Chapter Text
Sometimes, the only way to find something you've been desperately searching for is to stop looking. You can comb through your house for weeks, scouring every corner for a lost piece of jewelry or a misplaced trinket, only to find your efforts in vain—frustrating and ultimately a waste of time and patience. Then, months later, even years, you’ve all but forgotten about the missing item, and there it is. Tucked away in a pair of shoes you rarely wear, or slipped between the gap between the bookcase and the coffee table. Overlooked time and again, because things that are lost don’t always want to be found. They’ll only reveal themselves when they’re good and ready.
So, it goes for Stan and his past. The universe decides what he should and shouldn’t know about the man he once was with little regard towards Stan’s own wishes in the matter. The USB serves as an excellent example of this phenomenon. Determined to learn about his past, he had explored every nook and cranny of this house. Yet only when he had partaken in something as routine and mundane as pouring a simple cup of tea had the fates decided to bless (or curse, rather) him with the gift of knowledge. The laptop had been located in a similar manner. True, he had been hunting for memories at the time, but it had been in an innocent, exploratory manner, like an infant sticking its fingers in its mouth. He hadn’t expected to uncover any dark secrets. He had hoped to find a photo album in his closet not an entire graveyard of skeletons.
Perhaps it’s the same twisted destiny that led Stan to stumble upon the email only after he had given up hope of ever discovering anything new about his past.
Stan knows about messaging services. He remembers them, even the ones he has no real need to recall—ICQ, MSN, AIM—long-dead programs that half his students have never heard of, and the other half only know of because the band geeks seem to be intent on dating the computer nerds. He’s familiar with Discord, too. But he always assumed his understanding of the app was like his knowledge of TikTok or Snapchat—something learned from a distance, as an outside observer. After all, he never had a reason to use it. He’s an adult with a full life—real friends, a rewarding job, and some… interesting hobbies, to say the least. His secret life alone kept him more than busy during his free time.
This is what he assumed, without question, until the kids bring up the band server.
“It’s just for us,” Allen, the drummer, had explained on the second day of practice. He had been looking at his phone at the time, not at Stan, which he would normally find disrespectful but considering the topic at hand, it was an excusable offense. “You know, the summer band. We use it for talking about the auditions and the actual competition and stuff.”
“Also, so our parents can talk to each other,” Beryl added. “My dad talks to all the other parents on there. He’s one of the mods. He brags about being the head mod, but I don’t think that’s actually a thing.”
Despite his memory of the app, Stan doesn’t know how to go about logging onto the thing. He installs it while the kids are on their lunch break and the interface is just a little too familiar to be mere secondhand knowledge. He tries using his work e-mail to log in, which fails, and when he tries resetting the password he receives the message that his e-mail does not exist in the system. Neither do either of the two personal e-mail addresses he tries out in secession.
“You can use your screen name,” a mousy trumpet player by the name of Kayleigh says from over his shoulder. A bit of a teacher’s pet, Stan already senses that she prefers to hang out in the kitchen longer than the other kids, helping with the cleaning up. Now, she brings out her own phone, searching through the server until she finds a message from him, and clicks on his icon, a picture of his smiling face. Even though it’s him, it feels like he’s looking at a tiny stranger on the screen. He looks younger in the picture, clean-shaven with a different haircut and a shirt in a color he doesn’t recognize. He has a feeling it’s probably the photo they use of him on the school website.
“That’s your screenname,” Kayleigh says, pointing to the top of the little popup where the name Mr. Bro sits in bold. “You can change that whenever. But your username doesn’t change.”
There his username is. MisterBro and a string of numbers. He types them into his note app and promises he’ll try logging in later. Some of the kids are already starting to head towards the pool and Kyle has made him well aware of the fact that it would be considered a liability for a bunch of minors to be swimming on their property without supervision.
Though to be fair, it’s probably more of a liability to have them being watched over by a reformed pedophile.
He has another dream that night. Writhing and heat and sweat and pleasure sizzling down his spine. Beneath him, the body is small and trembling. The boy is unrecognizable at first. Perhaps just a creation of his mind, perhaps an ex-victim he does not remember. Straight dark brown hair the color of bitter chocolate, pale skin like that of a Victorian maiden, the faintest of freckles dusting his nose. Stan is kissing tears from those freckles when the hair begins to change. Raising up off the boy’s cheeks as the curls twist, the hue bleeding out until the dark chocolate is a vibrant shade of red. The red curls are like silk between Stan’s fingers, so much longer and smoother than in real life, almost alive as they seem to shiver against pale flesh. The young Kyle in his arms is skinny and warm and eager for Stan’s touch.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he whispers into his future husband’s ear. Sharp nails dig into the skin of his back.
“You could never hurt me,” the young boy breathes, pressing his hard little prepubescent cock against Stan’s hips. His lips are nearly the same shade of red as his hair, plump and bruised looking from their lovemaking. His green eyes shine up at him with nothing but adoration. “We’re married, Stan, it’s not illegal if we’re married.”
“We’re not married yet,” Stan protests, even as his hands grab at soft, vulnerable young flesh. They’re moving on their own and he tries to stop them, to will them to obey him, but he knows that, though he has no control over them, he wants this. His fists tighten around skinny thighs, so ridiculously thin, pulling them up and apart so that he can settle between them. Kyle’s body is hairless and smooth and silken to his touch. Stan’s cock throbs where it lays cushioned between the boy’s ass cheeks, feeling the heat emanating from inside.
“We’ve always been married,” Kyle insists, those tiny hands squeezing Stan’s backside. He presses up with his hips, spreading himself wider so that Stan’s erection prods at that secret space behind his little hairless scrotum. Stan feels dizzy with need, and he can’t stop looking at those plump lips. “Put it in me. I need you, Stan. I’ve always needed you.”
The words play in his head as he once again startles himself from sleep. I need you, Stan, I’ve always needed you. Kyle doesn’t need him. Stan is the one who needs his husband. But Kyle is still asleep and as much as Stan wants to roll him over and rut his frustration into him, he resists, retreating towards the bathroom instead where he works out his unquenched lust with his hand and a bottle of lotion. Eyes clenched shut the entire time, he tries to think about Kyle. His Kyle, his adult husband, not the nymph in his dreams, but the image of the young boy with the bruised red lips lingers just behind his eyes as he finishes.
Kyle is still asleep by the time he returns to bed. Stan is wide awake, and he simply cannot stomach the thought of lying there next to his peacefully sleeping husband. His poor, unsuspecting husband who has no idea what sorts of acts the dream version of himself has been getting up to in Stan’s fuck up excuse for a brain.
The clock says four. Stay doesn’t see himself getting back to sleep at this hour, so he heads downstairs, pours himself a mug of Nespresso, and retreats to the comfort of the library.
The library is pleasant at this time of night. Quiet, cozy, he almost wishes it were autumn so he could listen to the rain outside. Deep inside him somewhere, he knows that must be something he does often in such weather. Possibly with Kyle in his arms. He imagines making love to his husband with orange leaves and drizzling rain just outside the window, the fireplace aglow, but that other version of Kyle threatens to make an appearance, so he banishes both from his mind.
Wrapped up in a throw blanket on the window seat, he scrolls through his phone as he sips at his coffee. He could pick out a book to read instead but the only light in the room comes from a single nightlight on the opposite wall, not nearly enough to read by, and Stan can’t bear the through of turning on the lamp at the moment. Not when the blackness outside is so inviting. So, he scrolls through his Instagram, and he drinks his coffee, and he tries to not think about anything.
Only when a meme shows up on his feed that has been obviously captured from Discord does he remember that he meant to look into his account. A feeling of dread overcomes him once more. Maybe it’s the way the dream still has his heart thumping in his throat or the way the hit of caffeine is pulsing through his body, but he can’t help but compare this experience to the list of passwords found on the USB. He doesn’t know if he can take another wrong password notification.
