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Michael hasn’t moved all day.
He can’t bring himself to move. Can’t bring himself to want to move.
He can’t get away from the emptiness. It has a different flavor, this emptiness. His normal baseline is a generalized short supply of purpose, and he’s learned to live with that. That, and the dull ache that points to a blank spot where a family should be. Those feelings have been with him his entire conscious life.
But this is a new extreme. This emptiness feels alive. Like it’s actively sucking all emotion and rational thought from him while moving farther and farther away. A black hole. An glacier of ice that took the place of his heart when he met his mother and then watched her die in the space of ten minutes. A glacier of ice that started drifting away, unmoored, when Max stopped breathing.
It doesn’t hurt, even. It doesn’t feel like sadness or pain. What it feels like, he thinks, is death. Without, of course, the all-important loss of consciousness part. This is merely an observation he makes. He doesn’t feel drawn to death—he never has—and he certainly doesn’t want to feel it. He’s only ever chased oblivion of the temporary sort. Alcoholic blackouts. That sort of thing. He lays in his trailer and feels the emptiness. Waits, with no real hope or expectation, for it to pass.
~ * ~
When a knock comes at his metal door, he sees that the sun has set, that it’s full dark outside. His mouth tastes like cotton and feels like gravel when he grunts out a response.
“It’s open.”
Sitting up is a battle, and his tendons scream at being yanked into action. That’s an honest pain, at least, he thinks. Something concrete. He wipes crud from his eyes.
He expects Isobel, bringing him some fresh new spiritual insight about compound grief, or maybe Liz with some cockamamie scheme and that heartbreaking desperate gleam in her eye, a gleam that unconvincingly mimics hope. But no.
It’s Alex Manes framed in the doorway, a black nylon guitar case in his hand.
“Oh,” Michael says. “You.”
“Hey,” Alex says, looking him over, wincing openly. He lets the door click shut. He moves as if to step toward Michael, but checks himself. He grips the countertop. “Holy hell.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“You—,” Alex says. “You don’t seem to be doing . . . great.”
Michael looks at the floor piled with balled-up socks and empty nail polish remover bottles, at the sink filled with dishes, then looks back. He can guess how he seems.
“No. Not great.”
Alex looks at him with concern, assessing and evaluating. Ever the tactician, searching for clues to a problem that needs solving.
Michael makes a nodding movement with his chin. “You brought me a guitar?”
Alex leans it against the counter between them and shrugs.
“I didn’t think you’d be here. I was just going to leave it with a note.”
Michael breathes and tries to focus. Tries to remember that kindness exists, and that Alex believes in kindness, which is a small miracle when you think about it.
“You said once—,” Alex goes on. “Well, you know. About how it calms you.”
“I remember.”
“And I saw your hand was healed, so.”
Michael snorts, badly masking a sob. “Max,” he says, shaking his head.
People are always giving him things and then dying. Max gave him his hand back—gave more than that to more than just him—and promptly died. His mother gave him a feeling he’d never even hoped to feel, then was blown up in front of him. It’s not a pattern he wants to repeat.
“That won’t help me,” he says. “You’d better keep it for yourself.”
Alex doesn’t respond to that. He studies Michael with that shrewd look of his, intelligence boiling behind an outwardly calm facade. Intelligence and something else. It’s Michael’s weak spot, this look. The feeling of being seen, messiness and all.
He reaches for the guitar case in spite of himself. He can’t imaging playing music, but he can at least tune the thing before he gives it back. It’s something to do.
He unzips the case and gets to work, starting with the low E string. He’s vaguely aware of Alex filling the sink with sudsy water and washing his dishes. He decides not to object. For the next long while, the trailer is filled with the sounds of metal and glass clinking gently, the swish of water, and the occasional notes he plucks as he adjusts the guitar’s strings. When he looks up again, job finished, he strums once. Alex is watching him. The clean dishes are stacked neatly on the counter.
“That’s fucking hot, you know. Tuning by ear, without an assist.” Alex says. It’s a statement of fact with no real heat in it.
He smirks. He knows. He’d tried to impress Alex with it once upon a time, back in high school, borrowing Alex’s guitar without permission. He’d wound up provoking annoyance, which was expected, and an invitation, which was a surprise.
