by John Inman
He gave us a hearty greeting, shaking our hands like pump handles. “This isn’t just an eye candy commercial,” he told us proudly. “This commercial actually offers spoken lines. Three of ’em. Commercials cost more to produce when they have dialog, you know. We here at Charlie Devlon’s Dodge Dealership spare no expense. No siree.”
Charlie Devlon waited for us to appear impressed; then he handed us a printout of the dialog. Directing us one at a time to stand in the bed of a bigass Dodge Ram 1500 HFE EcoDiesel half-ton pickup, he told us to think of ourselves as macho construction workers when we read our lines.
I knew I was in trouble the minute he said it. I could tell by the suspicious glance he shot in my direction that he was doubtful I would ever qualify as a construction worker, and the prospect of categorizing me as macho was pretty much a fairy tale. Hell, even I knew that. But he let me read.
Since old man Devlon seemed to have hung his hopes on Cory, and since I was about as butch as a tube of eyeliner and knew it, I decided to give Cory an extra boost in nailing the role.
Standing in the truck bed, I flung my arms wide and sang my lines out like a lisping Maria von Trapp on a frigging Alp.
Charlie Devlon stood slack-jawed watching me. His cigar died in his mouth. His eyes were the size of Ping Pong balls, and his face turned suddenly puce. I wasn’t sure, but I thought he was about to swallow his tongue. I could see Cory off to the side looking for a car to crawl under. He was puce too.
With my lines delivered, I patted my hair and daintily climbed down out of the stupid truck with a nelly little hop, which I thought would be the last nail in my audition’s coffin, and it most assuredly was.
Devlon pulled his dead cigar out of his mouth, looked at it like he’d never seen it before, then came up and flung an arm around my shoulders. He just stood there hugging me for a minute while he gathered his thoughts.
“Son,” he finally said. At that moment his thoughts must have dried up, and he just stood there hugging me for a couple more minutes. He cleared his throat, pulled the seat of his pants out of his ass in a philosophical sort of way, fished around in his ear with a fingertip for God knows what, and then tried again.
“Holy shit, son, I’m even embarrassed for the truck. I don’t know how to break it to you, but maybe you’re in the wrong line of work. You’re a little too light on your feet for this here profession, don’t you think? You’d do better in a candy store. Or maybe manicure school would be the ticket for you. I’m afraid you’re just—oh lordy, how do I put this—I’m afraid you’re just a little too elflike for selling diesel trucks. Maybe if I sold little pink Vespas it would be another story, but I don’t. So why don’t you park your perky little homosexual fanny over there on the running board of that truck—the running board is that steppy thing running along the side of it. That’s right—and why don’t you just sit there and ponder your future while we let your big burly friend here take a whack at auditioning. How would that be?”
I gave him a simpering wink and was rewarded by an appalled expression that I will never forget to my dying day. He jerked his arm off my shoulder like I’d just burst into flame.
I sashayed away and threw Cory a real wink. As we passed, I muttered, “It’s all yours. Give ’em hell.”
Cory looked properly astounded, but he pulled himself together, hopped gracefully into the bed of the truck and stood there all butch and unbending, barking out his lines like Clint Eastwood.
When he was finished, Charlie Devlon all but dropped to his knees in gratitude, as if one more swishy actor would have surely been the death of him.
Two minutes later, Cory was in Devlon’s office signing a contract for a commercial to be shot the following day while I continued to play my role, sitting on that running board, one leg crossed over the other, tapping my foot in the air and humming show tunes.
If I had any doubts about harpooning my own career to give a boost to Cory’s, those doubts were lost when I saw the happy look on Cory’s face when he came back out to join me.
I wondered if Charlie Devlon saw Cory scoop me into his arms, swing me around, and plant a big wet kiss of appreciation on my mouth. Not that I cared. Cory was happy. And a happy Cory was better than all the roles in the world.
To make things even better, we held hands in the car all the way home.
“Thank you,” he said a dozen times.
