by B. G. Thomas
Wyatt’s eyes cracked open.
“I was like a changeling or something to them. I just plopped down in front of their eyes. I was a total mistake—”
“You’re no mistake,” Wyatt said, and the way he said it made Kevin’s knees go weak.
“I was not expected,” Kevin said. “I was that 1 percent chance that the pill didn’t work. My mom and dad had never planned on being parents. I think they would have put me up for adoption if they hadn’t been such prominent members of their community. They were both professors at Columbia University in New York. So they didn’t really have a choice, not and keep their standing with their peers. They never beat me or anything like that. They were just really bad parents.” And sometimes that made him really sad.
“Oh, darlin’,” Wyatt’s mother said and reached out and touched his hand.
But today?
“Then I’ll be your mother.”
Today not so much.
“If you’ll let me call you son.”
Kevin’s breath caught. “That…. That would be really nice.”
“But you have to stop calling me Mrs. Dolan. I want you to call me Mom.”
Today not so much at all.
“I will,” he told her. Then he sighed. Returned to his story. “You know, in point of fact, they weren’t even good at being married. My dad cheated all the time, and I mean a lot.” He closed his eyes and clenched his jaw and remembered his mother crying in the early years. “And then after a while, she just didn’t care anymore.” And sometimes that made him sad too.
Wyatt sat up and reached out for him.
“Which is why,” Kevin said, “I decided I could never be in a relationship like that. My way or the highway. Monogamy or nothing.”
Wyatt dropped his hands, pain sparking in his eyes.
“Total love, or nothing.”
KEVIN WENT with Wyatt when it came time to take care of the stitches, which were actually staples. Tiny ones. The stitches were all internal.
He held Wyatt’s hand, and Wyatt tried really hard not to whimper, but he was Wyatt, after all, and there were a lot of them.
But when all was done, he was finally willing to look, and red as it was….
“Pretty scar?” asked Dr. Lyons, who had insisted on doing the work himself instead of letting one of his students do it.
“Pretty scar,” Wyatt agreed with a weak little smile.
And then the days turned into even more weeks, and time seemed to have frozen.
Until Kevin got the phone call.
Wyatt was shocked when Kevin told him about it.
Somehow Wyatt had just let himself pretend that forever was going to be about him recovering and Kevin being there to help.
“I’ve got to go to New York,” Kevin said. “I’ve got to take care of Cauley’s estate. I’ve just totally ignored it. And SAFE wants to take it over. I’ve put them off too long.”
“You’re going?” But what am I going to do? he wondered, filled with dread and sorrow.
“And I was wondering, Wyatt. Would you go with me?”
What? What had he said? “Go with?” he asked.
“Oh yes, Wyatt. Because I can’t stand the idea of being without you for a single day.”
Gosh! Go to New York?
“For how long?” he asked, glancing around the room. A room—a house—he’d actually begun to think of as his.
“Well, I was thinking of to live,” Kevin said. He came to Wyatt then and got down on the floor next to the couch where Wyatt was resting. “And I was wondering—and God I know this is not romantic and you deserve romantic—if… if you’d marry me.”
Wyatt gasped. “Marry you?” Marry him?
“I thought what a good idea it would be. If you married me, I could carry you under my insurance and really be able to take care of you.”
Wyatt could hardly believe what he was hearing. Marry him? Marry Kevin?
“We’ve only been together for weeks,” Wyatt said. “What if you change your mind? What if I fuck up? What if it doesn’t work out? What if I fuck up? I mean, what if….” He gulped. “I’ve been around the block quite a few times, Kevin. What if I get cocktailed up at Festival and find myself in somebody’s tent?”
“Then we’ll deal with it,” Kevin said.
“But you said total monogamy or nothing.”
“I didn’t say that I’d throw away the love of my life for a mistake, though. Working through things is what being married is all about.”
Wyatt gave another little gasp.
And Kevin said he wasn’t being romantic?
“You know that I love you, right?”
“You do?”
