It was unbelievable. He had never felt this way from only kissing. He was afraid he would come just from the feel of her lying across him, her weight on his body and her mouth lowering itself onto his as if they’d never come up for air.
“Wait, wait—” he whispered, frantic to stop her before he lost all control—how could anyone kiss like that?—and she sat up, frightened, her face flushed.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, only—only—” He caught his breath, confessing, “It’s too much.”
“That’s supposed to be my line.”
“Well, but wasn’t it—for you?”
In answer she kissed him, kisses that seemed to go directly to his core, his body screaming as if he’d never had sex before.
“Clay?”
He opened his eyes, unaware he’d shut them, hardly knowing where to look. This was much worse than he’d anticipated. He’d thought getting her to sleep with him, sleeping with her, would get her out of his system, calm him down once and for all. Yet this was a catastrophe in the making, clearly, if a few minutes of kissing could bring him to this point.
“Clay?” She touched his shoulder. “Could I ask a favor?”
“If—sure.”
“Do you think you could take off every stitch of clothing you have on?” She grinned, wicked. “Nothing personal. It’s just I’ve never seen a man naked before.”
Now he was bright red, but he rose and complied, though he hardly knew what to do with his hands when he was done.
“Hmm.” She studied him.
He hadn’t been this shy since he was a teenager. “Doesn’t seem exactly fair,” he muttered.
“Don’t get all hot and bothered.” She tried unsuccessfully to stifle another giggle.
“Am I amusing you?”
“No,” she answered gently, rising to stand before him. She trailed a hand so lightly across his chest it made him shiver. With an effort he kept his hands at his sides, but she inspected him freely, surprised at his intake of breath as she caressed him.
“Sensitive,” she mused. She could understand, suddenly, why gay men liked men’s bodies; his was lovely, nearly as graceful as a woman’s.
“Yeah,” he managed.
She drew closer, still not relinquishing her hold on him. “What does it feel like to put it inside someone?”
Jesus! She was serious. He hardly knew what to answer her. “Incredible.”
“Must be.” She pushed his cock against the shielded front of her and he groaned softly. “Hmm.” She rubbed him up and down the fabric. He closed his eyes, feeling all the energy in his body concentrated on the small part of him barely touching her.
“Louey,” he said, stopping her hands at last, “you’re driving me crazy.” He unbuttoned the shirt, pulling the fabric away from her body, and she flushed as he bared her breasts. Then his hands were acting of their own accord, stroking her skin, cupping her breasts as if it were his right to touch her this way, as if she wouldn’t mind his doing it.
“Am I?” she asked, kissing him so hungrily his whole body responded. He could feel her heart pounding against his, her breasts crushed against his chest, as she kissed him again and again. He bruised her lips, her neck, the swell of her breasts. He was disheveled, out of control, swept away by something he didn’t understand.
What on earth is happening to me? Louey thought as waves of heat swept across her body. This wasn’t like her, not like her at all.
“What are you doing?”
The blood was rushing to her face.
“You’ll burn if you don’t put some of this on. Your skin isn’t used to California sun.” Mia continued to rub lotion into Louey’s lower back, pulling down the pants of her bathing suit and cooling her exposed skin with the moisture. “Lift up,” Mia said. Her voice was completely cool, matter-of-fact. I’m making too big a deal of this, Louey told herself; the rest of the world wasn’t as painfully modest as she was. She lifted her body so Mia could pull the bottom off completely. Mia continued rubbing the cream into her, using both hands. Louey tried to make herself feel drowsy, lulled by Mia’s rhythmic hands, but her nerves seemed to be on edge. Mia reached up to unhook the top of Louey’s suit, pulling it away from the sides of her body, rubbing some of the oil into the line on her back.
“Turn over.”
“What?”
The breeze played along the back of Louey’s legs and neck. Neither of them spoke for a moment. Louey nearly lost track of where she was, hearing Mia’s sentence shatter into the distance. Then her voice broke through again, clear and insistent.
“Turn over, Louisa.”
