Divine Intervention Read online

  Divine Intervention

  By Francis Gideon

  Published by JMS Books LLC

  Visit jms-books.com for more information.

  Copyright 2014 Francis Gideon

  ISBN 9781611525090

  Cover Design: Written Ink Designs | written-ink.com

  Image(s) used under a Standard Royalty-Free License.

  All rights reserved.

  WARNING: This book is not transferable. It is for your own personal use. If it is sold, shared, or given away, it is an infringement of the copyright of this work and violators will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

  No portion of this book may be transmitted or reproduced in any form, or by any means, without permission in writing from the publisher, with the exception of brief excerpts used for the purposes of review.

  This book is for ADULT AUDIENCES ONLY. It may contain sexually explicit scenes and graphic language which might be considered offensive by some readers. Please store your files where they cannot be accessed by minors.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are solely the product of the author’s imagination and/or are used fictitiously, though reference may be made to actual historical events or existing locations. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published in the United States of America.

  * * * *

  Divine Intervention

  By Francis Gideon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 1

  Evan couldn’t get over how dark the apartment looked. When he and Bart stepped over the threshold, it felt as if they were heading down into a basement with nothing to guide them.

  “And God said,” Evan boomed comically as his hands felt the wall for a switch, “let there be light.”

  Bart laughed. The small bulb flooded the front hall with a yellow glow, illuminating the piles of shoes, empties, and other disarray. Both men slowly took a deep breath.

  “Man. Seems like Liam took a day of rest on this place,” Bart remarked. He gingerly took a step forward.

  “Yeah, he’s gone pretty underground since he and Sarah broke up,” Evan explained. He placed the keys Liam had let him borrow that afternoon on the front table, in amongst receipts and old boxes from electronic stores and jewelers. Bart took another step forward and nearly tangled himself with the pile of shoes.

  “Underground in a Unabomber type of way or a Dostoyevsky one?”

  Evan laughed. “Nah, nothing like that. We don’t need to worry about Liam being violent. Just…”

  Evan didn’t finish his statement. Bart pulled his jacket down his arms, stepping in front of the closet, opening it up, and then shutting it very quickly as more stuff toppled outward.

  “Perhaps this is more like Hoarders.” Bart considered. “Is he preparing for the end of the world? Or he is keeping every item that Sarah has touched in an attempt to preserve her memory?”

  Evan stifled a laugh and took Bart’s jacket from him. He tossed them on a chair by the front hallway that was already accumulating old sweaters and then began to feel the wall space for more light switches.

  “You know Liam. He’s never been the cleanest person in the world. And most likely, Sarah was on his case about that. Without her, we are left with Liam and all of his neurosis.”

  More yellow light, a wattage not high enough for the outlet it was in, washed over the two of them as they made their way deeper inside their friend’s one bedroom apartment. Evan led the way, feeling the most responsibility since he had visited Liam earlier at his job and grabbed his keys. Liam’s fourth floor apartment was familiar to them both, but with the amount of stuff on the ground, they needed to be cautious. Evan found the kitchen light easily. A hum of a fluorescent bulb greeted him.

  “It’s not the nicest place in the world, no, but it’s home, right?” Evan said. “I mean how many nights have you camped out on his couch over the past few years?”

  Bart’s concern was replaced with a small smile. He stared lovingly at a small couch in the next room, also covered with clothing, unfolded blankets, and magazines. “Oh, far too many to count. You know how my parents were.”

  Evan nodded. Bart never liked to discuss his past beyond a few allusions and subtle references, but Evan had picked up all he needed to know from Liam, both around and away from Bart.

  Bart had grown up in a traditional Mormon household back in Utah. Though he had known he was gay since he was six or seven, he held off telling anyone (aside from some kids at the Mormon camp he went to every summer, who were just like him) until after he had graduated high school. When the family voiced their disappointment towards his sexuality and told him they would discuss it in the morning, Bart had gone up to his room and waited for everyone else to fall asleep. In his eighteen years of life, he had gotten pretty close to the grim reality of the world. While he followed all of the commandments set forth for them and read the texts prescribed to him, he watched as others cut corners. He knew that, in spite of love and charity and whatever else was preached, he would most likely be cast out. So he waited, planned, and when the moment of absolution came, he knew where he was going. He packed all he needed into a small backpack and met his friend Chris a few blocks away from his house. They ran away together, hoping to get married in one of the legal states or even Canada.

  But like all road relationships, it fizzled out too quickly and Bart was left in New York State and on Liam’s couch. Though Liam wasn’t gay, he liked the strange drifter he found at a Denny’s. Bart’s hair had already started to grow much longer than the standard crew cuts he had grown up with and his pale skin had become tanned on the road; he was a stranger from a strange land, quite literally.

  As Bart stayed on Liam’s couch and ate his food, Liam was allowed to live vicariously through a person who seemed to have walked straight out of the 1960s and SLC Punk at the same time. The stories that Bart told Liam about some Mormon doctrines were enough to count as rent in the first few months. After Bart found a job at a record store, Liam still kept him close by. Bart was famous, in the small circle of gay men from Liam’s neighborhood, for paying his way around with his stories, not his blowjobs.

