Elegy

[ChrisGibson]

Well, yes, of course this is all in the past, because as you can see in the present, they are all together.

 

[ChrisGibson]

CONCLUSION OF CHAPTER TWO


We were on a pier looking over the deep blue water of Lake Michigan. It was summer now and Simon pointed down the coast.
“New Union is just that way.”
New Union, where Cade and I had gone on the trip that brought us together at last, That was the trip Cade and Simon were supposed to go on until things feel apart between them.
Simon was in shades and a ball cap looking, frankly, like someone I wouldn’t like.
“I feel ugly,” he said, taking his shades off and shoving them into the pockets of his cargo shorts. “I feel like an ugly person.”
“You’re not an ugly person.”
“I’m white, I’m 5’10. I’m blond with blue eyes and of average weight and this is America, so no I’m not ugly. I’d have to have tusks or a big red birthmark on my face to be called ugly. I am something you pass over, see it has the right things, and then find it acceptable and know it’s not ugly. But that’s not what I meant.”
“That is not what I meant either.”
“Okay,” Simon said.
“But what do you mean?” I asked.
“I mean that I am great for work and great for work parties. I have the right ideas. But when people get to know me, I am not a good person. I am an ugly person.”
“Do you really feel like that?”
“I’ve always felt it.”
“It isn’t true. I’ve never felt that way about you. I wouldn’t be here with you if I felt that way.”
“Well, that’s good because I don’t feel ugly when I’m with you,” Simon said.
A kid skateboarded behind them on the promenade and I knew all the things I could write, but not easily say. It isn’t enough to list the reasons you love someone. Those reasons all boil down to something deeper altogether, but when you look into them, that is, when I look into them, and then look at Simon, holding his shades, squinting at the sun, I know one thing
I do love him.




“You love him.”
I said nothing. Everything I thought of saying was kind of useless.
“Say something, Don.”
We had been together almost a year now. Cade had never raised his voice to me. Actually, he wasn’t really doing it now. But he was clearly angry.
Pasty forty, I was also past rage. It didn’t interest me. The more excited he was going to get the more I was going to retreat into silence.
“I don’t know what you want me say.”
“Tell me the truth.”
“What you want is for me to say no,” is what I said.
I sat down thinking of taking a cigarette out, thinking it seemed disrespectful to the moment, and then thinking I wanted one anyway.
“You want me to say that you’re wrong. You want me to defend myself.”
“I want you to stop it,” Cade stood at the window his hands in his pockets.
“The first time you stayed in this house, that night when we went to my bedroom, and we did what we did all night, and then you went back home to Simon, not having told me of his existence, and climbed into bed with him and went to sleep.”
“Are you going to throw that in my face now?”
“It hardly needs throwing, and don’t interrupt me.”
The following weekend, when I came over and that man opened the door, you suggested it. You suggested that you could sleep with me and Simon at the same time it wouldn’t matter it would be okay.”
“I was in a fucked up place, Don. I was a fucked up person.”
“And when we were together, and then Simon came to us in the morning. When he came to us in his underwear and crawled into bed—“
“I know where you’re going with this.”
“No you don’t. And you fucked him—we lay in our bed, in my bed and I watched you fuck him, and you wanted to fuck him, and you wanted me to. You loved it until you didn’t.”
Cade didn’t speak now.
“Everything isn’t about you. You aren’t the center of everything. You’d like to be.”
“No, I wouldn’t. I—”
“You would. You want all this on your terms. You want two lovers until you don’t. You want to be in love with two people until you don’t. You want to keep fucking your ex until you don’t.”
“Cause I’m such an assholes!” Cade smacked his head and laughed sarcastically.
“Yes,” I said simply. “Yes, love. You are.”
I saw his nostrils flare.
“I love you, but you came into this relationship with him. You used to love Simon Barrow. I do love him. I haven’t touched him.”
“But there’s something between the two of you. You finish his sentences. I see when he touches your hand, when you laugh at his jokes.”
“What about that doesn’t happen with us?”
Cade looked away from me. He looked upset, embarrassed now.
“It’s supposed to only happen with us,” he said. “You’re supposed to be the only person for me. I’m supposed to be the only person for you.”
“The only person in the whole world?”
“Yes,” Cade said. “Isn’t that the way it’s supposed to be. We fuck around, fuck other people, go in and out of this, but in the end you’re my soul mate and I’m yours and nobody else’s.”
Cade was holding my shoulder’s looking into my eyes. He was my soul mate. I hate that word, but he was, and I wanted him.
“You would be happier if I told you I wanted to fuck him. You’d be happier with that than if I told you I loved him. That he meant something to me.”
“Yes,” Cade pulled away from me.
“If you told me you were attracted to each other and it was just a fuck, or he was important but not like me, or you wanted us to have threesomes now and then, anything, anything would be better than you telling me that you love him.”
“It’s not all about me either, Cademon. He loves me too.”
“I know,” Cade said. “That’s the worst.”
We were silent for a long time. I wanted to feel bad because I was supposed to. I did feel bad because we were happy most of the time. We were becoming happier and happier, but this had been rearing its head for a while.
“Isn’t this how it’s supposed to be? I love you, you love me and if you love someone else I’m jealous? You cheat or we split up?”
“I suppose if we were straight. If one of us was a woman. If we were doing what American Christians are supposed to be doing, but frankly, I don’t think a marriage ever worked out like that anywhere. You weren’t concerned about it before.”
“Because I wasn’t trying to be right before. Me and Simon were fuck ups. Everything we did was fucked up. And I didn’t think I deserved to have the real thing. But we are the real thing. So it should look like the real thing.”
“Like straight people?”
“I feel like I have the right to be jealous,” Cade said.
I wondered if he was challenging me.
“I feel like I have the right to be jealous, but I feel so selfish for it. I feel so small being like this. I feel like my heart is hardening because I want you to stop loving each other. And I feel like everything in the world is telling me I’m right for that feeling, but I don’t feel right. I feel jealous and I feel hateful.”
“Do you think,” I asked after a while, “you could ever love him again?”
“He was so broken.”
“But so were you.”
“I thought he was so much better than me. I followed him into whatever he said.”
“It doesn’t have to be like that again. You could know him in a new way. Because whatever you feel for him that isn’t love, this will never work out if you don’t figure it out.”
Cade nodded, and then I asked him, “How do you feel about him?”
“I don’t know.”
“When he came back to us. In the beginning. When you all were… How did you feel about him?”
“Don,” he said to me, “I have felt so many ways about Simon, I can hardly answer that.”


MORE TOMORROW

 

[CharmedFan28]

A very interesting conclusion to chapter two. A bit of a fight between Cade and Don but I can see both sides and at least they are being honest with each other. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!

 

[ChrisGibson]

Yes, well, people fight. And stories must have action. Wow. I'm sleepy.

 

[ChrisGibson]

