Dreaming of You: M/M Gay Romance

by Marina Lander

  Afterwards, he fell into a shockingly deep sleep. Typically, just having another person in the room would be enough to keep him awake all night, but somehow he managed to drift off within moments of putting his head on the pillow with Conrad wrapped around him like a big, sweaty octopus.

  In the morning, when he woke up sore and sated, but with a painfully hard dick, he was ready to climb on top of Conrad and ask for another round. Unfortunately it was almost 8:30 and he had a 10 o’clock class. He wiggled his way out of Conrad's still sleeping grasp and started to head for the shower, but on his way he happened to look out the window.

  His first thought was that there’d been some kind of apocalyptic event while they were having sex. It was such a complete white-out, he couldn't even make out the shape of the trees in the landscape outside. It was immediately obvious that his morning class would be cancelled, and probably the rest of them as well, but he dug out his phone out and checked just in case. Sure enough, there was a text from the university saying that they’d be closed for all of today and tomorrow as well, so Phil climbed right back into bed. Nearly five hours later, he still hasn’t left.

  Conrad went downstairs at some point to make them breakfast (mango and goat cheese omelets), but he brought it up for them to eat in bed and hasn’t left since then either. They’ve had sex again, twice, but now Conrad is doing the New York Times crossword puzzle and Phil’s reading some stupid Steven King novel his sister-in-law shoved in his satchel before he left. Penelope’s curled up on top of their feet, snoring, and it’s so ridiculously cozy and comfortable and domestic and Phil thinks this is it, this is what having a boyfriend is like.

  He can’t even really remember why he was afraid of it.

  Then Conrad's phone rings. He picks it up from the bedside table with a grunt and starts fumbling around with it, trying, Phil guesses, to turn it off. Phil sneaks a look at the screen and sees the name Gwyneth just as Conrad, in a phone related mishap similar to Phil’s own on Thanksgiving, hits the wrong button and a woman’s face suddenly appears on the screen. Phil recognizes her immediately- the beautiful dark haired woman from the whale watching picture. In a freaking nightgown. No, not a nightgown- lingerie. There is visible cleavage.

  “Who is that?!” the woman asks, and Phil realizes, shit, she can see him too. And he’s naked.

  “What the hell is this?” Conrad asks, looking and sounding completely panicked and confused. “How do I turn it off?”

  “It’s a video call,” the woman- Gwyneth, she must be named Gwyneth- says. “We installed the app on your phone when I was there. Don’t you remember, darling?”

  Darling?

  Phil scoots away, down to the end of the bed, next to the dog and hopefully out of sight. She’s got an English accent, he tells himself. She could be his sister. It’s still possible that she’s his sister, even if she’s video phoning him in lingerie. British people are peculiar sometimes.

  “Don’t you know I’ve been trying to reach you for hours?” Gwyneth asks. “I was terribly worried you were no longer living.”

  “I sent you a text,” Conrad says, and Phil thinks when? When did you send her a text? Why did you send her a text? “It’s just a bit of snow,” Conrad says. “Honestly...”

  Maybe she’s his wife, Phil thinks, insanely. Maybe he’s secretly married to a woman in England. Maybe she lets him sleep with random boys because they’re on separate continents...

  “Was that Phil’s bum I saw?” she asks. “Were you two having relations?”

  Conrad shoots a helpless, apologetic glance in Phil’s direction and that’s when he knows for sure. This is the sort of embarrassment that can only be doled out by family.

  “Seriously,” Conrad says. “How do I turn it off?”

  “You can’t,” Gwyneth tells him. “Not without disconnecting the call.”

  “So you’ve boobie trapped my phone.”

  “No, it’s wonderful!” she says. “Now I can see you whenever I want. And you can see me. Albeit in a man’s bed...”

  “What?”

  “Look,” she says, presumably panning the phone around to give Conrad a view of her bed partner. “Isn’t he divine?”

  Conrad scowls and looks back at Phil, shaking his head. Phil shrugs.

  “He looks like a criminal,” Conrad says.

  “I really like this one, Connie,” she says.