Fortunately, it’s nothing like logging into one of the forums. He puts in his username and the same password he uses for his gaming laptop and like that, he’s on. To the left he sees the little bubbles indicating his active contacts and recognizes Butters and Bridon’s faces among several others that mostly look vaguely familiar. Parents he’s seen dropping off the kids or maybe ones from the graduation. He’s relieved to see he has no active and ongoing discussions with any of the children directly. Considering how careful he had been about using secret e-mails and secure browsers, he didn’t think he would be stupid enough to try sexting Beryl on here or something equally as ridiculous, but who knows what a man does when he’s horny enough.
After checking the discussions with the adults quickly and finding them rather dull, he moves onto the server directly.
The last few messages were only dated about three hours ago. A handful of the kids talking about bringing some pool noodles to practice the next day, one of them mentioning that she owns a giant unicorn floatie but unsure if she should bring it along considering the size. It makes Stan smile despite himself. He’s glad that the kids like being at his house, even if they are enjoying unlimited access to his pool more than the lessons themselves. Though not all of them are as into the pool as the others. Some of the kids have already taken to banging on his piano during their break or playing video games on the Switch in the living room. Whatever makes them happy.
The little image of himself staring back is unnerving him, however, so he decides to switch it out to a more recent picture. He wants to be represented by a picture of himself, not one of Mr. Bro. He has texted a number of selfies to Kyle over the last couple months, some less appropriate than others, and he settles on a simple picture of himself smiling beside a flowering bush in their yard. He’s wearing a simple black T-shirt and while not clean-shaven, his stubble is less prominent than most of the others on his phone. Only when he goes to add the picture to his profile does he notice the hidden address. *********** @protonmail.com. Not his work e-mail. He must have signed up for this account with a personal e-mail. But the only e-mail accounts he has been made aware of so far have been his Gmail accounts, and though he has several of those he’s never seen a Proton account mentioned anywhere.
He remembers Proton mail. He knows what it is, and he knows it isn’t like one of those throw-away accounts he used for the forums. It’s a legitimate e-mail service like Gmail, if not as popular, and he can’t help but find it a bit suspect both that Kyle never mentioned it and that he has chosen to use a vaguely obscure service when he already owns several Google accounts. Opening up the website, he sets the unhide option on his address in the Discord app, copies the name provided, and pastes it into the login screen. Then he types in the same password he uses everywhere else.
Isn’t it nice when things work as they should?
Right away, he knows this e-mail isn’t connected to his secret life. There are unopened e-mails waiting to be clicked from Ticketmaster, Bandcamp, Discogs, Guitar Center, and a variety of what appear to be teaching publications for music teachers. He spots several alerts about various bands playing in the area as well. This must be some sort of semi-official account he uses for work or at least music-related stuff. What’s the point? This could have all been sent to his work e-mail or his Gmail, couldn’t it?
Except, looking at the long list of e-mails, Stan has a feeling that a lot of these would have been filtered out as spam by Google. That, or maybe he had been afraid they wouldn’t have been. He’s signed up for dozens of sites and publications from the look of it, he imagines this could easily flood his other accounts, maybe burying more important notifications beneath them.
It takes him a good while to scroll down through the list of unopened e-mails. He thinks about just deleting them all, but many of them seem like they might be important at some point. Articles about the use of woodwinds in elementary school classrooms and studies about the impact of stress on small children. He does delete the concert alerts, not imagining himself wanting to go to see Green Day or Fall Out Boy in person in the immediate future, as well as obvious ads like the upcoming Memorial Day sale at Guitar Center.
He’s at the very end of the list of Unread e-mails when he spots it. One single e-mail, dated the day before he had been attacked, already opened, from what is obviously a throw-away account. Nothing is written in the body but there are about a dozen attachments, give or take.
For a second, he is afraid to download them onto his phone, fearing the worst. But surely whoever had sent those e-mails wouldn’t have sent them to that address if they had been too bad? Stan wouldn’t have handed out this e-mail to any of his accomplices, would he? No, they can’t be that bad.
Well, they’re not child porn, anyway.
Screenshots. Screenshots of that same chat site he had visited before. Between BigDickLit and somebody simply named Dante.
Ah, the infamous Dante, at last.
Filled with dual senses of both dread and excitement, he opens each screenshot in turn and reads through the conversations. Resisting the urge to skip through sentences as he hurries towards the end of the conversation, sensing that there must be something big waiting for him at the end. He must have been one of those types of kids that always read the last page of a book before finishing the rest. Yes, he was definitely that sort of kid.
Dante: I uploaded some new pics on PG did you see em?
PG? Oh, The Playground. Stan wonders if that’s where they met, it seems likely but maybe these circles just intersect a lot.
BigDickLit: No just got home from work, boy or girl?
Dante: Boy :)
BigDickLit: I’ll check it out once the husband passes out
BigDickLit: Hope it was a cute one
Dante: Does he ever notice you sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night?
BigDickLit: No, he’s a sound sleeper, especially after sex ;)
Good job, Stan, just gossip about the one person in the world that loves you. Why not share intimate details about your wedding bed with strange pedophiles on the internet? Bet Kyle would love that. It occurs to Stan suddenly that most of these men have probably seen his dick. At least the part of it not buried inside of some helpless child. He doesn’t recall seeing any pictures of his penis in any of the photographs, but he hadn’t exactly been looking that deep into them.
Dante: I’ve never shared a bed with anybody but I feel like I’d wake up anytime they turned over
Dante: Must be nice, not being exclusive fml
BigDickLit: I know it sucks but imagine if you were anti-c
BigDickLit: Not that you’d wanna those aholes are such uptight pricks
Exclusive? Anti-c? Stan stops reading for a second to consider the terms. Exclusive must refer to attraction to only children, especially considering the context of the previous few messages, but he’s not sure what anti-c would mean. People from a different website, maybe? Some sort of rival community? Is that a thing, a rivalry between competing child porn sites?
Dante: I know I know I’m an ungrateful bastard
Dante: I just wish I could find a boy to date instead of just fuck lol
BigDickLit: Gross don’t get mushy on me
BigDickLit: Why don’t you just find a nice paperboy to groom and get it over with
Grimacing, Stan feels a wave of nausea overtake him. Is he seriously suggesting to another grown man that he should groom some poor kid? He had to admit that the idea of a pedophile wanting to actually date a kid instead of just sexually abusing them has never crossed his mind though. At least it seems unlikely that he’s having an affair with this Dante guy anyway.
Dante: Sorry if some of us don’t just see kids as breathing sex toys
Great is that Stan’s reputation on these sites?
Dante: Ugh I don’t know how you can’t get attached
Dante: Also I’m pretty sure kids don’t deliver papers anymore
BigDickLit: It’d make life so much easier if they did
Dante: Just scooping up a cute little boy off the side of the road, bike and all
BigDickLit: Not as easy as working at a school though
Dante: I still think grooming one of your students is just asking for trouble
Jesus Stan, are you really that open with these people? Why not just send them a copy of your driver’s license while you’re at it? Don’t forget to include a detailed schedule of your workday.
BigDickLit: Speaking of which
Stan has to click the arrow to bring up the next picture after this line and jumps in surprise to see the very next message is a picture of a blond-haired boy, shirtless, kneeling in the cubicle of a bathroom. He can see the dark arm hair on the man holding the boy’s chin up to face the camera. Something white and viscous is dripping down the boy’s chin and his face is damp, eyes red.
Dante: Is that a new one?
BigDickLit: Couple weeks ago
BigDickLit: Taken in the school bathroom he was supposed to be at recess
Dante: He’s got such a cute little dick its too bad you can’t upload his pics anywhere
Dante: If you ever get sick of B you can send him my way ;)
Huh. Stan pauses again. He doesn’t upload pictures of Beryl anywhere? It’s not like he had actually seen a photo of him online, but he hadn’t gotten very far on any of the forums. Unfortunately, this does confirm his worst suspicion. The boy is a repeat victim. One he evidently keeps to himself, most likely to conceal both their identities. Yet he’s been sharing pictures with this Dante person so he must trust him to some degree. Does the guy know his real name? Where he lives?
