Justin

I’d just flipped the sign to closed and was counting up the till when Cam stepped into the shop, holding the door open as Flynn carried in two cardboard boxes stacked on top of one another. I hurried over to take one from him and led the way to the small storeroom in the back.

“Thanks for helping out again, Flynn,” I said as I set my box down and took his to stack on top. 

“Oh, yeah, no problem,” Flynn said. “I love carrying shit.”

“Don’t ever feel like you have to, but it has made things easier while Cam’s back is out.”

“Nah, anytime. But, uh. There’s something I need to talk to you about.” He tugged a familiar shirt loose from the band of his—no, wait, my—shorts, and held it out to show a ragged line of rough stitchwork on the back as he handed it to me. “So, this morning, I put my clothes in the wash—like, all of my clothes—and then I realised I had work and it was still going. So Cam said it would be okay if I borrowed some of yours.”

I nodded as he spoke. Cam had already told me all of this, but I felt like it was better to let him say his bit.

“But then on the way home, I saw this goanna, and I followed it into the brush and I fell and ripped your shirt. Cam showed me how to sew it, but I kinda fucked it up. I can try again. The sewing kit I bought came with tiny scissors, so I could cut the stitches out.”

“First of all, I bet it came with a seam ripper too, which is the actual proper tool for that job. Second, no, leave it like that. It’s just a shitty old shirt. Baby’s first sewing attempt gives it character. Third… are you okay? Did you hurt yourself when you fell?”

Flynn lifted his leg and pointed to the bandaid on his knee. “Just a scrape. It’s okay.” He put his foot back on the ground. “I really am sorry, though. Even if you don’t care about the shirt, that’s not the point, right? It probably seems like I just don’t respect your stuff, but that’s not it. I was careful all day that I didn’t sit anywhere dirty or even get them too sweaty while I was working.”

My fingers tightened around the shirt. He could not be putting those kinds of thoughts in my head right now. Or ever, actually.

“But nobody sees all that. None of that even matters. All that matters is that in the end, I did fuck it up. You try hard and do great all day, and then you get distracted for one minute—”

“Hey, I can tell you care, alright?” I interrupted. “Even before you said that part. It’s very obvious that you care.”

“But I still ripped the shirt. That’s what matters, in the end.”

“So the point is the shirt, except it’s not, it’s your intentions. But actually, they don’t matter at all. I’m not sure I’m keeping up here.”

“The point is that intentions don’t matter if I can’t follow through, and next time it might be something you do care about.”

“Six months ago, my sister died. Something like that really puts things into perspective. As long as Cam is okay, how much do I really care?”

“Most things are fixable,” Cam added. “Being a little scatterbrained isn’t the worst thing in the world.”

Flynn drew in a deep, bracing breath. He smiled, but it felt more like plastering over his feelings than truly accepting our words. Being told something was never enough; not when it contradicted an entire lifetime of experience. It’d taken me years to stop feeling like kindness was a trap. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I’d ever really learnt to embrace it. I just wasn’t a guy who needed any fuss. The important part was that I’d grown up into a man who treated others kindly.

“Thanks, guys,” Flynn said, his smile held on his face with visible effort. “Really. I appreciate the patience.”

Finally, I deployed my original plan of attack, before this giant puppy of a man had decided to get all philosophical on me: jingle jangle shiny keys distraction. If his short attention span could get him into trouble, it could surely make him forget about it.

“So, how big was that goanna?”

A spark of genuine enthusiasm lit in Flynn’s eyes, though I got the impression he was fully aware of the bait he was taking. “Oh man, it was like…” He gestured from the tips of his fingers to halfway up his bicep. “It was pretty big! I wanted to get a picture, but no dice. It’s a long commute, but I love working out there. We’ve got this frilled-neck that hangs out in the parking lot sometimes, too, and we decided to put up a sign to warn people so nobody’d run it over, but it turned out none of us knew how to draw a frilled-neck lizard. My attempt looked like a lion. In the end Ethan just made something on his computer and laminated it, and that did the job, but he kept all our lizard paintings and hung them around his greenhouse like it was kid art.”

