Following Grandpa Jess

by TJ Baer

  He was quietly thoughtful for a moment, but I felt the tension relaxing a little now that we’d strayed away from the topic of parental disapproval. “I think it’s because it was so tough for me. My teachers were never very supportive or understanding. I think they thought I just didn’t care enough to try, when that really wasn’t the case. So I guess being a teacher helps me feel like I’m evening the score, somehow, being the kind of teacher I would’ve wanted to have when I was a kid.”

  Holy crap, that was beautiful. Had the man sprung fully formed from a Hallmark movie? Cripes.

  Before I could find an appropriate reply, David gave himself a little shake and smiled. “Anyway, enough deep conversation.” He shot me a measuring look. “Unless...you want to talk about whatever happened with your dad?”

  A pale echo of my earlier anger started up in my chest; I forced it back with an effort. “That’s okay. I think I’d rather ignore it completely for the time being.”

  “An emotionally healthy choice, I’m sure.”

  “I’ll be emotionally healthy tomorrow.”

  We turned the corner and stepped from our quiet residential bubble into a world of engine noises and swarming headlights. The entrance to the nearest subway station waited a few feet away, still looking pretty dilapidated despite a recent coating of paint. David led the way there, and I followed with a smile pulling at my lips, because I’d come to an important decision: Like the aforementioned Hallmark movie, reality had no place in my evening tonight.

  Tonight, there was no worsening situation with Grandma, no trouble with my parents—no trouble of any kind, in fact—and David, for the course of the night, was my intelligent, attractive, fully-interested-in-me date. A little make-believe, a little harmless flirting... It sounded like exactly what I needed, a small holiday from the pain in the ass reality had become lately. And as far as I was concerned, I freaking deserved it.

  Just don’t get carried away, I warned myself as I brushed past David to get to the ticket turnstiles, fully enjoying every second of the contact. You want to escape from reality for a little while, not create a whole new slew of problems to deal with when reality comes bulldozing back.

  I gave myself the firm promise that I would not get carried away, and began the blissful descent into what I hoped would be a perfect evening.

  Chapter Four

  I woke up the next morning tangled in sheets, David’s sleeping face about two inches from my own.

  I lay there absolutely still for a few seconds, shock and disbelief warring for control of my reaction. Finally, I settled on uttering a quiet, fervent whisper of, “Crap.”

  I untangled myself and crawled out of the bed as carefully as I could, needing some regrouping time before I could deal with a conscious David.

  What...the hell...had happened? My brain was still all fuzzy and slow, and I couldn’t piece together the broken fragments of the night before without interspersing them with images from my dreams, and somehow I just wasn’t awake enough yet to tell the difference.

  Okay, calm down, I commanded myself sternly, and padded out into the hall—David’s hall, since naturally I’d woken up in David’s bedroom. I paced back and forth for a bit, feeling the springy carpeting under my toes and shivering, since I wasn’t wearing more than a T-shirt and a pair of boxers. Calm down. Probably nothing happened.

  Right. Of course nothing happened. I mean, if something had happened, I’d remember, because I’d been wanting something to happen with David for an eternity, and finally having that wish come true but not remembering it afterward would’ve been cruel.

  And the Universe was never cruel.

  Crap.

  But no, no, there was a logical explanation. I pressed my hands against my eyes and forced myself to think, and think hard, about the night before. I could piece it together, take things up to their logical conclusion, and then I would know what had happened. Right? Right.

  I remembered a comfortable train ride sitting with our shoulders pressed together, talking about nothing in particular but nevertheless keeping up a running dialogue. There was a lot of laughter, a lot of smiling at each other, a lot of happy tingling when David’s hand brushed mine or he turned to look at me and his eyes were only a few inches away. Typical sappy crush stuff, but nothing out of the ordinary.

  Next, we’d arrived at the restaurant and been shown to a nice table in the back, this by a friendly Japanese woman who seemed to remember David and kept throwing us conspiratorial smiles that made me wonder if she knew I was male. Then again, maybe she was just a fan of that sort of thing. I’d heard that this was actually fairly common in the female population, which was fascinating but not horribly surprising given the straight male fascination with girl-on-girl.

  Off-topic. Focus.

  We sat down. Conversation continued in a comfortable, steady gush, shifting from one topic to the next with the kind of seamlessness that only happened when I was able to put my unrequited angst out of mind and just enjoy David’s company. We ordered an appetizer—salted, boiled soybeans, which David ordered without prior knowledge that they were one of my favorite dishes—and because he’d never had them before, I got to show him the proper way to eat them, bringing the shell up to my lips and popping the soybeans out into my mouth. Holding each other’s gazes while doing this was weirdly sexy, and went on for at least a full ten seconds before we shifted back into conversation.

  While waiting for our entrées, David ordered a bottle of saké, Japan’s highly concentrated alcohol of choice. He was already well aware that I wasn’t a big drinker, as my general skinny-girliness tended to give me a pitifully low tolerance for the stuff, but he insisted on a toast anyway. I took a polite sip and was certain he wasn’t trying to get me drunk, even when he very politely refilled my glass after every subsequent sip.

