by Alice Archer
I stared at the faint freckles on Oliver’s neck. At the age of five, his neck would have been so precious as to be unleavable, wouldn’t it? I couldn’t bear the suspense. “She what?”
“She told Dad to tell me it was all her fault, to make it easier for me. Then she whispered in my ear that she would always love me.”
I pictured the little boy who’d heard that conversation and buried it deep.
That boy.
Goose bumps rose on my arms.
That boy was who I wanted to help in my career. I felt his deep pain as he grappled with the invisible thing too scary to know, tucked it way down, below the layers he pulled over himself to keep it hidden. Helping that boy would require a hell of a lot more than a few volunteer hours. I’d need a psychology degree or something, enough training to trust myself to peel children from their buried depths into sunshine filtered through a forest canopy.
Oliver glanced back at me then away. I heard the whisper of a tissue pulled from a box. Without looking at me again, he stuck his left arm between his seat and the door. A white tissue fluttered down onto my papers from the treehouse.
After I blew my nose, I said, “How did you bear it when she left?”
“I didn’t have to bear it, not consciously. Dad and Granddad worked hard to make me… forget. Forget… her.”
“How?”
“They turned her into fiction—an elusive red fox they told me stories about, until that was all I really remembered.”
“Your dad lied.” I suddenly remembered Oliver’s blurted words as we stood by the DeVille.
“He lied to me most of my life, about her, anyway. I continued that legacy of lying—lied to my friends, lied to myself, persuaded myself I’d be okay if I let Freddie take me away—”
I snorted my disapproval.
“I also distracted myself by clearing the air with Aza, which I’d needed to do for a long time. Aza led me to the treehouse… and your art. The memory stalked me through it all.”
“I think I’m glad it finally caught you,” I said.
“Me too. But… I thought I was resisting a memory of my mother rejecting me. My world feels… topsy-turvy now. My mother wanted us to be together. My dad kept us apart.” Oliver cocked his head to the side, maybe to try out his new perspective.
He kept his foot on the gas and we passed the turn-off to his house again.
“What happened after your dad died?” I asked. “Did you try to tell her?”
“No, but she found out. Maybe she saw it in the newspaper. She contacted me, after the… funeral. It was our first direct contact since… before. She sent voice mails, letters, emails.”
“What did she say?”
The strained pause between my question and Oliver’s answer bowed his shoulders. I waited. Oliver drove. The majestic starship DeVille bent time in grand sweeps as Oliver wrestled with his answer and the last remnants of my anger fell away.
When the road straightened out, Oliver said, “I don’t know what she said. I deleted her messages without opening them. I never responded.” He let out a heavy sigh. “I’d been devoted to her before she left. I do remember that. After she left, Dad and Granddad helped me blame her. It was like I chose one parent to be loyal to, and that was Dad.”
Oliver took a hand off the wheel and rubbed a knuckle over the corner of his eye. “I grieved so hard after Dad died—months of fear and loss. That was when I stopped leaving the property. Whenever I tried to leave, I felt like I was leaving him.”
“Might have been a good time to let in someone else,” I said.
“Probably. But not her. Dad had… painted over her. She didn’t exist.”
“I’m sorry.” Out beyond the massive hood, the straight shot of Vashon Highway ran on to the horizon. Oliver’s capable hands high on the steering wheel, his glorious hair and tanned skin, the calm presence of him, lifted another layer of tension from my body. “I’m sorry for what you went through. Thank you for telling me.”
He shifted in his seat and pulled the seatbelt strap away from his chest. “I remembered something else.”
“Uh-oh,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“More about your dad?”
Oliver nodded. “Dad used to host fire circles, out at the holly wall, at the full moon. We’d drum and dance and eat. On one of those nights, after all the guests had left—”
“How old were you?”
