by J. M. Snyder
“The creek behind the house runs out this way,” Dan explains. He leads me to the edge of the stream and sinks down, pulling me with him. I’ve never felt anything as soft as this damp moss—it’s all I can do not to lie back on it. “I was thinking that it meant so much to you,” he says, watching me with the hint of a smile in his eyes. “But it was too tied up with everyone else in your life. I wanted to find a place that would be just ours. A place where we could make our own memories.”
“This is perfect,” I tell him, and it is.
Chapter 33: Making It Right
It’s the middle of October, true. Chilly beneath a sky that threatens rain. But there’s enough down home country boy left in this city slicker to make me kick off my sneakers and shed my socks before plunging my bare feet into the rushing stream. “Jesus!” I gasp as Dan laughs at me. Water like ice swirls around my ankles and numbs my toes.
“Cold?” my lover asks with a grin. He sits cross-legged on the ground beside me, his knee barely resting against my thigh.
I punch his leg playfully. “Just slightly,” I admit, but to be honest, it feels absolutely wonderful. Leaning over, I roll up my pant legs, the left one first, then the right. A fine spray mists my fingers, incredible and so amazingly cold, I just love it. “Come on, baby,” I cajole. “It’s not that bad. Take off your…”
My words trail off when I turn and see the lust in Dan’s eyes, the insatiable way he’s staring at me, like he’s famished and I’m just what he’s has in mind. “Take off my what?” he asks softly, his meaning worlds different from what I had started to say.
A flirty shyness descends over me and suddenly I feel like I did when we first started dating, when everything between us was still new, we were both explorers in uncharted lands, and the slightest touch was enough to set me grinning like a fool for weeks on end. “I love you,” I say simply. My heart swells with the emotion and in this instant, I fall for him all over again. I love him completely. There’s no doubt in my mind that I do.
He moves closer. One arm eases around behind me, one hand on the ground by my hip as he leans against me, his chin on my shoulder. His breath flutters over my neck as he whispers, “What do you want me to take off, Michael?” His chest is so warm against my back, and on my arm he traces the pattern of my sweater. My body thrills to his touch.
Clearing my throat, I hope I sound coy and unaffected when I tease, “I thought we just came out here to talk.”
His arms come up around my waist to hug me back against him. “We are talking,” he tells me. “I’m afraid I’m going to lose you.”
“You won’t,” I promise. I half-turn in his embrace so he can see the truth in my eyes—I’m not going anywhere without him.
He studies me for a long time before he asks, “So what do you want to talk about?”
I don’t know. Despite our comfortable position—me in his arms, right where I belong—I still sense a barrier in me, keeping us apart. I imagine him on one side, yelling and kicking and trying his hardest to tear through the obstacle that stands between us while I wait on the other side, my arms folded around myself, pleading silently for help. For him. I want him in, why did I ever push him out? What made me close the door to my heart on him? And how can I possibly find the strength to open it again?
“Michael.” My name purred into the hollow of my throat, tickling away beneath my sweater. Arms tight around me, keeping me close. I’m not getting out of this so easily. Gentle fingers slip beneath the hem of my sweater, play across my stomach, as quick as the light that refracts off the water at my feet. “You’re not talking.”
“What do you want me to say?” I murmur. I give into the embrace, lay back against my lover’s body, my head on his shoulder, my legs stretching out. I feel like a cat asleep in the sun, an owner’s hand stroking my chest, lower, over my belly where I’m ticklish, lower. Dan fingers the fly of my jeans, flicks open the button, eases the zipper down and rubs until I moan softly. Does he really want to talk? Now? He’s got to be kidding me.
But he’s not. “Yesterday,” he whispers. I nod as if it’s a question, yesterday, yes. Anything you want, I should tell him. Yesterday, tomorrow, next week, last year. Anything you want, it’s yours, just don’t stop touching me like this, please. “Talk to me about what you were going through yesterday.”
Stephen. Is that what he means? He wants me to talk of my old friend at a time like this? I can barely think at this moment, let alone remember.
