All the characters and events in this story are fictitious. Any resemblance to real people, either living or dead, is entirely unintentional.
The story is copyrighted and may not be reproduced in any way without the express permission of the author who can be contacted at:
pjalexander1753@gmail.com
PJ
From Chapter 9:
Dan was away on another distant site visit, having left the apartment almost before the sun was up that morning. It was that fact, more than anything, that had been the final clincher in her decision to act. It hadn't been unanimous, with Roger, in particular, advising against. But eventually they'd come up with a plan that they could all agree on, the plan that Helen was about to put into action.
Chapter 10:
The table was set, the food-prep pans and dishes washed and put away, the surfaces were spotless and the salad only lacked a light drizzle of vinaigrette. In other words, Helen had pretty much run out of reasons for not being well on her way home when she heard a key being turned in the apartment's front door. She crossed her fingers, hoping that it would be Dan she saw walking into the kitchen and not Milo back from his ride. It was.
"Oh, hi mum, I wasn't expecting you still to be here. Everything okay?"
Helen saw the dark circles under Dan's eyes and the drooping angle of his shoulders and straightaway knew she'd made the right call when she'd decided that, despite Roger's doubts and reservations, today would be the day she'd get Dan to tell her what, exactly, was going on. Or, more specifically, going wrong.
"Hi there, D. Beer?" When planning her strategy, Helen had eventually decided that playing it cool was more likely to have the desired outcome rather than her usual, and preferred, full-frontal approach, but Dan knew his mum all too well, so the offer of a mid-week beer immediately had his suspicions on full alert.
"Okay mum, what's going on. Has something happened? Is M all right? And Nico?" There was genuine anxiety in his voice.
"Calm down. There's nothing to worry about. Everyone and everything's fine. I just thought it would be nice for us to have a bit of a mother and son chat over a glass of beer at the end of a long day. You have so many out of town visits these days, it seems like forever since we had a chance to catch up." She popped the lid, poured the beer and placed the glass on the corner of the dining table nearest to where Dan was standing. Yes, he knew his mum, and so was very aware that, whatever scheme she was plotting, avoidance wasn't an option. He knew that the best thing he could do was to sit down and let her say whatever it was she wanted to say before giving her a warm and genuine hug and then closing the apartment door behind her. He sat and took a swig of his beer. He noticed that his mum had not poured one for herself.
"D, we're worried about you. About you and M."
"We? Who's we? And worried about what, exactly?" Dan couldn't hide the prickly tone in his voice and was too tired to try.
"There's no need to be so prickly, D. Your father and myself, and Gerry too, well, we can all see that things have been difficult for you ever since Nico got here."
"Difficult! Mum, what do you expect? Of course it's fucking difficult." Inwardly Helen winced but managed not to show it on the outside. The last thing she wanted to do right at this moment was to antagonise D even more by complaining about his choice of language.
"If you remember I said, right from the start, that bringing a damaged and traumatised kid into our home, into our lives, would be no picnic. So yes, it's been difficult. What of it? We're managing." Dan wasn't just prickly now, he was well on the way to being angry, though whether with his mum, with himself or with the whole sorry mess he and M were in, he honestly didn't know and couldn't say.
Helen was completely taken aback and warning bells began to sound loudly in her head. She honestly hadn't anticipated this sort of response and for Dan to react so aggressively was very much out of character. She couldn't remember the last time she'd heard him speak like this to anybody, especially not to his mother. Things must be bad, possibly even worse than she'd suspected.
"Dan. Dan." Helen kept her voice as calm and reasonable as she could. She really didn't want to wind D up any further. "We're worried, worried about all three of you. We've seen how things have been these last few weeks, the silences, the anxious looks. And the atmosphere, well, you really could cut it with a knife. And a not very sharp one at that."
Before he spoke again, Dan consciously turned the tone of his voice down a notch or two. "That's fine, mum, and I'm grateful that you care so much, really I am, but unless you've got a magic wand you can wave around to make everything better ..." Suddenly, as if all his energy had got up and walked out on him, Dan's head and shoulders slumped and the words he was speaking ran out of anywhere to go.
Over the years, throughout her professional life, Helen had seen a lot of discomfort. As a dentist it came with the territory. And it wasn't always physical. She knew that bad teeth, sometimes the result of years of neglect, could often have serious negative emotional and psychological effects which the patients brought with them into the treatment room. For many of those patients the dentist, white-coated, masked, anonymous and, therefore, strangely safe, provided an outlet for voicing their fears and insecurities. Strangely this compulsion to off-load often wasn't entirely restricted by having a mouth full of dental paraphernalia. So, yes, Helen was used to seeing people in distress. But that was at work, and that's where she could leave it, with a brief record of the conversation typed into the patient's notes. Seeing her own son on the very edge of breaking down completely, well, that was something else again, and brought back some very unwelcome memories of what had happened to him as a young teen. And it was those memories that made Helen realise even more just how serious things had become between Dan and Milo. Dan had endured so much as a result of the abuse he'd suffered but had come through it a whole lot stronger and more able to deal with all the negative stuff that life frequently throws up. In her eyes, Dan was strong and incredibly resilient. He was the rock on which his relationship with M was built, and if the rock was about to crumble, well, that didn't bear thinking about. Yes, something had to be done before a bad situation became a whole lot worse.
