CHAPTER 17 - NERVOUS ENERGY

Part 2

Kai tipped his head back to look at Bard’s face and then reached out to touch his lip.

“You’re bleeding,” Kai said.

“I don’t care.”

Kai placed a light kiss where his lip was split. “What now?” he asked.

“I suppose...we could do more of the same?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’d like that. But....”

“But what?”

“You said you don’t have ‘much’ experience. Does that mean you have some?”

Bard pulled back slightly, his chest giving one great heave as he closed his eyes. The light caught on his lashes, making them glow like gold.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to,” Kai said hurriedly. “I wouldn’t have asked, only—I’ve never—and maybe you could help me understand the right way —“

“Kai,” Bard said, his voice a husky tenor ring. He reached out and slipped his hand under Kai’s, resting his palm on Kai’s knee. “It was… I knew him a school. Back then, it was a fleeting crush, rarely more than chaste, stolen pecks behind the gym, that sort of thing. Then the other boys got suspicious.”

“Oh,” Kai said. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

“His parents shuffled him—his name was Jack—off to another school before he could get the worst of it. And I learned how to run. How to hide. But then—five years later, he found me. He came back. And there were three months of—well, not bliss, but something like being a real person. Secretly, of course.” Bard smiled, ruefully. “I was with him on the day of the fire, at Winthrop’s. We were having tea in the cafe. It was supposed to be a kind of test—what it would be like to be honest, to be open. To go to a cafe together and not pretend we weren’t what we were to each other.”

Kai sunk into the back of the sofa. “What—” he began and then did not say were you to each other? What did he look like? What did you do with him? Did you love him? He rubbed his hands on his knees and silenced his mouth, tried to silence his mind.

“We hadn’t decided when we first smelled the smoke. Jack wasn’t sure, but I wanted to do it, live out in the sun—whatever sun Milton could offer us, anyway. I don’t know how I expected to feel, but it was like a core of terror encased in elation. I was afraid that the happiness would be like candy floss—a big, fluffy mass that melts away way the rain hits it. And then all I would be left with was the terror, the heaviness of it.”

Kai nodded. “It’s like you swallowed a weight, the way it feels.”

Bard quickly darted his eyes down, blinking. “Jack ran toward the fire, to try to help, but there was too much smoke to see. He inhaled a lot of it, and I had to drag him away. The worst moment was when I thought, If we die here, no one will have to know what we were planning. I was so ashamed.” He sniffed out a quiet laugh, one empty of real humor, and shook his head. “But one’s body has a way of wanting to stay alive—just like one’s guilt , even guilt over a thought. I carried him out, and I remember thinking that if I could carry him out of the store, I could bear the weight of anything.”

Bard told him the rest—of plunging into the street, shaking Jack until his eyes fluttered open, kissing him in the pure rush of relief—the act that meant Jack’s removal to Liverpool and Bard’s return to a life in hiding.  “The fire made me realize that if I had died, I would have done without ever having been authentic. I thought Jack agreed. But then my father found evidence of… acts from Jack’s past that he threatened to give to his family. There was already so much attention on us. People thought the IRA did it—the fire—at first, so there was much made about the Irish Catholic lad who saved a Protestant one. So if there was a scandal, it would make its way to everyone in Milton. I told Jack, we had planned to be together, not to hide it, so why go? And he said ‘Did we? Did we decide, though?’ And I knew then he wasn’t going to fight for me—or for himself. He was going to run. He was going to hide, the way I didn’t want to anymore.” Bard patted his chest, as if expecting to find something there.

“Oh,” Kai said, understanding the motion. “I have your necklace, here.”

He quickly unclasped it and held it out, but Bard stopped him with a hand on his wrist. “No, keep it,” Bard said. “My mother gave it to me, and I was wearing it that day.” He put his palm under the dangling pendant. “St. Christopher Protect Us. You see how he’s carrying the Christ child across the water? It felt portentous to me, after I had carried Jack out. I gave it to you when I entrusted you to bring home Cassandra, and you did.” He let the pendant fall and raised his eyes. “I’m so very grateful, Kai.”