  Liam, on the other hand, had met Evan through his younger brother, who was gay. Daniel and Evan had been roommates at college when both guys were nineteen. When Daniel moved out of dorms and back with Liam’s parents in order to save money, Evan and Liam had been drawn together. Evan managed to fill in as the little brother figure Liam needed in his life so he could keep caring for and gathering people inside of his small and dirty apartment. Evan supposed Liam’s interest in him had always been paternal, but it never bothered him. Since Evan usually needed someone looking out after him, he allowed the constant calls and unsolicited advice.

  Liam had tried to set up Bart and Daniel a few times—always unsuccessfully. Daniel liked Bart’s stories of travel, but was never into anything else that Bart seemed to want to talk about now that he was free. Instead, Evan ended up bonding with Bart over some ridiculous fascination with the band The Bouncing Souls that no one else in their group seemed to share. Now, with Daniel more than an hour away, Liam, Evan, and Bart had become a solid trio, walking in and out of Liam’s apartment as if it was still a mecca.

  From the hallway, Bart walked into the living room toward Liam’s blue couch. He cleared off the pile of the magazines onto the already overcrowded coffee table. Evan walked under the bright fluorescence of the kitchen and struggled to find counter space that
wasn’t covered, stained, or otherwise marred. He sighed.

  “Liam does have a tendency to collect strays,” Evan mentioned. “Who knows? Maybe now that Sarah’s gone, he’ll finally get that dog he wants.”

  “Why couldn’t he before?”

  “Allergies.”

  “But she could stand all the dust here?” Bart said, raising his eyebrow.

  Evan held up his hand in a dismissive way. “Hey, I don’t know these things. As far as I’m concerned, most healthy relationships seem to have a good deal of repression in them to make them work.”

  Bart laughed. “Most religions, too.”

  Evan smiled. While he had heard a lot of stories about this escapee from the Utah Mormon community, seeing Bart with his long, shoulder-length hair and constant outfit of jeans and T-shirts nearly three years later made it hard to believe that he had a history before this. The short sleeve, white, collared shirt with a thin black tie that most Mormon missionaries wore was not a becoming look for him.

  “And magic underwear,” Evan said. “I still can’t believe that. How exactly does it work?”

  “Hey, you have lucky clothing, right?” Bart said, lifting his brows suspiciously. “The stuff you wear for job interviews and whatnot? It works the same way. Everyone has superstitions, Evan. It’s just religion makes a lot of people’s quirks more obvious.”

  “Okay, fine,” Evan said.

  Evan’s gaze bounced around the kitchen, regarding the stove in a disarray with dishes and used pots. His eyes widened at the left burner that still appeared to be on. He moved forward and shook his head.

  “Maybe we should leave some lucky clothing for Liam. It sure seems like it he needs it now.”

  When Evan held his hand against the burner, no heat emitted. He checked the light and the electric burners all around, still finding no heat evident. When he went to turn the stove on, a spark flew, and the light on the other side of the stove now began to alight without any rhyme or reason. That’s a lovely safety hazard, Evan thought. But it didn’t matter. As soon as Evan made sure that the oven could be turned off, in spite of what the light insisted, he found the fridge. With leftovers, regular beer, and his favorite kind of non-alcoholic beer that didn’t actually taste like wheat-water, he smiled wide.

  “At least Liam left us some supplies,” Evan said, holding up a case for Bart to see. He moved towards Bart in the living room, tossing him a bottle carefully. Bart caught with an expert precision and Evan cracked open his own bottle.

  Before Bart became a constant presence inside Liam’s inner circle, Evan was a pretty heavy drinker. In a way, Evan used to be envious of Bart’s upbringing. Not because he was particularly fascinated by Joseph Smith’s take on the Bible, but because it would have been a distinct catalyst to fight against. As it stood, Evan’s parents and his small group of sisters still lived in upstate New York area, but he never saw them and none of them spoke at all. Even when Evan lived with them, no one talked. No one wanted to talk. The whole idea of ‘coming out’ was actually redundant because Evan knew he would get no response. It was very hard for him to see exactly how much silence could hurt him, and even now, he still had a hard time articulating why the lack of utter acknowledgement, good or bad, utterly destroyed him.

  But he began to drink, since no one seemed to see him. Even though his friends began to grow concerned about the amount he was consuming, Evan ignored them. He thought their expression of concerns were lies. No one, not even his family, had really cared about him up until this point in time, so why did things suddenly change? It had all been a mirage, one that he tried to drown himself in.

  Then Liam gave Evan an intervention. That night, two things became cemented in Evan’s mind: One, he had a problem. And two: people actually did care. It still boggled his mind every so often that Evan could tell someone something and have them respond. Evan’s actions no longer existed in the vacuum that had been his parent’s house. People listened and talked to him. About things both good and bad, and this type of communication had been exactly what Evan needed. The road to sobriety had been a difficult one, but the cheap bottles of fake beer, so he didn’t feel left out, were keys to his success.

