2016 Top Ten Gay Romance

by Snyder, J. M. ; Black, Becky; Creech, T. A.

  “They got a lot of nerve calling that there a ‘bed,’” I say, laughing.

  “Technically, I think they call it a ‘berth.’”

  “Technically, I’m pretty sure it’s called an ‘ironing board.’”

  Eventually we find our way back to the two-chairs-and-a-table arrangement, although we’re just as happy snuggled up in the one chair. Glenwood isn’t but a three-hour drive from Denver, but the train takes more like eight to snake through the mountains, and we spend them pressed together, making very occasional chit-chat, but for the most part content to sip on the champagne he thought to bring and watch the trees scuttle past the window.

  Naturally there’s a limit to how long we can sit flesh against flesh in a rhythmically rocking lounge chair and discuss current events. I’m astride his dick, working on bouncing him to climax, when the train slows into the station. “Glenwood Springs!” the conductor hollers, rapping on the cabin door.

  “Don’t come in!” I cry. Much louder than would ordinarily be necessary, but Ben comes just then with a laughing bark I hope to mask.

  “Don’t you worry,” the conductor calls back. “Just don’t miss your stop.”

  We scramble into our clothes and shoulder our bags. We hurry down the hall and jump to the platform, flushed and laughing, just as the train is starting to pull away.

  It turns out Glenwood is the perfect getaway by train. The station is an easy walk to the little Main Street, which is right across the highway from the pool and the historic stone pile of the Hotel Colorado, to which Ben suggests we head.

  “Fancy,” I say.

  “Hey, we’ve only been going out a few months. I’m still trying to impress you. Next year you’ll be lucky to get a card.”

  We start across the bridge over the highway. It’s pushing six o’clock, and it has started to snow. Heated by the springs, the pool sends up a seductive curtain of steam; if the overpass was closer to the water, I’m pretty sure I’d strip and swan dive from here.

  The hotel is very stately, if not especially updated. Its high ceilings and gilded mirrors and ornate sweeping stairway are all very Olden Days. The room is darn near spartan, but it has a bed in it sure enough, and I can’t imagine what else we might require. Out the window, we can see the pool. It’s practically deserted on account of the snow, but if you can brave the trip from the locker room to the pool—or more importantly, the wet dash back—the hot springs are welcoming even on the chilliest night, and we hurry to shove our trunks and a couple towels together into his backpack.

  Snow is falling thick and fast, but it’s not a January blizzard. The big flakes stick to the trees and the grass, but the streets and sidewalks have already been warmed by two weeks of spring and the snow melts on contact. It sits in Ben’s curls while we’re walking, but when we get inside to buy our tickets, those flakes evaporate, too.

  In the locker room, we strip. We shove all our cold damp clothes into one locker, wriggle into our suits, then hang the towels together in another locker closer to the pool. The huge hot pool is closest to the locker rooms, and on a night like this is definitely the main attraction. I can’t see the surface of the water for the steam as we scamper gingerly across the wet deck, but its warmth shoots through me at the first dip of the first toe.

  The water’s quite hot, actually; prickly against my cold skin until I’m in it up to my neck, at which point the world’s cares rise off me and into the evening. I’m floating on my back when Ben materializes from behind a wall of steam; he holds out his arms and I drift into them, let him rock me and carry me, as close to weightless as I’ll ever get, to and fro around the pool. He tows me over to a corner, near where the water bubbles in at its hottest from the spring, and we snuggle up like every other couple in the pool. If anybody cares that we’re a couple of dudes, they keep it to themselves, and before long we’re as kissy as the rest of them. The moon creeps over the mountains, shiny and three-quarters full, and as the breeze shifts the columns of steam, stars dance in and out of view—first one, then three, then dozens, then a whole sky-ful the likes of which we rarely see in the electrified twenty-four/seven city.

  I float into his lap and put my arms around his neck. He wore his glasses into the pool and they’re all fogged up; I slide them onto his head the way my mom always did with her sunglasses. It takes his eyes a second to focus, then he smiles into mine and says, “Hi.”

  “Hi,” I say. “Thank you for a wonderful birthday. This was a good present.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  Today I am thirty-seven years old. I’ve never said this to a guy before, but I realize it’s true, so I say it to Ben. “I love you.”