Kevin looked at him sternly. “Surely you do, right? After all we’ve been through? I wouldn’t do all that for just anyone.” But then his firm look melted. “Oh God, Wyatt. You’re giving me your Bambi eyes. I can’t deal with those sweet Bambi eyes!”
Wyatt sighed happily.
“I love you so much, Wyatt. I wish I could tell you how much.”
Wyatt’s heart began to pound and the words flew out before he knew it. “I love you too, Kevin.”
And by Eros, Venus, and Clíodhna, he did.
“So will you?” Kevin asked.
“I will,” Wyatt said.
And what do you know. There was no cosmic scale keeping him from getting love, was there?
After all, he was going to be the first of the Fabulous Four to get married.
CHAPTER FIFTY
WYATT AND Kevin threw some things together—with the idea that they would be back for what they needed—and flew to New York the next morning. And hey, Howard had been serious about letting Wyatt have more of the things he’d kept. They would need that too, although once Wyatt saw Kevin’s condo, he wasn’t sure where it would all go. The condo was a stark black and white, but it wouldn’t be that way long with Wyatt’s stuff added in.
Kevin assured Wyatt he didn’t mind at all.
They had a civil service before a judge right away, and almost no one could make it, of course. Theresa was Kevin’s witness, and he flew Sloan in to be Wyatt’s, which was fitting because Sloan was Wyatt’s best friend after all. He couldn’t even stay that night because something huge was happening at his work. When it became apparent that, with Sloan leaving, dinner would be either two or them or three, Theresa begged off, even though both of them assured her she was welcome.
“Not this time,” she said with a radiant smile. Then nodding at Wyatt: “I’ll get to know you better soon.”
So Kevin took Wyatt to a small, quiet, out-of-the-way almost-hole-in-the-wall for a sweet and romantic dinner.
That night they made careful love. Wyatt wasn’t quite healed yet, but he rode Kevin admirably, marveling out loud that he couldn’t believe what was happening and how thrilling it was.
The next day was business and the basement of Cauley’s house. It was hard for Kevin not to fall into despair. This was Cauley’s life they were going through.
But during it all, Wyatt not only didn’t complain, but was incredibly efficient. Kevin did most of the box moving, but Wyatt was able to quickly figure out what to do with everything and made piles and helped Kevin make objective calls on what should be kept, what should be donated to the GLBT archive, and what should be thrown away. And he helped, too, when Kevin couldn’t be objective.
Then Wyatt did something that made Kevin love him more than he could have ever imagined. He was near despondent over the fact that what was being given to the archive could simply disappear forever when Wyatt made a suggestion.
“You know, if we could do it—I mean you’d have to make the final decision, and it might not be easy—we should pick out about a dozen things—they’d have to be flat, like an article or a photograph or a magazine cover—and frame them. Then we could hang them in a room. No, better yet, the staircase. Make it a memorial to Cauley. Even insist on it to SAFE. The staircase would be a remembrance to all who stay here of who Caul
ey was.”
Kevin rocked back on his haunches, stunned by the idea.
And instantly won over by it.
He went to Wyatt and kissed him, and then they—astonishingly—quickly picked out a baker’s dozen items and set them aside, and somehow, through some miracle, got through everything over the weekend. Wyatt had to take a few naps, but that was understandable. He did it on the ugly couch instead of the bed. Most of the rest of the furniture was gone by then. Kevin had let Cauley’s mother send a lot of it to local secondhand stores—the charity ones. He’d reminded her not to tell the shops how Cauley had died. The times were indeed a-changing but he knew the word AIDS would scare a lot of them. Let them wonder all they wanted about how Cauley had died.
It was with a heavy but happy heart that Kevin gave the president of SAFE the keys. The house would provide a place to live for those in need—for their final weeks of life for many, and for others, a new start—but it would never again be Cauley’s house. Back at the condo, it was Wyatt who held Kevin this time while he cried.