We eat in silence, which is not terribly unusual. When we are done, Cade takes my plate along with his. He has cooked tonight, but he takes out the dishwashing liquid and turns on the water. Is he apologizing? What for? The way he feels is natural. I sit at the table, look at his shaggy brown hair. He’s cut it, but it’s always a bit shaggy. He is in his old brown sweater, the one so thin he doesn’t wear a shirt under it, and those old brown corduroys. Tonight, as he sits across from me saying nothing he smells of cedar, all of his clothes do from the old chest his mother gave him. He looks rigid still, unhappy after out uncomfortable conversation.
I get up to hug him from behind and he stiffens. I place by head in his back while he scrubs. I hear a frustrated breath from his nostrils. I reach into his sweater and run my hands up and down his chest.
“You see I’m washing dishes, right?”
I ignore this, and while he continues scrubbing, paying more attention to a black pot in the second sink than he should, I run my hands up and down the hair of his chest, my fingers over his nipples.
“Don,” he says frustrated. “Don.”
I continue rubbing him up and down. He smells so good, feels so good.
“Don, I’m…. Don. We can’t just make everything better by…. You can’t just start.”
I slip my hands into his pants and begin to massage him. He puts down the last plate.
“Goddamn it, Don,” he sounds irritated, but he hasn’t said stop. The water runs while he lies against the sink and my hands move on his chest, in his pants, massaging im, feeling him become more and more firm.
His breath catches and he shuts off the water.
“I hate you sometimes,” he murmurs.
“No, you don’t,” I murmur back.
He turns around and I pull his trousers down and take him in my mouth. I feel him become larger while his hands massage my scalp. My mouth moves up and down on him, feeling the thick head of his cock, taking in the widening shaft, feeling the pulsing vein on my tongue. Wordlessly he gently pushes me to the floor, and moving my pants down does the same to me. The yellow light is on in the kitchen as I feel Cade’s mouth, tight, like a vacuum, moving up and down on me, licking, tasting. He had been so angry, so distant from me this whole day, but now he takes my completely. I pull his face to me and kiss him, pulling his tongue into my mouth, our tongues move like our bodies will. I pull him down to kiss his eyes, his lips, his eyes again, his cheeks, pull his head into the crook of my arm. We struggle to pull his trouser legs down, mine down completely. In the lust of the moment, I open the cabinet, take out the coconut oil, squeeze it into my palm and rubbed it on the knob of his cock, in a moment, after we both grunt, he is in me. In the silence of the house we move in silence, almost, but for the grunts and sighs escaping us, my legs hooked and crossed about his waist as I pull him in. I don’t have enough of his long back. I am reaching for his ass, soft, firm, silky with smooth dark hair, stroking his hair, feeling his kiss, opening my eyes to see his shoulders, his back, his ass bouncing rhythmically, thrilling to watch it flex as he fucks me. When I cry out he cries. When I groan, he groans too.
“Fuck.”
“Fuck,” he whispers as I pull his face closer and we looked into each other’s eyes.
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck,” And every time he says it, he fucks me harder.
“Come inside of me.”
“Fuck—”
His breathless voice rises a little. He loses control. He shudders and we shake together as I feel him bloom inside me. When he comes in me it always feels like a thick blossoming of heat and against his chest, I come too. Our bodies shake together and we seemed to pass in and out of time until we are finally breathless, my thighs unhooking from his, readjusting to fit him between my legs as his cock, still throbbing, lays against mine and my hands, hooked his his curls, massage him.




Of course, sex doesn’t solve everything. But it’s a lie to say it doesn’t take care of problems or that it isn’t a shortcut through them. I wanted him. All that day I had been distinctly out of love with him, but as he washed the dishes with his back to me, a little angry, a little hurt, I wanted him. I wanted to bridge the gulf between us and be at that place where there wasn’t anything in our way. That was the place where we could talk about anything. I wanted my brown haired boy in my arms and in me. I wanted the look of eager lust in his face, the joy of watching his eyes flutter, his body shake, when he came, when he was soft and vulnerable and I was soft and open before him.
We made our way hand and hand to our room, where we lay together saying nothing. We’d said so much, said it in circles. Now we were only holding each, content in this until we stirred to make love again. I was forty. Cade was nearly thirty, but we were like young boys with each other. Young except we knew each other after so long a time and moved comfortably into every pose of pleasure, and nothing shamed us. Cade got up naked from the bed and was gone a while when he returned with the French press, cream, sugar, two cups for coffee. We drank and smoked and held each other in the orange semi light of the one lamp by the curtained window. In time, Cade used his phone to get the news on the radio.
“You’re right,” he said.
“Huh?”
“I am an asshole.”
“Not for feeling the way you feel.”
“Yes, maybe,” he said. “For the many ways I’ve felt.”
I said nothing.
“Simon wants you all to go up to the orchard tomorrow, right?”
“He wants us to go.”
“No,” Cade said, grinning a little. “He wants the two of you to go. He wants to hang out with you. Alone. And you want time with him. Whatever you feel, it’s natural.”
“We’ll just be picking apples.”
“You know what?” Cade’s voice had changed, become lighter. “I trust you.
“I mean, I trust you to love me. And your heart is huge. I don’t need to know what you do with him. Whatever you and Simon do, you have my blessing. I… didn’t want you to love anyone else but me.”
“It’s natural.”
“No,” Cade disagreed again. “It’s what we’ve been taught. And it’s selfish. You saw something in Simon I saw a long time ago. And then you saw something that when I saw it made me walk away. And you loved him for it. Same as you loved me when you saw all my fucked up ness. And…. If your heart is big enough for

MORE WEDNESDAY

 

[CharmedFan28]

That was a great portion! A hot sex scene and I am glad that Cade trusts Donovan to go away with Simon. Excellent writing and I look forward to more in a few days!

 

[ChrisGibson]

Oh, yes, the sex between Cade and Donovan is as hot as ever. They are as much in love as ever, and of course we will continue our story, or our trip to the past in a few days.

 

[ChrisGibson]

AND NOW BACK TO ELEGY



Of course, sex doesn’t solve everything. But it’s a lie to say it doesn’t take care of problems or that it isn’t a shortcut through them. I wanted him. All that day I had been distinctly out of love with him, but as he washed the dishes with his back to me, a little angry, a little hurt, I wanted him. I wanted to bridge the gulf between us and be at that place where there wasn’t anything in our way. That was the place where we could talk about anything. I wanted my brown haired boy in my arms and in me. I wanted the look of eager lust in his face, the joy of watching his eyes flutter, his body shake, when he came, when he was soft and vulnerable and I was soft and open before him.
We made our way hand and hand to our room, where we lay together saying nothing. We’d said so much, said it in circles. Now we were only holding each, content in this until we stirred to make love again. I was forty. Cade was nearly thirty, but we were like young boys with each other. Young except we knew each other after so long a time and moved comfortably into every pose of pleasure, and nothing shamed us. Cade got up naked from the bed and was gone a while when he returned with the French press, cream, sugar, two cups for coffee. We drank and smoked and held each other in the orange semi light of the one lamp by the curtained window. In time, Cade used his phone to get the news on the radio.
“You’re right,” he said.
“Huh?”
“I am an asshole.”
“Not for feeling the way you feel.”
“Yes, maybe,” he said. “For the many ways I’ve felt.”
I said nothing.
“Simon wants you all to go up to the orchard tomorrow, right?”
“He wants us to go.”
“No,” Cade said, grinning a little. “He wants the two of you to go. He wants to hang out with you. Alone. And you want time with him. Whatever you feel, it’s natural.”
“We’ll just be picking apples.”
“You know what?” Cade’s voice had changed, become lighter. “I trust you.
“I mean, I trust you to love me. And your heart is huge. I don’t need to know what you do with him. Whatever you and Simon do, you have my blessing. I… didn’t want you to love anyone else but me.”
“It’s natural.”
“No,” Cade disagreed again. “It’s what we’ve been taught. And it’s selfish. You saw something in Simon I saw a long time ago. And then you saw something that when I saw it made me walk away. And you loved him for it. Same as you loved me when you saw all my fucked up ness. And…. If your heart is big enough for that. Well, then, I think mine can be too.”



