Hopes and Fears

by Rowan Speedwell

He fell back against the pillows, laughing quietly to himself. “Well, sort of, I guess. I was just kind of expecting a different outcome.”

  Shit. I chilled and sat up, crossing my legs to hide the fact that I’d deflated rather quickly. “I don’t top,” I said. “Ever.”

  “That surprises the hell out of me,” he said. He didn’t have the same problem; his fine, thick dick was as hard and happy as ever, but when he went up on his elbows, his face was serious. “It’s been a hellaciously long time since I did, Bri. My last few boyfriends—well, they were all the more aggressive types. A lot like you, actually, except that most of them wouldn’t have been as considerate about the drunk bit. So I sort of assumed….”

  I curled my fingers around his thick cock. “But you have done it, right?”

  “Yeah.” He sat up, touched my cheek, and kissed me. “And will again. If that’s what you want.”

  “It’s what I want.” I reached for the condoms and lube in the nightstand and tossed them at Jerry. “Suit up, lover.”

  He rubbed his fingers on my cheek again, his eyes bright and solemn.

  If it had been a long time since he’d topped, he certainly hadn’t forgotten anything in the meantime, and he did it just the way I’d hoped: slow and considerate and gentle to start with, building up to a fine, fierce fucking that made me grab the headboard and hang on for dear life. He pegged the sweet spot on every single stroke; the sheet beneath me was soaked, and I hadn’t even come yet. I was close, really, really close when I felt him tense and tighten and cry out, but it was a shock when he pulled out even before I came. I said, “What the fuck?” indignantly, because he was still hard enough that he was perfectly capable of the few more strokes I needed, but before I’d even finished the exclamation, he was flipping me over on my back—God, the guy was strong, ’cause I’m no lightweight—and was sliding a condom down over my wet cock and following it with his mouth. He took me all the way down, and the head bumped against the back of his throat, and he didn’t even gag. A pair of fingers found their way back inside me and started stroking against my prostate even as his lips and tongue worked their magic, and I threw my head back and arched and yelled as I climaxed. They really need a better word for that, you know? Nothing really quite describes it when it’s so intense that your head smacks hard enough into the pillow that you feel it in your nose, and your eyes go blind with those fuzzy little sparky things that people call “stars” but that, too, is an understatement.

  When I’d rejoined the living, Jerry was lying beside me, staring at the ceiling with that dazed expression again. “Holy fucking shit,” he said reverently, and his hand reached down and found mine where it was splayed beside me. I laced my fingers through his even as a part of me was saying What the fuck are you doing, McCarthy? I didn’t know what I was doing. I just knew I didn’t want to lose the connection. It was okay—the Irish aren’t particularly touchy-feely, but the Italians are, and Jerry was Italian, so he probably wouldn’t misread it. Whatever it was. The hand was warm and damp with sweat, and solid.

  I GUESS I fell asleep, because the next thing I knew (God, I hate that cliché, but it fits, damn it), the warmth beside me was gone. I turned my head to see Jerry buttoning up his jeans, his shirt under his arm. My gut hurt. “Going already?” I said, and my voice was hoarse. With sleep, I suppose.

  His head jerked up, startled, and he stared at me with those dark eyes. Swallowing, he said, “Uh, yeah? I mean, I don’t know. I don’t know what the etiquette is for hookups. I don’t do hookups.”

  “You said that,” I said. I should have just let it go, let him go, but I was missing the warmth already. I sat up, wrapped my arms around my knees, and watched him dress. The bad one was starting to hurt again; I guess aggressive sex wasn’t exactly the smartest thing to do for it. Somehow we’d both forgotten about that.

  He pulled the shirt over his head; then, as if it had been a major effort that drained him, sat down on the edge of the bed with a thump. “I don’t want to leave,” he said. “God, this is so stupid. This is why I don’t do these things. I date. I go out to dinner. I go to movies. I get to know a guy. I know it’s nontraditional, but I like liking a guy before I sleep with him.”

  “You don’t like me.” God, it hurt. That was so stupid. Why should I care if the fucker liked me or not? What was this, junior high? I’d just been fucked the way I like it, and I didn’t much care if he left or not, right?

