“Good morning,” came the sound of Kevin’s voice.
I didn’t want to answer. Answering meant crossing the line between my bittersweet morning-memories of Sean and me and my necessary reality. There was a world of difference between what I wanted and what I could have. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes.
On a chair that was drawn up close to the bed, Kevin was sitting hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, intently regarding me as if I were a prize sculpture in a museum. Kevin. The past two nights with him didn’t feel real. Weren’t they some movie I’d watched? He was a gay man’s dream that I couldn’t dream, naked and with his spread legs giving me a prize view of his cock and relaxed balls resting on the seat.
“Hey, Tom Smith,” he said with the smallest of smiles. He reached out and flicked his thumb against my cheek. His voice sounded a little more hoarse than usual.
“Hey, yourself,” I said.
“You all right?” Kevin nodded in the general direction of my ass.
“I’m good,” I said cautiously. The Teacher of the Year was back in full force.
His gaze flicked toward the bathroom, then back to me. “That was really good last night. The way you moved, the way you looked.”
“Yeah, it was good,” I said, shifting my eyes to look at his feet. He had long toes.
“No, I mean it. You’re a pretty uptight guy, you know that? But you let loose a little last night.”
“Well, yeah, I guess.”
He shifted forward and reached out as if he wanted to take my hand. But my right arm was tucked under me, and it wouldn’t have been easy to produce the range of motion to extend and hold out my left arm. “That was fine, to see you like that,” Kevin said. “You know, it’s okay to let go.”
My eyes abandoned the carpet as I consciously allowed a flare of genuine annoyance to spike in me. He didn’t really know me, and I didn’t need preaching to. “Okay for you, maybe.”
“Geez, you’re as prickly as a cactus. Worse than my ex-wife.”
Right. Sure. I should have known. This guy who came across so sincere, Christ-come-down-from-the-cross, he was just like the rest of us, putting on disguises. Sometimes I thought that half the gay men had taken vows with an unsuspecting woman, and the other half lived with me in the closet.
“Listen, Tom,” Kevin said, oblivious, “I wasn’t blowing smoke when I said yesterday I was tired of the club scene. What do you say we meet up again? I can usually get away—”
“No,” I said definitely. I pushed the sheet aside and sat up in bed.
Kevin sat up straight too. “I know you’re a cautious kind of guy. But every few months, we could meet at the bar, have a few drinks, and then… leave with each other. Get to know each other. Maybe… maybe we can make something more of this.”
“I said no.” My clothes were bunched on the floor, testament to how last night I hadn’t cared about anything but my dick. Well, this morning I was sober and I cared about other things. I got up and grabbed for my shirt, shook it out, and didn’t look at Kevin.
He stubbornly plowed on. “We’re good with each other, don’t you think?”
The shirt sleeves were inside out. I remembered Kevin pulling them off me and jerking at the stubborn cuffs that had lingered on my wrists. He’d laughed.
“Tom? Did you hear me?” Finally, Mister Patient stood up. “You can’t deny it, we’ve had great sex.”
I finally got the shirt to cooperate and started to pull it on. “That doesn’t mean we have to—”
Kevin took a step closer. “I’m not saying we should move in together, for God’s sake. Why not think about—”
“Are you that hard up?” I rounded on him, my open shirt flapping around me, and snarled. “There are a hundred guys who’ll show up next weekend at the bar that you can pick up. Just leave me alone.” Leave me be to put on my clothes, to resume the order of my days.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” He ran fingers across his hair. “Last night was great, the whole thing, the dinner and—”
“I never implied that we—”
“You barely gave me your real name, if that really is your name, but I thought that we—”
“Forget it,” I said, intending by the snap of my words for that to be my final say on the matter. I snagged my briefs and hauled them on, then picked up my good dress pants. They were wrinkled so that it was going to be embarrassing wearing them out to my car, but I sure wasn’t going to borrow Kevin’s iron so that I didn’t have that spent-the-night-and-just-been-screwed look as I left.
