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The sound of the lawnmower dies, the old engine sputtering out before it quits completely.
Naim squints in the sun from where he’s sprawled out on the deck, book in his lap, and sunglasses uselessly push up on top of his head. He watches Ryan out in the yard, half sunburnt and shirtless, standing with his hand on his hip while answering his phone.
How did he even hear that ringing? Naim huffs to himself, sharing a look with Ollie who blinks up at him with her big yellow eyes. Her leash is tucked up beneath his foot, even though he knows she wouldn’t go anywhere; her only goal in life was wanting to bask on the sun-warm slats of the deck.
A snippet of conversation floats towards Naim’s ears, “Jamie, how’s it goin’, mate?” before Ryan turns in another direction and his words are too muffled for Naim to hear. Jamie was Ryan’s cousin in Melbourne, and more than likely he was calling to let them know he was going to be in town sometime soon. He usually liked to stop by and see them when he had a work thing in Brisbane.
Naim returns to his book, flips through a few pages. He had been trying to make an effort to read more, thinking it was good to expand his mind, or whatever. “Little late for that, isn’t it mate?” Ryan liked to tease him. It had been a week and he was still stuck in the first chapter, needing to run it back every so often and reread pages when he forgot what he had just read.
Minutes pass and he realizes there’s no more telling murmurs of Ryan talking on the phone, and the mower hadn’t been started up again.
Looking back up, he sees Ryan standing in the middle of the yard, staring at something, or maybe nothing, phone hanging loose in his hand.
“Ryan?” Naim calls out to him, concern on the breath of his voice.
Ryan looks up at him and his mouth opens and closes a couple times, but he says nothing.
Naim feels a sharp stab of worry and abandons his book without marking the page, scooping Ollie up in his arms before crossing the yard, through the still uncut grass until he’s standing in front of Ryan.
“Hey, what’s going on?”
“That was Jamie,” Ryan says, eyes turned back to the black screen of his phone.
“Everything okay?”
“He uh,” Ryan rolls his shoulders, like he’s psyching himself up to get his words out, and they come flat and tasteless, “Said my dad died.”
“Oh,” Naim says stupidly, words dying in his throat, a sudden block that he didn’t know how to get past. The sharp prick of Ollie’s claws kneading into his forearm are the only thing that spur him to spit out something, “I’m sorry, Ryan.” Fuck his dad had been a shitty guy, obviously, but still.
Ryan grimaces at the apology and shakes his head, “It’s not-nah, I’m fine.”
Naim doesn’t completely believe him when he says that. He had heard some version of the same words from Ryan’s lips before, and knew enough to sense that it was a falsity. Ryan had a forever habit of downplaying things that made him hurt.
“What…uh, what happened?”
“Heart attack, I guess,” Ryan says casually, like it’s all washing right over him. Like it’s nothing. Without looking up at Naim, he walks over to grab his shirt from where it's hanging over one of the chairs around the firepit they built together a few years back. He pulls it on over his head, hair skewed and sweaty, “Jamie said my mum is trying to get a hold of me. She’s really desperate, I think.”
Naim studies him, the set of his shoulders and the distant look in his eyes that happens when he’s upset but doesn’t want to admit it. Naim doesn’t press.
It had looked a lot different, but some time ago Naim had sort of been in Ryan’s position once. Except he was only a teenager, watching his mum grieve her lost husband, finding a way to handle her pain and all while she shouldered Naim out in the process.
Ryan’s mum was apparently looking for something to lean on that which she had already pushed out long before. Naim’s not sure if it’s fair of her, and less sure if he would be willing to speak to her if he was in Ryan’s place.
“Are you going to call her?”
Ryan closes his eyes and Naim can see the flare of his nostrils while he breathes deep into his lungs. After a long pause, his voice is clipped when he says, “I think so,”
“You want to be alone? I can fuck off for a bit.”
Ryan grabs Naim’s hand that’s free of the cat, “No. Stay with me, please.”
Naim lets himself be tugged along back inside, and the lawn stays half mowed.
-
Ryan hadn’t seen his mum for almost twenty years.
Naim’s mum had been more persistent, trying over and over to reach Naim over years. Found him once and made things so bad they had to abandon the life they had been trying to build at the time, and then Naim tried with her again later on, and it was even worse.
Ryan’s parents never tried that hard. He had only ever had to block his parents' numbers. They tried to talk to Jamie about him once in the first year, before he turned eighteen, and that was it.
When her sobs find him through the speaker of his phone, his jaw feels tight and laced with a tension he hadn’t been prepared for. It’s not fair that she comes to him crying after all these years, telling him how he is all that she has now. A lie, Bandee was still filled with countless other family members, Whelan’s and otherwise. She had friends, and the church. She was the furthest thing from alone. Certainly not the way that Ryan had been left to be.
“I’m not sure. I don’t think there’s a reason for me to be there,” Ryan hesitates. How can she expect him to come, after everything?
“I’m so sorry, Ryan. And I would like to tell you that in person,”, her voice comes so small and nervous, and doesn’t sound like his mum at all, whether it’s the years or the unexpectedness of her saying that at all. He knows what she is trying to say sorry for.
The words chip away at something inside of him, the exact target she was aiming for, maybe. She lost her husband, and she’s trying to atone with the only thing on the planet left of him. The only possible thing Ryan could ever hope to gain from seeing her again.
He doesn’t know if he believes it, if it comes from a place of sincereness or otherwise, but it’s enough to make him say that he’ll think about coming before he hangs up the call.
Cathy Whelan had never been an incredibly doting mother, and they had never been particularly close. Not that Ryan ever had a problem with that growing up. He had always liked doing things on his own without much pushback, and while she cared about him, for the most part she let him do what he wanted.
Part of him imagined she had always wanted a daughter, and instead had been stuck with a singular son who was as rough and tumble as any boy from Bandee could be. And then, turned out that he was gay on top of that, so, not a lot going for him really. Her calling and pleading for him to come back was a desperation he’d never seen from her, usually she’d been quiet and prone to letting his dad take the lead in everything. Accepting everything he did with a smile and a nod, the way that his dad had expected Ryan to.
The phone call settles over Ryan heavily, the unspoken potential of a real apology twitching away uncomfortably in his chest. Ryan feels it in the tenseness of his arms braced against the chipped kitchen counter, and can feel it pulse through him and into Naim who’s draped himself against his back.
“What do you want to do?” Naim asks him quietly, his usual chatter subdued as he waits for Ryan’s lead.
Ryan crosses his arms on the counter and hides his face in his arms, feeling his body shake with some tearless sort of sob.
“I don’t know,” he mutters, voice dripping with how miserable he felt.
Naim rubs his back in slow circles, and Ryan wishes that Naim could tell him what to do, but some things only Ryan had control over.
-
Cold water hits Ryan’s skin, spraying off him and onto Naim, making him flinch.
“Fuck, why don’t you ever let it warm up first?” Naim says with a hiss through his teeth, a careful smile on his lips.
Ryan smiles back, and it's so weak that it falls off his face just as fast. He watches the water soak through Naim’s hair, and he thinks about forgiveness.
“So what? You thought you could just forgive them?” Naim had asked once with bitterness in his voice when Ryan had gone to a local church service without telling him.
They had a rainbow flag on their door and a sign that said ‘Everyone Welcome’ and Ryan had just wanted to see what it was like. He had been curious if there was any of the life he remembered inside the walls of a place like the one that had raised him. And it was fine, it was nice, but it hadn’t been the community that he grew up with.
He wasn’t sure what he was searching for, then.
“It’s not…I don’t forgive anyone. Not for this,” Ryan told him, eye half swollen shut from an encounter with the entity that had followed shortly after.
He had forgiveness to give when it was earned.
He forgave Naim, all those years ago, for telling the pastor and his wife about Hunter and Ryan.
He forgave him, because Naim was a kid, because he was scared, and he was only doing what he thought had been right. What the adults in their lives had taught them to do.
The church, their parents, they were supposed to be the ones keeping them safe from harm. They knew exactly what they were doing when they had their sons ‘healed’, and so, Ryan didn’t know if there would ever be room in his heart to forget or push that aside.
He didn’t know if he had it in him to absolve his mother of the pain she caused him, or if that’s even what he was looking for, or if he just wanted to hear the words of a real apology. Just to know there was something in her that regretted what they’d done. That there was any bit of love for him back there.
There was something else he felt, too, pulling him to Bandee for a funeral of a man that didn’t give a shit about him. It was some hole that gaped in him after the community he grew up in had been ripped away from him. It mostly filled over the years, little by little, Naim becoming his family, and with their friends, with his cousin Jamie, with Ollie.
Even with all of that, there was still something small under it all that cried out in a hollow that sat empty. Something that refused to be mended without a real goodbye to the place that had been home.
“Hey, come here,” Naim coaxes him from his thoughts, gently pushing Ryan until he’s beneath the showerhead.
Naim washes Ryan’s hair and Ryan gives into it wordlessly, closes his eyes while the pads of Naim’s fingers scrub through his soapy locks. He hums a half-recognizable song into Ryan’s ear while his arms hold him from behind, and the water washes over them, falling in streams that trickle onto the shower floor and down the drain.
