Unusual Attention

by B. G. Thomas

  Shane raised an eyebrow.

  Oh, shit.

  “May I ask you something, Mr. Brookhart?”

  Adam swallowed hard. Nodded.

  “Do you think you’re somehow perfect? With your prejudice against small-town life? The town I love? The home I love? How do you think it makes me feel that you hate baseball? I love baseball, Adam. Love it. If you understand it or not, I do. I’ve fantasized all my life that the person I fall in love with would spend a lifetime going to games with me. I have this dream to see a game in each of the thirty major league ballparks—which is pretty out there considering it makes me nervous to leave Buckman. But with a boyfriend at my side, it could be an adventure. And having you as my boyfriend would mean I’d have to give that dream up. And I’d do it for you. Because I do love you. A lot. And just because you believe that baseball is dumb and boring, that doesn’t mean I do. In fact, it kind of hurts my feelings.”

  It was all Adam could do to keep his mouth from falling open.

  Fuck.

  It was almost like a slap.

  Am I that big a fucking shit?

  And did he just hear that?

  “And we haven’t even begun to talk about the problems we’re going to face being together. We live three hours apart. And I think it’s pretty clear you don’t really want to live here. In the house that I love. In Buckman. And baby, I don’t want to live in a cramped little apartment in Kansas City. One of us is going to have to give up our home if we’re going to live together instead of just spending weekends together. I want more than that. Don’t you? I want more than a weekend lover.”

  Now Adam’s mouth did fall open. He was speechless.

  And his heart ached.

  Because he did want more than a weekend lover. A lot more.

  “In the meantime….” Shane turned on his side and shoved back against him. Adam had to turn on his side so there was room. But then Shane wiggled so his butt was even closer. Was pressed up against Adam’s crotch.

  “Don’t do that, baby.” He could already feel his cock responding.

  “Why not?”

  “You know why not,” Adam said. Because I’ll want you. I want you already.

  Then Shane sat up. He sat up and looked down at Adam. Adam’s heart started to pound. Those eyes.

  “I want to try,” Shane said.

  “T-try?” Try what?

  And then he saw it in his mind. Saw what Shane meant.

  Oh God.

  “Are you sure, baby?” Now his heart was really pounding.

  “Very sure,” Shane said.

  27

  AFTER THAT they went to bed, and it was sweet. Not like anything Adam had ever experienced.

  “Are you sure?” Adam asked again.

  Shane kissed him by way of an answer.

  They held each other. They touched each other. Kissed each other. Everywhere.

  Adam made love to Shane’s beautiful bottom the way he’d wanted to since that day he saw him standing next to his picnic blanket. Standing there wearing those blue-and-white plaid shorts that had done nothing to hide his round, firm ass.

  He took his time. Covered those mounds with kisses and licks and tiny nibbles. He slowly nudged his face between them. Ran his newly bearded face in that tight cleft.

  And thank God, Shane moaned through all of it.

  When he found Shane’s hole, his lover flinched for just a second and then relaxed. Adam could feel the trust. In his heart and in his mind, he felt it. Normally he might have attacked it. This night he took his time. Kissed it. Licked it. Made love to it.

  Shane cried out over and over, was practically sobbing and telling him how wonderful it was and how good his beard felt “down there.”

  Adam, urged on and feeling things he’d never felt before, made love to that tight little coil of muscle, and slowly but surely it relaxed and let him in.

  It was glorious.

  Slowly but surely he worked a finger inside, telling Shane that he loved him all the time he was doing it.

  Slowly but surely it became two fingers.

  And when he was ready to try for something more significant, when he was sure he might only last a second before he came he was so excited, wanted Shane so much, Shane stopped him. Rolled over.

  “This way,” he said. “I want to see you. See you. Know it’s you.”

  And that truly was what it was all about, wasn’t it?

  “If they have invaded their victim’s bodies,” Ms. Minden had said, “how easy can it be for the abductee to allow anyone inside them?”

  And so he held Shane and told him over and over that he loved him—

  (because he did)

  —and he took forever to find himself inside his lover, and he was slow, so slow, and it really was unlike anything he had ever experienced.

  More than sex. It was making love.

  Then when Adam could hold back no more, and God, when Shane’s eyes rolled back and he began to ejaculate between them without ever touching himself, Adam came like he never had before.

  It was glorious.

  And holding each other, after, something hit him. Something Daphne had said to him.

  “You’ve always had troubles with relationships, with trusting anyone.”

  And on the tail of that….

  “Something that many abductees have in common is the same with many rape victims,” Ms. Minden had said. “Abductees have trouble with relationships, with trust, with sexuality and their own bodies.

  My God, he thought. That’s me.

  28

  BUT AS Adam was falling asleep, he couldn’t help but look at the ceiling. Wish for aluminum foil.

  “We’re okay,” Shane assured him. “They won’t come.”

  “Okay,” Adam said, and he snuggled tight to his lover and hoped Shane was right.

  29

  BUT HE wasn’t.

  They came.

