Rush Klondike

Now mostly I ain\'t one to complain about the hand I\'ve been dealt. It\'s hard knock for everyone one way or another, so that\'s why you ain\'t heard anything much about my mother so far, but you really gotta know what went down when I was a kid for the rest of this little tale to make sense, so here goes:

My mom got sick and died.

That\'s the short version. The long version goes something like this:

My dad was gone a long time by the time I was twelve. That was the year my mom got sick. She used to work three jobs to feed me and keep the pretty damn crappy roof we had over our heads. Then she couldn\'t work, so I did. I worked and went to school and did for her whenever she needed anything. I tried to fix it all, fix her, as if, if I worked hard enough at it the virus eating away at her heart would stop and say, \"Oh, sorry. Didn\'t know she was so well loved. We\'ll go chew on someone else\'s mother.\"

When that failed and she just kept on getting sicker, I figured that if I couldn\'t fix her, I\'d at least fix myself. I worked even harder and made myself over again and again until I knew just what she needed and what she needed me to be better than she did. After she was finally gone and I had nothing left but thousands of dollars of medical bills, I realized that I\'d made so many deals with God and the devil, that I wasn\'t me anymore. I was the me she had needed and once she wasn\'t there to need me anymore, I was no one.

Eventually, I decided that, all in all, love was a shitty deal. You work and sacrifice and she leaves anyway. So, I sorta shut that part off, put barbed wire up and tried to salt the ground so I wouldn\'t loose me to some other fragile person who\'d go off and die on me. And I sure dodged a bullet on that one with Peggy, didn\'t I? It was really worth it not to have those years with her and Little Cherry Blossom, so I didn\'t have to miss her. Oh wait, I did miss her and I get to forever regret not doing for her like I tried to do for my mom when she was sick. So yeah, I\'d gotten that one wrong, which was pretty shitty, too.

Then Nannette happened to me and I couldn\'t help but love her. I changed my whole life to make things right for her. And, Denny snuck in on Nannette\'s coattails. So I reckoned maybe I didn\'t really want to kiss Denny as much as I wanted to make Denny happy and was changing myself to make it right for him. I did have a history of doing that.

Banking on the fact that I was letting how much I liked Denny change the way I liked Denny, I decided that the best I could do was make it up with him, take my lumps as far as loosing our close friendship and start dating. If I had a girl, then these weird feelings I had going on about Denny wouldn\'t get so out of control. Maybe we\'d even salvage the friendship, once the lines were drawn in indelible ink and I knew where to stop.

That\'s how I came to ask Lula out. She was cute in a funky southern bell gone bad kind of way and she was great with Pinky, so it seemed like a good idea. It kinda stung when she laughed in my face as her answer.

Then she put on a sympathetic face, the one she used on Rose Bud when she was upset, and asked, \"You and Denny still fighting? I thought you two were back together since he was over last night.\"

\"Back together?\"

\"Okay, what stupid thing did you do? Forget his birthday? Tell him he looked fat? Not swallow?\" she teased and it clicked that she really thought that Denny and I were together, as in fucking. Shit! How long had I been headed that way, if Lula had noticed?

\"Uh, Lula, Denny and I aren\'t, I mean, we never-\"

\"Sweet Brigit, you can\'t be seriously telling me you don\'t love him? Come on, Rush. Even I can\'t believe in that and I\'m open to all possibilities in the multi-verse,\" she replied.

\"I\'m straight. We\'re just friends, honest.\"

\"And I\'m into girls, but it\'s Denny, Rush. He\'s the cutest thing on the planet. If he looked at me the way he looks at you, I\'d learn to like dick in a heartbeat, and you look at him the same way, I\'ve seen it.\"

\"No I don\'t!\" I insisted. Though, maybe I did. I did spend an awful lot of my time thinking about his happiness. \"Okay, maybe I do, but that\'s not so much about him as it\'s this Freudian thing I got left over from when my mother died. I\'m letting how much I like Denny change the way I like Denny, just to please him.\" You know, when I said that out loud, it stopped making the same amount of sense.

\"No shit. Of course you are. Half of attraction is the fact that that person wants you too. We all need affirmation, even you, tough guy.\"

\"But wait, doesn\'t that mean I\'m lying to him or to myself, if I only want him because he wants me to want him?\" Now I was not just thinking in circles, but talking in them, too.