Ryan listens, trying to let it drown out the noise in his head.
-
“You want to go, don’t you?”
“I think so,” Ryan tells Naim quietly while they lay in bed together, his hair still damp from his shower and soaking into his pillow, “Is that weird?”
Years ago, Ryan and Naim had gone to Melbourne to visit Jamie, as they did on occasion, and on this particular time Naim had thought…maybe he should try. His mum had tried reaching out to him so often. Somehow finding a way to contact him over and over again. Maybe it would be good to have a conversation with her, he thought.
It hadn’t gone well, Arlene Reid’s words cutting deeper than they ever had in Bandee. Telling him how she still didn’t agree with his lifestyle, “It’s not too late to abandon this life of sin you’ve chosen, Naim. You can be safe.” You can be saved. From what? It had been enough for Naim to shut the door completely, enough to decide that was it and he had no further hope for a mother he once had.
Naim had heard Ryan’s mum's cries over the phone, and he understands why Ryan wants to go, or why he feels the need to. Ryan had always been more hopeful than Naim ever was, more quick to see a bright side to things when Naim thought there was none at all. The hurt that their families had given to them ran long and deep, but he knows there’s something in him still that hopes that going to Bandee will give him some closure that he had never been given before. Bandee, that had been home for Ryan like it never had been for Naim.
“No, it’s not,” Naim shakes his head, and scooches closer, tucking his knee in between Ryan’s thighs, the thought of being back in that town rattling around in his head, “But I–Ryan…I don’t know if I can go back there. I-”
“Hey, hey,” Ryan stops him with a gentle hand on Naim’s cheek, “Naim, I won’t drag you back to that fucking place. I’ll go, it’ll only be the weekend.”
Alone. Naim shudders, a concept that still feels foreign around its edges. They were safer now, mostly, but there were years of scars on their bodies that made Naim wary.
“I don’t know how I feel about that,” Naim tells him, looping his hand around Ryan’s forearm to keep him close.
“We’ve had nights apart before, like that fishing trip I took with my mates from work last summer. Stella stayed with you for the evenings, then, right?”
“Yah. No way I was going on that,” Naim agrees. He enjoyed going camping with Ryan when they were on their own, maybe a couple friends, but a bunch of blokes kicking it in the bush for two nights had sounded out of his wheelhouse.
Ryan smiles at him, “And that was fine, wasn’t it? I didn’t end up seeing it at all that time. And you still haven’t seen it in years.”
Naim can’t help but feel it’s not quite the same, “But you want to go back to Bandee, Ryan. Don’t you think that it might be different there?”
“Maybe…but I’ll be safe. Jamie’s gonna go, too, I’ll get a motel with him.”
Naim chews at the inside of his cheeks, “And I just…stay here?”
Ryan’s smile turns flatter, “Well, someone’s gotta look after Ollie.”
“Ah, that’s it, it’s all concern for your fucking cat, I should’ve known,” Naim sighs, overdramatic and smiling as he rolls away and onto his back
“My cat? What's this always with the ‘my cat’,” Ryan laughs as he follows, hovering over Naim and bracketing him in between his thighs, muscles solid beneath Naim’s wandering hands, “Who’s the one who found her, again?”
Naim looks up at him and smiles, fingers hooking in the edge of the elastic waist band of his shorts, frayed and pilled with age, “Hmm.”
“Hmm,” Ryan echoes back as he puts his hands on either side of Naim’s face and bends down to kiss him, tongue hot and firm against the sharp edges of Naim’s teeth. He kisses him and in it Naim can feel the words Ryan doesn’t know how to say. When he pulls back to rest his forehead against Naim’s he breathes, “If you really don’t want me to go, I’ll stay.”
Naim shakes his head quickly at the suggestion, in his heart he knows that’s not fair, “I can’t keep you from something you have to do, Ryan.”
Ryan sighs, and Naim doesn’t miss the tremble in his forearm before he lets his body collapse on top of Naim’s.
Naim was intimately familiar with Ryan’s fears, having seen him scared and shivering like a cornered dog from the entity and the terrified look that lived in his eyes so often through their twenties–the way it looked when he used to look at Naim and couldn’t tell if it was actually him or some mirage of him that would cause him pain.
Now, he only saw it in moments. Like when a rolling clap of thunder echoed through the house and Ryan sought shelter in his arms. Naim had been surprised, at first, to learn that Ryan was so terrified of storms when they were kids. They had gotten caught outside in a particularly nasty one, sheltering themselves in a shoddy bus stop that hadn’t done anything to protect them from the slanted pelt of rain. Naim had been thrilled at first, drops running down his face and sinking into his unwashed clothes, it felt exciting, refreshing. Until he looked at Ryan at his shoulder, eyes pinched shut and flinching every time another boom of thunder exploded somewhere in the clouds. Naim could still remember the way Ryan’s drenched body shook in his arms, and how Naim wanted to do anything to keep him safe, vowed it then and there while the sky raged above them.
When fear came for Ryan these days, the shine of it in his eyes was so much quieter than it had been when he was seeing Naim’s face in the shadows.
Naim hadn’t seen the entity for a long time, and Ryan wasn’t scared anymore. Not of Bandee, not of the entity. He kisses the side of Ryan’s head and breathes in the smell of Ryan’s shampoo, of damp skin scrubbed clean.
“I’ll call Stella tomorrow, I’m sure she’ll be fucking thrilled to come spend the weekend here again,” Naim says into the mess of blonde hair in his face.
“Thank you, Naim,” Ryan whispers.
-
Ryan wakes up before Naim does, his face pressed against Ryan’s chest with his mouth half open. There’s a wet patch of drool pooling through the fabric of Ryan’s shirt, but he doesn’t have it in him to shove Naim off.
He taps through the calendar on his phone instead, looking at dates and cross referencing with flights. The funeral was set for Saturday and it was Thursday now, and his options seemed to be getting a flight to Mildura and a bus or rental car from there, or flying to Melbourne and driving up with Jamie tomorrow. Either way, the timing left limited options, and the available flights that would get him there were even less available.
“Naim, hey,” Ryan says as he prods at Naim's side gently, sorry to not let him sleep any longer.
“Hm? What's the…what?” Naim slurs, eyes still closed to the world.
Ryan smiles at him, sleep warm and comfortable, and leans down to kiss the wet drool spot beside Naim’s mouth, “Wake up. I gotta leave today.”
Naim’s eyes fly open, “What? Today?”
“The flights wouldn’t work tomorrow, it just makes the most sense for travel time,” Ryan tells him regretfully, “Early afternoon probably.”
Naim sucks in a breath and nods, folding in closer and nuzzling into Ryan’s chest, “Okay. Alright.”
Ryan cards his fingers through Naim’s hair, and soaks up the moment while they have it.
-
Naim watches Ryan book his flight to Melbourne across the kitchen island with half empty breakfast plates between them. Only eggs and toast, because apparently there wasn’t going to be time for much else.
Ryan’s closer lipped than normal when Naim listens to him call his boss and explain the situation, and there’s less of a rhythm to the way he speaks. He laughs, but it doesn’t reach his eyes in the same way.
He’s struggling and you’re letting him go by himself, you fucking coward, Naim thinks to himself while Ryan moves on to calling Jamie next in the living room.
Naim gets the dishes cleaned off and loaded in the dishwasher before he disappears back into their bedroom, bed still unmade. His hands feel useless and they twitch at his side with the need to do something. In the closet, he digs out an old backpack. They didn’t travel too often, when they did it was usually a road trip somewhere. Occasionally a plane. Never alone, when they did go somewhere farther away. Naim doubted Ryan would want anything other than carry on.
He gathers a few changes of casual clothes for Ryan, and scrounges the depths of the closet for something that would make sense for a funeral. He ends up finding a black button up that he can't even remember the origins of, and a pair of dress slacks that Naim had bought when he had an opening for a small exhibit at a local art gallery. He’s pretty sure Ryan had worn his nicest jeans that night, free of grass stains and maybe a chic hole on the thigh.
There’s some travel sized toiletries that he digs out from the bottom of the bathroom cupboard that he tosses into the front pockets of the bag. It’s not much, but it’s something to do, something to distract from the guilt eating away at the lining of his stomach.
Naim is rolling up the worn leather of one of Ryan’s belts when he rounds the bedroom door.
“There you are,” Ryan says with a small smile as he sits down on the edge of the bed, “What are you doing?”
“Thought I’d get you started on packing so you don’t have to worry about it,” Naim puts the belt in the backpack before he lets himself be pulled in close by Ryan tugging on the front of his shirt. Ryan’s hands land on his hips, the press of his fingers moving slowly to the small of his back to hold him close.
Ryan’s eyes are soft, hair falling back from his forehead as he looks up at Naim, the point of his chin pressing to Naim’s chest, “Thank you. You didn’t have to do that, y’know.”
“I know,” Naim says as his hands wander, up Ryan’s neck, passing by the familiar patterns of moles, wandering over the curves and corners of Ryan that he knew so well, “You call your mum?”
Ryan nods.
Naim runs his fingers through Ryan’s close cropped curls, passes a thumb over the small scar on his eyebrow from a piercing there and gone for years. The moustache that he kept growing back that Naim had actually come to love…most of the time. So handsome, and so grown compared to the boy in the far reaches of his memories.
