We bypassed the living room in favor of the kitchen, and once Lance was seated at one end of the table, everyone else brought him food or drinks, and he looked overwhelmed, but happy with the attention. I just sat quietly by him, studying his beauty. It was almost unreal to see him sitting there, trying to eat and answer everyone’s questions at the same time. He had lost all hint of a tan, and his formerly sandy brown hair had turned a shade darker. His full rosy lips and violet eyes beneath dark brows stood out against the white of his face. Except for the slight puffiness around his eyes from lack of sleep, his skin was flawless, though slightly rough from having not shaved in a while, and amidst all the attention, he managed to keep looking at me and smiling.
After a while, the excitement of Lance’s arrival subsided. Ernie again invited May and Kelsey to spend the night at his house, as well as Uncle Sean, Hank, and the kid. So when they left, it was just Lance, me, Mama, Trinket, and Rita. It struck me that we were back together as a family, as we had been on the farm, six-hundred miles away and a year ago. Although Lance looked bushed and his eyes teared up as he yawned, he seemed as reluctant to go to bed as Mama and the girls were to let him go.
“Now this is as it should be,” Mama said, rising from her chair. We had moved to the living room when everyone else left and had shared a few more minutes talking. I knew what she meant, and there didn’t need to be anything more said about it. Her statement encompassed so many possibilities—all of them true. Lance and I should be together. We should be here with Mama. Our happiness that night—all of ours, including Mama’s, the girls’, May’s, even Uncle Sean and Hank’s—was as it should be, too.
* * *
Up in Trinket’s room, with just the desk lamp lit and the heat coming up from below, Lance and I undressed each other. It wasn’t cold, but both he and I were shaking a little. Me with excitement and plain nervousness. He seemed so small to me, and I felt large in comparison as we went naked into each other’s arms, both sighing, locking lips and hips and breaking apart long enough to crawl beneath the covers, our arms going around each other, our legs entwining, cramming ourselves together, then just lying together. I could feel Lance’s heartbeat in his chest against mine, the heat from below where we lay hard against the other, both of us throbbing.
“I’m going to let go, Will. I can’t wait,” Lance whispered into my mouth, and just as he said it, we both let go. Having saved it up for each other, we spent it within moments of lying down.
And that’s how we fell asleep, our stomachs slick and warm, our mouths sealed together, sharing one breath.
Sometime during the night, when we had slept for a little while, we both woke up and began making love. At first it was just the pleasure of stroking each other, kissing, and otherwise celebrating our being together; then it became more intense and hurried, as in the old days when we were first together on the farm. It had always been that way, both of us crawling all over the other tasting every part of each other with our lips and tongues and hands, and him entering me, then me entering him, both of us bucking to the increasing rhythm of our young bodies, starved for each other.
Then we lay together, spent and breathing heavily, and I couldn’t stand it any more. “I’m never going to let you go again, Lance. Not another single night apart—ever.”
He gripped me closely, moved his hand from my cock, which he had been slowly stroking, to my face. Cupping my cheek and turning it toward him. “I have until the third of January. I already miss you, though.”
“You don’t understand, honey. I’ve checked out of school, here. I’m going back to San Francisco with you. I said I’m never going to let you go, again. That’s what this last year has taught me. Rita told you straight. I was stupid for ever letting you go. We took a big chance by separating.”
“But what about Sean? I thought you always wanted to live with him, that that’s why you came here.”
“I did, but I was so wrong. I thought I could handle being apart from you for two years.
“Then what about school?”
Again, I told him I was stupid, that I had thought about that. And the more he asked and the more I explained, I could hear a lightening of his voice, from a kind of cello sadness to a brighter note in his words.
“You mean it? You’d give up everything here, just to be with me?”