Simon was in faded jeans and an open sweatjacket because it was warmer than either he or Donovan had thought it would be. His ballcap was backward and half off his head. He wiped away the sweat at his brow as they passed the row of low apples trees.
“I thought,” he began, “I was a more natural person than this.”
“Didn’t you grow up on a farm?”
“We’ve been through this before,” Simon said, feigning seriousness and pretending he didn’t see the smirk on Donovan’s face.
“I was near the trailer park but not in it, and off the highway, and we went to my mom’s family’s farm. And…” Simon shook his head, his voice lowering to its normal octave, “This is not a farm. This is a boring ole orchard with most of the apples picked away.”
“Well, you said it, not me.”
“I don’t think I even like apples.” Simon said.
“Were you imagining a version of you that did?”
“Yes.”
“Look, raspberries.”
“Well, there’s something like,” Simon said in a bad British accent, tossed the little apple in his hand, caught it, and stuck it in the bucket with the others.
They’d crossed it, and Don was picking the few remaining white raspberries from the patch when Simon lifted one and said, “Is this a maggot?”
Don squinted at it.
“Something like,” he smiled at Simon.
“Can we leave this place?” he whispered, not wanting to offend the Mexican family that was on the other side of their raspberry patch, picking diligently.
“I’m actually not sure why the fuck we came.”
“For the apple wine.” Simon said.
“We could have got that and left.”
“Well, then let’s get it and leave.”
They did get the wine and leave and Donovan refrained from saying that the wine was a little bit pricey and Simon said, “If wine comes from the Latin word for grape, then is apple wine really wine?”
“Poma.”
“Huh?”
“I think the Latin word for apple is poma or something.”
“Like pomegranate?”
“Exactly.”
“I don’t think I want to call this poma,” Simon said.
“Wanna call it wine?” Don asked as he climbed into Simon’s Jeep.
“Yeah, I think we’d better.”
The orchard and the shop were on a flat table of land, and beneath it spread more fields leading to a great red barn the southern sun was shone off. Simon drove the dirt road parallel to it that lead to the main highway, and then they were back down the stretch of road passing farms in the distance, wise cows with flapping tails, and lonely one story businesses composed of trailers and set back in gravel parking lots. The flat fields lowered and opened to the broad blue river and they passed over its winding body and then under an overpass a semi roared across. They threaded up and down roads and through little towns with only onee brick church bearing a low white steeple.
“I could live here,” Simon said, reflectively. “Could you live here?”
They drove until they reached a quiet town that Donovan could only describe as…. Clean. But that didn’t seem the right word for it. It seemed like it had something going for it. It was lively. The downtown, though not busy, had people bustling about with purpose. Folks came in and out of the shops, and many of the houses were painted in vivid colors. When they drove on the main road he recognized it now. Sawyer, not too far south from Ely. Ely had never become a beach town, just a town on the water near some beach. Little hotels and bright stores and restaurants lined the main road, and now Simon turned into one street and they were coming down into a deeply wooded complex of condos and houses. They parked and climbed out and were traveling to a little patio like an overhang. Its wooden steps descended in three long flights to the roaring of the waters and a small and almost private beach.
Sawyer wasn’t like other beach towns because you had to work your way to the water, and this space was carved out of the earth like a nail, and all along it rose the walls of trees and leaves that lead to houses above and set back. It was as long as a beach should be Don thought, as saw families playing in the distance, In the opposite distance a man was walking his dog. Everyone was here for the sun over the water.
“I was talking to someone, or rather someone was talking to me,” Don said, “about coming here, and he said, it isn’t so great. I’ve seen the ocean.”
“Was it Martin?”
“It was.”
“Have you noticed that he’s always miserable, but if you say anything to him he can top you with some nonsense, and not even nonsense about the present?” Simon said.
“It’ll be about all the shit he did some time in the past, somewhere that’s not going to happen again where he’s not going to go.”
“He’s kind of a mess.”
“Yeah he is.”
“If you’re an ant,” Don said, looking over the expanse of pale blue, “does it matter if you’re on one side of a puddle or of a pond?”
Don had taken off his shoes and rolled up his beach pants, thin linen, and now he moved into the water and Simon called, “Is it cold?”
“Just cold enough,” Don said, as a great, glassy wave rolled into his knees and moved past him.
Simon waded into the water and then lifted up his hands and tilted his head back so his ball cap fell into the water. Don snapped it up and Simon wrapped an arm about him.
“I should say,” Donovan said, “that I have spoken to Cade.”
“Yes?”
“About us.”
“Why about us?”
“Don’t pretend to be naïve. Neither one of us is twenty and neither one of us has time.”
Simon said, “Oh.”
“Cade knows. He knows my feelings. He was more upset about feelings than anything. He said that he’d rather we were screwing in hotel rooms than having actual feelings for each other.”
“He said that?”
“And then we worked it out. A long time. And Cade said whatever happened between us was fine. He trusted my love no matter what. He gave me his blessing. Us his blessing.”
Donovan refrained from adding, No matter how reluctantly.
“So…” Simon said, “what are you saying?”
“That’s what I’m saying.”
There was a long space of silence, dotted by the lapping of waves about them, by the occasional cries of children playing on shore.
As a gull winged by, Simon said, “Did you know… the ancient Romans ate peacocks?”
“What?”
“Romans were so given to power that when they saw something beautiful, it wasn’t enough for it to be beautiful and then say, oh that’s lovely. They had to eat it too.”
The white water went on till it was pale blue and the pale blue went on into a blueness that went to the horizon. The yellow sun was high up in a pale blue sky and Simon said, “I saw this runner. I guess he was about twenty. Shirt off, rubbing his v line, maybe wanting people to see it. He didn’t look vain, just… really beautiful in the way that kids can when things haven’t happened to them yet. And I thought, what is it with us? Why can’t we look without lusting? Why can’t we look at something beautiful and not want to eat it. Why can’t we look at something… in…”
“Worship?”
“Yes,” Simon said. “Is that what worship is? To look at something beautiful and just,… shake your head and want to cry. That’s how I felt about that boy. I wished he knew how beautiful he was. He probably doesn’t. But I wished he did.”
Standing in the water to their knees while the warm water bobbed about them, under the cool light of late summer turning to autumn, arm about Don’s shoulder, Simon leaned in and kissed him. The kiss was firm and deep and public, and Donovan gave it back. They stood, heads pressed together.
“When do we have to be back?” Simon whispered.
“Tonight,” Donovan said. “I said eight or so.”
They were both looking out over the water.
“There is the little motel. Up along the road. Where it meets with the highway.”
“They two story I said I’d want to write a book in.”
“You could write a book if you want,” Simon laughed low in his throat, “but that’s not what I had in mind.”
“Yes,” Donovan said, and now the water almost knocked him over. His body hummed and he didn’t feel quite stable. His voice was though.
“Let’s go.”


























“I hate this business of looking at the clock,” Simon said as he turned his phone over and lay on his back.
“It’s six thirty. And least we’re still in the part of the year when the sun won’t go down for long,” said Donovan.
He lay on his side and he traced Simon Barrow’s face with his index finger.
Simon had been looking up at the ceiling with that preoccupied gaze, the look of someone always a little bit worried who was always on point, running from place to place.
“And we will be back around eight…. Eight thirty. Who knows. There is no schedule.”
“I wish there wasn’t… No,” Simon said, “That’s not it. It’s only.
Simon turned on his side to face Donovan.
“You have made me so happy. I’m so happy right now. And I don’t want it to end. And it has to end. We have to get dressed in a few minutes and…”
“You don’t live a hundred miles away. I’ll come to you again.”
“You would do that?”
“Yes.”
“Come to me again?”
“And again.”
Simon had these moments of courtliness, these old fashioned moments, and now he took Don’s hand and kissed it.
“This is the first time we’ve been together.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“The first time alone. You and me. Just us, planning to be just us. And it is so special to me. I wish I’d asked earlier. I have been so shy around you.”
“That,” Donovan said, his hand still not released, as he sank into the covers, “is a thing I cannot understand. I must be the oldest man you’ve ever been with.”
Simon was about to say no, but then he said, “You might be right. Except for some strange things I did when I was in odd places. You are definitely the oldest man I’ve ever actively and honestly desired.”
Donovan, under the covers drew his knees to his chest.
“I would not have thought that or even known that if I didn’t know your age already,” Simon continued, “and I honestly don’t think of it now. But maybe it’s why I want to be with you. Because you are finished. You’re a whole person. I was with boys. I was with a bunch of little boys and I was a little boy and I’ve been trying to be a man. And, you are a man. So…” Simon was still sitting up on his side, neck propped on his shoulder, “that’s why I was a little surprised when you said you’d come back to me.”
“I have to. I can. Cade already knows.”
“I know, you said that.”
“He knows that I love you.”
Simon’s face changed.
He turned around, his back to Don.
For a moment Don did nothing, and then he sat up.
“Did I say…”
“Why can’t I say love?” Simon’s voice was different now, and when Don leaned over him, Simon Barrow’s eyes were wet and he was wiping them with the back of his hand.
“I feel it. I know it,” Simon said. “But everything I said. About wanting to be with you, respecting you, I just wanted to say I loved you and I couldn’t because…. I was afraid to say it. Because I honestly haven’t loved or been loved by… I mean, today was so special. Everything in this bed was special because I love you too. I really do.”
Don held him, and wasn’t sure if he wasn’t weeping a little too. He wasn’t sure if he thought it, or if he said it out loud, that he had probably loved Simon since that first day he met him. Simon turned around for him, like when they’d come into that hotel room and kissed before undressing in front of each other. As the day turned to early evening they made love again, clinging to each other and then clinging harder when orgasm moved through each of them so strong it was almost like they were flying from their bodies.
It was so strong they didn’t move and they stopped caring about the time. Don lit a cigarette not giving a fuck for the no smoking rules and Simon took one from his pack. They showered together, not wanting to be separated and as they dressed. Don called Cade and said he was on his way back. He waited for the question in Cade’s voice but there was none.
They drove back Wallington in almost silence, so comfortable, so quiet, watching the sun begin to set orange and red and the sky go iridescent blue. The tree line became black shadows and Donovan’s body hummed as he touched Simon’s knee, his thigh, his hand, his hair and they rolled along the road contented. Whatever agreement Cade and Donovan might have made, Simon stopped the car at the corner before coming up to the new house. He kissed Don fiercely there, and then sighing, buckled his seat again and drove up to the house.
“It’ll be weird if you don’t come in,” Donovan said.
Simon smiled from the side of his mouth.
“It might be weird if I do.”
He turned off the car and unbuckled his seat though.
Cade was on the porch.
If he noticed that Simon rounded the car door to let Donovan out, he never said it.

