Out of Nowhere (36 page)

I called the board of directors and talked to the chair, Carly, who seemed friendly enough at first. Once she realized who I was, she began by thanking me for working with the kids and even snuck in a fairly subtle suggestion that the shop might want to donate money for programming in the future. But when I turned the conversation to Rafe, she was cold. Not unsympathetic—hell, she’d known him for years—but absolutely decided. I tried everything I could think of to get her to give him another chance. I even sent her testimonials I had the kids make, but she was immovable. Under no circumstances could they have someone with a record working with youth. She was, she told me, frankly horrified that Javier had hired him in the first place, and they were now undertaking a thorough review of everyone he’d vetted.

I went back to Books Through Bars, where I’d been with Rafe, and talked to people there about what his options might be for working with queer youth. They were full of righteous indignation about him getting fired, which was at least satisfying, but they explained in no uncertain terms the realities of how having a record made you nearly unemployable in any job involving youth. Of course it was delivered alongside impassioned monologues about racial disparity in incarceration, the school-to-prison pipeline, and an ex-inmate shadow economy that rivals that of undocumented workers—not to mention several articles that someone e-mailed me from their phone. Still, the takeaway was clear. There wasn’t much I could do.

Now I’m here. At Rafe’s apartment, where I’ve never been invited. To tell him that I fought.

And that I lost.

The pounding of my heart in my ears is louder than my knock, and it speeds up as the door squeaks open and Rafe fills the doorway. He looks awful. His hair is dirty and coming out of its hair tie, and there are dark circles under his eyes. Worse, he looks defeated. Every muscle is slouched inward like they’re curling around him, a last-ditch protection against the world. In his threadbare gray sweats, he looks like he’s back in prison.

Worst: he does
not
look pleased to see me.

“I told you I needed time.”

“I know,” I say. He’s blocking the door. “You look like shit.”

He narrows his eyes at me but backs up just enough to let me in, like he doesn’t even have the energy to tell me to fuck off.

His apartment is an efficiency, with a kitchenette that connects to the living room-slash-bedroom, and a bathroom off to the other side. It’s dark and musty and everything is brown and a yellowish color that was probably once white.

He has a couch backed against the kitchenette, with a card table in front of it and a small TV on an upended wooden crate. On the card table are his phone and a beat-up old laptop. Taking up most of the rest of the space are a mattress and box spring pushed against the far wall and a small dresser next to them, stuffed to capacity. There’s no closet, so a few dress shirts and a suit are hung from a hook next to the window and his shoes are lined up along the wall. A shelf between the kitchenette and the living room holds a few stacks of books, some DVDs, and random odds and ends piled among framed photographs of what must be his family.

Several posters for political rallies and groups hang in the living room, among them one for Books Through Bars. Other than the posters, the only decorations look suspiciously like craft projects. Maybe things his nieces and nephew made him? But no, looking closer at the amount of glitter and the preponderance of rainbows, they have to be from the kids at YA.

Rafe drops down on the couch and I sit next to him, sinking deeper into the worn couch than I expect to.

“Are you… okay?” I ask like an idiot. He’s clearly not.

“Nope,” he says flatly, staring straight ahead. “I’m exactly what I never wanted to be. An unemployed ex-con addict who sits around his apartment all day wishing he could get high and forget everything.” His voice is so blankly hopeless that he doesn’t even sound like the same person.

“No,” I start to say, but he turns to me and grips my forearms.

“
Yes
,” he snarls. “Those are true things. You can’t hide them by keeping me a secret from everyone. I’m a fucking loser. So why are you here? I didn’t call you.” He drops my arms and turns away.

Rafe is pushing hard. I’ve done it so many times but never quite seen what it looks like from the other side: forcing someone to see you the way you see yourself. Forcing them to press their face right up to the ugliness inside and then make the decision about whether they want to go or stay from there. Most people go. But Rafe saw me at my ugliest and he didn’t go. He asked for time and I gave it to him, but now I’m done. Done messing around. Done sneaking around. Done making excuses for either of us.

“Okay, yeah. You are unemployed. You went to prison so you are an ex-convict. You had a problem with drugs. And maybe you have been sitting around thinking about getting high. God knows you smell like you haven’t left your apartment in weeks. So sure, those things are true.”

