by Alice Archer
I closed the door of the DeVille and leaned against it. “Aza was in high school when he came to live with me and my dad to study painting.” I paused and glanced at Grant. “Clementine told you about him?”
Grant nodded.
“What Clem doesn’t know, what… no one knows, is that Aza… called me. That day.”
“Oof,” Grant said, like my statement had punched him in the stomach. He tilted sideways toward me until our shoulders touched. I didn’t move away.
“Aza didn’t say anything on the call that alarmed me. He’d sounded… happy. Told me about galleries he’d applied to since we’d spoken a few days before. We laughed about some of the good times we’d had together. At the end of the call he… thanked me.”
Grant unfolded his arms. His hand, warm and alive, wrapped around my hand between us.
I didn’t want to expose more of myself to Grant, but the weight of Aza’s last call made my head feel so heavy. “I’d known Aza all his life. We’d lived together. I thought I knew him. I thought…”
Grant remained calm and didn’t speak, just like he’d done with the tweens. He let me be. It felt… different. Dad would have nudged, caught my eye, tried to make me laugh, fixed me something extravagant to eat, invited people over, filled the house with cheer.
I liked what Grant did better. Grant let my pain be about me. Dad, I realized, had made my pain about him, about his ability to distract me from pain.
“I pieced together the timing,” I told Grant. “Aza must have called me from a bus stop on his way to the shore. He called me and then… walked into the ocean. Maybe that’s why he was so happy on the call.” I let go of Grant’s hand and slid to a crouch at the thought. “He’d already decided to do it.”
“He called to tell you goodbye,” Grant said.
I nodded. “He didn’t say that word.”
“Maybe he didn’t want you to worry.”
I wished Grant would put his hand on my head. I remembered how Kai had leaned into Grant’s legs at the hedge and in the toolshed. I let gravity take me, pressed the side of my face against Grant’s thigh. When he didn’t move his hand, I picked it up for him and set it on my head.
He left his hand there, grounded me, stood beside me, a sentry on lookout, while I let out a long breath and removed Aza from the box. With the earth beneath me and Grant’s patience above, I took a long look, felt my body absorb Aza’s story and make it mine, a story of my own, one I might be able to forgive myself for.
After a while, Grant moved his fingers to caress my hair, a swipe of sandpaper to smooth the jagged edges of my new story.
When I tilted my head up to look at him, Grant squatted and put his palm on my cheek. “Aza must have loved you very much.”
If they think I’m awake, my dad and my mother will stop talking the way they are, so I act asleep with my whole body, like Dad taught me. I play the role of a noodle in hot water on the stove and go slowly limp. I don’t move any part of me except to breathe, and I breathe like The Eagle when he sleeps on the couch in the great room in the afternoon—long and slow.
Coyote leaned me forward. I touched Grant’s lips with mine.
Before I could get a taste of his tongue, Grant pushed me away and stood.
They stop talking, even though I’m a noodle. And then there’s so much silence in the car it’s hard to keep pushing sleep away.
“Are you certain he’s asleep? It won’t do for him to hear this,” my mother says.
“Please.” I stood, the memory hot on my heels. All the spaces of my home, spaces I moved through every day, crowded me with traps. My life tangled and tightened around me. Grant was both trigger and escape, the source and the salve. “Please let me.”
He shook his head, backed away another step. “Tell me the truth. How long has it been since you left your property?”
“Only about… I’m not sure exactly. Maybe… a year?” My breath sped up at the lie. It was a big lie, big enough to make the memory fade.
“Who can corroborate your claim? Get someone on the phone right now—someone who met you in town for lunch in the last decade. Then I’ll believe—”
“He finds the king in the stone prison.” Coyote spoke past Grant’s confused blink, to hook him before he moved farther away. “That smile…” I passed a finger through the air an inch from Grant’s lips, to mark the place I wanted his smile to appear. “He smiles that smile and kisses me for the first time, as if his smile was always supposed to be a kiss.”
