I am not a fucking morning person. So when Brian woke me up at the crack of dawn with “What do you say about moving to LA?” I swear I thought I was still asleep and having a very confusing dream. A very confusing dream with a Brian who felt and smelled like Brian and had Brian’s sleepy voice but who was suggesting we move...like as in pack up house. Leave Pittsburgh. Go to a place where people are known to be friendlier. And, like, do it together as some sort of couple? No fucking way. It was a dream.

So in my dream, in response to this truly crazy question, I patted the top of Brian’s head and managed to say something that sounded like, “Mmhmmfff.” And, in the dream, I fell back asleep hoping that the weird part of the dream would end and I could just get the nice Brian-y part to stay. Then when I woke up in the actual morning, he would be there and we could laugh about it.

When I actually woke up, I was impressed with how accurate my dream Brian was, down to the sweatpants Brian had stolen from me and was wearing. For someone who criticizes my clothes every second breath, he sure winds up wearing them a fucking lot. I really hoped he had brought some American Apparel shit back from LA  for me and that it was all too small for him.

I looked over at Brian who was still sleeping, wheezing a little through that deviated septum and otherwise just looking totally at peace and vulnerable in a way that I very rarely see when he was awake. I slid out of bed carefully so as not to wake him and went to make coffee. One of the first things I learned about Brian way back when I lived with him the first time - pre-sojourn to NYC - was, “Don’t wake up Brian.” I would never, or at least rarely, describe Brian as “cheerful” or “happy,” but Brian who has been woken up is not at all pleasant and much less likely to engage in the morning activities that make me cheerful and happy. However, I also learned, “Coffee wakes Brian up.” He has a Pavlovian response to coffee and it wakes him up in a way where I get none of the blame. (Sometimes - rarely, but sometimes - I even get a half smile and a gruff “thanks.”) But I also get an awake Brian. And goddamnit, I hadn’t seen him in three days and I fucking missed him, okay?

While the coffee was percolating, I began to paw through the bag of clothes he had left by the door.

“Found your present, I see.”

Brian was standing at the top of the steps leading to the bedroom, with total bedhead and his tongue planted in his cheek and one eyebrow raised. Fuck, he was gorgeous.

“Looks like I’ll be sharing my present.” I stared pointedly at his legs.

“Whatever, these were the first things I grabbed. Maybe if you didn’t leave your shit everywhere, I wouldn’t wear it.” Uh huh.

He crossed the loft to the kitchen and grabbed two mugs from the cabinet, just as the coffee finished. I swear his Pavlovian conditioning is so sensitive that he wakes up at exactly the time that the coffee is finishing percolating. He doctored each coffee the way we like it - plenty of milk for me, plenty of sugar for him - and I walked over to grab mine. He held onto it and leaned over and gave me a kind of sloppy kiss that made me so glad he was home and then handed me my mug.

We sat on the couch, twisted sideways so we could face each other. “I had the craziest dream this morning.”

“Oh yeah?”

“You came home and were changed already into those exact sweats, in fact. But then you asked if I wanted to move to LA,” I giggled.

“That is a bizarre dream,” Brian sounded vaguely bored. “Would you want to?”

“Move to LA?”

“Yeah.”

“Brian, that doesn’t even make any sense. I told you when I moved in that I wanted to be here, with you. Why would I move across the country?”

“Well, let’s say I was moving with you... Would you want to? I mean, you know some folks, have some connections. That animation program your coworker mentioned...what was it? Cal Arts? That’s out there. Fuck knows you were a helluva lot happier there than you have been in Pittsburgh.”

“Brian...Pittsburgh didn’t make me depressed.”

“Even so…”

“Would I move three thousand miles away, where I barely know anyone, for a school program I may or may not want to do, with you as the only person I really know? And with you, what? Working remotely? So we would both be at home all the time? Setting aside the fact that I don’t have the best track record in higher education. I like you…”

“Well thank you, you’re not so bad yourself.”

