Best Gay Romance 2013, page 13
“How old was he?”
“I don’t know.”
Then again, after a pause, he added, “It was part of why I left. He was too young. I wasn’t sure what I could give him. So I ran away.”
“You ran away?”
“I left him in Kabul. I told him that I had to return to America for a while, because of a family problem; that I would be back soon. He took it okay, because I convinced him that I was coming back. There was no family problem.”
“Are you going to go back?”
“I’ve gotten a new assignment. Working in Tunisia.”
He lay still for a while, breathing slowly in and out. Then we both rose and showered together, stroking each other to another orgasm beneath the warm flow of water.
Clean, exhausted and back in the bed, I drifted off to sleep in his embrace. I sensed him stir hours later, rise out of bed and begin to get dressed. The activity aroused Inky in the other room, and I groggily stayed awake until Sam was dressed and at the door.
“Good-bye and thanks,” he said, as he left. “I hope you find him.”
I nodded and closed the door, petting Inky and groping my way through the darkness of the apartment and back to sleep. I was by then too tired to miss him, but I knew I would in the days that followed.
WHAT WE LEAVE BEHIND
Shanna Germain
There is a dying dog the size of a small horse in my kitchen. She is nearly as tall as the kitchen table. Nearly as wide. With a hell of a lot more long white hair.
“I’m sorry,” I say to the man who brought her here. “There’s been a mistake.”
The man who brought her is on his knees on my kitchen floor, rubbing the dog’s brown- and gray-tipped ears. He has bits of gray in the dark hair above his own ears.
“It’s okay, Annie,” he says to the dog, who lets her tongue fall from her mouth and tilts her head sideways to listen. “This is gonna’ be sooo good for you. Okay, girl, it’s all good.”
He doesn’t seem to care that he’s talking baby talk to this polar bear–like creature in front of me. He doesn’t seem to hear me saying that the polar bear cannot stay in my kitchen.
When the man stands, his knees pop on the way up. “Ack, getting old.” He shakes his legs out and laughs. “Too much bending down to dogs is more like it.”
Even standing, he can’t seem to keep his fingers out of Annie’s fur. They nuzzle the pads of her ears while he pulls a clipboard from his shoulder bag.
I want to touch Annie, too. She’s almost all white, except for those ears. From here, her fur looks like soft fuzz all over. But I don’t touch her. I can’t. It’s not that she’s dying. That, I’m used to. It’s that she looks so damn healthy.
By the time Bella came to us, she was already missing her back leg from the knee down and was getting oral pain meds twice a day. Her owners had tried to save her by cutting off the tumored foot. But when the cancer spread, they decided it was too much and turned her over to the shelter. That’s when she came to Thom and me.
It had been Thom’s idea to take in a dying animal. A few years back, our local shelter had joined with a group of vets to start a hospice program for animals—some strays, some abandoned—who were dying, but still had quality time left in their lives. The goal was to get the animals into a good final home, a place where they could die with love and compassion. “We can still do something good,” Thom had said when he’d heard of it. “Think of it, these animals, having to die alone.”
He was thinking of himself too, of me after he was gone. That was after he got sick, but before we realized what it was. We’d thought it was AIDS, of course. As a gay man, you spend your whole adult life running from the thing you fear most, so fast that you don’t see the other things on the way by. Until you get sideswiped by them. Car accidents. A guy in the alley with a knife. With Thom, it was lymphoma.
I’d said yes to the first dog—Bella, a lab-something-or-other—because I loved Thom, and I wanted to give him whatever I could, even at the end. Especially at the end. It made his skin ache to feel anything on it, but even so, it was Bella he let in the bed at night, Bella he reached for when the pain was bad. It was helping Bella toward her death that gave us something to focus on, that helped us move toward Thom’s death in a way that felt, if not normal, no, never normal, at least like we were working with some kind of plan.
I didn’t know that somewhere between those last days at home and his final trip to the ER he’d signed us—no, signed me—up for another dog.
I try again with the man in my kitchen.
“Really, I can’t take her,” I say.
