Under His Roof {MM Romance}

The ceremony was supposed to be the best day of Julian Paul’s life, and for the first 45 minutes it was exactly that, the kind of morning that felt earned after 4 years of late nights and early mornings and every sacrifice his parents had made to put him in this gown on this stage in this university.

He’d called his mother at 9:15 am, and she’d answered laughing, telling him they were already on the road, that his father had packed sandwiches, that they were going to be early, that she loved him, that she was so proud she could barely see the road, and Julian had laughed and told her to let his father drive then, and she’d laughed harder and hung up. That was the last time he heard her voice.

By 10:30 am the auditorium was full and the processional music was playing and Julian was in line with his classmates in alphabetical order, cap straight, gown pressed, the rolled certificate holder his roommate had lent him clutched in his left hand, and he was scanning the crowd the way he’d been scanning it since he arrived, looking for his parents’ faces in the sea of proud strangers. He didn’t find them.

He told himself they were late, that the road from home to the university was 3 hours plus and his father’s driving was cautious at the best of times, that they’d slip in through the side doors and find seats in the back and his mother would cry and his father would pretend he wasn’t crying and it would be perfect.

He told himself that all the way through the opening remarks and the dean’s address and the first third of the name calling, and then his phone vibrated in his pocket and it was an unknown number and something in his chest went cold before he answered it.

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer it in the middle of the ceremony, so he let it ring out and watched the screen and waited, and 30 seconds later the voicemail notification came through and he told himself it was nothing, that it was a wrong number or anything other than what the cold in his chest was telling him it was.

“Julian Paul,” the dean said from the stage, and Julian stood and walked forward and shook the hand and took the certificate and smiled for the photograph and walked back to his seat, and the cold in his chest didn’t go anywhere.

At 11:47 am, when the ceremony ended and the auditorium erupted in the noise of 4 years of effort being released simultaneously, Julian stepped into the corridor and listened to the voicemail.

It was a police officer. Her voice was careful and kind in the way that voices were careful and kind when they were delivering something irreversible, and she said there had been an accident on the highway outside the city at approximately 10:15 am involving a vehicle registered to his father, and that she needed him to come to the university administration office where officers were waiting to speak with him.

Julian stood in the corridor with his graduation gown and his rolled certificate holder and his phone pressed to his ear and listened to the message twice, and the second time he listened to it the noise of the celebrating crowd around him became very far away, like something happening in a different country, in a different life, to people who still had parents waiting for them in the auditorium.

He walked to the administration office. There were two officers and the university’s student welfare coordinator, a woman named Mrs. Adler who had a box of tissues on her desk and the expression of someone who had done this before and found it no easier for the practice, and they told him what had happened in the careful kind language of people who understood that no version of these words was acceptable and were doing their best anyway.

A truck had crossed the median on the highway outside the city at 10:15 am. His parents’ car had taken the full impact. They had been pronounced dead at the scene. The officers were deeply sorry for his loss.

Julian sat in the chair across from Mrs. Adler’s desk and held the rolled certificate holder in both hands and said nothing for a very long time.

“Is there someone we can call?” Mrs. Adler said. “Family, or a close friend of the family? Someone who can come and be with you?”

Julian thought about his parents’ address book, which his mother kept in the kitchen drawer next to the refrigerator, and about the names in it, and one name came to him before all the others, the name his mother had written in the emergency contact section of every form Julian had ever filled out since he was old enough to fill out forms.

“Simmons,” Julian said. “Simmons Jake. He was my parents’ closest friend. His number is—” He stopped, because he didn’t know the number, because his mother had always been the one who called Simmons, and then he unlocked his phone and scrolled through his contacts and found it there, added years ago and never deleted. “I have it.”

“Would you like us to call him?” Mrs. Adler said.

“No,” Julian said. “I’ll call him.”

He called Simmons Jake at 12:03 pm on his graduation day, sitting in the student welfare coordinator’s office with his graduation gown still on and his certificate holder in his lap, and Simmons answered on the second ring with the easy warmth of a man who wasn’t expecting bad news.

“Julian,” Simmons said, and his voice was warm, familiar and everything Julian had heard at every birthday, every Christmas and every family barbecue for years. “Hey. Happy graduation day, kid. Your parents must be so—”

“Simmons,” Julian said, and something in the way he said the name stopped Simmons mid-sentence.

“Julian. What happened.”

It wasn’t a question. It was the voice of a man who’d already understood from the single word that something was wrong and was bracing for what came next, and Julian held the phone and said, “There was an accident. On the highway. They were on their way here and there was an accident and they—” He stopped, because saying it out loud was different from hearing it from the officer, it was the first time he’d said it in his own voice and his own voice didn’t sound like his own voice anymore. “They’re gone, Simmons.”

