Every Time I Think of You

by Jim Provenzano

  “After we get stoned.”

  “And have pizza?” Everett begged in a childlike tone.

  “And have pizza.”

  More silence followed, until Everett began singing, softly at first, “Mommy’s all right, Daddy’s alright, they just seem a little weird …”

  Chapter 8

  Fortunately, Holly had arrived home soon after we’d returned. Instead of feeling relaxed while alone with Everett, I felt edgy and frustrated, despite his flirty small talk and attempts to calm me.

  We’d changed into more comfortable sweatpants, and for myself a T-shirt and Everett a rather cute thermal undershirt. He’d warned me that Holly’s apartment could be a bit drafty. We’d waited for her arrival before stuffing the small bong with the frighteningly acquired pot. I didn’t want to meet her while high, and Everett understood.

  Holly turned out to be as wild, gregarious and self-aware as her younger brother, and as beautiful. Her long brown hair kept her tugging it back behind her ears. We had ordered a pizza from a flyer attached to the fridge by a magnet, which pleased her as she dug in while Everett told of our minor misadventure.

  “Oh. My. God. I have to call Barry.” She abruptly left for the kitchen, where it seemed the only phone was. So that was the name of Mr. Young Republican.

  Promising to “clear things up,” she assured us that no tattooed felons would come banging on her door, and that the gun was her dealer’s way of showing off. The distant one-sided conversation in the kitchen made me wonder how much of that laughter was at our expense.

  An old black-and-white Cary Grant movie set in some small town played on the television. Most of the pizza had been consumed, and Everett and I sat on the couch, which would soon be our bed. I felt a bit awkward, and the pot gave me that dizzying tingle I’d recalled from the few times I’d smoked any.

  As Everett once again leaned in for a little pizza-flavored smooch, I felt a sudden rumbling in my lower intestines, and headed abruptly for the bathroom.

  As I ran sink water to disguise what I knew would be a rather noisy release, I flushed the toilet, then waited for a second round. Dutifully washing my hands, and my face, then impulsively slurping down some tap water, I was dismayed to see how red my eyes had become. I looked in the cabinet for eye drops, found some, and dabbed a few drops while staring at the ceiling.

  “You okay?” Everett asked as I returned to the sofa.

  “Yep. Just a little peristalsis.”

  Holly had returned, seated on the nearby chair. “A what?”

  “Sounds like a drag name,” Everett joked. “Paris Talsis.” The two of them burst into laughter, until I got the joke and forced a grin.

  “Oh,” Holly pointed at the television, having abandoned that bit of humor. “Randolph, Randolph…”

  “Scott,” Everett finished.

  “They were lovers, you know.”

  I looked at the TV. “Who, that woman?” The actress was the subject of a brief argument between Cary Grant and the other man, handsome, but in a different way, rugged. They both wore tuxedos and were trying to simultaneously dance with the wide-eyed blonde.

  “No, him and Cary Grant.”

  “No.”

  “Yes,” Everett corrected me.

  “See? You’re not the first,” Holly nodded toward us. I was stunned. While she obviously knew what was up between us, it seemed so casual.

  Everett chuckled, spinning off a completely unrelated reminiscence between him and his sister. While I was familiar with the known behavioral changes that took place under the influence of pot, Holly and Everett’s talk raced like the chatter of chipmunks, almost a secret lingo full of inside jokes.

  My own buzz left me in silence while gazing at the TV screen. I longed for another scene between these two handsome actors, to see some indication of the rumors Holly and Everett had mentioned, but there were none.

  After a brief moment between the leads and two parental character actors, the blonde rode off in a convertible with Cary Grant, unsure of her fate. The movie wrapped up abruptly with a traditional script-fonted The End.

  “What about you, Reid?”

  Holly had been talking to me.

  “Sorry. What?”

  “College plans?”

  “Oh.”

  Everett had also turned his attention to me, only slightly distracted by a commercial. “I have to send out some applications. I might have a scholarship at Temple University.”

  “In…?”

  “Well, my major’ll probably be Geography, but I want to focus on the environment. I was thinking about Forestry at Penn State, but Philadelphia seems more interesting than State College.”

  “That’s a bit unusual, to go to a city to study trees,” Everett said. He was honestly perplexed or being sarcastic. I couldn’t tell.

  “Well,” Holly joked. “You’ve already studied the forests, or one, at least.”

  “Bad joke, Sis.” Everett grinned nevertheless.

  Holly said, “You could go to Carnegie Mellon. We could be neighbors.”

  “They don’t have the degree I want,” I said, adding, “Besides, my parents can’t afford that.”

  “Sorry.” Holly gulped her soda. “So, your mom’s car’s okay?” Holly asked.

  “Yeah, it’s just a little dent,” I said. “I’ll make up some story; tell him I was teaching Everett how to drive.”

