Divine Intervention Read online

  “You’re not going to have time,” Bart protested.

  “What do you mean?” Evan looked at the clock. “He’s already over an hour late.”

  “Exactly. He could walk in at any moment. You never know. You’ll barely have time to get out of the spin cycle.”

  Evan considered this. He’d have to do the laundry down the hall, which would mean if he left it for anything more than the half hour the wash required, the old woman across the way would watch and get angry if the machines were in use. And Liam, if he didn’t show up within the first hour, then there was no telling just how long it would take him.

  “Okay,” Evan said. “Laundry’s a bad idea.”

  “Exactly—”

  “Dishes or organization is better.”

  Bart groaned from the couch, to which Evan only beamed over another smile.

  “Come on, sit down. You’re moving around over there is enough to make me nervous.”

  In spite of the protests, Evan didn’t stop. He opened the closet again, this time removing the shoeboxes to prevent injury, and began to sort out the recycle from plastics to glass. As he touched the wine bottles that Sarah and Liam used to announce their anniversary and engagement, Evan stopped. Perhaps Liam was hanging on to things to preserve her memory. Their break up a few weeks ago had been so sudden that Evan didn’t even think it was real.

  “You okay over there?” Bart asked. He stood from the couch and walked the few paces to the hall where Evan still stood with the bottles.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “You okay with this?” Bart said, pointing to the beer in his hand.

  “Yeah, why wouldn’t I be?”

  “No reason.”

  Bart still lingered in the hallway, drinking casually. Evan tried to push through the empties into specific sorting bins, but soon gave up. An empty bottle with a few drops left in it spilled over his fingers and sent a familiar feeling course through his veins. Evan stood.

  “Fine,” he said. “I give up.”

  With a smile, Bart nodded in triumph as the two of them walked back to the couch.

  “Calm down,” Bart teased. He elbowed Evan lightly in the ribs, which made Evan gasp in his throat. He tried to play it off as a laugh and grabbed the remote from Bart’s hand. Bart’s body was already warming up from the alcohol and felt distinct against Evan’s cool hands from the dishwater.

  “I am calm,” Evan insisted. He began to flip through the TV channels and stopped on a vague crime or supernatural show. He waited to see if Bart would comment, if he would playfully flirt back again with his choice, but he was quiet. He sipped his non-alcoholic beer and watched as Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki solved a case about a ghost.

  Even though Liam sometimes touted himself as a gay matchmaker, he had never tried to put Bart and Evan together. Possibly because they met on their own and bonded about music that Liam had no claim over. It was hard to tell. But Bart’s subtle smiles that emerged from his usual quiet expression were enough to melt Evan in all the right ways. As the show carried on, he found himself glimpsing at him to see how he reacted to a joke or a sudden scare scene on screen. Bart’s eyes were a piercing blue and his skin had gone back to the pale skin he possessed before his road trip tanned him. Bart was different enough from Evan’s dark hair and eyes, along with his dark olive skin, to seem distinct, attractive in a rare way Evan didn’t come across often. Evan had gotten so used to beefy guys with buzz cuts and too much testosterone in their veins from the gym. But with their arms by their sides, Evan could see the difference between his own body and Bart’s pale skin and skinny frame. He was delicate, yet flexible. And his unruly hair and love of music made him seem more sensitive than the gym buffs.

  On the couch, Evan and Bart were both roughly the same height. Standing, Bart was a couple inches above Evan and both men were rather short. Liam towered over both of them, though he did that with most people and tended to hunch for compensation. Both men were about the same age, both had somewhat crappy jobs as they waited to see what to do with the rest of their lives, and both were obviously gay.

  And yet, the match for them hadn’t been made.

  Evan figured at this point too much time had passed. They had become friends without Liam to lean on for support anymore. Now, they were too similar and had spent too much time waiting for something to happen that nothing ever would. They had merged into good friends, even with the amount of small gazes that Evan threw over at Bart. Maybe if he still drank, Evan thought to himself, he may have been able to work up the nerve to risk the friendship for a relationship. Or did he just want a fuck? Evan didn’t like to think too far into his psyche, especially if it was unreciprocated. As he leaned into the couch and felt the heavy weight of the necklace around him, he knew he didn’t want to risk his sobriety either.