He has finally let go of Annie’s ears and is signing a clipboard with a big flourish. He holds the clipboard out to me.
“Of course you can,” he says.
There is something in his dark eyes, a glimmer around the edges that shows he doesn’t have any doubts. I signed on for this dog. She is here in my kitchen with two months to live. Of course I can take her.
I push the clipboard back at him. The ID tag clipped to his shirt pocket says, I’M A PAWSPICE VOLUNTEER! Beneath that it says, SETH.
“Listen, Seth,” I say. “I can’t take her. My partner signed us up and…” It is too complicated, too much to say. The words pile into my throat like bones and stick there.
Seth stays silent for a moment. Annie whines for the first time and pushes the side of her face carefully into his palm.
I feel like I have to say something, so I say, “I can’t do it alone.”
Seth holds the clipboard as though it’s a Frisbee he’d like to wing at my head. I can understand the impulse. He probably sees this all the time—people who sign on for this venture and then decide they can’t see it through.
But he doesn’t wing the clipboard. He just says, “You wouldn’t be alone. You’d have Annie.”
At the sound of her name, Annie pushes her cheek harder against Seth’s hand. When she doesn’t get a response, she turns her head my way. The kitchen is small, and she’s so big that she nearly touches my thigh with her nose. Her eyes are so dark in all that white fur. I think what it would be like to have footsteps in the house again, noise at the door when I get back from errands. Somebody who needs me again.
I need time, so I ask, “What…what is she?”
Seth doesn’t seem to notice my change in subject. Or perhaps he’s content to ride it through.
“Great Pyrenees,” he says. “Full-bred and papered.” He doesn’t say it with anger. He doesn’t shake his head like I would have, to think of someone dropping off an animal, any creature, papered or not, just because it was terminal.
“Pyrenees?” I’ve never even heard of it.
Seth smiles for the first time. It’s a half smile, shy enough to bring out dimples on both cheeks. “It’s Norwegian for small horse,” he says.
Annie wags her tail as though she gets the joke, and then drops herself to the kitchen floor at my feet. Her body makes a thud that’s so loud I wonder if she’s hurt herself, but she just puts her head down on her paws.
I stare at her. She looks so healthy. Thom and Bella both showed their illnesses. They were twins in the way their bodies responded. Losing weight no matter how much I fed them, until their knees were bigger than their thighs, until I could count every vertebra and rib with my fingers. Thom’s fine blond hairs shedding on blankets next to Bella’s dark curls. Neither of them said anything, not by mouth, but at the end, their bodies knew no language but pain.
This is what I think: I can’t do this again.
This is what Seth seems to think: He’s going to do it.
He is unpacking her things from his bag onto my kitchen table. The bag says, PAWSITIVELY PAWSPICE, in green letters with a big paw print on it. Like some kind of bizarre Mary Poppins, he pulls out two leashes, cans of dog food, an unopened package of very large bones, and a bottle of meds that rattles like maracas and makes Annie open her eyes warily.
“She doesn’t need the meds very often,” he says. “I don’t think she likes the way they make her feel.”
I nod. Thom complained of that all the time. The pain, he said, was easier than the disconnect. But then the pain would come on, hard, and he would let me open the IV, watch the liquid drip-drip him into semiconsciousness.
“She looks so healthy,” I say. I don’t even realize I’m going to say it.
“Nasal cancer,” he says. “It’s all on the inside.”
“Nasal?” I’m not sure I know what that even means. I mean, I know what it means, but, “How does nose cancer land a dog on the hospice list?”
“It spreads,” he says.
Seth keeps his eyes on Annie, who is, for the first time, starting to sound like a dog who might have something wrong with her. Her breath whines in, just a bit, only if you’re listening in a quiet kitchen.
Seth reaches into his canvas bag and pulls out a tennis ball punched full of holes. Then he goes down on his knees next to Annie. I’m getting used to seeing the top of him like this. Even though it’s not my own instinct, I like a man who will get down on his knees. Thom was a gardener, always in the dirt. Even near the end.