In the house things were different. Life was different with Cade than with Simon and once, Donovan realized, these two men had known a life together. How had that been possible? Simon was two years older than Cade, and he had been the lead in that relationship. Don remembered this, remembered also hearing about their past. Now Cade seemed the dominant one. Simon was all blond trimly cut hair and the occasional cigarette. The five ten compact frame. Simon’s house was well appointed and quiet, with no dust, his words full of careful gentility. But the energy of Cade was cigarette smoke, shaggy hair, the hairy body, the long limbs and large hands. Cade’s house was his house, the place that was then becoming a day care, where one had to watch the toys on the floor, where your foot crunched down on a Cheerio.
Don waited to see what feelings came up in him. There was no resentment for losing his quiet with Simon. Cade’s fuzzier hairier world did not lack quiet. It was a different quiet, another peace. He did not resent Cade. Then it would have been time to leave. He was surprised by the joy at having him again.
Donovan did not feel the need to hide any of his affections. As he touched Simon’s hand and Cade’s cheek if, for a moment, he wondered what the other felt, what it made the other think about, he put it out of his mind. After all, Simon had come to him knowing exactly how he lived and, over a year ago, Cade had come to him, disguising the way he lived.
In an hour, Simon was returning home and Don walked him to the car. Whatever had happened today, and whatever Cade accepted or didn’t accept, it was wrong to lean into the car and kiss him and so Don left it at a touch of the hand.
“When are you home tomorrow?” Don asked, casually.
“I’ll be home around six.”
“Around six?”
“I’ll be home at 6:15.”
“I will come to you at seven,” Don said simply, turning to leave the car, surprised by the firmness of Simon’s hand, gripping his.
“Come at seven,” Simon charged.
“Yes.” Donovan said, and rounding the car, turned to go back into the house.



MORE TOMORROW

 

[CharmedFan28]

That was a great portion! Nice to see some more of Simon. This three way relationship gets more and more complicated and even though I know how it ends up I am enjoying this story. Excellent writing and I look forward to more soon!

 

[ChrisGibson]

Hello, Matt! I'm glad you're enjoying the story. The relationship is getting more complicated, or at least we're getting a closer look at it. I do love the way it works itself out.

 

[ChrisGibson]

In the house things were different. Life was different with Cade than with Simon and once, Donovan realized, these two men had known a life together. How had that been possible? Simon was two years older than Cade, and he had been the lead in that relationship. Don remembered this, remembered also hearing about their past. Now Cade seemed the dominant one. Simon was all blond trimly cut hair and the occasional cigarette. The five ten compact frame. Simon’s house was well appointed and quiet, with no dust, his words full of careful gentility. But the energy of Cade was cigarette smoke, shaggy hair, the hairy body, the long limbs and large hands. Cade’s house was his house, the place that was then becoming a day care, where one had to watch the toys on the floor, where your foot crunched down on a Cheerio.
Don waited to see what feelings came up in him. There was no resentment for losing his quiet with Simon. Cade’s fuzzier hairier world did not lack quiet. It was a different quiet, another peace. He did not resent Cade. Then it would have been time to leave. He was surprised by the joy at having him again.
Donovan did not feel the need to hide any of his affections. As he touched Simon’s hand and Cade’s cheek if, for a moment, he wondered what the other felt, what it made the other think about, he put it out of his mind. After all, Simon had come to him knowing exactly how he lived and, over a year ago, Cade had come to him, disguising the way he lived.
In an hour, Simon was returning home and Don walked him to the car. Whatever had happened today, and whatever Cade accepted or didn’t accept, it was wrong to lean into the car and kiss him and so Don left it at a touch of the hand.
“When are you home tomorrow?” Don asked, casually.
“I’ll be home around six.”
“Around six?”
“I’ll be home at 6:15.”
“I will come to you at seven,” Don said simply, turning to leave the car, surprised by the firmness of Simon’s hand, gripping his.
“Come at seven,” Simon commanded.
“Yes.” Donovan said, and rounding the car, turned to go back into the house.



























Much of Simon Barrow’s life had been unkind. It didn’t do to look too deeply into the sources of the unkindness or the roots of shame. He often left it at, he had been unkind. A year ago or two years ago, when he was drunk all the time, when he was always finding the best ways to get the best cocaine and urging his then boyfriend onto all night sex parties, he would have said, at his most honest moments, “I hate myself.” But he wouldn’t have really gone further than that.
“An admission isn’t an exploration,” Donovan had said almost coldly, “and saying you feel something doesn’t do anything to change it.”
Donovan had said what Cade had never been able to say in four years.
“If you don’t believe you’re loved, then there’s nothing I can say or do to make it so.”
But, Simon had thought, the truth is he would not have gone quite that far. It was like it was enough to say, “I am unkind, or I don’t like myself,” but to admit, “I am unloved. I am not loveable,” would have been too much.
Simon was a striver. He would have called himself a grasper, and how in the world did you reach for the best if all the time you reached you were sure you didn’t deserve it at all? How did you reach for what you wanted if you allowed that voice that said, “You are, you are, you are lower than the dirt.”? So he stayed away from the matter of his own lovability he stayed away from.
Better to focus on how unlovable other people were, better to focus on how disappointing, how stupid, what a waste of time they could be. And they could be. He had become a stereotypical gay man, thin and attenuated, stuck up, almost nasal in his tones and gestures, insisting he was above everything. Between boarding school and college he decided this had to be toned down. It was as if he was looking at himself in the mirror one day and thought, “Who is that annoying, outrageous faggot?”
His senior year he met Dan Soldener, a track runner who had just graduated a year earlier. He was lean and trim and his jeans snug. He was strong, handsome, golden, obviously gay when Simon had, until then, not decided he was gay, and his lazy smile, his purring voice, his evident pleasure of everyone was the direction Simon decided he wanted to go in. As Dan had parted from him, he’d held onto Simon’s hand, shaking it firmly, looking into his eyes and saying, “It was a pleasure to meet you.”
Simon could hardly sleep and kept touching that hand, remembering that strong grip, Dan’s lightly muscled body, his walk, the look in his eyes that was so sexy and so unlike what men were supposed to be. So not… straight. That night in his bed, Simon, who had by his own admission been an outrageous fag, but never admitted to himself that he was gay, decided he was and decided it would be sexy, that he would be like Dan Soldener.
When Simon was thirty he began to wonder when it was that he became likeable. He wasn’t truly convinced that it had ever happened, and what was more, for him what he meant by likeable was when he had convinced people he was likeable, when he had built up the personality they couldn’t see through. He didn’t have a shrink to help him out and teach him to see through this. Later on, though Donovan asked pointed questions, he always insisted he was not a shrink and Simon would have to figure out his own shit.
“I spent thirty years being leaned on and offering free advice and analysis that no one had any use for,” Don said, “and now I’m about done.”
Simon began piecing it out one night after a long discussion with Donovan and Cade. He wasn’t sure who had said what, but one of them had said, “It’s hard to get out of the hamster wheel.
“You can get a better job, make the money, move to a new place, get a spouse, get a new spouse, but you keep being you. You keep being the you that’s fucked up. It’s hard to change. It’s hard to look at that thing or…. That lack of thing, lack of soul in you, and do something.”
And yet, when that had been said, Simon knew he had to look back. He had to do something about his own stories. The lies he told himself to make the story he could accept. Don had said that.
“If we looked back at our own stories and replaced the lies we tell ourselves with truth, how different things would be. We want to look nice to ourselves the whole time a voice is shouting, telling us what bullshit we are. So we hear the voice on the outside, justify ourselves and pack on the lies. We say, I’m horrible, but we don’t believe it and we don’t look at the specifics of our horror. We don’t really say how horrible we are or why.”
Simon had tried to make himself lovable in the hopes that the lovability reflected in other peoples eyes might… make the real him lovable? Was that it? And while he did it, he hated them for being his mirrors and he hated himself, and he wanted to cut loose. That’s why he felt loose smoking pot while running Young Republicans, which he had been part of then, felt loose while being a Eucharistic minister at Mass and fucking the altar boy in the church closet, felt liberated the first time he snorted coke on his study Bible, in short, felt liberated and rebellious in what became an ever downward spiraling path of hypocrisy.

