The One Where Cynthia Tags Along
LaVieEnRose

“Oh, and Cynthia? One more thing?”

He always does this. He calls me into his office for some completely tedious bullshit, stalls by going over it in way, way too much detail, and then, when my hand is on the door, tells me the actual reason he wanted to talk to me. For someone with a well-earned reputation for overconfidence, Brian Kinney is fucking chickenshit about asking for favors.

I turned around and crossed my arms. He winced, ran a hand over his mouth, and finally said, “Can you come to New York this weekend?”

“This weekend?”

“Justin and I have business in the city,” he said, and I couldn't help smiling a little at how easily the phrase Justin and I fell out of his mouth. Sue me, I've been rooting for them since the first time the kid waltzed into the office and Brian sent me home early for the first time in five years. Plus Justin gets me way better birthday presents than Brian does.

“Courting an art gallery?” I asked. One of Justin's paintings hung right over his head.

A ghost of a smile passed over his mouth. “Something like that. I found some office spaces I'd like to look at while we're there, and I'd like it if you could look at them with me.”

I tried very hard to keep my face neutral, because there's no fun with Brian if you don't string him along and make him beg for a little while, but I wondered if he knew that until that moment I'd had no idea if I was included in his plans to expand Kinnetik to New York, or if he'd be leaving me here with the great unwashed (no offense, Ted). Sure, I knew he'd prefer to have me with him—I'm the only staff he's ever had that he's tried to fire under ten times—but considering the relocation fee and the raise he had to know to know I'd be demanding, I couldn't pretend it wouldn't be a hell of a lot cheaper for him to hire someone new in the move and leave me to hold down the fort here.

And now he wanted my input on the office space.

He looked at me expectantly.

“I'm assuming this will count as a working weekend when you're deciding my Christmas bonus,” I said smoothly.

He rolled his eyes. “Of course.”

“And I'm assuming there will be dinner. Lobster.”

“Naturally.”

“Maybe some Louboutins changing hands.”

Brian picked up his phone and started to dial. “Now, don't be ridiculous,” he said. “You don't have to get me anything. And they don't even make men's shoes.”

I rolled my eyes. “I'll get tickets.”

“Just one for you,” Brian said. “Justin and I are taking the train.”

“All the way to New York?”

Brian shrugged. “He doesn't fly anymore.”

Right. The truth was, I hadn't spent much time with Justin since he lost his hearing. He didn't stop by the office as much as he used to, and his semi-regular calls to the office phone, filtered through me, had switched to emails and video calls on his cell phone, which weren't. We used to waste a ton of time on the phone, gossiping about accounts, and his school friends, and whether Brian was getting enough sleep, until Brian would start shooting daggers at me through his glass doors and drop some pointed comment later about how he didn't think he was receiving all his calls.

Now, most of what I saw of Justin was when Brian came in with a new painting for the foyer or the conference room, always perfectly designed for my, thank you very much, carefully selected color schemes.

It would be nice to see him again, I told myself. And it was still just Justin. There was no reason for me to be nervous.

I don't get nervous. I work for Brian fucking Kinney, for God's sake.

**

Looking back, I don't know how I managed not to strangle Brian before Justin came along. I guess because it was easier back then to put up with him when I had no idea how much better things could be. It's not as if I sat around wishing someone would could file down some of Brian's rough edges, because I had no reason to believe a better version of Brian was even possible. How was I to have guessed he had a heart way, way deep in there?

It's so many years back now that it's hard to remember, but what I won't forget is how gradual Justin's presence was, like maybe even when they barely knew each other he could sense that the only way he was going to stick around was if Brian never really noticed he was inching closer. And either it worked, and Brian really didn't realize that he was falling in deeper with every phone call, every dirty letter Justin had me messenger in, every late-afternoon drop-by, or maybe he made a conscious decision at one point to let it happen, to actually enjoy something for once in his miserable life. Either way, Brian never actually mentioned Justin to me, not during that first year of his quiet, less-and-less occasional existence, and not when he came in one Tuesday in May with every bit of light missing from his eyes. I knew what had happened, of course—Michael had called the morning before, to explain why Brian wouldn't be coming in, and I'd already had flowers sent to Justin's mother—but Brian strapped on a mechanical version of his voice and talked to me about work and only work so I returned the favor. It took six weeks, but he came back one morning, and he still looked like over-tired, overworked shit, but there was life there, there was something, and I knew without having to ask that Justin was back.

