disclaimer: Gene & Finny belong to the estate of John Knowles, not me.

Nothing else matters

"He was nodding his head, his jaw tightening and his eyes closed on the tears. 'I believe you. It's okay because I understand and I believe you. You've already shown me and I believe you.'"

Finis, end of story.

Really? I'm thinking not.

A moment later, almost as if rehearsed, we exhaled audibly and in unison. Our eyes met, then he looked away. It was still early, not yet nine and we were both exhausted.

Raising the shade, I glanced out the window, down at the spot where I'd been the night before. Unsurprisingly there wasn't much to see.

He believed me. It was okay - now that he knew what he knew.

I looked back at him. He'd wiped his face. With a bleak shadow of a smile he told me I could come back after four, if I wanted, "The bone'll be set and I should be conscious by then, just don't expect me to make much sense," he said.

His hands lay before him on the sheet; I touched the back of one with an index finger. He looked up, unreadable.

I would be back, and said so. Then I left him.

Outside, I forced the damp fresh air into my lungs and shut him out of my mind as best I could. Away from him the day passed rapidly, forgettably.

He was asleep when I returned to the infirmary. Sitting there as the room grew dark, I briefly dozed, then woke and stretched and stood and for lack of anything better to do, opened the door to the hall. Again, looking out only made me look back. The last inhibiting voice in me had gone quiet, and the reality of my feelings for Finny resolved and coalesced: he meant more to me than anybody. Hell, I loved him.

And one way or another, he'd loved me, for some unimaginable reason. That was clear too.

My hand was still on the door; I pushed it shut. He turned over and groaned slightly. He was awake. His eyes were open. He reached for the lamp and switched it on. The light was flat and undramatic, the room impersonal, the patient pale.

"Dreamed I was dead." he said. Taking a glass from the bedside table, he gulped the water, and tipped the last drops onto his hands, and pressed them to his face. "And you were in the dream, told me you were dead too - that you were supposed to be there, almost like you said this morning. Then you woke me here in the dark, not dead at all."

Having no idea what to say to this, I offered the already established, "Except for me - what I did, you would have been fine."

He half-raised himself on his elbows. "Don't need reminding - I know, you know, by now half the school probably knows . . ." at this point he finally looked at me, "For a while I hated you so much I couldn't even see straight."

Pausing, he lay back casually, looked up at the ceiling and said, "Thinking I knew you better than anybody, that was my mistake. I never knew you at all."

"And you know what's weird? Not knowing what to know. Just when I'm thinking I know the real you – I'm not sure all over again. You belonged here last night, and you should have been here – and you were here, well, out there. And I'm glad you were – now. I'm thinking I'm right about that and if I am, nothing else matters, at least not much."

I felt it deep that wherever the hell I might have belonged, he shouldn't have wanted me back - but I wasn't about to correct him. I loved him and you don't correct people you love if you only feel they're wrong. Not when they want you back.

"Dr. Stanpole says worse breaks than this stay at school all the time, so I won't be going home, should be back at the dorm in a few days."

Then dinner arrived, for one; on a tray.

I wanted to tell him what he meant to me. But having this plate of food between us put me off the idea, made me think again. I looked at my watch, "Maybe I should go."

He asked, with his mouth full, "You had any dinner?"

"Not hungry."

"Then stay."

I wanted to, but with just the two of us, one thing would lead to another, and I would wind up saying more than either of us wanted to hear. Rummaging through the stuff I'd brought with me from class, I said, "I've got that Latin you were working on here somewhere; maybe give you something to do."

He looked at the folder unenthusiastically. "Stay." He said.

I stayed. For a dead general, Caesar proved an agreeable enough distraction, demanding little more than the memory of learned lessons. For an hour we focused on the text, full of death and struggle in a remote, long ago war.

That night it was my turn to dream. Dr. Stanpole appeared out of nowhere in particular, saying "Your friend is dead." This wasn't as disturbing as it sounds, because Finny was there and started arguing with him. Then the doctor was gone and Finny was edging away, out on the branch among the leaves. Letting go of the tree's trunk, I took a step, and fell, hitting the floor hard. I lay there for a while with the sheet still twisted around me. It was the middle of the night; the rest of it I spent curled on his bed, not wanting to put my bed back in order, not wanting any more dreams.

Having been driven the few blocks distance from the infirmary, we were on the short brick walk leading to the dorm. Overhead, a clouded sky grudgingly revealed here and there, a few tentative signs of blue. A brief and unexpected spot of sun passed over us.

"You trusted me." I told him.

Ahead of me, he stopped.

"So?"

"It was just a thing you did and I took it for granted."

He crutched up the few steps to the entrance, "Get the door for me, will ya?"

"No, stop – here's better."

Looking over his shoulder, "For what?" he asked, his hair pale in the shifting light.

"Humor me." Outside was better. I knew it instinctively. "Please."

Relenting, he parked his crutches against the low wall flanking the steps and sat down there. Loosening the scarf around his neck, he looked up at me.

