Zach set his glass on the end table, then reached out and took the condom. Then he said, “Beat you to the bedroom,” and took off, David at his heels.
Inside, he stepped to the side as David came in and grabbed him around the waist, tossing him onto the bed. “For the love of pancakes,” David gasped, “what the hell do you press?”
“Easily more than you weigh,” Zach said, and pounced on him, pinning him to the mattress. “No wrestling shit,” he murmured against David’s mouth.
“No wrestling shit,” David whispered. He wriggled his arms loose from Zach’s hold and wound them around Zach’s neck. “No shit at all. Make love to me, Zach Tyler. I’m yours.”
Zach kissed him leisurely, thoroughly, then abandoned David’s mouth for more interesting territory farther south. He loved David’s body, the strong, lean muscles, the long bones and graceful conformation. A beautiful package. Then he made the mistake of looking up into that beautiful face as he licked into the divot of his navel and saw David watching him, his heart in his brown eyes.
Zach closed his own eyes. David loved him. David loved him. He didn’t know what to do. Didn’t know if he was even capable of reciprocating. He wanted David, true, but love—that was asking more than he felt ready to give. It was commitment. It was eternity. It was prison….
He flipped David over and started back up at David’s neck, kissing the nape, safe from those eyes. He licked down the spine, pressing hot, wet kisses to each of the bumps of vertebrae. When he got to the small of David’s back, he closed his hands on David’s hips, hiking him up on his knees, then pushed his knees apart and licked down David’s crease to his opening.
David arched his back, moaning as Zach’s tongue stroked him, and his hand went down to curl around his own dick, his other arm supporting him. Zach nuzzled him until David was rocking back with every brush of Zach’s tongue; then Zach fumbled for the condom he’d dropped on the bed and reached for the lube on the nightstand.
He eased into David slowly, carefully. They’d only actually fucked the one time last night, and he was worried about David still being sore, but it had been David who’d initiated this, so he figured he was okay. Still, he was careful, and took his time. He eased forward and kissed David again on the nape of the neck.
David turned his head so that he could kiss Zach. “That feels good,” he said, a note of surprise in his voice. Zach smiled at him, then kissed him behind his ear. “Good,” he said. “Cuz it feels great to me.”
“You know,” David said thoughtfully, “there are other ways of doing this.”
“I know,” Zach said, and slid his arm around David, across his chest, cupping the front of David’s shoulder, pulling him close as he sat carefully back on his heels, David in his lap. “Like this.”
“Oh,” David said, and then as Zach rocked forward into him, “oh.”
A shaft of early sunlight had broken through the bedroom window and Zach’s movement had brought them into its illumination. Across the room, their bodies were reflected in the big mirror over Zach’s dresser. Zach watched them move a moment, seeing David’s skin bright in the light, his own dark sweats and dark hair a shadow behind him. “Look at you,” he whispered in David’s ear. “Look at you—so beautiful.” And he was, his slim body a bright shaft against Zach’s darkness, his lean thighs splayed wantonly on either side of Zach’s, his elegant cock curved high. Zach slid his hand down to play with that lovely thing and looked up to see David’s head thrown back against his shoulder, his sleek golden chest glittering with sweat and his breath coming hard. “Open your eyes,” he said in David’s ear. “Open your eyes and look at yourself. I want you to watch yourself.”
“What?” David said in confusion, and opened his eyes. He stared at their reflections in the mirror. “Oh, my God, Zach.”
“Watch yourself,” Zach said. “Watch how beautiful you are,” and he rocked forward again, his hand moving on David’s cock. David reached his arms back to circle Zach’s neck, freeing Zach from the need to hold him; he released David’s shoulder and began to use both hands to caress his lover’s body as he made love to him. When he felt David beginning to tense, he said urgently, “Don’t close your eyes!” and met David’s gaze in the mirror as those dark eyes glazed and his body surrendered to Zach’s.