“...But that’s a lot of pressure to put on….this.” I waved my hand between us.

“This?”

“Our non-defined, non-conventional non-relationship,” I sighed.

“Hmm...well let’s say I didn’t work remotely. Let’s say I had an office thatI left the house and went to everyday. Let’s say we opened a Kinnetik West. What then?”

“It’s still moving away from all our friends and all our family to a place neither of us knows.” I suddenly tilted my head and squinted at him. “What’s this all about anyway? Since when are you so interested in what I dream?”

Brian shrugged one shoulder and shifted his focus to drinking what must have been the very last drops of his coffee.

“Oh my god.”

“Nope, it’s Brian. But I understand the confusion.”

“Christ, Brian, that wasn’t a dream?” I pushed both my hands back into my hair. “You really woke me up and asked me about moving to LA?”

“Well now, Justin, let’s be accurate. I tried very hard not to wake you up. You happened to wake up when I was trying to fit myself onto the one square inch of available mattress. Can we talk about how such a little guy takes up so much mattress?”

I stood up and started pacing. “Fuck off, Brian. Be serious for a minute.”

“Oh I’m deadly serious. You seem to defy all laws of physics. You should be studied.”

“Brrriiiannn.”

“Yes?”

“Why did you ask me about moving to LA?”

He got up and took our mugs to the kitchen to refill them and talked with his back to me. “The meeting with American Apparel went well. Really fucking well, in fact.”

He sounded bored again. He just can’t fucking talk about anything he’s actually proud of without trying to brush it off like it’s nothing.

“Okay, so what? You don’t need an LA branch to handle one account. You handle accounts out of state all the time.”

“True. I’ve been doing some research and - well, I need to get Ted to verify all this - it seems like California, LA in particular, has a lot of industries yet untapped for marketing. Everyone thinks LA - Hollywood, the entertainment industry. That’s a whole different ball game...maybe it’s not even a ball game, some other type of game, activity entirely. Whatever. There are a lot of local companies who seem poised to branch out nationally. I mean, you’ve got Silicon Valley up north. Venture capitalists, they’re looking to California for new and innovative ideas. Or new approaches to the same old stuff. You wouldn’t believe the number of breweries within driving distance of LA. Craft beer is just now really becoming popular here on the East Coast. It’s already exploded in California. And sure some of this stuff is big risk, big reward, especially the tech stuff, but there’s a lot there that’s not tech.”

He maintained that bored voice the whole time but I could see his eyes start to sparkle.

“This is exactly what you had in mind when you started Kinnetik, right?” I said. “A little ad firm looking to work with companies that are little but with great potential. You both grow together.”

“When I started Kinnetik, I was just hoping to not have to default on my mortgage. But yeah, a boutique firm for companies like American Apparel, or some of these breweries, where the founder is still involved in the day-to-day, where they’re in their first generation.”

“Shit Brian, when you say it like that... But LA? That’s a huge move. And LA is fucking expensive. Do you know what a loft like this would cost in West Hollywood?”

Brian walked over to his briefcase and pulled out a piece of paper that had been torn from a yellow legal pad. It had clearly been folded over and over, its creases well worn. He handed it to me, and I opened it. It looked like… “Hey, I thought we said no phone numbers.”

Brian laughed. I swear if it was anyone but Brian I would have said he giggled, but obviously Brian Kinney doesn’t giggle. “Oh Sun - Justin, that’s not a phone number. That’s how much Kinnetik made last quarter.”

…

“Ted showed me the numbers just before I left for LA. He told me, and I quote, to ‘go buy a new toy.’ He actually suggested I get you a Corvette so we could have matching ‘his’ and ‘his’ cars.”

I was frankly surprised Ted was still gainfully employed. “I’m sure Ted did mean something like a car or something. A new branch of your brand new company...that’s not a toy Brian.”

