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Brian's got a fantasy, a fantasy of doing something wrong. This is not new; it feels like he's spent whole days playing what-if. What-if he got caught with drugs, what-if he got caught with a girl, what-if he got caught cheating. What-if he got caught with a boy. Nothing he's ever going to do, but it's an escape valve on his life. It's harmless. Probably.
He's not sure this is as harmless, day-dreaming of going against whatever code Bender holds dear. What-if Brian could do more than accidentally challenge Bender's ego? That would take some research to suss out, to find the borders beneath his bluster, but it's not like Brian doesn't know how to research.
It goes like this, the fantasy - Brian does something wrong. Something stupid. And then Bender's pressing him up against the locker, or, no, maybe one of cinder-block walls surrounding them - that wouldn't rattle. Everyone knows the sound of a locker slamming, or of someone being slammed into a locker, and neither of them would want to invite any attention. So what if Brian's reasons were not Bender's. John Bender would push Brian Johnson up against the wall, and. He's not sure what happens next.
Three days before John Bender's 18th birthday, he disappears. Presumably he wasn't, like, taken by aliens or anything, and he's probably not garden variety dead, because on Thursday afternoon when Brian finally works up the courage to ask Jimmy Pulaski where his smoking buddy is, Jimmy says, "uh, Pittsburgh?" He says it like honestly he had to think about it, and not like he's making shit up to yank Brian's chain. Brian's - maybe - finally learning to tell the difference.
Brian doesn't know what's in Pittsburgh. He still hasn't learned what Bender cares enough about to follow.
Brian only learns that it's Bender's birthday because Claire tells him when he works up the nerve to ask her if she's seen Bender. She hasn't, and doesn't remember the last time she had. Brian remembers exactly when the last time was for him: between first and second period on Monday, when Brian was walking (the long way, the way he's walked for the past two months whenever he had the time) from Calc to Bio, and Bender was walking from Math 2 to US History.
He's run into Bender, sometimes literally, accidentally-on-purpose at least twice a week in that upstairs hallway since he figured out Bender's schedule. Bender usually looks - looked, now, he guesses - at Brian like he was an idiot, but sometimes fondly, like it couldn't be helped. Those moments quickly upstaged the warm glow that Brian had used to depend on A's on assignments to provide.
'I wish you'd taken me with you,' Brian thinks, or, 'I'm yours. I could be yours if you'd just take me.' That's not going to happen though, not least because Brian knows it's stupid, knows he'll get into college somewhere and that's his path out, his path to finding a life, a person, that he wants, that wants him back.
John doesn't want him back.
The best chance Brian ever had of Bender laying hands on him was seconds before he suffered the same casual violence that Moliere had. He's not lonely enough to want that. Yet.
Brian watches, frozen in something that's closer to shock than fear, as almost the last person he'd expect walks through the door of a Perkins just off I-80, in the middle of Pennsylvania on a cold, dark Saturday afternoon. It's hardly Spring Break, as presented by MTV.
Brian's 500 miles from home, whichever place home is. He doesn't belong here, but it looks like Bender does. Bender, or John, or whatever he's calling himself these days, he still walks around like he owns the world. He slaps two guys on the shoulder in friendly greeting, and wobbles the pencil-holder on the hostess's desk. His left hand drifts across the furniture as he walks, seat-table-seat-table like it's on roller-coaster rails. Most of the tables aren't set, but where they are, Bender's hand leaves the napkin-wrapped utensils slightly askew.
'Touch me.' Brian thinks. 'Muss me up.' So, that hasn't changed either.
Bender - "John," he says. "Jesus, Brian. Just call me John" - can't keep his hands off Brian's plate, the hood of Brian's car, the door jamb as they pass from an overheated bar five miles and four hours down the road into the cold dry air outside. Brian had showed John his drivers license, and he'd tested the edges more than the bartender had. John couldn't keep his hands off Brian's ass either. Brian's never shot a worse game of pool in his life.
"I don't have a phone," John says when Brian asks for his number, voice flat in the still, damp parking lot air. It seems impossible, but it also seems rude to push him on it.
