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The states are full of dive bars and diners and Dennys’, and it doesn’t take a whole season for them to start blending together, kaleidoscopeing like gasoline slick across the surface of a puddle of rain. You don’t remember what city you’re in, most of the time. Racing wasn’t like this when you were doing it, so the endless parade of holes in the wall is just another way in which the sport has gotten bigger and faster since it spit you out.
You threw yourself back into it for Lightning McQueen, though, so you’ve got to keep up. Follow the spun-gold sweat-slick of his hair, the tapered shape of his back cutting through the haze of smoke and bacon grease, blood red bomber jacket embroidered in the 95 forever weaving just out of reach.
So now, all your memories are marked by things other than locations or landmarks. You don’t have a map anymore to find yourself on, push a pin into and track your course, so instead you use other signals: If the whiskey was good, or not. If there was snow on the ground. If they overcooked your eggs. If folks stared at Guido over the tops of the Sunday papers and black coffee, or if your crew blended into the horizon like fall trees the same color as the red southwestern sand. If Lightning wore a shirt after the race or if it he pulled it over his head with a single fist behind his head like he was reeling back to throw a punch.
The season is not a series of cities, it’s a series of subjective impressions, his ocean-blue eyes in the center of it all like you drove up the coast instead of crunching middle-America up under Mack’s super-liner. Everything is a sun-doused blur, except for San Diego.
You remember San Diego. The dive there should be like any other dive, but instead it gets cemented into you, everything about it whorled in scar tissue like a brand. The neon Budwesier sign reflecting red and blue in his hair as he stood in front of you, arm around Sally’s shoulders, flanked on either side in other couples: Sarge and Fillmore to his left, Luigi and Guido to his right. You are opposite him, leaning against the bar, on the outskirts of a line drawn in peanut shells on the floor. On his side, the men are not lonely. On your side, there are empty holes in empty chests, empty glasses clutched tight so palms aren’t empty, too.
“Like, everyone’s paired off in Radiator Springs,” he says, drunk and sloppy enough he’s acknowledging that line as he holds up his beer to toast it. Sally’s head drifts down onto his shoulder, because he wears risers in his boots, still, so he’s not shorter than her (he’d fit right against you, though, risers or not. He’d nudge up right at pulse level so he could whisper to your blood to keep moving). “S’fucking full of couples. Except Izzy, Red, Sheriff… and you, Doc.”
“Sheriff had a wife, Paloma. She died a few years ago,” Fillmore murmurs. He’s trying to get Lightning to stand down, you think, shut up and leave it alone and allow himself to be silenced by death, but Fillmore never says anything outright and Lightning never stands down, so. The truth barrels ahead.
“We gotta get you a wife,” Lightning says to you, reaching out with the hand he doesn’t have curled tight around Sally’s shoulder to press his beer-bottle right into your chest. His knuckles are cold between the glass and your shirt, but you still feel your skin blister. Everyone looks at you. Five pairs of dark, glittering, knowing eyes, and then, his: sea-glass wide and ignorant and hazy.
There’s nothing to do but laugh into your neat whiskey, so you do. You shake your head and scoff and say, “Now what in the hell would I want a wife for?”
Fillmore’s laughing now, Guido snickering as he reaches around and drives his index finger into Lightning’s ribs. “McQueen,” Luigi says, always thrilled to explain something, to draw and quarter you, gleefully expose what he perceives as your secret. “Doc is like us.”
“Don’t much like women,” you explain, reaching out and squeezing his girlfriend’s arm. “Except Sally.”
“I—wait, what?” he sputters. “You’re—oh. Shit! Damn, are Sally and I the only straight people on the whole crew?”
“I’m not even on the crew, don’t implicate me in this,” she says, peeling away from him. “I’m just your lawyer, Stickers.”
