Unusual Attention

by B. G. Thomas

  “I’ve been wanting to all day.”

  Shane looked so cute and sweet when he said it, all Adam could do was nod his head yes.

  And then Shane did, and Adam shivered (both of them did, actually) and said, “So soft. I didn’t know what it would feel like. But it’s so soft….”

  Adam couldn’t help but kiss him then, and Shane kissed back, and Adam got so hard he thought he might ejaculate in his pants like a teenager.

  —and afterward Shane followed him back to the Oscar Wilde.

  They went into the building, took the elevator up—Shane’s nervousness was palpable—and entered Adam’s apartment.

  “Nice,” Shane had said, looking around.

  Adam’s apartment wasn’t. Not real nice at least. And it was messy. There were empty takeout containers on the coffee table and in the kitchen. Magazines and fag rags littered about. He was embarrassed. Then Shane asked him if he had anything to drink.

  “I’d rather kiss you again,” Shane said. “But I’m so fucking nervous I could puke.” He rolled his eyes. “I guess that wasn’t very sexy, was it?”

  Adam told him not to worry about it and cleared off the couch fast. “Sit,” he said and went and got the Crown out of the freezer. He poured two fingers’ worth into a pair of glasses and brought them back.

  “What is it?” Shane asked.

  “Whisky,” Adam said.

  Shane grimaced.

  “This isn’t Old Crow,” Adam said. “Try it. Sip it.”

  So Shane had. He’d grimaced again—but not nearly as much.

  “So?”

  Shane looked up at him. “Sit.”

  Adam sat.

  They drank.

  Then they kissed.

  It was sweet and hot and wild and adorable all at once.

  They kicked off their shoes.

  They took each other’s new T-shirts off.

  Shane climbed into Adam’s lap.

  Then Adam surprised them both by standing and clasping Shane’s (hot little) ass and carrying him to the bedroom.

  And then…

  …then they made love. Or something like it.

  Adam’s usual technique would have been to tear Shane’s jeans off and start a rock-and-roll party. But even in his darkened bedroom, he could see the fear and the hope and the desperation in Shane’s eyes.

  What came next was something between wild sex and sweet sex.

  It was utterly amazing.

  The only downside was when Adam started making love to his ass—he’d wanted that rounded perfection all day—Shane panicked.

  “I don’t fuck!” Shane had cried.

  “It’s okay,” Adam assured him.

  He’s a virgin? Of course the possibility had been there all day. “You’re a virgin?” he asked.

  Shane had looked at him like a wounded puppy and whispered, “Down there.”

  Down where Adam was, between his legs, kissing his perfect rounded cheeks, had been running his tongue down the deep cleft between them.

  “But I’ve been with men. A few men.”

  Shane had looked at Adam as if he were asking for forgiveness.

  So then Adam had assured him that fucking him wasn’t what he wanted to do and showed Shane the wonders of what a tongue could do to a tiny, tight hole and then kissed him everywhere. Shane had cried out in delight, which only spurred Adam on. Virgin he might not be, but instinctively Adam knew the sex Shane had experienced with men in Buckman, Missouri, wasn’t anything to write Fifty Shades of Grey about.

  He was right.

  And as inexperienced as Shane had been, Adam still gave him his phone number. His real phone number.

  And they’d spent every weekend together since.

  11

  “WHERE DID you get all this stuff?” Adam asked, pointing to the books on his coffee table. He’d almost said “this shit.” He was sitting next to Shane, and their thighs were touching. Normally that might have been erotic. Now he wasn’t sure what he was feeling.

  “I’ve collected it for a long time. Got a lot of it online. You don’t find many books like this in Buckman. Not at our little bookstore, that is.”

  It was hardly much of a bookstore. At least as far as selection. They also served breakfast. It was kind of charming, Adam had come to admit, but the Library of Congress it wasn’t.

  “Why?” he asked.

  Shane turned his head and caught Adam’s eyes with his own. “Why do you think?”

