Center of Gravity

by Neve Wilder

  “And?”

  I blinked. This was usually where Tom cut me off, citing gay/straight boundaries, so I wasn’t sure why he was prompting me this time.

  “Uh. Well, he came charging into the room while I had my dick in my hands and I thought he might kick me out because—”

  “Jesus, dude, you were going to jack it in his dead parents’ house?”

  “No! God, let me finish—” It was nice to see him grinning, though.

  “That’s what he said.” Tom snickered.

  “Actually, he didn’t, because he was too busy giving me the most phenomenal blowjob ever. I mean his mouth…his hands—and I know maybe he doesn’t look like it and acts kind of uptight and all, but he’s not. Well, he is a little, but…nnnnnnn.” I groaned. That was a professional classification for really fucking good.

  “Nice dick?”

  I eyed Tom dubiously. This was new territory for us, too. “Yes, definitely. Not a club or anything, but a solid piece.” One I really, really wanted to get my hands or mouth on. Again.

  “You been humping him ever since?”

  “No. Sadly, he cut me off the next day.” I said it with a lightness I didn’t feel.

  Tom chuckled. “Aww, man. That’s harsh. Cold showered and kicked to the curb by Eeyore. Twice. That’s a great story. Maybe he wasn’t impressed by round two.”

  I flared my nostrils and puffed out my chest. “He was impressed, trust me.” He’d at least been very interested at the time and in spite of all that talk in the kitchen, I thought he might still be, but something was getting in his way.

  “Uh-huh.”

  I threw a wad of panties at him. “Here, sniff these or something, caveman.”

  Tom twirled a panty by its string and kept laughing at my expense until the girls popped their heads in the bedroom. He flushed bright red and made a show of folding the thong delicately, his big hands fumbling as they tried to navigate frilly lacework.

  “Great taste,” he said, pointing to the orange lace. The girls seemed a cross between amused and creeped out. I was dying, covering my mouth with my fist.

  When he realized what he’d said, he started backpedaling. “Shit, I didn’t mean it that way. Fuck!”

  The girls started to giggle and he shot a glare at me. “If we get written up, it’s all your fucking fault.”

  Later, after we pushed the last box into their storage unit and got paid—with a nice bonus that I’d have to attribute to Tom’s heavy-handed use of his dimpled smile—we got back in the truck and headed back to the office.

  Tom cracked the window to let the heat out.

  “You think dudes really do it best?” He seemed serious, brows slashed down in a furrow, his jaw set.

  “I’m a pretty biased source. But like I’ve said before, if you’re getting a little bi-curious, I’ll gladly lend you a hand. I know you’re packing something fierce.” I shot a pointed look at his crotch and he grinned before waving me off.

  I kicked my feet up on the dashboard and adjusted the air vent to blow on my face. I’d entertained the notion of Tom a couple dozen times, but we’d grown into a solid friendship and his straightness seemed unwavering. He was good fodder for the occasional jerk fantasy, though lately it was images of Rob on top of me that kept populating my spank bank.

  “So who was it?” I asked.

  “Who was what?”

  “You got laid on my birthday, you said. So was she hot? Lukewarm? Beer goggles required?”

  “Eh.” Tom ran his fingers along his jaw then down the curve of his throat as if he was giving it some serious thought. His shoulder hitched up. “Just some chick on vacation.” He didn’t offer his usual extensive play-by-play, just put the truck into gear and started us back to the office.

  “You want me to help you to the dinner table?” I stood in the doorway of Dad’s room, watching him curled over one of the civil war figurines. He had a task lamp trained on his lap where a hardback copy of Ansel Adams photos rested. The paintbrush was tiny in his large hands, and he squinted, even through his reading glasses, but his brushstrokes were careful and patient as he applied paint from the small pots on the side table. He glanced up at me from one corner of his eye.

  “Nope, going to pass tonight.”

  Mom had already told me he hadn’t left his room all day. Lainey had brought him his pills and ginger ale and he kept the room dark. Even the TV was off.

