At eight forty five the next morning, Gavan pulled his apartment door open to find Val waiting outside. “Oh,” He sighed breathlessly. “I thought Wally had come up. Come in, sorry.”

“He’s not supposed to meet you here?” Val watched as Gavan hurried about the room and dropped a plain, black travel bag by the door.

“No, I’m going to meet him downstairs.” He stopped and grinned the goofy grin he’d been wearing all morning. “Here, keys to the apartment.” He placed the spare set on top of a carefully printed out paper. “Phone numbers. Start at the top and work your way down, they’re in order of effectiveness. Only in an absolute emergency, call our aunt, if she gets called so does our grandmother and that often makes things a thousand times worse.” He looked Val over in his sneakers and old jeans, wearing an old sweatshirt that he’d rolled the sleeves up on and knew the poor man really had no idea what he was getting into. “Questions?”

“Where is the hellion?”

“Still asleep, he was up until almost four so he’ll sleep until at least noon, or he’d better anyway.” He ran a mental checklist and couldn’t think of anything he’d overlooked or forgotten. “I can’t thank you enough for doing this, Val, I really can’t.”

He ducked his head. “Don’t worry about it. It’s not easy being a caretaker, you need time away. Try not to worry, I’ll call if there’s any problems I can’t handle.”

“Still, thank you.” If Val had been anyone else, he’d have hugged the other man but that felt like a bad idea. “Just going to say goodbye to Trist and get out of here. You don’t need to hang out up here, just leave him a note but make sure he let’s you know he’s awake.”

Val followed, nodding, as Gavan opened Trist’s bedroom door and slipped inside. He didn’t follow though the door but hovered in the doorway. Trist’s room was as orderly as the entire apartment except the bed. The sheets were tangled and twisted, some partly around the curled up sleeping form, most slipping over the side of the bed. Trist lay, curled into a tight ball, near the edge of the bed, sleeping off his pillows and wearing warm flannel pants and a tight fitting t-shirt that still had managed to ride up and twist about his chest.

Gavan walked softly across the room and tugged the blankets back onto the bed and draped them back over his sleeping cousin. Trist muttered a little and almost instantly unfolded from the tight curl he’d been in. “Hey, Trist?”

“Hmmm?” A sleepy groan rose up.

“I’m leaving now.” He leaned down and stroked the side of the sleeping face.

“Have fun…” A hand snaked out from the covers and caught at Gavan, pulling him until he leaned down. Without even opening his eyes, Trist managed to find and kiss his cousin’s lips.

“Go back to sleep, you.”

“Okay.” The sleepy voice muttered and the arm slithered back into the warmth.

Gavan checked to make sure the blankets were pulled far enough over Trist before leaving as silently as he’d entered. He pulled the door shut behind him. “Shit, look at the time. I need to get down there. You’re sure? You’re okay with this?”

Val nodded. “Go, he’ll be fine, we’ll be fine.”

“Right.” He pulled his coat on and draped the bag over his shoulder. “Right now. Okay.”

“Go!” Val ordered.

“Right, okay.” He smiled shakily. “Thanks, Val.” And hurried out the door, shutting it behind him as he went.

Val waited, standing in the living room, for several minutes just to make sure Gavan didn’t return. When it was pretty clear he wasn’t going to wimp out and come back, he wrote a quick note, included his apartment number and phone number and left it out for Trist to find. He gathered up the spare set of keys and locked the apartment behind him and went back to his place.

Trist woke up a couple of times from uneasy dreams but exhaustion clawed him back to sleep and he stayed in bed until almost one. He staggered from bed, pulling his clothes about him and ended up in the bathroom. While he batted away the images from fragmented dreams, he emptied his bladder on auto pilot an scratched his side. He washed his hands and face, shaved while still yawning and brushed his teeth.

It wasn’t until he stepped out into the living room and the intense emptiness of the apartment that he remembered what day it was. Gavan was gone, hours now, and from somewhere in the sleep hazy images of dreams, he vaguely remembered saying goodbye to his cousin.

Still yawning, he found Val’s note on the counter. The neat handwriting was so different from his own scrawling chicken scratch but it suited the proper and controlled man perfectly. He scanned the message, reading it with eyes and senses as well. There was a promise of coffee down at Val’s place if he wanted to come down and a request to eat something if he didn’t. It was direct, to the point and effective. It was controlled.

“Day one, operation crack Val open, mission accepted.” He grinned and wondered if he owned black spandex shorts and a green tank top. Figured even if he did he’d freeze to death before he reached Val’s apartment and giggled at the silly thoughts. As he dug out clean clothes and started dressing for the day, he started to wake up and the voices started getting louder. It always made him edgy knowing Gavan wasn‘t there to shut him down if it came to it, like walking the tightrope with no net. If he could just stay focused on Val, maybe the voices would leave him alone for a little bit.

