Chapter Text
David took some time to walk around his neighborhood before he went home. He had to process what he’d just heard.
It wasn’t just the content of what Spot had told him. It was the fact that he did, and that it coincided with David feeling ready to start again. It had to be a sign, that they were moving in the right direction, right? But where was Spot? And why was he going to Philadelphia?
He started to call Jack first before he realized that Jack—as great as he was—wouldn’t have answers. So he hung up and called Blink.
Who was not helpful.
“Spot has lit-er-al-ly never mentioned Philadelphia. I don’t think the boy’s ever been south of Brighton Beach.”
David turned a corner and passed the toy store that he used to steal matchbox cars from. “Okay, but has he mentioned like, leaving town?”
Blink sighed. “I don’t know,” he said, “last we talked we fought? So he wouldn’t confide in me.”
Damn it.
He tried Spot’s phone again. No answer.
It wasn’t like he could do anything. There was nothing he could control about Spot, nor did he really want to. He just hoped he wasn’t leaving forever.
At home, there was no room for him to be bereft about Spot going to—Philadelphia? He heard the chaos as the walked up to the steps and it came in full force when he opened the front door.
Mama and Les were doing their level best to pull the refrigerator away from the door and Papa was yelling “Don’t strain yourselves!” and Sarah was sorting through a pile of food on the kitchen table and unceremoniously dumping a bag of lettuce into the trash that had been pulled up next to her.
The moment struck him as similar to what happened when his father fell or Les had a nosebleed. Everyone had a job and was doing it stoically and Papa was yelling.
“What’s happening?” David asked loudly.
“David!” Mama said, sounding almost upset with him, “where have you been?”
“I told you I was—wait why is Sarah throwing out food?”
Mama gave the fridge a good hard yank and pulled it away from the wall. “The refrigerator died. We need you to fix it.”
David laughed sharp and loud. “You what?”
Mama swept hair off her face. “We need you to fix it! It looks like it’s been down all day, the food is warm. We have to get rid of most of it. Can you get back here and see what’s wrong?”
David knew he was supposed to get on his hands and knees and try to figure it out. But he knew nothing about the appliance and didn’t want to fry this brain electrocuting himself. And he was annoyed. First Spot was running away to Philadelphia and now his parents expected him to what, fix a refrigerator? When he was bereft?
“I don’t know how to do that,” David said.
“Oh come now David,” Papa said, “You fixed the toaster and the microwave!”
David scrubbed his face. Sarah was still loudly throwing food in the trash and all he saw was money disappearing. “The toasted had a piece of bread wedged in it, and I invoked the warranty on the microwave. That’s it. I can’t do this.”
Les said, “I’ll do it!”
“No,” Mama said, “Come, David. You’re home, you can do this.”
“I can’t,” David insisted loudly, “I can’t do anything.”
“I can!” Les insisted. “Let me do it!”
Why was he doing this? Why wasn’t he calling Spot? Why did he come home at all?
“Can’t you call the landlord?” David asked. He hadn’t taken more than two steps into the apartment. If he was wearing a coat he wouldn’t have taken it off. His bag was still hitched on his back, his phone was in hand. He could leave.
Sarah laughed. “You haven’t been gone that long.”
Their apartment was only leased for two people, their landlord pretended not to know there were five people crammed into it in exchange for them never for asking for anything they had a right to, ever.
“Call an electrician,” David said.
“David just try!” Papa cried, passionate voice cracking through the apartment.
David huffed and threw his bag on the floor. He took three steps towards the fridge and got down on his knees. He stuck his head behind the fridge and took a moment to breathe as the apartment fell quiet. There was a grill, and some wires and coils but not as many as he expected. Nothing he could touch or interact with to fix anything.
He couldn’t fix anything.
But he wanted to. It wasn’t that he was unwilling to try or give things a shot. It was that he knew there were things outside of his control, outside of his skillset. He wasn’t about to hurt himself trying to fix what wasn’t his business.
He backed up and rose to his feet. “You need to fix this yourselves,” he said quietly.
“David!” Mama said, surprised.
“I can’t do this for you,” he said.
“I can!” Les insisted.
‘Les can’t either.”
Sarah stopped dumping food in the trash. She looked at him levelly, nodding. She looked pleased, almost proud. This was what she was aiming for, David realized, when they talked earlier.
“Sarah?” Mom asked.
“I’ll call an electrician,” Sarah said. “I’ll take care of it.”
