Every Time I Think of You (12 page)

“There are so many things we can’t do, places we can’t be ourselves. Here,” his upward glance drew me to the dark tree branches, oaks mostly, canopied above us, “God sees us and likes it.”

Wrapping his arms around me, we kissed and dry-humped with a warm familiarity. I avoided a few of his newly-earned elbow scrapes.

He was right, and knelt before me to prove it. It was the perfect setting. While secluded, the distant campus lights offered just enough of a glow to see Everett’s face bobbing at my groin. I stroked my fingers through his hair, tugged an earlobe, quietly humming approval, until he stood up and whispered, “I want you to fuck me.”

He unceremoniously turned and dropped his pants. The stark sight of his curved butt cheeks as he arched his back and leaned against a thick tree trunk sent a surge of lust through me, but also confusion. He wanted to do it standing?

“Oh, wait.” He dug for something in his jacket pocket. “Here.” He handed me a small tube of KY.

I slathered a bit on my cock, then brought my hand to the fuzzy crevice between his legs. As my finger dug up inside him, he flexed his muscles with pleasure, reached back and pulled me closer. I aimed, pointing myself toward him, and into him. I pulled up his sweatshirt and jacket, licking up his back until he shucked them both off completely. His pale skin glowed in the dim light.

Cautiously glancing around at the darkened woods, I expected his teammates to pounce upon us in some mad hazing ritual. But no one stopped us.

The wind shushing through tree branches was our mood music. We began an awkward, then comfortable, back and forth thrusting. That fleeting surge of power over him, even given willingly, was as exciting as the night breeze against my skin.

I reached around to paw his chest, join him in stroking himself. I licked the nape of his neck while his hand held my thigh, gripping it harder. At one moment, a leaf fell from the tree, landing on his back and sticking to a trail of my spit. I slid in deeper, until he was almost sprawled against the tree. Shoving myself closer, I found my hand atop his as it gripped the trunk. Bark crumbled between our fingers.

We grunted and moaned and giggled and grabbed. As with our first time, the steam around us became visible, but this time it was more of a mysterious mist in the night. Overcome with pleasure, I almost burst out a cry of love for him. Nothing could pull us apart, until finally, sticky and satiated, we did, with a mutual regret.

“Did you happen to bring a wet towel?” I joked.

“Here,” he said, offering his undershirt as a sort of rag.

We pulled our pants back up. I helped him untangle his sweatshirt and jacket, helped him dress. Everett grabbed the balled up undershirt I had dropped. “A souvenir,” he joked after wiping his butt. Feigning disgust, I nevertheless accepted it.

We sat down together, leaned against the trunk and nuzzled for a while, not needing to talk.

“Wasn’t that worth the wait?”

I shook my head as I wiped my fingers again on his shirt. How could I explain that it wasn’t just about the sex, that I’d begun to clutch a spare pillow at night, pretending to hold him, that even the occasional chirp of his voice when he spoke in a joking tone brought flutters of pleasure inside me?

But he was right. His company was always worth the wait.

After getting my backpack from the car and checking me into the guest dorm, Everett walked with me to the small downtown main street of Saltsburg, where we nearly had the diner to ourselves. We ate slowly, talking quietly of plans to be together for the few weeks between our graduation and my departure for the park job.

Through the meal, and our slow walk back to the campus in the night, I found myself admiring his ability to shift gears so swiftly. One minute we were passionately humping in the woods, and then we casually shared French fries in a restaurant. Yet he was able to keep that intimate connection with a mere glance or the briefest touch.

My restless night of sleep alone in a nearly empty wing of the small guest dormitory felt like a detention, until Everett arrived the next morning, chipper and casual, offering a good morning kiss before we left the dorm room.

Over a noisy breakfast in the crowded school cafeteria, a few of his classmates made innocuous jokes and offered earnest farewells.

Everett walked me around the campus. We kept the talk light, nothing too intimate. We enjoyed the brisk morning air while sharing admiring glances, but barely touched. Before long, Everett had gradually guided me to my dad’s Pontiac in the parking lot.

I had hoped we could spend the rest of the day together, but he offered up a volley of impending duties in addition to homework. I was also behind in my own studies but would have ignored them just to spend more time with him.

“It’s nothing, just … Thank you for coming.” He held a serious look, until it grew into a mischievous grin before he added, “ … up my butt!”

Our laughter bounced across the parking lot.

“So, we’re cool, right?” he said as we settled down.

Actually, we weren’t. Jealous of his schoolmates for their casual privilege of simply being with him every day, leaving him once again pained me. I couldn’t hold him in my arms as we had when we’d slept over at Holly’s, and I wondered when that would ever happen again.

Yet I agreed. “We are extra cool.”

Chapter 17

Days later, as I was scolding myself for harboring conflicted thoughts about Everett, the gift he mentioned arrived in the mail.

Inside a small cardboard box the size of a postcard was a cassette tape. I figured Everett had made a mix tape which included some of ‘our songs,’ and I was partially right.

Laying on my bed with my little cassette player and earphones, I listened. It sounded like he was taping songs from a nearby radio, starting with the Fleetwood Mac song that played when we had first made out, indoors, at least.

