Best Gay Romance 2014

by R. D. Cochrane

  The cabin was exactly as Evan had described it. Down a bumpy path that was part gravel, part dirt, made from prefab wood sections, with a tiny front porch and a chimney, the whole building smaller than my Manhattan apartment. I looked at it and thought, Oh my god, what have I gotten myself into? Scott helped me carry my bag of books inside and when I handed him his fare, plus a too generous tip because of his youthful beauty, he handed me a business card and said, “Call us if you need anything else—to check out bear tracks. Go down to the village for supplies. Whatever.”

  Us, I noted him saying. Not him. Don’t call me. Call us. I nodded as he left and was suddenly so worried about whether there was food in the cabin that I forgot to give him a smile and a polite good-bye. Evan had not told me if there was any food in the place, nor what I would have to do if I needed to find food. I quickly discovered some canned soup in a cabinet, but could not spot a can opener, then realized, when I turned on the faucet and the water that came out appeared brown, that I was not about to stay here in this godforsaken place unless—well, unless I could at least believe that the water was decent enough to drink.

  I tried to relax for a few minutes, unpack, settle in and start a book, but my mind was consumed by the fear that there was no satisfactory drinking water. As I read, my throat became drier and drier as words raced in front of my eyes and straight out my ears. Why had I not thought this trip completely through? Why hadn’t Evan told me I needed water, of all things? And food and toilet paper and a can opener if I wanted to survive? Finally, feeling as if I had been dumped in the Sahara, I went to the phone and dialed the “Us” number on the card Scott had left. When a woman finally answered (after about the six-hundredth ring), I explained my predicament and asked if someone could find me—wherever the hell in the middle of nowhere I was—and take me to a store.

  By now I was sweating. It was hot outside and even hotter inside the cabin, and I felt all my body fluid flowing right through my pores. It was another ninety-minutes of sheer, dry torture before there was a knock at the door, because I was certain the woman who had taken my call was purposely trying to scare the High-Strung Undesirable I had become right back to the city where I came from. “Hey,” Scott said, when I opened the door. “My mom said something happened.”

  I could not contain my embarrassment, felt my face redden and my throat constrict and the Mojave sand my tongue had turned into made my eyes go teary, ready to expel the last of my body’s moisture. “I need to go to the store,” I said rather curtly, then tried to find a way to soften my behavior, so I reached out for my crutch and hopped across the room.

  “Sure,” he said and started out to his truck.

  He helped me shop, following me patiently through the aisles of the tiny grocery store in town. The prices were astonishingly low compared to my corner bodega in the city, though some of the items on the shelf seemed to be older than my drivingaide. Scott was a practiced companion, not wandering away, not trying to convince me to buy something I didn’t want, exhibiting no signs of boredom, and my first instinct was to turn to him and ask him to marry me because he was so much more composed than any guy I had dated in the last decade and gone shopping with, but then I realized I would not be able to fight off his potentially angry, insulted youthful fists with a crutch and my unbalanced posture once he realized what I really hoped and desired of him.

  His gentlemanly behavior continued even when mine did not. (I had a snippy exchange with a clerk in the meat aisle when I couldn’t see where they had stamped the expiration dates on the labels.) Scott carried the bags to the truck, helped me up into the passenger seat, even carried the bags into the cabin and emptied the contents onto the counter.

  When I handed him his fare and another nice tip, I asked him if he wanted to stay for something to eat. Outside, the sun was setting, though it would be another good hour before it was fully dark.

  He fumbled and squirmed at my unexpected invitation and said that he’d like to but couldn’t, since he had promised his mother he would be home for dinner and then there were a few things he needed to talk to his girlfriend about. Mother. Girlfriend—these were such strange words to me that I almost asked for a definition or explanation of the terms. I really didn’t expect he would take me up on my offer, but I also didn’t expect he would have one of his own. As he was walking back to his truck, his head cast down toward the ground in thought, he stopped and yelled back to ask if I liked boating.

