Chapter Five - Paul #3
The television is on, and I hear Aunt Amy getting up from the sofa and turning the knob. She appears in the kitchen doorway, Pepto-pink curlers in her hair wrapped in a pink net, nightgown brushing against her knees, also Pepto-pink.
I freeze behind the table, hoping she doesn’t come too close or turn on the kitchen light.
I’m sure his scent is all over me. His come is still on me.
I wouldn’t let him clean it off. And do I look like I just tumbled with the fella next door?
I did my best. Smoothed out my hair, cleaned my glasses, and made sure my shirt wasn’t buttoned up crooked.
But Aunt Amy doesn’t move closer or turn on any lights. She simply crosses her arms. “I don’t mind if you stay out late. But you need to tell me.”
I nod, then feel that mule-kick of defiance. “I’m almost twenty. I shouldn’t have to tell anyone anything.”
Her eyes narrow in the same way Pops’ eyes do, and I feel a prickle on the back of my neck.
I see her jaw clench and unclench. “Yes, that’s true. You’re an adult. But this is my home. It’s not much to ask, really.”
I glance down at the tops of my shoes. “I know. I’m sorry.”
“Just leave a note or something. All right?”
“All right.”
She looks me over and if she can tell anything, she doesn’t say. “I’m going to bed. Good night.”
“Night.”
I stand there while I listen to her go upstairs, down the hall, her bedroom door close. I turn to look out the patio door to see if maybe he’s looking out his window, smoking on his balcony, but his lights are off.
I didn’t ask him, after all.
I thought he’d invite me, suggest it, but I guess because he’s got work tomorrow. Aunt Amy’s got work tomorrow. Everyone’s a functioning member of society except me, earning their keep, and I waste away my days, just waiting. I don’t even know what for. I could do better than this.
But I am in limbo. A perpetual almost. I’m straddling the border of one decade into another.
One foot in responsibility and the other in carelessness.
There’s the slightest whisper from my conscience about how maybe, maybe , I should consider getting a job and paying Aunt Amy rent.
Maybe I ought to act like the man I so desperately want to be, that I so desperately want someone to defend, that I so desperately want someone to say that they’re on my side, in my corner, and that they won’t leave me abandoned in an overgrown lot.
I get in the shower, and a hot stream washes him away, where his come dried on my stomach, where I got his orangey spice and cigarettes on my clothes and in my hair, where I’m dazed in the steam because even though I’ll see him tomorrow, I feel let down and as if someone gave me a gift and promptly took it back.
It feels like the most unnatural thing in the world: to be with him and then go to sleep alone.
This doesn’t bode well, does it?
I fall onto my grandmother’s quilt, a towel around me, and realize this does not bode well indeed.
If I don’t watch it, I’ll be like Grantaire, a drunk and frightfully ugly, following the revolutionary Enjolras into oblivion.
Before I can think better of it, I reach under my bed for my book and flip through it, worn pages bending until I find the first mentioning of Grantaire.
I’m almost feverish as I read. He’s suddenly more important to me than Marius, than Javert, than Jean Valjean.
Because Grantaire was a leaf in the wind for the longest time, a real lush, but in the end, he chose Enjolras first. In the end he was on his side, in his corner, and if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
So they died together, hand-in-hand.
And if that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
I don’t want to be rude.
I try not to rush through my dinner, and I compliment Aunt Amy’s Jell-O mold.
I try to be more pleasant and pretend as if I’m not listening for his motorcycle.
And although I sense there’s something she’s withholding, I try to ignore that, act as if this is just another dinner I have to get through before I can walk out those patio doors and right into his arms.
And when I’m ready to do just that, eaten the last spoonful of ice cream, pushing away from the kitchen table, she reaches across and stops me.
“Paul.” She puts her big man-hand over my wrist. “Can you hold on a minute?”
“Sure,” I mumble, and glance longingly toward Asher’s apartment. I haven’t heard the Triumph yet, but it always seems like he’s there, even when he’s not. As if he leaves behind a piece of himself in a cloud of orangey spice and cigarettes to watch over me.
Aunt Amy irritatingly takes her time. She removes our ice cream bowls, rinses them in the sink. She sponges at some crumbs on the counter. She folds the dish towel and opens a drawer. She takes out an envelope, smooths her skirt underneath her as she sits, and pushes the envelope over to me.