He can’t summon a cute response or any amount of banter now. It just isn’t in him.
Alex sits down on the thin mattress beside him and hands him a glass of water. “You have perfect pitch? I never asked.”
“Not the kind of thing we usually talked about.” He gulps down the water and wipes his mouth with his sleeve.
“No, I guess you’re right. We never did a hell of a lot of talking.”
Michael stares at his own feet. He feels amazed that there was a time in his life he was ruled by desire. He misses how simple that was. How simple and how rich.
It’s been quiet for a while when Alex breaks the silence, clearing his throat.
“Should I be worried, Guerin? I mean, deeply worried? Wallowing isn’t your style. And sober wallowing really isn’t your style.”
Michael sighs. He knows he should give Alex the bum’s rush and let him get on with his night, but he can’t bring himself to do it.
“I have some experience with trauma, you know. You can talk to me.”
Michael finally looks at him straight, really seeing him, and there’s something about Alex’s generous, expressive face, his earnest decency in this moment, that snaps Michaell’s resolve. He makes a decision to talk through something he’s been mulling over.
“There is . . . something I think would help. Not talking exactly.”
Beside him, Alex blinks, and his face cycles through a complicated series of micro-expressions. His Adam’s apple bobs once. “Anything,” he says, and it comes out almost a whisper, as if he’d rather not say it but feels he has to.
“Not, uh. Not what you’re thinking.”
“Okay.” Alex’s tense smile relaxes a touch, as if he’d been mentally plotting a way to get Michael to take a sponge bath first and can now dismiss that battle plan altogether.
“The psychic bond—what do you know about it?”
“Liz told me about it once,” Alex says, “how when Max put his handprint on her he was able to use it to show her his memories. She said she could feel what he was feeling.”
Michael chews the inside of his cheek, thinking about that.
“Can you do it, or only Max? It, uh, sounds like it could be nice,” Alex continues, but he doesn’t sound so sure. He’s trying to help, fumbling his way around this strange conversation, and Michael isn’t doing him any favors.
Alex tries another angle. “Liz also said she could feel when he was hurting.”
Michael nods. He felt Max’s hurt, after Max had healed him the night things went haywire with Noah. The agonizing twist of pain when Max was in trouble. Max’s death. And he felt his mother’s hurt. Her death. He’s still feeling it—all of it. The emptiness. It tries to suck him under again now. Alex’s voice brings him back.
“Does it—help somehow? The person who makes the bond, they can release some of their pain that way, share it out?”
There’s an odd note of relief in Alex’s voice now, a tone he uses when he thinks he’s landed on a solution to a problem. Michael’s head snaps up when he understands Alex’s meaning. Alex is nodding.
“What? God, no. Jesus.” Michael presses the heels of his hands to his eyes. He could almost laugh. “You think I want— I’m an alien, not a monster.”
“You’re not a monster for wanting to feel less pain!”
“By giving it to you? Absolutely not! No. And for the record, it doesn’t work that way even if I wanted it to, which I don’t.”
“So, then—what? What way does it work? Stop making me guess. You need to speak.”
“I just . . . okay, listen. When we were at Caulfield together and my mother connected with me through that glass, I didn’t tell you everything that happened. She downloaded a ton of information to me in a few seconds. She let me know I could do it—how to do it—the psychic bond. She showed me by doing it.” He plows through this speech rapid-fire, hoping to skim over the top of that moment.
“So you were feeling the bond when she—. Oh, god, Michael, I’m so sorry. I thought, maybe . . . but your hand didn’t have that shimmer.”
He nods. “It’s different, the one from her. It’s only visible in the moonlight.”
“And it’s still there?”
He tries to say yeah, but he barely makes a sound. He feels Alex’s hand gripping his shoulder, which must feel to Alex like massaging a rock.
“And something else.”
“Okay. What else?”
“The way it works when she does it, and when I do it, from what I understand . . . it goes both ways. I could see her memories and her feelings and she could see mine. At least, that’s what I think was happening. It was like a game of psychic volleyball in a hall of mirrors because I think we were both doing it simultaneously and I kinda lost track of where her thoughts ended and mine began.”