“Damn,” he says again, shaking his head, stumbling now that he’s not using her as a kickstand. You watch him sway, and dig nails into the meat of your palms to keep from reaching for him, holding him up. You’re always wanting to offer more scaffolding than he deserves. Than what’s good for him. “Ok, fine, then. A husband,” he says, holding up his hands and spinning, tripping on mounds of shells. “Sorry. Damn.”
And that’s how, at the end of this season, when you’re keeping yourself company with the memories you have of him tucked into your palm like a well-worn deck of cards, you can’t place the spades of the diamonds or the clubs a single other city. But you remember the hearts , at least, are in San Diego.
—-
You wonder if he’ll treat you differently, upon knowing. If he’ll quit touching you, or stripping down to his briefs around you, if the way in which you stare at anything but skin will make sense to him, scare him away in its stark inability to pass as casual. You wonder if you’ll end up as one of one hundred crew chiefs he’s fired, like chewed up earth and bits of stripped tires all falling into an open grave.
Nothing changes, though. He’s the same blind spot in your vision, a hazy orb left there in dead space because looking at him is like looking at the sun.
You’re very good at chasing the sort of things that might bash your head in, split it against a steering wheel or a windshield. So, it’s strange that you still want him so badly, even after he’s shown that he’s not the sort of man who'll fight you for it. He hurts you in more subtle, insidious ways, and that’s never been your style. Or, maybe it is. Maybe you race cars and you drink too much. Maybe you look for every brand of pain, and don’t bother to distinguish the ways in which they flay slivers of old flesh from older bones.
—
It’s a Holiday party, and he’s digging for the information you refuse to give him. Lightning relies on the crew and his neighbors to confess on your behalf, because he is the one person you can’t look in the eye and be crass with. You don’t want him to know about the men you’ve loved, the men you fucked, the men who loved you, the men who fucked you. The boys you kept around in the months before he showed up, who were looking for money and stability at the same time you were looking for something beautiful to keep your sheets warm.
You have the sort of blue eyes that will shine like sapphire until you die and the light fades from them, so even as you age, skin loosening while the muscles beneath them stiffen, you’ll always be able to find a man to suck your cock in a bar. But you don’t want him to know that. You don’t want him to push you anymore than he already does, always complaining about how you’re the only single man on his crew, the only broken heart, the only empty thing on that invisible line he’s not supposed to fucking talk about.
When he prods, you call him boy, and son, and kid. Anything to remind him you’re not afraid to put him into his place and dismiss him. Anything to remind him he’s young and straight and you’re old and not and if he wants to treat you like his pathetic, divorced dad he’s got to set up on dates, you’re gonna treat him like he’s your incorrigible son, your rookie racing project. You’re not gonna make friends if he’s not gonna be your friend. You’e not gonna wish he was your lover if he never will be.
You try your damnedest to shut him up and out, but everyone in Radiator Springs likes to gossip. Especially about you, because they want to tear you down from your frosted peak and down into the dirt. You’re too clean for them, so if there’s enough wine involved and he starts asking, they’ll lean in close and spill all your secrets. You’re in Flo’s kitchen making yourself another drink when you hear him. “So, I gotta ask…what’s up with Doc? Why in the hell doesn’t he date?”
Ramone cackles, and you roll your eyes, fist tightening on the glassware from Flo’s good china. “He dates, if you can call if that. But the only sorts of guys who’ll give him the time of day are twenty year olds looking for a sugar daddy,” Luigi says, the biggest drunk, the biggest gossip, always ready to throw you under the bus. “Pity there aren’t more eligible bachelors his age out here in the desert.”
“You talking about me?” you say to announce your presence as your ice cube clinks noisily. “Lightning here thinks he's got to find me a man. He watched the parent trap one too many times.”