When he paused for breath, I jumped on the opportunity to execute the final part of my reassure-Flynn plan. “I think we saw that sign when we were parking. Why don’t you tell us more about it over dinner? There’s a nice little spot down the street. Our treat.”

“Oh, yeah, thanks, that’d be amazing,” Flynn said, following as we started moving towards the door. “Though I don’t know how much more I had to say about the lizard. Might need to come up with another topic.”

The small, local restaurant we were walking to was only at the end of the street, but that was enough time for Flynn to start visibly flagging, his shoulders held loose and none of the usual bounce in his step. We chose a table outside and he immediately started scouring the menu.

“What looks good?” Cam prompted when Flynn stopped flipping.

Flynn pointed. “Big beef burger.”

“Excellent choice,” Cam said, forcing false cheer into his voice. I could tell he was worried. I recognised that look on his face from when Tammy had started to go down hill. That smile that wanted to be a frown, all fragile and wavering at the edges.

But this was different. Flynn was just tired because he’d been up half the night rearranging our living room. After everything he’d been through, there was no way we’d been the ones to actually break his spirit in under twenty-four hours.

I went inside to place our order. When I sat back down, Cam asked Flynn, “So, how was work today?”

Flynn perked up a little, but it took visible effort. Normally energy flowed out of him, effortlessly and endlessly. “Yeah, not bad. Mostly I was trying to figure out if Ethan was mad at me for begging him to be my reference. He’ll never tell you if he is, and it mostly just looks the same as him being tired.”

“Oh, sorry, we didn’t realise that would cause any dramas,” Cam said. “Honestly, our minds were already pretty made up on the matter. Asking for a reference just felt like the responsible thing to do. I’m not sure it would have made much difference what he said.”

“That’s good. I was thinking about it, and I’m pretty sure Ethan just lied.”

“That wasn’t that impression I got,” Cam said. “He told us that you’re his best friend. Well, after his boyfriend.”

“Well, yeah, because he doesn’t have any other friends,” Flynn said. “And he told me last night he compared me to a smart cat. When someone compares me to an animal, it’s always a dog. Whether they’re saying I’m friendly, or goofy, or whatever, it’s gonna be a dog every time.”

“You do have a bit of golden retriever energy going.”

“Right. Exactly. And nobody’s ever accused me of being smart. So you take dumb dog… flip it… and you get smart cat. Ethan’s no good at lying, so he just reversed the truth.”

“I can see how you got there, but I don’t think that’s what happened,” Cam said. “He didn’t just throw out the smart cat thing as a one liner. It came with a whole story about his boyfriend’s friend’s cats, and how he thinks the one everyone calls stupid is actually the smart one. He had quite a bit to say about you.”

“There’s no way a bad liar could have come up with all that if it wasn’t true,” I added.

“Huh,” Flynn said, tilting his head back and contemplating for a long moment. “No, yeah, you’re right. Ethan almost never has a whole lot to say, and when he does, it’s the stuff that really matters to him. Still don’t really get what he was on about, but I bet he did mean it.”

“He seems like he cares about you a lot,” Cam said.

“Ah, yeah, he does,” Flynn said. “Sometimes I don’t think he likes me much, but he’s a real pro at the caring part. Maybe it’s good he doesn’t have many friends, because a lot of people would take advantage. I’m sure not a perfect friend, but I’m pretty much harmless at least.”

“Isn’t that a sad way to live your life, though? Not making friends just in case they’re assholes?”

“Yeah, I guess. Though I don’t think he could really handle having more anyway, so if he ever does make another friend, I’m probably getting voted off the island.”

I really didn’t think Ethan valued their friendship as little as Flynn seemed to think, and a glance exchanged with Cam told me he agreed, but Flynn’s chin was resting on his hand and his eyelids were drooping. I got the feeling getting into a debate right now wouldn’t be doing him any favours. It only took a few more seconds of lull in the conversation before Flynn folded his arms on the table, mushed his face into the crook of one elbow, and shut his eyes.

So Cam and I launched into a conversation that didn’t require his input about bills and auction dates and work scheduling. I wanted to bury my fingers in Flynn’s hair, gently scratch his scalp to let him know that he was still a part of this, that we were still all here having an evening out together even if he was too tired to chat. Unfortunately that would have been deeply weird, so I kept my hands to myself.