  Phil mouths “Connie?” and Conrad winces.

  Gwyneth keeps talking. “I’ve been with him five times now!” she says. Conrad rolls his eyes, like this isn’t much of an accomplishment, but Phil can kind of relate. “How about you and your Phil?” she asks. “More than five times?”

  Conrad looks utterly mortified now, but Phil can’t help it- he smiles, finally noticing that Gwyneth knows his name. She knows who he is and she’s calling him “your Phil” and this must mean that Conrad has been talking about him, telling his sister about what’s been happening between them.

  “Have you told him about the South London incident, yet?” she asks, and Phil raises his eyebrows questioningly. “Have you told him about Mother? Or me? Have you told him about how you lost your--”

  “You know he’s still in the room, Gwynnie!” Conrad barks, and Phil bites his lips, trying not to laugh.

  “Oh, well then I’ve helped things along, haven’t I,” she says.

  “As always...” Conrad says with a sigh. The tips of his ears are bright red- he’s actually blushing.

  “Oh, Guillermo is waking,” Gwyneth says. “I must dash.”

  “Guillermo?”

  “Goodbye, Phil!” she yells, and then disconnects from the call. Conrad scowls at his phone, as if it’s betrayed him somehow, then shoves it into a drawer in his bedside table.

  “What the hell was that?” Phil asks.

  “That,” Conrad says, “was my sister.”

  “Is she always so...”

  “Yes,” Conrad says. “Now you see why I found it necessary to buy an entirely separate house for her to stay in when she visits me.”

  His tone is snippy, but Phil thinks this probably says more about his affection for her than his current annoyance. After all, he bought his home with her in mind.

  “She showed you who she was sleeping with?”

  “Yes, that’s her way of keeping in touch,” Conrad says. “She usually just sends a photo.”

  And Phil thought his family was nuts. If she's that fond of oversharing, he has to wonder how many of her boyfriends Conrad has beaten senseless over the years.

  “So... what’s ‘the South London incident’,” Phil asks, crawling back up next to Conrad and under the comforter.

  “Oh," Conrad says. "Well, it’s rather silly.”

  “And yet it’s referred to as an incident...”

  “I was... briefly incarcerated,” Conrad says.

  Phil stares at him, waiting for the punchline, but Conrad doesn’t smile or retract the statement. He doesn’t elaborate either, just averts his eyes and reaches for his newspaper.

  “Oh no, no,” Phil says, and grabs the paper away from him. “You can’t just tell me I’m sleeping with an ex-con and then go back to the crossword puzzle. What’s the story?”

  It occurs to him suddenly that he really doesn’t know all that much about Conrad and his past, relatively speaking. Conrad knows everything about him- his whole life story and his most intimate thoughts and feelings thanks to that stupid journal- but for all Phil knows, Conrad was some kind of serial killer back in merry old England.

  Not that he’s actually afraid of that. He’s more curious than anything- what could Conrad have done to land himself in prison? Is that where he got his tattoos? Were there shankings involved?

  “Well it wasn’t a proper prison,” Conrad says. “It’s not a very interesting story.”

  “What does that mean, not a proper prison?”

  Conrad sighs and runs his fingers through his hair, which is already a rumpled, sexy mess. Phil kind of wants to touch i
t himself, but not before he hears this goddamn story.

  “I was sixteen,” Conrad finally says. “It was Her Majesty’s Young Offenders Institution.”

  “Her—what?”

  “Juvie,” he says. “I was in juvie.”

  “Oh my,” Phil says. He’d always sort of imagined Conrad spending his adolescence at some snooty boys’ boarding school, in a little tie and a jacket with a crest on it. “Is that where you went off-hetero?” he asks, because that had been part of the boarding school fantasy too, but prison seems just as likely a candidate for that sort of thing.

  “No, that was rugby,” Conrad says, and Phil giggles. His mind wanders helplessly in the direction of a young Conrad, in rugby shorts and high socks, furtively rutting against some random boy in a locker room, but no- save that for later. He refuses to be distracted.

  “What did you do?” he asks.

