by R. Cooper
“How about the stars?” Rafael swept his hand across the sky. “You could share those. Your city friends don’t get that magnificent view. And no one will question why you love it.”
“That is so very true,” Chico agreed. “You’re very smart and reasonable, Mr. Raf.”
“I know.” Rafael’s tone was dry. “It’s one of the reasons my parents’ school breaks even. If it was up to them, it would be all ‘Dance, darlings! Follow your dreams!’ and no profits.”
Chico couldn’t stop a cackle from slipping out. “That is a dead-on impression of your mom. No offense.”
“Oh, I know.” Rafael turned toward him and bowed his head. “I perfected it at age nine.”
“Clever boy.” Chico wanted to bop him on the nose. Luckily, the fact that he would probably miss in the dark and end up hitting him in the face stopped him from doing anything too silly. He bopped Rafael on the shoulder instead.
Rafael caught his arm by the wrist and held it carefully, as if even with a layer of sweatshirt, Chico might break if he held on too strong.
His whisper took Chico equally by surprise. “If you don’t like it up here, you don’t have to stay. You don’t have to do anything you don’t want. But you should know, I think you’re doing okay up here. You have Davi, and everyone at the studio, and… you have wherever else you’ve been volunteering.”
“Maybe my next status update can be a movie among the trees,” Chico whispered back, teasing.
“That’s all?” Everything seemed so quiet, as careful as Rafael’s soft voice.
“They’re looking for people to visit the seniors at the senior center. That’s the only thing on my dance card at the moment.” Chico lowered his head, although his warm face and any traces of his blush couldn’t be seen. “It will probably stay that way. I can’t imagine… I mean. It’s been months, and even before then, sex was this distant thing, and now I think about it, and I shudder. But you put your hands on me and—” He swallowed, stopped there. “I’m currently wound so tight I’d probably pop off in my jeans if you—if anyone touched me. Oh God.” He yanked his hand away from Rafael and put it over his mouth. “I thought I was done dumping my problems on you.”
He leaned away toward the edge of his chair and shook his head. “No more embarrassing truths, I promise. I’ll make more friends. Go out more. Something.”
He flapped his other hand toward the stars, as if that made any more sense than anything he was saying. “I can’t just…. Trust is. A thing. These days. For me.” He made himself take a breath. “To imagine someone thinking only of me again, to trust that they want me, the actual me, this whole messy shebang and not polite, perfect Chico, is hard. I’m working on it. I really am. I was never the insanely jealous type, or worried about a partner having fantasies about someone else. It’s only that he made me feel like I was less than. I wasn’t ever good enough somehow. Like I was there, but I wasn’t quite what he wanted; I wasn’t the someone he couldn’t keep his hands off of. And—” Chico let out a nervous laugh. “—I’m not going to pounce on you or anything. I don’t expect that from you.” He got anxiously to his feet. “I know you’re available and seeing…. I know you’re seeing other people.”
“Chico.” His name shut him up, which was something until Rafael stood up too. Chico didn’t want him to go, and he made a stupid, little, sad sound he would have regretted if Rafael hadn’t slid his hands around Chico’s waist to his back, if he hadn’t pulled Chico forward and kissed his shocked, open mouth.
Chico touched Rafael’s face, put his hands in Rafael’s hair, and shivered for the heat of it, the kiss in the dark that turned into two, and then three, without any pulling away or moments to breathe or stupid questions like what was air? Rafael kissed Chico’s bottom lip, and then the top, and then both of them together, with Chico on his toes for it, releasing soft, shaky moans that would have been words if he could think at all.
Rafael fitted his hands to Chico’s back and grabbed bunches of sweatshirt when Chico gasped and curled forward. He kissed Chico for that too, the fourth kiss, or maybe the fifth, slow and hot and dragging, and then pushed his hands down to Chico’s waist.
Then he stopped. Chico panted against his lips and inched forward to follow his mouth, but Rafael stopped.