BigDickLit: You’d have to ask his father about that he didn’t say anything about sharing
Stan’s eyes widen at this comment. Is he implying that Butters is aware of what is happening to his son? Surely not? Butters is such a sweet, doting father, he would never allow anybody to abuse his beloved child. Would he?
Dante: How would he explain to his husband that he was sending his kid to Pennsylvania?
BigDickLit: I dunno his dad is really into arts and crafts
BigDickLit: He can just tell him he sent him there to make some Amish crafts as a present
Dante: A present for his daddy
Dante: How cute
Dante: I wish I had a cute little blond boy to call me daddy and make me presents
BigDickLit: He stopped calling his dad that years ago
BigDickLit: He still calls his father by his first name too
BigDickLit: Even though he’s raised him since he was a toddler
Dante: Raised him to suck cock you mean
Dante: Like a proper father should
Stan presses the back arrow to reread this part of the conversation. His father knows about them, his dad does not. He calls his father by his first name. Stan knows Beryl calls Butters his dad. His father isn’t Butters, they’re talking about Eric. Eric knows that Beryl is being molested, or at least he knows something nefarious is going on from the sound of it. This is far less surprising than if Butters had been in on it. Stan can feel his heart breaking for the poor boy. He’s such a sweet kid and apparently there are at least three grown men in this world talking about him like he’s property to be owned and used.
Dante: I would make such a great parents
Dante: Best batch of cocksuckers in the county
BigDickLit: B isn’t that good at it tbh
BigDickLit: He gags too easily
Dante: Hey a mouth is a mouth
Dante: He’s still sexy as hell
Dante: Next time you should put him in a sheer nightie with angel wings
BigDickLit: I’ll put that on my Amazon shopping list
BigDickLit: It’s almost summer though
BigDickLit: So there won’t be anymore of B until fall probably
BigDickLit: Maybe during fair practice but that’s pretty tricky
Right, hard to rape school children when they’re out of school, huh? Yet Beryl seems to be the only one of his actual students that Stan has been abusing. It makes sense, honestly. If Eric knows about the abuser and is condoning it, he must also be helping him keep the boy quiet somehow. That poor kid. He must think he has a target on his forehead, to face so much abuse from the adults in his life. The adults who are supposed to care for him and look out for his welfare.
Dante: :(
Dante: He’s literally my favorite
Dante: How much do you pay his father again?
BigDickLit: 500 a month
Dante: Worth every penny
Oh. Okay then. Stan pays Eric for the privilege of fucking his stepson. Does Kyle never wonder where that $500 a month just disappears to? They haven’t really discussed finances since he woke up from the hospital, but Stan has a feeling that maybe it was his job to balance the checkbook. Or maybe he makes up some excuse about school supplies or guitar parts or something. Kyle does provide well for them, maybe $500 really doesn’t seem like much in comparison to what he’s raking in monthly. What a fucked-up situation for everyone involved.
Dante: I’m surprised he doesn’t charge more
BigDickLit: I don’t think he even cares about the money tbh
BigDickLit: He just sees it as a way to punish B’s dad for cheating on him
Butters cheated on Eric?
Dante: Think he’ll ever confess?
BigDickLit: His dad or his father?
Dante: His dad
BigDickLit: Maybe someday
BigDickLit: He’s probably afraid of being ordered to quit his job if he does
Dante: Should have thought about that before having an affair with your boss
Alright, more information Stan wasn’t expecting here. By his boss do they mean PC Principal? Stan tries to remember any time he’s seen the two interacting. There had been that time Butters had been missing at the graduation and then came back saying something about the principal, but it’s been too long for Stan to recall what he had said. Had the two been fucking at his son’s graduation? Behind Eric’s back? Stan almost feels bad for Eric if that’s true. Almost.
Hard to feel too bad for a guy willing to pimp out his underage stepson.
BigDickLit: It’s a dick move
BigDickLit: Their entire marriage is a sham
BigDickLit: I couldn’t imagine cheating on my husband
Dante: Uhhhhhh
Dante: How many kids have you fucked since you got married???
BigDickLit: That doesn’t count and you know it
BigDickLit: Boys aren’t people they’re just sex toys with cute faces
Stan closes his eyes, grimacing once more. What a thing to say. What a thing to think. He loves children. Not in that way. Not just in that way. Children are such little bundles of sunshine. They absorb new information so quickly and they’re so funny and so smart and he loves spending time with them. He can almost see why this Dante guy would want to date one, but he absolutely cannot see himself ever seeing one as nothing but a sex toy. He’s a teacher, for Christ’s sake, he wants to teach and help them grow and learn. There’s no way he chose to become a teacher just so he could be in a position of power of children, is there? His fondness for them seems too innate.
Dante: What about Booty?
BigDickLit: That doesn’t count either
So there is something going on between him and Booty? But whatever it is must be vague enough that it isn’t physical? An emotional affair, perhaps? Are he and this Booty guy in love? What would he count as cheating before the attack? Apparently, Dante wonders the same thing.
Dante: What does count?
BigDickLit: Sleeping with your boss
Dante: lol
BigDickLit: Is it wrong I feel worse about going behind my husband’s back than I do fucking kids?
BigDickLit: I know I don’t think of it as cheating but it’s still like
BigDickLit: I just wish I could tell him
Dante: You know you can’t
Dante: Nobody is going to willingly stay married to a pedophile let alone an active one
BigDickLit: I know I know
BigDickLit: I know I gush about him all the time but you don’t understand how amazing my husband is
BigDickLit: He’s so good to me
BigDickLit: And he’s so sweet and loving and hot as fuck and I dunno
Dante: So I’ve heard
BigDickLit: I can’t lose him
BigDickLit: I just want him to really understand me. How can he ever really love me if he doesn’t understand me?
Dante: Doesn’t that go for everyone in our lives
BigDickLit: I feel like as long as I always have to hide this from him he’ll never be able to love the true me
BigDickLit: But that doesn’t stop me from loving him entirely
BigDickLit: I could lose anything else in the world but not him, if he rejected me I think I’d just off myself, I can’t imagine going on if I lost him
Dante: Angel you aren’t seriously thinking of telling him are you?
BigDickLit: He’s my everything
BigDickLit: No, I’ve just been drinking tonight I guess I’m emotional
Dante: And you call me mushy
Dante: I can’t believe you two grew up together
Dante: Was he hot as a kid?
BigDickLit: So fucking hot
BigDickLit: Did I ever mention jerking off to his old school pics?
Dante: When you were a kid?
BigDickLit: No like last week lol
The conversation abruptly ends there—or at least, that’s the last screenshot attached to the email. Stan scrolls back to the beginning and rereads it, analyzing each word as if he were an English teacher rather than a music one. He searches for meaning hidden between the lines. The ending is the most intriguing and the most puzzling. He had clearly loved Kyle and was worried about him finding out, so why go through all of this? What was the point? Just to get his dick wet? It’s so much to risk for something as inconsequential as sex.
That one line about his husband not knowing the true him stands out perhaps the most of all. It’s a concept he had never considered, though it had clearly been a concern in his past. Honestly, it’s a valid point. Some secrets are nothing more than harmless white lies, and whether or not you share them with a loved one doesn’t really affect the strength of your bond. But some secrets define who you are. Hell, sometimes it’s not even a secret, there are dealbreakers in every relationship. It could be something as transparent as religious beliefs or political leanings. Would it be considered deceptive to keep that information from a potential partner? Would it be considered entrapment for a Catholic to unknowingly fall in love with a Protestant? Would discovering this information years down the line undo everything they had built? It seems ridiculous to dwell over such a trivial matter, but to a devout believer, losing their partner to the fires of Hell would be anything but trivial.
