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For the moment, the room around them disappeared. Gerard could see Ray’s hair, nothing else, feel it as it fell over his face, got in his mouth. He felt where the stubble on Ray’s jaw had scraped the skin of his neck raw. He didn’t protest, just let it burn.
This was what he liked. The way sweat formed on his wrists so they would slip in Ray’s big hands, and then Ray would tighten his grip. How Ray lay heavy against him, using his full weight to bend him until it hurt, until he felt crushed, like he’d snap in half. Til it forced an involuntary sound from his mouth. Ray used to pause. He’d murmur a question, and Gerard would say, “No, no. Keep going.” They didn’t bother with that anymore. They just kept going.
Nothing was easy anymore, and the fucking was like everything else: pain, exhaustion, numbness. All the ease and grace there had ever been for anything had rubbed away.
He felt Ray closer, heavier, collapsing against him, his movements becoming clumsy and involuntary. But in that moment, he was simultaneously floating further away, out of Gerard’s reach, closer to that starburst of nothing.
It was what Gerard could give him, those precious seconds of being transported. Of being away from here. A few seconds of being nowhere.
Gerard felt Ray’s climax pull at him, its electricity expanding his joints millimeter by millimeter, his body that much closer to flying apart. He gritted his teeth and held on for a moment, willing himself to stay in one piece.
Then, before Ray opened his eyes again, Gerard rolled them both over.
He groped for Ray’s fingers as their bodies slipped apart, pressing Ray’s hand between his legs and underneath as he knelt over him.
“Here,” he said, wanting Ray to use his fingers, give him something to grind against.
“I know, I know,” Ray murmured.
Ray did know. They mostly did the same things. There was no innovation, no seduction. Trying new things, or even thinking very hard about what you wanted—it all seemed a little pointless. It implied a sense of future they both tried not to think about.
Gerard felt Ray’s fingers inside him, and he twisted his hand around his own dick, reaching for that feeling, a cross between pain, rawness, and something else.
His body shook. He let it. It was a relief. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand, hesitated for a moment, and they slowly moved apart.
The room came back into focus.
*
Their broken down apartment was even worse in the bitter desert cold. A spidery crack at the bottom of the living room window let all the wind in, and all the locks had been broken before they got there. But there were still large pieces of furniture—a dirty couch, a double bed. A heavy dining table that Ray would push in front of the door before they went to sleep each night. Even though Gerard had pulled back on most of the clothes he had, the air in the living room still chilled him.
The reason they stayed was the apartment was on a top floor and the fireplace vented through the ceiling. It had been a gas fireplace, an expensive fixture from when the place had been a medium-grade condo. Ray had torn out the pipes and machinery, once it was clear the gas would never come back on, because he had a practical streak and was anticipating more winters.
Gerard rubbed his hands together and knelt by the heap of junk in the corner between the window and hearth. The fireplace’s usefulness depended what there was to burn. This week, it was chairs, looking like they had come from some dated new covenant church or the remodel of a bank waiting room. Ray had mostly pulled them apart, into pieces small enough to wedge into the impractically small and decorative hearth. The varnish on the cheap wood melted and bubbled in the fire. The fumes made Gerard cough, and his eyes stung. The fireplace worked well enough, but only when there were things to burn. Apart from that, a quick fuck helped keep you warm, keep you sane—helped you survive, forget, do both.
For a while at the at the beginning, there had been alcohol and some drugs. Gerard used to see drunk people in the streets from time to time, and sometimes someone would OD in the park. Back when he used to weigh possible futures against this one, a pointless bargaining game he had stopped playing, he thought the ones in the park were the lucky ones. But then the alcohol ran out, and there was nothing. Not gasoline for the cars, not anything. It made sex and pain easier choices, because they were all that was left.
They weren’t the only ones doing it, Gerard knew. He heard other people through the walls sometimes, eerily, several units away or more, never nearby enough to know for sure where they were. It wasn’t unusual to go for a day or two without seeing anyone, especially if no one was selling anything in the park. The city wasn’t deserted, but sometimes it felt that way.
Today was a quiet day. It was midafternoon, not yet dark. The park was empty—too cold for most of the sellers. Gerard looked out the window, still examining the park for signs of life. It was habit, the only entertainment there was.
He heard Ray moving in the room behind him, coming out of the bedroom, but he didn’t turn away from the window. Afterwards was always harder. Coming apart, coming back together as separate objects in space, a physics diagram where two parallel lines never crossed. Gerard rubbed his hands over his face.
