Every Time I Think of You (6 page)

“Sounds like a drag name,” Everett joked. “Paris Talsis.” The two of them burst into laughter, until I got the joke and forced a grin.

I looked at the TV. “Who, that woman?” The actress was the subject of a brief argument between Cary Grant and the other man, handsome, but in a different way, rugged. They both wore tuxedos and were trying to simultaneously dance with the wide-eyed blonde.

“See? You’re not the first,” Holly nodded toward us. I was stunned. While she obviously knew what was up between us, it seemed so casual.

Everett chuckled, spinning off a completely unrelated reminiscence between him and his sister. While I was familiar with the known behavioral changes that took place under the influence of pot, Holly and Everett’s talk raced like the chatter of chipmunks, almost a secret lingo full of inside jokes.

My own buzz left me in silence while gazing at the TV screen. I longed for another scene between these two handsome actors, to see some indication of the rumors Holly and Everett had mentioned, but there were none.

After a brief moment between the leads and two parental character actors, the blonde rode off in a convertible with Cary Grant, unsure of her fate. The movie wrapped up abruptly with a traditional script-fonted
The End.

Everett had also turned his attention to me, only slightly distracted by a commercial. “I have to send out some applications. I might have a scholarship at Temple University.”

“In…?”

“Well, my major’ll probably be Geography, but I want to focus on the environment. I was thinking about Forestry at Penn State, but Philadelphia seems more interesting than State College.”

“That’s a bit unusual, to go to a city to study trees,” Everett said. He was honestly perplexed or being sarcastic. I couldn’t tell.

“My bad boy phase.” He shrugged as if it were nothing. “I was acting out after the divorce. Mom thought it would teach me a lesson to have my license taken away. It was ... stupid.”

“Oh,” I said. At least that small lie was finally explained.

“Anyway,” Holly said, “I just want you to know you’re safe here. It’s cool. I love my little bro, despite his sometimes delinquent behavior, and you’re his friend, and that’s that.”

“Okay, let’s…” He made a gesture towards the table. I got up, grabbed the pizza box and cups, and took them into the kitchen as Everett pulled the table out from the sofa.

As I washed a few cups and a knife, tossed the paper napkins in the garbage, basically busying myself as Everett adjusted the sofa bed, I tried to prepare myself for what would or should happen next. Would we dance slowly like two tuxedoed gentlemen, then fall into each other’s arms again? What happened after the fade to black? Our previous couplings had been so abrupt. This night should mean something more, but so far the whole trip had seemed like just a fumbled jaunt.

But when I returned to the living room, Everett had shifted things to a romantic mood. The room was darkened to only the flickering light of two candles, the TV turned off in exchange for a softly-playing James Taylor album on the stereo. The couch had become a rumpled bed. He tossed pillows onto it.

“Come ‘ere.”

I approached him, ready, I hoped.

In our socked feet, he led me in a swaying slow dance until the tents in our sweatpants bumped together too often to ignore. He then simply sat with me on the sofa and slid under the covers, smiling, anticipating, and I joined him.

While the room’s heater kept the slight draft from the large windows at bay, the high ceilings of the living room left me feeling exposed. I tried to ignore Holly’s proximity behind her bedroom door, tried to remember that this was our third time. A charm?

I let Everett lead me, and he knew that he should. We hugged and kissed, caressed faces and chests, pulling shirts up, sweatpants down, pushing our skin close together under the blankets and a sheet that kept getting caught under our feet.

His mouth trailed over my chest, down toward the fuzzy parts around my erection, his lips enveloping it slowly, before moving downward to my thighs. My hands awkwardly grasped at any bump and crevasse of his smaller body and its little muscled curves, awaiting a turn to reciprocate what he did to me.

He was a bit simian, I noticed as I once again felt the tufts of dark hair between his legs, and the beginnings of a fuzzy trail from his belly to his groin. My leaner and longer body surrounded him, my tapered fingers caressing the ridges of muscle at his waist.

“Wait,” he whispered as he untangled his sweatpants, pulled them off, then leaned over the sofa bed to forage in his duffel bag for a small tube. I heard a squishy sound. Everett bashfully smirked as he seemed to wipe his butt. He leaned over again, and in the shaft of a streetlight, combined with the candle glow, his buttocks rose, and I understood what we were about to do.

Placing a small towel underneath himself, Everett lay on his belly, turned back to grasp my cock, then aimed it toward himself. After tugging the covers over our bodies, I positioned myself closer.