The thing about life is that you had to remember it. To be sure, many people misremembered, glossed over it, told a different tale, told it to themselves over and over again like a self hypnotist until they almost began to believe it. The belief was never so complete that the littlest of words wasn’t enough to undo the spell and send someone into a fury. Simon remembered the kind of person he was and how he’d become such a person. His mother had become reluctant of sending him to the family farm, had become reluctant of even those reunions and family gatherings out near Angola. She needn’t have been though, the cousins she had found him lying around naked with didn’t speak to him anymore. There were sullen and distant shrugs as if they were acquaintances in the same high school class and not family. Every ordinary day he went to Dewey School that sat midway between the nice part of the town and the shabby part where he lived, and he started to hear Jacob Brown and Molly Faner talking about going to Roycemore when they got out of here. Roycemore was one of those good high schools, and the truth is Simon was a little nervous about going to big old Midtown High. His grades were good and he took things in hand, went to the library and asked the librarian, Mrs. Butler, about good schools. He learned from her that he wanted a boarding school and the one called Triton, two hours north, might not be out of reach. They had scholarships. He needed a uniform but uniforms cut down on the price of the clothes his parents would have paid for right away. Getting into Triton, getting the scholarship, was the first thing he’d worked for, the first time he had set his will to a thing and known he could achieve it.
“You trying to get away from us?” his father jested, cracking open a beer as he sat in front of the television.
Back then Simon would have said yes, but he was glad he had his father half sober tonight.
“Of course not,” he said. “I just want something new.”
Now when he thought of his father, he thought of being nineteen, way too young to lose a dad, and coming home to see that chair empty, and an empty beer can on the little table before it. He had been found one morning, slumped over toward the floor, and been taken to the hospital. He had never come home.
But none of this had happened when Simon received the acceptance letter and the scholarship from Triton, the place where he would stop being the Simon Barrow who lived three feet from a trailer park and who had been found in a compromising, nude tangle with his older cousins, and become the Simon Barrow he wanted to be. Exactly who that was, he could not say. Exactly what that was he knew a little bit more. He would be handsome, yes, confident, good, strong, get what he aimed for. He would have class and style and winning ways. He would be someone that he liked.


MORE TOMORROW

 

[CharmedFan28]

That was very cool to hear from and about Simon. Sounds like he has some very tough times and at least I know he has some better ones in the future. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!

 

[ChrisGibson]

Yes, Simon has been through a lot, and in a way, Donovan's mourning is helping Simon to mourn. Now we can see why Simon is so sympathetic to him.

 

[ChrisGibson]

TODAY'S EPISODE IS NOT ENTIRELY A REPEAT


The thing about life is that you had to remember it. To be sure, many people misremembered, glossed over it, told a different tale, told it to themselves over and over again like a self hypnotist until they almost began to believe it. The belief was never so complete that the littlest of words wasn’t enough to undo the spell and send someone into a fury. Simon remembered the kind of person he was and how he’d become such a person. His mother had become reluctant of sending him to the family farm, had become reluctant of even those reunions and family gatherings out near Angola. She needn’t have been though, the cousins she had found him lying around naked with didn’t speak to him anymore. There were sullen and distant shrugs as if they were acquaintances in the same high school class and not family. Every ordinary day he went to Dewey School that sat midway between the nice part of the town and the shabby part where he lived, and he started to hear Jacob Brown and Molly Faner talking about going to Roycemore when they got out of here. Roycemore was one of those good high schools, and the truth is Simon was a little nervous about going to big old Midtown High. His grades were good and he took things in hand, went to the library and asked the librarian, Mrs. Butler, about good schools. He learned from her that he wanted a boarding school and the one called Triton, two hours north, might not be out of reach. They had scholarships. He needed a uniform but uniforms cut down on the price of the clothes his parents would have paid for right away. Getting into Triton, getting the scholarship, was the first thing he’d worked for, the first time he had set his will to a thing and known he could achieve it.
“You trying to get away from us?” his father jested, cracking open a beer as he sat in front of the television.
Back then Simon would have said yes, but he was glad he had his father half sober tonight.
“Of course not,” he said. “I just want something new.”
Now when he thought of his father, he thought of being nineteen, way too young to lose a dad, and coming home to see that chair empty, and an empty beer can on the little table before it. He had been found one morning, slumped over toward the floor, and been taken to the hospital. He had never come home.
But none of this had happened when Simon received the acceptance letter and the scholarship from Triton, the place where he would stop being the Simon Barrow who lived three feet from a trailer park and who had been found in a compromising, nude tangle with his older cousins, and become the Simon Barrow he wanted to be. Exactly who that was, he could not say. Exactly what that was he knew a little bit more. He would be handsome, yes, confident, good, strong, get what he aimed for. He would have class and style and winning ways. He would be someone that he liked.


Fifteen years later, when he lay naked on his stomach, face buried between his pillows, luxuriating in the heat of his bedroom and the back of Donovan Shorter’s running up and down his shoulders, his spine, his ass, massaging him and making circles, he wondered how much it mattered to be liked when you could be loved, how much it mattered to be good when you could, for once, be happy.


MORE TOMORROW

 

[CharmedFan28]

Very interesting indeed to read about Simon’s history. He has had a lot of sadness in his life but I am glad you are sharing it. Great writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!

 

[ChrisGibson]

F O U R



MAINLY
ABOUT
THE FREYS



”I can’t believe she’s gone, and I can’t believe the people who are still here!”

- Isaiah Frey



“What?” Rob Dwyer said.
Isaiah Frey repeated what he murmured from the chair where he sat looking out on the bleak day.
“At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord.”
“Are you going to explain that?”
Isaiah Frey was sitting in the old battered chair in the first week of Advent with the ancient leatherette bound Bible on his knees and he recited, reading the large black print:
“Adam again knew his wife, and she gave birth to a son and named him Seth, saying, ‘God hath granted me another child in place of Abel, since Cain killed him.’ Seth also had a son, and he named him Enosh. At that time people began to call on the name of the Lord.”
Rob said. “I remember that. The Seth business. Cain had killed Abel and he ran away and got a wife from who the hell knows where, and then founded a city with, again, who the hell knows who? And then he had all these kids. And there was the guy who killed a man, and he had two wives.”
“Lamech.”
“Yeah. And then the story goes back to Adam, says he had this son.”
Neither of them said anything, and then Rob said, “But what does it mean, you suppose? What does it mean, and then they began to call on the name of the Lord?
“Do you suppose,” the red head continued in the voice of one who had already taken his detective exam and was on his way to becoming a sleuth, “that it’s one of those Kabbalah things, or something like mysticism? The Name of God, all that stuff?”
“It might be,” Frey allowed. “But I wonder if it isn’t something simpler. I’ve had this book so long, most of my life, but not all the time, not consistently, and now and again I will come back to a passage and wonder about it. See it differently. I do wonder if the reason they called on the name of the Lord wasn’t simply because, with all the Lamech’s killing people and the Nephilim sweeping down and humping human women, things just hadn’t gotten so bad that people really began to pray. That’s what I think it means. They began to cry out cause stuff got so foolish.”
“And then the flood happens.”
“Well, yes.”
“Isn’t that,” Rob began, “a bit like Sodom? People cried out to God. God heard and saw all the wickedness and killed all the people? I don’t know, but doesn’t that mean God kind of gets a fail?”
“Don is still reeling from Aunt Adrienne’s death. I can’t believe she’s gone, and I can’t believe the people who are still here. And while we sit here thinking about all the shit we face, I hear about Afghanistan, where a shooter walks into a classroom and kills sixteen students. They say their teacher was calling one of the students, got no answer, called another, got no answer, kept calling students and getting no answer. This is how he found all those young lives had been done away with, young handsome men with their shining smiles, young women in their headscarves and glasses. In the stories God does far too much. In real life, very little at all. The only thing the two have in common is a most massive, epic fail.”
“What would be,” Rob began, “the getting it right? This world is a wrong one. It’s a wrong one. Not just that people are bad, and they are. But that things are bad. The Plague is bad, good people dying while bad people keep on living, People who haven’t even begun living just sort of struck down before they have a chance to change. The pointlessness. Especially at this time of year.”
“Christmas?”
“Yes, when you think there should be a point more than ever and you keep facing all of the foolishness.”
And there was much foolishness to be sure, for everything bad, Rob understood Isaiah Frey counted as foolishness. When his Aunt Adrienne had died, he and his cousin Donovan had agreed, or rather Donovan had decided, that there would be no funeral. There would be a memorial service in the spring, and they would all get on with things in the present. There was much to get on with, for Donovan was saddled with a stepfather to care for which it seemed, day by day he was realizing he was saddled with and wasn’t exactly able to care for. He had been letting things go and so had Frey. Those two cousins more than anyone else in the family had been decided day by day what they would care about and what they would not, what they were going to handle and what they weren’t going to let bother them.
It had not been two weeks since the passing of Adrienne Shorter when Donovan traveled to Calverton for Mass in the first Week of Advent. He brought Simon Barrow with him, though Cade remained in Wallington. The cousins were of like mind. Church had been canceled much of that year due to the Plague and this justified for them the stance they had so taken against attending actual houses of worship and remaining on the fringes of things. They found a high mass to their agreement on YouTube, plugged it into the television and then augmented it with their own incense and candles and songs. Don brought bread and served communion. Rob wasn’t sure about this shit, but DJ took it and so did this Simon. When Rob had asked them where Cade was, Donovan actually seemed merry, merry nine days after the death of his mother.
“He is in Ely. We are all going there next week to have the second week of Advent with some friends of his.”
“Friends of ours,” Simon corrected.
“Yes,” Donovan had said. “That’s right.”
After the opening hymn, while Rob found himself in this strange half in, half out world where incense was burning on a table while a priest stood at an altar on television, Frey had stopped it to stand over the wreath with its three purple candles and one pink, and light the first one.
He had read from his phone:


