Chapter Twenty-Three Not What I’d Planned
Chapter Twenty-Three: Not What I’d Planned
When we arrived at the nearest town to the cottage, I pulled into a grocery store.
“I made a list,” I said.
As he was unbuckling his seatbelt, I said, “Hey you.” And I leaned over and kissed him.
He smiled, bemused. We hadn’t grocery shopped together before because our work schedules conflicted. It felt like a date, walking so close we brushed against each other. He kept shooting me sly glances, picking up stuff that wasn’t on the list.
“Do you go off script at work too?” I said.
“If it feels right.” He put hot chocolate in the cart, and his arm slid along mine, and even though we were both wearing coats, I got chills.
After we’d loaded the food into the car, I drove us to the cottage.
It was deep in the woods down a gravel road.
Private. Just like I wanted. It didn’t have a real address, only a fire number at the end of the driveway.
I backed the car to the front door and popped the trunk.
The door key was hidden in a magnetic box under the porch.
I let us in. The place was smaller than it looked in the photos.
“It’s cold in here,” he said.
I didn’t notice the cold much. Growing up in Timmins, I was used to it, but Eddie, being a Toronto boy, wasn’t. I turned the thermostat up.
We brought the groceries in first. The kitchen was super old.
The countertops were cracked and stained, the microwave and stove looked ancient, and the fridge was making a loud humming noise.
The kitchen was open-plan with the living room, which was good, or it would have felt claustrophobic, like a bear’s den.
I took the box of last night’s appetizers from him. “I’ll put them in the oven, and by the time we’ve unpacked, they’ll be done, and we can have lunch.”
We spent an hour unloading the car. I got the roll of bedding last and carried it over my shoulder into the cottage to the bigger bedroom, and I made the bed.
Then I realized why I’d left that till last. Because this meant it was showtime.
I heard him come into the bedroom. He took off his jacket and hung it over the back of a chair, then he sprawled on his back across the bed in front of me.
He grabbed the front of my coat, pulled me down, and kissed me.
“Fuck,” I said.
“What?”
“The apps. They’re gonna burn.”
I got up and ran to the kitchen. I turned off the oven and opened the door.
Smoke billowed out. I looked for an oven mitt but there were only skimpy dishtowels in the drawers, so I grabbed a mitt out of my coat pocket and used that to pull the cookie sheet out of the oven.
Mistake. The metal burned me right through my mitt, and I dropped the cookie sheet onto the stove.
I pulled the mitt off, held my hand under the tap, and turned the cold water on. My fingertips felt like they’d been skinned. The apps were black around the edges, but salvageable.
He came into the kitchen.
“No oven mitts,” I told him. “Tried using my actual mitts.”
He went looking for plates and found a couple of old, chipped ones in the cupboard. He picked up the apps with his fingers, loaded the plates, and put them on the table. By then, my fingers were numb, so I turned the tap off and joined him at the table. I ate with my good hand.
“You okay?” he said.
“Yeah, it’s not that bad.”
It wasn’t much of a lunch, but we were too hungry to be picky since we hadn’t eaten for a few hours. Afterward, we washed up.
“You want to go for a walk?” I said.
“Sure,” he said.
I wasn’t stalling. I just wanted to scout the location and pick out a good place to propose.
He got his jacket from the bedroom, and then we went out the back door of the cottage.
A path led into the woods, wide enough for us to walk side by side, so we held hands.
My fingers didn’t hurt as much when he was touching me.
We saw one cottage in the distance through the trees, but it looked vacant.
The path went up a steep hill, and he got tired, and I was pulling him up behind me. He wasn’t in good shape.
“Hop on my back,” I said.
“What?”
“I’ll carry you.”
“You can’t.”
“C’mon. Get up.”
He climbed up onto my back, and I carried him up the trail. I figured I had twenty pounds on him. He wasn’t easy to carry, but I liked feeling his weight on me. When we got to the top, he slid off my back.
“You’re stronger than you look,” he said.
“It’s core strength.”
The lake looked beautiful. This was where I was going to propose. After we—
“Let’s go back,” he said.
“Sure.”
We held hands on the way. He elbowed me playfully.
“What?” I said.
He let go of my hand and shoved me up against a tree by the trail. He grabbed the collar of my coat in one hand, pulled up the bottom of my coat, and pressed himself against me.
“You feel me?” he said in my ear.
“Yeah,” I said, because I could. And fuck, I wanted him then as much as he wanted me.
“One day, I’m gonna do you like this. I’m gonna do you so hard and fill you up and come inside you.”
“Fuck,” I whispered, because my voice didn’t work properly.
He let go of me and stepped back. “I don’t want to pretend anymore.”
The walk back to the cottage seemed to take a lot less time than the walk to the lake had.
“Okay,” I said, holding his shoulders. My hands were shaking. “How do we do this? Where do you want me to stand?”
“Get on the bed. You’ll want to be lying down for your first time. I’ll join you in a sec.”
“Okay,” I said. We were gonna do this. We were actually gonna do this.
I didn’t know what to do, so I lay face down on the bed.
This was starting to feel like a painful medical exam.
