A More Perfect Union

by J. Scott Coatsworth

  Why not? Jay had his weekends free, now that he was single. Even if the group didn’t lead him to Wallace, it would be something to keep him occupied—something not tied in with computers and business and stocks.

  “All right,” he said. “I’ll do it.”

  Chapter Five

  WALLACE HAD received the e-mail about the coffee chat starting up again at his baikingu.com domain address and felt an inordinate amount of excitement at the prospect. He didn’t recognize the name of the new organizer, Jayson Corey, though it sounded familiar. Even if Wallace didn’t know him, he looked forward to seeing some old faces. Maybe one of them would have a clue about the handsome tech support guy he’d gone to lunch with. It seemed unlikely, considering the guy had only shown up once. But several people had seemed to know him. Maybe….

  Should he bring the coffee urn? Some people had gotten bitchy about it in the past, until Julie had caved and bought a drip coffeemaker. But Wallace tossed the monstrous thing into the trunk of his car anyway. If nobody thought to bring a coffeemaker, he could dig it out. Better safe than sorry.

  He got to the church about ten minutes before the meeting was scheduled, as he’d done in the past. Even though it wasn’t the type of event people needed to show up “on time” for—they were welcome to wander in and out as they liked—Wallace had a thing about being late. He walked in the door and at first didn’t see anyone in the room.

  “Hello?”

  “Hey!” someone shouted. Then a man walked out of the tiny kitchenette.

  They stopped dead when their eyes met. Then the man with dirty-blond hair and soft emerald eyes smiled and said, “I was hoping you’d show up.”

  Wallace’s mouth was suddenly dry. He swallowed and said, “You’re Jayson?”

  “That’s what my e-mail signature says. Normally I go by Jay.”

  Jay. That sounded familiar. Wallace kicked himself for not recognizing the name in the e-mail. But really, why would he have expected the person starting up the coffee chats again to be someone who’d only attended once? It didn’t make sense.

  At last Wallace asked, “Why were you hoping I’d show up?”

  Jay’s smile faltered. “I don’t know. I guess… I thought we kind of connected.”

  “We only met once.” Did I just say that? Am I a complete moron?

  “I know, but….” Jay looked lost for a moment. Then he gestured toward the snack table, which held just a couple of packages of store-bought cookies. “Well, for one thing, I forgot to bring coffee!”

  “Oh,” Wallace said, relieved. “I can take care of that.”

  By the time he’d retrieved the coffee urn from his car, more people had wandered in. He was simultaneously annoyed and relieved—annoyed that Jay was now busy playing host and couldn’t continue the conversation they’d begun, but relieved he no longer had to fumble his way through it.

  While he was setting up the coffee urn, someone remarked loudly, “Oh God! Not that horrible industrial coffeemaker again!”

  He was joking around—Wallace knew that—but it was still embarrassing. Wallace could feel his ears burning as he opened the urn up and poured coffee grounds into the top, pretending he hadn’t heard.

  Then Jay said, “I wanted him to bring it. I think it brews a nice, mellow roast.”

  The other guy scoffed at that, but he shut up. When Wallace turned around, he found Jay regarding him with a look of… something almost like affection. Then someone called Jay’s name, and whatever it was flitted away as he turned to address the newcomer.

  WALLACE HAD a good time at the chat, and he drank far more coffee than a man who had an hour’s drive home ahead of him should. He kept moving around the room, dodging whenever Jay drew near, pretending he hadn’t seen him approach. It was kind of childish, and he wasn’t sure why he was doing it. He needed time to sort things out.

  I was hoping you’d show up.

  That was kind of creepy, wasn’t it? Of course, Wallace had been hoping to bump into Jay here too. But he hadn’t come right out and said it like some kind of… weird fairy-tale character—a tawny-colored cat with green eyes asking, “Where have you been? You’re late!”

  On the other hand, it was definitely cool that, while Wallace had been hoping he’d run into Jay, Jay had apparently been hoping he’d run into Wallace. What were the odds of that happening? Wouldn’t it be pretty dumb to walk away at this point?

