Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits

by Jenna Hilary Sinclair

  “Come on.”

  “Can’t I be attracted to you? Can’t I like you?”

  “Kevin, I’m just an ordinary—”

  “Let’s go out to dinner together.”

  I didn’t even stop to think. “I can’t.”

  “You didn’t let me finish. Let’s go out to dinner in Abilene. Can you do that? Two businessmen consulting over steaks on Saturday night? It’s more than a hundred miles away, and nobody you know will see us.”

  “Businessmen?”

  “I don’t know that I have the patience to keep dancing around you like this. It’ll take a hundred years for us to get to know one another when I can only exchange two words with you at school, and when I can only get away on Tuesdays.”

  “You were the one who said you weren’t in this for a casual fuck,” I said.

  “Right now a casual fuck sounds great, doesn’t it? Like we had back in Houston? Remember them?”

  I pushed away from the laundry basket. “You’re good in bed.” I could feel his ghost-hands on my ass.

  “Give me the chance to remind you of that.”

  “I thought you said you wanted to go out to dinner.”

  “And something afterward. Only if we feel like it. A motel. A city like Abilene has hundreds of them.”

  I rubbed my arm across my face, my bare arm, because in the privacy of my own home I had put on one of my few short-sleeved shirts. Who was I trying to fool? There was no way I was going to pass this up; I was hard simply talking to him.

  “Yes,” I said. “Why should we stop fucking just because you’ve got some weird idea of dating each other? It’s not natural. Let’s do it.”

  “You like having sex in a different city, don’t you? You get off on it.”

  “Yes,” I said again. And then, “No.” This really was scary, chill-up-my-spine, cock-stiffening scary. What was I agreeing to? Abilene was right up the road, where the mothers of my students went to shop for Christmas.

  “Saturday. I bet you don’t want me to pick you up.”

  “Let me drive you in the Miata.”

  “You do love that car, don’t you? With the top down.”

  Could a thirty-eight-year-old man feel giddy? “With the top down. I’ll come get you at your house.”

  “I’ll make reservations someplace nice. Come at five o’clock? Saturday?”

  “I’ll come,” I growled, wildly emboldened, “every chance I get.”

  Kevin groaned. “If you don’t want phone sex, you’d better hang up right now. I’m busting out of my shorts.”

  “Goodbye, Kevin,” I said wickedly.

  “Bitch. See you soon. All of you.”

  I spent the rest of the evening wondering what it was about him that so pulled me out of myself that I’d agreed to a date in the city that was the home of Abilene Christian University, one of the most conservative schools in the state. Around ten-thirty my cell buzzed with a text message from him.

  Forgot address 237 darwin. Can’t wait.

  Ten minutes later another one came through.

  No mulligans No beards.

  Fifteen minutes after that came another.

  Forget top down. Know you won’t want that. Good night sleep tight.

  Chapter 4

  Riding Shotgun

  IN APRIL of our junior year, Sean and I drove to New Orleans. We’d only been more or less together a few months, everything casual, nothing any-big-deal, but he had a car and got us fake IDs, I had some money my folks had sent me, and New Orleans was only eight hours away. That was nothing for us. We were young and dumb and full of come, and the whole world was before us. Even though we were faggots, back then we still thought the world was before us. Or at least I did.

  We left San Marcos at mid-afternoon on Thursday and pointed the car toward Bourbon Street. I’ll never forget that ride, the high point of my time before manhood, though I’d been convinced at the age of twenty that I already was a man. We rolled the windows down, all four of them, and the air swept through Sean’s clunky old Oldsmobile like some magic carpet that was transporting us to heaven. Heaven. Three days of drinking, finding the gay bars, and sex. Nirvana.

  Sean laughed at everything, the dumb billboards and the corny music on a country music radio station and how we were skipping class, and he pulled me right along with him until everything seemed funny and I couldn’t help but laugh with him. We made our way across Texas and then across Louisiana as the sun set behind us, rocketing like maniacs across the long stretch of elevated highway that was Interstate 10, not inching our way over the posted speed limit but blasting through it. When we stopped to take a piss at a McDonald’s outside Lake Charles, we tossed the empty six-pack of Bud. We didn’t stay to eat because we were only two hundred miles from the fabled city on the bayou.