  Right?

  He was talking again. “Shit! No, I like you. I like you a lot. It’s been really hard just keeping it professional, not taking you up on your offers to go out. I’ve wanted to.” He sighed and hung his head. “I’ll go in tomorrow and see about switching my schedule so you can have a new therapist.”

  “You don’t want to work with me?”

  There was a quick glance from underneath the tumble of dark curls. “No,” he said, slowly. “No, I just thought you’d prefer it….”

  “Why don’t you just worry about what you want, and leave me to worry about what I want?” I said, and shifted over so that I sat beside him. He picked up my hand as if it were something unusual, like a big, odd shell he’d found on a beach somewhere, and started rubbing his fingers over the palm, massaging it, but not really paying attention to what he was doing. It was as if he had to have something to play with.

  “Okay, then,” he said to my hand. “I’ll leave the request up to you. I’d appreciate it if you didn’t tell them why you were requesting another therapist. It doesn’t look good on my record if I lose a client like this. This way.”

  “Happened before, has it?”

  “No, of course not,” he said defensively. “It’s not like I, I get interested in my clients. You’re the first one. The first anything in a long time.”

  I considered this. That might explain why he’d skipped the whole dating thing, if it had been a long time since he’d fucked. Or been fucked, I corrected, thinking about his surprise when I’d asked him to top. It was just him needing to scratch an itch. I got that.

  So why did it fucking hurt so much?

  But then both his hands closed around mine, holding it tightly a minute, and he said, “I really don’t want to leave, Bri. Would it be so awful if I stayed?”

  “Lemme think a minute. No, of course it wouldn’t be awful,” I said instantly. “I know a great place to have breakfast. I never had breakfast with a hookup before, so we’d both have tried something new.”

  He was smiling and looking me in the eye now, and the brightness of his expression tightened something in my chest. “That would be really cool,” he said.

  “Then get back undressed and come to bed, because I’m really not done with you yet,” I said, trying to get this back to the simply physical instead of this weird need. I didn’t need him. I didn’t need anyone. But actually liking the guy I was fucking was a plus, and until I got bored with him, it might be kind of fun. The urge to cling to him was just a symptom of something, loneliness or boredom or the mental effects of one too many renditions of “Silver Bells,” or something. It would wear off.

  He slid under the sheets with me, his long, strong body next to mine, and as his mouth found mine, I was thinking, praying, But not too soon….

  THE breakfast place is one of those restaurants that close mid-afternoon and supply breakfast and lunch only, and it’s always crowded. It was even more so that Saturday morning, with all the Christmas shoppers out circling like sharks in search of a meal, but I eat there all the time (and I do mean that. All. The. Time.), so when the owner saw me standing there, he came over and offered us coffee while we waited. Which wasn’t really that long; they move people in and out of there fast. But their coffee was just what I wanted, and from the gray, post-binge tones to Jerry’s skin, what he needed. So we stood and drank their version of ambrosia, and about ten minutes later, my favorite table opened up and the hostess seated us.

  Eggs and toast and bacon and three glasses of apple juice later, Jerry was starting to lo
ok less like those little guys from Roswell. He sat back, a piece of toast slathered with orange marmalade in one hand, and said, “So why don’t you like Christmas?”

  “Too commercial. Too phony. Too shove-it-down-your-throaty. It’s kind of hypocritical, you know? It’s supposed to be all sweetness-and-light and love-thy-neighbor kind of crap, and it’s mostly just greed and unkindness. Shoving little old ladies out of the way so you can grab the last whatever-the-thing-of-the-moment-is. I mean, I’m Catholic—a bad Catholic, but I still believe, you know, and this is so not about Jesus anymore. Pushing people to spend money they don’t have. Lying to kids about Santa Claus as bribery to keep them from behaving like the little savages they are the other eleven months of the year. Using up the entire month of December so that you can’t even do anything without it smacking of Christmas crap. I wouldn’t mind it if it were like a week or something. But f’chrissakes, they start putting up Christmas stuff the minute the back-to-school stuff comes down.”

