Fight

Chapter 1-2

Nathan’s cell phone rang at almost the exact same time as the alarm clock started to screech. He slapped the clock, and it blessedly stopped blaring, but then the hotel phone lit up and clanged with what was likely his scheduled wake-up call. He managed to take it off the hook, grunting a response that satisfied the person on the other end of the line. All the flailing had him tangled in the covers. He was naked, his belly was splattered in dried patches marking m**********n of yesternight, and the adrenaline rush sent him straight across the hotel’s floor and into the cubicle of a bathroom to dry heave.

“Awesome,” Nathan croaked to the porcelain god.

Nathan sat sprawled on the tiles until he could stand. His head felt like it’d been repeatedly clubbed with a spiky board, and everything hurt like he had the flu. Sweet baby Jesus. What the hell had Duke given him this time?

Not wanting to contemplate the trickster tendencies of drug dealers, Nathan began the second phase of his morning-after routine: the shower. He climbed into the tub, shivering, and took a deep breath. He turned on the water, leaving it icy cold, and let out a whispered scream of protest. He endured, c**k and balls trying to sprint to warmer climes, and slowly but surely, he warmed the temperature until it was scalding. He tore open two bars of hotel soap and used up both of them, scrubbing his skin. He paid particular attention to his hind end, trying to wash away both any microscopic traces of guilt as well as the haunting memory of how good the guilt had felt in its making.

When the scouring was finished, Nathan gave himself another blast of frozen water and got out of the bathtub entirely too awake. He dried off, threw on clean clothes, and was shoving his feet into his shoes when his cell rang again.

It was Laura. s**t. This likely wasn’t good. Nathan answered the phone. “Hi, honey.”

“Don’t you f*****g honey me,” Laura snarled.

“Would you prefer sugar?”

“Where are you?” Laura demanded, ignoring Nathan’s poor humor. She usually did.

“Running errands,” Nathan said in case Laura was standing in his empty apartment and noting his absence.

“Errands? You have got to be—Look, drop whatever it is you’re doing and get over to—Oh, is our table ready, Daddy?” Laura’s voice changed midstride from Satan Woman to Angelic Cherub.

“Yes, this is Nate. He says he’s not feeling well.” A pause and then Laura’s tinkling laughter scraped Nathan’s raw nerves. “Daddy says you’d better be in top shape by Monday morning for your meeting.”

“Tell him I’ll try to explain to my guts that they can’t slither out my asshole while I’m on the clock.”

“Aw,” Laura cooed. “He says, ‘Yes, sir!’” Laura reported to her father, and Nathan knew Gregory Moore had moved out of earshot and on to the readied table because Laura’s voice regained its normal, cut-the-nonsense tone. “You owe me, bitch.”

“Usually,” Nathan said, but Laura had hung up. Nathan flopped onto the bed. He stared at the ceiling, trying to connect the dots and finally gave up. He picked up his phone, slid through screens to get to his schedule, saw an alert, an alarm, and a notation. It read: LUNCH WITH FAMILY MOORE, RIDGES CLUB, SUNDAY, NOON.

“Well…shit.” Nathan covered his eyes with his hands. He pressed the heels into the sockets until he saw white, and then he got up. There was no way to make good on his mistake today, and the fact that he’d made such a grave oversight was more disturbing than he wanted to contemplate. It occurred to him that he might not be coming unhinged. He might already be unscrewed, taken out back, and set on the burn pile waiting for the match.

Checkout was a breeze, and Nathan opted to keep the radio and his phone off and make the drive in silence. He stopped and got himself a ginger ale to soothe his guts, and as the miles flew by, the urge to rush back to his other life dwindled. A flashback of the night before rose like bile to haunt him, but it wasn’t the s*x or the dance or the drugs or drink. He remembered being curled up and dying to be at home with someone who wanted to take care of him. With someone for whom Nathan wanted to return the favor.

Did all men secretly want that, or was it only his sorry ass?

It wasn’t exactly the desire expressed in locker rooms or road trips with the buddies. No, those wants had less to do with the cuddle and more to do with the c**k. Nathan wasn’t immune to those demands either, as the evidence definitely would show, but damn did feeding that beast sometimes feel shallow.

That was probably the come-down talking.

Nathan wasn’t even sure what he meant by “take care of” anyway. He knew it involved holding. Beyond that, though, Nathan was at a loss. All those chick flicks he’d watched over the years, and none of the lessons had stuck.

Nathan had never been the closet queer who dreamed of weddings. He had a hard enough time admitting he was gay at all. Thirty-one years of living, and he had no idea how to deal. Most days he tried to ignore it; the tactic had worked for a long time. Sure there were battles with depression and anger, but didn’t everybody have those? In Nathan’s experience, most people were pretending to be something they weren’t. Hence the rising demand for Prozac.

Mood-altering drugs hadn’t done anything for Nathan, though. His self-hatred had gotten worse and worse. It was especially bad after he finally caved in to the inevitable man-on-man f**k, and Nathan had read enough self-help manuals to know succumbing to his needs made him angry because it reminded him that he couldn’t meet them all the time. Or, maybe even worse, that he was choosing not to meet them all the time. Talk about a recipe for feeling powerless and weak.

The whole nasty spiral was responsible for the wreckage Nathan had made out of his life, but the longing he’d been feeling lately wasn’t like the one that came with wishing for the probably-not-simpler straight, clean life. It wasn’t a straight-versus-gay thing. Maybe all people craved a kind of forgiving affection. The kind that wouldn’t condemn anybody for making mistakes, even if someone made them over and over again. Every time a person would swear he’d learn, and the person who loved him would believe it.

Nathan’s mama had been like that on her good days. When Mama had found Nathan and a boy from Sunday school at First Revival Baptist Church in the bathroom with their c***s out, but not for pissing, she’d hauled him out by the scruff of his neck and shaken him until he promised never to do anything like that again. Nathan had sworn, his mother had hugged him, and she said they wouldn’t bother Nathan’s dad about the incident.

But when his father had caught Nathan and a boy from the basketball team in the driveway out back behind their trailer, forgoing the task of changing the oil in Daddy’s Thunderbird for a little tongue action, he’d put Nathan’s head through the double-wide’s siding.

Mama and Daddy always did have a difference of opinion on what would make Nathan more of a man.

After Nathan’s ears had stopped ringing and the concussion subsided, he’d promised his mother, yet again, that he would stop trespassing into Satan’s garden of temptation. He’d also promised himself he’d stop getting caught by people who’d rather see him dead than see him honest.

Maybe that was the crux of it: truth. The special sauce in the holding, s*x, forgiveness thing that Nathan could admit he wanted when drugs and circumstances tore away all his shields and walls and left him bare-ass up to the search light. Scary stuff, truth. All it’d gotten him so far in life was his brains knocked around, his jaw unhinged, and his whole body once very publicly fired from a high school fast-food job. Turned out, the manager’s innuendo had been rhetorical in nature. The guy was even farther in the closet than Nathan, and he had made an example out of Nathan in front of a dining room full of Nathan’s classmates.

Perhaps he was doing it wrong, this truth business. Telling it to the wrong damned people. Nathan chuckled. Well, obviously, but in his defense, it wasn’t like he had much by way of recent comparison. Nathan couldn’t remember the last time he’d opted to tell the truth instead of a lie.

Such thoughts led him straight to Laura and Monday’s meetings at the office. Nathan was glad for the drive. It gave him time to get all this crazy thinking out of his system so he could get back to surviving his life.

Nathan came out of the mountains and merged onto the roads toward home, his foot heavy on the accelerator and his radar detector working overtime.