The distance between the two lines felt especially large today, and it made the quiet in his head come back with a vengeance. Everything was getting quieter lately—outside, because of the cold, but in his head too, even more than usual. After he and Ray had fought, after the ugly words he’d let slip out, there hadn’t been much more to say. And the silence was starting to scare him.
Snow floated on the air, dry flakes that wafted higher in some kind of updraft near the chilly window. Or ash, Gerard thought, before he could help it. It had been almost a year, but seeing flakes float weightlessly upward like that still made panic clutch at his chest. He stopped himself. It wasn’t ash. He could see the flakes melting into drops of water where they touched the glass.
It was hard—probably would be hard forever—to shake his mind free of the memories of the ash storms. The first time it happened, everyone was still here, the children hadn’t gone. And when they saw the flakes and specks in the grim air, they thought—in a wondrous moment of reprieve—they thought it was snow.
But it didn’t melt the right way. It smeared and made everything dirty. And it was dry, so dry. Lips and fingertips cracked in the vicious air as the days passed. They reported on the news—there had still been news, then—that some volcano, far away, had erupted, and global air currents had swept the ash here.
For a short while, the ash felt like a missive from somewhere else, foreign, possibly friendly, an international letter, maybe from a place where other people were having other lives, where things were normal. But when stories of rashes and radiation migraines came, they knew the volcano had been just another piece of disinformation.
He and Ray hadn’t found each other yet. Lindsey and Bandit hadn’t even gone. It had only been the beginning.
*
When he first met Ray, it had stunned him that anyone could still smile. It caught him so hard, a hook that dragged his stomach up into his chest, his heart into his throat. Gerard had stumbled while he was walking beside him, following him back to this place for the first time.
And in the days that followed, it confused him, then annoyed him, then started to anger him.
There were some moments of reprieve, where they seemed to be seeing things eye to eye. The day there had been two sellers in the park who had nothing but vitamins and personal lubricant, an uncomfortable crowd of bottles of each—the remnants of a drug store, but without anything useful, like soap or aspirin or Neosporin. God only knew where any of it was coming from, now, or from how far away.
After some bargaining, Gerard convinced them to take a faded ten dollar bill that he’d drawn a little sketch of the old Los Angeles skyline on. The sellers gave in without much fight—they knew how little of value they had on the tables—and Gerard came home with two bottles of gummy vitamins and a tiny, ridiculous bottle of strawberry lube.
He had tried to tell the story to Ray when he got home, but his voice crumbled into violent laughter, and he couldn’t stop. He laughed until his eyes dripped, until his stomach ached, and he was almost sick. Then they ate most of the gummy vitamins for dinner because they were sugary and hardly anything was sweet anymore.
Even that, Ray seemed to take calmly in stride. After some moments like that, Gerard had started to feel the beginnings of gratitude toward Ray, a little bit of awe for how he seemed able to see someone at their most pathetic and … well, Gerard didn’t know if Ray forgiving him made sense exactly, but he certainly didn’t seem very fussed about it. Ray probably had been a great father.
But were other kinds of times, too. The fight they’d had had really just been the worst in a series of … ongoing misunderstandings.
When Gerard came home from one of the schools, the one that sometimes still had water, he heard someone singing in the apartment. It took him a moment to recognize the voice as Ray’s. He stood in the doorway, listening.
Remember the laughter, and none of the tears
Ray’s voice was sweet and full of light. It echoed in the empty rooms. It had never occurred to Gerard that Ray could sing, or that he would ever have a reason to. He listened for a second longer and then slammed the door, hard, hoping Ray heard him.
“What are you doing?” Gerard called into the other room. “What are you saying?” His voice was rough and accusatory, harsher than he expected, and Ray’s singing stopped. Gerard rolled his shoulders, like he was trying shrug away a sensation that disgusted him. Ray came out of the bedroom.
“Gee, I was just singing. A little song I wrote once,” he said. His face had that smile on it, the one that seemed to come so easily to him.
Gerard found that he was angry. The innocent song, Ray’s easy smile—something about them made Gerard so angry he was shaking.
“Hey, what’s going on?” Ray came a little closer and held his arm out, as though he expected Gerard to step into his embrace.
Gerard shoved his arm away and pulled out of his reach. He flattened himself against the closed door behind him and glared at Ray.
“The way you act—” Gerard struggled to catch his breath, and then continued, slower, and with more venom. “It’s disgusting. I don’t know what your problem is. How can you talk like that about things that don’t exist anymore?”
Underneath his white hot anger, Gerard felt tears pricking at his eyes.