  I moved to the foot of his bed and sat gingerly, trying not to jostle him in case he was queasy. “Who is that?”

  “Fella by the name of Jubal Early. Never heard of him until I looked him up today, but he was a Confederate general. Owned one slave in his entire life, had four children out of wedlock but was committed to the cause on the basis of conservatism, regardless. You believe that?” He arched a brow in my direction.

  “I guess.” I shrugged. “People do all kinds of dumb shit if that’s the only thing they really know.”

  “See, that’s something I’ve always admired about you, Alex. You think about things. Really think about them in ways I never did.” Dad cleaned his brush and dipped it into the red pot next. “Growing up, I always thought things were the way they were and that was that. Hopefully you were good at something, or you could learn to be if you worked hard enough. You put food on the table, that was the point. Everything was shifting, though. I was hardly aware of it. We were too broke, too country, too stuck in the survival loop to think bigger, I guess.” He trailed off and I was reluctant to interrupt the quiet peace of his brush moving back and forth and his mellow voice.

  “I don’t want to sound like a broken record, son, but you need to finish school.” His eyes were fierce upon me. We didn’t fall into father-son moments often, but it looked like this was going to be one of them. “Because it’s easy to get stuck in the cycle of just providing and making ends meet. But it’s not a burden you’re supposed to be saddled with right now.”

  “Dad—”

  “Save your breath. We’re at a point now where—” He hesitated. “You can take out a loan, you can even still work if you want to, if it makes you and your mother feel better. But you need to finish what you started. The world runs on people like me, the ones who show up and work, but it thrives on people like you, who create.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I was touched and saddened and uncomfortable all at the same time.

  “You create, too.”

  “In a limited way, I guess. But there are no limits for you yet, so don’t start creating them now.” He set down the paintbrush and examined the General in the light before touching up a button on the guy’s coat. “I want you to promise me that you’ll finish school, finish your senior project.”

  Shit. He’d never straight out asked before and I was absolutely powerless to deny him. I thought of Tom in that moment. I didn’t know his whole story, just little bits he’d dropped here and there. I knew at one point he’d wanted to go to New York and that had fallen through. The only thing he talked about lately was maybe opening a Buffs franchise of his own in the future. My lips compressed and I nodded. “I’ll finish. Way to lay the fucking dad schtick on thick, dude.”

  He chuckled and cuffed the back of my neck, pulling me forward to press a kiss into my hairline. “You can take it out on your own kids one day, if you go that route.”

  I laughed and edged off the bed. “You want me to bring you anything?”

  “A morphine drip, a bottle of tequila, and some dancing girls.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you’re like a broken record about the dancing girls. What would Mom think?”

  “Well, I’m hoping she’d be one of them.”

  God, this man. I’d always felt lucky to have parents like mine, who’d been more concerned with who I was than where I wanted to stick my dick. Max’s relationship with his dad had crumbled when he’d come out to him, and Sam’s parents still thought she was just going through a phase because they didn’t believe a thing like bisexual could exist. I’d told Dad I w
as gay when I was fifteen. I’d been nervous as hell, even if he hadn’t given me a reason to be. We were in the garage, which was where he’d been taking side jobs, building his business whenever he could. I remembered the scent of grease, how he’d wiped his hand with a dirty rag and ended up staining his hands further as I’d dropped to the bench. He’d listened and then, as he had tonight, sat there in thoughtful silence for a long minute before saying, “Well that’s a weight off my shoulders. No worries about becoming a grandfather too soon.” But he’d put his arm around me, stroked my hair, and the tension in my shoulders had eased as I’d leaned against him.

  In the garage that night, I upended four different boxes of other peoples’ cast-offs I’d collected on the job along with one box of old art supplies—including a shit ton of charcoal, pencils, and fine tipped markers—and my carving tools, and fanned it all around me, waiting for inspiration to strike. Before Dad had gotten sick, I’d thought maybe I’d do something with wood carving. Some hyper-realistic renditions of flowers and plant life, meticulously detailed as a kind of commentary on art imitating life, except the medium was also natural.

