So I stopped pretending to be shocked and tentatively took her up on the offer, but not until I presented it to Étienne and Wells Caitlin.
* * * * *
“I will do what I need do to be with you.”
That’s what Étie said when I presented Frankie’s marriage proposal to him over the phone. But there was something strange in his concession.
“Talk to me, baby,” I said to him.
“What do you mean?” he asked knowingly.
“You don’t feel good about this, do you?”
“I do not feel bad, my Jesse. But I feel—how you say—confused, unnatural. I know you no have marriage between two men in your country, just like here in mine. But I am gay man. That is my truth. If I stand before Heavenly Father vowing holy matrimony to one I do not love, then I am not truth. And yet to be with my true love, that is the truth I must give up. Do you understand?”
“Yes, baby. I do. But—”
“No but, my darling. This crazy fucked-up world make us do crazy fucked-up things. I will marry your sister who I do not love, to be with you who I do love. As crazy as it may be, I think Heavenly Father will side with love over man’s crazy fucked-up rules.”
Wells Caitlin was not so poetic.
Chapter Six
“Stop right there,” Attorney Caitlin said even before I was able to fully explain the plan to have my sister marry my lover. His premonition was acute, made sharp by years not only as an attorney but also as a former immigration officer, schooled and wearied by every immigration perpetration imaginable. “I have to warn you, Jesse, that if you’re about to tell me what I think you’re about to tell me, then I can’t legally represent you. If I think you’re about to tell me what I think you’re about to tell me, then you need to stop right now and let me know that you’re not about to suggest what I think you’re about to suggest.”
“Huh?” Okay, sometimes I can be a brick wall.
“So what you’re really about to say to me is that your sister has fallen in love with a man in the Dominican Republic, wants to marry him, and wants to bring him here to live with her as her loving husband.”
“Wells…”
“That’s what you’re telling me, right?”
“Ah…yeah.”
“Good. Now we can do business.”
* * * * *
The previous immigration paperwork on Étie’s behalf was abandoned and Wells Caitlin met with Frankie. I sat back quietly while they conversed, or I should say while the attorney grilled the intended bride.
“I’m so sorry, Miss Templeton, to have to ask you these questions, but so many individuals attempt to commit marriage fraud, and you do understand that is a very serious federal offense?”
“No problem, Mr. Caitlin. I just wanna get my sweet husband-to-be here with me so that we can start having a whole lot of babies and raise them and love them as much as we love each other.” Miss Frankie, so the actress, said all of that with a straight face.
“The immigration officers who will be interviewing you and Mr. Saldano have been known to ask some very invasive questions and, of course, the marriage will have to be consummated.”
“Don’t you worry about that,” Frankie bragged a little too convincingly. “I’m the consummate consummator.”
“But I understand you haven’t met your fiancé in person.”
“No I haven’t,” she spoke up confidently, “but the conversations we have on the phone are fires in the furnace. Trust me.”
“So how did you meet Mr. Saldano?”
“Through my brother here. As you know, Jesse’s a professional photographer, and he decided to go down to the Dominican Republic and do a shoot for a coffee table book he was working on. Étienne was one of the local models he used on the shoot. So when Jesse came back, I saw the picture of Étie and I went, ‘Dayum, Bro, who the fuck is that?’ I went absolutely ga-ga! Here,” she said, pulling out the small wallet-size photo of Étie, part of her documentation arsenal, and flashing it before the impassive lawyer. “I mean, you tell me, Mr. Caitlin, is he not fine or what?”
“He’s a very handsome young man, Miss Templeton.”
“Yes he is,” Frankie concurred with Betty Boop baby talk and a big puckered picture smooch. Sis has been known to overact on occasion.
“So I made Jesse introduce me to him over the phone, and it was love at first chat. After that, we talked almost every day and decided that marriage was definitely part of our immediate future.”
“Why haven’t you been down there to see him yet?”