My heart is in my throat. It’s typed out nice and neat, my name and Aunt Amy’s address, and I recognize the ‘e’ that drops a little bit lower than the rest of the letters.
I remember the sound of my mother on her Olympia, mostly before the cancer and sometimes after, when she was feeling okay.
The terse pecks of the keys that echoed in every room of the house, even when I shut my bedroom door.
She always typed her letters, saying her penmanship wasn’t the best, but I always liked her handwriting.
The way she looped her ‘l’ and the flowy stem of the ‘p’— especially when she was writing out my name.
On a birthday card, kneeling beside me, her bracelets silver and her rings gold.
She smelled like springtime lilacs and honeysuckle.
I blink hard, as if that will make the envelope go away.
It’s as if his face is staring back at me in each hard line of the letters.
Impaled on the points of the ‘u,’ his thick set jaw hidden in the ‘a.’ Pops couldn’t ever type to save his life.
His secretary did it all, it’s how he met my mother after all, they’d always say, so I can picture him hunched over the Olympia, scowling, index fingers poking and pecking, and then pasting the green-tinged postage stamp with a trio of Boy Scouts, honorable and true.
I feel as if I’ve just been knocked upside the head, a blow that’s left me reeling. I push back from the table and my chair makes a God-awful screech.
“You don’t have to read it now,” Aunt Amy says. “But —”
“Throw it away —”
“You can just hold on to it —”
“When did he —when did it come, huh? When did —”
“— and you can write him later. Or not at all. But at the very least —”
“I don’t want to.” I stand on shaking legs. “I don’t want to read it.”
Her voice is soft, pensive. “Don’t you think you owe him that? At the very least?”
“I don’t owe him shit!”
I don’t know if it’s the volume of my voice or the swearing that makes her face redden. Probably both. I unclench my fists. Push up my glasses. I open my mouth to stumble through an apology that doesn’t want to come out, but I hear his Triumph, the low vroom of it coming closer.
Aunt Amy plucks the envelope up from the table. She takes it over to the drawer and puts it back. She pushes it closed, her fingers lingering on the handle. “You can just write him back to tell him his letters aren’t welcome, Paul. If that’s what you want.”
“I don’t want your advice.”
I know the sting of betrayal I’m feeling is false. And that’s the thing, really and truly: if somebody was on my side, my defender, and in my corner, I’d find them suspicious. I’m not at all careful about what I wish for.
The engine stops. For a few minutes, we both stand in the kitchen, wordless and expectant. A gust of wind comes through her yard and the sunny evening is getting darker as storm clouds roll in just in the nick of time.
“I’ll be back late,” I tell her. “Real late.”
And then I’m out the door, fat raindrops falling, and my feet fumbling forward.
He lets me into his bedroom.
I’d gotten a few glances of it from his sitting room.
I was just waiting. I figured he’d make me wait because it’s the most intimate of places.
Anyone’s bedroom would be, really, but it’s here he sleeps.
It’s here he’s made himself come. It’s here he’s at his most vulnerable, and I tour it like a room in a museum.
I circle around a small rectangle of space, around his bed—nightstand on one side, closet door on the other—with a chest of drawers against one wall, a painting of a sailboat on another, a little window, and the door to his bathroom.
He watches me from the doorway, arms braced against the frame.
I expect him to tell me any minute that his bed was the very bed some long-dead general slept in during some long-dead war.
Or that the painting of the sailboat was the very sailboat that Captain Something-or-Other sailed on when he went on his Last Great Voyage.
Instead, he crawls onto his bed, lies on his side, head propped up on his elbow. I toe off my shoes and mirror his posture.
He looks at me for a long moment before he says, “You okay?”
I run a hand over his bedspread. Deep blue and manly, just a shade darker than his eyes. I nod.
“You sure?” He hooks a foot around mine.
I scoot closer to him till we’re almost nose to nose. “It was a long day.”
“I’ll say.”
“And it’s raining.”
“Sure is.”
I slip my fingers into the waistband of his jeans. His eyes roam all over my face as if he’s reading me. As if I blink and breathe in words and phrases. Sometimes I wish I did, and he could know me, with little effort on my part. He could be the only one.
“I want to take you somewhere this weekend.” His lips brush over my forehead. “Is that okay?”
I nod.
“Your aunt won’t mind?”
I shake my head and when his gaze meets mine, I roll my eyes. “I’m almost twenty. She can’t tell me what to do.”
“Sure. I know that.”