“That’s exactly what I should have done in the first place. It was never you who should have had to decide. Remember last December when we went out to the rock ledge where we first met? I put the question on your shoulders, about whether you were going to go to art school or come to Austin with me. It should never have been up to you to decide. Your art is light years more important than my bachelor’s, here. UT isn’t the only university I can attend, but the art school is for you, and so it’s more important. “
Again, he asked about Uncle Sean.
I told him how I’d finally realized that part of what had made me follow Uncle Sean was that unexplored love I felt for him. “But you’re the one I love, Lance. You’re my husband. You always have been. You always will be.”
We scooted under the covers and turned head to thigh and for an hour or more we lost ourselves in the all-consuming sensations that came with that slow, mutual consumption. It went beyond the physical act and into something I’m unable to express.
Daylight broke into the room and we awoke but didn’t want to get up. We heard May and Kelsey come into the house, which we both recognized by their raucous laughter and the laughter they caused in Mama and the girls. Then later as we lay together, stroking each other, kissing, and napping, we heard Uncle Sean, Hank, and little Hank come into the house, followed by Ernie. Still we didn’t get up. For a while we just lay together holding hands or one another, or kissing, or staring into each other’s eyes.
And when the door opened slowly, we both looked toward Kelsey and May standing tentatively in the doorway.
“Everybody’s wondering when you two are going to get up,” May said.
“We’re not through yet,” I said back, not really resenting the intrusion, but hoping they would leave.
“I thought men were good for about two minutes in that department,” Kelsey said.
“Oh, that,” I said, smiling, thinking how funny Kelsey was. “We’ve done our two minutes worth several times and rested in between.”
She gave me that horsy snort-laugh again.
“Just get up,” May said. Apparently she didn’t find our exchange all that funny. “It’s almost lunch time and Mama’s been fretting about feeding Lance.”
I could have said something else about that, but figured time for such humor was over with, so I just threw back the covers and exposed both Lance and me.
May screamed with laughter and pulled Kelsey quickly out of the room.
* * *
Christmas Eve. I helped Lance unload his car and was amazed at how much stuff he had managed to pack into it, including a suitcase of paints, canvases, paper-wrapped paintings he said were presents, other presents already nicely wrapped, which were obviously not paintings, and a whole assortment of boxes that he had clearly marked ‘Mama’, ‘Trinket’, ‘Rita’, ‘house’, none of which he said were for Christmas, “but if they want to open them on Christmas that’s all right.” We had already carried in his regular luggage the night before, and it was up in Trinket’s room, already opened and spilling its contents onto the rug next to the bed.
I was fascinated with the changes I’d begun to notice in Lance from just a year on his own in school, and almost two years, now, away from his abusive step-father. As I already noted, the skin on his face was flawless. Sometimes, in my dreams and when I was trying to recall him in detail, I usually saw the bruises, either the fresh ones I saw the first time I laid eyes on him or the ghostly hint of them that had still haunted his face months after we had been together. But all that was gone. Gone, too, was a more elusive scarring in the way he had carried himself when we first met. Instead, he had developed a m
ore confident demeanor that had not been there when we parted in January. It spoke well of his time in San Francisco, making his way on his own. And as we gathered for lunch, now that he had rested (kind of, anyway), he was more part of the gathering rather than the tired new arrival overwhelmed with all the family members surrounding him. He had taken to little Hank, and the kid was sitting in his lap. Even at four years old Hanky-Hank was a lap full, but when he found out Lance could draw, Hanky had him drawing horses and dinosaurs while the finishing touches were being put on the lunch. Trinket was also back with Lance the way she used to be, and maybe, now that she was of the age where she found boys cute for their looks, I think she didn’t just love Lance as she had a year earlier, but was kind of falling for him as boyfriend material, the way an adolescent does. She was still the same adoring kid, but her dark eyes smiled with what was probably a secret enjoyment as she studied his face and stood next to the chair with her arm around his shoulder, watching him draw for Hanky-Hank.
For that matter, Hank thought Lance was beautiful, too, and got me aside and admitted that Lance was breath-taking in his beauty. “I can’t believe you would ever have thought to let him go for an instant, Will.”