“Our help is in the name of the Lord.
Who made heaven and earth.”

It had seemed that Donovan was about to read, but he had passed the Bible to Rob and pointed out the penciled passage for him to read. And so, while Rob had not stumbled through it, there was that strange moment of reading from the sacred book that he halfway feared, never having intended to read from it at all:

“The people walking in darkness
have seen a great light;
on those living in the land of deep darkness
a light has dawned.
You have enlarged the nation
and increased their joy;
they rejoice before you
as people rejoice at the harvest.”

Donovan nodded to him, prompting him to continue, and Rob had said, “The Word of the Lord.”
Even DJ responded: “Thanks be to God.”



This is how it was for them. They played with God.
“My mother always said, don’t play with God, but you must or he isn’t real,” Donovan had said.
To them, Rob observed, their services and their holy bread and their theology was as good as any priest’s. They would never go to formal church because, as Isaiah said, “The whole world is God’s cathedral, and everyone in it is his Church.”
Isaiah, in anticipation of his cousin’s coming, knowing that on Thanksgiving Donovan’s mind had been filled with the thought of meeting Adrienne’s ashes and the price tag attached to them, had done a great beef roast with Yorkshire puddings and mashed potatoes, thick gravy, broccoli and cheese, two kinds of pies to usher in Advent.
“This is the best First Sunday of Advent dinner we’ve ever had,” DJ said, and that afternoon Javon came, and with him was his friend Pat Thomas.
“This is the only First Sunday of Advent dinner I’ve ever had,” Rob said.
“I cooked last year.”
“Not like this.”
“My mother wasn’t dead last year. Now pass me a pudding,” Donovan said without missing a beat, and Frey nodded, passing the plate of steaming gold, spongy cakes.
When they had eaten their fill and more than their fill, they sat around smoking and sipping on hot things and liquory things and then turned to setting up the Christmas tree.
“We’ll set ours up when we get home,” Donovan had told Simon.
Later Rob would say, “I thought you might not want to celebrate this year, with everything.”
Frey frowned at his lover.
“Aunt Adrienne is already dead. Isn’t that enough? Why should we die too?”

And Frey did not want the celebration to end, so when he realized that Donovan was going to put the tree up tonight, and that he and Simon and Cade were on their way to look for one, he simply folded up the party and said, “We will go with them.”
Rob did not say anything as pedantic as, “Babe, I gotta be up in the morning.” He knew that Frey would either not care, or simply have DJ or Javon drive him, and Rob knew, after two years with Frey, that where Frey went there would be a party and if there was already going to be a party, he would bring a bigger and better one. And so they drove the hour or so for Wallington. Pat Thomas came as well. The roast set up for lunch became the roast for dinner, Cade, just arrived from Ely and his time with his mother and Father Dan, burst out laughing to see Frey so ready for a holiday.
“Oh, well, it’s a feast now!” Cade cried, and they drove out past Tangerine Road, to where things became rural again.
“There’s a rumor,” Simon began, “that a porn studio’s out here.”
“It’s not a rumor,” Don said. “It’s the truth. It’s where Casey Williams used to make his stuff before he went to Chicago.”
“And you know this how?” Cade eyed him.
“Stop being a prude, Cademon. I know it the same way you know it.”
“You know we met Logan Banford once,” Frey said. “When we did I didn’t know who he was, but I do know now.”
“Well he was at that place,” Don said. “Him and Noah Riley—”
“Noah Riley? The Noah Riley?”
“Yeah. And Johnny Mellow. I think Johnny Mellow’s supposed to live around here.”
“Around here? In Indiana?” Rob seemed dubious.
They were all crowded into Cade’s Land Rover and pulling into the Christmas tree lot.
Donovan shrugged and said, “Well, now, they have to live somewhere.”
They felt so good, and the first night of December was so cold they didn’t haggle over the Spencer fir for too long.
“Oh,” Don sighed as he patted the tree while Cade and DJ strapped it to the roof of the Land Rover, “I love the smell of a fir tree.”

People, look east. The time is near
Of the crowning of the year.
Make your house fair as you are able,
Trim the hearth and set the table.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the guest, is on the way.

It was on this night that Don supervised while Cade and Simon put up then decorated the tree. Frey was administrative more than anything, and Rob was upstairs showering and preparing to go to bed. He had been in this large house several times in the last ten days, and the majority of those times was for sadness, and now they were here for joy.
But there were times when they all began to feel a great heaviness, and Donovan stared off into the darkness of the night and sighed. Cade touched his shoulder and wrapped his arm about him, and for a moment it was as if the whole house was in a sadness. Not incongruously, the choir sang, slowly,

Furrows, be glad. Though earth is bare,
One more seed is planted there:
Give up your strength the seed to nourish,
That in course the flower may flourish.
People, look east and sing today:
Love, the rose, is on the way.

There was always a sadness to Christmas,” Donovan said, regaining himself, coming up out of the black country. “And I don’t think Mom ever really liked it. Now, looking back at so many things I think she never stopped mourning her own mother, and so she could never really find her joy.”
Frey looked suddenly very sad, almost like he wanted to cry, but instead he kept nodding, and the great Christmas tree shone with it’s little lights.
“She didn’t understand that joy and sorrow sit together,” Donovan said, “which I seem to be discovering every moment.”