Ryan wasn’t that kid anymore, he was strong and brave and an adult and Naim knew he could do this, but he still felt sick that he was letting him do it on his own.
“Ryan, I still don’t know if I feel right about you going by yourself,” Naim says quietly, through the nauseous feeling rolling in his gut.
“Naim. I told you, alright?” Ryan’s muscles stiffen as he speaks, voice laced with something rigid and yet gentle in its unwillingness to yield, “I’m not taking you back there. There’s no reason for it…I’m a big boy, I can handle it.”
Not a boy at all, Naim thinks as he nods. Ryan tugs him back onto the mattress and into the rumpled blankets, falling together with some breathy laughter. It settles and fades, and Naim listens to the mingle of their breath, oxygen flowing into their lungs. Alive and older, somehow, by some miracle.
“I know you can,” Naim whispers as he gathers Ryan into his arms. He feels Ryan shake in his embrace, but says nothing, only holds him close in the quiet that follows.
-
Naim drives Ryan to the airport, and holds his hand across the center console almost the whole way there, thumb flicking back and forth across Ryan’s knuckles with unsettled nerves.
“So, you’ll call me when you land?” he asks Ryan, maybe for the second time.
“As soon as I can turn my phone on,” Ryan assures with a squeeze of his hand.
At the drop off gates, Naim is quick to grab the backpack for him from the seat behind and hands it over, the weight leaving his hand and onto Ryan’s shoulder. Naim hates feeling rushed, but he can feel the airport security's eyes on him when he starts to linger.
Naim had never had to say goodbye to Ryan at the airport before, it had always been both of them going anywhere before this. An anxious feeling wells up inside him, gathers wet in his eyes and in a sudden ache at his temple. The air is hot and sticky, and Naim hates goodbyes.
“Don’t cry, cause then you’re gonna make me cry,” Ryan says but there’s already the telling glint of tears forming in the blues of his own eyes.
A wet laugh leaves Naim as he gathers Ryan in his arms, shaking his head into the crook of his neck, “Good luck, Ryan. I hope you find what you need.”
Ryan sniffs and kisses the side of Naim’s head desperately, “Hey. Listen to me, I already have everything I need here, Naim. I just-”
“Hey, Excuse me! You fellas have to hurry it up! This location is for loading and unloading only, please,” the lady that had their number since they parked yells out.
“Fuck,” Ryan mutters.
Naim scowls at the interruption and pulls back, kisses Ryan hard and rushes to pull one of the rings off his finger at the same time. He presses it into the give of Ryan’s palm as the kiss breaks, “Take it, please.”
The ring was one that Ryan had custom made for Naim’s thirty-fifth birthday, all silver and intricately carved with the shape of fish and birds circling the entire thing. Naim never took it off, but he needed it to go with Ryan, a piece of him at least, if he wasn’t there physically.
Ryan blinks rapidly and fits the ring onto one of his empty fingers, tears falling down his cheeks as he kisses Naim again, “I’ll call you, okay? Every fucking day. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“Ryan. If it…just remember this is waiting here for you. Us. And that you’re still everything to me, hm? Always.”
Ryan squeezes his hand, lifts it to his face and kisses his palm with a tenderness that Naim understands through the years of their lives being intertwined, “I love you, Naim.”
“I love you,” Naim echoes and struggles to let go of Ryan’s hand, but he does, and watches all the way until he’s on the opposite side of the sliding glass door and lost in the throng of people.
The security woman glares at him from her spot with her arms crossed against her chest.
“I’m leaving!” Naim holds up his hands in self defense before he rushes to leave so that she can’t say anything more. The temporary annoyance tampering down the hurt of Ryan leaving.
Naim starts the drive out but finds himself pulling into the car park when his vision starts to blur, crying against the soft cracked leather of the steering wheel that had been stained over the years with sweat and sun damage. He tries not to think about how this will be the farthest he’s been from Ryan since they were seventeen, tries to ignore the ache blooming underneath his skin like a bruise.
There’s no version of Ryan waiting in the shadows of the lot, no empty pair of eyes that haunt him, only a quiet, empty space that feels like a part of him had been ripped out.
-
The flight passes by uneventfully when Ryan falls asleep after they take off. Naim was a nervous flyer, but Ryan had no problem sleeping through. He finds he misses Naim’s nervous twitching, though, odd to see a stranger at his shoulder rather than the man who was always at his side. He twists the ring on his finger, and holds it against his lips while when the plane lands.
As promised, Ryan calls Naim as soon as he’s off the plane and in the airport terminal heading to the exit. Naim told him that Stella was on the way, and said she had a bunch of shit movies she was planning to show him. Ryan laughs when Naim’s obvious disgust is apparent through the phone.
“You’re going to get sick of me calling so much,” Ryan tells him before they say goodbye.
“I doubt it,” Naim says back.
Jamie pulls up shortly after Ryan exits the airport doors.
“Long time no see, mate,” Jamie greets him with a wide smile, a fist bump and a slap on the back.
His cousin, son of his his dads older brother, was taller than Ryan with ruddier blonde hair, and always smiling and easy-going. Ryan had always remembered him being around when he was a kid, and the way he was miserable in Bandee and the quiet way everyone mostly stopped talking about him when he left after he finished high school. Occasionally he’d show up for holidays, but mostly to see his younger sisters who stayed and married in town. Ryan assumed that was the only reason he was going back, now, too.
Jamie Whelan was still tolerated by the family, because he wasn’t loud about it. Jamie with one foot still in Bandee, who loved his siblings, who lived with his ‘roommate’ Mitch for years and that's all it ever was. Never anything more. Even to Naim and Ryan who Jamie was so adamant in protecting when they showed up on his doorstep, he never called Mitch anything other than his roommate, always so careful not to misspeak.
Ryan doesn’t know if he could ever have lived that way. In another life, maybe that was what it would have been for him.
Ryan had known exactly who he was from a young age, and he assumed it meant that his life in Bandee had always come with an expiration date. If he had made it out of Bandee without the entity attached to him forever, if he hadn’t fallen desperately in love with Naim, would it have been a similar quiet existence with someone his family never knew about? Would he have chosen to keep in contact with his family? Or if he had Naim, but chose not to talk about him for the fear of being shunned?
Jamie had been Ryan’s only possibility of help after he left with Naim at his side, and he had been kind enough to give them his spare room for the better part of a year. Ryan wasn’t sure where they would have been without his help in the beginning, his patience and willingness to be what they needed when he was just trying to do his best as well. He had been so open and caring for Naim and Ryan in their situation, and Ryan had no place to pass judgement on the life he chose to live.
Ryan hugs him quickly, “How are ya? How’s Mitch?”
Jamie tells him about Mitch’s research grant with an environmental company, and how he’s gone more often than he’s home these days.
They head back to his place with a plan to start driving early in the morning, to make it to Bandee sometime in the early afternoon. Ryan’s stomach twists at the thought of seeing his mum again after all these years, but he pushes it away to be tomorrow’s problem.
-
“I am sorry about your dad, Ryan,” Jamie says while they eat Thai food from a restaurant down the street–it had been a place Naim and him used to frequent often when they lived with Jamie. He was surprised to find that it was still open for business.
One of the first times Ryan took Naim out for a proper date, he took him there. They had dressed in clothes they bought from the op shop that they had just taken to the laundromat the day before, clean and as crisp as they could be, and Ryan paid with some crumpled bills that had sat in his pockets since Bandee. They had sat shoulder to shoulder, stealing glances at each other with nervous smiles and red cheeks.
Still just boys with crushes on each other, who were so scared of being alone, then.
Ryan hums at Jamie’s comment but shakes his head, lets it roll off him like water off a ducks feathers, “Been dead to me for a long time.”
-
“How’s Jamie?” Naim asks over the phone, having just told Ryan all about the terrible movie he’s just watched with Stella, and how Ollie was a traitor and went to sleep with her instead.
Ryan stares at the popcorn ceiling of the same bedroom he and Naim once shared, “He’s good. Says he and Mitch are planning a trip to Brisbane in a few months, gonna stop and see us.”
“Aw, sick,” and Ryan can tell by the stretch of his words that he’s yawning.
“You should go to bed,” Ryan murmurs as he turns over and lets the pillow press the phone into his ear. If he closes his eyes and listens real hard, he can almost feel the sound of Naim’s breath and the thump of his heart beneath his ribs, rather than an overheated glass screen and unfamiliar sheets.
“Just…stay on a little longer.”
Ryan lets the call go until he’s sure that Naim is fast asleep.
-
Jamie drives first, knowing the way out of the city better than Ryan. Ryan had never had a reason to remember the route to Bandee. He watches the city fall away in the morning sun, and eventually give out to the sprawling yellow fields, sparse houses and lazy clouds dotting the sky as far as his eyes could see.
It was familiar, in the sense that Ryan’s memories would always be painted with the low yellow hues and dirt roads. At the same time it felt completely foreign. An alien landscape from some other world, another life that he never thought he would have reason to return to.
Watching the power lines whisk by out his window, Ryan fiddles with one of the hoops on his ears and he wonders if he even does have reason to be here to begin with. If it’s all some vague idea of something he thinks he needs to do, when he would have been better off staying home with his partner and his cat.
