice was softer this time. It sounded like burnished gold in candlelight to Eric, who let this strange thought pass without really noticing it.
"What's your name, night manager of Sbarros?"
Eric felt he should be wary of this man, as if a strange premonition just wracked his bones. This was a man who could change things, and that observation made absolutely no sense to Eric. Again, he ignored the feeling. "I'm Eric. Eric Murphy."
Again, a pause--sounds of things being shifted quickly, as if he were rifling through a stack of records.
“And you are?” Eric asked, obeying his mother’s directives on the polite use of grammar instinctively. (Even though she rarely bothered to be so polite herself, she would whack her son a good one upside the head if she heard him being crass.)
"Who, me?" the deejay said. "I'm the Godfather."
A slight snicker, then a dial tone buzzed in Eric's ear for a moment before he realized he'd been hung up on. Putting the phone back on the hook, he realized that the last sickening strains of "Oh, Mandy" were fading and the deejay's voice warbled into the lobby.
"Well, I've just have the most interesting conversation with a disgruntled listener out there in radio land. A first time caller, long time sufferer of Barry Manilow, his arch-nemesis in the world of music."
Eric managed to choke on his own spit as the deejay spoke; he could still hear the Godfather's voice over the sound of his own hacking cough.
"This one's for you, Eric."
As his cough subsided, the driving rhythm of "Paint it Black" by the Rolling Stones entered his ears. He smiled.
"Nice choice, asshole," he said as he returned to the empty lobby and his night's work.
---
It was Saturday night, and Eric struggled to stay on his feet. Saturdays were always the worst, even worse than Fridays, because the kids came out in full force. Not just high schoolers, but kids from middle and even grade school waltzed in like they owned the place, wanting their pizza and sodas and breadsticks on the hop, as if Eric were a waiter in some fancy Italian restaurant.
Shirtsleeves unbuttoned and rolled up past his elbows, a large splotch of marinara on his front from when he collided with Jenny as she carried three cheese pizza slices to the register, and his black work pants and shoes soaked clean through while cleaning an overflow in the women's bathroom, Eric laughed at the disheveled lobby, then grimaced at the hollow sound.
"You okay, boss?" Jenny asked as she walked into the lobby, gathering her coat and purse under one arm. Her brown hair, usually pulled back in a neat bun, had pieces cascading out from all sides. There was a smudge of dried marinara on her cheek, a lurid stain, most likely missed during their hasty post-collision clean-up.
Eric nodded and saw Jenny wince when she glanced at his shirt.
"It's okay," he said, walking with her to the front door, forcing himself to smile. "It was an accident."
Jenny relaxed, her shoulders slumping. "I'll see you tomorrow."
"You bet," he replied. Watching her move across the tiny parking lot, shooting him that salute from underneath the light of one flickering streetlamp, Eric knew more separated them than just one year. She had her senior year ahead of her, and her hopes of the future were still shiny, unformed visions in her dreams. Working the night shift at Sbarros and taking business classes during the day at the local community college weren't exactly the dreams he'd hoped for upon graduation.
Looking at the trashed lobby made Eric feel queasy, so he headed back toward the registers and leaned against the chipped linoleum counter and closed his eyes, pinching the bridge of his nose. A habit he's acquired after graduation, he guessed.
This moment had almost become relaxing for Eric when Barry Manilow's unmistakable tenor invaded his silence.
"There you are, looking just the same as you did, last time I touched you...and here I am, close to getting tangled up inside the thought of you..."
Eric groaned. Barry was the last thing he needed right now. In a sudden burst of movement, he went to the phone and dialed the station's number.
It was curious that Eric remembered the number after having only dialed it once, but it was just another observation his exhausted mind ignored.
"You're on with the Godfather on KLVW."
It was that same voice, a little smug, a trifle contrived, but still rich and full in Eric's ears. "Do you really want me to put a horse's head in your bed, or what?"
The deejay laughed. "That would be difficult, since you don't even know who I am."
Something shifted inside Eric, bizarre buoyancy lifting his mood for no reason at all. He hadn’t even realized he’d been sad, but the bubble of happiness inside his chest almost became too much to bear.
“Jesus Christ, just play something that doesn’t make me want to puke all over the lobby.”
“Why, ‘cause you don’t want to puke on all those annoying kids? I might play Manilow until you vomit, just so they could get a little taste, yeah?”
“It’s after midnight, asshole. No more customers.” Eric laughed.
“No more Barry, then. It’s a shame, though. A little revenge might do you good, Eric.”
He shook his head, thinking he would like nothing better than to cover those stupid kids in something disgusting, just once. “Make my night a little easier and play some better music, man. Okay?”
