Title: Stages Of Gale- Part 3
Author: phobosgirl (phobosgirl@hotmail.com)
Date: 12/23/04
Rating: R
Authors notes: Part 3. Stupid muse. Stupid silly muse. Vengeful muse, won’t let me vacation. Darned stupid muse! Somebody shoot me, please! Not beta’d, blah blah blah. The snippet of the song at the end is by Travis and is called ‘Love Will Come Through’. I don’t own any part of it. Feedback is more than welcome and can be sent to phobosgirl@hotmail.com
Disclaimer: This is only for fun. None of this is real nor should any implication be made based on this manuscript that I have any insider info on either of these two fine men.
Warnings: Gale/Randy (Queer As Folk) RPS
Complete: no

Stages Of Gale- Part 3

The third time, I asked him to fuck me.

In the heat of the moment, I’m not sure why it became so important to me. Maybe it was because he’d already made himself so vulnerable to me. Maybe it was that a part of me felt guilty because I was, in essence, using him and we both knew it. Mostly it was because I needed to feel him in me, becoming a part of me- joined. I think I had convinced myself that until I let him do it, all of this could have just been a dream, that maybe none of it had really happened and that I wasn’t changing into someone I didn’t recognize.

I was scared shitless to go back to work. I couldn’t tell him, would never tell him, that I spent the ride to the airport in a cold sweat, shaking like I might just jitter into a million tiny pieces at any moment.

I wasn’t even sure exactly what I was afraid of. It wasn’t until months later that I realized what had really scared me- not that I might be gay; not that I might fall in love with a man or that I could be jeopardizing a career that up until a year ago hadn’t meant much to me but that now meant everything to me. It wasn’t really, down deep, any of those things but I was too messed up right then to get it.

I rested my forehead on the cool glass of the taxi, squeezing my eyes shut against tears that kept trying to surface. The city whizzed by unnoticed. All I was aware of was an ache that went so deep I was sure I must have damaged something inside, something of value to me that I might never be able to repair. My sense of self? Maybe. Maybe that was it.

It wasn’t until I boarded the plane to LA and was safely ensconced in the business class john that I broke. With fists full of cheap brown paper towels held stuffed into my mouth to mute the sound, I screamed out my fear and confusion until I was hoarse and my lips were parched.

I returned to my seat some unknown time later, emotionally wrung out and craving tequila. I’m not a drinker. I know a lot of people assume I must be because Brian is a heavy hitter, but I’m a lightweight. After sipping my way through less than one tiny airline bottle, squeezing lime into my mouth occasionally so I could bear the taste, I fell asleep and was jostled awake a few hours later when the wheels met the tarmac.

I made my way home, pulled the drapes and laid in bed like an invalid for three days.

You’d have thought I’d figured a few things out in that time. You’d be wrong.

I arrived in Toronto three weeks later just as bruised and mystified as when I’d left Randy standing on a curb in Soho looking like someone had just run down his kitty and then laughed about it.

Would he expect love? Would he want a relationship? Was it just fucking, to him? Was it only that to me, too? How much could I give and how much would he take? The space inside me where those answers should have been was a gaping black hole that terrified me to look at, much less explore. I had very effectively spent the last several weeks like an automaton- pack; eat; drive; sleep; piss; forget.

And in his usual fashion, he rendered all of my grief and angst moot when he showed up in town. One look at him and all I could see was my Randy. My best friend. He didn’t want anything from me. He didn’t have demands or hidden agendas. His smile was fresh and open and it said, “We’re good. We’re ok. I understand everything.”

It nearly killed me.

Who the fuck was I?

**************************************** *******************************

Filming began and we fell into a familiar pattern of working all day and into the night, giving interviews on weekends, making guest TV and charity benefit appearances when required and trying to find time for sleep and sustenance in the few spare moments left over.

I allowed myself to be lulled by the routine and his easy, undemanding manner, and all thoughts of my future were put on hold while I focused every ounce of energy on the next minute, and the next.

Weeks passed in this fashion until a pressure I was regrettably becoming familiar with began to build in me once again. Despite an intense inner struggle to ignore what I was feeling, I began to watch Randy more covetously every day. His voice would catch my attention at odd moments; a trace of his scented bath soap would waft towards me on my way back to my trailer at night; a song I knew he loved would play on the car radio and make me hard and uncomfortable in my jeans.

I desperately wanted it to stop.

