ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I'm glad you enjoyed. It was time to get back to the story, and back to the Frey clan.
The Original Gay Porn Community - Free Gay Movies and Photos, Gay Porn Site Reviews and Adult Gay Forums
-
Welcome To Just Us Boys - The World's Largest Gay Message Board Community
In order to comply with recent US Supreme Court rulings regarding adult content, we will be making changes in the future to require that you log into your account to view adult content on the site.
If you do not have an account, please register.
REGISTER HERE - 100% FREE / We Will Never Sell Your InfoTo register, turn off your VPN; you can re-enable the VPN after registration. You must maintain an active email address on your account: disposable email addresses cannot be used to register.
Elegy
- Thread starter ChrisGibson
- Start date
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
But, as DJ already suspected, his father knew much. Isaiah Frey always knew. The first time that Frey had seen Josh Dwyer or rather been aware of him, had been when he and DJ and Javon and Pat Thomas had all come to find them at the Monastery of St Clew. It had only taken a moment for his eyes to pass over them and realize something was going on. These were more than chance friends who had met. Exactly what was going on he could not say. This was in part because he was never sure about what was going on between DJ and Javon. Looking back Frey realizes he completely knew, but was completely shocked, that DJ and Javon’s relationship was something out of a weird Toni Morrison novel. When Frey was sure that his son was sleeping with his nephew, he had to think about how to deal with it.
He had grown up in a home with a mother who reacted to everything with no thought whatsoever and endless drama. His father’s reaction had simply been to walk away. So now Isaiah Frey never let his actions be reactions. No, DJ and Javon were not actually related. He knew DJ was gay, and had identified as such. Had Javon? What was going on with his nephew? Who needed to be shielded from whom? But in the end, boys would be… he hated that phrase but things were going to happen, and he had to consign himself the agony of telling no one while waiting for whatever was going to happen to play itself out.
What had happened was that DJ and Javon functioned like a very close unit of best friends who some knew were cousins. Whatever went on in bed seemed to bind them closer and their bed was, after all, their bed, so Frey had left it alone.
And then came the day when they had shown up with Patrick Thomas and Josh Dwyer. It had not taken long to divine from Rob that Pat had not only been his first sexual experience but had been sleeping with Josh and they were in something much the same as DJ and Javon. What was more, the moment Frey saw all four boys together, he was sure that in some way they’d all been with each other. At first he cursed himself for the thought, and said he was a nasty old man, but it seemed so obvious and then it turned out to be true. When they had all gone back to Ashby, Pat and Josh were coming over frequently, and it seemed from what was left out of conversations that it was not four friends, or two couples hanging out at the rented house down the street where Javon and DJ lived, but a sexual swapping between four people.
Frey was troubled, but not alarmed, and certainly not disgusted. Eventually Josh had drifted from the thing and it seemed, as it always had, that there was something more between Javon and Pat, something that, Frey did not like, left his son out. He wasn’t perversely puritanical. He wanted his son’s happiness. They had traveled to Lake Michigan last year and DJ had confessed how much he wanted to love someone, not even be loved, but to love. So when Josh would come to visit and sneak into conversations questions about DJ, Frey’s ears perked up and when Josh had nothing to do today, Frey decided to give him something to do. Josh might not be everlasting love, but what he was is what DJ had never really had, someone who was curious about him. Things had to start somewhere after all. All you could do was try.
“So,” Josh was saying as he held the hash brown in his hand, “I know I’m not completely right. I mean, I still feel a lot of the damage of… what happened. Of my friends being killed. Of all of that. And taking so long to get through school, I kind of don’t have the confidence in myself that I used to, but I was just like, fuck it. Excuse my language.”
Isaiah Frey was languidly sipping his cooling coffee as the sun began to fill the sky in the window that looked over the sunken front yard.
“Fuck its are always allowed in this house,” he said.
He sat away from them, aware that DJ was sitting knee to knee with Josh.
“Well, then,” Josh continued, animated, “I said, Fuck it. And I took the GRE, and I think I did pretty well, and I’m sending my applications to Notre Dame, De Paul and Loyola because… I don’t really want to travel very far.”
“Not Valpo?”
Josh shook his head.
“Go big or go home.”
“I feel like it’s get a degree or don’t get a degree,” DJ said, prosaic.
Josh laughed and knocked DJ’s knee with his own.
“See, I should have had someone like you around a long time ago. It would have made me a lot more practical. Still, I really want what I want and….”
“All you can do is try,” DJ said.
“Exactly,” Frey said, and got up to find his cigarettes.
END OF PART ONE
TOMORROW: THE PREMIER OF THE BOOK OF THE BATTLES
He had grown up in a home with a mother who reacted to everything with no thought whatsoever and endless drama. His father’s reaction had simply been to walk away. So now Isaiah Frey never let his actions be reactions. No, DJ and Javon were not actually related. He knew DJ was gay, and had identified as such. Had Javon? What was going on with his nephew? Who needed to be shielded from whom? But in the end, boys would be… he hated that phrase but things were going to happen, and he had to consign himself the agony of telling no one while waiting for whatever was going to happen to play itself out.
What had happened was that DJ and Javon functioned like a very close unit of best friends who some knew were cousins. Whatever went on in bed seemed to bind them closer and their bed was, after all, their bed, so Frey had left it alone.
And then came the day when they had shown up with Patrick Thomas and Josh Dwyer. It had not taken long to divine from Rob that Pat had not only been his first sexual experience but had been sleeping with Josh and they were in something much the same as DJ and Javon. What was more, the moment Frey saw all four boys together, he was sure that in some way they’d all been with each other. At first he cursed himself for the thought, and said he was a nasty old man, but it seemed so obvious and then it turned out to be true. When they had all gone back to Ashby, Pat and Josh were coming over frequently, and it seemed from what was left out of conversations that it was not four friends, or two couples hanging out at the rented house down the street where Javon and DJ lived, but a sexual swapping between four people.
Frey was troubled, but not alarmed, and certainly not disgusted. Eventually Josh had drifted from the thing and it seemed, as it always had, that there was something more between Javon and Pat, something that, Frey did not like, left his son out. He wasn’t perversely puritanical. He wanted his son’s happiness. They had traveled to Lake Michigan last year and DJ had confessed how much he wanted to love someone, not even be loved, but to love. So when Josh would come to visit and sneak into conversations questions about DJ, Frey’s ears perked up and when Josh had nothing to do today, Frey decided to give him something to do. Josh might not be everlasting love, but what he was is what DJ had never really had, someone who was curious about him. Things had to start somewhere after all. All you could do was try.
“So,” Josh was saying as he held the hash brown in his hand, “I know I’m not completely right. I mean, I still feel a lot of the damage of… what happened. Of my friends being killed. Of all of that. And taking so long to get through school, I kind of don’t have the confidence in myself that I used to, but I was just like, fuck it. Excuse my language.”
Isaiah Frey was languidly sipping his cooling coffee as the sun began to fill the sky in the window that looked over the sunken front yard.
“Fuck its are always allowed in this house,” he said.
He sat away from them, aware that DJ was sitting knee to knee with Josh.
“Well, then,” Josh continued, animated, “I said, Fuck it. And I took the GRE, and I think I did pretty well, and I’m sending my applications to Notre Dame, De Paul and Loyola because… I don’t really want to travel very far.”
“Not Valpo?”
Josh shook his head.
“Go big or go home.”
“I feel like it’s get a degree or don’t get a degree,” DJ said, prosaic.
Josh laughed and knocked DJ’s knee with his own.
“See, I should have had someone like you around a long time ago. It would have made me a lot more practical. Still, I really want what I want and….”
“All you can do is try,” DJ said.
“Exactly,” Frey said, and got up to find his cigarettes.
END OF PART ONE
TOMORROW: THE PREMIER OF THE BOOK OF THE BATTLES
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great portion. Nice to hear more of DJ and Frey. I like DJ as a character. Excellent writing and I look forward to more writing with The Book of the Battles tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Thanks for reading, Sorry to get back to you so late. I really like DJ too, and better and better since his first appearance. It was great to get back to this story, and it's going to be grand to get back to the Book of Battles.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
BOOK
TWO
peregrine
F I V E
A PILGRIM
“Let’s not come? Let’s not come. Let’s not come. Let’s… stay… on this edge… in this place…”
-Bryant Babcock
’
Simon Barrow had decided he wanted to try out church now that Advent was here. Donovan had tried it some time ago, but anything that could take him from the sometimes claustrophobic thoughts of Adrienne, or the all too dark darkness of this private study in the house or worry over his stepfather, was welcome. Since the new election where Mayor Jack was no longer in office and a Republican government had taken over, Simon was working in Rossford and dragging Donovan there for lunch, or either Donovan was willing to take the bus that crossed Tangerine Road, the border between Wallington and Rossford, and let it take him to the latter’s downtown.
He wasn’t sure if it was as charming as Wallington. Rossford had gone through some sort of heyday which left it with some odd almost skyscrapers and some of the quaint old shops had been torn down, Its downtown largely looked like a baby city that had been aborted before coming to full term and left wet, cold and grey here in Indiana.
Three tall buildings, one of which was called the Independence Tower, and had been a bank, a Holiday Inn, a Residence Inn and was now a bar, a racquetball club and another type of hotel, dominated the cityscape. The old library, which was boarded up for renovations, sat cattycorner to the old and venerable city hall and courthouse complex, but downtown was anchored by two old and mighty grey stone and steepled churches. On Archer Street, high stepped and high arched sat the ancient Catholic church, Saint Agatha’s and three blocks down and one over, toward the northeastern neighborhoods, its newer stone a paler grey, was the Episcopal Church of Saint John Crysostom.
Privately, Donovan always thought that Episcopalians were to Catholics what Canadians were to Americans. Newer, cleaner, more rational, certainly more convenient with their lady priests and gay clergy. After all, hadn’t this been the very church where Dan Malloy and Keith McDonald had been ministers? But it was, in its reason and cleanliness, bloodless; in its lack of mess, lacking. He had sat through the masses which were longer and more ornate, stuffier than anything in a Catholic church, and felt that they were imitations. This place, beautiful as it was, with its stations of the cross under long windows was somehow, in its proximity to Catholicism, for Donovan, unnervingly un Catholic.
He couldn’t get others to share that opinion with him, except for Frey. And Rob too. He had come here with Melanie and she had said, “I couldn’t even tell we weren’t at a regular,” by which she meant Roman, “mass.”
“Then you weren’t paying attention,” Donovan said.
But yes, he looked around at the fanned and vaulted ceiling, at the niche where there was a stature of Mary, but it wasn’t really an altar and she wasn’t really to be beseeched, back at that strange gated thing, the columbarium where they placed the cremated remains of dead parishioners. This was not his church, nor was it distant enough from his church to feel, well… right.
And then, there was this middle aged piece of work talking to Simon. Were he and Donovan the same age. Donovan thought he himself might have been a little bit older, but damn it he looked younger, and even with a recently dead mother, certainly happier. The chief of music at this esteemed church, Chadwick North, was trying to act like he was glad to see Donovan, trying to act as if he didn’t wish Donovan would die. Chad wasn’t bad looking, dark haired, always with a five o clock shadow, black rimmed spectacles. Apparently he and Bryant were living in that nice yellow house Donovan remembered so well. They were happy, or at least he hoped they were. More power to them. No children, but children weren’t everything. No, they really weren’t. Donovan had only had them as students and wards at daycare, but ever since that Plague which had changed so much and at the same time so little, he had no time for them.
“Well, it was really good to see you again,” Chad said with that raise of an eyebrow.
“Don,” he added in the tone of someone who wanted to be dismissive and catty, but wasn’t entirely sure if he wouldn’t get his ass kicked even in a church.
Donovan nodded and then he and Simon turned to leave, heading toward the open doors that looked out on downtown.
“That was interesting,” Simon began, and Donovan said, “It was. But… hold on a minute.”
Simon stood by the baptismal font and Donovan went back up the aisle calling, “Chad!”
That’s another thing. They put their organs and their choir in the wrong place, behind the altar and not up in a loft. What the fuck?
“Yes, Don,” Chad, looking like the college professor he was, oh, Don knew college professors, slipped his hands in the pockets of his dark trousers.
“You don’t have to be this way. It’s been a long time. I don’t want your husband.”
Chad cleared his throat and touched his glasses.
“Then, you didn’t sleep with Bryant?”
“Oh, I didn’t say that,” Donovan replied, honestly. “I just said I don’t want him.”
Donovan tipped Chad a salute. “Give my regards to him by the way.”
And so he left.
On the steps of the great porch, in the cold wind of downtown as the Number Twelve bus trawled by, Simon asked, “Are you going to tell me what all that was about. Clearly you know each other.”
“Yes,” Donovan said, “Clearly.”
Donovan did not feel the need to go into great detail about the past, and he wasn’t always sure which parts were true or interesting. It was true that over a decade ago when Chad’s on again off again but definitely now and forever partner, Bryant Babcock had been in his absolutely prime with just a touch of white in his temples, and it had been during this time that Chad had, he remembered Bryant telling him this, decided to start fucking Bryant’s brother behind his back, and the two of those assholes had run off together to make a life. Chad had been out of Bryant’s life for a good five years, and when he’d come back into it, they were now a permanent and definite thing.
Bryant Babcock a former dancer and musician who talked far too much and had an undeveloped since of humor, was marvelous to look at and inexhaustible in bed. He possessed the measures of love and need and passion that for someone like Donovan, a lover who truly loved, were perfect. It did not matter that he was not the love of Bryant’s life, or that he was not Bryant’s. Donovan was good at loving and so was Bryant. Bryant was a love, and a friend and Donovan was glad enough when he had officially decided to make a life again with Chad. Really, if anyone should have been mad, Donovan thought it was himself. But every time Chad saw him, he must have wondered at what time was his Bryant sleeping with them both? At what time was Donovan in that big old bed How much did Donovan know? And Donovan wasn’t telling anything.
And Donovan didn’t have time to try to take Bryant, a man who was damned near sixty by now, away from Chad or anyone else. At the moment he was doing all he could to keep the two younger men in his house happy and, he reflected, as he patted Simon on the knee and the blond began driving to the restaurant, that was really all he needed.
When they were home, Don spent some time looking Bryant up. He was sure that he must have lived in the same house, and lunch with Simon had been good. Cade would be home in an hour. This business took his mind off of the last week, off of Adrienne. He sat on Facebook looking up Bryant Babcock, Dr. Bryant Babcock, Bryant Babcock of Loretto College, every permutation he could of the man who had been a ghostly shadow in his short conversation with Chad North, director of music at Saint John Crysostom. He had seen Bryant’s Facebook page before. He had seen him dark complexioned, still mostly dark haired, and this afternoon all through lunch he had thought about, how in a way he was like both Cade and Simon, Simon in his gentle demeanor and upper middle class aspirations, Simon in how he never quite saw in himself what others did. Cade in his dark features, his trans European background seen in the brown of his eye, and the curl of his hair, the wavy gentle hairs on the backs of his hands and down his body.
He felt like he might have stopped thinking about him had a single picture come up, but there was none, and Donovan, glad to not be thinking of funeral bills, lost insurance policies and senile family members, meditated on Bryant.
Donovan rarely went to the houses of others. Men came to him. When he did go, it was always strange, not totally comfortable. There was the knowledge of the house not being his, knowing he would have to leave or not really wanting to stay. But Bryant’s bed felt like his own, warm and large and inviting as Bryant was warm and long and tall and inviting. He remembered the conversations after sex as much as he remembered the lovemaking, remembered tracing his finger along Bryant’s shoulder and neck, along his jaw, gently touching his lips, running his hands through his wavy hair, kissing him. Remembered lying there in a half sleep.
“I tried to kill myself,” Bryant said.
Donavan was beyond surprise for the most part, and when he wasn’t beyond it, he was beyond showing it. Nobody needed that.
“It was stupid,” Bryant’s finger was unconsciously tracing circles on Don’s arm. “I felt desperate. I had been feeling desperate, like I didn’t matter, Like no one would care if I was gone. The truth is, part of me still doesn’t believe that people would care.”
“You know that’s not true,” Donovan said. “I messaged you. I’m sure I wrote you several times.”
“It’s hard to explain,” Bryant said. “It’s hard to explain being in that place.”
His eyes weren’t teally looking anywhere, but he had drawn his body close to Don’s.
“Even if you sent me a million letters, I might not have…. Nothing may have changed.”
Donovan wondered something, and so now he just said it.
“It’s not just the sex, you know? I do like you. It’s you I like.”
Somewhere there was a world of people, men and men or women and women, who met in church and went on dates, but Donovan knew nothing of that world. He had seen Bryant Babcock once when he was working in the library of Loretto College and taken an elevator with him and several others. The day was incredibly hot, he remembered, and Bryant was in a white suit, white jacket, white trousers, checked, even white fedora, his white teeth glistening from his dark Mediterranean skin.