She obeyed, trying to be as nonchalant as Mia, hoping Mia would mistake her blush for a flush from the heat. She couldn’t stop her sharp intake of breath as Mia’s fingers came down on her breasts, rubbing cream into them gently, and Louey turned her head to one side, trying to harden herself against the effect Mia’s hands were having on her. If Mia realized what Louey was feeling, she’d be lost, Mia would be horrified, her family would—oh! Mia’s hands cupped each of Louey’s breasts, resting, heavy, and she was filled with a dull pain that was almost unendurable. What was wrong with her?
“Mia,” she ventured, about to ask if Mia would mind if they didn’t put any more lotion on her, but before she could speak, Mia had bent her head to her and was rubbing her mouth where her hands had been. Louey let out a sob. Mia had her tongue on Louey’s nipples, teasing and swirling as she brushed her open lips across them, going from one breast to another, nipping and sucking. Surely she couldn’t be doing this, and in public—her hands trailed down to Louey’s thighs as her mouth continued its onslaught, her fingers searching Louey out, drifting to the exact center of her pain—Cod! Her mouth found its way to Louey’s, and soon there was nothing at all Louey could do to stop her.
Louey woke to find not Mia but Clay making love to her. Her body felt unfamiliar, disoriented; how had this strange man gotten in her bed?—but this wasn’t her bed at all. Everything he did set off some alien, unexpected heat in her, as if there were some chemical bond between them that neither had suspected. It was so unlikely a boy should provoke such feelings in her that she wanted to laugh; it was silly, false, out of the question. She would have stopped him and explained that this was nothing she cared to be doing—if only she could get her body to agree.
If anyone had said to Clay a year ago that he would find himself one sunny summer afternoon preparing to walk down Fifth Avenue surrounded by gay people in the tens of thousands, he would probably have answered, “You should watch those pharmaceuticals.” Yet here he was.
The decision now at hand was whether they should march with gays from Yale or (as Louey was inclined to favor) Gays for Grains. Clay himself would not have minded marching with the Gays for Pot, who not only got to ride the biggest truck in the parade (festooned with six-foot marijuana leaves and an enormous joint) but also had the choice of wearing lovely bandanas to obscure their faces if they wished. (These guys can’t be gay, Clay thought: with their long, bedraggled hair, scruffy tie-dyed clothes and sixties druggie music?)
They stood with several friends of Louey’s at the corner of the park and Fifty-ninth Street, watching the Gay Pride Parade march past them. Clay was astonished at the sheer volume of people out on a Sunday, waiting to cheer, or stare. This went on every year and he had never even known that it existed? It boggled his mind, like the underground gay world and every detail Louey knew by heart—sex clubs that wouldn’t admit men if they wore cologne (“too sissy”), what the rainbow-colored handkerchiefs once had meant (“those days are gone”).
“What do you say to spending the Lord’s Day together, babyface?” he’d asked her earlier that week, and Louey had been forced to tell him she was going to the march. After a pause, she had invited him (somewhat reluctantly, it seemed to Clay) to come along.
She’d seemed so certain that he would refuse he’d been compelled to prove her wrong. “Sure,” he said, “I’ll
wear that special outfit you got me …”
It was not at all what he’d expected. Crowds of people beamed at him—so many pretty women holding hands; huge, burly men; flamboyant black drag queens. “Look at those guys”—Louey pointed as a group of someone’s grandparents marched by. Clay stared; how could they be gay? “I love it,” Louey added. (Of course gay people grew old, Clay chided himself, just like anyone.) One pair of men carried a sign that said “52 years together,” which outdid everyone he knew. There were even gay cops, though their friends on duty gave them a wide berth, with no sign of emotion on their faces.
The college contingents made Clay feel old, an unfamiliar—and unpleasant—sensation. The biggest college groups were Yale and Harvard. “Don’t you think Yale calls to us?” teased Louey. “Rally those pretensions and we’ll join ’em.” The next float held a sign up: Gays for Grains. She grabbed his arm—“We have to”—tugging him.