\"Rush, Rush, Rush,\" she said, shaking her head at my cluelessness, \"Why are you trying to talk yourself out of love?\"

\"I-\" Yow! She was right. \"Oh shit, I am. I\'m fucking running away again. Lula, you gotta help me. I messed it all up. He\'s never gonna forgive me.\"

\"What did you do, Rush?\"

\"I kissed him,\" I mumbled.

\"And this was bad because?\" she asked.

\"He thought I was screwing with his head.\"

\"But you weren\'t, right?\"

\"I was too busy with my own messed up brain to even think about his.\"

\"And you didn\'t correct him?\" she scolded me.

\"I didn\'t know how. I didn\'t know I was in love with him. I just thought I was- I don\'t know what I thought. This is bad, Lula. I completely fucked up.\"

\"It\'s okay, we can still fix this. It\'s not like he\'s gonna get over you and find someone else in a day.\"

Then Lula and I sat down and started figuring how I could fix this. And, the rockin\' thing about it was that I wanted to fix it. I wanted to fix it not just for Denny or for Nannette, who was picking up on the bad vibes floating all around her, but for me. I wanted to fix it for me.

***

So, I quit Jamesfoods. Okay, really I didn\'t, Clive just let me take a few weeks off to take Rose Red to see the giant mouse down south and Lula had this cockamamie idea that if I took off, Denny would chase me. I wasn\'t so sure, because, as much as I could still read a mark, when it came to my own life, I was the rube. So I put my faith in Lula and Clive (who\'d wholeheartedly agreed with Lula\'s plan and seemed to be getting off on the espionage his part called for- lying to Denny).

On our fourth day in Kissimmee, we got back to our hotel to find Denny waiting for us. He was standing against the wall in the hallway outside our suite, eyes closed and looking beat. Seeing that made me wonder how much he\'d had to go through to find us. Everyone who knew where we\'d gone had promised to keep quite for at least a few days to make it seem real. Maybe that had been a mistake. I hadn\'t thought about it, but if I had had to spend four days not knowing where The Little Gingerbread Girl was, I\'d have been a goner. Damn it, I sucked, and I was gonna kill Lula and Clive when we got back to Trenton.

Denny opened his eyes as I walked up, a sleeping Strawberry Shortcake on my shoulder. \"Rush, thank God. I didn\'t think I\'d make it if I had to follow another damn clue.\"

\"Clue?\" I asked, handing Nannette to him and fishing in my pocket for the keycard.

\"Fourteen different haikus. You\'re just sick, Rush, plain and simple.\"

\"Denny, what the fuck are you talking about?\" I got the little light on the lock to turn green and pushed the door open.

\"The poems you left for me. I have to tell you, you may be a genius in the kitchen, but you suck at poetry and I should know, I have a doctorate in poetry.\"

\"Yeah, I know, you left your uncle\'s law firm to study dead French guys. Her room\'s over there.\" I pointed to the door for Nannette\'s bedroom.

\"Thanks,\" he said and disappeared through the door. I poured myself a tiny little whiskey out of the mini-bar and sat on the sofa.

When Denny came back, I asked him again, \"So, what clues are you yammering on about, now?\"

\"What, you mean you didn\'t leave- Rush, you better give that nanny of yours a raise, or maybe fired her, I\'m not sure which.\" He sat next to me, took the glass from my hand and finished my drink.

\"Lula made you follow a trail of haikus to find us?\"

He went to the mini-bar and poured another two tiny bottles of scotch into the glass before asking, \"You seriously didn\'t know about that?\"

\"You think I\'d have approved of haiku?\" I answered, taking the scotch from him and having a swig.

\"I thought you had more taste than that,\" he agreed.

\"Denny, what did they say?\" He took the glass from me for another sip.

\"The haikus or the grifters formerly known as our friends?\"

I took back the glass, downed the rest and answered, \"Uh, both I guess.\"

\"Well, nothing. That is to say, the bad Japanese poetry pointed me to your whereabouts, but Lula and Clive didn\'t say anything. Lula just handed me the first clue and Clive gave me a kiss, for luck he said, and they went off together sniggering.\"

\"Clive sniggered?\"

\"Yes, it was quite disturbing.\"

\"I\'ll bet.\" We sat on the sofa for a few minutes. I rolled the empty glass between my palms for something to do. \"So . . .\"

\"So.\"

\"You\'re here to make sure Nannette\'s okay, right?\"

\"Yes.\"

\"She\'s okay.\"

\"I saw.\"

\"So, good.\"

\"Yes, good.\"

\"Denny?\"

\"Yes?\"

\"I\'m sorry about the haikus. This whole thing was Lula\'s idea. I shoulda never listened to her.\"

He stood up and started pacing. \"And what was this snipe hunt supposed to accomplish, anyway?\"

\"You were supposed to miss me and then you were supposed to chase me and then I was gonna let you catch me.\" I stood up, crossed the room and put the rock glass back by the mini-bar.