  30

  AT FIRST Adam took it all as if nothing were unusual.

  Like a dream where you never questioned why you were sitting on the porch with someone who had died years and years ago, but it didn’t seem the least bit peculiar.

  Or living in a tree house like the Swiss Family Robinson.

  Married to Chris Evans and both of you were on the Ellen show.

  And finally you began to realize that maybe this wasn’t real….

  Because you didn’t slowly float out of bed and go drifting down the hallway.

  Windows didn’t open by themselves.

  You didn’t float out of them and drift up to a dark shape barely visible against a night sky where the only thing to indicate it was there was a lack of stars.

  You didn’t wonder why you weren’t afraid of the manlike shapes around you. Manlike except that their arms and legs were stick thin and their heads were huge and oblong and the only face you could see was ominously large, slanted almond-shaped eyes. You didn’t remember that these gray beings were exactly what you had been afraid of. For some reason you were fine with it.

  Adam went through all this.

  The accepting.

  And then the noticing.

  The wondering.

  The thinking that this might be a dream.

  And slowly, slowly realized that it wasn’t.

  He quite suddenly remembered the night on the lake. Following Skip into the water, embarrassed by his throbbing erection. His friend hadn’t seen it—or noticed his confusion about why his penis was behaving like that. Wasn’t that only supposed to happen about girls? They’d waded until the water was at their necks and then begun to slowly dogpaddle out and then tread water and then…

  “What’s that?” Skip asked and brought an arm out of the water long enough to point at the sky over Adam’s shoulder.

  Adam looked, and at first he thought Skip meant the moon and was just joshing with him, but then he saw there was a shape just to the right. The full moon’s light was silhouetting it, and it was disklike, but there was some ki
nd of mechanical-looking arm sticking out of the left side. It looked like a helicopter.

  “It’s a helicopter,” Skip said.

  But it wasn’t. Adam saw that without a doubt, because there was no rotor, just the mechanical thing jutting out the side of whatever that was hovering up in the night sky.

  No. Not hovering.

  It was moving. Moving very slowly, and as it did it came in front of the face of the moon and Adam could see an identical arm on the other side of the… the…. What was it?

  Then red lights, one on either side, began slowly blinking at the ends of the arms. The disk, again slowly, began to glow with blue-white light.

  It was getting closer.

  “I wanna go home,” Adam said and realized he was almost crying, and Skip agreed.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he said.

  They swam as fast as they could to the shore, Adam crying all the way, and as they climbed out of the water—Adam’s erection was a thing of the ancient past—they didn’t even reach for their clothes. They ran.

  The craft, because that was what it was of course, quickly reached them. The lights along its sides, as well as the blinking red lights at the end of the helicopter-like arms, went out.

  They don’t want anyone to see…. And how Adam knew that, he had no idea.

  It was flying so low Adam couldn’t understand why it wasn’t hitting the trees. He was crying. He couldn’t stop. And then came the light. A single misty white beam shone down on them, and Adam turned to his friend—his brave friend who was openly crying now as well—and they were floating.

  “Adam,” Skip shouted but didn’t shout. “Make it stop!” His voice was muffled somehow. It was like Adam was listening to his friend while holding pillows tightly against his ears.

  They don’t want anyone to hear us!

  The bottom of the craft had opened, and they rose and rose until they were inside. Then the door, or whatever it was, screwed closed.

  Adam could hear his friend clearly now, sobbing and telling him to “make it stop!”

  But how could he?

  The men came to them then. Small men, not much taller than the two of them, and they were gray and their skin was shiny, like plastic, and they had huge unblinking black eyes and then…

  That was when the terror began.

  31

  ADAM WANTED to scream.

  The darkness in the sky opened up, and there was a door filled with bluish light. The only light.

  There was no huge orange ball like in some of the abductee accounts he had seen. Like in that book…. UFOs Caught on Film.

  No blinking lights either.

  No lights beneath or along its surface.

  No windows with slant-eyed beings looking out at him.

  Only that door.

  Like before! Oh God, it’s real! It’s fucking real, and it has happened before.

  More than once.

  And maybe, just maybe, many times.

  Then he was going through the doorway. Going down a corridor, and he couldn’t see Shane. Where was Shane?

  Shane! he screamed. Screamed with his mind.

  Adam was floating on his back, as if on an invisible stretcher, and when he lifted his head, he could see the three “men” ahead of him, but not Shane. He looked to the left and right, and there were three more of these men.

  He smelled cinnamon. Of course he did. He’d remembered it from before, and he hadn’t been able to stomach cinnamon rolls since he was a kid—which infuriated his mother, who made the Pillsbury ones many a Sunday as he was growing up.

  They all looked the same, those others.

  Exactly the same.

  Their skin was gray and shiny and perfectly smooth. Their heads were large, their unblinking black eyes like polished stones.

  “It’s a magnetic stone,” Ms. Minden had told him, clutching at her necklace. “They… don’t… like… magnets….”

  He so wished he had a magnetic stone.