How much does a person truly need to know about another person to love them? Love at first sight is merely a concept, it has to be. To love somebody, you must know them. Can one truly hate the sin but love the sinner? What if they don’t know that their loved one is a sinner in the first place? Is the potential of rejection enough of a reason to keep anybody at arm’s length?
Stan is fortunate to be surrounded by an accepting community, but he can’t help imagining how difficult it must have been to come out as bisexual—or even gay—just a hundred years ago. It wouldn’t have been about deception, not exactly; it would have been about survival. But how would it have felt to be a man living in that time? Would he have felt like he was deceiving his friends and family, tricking them into caring for someone who wasn’t fully honest with them? Would he have felt guilty? Or would he have been consumed by bitterness over his own situation? If you know your closest friends would despise you if they truly knew who you are, can they really be called your closest friends?
Now imagine it isn’t a friend but a lover.
The idea of Kyle losing that love for him leaves him nearly breathless, a sudden pain in his chest so deep that for a moment Stan thinks he may be on the brink of having a heart attack. Or maybe more of a panic attack. He takes several deep breaths in a row and hums an unfamiliar tune below his breath, trying to will the pain away.
There’s something subconscious about his love for Kyle, something Stan has learned to accept over time. This level of emotional turmoil isn’t the result of a two-month-old relationship. No, it runs deeper—more primal, more instinctual, like the human fear of heights, snakes, or loud noises. It’s a remnant of a past life, perhaps, but his love for Kyle is so deeply woven into his being that Stan feels it must be imprinted on his very brain—tiny Kyle faces etched into his mind, outlined with hair-thin hearts. From the moment he woke up in that hospital bed, his love for his husband was inevitable.
Which is why Kyle can never know.
Stan doesn’t care if he tricked Kyle into loving him. Maybe he didn’t, not really, he’s sure they’ve loved each other since they were children when they were both still truly innocent. But even if he had, it doesn’t matter. All that matters right now is that Kyle loves him with his entire being and Stan loves him back just as much and he will do anything to protect that love. He doesn’t care that Kyle would probably hate him if he knew the truth because it’s irrelevant. Kyle will never know.
Several minutes pass by. Stan stares out the window, at the faintest bits of light starting to glow along the trees. Outside, the earliest of the early birds rouse themselves and their soft chirps begin to fill the skies. A new day. New beginning. But at the heart of everything, still a continuation of every single day that came before it.
It’s okay. Everything is okay. Everything is fine. Time to get back to work. He unlocks his phone and looks back down at the image of the last message sent once more.
“But who sent this to me?” Stan whispers, his own voice startling himself in the stillness. He looks towards the door and sees nothing but the empty frame. The hallway outside is dark and empty. He looks at the From e-mail address again. There may be context missing here. No, there definitely is, but what sort? The most obvious is the reason behind this e-mail’s existence.
He has a strong feeling he knows where this e-mail originated. Who else could have had access to that conversation beside himself and whoever this Dante is? Maybe somebody behind the actual software? A developer of the website? Or a hacker? But there had been nothing on the e-mail besides the attachments. No threats. No demands. No blackmail. No follow-up e-mails that he can see. It is possible that the sender may have contacted him via telephone and forwarded the e-mail as they were talking in real time but why that e-mail address then? He seriously doubts he’s ever linked this address to the messaging service.
This situation seems almost laughable. Imagine someone somehow accessing a private conversation, finding his phone number, and then tracking down an email address that has nothing to do with his secret second life. Wouldn’t they just message him directly instead of bothering with an email?
No, the entire situation is just too ridiculous to consider.
Which means one thing. He’s almost certain that these pictures came from himself. He must have screenshot his own chat with Dante and emailed them to himself…why? Consider the context. The pictures were from the day before he was attacked. Maybe this was something he did with all his conversations, saving them in case he needed them, but he just hadn’t gotten around to storing them elsewhere like he usually would. That might make sense given the situation. No chatlog exists on the website once the browser is closed, so perhaps Stan had made a habit of keeping a record of their conversations just for his own personal usage?
There are plenty of reasons he can see wanting to go back to those screenshots. Maybe to blackmail somebody who turned on him. Or to track the lies he’d told. Or the truths. It makes more sense to be able to look up everything he’s shared with this horrible community than to not.
That still raises more questions. Why e-mail them to himself? If he had been chatting on the laptop, why didn’t he just leave them on the laptop and transfer them to a USB later? Unless he didn’t save them on a USB. The Cloud? Still doesn’t explain why he would use that particular e-mail.
A creak down the hall startles him. Sitting up straighter, Stan glances out the door once more and sees a light has been turned on in the bedroom. A moment later, Kyle pads out, his curls half-flattened on one side. Stan closes the app and opens up Instagram. A video of a puppy licking a baby appears on his screen.
“Whatcha doing up so early?” Kyle asks, yawning in the doorway. There’s a mark on his face from burrowing too deeply into his pillow.
“Had to pee,” Stan lies, setting his phone against his thigh. “Then I was too awake to get back to sleep.”
“Mmm,” Kyle mumbles, clearly half asleep. Stan expects him to turn and head back to the bedroom, he can still get at least another hour and a half before he needs to be up, but he approaches Stan instead. His chest, fully exposed in just his boxers, is flushed pink from the heat of their marriage bed. Stan opens his arms to accept the tired redhead and seemingly within seconds, the other man is curled up on Stan’s chest, snoring once more. He’s a solid weight in his arms, comforting if not somewhat unwieldy.
Carefully, Stan sets his phone down on the floor beside the window seat. He has more questions that need answering but he knows they won’t be answered today. Right now, there are more important things to be concerned about, like adjusting the pillow behind his back. He squirms into a better position, Kyle grunting on top of him, so trusting in his sleep. Burying his face into his husband’s curls, Stan inhales. The smell of his scalp is nearly overwhelming. Concentrated essence of Kyle. He wants to bathe in it.
Maybe he can do with another hour of sleep.
The first week of band practice is relatively uneventful. Stan puts in some orders for sheet music and Kyle helps him fill out the reimbursement forms for the school. The papers aren’t scheduled to arrive until Thursday afternoon and Stan spends the days between teaching the kids the basics of This Land Is Your Land. All of the songs they’ve picked have various free online versions available, but they differ from version to version and between instruments. As a rather simple public domain song, This Land Is Your Land is more consistent across the board and less likely to differ as much between the bootleg and official copies once they arrive.
Stan’s initial concerns begin to fade as each day passes by without incident.
The more time he spends with the kids, the more comfortable he becomes around them. He is almost certain at this point that Beryl is his only victim among the crowd, probably the only one in the entire school, and what he had initially assumed was judgment in their eyes had melted into something more akin to adoration. He’s one of the cool teachers. They don’t look at him and see a pedophile or an abuser, they see their fun music teacher.
This said, he can’t allow himself to become too comfortable with them. Even given the number of kids roaming around his house, he finds himself caught in situations where he is nearly left alone with one child or another, usually when the rest of them are outside or one of them sneaks up on him upstairs or in the kitchen. When they come to him in solitude, deliberately seeking his advice or mentorship, he makes sure to direct the two of them back towards a most populated area as he speaks to them.
He would never touch a child. Stan knows he wouldn’t. He’s not attracted to these kids in the least. But, well, better safe than sorry.
For his part, Stan spends much of his daylight hours trying his best to not stare at his charges but the more he dwells, the more he finds himself looking. It’s a compulsion. Some sort of fucked up excuse at reverse psychology than his brain is pulling on himself. What’s the best way to make sure somebody imagines something in their head? Tell them not to imagine it. Try not to imagine a carrot in your mind. Oh look, you’re thinking about carrots now, aren’t you?
