Bird Came Down

When Felix came home late that afternoon, the sun was slanting into the apartment and Scott had just arrived.

“The kids are with Mom and Dad,” he said. “I told them you needed space. And then of course I came over here to take away your space.”

“Don’t pretend to be apologizing,” Felix said, getting on his knees and untying Scott’s shoe’s, taking one off and then the other.

“Are you hungry?”

“No,” Scott said. “Not yet.”

“Neither am I,” Felix said.

He climbed onto the futon, stretched his arms and legs, and while the sun went down and left them in semi darkness, he sat across from Scott just looking at him.

“I am a gloomy man,” Scott said.

“Utterly.”

“I don’t know why you love me.”

“If you don’t know I won’t tell you. I’ve got no time to stroke your ego.”

Scott smiled weakly.

“I killed Jen.”

“What!”

“I wished it. I really wished it. And then it happened. I’m a fucker.”

“Maybe,” Felix allowed. “But you’re not a witch.”

For a whole hour, as darkness took the little apartment, neither of them got up, and neither one of them said anything.

“The funeral is at Scott’s family’s church,” Felix told Elias over the phone. “I haven’t been to a Catholic church in years.”

“I didn’t know you’d been at all. I thought you were Episcopalian?”

“My sister is an Episcopal priest,” Felix said. “Our father was Episcopal. My mom is Catholic. We were confirmed in the Catholic Church and received into the Episcopal one. Dual membership really, though I’m pretty sure both churches frown upon it.”

“They do gay marriages at your church, right?” Elias said.

“They do, though I don’t think I’d really want to be married there, and I’m pretty sure they don’t do gay three way marriages. They aren’t quite as liberal as they think they are.”

Elias chuckled. “Most liberals aren’t.

“So?”

“Yes?”

“Have you decided if you’ll take Communion?”

“You know what?” Felix said, “the funny thing is I would never think ‘I can’t take Communion because the priest will know I stick dicks in my mouth,’—hell, he probably does too—but I do have this weird fear that I’ll get up there and the priest will say, ‘You’re a Protestant!’ I don’t know. I really don’t know what’s going to happen until I get up there.”

They were both quiet, and then Felix said, “I wonder if I talk about that to distract from the truth.”

“That a woman is dead?”

“That a woman is dead who I wanted to die, who makes things so much easier for Scott by being dead. A woman who took my love away from me, and now I don’t exactly know what’s going to happen in the future. My future.”

“Because of Scott’s kids?”

“I don’t want to be a mother,” Felix said, “and I don’t want to be an asshole either.”

That night when they were eating dinner, Dylan said, “This has been one hell of a week.”

“And not even our hell,” Lance said.

“Right? But we’ve been so in our own little world, trying to make our own little life, and now we’re meeting friends, getting into their lives and I have to say, I like Felix.”

Lance nodded and Elias said, “I like what’s happened to us. I like what we’ve been through. I’m glad we could be part of people’s lives right now.

“Felix said something about kids.”

“About having to raise them?” Lance said. “That would be something, to be free and single and then be strapped with someone else’s kids.”

“Hey!” Dylan interrupted. “Watch yourselves! That’s how my dad got me.”

“It’s not exactly the same,” Elias said, laying his fork down.

“It kind of is,” Dylan told him.

“Fenn wasn’t free and single. He wasn’t even with your dad.”

“Whatever it is,” Elias said. “It would be something. To have a kid.”

“Something I have never allowed myself to think about,” Dylan said, “one: because I wasn’t ready for it, and two: because I didn’t think it would ever happen for us, is how it would be for us if we had children.”

“Us,” Lance said, pointing to his chest.

“See,” Dylan said, “the idea is so outlandish you don’t even let yourself think about it.”

Elias folded his hands together and looked at the two of them, but Lance shook his head.

“That’s not true,” he said. “You don’t know how many times I’ve thought about having a little boy. Sometimes I picture him on like one of those tire swings, or me teaching him how to throw a football and I want it so bad it hurts. You’re wrong, Dylan. I think about it everyday.”

The funeral was at Saint Casimir’s. There, it seemed as if Scott had pulled himself out of the wreck. Against his will Felix thought, He is more handsome than before because, for some reason, sadness is beautiful, and some people call it gravitas. It makes you sexier than being happy, and here he is grave and all in black, the pitiful single father at age thirty with his boys.

The choir sang:

I am the Bread of Life
You who come to me will not hunger
And you who drink of me shall not thirst
No one can come to me
Unless the Father beckons..

Scott was not a pallbearer. He had been at the front, on his family’s side, with the children, overlooking the rose colored coffin of his wife. The casket was closed and Felix couldn’t even remember what Jen looked like. None of this was real. Nothing real could be said at the eulogy. This false sadness was best. Scott chose to say nothing. He did, for the sake of decency, nod his head a few times. On either side of him sat Nathan and Taylor, and then beside Taylor were Matt and Joey.