He shrugged. “It wouldn’t be a full branch. Ted did warn me against scaling too quickly. Maybe just me and an office manager. The art department here in Pitts can handle the extra work or we could expand them slightly. They could work remotely with me for the pitches. They’d probably prefer it too.”

“Probably. But if everything is going to remain housed in Pittsburgh, why go?”

“To generate business. It’s advertising. I’m selling myself. I can’t expect West Coast...LA companies to look at a small firm in Pittsburgh of all places. I would need to be there, in person.”

“So, why now? I mean it seems like there’s great opportunities, but won’t those opportunities still be there in a year, or two, or three? Wouldn’t it be a safer move once Kinnetik is more firmly established?”

He shrugged again and took back the piece of paper, folded it, and walked to put it back in his briefcase. His back was to me the whole time.

I stopped pacing and plopped back down on the couch, staring at his back.

“It’s...it’s me, isn’t it?”

Shrugged again, back still to me and he reorganized things in his briefcase.

“You said...you said I had been happier in LA than I have been since returning. You...you remembered the animation program at Cal Arts. You think I’ll be happier, that I’ll be less depressed if I’m in LA...in LA doing animation.”

He moved to start refolding the clothes I had taken out of the bag to look through. “Brian. Brian! Look at me.”

He looked up and I swear to god he had that vulnerable face he has when he sleeps. He also looked like a kid who had been caught doing something he wasn’t supposed to.

“It’s because of me, isn’t it?”

“I wouldn’t risk my company - I wouldn’t risk what supports us both - for something that wasn’t a solid business decision.”

“Right, of course not. But…”

“But yeah.” He looked me in the eyes and oh god his expression was at once both hopeful and nervous. “I can’t help but remember how happy you were there. And not just compared with now...christ, anytime compared with now, you’ve been happier...but even before you left to work on the movie. And god, I would do…” He let his voice trail off before he changed directions entirely. “But maybe you’re right. All our friends, your family, they’re here. As fucking annoying as they can be, they care about you, and they know you. Maybe it’s stupid to take you away from all that.”

He came back over to the couch and sat down next to me.

“Brian.”

“Yeah?”

“I’m going to be depressed no matter where we live...until, you know, I’m not. Treatment is going to be treatment whether it’s here or LA or fucking Iowa.”

“I draw the line at Iowa.”

“I don’t think a change of geography is going to magically cure me.”

“Well, no of course not. I just thought that...I guess I wasn’t looking at this from every angle.”

“Hey, hey. Look, it’s not to say this isn’t a good idea, that it isn’t something to consider. But it’s an idea. Something to think more about. You haven’t even asked Ted if the business side of it makes sense. I would need to look into the animation program, see if it’s even something I want to do, see how many of my PIFA credits would transfer.”

“Yeah.”

“And then we both need to consider what moving across the country would really be like. I mean, neither of us has ever lived anywhere else but Pittsburgh. We know it, it’s home, it has a lot of memories, good and bad.”

I saw Brian wince and then quickly return to his neutral face. We both knew what bad memories were here.

“And our friends, our family, really. Fuck yes, I do sometimes wish I was thousands of miles away from them. But in reality? I don’t know what that would be like.” 

“So?”

“So.”

“We think about it.”

“We do more research and we think about it.”

“Okay, I can live with that.” He grabbed my legs and pulled me across the couch and onto him and we engaged in the morning activities that make me cheerful and happy.

And we did think about it. And we researched it. Sometimes days went by and LA wasn’t even mentioned. Other evenings we would sit at the computer and look up real estate and different neighborhoods and holy fuck the prices. I poked around on the Cal Arts website and Brian talked with Ted, who was sworn to secrecy under penalty of castration.

