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In you the wars and the flights accumulated.
From you the wings of the song birds rose.
You swallowed everything, like distance.
Like the sea, like time. In you everything sank!
-Pablo Neruda, A Song of Despair
I.
They were fighting again because they were always fighting, and they didn’t know a world beyond blood and sweat and tears. They had never experienced a world that wasn't in the process of unraveling.
Fabio was quietly moving things around, fidgety and upset and trying to remain calm. He touched the handle of a hot pan. "You have no shred of human decency."
"You're right," he sneered. "I don't." And he threw his hand out. It swung in the air, hit the vase on the counter, and it came crashing down to the floor. "I'd apologize for that, but I don't have a conscience, remember?" He was young, ready to thrash around, fight anything.
"You have--" he struggled to contain himself. "You have no right to be angry. You betrayed me."
"I didn't betray shit," Cristiano snapped. "You weren't my boyfriend. You aren't my boyfriend."
"But promises are promises, and the only thing you've ever been able to do with a promise is break it."
"Cry me a fucking river," Cristiano told him, and he went to bed. He slept soundly while Fabio tossed and turned, remembering people and events he had never seen or felt. In his dreams, he felt what Cristiano had felt. Betrayed what Cristiano had betrayed. Felt himself unravel with his fist around the sheets.
II.
Fabio stared out the window as they drove. His hands were in his lap. He fidgeted. The windows fogged up, and he turned to look at the man driving beside him. Strong shoulders, tense jaw, eyes he’d forgotten how to read.
“Where are we going?”
Cristiano sighed impatiently. “You said you wanted Chinese food, so we’re getting Chinese food. You always have to--”
“I meant where are we going for Chinese food. There’s that place on the corner, that place next to the grocery store, that place in the grocery store--”
“Yeah, I’m well aware that more than one place to get Chinese food exists. Thanks, Fabio, for being entirely useless--”
It didn’t even hurt anymore. Like a whip, quickly across the face. Numb at first; the pain sinking in much later. “Well, that’s no different from usual, right? Useless? Since when am I not useless. Just useless me walking around doing useless chores around the house, uselessly babysitting your son, uselessly sucking your dick--”
“Don’t bring Junior into this--”
“Alright, alright. I didn’t mean to bring him into this. God. Can you just focus on the argument?”
“I’m trying to focus on the argument.” He swerved to avoid someone who’d forgotten their signal. Swearing under his breath, he pulled into the nearest parking lot. The Chinese restaurant on the corner. “But it’s a little difficult when you start bringing my son into it.”
“Shut up,” Fabio moaned. “You know I love that kid more than anything. I would never complain ahout taking care of him. I’m not complaining about him. I’m complaining about you and your inability to see that I am actually worth something.”
“Jesus. I know you’re worth something. You just have to act like….”
It hardly mattered how the argument went on. All that mattered was that it went on and on and on until they were violently kissing in the car, so roughly, so lacking love that it could hardly be called a kiss. And burning, they went on.
III.
His son was older now, starting high school, and they were beginning to consider themselves old men when they caught sight of a mirror. Fabio didn’t live with them anymore; he stopped living with them when Junior was much younger. Cristiano wanted to avoid the nasty tension a love affair created. Fabio understood being pushed aside, but that didn’t mean he welcomed it.
He picked Junior up from school sometimes, brought him home and stayed with him until Cristiano returned from work. He always came home with a smile for his son, a hardened expression and a lingering kiss on the cheek for Fabio. They were friends-- what they told Junior. Friends, he always repeated with a roll of his eyes a flick of his wrist as if he wanted to dismiss the concept entirely and get down to the heart of things. He was so like his father in that way.
“So I heard you and dad arguing again.”
Fabio looked up from the stove. He was making spaghetti and tomato sauce for dinner. “You shouldn’t have to hear that. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be.” He was working on his homework at the counter. He wasn’t as tall as his father, inherited his height from his mother-- at least until the growth spurt that was bound to occur. On the stool, his feet dangled an inch from the ground.
He added salt, sugar, pepper, onions. “How much did you hear?”
“Enough. I love my dad, but he can be a real asshole.”
He opened the fridge to pull out the mushrooms. Pulled out the red cutting board and chopped them into tiny pieces in the hopes of disguising them from Junior. He saw them, didn’t complain. “You have to take his side on this sort of thing.”
Junior thought about it. His pencil hovered above his geometry homework. “Fine,” he said after a moment. He completed a problem and swung his legs awkwardly. “I will, but that doesn’t mean I want you gone. And he doesn’t want you gone either.”
Fabio shrugged. He didn’t feel like discussing the severity of Cristiano’s complexity with his son. There was too much distance to cover with too little time to explain the road. “You want to help with dinner?”
“I’d love to, but let me start after I stop fucking up the area of a triangle--”
“Language.”
