Lay Your Sleeping Head

by Michael Nava

  “No brothers or sisters?”

  “No,” he said. “It’s just me.”

  “Do you have any other family?”

  “My great-uncle,” he said. “He’s the one who arranged for me to go to prep school when I was fourteen. I think he suspected what my grandfather was doing to me.”

  Doing to me. His grandfather had raped him more than once. That explained his hatred of his grandfather and it made a lot more sense than the implausible story he had told me about the man murdering his wife and son. It also explained why, driven by the desire for revenge, Hugh had concocted that story. And it may even have explained why he believed his grandfather was following him because, in a way, Hugh was being followed, if not literally, then shadowed by the horror the old man had inflicted on him.

  He glanced at me. “What are you thinking?” I heard the worry in his voice.

  “Someone should have been there to protect you.”

  “I survived,” he said. “And I’m here with you. That’s what matters, isn’t it? You have one more question. Not so heavy, okay?”

  “Who is the other boy in the picture you sent me.”

  He smiled. “Are you jealous?”

  “Should I be?”

  “That’s six questions,” he said. “His name is Grant Hancock. Uncle John is friends with his father and when I went back east to school, Mister Hancock asked Grant to watch out for me.”

  “From the way he had his arm around you in the picture, I’d say he took his job seriously.”

  “You are jealous,” he said, grinning. The grin faded and he said softly. “He was a good friend. I owe him amends.”

  “For what?”

  “That’s question seven,” he said. “Anyway, now it’s my turn. Where are you from?”

  “I grew up in a little town in the Central Valley called Los Robles, about a hundred miles northeast of here.”

  “What about your family?”

  “My father died of a heart attack when he was fifty-eight, my mom died a few years later. Breast cancer. I have one sister, older. We’re not close.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you were close to any of them, Henry.”

  “I’m going to count that as a question,” I said. “The answer is no. I got away as soon as I could.”

  “Why?”

  “My father knew about me before I did,” I said. “Knew I was a joto—they probably didn’t teach that word in your Spanish class, it means faggot—and thought he could beat it out of me.” His hand tightened sympathetically around mine. “I survived too, Hugh.”

  “That must’ve been hard.”

  “Don’t ask me how, but I knew he was wrong,” I replied. “Not wrong about who I was, but wrong to try to change me, wrong to believe there was something defective about me.”

  “My grandfather told me it was unnatural for a boy to be as pretty as me,” he said, quietly. “Like that justified what he did to me.”

  “We were what they feared or hated in themselves,” I said. “It had nothing to do with us. You have one more question.”

  He was so quiet so long I thought he’d dozed off but then he asked, “Have you ever been in love?”

  “No,” I said, “but there’s a first time for everything.”

  He was quiet again, but I knew he was awake and thinking.

  “We had to take a Classics course at my prep school,” he said. “I don’t remember anything about it but this one story about the first human beings. They were created with four arms and four legs and two faces and joined together like Siamese twins, men and women, women and women, and men and men. The gods worried the humans were becoming too powerful so they split them in two, condemning them to spend their lives looking for their missing half.”

  “How will we know if we’ve found our missing half?”

  “Our bodies would fit together,” he said.

  He eased his body onto mine, I put my arms around him and he sank into me.

  My idea of eating out involved a picnic table, a hamburger and a beer at a student hangout in the foothills above the university, so I was surprised at the plush booths, starched white tablecloths and flickering tea lights at the restaurant Hugh had suggested for dinner.

  “I’ve lived here since I was eighteen and never knew about this place,” I said, after the waiter handed us oversized, calligraphed menus and departed. “How did you find it?”

  “I lived in Westborough,” he said, naming a wood-sheltered enclave of old money northwest of the university. “We came here sometimes.”

  “We?”

  “My grandparents. No, it’s okay, Henry. They’re not here.” He applied himself to the menu.