The other day, when Matt and Joey had come to the house with the furniture, Matt was in a feed cap, unshaven and in flannel, and he looked a little bit high. After they had put up the furniture and Joey was in the restroom, Matt began to cry.

“I’m such an asshole. I shouldn’t have fucked him, Felix. We shouldn’t have. We were doing it while I was doing the divorce and then I knew about you and it was all wrong and I was so jealous and now she’s dead and I’m such an asshole!” he wept into his hands and then balled his hands into fist and boxed himself in the head.

“I feel like such a shit.”

But here was Matt right now, hand on Taylor’s shoulder, red hair styled till it glinted copper, in an immaculate black suit.

And I will raise you up!
And I will rai-aissse you up!
And I will rai-aissse you up
On the la-assst day!

They filed out of the church, into the black cars. Scott did not go with Jen’s family. He drove his Land Rover with Nathan and Taylor, Felix and Joey, requesting that Felix sit shotgun while the kids sat between Matt and Joey. In front of Saint Casimir’s the taillights of the hearse went red, and then they pulled up Archer Avenue. Next came Scott, knowing his parents followed. At the grave side, the priest talked on and on, and in Felix’s memory the priest is talking while the dirt, scrabble, scrabble, thud, thud, hits the lid of the coffin. But he knows this is not so. There might have been one dirt clod, but people are buried in vaults now, a vault that the casket goes into, and then it’s sealed later, so that whoever is in there is protected from the earth, and from the cranes should there ever be a building project here. Returning to earth, ashes to ashes and dust to dust: that is a lie here. So is eternal rest. It’s rest till they dig you up again. Felix thinks: better to evade desecration and costs in the five digits bullshit funerals by a quick trip to the crematorium.

Crematorium.

Jesus Goddamn, picturing his mother or his sister, or his anything in ashes, or not alive fucks with Felix.

He goes back to his preferred memory of “thud, thud” and the priest talking.

Scott was standing beside him when everyone has gone, when Joey had led the kids away, Scott murmured over the open grave: “We are so different

“You from me?”

“No,” Scott shook his head. “Both of, at this moment, from what we were when we first met again.”

“I think I’ve been a bad man because I’ve been a bad Christian,” Felix said. “I think I would like to come back to Saint Casimir’s with you. I think I looked for God but I was never anywhere that was quiet enough to let him in. Margaret’s is nice. It’s very social. But there is something missing. It’s soulless… Or maybe I’m soulless when I’m in it. I don’t know. But I think I have to leave. Find something for myself.”

Scott slipped his hand into Felix’s.

“I’ll go anywhere and do anything you want me to do,” he said.

“FUCK ME!” he says, “Ah, God, fuck me!”

He says it so tenderly in the bed that tonight is their bed. Scott presses his ass to bring Felix deeper into him, reaches behind to press Felix’s ass, tightens on him, grinding himself.

“Fuck me like you did that first time... When we didn’t expect it... Ahh... God. Ah... Felix ... Ayyy....”

So quiet, in the dark.

All sex is the same in the end. It is the journey to the end that is different. The lovemaking, the fucking, is just as much about how they got to this point as that moment itself, bodies together.

That night, after they both shower, Scott sits in the window ledge, naked, sure no one can see, but also not really caring. He sits there, legs open, and Felix, coming out of the bathroom, comes to him immediately, goes to his knees, takes him in his mouth. Is he surprised? Are either of them. Hard to say. It doesn’t matter. After so many days of feeling dead, feeling alive right now, growing firmer, harder, Scott takes Felix’s head and is fucking his face.

In the end, standing up and taking him by the hand, Scott leads Felix to the bed, not begging, just climbing into the bed, just covering him with hungry kisses and the hot warmth of his body, and awakening in Felix a passion he did not know he felt, taking his penis in his mouth. In just a few moments, their bodies work together and now Scott is riding him.

Scott is still a surprise of tightness, of deep, deep, shocking, electrifying, hands pressing on Felix’s chest, moving down his chest to his stomach, moving to make his hips buck, taking Felix’s hands in his and moving them up his own chest, white in the night, and then touching his own chest, massaging his own cock, coming down so that Felix’s hands can plant themselves in his tawny hair that is dark in the night. He is so beautiful and skilled this way, so full of the same heat that is in Felix, both of their voices catching. Scott is arching his back, opening his mouth, planting his hands behind him, on either side of Felix, opening his mouth in swears and promises of love, whisper moaning:

“Fuuuuuccck—”

As he comes, he cuts himself off with the spurt of semen shooting all up Felix’s stomach, a trail on his chest, speckles under his chin.