by Rachel Kane
I touched his bandage, so clean and white compared to the torn t-shirts we’d been using before. “I’ll try to remember not to throw you around,” I said.
He took my hand, pulling it to his lips, kissing my fingers.
“Now that you’re here,” he said, “I have something really dreadful to ask you. You’re probably going to hate me afterward.”
20
Eli
My thoughts were rushing, which was either the sheer excitement of Jake finally being here in my home…or maybe brain damage. Either way, I had this insane energy, this urge to bring him all my belongings, all my thoughts, all my everything, like I had to display my entire life to him in the next thirty seconds.
You’re happy. That’s what this is. He’s here, and you’re happy, and you want to show it all to him.
I don’t know when I decided to share my book with him. I hadn’t thought about it consciously, at all. If I had, I would’ve argued with myself. That’s ridiculous, you don’t show a new boyfriend—if that’s what he is—your book right out of the gate! It’s socially awkward, especially because he knows the book failed on so many levels. Let him sit here and get comfortable with the fact that you’re a grown man who still collects action figures, because you know some people have a problem with that.
But there was the idea, as I was sitting next to him on the couch, and I couldn’t get rid of it. Of all the things we could do together right now, ordering food or watching a movie or kissing or adjourning back to the bedroom, this is the option that came to mind?
You know what, it has been a hard fucking day, and you need to stop second-guessing yourself.
“Now that you’re here,” I said, “I have something really dreadful to ask you. You’re probably going to hate me afterward.”
He looked appropriately skeptical. “After what we’ve been through, I’m probably not going to hate you afterward. Unless you’re going to suggest spinach on the pizza. In which case, it’s over between us.”
I gave him a little kiss then, and got up from the couch.
Over near the TV there was a shelf that was mostly other people’s books, but there were five paperbacks, all alike. All copies of my book. Pieced Together: A Novel By Eli R. Groom. I pulled one out and touched the cover.
Jake had risen from the couch and joined me. “Is that your book?”
“Yeah. The biggest failure of my life, if you don’t count all the stuff I’ve gotten wrong in the past 72 hours.”
He took it from me and held it in his hand. “A real live book. I never knew anyone who wrote one before. When I was little, I didn’t understand that people still wrote them. My mom was always talking about these guys who’d died hundreds of years ago, and I thought maybe everyone had stopped writing, it was something we’d given up. I know better now, but it’s still strange to stand here holding this, knowing you wrote it. Do you want me to read it?”
Yes oh god yes, read it and tell me it’s good, tell me it’s the best book you’ve ever read, tell me I didn’t waste a year of my life writing it.
“I mean, if you wanted to. I was really just giving you a copy of it. A little gift.”
He flipped it open to the first chapter. “At first they were alone in numbers uncountable, a billion, a trillion, they couldn’t possibly know—”
“Don’t read it aloud!” I shrieked, and we both laughed.
He got a handful of my shirt and pulled me close. He kissed me with a sweetness and care that made me tremble. “You know you want me to,” he whispered. “I know you. You don’t have to lie about it.”
I looked away. “It’d be nice if someone liked it.”
“I like you,” he said, with that simplicity and plainness I loved in him.
“Do you?”
Somehow I was in his arms. Somehow we were on the couch. I let myself go. I didn’t ask any questions. I just accepted it. He liked me. He wanted to be here, wanted to spend time with me, and I didn’t have to apologize for everything about me.
I was on top of him, kissing him, trying to tell him without words how grateful I was to just be liked, to have it be that uncomplicated.
“I missed you.” I managed to say it in between kisses. “I kept wishing you were with me, all day. Can you stay the night?”
He didn’t hesitate. “I can stay.”
I pulled him into my room.
Sometimes after you’re gone for a while and you come back home, you’re struck with a sense of strangeness. Everything is familiar to you, everything has that sense of home to it, but it’s also all a little different than you remembered it. Didn’t I make the bed? Was the table right there, or was it an inch to the left?
That’s how it felt when I pushed Jake onto the bed. My bed, and yet a bed that felt a little odd to me, because it wasn’t our cot in the cabin, it wasn’t the bank of the stream. It was like being in a strange new place.
I could not have told him how much I needed him. It would have ruined the moment, maybe, to describe it to him. To tell him how awful the day had gone without him, how I’d wished he could’ve been by my side the whole time, how much I’d needed him.
There’s a moment when you realize you’ve needed someone all your life, you just didn’t know who you needed until you met them. A moment when everything makes sense.
He was reaching up, unbuttoning my shirt, pushing it off me. His fingers played down my chest, thumbs over my hard nipples. I took his hand and put it on my crotch, so he’d see how hard he was making me. He squeezed my cock. He knew. He knew the effect he had on me, and when he ground his hips against me, I knew I was having the same effect on him.
There was a frantic energy between us then, as though we hadn’t seen each other in ages, as though these clothes were the last barrier keeping us from being together. Shirts and jeans and boxers fell to the floor.
