Guardians and Angels | Chapter Two (Part 8)

His father was standing in his bedroom doorway longer than we realized. He took in everything we were doing with his cold calculating coyote-like eyes; gathering all the details. He knew exactly what he saw. He saw the thunderbolts sparking between us, he smelled our magnetic fields entwining, he heard our heartbeats beating... as one.

And he was not happy about it.

He stood in his son's bedroom doorway for ten seconds, perhaps. Ten long, unguarded seconds that were so revealing they may as well have been a thousand lifetimes playing out in slow motion. It was enough time for him to see how close our lips were, how close our hips were, how his fist beat upon my chest to the beat of my favorite song, and how I closed my eyes in anticipation of his next move.

His father was one of those men who could make up their mind with a single glance. In the time it takes you to recognize the color "red" when you see it, he could determine what he thought about another man. Later on in my life I would wonder how many shades of red he saw in the ten seconds he stood there watching us dance as the music faded away. Ten seconds is a long time to watch your son dance with another boy.

"I said"

Long Pause.

He has eyes like a coyote, I thought to myself.

"What"

"Are"

"You"

"Two"

"Boys"

"Doing?"

The last word came out with a sneer attached to it, falling from his mouth and clanging like cutlery upon steel, sharp and slicing. His ecru-colored teeth were showing through thin lips, the color of bruises as he spit out his question toward us. His query fell forth like afterbirth, bloody and twisted, revealing a slickness that pulsed inside him. For a moment I swore I saw jagged triangles of teeth lined up in rows like a piranha peering out from the slit between his too thin lips, enamel stalactites waiting to pierce us if given the chance.

His father was a watcher.

The type of person that watches and notices everything, yet you'll never see him look at you. He could somehow memorize every part of you in a split second and then turn away before you could catch him. He would act like he's never met you, never seen you, but inside his mind he has logs and files and boxes labeled with everything you do. I didn't know it at the time, but he had been watching me from the moment he saw his son lay his hazel and green eyes upon me one warm Saturday afternoon at a wrestling tournament in September.

He saw him stare at me intently, glancing over at me two, sometimes three times in a row. But no one else. He saw him stand up and move to the edge of the mat and cheer as loudly as he could for me as I wrestled my match. But no one else. He saw the way he gave me a high five for the first time, our hands smacking, eyes locking, smiles squaring off, strangers recognizing one another. He saw how we both looked over our shoulders as we walked away from one another... He didn't know it, but when our hands met there was an electric shock. We both felt it. Blue and yellow thunderbolts crackling between our palms in the quantum realm.

He didn't know it, but he sensed it.

Somewhere within his father's coyote mind he heard the faint zzzzzzcccrkkkkk! sound of the spark between us and his coyote senses kicked into overdrive... he squinted his eyes and he really watched me intently from that first day forward... and he saw something.

He called it "The Twinkle"

He saw it in my eyes.

That Twinkle

He caught us doing double takes. We both turned around after our high five, each of us taking a second glance among a crowded auditorium in the wine country of California. He saw something between us in that moment, something only watchers see, and he would never tolerate in a million billion years if it were true.

"ANSWER ME!" the Coyote Man roared at us.

His face now a snarling snout baring large incisors that turned into fangs. Any moment I expected a pink tongue to roll out of his mouth so he could start panting in excitement. Smelling his prey. Slobbering with hunger.

I backed away from him instinctively, my heart pumping with adrenaline and rushing blood into my face and cheeks. Blood that gave me away. A deep blushed red tone had spread across my face.

What shade of red is that, Christopher?

Shame

Shame is not a shade...

Oh yeah it is

If the crimson shade of my face didn't point out my overwhelming guilt, my wide unblinking eyes didn't help either. He had caught us red-handed. Flush cheeked. Rose-red lip next to rose-red lip. Flirting

Not grappling like young wrestlers... but DANCING?

And almost KISSING?

A squealing sound began to ring in my ears... a slow high-pitched ring, a tsunami warning from my mind. We were trapped. Defenseless.

