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Ray comes to him in temporal affections.
The physicality of their motives stark out the words and bleach them dry.
They share the space between breaths and laughter. Sometimes they dine together, in bright rooms and powdered tenderness. Sometimes they even hold hands. Yet Ray has a penchant for mystery and thinking too highly of him, as if he were some mirror reflective of thoughts unconsumed yet. Truth be told, Nate has a hand on the wall of Ray’s mind, trying to navigate through the darkness as he turns away from the faux light he knows would burn him.
It's an uphill battle, and so he rests easy every now and then, until Ray comes back with a new set of warm, ferocious kisses.
-
Ray never says goodbye, and so Nate never gets to welcome him back.
In the time and space between the now and the next, when Ray lays in his arms again - panting and moaning and maybe even smiling, thoughts consume him: he muses, through bright rooms and powdered affections, where Ray disappears to - who he disappears into - when he's not disappearing into him.
-
He has other people, too, sure - girls with brown hair and brown eyes and a penchant for having sex under the influence of alcohol, guys who like to laugh during sex.
If Brad has something to say about it, it is very good that he doesn’t let it spill out, because, with all honesty, Nate would either have to punch him the face or cry on his feet - especially after learning from Poke, in a tongue-slip of drunkenness, that Brad fosters something akin to love for Ray, too.
-
What terrifies him more than Ray not returning is the idea that Ray never once came in the first place; and so Nate swallows it down when Ray tell him ‘thanks for the night’ with unabashed casual ease. Nate watches him pick up his clothes from the floor and leave after he gives Nate a kiss on the forehead.
He can oftentimes hear Ray forget to lock the door behind him. Nate knows he’s got to do something about that, but tonight, the weariness of the situation tethers him to the bed. It consumes him: Brad, Ray, and them together.
When the brittleness of his resolve snaps he asks himself whether or not Ray thinks about him when he’s under someone else.
-
He swallows down his pride, and his better judgement, and his heart, so that he can find the strength enough to open the door for Ray three days later.
-
Mike has his hands on his hips, tapping his foot on the car stopper on the base’s parking lot.
Nate prepares himself for the nag.
With a breath, he apologizes quickly and lets Mike fall into his step.
“You got promoted captain three days ago,” Mike, in his mercy, starts only after they've reached Nate’s small office, “what the hell are you doing with a black eye and a split lip?”
The reasons fly over his head, and in his mind, he can see the workings of the night before: the punches, the screams, and the premature declarations of undying devotion; Brad on his knees with bruises on his cheek and Ray behind Brad, trying to help him up; his reflection in the mirror an hour after, the tear stains and blood on his lips.
He should have listened to his mother when she told him, during his parents' divorce, that only the weak-willed fall in love.
He spares Mike of it, and answers with a half-truth: “tequila.”
-
The incredibly ridiculous thing that happens, aside from Brad accepting the offer to serve in Royal Marines Commandos, is the fact that Ray still returns to him with the same tenacity and thin smile, and Nate still accepts him back with the broken arms of a man too tired of carrying the weight of the world.
The biggest difference is, however, Ray stays over until the morning for breakfast.
Until one day, he stay for lunch, too; and then dinner, and then breakfast, again, on the second morning.
Muted rage builds inside of him, and it appears in Ray’s skin as slightly tender bruises from lovemaking and bites on the exposed skin of his neck.
Ray wears them like a champion’s ribbon and gold, with the fondness Nate floods him with as a wreath over his head.
This goes on steadily enough for Nate to be acquainted with Ray’s laundry with his, to come to know his classmates from university, and to meet Ray’s mother in that weekend she flew to California for Ray’s birthday.
It feels like heaven, like redemption and payment and absolution.
It’s too good to be true, and it is.
-
Nate has only started to get to know what being rationally and righteously selfish is when Ray starts introducing him to the concept of sharing, again.
“Brad’s coming home.”
“For good?”
“Nah, homes, he’s going back under the skirt of the Queen and its many folds after 15 days.”
A pause and breath and then, “does he know about us?”
“What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”
This time, with enough domesticity and faux promises between them, Ray remembers to lock the door.
-
He steeps in the cool of Ray’s words.
Because, see, Nate knows, and it hurts him .
It hurts him like a son of a bitch: like lead over his chest, like breath building into tears, a restlessness that makes him want to run over to where he knows Ray is and scream out his love in very spiteful words. He knows, he knows, he knows: how Brad touches Ray, how Ray touches Brad; how Ray sometimes touch him like he’s touching Brad, and how Ray buries into his ears words he so long wants to tell Brad.
It weighs so much, there, in his chest, that he lays on top of the kitchen table and lets the tears try to expel it.
He cries, and sobs, and weeps because something inside him demands the need for it, like how clouds turn grey and let the downpour roll upon the earth with thunder when it tires from holding all of it -- too much, too long.
It storms in the kitchen, and many of the plates lay in shatters on the floor.
In bed, some time later, the thought that lulls him to sleep is whether this hurts Ray, too.
-
Ray returns after 17 days, and still, because he never said goodbye, Nate cannot welcome him back.
There, in the presence of pain and a bottle of red wine between them, Nate says, “One day, I’m going to stop this.”
Ray looks up to him from across the kitchen table where he slices tomatoes for the bugers and smiles. His education and damped manners speak for him when he says, “Good. In fact, when that day comes, I’m gonna thank you for it, because I can’t do it myself, and I am tired of hurting you and you letting me do it.”
-
For his birthday, aside from the dirty, carnal, passionate sex in the back of his car, Ray wishes upon him kindness.
Nate takes it, and turns it over, and picks at its loose threads - until, one day, it comes apart.
Unwrapped, he gives it to himself.
-
Brad comes home for good and Ray moves in with him.
Nate goes back to the east coast.
He visits his childhood home and kisses his sister on the cheek, and then her two little sons. She is without a man in her life in the same sense Nate is, too.
They drink sangria despite the cold weather and talk about how heartbreaks seem silly compared to the pain of birth.
“I feel birthed, then,” he tells her when she returns to him after tucking the boys into bed.
“Good,” she replies, “you're anew.”
At dawn, he runs into the vastness of the peeking light, and when he reaches the mouth of the river, he lets the stream drain away the fragments he broke himself into, in hopes that Ray may have an easier time swallowing him.
The oceans swallows it instead; and this time, on his way back, he lets himself disappear into the warmth of the sun.