His shoulders soften a little bit.

“Listen,” I tell him, deciding to jump right in to what I came here to say. I’m not much for comfort at the best of times. “About YA. I’m so fucking sorry, man. I really tried to get them to give you your job back. The kids did too. Jesus, the shit they said. But….” I shake my head.

He turns to face me. “What?”

I tell him about talking to Carly and how I asked the kids to write testimonials about how important Rafe had been to them. When I tell him that instead of writing them, they recorded videos on their phones, he almost smiles, and mutters, “Of course they did.”

“I can’t believe you did that for me,” he says finally, and shame settles in my gut at how clearly Rafe expected absolutely nothing of me.

“Sorry it didn’t do any good.”

“It did,” he says softly. “Thank you.”

“I get it more now. How freaked you were about the thing with Anders. How scared you were to break any rules. I—” I roll my eyes at myself. “—read some articles about all that stuff. How difficult it is to get hired when you have a record and how hard people come down on anything you do that’s not perfect.” I trail off, not really knowing how to talk about this stuff. “It’s so damn unfair.”

“Fuck, Colin,” he says, and he takes my hands. “I don’t know what I’m going to do without them. I just… I haven’t felt this… untethered since….” He shakes his head and slumps back into the couch.

“Look, everything sucks right now, but you’ll figure it out. You will,” I insist as he starts to turn away. “When I met you, my life was utter garbage. No, it was. You changed everything for me, man. If you can do that for me, you can do it for yourself. Hell, maybe you’ll start your own version of YA. Or whatever. I don’t know. But you’ve got all this experience and you know tons of people who’d want to help. Maybe you can’t do the same job. But that doesn’t mean your life is over.”

Rafe bites his lip and doesn’t say anything, and I go up on my knees on his stupidly uncomfortable couch and put my hands on his shoulders. “I know my timing’s shit,” I say, forcing him to look at me, “but I want to be with you. For real. I want to… go to dinner at your mom’s or whatever the hell.”

“You do?” Rafe says suspiciously.

“Well, okay, no, I don’t actually
want
to go to dinner at your mom’s, but I will. If you want. And yes, I want to be with you. I just… I need you to tell me shit that you want. Like going to dinner. And I’ll try. I know I haven’t been very good at that, but I’m going to do better.

“And, like, we might each need different things, but that’s normal, and if we can tell each other what those things are, then we can try and… you know… give them to each other, and….”

I trail off, embarrassed. Rafe’s looking at me with narrowed eyes and a slightly open mouth like he has no idea what to say to me, which is fair, given that I totally garbled that.

“Uh. Fine. Daniel told me a bunch of that stuff, but it’s true, right?”

Rafe almost smiles, then lets out a long sigh and scrunches up his eyes. “You’re not really letting me wallow in my misery here, babe.”

I grin. “Yeah, I guess I’m not as good at that as you are with me. Besides, you’ve been wallowing for weeks, looks like. So go on, then. Tell me what you need.” I cringe at sounding like a self-help book.

He runs a tentative finger up my arm, and I brace myself to listen to what Rafe’s conditions are. “I need you not to be drinking, mostly. A beer every now and then, sure. A glass of wine with dinner once in a while, okay. But I… I can’t see you drunk. I just can’t. And I can’t know that it’s your coping mechanism. I can’t be honest with you if I know that I might potentially be the cause of you going off and getting wasted to cope with what I’ve said, even if you do it where I can’t see. I can’t know that’s what I might trigger. It’s not something I can live with. And I need to be able to be honest with you, so….”

“I get it,” I say. “I—it’s just something I’ve always done. I—Pop was always a drinker, and my brothers, and so….”

“I know a lot of people who could help you with it. There are meetings. A lot of support.”

I shake my head. “Nah. I mean, no offense to the twelve steps or whatever. I know it helped you a lot. But I don’t want to talk to people about that shit. I haven’t had anything to drink since that night. The night you left. I can do it. I promise.”

Rafe traces my mouth with his finger, but he doesn’t look as hopeful as I’d like.