Ironically enough, it’s almost easier to avoid staring when the lot of them are paddling around half-naked in his pool. Oh, he plays the part of the attentive chaperone, sticking close by, lounging beneath the shade of an ash tree. He sips at a mocktail as he pages through a paperback he grabbed from their personal library. (One of your favorites, Kyle had assured him, though Stan has no recollection of ever having heard the title in his life.) It is easy to avoid watching the children then, preoccupied as he pretends to be. Close enough to the children that he can be up and in the pool at a moment’s notice. Playing the part of responsible mentor at arm’s length, his presence is enough, they don’t need his attention. Not when there are so many other kids available to alert him of any dangers.
Maybe sometimes he can’t help but glance at one of the girls and note how much flatter she is than the rest of her classmates. Or how charming a young boy’s grin looks fresh out of chlorinated water. Maybe the way droplets of water trail down goosepimpled flesh is unusually appealing.
He is only looking because he doesn’t want to look though. He is seeing what his past self once saw but through different eyes.
Intrusive thoughts.
Yet practice is worse. True, the children are less ripe for sexualization in this setting. Maybe some of the girls wear suggestively small shorts, and maybe the boys expose more arms and chest than the school dress code would have allowed, but they’re fully dressed, at least. Yet he cannot avoid watching them while he’s teaching. It wouldn’t only be impractical, it would be perplexing. What teacher averts their eyes during a lesson? Especially one that is so often as visual as Stan’s own? Music may be about making sound, but the sound comes from lips and fingers and throats. And so, he has to look. Noting how pretty a boy’s arms are as he helps adjust his fingering or how slim and feminine a girl’s throat is as she breathes between notes on her flute.
They really are beautiful.
Recognizing beauty isn’t the same as attraction. Stan doesn’t find these children, or any children, for that matter, attractive. Yet these little flashes of eroticism are spurred on by the reoccurring intrusive thoughts of “would I?”
Would I have been aroused by the way he bit his lip?
Would I have enjoyed the way she shook the water from her hair?
Would I have fantasized about the way he licked that popsicle?
Paranoia, that’s what it is. Definitely not attraction. Definitely not arousal. He is terrified of what should and shouldn’t affect him. And what would have. He is trying to analyze his own former way of thinking by trying to get into his past self’s frame of thought, whether he wants to or not.
He tries to compare how he watches Kyle to how he watches the children, and the similarity makes him uncomfortable. So, he tries to not compare anymore and finds that he cannot.
Kyle is beautiful too.
“What?” His husband asks him when he notices him staring after a post-dinner dip in the pool. There is a droplet of water sliding down the hollow of his husband’s throat. Suddenly Stan can feel a vein in his own throat pulsing, his breath sounding shallow. “Stan? Why are you staring at me?’
“Just thinking about how beautiful you are,” he half lies. Because Kyle is beautiful, but one of the boys had looked just as beautiful earlier that day with a similar droplet of water trailing down his thinner, prettier little throat. Stan leans over to kiss his husband.
The weather takes a turn starting Thursday morning. The temperature spikes and Stan takes to lowering the blinds on the yard-facing windows to shield the kids from the sun. Even with the AC running nearly constantly, the sunlight is baking, and the aspiring musicians begin to sweat through their clothes as lunch approaches. The girls are self-conscious about it, raising their arms in clumsy ways that interfere with their playing. The boys fan themselves with sheet music and ask about taking their shirts off.
“None of the girls want to see that,” Stan scoffs at the request, and tries not to ask himself if he would be included in that group or not.
By the weekend, South Park is fully entrenched in summer and the town seems slower and lazier than it had just weeks before. Stan feels strangely exhausted for how little physical activity he actually took part in over the past week.
“Probably just the heat tiring you out,” Kyle excuses. Then, later, when Stan is yawning and already ready for bed at seven, “Keep in mind, you do have a head injury. Your body needs to rest to heal. Hopefully, you’ll have more energy by fall.”
Wendy invites them out for Saturday brunch, which Kyle gladly accepts without even asking Stan, and they spend the afternoon in drunken lovemaking followed by several hours of lounging in and around the pool with frozen cocktails in hand. Stan isn’t sure if this is how they usually spend lazy summer weekends, but it feels right. Once more, Kyle mentions something about maybe taking a trip somewhere before Stan’s return to the school in September. Half-drunk, half-asleep, Stan just mumbles something vaguely affirming about the idea.
Sunday morning, Kyle forces him out of the house barely past dawn, and tells him they’re going to the farmer’s market.
“You’re a chef, you’ll love it,” he insists when Stan starts to protest, head still pounding from all of Saturday’s booze. “I think the tomatoes are already in season. If not, we can at least get some fresh berries.”
They buy half a dozen bottles of homemade salsa, and some freshly made chips, and Kyle picks out a four-pack of different berry varietals. A woman near the egg stand has brought a few goats along and Stan watches her milk them by hand right there in front of him. When he asks if he can try some of the fresh frothy milk she shakes her head no.
“I use it in soap,” she explains, waving a hand at the stack of creamy-looking bars at her stand. “I’m sure it’s probably safe to drink but I don’t want to test it on an innocent bystander. I know another farm that sells goat milk that’s been pasteurized if you’d like their website?”
At least she lets him pet the goats. Kyle stands to the side, arms crossed, rolling his eyes as Stan cuddles each of the goats in turn, repeating the names the old lady uses as she introduces each of them. They’re all named after flowers but five minutes later, Stan only remembers Marigold. The bars sell at $8 each or five for $35 and Stan picks out one rosemary scented bar and lets Kyle choose the other four. His husband seems much more at home with the fancy soaps than the goats and it keeps him busy as Stan scratches behind their long, floppy ears and tells them how beautiful their strange, vertical eyes are.
“You’ll see plenty of them at the fair,” Kyle huffs when Stan complains about having to walk away from the beasts. “Way more of them. Cuter ones, too. Smaller ones.”
“Those ones were cute,” Stan informs his husband, but the redhead is already ahead of him. Stan has to jog to keep up with him with his own shorter legs. “Why are you walking so fast?”
“To get away from that smell,” Kyle gripes, waving at the air in front of him. “They stink Stan, can’t you smell them?”
He can but he doesn’t think it’s a bad smell. They smell like hay and fresh air. Kyle pulls out some hand sanitizer from seemingly nowhere and squirts some into Stan’s hands, telling him to rub before he’s allowed to eat ice cream.
“What ice cream?”
It looks like the woman at the ice cream booth is churning the stuff right there in front of them. The machine makes a loud whirring noise that sets Stan’s teeth on edge, he can’t imagine being stuck behind that booth all day. Kyle orders something called Chantilly flavor in homemade waffle cones. They watch as she scoops plain white ice cream from a bucket, plops it onto the table in front of them, and mixes in a variety of berries and syrups. Kyle takes the first cone, wraps a napkin around it, and hands it to Stan.
“Don’t touch it with your bare hands,” he warns. “We need to wash the goat germs off you more thoroughly.”
“Whatever,” Stan replies, taking an experimental lick at the treat. The flavor tastes strangely cool, in the way mint is cool, but it doesn’t taste anything like mint. He licks it again and admits to himself that his hand does smell vaguely like a farmyard. “What flavor was that syrup she added?”
“Almond,” Kyle replies, reaching to take his cone from the woman. He thanks her and turns back to Stan. His waffle cone is a different color than Stan’s normal, beige-colored cone, a strange hue somewhere between purple and red. “The recipe is based on this cake from Whole Foods you like, it’s your favorite. I guess I was sort of hoping it might spark something.”
“A memory, you mean?” Stan clarifies.
Kyle shrugs noncommittally and leads him to a nearby bench. Before them, a large old fountain spills water over its sides into a sparkling blue and white basin below. The bottom is littered with shining pennies. No kids to retrieve those coins, apparently. Kyle sits right in the middle of the bench, leaving either side of him empty for Stan to choose from.