  “What?” Everett shot back. “I know how to drive.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t have your license,” I said, confused.

  “Oh, that.” He offered a sheepish grin. “It’s nothing.”

  “You didn’t tell him yet?” Holly eyed her brother.

  Everett glared back at her, then rolled his eyes. “Actually, I did have my license, but I … Okay, I stole my mom’s car. Once.”

  “The Mercedes,” Holly added.

  “My bad boy phase.” He shrugged as if it were nothing. “I was acting out after the divorce. Mom thought it would teach me a lesson to have my license taken away. It was ... stupid.”

  “Oh,” I said. At least that small lie was finally explained.

  “Anyway,” Holly said, “I just want you to know you’re safe here. It’s cool. I love my little bro, despite his sometimes delinquent behavior, and you’re his friend, and that’s that.”

  “Thanks,” I nodded, choking back a burst of emotion. Everett leaned close, gave my shoulder a few rubs.

  “Just don’t give him your car keys,” she joked. Everett replied by tossing a crumpled paper napkin at her.

  “Well, then,” Holly stood, “I will retire to my room, sketch some more ridiculous costumes and dream of young love.”

  Before closing her bedroom door, her head popped out, “But keep it down, horn dogs.”

  We were alone again, somewhat.

  “You want some more of anything?” Everett gestured toward the pizza and the bong.

  “No, thanks.”

  “Okay, let’s…” He made a gesture towards the table. I got up, grabbed the pizza box and cups, and took them into the kitchen as Everett pulled the table out from the sofa.

  As I washed a few cups and a knife, tossed the paper napkins in the garbage, basically busying myself as Everett adjusted the sofa bed, I tried to prepare myself for what would or should happen next. Would we dance slowly like two tuxedoed gentlemen, then fall into each other’s arms again? What happened after the fade to black? Our previous couplings had been so abrupt. This night should mean something more, but so far the whole trip had seemed like just a fumbled jaunt.

  But when I returned to the living room, Everett had shifted things to a romantic mood. The room was darkened to only the flickering light of two candles, the TV turned off in exchange for a softly-playing James Taylor album on the stereo. The couch had become a rumpled bed. He tossed pillows onto it.

  “Come ‘ere.”

  I approached him, ready, I hoped.

  In our socked feet, he led me in a swaying slow dance until
the tents in our sweatpants bumped together too often to ignore. He then simply sat with me on the sofa and slid under the covers, smiling, anticipating, and I joined him.

  While the room’s heater kept the slight draft from the large windows at bay, the high ceilings of the living room left me feeling exposed. I tried to ignore Holly’s proximity behind her bedroom door, tried to remember that this was our third time. A charm?

  I let Everett lead me, and he knew that he should. We hugged and kissed, caressed faces and chests, pulling shirts up, sweatpants down, pushing our skin close together under the blankets and a sheet that kept getting caught under our feet.

  His mouth trailed over my chest, down toward the fuzzy parts around my erection, his lips enveloping it slowly, before moving downward to my thighs. My hands awkwardly grasped at any bump and crevasse of his smaller body and its little muscled curves, awaiting a turn to reciprocate what he did to me.

  “Your legs are so long,” he whispered as he caressed my thigh. “Like a giraffe.”

  “Uh, thanks?”

  “I feel like Curious George climbing all over you.”

  He was a bit simian, I noticed as I once again felt the tufts of dark hair between his legs, and the beginnings of a fuzzy trail from his belly to his groin. My leaner and longer body surrounded him, my tapered fingers caressing the ridges of muscle at his waist.

  “Wait,” he whispered as he untangled his sweatpants, pulled them off, then leaned over the sofa bed to forage in his duffel bag for a small tube. I heard a squishy sound. Everett bashfully smirked as he seemed to wipe his butt. He leaned over again, and in the shaft of a streetlight, combined with the candle glow, his buttocks rose, and I understood what we were about to do.

  Placing a small towel underneath himself, Everett lay on his belly, turned back to grasp my cock, then aimed it toward himself. After tugging the covers over our bodies, I positioned myself closer.

  “Just lay on top, first,” he whispered.

  “I never…”

  “I know. You’ll figure it out.”

  But first, I did what I wanted. The pot had settled, no longer inducing the antsy itch. I felt free to indulge, to caress his back, to hold the mounds of flesh and toy with the dark wisps of hair between them. My fingers, sticky from the lubricant, burrowed lightly. Everett raised his hips in response. “Come on, Starsky. You promised.”

  I pressed myself atop him, concentrated kisses on the few slight freckles along his shoulders, the nape of his neck, his ear, the side of his face as he turned, opening his mouth for a sideways kiss that became a shared soft humming between us as I slowly began to grind my hips above his.