"Well?"

"Remember that best pal stuff you said at the beach?"

He thought for a moment; then nodded.

"It was like you were asking me to trust you back. And I couldn't. I was nowhere near brave enough to trust you – like that. Then I flunked that trig test the next day and began thinking, maybe you wanted it that way. Maybe the beach trip, the tree every night, was all part of a plan – you helping me to fail in every way you could. Maybe you didn't trust me at all, maybe you hated me, and maybe I should hate you back.

"The idea stuck: I stopped believing anything from you. It made more sense, was easier than trusting you. Hating you."

I sat down a few feet from him. "It went on until that last afternoon when I told you I needed to study, and you tried to make me stay, told me not to go to the tree. The things you said - without having any idea - it was like being hit in the face, really hard, only worse. You'd been thinking I was like you. Hell, it was like I could see your mind working – you were right in front of me and I could only see how wrong we'd both been. I tried to act normal, not to let it show, get through it. And I did act normal, didn't I? I don't think you noticed a thing, until . . .

"In a few minutes we were in the tree - and then you weren't. I jumped alone, there was no fear at all for a change - I felt nothing. In a detached kind of way I wondered if I'd killed you. You were sprawled there on the dirt, your leg twisted and broken and your blood everywhere, but you were breathing. It was the part of me that hated you that died. I understood that later.

"No thinking part of me had wanted to hurt you, but I did it, just the same. I did it."

The sun was gone, and the breeze stirred his hair, now dark again. He turned to me, and said: "You wanted to tell me, I wouldn't let you. You had to tell me, I had to know . . . It's over."

"How can it be over?"

"Just is."

Then he glanced at me like I'd missed something important. Maybe I had.

"'Look at it this way," he said, pulling his scarf off altogether, "If you'd been less of a person, would you ever have tried to tell me back in Boston? And when you did, could I listen? No, I couldn't. Maybe that seems crazy and it only made things worse, but something in me just shut down. You had to be wrong. There was no way in hell I could face what you'd said.

"Now Leper opens up, and makes it a 'fact.' So I have no friend, just the fact; and I wanted to get away, and I tried to go. Next thing, I was at the bottom of the stairs with another fact: running was useless; there was nowhere to go.

"Then you were outside the window and I so wanted to beat the shit out of you. And I tried - couldn't do that either. I hated your being there, hated hearing your voice - whatever you had to say. Couldn't understand why you were there. I gave up on trying to do anything, and lay there flat on the floor, listening to you, your sorrys.

"Don't know how long I was on the floor, but pulling myself back onto the bed; that's when it hit me: there was something in you I couldn't hate. There was something in your sorrys stronger than any of Brinker's 'facts.'"

He bent his head back, watching a passing hawk, his wide eyes soberly reflecting the gray sky.

"I was right - wasn't I?"

This last was as much a statement as a question, almost inaudible.

In a voice as low as his, I answered "I belonged there, Finny."

He stood, maneuvered his crutches, leaned forward toward me and let me know it was time we were back inside. He was matter-of-fact. The air was cooler, and the sky had turned a much darker gray. I followed him in.

The doctor had reduced Finny's class attendance for a few weeks to rest the leg and I was asked to help him out with the classes he was missing. Sitting at his desk, our heads close together with his hair sometimes in my face as he reached for something, I was where we agreed I belonged and, as he said, nothing else mattered. We were both, I thought, rudderless and drifting, and I, at least was happy not to think about where we were headed or why.

An unexpected answer to this unasked question came soon enough, his sense of destination always being stronger than mine.

It was a Monday, after dinner, in our room, when he rose from his desk and came over to the lion carved chair where I was sorting notes on the floor in front of me. His shadow fell quickly across the yellow papers and I felt a kiss on the top my head, his left hand by my ear.

The chair's castors creaked as I slowly twisted and asked "What was that for?"

Leaning against his cane, looking everywhere but at me, he answered "If French Generals can kiss each other right left and center . . . Well, you looked deserving and I felt like it."

That he'd kissed me didn't matter much; Finny was always doing things only he could get away with, things that meant God knows what or nothing at all. But coupled with the words, the gesture was something else. My eyes wandered back to the sorted notes as I took it in. Looked deserving. He'd forgiven me. Rationally, I'd known this fact for days, but only now it settled in – and now my flooded head swam with it.

Finny's French was fairly good and he had an ear for the accent but often something in the textbook irked him. He had been indulging in a typical rant about the word inusable; that it meant everlasting apparently appealed to his sense of the absurd.

I said, when he wound down, "There's something I have to tell you."

"Again?" He didn't look up from his work.

I glanced over at his handwritten French, somehow always neater than his English, "Something you maybe already know."

He stopped writing.

His pen to his lip, "Maybe you don't need to tell me then."

My resolve faded. Maybe he was right; maybe there was no need to say anything. "Damn pen's out of ink." I said.

He craned back in his chair and pitched his pen to me. I fumbled it.

