Sebastian
SEBASTIAN
A ustin leads me upstairs to his room, and after dropping our bags at the end of his bed, I step closer to kiss him.
“Woah, what are you doing? She’ll be home any minute.”
“We can be quick, and quiet.”
He holds me at arm’s length. “Don’t you want a tour or something?”
Yes, I absolutely want a tour of Austin’s house. I want to look at everything greedily and find things out about him that no one else knows. I want to read the plaques on those hockey trophies lined up on the shelves. Focus on who’s actually in those posters on the walls and riffle through his CD – who the fuck has CDs? - collection. But right now, after sitting next to him in a cramped car for five hours, trying not to get hard checking out the shape of his cock in those sweatpants, I want him naked.
I kiss his neck and slide my hand between his legs and he melts.
“Fuck, okay, but quick.”
He closes the drapes and we shimmy out of our clothes, kissing and falling back onto his single bed. Still half-dressed in t-shirts with our pants around our ankles as we start jerking each other off.
Austin’s groan turns me to jelly. He opens a bedside drawer and squeezes some lotion out onto our hands, and the smell is intoxicating. This is what Austin uses to jerk off. The thought of it makes the pit of my stomach fizzle.
Our lips fuse together, though we’re not kissing anymore, just working frantically with our hands.
I hear a car outside, and before Austin can panic, I speed up. He closes his eyes and tilts his head back as he comes. Spilling over my knuckles while I plant kisses all over his neck.
“ Fuck Seb. ”
He rolls me onto my back and pumps his fist, fast and hard until I lose it.
Seconds later, there’s the sound of a key in the door and we’re jumping up, wiping ourselves off with one of Austin’s old t-shirts.
“Oz, you home?”
We probably look way too flushed and out of breath to be innocent, but the pretty woman standing at the foot of the stairs looks too happy to see Austin to notice.
He bounces down the steps to hug her and I flinch at the thought that she might be able to smell me on him. I watch her face for changes – realization, acknowledgement, anything. But all I see is pure joy as she squeezes him hard with her eyes closed.
“I missed you,” she says, and for some reason, that hits me like a fist. Has my mom ever squeezed me like that? Not since I got taller than her and graduated boarding school.
She remembers they’re not alone, but she doesn’t seem embarrassed to have a witness as she takes me in.
“This must be the notorious Huntington.”
Austin flushes, but she’s too busy looking at me now.
I come down the stairs, trying to make myself as presentable as possible. I’ve never had to introduce myself to someone’s mother at the foot of a narrow staircase before. But I can make it work. I hold my hand out and say, “hello ma’am, it’s a pleasure to meet you, thank you so much for welcoming me into your lovely home.”
Her face spreads into a slow, wide smile and wow, she’s stunning. Not like my mom is stunning, with her platinum hair and her discreetly-placed Botox. But with chestnut hair tied haphazardly back and kept in place with visible bobby pins. The slightest of crow’s feet in the corners of her eyes, and freckles dotting her cheeks. She takes my hand in her thin, callused one and says, “so polite,” with a wink to Austin. “You can call me Lisa, and you’re more than welcome, mi casa- ” she waves a hand. “And whatever the rest of that saying is.”
“Thank you, Lisa.”
Lisa is still wearing her waitress uniform of a red shirt with big collars and black and white gingham detail, with a black pencil skirt that shows off her svelte figure. Dark pantyhose and comfortable-looking black slip-on shoes.
We follow her into the kitchen, where she opens a drawer full of take-out flyers and tells us to pick something for dinner while she changes out of her dirty clothes.
She squeezes my arm as she passes and, looking right into my eyes, she says, “it’s really nice to meet you , I’m glad you’re here.”
I look at Austin after she leaves to see if he felt the intensity of that moment too, but he’s too busy rifling through the cupboard to notice anything.
“Pizza?”
Lisa has her hair tied up in a messier style when she comes back down. Her face scrubbed clean of make-up. She’s wearing leggings and a t-shirt with some - I think - album cover, on the front.
“What did you guys order?”