"No, I haven't got a magic wand, but I do have eyes and I do know you and M, and I sure as hell know that you're in trouble. I have no doubt that you still love M as much as ever but I can see that this whole `Nico thing' is making it really hard for you both to remember that."
Dan couldn't disagree with his mum's assessment of the current state of play between him and M but he oh, so didn't want to hear what he suspected she was about to say.
"Of course I still love him." The notches had gone up again. "He means everything to me. Okay, so maybe things aren't exactly perfect these days but we can work stuff out for ourselves. We always have. We don't need anyone interfering and ...."
"Daniel, hear me out." It was rare for Helen to use his full first name, a fact that didn't go unnoticed by either of them. "It's not about interfering, it's about helping. Me and your dad, and Gerry, we're not blind and we see how things are. We've also been round the block a few more times than you and M. We know what it means when two people stop doing the little things that bond them together as a couple."
"Little things? What little things?"
"Oh, you know, little things like the casual touch on the arm or the tap on the butt, like the shared smile when you think no-one's looking, like having a beer ready and waiting at the end of a hard day. Those little things. Not to mention the early nights and the spring in your step next morning."
"Mum!!" Dan really didn't want the focus of this conversation, which was already uncomfortable enough, to turn in the direction of his and M's sex life.
"Don't you Mum' me. You're both young and fit and you definitely should be enjoying great sex -- you won't be in your prime forever -- and it's one of the most important things for keeping a relationship fresh and alive. So, no, don't you Mum' me, Daniel Reed!" There it was again, though this time it was the whole full name.
Dan wouldn't have been surprised if his mum's next question was to ask when he and M had last had sex, and there was no way he wanted to go down that road. And not only because he didn't think that that was the sort of conversation a grown-up son should be having with his mum or because he couldn't remember the last time he and M had been intimate together. No, it was because he knew exactly when it had been -- the night before M had set off for Buenos Aires, and that meant it had been weeks and weeks ago.
And it wasn't for lack of trying on Dan's part, that's for sure. When Milo had first got back, after the disappointment and frustration of that first night, Dan hadn't been too worried when M didn't seem to want to do anything other than cuddle. Initially he'd put it down to jetlag, then, when a week had past and things were no different, Dan had assumed that M must be stressed out by the new responsibilities regarding Nico, as well as his worries about Hamza's visits. But by then even the cuddling had stopped, with M offering nothing more than a brief, "Good night," before switching off his reading lamp and turning onto his side away from Dan. It was as if the Great Wall of China dropped down between them every night.
After enduring weeks of this treatment, Dan had eventually felt that he couldn't keep silent any longer. If something was bothering his man, then he wanted to know what it was and what he could do to help. But every time he tried to get M to talk, every time he reached out to him, every time he did the little things that had always been guaranteed to get an enthusiastic response in bed, the answer was, "I'm too tired," or, "I've an early start in the morning," or, "I've got a headache," -- all the sort of things that straight comedians complained that their wives and girlfriends said whenever they didn't want to put out. So was that what they'd become, thought Dan, some sort of pathetic and unfunny comedy double-act, destined forever to go through the motions of being a happily together couple but, actually, gradually rotting away from the inside?
Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! He couldn't bear it. Too many nights recently he'd fallen asleep with tears in his eyes.
And anyway,' he thought in the pause before his mum continued, If anyone's to blame for how bad things have got between me and M, well, it fucking well isn't my fault.' He was angry now and ready to lash out, even if only inside his own head. `Everything was fine before Nico turned up. All this shit is because of M bringing him here, and I don't know how much longer I can go on pretending that I'm on board with the whole project.'
But before he could mentally lay any more of his anger and resentment at Nico's door Helen broke into Dan's thoughts.
"You and M, you're both such good men and you make a great team together. I am so proud of what you're both trying to do for Nico. But you've got to go on believing that one day, hopefully soon, he'll see that the two of you are prepared to do everything you possibly can to keep him safe and that he is truly loved by both of you. But he's got a lot of hurt to work through first -- just think about all the horrific stuff his mum wrote about in that letter. So we're all gonna have to be very patient while he gets his head around everything, however long it takes. Just remember that you've got our 100% support, me, your dad and Gerry, and that we're here to help in any way that we can. Which is why we've come up with an idea."
Again, Dan's alert systems turned bright red. "An idea? What sort of idea?" Dan was suspicious of what might be coming next.
