All the characters and events in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, either living or dead, is entirely unintentional.
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PJ
D'n'M Part 7.
From Chapter 7:
"Yes, Nico has a beautiful body, I'm not gonna lie about that, but it's a boy's body and I don't want a boy's body. I want a man's body. Your body. But it's not just your body that I want. What I want more than anything in the world is the beautiful, kind, fun, loving man who inhabits that body. I want my friend, my husband, my lover." Milo moved his hands and took them from D's shoulders and placed them one on each side of his face. "I want you -- now and forever. Not Nico, not anyone else. You, Daniel de Beer-Reed. I, Milo de Beer-Reed, I want you!" Then slowly, carefully, gently, Milo edged forward to close the last few inches that separated them and brought his lips to meet D's in the most loving and, he hoped, convincing way.
If this doesn't work,' he thought, Then we are well and truly fucked!'
Chapter 8:
Milo felt himself falling into the moment, into the magic of the kiss. Every drop of his blood seemed to be being pumped either to his lips or to his dick, both were filling and becoming more and more alive and sensitive with every exhilarating second that passed. If he'd been compiling a dictionary, this was the definition he'd write for the word `euphoria'.
This is right. This is how it should be,' he thought. This is home.'
And he knew that D was feeling it too, knew because the same parts of his body were responding in just the same way. The urgency and desire were unmistakable. What was the point of words? Who needed them? Why bother to talk any more about Buenos Aires and what did or didn't happen in that stupid hotel bedroom? This simple, amazing, breath-taking kiss was doing all the talking that was necessary. All the misunderstandings and tensions of the past days and weeks -- and particularly the last couple of days -- could all be put behind them and forgotten about. The future was what mattered now, their future, his and D's and Nico's.
Deep down he'd known all along, of course, that D would come around. How could he have doubted it? After all, they were D'n'M, the indivisible partnership. And this kiss was all that was needed to prove it. Except. Except ..
Suddenly there was no longer any amazing or breath-taking or even ordinary kiss. Suddenly, Milo realised that his lips were no longer pressed against D's, that his clothed body was no longer pressed against D's naked one, that the euphoric feeling had vanished like a desert mirage.
"No, M. No! Stop! This isn't gonna work. Stop!"
Milo could hear the words, knew it was D's voice speaking them, but he could make no sense of them. No sense at all. Just seconds ago everything was perfect and the world that had been turned upside down was well on its way to being right side up and back on track. So why was D telling him to stop? That this' -- whatever this' was - wasn't going to work?
"We have to talk," Dan said as he abruptly turned away and walked across the room to the dresser over against the wall by the window and took a pair of boxer briefs from the top drawer.
"We can't just pretend that none of the last couple of days ever happened. A kiss and a jump into bed and a quick fuck aren't going to cut it." As D moved around the room Milo stood fixed to the spot. He didn't think he'd ever heard D sound so determined.
"You need to go and give me time to finish dressing. Go to the kitchen and make some coffee. I'll be there in five minutes, tops. And then we're gonna talk, and listen to each other, and we're not gonna stop until we've both agreed on how we're gonna make this whole Dan, Milo and Nico thing work. If we can make it work."
Milo wanted to argue that talking was exactly what they didn't need to do, that they just needed to get on with building the new family that Kate had so wanted for her boy. And he definitely liked the idea of jumping into bed and the quick fuck (though in his head it wasn't quick and certainly wasn't just a fuck). But the look on D's face told him that this wasn't the time to do anything other than what he'd been instructed, so he nodded, turned around and made his way back to the kitchen.