“And then while you were mind-melded, she . . . she died,” Alex says, eyes wide. “That’s a hell of a mindfuck. No wonder you’ve confined yourself to a sensory deprivation chamber, population one.”
He releases a heavy breath. “I just was thinking, if only I could confirm . . . if I was doing it right, in that moment . . . then that would mean she knew I loved her when she died. Because it was all I was thinking. I saw myself as a kid through her memories, and then I remembered being a kid, and I remembered loving her, and I did love her. If I was doing it right, she would know that.”
“If you were doing it right.”
He nods without looking at Alex.
“So you want to test it on me.”
He finally glances at Alex’s face, and he can see the face Alex uses to mask surprise, and Alex is nodding. And he can see the wheels turning as Alex takes this all in—all the nuances, all the ramifications of it goes both ways. “Oh,” Alex says.
There’s more to it, though, and he needs to be transparent. He blinks back tears as he admits the truth to Alex. His ulterior motive. “I want to confirm it and . . . I just need to feel something that you feel for a little while, okay? Something—soft and . . . kind. Maybe your nice memories of me? I know it isn’t fair to you. I shouldn’t ask. But I can’t stand this black-hole feeling, Alex. I had that glimpse when my mother connected with me, it was so much—it was like the whole world, I felt right for once, and then just as fast it was gone, totally gone, replaced by emptiness, and now Max is gone too and I really think I might be losing it. It’s stupid, I know, and I’m ashamed to even ask this, but you’ve always managed to be kind to me even when you’re calling me out on my bullshit, and do you think you could maybe consider it?” He wipes at his eyes with his t-shirt sleeve, which barely covers his shoulder, so he’s forced to hunch awkwardly. “I know it isn’t fair to you. But I’m kinda at my wits’ ends here.”
He notices that Alex is quiet and still. He’s controlling his breathing, his chest rising and falling evenly beneath crossed arms. He looks royally pissed about something.
It occurs to him that Alex might say no. He has every right to tell Michael to fuck right off, the way these past few months have gone. He probably should say no, because they are barely friends, and Michael has just announced he wants to role-play as an emotional vampire and gorge himself on tenderness he doesn’t deserve from Alex like so much delicious blood. But maybe Alex can help him brainstorm a plan B, maybe Alex will—
And then Alex is hurriedly undoing the buttons on his mustard-colored shirt and loosening it, making a place for Michael’s hand, tugging at Michael’s hand. “How does it work? Like this?”
Alex presses Michael’s palm to his chest where his heart is beating. Alex’s skin feels simultaneously cool and hot to him, like it always has, though his pulse is working faster.
He likes the way it feels, but he pulls way. “More like this,” he says. He takes Alex’s hand in his, lines up their fingers in a high-five configuration so they can weave them together the way his mother did in Caulfield. “It’ll probably be easier for you if you recall a happy memory before we start. If you can think of one.” He’ll die of embarrassment over this, but he can worry about that tomorrow.
Alex raises his eyebrows and shakes his head with that exasperated look he somewhat frequently directs at Michael.
“Michael,” Alex says, crisp and direct, commanding his attention. He closes his fist around Michael’s first two fingers like he’s redirecting the barrel of a weapon. “If I’m going to do this, let me be very clear about something with you.”
“Yeah?”
“I have not always managed to be kind to you.”
Okay, weird quibble, but whatever. Michael tries to protest, summoning a thousand examples, but Alex shakes his head, silencing him.
“I love you,” Alex says. “Full stop. I loved you when we were seventeen, and I love you now, I’ve loved you every day since, and I will always love you.”
The conviction in Alex’s voice borders on anger, it’s that fierce.
“I’m telling you because I don’t want you to be surprised when you feel it.” There’s a break in his voice now, just the smallest quiver at the end. Then Alex releases his fingers, flattens their two palms together, and weaves his fingers through his. “Ready when you are.”
Michael is too stunned to respond. He feels his palm begin to warm, then glow, and that means he needs to focus on doing this properly.
And so he does. And then he’s in.