  When another commercial break came on and the crime had been solved, Bart rose to his feet.

  “Where are you headed?

  “Another drink,” he answered smoothly. “You want?”

  “Sure, but…” Evan stopped and stuttered, trying to not pay so much attention to Bart. “Shouldn’t we wait for Liam at least? I mean, I thought this whole thing had to do with Sarah. He’ll probably be super bummed if we go on without him.”

  Bart leaned against the entrance to the kitchen. Though he held an open beer in his hand, he didn’t drink it.

  “How long were they together for?” he asked, not raising his eyes from the grimy tile floors.

  “Five years, give or take,” Evan answered. “I remember when they met.”

  Bart nodded. He had come in on the relationship halfway through, meeting Sarah one of the mornings when she stayed the night and was able to brave the apartment. A tall, blonde woman who worked in advertising, she and Liam seemed like a perfect couple. They had met inside the tall office building where they both worked, on different floors and departments. But they always made time for lunch together, even if deadlines were approaching. Bart had been in the apartment (but no longer living there) when they became engaged. He had talked to Sarah for many nights, in brief bits of conversation, about her suspicions of proposal. But no one—not even Evan or Bart—knew when Liam was going to pop the question until the actual night.

  “I always thought he hated marriage, you know?” Bart asked.

  “He did,” Evan confirmed. “But I don’t think that mattered for Sarah.”

  “Poor guy,” Bart added. “Just when we thought we were unlucky in love.”

  “Hey, speak for yourself,” Evan joked. He took a quick sip from his beer, though he knew it was empty. Air and the leftover bits that still tasted like water fell onto his tongue.

  “I guess things do change,” Bart added.

  “Or they go back to the way they were in the beginning,” Evan suggested. “That wasn’t so bad, right?”

  Bart rolled his eyes and shook his head a bit. Every Friday night, instead of meeting at Liam’s place like they were now, the three of them (sometimes accompanied by Daniel, Liam’s brother or his other coworker, Nate, from his office) would go to a gay club just around the corner from where they were called Kiss. As far as gay bars went, the place was tame. Not as much E or coke done in the bathrooms, and there were more than just twinks or young and flexible guys who hung off the bar. There were lots of bears and older gay guys, too. Straight men also came, sometimes with their girlfriends or lesbian sisters, which always made Liam feel a little more at home. The four, sometimes five, of them had all grown quite close over this set up. It was amazing how much routine and a common cause could unite all of them. And when so many movies were being made about gay men either dying horrible deaths or using far too many drugs in club scenes, it was nice to just have a group of friends hang out.

  “Hey,” Bart said, also reminiscing about their past Friday nights. “If you’re no longer willing to play the Zach Braff character in our Broken Hearts Club, then I don’t know what to do next. We may have to recast, man.”

&nb
sp; Evan laughed, probably too much. The five men had joked often about how their group functioned, more or less, like that 2000 romantic comedy. Except with less baseball (no one, not even Liam, in the group liked any type of sports). With that film, the director had set out to make a more “positive” interpretation on gay men’s lives and cast some of the nineties heartthrobs in the roles. Before playing Superman, Dean Cain was a gay player and Zach Braff, before Garden State and Scrubs, had been a drug-using twink. Evan was hardly a twink, but he had nursed a schoolboy crush on the star, even in spite of Braff’s ridiculous bleached hair for the Broken Hearts film. The comparison fit well, even if Liam acted as the center of the group and he was as straight and in a long-term relationship.