  “I stole something,” Conrad says. He reaches for his crossword again, and Phil drops the paper over the side of the bed and onto the floor.

  “Please be more specific, Doctor Conrad,” Phil says. “Animal, vegetable or mineral?”

  Conrad leans back against his pillows with a huff. “Aston Martin,” he says.

  “Excuse me?”

  “It’s a car,” Conrad says. “Haven’t you ever seen a James Bond movie?”

  “Yeah, I know what it is, I’m just... you stole a car?”

  “I stole a lot of things,” Conrad says. “I was rather good at it. So I thought, why not a car? I thought I’d be free, could just run away, go anywhere... ”

  Conrad sounds almost nostalgic about his little adventure, and Phil thinks then of his own car stealing incident with Alex, of that feeling of the open road and how captivating it could be, especially to a teenager. But a freaking Aston Martin? Those things had to cost at least two hundred grand.

  “How’d you get caught?” Phil asks. “Please don’t tell me you killed someone...”

  “A fruit stand,” Conrad says. “Ploughed right through it.”

  “Oh come on!” Phil laughs. “Now you’re just fucking with me.”

  Conrad laughs, too, but insists it’s the truth.

  “What, were you auditioning for Benny Hill?” Phil asks.

  “I was a terrible driver,” Conrad says. “I told you it was silly.”

  It is incredibly silly- the silliest case of grand theft auto Phil’s ever heard of- but it’s still kind of turning him on. It’s pretty hot to imagine Conrad as a juvenile delinquent, a car thief, a thug.

  Phil turns on his side, curling against Conrad and resting his head on his chest. Conrad wraps his arm around Phil, starts twining strands of his hair around his fingers.

  “Why were you so bad?” Phil asks.

  "Oh, I dunno," Conrad says. "The usual reasons I suppose. Troubled home life, desperate need for attention, general prattishness..."

  "What was the trouble?"

  "Hm?"

  "At home," Phil says. He doesn't want to pry- not really- but it only seems fair after everything Phil's told him. Conrad sighs and sort of squeezes Phil's scalp with his fingers.

  "It was... my mum died when we were young," he says. "I was twelve, Gwynnie was ten, and our dad was... a bit wrecked by it. S'pose we all were."

  "Oh, wow, I'm... really sorry," Phil says. He thinks he should probably say something more, something better, but he never knows what to say about tragedies and dead parents and things like that. This is why he’s never going to be a therapist. He’s absolutely horrible at comforting people.

  He kisses Conrad's chest, hoping that will convey something to him- something Phil can’t manage to put into words.

  “It was toughest on Gwynnie,” Conrad says. “It’s a terrible age for a girl to lose her mum. And our dad was... well, to put it kindly, it was difficult for him to offer any sort of emotional support.”

  “So it was up to you,” Phil says. “You took care of her.”

  “I tried,” he says. “Still do, but back then I wasn’t very good at it.”

  “Did you move here together?” Phil asks.

  “Mmhm, after our father passed, about ten years ago.”

  He’s dead too? Phil thinks, but, thankfully, does not say. His sister-in-law has been telling him since they were kids that his life doesn’t suck as much as he thinks it does, that other people have had to deal with so much worse, and he’s always known intellectually that that’s true, but to find out what Conrad has been through puts it in a whole different perspective. Ten years ago Conrad probably wasn’t much older than Phil is now. To lose his father at this point in his life, to have lost his mother (really lost her, forever) as a child... he can’t even imagine it.

  “I know she’s a bit eccentric,” Conrad says. “But I’ve been called that myself.”

  “I think you’re amazing,” Phil blurts out. And he does. He does.

  It occurs to him suddenly, that he hasn’t just been afraid of revealing things about himself. He’s also been afraid of knowing someone else. Of growing increasingly irritated with someone, the more he learns about them. Of being disappointed by what’s underneath a hot body and a pretty face- of finding out there’s nothing underneath- and discovering that he’s slept with someone he doesn’t even like. He never realized how much he was afraid of that until now, feeling this strange sense of relief, of near elation, because everything he learns about Conrad just makes him want to know more.