Grant didn’t speak, but he stopped breathing.
Coyote loaded my voice with hypnotic allure. “I lift my chin. If it’s my last kiss before he kills me, I want as much as he’ll give me. He says, ‘I can feel you mooning over your early, tragic demise.’”
With a slow shuffle, I reached Grant, brushed my hand down his arm, dropped my voice to a whisper. “He gives in then. ‘You don’t need to do anything,’ I say. ‘I’ll do everything for us both.’”
The planes of Grant’s broad chest felt real under my palm. The dip between his pecs directed my hand downward.
“Oh, Jesus.” Grant gasped and snatched my hand away “Oliver. Stop. This is wrong. Even now you’re lying. Don’t you see that? You’re lying about why you want me.”
“Let me go.” I turned my wrist inside the ring of his fingers.
“No.” He tightened his grip. “Listen. You rehabilitated me. You did it. I have no doubt I’ll work my way up to a career I’ll love. My next job will suck, but that’s okay, because for the first time in my life, I have a career plan—and that’s because of you. Yet somehow, in the process of giving me new life, you’ve lost yours. I don’t want to leave you like this. Help me know how to help you. Should I notify someone, send out an alarm? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to understand.
“When you try to help people who come to you, is this how you feel? Like you see what they can’t?” Grant pulled me toward him.
Finally.
He wrapped his thick arms around me, buried me in bulk and skin and muscle and warmth, his embrace more like a parent’s than a lover’s.
“Dad lied.” The words flopped out of my mouth.
“About what?” Grant asked.
“Never mind. I don’t know why I said that. Dad never lied. He wasn’t a liar. He was the center. Our community revered him. He… took care of me when my mother left, filled my life with magic and friendly people and art until I didn’t need her, until I didn’t even really remember her.”
The muscles in Grant’s arms flexed and tightened. “There’s something unbearably sad about that, Oliver.”
All I managed was a shrug, a twitch to shed his pity.
There’s so much silence it’s hard to keep pushing sleep away.
“Are you certain he’s asleep? It won’t do for him to hear this.” My mother says her words like Fox Mother Queen. That’s the name I give her when she sits on her throne with her back straight and her chin up, like her eyes can see trouble coming from far away. When she speaks from her throne, her voice sounds like she’s reading a proclamation from a long paper with a curl at the end. Fox Mother Queen likes words to be neat and final and black, with a lot of signatures at the very end. I know because I sit with her at the dining table on Saturdays and Sundays. I pretend to draw but really I watch her work. I can’t sit in her lap because Fox Mother Queen is small, like me, and she doesn’t like to be climbed on. Dad and Granddad are bigger than enormous. I can climb on them whenever I want to.
Dad’s hair is black—blacker than Fox Mother Queen’s words. When I paint my pictures of him, I have to add a dab of indigo to make his hair look exactly right. Dad is Dolphin King. Granddad is The Eagle Emperor. The emperor always gets a capital The before his name, because he’s the king of kings. Dolphin King and The Eagle Emperor like to r
elax. They don’t care if I make a mess. “Creativity requires a mess.” That’s one of The Eagle Emperor’s favorite proclamations.
“He’s asleep,” Dolphin King says to Fox Mother Queen in a very quiet voice. “And you’re cruel.” His voice is the same quietness of Granddad’s and my entire bedroom after Fox Mother Queen reads to me at home, after she kisses my cheek and stops saying anything. It makes me happy that Fox Mother Queen likes the same kind of no noise I like. Behind my closed eyes I hear a tiny ocean wave shhhhh when she slides the book onto my bedside table. She stays with me in the beautiful quiet stillness, tall in her throne pose on the side of my bed, and holds my hand as I fall asleep.
Chapter 75
Grant
Oliver’s head lolled back on the arm I’d wound around his shoulders, eyes open but unfocused. I gave him a shake. “Oliver? Oliver. Hey, you’re really scaring me here.” When I started to move to get him into the car so he could lie down, he jerked against me.