Then Zach was climaxing too, his hands pressing on David’s hips and thighs as he plunged deep and came, then fell backward on the bed, David clutched to him. David rolled them both onto their sides and Zach straightened out his legs and spooned himself against David’s back, oddly reluctant to disentangle himself.
After a while David said, “Well, that was interesting. It’s not quite what I had in mind, but it was interesting.”
“What did you have in mind?” Zach asked sleepily.
“I was thinking more in terms of face to face,” David said. He turned his head to look at Zach. “I’d like to watch you come sometime. I know, I should have been able to see that this time, but quite frankly I was completely out of it. You do that to me, you know. Fuck me into oblivion.”
“Is that a good thing?” Zach asked, not completely sure.
“Oh, yeah,” David smiled, and kissed him. “Oh, yeah.” He kissed him again then curled back into the shelter of Zach’s body. Zach lay his head on his pillow.
IT HAD been easily five a.m. by the time they’d gotten back to sleep, so David was surprised when he woke at six-thirty to find himself alone. The apartment was silent, no sound of water running or footsteps, and when he rolled over and felt the sheets, they were cold. He got up and pulled his jeans on before padding barefoot out to the kitchen.
Zach wasn’t there, either, but David’s cell phone rested on the breakfast bar, so he picked it up and pulled up the Andrew application. “Good morning, David,” Andrew said.
“Good morning, Andrew. Can you give me Zach’s location, please?”
“I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Andrew said in the voice of Hal from 2001: A Space Odyssey.
David laughed. Zach had programmed Andrew to say that when he was about twelve. “Funny, Andrew. Where’s Zach?”
“According to his cell phone, he’s headed northwest on Route 24 at speed toward Cascade,” Andrew said. “He had me open the concealed north gate twelve point six minutes ago.”
“Thanks,” David said, puzzled, and disconnected. Then he saw the piece of paper on the kitchen table.
It read, in Zach’s oddly childish scrawl, “Had to go out. See you later.” No salutation, no signature. David stared at it a long moment, feeling sick and confused. He let out his breath in an exasperated exhalation. Something told him he’d better get used to that feeling.
ZACH SAW David about fifty yards ahead of him as he came over the last rise north of the house. He slowed the Ducati immediately, letting its engine drop rpms until it was a low, barely audible purr, the bike going just fast enough to stay vertical. David had to have heard it, but gave no sign, just kept running at his usual steady speed. Zack kept pace with him until he turned off on the track that would take him away from the main house and toward his own. Then Zach stopped and watched until he vanished before revving the engine again and driving into the garage.
He went upstairs. There was no sign David had ever been there: the bed was neatly made, the towels Zach had left on the floor hung back up, the bedroom garbage emptied and the sink devoid of the glass he’d had his Scotch in last night. The note he’d left for David wasn’t on the table; he found it crumpled in the garbage and wondered if it meant anything other than David’s tidying up before he left. Maybe David was pissed at him. Maybe he’d decided it wasn’t worth the effort. That would make it easier on Zach; the decision taken out of his hands. If David wrote him off, he wouldn’t have to worry about any of it. No fear of hurting David; no fear of David hurting him. No decisions to make. Done. Over. Just the rest of his life to go through alone, but that was okay. He could do alone.
He opened the refrigerator and to
ok out juice and a couple of slices of Annie’s homemade bread for toast. There was microwave bacon there, too, so he took that out as well and put the whole package on the paper plate he put in the microwave while the bread was toasting.
He ate the toast dry and the bacon crisp to the point of almost burnt, but tasted none of it.
The apartment was so quiet. Why would it seem so unusually so? It wasn’t as if he was a noisy tenant at the worst of times. But today the silence was different—more hollow, more echoing.
More lonely.
“Shit,” he said aloud, and tossed the paper plate into the garbage. No point in hanging around here; there was a fully equipped gym with his name on it at the house. And gyms didn’t care.
WHEN ZACH walked into the sunroom, his mother was telling the shrink, “Oh, we had a lovely day yesterday. Zach’s friend the lieutenant came for the weekend, and David came for breakfast, and both Saturday and Sunday we grilled out. Zach took Mike up around the Garden of the Gods. Have you ever been there? The rock formations are just spectacular—oh, hello, honey.” Jane smiled at Zach. “I was just telling Dr. Barrett….”