“Oh, I have just the thing. You’re gonna love it.”
“If I say I love it, will you tell me your name?”
“Ooh, nice try, but it’s not gonna happen. Like the eight ball says: try again later.”
And the Godfather hung up, but it didn’t bother Eric as much this time. He guessed the name thing was just a quirk of the deejay world, so he shouldn’t press anymore. Moving away from the wall and back into the lobby, stretching his shoulders as he went, Eric heard the current song fade out early.
Suddenly, Eric heard Joey Ramone belting out “Pinhead” through the restaurant speakers: “Gabba gabba, we accept you, we accept you, one of us…” If Eric danced around the lobby while he cleaned, doing much more than his usual restrained side-step and looking a bit like he was having a seizure, there was no one around to see him. No one to see the big smile he had on his face as he balanced on a rickety table to play air guitar.
---
A month went by, and Eric spoke with the Godfather three times each week. Friday, Saturday, Sunday. If Eric wasn’t the manager, he’d be worried that someone would wonder about how the restaurant phone bill had risen considerably over the last few weeks. But Alby Denker, the day shift manager, had finally become useful to Eric-his aggravating laziness meant that Eric could, and often did, handle the restaurant’s bills, along with inventory and product invoices.
Eric would have been surprised to realize that he associated the conversations he and the Godfather shared with the Barry Manilow song requested each evening.
Three weeks ago, on a Saturday, Barry sang “Can’t Smile without You” while the Godfather told Eric how he’d gotten his position at the radio station: “Now some people say happiness takes so very long to find-Well, I'm finding it hard leaving your love behind me.” Eric, in turn, talked about Sbarros: the bratty, entitled kids, the lazy employees, the sickly sweet smell of rotting marinara.
Two weeks ago, a Sunday, the Godfather admitted to having been in Sbarros before as Barry told the world to “Read ‘em and Weep.” Recently. That Friday, in fact. Eric was shocked for a moment, hearing Barry chant: “If I could only find the words then I would write it all down, if I could only find a voice I would speak, oh, it's there in my eyes, oh, can't you see me tonight -come on and look at me and read 'em and weep!” Eric said he didn’t believe him, but the Godfather described him thoroughly, down to the stains on his shirt. When Eric asked about the station, complaining that he couldn’t just walk in on the Godfather at work, the deejay said not to worry. He was welcome anytime.
That week, on Friday, Eric had called 911 when an elderly woman collapsed while eating a breadstick. He gave her the Heimlich, and watched with detached fascination as the obstructing morsel flew out of the woman’s mouth, onto a table surrounded by unruly preteens. “Somewhere Down the Road” played that night (“We had the right love, at the wrong time, maybe we've only just begun, maybe the best is yet to come”), but Eric could hardly hear Manilow’s voice over the sound of their raucous laughter as he told the Godfather the whole story. And, if a few tears slipped out while he shared stories about his mother, well, the deejay didn’t say anything. Just commiserated with his own story: his mother threw him out when he was fifteen, sending him to her sister’s house for three years. Banishing him, more likely. When Eric said as much, the Godfather just laughed and said things were looking up.
If the Godfather’s laugh had a tendency to make him feel light-headed, Eric ignored the feeling. Didn’t even realize he paid attention to the station all night, just hoping to hear his voice. Besides, paying attention was what friends did for one another. Nothing unusual about it. Eric, who was man enough to admit he missed his high school friends, was just lonely. That’s all.
---
It was Sunday, the slow night, and Eric was supremely grateful. Even the kids must have had other things to do, because it had been the slowest summer night thus far. Jenny went home in high spirits, remarking on how happy Eric seemed, even though the tip jar was nearly empty. Eric just winked solemnly, a combination sure to make Jenny laugh.
People shouldn't feel things, in Eric's mind. They either knew or they didn't know. Knowledge was solid, feelings a mess of amorphous, shifting mists which came and went without rhyme or reason. Eric had little patience for feelings. So, when Barry Manilow sounded through the speakers again that night, he didn’t wonder why changing the station never occurred to him.
Barry crooned: “Up, down, trying to get the feeling again, all around trying to get the feeling again, the one that made me shiver, made my knees start to quiver, every time she walked in…”
Eric did what he’d done the past month, just picked up the phone and called the station.
“Hey, Eric. How’s the night treating you?”
Eric smiled. “Not too bad, actually. Slow, but good.”
“I bet. You needed a break,” the Godfather said, his voice as mellifluous as always. “That’s gotta be tough work.”