With an invisible jolt, David realized what he had done. Not just now, not just with this fridge business but with going to off to college and leaving her alone to get promoted at Walgreens and call electricians.
It wasn’t fair.
“I’ll take care of it,” David offered, “I can pay for it.”
“It’s not your fridge anymore,” Sarah said breezily. “I’ll take care of it.”
“It’s not your fridge either,” David said, looking only at her.
“It’s everyone’s fridge!” Papa said, “What is going on with you two?”
Sarah shook her head. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and stood tall. “It’s my fridge as much as it was yours, and I get to decide, okay? So I’ll pay for it.”
It wasn’t fair.
But it was their choice.
The butter was decreed not bad, so Les—indignant with the implication that he couldn’t do anything—made buttered noodles for dinner. David desperately wanted a beer or a rum and coke but there was nothing but water and tea in their apartment. There was some shift at the dinner table, like Mama and Papa knew that he had rejected them in some way, and were hurt by it. There was less talk than there had been before, but David found he didn’t mind much. It gave him room to think.
If he wasn’t responsible for his family.
And he wasn’t responsible for Spot.
That didn’t mean that he had to walk away from both of them. All of them. It didn’t mean the relationship was over. It meant that he was able to have a relationship with them that wasn’t just about saving them. Maybe one day he could say no to giving his family money if he needed it first. Maybe he could watch Spot sit up in bed panting for breath and care about him without needing anything else.
That didn’t change that it seemed like Spot was running away and as soon as David had a moment, he needed to give him a call. Not to save him, but to find out what the fuck was happening.
But when the family sat down for a movie and David begged off for a walk, his calls when straight to Spot’s nonexistent voicemail. He didn’t bother leaving a message that wouldn’t be checked. Instead, he texted, Philadelphia? which was extraordinarily restrained for what he really wanted to say.
“Am I the only one who wants to get together again? Are you running away to start a new life? Are we done? What is going on in that brain of yours? I won’t fight to be a piece of luggage in the life you’ve chosen.”
He did not send that.
Instead, he went to bed with his phone next to his head and the ringer on loud. He was rewarded when the text tone trilled loudly, bringing groans from Les and Sarah. Les threw a pillow at his head.
David sat up quickly and took his phone in hand.
Philadelphia?
Good. A text from Spot. Even at three in the morning, it was good to have confirmation he was alive. Sarah sat up in bed.
“Who is it?” she whispered.
“Spike,” David said.
“Ohhh,” Sarah said, “mending fences?”
“I hope so,” David whispered.
“Well take your hammer outside, I have to work in the morning.”
David reached under his bed for his shoes and jammed his feet in. He groped around for his keys until Sarah made a put upon noise and reached into her purse by her bed and handed her his. He smiled at her and started composing his reply as he walked out the door.
Isn’t there where you’re going?
No?
David scrambled to understand what he’d assumed but he had no confirmation of. So Spot wasn’t leaving New York. Why would he be? He had an apartment and Boots and a life in New York. It was so silly of him to get all spun up about something that he’d heard in the background of a two-second phone call.
That’s what the announcement was in the background when you called me. I should have figured, you’d never leave New York, all other cities are beneath you.
Right
What did that mean?
Right?
There was a long pause while David stood, leaning against his parent’s building, waiting. Despite the heat of the late summer, he expected it to start snowing or to feel a chill on his bare arms. He looked over the neighborhood he’d grown up in, that had no idea what he’d gone through in the last year. He wondered if anyone had ever gone through anything he’d had, exactly, standing on this corner waiting for anything to happen. Anything.
Finally, a text came through.
Can I call you in the morning? I don’t want the ire of this entire train car to deal with if I talk.
Train car?
This pause was shorter, but it was long enough for David to predict with a racing heartbeat what was coming.
I’m coming to Chicago. I’m coming to you.
Spot wasn’t sure if David knew that he’d never left New York City.
He’d asked him back over winter break if Spot had ever been out of the state, but he’d begged off. Changed the subject. Spot didn’t exactly spout stories about his childhood the way David did, but it might have been noticeable that his stories never left the boroughs.
It was unlikely, someone in the system as often as he was, would never be put in a placement in upstate or something. Long Island was an affront as it was. But he’d read books and seen movies and he thought he understood how large and varied America was.
He didn’t.
He got a window seat, next to a stocky guy his age in an NYU sweatshirt who he barely looked at because the window demanded all of his attention.
