A Winter in Rome

by Francis Gideon

  "Slow, please," I said, my hands moving down to his waist. "I don't know what I'm doing. I've never done this before."

  "Ever?" he asked.

  "With women. But…that's it."

  His hands loosened, but he didn't let go. "Do you want to? We don't have to."

  "I do, trust me. Just…"

  "Slow?"

  I nodded. When he leaned closer, he kissed me lightly. I opened my mouth for more, but he pulled away.

  "Give me your hands?" he asked.

  I did. He clasped my fingers as he put distance between our bodies. He folded our hands together, warming up my cool fingers from the wind and chill outside. Then, he kissed along my palms, his lips tracing the lines there, as if he could tell my future.

  "I will go slow," he said, whispering. "I promise you that."

  He held my hand inside of him, before placing it down over his side. I rubbed the small of his back, feeling the way his skin felt beneath clothing. He was warm, secure. When he backed me up so I was against the wall, I felt better. I didn't want us to move, because I liked being around his art supplies. When his mouth opened to ask me something, I closed it with my own. He moved with me, allowing me to take the lead with our lips and tongues as his hands moved from my face, down to my waist. He kicked a foot between my legs, allowing me to rub up against him. I was hard in my pants and I could feel the ache in my stomach, but I didn't want his leg. I wanted him. I pulled both hands around his back, and his body towards me. Our teeth gnashed slightly with the sudden aggression, and he opened his eyes to look at me. I placed my forehead against his and waited, breathing hard. My skin felt tender from his stubble, from the sudden panicked movements.

  "I want you so badly I think I may burst," I said.

  He nodded against me, then kissed my neck. I pulled his shirt from his pants, and soon his hands were on my skin, too. Our hips moved together, our cocks hitting one another through fabric. I groaned as I felt him move against me. He took my hand again and placed it over himself. I felt his dick twitch through my fingers, and I cupped him. It felt surreal, that I could suddenly touch him and feel him touch me. Soon, he pulled my hand away and kissed my fingers, sucking on each one. We moved faster and faster, our shirts half-pushed up our bodies, but our pants on. I didn't want to move, in case the moment changed. But I knew I wasn't going to last. I kissed his neck and felt the scrape of stubble, before I grabbed his waist, then ass, and pulled him into me. I came in my pants—something I hadn't done since I was fifteen. He could tell, I knew, because he kissed me hard and finally let himself go, too. He mumbled and groaned, and I thought to myself, in a happy euphoric way post-orgasm, that I was glad he talked when he came. It reminded me of how he said goodbye.

  "Fuck," he said, then kissed me again. "Oh, fuck. Craig."

  I kissed him and felt him moan more into my mouth. After I realized how tired I was, I let him take me to his couch.

  When our breathing had returned to normal, he cupped my face in his hands. He stared at me with a serious and almost pained expression. "I know all profs are supposed to say this. But I want to tell you that this is really the first time I've done anything like this before with a student."

  "Could you have done this before me?"

  "Oh yeah. Everywhere, everyone. That's the one damaging thing about teaching in the arts. People think you're someone you're not, and try to bed you. Especially the ones who endorse the genius crap."

  "Men or women?"

  "Only men interest me."

  "What about Rebecca?" I asked, thinking of the two deck chairs on his balcony. I knew from his talks that they had spent a lot of time together, and from the way he smiled when her name came up, that there was the possibility for something more between them.

  He smiled—that same grin I knew—before answering. "She's different. But that was a long, long time ago. We were students then and in love with our art."

  "And now?" I asked.

  "Now I go to work and do my job. I come home, and I do art. It's a small life," he said, his voice quiet, as if he was truly examining it from the outside. "But I like it."

  I swallowed hard. I thought of my apartment with a high school friend, how he had called me 'faggot' because I had thought taking art would be a good idea, and that Women's Studies was a valid major for his on-and-off-again girlfriend to choose.

  "I don't want to go home," I said, the ache in my chest suddenly acute.

  "Stay with me," he said, pressing a kiss to my temple. "Just sleep, I promise. We're going slowly. I won't forget that."

