The Park at Sunrise (2 page)

From the country club, we'd rushed over to a backyard BBQ at Jason's parents' house, where we could be as openly affectionate with each other as we liked. A sense of impending disaster hung in the air, a something-wicked-this-way-comes aura that compelled us to cling together. We accepted congratulations, drank icy cold beers, and ate hot dogs and chili with Jason's parents and their friends before escaping to the studio above the garage.

The studio had been first our playroom, then our clubhouse, then a studio when Jason began to show an interest in art. Always, it had been our preferred hangout. Jason's studio had been the scene of many an evening of debauchery and mayhem. We'd gotten drunk for the first time there, we'd smoked pot for the first time there, and we'd had sex for the first time there. A ratty old futon and a table next to the easel were the only furnishings. A CD player sat on the floor nearby, and the scent of oil paint and turpentine had seeped into the wood.

Graduation day, we'd fallen together on that futon and held each other close for long moments. We exchanged kisses and caresses, whispers of reassurance and love. In this place we could pretend that our world wasn't changing more rapidly than we'd prepared for. In this place, we could just be...three men in love.

I leaned against the door and watched as my friends, my lovers, hastily shed clothing and set the scene. Jason had Tom Petty pouring from the CD player in no time. I feasted my eyes on smooth white skin, taut, firmly muscled bodies, and hard, throbbing cocks as I slipped out of my own Dockers and dress shirt.

As always when we were close, we couldn't keep our hands to ourselves. I sighed in pleasure. I lay back on the futon in the corner, salvaged from Jason's mom's renovation of the guest room years earlier, and watched Jason and Paul kiss hungrily.

Cheeks flushed and eyes sparkling, they approached me, intent on satisfaction. One hot, wet mouth latched on to a nipple, and the other covered mine. I reveled in the flavor of Paul's mouth as Jason sucked me sweetly, tenderly. I nudged him away.

"All of us, at the same time," I whispered.

A bit of shuffling and rearranging and Jason was on his knees beside the bed, Paul behind him. While Jason tormented me, severely testing my willpower with the seductive heat of his mouth, Paul prepped him for entry.

Jason moaned in gratification as Paul's thick cock slid slowly into his waiting body. Paul paused and we all waited, poised on the edge of orgasm, for Jason to adjust to the invasion. At last his brow smoothed, and his lips parted on a sigh of pleasure. He
opened his mouth wide to take my cock to the root, and Paul thrust carefully, his face intent, eyes luminous as they met mine. We leaned forward to kiss over Jason, who arched his neck and twisted his head to get a part of the kiss.

Kisses were forgotten as the end fast approached, and Jason reached for his own cock, to have his hand batted away by Paul, who stroked him furiously, matching his rhythm.

Jason pulled away from my cock when orgasm overcame him, and I stared enraptured as ecstasy washed over his features. Beautiful, he was so fucking beautiful when he came. My own tribute to love spurted, landing in slick arcs across his face, lips, and chin. Paul cried out and slumped forward as he too found satisfaction. We lay in replete aftermath, words of love, soft chuckles, and tender jibes passing for conversation.

The demands of the world couldn't be held back for long, and no sooner had we made ourselves decent than it was time to head off for the next event.

The round of parties and drinking and celebration had lasted throughout the night, and every minute that passed, we became as a unit more desperate to break away. Our time together was precious now, because the next day would bring a big change. Bigger, perhaps, than we had dreamed.

In all our dreamy talks and confidences, reality had never played a part. I never realized how my heart would ache at the idea of being separated from Jason and Paul. I had only considered how wonderful California would be with the beaches, the missions, the cities, and the museums. The job I'd been offered had seemed like a dream come true. A place that wasn't always ass-freezing cold? Summers free, and long holidays? Teaching in California had a great deal of appeal. I tried to convince the others to leave with me,
but Paul had a job offer in New York City, and Jason wanted to paint in the mountains. His parents would allow him to stay at home and focus on his art, and he wouldn't even need to work.

So this was it. May twenty-six, two thousand,
sunrise in the park. The final sunrise for a year.