“Now, I’m guessing deejaying, that’s stressful, right? I mean, you might get a wrist cramp or something, changing records all night.” Eric leaned one shoulder against the wall, a small smile on his face.
“Hey, it isn’t a walk in the park, you know. It takes effort, keeping things running.”
“Yeah, and talking to the Manilow lover is a real occupational hazard.”
“No, Manilow’s the hazard. She’s just nuts.”
They laughed, Eric’s laughter echoing in the empty lobby, still messy despite his efforts to clean it before Barry came on.
“You know, we don’t have to play this game anymore. You can stop pretending.” His voice was playful, with a soft slur which made Eric feel a bit dizzy.
“What game?
"Can you really not know who I am, after all this time?" His voice was deeper, laced with a sadness which put a lump in Eric's throat.
"No. I don't. So why don't you tell me who you are?"
A pause, a sharp exhalation, then a dial tone. That shrill buzzing, after listening to the Godfather all night, coiled around his brainstem and squeezed. Pain arced through Eric's mind, and he flung out one arm against the counter to keep himself from falling.
Eric knew him from somewhere. That was the only explanation. But Eric knew lots of people, and there was no telling when or where he had met the deejay before.
His mother’s strident voice cut through his despondent musings. Yeah, you knew him, Eric, she said, but why bother? If he ain’t around anymore, is he really worth the damn effort? You should be working, not calling random strangers! Don’t waste your time, son.
As always, his mother’s ever-present voice was right. He had friends, and he had work to do. So what if his friends were suddenly gone, off to bigger and better things, while he was still here, working a job filled with demanding customers and their disgusting messes? There was no need to waste time on a fruitless mystery. After all, the Godfather was just the damn late night deejay, nothing special.
But his instincts whispered that this man was somehow familiar to him, had been from the beginning. However, as a good son should, he set aside his questions for the night, but didn’t banish them.
Eric sighed and did the only thing he could think of. He went back into the lobby and kept cleaning. But he let his instincts talk to him, let his mother's directives show him the way. Because, he felt, the answer would come to him.
Eric hated relying on feelings, but there was nothing else left to do.
----
In the end, it was simple. So simple, in fact, that Eric realized that some part of him must not have wanted to know who the Godfather was. He called the station and asked. When the receptionist, in her flat, bored voice, said his name, it didn’t feel like a revelation from on high. It felt like a sharp thud in his chest, right underneath the breastbone, telling him he’d known all along. And now, his high school yearbook held limply in his hands, Eric understood why.
Although Eric thought he didn't know where he'd stored all his high school keepsakes when he sold his mother's house, his body somehow knew exactly where, in this tiny, meager apartment, the box was, buried in the back of his crawlspace.
Eric pulled out other boxes, full of his mother's things which he hadn't been able to part with, in the end, setting them carefully to the side, leaving their contents undisturbed.
The box marked HIGH SCHOOL, in his cramped, all-caps handwriting, was much more worn looking than the boxes filled with his mother's things, and much smaller. A puff of dust whirled upward as Eric opened it.
The yearbook was from 1996, black hardcover with scrawling blue text across the front. Inside the covers, Eric pondered all the different signatures from that year, calling up a slew of memories in bright hues behind his eyes. But one was missing; only hasty, strong eraser marks left in its place.
Something tightened inside Eric's chest. Riffling through the pages, he knew he'd find the page he wanted without scanning the number. It had a frayed edge in the middle, a cut made in the paper long ago but not completed, left to rip and tear, but not be removed.
Funny, all the times he'd looked over this yearbook with John, his best friend, and they'd never stopped at this page. Now he knew why.
It was toward the back, where yearbook staff had placed pictures which didn't fit anywhere else, but were decent enough to fill up random spaces.
Eric knew he'd heard that voice before.
The picture's main focus was a threesome of smiling freshmen in the foreground, toward the extreme left of the frame. Someone had slacked on their cropping job, because the majority of the photo was slightly out of focus, a background lost within the depth of field. In the middle, there were two boys sitting at a table with a book between them.
"Freshmen English," Eric said. "Lord of the Flies."
The boys' faces were in profile, both smiling at each other, as if they'd just enjoyed some particularly funny joke together. Eric, on the right, was staring straight into the other boy's eyes.
That other boy, with his thick, curly black hair and too-wide eyes, had an easy, earnest smile, fit to win over anyone without even trying.
"His name was Vince. Vincent Chase." A shiver passed through Eric as he said the deejay's name. The name, it seemed, clicked inside his head and Eric remembered.
