I looked at them the way George had, seeing the not-quite-children, almost-adults, and I wanted to be a teacher for the rest of my life. I was born to teach; there wasn’t anything better. “What you did, all on your own, was extraordinary. Remember what you accomplished tonight when you run into rough patches in your life, because everybody does. You can… get through it. You can find some way to make it good again.”
I smiled, because a lump had lodged in my throat, and I was very, very glad that George had asked me to help him direct Rent. “That’s all. Sorry to get so serious on you. Tomorrow’s Thanksgiving. Have a good day. Enjoy these next four days off. You’ve earned them.”
“Happy Thanksgiving, Mr. Smith,” Channing said, and then she came over and hugged me. I was startled and didn’t quite know how to react, but then I gingerly hugged her back.
George clapped me on the shoulder, my bad side, and that sent a ripple of pain down my arm. “Tom, it’s been a pleasure working with you.”
“And with you, George,” I said, and I really meant it.
“Hold on a minute,” Danielle said. “I want a picture of the two of you. Could you stand there and shake hands?”
We did that for her while everybody watched, and she snapped the picture.
“Good,” George boomed. “So, tell me, what will you be doing tomorrow for Thanksgiving? Going to your brother’s like you usually do?”
It was only my imagination that everybody stopped breathing while they waited for my answer. Not everybody was watching and listening. Directly over George’s shoulder, though, Kevin was. The hope on his face was excruciating.
“No,” I said as steadily as my shaking world would allow. I trained my eyes on George and kept them there or I wouldn’t have been able to say a word. “I’m not. Kevin and I are leaving tomorrow for a trip to Big Bend.”
Said. Done. Acknowledged. One more trip out of town over a weekend for us, but openly. “We’re taking my Miata,” I added.
George’s eyebrows rose, but then he smiled, and it was a genuine smile. “You are? You and Kevin? That’s great! You’ll have a good time. When do you leave?”
I risked a look at Kevin. Oh, yes, it had all been worth it. Kevin was trying so hard to act nonchalant, but I knew this man now, and I saw his joy.
“Kevin?” I asked. “When do we leave? Five a.m.?”
He groaned and clapped a hand to his head. “Have pity on an old man. Six?”
“We could do seven, but only if we stop for breakfast at that little café in San Angelo.”
He drew closer to me. “It won’t be open on Thanksgiving.”
I took a step closer to him. “We’ll have to figure something else out then.”
George turned away to pick up his flowers. Danielle got busy taking the makeshift curtains down from the kitchen. Sandy started pulling up the masking tape from the floor. The kids were picking up their stools as keepsakes to bring home.
Nobody here cared.
“We could eat before we leave,” Kevin suggested, and his eyes danced.
I wanted to keep them dancing. I wanted… to be free. “At my house,” I said deliberately. “Drive over and we can leave from there.”
I’d wondered how Kevin had looked when I’d told him I would spend the weekend at his house. Now I knew, ten times over.
In some other universe, or maybe in Texas a hundred years from then, he would have grabbed me in a hug and kissed me, and we would have laughed out loud, because he didn’t have to push me anymore.
Kevin had seen a place for the two of us together all the way back when he’d asked me to tour Houston with him for just a day. He’d been in that place, somehow, in a way that I still didn’t understand, from the beginning. And now I’d finally caught up with him. I wasn’t walking behind.
But this wasn’t a hundred years from now. This was Gunning, Texas, in 2008, and freedom only reached so far. So instead, Kevin looked up at the ceiling and grinned. I watched him. My confident Kevin.
“That,” Kevin said, and he looked back to me, “sounds like a very good idea.”
Chapter 10
Lead On
FOUR OF us were the last to leave the social hall. George, Jenny, Kevin, and I made certain everything was put back where it should be before walking out into the night together. Outside, on the sidewalk, George shook my hand one more time, I congratulated him on the play’s success, and he and Jenny turned away to where they’d parked their car in front of the church.
“Where are you parked?” Kevin asked.
I still felt slightly giddy from all that had happened. I hadn’t let myself imagine that I’d walk out of that church hall with Kevin so securely by my side. Anyone talking to him the past half hour would have assumed he was happy about the way Channing had done so well in the play, but I knew the smile that hadn’t left his face was for me. For us. I might have been doing a little smiling myself. I’d really done it. Maybe nobody had noticed but Kevin—and George—but in my own very small way I’d taken a huge step toward a new life. I had one foot out of my own personal closet and one foot still in. Even so, I’d never thought I’d get this far.
Waving down the street, I said, “I’m that way two, three blocks.”
“I’m here in the lot,” Kevin said as happily as if that were the most fortuitous circumstance there could be. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride to your car.”
My feet were in perfectly fine shape, but riding with him would prolong the time until we said goodbye. Suddenly, I was desperate for alone time with my lover.
“All right,” I said. “Lead on.”
Shutting off the rest of the world when we slammed the doors of the Silverado was the best thing. We were the last vehicle remaining under the security lights, and George and Jenny had disappeared around the corner.