“Seven or eight. I was supposed to be brushing my teeth and going to bed, but Dad hadn’t come inside yet. It was late. Granddad fell asleep on the couch. I put on my sneakers and padded outside in my pajamas. The holly gate stood ajar. I saw Dad standing over the glow of the fading fire with papers in his hands. His face and his body seemed… small. He fed the papers into the fire, one by one.”
“Did you go in?”
“No. I hid. Watched. After he’d released the last… paper, he doused the fire with the buckets of water we kept handy on those nights. I moved back around the wall and waited until he’d gone, until I couldn’t hear his footsteps on the gravel anymore. Then I found a stick and poked through the mess of wet ashes.”
“Did you have a flashlight?”
“Full moon,” Oliver said.
“I saw the place where those fires must have been. A patch of scorched earth. You’d parked the DeVille right on top of it.”
“Huh.” Oliver let out a small laugh. “So I did. Not consciously.”
I marveled at Oliver’s clever psyche. “Was there anything left?”
“Enough. Tiny scraps of paper. A corner of a smoked envelope. The tiniest edge of a postage stamp. Bits of postmarks. One swirl of… handwriting. Handwriting I recognized.”
“No way.”
Oliver nodded. “It’s hard to accept, but I think Dad was the parent who left me.”
“Your new topsy-turvy world.” We cruised along Cemetery Road again, which seemed appropriate. “How do you feel about them now? Or is it too soon to say?”
We’d pulled up to the stop sign at the intersection of Westside Highway. There was no one else anywhere near us.
“They were human,” Oliver said. “My parents were only human.”
“You too.”
“Yes. Me too.” He resettled his hands on the steering wheel.
“Wait,” I said. “Stay here a minute.” I unfastened my seat belt and slid across the back seat to wind my arms around Oliver’s shoulders and whisper in his ear, “Why did you let your hair down for Freddie?”
“I didn’t. I mean, it wasn’t for him.” Oliver took his hands off the steering wheel and rubbed them over my forearms. “I’ve always worn it up, but since I had the memory, I feel like…”
“Like what?”
“It’s her hair, my mother’s hair. Or it was. I don’t even know if she’s… alive.”
It took me a few seconds to connect the dots. “Your hair reminds you of your mother.”
Oliver nodded. “I could have cut it off, but…”
I lifted a loose tendril of hair and kissed Oliver’s cheek. “But it reminds you of your mother.”
Oliver turned his head to kiss me. Without the undercurrent of his desperation, the kiss felt like his first kiss, Oliver’s true kiss, a kiss with enough heat to lure me into the front seat to sit beside him.
With his thigh pressed against mine, Oliver roused me with another kiss, an unrepentant slide of tongue and arms and hot breath, brash and honest and—
Someone behind us honked.
Oliver reached out and put the blinker on for a left turn before he removed his mouth from mine and his hand from the back of my head.
It took me until then, until the blinker prompted me to pay attention, to realize what Oliver had done.
We’d traveled the same route over and over, toured the island from north to south and
back again, the twist of Cemetery Road at the middle of the infinite loop. Oliver’s serene focus told me he would have driven me forever, as long as it took to retrieve my truth from beneath the anger and fear.
When I told Oliver I’d figured out his devious route, he lifted my hand from his thigh, pressed it to his hard cock, and said, “The 1968 Cadillac Sedan DeVille showcases a powerful 375-horsepower engine, six-way power seat adjustment, and a fuel tank capacity of 26 gallons. Would you like to take me for a drive?”
“God, yes.”
“Did I mention the cruise control?”
Chapter 85
Oliver
I’d been half-hard since Grant stormed into the DeVille and slammed the door. After he thawed and touched me, my focus was shot. I put the DeVille into park and waved the car behind us to go around.
“Your turn,” I told Grant.
We resettled, refastened our seat belts with Grant driving and me in the center front seat. I kept my hands to myself for a minute, to let Grant get a feel for the DeVille. For one whole minute. Then I gave in to temptation, wrapped my left arm around his massive shoulders, and kissed his neck.