“We got Luigi’s, should be here in about twenty minutes.”
Am I imagining things, or is Austin’s accent stronger here?
She takes a seat on the couch next to Austin. When she notices me looking at her shirt, she asks if I like Fleetwood Mac.
“Who?”
She shares a look with Austin and they laugh.
“What?”
“Who the fuck doesn’t know who Fleetwood Mac are?”
Lisa slaps his arm. “Language.”
“Sorry Ma.”
“You should play him some,” she says.
“Put some on now,” I suggest.
“Alright.” Lisa jumps up and stalks over to a stack of records in a little shelving unit in the corner of the room. There’s a modern record player there, and she takes whatever record was under the needle off and exchanges it when she finds what she’s looking for.
“This is Rumours, ” she says. “One of the greatest albums ever recorded.”
A song starts to play, kind of like the country playlists Austin’s been playing me, but kind of different.
Lisa sings along and, wow, even just singing in the living room, her voice is beautiful.
Austin taps his leg in time with the music without noticing. When I look at Lisa again, she’s singing unselfconsciously and looking at me.
The doorbell rings and she shoots off to go and get it before I can offer.
“Will your mom be offended if I try to give her money for the pizza?” I ask.
“Very offended, don’t do it.”
“But we eat like pigs.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll stuff some cash in her purse before we leave.”
“Shall we eat in front of the TV?” Lisa asks when she comes back in, balancing two huge pizza boxes and bags of fries and cans of coke like a pro.
We lay it all out on the coffee table, Lisa sitting on the couch, tapping her feet as she eats to the music playing in the background with ESPN on mute on the TV. I sit cross-legged on the floor next to Austin, feeling warm and sad at the same time.
“This music is amazing,” I say once I’ve had my fill of pizza.
While we’ve been eating, a slower song has played through, with a haunting kind of melody I wanted to ask Lisa to immediately put on again, (though I know that’s not easy to do on a vinyl record), two more upbeat songs. One that sounded vaguely familiar, like maybe it was on a TV show or an advertisement or something, and now a really slow, sad song is playing with a new singer.
“I can’t believe you’ve never heard Fleetwood Mac,” Lisa says, still eating fries at a snail’s pace. “What do your parents listen to?”
“I have no idea.”
“You have no idea what your parents listen to? What did they play in the house when you were growing up?”
“I don’t know. I went to boarding school.”
“Oh.” The way she says it, it sounds like she wants to follow up with, “I’m sorry,” the way you do when you hear someone died.
The sad song in the background only makes me feel more pathetic.
Lisa jumps up. “In that case, you’re going to be my new pet project.”
Austin groans.
“It’s not often I get a music virgin to mold.”
Austin flushes, but Lisa has her back turned, rifling through her vinyl collection. A new song starts to play and she bumps her hips to it before saying, “oh I love this one,” and turning the volume up.
“When Austin was a little kid he’d sing this all the time.”
“Austin sings?”
That wipes the smile off his face. “No.”
“He had a lovely voice.” She turns to me. “It’s a shame he’s too cool to sing anymore.”
I ruffle his hair and he drops his eyes.
“Okay, so if you like Fleetwood Mac, you’re gonna love this-”
Lisa plays me records for most of the night, telling me stories about Austin when he was a kid. Before we go to bed, she cracks open the old photo-albums, showing me pictures of Austin running around the backyard in this very house in a diaper. Playing in an inflatable pool, surrounded by similar-looking men I guess are his uncles with their wives. In the pictures, no one is posing, nothing is staged. Everything is just naturally happening. The men and women are drinking beer from cans or bottles and laughing. They’re wearing Devil’s hockey jerseys (Austin too), or big puffy coats as they pull the kids down a snowy hill in homemade sleds. They’re BBQing in comedic aprons. They’re smoking cigarettes and joking around, picking their wives up and playing hockey in the backyard.
I’ve never been so jealous in my life.
Lisa starts yawning and excuses herself to go to bed.
“There’s extra blankets and a sleeping bag in Austin’s room for you Seb.”