Then Kevin quite suddenly had another issue to deal with. There was a problem with one of his new apps Google had bought that wasn’t coming together the way it should. With it a customer could create an account and make a list of friends who also had accounts. Then they could take a picture and send to one or more friends. The “friends” could view the picture once or twice, but then it went away. The customer could send a message along with the picture, or just send a message without a picture. Same rules applied, but there was a limited life on the messages.
Kevin figured out what the problem was within a few days, and Theresa dropped in on Wyatt to make sure he was okay.
It embarrassed Wyatt because he really was doing better every day—he wanted to show Kevin he could be a man—but he just got winded quite easily.
Kevin took him places, and he soon got caught up in the magic of the City That Never Sleeps. Kevin took him to some Broadway shows—oh, that had been thrilling!—Wicked and Kinky Boots and The Book of Mormon. And that had caused one of those embarrassing days. The first show had been The Book of Mormon, and he was falling asleep in it and was unable to get comfortable, and Kevin insisted on them leaving during the first intermission, but not because he was mad (which Wyatt had thought at first). The tickets weren’t cheap, after all, but then he was stunned once again by the love in Kevin’s lovely eyes and the assurances that it was just a show—imagine! The Book of Mormon being just a show!—and that they could go again.
And they did.
Kevin took Wyatt to the Empire State Building, and he knew the off days when there were almost no crowds at all, and they went almost immediately to the top. The view was spectacular, but Wyatt did get scared. He knew he couldn’t fall, but the way the walkway was built, with only that storm fence there to keep people safe, it looked like he could fall. He’d had to sit down right there, which sent a young guard into a tizzy telling him he had to get up, and no amount of Wyatt’s insisting that he couldn’t stand up would calm the man down, and then what should happen? Kevin scooped him up as if he were a child and carried him inside.
And Kevin said he wasn’t romantic!
But….
Wyatt fell in love with Times Square, and Kevin promised him that he’d take him to see the ball drop come New Year’s Eve. They’d get a room right there so they wouldn’t have to fight hours of traffic to get home, and boy, that sounded nice.
But….
He fell in love with Theresa in no time, and he liked that she had been so cautious the first time or two they met. That meant that Kevin’s best friend truly loved him and wasn’t at all the type who was secretly holding a candle for her gay best friend.
But….
Kevin took him to art museums, where he saw Dali’s famous melting clocks and Frida Kahlo’s Self-portrait with Cropped Hair and Andy Warhol’s Gold Marilyn Monroe and Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Willem de Kooning’s Woman I, but….
Except for maybe the clock one, Wyatt found them to be pretty fucking hideous.
“These are the most famous pieces in New York?” he asked, not thinking, as he was prone to do. “I mean, we have that gorgeous Saint John the Baptist by Caravaggio for the gods’ sake, and what has got to be one of the world’s best known Kwan Yin! I mean, I knew we wouldn’t see the Mona Lisa or Michelangelo’s David, but golly….”
But….
But Wyatt wasn’t sure just what it was that made him feel so…. So…. So he didn’t know what!
February Porch Night came, and he wasn’t there. It was Scott’s turn to host, and he made his margaritas, of course, but now he had graduated to real ones made with top-shelf tequila and in a blender and everything. The whole gang was hooting and hollering over the phone about how good they were and gods…. Gods, it sounded so fun.
And that sweetheart Kevin even ran downstairs and across the street and got mixings and made them for the two of them, and it was so sweet and fun and they were even able to dance to Harry Nilsson’s “Put the Lime in the Coconut” song, just like the Fabulous Four (plus three) were doing while they all watched Practical Magic. Kevin and Cedar got the movie timed so eight men separated by thousands of miles could watch (and dance) at the very same time.
KEVIN WOKE up one morning and found Wyatt on the balcony, looking out at the city. A view that Kevin loved so much. A view that Wyatt told him he loved as well.
But….
The look on Wyatt’s face.
He’d seen it more and more.
Wyatt wasn’t happy. Not really.