“That’s good. That’s really good. But… you can’t promise something like that, okay? I mean, promise that you’ll try, but it’s a big deal. A process, not a onetime decision. And it’s exactly because you’ve always done it that it’s going to be hard. Because it’s not only about stopping. It’s about finding other ways to cope with stressors and problems when they arise. Do you see?”

I want to fight him with everything I have. Want to assure him that I
can
promise this, since it’s the thing he says he needs. But I know he’s right.

“But if I can’t promise, then… are you saying you don’t want to…?” I gesture between us, and Rafe catches my hand and kisses it.

“No, I’m not saying I don’t want this. I’m saying that’s one thing I need, and if you can promise me that you’re going to work on it, then thank you.”

I nod. I can do that. I can fight for that. “Okay, so what else?”

Rafe slumps back into the couch like he didn’t expect me to agree or something.

“I missed you,” he mutters. “I hated not being with you.”

“Yeah. I—look, I know I fucked up. I’m going to prove to you that you can trust me. That I can be your, um, your you.” He looks confused. “You know. Like when you said you were jealous of Luz because she had you.” Rafe’s expression softens and leans a little closer. “I know I’ve been a mess since you met me, okay? I do know that. But you can talk to me about the shitty stuff too. You don’t have to wait until it gets this bad.”

“I tried,” he says.

“Yeah, maybe. And I probably fucked it up. But there have been other times. When you’ve been upset about things or feeling shitty about stuff and you didn’t tell me. Like you thought I couldn’t handle it. But I can.”

“Yeah?”

I nod once. I think it’s even the truth.

“Er, and I have to tell you something. You might be mad.” Rafe tenses immediately but schools his expression. “I, um, I gave Anders my phone number that day that he came into the shop, and he gave it to the other kids and we’ve been texting. Especially me and Anders. Not in a creepy way, I don’t mean. Just, I’ve been thinking a lot about all the shit he’s going through. All of them are going through, really, and then we were texting, and anyway, I know it isn’t protocol or whatever. But there are records or something, I’m sure, so it’s not like anyone can accuse me of being inappropriate.”

I’ve said all this in basically one long sentence so Rafe can’t say anything, and now he groans and collapses onto me.

“Jesus Christ, Colin, I thought you were going to say… I don’t know. Don’t fucking scare me like that.”

His body against mine for the first time in so long feels exactly right. I breathe him in and he smells—well, he smells bad, honestly, but underneath the not-showered, hiding-in-my-apartment mustiness, he smells like Rafe. I put my fingers in his dirty hair.

“I told Brian and Sam that I’m gay,” I tell him quietly.

It feels like I’m peeling off my cards one by one and throwing them down on the table for Rafe. It’s shock and awe and I’ll be damned if I’m leaving here without getting Rafe on board. Something about seeing him this low, this down about everything, makes me finally feel like I have something to offer him.

“You
what
?”

He jerks away from me, and I start laughing at the look of total shock on his face. It may be slightly on the hysterical side because once I start, I can’t stop. He’s staring at me like I’m nuts, mouth hanging open ridiculously, which makes me laugh harder. He sputters.

“But… you… but, why?”

“Because of Anders’ stupid dad,” I get out through my laughter, “and because of Daniel, and because—because I fucking love you,” I cackle. “I think. Maybe. Probably.”

“What!”

He sounds so exasperated and looks so affronted that I laugh until I have to sit up so I don’t choke. “Well, I don’t know! I’ve never…
you
know.” I gesture between us.

“Oh my god,” he mutters, shaking his head, and starts laughing. Then he lunges at me and kisses me until I’m gasping for breath. He kisses my neck, and his hair falls in my face.

“You’re filthy,” I say. He makes a noise in the back of his throat. “No, I mean, when’s the last time you took a damn shower, seriously?” I feel so light, so buoyant in the moment that I can’t put any heat behind it. And honestly, I don’t care.

“Mean,” he murmurs and pulls me off the couch and onto the mattress two steps away.

“Ow! God damn it!” I roll to the side to escape the stabbing spring that Rafe just threw me onto.

“Sorry,” he says, but he goes right back to attacking my neck.

“Jeez, no wonder you want to stay at my house all the time. All your shit is uncomfortable as hell.”