After that, the only reminders of what a tremendous bastard he used to be were when he had cancer a few years back, when he and Justin were split up a a year before that...and when Justin got sick.

Don't get me wrong, he held it together better for that last one—I guess once you hit enough crisises, you start to get a sense of how to power through, and God knows they'd had their fair share—but Brian still reverted back to the guy who threw his lattes at boards he didn't like and made interns cry on a regular basis. His calendar filled up with doctor's appointments and prescription refills, and he snarled at me about why the office didn't have video phones and why we didn't have a sign language interpreter on staff.

For a while, Justin came to the office more than he used to, but he mostly hung out on Brian's couch and drew or read or slept. I could tell he'd lost weight, and he always looked worn out as hell, but for that matter so did Brian. I asked Ted about it once, in a whisper: “Is Brian fucking sleeping?”

“They're in night school,” Ted explained. “Between that and getting in at six every morning, and by what I must assume is a dogged refusal to let it affect his sex life...”

I said, “How's Justin doing, do you know?”

“Brian says it's progressing faster than they expected,” he said. “If you ask me...” He glanced around. “Don't tell Brian, but I saw him break down at the diner the other day.”

“Justin did?”

He nodded. “He was trying to take someone's order and he couldn't understand it, and he'd been having a rough day already, y'know, with his hand, and he just started fucking crying right there behind the counter. Deb dropped everything and came and held him, of course. It was rough. I was the only other one of us there, and...afterwards Justin made me promise not to tell Brian. Said he's worried enough as it is.” Ted shrugged a shoulder. “Not that he seems all that worried to me.”

It was one of those moments—I have them with Michael sometimes too, whenever he stops by and wants to shoot the shit about Brian—where I'm baffled by his friends, and how they've known him longer than I have and yet sometimes act as if they met him last week. Anyone with half a semester of Kinney 101 under their belts should have been able to tell that he was terrified out of his mind, that scheduling meetings at ridiculous hours and taking on twice his normal workload was exactly how Brian Kinney did worry, but...here we were again. The man really isn't all that complicated. He just likes people to think he is, and his friends, for some reason I can't suss out, seem to be equally invested in keeping the illusion alive, even if all it leads to is everyone getting pissed off at each other. Thank God Justin's never been one to partake. From the first time he came in here, he was rolling his eyes at me about how transparent Brian is, and I thought, finally.

An hour later I walked towards Brian's office with some paperwork for him to sign off on, and stopped outside the doors when I saw him sitting on the couch. He had a pen in his mouth and a file open in his hand, deep in concentration, but Justin was asleep next to him with his head resting on Brian's knee, Brian's hand tangled up in his hair.

The paperwork could wait.

**

Brian took a half-day on Friday to catch his train, and I took a flight right after work and met them in Chelsea for a late dinner. I kissed Justin's cheek, gave Brian an overly professional handshake to annoy him, and ordered the most expensive thing I could find on the menu. Brian had me sit down next to him with Justin on the other side of the table so that he could interpret. Brian was dressed to the nines, of course, but Justin had on an open-collared deep blue shirt that made his eyes look like swimming pools, and he seemed happy, comfortable, darting his gaze between my lips and Brian's hands when I spoke. The last few times I'd seen Justin Brian had been rushing around with his arms full of files, so I'd only seen him lipread before now. And I'd never seen Brian sign more than a few words. I knew logically that he could, of course, but seeing it live was kind of amazing. Not to get too hetero about the whole thing, but Brian has lovely hands.

“So what's the schedule tomorrow?” I asked, and Brian interpreted, his thumb under his chin for tomorrow.

“The first space is in SoHo,” Brian said, signing while he spoke. “We have an appointment there for...Christ, I hate simcomming. Sunshine, interpret for me.”

