T.J. Klune - Bear, Otter, and the Kid 2 - Who We Are (26 page)

“Gotta take care of you,” I told him quietly as his eyes started to droop. “You’re just a little guy. Just a kid, you know? I may not know what I’m doing all the time, but we’ll figure it out. Otter taught me, so I think I can teach you, I guess. Okay, kid?”

I placed him back down in the crib and covered him with a blanket, and I watched him for a moment, hating my mother but never him. Only then did I realize how much I needed to speak to the one person I knew who could understand.

“Hello?” he said as he answered his phone.
“I thought you’d be in class,” I mumbled.

“I am,” Otter said. “I saw it was you and stepped out. What’s up, Derrick? You sound upset.” His voice was warm, concerned. It was Otter, and I was immediately calmed.

“Am I going to be a good brother?” I asked, hedging.
He laughed. “The best,” he said. “You learned from me, didn’t you?” I picked at a chip in the countertop. “Yeah.”
“Now tell me what’s really wrong.”

I thought about bullshitting, but I knew he would see right through it. “Mom went out of town.”

 

Slight hesitation. “Oh? She left you alone again? Why don’t you just go over to my house? Mom won’t mind. Do you want me to call her for you?” “She left Tyson too.”

Silence, and for a moment, I thought we’d been disconnected. But when Otter finally spoke again, his voice had lost the warmth and had become something else entirely. “Where’d she go?”

I didn’t know if he was mad at me too or not, and my own voice was small when I said I didn’t know.

“Did she say when she’s going to be back?”
“Two days.”
“I’m coming home.”
I was alarmed. “Wait, Otter, you don’t have to—”

“Derrick,” he said in that warning voice of his, that voice that already drove me fucking crazy, “this isn’t up for debate. You have school tomorrow, and you need to go. I’ll watch Tyson while you’re in school.”

“What about your school?”

He laughed again, but it had an edge to it. “That’s the difference. You pay to go to my school, and they don’t care if you miss a day or two. You can’t do that. You need to go to school.”

“Okay,” I said meekly. Then, “Otter?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re not mad at me, are you?”

No hesitation. “Never in your life,” he said. “You listen to me, Derrick McKenna, and you listen good. Are you listening?”

 

“Yeah.”

“You’ve done nothing wrong. As a matter of fact, you’ve done everything right. You are strong and brave and kind, and I am proud to call you my little brother. You did the right thing by calling me because it means you trust me to help you. It means you know I can be there for you. And that makes me happier than I could ever say.”

There was a lump in my throat, and I couldn’t make it go away. “Otter—”

“Do you believe me?”
“I….”
“Do you believe me?”
“Yeah.” Because I did.
“Good. I’ll be there in a few hours. Hang tight, okay?”

I wanted to tell him I loved him, because right then I didn’t think it was possible to love another more. But that was stupid. That was gay. How faggy would that sound? He’d laugh at me and tell me that I shouldn’t say things like that, that guys didn’t speak that way. So instead of saying what was in my head and heart, I just said good-bye.

I
DON
’
T
know how much time has passed, and I think I’m dozing and

dreaming (surreal and bright, everything gold and green and warm and right, and even though
she’s
trying to poke her way through, he keeps her at bay) because I hear a sigh come from the doorway and footsteps walking toward me. Someone steps over the ledge to the bathtub, and suddenly I’m being crowded against the side, a large mass at my back, a big arm sliding over my chest and pulling me back, another arm sliding under my head to act as a pillow that’s as hard as the tub floor. Lips press against the back of my neck and trail up to my hair, and a nose is pressed against the back of my head, and I’m inhaled, I’m breathed in, and there’s another sigh, and this one sounds more content, more like the feeling of coming home after a long day. I don’t open my eyes because I think I’m still lost in memory, that the only way he could be at my back is because I wish it to be so.

“Earthquakes?” he whispers as he curls around me. He’s real. Oh God, he’s so real, and I can hear the memory in my head because he thinks I’m brave and strong, and I want to tell him I’m not, that he sees something in me that’s not there, that I’m weak and scared, and I don’t think I’m good enough for him, but I want to try. I want to try and be the person he thinks I am, because if he thinks I can do it, then maybe, just
maybe
it’s possible, just
maybe
it’s true, and I need him to help show me who I am. I need him to show me what I could be.