  Before we got to Lafayette, Sean grabbed me around my neck, pulled me close, and kissed me while we were going eighty-five. His lips were hard against mine, first and only man so far for me. “I love doing this,” he told me straight into my face, not even seeming to care about the road or being seen. Who cared? “Let’s keep driving forever.”

  The road went on and on, and I could not imagine any other way, any other time, any other me.

  As we left the outskirts of Baton Rouge, I stuck my head out the window and howled at the moon like a dog. The car behind us suddenly decelerated; I watched its headlights retreat. Sean said, “That’s my man.”

  We rolled into New Orleans at eleven-thirty, got to only a few bars before closing time, and staggered down the streets of the French Quarter until past four. The ships trolling the Mississippi let loose their foghorns as if we were actors in an old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie. Sean and I liked to watch those late at night with our hands down each other’s pants as we lounged on his bed.

  On Friday night we found the bars that were filled with men like us. I got blown by some dude wearing leather in a back room. Sean dared me into it—Go ahead, it’s why we’re here, you know you want to—and the fear and the strange lips on my dick and the sounds of the other guys doing the same thing as we were in the nearby shadows gave me my most intense shooting ever. Then a cop pushed aside the curtain that pretended to shield us from the outside world, growling, “Everybody back up front, let’s keep this place legal.” My instant fear and then relief erupted in a small hysterical hiccup of a laugh; the cop shoved me on the back as I walked past him.

  Back where he was leaning on the bar, Sean wanted to know what it’d been like, and half an hour later he disappeared, returning with a smirk and a case of the clap we both had to get treated for two weeks later.

  But we didn’t know that then. I changed that weekend from virgin-except-with-Sean to experienced-gay-man, a rite of passage we both had felt we needed. When we drove across the river to our motel, swimming in booze up to our eyeballs, we sang “YMCA” at the top of our lungs, convinced nobody else knew what it really meant—really, really meant—except us.

  On Sunday we slept until almost noon and were awakened by the housekeeper banging on the door, shouting, “Get out in thirty minutes or we charge you for another day” in an accent so thick we could barely understand her. We untangled ourselves from each other and then rolled back to the center, me toward Sean, him toward me, each of us suddenly on fire. He climbed on top of me and we humped until I was almost rubbed raw, but seeing him when he came was worth it.

  We drove back with everything casual, still nothing-any-big-deal, with the sun shining down on us and everything right with the world.

  THE PALMS of my hands were slippery against the leather-clad steering wheel as I turned onto Darwin Lane in Kenneton just past five o’clock. It was a soggy, humid day in west Texas, but I couldn’t blame my nerves on the sun and the shimmering air. It seemed since the day I’d met Kevin—at least since the second time I’d met him—he’d been edging me away from my comfort zone, where I lived hugging the wall. I was aware of it and was, inconceivably, letting it happen. Not for
a second had I considered not meeting him, not driving with him to Abilene, not having dinner with him, or not falling into bed with him later that night, but I had wished I didn’t own the only Miata I’d ever seen in the area. At least it was alpine green, a nice sedate color that didn’t demand attention. I hoped.

  Kenneton was a more prosperous town than Gunning, bigger, with the malls and chain stores we lacked. While Gunning had an old-time, traditional Texas flavor—local fiddlers played on the town square every Saturday night—Kenneton could probably have been picked up by a giant hand and put down as a Houston suburb, and it wouldn’t have been out of place. While Gunning citizens gathered at Little Bit’s in the mornings for coffee and home fries, Kenneton boasted the elegance of the Mourning Dove Country Club. The differences between the two towns had grown because of the proximity to the interstate. Gunning was far enough away to have escaped modernization, and it moved at a different pace with a different mindset, more than those who lived in Washington, DC, or San Francisco or even the state capital of Austin could know. You couldn’t get much more middle-American, though some might say backward-American instead.