I continued to work at the diner. I showed up to my studio here and there and worked on some pieces that were not very good but eh? They were better than nothing. I kept going to therapy, although I still wasn’t sure I liked it. Or maybe I didn’t like Peter. He kept focusing on my relationships with my dad and with Brian and it just didn’t feel helpful. Daphne had done her research on depression and kept encouraging me to find a cognitive behavioral therapist. But the idea of starting over with someone new, even if what I had right now wasn’t great, was just exhausting, and who was to say this other person would even be any better? And was I getting any better? I felt somewhat better. The dark thoughts were still there but I got better at kind of dividing up my mind. Paying attention to whatever was going on around me with one part and freaking out and trying to talk myself out of these thoughts with the other part. And doing neither very well. For all the time I spent in Dr. Peter Green’s office, honestly Dr. Bitonti’s ten minute rule was the most helpful thing. Not a cure. Not even close. But it got me out. It got at least half my brain focused on something else.

So I tried to say yes to as many invitations as possible. I wound up hanging out more with Molly than I had in...well, forever. She was 14 and finally a person I could have a conversation with. When I was in LA, we had emailed a bunch. She had found out why I really moved out of the house and what really happened at prom and was not at all pleased that Craig was forcing her to go to St. James. This was her freshman year and I was on the receiving end of a lot of angst that is probably normal for any high schooler but maybe even more normal if you’re being taught by the faculty who were basically complicit in the whole hate crime at prom thing. Being around a self-obsessed teenager (God, had I really been that bad? No wonder Brian tried so hard to shake me.) was actually a relief and a welcome change from everyone else who seemed obsessed with me and how I was feeling and how I was sleeping and how I was eating and what I was eating and whether I was painting and whether I was going out enough and whether I was going out too much. I felt badly resenting having so many people care so much about me but jesus christ did they have to care so intrusively? Although have you met them? I shouldn’t have been surprised.

**********************************************************************

My shirt was already unbuttoned when we got in the elevator and I slid the door closed. He was immediately all over me. Biting at my chest, hand down my pants, licking at my neck. If this was a preview of what he could do with his mouth, it was going to be a good night. The elevator jerked to a halt and I slid open the gate, walked us over to the loft door, unlocked it, and slid it open one-handed, without breaking contact. Practice makes fucking perfect. He looked up.

“Woah, nice place.”

“So I’ve heard.” I maneuvered us over to the couch and sat back. He had already unbuttoned my pants in the elevator and…

My cell phone rang. Goddamnit. If it was fucking Mikey I would...I glanced at the caller ID and thought, “Perfect.”

Hearing Justin’s filthy dirty phone sex talk while I had a real mouth on my cock? I couldn’t have planned it better.

“Hey there,” I drawled. “What are you wearing?”

The trick didn’t even seem to notice that a third party had joined us remotely.

…

“Justin?”

“Brian?” A young girl’s voice that was definitely not Justin came across the line. As my brain was processing what was happening, I was already standing up and pushing the trick off me.

“Molly? Molly what’s wrong?” I was pulling my pants up and buttoning them one-handed. Justin was spending the night with Molly because Jennifer was out of town and Molly was...whatever age it is when they can take care of themselves but also might invite all their friends over for a kegger.

“It’s... it’s Justin. He was screaming and I went to see what was wrong…”

No, no, no. Fuck!

“He was probably having a nightmare,” I said. “It’s okay, he gets them sometimes. You didn’t...did you go in his room?”

“Yeah... Brian, he was screaming and crying, and I went over to the bed. He sounded so scared.” She was crying. Fuck fuck fuck. I did not want to know what happened next.

“Molly, did you try to touch him?” Please say no, please say no. Justin hates to be touched when he’s having a nightmare or just after. It the hardest fucking thing in the world to not reach out to try to comfort him physically. But fuck. Especially if he was still asleep, god knows what he was dreaming about. Of course he lashes out when he’s having a nightmare.

“He hit me! Brian he hit me!” My stomach sank and my heart was in my throat.

Jesus. I already had the ‘Vette keys in my hand. I was halfway dressed but that was enough and I was ushering the trick out the door and down the stairs. Fuck the elevator. It took too long.

