​ELEVEN

Mitch 

The church is up on a hill, and I keep imagining it rolling down like a stone and pinning me and Aaron where we lay in the unclaimed cemetery. Not the one owned by St. Bonaventure with the old outhouse at the side of it where the two rabbits mate like rabbits and everybody knows about it by Spring. But the one with a small cluster of headstones breaking the earth like teeth.

“I've always wanted to get married,” Aaron says, his wine-soaked lips pressed to my ear.

“There's still time.” I smile—I can feel it crawling and quaking through my lips—but happiness isn't a threat. Three weeks. It’s been three weeks since our first meeting at the Franklin Center. Three weeks of avoiding telling Aaron about AA. Three weeks of going to bed hours after Elena and only hitting the sheets when sleep begins to feel like a small and merciful death. Three weeks of knowing therapy bills will be added to our growing heap of payments because Sela’s pediatrician has recently recommended a child psychologist who specializes in “frequent elimination.” Sure, my heart's a mess, but my mind? My mind is the equivalent of a dog yacking up something it just can't hold down. 

“I’m in AA.” Quiet. Aaron disconnects his lips from my ear and turns over onto his belly. He brought a picnic blanket, and it lies beneath us here in the small clearing. I know about this place because it's one of the stops during the church's annual Haunted Hayride, and it's where Sela, Elena and I stood still in the shadows last Halloween, a family of vampires waiting for our next feast.

“Elena?” he asks. His eyes are on me now. I'm a lake, and Aaron’s the straw. I imagine hovering high beyond the trees and spying our breathing bodies, the two empty wine glasses at our sides.

“Elena thought we were...unraveling.”

“At the seams.”

“Yes, there. At the seams. Everywhere really. It got to the point we couldn’t even sit outside on the back porch without yelling at each other.” I think of her naked feet, which is a stupid, stupid thing to do. I hate that—when something comes tearing out of you and blinds your eyes. I blink hard and look at the sun.

“Yelling about what?” Aaron perches his head in his hand. Glimpses of golden light filter through the space his arm makes. I want us, but I want us in a different time and place. There they are again, her toes, her arches...

“The past. She thinks I cheated on her with a girl when we were in high school.” The woods are silent, but they’re also not silent because twigs crack under the weight of stalking deer. Live it up, I think. It’s not your season.

“I don’t think you’re the type,” Aaron says.

“What type am I?”

“Gay,” Aaron says and laughs into my shoulder. I laugh, too, but the word is a steel blade between my teeth.

“It’s not the worst thing in the world,” he whispers when met with the look on my face. He glances at two lone tombstones on the outer banks of the toothy circle. Alistair and Bonita Jenkins are the names of the man and woman rotting in the ground a few feet from our blanket. 

“Look, we can breathe, can’t we? We can walk and talk and take a dump like every other man, so here’s to us!” Aaron grabs me, and we roll beneath truth and light and birds flapping through the leaves.

To us.

#

Later, we're all business. Aaron folds up the blanket and puts the empty bottle of wine into the otherwise untouched picnic basket he brought. I glance at my cell and pray Jimmy is still out picking up the material. St. Bonaventure's roof is leaking, water flooding through worn holes around the steeple, and Jimmy agreed to pick up the flashing grade while I agreed to walk the roof, prepare the holes and not think about the edge butting so perfectly close to the sky. 

“You first or me?” Aaron asks.

“Me. Jimmy should be heading back now if he hasn’t already.”

“Don’t get in trouble,” Aaron says and kisses me on the lips, but before he does, he takes off his sunglasses.

“I love you.” I've had dreams before, these dreams where I'm supposed to dance, and there's this instructor who has my mother's face and a switch in her hands. She smacks it back and forth and the thwacking sound is hard to handle, so I try to move my feet like she tells me to. But I just can't. And I feel the same way now.

“I hope so,” stumbles out of me and my shoulders shrug. My eyes are boiled from the sun as I walk through the cemetery—the one with the mating rabbits—to the blacktop that leads back to the church. Aaron is behind me and stares at me for a minute before getting into his car. I think he's waiting to say something. I hope he says something, but his door shuts.

I've hurt his heart.

I eat the gasoline-streaked air on my return to the church, to the ladder I made a big show of propping up as Jimmy was leaving. “Yup, I’ll just be up here seeing what I see,” I said before Jimmy sped away, and I headed off in a dead sprint to meet the man I love.

And it is love, on some blatant level. Because in the night, or morning, when 3 a.m. reaches for me, I sit outside, back against the house with the phone in my hands, and I think about being the kind of man who calls and says, “I wish everything were different” even though “different” is fear streaming beneath my skin like veins pumping blood.

I climb the ladder, and at the top, I skim out beyond the edge of the roof, a foot loose in the air, but pull it back as Jimmy squeals through the gravel and slams into a paved parking space next to the church.

“Hope you had a better time up there than I just had. Nothing but a bunch of goons who can’t tell their asses from their elbows,” Jimmy says, the tailgate slamming down. Buckets of material scrape across the truck’s metal bed.

“Hardly,” I say, only recognizing Jimmy as a glimmer of movement and light. I didn’t mean to fall in love. I didn’t mean to do anything, and now I do nothing but feed on that fear. I think maybe that’s what love is: fear released and streaming like an open wound. And up here, back on the roof, mere seconds from the sky, it hits me—a warm pulse of love.

But maybe it’s just the wine.