Rhetorical Questions
Even if he had wanted to, there was no way that Zac could pretend that his life hadn’t been turned upside down. That fact became abundantly clear as soon as he walked back into his apartment. First, the television was on; he’d gotten used to living in silence over the last few months and preferred it that way. Second, the entire apartment smelled like home cooking.
It didn’t take long to track that second fact down to the kitchen, where Taylor was bent over, pulling something out of the oven. Zac coughed loudly to get his attention, and Taylor jumped a little as he set the pan down.
“Oh,” Taylor said, a somewhat uneasy smile on his lips. “You’re just in time. I didn’t have time do the homemade steak fries like I wanted to, but crinkle fries are always good, right? And I made the burgers the way Mom used to, with the cheese right in the patties. I know that was your favorite, and I assume it still is, unless you’ve gone vegetarian or something crazy.”
“I haven’t gone vegetarian,” Zac replied, chuckling slightly in spite of himself. He tried to cover it with a cough as he stepped toward the refrigerator and retrieved a beer. “You didn’t have to do all of this, you know.”
“It’s not about what I had to do or didn’t have to do. It’s what I wanted to do.” Taylor gave him a pointed look, but quickly shrugged it off. “I cook; it’s what I do. Especially when I’m stressed out. Devin hated it. We would fight and I’d spend hours baking cookies or brownies or something. He probably thought I was trying to fatten him up or something.”
“You still miss him, huh?” Zac asked before thinking. “Sorry, I shouldn’t have. I mean. You don’t have to answer that. That was really nosy of me.”
Taylor shook his head as he scrapped patties out of a pan and onto a waiting plate. “No, it’s fine. I do. I mean, we hadn’t been together forever or anything. But he was one of the first people I met when I moved out here last spring. I guess we moved too fast, deciding to live together and everything. We didn’t get to know each other well enough first, and living together meant there was nowhere to run when we fought. It just wasn’t going to work like that.”
“I’m sorry,” Zac said softly, accepting the plate Taylor held out to him. He kept his eyes down as he added all the fixings to his burger, along with a healthy side of fries and ketchup.
Taylor shrugged. “Like I said, it wasn’t going to work out. I didn’t think we were going to get married or anything—I mean, if we could. You know what I mean. But I’m surprised—but glad—that you care.”
Zac looked up from the seat he’d taken. “Why wouldn’t I care?”
Taylor just shrugged again and sat down without giving Zac a real answer.
“I didn’t hate you,” Zac replied. “I wasn’t like them. You wouldn’t have known that, I guess, because you were just gone and I didn’t have a chance to really tell you. But it wasn’t fair. It wasn’t right. I’m not—I mean, I’m straight, but that doesn’t mean I have anything against you for just being you.”
“Well, you’ll forgive me if I have trouble believing that you’re one hundred percent straight,” Taylor said, his eyelashes fluttering as he seemed to be attempting to look Zac anywhere but right in the eyes, “but thank you. I didn’t know, Zac. I really didn’t. I thought you all hated me, all of you. And that’s why I never tried very hard to find you. I’m so sorry for that now—for more than one reason, really.”
Zac scowled at his burger. “I don’t want to talk about that. What—what happened at the club, I mean. Can we just eat our food and forget about that?”
“Sure,” Taylor said, his voice an octave or two higher than usual. “We can do that. We can do whatever you want.”
“Thank you.”
Zac knew he was being short with Taylor, and that wasn’t fair, especially when Taylor had gone to so much trouble to cook him a meal. And not just any meal, but a burger that was identical to the ones their mother had cooked for them. Taylor had put not just time, but thought, into this dinner, and all Zac could do was shut him down every time he tried to talk. It wasn’t right, no matter what had happened.
But what Taylor had done, trying to cover it up and keep Zac from knowing the truth… that wasn’t right, either. Zac wasn’t ready to forgive all of that yet, although he wished desperately for the strength to forget it.
At Zac’s request, the two ate their dinner in an awkward silence, sharing little more than a few brief words about their days. Zac still didn’t even know where Taylor worked, how he had ended up in Austin to begin with or where he had been for the past eight years before that. There were so many questions just on the tip of his tongue, but none that he was ready to ask.