Ray had dropped his arm. Gerard saw the distance between them and suddenly wondered if Ray would start treating him like he was something dangerous. He thought he saw the ghost of something pass over Ray’s face, a flicker of him pulling away, and it was more than Gerard could take.
Now he really was crying. He felt himself slide down the door. His mind scrambled for words to explain his involuntary reaction. He couldn’t make himself different, couldn’t make himself not a cowardly, despairing mess, but if he found the right words, he could maybe make Ray understand him, at least.
“You’re so … hopeful,” he choked out. “And I don’t … What’s your problem? Don’t you see what’s going on around us?” Gerard talked through his sobs, his voice high and broken. It wasn’t what he had meant to say.
Ray stayed standing where he was, looking down at Gerard. He said slowly, carefully, “You act like you think I’m stupid. Like I don’t get how bad it is.”
For a moment his face hardened, like he might be preparing to answer what Gerard had said with accusations of his own. Gerard knew there were plenty—his anxiety, his fear, his blinding hopelessness, the fact that these currents moved in him with such a force that they could knock him to his knees without his consent. Like they had done when provoked by something as harmless as Ray’s little song. Gerard knew all of this.
Then Ray’s shoulders slumped and he looked away, like he wasn’t even in the same room as Gerard anymore.
“I get it, I get all of it,” Ray said wearily, without any fight left in his voice. “I made a choice about it, a long time ago. About how I would act, how I would be. It was during the evacuations, actually. When I knew that whatever I was like then was how my son would remember me.”
Ray went into the other room, and Gerard stayed on the floor where he was squatting, wiping his eyes with his sleeves.
They hadn't talked about it again. The conversation didn’t matter, Gerard told himself, it didn’t change anything. Gerard didn’t have more hope or less despair, didn’t stop wanting to fuck Ray, didn’t stop noticing how Ray looked at him from time to time, like he was worried for him, or maybe just a bit frightened of him.
*
Back when the evacuations had started, Gerard and Lindsey stayed up nights screaming at each other, only half worrying about waking Bandit in her bedroom at the other end of the house, Gerard doing everything he could not to think of their bags packed, ready to leave him.
He’d packed them. She kept saying they wouldn’t leave, they’d stay, they’d fight this together. Fight what? he kept asking, raising his voice a little each time. You can’t fight radiation poisoning. They’re evacuating people to keep them safe.
When they fought, it felt like he was fighting for her, for them. It felt like they were doing something. Instead of accepting it.
They had talked briefly, crazily, about hiding Bandit, about taking her and escaping from the city, choosing to do the crazy thing, so they could at least stay together. In the end, it was basically the same fantasy as becoming a hero. They didn’t know how to do it. No one did. It was hundreds of miles before the risk of radiation exposure got any less. The trains could take you that far, but there was no way they could travel that distance on their own. In the end, Lindsey and Bandit had gotten on one of the last trains.
After the train station, Gerard walked home to the house they had lived in and got into bed, covered his head with the blankets. First he slept, he didn’t know for how long. Then, later, he got up. He didn’t eat, because there was no food, and he didn’t yet know how to find any.
When he finally went out again, the streets were empty. There was a hardware store he would pass along the way, he remembered this. The sliding doors were pulled out, standing wide open. In the aisles, lots of things were already gone, but there were still some spray paints. Black, white, red, one can of silver. He didn’t think he’d need any other colors, not from how the pictures were looking in his head.
He walked back down to the train station they’d left from and painted the mural, stretching it along the acoustic walls beside the train tracks.
It was a parade, but an ugly one—nothing like the colorful, triumphant scenes they used to inexplicably show on the news, with all the country flags pixelated out, and heavy voiceover so you couldn’t tell if what the announcer was saying and what was going on in the picture matched.
He painted a drum major leading it all, a skeleton in a jaunty uniform, followed by figures in varying states of hilarity and decay. There were hints of characters he had used in his comic books, from before, back before everything took on such dreadful, literal overtones. Toward the end, he put in a tall and ghostly woman. Mother War, he named her in his head. The cause of all of this—or the excuse for it, an excuse that everyone had been willing to believe at first. She was bigger than the other figures, towered over them, and he used most of the can of silver on her hands and her hair, and the rings of her wide, enveloping skirt.
