He sighs into his palms. “It’s not that, it’s—” He starts over. “Remember the kiss I told you about in college?” he asks. “My freshman year?”
I do remember it. Aiden had come to my apartment one night, drunk and rattled, and when I finally got him settled down with a grilled cheese because of course he hadn’t bothered to feed himself that day, this story came spilling out about the weekend before. The final trial of pledge week had been some nebulous ritual involving togas and darkness and kissing—all very Greek-sounding to me—but when Aiden kissed the brother on his left, it had been something more than chastely fraternal.
“I knew the guy,” Aiden had confessed, looking down at the empty plate where his grilled cheese had been before he inhaled it. “And it was dark, and you had to keep kissing for as long as they told you to, and they made us kiss for a long time and I—”
“You liked it?” I supplied.
I’m not going to pretend that Irish Catholic boys are the experts on kissing other boys, but I’m also not going to pretend that Irish Catholic boys are totally ignorant, if you catch my drift, and there’d been enough fooling around at my all-boys high school and enough frank gossip with Elijah that I wasn’t at all bothered by what seemed to be bothering Aiden very much.
On the other hand, I’d come out of high school knowing that I was a one on the Kinsey Scale—all my random encounters confirming my belief that I was mostly straight—and Aiden seemed to be coming out of this with a very different conclusion.
“I liked it,” Aiden had whispered. “What does that mean?”
“It means that you liked it.”
“But—”
“Aiden. Seriously. You know me and Mom and Dad. No one is going to give you a hard time about who you like to kiss.” But he had an expression like he might give himself a hard time.
Which is how, I imagine, we’ve ended up here on his stairs with my best friend half-naked in his room.
“After I talked to you that night, I kind of came to grips with—” he makes a vague flutter with his hands. “Being bisexual. But it seemed abstract still. Like it was okay if it was the kind of porn I watched, if maybe I flirted a bit, but actually dating a boy just didn’t occur to me. It sounds stupid, I know, but that’s how it was. The opportunity to be with another guy didn’t come up again and I never thought to chase it. And it was so easy to date girls. So very easy.”
I’ve seen Aiden’s very easy life with girls, and he wasn’t lying. He’s got the big Bell grin and the deep Bell dimple and the kind of body that promises being swept up and carried off to some evil sex lair.
“And then, I don’t even know. My firm was having an event that Elijah was planning, and all of a sudden, it didn’t seem so abstract anymore. One thing led to another, and then all of a sudden, I was really doing it.” He goes red in the face. “Uh, I mean being actually bisexual. Not…you know.”
“But that too,” I say, and I’m surprised at how warm and teasing it comes out, that I can still manage to be the big brother, the caretaker, even now when my heart is gone and pulped under Zenny’s doodled-on sneakers.
“Yes, that too,” he says, laughing and still blushing.
“You could have told me,” I point out.
“It’s so easy for you to say that. And easy for you to feel, I don’t know, like wounded that I didn’t tell you, feel like I didn’t trust you. But can you accept—just in part—that it’s not all about you? That sharing something like this is complicated?”
“Yes,” I say. “I can. And I’m sorry.”
Aiden looks up, propping his chin on his fists. “You’re my big brother, man, you’re Sean Bell. I wanted to party like Sean Bell, work like Sean Bell, be like Sean Bell. Telling you this would make me…not Sean Bell.”
“It makes you Aiden Bell,” I say, giving him a light punch to the thigh. “Which is even better.”
Elijah is still furious with me. I manage to shower and borrow some clothes, and then Aiden promises to be at the hospital in the morning. Elijah won’t even look at me the entire time I’m there.
Fitting. I barely want to look at myself.
When I get to the ICU back in Kansas City, I’m ushered to Mom’s room, which is walled with glass and has a large door opening to the nurse’s station in the middle of a semicircle of rooms. Dad snores on the small sofa across the room, and Mom’s awake, her eyes moving from the TV mounted in the corner to my face. I think she tries to smile, but the huge plastic mask over her face obscures it.
“Oh, Mom,” I say, coming over to her bed.
She lifts a hand, and I give it a squeeze once I reach her. Her skin looks better—pinker, less wan—and I have a moment of real, untempered relief. The BiPAP is working, the oxygen is helping. Everything is going to be okay.
I scoot a chair over so I can sit beside her and hold her hand, and to the harsh drone of the breathing machine and the various other beeps and blips of the monitors around us, we watch people shop for tiny houses and then act surprised when the tiny houses are indeed tiny.
And with both my hands curled around hers, I drop into a murky, exhausted sleep.
Morning brings shift change, so Dad and I are nudged out of the room. I don’t like it, but I’ve learned the hard way that it’s better to have the nurses on your side—and perfect hair or not, nurses don’t like family members clogging up their process. So we trundle out to the waiting room for bad coffee, and I go brush my teeth in the bathroom with the toiletry kit I keep in my car nowadays.
I call the office, leave a message with Trent the Secretary that I won’t be in, and then watch with disinterest as my phone lights up five minutes later with Valdman’s office line. It’s only because it’s shift change and I’m not needed with Mom I pick it up.
“Sean Bell,” I say in greeting.
“Son,” Valdman rumbles. “I need you in the office today.”
“Did you get the message I left with Trent?” I ask idly, knowing that he has. I decide to make more bad coffee and walk over to the machine.
“I did, and I’m calling you to tell you that’s not going to work for me.”
“The Keegan deal is almost fixed,” I say, stabbing at the brew button on the machine. “The nuns are moving in two weeks, well before the Keegan demolition schedule. We have a press release in the works, and the Reverend Mother has agreed to talk to the local media about it.”
“This isn’t about the Keegan deal. This is about your commitment to this company.”
I stare at the amber liquid spattering into the disposable cup. “I don’t understand. I’ve been keeping up on everything else remotely.”
I hear Valdman’s chair shifting. “Well, I don’t know how to say this delicately, so I’ll say it bluntly. When you told me last winter that your mom had cancer, I was willing to let you do your thing because I figured she’d die soon after. But it’s been more than half a year of your attention being divided, and that’s not the kind of drive I’m looking for in my firm.” His voice goes conspiratorially low. “I know you can do better. I’m going to retire from day-to-day soon, and when I do, I want you in the chair, my boy. But I can’t put you there unless I know you’ll put the company first.”