“Hey! I just want you to be happy, old man,” he says, tilting all over the couch. Sally didn’t come with him to this party, so he doesn’t know where to put his goddamned hands, and of course, that just makes you want to hold them. Reach out for those calloused fingers, fold them into your own and look him in the eye like gazing out on the ocean to say, it’s the stupidest thing, but believe it or not, you make me happy. Even if I’m in love with you and you wish I was your dad. Even if I only love shit that hurts me, kills me nice and slow. You’re good whiskey, kid. You keep my glass half full, which is the same thing as half empty, but who’s counting when you’re this old. Not me. So stop. Please. Stop counting and let me want things in silence.
—-
Later that night once Guido and Luigi head home and Ramone is doing the dishes and Lightning’s learning cribbage from Flo, you wander outside into the snow. It crunches under your boots, makes the silver hair on your arms stand up, your breath a live, visible thing like smoke from a house fire. You’re lingering as long as it takes for you to sober up, even though all you want is another fucking drink. Anything to dull the ache, even it makes his eyes bluer and his smile brighter and you shouldn't be thinking about him in superlatives.
The sliding glass door creaks open, and you know it’s him without turning around to look. “Hey,” he says, standing next to you, breath joining yours in plumes, two burning houses, nothing but ash. “If you want me to stop asking about your personal life, I will.”
“It’s ok, kid,” you mumble, gazing out into frigid black. “Dunno why you’re so interested, though.”
He laughs, and it’s clipped, self-deprecating. Then he’s quiet for a long time, so you’re left to the treacherous minefield of wondering. Wondering what you don’t know, what he does, what that laugh was supposed to mean. Eventually he clears his throat and says, “Sally and I broke up.”
You’ve imagined him saying this to you so many times, and always felt shame at the assumption you'd be relieved to hear it, personally and cruelly triumphant. But now that he is saying it, you don’t feel anything. Not a foolish surge of hope, or the bite of self loathing brought on by such things. Just empty hearts, an empty glass, an empty grave. “You did?” you say, just to say something.
“Yeah. It’s a mutual thing, for the best, probably. We’re um, not telling anyone yet, until after Christmas I just know people are gonna freak out. I don’t want to ruin Mater’s holidays,” he explains, kicking the toe of his sneakers repeatedly into a dirty, wet mound of snow in front of him. You watch it splinter into bits of white, and wonder if his feet are cold.
“Why are you telling me, then?”
“I dunno. I just thought you—I wanted you to know,” he says, shrugging. “I didn’t think it would ruin your Christmas, I guess.”
You don’t know what that means, but it feels like a dangerous thing to touch too much, so you don’t. You can think about the minefield, and gaze upon it like staring into the darkness of the desert, but you can’t freeze your fingers, or kick snow. You can stand stoically beside him, reminding yourself to breathe.
Minutes pass before you realize how insensitive you’re being, what a shitty father figure (because you’re not, calling him boy and son and kid are lies, they’re scar tissue built up on old wounds he won’t quit picking at, like your skin is his to touch when it’s not). “M’sorry, kid,” you murmurs, awkwardly clapping him on the shoulder. “Are you doing ok?”
He laughs again. “Surprisingly, yeah. The thing is…I sort of knew it would happen. I love Sally, we love each other. But the whole time she felt more like a lucky break, like—this thing I was going to prove I was getting my life together. A relationship because I should have one, and I was hellbent on convincing myself I was mature enough to be in one with a smart, normal girl. But not because I wanted, genuinely, to be with her.”
“Well hey,” you mumble, heart suddenly racing as he fits his arm around your waist and hugs you, making you both sway there in the snow. You inhale from his hair because his head is nudging up under your chin and he smells like booze and tears and you suddenly realize how fucking drunk he is, what a mess, how you might be the only thing holding all these pieces together and he could fly to bits like a kicked snow-drift. You love him and he hurts you and you love the things that hurt you so you pull him closer, let him use your body to prop himself up. “I’m not the only single guy on your crew, anymore.”
“Yeah,” he sniffles, pulling away, eyes wet and cheeks flushed. “Don’t you leave me too, alright?”