I was kissing him again, his arms around me, our cocks pressed against each other. His skin was so hot. Now he was rolling me, now he was on top of me, still kissing. He reached down and grabbed our cocks, jacking them slowly together in one hand, hardness touching hardness.
“Do you—”
I didn’t let him finish. I waved at the nightstand, and he reached over and opened the drawer. His face lit up when he saw the box of condoms, the bottle of lube.
He wanted to fuck me. I could feel his hunger like waves of heat coming off of him. He’d wanted to, back in the woods, but I’d told him no then, out of fear. Yes, fear of discomfort without all my civilized accessories…but fear of the closeness, as well. Fear that the moment he penetrated me, something would change between us, something would become so real I couldn’t stand it anymore.
At some point fear had turned into hope. I wanted him so badly. Wanted him inside me as much as he wanted to be inside.
There were no preliminaries. We didn’t drag things out. He was hard, he was ready, and sheathing him was a matter of moments. Then he was between my legs.
I gasped at the feeling of his lube-chilled cock head touching my ass. I reached down to guide him, gasped again as he pressed his head into me.
He stared down at me with a look of wonder on his face.
It was something he had wanted his entire life, and I was giving it to him. He hadn’t even known he wanted it, hadn’t been able to express it, to ask for it, and I wondered what that had done to him, how it had hurt him not to get what he needed so badly. Here I am, I thought, I have been waiting for you for so long.
He slid further in. My cock throbbed in response. I wanted to touch it, to wrap my fingers around myself and rub my shaft as he fucked me, but there was no room for my hand between us. As he pressed further in, my cock was squeezed between us, and that was enough for me, our bodies together.
Jake was a slow and gentle lover, a gentleness I had not expected from a powerful man like this. I would have understood if he had pounded me athletically, shoving himself in, giving me no mercy. I would’ve liked that.
But…I liked this
even more. The feeling of him pulling almost all the way out, an excruciating slowness that let me feel each and every inch of him, then the languid return.
God, I could have done this forever with him. He could have taken hours with me like that, this delicacy that threatened to drive me to the brink faster than a pounding would have.
He knew it, too. I could tell by the look on his face that he knew what he was doing to me, driving me crazy with his delicate hardness. His smile was wicked and evil and I hated it and I loved it. I wanted to tell him, but I was so full of him that all my words were pressed out of me, so full of his need and my need and our need and—
My cock had given me no warning. One minute it was loving being clasped between us; the next, my balls pulsed and I was coming, spilling my seed on my belly, on his, gasping and writhing beneath him, my ass tightening with every pulse of my wordless, breathless climax.
In the face of my orgasm, he could no longer go slowly. His eyes were wild, as though he’d been driven mad by the things he was doing to me, the agonizing pleasure he was putting me through, and now his thrusts grew faster, now he was just fucking me, and he groaned loud and long with one last thrust deep inside me. I grabbed him, let him collapse on me, as we tangled together in our climaxes.
“I love you,” he whispered. “I know it’s too soon to say that, I know it’s ridiculous, I know—”
I kissed him. “I love you too. I do. It’s a mistake and it’s too fast and it’s wrong and I love you.”
We ended up ordering a pizza after all. Half pepperoni and sausage, half spinach and pineapple. He made jokes about my half, I told him it was awfully symbolic to have his toppings. “You must really like a lot of meat in your mouth.”
I don’t remember what we watched. The TV was on, but neither of us was paying attention to it. All we had eyes for was each other.
I had everything I ever wanted, right here with me.
You know it’s not going to last. You know it’s going to crash and burn. You know you’re not good enough for him. You know you know you know—
But he had a way of silencing my crazy thoughts. His quiet conversation, his touches, the way we ended up making love on the couch, then the floor, then somehow back in bed with a trip to the shower in between, it was like we both knew all the objections, and knew if we just loved each other hard enough, the objections would give in, they’d cease.
I wish it were that easy.
21
Jacob
“I tried calling you last night,” said Marcia. “I got worried when you didn’t pick up. Is everything okay?”
Being back at work was pretty strange. Everyone had heard about the crash by now, and there had been a lot of pats on the back, glad you made it, remind me not to fly with you any time soon. When I’d gotten on the forklift to start moving pallets, my boss had come by and asked if I was really sure I was ready to work.
“You didn’t ask me that when I broke my toe that time.”
“Hell, boy, falling out of the sky is a little rougher than breaking your damn baby toe. You sure you’re all right? I don’t want you re-injuring something and filing a damn worker’s comp claim on me.” He was smiling when he said it, though, so I knew he was just pulling my chain.
“I’ll be fine, Dale.”
“You come off that thing if you need to,” he said, before turning away to yell at the guys in Receiving.
“Everything’s fine,” I told Marcia. I was on my lunch break, but I didn’t have any appetite.
Honestly, everything wasn’t quite fine. I was miles away from Eli, I was exhausted after the night we’d spent together, and all I wanted to do was go back and see him, instead of sit here yawning at work and hoping I didn’t knock anything over with the forklift.
