It's Not Shakespeare (15 page)

And she listened to him, bumbling pathetically about the best three weeks of his life, and how he had hesitated—or gotten too casual—with those all-important three little words.

She was good company, and he was surprised at how fast the time went, but that didn’t stop him from having a pang of something awful in his chest when he dropped her off back at the college and watched her get into that blue Charger.

As he was idling in the parking lot, waiting for her to start the engine, his cell phone rang, and he hit the button to answer even before he registered it was Rafael’s number.

“Hey,” Rafael said, sounding apologetic, “I was wondering if you know where Sophie is. I’m going to need my car tomorrow, and the bitch keeps putting me to voice mail.”

James hadn’t realized she’d been doing that, and he found himself looking at the silhouette of the Charger with even more affection. Bless her dark little heart, she
did
like him!

“Yeah, she’s leaving now,” he said into the phone. “We went out with Marlowe and then went and had coffee.”

“What about dinner?” Rafael asked, and for a minute James’s heart jumped.

“We didn’t eat that,” he said, hoping for an invite.

“You should,” Rafael murmured. “I don’t like skinny men. Talk to you later.”

James sighed as Rafael hung up and then turned off his own phone. Well, it wasn’t an invite for late dinner and sex on the side, but it wasn’t goodbye, either. James didn’t
have
to start thinking about big, melodramatic beating-the-chest measures to get Rafael back. But in college he’d always liked to study early, and he spent the entire trip home doing just that.

Chapter 8

Beating a Hairy Chest

B
Y
W
EDNESDAY
, he had become a pathetic wreck.

He remembered his breakup with Austen—coming home to a note saying “it wasn’t working” and six messages on his machine from “friends” who’d known who was working what all along. The next day had been Christmas Eve, and he’d shown up to his parents’ house alone, with a bag full of gifts for his nieces and an excuse. By January second, he’d had to move in with them, because he had to sell his house to pay off all of the other bills Austen had left him with, or his credit would be shot to hell. His mother had the contacts to auction off everything but his clothes, so really, he made one trip to the house to pack (and to hide the porn, like every good boy did from his mother), and that was it.

He was relieved of the burden of a five-year relationship that had been mostly façade.

He’d lived with his parents for exactly three weeks—long enough to find a job so far away, the likelihood of him running into Austen and his sugar daddy was damned fucking thin, and then to resign from his other position. His department head hadn’t been pleased, but James was reasonably certain that somewhere in another part of the world there would be someone desperate to start another life, just as he had been. His mother had told him that the woman to fill his position had just lost her husband to cancer, and he almost felt good about the whole transaction—it was like a karmic cleansing of his tenure. He could truly start anew.

His parents had given him the down payment for the house—but he’d been reluctant to take it.

He was surprised when his father showed up at the doorway of his old bedroom that night, because his mother was usually the one assigned to talk to them. All through their childhoods it had been the same: Susan was suffering from a break-up? Dad would look panicked and go screaming, “Mallory!” until their mother showed up. James didn’t make it onto the high school baseball team? Mom was the one to come into his room and tell him that he was probably not really meant for sports to begin with, but that didn’t mean he should give up trying.

When he came out, right after high school graduation, it had been to his mother, and when his father hadn’t grunted one syllable differently at the dinner table, he had known things were going to be all right.

So there was his father, hovering in the doorway, glowering down the hall, where his mother was probably shooing him with little hand motions, and James had looked away from the desk he’d had as a child and turned around and smiled, trying to make his father welcome like this was his own big house in the nice neighborhood instead of his parents’ sturdy mansion by the sea.

“What can I do for you, Pop?”

Alan Geoffrey Richards looked acutely uncomfortable in his olive-green corduroys and his Mr. Rogers cardigan. “I’m… look,” he muttered, glaring at James’s laptop computer. There were ads for apartment buildings there, because James had just enough money for his plane ticket, a first and last month’s rent, and a very old used car.

“Are you really going?” he asked after that heavy pause, and James shrugged and nodded.