I merely blushed and said, “Pshaw. It was nothing you wouldn’t have done for me.”
He leaned into my ear as I steered us down the freeway. “You’re right, Malcolm, there isn’t anything I wouldn’t do for you.”
ON THE same night as the truck audition, Beth waited until Cory was out walking Rosemary before interrupting her yoga and rushing over to hug me tight.
“Cory told me what you did,” she said.
“I didn’t do anything.”
“Yes, you did. Did you see how happy he was?”
I smiled. Then my eyes misted over. For some strange reason, I didn’t trust my voice at that moment, so I nodded instead.
“You aren’t usually big on selflessness, Malcolm. This time you surprised me. You did a good thing.”
Beth’s eyes misted over too as she stood there holding me at arm’s length. “I’m glad Cory found you,” she said. “I’m glad you let him in.” She tapped her chest. “In here, I mean.”
“Is he in?” I asked.
She removed her hand from her own heart and laid it over mine. Her lips molded into a wise smile. Mona Lisa in yoga pants. “Oh, yes, Malcolm. I’m pretty sure he’s in.”
“I-I’ve never felt like this before.”
Beth stroked my cheek. “I know you haven’t, honey.”
“I don’t know what to do.”
“Don’t do anything,” she said. “It’ll happen in its own time.”
“What’ll happen?”
She gave her head a sad little shake, but she smiled all the way through it. “Everything, Malcolm. Everything will happen.”
Chapter Twelve
CORY’S TRUCK commercial ran three weeks later. We spotted it during the evening news on Channel 7. Cory, Beth, and I sat frozen, soaking up every nanosecond of Cory’s time in the spotlight. We had shared the restaurant commercial in a three-way orgy of unbridled ego several weeks back, but this time around it was Cory all by himself. Center spot. The star of the show.
He was terrific. Butch, handsome, sexy. He stood in the back of that damn truck like a god. If I had the money, I’d have run right out and bought a Dodge Ram 1500 HFE EcoDiesel half-ton pickup on the spot.
Beth and I pounded Cory with congratulatory slaps on the back. We hugged him until he was a rumpled mess. His smile was so wide his dimples were a foot deep. Beth shook up a beer and drenched him with it while I went around after her with a towel, wiping up the mess.
All the while Cory took turns laughing like a hyena and looking all solemn and humbled at the very same time. For every hug bestowed on him by Beth and me, he bestowed just as many back on us.
He stood and cradled his beer like an Oscar statuette. “I’d like to thank the Academy,” he announced grandly. Then he got serious. “If it wasn’t for you guys, I’d still be sitting in Missouri living another life and wishing I was someone else.”
When he said it, his eyes never left my face.
That night in bed was the first night Cory and I did not make love. We merely lay in each other’s arms for hours, talking. So many times that night I wanted to tell him things I had never told anyone, but I just couldn’t do it. The words hovered in the air around us like phantom sparrows. I could almost hear them. But they remained unsaid. By myself and by him.
When we finally slept, my dreams were uneasy. The only comfort I had through the long cool night, was the bliss of lying in Cory’s arms. For even on that night, as he had done every other night since we had joined forces in my bed, Cory held me close from night to morning. I had forgotten how it felt to sleep without his heat against me. With
out his warm breath stirring my hair. Without his heavy satin cock lying soft or hard upon my leg, filled with promises. Promises kept and promises yet to come.
In my dreams I said the words. Almost every night. While I slept, I screamed them to the sky. I whispered them to the wind. I tasted them on my tongue. I heard them in my ear.
Awake, I remained mute. I couldn’t bring myself to utter them. Not even to myself.
Then one night, the words finally came. By an incredible stroke of serendipity, they burst forth in a hushed whisper in third-row orchestra seats in a darkened theater, with music and laughter filling the air and Beth up onstage in front of us, tap-dancing her little heart out like Ann Miller without the big hair.
Remembering it all later, I would think—how fitting. After all, a theater is the place for magic. A theater is the place where dreams come true.
Sometimes maybe even real ones.
