Chapter Eight - Asher #2
“I mean.” He pauses. “I really wanted to see you all day yesterday. And today. And it’s like…you can just come get me and bring me here. Just when you want to.” He pauses again, and he does the glasses push. “It’s like you’re messing with me.”
I’m surprised to feel my cheeks redden. “I’m not messing with you.”
He looks at me with an expression in his eyes that makes me want to cover him like a tent and protect him from the downpour. “I told you I wouldn’t bother you. Just…please don’t mess with me.”
I step toward him, close. “I didn’t realize, pal. You can go if you want. I just wanted to see you.”
“Me too.”
I reach for his hand, and he takes it. “I just thought, like you might need some space or something. Or your aunt might ask you stuff. I don’t want to get you in any trouble.”
“Let me worry about that.” He takes a step closer. “And I’m not expecting you to drop everything or whatever, but if this is just a thing for you, and it’s okay if it is, then at least let me come see you. We don’t have to do anything. You don’t even have to talk to me. You don’t —”
I shut him up with a kiss, and instantaneously he melts into me, his body pressing against mine.
I pull away. “This isn’t just a thing for me. All right?”
He stares at me, tongue flicking over his lips.
“Is it just a thing for you?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
I don’t even know what it actually is. Or what it could be.
“You can come here anytime,” I say. “Anytime you want.” He doesn’t reply, so I say, “Sound good?”
There’s a smile in his eyes. “Yes.”
I want to fuck him again, and I hope he isn’t too confused when I take us back to the abandoned shop we were at a few days ago.
It’s his aunt, I think. Being so close and I keep rationalizing it like my neighbors might think something’s up or what if someone stops by, even though no one ever has or ever will. Except him.
And I like sharing this place with him. I always thought the place was ugly, but once I got inside it seemed to grow on me, like an ugly but loyal dog. Each time I drove by, I could count on it to be here. Still abandoned, still quiet, and still ugly.
Paul leans against the dusty counter, looking over at the broken register. “Do you know what happened? Why the place closed up?”
I pick up a piece of shelving and try to put it back into place. “No, not really. Probably got run out by Eckert’s or Woolworth’s I’d imagine. Little places like this can’t really compete.”
It’s what my old man would say, anyway. There was a place just down the road from our farm.
Jimmy would walk me and Glen down sometimes and buy us each a Coke.
We’d sit on the wooden steps and Jimmy would stand there, and I thought he was rich, and he seemed so big to me.
Big in the way a little kid sees a bigger kid — better, stronger, and with a secret mysterious knowledge.
I thought that would have to happen to me one day.
I’d have to know things, the way they knew them.
But I don’t know anything. I drift. I am a fraud.
The place closed down one winter after a department store came to our little town. My old man hated it. Said it wasn’t right that you could buy toothpaste and handkerchiefs under one roof. What was the world coming to?
Paul picks up something off the counter. It looks like a button. “You think you might fix it up?”
I light a smoke and look around. It amazes me that someone, several someones, built this and just let it go.
They spent time and money. Fingers were smashed under hammers, a penny fell from a pocket when the cement was poured, and probably that same someone turned his back on it one day.
Put on his hat, shut the door, and let it all buckle and fold under the weight of time.
“Nah.” I find myself standing in front of Paul, still leaning back on the counter.
I place a hand on either side of him and lean over him.
“It would lose…something.” I try to think of a good word, a way to describe it, but I can’t.
“It’ll be worse years from now, I suppose.
That is, if someone doesn’t just come by with a bulldozer, ready to put something else here. ”
It would be a shame. Not letting a place die off with some dignity, gracefully, and take its sweet damn time. It goes to show that anything is replaceable, really.
I look at Paul, and he’s looking at me.
Maybe not anything.
“You could put something here,” he says.
“Like what, pal?”
He shrugs. “Anything you want, I guess.”
I run my gaze over the smooth slope of his cheekbones to his mouth. “There isn’t much that I want.”
“Oh, no?”
“No.” I drop my cigarette to the rotting wood floorboards and crush it out with my foot. “It’s easier, life is, when you don’t want much.”
His brows pull together with thought.
“And it’s even easier when what you do actually want is easy to get.”
He turns his head, gazing out of a window beside us. “What if what you want is right in front of you, but it’s not so easy?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
He shrugs again. “Because…maybe you shouldn’t want it. But you can’t really help yourself.”