“Don’t you think your loud, persistent ridicule will start to get to them?”
“You’re such a nice boy.” She sneered, giving in. A Gay Daddy passed them, waving.
Clay glanced at her as a collection of people with AIDS approached. If Louey were worried that her other friends might die, she hadn’t shared her fears with him. A mass of Catholics followed, and then, fittingly, a group in leather. “Sick,” said Annie, one of Louey’s friends.
“People think we’re sick,” Louey pointed out.
“Everyone has fantasies. They just shouldn’t act them out.”
“Where have I heard that argument before? You don’t think people say the same thing about you and Joyce? Christ, those guys aren’t hurting anyone.”
“Just each other,” Clay said.
“I’m not saying I understand it,” Louey replied, “but everyone defines things differently. We can’t all be stockbrokers in three-piece suits—now there’s a scary image. You know, one man’s meat …”
“…’s another boy’s linguini?” offered Clay.
“You’re too kinky for me.” Annie glanced at Clay to make her point.
“That’s me,” Louey sighed. “Miss Perversion. If my mother only knew.”
“I thought you tell your mother everything.”
Clay thought of the one time he’d answered Louey’s phone when she’d been in the shower; Meredith Mercer had seemed baffled by the fact of him. What did Louey tell her family, he thought, if her mother didn’t even know he existed? Any day now, she was sure to take him by the arm and say, “Like you madly, let’s be friends.”
“I never thought I would be doing this,” she’d told him after they’d made love the first time. She seemed as undone by the sex as he was, yet any time he tried to find out how she felt, she called him her “sex buddy” as if warning against taking it too seriously.
“So what do you think, my little petunia?” she asked now, turning to him. “Are we having fun yet?”
“Yeah,” he admitted, surprised.
“Everything a boy could hope for?”
“And then some.”
“Do you mind marching?”
He didn’t know how he felt about thousands of people staring at him, but he wasn’t going to admit that. “I don’t know about everyone staring at me, though.”
“They’ll be eating their hearts out, moose lips.”
He smiled. “The sacrifices I make for principle.”
He’d never seen her so energetic—or so elated. As she flirted with old friends and strangers (an inordinate number of strange gay men treated her as if she were their oldest pal, which didn’t make sense), he realized she was in her element He felt a twinge. Why was this more important to her than the way they felt together? He could share the spirit of the crowd: so joyous, even brave. Yet why couldn’t she be equally elated being with him?
“Having fun?” Louey called out as a cop rolled his eyes at a drag queen on roller skates. The officer met Louey with a blank expression that might as well have been a sneer. “Asshole,” she muttered to Clay. “I can’t believe how unfriendly these cops are.”
“This is work for them,” Clay said.
“It takes a twisted spirit not to have a good time in this crowd.”
“They’re just eating their hearts out, moose lips.” When she turned to him and beamed, he prayed: Just give me this, this one thing. I can make you happy, he thought, smiling back at her. If only she would let him.
Louey dreamt that she was being lavished with heated attention. Mia? she thought for a moment, reaching out to empty bedclothes before recognition and awareness dawned on her. Why did she continue to feel Mia’s presence so vividly after all this time? It must be all this business with Clay unsettling her.
It had been several months since they’d started—well, she didn’t know what to call it. Since their friendship had grown sexual. She hadn’t actually slept with him the way he wanted; for some reason, she didn’t seem to be able to get herself to do that, she didn’t know why. He’d been surprised and frustrated at first, she could see, and irritated with himself for not having thought to bring contraceptives, as if that was what was holding her back. She didn’t understand what the big deal was; wasn’t it enough to be completely naked and make each other incredibly excited until they came? Did they have to fuck?
It seemed so odd to be involved with a man, so completely out of character. She would walk down the street on weekends and be struck with the unlikeliness of it; how her family would react if they knew! Sometimes she had to laugh at the notion that suddenly she was a conventional woman. She couldn’t believe she had so much passion for Clay, she who couldn’t think of men’s bodies without going blank. Yet when she touched Clay, it was as if some current flowed between them, as if they had secret lives outside their clothed ones.