  “Well, thank you, Phil,” Conrad says. “I think you’re pretty amazing, too.”

  Conrad tugs at his hair a bit, pulling him up into a kiss. Phil moans, instantaneously and ridiculously turned on all over again from the gentle press of Conrad lips. He pulls himself up and rolls on top of Conrad, straddling his lap.

  “Now,” Phil says, sliding his rapidly hardening cock against Conrad's belly. “Tell me more about rugby...”

  Chapter 11

  Over the next few weeks, Phil learns a lot more about Conrad.

  He learns that Conrad is an artist. Some of his dream journals are actually sketchbooks, filled with incredibly detailed and colorful pastel drawings, attempts to capture the visual aspects of his dreams which Phil spends several hours exploring one rainy Sunday afternoon. They’re surreal and strange, frequently inexplicable, like dreams, and, though Phil’s not a great judge of art, he’s pretty sure they’re really fucking good.

  He wanted to be an actor before he wanted to be a professor. He started his career in the theater at age six, portraying “the pony” in the Gwyneth Conrad original production, A Princess and Her Pony. Thirteen or fourteen years later, he was securing starring roles in university productions of Hamlet and A Streetcar Named Desire. He considers teaching a sort of “educational performance art.”

  He has no musical talents whatsoever. He can’t play the piano- the one in his house belongs to his sister- and his singing is some of the worst Phil’s ever heard.

  He watches Soapnet the way Phil watches msnbc, clicking over to it compulsively when there’s nothing else on. He doesn’t seem to follow any particular soap- he’ll just watch a scene or two of whatever happens to be playing- and, in fact, doesn’t seem to know the differences between them, or the names of any of the characters. He once tried to explain a plot on One Life to Live to Phil, using terms like “sexy blond” and “crazy guy” and “that bloke who died, but not really” to refer to the characters involved. He also likes Animal Planet and The Daily Show and creepy intervention programs about hoarders and people with substance abuse problems.

  He gets prickly and defensive when he’s insecure, and when he’s angry he goes very quiet. Whatever he’s feeling, you can always see it in his eyes if you’re looking hard enough.

  He truly believes that his old man clothes and hair are fashionable and “vintage-inspired.”

  He was pudgy as a child and he’s still got a sweet tooth- there are bags of candy stashed all over his house. Other bad habits and addictions include cigar smoking, fingernail biting
, eavesdropping on strangers and buying scratch-off lottery tickets.

  His book collection contains everything from French poetry to German philosophy to American crap (he actually owns a hardcover edition of Hollywood Wives) and, bizarrely, he’s got them all alphabetized by topic. Phil still hasn’t figured out what James Joyce’s Ulysses and Judy Blume’s Blubber have in common.

  After graduate school, he spent a year working at the state hospital in New York, giving psychiatric care to the criminally insane. He had a wife back then, a med student named Blair, whose very existence Phil finds both confusing and alarming.

  Conrad is a people watcher. One weekend they take an overnight trip to Boston and Phil notices that Conrad is always watching someone, whenever there is someone to watch. At first it makes him nervous- is Conrad checking people out? But his eyes flit over everyone- young or old, hot or ugly- in the same distantly appraising manner. Only when they settle on Phil do they reflect any kind of warmth or desire.

  He’s got a Bowflex and a treadmill in his garage. He bought them last year after he realized people were taking pictures of him at the fitness center on campus and posting them “on the tweeter”. He listens to Beyoncé and Abba when he’s working out.

  He’s extremely possessive. Their first time was no fluke; whenever they’re together Conrad marks him in some way, with bruises and bites, claiming him over and over again. When a waiter on that Boston trip makes the mistake of behaving a little flirtatiously towards Phil, resting his hand on the back of Phil's chair and complimenting his appalling pronunciation of a French dish, Conrad glances up from his menu with such a quietly dangerous expression, eyes narrowed and nostrils flaring, it actually causes the man to visibly whiten and stumble backwards a few steps.

  He’s never been west of the Mississippi. Every summer he plans on taking a road trip across the country, but so far he’s failed to get off his ass and do it.