Tommy looked up at him with wide, startled eyes. “Please do,” he said.
“Hello, Daniel,” Everett said. “Are you enjoying the game?”
The child hesitated. “Well, I’m enjoying the chocolate,” he said diplomatically, gesturing at the thermos in his hand.
“I’m afraid young Daniel doesn’t appreciate the finer things in life,” Tommy said with a sideways smile at his son that hinted at a longstanding joke between the two of them, and Everett was forcibly reminded that he had been out of Tommy’s life for longer than Daniel’s entire existence.
The game started up again, and for the following quarter they sat shoulder to shoulder, only occasionally murmuring such boring commonplaces as “that was a bad hit,” and so forth. The strain between them was so palpable that Everett started to think other people could see it.
Everett tried to tell himself that he didn’t mind, that it was for the best, but this ranked among the more miserable moments of his life, outmatched only by a handful of funerals and Tommy’s wedding. He was settling in for some good old-fashioned wallowing and self-reproach when Tommy let out a low and exasperated chuckle. “This is horse shit,” he said, low enough and close enough that only Everett would hear. “Whatever the hell happened to make it so that we can’t even talk, can we just be done with it? Every time I see you, I feel so ashamed of whatever it was that I did.”
Everett didn’t know what disconcerted him more, this tactless honesty or the idea of Tommy Cabot being ashamed of anything. He cleared his throat and tried to sound normal. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said, irritation bleeding into his voice at being asked for sincerity on a topic he’d rather never acknowledge.
Tommy fell silent for long enough for St. Matthews to score a touchdown. When he finally spoke, his voice was even softer than it had been before. “You know, I told Daniel that he’d make friends for life at Greenfield. I told him that I had made the best friend I ever had.” He took a shaky breath. “And that holds true, what I told him. Other than my brothers, I’ve never—fuck.” He cast a frantic glance at his son, and Everett wasn’t sure if Tommy was more concerned about the profanity or the suddenly misty quality of his voice. Tommy passed a hand over his eyes and sat up straight, as if trying to get control of himself. Everett earnestly wished him success, because he did not know what to do in this situation.
Then Tommy glanced a hand across Everett’s knee. And, God, that was what had started it all in the first place, Tommy Cabot’s inability to keep his hands to himself. Affectionate by nature, he was always reaching out for whoever was near: an arm around the shoulder, a pat on the back. Everett, the only child of distant parents, soaked up Tommy’s attention and had fallen in love with him long before those easy touches became something different. Hands on one another in the showers. Mouths, but only if they were drunk. Kissing, eventually, but they never talked about it. They never talked about any of it. What was there to say? So, Cabot, are we in love or just regular old friends with a habit of getting one another off? His face heated just thinking about it.
Everett made a snap decision. “Come on, Daniel. I see some other boys in your year over there by a plate of franks. Let’s see if I can’t pull rank and get you to the front of the line.”
He led the boy to his friends, resisting the urge to look over his shoulder at Tommy.
* * *
Tommy had been trying to keep his distance from Everett, both because Everett clearly didn’t want anything to do with him, and also because Tommy wanted to curl up and die whenever he thought of Everett not wanting anything to do with him. He’d never forget how stiff and uncomfortable Everett had been when Tommy, motivated by bad judgment, wishful thinking, and about three fingers of scotch, had attempted to embrace Everett on Visiting Sunday, as if the past decade or so hadn’t happened, as if they were friends.
He hadn’t expected Everett to come sit by him, and still couldn’t figure out why he had, if all he wanted to do was sit there and radiate starchy discomfort. The contrast between Everett’s stiffness and the three students in the row in front of them, who were unsubtly passing a flask back and forth while whispering things that made one another dissolve into shaking laughter, was too much for Tommy. He remembered when he and Everett had been the ones laughing and earning reprimanding looks from nearby adults. He remembered all the times he and Everett had slipped off at halftime to make use of their empty bedroom. If anyone had told him then that fifteen years would pass during which he and Everett wouldn’t exchange a single word, he wouldn’t have believed it. And what was more, he didn’t think Everett would have believed it either. It was just another thing that Tommy had failed at, and it seemed grossly unfair that this failure from the past was being thrown in his face right at the moment when he had to try to piece together a future.
Now Everett was coming up the steps, sitting back down. Tommy hadn’t expected that either. He had rather assumed that Everett would deposit Daniel in a place mercifully far from his father’s emotions, and then make himself scarce.
“That was kind of you,” Tommy said. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought Everett was watching him out of the corner of his eye.
“Nothing of the sort.” The syllables jammed together into one formulaic nonsense word, nothingofthesort, its only purpose to dismiss Tommy’s feelings. Tommy dug his fingers into the fabric of his trousers, into the meat of his thighs.
“It was kind of you,” Tommy repeated. “I’m trying to spare Daniel the worst of things.” Ask me what I mean, he wanted to shout. A simple “how so” would do the trick. Make a conversation with me. Meet me halfway. Pretend we knew one another once.
One of Everett’s fingers slid beneath the edge of his cardigan—the man was wearing a cardigan for God’s sake, he wasn’t even forty and he was wearing an argyle cardigan with scratchy-looking plaid woolen trousers. One of his long fingers insinuated itself into the cuff and Tommy guessed he was fiddling with the stem of his watch. As far as Tommy knew, that was Everett’s only nervous tell.
And then—Jesus Christ, ghosts were so thick on the ground in this place he could hardly fucking breathe—he remembered Everett spending the entirety of fourth period Latin fiddling with that watch stem. Before class, Tommy had said something filthy to him, some effortless and eager promise he fully intended to deliver on, but not before he spent an hour watching Everett slowly lose his mind instead of doing his declensions. But that tinkering with the watch stem had been the only outward sign that Everett had been distracted; the bastard had even primly raised his hand a couple of times. After class Tommy had dragged Everett into a broom closet as if it were the most normal thing in the world.
“Tommy. What the—” Everett had started, but Tommy was already groping at his zipper.
“Tell me to stop if you don’t want it,” Tommy had mumbled into the wool of Everett’s school sweater.
“I’m not going to tell you anything of the sort, you moron.” And then he had dragged Tommy even closer by the tie, pushed him against the wall, kissed him stupid. Stupider, rather. He had been operating at a baseline level of moderate stupidity since the first time Everett had caught him looking and then looked back in return. But this, daytime kissing, Everett’s mouth taking him from frantic lust to something gentler, that had been new. “I’m not going to tell you to stop,” Everett had repeated. “But I am going to tell you to wait until we can do this properly.”