Read Halfway Home for Free Online

like a gust of tropical rain. I am spellbound by the sound of it. I can feel the exact shape of my brother's dick—heavy and thick with a flared head—more clearly than my own. The pissing is brutally sensual, beyond erotic, and I'm not especially into kink. The stream abates to spurts, gunshots in the water. Then Brian flushes. The bar of light under the door goes out, and there's silence.
    Still I stare at the ceiling, but now the rage is replaced by an ache, just like the empty throb that followed my little heart attack. Not that I want my brother anymore—not his body anyway. At least my own carnal journey has brought me that far, slaking the old doomed hunger. I used to jerk off sniffing his underwear, the uniforms he'd peel off after practice. But even with the incest gone, a darker yearning wells up in me, undiminished by years. I still want to be him.
    For he's what a man is, not Tommy. From seven to seventeen I walked around with a sob in my throat, the original crybaby, mourning for what I would never become. And now it's come back like a time warp. I'm still wearing the glove I can't catch with, a Wilson fielder. I'm flinching in the middle of a scrimmage, terrified someone will pass me the ball.
    This goes on for maybe half an hour, a sort of anxious misery, leaving me wired and desolate. I'm sick, I need my sleep. Eventually the rage comes back around like a boomerang, because it's also Brian's fault. I get up and grope into the bathroom, flicking the light, my ashen squinting face looking dead and buried. Fishing among my prescriptions, I palm a Xanax and down it. Neely O'Hara again. I turn off the light and take a silent step to Brian's door, cocking my ear. I don't even know what I'm doing. Go back to bed, I order myself, but that is the voice I have always ignored, the one that used to tell me not to pull my pud or stare at boys.
    By inches I open the door into the darkness beyond, barely breathing, craning to hear. And there it is: the deep rolling surf of my brother's breathing, a soft whistle at the end. He sleeps a hundred fathoms deep, he always has. Please—I slept in the twin bed next to him for seventeen years. I step inside and stand there a moment to orient myself. The moonshine is strong, though it throws deep shadows on the clutter of wicker, crazy expressionist angles.
    Brian in the bed is lit up clear, the white of the sheets like a luminous ground. He's turned on his side and facing me, one arm under the pillow that cradles his head. Bare to the waist, the top sheet drawn up only to his hips, so I can see the waistband of his briefs. He doesn't even bother with a blanket, for the Irish side is very cold-blooded. Unlike me, who's always shivered in the California nights, shrouded in quilts and comforters.
    Yet the cold doesn't bother me now, even in just my underpants, as I move to the wicker armchair by the bed. Though I sit carefully, perching on the edge, still it creaks and rasps under my weight. I scan Brian's face for any stir, but he sleeps right through. Now I am only three feet from him, so close I could reach out and touch him.
    But I just watch. His red hair is silver in the moonlight. The arm that's crooked under his head has a biceps as round as a melon. The other arm rests on his side, and now that he's bare I see that his chest and stomach are still in shape, if not so finely chiseled as when he was young. All evening I've been trying to find him battered and soft, but it's not true. He's beautiful still, and even the puffiness in his face has soothed in sleep. If anything, the greater bulk and mass the years have wrought have only made him more of a warrior, king instead of a prince.
    Am I still in a rage? Yes, livid. The last thing I need is this mocking reminder that life goes on for straights, mellowing and ripening into an ever-richer manhood. In the glint of the moon Brian's skin fairly radiates with health. The bristling hair on his belly is thick with hormones. He'll be