~ * ~
The first thing Michael feels is lightness, a kind of pure entertained delight and admiration. He sees himself at the whiteboard in front of tenth grade math class, doing nothing the teacher asked for and working out an elaborate proof instead, getting told off for writing “gibberish.” He hadn’t known anyone in the room caught on to what he was doing.
He sees himself in the Crashdown, junior year, distracting a group of Liz’s friends so they don’t notice that Alex is cleaning Rosa’s vomit from his prized Vans. Gratitude fills him, and relief.
He sees himself sneaking into the locker rooms an hour before school starts to take a hot shower, finding shampoo and a fluffy towel waiting as if elves had visited. He remembers disbelieving his luck at the time. Now, inside Alex’s memory, he feels Alex’s mind eased, he feels useful, he feels a pang at how rarely he gets to feel useful.
He feels Alex’s trepidation that day in the museum, the secret fear he’d felt that Michael might have a violent streak, and that cruel voice in his head, and the shame of hoping against hope—and then elation, because he wasn’t hoping against hope after all, he’s being kissed, he’s kissing back, and he’s himself for once, his authentic self, and he’s wanted. Wanted by someone worthy.
He feels what it is to be on the receiving end of not with someone I’ve liked as much as I like you, and damn, he’s glad he had the balls to say it back then because this is a goddamn top-shelf feeling.
The memory of their first time together comes in fragments, glimpses, like fragile snapshots kept in a drawer and exposed to the light only once per year so they don’t lose their vibrancy. The feeling of breath in an ear, soft and asking. A lock of hair grazing skin, and the head it’s attached to trembling. A gasping laugh—the awkward geometry of limbs, figuring it out. Teeth against a collarbone. Strong fingers gripping the back of a neck, awakening something primal and deep. A nonsensical sorry, sorry, oh god, I’m—oh.
Then a blur, like a VHS tape on fast-forward.
Then a long series of meditations on his face, his smile, long afternoons and hot summer nights spent lazily and sometimes frantically making out in the back of his truck. These memories have a burnished quality, like an everyday tool handled thousands of times. Interspersed are memories of Air Force buddies talking about their wives and girlfriends back home, and a feeling of yearning, and regret, and a kind of storybook version of himself reflected through Alex’s imagination, a version that has left Roswell behind, a free and happy version, far from any Manes man, far from pain.
He sees a photo of himself tacked to the base of a lamp next to a hospital bed. Sees it before the lamp turns off at night and as soon as the lamp turns on in the morning—dozens of times, a hundred times—sees nurses admiring it, sees Alex’s buddies slapping his back. Feels a shell forming around a feeling of pretending—Alex’s inner monologue saying it’s okay to pretend, just let me get through this. He loved me for a long time. He did.
It goes on like this, a flood of visceral, undiluted, pure memories of feelings of love, complicated distant love, desperate love, I-know-what’s-good-for-you love and I’ll-fix-this-for-you love and don’t-you-dare-walk-away, I’m-begging-you-to-do-your-worst-to-me love. And all along, he sees his own memories answering back, the unspoken depths of his desire and his wild hope, the ways he wanted to be better for Alex, his joy at seeing everything Alex has become, his picket-fence fantasies and his library of favorite outfits and gestures and facial expressions he didn’t even know was a thing, frankly, and then his spank bank, the filthy bits, the wet heat of Alex’s mouth and the face he makes when he comes, and the face he makes when Michael comes.
It has to come to an end eventually, this flood of memories. For now. He has to find the willpower to come up for air, to give Alex a rest. He thinks of a morning they spent in bed together not long ago, waking up to glaring sun and the feeling of Alex’s head on his chest and Alex’s hand in his, of all things. He thinks about how for ages that morning he pretended to be asleep just so he could keep holding Alex’s hand.
He opens his eyes and sees Alex looking at him.
“There you are,” Alex says. “You believe me now?”
He knows the psychic bond will give both of them an echo for a while, making things messy. But he knows now, knows with more certainty than he’s known anything in his life: messy is no match for the two of them. Messy is nothing.
He takes Alex’s face in both of his hands and kisses him—a little bit like he kissed him for the first time in his life, and a little bit like he’s never kissed him before.