“Yeah,” you mumble, closing your eyes, swallowing around the sickness rising like high tide in your throat. There’s salt and fish and sand and sadness, but it will pull back, eventually, leaving a silver strip of shining shore. “Alright.”
—-
Come January he moves into a cone, and then into Flo’s back house though most nights he stays at your place. And it’s the new year and you've already broken all your resolutions by not putting an end to this pattern as soon as it started.
You let him needle his way in—under your skin, into your blood. You let him drink in your living room and pass our on your couch. You let him buy a toothbrush to keep in your guest bathroom. You let him go on bad dates with girls out of his league, and you let him tell you all about them, nodding along with a skull’s smile plastered on like it doesn’t ache to hear about the way he tries to fill voids with hollow sex and top shelf booze.
“I feel like m’regressing,” he tells you one night, lips pressed to the rim of your whiskey glass, one of the many inanimate things you wish you could be, if only to get a little closer to him. “Like I was on my way to being a good person and now—m’just doing the same stupid shit I used to. Making mistakes. Running all over again.”
You prop your feet up onto your coffee table, and swallow a mouthful too big and too quick, so it burns as you choke out down. “What’re you running from?” you ask.
He doesn’t tell you, though, he just snorts wordlessly, rolls over, and passes out in his shoes with his face pressed into your couch cushions. Later that night you make sure he’s breathing, hover your hand an inch or so away from his lips, so that you can feel the steady exhalations. Even then, you don’t sleep. You worry, and you wonder.
—-
At least once a week the crew gets together at someone's house for drinks and cards and shit-talk. It beats nights alone but still you find yourself wandering out onto Flo and Ramone’s back deck or letting yourself into Luigi and Guido’s manicured succulent garden too often. Sarge and Fillmore’s place is best for it, though: they have a whole wall that’s nothing but sliding glass, and you like to stand on the cement landing around their kidney-shaped pool and stare back in at the party you’ve abandoned like a voyeur, far enough away you can watch your friends without hearing what they’re saying about you, about Lightning, about loneliness. They fade into a comforting din of laughter and there you can inhale chlorine and watch Lightning straighten up the kitchen with Sally, the two of them chummed-up all easy again because break-ups don’t always have bad blood, you learn. If the flex of his forearms hurts too bad to watch, you turn your gaze outward and gaze through the chainlink fence, listening to the distant rustlings of coyotes and quail sneaking around in the brush. The desert is quiet but not silent, and you love to lose yourself in the private world of creatures just living their lives, out there in the sand and the shadow. You get to feel like a bystander, like a ghost, and that’s easier than nursing the ache of loving him all the goddamned time.
Lightning never leaves you alone for very long, though, so always you meet in backyards, on back porches, through back doors. He pushes the sliding glass open and says “Hey!” as loud as you've ever fucking heard it, and you turn with your finger pressed to your lips, and shh him.
He balks, holds his hands up as if in surrender. “Sorry,” he whispers. “What are we looking at?”
“Listening, not looking,” you tell him in a hush, gesturing for him to come closer.
He picks his way around the pool, face pale with blue shimmery light, pretty as spring, as summer. You close your eyes so you don’t have to look at it. Then you feel the heat of his body too close, smell gin on his breath, and under that, remnants of Sally’s perfume from when he last hugged her, hours ago upon her arrival. Sometimes, after training, he smells like he belongs to you. When he’s nothing but sweat and diesel and sun. But other times, like tonight, all you can think about is how far away he always is, the north star hung a million lightyears away in the vast black of the sky. You plot your courses home by him, but you’re never, ever gonna touch. You try to make your peace with that every day, but then presses close to you, loops his arm around your lower back, capable of ruining your hard work with a single, effortless motion. “M’listening,” he says.
The owl you've been sharing the night with hoots as if you willed it to in your wanting, and he tenses, eyes wide. “Shit,” he says. “What’s that?”