“It’s hot, isn’t it?” he demanded.
“Damn it is hot,” Don agreed, and they had both began laughing.
“We’ve got to got to find some air. You think with the money alumni throws to Loretto they could get some air in this library!”
Donavan had seen him earlier while he was working on the second floor near where its balcony looked down to the lobby and this handsome man was straddling a bench, bent over it so that Donovan could just see the rounded heart shape of his ass.
“You have a grand day,” Bryant held out his hand to him. It was a firm grip. After Bryant was gone he could still smell his cologne. Biking back to the apartments off Birmingham Street where he was living at the time, he thought he could still smell that cologne.
Cervus. CERVUS. Now he knew it was a type of deer with a rack like kitchen tongs. Now Donovan could imagine it pulling a sleigh, but the first time he saw it, Cervus was the screen name for a handsome man online, and when Donovan saw him he could not believe that this was the man he’d been with in the elevator, the man he had looked down from the balcony and saw bending over, falling in love with his ass.
There were moments when he knew that things were going to happen. Sometimes he would write someone and know his interest was in vain. Or the other was flaky or they were unwilling or they simply never answered their messages, but he had barely messaged Cervus before he received a message back, and he had barely sent back a message before Cervus was at his door, in a forest green shirt and khaki trousers. They chatted a bit, and then Donovan said, “There’s no need for us to sit and be shy, talking about the weather and tea,”
He kissed him quickly. Had he known his name was Bryant yet? Or was he still calling him Cervus? They’d made out on that sofa and were naked before Donovan led him back into his bedroom. That was the beginning of them. It seemed slutty or needy to message him the next day. But they’d had weeks enjoying each other. The tea had eventually come. But then, as things happen, time had passed and Donovan had not seen him.
Now he stands in the kitchen and mixes the flour into the auburn water that is yeast and salt and sugar. He tosses in flour over the water and then gradually his glue of flour becomes a ball of dough. He tosses in more flour, puts more water, repeats. In the old glass bowl that came from his great grandmother who is Frey and Sharon’s great grandmother as well as his cousin Jonah’s, he thinks that it would be nice to be the type of person who lived only in his world, who saw only his thing. How interesting that would be. The type who could forget. Well, it would not be nice, but it would be easier than this weird flooding that he and possibly every other storyteller had, where he wondered about people who had never wondered about him, and peered at people he would never converse with and imagined then reimagined their lives.
He wondered what Bryant was up to, imagined that in the time he had disappeared maybe that was when Chad had first come back, or was he just troubled thinking about the possibility of Chad coming back? Of all the days he remembers with Bryant, he remembers when by an act of witchcraft, some sympathetic magic, no longer caring for the library, he had gone to the music library in the old Music Building of Loretto College, past the red stone water fountain trickling in the light. He’d found himself in the old building that smelled of dust and old manila folders and he had been getting on the elevator when he’d blinked and there was Bryant coming in with him.
“Oh, Don. Oh, I’m so glad to see you!”
“Really?” Donovan had said. Sarcasm was a natural defense and he pushed it away for genuine curiosity.
“Yes,” Bryant said. “I.. I… So much has happened.”
They were traveling down in the elevator and Bryant was not in a white suit, He was in khakis and a white, untucked shirt, unbuttoned at the top and his hair was mussed. He looked younger, not older.
“Yes,” Donovan said. “A lot has happened to me—”
And just like that, there had been a great heave, a flickering of lights and now the regular bright elevator light was replaced by a small golden one and it heaved into silence.
“Oh, shit,” Bryant murmured.
“We’re stuck.”
Bryant nodded.
“The first time I met you was in an elevator.”
“No, it wasn’t,” Bryant said.
“It was,” and Don related it, and said, “that’s why I knew who you were when I messaged you.”
“I don’t even remember. I remember the suit, but...”
Bryant sighed, “That’s the thing about me. I remember all the wrong things. I wish I could remember that.”
They stood talking for a minute or two before Donovan said, “Shouldn’t we…. Do something. Pull a lever?”
“Uh, yeah,” Bryant said. “That’s the thing about you, now. I always feel so comfortable with you I guess even being stuck in an elevator isn’t an issue.”
But rather than hitting the alarm, he took out his phone and called a number. He spoke calmly for a minute and then said, “We’re going to be in here for about an hour.”
“Oh?”
“Fire department is coming, but not in a hurry. Or, rather, there’s a fire on the south end, so we’ve just gotta wait.
“If we were in the library that elevator has a mechanism where anyone could let us out.
Bryant leaned against the back of the elevator, his hands in his pockets and blew out his cheeks, but he didn’t seem troubled.
He turned to Donovan and winked down at him, yes Bryant was taller.
If he asks himself why he did it, the answer is because he wanted to, because he’d always wonder what it would have been like, because he didn’t like what if’s. And so, in the same easy way Bryant had winked at him, or showed up at his house one night in a forest green shirt and ten minutes later told him he didn’t want tea, Donovan went to his knees, opened Bryant’s trousers and took all of him in his mouth. Bryant was a little startled, but didn’t make much of a protest, indeed, only stopped it long enough to unbelt his trousers and pull down his underwear. He tasted like the heat of midday and baked bread and earth. Don felt the need to have all of him in his mouth, and then he was undressing, kicking down his trousers and Bryant’s hands were kneading his scalp. Whatever Bryant had wanted to say before, now the professor came down and pushed him to the floor of the elevator so that they were tasting each other, Donovan on his back, his hands reaching up to caress Bryant’s thighs and rub his ass while Bryant’s cock filled his mouth and kept him from shouting while Bryant sucked on him. There was nothing more than this right now, nothing more than them. There was not the worry that someone might come early to let them out. No one would, and if they did, surely they would hear them and there would be time to dress. But not now, For now no one must come.
On his back Donovan brought Bryant between his legs, wrapping his thighs around him, Bryant hocked and let a string of phlegm out onto his firm, bobbing cock, and then pushed it in Don. They both moaned in shock and something like pain while Bryant entered him. They moved slowly and then quicker, quick and slow, not wanted it to end, Don in a place that was no place, that was only his old… better than lover, his old friend. Don’s hands ran under Bryant’s shirt, over Bryant’s hot skin, to the dimple at his back to the hills of his flexing buttocks, feeling the power and pleasure of his flexing in the dull pain and high pleasure of Bryant inside of him, in and out. He brought his face down and kissed Bryant’s lips, his cheeks, his eyes over and over again, squeezed his own hips, ran hands over him, watched Bryant Babcock’s eyelids flutter, his dark eyelashes open and close to reveal eyes that looked down with love and pleasure.
“Let’s not come?” Bryant suggested. “Let’s not come. Let’s not come. Let’s… stay… on this edge… in this place…”
Donovan nearly drops the bread bowl. He recovers himself. He is hot with the memory of that moment. Sad with the loss of Bryant. Sadder than with the loss of Adrienne. He thinks about the string of professor lovers starting with Ezekiel and going onto Brian Vaughn. Never able to be content, always working on some book or hoping for some tenure, deeply loving, but deeply unsettled, perhaps even finding themselves on some level… unworthy. It has been three months since he’s talked to Ezekiel, three years since he’s fucked him. He gave that up, lost that touch. He resents nothing. He is very lucky, but he misses Bryant and that particular love. When he clings to Cade will he pretend he’s Bryant? Sometimes he’s pretended he was Simon and sometimes when he was with Simon he imagined he was Cade or Ezekiel at least for a moment. Once upon a time he thought that was treachery. Or lechery, but now he thinks it’s just a function of being in your forties. That all loves blend into one. Is that such a bad thing?
He soaks the cloth, rings it out and spreads it over the bread bowl
“Let’s not come?” Bryant suggested. “Let’s not come. Let’s not come. Let’s… stay… on this edge… in this place…”
But you cannot always remain on the edge, and as great as the joy in maintaining can be, in the steady rhythm that keeps things going, in the end, it must end, the elevator must start again, but before that, you must give in to your nature and the nature of time and in the release, find the pleasure that rocks hands and sends souls from bodies. You can only hope that the soul will return…
MORE TOMORROW
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Great to get back to this story! It was interesting to hear of Donovan’s past with Bryant. Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Thanks for reading
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
DONOVAN
The first loaf of bread was yesterday, and it was a disaster, and I tried to pretend it didn’t matter. As I tore off a piece both heavy and chewy that tasted salty as a horse lick, I tried to convince myself that this was how bread should be, that maybe next week I could learn what I had done wrong.
But that’s never been me. Goddamnit, the way the proofed yeast looks in the picture is not the way it looked in that bowl. Goddamn, that recipe said mix salt and water and yeast together and everyone else says, no, no, salt kills yeast. And for good measure, I threw a little more salt in for flavor. And this is where this hunk of lifelessness came from.
That is not like today’s delicate dough that sticks to my fingers, and I cut away with the butcher knife because it is long enough to collect that line of dough. Today’s dough goes in the great oiled glass bowl I always wondered how I’d utilize. The recipe, which presupposes everyone is a middle class white woman living in the suburbs calls for you to just reach over and spread some plastic wrap over the bread. I take a Walmart trash bag. The recipe says preheat your oven and turn it off. Bread likes to rise in a warm place. I put that dough in the turned off oven for an hour and come back to see a strange monster. I come back later to try my hand—no pun intended—at kneading this fragile thing that doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever worked with before. This isn’t like dumpling dough, or the batter of the Yorkshire pudding or the breading for fried chicken. This airy, sticky half silly putty half cloud business isn’t like anything I’ve touched before, which makes me think I may be doing something right.
The phone has been ringing and I’ve been ignoring it, because pulling dough off of your fingers is not conducive to phone calls. I am sure it’s my stepfather, and it rings again while I am shaping the loaves which I why I miss a step, and while they are finally in the oven I go to the phone, but it isn’t my father. It’s a number I don’t know.
Fifteen minutes into the bread baking and me realizing I was supposed to let it rise again for another half hour, the phone rings again and it’s that same number. This time I pick up.
“Hello.”
This is the asshole who’s made me fuck up the bread.
“Don?”
“Yes?” I say. He sounds familiar.
“This is Chad.”
I say nothing.
“Chad North.”
Really?
“Hello, Chad.”
“Don, I just wanted to apologize for the way I acted today, and… And… Simon told me. About your Mom.”
Everyone who brings it up wants something from you, wants that first reaction. Everyone wants to be the first person to say:
“I’m so sorry. I am… This is terrible.”
“Thank you, Chad.”
“And here I am being all ridiculous about some shit that does not matter. Are you all right?”
“As all right as can be expected?”
It was been not quite two weeks, so at this time, every time someone asks I actually feel a little less all right.
“Well, you will be alright,” Chad says.
Then he says, “You know, I lost my Mom two years ago.”
Here he is, in the club. Or I am in the club now? I don’t want to talk to people who have not lost someone. They are making up the pain or either they’re just afraid of it happening to them. They say things like, “Oh, I can’t imagine what this feels like,” and I pat them gently and say, “Don’t worry, one day it will.”
I have taken to proclaiming grief on the rooftops, and telling everyone I know about just how it feels, and listening, listening because I don’t remember anyone else talking about it when it happened to them. So I take out a chair and listen to Chad.
“I kept thinking I had done something wrong,” he said. “Like… if…”
“It’s like playing detective. You think, what did I miss?”
“Exactly… Exactly…”
I set the timer to twenty minutes, because I am going to need this talk, and if I don’t have an alarm go off, I’m going to get so lost in it there’ll be no bread.
“But you seem healthy,” Chad said. “When my Mom died, I was a mess. I drank all the time. I was a fucking idiot. I wasn’t with anyone so I was just sleeping with everyone and being a nut job. I’m not sure I ever stopped.”
“Well, I laid on the floor and cried for seven days. I was so weak the Saturday after she died it took me forty minutes to make a sandwich. I couldn’t stop breathing fast, or being terrified or weeping. And I’m not really a crier.”
“Uh… yeah, I’m gonna say it,” Chad said, starting to laugh.
“Once, after it happened, a guy was giving me a blowjob and I burst into tears in the middle of it. It was… highly awkward. My emotions were all over the fucking place.”
When they had come down from laughing, Don admitted, “I worried something like that would happen to me too. But, so far I’ve been…. More stable.”
“Simon said you did shiva.”
“Yeah”
“I should have done that. I would have been so much less CRAZY.”
“If you ask me, we could all afford to be a little less crazy.”
“Amen.”
“I have a friend,” I said, “who tells me that five years later she still cries for her father once a week, and I can’t have that. I just feel like my mother lived her life and now she’s gone and I have my life and it’s wrong to fall into grief like that. Not that it’s evil, but that… it just shouldn’t be.
“I think we don’t want to be happy because… because we think maybe God will look down and see how sad we are and bring them back, or because we think it’s disloyal to feel joy. I honestly thought that I wouldn’t be able to live if she was gone. I didn’t see my life past hers. And yet, it’s funny, I have a great deal of life in me it turns out.”
Chad said, “I haven’t been saying anything because I’m just nodding. You’re right, and I haven’t heard anyone say that before.”
Then Chad said, “Your mom?”
“Yeah.”
“I bet she was really nice.”
“Not really,” I said. “Not at all, actually.”
Chad chuckled.
“Neither was mine.”
Cade and Simon have come home separately while Don is on the phone. He motions to them that the bread is ready and it appears to have turned out well enough. It is cut open and Cade is amazed by the warm, white inside. Of course Donovan would have tried it first. Ripping some off for himself he thumbs up Donovan while he takes out the butter. When Simon comes in, Cade kisses him absent mindedly on the cheek and he hears Donovan say, “I have to get off this phone. I have a family to feed. Yes… Thank you for calling…. Good night… Yes… I would love that.”
When Donovan tells Simon that it was Chad that called, he adds, “Get that silly look off your face.”
They eat the bread with the white chicken chili Cade and Simon made together last night, and Don thinks about how good it was to stay out of the kitchen and watch the two fhem laughing and joking like old times. Only they didn’t laugh and joke in old times from what Don has heard. And the old times were times he didn’t see.
There was a time when he half feared that they would run off with each other, rekindle their love and leave him. He supposes this is what you have to think about when you allow something like this. Back then he would tell himself, “Well, whatever happens is going to happen.”
Back then.
Back then before his stepfather called and said his mother was on her way to the hospital. Back then before the doctor said she was dying. Back then before it happened. The world seems like a very different place with very different priorities on the other side of this death.
Later that evening, in the living room where only one lamp lights things, Donovan lies on the couch looking up at the ceiling, blinking in and out of something like a nap while, beside him, his coffee steams toward the ceiling. His boys come into the living room, Cade sitting on the sofa and Simon sitting on the chair beside the sofa, props his legs on the coffee table.
“Feeling feelings?” Cade asks.
“I dreamed about her this morning,” Donovan says. “It was right before I got up. Nine-ish. We were on a day out, looking into shop windows. All the shops were closed or closing. We were leaving the shops and it was night and there was a gas station. We were going toward it and I put my arm over her shoulder and we were walking like that.
And then I thought, but I never did that. My mother didn’t really like to be touched, and I thought, “Oh, you’re gone. You’ve been gone for weeks. This is a dream. And I woke up.”
Neither one of them said anything, and Cade began rubbing Don’s feet.
“I’m just trying to write. I’m trying to find something to write about.”
“Your mom?” Simon suggested.
“No,” Donovan shook his head. “I never wrote about her before, I wouldn’t do it now. In a way, a lot of her was an absence, and I think I could write about that absence, but I don’t quite know how.”
“Up!” Cade grunted. “Up, Simon. Up!”
“Where are you all going?”
Donovan watched Cade’s flat stomach as he stretched and his tee shirt lifted.
“We’re going to let you alone with your thoughts.”
Simon leapt on Donovan, straddling him lightly, and bent down rubbing his temples and smiling fiendishly.
“You’re gonna delve into your mind and be a fucking genius! And then when you’re gone, you’ll wake us up and we’ll be tired and passed out, but we’ll ask you if you got work down and if you say yes—”
“We’ll ravish you,” Cade said.
“Oh, yes,” Simon said, looking up at Cade fiendishly, and then down at Don, “We’ll ravish you for the rest of the night.”
“Well, with inspiration like that…”
Cade bent down and kissed Donovan on the head.
“Get to work.”
Donovan thought they might as well have stayed in the living room, though now they were washing dishes so that was something. He went up to his little writing room in the back of the house, and sat there for a long time. He remembered this girl Amanda who said she liked to write with a quill and ink from a bottle because it made her feel special. He said he wrote on a computer because he wanted to get things done, and this is what he was doing now, going over all the thoughts he had posted in the intervening days, since the death of Adrienne. Adrienne, Adrienne, yes, she was his Adrienne. She was his mother, true enough, but she was herself in her own right. He collected what he had written and he began to write some more.