Even he had believed it. How often had he accommodated himself to doing this, or not doing that, because it was wartime? After agreeing to so much, it became harder to disagree, even as the edicts became stranger and stranger: Curfews and street patrols to enforce the curfews. Television channels that went off the air, supposedly to redirect resources to valuable war efforts. Zines and newspapers that quietly disappeared. Rolling blackouts, a power conservation measure, but they occurred conveniently on the heels of government policy announcements, which meant no Internet, no communication, no visible public reaction.
Everything had a certain plausibility to it that, at least at the beginning, they hadn’t doubted. Even the evacuations had that brutal logic: designed to keep people safe, unarguably—but only some people, only ones that still might be bankable state commodities. Women and children had been on those trains. No men over eighteen from contaminated/potentially contaminated areas were transported. It was so wrong, so repulsively wrong, and yet, by the time the trains were running, there was nothing left to argue with. There was only one ticket out of here, and it was a ticket for two people, not three. And Gerard had argued with Lindsey until she and Bandit had taken it. He poured all of this into the mural. His anger and betrayal, the fear and misgivings he had felt all along and not known how to act on.
It took several days. On the first night, he hid the paint cans in the bushes and walked back to the empty house, but after that, he didn’t bother going back anymore and slept outside. Nights had the lingering chill of late spring, but it wasn’t colder than the empty house.
Later, he thought fancifully that the parade must have carried away most of his hope, too, and his ideas and creativity. There had been this thing from the story arc of one of his cartoons, about art being a weapon. It was the same story where his fantasy of desert outlaws—but outlaws who were heroes—had come from. The same outlaws he had thought that he and Lindsey and Bandit could become if they escaped from the city on their own.
The mural felt powerful when he was painting it, but later that month, government vehicles had demoed the sound walls when they were pulling up sections of tracks, and it was like it had never even existed.
But at the end of the third day, when he knew he was finished painting and he walked back down the tracks to the platform, a man was standing there, the first person Gerard had seen in several days.
“It’s beautiful,” the man called to him. He squinted at the sprawling mural in the light that had just changed from afternoon to evening. Gerard felt a little breeze, not unpleasant, and it passed across him and moved the man’s hair, all this curly hair that the man pushed away from his face as he shaded his eyes and kept looking at the mural.
When Gerard had reached the platform, the man put out his hand and helped him climb up.
“Do you have anywhere to go?” the man asked.
Gerard didn’t answer. He thought of the house. The water wasn’t on; he didn’t know how long that would last. Maybe it was permanent. He hadn’t eaten in several days.
“Why don’t you come with me?” the man asked, without waiting for Gerard to answer his first question. “There’s this place I’m staying. It looks over the park, so you can see when they have things to sell there.” He gave a dry chuckle. “That’s worth something, at least.”
He actually smiled, Gerard thought numbly, following the man away from the train tracks and back to the street. He smiled at me when he said that.
The man introduced himself as Ray and Gerard managed to choke out his own name in response, and to keep walking alongside him.
“That was some pretty impressive artwork back there,” Ray said. “How did you learn to do that?”
“I was a cartoonist,” Gerard said. “Before.”
“Mmmm,” Ray said appreciatively. “An artist.” Ray explained that he used to be a guitarist, working for the studios, recording music back when there had still been music to record. Like cartooning, it was something that wouldn’t exist again as a profession for a very long time.
Gerard couldn’t manage a response to that, but Ray rambled on, graciously filling the spaces left by Gerard’s inability to hold up his side of the conversation. Ray talking about the city, about the park and the sellers, the beginnings of an underground economy, the rumor he’d heard that if the summer was cooler, it meant the jet stream was moving south of them and the worst of the contamination might pass them by. Gerard mumbled his wordless agreement to all of it.
“I had a wife and a son,” Ray said. “They had to leave, not too long ago.”
Gerard appreciated that Ray could say the words. He hadn’t begun to think about how he would talk about it. To find words that described it would make it too real, he thought. It would solidify the fact that he was speaking, by himself, in the past tense.
They walked the rest of the way to Ray’s apartment in silence.
*
They settled into an uneasy cohabitation in the apartment. Sometimes it was friendly, and sometimes they paced like caged animals—when it had been too many days since they’d been able to get any food, or when it seemed like there were more military vehicles on the road. But the summer was cooler. Gerard thought occasionally about the jet streams and whether there was anything to that rumor that Ray had heard. It was something.
What broke the pattern, jarred them into something different, was a dream—a literal bad dream, ironically, in the midst of a daily life that had become so nightmarishly routine. Gerard used to have more bad dreams before—elaborate, graphic, horrible ones, back when there had hardly been a reason to have them at all.