The pants went on one leg at a time like they always did. Nothing had changed. Kevin was silent as I dressed in haste.
Button up the shirt, tuck into the pants. Zip up and engage the catch, then button the shirt cuffs. Look for the socks, one under the bed, and the tie, over by the mirror where I’d shoved Kevin and tried to crawl inside his skin. It was a good thing the mirror wasn’t shattered. That would have been a great way to start some of the best sex I’d ever had, confronting shards of reflecting glass, him and me over and over again in tiny pieces.
I put the tie on and even made a decent knot for it, and by the time I was finished slipping on my boots, I had myself under control.
“Why won’t you give this a chance?” Kevin asked like a kid would, plaintively, as if he couldn’t understand the workings of an unreachable mind. He was over by the window now, looking out on the parking lot through the sheers. “I’m not asking for much.”
My anger, which I was well aware I was using as a shield, drained away, and I was left vulnerable and sad. But I had at least some courtesy remaining, some sense of dignity. I went over to him, came up behind him, but didn’t touch him.
“Look, it isn’t you. It’s….” I stopped myself from saying it was me, because that sounded too much like I was laying blame on myself. “I told you before, didn’t I? That first time. That I like to keep things in their place.”
“Compartmentalize,” Kevin said. “That’s what you said.”
“Right.”
“It’s not that you’ve got somebody at home, a partner or a boyfriend?”
I sighed, and the weariness that lately had become as much a part of me as the necessity to do lesson-planning returned in full force. I felt like I could sleep for a week. “No, I don’t have anybody at home.”
Kevin turned around to face me. “I don’t either. But I’m tired of living like this, and I’m going to make some changes. I need somebody in my life.”
“Good for you, then, but that’s not for me.”
He searched my face. “I think you’re making a mistake. If you reconsider, I could give you my cell—”
I actually backed away from him, as if the very idea of having his number could destroy me. “That’s not going to happen. Whether you understand me or not, I’ve got good reason for what I do.”
“I guess you think you do. Wish I had the chance to change your mind.”
How could he pursue this idea so doggedly after only a few nights spent together? What, did he want to make one good fuck the basis of a relationship? Life wasn’t like that, and personal risks seldom paid off. Like I’d said, there were plenty of men who’d be happy to take Kevin up on whatever he offered; he just happened to have picked the one guy who wasn’t interested. He wouldn’t be alone for long.
He stuck out his hand, and I felt that the least I could do was shake it, though it felt eerie for me to have all my clothes on and to have him standing there bared and exposed.
“So long, Tom,” he said. “Good luck to you. Try to let loose once in a while. It’ll do you good.”
Sure. I’d done that last night, and look at what it’d gotten me. “Goodbye, Kevin.”
I walked to the door, my footsteps almost soundless on the carpet, and I felt like… like the smallest leaf from a tree, fallen and caught in rushing water, inexorably drawn downstream. I paused with my hand on the doorknob.
“Don’t think this is easy,” I said witho
ut turning around, my voice low.
My heart pounded in my ear a few times before Kevin said, “No, I don’t imagine it is. But it’s not necessary, Tom. Think about that.”
I left, and I knew there wouldn’t be another time Kevin and I would have sex.
Chapter 2
Gunning, Texas
THE FIRE ants were taking over the backyard. There was a telltale black mound sticking up out of the grass over by my abandoned vegetable garden, another one in the corner under the tallest crape myrtle, and a third one peeking out of some leaves that had been blown against the back part of the fence. If I left those mounds there, I wouldn’t be able to walk around in bare feet without the tiny red critters swarming up onto my ankles and biting. I’d already endured a rash of stinging bites earlier in the summer, and I absolutely was not going to tolerate any more.
I stomped over to the door that led from the patio into the garage and into the dark, oil-slicked recesses where my Miata lived. My garage was a mess, but I knew where the container of Amdro should be, off in a far corner on top of a stack of boxes. I dumped some newspapers onto the floor, uncovered the ant-killer, and clomped outside again. The poison should control the ants.
