Chapter Forty-One New Beginning #2
It was a nice bathroom, but he was right.
It would have been tight with both of us in here.
The water pressure wasn’t too bad. I got my clothes off and stepped into the shower.
It felt like all the sadness and the pain from my time away from him was rinsing down the drain, and I started singing “Renegades.” I was usually stressed first thing in the morning thinking of all the stuff I had to do.
I didn’t feel stressed today. I felt happy.
Afterward, I dried off with one of his fancy towels and got dressed. And he was right. Everything fit, though the shirt clung to my body. It felt nice, wearing his clothes.
I came out of the bathroom to find him lying on his back on the bed, cradling his head in his arms and looking happy.
“You look good in that shirt,” he said, getting up. “Goes with your eyes.”
“I don’t know.” I looked at myself. “Can you see my nipples through it?”
“Hardly at all.” He rubbed the pad of his thumb over my nipple, which I guess I’d asked for.
He moved to touch the other one, then he stopped and tapped the middle of my chest. I’d been wearing them for so long I’d forgotten.
“What’s that?” he said.
I pulled the necklace off and held it up. My gold ring and his wooden ring were dangling there. “I kept them.”
He blinked at them.
“I couldn’t throw them away. I knew you were done with me, but I wasn’t done with you.”
He didn’t look like he wanted to argue, but he wasn’t saying anything. Maybe he was waiting for me to say it.
So I did. “We gonna get married now?”
“That’s not a good idea, Craig.”
I felt like he’d punched me. Was this just...a one-night stand? No, he’d said he wanted to see me again.
“What’s going on here, Eddie?”
“We don’t know each other well enough to get married,” he said. “We were only together a few months when we got engaged.”
“Yeah, but when you know, you know.”
“Craig, we don’t know anything right now. You still don’t know what my kink is.”
“I’ve been wondering about that, actually.”
“And I don’t know what yours is.”
“I don’t have any kinks.”
“That you know of,” he said. “How well do you know what you want? You thought you were straight for the first twenty-two years of your life. The only sex you had with your girlfriends was vanilla, and we weren’t together long enough to figure out what you’re into. We’ve hardly tried anything.”
“We didn’t get to do enough of the stuff I already know I like.”
“Exactly,” he said. “But it’s more than that. We don’t really know each other. Those questions you asked me when we first got together—”
“I remember everything you said that night. Your favorite color is orange.”
“Do you know why it’s orange?” he said.
He had me there.
“That’s the thing,” he said. “My answers didn’t tell you about me. It’s the reasons for my answers that tell you who I am. Joel’s been asking me stuff about myself I don’t know the answers to. Right now, Joel knows things about me that you don’t know.”
“Could you stop comparing me to Joel? It’s bad enough I had to watch him give you a hand job on TV.”
“Do you remember that conversation we had when I first moved in with you, when we were putting your model plane together? You said you thought you’d seen my O face because you’d watched Wanton Town.”
“Yeah?”
“But you hadn’t seen it, had you?”
I smiled. “I have now.”
“You didn’t see that on TV, did you?”
“No.”
“Joel’s never seen it, and he never will. Same with kissing—on the set, it’s all for show. When I kiss you, it’s just us. It’s about how it feels, and how I love you. And I don’t use my tongue when I kiss Joel.”
I laughed because he was making it better. And he’d said he loved me.
“I can’t marry you till we know each other a lot better than we do now,” he said.
“I want to get to know you—really know you. And I want you to know who I really am so you know what you’re getting when you ask me to marry you.
I want to help you find out what your kinks are, and I want to try them all with you. ”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It will be,” he said. “But it’s gonna take time.”
“Well, if we’re getting to know each other better, then we need to live together, because we’re not gonna see much of each other any other way, not with your job and both of mine.
So, will you move back in with me? I know your place is bigger and fancier, but I want to be alone with you and not have Joel know about it every time we do anything.
And I want to make out with you in front of the TV without an audience.
And I want to cook you breakfast every Sunday and blow you whenever I want to. ”
He laughed. “Sure, I’ll come live with you. You can ride with me to work every morning, and maybe we can make out in the back of the car on the way. And let’s do this: every day, we ask each other one really personal question and get to know each other. Really know each other.”
“Okay, me first,” I said. “Why is orange your favorite color?”
“It’s my lucky color,” he said. “It landed me my second role on account of that resemblance.”
“You said you couldn’t see the resemblance.”
“I can’t, but if other people can, and it helps me get work, I’m not gonna argue. Now you know something about me. My question to you is, what do you put in your brownies?”
“What?”
“They don’t taste like anybody else’s. What’s in them?”
“That’s a really personal question, Eddie. I don’t know if I can tell you.”
“We need to get to know each other better.”
I pretended to think it over. “Espresso powder.”
“You put coffee in them?”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t drink coffee.”
“You got no problems eating it, apparently.”
“I guess not.”
“Eddie?”
“Yeah?”
“I got another question: you like it when I shoot myself, don’t you?”
He laughed, but quietly. “You could say that.”
“And I’d be right saying that. Is that your kink?”
“No,” he said.
“No?”
“No...but you’re in the right ballpark.”
“So, what is it?”
“Let’s talk tonight,” he said. “When we don’t both have work to go to.”
“What about these?” I held up our engagement rings.
“They’ll keep. So keep them.”
I pulled the cord back over my head. I usually kept the rings under my shirt, but I left them out this time so everyone could see.
He smiled at me. “Guess I’ll see you tonight?”
“Guess so.”
I gathered him into a hug and whispered in his ear, “My honey kid.” And I kissed the side of his head. Then I let myself out of the trailer and headed off to work in the morning sunshine.
I had my honey kid back, and everything was going to be okay.