“You are a bad person,” he muttered.
With my right hand, I roved Grant’s bristly jaw and neck, devoted myself to his skin. “You’re too gaunt. I need to feed you more.” The wiry muscles of his chest and torso twitched under my touch. By then I was cursing the seat belt, the only thing keeping me from humping his thigh.
He elbowed me a third time as he slowed for the turn onto 220th.
I bit his shoulder.
“Get off, Oliver.” With a harder shove, Grant put a few inches of space between us. “At least wait until I’m off the highway, you prick.”
I laughed and put my hands in my lap. Mistake. A flick of my thumbs rubbed my dick through my shorts.
Grant kept his eyes on the road and his hands on the wheel—all very nice and proper, but his jaw muscle twitched and tightened, and when we reached Violetta Road, he clamped his hand over both of mine to stop them.
No problem.
I braced my feet on the floor and lifted into the firm pressure of Grant’s hand. “Yeah.” I did it again, intoxicated by his touch, by all our breakthroughs. High on life and horny.
“You are a foul, vicious bastard,” Grant snarled. He slapped my busy hands off my lap. “No. Not fair. Wait.”
Before we reached my driveway, Grant slowed to a stop and turned off the engine.
“Don’t stop.” I moaned. “I can almost see my mailbox from here.”
“Get out.” Grant found the button to undo my seat belt and shoved me toward the passenger door.
“No.” I fell onto my side on the seat. “We’re almost home.”
“I’m not asking.” The freed end of Grant’s seat belt thudded against his door and he got out. He slammed the door hard, like he was mad at me again. Two seconds later, he opened the front passenger side door.
I looked up at him, raised my eyebrows, and palmed my cock.
Grant’s answer was to grab me under my arms and haul me out of the DeVille. I was too turned on to coordinate anything not directly related to my cock, including my feet. It didn’t matter. He managed my limbs for me, laid me out on the edge of the road.
“What in the fuck are you doing?” I asked.
Grant’s answer was to stretch out on top of me.
I pushed at his shoulders and tried to get up. “Move. We’re on the side of the road. Rocks? Shoulder blades? Ow?”
“I can fix that.” Grant held me tight and executed a half-roll away from the DeVille, which put me on top. It seemed like a crappy solution when my house was right there.
“Stop rolling,” I said, “or we’ll end up in the…”
Grant watched me with a self-satisfied smile.
“Ditch,” I finished. Oh. The ditch.
“Reenactment, anyone?” Grant lifted his eyebrows. “I’ve fantasized for weeks about a do-over.”
I laughed, and the motion caused my cock to rub against Grant’s. Firestorm with a side order of whimpers, please. “Ungh. Yeah. Say something else funny.”
Grant clutched my ass with enough fervor to convince me he was serious.
“Okay, then.” I’d give Grant his do-over—with a few crucial edits. I clamped my knees around his hips and rolled us through the tall grass, all the way down. Grant landed on his back with a splash.
“Oops,” I snickered.
“Agh.” Grant scrambled to get up. “It’s cold. Get up!”
I couldn’t. I could only draped my boneless body over Grant’s and shake with laughter at my reenactment skills.
“Goddamn it, Oliver.” Grant’s attempts to get up amped the friction at my crotch. I pressed my ditchwater-soaked knees into the wet earth and drove my cock over Grant’s in a burst of movement I couldn’t restrain. I’d been hard for too long. For a decade, it felt like.
I came fast, without trying to stop myself, with an unselfconscious groan and a laugh to chase the satisfaction, relieved and ridiculous in equal measure.
A splash of water doused my back. “Seriously?” Grant sounded peeved.
“Hang on.” I slithered down Grant’s body and rifled through his shorts to find his dick and get my mouth around it before he could scramble away.
Grant’s upward thrust with his hips almost threw me off him. When he’d splashed back into the ditch, I swallowed him again, shoved one hand down into his underwear to work at his balls. In seconds, with a litany of nasty curses, Grant spewed down my throat and all over my hand. Rivulets of cum ran out of my full mouth and over my hands. Ditchwater flowed past, carried our cum away downstream.
