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A puff of smoke. A crackle of fire. Grant was gone.
A swoosh of air. A flash of light. Gerard was gone leaving behind the faintest hint of apple pie in the air where he had been standing, in contrast to the heavy noxious smell from Grant’s departure that permeated the rest of the room.
“That went well, then!” Frank stood in the middle of the empty living room, once again questioning his relationship choices. He flopped down on the nearest seat, rested his elbows on his knees, leant forward and rubbed his eyes with the palm of his hand. It was going to be a long night.
He could hear Ray’s voice as clear as if his best friend was sitting right next to him. Ray’s looks were deceiving, all goofy smiles and bouncing curls, hence his nickname – Princess Sunshine. Most people wouldn’t credit him with having wisdom well beyond his 27 years, but he had it.
“Why did I not listen to him?” Frank groaned.
Having a polyamorous relationship is fine, Ray had said. Loving an angel is fine, if a little hard to get your head around, Ray had said. Loving a demon is a dubious choice no matter how you look at it, Ray had said. But being a mortal stuck literally between Heaven and Hell that, Princess Sunshine had counselled, was the closest thing possible to the dictionary definition of insanity as anyone could get. Tonight, with not an ounce of weed or a drop of alcohol in his system, and both his boyfriends disappearing on him in supernatural huffs, Frank had to admit that Ray could have a point.
Well, if the option for movie night, curled up on the couch munching junk food with the loves of his life was off the table, Frank was going to get drunk and quite possibly high. This sucked. Frank hated arguments. He had lived with enough of them as a kid. His parents had ‘stayed together’ for as much of his childhood as they could, but as Frank hit his teens, the arguments became more frequent and more physical. The older Frank got, the more difficult it became to stay out of things, no matter how many times his parents told him to leave alone. Eventually, in his sophomore year, his parents had agreed to split. That was when Frank had had to pick up the pieces of his mother’s broken heart and try to hold her together. It was also at that time that Frank discovered weed. Between his guitar, weed, and whatever alcohol he could get his hands on, Frank developed a coping mechanism which saw him through until he graduated and left home.
Frank trudged through to the kitchen. He had picked up a twelve-pack of bottles only the other day, most of which should still be in the fridge. He couldn’t, however, remember offhand where his stash was. Gerard didn’t like having it in the house, so Frank had to be ingenious in his hiding places, with the inevitable problem that unless he noted the location on his phone, Frank could never remember where he had hidden it when he really needed a hit.
He knocked the top of a bottle. No finesse involved, he threw his head back, tipped the neck of the bottle into his mouth and drained as much of it as he could in one go. He wasn’t in the mood to mess around. Two gulps, one bottle down. Nine more to go. Grant had obviously sneaked two out from under Frank’s nose, not that he minded really because, of course, they shared everything. What was his was theirs, and what was theirs was his.
By the time Frank was on his third bottle, he had remembered where his baggie was. He had stowed it underneath a bunch of hammers and screwdrivers in one of the toolboxes in the garage. That was handy. He could stay out there and smoke. Then he would be out of the way if either Grant or Gerard came back to the house that night until Frank was ready to see them.
Frank could understand that demons would probably have a short fuse and a flair for the melodramatic, but he was a kid, he had assumed, no, he had always been brainwashed by church and school to believe that angels were pure, guileless creatures. Taught to see them as messengers of God, advocates for humanity. In Frank’s experience, they could be overprotective, oversensitive, sulky creatures with a way of manipulating you to do what they wanted. So much for free will, huh?
“Love certainly does strange things to you,” he muttered tamping down his mixture and rolling up the paper.
While he smoked two roll-ups and downed bottles number four, five and six, Frank sat on the hood of his old Dodge Charger, surveying the cluttered state of the garage. Most of the mess was his. Boxes of old records and posters. Books. Piles and piles of books. Some of them works of fiction, some of them textbooks from his degrees that he couldn’t bring himself to throw out. Then there were a couple of tool boxes. He liked to think of himself as fully capable when it came to fixing things around the house. Even if that was a gross overstatement of his DIY prowess as indicated by the few botch jobs around the house, he had the tools that told him otherwise.
There were also one or two clues sprinkled through the chaos that someone other than Frank lived in the house. Canvases covered by tarpaulins were lined up against the only free wall space. Some were awaiting collection by their buyers; some were blank waiting for inspiration to strike Gerard. Then there were Grant’s trophies from winning various awards for their ‘shock jock’ radio shows, gathering dust on the shelves alongside Frank’s book and record collections. The awards were evidence of the ‘human’ job Grant had that allowed them to be way out there in their views and actions, and get away with saying some of the most outrageous things without anyone suspecting who they really were.