Justin laughed and watched Brian sign. “We're scheduled to look at that at ten in the morning. Then Justin and I have an appointment at one, and then we can see a place on the Upper East Side and one in the Financial District sometime after that.” Brian nodded, and then Justin added, “And tonight Justin wants to go to Battery Park and see the boats.”

Brian laughed and rolled his eyes and signed something, presumably that, and Justin grinned.

“Yeah, Brian said you two had business here,” I said. “Finally scheduling a show?”

Brian signed quickly and Justin shook his head. “It's fine, Brian. No, I have an appointment with a neurologist.”

Fuck. “Oh, I didn't—”

“It's fine,” Justin said. “Everything's fine.” He looked at Brian, hard, and they had some conversation not in English, not in ASL, just looking at each other. “Right, Brian?”

“Absolutely,” Brian said.

Justin turned to me and asked me a question, but it was lost under a roar of laughter from the table next to us. Brian waved his hand to get his attention and said, “Loud in here, Sunshine. You gotta speak up.”

Justin wrinkled his nose. “Sorry.”

“You can sign if you want,” I said. “Put Brian to work.”

Justin glanced at Brian and then quickly away. “No, it's okay,” he said. “Just tell me if I start shouting or something.”

Our food arrived, we finished two bottles of wine, and I wondered what it was they weren't telling me. Brian was quiet through dinner, just cutting in to interpret when necessary, but once we left the restaurant and got into a cab he seemed to unwind. We walked under the lights of Battery Park towards the water and in incredible view of Brooklyn, and he kept his arm over Justin's shoulders and signed something with his other hand that made Justin laugh so hard he doubled over.

Anyone watching them would think they'd been speaking this language to each other their entire lives. You'd never guess that they'd lost anything.

Justin started to sign something to him but stopped abruptly, and his expression darkened all of a sudden. Brian just nodded a little, took each of Justin's hands in his, and kissed him deeply, leaning against the railing.

A neurologist appointment.

Maybe they were about to get something back.

We couldn't for the life of us find a cab, so we took the subway back to our hotel on the Upper West. Justin was delighted, probably just because of how pissed off it made Brian, but he fell asleep a few stops in, his head on Brian's shoulder.

“He gets really tired nowadays,” Brian said softly, and the gentleness of his voice, the way he rested his cheek just so slightly against Justin's head and pulled Justin's hand into his lap, left a bad feeling in my stomach, and I suddenly worried I was very, very wrong about why they needed to see a doctor.

“Brian...” I said.

“Mmm.” He didn't look up from his thumb rubbing circles on Justin's palm.

“He's...he's okay, right?”

“He's fabulous,” Brian said dryly, and I knew I wasn't getting anything out of him tonight.

Just before our stop, he woke Justin up and pulled him up with his hands cupped carefully under his wrists. Justin leaned against him, cheek on his chest, as the train slid to a stop. He tilted his head back to look at Brian, eyebrows raised like a question, and Brian smiled, and he smiled back.

“We'll see you tomorrow,” Brian said to me, as we parted at the hallways for our rooms.

Justin nodded. “Tomorrow.”

**

They were chipper in the morning. Brian sipped a latte and snapped questions at the poor realtor. “I've got to get Jennifer to come with us next time,” he grouched to me at one point. “Someone who can do their fucking job...”

Justin explored on his own, measuring walls with his arms, studying the ceiling, checking the floorboards. “What do you think?” he asked me at one point, while Brian was arguing with the realtor over the accuracy of the floor plan he'd been sent.

“Well, it's no bathhouse,” I said, and the way Justin grinned I knew he'd understood.

Brian came over and slung an arm over my shoulder. “What do you two think?” he said, signing to Justin.

Justin screwed up his face. “It's got no character.”

“Well, you haven't painted a mural for this wall yet.”

“Oh, I'm painting a mural now?”

“I thought a bathhouse scene,” Brian said. “To honor our origins.”

“Technicolor fucking in...” Justin scanned the wall. “Thirty feet by nine, maybe.”