“I have been trying, you know,” Stan frowns, taking the spot to his left. He pulls one leg up to his chest, leaving the other to rest on the ground. The ice cream is already starting to melt in the warm summer heat, and he takes a quick lick from the side before it drips down his hand. A half-mushed berry tumbles out and falls to the ground before Stan can get it.
“I know you are,” Kyle reassures with a smile. He kicks at the berry with one foot, pushing it beneath the bench where somebody will be less likely to step on it. “I was just thinking- I mean, you love food so much. And you remembered my favorite pizza? So, I was thinking, you know, food and memories go hand in hand? They say smell is the sense most strongly linked to memory and what is smell but a less direct sense of taste?”
“Is that why you wanted to come here this morning?” Stan asks, turning his eyes towards all the booths of fresh and homemade foods. They haven’t found any tomatoes yet, but they’re not done looking. “Sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound accusatory. It’s a good idea, I’m just curious.”
“Only partly,” Kyle says with a shrug. He takes a few licks from his weird purple-red cone and sits up, folding one leg beneath himself before laying back against the bench. “I didn’t want to say so though, I figured pressuring you would just have the opposite effect. I know I don’t talk about it much because I know you just need time, but I do worry about you, you know? I do want you to get better.”
“You want me back,” Stan clarifies.
“You haven’t gone anywhere,” Kyle corrects him. “How many times do I have to tell you, you’re the same person you were before. It just makes me sad sometimes, is all, knowing that I have all these great memories of our years together and you don’t. All the new innovations of modern medicine, and they can’t just fix your brain with a laser or something? Sometimes it feels like we might as well be in the Middle Ages.”
If only Kyle knew. Stan’s memory loss isn’t a medical issue, he’s almost sure of it at this point. His brain is protecting him from his memories for his own good in some strange Freudian way. What would happen if all that knowledge of his fucked up secret life came rushing back all at once? He can’t even begin to imagine. Would it result in some sort of physical response? A stroke? An aneurysm? He can’t help but envision a stream of memories rushing into brain and sending him into convulsions, blood dripping from his nose at the trauma of it all.
“Anyway,” Kyle says with a sigh between licks of his half-melted cone. “I called around Denver looking for a specialist. They’re all booked up until the holidays.”
“Until the holidays?” Stan asks, incredulous. The sun above, even this early in the morning, is like a furnace on the crown of his head. The concept of Christmas snow is about as distant as it can be from his mind. “I can’t go that long off my medication, can I? That’s like half a year away.”
“No, you can’t,” Kyle says, then sighs again. “You’ve been doing well but I feel like the longer we wait, the more likely it is your depression sets in, and with everything going on in your life- I called the school Friday and spoke to Craig.”
“He was there?” Stan asks, surprised by this information. It’s summer, the school is nearly empty, it seems like it would be pointless to keep a psychiatrist on duty with a skeletal staff.
“He’s in on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays apparently,” Kyle tells him, waving his hand in the air like he’s trying to wave away more of the goat stench except now he’s waving away the concept of Stan’s psychiatrist. “I was surprised too. But the kids he sees can’t just take the summer off from their medication, so he’s available for half days during the summer. He’s agreed to renew your prescription for another month, but he wants to see you on July sixteenth.”
“The sixteenth?” Stan asks. “Like the Monday after the fair competition?”
“Yeah, I told him you were too busy with the band before that,” Kyle replies. He wipes some ice cream from his lips but doesn’t go in for another lick despite the way the desert is starting to drip down his fingers; he seems to be thinking to himself. “I told him he better be nice to you or I’d make a formal complaint to the school for his behavior.”
“Is he really that much of a jerk?” Stan asks skeptically. He understands just being that sort of person, but professionalism should always take precedence when it comes between a doctor and a client, surely?
“Yes,” Kyle replies flatly. “He’s been an asshole since we were kids. Especially to us.”
“What did we do to piss him off?”
“Exist,” Kyle replies with a roll of his eyes. He seems to notice the melted ice cream on his hands suddenly and Stan watches him take a few quick licks from the cone before using his napkin to wipe at his fingers. “Alright, there might have been an instance where we swindled him out of like, a hundred dollars, but we were little kids. It’s stupid to hold a grudge for nearly thirty damn years.”
“A hundred bucks is a lot to a little kid,” Stan reasons. “Especially thirty years ago. And seriously, why is your cone that color? I didn’t hear you order a special cone?”
“Oh,” Kyle blinks down at the ice cream in his hand, as if just noticing the strange color. He laughs then, the mood seeming to lighten. “She just knows my order. She says I’m one of her only regulars to get the beet-flavored cone. Apparently, it’s mostly just a novelty thing for everyone else, once and never again. Do you want to try it?”
“God no,” Stan says, horrified by the very idea of a beet-flavored waffle cone. “How haven’t I divorced you yet over that atrocity?”
Kyle takes off the entire week leading up to the fair. The manner in which he casually mentions not returning to work on Monday seems dismissive in a way that leaves Stan feeling off-center. Normally, Kyle is very good at catering towards Stan’s condition, explaining every little plan or backstory out in detail, but he seems almost dismissive in the way he brings up the topic, as if expecting Stan to have already been aware of the situation.
“Oh, well, I always take that week off,” his husband had shrugged, not even looking up from the Sudoku puzzle he had been playing on his phone. “I already booked it off back in January. You like having me around for preparation. You get too stressed trying to do everything on your own.”
Preparation includes everything from running errands to mending costumes and painting signs. Stan is surprised to learn that they won’t be the only students from the school competing in the musical performance section of the fair. The gymnastics department has its own team of dancers (not cheerleaders, they insist when Stan asks for clarification, the dance team is nothing like cheerleading) and they contact him a week before to inquire about coordinating.
“We aren’t synced up or anything like that,” the woman on the phone insists. “But we have to share the school flag and mascot, so I want to make sure there isn’t any confusion there.”
Stan wasn’t even aware they needed a flag or a mascot to begin with so he’s grateful for the phone call.
“Bands go before dancers,” Kyle tells him when he mentions it over breakfast. “I’ll go pick up the stuff at the school on Monday. It would be more convenient if they went first, it feels like we’re always the ones doing the extra work.”
The mascot ends up just being a statue of a cow. Stan had half expected an actual person in a costume to show up at his door, so he’s relieved to see it waiting there, approximately life-sized, standing in the back of the U-Haul his husband had rented. Beside it, rolled up on the floor, is a large green and white flag.
“We didn’t have a school flag when we attended,” Kyle mentions, looking down at the lump of fabric. “You were on the committee when it was chosen. They went with a meat cow for the emblem, but you campaigned hard for a dairy cow. The PTA voted against it because they said South Park’s heritage was more closely tied to the meat industry. But it’s not like we don’t have dairy cows.”
“It does seem sort of perverse to rally behind an animal being led to its slaughter,” Stan agrees, walking over to the statue of the cow. When he touches it, he’s surprised to find it appears to be made of resin rather than ceramic or something sturdier. He strokes the neck of the creature absent-mindedly. “This one is a dairy cow?”
“No,” Kyle shakes his head and points to the little stubby horns on top of the head. “They remove the horns on dairy cows. Not all black and white cows are Holstein.”
Stan lets his arm drop, disappointed. What does it matter if it’s a meat cow or a dairy cow? It’s not even real. But he can’t help but think about how he has become complicit with the murder of these poor beasts since changing his diet. Maybe he can see why he was a vegetarian in the past. He thinks of mentioning the idea to Kyle but is embarrassed over the idea of changing his mind again so quickly. Besides, he really does like steak.
Kyle drives the supplies over to the fairgrounds Monday afternoon while Stan is practicing with the kids. Besides the flag and the mascot, he brings along some stands from the school. The fairground provides the chairs, just simple fold-out metal ones that are probably used again and again for various gatherings. The kids are just heading out when Kyle arrives home, kissing Stan on the cheek and bragging about his efficiency.