The silence that followed lasted 8 seconds, and Julian counted them, and in those 8 seconds he heard Simmons breathe and heard the sound of something being set down and heard a single syllable that was not quite a word, just a sound, the sound a person made when something hit them that they hadn’t been able to prepare for.

“I’m coming,” Simmons said. “Don’t move. I’m coming right now.”

“You don’t have to—” Julian started.

“Julian.” Simmons’ voice was steady and certain, carrying something underneath it that had nothing of the warmth of the greeting and everything of the man Julian had always known him to be underneath the warmth, solid and immovable and completely reliable. “Don’t tell me I don’t have to. I’m coming. Stay where you are.”

He came.

It took Simmons Jake three hours and forty minutes to drive from Tulip Town to the university, which was twenty minutes faster than the route should have allowed, and Julian knew without being told that Simmons had driven the way people drove when they were closing distance between themselves and someone who needed them.

Julian spent those three hours and forty minutes in Mrs. Adler’s office, and then in a chair in the corridor outside, and then on a bench in the university’s small garden where the celebration noise had mostly dispersed and the afternoon had gone grey in the way that October afternoons in Tebena went grey, and he sat on the bench in his graduation gown with his certificate holder across his knees and felt the specific numbness of someone whose mind had decided that feeling everything at once was not survivable and had instituted a temporary moratorium on feeling.

He was still on the bench when Simmons arrived.

He heard him before he saw him, the sound of footsteps moving with purpose across the garden path, and then Simmons Jake was standing in front of him, still in his work clothes, dark jeans and a grey shirt with the sleeves rolled up and grease on his forearms that he hadn’t had time to wash off, and he was forty-two years old and he looked it, broad and solid with grey at his temples and a jaw that hadn’t been shaved in two days, and his dark eyes found Julian on the bench and the expression on his face was something Julian didn’t have a word for, grief and determination and something else that he was too numb to identify.

Simmons sat beside him on the bench without saying anything, and for a long moment they just sat there, two people with twenty-seven years of shared history between them and the worst possible thing sitting in the space where all that history used to live, and the October afternoon did its grey indifferent thing around them.

“I drove too fast,” Simmons said finally.

“I know,” Julian said.

“I kept thinking—” Simmons stopped. “I kept thinking I needed to get to you.”

“You’re here,” Julian said.

“Yeah,” Simmons said. “I’m here.”

Julian looked at his certificate holder and thought about his mother laughing on the phone at 9:15 am and his father’s sandwiches and the crowd in the auditorium and the unknown number calling at 11:47 am, and felt the moratorium on feeling begin to crack at the edges, and Simmons must have seen it because he put his arm around Julian’s shoulders without saying anything and Julian put his face against the grey shirt that smelled like motor oil and the specific warmth of a person who’d driven too fast to get to him, and cried.

He cried for a long time, and Simmons held him and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that the holding didn’t say more completely, and the garden was empty around them and the October afternoon went greyer, and eventually the crying ran out of itself the way crying did, leaving something that wasn’t better but was quieter, and Julian sat up and wiped his face and Simmons’ arm stayed around his shoulders.

“What do I do?” Julian said. “I don’t—Simmons, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Right now you don’t do anything,” Simmons said. “Right now you just sit here. Everything else can wait.”

“There are things that can’t wait,” Julian said. “The police said there are things I need to—identification, and the car, and the—”

“I’ll handle it,” Simmons said. “All of it. That’s not your job right now.”

“It is my job,” Julian said. “They’re my parents.”

“And they were my closest friends for twenty-three years,” Simmons said, and his voice was even and steady and carrying the weight of his own grief alongside Julian’s without making Julian carry any of it. “Let me handle it. Let me do this for them. And for you.”

Julian looked at him, at the grey shirt and the unshaved jaw and the dark eyes that were red at the edges in the way of someone who’d cried in a car on a highway for three hours and forty minutes, and felt the specific gratitude of someone who’d been handed something they hadn’t known they needed and couldn’t have articulated if they’d tried.

“Okay,” Julian said.

“Okay,” Simmons said.

The drive back to Tulip Town happened at 6:30 pm, after Simmons had spoken to the police and the university administration and the hospital and done everything that needed doing with the quiet efficiency of a man who understood that someone needed to hold the practical things together so that Julian didn’t have to, and Julian sat in the passenger seat of Simmons’ truck and watched the highway go past and thought about the last time he’d been on this road, three weeks ago, going home for the weekend, his mother making his favorite meal and his father complaining about the cost of university textbooks while secretly being proud of every single one.

They didn’t talk much. There wasn’t much to say that the silence didn’t say more honestly, and Simmons drove and Julian watched the road and occasionally Simmons would say something practical, that he’d called ahead to cancel his workshop appointments for the rest of the week, that Julian’s things from the university dormitory would be packed up and sent on, that there was food at the house, and each practical thing was its own kind of care, the language of a man who expressed what he felt through what he did.