  Now it didn’t appeal to me. I wasn’t someone who believed all art had to be personal, but putting my focus on something impersonal just didn’t feel…right.

  Lying on my stomach, my chin on my forearms, I studied my collection, dragging my fingers through it. A peacock feather, a wood carving of a sailor, a watercolor wash that Mrs. Kemper had thrown in the trash pile. There were a few jewel cases from Mrs. Ward. I deconstructed them and put the plastic frame right in front of my eyes, peering through it at all the junk scattered around me. And then I got my idea.

  13

  Rob

  “It’s kind of weird, isn’t it?” Alex said, tipping his roller to one side, excess paint fleeing in pale gray rivulets.

  We were in the room my mom had designated as mine, painting over the violently electric blue walls. I had never felt much ownership of it, since I’d only spent time in it when home from college. There weren’t any leftover posters on the walls or cherished ephemera saved over the years, just a few mass-produced drawings of wildflowers and a photo of Summer and me at her high school graduation that Alex had studied for a few minutes, gaze darting between the picture and me before declaring that I looked the same. I wasn’t sure that was a compliment.

  There was no further mention of the night he’d stayed over, and though it didn’t feel like we were tiptoeing around the subject, it seemed to hover in the background like a guest hesitating at the door, unsure whether or not they’d be welcomed inside.

  I liked watching Alex paint, the deftness with which he soaked up the color on the roller, the absent flick of his wrist to get rid of the excess, and the hushed shoosh when he laid the saturated fuzz of the roller against the wall. Painting a wall wasn’t a task that required any art, but Alex made it look as if it did, somehow.

  “What’s weird?” I’d not been a passenger on his train of thought, so I had no idea what he was talking about.

  Alex raked a few strands of hair from his forehead and wiped a smear of paint on the side of his hand against his pants.

  “The whole concept of mass market appeal, I guess. Like painting over this room so it will visually appeal to more people.”

  It was a little strange, after all, I supposed. I watched another stripe of gray overtake blue. I thought I understood what he was getting at: that we were erasing a bit of someone to make room for others and in order to do that, we had to make the setting as bland as possible.

  “I mean, think about it. Paint is simple. This is simple, but I don’t think it’s just the idea of having to paint a room that turns people off. It’s…it’s—”

  “It’s like someone else’s history breathing down your neck.”

  “Something like that, yeah. It’s like when the buyer walks in on someone else’s personal color choices, this kind of subconsciously-projected territoriality kicks in.”

  “Like this blue sublimates one personality with the threat of another?” I gestured to the old wall color and squinted at him. I wasn’t sure if I was following now.

  “Yeah, it’s uncomfortable. It makes you think, why did this person originally choose this color? And a buyer doesn’t want to think that. They don’t want to think about the color, so we paint it in a color that you don’t have to think about.”

  “Some people would walk in and love the color, though.”

  “That’s true, but it’s a risk.”

  Alex did this on occasion, I’d noticed, wandered into philosophical thickets of thought. It beguiled me, these deeper glimpses of him, his thought processes. He could be shallow at moments, but those moments were also diffused by ones such as this. I didn’t think I’d ever had such random conversations with Sean. Maybe my sister on occasion back in high school or college, when we were trying to understand our place in the world—if such a thing could be understood. At some point, I’d given up on all of that, lost interest in favor of actionable things. Forward progress, upward progress. Mobility and retirement funds. The wonder of meaning had become uninteresting. Until Alex. I couldn’t say his wondering revived my own, but I liked listening to him and debating it with him. So maybe it was reinvigorating in its particular way.

  “I’ll bet ninety percent of the time, people don’t change the colors, that whoever buys this house will live with all of the grays and pale blues. But they want to feel like they have the option to without someone else’s colors breathing down the back of their neck or forcing them into it.”

  I wanted to tell him I thought he was both right and wrong. That most people probably wouldn’t change the colors, because the colors were fine. And at a certain point in life, fine was an acceptable barometer for things like paint colors or couches or the mug you drank coffee from. I thought of my apartment again and its beige walls. When I’d moved in, I’d noticed them only long enough to mark them as fine. And then had left them unchanged. But I would have done the same, even if they were purple.