In spite of the chill, I felt better than I’d ever felt in my entire life.
Grant heaved up, lifted me out of the water with him, and stood. Clouds rolled by above us in the twilight. We squished our way up to the road.
“Still think I’m a bad person?” I asked.
“Yes.”
“Wait. Stop. Don’t touch the DeVille. I mean it. We’re too wet and dirty.”
“See?” Grant said. “Still a bad person.”
We stripped naked, slopping our clothes and shoes into a pile in the grass.
“I suppose we’ll have to air dry,” Grant said with resignation. We stared at each other and shivered.
“Kiss me again,” I said. “You taste like pine sap.”
“I should say no, you freak.” He smiled and pulled me close. “But you don’t taste like lies anymore, so I’ll make an exception.”
We kissed until shivers made my teeth clack against Grant’s.
For our final wipe-downs, I snagged chamois cloths from the trunk, scrubbed myself, then ran my cloth down the middle of Grant’s back where he couldn’t reach. “Ready?”
“More than.”
“Guess what you have to do now?” I raised my eyebrows at the pile of wet clothes and shoes.
“The hell I will.”
“It’s either that or you walk.”
Grant knelt on the passenger seat with his upper body out the window to hold our dripping clothes away from the side of the DeVille. I sat on a fresh chamois and drove.
“This is not fun,” Grant groused.
My careful study of the spot where Grant’s white thighs met the lower curve of his round butt caused me to miss my own driveway.
Chapter 86
Grant
When we got to the house, I dumped the pile of wet clothing on the porch. Oliver backed away from me toward his bedroom and said, “I’m going to wash the ditchwater out of my hair. Alone, or it’ll take forever. Use the guest bathroom.”
“Fine.” I showered fast, wrapped a towel around my waist, and sat on Oliver’s bed to stare at his painting while I waited.
“Not here,” he said wh
en he emerged from his bathroom.
“But I want to look at your painting.”
“Tomorrow. Tonight I need your help to reclaim the great room from the ghosts.”
Oliver loaded me up with pillows and comforters, turned off the bedroom light, and we decamped to the orange couch. Moonlight seeped in through the windows.
I swung a comforter around my shoulders like a cape and watched Oliver get the couch ready. He stretched out when he was done, looking scrumptious in navy-blue pajama bottoms on the light blue comforter.
“You’re going to sleep with wet hair?” I asked.
“It’ll dry overnight. Come here and be my blanket.”
I shook my head. I wasn’t ready to touch him yet. It would turn off my brain, and I had a few things on my mind—things that wouldn’t wait until morning.
“I flipped through those drawings.” I nodded at the dining table.
The come-hither expression on Oliver’s face turned into a frown. “When you broke in. Give me that comforter. I’m cold.”
I draped it over him then stood back and folded my arms.
“Mmm. Yeah.” Oliver wriggled and his eyes went dark. “I require you to stand over me naked and glare at me at least once a day.”
“You drew a lot of pictures of Freddie. How far did you guys go?” I hadn’t been able to ignore my memory of the two of them touching, or my imagined scenes of what they’d done when I wasn’t around. It bothered me. “Did you guys have sex?”
Oliver smiled a private smile I hated, because it probably meant he was remembering.
“You did, didn’t you? That day I came to do laundry when Freddie got mad. He was angry because I interrupted, wasn’t he?”
“I’ll tell you.” Oliver threw back the comforter. “I promise. But only if you lie on me.”
“Why the hell are you wearing… anything?” I held up the comforter while Oliver shoved off his pajama bottoms. To make room for myself on the couch, I pushed him toward the back and lay on my side. I needed to minimize contact until I was done talking. “Well?”
“A few pecks with closed lips. That was all I could manage. And one slightly tonguey kiss.”