Back in Houston I’d regained control just long enough to say “No” to the best opportunity that was likely to come my way. By the time I was headed out of town that control had flown the coop and hadn’t been seen again. I was thirty-eight years old—as a matter of fact, I was thirty-eight years old this day, exactly, because July twenty-sixth was my birthday—and I’d had the better part of the past four months to regret what I’d told Kevin that stupid, stupid Sunday morning.
Making my way carelessly in my flip-flops, I took the poison over to the dark lumps of dirt and surrounded them with the flecks of feed that would kill the ants in a few days. I upended the canister and thumped it until the last flakes fell out. Then I tossed it up to the patio and watched it skitter across the concrete until it banged against the sliding glass door that led to my tiny house. Who needed more than tiny? I was the only one living there, and it seemed to me that I’d shrunk down to child-size. My yard was a big corner lot, though. It was surrounded by a high, wooden fence that was outlined with swaying, pink-blossomed crape myrtles on one side, glowing red-leaved bushes on the other, and honeysuckle vines in back. I pivoted on my heel and surveyed it all with a jaundiced air. My home and my refuge and my fortress. I could spend as many hours out here drinking as I wanted to, and no one would be the wiser. So what if Mr. Smith, teacher extraordinaire, was finishing off a six-pack a little more often than usual this summer? Nobody knew it was because he’d finally cracked, because one good dinner, one good conversation, one good fuck, and one good man had revealed his careful deceptions and his ordered life for the empty facades they were.
How was I supposed to go back to pretending this life was good enough? My brief burst of energy suddenly drained away; I could actually feel my reserves headed straight for my toes. I slumped where I was standing and ran a hand over the bristles of my early five o’clock shadow. This summer, I’d pulled myself in like a hedgehog rolling into a ball. I’d been brooding, alternately depressed and angry. Kevin had stolen my equanimity back in that hotel room, and I didn’t know how to get it back.
A seen-better-days red oak towered over the patio. Slowly, I walked to it and looked up, as I had most days that summer. I went over the well-worn thought that it might not last another year. The leaves were sparse and small, some of them misshapen. I didn’t know how long the red oak had been standing there, but I guessed it’d been a sapling way back when the town of Gunning had been mostly open prairie.
I didn’t know much about trees, and I kept thinking I should consult the nursery over in Kenneton about it. Maybe it only needed to be sprayed. But I hadn’t been able to stir myself to take a sample of the tree and bring it in for advice. Kenneton was a good twenty-five miles away, and I hadn’t done much traveling lately, except in my head. Sometimes I went back to Houston, saw Kevin at Good Times, pulled my fist back, and decked him with a right jab. Other times… well, other times were hazy. How did men like us make something of what had started with a midnight hookup? I couldn’t wrap my head around any change to the stark realities of my life. I didn’t want to change. I couldn’t. For one thing, there were no gay men in Gunning, Texas. No visible gay men, anyway. Here they didn’t exist, because the community wouldn’t allow them to. That part of me couldn’t be.
A fly buzzed nearby, and I followed its flight until it disappeared over the steamy asphalt roof of the garage. Inside the house, propped on top of my TV, were three birthday cards: one from my brother and his family, one from the sister who lived in London, and one from my mom. Probably my mother would try to call this evening, and she’d leave her rendition of “Happy Birthday” on my answering machine. For sure Grant would call.
They cared enough to remember me on this sultry summer day, but none of them had ever asked me why I wasn’t married, never dated, and had never to their knowledge had a relationship with anyone. Did they think I was sexless? By God, I wasn’t.
Sweat prickled under the back of my shirt as I stood there in the sun. At dawn the temperature had already hovered at eighty-one degrees, and the Weather Channel was forecasting that the mercury would hit one hundred and two by the end of the day. Summer in Texas, just great.
