Chapter Seven - Paul #2
Neither one of us thought to bring food. He supplied the beer, and I just didn’t think of it. It’s not like anyone has ever invited me anywhere.
We did find some saltines, a can of marmalade from four years ago, and a tin of thumbtacks in the cupboard.
I keep saying to myself that next time, next time…
like there will be another time. Like he’ll want to bring me back after this.
I shouldn’t plan for any futures. He could take me back to my aunt’s, tell me “see ya pal,” and that’s it.
What could I even do about it? There would be nothing left.
Back to Jean Valjean and Javert, my old friends, like meeting up in a pub after years gone by.
On the way back, I feel fat wet drops on my head and see them splash across my glasses. We have to run the rest of the way, and we get inside just as the sky really lets loose and we fall back on the bed, our clothes wet, snickering at the rain. It didn’t get the best of us.
I take my glasses off to clean them, and he gets up, peeling his soaked white T-shirt from his torso.
He drapes it over the back of a chair and goes over to the record player.
As he flips through some albums, I decide to remove my wet shirt also.
And then I worry that he’ll think I’m copying him, like some annoying kid brother, and I go over to Aunt Amy’s suitcase to find something dry.
But before I can, I hear the first few notes of a song and freeze. All my blood vessels seem to constrict, and there’s a chill down my neck.
The lilting light refrain of “La vie en rose” plays and Edith Piaf’s vibrato sails through the humid air of the cabin and crashes into me like a warm wave.
It conjures up images of marigolds and nasturtiums on the sun porch, the taste of something sweet and doughy on my tongue, and the lazy comforts of a day spent in dreamy repose.
I sense Asher behind me, hesitant. I’m standing stiff as a statue.
“What’s wrong?”
“This was my mother’s favorite song.” My voice sounds squeezed.
I hear him move toward the record player, remove the needle.
“No,” I say quickly, without turning around. “Let it play.”
It comes back, this time from the very beginning, and I settle onto the edge of the bed. I feel it depress behind me and Asher’s is voice quiet, “I didn’t mean to…”
“It’s fine. It’s not anything.” I pause there while Edith sings the chorus again. “She used to play this all the time…”
On Sunday afternoons, mostly. It would waft up to my bedroom, and I’d come downstairs.
It was long before she knew anything was wrong.
Long before I knew anything was wrong. I’d lay on the peach Berber of the sitting room and contemplate my young life, my no life, my untethered life.
My thoughts came in neat rows like the ducks in the carnival game — short, languid, and blissfully ignorant.
And my mother would sing along softly in her contralto, fixing Sunday supper, her apron frilled and her hair curled.
Then we’d sit over some roasted animal, sautéed vegetable, and crusty bread.
My mother made sure I had enough on my plate and enough love from her heart.
Even Pops looked at me differently back then, in the Days of Edith.
It was with hopefulness, watchful, fingers crossed.
And then I grew, I disappointed, and his gaze hardened into two gray stones.
The songs ends with an orchestral flourish.
I close my eyes. There’s a few moments of discomfort between me and Asher.
I feel his fingers on mine, timid. I want to lean into him as if he’s the shelter from the raging storm.
I want to cling to him like the preserver offered to me in the middle of the sea.
I want to drink him in like the first euphoric gulp after nearly dying of thirst. He’s right beside me, and I could just surrender, and let myself see life in pink, life in roses, life in a glow.
But I can’t.
I can’t even move.
I feel his breath by my ear. “I miss my mother too.”
I turn my head slightly.
“I haven’t talked to her or seen her in,” he pauses, “ten years?” Another pause. Longer. “I left home. When I wasn’t much younger than you. I didn’t say goodbye or anything. I just…left.”
I hold my breath as if one movement from me will have all his secrets running back under a bush like a skittish rabbit.
“She could be dead, and I wouldn’t know.