  Wallace made up his mind, finally, and the next time Jay zigged, he refrained from zagging. They collided in the kitchenette.

  “Hey,” Jay said breathlessly, as if he’d been running to catch him, “we haven’t had a chance to talk yet.”

  “No, I guess not.”

  “Are you getting another cup of coffee?”

  Wallace looked down at his half-full plastic cup and grimaced. “That’s okay. I think I’ve had enough.”

  “I really appreciate you bringing the coffee urn. I don’t know what I was thinking, showing up without a coffeemaker. Julie told me people would bring things….”

  “Well, I guess they did.” The table had been full of cookies and… well, mostly cookies—a lot of cookies—until about a half hour ago.

  Jay glanced at the table, but clearly he wasn’t all that interested in food. He asked, “So… are you still into all that Viking stuff?”

  Wallace debated whether he should be offended by the term Viking. The correct term was Norse, and even though Viking was technically correct in some instances, it seemed as if Jay might be mocking him. But maybe it was just because he didn’t know much about it.

  “You might say that,” Wallace replied. “I’ve been trying to put together a study group for Old Norse, but there haven’t been many takers. Or any, really.”

  “Really?” Jay said, his green eyes lighting up with excitement. “That would be so cool!”

  Wallace blinked at him. “Are you… are you saying you’d be interested?”

  “I was pretty good with German in college. Didn’t you say it was kind of like that?”

  “Well, not so much like the language. But a lot of the vocabulary sounds familiar if you know German—or English, for that matter. If you know both, then it’s even better.”

  “Can I join your group?”

  Wallace realized his hand was shaking, so he set his cup down on the table. He wasn’t sure why he was so unsteady. Maybe it was shock. “Um… sure.”

  “When do you want to get together?”

  He thought about it, embarrassed by the realization he had nothing whatsoever planned for the immediate future. “Next weekend?”

  They haggled over it a minute, settling on one o’clock next Saturday afternoon. Wallace had housemates, which wasn’t really a big deal, but they decided to meet at Jay’s apartment anyway. Jay jotted his address down on a napkin and handed it to Wallace before turning to go back to the main room.

  He took a step and then turned back and looked quizzically at Wallace. “Wait a minute! I’ve been trying to figure out what’s different about you, and I just realized… you don’t have glasses anymore.”

  “No. I got Lasik.”

  Jay beamed at him. “Nice. Very nice.”

  Then he turned and walked away. Wallace picked up his coffee cup, saw it had cooled to the point where the cream had coagulated on top, and dumped it into the sink. While he rinsed out the cup, he told himself, Don’t get excited. He’s just inviting you over to study. It’s not exactly a date.

  But somehow it felt as if it was.

  Chapter Six

  JAY WASN’T exactly a great housekeeper. In fact, he was a terrible one. The one thing he missed about his ex was the way the guy kept the apartment spotless. Since he’d left, everything had more or less fallen apart. The cat litter box wasn’t changed as often—to the cats’ obvious annoyance—dirty dishes piled up in the sink, hairballs gathered in the corners, and stacks of books and DVDs had mysteriously appeared in every room.

  The apartment itself was different. Jay had
been forced to vacate the previous apartment when the landlord wanted to convert the old place into an insanely expensive condo. There hadn’t been much available, at the time, so he’d moved into a smaller place and gotten rid of most of the old furniture. Not that he really minded. But his furnishings had been reduced to just a few things and piles of boxes he didn’t know what to do with.

  He wasn’t sure why he’d invited Wallace to his apartment rather than go to Wallace’s house. Maybe he was hoping, somewhere in the back of his mind, they’d fool around a bit if there were no housemates around. Jay tried not to think about that. It seemed a bit sleazy. Instead he focused on scouring the place.

  By the time Wallace showed up, the apartment was reasonably clean. Jay had cleaned the cat box—though Butterscotch had already seen fit to… christen it again—and he’d done the dishes. A quick sweep had taken care of most of the hairballs, but the stacks of books and DVDs would have to fend for themselves.