As he finished dressing -- jeans, T and hoodie -- Dan couldn't stop thinking about the kiss. He didn't want to but he couldn't help himself. It had been everything that any kiss between him and M had ever been, in fact his lips and his dick were still pumping with the last of the blood that had flowed there as soon as M had closed the gap between them. For those few seconds all the tensions and doubts and negativity of the last few months had melted away as if they'd never been. It had just been him and M, their bodies moulding to each other like the two halves of a Ying and Yang. But, Dan reminded himself, it wasn't just him and M any more, there was Nico, and what had been a smooth and fluid circle of two halves was now a triangle with straight edges and sharp corners. Geometry had never been one of his great strengths at Greenside High but Dan remembered enough to know that circles and triangles each have their very separate places in the world of mathematics, and that the rules that applied to one weren't going to fit for the other.
He also knew that it would be way too easy to convince himself that a triangle could defy all the rules laid down by those ancient Greek guys like Pythagoras and Euclid and, somehow, go rolling along pretty much exactly like a circle; too easy to pretend that taking Nico into their home and into their lives would be totally straightforward and trouble-free; too easy to park what had (or hadn't) happened in Buenos Aires in a dark corner of his mind and try to forget about it. But he knew that that simply couldn't be, and by the time he was slipping his feet into his favourite sliders he also knew what it was that he needed M to hear him say.
It wasn't until Milo heard Dan coming down the hallway towards the kitchen that he started doing anything about the coffee. What had he been doing in the intervening five minutes? Nothing, unless you count going over and over in his head all the possible things that D might be going to say. Worst case scenario was: It's all over, I've packed a bag, I'm going back to mum and dad.' Best case: We've had a shitty few months, let's pretend they never happened, you me and Nico will make a great family.' And being honest with himself, he had no idea which way the `talk' with D was going to go, unlike the two halves of his mind, with each half favouring one of the two very contrasting possible outcomes. Milo -- confused, vulnerable, anxious Milo - just wanted it all to be over, one way or the other (though with a strong and understandable preference for the best case option). He felt as if every nerve in his body had been through a grinder. The one thing he knew for certain was that he couldn't bear the uncertainty any longer and that something had to give before he imploded.
"Do you want anything more than coffee? I could put on some toast or scramble some eggs." Milo didn't want it to look as if he had been totally idle while D had been dressing.
"No, just the coffee." Dan sat at the kitchen table, his voice flat and distant. Milo glanced across and was puzzled by the way that D was looking around the room, almost as if he'd never seen it before. Or could it be that it was for the very last time?
Coffee made and poured, Milo carried the two mugs over, placing one in front of D. He sat down opposite, elbows on the table, cradling his own mug in his hands and looking anywhere except straight ahead. Silence hung over the two of them, with only the background whirring of the fridge to disturb the quiet. Maybe they were both waiting for the other to speak, Milo in particular, afraid of saying something stupid or inappropriate and setting off on the wrong foot, making it impossible to keep this unwanted conversation on a positive track. Besides, it was D who had said they needed to talk so, as far as Milo was concerned, it was up to him to start.
"Look, M, I know you don't want to do this, talking about stuff I mean, but I've got things I've got to say to you and, even if you don't say anything, I need you to listen. And I know you're a good listener `cause you do it every day with the kids at work and your listening helps people feel better and make sense of their shitty and fucked-up lives." This was all said in a rush, almost, Milo thought, as though it had been rehearsed -- which it had -- but now, having got started, Dan was suddenly silent, as if he had forgotten his lines and was waiting for the off-stage prompt to remind him of what to say next.
And Milo was thinking hard, mentally stopped dead by what he'd just heard. Shitty' and fucked-up'? If that was what their life together had become in D's mind, then they were definitely at the `worst-case-scenario' end of the spectrum. He needed to put his coffee mug down on the table which he did with enough force for a wave of half-warm coffee to crash over the rim.
Dan saw the shocked look on M's face and instantly realised that he needed to back-track. He ignored the pool of dark liquid which was starting to spread outwards from Milo's mug.
"Not that I think our life together is shitty or fucked-up." He paused. "At least, not so much that we can't find a way to put it right." He saw shock turn to puzzlement.
