Whoever they were.
I wondered what they would say if they could witness the mess that I’d stumbled into. What words of sage advice would the mysterious they pass along to a soul who had shunned any kind of relationship, and now, without warning and one smile at a time, was balancing on the edge of a ravine as deep as the Grand Canyon.
“… how full the frames are. I’ll be putting the supers on the hives within the next two weeks.”
“Uh-huh,” I replied as my sight lingered on the setting sun. The western part of the yard was alive with flowering plants and honeybees making one last journey out to collect pollen before calling it a day. It had been a day of packing as fast as I could, then jumping on the first available flight to get me out of LA. Even being a state away didn’t seem to be helping though. I could still see Finn’s eyes in the dark blues of the evening sky.
I wish I’d asked him to come with me.
“Of course, if that were to happen, then your mother and I would have to sprout wings and grow stingers.”
My mind was on Finn, as always, as I wondered what he was doing tonight. I’d sent one fast text when I had arrived, but that was it. I wanted to send more though, and that was the whole problem in one big, closeted nutshell.
“I’ve always thought about what it might be like to sting the neighbor’s wife. She has enormous pollen baskets.”
“Yeah, me too.” Then what he said sank in, and I threw my father a befuddled and shocked glance. “What did you just say about Mrs. Wilcox?”
“Ah, there you are!” he joked, giving me a soft nudge in the side as we took our seats in the two Adirondack chairs Dad had put out in this massive, and busy, flower garden. “I knew if I kept talking you’d drift back to the conversation in time.”
“I’m sorry, Dad.” I shoved my fingers into my hair as I exhaled though my mouth.
“That was quite the sigh. Want to tell me what’s weighing on you so heavily?” Dad leaned up, resting his elbows on his knees, his gray eyes locked on me. “Is it the finals loss?”
“Sort of, sure, I’m disappointed that we lost. We were so close.”
“Well, that is tough. But you’ve been through hard losses before, Son. If you can look back objectively and learn from the mistakes that were made, then that loss will have served a purpose.”
He was right. I would move past the loss. I’d started to already, as had most of the team. It still hurt, sure, but the sharp pain had lessened. Dad had been through a ton of highs and lows with me as I’d gone through the various age brackets of youth hockey right through my collegiate career. Hell, even into the pros. Being an athlete was all about learning how to cull whatever knowledge you could from a brutal loss and applying it to your next time on the ice or field.
“Is there something else, Cameron? You seem abnormally distant tonight,” Dad questioned softly, reaching out to lay a hand on my knee. “You know you can talk to me, or your mom, about anything.”
I knew that. Truly, I did, but this was just… How did I even begin to say what I was feeling when I was so scared of saying what I was feeling? I felt like a dog chasing its tail, spinning in circles while getting dizzier and dizzier.
“There’s this guy,” I chanced, glancing at my father.
He’d been very accepting of my sexuality when I’d come out in college. As had Mom and Lyle and Kelly. But this was different. This was me getting snared. No, that wasn’t the right sentiment. Finn hadn’t set a trap for me. Shit, he was as wound up in the choking wire that had us both by the neck as I was.
“Did he hurt you?” Dad asked, then gave my knee a squeeze. I shook my head, unable to conjure up the words so that they could make sense. “Did he steal your heart?”
I nodded. The rush of emotion felt like a dam breaking. The story of Cam and Finn flowed from me like honey, only this was far stickier, but God, loving Finn was just as sweet. And I thought that I did love him, or felt something powerful for the man, which had me jabbering nonstop about every drab damn detail of the situation we were in. Dad said little, nodded, uhm-hummed, and patted my knee while I word-vomited all over his pretty bee garden. When I reached the part where I got on a plane and flew home, I was spent. Exhausted. Like I’d been made to do speed sprints or a bag skate. My spine met the back of the chair, my eyes drifted shut, and I did my best to pull myself back together.
“Sounds to me like you’ve fallen pretty hard, Cam,” Dad said as a bee flew past my ear. I cracked one eye to make sure she had continued on her way to the hive, then stared out at the mesa and the purple-pink mounds of stone that had sat there for thousands of years. “Does he feel the same way about you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. We agreed this would be just friends. There was an NDA.”
“I have lots of friends, but I don’t jump them in the bathroom and get jiggy with it with them. I save that for your mother.” I scrunched my face. Did any child ever want to hear about his parents getting jiggy with it? No, they did not. Still, I appreciated the input. “Perhaps you need to explain your feelings to him. Maybe he’s in the same boat. Sometimes things start out as one thing, then they grow into a different thing. I’m using thing a lot.”
“It’s fine. This isn’t English class. Say thing ten times in each sentence, I don’t care. I’m just… this has felt… good. I’m so scared, Dad. I’ve done my best to avoid any kind of emotional entanglements, yet here I am, entangled but good.”
“I’m not sure where you ever got the idea that being alone is how to face the world. Just look at the bees.” He released my knee to throw his hands open to the honey bees returning to the brightly painted boxes. “They know the value of being one of many.”
“They’re Borg, clearly.”
He snorted. “Very funny. The point I was trying to make was that no creature does well alone.”
“I wasn’t alone, or lonely.”
“Having a stranger in your bed and sharing your soul with another person are two very different things. And while you can get pleasure from a purely sexual experience, I’ve found that loving someone openly is more sexually stimulating than the other.”
“But see that’s just it. We can’t be openly anything. I just…” I raked my fingers through my hair as a shooting star raced across the desert sky. “It’s not at all how I thought love would be. If it even is love.”
“Oh, I’m pretty sure it is. And by the sounds, it’s exactly how love feels for all of us. Like stepping out of a plane with no parachute.”
“Yes, God, yes, it feels like that only a million times scarier. I don’t know what to do, or if there is even any point of exploring how I feel when it won’t go anywhere. It’s just…” I let it dangle. What more was there for me to say? “Should I tell him?” I asked on the weakest of whispers.
“I think you should, yes. Give the man the chance to say it back.”
“What if he doesn’t?”
“What if he does?”
Yeah, that was the question.
Either way he replied was a field filled with sharp stakes and tiger traps.
Gee, love was grand.