“Exactly.”

“You could have exposed brick,” Justin said. “Pre-war touches. Levels. Not an...office, Christ.”

“I'm telling you, when I was your age, this was not Chelsea,” he said. “All the fucking married gays with their little dogs now...you should have seen how it used to be, back when the Best Buys were bodegas.” He shook his head and looked around. “Well, I'd rip up the carpet.”

“And what's under there, linoleum? You could have hardwood.” Brian started to sign, and Justin grabbed his hands and gave him a look. “Watch it.”

“I agree with Justin,” I said.

Brian sighed.

“And you do too, and you know it,” I said.

“I do not, because Justin's pulling a long con here trying to make us look at outerborough buildings because he thinks they have more character.”

Justin shrugged innocently. “I'm just saying, there's this gallery space in Dumbo...”

“You don't move to New York to get an office out in Brooklyn when you can get something in Manhattan,” Brian said. “Right there, you're cutting your credibility in half.”

“Yeah, I don't know what you just said,” Justin said.

“Yeah, I signed it really badly. I told you I hate simcomming.”

“I just don't see how it could hurt to look at somewhere in Brooklyn or Queens.”

“Why not just go to Staten Island?” Brian said. “Westchester? Albany? Pittsburgh?”

“Does this place have a bathroom?” Justin asked. “I don't have to pee, I just want to get away from you for a minute.”

“That's what you think,” Brian said, and he stalked Justin to the bathroom, body pressed obscenely against Justin's back, leaving me alone with a very frazzled realtor.

“Thanks,” I said to her. “We'll be in touch.”

We had another hour before they had to head to their appointment, so we ordered brunch at a cafe in Chelsea. Or, Justin and I ordered brunch, and Brian sipped a Bloody Mary, bitched about the calorie counts, and then ate half our food. He checked the time on his watch, took a pill bottle out of his briefcase and shook out two for Justin, who took them wordlessly.

“Teach me how to say something,” I said to Justin, after a mimosa or three. “Teach me how to hit on a Deaf guy.”

“Excuse me,” Brian said.

Justin rolled his eyes and kicked him. “All right,” he said, leaning forwards. “So here's what you want to do.”

I was practicing, and Brian was heckling Justin over his choice of pick-up lines, when a guy walking by stopped on his way past our table and signed something to Brian. Brian shook his head, pointed at Justin, and Justin greeted him and the two started signing animatedly. Brian smiled a little to himself and scooted his chair back to get out of their line of sight.

“Do they know each other?” I asked him.

“Nah.” He sipped his drink. “You think queers can find each other anywhere, but that's nothing compared to them.” He watched the conversation for a minute. “I can't follow this at all,” he said.

“Really?”

He shook his head. “Justin slows way down for me. I always forget until I see him signing with someone Deaf.” He grinned. “Learned a second language in his twenties, you know how hard that is? And fucking look at him.” He shook his head. “Hell of a thing.”

“Can't be as hard as learning it in your thirties,” I said, partly to mess with him, mostly because I have no idea what to say when Brian gets sentimental. It's not like I have a lot of practice.

“Nah,” Brian said. “I just...I get by. I function. He...” Another headshake. “Hell of a thing,” he repeated, softly.

Justin continued his conversation, and Brian and I looked over the specs of the space we'd be touring after their appointment, until Justin stopped signing suddenly, slipped one hand into his pocket, and continued one-handed. It was such a little thing, and I would never have noticed it if Brian hadn't fixed his eyes on him the second he hesitated, if he didn't immediately touch Justin's elbow and sign something to Justin, then the guy. Justin smiled apologetically at his new friend and they signed a little, Justin still one-handed, and the guy went on his way.

“Can't believe I got a Deaf person to say goodbye in under ten minutes,” Brain said. “I really am a superhero.” His voice was light, but he still had a tight look on Justin.

Justin looked at me instead. “He's nice,” he told me. “And straight. You should have practiced the line I taught you.”

Brian got his attention.“First you're teaching women how to hit on men, now you're talking to straight people. What am I going to do with you?”

“You were right before, though,” Justin said. “We are gonna be late.”