Partner, boyfriend, he wonders what to call Naim when people ask. If people ask at all.
He closes his eyes against the window, and lets his thoughts fall away with the cables overhead.
-
Ryan remembers standing bloody and hurt in the family living room as a kid, his mum crying and unable to look at him.
He could remember the anger burning in his dad’s eyes as he stared him down, tearing Ryan down in his head one thought at a time.
“If you’re still getting hurt it’s your own fault. Smarten the fuck up and maybe you have a chance,” his dad told him with a disgusted look on his face. No help to give, and not caring about the thing he had done to his son.
Ryan knew then that his dad would never have anything more to offer him.
-
Naim sleeps late, and wakes up to an empty bed, not for the first time, but the first time knowing that Ryan was too far away to drive to in an hour. First time waking up with the knowledge that Ryan was facing something that was going to hurt, without him. There’s a text waiting from him that tells Naim that he’s already on his way to Bandee.
Closing his eyes against the morning light, Naim tries to count the years since the last time he saw his own mum. Nine? Maybe ten? They all blurred together after a while.
Naim lets the memory peek in at the edges of his mind, the fuzzy images of meeting her alone because she had asked him for that. There had still been a part of him that wanted to please her, and to make her happy so he could finally get her to listen to him. If he just did what she wanted enough times, maybe she would have found it in her to give him the possibility of being heard, at the very least.
When he drags himself out of bed, he slips into one of Ryan’s hoodies and pads into the bathroom. He can hear Stella in the kitchen, the muffled clinks dishes clattering as she makes herself at home. Words he can’t hear as she talks to Ollie, who is probably being a pest and sticking her nose in places it didn’t belong.
Stella had shown up the night prior with an overnight bag at the ready and so much junk food that his stomach hurt just thinking about it. Lucky to have someone that made existing so much easier.
Thoughts continue to knock around in his head, of his mum, and her persistent refusal to love him as he was, and turn into thoughts of his dad, even further and blurrier in his past. He wonders if life would have been any different if he hadn’t died, if his mum would be kinder and they never made the move to Bandee.
He remembers the fear that gripped him at the hospital while his mum wailed, and the face of a random but very kind nurse had sat with him while his own tears fell. The birthplace of a pain that made his mother unrecognizable. Naim thinks that without that pain that drove her to move them to the middle of nowhere, he would have never found Ryan.
The dull grief of the loss of his dad simultaneously led to the greatest part of Naim’s life, intertwined forever and impossible to separate.
Naim tries not to think about how Ryan’s missing toothbrush feels like a punch in the gut while he brushes his teeth. He side-eyes himself in the mirror, at the mixed bag of his parents' genetics passed down to him; his nose that he got from his dad. the way if he tilts his head at just the right angle, that he can see a glimpse of Arlene staring back at him through the condensation spots he needs to wipe off the mirror's surface.
Naim shifts and watches the shadow fall away, only able to stomach it for so long.
He imagines Ryan looking at his own mum’s face, and seeing himself staring back at him. Would he find something more loving than Naim had with his?
Naim remembers stumbling away from the meeting with his mum, unable to breathe and tears streaming down his face. The way Ryan had been there to catch him, to run his hands through his hair and tell him that everything was going to be okay because he loved him and his mum didn’t deserve to have him in her life.
Naim closes his eyes and turns away from the reflection.
-
The driveway outside the house is about the same as Ryan remembers. The house itself is painted a different colour, he thinks, painted at some point in the past ten years but enough time that it just looks patchy and faded again. There’s cracks through the colour, sun bleached spots that peel away to the wood underneath.
He dropped Jamie off at his sisters place first, because he certainly didn’t need to come with him, with plans to meet at the motel later (one of the only ones Bandee had, and hopefully the one with a lesser chance of bed bugs). The whole family and then some would be at the funeral and the wake the following day, but visiting his mum beforehand was something that was solely Ryan’s own undertaking, but seeing her for the first time surrounded by everybody sounded a whole lot worse.
At my parents, he texts Naim. He’s not sure if that sounds funny. Calling it ‘his mums’ sounds weirder, but he supposes that's what it is now.
call me after if you need to?
i love you ryan <3
Ryan swallows around the lump in his throat and looks at himself in the flip down mirror, smooths his fingers over the blonde moustache on his upper lip. Probably should have shaved that, he thinks, but there hadn’t been time for him to consider it.
An attempt to delay the inevitable, he fiddles with some stray bits of the short curls on top of his head so they lay flatter. He wonders if he looks like how his mum would imagine him to, her disowned gay son out in the world living in sin with another man, or if he would still be…Ryan. Who she had once tucked into bed at night and made sure that he had shoes that fit him well.
He twists the ring around on his finger before getting out of the car. He parked it on the side of the road and up a bit, because there were already two vehicles in the driveway and Ryan preferred a quick getaway if he needed one. A hesitance within him not wanting to get too close. He walks around to the back door–because no one ever used the front–at the same time it opens, and a vaguely familiar couple steps out. He can see their faces in his memory, but couldn’t remember either of their names, pushed out with so many other things that hadn’t been important.
They stare at him for a beat, the woman the first to fill the awkward air with a plastered too-bright smile, “Hello, Ryan! How nice to see you again. I’m coming back with some meals for your mum later, she’ll be so happy to see you I bet.”
“Condolences, mate,” the man tips his head, but Ryan doesn’t miss the suspicion in his eyes when he walks past.
“Thanks,” Ryan says lifelessly in lieu of explaining why he didn’t actually need them. There was no grief for his father in his bones that needed padding from the words these people had to offer him.
They make their way out, and Ryan steels himself to go knock, but the squeaky metal door opens before he gets the chance to lift his hand.
“Oh, Ryan,” his mum sounds a lot older than he remembered, her voice made even more raspy and hoarse from crying. Her hair is grey and unwashed, longer than he remembered, her skin spottier, more wrinkled and looser beneath her chin.
Ryan feels his shoulders lock into place, and takes a hesitant step backward, “Hi.”
There’s tears spilling down her cheeks, and Ryan feels a knot in his chest that threatens to build and make him cry as well. They come from a painful feeling, but not the one of his father, rather the years that had been ripped from him and the love that had been taken away because of who he was. A mourning that he never thought he’d get. There’s anger, too, still hot and real beneath his skin, but it flows into something more tender and achey…something that feels like a little boy who just wants his mum again.
That part of him steps forward and lets himself be wrapped up in her arms as she cries into his shoulder.
“I didn’t think I would ever see you again,” Cathy Whelan sobs.
Me either.
-
His mum ushers him inside, through the kitchen that’s piled high with dishes and food that has to be put away. Ryan peeks into the living room filled with flowers and cards, and other than that it looks about the same as it ever had. His bedroom door down the hall is closed, and he wonders if there’s anything of him left behind it.
They sit across the kitchen table from one another.
“Don’t mind the mess, someone’s going to come help me clean tomorrow before the…” she starts to tear up, waving her hand as she tries to stave off another round of tears.
“I’m sorry,” Ryan says on instinct, because that's what you say when people lose somebody.
She shakes her head and reaches to hold his hand across the table, and Ryan lets her. The skin on her knuckles is thinner and lined with age, but her palm is still soft where it rests over top of Ryan’s.
“Thank you for coming. I didn’t think you would,” she admits, tissue clutched tight in her other hand.
“Wasn’t gonna.”
“Did you…” she trails off, and Ryan can see her searching for the words she wants, “”Did you come by yourself?”
Ryan feels the muscles of his chin quiver slightly, wondering what the question meant. If it was an opening for him to tell her about Naim, or an opportunity to tuck it away and be what they had wanted him to be. To hide again to make everyone else more comfortable.
“Did Naim come with me, you mean?” Ryan spits out, he hadn’t come here to be pushed back into a closet he fought so hard to get out of.
She nods.
“No, he stayed back home.”
“You two are still hanging around each other, then?”
Ryan keeps himself from scoffing, he knows she doesn’t know the right words to say are, hanging around each other, “We’re still together.”
Something in her face softens, “After all these years.”
“That’s what you do when you love someone, right? You stick together,” the hard edge of his voice wavers when he says it. That’s all it had ever been, love. Love that was worth it for him, love that hadn’t been enough for the church.
His mum starts to cry again and she lifts his hand up with both of hers, squeezing it tight when she tells him, “I’ll never be able to say how sorry I am, Ryan. I know words are just words and it can never undo the things we did to you, and you don’t need to forgive me and not your father who never…but I’m so, so sorry.”
But we were just kids.
The tears spill out of him, opening his mouth only for nothing to come.
He didn’t need to forgive her, he didn’t need to forgive her. He lets his forehead fall onto her hands and his fingers reflexively hold tighter. His ribs pulse with the heave of a sob from his lungs, something he had been holding there since he was a kid. His mum’s trembling hand strokes over his hair. He didn’t forgive her, but he can feel the regret from the gentleness of her touch, some shadow of a mother who was doing what she thought was right for her son, and sees now that it was wrong.
Ryan is thirty-six, and his dad is dead, and the fight in him that once would have made him scream and yell, is long gone.