  “Straight but not narrow,” Liam would always quip. He embraced gay culture probably even more than his younger brother, since Daniel was a bit of a jock back in the day and never quite got into the whole rainbow pride stuff. Liam was the sensitive guy of the family, working as a copyeditor and reading in his spare time. A gay bar, in spite of not picking anyone up, was where Liam could have long conversations about the latest biography or memoir, romance or bestseller. Once or twice, Liam danced with a few men but he left the “broken hearts” to the masters. As Nate paired up with a boyfriend he met soon after and Daniel moved back home, it was only the three of them at clubs. When Sarah and Liam announced the engagement, it was just Bart and Evan who were the only broken hearts and lost among love.

  Maybe not anymore, Evan thought to himself. He looked around the apartment, and even with a keen eye, saw nothing left over from Sarah. She had taken back her clothing from the floor and closet, her shoes in the front hallway, and had even retrieved her favorite fantasy series from his shelves. Now, Liam would never know how Divergent ended. And neither one of them could even do the whole ‘oh I forget this item’ and try to worm their way back into the other’s life. They were done. Finished.

  “Here you go, my broken-hearted friend,” Bart said, passing Evan another beer.

  Evan laughed a little, but with less conviction. As Bart and Evan sank back into the couch to wait, Evan allowed his mind to wander. When Bart put on the music channel again and they began to play songs that were popular a few years earlier in the club scene, Evan felt his mind slip away a little more.

  Chapter 2

  Liam had always called the quick-hook up at all of the clubs the Friday Night Lust.

  “It’s a disease really,” Liam had said. “You all disappear into bathrooms or coat closest or alleyways and have the time of your life for fifteen minutes. Then you come back out and pretended nothing happened.”

  “Sure, okay,” Evan allowed, leaning on the bar. “But what’s your point? Shouldn’t we be looking at the plus side in all of this?”

  “Yeah,” Bart agreed. “Now we’re allowed to do what we what with who we want to.”

  “Are you sure it’s really what you want?” Liam asked. When the two men in front of him gave him a quizzical glance, he shifted on his bar stool. “Okay, but you see what I mean, right? This is a disease, though it’s more of a way of thinking than something that makes you sick.”

  “Okay…” Evan wanted to tell Liam he was reading too much sci-fi at work, but he decided to humor him. The club was decked out in too much red and pink anyway, getting the patrons geared up for Valentine’s Day a few days away. There were men in white go-go shorts, holding large arrows as they pretended to be Cupid and danced on the side of the stage next to a DJ. Far too many Lady Gaga songs blasted out at them, though that was nothing new. More attention was paid to “Marry the Night”, about a relationship, rather than “Born This Way”, about pride in life.

  “You think you want the quick hook-up, but it’s really another manifestation of shame,” Liam went on. “You take what you want—a guy, whatever desire you have in you—but instead of sharing it with the world, you end it in a bathroom stall. It’s sad, really.”

  “What if you don’t want long term?” Bart said. “Most of the guys here are too young to really appreciate that.”

  “I know and there are lots to be said for playing the field. Don’t get me wrong. I’m also not trying to rationalize my choice for the rest of my life,” Liam said with a quick wink. “But all of this strange lust fueled desire will only get you so far. It’s like a sugar crash. You’ll eventually fall and fall hard.”

  Evan looked down at his drink. The pink concoction was chock full of sugar, since he limited himself to the virgin variety they served at the bar. He had tried the club special of the night, which had been a strawberry daiquiri with a large, heart-shaped stir stick. The whole thing made him look like even more like a fairy, but it had also worked as a good conversation starter for a few guys. He had already given and received one blowjob of the night. Though he had no desire to take either guy back to his place, he did know the type of crash that Liam discussed. It was the dull ache of waking up alone in the morning or falling into the bed at night, still feeling the handprints of others on your body. It was talking to someone for five minutes about the song that was playing and then getting on your knees, and really just wishing there was someone else there to talk about how your day went.

  “You’re looking at this the wrong way,” Bart told Liam. He motioned with his hands insistently, placing his beer on the counter. “There’s the crash of desire, but think of how bad it hurts when you fall so hard for someone only to have them not reciprocate? Only to have them break your heart?”