  Evan still remembered exactly what he was wearing the day of the intervention. Red shirt, black skater pants, and his old necklace from high school with Saint Valentine on it. Evan’s family were largely un-practicing Catholics. His grandmother had given him the necklace when he had been sick in bed with mono. Valentine, in addition to protecting lovers, also helped with plagues.

  Thanks, Grandma, he had thought when she explained how the kissing disease could be fought with the help of the beheaded martyr that Valentine’s Day was named after. Nothing like a standard overreaction to a disease that could also be spread through drinking straws. Soup would have been nicer instead. But the medallion had a charm to it that Evan couldn’t articulate. It made him want to slip it on and over his neck, dangling the martyr right next to his heart. And he had recovered rather quickly after she had given him the necklace, he reasoned. So perhaps it was lucky.

  Though Evan had outgrown many of the outfits of his past, the necklace only seemed to grow in importance and meaning. The day of the intervention, each time he took a labored breath as he argued his for his competency, it bounced across his chest as if reminding him that even martyrs had needs. Inside the prison cell before Valentine was killed, he cured a judge’s daughter of her blindness. In his final letter, he had reached out to her for comfort and support, signing it ‘Your Valentine.’ Even he, Evan told himself, wanted someone to reaffirm that he existed and that his silence could be broken. And now he was a holiday. A greeting card holiday that Evan hated, but his story still gave Evan some kind of abstract hope.

  Inside Liam’s kitchen, Evan fingered the chain. People still cared about him, even when they were ridiculously late like this. Evan eyed the kitchen clock: nearly seven. Liam wanted to meet at six. Evan took another swallow of his beer. When he glanced back at Bart, Evan noticed Bart was eyeing him.

  Bart knew about Evan’s small problem the same way that Evan knew about Bart’s escape: Liam. But Bart was smart enough not to mention it. He raised his own alcoholic beer from the living room area in a silent toast. Evan smiled as he took another drink.

  “So, how does it taste?” Evan asked Bart, just as he pressed the bottle to his lips.

  “Not too bad,” Bart said. “Probably better than yours, no offense.”

  “Taste is a matter of perception,” Evan said casually. “And I know I’m lucky.”

  Bart nodded, taking another sip. He moved through the channels on the television, stopping on all the music ones, but shaking his head in a disgusted sigh each time a new song came on or a VJ spoke.

  “Are you sure Liam wants to meet us here?” Bart asked.

  “That’s the message I got,” Evan said. He picked up his phone from his pocket and scrolled through the old messages. Liam’s quick texts were always full sentences with proper commas and periods in place. It was the leftover curse of a copyeditor; they could not engage in anything less, even when texts were concerned.

  “What did he tell you?”

  Bart grabbed his phone as he wandered back into the kitchen. Palm to palm, Evan and Bart held their phone out for the other person to read as they scrolled to the last message from Liam.

  Hey guys, how about a Friday night gathering for old times’ sake? I have big plans for us. Come by at six and we’ll head out for another six. L.:)

  “That’s odd,” Evan noted with his brows furrowed. “We both have the exact same things. Down to emoticons.”

  Bart shrugged. “Who knows? At least we know we’re supposed to be here.”

  “I guess,” Evan said, not shaking the familiar feeling of this event. This isn’t quite how his intervention started, but something close to it.

  Unconcerned, Bart moved over to the couch again as Evan stayed in the kitchen. Even under the low wattage of the florescent light, each sur
face seemed to be caked in dust or grime of some kind. Evan made a disapproving noise and then moved into the sink. After clearing away the remnants in the drain, he ran water to soak the dishes already there, plus the ones on the stove. Bart leaned forward, moving the magazines from the coffee table to the floor and put his legs up.

  Evan laughed. “Well, it’s good you can make yourself at home.”

  “I’ve had to find comfort in the smallest of places,” Bart stated with a smile as he took another drink. Evan marveled at how well Bart could acclimatize himself to messes. He supposed, after years of living inside a tight-knit community where no one kept secrets on the surface (but everyone had them deep down) that a mess was delightfully…honest. Liam’s inability to clean seemed to be for that very reason. He welcomed so many people into his apartment, into his life, that he didn’t bother to clean that much. If they could accept Liam on the surface with his suit and tie and big important job at a local publishing house and magazine, then they could accept his apartment. It was a test, even if Evan wasn’t too sure about who he was testing anymore.

  After Evan finished the dishes, he glanced back at the living room. His eyes zoned in on the socks, clothing, and other bits and pieces that really belonged in the laundry. He moved towards Bart and began to pile the stray clothing in his arms.

  “Hey, lift your legs. There are socks under you.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Making a fort. What does it look like?”

  With a sigh, Bart lifted his legs and Evan leaned down to grab a pile of clothing. Evan could feel Bart’s eyes on him, even as Evan moved through the apartment.

  “You’re not his maid, you know,” Bart said.

  “Thank you. I’m well aware of my role in this universe.”

  Bart shook his head. “I mean, come and sit down with me.”

  Evan dumped what he could into a laundry hamper. He opened the closet again, using his arm to brace the few shoeboxes at the top from falling, and grabbed the basket that hid in the back.