TOMORROW THE BOOK OF THE BATTLES
The first loaf of bread was yesterday, and it was a disaster, and I tried to pretend it didn’t matter. As I tore off a piece both heavy and chewy that tasted salty as a horse lick, I tried to convince myself that this was how bread should be, that maybe next week I could learn what I had done wrong.
But that’s never been me. Goddamnit, the way the proofed yeast looks in the picture is not the way it looked in that bowl. Goddamn, that recipe said mix salt and water and yeast together and everyone else says, no, no, salt kills yeast. And for good measure, I threw a little more salt in for flavor. And this is where this hunk of lifelessness came from.
That is not like today’s delicate dough that sticks to my fingers, and I cut away with the butcher knife because it is long enough to collect that line of dough. Today’s dough goes in the great oiled glass bowl I always wondered how I’d utilize. The recipe, which presupposes everyone is a middle class white woman living in the suburbs calls for you to just reach over and spread some plastic wrap over the bread. I take a Walmart trash bag. The recipe says preheat your oven and turn it off. Bread likes to rise in a warm place. I put that dough in the turned off oven for an hour and come back to see a strange monster. I come back later to try my hand—no pun intended—at kneading this fragile thing that doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever worked with before. This isn’t like dumpling dough, or the batter of the Yorkshire pudding or the breading for fried chicken. This airy, sticky half silly putty half cloud business isn’t like anything I’ve touched before, which makes me think I may be doing something right.
The phone has been ringing and I’ve been ignoring it, because pulling dough off of your fingers is not conducive to phone calls. I am sure it’s my stepfather, and it rings again while I am shaping the loaves which I why I miss a step, and while they are finally in the oven I go to the phone, but it isn’t my father. It’s a number I don’t know.
Fifteen minutes into the bread baking and me realizing I was supposed to let it rise again for another half hour, the phone rings again and it’s that same number. This time I pick up.
“Hello.”
This is the asshole who’s made me fuck up the bread.
“Don?”
“Yes?” I say. He sounds familiar.
“This is Chad.”
I say nothing.
“Chad North.”
Really?
“Hello, Chad.”
“Don, I just wanted to apologize for the way I acted today, and… And… Simon told me. About your Mom.”
Everyone who brings it up wants something from you, wants that first reaction. Everyone wants to be the first person to say:
“I’m so sorry. I am… This is terrible.”
“Thank you, Chad.”
“And here I am being all ridiculous about some shit that does not matter. Are you all right?”
“As all right as can be expected?”
It was been not quite two weeks, so at this time, every time someone asks I actually feel a little less all right.
“Well, you will be alright,” Chad says.
Then he says, “You know, I lost my Mom two years ago.”
Here he is, in the club. Or I am in the club now? I don’t want to talk to people who have not lost someone. They are making up the pain or either they’re just afraid of it happening to them. They say things like, “Oh, I can’t imagine what this feels like,” and I pat them gently and say, “Don’t worry, one day it will.”
I have taken to proclaiming grief on the rooftops, and telling everyone I know about just how it feels, and listening, listening because I don’t remember anyone else talking about it when it happened to them. So I take out a chair and listen to Chad.
“I kept thinking I had done something wrong,” he said. “Like… if…”
“It’s like playing detective. You think, what did I miss?”
“Exactly… Exactly…”
I set the timer to twenty minutes, because I am going to need this talk, and if I don’t have an alarm go off, I’m going to get so lost in it there’ll be no bread.
“But you seem healthy,” Chad said. “When my Mom died, I was a mess. I drank all the time. I was a fucking idiot. I wasn’t with anyone so I was just sleeping with everyone and being a nut job. I’m not sure I ever stopped.”
“Well, I laid on the floor and cried for seven days. I was so weak the Saturday after she died it took me forty minutes to make a sandwich. I couldn’t stop breathing fast, or being terrified or weeping. And I’m not really a crier.”
“Uh… yeah, I’m gonna say it,” Chad said, starting to laugh.
“Once, after it happened, a guy was giving me a blowjob and I burst into tears in the middle of it. It was… highly awkward. My emotions were all over the fucking place.”
When they had come down from laughing, Don admitted, “I worried something like that would happen to me too. But, so far I’ve been…. More stable.”
“Simon said you did shiva.”
“Yeah”
“I should have done that. I would have been so much less CRAZY.”
“If you ask me, we could all afford to be a little less crazy.”
“Amen.”
“I have a friend,” I said, “who tells me that five years later she still cries for her father once a week, and I can’t have that. I just feel like my mother lived her life and now she’s gone and I have my life and it’s wrong to fall into grief like that. Not that it’s evil, but that… it just shouldn’t be.
“I think we don’t want to be happy because… because we think maybe God will look down and see how sad we are and bring them back, or because we think it’s disloyal to feel joy. I honestly thought that I wouldn’t be able to live if she was gone. I didn’t see my life past hers. And yet, it’s funny, I have a great deal of life in me it turns out.”
Chad said, “I haven’t been saying anything because I’m just nodding. You’re right, and I haven’t heard anyone say that before.”
Then Chad said, “Your mom?”
“Yeah.”
“I bet she was really nice.”
“Not really,” I said. “Not at all, actually.”
Chad chuckled.
“Neither was mine.”
Cade and Simon have come home separately while Don is on the phone. He motions to them that the bread is ready and it appears to have turned out well enough. It is cut open and Cade is amazed by the warm, white inside. Of course Donovan would have tried it first. Ripping some off for himself he thumbs up Donovan while he takes out the butter. When Simon comes in, Cade kisses him absent mindedly on the cheek and he hears Donovan say, “I have to get off this phone. I have a family to feed. Yes… Thank you for calling…. Good night… Yes… I would love that.”
When Donovan tells Simon that it was Chad that called, he adds, “Get that silly look off your face.”
They eat the bread with the white chicken chili Cade and Simon made together last night, and Don thinks about how good it was to stay out of the kitchen and watch the two fhem laughing and joking like old times. Only they didn’t laugh and joke in old times from what Don has heard. And the old times were times he didn’t see.
There was a time when he half feared that they would run off with each other, rekindle their love and leave him. He supposes this is what you have to think about when you allow something like this. Back then he would tell himself, “Well, whatever happens is going to happen.”
Back then.
Back then before his stepfather called and said his mother was on her way to the hospital. Back then before the doctor said she was dying. Back then before it happened. The world seems like a very different place with very different priorities on the other side of this death.
Later that evening, in the living room where only one lamp lights things, Donovan lies on the couch looking up at the ceiling, blinking in and out of something like a nap while, beside him, his coffee steams toward the ceiling. His boys come into the living room, Cade sitting on the sofa and Simon sitting on the chair beside the sofa, props his legs on the coffee table.
“Feeling feelings?” Cade asks.
“I dreamed about her this morning,” Donovan says. “It was right before I got up. Nine-ish. We were on a day out, looking into shop windows. All the shops were closed or closing. We were leaving the shops and it was night and there was a gas station. We were going toward it and I put my arm over her shoulder and we were walking like that.
And then I thought, but I never did that. My mother didn’t really like to be touched, and I thought, “Oh, you’re gone. You’ve been gone for weeks. This is a dream. And I woke up.”
Neither one of them said anything, and Cade began rubbing Don’s feet.
“I’m just trying to write. I’m trying to find something to write about.”
“Your mom?” Simon suggested.
“No,” Donovan shook his head. “I never wrote about her before, I wouldn’t do it now. In a way, a lot of her was an absence, and I think I could write about that absence, but I don’t quite know how.”
“Up!” Cade grunted. “Up, Simon. Up!”
“Where are you all going?”
Donovan watched Cade’s flat stomach as he stretched and his tee shirt lifted.
“We’re going to let you alone with your thoughts.”
Simon leapt on Donovan, straddling him lightly, and bent down rubbing his temples and smiling fiendishly.
“You’re gonna delve into your mind and be a fucking genius! And then when you’re gone, you’ll wake us up and we’ll be tired and passed out, but we’ll ask you if you got work down and if you say yes—”
“We’ll ravish you,” Cade said.
“Oh, yes,” Simon said, looking up at Cade fiendishly, and then down at Don, “We’ll ravish you for the rest of the night.”
“Well, with inspiration like that…”
Cade bent down and kissed Donovan on the head.
“Get to work.”
Donovan thought they might as well have stayed in the living room, though now they were washing dishes so that was something. He went up to his little writing room in the back of the house, and sat there for a long time. He remembered this girl Amanda who said she liked to write with a quill and ink from a bottle because it made her feel special. He said he wrote on a computer because he wanted to get things done, and this is what he was doing now, going over all the thoughts he had posted in the intervening days, since the death of Adrienne. Adrienne, Adrienne, yes, she was his Adrienne. She was his mother, true enough, but she was herself in her own right. He collected what he had written and he began to write some more.
TOMORROW THE BOOK OF THE BATTLES
Last edited:
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
I was glad to read that Chad called Donovan and apologised. Most of the time we don’t know what other people are going through so I think it’s good that they had their chat. Losing anyone is never easy and I am happy that Donovan has people around him and is writing. Great portion as always and I look forward to The Book Of The Battles tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Yeah, it was a good thing that Chad called. So often in life people don't make amends for what they do and that's the real sadness, but this story is about healing and Don isn't the only one who needs that healing.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
TONIGHT, AFTER A BIT OF A HIATUS, WE RETURN TO ELEGY. AS CHRISTMAS ARRIVES, DON SETS OUT TO PUT HIS THOUGHTS ON PAPER. CADE AND SIMON DO NOT LEAVE HIM ALONE, AND EVENTUALLY BEGAN TO ADDRESS EACH OTHER AND THEIR MUTUAL SORROW AS SIMON UNFOLDS MORE OF HIS OWN STORY
Later that evening, in the living room where only one lamp lights things, Donovan lies on the couch looking up at the ceiling, blinking in and out of something like a nap while, beside him, his coffee steams toward the ceiling. His boys come into the living room, Cade sitting on the sofa and Simon sitting on the chair beside the sofa, props his legs on the coffee table.
“Feeling feelings?” Cade asks.
“I dreamed about her this morning,” Donovan says. “It was right before I got up. Nine-ish. We were on a day out, looking into shop windows. All the shops were closed or closing. We were leaving the shops and it was night and there was a gas station. We were going toward it and I put my arm over her shoulder and we were walking like that.
And then I thought, but I never did that. My mother didn’t really like to be touched, and I thought, “Oh, you’re gone. You’ve been gone for weeks. This is a dream. And I woke up.”
Neither one of them said anything, and Cade began rubbing Don’s feet.
“I’m just trying to write. I’m trying to find something to write about.”
“Your mom?” Simon suggested.
“No,” Donovan shook his head. “I never wrote about her before, I wouldn’t do it now. In a way, a lot of her was an absence, and I think I could write about that absence, but I don’t quite know how.”
“Up!” Cade grunted. “Up, Simon. Up!”
“Where are you all going?”
Donovan watched Cade’s flat stomach as he stretched and his tee shirt lifted.
“We’re going to let you alone with your thoughts.”
Simon leapt on Donovan, straddling him lightly, and bent down rubbing his temples and smiling fiendishly.
“You’re gonna delve into your mind and be a fucking genius! And then when you’re gone, you’ll wake us up and we’ll be tired and passed out, but we’ll ask you if you got work down and if you say yes—”
“We’ll ravish you,” Cade said.
“Oh, yes,” Simon said, looking up at Cade fiendishly, and then down at Don, “We’ll ravish you for the rest of the night.”
“Well, with inspiration like that…”
Cade bent down and kissed Donovan on the head.
“Get to work.”
Donovan thought they might as well have stayed in the living room, though now they were washing dishes so that was something. He went up to his little writing room in the back of the house, and sat there for a long time. He remembered this girl Amanda who said she liked to write with a quill and ink from a bottle because it made her feel special. He said he wrote on a computer because he wanted to get things done, and this is what he was doing now, going over all the thoughts he had posted in the intervening days, since the death of Adrienne. Adrienne, Adrienne, yes, she was his Adrienne. She was his mother, true enough, but she was herself in her own right. He collected what he had written and he began to write some more.
Well, let's be clear. I do not keep these notes to garner sympathy and I don't keep them because this experience is rare. It's actually one of the most common in the world, but never recorded, rarely spoken of, unshared. That's why I keep them, so maybe you'll see something of what was your private grief in this public display.
"May God comfort you among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem..."
-Traditional greeting toward Jewish mourners.
When we mourn, at first it is as if we are doing it alone and then, slowly, we realize we have come late to a large and terrible party, a club with a painful initiation. We mourn because we have been robbed. I mourn not only a mother, but a together family, the joyful holidays around the table, the house hung up with lights, the kiss on her warm cheek, my father's delight. All this and more is taken away, the years to come have been taken away. You and you, who waited so long to meet the loves of your life, who knew him, loved him, married him, and then watched him die of cancer lost the years, the hand holding, the laughter. Children lost, lovers lost, vocations lost you gave your life to. We are all walking shaking from the dizzying loss of what was and the reconciliation with what is.
My mother, who abhorred death, who dreaded it, never planned for it, thought by not considering it she might outsmart it, is dead. The fear of death was so great in her it became a fear in me. I sit with her ashes on my lap, in a cask and they are heavy. I think, how do I know it is her? It might be a Great Dane, a few chihuahuas. Perhaps she is divided among three people who think they have their cats. But, of course, it is not her. It is only a pile ashes in a box, or as they say, the remains of her. And I read the box with her name and it is not real, and I begin to have the first actual inklings that death, and for that matter life, as we have known it, may not be real. We know so little, and take so much for granted.
In Jamaica, when one mourns people show up, send food and mourn with you for nine nights. In America, you get one visit, and lots of text messages and basically have to stand on a roof and scream I’m dying, for people to have the sense to invite you over for dinner. People make the excuse, “We did not want to intrude.” But what did you think you would intrude upon: our shock, our grief, our loneliness, our absolute despair? Don’t ask what a mourner needs. What a sick and disabled culture this is! A mourner needs you.
Here is what he had heard on Thanksgiving, sitting in the house of two dull lesbians when he should have gone to Ely. A special on the Mayflower was on, and the voice over had said these words while the Mayflower, or rather its modern model, had been sailing over the water
In fears and wants, through weal and woe, A pilgrim, passed I,
to and fro: Oft left of them whom I did trust;
How vain it is to rest on dust!
-William Bradford
He had looked Bradford up, heartened by this faith which, rather than being destroyed by suffering, seemed to be made of it. Later that night, when he was alone, he read the whole passage.
Donovan copied out what he liked and left some lines out because… some of them weren’t good. But William Bradford had been writing in a time when men did, as he was doing now, write to understand themselves. He hadn’t been trying to win and award nor had he gotten one.
FROM my years young in days of youth,
God did make known to me his truth.
And call’d me from my native place
For to enjoy the means of grace.
In wilderness he did me guide,
And in strange lands for me provide.
In fears and wants, through weal and woe,
A pilgrim, passed I to and fro:
Oft left of them whom I did trust;
How vain it is to rest on dust!
A man of sorrows I have been,
And many changes I have seen.
When fears and sorrows have been mixt,
Consolations came betwixt.
Faint not, poor soul, in God still trust,
Fear not the things thou suffer must;
For, whom he loves he doth chastise,
And then all tears wipes from their eyes.
Donovan wrote:
“I'm sleepy. This ceiling fan is dingy. I want a cigarette but I think I'm going to forego it tonight.... What? I can't be constantly obsessed about you being gone.”
“Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?”
- Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī ( Rumi)
On the little couch where he had sometimes dozed in the days of shiva, Donovan had fallen asleep with a crick in his back, but now he sat up quickly and wrote:
“See, even when I feel like I can't get past this, there is this thing: I believe in the new world. There have been scary moments when, overwhelmed, I thought I was much weaker than I am and felt cold and alone. But I am with the whole waiting and mourning world. I am with a great company of people who have in place of current happiness, hope, and who from cold fortitude are developing determination. We look forward to the new world. I look forward to the new world, and I want to be present to stand in its beauty when it comes.”
Before he could think about it he dragged his cramped and middle aged body to the shower where there was hot water and sweet soap and water pressure drummed his muscles and he turned his head again and again, arching his neck and rolling his shoulders. He padded down and came to the great bed, naked. The bed was alive and breathing with the sprawled forms of lovers who waited for him, who turned back the covers to welcome him, arms to enfold, one after one after one after the other, pillows to fluff, rest to give, love and love and love to give.
Last night’s writing was like burning a torch in the dark, and the brighter the torch became the more was the darkness around. Now and again there are great patches of grey like a blighted field, the grey of what might have been, what should have been, what was past amending. There were bleak spaces of wishing for what couldn’t be. Donovan pulled his mind from these things.
Then there was the surprise of the morning. Sometimes they all woke up together, like they did now, with the sun coming through curtains that were never properly shut, with the shared of joy of arms and legs and small giggles and groans, with Cade, mouth open, his dark hair on the pillow, murmuring, “Five more minutes.”