  Adam longed to look behind him. Because he was sure that if he could, he would see three more of the men.

  It was in all the books.

  Books by Whitely Strieber and Kathleen Marden and Mary Minden.

  Threes.

  Adam knew if he could look behind him he would see his lover and three more men. Greys, not men.

  They came in threes.

  And they looked at you with big unblinking eyes.

  How could those eyes not blink? Didn’t they need to blink? Blinking did something, for God’s sake. Kept the eyes moist or something. Kept them clean!

  That’s what we need.

  Who knew if they needed the same thing?

  Who knew how their eyes worked?

  “Shane!” he cried. Or tried to. There was something wrong with his mouth. He couldn’t scream. He couldn’t say anything.

  So he used his mind.

  Because Shane had heard him before. Maybe he could hear him again.

  Shane, he thought. Thought as hard as he could. Shane!

  I’m here, came Shane’s voice.

  What do we do? he thought back.

  For the longest time, there was no answer. He wanted to panic. Because for some reason he thought—he knew—that Shane would know the answer.

  We wait, came the sudden reply.

  And as much as waiting scared him, he decided to trust Shane.

  He was filled with warmth then. A warmth a thousand times better than being inside his lover. And he’d never felt anything like that before.

  I love you, came Shane’s mental voice.

  He was brought into a room, and good God, all the stories were true. The room looked like an operating theater. There were long, slim tables that stuck out from the walls—walls that somehow glowed blue. There was light above the tables, and they glowed blue (but much more brightly) as well.

  I love you, he thought back.

  There were machines above the beds. Mechanical arms and bars and poles and more. He floated toward the bed and then above it, and then he was drifting down onto it.

  Three of them came around the bed.

  Three.

  And for some reason, he was terrified.

  They looked at him.

  Unblinking.

  The machines began to move. One of the mechanical arms shifted, lowered, and then a long needle came out of it.

  No no no no….

  And then it was sticking down into his navel, and it was horrible. Excruciating!

  No! Why are you doing this to us!

  Then he remembered what Ms. Minden had said. “I believe these beings are much more advanced than us, so ahead of us that they don’t even consider us to be much more evolved than monkeys. Think on it. When we capture animals in the wild, then tag them, then release them again—do we explain to them what we are doing to them?”

  No. Of course they didn’t.

  “Do we say ‘sorry, Mr. Bear, we’re doing this to track your behavior’? When we tag tigers to see about their migratory habits, do we tell them what we’re doing? Or sea creatures. Do we tell them we are just trying to learn about where they travel in the ocean? Of course not!”

  Of course not!

  “And that is what is happening with these beings. They don’t explain what they’re doing to us. They wouldn’t even be able to explain. They don’t think to explain. They don’t consider us… human, for lack of a better word. They probably consider us only barely sentient.”

  Barely sentient! They barely consider us sentient! And what do they want from us?

  “To study us. There is something they want to know. Something that makes us different from them and they want to know what it is.”

  But what was it?

  Did it even matter?

  No!

  All that mattered was that these being were treating him as less than human. And worse. Treating Shane as less than human. And that he couldn’t allow.

  Shane!

  Nothing.

  Shane! he s
houted with his mind. With all the strength he had.

  Nothing!

  He had to fight. He had to. But how?

  And then he had an idea.

  32

  HE TRIED to raise his arms, tried to form fists, but he couldn’t. Somehow they were preventing him from moving. Maybe through an implant? The books said they could control minds. Had Ms. Minden said something about that? He couldn’t remember anymore.

  So then what?

  Emotional defense. That is what her book said. Anger. And God, he was angry!

  He tried to shout and saw he couldn’t even do that. Not physically. Not with his mouth. But with his mind?

  With his emotions?

  Stop it! You’re hurting us! He shouted it with all of his mind. Screamed it. Leave us alone!

  To his surprise the creatures staggered back.

  That and more, you fuckers!

  What was next?

  Love?

  Really?

  Self-love, he remembered.

  And what could he do with that? Nothing. Not now. Because all he could think about was Shane. Shane, who had gone silent. What had they done with him? Done with the first person he had ever really loved?

  Baby! he shouted with his mind. I’m here! I love you!

  Now several of the Greys put tiny hands on sticklike arms to either side of their heads. Several of them moved away. Fast.

  That was when he saw Shane. He was on the table next to Adam.

  Shane! My God, Shane! Are you all right?

  For a moment, nothing.

  And then Shane moved!

  Shane!

  Shane turned his head to face him. Looked at him with eyes filled with fear. Shane. The one who knew all about this shit. The one who had told him there was nothing to fear. The one who had been brave.

  “It’s okay,” he said. Aloud. He’d said it out loud!

  “Shane, I’m here.”

  Shane’s mouth opened. Closed. Opened. But nothing came out.

  It’s okay, he thought to Shane. I love you. He reached out to his lover.

  And Shane. He was reaching back!

  I love you.

  Their fingers touched then. Interlocked.

  Love you, they both thought at the same time.