---
Jenny left, and Eric watched her go. She said earlier she was thinking about getting a new job, and Eric didn't blame her. For minimum wage, this work was too hard. So, when she'd asked if Eric was feeling okay, blaming the work was easy. She'd accepted it just like she'd accept anything Eric Murphy told her, he believed. Because she was naive. Because she didn't know.
Know what? The truth? Eric went through the motions that night like a man sleepwalking, because the truth had covered him like a suffocating blanket, blocking out all else but what had happened to him, what the Godfather had done to him.
It was so easy to forget him. Just like his mother had said it would be. Vince was his English tutor that year, sitting beside him during fifth period, explaining the significance of mental illness in Hamlet and the use of story framing in Wuthering Heights. After getting D’s on two essays, Eric was scoring easy B’s with Vince’s help, and not by cheating, either (as John often implied-he did so himself).
When Vince admitted he was struggling to pass gym class, Eric helped by teaching him the rules to games he’d played since childhood: basketball, baseball, football. During one of their training sessions, Vince admitted he’d been hit by a car as a child and was in the hospital for over a month to recover. His mother never allowed him to play sports or do anything remotely physical since.
Vince showed him a scar he had from the accident, a long, jagged line running down his right rib cage, very pale against his naturally tan skin. He was tall and lanky, with hardly any muscle on him. Although Vince worked hard to learn the games, he struggled to develop the muscles necessary to actually have any fun playing. But, even when he couldn’t carry his textbook-laden backpack anymore because he ached so badly, he still smiled and never complained, not once.
That smile, Eric knew, was the reason he carried Vince’s backpack every day. They spent all their time together, bumming around the neighborhood when Eric wasn’t in wrestling practice. Every day, during the season, Vince would wait outside for him, behind the bleachers, until Eric said goodbye to his teammates and found him there.
Vince never hung out with Eric’s other friends, or came to his house to meet his mother. Eric never met any of Vince’s family or friends, either. When they were together, Eric felt the whole world slip away until it was just the two of them, enveloped in their own, private world. They didn’t need anyone else. No one else had that effect on him, not even John Miller. Not even his mother.
Early that May, Eric emerged from practice and was unable to find Vince anywhere. Walking home alone, he ignored a sticky lump in his throat. Not knowing where Vince lived, not even having his phone number, excluded any real chance of finding his friend.
When he walked in the door, his mother was waiting for him, sitting at the table with a drink in one hand and a letter beside her. Eric felt his skin squirm under his mother’s scrutiny, but then she sighed, her body relaxing.
She said she had bad news for him. His new friend, Vincent Chase, had come by the house earlier to say he was going away with his family for a little while because there’d been some kind of emergency. He wasn’t sure when he was going to be back.
Eric felt that same, sharp feeling underneath his breastbone, an intense ache threatening to strangle him. He listened to her speak and each calm, composed word chipped away at his crumbling composure. Vince was gone.
Eric burst into tears. He turned abruptly away, covering his face with his hands, but didn’t leave the room. After a moment, he felt his mother’s callused hands on his shoulders, as gentle as they were when he was a child.
She told him not to be sad. He had other friends, better friends, ones who wouldn’t leave without saying goodbye. John Miller, she said, wouldn’t ever do that.
And that was the end of it, the end of them. Vince had left, but now he was back. He could have all the answers he wanted, if he just picked up the phone and dialed his number. If he was brave enough to ask the right questions.
“This is KLVW and you’re on with the Godfather.”
“Hey, Vince,” Eric said.
There was no surprised gasp, no shock in his voice. “About time. It took you forever to figure out it was me.”
“Um, yeah. I’m-uh-a little slow on the uptake, sometimes.”
Vince laughed. “Don’t think I don’t remember. You’d have failed English without me.”
“And you’d have been stuck in gym class for another whole year without me.” Eric smiled.
“True, true. I never did get to thank you for that.”
“Are you kidding? I was doing the world a public service, really. I mean, a kid who sucks at every sport is just an embarrassment.”
“Well, I hate to tell you, but I’m still pretty bad at sports. That has nothing to do with my awesome teacher, though.” His voice was a bit faster now, more energetic, bright flashes of gold in warm sunlight.
“Yeah.” For the first time, Eric had no idea what to say. His heart was beating slowly but thickly in his chest, measured but strong.
Their laughter tapered off-both were quiet for a moment.
“Eric,” Vince said. “I have to tell you something. I’ve gotten a job offer at a different radio station, one on the West coast. In LA.”
Eric’s heart seemed to stop beating. He forced himself to take a deep breath. “That means you’ll be leaving, then.”
“Well, uh-that’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I haven’t accepted the job offer yet.”
“Why?”
“Because of you, Eric. I was waiting for you.”
