It's All Relative

by J. M. Snyder

  I folded the newspaper quickly to keep her from seeing the magazine and nodded. I had been so busy reading an article on an upcoming pride march in D.C. that I didn’t notice her step out on the porch or come over to me—I was usually more alert than that. This was back when I still wasn’t comfortable with my sexuality. On campus I could hang out at the GLBSA room and take courses like Gay Lit, but I couldn’t seem to bring myself to tell my parents or any of my old friends that I liked boys. It took another five years after that summer to finally come out, and I’m still not sure exactly how it went over.

  To me, Aunt Evie always looked younger than she claimed to be—sixty that year, without a stitch of gray in her hair and clear, blue eyes that crinkled in the corners when she grinned. And she was a big woman, always had been. Not fat, mind you, just…big-boned. Well-proportioned, my mom used to say, but then she’d laugh in that less than amusing way she has that said she thought the term didn’t quite fit Evie. She was tall, for one thing, almost six foot even at her age. When she stood next to me, Aunt Evie could look me in the eye, and she’d put her hands on her fleshy hips and cock her head to one side as she squinted at me as if trying to see me right, and she’d tell my mom that I needed to eat more, even though I gained the legendary “freshman fifteen” once I hit college. It still sticks to me, in my arms and ass, but Dan says he likes me meaty. More to sink his teeth into, and his eyes twinkle when he bites me playfully.

  Evie was more than meaty. She was shaped like an X—big breasts, big arms, big hips and thighs, and an hourglass waist that almost seemed out of place on the rest of her. She favored baggy dresses that hid that waist, though it came out when she propped her hands on her hips. She did that often, it was someplace to rest them, I guess—in my mind I still see her at the kitchen sink, one hand on her hip and the other shaking a spatula at Ray because he got into the cake she was saving for after dinner. Evie was a great cook, worlds better than Mom, and part of me suspects that was the reason she was so big. All that food had to go somewhere, and most of the year it was just her and Penny in that house. My mom’s sister lived with Aunt Evie, and the two of them rambled through the large Victorian-style home alone, except for summer vacation when everyone descended on Sugar Creek for a much needed break from the rest of the world. Up there things move slower, people linger, and time seems to trickle by like the ever-present lull of the creek behind the house.

  In hushed tones I try to tell Dan exactly what that place means to me, but it’s hard to put all the memories into words. Somehow they lack the luster that shines in my mind when I think of the anticipation that curled through my stomach as we rounded the last turn out of Sugar Creek and Aunt Evie’s house loomed like a dream in the distance. The wooden siding painted a pale Wedgewood blue, the steepled roof dark, orange drifts of dead pine needles blown into the eaves. In the front of the house, a large bay window juts out from a turret, and the porch wraps around the corner, out of sight from the road. It’s a large home, crowded inside, a jumble of rooms downstairs that are overflowing with furniture in vinyl slipcovers and wooden antiques and a staircase that runs straight up the center of the house. The second floor is like a patchwork quilt, a dozen small rooms that barely fit a bed and dresser, and above it all is an attic full of old trunks and musty clothing.

  From the attic windows you can see the whole backyard—Evie’s vegetable garden along one corner, row after row of tomato plants and stakes strung together with twine for her grapes, a shed were she kept yard supplies, even a small kiddie pool that I stopped playing in long ago. There’s a deck, which you can’t see from inside because it hems in close to the house, and between that and the garden is a large gas grill and an outdoor set, table and chairs, complete with an umbrella to keep out the sun. At the edge of it all, trees stand like sentinels, a ragged wood that we used to explore as children. It held so much adventure for us—how can I explain to Dan the trepidation I felt playing hide and seek with Ray amid the trees? How can I convey the crunch of leaves underfoot as we ran, or the magic in finding a colony of tiny snails clinging to a broken branch half-buried in water? How can I possibly express all the excitement that ran through me as I stood in a tiny room on the second floor and looked out the window, past the garden and the trees to the creek that I could just barely see twisting along in the woods?

  I can’t. So instead I tell him about my first kiss, right there on Aunt Evie’s front porch. A girl by the name of Stephanie Robichaud, a real brute at ten, who chased Ray and me home from Grosso’s, the three of us on bikes and damned if she didn’t keep up. Ray threw his bike down and leaped the few steps up to the porch, raced inside, slammed the door shut just as I was kicking free of my own bike. I made it to the door but the bastard had locked it—I could hear him on the other side, giggling as he held it shut. “Open up!” I shouted, banging on the door with my small fists. “Ray! I’m gonna tell Mom if you don’t open up this door right now!”