“S’just a bird. Can’t hurt you,” you tell him, smiling because smiling is a reflex when you can feel the heat of his blood tucked under your arm like something feverish.You must say it too loud though because the owl takes off from the tree in a mess of feathers, swooping momentarily over the pool so that you can see the honey-brown glow of its body before its gone. You watch it leave together.
“Damn, sorry I scared your bird,” he says in his normal voice then, tipping into you, close enough to send you off balance. “Is that what you do when you sneak off mid-party? Birdwatch?”
“Hmm,” you say, trying to pull away even as he holds you fast. You relent, then, sagging into the heat of his arm, giving up because you have to pick your battles where he’s concerned. I“Not always. Sometimes I look at the stars. Other times I just watch you all having a good time though the windows. Like you’re someone else’s friends.”
“But we’re not,” he reminds you. “We’re your friends. Waiting for you to come back in so we can like. Play charades or whatever.”
“I know,” you say, trailing off as you begin to sweat in the curl of his arm. You don’t know what else to say—you don’t know how to tell him, how to explain what it feels like to exist outside something you should be a part of. You’re not the only old queer in town, but you’re the only one not partnered up for the long haul.The only one without a back yard to escape to. The only one hung up on some unattainable straight boy you should be mentoring. The nuance is lost on him, though, and that’s the problem. Why the words die in your throat, why you’re stuck outside of parties, blending into the black of the desert, wishing on birds as they call out in the night. Give up on understanding it, kid, you should say. There are things you’ll never know. But you’re drunk and exhausted and can’t remember how to talk when he's this close, so without meaning to, you rest your arm over his back, fingers digging into the too-familiar shape of his shoulder. “I don’t tell you this enough. Maybe I never told you, even, but. M’glad you came to town, rookie.” Even if it makes me sad most of the time. Even if I never noticed how breakable my heart was, before your name got etched into it ten times over.
He looks at you. “Really?” he asks, eyes big and blue enough to swim in. “You know, half the time I can’t even tell if you actually like me or just think m’some giant pain in the ass. When you leave—I wonder if you’re trying to get away from me.” He snorts then, licks his lips. “I’m sorry I make everything about me.”
Everything is about you, you think.
You want to tear away, but you don’t. You feel pinned down by his shock, run through the heart like the three of swords. “I am trying to get away from you, sometimes,” you admit, even though it is a secret, a confession, the sort of shit you've been trying your hardest to lock away. It just tumbles out, though, because you’re grown weary of silencing so much, maybe. The words breaks the spell and finally you pull away from his grip, stumbling away from him, scrubbing a rough hand over your own mustache. “Not—not in the way you think, though. It’s not that I don’t want to be around you. I just. I got shit to run from, too.”
“Yeah?” he asks, taking a step towards you, eyes still impossibly wide, spots of color on his cheeks you can see even in the streaky yellow porch-light, with the night pressing in from every angle around you like shifting, oppressive walls of black. You feel pinned, stuck, and in one more step your back will be flush with the chainlink. “Well. What are we both running from, huh?”
He asks this like he’s desperate for you to tell him. Like he already half knows, like he’s patched together the sad, ugly story in the bits and pieces he’s wheedled out of the crew ever since he first suspected the truth in San Diego. And so you imagine saying it, laying it out between you like a rat to dissect: I fell in love with you, obviously. That's why I let you drink my good whiskey, sleep on my sofa. Why I inject you into my vein one minute and leave parties to get away from you the next. Why I'm alone. Why I’ll always be alone. You say nothing, though, you just shake your head, studying the hollows of his cheeks, the way the lines around his mouth look more pronounced out here in the light from the single, moth-sought lightbulb. Sometimes he seems younger than thirty two, but right now he looks it and then some, and you imagine for a stupid self destructive second what it might be like to kiss the crease through his brow. To watch him grow even older, from a centimeter away in the same bed, instead of across this yawning chasm. “What do you think?” you finally ask, the chainlink biting into your back, cold even through your windbreaker. “What in the hell do you think someone like me is running from, Lightning?”