  Nudge by nudge, I dabbed, then poked, then retreated, then slid in, then out, overwhelmed with the sensation of his muscles clamping around me, then releasing, relenting as I slid further inside him. I found myself needing to think not of him, looking up at those reserved French people in the poster on the wall above us. Thrusting with too much intensity, realizing I finally had some power over him, I tried to hold off, wanting it to last, to grab some kind of memory before it all dissolved.

  The album had finished before I did. The slight squeaking sound of the sofa bed amid the silence made me starkly aware of what we were doing. Abruptly, Everett shoved himself out from under me, rolled over, repositioned his legs, wrapping them around my hips, guiding me back inside him.

  The covers had slid off us, but being exposed made it more intense. The shock of looking eye to eye, of kissing him, arching my back up to clearly see his face under tousled hair, and his own strokes to himself, assured me. Now, remember this, burn this into your racing heart, ignore all else but his almost proud smile and his panting breath.

  With a gasp, he unleashed on himself. I followed inside of him, and the wet puddles glued us together as I collapsed atop him.

  His fingers grazed my back as I panted, then soon calmed. He eased me off his chest, slipped the towel from under himself, wiped some of the sweat and sperm from our skin, and repositioned us into a more comfortable sideways hug. We tugged our disheveled sweatpants back on, but remained shirtless. Under the tugged-back blankets, our mutual body heat sufficed.

  His face adjacent to my own, he whispered, not exactly into my ear, but actually at my forehead, “I told you we’d be great.”

  “Are you always right?”

  “I’m right for you.”

  “But when will we see each other again? I mean, what, Tuesday’s school. We’ll be totally separated.”

  “Pro tempore.”

  “What?”

  “‘For the time being.’ Shhh.” His fingers touched my lips, then slid from my face, past my sternum, settling at my waist after a playful cupping at my groin. “Time means nothing.”

  I didn’t believe him, but didn’t argue.

  Our romantic post-coital bliss was interrupted by an unpleasant odor.

  “Sorry,” Everett pulled the blankets off himself, fanning them as he left for the bathroom. “Tried to get by with a silent but deadly.” He winced, then let rip a comical toot before padding off to the bathroom. I almost thought I heard his sister giggling from inside her room.

  After some sounds in the bathroom that he managed to disguise with the running faucet –great minds think alike– he returned, momentarily bashful. I wanted to say how something so clearly human endeared him to me even more, but I guessed it would hardly be romantic to compliment his farting.

  We tried to sleep, but our hands continued more aimless grazing.

  “That day … in the forest?”

  “Mmm,” I mumbled.

  “... was like I conjured you.”

  “Hmm?”

  “I wasn’t just doing that to do it. I was hoping for someone as daring, as crazy as me. And there you were.”

  While I considered our meeting a mere accident of good timing, I couldn’t disagree. I remembered a feeling of urgency, unlike so many times before in more reasonable seasons, since my outdoor pleasures had become almost routine. I’d never thought some other boy would consider the option, the location, as perfect. It had been purely solitary, a gesture in defiance of the thought of a potential companion.

  That happy accident had led to all this. But the line of our proximity, between the field and the forest would in a matter of days stretch further than he or I would be able to bear for long.

  Chapter 9

  Despite the quiet joy of being so close to him in the bed, Everett’s tousling shifts and our mutual body heat had kept me half-awake for most of the night. By morning, in my drowsy state, I tried to keep still after repositioning myself alongside him, an arm slung over his side. I wanted to cherish this quiet time of our bodies touching.

  But soon he rolled over, and after a bit of affectionate nuzzling he led me to the bathroom for a shared shower that led to some playful soaping and, surprisingly, Everett’s almost reverent gesture of toweling me dry.

  Our preparations for breakfast roused a rumpled bathrobe-wrapped Holly, who jokingly slumped into a kitchen chair like a disgruntled diner patron.

  “How are my two love birds?” she said, perking up after a few sips of coffee. Everett had learned a few tips from his family housekeeper, and presented each of us with plates of scrambled eggs and buttered toast.

  Holly’s conversation, more of a monologue, as Everett had predicted, revolved around her version of her year spent living in Paris. We listened attentively, and at one point, Everett casually placed his hand over my own.

  “You really should go sometime,” she suggested.

  “Oh, I could never–”

  “Yes, you could,” Everett said. “We could go this summer.”

  “Actually, I might have plans.”

  “Which are?” Holly sipped her coffee.

  “If I get accepted at Temple, I might get a summer job at Allegheny State Park, and that’s good for advanced credit.”

  “Keeping grizzly bears from eating the tourists?” Everett joked.

  “Th
ere aren’t any,” I half-scowled. “Just black bears.”

  “I know,” Everett patted my shoulder. “Really, though, what would you do?”

  “Give tours, probably; lead hikes for summer school, keep the tourists from getting lost.”

  “Ranger Reid! Those brown uniforms are hot.”