"I'm not gonna pretend that what you told me about what happened in that hotel room didn't shock me. But you know that anyway. It was like being pushed over a cliff, a cliff so high that you could never touch the ground at the bottom. And in one way that was good because you knew that if you ever did get to the bottom you'd be smashed to pieces. But it was bad, too, because, all the time you were falling, there was this overwhelming fear of what would happen to you when you did hit the ground. I don't know if that makes any sense but that's how it felt -- still does in some ways."
Milo nodded, but said nothing. All his professional training and experience told him that this was not his time to speak. His guts were strangle-hold tight.
"And I was angry, angrier than I have ever been with you before. Angrier than I've ever been with anybody, even Baker. I'd never felt so betrayed. You're the person I trusted more than anyone else in the world -- more, even, than mum and dad -- but, suddenly, all that trust and belief was blown away as if it was made of dust or cobwebs. And, almost, my love for you, as well."
Milo didn't think he'd ever listened so hard, so hard that he wasn't aware of anything other than D's voice, wasn't aware, even, of the spilt coffee which had inched its way to his elbow and was soaking its way into the long-sleeved T he was wearing. He was listening with his whole self and becoming more and more despondent as D described the impact of the hotel stuff, more and more convinced that D was leading up to the worst possible ending. But then, like a bulb suddenly lighting up a darkened room, he heard the magic word.
"Almost?" He daren't speak louder than a whisper.
"Yeah, almost. When I walked out of the apartment that night I couldn't get my head around what you'd said. When I closed the door behind me just about the only thought I had was that I never wanted to see you again. Never. After that it's all pretty much a blank, as if my mind completely shut down, until dad found me outside Saint Peter's and took me home. Mum told me later that I'd called Tom and that he rang her to tell her where I was, but I don't remember doing that. I hadn't even got any shoes on but had somehow managed to walk half way across town."
Still Milo stayed silent. D had walked barefoot from the apartment to Saint Peter's? Shit! He really had been out of it. And judging by the look on his face, there was clearly more to come. Milo was aware of a feeling of tepid dampness creeping up his arm but didn't dare risk the distraction of looking down to investigate.
"I've been over and over what you told me about that hotel room, trying to make sense of it, trying to figure out how the man I've loved for so many years, and who I thought I knew better than anyone else on the planet, could want to do something so ... so ... wrong." Dan's voice had become much softer and more distracted, almost as if he was talking to himself, as if he'd forgotten that Milo was sitting less than a metre away on the other side of the table.
"Mostly it was silent conversations in my head, but I talked to mum and dad too. Well, really it was them talking to me. Mum had a lot to say about it -- no surprise there, eh? She told me to think about everything we'd meant to each other since we were little kids. To think about what I was on the verge of throwing away. And she was right, but I still couldn't square that with the idea of you wanting to fuck a teenage boy who was still trying to get over the shock of losing his own mum. I have to tell you, M, that, at that moment, I'd pretty much given up on us."
And now Milo couldn't keep silent any longer. He had to know. Was there still a future for D'n'M?
"Pretty much?" The question was as non-confrontational as he could make it, in his best therapist mode. At first Dan made no reply, though there was no longer such a distracted expression on his face. "But not completely?" A little more probing.
"No, not completely. Otherwise I wouldn't be here, talking to you now."
"So what changed?" A bit more pressure. Risky maybe, but, nothing ventured...
"I s'pose the things that mum and dad were saying to me started to cut through all the crap that was filling my head. But the thing is, and I'm being totally honest here, I still couldn't get past the `sex-with-a-teenage-kid' thing. I thought, if that's what you were really into then I didn't want to be within a million miles of a relationship with you." Dan's voice had taken on a strength and urgency that hadn't been there just a few seconds beforeaa. "I didn't want it to be true but ..."
"So what changed? Why are you here, talking to me?" The biggest risk yet.
"Nico. What he said made me understand things that hadn't made sense before. Got me to see the situation from a different point of view."