But I say none of that. I don’t know if I could get the words out. Instead, I nod.

He pulls me tighter against his body and breathes me in again. “I never….” His words get caught in his throat, and I feel him shake behind me, and it’s like the earthquakes have followed us here, in this safe place, but then he stops and clears his throat, but it still does nothing to hide the wetness pressed against the back of my head. “I never wanted to be the cause of this. To have to make you feel like you needed to hide in here. I told myself a long time ago that if you or the Kid ever needed to come in here, I’d be right there with you because it’s my job to protect you both now. You’ve done enough all these years, and I promised myself that I was going to be the one to keep you both safe from now on.”

He squeezes me tighter, and I want to tell him everything, that I love him and only him and that there will never be anyone else for me, that if only he’d hold me like he’s doing now for the rest of our lives, it still wouldn’t be long enough.

But he continues: “And now you’re here because of me, and I can’t help but feel like I’ve failed you, that I’ve broken my promise.” A light kiss behind my ear, lingering and sweet. “And I didn’t think I could do that, that I could be the one to make you scared. I’m sorry,” he says, his voice cracking, my big, strong Otter, my unflappable man, is breaking behind me, his arms starting to shake again. “I’m sorry if you thought I doubted you. I’m sorry if I made you doubt yourself. I never meant for that. I never meant for any of this. The thought… the thought of losing you terrifies me, Bear. It’s not that I don’t trust you… but, Christ, you’re so fucking young, and this is all so new to you. What if there is something better out there for you? What if I’m just holding you back? I could never forgive myself if I kept you from being happy, from finding out who you are, no matter if I thought I knew who you already were.”

He sighs in my hair, his voice stronger, another soft kiss. “I love you, Papa Bear. Like I’ve never loved anyone else in my life. I will always love you, no matter what happens in the future, no matter what has happened in the past. You are my family now, you and Ty. You know you’ve always been a part of
our
family with my parents and Creed, and you both still are. But now you belong to me, now you’re both mine, and I get to call you my own, and I promise to remind you of that every day, to make sure you know that I could never want anything other than you, that I will support you no matter what. It’s because of you that I am the way I am. If I’m a good person, if people see me as such, it’s because you made me that way. And I promise to spend the rest of my life making sure you know that.”

His voice broke at times, the words sometimes rushed and sometimes halting. His voice was low and rough, the words building up steam until the last came out breathlessly harsh in my ear. His grip across my chest grew in strength until it felt like I was trapped in a vise, fused into the chest behind me. I could feel his groin against my ass, and I could almost resist the urge to press back against him, grinding myself into him. But it was his words, his words that negated all the rest, his words that caused me to gasp into his arm, that let the tears fall from my eyes in a hot rush all because—

you belong to me

—while I knew how he felt, I’d never heard him say it with such clarity, and I’m annihilated, my heart shredded, and body weak and loose. He’s waiting for me to say something,
anything
, and Christ, I’m dragging this out, but I can’t even think, much less process any coherency that would be remotely close to the gift he’s just given me.

Well,
it says, chuckling.
You could always ask him to marry you. That’d top his speech for sure. Could you imagine the look on his face? Four words, Bear. Four words is all it would take. It might not solve everything, but don’t tell me you haven’t thought about it, that it’s not there at the back of your mind like a gnat buzzing in your ear. You see him and you wish and you hope and you pray, but you don’t name it. You never do. It has a name, though. You could give it one and finally admit to yourself what you really want.

I don’t… I… I can’t….

 

It sighs.
Of course you can’t. I don’t know why I would’ve thought otherwise. Give him what you can, Bear, and hope it will be enough.