"Well, we think, all three of us, that, ever since Nico arrived, everything's been totally full-on and chaotic, so much so that you and M haven't had the chance to think, much less enjoy any proper alone time. What with Mrs. Bolton and Hamza and Shania Margelles, not forgetting Nico himself or the fact that there's always one of the three of us hanging around." Helen smiled, "You've not had a moment to just `be'." She hoped she was successfully laying the groundwork for what she was about to suggest.
"Yeah, it's true that it's all been a bit mad round here for the last few weeks. So what? Things will settle down eventually." Dan really didn't want to have to admit that he and M were seriously struggling and not just experiencing a little, and entirely predictable, turbulence.
"Yes, you may be right about things settling down `eventually', but it wouldn't do any harm to have a break from all the madness, now would it?" Before Dan had a chance to voice any doubts, Helen charged on. "So we're going give it to you."
"Give what to us?" Dan was beginning to get confused. What was his mum getting at?
"A break, that's what, a break so that you and M can have some together time. Nico is going to spend next weekend with his granddad and his in-laws, while you and M get to spend some time together, just the two of you, to do exactly what you want, when you want."
"But ..."
"No buts, it's all decided. During the day we'll keep Nico busy, showing him the sights, maybe swimming or going to a soccer match. Since he's been here he's hardly been outside the apartment except to go to his sessions with Shania, so it'll be a chance for him to have some fun and for us to get to know him better, begin to build our own relationships with him. Overnight he'll stay with Gerry. The connection between a grandfather and his grandson can be really special, so this will be a chance for them to start to build one. A few hours each week in the car going backwards and forwards to the therapist isn't enough to create a meaningful bond."
Dan could see that his mum had got it all worked out and, on the face of it, the idea made a lot of sense. For the last weeks, his and M's life had been hell on wheels (he remembered that those had been Tom's exact words) with hardly a moment to breathe, much less take time just for themselves. But the idea also terrified him. What if it was too late? What if too much damage had already been done? What if he dared to admit to M that he did not support the idea of Nico becoming a permanent member of their family and M couldn't, or wouldn't, accept it? There were so many unknowns, so many elephant traps, so many ways everything could come crashing down around their ears.
"And," continued Helen, "It'll be a chance for the two of you to spend an entire weekend in bed if you want to, reminding yourselves what your dicks and buttholes are for!" She knew this was going too far but hoped it would, at least, bring a smile to D's face. It did, albeit one that was mixed with an expression of shocked horror which she thought (hoped) Dan was putting on for her benefit.
When it came down to it, Dan knew he was no match for his mum once she'd set her mind to something. Best to give in as gracefully as possible and, in this case, hope and pray that her assessment was right, that all he and M needed was some quality alone time together, along with the opportunity to reboot the whole `Nico thing'. He knew it was a risk, that Helen's plan could blow up in all their faces, that it could push his love for M to the edge of a catastrophic implosion. But that thought reminded him that, yes, he did love M, loved him absolutely and completely and that, fuck it, that was worth fighting for. He made up his mind.
"Okay mum, I'll buy it. This next weekend we go for it, all out, 100%. But I'll tell you now, if your plan doesn't work I don't think there'll be any way back, so you gotta be prepared for the fallout." Dan was almost in tears as Helen wrapped him in the sort of hug that only a mother can give and whispered in his ear, "Believe in yourself, and in M. I do."
Two minutes later, having given some last minute instructions about the pasta bake, she was walking down the hallway and out of the apartment. If she hadn't been so wrapped up in her own head, thinking and hoping that she hadn't pushed D too far, she would have noticed the silent closing of Nico's bedroom door. Part way through Penalty Shoot-out 3 he'd felt the need to pee and had started to leave his room to cross the hallway to the bathroom. He didn't get that far once he heard the two familiar voices coming from the kitchen. He didn't hear every word of Dan and Helen's conversation but what he did hear had his thoughts racing round his head like they were in an F1 Grand Prix. So Dan's mum - the one member of the family he was sure could have no part in any plan to pimp him out - she believed that Dan and Milo loved him and that, far from intending to do him any harm, were determined to protect him and provide him with a proper home. And what was that about a letter from his mum? From what he'd heard Helen say, it sounded as if she had written about their lives together and all the shit they'd suffered. Is that how Milo and the rest of his new `family' seemed to know so much more about him and his past than he had ever told anybody? Nico's head was throbbing. This was a lot to take in, a lot to think about. His need to pee had completely disappeared. He closed the door and walked back across the room and lay on his bed, not even bothering to switch off the game. His brain hurt. Was he going to have to totally re-think every bad thing he'd been told by his mum? Everything he believed about his uncles? Was he going to have to let go of the anger, the one thing that gave him a reason to get up in the mornings? Maybe even give up on the silent treatment? So many questions but so few answers. And as for the idea of spending the weekend with his grandfather and Dan's parents, he certainly didn't have any head space for that right now. So he did the only sensible thing he could think of -- he went to sleep.
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