-
He watches his mum try to fight through her tears to tell him about how it happened, how his dad just dropped on the floor one morning and how it was quick. Painless, probably. Ryan still finds there’s nothing very upsetting to him, he tries to remember a dad who had been kind to him once and searches a way to mourn that part of him
You came all this way and you can’t even be upset about it, Ryan muses to himself while his mum goes over details for the services the next day.
She tells him regretfully that there was nothing in the will for him, not that they ever had much to begin with. There’s no mention of him at all except one sentence that she can’t bring herself to read to him. Ryan doesn’t look at the rest of it, doesn’t need to.
To my son who refused to accept the word of God into his life, I leave nothing but the hope that you heal from the sin imparted on your soul.
Ryan reads it and he laughs, a tasteless bitter bark of a thing that takes away any guilt for refusing to mourn the man who never loved him.
-
On the drive back to the motel, Ryan sees a kid walking his bike on the side of the road up one of the big hills. Ryan doesn’t think much of it while he slows down to pass him, giving him a wide berth.
He almost misses it, almost doesn’t let his eyes flick over as the kid looks at him.
Naim.
Ryan keeps driving, glancing in the rear view mirror at the piercing eyes staring back at him.
Not his Naim–a Naim he had only seen in dreams since. This was the same Naim he had been prepared to leave behind, who Ryan listened to sob and apologize outside his bedroom window the night he chose to leave. The one that drove him to the woods and the one Ryan thought might be the reason he wouldn’t see the sun rise in the morning.
The entity’s eyes gleam in the afternoon light, and Ryan imagines the tears that are running down its cheeks.
-
“I don’t know how many more of these I can take, Stell,” Naim groans behind his hands.
They have snacks strewn out all across on the coffee table, Naim at one end of the couch and Stella on the other. Stella tilts her head back and laughs at Naim’s reaction to the movie playing, “I still can’t believe you’ve never seen this one, Naim.”
“Horror isn’t really my thing,” Naim winces as blood spurts from someone's neck on screen. Terrible special effects, really.
“I can tell,” she chuckles and tosses him the little bag she had brought full of DVDs, “Look, I have other things we can watch next.”
He laughs and starts to flip through the options, reading the backs instead of really paying attention to their current movie, when his phone starts to ring.
Normally he kept it on silent but since Ryan left it had been switched to full volume. Ryan’s name flashes onto his screen, along with the picture Naim had set for his contact info; Ryan on a hike they went on sometime last year, hat shading his eyes and a smile so big as he looks back at Naim over his shoulder mid-sentence. Told him to watch his feet on the rocks instead of taking pictures of him. “But your ass looks so good in those shorts,” Naim had defended himself with a laugh.
“Excuse me for a sec?” Naim apologizes to Stella, already off the couch and scrambling to get the phone before it could stop ringing.
Stella, forever understanding, smiles and nods, “Of course. Take your time.”
There was no one in the world that knew the extent of Ryan and Naim’s past or the reach of the entity, only that they went through some shit together and they were borderline too codependent on one another, but the people that loved them never cared.
Naim answers the phone in the hallway, before he gets to the bedroom and shuts the door behind him, “Ryan?”
“Hey,” Ryan’s voice sounds spent, and not in a good way. It sounds tired and small, and so very far away.
“You alright? How’d it go?”
He listens as Ryan recounts the events of seeing his mum, and how he hadn’t thought about how it was going to be quite that hard. Naim can hear the tears in his voice at the admission.
“Dad didn’t even put me in his will, but I guess that’s not a surprise,” the bitterness drips through the speaker of the phone.
Naim closes his eyes and feels the desperation for wanting something their parents never knew how to give. He imagines Ryan sitting in Jamie’s car not knowing what to do next, how he was going to the funeral tomorrow for a man he didn’t even care about, and the guilt for not being there hardens in Naim like a knot of whorled wood.
“You deserve better,” Naim says weakly, “I’m sorry that I’m not there with you.”
Ryan sniffs, “Stop. I’m glad you’re not here, Naim. I couldn’t…it’s good you’re home.”
Naim wasn’t so sure about that. The thought of Bandee was a giant wall for him that he had felt no need to cross, no need to relive, but his concern for Ryan was chipping away at the resolve he held.
“I uh…I saw it on my way back to the motel,” Ryan breathes over the phone speaker.
“What? Ryan-”
“It’s fine, it’s just…there.”
Naim feels a twist in his stomach, he should be there, not something that’s using his face to get in Ryan’s head again, “Stick close to people, hm?”
“I am, I promise,” Ryan sighs, and Naim can hear the bend of truth on his tongue when he says, “It’s all good.”
Naim hangs up the phone after a drawn out goodnight, love you, see you soon, and feels a pull in his chest, something that he should have let take him on that plane with Ryan, that should have made sure he was there to catch him when it was said and done.
It’s all good. It’s fine. No worries. Ryan liked to say those things, liked to downplay his hurt and how deep it ran. Ryan, whose finger had been half chopped off cutting some planks of wood in the backyard and said It’s nothing really, it's gonna stop in a second, all the way to the hospital with blood soaking Naim’s balled up t-shirt the whole way through. Ryan, who didn’t like to admit he needed help, who was better at it now in his thirties, but some fences were too big to ask for help over.
Naim’s hand tightens around his phone, knuckles turning white and bloodless as he walks back to the living room where Stella still has the movie paused and waiting for his return. Ryan was brave, and Naim was, too.
There’s some concern flashing her eyes in the way she watches him over the back of the couch, “Everything alright?”
Naim looks at her, and his mind is already mulling over the petrol prices and the time Ryan was supposed to leave Bandee on Sunday morning, “Hey. I’m really sorry, but I…I think that I have somewhere that I have to be.”
-
The morning of the funeral is odd. Jamie takes off early to help his sisters with their kids, and asks, “Want me to come back here to give you a ride?”
Ryan shakes his head, “Nah, I’ll just walk.”
“Okay…but call me if you change your mind.”
Ryan lays back in bed for a long time watching the ceiling fan turn in circles, he still feels raw from talking with his mum the day prior, and he keeps poking at it the way he did with a bruise on his skin. “Leave it alone it’s never gonna heal,” he can hear Naim say. The looming funeral and the following wake being surrounded with countless family members side eyeing him and asking him questions, prying but trying not to be rude, all sounds exhausting. All he really wants to do is stay between the scratchy motel sheets and call Naim.
He tries, and just gets his voicemail. Hey, this is Naim Reid. Leave me a message and I might get back to you. Or just text me instead like a normal person…Hey, Ryan you wanna call my phone and see if I got the voice mail figured out? Yah, just call and see what it says. Ollie, hang on, would ya. Oh fu- Ryan listens to it all the way through with a smile on his face, but worries at the inside of his cheeks when there’s still no answer. He gets a text about a minute later.
I’ll call in just a few
Ryan sighs and he knows he can’t put it off getting ready with nothing to distract him. He unpacks the folded set of black clothes that Naim had packed for him, along with some product to run through his hair after the shower. Tucked in the pocket with that, Ryan finds a folded piece of paper.
ryan,
I’m sorry i can’t handle being back there. but thank you for ever getting me out in the first place. thank you for letting me get on that bus with you when we were kids. i don’t know if i knew what love could be until you showed me in that moment.
if bandee made someone as good as you, then maybe there is something there that you need still. I hope that you find it, because you deserve it, whatever it is.
thank you for making a life with me. i hope that it's ended up as much of a home for you as bandee ever was.
I love you. endlessly. i love who i’ve watched you become.
see you when you come back, and good luck,
-yours always, naim
The words get small and narrow at the end for Naim to have fit everything on it, but Ryan still manages to read every word through his tear-blurred vision. He calls Naim again, and this time he answers within one ring.
“He-llo?” his voice comes crackly, stupid Bandee reception still shit after all this time, “Ryan? You good?”
Ryan sighs, and listens to Naim’s voice with his eyes closed. It’s choppy and he keeps missing words, but it relaxes him to hear his voice. Ryan tells him he’s headed out soon and how much he misses him.
Naim says something about how he’s brave, and Ryan scoffs. Ryan wanted to run back to Brisbane with his tail between his legs. He didn’t feel very brave at all.
He’d be on his way home tomorrow. Naim in his arms on Monday. Just have to get through it.
Ryan gets dressed after the call and tucks the note in his shirt pocket, unsure if he’d found anything that was worth coming here for yet.
-
Ryan starts his walk to the cemetery with time to spare, with plans to skip the initial service in the church because there are some places he doesn’t need to go. He takes his time.What could they do, finish the whole thing without him and spare him the awkwardness of standing there while they bury the man he had no love for?
It’s quiet, save for the breeze through dry grass that rustles as he walks, and he keeps his eyes open and his senses alert but he doesn’t see not-Naim anywhere. The birds are singing, and some horses follow him along an old fence that looks like it’s about to fall over. He watches them and laughs when they snort, shaking their big heads at him like they’re waiting for him to hand something over, muscles twitching beneath their shiny coats to keep the flies away.
“Sorry mate, got nothing for you,” Ryan pats his pockets as to prove he was really truly out of snacks that would be appropriate for a horse.
They watch him go with ears perked once he gets to the end of their pasture. “See ya later,” he tells them over his shoulder.
