Must Not Be Too Kind
By a.j.
……
Stop thinking love is blind
Clench your fists yeah write
"she's just not my type..."
The Dresden Dolls
……
California is cold, cold and calculating. Mike can appreciate the beauty, of course: there are miles and miles of shores and horizon that sits comfortably on the ocean; the sun casts such bright shadows on the people that it seems they are themselves made of light; even the burgeoning buildings provide some comforting shadows and an interesting skyline that still manages to catch his breath when he drives back into the city through route three.
Still, even after three years, Mike Conner can't help but feel that California has remained distant to him, distant and beautiful, like the moon.
The people, as well; the same people he sees every day as he drives into work are in the room with him. They are celebrating, and with reason. His latest screenplay has just premiered to a full audience, all beauty and glitz and everything that makes California what it is.
What it is.
Mike downs another glass of champagne. The buzz has only just started to warm his toes and he'll be damned if he isn't floating out of this room by the end of the night.
And then, three and three fifths hours later, his entire life changes.
Across the room, deeply tan and blinking fetchingly is C. K. Dexter Haven. Mike catches his breath and puts his drink down on the nearest table. It has been eight years, eight years of almost-nothing and too-much and why, and C. K. Dexter Haven doesn't even have the only thing that tied the two of them together tied to his side.
Slowly, a smile crosses across Dexter's face, and Mike can't help but mirror it. And, like in one of his stories, the room melts away and blurs and slips sand-like out of the way until they are together, somewhere, in the middle of the mire.
"Why?" Mike asks, hands clammily coming up to grope at Dexter's arms as if he will slip away, too.
"I heard you had made a name for yourself. Thought I would come out to see if the rumors were true." Dexter looks away, and Mike can't blame him; he knows his own eyes must be searching mercilessly. "Where's Liz?"
"Colorado, last I heard," Mike says with a shrug, stuffing his hands into his pockets awkwardly. Dexter nods like he understands. "And Tracy?"
"Home. Ruth has a play tomorrow and she would die if her mother missed it."
"And you?"
"Well, I'm right here, Mike," Dexter says, smiling and clapping Mike on the shoulder. "How much have you had to drink, incidentally?"
"Enough to dream, I suppose," Mike responds. A lapse in the conversation, in which there is a lot of awkward smiling and moving.
"Say, you wouldn't mind to have a place we could sit down, would you? I fear all this smoking has made me feel unclean," Dexter finally says. And with a hand on Dexter's shoulder, Mike leads him away, out of the pot, into the kettle, as it is.
……
Mike never meant to write screenplays. He had also never meant to write for a gossip magazine, meet the woman he would fell in love with, the man he would love and hate, and the woman he would marry, but that didn't seem to matter much. He also never meant to be like his hero, Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, the one and only, but sometimes writers have to make ends meet and, like he often reminds himself, patronage is dead and it never would have worked out, anyway.
Tracy would have gotten in the way, in the end.
Of course, these explanations don't seem to make much sense to Dexter, though you wouldn't know from looking at him. Dexter always looks like he is completely sure what is going on. Only Mike knows better, knew him too well, likes to think he still knows him well enough to know that his words are falling on deaf ears. Or maybe he himself just isn't making a lot of sense, anyway.
He sips his champagne and asks about Dexter's life. Gets an earful. He and Tracy are still together, just not very often, which is the only way they can stand each other enough to not commit suicide and take from themselves the only true gifts they were ever given. Their children are prim and amusing and keep Dexter on his toes. He adores them, basically, not as much as they don't adore him, but he doesn't blame them for it.
"They just aren't old enough to understand. You understand," he says, and the writer in Mike is too busy calculating the different meanings in this one sentence to mind the silence as Dexter sips from his drink, realizes it's empty, and puts the glass down. "I may have caught up to you, Mike."
"Not quite yet, my friend," Mike says with a grin and takes a swig right out of the bottle. "Never, maybe."
"That remains to be seen, I hope," Dexter says, fiddling with his sleeves. My, but he looks fine, better than anything Mike has seen in California, certainly, better than ever.
"Why do we always talk in secrets?" he whispers. He is on his own couch, Dexter on the floor, which allows him to slide his foot, bare, against Dexter's legs. Dipping his feet into the water, as it were.
"I thought that was how your type naturally communicated. And I am not one to go against nature."
"Oh?" Mike asks, sliding off of the couch and onto the floor. "A real 'go with the flow' kind of guy."
Dexter doesn't even blink when Mike crawls into his lap, his long limbs fitting around Dexter's solid body, nuzzling into the dark curve of his neck, chin hitting sharp collar bone. Dexter does, though, let out a shaky breath and rattles through both of them, and if that doesn't make Mike's heart beat faster he doesn't know what ever will.
"See what I mean, though," Mike is saying, but not. "Tracy couldn't fit between us."
"Mike, before I'm through, air won't fit between us," Dexter whispers, takes Mike's hair in his hand, pulls him up, kisses him, steals him away from Hollywood, from boredom, from life.
It's all cliché. It's all very cliché, and Mike knows it, and he will never deny it, but he will also always love it and cherish it and scream "thank God!" for it. Not in the moment, because there is no time for too much appreciation, just feeling. He likes to think that he knows one C. K. Dexter Haven, and he knows that, in the morning, C. K. Dexter Haven will be out of his life again like he was never even there, because C. K. Dexter Haven will never be his Zelda.
But he also knows that C. K. Dexter Haven believes in the right things. Which is enough for Macaulay Connor, for right now. For California, for Philadelphia, for life. So, Mike holds Dexter close and loves him. Because you don't get these chances often. Not even in California.