  “I don’t have a clue,” Adam said.

  The look on Shane’s face was obvious. He didn’t believe Adam.

  But he should.

  Adam didn’t know what Shane was saying.

  Liar.

  There was an infinite pause.

  Then: “The time that you lost on the road last weekend….”

  “What about it?” Adam said, and something… twisted inside him and he knew he was avoiding… something.

  “Have you ever had that happen before? Have you lost time?”

  “What?” He almost got up, but the sincerity in Shane’s voice kept him there.

  He felt that twist again.

  “Especially late at night? Driving out on empty roads where there was nobody else around?”

  Adam blinked at him. What was he asking?

  And then that niggling little thought began to tickle at his memories…. He shook his head. That tickling made his stomach clench even worse. Made him feel cold. Made him feel….

  “No,” he said (lied).

  “Never?” Shane’s eyes were so wide. Desperate?

  Adam shook his head.

  A sudden image of camping out when he was in fourth grade. Pup tents. He’d been in the Webelos, a group that was sort of the “junior high” between the Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts. He and his buddy Skip had snuck off to go skinny-dipping. The moon had been just rising over the lake. And then quite suddenly it was high overhead.

  He hadn’t thought of that in years.

  Adam looked away from Shane. He didn’t want him to see.

  See what?

  Shane leaned back and put his arms behind him. It made his baggy T-shirt ride up and revealed his well-filled underwear. Maybe they could forget about this stuff. Somehow Adam knew, just knew, that he didn’t want to talk about these books. This time-loss stuff.

  “For me? The first time I was in… fourth grade, I think? I was hanging out at this old abandoned house.”

  Fourth grade.

  Webelos.

  Adam looked away again. He wanted to put his hands over his ears. And the thing was, he didn’t know why.

  Because five or ten minutes ago, everything was normal and he was definitely coming to the conclusion that he was falling in love. He’d woken up and Shane wasn’t there, and he was thinking about how much he missed him even though he knew he couldn’t be far.

  And he’d thought to himself, I think I’m in love. And he’d smiled.

  Now, though, he was sitting next to Shane, and these weird books were on the coffee table, and he was panicking. And he didn’t even know why. Why should that be anything to panic over?

  “Me and Mom,” Shane went on. “We lived out in the middle of nowhere so I didn’t have anyone to play with, you know? And Mom got me this little motorcycle.”

  “You had a motorcycle in fourth grade?”

  Shane gave a half laugh. “It was more like a bicycle with a motor on it. I wasn’t going anywhere fast. But I sure pretended. Usually that I was the Ghost Rider.”

  “That dumb movie with Nicholas Cage?”

  Shane shook his head. “No. The comic book. The comic book was really cool. Great art. Anyway, I would ride down the road about a quarter mile or so, and there were these three old houses at three of four corners. One had fallen over, and one my mom had flat-out forbidden me to go to ’cause it looked like it could fall over any second, and the last one… well, it was kinda cool. At least to a fourth grader. I’d go in there and play. Whoever had owned it even left
some furniture in there.”

  “And it was okay with your mother for you to play in there?”

  Shane smiled at him in that way that usually got his heart beating faster. “Well… she hadn’t actually forbidden it.”

  Shane laughed, and Adam tried to join him. It didn’t sound real at all.

  “Anyway, I was in there playing one day, and I felt someone tap my shoulder.”

  A shiver passed through Adam.

  “I turned around, and there was nobody there. But then something caught the corner of my eye, and I looked, and there was this man.”

  “A man?” Adam asked, and for some reason, his stomach got heavy.