  I touched my hand to his face, curled it around his neck. I could feel the small burn of his stubble against my cheek and I wondered how it would feel on his pillow. How it would feel on his bare chest.

  "Okay," I said.

  *~*~*

  One morning, I woke up first and made coffee from the French press in his kitchen while he slept late. We had been sleeping together for a while now, but our nights were spent actually sleeping, with the occasional make-out session that led to more, but never quite all the way. I was still getting used to the way his apartment creaked and how opera came from the other end of the hallway without explanation. I usually drank my coffee and checked emails before he got up, but today, I went into his art room. I looked through his paints, his charcoals, his canvases. I touched everything I could, just to see if I liked it. If I could use it. Sometimes I would try to imagine myself creating something with these supplies, but it was always easier to imagine him being the artist.

  "Find anything?" he asked from the doorway. His dark hair was messy, bedhead apparent. He wore flannel pants and a black t-shirt: the same thing he had worn to bed.

  I smiled. "Not yet. I'm still not quite sure what I'm looking for."

  He nodded, sipping his drink. "Can I read you something?"

  I put down the brush I was holding, relieved for the distraction. He took my hand and led me into his living room, clearing off room on the couch for me with one hand and digging through his piles of books with the other. My eyes danced around, unsure of where to look, before he finally pulled out Just Kids by Patti Smith.

  "You know her?" he asked.

  "Of course. I love her music. I didn't know… I didn't know she wrote a book."

  "About Robert Mapplethorpe."

  "I thought her husband was Frederick?" I heard the song after I asked the question, the crescendo of music in my ear.

  "Well, yes. But she explains it all. Let me read some parts to you, so I don't give away the show."

  He cracked open the spine and began to read aloud, skipping around from different parts and passages. I curled up into his side when my coffee was gone and let him read to me. It was nice, being read to. I hadn't done anything like this since I was a kid. Occasionally, I'd look up and watch his lips move and think it surreal that I had kissed them. That earlier last night, I had put my lips around his cock just to try it out. He had done the same to me, though we had finished with our hands. There was no space between our bodies anymore, and my skin still felt flushed anytime I thought of it.

  He put down the book after a half hour or so, and sipped more of his coffee. "It's cold." He made a face and pinched his nose.

  "I can get you more?"

  "No, no, I like you here. You're warm."

  I smiled up at him and then rested my face on his chest. His hands moved up and down my arms slowly, thoughtfully.

  "You know, Patti gave up her early career—almost all of her twenties—because she thought she wasn't good enough."

  "Really?" I asked. What he had read to me sounded so counter-intuitive to that statement. She was so alive, so filled with passion.

  "Yeah," Alan said. "Don't do that."

  "Okay…"

  "Good. I'm reminding myself, too. Even though my twenties are gone."

  I smiled thinking of his black jeans—and then the deck chairs. "Did you give up your career for anyone?"

  "No, but I still had people."

>   "Tell me," I asked. "Tell me about Rebecca."

  He laughed a little, like it was almost too easy to go to her first. I realized he had been reading to me from Just Kids, not because he thought Patti Smith was amazing, but because he thought Rebecca was amazing. Alan was Mapplethorpe in their story together, not doing anything good, while Rebecca was the real show. He told me about their time in art school together, her feminist performance shows that no one understood and no one went to. Just him, only him. They had met during a Marina Abramovic-like set up where Rebecca and he just stared at one another without speaking. Rebecca had staged the show as a test, to see if the psychology behind eye contact and love had been correct. It was, and for a while, they were in love. She was a psychology and art major, trying to pad her résumé in order to have "something to fall back on", just in case. Alan had just gone through to be an artist. Nothing else, no holding back.

  "So why are you teaching now?" I asked. "Why are you both teaching?"

  He laughed and drank more cold coffee. "Because sometimes they give you grants in Canada. Sometimes, if you look impressive, they let you teach. We both kind of looked impressive on paper, so we could goof around otherwise."

  "Good plan. I almost took her class, too, you know."

  "Why didn't you?"