Blessed are the old who past their time are allowed to be innocent again. That should be a beatitude. When he comes to bed, he is so tired all there is room for is sleep, and Cade and Simon are deep in sleep themselves. They are always themselves, always naked before each other, but there is a spirit in the night, past three in the morning, that makes those naked more naked still, that makes the seed of longing into a full grown plant. Those who have known each other in darkness and in light and have no shame move to something past even that, and kisses become hot, limbs tangled, hearts open. In the darkest parts of the night one of them is witness to two of them striving together, gently at first then in great need.
Only love could bear the nakedness of these moments as the three of them move into different dances, as the strong bed creaks and the silent room gives way to noises. Then joy and peace roll back to reveal most urgent need, tasting, touching, entering and being entered, hands planted upon hands, hips slamming, hands reaching into hair, holding onto shoulders, eyes and mouths, wide and shining in the dark, open in something between fear and the hope of revelation, the calm after the earthquake and the volcano, the falling back into arms, even the laughter, especially the laughter, everything that leads to this sunlit morning.
While Cade is downstairs making the coffee before coming back to bed, Simon rolls across the bed, over Don, and takes Cade’s cigarettes. He pulls one out along with the lighter and lies on his back. He inhales and Donovan watches smoke roll out of his mouth, white clouds on the morning light.
“When my father died I was nineteen and a straight up mess. I don’t mean to say I wasn’t sort of a mess before that, but afterward I was a true mess, and I remember I had this friend. I knew he was gay. I didn’t much like him. I mean, I hated him and the reason was because a guy I liked, that I’d been with, told me he didn’t like me he liked this guy. So I decided to get him back. I found the guy he liked and that was stupid because he was closeted. He was a jock and who knows what he and his closeted friends got up to? That’s not the gay world. That’s a whole different world. Well, I was about to find out.”
Cade came back into the room, naked, dark hair down his chest to his loins where his penis hung dark and heavy. Simon gave him only a glance, as someone who had known that body just last night and known it for years before would. Cade climbed back into bed, circling Don and hooking a long leg around him while Simon continued.
“So Dad had just died and this guy, this jock invites me over to fool with him and his friends and I don’t think in my right mind I would have done it, but I wasn’t in my right mind. This guy… let’s call him Matt, comes to the house to see me half naked with his boyfriend and I feel pretty great, pretty vindicated, like, this person who fucked me who you are so into doesn’t care enough about you not to be fucking me, and actually that sentence is getting so convoluted it just proves how fucked up I was.”
“Youth.”
“That’s kind of you, Don,” Simon continues looking at the ceiling, blowing smoke out of his nose while he ashes his cigarette.
“It was warped, a fucked up way to spend my life. So, I start making out with… let’s call him Jerome. And his friend comes out and we’re all just,” he shrugs, “Getting ready to have this threesome.”
Simon laughs and says, shaking his head, “And it is not like anything we’ve ever done. It’s not like that at all, and I haven’t told anyone this, but I feel like I want to now. So like, this other rando guy is eating me out and it’s great and I’m into it, and then fucking Jerome—this big dicked motherfucker—just shoves his cock in my mouth, and I’m going with it. Right. And it’s kind of an effort and he’s grabbing my head and just fucking my mouth, and you know. We all do shit like that from time to time, see how comfortable we are with stuff, take risks, go a littler further. And sometimes maybe you get to that place where you’re like, I’m not sure about this, and that’s where I was.
“So then the other guy starts fucking me and this goes on…. Forever. And then they switch. And then they switch again. And I’m like the little twink in the porno, the one who just powers through it, except he’s getting paid and I’m not. I just feel like I can’t stop, like I can’t get away, like eventually it will end, and eventually it does. There is not one time when they ask me what I want or if I like it. They just… it seems like all night they do things to me and maybe I could have gotten away, Maybe I could have said stop, but I didn’t. I was scared is what I was, and when I got back to my room I felt numb.
Don was a listener, but Cade, who had been holding Don like a lover had slackened his hold and pulled the bed sheets over all of their waists as if to make things more decent.
“You never told me this,” Cade said.
“No,” Simon agreed, crushing out the cigarette. “Well, it’s a lot of things I didn’t even tell myself.”
“What did you do?” Cade asked.
“I… uh… went back. I put myself in increasingly risky situations. I had tried to make the story sound sexy and I had told some people about it in a hot way, but when it happened I felt stupid. I felt like these assholes are going to kill me. And speaking of assholes, I hurt so bad after they got done with me. But when I was okay I went to these places and met these men I thought would seriously kill me. Most of the time I went through life not feeling anything. Ever. I was so sad when my dad was gone. I didn’t want to live, but when I was meeting folks in alleys or getting gang banged without condoms I felt things. Fear. Lust. Self hatred? Yes. Terror. I felt close to death. Part of me thought I’d get Matthew Shepherded, strung up on a fence and found dead, and that would have been fine cause I felt dead.”
Between them, Donovan turned to see Cade. His dark eyes had sharpened and become serious.
“Then things changed.”
“I met you,” Simon said.
“I mean, things changed in that I covered my tracks better, got good grades, graduated from college, got a decent job. They got better because I learned that instead of driving with no brakes I would just drive well over the speed limit in the fastest car possible. That’s who I was when we met.”
“I,” Cade started, and then he said, “Don, I told you I thought he was better than me.”
“And I thought he was better than me,” Simon said. “But I talked to you anyway. I thought… I’m not going to be good for him. But still, I talked to you.”
“Why?” Don asked the same time Cade did.
Simon looked at Donovan, and then he looked at Cade.
“Because when I looked in your eyes, I saw we were the same. I saw you wanted to die too.”
TOMORROW NIGHT IS MONDAY, SO BOOK OF THE BATTLES. WE WILL RETURN TO ELEGY ON TUESDAY.
Later that evening, in the living room where only one lamp lights things, Donovan lies on the couch looking up at the ceiling, blinking in and out of something like a nap while, beside him, his coffee steams toward the ceiling. His boys come into the living room, Cade sitting on the sofa and Simon sitting on the chair beside the sofa, props his legs on the coffee table.
“Feeling feelings?” Cade asks.
“I dreamed about her this morning,” Donovan says. “It was right before I got up. Nine-ish. We were on a day out, looking into shop windows. All the shops were closed or closing. We were leaving the shops and it was night and there was a gas station. We were going toward it and I put my arm over her shoulder and we were walking like that.
And then I thought, but I never did that. My mother didn’t really like to be touched, and I thought, “Oh, you’re gone. You’ve been gone for weeks. This is a dream. And I woke up.”
Neither one of them said anything, and Cade began rubbing Don’s feet.
“I’m just trying to write. I’m trying to find something to write about.”
“Your mom?” Simon suggested.
“No,” Donovan shook his head. “I never wrote about her before, I wouldn’t do it now. In a way, a lot of her was an absence, and I think I could write about that absence, but I don’t quite know how.”
“Up!” Cade grunted. “Up, Simon. Up!”
“Where are you all going?”
Donovan watched Cade’s flat stomach as he stretched and his tee shirt lifted.
“We’re going to let you alone with your thoughts.”
Simon leapt on Donovan, straddling him lightly, and bent down rubbing his temples and smiling fiendishly.
“You’re gonna delve into your mind and be a fucking genius! And then when you’re gone, you’ll wake us up and we’ll be tired and passed out, but we’ll ask you if you got work down and if you say yes—”
“We’ll ravish you,” Cade said.
“Oh, yes,” Simon said, looking up at Cade fiendishly, and then down at Don, “We’ll ravish you for the rest of the night.”
“Well, with inspiration like that…”
Cade bent down and kissed Donovan on the head.
“Get to work.”
Donovan thought they might as well have stayed in the living room, though now they were washing dishes so that was something. He went up to his little writing room in the back of the house, and sat there for a long time. He remembered this girl Amanda who said she liked to write with a quill and ink from a bottle because it made her feel special. He said he wrote on a computer because he wanted to get things done, and this is what he was doing now, going over all the thoughts he had posted in the intervening days, since the death of Adrienne. Adrienne, Adrienne, yes, she was his Adrienne. She was his mother, true enough, but she was herself in her own right. He collected what he had written and he began to write some more.
Well, let's be clear. I do not keep these notes to garner sympathy and I don't keep them because this experience is rare. It's actually one of the most common in the world, but never recorded, rarely spoken of, unshared. That's why I keep them, so maybe you'll see something of what was your private grief in this public display.
"May God comfort you among all the mourners of Zion and Jerusalem..."
-Traditional greeting toward Jewish mourners.
When we mourn, at first it is as if we are doing it alone and then, slowly, we realize we have come late to a large and terrible party, a club with a painful initiation. We mourn because we have been robbed. I mourn not only a mother, but a together family, the joyful holidays around the table, the house hung up with lights, the kiss on her warm cheek, my father's delight. All this and more is taken away, the years to come have been taken away. You and you, who waited so long to meet the loves of your life, who knew him, loved him, married him, and then watched him die of cancer lost the years, the hand holding, the laughter. Children lost, lovers lost, vocations lost you gave your life to. We are all walking shaking from the dizzying loss of what was and the reconciliation with what is.
My mother, who abhorred death, who dreaded it, never planned for it, thought by not considering it she might outsmart it, is dead. The fear of death was so great in her it became a fear in me. I sit with her ashes on my lap, in a cask and they are heavy. I think, how do I know it is her? It might be a Great Dane, a few chihuahuas. Perhaps she is divided among three people who think they have their cats. But, of course, it is not her. It is only a pile ashes in a box, or as they say, the remains of her. And I read the box with her name and it is not real, and I begin to have the first actual inklings that death, and for that matter life, as we have known it, may not be real. We know so little, and take so much for granted.
In Jamaica, when one mourns people show up, send food and mourn with you for nine nights. In America, you get one visit, and lots of text messages and basically have to stand on a roof and scream I’m dying, for people to have the sense to invite you over for dinner. People make the excuse, “We did not want to intrude.” But what did you think you would intrude upon: our shock, our grief, our loneliness, our absolute despair? Don’t ask what a mourner needs. What a sick and disabled culture this is! A mourner needs you.
Here is what he had heard on Thanksgiving, sitting in the house of two dull lesbians when he should have gone to Ely. A special on the Mayflower was on, and the voice over had said these words while the Mayflower, or rather its modern model, had been sailing over the water
In fears and wants, through weal and woe, A pilgrim, passed I,
to and fro: Oft left of them whom I did trust;
How vain it is to rest on dust!
-William Bradford
He had looked Bradford up, heartened by this faith which, rather than being destroyed by suffering, seemed to be made of it. Later that night, when he was alone, he read the whole passage.
Donovan copied out what he liked and left some lines out because… some of them weren’t good. But William Bradford had been writing in a time when men did, as he was doing now, write to understand themselves. He hadn’t been trying to win and award nor had he gotten one.
FROM my years young in days of youth,
God did make known to me his truth.
And call’d me from my native place
For to enjoy the means of grace.
In wilderness he did me guide,
And in strange lands for me provide.
In fears and wants, through weal and woe,
A pilgrim, passed I to and fro:
Oft left of them whom I did trust;
How vain it is to rest on dust!
A man of sorrows I have been,
And many changes I have seen.
When fears and sorrows have been mixt,
Consolations came betwixt.
Faint not, poor soul, in God still trust,
Fear not the things thou suffer must;
For, whom he loves he doth chastise,
And then all tears wipes from their eyes.
Donovan wrote:
“I'm sleepy. This ceiling fan is dingy. I want a cigarette but I think I'm going to forego it tonight.... What? I can't be constantly obsessed about you being gone.”
“Try not to resist the changes that come your way. Instead let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?”
- Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Balkhī ( Rumi)
On the little couch where he had sometimes dozed in the days of shiva, Donovan had fallen asleep with a crick in his back, but now he sat up quickly and wrote:
“See, even when I feel like I can't get past this, there is this thing: I believe in the new world. There have been scary moments when, overwhelmed, I thought I was much weaker than I am and felt cold and alone. But I am with the whole waiting and mourning world. I am with a great company of people who have in place of current happiness, hope, and who from cold fortitude are developing determination. We look forward to the new world. I look forward to the new world, and I want to be present to stand in its beauty when it comes.”
Before he could think about it he dragged his cramped and middle aged body to the shower where there was hot water and sweet soap and water pressure drummed his muscles and he turned his head again and again, arching his neck and rolling his shoulders. He padded down and came to the great bed, naked. The bed was alive and breathing with the sprawled forms of lovers who waited for him, who turned back the covers to welcome him, arms to enfold, one after one after one after the other, pillows to fluff, rest to give, love and love and love to give.
Last night’s writing was like burning a torch in the dark, and the brighter the torch became the more was the darkness around. Now and again there are great patches of grey like a blighted field, the grey of what might have been, what should have been, what was past amending. There were bleak spaces of wishing for what couldn’t be. Donovan pulled his mind from these things.
Then there was the surprise of the morning. Sometimes they all woke up together, like they did now, with the sun coming through curtains that were never properly shut, with the shared of joy of arms and legs and small giggles and groans, with Cade, mouth open, his dark hair on the pillow, murmuring, “Five more minutes.”
Blessed are the old who past their time are allowed to be innocent again. That should be a beatitude. When he comes to bed, he is so tired all there is room for is sleep, and Cade and Simon are deep in sleep themselves. They are always themselves, always naked before each other, but there is a spirit in the night, past three in the morning, that makes those naked more naked still, that makes the seed of longing into a full grown plant. Those who have known each other in darkness and in light and have no shame move to something past even that, and kisses become hot, limbs tangled, hearts open. In the darkest parts of the night one of them is witness to two of them striving together, gently at first then in great need.
Only love could bear the nakedness of these moments as the three of them move into different dances, as the strong bed creaks and the silent room gives way to noises. Then joy and peace roll back to reveal most urgent need, tasting, touching, entering and being entered, hands planted upon hands, hips slamming, hands reaching into hair, holding onto shoulders, eyes and mouths, wide and shining in the dark, open in something between fear and the hope of revelation, the calm after the earthquake and the volcano, the falling back into arms, even the laughter, especially the laughter, everything that leads to this sunlit morning.
While Cade is downstairs making the coffee before coming back to bed, Simon rolls across the bed, over Don, and takes Cade’s cigarettes. He pulls one out along with the lighter and lies on his back. He inhales and Donovan watches smoke roll out of his mouth, white clouds on the morning light.
“When my father died I was nineteen and a straight up mess. I don’t mean to say I wasn’t sort of a mess before that, but afterward I was a true mess, and I remember I had this friend. I knew he was gay. I didn’t much like him. I mean, I hated him and the reason was because a guy I liked, that I’d been with, told me he didn’t like me he liked this guy. So I decided to get him back. I found the guy he liked and that was stupid because he was closeted. He was a jock and who knows what he and his closeted friends got up to? That’s not the gay world. That’s a whole different world. Well, I was about to find out.”
Cade came back into the room, naked, dark hair down his chest to his loins where his penis hung dark and heavy. Simon gave him only a glance, as someone who had known that body just last night and known it for years before would. Cade climbed back into bed, circling Don and hooking a long leg around him while Simon continued.
“So Dad had just died and this guy, this jock invites me over to fool with him and his friends and I don’t think in my right mind I would have done it, but I wasn’t in my right mind. This guy… let’s call him Matt, comes to the house to see me half naked with his boyfriend and I feel pretty great, pretty vindicated, like, this person who fucked me who you are so into doesn’t care enough about you not to be fucking me, and actually that sentence is getting so convoluted it just proves how fucked up I was.”
“Youth.”
“That’s kind of you, Don,” Simon continues looking at the ceiling, blowing smoke out of his nose while he ashes his cigarette.
“It was warped, a fucked up way to spend my life. So, I start making out with… let’s call him Jerome. And his friend comes out and we’re all just,” he shrugs, “Getting ready to have this threesome.”
Simon laughs and says, shaking his head, “And it is not like anything we’ve ever done. It’s not like that at all, and I haven’t told anyone this, but I feel like I want to now. So like, this other rando guy is eating me out and it’s great and I’m into it, and then fucking Jerome—this big dicked motherfucker—just shoves his cock in my mouth, and I’m going with it. Right. And it’s kind of an effort and he’s grabbing my head and just fucking my mouth, and you know. We all do shit like that from time to time, see how comfortable we are with stuff, take risks, go a littler further. And sometimes maybe you get to that place where you’re like, I’m not sure about this, and that’s where I was.
“So then the other guy starts fucking me and this goes on…. Forever. And then they switch. And then they switch again. And I’m like the little twink in the porno, the one who just powers through it, except he’s getting paid and I’m not. I just feel like I can’t stop, like I can’t get away, like eventually it will end, and eventually it does. There is not one time when they ask me what I want or if I like it. They just… it seems like all night they do things to me and maybe I could have gotten away, Maybe I could have said stop, but I didn’t. I was scared is what I was, and when I got back to my room I felt numb.