  “What’s your favorite color? I’ve got a feeling it’s not teal.” He inclined his chin to indicate the bright blue wall he was painting over.

  “I have no idea. Do people actually have favorite colors after the age of twelve?”

  “Sure. Everyone gravitates toward something.” He nicked at his lip ring with his teeth and I looked away.

  “I don’t think I have a favorite color.”

  “Well, do you have more of a certain color of shirts?”

  I thought about that, then shook my head. “Most of my shirts are blue or white because…” I realized I had no good answer. Clothes didn’t matter to me. “Because I guess they go with my suits.”

  “You have a favorite color.” Alex gave me an exasperated stare that made me chuckle.

  “I really don’t think I have a favorite color.” Was he getting at something with all of this? I had this idea there was an underlying motivation that I couldn’t detect but was failing miserably at satisfying. “What’s yours?”

  “White.”

  “White is the absence of color.”

  He smiled, appearing impressed that I’d retained his color theory lectures, but shook his head. “White is possibility. Like a blank canvas. And it’s classic.”

  “I’ve only seen you wear white once.”

  His smile broadened into a grin. “That’s because I can’t ever keep white, white. But I’m a huge fan of the concept.”

  An hour later, we sat on the porch watching late afternoon wane toward twilight as we’d done over the past few days. Beers and Cracker Jack that Alex tossed me kernels of now and again made a lazy cap on a day of hard work. For the record, Cracker Jack and beer did not mix well. I didn’t know how Alex could stand it.

  “It’s fucking hot.” Alex flung his arm above his head, knocking it against the back of the Adirondack as he squirmed in the heat. We’d both stripped our shirts off long ago and were sitting around in our shorts, me in a
pair of Nike runners, Alex in some cut-off khakis that looked like they’d been used as a rag for paint drips.

  I polished off the rest of my beer and rolled the glass bottle across my forehead, trying to leach what lackluster chill remained in the glass. We were in the devil’s breath of summer, when even the wind coming off the ocean was lukewarm and exhausted. Alex’s bare feet were propped on the railing, his entire body stretched and sprawled to maximize airflow across his skin. Winslow was stretched likewise in a doggy version of Alex’s posture, panting heavily under his legs.

  “Let’s go swimming.”

  I considered the inviting sliver of blue through the gap in beachfront houses and palm trees across the street.

  “Come on, man. I’m dying. We’re already halfway there.” He gestured at his bare chest.

  I looked, of course I did, and could have kept looking.

  “I’ll get the beers.” I nudged off my running shoes and stood.

  Alex grinned and launched from the chair with more energy than I’d seen from him in the past hour. I took Winslow inside and returned with a couple of towels and the rest of the six-pack from my fridge. We walked down to the beach in companionable silence. These kinds of silences had become a stand-in for flirting, I’d noticed. Alex hadn’t fully withdrawn from me since the night of his birthday, but he’d kept a certain distance, as if someone had twisted the dimmer switch on his usual vibrancy, and I couldn’t blame him for it. We’d settled into an easy routine, but it did nothing to keep him from my mind. Maybe I’d wanted him to push back against me a little more, but he was right. I denied him over and over. It was hardly fair to have any expectations of him at this point.

  Twilight had drained the noon scorch from the sand, but it still toasted the tender arches of my feet as we left the boardwalk behind. After dropping the six-pack on top of the towels, I trailed Alex to the shoreline where waves lapped at our feet. Without pause, Alex hit the sea spray and kept walking, diving when he got waist deep. I hung back, watching as he shook his head from side to side like a dog when he surfaced. He was stunning, as always, late afternoon light like golden sludge sliding over his body, water droplets refracting the light, his nipples pinched hard against the chill of the water. I could have just stood there gazing at him with that tension building low in my gut, but it was rerouting to my cock, so I followed, diving and coming up next to him.