\"I don\'t understand,\" he asked my back.

I turned around to say, \"Hell, neither do I. It made sense when Lula and Clive explained it, well, it sort of did.\"

\"Again, I say, I don\'t understand.\" He paced closer to me, then back towards the sofa.

\"Well, it\'s- uh, the thing is, I didn\'t kiss you as a joke.\"

\"You didn\'t?\" He stumbled a little as he turned around to face me again.

\"No. It was real. I wanted- no, I want you.\" I took a few steps closer to him. \"I just didn\'t know that I wanted you until you were- I mean, you smelled so fucking good. I just couldn\'t stop myself. Then later, I figured out that I loved you, but I wasn\'t sure if it was love or love, you know, because of this weird subservient, oedipal thing I do when I let myself care about anybody. So, I tried to shake it off, run back to something I knew- I asked Lula out, but she\'s too sharp not to see what a bad idea that would\'ve been. Then she came up with the running away thing. God, I\'m gonna kill her.\"

\"Rush, I\'m not sure I followed all of that, but did you just tell me you love me?\"

\"Uh, yeah.\"

\"But, you\'re unsure if it\'s truly romantic in nature or if you might be mistaking me for your mother?\" He paced over to Nannette\'s door, peeked in on her and then, closed the door again. I followed him a few steps.

\"No. I don\'t think you\'re my mother. I ain\'t that far gone yet. I just get scared of feeling so much for someone, \'cause they- you might leave, like she did. So, I either try to make the people I love stay by being anything and everything they want, no matter if it\'s my cup of tea or not, or I run for the hills.\"

He walked passed me again, this time going towards the door to the hall. \"Leave them before they can leave you?\"

\"Exactly.\"

\"So when you kissed me, you were afraid you were changing yourself to keep our friendship.\"

\"Right, but now, I know that me thinking that was just me getting scared of how well I love you, which I do.\"

\"Yes, but is it romantic love or frien-\"

I just gave up trying and grabbed Denny by the shoulders, pushed him up against the door and planted one on him. He didn\'t kiss me back, maybe because he wasn\'t expecting the lip lock. The last time I kinda let him know I was coming, taking my time to get our mouths together. This time, he was in the middle of a sentence. He pushed me away and I let him, taking a step back, but not letting go of him. I wasn\'t ever gonna let go of him.

\"Rush,\" he hissed.

\"Denny, just go with this, please.\" I couldn\'t explain all the stuff in my head without screwing it up even further. I was betting on him trusting me, trusting that I was a changed man.

\"You have to promise,\" he murmured.

\"Anything, Den.\"

\"Promise me you\'ll leave if I stop being what you want.\"

\"You\'re not gonna stop being what I want. I can promise you that.\"

\"That\'s not the same promise.\"

\"That\'s the one I\'m offering, take it, Denny, it\'s a good deal.\"

\"Rush-\" I tried again, putting my mouth against his, hoping he\'d give in. I thank my lucky stars he did, working his mouth against mine, sliding a hand behind my neck and angling my head to better suit his plans. I moaned and opened up, letting him in, like I should have a hell of a long time ago and- yeah, it was better than I remembered. He pushed me away again, but this time it was so he could work open my pants, slide down my body and- oh shit, we have oral-genital contact. It would have been overwhelming if I\'d had time to think about the fact that, five days ago, he was planning on maybe never seeing me again and now he was digging his fingers into my ass to encourage me to thrust into his mouth more vigorously. I was leaning against the wall with my outstretched arms and grunting with each push because it was so damn sweet.

A small noise from the other room alerted us that the Little Gingerbread Girl was awake. In an instant, Denny was up and on his way to head off Nannette, so I could make myself presentable, shoving my suddenly lax dick back in my pants and catching my breath before following Denny in to greet Little Cherry Blossom.