40. Prom, YayNeigh? #2
Jonathan looked up at him through his long, dark eyelashes, almost as long as Cashew’s, and let his lips curl. “I did get my first blowjob that night.”
“Of course you did.” He shouldn’t be annoyed.
They’d had lives before meeting each other, both of them, but he wasn’t sure if he was frowning because someone else had once had his mouth on Jonathan, or like a stupid competitive motherfucker, because he hadn’t managed to get a blow job until college.
“Hey.” Jonathan’s smile transformed to something that hid his teeth but showed that pillowy lower lip in its full glossy glory. He tossed his head, letting his hair float momentarily in the air, before gazing up through those sinful eyelashes.
“It would be purrrr-fect if you went to prom with me.”
“What?” He pictured Jonathan in a tuxedo jacket, shawl collar, but no shirt. His gleaming skin instead of white fabric.
“Prom? Yay or neigh-eigh?” Jonathan’s whinny wasn’t bad, Connor recognized it as horse sounds, but he didn’t understand. It was only River Days.
“Go with me tonight? How can you paws-ibly say no?” Jonathan curled both hands in front of his chest like he was imitating a bunny rabbit. “Let’s hop off to prom together.”
“You—it’s—what do you mean?”
“Let’s pretend it’s your prom.” Jonathan tapped on the end of Connor’s nose. “We can use our imaginations. Or at least yours. Will there be dancing?”
Connor nodded. Once again, Jonathan knocked the words out of him.
“We both look and smell far better than we did at eighteen, I guarantee that.” He laid his fingers on the pride pin at Connor’s collar.
“We have our trendy gay boutonnieres. We can hold hands across the center console, sneak booze in the parking lot, and then dance to…what? What sort of music do they play at River Days?”
“I don’t know. I wasn’t on the prom committee.”
“That’s the spirit.” Jonathan held out his hand. “Give me your keys. I’ll come pick you up, since I asked you.”
Jonathan kept giving him his fantasies.
He could trust him with the squishy bits that he hadn’t ever shared with anyone, the goofy dreams, the silliness, and Jonathan would roll with it. Would in fact hop around like a rabbit, make a joke, and then make it happen.
Jonathan didn’t just like that part of him, he enjoyed whatever Connor said.
“Let’s do it. Let’s go to prom.”
It was twenty-minutes of winding two-lane roads and cranked up Pink Pony Club sing-alongs in between warnings to watch for deer.
Because Jonathan liked to use two hands on the wheel, they only occasionally held hands across the console, but Connor was flying.
Then they parked in a back row of the fairground lot and emerged into the perfect night.
Jonathan came around to the passenger side and linked his fingers with Connor’s. The dry air carried the distant soundtrack of rides and crowds, but screened between the Subaru and an F-250 extended cab, their cocoon was quiet and dark.
“How do you want to handle this?” Jonathan asked. “We don’t have to do this if you don’t want.”
“What do you mean?”
“Connor, you’re emoting a lot of nervous energy right now.”
“I’m not.” He heard gravel crunching under his boots and stopped rocking. For a moment. “Okay, I am.”
A deep breath shuddered into his chest, and he knew suddenly why he felt like this.
“I don’t want to have the same conversation twenty times.
Hey, this is my boyfriend Jonathan, and then while I wait for you to have a minor stroke over that word, the other person is like, wait, are you gay, and I have to nod politely and say yes, I am, in my not at all femme voice, and then they start verbally running through every clue they ever had about me, like, oh, in third grade you drew a rainbow, I should have realized.
Do you know how exhausting that’s going to be? ”
“Sorry, I don’t.” Jonathan shrugged, but at least he didn’t remove his hands from Connor’s.
“Honestly not something I have to keep explaining. Most people meet this”—he let go of one hand and waved at himself—“and they immediately know how amazing I am. And how gay.”
“Not helpful.” Connor sighed and pulled Jonathan closer to his chest. He wanted to feel his weight and, hopefully, sense the thud of his heart. “And until this week, you hyperventilated when I introduced you as my boyfriend, so forgive me if I doubt your no big deal attitude.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t mean to make light of this.” He tightened his arms around Connor and stepped closer into the embrace. “We could hold hands? You could put your arm on my shoulders? Then it’s sort of clarified? Or is that going to be uncomfortable here?”
“I want to.” Even Connor heard the hesitancy in his own voice.
“But?” Jonathan squeezed his waist, encouraging him.