I step closer to him so that I can feel his body heat, see reddish hairs mixed in with the deep brown on the crown of his head.
He’s not very subtle. It’s not one of his finer points.
Because that’s the problem with people nowadays — too much emphasis on the vague.
And maybe he does it on purpose, dances around the obvious, giving me the opportunity to pretend I don’t get it.
But I do, and I decide his lack of subtlety is one of the best things about him.
I act as if I’m giving his hypothetical issue some thought. “Then I’d say that’s quite the predicament you’d have there.”
“It is.”
“You’d need some help with that kind of problem.”
“I would.”
I wait until his eyes shift over to me and he turns fully so he’s facing me. “It’s not so terrible,” I trace my thumb over some stubble on his chin, “to have a problem like that.”
He gazes at me for a long moment. Then he dips his head, turning it, so that my thumb slips in between his lips and into his mouth.
I get him into my bedroom, and I’m not sure yet if I can fuck him here.
I want to, don’t get me wrong, but it’s like I’m trespassing on private property.
Because now I want to be inside him. I don’t think about anything else but that, about how he feels and about how I want to make him come so hard that every time he’s with someone after me, he’ll think of only me.
I get hot with the desire. Flaming heat.
I want him to compare. I want him to ache, to wish, to want.
And in that split second of nothingness, in that moment when the mind goes completely blank, I want him to call out for me, remember me, search for me.
Because that’s going to happen. I practically rip his shirt off with envy.
There will be someone after me. He’s going to let someone else fuck him, or maybe he’ll do the fucking, because this can’t last. We’re two cars passing in the night, two comets zipping by one another, two stones rolling down the hill.
He doesn’t know that and he doesn’t care as he gets on my bed, under me, taking off my clothes, then his, back and forth, unsure of where to put his focus until we’re both naked. I reach for his dick and rub my thumb, the very one he sucked on just minutes ago, over the wet slit.
He stills my hand. “I don’t want that.” His eyes are like smoldering green embers.
“Let’s wait for that,” I say. “This weekend.”
“Why?”
“Because we’ll be alone.”
“We’re alone now.”
“Not really. My neighbors are home…and there’s…”
He props himself up on an elbow. “There’s what?”
I shake my head. “Your aunt’s house is like right there, pal.”
“So what?”
“It’s…it’s just not…”
He stares at me for a second, then he reaches for his clothes strewn haphazard on the floor.
“Hey—I didn’t mean…”
He puts on his underpants.
“Paul.”
His jeans.
“Hey.”
Puts on his shirt and glasses and turns to me. “You really think I’m just some stupid kid, don’t you?”
I stand. “What?”
“You don’t want to do it with me because my aunt’s house is too close? Is that what you’re saying?”
“Listen. I’m her neighbor,” I try to explain. “And I’m older than you. It’s, it’s…it makes me feel like I’m some kind of sicko preying on you. I mean, that’s what she’d think. That’s what anyone would think.”
“I don’t care about what anybody thinks,” he says. So sure. So proud.
I huff and grab my own clothes and start putting them back on, frustration bubbling up inside me. “I have to live here, stay here, and one day you’ll be…” I let that fade and the irritation on his face does the same.
We stand in silence for a minute or so, getting used to the imbalance between us, like ball bearings shifting. I don’t want it to be like this. I didn’t plan for it to be like this. In so many ways.
He sits on my bed, hands folded in his lap. I slowly sit next to him. We say nothing for a long, long time. My bedroom gets darker. Cicadas begin warming up for their nightly chorus.
Then he turns to me. He seems to contemplate something, pushes up his glasses, then he says, “After my mother died, I started noticing empty bottles in the kitchen. Liquor bottles. Sometimes in the hallway. Just all around.”
I shake my head. “You don’t have to do this.”
“I just kind of ignored it for a little while.” His gaze shifts from me to beyond me.
“It helped him sleep, and he’d sleep a lot.
” A long pause. “He didn’t know what he was saying sometimes.
The housekeeper he hired to help my mother would come by to make us our meals for the week, and he’d say things to her.
And I’d have to apologize for him.” He looks down and messes with his thumbnail.
“I didn’t really care what he said to me.
We’ve never gotten along, and I knew he wasn’t happy to be stuck with me. ” A shrug. “I was used to it.”
“Paul. You don’t have to — ”