Brian nodded and took out his wallet. “We'll see you after,” he said to me, and he threw down some money and wrapped an arm around Justin's waist as they stood up and headed for a cab, leaving me at the table wondering what the hell just happened.

**

We were supposed to meet in the Upper East Side at four, and at four fifteen I was still alone on the sidewalk. I finally gave up and took out my phone to text Brian when a cab pulled up and he got out. He'd changed clothes; this morning he was all power suit, cuff links, show the realtor who's boss, but now he was in jeans and a sweater and his hair was messed up. And he was alone.

He lit a cigarette the second he was out of the cab.

I said, “Um, we should—” and he held up his hand.

He took a long drag and exhaled, eyes closed. When he opened them, he fixed me with a hard stare. “He's back at the hotel,” he said. “He wasn't feeling well, so he's taking a nap. Okay?”

“I didn't say anything.”

He rolled his eyes and inhaled.

“I was going to say if he don't go in they're going to think we're not coming.”

“They can wait,” he said. “It can wait five fucking minutes.”

We went in once he'd finished the cigarette, but he was distracted and disinterested and even if he hadn't been, we both knew this wasn't Kinnetik's new home about a second after we'd walked in. It was airier than the first space, but it was still blank, still generic, still the kind of place that needed a full wall mural of guys fucking in order to have anything resembling a personality, and Brian wasn't having it. We spent less than ten minutes touring the place before he rolled his eyes and charged out the door, and we headed to the nearest bar.

The way he was acting, I figured he'd be getting shitfaced, but instead he ordered a martini—my standard—for me and a beer for him and nursed it from a booth in the corner. He looked around dispassionately. “Straight bars are very subdued,” he said.

“Well, it's four-thirty in the afternoon.”

“You can get a blow job in the bathroom of a gay bar at ten in the morning,” he said. “If you tried to blow someone here they'd probably take you to get your head examined.”

“Is that a challenge?” I said, and he grinned with half his mouth and took a swallow of his beer.

I let the moment rest for a while, watching him start to decompress, and when I couldn't stand it anymore I said, “Brian, what the fuck is going on?”

He sighed and leaned back in the booth. “You know Occam's razor?” he said.

“Of course.”

“The simplest answer is the best,” he continued, like I hadn't spoken. “Don't think that there are two things going on when it's probably just one. Because what are the odds? That one person, that one fucking kid, is going to have two fucking catastrophic things happen to him before he's twenty-five. You'd think, there's gonna be a connection, right? But...” He gestured carelessly, shrugged. “But he was born with this fucking disease and a guy swung a bat at his head because I danced him around like a circus act. Because it's not a razor, it turns out. I don't know. Jesus, remember when you could smoke in bars?”

“Barely,” I said, and he rolled his eyes. “This is about him being bashed?” I said.

“Everything,” he said. “Is about him being bashed. That's the thing. No matter what we do, no matter how much fucking distance...no matter how many fucking bigger problems we have to deal with, it always, always goddamn comes back to the fucking...” He closed his eyes, shook his head. “And I can't make it go away.”

“Nobody expects you to,” I said.

He laughed harshly, took a drink. “Well, that's just bullshit.”

“Brian...”

“It makes him ineligible,” Brian said, drawing the word out. “For certain treatments. The type of brain damage he has. Could be catastrophic, they say, if they were going to go digging around in there. A miracle that he's recovered as well as he has, that he's able to paint, that he's able to...” He clenched his jaw. “Look how functional. Look at the little boy go.”

I sipped my drink. “This about a cochlear?”

He looked up, finally. “What?”

“That's brain surgery, right? To make him hear again?”

Brian waved me off. “He's not getting a cochlear.”

“Right, because—”

“No, not because, he...I mean, no, he can't have one, they said he'd stroke out on the table, but that's not...he doesn't want one. It's a non-issue. He's fine how he is.”

“You're not really acting like someone whose partner is fine how he is,” I said.

He groaned and said, “Not that.”

“If you're annoyed that I'm not catching on, maybe just fucking tell me what's going on instead of mumbling in metaphors.”