“You don’t have to do all of this,” Julian said, somewhere around 8:00 pm when the lights of Tulip Town were starting to appear on the horizon.

“I know,” Simmons said.

“I mean it,” Julian said. “You have the workshop, and your own life, and I’m not—I don’t want to be a burden on you.”

Simmons was quiet for a moment, and then he said, “Your father asked me something, a long time ago. When you were about seventeen and he was going through something difficult at work and he was thinking about the things people thought about when things were difficult.” He paused. “He asked me if anything ever happened to him and your mother, would I look after you. Make sure you are okay.”

Julian looked at him. “What did you say?”

“I said yes,” Simmons said simply. “Without thinking about it. Without conditions.” He kept his eyes on the road. “I meant it then and I mean it now. You’re not a burden, Julian. You’re the thing I promised them.”

Julian looked at the lights of Tulip Town growing on the horizon and felt the words land in the place they were meant to land and said nothing, because there was nothing adequate to say to a man who’d driven too fast on a highway and handled the practical things and driven you home and told you that you were a promise he intended to keep.

He said nothing and Simmons drove and Tulip Town received them with its ordinary evening business, and at 8:23 pm Simmons pulled into the driveway of his house on Canter Street and turned off the engine and said, “You’re home.”

Julian looked at the house, at the lights Simmons had left on and the workshop visible at the side and the front garden that was practical rather than decorative in the way of a man who lived alone and had other priorities, and thought that this was not his home, that his home was an hour away in the town where his parents had lived and where tomorrow there would be things to arrange and decisions to make and a house full of everything they’d left behind.

He thought all of that and got out of the truck anyway, because Simmons had said he was home and Simmons had promised his father without thinking about it, and that was enough for tonight.

That was more than enough.

Inside, Simmons made tea that neither of them particularly wanted and they sat at the kitchen table and the house was quiet around them with the quietness of a place that had only ever held one person and was adjusting to two, and Julian wrapped his hands around his mug and looked at the kitchen table and thought about his parents.

“Tell me something about them,” Julian said. “Something I don’t know.”

Simmons looked at him across the table. “What kind of something?”

“Anything,” Julian said. “Something from before I was born. Before I knew them. When they were just your friends and not yet my parents.”

Simmons was quiet for a moment, and then the corner of his mouth moved and he said, “Your father was the worst driver I have ever known. He drove like he was personally offended by every other vehicle on the road. Your mother used to make him pull over and she’d drive the rest of the way, and he’d sit in the passenger seat pretending he’d chosen to stop.”

Julian looked at him, and something that was almost a laugh came out of him, brief and raw and genuine, the first one since 11:47 am, and Simmons looked at him when it happened with an expression that Julian was too tired to read properly but that he felt anyway, warm and watchful and entirely present.

“Tell me another one,” Julian said.

So Simmons told him another one, and then another, and they sat at the kitchen table in the house on Canter Street in Tulip Town while the October night did its thing outside the window, and Julian listened to the man who’d promised his father without thinking about it tell stories about people he’d loved for twenty-three years, and felt the grief of the day sitting alongside something that was not comfort exactly but was the closest available thing to it, which was the presence of someone who’d loved the same people and was willing to say so.

At 11:15 pm Simmons showed him the spare bedroom, which was clean and practical and had clearly been prepared at some point during the three hours and forty minutes of driving, fresh sheets and a towel on the chair and the curtains drawn against the October night, and Julian stood in the doorway and looked at it and said, “Thank you. For all of it.”

“Get some sleep,” Simmons said. “Tomorrow will be hard. Tonight, just sleep.”

“Simmons,” Julian said.

“Yeah.”

“Did you really not think about it?” Julian said. “When my father asked you. Did you really say yes without thinking about it?”

Simmons looked at him from the hallway, and his expression was the one Julian hadn’t been able to read at the kitchen table, warm and watchful and something underneath both of those things that was its own category, and he said, “Some things you don’t need to think about. You just know the answer.”

He went to his own room and Julian stood in the doorway of the spare bedroom and felt the day in its entirety sitting on his shoulders, the 9:15 am phone call and the ceremony and the voicemail and the officer’s careful kind voice and the garden bench and the grey shirt and the highway and the kitchen table and the stories about his father’s driving, and he went inside and sat on the edge of the bed and held his graduation certificate in both hands and looked at it.

His parents had been on their way to see him hold this.

He put it in the drawer of the bedside table, face down, and lay on top of the covers in the spare bedroom of the house on Canter Street and looked at the ceiling and listened to the sounds of Tulip Town settling into its night, and thought about what Simmons had said.

Some things you don’t need to think about. You just know the answer.

He didn’t sleep for a very long time.

Outside the window, the October night did what October nights in Tebena did, which was nothing in particular, and the house on Canter Street held two people who’d lost the same thing in different ways, and the morning was still a long way off, and the rest of everything was further than that.