"I, uh, I do," Brian says. He writes down his parents' home number, the number for the phone on his hall in the dorm, his mailing address in Cambridge, his street address, each carefully labeled on the sheet of looseleaf paper he rips out of the first binder he can lay hands on. John folds it in half, then in half again, and slides it into the back pocket of his pants.
John doesn't say he'll call, but he does grip Brian by the back of the neck and trace the edge of Brian's jaw with his thumb. Then he checks over his shoulder and pulls open the back seat of Brian's 1980 Corolla.
It turns out that John Bender, three years out of Shermer, can laugh at himself, and at Brian so that it doesn't hurt. He goes in for a kiss while they're twisted around each other like a bar puzzle. Brian's never made out with someone in a car before, and John is built to operate on Oldsmobile scale, but they manage. John's good with his hands, and in high school for some reason that hadn't occurred to Brian as a double entendre, even though he had long since learned what one was.
Brian loves that John still acts like the world belongs to him, and hopes that it feels closer to the truth. Brian is part of that world, right now, even if they can't get their hips close enough to press against each other. Brian unzips his slacks, stealthy, one hand nearly flat on his abdomen, and John is there right away, freeing Brian's dick from his briefs, pulling back to lick his palm. Brian unbuckles John's belt with a rattle and clank, hardly needs to unbutton the fly to get his hand inside the waistband, pressing down along John's dick.
"Happy Birthday," John says.
Six years later, Brian skirts a group of soldiers in the atrium at Hartsfield and runs straight into a guy who's paying more attention to the folder in his hand than to where he's going. Looking up to apologize, he meets a man's eyes and turns into a gawky kid again.
Brian's got a couple hours layover before his next flight. He'd been planning on spending it reviewing the manual for the system in Dallas. John was the victim of an early, shared airport shuttle tailored to a corporate training budget. There are worse ways to spend it than at an airport bar. After his first beer, when Brian orders another for each of them, John fluffs up the hair on the back of Brian's head and he smiles
"I'd like to say that I saw, y'know, 'the error of my ways,' studied hard, went to college, 'lived up to my potential' but," John shrugs. "Turns out that I'm pretty shitty in a classroom no matter where it's located. It wasn't just Shermer. I got in early at a Home Depot, though, management track, and they're, y'know, expanding. This training though. Market analysis. Dunno, man, if I only have to do this twice a year, I guess I can handle it."
It's on the tip of Brian's tongue to say the polite thing, that of course Bender wasn't stupid, that he hadn't done all that badly at Shermer, but he'd seen John's file during a volunteer shift in the school's front office that had left his heart pounding, convinced that he was going to get caught in the student records room, that he'd be suspended or maybe even expelled.
He'd gotten Bender's home address, too, but by that point, it'd been too late to find John, and Brian had been too scared to knock on the door and encounter Mr. Bender. He still drives past the place, when he's home for Christmas.
When it's time to go find his gate, Brian goes in for the hug that he'd been too skittish to try for, dead sober. John's hair smells like a shampoo Brian doesn't recognize, and weirdly, the lingering scent of freshly-cut pine. Maybe they'd been in a store. Hell, maybe he bathes in sawdust.
"I know you've got a phone now," Brian says. "And I bet you have an e-mail, too. Are you going to let me call you this time?"
"Sorry," John says, but this time he smirks. "Business only."
"I could be business," Brian says.
"No," John says after a moment's pause. "I don't think you could."
"Can I have it anyway?" Brian asks. It's been far too easy to escape John's gravity. He'd like just one tether.
"Would you have called?" Not 'will you' he asks. 'Would you have.'
Brian feels his neck flush as he's thinking about it. "Probably not," he admits. "I would've kept it, though."
"Oh, I kept it," John says, pulling a ballpoint pen from his pocket and writing a number on a bar napkin in blocky numerals, careful not to tear through the flimsy paper. When he's satisfied with it, he folds the napkin over into a triangle and tucks it into the pocket of Brian's blazer like a handkerchief.