3-3
1877 Words
EVENTUALLY, ALEX RUNS out of targets and decides that Paul has been sitting alone long enough. He packs the things up carefully, then flops down next to Paul on the grass and looks up at the sky.
“I had no idea you could do that,” Paul tells him.
“Mmm. Not a thing to bring up in polite conversation. Especially not in Hollywood hippie society. But here?” he shrugs.
“You’re really good.”
Alex grins. “I am. I should be, even if I’m out of practice. I spent enough time shooting in high school.”
“I got pictures,” Paul holds the phone up so Alex can see. “Mind if I post one?”
“Knock yourself out,” Alex says. He shuts his eyes.
Paul’s not saying anything about lunch, which means either that Alex is supposed to ask or that Paul doesn’t want to talk about it. Alex isn’t going to press. If posting a random picture of him to Twitter is going to make Paul feel better about his day, he doesn’t really mind.
He nods when Paul asks for his okay on a caption (Look what Alex can do!’) and is glad when Paul slips his phone back into his pocket and then lies down next to him in the grass.
“Done,” Paul says.
“Cool.”
Paul’s phone chimes insistently as people retweet it until he thumbs the setting over to turn off notifications. Alex rolls his eyes. Paul always forgets that things tend to get out of hand when he tweets anything that mentions him.
For a long while they drift, not saying anything and watching the clouds sail by overhead. There’s so much quiet to enjoy.
“It’s really beautiful out here,” Alex says apropos of nothing.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. Makes me wonder. Is Indiana beautiful, but I just can’t see it?”
“Probably.”
“It’s not beautiful to you here, is it?” Alex asks, turning his head to look at him.
“Mmmm, no. It is. Just horror coexists. Like the crickets. And I worked hard to get out of here. Nearly didn’t.”
Alex hums slightly, leaving space for the conversation that he thinks is coming.
“I almost drowned in the lake when I was a kid,” Paul offers.
“Didn’t you know how to swim?” Alex asks.
“No, I dunno. Something grabbed my leg.”
“What do you mean something?”
“I don’t know... I mean, weeds or something. It was dumb. My sister pulled me out. I’m a better swimmer now, although you couldn’t pay me to go back in there.”
Paul chuckles a little, and it makes Alex fond. They’re of a type to be amused by the really dumb s**t that’s happened to them, even if a lot of it isn’t supposed to be for laughing.
“I know you want me to tell you what happened,” Paul says. “And I will. I’m just — working up to it.”
Alex wants to say something, but at that moment his phone chooses to ring. It’s Liam. Alex frowns at it before ignoring it. He’s on vacation, and that includes from colleagues he sees way too much of, no matter how close their friendship has become. If it’s important, Liam will call back. Over and over again until he answers, because Liam, Alex’s friend, kind-of ex, and co-star on The Fourth Estate is annoying that way.
“What does he want?” Paul asks.
“Didn’t answer it, so don’t know,” Alex says. He chooses to not comment on what now seems to be an immovable bit of edginess from Paul around the way Liam is unavoidably enmeshed in their lives.
“Could be secret early renewal news,” Paul offers.
Alex shrugs. Paul’s not wrong. Liam is likely to hear things off-the-record from Victor long before there’s official news, but Alex is fairly sure he’d only share if the word were bad. It’s too nice a day — despite everything — to interrupt it with that. And if it were news about Paul’s show, it wouldn’t be coming from Liam anyway.
Paul takes a deep breath. “So, I didn’t exactly try to kill myself,” he says.
Alex feels dizzy. Of course Paul tells him he’s not telling him something right now and then manages to wait only five minutes after effectively waiting years. If it weren’t so strange and horrifying, the whole situation would be hilarious.
“What were you trying to do?” Alex asks, keeping his voice neutral.
“I was having a fight with my father. One of those free-ranging arguments where you want to run away but you’re not fast enough and the fight goes from room to room.”
Alex wants to say he has no idea what Paul means. His house growing up was so small, and he hasn’t had a fight like that as an adult. But that’s not true. Because that’s exactly what the fight when they broke up was like, until Paul had said how angry he was instead of actually being angry.
“What was it about?”
“Nothing. Everything. Girls. The lack of girls. My grades. The thing with the pot. My best friend. My clothes. Church. I mean, anything and everything. My attitude, and Lord knows, he wasn’t wrong about that.” Paul gives a strange little chuckle.
“I feel like the next question is ‘What did he do?’” Alex says carefully.
Paul shakes his head against the grass. “No. Valid assumption, but I was so angry, and I remember wanting to hurt him, except that didn’t feel like enough? It wasn’t good enough? So what if he hurt? People hurt all the time without knowing they’re wrong, without having to live with the consequences of it.”
Alex reaches for his hand, but Paul pulls away, folding his hands on his chest and breathing evenly.
“No. Let me get this out. We wound up in the kitchen, and I just kept asking, I mean screaming, really, at him about what he wanted from me. Like, there was this list of everything that was wrong with me, but there weren’t any answers.”
Alex snorts. “I love those fights,” he says quietly. He knows what Paul means, even if he feels increasingly non-resident in his body as the story goes on.
“I pulled a knife out of the block in the kitchen and cut my own wrists,” Paul says. “I didn’t know how else to show him that I hated myself enough that he could stop talking. There was blood f*****g everywhere.”
Paul pauses for a long moment. Alex feels himself shrink in sheer horror. He struggles to breathe.
“So,” Paul turns onto his side to look at Alex, “that’s why I don’t tell that story. It’s a lot easier to let people think the obvious thing that’s not exactly true. Also, can’t recommend psychiatric inpatient treatment as an exciting summer vacation, but so it goes.”