Isaiah as always loved the largeness of this old house that Cade and Donovan—which Frey understood meant primarily Cade—spent so much time renovating. At around eleven o’ clock they wind their way to bed, Frey on his way to join Rob, DJ going downstairs to the spare room in the front. Frey keeps forgetting to ask about Simon because, in a way, he keeps forgetting to care. It seems they’re in a whole new world and old Christmas music, Bing Crosby, is playing in the living room. Frey embraces his cousin and then, because big tall Cade is standing there with his arms out saying, bring it on in, embraces him too.. He hugs Simon quickly, feeling it’s the right thing, but then it actually feels right, and he watches the three of them head to the same bedroom.
He lies in bed, trying to sleep, and then gets up to read a bit, turning the corner light of the large old room on. He hears shower water and thinks he could live with a shower too, but is also glad he didn’t decide to go in when Cade or Simon or Don wanted to wash. He waits for the shower to be over, waits ten minutes for the water to heat up and then takes pajamas and goes in himself. The water is hot and the soap is sudsy and he feels like life is for the living and all that went on before must give way for whatever is ahead. He hums to himself about life and life and beginning again, and for a moment when he thinks of Adrienne, though it is sad, it is not devastating.
When he comes back to the bedroom to dry himself in the dim light he hears Rob say, his voice low and sleepy, “I forget how goddamn black and beautiful you are.”
Frey is shocked because he thought Rob was asleep, and a little embarrassed because he does not like to be naked, but he likes to please Rob and likes to be loved by him, so he dries himself slower, and Rob murmurs for him to come closer.
“Come to the bed,” Rob says, climbing out, “Give me the lotion.”
He lets Rob rub his body down because he is good at it. When they were first together he would do a half assed job and then start to rub his penis in hopes that sex would happen. It did, but eventually Frey said, when I come from the shower I want to be smooth and I want to sleep, I don’t want to be your fucking play toy, so if you’re not going to do it proper, leave off.”
Now Rob even knows how to massage the short curly hair of Frey’s scalp and rub into his shoulders and rub out all the pain. Now, when he is done, and when Frey has used the good deodorant and sprayed on a bit of cologne, they lie together holding each other.
“What time do you have to be up?”
“Five,” Rob says.
“Um. That’s my fault. If we’d stayed in Ashby—”
Rob, strokes his arm. “It would still be five o’clock.”
“Did you hear that?” Frey said.
“Hear—? Oh, well, it was a matter of time.”
On the other side of the wall, they hear the bed moving with a slow, almost majestic creaking, and then moving quicker, more franticly, hitting the wall, stopping a while, only to start again. But even when it stops, the increasing murmur of voices, the occasional outcry or even shout does not stop. Distinctly, Frey hears an exclaimed breath declaring: “Fuck!”
They lay listening to love on the other side of the wall, desire after death and Frey wonders what it is, Cade and Don, or Simon and Don, or how all three of them move together, but what he hears bears evidence that they certainly do move together, and as he listens, Rob moves closer, and almost without him knowing, the sound and rhythm of love on the other side of the wall becomes their rhythm, and he turns to Rob Dwyer, his open mouth meeting his, his open arms coming to his, their arms and legs coming together to hallow this room and this other side of the wall with their own love.

MORE TOMORROW

 

[CharmedFan28]

Great to get back to this story and that was an excellent portion! So much going on and I am enjoying it! I liked the small connection to the Rossford stories. Well done writing as always and I look forward to more tomorrow!

 

[ChrisGibson]

Oh, yeah. There is the little connection! It is good to get back to these old friends, and I'm glad you enjoyed.

 

[ChrisGibson]

MAINLY ABOUT THE FREYS

CONTINUED


In the winter darkness of early morning, Rob parted from Frey, and Frey lay in bed watching him dress. They touched fingers and Rob kissed him on the lips gently before departing. Frey lay in the bed, listening to him move through the house, listening to the doors open and close and then the rumble of the car as he left. He had thought of walking him out and traveling to the door. But he had thought of sleep more. He slept through Simon dressing and Cade dressing, though he was not sure who was whom, and he only sat up when the door opened and DJ came into the room in his shorts and tee shirt, groggy, and crawled into the hollow space were Rob had slept, burrowing under the covers and immediately going back to sleep. In DJ’s mind, Frey was both mother and father and he was a child. Being six feet tall and a hundred and eighty pounds changed none of this.
They all found themselves in the first floor kitchen by nine thirty, Don pouring coffee. He and Frey sat at the little island and looked out onto the street. Apparently this strange place had gone through being a house, being apartments, being ramshackle and then being a house again.
“I don’t need to go,” Frey said. “I’ll stay a few days.”
Donovan saw no need to go through the business of asking how does Rob feel about it, or won’t Rob want to be in his own home. Nor did he see the point in saying, “Oh, but you don’t have to do it.” Frey had said he would be staying and that was that, and when he felt it was time to go he would.
“Besides,” Frey added, “college ended early with the Plague and everything, so DJ is out till February.”
“We’re not that far from Ashby anyway,” DJ reminded them both, and this was true.
“I just tend not to leave Ashby,” Frey realized.
“I was worried about Ed,” Donovan began.
“You’re stepdad?”
“Yeah. Without Mom there to care for him, things are going to fall apart pretty quickly.”
“That was her responsibility, not yours.”
Every time I try to help or ask about money, he gets loud and ridiculous.”
“My mother was the same way after my father died,” Frey said, taking out a cigarette. “The old bitch just could not be helped. Hell, she could hardly be civil. I wouldn’t worry to much about crazy old Ed. The truth is, he wouldn’t worry too much about you.”
“I just hope he doesn’t end up on the street.”
“But what can you do?” Frey asked. “Can you get him to sign a power of attorney?”
“No.”
“Can you get a guardianship or something like that over him?”
“No, and God, I don’t think I’d want to.”
“Well then there’s nothing you can do,” Frey shrugged. “And knowing how little you can do is half the battle.”
“Didn’t he have a son,” DJ asked.
“My stepbrother, Tyler,” Donovan said. “No one’s heard from him for a while.”
“He was a piece of shit,” Frey decided, and Don barked out a laugh.
“You’re still in heavy mourning,” Frey said. “I’m less so, and I can tell you, Tyler’s a piece of shit and so is Ed. You have to watch out for yourself right now.”
Frey pointed his cigarette at his cousin.
“You have to look out for you.”

“I feel like I need to unfriend this bitch.” Donovan declared.
“I also feel embarrassed for being over forty and talking about friending and unfriend.”
“Oh, who is it,” Frey pushed his glasses up and snaked his head over to look at the computer.
“Fuck her. Where has she been all this time?”
“Not around.”
“Bitch is never around, definitely unfriend her.”
“I get angry every time I see her thumbs up on something I write, but she can’t pick up a phone or be present?”
“And at a time like this?”
“Exactly.”
“Well, I don’t know why you didn’t unfriend her before,” Frey shrugged
“Because it seemed childish.”
“It’s childish to be an irresponsible friend who isn’t there when you’re needed.”
“She said she was sick, and yet….”
Donovan scrolled down and Frey cleared his throat.
“She wasn’t so sick she could take his picture of herself with her big fat ass in a thong while her boyfriend makes out with her.”
“You know what,” DJ stood up all of a sudden, “let me make this easy for the both of you.”
He leaned over Donovan Shorter’s computer and clicked unfriend next to the name of Faye Keller. When it asked if he was sure, he hit confirm.
“Bye bye,” DJ said, and went back to finish his coffee
“Out of the mouths of babes,” Frey said,
DJ frowned at his father.
“Or twenty year olds.”
DJ had been with them at the funeral home when they had sat on the other side of a long dark table and Mr. Wells had gone over what he euphemistically called “options”. At each one, Don chose the cheapest, at some, like the long form obituary, he chose nothing at all. When they had settled on direct cremation and the mandatory one hundred ten dollar coffin, Mr. Wells asked, “Would you like a pillow?”
Frey heard his son say, before Donovan could utter a word, “Will it make her more comfortable when they burn her?”
Frey’s eyes had nearly flown from his head, but Donovan had thrown back his head and laughed out loud, touching DJ’s hand and DJ had felt warmed for what at first he thought was his mouth getting ahead of him.
“No, no,” Don shook his head and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. He had not wept the whole time, but now tears of laughter sprang up.
“I think we can all agree she’s a bit beyond pillows now. She’s dead, right?”
“Yes,” Mr. Wells agreed.
“I mean, her body is downstairs not doing anything.”
“Pretty much.”
“Pretty much?” Frey raised an eyebrow and Don began to laugh again
Even Mr. Wells, taken aback by this, smiled a little.
“We do have to wait forty eight hours, however, before doing anything.
Serenely, still smiling, Donovan nodded.
“Yes, well, when that’s done just stick her in a box and burn her. She’s gone. That’s all we need done.”
It was Tuesday afternoon in the first week of Advent when they were heading back to Ashby and DJ remembered this scene of a few days ago.
“I don’t think Adrienne really liked me,” DJ confided in Donovan.
“It wasn’t that she didn’t like you,” Donovan said. “She didn’t care. She was that kind of creature. It doesn’t really reflect on you.”
On the road DJ demanded of Isaiah Frey: “Is that what you want me to say when you go?”
“Huh?” his father asked from the passenger seat.
“He’s gone!” DJ gesticulated. “Stick him in a box and burn him!”
“Well, yes, that’s exactly what I want you to say. Except, add… Carnivale!”
“Carni… Farewell to the flesh.”
“Yes,” Frey said. “But only to the flesh. The rest of me will never leave you. You don’t get to be so lucky.”