  Our entrées came a few glasses later, by which point David was frequently reaching across the table to touch my hand when he laughed, and I was unquestionably, stupidly drunk. Which, thankfully, didn’t lead to anything beyond a constant goopy smile and a general lowering of inhibitions, though of course that sort of thing could be dangerous when in the presence of an unrequited crush.

  We talked about various things while we ate, most of which were a blur of muzzy good feelings to me now, and by the time I was scraping the plate beneath my yakisoba, I was starting to feel a little more sober, and to realize just how lucky I was not to have blurted out anything wildly inappropriate while under the influence.

  Unfortunately, David chose that moment to reach across the table and touch my hand again in response to the story I’d just told about Juri asking me if I had a hangover that morning. When he didn’t let go right away, I reached over with my other hand to capture his fingers against mine. There was no reason for it, really, except that I was tired of the warmth of his hand vanishing back to his side of the table, and childishly wanted to enjoy it for a few seconds longer. And if he didn’t like it, well, it was his own fault for touching my hand in the first place, right? And for getting me drunk and gazing into my eyes with that big soft smile on his face when we both knew damn well that he wasn’t interested in me, this because of that whole pesky heterosexuality thing.

  I glanced up at him defiantly, daring him to pull his hand away, but he didn’t look pissed off or weirded out by the contact. He looked a little surprised, but he held my gaze without any kind of embarrassment, and didn’t make any moves to take away his hand. So I held on to it, and kept holding on to it, and before long, he’d reached across the table to wrap his other hand on top of mine, and this was about when my stomach started doing some high-level gymnastics and my mouth went dry and I wondered what the hell was going on but simultaneously didn’t care as long as it kept going on.

  Eventually, the check came and our hands disconnected so David could fish out his wallet and pull out his Visa card. I made the obligatory protests about his picking up the tab but was quickly overruled, and it was about then that I realized that h
oly crap, this actually was a date.

  Sobriety came back to me then in a cold rush, and I sat there feeling my careful wall against reality crumbling. David had taken me on a date. David had taken me on a date, which he could not have done unless he had some interest in me, and if he had some interest in me, then holy freaking hell...

  It was too much for my poor saké-addled brain, and I made a hasty retreat to the restaurant bathroom to think it through. Because if this was a date and David was interested in me, then what was going to happen when we moved to the next item on our agenda, which was to go back to his place?

  I wanted it. God, I wanted it, but...

  But what? What the hell was the problem? Hot guy of amazingness, a year of wanting exactly this, and now suddenly it seemed too...what? Too easy? Too weird? Too much like I was someone who looked conveniently enough like a woman for him to do a little make-believe of his own?

  Ding-ding.

  I groaned and leaned my forehead against the bathroom mirror, knowing David would probably be venturing in after me before long—the unfortunate side-effect of dating the same sex—and thinking that I should probably not let that happen. The thought of being in the close quarters of the restaurant bathroom with David right then made my skin start tingling, but while the idea of restroom sex was highly romanticized in the media—by which I meant porn, of course—the whole idea struck me as being kind of...unsanitary. Not that David was the type to start up something romantic by the urinals, but...

  The thought trailed off as I realized that I was standing in the men’s room at a Japanese restaurant having an internal ramble-fest about the pros and cons of bathroom sex.

  Damn saké.

  I splashed some water on my face and made my slightly wobbling way back out into the restaurant, where the mood seemed to have settled somewhat. It felt more like coming back to the David I’d always known rather than the David who might be interested in me. It felt good to find reality making sense again, so much so that I ignored it when David spent the next moments gallantly helping me into my coat and then holding the restaurant door open for me. This was stuff all guys did for their male friends, of course.

  The walk back to the subway station was punctuated with giggles—oh, God, giggles—and lots of instances where our shoulders collided because my steps weren’t all that steady. At one point, David’s arm reached out to steady me, sliding snugly around my shoulders, and just didn’t pull away afterward. And for all that I wanted to discourage such acts of chivalry, I couldn’t help leaning into him and drifting in a warm, cozy haze for a while. Our steps were slow and carefully measured against each other, and I could feel him breathing, both in the warm brushes of air against my cheek and in the slow movement of his rib cage against my side. And drunk or not, feminized or not, I wanted it to go on forever.

  Not enough to keep my mouth shut, though, apparently.

  “David,” I murmured as we walked, and he replied with a soft, “Hm?” that sounded like I’d jarred him from a particularly nice dream.

  I took a deep breath and shook a bit of sobriety back into my brain. “What is this?” I risked glancing over to meet his eyes, though it was difficult to get a good look in the dimness and from this angle. “This,” I said with a motion toward our close-pressed bodies. “What is it?”

  He was quiet for a second, his arm tightening around me almost possessively. “Does it have to be something? Can’t it just...be what it is?”

  I frowned and tried to process the logic of this, but it was a losing battle. My brain was saké-flavored pudding. I decided that thinking was overrated and pressed close to him again, leaning my head against his shoulder and deciding that for the duration of my inebriation I would play the part of the dutiful girlfriend, but after that we’d have to have a little chat about anatomy and its importance in future relations.