Otter starts to tense behind me, and I’ve let my silence drag on too long. I’ve gotten so lost in my own neurosis that he’s taken it for rejection, that I won’t speak because there’s nothing left to say. There is, there’s so much to say, so many words that one more eloquent than myself should be saying to him, but he’s stuck with me, for better or worse—

in sickness and in health for as long we both shall live amen amen amen

—and I turn over, his arm sliding off my waist, facing him, still using his other arm as a pillow, and he’s watching me, the gold-green wet and bright. He must see something in my eyes, because his shoulders start to relax, and when I tell him that there will only be him for me, he looks relieved and his body starts to shake again, and I pull his face to mine and kiss his cheeks, his lips, his forehead and hair, and then I cradle his head against my chest, and he floats away in that relief, but it’s okay, because I’ve got him. He’s attached to me, a part of me, and there’s no way I’m letting go.

We breathe in and out. And for the moment, we live.
6. Where Bear Contemplates Brotherhood
“
W
HERE
were you last night?” the Kid asks Otter the next morning, a look of suspicion on his face, eyeing the both of us in the kitchen.

“I had to work late,” Otter says cheerfully as he comes up behind me and wraps his arms around my waist, nuzzling against my neck. I lean back against his chest as he hugs me tightly, whispering something I can’t quite make out, but it doesn’t matter. I get the meaning. I understand the point of it. We might not be fixed, but we’re on the mend, like stopping a leak with duct tape.

“And that’s all?” the Kid asks. “Nothing else going on that I need to know about?”

Otter squeezes my ass before he sits down at the table with the Kid. “Nothing else you need to know about,” he says with a grin, reaching up to ruffle the Kid’s hair.

“
Otter
!” the Kid complains. “It just took me ten minutes to do my hair so that people would take me seriously when I walked into class this morning! Now I have to go redo it, and it’ll make me late. I’ll get a tardy mark on my permanent record, and then I won’t be able to get into an Ivy League school, and I’ll be stuck here with you two for the rest of my life while I wallow in my own self-pity and work at McDonald’s!”

“Bullshit,” I tell him as I hand him his bowl of yogurt and granola. “You wouldn’t work at McDonald’s if your life depended on it.”

“I feel bad for those people,” he says with complete seriousness. “Could you imagine having to listen to the bovine screams all day? I would think it would be enough to drive a person crazy.”

Otter snorts. “I don’t think they actually have a rendering plant at each McDonald’s, Kid. It would detract from the ball pit in the play area, I would think.”

“Bear likes playing in ball pits, or at least that’s what
I’ve
heard—” “Tyson,” I warn. “We keep it clean now, remember? Child Protective Services and all that. Wouldn’t want them to take you away and put you in a run-down haunted orphanage just because you couldn’t watch your mouth.”

He looks scandalized. “You just said bullshit!”
“No, I didn’t. I said Bolshevists.”
He cocks his head at me. “What’s that?”

Shit, I have no fucking clue. I just heard that word on TV a few days ago on the History Channel while flipping through trying to find Maury Povich. I glance at Otter for help, and he grins at me before turning back to the Kid. “They were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in the early 1900s.” Exactly. That’s exactly what I meant. I totally knew that. Maury Povich had been a paternity episode. Those are my favorites. The guy was obviously the baby daddy, even though he said he wasn’t. What a liar.

“Really,” the Kid says dryly. “Bear randomly dropped Marxism into the conversation? You should have gone with something a little bit more believable. Like how he was talking about toast, or how much he likes sunshine because it makes his insides feel warm.”

“You better hope you get scholarships,” I growl at him. “Because I’m not paying for you to go to college
anywhere
since you’re acting like a jerk.”

“Maybe I’ll just find a sugar daddy, like you did,” he retorts.

Otter laughs. I don’t think it’s funny. At all. On so many levels. “He’s not my sugar daddy!”
“Of course not,” the Kid placates soothingly.

“Eat your food,” I demand. “We’ve got to get a move on, especially if you have to go fix your hair again.”
“Er…,” he says. “About that.” He almost looks embarrassed. Or shy.

“Now what?” I sigh.

 

The Kid stirs his granola, thinking hard for a moment. Then his forehead scrunches up, and he looks up at me. All-Important Question Time.

“Derrick?”
“Yes, Tyson.”
“You know how I’ve been doing better, right?”

Huh. Not his usual type of question, but a question nonetheless. “You have been, Kid,” I tell him quietly. “And I’m very proud of you.”

He nods. “And you know how I’ve agreed to go to therapy even though I think it’s so unfair, and I’m not crazy even though you seem to think I am?”