A peculiar lightness invaded Eric’s chest-suddenly, it wasn’t difficult to breathe at all. All his tension receded, replaced by something almost giddy. But something else kept him tethered to reality, a question he needed to ask.
“Why’d you leave, Vince? When we were kids?”
“Don’t you know?” Now he did sound shocked.
“My mother said there was some sort of family emergency. But you never came back. I-I wanted you to come back.”
“Didn’t you get my letter? I left it at the house.” Vince paused. “But maybe your mother found it first.”
His voice was so dark, so suddenly filled with anger that Eric flinched. “What happened with my mother? How did you even meet her?”
“Jesus, she never told you.” Vince let out a frustrated sigh. “I came by your house that day, but not to say goodbye. I-I had planned to say everything in person, after practice, but I lost my nerve. So I wrote it all out and went to your house, wanting to just leave the damn thing on your stoop for you to find later. But your mother was home-she invited me in.”
“Wait-how’d you know where I lived?”
“I asked around. Wasn’t exactly privileged information, you know. Anyway, I gave your mother the letter and tried to leave, but she asked me to stick around for a while. I don’t know when, but while I was there she must have read the letter and-”
Eric’s breathing came fast. “And what, Vince?”
“She told me to get out. That she would never let me see you again. Said she saw the note in your yearbook and that her boy would never be a fucking queer.”
Eric couldn’t say anything-he kept replaying the memory of that day he’d come home and cried in front of his mother. Vince’s letter had been on the table the whole time. He’d never asked, just listened as his mother told him how easy it would be to forget his friend with the curly, dark hair and wide smile.
Eric felt sick and it took him several moments to realize he was still on the phone with Vince, still in the present. His mother’s voice had said he should leave this mystery behind him, let it go. But now her voice was silent.
Eric’s voice was unsteady. "Was--was it you the whole time? The Barry Manilow thing, I mean."
"Not the first time."
Eric felt that peculiar lightness again, like he was spiraling upward, out of his body into some unknowable territory, full of smoke and superstition. Although it hadn't been unpleasant before, it felt horrible now. Because he knew what it was, and his hands trembled with what that lightness might mean.
Because, if there was one thing Eric knew above all others, it was that everyone had to come down sometime. Everyone had to land.
"I won't go, Eric. If you want, I'll stay here. With you," Vince said, his voice quiet but sure.
Eric opened his mouth to speak, but no sound emerged; his jaw opened and shut a few times like a fish out of water.
Vince continued, his voice moving to a faster tempo. Streaks and flashes of gold, catching the eye and gone in an instant. "What we had, that year. I've never forgotten it. You--you were kind to me, Eric. And sweet. Those eyes, they really haven't changed. Jesus, I thought I'd never see you again...You haven't changed, I know it. Just, just give me a chance, us a chance. I've missed you."
Eric could speak now, felt something bright surge inside his chest, ready to spill from his lips like wine from a golden bowl, sweet and good. But his mother's voice stopped everything, dropping a lead weight through the lightness in his chest, settling like a slick ball in the pit of his stomach.
You're a queer, she said. And Eric had no reply. It was true.
"Hey, Eric, you still there?" Vince's voice was breezy, a bit embarrassed but exhilarated all the same. "I mean, I'm bearing my soul here and you've got nothing to say?"
Eric knew something, then: Vince was certain he would say yes. And why shouldn't he be? Eric had sent him all the right signals, had wanted this just as much as Vince had.
It’s still wrong, Eric. It’s still fucking sick, his mother intoned. The sting of her rebuke was almost as bad as the guilt pulling him steadily back to the ground.
"What did you write, in my yearbook?" Eric asked, his voice hoarse.
"Can't you read it yourself?" Vince laughed.
Eric closed his eyes tightly, choking down whatever lie he wanted to tell to spare himself. "I--I erased it."
Silence. So long this time that Eric thought Vince had just left the phone off the hook and walked away. Away from the studio, from his memories, from a childhood friend who hadn't even remembered his name.
"I love you." The voice was colder now, ice clinging to a tarnished chandelier.
"What?"
"That's what I wrote. I love you." A hollow voice, a chilly northern wind scraping away nothing but the harshest reality.
The space between them widened with every second they spent on that phone together, tearing easily through the bond they'd created those past weeks, rending apart those childhood memories.
Suddenly, there was a click, a final resounding end to their midnight calls.
And what was it, really? The sickening thud of landing back on solid ground, left with only a dial tone for solace, a disgusting, empty restaurant for comfort. For the first time, Eric felt a wave of hate for his mother's voice, her potent memory.