“No.” Oliver blurted the word before his eyes refocused, and then bowed his head onto my chest.
I kept my arms around him while he took a few deep breaths, curious to see how he’d explain away his trance, or whatever it had been.
“This is not convincing me you’re okay,” I said against Oliver’s soft hair. I kept one arm around his waist in case he flopped again, and swept my other hand up and down his back to soothe him.
In a low voice I felt on my sternum, Oliver said, “My mother left when I was five. She up and moved to Europe, with almost no notice. Left me and Dad for a job. Something about… the painting I’m working on is making me remember that time. It’s…” Oliver huffed a weary laugh. “Not fun. I already lived through her leaving once. I don’t need to do it again. I’m going with Freddie to… to take a break from my property. See if that helps.”
That seemed like too much information for Oliver to tell me, and I wondered why he had. He’d been eager to get rid of me moments before. “Sounds to me like you’re running away.”
“Maybe. But if I travel with Freddie we can have… a life together. More of a life.”
“Okay,” I said with suspicion.
“So I have a favor to ask.” Oliver pulled back and looked up at me. “As of when I get on the ferry on Saturday, Freddie and I will be exclusive. That will be our start of something new.”
“Sure it will. Keep telling yourself that.”
Oliver glared at me.
“Why not let the memory come and be done with it?”
The sudden, stark terror in Oliver’s eyes told me why.
“Too much?” I asked.
“It’s like… watching a movie, but I feel it. A scene in horrible detail in which a mother abandons her young son. I don’t want the details. I know how that movie ends.”
“I get it. But if the memory haunts you, maybe it would help to work with a therap—”
“What would help,” Oliver interrupted, “would be a distraction. With you. Now. That’s the favor I’m asking.”
“God, your reasoning sucks. Don’t think I can’t see that.”
Oliver steadied his gold-flecked eyes on mine, put his hand on my chest and left it there. “I feel it, Grant. Here. You want me.” He splayed his fingers over my heart. “I know you want me.”
We stared at each other while my heart ran amok.
I put my hand on top of Oliver’s, to keep him close.
Oliver lifted his other hand to free his hair from the binding. That would have been enough to get me hard, but he pulled the mass of hair forward over his shoulders and leaned toward me. Glossy strands draped over my arm, caressed my hand.
The Professor Evil leer and loose hair were almost more than I could resist.
“Traveling with Freddie isn’t a solution,” I managed to say.
Oliver upped the ante, slid his hand out from under mine, leaned in, used both hands to drape his hair over my shoulders. I felt its weight on my shoulder blades. Christ, why is this such a turn-on? I had a relentless boner for Oliver’s hair. My cock pressed its approval into his abdomen.
“You are so messed up,” I said.
Oliver’s feral smile promised damage and oblivion. “Now or never.”
Touch his beard, my cock suggested, and I did. I stroked his moustache, caressed his beard, the hairs sharp and soft at the same time. I lifted Oliver’s hair to drape it down his back, then wound the slippery weight of it around my hand.
With a squirm against me, Oliver said, “No false pretenses this time. Just you and me and a tale I call The King’s Rescue.”
“Another fantasy, huh?”
Oliver pulled against my hand that held his hair, tried to get closer to me.
I didn’t let him.
“I want you to fuck me,” he panted. He mashed his hard cock against my thigh. “One-time deal. A goodbye fuck.”
I swallowed my objections, slid my hands along the curves under his ass cheeks, and lifted him enough to show him I knew what I wanted. When I spread my hands to caress the crease of his ass with my fingertips, his eyes glazed.
“A goodbye, good luck fuck.” I slid my fingers farther, stooped to reach between Oliver’s legs to where I’d pressed my fist when we’d lost ourselves in the brambles.
He lifted onto his toes. “The… fuck—the king doesn’t want to be rescued. Not really.”