“It's not my place,” he said, and then not thirty seconds later burst out with, “It was a consultation for deep brain stimulation for epilepsy.”

“Epilepsy.”

“Yeah, that's what the thing with his hand is called. Post-traumatic epilepsy, focal seizures. He tries to send too many signals to his hand, and it goes haywire, his vision tunnels out, he can't control his hand. Which means he can't write, or paint, or...” He looked at me, waiting for me to fill in the blank.

“Or sign,” I said.

He pointed to me.

“Fuck.”

He drained his glass and signaled for another. “Pretty much.”

“I didn't know it was still such a problem.”

“It wasn't,” he said. “But he's been sending a lot more signals to his hands lately. Because he just...because Justin cannot, because Justin is apparently not fucking allowed, to have one fucking thing. His hand is fucked up from the bashing, and he's not a candidate for treatment to fix it, because of the fucking bashing. That right there, that's Occam's razor.”

I didn't know what to say.

Brian dropped his head into his hands. “I swear to God,” Brian said. “I swear to God, if he loses this, if this gets taken away from him too...I can't, I can't fucking watch this.”

“He can still talk,” I said, maybe a little desperately. “He can talk, and you can sign to him...”

He looked at me like I was crazy. “Yeah, sure, he can talk to me,” he said. “I don't care about me. How the fuck is he going to talk to his friends?”

“His friends...?”

“Not our happy little Pittsburgh family who couldn't be bothered to learn to sign more than two sentences to him, not those friends. His actual fucking friends, his Deaf friends, these people who are fucking...seeing him and listening to him and he is fucking...fucking flourishing, and I'm supposed to be happy that he'll still be able to speak and sit at home and watch my shitty signing?”

“You could interpret—”

“No,” Brian said. “It's...it's connection. It's fucking...intimacy, him and his whole Deaf...it's community,” he said. “You don't get it. Fuck, I don't get it. That's the point.”

There wasn't much to say to that, so we sat and drank in silence for a while. Brian drained the last of his beer and said, “I gotta get back.”

“We're supposed to see another place...”

“Another sealed-window office in the fucking Financial District,” he sneered. “No. I'm going back to Justin.”

I didn't see either of them until the next morning. My flight was at one, so at ten I was already packing up my stuff to head to the airport when there was a knock at the door. I opened it, and Justin was there with a bright smile on his face, looking nothing like a boy who got bad news from a doctor the day before. Brian stood behind him, his arms crossed.

“We're seeing one more place,” Justin said.

I narrowed my eyes. “Why do I get the feeling this place is in an outerborough?”

Justin turned to look at Brian who sighed and interpreted it, and Justin beamed at me. “Because I'm good at what I do,” he said simply.

We took the train ten minutes into Queens and got off in Astoria. A small, balding realtor met us at the station. He shook our hands and signed nice to meet you at Justin, and fuck if Brian wasn't ready to get into bed with this guy after that, in more ways than one.

And then we saw the space.

“It used to be a concert hall,” the realtor explained. “The stage was here...James Taylor played here once.”

“Any relation?” Brian asked Justin, who shook his head sadly.

“Eric Clapton,” the realtor continued.

Brian raised an eyebrow. “No shit.”

“The Four Seasons. Freddy Mercury. The Drifters.”

Brian blinked, looked at Justin, looked back to the realtor.

“Back in the day,” the realtor said. “Before the city was...”

Brian nodded slowly and put his hand on Justin's shoulder. “What do you think, Sunshine?”

Justin tilted his head back, taking in the wooden rafters, the steal beams. “You know what this reminds me of?” he said.

Yes, Brian said back, simply.

The realtor talked to me about specifics, and Brian and Justin drifted over to the stage. I imagined where my desk would go. Where Brian would build his little enclosure (obviously, on the stage). Where we would hang Justin's paintings.

“So what do you think?” the realtor asked me.

I looked over at the stage, where Brian and Justin were locked together, swaying slightly, dancing to some kind of music that only Brian could hear. Or maybe not.

“I think we could be really happy here,” I said.