Enter, Night

“Thanks, honey,” Elliot said to Donna. What he wanted was for her to go away back behind the bar, sooner rather than later. He winked, dead sexy, something that usually opened doors for him with whichever woman was the recipient of the wink.

Donna rolled her eyes. “You with the winks,” she said. “All talk, no action.” But Donna smiled when she said it and she winked back, putting a little extra sway in her hips when she turned around and walked back to the bar. Under any other circumstances, Elliot would be looking forward to getting laid tonight, but right now he just wanted her away from him and Jeremy so he could neutralize this situation as quickly as possible. Bedding Donna Lemieux was the last thing on his mind.

For his part, Jeremy couldn’t take his eyes off Elliot’s face.

Late at night when he was alone in his bed, he’d let his mind wander back over the years. It was the only time he felt safe thinking about Parr’s Landing and what his mother had done to him by sending him away. He was able to safely scan the memories he had, sifting through them, bypassing the cruellest ones and fingering the ones that contained traces of love, or beauty, the way someone else might lovingly caress a favourite photograph in an album. Over the years, Jeremy had found that the easiest way to access those memories was to conjure Elliot’s face and body. The memories weren’t sexual, necessarily, because that part was so associated with the pain that came later at the hands of Adeline and Dr. Gionet. But they were resolutely romantic memories nonetheless fuelled by lovingly tended longing and desire.

Small things, flashes and mental snapshots; Elliot’s tanned neck as he saw it from his desk a row behind and two seats to the left in homeroom at Matthew Browning; Elliot’s dented red hockey helmet, and the way his black hair looked, wet with sweat, when he took the helmet off in the intermission between periods, his eyes never leaving the action on the ice, during the Friday night hockey games at the old Mike Takacs Memorial Arena out on Brandon Nixon Road, before the fire that shut it down.

Mostly, though, he remembered Elliot’s smile which, however rare (back then at least), lit up his entire face when it suddenly appeared. His voice, his laugh. Elliot’s powerful butterfly stroke as he swam out to the summer raft in Bradley Lake. The way the girls at Matthew Browning stared at Elliot when he passed in the hallway, the way Jeremy hated them for staring and knew that he hated them because he stared, too. But they could do it openly while he had to stare surreptitiously.

And Jeremy was still staring surreptitiously now, fifteen years later.

The face and body sitting in the chair in front of him, the man pretending that the two of them were just a couple of guys who had barely known each other in high school, and had now met again in a bar fifteen years later, was still Elliot’s. The body had hardened and thickened with muscle, and the face had the natural bronzed look of a man who lived and worked outdoors in a northern Ontario town.

But it was still somehow the same: the same thick pelt of black-brown hair in a military crew cut, almost like mink, tapering into the barest suggestion of a widow’s peak over a wide forehead; the dark eyebrows against the olive skin of his face, arching up over eyes the colour of black coffee; the strong nose and jaw, the aggressive five o’clock shadow, the sensual mouth, the white, white teeth. Jeremy’s eyes reverenced Elliot’s neck and throat, thick like the rest of him. More than anything at that moment, he wanted Elliot to laugh, so he could hear that joyous growl of pleasure he remembered better than any other part of Elliot. If he heard that, Jeremy believed, the rest of what had happened that night would go away, or at least not matter quite as much.

“So… are you still playing hockey?” He realized he was flailing for a neutral topic that might prompt even a minor thaw in Elliot’s demeanour, and that he sounded desperate and the question was idiotic.

Elliot shrugged. “Some. Why?”

“Elliot, aren’t we even still friends? Even just a bit? Even with everything else that happened, couldn’t we just… I don’t know, talk?” His eyes filled with tears again, and he hated himself even more for allowing Elliot to see them.

“We are talking,” Elliot said, looking away. He took another pull of beer from the bottle. “This is us, talking. Jem, this isn’t Toronto. People remember things here, and what we did-well, it’s taken a long time for me to make it OK here, to convince people that rumours about us… well, you know. That they weren’t true.”