  Stephanie was behind me—I turned just as she jumped off her bike. I swear she didn’t let it stop first, and the bicycle rolled another foot or two before it realized the rider was gone and flopped to one side like a fish out of water. “Michael Timothy Knapp,” she said, punctuating each word with a stomp of her foot on the porch steps. She wore black Mary Janes, I remember that clearly, and although she wore a dress, she had on shorts underneath it because she was such a tomboy. I saw those shorts once—she flashed us with them outside of Grosso’s the summer before. I think I was scarred for life.

  As she advanced on me, I flattened myself back against the door. Running was out of the question—even two years older than me, she was faster, I knew that already, and if I ran, then I’d get a fist in my arm for my troubles. Stephanie was Sugar Creek’s number one bully back in the day. As she came closer, I squeezed my eyes shut and prayed that Ray, being the chickenshit that he is, would go and get Aunt Evie to rescue me.

  The punch I was expecting never came. Instead, I felt something soft and wet touch my mouth, and my eyes flew open in surprise. Stephanie’s big brown eyes were staring back, so damn close that they seemed larger than life, and her breath was hot and sour against my cheek. I had barely registered the fact that she was kissing me before she hit me in the shoulder. I shrunk away and she hit me again, twice, hard in the upper arm. “Two for flinching,” she told me. Then she laughed as she raced back to her bike. “You tell anyone I kissed you, Michael, and I’ll kick your butt.”

  Telling anyone that she even touched me wasn’t something I planned on doing—she wasn’t one of my favorite people in the world. Ironic, then, how a mere four years later it was her twin brother Stephen who gave me my first real kiss, this time not on the front porch but out behind Aunt Evie’s gardening shed. He had the same big eyes, which his thick glasses refracted until they swam like two pools in his face, and he had a shy grin that was nothing like his sister’s vicious grimace. By the time I was twelve, I knew I liked boys, and he was the first who ever looked back at me with the same telltale mix of curiosity and interest in his eyes. We were in Grosso’s leafing through an issue of Playboy, giggling over the naked women inside while the cashier’s back was turned, when we found a full-page ad for adult videos in the middle of the magazine.

  It was the first time I can remember seeing two men together. Before that, I had vague dreams of letting boys touch me in places where I would touch myself, and I thought it might be nice to kiss a guy, but I had never seen it. And there, on the glossy pages of the magazine, were men in various sexual poses. With women, true, but one picture caught my eye, one man lying another down, the one beneath him arching in pleasure or pain, at the time I couldn’t tell which. A big black swath hid their naked bodies, but I could see enough to get a pretty good idea of what they were doing, and my mind filled in the rest. Across the black bar read the words HOT GAY SEX!!

  I knew what gay meant—hell, I went to public school. It meant you were a wuss who cried when someone hit you and always got picked last in P.
E. class. I wasn’t gay. Even when I asked Ray, in the darkness of the room we shared, what the word really meant, and he told me it was a boy who porked other boys, I didn’t think it pertained to me. Mostly, I think, because I didn’t really know what Ray meant by the word porked, and whenever I tried to ask, it set him giggling so bad that he simply couldn’t tell me.

  I pointed the ad out to Stephen, who I sort of suspected might like it the same way I liked it—call it gaydar, even at that age. There in the back aisle of Grosso’s, he ran one grubby finger over the image of the men and in a harsh whisper, asked me, “Have you ever done anything like that?”

  I shook my head no. He pushed his Coke-bottle glasses up the bridge of his nose and said, “Me either.”

  He was two years older than me, putting him at the grand age of fourteen, and he lived in Sugar Creek, of all places. Of course he hadn’t done anything even remotely like that picture. “Have you even been kissed yet?” I asked him. I thought of his sister and her sloppy press of lips years before, and decided that if he asked me the same question, I’d say no.