Don was a listener, but Cade, who had been holding Don like a lover had slackened his hold and pulled the bed sheets over all of their waists as if to make things more decent.
“You never told me this,” Cade said.
“No,” Simon agreed, crushing out the cigarette. “Well, it’s a lot of things I didn’t even tell myself.”
“What did you do?” Cade asked.
“I… uh… went back. I put myself in increasingly risky situations. I had tried to make the story sound sexy and I had told some people about it in a hot way, but when it happened I felt stupid. I felt like these assholes are going to kill me. And speaking of assholes, I hurt so bad after they got done with me. But when I was okay I went to these places and met these men I thought would seriously kill me. Most of the time I went through life not feeling anything. Ever. I was so sad when my dad was gone. I didn’t want to live, but when I was meeting folks in alleys or getting gang banged without condoms I felt things. Fear. Lust. Self hatred? Yes. Terror. I felt close to death. Part of me thought I’d get Matthew Shepherded, strung up on a fence and found dead, and that would have been fine cause I felt dead.”
Between them, Donovan turned to see Cade. His dark eyes had sharpened and become serious.
“Then things changed.”
“I met you,” Simon said.
“I mean, things changed in that I covered my tracks better, got good grades, graduated from college, got a decent job. They got better because I learned that instead of driving with no brakes I would just drive well over the speed limit in the fastest car possible. That’s who I was when we met.”
“I,” Cade started, and then he said, “Don, I told you I thought he was better than me.”
“And I thought he was better than me,” Simon said. “But I talked to you anyway. I thought… I’m not going to be good for him. But still, I talked to you.”
“Why?” Don asked the same time Cade did.
Simon looked at Donovan, and then he looked at Cade.
“Because when I looked in your eyes, I saw we were the same. I saw you wanted to die too.”
TOMORROW NIGHT IS MONDAY, SO BOOK OF THE BATTLES. WE WILL RETURN TO ELEGY ON TUESDAY.
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
Great to get back to this story. It is sad the sorrow and pain these characters have been through. I am glad they have each other to talk to. Excellent writing and I look forward to Book of the Battles tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Yes, there is a lot of sadness in this story and it is a good thing they all have each other. Sometimes I think these stories are nothing but sadness.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
TONIGHT, CADE REMEMBERS HOW HE FIRST CAME TO KNOW SIMON
S I X
redemption
“I didn’t know the shit you’d been through. We didn’t really know anything.”
- Cademon Richards
When everything that should have happened finally happened, it was early spring, not long before Easter, and Cade had just returned from Ely where he had been going often to see his father who was recovering from stroke. He’d had no relationship with his mother for years and was now developing one, and everyone in the family had wondered what had become of their sisters, Deanna when, at last, she had joined them again. Finally, it was time to return to Wallington, and Donovan had insisted Deanna sit in the front with her brother and they go over old times, reconnect while he slept in the back. Toward the end of the journey, as they returned to Wallington, Donovan had said he would stay would Simon and Deanna and Cade could have the night to catch up.
“Are you sure?” Cade had asked, and Donovan said had replied, “Yes, I’m absolutely sure.”
They drove near their neighborhood but went uphill a few blocks to houses hidden behind trees, and at one of them Cade knocked on the door and Simon answered.
“Hey…?” Simon looked confused, “Guys?”
“This is my sister, Deanna, and she’s staying with us,” Cade said.
“I think we met before,” Deanna said, politically, even though she had hated him and thought the wheat haired boy was bad for her brother.
“And Donovan said we should sit up and talk all night, and he should stay with you. So…” Cade said, kissing Donovan on the cheek, “There you go.”
As Cade and Deanna got back into the Land Rover, and Donovan came into the house with his bag, Simon said, “You all are so… strange.”
But they weren’t so strange that Simon was totally surprised by Don’s arrival, and they weren’t so strange that Simon spurned him. Donovan had never stayed here before, in the old bungalow with the old white carved doorway and molded lentil that led from living room to dining room, and the long hallway leading to three bedrooms. Simon had stayed at Don and Cade’s a great deal, and stayed with Don during the time when Cade was taking care of his father, so it it only made sense that, at last, Don should come to stay with him.
Cade had that entire night with Deanna, and he was sure that on that night Donovan and Simon were sleeping together. He didn’t know when it happened, and didn’t think it happened very often. He wasn’t even sure if Donovan had consciously planned it, but he believed it was happening. He put it out of his mind, and out of his mind it mostly remained until Simon brought Donovan back that afternoon. They’d still had the daycare in the house back then, and the kids were glad to see Don and Deanna. who had been with the kids all day, was happier than she would willingly admit to now be relieved of them.
“Don let me know he doesn’t much believe in politics,” Simon said, “Or in our mayor.”
“Well,” Cade shrugged and laughed. “You know Don. You know Don very well.”
“All the time we were together,” Simon said, “you never said anything about my job, about politics, or about anything I did.”
“When we were together I never said anything about anything,” Cade told him.
“I always assumed you were smarter and better than me.”
“You did not.”
“I did. And I just always thought you were right.”
Simon nodded.
“And then,” Cade added, “you never asked my opinion. On anything.”
Simon still smiled, but he looked reflective.
“Well, that is right enough. I never did ask. I had a lot of ideas. A lot of bad ideas. And I’m sorry for that, Cade.”
“Good thing about Don?” Cade said, “He doesn’t wait to be asked.”
Here Simon looked over at Don and Deanna and then Cade said, “What are you doing for dinner?”
“Dinner?”
“Yeah. Some people call it supper. It happens at night. Last meal of the day.”
“Ha. Yeah. I hadn’t planned anything really.”
“We hadn’t planned anything either,” Cade said. “Why don’t you eat with us, We’ll all plan something together. I don’t think it’ll involve actual cooking.”
“I’d like that,” Simon said. “I could go for some Thai or Italian. Maybe Ethiopian or Indian.”
“I was thinking chicken or pizza or Taco Bell, but sure.”
Simon shook his head and chuckled.
“I’m pretentious.”
“You’re not pretentious. You just have a disposable income and good taste.”
Cade thought about what he wanted to say next and then he did.
“Simon?”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad Don stayed with you last night.”
“Good.”
“Real glad. I think… We love each other, but we know love is big. It’s not like when you and I were together. We didn’t love each other enough, and so we were always looking for love somewhere else. But… I know you and Don love each other. It’s different from the way I love him. Or the way I love you. And… yet…”
Simon looked a little nervous now, wondering what Cade was getting at.
“Deanna is staying here tonight. I love her, but she’s back after two years and I don’t feel like explaining everything. But, if you wanted to eat with us tomorrow night too, that would be great.”
“Yes,” Simon said, still not entirely sure of Cade, surprised by the dark haired man with the fringe of dark beard all along his fine face. “I can come over after work.”
“Great,” Cade said. “And after dinner, if you wanted, you could stay. Stay the night like you used to. With us. If you’d like. Don would like. I would like. Would you like?”
Cade was not looking at him. His brown eyes had darted to Simon, and now looked at the table, one of his long fingers was tracing a circle on the table with its remnants of yellow and red construction paper. Simon’s heart beat a little faster than it had in a while. He felt himself going firm in his pants, his skin flushing with happiness.
“Yes,” he said, “I would like it very much.”
“I,” Cade started, and then he said, “Don, I told you I thought he was better than me.”
“And I thought he was better than me,” Simon said. “But I talked to you anyway. I thought… I’m not going to be good for him. But still, I talked to you.”
“Why?” Don asked the same time Cade did.
Simon looked at Donovan, and then he looked at Cade.
“Because when I looked in your eyes, I saw we were the same. I saw you wanted to die too.”
What was it about Simon, Cade wondered? Yes, he was good looking, sure enough. But there were lots of good looking people. What was more, he was very conventionally good looking. He was blond and preppy and at the time he was only what Cade could immediately see. Cade didn’t know about a trailer park. He didn’t know about the barn where Simon had been caught with his cousins. He didn’t know about the men before him or the dead father. He did know he had a hard time making conversation, especially with other gay men for some reason. He did know that he had kind of given up on meeting anyone, and here they were together at this little Democratic Party function, and when Cade made a joke, Simon laughed. And it wasn’t when they were close to each other. Simon could be halfway across the room, and Cade got a little shiver when he’d hear him laugh, or when he’d see him smile. No, Simon Barrow didn’t happen in one evening.
“Whaddo you like?” Simon asked Cade. They were at the Fiddler’s Hearth, downtown, across the street from the Holiday Inn.
“Uh… Excuse me.”
“I am buying you a drink,” Simon said, over pronouncing each syllable, “so what do you want?”
“Oh, I’m. I’m just drinking beer.”
“Just beer?”
“Uh huh.”
“What can I get you for?” the girl asked Simon who seemed to have just gotten off work and was in a black overcoat with a blue scarf hanging loosely.
“Jameson on the rocks and my friend over here is having….. just beer.”
“Corona.”
“Corona really sucks.”
“Should I have Guinness?”
“You should have whatever you want,” Simon said. “I’m just saying.”
“What about Rolling Rock?”
The girl was looking between the two of them.
“Why don’t you try Stella Artois?”
“Uh….” Cade was shaking his head so that his Jesus Christ curls sjook around his face, “that sounds great.”
When the bartender left them, Cade said, “I remember you.”
“You should. I laughed the loudest at all your jokes.”
“Am I that funny?”
“I think so. You’re also not bad to look at. How long did it take you to grow your hair?”
“Uh, I don’t know,” Cade grinned at him, not conscious of touching a dark lock of it, before he scratched his thin beard. “I kind of just don’t cut it.”
“Fair.”
“Are you hitting on me?”
“Yes?”
MORE TOMORROW
S I X
redemption
“I didn’t know the shit you’d been through. We didn’t really know anything.”
- Cademon Richards
When everything that should have happened finally happened, it was early spring, not long before Easter, and Cade had just returned from Ely where he had been going often to see his father who was recovering from stroke. He’d had no relationship with his mother for years and was now developing one, and everyone in the family had wondered what had become of their sisters, Deanna when, at last, she had joined them again. Finally, it was time to return to Wallington, and Donovan had insisted Deanna sit in the front with her brother and they go over old times, reconnect while he slept in the back. Toward the end of the journey, as they returned to Wallington, Donovan had said he would stay would Simon and Deanna and Cade could have the night to catch up.
“Are you sure?” Cade had asked, and Donovan said had replied, “Yes, I’m absolutely sure.”
They drove near their neighborhood but went uphill a few blocks to houses hidden behind trees, and at one of them Cade knocked on the door and Simon answered.
“Hey…?” Simon looked confused, “Guys?”
“This is my sister, Deanna, and she’s staying with us,” Cade said.
“I think we met before,” Deanna said, politically, even though she had hated him and thought the wheat haired boy was bad for her brother.
“And Donovan said we should sit up and talk all night, and he should stay with you. So…” Cade said, kissing Donovan on the cheek, “There you go.”
As Cade and Deanna got back into the Land Rover, and Donovan came into the house with his bag, Simon said, “You all are so… strange.”
But they weren’t so strange that Simon was totally surprised by Don’s arrival, and they weren’t so strange that Simon spurned him. Donovan had never stayed here before, in the old bungalow with the old white carved doorway and molded lentil that led from living room to dining room, and the long hallway leading to three bedrooms. Simon had stayed at Don and Cade’s a great deal, and stayed with Don during the time when Cade was taking care of his father, so it it only made sense that, at last, Don should come to stay with him.
Cade had that entire night with Deanna, and he was sure that on that night Donovan and Simon were sleeping together. He didn’t know when it happened, and didn’t think it happened very often. He wasn’t even sure if Donovan had consciously planned it, but he believed it was happening. He put it out of his mind, and out of his mind it mostly remained until Simon brought Donovan back that afternoon. They’d still had the daycare in the house back then, and the kids were glad to see Don and Deanna. who had been with the kids all day, was happier than she would willingly admit to now be relieved of them.
“Don let me know he doesn’t much believe in politics,” Simon said, “Or in our mayor.”
“Well,” Cade shrugged and laughed. “You know Don. You know Don very well.”
“All the time we were together,” Simon said, “you never said anything about my job, about politics, or about anything I did.”
“When we were together I never said anything about anything,” Cade told him.
“I always assumed you were smarter and better than me.”
“You did not.”
“I did. And I just always thought you were right.”
Simon nodded.
“And then,” Cade added, “you never asked my opinion. On anything.”
Simon still smiled, but he looked reflective.
“Well, that is right enough. I never did ask. I had a lot of ideas. A lot of bad ideas. And I’m sorry for that, Cade.”
“Good thing about Don?” Cade said, “He doesn’t wait to be asked.”
Here Simon looked over at Don and Deanna and then Cade said, “What are you doing for dinner?”
“Dinner?”
“Yeah. Some people call it supper. It happens at night. Last meal of the day.”
“Ha. Yeah. I hadn’t planned anything really.”
“We hadn’t planned anything either,” Cade said. “Why don’t you eat with us, We’ll all plan something together. I don’t think it’ll involve actual cooking.”
“I’d like that,” Simon said. “I could go for some Thai or Italian. Maybe Ethiopian or Indian.”
“I was thinking chicken or pizza or Taco Bell, but sure.”
Simon shook his head and chuckled.
“I’m pretentious.”
“You’re not pretentious. You just have a disposable income and good taste.”
Cade thought about what he wanted to say next and then he did.
“Simon?”
“Yes?”
“I’m glad Don stayed with you last night.”
“Good.”
“Real glad. I think… We love each other, but we know love is big. It’s not like when you and I were together. We didn’t love each other enough, and so we were always looking for love somewhere else. But… I know you and Don love each other. It’s different from the way I love him. Or the way I love you. And… yet…”
Simon looked a little nervous now, wondering what Cade was getting at.
“Deanna is staying here tonight. I love her, but she’s back after two years and I don’t feel like explaining everything. But, if you wanted to eat with us tomorrow night too, that would be great.”
“Yes,” Simon said, still not entirely sure of Cade, surprised by the dark haired man with the fringe of dark beard all along his fine face. “I can come over after work.”
“Great,” Cade said. “And after dinner, if you wanted, you could stay. Stay the night like you used to. With us. If you’d like. Don would like. I would like. Would you like?”
Cade was not looking at him. His brown eyes had darted to Simon, and now looked at the table, one of his long fingers was tracing a circle on the table with its remnants of yellow and red construction paper. Simon’s heart beat a little faster than it had in a while. He felt himself going firm in his pants, his skin flushing with happiness.
“Yes,” he said, “I would like it very much.”
“I,” Cade started, and then he said, “Don, I told you I thought he was better than me.”
“And I thought he was better than me,” Simon said. “But I talked to you anyway. I thought… I’m not going to be good for him. But still, I talked to you.”
“Why?” Don asked the same time Cade did.
Simon looked at Donovan, and then he looked at Cade.
“Because when I looked in your eyes, I saw we were the same. I saw you wanted to die too.”
What was it about Simon, Cade wondered? Yes, he was good looking, sure enough. But there were lots of good looking people. What was more, he was very conventionally good looking. He was blond and preppy and at the time he was only what Cade could immediately see. Cade didn’t know about a trailer park. He didn’t know about the barn where Simon had been caught with his cousins. He didn’t know about the men before him or the dead father. He did know he had a hard time making conversation, especially with other gay men for some reason. He did know that he had kind of given up on meeting anyone, and here they were together at this little Democratic Party function, and when Cade made a joke, Simon laughed. And it wasn’t when they were close to each other. Simon could be halfway across the room, and Cade got a little shiver when he’d hear him laugh, or when he’d see him smile. No, Simon Barrow didn’t happen in one evening.
“Whaddo you like?” Simon asked Cade. They were at the Fiddler’s Hearth, downtown, across the street from the Holiday Inn.
“Uh… Excuse me.”
“I am buying you a drink,” Simon said, over pronouncing each syllable, “so what do you want?”
“Oh, I’m. I’m just drinking beer.”
“Just beer?”
“Uh huh.”
“What can I get you for?” the girl asked Simon who seemed to have just gotten off work and was in a black overcoat with a blue scarf hanging loosely.
“Jameson on the rocks and my friend over here is having….. just beer.”
“Corona.”
“Corona really sucks.”
“Should I have Guinness?”
“You should have whatever you want,” Simon said. “I’m just saying.”
“What about Rolling Rock?”
The girl was looking between the two of them.
“Why don’t you try Stella Artois?”
“Uh….” Cade was shaking his head so that his Jesus Christ curls sjook around his face, “that sounds great.”
When the bartender left them, Cade said, “I remember you.”
“You should. I laughed the loudest at all your jokes.”
“Am I that funny?”
“I think so. You’re also not bad to look at. How long did it take you to grow your hair?”