I realize that Seth is talking to Annie and to me at the same time.
“C’mon, girl, open up,” he says. Then, to me, “Now, you’ll want to catch her just before she falls asleep, and get the ball in her mouth. The holes help with the stridor, so she can breathe. She’s used to it, so if you just ask her to open, she will. A bone works too, if you’re out of tennis balls. Anything big enough to keep her mouth open while she sleeps.”
Annie takes the ball in her mouth and drops her head back down on her paws. Her breathing is noticeably quieter.
Seth is still on his knees. I try not to look at his hands across her back. He has good wrists, muscled enough to chop vegetables and lift weights, soft enough to hold books and wineglasses by the stem.
Seth is still talking about Annie. “You could give her one of the pain pills, too, if she’s having an especially hard time, but the tennis ball usually does the trick.”
I realize I’m not listening. What I’m doing is eying Seth’s back, the curve of his shoulders and hips. This realization makes me want to fuck and cry. While Thom was dying I looked at everything—everything—that walked by. I didn’t touch; that was our rule. But, Jesus, I don’t know if I’d ever been so horny in my life. We fucked some, then, almost to the end. Thom joked we were like pregnant women or little old ladies. He was afraid I wasn’t attracted to him anymore; I was afraid to hurt him.
Near the end, sex took on this ritual: I would lie next to Thom, barely touching, and we would kiss. Just our lips and tongues. His lips still silver-soft from the lip balm he was addicted to. And then I would suck. As much as he was ashamed of his body at the end, he was always proud of his cock. I’m so grateful for that, that he had something to be proud of, always.
And I loved to suck him. The only part of his body that didn’t lose its weight, that stayed full and heavy and alive in my mouth. I’d run my tongue up the ridges and veins, play over and over the soft curve of his head until his sighs changed from a long, slow release to a near-pant. Until he lifted his hips off the bed and put his fingers in my hair and said my name, over and over. And then, sometimes, he could fall asleep without the pain meds. Sleeping then, he looked like my Thom again. If I squinted, I could pretend I didn’t see the IV poles, the hospital bed, the pill bottles, and tissues scattered around the living room. I could pretend he was just napping in the middle of the day.
And then the truth would come back and I’d go down to the laundry room and put already dry clothes in the dryer. Beneath the loud clunk-clunk of jeans and T-shirts, I’d masturbate, hard and fast, without lube, chafing my skin into some kind of pain. Sometimes I came. Sometimes I just cried.
But after Thom died, nothing. It was like my libido got dressed up in its best clothes, and lay down to be buried somewhere between Thom and Bella. For it to come back now, suddenly and with such force that my cock tightens in my jeans—it wrecks me.
I back away from Seth, trying to shift my legs to hide everything that’s happening inside me. Seth raises his eyes to the triangle of my jeans. I turn away and grab the first thing my hand finds. One of Annie’s tennis balls. When I squeeze it, the air shoots out the holes into my palm. I pick up the cans of food, put them into the cupboard, so I don’t have to turn around.
“Well, I guess that’s settled, then,” Seth says to my back.
I’m not sure anything is settled, least of all me.
But I find myself stacking another can of food in the cupboard, saying, “I guess it is.”
Even as Seth gathers his things, I keep my back turned. It isn’t until he says, “I’ll see you both in a week then,” that everything subsides and I can turn and meet his dark eyes.
This, finally, is when I realize that somewhere between “I can’t,” and “You can,” I’ve lost the battle. Annie is staying, and this man is going to be back in my house in a week’s time. And I have no idea how to feel about either.
For the next six days, Annie and I try to get acquainted with each other. She’s learning to navigate the small house with her big body, and I’m learning to get used to the sound of movement in the rooms.
Every day, she chews her tennis ball at the back of my home office while I build websites and answer emails. Every night, I make up the bundle of blankets for her to sleep on in the living room and every night, she stands at the foot of my bed watching as I read or do crosswords or try not to think about Thom. She doesn’t whine or even beg. If she did, I think I could turn her away, make it clear that the bedroom is not her space. But she just watches me, tongue hanging, until I sigh and pat the covers.