“Molly! Are you okay? Where did he hit you?”

“I can still hear him, he’s crying.”

“Molly where are you?” I ran to the car, slid in, turned the key,  and put it in gear.

“Brian what should I do, he’s so upset!”

“Where are you?” I fucking needed to know she was safe. Justin would be okay. It was a nightmare. A panic attack. They are terrifying for him in the moment, but he will eventually be okay. He has ways of coping. If he hurt Molly, if she needed medical care, I needed to know. And FUCK FUCK FUCK Justin would not be okay - not even a little okay - if he hurt his sister in some real way. He was already struggling with thoughts of hurting himself and of me and Gus. If actually hurt someone? Someone he cared about? Nevermind that it wouldn’t be on purpose. Nevermind that he would have been fucking asleep when it happened. I was breaking into a cold sweat and also breaking most traffic laws. I hadn’t felt this panicked for one of Justin’s nightmares since just after he first moved in with me after the bashing. Once we had a routine, once we knew what helped and what made everything worse, we were okay. As okay as one can be being woken up by your boyfriend screaming, terrified, because he was hit in the head with a baseball bat and you saw the whole thing and couldn’t do a fucking thing to stop it. Yeah we were as okay as we could be.

“I’m - I’m in the bathroom, next door to his room. Should I go back in?”

“No!” I said more forcefully than I probably needed to. Didn’t need to scare her more than she was. “No. He’ll be okay. I’m on my way. Are you hurt?”

“I - I don’t know.”

“Molly, can you look in the mirror, can you see blood?”

“Uhhh... a little, I think.”

“Where? Where did he hit you?” I was almost there and starting to breathe a little more easily.

“On my lip.” Okay, okay, we could handle this.

“Alright. Molly, listen. Go to the kitchen and get some ice and wrap it in a dish towel. Put it on your lip. It will keep it from swelling too badly.” Thank you Jack Kinney for giving me the opportunity to learn how to treat a busted lip. “Then go to the front door and wait for me, okay?”

“Uh, okay Brian... Brian?”

“Yeah?”

“Will you stay on the phone with me?”

“Of course, kiddo.” I heard her walk downstairs and open the freezer door. I heard the sound of ice from the ice maker and a drawer opening - I assumed that’s where the dish towels were. I tried to picture Jennifer’s kitchen. “Got that ice on your lip?”

“Yeah.”

“Good job. Can you pour a glass of water?”

“Yup.” And sure enough, I heard the refrigerator door open and the sound of water being poured.

“Great, you’re doing great. Now go to the front door and unlock it, I’m pulling up now.”

I ran up the few steps to the door and Molly opened it, looking even younger than her...what was she 13? 15? years... in her Powerpuff Girls PJs. Jesus, what was with these Taylors and their cartoons?

I took her face in my hands and inspected it. Her lip was beginning to swell but it wasn’t actually split. It looked like the blood had come from biting her lip when she got hit. Not too bad. I breathed a little more easily. I took the glass of water from her.

“Do you have any Adv...uh, do you have any drug allergies to like Advil or Tylenol?”

“We have Advil. I take that.”

“Good. Go take a couple of those and lie down on the couch for now, okay? Watch TV or something. And keep the ice on that lip.”

She left to go into the downstairs half bath while I ran up the stairs to the room Justin slept in on the rare occasions he stayed with Jennifer. I knocked softly and said, “Sunshine?”

I could hear his ragged breathing, sharp and short. He was hyperventilating and crying.

“Brian?” His voice sounded impossibly young.

“Can I come in?”

He gasped a few more times. “Yeah.”

I opened the door and he was sitting in the middle of the bed, his knees pulled up to his chest and his forehead resting on his knees. His shoulders were wracked with sobs.

I walked over to the bed and crouched beside it. “Hey, hey, it’s okay. You’re okay. I know, I know.”

“I can’t, I can’t catch my breath.”