” His tone is guarded like a castle. “But I miss her. She liked music too. I learned everything about opera and classical from her. She came from this real well-to-do family up in Vermont. Really ticked off her folks when she married my old man. Because he was beneath her, you know? A country boy. Dirty and uncivilized.” His voice softens into something that reminds me of velvet.
“They gave me hope. My parents. That loving is all that matters, and it can carry you through anything.”
The inches between us get as heavy and saturated as it is outside. I feel a weighty tenderness bloom inside me, and I lean my head against his, looking down at our hands. The music has stopped altogether and the record skips.
He gets up to stop it. I can tell by the back of his neck and shoulders that I’ve done something wrong.
“Asher…”
He holds up a Five Satins record. “How about this?”
I lower my gaze, shrug.
He puts the record on and the first swaying beats play. He sits back on the bed with a cigarette, hunched. After a couple minutes, I almost feel as if he’s forgotten I’m here.
There’s a prickle on my spine, an ache. And a fear.
I get up to stand in front of him. I run my hands over his head, gentle.
My fingertips brush his ear, the back of his neck and shoulders.
He exhales against my stomach. I get down on my knees in between his.
His cheeks are wet, and I’m patient. I don’t force it when he turns his head away from me, smoke streaming from his nostrils. I get closer, put my arms around him.
“Don’t do that.” His voice is razor sharp.
Sometimes I like getting cut. “I won’t let you go.”
I tighten my arms around him. His head falls heavy on my shoulder.
“I won’t let you go.”
It rains the rest of the afternoon and into the evening.
There’s a kind of cloudy light over us in the bed. It gives his skin this unearthly glow, blue eyes hazy. I tangle my legs in his, get his hips against mine. I’m already getting hard again and he is, too, but I’m thinking something else. Something different.
I maneuver myself underneath him when he kisses me.
His hips rest in between my legs. His kiss isn’t as urgent as it is concentrated, as if he hasn’t had a taste of me in months and he’d like to savor it.
It’s darker underneath him; his body looms and his skin has that orangey spice with the breath of rain that comes in through the screen door. It makes me dizzy.
I think about being in his sitting room that first time. It couldn’t be only a week has passed. I feel as if the man above me has been with me for lifetimes.
His hips rut against me. My dick hardens.
He does it again.
“Are you going to —” I start and stop.
His brows stitch together in confusion, then it dawns on him what I meant.
“I want it to be with you.” I blurt it out, stupidly.
His expression shutters, briefly, then his fingers rest on my cheek. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
I know what he’s saying, but on the surface of my mind, I let that slip into a crack. “Then don’t.”
He sighs, his forehead coming to rest against mine.
I convince myself it’s something I can give him.
For what he shared with me. For the hurt it caused him, and although I know, realistically, the hurt isn’t my fault, I think it’s a way to accept.
I tell myself I won’t be silly after. I won’t be pathetic.
I won’t be like I have been, coming over, following along, and foolish.
I could withstand however it would be between us.
Because there isn’t anybody else, and entwined underneath him like this, I feel sure there never will be again.
He gets up, and it’s cold where his skin pulls away from mine. I sit up on my elbows. His dick is bigger than the two fingers I’ve managed before. The first time I tried it, I’d seen a picture of two men fucking. It was a complete accident.
When my fantasies of Valentino got redundant, I went to the library and perused the magazines.
I’d look at the sports ones to get ideas, images stuck in my mind.
Sometimes I liked the drawings better than real life.
It was the illustrated men with broad shoulders and thick arms, so different from my own, that I liked the most. I could imagine them wrapped around me. Or myself gripping them. Tightly.
Then there was a picture.
It wasn’t supposed to be in there. Someone slipped it in.
One guy was on his back, legs in the air.
The other was over him, still wearing a shirt, round ass bare and his cock halfway in.
Mine hardened in seconds, my face heated, and I almost dropped the magazine.
It wasn’t something I’d ever thought about before.
Or even considered. But once I knew, once I saw, I couldn’t stop.
That night, I bit my knuckles to keep from crying out I came so hard.