We sat together, arms wrapped about each other, staring out across the still water of the pond, focusing on the deep
blues giving way to intense reds and oranges, unspeaking. There were no more words to say. This was goodbye. Two of us had flights out of town that afternoon, and one of us had pictures to paint.

"You're coming back, right?" Jason asked.

I turned and reached across Paul, in the middle, to tug on one of Jason's dreadlocks, twining it about my fingers. As I shifted on the bench, my shoulder brushed Paul and sent him swaying as well. His hand landed on Jason's knee as he, too, turned.

"Babe," I remember saying with foolish confidence. "Nothing could keep me away!"

"May twenty-six, two thousand one," Paul's mellow, cultured voice inserted. "We'll meet here at sunrise and see how the year has gone." Paul grabbed our hands, withdrew a pen from his pocket—ever the closet poet, our Paul—and he wrote on the backs of our hands.

"So you won't forget." He drew both newly inked hands to his mouth and pressed a kiss to each inner palm, and my skin tingled in response, as always.

Jason stared at his hand and at mine, then grabbed Paul's hand and the pen. He carefully copied Paul's 5/26/01 sunrise comment and added something I couldn't quite read beneath it. Then he grabbed my hand, and as I watched, he added the same notation to mine. A tiny series of three hearts overlapped under the message.

Not to be outdone, I grabbed the pen and scrawled an infinity symbol below each message, then held out my hand to Jason. "Do mine too." He complied, tracing the symbol below the hearts.

Paul took out his cell phone, and we lay our hands in his lap. He snapped a quick shot, and we sighed in relief. A pact had been made.

This was no end. It was a beginning, and we would still be together.

"Hey, mister."

A stranger's voice jolted me from my reverie. How long had I been sitting here in the falling snow? Long enough. The sunrise had ended and the snow was sticking. My buttocks were a bit sore from their lengthy perch on the bench slat, and now that I was thinking again, the cold was unbearable.

"You need help, man?"

I glanced at the kid and attempted a smile as I brushed the tears from my cheeks. He couldn't have been more than twenty, probably a student on his way back to the dorm or something. How embarrassing to be caught like this. Had I really been sitting here in a public park, mindlessly crying for a past I could never recapture?

"No, I'm okay." My voice was rusty and my throat scratchy. Nodding dubiously, the kid strolled away, heavy boots leaving clear prints in the freshly fallen snow.

I extracted my cell phone from my pocket and scrolled through the photos I had stored there. It showed the kids in my calc class clowning around at a competition last month. We'd placed second. The school chess team at a tournament in Anaheim, smiling as they stood around a first place trophy the size of a candy bar. The field trip to the Getty Museum. I stopped thinking about the pictures. The kids were awesome. I fell a little in love with every class I taught at the St. Anselm Academy for the Sciences and Mathematics, but inevitably classes graduate and move on. The kids might come back and visit, you might hear from them again, or you might not.

The picture I was searching for was way at the back of the list. I'd been transferring it religiously from phone to phone for ten years, though I never clicked it open to look at it anymore.

There it was. Hesitant, I closed my eyes and opened the file. The pain in my heart was dulled. Reliving the memories here this morning made it more bearable. For one hundred and eighty-three days this picture had been my lifeline. I'd looked at it first thing every morning and last thing every night. This picture had been the screen saver on every electronic device I owned, until November thirty, two thousand. I'd thought I couldn't bear to see it again.

We'd written the notes on the back of our hands so we wouldn't forget. So we'd remember that however far apart we were, at heart we were together, for infinity. I'd forgotten that.

I forced my eyes open and peered down at the image.

Now, that note changed everything I'd known for the last nine years.

I leaped from the bench, cursing as my feet skidded on the icy snow that lay on the sidewalk. Damn California clothes. I'd have to shop. My brain was spinning. I needed a rental car. I needed a newspaper. I needed to get my ass to Jason's parents' house.