The apartments were well made and well soundproofed but in the hallway, Trist could hear the music drifting from Val’s apartment. He doubted knocking or ringing the doorbell would do any good, if the music was as loud as he suspected. So, he did what he always did, he barged in.

The door was unlocked, not surprisingly since Val should have been expecting him. What did surprise him was seeing stacks of books everywhere. Piles of them, gathered in seemingly random order and Val moving to dust off and gather another armload. His back to the door and Trist stood, unnoticed.

The music was vaguely familiar, like some distant one hit wonder but the song wasn’t one Trist had ever heard. It was obvious it wasn’t a distant memory to Val, the man sang softly along with it. His deeper mumbling voice vibrating along with happily deceptive tune.

“Fuck the world around, don’t let it confuse you, you’re not heaven bound so God can not abuse you, just, push the feelings down when they start to come. Put those feelings in their place, ‘cause this lousy human race don’t deserve them, they don’t deserve you, they don’t deserve you.” Val muttered along, his head bouncing a little to the perky tune.

It was more than Trist could stand. The sight of Val happily bopping along to any music let alone singing as well seemed so at odds with the man he’d seen that it alone would have made him laugh. Add in the perfectly ironic lyrics and he lost totally control.

Chuckling behind him stopped Val’s mindless singing in it’s tracks. He turned and frowned at seeing Trist leaning against his open door, smiling widely and laughing lightly. “Hey.” He nodded and snatched up the remote to turn the music down.

“Holy, fucking God, it’s the Valentine York theme song!” He shut the door and came into the apartment, openly studying the art on the wall and the general disorder of things.

Val listened to the song playing that had just been background noise to him. “Oh, Push the Feelings from Matthew Sweet. You know him?”

Trist shrugged. “Nope.”

“It’s normally more guitar rock but this new album is like a post-millennium twisted Beach Boys thing. It’s good.” He lowered the stack of books to one of the dozens of seemingly random piles before straightening up. “Did you sleep well?”

“Well enough.”

“Good. Coffee is made, I put a mug out on the counter. Milk’s in the fridge, just soy though, and sugar is in the tin there. Oh, and there’s muffins in the oven, they should be cool enough to eat if you’re hungry. Or, there’s tuna salad in the fridge and ah, couscous but that’s a couple of days old.” He wiped his hands off on his jeans and considered taking a break to eat, as well. He changed his mind when he saw the suddenly uneasy way Trist was moving in his apartment. The man obviously wasn’t used to being in a different setting and for as much as he was trying to not show it, Val saw through the act.

Trist nodded and was grateful when Val continued to go about his sorting. The apartment wasn’t what he’d expected. Val seemed to place so little attachment on things, on people, he felt so removed that Trist had been expecting the apartment to almost be a blank slate. What he found, instead, was that everything held meanings. The art on the walls, the paintings done with shadow figures and moody shades of blues and greens, Trist knew they’d been painted by a client of Val’s that had killed herself. The mug waiting on the counter top reminded Val of a vacation he’d taken as a child. The books, well he was afraid to approach the books because each one felt like a loaded gun to his senses. Even the muffins, still in their tray in the oven, had been baked as a means of releasing stress and unhappiness. It made him smile a little that Val took bitterness and made it into something sweet, that somewhere in the steady man’s mind, he actually saw that image.

It was going to take a while for him to sort out things, to shift out what was relevant and what was secondary. He sat down at the high backed, raised chair that lined the counter toward the kitchen and flinched from visions that didn’t arrive. Luckily, the chairs held no double meaning, no secondary reminder to Val. It let him watch Val’s steady progress through the books over his very good muffin in peace.

“You know, I thought Gavan was shitting me when he said you baked.” Trist shoved more of the blueberry muffin in his mouth.

“It’s just from a box, not that big of a deal.”

“Says you, Gavan set the kitchen on fire the last time he tried to bake something more complicated than a pizza.”

“You don’t cook?”

“Didn’t you hear? I’m not allowed sharp objects.”

“Now, who’s kidding who?”

The light teasing made Trist smile. “True, I’m just too lazy to bother. That and everything I make tastes like utter shit.” He started in on the second muffin. “These are nice, thanks.”

“Welcome.” He straightened up and noticed the time and froze.

There was no need to ask what Val was thinking, Trist saw it like a bad movie. Two o’clock, the wedding was supposed to have been at one. Trist saw a woman with shorter hair, bleached blonde streaks in it, wearing a fussy white dress and he knew. If things had gone according to the way Val had planned his life, he’d be married by now. They’d have been introduced as Mr. and Mrs. Valentine York and been in the middle of toasts to their future. Oddly, Trist felt no pain at the vision, just confusion and a sense of loss.