His hands, warm and strong, burrow into my open jeans to cup my budding erection. I’m expecting more—his fingers sliding lower maybe, moving my briefs aside, slipping inside me and making me arch against him in desire, but he does nothing like that. He just waits. The sweet pressure at my crotch is a promise waiting to be fulfilled. Talk to me, his hands say, his fingers, his arms. Tell me what I want to know, Michael, tell me what’s wrong, let me in, and I’ll fill you completely, I’ll make you whole. If you’ll just talk to me…
I say simply, “Stephen loves me.”
Dan doesn’t reply at first and I don’t say anything else, I let him digest that. Loves me. Not loved, not past tense, because it’s not an emotion relegated to the past. Loves, as in he came over yesterday hoping to get with me. Loves, as in his heart shattered like a dropped mirror when I told him about Dan, when Caitlin told him. Loves, as in right this minute, wherever he is, he’s probably thinking about me.
In his soft voice, Dan echoes, “Loves.” I nod and swallow against the lump rising in my throat. “He told you this?”
“Yesterday,” I whisper, nodding again. “After Caitlin left to get you, and he was like you have a boyfriend? And God, I knew it then, Dan. I could see it, his whole face just collapsed. I felt like shit.”
“It’s not your fault,” Dan tells me. He squeezes my cock in tender hands and kisses my neck. “Baby, you can’t control something like that—”
I shake my head—he doesn’t understand. “I didn’t have to encourage him,” I scowl, growing mad at myself for not realizing it at the time. Could I have prevented any of this if I had only had the strength to keep him at bay? I don’t know. “I didn’t have to kiss him, Dan, every damn time we came up here. I didn’t have to fool around with him, I didn’t have to let him blow me, I didn’t have to fondle him and stick my fingers up his—”
“You don’t need to go into detail,” Dan snaps. As I sit up, he pulls away, and a cold so poignant, a loneliness so sharp, settles into my bones. The look on my lover’s face has solidified into something I can’t quite discern, but it scares me. I don’t like what I see—disgust? Jealousy? “I didn’t know you two were like that,” he mutters. “You said you were friends.”
“We were,” I say, and catching the past tense, I correct, “are. It never meant anything more to me, baby, and it was way before you came along. Don’t get all indignant about it now. I know you messed around before me. Hell, you told me all about the shit that went down after hours at boot camp. Stephen and I stopped years ago.”
Dan narrows his eyes and challenges, “When?”
With a sigh, I pull my feet from the water and start to stand. “Don’t do this to me,” I grumble. I’m not in the mood, this is a stupid idea, talking about it is just inviting trouble and I have enough of that as it is.
But as I try to stand, Dan won’t let me go. He holds me to him, keeps me down, and the most I can manage is to turn my body until I’m facing him, his hands still on my waist, anger or tears shining in his eyes. “When?” he asks again. “When’s the last time you got with him?”
If it was all those years ago, why am I afraid to admit it? “Last time I came up here,” I tell him, my gaze sliding away from his. “After I broke up with that kid Matthew, remember him? I told you all this, Dan.” I did, too—before we ever slept together, we sat down at my kitchen table one afternoon and talked all this out. My previous lover, all of our old boyfriends, the senior cadet at boot camp who took a liking to Dan and came to his barracks
night after night, once the lights were out, just to lick his dick. I was Dan’s first real lover and he knew about Matthew, how the boy used to be at one time my whole world but I was over him, I am. I haven’t thought of him—or any other guy I’ve ever known—in the entire ten months that we’ve been together, not once. Least of all Stephen Robichaud and whatever it was we played around at growing up.
It occurs to me that I never told Dan exactly what that was, either.