  I kept forgetting he came from money and then some quirk or gesture would remind me we had been raised in very different circumstances. Now, for example, even reading the menu he kept his elbows off the table and he hadn’t been startled by the arsenal of cutlery aimed at our dinner plates. I was no barbarian—I kept my mouth shut when I chewed and buttered my bread one bite-sized piece at a time—but when the only other brown faces in the restaurant belonged to the busboys, I couldn’t help feeling out of place.

  “I think I’ll have the lamb,” he said. “What about—Henry, are you all right?”

  “Rich people make me nervous.”

  His gaze swept the room. “They should,” he replied. “Most of them are sharks. Do you want to go somewhere else?”

  I shook my head. “Swear you won’t let me pick up the wrong fork.”

  The food was excellent and the wine he’d ordered, a red with a French label, was liquid seduction on my tongue. He told me to order tarte tatin for dessert. The waiter set the plate down before me with a small flourish. I glanced at it, then Hugh and said, “Apple pie?”

  “Try it.”

  I cut a piece, with the correct fork, and put it in my mouth. “Oh, my God,” I said. “This is what the serpent gave Eve in the garden.”

  “Nice to know a little caramelized sugar and pastry dough can lead you into sin,” he replied, smiling.

  “That smile is what led me into sin,” I replied. “And believe me I’d follow it anywhere.”

  He picked up his wine glass and swirled the wine but didn’t taste it. “This thing that’s happening between us,” he said, watching the dark liquid dribble down the inside of the glass. “It’s not just about sex, is it?”

  I put my fork down. “You know it’s not.”

  He drank some wine, as if to give himself courage. “But I don’t,” he said, “because nothing like this has ever happened to me before. Sex, yes, I could write the book about sex. There’s nothing I haven’t done. I know what guys see when they look at me, Henry. A hunky, little, blond twink, the kid brother, the boy next door, the hot ass you can’t wait to fuck. That was fine, it’s how I made money for the next fix when heroin was the only boyfriend I cared about. But I need to know. What do you see when you look at me?”

  “The boy in the picture?” I replied. “The one you said could have grown up to be a good man? I see the good man. Kind, smart, decent. Okay, and beautiful, but I can’t help seeing that because you are.”

  “The first time I came to your place you thought I was crazy.”

  “The first time you came to my place I barely knew you.”

  “You know me now?”

  “Getting there,” I said. I smiled. “Here, have some apple pie.”

  When the bill came, discreetly tucked into a wallet made from the hide of some endangered species, he took it before I could reach out my hand and said, “I’m paying,” in a tone that defied argument.

  “Thank you,” I said. I watched him pull a couple of hundred dollar bills from the sheaf of hundreds in his wallet as if he were paying for a burger at McDonald’s.

  Back in bed. Fresh sheets. I was lying on my belly, head buried in my arms, listening to Hugh take a leak; even the splash of his piss hitting the water was sexy to me. I heard muffled footsteps on the carpet and then he was lyin
g on top of me, his cheek pressed against my hair. His scent was as complex as the flavors of the wine at dinner; I wanted him to saturate me in it. His cock twitched tentatively against my butt. I smiled. His cock was as pretty as the rest of him; his genitals could have been carved on a statue of a Greek ephebe. With each breath, his belly expanded against my back. He flattened his feet against my calves, reminding me how much smaller he was than me. His long hair brushed against my neck.

  “Have you ever bottomed, Henry?” he asked me in the silty voice I had come to recognize as his sex voice.

  “Back in college a couple of times, when a guy wanted to flip,” I replied, my voice muffled by the pillow pressed against my face.

  His cock twitched again. “Did you like it?

  I shrugged against his chest. “I never got past, ‘ow, that hurts, take it out.’ ”

  “Those guys didn’t know what they were doing,” he said. He reached down and stroked my butt. “You’ve got a great ass, Henry. It’s so muscly.”

  “Running up hills will do that,” I said, my own cock beginning to stir as I wondered where this conversation was going.