  Shane nodded. “He was standing down the hall in the kitchen. He was wearing a long black coat, and he had on this black hat. He had his arms up in front of him—” Shane raised his hands and then hung them over each other, limp, demonstrating. “—like this. I could only barely see his face. He was standing back in the shadows, and there was this shaft of sunlight between us, and I remember seeing the dust moving around in that light so clearly. I thought he said something then, thought I could almost see his face. These eyes, big and up to either side of his face instead of where they were supposed to be, and the next thing I knew, I was sitting on the floor and the shaft of sunlight was gone. I….” Shane gulped hard. “I jumped up and looked around, and the sun was almost setting. It couldn’t have been later than four in the afternoon at the most. And then suddenly the sun was setting. Scared the shit out of me. I ran for my bike and raced home and dashed into the house and told my mom all about it.”

  “What did she say?” Adam asked, knowing the answer. She would have thought he was being silly. Would have told him he fell asleep. Of course she would….

  “She said, ‘Oh! You met the man in black.’”

  12

  ADAM DIDN’T understand what Shane was getting at, although it was clear that Shane thought he should have.

  “She knew who this guy was?”

  Shane’s eyebrows went up. His expression was “Are you shitting me?”

  Adam wasn’t shitting him.

  Shane sighed and leaned back again, hands behind his head. The T-shirt hiked back up, and the underwear once more revealed something that Adam was far more interested in right now than pursing this conversation.

  “You’re being deliberately slow here, Adam.”

  “Let’s go to bed,” he said hurriedly and then laid his hand on Shane’s sexy, just-hairy-enough thigh and let it slide slowly upward.

  Shane dropped his hand onto Adam’s and stopped it.

  “Later. If you still want to.”

  Adam pulled his hand away. “Later what?” he cried.

  A long sigh was Shane’s response. “Let me back up.” He sat up. “I was late for dinner. Mom didn’t even ask why. She just had me sit down and got me a glass of milk. Then she started serving up our food. I can’t remember what we had except for macaroni and cheese. That kind from Kraft. She made it all the time. It was cheap, and we needed cheap. We ate lots of ramen noodles and tuna too.”

  Adam didn’t say anything.

  “Then she sat down and told me her story. Told me about how one day she was cleaning house while I was at school. She said she had just sprayed the inside of the stove with cleaner, and she looked up and there was this man standing there. Startled her. For some reason this little house had a really big kitchen—it was bigger than either of our bedrooms—and she guessed that was why she hadn’t seen him right away. He was standing in a corner, and he was wearing this long black coat—like a trench coat—and his hands were crossed up in front of him. Kind of like a praying mantis.”

  The insect men? Adam wondered. Geez. And then wondered what had brought such a thought. Insect men?

  “That’s what she said anyway, and that made me think it was just what the man I met looked like. She said she was totally shocked—but not shocked at the same time. That once she saw him, he seemed familiar. She couldn’t see his face. Not clearly, and that didn’t make any sense because it was right around lunchtime and there was plenty of light coming in through the kitchen window. Somehow his hat, the brim, was keeping his face in shadow… but not.”

  Shane rubbed at his upper arms, and with that simple gesture, Adam’s own arms broke out into gooseflesh.

  “She said she thought the more she looked, she could almost see his eyes, but they weren’t where they were supposed to be. That they were more up here.” Shane cupped his hands and then placed them above and to the sides of his eyes.

  Like a praying mantis, Adam thought. And once more shivered.

  “Yeah,” Shane said. “Just like that.”

  Did I say that out loud? He hadn’t thought so.

  “Mom told me she wasn’t scared. That there was a part of her telling her that she should be, or maybe she should be, at least, but that she just wasn’t. That there was this man suddenly inside the house, and she should have screamed and run, but she didn’t. She just said, ‘Hello.’”

  Hello? “Hello?”

  Shane nodded again, but this time Adam knew he’d spoken aloud.

  “Hello,” Shane repeated. He ran a hand through his short hair. It was messy from sleep, and Shane’s finger combing had done nothing to help matters. Not that hair as short as Shane’s could get that messy anyway. “Then the man told her that it was time.”

  “Time?” Adam asked, and realized he really had become some kind of human echo.

  This is fucking weird.