“I never thought of him like that,” I admit. I’ve begun to shiver and I want to ask Dan to hold me, but that will sound needy. I don’t want to have to ask for his touch, I want him to simply look at me and not be able to keep his hands off. But he’s watching me, weighing my words, and I pull my knees up to my chest, curl my hands over my icy toes to warm them. I’ll talk through this. He loves to hear me talk, right? So I’ll talk until he loves me again. Until he holds me…“I was never like oh Stephen, my boyfriend, you know?” I glance up at Dan’s closed face and find in it the encouragement to continue. “It was just that we were friends, and when I had something I was curious about, I went to him. I wanted to know what a boy kissed like, he kissed me, stuff like that. It was all experimentation to me, Dan, I swear it. I mean, sure, I stayed up some nights and wanted him with me, but only because I was lonely or horny or…something like that. It was never Stephen, I love him.”
Dan stays silent. I figured he would—he doesn’t like to interrupt when I speak. He knows me too well. If I don’t want to talk about something, I’ll jump on the first thing someone says, anything to change the subject, and he hates that. If something needs to be said, he sits down and wants to talk about it until he’s satisfied that the matter is settled. Me, I’m all too willing to steer the conversation away, anything to lighten the mood and get us laughing and happy together again. Somehow, though, I don’t think I’ll be able to do that today. I have a feeling that if I don’t see this through, then there will be no more laughter, no more happiness, not with him, and I don’t want that. I’ll talk about anything, anything at all, to keep from losing him.
“I’ve never loved anybody but you,” I say. That’s the truth. Even Matthew, who I thought I was in love with, never made me feel the way Dan does. Hugging my knees tight, I set my cheek on them and stare at him, trying to see past the mask he’s hidden behind, trying to see my lover inside the man. “You know that, baby. I love you.”
Softly, Dan wants to know, “Why were you so upset then? If you don’t feel the same…”
“Because he’s still my friend,” I tell him. I still feel for Stephen, even if it isn’t love. When I sigh, tears prick my own eyes, and try as I might, I can’t seem to blink them away. “Because you didn’t come meet him,” I say, sniffling. I feel as if I might start to blubber at any minute, and I rub the back of my hand across my nose, I don’t want that. “I know Caitlin went to get you just to stir up trouble, that’s the kind of girl she is and she didn’t need me to tell her how it was between us, she could see it well enough when he looked at me. So she went to track you down and I was like I can do this, at least until you show up, and you never did.”
I’m crying now, when did that happen? Hot tears spill over the corners of my eyes to dry in the cool air. I wipe my face on my knees, the denim rough against my face. “Maybe if you were there, Dan, he wouldn’t have said shit. He wouldn’t have told me he always loved me, or that he probably always will, and he sure as hell wouldn’t have kissed me right here—” I point at the corner of my mouth where I swear I can still feel Stephen’s lips, the ghost of our friendship and what we used to be together. “If you showed up, none of that would’ve happened.”
Dan reaches for me but I shrug his hand away. “My being there wouldn’t have changed the way he feels about you,” he tells me—damn him. I don’t want to hear this, I bury my head in my arms and struggle against tears that continue to course down my face. “Just because I showed up doesn’t mean he wouldn’t love you.”
“But I wouldn’t have to know!” I cry as sobs rack my body. “I wouldn’t have heard his heart break, Dan. I might have seen it in his eyes but I would never have to hear the words out loud. What would it have hurt? Five minutes of your time, that’s it, and I wouldn’t see his broken eyes every time I close my own, I wouldn’t hear he loves me every time I’m alone.”
A comforting hand smoothes along my shoulders, across my back, and quietly, my lover asks, “So that’s my fault?”
My anger dissolves in an instant. “No,” I whisper—how can he do this? In the face of an argument, he remains a rock that the sea of my emotions rages against, and like stone, he simply waits the storm out. When the tears come, he knows the end is in sight, and with one touch, one word, he can take the wind from my sails and calm the waters again. Like now, he scoots closer, pulls me to him, presses my head against his chest so I can hear the beating of his heart as he strokes my hair, my brow. I cling to him desperately, my arms wrapped around one of his, my face burrowed into his jacket where the sweet scent of him lingers. “No,” I sigh again, a thousand times, no. It’s my fault, I’m the one who let it get this far. I knew it last time, who am I kidding? I knew what Stephen felt for me even if I never let myself admit it. He came by yesterday to comfort me because in the past, I let him. It’s not Dan’s fault that I held no regard for my friend’s feelings, it’s not his fault that I used Stephen when it felt good and didn’t care what it might mean to the boy. It’s mine, my fault, I shouldn’t have done it but I did, and maybe Stephen and I weren’t as good of friends as I thought we were, if I let my own pleasure come before him.