He passes a servo with a couple cars outside, his mouth is dry and there’s a voice in his head that sounds a lot like Naim’s that tells him he’d better grab some water or else he’d regret the headache that would come later.
Ryan takes too long perusing his options in the sparsely stocked aisles, the expensive bottle of spring water covered in dust or the cheap one that would spill all over him when he opens the cap. He ends up going for the cheaper of the options, digging into his wallet for some spare cash to cover it when he stops in his tracks.
Arlene Reid stares at him across the snack aisle and Ryan imagines he looks something like a fish out of water with his wide eyes and his mouth open. He’d expected his family, he’d been able to prepare himself for that, but somehow in the chaos of throwing the trip together, the idea of seeing Naim’s mum had fallen into the category of things that hadn’t even crossed his mind.
“Ryan,” she says, the surprised look in her own eyes turning cool, and his name sounds so strange from her mouth. The fact that she even knew it at all. But of course she did, Ryan was the bad influence that had taken her son away. She had probably used his name in her prayers, begging God to do something about him and save Naim for her. Of course she knew his name.
He nods, feeling stilted and awkward as he shifts from one foot to another. Nothing had made him feel like a kid in Bandee again until now.
“I was sorry to hear about your dad. He was a good man,” she says after a beat, and Ryan, mature, has it in him to not roll his eyes.
The last time Naim had seen her floods into his head. Ryan remembers the hope that Naim had in his eyes that day, and the way he watched it die while holding Naim’s sobbing frame in the aftermath. Ryan feels guilty, then, for getting the apology his mum had tried to give him, when Arlene had given Naim nothing of the sort. Naim had wanted it so badly.
“Look, I gotta-” he nods to the counter at the front and starts to leave, feeling his walls going right back up as he tells the cashier to throw in a pack of smokes. Naim and him both made a joint effort to quit years ago, and Naim was good at sticking to it but Ryan still had his moments of weakness.
The cashier shares a look as he grabs the right brand that Ryan asks for, even he can feel the stiffness in the air.
Ryan isn’t going to look back, cigarettes shoved into his back pocket and the cold water bottle clenched between his fist as he soothes the unexpected spike of anger travelling through his blood. He’s out the door, the bells on it jingling behind, only to hear the jolt of them again and Arlene’s voice.
“Wait! Wait.”
Ryan stops and turns to her, patient, for a moment, not sure how long he has it in him.
“Is Naim…” there’s a falter to Arlene’s voice while she crosses her arms and refuses to look Ryan in the eye, “Is he alright?”
Ryan weighs his options, his first thought being that she has no right to ask after Naim’s well being. Then he catches something in her eyes when she finally looks at him, something scared that he used to see in Naim’s but didn’t anymore. Hadn’t for a long time.
“Naim’s just fine,” Ryan relents, and thinks about the note in his pocket, “He’s great, actually.”
He’s got a nice house, a job, and friends that adore him. He loves our cat and he makes art that’s so beautiful it honestly makes me cry sometimes. He’s my best friend in the whole world. And you don’t get to know any of that.
Arlene looks away again, her jaw clenched and eyes glistening, not able to look at Ryan once more.
Ryan’s phone buzzes in his pocket reminding him he has somewhere to be, and there’s nothing else he can offer her. He looks at her for another moment, waiting if there is anything more to come.
“I love him so much,” Ryan stares at her, through her, “Is that not enough for you?”
She doesn’t say anything to Ryan when he finally walks away.
-
Ryan stands near his mum, not close enough to touch but close enough to smell the headache-inducing florals of her perfume. Most of the service had already been done at the church, so it isn’t much more than the pastor saying some words and the casket being lowered to the ground below. It’s tellingly quiet, the occasional racking cough from an elderly man standing across the gape of the open grave. Ryan scans the people in the crowd, and realizes how unfamiliar everyone is, even those he used to know.
Some stare back, he gets the occasional sad smile. A group of kids who probably couldn’t even tell him his dad’s name stood to the back of the crowd. Ryan catches the eye of one of the girls, and she’s quick to look away and pretend that she hadn’t been staring at him.
He can’t fault her too much, because Ryan probably would have been doing the same thing if some random mythical cousin showed up to a funeral like this. He’d be gossiping about it the whole time with the same cousins who didn’t want to look at him now.
Ryan feels like he’s on auto-pilot, that someone else is in control while the dirt falls down onto the light coloured wood. He hears the sniffs from his mum, the tears falling from people around him, but nothing comes from him. Standing above the grave, there’s nothing for him to give just as his dad had nothing for him.
When it ends, his breath feels caught in his throat, scuffed boots feeling heavy and stuck to the upturned dirt around him.
His mum's hand holds on tight to his arm as she passes by him, “I’ll see you at the house?” she asks.
Ryan nods once, brisk. Everyone else starts to filter back to their vehicles in a hum of hushed murmurs spoken in the midday sun fills the air.
“Ride with us back to your mums?” Jamie asks and startles Ryan out of his dazed state, one of his sisters at his shoulder.
“No, uh, thanks. Think I’m gonna walk,” Ryan says as he scuffs his shoes on the dirt and gestures to the thinning crowd, “Need to just. Think without all this around.”
Jamie nods, understanding, but Ryan doesn’t miss the concern in his eyes, “Alright, mate. I’ll see you there.”
Ryan stands there for a long time, slowly rolls up the sleeves of his wrinkled dress shirt as the sun bakes into the black fabric. He stares at the words on the plaque marking his fathers grave.
Husband.
Brother.
Son.
It doesn’t say father.
Ryan wouldn’t want it to say that, it was something he didn’t deserve the title of, but the omission still burns Ryan. Even in death his father couldn’t claim the child he helped create–who he had once promised to love. Children were never something Ryan wanted, couldn’t imagine it really, but when he did prod at the idea in the very back of his daydreams, he couldn’t imagine having anything but love for them.
A painful breath is heaved from his lungs as he leans down to the assorted flowers that surround the ugly slab of rock, grabs a fistful of them and walks to the only other plot in the cemetery that Ryan knew of. He grips the flowers so tight that the stems break beneath his fingers, and he can feel the moisture from them seeping into his skin when he puts them down at the foot of a headstone he hadn’t seen since the day he stood there for the funeral like he had for his dad’s.
The tears didn’t come for his dad, but they came now as he collapsed onto his knees in front of Hunter’s grave.
Fuck.
With the bare skin of his palm he wipes the layer of dirt off the name and the picture beside it, a portrait of Hunter in his school uniform. The colours are faded so much it looks like a pale version of what it used to be, like it hadn’t been touched in many years–family long moved away, leaving him behind here in a cemetery full of strangers. There had never been a time for Ryan to pay his respects properly. Everything had happened so quickly.
Hunter never deserved this. He was a dickhead, and so angry at the world, but he had been all Ryan had at one point. The single other person who felt something remotely like he did in this town, and Ryan knows how easily it could have been him in Hunter’s place, six feet beneath the ground. Stuck in Bandee forever. A kid, forever.
But it wasn’t Ryan, Ryan lived. Ryan got out, Ryan had a good life, and he had so much love in it. Hunter had deserved that, too.
“I’m sorry,” he chokes out, “I’m sorry you didn’t get out of this fucking place.”
Some birds nearby leave their perch in a tree and call out into the air.
“You should’ve been able to grow up like we did,” Ryan says with sharp pebbles digging into his knees. He braces a hand against the headstone and his dirt covered nails scratch against the surface. When he looks up across the sea of graves he sees Naim standing in the same suit he wore to Hunter’s funeral, the same one that was too big for his small frame and drowning him. It watches, but doesn’t move.
Ryan closes his eyes and lets his head fall, the tears dripping off his cheeks and into the dirt and the grass, disappearing into it as quick as they land.
“I’m sorry, Hunter,” he says. Sorry that it looked like me. Sorry I never felt that strongly about you. Maybe if I had, it would have been you on that bus.
And if it had been Hunter, then what?
Ryan knows it could never have been Hunter.
It was the new boy in school that showed up one day who made Ryan’s knees weak, who liked to draw birds on his bedroom wall and liked to tease Ryan, and who took Ryan’s rings with shaking hands and a blush on his cheeks, who kissed him so gently on the floor of that old mill and made Ryan realize he could see a life outside of Bandee. Before the deliverance healer had even touched them, Ryan had already decided that he would follow that boy anywhere.
“I’m sorry,” he says again, voice shaking. Because that’s all he could offer to the boy in the ground.
Ryan’s chest aches, and he misses Naim so much, and there’s nothing here that’s filling the empty space that taunts him–only things that tease at the painful edges of it, making everything bleed all over again.
-
The walk back to his mum's house is long and hot, Ryan ends up with the black shirt slung over his shoulder, grateful for the grey tank he had worn underneath. His eyes feel red and puffy, and he goes through several of the cigarettes in his back pocket
The entity trails him the whole way, silent at his shoulder. Occasionally tripping over its feet as it tries to keep up with Ryan.
Ryan stares at it, the slope of its nose, the way it looks small and kind of helpless with the sleeves of its suit hanging over its palms. Ryan flicks off the glowing end of his cigarette towards it.
It catches on the edge of its sleeve, and not-Naim gasps trying to shake off the sparks.
