The First Male (5 page)

Now, it was back.

His body tightened.

Don't be afraid
.

Something was hissing his name, and now it seemed as if someone was speaking to him inside his head. Tomorrow, he'd take Brooke's advice and see that doctor, although, at this point, he didn't think he needed a regular one.

He needed a shrink.

C
HAPTER
3

S
imon awoke the next morning to find an empty bed. Brooke, no doubt, had quietly slipped out in the early morning hours to make her eight o'clock class. When she stayed over the night before an early class, she was usually careful to not wake Simon on her way out. He always appreciated her thoughtfulness, but that was her nature. Caring. Considerate. Kind. In his whole life, Simon had never been doted over the way Brooke did.

Simon stretched and yawned, then rolled over and pulled Brooke's pillow to his nose, drawing her enticing scent fully into his nostrils. Upon the first inhalation, his half-engorged organ stiffened into a powerful erection, which he simply could not ignore. Memories of her firm breasts and sweet nipples replayed in his head. He thought about how good it had been only hours ago. Images of her naked flesh flashed before his eyes. Her skin. Her shapely thighs. The arch of her back. Her lips. He closed his eyes and remembered the sweet taste between her thighs. She had a power over him that weakened him in a way no other woman had, and Simon was no stranger to sex. He first lost his virginity at the tender age of twelve and had led a very active sex life since then. He wasn't yet twenty-one, but he'd had so many sexual partners that he'd lost count; but Brooke was different from the others. She was not just a notch on his bedpost. Something about her put her well above the rest. Sure, she got on his nerves
and sometimes talked too much, but their sexual chemistry couldn't be denied. The more he thought about her and the more he smelled her scent, the more turned on he became. Over the last few days his lust, alongside his anger, had become insatiable, with him masturbating three or four times a day to carry him over until Brooke was within his reach. It was like puberty all over again, only worse. He could hardly focus on anything other than being with her. As he thought about her, his manhood throbbed painfully with passion. A fire swelled within him that had to be quenched. His hand was a poor substitute for her body, but it would have to suffice. He pumped some lotion into his hand from the bottle on the nightstand, closed his eyes, wrapped his hand around it, and stroked frantically, to completion.

After he finished, he lay in bed and contemplated his next move. Technically, he had a chemistry class at noon, but he had no intention of going. In fact, he hadn't attended any class in weeks. At this point he needed to drop out, but he hadn't bothered to do so yet.
Fuck the university and its rules
, he'd said to Brooke when she had suggested he officially withdraw and take his final classes next semester. All of his classes bored him to tears. Listening to Mr. Long ramble on about organic and polymer synthesis simply didn't interest him. The elementary methods employed to teach the class only annoyed Simon and he often butted heads with the professor, particularly when the instructor misspoke and Simon corrected him in front of the class. He knew far more about the subject than his instructor, who had a Ph.D.

Simon exhaled and looked around the room. Brilliant sunlight, piercing through the Venetian blinds, cut horizontal swathes across the space, dividing the room into sections. The light forced him to squint. The sun seemed brighter than usual; in fact, he was certain that he could feel the beginnings of a headache coming
on—again—and he was sure it was induced by the light. By the angle of the sun in the sky, he knew that it was not yet ten in the morning. He wanted to get up and go over to the window to close the blinds, but he wasn't ready to stir yet; that would require far too much energy and the bed was far too comfortable.

Instead of getting up, he buried his face in Brooke's pillow again. After a few moments of total darkness, he reached over to the nightstand and grabbed the remote control. He aimed it at the television set and waited for voices to fill the empty space in the room. The incessant chatter of the local news team filled the room with sound. Simon could only tolerate silence for so long; silence gave him too much time to think, to ponder things better left alone. Sometimes, when it was really quiet and he was really still, he felt connected to the world in a way that he could never articulate. It was as if he knew the inner workings of the universe and was a part of it. Even as a child, it unnerved him and he never spoke of it. To anyone.

He noticed a note on the nightstand and reached over and picked it up. It was from Brooke.

Baby, you have a doctor's appointment today. Please go. Don't let me down. I want to know that you're okay
.

Dr. Gregor Myles

1118 Canal Street

Appointment: at 3:30

“Fuck,” he said to himself. He looked at the note in his hand and tried to suppress his growing smile with annoyance, but he couldn't. She knew how to take care of him. He thought about Brooke's sneaky ways. He knew how her mind worked; she probably had made this appointment for him days ago in the hopes that she'd break him down and get him to agree to go. She loved him
and was only looking out for him, but the last thing he wanted to do was spend hours waiting at some doctor's office for some over-paid professional with a God complex who, when they finally saw him, would probably tell him to take two aspirin and get some rest. Simon knew that if he didn't go today Brooke would nag and nag and nag him until he finally caved in; or, she'd skip class one day and take him to the doctor's office herself and that was the last thing he wanted her to do. He didn't want her tagging along, and he didn't want to fight about it; he didn't have the energy. He'd go see the doctor just to appease her.