Kevin started the engine, but then he turned in his seat toward me. The outside lights didn’t reach into the pickup; his face was shadowed, but still I knew the slope of his cheek, the curve of his eyebrows, and the desire in his eyes. He laughed softly. “I want to kiss you in the worst way right now.” His hand reached across the console between us, not quite touching me.
The temptation to kiss him right then was overwhelming, and I actually swayed toward him before I caught myself. I grabbed the edge of the leather seat instead. I might have wanted nothing more than to connect us in whatever ways were possible in the restricting front seat of his truck, but we couldn’t. The church parking lot wasn’t really private, not like his house. Or mine.
Frustration raced through me. “Fuck,” I said directly in his face.
His smile grew. “That too.”
“Kevin….”
He did take my hand then. He had strong, capable hands, a man’s hands. Feeling his palm against mine did nothing to calm me down.
“Tom,” he said, and sudden wonder enriched his voice. “Thank you. I wasn’t even sure you’d talk to me but now…. Four days together. Three nights with you.” He shook his head. “I wasn’t hoping for that because it seemed like too much to ask for.”
Thursday night, Friday night, Saturday night together: that’s what he meant. But…. It was ten-thirty p.m. on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. Yes, we had the long, four-day weekend in front of us, but I wanted more.
Were we going to just say goodbye and drive away from each other? Today was the most important day of my life. I wanted to celebrate what I’d done, and I wanted to keep walking forward.
“More,” I croaked. I stroked the back of his hand with my thumb. “Let’s….”
“What?”
“Spend the night with me. Come back to my house.”
His breath caught. He tightened his grip so fiercely that it hurt, but I wasn’t going to pull away. “Do you mean it?”
“Please. Yes. We can go back to your place tomorrow morning and get you changed and get your camping stuff, but tonight….” I slid my hand up inside his sleeve, feeling the fine skin at his wrist, his shuddering pul
se. “Don’t make me go back home alone.”
Kevin jerked away from me and reached to put on his seat belt. “Right now. Let’s go.”
I tersely directed him to where I was parked, and he answered with mere nods; neither one of us wanted to talk right then. We had a lot to discuss, but not now.
I slammed the door of the pickup and got into the Miata in a hurry. It couldn’t go anywhere, though, until the Silverado pulled away. I looked up from my low-slung sports car seat to find him looking down at me from the high perch of the truck. He rolled down the window. “Last one there is a rotten egg.”
He gunned the engine and was gone.
I still made it to the house first because I knew the shortcuts. Even so, I had just managed to park in the garage, get that door down, and race through the kitchen to the front when the bell rang.
I fumbled with the deadbolt and the knob, but then the door opened, I stepped back, and Kevin came into my house. Standing within the still-open door, and with his hand on the doorknob, he said with wonder, “You said we were going away for the weekend together in front of everybody. Are you really the Tom Smith I know?”
Maybe more like the Tom Smith I was meant to be, or the outline of him. I nodded a few times and then managed to say, “It’s me.”
He took a step inside and closed the door by leaning against it. The lock caught with a loud snick. “Have you…. Are we going to…. Tom, don’t lead me on.” The look on his face broke my heart. “I can’t take it if….”
“Come here,” I told him, but I was the one who stepped toward him and pulled him into my arms, away from the door, and pressed against his solid strength the way I’d been wanting to since I’d seen him looking at me with such need at the play. He clutched at me, and I kissed his cheek. “Don’t worry,” I whispered. “We’re going to work it out, okay? I… I’m going to make it happen. I’m not going to let you get away, no matter what.”
He drew a deep, long breath and then pulled back to take my shoulders. I couldn’t look at him enough. My gaze darted between his lips and his eyes.
“You are incredible,” Kevin said. “I knew it. Nobody else would be able to…. In a week, only a week, you’ve been able to reconcile all that you told me about? To deal with it somehow? You were wrecked that night. Hell, I was wrecked, and I’m not the person who’s been living alone with that for years. Are you really okay?”
“I just needed….” The span of years, sleeping with many nameless men, the increasing weight of my isolation in Gunning, a high school production of Rent and, finally, someone I could talk to. Someone who could pull my pain out of me. Someone I could love.
“You,” I said. “I just needed you.”
The youthful fool I’d been had thought I’d known love with Sean. Since then I’d given up on the idea and arranged my life so I’d never come close to it. Then Kevin had crept up behind me, and there it was, so unexpected I’d barely recognized it when it arrived.
Love was in Kevin’s eyes as he looked at me now. Love had been in the way he’d held me the week before in my kitchen, and in his calls, and in how he wanted me to leave Gunning with him. I didn’t understand why, because I was an ordinary man, but I felt it.
I took Kevin’s face between my hands, and I wanted to say it back to him, but I couldn’t. That was okay. I tilted my head, went closer, and finally touched my lips to his in the gentlest, barest contact. I closed my eyes, feeling it, how close we were to diving down into each other: into lust, into sex, into the messy, wonderful challenge of us together.
He sighed and murmured, “Kiss me,” and so I did.
I hadn’t kissed anyone this meaningfully—my whole heart in it—since college, and those kisses had been but a pale shadow of what I gave to Kevin and what he gave to me. We spent minutes there in the foyer, erasing the memory of the last time we’d stood there together, deliberately and slowly feeding on what we had to give to each other with lips and tongues and roving hands.