“Paul.” Alex feels small, and numb, and very far away. He wants to grab for Paul again to anchor him — or himself — but he’s afraid to touch him. He isn’t sure his hand won’t go right through him, here in this beautiful, terrible place.
“I love you,” he says instead, desperately, like the words can call Paul back from the past and have made this have not-happened. In what world is suicide not the worst option? His voice is shaky. The small bit of his brain that isn’t obsessed with the horror of what Paul’s just told him is shocked and unsettled by that. He didn’t tell it to be shaky.
Paul tries to smile and doesn’t quite manage. “Love you too.”
Alex’s phone goes off. Again.
“Are you f*****g kidding me?” Alex mumbles.
“You should at least see who it is,” Paul says. He’s not wrong. They’re both waiting on too much incredibly important news.
“Victor.” Alex drops the phone between them. Dealing with his boss, let alone his casual menace, is the last thing he wants right now. But he’s not going to pretend he doesn’t want to know about the renewal.
“You should answer it,” Paul says.
Alex feels sick. Because there’s no world where this call — whatever it is — should be more important than what Paul’s just told him. But this is now and therefore, it sort of is. With the unanswered call from Liam earlier, he does not have a good feeling about this.
“WHAT THE HELL DO YOU THINK YOU’RE DOING?” Victor yells into Alex’s ear before he can even say hello.
“Being on vacation?” Alex says. He’s confused and whatever delayed reaction he’s having to Paul’s story is just starting to kick in. He is not okay to deal with whatever this is.
“Do you have any idea how crazy you and a g*n have made the internet?” Victor says, the decibel level only barely reduced.
“Everything I do makes the internet crazy.”
“My God, Alex. I am in the middle of some terrible f*****g negotiations AND YOU’VE JUST SINGLE-HANDEDLY REIGNITED AMERICA’S g*n CONTROL DEBATE.”
“I sort of doubt that.” Alex is still trying to catch up. “And Paul tweeted it.”
“You two are IDIOTS.”
“Victor,” Alex snaps to get his attention. “Your timing is not great. What can either of us do right now, and then we can all touch base later?” Alex reaches for Paul, who’s looking at him with a ridiculous amount of pride in the middle of all this bullshit and misery.
Victor, of course, doesn’t have an answer other than a list of things Alex and Paul shouldn’t do next. The whole thing is, frankly, a little crazy. Alex feels bad for him — a little. Victor views himself as responsible for every one of the hundreds of people that work on Fourth and with its fate up in the air, that has to be hard.
“Is there anything else I can do?” he says once Victor has run out of steam.
“Yes. Call Liam back. Like a good little New York liberal, he’s completely freaked out.”
“You’re f*****g kidding me,” Alex blurts before he can help himself.
“I am not. We will touch base later,” Victor says threateningly before the line clicks closed.
Alex stares at the phone in his hand.
“Not good news?” Paul hazards.
“Apparently America doesn’t like its darling little gay to have a gun.”
“Technically, it’s my gun.”
“I think that makes it worse,” Alex rolls his eyes as he scrolls to Liam’s number.
Liam picks up immediately. “Alex? What are you doing?”
It’s an odd repetition of Victor’s initial reaction, except much quieter and less angry.
“I’m hanging out with Paul. How are you?”
“The internet says you have a gun.” Liam sounds aggrieved.
“The internet is incensed about things that are not its business.”
“Why do you have a g*n?”
Alex rolls his eyes. “Liam. The internet being inappropriate is nothing new. This doesn’t actually affect you. What the hell is your problem?”
Liam babbles his way through a paragraph of a response that is, at best, incoherent. Whatever has him upset, it’s more than a principled, political objection to firearms. Yet it provides Alex no information he can use to soothe whatever inexplicable anxieties have cropped up in Liam’s head.
“Okay, I don’t really know what to say to that,” Alex says when Liam finally winds down. “What do you need from me?”
“Can we hang out when you’re back in town?” Liam sounds wary, of what, God knows.
“Sure,” Alex says. “Now, I know Victor doesn’t care, but I really am on vacation with Paul, so can I get back to that?”
“Yeah. Okay,” Liam says. He sounds meek now. “Bye.”
“Goodbye.” Alex hangs up and drops the phone on the grass.
Paul just stares at him. He looks like he doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Alex can sympathize.
“So that was an interesting fifteen minutes.”
Paul chuckles weakly. “You yelled at Victor.”
“He yelled at me first.”
“This is why I’m impressed.”
Alex tries to smile. “Just priorities.”
“What did Liam want?”
“To know why I’ve offended all of his sensibilities by having a g*n. I can’t figure out if he’s more afraid that I’m in danger or putting everything else in danger.” He takes a breath and lies back again with his arms folded behind his head. “This place is weird. I’m not sure he’s wrong to worry.”
“Maybe we should go back inside,” Paul suggests.
“Oh, f**k no. Not yet.”
“It was a long time ago,” Paul says.
“I know. And in my head it was twenty minutes ago.”
“Okay.”
They lapse into silence again, until Alex says, “Psychiatric in-patient?”
Paul keeps his eyes on Alex. “That was not a good summer.”
“Do you want to talk about it?”
“Given that I didn’t tell you for almost two years, not particularly. It wasn’t terrifying or traumatic or anything like that. At least not from this vantage point. But it was not my happiest time.”
“And you had lunch with your father today.”
Paul nods. “Yeah.”
“And I’m the one that doesn’t talk,” Alex says. He’s far more baffled than angry.
* * *
- Writer