Once they had eaten their fill, Taylor covered the leftovers with aluminum foil and stored them in the refrigerator. Zac decided to make himself useful and began cleaning up Taylor’s mess, scraping off plates and dumping them into a sink full of soapy water. It was the least he could do, and even as he thought that, he wondered why he felt like he owed Taylor anything at all. After everything, how could he feel like the guilty one? It wasn’t right. And yet it was how he felt, illogical as it may have been.
Taylor soon joined him at the sink, their bodies uncomfortably close. Zac could feel Taylor’s body heat next to him, and it made his own body temperature rise. He hated it. Taylor was his brother; he didn’t want to feel that way. He didn’t feel that way. And yet every time he remembered the person he had mistakenly thought Taylor was, this illusive Jordan character, butterflies fluttered up in his stomach. Standing so close, feeling Taylor near him and smelling his soft scent that could have been soap, shampoo, even perfume for all Zac knew… it was more than he could handle.
“We’re still not okay, are we?” Taylor asked, taking a clean glass from Zac’s hand.
“No,” Zac replied tersely, making a pointed effort not to let their hands brush. “How could we be okay? After… everything?”
Taylor sighed. “I can apologize a million times for not realizing sooner that it was you, and I will if it’s what you want me to do, but nothing will erase it. I know it’s crazy to expect everything to be perfect right now. I’m not asking for perfect. I’m asking for you not to hate me because of a mistake. An accident. A complete, freak accident.”
Zac considered Taylor’s words as he scrubbed the last pan. He didn’t disagree with them, really. It was an accident; he knew that. That wasn’t what upset him, he realized. It may have thrown everything he thought he knew about his sexuality into disarray, but that wasn’t Taylor’s fault, and so that wasn’t really what bothered him.
No. What bothered him went deeper than that, and he didn’t think he could keep it bottled up much longer.
“I know it was an accident,” Zac practically growled. He thrust the pan into Taylor’s hands and backed away, barely even bothering to dry off his own hands. “It’s not that. It’s really not. But you… you just assumed I took their side. You ignored me for years, because you didn’t have enough faith in me to realize I wasn’t that full of hate. And then when you find me again, I think the circumstances ought to have been a hint that you were wrong. But what do you do? You get so scared of how I’m going to react to that accident that you decide it’s better to just ignore me again. For how long, Taylor? How long were you going to hide from me just so I wouldn’t know the truth? Because hiding that from me was somehow better for me than having my brother in my life again?”
Taylor’s mouth opened, as if he were going to respond, then quickly slammed shut again. His bottom lip quivered, but he was completely silent.
“You don’t need to answer,” Zac continued. “I guess they’re all rhetorical questions. It doesn’t matter anyway. Another day without you is bad enough. You don’t know how hard I looked, but it isn’t like I had any clue where to start. But I tried to find you. You didn’t do that for me. I see that now. I see where your priorities are. You can say you were protecting me, and I’m not going to lie and say that it’s okay to live with… the knowledge of what we did. It’s not. But it’s better to know that and know you’re at least alive than to always wonder if you weren’t.”
His lip still quivering, Taylor mumbled, “I’m sorry. Zac, I am so sorry.”
“For that, you really could apologize a million times, and it wouldn’t be enough,” Zac replied.
He didn’t give Taylor another chance to respond. Maybe someday Taylor could come up with an apology or explanation that would be enough, but Zac doubted it. He supposed that it was a wound that only time could fix, the way that only time had created it in the first place.
As he retreated to his bedroom, he could still hear Taylor puttering around the kitchen. Based on what Taylor had told him earlier, Zac assumed the clanging and banging he heard were the sounds of something being baked. That, too, wouldn’t heal any wounds.
Had he created even more wounds with his outburst? Zac hoped not. It was all just a mess that neither of them could have foreseen, a mess that not even their parents could have imagined when they had made their close-minded decision to cut Taylor out of their lives. Zac doubted anyone else had ever been in such a situation. It was the sort of thing that you couldn’t even begin to imagine, and yet it was now his life.
With those thoughts in mind and the scent of chocolate in the air, Zac drifted off into an uneasy sleep, trying not to even attempt to guess what the next day might bring.