"Different?"
"Yeah. That it wasn't all about you. That there were two people in that hotel room, and two different agendas. But most of all it got me thinking about the incredible strain you were under, not just over there in Buenos Aires but for weeks and weeks before you went. In fact, right from that first visit from Ms. Lamar."
Milo was suddenly aware that one of D's hands, the right one, had stretched out across the coffee-damp table. Tentatively, but hopefully, he mirrored the movement with his left, his fingers lightly connecting with D's upturned palm. The tension in his shoulders suddenly vanished like a rubber band snapping. It was as if his whole body let out a sigh of relief.
"And then I realised that I was partly to blame."
"What?!!!" Milo wouldn't have been more shocked if he'd had fifty thousand volts shot through his body. His hand sprung back. "How was any of this your fault. It's all on me." Definitely end of therapist mode.
Dan quickly reached out and took back Milo's hand which had been left hanging in mid-air.
"Yeah, it was." Dan looked directly at Milo. His eyes were irresistible. Milo didn't want to resist.
"But how?" Milo asked.
"First, `cause I let you go half way across the world on your own. The most difficult journey of your life - what you were going to do, had to do, at the end of it - well, that was hard enough by itself, but to have to go and do it without the support of the person who is supposed to have your back every minute of every day. M, I can't begin to imagine how hard that had to be."
"You had other things to do."
"No. They were just excuses, ways of trying to cover up the real reason."
Milo didn't need to say anything with actual words because the look of confusion on his face said everything.
"The truth is that I was scared, M, scared that you'd bring back this unknown boy, your nephew, your last link with the sister that you were feeling incredibly guilty for rejecting all those years ago, and that there would be no room left in your heart for me. I mean, it wasn't difficult to see how important he'd become to you, even though, at that point, you hadn't even met him. Oh, except in that weird video call. So, yeah, I was scared that I'd get pushed out. And it took me too long to accept that that was completely selfish of me."
Again Milo didn't say anything. He couldn't. His throat had tightened to the width of a straw and tears were welling up behind his eyes. Okay, so he couldn't speak but he could squeeze D's hand and reach out for the other one.
"And what sort of husband had I been during all those weeks when nothing seemed to be happening between Ms. Lamar and the authorities in Argentina? None. I just stood back and let you get more and more stressed out."
Milo opened his mouth to speak, but Dan continued before any words came out. "No, M, it's true. I knew you were having a hard time. I could see it every day -- trying to keep everything together at work, always having a smile for your mum and dad, keeping a lid on your frustration with all the bureaucratic shit. I knew all that and yet I expected everything to be normal between the two of us, business as usual, instead of taking the pressure off, at least here at home, so you could properly relax and feel that you could talk to me about all the shitty stuff. So, yes, M, I can't pretend that I'm not partly to blame for the mess we've got into. And I'm sorry. So very sorry."
As if there was a master puppeteer somewhere up near the ceiling controlling their movements, the two of them simultaneously stood up and moved to close the short distance that separated them. For the length of one heartbeat, maybe two, they simply stood looking into the other's eyes. Then, again as if synchronised by a greater power, folding each other in the tightest, most intense home-coming hug. It wasn't sexual, it wasn't passionate, but it was packed full of more intense emotion than any they had ever shared before. And words were left unspoken, not because there weren't any but because they weren't necessary. The closeness of their bodies, the sharing of their breathing, the comfort of the silence said everything.
Eventually (who knew how long?) Dan gently disengaged his arms and pulled back. He reached out and took both of Milo's hands in his while looking directly into his husband's eyes. He took a breath. A wry smile twitched the corners of his mouth.
"Okay, it looks as if we might have got over hump number one." The smile broadened. "But we're not in the clear yet." He glanced at the table and changed his mind about returning to sit there. "Let's go sit."
He led the way out of the kitchen and down the short hallway to the sitting room where he guided them to the sofa. He locked eyes with M.
