Nowhere Man - 15. Chapter 15: Follow That Nowhere Man

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come,” Davis asked from the driver’s seat of the squad car, parked at the top of the trail that sloped in a semi-circle around the park.

“Yes,” I replied, unsure at all. Why was I putting myself through this torture? 24 hours before, Davis had given me a choice: to walk away from it all and trust him. To allow him to protect and take care of me. But I couldn’t just throw it all away like that.

“You can stay here as long as you need to feel comfortable,” Davis had said the night before, his arms wrapped tightly around me. I was safe in his arms. Protected.

“I can’t put you out like that.”

“It’s no put-out, trust me. I’m enjoying this as much as you are.”

And then he proceeded to enjoy me. Slowly at first, determining just how much my fragile psyche could take. He had no clue what lay past the surface, beneath the visible demons I was fighting. There were more, I assured him. Demons that started way back when my father died and did nothing to stop himself.

The first time he came, it was slow. The intimacy lasted a long time, and for the first time in my life, I felt like a guy was communicating to me through his body. It was different than Tyler and Wade. It was special.

The second time, we came together. He lay on top of me, slowly grinding his night stick into me. He maintained eye contact so intense, it read my every thought. At first it scared me, being so close to him. But eventually, it showed me that there was life outside of my living nightmare.

Protect love at any cost.

After wrestling Davis all night and my own decisions all morning, I decided to go through with it.

“Okay,” Davis said as I stepped out of the car. “If he’s there, you say your goodbyes, signal me, and I’ll come make the arrest.”

It was that simple for Detective Davis, the no-nonsense type-A counterpart to bedroom Davis, the passionate, giving Davis. Detective Davis had an exploratory committee on its way to a lake three hours from Easton to exhume a buried body. The body had Tyler’s murderous finger prints all over it. That body was going to put him in jail for a long time.

I walked into the trailer hoping that I was wrong about Tyler, and that he had left me. It would have spared me the confrontation I desperately dreaded, but needed.

Need a light?

I knew if I didn’t face him once and for all, his memory would nag and drive me insane. This was a necessary part of the journey with the nowhere man.

The house was still and empty. Regardless of the high noon sun beating outside, the trailer still carried an overcast grey hue.

I walked straight to the bedroom and found him sitting shirtless, hunched on the mattress, clicking his lighter on and off. His jeans were mud tracked. He smiled at me and his eyes glistened through the blood shot when I appeared.

“I knew you’d be back,” he said, his voice low and calm. “How’d you know I’d be here?”

“I just knew,” I replied. There was no other way to explain it. I had a connection to him. The force that had kept me there for so long had drawn me to where I knew I would find him.

“How’s your cop friend?”

“How’s Wade?” Tyler sniffed in and his face twitched for a split-second. He smiled.

“I told you I’d take care of Wade,” he said, his voice gritty. Sexy.

“Tell me everything,” I said, fighting every urge to sit down next to him. Tyler was dangerous, and that was the fact of the matter. I had no clue what he had up his sleeves, but to get close to him would have drawn me in further. I couldn’t let that happen.

“What do you wanna know?” He glared at me.

“Everything. From the beginning.”

He hesitated. He licked his bottom lip, assessing just how much to tell me. He sensed that I was there to end everything forever. He could tell me everything, and it wouldn’t matter.

“Sit down.”

“I’ll stand.”

His smile grew.

He let out a slight chuckle and stood and walked towards me.

I fought the urge to run outside and call for Davis.

I had to do this.

With his skinny frame, Tyler approached me confidently and grabbed my hand. I resisted, causing him to pull me harder.

Moving faster than I’d ever seen him move, he side stepped me, pulled the gun out of its stash in the small of my back, and turned it on me. All before I could react.

I breathed in, feeling the cold, hard medal of a piston barrel pressed hard on my neck.

“Don’t you wanna sit down now?” he asked in a low voice. I fought back a tear and slowly crossed to the bed. A minute and several beads of sweat later, Tyler crawled on top of me, holding our hands together above our heads. The gun lay a centimeter away from our hands. As skinny as Tyler was, he completely overpowered me.

I was alive at his mercy, and we both knew it.

“The beginning,” he whispered into my ear, pressing down on my torso, deliberately muffling the sound of the wire that was taped to my stomach. It was obstructed just enough that Davis could hear someone was talking, but the machine couldn’t register any words to record.

“The beginning,” he repeated; his gaze bore into me. “I started having these feelings for a friend of mine, Trav. I was a happily married man one day, trying to get his wife pregnant. And then a friend of mine and I start getting close, and I’m feeling things I’ve never felt for a guy before. Sound familiar?”

It did. It sounded like me being 16 and not knowing what was wrong with me. It sounded like me wanting to fuck my best friend, my brother, my baseball coach. Any man I could get close to. It sounded like me at 20 making trips to the flats to experience the touch of an anonymous man, just to feel loved by someone. It did sound familiar.

I needed a light.

“One day, I went over to my friend’s house and I told him I was losing interest in my beautiful wife and that she wasn’t happy. I wasn’t happy. And I told him I knew why. And I leaned over and I kissed him. And instead of beating the shit out of me like I thought he would, and sending me home to Les like he should have, this buddy of mine kissed me back, Trav.”

Tyler smiled at the memory, closing his eyes to stop a tear. When he opened his eyes again, I saw the remnants of a look he had once given to me. Love.

“And so we started. Any chance we got. Fishing trips to the lake. Any chance his circuit was in town or he could get away for a night. My wife would work double shifts at the hospital and we’d fuck at my place. All the time, like school boys who could never get enough.

