“I love you too.”
“Let me go, you wannabe gay-mo.”
He does, but that’s okay.
“And the record for the longest hug in history goes to Bear and Creed,”
the Kid intones. “Congratulations. You have just made this the most uncomfortable moment of my life.”
“Wait until you hit puberty,” Creed says cheerfully as he goes to sit back down. “Between acne and hair in weird places, you’ll see what it really means to be uncomfortable.”
“What?” I ask Otter as I sit wobbly back in my chair. Fun. The room is starting to spin a bit. That should make the dinner even better.
“You and me,” he hisses in my ear, “we’re going to have a long chat later about who you belong to. You get me?”
Oh.
Oh, boy, do I.
4.
Where Bear Meets
Two Very Different People
BUT it didn’t happen that night. By the time we got home, I was full-on drunk, having spent the car ride home singing Duran Duran at the top of my lungs, asking the Kid if he was “hungry like the wooooooooooooooolf.” He told me no, he sure wasn’t.
Otter got me upstairs, and I started slinking around the room, dancing and asking him if he thought I was sexy. He said he thinks I’m always sexy.
Then I threw up and blamed him for letting me drink too much. And then I passed out.
It’s a good thing he says he loves me, because I’m a train wreck.
AFTER Creed’s and my Awkward Hug Extravaganza, dinner had only gotten more strained. There were questions that I didn’t really know how to answer (“Have you always felt this way about Otter?” Um, yes? Maybe?
“Don’t you think this is a little fast for all of you to be living together?”
That’s what I said, but Otter says it’s forever so…. “Forever? You’re both so young! You can’t possibly know what forever means!” I believed him when he said it. “Bear, we’re not trying to put you on the defensive.” Then stop acting like you’re attacking us! “Bear, we’re just worried! Can’t you see how this is such a shock to us?” Shock to you ? You guys aren’t the one whose whole world was turned upside down. “That’s what we mean….”).
And on and on, with me getting more flustered, with Otter getting angrier, the Kid looking like he was ready to bust some kneecaps. I could understand their questions, I could see their need for answers, but nothing we said seemed to satisfy them.
Of course it probably hadn’t helped when Otter—without discussing it with me first—had pulled out a check in the amount that his parents had fronted me to cover the custody attorney. And damn it if it wasn’t like an electroshock to the heart when he’d told them (against their protestations, of course) that we didn’t want their money, that he was man enough to take care of his own family just fine. Anything the Kid or I needed would come from him and that was final. He had already resumed his prior position at the photog studio he’d worked at before fleeing Seafare, and while that in itself was not a lot of money, he’d done more than well enough for all of us during his time in San Diego, and we didn’t have to worry about finances anytime soon. Part of me was horrified at this unintended emasculation (my old pride rearing its ugly head—I don’t know if I’ll ever be rid of it), but then he’d looked at me with such earnestness in his eyes that any argument to the contrary died in my mouth. And, I’m not ashamed to admit, there was something so unbelievably hot about Otter’s words, that glint in his eyes that just begged for his parents to speak against him, to doubt he could provide what he said he could. He believed it and therefore I believed it.
But that didn’t help when I hugged his mother good-bye and noticed it was much stiffer than the one I’d gotten in greeting. I couldn’t help but notice the way his father couldn’t quite meet my eye as he shook my hand.
Anna’s parents were still too blown away to do much but mumble at me as Otter practically carried
me from the house.
I’ve never understood their hesitation on the matter, but I know how much it hurts Otter. It was only a couple of nights ago that we’d lain awake in the dark, with him telling me in a low voice how surprised he was when he came out and was met with an almost cold indifference, how that surprise had quickly turned to anger and outrage that his parents, seemingly left-leaning quasi-hippies, would make such a big deal about something he considered so small. There was one point when he’d described the look on his father’s face when he’d come out, and his voice had cracked ever so subtly, but I heard it, that breaking cadence that tore at me like claws, and did the only thing I knew how: I gathered him up in my arms, stroking his hair as he lay on my chest, both of us waiting for the tremors that rolled through his chest and shoulders to subside.
If there’s one thing I know about, it’s earthquakes.
But it’s easier for me to say “fuck you” to his parents than it will ever be for him, and this is something I realize very clearly. My dad was never around, even though Jerry was kind of like one. My mom… well, you know about her. Alice was there more than she was. But there’s a knowledge in me, something that understands that these are not my parents. So while I can do my best to make sure that Otter is okay, that he knows he will always have a home with the Kid and me, I can still view the situation with a cool detachment that quickly turns into self-righteous anger. It bugs the crap out of me that I’d be so quick to distance myself from Jerry and Alice, but then I’ve never been in this position before, one where I gave a damn about someone other than the Kid and myself (I know, I know, what about Anna, right? It sucks. It really does. But something Creed said has stuck with me, even though it’s almost cold. Anna was my girl friend. It’s just fucking different, okay?).
But I can’t do any of that. I can’t cut them out, because Otter can’t.
They are a part of him and, by proxy, a part of me. So naturally, I started thinking of ways to fix it. And if history is any judge of the future, then I’ll probably just end up making things worse.