I thank her, and when she leaves, Austin and I sit for a moment surrounded by the albums with some song I don’t know playing on the record player.
“You don’t want me to sleep on the floor do you?”
“Don’t be stupid. We can’t do anything while my ma’s home though, the walls are thin.”
“Okay.”
We change into old t-shirts and shorts and brush our teeth in the only bathroom. When we climb into Austin’s single bed, our bodies are close and I can feel his warmth under the comforter.
I want to touch him, but don’t know if he wants me to. Then he puts his arm around me and pulls me in close with a sigh. He rubs my back and I settle in.
“I really like your mom,” I whisper.
“I think she likes you too, she doesn’t show just anyone her record collection.”
I snort. “I’m honored, seriously. And those baby pictures-”
Austin groans. “If you ever mention those pictures to anyone on the team, I’ll kill you.”
“Noted.”
It’s quiet on the street outside except for the occasional car door slamming and a dog barking somewhere.
“You’ll have to make me a new playlist now.”
I hear him swallow in the quiet. “I’ll make you as many playlists as you want. Now go to sleep."
Fuck, I’m practically glowing while I try to fall asleep.
There are pancakes and bacon waiting downstairs for us the next morning.
“Ma, you didn’t have to cook.”
A little radio is playing some country song and Lisa licks batter off her finger as she sways to it. “I was hungry, sit down, eat!”
We do as we’re told.
“A few of your uncles and aunts are coming over today for a BBQ, you guys don’t have to stick around if you’ve already got plans, but you should wait for them to get here to say hi.”
“We don’t have any plans,” I say.
“I thought you wanted a tour of Jersey?” Austin asks.
I shrug. “We can go to the boardwalk another time.”
“Don’t go to Atlantic City, that place is covered in trash and full of hooligans.” Lisa says as she cuts into a pancake. “Do get a hot dog though, and did he try the hoagies at that place?”
I stifle my smile at the ‘hoagie’ thing.
“I’ll get him one,” Austin says with a grin.
We’re watching TV after taking a shower, (not together unfortunately), when the doorbell starts ringing and Austin’s relatives pour into the house and filter out into the back yard.
His uncle Pete is a balding, rotund guy with a big jolly laugh and sparkly brown eyes. He shakes my hand and slaps me on the back when Austin introduces me as a ‘friend from school.’
“You on the hockey team ?”
“Yep.”
“What position do you play?”
“Right now, I’m playing left-wing.”
“Right now?”
“Usually I’m a center.”
Uncle Pete’s eyes get wide. “You’d better watch out Oz, this one wants your spot on the team.”
Is it okay to punch the uncle of the guy your sleeping with? I didn’t think so.
Austin just snorts and slaps me on the shoulder. “He can try.”
That elicits a hearty chuckle from his uncle and a couple of others.
Lisa has changed into jeans and a puffy jacket, like most of the other women there, she’s sipping beer from a bottle and bopping to the music playing on a boombox one of the uncles brought with him.
“What’s the occasion?” I ask Austin.
He looks confused, so I gesture to the crowd gathered in his garden.
“It’s Saturday,” he says. “And there’s no hockey. What else are we gonna do?”
I smile.
“What?”
“Nothing, I like it.”
He raises one eyebrow like he doesn’t believe me. Fuck, I wish I could kiss him right now. He looks so good, so… at home in this setting. In his puffy jacket and college hockey sweats, sipping a root beer and joking around with his uncles. Playing with his little nieces and nephews. One of which is messing around with a hockey stick, smacking soccer balls against the trees at the bottom of the garden.
People have stopped ringing the doorbell and just come around the side of the house to join us. I’m introduced to some of the neighbors, who seem to be here mostly for the free food.
I’m distracted, watching Lisa and a few other women sing one of the songs from Austin’s playlist – you’re so vain by Carly Simon. And when I turn around, Austin’s hugging one of those girls who are so naturally beautiful, they couldn’t hide it even if they tried.
My stomach drops and I know without anyone telling me that this is Alyssa.