“I don’t know how anyone is going to act.” He raised his hand to rub a thumb across the ridge of bone under Jonathan’s eye.
He’d skipped his usual night-out sparkling highlights, just the smooth glowing lotion he used and probably mascara. He should know if the glossy lips were natural or cosmetic, but he could never tell. They were just Jonathan.
Connor wanted to kiss him more than he wanted to go into the fair and eat fried food and greet people who remembered him from his high school baseball days, and Jonathan was right here in his arms, but words kept pushing at his throat to escape.
“I want you to like it here, I want you to like being here together, and I don’t want us to hear shit, you know?
I don’t want you to hear anything that means you don’t want to come back.
I don’t want someone I haven’t seen in years to come up out of nowhere and insult us because we’re doing what everyone else gets to do! ”
His chest was heaving more than he’d expected.
Jonathan threaded his fingers through the hair on the back of Connor’s head and pulled his forehead down until their brows touched. “We’ll be okay. You and me. No matter what. We won’t let go of each other. Even if we’re not touching, we’re together. Agreed?”
“I love you.” It felt like a moment made for those words.
“I love you too, Connor McMillan.”
He took a deep breath. “You’re getting good at saying that.”
“You make it easy.”
He lifted Jonathan’s chin with his finger and looked into those eyes that sometimes pierced him, sometimes comforted him. “Someday you’re going to say it first.”
The eye roll and smirk deserved his best work in reply.
They kissed, hidden between the parked cars, at the dark end of the gravel lot.
Slowly. Sweetly. The way they kissed when he was trying not to smudge Jonathan’s makeup, not the way they kissed when he absolutely wanted glitter-powder proof of Jonathan’s existence spread all over his body.
Jonathan’s pulse beat against Connor’s thumb, steady, and steadying him.
They stopped before it went too far, as if they both knew they were going to go forward to the fair, and not back to the farm.
“You could tell your sister she’s free to spread the word.”
As if cued, his phone chirped. It was Jess.
“That’s spooky. Is she clairvoyant?” Jonathan asked.
Jess
Whatcha doing? Why aren’t you here yet?
“Fucking spy kid,” Connor muttered as he typed his reply.
Connor
Were here.
In the lot
Jonathan hung over his arm and read what he typed. “Tell her you’re having an existential crisis, and she needs to build a safe space for you. Maybe with some cookies.”
“Not gonna do that.”
Jess
I’m in the beer garden across from the street corn stand with Hannah and Bri
“That’s my safe space. See, I didn’t need to ask.”
Connor
Go ahead and tell them about Jonathan. And me. About me and J I mean
His finger paused. He heard Jonathan’s breath next to him, and swore he could almost hear their heartbeats in the dark. No way that was real, though, because the tinny music of the rides and some distant announcer on the other side of the fairgrounds would have drowned out the thumps in his chest.
He sent the message.
It felt like a good start, or at least as much field prep as they were going to get on short notice.
Together, they crossed the lot. He took Jonathan’s hand at one of the drainage ditches, although Jonathan’s balance was better than his own, and didn’t let go until they reached the gate.
Jonathan already had a twenty out. “I’ll get the tickets. I asked you to prom, remember?”
The fairy lights hanging across the midway were a bit dreamy, or maybe he was.
He’d been attending River Days since he’d been too young to remember.
There were photos of him in a stroller on the midway, and this was where he’d won his one and only buckle, yet he’d never seen it sparkling and glowing like this.
“Where’s the corn stand and the beer garden? Connor?”
“Oh, this way.” He pulled Jonathan down a row of carnival food stands.
Walking tacos, fair scones, street corn, pizza cones, elephant ears, actual real tacos that looked and smelled excellent, over-sized lemonades, soft-serve cones, burgers, barbecue, everything called his name, but he was headed for Jess and a beer.
“Wait!” Jonathan pulled him back. “What is this? Do you know anything about this?”
There was a line in front of a stand marked simply, The Bacon Barn. The sign board listed bacon-wrapped franks, no surprise, but then it continued through another fifteen or more options, including fried bacon, chocolate covered bacon, bacon sundaes, and pickle-juice marinated crispy bacon.
“I think,” Jonathan stared at the menu and shook his head. “I think.” Midway food seemed to have stolen his ability to make sentences.
“No thinking. The Bacon Barn is a do or don’t do moment, that’s what a fair is.”
“Do.”
Connor heard I do and it sounded beautiful.