IT WAS a month after the debut of Cory’s truck commercial.
Beth’s tap dancing had improved a lot. Cory and I sat in the audience watching her tap her way through the Coronado Playhouse production of Me and My Girl. Beth had no lines—she was strictly chorus, but she held her own. Cory and I were proud of her. Not only did she have a three-week run ahead of her, but she was actually very good in the role. I was trying hard not to be jealous.
While the show proceeded onstage, Cory and I and two or three hundred other people sat in the shadows behind the footlights, humming along to the tunes, gaily tapping our toes to the music. It was community theater, of course. The sets were sparse, the costumes Spartan. Yet every soul onstage, including Beth, gave it their all. Their love for the work shone through, brightening the less than stellar wardrobe, the lackluster backdrops, sprinkling it all with showbiz magic. They brought the music to such merry life it rattled happily through the rafters above our heads. And through our hearts.
Cory’s knee rested snugly against mine. The moment the overture began, Cory scooped my hand in his and claimed it for the rest of the night. At the top of the first act, just as Beth began working her way up to the number’s big finale with the other dancers, Cory’s index finger began stroking my palm.
I felt him tense just before he leaned in toward me and, in a puff of sweet breath, whispered three quiet words.
“I love you.”
I gazed over at him in the flickering stage lights and saw a lone tear streaming down his cheek. The show was a comedy.
By the time he looked away, then turned back to me, his eyes were afloat in tears. He clutched my hand all the tighter, tore his gaze from mine, and refocused his attention on the stage. In profile, I saw the tears continue to slide down his cheeks. He let them fall, unhindered, as if he had earned every one of them. And maybe he had.
The show forgotten, I sat there watching him, remembering his three little words. It was the first time in my life I had ever heard those words directed at me from anyone other than my mother. Hearing them now, my heart drummed a thundering tympany.
I lifted Cory’s hand and pressed it to my lips. He glanced at me and licked a tear from the corner of his mouth. His face was solemn.
“I love you,” he whispered again, as if maybe I had missed it the first time. There was pain in the way he spoke the words—a gentle plea of torment.
A quiet sob welled up inside me. I hiccupped.
I whispered back, “I love you too. I always have.”
With my heart racing, my throat constricted, and trying to ignore the old man sitting next to us who was listening to every word we said, I thought, There now. That wasn’t so hard, was it? I said I love you. The world didn’t implode. My teeth didn’t fall out. I actually feel better for it. So I guess that’s it, then. I’m in love. Officially. And believe it or not, the man I love actually loves me back. He told me so first. Holy cow. But still Cory looks so sad. Why does he look so sad?
We sat through the next five minutes of the show not knowing what the hell was happening up on the stage. Finally, Cory tugged me to my feet, and we awkwardly weaved our way between the seats and past the legs of annoyed strangers to the aisle, where we made a hurried exit from the theater. Beth wouldn’t miss us. She was too busy being a star.
Cory solicitously laid his hand to the small of my back as he ushered me through the lobby and onto the street. Once there, under a streetlight with a gazillion people traipsing back and forth, Cory pulled me into his arms and kissed me. Sort of like John Wayne kissing Maureen O’Hara in The Quiet Man. Romantic, you know? Assertive. Brooking no opposition. I was putty in his arms. But then, I always had been.
“Let’s go home,” he said. “I need to hold you. I need to feel you in my arms. I need to know you’re really there. You’re really mine.”
“I’m yours,” I said, pushing my face to his throat. Ignoring the people on the street brushing past. Inhaling his scent. Trusting his heart. “I think I’ve always been yours.”
He stared down at me, his handsome face strobed by passing headlights. He trailed a gentle thumb across my lips as his eyes burned through me. The pain on his face was gone now. He was simply trying to understand. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I don’t know. I just couldn’t.”
The worry in his eyes disappeared. He offered me a kind smile. There was love in it. I could tell. “I knew it anyway,” he said. “I knew it before you did.”
“You were always smarter than me,” I mumbled into his chest. “I’m sorry I didn’t give you what you wanted.”
