Ethan, Who Loved Carter (24 page)

Instead of answering, Ethan hugged him. Carter held on until he stopped shaking. As he pulled away, Ethan whispered, “I miss Mike being my friend but I don’t want to see him ever again.”

“Oh, baby.” Carter kissed Ethan’s cheek as Ethan slid out of his arms.

“I think it’s time to call it a night,” Alice said. “Early start tomorrow.” She chugged the rest of her beer and tossed it down.

“You riding home with us?” Carter asked.

“Vera goes in the other direction once we get to the city, so yeah. That all right?”

“Of course.”

“Hey.” Alice took Carter’s other arm. Ethan sleepily walked with his arm draped over Carter’s shoulder. “It’s funny, you know.”

“What?” Carter asked.

She rested her head on his shoulder and against Ethan’s hand. “You came out here to get away from people and now you’re surrounded by more friends than you’ve had, probably in your life. You’re playing original music for them. And you’ve agreed to do an open mic night. In public.”

“The coffee is really good,” Carter said. Ethan murmured in assent.

“I can’t argue with that,” Alice said.

Carter hugged them both. In the car, Alice curled up in the backseat and fell asleep. Carter remembered the last time they’d made this drive at night, when he’d told Ethan that he loved him. He wondered if Ethan was thinking about that, too. Ethan yawned and turned a sleepy smile to him.

Seeing that the road was clear ahead, Carter grabbed a quick kiss. “I’m glad we came out here tonight.”

“Me too.”

It was a beautiful night. Even if the moon hadn’t been shining overhead and the sky a dusky blue, Carter would have looked at Ethan dozing beside him and thought so.

From the backseat, Alice snored.

“I’
M
REALLY
doing this?” Carter stopped a few feet from the “stage”—an empty spot on the floor where Andy had shoved some tables to one side and set up a stool and microphone stand. The espresso machine rumbled and hissed a few feet away. No one paid any attention to Carter yet, probably not realizing that the twitchy guy eyeing the stool was the upcoming entertainment.

“Yep.” Ethan had his arm around Carter’s shoulders. “You’ll be great. I can’t wait to hear the songs you’ve been hiding from me.” Carter had been working on new material especially for this performance. Ethan had plied him with chocolate cream pie from the coffee shop, trying to convince Carter to reveal his new songs, but Carter had refused.

“I want to surprise you,” he said whenever Ethan sidled up next to him to catch a glimpse of Carter’s notebook.

“You’re a hard ass,” Ethan said, “and not only for real.”

“You’d know,” Carter said.

There’d been a time when he’d played willingly; that had been Before (Carter had his own
Before, Capital B
that he wouldn’t mention to Ethan because what kind of a dick would he be to compare his Before, his stupid childish Before to Ethan’s?).

Before, in Carter’s life, was the day of the high school talent show when he’d thought it would be a good idea to play in front of four hundred other students. He realized his mistake with the first stammered lyric. He’d never had trouble performing for his family or at church. His tics went away when he sang, all of them. But on that day at school they didn’t. They magnified, and his classmates, who already thought he was weird, exploded in laughter.

Carter pushed on though. His parents always told him to keep going, to
work through a mistake
, and Carter, good boy always, did his best. It was too much in the end. As soon as the song ended, he strode off the stage, guitar shaking in his hand, tears clenched in his eyes, walked out of the gymnasium, out the door into the parking lot and drove home. No one stopped him. His homeroom teacher called to check on him after school was out. That was on a Friday. When he went back to school on Monday, none of the teachers said anything. The kids, some of whom were his friends, he’d thought, jerked and clicked anytime they could get away with it, all with cruel smiles. They were too young to manage ironic ones, otherwise they surely would have.