In a small voice, I admit it aloud. “My fault,” I say. There’s no weight lifted from my heart, the pain in my chest isn’t dulled in the least, and the admission brings with it fresh tears. But they’re softer this time, a gentle, cleansing rain, washing away the lump in my throat that formed when I saw in Stephen’s large eyes his hopes and dreams shatter the instant he realized I didn’t love him back. So I say it again, “My fault,” and Dan holds onto me as I cry it out, my fault. Not Dan’s, not Stephen’s, mine.
At some point I start telling him about Stephen because I think I have to, but my voice is strained. He wants to hear this, right? Even though it’s gone to me, it means nothing anymore, Dan told me to talk…“Michael,” he interrupts, kissing me quiet. I look up at him and there is no anger or judgment staring back—only love. Just the man I’ve always seen when I look at him. “This is our place,” he tells me. “Not Stephen’s. Unless you really want to talk about him…”
“No,” I breathe. He’s so close to me, every heart beat fills my head, an echo of my own. “It’s over, Dan. I’m over it, honest. I just thought you wanted me to go on.”
His reply is another kiss. With gentle hands, he lies me back to the ground, the moss impossibly soft beneath me, the grasses tall around my head. He covers my body with his own, pins me down, moves above me until I’m hard between us, my jeans still unzipped and his crotch rubbing into mine. My lips ache from his kisses, my body throbs for him, his name is a litany I sigh over and over again.
He trails kisses over my chin, down my throat, his arms as thick as the trucks of trees on either side of my head. I move against him, thrusting up as my hands slip into the back pockets of his jeans and pull him down to me. Our moans drown out the water’s gurgle, the rustling grass, the distant rumble of thunder when it rolls across the sky. Somehow he manages to get my jeans down to my knees, my briefs, without breaking the hunger of his kisses, and when he sits back to unzip his own pants, I fumble in my pocket, looking for…my fingers find a small vial—the rose—and then the coin-shaped condom. When I pull it free, Dan laughs. “Where’d you get that?” he wants to know.
“Grosso’s,” I reply. With a wink, I add, “Always prepared, you know?” He takes the condom from me and slides down his pants, his erection standing up from a patch of dark hair where his legs intersect. So beautiful, I think as I run my fingers through the kinked
hair, watch it curl around my nails. And mine. Thank you, Lord, all mine.
He lays me down again, pulls the condom on, then lies over me, his strong arms corded muscle as he holds his body above mine. There’s a sharp pain, I’m not accustomed to this position, but it’s gone the instant he pushes completely in, filling me, making me whole. I dig my fingers into the soft grass, into the ground—I lean my head back and gasp out his name, cry it to the trees, scream it as he drives into me, I don’t care who hears. Faster, harder, deeper, until he’s in every crevice, every hollow, he’s filled my head and my senses, he’s in the whole of me, from my fingers up my arms and down my legs to my toes—he’s half of my soul. I want it, I want this, I want him forever and when I come, it’s an orgasmic rush that rips from my throat and cock, a bellow of intense love that leaves me weak and trembling and utterly satiated in his arms.
Small kisses on my throat, my face, as soft as the grasses that dance around me. A warm tongue licks away my tears, tender lips cover mine. Every breath he expels, I take in. “Love you,” I murmur, hoarse, my throat raw from my lusty cries.
With a grin, Dan whispers, “Reason number one why we don’t do that when we’re staying with relatives. You’re so loud when I top you.” I laugh, breathless, and snuggle up to him. Despite the sweater I wear and his jacket, I still feel as if I’m naked against his skin, he’s that much a part of me, so deep inside that there’s no telling where I end and he begins. We’re just one, we’re love, and that’s all we need to be. “I love you,” he sighs as he kisses me again. He moves within me and is mine.