By the time the waiter brought our food out, I was pretty sure Flynn actually had fallen asleep, but he sat up at the first whiff of burger near his nose and began devouring it without a breath of hesitation.

Cam gave an uncertain laugh. “Nobody’s going to take it away, you know.”

Flynn smiled and slowed down for a few seconds, but it wasn’t long before he picked back up to a pace that made me worry he would choke himself.

Once again I found myself wondering if he hadn’t been eating, but the evidence of his body really didn’t support that hypothesis, and he’d left the house with a full belly this morning. But maybe it wasn’t about the here and now. Maybe it went further back than that.

When I was eight years old, a tiny kitten fell over the fence into our backyard. I still don’t know how that tiny, half-starved, flea-bitten thing had managed to scale a fence taller than I was now as a grown man, but there she was, screaming in the tangle of weeds at the back of the yard. 

We probably should have bottle fed her, but my mum never put that much work into anything and I was too young to know any better. She survived on a diet of homebrand tinned kitten food. She put on weight, and then more weight, but even once she started waddling when she walked, she never stopped eating every meal like she was starving.

I took her with me when I snuck into Cam’s house for the last time in the middle of the night. That final time, when I stayed.

She was still in that house, living with Cam’s parents, now only moderately overweight. When Cam and I moved out, our first apartment hadn’t allowed pets, and by the time we had a proper place of our own, it hadn’t felt right to take her. She was old, and settled, and Cam’s parents loved her.

It felt a little strange whenever I saw her, knowing that all the life I’d lived between age eight and now was less than the lifespan of a cat. That you could hit the bottom and come back up and fall in love and be a parent and lose a child and you hadn’t even lived a full human life yet, not even close. By any reasonable measure, I was still just barely a man.

The burger seemed to have restored some of Flynn’s energy, or at least woken him up. He looked even more dead behind the eyes than before, and Cam’s attempts to talk to him did nothing to stoke his spirits. Me and Cam were still eating, so when Flynn decided he wanted to turn in his chair and stare off down the street, we left him to it.

I assumed he’d just disengaged and zoned out until suddenly he stood, strode off down the footpath with purpose, and crouched on the ground. He stayed like that, shoulders hunched, staring into a bush. Reached a hand out, beckoning. A little furry head emerged and headbutted it.

It took a little more persuasion to lure the elegant little tabby cat out, but as soon as it came to rub against his knees, Flynn picked the creature up and carried it back to the table. He sat, placed the cat on his lap, and it immediately jumped off and strode a few steps away in a huff. When Flynn followed and tried to stroke its ears, the cat swatted his arm and dashed off to slink away through the iron bars of a fence.

I grabbed Flynn’s hand when he returned to the table, but the scratch wasn’t deep. Just a pink line of raised skin, barely beading blood in a couple of places.

“I think you came on a little too strong,” I told him as I released his hand.

Flynn sank down in his seat. “Yeah. I do that a lot, I guess.”

And I might’ve advised him not to do that, at least with cats, but I pushed the menu towards him instead and said, “Pick a dessert,” because all I wanted was for him to get back to being his usual too-much self. 

Not that the pavlova he chose had that effect, but he did eat it with gusto. By the time he was done, me and Cam had finished eating dinner, so we paid and headed back to the shop.

On the drive home, Flynn curled up on the back seat as best as his large body would let him. Cam twisted around, on the brink of asking him to put his seatbelt on, but I stopped him with a shake of my head. It was a short drive. He’d be fine.

Cam reluctantly let it be.

That was just how Cam had grown up. I still remembered the booster seats in his parents’ car, and we’d been in school when we met. Not exactly babies. But those were the safety recommendations for kids our age, and Cam’s parents had followed them to a T. I’d always thought they were the weird ones because even Tammy didn’t get anything special after she was about four. Now I realised our parents just hadn’t cared that much about either of us.

I wished there was something we could do to cheer Flynn up, but I knew from hard personal experience that it didn’t work like that. Not when the things that were haunting you were entrenched. For Flynn, happiness would be very much a long term project.

But that was fine. I liked a good project. We were all young, all healthy. We weren’t about to run out of chances for a better tomorrow.