  Wallace didn’t comment one way or another on the décor, and Jay figured that was probably for the best. Hopefully it was clean enough that Wallace wouldn’t feel he needed a shower by the time he left.

  Oh fuck! I hope he doesn’t look in the shower. Jay couldn’t remember the last time he’d cleaned the tub.

  “Would you like a cup of coffee or juice or something?” he asked.

  “Sure, that would be great. Coffee, I mean.”

  Jay already had the coffeemaker set up. He flicked the switch on. While it brewed, he fished for a topic of conversation. “So how exactly does one go about studying Old Norse? There isn’t a textbook for it, is there?”

  Wallace lifted a hand as if to push his glasses back on the bridge of his nose—except he wasn’t wearing glasses. He stopped, glanced at his hand a moment, then lowered it. “Actually, there’s an online course.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes. I’ve printed out the first few lessons.”

  He held up a notebook, and Jay could see a bunch of papers sticking out of it.

  “Oh. Cool.”

  JAY DIDN’T have a table. He had a couch, some counter space, and some chairs, and he had his bed—a futon on the floor in his bedroom.

  “Would it bother you if we sat on my bed?” he asked nervously. “I’m not trying to make a pass at you. It’s just the only place we’ll have room to spread out.”

  Wallace gave him a curious look he couldn’t quite sort out, then said, “Sure. No problem.”

  They sat on the futon, the papers spread out between them and their coffee cups resting on the hardwood floor, while Wallace led Jay through the first lesson. He’d already been through the entire course, but he showed no impatience with Jay as they went back to the basics of pronunciation and simple declarative sentences.

  For Jay’s part, he found the lesson fairly easy, as Wallace had predicted. Though one of the simple dialogues puzzled him. “Never… give… a dwarf—”

  “Dwarves,” Wallace corrected. “It’s plural.”

  “Dwarves….” The last word he had to look up again in the vocabulary list. “Um… cheese? Never give dwarves… cheese?”

  “One can only assume,” Wallace said gravely, “that dwarves are lactose intolerant.”

  “I see. Yes, I imagine that would be pretty bad.”

  Then they both snickered and started riffing on the idea of dwarves having intestinal distress while they worked their forges deep in the… bowels… of the earth. It was very juvenile, but Jay loved the fact that Wallace shared his sense of humor, even when it was silly.

  When Jay finished the first lesson, he was stoked enough about it to move on to the second one. He’d always found Vikings—or more properly, the Norse peoples—to be interesting, and now Wallace made them even more so. He kept dropping little tidbits of information, ranging from the way Norse toilets were constructed to the way women were treated in their culture to the war between the Aesir and the Vanir, two rival factions of gods in Norse mythology.

  What worried Jay was the possibility that they might have nothing else to talk about. He’d had friends like that in college, who could go on at great length about role-playing games and LARPing but never wanted to talk about anything else. Was Wallace only interested in Norse stuff? But when they wrapped up the second lesson, the conversation didn’t falter. Wallace seemed more comfortable now, and they stretched out beside each other on the futon and chatted about all kinds of things—their jobs, what they’d studied in college, how Wallace had pooled his resources with some friends to buy a house in Derry, Jay’s interest in painting and writing….

  “Do you have any of your artwork?” Wallace asked.

  “My paintings from college are packed in storage, but I have some of my sketchbooks handy.”

  It made him nervous to show the sketchbooks to anyone. Doug had never been at all interested in Jay’s artwork, and Jay had eventually tucked it away in a drawer. Now he drew out his old sketchpad and flipped it open. The first sketch was of a nude man lying on the grass near a stream.

  “Oh my God,” Wallace said in a reverent whisper. “You drew that?”

  “A long time ago.”

  Encouraged, Jay flipped to the next picture—another sketch of the same young man, standing this time, still nude except for a cloth draped over one shoulder. “This was a model in one of my art classes. I thought he was gorgeous.”

  “This is amazing! You should have been an illustrator or a comic artist or something.” Then, as if he realized what he’d said could be misconstrued as criticism, he flushed and said, “I mean… you’re really good.”