“And then one day, she came home before she was supposed to. Cut her hand on something at work and they sent her home. And she walked and saw my friend on top of me, riding my dick like he loved doing so much. And I didn’t know she was there until I heard the gun shot, and Wade fell down next to me, bleeding from the ear. And I looked up, and she was standing there crying, ready to go and tell everyone I knew that I was a faggot who’d got caught fucking his boyfriend in the ass on a sunny afternoon.

“I snapped, Trav. I jumped out of that bed, wrestled her down, and before she could fire another round, five shots went straight into her chest.”

The clarity with which he told the story should have alarmed me. Two deaths in one night, both because of him, and not an ounce of remorse.

“I left Wade there and I took Leslie’s body. I buried it by the lake I showed you, because I felt she deserved that. She always thought that place was beautiful, and ours, and she had no clue that I’d been there a dozen times with a man named Wade. And then I drifted. For the longest time, I doubted that I could be happy again. It just didn’t seem right to try.

“And then Wade came back. I thought he had died, but he hadn’t, that sneaky fucker. He passed out and stayed there; lucky bastard avoided being shot again. We tried to make it work with the two of us, but it was different. Things weren’t the same without the risk and the excitement, and at one point, I couldn’t even touch him without feeling awful. It was ‘cause of him that Les was dead, and my brain couldn’t separate it.

“So I left Wade and moved to Easton and I met you.”

Need a light?

“You were different than anyone. It was like you got me from that first night we sat around and sang stupid songs to each other. How’d it go? Follow that nowhere man, follow him where he goes…”

“Follow him where he leads,” I sang softly. “Follow him down that path, he won’t lead you astray, he’ll take care o’ your needs.”

We sang the last part in harmony, and I felt something I didn’t expect to feel. As Tyler pressed down on me, I felt his piston pumper get a little stiffer between us. He bucked around to reposition himself, and then returned his weight to me.

“And that second night, when I remembered what it felt like to be intimate with someone again, it was almost too much to handle, Trav. I’d put that part of it away for myself. Suppressed it. And every experience with you was rediscovering what I had with Wade the first time around.

“And then I saw you talking to him at that bar, and I knew he was trying to get at me. He made it clear that he would try, and I made it clear that I was done. That’s why I took you away.”

“You kidnapped me,” I said suddenly.

“You wanted to come. You were so desperate to find someone who cared about you; who could reciprocate that human touch. The love you never got from your father.” He stopped mid-breath and opened his eyes wide.

“You read them?” I asked, not expecting an answer. It was clear.

He shrugged. “I had no idea that Wade would get more aggressive and that you… how was I supposed to know that you would kill him?”

“I did that for us,” I defended. It didn’t matter anymore. I was on my way out. Tyler gritted his teeth, took a deep breath, and pushed down on me harder. His body weight restricted my breathing. I could have pushed him off if I’d tried. He was strong, but I had him on sheer size alone. In a minute, I would push him off. I still had one more question.

“Did you love me at all?” I asked softly.

“What kind of question is that?”

“As soon as you found out that Wade was dead, you jumped on his side, Tyler. How was supposed to feel about that?”

“You try losin’ someone you love twice and tell me how you feel.”

He was right. Maybe I had made a mistake. Killing Wade had been a mistake. Calling Davis had been a mistake. Maybe I should have trusted Tyler and stayed with him. Listened to him. Followed him.

Follow that nowhere man.

At that point, however, there was no turning back. I’d made my bed, and Tyler was crushed me into it.

The pressure increased on my stomach, making it hard for me to catch a breath. By the time I realized that Tyler’s elbow was crushing my neck, my head was already aching and my eyes were already bulging.

“Follow that nowhere man, follow him where he goes, follow him where he leads,” he hummed as my mind flew a million miles above us. I watched the scene out of body, floating above Tyler’s naked back. I felt like my soul had already escaped my body and was watching the last remnant of this nowhere man strangle the life out of me.

I closed my eyes just before my mind went blank. I focused on making everything around me black. I tried my hardest to force my body to go limp under him. A second later, Tyler released the pressure on my neck. I kept my eyes closed, not too tightly, but tight enough. I pictured him looking down on me, examining his handwork and being proud of himself. Violence was the only language Tyler spoke, and he’d said volumes to me just then.

I knew I had a split second from the time his body rose off of me to when he would discover I was still breathing. I felt him lift up slowly, and mustering every ounce of adrenaline in my body, I extended my hand a centimeter, grasped the piston, straightened and fired.

Tyler’s gasp echoed throughout the room, creating the loudest silence I’d ever heard. I fired a second shot into his chest and he collapsed on top of me, soaking through my clothes with gallons of blood.

I pushed him off just as Davis sprang into the room, gun drawn, and in perfect stance.

“Travis,” he whispered quietly. I pushed Tyler off of me with a grunt. The two shots to his torso had caused more blood than I’d ever imagined him to have to seep out slowly. Vibrant crimson. It looked like he was covered in a million rose petals.

“What happened?” Davis asked, standing before me.

“He tried to kill me.”

“Where’d you get the gun?”

“Your drawer this morning.”

“Travis,” Davis said, disappointed.

“I’m sorry.” It was the only confession Davis needed to hear.

“You know what I have to do, right?” he asked. He returned his gun to his holster. I stood up and turned away from him, placing my hands behind my back. He took a deep breath, grabbed my hands, and drew me close to him. “It was self defense, all the way. He had the gun, you wrestled it out of him, and two shots went off, okay?”

“He tried to kill me.”

“I know babe,” he said. “I know.” Davis took in a deep breath.

“You have the right to remain silent.”