“Got the truck back before they could charge me for an extra day,” he crows triumphantly, as if they don’t have plenty of money to spare on a second-day rental. Especially now that Stan isn’t handing over hundreds of dollars to Eric Cartman on a monthly basis.
Speaking of which, Butters shows up on Tuesday to help out once again, assuring both Stan and Kyle that he found somebody to cover his yoga classes for the day. One by one, the kids shuffle upstairs to Kyle’s office and he and Butters help them try on uniforms. The school isn’t willing to waste money on a dozen band outfits for an elementary school competition, but they do have an agreement with the middle school to take some of their older ones out on loan. Unlike the elementary school, the middle school musicians travel between schools for competitions. There are dozens of uniforms to choose from and Kyle and Butters take measurements of each child, matching them with the closest fit they can find in their pile.
“At least the uniform hasn’t changed in the past decade,” Kyle says gratefully. “It makes finding ones that fit a lot easier. They better think of us when they change the design.”
Stan stays downstairs with the remaining kids while Butters and Kyle work their magic upstairs. Unbelievably grateful in more than one way for their help. He hadn’t considered the work that needed to be put towards the uniforms until Kyle had brought it up, but the outfits lean towards larger sizes, being made for older kids, and it only makes sense they would need to be tailored for appearance. The kids want to look like true professionals. He’s just glad that he doesn’t have to be the one stuck upstairs dressing up a bunch of prepubescent kids like they’re his personal collection of underage blow-up dolls.
As to be expected, the kids are rowdier than usual that day. It’s not that they get no work done but the crowd of students are definitely distracted by the stream of bandmates marching up and down the stairs. Beryl, in particular, seems to be having trouble with his finger work, and Stan has to go to him several times to help him work through a particularly difficult section of one song or another. Often, the boy seems to be on the verge of tears, ready to melt down at a moment’s notice and on one occasion, Stan almost considers calling down Butters to deal with his frustration. If he’s picked up on anything about the boy over the past month, it’s his sensitivity. He’s just so more emotional than the other kids and reminds Stan of his dad in many ways.
“I’m going to mess it up and ruin the entire song,” he chokes out after failing to complete the same section of Bittersweet Symphony for the fifth time in a row. “We’re going to lose the competition because I’m too incompetent to play this stupid song.”
Stan wants to hug the poor boy so badly that his fingers are almost twitching. Every fiber of his being yearns to comfort the sensitive child, but he knows it will only do more harm than good. This isn’t just any student, this is his victim and the last thing he should be doing is laying his hands on him. He’s been through enough already.
“You’re just fatigued from playing it so many times in a row,” he reassures the boy with a little pat on the shoulder. “Let’s switch to Mr. Brightside for a bit.”
Despite the situation with Beryl, it’s good practice overall. This is something Stan will have to put up with as a full-time teacher, dealing with fidgety, less motivated children. They won’t all be aspiring musicians and he’ll be teaching the recorder to a bunch of third graders next year and while it won’t be as difficult as learning the flute, they’ll also be more clueless.
They continue with the fittings throughout lunch. Butters is only able to get the one day off from his yoga classes and Kyle insists there needs to be two of them working together on getting the right measurements, so they need to finish them today. Kyle comes downstairs to eat lunch with Stan and the kids as Butters measures a girl by the name of Fiona, and then they switch, Butters skipping lunch entirely to join the kids in the pool as Kyle calls for Beryl to come up for his turn.
“But I want to swim,” the boy complains, sticking like glue to his father’s side.
“You can swim whenever you want,” Butters consoles, kicking at the boy’s foot under the water. His feet are nearly as small as his son’s. “Your father is friends with your teacher, we’ll be over to swim plenty of times during the summer. Right, Stan?”
“Right,” Stan agrees, forcing a smile on his face. He hasn’t even considered inviting Butters or the rest of his family over for use of the pool, is that something he normally does? What about Wendy? He’ll ask Kyle about it later. “Maybe we’ll do a barbecue next weekend? Beryl, you like barbecues, right?”
Beryl agrees half-heartedly but seems down still as he trudges past Stan into the house.
That evening, Kyle sets himself up at the dining room table and insists Stan serve their dinner at the island kitchen even though he’s usually a stickler over formal dining rules.
“Easier just to keep them in one place instead of moving them constantly,” he says, waving a hand at the pile of clothes heaped on the surface before him. He has adjustments to make. Hems to lift, small holes to mend, waists to take in or let out.
“Did Butters take any?” Stan asks, surprised by the mass of cloth taking up so much space in their dining room. The costumes are bulky, made of very stiff material, but it still seems excessive. The pile, heaped up on the table, is nearly taller than him.
“Butters?” Kyle asks, lifting an eyebrow. There’s a small piece of string tucked into the corner of his mouth. “You think Butters knows how to sew?”
Yes, actually. Butters seems the type to have his own sewing room. He probably also knits and crochets and makes homemade decorations at Christmas time.
“Butters can barely replace a button. My mother taught me when I was young,” Kyle explains, plucking the string from his mouth. Stan watches him thread it into the tiny end of a needle. “She said I couldn’t just marry the first girl who came along just so I had somebody to take care of me. Kind of missed the mark there, didn’t she? I can’t make a shirt from scratch or anything that intricate, but I know the basics.”
Stan expects Kyle to be too tired for sex that night, so it surprises him when Kyle not only initiates it but is unusually dominant in his demeanor. One minute he had been sitting at the table with his glasses on, a needle clenched between his teeth, and the next he’s got Stan’s hands pinned over his head and he’s whispering filthy things into his ear.
Maybe he can understand what Kyle had said about being used like a whore. Just a little bit. It is nice to be wanted.
He sleeps so deeply that he doesn’t even get a chance to shower Wednesday morning. The kids arrive as he’s barely rolling out of bed, and he knows he must reek of sex but none of the kids must know what that even smells like since they don’t say anything. Still, he leaves Kyle in charge to go over some scales with them as he takes a quick shower.
“Sorry, I was sweating in my sleep a lot last night,” he explains to the students with a laugh. “I probably stank like the pigs at the fair.” The predictable laughter of children follows.
Kyle sits next door in the dining room and works on the uniforms all day. Every so often he calls out a remark about something they’re doing great, or, occasionally, something that needs work. He’s more critical than Butters had been but at this point in the game, that criticism is needed. Stan takes his pointers to heart.
On Thursday, they start working on formation. They will need to file up to the stage at the fair in an orderly manner and take their seats with as little confusion as possible. Stan takes the chairs outside to the yard and tries to approximate the setup of the stage in the grass and has the kids practice walking to their seats. There are no stairs, but he thinks it’ll be okay. It’s just a fair, not a sold-out concert hall. Kyle stays inside and works on some background decorations for the show. He’s also creating confetti balloons for the kids to pop at the end of the show, though Stan isn’t sure if their usage is against the rules or not. He’ll check with the judges Saturday morning before they go on.
Friday morning, dress rehearsal. The kids go upstairs to get dressed on their own then walk down the stairs to show off their final look. Kyle has done a great job on the uniforms, but he seems dissatisfied, rushing from one student to the next and adjusting little details here and there. Cutting off a loose thread from this elbow, adjusting the collar at one of the boys’ throats, handing one of the better endowed girls a safety pit and telling her to use it to “ease the tension” across her chest.
“It’s too late to fix at this point,” he says regretfully. “I’m sorry, that was my fault. I should have measured more thoroughly.”
She ensures him it’s fine and she takes the safety pin to the bathroom to adjust her top in privacy.
They practice walking a couple times in full uniform while it’s still cool, then file back in to run through the entire show, also in full uniform. The kids need to get used to the feeling of confinement, so it doesn’t surprise them during the show. They play through each song several times over before lunch time but at noon, Stan surprises them by announcing they’re done.