But first, I did what I wanted. The pot had settled, no longer inducing the antsy itch. I felt free to indulge, to caress his back, to hold the mounds of flesh and toy with the dark wisps of hair between them. My fingers, sticky from the lubricant, burrowed lightly. Everett raised his hips in response. “Come on, Starsky. You promised.”

I pressed myself atop him, concentrated kisses on the few slight freckles along his shoulders, the nape of his neck, his ear, the side of his face as he turned, opening his mouth for a sideways kiss that became a shared soft humming between us as I slowly began to grind my hips above his.

Nudge by nudge, I dabbed, then poked, then retreated, then slid in, then out, overwhelmed with the sensation of his muscles clamping around me, then releasing, relenting as I slid further inside him. I found myself needing to think not of him, looking up at those reserved French people in the poster on the wall above us. Thrusting with too much intensity, realizing I finally had some power over him, I tried to hold off, wanting it to last, to grab some kind of memory before it all dissolved.

The album had finished before I did. The slight squeaking sound of the sofa bed amid the silence made me starkly aware of what we were doing. Abruptly, Everett shoved himself out from under me, rolled over, repositioned his legs, wrapping them around my hips, guiding me back inside him.

The covers had slid off us, but being exposed made it more intense. The shock of looking eye to eye, of kissing him, arching my back up to clearly see his face under tousled hair, and his own strokes to himself, assured me. Now, remember this, burn this into your racing heart, ignore all else but his almost proud smile and his panting breath.

With a gasp, he unleashed on himself. I followed inside of him, and the wet puddles glued us together as I collapsed atop him.

His fingers grazed my back as I panted, then soon calmed. He eased me off his chest, slipped the towel from under himself, wiped some of the sweat and sperm from our skin, and repositioned us into a more comfortable sideways hug. We tugged our disheveled sweatpants back on, but remained shirtless. Under the tugged-back blankets, our mutual body heat sufficed.

“
Pro tempore
.”

“What?”

“‘For the time being.’ Shhh.” His fingers touched my lips, then slid from my face, past my sternum, settling at my waist after a playful cupping at my groin. “Time means nothing.”

I didn’t believe him, but didn’t argue.

Our romantic post-coital bliss was interrupted by an unpleasant odor.

“Sorry,” Everett pulled the blankets off himself, fanning them as he left for the bathroom. “Tried to get by with a silent but deadly.” He winced, then let rip a comical toot before padding off to the bathroom. I almost thought I heard his sister giggling from inside her room.

After some sounds in the bathroom that he managed to disguise with the running faucet –great minds think alike– he returned, momentarily bashful. I wanted to say how something so clearly human endeared him to me even more, but I guessed it would hardly be romantic to compliment his farting.

While I considered our meeting a mere accident of good timing, I couldn’t disagree. I remembered a feeling of urgency, unlike so many times before in more reasonable seasons, since my outdoor pleasures had become almost routine. I’d never thought some other boy would consider the option, the location, as perfect. It had been purely solitary, a gesture in defiance of the thought of a potential companion.

That happy accident had led to all this. But the line of our proximity, between the field and the forest would in a matter of days stretch further than he or I would be able to bear for long.

Chapter 9

Despite the quiet joy of being so close to him in the bed, Everett’s tousling shifts and our mutual body heat had kept me half-awake for most of the night. By morning, in my drowsy state, I tried to keep still after repositioning myself alongside him, an arm slung over his side. I wanted to cherish this quiet time of our bodies touching.

But soon he rolled over, and after a bit of affectionate nuzzling he led me to the bathroom for a shared shower that led to some playful soaping and, surprisingly, Everett’s almost reverent gesture of toweling me dry.

Our preparations for breakfast roused a rumpled bathrobe-wrapped Holly, who jokingly slumped into a kitchen chair like a disgruntled diner patron.

“How are my two love birds?” she said, perking up after a few sips of coffee. Everett had learned a few tips from his family housekeeper, and presented each of us with plates of scrambled eggs and buttered toast.

Holly’s conversation, more of a monologue, as Everett had predicted, revolved around her version of her year spent living in Paris. We listened attentively, and at one point, Everett casually placed his hand over my own.

I told them of my shared hobby of gardening with my mother, something I’d enjoyed even as a child. Around the time she started working, as her interest waned, mine had continued beyond our yard.

Perhaps the actual passion had been planted on a summer weekend my parents and I spent at Twin Lakes Park. Although tiny by comparison to my possible summer job, while only a few miles northwest of Greensburg, Twin Lakes was magical to my boyhood eyes.