“Uh, I don’t know,” Cade grinned at him, not conscious of touching a dark lock of it, before he scratched his thin beard. “I kind of just don’t cut it.”
“Fair.”
“Are you hitting on me?”
“Yes?”
MORE TOMORROW
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was an excellent portion! Great to read some of Cade and Simon’s history. I am enjoying this story a lot and look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
What was it about Simon, Cade wondered? Yes, he was good looking, sure enough. But there were lots of good looking people. What was more, he was very conventionally good looking. He was blond and preppy and at the time he was only what Cade could immediately see. Cade didn’t know about a trailer park. He didn’t know about the barn where Simon had been caught with his cousins. He didn’t know about the men before him or the dead father. He did know he had a hard time making conversation, especially with other gay men for some reason. He did know that he had kind of given up on meeting anyone, and here they were together at this little Democratic Party function, and when Cade made a joke, Simon laughed. And it wasn’t when they were close to each other. Simon could be halfway across the room, and Cade got a little shiver when he’d hear him laugh, or when he’d see him smile. No, Simon Barrow didn’t happen in one evening.
“Whaddo you like?” Simon asked Cade. They were at the Fiddler’s Hearth, downtown, across the street from the Holiday Inn.
“Uh… Excuse me.”
“I am buying you a drink,” Simon said, over pronouncing each syllable, “so what do you want?”
“Oh, I’m. I’m just drinking beer.”
“Just beer?”
“Uh huh.”
“What can I get you for?” the girl asked Simon who seemed to have just gotten off work and was in a black overcoat with a blue scarf hanging loosely.
“Jameson on the rocks and my friend over here is having….. just beer.”
“Corona.”
“Corona really sucks.”
“Should I have Guinness?”
“You should have whatever you want,” Simon said. “I’m just saying.”
“What about Rolling Rock?”
The girl was looking between the two of them.
“Why don’t you try Stella Artois?”
“Uh….” Cade was shaking his head so that his Jesus Christ curls sjook around his face, “that sounds great.”
When the bartender left them, Cade said, “I remember you.”
“You should. I laughed the loudest at all your jokes.”
“Am I that funny?”
“I think so. You’re also not bad to look at. How long did it take you to grow your hair?”
“Uh, I don’t know,” Cade grinned at him, not conscious of touching a dark lock of it, before he scratched his thin beard. “I kind of just don’t cut it.”
“Fair.”
“Are you hitting on me?”
“Yes?”
“That’s….” Cade ran a long finger around the wet bottom of his glass, “daring.”
“Only if you’re straight, and I’m sure you’re not. We’ve been to too many gay things together.”
“You don’t even care if people hear,” Cade shook his head and smiled.
“This is Wallington. Wallington is gay as fuck. And, no, I don’t care if people hear anything. It’s not a lot I do care about.”
“Then,” Cade said, putting his pack of cigarettes on the bar, “if you want to go out on the smoker’s porch and talk about life with me, why don’t we get to know each other little better?”
They talk for an hour. What Simon learns after flat out saying, “You look like a hipster Jesus,” when Cade says that every hipster looks like Jesus, is that Cade is part Lebanese, and therefore Middle Eastern and a pretty good candidate for Christ. He learns that Cade plays the guitar for a band and does kids’ parties. He learns that Cade smokes pot a lot. Simon says he does too. Cade is surprised. He learns Simon graduated from Notre Dame and went to privates schools before that and now he works for the mayor’s office. Neither one of them learns about the other’s history of abuse or embarrassment. Everything is light in that first meeting and yet...
“We knew,” Cade says years later.
“We must have known,” Simon says.
For it isn’t the light that attracted them to each other.
As the night draws on, Cade yawns and says, “I should be getting home.”
“Would you like to come to my home?”
Cademon Richards raises an eyebrow.
“You do move fast.”
Simon shrugs, looking up at Cade.
“I just asked if you’d like to come to my home.”
“No,’ Cade said. “I don’t plan on going to anyone’s home but mine tonight.”
It’s a decision he’s proud of, not to throw himself into things and beds so easily anymore, but Simon, not looking at him, swiping one of his cigarettes, the first one of many, lights it and says, “Well…. Could I come to yours?”
Back then Cade lived in the apartment complex of brick buildings they have since torn the tops from and rebuilt mansard roves over that still look as shady as ever. It took a half hour to get there. Then minutes to get through nerves and another ten to end conversation and get to kissing. Before the hour was done, they stood naked in the darkness of his room making out, arms around each other’s waists, hands in each other’s hair and back again. Simon was stronger than he looked and brought Cade to the bed where they knew each other for the first time. Cade had been looking at Simon and Simon had been looking at him for weeks and then all that night. Neither one of them fully understood their passion until the moment they went to the bed, and when they had both been spent neither knew what time it was.
Cade lay on his back, feeling the sweat and funk on his body cool, and beside him Simon was still breathing heavily. The first heat of passion had given away to the most comfortable entanglement of bodies, stroking of hair, kissing of shoulders, running circles along each others backs Cade had known since Nash Taylor.
“Do you mind,” Simon began, “if I stay the night?”
Everyone whom he wanted to say never stayed, and the ones who wanted to stay never should have, so tonight, contented with Simon’s touch, feeling perfect in the dark, Cade said, “Yes.”
That first night, the built up fear and eagerness, the welcome of Simon’s touch, of his kiss, how at home they felt in each other had been eclipsed by other things. Their relationship had been so welcome to both of them that very quickly they had moved in together. Simon had the apartment in the beige two story on the river, and it was closer to everything and so Cade moved in with him. Partially, Cade was tired of feeling alone, and it was all too easy to take his small things and join them to Simon’s. He was proud of Simon and glad to bask in the glory of the Notre Dame graduate working in the mayor’s office for his new progressive government. If Simon drank too much, it wasn’t noticed because Cade did too. Pot hardly mattered. Cade loved it. Still did. Loved it more so then. Besides Cade smoked like a chimney and if Simon could live with that, Cade could turn a blind eye to all the prescription pills that seemed to get Simon through the day.
When cocaine showed up, she was just another good time. She was a new adventure after the shrooms and the acid trips. Everything seemed to happen so gradually, one new adventure after the other. And then they were driving to New Buffalo to meet couples and have a first boyfriend swap and then another, and then several others. And then orgies were fine. As long as there were condoms it was a cool thing. Somewhere along the line the phrase open relationship came up and Cade remembers meeting lots of people who liked all of those things, who said that it made their relationships stronger. He remembers one weekend when they were in their third year, when the sun came up and they had never slept. Simon, for some reason, was in loafers and a tie and nothing else, snorting cocaine like a Hoover at a round slate table, and Cade was busily being fucked by a couple who took turns fucking his mouth and then his ass.
When Cade was exhausted, he had another bump of coke and they were back at it again. He remembers the sun being up and feeling twitchy as fuck. The big cocked man across from him, well built, but red because of the suntanning, grey haired, was saying that things like this brought him and his husband closer. But Cade didn’t feel close to anything. Sitting there, heart still racing, eyes dilated, asshole beginning to ache, smelling like three men and his man on the other side of the room walking up and down, still in loafers and a tie, dick swinging while he talked to himself, he certainly didn’t feel close to Simon.
The night Deanna left, Simon came to dinner with Cade and Donovan. Donovan said, “I didn’t cook this, but I did one hell of a job ordering.”
When they were finishing eating, Cade took out his marijuana which, by now was more a treat than a rule, and rather than pass a joint around, which Don hated, he rolled three and gently gifted the other two.
Donovan said, “I’m going walking for a bit. And then I might get some work done.”
He stood up and pushed the chair in, taking his joint and placing it in the breast pocket of his button down shirt.
“You all need to talk.”
Simon and Cade blinked at each other, but when Donovan was gone, Simon said, “He’s right, you know.”
And they had been discussing this very thing, going over their past so seriously that Cade had put the joint out after two puffs and never taken out a cigarette.
“I just remembered the fucked up parts,” he said. “I remembered the end and not the beginning.”
“The beginning was nice,” Simon said.
“The beginning was great.”
“I really fucked it up. We started out so good and I just fucked it up.”
“You did,” Cade said. “You really did. But I was stupid enough to let you.”
“Our heads weren’t on anywhere near straight.”
Simon picked up his joint and lit it. His eyes tightened while he inhaled and kept the smoke in him. Cade watched it leak from his nose and Simon finally said, “I really love Don.”
“I know.”
“Do you mind?”
“Did you all sleep together last night?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t mind. Not really. I’m just upset that he knows a part of you I don’t. The you I started to know but… Things got screwed up.”
“Do you think,” Simon began, “possibly, there’s a chance we could start… fresher? Would you like to know me? For real? We could know each other.”
“Yeah,” Cade said. “Forgive me?”
“For?”
“Being angry at you. I still was. All this time.”
“If you can forgive me for being the jerk I was.”
“I didn’t know the shit you’d been through,” Cade said.
Simon said, “We didn’t really know anything.”
They started by talking. Cade realized how much he had forgotten about Simon, or how much he had never known, When Simon confessed that he wasn’t sure if any good was being done by the city council or if what he was working for was useful,
“They had this meeting in the basement of the library, so people probably missed it anyway, and it was to protest the raising of the bus fare. From seventy five cents to a dollar. And lots of people were there asking for it not to be done, sighting how that twenty five cent difference was a real difference to people and there was this asshole lawyer, Jaime Cook, who works for the city, and he was defending the bus company. There’s a place in hell for him. Anyway, not only did they raise the bus price, they got rid of transfers.”
“So now if someone is crossing town on two buses, it isn’t just seventy five cents, it’s two dollars.” Donovan said.
“Exactly.”
Simon shook his head and said, “Middle class people don’t know about this shit and if they knew they wouldn’t care, and the people who can afford to send their kids to nice schools just do it, and so this town gets poorer and poorer from the inside eating its way out and everyone just moves to the edges. Fuck everyone.”
Cade said, “I’m sorry.”
Simon stopped in the middle of dinner and looked at Cade wide eyed.
“You sound like you did the whole thing. You’re not city hall, Cademon. It’s not your fault.”
“No,” Cade said. “It’s just, I don’t think the whole time we were together I really listened to you.”
Simon was in pain, in pain a lot over the uselessness of his work and its apparent failure, and before love and friendship, the pain had been drowned out in drugs and drink and fucking, and Simon just said, “I never really told you.”
This was the year Cade spent so much time away from Wallington, taking care of his father up in Ely by the lake. He and Donovan never fought for more than five minutes. Don just didn’t have time for it, and they had come to the decision that Cade would more than make up for his not being around and give Don more days off from the daycare to write, more days out to meet other people and reconnect with friends, more days to walk by the river and yes, days to begin applying for other jobs.
“I don’t think I want children around all the time,” he’d finally said. “I think I’m going to want to do something else, and I haven’t really allowed myself to imagine that.”
They had talked a little more and finally Cade said, “What if I were to move the kids out of the house? To put us in a proper space that isn’t our home? Would you still want to get away from it?”
“If Suzie put in her proper share, if I did less of a share, then yes. Right now what I want to do is walk by a river more and clean up vomit less.”
Cade loved the children. He knew when he said it that way it wasn’t entirely fair because Don did too. Only, he didn’t feel weary or like he wanted to do anything else. Of course he’d been away from them a lot. Easter was nearly here, and Cade had had them all day with help from Suzie in the afternoon. He was just sending the last of them off and saying goodbye to Suzie when he decided to walk through the neighborhood, up to the high and twisted cobblestone streets where buds were just appearing on the trees. He would go to Simon’s house because Simon was off and he knew this was where Don was.
His heart was merry, but merry was not quite the right word. It was going toward something, a revelation like the green buds on the trees. He went up the porch of the old bungalow and into the well appointed house that looked like it would be owned by a female English professor who had it photographed for Better Homes and Gardens. He slid off his noisy shoes that slid through the house over the hardwood and realized he was doing one of those things that couldn’t be explained, that was a little bit mad and that he had chosen not to explain even to himself.
He went through the halls lit grey by the oncoming evening and went to the bedroom. He stood there, hidden in the doorway, and watched them like children, hands open, mouths open, abandoned to sleep, the dim light of one lamp and of the departing day on Simon, his arms round Don, one rosy white, one brown like chocolate, both of their tender bodies naked and curled together like commas. He sighed, and hugged himself and lay against the wall, a dull pain rising up in him that was not jealousy. It was longing. He wanted to have his arms around Don. He wanted Simon’s arms locked about him like that first time they’d made love. He wanted it so bad his dick hurt even while tears sprang to his eyes. Simon’s arms about Don made a circle of love and he wanted to be in that circle. He had come to see it. He knew he should leave, but he could not.
It was to his soft weeping they woke up, stirring, a little distressed, a little confused while they half dressed and listened to him.and Donovan wiped the tears from Cade’s cheeks, and Simon dared to kiss them. Then Donovan dressed, not quickly, and when he was dressed he took Cade’s hand and placed it in Simon’s, and then he kissed the both of them and a moment later they heart the door closing as he left.
“What do you want?” Simon said, and though his face was compassionate, his voice was hard.
“To be…” Cade stopped and started again, “to be part of this.”
“Do you love me?”
Cade started to say he did, but said:
“I’m afraid to love you. Again.”
“Do you want to go someplace?”
“You were… with Don. I ruined things.”
“You know better than that, and nothing about what we’re doing is normal so it can’t be ruined very easily. But before we go I need more than a tee shirt and pair of Jockeys.”
MORE TOMORROW. THAT WILL BE OUR LAST POSTING FOR THE WEEK. OFF TO VISIT FRIENDS BUT I'LL RETURN ON SUNDAY
“Whaddo you like?” Simon asked Cade. They were at the Fiddler’s Hearth, downtown, across the street from the Holiday Inn.
“Uh… Excuse me.”
“I am buying you a drink,” Simon said, over pronouncing each syllable, “so what do you want?”
“Oh, I’m. I’m just drinking beer.”
“Just beer?”
“Uh huh.”
“What can I get you for?” the girl asked Simon who seemed to have just gotten off work and was in a black overcoat with a blue scarf hanging loosely.
“Jameson on the rocks and my friend over here is having….. just beer.”
“Corona.”
“Corona really sucks.”
“Should I have Guinness?”
“You should have whatever you want,” Simon said. “I’m just saying.”
“What about Rolling Rock?”
The girl was looking between the two of them.
“Why don’t you try Stella Artois?”
“Uh….” Cade was shaking his head so that his Jesus Christ curls sjook around his face, “that sounds great.”
When the bartender left them, Cade said, “I remember you.”
“You should. I laughed the loudest at all your jokes.”
“Am I that funny?”
“I think so. You’re also not bad to look at. How long did it take you to grow your hair?”
“Uh, I don’t know,” Cade grinned at him, not conscious of touching a dark lock of it, before he scratched his thin beard. “I kind of just don’t cut it.”
“Fair.”
“Are you hitting on me?”
“Yes?”
“That’s….” Cade ran a long finger around the wet bottom of his glass, “daring.”
“Only if you’re straight, and I’m sure you’re not. We’ve been to too many gay things together.”
“You don’t even care if people hear,” Cade shook his head and smiled.
“This is Wallington. Wallington is gay as fuck. And, no, I don’t care if people hear anything. It’s not a lot I do care about.”
“Then,” Cade said, putting his pack of cigarettes on the bar, “if you want to go out on the smoker’s porch and talk about life with me, why don’t we get to know each other little better?”
They talk for an hour. What Simon learns after flat out saying, “You look like a hipster Jesus,” when Cade says that every hipster looks like Jesus, is that Cade is part Lebanese, and therefore Middle Eastern and a pretty good candidate for Christ. He learns that Cade plays the guitar for a band and does kids’ parties. He learns that Cade smokes pot a lot. Simon says he does too. Cade is surprised. He learns Simon graduated from Notre Dame and went to privates schools before that and now he works for the mayor’s office. Neither one of them learns about the other’s history of abuse or embarrassment. Everything is light in that first meeting and yet...
“We knew,” Cade says years later.
“We must have known,” Simon says.
For it isn’t the light that attracted them to each other.
As the night draws on, Cade yawns and says, “I should be getting home.”
“Would you like to come to my home?”
Cademon Richards raises an eyebrow.
“You do move fast.”
Simon shrugs, looking up at Cade.
“I just asked if you’d like to come to my home.”
“No,’ Cade said. “I don’t plan on going to anyone’s home but mine tonight.”
It’s a decision he’s proud of, not to throw himself into things and beds so easily anymore, but Simon, not looking at him, swiping one of his cigarettes, the first one of many, lights it and says, “Well…. Could I come to yours?”
