The Love of My Life
Page 3
There was no grand reunion, no bear hugs or kisses, just a long and welcoming look that told me I was home. “Do you have a checked bag?” he asked as we started walking.
Did I? For a few seconds I had no idea. Tom had erased my mind. I was starting life fresh. “Uh, yeah,” I finally managed.
At the baggage carrousel we stood like any couple, which warmed me no end. He was mine.
At his car, he threw my bag into the back seat, but when he got in he didn’t start the engine. “It’s been hell,” he said, hands on the wheel. “Probably the dumbest decision I ever made.”
I started to laugh. “I told myself I’d kiss you, then slap you,” I said.
“Well-deserved.”
He started the car and off we went, me awake and happy this time instead of drunk. Everything looked beautiful, including Tom, but we said little. At his apartment he took my bag into the bedroom, then took me to bed. Between kisses came phrases: “It’s been…” “I know.” “Agony, pure agony.” Then he was inside me as I lay on my back, legs up on his shoulders. “Home,” I said.
“And then some.”
* * * *
We didn’t fuck all day, but we did stay naked until Sunday night when we decided to have dinner out. The interim was a delicious descent into an unprecedented sexual wallow, during which we engaged every organ, orifice, and limb. Come was all over us and our mouths tasted of salt from all the licking. In between actual sex, we talked, mainly him saying he loved me so deeply, so completely that he didn’t want me to return north. “Stay,” he said. “I have no life without you.”
“I have a job, an apartment.”
“Phone it in. Call and resign and we can rent a van and drive up to get your stuff.”
“But I’ll be unemployed,” I noted.
“I have a business, Alex, a thriving landscaping business. You can work for me if you want, learn it from the ground up. Do you like plants? Outdoor work?”
“I like greenery. I mowed lawns as a kid.”
“There you are. I’ll love and support you all the way,” he said. “Care for you through thick or thin.”
“It’s meant to be, isn’t it?” I said.
“It is, and that’s rare.”
We sealed the deal with another round of sex play, both of us totally spent but unwilling to stop touching and caressing.
“It’s going to take three months to catch up,” I said.
“Day one,” he replied with a kiss.
* * * *
Twenty years later, we still share his Santa Monica apartment. I’m now a partner in his business and we have a dog named Myrtle, who goes everywhere with us. Sometimes in bed, after sex, when we’re lying blissfully spent, Myrtle in her nearby basket, we talk about how we met, and more than once Tom has said he should send Raymond a card.
THE END
ABOUT DALE CHASE
Dale Chase has been writing gay men’s erotica for seventeen years with nearly two hundred stories published in magazines and anthologies. In addition, Dale has three published story collections and two novels: Wyatt: Doc Holliday’s Account of an Intimate Friendship from Bold Strokes Books, and Takedown: Taming John Wesley Hardin from Lethe Press.
While Dale occasionally ventures into contemporary fiction, her primary interest remains the old west. She is presently at work on a novel about two cowboy detectives working out of a San Francisco agency in 1876. A California native, Dale lives near San Francisco.
For more information, visit dalechasestrokes.com.
ABOUT JMS BOOKS LLC
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