It was the old familiar tickle that made him sure. The one that started at the base of his skull. The one that traveled over his scalp. The one that happened more and more lately. That now traveled even over his shoulders and down his arms.
The “knowing” that no matter how brave his face, Wyatt was not happy.
He left Wyatt alone for a bit, went and made coffee—the Sweetleaf bean he loved, but even he had to admit it wasn’t as good as the coffee from The Shepherd’s Bean (Wyatt’s favorite coffee).
When it was done, he brought two mugs out onto the balcony and handed one to his sweet Baby Bear. Wyatt was wearing his flannel pajamas and his big bear slippers and his matching bear hat and nothing else, and Kevin had brought the quilt that Wyatt’s mother had given them and they kept over the black suede couch.
“You must be freezing,” he said.
Wyatt shrugged and said it wasn’t so bad. “Hey, you’re talking about the guy who was buried in snow. Nothing is cold after that!” He even managed to laugh about it.
Maybe. Maybe not. But there was still snow about, and it was too cold for Wyatt not to be wearing a coat.
“I love you,” said Wyatt and sipped at his coffee.
“Do you?” Kevin asked, heart in his throat. He didn’t know what he’d do if Wyatt said otherwise.
The look that came through Wyatt’s eyes then was as immense as Manhattan itself.
“Oh gods, Kevin. I never knew what love was before you.” He smiled and his entire face lit up, and any fraction of unhappiness that Kevin had seen growing in Wyatt over the past couple of weeks vanished. “I’m so in love with you. My heart… it swells until I think it will burst. I want to be a poet so I can tell you how much. I wake up in the mornings and just look at you sleeping next to me, and I can’t believe I ever thought there was some cosmic balance keeping me from love.”
Kevin felt the rush come over his own heart. He knew what it was like to wake up and just look at his lover and be amazed. The unattainable dream there in his bed and in his life. “I don’t know, Wyatt. That sounded pretty poetic to me.”
Wyatt took a bigger drink of his coffee, looked down the street and the look—for one second—came back to his face. He turned back, the smile returned, and he said, “You’re right. Too cold for pajamas. Let’s go in. And maybe you can warm me up.” He growled.
And the loving had been sweet. They’d had to b
e so careful in their lovemakings at first, but it had been getting easier as the weeks passed. And having to be careful at first had somehow made the sex all the better. Had made them make love instead of passionate rutting. And while Kevin looked forward to some wildness again, right now what they were doing was perfection. It was building a foundation. At least he hoped so. It’s what he felt.
But….
“You hungry?” Kevin asked and Wyatt said, oh yes, he was, and sat down on the couch and pulled Kevin to him and dragged his very full (by now) Calvin Klein underwear—red—down under his balls and took Kevin into his mouth and—God, God, God! What Wyatt did with his mouth!—and way too fast he was cumming, and Wyatt was moaning and greedily drinking him down. When he was done swimming in the aftereffects of Wyatt’s brilliant talent, he pulled his lover to his feet and picked him up—God, Wyatt loved it when he did that, and so he loved to do it—and carried him to the bedroom and ate that adorable round plump butt, and it was so sweet, delighting his tongue, and then when Wyatt was begging him to fuck him, he rolled his lover onto his back instead and straddled him and took that thick cock inside him with only a bit of spit—he wanted, needed to feel this—and rocked and lifted and dropped himself until Wyatt was shouting and cumming inside him—Kevin could feel the rod of flesh thrumming, feel it like water rushing through a hose, feel the heat of his seed, and it was glorious—and Kevin was fisting his own cock and then shooting a second time, his cum landing all over Wyatt’s sexy hairy chest in what seemed like endless pearlescent ropes.
And it was all the best positions so that Wyatt wasn’t hurt, and Kevin made sure he didn’t collapse upon the smaller man—they both loved it that Wyatt was smaller (in almost every way)—and let himself fall to the side instead, and they went naturally together in each other’s arms, and—oh!—the loving was so good.
But when he roused himself he saw that Wyatt was awake and looking out the window.