Back then Cade lived in the apartment complex of brick buildings they have since torn the tops from and rebuilt mansard roves over that still look as shady as ever. It took a half hour to get there. Then minutes to get through nerves and another ten to end conversation and get to kissing. Before the hour was done, they stood naked in the darkness of his room making out, arms around each other’s waists, hands in each other’s hair and back again. Simon was stronger than he looked and brought Cade to the bed where they knew each other for the first time. Cade had been looking at Simon and Simon had been looking at him for weeks and then all that night. Neither one of them fully understood their passion until the moment they went to the bed, and when they had both been spent neither knew what time it was.
Cade lay on his back, feeling the sweat and funk on his body cool, and beside him Simon was still breathing heavily. The first heat of passion had given away to the most comfortable entanglement of bodies, stroking of hair, kissing of shoulders, running circles along each others backs Cade had known since Nash Taylor.
“Do you mind,” Simon began, “if I stay the night?”
Everyone whom he wanted to say never stayed, and the ones who wanted to stay never should have, so tonight, contented with Simon’s touch, feeling perfect in the dark, Cade said, “Yes.”
That first night, the built up fear and eagerness, the welcome of Simon’s touch, of his kiss, how at home they felt in each other had been eclipsed by other things. Their relationship had been so welcome to both of them that very quickly they had moved in together. Simon had the apartment in the beige two story on the river, and it was closer to everything and so Cade moved in with him. Partially, Cade was tired of feeling alone, and it was all too easy to take his small things and join them to Simon’s. He was proud of Simon and glad to bask in the glory of the Notre Dame graduate working in the mayor’s office for his new progressive government. If Simon drank too much, it wasn’t noticed because Cade did too. Pot hardly mattered. Cade loved it. Still did. Loved it more so then. Besides Cade smoked like a chimney and if Simon could live with that, Cade could turn a blind eye to all the prescription pills that seemed to get Simon through the day.
When cocaine showed up, she was just another good time. She was a new adventure after the shrooms and the acid trips. Everything seemed to happen so gradually, one new adventure after the other. And then they were driving to New Buffalo to meet couples and have a first boyfriend swap and then another, and then several others. And then orgies were fine. As long as there were condoms it was a cool thing. Somewhere along the line the phrase open relationship came up and Cade remembers meeting lots of people who liked all of those things, who said that it made their relationships stronger. He remembers one weekend when they were in their third year, when the sun came up and they had never slept. Simon, for some reason, was in loafers and a tie and nothing else, snorting cocaine like a Hoover at a round slate table, and Cade was busily being fucked by a couple who took turns fucking his mouth and then his ass.
When Cade was exhausted, he had another bump of coke and they were back at it again. He remembers the sun being up and feeling twitchy as fuck. The big cocked man across from him, well built, but red because of the suntanning, grey haired, was saying that things like this brought him and his husband closer. But Cade didn’t feel close to anything. Sitting there, heart still racing, eyes dilated, asshole beginning to ache, smelling like three men and his man on the other side of the room walking up and down, still in loafers and a tie, dick swinging while he talked to himself, he certainly didn’t feel close to Simon.
The night Deanna left, Simon came to dinner with Cade and Donovan. Donovan said, “I didn’t cook this, but I did one hell of a job ordering.”
When they were finishing eating, Cade took out his marijuana which, by now was more a treat than a rule, and rather than pass a joint around, which Don hated, he rolled three and gently gifted the other two.
Donovan said, “I’m going walking for a bit. And then I might get some work done.”
He stood up and pushed the chair in, taking his joint and placing it in the breast pocket of his button down shirt.
“You all need to talk.”
Simon and Cade blinked at each other, but when Donovan was gone, Simon said, “He’s right, you know.”
And they had been discussing this very thing, going over their past so seriously that Cade had put the joint out after two puffs and never taken out a cigarette.
“I just remembered the fucked up parts,” he said. “I remembered the end and not the beginning.”
“The beginning was nice,” Simon said.
“The beginning was great.”
“I really fucked it up. We started out so good and I just fucked it up.”
“You did,” Cade said. “You really did. But I was stupid enough to let you.”
“Our heads weren’t on anywhere near straight.”
Simon picked up his joint and lit it. His eyes tightened while he inhaled and kept the smoke in him. Cade watched it leak from his nose and Simon finally said, “I really love Don.”
“I know.”
“Do you mind?”
“Did you all sleep together last night?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t mind. Not really. I’m just upset that he knows a part of you I don’t. The you I started to know but… Things got screwed up.”
“Do you think,” Simon began, “possibly, there’s a chance we could start… fresher? Would you like to know me? For real? We could know each other.”
“Yeah,” Cade said. “Forgive me?”
“For?”
“Being angry at you. I still was. All this time.”
“If you can forgive me for being the jerk I was.”
“I didn’t know the shit you’d been through,” Cade said.
Simon said, “We didn’t really know anything.”
They started by talking. Cade realized how much he had forgotten about Simon, or how much he had never known, When Simon confessed that he wasn’t sure if any good was being done by the city council or if what he was working for was useful,
“They had this meeting in the basement of the library, so people probably missed it anyway, and it was to protest the raising of the bus fare. From seventy five cents to a dollar. And lots of people were there asking for it not to be done, sighting how that twenty five cent difference was a real difference to people and there was this asshole lawyer, Jaime Cook, who works for the city, and he was defending the bus company. There’s a place in hell for him. Anyway, not only did they raise the bus price, they got rid of transfers.”
“So now if someone is crossing town on two buses, it isn’t just seventy five cents, it’s two dollars.” Donovan said.
“Exactly.”
Simon shook his head and said, “Middle class people don’t know about this shit and if they knew they wouldn’t care, and the people who can afford to send their kids to nice schools just do it, and so this town gets poorer and poorer from the inside eating its way out and everyone just moves to the edges. Fuck everyone.”
Cade said, “I’m sorry.”
Simon stopped in the middle of dinner and looked at Cade wide eyed.
“You sound like you did the whole thing. You’re not city hall, Cademon. It’s not your fault.”
“No,” Cade said. “It’s just, I don’t think the whole time we were together I really listened to you.”
Simon was in pain, in pain a lot over the uselessness of his work and its apparent failure, and before love and friendship, the pain had been drowned out in drugs and drink and fucking, and Simon just said, “I never really told you.”
This was the year Cade spent so much time away from Wallington, taking care of his father up in Ely by the lake. He and Donovan never fought for more than five minutes. Don just didn’t have time for it, and they had come to the decision that Cade would more than make up for his not being around and give Don more days off from the daycare to write, more days out to meet other people and reconnect with friends, more days to walk by the river and yes, days to begin applying for other jobs.
“I don’t think I want children around all the time,” he’d finally said. “I think I’m going to want to do something else, and I haven’t really allowed myself to imagine that.”
They had talked a little more and finally Cade said, “What if I were to move the kids out of the house? To put us in a proper space that isn’t our home? Would you still want to get away from it?”
“If Suzie put in her proper share, if I did less of a share, then yes. Right now what I want to do is walk by a river more and clean up vomit less.”
Cade loved the children. He knew when he said it that way it wasn’t entirely fair because Don did too. Only, he didn’t feel weary or like he wanted to do anything else. Of course he’d been away from them a lot. Easter was nearly here, and Cade had had them all day with help from Suzie in the afternoon. He was just sending the last of them off and saying goodbye to Suzie when he decided to walk through the neighborhood, up to the high and twisted cobblestone streets where buds were just appearing on the trees. He would go to Simon’s house because Simon was off and he knew this was where Don was.
His heart was merry, but merry was not quite the right word. It was going toward something, a revelation like the green buds on the trees. He went up the porch of the old bungalow and into the well appointed house that looked like it would be owned by a female English professor who had it photographed for Better Homes and Gardens. He slid off his noisy shoes that slid through the house over the hardwood and realized he was doing one of those things that couldn’t be explained, that was a little bit mad and that he had chosen not to explain even to himself.
He went through the halls lit grey by the oncoming evening and went to the bedroom. He stood there, hidden in the doorway, and watched them like children, hands open, mouths open, abandoned to sleep, the dim light of one lamp and of the departing day on Simon, his arms round Don, one rosy white, one brown like chocolate, both of their tender bodies naked and curled together like commas. He sighed, and hugged himself and lay against the wall, a dull pain rising up in him that was not jealousy. It was longing. He wanted to have his arms around Don. He wanted Simon’s arms locked about him like that first time they’d made love. He wanted it so bad his dick hurt even while tears sprang to his eyes. Simon’s arms about Don made a circle of love and he wanted to be in that circle. He had come to see it. He knew he should leave, but he could not.
It was to his soft weeping they woke up, stirring, a little distressed, a little confused while they half dressed and listened to him.and Donovan wiped the tears from Cade’s cheeks, and Simon dared to kiss them. Then Donovan dressed, not quickly, and when he was dressed he took Cade’s hand and placed it in Simon’s, and then he kissed the both of them and a moment later they heart the door closing as he left.
“What do you want?” Simon said, and though his face was compassionate, his voice was hard.
“To be…” Cade stopped and started again, “to be part of this.”
“Do you love me?”
Cade started to say he did, but said:
“I’m afraid to love you. Again.”
“Do you want to go someplace?”
“You were… with Don. I ruined things.”
“You know better than that, and nothing about what we’re doing is normal so it can’t be ruined very easily. But before we go I need more than a tee shirt and pair of Jockeys.”
MORE TOMORROW. THAT WILL BE OUR LAST POSTING FOR THE WEEK. OFF TO VISIT FRIENDS BUT I'LL RETURN ON SUNDAY
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great portion! It was interesting to see these characters sorting out how they fit in each other’s lives and of course their history. Excellent writing and I look forward to more tomorrow!
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
I'm glad you enjoyed tonight's portion. This is one my favorite parts of the book.
ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
“Oh fuck! Oh fuck! Fuck! Fuck me!”
“You like it? You fucking like it?”
“God!” he growled. “I love it.”
The hard clapping, Andrew slamming into his asshole over and over again, his balls and hips clapping against him, as he pushed his ass out. He loved it, and he loved how they called him by his name.
“Take it, Cade! Take it, Cade! Take it, Cade. Take it.”
Andrew, deep in him, leaned over him, kissing his back, pushing his cock deeper, and biting his shoulder, kissing the round bone at the base of his neck, running hands up and down him while Cade reached out, high and hungry for Cory’s dick, taking it in his mouth while he cupped the other boy’s ass, and pulled his cock further down his throat. One fucked his ass, the other fucked his face. After a while, who pulled his hair and made his eyes water, he couldn’t say. He didn’t want to say. He’d met them on the beach. Andrew and his boyfriend had talked to him and Simon on Grindr, but, once they’d reached New Union, Simon had ended up with some other guy. For a moment, Cade had been afraid that everything that was supposed to happen wouldn’t happen, and then Andrew, with the musical, slightly nasal voice, with the small waist and Mediterranean features, touched his hand and said, “Cademon? That’s a beautiful name.”
So, Cade had shown up alone. He had wanted to be with these boys, and after all the shadowy and often half hearted hookups, this was the first one he’d actually wanted.
As he had touched his hand, he wondered who the cute boy with the dark features, the big ears, the nasal voice and the slightly big nose was in all of his other lives, here suave and twinkish on the beach, but what about Monday through Friday, and right now, tonight, he was fucking the shit out of him.
“Oh MY FUCKING GOD!” Cade cried, each syllable fucked out of him by Andrew. Cory fucked his mouth, and in a few moments he would take Andrew and fuck him again.
The fucking had started well into the night, after they had snorted up all the cocaine and smoked the majority of the pot, they began to make out in the hot tub. Cade sat there watching Cory and Andrew make out, and it was just when he was starting to feel sad and jealous that Andrew said, “We haven’t forgotten about you,” and swam a little to press his mouth to Cade while on the other side of him, up and down his back and neck, Cory kissed him, his mouth going down, down and further down. He reached behind him to kiss Andrew’s mouth and while they were all loving each other in the warm water of the hot tub, Andrew said, “Cade, why are you crying?”
“Am I?” Cade said.
Then he said, “We all ought to love each other. All the time.”
That last time, they had moved to the bed, and none of them talked, though occasionally something like a sob escaped Andrew’s mouth. Cade closed his eyes and gentle mouthed Andrew’s ear while he fucked him slowly, massaging his back, kissing him up and down while he moaned. Cory pounded him tenderly. That last time, when the climax came, gentle, but insistent and body rocking, Cade’s hands opened, closed, opened, and his body shook. He stayed for them all to finish up, all to lie in the bed naked. He stayed until that moment right before he was there a moment too long, and then Andrew said, as Cade stood up, “You should shower before you go.”
“No,” Cade said. “It’s a good night. I can shower when I get home.”
Outside he could look all up and down the street, passing the brightly lit apartments by the marina, fairy lights strung over them at midnight, watching the stragglers go through the stores still open this late. Beyond was the rich blue darkness, and the beach with the lights of a few boats. Cade passed over the train tracks past another row of beach apartments until his sandaled feet, in the increasingly cool night, crossed the last empty street and came onto the beach.
Cademon Richard’s eyes had to adjust to the darkness to see the stretch of sand on the water, to see, of all things, geese floating on the lake, and one small motorboat setting out toward the pier. Across the water, lights twinkled from Michigan City. Cademon took off his sandals and laid them on the wet sand, walking further into the water, sinking his feet into the silt that passed through his toes. He walked in further until the water was around his calves and then, not quite knowing what he was doing, he took off his shirt and then undid his shorts and next pulled off his underwear, and balling them all up he threw them on the sand near his sandals, and then sank into the water, swimming out a pace, where he buried himself in the cool water and thought about never coming up.
The hotel room was empty. Wherever Simon was, it wasn’t here
Simon doesn’t come home until the next morning. When he does, he is green faced and lank haired. He looks beaten up. His nose is red, his lips pale.
For a moment I wonder if a man did this to him, but as he looks up at me, I know that isn’t true, and he says, in a kind of defeated voice:
“I think we need to end this. I think it’s time to break up.”
“I can’t believe I started crying,” Cade said as they drove.
Then he said, “The last time we were in a car together was—”
“After we’d broken up.”
“After you broke up with me,” Cade corrected.
Simon nodded.
“It was rotten of me.”
“It’s in the past.”
“But not completely,” Simon said. “And when I said it was rotten, I meant it was rotten of me not to own up to it.”
As they drove, the sky turned bright white and Cade said, “It’s going to snow.”
“Huh?”
“When the sky goes that way, it means it’s going to snow.”
“I never noticed that,” Simon said as he drove into the country of hills, bare fields and distant trees that lay southeast of Wallington.
“I’m not sorry about us breaking up,” Simon said. “I’m sorry for the shitty way I did it, though.”
When Cade didn’t answer, Simon said, “We were a sinking ship. Because I was a sunken ship. We should have stopped a long time ago.”
“We got off course.”
Simon chuckled.
“That’s actually what I wanted to say, but I thought we’d had enough sea metaphors.”
“You mean we’d—”
“Run that ship aground?” they said at the same time and laughed.
Then Cade said, “I was crying because you all have what we lost. I just want to know you that away again.”
“You can’t ever know me that way again,” Simon said. “The way we showed ourselves to each other wasn’t quite real. We’d have to know each other… In a different way.”
Looking at Simon’s shy expression, and how even in the dark his hair shone silver, Suddenly Cade leaned over and kissed him.
Simon didn’t say anything, but he pulled to the side of the road. Cade had been right, and white little dots of snow were beginning to fall. Simon leaned over and kissed him, and while the snow fell, in the darkness of the car they kissed deeply. They stopped and started again.
While the flakes fell thicker and the sky above was whiter, Cade sat in the car and watched Simon, in his black coat and blue scarf, the light of the night shining on his blond hair, walking around and around the car, talking in a very businesslike tone. He did not know the words, but he suddenly knew that Simon was talking to Donovan, that in a business like and calm manner they were discussing what had just happened, what was about to happen. They were both older than him, Cade remembered, and though he had seen them in bed together, seen them as friends, knew them both as his lovers and their own, it was only then, when Simon said, in a very husband like way, “I love you,” and he semi heard, “I love you too.” that he really understood the relationship between his first lover who was about to become his new one, and his principal one who was waiting at home.
Simon pushed up his glasses much as Don would, and buckled his seatbelt.
“You’re coming home with me tonight if that’s alright?” he said, smiling as he started up the car..
“Yeah…” Cade said, sounding more breathless than he’d planned. “That’s fine.”
Simon nodded and then, as he put his foot on the gas he said, “We’d better beat this snow then.”
The car moves into town and up the hills and before the house in a circle of light filled with falling snow. The lights of the car are out, but the sky is filled with snow light and the black trees are lined in white.
In the darkness of the car they kiss, and the windows heat as soft white flakes falls outside all around them. Moore Street is a winter land, and no one ventures out, the light of some houses looks out onto this glistening country. Their hands move over each other, lips touch to become mouths grasping hungrily, unafraid of their hunger.