“It’s a new start,” he said simply.

“It’s a hellacious pay cut,” Pop said in his blunt way.

A small smile played with the corner of James’s mouth. “Well, when it’s just me, I live simply.” It had been true. Basic things—a bed, a modest entertainment center, enough money for a couple of trips a year—James had lived with these things for years before Austen had shown up.

“You don’t know that area,” Pop had muttered, glaring. “The cost of living out there is….”

“Horrible!” James grimaced. He’d gone to the Internet, and the Internet calculator had told him that the same salary that would get him a crappy apartment in Northern California would buy him a mansion anywhere in the Midwest. “But it’s far away, Pop. That’s all I want to be right now. Far away.”

Pop had looked away and rubbed his thumb on his wedding ring—a sure-fire sign he was distressed. It was like he was trying to channel Mom when he did that, and James had felt a pang of compassion. It must be difficult: Mom was such a bolt of lightning. How did someone like Pop—someone who was quiet and stoic and nondemonstrative and all of the things Austen had mocked James for being in his final kick-in-the-nads Dear John—channel that much energy?

He must have had a way, James had thought that night, because Mom continued to love him devotedly, continued to confide in him, continued to bring him into the family crises and his children’s lives and force him to participate. Sometimes, like this night, he’d do something that would remind them all that he had chosen
her,
and that he loved their children as much as she did, and that every now and then, when someone had suffered a setback or been depressed or had a bad break-up, there would be ice cream unexpectedly in the freezer or tickets to a baseball game on James’s desk or a new dress or favorite pair of shoes in Susan’s closet. Once, one of the women in their mother’s favorite charity had made a snotty remark about waitresses thinking they could rule the world, and Mom had gone outside to take them to school and found a brand new Mercedes in the driveway. She’d sniffled the whole way to school, and James had always privately hoped she’d gone home and called their father and convinced him to come home early and have sweaty monkey sex, because damn, that had been a class-A move.

And even though Dad was shuffling from foot to foot here in his room, uncertain, using “uhm” like it was an entire dictionary of words, James had that same feeling.

“You haven’t asked us for anything,” Pop said, looking around James’s old room. All of the Little League trophies were still there, the ones James had gotten when he didn’t have to do anything but show up.

“I’ve got it covered,” James told him tightly. He did. He’d picked himself up out of the detonation of his life with what felt like hardly a scratch.

“I’d be angry,” Pop muttered. “You don’t look angry. Why is that? If your mother left me, I’d wreck something.”

James had laughed humorlessly. “I don’t know, Dad. I think Austen wrecked enough for both of us.”

Dad shook his head. “I wish you’d ask us for something. You always were a self-contained child. I used to try to help you throw the ball, but you always wanted to do it yourself.”

James could barely remember that. “Yeah, well, I paid for my stupidity, right?”

“This wasn’t your stupidity,” Dad said decisively. “It wasn’t. You trusted him. We all trusted him. Here.” He slapped an envelope on the desk in front of James, and James flinched at the loud smacking sound. “You won’t ask for anything, but we want to give you this. Buy a house. Get a dog. Find someone you can’t live without. I should have made you practice with that ball, goddammit, I really should have.”

And with that he wandered out, the set of his shoulders saying he’d probably said entirely too much for his comfort already.

James had taken the check and tried not to cry like a little boy who’d been cut from the baseball team. He failed.

J
AMES
tried to tell himself there was no reason that memory should haunt him, none at all. But the end of Wednesday arrived, and Sophie grimaced apologetically and slunk off to Rafael’s car to drive to work. James tried Rafael’s phone for the second time that day and was put immediately on voice mail, and he couldn’t lie to himself anymore.

He knew exactly why that memory was playing in his brain on auto loop. There were a thousand and twelve ways to show love, and until that moment, he had never realized that his father, for all his limitations, had chosen obscure and subtle methods to do it for James’s entire childhood. James had done the same for pretty much any lover he’d had, including Austen. Taking care of someone was love—he just knew it.