Oliver’s words meant nothing to me. I almost couldn’t hear them over the sound of his body in my hands. I slid my fingers under his shirt to touch his hip bones, his back muscles, the smooth skin of his shoulders. His skin heated. Skin like warm cream, thick and liquid.
I wanted Oliver relaxed enough to pour onto the ground. I slid his arms inside his T-shirt, pulled it over his head and off. Miles of hair took forever to let go of the shirt, then fell around his shoulders with the swirl and splash of a sequined cape.
The contrast of Oliver’s hair against his skin undid me. “Stop talking now.”
Oliver shook his head. More hair fell forward over his shoulders.
“I’m going to deconstruct you,” I whispered. I spread my fingers up into his hair at the back of his head, put my other arm around the small of his back, and lowered him to ground. “I’m going to leave you in pieces for him.”
“For who?”
Oliver’s dazed look got to me. I wanted him slack and drooling. “You’re right,” I said. “He doesn’t exist. I’m going to demolish you for me, before I let you go.”
Oliver gave a slow blink and began to talk again. I caught a few words—stone wall, far horizon, soldiers. The story wasn’t about us. We lay on the grass in the fresh air of Vashon Island, my favorite place on earth.
“You come in through the window,” Oliver panted.
“The window? Is that what we’re calling it these days?” I reached down to caress Oliver’s asshole. “Get your pants off so I can get into your window.”
Oliver jerked to try to sit up.
“No. Keep your shoulders on the ground.” I stretched out beside Oliver, used my fingers to fan his hair into a halo while I enjoyed his squirm and fret as he tried to kick off his shorts and underwear without lifting his shoulders.
“You’re hurting me,” he finally said, his face pained.
“Liar.” All I’d done was touch his hair. I bent to put my lips on his, settled there and waited.
Oliver opened his mouth, found my teeth with his tongue. Once he got started, Oliver’s kiss grew a mind of its own, demanded and teased at me until I shifted to lie on top of him. I bit and sucked at his mouth as I bullied off my own clothes, all of them, down to the truth.
“No more hiding.” My voice had dropped an octave during our diss.
“Let’s go to the house,” Oliver said. “We need lube.”
“No. I like it here.” I brushed my hand up Oliver’s forehead and over h
is hair I’d spread out on the thick grass. I wanted to stay outside, to be in control for a change, to make something good happen for someone else instead of taking what I couldn’t repay. “I have a condom and lube packet in my wallet.”
“Seriously? Hopeful much? Go get them.” Oliver tried to push me up.
“Just wait.”
I needed another few minutes with his skin. God in heaven, Oliver’s skin. I smoothed the worry line between his eyebrows with my thumb, followed the bridge of his narrow nose, ran my palm over his cheek. Everywhere I touched turned pink. Cream with a splash of cherry juice. I laughed and slid half off him to stroke his neat chest, down his abs. His cock, sloppy with pre-cum, had turned so pink it was red.
“I’m ready now.” Oliver wiggled and pushed against me.
“You don’t get a vote.” I held him down with my leg.
In a deft move, Oliver slid out from under me before I could grab him, and walked away.
From where I lay, I could follow Oliver’s progress under the car. I watched his feet as he approached the shorts I’d flung over the car in my enthusiasm to get naked.
Like a caveman who hadn’t eaten in a month, I stood to track him.
As Oliver came back around the car, I got my first frontal view of him naked. He loped toward me, eyes locked on mine, hair a gust of autumn leaves around his upper body.
“Goddamn, you’re beautiful,” I told him.
Oliver walked into me hard enough to take me down, a clumsy move that hurt the arm I put out to break our fall.
Clumsy and genuine and excellent.
When our bodies met, my brain surrendered to my cock.
Full frontal contact, a flash of joy, then nothing but nerve endings and need.
Chapter 76
Oliver
My hair fell around Grant’s head to make a private space for our faces. “Everything falls apart for the king’s rescuer.” My fantasy had devolved into rubble, but I kept at it. In an unexpected twist, trying to tell the story kept me from coming too soon.