Prompted by lack of fear, Cade opens his pants and his penis rises, a dark baton in the night. He wants to show it, wants to let Simon know it is there for him. Simon’s hands close around it, stroke it in that old way, and then he bends down taking him in his mouth. For only a few minutes in the car, they struggle, Simon’s mouth working, gagging to take him in, Cade trying to keep back his pleasure, trying to stop shouting, his hands flying back until he realizes as snow whirls around them, no one will hear. His hands fall in Simon’s hair and when he moans and shouts, when he comes and ejaculates and Simon gags, coughing as his mouth balloons and is filled with come, only the trees and white snow witness.
They love each other, true enough, and were coming to know each other, but there is a different kind of trust which only lust can make. Only lust can rebuilt the trust in an old lover who has wronged you, whom you have wronged, who has hurt you and you have hurt, whom you are open to again fully. Only lust makes you twenty five again, where you tear off the coat and pull down the pants, wrestle down the underwear, situate yourself in the seat, turn on the car long enough the keep the heat going, kiss, lick, bite, bite, bite back, suck fingers, kiss so hard you suck on each other’s tongues, move into the new position where Simon, always proper, coughs up phlegm to spit on his own bobbing erection, so hard it stands up and salutes his old lover, so hard it hurts with desire as the longer, taller, Cade sits down on him and they guide each other into fitting together, both of them shocked at the pleasure, the tightness, the initial discomfort and absolute necessity of entry. As the snow falls outside, and one truck with a snow shovel passes, they fuck like this, quietly, Cade on his lap, lifting up and down, Simon pressing back until they push back the seat and Cade straddles him like that first time.
They stop long enough to gather coats and clothes and rumpled, in a mess, laughing to be pulling up pants and holding shirts together, they quickly go up the walk, up the porch, Simon struggles with the door. Cade declares, “It’s cold.” Simon says, “Fuck.”
Cade twists the door, It had never been locked, Simon, shirt half open, hair standing up, looks amazed, but Cade pulls him into the bungalow where there is a light in the living room, but not in this little foyer, and Simon closes the door behind them, pressing Cade against it. They don’t say a word. They are as quiet as conception while Simon fucks him against the door, burying his head in Cade’s back. They both think they’ll stop in am moment, in just a moment, and be sensible men in their early thirties who go to the bedroom. But they can’t stop and Cade, who remembers Simon and his single malt scotches, his cigars, his shirts, his ties, his sensible decisions, longs for this out of control Simon who is fused to him when fucking him and fucking him deeper, grunting from his nose like a steam engine. He misses being pinned to the bed or to the the wall, the side of a sofa or to this door. He came in the car when Simon went down on him, but there are different types of coming and he’s been coming again, his whole body trembling against the door, when Simon’s hands tense and bruise Cade’s flesh, when he buries his head in Cade’s back and biting his lips groans, “FUCK”…
He feels Simon coming, feels himself being filled with so much, so much semen, feels Simon slack against him, clinging to him, feels himself slacking, evaporating along with the walls put up between them, feels them becoming something they haven’t been in a long time, becoming one thing, a thing without division, two homes and not two fortresses, houses possible of becoming one home.
Sex has passed through them like the Holy Ghost passes through a revival meeting, and having left, the two of them had remained against the door, pants down, clothes scattered, Simon’s face in Cade’s back. They were in that time when the body still thrummed with the shocks of lovemaking, the ache of fucking, the first feelings of nailmarks, oncoming exhaustion after the come. Simon’s hand weakly patted Cade’s back, faintly stroked him. Finally Cade had laughed.
“Can we get off this door?”
“That… “ Simon murmured, “is a great idea.”
He looked around the floor to see if coats and scarves and gloves were there, told Cade to check for his. That was very Simon. Cade would have said, let’s wait till tomorrow, and then gone searching the next day never to find his missing glove again.
And there was a missing glove. Cade went out and returned with it, but by now Simon had hung up his coat and his pants and shirt were under and over his arm. His shoes neatly near the coat rack and he stood naked except for his black socks.
“Everything?” Simon asked.
“Everything,” Cade said.
Simon kissed him and Cade followed him to the room where Simon neatly put his clothes in a chair and pulled off even his socks. He lay on the bed and Cade looked at him before undressing and laying on the bed too. Well, of course, this was Simon’s house, and he was his lover. And the heat was always on, why would he wear clothes? Whatever hang ups Simon had ever had, he had none about his body.
“What should we do?” Cade wondered.
“Nothing right now. I’m exhausted, but you can help yourself to whatever’s in the house.”
Simon had rolled over and pulled out a pillow and Cade looked over the body that, he realized, it was now his right to see again. Simon was not forgetting him, Simon was taking him for granted, assuming that now that they were together again there was no need to endlessly entertain or think too much over.
“But,” Simon said into his pillow, “since that snow is falling, I suggest you called Donovan and let him know we’re safe. You know how he worries.”
MORE NEXT WEEK
“You like it? You fucking like it?”
“God!” he growled. “I love it.”
The hard clapping, Andrew slamming into his asshole over and over again, his balls and hips clapping against him, as he pushed his ass out. He loved it, and he loved how they called him by his name.
“Take it, Cade! Take it, Cade! Take it, Cade. Take it.”
Andrew, deep in him, leaned over him, kissing his back, pushing his cock deeper, and biting his shoulder, kissing the round bone at the base of his neck, running hands up and down him while Cade reached out, high and hungry for Cory’s dick, taking it in his mouth while he cupped the other boy’s ass, and pulled his cock further down his throat. One fucked his ass, the other fucked his face. After a while, who pulled his hair and made his eyes water, he couldn’t say. He didn’t want to say. He’d met them on the beach. Andrew and his boyfriend had talked to him and Simon on Grindr, but, once they’d reached New Union, Simon had ended up with some other guy. For a moment, Cade had been afraid that everything that was supposed to happen wouldn’t happen, and then Andrew, with the musical, slightly nasal voice, with the small waist and Mediterranean features, touched his hand and said, “Cademon? That’s a beautiful name.”
So, Cade had shown up alone. He had wanted to be with these boys, and after all the shadowy and often half hearted hookups, this was the first one he’d actually wanted.
As he had touched his hand, he wondered who the cute boy with the dark features, the big ears, the nasal voice and the slightly big nose was in all of his other lives, here suave and twinkish on the beach, but what about Monday through Friday, and right now, tonight, he was fucking the shit out of him.
“Oh MY FUCKING GOD!” Cade cried, each syllable fucked out of him by Andrew. Cory fucked his mouth, and in a few moments he would take Andrew and fuck him again.
The fucking had started well into the night, after they had snorted up all the cocaine and smoked the majority of the pot, they began to make out in the hot tub. Cade sat there watching Cory and Andrew make out, and it was just when he was starting to feel sad and jealous that Andrew said, “We haven’t forgotten about you,” and swam a little to press his mouth to Cade while on the other side of him, up and down his back and neck, Cory kissed him, his mouth going down, down and further down. He reached behind him to kiss Andrew’s mouth and while they were all loving each other in the warm water of the hot tub, Andrew said, “Cade, why are you crying?”
“Am I?” Cade said.
Then he said, “We all ought to love each other. All the time.”
That last time, they had moved to the bed, and none of them talked, though occasionally something like a sob escaped Andrew’s mouth. Cade closed his eyes and gentle mouthed Andrew’s ear while he fucked him slowly, massaging his back, kissing him up and down while he moaned. Cory pounded him tenderly. That last time, when the climax came, gentle, but insistent and body rocking, Cade’s hands opened, closed, opened, and his body shook. He stayed for them all to finish up, all to lie in the bed naked. He stayed until that moment right before he was there a moment too long, and then Andrew said, as Cade stood up, “You should shower before you go.”
“No,” Cade said. “It’s a good night. I can shower when I get home.”
Outside he could look all up and down the street, passing the brightly lit apartments by the marina, fairy lights strung over them at midnight, watching the stragglers go through the stores still open this late. Beyond was the rich blue darkness, and the beach with the lights of a few boats. Cade passed over the train tracks past another row of beach apartments until his sandaled feet, in the increasingly cool night, crossed the last empty street and came onto the beach.
Cademon Richard’s eyes had to adjust to the darkness to see the stretch of sand on the water, to see, of all things, geese floating on the lake, and one small motorboat setting out toward the pier. Across the water, lights twinkled from Michigan City. Cademon took off his sandals and laid them on the wet sand, walking further into the water, sinking his feet into the silt that passed through his toes. He walked in further until the water was around his calves and then, not quite knowing what he was doing, he took off his shirt and then undid his shorts and next pulled off his underwear, and balling them all up he threw them on the sand near his sandals, and then sank into the water, swimming out a pace, where he buried himself in the cool water and thought about never coming up.
The hotel room was empty. Wherever Simon was, it wasn’t here
Simon doesn’t come home until the next morning. When he does, he is green faced and lank haired. He looks beaten up. His nose is red, his lips pale.
For a moment I wonder if a man did this to him, but as he looks up at me, I know that isn’t true, and he says, in a kind of defeated voice:
“I think we need to end this. I think it’s time to break up.”
“I can’t believe I started crying,” Cade said as they drove.
Then he said, “The last time we were in a car together was—”
“After we’d broken up.”
“After you broke up with me,” Cade corrected.
Simon nodded.
“It was rotten of me.”
“It’s in the past.”
“But not completely,” Simon said. “And when I said it was rotten, I meant it was rotten of me not to own up to it.”
As they drove, the sky turned bright white and Cade said, “It’s going to snow.”
“Huh?”
“When the sky goes that way, it means it’s going to snow.”
“I never noticed that,” Simon said as he drove into the country of hills, bare fields and distant trees that lay southeast of Wallington.
“I’m not sorry about us breaking up,” Simon said. “I’m sorry for the shitty way I did it, though.”
When Cade didn’t answer, Simon said, “We were a sinking ship. Because I was a sunken ship. We should have stopped a long time ago.”
“We got off course.”
Simon chuckled.
“That’s actually what I wanted to say, but I thought we’d had enough sea metaphors.”
“You mean we’d—”
“Run that ship aground?” they said at the same time and laughed.
Then Cade said, “I was crying because you all have what we lost. I just want to know you that away again.”
“You can’t ever know me that way again,” Simon said. “The way we showed ourselves to each other wasn’t quite real. We’d have to know each other… In a different way.”
Looking at Simon’s shy expression, and how even in the dark his hair shone silver, Suddenly Cade leaned over and kissed him.
Simon didn’t say anything, but he pulled to the side of the road. Cade had been right, and white little dots of snow were beginning to fall. Simon leaned over and kissed him, and while the snow fell, in the darkness of the car they kissed deeply. They stopped and started again.
While the flakes fell thicker and the sky above was whiter, Cade sat in the car and watched Simon, in his black coat and blue scarf, the light of the night shining on his blond hair, walking around and around the car, talking in a very businesslike tone. He did not know the words, but he suddenly knew that Simon was talking to Donovan, that in a business like and calm manner they were discussing what had just happened, what was about to happen. They were both older than him, Cade remembered, and though he had seen them in bed together, seen them as friends, knew them both as his lovers and their own, it was only then, when Simon said, in a very husband like way, “I love you,” and he semi heard, “I love you too.” that he really understood the relationship between his first lover who was about to become his new one, and his principal one who was waiting at home.
Simon pushed up his glasses much as Don would, and buckled his seatbelt.
“You’re coming home with me tonight if that’s alright?” he said, smiling as he started up the car..
“Yeah…” Cade said, sounding more breathless than he’d planned. “That’s fine.”
Simon nodded and then, as he put his foot on the gas he said, “We’d better beat this snow then.”
The car moves into town and up the hills and before the house in a circle of light filled with falling snow. The lights of the car are out, but the sky is filled with snow light and the black trees are lined in white.
In the darkness of the car they kiss, and the windows heat as soft white flakes falls outside all around them. Moore Street is a winter land, and no one ventures out, the light of some houses looks out onto this glistening country. Their hands move over each other, lips touch to become mouths grasping hungrily, unafraid of their hunger.
Prompted by lack of fear, Cade opens his pants and his penis rises, a dark baton in the night. He wants to show it, wants to let Simon know it is there for him. Simon’s hands close around it, stroke it in that old way, and then he bends down taking him in his mouth. For only a few minutes in the car, they struggle, Simon’s mouth working, gagging to take him in, Cade trying to keep back his pleasure, trying to stop shouting, his hands flying back until he realizes as snow whirls around them, no one will hear. His hands fall in Simon’s hair and when he moans and shouts, when he comes and ejaculates and Simon gags, coughing as his mouth balloons and is filled with come, only the trees and white snow witness.
They love each other, true enough, and were coming to know each other, but there is a different kind of trust which only lust can make. Only lust can rebuilt the trust in an old lover who has wronged you, whom you have wronged, who has hurt you and you have hurt, whom you are open to again fully. Only lust makes you twenty five again, where you tear off the coat and pull down the pants, wrestle down the underwear, situate yourself in the seat, turn on the car long enough the keep the heat going, kiss, lick, bite, bite, bite back, suck fingers, kiss so hard you suck on each other’s tongues, move into the new position where Simon, always proper, coughs up phlegm to spit on his own bobbing erection, so hard it stands up and salutes his old lover, so hard it hurts with desire as the longer, taller, Cade sits down on him and they guide each other into fitting together, both of them shocked at the pleasure, the tightness, the initial discomfort and absolute necessity of entry. As the snow falls outside, and one truck with a snow shovel passes, they fuck like this, quietly, Cade on his lap, lifting up and down, Simon pressing back until they push back the seat and Cade straddles him like that first time.
They stop long enough to gather coats and clothes and rumpled, in a mess, laughing to be pulling up pants and holding shirts together, they quickly go up the walk, up the porch, Simon struggles with the door. Cade declares, “It’s cold.” Simon says, “Fuck.”
Cade twists the door, It had never been locked, Simon, shirt half open, hair standing up, looks amazed, but Cade pulls him into the bungalow where there is a light in the living room, but not in this little foyer, and Simon closes the door behind them, pressing Cade against it. They don’t say a word. They are as quiet as conception while Simon fucks him against the door, burying his head in Cade’s back. They both think they’ll stop in am moment, in just a moment, and be sensible men in their early thirties who go to the bedroom. But they can’t stop and Cade, who remembers Simon and his single malt scotches, his cigars, his shirts, his ties, his sensible decisions, longs for this out of control Simon who is fused to him when fucking him and fucking him deeper, grunting from his nose like a steam engine. He misses being pinned to the bed or to the the wall, the side of a sofa or to this door. He came in the car when Simon went down on him, but there are different types of coming and he’s been coming again, his whole body trembling against the door, when Simon’s hands tense and bruise Cade’s flesh, when he buries his head in Cade’s back and biting his lips groans, “FUCK”…
He feels Simon coming, feels himself being filled with so much, so much semen, feels Simon slack against him, clinging to him, feels himself slacking, evaporating along with the walls put up between them, feels them becoming something they haven’t been in a long time, becoming one thing, a thing without division, two homes and not two fortresses, houses possible of becoming one home.
Sex has passed through them like the Holy Ghost passes through a revival meeting, and having left, the two of them had remained against the door, pants down, clothes scattered, Simon’s face in Cade’s back. They were in that time when the body still thrummed with the shocks of lovemaking, the ache of fucking, the first feelings of nailmarks, oncoming exhaustion after the come. Simon’s hand weakly patted Cade’s back, faintly stroked him. Finally Cade had laughed.
“Can we get off this door?”
“That… “ Simon murmured, “is a great idea.”
He looked around the floor to see if coats and scarves and gloves were there, told Cade to check for his. That was very Simon. Cade would have said, let’s wait till tomorrow, and then gone searching the next day never to find his missing glove again.
And there was a missing glove. Cade went out and returned with it, but by now Simon had hung up his coat and his pants and shirt were under and over his arm. His shoes neatly near the coat rack and he stood naked except for his black socks.
“Everything?” Simon asked.
“Everything,” Cade said.
Simon kissed him and Cade followed him to the room where Simon neatly put his clothes in a chair and pulled off even his socks. He lay on the bed and Cade looked at him before undressing and laying on the bed too. Well, of course, this was Simon’s house, and he was his lover. And the heat was always on, why would he wear clothes? Whatever hang ups Simon had ever had, he had none about his body.
“What should we do?” Cade wondered.
“Nothing right now. I’m exhausted, but you can help yourself to whatever’s in the house.”
Simon had rolled over and pulled out a pillow and Cade looked over the body that, he realized, it was now his right to see again. Simon was not forgetting him, Simon was taking him for granted, assuming that now that they were together again there was no need to endlessly entertain or think too much over.
“But,” Simon said into his pillow, “since that snow is falling, I suggest you called Donovan and let him know we’re safe. You know how he worries.”
MORE NEXT WEEK
CharmedFan28
JUB Addict
That was a great and hot portion! I am enjoying learning so much about these characters pasts. Excellent writing and I hope you have a wonderful few days away!