That he didn’t dream now was part of the silence he felt growing around him, part of what scared him more when he was awake. He jerked awake in the middle of the night. It must have been with some force, because he felt Ray move in the bed beside him.
“You okay?” Ray whispered.
“I had a bad dream,” Gerard said, hating the way it made him sound like a child.
“Yeah?” Ray asked softly. Gerard could feel him listening.
“Um,” Gerard said. “It didn’t have a story or even pictures. It was just a feeling.”
The dream was quiet, too. Gerard didn’t know how to explain that part. The silence had been suffocating him.
“I felt scared,” he continued. “I mean, more than … than usual. I frightened myself awake, I guess.” He tried to say it lightly, but he heard his voice break in the dark. He took a shaky breath.
“C’mere.” Ray moved a little closer in the bed and put his arm over him. Gerard felt a tear slip down the side of his face. He tried to calm his breathing, still trying to smooth over the breathless panic of the dream, and now, too, to keep himself from shaking, or crying harder.
“It’s okay,” Ray said softly and did something with his arm. It was like a pat or a squeeze, surprisingly sympathetic for someone who’d been woken out of a dead sleep. Or else those things were just reflexive for Ray.
Then Ray said, “I was dreaming, too.”
“Yeah?” Gerard said, turning a fraction of an inch toward him, focusing on his voice in the dark.
“I was a bird,” Ray said, “and I was flying. The sky was so big. It was full of light. I could see everything from the mountains to the ocean, and it was beautiful.”
Gerard listened, trying to hang on Ray’s words, to imagine floating over the world.
“Over the mountains, too. I flew over the mountains to the other side. Wherever they are now—in the dream, it was like camps where they were living—but it wasn’t bad. It wasn’t scary. It was just where they were. And I could see … everyone. I could see my son.” In the dark, his voice sounded like a smile.
Gerard waited, until he half hoped Ray had already fallen back asleep. “Why can’t my dreams be like that?” he said finally.
Close beside him, Ray made a breathy sound, not quite loud enough to be a chuckle. “I guess we’re built different. Nothing wrong with that.”
In the morning, Gerard woke up before Ray did. Ray’s arm was still over him. It felt comfortable, warm, almost safe. Gerard turned carefully under Ray’s arm, rolling over to face him, and was looking at him when Ray’s eyes fluttered open.
“Mmm, hey.” Ray gave him another squeeze, something more like a quick hug now that they were facing each other. He shifted to pull away from how close they were lying.
“Wait,” Gerard said. He put his hand out tentatively, resting his palm on Ray’s side. “You said you saw your son?”
A smile came across Ray’s face, and he wasn’t pulling back anymore. “Yeah,” he said. His eyes were soft and faraway, and then the smile slipped away, and his face was empty and sick with grief.
Gerard looked away, but forced himself to finally say, “I miss them too. And it hurts, all the time.” He put his arm around Ray, and Ray pulled him close, and they were holding each other in the tightest hug. It lasted a long time.
When they pulled apart, Ray put his hand against Gerard’s face, his thumb dragging over places that were still sticky from last night’s tears. He lifted his head toward Ray, turned into his touch by just a fraction of an inch, and then they were kissing.
Gerard leapt forward with a ferocity that surprised him. Ray’s body was sleep-warm and pliant, and he surrendered easily to Gerard’s advances, letting Gerard push him onto his back and opening easily to the way that Gerard pressed into his arms.
Gerard felt the way Ray’s arms draped heavily over him, his muscular arms that Gerard had seen, always, but not really noticed until now. Gerard kept running his hands up and back down again, over the rise of Ray’s chest and the dip of his stomach, the whole of his body, its realness, coming into focus for the first time.
When they took off their clothes, Ray kissed his neck and his shoulders, his chest, all the way down. Gerard kept his hands on Ray, his arm hooked awkwardly around him, not willing to let go even for a second.
And when they lay down together again, Gerard reached and caught Ray’s leg at the bend of his knee, asking without words that Ray wrap his legs around him. Ray complied enthusiastically, and Gerard felt enveloped in his long limbs. Ray felt warm and human, safe.
And when their bodies came together, like Gerard knew they would, it felt partly a surprise, partly inevitable. Afterwards, sweaty and exhausted, they held each other so tight, Gerard felt he might break.
They’d relied on it ever since. The shine wore off, and the fear crept back in, and Gerard didn’t know about the jet streams or what the future would hold, but their bodies together continued to offer him some escape, some measure of comfort.
*
From behind him on the couch, Ray said, “I’ve been thinking, about what you said.”
