I wrote this for resonant8 a ways back, as a companion piece to her story Left, but never finished it. Now I've stuck it in a box marked done.Right
by Pares
Do I miss Fraser? Fuck, no. Maybe Dief. The other day the ASPCA was having a scratch and dent sale in front of some pet store, and there was this white-faced mutt giving me the eye. I caught myself thinking, I could keep it at Kowalski's place. He's a guy who could stand to have a dog around.
But Fraser? Why would I miss that guy? He walks away from everything, from me, from Kowalski. Because feeling things would maybe get his tunic dirty. Two years of dry-cleaning bills, did I ever complain? Anyway, he skipped the country for the great white North, and for what? Duty? My ass.
I think of him sometimes, especially when I see Kowalski rubbing at his finger, where the nail on his hand should be, and I wanna find that Mountie and punch his goddamned face in. He walked out on me, but I walked out on him first, fair's fair. So what if I did it for the Feds, for honor, for The Right, maybe for some glory, but I did it to get away from him, too, and that's what he could never forgive me for.
So maybe it's my fault more than the Mountie's that Kowalski's missing a fingertip. Maybe I burned that Mountie pretty good, maybe I pissed on whatever spark Victoria left him, maybe I'm the reason he's a fucking zombie under that stiff hat.
But he hurt Kowalski bad, real bad. And that's something that I'll never forgive him for.
*
So here's me, Raymondo Vecchio, coming back to my life twice, and finding Kowalski there both times. And maybe first I was jealous that he took my Mountie, but then I was kinda worked up about him getting there first with Stella, too, and maybe I didn't want to be all 'let's be friends' with a guy I now probably had just a little too much in common with. In my part of town, if you meet a guy who used to date your old girlfriend, you either ended up playing bocce ball together every Sunday afternoon or else you spit on the sidewalk every time you heard the other guy's name. Since we had two exes in common, and we both knew it, I felt it was in our best interest to establish some healthy boundaries, as I sure as fuck didn't want to play bocce ball with anybody and I didn't feel like hearin' Frannie bitch at me for my disgusting habits for the rest of my life.
So I dogged his ass, and I called him Stanley because I didn't want him forget for one minute that I was back and that my life was mine again, and because I could see him flinch a little every time I said it, and Huey finally got tired of breaking us up in the bullpen and started taking book on us instead. I didn't want to admit it, but it was fun to wind Kowalski up, and it was so damned satisfying to shove him back when he got in my face, and it was nice to feel something solid against my hands, good to go toe to toe with somebody who felt things, who could lose their cool.
Sometimes I felt shitty about it, but mostly there was just this mean little thrill in poking at him. And he was so easy, I could hardly help myself. And then one day, I was riding Kowalski just because I could and Frannie came in and she gave Kowalski this hard little push in the small of the back and sent him out of the room, still bitching at me over his shoulder, and she clacked up to me in her heels and smacked me in the head with the file folder she had in her hand. It didn't hurt, but I saw something in her face I hadn't seen since she was twelve, and I knew it was the look she used to give my dad when he was coming down on me, and that was when I knew I had to let up or turn into one of those sour old bastards who just rides the El all day giving everybody the stink eye and living on canned minestrone.
*
Kowalski mumbles in his sleep and I pet the back of his neck. His hair is stiff from all the shit he puts in it, but I like it that way. He's gold all over, and his hair smells like Aunt Cecily's Beauty Parlor, and it's almost creepy sometimes how much he reminds me of Stella.
Not that he's anything like a woman. But he's like her. They move the same, confident, long legs, light step. It's almost like freakin' incest or something... Like sleeping with a brother and sister. Long lean blondes with silvery eyes and... If they'd had kids, they probably would've looked straight out of central casting for Village Of The Damned. I get a headache thinking about it. Sometimes I even think they taste the same, and that's just spooky. Black coffee, sweet enough to rot your teeth and hot enough to scald your eyeballs. Except Stella only ever had one cup in the morning and Ray jitters through two pots a day. But at night... he tastes like beer. Stella, she liked it when I'd cook on the weekends, serve up a bottle of good red. He'd rather just eat out-- says it's because he doesn't have a dishwasher, but I don't think he wants to get too domestic.
He played house with the Mountie for a few months. If you can call camping out on the friggin' permafrost playing house. I know he tried like hell, and that he thinks in the end, he just wasn't good enough.
I don't know how to tell him he's got it backwards.
