Summer Sons

by Lee Mandelo

Friends meant nothing in comparison to what he and Eddie were to each other.

Abandoned again. It was the third time in fifteen days that the haunt had visited him.

The framed picture on the bedside table, a twin to the one he knew waited in Eddie’s room, nailed the final stabbing touch. Del had taken the original on her phone of Andrew’s and Eddie’s cars parked side by side, while she waited on the road ahead of them to serve as flagger. The photo immortalized the moment when Andrew had sprawled over his center console to reach out his passenger window and flip off a smirking Eddie, who had his shades pushed up into the unkempt mess of his hair. Their expressions were savage with joy.

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.

Home was where Eddie was; home was nowhere, now.

The imaginary fist he kept clenched around the haunted, haunting presence in his chest loosened bit by bit the longer he stuck around Nashville, and those cracks let out something other than light. He pictured a cold darkness seeping out, dripping free of the confines where it belonged, almost as tangible as the blood pulsing in his veins.

In the course of hours he’d learned that Sam Halse had cocaine and a fast car and apparently a goddamn death wish—inviting scabs on his knuckles, plus a mouth that could peel paint off a wall. The appeal was obvious. Eddie might have been fond of Riley, talked gothic bullshit with him and got drunk on cheap beer, but now Andrew understood where the hook had sunk in because it pierced straight through the meat of his cheek, too. He wanted to race Halse again, and that was a strange sensation: want. He also wanted to break his knuckles on Halse’s jaw.

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.

“Was it worth it?” “Of course. He shouldn’t have touched you,” Eddie said. How come, he hadn’t asked. The night it really happened, Eddie had rolled over and gone to sleep, leaving Andrew to his curious lightness. He hadn’t reached out to pinch his bottom lip between sharp fingernails as the shadowed room dropped abruptly to blackness, whispering in a ghoulish voice that hissed like static, “You’re not his.”

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

Eddie had visited him at the end of the spring term and spent the whole five days manhandling him: scratching his scalp, digging thumbs into the knots of his trapezius muscles, rolling on top of him during naps, once gnawing absently on the knob of his wrist for a full five seconds during a movie. Eddie’s touch was a careless claim that meant home, home, home.

The soil drank his sacrament and shot an echo into the world, an arrow that struck Andrew through the heart as he tore himself free of the mist with a shout, kicking leaf litter, mindless with the struggle to escape the married memories.

No one else was Eddie, and no one else held him the same as Eddie had.

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?

He’d known Eddie to the bone, or so he thought. But having Eddie’s memories inside of him was different. The tender awfulness of remembering himself through Eddie’s eyes, beautiful and cherished and wanted with raw confused intensity, with ownership, a sublimated tangled connection that Eddie had never spoken or unpacked, though it loomed so large—that understanding was an answer to the things about himself Del had made him confront, that he’d started figuring out with Halse, but it didn’t help. Having been loved wasn’t the same as being loved.