  Stuff after that was fairly predictable—train ride back, with the added bonus of his arm around my shoulder, a quick trip to the video store, another walk down his quiet street, and then a moment of tingling anticipation as I stood shivering on his porch waiting for him to get the front door unlocked.

  When he had, I brushed past him into the warm apartment, not sure what was going to happen next and strangely reluctant to find out. Then again, it struck me as kind of unfair that he’d waited to make a move until I was less than sober, because not only did this strip me of the luxury of acting like a rational, non-giggly adult, it gave us both the “it only happened because we were drunk” excuse.

  The sheer depressiveness of these thoughts pulled me even further back into sobriety, and by the time we’d settled on David’s couch with our rented DVD, whose title I’d already forgotten, I was feeling more my usual self, and vowing all over again to keep alcohol and my mouth as far away from each other as possible in the future.

  “You’re kind of quiet,” David said. We were sitting a respectable distance away from each other on the couch, like being back in the familiar world of David’s living room was enough to snap us back to our former, non-romantic reality.

  “Yeah,” I said, trying not to sound like I was ruminating on Our Relationship, because the only thing worse than actually doing that was having David know I was doing it. “Sorry. Drinking always kind of wears me out.”

  David took a breath and let it out slowly, and we sat in a heavy silence. Finally, he reached for the remote. “Well, should we start the movie?”

  Instead of sitting here in crippling awkwardness? “Sure,” I said.

  And this, of course, was when everything went to hell.

  The movie, which I had no memory of selecting since I’d still been kind of fuzzy at the video store, turned out to be an artsy Japanese film from the nineties—with subtitles, of course, since neither David nor I knew any of the language beyond usage of words like “tempura.” It had strong acting, a good soundtrack, great reviews...

  And it was about a teenaged girl with AIDS. Better still, she’d contracted it through a blood transfusion, and now everyone in her hometown was shunning her while she dealt with her extraordinary pain and uncertain future. Personal demons aside, I had to wonder what the hell David had been thinking, ending an evening of alcohol and romance with this. Christ.

  Well, I’d just have to deal with it. The movie was on, David was sitting there looking reasonably interested in it, and I would just have to be a grown-up and get through it. So what if it made me want to run screaming for the door? So what if I was already breathing fast and feeling like something heavy and cold had settled in my chest? So what if this had the look of a movie with a tragic ending that would likely see me breaking down in embarrassing tears in front of David and gabbling about things that shouldn’t be gabbled about? So what?

  I grabbed the remote from the cushions between us and clicked Stop. “Um. You know. I’m not feeling so great all of a sudden.”

  David’s eyebrows furrowed in concern, and to my immense gratification, he reached out to touch my arm. “Can, ah...can I get you something? Some water, or...” He shook his head, I guess because he wasn’t entirely sure what variety of “not feeling great” I was experiencing. “Something medicated?”

  “No, you know, I’m good, I just...I need to get some sleep. I’ll be fine in the morning. I just think that with the saké and with how little sleep I’ve been getting lately, I really just need to call it a night.” I got to my feet, a sudden yawn reminding me that this wasn’t all that far from the truth. “So, um, thanks for everything, and I’ll see you at work...”

  As I started for the front door, David caught my arm, anchoring me to the couch. “Jess,” he said, giving me a quizzical, concerned look, “I don’t think it’s such a good idea for you to drive.”

  “What? Why?” Several seconds passed before my brain managed to connect my current inebriation with certain laws regarding drunk driving. “Oh,” I said, sinking back down onto the sofa next to him. “Right. Well, guess I’m camping out on the couch tonight, then.” />
  David made a face. “This thing is a medieval torture device. You’ll sleep in the bed.”

  “David, this is your place. If anybody’s gonna sleep on a torture device, it should be me.”

  “It’s my fault you’re stuck here.”

  “You didn’t pour it down my throat. Now, come on.” I lay down on my side, pillowing my head on my arm. “Get off my bed and let me get some sleep. Early day tomorrow.”

  I expected a last protest or two, then a final acquiescence and the sound of David leaving the room, maybe to get me a blanket or a pillow or something. What I did not expect was for his arms to suddenly come around me and lift me up off the couch into the sort of carry you’d expect of a married couple about to go over the threshold.

  I gritted my teeth and tried to focus on the lack of dignity and not on the fact that this was the closest I’d ever been to David in my life, and damn did it feel good. “David,” I growled. “This is just the teeniest bit emasculating.”

  “Sorry,” he said, which was nicely offset by a totally unapologetic grin. And then he gave a little grunt of effort, shifted me into a better position, and set off out through the living room doorway and down the hall. Toward, of course, his freaking bedroom. At which point I began to wonder if maybe I should just keep my mouth shut and see what would happen next.

  Unfortunately, for all that I was in no danger of intimidating anyone ever, I still had a respectable amount of muscle interspersed throughout my rather petite body, and this muscle kept my weight a safe distance above that of a college cheerleader. By the time we were nearing David’s bedroom door, his steps were faltering, he was sweating a little, and I could feel his arms shaking.

  I smiled at him. “Problem?”

  He shook his head and trudged bravely onward, puffing for breath but finally managing to haul me into the bedroom and dump me onto the bed.