But then it was time to move on. I tried to pull away, got caught in him again when he brushed the tip of his tongue against my upper lip. It took a few minutes before I managed to part us even a little.
“You want a tour of the house?” I asked, out of breath, and amusement appeared in his eyes. I moved my fingers through his short hair, loving the way it tickled my palms.
He chuckled and kissed me again. “No.”
“You want a beer?”
“I think I’m drunk on you already.”
“You want me to drag you to the bedroom?”
“Tom. Take me to bed or we’ll be arm-wrestling to see who does the dragging.”
When I flipped on the overhead light, the bed was the way I’d left it, with the sheet a chaotic mess and the blanket trailing onto the floor; sleep had eluded me for half the night as I thought of seeing Kevin at the play. I didn’t have fancy mirrors in my room, and it was small for a master bedroom, but everything we needed was there: One mattress for two men.
I undressed him in a wild rush, batting away his attempts to get to me because I needed him to be nude before me while I was fully clothed. When I finally worked his pants and briefs down off his legs and he stood naked, he took a step back. With his fingers along the underside, he lifted his cock, as hard as I’d ever seen it, the head of it purple and firm. “See what you do to me?” he said. “I’m thirty-seven and you drive me crazy like I was seventeen. I’ve jacked off more since I’ve met you than any time in my life.”
I moved toward him but he quickly shook his head and held out his hand against me. “You get none of this until I see you.” In his sex-drenched, raspy voice, he said, “Get undressed.”
There was a time when I hadn’t liked being ordered around that way by him, when I hadn’t trusted him, when I’d feared my own responses. But not now. With his eyes following my every move, I took off my suit jacket, threw it onto the dresser, and felt like a porn star. When I unbuckled my belt and unzipped, Kevin licked his lips, and I became impossibly harder. Off came the pants and my briefs, shoes and socks, and I stood there in my white dress shirt with my cock poking through the opening. My hands went up to my tie, but Kevin stopped me.
“No, let me do that.”
He came to me with the smooth walk that had attracted me in the first place, like a panther silkily stalking me and making me love it. “Lift up your chin,” he told me, and I caught my breath. He could ravage me with words alone. It was like being told to turn around and bend over because I was going to get the fucking I deserved. His fingers brushing my neck, busy at undoing my tie: my cock lifted and pulsed. The sexiest thing anybody had ever done to me. He was so close. His nostrils flared, his eyes were so alive, and if I moved forward mere inches our cocks would brush against each other.
“Kevin….”
“Just a minute.”
“I need you.”
“You’ll have me. But I’ve got to do something first.”
I willed myself to patience and rested my hands flat against his chest to stop myself from throwing him down onto the bed. His skin was warm.
The tie came slithering off my neck, and he simply dropped it to the floor. He reached for the top button of my shirt but paused to devour me with his eyes. My fingers curled in his chest hair as I was seen, and as I looked in turn. Kevin was a beautiful man.
“Love you,” he said quietly, matter-of-factly. “You’re going to have to get used to me saying that.” He finished opening my shirt and pushed it off my good arm, leaving only the scars on my left arm covered by cloth. Kevin left the shirt that way, took my hand, and pulled me over to the bed; he pushed me down so I’d sit on the end of the mattress. He knelt in front of me, off to the side, and slowly pushed the hanging shirt off my shoulder.
He did it slowly because, after a few inches were exposed, he stopped to press his lips to my skin at the very top of the worst scar left from the surgery. Unmistakably. Deliberately. He kept his mouth there.
The entire world shuddered,
tilted, and then stopped: my heart, his lips.
I stared down at him, at his mouth moving against the evidence of my long-ago shame. Our faces were close as he lifted his eyes to mine.
“Kevin,” I breathed. “You don’t have to—”
“All of you, Tommy. All of you.”
He inched my sleeve a few inches further down and held it in place. There, laid bare, was the next puckered remnant of hate, and misunderstanding, and Sean’s cowardice, and Kevin bent to give his healing touch, lapping at it with his tongue. I trembled to see it. The rest of the room narrowed to that: Kevin at my arm.
I leaned down, kissed the top of his head, and rested my cheek against him, blinking for what he gave me. I embraced him with my good arm, and I felt more than heard him sigh as he twisted a bit and laid the side of his face against my bicep.
“Don’t hide from me anymore,” he said even more hoarsely than usual.
My throat tightened. “I’ll try.”
“Am I hurting you?”
“No,” I told him right away, low and forcefully. “You are not hurting me.” Even though the bone-deep ache would never go away, and shattered nerve endings would always fire.
“I don’t believe you.”
With a finger on his chin, I brought his face around to mine. “Thank you,” I said. I brought us together, and his mouth promised everything.
He went back to my arm, and I let him. He inched down past my elbow, past the wrinkled white flesh and the flared red line that had never faded, licking and sucking and kissing until my whole arm tingled. I hadn’t ever been touched like that.
Down to my wrist, thankfully uninjured, but still there Kevin paused and spoke to me in a way that I would never forget, on his knees, joining me in my journey toward wholeness.
Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits Page 109