“I’m old enough, you know. I can do whatever I want. Why does everybody always think I’m some kid? Just some stupid kid.”
My fingers tighten in his waistband, and he slides a hand over my shoulder, squeezing. “I didn’t say that. I don’t even think that.” He tries to catch my eyes, but I won’t let him. “What’s wrong, pal? Tell me.”
I don’t want to do this. I’m in his bedroom, on his bed.
It’s trust, it’s intimate. I don’t want to let him down or give him regrets.
So, I lie and tell him it’s nothing, there’s nothing, and I kiss him deeply so he believes me.
So that he believes there’s nothing, really just nothing at all, except me and him.
I can make him believe in things. All the things other people believe in.
I’m good at distorting reality.
We undress each other like we’ve done it a thousand times.
He opens the window a crack. Pulls down the shade.
There’s the sound of thunder, a low drum roll, and the shade billows out like a sail from the rain-cooled air.
I kiss down his naked abdomen, hairs tickling my chin on my approach, a path to another first. It seems like he wants to say something, but I don’t want to listen.
I want to give him something to mark this occasion.
I push away any thoughts that convince me otherwise.
I don’t want to do it wrong, so I grasp the base of his cock, wrap my fingers around, lick the drops of precome off the tip, and take him in my mouth.
I do it so sudden, his stomach muscles jerk and he gasps.
I’m mindful of my teeth, and then I don’t know what to do for a minute.
I didn’t think too far beyond the first move.
My tongue flattens out and I pull off and take him back in, once or twice, until I can find a pace.
I close my eyes and listen, hoping he warns me.
I want to swallow him so bad, but I don’t want to make a fool out of myself.
It’s probably too late for that anyway.
I feel the humid breeze coming in from the window, smell the scent of heated flesh, and it’s all so erotic. It’s all so earthy, deep soil and rainwater, I forget who I am for a few seconds. I reach my free hand up his body to take hold of his. I don’t think twice about it.
His fingertips brush against mine, but then his fingers are in my hair, tugging.
And then it’s like I’ve done too much. He’s in my mouth, and it’s the closest thing, and I’m afraid I’m not pleasing him enough.
I’m not doing it right. So I make a sound and make a mistake.
I look up to see him watching me, and I pull off him and turn my face to the window, swipe my fingers across my lips.
He sits up, perplexed.
“Don’t watch me.” I lick my lips. “I don’t want you to watch me.”
A pause. “Okay.”
“Not — not yet.”
Another pause. “Okay. I’m sorry.”
“You don’t have to be sorry, I…” I feel the sting in my eyes, and I’m so mad. I’m going to ruin this.
He reaches for me. “Hey.”
I blink and hot tears just fall down my cheeks, and I’m so mad I can see the sharp points of a “u.” I’m ruining this.
“Hey.” He pulls me into his arms.
“I’m sorry.” I repeat it. Over and over.
“It’s okay.” He repeats it. Over and over.
When a few minutes pass, and I’ve stopped shaking, I let out a harsh laugh. I avoid his concerned gaze. “I guess I should go.”
I start to reach for my glasses, my clothes, when he places his hand on my bare chest, stilling me. “Stay the night.”
I pause. “Why?”
“I want you to.”
“Why?”
“Come here.”
He lays me down beside him, and in the late evening light everything looks as if we’ve just come home and still need to turn on the lamps.
It’s irresponsible, to just let it get dark, and not fight it off.
It’s lazy. It’s the ending of a day that will never come again, and I don’t want to get all choked up about it right this minute.
Okay? Can it just not happen right now? Enough of this sappy shit.
“I don’t want to ruin this,” I say.
“Ruin what?”
“This. Tonight. Later. Anything.”
He pulls me into his arms and we just lay there until it’s completely dark.
Until there’s the sound of moms calling for kids and buzzing insects.
Until there’s the sound of distant cars going home, and the sound of bicycle wheels on gravel.
Until the streetlight makes his window shade look like a glowing phantom from the inside.
Until he turns to me, his mouth against the crown of my head, and says, “You think you could ruin this, pal?”
I think maybe I could. And then I think maybe it could always be like this.
Just like this. Not me crying like an idiot.
Not me being stupid. Not me having any other problems. But it could always be him and me in his bed.
It could always be him and me staying the night.
I get just a peek from behind the curtain. A glimmer.
And so I kiss the center of his throat, look him in those azure eyes, and tell him, “I’ll give it my best shot.”