Even in the thick of Central Park, it was impossible not to see the tops of buildings, to know the city was there. Very quickly the city turned to Upstate New York turned to woods and woods and nothing else then turned into fields and it was nothing but fields for an impossibly long time.
There were no buildings behind the fields. There were occasional small houses, occasional tractors, churches. But mostly fields. Every once in a while the train would stop, and a seemingly impossible number of people would be at each stop despite there being absolutely no civilization surrounding the station.
Spot knew exactly how to navigate New York. You could drop him on any corner with no money, and he’d end the day up $200 with a cell phone and new coat. But he would be useless anywhere else.
Including on this train. A few shaky walks confirmed there was nowhere to buy a phone charger. He cursed himself for failing to pack it in his backpack. At least he had his laptop and charger, and a change of clothes and stash of cash, like he always did. But what he really needed was a phone charger. What if Blink or David or Race or David was trying to contact him?
What he wanted to contact them?
He didn’t know David’s address. He couldn’t exactly wander around Chicago hoping to run into him. He knew Chicago was puny, but that didn’t mean he’d be able to find David. The plan—or lack thereof, fell apart as it grew dark. There were no streetlights along the fields and train tracks, so for the first time in his life, Spot found himself naturally plunged into entire darkness. It stirred something inside him, made him uncomfortable. This wasn’t the way the world was supposed to be. He felt like a tiny ion as he looked out the window at nothing but his own face reflected in the grass.
The guy sitting next to him foisted his phone charger on Spot and grunted for him to stop typing so damn loud on his laptop.
So Spot got David’s text. So he texted him back.
It occurred to him, probably belatedly as he was rolling through what was quickly becoming the Midwest, that this could backfire. If David didn’t want him there what would he do? See the bean? Eat a weird hot dog? This could all be a bust. And he couldn’t just show up at David’s apartment because he didn’t know where it was except West Rogers Park. He didn’t think much before sending
I’m coming to Chicago. I’m coming to you.
It looked too sentimental, on his screen. He’d been writing, before the guy next to him told him to shut up, and that explained the overly flowery language. Still, David seemed to respond to it.
HOLY GUACAMOLE.
So we’ll talk in the morning?
UH YEAH, WE WILL TALK IN THE MORNING.
He couldn’t help but picture David is his famous apartment in Chicago, trying to sleep. Spot tried to sleep too but it was impossible so at seven Chicago time he texted David asking if they could talk. David immediately replied
Never went to sleep thanks to your dramatics. Yeah. Now.
He found a booth in the viewing car that was surrounded by people but broadcasted the now decidedly Midwestern landscape outside. He stared at wind turbines—bigger than anything he’d ever imagined—while the phone rang.
David picked up after two rings. “Before we start, any other wild proclamations to make?”
The too soon, dangerous words.
“Nope,” Spot said.
“Because you’ve been out of control. I appreciate you telling me that stuff you told me on our last phone call. Like. It wasn’t needed. But it was needed. I don’t appreciate you hanging up on me?”
“My phone was dying.”
“Sure. Also the drama of telling me that you were coming here. Wow. Spot. Should we get you a skull to hold?” David was in rare form, and it was delightful. Spot couldn’t help but smile, even though he was the one being roasted.
“Shut up.” Spot slunk down in his booth, eyeing the people around him. It didn’t matter if they heard him, would it? What would they think, that he had someone who was mad at him? Did they even care an iota if he was gay or if it was his boyfriend? Hopefully his boyfriend.
“So you’re coming to Chicago,” David said.
“I’m coming to Chicago.”
“For the pizza, right?” David asked, “I’d come across the country for our pizza too.”
“For this guy I’m into,” Spot corrected, forcing his eyes not to flick across the train car and scan for reactions. “To try to win him back, see.”
David was quiet for a minute.
“You’re not in some private sleeping car, are you?”
“No,” Spot confirmed, “I’m surrounded by people.”
“I have a lot going on,” David said, “with my family. I wanted to talk to you about it.”
“You can.”
“Our fridge broke.”
Spot waited for more. Nothing came. “That doesn’t sound like a big deal?”
“It was a huge deal,” David said, “I think I had an epiphany.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. I think I realized something big. We can be together, and I don’t have to save you.”
Spot rubbed his eyes and laughed. “Okay. Good. Because I don’t need to be saved. But I need you.”
“You do.”
David’s response didn’t reveal his feelings. Which was to be expected, Spot figured. But he hoped so hard. Harder than he’d hoped for anything he had before. So he opened his big fucking mouth.