“I’m an actress, chile,” she said with a Vivica A. Fox ghetto-fabulous head twirl and hand flourish. “I been working on a new film, Short Sleeves in December, for the past three months and haven’t had a single day off. But now that the film’s wrapped—by the way, look for it in theaters this winter. I play Evan Ross’ Cal State LA college professor he has an affair with during Christmas break, but when school starts back up, he dumps me for Meagan Good, a new student fresh off a farm in Indiana. It’s a fabulously messy love story with lots of steamy sex scenes—well anyway, now that the film’s wrapped, I’m headed down there to marry me up my man.”
“You seem to have a lot of experience with marriage, Miss Templeton. What would this be, your third?”
“Only my third. Honey, in Hollywood terms, I’m Mother Teresa.”
* * * * *
Ten days later, with her film shoot behind her, her story intact and a week before I’d have to prep my Snoop Dogg photo shoot for The Source, Frankie accompanied me to Santo Domingo to marry the man of my dreams. We burned up thousands of frequent flier miles gliding over the glistening blue Caribbean with the giddiness of teenagers on spring break. The plane couldn’t set down on its island destination fast enough, especially for me. I dialed Étie’s number the moment wheels met tarmac, and the flight attendant gave us permission.
“Hey, baby!” I singsonged like a Christmas caroler. “We’re here!”
“Oh my darling, I be waiting at main terminal,” he said with a festiveness of his own. “I love you! I miss you!”
We paid the ten dollar visitors’ admittance tax, sailed through customs and entered the main terminal, which was crowded with smiling wide-eyed locals. And then I saw him and he me. He was giggling excitedly. We both were as we fought our way through the thick crowd. We rushed toward each other.
“There he is!” I exclaimed to Frankie as she hustled to keep up with me.
“Dayum!” she blurted out, stopping in her tracks. “He’s even prettier in person!”
I barely heard her. All I could hear was Étie crying, “Baby! Baby!” as we fell into each other’s arms and hugged furiously. When we finally came up for air, I introduced him to my sister.
“It is pleasure to meet you,” he said with a warm sibling hug, “and thank you for doing this for us, Francesca.”
“No problem,” she swooned, eyeballing him from head to crotch to toe.
He led us to the parking lot and helped us load our carry-ons into the car he had rented. He then whisked us off to the all-inclusive beachfront resort in Juan Dolio we had booked for the occasion of the mock honeymoon, which would follow the small civil marriage ceremony in downtown Santo Domingo. I had totally agreed with Étie when he’d said that a church wedding should be reserved for when he and I could legally walk the aisle together.
After getting Frankie settled in her room and reminding her to take full advantage of the all-inclusive cocktails down at the pool bar, Étie and I could not wait to get to our room. Once there, my lover attacked me with all the force of his anxious love, backing my stumbling, giggling body to the bed with his hungry kisses and groping.
“I love you so much, my beautiful chocolate man,” he cried desperately in between kisses, as I landed flat on the bed with a bounce and equal want. He jumped on top of me and pinned my surrendering arms down with a strength I hadn’t experienced from him before. He stared down at me with so much love in his eyes.
>
“You are so beautiful,” I whispered.
“Y tu también, mi amor,” he whispered back. He then covered my face, my neck and my shoulders with more slobbering kisses. The sweet sting of him biting my ears and my neck intoxicated me into whimpers and gasps of sheer pleasure.
“Oh baby…” I cried in a dizzying daze when he bit open my shirt and sucked on my nipples, stiffening them, even as my dick stiffened under the weight of his groin and his thighs and his own hardening dick.
“Yes, baby, that’s it, yeah, baby, that’s it!”
While barely disengaging from what had become deep-throat kissing, we managed to discard our clothes and rolled about the bed interlocked in full nakedness. A chance glance at the huge mirror atop the dresser escalated the heat of my desire to blissful scorching. The reflection of my baby’s strong, sturdy back, trim waist and tight muscled ass pumping and grinding on top of me dazzled me toward breathlessness.
