Ben's T cells are low again, but he doesn't tell Michael. He doesn't feel sick yet, only tired. He may not get sick. There may be no need to worry Michael. JR is having boy trouble, something Melanie and Lindsay can't really help her with, and that has Michael preoccupied.
"She's straight," Michael says over his morning coffee. He says it with such innocent bewilderment that it's like he's never said it before, like it's actually news. This makes Ben smile.
"My daughter's straight. She likes boys."
Ben glances up from his newspaper. "Straight girls tend to."
Michael sticks his tongue out and the years peel away briefly. For a moment Ben can't see the grey in Michael's hair, or the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and smile. The flash of youth makes Ben wistful.
Why did I have to wait so long to meet you? Why couldn't we have met when we were young boys, before I got infected and you wasted all those years chasing Brian Kinney?
Ben knows that it's useless to think along such lines. What's gone is gone and can't be recovered. He's had fifteen years of Michael, and he's loved him in ways that Brian could not, or would not.
Whatever Ben missed, he has mornings like this.
The light May breeze carries the scent of lilacs, mint, and thyme through the open window, and causes the bamboo wind chimes to clack gently. Ben sips his tea and turns back to his newspaper, but he doesn't read. He listens as Michael resumes his chatter about JR, glancing up every now and then to smile or to talk Michael back to reality.
Ben doesn't teach on Fridays, so, while Michael is at work, he takes a stack of photo albums off the shelf in the living room and carries them to the bedroom. Propping himself up on his elbow, he turns the pages slowly and tells himself that he's not being sentimental, even when certain pictures make his throat close up.
The pictures date from his first year with Michael, and he's astonished by how young they look in the oldest ones. Both of them. Michael was in his early thirties when they met, but to Ben he looks much younger.
Maybe we weren't as old as I thought we were when we first met, he thinks. Maybe we didn't lose as much as I thought.
There are pictures from birthday parties, pictures with Hunter, Deb, Vic, their friends. There are pictures from their wedding, pictures of Michael holding an infant JR and grinning so hard it looks as though his face is about to split. There are pictures from their trip to Asia: Michael looking self-conscious in an indigo yukata, Hunter posing on the Great Wall of China, the three of them slurping buckwheat noodles from the same clay bowl.
There's a picture of Hunter standing beside a small mountain of cartons and a cascade of bubble wrap in his new Pittsburg apartment. There's a picture of JR, which Melanie must have sent them, looking about four, riding a blue tricycle with plastic ribbons flapping from the handlebars.
There's a picture of Ben and Michael curled up together on the bed, with Michael's head pillowed against Ben's chest, and Ben's arm draped lightly across Michael's shoulder. The sunlight is the deep gold of late afternoon. Squinting, Ben thinks he can almost see the dust particles floating on the beam. Hunter took that picture while they were sleeping. They found it about a year later, after Hunter died, while they were cleaning out his apartment.
Ben touches the picture with his fingertips and wonders if he should contact Brian. He nearly did when Hunter died, when he worried that he and Michael were too broken to help each other.
Contact me if you need me, Brian had said quietly to Ben just before he left Pittsburg six years ago. By "you" Ben knew he'd meant Michael.
I probably won't be at that number I gave you, but I'll find out you're trying to contact me.
Brian's number is scribbled on the inside cover of The Art of Happiness. All Ben knows is that it's not a North American or an Asian number. After Hunter died, Ben sat for a long time with the book in his hand. He pictured Brian standing on the edge of the Coral Sea, grinding against some young man in a wild European nightclub, dropping everything and flying back across the years and miles to hold Michael together. The book remained closed in Ben's hand. He never made the call.
He's glad that he didn't, because he and Michael -- with Deb's help, and Emmett's and Ted's -- were enough for each other. The jagged pieces of their hearts fit together; they survived.
Michael will survive Ben's loss, Ben thinks as he closes the last of the photo albums and pushes all of them aside. He rolls onto his back and stares at the ceiling. Michael will hurt for a long time, but not forever. This thought is neither soothing nor troubling. It is a truth that Brian and Ben both know, and that Michael will learn.
But not yet. Not yet.
"Not yet," Michael says later when he and Ben are in bed and Ben is nuzzling the soft skin of his neck.
Ben waits while Michael reaches for his bookmark, marks his place, and sets his book on the night table.
"Yet?" Ben asks with a grin.
"Yet," Michael agrees, turning and sliding into Ben's arms.
Then they are kissing, and fingers are fumbling with buttons and with the elastic of waistbands. It's a warm night, but Ben doesn't kick the blanket aside. It cocoons them, holding them together in a cloud of benmichael scents.
It also blocks the moonlight, which might betray grey hair, or a belly that's not as flat as it once was, or legs that don't bend as easily as they did years ago. Ben does not deny these things. There are some nights when he loves them because they're proof of the years he and Michael have spent together. But tonight he finds himself craving the illusion of youth, and for a few moments he captures it.
It doesn't last. The illusion is rent by the harshness of their breathing, by Michael's laughter when he can't get his ankles up to Ben's shoulders on his first attempt, by the slowness of their lovemaking.
In the end, it doesn't matter. Afterward, they lie together in satisfied silence, Michael's head on Ben's shoulder, his hand over Ben's heart, and Ben's fingers slowly stroking Michael wrist. Time flutters around them like pages in a dark wind, but that doesn't matter.
They have time, Ben tells himself.
End of "Between Here and Gone" by Thistlerose (thistlerose2002@yahoo.com)