Besides, he had bigger things to worry about than some doctor's appointment. His body was going through some very odd changes that he didn't understand; changes that didn't feel medical, or natural. Everything around him seemed to be changing all of a sudden. Colors glowed with a brightness he had never seen before; his hearing sometimes was so acute that he could clearly hear conversations across a crowded room that should have been impossible for his human ear, like the conversation with Brooke and her sorority sisters. Twice already, when he was sitting alone watching television, he started sweating profusely and his heart pounded in his chest as if he had just completed several back-to-back sprints.

His body would sometime tingle, like he was being pricked with tiny needles, right before something strange occurred. The other night at work when he was wiping down tables in the dining room his skin started to feel prickly, like with electricity. He looked at his forearms and the hairs on his arms were literally standing on end. Then, the power in the building flickered and the lights in the ceiling closest to him exploded, sending glass raining to the floor. Then, the power on the whole block went out, casting the entire neighborhood in darkness. He remembered
feeling a surge of energy so great that he felt like he could power the electrical grid himself.

The oddities he was experiencing in his body probably warranted a doctor's visit, but he didn't want to go. A part of him thought he should see a doctor, but he was so resistant to the idea. He had painful memories of doctors at free clinics poking and prodding him like prized cattle as a child. He had never been sick, but they wanted to inject him with all sorts of drugs that were mandated by law, so they told him. Those experiences never sat well with him.

Maybe this appointment won't be so bad
, he thought, if for no other reason than to hear the doctor tell him he was okay. But, what would he tell him when he arrived? That light hurt his eyes so much that it gave him a headache? That he sweated a lot while at rest? Or, that he had really, really good hearing? Or should he tell them that he was having some really fucked-up dreams about snakes and shadows? Was that even relevant to his physical maladies?

Simon exhaled, more out of frustration than anything else. He looked at Brooke's note again. Her penmanship was exquisite, each letter given proper time and attention to develop as she wrote, especially in an age where handwriting was becoming obsolete. Her concern for him made him feel special and desired, feelings that had been foreign to him for most of his life. She was the only person in years that he believed really and truly cared about what happened to him; a small part of him believed that she always had his best interest at heart, but another part thought maybe she was pretending, in the ways that all the others had. The foster families. The fake girlfriends. He had been deceived by love, or the thought of it, so many times that his heart had closed.

When it came to that four letter word, he couldn't tell the difference between fiction and truth; even with Brooke he couldn't be entirely sure what she felt. He had been burned far too many
times to trust without suspicion; but, in spite of his trepidation, he allowed himself to go emotionally farther with her than he had with anyone. Sometimes when he thought he had gone too far, he'd pull back instinctively. He'd start arguments to push her away and sometimes not call her for days, always reminding her through his actions that her position within in heart was temporary, fleeting at best. Yet, she held onto him. She held onto him tightly, in spite of offers from more suitable Southern sons whose fathers bore the riches of their fathers before them.

Her family couldn't stand him and he knew her friends didn't like him, either. He wasn't from the upper echelon of southern society. Her friends found him attractive, maybe even dangerous, and he was certain they all wanted to fuck him, especially after Brooke's conversation with them last night, but they didn't like him. They couldn't; it wouldn't be proper. Still, he saw the way they secretly cut their eyes at him when they didn't think anyone would notice; disdainful looks ripe with lust. At parties, Brooke talked him up—not in a condescending way—letting her aristocratic friends know that he was brilliant (probably an understatement) and one day, in spite of his unfortunate heritage, he'd conquer the world as the next Bill Gates, Warren Buffett or Mark Zuckerberg.

Simon never understood her world. High society was a mystery to him. Formal. Pretentious. Status determined by bloodline. He'd never fit into her well-bred world, full of cotillions and society parties, nor would he ever try. He made it clear that if they had any hope of surviving as a couple, she'd have to come down to his level. He thought that would push her away, but his plan didn't work. She met him on his level and did so without hesitation, spending many nights in his low-rent apartment when she could have been sleeping in the luxury of her canopy bed inside her sorority house, a former plantation house.

They were such an unlikely couple: the ambitious daughter of a prominent New Orleans surgeon whose life had been handed to her on a silver platter, and the mixed-up, multiracial orphan who had yet to discover the value of his worth or his path in the world. When they first met, volunteering at Habitat for Humanity and building houses for the impoverished, he had to have her. He was drawn to her in a way he couldn't explain. She was everything he was not. She was the perfect Southern belle. Beautiful. Poised. She was so unlike the fast and loose women whose beds he had stained on many a night. He wanted to possess her, if even for a short time, all the while knowing that whatever they were to share together would have an expiration date. He wasn't good enough for her and probably never would be. He was too unstable to ever offer her a lifetime of security; he could only give her this momentary pleasure. He knew that if she stayed with him for too long that he'd eventually assassinate the woman she was intended to be and she'd become something else. Bitter. Broken. Full of resentment. Angry at what she had sacrificed to be with him. Even knowing all this didn't make him want to leave her any time soon. He simply wasn't ready to let her go. They had some time left, he hoped. In the comfort of her arms she offered him something he had never experienced before—a place to be that was rightly his. He wasn't ready to let that go. He couldn't let it go; especially now.