  “Yup.” Shane smiled but it was a strange one. Not nice at all. Not Shane’s sexy smile or even one of his big laughing takes-over-his-whole-face smiles. It was kind of creepy. “She told him that it would have to wait until another day because she had just sprayed the stove and it was important that she wipe it down in thirty minutes, but then he reached out, and she saw that his fingers were thick and very long, and the next thing she knew she was sitting at the table and I was coming in the front door. She realized that she’d lost the entire afternoon.”

  Adam had to fight the urge to jump up and leave the room. What Shane had just said was bonkers and creepy. It was the other shoe. It had dropped.

  “Mom said this happened once or twice more, but then it stopped. So when I told her what happened to me, she knew just who it was.”

  “Who was it?” Adam exclaimed.

  Shane rolled his eyes. “Adam!”

  “Adam what?”

  “A man in black!”

  God. Oh fucking God. A man in black? Really? “Will Smith or Tommy Lee Jones?”

  The expression he got in return was a hurt one. And that made Adam feel bad. But not bad enough. This was wackadoodle. “And she wasn’t the least bit freaked the fuck out?” he asked, trying to back things up.

  Shane shook his head. “No. She said he never harmed her. Not that she knew of. In fact she said she found out that leaving oven cleaner in the oven for several hours made it easier to clean.” Then he looked at Adam so calmly, so matter-of-factly, that Adam burst into laughter and suddenly all was well with the world.

  Shane was pulling his leg.

  Joshing with him.

  Kidding around. Yanking his chain. Clowning around. Busting his chops. Messing with him. Kidding.

  Then Shane ruined it.

  “It’s happened to me a lot of times since then,” Shane said. “Me losing time. I never saw the man in black again—”

  Wait! Wait just a goddamned minute. Man in black?

  “—but there are times when I just lose time. It’s almost always when I’m driving. I don’t think it has happened while I was at home. I don’t live in Manhattan, or even Kansas City, but if something came down to get me when I was at the house, then people would see….”

  See? People would see?

  See what?

  But Adam knew just what Shane was saying. It was in the books laid out before them. UFOs. He was talking about frigging U, F, fucking Os!

  This is crazy.
<
br />   How is this happening?

  He looked at Shane. A guy whose flaws had been cigarettes and baseball. And now what?

  He believes in UFOs.

  UFOs that took him away!

  Did Shane actually believe that he’d been abducted by aliens?

  “Not that people don’t see them all the time. That part confuses me. Why all the secrecy when sometimes they don’t seem to be concerned in the least.” He picked up the book called UFOs Caught on Film and began to leaf through it. Showed Adam a page. Then another. And another.

  All of which were pictures of flying saucers.

  “So many of these were taken in broad daylight. I mean, I know a lot of them were out in the middle of nowhere—”

  Like in Buckman, Missouri, population somewhere around four thousand people and far from any kind of real civilization?

  “—but some of these are over huge cities or towns. Look at this one.”

  There was gooseflesh again, and Adam didn’t want to look. But the page had been shoved pretty much under his nose, and when he focused (involuntarily) on the photograph, he saw a dark disk with several blue lights beneath. It was hovering or flying over a tree and some power lines. The notation said 1976.

  He looked away.

  “Do you really believe in this stuff, Shane?” he asked. It was more of a whimper. Things had been going good. He really, really liked—

  (loved)

  —this guy.

  But the other shoe had dropped. The shoe he was somehow waiting for because nothing should be as perfect as this had been. Nope. Not perfect.

  Shane was wackadoodle.

  13

  ADAM BORE Daphne’s hug today. He wasn’t in the mood to be touched. Not even by Daph.

  They sat down on either side of the long slim table. “Surprise, surprise,” Daphne said. “Saturday morning coffee again. Shane didn’t come in?”

  Of course that would be the question. He shook his head. “All they have today is Colombian. Three kinds.” He sighed.

  One of her eyebrows started to rise… then fell back into place. “Well, good for me anyway. And it’s good to see you, brother.”

  He tried to smile and told her that it was good to see her too. It was, wasn’t it?