“I heard,” Zach said shortly. He dropped into his chair, stretched out his legs and stared at the toes of his boots.
There was silence in the sunroom; then Richard said evenly, “That wasn’t terribly polite, Zach.”
“Sorry.” Zach bit down on a smart-ass remark. His parents didn’t deserve to catch the flak from his lousy mood. Even without looking up, though, he knew his parents were exchanging The Look, the one they always exchanged when he was being a dick. And he was. He didn’t want to be, but he was. He sighed wearily and kept studying his toes.
“Often,” the shrink said to Dick and Jane, “an exciting or enjoyable weekend leaves a sense of let-down behind it. One feels like one can’t ever recapture quite the same enjoyment. Which is true, of course. We can’t repeat our good days, but we’ll have other days just as enjoyable in different ways. Did you have a good time yesterday, Zach?”
Zach shrugged. “I guess. Yeah. It was good. Okay, anyway.”
“How are you feeling now?”
“Okay.”
“Your body language doesn’t seem to agree.”
Zach shrugged again.
“Honey, did something happen last night to upset you?”
“No,” Zach said, then more slowly, “No…. No, nothing happened. I mean, yeah, shit happened, but I’m not upset or anything from that. It was a good evening. Nothing bad happened. Well, I had a nightmare. And I….” he trailed off.
“What did you do?”
“I socked Taff,” Zach said curtly. “Accidentally, so it wasn’t quite payback for him punching me. But he wasn’t mad.” He looked up and met Dr. Barrett’s eyes. “I’m sleeping with Taff,” he said bluntly.
“Is this a new development?”
“Yeah. Since Saturday night.” He glanced at his parents. “I figured you guys figured it out.”
“Well, we suspected,” Richard said. “Pretty confidently.”
“How do you and Jane feel about this?” Dr. Barrett asked Richard. Zach looked up to watch their faces.
Richard hesitated, and then said, “Ambivalent.”
“Join the club,” Zach muttered, and went back to studying his feet.
“Why do you feel ambivalent, Richard?”
Zach’s father sighed. “Well,” he said, “it’s a big step for Zach. We worry about him, but he has to take the opportunities he’s presented with, and make the decisions only he can make, and starting a relationship is both a big opportunity and a big gamble. Jane and I both love David too—he’s part of our family—but our main concern is and always will be Zach. We don’t want him to get hurt, but we have to let him take the chance. It’s not comfortable.”
“I want Zach to have a good relationship with a good person,” Jane said fiercely. “And David is a good person. As long as he won’t hurt Zach. And David’s been Zach’s protector all his life, and I think Zach will be safe with David.”
“What if I don’t want to be safe?” Zach demanded. “What if I don’t want David as a protector? I mean, Jesus! I’m not a little boy anymore. Okay, I’m not quite a normal grown-up, either, but I can take care of myself. You know,” he said roughly, “I fuck David, not the other way around.”
Jane went scarlet. Richard’s hands clenched. “Just because we more or less approve of your relationship with David,” he said tightly, “that doesn’t mean that the details of that relationship are anyone’s business but your own. I’m sure you think that this is an appropriate venue for sharing private information, but there is a limit, Zach.”
“Why did you feel you needed to share that, Zach?” Dr. Barrett asked, unruffled.
Zach didn’t answer right away. Finally he said, “They think I’m still a little boy. They think that if they’re careful enough nothing will ever hurt me. But I’m not a little boy. I may be retarded, but I’m not young. I don’t want David to protect me. I… I’m not sure yet what I do want from him, but I don’t want that. But he does. He does. I feel safe with him, and that is not good.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because nobody’s safe. Nobody has the right to feel safe, because it can all be taken away from you. David makes me feel safe and that makes me feel not safe.” Zach shot out of his chair and started pacing. “I know, it’s stupid. But I don’t want to feel that way. I can’t let myself feel that way. If I let myself, what will happen when I’m not safe anymore? I won’t be ready. I won’t be prepared.”