Finally one day as I found myself eating the same lunch that was his usual order, the term “self-loathing” crashed down on me like some hideous cartoon-y 16-ton weight from above. I choked on a bite of dry sandwich, wondering if I would just finally die this way and be done with it all, until a passing crew member thumped me hard on the back and I coughed up the offending crumb. I vaguely heard my savior scolding me to be more careful and chew each bite ten times. I could breathe normally again, but the threatening blackness that fluttered at the edge my vision refused to dissipate.

I excused myself and stumbled to my trailer, locking the door behind me. For the first time since my childhood, I dropped to my knees, folded my hands together in front of me and prayed, begging God to take away the thing inside me that made me want Randy.

Yeah. Self-loathing and I were becoming fast friends.

I knelt on the cheap carpet silently pleading, my knees beginning to ache, and waited for an answer. Only when the echo of my own voice cried, “Grow up!” did I stand, brush myself off and go in search of Randy.

It was time to put an end to this insanity.

I stalked the set, seeking him out, but he had already left for the day. So much the better. After work, I’d show up at his apartment, confront him and be done with it. I’d be as gentle as I could- he deserved that and more from me- but I would let him know that under no circumstances was I gay; that no relationship beyond friendship would ever be possible between us; that I was grateful beyond measure for his invaluable help in this critical self-realization. I would thank him, give him a platonic hug and we would both know once and for all that the physical side of our relationship had run its course and was over.

The best laid plans.

By midnight, my face was pressed into his feather pillow and I was biting my lips hard enough to draw blood. I hadn’t so much asked him as I had begged. And the pain I expected to feel was slight compared to the soaring ecstasy of having him buried inside me, feeling his hands stroke my back and grip my shoulders, hearing my name ripped out of his throat again and again as he closed on an orgasm that surged through him and into me.

Afterwards, he held me until I stopped shivering, whispered quiet comfort and kissed my shoulders, cheeks and face.

I didn’t know how to feel or what to think, but as usual, Randy didn’t make an issue of it. I wondered how long his patience would hold out.

We showed up at work the next morning ready to do our jobs and again, we dodged the issue of our relationship and the possible deeper meaning of what we were doing. To say I was relieved is to say that Australia has a few kangaroos.

After all, there was no deeper meaning. There didn’t need to be because I didn’t even want the life of a gay man- a gay actor, no less. I didn’t want to try and deal with the fallout from my family, the press, or my fans. I was straight and if I occasionally liked fucking one man and only one man, it didn’t change the fundamental structure upon which I’d built my life. I wasn’t closeted because I just wasn’t gay.

I locked my compass on that single fact and steered a course around all other notions to the contrary.

Three months later, after a particularly brutal day of filming, Randy caught me leaving through the studio door and told me that he thought he might be in love. My heart lurched. Here, in a rush of adrenaline and the coppery taste of fear in my mouth, was the conversation I had been dreading, the one I thought we’d successfully managed to put on indefinite hold.

I could barely hear him speaking past the sound of my heart thudding in my chest but I gradually began to realize that what he was saying didn’t seem to make any sense. I tried harder to listen. He wasn’t professing his love for me. He wasn’t apologizing for rushing me when he knew I wasn’t ready for something like a full time intimate relationship with him. He wasn’t saying any of the things I would have expected him to say. Then it dawned on me that him being in love didn’t have anything to do with he and I.

Because, I suddenly realized, he was talking about someone else. He’d met someone else.

“You have a boyfriend?” I blinked, trying to process this. “A boyfriend?”

“Yes,” he answered warily, and I could tell he was waiting for my reaction, trying to gage whether I was happy for him, furious with him or indifferent on the entire subject.

I swallowed hard, and then swallowed again. I was relieved, right? This is the way it was supposed to be. He was my best friend and I wanted him to be happy, to find someone to love, someone not me, and he had. I could now go on with my life knowing without a doubt that my decisions were sound, my logic still impeccable and my compass leading me true north.

“Randy,” I gushed, “that’s fantastic, man, I’m so happy for you!” I yanked him into a hug, gave him a loud sloppy kiss on the cheek and thumped his back. Just the way a good straight boy would have done.

Halfway home, my stomach rolled nauseatingly when I suddenly realized what exactly had so terrified me during my taxi ride through the streets of New York City. It was this- losing Randy. Only I hadn’t lost him. I’d thrown him away.

My insides cracked wide open and everything I was bled away into oblivion.

“If I told you a secret,
You won’t tell a soul, will you?
Hold it and keep it alive.
Cos it’s burning and hole,
And I can’t get to sleep
And I can’t live alone in this lie.”


The last time was angry and violent and left us both battered and seething.

The End of Part 3


Continue on to Stages of Gale - Part 4