“So, today would have been the big day, huh?” He tried to ask the question gently but the look Val shot him made it clear he’d failed.

“Try not to do that.”

“Do what?” Trist tried to look innocent and apparently failed with that as well.

“Your parlor tricks, reading my mind, whatever it is you do, just don’t do it.”

He slurped his coffee. “Wish it was that easy, sweetheart, but it’s not. You threw that image at me, I didn’t go looking for it.” He promised to behave so he backed down. “Gavan get away, okay?”

“With a little fussing, yes.”

“Good, it’s a shame though, about Wally.”

Val dusted a now empty bookshelf before moving on to the next one. “What about him?”

“He’s eventually going to dump Gavan, make him cry and everything.”

“You’re certain?”
Trist nodded. “Yeah.”

“Did you tell Gavan?”

“No, I don’t tell him shit like that. He’s happy now, going this weekend will prolong things. Dear Wally has his eye on a new accountant at the firm, someone as boring and stable as he is. Stupid Wally is just a house in the burbs, white fence, two point five kids kind of fag and as much as Gavan wants that, he’s stuck with me. There’s no room in Wally’s fantasy world of the American dream for his husband’s crazy ass cousin.” He sighed, feeling even more like a burden. “So, bit by bit this new guy will look better and better, they’ll have coffee, then dinner and opps, sex will just happen. Balless wonder won’t tell Gavan until after he’s snug in his new relationship.”

“You can’t be sure of that.”

“Yeah, right, I can’t be sure.” He repeated with an extra helping of sarcasm. “The point is, for now, he makes Gavan happy. Lets him pretend he’s got something normal and that’s good.”

He finished wiping off the books from the current shelf and started sorting them into stakes but he was really watching the way Trist was picking about the muffin and swirling a spoon around his coffee. “What’s it like?”

“Huh?”

“I mean, do you hear voices all the time? Visions? What’s it like, how does it work?”

He sighed, those questions bored him. “I did promise to behave and play nice with you so.” He shrugged one shoulder and propped his head up on his hand, resting the elbow on the counter. “It’s like, being in a really crowded room all the time. Sometimes the crowds thinner, sometimes its like being in the center of a stadium. Everyone is always talking, shouting, screaming, but it all blends into this…” He shook his hand trying to figure out the right word. “This roaring. None of it makes sense as a whole but like if it was a crowded place, you can focus your ears on one voice or conversation or direction and catch snatches of meaning.”

“Doesn’t sound like it’s being directed at you.”

“It’s not, not really.” He smiled, softly, liking that Val was believing or trying to and that he was quick to understand. Even if he knew it was because part of his job was to quickly understand the delusional worlds of madmen, Trist was glad he didn’t have to repeat himself to be understood. “Sometimes it’s directed at me, shouted at me. They’ll scream and curse and fuss until I listen or find a way to silence them. They don’t make a lot of sense normally.”

“And the visions?” He began to put the smaller stacks with the main groups.

The visions were exhausting. “Sometimes, it’s like remembering a movie you’ve seen. It’s totally inside my head. Sometimes, it’ll be right here in the real world.” He let his eyes drift to the side and tried to ignore the little girl standing there, staring with large, sad eyes. “Most times I can tell what’s real that everyone can see and what’s real that only I see, sometimes I can’t.” He firmly told his mind to ignore the girl. “It’s normally a real pain in the ass.”

“I can imagine, is that how it is when it gets bad?”

“Fuck no!” He shook his head. “When it’s bad, I’m lucky to remember who I am. Nothing makes sense, I don’t see things that are real and solid. Everyone’s screaming at me, I can’t help but do stupid shit to try to purge it out. It makes no sense but it does at the same time. I took a hit of LSD once, when I was like sixteen, that made more sense then a bad day. Shit loads more sense and trust me, a seer on acid isn’t a pretty sight.”

He glanced over to see if Trist was teasing him but the other man looked far too serious. “That sounds like an incredibly stupid thing to do.”

“Oh, royally.” He grinned. “But oddly satisfying at the same time. I’ve done a lot of dumb shit when I was younger. I don’t see much difference between LSD and shit you docs push on me.”

“I’m not a doctor and their meds were trying to make you better.”

“Darling, this is as better as I get.” His head whipped to the door and he shivered. “Oh, cold, cold, cold.”

The change in tone made Val look up in time to see his guest staring at the door and the door in question open. The woman that walked through the door stopped his heart, but not in a good way. He stood up but still held the book he’d been cleaning off in his hands.