“You’re all playing beautifully,” he assures the lot of them. “You’re going to blow everyone out of the water tomorrow! At this point, there isn’t any use practicing any further, you all know the routine inside and out, so we’re going to go out with a party!”
Butters had been the one to contact all the parents behind the backs of the students. Stan has avoided the Discord server for the most part, besides answering questions he’s been tagged on, sending out questions of his own, or giving updates when needed. Not only a moderator but an active member on the server, it had only made sense for Butters to be the one to arrange all the little details regarding attendance and permission slips and potential chaperones.
“Your parents won’t be picking you up until nine,” Stan tells the kids with a clap of his hands. “Well, if you want to stay, anyway. Feel free to text your parents if you’d rather leave earlier. But we’re going to be playing some party games, and I’ve set up the projector outside so we can have a movie night once the sun goes down. Some of your parents will be coming over to help supervise.”
None of the kids express any urge to leave anytime soon. Fiona’s father shows up at about 12:30, carting along several bags of McDonald’s food in each hand, and around 2:00 Allen’s mother makes an appearance with a large sheet cake, a large G clef in icing painted across the surface. Stan isn’t sure if she had added that detail herself or had the grocery store do it as the rest of the cake is decorated in generic pastel flowers. About an hour later, Butters shows up, still dressed in his yoga pants, a workout bag over one shoulder.
“Do you want me to shower before I get in the pool?”
“Nah, that’s what the chlorine is for,” Stan says, waving his hand as if he were clearing the man’s worry from the air.
Kyle is absent most of the party. Leaving Stan to be the face of the band, he drives back and forth between the school and the fairgrounds, running last-minute errands. The night before, he had decided they needed playbills, but he chose to print them on colorful paper from the school instead of using the plain printer paper in their home office.
“I was already going over to get the supplies anyway,” he had reasoned. Supplies meaning little things like extra strings and valve oil that the school offered for free. He also needed to get the official releases from the principal’s office, just in case anything happened at the fair like one of the kid’s getting mauled by a stray goat or chicken.
By the time he arrives home, it’s nearly five o’clock. A few more parents stop by, just getting off work, including one father who shows up with free food for the kids. Despite having McDonald's for lunch, the kids are famished after a full day of swimming and party games like tug-of-war and the three-legged race. When the man arrives with more pizzas, they’re practically ravenous. Miraculously, one of the boxes contains a Hawaiian pizza, and Stan quickly grabs a couple of slices, slipping them upstairs before the entire stack is ransacked.
“Don’t you want to come down and hang out?” Stan asks, setting the plate beside Kyle’s arm. He’s at his desk, his computer on, looking through his e-mails. Stan watches him remove his glasses and rub tiredly at his eyes.
“Long week,” he says with a sigh. He leans back against his chair, raising his arms above his head in a languid stretch. The t-shirt he’s wearing rises to expose several inches of his stomach. They fall back to the arms of his chair, but he stays where he is, head tilted slightly up against the headrest. “I don’t want to be too behind on Monday, I’ll be down in a couple hours for the movie.”
The redhead grunts when Stan climbs into his lap. He’s heavier than Kyle and though the chair is rather large and sturdy, it isn’t really made for two, but his husband presses his knees together, giving Stan room to dig his own knees into the cushion on either side.
“You’re too big for this,” Kyle murmurs against his shoulder, doing nothing to stop him. Stan sits back, mostly supporting himself on his knees and shins, applying the scantest weight to Kyle’s thighs.
“I’m terrified about tomorrow,” he admits, laughing a little. He’s not about to have an anxiety attack or anything, but he feels like he needs a little coddling at the moment. Beneath him, Kyle smiles and reaches up to touch his cheek.
“You’ll do great,” he assures Stan, caressing his lips with his thumb. “And even if you don’t, who’s going to remember? It’s a county fair. Everyone is just there for rides, games, and junk food.”
“And the animals,” Stan reminds him, pressing his palms to the flatness of his husband’s chest. The fabric of the shirt is thin enough to feel how warm he feels beneath it. Even with the AC running, it’s warmer upstairs than downstairs and the leather chair is trapping his body heat close. “I want to see the animals.”
“I know you do,” Kyle smiles softly. “I had to talk you out of buying a baby pig last year.”
“They have baby pigs?” Stan asks excitedly. The chair rocks beneath them as he straightens up quickly.
“Stan, honey, babe, love of my life. No.”
“It’ll be good for my mental health,” Stan argues, moving his hands down to feel his husband’s stomach. It rises and falls beneath each breath. His waist is slimmer, his belly flatter, than Stan’s own. But there is still a certain softness to him that Stan suspects has more to do with age than anything else.
“We already talked about getting you a dog,” Kyle says, then frowns, remembering. “Sorry. I mean, we did. Before the accident.”
“We did?” Stan asks, now rubbing his hands along Kyle’s thighs. Near his crotch but only because that’s the only area of leg he isn’t sitting on; he’s not trying to arouse his husband, and Kyle doesn’t seem tempted in the slightest.
“Last time you asked about having a baby,” Kyle says, rolling his eyes. He shifts beneath Stan and then reaches down to remove his hands, sliding them back up so they’re pressing against his chest once more. Stan locked the door behind him, but he gets why Kyle might have felt uneasy over the idea of one of the students barging in on them in such a position. “I told you no, as usual, then suggested we get a puppy instead. I wasn’t being serious.”
“Wait, no,” Stan objects. “I want a puppy.”
“Only if you agree to never ask me for a baby again.”
It seems like a fair tradeoff. Becoming a parent is the farthest thing from his mind right now, but the thought of a playful, yapping puppy running around the house is incredibly tempting. Still, given how adamant Stan had been about wanting a child before, he doesn’t feel it's wise to jump into the idea without more consideration. Having children—or choosing not to—is not something to take lightly. As unappealing as the thought seems at the moment, they’re still relatively young, and things could change.
“I’ll think about it,” Stan tells Kyle. Kyle’s expression drops, and for a moment, Stan worries he’s upset him with his decision. But it quickly becomes clear that the expression has nothing to do with the puppy-versus-baby debate.
“As far as your mental health goes, I ran into Craig at the school today.”
“You did?” Stan asks, frowning as well now. His appointment is fast approaching and while he does want to see somebody about his mental health, the more and more he’s heard about Craig, the more he’s started to think maybe he doesn’t want to meet this man. “Did he, did he say anything about me?”
“Just reminded me that we better not be late for the appointment,” Kyle says a little bitterly. The way his voice darkens whenever he talks about the doctor just reinforces Stan’s own reluctance to attend Monday’s appointment. “I tried to see about postponing another month and just getting another refill, but he wasn’t having it.”
“He’s just being a responsible doctor,” Stan reasons, because no doctor should just offer infinite refills on any medication, should they?
“He’s just being an asshole,” Kyle replies, wincing. He pushes lightly at Stan’s shoulders. “You’re heavy and I’m losing feeling in my legs.”
“Sorry,” Stan apologizes, but he leans down to give him a quick peck on the lips before climbing off of his husband’s lap. “I need to get back downstairs anyway. Are you sure you can’t come down sooner?”
Reaching for his glasses, Kyle just shakes his head.
“Come get me when the movie’s about to start,” he tells Stan instead. Then, after a beat. “Can you also bring me a glass of wine? I’m afraid to venture down there. I heard Mrs. Beech arrive a while back. She always tries to pinch my cheeks when she sees me, it’s humiliating.”
“I really can’t blame her for that,” Stan snorts, considering reaching down to give his husband’s cheeks his own little pinch just on principle. Instead, he drops a quick kiss on top of his head as he heads back towards the door. “Red or white?”
“The Sangiovese next to the fridge,” Kyle calls over his shoulder, already back to answering e-mails. “Oh, and maybe a couple of napkins? This pizza is so greasy.”