By the time I'd walked around the corner to where I remembered the rental car place used to be, my feet were damn near frozen, and my hair was soaking wet. I kicked myself for shoving only my driver's license and debit card into my back pocket before leaving for LAX. What the hell was I thinking? A driver's license and a debit card. Not even a credit card. Odds were I'd be jogging or hitchhiking out to Jason's parents' house. To top it all off, I hadn't even grabbed my cell phone charger. Great. My parents would be so proud. Their only son, the one with the PhD in education and the MS in mathematics, severely lacked common fucking sense.

Fortunately for me, the guy behind the counter at the rental place remembered me from some chess tournament that we'd both played in back in college. Roderick "Call me Roddy" Simpson was happy enough to let his old buddy Morgan rent a car with just an ID from out of state and a debit card, if I promised to "meet" him for a game of chess before I left for home.

I climbed into the nondescript little Ford Focus and drove out of the lot without looking back. I didn't bother telling Roddy I might not be heading home, and even if I was, I wouldn't be meeting him for anything. The only person I wanted to meet was Jason. I had a promise to keep, one that I hadn't thought of for years but couldn't get out of my head now. I should have paid more attention to that gallery invitation. When I found it in my inbox along with the morass of catalogs and other crap that teachers' boxes are inundated with, I almost threw it away without opening it. Instead I opened it, skimmed it, and shoved it to the back of my desk drawer. Every so often it caught my eye, and I thought about Jason briefly before slamming the drawer shut.

The steering wheel was painfully cold on my hands and I gripped it cautiously as I turned to head out of town. If ice hadn’t coated the roads, I'd have taken the chance of steering with my knees. As it was, I blew frantically on my hands and cranked the heat up as high as I could. If this were two thousand one, I would have said that Jason would forgive me in a minute, and we'd be on sure footing before I'd gotten the words of apology and love out of my mouth, but how much did I still know this man? He'd proven he still knew me, but ten years? People changed, didn't they? If he loved me still and was willing to forgive me, hell
—he knew how to find me in California, didn't he? The gallery invite proved that. So, if he really had wanted me in all these years, wouldn't he have just flown out and found me? I told myself that, but I kept hearing my own voice in my head, in a stupid loop, "Babe, nothing could keep me away!"

Fucking Colorado cold. How could I have forgotten this? I should have let the car warm up at least fifteen minutes before I left the car lot. Nervous and tense, now I crept along Highway Twenty-Four, striving to remember how to drive in snow and ice, peering through the windshield at the road through the falling snow. My mind wouldn't leave the subject of Jason. I had to see him, to talk to him. No matter how much he still appeared the same, how could Jason have lived through these last nine years unchanged on the inside? I figured it served me right if he kicked my ass to the curb and sent me back to LA without delay, but I had to make the effort. His heart could warm this cold that had been seeping inside me for the last nine years. I'd been stupid not to recognize it then.

The hurt in those green eyes, eyes that customarily sparkled with love and laughter, had caused a pain I had never wanted to experience again.

It was worse by far than the day I got the phone call from Paul's aunt telling me about his death in a New York City subway mugging. Disbelief didn't cover how I felt then. Betrayed. Devastated. Proud. I think I laughed. In the middle of illustrating graphing inequalities to a class of bewildered freshmen, a day after hearing the news, I laughed. Because it was so fucking typical that Paul would involve himself in something like that. The white knight of the NYC subway system
—what business did he have interfering with that mugging, rescuing that kid? He was supposed to be in NYC working, putting in time till he could come back to me and Jason, and we could all figure out a way to be together. Then again, if he'd been the type of man to turn his back on someone in need of aid, he wouldn't have been the man I loved, would he?

The car hit a patch of ice and skidded into the intersection. My heart flipped over, and the entire world slowed down. The light was red. For all I knew, I was sliding in a three-sixty degree circle into oncoming traffic, but all I could do was turn gently into the skid and pray that when the car came to a stop, it wouldn't be due to an impact. I knew not to slam on the brakes. I knew to go with the skid and not fight it. I just didn't have a clue what surrounded me. Visibility sucked, and so did the fact that now, when it might be too late to tell Jason, I realized that I still not just loved him, but needed him to love me too.