“Just think about the coffee you’ll get after,” Ethan said. Carter raised his face up for a kiss. Where had Ethan been when Carter was a kid? Ethan couldn’t be that different now from Ethan’s Before, could he? It was easy to imagine Ethan as the strong, confident older boy Carter had needed to come to his rescue. Hell, Carter could have used a younger brother like Elliot, smart and sassy and not taking shit. Ethan rescued Carter now though, didn’t he? Or they rescued each other. It got too complicated for Carter to think about. They needed each other. It boiled down to that. That they wanted each other too was the bonus. Carter dreamed about Ethan, about his dick, his hands, as much now as he had before they were together.

There it was, a new Before, and now, a new After, one they could share. “I love you,” Carter whispered. Ethan heard anyway and grinned down at Carter. Nothing mattered in the room except Ethan. Maybe nothing mattered in the world except Ethan.

“You’ll do great,” Ethan said. He didn’t need to say he loved Carter back. It wasn’t what Carter needed to hear. Maybe Ethan knew that. Taking the reassurance, Carter stepped forward and slid between the mic stand and the stool.

“Um.” His voice swept across the coffee shop as the microphone picked it up. “I’m Carter Stevenson, and Vera has refused to serve me until I sing for you.”

A few titters from the newly quiet crowd steadied his lurching stomach. Ethan remained in the same spot, so Carter could focus on him, if he needed to. Deciding against more talk—no need to risk falling off the bottomless stuttering cliff—he situated himself on the stool with his guitar and began to play.

He started with a cover of a Michael Jackson song. He couldn’t do it like Michael, wouldn’t try, but a few people offered nods and the crowd didn’t bay for his blood, so he ended feeling encouraged. As he played, his fingers stayed where he needed them. His foot bounced off the crossbar of the stool, but that was all right. His head jerked a few times, and he almost made the neck of the guitar fly up as the movement pulled his arm along with it. In the break between songs, he concentrated on focusing his tics into his foot. The next song was one of his originals he’d kept from Ethan. He hadn’t even written the lyrics down, it had been that secret. He focused on his hands for the first verse. He hadn’t needed to watch himself play for years, but if he looked up, he’d see what Ethan thought of it.

Never saw the music in me

Until you taught me how

Never heard the cloud’s song

Until you showed me how

Let me love you all night long

Today, tomorrow, and yesterday

Let me love you, just you and me

Jerk, skip, blink, blush

When I’m with you

Can’t hide, wouldn’t try

Not when I’m with you

He finished to polite applause from an audience that didn’t know he’d laid his soul in front of them. Looking up took more effort than he could muster, so he didn’t see Ethan coming. Carter was knocked off the stool; he became a shocked wondrous victim to Ethan’s enthusiasm as Ethan showered him in kisses, soaked Carter’s lips, cheeks and neck with them. “You liked it?” Carter managed to ask amidst the assault.

“You big dummy,” Ethan said. “Can’t believe you kept that from me.”

“Surprise,” Carter said. “I wanted you to know how I feel.”

“I do know.” Ethan hugged him again. He nudged Carter back to the stool and returned to his spot.

A few days before, Ethan had pulled Carter into Carter’s backyard, pointed up, and said, “Listen.”

Carter listened.

“My music’s back.” He laughed in joy. Carter clung to him and kissed him until he heard it too. The stars and clouds, grass and wind, and Ethan, all of it Ethan’s music.

Carter leaned into the mic. “So, that was my boyfriend. The song was about him.”

A responsive “awww” rose up. Carter brushed the back of his hair with his hand and then, because the touch felt incomplete, repeated it with his other hand. He needed a haircut. A moment to focus on that relieved some of the self-consciousness his tics caused. Picking up his guitar, he started again. A minute of instrumental work let him find his footing. The worst part was over. He’d pleased Ethan. He could turn in a stuttering twitching wreck of a performance now and he wouldn’t mind.
Plus, you’re getting coffee again.
It was Ethan’s voice in his head, saying this. Carter’s coffee embargo had possibly bothered Ethan more than it had Carter, but now that he was minutes away from getting it, Carter’s mouth watered.