He stroked my hair, pulling my face closer to his chest. “You’ve never failed me once. Don’t ever think you have. You’ve given me everything. You’ve made me happy. You’ve made me love my life. You’ve made me love myself.”
“Have I really done all that?” I asked, my lips brushing his shirtfront.
“Yes,” he said, and after casting his glance up and down the street as if trying to remember where we’d parked the car, he took off at a brisk clip in the right direction, pulling me along behind him, trapping my arm in his, never letting me break the connection.
Twenty minutes later, a little breathless, we stood face to face at the side of my bed. Our clothes were scattered on the floor around us. We were naked. His arms were wrapped tightly around me, and our two cocks, already hard, lay squeezed between us, nuzzling up against each other.
Cory’s lips found my mouth. They found my throat. A tremor ran through me as he lowered himself to his knees in front of me and took me into his mouth. I rose up on tiptoe, the muscles in my legs quaking. Clutching his head as he stared up at me, I slid my cock in and out of that loving portal. His hands stroked my ass as his tongue and lips worked magic.
Just as I began to see stars, he released me and pressed his moist lips to my stomach while my cock lay pulsing against his cheek, wondering why it was suddenly being ignored.
Nestling his chin over my belly button, he once again gazed up at me as I stared down at him.
“Did you mean what you said back in the theater, Malcolm? Do you really love me?”
I stroked his temples with my fingertips. My hands were still shaking. His mouth had brought me this close to coming. I wondered if he knew that.
“I think I’ve always loved you,” I said. “I think I loved you before you ever came to California. Before you ever came into my life. Before I even knew who you were.”
His dimples flashed. “That seems highly unlikely.”
I stepped closer, pressing my dick to his cheek. A drop of precome smeared his skin. He tore his eyes from me for a brief second, just long enough to kiss away another drop as it seeped from my cock.
Only then did his eyes find me again.
“I didn’t know who you’d be,” I said. “I didn’t know when you’d find me. I just knew maybe love was waiting somewhere for me. I was afraid to believe it. I was afraid to hope. But the minute I saw your green eyes, I think my days were numbered. The magic in all of this is that you actually love me back. At least you say you do.�
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His warm hands slid along my back and hips as he laid a kiss on my stomach. I felt his hard cock nudging my knee down below.
He found my eyes again. “I was infatuated by your picture. But I’ve loved you, I mean really loved you, since the first time we made love. You were so—amazing. So open. So fearless. So sexy. So giving. Your body is the exact type of body I’ve craved. Your skin is exactly what I’ve dreamed of tasting. Feeling. Holding.” He closed his eyes and pressed his face into my stomach. “I can’t hear it enough. Tell me again, Malcolm. Tell me you love me again.”
“I love you,” I said, and pulling him to his feet so that his long body slid upward against mine, I whispered on a trembling breath, “Let me show you.”
He allowed me to ease him around and lower him onto the bed. He lay back, staring up at me with a growing heat in his eyes as I eased myself down on my knees between his legs, coaxing them apart to give me room.
His fingers dawdled in my hair as he watched my mouth slide along his thigh, his hip, across the fuzz on his belly, and finally plant gentle kisses along the length of his cock. It bobbed of its own accord with every lingering kiss. When I could wait no longer, I slid my tongue across the ridge of his corona, oh so slowly, before climbing higher and pressing a kiss to his slit, gathering up the smear of crystal moisture there. It tasted sweet, that moisture. It tasted like I knew his orgasm would taste later. I was an expert at the taste of this man beneath me. Just as he was an expert at the taste of me.
With his smoldering eyes burrowing into mine and his body beginning to tremble beneath me, he watched me tuck his cock between my lips and take it in as far as I could. His back arched into me as his fingers stroked my hair. Every now and then he would grip my hair almost frantically as my mouth brought him closer to where I wanted him to go. Closer to coming. Closer to filling my mouth with his juices. Closer to hearing him cry out as he burst into orgasm beneath me.