“You’re hyperventilating. You’re going to be okay...can I come on the bed with you?”

He nodded and held out the arm closest to me. I got on the bed and pulled him into me and just held him tightly for a moment. It really wasn’t helpful for his breathing and goddamnit it was selfish, but I just needed to feel him that close for just a second. I released him a bit and handed him the glass of water and the Ativan I had grabbed on my way out the door. He took it and handed the glass back to me and put it on the bedside table. I placed my hand on his back.

“Okay, let’s breathe.”

We did the exercises he had been taught. “Inhale 1-2-3-4 and exhale 8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1.”

Finally, his breathing began to normalize.

“I - I didn’t know where I was.”

“I know, you’re not used to sleeping here.” It’s not like Jennifer’s townhouse was ever home for him. He had never lived there except for briefly after rehab and before moving in with me so, you know, no good memories there. What I’m saying is on the best of days it was neutral. On the worst he had some pretty bad memories of sleeping, or trying to sleep, there. 

“I woke up screaming, and I was so confused and I...oh god! Molly! Did I hurt Molly? Where is she?” He began looking all around the room frantically, like Molly was going to be crouched in a corner like some gnome.

“Shh, shh. She’s okay. You were asleep. She came in to try to comfort you. She didn’t know what was going on. She didn’t know…”

He buried his face in his hands. “Did I hit her?”

“You knocked her in the lip. A little ice, a little Advil, she’s going to be okay. She can tell everyone she got a collagen injection.”

He huffed, his face still buried in his hands. “Did I scare her?”

“She was worried about you. She did great. She found your phone, and she called me. She’s downstairs watching TV now.”

He turned his head and looked at me. “She’s okay?”

“She’s okay. Remember, she knows what happened to you. She’s not a little kid anymore. She can understand that you have nightmares. You’ll explain it more to her either tonight or tomorrow and she’ll understand. She was just worried. She knew to call me. She hasn’t been traumatized.”

…

“Oh.”

“Brian. What?”

“I may have answered the phone by asking what you were wearing. But I bet she’s forgotten that, she won’t remember that.”

“Brian!”

“It was after midnight, it was a call from your cell phone! What was I supposed to think?”

“Brian! You thought I would have phone sex with my teenage sister in the next room?”

“See? If she’s traumatized it’s all my fault. She can hear about her brother getting bashed at his prom and hear him have a nightmare, but noooo god forbid she hear about her brother having phone sex. That’s the line that’s been crossed here.”

He cracked a smile.

“Oh god, I just gave Craig another reason to want to kill me. I’ve corrupted his daughter.”

“Oh no, I think he stopped wanting to kill you and started being grateful to you for taking his faggoty fairy son off his hands once it was clear I was never going to straighten out. But, yeah, now he’ll want to kill you again.”

“Brian Kinney, Corrupter of Taylors. There are worse Homeric epitaphs.” I shrugged. “Whaddaya say, shall we check on the littlest Taylor?”

“Can I have one more minute?”

“Of course.”

…

“Hey, Justin?”

“Hmm?”

“Can we have phone sex while a trick is giving me head?”

“Oh is that what you were up to?”

“Up to, into. I can’t believe we’ve never done that. I’ve never done that.”

“Stop the presses, there’s a sex act Brian Kinney’s never tried!”

“And it’s so not kinky. Sad, really. You do kinda owe me.”

“For tonight?”

“For corrupting Molly tonight and for when you were 17. Who else was going to corrupt the lot of you?”

“I guess I do owe you...wait, why isn’t Molly on the hook for this?”

“Given her lackluster response to ‘what are you wearing,’ I would prefer the more skilled Taylor.”

“Well, I guess if I must, I must.”

“Tough life you lead.”

“Mmhmm. Okay, let’s go see how she’s doing. We can explain the nightmares and phone sex.”

“Okay,” I said, getting off the bed and giving him a hand to pull him up too. “But I have dibs on explaining phone sex.”