Page 61 of Bounced!

“You called on God about six times.”

“That was worship,” I said. “It was a religious experience. I was giving thanks.”

He laughed, and I felt it move through both of us where we were joined. I stroked his head, which I’d wanted to do for two years and had never once let myself do. I did it now because I was allowed, and that fact that I was allowed coursed through me warmer than anything.

We lay there. The fan turned. Somewhere outside a car went by, then the quiet came back.

I’d never been good at quiet. I usually filled it. I heard a silence and put a joke in it, or a question, or a plan, because a quiet room felt like a problem and I was a man who fixed problems. But as I lay there with Dante’s weight on me, I found I didn’t need to fill anything.

That was new.

Then I did put something in the quiet, but it wasn’t to fill it. It was because I genuinely wanted to know.

“Tell me about your family,” I said.

I felt him go still.

It wasn’t much, just a hair, the kind of stillness most people would miss, but I’d spent two years learning to read the small weather of this man, and I felt his wall try to come up out of old habit. I felt him reach for the flat, easy nothing he handed everyone.

He’d spent his whole life with people pushing at that door. He’d gotten very good at holding it. No, I’d learned that the way inside was to do the thing he did for everyone else and nobody ever did for him. I gave him space. I didn’t ask again. I didn’t fill the silence.

I kept my fingers massaging slowly across his scalp, and I waited. I waited the way he waited at the bar, the way he waited for me to turn my head for two years. I let the silence be his to fill or not, whichever he needed. It was the hardest thing I did all night, and I’d bottomed for the first time in a decade with a man whose dick was bigger than the whole damn Weinermobile.

“My mother,” he said finally. I felt the door come off the latch. “She’s the best woman in Georgia, maybe the whole damn world.”

“You told me that, in the truck.”

“I did.” He paused. “Vernell Pierce of Cascade Road in Atlanta. She’s five-foot-nothing, and I’ve watched grown men fold up like lawn chairs when she gets going. She raised two boys and half the neighborhood on a church salary and a garden, and she did it loud, and she did it laughing, and she never once let me get away with anything.” His fingers moved absently on my chest. “She wants a grandbaby. That’s her current project. She has a whole campaign. She’s read pamphlets. She’s even decided Amazon might deliver one if I did the Prime thing.”

“The Prime thing?”

“The Prime thing.”

“Your mother thinks Amazon delivers babies, like a stork with trucks?”

“My mother thinks Amazon delivers everything, Mark. They brought her a ladder and a ham last month. She’s not wrong about the general principle. She’s just extending it.” He lifted his head an inch. “She asked me, in total sincerity, whether there was a two-day delivery option.”

“On a baby?”

“I told her I didn’t think the baby qualified for Prime, and she told me not to be smart, that everything qualifies for Prime, that’s the whole point of Prime.” He grunted a chuckle as he laid his head back down. “She’ll have you signed up as a co-parent inside a month. I want you prepared for that. She works fast. You’ll get a text with a car seat in it.”

I was laughing now, the whole bed shaking with it.

I felt him grin against my chest, pleased with himself. God, that was the thing, that a man this locked down could reach into the worst subject in his life and hand me his mother like a gift, funny side out, so I’d love her before he ever showed me the hard part.

“I already love her,” I said. “Tell her I’ve had Prime for years.”

“She’ll weep. You’ll be her favorite. She’ll like you better than me inside a week, and I’ve been doing this for thirty-nine years.” He was quiet a beat, the laugh settling. “She knows about me being gay, has since I was young. My father made it a thing, and she made it not a thing. She stood right in the kitchen and told him love was love and he could argue it with the Lord if he had a problem, because she was busy. She never blinked. She still fumbles the words to this day. She’ll say, ‘lifestyle’ and ‘the way you are,’ and she nearly sprains something getting the word ‘gay’ out, but she fumbles them toward me, never at or away. There’s a difference.”

“There’s a big difference,” I said.

I felt him nod against my chest.

“And your dad?” I asked, carefully, the way you test a floor before you put weight on it.

The stillness came back, longer and stiffer this time.

“My father is a hard man who has hard reasons. I’ve spent a lot of years trying to hold both of those facts at once.” His voice had gone flatter. “He grew up with a boot on his neck, the real kind, the kind that leaves a man angry in his bones. Some of that anger he aimed at the world that earned it, and some of it he aimed at a white world he never trusted in the first place. Some of it, when I turned out the way I turned out, he aimed at me.” He paused. “He didn’t yell. That’s the part people don’t understand. He just closed down, went quiet in a way that couldn’t be repaired. I learned the wall from somebody, Mark. I didn’t invent it.”