  It seemed foolish to lie at this point, so I told him the truth. "I Googled her and a YouTube video of an art performance came up. She… seemed a bit much."

  He laughed, hard and sudden. My body bounced against his. "That's a polite way to say it. She's good once you get to know her, really."

  "I'm sure that's true of anyone."

  He squeezed my arm, then asked quietly. "Did you Google me?"

  "Yeah."

  "What came up?"

  "Your faculty profile."

  "That's it?"

  "That's it," I said. I felt Alan deflate a little. Rebecca seemed like she had a million hits, a million different 'like's on Facebook, many people commenting on her art. She got a lot of criticism for her art, too, but I could sense Alan's disappointment in his own digital footprint. At least Rebecca got something. Alan was just in his small life in his small apartment: an art professor in Toronto with a few books and past shows.

  "But she did the same thing as Patti," Alan said. "Only for me. She thought she had to. And… Well, I'm clearly not even Mapplethorpe, so… I don't want that to happen to anyone else. You know? I want people to do what they want."

  "What do you want to do?"

  "I've done it."

  "What?"

  "I made art and got paid for it."

  "That's all in past tense."

  There was a sadness to his voice that I could feel in the air and it hurt. He told me more about shows he had done, the openings and venues. He had done a lot—so much that filled up the ten-year age difference between us. But I could feel the goose bumps on his skin when he got close to something more he desired. He told me about Rome that day, in small sentences and segments. I didn't realize how big that dream really was until later.

  "Rome has the Sistine Chapel—God's ceiling. I think there is a point when you make art: it becomes so huge it takes over. It is literally a god that watches you from the ceiling. And it's not about you as an artist, it's about the art. I like that, you know? I sometimes like fading into the background."

  "You certainly can get away with more then," I said, trying to lighten the mood. He looked down at me and smirked, pulling our lips together. I kissed him with more force, opening my mouth as if I could empty out the sadness from him. His hands moved down my chest to my shirt, and he began to pull. As bare skin hit the air, the chill in the apartment got worse. I got goose bumps, too.

  I broke the kiss to get off the couch. I stood in front of him as I pulled my shirt off, and then went for my pants. His eyes gazed at me, heavy-lidded with desire.

  "What are you doing, Craig?"

  "I'm taking off my clothes," I said, sliding books aside on the couch. "Maybe taking off your clothing afterwards. I want to see you."

  Alan watched me undress with a tight jaw. He couldn't move; he seemed like a statue. When I was naked, I sat on his hips. I felt him underneath me, still in his flannel pants. I was hard already, and my nipples perked in the sudden chill. I took his hands in mine now, kissing his fingertips, before I put his hands on my chest.

  "Touch me," I said, leaning down and whispering into his ear. He turned my head and kissed me hard. I began to grind my hips into his until his breath caught inside of him.

  "I'm going to get into trouble, aren't I?" he said in a sudden quiver.

  "I don't think so," I said. "We're adults."

  "But I don't have tenure," he laughed awkwardly. His hands slid against my naked hips. He hadn't touched me yet, though I wanted him to so badly.

  "Touch me," I repeated.

  He did, slowly. I placed my arms on his shoulders, leaning down to meet his lips as I continued to rock into him. His thumb rubbed against the head of my cock, underneath it, before he wrapped his fist around me and started to pump. He used another hand to steady me as I rocked into him, pushing against the small of my back. Our breath was warm and ragged, and soon, I slid my hands under his black t-shirt.

  "Take this off," I said. "Take all of it off."

  He shifted carefully, stopping to touch me only to remove his t-shirt. I shifted against his lap, just enough to work his cock through the fly area of his flannel pants. In the light of morning, I could see what he looked like a little better. My stomach twisted, but I still felt good. So fucking good.

  "I want you," I whispered to him. "All of you."

  "You do?"

  "Yes. Do you?"

  "Yes," he said.

  He picked me up then— his arms wrapping around me until he could get on his feet, and carried me to the bedroom. His strength was astounding, and when I balked in surprise, he merely murmured, "You have to build up strength stretching canvases and hauling stones to sculpt."