The next song wasn’t anything special. Carter didn’t have a good reason for keeping it from Ethan. It was too boring to discuss, really, but he checked for Ethan’s reaction anyway and got a proud, sleepy smile in return. Ethan worked too hard to make up for the days he’d lost. Maybe he needed to spend a few nights at his own home to catch up on sleep. Carter fumbled a chord, a protestation of the thought. They hadn’t made it official, but Carter’s home
was
Ethan’s home. Was it too soon to say something? Ask him to move in? God, he needed to trash this fucking song if he could let his mind wander during it. A glance around at people resuming their conversations confirmed his decision. Even Carter’s foot was too bored to twitch. He’d planned to end with it, but he pulled a Beatles cover out, a balm against the last song, and closed with that.
Leave them feeling good,
his father’s other advice on performing. Carter’s father played locally, back home. Carter had never seen him have a bad night, but maybe he followed his own advice better than Carter and never let the bad nights show.

He ended to applause. No running out this time; Carter took his bows, grabbed Ethan’s hand, and dragged him to the counter. Ethan laughed. “Priorities?” Ethan asked.

Carter popped the lid off the decaf cappuccino Vera had ready and waiting and gulped it down as his answer.

“Good job,” Vera said. She offered him a brownie on a napkin. Carter grabbed it up as if he expected someone to take it from him. “Really, Carter. I knew you could do it.”

“Threats don’t always work on me. So don’t get any ideas.” It was hard to talk around the brownie, and Ethan’s laughing didn’t help his point, either.

“Sure,” Vera said, smiling. “No more threats. Don’t need them now that you know you can do it, anyway. See you here next week.”

Ethan grabbed the rest of the brownie and took off, leaving Carter to debate confronting Vera about the complete and total impossibility of tonight’s performance happening again or going after his delicious dessert. Vera smirked—there was the ironic smile Carter’s high school classmates had striven for. “Fuck,” Carter said. He went after the brownie.

Ethan stood next to Carter’s car, waving the brownie like a prize. In three steps, Carter had it in his hand and his mouth on Ethan’s. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he plotted out the set list for next week. How had he ended up with these people, Ethan’s friends and Ethan, who could make him do anything… who could make him forget to be afraid? He clung to Ethan for a few extra seconds, long enough to get a “Gay!” from a passing car. Carter flung a hand up, middle finger extended. He snatched it back, fast. What the fuck was he doing, baiting like that? The car drove on.

“Ignore them,” Ethan said. His smile looked false; Carter felt like shit, but fuck those kids, fuck them. If he and Ethan wanted to hug outside like normal people in love, which they
were
, they’d do it.

“Let’s go home. I want to have a lot of sex with you tonight.”

Ethan’s smile returned, bigger than ever. He loved it when Carter talked about sex. Statements like that were all Carter had the guts to manage without falling into a blushing mess, but Ethan’s reaction was always worth it. Ethan almost dove into the car. He had the ignition turned on before Carter got into the driver’s seat.

“Eager much?” Carter asked.

“Yes,” Ethan said. “Drive fast.” He bounced his hand on his knee. “And I want you to teach me the song you wrote for me so I know it forever.”

“Okay.” So far, the evening had gone a thousand times better than Carter had expected.

“I was thinking I’d like to try having sex with you in the kitchen,” Ethan said as they reached a stoplight. “I bet you’d look great all spread out on the table. Have you ever used butter as lube?”

Carter adjusted his previous assessment to count his night as a thousand and one times better than predicted. “Uh, no,” he said. He was grateful again that he’d finally made Ethan understand that statements like
that
had to wait until red lights, or else Carter might wreck the car. He pushed the speed limit when the light went green. “We’ll have to try that.”

Ethan hummed in response and tapped his leg to one of his secret songs. “What music do you hear?” Carter asked.

Ethan looked at him. “Yours,” he said, as if Carter should have known.