Tenderness overwhelmed Kai, as if he had been plunged into warm water with his head under the surface, but content not to breathe. He was breathless anyway from the heady rush of emotion, from the nearness of Bard. He answered Bard’s confession by putting his hands back around his waist and pulling Bard to him. Bard swooned toward his mouth, so willing that Kai could hardly stand it. He dived into the kiss like a starving man.

I was starving, he thought. Starving for this. I knew it the moment I saw him. I knew it I knew it I knew —

Without really intending it, he slipped his right hand under Bard’s cardigan and pajama top, his fingertips and palm against smooth, cool skin. The contact shot through his hand, up his arm, igniting a need—to feel more of Bard’s skin, all of it. He leaned in, pressing Bard backward onto the arm of the sofa. Their hips touched as Kai braced himself above Bard with one hand on the sofa—he didn’t want to put his weight on Bard, but, oh, at the same time he did, he did. He wanted that skinny body beneath his, to whisper words into his ear and feel Bard’s hands twined in his hair. Bard grabbed the front of Kai’s sweater to pull him closer, and Kai let out something like a helpless yelp that was immediately muffled against Bard’s mouth. Bard laughed quietly and took Kai’s bottom lip to resume his kisses with fervor, using Kai’s shoulders to pull himself up so that their chests touched. The feeling of Bard’s stubble—much softer than he thought it would be—against his cheek was like hundreds of the same tiny pricks of pain, and Kai groaned, hardly able to believe that this man was kissing him. Kissing him, Kai Harper, the congresswoman’s son who had to be sent away and hidden; Kai Harper, the boy who had always feared what he was capable of. 

In the midst of their fumbling—when Kai’s groan had made Bard dig his fingers into Kai’s side and buck up his hips, suddenly Bard was bending his bony knees up, pushing them into Kai’s abdomen. Bard slid from beneath him and then sat back down on the couch, panting.

Kai looked at him, dazed from kisses, not understanding. “Bard?” he said hesitantly.

“I—I think that’s well enough for now,” Bard said. His face and chest where it was bared by the V-neck of his pajama shirt were blotched with a deep blush. His lips looked even fuller, the cut cherry red in the pink.

Kai realized he was breathing hard too, as if he’d been fencing with a particularly skilled opponent. That was a novelty—he had told Bard he had won competitions, but the truth was nobody had ever beat him. His uncle probably would tell that to Bard before too long. He was proud of it.

Good. Yeah. Think about Uncle Jude, Kai thought as he shifted carefully back to sitting. Uncle Jude with cheese curds all over his hands.

Kai steadied his breathing. “No—I mean—yeah, I guess you’re right. We’ve hardly even gotten a chance to talk again. Except for me babbling about my tortured childhood.”

Bard sighed thinly, pulling his knees to his chest. “And I my tortured love life—thin as it is.” He turned to face Kai. “I’m sorry I pushed you off like that, without any warning. It wasn’t because I didn’t like it. It was because—Kai, you know what my father did to Jack. You have to be prepared for the same. It’s more than exposing what you did at your school. It’s about this too, about who you are. I’m sorry—you never asked to get involved in all of this.”

“Don’t apologize,” Kai said. “You never have to be sorry for anything—not to me.” He laughed. “And anyway, there’s nothing like that in my past for him to find, and my parents wouldn’t care. They probably suspect already.”

Bard put his hand against Kai’s cheek then brushed back the dark waves of hair from his temple. “You strange boy,” Bard breathed. “You and your life is… almost alien to me. You’re from a different place entirely.”

“Yeah,” Kai said. “San Francisco.” He laughed again, mouth open, teeth showing, then rested his forehead against Bard’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” Bard said. “I must seem hopelessly prudish to you.”

“There’s nothing you need to be forgiven for,” Kai said. “Not ever.”

Slowly, Bard slid one of his hands across Kai’s stomach, wrapped the other behind him, and then sunk into him, his head nestled against Kai’s neck. 

“Then I won’t have to apologize for keeping you hostage like this,” Bard said, his breath warm on Kai’s throat.

Kai put his arm around Bard’s shoulder and dipped his head to rest his cheek against his brow. The tension he had felt in Bard, the hesitancy, was still there, but it seemed to dissipate with each breath. They stayed like this, murmuring about the smell of each other’s skin, the beauty of each other’s voices, the color of each other’s eyes, until, slowly, they slipped into sleep.