  Driving over to Kenneton always did feel like stepping from one world to another. Kevin’s street was in an upscale subdivision—Gunning had no subdivisions, only the right side of the railroad tracks and the wrong side—with crape myrtles still in bloom along the houses and sharply edged, vigorous green lawns. It was the kind of neighborhood where the only trucks parked in front were the ones owned by the lawn mowing services.

  I pulled up in front of Kevin’s house, killed the engine, and without letting myself think, hauled myself out of the low-slung seat of the Miata. My feet took me up the walkway with my judgment in suspended animation, though my heart was beating wildly as I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants. It occurred to me that we could skip the dinner and the driving and go directly to his bed. My body had been turned on since that phone call, simmering on the edge of a constant arousal like the dick-ready, trigger-happy boy I’d once been. But Kevin wanted it this dinner-date way, even though we both knew how the evening would end. Besides, could I envision sauntering over here for sex with no cover, no disguise, no reason other than that he was here and I wanted him?

  Not anybody else: him.

  A few weeks ago, I’d known the answer to that question. Now, maybe not. I was doing something I would never have contemplated six months before, that I’d considered much too risky. Somehow Kevin had forced me into rearranging what was important. How had he done that?

  My thumb pressed the doorbell, the door opened, and part of my answer was standing right there. Sex-on-a-stick. Kevin looked like he’d just come in from running a mile in the Texas heat, in a black T-shirt and white gym shorts and his scruff of a beard, a far cry from the put-together elegance I’d met in Houston. I couldn’t believe that here was the man I’d spend the rest of the weekend with, this attractive, personable man. Not staring at him wasn’t an option.

  He mopped the sweat off his face with the hem of his shirt, exposing his flat belly and his navel and the hair that ran straight down. He had to be doing it on purpose, didn’t he? “Sorry I’m running late,” he said. I bet. “Come on in.”

  He stepped back from the open door, holding it wide for me. I walked into his foyer that was all chrome and glass and high chandelier and creamy tiles underfoot, and he closed the door behind me. Through the archway I could see newspapers strewn on the carpeted floor and a coffee cup turned on its side next to the sofa. I managed to dredge up, “This is a nice house you’ve got.”

  “Thanks. Tom?”

  I turned to find he’d come close enough to kiss. He had bluish-grayish eyes with dilated pupils.

  I suppose if we’d been younger, it would have been different. Or if we’d been in Houston where the rules of nonengagement while having sex were clearly spelled out, and desperation was the name of the game. I might have shoved him up against the wall, or he might have dragged me down onto his living room couch. That’s what I wanted to have happen; that’s what I was familiar with and knew. But instead Kevin tilted his head and closed his eyes. Awkwardly, I tilted my head and closed my eyes too, and I moved forward, blindly seeking, until our mouths rested against each other.

  That was it for a long span of seconds: no movement, no sound… the smallest kind of kiss, the kiss of children who didn’t know how to do it, or of lovers who’d done everything and could encompass the universe with a mere touch. Then Kevin made a noise at the back of his throat, slid his hand to the back of my neck, and slowly traced the shape of my upper lip with the tip of his tongue.

  Unfamiliar. Uncomfortable. Sexy as could be. This was a kind of kiss I couldn’t remember exchanging with anyone. It took all my resolve to stand there, take it, and let him do it to me. My tingling lip, his wet tongue, the stroke of his thumb against my neck, my deep, accelerating breathing. It was… a kiss I could associate with no one at all except Kevin.

  I needed something to hold onto, because bits of me seemed to be flying off into space. My hands moved to his hips, the folds of his clinging shorts against my fingertips, and then around to his hard ass. I remembered it, small and muscled, the athlete he’d been. My palms gripped, flexed, gripped again, aiming for an elusive anchor I couldn’t quite find, would never be able to find merely in the body. I pulled him full against me instead, releasing myself to the purely physical kick of him wearing so little that revealed so much, while I was dressed in the armor of going out for dinner. I forced him to abandon the delicate, painter-like dabbing against my lip and plunged into a full, open-mouthed kiss. His tongue against mine still tasted sweet, the way it had before.