“C’mon then,” I say. And she does. Crawls on her elbows and knees across the covers like she’s trying to make herself smaller. Which is nearly impossible for a dog her size. Even the bed lilts sideways at her weight. I give her one of the holey tennis balls and she chomps on it for a while and then puts her head on Thom’s pillow to sleep.
So far, we haven’t needed the drugs, and I think that makes us both happy. It’s a slippery slope, and slipperier at the end. And although Annie’s chart says five weeks, I know that could mean anything. Bella lasted longer than she was supposed to. Thom didn’t.
Every morning, before our walk, I read the quality of life checkpoints off to Annie. It’s a lot of h’s and a few m’s. Hurt, hunger, hydration, hygiene, happiness, mobility, more. It’s supposed to gauge how she’s doing, what her quality of life is like, if she’s having more good days than bad.
I don’t know if we got one of these for Bella. I’m sure we did, but I don’t remember it. I wish I’d paid more attention. I wish I’d had a chart like this for Thom, although he probably would have thrown it across the room. He’d voted for calling the vet to put Bella to sleep as soon as she started showing real signs of pain, when she started having more bad days than good. But for himself, he wanted to hang in until the end, no matter the cost.
On our seventh day, the day that Seth is scheduled to come by for his check-in visit, Annie seems her usual tail-whipping self. Between breakfast and her walk, she manages to knock over the vase of yellow calla lilies that I bought…well, I won’t let myself think why I bought them. The vase doesn’t break, but the callas aren’t salvageable.
Sometimes I swear she knocks shit over just to say that she’s alive. Today, I wonder if she’s not doing it to spite me for running the vacuum last night. Or maybe she’s as nervous as I am about Seth coming. The way my body’s jumping, if I had a tail, I’d be knocking crap off every surface, too.
I tell myself that I’m just nervous because I’ve gotten used to having Annie in the house, and he could decide it’s not working out. But the truth is I’m excited, too.
“Okay, Missy,” I say as I give both of us a once-over in the bedroom mirror—the tip of her tail is soggy from its run-in with the vase and I’ve got a squeaky toy tucked in my shirt pocket, but otherwise we look pretty good. “We need to make a good impression today,” I tell Annie, who wags her tail at me.
And then Seth’s knocking, calling. Annie and I nearly trip each other up trying to get to the door. Halfway across the kitchen, I calm myself and let Annie run ahead. Even so, when I swing the door open, we’re both panting like fools.
Seth’s standing there with a bone the size of Texas in one hand and what looks like a hand-picked bunch of black-eyed Susans in the other. Annie looks back at me like she’s smiling. I take a big gulp of air.
“Hey,” I say.
“Hi,” he says. I’m not sure if I noticed his smile last time, but I do now: straight white teeth, a full bottom lip that I want to suck.
We stand there while Annie’s tail goes back and forth between the two of us. Seth holds out the bone.
“For you,” he says to me.
We both look down at the huge thing in his hand.
Seth realizes what he’s done. “Oh, ah…” he says. The tips of his ears darken with color. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen anything so sexy. He tries to switch hands, to offer the flowers instead, but I take hold of his wrist. I don’t mean to. If I’d thought first, if a vision of Thom had entered my head, I would not have done it. But my body moved first, took his wrist, and now I’m holding the hand that’s holding the bone.
“Come in,” I say. His blushing, the way he fumbles through my doorway, are things Thom would never have done. I’m so grateful for the difference, for not having to compare him to Thom, that I pull him into the kitchen and press him back against the fridge. I find his mouth, that bottom lip, and I suck it into my mouth. He tastes of peppermint and basil.
Seth says something, but I can’t tell what it is. It must be good, because his arms go around my back and he pulls me against him. The knotty end of the dog bone digs into my shoulder, but I don’t care because our mouths are pressed together, our chests and cocks pushing into each other. He’s big and the feeling of him through his jeans makes me grow large too.