  But he didn’t. He giggled, nervous, and looked at me in a way that said he wanted to kiss me. I made him chase me, though—without another word, I stuck the magazine back on the rack and ran from the store. Ran all the way down the three blocks and around the corner to Aunt Evie’s house, looking over my shoulder to make sure he was right behind me. He was. Around the house, into the backyard, past Ray splashing in the kiddie pool even though he was too old to play in the thing, behind the shed. That’s where I stopped to catch my breath and Stephen found me, leaning back against the wooden shed. With a breathless laugh, he touched my face, his fingers surprisingly gentle on my skin. Then he took a deep breath and inched close to me, closer, until his eyes eclipsed the world and his lips met mine.

  I can still remember the way he tasted, like licorice whips and Gobstoppers, because we were eating candy at Grosso’s before the girl behind the register lost interest in us and we found the Playboy. When we finally broke apart, Stephen looked slightly pale from holding his breath for so long, and I told him next time he might try smaller kisses to keep from passing out. “But I like it,” he said. Secretly, I did, too. “I like how soft you are inside.”

  When I tell Dan this, he laughs into my neck. “He doesn’t know just how soft you are,” he breathes, his hands straying down my chest and stomach to cup the budding erection in my boxer briefs.

  I moan as he kneads me hard. “My mother,” I sigh as a reminder. She said no sex. Did I promise to that?

  Dan rolls on top of me. “What a way to kill the mood,” he jokes, but his dick presses into mine and I know nothing will tamp down that. Nothing but me, and with expert moves I hook my fingers into the waistband of his briefs, tug them down over his smooth ass, his thighs, down to his knees. As he straddles me, I hear the tiny rip of fabric, but he bends one leg and lets the briefs slip off. “Love me,” he says. That’s what he always says when he initiates it.

  I packed condoms, of course. Heavily lubricated—they’re easier to hide in my pockets than a bottle of lube, easier to explain away. What guy my age doesn’t carry a condom anymore? Despite the darkness and unfamiliar bedroom, Dan manages to find the half-empty box, shoved down one side of my suitcase just in case anyone goes rooting through my stuff. I put nothing past my siblings.

  Straddling me again, Dan eases my boxer briefs down over my balls, exposing my erection. Like a seasoned lover, he rolls the condom on, the lubricant cool on my heated flesh. Then he lies down over me and I guide myself into him, into the hot tight center of his being, where I love him most. We take it slow because Dan likes it that way and tonight I’m not up for much, my mind is too heavy. I’m all too eager to lose myself in him like I have so many times before, his hands holding me back to the bed, his lips on my throat. I cup his ass in both hands and pull him to me, each thrust bringing a muffled moan into my neck, my name sighed in his voice. We melt together perfectly, like we always do, and he fills the hollow ache that opened in me tonight at the dinner table. He makes me whole.

  Right before I come, I get a little randy, and the bed knocks against the wall in a quiet rhythm as I drive into my lover, deeper, further, in. The moment my orgasm rips through me and into Dan, someone on the other side of the wall bangs back.

  Caitlin. Her room is next to mine.

  We giggle like schoolboys and I can finally fall asleep now, Dan’s arms around me tight. In the morning, though, my little sister stares at me from the dining room table as I sit down with a bowl of cereal. Dan’s still asleep, savoring his day off, and no one else seems to be awake. Caitlin waits until I put my spoon in my mouth before she says, “I have some incense, if you want it.”

  “What for?” I ask, innocent.

  She shrugs and stirs her cereal halfheartedly. “It’s good for getting rid of smells,” she tells me. “You know, cum, weed, shit like that. Thought you might need some after last night. If Mom smells sex—”

  “I opened the window,” I say with a grin. Sixteen years old, Jesus. “Didn’t mean to keep you up.”

  Caitlin flips her dark hair out of her black-rimmed eyes. “You didn’t.” Without looking at me, she adds, “Hey, if I had a guy like that in my bed? Shit on Mom, I’d fuck him, too.”

  Sixteen, I have to remind myself.

  Chapter 5: Aunt Jessie

  Dan wakes before my parents or Ray—it’s the military in him. He can’t sleep in even if he doesn’t have to be on base before dawn. When I hear him in the kitchen, I give Caitlin a quick grin and hurry in to kiss him good morning. “Hey,” I sigh, coming up behind him and wrapping my arms around his waist. He stands at the sink, pouring himself a glass of orange juice, and he looks something close to amazing in his gray ARMY t-shirt and PT shorts. They’re tight around his ass and hang loose on his thighs—whoever designed those things knew just how to show off a soldier’s best assets. I’m glad the t-shirt hangs low enough to hide what Dan’s packing from Caitlin’s young eyes and sarcastic mouth.