His dick wasn’t huge, but it was big enough, and never mind he said he’d be careful, he’d also said it could hurt, so I tried to take my mind off it by reciting the proposal in my head, but I kept getting stuck. Then I heard him come into the bedroom.
“Lie on your back,” he said.
I rolled over. “How will that work?”
He took a box of condoms and lube out of his backpack and set them on the bedside table.
“The first thing we’re gonna do is make out for a while,” he said. “A good long while, until you’re really turned on and relaxed.”
“I’ve gotta take a piss.”
“Go do that. I’ll be here.”
I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. You have to do this, Porter. Then you can propose. Then everything’ll be okay. If he says yes. He has to say yes. He can’t fuck me and dump me...can he?
When I got back to the bedroom, there was a condom on the bedside table, and he was opening a package of Kleenex. I stood in the doorway, watching.
“We don’t have to do this now if you’re not ready,” he said.
“No, I want to, but I dunno. Stage fright, I guess.”
“You get stage fright?”
“Yeah. Pretty bad sometimes, when I tap.”
“You wanna make out?” he said.
I could do that. “Sure.”
“Then sit on the bed.”
I did, and he came over to me, and he cupped the back of my head gently and brushed his lips over mine and then held still with our mouths touching.
Which I wasn’t going to sit there and let him do, so I kissed him properly.
Then we maneuvered ourselves onto the bed so we were lying side by side and kept kissing.
How much would I have killed to be in this position all those weeks we were both working and couldn’t be together?
And my eyes were closed, and even though I was in my head, he was in there with me.
I was getting pretty turned on, because my body responded to him like that, and he must have been able to tell because he was right up against me, and he said, “I’m gonna do something to help you relax. It won’t hurt.”
“What?”
“I’m gonna put my finger inside you.” He reached over to the nightstand and picked up the tube of lube. “Unbuckle your belt for me. You don’t have to take it off.”
I unbuckled my belt and watched him squirt lube onto his fingers and spread it all over the tips. He leaned over, and with his other hand, he untucked my T-shirt at the back and tugged out the waistband of my boxers.
“It’ll feel wet,” he said. “That’s the lube. If you want me to stop, tell me.”
His hand felt cold and wet as he slid it down the back of my jeans, and I was tensing up. Then when he pushed inwards, I froze.
He pulled his hand out right away. I didn’t have to say anything.
“Sorry.” I felt like a fucking failure.
I heard him get up, and I thought he’d left, but a few seconds later, he touched my shoulder softly and said, “It’s okay.”
“I’m sorry.”
“I know,” he said.
He buckled my belt for me, and then he sat beside me on the bed and put his hand on my side. I put my hand over his.
“I pushed you too hard,” he said.
“It was my idea.”
“But I let you build it up as a fantasy fuck when it’s just another thing we’re gonna do together. It’s not a bigger deal than what we’ve already done.”
“You can say that because you’ve done it before.”
“Was your first time with a woman that big a deal?”
The first time I’d had sex was at a dorm party with Kim, whose last name I didn’t remember.
My first girlfriend, Deb, who wanted to wait until marriage, had dumped me the month before, and I was feeling pathetic.
Kim lived three floors above me, so I’d seen her around.
We started talking, drank peach schnapps and Sprite from plastic Disney cups, and then we started making out on one of the lounge couches in front of everybody.
Then she said her roommate was away for the weekend, so we went to her room and made out on her bed.
Then she gave me a blow job. I didn’t even have to ask.
Afterward, I apologized for shooting in her mouth, which was stupid because clearly she’d wanted me to.
She’d laughed. Then we made out some more and ended up having sex, and she showed me how to get her off.
She acted like it wasn’t a big deal. So it felt like it wasn’t.
It was a letdown. It didn’t make me feel cool or confident or more mature.
“I felt like it should have been a big deal because everyone says it is,” I said.
“But since you ask, no. Nothing I did with anyone felt like my first time with you. And all I did was touch you and kiss you. I’ve never shot just from doing that before, and I thought, This is it.
This is why people talk about how special it is.
You changed me, made me what I was always supposed to be my whole life, but I never knew until then. ”
It was quiet in the room.
“Craig?” he said, and his hand moved slightly on my side.
“Yeah?”
“Will you marry me?”
The world blinked out for a second, and when I opened my eyes, I was in another world where everything was backward.
“What did you say?” I said, and it came out sounding angry. I sat up.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to say that.”
“Why did you say it, then?”
“’Cause I want to marry you.” I could see from his face that he wasn’t kidding.
“But I won’t let you fuck me. And I’m all messed up from being molested. Why would you want to marry me?”
“What you said about how it was for you our first time was the same for me. I’ve been with a man before, but with you, it’s a whole different experience.
You don’t get what you are to me, tapper.
You’ve gone through all this stuff, and you’re working on all that stuff so we can be together. No one’s ever done that for me before.”
“Fuck, Eddie.” I started crying. I curled up on the bed and covered my face, because it was fucking embarrassing.
I felt his hand on my side again.
“What’s wrong?” he said.
“I was gonna ask you to marry me.”
“Guess that’s a yes, then?”
I hiccuped, because I was crying and laughing at the same time. I nodded. He held me, and we lay like that, and I gradually relaxed. Then I fell asleep.