Frank started to giggle. The ridiculousness of the situation once again catching up with him. To anyone who didn’t know it would look like an artist, a radio DJ, and a would-be clinical psychologist shared the house. Which in one way was right, only no-one would suspect that there was more to the artist or the DJ than the human eye wanted to see.
“Hey,” Frank said, like he had forgotten that he was the only one in the room, “have you heard the one about the angel, the demon and the agnostic psychologist…” The rest of the joke was too funny to be repeated coherently. The giggles turned into a side-splitting belly laugh that had Frank throwing down the empty bottle of beer, and folding his arms across his stomach as lay back, kicked his legs up and rolled around on the hood for a full two minutes, gasping to get the punchline out.
Frank fairly quickly sobered up, a little, when with a dull thud he found himself on the garage floor, having rolled a bit too vigorously to one side of the hood.
“Ok, enough’s enough,” he muttered as he collected himself and clawed his way back up to standing, then dusted the muck off his jeans.
Frank knew where Gerard would be. Grant? Frank had no idea. Frank never asked Grant where they went when they weren’t working or with him because frankly, he didn’t want to know what a demon did to relieve stress or let out their emotions. It didn’t bear thinking about, so Frank tried not to, and he made it a rule never to ask a question or make a statement that indicated he wanted Grant to tell him.
The decision made to get things back on an even keel with Gerard made, Frank went back into the house and started up the stairs. He knew that his current stoned and drunk state wouldn’t exactly be welcomed, but he had an idea what might just get him back in the angel’s good graces. As he stepped fully into the bedroom, he could see that Gerard had his wings out. Not on full display like some tropical bird trying to attract a mate or scare off its competitors. No, Gerard had them wrapped around himself like a blanket blocking out the world. However, it was enough of a display to attract one particular mate.
Manipulative little shit, Frank thought, falling headlong and knowingly into the angel’s blatant trap.
Frank crawled up onto the bed, kneeling beside one of the walls of white feathers. It never ceased to amaze him how many tones of white there could be, not just the speckling with lilac and light grey along the very outer edges of the primary feathers. Gerard had tried to explain it to him once, using the example of a guitar string and how many different sounds you could draw out of that one string depending on where you placed your finger along the fretboard, whether you used a capo, what other strings you played alongside it, and whether you strummed or plucked it. Frank sort of got the analogy, but he continued to marvel at the way the colour in Gerard’s wings changed depending on the angle you looked at them from or where the light fell on them.
The feather cocoon was ruffled. Of course, it was. Whereas Frank could be described as wearing his heart on his sleeve, the angel wore his emotions on his wings. He was upset then his wings would be out of place, ruffed up, and dull without an ounce of oil or glory anointing them.
Frank leaned in, inhaling the scent of apples and cinnamon that somehow clung to the angel’s feathers despite the numerous cigarettes that Gerard smoked. The stench of stale nicotine never seemed to become attached to his wings, although his mouth always tasted of coffee and cigarettes. Frank marvelled at the duality of his angel, so divine and yet somehow so human too. In some ways, Gerard, the angel, was far more complex than Grant, the demon. Grant always smelled of whiskey, coffee, cigarettes and the blazing fire of hell. His wings were black and leathery. He took great delight in teasing and winding others up, causing chaos wherever he went. Grant’s only redeeming feature was a shocking one for a demon - he loved Frank and Gerard passionately and on occasions showed a gentleness Frank would never have expected a demon could possess.
Frank let his hands rest lightly on Gerard’s hips. He nuzzled into the crook between shoulder and wing and placed a kiss there. Frank was careful to keep the kiss reassuring. A way of letting Gerard know he was there for him.
There was a shifting and a muffled half-hearted “Fuck off, leave me alone” from behind the wall of feathers. A token display of pique to satisfy angelic pride.
Frank ignored Gerard. Leaving his left hand where it was, he inched the right hand along and up until he found the little bump at the base of the right wing. He pressed it; instantly, his fingers were slicked with oil.
Frank let go with his left hand as he shuffled further round to the right. He rubbed his hands together, warming the oil and making sure that it covered the palms and fingers of both hands. Tentatively he reached out to the large primary feathers furthest from Gerard’s body. He was half expecting another protest, or that Gerard would flinch away from his touch. He did not. Frank began the task of smoothing oil along each feather, working his way around the outside.
Eventually, he was rewarded with a sigh from within the wing defences. The shielding remained in place, but the way that the feathers fell told Frank that the tension was leaving the muscles that had been keeping the wings rigidly in place.