  His bedroom was only a few feet away, so he didn't test his muscles much. I was still smaller than him, only about 5'8" and while I wasn't skinny, I wasn't big, either. I was also still shaking, still naked, and blown away by him.

  He laid me down on his bed, still unmade from our sleeping, and then began to pull off the rest of his clothes. When he came back over me, he was naked, and pressed a kiss to my lips. We had never been completely naked around one another, never in the light. I wanted to watch him, study every angle, but I also wanted him to stretch me out against the bed like I was a canvas. He kissed my neck and down my body, his tongue coming out and tasting as he moved. When he went between my legs, I thought I would black out from desire. I opened myself more to him, and then heard the song "Black" by Pearl Jam in my head. It switched over to Patti Smith's "Frederick" and "Because The Night" before everything eventually went quiet. All I heard was the sound of his body against mine and the slow hum of his mouth against me.

  "Fuck me," I said. "Oh, God, please, I want more of you."

  His mouth moved back to my throat and he kissed me over and over. "Say it again."

  "Fuck me," I said, then moaned. "Oh, God, please."

  I didn't even know what exactly I desired, save in the abstract. I wanted him inside of me. I knew it would probably hurt. But I had also seen him create something out of nothing in class before. Turn a blank page into something beautiful in a couple of minutes. I could trust him.

  "Touch me and fuck me," I murmured when he ceased to move—only kiss me. "Please."

  "You wanted to go slow, remember?"

  "I did. And we did. Now, I want you."

  Alan shifted against me, kissing as he left my body. I heard a cap of a lube container. I felt his hot breath on me again as I slid open my legs more, allowing his fingers inside.

  "Like this?" he asked, pressing against me.

  "Yes," I said. I waited, biting my lip, and moved into the sensation. Oh God, I thought. I had fucked women but I had never been this vulnerab
le. I needed him to stay like that for a long time. "Please," I said when he added another finger. "Stay."

  "I will, we can just do this. We can just…"

  I was already hard and straining against my belly. I could have come if I wanted to; I could have just let go. But I looked at him and knew that this wasn't a desire-induced decision to get off and get fucked. I really wanted him.

  "No," I said. "No…I want…"

  His fingers stopped. I reached down and grabbed his wrist and kissed him again.

  "No, please, I want you. More now."

  "Yes?" he asked. He shifted slightly to get more lube.

  "Yes." I nodded and swallowed hard. "Yes, fuck me."

  "Okay," he murmured, kissing me softly before pulling away. My lips were so raw and chapped and it was so overwhelming. I heard his drawer slide open and the crinkling wrappers of condoms. I was so familiar with this, but it felt so new to be on the other side. To be the one waiting.

  "Give me your hands," he asked.

  I reached forward and he placed the condom into my palm. I propped myself up on one elbow and eyed him.

  "Do it for me," he said, leaning forward. I could see all of his body now, his imperfections, and his vulnerability. "Please."

  This close I had the sudden impulse to take him into my mouth again. But we would have time for that later. I rolled the condom on him. It was the lubricated kind, I could feel it between my fingers. I looked up at him when I was done and he kissed me again, a hand on the back of my neck. His fingers trailed down to my waist and he pulled me higher on the bed. I opened my legs for him. Each movement felt slowed, dulled, as if I was moving through the flecked static of a TV screen. But when his legs touched mine, when I felt his body over me, I came back into focus. Outside of me, he waited.

  "Go," I said.

  And so, he did.

  *~*~*

  After we had had sex, I placed my head against his chest and breathed. My legs still trembled and my body felt weak. We hadn't eaten breakfast, and didn't really eat well the night before. I was ravenous, but I didn't want to move. I liked being here, under his blanket. I could only hope he felt the same way, because he wasn't talking. I was so used to always hearing his voice, having him take the lead, that I was unsure about everything in that moment. I listened to his breathing and heartbeat for a while. The beat went from calm to stormy, and I looked up at him and kissed his ear. When he furrowed his brows and then laughed, I knew things were going to be okay.