Page 74 of Hush

June 27th

After an indolent, languorous Saturday morning, Mike and Tom dragged themselves out of bed and took Etta Mae to Georgetown for a late brunch. Etta Mae napped in the shade beneath the patio table as they shared a plate of French toast and held hands beneath the tabletop. It was a budding routine, two weeks in a row. Something they’d begun together, which made it ten times as special.

Nervousness, though, crept up Tom’s throat, strangling his voice. His memories kept skipping back to the little rainbow pyramid advertisement, the one he’d played with the night he thought Mike had ditched him for a date. A date he now knew was just Kris—and, now he knew Kris, too. Could call Kris a friend, albeit a new friend. But still, a friend.

“The, uh…” He swallowed. Mike watched him, frown lines appearing on his face around the edges of his sunglasses. He squeezed Tom’s hand beneath the table. “Pride Month ends this weekend. There’s a march over by the Mall today. This afternoon.”

“I know.”

“Have you ever been?”

“I have. I marched my first year here in DC. Kris and I went together for a while, and then I would go with whoever I was dating at the time.”

Tom inhaled sharply. He chewed on his upper lip.

“Do you want to go?”

“I do. I don’t know if I’m ready to march yet.” He looked down. “The last march I was in was in 1987. It was hard. Things… weren’t great.”

Mike squeezed his hand, hard. “It’s different now. I swear.”

“I know. Everything is so, so different. It’s amazing. It’s just…” He trailed off. “It’s hard to let go of the past. The fear.”

“You lived something I’ll never know. Never fully understand. I never faced that kind of hate, from individuals or from society. I hate that you experienced all that.” Mike’s face screwed up, like he was fighting back his bad temper, a rage that wanted to let loose. His frustration melted a moment later and he laced their fingers together on top of Tom’s thigh. “I’m just happy you’re taking this second chance. On us.”

“This is worth it.”

Another squeeze, and Mike’s slow smile. “So, we’re going to go to the National Mall? Watch the march? It gets real lively in front of the Capitol.”

“Yes. We’re going.” He smiled, and Mike squeezed his hand again. “I don’t think Etta Mae can last all day in the sun.” It was already ninety degrees and only getting hotter.

“Let’s take her home and then head down.”

Home. Mike casually referred to his place as home. It was too early for that, but still… Tom couldn’t stop the smile breaking over his face.

The Pride March was everything and nothing he’d expected.

It was a celebration, like the day on the National Mall when he’d played frisbee with Mike and Kris. Bucket drums banged, cheers roared, songs sang out. Laughter floated on sunbeams, smiles traveled on the wind. Rainbow streamers and balloons and body paint created a moving canvas of light and pride, buoyed by hope, and every happy step of the march was another earthshaking accomplishment on the long, long road of their history.

It was a memorial, a somber reflection on lives loved and lost. Marchers carried posters with blown-up pictures of the faces of loved ones lost too early in life. Men and women, taken too soon by disease or violence. Twenty-six marchers in black, wreathed in white, pink, and blue striped ribbons, carried individual posters with pictures of the trans men and women murdered the year before in the U.S.

Tears flowed in the same space as cheers, as smiles. Wet faces turned up to the sun, people wreathed in rainbows and light doubling over and sobbing, lost in the combined anguish and joy.

It was a moment in time in which everything could be felt: the pride, the joy, the surge of exultation, rage, relief, and empowerment, hand in hand with the loss, the crushing pain of burying too many friends and the million tiny defeats they all felt every day. The curled lips, the snide looks. The sneers. The everyday hate that turned into normalcy, set against the dry victories of legal protections that were supposed to stop all of that, and sometimes actually did.

In 1991, he’d died a thousand different deaths, had seen a million different ways the world could hate him and his people.

Today, he saw a thousand and one dreams that had come true for them all, and a million and one ways in which they had all fought back, and the world had changed for them. Was still changing for them.

And… perhaps the biggest dream he ever dared imagine was standing beside him. He and Mike weren’t holding hands anymore, but Mike stood close enough to press his body against Tom’s shoulder, the curve of his back. Close enough to be there, really be there. He leaned back into Mike’s touch, just a bit.

Tom wanted to clap and he wanted to sob, scream at the top of his lungs in pride, in relief, in crazed, delirious happiness.Look at this! Look at what changed!And, he wanted to sob, collapse to his knees, cling to the grass—the same grass where he’d watched the AIDS quilt be unfolded for the very first time—and try to pull the ghosts of those men from the dirt, rip them back from dead like he could pull up the sun-warmed blades of grass.Do you believe this?he wanted to ask.Do you believe that this is happening, when all the world gave you was silence?

Where were the men who’d chased him and Peter with baseball bats? They hadn’t just disappeared in a cloud of smoke. They didn’t just fade away, a Hollywood movie where the bad guys get what’s coming, and the threads are neatly tied up in the end.

A hand landed on the small of his back, big and warm, even through his t-shirt. Mike shifted, stood behind him, hiding his touch. “It’s hard. I know,” Mike murmured.

“These are our museums. This is our living history. Everything, tangled together.” Tears rolled down Tom’s cheeks, sliding from beneath his sunglasses.