  He slipped his legs between my thighs, forcing them apart. His cock, now hard, grazed the crack between my ass cheeks. He dragged his cock slowly up and down, then stopped and pressed its head against my hole. I made a noise I had never heard myself make before, a kind of whimper.

  “That feel good?” he asked.

  I managed a barely audible, “Uh-huh.”

  He laid his cheek against mine and whispered, “Can I fuck you, Henry?”

  I moved my head to meet his eyes. They were bright with want. I remembered our conversation about how sex for him had been about getting money or a fix, and not about pleasure or affection. This time, it was all about that for him.

  “Yes,” I said. “Fuck me, baby.”

  “Okay, daddy, roll over on your back?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Daddy?”

  “Shh, this is my fantasy.”

  He knelt between my outstretched legs, squeezing lube on his cock from the almost empty bottle. A little of the lube trickled down my thigh; he’d been generous with it. He began to stroke himself. In the dim room, the lamplight cast a nimbus around him. He looked both wild and completely in charge. I was so hard it hurt.

  “God, you look gorgeous,” he said. “I don’t understand why more guys haven’t tried to fuck you.”

  “You know how it is,” I said. “They look at me and see the Mexican gardener they always fantasized having fuck them.”

  “Do you give them what they want?” he asked in a low voice, taking my cock in his hand and stroking it against his.

  I shuddered. “Yeah, I like being in control.”

  “But I’m in control now, daddy,” he said. He let go of our cocks. “Lift your legs up.”

  I stretched up my legs and he positioned them on his shoulders. He edged himself forward into me until the tip of his cock was at my hole. He leaned over my body until our chests nearly touched and slipped his tongue into my mouth. I was so intent on the kiss I barely noticed when his cock pushed into me but then—

  “Ah,” I said, jerking back. “Wait.”

  He sat back on his haunches, the head of his cock still inside me. “Breathe. Deep breaths. Yeah, like that. I promise I’ll make this good for you.”

  He took the head of my limp cock between his forefinger and his thumb, gently squeezing and rubbing, distracting me from the discomfort until the discomfort faded.

  “Okay,” I said.

  “It feels incredible being inside you,” he said, and drove his cock into me one hard inch at a time, stretching me open. I felt like I was being pushed down deeper and deeper into the bed and then the pushing stopped.

  “That’s it,” he said. “I’m all the way in.”

  He leaned over me again and we kissed. I felt the heft and fullness of his cock in me and started to get hard again.

  “I’m going to fuck you now,” he whispered. “I’ll start slow.”

  I managed a weak, “Yeah, do that.”

  At first I felt only the slide of his cock pressuring what I thought was my bladder but as he quickened the pump, I realized it wasn’t my bladder but something else he was hitting and with each hit came a spark of pleasure so intense I almost saw it flicker in front of me, like a firefly.

  “Fuck,” I gasped. “What is that?”

  He smiled. “Your prostate.” He pressed his hands against my chest hard. “Ready for more?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  The bed shook beneath us, his hips slid beneath my fingers and he moved in and out of me. He closed his eyes and tossed his head back, spraying me with beads of sweat. He had never looked so naked as he did at that moment, so ecstatic. His breath came in hot, hard bursts. The sparks of pleasure from his cock slamming into me came faster and faster, racing through a circuit that went straight to my cock. I grabbed it and began jerking myself off. Hugh’s eyes opened wide and he gasped, “I’m going to come,” and then his cock seemed to expand in me and he shuddered. He pulled out and I felt a warm jet of liquid hit my thigh just before I was lost in my own scalding orgasm. Hugh tumbled forward and fell on top of me, sweat and semen sealing our bodies together. The double man, I thought, when I could think again. This was how you found your other half.

  We took a long shower together and then, because we didn’t get much actual cleaning done, separate showers. Another change of sheets—I was down to my last set—and we crawled into bed.

  I yawned. Hugh asked, smirking, “Did I wear you out? Daddy?”