“I need you so much, mi amor,” he whined winsomely, squatting in my lap, grinding his sweet ass into the bush from which my stiff dick was being worked into a dripping rod in desperate need of a tight, deep, warm and wet place to love. “When you no here I ache for you so bad,” he huffed, throwing his head back and forth, riding me, grinding me to near coming.
“Oh Étie! Étie!” I now was whimpering, struggling to hold back the eruption.
“No! No!” he warned frantically, sidesaddling off me, rummaging through the pocket of his pants balled up on the corner of the bed, finding a condom, tearing it open with his teeth then slipping it down my throbbing shaft.
“It be so long you no fuck my ass,” he cried, climbing back on me, lubing my rod with his spit. “I need you fuck me. I need you fuck me good!”
I was so afraid—fierce with want and desire, but afraid, as he lowered his tight hole down on me and swallowed my swollen dick whole. I was afraid that the heathen sexsation would last only seconds, as I was that close to coming, and praying for redemption. I moaned and I groaned and I bit my lip, straining to hold back, as he rode my crazed dick with a ravenous madness, controlling the uncontrollable stir of me deep inside him. His nasty rhythm was hellish and holy, a holy rolling, a churning of incomprehensible bliss.
“Yes, baby! Yes!” he shrieked as he bucked in my lap, slamming himself onto me, impaling himself, getting and giving peak pleasure, riding me and beating his stiff, dripping cock, cursing and praising the joy of the ride. I was dizzy with ecstasy and crazed with the bliss that too had me screaming and rocking and slamming into him with furious joy.
Then neither of us could take it anymore. Our thunderous roars, holy and hellish, syncopated and emancipated, came with a heaving that exploded us both, me deep inside my baby’s beautiful ass, him in a powerful gush of man cream all over my chest.
He collapsed on my chest, spent and pleasured, as spent and pleasured as I was. I held him in my arms. We kissed gently.
“I love you so much, Étie,” I whispered in his ear, weakened by my emotions.
“I love you too, my Jesse,” he whispered back, kissing me then kissing me again. In each other’s arms, we had found heaven.
A sudden knock on the door made us jump, blush and giggle like brazen young schoolboys caught in the afterglow of a really good circle jerk.
“Junie?”
“Junie?” Étie whispered in my ear as he gently rolled off me.
“Short for Junior. Named for my father who was named for his father,” I explained in a whisper. “But since my dad was already Junior, everybody in my family calls me Junie.”
I bent down and kissed the dent of his navel, his flat, tight stomach, and his beautiful mocha-colored penis nestled in his neatly trimmed bush of jet-black pubes. My own dick immediately grew hard again.
“Then I shall call you Junie too,” Étie insisted as he ran his fingers gently through my dreads and grabbed my now throbbing hard-on with his other hand. “I now your family too.”
“Yes you are, my gorgeous,” I whispered weakly as he stroked me, and my kisses found the soft flesh of his neck. “But I do love it when you call me ‘Papi.’”
“Really?”
“Yes I do.”
“Okay, Papi,” he giggled as he eased me up to his lips.
“Junie!” Frankie called out again from the other side of the door.
“Just a second, Frankie.”
“Oh, sorry,” Frankie then said knowingly, a naughty little smile in her voice. “Listen, why don’t you guys finish up what you’re doing and I’ll meet you down by the pool bar. Maybe I can find me some of what y’all gettin’.”
Étie and I looked at each other with a sudden wide-eyed glee as Frankie clicked away from our door, down the shiny tiled veranda that fronted the row of rooms on the second level, anxious to get her drink and her groove on. We broke out into hysterical laughter. And then our eyes met and stilled us both, but not for long, for we were anxious too. And so we made love again, one more time for good measure.
Chapter Seven
I nearly forgot how really beautiful my baby sister was until that sunny afternoon as she sat perched seductively on a shaded barstool and held court over a handsome trio of male tourists from three different corners of the world. There was a bare-chested, bare-assed, tight-chiseled blond European nearly bulging out of a shameless G-string bikini. His dark tan set off his piercing blue eyes with a startle. Next to him was a hairy-chested Spanish lothario with a gold nipple ring and a buzzed six-pack. Perched next to him was a dark-chocolate Jamaican slim-sized hunk. In his white shorts and sandals, he looked more like a pretty young back-in-the-day Taye Diggs than the pretty young back-in-the-day Taye Diggs did.