Clay would run into her on the street and light up, throw both his arms around her, kiss her, stroke her shoulders in the open air. Even more unsettling than how instantly and fiercely she became aroused was the fact that no one seemed to notice. So this was what it was like to be straight Clay had no idea how lucky he was to be able to express what he felt without giving it a second thought; he could nibble on her earlobe as they stood in line at the movies, he could walk up to her on the street and pull her to him, nuzzling her hair, his arms around her middle, cradling her from behind. When she and Mia had sat together on the subway talking closely but not touching, people had glared at them, though she’d thought she had been imagining their disapproval. In contrast, everyone seemed to give her being with Clay their blessing. She could publicly molest Clay, anything, and no one else would even notice, much less raise an eyebrow. If it hadn’t been so educational, it would have made her angry. She’d thought she’d been free with Mia, heedless of the world’s opinion, but she saw now that she’d held herself back without even realizing it. From now on, she would never be able to accept anything less.
How she felt about being with him was another matter. She had never been so lavished with affection, it was true. Still, she couldn’t believe he never tired of being with her; sometimes when she could quite happily have been alone, when she would almost have preferred to be alone, she couldn’t understand why he didn’t feel as she did. She certainly did not approve of being so compatible with a boy. It seemed a mockery of everything she was, a dirty joke; it made a sham of how she felt about the world. Still, it wasn’t Clay’s fault. He was as easygoing as ever, without lurking expectations of a sudden transformation on her part, as far as she could tell. My mother would be so confused, she thought.
It had been odd, the first few weeks, not really wanting him to call, afraid to lead him on. If only he were female, she wouldn’t find herself remembering how it felt to hold a woman’s body, longing for some woman, any woman, to make love to. She couldn’t bear to be without the way she’d felt walking down the street with Mia: never again to see that flash of a reciprocal smile on a stranger’s face at the most unexpected moments. Yet when she saw Clay, her doubts receded; she was happy,
too, if in a different way. She had no clue: what should she make of it, this thing they had? What kind of future could it hold?
She cared for him. Denying that because it didn’t make sense to her would be like denying her love for Mia because it didn’t make sense to most of the world. How could he have wanted her so much without betraying any hint of how he’d felt? She shook her head. The situation was too perverse to comprehend.
Clay looked up from a bench in Riverside Park to see her striding toward him. His heart leapt. Why was it that each time he saw her unexpectedly he was filled with such elation it neared pain? Perhaps the strangest part of it was how intense his physical response to her was; denied a conventional outlet, he was constantly aroused, as if their time together were all foreplay. Simply picking up her hand and playing with her fingers got him hard. When he held her in his arms each time she told a snide, self-mocking story, every particle of her body would seem to touch each particle of his, suffusing him with sensation. He was almost scared to fuck her, lest it disillusion her—hell, disillusion both of them. How could sex be any better than it was already? They were both completely out of hand. No doubt she’d been prepared for something brutish—or, at best, perfunctory, but this was almost frighteningly intense, surpassing anything he’d thought sex could be. He’d never been attuned to any woman’s body as he was to hers. He’d been amazed, when he tried to imagine what she felt and what she wanted, how his own body responded.
One day they were sitting watching an old movie on television when she began idly playing him, looking straight ahead, engrossed in the movie as she stroked his arm lightly up and down, then moved to stroke his leg as lightly, up and down, then landed softly between his legs, pressing him until they were both breathing heavily. When he tried to move, she held him back; the same for reaching out to her or loosening his clothes. In a way, discomfort heightened his excitement; she manipulated him carelessly, almost rudely, through the cloth, grasping him so that he groaned. She mauled his chest through the fabric—none of her touched skin—and finally he couldn’t take any more but pushed her down, flinging himself on her. She turned her head, refusing to kiss him, and he followed the defiant mouth, unable to get any satisfaction. What was she doing? “Louey?”
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