His words were rough against Chico’s skin. “You’re driving me crazy.” He tightened his grip at Chico’s side and kissed him again, soft at his mouth, hungry and then gone. Chico was dazed and hard and so warm.
He put his palm along Rafael’s jaw. “I drive you crazy?” He thought he was close enough to Rafael to know him, but he wasn’t. The control on the surface had this underneath. “But you stopped flirting with me.”
Rafael shuddered when Chico touched him, and then he made a funny, angry noise. “What do you want from me?” he demanded, in a tone Chico had never heard from anyone before. It made him think of the music from the ballet, the dancer striving to save a life. “You were hurt, and I couldn’t have that.”
It was like he wasn’t speaking English. Chico had to repeat everything he said, softer, in wonder. “You couldn’t?”
Rafael shook his head and put his mouth to Chico’s cheekbone. “If you can’t stay, then you can’t. If being with me scares you, just tell me. But don’t think for a second that I don’t want to touch you. All of you. The real you, whoever that is. You aren’t like anyone else, Chico.”
Chico shivered for Rafael’s breath over the short, buzzed hair of his undercut, and the expanse of his hands at his waist. Everything else was so foreign he couldn’t process it. “You don’t scare me.” It seemed very important for him to say that much, if nothing else.
“But you don’t really believe me,” Rafael finished for him, “or you won’t. You like it when I tease you, but you won’t ask me for more than flirting. Because you don’t trust me or because of the town or something else?”
All of those things. None of them. Chico shook his head. “I don’t know. But I’m sorry. I’m sorry I’m like this. You shouldn’t have to wait for me to figure myself out.”
Rafael laughed and for the first time, Chico didn’t like the sound. “The strangest thing is… I would. I’ve been waiting, and I don’t even really mind. At least not in those moments when I can tell you’re thinking about it, about me.” Rafael lowered his voice, but it was still rough. “If you asked, I could keep waiting. As long as you said what you wanted, I could go slow. I’m not used to slow anymore. Tourists come and go. But I can relearn, if you think we will work. There’s something about the way you look at me….”
Chico didn’t say anything, and maybe Rafael took his silence for denial and not a stunned loss of voice. “Chico, from the second you first spoke to me, I liked you. You were apologizing too much and insisting you were bothering me, and you didn’t even notice I would have walked you to Davi’s house and carried all your stuff for you if I had to.” He shook his head at Chico’s startled jump. “You still don’t see it. If you don’t want me, that’s one thing. But if you even hinted that all you needed was time, I would wait to see what we might be like. Because I think we’d be great.”
Chico had wandered into some grand story, which had to be a mistake. Nobody said things like this, and if they did, it wasn’t to him. This was not a fairy tale. He put his hand to Rafael’s face again and yanked it away when he couldn’t feel a smile. “But I’m just Chico.”
“And that’s the real issue, isn’t it?” Rafael stepped away.
Chico wasn’t prepared for it. He leaned after him, missing kisses and now his hands. He wanted Rafael’s smile back. “Great?” he echoed, and wet his lips. His cock was throbbing but that was a less immediate problem than the cold anxiety pooling in his stomach. “How do you know?” he demanded. “How do you know you wouldn’t get tired of me?”
“How do I know you wouldn’t get tired of me?” Rafael returned sharply, with another hint of real anger, but then sighed heavily. “Speaking of what a reasonable man I am, it�
��s been a long day. I should go home.” The kind, patient tone had returned.
Chico frowned and wrapped his arms around his chest. “What is it I don’t see?”
“Tomorrow’s going to be another long day,” Rafael went on, irritatingly stubborn all of the sudden.
Tomorrow was Friday. Saturday night Rafael would be out with the others. Maybe not to sleep with anyone, but he could. Either way, it wasn’t Chico’s business.
Unless Chico said something. If he asked Rafael to wait, to do this slowly, then Chico could make it his business.
He put his head down. His eyes began to sting because he was an idiot. “I don’t inspire feelings like that,” he said at last, voice choked. “I’m not like you.”