Rafael didn’t have that dictionary. He couldn’t look up the thousand and tenth, eleventh, and twelfth ways to show love. He needed the first thing on the list, and then the second, and then the third, because there was nothing about him that wasn’t up front and on his sleeve and ready for the world to see.

James loved him exactly like that.

“Uhm, Mom?” It was Wednesday. He called sometimes on Monday and sometimes on Wednesday, but never about this.

“James, is everything okay?”

James swallowed. God. It had been three days. He was either a hopeless addict, or hopelessly in love. “Yeah, sort of. Look, Mom, I… I want to come visit this summer. With Marlowe. And a friend. And, well, I can’t afford the tickets. Is there any way….” He swallowed again and got ready to just lay his pride out on the line and beg.

“Oh, honey, we’d love to bring you out. I’m so glad you asked! Now tell us about your friend—what’s he like?”

And like that, his pride disappeared, because it wasn’t necessary. That’s what family did. James blinked back tears. “Mom, you’re really going to love him. He’s wonderful. Really, really wonderful. I can’t wait for you to meet.”

H
E
HAD
a plan. He did—he wasn’t naturally sneaky, and subterfuge was
definitely
not his strong suit, but he had the feeling Sophie had no such qualms. He also had a feeling that she was on his side. She had certainly seemed sympathetic enough Wednesday, when he realized that Rafael wasn’t coming to pick her up.

“It’s okay, Professor—he’s being stubborn.”

“He won’t take my calls. He said it was just some space and not goodbye. How am I supposed to know that if he won’t even take my calls?”

“I think he’s afraid of being weak. He’s Mexican, Professor—he’s got pride like you wouldn’t believe. It’s a good thing you’re beyond that.”

James had resisted the urge to tell her that it was his own stupid pride that had made this fucking bullshit pile of crap. He didn’t, but there was no doubt that the conversation had helped prompt the phone call to his mother.

So on Friday, he caught Sophie on the way into class, pulling her aside while everyone else filed in.

“Hey,” he said, feeling horrible and cheesy and like he was abusing his privilege as a professor. “Is Rafael…?”

She shook her head and grimaced, and he decided to commence with operation I Have Had Enough Of This Shit.

“Okay, could you do me a favor?”

“What—it’s not illegal is it?”

“No!” He probably should have been more frightened by her apparent zeal to break the law for his love life, but it was almost time to start class. He was still a professional, for crying out loud!

“Then what am I doing?”

He shrugged. “Could you… I don’t know. Text him, and tell him that you heard a knocking sound in the car or something? It’s the only thing that’ll get him here, you know? I’d go to his place, but—”

“He wouldn’t show you his place. It’s a real shithole.”

“You’ve been there!”

“Well yeah! I keep bringing him houseplants. He kills them, the stupid fucker. But seriously, it’s a one bedroom with a shitty kitchen and a couch. He sleeps there—but he spends most of his time at my folks’ house or his folks’ house or….” She looked at him meaningfully.

“Or my house,” James muttered, and she put a finger on his nose to reward his general astuteness. “So, could you?”

“Could I deceive my oldest, dearest friend because he’s being a fucking stubborn jackass and hurting someone he keeps saying he’s desperately in love with? Oh
fuck
yeah!”

James relaxed a little, and his flop sweat eased off. “Awesome. Tell me when he’s going to get here. I’m going to be with you and waiting.”

“You’d better be out of sight when they pull up, though. As stupid as he’s being, he’ll probably ditch me.”

“Really? He
loves
that car.”

“Not as much as he loves you.”

C
LASS
actually passed pretty quickly—they were discussing female archetypes in speculative fiction, and Ursula Le Guin’s
The Left Hand of Darkness
figured large. Sophie was still trying to come up with a character in
non-
speculative genre fiction that defied the Virgin, Victim, Vixen, or Vamp archetype when students started shifting reluctantly in their seats because class had actually ended five minutes before.