  “What’s with the daddy thing? I’m not that much older than you.”

  “It’s not about age,” he said. “It’s about, you know, power, authority.”

  “So by fucking me, you fucked authority?”

  He shook his head. “No, I felt powerful. In control. Does that sound ridiculous?”

  “No,” I said. “I get it. You want to know that we’ll be equals. We will, Hugh, and if you have to fuck me every now and then to make the point, that’s okay with me.”

  He laughed. “I actually prefer bottoming so your butt is safe.”

  “What if I want to change it up sometimes?”

  “Just say the word, daddy,” he said.

  I woke up to the smells of bacon and coffee and followed them into the kitchen where Hugh was at the stove in a pair of my running shorts and a Linden University T-shirt. He glanced over his shoulder at me and said, “How do you like your eggs?”

  “Over easy,” I said.

  “Okay, over easy it is. Put some bread in the toaster.”

  “Let me throw some clothes on first.”

  We ate at the table on the patio I had forgotten was there, watching a hummingbird dart back and forth between a trellis thick with honeysuckle.

  “I have to go back into the city,” Hugh said.

  “Why?”

  “Henry, I’ve worn the same clothes for the last four days.”

  I looked at him and said, “To be precise, you mostly haven’t worn any clothes the last four days and anyway I have an unlimited supply of running shorts and T-shirts.”

  “There’s something I have to do,” he said, growing serious. “An errand. It’s going to take most of the day but I can be back here tonight.”

  “Can you tell me what it is?”

  He set his cup down. “When I come back, I’ll tell you everything. I promise.”

  “What am I going to do while you’re gone?”

  He laughed. “I’d start with the laundry. Your sheets are a scandal.”

  “Screw that, I’m going to frame them.”

  But I did do the laundry and, when that was dried and folded away, started cleaning the apartment. It had been so long since I’d cleaned, even the vacuum cleaner had a layer of dust on it. I swept, washed, vacuumed and dusted; it was dark when I finished. I inspected the groceries we’d bought to figure out what I could make for dinner with my limited cookin
g skills. Ground beef. That looked promising. I glanced at my watch. It was 7:30. Hugh hadn’t said when he’d be back, only that he’d be back tonight. That covered a lot of ground. He’d left me his number but I was reluctant to call yet. So, I cracked a beer and watched the tail end of a baseball game that had gone into extra innings. The cleaning must have worn me out because when I opened my eyes, the local ten o’clock news was winding up. I glanced at the answering machine. No messages. I dug Hugh’s number out of my pocket, picked up the phone and dialed the number. The phone rang off the hook. I hung up. It was almost 11 now.

  At midnight, I was worried, by one I was angry and then, a few minutes before two, the phone rang. I hadn’t moved off the couch except to get a couple of more beers. I grabbed it.

  “Hugh?”

  There was confused silence and then a male voice said, “Uh, hi, is your name Henry?”

  “That’s right, who is this?”

  “Listen,” he said, lowering his voice. “Do you have a friend named Hugh Paris?”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Okay,” he said. “My name is Leon. I manage the Liberty Baths in the city. We found your friend unconscious in one of the rooms. It looks like he OD’d on something. Do you know what that might be?”

  “Heroin,” I said, quickly. “Have you called an ambulance?”

  “The ambulance is on its way,” he said. “He’ll probably go to the emergency room at General. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes,” I said. “How is he?”

  “He’s breathing,” Leon said. “He should be okay until the ambulance gets here. This area code I called. You’re not in the city, are you?”

  “I’m down on the Peninsula. I’ll head over to General now.”

  “Yeah, do that. If he’s not there, call me and I’ll tell you if they took him to another hospital,” he said. He gave me his number.

  “Thank you. Leon, did he come in alone?”

  “Yeah, and he was alone when they found him. I’m sorry about your boyfriend. I hope he’s okay.”

  I hung up, threw on some clothes and headed out.

  FOUR