Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

He’d cared about music, once, though he no longer had access to the emotion, which felt like it had happened inside a different person a long time ago.

Just because he was the only thing you ever gave a shit about doesn’t mean that other people don’t care about you.

Through the cavern and their hauntings since, through a life spent with Eddie keeping him leashed but cared for at the same time, he couldn’t find a label that fit where he needed it to go. Maybe instead, just a hard stop: he was yours.

“For fuck’s sake, Andrew. Is there anything in this scenario that feels heterosexual or well-adjusted to you?”

He hadn’t known how bad he’d wanted this, before, but—he guessed he had. Sam was alight with matched, devastating need under the moonlight streaming through the windows.

Andrew ignored the reflexive burn of dampness that sprang to his eyes at the domesticity of the morning in favor of the fresh wonder of smooth skin under his cheek, magnetic and allowed. Life coursed through him with each thud of his pulse. He had no idea what he was doing, except that it fit. Sam pulled him apart one notch at a time to release the horror he held under his skin.

I don’t want to share not even with a dead man

Once in the car, Andrew asked, “You sure about doing this with me?” “Don’t say dumb shit. You’re one of mine, Blur, and we’re going to get you sorted out fine, okay?” Sam said as the engine growled to life. Andrew shut his mouth. One of mine—that had a ring to it, and so did the promise of safety, of being taken in hand. If Riley had tried to slap a label on the thing budding between them, he’d have rejected it out of hand, because nothing encompassed the particular set of feelings he might sum up as owned. What did it mean that he found that comforting, still, now that Eddie was gone?

“Don’t be,” Sam cut him short. “It’s a choice I made, getting in this thing with you, whatever it is. But don’t mistake me, I’m not interested in filling in for a ghost.” “You aren’t,” Andrew said.

An abyssal gulf opened in him at the thought that he had wrecked the potential for that to happen again. The endless taunting text messages and the raw late nights, fistfights and firelight, the one bright savage thing he’d gained from all the loss since the turn of summer—nothing else kindled him to human, eager life. Sam Halse wasn’t going to be another almost. He’d made that mistake over and over in total ignorance for almost a decade, and he wasn’t going to do it again.

Each crunch of forest debris under his shoes put another foot of distance between the person he had been and the person he thought he might become. Eddie had left him this, also: a future to see through.

He fought the urge to blurt out a grandiose, ill-conceived, revealing offer, do you want to open a garage together, or something like that. Instead he said, “I thought about the whole thing, start to finish. How much you did for me and how much I didn’t do for you, just kept taking. And I know I want to do shit for you, with you. I do.” He sipped a quick shaken breath and finished with crushing simplicity. “You’re worth it to me.”