“Rumours,” Jeremy said. “Right, the ‘rumours.’ Jesus Christ.”

“You know what I mean, Jem,” Elliot said fiercely, keeping his voice down. “Do you know what my dad did to me after your mother told him about us? Do you know what your fucking mother ordered him to do? He beat me with a fucking whip.”

“Well, my mother sent me away to be tortured for six months, Elliot,” Jeremy said, matching Elliot’s tone. “What are we doing here, having a contest to see who got it worse? Do you want to see the scars on my body from the burns? I see them every day when I’m naked. Do you want to see them?”

“Keep your fucking voice down.” Elliot looked around, but no one in the bar appeared to have heard either of them. Behind the bar, Donna was washing glasses.

Jeremy said again, softly, “Do you? Do you want to see them?”

He nudged his beer bottle almost imperceptibly across the surface of the table between them until his knuckles grazed Elliot’s. Their eyes met. Behind them, the jukebox played “Maggie May.” Elliot allowed Jeremy’s fingers to linger there for a brief second, then jerked his hand away.

“You left,” Elliot said. “You ran away from home and left me here. I had to stay. You got a new life. All I had was the same one I always had, except I had to face everything by myself that you left behind. It doesn’t matter anyway now,” he said. “I’m normal. I have a normal life. I’m somebody in this town. The past is in the past. I don’t want you fucking it up.”

Jeremy looked down. “I’m sorry.” He took another sip of his beer. “You know what? No-I’m not sorry. None of this was my fault, and none of it had anything to do with you. I came back to Parr’s Landing with Christina, for Christina. Not for you, and certainly not for my own good. Thanks for reminding me of that, Elliot.”

“Jem-”

“Forget it, Elliot,” Jeremy said tiredly. He raised the bottle to his lips and drained it in one long draught. Then he pushed the bottle away. “I won’t bother you again. But please, it’s a small town. If we do run into each other, can you just not act like… well, can you just be nice? I don’t think I can handle any more shit right now from anyone, least of all you.”

“Don’t drive drunk now,” Elliot said, trying to joke, and failing. “I don’t want to have to arrest you.”

If he smiles now, I’m done for, Jeremy thought. If he laughs, I don’t know if I’m going to be able to walk out of here. Please, God, don’t let him laugh.

But of course he didn’t laugh, nor did he smile, and for that Jeremy was profoundly grateful. It made it easier for him to stand up without saying goodbye to Elliot, and to walk calmly out of the bar, nodding to Donna and smiling, but otherwise drawing no attention to himself.

And because he didn’t turn around, he didn’t see Elliot watching him, the longing in his face breaking through the mask of ruthless masculine efficiency. For a moment Elliot looked seventeen, not thirty-two. The sight of it would have broken Jeremy’s heart all over again and shattered his resolve. Elliot knew this and was likewise profoundly grateful that Jeremy hadn’t seen it.

Still safe, he thought, looking around the bar. Everything is good. And even if it’s not good, it’s safe. Elliot walked slowly and deliberately over to where Donna was polishing glasses behind the bar and sat down at one of the stools.

He leaned in on his elbows, laying his arms on the bar. Looking deeply into her eyes, he smiled and said, “So?”

“So yourself, “ Donna said. She flushed slightly and unconsciously touched her hair. “So, nice evening with your friend?”

“Not a friend,” Elliot drawled. He increased the heat of his smile. “Just somebody from high school. We were in the same class at Browning, but I really barely knew the guy. He’s just passing through town.”

Donna had dismissed the rumours she’d heard about Jeremy Parr and Elliot years ago, hinting-to her girlfriends, at least, not to men, because she didn’t want them to think she was some kind of slut- that she had proof he wasn’t a queer. Certainly she had entertained no doubts herself during the hours they’d spent in her bed together, with Elliot on top of her pumping away, hard as an anvil.

If she’d thought-well, not thought, really, just maybe felt, if even that-some trace of energy between them when she’d brought the beer over, she told herself she had