"Like I said, Nico's version of what went on in BA, along with me finally accepting what huge pressure you were under (and not to mention what mum and dad had to say about the whole fucked-up mess) made me have a very serious think about everything. But can you guess what the clincher was?"
Milo shook his head. Despite the hug and the smile and the hope that had been building up in him, he still wasn't 100% sure he knew where all this was going, whether this was best case or worst case scenario, or somewhere in between. Keeping silent seemed the safest thing to do. Psychotherapist Milo agreed.
"It was because, when I'd thought about it from every angle and argued myself to a standstill, I fundamentally couldn't believe you'd ever do anything as gross as what I thought you'd wanted to do with Nico, that you basically wouldn't do anything to hurt me so badly. Because I believe in you. In us. Deep down I knew that was the truth and that, together, with help, we could move past this." Dan's voice was steady but not at all forceful, but Milo recognised the strength and determination lying beneath the words. He knew that whatever came next, this was make or break time.
"So, I've got conditions," he paused, "No, not conditions, more like a plan for how we make things work."
Milo nodded, still feeling silent-mode to be the most sensible option. Besides, if he was honest, he knew he'd accept any condition, any plan, if it meant him and D, and Nico, being together and starting to live a normal life.
"First we -- you and me -- we get help to make sense of all the crap we've been through lately. Call it couples' counselling if you like, and you can choose someone from work to be the counsellor. Shania, maybe?"
Condition number one came as a bit of a surprise, and there was no way Milo wanted Shania in the role D was suggesting, that would be way too weird, but he nodded anyway. Fine details could be worked out later.
"And the same goes for Nico. Not couples' counselling, obviously, but he has to agree to talk to someone. He's suffered ten times more trauma than any kid his age should ever face and he has to be willing to talk to someone about it otherwise he's never gonna move on and we're not gonna stand a chance of working as a family."
Well, no argument there. Milo was a therapist, after all.
"And talking of Nico, he needs to go to school. Mrs. Bolton says he's ready, even if it means she tops him up for a few extra hours each week. He's fourteen years old, for fuck sake, he needs to be with kids his own age and doing the stuff that teenagers do."
Another nod. Milo was imagining a very interesting conversation with Ms. Ohura at Greenside High. D looked as if he might have finished.
"Anything else?"
"Yeah, I think we should move house!"
Now this one was a surprise. A questioning look appeared on Milo's face.
"The apartment has been great for just the two of us since we got married, but it's not big enough for three, especially as one of them is a growing boy who's gonna need his space and who definitely won't want to hear his uncles going at it in the next door bedroom!"
The questioning expression instantly turned to something very different.
"And it's not as if your dad won't be happy to help us out. He'd do just about anything for his favourite grandson. In fact, I think the new development you've been working on down by the river would be the perfect place.
An actual house of their own? A family house? With stairs? And a garage? And a garden? Wow. That would be proper grown-up stuff. To Milo it sounded like heaven.
"Look, M, I know I'm asking a lot from you, but I don't want you to think it's all a one-way street. If we're really gonna be together on this, then I know I've got to man up and take my share of the load."
Milo's questioning expression returned.
"So, I promise that I'll do everything I can to get to know Nico and stop resenting him like I think I have been. I wanna build a proper relationship with him. You know, be the `other' uncle -- the nice one!"
"Yeah, right," scoffed Milo.
"And I'm gonna work by butt off to convince Hamza and everyone at Social Services that Nico will have a safe and loving forever home with you and me. No question."
Milo could feel the smile spreading across his face like the sun finally coming out from behind the biggest, darkest cloud the sky had ever seen.
"Right, that's me done," said Dan. "Any questions?"
"Just one -- when can we go and get started on the uncles getting it on in the bedroom part?"
What is it they say - the best thing about having a fight is the making up afterwards? Well, D'n'M certainly enjoyed testing out that theory during the course of that night -- several times.
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