  “Boating?” I echoed back at him, not really understanding the concept of a structure floating in water—we were in a forest, of all places—I knew of no lake nearby. So I thought he might have said, Voting. Do I like voting?

  “Yes, well, sure,” I said, not wanting to displease him. I tried to sound positive and optimistic, and, well, happy.

  Then he explained that he owned a small boat at a lake that was not far from my cabin and he needed to check up on it sometime the following day, and did I want to ride over with him to the lake—get out of the cabin for a while—and if the weather was good, we could go out for a bit on the lake.

  I hung on to the we. We could go out a bit.

  “Sure,” I said, not at all worried that I was a hundred years old and had only one working leg. I closed the door dizzy and confused. Tom Sawyer had offered to take me out on his raft.

  I waited and waited and waited and waited for young Tom Sawyer to show up the next morning. He called me early and said he had to run an errand for his brother, then called and said he needed to sub for his uncle for a fare in town, and then called and said he would have to drop his mother off at the church and would be over after that. It was after lunchtime when he finally showed up at the cabin, honking the truck’s horn from the end of the drive.

  “You ready?” he yelled out of the window, as if I had been holding him up. From the doorway I stood amazed at the impatience in his voice and I almost called out and canceled, till I noticed his smile, his too-white, beautiful nineteen-year-old smile. “Just a sec,” I yelled back, then hopped to my crutch and was out the door as quick as my one old reliable leg could take me.

  “It’s not far,” he said, when I was settled in my seat and we were headed down the small road that led to the cabin. Not far turned out to be farther than you’d think. About an hour later we reached an enormous lake where there was a small inlet in which ten boats were harbored. Scott pointed out the boat that was his, then sprang out of the truck and began unloading several bags from the back onto the dock. I hobbled over to the boat and waited for him to help me in; once he did, he began to toss the bags into the boat for me to catch. I tried to pretend that I was much stronger and more seaworthy than I really was, but each time I absorbed the weight of a bag, I felt my bum foot creak and burn with pain. Finally, when all of the bags were inside the boat, Scott began pitching them into the hold.

  The boat was a small sailboat, about twenty feet in length, named The Harbor Witch, which I felt was an adequate description of my mood as I tried to catch my breath and keep steady. As Scott stood in the hold unloading the bags—canned foods, bottled sodas, towels, pillows, stuff like that—I stood at the doorway and watched. “It doesn’t really belong to me,” he said. “My brother said if I cleaned it up, I could take it out today.”

  At last, there it was. The catch. The glitch. It wasn’t Scott’s boat, it was his older brother’s and he was only allowed to use it if he cleaned it up for him. “What could I possibly do?” I asked, leaning into my crutch and balancing myself as the boat wobbled in the water. I didn’t expect that he would take me up on my halfhearted offer. First of all there was the crutch, which I clutched for dear life as the boat pitched back and forth. Then there was the fact that I was a guest. An invited guest. You don’t ask invited guests to clean your brother’s boat. Do you?

  But he did. “Mop, I guess,” he said.

  Mop? He wants me to mop? I don’t think I actually articulated my exasperation, but it must have shown in my tense, cynical, horrified urban p
ersonality and posture. Then I realized that if I stormed away in a huff I was a good hour from the cabin with no way to get back unless I called a cab. Him. I would have to call him.

  “Or scrub if it’s easier for you.”

  Scrub? If it’s easier?

  And then there was the smile. (And I suppose I should add that he was dressed in shorts and a tank top, his shoulders smooth and deeply muscled, with the silky blond hair of his armpits peeking out beneath them.) Yes, he was Tom Sawyer. That smile had made it impossible to resist him. He soon had me starboard on my knees washing down his brother’s boat, the sun beating against the back of my neck, the cool air from the water chilling the sweat-soaked T-shirt I wore and that I refused to take off because I was too worried it would reveal the layers of fat around my waist. Scott, however, took off his tank top, and I had chance enough to stretch and look and stretch and look and stretch and look. It was a glorious thing, really, working, stopping, looking at a young god sweating underneath the summer sun.