They hung on Frankie’s every word. They marveled at her every gesture and laughed hysterically at her corniest quip. They vied shamelessly for the favor of her glance like horny young students with hands in the air, hoping to be called on by the teacher they each had wet-dreamed about. Étie and I, ourselves replenished and flush with the joy of our intimacy, smiled and marveled at the sight of Frankie holding her audience spellbound.
“Baby, your sister is so quite beautiful,” Étie whispered to me as we drew closer to the scene.
“She said the same about you,” I whispered back to him, in his ear, stealing a small kiss on his neck in the move.
“Jesse! Étienne!” Frankie burst into glee at the sight of us approaching, compelling her triptych of admirers to follow her grinning glance and check out what they falsely assumed was more competition. And what my sister said next confirmed those assumptions as both wrong and right.
“Gentlemen,” she said to them as she jumped up and hugged both Étie and me, “this is my brother Jesse. And this is Étienne, my fiancé.”
The three of them—German Wilhelm, Spanish Alejandro and Jamaican Carlton—displayed their surprise and masked their disappointment handsomely as they rose jauntily to the occasion. They pumped my hand, then stood in line to give Étie congratulatory backslaps and roughhouse man-hugs. And in tribute to my sister’s unquestionable appeal, they swore, at her request, to be at the wedding ceremony that upcoming Friday in downtown Santo Domingo.
“The perfect photo op,” Frankie would say to me later. “Pictures of us with a few ‘locals’ and a dignitary or two will really soup up the package for the meeting with the immigration officers. Now what will really set it off, Junie, is if we did it in a church.”
“No, Frankie. No church. That’s something both Étie and I are really firm about.”
“But why?”
“Look. It’s bad enough we’re breaking the law. We don’t want to call down lightning bolts by selling the lie in a house of worship.”
“My God, Junie, you are such a conventional paranoid stick-in-the-mud hypocrite.”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re not breaking God’s law. Hell, if God is love and love is for everyone, why shouldn’t you be able to express yourself in God’s house?”
“Frankie, this ain’t
Massachusetts, this is the Dominican Republic.”
“Yeah, right. The place where it’s okay for two men to fuck for money, but it ain’t okay for two men to love for love.”
“Look, Sis, we’re not talking about me and Étie, we’re talking about you and Étie. We know exactly why we’re doing this.”
“Yeah, so you can get your man over to America to be with you so the two of you can enjoy what everybody else in America has a right to enjoy—being with the person you love.”
“There are some rights we’re still waiting on.”
“The kind of rights it’s worth breaking rules over, Junie. What’s getting ready to go down here is one of those by-any-means-necessary situations and we need to make this a full-out production. A church ceremony would be the icing on the cake!”
“Read my lips, Frankie. No church wedding.”
“Come on, Junie.”
“No,” I said firmly. “Besides, we’re saving that for when Étie and I can get married.”
“Huh?”
“When the laws change, when society changes, and it is changing. Then we’ll get married in a church.”
“Well why the hell didn’t you say that in the beginning?”
* * * * *
That Friday we all gathered in the little courtroom in downtown Santo Domingo. I, along with Wilhelm, Alejandro, Carlton, a civil servant on her lunch break, a courtroom peace officer and a tourist couple from Toronto, stood by as a magistrate administered the vows to Étienne Saldano and Francesca Templeton Chapelle DaSilva in poetic Spanish.
I kept my camera busy throughout, marveling at the beautiful lie so stunningly, yet simply, captured in my lens. If ever there was a tableau so sacred and profane, this was it. My sister and my lover were the picture of perfection; she in an uncharacteristically understated summer Chanel, he in cream linen slacks and shirt, a gold-cocoa tie, as luminous as his skin tone, knotted neatly at the collar.
Aching For It Page 3