His eyes flash, and he bites his lip. “Close your eyes,” he says then, voice shaking but still stiff with resolve. “I can’t do this if your eyes are open.”
“Do what?” you ask even as they snap shut on command. Then you can smell his breath, his dirty hair. The universe tilts and shudders like a hologram behind the static shut of your eyelids, and you wonder if you’re dreaming.
You feel the heat of his body, then a shaky exhalation on your licked lips as he murmurs, “this,” before he kisses you.
You don't even register it as a kiss, at first. Just that your mouths are touching, he’s pressing into you hard enough you can feel the outline of his teeth through the softness of his lips, the stubble on his jaw scraping against your own. Then you feel his hands tighten into fists in your windbreaker, his feet bumping against yours on the scuffed pavement surrounding Fillmore and Sarge’s pool. He pulls away before you catch on and tip into the impossibility of it, his gasps tasting like heaven and fire and salt and liquor as he sways. “Fuck,” he chokes out as you stare down at him. “I’m so sorry, Fuck, I thought—”
Then it hits you, washes over your thrumming like a sudden icy wave. Everything else melts away: the world beyond the sliding glass doors silenced, forgotten, lost to the madness of a glass tipping over and spilling. You wonder if an empty glass is the same thing as a full glass. If something can be full of emptiness. Full of nothing. You cup his face between your palms, and kiss pull him in, so that his words turn into nothing, too.
He shudders, then he opens his mouth, and you’ve never been a gin guy, really, but it’s sweet and bitter on his tongue and now it’s your goddamned favorite. You suck it off of him, you put your fingers in his hair, you let him fall into your arms and lose your heartbeat to his, so that there’s nothing but racing blood and thunder between you. “Fuck,” he swears when you pull away to mouth down the ripple of his throat, hell bent on getting whatever you can out of this dream before it fades into ether. “Doc.”
“Yeah?” you say, reaching for his lips so you can feel your own name on them with your fingers. “You ok?”
“I dunno. I think so. I just—you need to know that I—that ever since I found out you were gay, this is all I could fucking think about. S’been driving me fucking crazy. I thought I was going insane.”
The words hang between you, suspended like the stars. You don’t know why he’s telling you this. You can’t believe it anyway. All you can do is suck in his exhalations, trace his bones.
You feel him out, put a hand up his shirt to slat finger between ribs, waiting to wake up, for his body to dissipate into smoke, but instead he just shifts and gasps and grinds as the chainlink fence creaks beneath your weight. He doesn’t go anywhere. He’s real and he’s warm and he’s half-hard against your thigh as he presses close, voice reed-thin as it stretches over a groan.
“If it was all you could think about, why’d you keep pushing for me to date, huh? Why did you keep dating?” You ask him, thumbing up the jut of his spine, still waiting for the world to end. All that comes is a strangled laugh, though.
“Jeez, I guess I was trying to drown it, I dunno. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn't want to want you,” he admits, rolling onto the balls of his feet, finding your mouth in the dark and biting it. “I told you. I’ve been running. I was scared. M’still scared, but more than that I’m hungry.”
You smooth a hand up to cup his cheek, to thumb over the bone of it, astounded that hunger wins out over fear, sometimes. In your experience, the latter always wins. But he makes you believe in new things. He changes rules, melts them down and sculpts them into something new.
Somewhere in the distance, the owl hoots again, sounding so far away. Your friends laugh at something from the other side of the sliding glass, and that sounds even further away, you think. The world is fading, and often you’re the only thing outside it, but not right now. This time, he’s with you. In your arms. Against your lips. “You done running?” you ask. “Because I am. M’tired, and old, and I think I’d like to just sit down for awhile.” Stretch out and lay in my empty glass. There’s room enough for both of us, I think, if we lie close.
“Yeah,” he says, melting into you, tipping forward to flick his tongue against the roof of your mouth. “Same.”
You kiss, and he spreads his fingers over your heart.