  Jay couldn’t stand it anymore. Wallace was sweet on so many levels and adorable to top it off. He set the sketchbook aside and then tentatively leaned forward, bringing their faces close together, testing the waters.

  Wallace looked back at him, his mouth slightly parted, as if those sensual lips were inviting him to kiss them. Then he reached up to brush his temple, causing Jay to pull back.

  WALLACE LAUGHED and glanced at his hand. “Sorry. I was trying to take my glasses off.” He’d been so nervous, he’d forgotten again. All morning he’d tried to force his thoughts away from anything happening between them. An invitation to study at Jay’s apartment was far from an invitation into Jay’s bed. But now they were on Jay’s bed—surrounded by the lessons Wallace had printed out, true, but it looked as if Jay was making a pass at him.

  He looked back into Jay’s eyes and wet his lips. It was an unconscious gesture, but Jay gave a soft laugh and something like a growl. He leaned forward again. When their lips met, Wallace couldn’t help himself—he whimpered. Then he reached up to grip Jay firmly by the shoulders and fell back onto the mattress, pulling Jay down on top of him.

  Am I being too… slutty? In the past he’d had men get turned off by him being too eager. He’d been told he should be less willing, make it more of a challenge so guys wouldn’t think he was easy.

  Jay didn’t seem to have a problem with the clear invitation. He stretched the full length of his body out on top of Wallace’s and devoured his lips. Wallace grew hard and felt Jay’s erection grinding into his through the material of their jeans.

  Jay pulled away from the kiss to gather up the papers and stuff on the futon and set them on the floor. Then he pulled off his shirt. He had an average build. His musculature was defined, though it would be a stretch to call him “buff.” Wallace reached up to caress his taut abdomen.

  “I’m a little thin,” Jay said, as if apologizing.

  “You’re gorgeous.”

  Wallace pulled him down again, and they stopped talking about stuff that didn’t matter.

  Part Two

  Chapter Seven

  JAY WAS the kind of guy who made instant decisions. The first time Wallace stood with him in a checkout line, he was utterly horrified by the way Jay kept grabbing things off the shelves and tossing them into the cart—candy bars, DVDs, magazines, cigarette lighters….

  “You do not need a robot key
chain!” he finally exclaimed, snatching the item out of Jay’s hand. He put it back on the display.

  “But it has glowing eyes!”

  It didn’t matter. Jay had forgotten about it ten seconds later. He was, in Wallace’s estimation, the quintessential impulse buyer. Anything within easy reach might catch his eye and end up in the cart. When supermarkets planned their checkout lanes, Wallace was certain they distributed photographs of Jay and told their employees, “Listen up! This is our target! Put everything at his eye level and make it shiny. Understood? Now move out!”

  Which is why, when Jay suggested moving in together, Wallace wasn’t sure just how seriously to take it. They’d been seeing each other for the better part of a year now. And they were seeing each other a lot. The general pattern was Wallace would show up at Jay’s apartment on Friday night, after they were both off work. He’d stay all weekend and drive to work from there on Monday morning. Three nights together, four nights apart. And lately they’d begun calling each other during their evenings apart.

  So it wasn’t that the idea of being with Jay full time bothered him, necessarily. But Wallace was cautious. He liked to think things through carefully before making a decision. And he wasn’t convinced yet this wasn’t just an impulse on Jay’s part and he’d change his mind later.

  There were also some practical concerns. Wallace was co-owner of a house. He liked his house, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to give it up—certainly not for a tiny apartment an hour’s drive away from where he worked. At the same time, Jay couldn’t just move into the house. He had three cats, and one of Wallace’s housemates was allergic to cats.

  And then there was the nudity. Apparently Jay really liked being naked. He’d been to some nude beaches in Vermont with guys from one of the gay men’s groups he went to and really enjoyed the experience. When he’d met his ex-boyfriend, Doug kind of put a damper on that. He thought it was weird if Jay even walked around the apartment naked. But now that Jay was living on his own, he was prone to shuck his clothes the moment he came home from work. Wallace loved watching him putter around the apartment in the nude, but… would Wallace’s housemates? Probably not.