I felt the back of my friend's arm, above the elbow, come across my chest and land, placing him in between me and the rabid Coyote Man. It found my sternum, and pushed back hard when I wasn't expecting it. My eyes, still taking in the massive pale yellow and tan man standing in front of me, his fist now clenching as his rhetorical question lay hanging in the thick air like a steaming carcass.

"We weren't doing anything!" I heard my friend exclaim as I fell backward and tripped over my feet. His bed was behind me so I fell back and half sat, half tumbled, rocking back and then forth, then pulled myself upward.

As I sat up I heard his father's fist connect with his face more than actually seeing it. It was a dull thud with a clink of teeth clattering together as the knuckles collided with his cheekbone.

It sounded like a loose fist shaking two dice together before you blow on them for good luck. From his mouth a sound I can barely describe arose, a sound I never want to hear fill a room again, a small yelp almost.

It came out of him as a half-cry, half wail, a little boy noise springing forth from a young man’s throat, a high-pitched exclamation full of pain.

"Don't talk back to me!" his father spat as my friend crumbled to his knees, his hands covering his face as he knelt to the carpet.

"Ooww, owww, owwww. Owww!" siren wails from a human throat

He rocked back and forth on his knees a few times and pulled his palms away to reveal the crimson splatter of his blood glistening as he clenched his fingers back into fists. I heard a growling, a deep guttural throat noise emerge, a sound I never expected from him. He sounded like a wolverine with a chainsaw, a tornado and a volcano emerging at once. A split second later he sprang up toward his father and flung himself, shoulder first, straight into his hips, pushing with his arms, and shoving him out of the bedroom doorway.

Nothing was getting to me.

He was my guardian.

"Get the fuck out of my room!" he screamed.

Blood the color of ruby red wine spilling from his nose. Shades of garnet, deepening into burgundy as the blood coagulated upon his bronzed skin. Flowing in tendrils down the corner of his lips and dripping from his chin onto the carpet below.

Drip

Drip

Drip

"I just came to tell you I'm giving you your damn dog back!" his father responded, gaining his balance, now standing tall again in the hallway.

"I didn't know I was going to stumble onto a fucking sausage party," he half snickered and half giggled to himself. His eyes glancing toward me as I sat on the edge of the bed staring back toward him, beet red. Petrified.

"Shut the fuck up!" my friend screamed.

The door slammed in his father's face. A quick twist of his blood-covered wrist and a firm click and the lock was secured. The threat was now on the other side again but I knew it wouldn't hold him back if he really wanted to come in. All it would take would be one solid kick. We both instinctively moved toward the dresser to move it against the door. Little piggies in a house made of wood.

"She's outta control," he said through the door. A low mumble now, a complete change in tone that terrified me more than anything. When the bedroom door slammed shut a new personality emerged from the other side somehow, as if the noise triggered a more sinister level of demon. A deep guttural voice rumbled from the other side.

"She's just like you," he growled.

"Afraid of everything."

"Mean"

"Spoiled Rotten"

"Disrespectful"

"Ungrateful" he continued, his voice more and more sinister with each word. Poisoning our ears with the taste of his distaste.

"Doomed" he spat out

"You know what happens if she bites me one more time, don't you, Malachi?"

Malachi? I thought his name was Kai?

Malachi... Kai

Kai

I saw Kai clench his fists and place his forehead on the door. He banged it against the wood a couple of times softly and gritted his teeth. Eyes closed tightly shut, face crunched with tears squeezing out the corners. Through his perfectly white straight teeth I heard him say in the most clear and sweet voice I could imagine,

"If you harm her... I'll kill you"

The laugh that emerged as a response from the other side of the door as his "father" descended the stairs didn't come from a man born of this earth.

It didn't come from a person at all.

It came from something grotesque and salivating, a creature who watched from the distance for a long time while we were too preoccupied to notice.

It came from our murderer.

We both somehow knew it. From inside our little snow globe world that had been shaken and upended that night as the sun set over the Pacific Ocean, we found out how high the stakes were. As that demon-coyote laugh trailed through his house and grew further away we heard the front door slam and Kai looked over at me, blood cracked and dried upon his handsome face, hazel eyes on fire with plots of revenge that he couldn't wait to tell me as we grabbed our clothes to plan our escape.

"Can I sleep at your place tonight?" he asked for the first time.