[For Jess' birthday]
You can't touch Chris when he's like this, so that night you touch JC even more than usual. You touch JC so much that after the show he presents the base of his neck like a gift. He backs up into your arms and you lick a trail of sweat from behind his ear.
You understand. He wants to touch Chris, too. It's how you both like to fix things, and when you can't fix Chris, you can at least hold each other's heads above water.
"If he'd been bigger --" Chris says later, on the bus.
"Oh, man, don't," you say. "Then he never coulda --"
"Yeah," Chris says.
You'd always thought the dog matched Chris in temperment, not size, no matter how you joked. Chris keeps saying, to no one in particular, "he was just so small, he never had a chance."
You never think of Chris as small because he fills a room like baking bread. Not now, though. Now he won't cry, he won't eat, he won't even hit anything. Not even earlier when you'd stood right up against him and tapped his shoulder and said, "c'mon, you know it won't hurt me." Not even then.
You sit across the table from him, counting it as progress that he'll let you that close. Even Justin's fed up, made you swap buses at the last pit stop. You slide out, pull two beers from the fridge and set one in front of him. He just rolls the lip of the bottle between two fingers and sighs. "I'm never gonna be a dad," he says, and you swallow hard.
"What're you --"
"I'm just not, Joey. I mean, Dani -- and. I won't." He bites his lip and you flatten your hand on the cool laminate so you don't touch him. "It's okay," he says, low. "It's better this way anyway, if I can't even --"
"Don't."
Chris shakes you off. "No, really," he says. "You -- you're good at the family thing. The dad thing."
Squeezed in a bar bathroom in Amsterdam, Chris had palmed you a condom and whispered some warning in your ear, something about how it wasn't worth all that work to write royalty checks over to kids you'd never see. Even then he'd been sure you'd all be worth something. Even then he knew you well enough to get that you might fuck it up.
Chris finally lifts the beer and downs it one long pull. "I guess I just never wanted to believe I'd end alone," he says.
"You're not --" Chris stops you with a sharp cut of the hand and he won't hit you so you guess you'll give him that much. "You have Kelly," he says. "You have --" He mouths the neck of the empty bottle once, like a hungry calf. "JC," he finishes.
You want to offer JC the way he offered himself to you but you know Chris would mind even if JC didn't. Chris wants more than a fix.
You say, "You have me."
Chris stares at his nails and says, quickly, "You have your daughter."
"Everything I know about being a dad I learned from you," you say, fast like it's a secret. Which maybe it is, you've never told him before even though you figured it out the first time you picked up a crying baby and said, "come on now," a bemused reprimand you'd heard him say for years to his sisters and Justin.
Chris shakes his head. "I get no credit for that," he says. "But you got your little girl --"
"I have you." You look across the table but stare at his shoulder. He sits up straighter and his arms pull back. He looks wider somehow. Bigger.
"You've got all of us," he says, and when you shake your head you meet his eyes by accident. They're wet and you look away because Chris doesn't cry.
You stand up and pluck the empty bottle from his hands, standing it next to yours in the shallow sink. You turn around and he's standing right there, so close you can see that his eyes are dry and his lashes are wet.
"You got all of us," he says again. He blinks and you touch his jaw.
"Come on now," you say.
like all good men who swim too well
it takes all that I have just to cry for help
END.
Credits: Thanks to STO and Kel for beta. Lyrics and title by George Michael. "You're a great dad" courtesy Will & Grace (& Jack).