Gerard’s stomach sank. Ray was talking about the fight, he knew—it was the only time either of them had ever said things to each other that would need to be talked about again.
Gerard sighed and said, “What I said was shitty, I know that. It was horrible. I’m sorry. I had no right to say it.” He came a little closer and sat down on the opposite end of the couch.
“It’s not that,” Ray said. “It’s that we see things differently. Like, at really different levels. You have vision. I knew it from the day I saw your mural. That whole huge thing that you made—it was amazing.” He shrugged and looked away, as though he could still see the whole mural. Then he took a deep breath and went on carefully. “It’s good—that you have that. But it means you can see the whole story that’s happening here. You see the whole—” Ray made a vague gesture that took in the mural in his mind’s eye, “—the whole parade, you know? All the time. But you don’t see what it’s doing to you. I see that.”
Ray pulled his eyes away from the distance and looked at Gerard. “I think seeing it all scares you and breaks your heart. It should. But that’s too much to walk around with all the time.”
Gerard crossed his arms and pulled his feet up. He could tell he was trying to fold away into himself. He didn’t like how plainly Ray had described him.
“I can’t look away,” Gerard said finally. “And I think what I can see is accurate. This is what’s really going on. I can’t rely on things that aren’t really there, like being kind or having hope—” Gerard felt his voice getting wobbly again, felt his own uncertainty and panic rising up and making him unsteady. He took a breath to calm himself, and tried again.
“You said you made a choice, about how you would be. But do you think it’s going to change what they do to us? Is it going to change how much radiation blows in from the gulf?”
Ray was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “It may not change what happens, but I think it changes our chances of living through it. Of surviving.”
They were quiet for a while, staring into the fire.
“Here’s what I don’t get.” Ray said it gently, gamely, like he was trying to match the way Gerard talked, to speak to him in a language he would understand. “There are these things, and you say they don’t matter, or they’re not real.”
Gerard looked at him, hardly turning his head but letting him know he was listening begrudgingly.
“So, what about this—” Ray gestured between them. “What is this? It’s nothing, right? Nothing that could possibly change anything in the end—we might as well be holed up in separate houses, in our own foxholes.”
Gerard didn’t move. He breathed. In. Out.
“But I think it makes a difference. I think it makes it better. For both of us.” Ray looked away from Gerard quickly, as if he had suddenly become a little self-conscious. “It does for me, at least.”
Gerard was silent. He turned it over in his mind, the possibility that Ray was right. He couldn’t even imagine what it would be like if Ray hadn’t been there, if he were trying to survive on his own, still in the empty house that Lindsey and Bandit had left behind. If it had been like that, he would already be gone.
“Come on.” Ray held out his arm, an invitation. “You’ve got to be getting cold, so close to that window.”
Gerard moved down and sat next to him, tucked himself under Ray’s arm. It was warmer, Ray was right. Ray arranged the blanket over them both, tucking it in, engaging in the mother hen habits that seemed to come so naturally to him.
“What I’m saying is,” Ray kept tucking the blanket, as though what he was saying was as practical as gathering firewood, “You have to let yourself find comfort somewhere, even if it doesn’t feel right. It won’t ever feel right. You have to do it anyway.”
Ray finished the blanket, humming absently. Then he said, “You know that song? The one you don’t like? I wrote it for my son.”
Gerard started to protest. “I—it’s not that—“
Ray ignored him. “When I sing it, I feel stronger. That’s the reason I do it. Someday soon, we’ll be stronger. You just have to survive until we figure something out.”
“You think you’ll last? Til we figure something out?”
“That’s my plan. To stay strong. To see my son again. To outlast this…” Ray’s voice trailed off and he shrugged. This … everything … too much to name. Gerard carefully let his head lean against Ray’s shoulder, a small gesture of concession.
“And to keep you from getting too lost.” Ray nudged him with his shoulder, jostling him gently.
“Me?” Gerard asked in a tiny voice. “You think about me?”
Gerard felt Ray nod.
“Of course I do. I think about you all the time. I worry a little, because I can tell how much you’re hurting. But I figure as long as I can keep a little bit of a hold on you, you’ll be okay.” He pulled Gerard a little closer.
“You think it’s that easy?” Gerard asked in the same small voice.
“Yeah,” Ray said. “I do.” Gerard felt Ray’s lips briefly against his hair.
They sat in silence on the broken down couch for a long time. Gerard let himself lean farther and farther back into Ray, feeling his warm arms, the rise and fall of his chest against Gerard’s back. It was the closest he had felt to comfort in a long time.