I knew that Hank had expressed such things before to Sean; but I think he was even more surprised because of Lance’s beauty. Truth is, so was I. And several times, as I watched Lance with the rest of the family, my heart fluttered—actually fluttered—when he caught my eyes and graced me with a private smile.
Kelsey was still grinning about my stunt in the bedroom when I had thrown back the covers, and once when she passed by me, placing plates on the table, she whispered in my ear, “you’re drooling.”
I snorted a laugh, because it was true. Even though I was surrounded by family and friends and this was the best Christmas Eve I could ever recall, I was having trouble taking my eyes off Lance. I’ve mentioned it a dozen times since I first met him, when I first fell for him head-over-heels, I felt once more that stranger thing about Lance. This was the guy I had talked to on the phone for almost a year, whose ‘essence’ I carried around in a vial, the guy I had lived with and made love to for almost a year; yet here I was observing him as if he was a stranger yet again. And the odd thing is, the more I drank in his looks and bathed myself in his deep voice with a soft Cajun accent, and remembered our times together, I realized I couldn’t know him completely. It would take a lifetime, and I couldn’t wait to continue that lifetime with him starting from right now. I reveled in the thought of the years we would be together.
He glanced at me when I laughed at what Kelsey had just said and even though we were in a room full of people, he pouted those beautiful lips into a kiss and, yes, my heart fluttered again.
Chapter Eighteen:
Saying Good-Bye
I took Lance around Austin the day after Christmas to introduce him to Charlie, to show him where I had gone to school, and to show him Hippie Hollow. Even though Mama had insisted that Lance and I continue to stay there through the holidays, I told her we needed to stay with Uncle Sean and Hank for a couple of days. “But we’ll be back, Mama, and spend New Year’s Eve and the first two days in January with you.”
As I had planned, I broke the news to Mama on Christmas day that I was going back to San Francisco with Lance. In a way, she was conflicted about it, since she wanted me near by. Still, she agreed that it would probably be best for Lance and me if we lived together. Rita was overjoyed at my decision, which she called “coming to my senses.” May and Kelsey were happy about my decision, too, and of course, Kelsey tried to tease me about it, though that particular attempt fell flat, because she tried to tease me about being a hick in a real city, and failing to realize she was teasing me, I agreed. She and May left the day after Christmas. They had other relatives on Kelsey’s side to see before they headed back to the ranch in New Mexico, on the west side of the Peloncillo Mountains.
“You and Lance be sure to spend the night with us on your way through,” Kelsey said, giving me and Lance a hug. “Now that my parents have moved to the senior center in Lordsburg, May and I have that big old ranch house to ourselves.”
Uncle Sean and Hank were mostly happy with my decision, and I could tell that they were kind of looking forward to having the apartment to themselves. They would make a great little family, with Hanky-Hank. He would be moving into my room, and Uncle Sean and Hank would make the den into their office.
Little Hank cried when he finally understood that I was going to be moving away, and I cried when he was put to bed the first night that Lance and I were there.
“You make sure he gets to talk to me when I call, won’t you, Hank?”
“Of course I will,” Hank assured me.
So, the day after Christmas. I was a little amused at the jaw-dropping look that Charlie gave Lance when I introduced them. He was actually tongue tied. I had called him to let him know Lance and I would be coming by. I figured he would be in San Marcos with his parents, but he said he preferred the quiet of the dorm over the Christmas holidays, so we went by around noon and planned to go to our little Italian café, which was kind of a special place for me and Charlie. It was where he and I and Uncle Sean had gone after that first day at the lake, and then it was there where Charlie and I had gone after getting drunk on the Thunderbird wine. So it seemed like a good idea to go there so he and Lance could get better acquainted.