-
Opening the door at his mum's is met with a collective hush as people turn to look at him. The house is small and crowded with no sky above to offer relief from the suffocating feeling. The funeral had been bad enough. This is so much worse, he thinks.
His mum is the only one to catch his eye and smile at him. How weird that the outstretched hand in this place was coming from her, and stranger yet that he wasn’t walking right back out the door.
People he’s unfamiliar with say things to him that go right over his head, a neverending stream of condolences and words that have nowhere to go and no purchase to make within him. He tries not to think about how each one of them knows who he is, how they talk about him when his back is turned, how they all know what wasn’t on that plaque at the graveyard.
Ryan needed to get out.
At some point, he exits to the back yard where he still can’t feel like he can breathe. A couple people mill about in the shade offered by the overgrown yard, but it’s better than the stifling crowd inside, where his childhood bedroom door looms and there is nowhere to run. He looks at the grass that sits far above his ankles, and the trees in desperate need of a trim. His gained landscaping skills would come in handy in a place like this, but he can’t imagine laying a hand on any of the plants here. Let them be as they are.
An empty bird cage still sits in the same place where his aunt's old cockatoo used to live, its screeches keeping him up at night. He imagines she died out here alone like she always was, but maybe he could imagine she got out and flew away. Somehow. Like the birds Naim painted on their bedroom wall. Like Naim and Ryan. Living a life somewhere far away from here with a flock of birds that loved her.
“Uh excuse me…Ryan?” an unfamiliar voice gets him to lift his head from his thoughts.
The young girl who had been staring at him in the cemetery stands in front of him, ringing her hands together nervously. Her features alone tell him that she’s family, blonde hair and blue eyed like a whole lot of them were, but he had never met her before. He thinks she’s probably in her teens, and given her age, she was probably born well after he left.
He raises his eyebrows at her, “Yah?”
“I’m, um, I think,” she stumbles over her words, and it reminds Ryan of Naim’s shyness at first, before he got to know him, “I think I’m your cousin. My name’s Grace.”
A thought strikes him, and he wonders if her interest is less to do with curiosity about the shunned family queer, and more to do with something she was scared about herself. The way Ryan had been.
Ryan tilts his head, “What can I do for ya, Grace?”
“Everyone’s been saying…I mean, about you, I don’t know,” her breath quickens and she looks down, her face flushing as she rushes to get her words out, “Are you gay?”
Someone who can fucking say it.
“I reckon, yeah,” Ryan says with a huff of laughter.
When she looks back up she smiles at him, and he can see some of her fear melt away, “Really? That’s cool.”
“You’d be the only one around here who thinks so.”
Grace’s face falls again and nods, “Yah. I know, it sucks here.”
Ryan can’t bring himself to ask her, but he has a feeling, so he takes a deep breath and tells her, “It does. But it doesn’t suck everywhere.”
Her blue eyes are wide when she looks up at him, hopeful for something.
Ryan puts himself back in her shoes. To be a teenager and scared of what the world has to offer because of who you love.
He remembers the first time he kissed Hunter after Hunter had punched him in the face, nose bleeding all rough lips and teeth. How he had cried about it after because he told himself that was all he was ever going to have, all that he would ever be allowed.
He thinks of Naim waiting for him at home, sleeping in their bed by himself with their garden out the window, with a friend who loves him enough to stay with him the weekend just so he doesn’t have to be alone. He thinks about Naim who kisses him gently and gives him patience, and how it was so much better than anything he had ever expected. Gentle and kind and more than he had ever hoped for.
“The world is a whole lot bigger than Bandee, mate. And trust me, it’s a lot better out there.”
-
Ryan doesn’t go back inside for a while, smokes too much after Grace leaves him and finds her way back to her waiting family. He texts Naim sporadically, but his texts back don’t come in as quick as they had been. Ryan sighs, and eventually decides to go back in to say goodbye to his mum, because all he wanted to do was go to sleep and wake up in the morning to go back home. He had done what he said he would, and maybe Grace was the only thing that had given him some reason as to why.
Heading through the kitchen, he hears snippets of conversations that don’t interest him anymore than the rest of it all. Until he catches one that makes his heartrate spike.
“Heard he still lives with that same fucking loser.”
“Oh, right. Couldn’t even stand up for himself,” the one guy jeers with a sick kind of laughter, “Stupid fuckin’ name, too. Couple a’ fags, good thing they left. Don’t need that shit around here.”
His stomach sinks at the words, and the half formed anger that had been waiting since they drove past the ‘Welcome to Bandee’ sign starts to boil over.
“Hey, if you’re gonna talk about me like that maybe wait until I fucking leave this place, wouldya?” Ryan spits, all teeth and venom that had been waiting in his gut the moment he walked through the door.
They both turn around, and one of them has wide eyes and the nerve to look embarrassed like they hadn’t been talking in a crowded room like this one.
“Aren’t you fucking ashamed of yourself?” The other one shakes his head.
Ryan feels the eyes and the ears on him when he steps closer, “Why would I be ashamed? Cause I have someone that loves me? Get a fucking life, mate.”
“It’s just not natural.”
He sees the murmur of approval and the nods. He doesn’t find his mum’s face in them, and realizes he’d rather not. Ryan clenches his fists and laughs, shaking his head while he walks back towards the door, “And for the record, Naim is braver than any of you fucking cowards could ever hope to be.”
Ryan lets the door slam behind him, telling himself he’d come back to say goodbye to his mum before he left tomorrow because he didn’t need to put up with anything more of whatever the fuck that had been. The driveway is coming to an end beneath his feet, texting Jamie that he’d see him later at the motel, when there’s footsteps running in the gravel behind him.
He turns, half expecting not-Naim to be staring back at him, but instead finds Grace, watching him with teary eyes.
“I-...I’m sorry, they shouldn’t have…” she starts, and Ryan doesn’t know why she’s apologizing for those assholes. He wonders if one of them had been her dad and his heart clenches. Still, not her fault.
“I’ve heard worse,” Ryan assures her..
Grace lingers, and looks again like she has something she wants to say, “How did you know? That you were really gay?”
Ryan doesn’t know if he could pinpoint the moment he knew. It had always just been…there. He never tried to force himself to look at girls rather than the boys at school, and never tried to fight it, it was just a part of him that he knew hadn’t been welcome and so he had to hide it.
“Always knew,” he tells her honestly, “Never had a big realization or anything like that it was just. Me, y’know?”
It doesn’t look like that eases her mind any by the way her face screws up tighter.
“Hey,” Ryan says as his shoulders give, voice tired, “Look. If you ever need anything, or you find yourself in Brisbane, you call me, okay?”
Tears start to run down her face, “Really?”
He nods her over to Jamie’s car where he digs in the glove compartment for a dull pencil that hardly has enough lead to write with. He tears off the very tip of the note from Naim to write his number on before handing it over to her, “Our door is always open. Promise.”
She clutches the piece of paper tight in her hand, and the way it’s shaking makes him frown.
“It’s not always gonna be so scary,” he promises with a hand on her shoulder, and he makes sure she makes it back inside before he turns away.
He swipes his thumb over Naim’s ring, and reads his note again.
i hope that it's as much of a home for you as bandee ever was.
Ryan starts walking and thinks Naim is the only real home he has ever had.
You are.
-
The lip of pavement outside the motel door is still warm from the day's sun, even as it sets above and casts gold edges onto the clouds that dot the horizon. Ryan has another cigarette burnt near to the filter between his fingers, he needed to use up the pack before he left.
“I miss you so much,” Ryan says into the phone pressed close to his ear.
“I’ll see you…Monday. Soon,” Naim’s voice is broken, sentences chopped in half by the phone’s incessant whirring noise of its bad connection.
“Naim, the connection is really bad, I can’t hear you,” Ryan closes his eyes.
“What time are you guys leaving tomorrow, again?”
That’s the third time he’s asked him that, “I dunno yet. I’ll let you know before we take off, probably in the morning.”
They say static filled I love yous, and for the second time in his life, Ryan is ready to leave Bandee behind in the morning.
-
Jamie regretfully informs Ryan that his sister has asked if he could stay one more day.
“Oh, no, that’s fine,” Ryan is quick to assure him.
Ryan tries to call Naim, but doesn’t get an answer and tries not to let it sting when he texts him the plan instead; that he was going to have to get a bus to Mildura and reschedule his flights from Melbourne, and he’d let him know as soon as he had an arrival time.
He says goodbye to Jamie with promises of seeing each other in a few months, packs up his few belongings and is only slightly surprised to find Arlene waiting for him outside the door when he goes to leave.
She hands him a crisp clean envelope with ‘Naim’ scrawled on the side of it in neat penmanship, and when it’s in Ryan’s hands he can tell it’s thick and heavy, bulging in a way that tells him it’s more than just a letter.
Arlene sighs and then nods at the envelope, “It’s from his dad.”
Ryan takes it, and doesn’t have much to say as he tucks it in the back zippered part of his backpack. She returns to her open car door and hands him a folder as well, “And some other things. That he might want.”
Ryan slips that in as well, taking whatever sort of offering it was.