Lemme tell you a story: one night after blowjobs and takeout, me and Kowalski were sacked out on the couch watching a football game (we don't watch hockey, even though Kowalski has a Blackhawks jersey in his closet, and we especially don't talk about why we don’t watch hockey) when the phone rang. Kowalski had been pulling a lot of late nights working a string of convenience store robberies, so I picked up the phone before it woke him up.
"Yeah?"
"Ray." And then nothing but Fraser's soft breathing on the other end of the line.
I clammed up. I hadn't heard his voice since the hospital, and even then, shot and doped up, I'd wanted to do things to him, mess with him, and now, six months later it was still my first reflex. But Kowalski's head was heavy on my shoulder and he was pawing at the phone, saying, "Who'zit?" and I said, "Yeah. Probably not the one you were lookin' for, though. Hang on, I'll get him for you."
Kowalski went all still, and somehow he knew that it was Fraser on the phone, and I handed it to him and he knotted his hand in the collar of my tee shirt, stretching it out, and I could feel the warm wet dot where he'd drooled on my shoulder touch my neck and then he stood up and took the phone out on to the fire escape.
"Hey, Fraser. How's things in the frozen northern areas? You get eaten by polar bears yet?" He closed the window, but I could see him, saw the color in his face, watched him pace and move his hands like maybe he wished he had a cigarette, and I pulled my shirt on over the ruined tee and while I was lacing my shoes, Kowalski banged on the window and shook his head, mouthing "Two minutes," but I just folded my jacket over my arm and left anyway.
I didn't get too far, though, because Kowalski tackled me in the goddamned hallway, and he pressed me up against the cheap, chalky paint and he kissed me, frantic and hot.
"Just—just let me say this and then you can go or whatever you want, but I—I want this, okay? I want you, and maybe I wasn't good enough for-- for Stella, but you weren't either, right? So—maybe we're good enough for each other. What do you think?"
"What do you fucking think I think?" And I looked at him and I could tell he didn't know, and his face was all open and scuffed up and I cupped my hand around his neck and I leaned my forehead against his. "I think you are one dim Polack. But you got good taste, I'll give you that," and I kissed him, right there in the hallway, where anybody could see us, and that was that.
Maybe I loved Fraser, so what, but I'll tell you straight; in the end, Kowalski's the better man. The hell of it is, Fraser actually does know what he's missing. Sad bastard. I still can't help thinking about him up there alone, and most of the time I can't decide whether to feel sorry for him or stick to my idle fantasy about punching him out.
Stella had a little of that chill. Reserve, you'd call it. She was a real cool customer. And most of the time, I loved that about her. But in the end, you're just in your skivvies in bed next to an ice block.
Kowalski's a day at the beach in comparison.
He'd tell me how he used to think about Stella all the time, plan things to impress her, try to meet her in front of school and walk her home, and I'd talk about the dinners by candle light, all the goddamned hand kissing, the dressing sharp, and neither of us talk about how we made puppy eyes after the Mountie hoping for him to love us, if we were good. Maybe it's the Italian melodrama in my blood, but still. I try to explain to him: romance never got anyone laid. And what I really mean is: it wasn't the candles or the puppy-eyes that got us into their pants. It was good old fashioned lust, nothing else. Stella slept with us because she was hot for us. Fraser didn't because he... wasn't. Or maybe he was, but was just too fucked up to do anything about it.
I don't want to know if Kowalski managed to get naked with him. Mostly because I don't like to think about it, and maybe a little because I don't know who I'd be more jealous of. But sometimes I catch Kowalski looking at me like he's pissed, and then he stares at my hands, and then I usually jerk him off and fuck him blind. I almost know that look, but I'm not hot to find out what it means.
Instead I tell him he makes me crazy, that when he talks dirty I can't even think.
That first goddamned night, when he clinked his fourth beer bottle against mine and let his other hand fall in my lap. I picked it up like it was a dead rat and dropped it on his own skinny thigh. He just looked at me, and then touched his lower lip with his tongue, frowning like he was concentrating for his SATs and just like that, I had to know what his lower lip tasted like or fuckin' die.
So lust, we got plenty of. Romance? Not a goddamned drop. We fight and fuck, usually in that order, and I never get tired of looking at him, never get tired of making him come. He's real. All I have to do is touch him to prove it.
Beats the hell out of marriage, out of chivalry, out of breaking my heart over a guy in a hat.
And maybe one day Kowalski'll think I'm right about that.END
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