Drawing a long row of loops on my blotter with his blue ink, I halfheartedly improvised. "I love your little rants, didn't realize I'd missed them till now; haven't heard one in so long."

He made no reply, and seemed ready to let it go. The moment over, I pitched his pen back to him.

He caught the pen almost without looking, his eyes on me, "Come on, there's something you want to tell me; get it over with."

Suddenly it was easy, I did as he said.

"It's that I love you - period, full stop. Never meant for it to happen, but there it is: I love you."

He was looking down again now, at the pen rolling back and forth between his fingers. After a long, long, moment, his eyes shifted back to mine. "So something ignorant and blind managed to break my leg, and now the rest of you loves me - without meaning to."

I opened my mouth. But he spoke first.

"Sorry, I'm not being fair - it's just... People think it's dead wrong. Why even say it?"

"Why? Because I used to think that way, and I don't any more, that's why. And, yeah, Finny, people think it's wrong; outside that door everybody thinks it's wrong. But they're wrong, and I'm pretty sure me loving you won't do you any more harm than I've done you already. Graduation's soon and probably you won't see me again and it ..." Here I stopped, then stuttered, " ...it, it, it - will all be over and that will be the end of it."

"A lot of its," he said calmly, then he stepped over, put his hands on my head, brushed my face with his and again kissed me, on the mouth this time, his lips parted. "Love you too."

I reflected in a whisper "Kind of already knew."

"Hmm?"

"Already knew."

"How?"

"The time you kissed the top of my head."

"Forgot about that, don't know what came over me."

"And when you came back, in November; I never forgot that look you gave me when you thought I was enlisting. You wanted me around, and I didn't know why."

"I didn't either, back then." He was watching his hand moving back and forth along my arm. "Even when we first met, I remember liking touching you; liking you touching me; it just seemed normal, the way things were supposed to be - I was so effing innocent." He turned my hand and looked at the palm. "And then, after, the tree, we should have told each other - what we just have. Should have."

"Well, guys aren't supposed to, are they?" I said.

"Sure as hell aren't." Feigning mild outrage he messed my hair with his hands and changing tack, said, "Go ahead; show me why we should have. Maybe I still need some persuading."

Moving forward, close, leaning into him, lowering my head to his neck, I found his pulse beating gently into my cheek. I kissed him there. Going further, with my face I pushed back his open collar exposing his shoulder and I kissed him there too.

Then he held me away but only to the point where our noses were almost touching; looking back and forth into one another's eyes we took a few breaths. On my face there were tears or maybe simply sweat, which once smeared by his nose and lips, he kissed back onto my mouth. Our limbs were too many for either of the narrow mattresses, making us a crowded tangle with roaming hands and mouths. His cast scraped against my leg.

We made do.

"Devon put us together, seems like they knew what they were doing." It came from me as a joke, but Phineas, didn't take it that way, "Devon? Don't be a sap; it wasn't Devon. I did it. You did it. What we've been to one another did it." For a long while nothing more was said. Eventually, and at length, I improvised some unlikely rules discouraging the illicit use of dormitory beds; he laughed, stifling the sound against my chest.

Afterward, he was on his side behind me, easily asleep, barely snoring, his arm at my waist. Unused to so much of him, or anybody, (or anyone's body) so close, I lay there more and more aware I needed more space to rest, sleep being unlikely, considering.

His ability to find physical comfort almost anywhere made my lacking it always a surprise to him. "You sure it's not just us, together? You have your way with me and ten minutes later, you're having second thoughts - aren't you?" He pushed me back, looked me over and added "Nah, maybe not." He was only playing, but with his face again inches from mine, I couldn't help wondering if a trace of fear remained; the fear that even now I might desert him.

"I only need some sleep, and I'll be all of seven feet away, and I'm done with having second thoughts."

His fingers around my arm above the elbow, he asked, "What about tomorrow?"

"What about it?"

"What about us tomorrow?"

I looked down at his fingers, my arm, then at him in the eye. "I suppose unless I get a better offer, I'll be right here."

"That's the spirit: no cheating on me unless it's with somebody really worthwhile."

"Love you." I said, and he let me go.

I lay in my bed, thought of saying a bedtime prayer, like he used to, but decided against it. Having been forgiven by and had just confessed to loving the boy in the other bed, I had nothing left to ask for - and giving thanks to the conventional Sunday God, in this case, didn't seem remotely appropriate.

Unexpectedly, soon enough, I was asleep.

Hours later he roused me, a finger tracing its way to the end of my nose. He sat down on the bed, his hand lightly grasping my foot through the covers, looking at me wordlessly, with the morning sun full on him. I lay there fresh from sleep, pleasantly inert, understanding and understood. There in the light it seemed that nothing was ever likely to interfere, that nothing else would ever grieve us. I was surely wrong, but I didn't care. In that golden moment nothing else mattered, not one tiny bit.

"Finny must die precisely because he refuses to reject the possibility of loving Gene." Eric Tribunella - Refusing the Queer Potential: John Knowles's A Separate Peace