“Pop called me,” she said. “He asked me if I knew where you were.”
“I told him I was going out.”
“Yeah, but you didn’t say where, and you didn’t say when you’d be back.”
I sighed into the phone. “That man hasn’t kept tabs on me since he kicked me out of the house when I was sixteen. Why’s he asking all these questions now?”
“Come on, Jake, you know why. He’s worried about you. He’s not going to say it. Not to you. But he’s not the only one. You can’t just disappear like that, not after going missing up on the mountain. You wouldn’t pick up your phone, and all I could think was, what if you’d been injured and didn’t realize it, what if the doctors missed something—”
I understood her point, and it wasn’t fair that it made me mad…but it did.
I didn’t want to tell anybody where I’d been, because what was happening between me and Eli was nobody’s business but ours.
Or maybe you’re just scared, because you know eventually you’ll have to admit that you’re seeing a guy. You managed not to really talk to Marcia about it when you broke up. But if she finds out you’re with Eli, then all that uncomfortable shit is going to come back up. And god only knows how Pop would take it.
Who was I kidding? I knew exactly how Pop would take it.
* * *
“You’ve got men back in town waiting for you,” Pop said to the drug runner. His voice was gravelly and slow, like he was the most reasonable man in the world. Not a lick of fear. “What are they going to think, when I come back with an empty plane?”
That’s when the man pressed the gun against Pop’s head. The gun seemed so big, or maybe it was just that I was so small back then, clutching the handle, trying to pull myself away from that awful sight. Wishing I’d never come with Pop. Wishing I could somehow call Mama and tell her to come get me.
“Who says you’re coming back?” asked the man. His voice so confident and evil, so convinced he had the upper hand.
But he was too confident in the safety his gun provided. Too confident to belt himself into his seat. Leaning forward like this, Pop knew he wasn’t buckled in.
When the plane dropped, it felt like my stomach dropped too. I gripped my seat with one hand, the handle in the other, and tried not to scream.
The man had no such compunction. Startled, he yelled as he was thrust back in his seat, the plane hurtling towards the ground.
Before the man could get his bearings, Pop made the plane swoop back upwards, his teeth gritted, the plane protesting all around us, not made for this kind of maneuvering. I understood what he was doing, but at the same time, understood how dangerous it was. He could tear the plane apart doing this.
Pop didn’t care. A man had threatened him, had threatened his son, and now he was going to pay.
When the man in the back hit his head, he slumped for a moment and the gun clattered out of his hand. We dove again, and the gun slid forward.
“Grab it,” said Pop.
I was terrified. I didn’t want to touch it. It would be like picking up a rattler, no, worse than that, at least a rattler was afraid of people. The gun feared no one.
“I don’t want to,” I said to him fearfully.
“Pick up the damn gun before he gets it back!” shouted Pop, and the sound of his voice wasn’t just fury, but fear. I realized he was as scared as I was. Dutifully I picked the gun up.
Back there the man sat, trying to get his belt on, blood dripping from a cut on his head.
“Let me tell you what’s going to happen,” Pop said to him. “We’re going to set down exactly as planned. You’re going to take your fucking drugs out of my plane, and you and your fucking friends are never going to call me again. I’m never going to see you, I’m never going to hear from you. You find someone else to cart your shit around. I’m done. Do you understand me?”
“You can’t fuck with me,” said the man in the back. “Do you know who I am?”
“Motherfucker,” said Pop, “you will not make it off this plane if you don’t agree with me right now.”
“What are you going to do, throw me out?” His laugh was cruel. “Gonna shoot me?”
Pop aimed the plane for
a stand of trees below us. The engine cried out as he throttled up, aiming straight for the tops of the pines.
There was almost no time left when the man said, “Shit, all right, damn! You crazy piece of shit! It’s over with. Just get me to the damn airport.”
We’d driven back home that night, a wad of hundred dollar bills and the unloaded gun both tucked neatly into a canvas bag Pop kept behind the truck seat.
He hadn’t said much on the way home, and I couldn’t say anything either.
When you’re little, you don’t have the words to express something like, I’m proud of you but at the same time you scare the shit out of me.
So I just sat there in silence. Eventually he said, “You can’t tell your mama about this.”
I looked over at him. I wanted to tell her. I was dying to tell her everything that happened, and to have her stroke my hair and tell me it was going to be okay. He was cutting me off from my one source of comfort in all the world.
“It’d kill her,” he said. “She wouldn’t understand. I’d tell her I wasn’t going to do it anymore, but she wouldn’t believe me. It’d just get us in too much fucking trouble. So promise me, boy. Promise me you won’t tell her.”
I remembered the way my body had been pulled in the plane. The way it had felt like the world around me had come unglued, the force of gravity whirling around me, unsure which part of me to pull on next.
That was like my head, pulled in so many different directions.
“I promise,” I said quietly.
“Promise you won’t tell her?”
“Promise,” I said.
And I never did tell. It’d kill her, he had said to me. She wouldn’t understand.