I retreated to the lawn chair next to the gas grill, fished a beer out of the six-pack cooler I had there, sat down, and took a long swallow that made the heat tolerable. Nothing else had made this summer better as I questioned myself ad nauseam over what I’d done in Houston. Why couldn’t I get Kevin out of my head? I’d bedded plenty of men—I didn’t want to think of how many over the years—but none of the others had done this to me.
It felt like he’d forced all the reasonable, mature thoughts of a well-adjusted teacher out of the neat slots in my brain and replaced them with indecision, the emotional ramblings of a teenager, and the bitter recriminations of a disappointed, frustrated gay man who never got enough sex and didn’t have anybody to talk to.
I didn’t want to think of him. What good did it do to think of him? But I remembered what Kevin looked like down to the pores on his nose. I remembered how it had felt to be touched by him that one night when I’d really known who I was in bed with. The sure way he walked. The way he talked. The way he’d tried to give me his telephone number in case I changed my mind.
You see, Kevin, I’m a fool.
The way he’d invited me to join him on that day’s tour, when instead of my precious peace and quiet I could have had a companion, a friend, maybe someone next to me in the place that was always empty.
The way he’d fucked me.
Yeah, I remembered that well. I’d been plastered, and I’d surrendered pretty much completely, had thrown my tough-guy, strong-guy disguise out the window and let everything hidden inside me out. He’d forced his way into me, literally and figuratively, and I still felt the echoes of him there inside. He’d run his hands over my ass and taken the whole shape of me, because he sure had gotten under my skin.
I shifted in the lawn chair, and it rocked back and forth on the uneven surface. My cock was getting hard. That wasn’t any surprise, because lately that was always happening. I pressed the Miller Lite can down on it, just enough to feel it, then put the can down on the concrete, on a crack that ran diagonally from one corner across the square and then under the house. Maybe I had foundation problems.
I closed my eyes and lifted my face to the unrelenting sun. The leaves of the red oak, which used to provide a thick coating of shade, only served to filter out the light now and then, so that it flickered behind my eyelids. I flinched but stubbornly kept my eyelids exposed to the sun, then finally gave in and shaded my closed eyes with my hand. I remembered reading an interview with a Catholic priest celebrating his fiftieth year in the priesthood. He’d been asked if celibacy had been difficult for him, and he’d replied that it had gotten eas
ier as the years went on. The less you got, he’d said, the less you needed it.
It didn’t work that way for me. I carried a deep craving inside me, usually banked through sheer force of will or maybe my own foolhardiness, and it felt as if Kevin had blasted through to the core and set it loose. This summer’s blistering nights had seen me hornier than I’d been since I was a twenty-year-old. Whether I wanted to or not, I ached for that pickup from the bar with the eyes that spoke to me. Or I ached for what he thought he could give me, what we could have made. I wasn’t sure which it was. Probably both.
Kevin had related to me as a person, not a cock, when to my shame I’d done my best to relate to him the opposite way. Ever since I’d driven away from that Courtyard parking lot, I’d been longing for that honest give-and-take—the normal company of other people—even as I denied it to myself.
Such a simple thing, such a complex thing. I could call up a number of people—mainly fellow teachers—and suggest we go out for a movie and a beer, but that wouldn’t provide what I needed. I wasn’t out. Not to anybody. Wasn’t that the crux of it? No one I knew from over the long stretch of years I’d spent teaching really knew me; then Kevin had come along and asked me my last name.
I laughed sourly. Kevin. I’d practically slammed the door in his face as I stalked away from him. He probably had been more than happy to consign me to the dustbin of his mind.
Damn.
Damn, damn.
I stayed out in the heat as long as I could, rationing the six-pack, and then I went back into the house and took a shower. After that, I lay down on my bed and retrieved my jack-off towel from the bottom shelf of the nightstand. I tried to take my time, but my coming burst out of me in a heated, angry confusion that didn’t do much to relieve my aching. And afterward, the familiar lassitude overcame me. I was so tired of being my own fortress.
Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits Page 77