But Everett’s voice came in, whisper-singing, making up accompanying lyrics that sometimes made no grammatical sense, but which told of that afternoon on his bed. He even mentioned the tree cookies.

Apparently he had a portable cassette recorder and separate radio, or had borrowed one, because the background noises fluctuated from what was probably his dorm room during a moment alone to some other room. A few of those had been interrupted by a door sound, some brief chatting.

But as the tape continued with abrupt stop-starts as segues, Everett found acoustically sound areas, and sang along to Cheap Trick’s “Dream Police” in what he narrated, like some frazzled war reporter, “the lone hill overlooking the sad prison where a flock of young boys toil in the brain camps of their despotic ruler…”

His comic voice faltered at one point, and switched to another clicked stop/start. I could hear his mouth close to the microphone, whispering, like a voice in a dream, “Reid. I miss you so much it hurts. I wanna see you soon. I have a lacrosse game the day before your berfday. Then we’re together again, okay?”

He broke into some made-up song, I thought (it was actually Genesis, he would later tell me), howling at the wind, which muffled the microphone and distorted his closing chorus. I knew this wasn’t just some silly game for him. He was pouring his heart out into a tiny box for me.

Weeks later, after what would happen in just a few days, I would sneak into the living room in the near dark, insert the tape into my dad’s stereo, which had a cassette-to-cassette copier along with the record player. I would make copy after copy of that precious recording. Because I knew, after listening to it again and again, that I would wear it out.

Chapter 18

At one point, oddly only minutes into the lacrosse match, Everett was soaring across the field, had caught the ball, jumped mid-air to catch it, when an opponent deliberately collided with him across the side of his waist. He fell to the ground sideways, mostly on his hip, and a portion of his spine went the wrong way.

That mid-air moment, imagined in my mind, repeated over and over again. Those two or three seconds lurched his life into a completely unforeseen and irrevocable direction.

At first, I didn’t cry when Holly called me. I was too busy feeling like a complete louse.

Her call came two days after the accident. Not knowing his injury was the reason he hadn’t shown up at the half-marathon or my birthday party, I only felt hurt and disappointed by his absence.

I had won fourteenth place in the race the day before and was going to celebrate with some beers in the garage with the guys. I had hoped to announce, upon his dependably stunning entrance, like a low-class debutante ball, Everett Forrester, my boyfriend.

And I knew none of them would have had a problem with it, which was why I wanted to do it.

Holly had tracked down my family’s thankfully listed phone number and called on that cold quiet Monday afternoon, when Mom was over in one part of town while Dad was in the opposite. I was alone in the house, doing absolutely nothing except feeling angry, just fucking angry about Everett’s absence, when Holly called and told me everything.

Sitting on the kitchen floor, dizzy, the room had begun to spin around. I needed to be lower, closer to the floor, to piece together the timing of events.

While I was anticipating the meet the next day, my little party, and what would have been my daring announcement, Everett was being flown by helicopter to a hospital in Pittsburgh.

While I was warming up that morning and feeling the good pain of stretching, Everett’s pain was dulled by an IV hook-up of morphine.

While I was feeling the tear of oxygen and carbon dioxide coursing in and out of my lungs as I ran, Everett lay face down on an operating table as a surgeon sliced open the flesh above the intersection of his buttocks.

Slumped on the sofa as my parents handed their moping son his birthday presents, at the same time Everett’s parents and sister listened in a waiting room as a surgeon offered hopeful condolences and grueling medical facts.

I had been pissed off at him while he was pissing into a tube.

I told Holly I wanted to run downtown and catch the next train to Pittsburgh to see him. But she reminded me that a lot of people ahead of me simply had to pay their respects in what Holly called “this orgy of sympathy.” Most of them weren’t allowed to see him yet.

I had forgotten about them. Between the talk of visits and calming each other, hopes and panic, the unspoken thought between us was that I might be the last person to ever make love with Everett, and those photos were the testament.

Chapter 19

What I had initially considered a less than perfect romantic night with Everett –that night at his sister’s apartment– would become my salvation over the next several weeks. Holly became my telephone informant, a go-between for updates on Everett’s condition.

I didn’t have the temerity to ask if, in the middle of it all, he’d mentioned me. But somewhere in her second or third call, after her work and hospital visits, she said, “He wanted to know if you got the tape he sent.” I told her to tell him I did, and I loved it.

My mention of the newspaper article didn’t surprise her, at first. The
Greensburg Tribune
featured a photo of an ambulance parked next to the school playing field, taken by some ambitious Pinecrest student photographer, and beside it, the smiling senior portrait of Everett. The headline read, ‘Forrestville Teen in Sports Accident.’

Not knowing whether to suggest sending her the clipping, I also didn’t say that I’d snuck out of the house to buy two more copies. Each night, I stared at the newspaper photos.

School became a ghost walk. Coasting on my eleven and a half years of good grades, I almost forgot about the senior college placement exams, until mimeographed pages of reminder schedules were doled out in class. Study? Why? Track practice continued. Training? Why bother?

Forcing myself through the habits of high school, for the next week I shifted books and objects from one place to another; cleats on, cleats off, pencils dulled, clothes discarded or not, as my body sat, walked, ran, then collapsed.