  “Don’t forget to clean the grommets,” he said to me.

  “Uh-huh,” I answered. Of course not. Don’t forget the grommets. Wasn’t there a term for this sort of role-playing I was willingly participating in? Slave and master? Sadomasochism?

  We mopped and cleaned and polished and when I thought we were almost done, Scott said there was “just a little more to do.” Just a little bit more turned into another thirty minutes or so, but it was such simple, honest work, cleaning, sweating and watching a beautiful young man, that I could not stop when he said we were through. In fact, I told him he had missed a spot where he had been polishing a rail and I went over and cleaned it myself.

  It was late afternoon when he showed me how to rig the sails and then used the small outboard motor at the back of the boat to guide us out of the harbor. When we were far enough out in the lake, he cut the engine and the sails caught the wind. He seemed to know what he was doing, yelling at me to watch the boom, demonstrating how to tie a proper knot and guide the rudder. Of course he made me wear a life jacket, which both upset and delighted me. It showed he cared enough to worry that I might drown, but there I was, next to a shirtless sailor at the helm of a sleek vessel, inflated and bulky like a bright orange rubber duck that would not sink.

  As we sailed along the lake, Scott pointed out his favorite homes on shore: the one with the best pier, another that he felt certain was big enough to turn into a nightclub. We dropped anchor in a small cove and The Young Worthy Seaman asked if I wanted to take a swim to cool off. Yes, I thought, of course I do. I need to cool off. I’ve had more excitement today than I’ve had in the last twenty years. And I wanted to swim and frolic with the Beautiful Boy of the Lake no matter how much I resembled The Ugliest and Most Awkward Pool Toy in the Store. While Scott was in the galley doing something or other, I took off the life jacket, removed my T-shirt and shorts, unwrapped the bandage from my leg, wrapped a towel around my waist to retain my modesty (and mask my growing desire) and put the life jacket back on.

  Scott helped me to the bow of the boat and we momentarily discussed the best way for me to jump into the water, whether it would hurt my leg less to fall on my good side or go straight in. He was now wearing nothing—having also shed his shorts, and I could not keep my concentration focused on how to jump when there it was, The Thing That Made Him So Young and Desirable, right there, right there beside me and in full glorious view. (And yes, he was hung, exactly as you’d expect a nineteen-year-old guy to be—a large, heavy set of balls and a pink, fleshy sausage of a cock.) Finally, I was so agitated and hot, hot, hot, that I just dropped my towel and fell overboard into the water. It was a glorious, wonderful and cooling dunk and Scott dove in as soon as he saw me bob to the surface.

  Scott swam and dove beneath the water, circling the Great Orange Inflatable Head I now was, talking about this and that as he gulped for breath and tossed the water out of his hair. “This is my favorite spot,” he said, and I cast my eyes around the lake and the shoreline as if we were pirates who had landed and found buried treasure. “Cindy—my girlfriend—doesn’t like the boat at all. She thinks it’s too much work. She’d rather have a speedboat. My brother says she just doesn’t get it. Sailing. You know, all the work and lessons to feel the wind catch in the sail and carry you away. Without the motor.”

  I nodded and bobbed and smiled in the best way I knew. At that moment I felt happy and content; the sun was glowing orange, setting slowly in the sky; the water was warm and still around us, broken only by Scott’s swimming and splashing. In the water I could move and kick my foot, whereas on land I felt useless. And for a moment I had left behind my daily urban struggles and continual boyfriend troubles. I expected nothing from Scott—certainly nothing in the romance or sex department—other than one nice surprise after another. Which was exactly what happened.

  “I wish I didn’t have to go back,” he said. “Don’t you ever wish that? That you didn’t have to go back to something that you don’t like when you’re somewhere having a great time. Everyone’s nagging me to keep applying for a job here or a job there. I just feel like I’m groveling. I want to do something I like to do and get paid for it.”

