Father? (Frerard)

Four - en fuego

Days went by very quickly. It was getting close to my birthday which meant Toni's birthday was right around the corner as well. She was born on October 1 a month before my own birthday. She was an adult and I didn't know what to give her now that she was older and living on her own. Finally, I asked Jamia what she thought about the whole gift thing and we agreed on buying her a piece of jewelry she could pick herself would be great.

Apart from that, I gave her a framed photo of me, her, Jamia and Gerard we had taken a few weeks earlier in celebration of Gerard living with us for six months. She really liked her presents and it didn't surprise when the jewelry she picked was a necklace with a dangler in the form of a palette. I smiled to myself while paying for the gift and looked at her and Gerard admiring her new neck decoration.

She had been wearing it every day since her birthday and the more it had pained me see her take it off that one day, but that would skipping way too ahead once again.

Speaking of Gerard, we were like the best friends you see in the movies. We spent a lot of time together – watching sports, drinking beer, making barbecue and talking about art – those were the best moments with him. The more time I was spending with him, the more I was realizing how much I liked him. He intrigued me mostly because of his behavior that was so carefree I was suspicious if he was on drugs.

We laughed a lot together and I got to see his true, quite fruity nature. He liked to touch people, not in a sexual way, more like he was making sure they were there with him when he was talking to them, to bring them down to earth or to take them with him on a journey. Sometimes he talked in metaphors I couldn't quite decipher and other times he used so much of artistic jargon I had to google what he was talking about.

I showed him my dark room and cameras so he could understand what I liked to do and what my passion was. He seemed captivated when I showed him the process of developing a photo, something he had never seen before.

"I never thought it required this many steps." he shook his head as we stood in my room and hung the photo to dry. I shrugged and let him try to do one photo himself.

"Don't be scared." I encouraged him as he was moving the paper from liquid to liquid. He laughed and looked at me to speak. Neither of us realized how close we were standing to each other in the cramped space of my dark room. Our noses brushed together and in the red light, everything felt different, ten times more intense and seconds felt like minutes. We stared at each other just for a few seconds really, but it was more than enough for me to start feeling things. Things I shouldn't be feeling.

"I think it's done." I whispered because there was no need to speak at normal volume when we were this close. I wasn't sure if it was for real or if my imagination was just toying with me but I felt like I heard him sigh quietly and maybe just maybe it was disappointment showing on his face. We hung the photo, coincidentally, of him and Toni and I was reminded once again, who he was. He wasn't my friend. He was my family and it was okay to be close, but probably not that close.

It was awkward after that so we just stood there, exchanged a few words regarding the developing process and then he excused himself to go to sleep. He usually hugged me or touched my arm when saying goodbye but that night when he reached out his fingers to touch my arm I stepped back like a homophobic coward, said 'goodnight' and let him leave probably very confused because he didn't know what I was feeling right then.

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Me getting more close to Gerard also resulted in me growing more distant from Jamia. She seemed tired, constantly asking me to do something together but after I finally agreed to go to the movies with her and made the mistake of letting her pick which movie we'll see, she gave up because I fell asleep during a boring romantic comedy.

I apologized to her, meaning not only the ruined movie date but also the other times I left her alone to be with Gerard. Jamia looked sad, then mad and finally, she went back to normal, she then revealed to me years later that she realized a very important thing about her life, that she had sorted her thoughts and feelings and became okay with her life again. Once again, I was oblivious.

We had sex on my birthday. It was okay, but I didn't enjoy it like I usually would and Jamia probably took it as a nice tradition. I had a conversation with Gerard the next day. I had been looking forward to it, because we hadn't talked like that in a few days and I was starting to miss those conversations, I was starting to miss him.

When I slowly got up to go to bed I noticed him looking at the back door to now his and Toni's apartment almost painfully. After asking him if everything was alright he just shrugged and proceeded to lit another cigarette. I recognized something was wrong because I have never seen him smoke that much before. He opened up and told me Toni was mad at him for no apparent reason and that she even yelled at him for the first time since they got together and even that was about a stupid coffee cup that he had left in the sink unwashed.

He said he felt like he didn't belong upstairs. At that time I didn't realize that it was another one of his metaphors and that it didn't mean he didn't belong upstairs for just that night because Toni was mad at him. So I sat back down and we talked until the early morning hours so he didn't have to face my raging daughter because if anyone knew how angry she could be, it was me.

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Christmas came sooner than I expected and the air was cold again. I wore my favorite sweaters and hoodies and despite my conversations with Gerard getting shorter and less frequent due to the weather, my relationship with Jamia had officially moved to just living in the same house. I purchased a small couch to sleep on in my room because even though Jamia never said a thing about not wanting to share a bed with me anymore I made the conclusion myself when she kept constantly complaining about me snoring or tossing around.

At least Gerard and Toni were okay again but my jealousy was getting the best of me. I wanted to have what they had, to be okay with my wife, to sleep in the same bed and to feel the spark when I touched her. However, that spark was long gone and though the fire of our love was still existent in the form of heat pulsating coal, we couldn't ignite it ever again.

Yet, my own spark was right there, ready to flare up and burn me alive and I couldn't see who was the fuel to my bonfire when everyone else around me clearly did. Sometimes I was really just plain stupid and oblivious to the most obvious things and it took me quite some to figure out what the hell was happening. Which in this case wasn't until after the new year.

We had been sleeping separately for about seven weeks by that time and Toni had realized something wasn't right and when Toni noticed something like that I had too. I also had my last conversation with Gerard before I stopped going out in the evenings definitively. And it wasn't because of the weather.

No one asked me why. No one asked me what was going on with me and I practically separated myself from my family and friends for some time. The only people I talked to were people at work and sometimes Jamia if she asked if I was hungry. I needed to get myself together so I could get back to my normal life, back to being a husband and a father. Except for the people around me changed and I had lost the place that I wanted to return to. I could only be a father from then on and if I wanted to be a husband I needed to realize first who was the fuel to my fire.