“I’m not sure what, exactly, you think I am that’s so different from you, but someday I’d like to know about those feelings I inspire in you. Maybe we could compare them.” Rafael stood there for another moment, then slid open the doors. “I hope you enjoy your weekend home, Chico,” he said and went inside. He was down the stairs a few moments later and then gone into the dark.
Chico watched him go for as long as he could make out his shape in the shadows, but Rafael never turned his flashlight on, guiding himself with the moonlight and the light from Davi’s house.
When Chico finally went inside, he had a single text on his phone—from Davi.
Idiot was all it said.
But when Chico took a picture of the view from his balcony around 4:00 a.m. and posted it with the caption, “This is my view,” Davi was the first one to like it.
HIS PARENTS liked it too. They commented on it almost the first moment he pulled into the driveway. He got tons of questions about the area and how he was doing, peppered with concern about Davi, who hadn’t been down to see everyone very much.
His father didn’t like that Chico only had part-time work. His mother was excited to find out he’d been sewing, although she was less than enthusiastic about the fact that he wasn’t getting paid for it.
This led to an explanation about Davi wanting him to meet people, with a carefully glossed over account of Chico’s first weeks there and the reasons Davi had been determined to make him a part of the world again.
They didn’t mention John, not once, which was perhaps the biggest indicator of how they felt about him. When Chico had dated someone during his time at community college and it ended because Kevin had transferred to a four-year school several hours away, his parents had literally mentioned Kevin every time he’d seen them for at least six months.
The first day down, whenever his parents weren’t all over him, he spent time with one of his nieces. Camille, he was tickled to learn, had started taking a tap class. She was staying the night so her parents could have time to themselves, but instead of sleeping in the little beds the kids used, she curled up on the floor with Chico and fell asleep with her hand over his face.
She kicked him twice and kept trying to smother him in her sleep, but it felt good to have her there. He liked the separation and distance of being up north, but he’d missed his family too. And it was always nice to hand Camille off to his sister when Camille began to insist Chico watch the same pony video with her for the seventh time. When he asked what kind of costume Camille wore to dance class and if she was going to be in any recitals, his sister marveled at him before telling him regretfully they were supposed to buy their costumes.
His mother consented to being dragged to the fabric store for curtain material. Much like Mrs. Winters, Chico’s mom was excellent at feigning reluctance for something before she dove headfirst into it. She insisted on buying him fabric for curtains, and also something thick but pretty to line all his coats for the “terrible mountain winters” she thought he was going to go through. She asked polite questions about tutus although he could tell she wasn’t certain what to make of Chico’s interest in them.
Down an aisle lined with every shade of embroidery thread in the world, she turned to meet his eye.
“And men?” His mother managed to sound uncomfortable and interested in the subject at the same time. She never changed.
Chico busied himself with different shades of pink and didn’t look back at her. “Something I’m currently not able to talk about.” But he ran his thumbnail along his bottom lip. It did nothing to banish the memory he was trying to avoid. “If I talk about it, I’ll think about it, and I’m not the best at making those kind of choices, am I? So… just not thinking or talking about it. Sewing. That’s what I’m doing. Lots of sewing. I’m not so bad at that.”
“Is there a new one who is making you think this way?” His mother pulled herself up into an indignant posture. “You’re not bad at anything. My sweet Chico is excellent at everything he chooses to do.”
Chico glanced around before trying to wave her and her maternal pride down. “No! Mom. Oh my God. He doesn’t—that is, there’s no new one! We aren’t talking about this.”
“Ah, so I should call Davi.” She uttered that threat, then took the thread from his hand and dropped it into the cart.
Chico narrowed his eyes at her, but had no way to stop her from calling Davi. Davi, missing his own mom, would do anything his precious Auntie Glória said, and answer her every question.
“There’s no new one,” Chico muttered to her at last. “There is someone who got me sewing again. But he’s not new, not mine, and not something I should be trying after the last time anyway. Look at me, being sensible Chico.” He stuck out his jaw to prove he could be stubborn.