“It’s like the easiest thing in the world,” he continued loudly, talking right over Fabio’s interjection. Another trait he inherited from his father. “But still, I keep fucking it up.”
“I’m actually going to start making you use your dad’s swear jar if you don’t stop with the f-bombs.”
Junior rolled his eyes. He looked a lot like Cristiano when he couldn’t give a shit about what anyone else had to say. “Alright, I’m sorry, but sometimes it’s necessary.” He stared down at the problem for a good minute and a half. Then he tossed down his pencil and joined Fabio at the stove. “Alright, fuck it.”
He pointed to the jar on the counter. “Make it rain.”
He reached for his wallet with a grin just as the door opened and Cristiano walked in. He surveyed the kitchen, stiff and unsmiling. “Making dinner?”
“No, we’re cooking the neighbor for running over the lawn,” Junior replied casually. He was radiant, glowing to get his father’s attention.
Cristiano smiled, a quick upward jerk of his lips, a special kind of dance reserved only for his son. “Glad to hear it. Those tire tracks were unacceptable.” He glanced at Fabio, and the smile faded. His eyes were gentler than when he walked in. “Thanks for dinner.” He nodded once before retreating to his office.
“You’re welcome,” Fabio said quietly after the door had closed behind him.
And on and on and on like a clock with a smashed face that just wouldn’t die.
Fabio returned in the morning to pick Junior up and take him to school. Cristiano was racing around trying to make coffee and read the paper and make breakfast for Junior all at once. Fabio took over, resting his hand lightly on Cristiano’s shoulder to make him calm down.
“Relax,” he said. “Get to work. I’ll take care of everything else.”
“You always do,” Cristiano said under his breath. There was a hint of regret, but Fabio couldn’t hear it.
Junior was walking sleepily downstairs with his curly hair sticking up in every direction. “I hate school,” he moaned. “Don’t make me go.”
Cristiano’s features softened, shoulders lost their tension. He set his coffee cup down. “Are you not feeling well? If you’re not well, you shouldn’t be going.”
Fabio rolled his eyes. “Get dressed. We’re leaving in ten.”
IV.
It was a year later, and Fabio was still around. He and Cristiano fought more but quietly, sometimes silently. They wouldn’t speak for days, and then out of the blue, they would look across the room and smile at one another, and everything would begin again. Their happiness was toxic, and it bred more poison with every passing hour.
When Cristiano was away on a business trip, Fabio went to Junior’s parent-teacher conference. Called Cristiano an hour after it was finished and told him everything. Listened as Cristiano shut his eyes and said, “Tell him I’m proud.”
It was a year later, and Fabio was still around, and not much had changed. Their silent fights were repetitive as were their loud ones. Junior was a year older, and he was used to it. He started playing football, and he was good at it, and he knew he was good at it, but he played with humility.
They were both at his first game. Cristiano watched him score, leapt up and yelled in the most undignified manner possible. They smiled at each other in the stands, watching the boy they raised together. Cristiano watched Fabio out of the corner of his eye, thinking that he never should have let it get this far, never should have let him have a handle on his son. He didn’t smile again.
Weeks later. Fabio was back in the house, working on something of his own. He couldn’t focus on his work because Junior was at a friend’s house, and it was just him and Cristiano in the deathly silent room. “We don’t communicate very well,” he said finally, feeling terrible and exposed like he’d just raked a claw over his own face. Blood dripping, skin burning, itching to mark himself again.
Cristiano was struggling with paperwork. For once, he wasn’t working in his office. He got up to open the drapes, paced the room for a few tense seconds before returning to his post on the edge of the couch cushion. He picked the file back up.
“No,” he said finally. “We don’t.”
“Don’t you think we should finish this? This thing we have?” He fidgeted again, like he used to do when they were younger and screaming.
He crossed his legs and straightened his suit like he was dealing with a client. “For his sake, I don’t.”
“For his sake, we suffer?”
“I would do anything for him. But you’re free to go. Free to do anything you like.” It was too polite to be a conversation between the two of them. They weren’t polite. They were biting and rough and terrible, and if they ever said a kind word, it must be some kind of mistake. Some underhanded gesture that trampled on the other’s humanity.
“Free to hurt him,” Fabio breathed, thinking of all the times Junior looked at him with Cristiano’s eyes and begged him not to go. “I wish I never started in the first place.”
“Wish you never met me? Please.” He rubbed the back of his neck. The conversation was making him weary. “We go over this again and again. It was the worst mistake of your life. I know. I’ve heard it.” Halfway to pain.
“The things we say…” Fabio got up to check the clock on the wall. Past time to go. “I don’t understand why I want to hurt you the way I do.”
“The feeling is mutual,” Cristiano returned without venom. “If we ever loved, that feeling is dead now.”
And do you think we did?” His hands were in his pockets.
“I hope not. I hope to God I never wasted my love on you.”