“This has been awful, us fighting. I have a right to want things, don’t I? I want you. You don’t have to want me back, like. I can get off this train in Ohio and get a return ticket. I will. I promise. But if you want me there, I’m coming and I’m going to kiss you.”
He could hear the smile in David’s voice. “Oh, you’re going to kiss me?”
“If you’re okay with it.”
“In Union Station?”
“What’s that?”
“That’s the train station where I’m picking you up.”
“If you want to.”
The idea of it was terrifying but somehow less than it had been a week ago. People knew and they didn’t care. They did care, actually, they cared about Spot and David and how they were doing, not that they were gay. These people in the train car didn’t care at all what Spot was saying. He’d never been to Chicago, but he figured it wasn’t so conservative that anyone cared there either.
David sighed. “I don’t expect you to start kissing me in public. You don’t owe it to me to be out.”
“No,” Spot agreed, “I think…I think I owe it to me.”
When he got upstairs and everyone was getting ready, it occurred to him to clean, but the apartment was as clean and organized as it could be. There was nowhere to hid his stuff, and no way to not make it obvious that his parent's bed took over the living room and his bedroom was basically three beds crammed into a space that was small for one person. But he wasn’t afraid that Spot would judge him. He’d known this life, too.
But where would he sleep?
During the morning rush of his mom and Sarah going to work and Les going to camp and Papa taking his pills, he stopped everyone.
“Um,” he said, “Spot is coming. Today. At noon.”
Everyone stopped, frozen where they were packing their lunches. “That’s wonderful David!” Mama said, the first one to break. “So you two have worked it out?”
“Yes,” David said, “I think we have.”
Papa didn’t stand from where he was retrieving pills from his tray. “It seemed like it was pretty serious between you two,” he observed, “a pretty serious problem.”
“We’ve been talking about it for weeks,” David said, “and he’s coming. And I’m really…really happy about it. So, can he stay here?”
In a comical moment, the four of them looked around the apartment. “Where?” Sarah asked.
David knew his parents were accepting, and reasonably progressive, but that didn’t mean he could propose sharing his twin bed with Spot. But what was the alternative? Him sleeping on the floor in a room with David’s parents?
So.
“We’ll get a—” David started.
Mama cut him off. “We will figure it out. Yours is welcome here, David. We will make room. I get off work at noon today, you two sightsee a bit, and I’ll make space for him here.”
David didn’t know how that was possible, but he chose this moment to believe in his mother so he nodded. “Are you sure it’s okay?”
“Yes,” Mama said decisively, giving Papa a firm look. “We have plenty of room.”
He went to the store and starting buying Spot’s favorite non-perishable foods—which was mainly candy. He chose an internship shirt, his cotton button-up blue shirt, and combed his hair.
It wasn’t like Spot forgot what he looked like, but he could put some effort in.
On the train ride to Union Station, he stared out the window and watched the familiar buildings pass by. He didn’t spend much time downtown growing up, but he still knew what the views looked like on nearly every line. This was only the second time he’d been home since leaving for school, but it still struck him how nostalgic the views were now, less than a year later.
Union Station came up quickly. He was early so he stopped in the Walgreens on the corner and bought Spot a Chicago flag t-shirt, just for fun. Then he got to the great room and waited.
Groups of passengers came out in waves, and David stood, waiting. Finally, a larger wave of tired looking people came into the great room and David saw him. Far in the back, wearing his black hoodie, nervously running his hands through his hair as he walked. His gaze pinged around the room before he landed on David, and smiled shyly.
David broke out into a grin. He started walking towards him, and Spot picked up the pace. People passed by them on either side when they landed in front of each other, smiling stupidly.
“You don’t have to kiss me,” David said. “I know that was a heat of the moment, and like—”
Spot stepped forward and kissed him. He reached down for David’s free hand and laced their fingers together and kissed him. More than the feeling of Spot’s lips on his, he felt the press of their shoulders touching, their fingers pressed together, their lives connecting like this for a moment. The kiss itself was contained, chaste, but more than they’ve ever done in public.
It lasted for a few seconds before David pulled away. Spot stepped back and looked around.
He didn’t find it necessary to point out that no one was looking at them because no one cared. The look on Spot’s face told him he’d come to that conclusion on his own.
“Wow,” Spot said quietly, “no stones thrown.”
“Someone’s been reading the Bible?”