Asher returns with Vaseline. He gets into bed with me, hands wandering. Mine do too. Bolder, reaching down to grip his bare round ass, I pull him against me in a suggestion and in a long-awaited want.
Just one of his fingers makes me grit my teeth. He kisses me, reminding me to breathe, and the second one isn’t so bad. But then there’s a third. I suck in a breath and he looks worried. I reassure him with a whisper and a long, deep kiss.
He puts me on my right and lies behind me. Rain pecks the sides of the cabin and the windows. It’s nearly dusk. I try to make myself remember it. Like that sunset long ago, plunging in, seeing it always.
For the longest time, he just kisses my neck, his hard length nestled against my ass. I start to get impatient.
He gets more Vaseline. Then he puts an arm around me. I pull a knee to my chest.
He’s careful and he’s slow. I get to a point where I either want to tell him to stop or beg him to never.
I didn’t think it would be like this. His breath is heavy against my neck, and I feel opened and exposed and vulnerable in a way I never have been before.
He pauses, asks if I’m okay, and I nod. For eons it seems there’s just the sound of the rain and our stilted stuttering breaths.
Then I feel his hips against me, resting.
His chest against my back, a heart pounding. I turn my head to him.
His lips brush the shell of my ear and in an exhale, he says, “Baby…”
The timbre of this voice makes my heart expand. The tender kiss he places on my shoulder makes my heart almost burst. There’s no way I can’t be a fool after this. I will be silly, and stupid, and I will follow him anywhere. A stumbling fool if there ever was.
He starts to move, just as painstakingly slow as he entered me.
It stretches, it burns, but he rubs that pleasurable place I found myself not too long ago.
I reach behind me and grab his hip. His thrusts are measured, controlled, but his groans are deep and animal, reverberating against my ribs.
My brain tries to wrap around the concept that he’s inside me.
That he isn’t just fucking me, like those two fellas in the picture.
The concept, the physicality, ping-pongs around in my mind, finding no escape, no net to be caught in.
And soon, I hear my own voice, desperate and crying out.
His thrusts get quicker and my fingers dig into his hip.
Both his arms are around me, and I don’t know where to go with all of it.
I want to remember everything. The sweat between us, the erratic roll of his hips as he gets close, the one more “baby” he whimpers before he comes, trembling, a warmth pooling inside me.
The two breaths he takes before he’s fisting my cock, getting me off, and I nearly black out as I come all over his hand.
“I didn’t hurt you?”
I perch my head on my hand, from where I’m lying across him, and I shake my head.
There’s a shade of doubt in his eyes.
“I mean, I think I’ll be, you know, sore…”
He lays a hand over my behind. “It goes away.”
“I know.” Although I don’t.
His head sinks back against the pillow. I lay my ear to his breastbone and hear the steady thud-thud-thud, rhythmic and peaceful.
Then his voice rumbles, “You surprise me sometimes.”
I look at him. He’s staring at the ceiling.
“Why’s that?” I try to think of what I could have done. Or said. Was it not being able to swim? My mother’s song? I’m near frantic.
“Maybe that’s not the right word.” He tucks an arm under his head, his gaze a straight line into mine. “I just meant — you’re really something special. You know that?”
“Really?”
He turns his body, so we’re facing each other. His fingers curl across my cheek, down my neck, a finger resting at the hollow of my throat. My pulse beats against it.
“You have no idea.” His lips barely move.
“So are you,” I say. “Special. To me.” I wince at my clumsiness.
His smile is everything. And his arms around me, embracing.
It almost spills out in a rush: You’re more than special.
You’re everything to me. I want to know you.
Everything about you. Please tell me. I want to give you things.
I want to take you places. I want to tell you all my thoughts.
I want to be with you, by your side, never let you go, have your trust. Hold it close to my heart, treasure it. I…
I let my unfinished thought hang between us like a fractured melody.
His arms are warm, firm. Strong.
I sink into them like a heavy metal.
It’s like he’ll never let me go.
And it’s the same for me.