As the oil in his hands ran out, Frank would lean in for more until he had completed smoothing and coating all the primary and secondary feathers on the right wing. Now he moved to the smaller downier feathers close-up to Gerard’s spine, the most sensitive part of the wing. Frank could feel the ripples of pleasure emanating from Gerard as Frank played with the elephant feathers.
Frank was so engrossed in running his hand along that bank of feathers, enthralled as always by the way that they moved under his touch, that he did not notice the other fingers which were playing a similar concerto in the same place on the other wing.
“Fucking hell…”
“Sorry, pet. Didn’t mean to startle you. You look so delightful grooming our sweet cherub that I couldn’t bring myself to spoil the moment.” Grant smiled charmingly. “I guess I kind of did anyway. So, uh yeah. Sorry.”
“And?” Frank was too far gone to be subtle.
“And?” Grant repeated back, looking as if they had no idea what else Frank was expecting.
“Maybe you could apologise?” The words drifted from behind the now glistening white feathers.
Grant formed an ‘o’ with their mouth. No sound came out.
“Er, yeah, that,” Frank said. “Apologise to me. No, actually, apologise to us.”
Grant’s hand fell away from Frank’s. The bed shifted underneath Grant’s weight as they backed away and off.
Frank guessed that it was not easy for a demon, heck any supernatural being, to admit that they were in the wrong. He was not sure that this mess was all on Grant, but they had been the one throwing the most slurs around during their ‘discussion’.
“I’m not going to apol…” Grant cut themselves off. They held their hands up in surrender at the scowl Frank shot them. “Gerard, sweetie, maybe you could let those divine wings of yours down for a minute? Please?”
Frank scooted around on the bed until he was sitting in front of Gerard.
“Come on, Gee. You know you’re gonna have to give this up some time, don’t you? Grant’s sorry… well no they're probably not sorry, but they know they should never have called the ranks of guardian angels those names or bitched so much about how all angels have an easy life floating away on the heavenly clouds doing nothing. They know how hard you work…don't you, Grant?”
“Hmphhh. Yeah, I…I shouldn’t talk shite about angels like that in front of you, Gee pet.”
At least Grant tried to sound sincere. There was something undeniably funny about a human ordering a demon to apologise to an angel. Quite how hilarious Frank found it had nothing to do with his visit to the garage, nothing at all.
His inappropriate laughter got the response that all the sweet words and apologies had not. Gerard peeked out from behind his shield of feathers. He drew closer to Frank and sniffed at his t-shirt.
“You’ve been smoking again, haven’t you?”
“Yup.” There was no point denying it; he hadn’t even bothered to try and cover it up with cologne or deodorant. “It helps me deal with the absolute mindfuck of being in a relationship with two supernatural beings who technically are sworn enemies.”
“Ah,” Grant’s eyes lit up at another devilish opportunity to poke fun at their beloveds, “’ For never was a story of more woe than this of Juliet and her Romeo.’ Of course, I am the handsome Romeo, and Gerard is my Juliet, my sun!”
“That’s honestly what you think is the right thing to say at a time like this?” Frank shook his head; he had a creeping feeling that soon they were going to be back at square one.
However, Frank was surprised when Gerard knelt up on the bed, drawing his wings back behind him and locked eyes with Grant.
“My only love sprung from my only hate, too early seen unknown, and known too late! Prodigious birth of love is it to me that I must love a loathed enemy.”
“Hey! What about me?” Frank whined.
“My darling Frankie, hear my soul speak. Of the very instant that I saw you, did my heart fly at your service.”
“Indeed.” Gerard agreed. “Frank, sugar, doubt that the stars are fire, doubt that the sun doth move his aides, doubt truth to be a liar, but never doubt I love you.”
“Ok, ok, ok! Enough with the Shakespeare – you do know I minored in contemporary English lit not that ancient stuff, right?”
Grant and Gerard nodded massive grins on their faces.
Gerard scrambled up off the bed. He held out one hand to Grant, the other he held out to Frank, who was still pouting in the middle of the bed.
“I thought the plan for tonight was junk food and a movie marathon? Coming?”
Frank ran to keep up with Gerard as he skipped down the stairs. Grant cheated and simply vanished from the bedroom to reappear on the couch before their lovers had even reached the living room, bowls of popcorn and candy on their lap and the remaining three bottles of beer on the coffee table in front of them. Frank and Gerard snuggled up on either side of Grant as they settled in for a night of movies that they all agreed on and for which they knew the scripts off by heart.