Spot stepped forward and kissed him again, putting his hand on the back of David’s head in the way David loved. It made David a little dizzy and he kissed back, risking touching the back of Spot’s neck. This one was less chaste—his parents would be horrified to know he was going on like this in public. It was incredible.
This time Spot was the one to pull away. “Okay, he said, somewhat breathlessly, “so I’m here.”
“Finally,” David said. “So. Millennium Park? The Art Institute? State Street?”
Spot fiddled with his backpack and shrugged. “Is that rock shop near here?”
It took David a minute to remember what he was talking about. He and Spot had been to a rock shop in Manhattan, where Spot had offered to buy him every rock he looked at, and David now remembered telling him about the rock shop in Evanston.
“It’s in the suburbs,” David said, “it’s really far away. We’re right by, like, world-class tourist destinations. And you’re a tourist. So we should—”
“Can we get to the suburbs?” Spot asked.
“We can.”
“I want to go there then.”
David looked around the great room and thought of the museums and parks all around them that Spot would love. That he would love. But he would go to the rock shop, for sure, if that’s what Spot wanted.
On the l they didn’t hold hands, but they sat close, and Spot looked backwards out the window at Chicago passing them by. It was so different from Manhattan or Brooklyn in a way he couldn’t describe, not just because the subway was above ground and seemed to teeter in a way that made him nervous that they would fall down into the street.
“Did you take this all the time?” he asked David.
“I used to take it to go to school when I went to the magnet school,” David said. “It’s basically the same as the subway.”
“It’s better than the subway,” Spot disagreed, pointing out the window, “you have views.”
They had to change trains once and rode the second train for a short time before getting off in a suburb that didn’t look at all how Spot imagined suburbs to look like.
The street was wide and open and David said if they walked not too far east they would get to the lake. They would do that after, David said.
The rock shop was different than the one in Manhattan. It had light and polished stones with words on them and no metal bucket. David stepped away from Spot, skimming his fingers over a pile of polished stones. Spot stayed in the center of the store but walked along parallel with David.
The shop was empty, even of visible employees, and Spot felt like he was in a dream.
“I used to come here with Sarah,” David said, “we would come here after school and save up our pennies to buy the little shiny ones. The guy who runs it, he caught on and he started giving us extra rocks for free. He was a good guy.”
“There was a bakery I went to growing up that gave me the badly iced cookies,” Spot said.
David smiled at him. “I love when people are good.”
Spot hummed.
“Was there a particular reason you wanted to come here, or?” David asked.
“You told me you liked it,” Spot said, unable to explain the poem, what that day in the rock shop had meant to him. How it was the first time the words came through his mind, watching David relax as he touched the stones and dodge private school kids. “You said there was a museum in the basement?”
David lit up. “Yes!” he reached out for Spot’s hand and he offered it. They walked down a set of narrow stairs together.
The museum was dark, with glass displays and shadows that reminded him somehow of a subway station despite being nothing like a subway station. It was cool and the light from the displays cast on David’s beautiful face.
“Is it what you expected?” David asked.
“I love you,” Spot said.
The words left him like air. It happened too naturally to be scary or regrettable. Because standing in this basement museum with the cool air on his skin, David’s hand warm in his, he loved David. He loved him in the dorm when they ate Chinese food, and he loved him in Central Park. He didn’t even need him to say it back.
David slowly turned from gazing at a cut stone. “Oh,” he said.
Fuck.
“Oh.”
“Oh wow,” David said, “No. Wow. I love you too. I do.”
“You do?”
“I do,” David confirmed, stepping close to Spot. “Holy shit. I love you.”
“I love you,” Spot said, “We should say something else now.”
David kissed him.
Alone in the basement on a rock shop, they kissed like two people who had just told each other they were in love for the first time.
“Holy shit,” David sighed, pressing his forehead against Spot’s. “Okay. We shouldn’t carry on anymore. We’ll embarrass the rocks.”
“Can’t have that,” Spot joked. He didn’t move. He kept his eyes closed, just in a case he opened them and none of it was real. “Remember when we didn’t know each other?”
“Let’s never go back to that,” David said.
Spot laughed and squeezed David’s hand. “I don’t think that’s possible.”
An employee finally became visible and Spot bought a single rock of blue apatite and David bought a handful of shiny silver stones. Before they got two steps away from the register they switched bags, wordlessly accepting the gifts from one another.
The sun shone through the glass windows and as they stepped outside the air was warm and clean. Spot reached out for David’s hand and stepped onto the street.