Isaiah Frey doesn’t understand guilt. He does everything for love, and aside from that he does have a sense of fair play. It is an hour from Ashby to Bennett, the town Rob grew up in, and it is twenty minutes further southwest—if you’re driving fast—to get to Wallington. For those days when Rob stayed with Frey at Donovan’s house, he had to travel to the police station a bit outside of Bennett, make the forty five minute trip there, and sometimes take his dad to Mass. When DJ had brought Frey back, Isaiah felt, well, frayed. He loved his aunt. He loves his mother who isn’t getting any younger or any more pleasant. Life seems so fragile, but not only fragile. It seems tawdry. Adrienne’s death seemed quick, but it wasn’t She used her illnesses as guilt sticks to goad people but never shared what was happening to her so that people could help, or she might live. There was something rushed and furtive about her death, something not clean, ragged and ragged as this grey, cold and rumpled time of year. Their two houses, his and Don’s should be the places seeking relief, but sometimes it seems as if they are the only places where there is a relief in a world that is far, far too sad and exhausted.
This morning in Advent, Frey does not want to separate from Rob. In the dark he savors the warmth of his body, the smell of ginger in his red hair, but he knows there is no time for this and they showered last night, so they get dressed quickly. DJ has been staying in the house and not with Javon, and Isaiah is not entirely sure what that means. In the dark they travel the hour into Bennett and attend Saint Augustine’s, the church Frey can count his times having gone to on one hand.
Josh Dwyer just graduated college, and he’s staying around town helping the family out this fall and winter. He has brought Rob’s father to church. Frey and DJ have decided to go back to the little beige house where he first met Rob and have breakfast, maybe have a little more sleep before heading back. When Frey first met Rob, they met in darkness and made love in a summer night, parting as the sun rose and the sun was rising at a time earlier than it is now. Now it is winter, and the sun will not be up for nearly two hours. Now you can get up at four and know there are for more hours of darkness. He knows in the past that when Rob brought his father to church there was the electric light, full on. Now the light is very low and only in a few places. In this brown light they make their way toward Josh and Mr. Dwyer. In the brown light they pick up the candles with their round paper guards which are on the little tables spaced every few pews. As they sit down, the last of the lights go out and they are in darkness but for the lit candles on the altar.
“Rorrrrrraaaate!” they hear a voice sing, and rise to their feet.
“Rorate, coeli desuper et nubes pluant justum!”
As the priest processes in followed by servers, lighting other candles, lighting the candles of each person at the edge of each pew so that they light the next person’s candle, the chapel is filled with golden light and the congregants sing:

“Aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem.”

As the chapel is filled with light at this time, which is on the edge of all things, they sing again:

“Rorate, coeli desuper et nubes pluant justum!”

All through Advent, all over the world, the service begun and ended in early morning darkness, the Rorate Mass is held. As they sing songs before the Mother of God and the Father of Jesus for the coming of the Holy Child, the golden light of candles which takes people beyond the normal light, teaches them to see in a different way. Singing becomes pleading. Pleading is made prayer:

“Aperiatur terra et germinet salvatorem.”
“Rorate, coeli desuper et nubes pluant justum!”

Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the just
Let the earth be opened and send forth a Saviour!

Bring him, Lord! We need him. Bring him, Lord. We’re serious. We’re not fucking around anymore. We need something to change. We need a total change. We cannot do it on our own, not at all. Send him from the heavens, send him with the rain, let him come groaning out of the earth, out of us, fragile and foolish and broken and scared, emerging from out bodies as from the watery and bleeding womb, the mother’s shout, the lovers shouts, the hands clasping and unclasping, the sex convulsing and spilling. Bring him from above, bring him from below, out of heaven, out of earth, son of God and most, most certainly son of man, bring this new thing. For we need a new thing. Rorate… Rorate… Rorate…


This time of the year the chit chat that occurs in the parking lot and porch is going to happen in the back of the church or in the vestibule.
Josh says, “How you been, DJ? It’s been a long time, hasn’t it?”
“Yeah. It’s been a while. I heard you finally graduated.”
DJ covered his mouth and blinked through his glasses, embarrassed.
“I mean graduated. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“You can say finally. It kind of took a little logner than it should have.”
“Well, you know,” DJ said, “things happened.”
By things happening, DJ meant that Josh had been in a diner three years ago when a shooter had walked in and murdered all of this friends around him. He’d played dead while he watched their dead faces and returned home traumatized after pushing himself through final exams. This was before he’d met DJ and by meet, well, that meant something else as well.
“And you,” Josh said, his eyes wide through his own glasses, his voice higher than usual as if he were remembering just how they had met and trying to make things in this early morning church normal, “you’ve started college.”
“Yeah,” DJ said, looking away, remembering manners, looking at Josh. “Yeah.”
“How is it?”
“It’s cool,” DJ said. But DJ was always listening to himself and judging if he sounded like a jerk or not.
“It’s really nice. I’m in town. I might go to a bigger school around junior year. We’ll see.”
“It’s all good,” Josh said. “I bet you dad is glad to have you around.”
DJ chuckled. “Hard to say.”
“Of course I’m glad to have my son around,” Frey, who had seemed to still be talking to Rob and Mr. Dwyer said.
Frey heard everything. DJ knew that by now. If Isaiah Frey were not so calm, if his way of hearing were not so gentle, his son would be tempted to say that Isaiah Frey knew everything.
“Well,” Rob embraced Frey’s waist, and kissed him on the cheek, leaving whoever was still in the church to interpret it however they wished, “I’m off. I’m gonna run Dad back home.”
“I was going to do that,” Josh said.
“But now you don’t have to,” Rob said. “Come on, Dad.”
“Well, what’s a boy to do now,” Josh lamented.
“Go to bed,” his father said.
“Or come get breakfast with us,” Frey said. “We’re just going to pick something up and go back to the little house.”
DJ looked at his father, who seemed to look away. What was he up to? Or was he up to anything?”
“Yeah, I think I’d like that,” Josh said. “We could pick up Bob Evans.”
Frey agreed.
“Bob Evans always makes the world seem right.”



“Why did you invited him?” DJ whispers in the car.
“Why are you whispering?” Frey says.
Josh, of course came in his own car and is driving in front of them. “And why are you being rude? I didn’t know you had something against Joshua.”
“Joshua?”
“That is his name.”
“I have nothing against—” DJ imitated his father, “Joshua. It’s just… It seems strange you’d invite him back to the house with us to have breakfast.”
“We’ve been to church. Does Christian kindness really seem that strange?”
“And I wasn’t aware that we were getting ready to have breakfast anyway.”
“I wasn’t aware that I was hungry.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Strike while the iron is hot,” Frey said.
“What?”
“Strike while the iron is hot.”
“Are you going to expand on that?”
“Expansion is the mother of invention.”
“What?”
“Do unto others before they do unto you.”
“I can see I’m not going to get a straight answer out of you.”
“There’s nothing straight in me, my dear boy. Apparently nothing in you, either.
“Look,” Isaiah said as they drove along the streets of Bennett that were just beginning to be touched by a grey blue pre morning light, “he asks about you. When I see him, when he is with Rob and I, he asks in on you.”
“That’s normal.”
“I don’t know what it is, but he’s a nice boy and you all get on well, if you get the chance to get on well together so…” Isaiah shrugged.
DJ said nothing as they turned into the parking lot of Bob Evans. He felt like he should before they got out of the car and were with Josh and unable to talk.
“You’re right,” DJ said. “I mean, Josh is a good guy. Far as I know. We actually haven’t had a lot of one on one time, Or at least not since we first met. Just the way things turned out. But things started out odd with us, so… I don’t know.”
“That’s right,” Frey said. “You don’t know. So why don’t we move forward, not get out heads up our asses and stuck in the past, and see what we can know?”


MORE SUNDAY

 

[CharmedFan28]

That was an excellent portion! Lots going on and I am enjoying exploring more of the world of this story. Great writing and I look forward to more in a few days!