  He was leaning forward, his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand, staring at me in fascination. “This isn’t just the usual dislike for Christmas I hear in your voice,” he said. “I mean, it’s what a lot of people say, but for you, it’s more. This is personal. What did Santa Claus do to you?”

  I snorted. “You sound like everyone else. I don’t have any horrible experiences to explain it. It just sickens me.”

  Shaking his head, he said, “No. No. It’s personal. I mean, I’ve heard every one of those arguments against Christmas at least once every holiday season. You’re not alone, and none of the things you said are original. But there’s something in your voice, in your face. You really, really hate Christmas.”

  “I told you,” I said, annoyed.

  “I wonder why,” he said thoughtfully.

  That was when I knew it wasn’t going to work. The sensation was sort of nauseating; a dull tremor of misery that started mid-throat and quivered down to my knees, making the terrific breakfast I’d just eaten turn into a lump of nuclear waste in my belly. It wasn’t going to work. Fucking Christmas was going to come between me and the one guy that I’d actually found interesting since finishing up Caged. “Thanks, but no thanks. You about done?”

  “Okay. I said something wrong. What was it?”

  “Nothing. I’m just done, and I got things to do.” I picked up the check and pulled the wallet from my back pocket to drop a couple singles on the table for a tip. “We pay this up front, so….”

  He reached out and closed his hand around my wrist. “You weren’t in a hurry five minutes ago,” he said. “Whatever I said, I’m sorry. You have every right to dislike the season. I don’t understand why, but….”

  “Don’t be stupid,” I said, and twisted my arm from his grip. “On second thought, you just sit and finish your toast. I’ll pay this so you don’t have to worry about it. I’ll see you around, ’kay?” and I was up and out of the booth and heading for the door.

  He caught up with me at the counter, of course, since I had to wait to get the check paid, but said nothing until we were out on the street. Then he put his hand on my elbow and said, “Let’s just walk, okay, Bri?”

  “Whatever.” I set off at a good clip, not really sure of where I was going. It didn’t matter; the thing I was trying to escape from was walking right beside me. When we got to the lake, I turned and started to walk along the footpath to where I knew there were a handful of benches. They’d be deserted this time of day and in this weather; it wasn’t that cold, for Chicago in December, but the sky was overcast and the lakefront not as pretty as it usually was. I sat down, my hands shoved deep in my pockets. He stood, looking out at the lake, his back to me.

  For some reason, that made it easier. I don’t know why I started talking. It just seemed to be time.

  “I came out to my parents when I was eighteen, my senior year of high school. I’d just turned eighteen. My birthday’s December third.”

  “The day you came into RehabiliCare.”

  “Yeah. Sucky day. Anyway, it was a couple of days after that that I told them.” I didn’t say anything more. Neither did he. Finally, I was ready to go on. “I have three sisters and a brother. I’m sort of more or less in the middle. The usual Irish-Catholic family. Nothing different about any of us. Just me. I always knew I wanted to go into journalism. And my family was big into higher education; my dad had a bachelor’s in business, my mom in English lit. Really, Irish literature—my older sister’s named Joyce after James.”

  His shoulders jerked in a brief laugh. “And you’re what, named after Brian Boru?” he asked over his shoulder.

  “Got it in one. Anyway. They had it all figured out. I was accepted at Columbia—the one in New York, not Columbia College here. I’d go there, live at home, save a few bucks. I didn’t mind. I liked living at home. I loved my family. They were noisy and happy and just… great, you know?

  “And so I figured that it wouldn’t be a big deal if I admitted what I’d known for years. Mom was trying to talk me into dating one of the girls I’d gone to high school with who’d be going to Columbia too, and one night at dinner she was at it again, and I just said, ‘Ma, there’d be no point, since I’m gay.’ Everyone laughed at first, until they saw that I wasn’t kidding. My mother stared at me a few minutes. Then she got up and went into the bathroom. My brother poked me and said ‘Nice going, asshole. You made Ma cry,’ and my dad just looked like someone had shot him in the gut. Finally, he sort of smiled and said, ‘Well, that’s interesting. Pass the potatoes’ or something like that. When my mother came out of the bathroom, she smiled at me in that same sort of tentative smile as my dad and sat back down as if nothing had happened.”