“You’ll be vulnerable,” Dr. Barrett said.
“Yes! And I can’t be. I can’t.”
“Zach, being vulnerable is part and parcel of being human.”
“Then I don’t want to be human,” Zach said wildly. “I want to be, to be Andrew.”
“Do you know what you’re protecting yourself from?”
“No. Yes. Everything.” He stopped pacing and stood before them, his hands fisted. “I’m scared. I’m really, really scared. And I don’t know what the fuck I’m scared of. Everything, I guess. And David makes me feel not scared and that scares me worse than anything else.”
“Fear is also a part of being human, Zach,” Dr. Barrett said. “There’s nothing wrong with being afraid.”
“How do you stop?”
“Well,” he said thoughtfully, “you can look at probabilities and rationalize them, but that doesn’t always work. Or you can face whatever it is that you fear. There are different therapies for specific phobias.”
“What about pantophobia?” Zach asked dryly.
Jane giggled, surprising everyone including herself. The shrink looked at her in puzzlement.
“It’s from Peanuts,” she explained. “Lucy’s trying to analyze Charlie Brown and she asks him if he has pantophobia, and when she explains that it’s fear of everything, he yells ‘That’s it!’ and she goes rolling over from the force of his yell. I guess you have to see it.”
“I remember the cartoon,” Dr. Barrett said. “That was in A Charlie Brown Christmas, right?”
“I think so.”
Zach said, “We always used to watch that every year at Christmas. We haven’t since I’ve been back.”
“We will this year,” Jane promised.
“Zach, back to your fears. Fear is normal, and most of the time more or less healthy. But not when it prevents us doing something that needs to be done or that we want to do. Maybe for your session this afternoon, you can make a list of things that you fear the most, and we can work on them.”
“Okay,” Zach said. He dropped back into his chair, stretched out his legs, and went back to studying his toes.
“WOODCHUCK CIDER,” David said, and slid a five across the bar. “Keep the change.”
“Thanks,” Terry said. “How you been, Davey?”
“Decent, decent,” David replied, and took the bottle Terry handed him. “I’m back for good, I guess. Got a job teaching at Wesley Commu
nity College.”
“That so? Teaching what?” Terry opened a Woodchuck for himself.
“Art and design. It’s a good gig. I start tomorrow. Thought I’d treat myself before I jump into the grind.”
“Beth’s sister taught there for a while. Math, I think. She said it was pretty nice there.”
“Why’d she leave?”
“Married a Kansan.”
“No shit?”
“No shit.”
“Flatlanders,” they chorused, and clinked bottles. Terry grinned.
“Haven’t seen your little buddy around lately,” he said. “Not that he’s that little anymore. Holy shit, what did they feed the kid while he was away?”
“No much of anything, from what I hear,” David said. “He’s built up some since he got back, I guess.”
“Yeah, musta. I didn’t recognize him when he first started coming around here. Took me a few days, but then I heard that his folks had brought him back and figured out who he was. Wasn’t what I expected, that’s for sure.”
“Thought he’d be this poor pitiful me type, didn’t you?”
“I did. Nothin’ pitiful about that kid.”
“Nope,” David said wryly. “He’s got a mind of his own.”
“Couple people come around askin’ questions about him, but I ain’t talkin’. I don’t think anyone’s figured out who he is yet, though. Like I said, he’s sure a lot different. I remember when Beth worked for Tyler before the kids were born and we’d go to the company picnics and stuff. He was always such a friendly, happy kid. Not anymore.”
“Who’s been asking questions?” David asked suspiciously.
“A couple people. Strangers, mostly. Reporters and that crap. But you know, this is a neighborhood place, not like some of those joints downtown. We know who our people are. And we don’t talk about them to strangers.” Terry glanced over David’s shoulder. “Speak of the devil.”
Dreamspinner Press Year Four Greatest Hits Page 20