  Liam took a sip of his drink and considered this. “I know. Trust me. There have been so many times where I’ve worried about Sarah. You know, at the beginning of every relationship you watch where you’re walking, trying to find landmines.”

  Both men nodded, though they hadn’t had too many flings that could even be close to long term. Though, Evan did remember long term defined as “two or more months” at one of the AA meetings he went to early on in his recovery. He supposed, then, that his relationships in high school could have counted.

  “Well, there are no landmines I’ve found for Sarah. She’s perfect.”

  “That’s great,” Evan encouraged

  Liam, wide eyed, shook his head. “It’s terrible. Now I’m so scared that I’m going to fuck it up. Nothing is perfect, Evan. There is always a crack. But if you can’t see the crack, then you don’t know where to step.”

  “This sounds more like a parable for your apartment than for Sarah’s psyche,” Evan had joked. He turned to Bart, trying to change the topic of conversation to an embarrassing story instead. This usually worked, Evan figured. He offered himself up for scrutiny as he reiterated the story of the first time walking into Liam’s apartment and not looking where he was stepping. He sliced his big toe open when he walked through a pile of clothing, thinking that nothing could harm him. Wrong. An old Exacto knife from Liam’s wood working days had been in the middle of the pile. Stitches and a lessoned learned, Evan had cleaned Liam’s apartment that day to prevent further hazards. At least, cleaned as much as he could.

  “So, really, I think Liam’s just worried that he may have to give up this apartment and his cavalier attitude about where he keeps anything when he eventually moves in with Sarah,” Evan added with a raise of his eyebrows. “This has nothing to do about gay culture.”

  “You know what I mean,” Liam chastised. “Eventually, you young kids are going to grow up and realize that there is something more than Friday nights.”

  Evan’s carefree smile fell from his face. He resented the dictum of growing up. He was sure most of adult life was an illusion that was masked by bills. He was about to open his mouth to argue more, when Bart had stepped up.

  “You know, Liam,” he said, faking a soulful diction. He rubbed his fingers on his chin, over the start of a beard. “I think you’re right. That is why there is Saturday, too.”

  Evan raised his drink to Bart and the two of them had exchanged a large smile with Liam trapped in the middle. He sighed and shrugged his sh
oulders.

  “Fine, you two. I cannot tell you how to live your life, I can only hope that one day you will come over to my side and start to realize what you need to do.”

  “And what is that, Liam?”

  “Face the power of love?” Evan added, mocking slightly.

  Liam walked away from the bar, turning around to face the two of them before he merged into the dance floor.

  “Not quite. But realize that you never quite have full control over your life. Your life, so rarely, is it about you. It’s about other people.” Liam caught the glance of a big guy, clearly a bear with his chest hair peeking out over his tank top, and took his arm. “So often we think we have to return something to get something better suited for us. Evan, you should know, working at the store and all. Aren’t the returns the worst?”

  Evan nodded, eyes wide. Liam still moved with the man who slid his arm around his waist, his head still turned to talk to his friends.

  “If you don’t like it, then, don’t participate in it. Don’t be part of the return culture. Don’t ask what’s in it for you. Just allow yourself to give and watch what you can get.”

  Liam spun away then, a large laugh coming out of his lungs and over the music. Evan and Bart faced one another, took a sip of their drinks, and sighed.

  “Ask not what your country can do for you,” Bart mocked, his voice mimicking the Kennedy drawl perfectly. “But what you can do for your country.”

  As Evan laughed at the joke, he watched as Bart’s eyes caught another man in the crowd. A small guy, with dark hair and a baby face motioned with the tilt of his head towards Bart. Without a word, Bart left Evan at the bar with his brightly colored drink.

  “Hey there.” Another man approached Evan. He had short hair cropped close to his skull with large biceps that swelled against his tight T-shirt. A bit of a Jarhead, but all right, as far as the men went. The man leaned over and took the heart-shaped stir-stick out of the drink and put it in his mouth, his eyes not leaving Evan.