  He’d turned around and was watching me now, his hands buried in the pockets of his leather jacket. I gave him a smile that felt funny on my face. “No drama. Nothing about being kicked out or cut off, no beatings, nothing like that. Nothing, except that from that minute on I was a stranger in my own house, the house I’d grown up in. People would stop talking when I came in a room—not because they were talking about me, but because they suddenly didn’t know how I’d react to things. Ma and Dad treated me as if I were a fragile piece of glass. They were kind—oh so fucking kind—but…. I don’t know if you have this in your family, the kind of thing where the kids smack each other around and the parents will just kind of reach in with a hand and whack heads, but never hard, never mean, not to punish, but just sort of physically sorting them out? Little things like that?”

  He nodded.

  “It stopped. Nobody fought anymore, and believe me, with three girls in the family, the fights were legendary. Everyone was on their best behavior.

  “Christmas that year was a fucking nightmare.”

  Finally, finally, he sat down beside me. He kept his hands in his pockets but his shoulder was solid against mine. “I’d never really liked Christmas,” I said, “for pretty much the reasons I gave. But that Christmas, with everyone tiptoeing around, everyone watching my face anxiously to see if I liked what I was given, everyone exclaiming over the stupid gifts I’d bought for them as if I’d given them the fucking Taj Mahal—Jesus, Jer, it was a fucking nightmare.”

  I stared out at the lake for a few minutes, marshalling my thoughts. He hadn’t really reacted to anything, but that was okay. I didn’t want his input; I wanted his ears. I’d never talked about this with anyone, let alone a guy I barely knew, but the memory of our therapy sessions, with him being so patient, so understanding, yet pushing me, challenging me as if he really cared whether or not my knee ever did get better—it made me trust him. “I thought that it was just the newness of the thing; that pretty soon, they’d get used to the idea, and things would get back to normal. A couple of weeks, maybe—I could live with a couple of weeks.

  “By the end of the summer, I knew it wasn’t going to get any better. I had figured it wouldn’t, long before that, and during the spring I had made alternate plans, just in case. So the day we wer
e supposed to drive to the city for orientation at Columbia, I came downstairs with my duffel bag on my shoulder, a cab at the door, and tickets to LA in my hand. When I told them I was going to UCLA instead, they just stared at me as if I’d announced that I really had two heads and had just been hiding the other one. They said nothing. Just watched as I walked out the door and got in the cab.”

  “Wow,” Jerry said, “you really are a dick.”

  “What the fuck?” I shot to my feet and glared down at him.

  “Listen, Bri, I get what you’re saying. But did it ever occur to you that maybe they were waiting for you to talk to them?”

  “Fuck you,” I said, and walked away, back down toward the Drive, away from the lake.

  He followed and grabbed my arm. “Just hold it,” he said commandingly, and I stopped, glaring at him resentfully. “I’m not saying you’re completely wrong, and they probably should have taken the initiative, but what you did then was pretty dickish. They were trying, sounds like, and if you’d taken the time to actually talk to them, try and explain what you were feeling, how the way they were treating you was making you feel…? What did you do when they were treating you like a stranger? I bet you reacted by shutting down, just the way you’re doing now. I bet you stopped talking to them at all. I bet your parents cried their eyeballs out the minute you left the house. Have you even seen them since college? You’re in your thirties. They’re probably in their sixties—how often do you talk to them? See them?”

  “They have my brother and my sisters,” I said defensively. “And besides, I keep in touch. I’ve seen them for weddings and funerals and shit. Hell, I just sent them a Christmas card, and I’ll probably call them on Christmas Day, like always. It’s not like I’ve just fucking abandoned them.”

  “But you think they abandoned you.” Jerry shook his head. “Christ, what a mess. I’ve never known anyone like you.”

  “Fuck you,” I said again, tiredly. Talking had leached all the energy out of me. I just wanted to go home and go back to bed. Alone this time. That was what I got for wanting something that just didn’t fit. For wanting Jerry. Shit.