His mother raised her eyebrows after his declaration but then patted his hair. “Okay, baby. No talking.” She was going to call Davi anyway, probably before Chico had been in the car five minutes for his drive home. “But if you sew tutus, am I invited up to see them in use?”
“Of course!” Chico sputtered at her before realizing this meant she’d be driving up to visit him in Brandywine. So much for being sensible. “Okay,” he agreed a moment later, in the same tone she’d used. “But no talking about this. I mean it. I am being smart this time.”
His mother yanked him in for a rib-squeezing hug. “We’ll play it cool,” she assured him, way too pleased with herself for vowing to be cool. “I’ll tell your father. Leave it to me.”
Chico spent a few fleeting, panicked seconds imagining his father watching ballet, his father seeing Rafael and how he gazed at Chico, his father knowing, for all that he wouldn’t say a word. He shut his eyes as if that would make it all go away.
“As long as you’re happy, Francisco.” His mother planted a fat kiss on his cheek that made Chico open his eyes again. “And we miss you and want to see your new life.”
“I don’t have a life,” Chico grumbled at her, feeling about seventeen, but smiled when she stopped at a display of metallic thread.
Afterward she took him around to some of the relatives’ houses, where he was given coffee and enough sweet bread to satisfy him and Davi for a week. About the same time, he started getting notices on his phone from friends who must have somehow heard he was visiting, but he ignored them like he ignored every message from his traitorous cousin.
He did his best not to cry all over his dad when his dad packed his car for him, and he sniffled at his mother for giving him more food—fish she’d soaked the night before and cooked that morning, just for him. She protested when he took her pile of sewing and embroidery in need of repair with him, but it was a weak protest. He’d enjoy the busy work and do it well, and she knew it.
He did give in, tearing up a little in the car, since there was no one but other drivers to see him, but by the time he was an hour into the drive, his wet eyes were long gone. He was hungry and tired and sore from camping out on the floor next to a six-year-old, but he was going to be home in time to sit outside for a while, eat his fish, and think about everything he’d been avoiding thinking about for two days.
Like how he missed his family more than most of his friends, even though he hadn’t seen them every day when he’
d lived in the city, so nothing had really changed. Maybe it was simply being around people who knew him, and let him care for them. Chico had been used to freely showing affection with people, once upon a time.
Back in Brandywine, he went up to his place without stopping to see Davi first. He sat outside while he went through the messages on his phone. Davi had been very drunk on Saturday night and apologized for it on Sunday morning, but he took the time to tell him Rafael hadn’t hooked up with anyone. Other people were sad they’d missed Chico’s visit south, annoyed he hadn’t said hi while he was there, and curious about what he was up to.
He needed another update on how his life was going but didn’t feel like sharing his stars again.
THE NEXT day, on his lunch break, he called the number from the slip of paper he’d taken from the poster at the restaurant.
ETHEL WAS possibly the most unpleasant person Chico had ever met, and he was including his ex in that list. An old lady of eighty-two, Ethel had pale brown skin and freckles and far fewer wrinkles than her gray hair indicated she could have. She complained about the sun in her face when she sat by the window, and then that she was cold in the shade. She had achy bones, she claimed, but moved pretty damn fast if someone offered her pudding.
She lived on her own but spent most of her days at the senior center doing puzzles with Alonzo. Alonzo had skin whiter than milk, with the veins showing through, and wore shorts in a way Chico’s grandparents would never do. He was seventy-eight, liked fishing, hunting, and apparently, back in his day, “sweet little things” like Chico.
Ethel had snarled at him for that one and called him a gross old man. Alonzo had retaliated by chuckling and telling her to go put her combat boots on, and it figured that when Chico had hesitantly offered to be a companion to some lonely older people, the man at the desk had sized him up in his spangled T-shirt and necklaces and sent him in to befriend the two old queers in the back.