“And it’s not. Ultimately, I don’t think it’s enough,” she tells him bluntly, and it takes Ryan a second for him to remember the question he had left her with yesterday, “But I hardly think I am going to change his mind now.”
Ryan lets the words sit after she drives away and chews them over like tasteless gum in his mouth, and ultimately leaves them at the motel.
-
Ryan’s mum apologizes for the plaque on his dads grave, telling him how she tried to talk him out of that when he put it in his will. Ryan tells her it doesn’t matter, because it doesn’t.
“If you. If you ever want,” she starts with her voice shaking, “You can call me. I would like to be in your life again, if you’d let me.”
“Yah, I don’t know,” Ryan tells her hesitantly, not sure if he would ever be ready for anything more than this. If there was actually room to truly salvage a relationship with her.
“And I would like to meet Naim. Someday, properly, if that is something you boys would be open to,” her voice is small, extra hesitant, when she rushes to add that part, and Ryan feels something painful within him because of how badly he suddenly wants to say yes. Some part of him had always wanted that, the kid before the healer who imagined a world where he brought his boyfriend home and was met with nothing but acceptance. But it’s coming too late, and Naim’s grace is not something for him to give.
He doesn’t think he can, but tells her anyway, “We’ll talk about it.”
Ryan is ready to leave, ready to stop thinking about all of it.
“Hold on. Before you go!” she says with her hands clasped together, and disappears down the hall and into the room that used to be his. He finds then that he has no desire to see what it looks like.
She comes back with a small box between her hands, a sad smile at the corner of her mouth, “I’m sorry we don’t have a lot of your things left but I did try to keep some of it for you. In case you ever…came back.”
Ryan takes the box with the collapsing edges, peaks in at a few things that he recognizes lying on top. A blue and red flannel, a couple magazines, an old stuffed animal that he had stopped sleeping with when he was ten. Things that were mostly inconsequential. His eyes fill with tears that don’t fall, and he thanks her.
When he leaves, he steps onto the pavement of the road outside and takes a breath, the box tucked beneath his arm. Memories of wheeling his bike home with Naim watching knock around in his head. They brim with the sweet taste of something new, when it had been exciting and carefree in its secrecy with no worries about an entity at their throats. He can hear their conversation.
First time.You?
Yah, first time.
Don’t tell anyone about it. The mill.
Yah, no. I won’t.
Those boys were long gone, they’d left here and took up space somewhere they were welcome.
Ryan watches not-Naim manifest across the street from him, in the same clothes from that day. The same sage green shirt that he had left Bandee with, that lived in their dresser, with holes in the armpits and stains on its edges.
-
Naim’s eyes fight against the morning sun glaring through the windshield, his lids feel heavy having got only just enough sleep at some dodgy motel to make it acceptable to drive the last stretch of road. He’d found a place to crash late in the evening, not a soul around except for the disinterested old man at the front desk, and Naim had walked to his room door on edge all on his own, lighter in his pocket at the ready, only to find there had been no need for it.
There’s a small part of him that buzzes with excitement to tell Ryan about spending the night in a motel, by himself, with only the locks it already had on the door. Had almost spilled it when Ryan called to say goodnight–carrying the proud feeling in his chest like he was a kid who just spent the night away from home for the first time.
In some ways, it wasn’t that far off.
His back hurts and his feet keep going numb, and Ryan’s calls keep popping up on his screen, but he doesn’t want to pull over to take them. He’s so close, and chancing some glances down at the text messages he can see that Ryan isn’t going anywhere just yet.
“I’m coming for ya, a little patience please,” Naim says to himself with his tongue between his teeth trying to bite back a smile. He can only hope that Ryan will forgive his temporary lack of communication.
The Bandee town sign comes into his view, old and rusty as it wastes away under constant sun, and Naim doesn’t think it’s as scary as he had expected it to be. Not when he knew who was waiting for him, not when he knew that he could be there to shield him in whatever aftermath he was bringing home.
-
“Naim pick up your fucking phone, would ya cunt?” he says into Naim’s voicemail, “I’m going to the bus station now and I’m getting the next bus…whenever the fuck that is. If you could look at flights from Mildura for me on the laptop, I can’t get the website to work on my phone. I love you. Call me.”
Phone shoved into his pocket, Ryan finds out inside the bus station that the next bus doesn’t come for two hours. He sighs and wearily decides that he’ll come back to buy a ticket after he makes a phone call.
Ryan sits heavy on one of the metal benches outside with his head in his hands for a few minutes, Get me out of this fucking place.
He tries Naim again with no luck, and is almost getting desperate enough to call Stella and check with her. Calm the fuck down, he tells himself, taking a deep breath and looking for a distraction while he waits for Naim to call him back.
In his backpack, he considers the open folder that Arlene had given him. He peeks inside it and sees it’s full of photos, papers, and old schoolwork. Not his to peruse, but he’s only so strong to not look at the one photo on top of it all.
He had never seen any childhood photos of Naim, that was never something either of them had kept on their phone as teens, but he can tell immediately that it's him. Probably around five, eyes big and wide with his hair sticking out from beneath a bucket hat that looked too big for his little head. He was being held by someone Ryan assumed was his father, gumboots half falling off his dangling feet.
Ryan smiles at it, finger hovering over its dog-eared edges before tucking it back safe inside to give Naim once he got back to him. Somehow, he managed to shove the soft edges of the cardboard box in there with it all, too.
He pulls out his phone only to call Naim again, only to see a text from him that had been sent only seconds ago.
hey..where are you??
Ryan starts to type out an answer when the hiss of a bus heading in the opposite direction roars to life and chugs past, the parking lot on the other side stretching into the empty field on the other side. Parked in the middle of it, a familiar car with the driver side door wide open, and a figure standing in the Bandee sun, grinning wide with his hair wild from the wind.
Taller than when they left, deeper circles around his eyes, and lines that showed up so often from his laughter that they were going to start leaving imprints on his skin. Not the image of a boy he left outside his mum’s house with teary eyes and the inability to speak to him any longer.
His Naim.
Ryan feels his heart leap into his throat.
Naim catches his eye and beams even brighter, shutting the car door with a show of making sure it slams before making his way across the parking lot.
Half walking, half jogging, Ryan meets him in the middle, arms gathering him in a hug without a second thought.
“What the fuck,” Ryan says into the crook of his neck, breathing him in, “You were driving here this whole time?”
“Should have come with you from the start,” Naim murmurs into his hair.
Ryan shakes his head, and pulls back as Naim’s gentle hands frame his face, “No. I needed to do this. I told you.” And you were with me, Ryan doesn’t say out loud.
“But on your own-”
“Naim,” Ryan breathes, “Shh. You’re here now.”
He kisses him quiet; lips soft and unhurried, out in the open in the Bandee bus station parking lot under the same rays of sun that would follow them all the way back home.
That’s when Ryan feels something finally cave in. A wound gets packed and mended in Naim’s arms; there's a backpack full of memories slung over his shoulder, a hand extended to a girl just like them if she needed somewhere safe to land, some doors closed for good, some left open just enough, and the reassurance that Bandee wasn’t the home he had once feared leaving. That it never had been. And now, the man he loved to take him back to the life they built on the other side of it.
Maybe Ryan had found what he was looking for, after all. Something worth coming here for.
“You’ve been smoking, haven’t you?” Naim asks him when they part, another quick peck to his lips.
Ryan’s nose wrinkles with a small twinge of guilt, having tossed the pack in the trash moments earlier. Of course Naim could taste it on him. “Yah, sorry,” Ryan frowns, hand cupping the side of Naim’s cheek.
His fingertips brush over the clean edge of his haircut, pushing back the short strands and catching sight of the few grey strands that peek through.
Naim leans to his touch, forgiveness seeping in through Ryan’s palm, “Ah. Doesn’t matter.”
“Take me home, Naim,” Ryan feels himself sag, tired and ready to leave it all behind in their rear view mirror.
Naim sniffs and kisses the tip of Ryan’s nose with a grin, eyes watery, “Let’s go.”
Naim fits his arm around Ryan’s waist, slips his hand into his back pocket as they walk back to the car, and Naim hums, “Called your boss and he agreed you should take more time off. Stella’s gonna stay the rest of the weekend at ours, and after that Maisie is going to stop in a couple times a day for Ollie until we get back.”
“Oh, yah?” Ryan smiles at the amount of Naim’s pre-planning.
“I thought we could take our time on the way home, take the scenic route? Drive the coast the whole way or something. I’ve got a bunch of spots mapped out, you can take a look while we drive. Oh, and I brought you more clothes, because I am not dealing with laundromats again.”
Ryan listens to Naim ramble, making note of things to ask him once he’s finished. He imagines a slow trek back to Brisbane, Naim by his side the whole time. Splurging on nice hotels because they could, quiet words and no rushing to find some place that they belonged, Naim’s hand in his. Heading towards something sure. Something they had built together outside of all this. Going home.
Ryan had been ready to get on that bus and leave this all behind once, by himself. Ryan had been ready to withstand a life here before that, before Naim showed up and showed him something better.
Naim stops at the car and turns to Ryan, beautiful and older and with everything Ryan loved about the world sitting there in his hazel eyes, “So, where do you think we should head first?”
“Wherever you want,” Ryan tells him. As long as it's with you.