  “It’s not easy putting yourself out there and asking for work,” I said. I thought about all the jobs I had waded through in the last few years—from a publicist to a temporary office assistant to a newspaper editor to an occasional bartender until I landed in the communications office at the corporation where I had a steady position. “I’m sure you’ll find a job soon. Just keep asking everyone you know. Someday, somebody will hear of something. That’s usually how it works. Somebody hears of something and remembers you were looking for a job.”

  “But I hope I like it,” he said. “That’s important. I’ve got to want to do it. Why can’t I have a job doing something like this?”

  “No reason why you can’t,” I said. “But that means you have to really look for it. You can’t wait for it to come along.”

  The sun was now a bright orange ball floating on the surface of the water. I imagined myself falling in love with a boy less than half my age, and it was a glorious fantasy. And for a moment I wasn’t the older man. I was as young and beautiful and as eager as him. Ready to find and conquer the world.

  “You know how to find the way back in the dark?” I asked. It wasn’t really an overwhelming concern, just a thought that had emerged from the back of my mind as I looked at the sun. We had stayed out later on the lake than I had expected.

  “I don’t have to be back till morning,” he said.

  That was when it struck me that we weren’t rushing back so quickly. He realized his mistake immediately—of not telling me his plans for fear of my casting doubt or suspicion on them. He floundered a moment by scrunching up his face, then said, “I can take you back if you want. The boat’s real comfortable though. Or we can sleep up there on the shore. I’ve done it before. It’s real neat. Feels like you’re right under the stars.”

  Sleep on the boat? Or outside in the wilderness? What is he thinking? Who does he think I am? Davy Crockett? I looked at the boat and then at the shore. “Okay,” I said in a weakened voice. Who was I to spoil the adventure?

  We decided to camp on shore. Scott got cushions from the boat and we floated various things to dry land—a blanket, towels, frying pan, canned foods, beer, matches. On shore, he spread out the blanket and I collected sticks and twigs, and we started a small fire at a spot enclosed by stones (where someone had obviously camped before).

  We ate, and drank the beers and sat beneath the stars and talked. I had dressed again in my T-shirt and shorts and rewrapped my leg, but Scott sat shirtless, wearing only a towel around his waist, as if he were a native tribesman entertaining the Great Big Fat Tourist. He confessed that he’d had an argument with his girlfriend the day before; it had happened right before he picked me up at the train station and had continued throughout the day. He said she was wearing him down, pressuring him to set a date fo
r a wedding when he knew he wasn’t ready or able to commit to her yet.

  “She’s not the right one,” he said. “But I just can’t tell her that. I’m too chicken. I don’t want to start her crying.”

  Of course, I realized exactly how the girlfriend must be feeling, loving the godlike creature he was, unable to fully snare him and make him submissive. I started thinking about all the men I had dated who were really boys at heart, emotionally distant, romantically immature, especially the ones who thought the notion of a great date with me was going to a bar and looking at other guys.

  “How come you don’t have a girlfriend?” Scott asked.

  It was a quick and hypothetical question, I knew that, but my stunned silence seemed to answer part of his question, so he backtracked and amended it to, “Or a guy? A boyfriend?”

  I tried not to let my memories make me feel sorry for myself. “There was someone years ago,” I said. “But he died. I just haven’t found anyone else who seemed right. Right for me.”

  “My brother says I’ll know when she’s right,” Scott said. “He says it’ll just hit me in the heart.”

  “Is he married?” I asked.

  “Divorced,” Scott said. “He said he made a big mistake marrying Melinda.”

  We talked about other things—favorite movies, worst TV shows, places we wanted to visit, as the dark grew deeper around us—crickets chirping, the wind rustling the leaves behind us, the fire snapping and talking as if it were another friend offering advice. We lay back on the blanket and looked at the sky and fell into a conversation about the possibility of God and our wish that He could provide us with more obvious and specific clues on how to live best.