  He half-turns in my embrace and kisses me in greeting. “Did you sleep well?” he asks. I nod in reply. With him beside me, I slept like a baby.

  “I can make you breakfast,” I tell him, just because that’s what I do in the mornings, I cook for him. Mostly eggs, though I saw some pancake mix in the cabinet, if he’s up for that. Since we’re alone in the kitchen, I run my hands up beneath the bottom of his t-shirt and rub his taut stomach. Kissing his shoulder, I murmur, “I love you.”

  He sets the orange juice aside and turns to hug me close. His hands smooth the bangs away from my forehead, tuck the wavy hair behind my ears, but the strands fall back into place on their own accord as he cradles my chin to kiss me again. “Love you,” he purrs, and between us I feel faint stirrings of interest at his groin. “We can head back to bed, if you want,” he suggests. “Breakfast can wait.”

  “My eyes!” I frown at Caitlin as she stumbles into the kitchen, eyes closed, cereal bowl in one hand and the other thrown out in front of herself dramatically to feel her way. “Jeez, boys. Take it upstairs, why don’t you? What will the neighbors think?”

  I kick out at her as she passes, but she’s quick—she dodges my foot and still manages to sock me in the arm with one small fist. I slap her shoulder and she hits me again. Damn, she has good reflexes. When I’m about to try a third time, though, Dan catches my hand and folds my arm between us as he holds me tight. “Don’t,” he admonishes. “No fighting.”

  I’m well aware that I’m suddenly Caitlin’s age again, picking with her the way I am, but she doesn’t seem to mind. “You’re just jealous,” I tell her. I stick out my tongue and marvel at how I can go from twenty-five to two in one minute flat. “I’ve got a hot boy to freak and you don’t.”

  Caitlin flips her hair over her shoulder and gives me a look that simply says, puh-leaze. “You don’t know my hot boy,” she says. “I ain’t jealous of yours, trust me.”

  Intrigued in spite o
f myself, I let Dan slip free and lean against the sink. “You have a boyfriend?” I ask as Dan pours himself a bowl of cereal.

  “Of course,” Caitlin snorts. As if she might not. “I’m not Ray, Michael. I date.”

  “Who?” I want to know. I realize that I don’t know anyone her age here—hell, I don’t know most people in this town anymore, but maybe the last name will sound familiar, maybe she’s seeing someone related to someone I went to school with. This is a small place—not as backwater as Sugar Creek, but close. Not D.C., that’s for damn sure.

  Rolling her eyes, Caitlin takes the box of cereal from Dan and refills her bowl. “No one you know,” she says.

  My lover leans beside me to eat, his hip resting against mine, and I give him a wink over my shoulder. “Who?” I ask again. “I’m just curious, is all. Unless you’re lying…”

  “I’m not lying,” Caitlin sighs. “Jesus. He’s the captain of the football team, okay? Shaun Donnigan. There, you happy?”

  I almost don’t believe it. My Goth sister dating…“The captain of the football team?” I ask, incredulous. “You can’t be serious.”

  With a mischievous grin, she says, “That’s what his girlfriend says.”

  That gets a laugh out of Dan. “Hey!” I cry, turning to tickle him. He laughs again and squirms away. “That’s not funny. He’s seeing someone else? Caitlin—” She shrugs and returns to the dining room, leaving Dan and me alone. With a withering look, I tell him, “Don’t encourage her.”

  The smile slips from his face. “She’s cute,” he says.

  I’m glad they’re getting along so well—Dan’s an only child, but I know he always dreamed of having a large family one day. I can’t imagine what it was like for him, growing up by himself. Ray might not be one of my favorite people in the world, but at least I had someone to play with when I was a kid, someone to share secrets with, someone to fight with. And every summer, there was the rest of the family at Aunt Evie’s…we easily doubled the size of Sugar Creek when we rolled into town. There are five great-aunts altogether—four, now that Evie’s gone. Aunt Bobbie has two boys, both married; Aunt Sarah has two boys, two girls; Aunt Billy has three girls. Add in their children, some of whom have children of their own by now, and my head starts to spin at the thought of them all. It’s going to be a madhouse over the next few days, everyone showing up at Aunt Evie’s to pay their respects, where will they all stay?