Charlie ordered wine for our dinner. Lance and I just sipped on our wine, while Charlie downed a few glasses during the meal. He became drunkenly philosophical as the meal progressed, though he handled himself fairly well. I am sure that, had I drunk as much as he did, my speech would have been slurred.
“You give me hope,” he said. “You both do. He indicated Lance with an upraised glass.”
“Hope?” Lance asked.
Charlie nodded emphatically. “When I first met Will at this gay organization meeting and he introduced himself to the people there, he talked about this ‘husband’ he had stashed away in San Francisco. Then later, as I got to know him, Lance, he talked about you and him just like a real married couple. At first it was kind of odd, because I didn’t think of gay relationships like that. Oh...I wanted to, kind of dreamed about having a husband of my own. Still, it was kind of a pipe dream. But Will wouldn’t bend, wouldn’t date, wouldn’t give himself up. And I’ll tell you there were lots of guys here who were hot for him. But no dice.”
Charlie laughed sadly (if that’s possible) then looked at us both, took our hands and, with the sincerity he felt coming mainly from the Chianti, said, “Hope. See?”
Lance and I glanced at each other, then smiled back at Charlie, nodding.
“Don’t ever let anything come between you guys. You’re beautiful together. You know that? You are. Beautiful.”
I appreciated the half-inebriated truths that Charlie spoke, even when he kept silent about my behavior the night of the concert. Or maybe my behavior wasn’t at all important to him, since nothing had really happened. I still had not told Lance that I hadn’t almost been raped as I first feared, nor that it was my doing that things had gotten sexual to begin with. I wasn’t intentionally hiding it, I just hadn’t told him yet. And at the moment, it didn’t seem appropriate for me to bring it up and contradict what Charlie was saying.
Still, I was tiring a little of Charlie’s purple praise. If I had learned anything in my year apart from Lance, it was that, had it gone on much longer, I might eventually have fallen as Renato kept warning me I would.
It wasn’t going to happen now, because Lance and I were back together. In a way we had proven that we could be faithful to each other, but it was long past time that we end our separation.
I could tell that Lance was also getting a little uncomfortable with the way Charlie was carrying on about us, so I suggested that the three of us take the drive out to Lake Travis.
“I told you about Hippie Hollow,” I said to Lance, “so you should see it. I doubt if there’ll be anyone ou
t there running abound naked this time of the season, but it’ll give you an idea of what it’s like.”
* * *
I was reminded of the first time Uncle Sean had taken me to the lake to see all the naked people. But the drive was less scenic, since the winter had stripped the trees of their leaves and what few evergreens grew there looked more forlorn in the yellow and bare undergrowth. The ice storm had done it’s work, as well, turning things yellow, and I doubted that such scenery would impress Lance, in comparison to the bay and the Pacific Ocean beyond it. Still, as we drove through the hill country, he said it was beautiful.
I thought it was, too, with the sky a sunny and clear winter blue. What little snow there had been was gone and even the ice that had gripped the area a few days before was now mostly gone.
The three of us were in my pickup, and I was reminded of all the times back in New Mexico when Lance and I had ridden together in this pickup. I planned to leave it at Mama’s and to rent a U-Haul for my stuff. Once I got to San Francisco, if I needed to, I’d get a car of my own. But Lance assured me that I wouldn’t need one, since he had his. Lance was sitting close to me in the pickup, and Charlie was sitting on the passenger side, half turned in the seat so he could look at us full on. It reminded me of the day he and I had come back from the lake with Uncle Sean. He couldn’t stop staring at Uncle Sean, and now it was the same with Lance.
I felt sorry for Charlie, and even though he said he was happy for me moving to San Francisco, I knew that he had some regrets. I have to admit that I would regret losing touch with him, but I doubted that we would correspond after a while. In another way, it was for the best. He needed to forget about me. But for that afternoon what the future held was really far from my mind. I just concentrated on having fun with Charlie and my beautiful husband sitting beside me, turning me on by his simple touch.
All Over Him Page 20