  I tore my mouth away from his before I wouldn’t have the will left to do it. “You slut,” I growled. “You dressed like this deliberately. Did you think you needed the extra to turn me on?”

  He kissed the base of my neck, above the collar of my green button-up shirt. “I remember from before, Tom. You don’t need anything extra.”

  “You’re right,” I said, and I humped into him.

  His eyelids dropped and then fluttered in arousal. “Do you want to….”

  Just asking that was enough for him to regain control. He straightened, and only then did I realize he’d sagged against me, that I’d been taking on a lot of his weight with my hands on his ass.

  “No,” he answered his own question. “I promised you dinner, didn’t I?”

  “Dinner, yes, prime rib. And after dinner, this too.” I released him completely only to palm his basket in front, his half-hard cock and the swell of soft nuts. The yielding cloth of his athletic shorts revealed everything to my fingers.

  “Bastard,” he said with real appreciation. “I am so going to bang your brains out tonight.”

  If I’d been turned on before, that was nothing compared to the wave of lust that swamped me then. I could imagine it: the sounds we would make, his weight on me, the smell of sex filling whatever motel room we’d find, reaching, reaching to shoot off with every thrust of him in me.

  I let go of my hold on his bulge and stepped back, resisting the urge to say Promise? “We’re not going anywhere,” I said, “with you dressed like that.”

  He held up both hands. “Okay, okay, watch me fly. I’ll go take a shower and we can get on the road.”

  He went past me in a rush and was halfway through his living room when he abruptly turned back. “Listen,” Kevin said. “I’ve been thinking. Would you mind if we took my truck?”

  Seconds passed while I processed his words. I was busy taking him in and simultaneously trying to subdue my reaction to taking him in. “What?”

  “I said, how about if we take my truck tonight?”

  At that moment it occurred to me that I hadn’t needed to come to his house at all, that we could have simply met in Abilene, away from prying eyes. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

  I shook my head. “I don’t really want my car sitting out in front of your house overnight
.”

  “You can put it in my garage out back. What do you say?”

  It wasn’t a good feeling, knowing I was retreating from my bold enthusiasm of a few nights before—let me drive us with the top down—to this cautious assessment of realities—let’s hide my car where it can’t be seen. It was hard to picture being comfortable riding in the shotgun seat of his Silverado, not being in charge, but I told myself that with Kevin I didn’t need to be in charge in order to protect myself.

  “All right.”

  “Good. There’s only one side cleared out to park in, so you switch them out while I shower. The keys to the truck are on the dining room table, and the garage is out back. The code is 4747. Give me ten minutes and I’ll be right with you.”

  I did all that and then waited in his living room, listening to the sounds of the shower going, of him toweling off and then dressing. I stared down at my hands a lot, wanting to go in to him: Kevin naked, his skin sleek with water. My throat was dry thinking of the two of us together after a six-month drought, and when he came in fully-dressed, ready to go, I swallowed heavily to see him. Tonight....

  THE DRIVE along the two-lane blacktop from Kenneton to Abilene was beautiful if a person favored flat prairieland, lots of cattle, the occasional windmill turbine twirling along the top of a mesa, and the decorative addition of rocking horse pumps pulling oil from the ground. The sun tracked us to the left, dodging streaks of clouds as it headed for the horizon. Kevin twisted his visor over to shield him from the light, and I noted that his pale eyes must be sensitive.

  Sitting next to him as we drove through Kenneton was especially uncomfortable. I fought it, because I didn’t want to act like Ennis Del Mar from Brokeback Mountain, convinced everybody was looking at him and knew his secret. But even so, it was a lot easier once we left the last strip shopping center behind and the highway stretched before us. I put my elbow up on the window rest, reminding myself that a man could keep his own secrets, and be cautious, and still be a man with pride in himself and his decisions.