“Kelly.”

“Hello, Val.” Tina answered and tried to smile, her eyes flicked to the strange man perched on one of the tall chairs, picking at a muffin. She moved uneasily into the apartment.

“Oh!” Trist pulled a knee up under his chin as he got a good look at her. She was slender, narrow hipped and rather tom boyish. Her short cut brown hair was streaked in trendy blonde highlights. She wore well cut jeans and a stylishly classic pale green sweater set under a sleek black coat. In her hand she held a set of keys and a very elegant, and expensive, handbag. “The ice princess!” He started biting on a fingernail. This was better then he could have asked for.

She glanced at Trist and back to Val. “You’ve company, I’m sorry, I should have called.”

He waved a hand in Trist‘s general direction but his eyes stayed on Kelly. “It’s okay, this is Trist, he’s a neighbor. What are you doing here?” His voice hardened. “Don’t you have a plane to catch soon?”

She nodded. “Yes, I…” her eyes slid to Trist and back to Val. “I wanted to see you before I left. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine.” Val’s voice answered but there wasn’t any emotion in it.

“Bullshit.” Trist whispered around the nail he was gnawing on.

It made Kelly look his way again. “Could we, maybe, talk somewhere in private?”

“It’s okay, it won’t make a difference anyway.”

That wasn’t like Val, he never wanted to talk in front of her, let alone someone else but she bowed her head. “I wanted to return your keys and well…” she tugged at the ring she wore and set the diamond down on the counter beside the returned apartment keys. “I know it was your mother’s, I wanted to make sure you got it back.”

Val’s cold expression broke. “Kelly, don’t, have we really come to this?”

“Val,” she made no move to try to comfort him even if he looked like he’d suddenly been shot. “I’m not saying I won’t ever put it back on, it’s just, right now, don’t you think it’s for the best?”

He shut his mouth and steadied his expression. “Whatever you think is best.”

“Damn it, Val! Don’t you ever listen to me? I’m an inch away from leaving you!” Her anger spiked and she wanted to throw her handbag at him, punch him, anything to get past the wall of ice he’d grown between them.

“You have to do what you think is right for yourself.”

She tossed her hands up. “I might as well be slamming my head into the wall for all the good this conversation is going to get me! Are you even human? Do you feel anything at all?”

Val’s hands clenched around the book he now held up like a shield, against his chest.

Trist grinned. “He feels more than you’ll ever know, sweetheart.” He mumbled.

“Look!” She turned to point at Trist. “I don’t know who you are but this doesn’t concern you, stay out of it!”

He smiled wider and held his hands out to his sides, palms out, in surrender.

“Val.”

“What is it you want from me?” He finally asked.

“What do I want?” She sounded generally surprised that he didn’t already know the answer to that. She’d spent the last few months trying to show him, tell him and he’d never understood. “Do you even love me?”

“We were getting married.”

“But do you love me?”

“Of course.”

She shook her head. “Love is a verb, Val. You really want to know what it is I want? I want to be loved! I want to be loved so deeply that it hurts, I want a kill for you, die for you, climb a mountain, last forever kind of love!”

“That kind of love isn’t real, Kelly, we’ve had this conversation.”

“Okay, maybe it isn’t, but I want to at least try. I can’t even try with you, you don’t let me! The more I try, the more you push me away. I can’t live like that Val.” She sighed. “Even now, hearing I’m about to walk away, forever, you just stand there.”

“I’ve done everything you’ve ever wanted of me. You wanted to date, we started dating, you said you were ready to get married, I proposed, you thought we should push the wedding back, I agreed. You canceled the wedding indefinitely and I agreed. I can’t win in this fight, if I agree, I don’t love you, if I fight, I’m an asshole. This is who I am, Kelly, you’ve always known it.”

She shook her head. “You aren’t who I thought you were. I don’t know who you are.”

Val actually took a step backwards, Trist almost heard the other man’s heart break. He paused, swallowed the lump in his throat and drew a slow breath. “I guess I’m not the man for you.”

“Look, all, I’m suggesting is a little space.” She stood her ground.

Trist snorted. “You’ve enough space between you to drive a truck their.”

“Shut up!” Both Val and Kelly snapped at him.

“Sorry.” He muttered and went back to biting his nails.

Kelly pulled her coat a little tighter around her body. “Just, think about things, okay, Val. When I come back, we’ll talk about it some more. You need to figure out where your head is at, I’m tired of being the only one emotionally invested in this relationship.” She sighed and moved toward the door. “I should go.”

“I’m sorry, Kelly.” Val forced out as she started out the door.

It froze her steps. Her head lowered. “I’m sorry, too, Val.” But she shut the door behind her and didn’t look back.