Whistle in the Dark

Calamity bit and sucked and kissed with tongue, and Gabriel had known, long before he was meant to, what a life baked in the shadows of some woebegone existence looked like. He had been made to feel like he was being hunted when the guns weren't even aimed yet.

Flint was classically an asshole. The Sgt. Major introduced them with the impression that they might get along, but the second he’d gone Flint’s all-American smile had grown teeth, and he had made a few dispassionate remarks about wearing one’s uniform properly. Gabriel had adjusted his lapel pins in the bathroom mirror later, growling under his breath.

DADT hovered over them in those days. Soldiers were expensive-- primed and primped into proper shape, more man than any man in the country could hope to be, they were kept that way, too.

Gabriel lived a life of dual citizenship, church pews and fighter jets running on the same wavelength as quick-flick looks of longing and occasional, stolen nights with a civilian too battered by the era to ask if they could last longer than a couple of hours.

He hadn’t expected someone like Flint to be like him but there he was, laughing in a bar and making too much eye contact with Gabriel, there he was, sitting next to him in class and letting their shoulders brush for too long, there he was with his jaw clenched so hard it was white, chest to chest with Gabriel and letting his fear freeze the moment until Gabriel took his chin and told them they were going to kiss, God, they were just going to fucking kiss, alright?

And they did, a tremulous, haunted thing, and they looked away from each other for a week before they did it again, in the shadow of a plane wing with twin American flags stabbed onto their chests.

Service as a signed thing came with a price, though, and the military’s shared ownership of the two of them dragged them from sea to shining sea until they could meet in the hallowed, damp halls of a shitty motel, curled up beneath moonlight and the shadow of a broken air conditioner.

Flint’s pasted-on smile may have been razor-sharp but Gabriel learned to memorize its brother, all dimples, with his eyes softened into something more hopeful every time Gabriel looked at him. He went on runs with him and politely admired the curves of golden muscle, let Flint throw him into the sea surf and drank down his laugh, watched Flint try out a mechanical bull, denim-clad legs tight on the sides, and waxed poetic about it to him later.

Flint loved to lick cherry juice off his fingers and jog hiking trails shirtless and read thrillers with a little furrow between his brows. He had two sisters and a clan of cousins somewhere in Texas. He could outdrink, outfight, outtalk anyone who tried him, including Gabriel, and he loved to fly, and he loved the beach, and strangest of all he probably loved Gabriel, if Gabriel ever bothered to check.

He couldn’t tell which of them was more afraid, then, he only knew that both of them jumped if a door so much as creaked in their vicinity when they were together. While things had, allegedly, come a long way, the long-standing feud between men and their masculinity had never been more prevalent than in those days.

And while Gabriel had been braced to live life out in the open for years, Flint was unprepared for the fallout of falling for each other.

But Gabriel could wait. He prayed to God when the moments called for it, went home for Christmas to have screaming arguments with his father, and daydreamed about a boy with a dazzling smile sending him selfies from the sweltering backwoods of Texas.

They spent nearly a year chasing each other across the East Coast, on separate planes and in counterfeit spots in taxicabs, as though they could pretend they weren’t a ‘them’, weren’t in the middle of an intense tug-of-war for who could feign apathy best-- Flint with denial caught in the crook of his smile, Gabriel terrified of chasing him away. The wind-down of their meetings always came too soon and too often.

Intimacy caged everything they'd never say, featherlight touches shot stars down their vertebrae, an impermanent consolation prize keeping them fused together in the sheets long after it was time to say ‘good night’ and make an elegant escape.

This time, he wondered muzzily. This time or that time or never. He watched the curve of Flint’s back and the way moonlight slid across it as he slept. He thought of all the gas stations and drive throughs they’d driven through, all those moments in California sun and those splintered weekends in Chicago, every half-won argument and unsettled mutter of ‘see you around’ planted like kisses along the edge of his fingers, his shoulders, his jaw.

The hurt had made a home in him and Gabriel had wrapped himself around it, unwilling to foist the blame onto Flint, too. There was nothing for it; there had never been, because Flint couldn't walk this path and Gabriel had spent his life halfway down its length.

In the months that swallowed them whole every wretched step they took towards one another, Gabriel broached the topic and tried not to attach too many questions to it as though it wasn’t ripping him apart just to ask.

He would not have thought that the time post get-together would have been the hardest part of all of this, would not have thought baring himself open to Flint would’ve been harder than being naked in front of him.

Eventually Flint’s agreements to try, maybe, yeah we could try tapered off into mumbles and averted gazes and silence. The Colors blared outside their windows at dawn across state lines and countrysides, dogged both of their steps. How far they had not come, Gabriel thought with no small amount of bitterness, getting up and pulling on his boots.

It came to a halt eventually, to neither of their surprise. Flint picked a fight and seemed surprised when Gabriel shouted back, but he had long since grown tired of cold sheets only occasionally warmed and two people running towards different futures.

He thought maybe, perhaps, perchance, they would come back together someday, prove the downpour of love he felt (they both felt, Gabriel knew this in his core) could be their reawakening; could undo the formal salutes and informal locker room jargon they had grown tired of, the curve of a woman’s smile and peach-fuzz of her skin unappealing, distant, marooning the both of them in some far lonelier reality they were continuously abandoning the other to.

The front door slamming, Flint’s snarl of resentment echoing through it, was its own sort of hollow victory. Gabriel, his heart broken by his own hands before Flint could do it, lifted his chin; and in the name of duty, he went back to the bedroom and began making the bed.

…

When the thing he had daydreamed of a million times before came back for him, it was four years and Flint’s ill-fated wife and their subsequent divorce later, and Gabriel was on a bench hoping someone would throw him into the sea surf again. He had kept that laugh for himself, locked up in the hollow parentheses of his heart.

Its owner came and sat down next to him and Gabriel looked over. Flint’s eyes were wet. He could see in that instant he had not been so easy to forget either, right before Flint said it himself, in a kind of horrified whisper.

“Nothing else for it, then?” Gabriel asked. It wasn’t a question, but he framed it like one. He stretched, and put an arm around Flint’s shoulders. He didn’t have to ask how Flint knew he was here; their deployments had always been some sort of cruel cosmic joke, tying them together like cats with their tails knotted up, unable to touch but unable to stray too far, either.

“They repealed it,” Flint said. This was a question, but Flint didn’t frame it like one either. “I figured… might as well see if you end up getting sick of me again.” He swiped at his face, irritated. “Shit, man.”

Gabriel laughed. It came out very shaky. “Flint,” he said, gently, and Flint, leaning in, right there and so beautifully out in the open, didn’t say anything at all.