  His voice catches. Mister Always Got A Comeback can’t squeeze it around the lump in his throat, bless him, until his third try. “I love you, too.”

  “I think that’s about the sweetest thing I ever saw.” Somebody’s grandma is trudging through the chest-deep water towards the stairs in her flowered bathing cap and she chimes in. “I lost my son in 1991,” she says to whoever cares to listen. “Bein’ fruity was killin’ boys in them days.”

  We look at each other, Ben and I. Do we say something? What do we do?

  Grandma coaches us. “Well go on,” she says to me. “Look at him. That boy needs kissin’.”

  Ben laughs, then nods gravely at me, so I kiss him.

  “That’s more like it,” she mutters as she hoists herself from the pool. She needn’t have worried—hell, we’re probably still going at it when she gets home.

  We don’t have the Sleeper Car on the train the next day, just two seats in the upstairs. Which is funny, because what with one thing and another we’ve been up most the night, and we sleep the whole way home. We agree, though, that what we got up to on it on the way up was a much better use of that little bed.

  * * * *

  We have big plans for Pride. We’re going to get up on Sunday morning, watch the parade with a gang of his friends, go to the festival, and see who comes out to be seen. Some one-hit wonder diva from the disco era is on the main stage at three, the beer bust starts at four, and there’s an angels-and-demons-themed boy-lesque show downtown at nine promising the hottest strippers this side of Hell’s eternal fire. I bought a cute little striped T-shirt that fits me like a glove; I got a pedicure the better to highlight my new flip flops; I even found a magic pair of shorts at an outlet mall that makes it look like I might have an ass. Oh, we’re doing this.

  Thing is, we hit Saturday night like a ton of bricks. A low-key barbecue in his friends’ backyard starts to get kind of rowdy around the time the gin-and-tonic Jell-o shots make their third pass around the patio. Music gets louder, laughter gets louder, his friend Antony brays the retellings of his hilarious capers even louder, so the next time the shots wobble by, someone turns the music up. A neighbor who we’re sure has come across the alley to complain instead invites all comers to the dance party in his basement. He’s been running around with a DJ, Ben’s friends tell us, so we roll across the yard en masse. Carrying trays of food and bottles of booze, we squeeze down the stairs into a concrete disco dungeon. The air thrums with the bass, people are sweating and stripping and humping and bumping, and by the time Antony has four mostly-naked dudes carry him over and tells me I have to do a shot out of his ass, it seems like a perfectly sensible idea, and I lick whiskey out of his crack until the upended bottle runs dry.

  Or so says Ben in the morning. For me the night starts to get a little fuzzy right around the Boney M Soul Train Line, and my memories of anything past the mashup of every Cher song ever are what you might call indistinct. Antony certainly struck me as the type who would consent to being carried around and licked by a bunch of people, and I never say no to a nice butt. Decorum dictates that I call Ben a liar to his laughing face, but it was that kind of night.

  “What time is it?” I mumble. My eyes aren’t so into the whole “open” thing just yet.

  “It’s early.”

  “How e
arly?”

  “It’s go-back-to-sleep early.”

  “Where are we?”

  “We’re at your house. You don’t remember driving home?”

  My eyes are open now. In fact I’m a little surprised they don’t pop out and roll across the floor. I gasp so hard I choke on it.

  Ben pats my back, laughing. “Sorry, baby. You okay? You didn’t drive home, we took a cab. We took a cab there, too, remember?”

  I admit that I do not remember that, and this leads to the revelation about the butt shots. “Drive?” he says, chuckling. “It was all I could do to get you out of the cab. I’m just glad we didn’t have to sleep in his backseat.”

  “I don’t feel all that hungover,” I marvel.

  “That’s ‘cause you’re still drunk. Now go back to sleep.”

  “But the parade…”

  He laughs again. “We’ll see about the parade.”

  “But we want to go to the parade.”

  “Do we want to get out of bed?”

  I growl and burrow into the sheets.

  “Right. So we’ll see about the parade.”

  By the time getting up out of the bed is anything other than a hilarious pipe dream, the parade has long since marched by, but we rally the wherewithal to leave the house. My cute shirt looks cute, and my cute shorts looks cute; my pedicure is a little the worse for wear after dancing the night away barefoot in some dude’s unfinished basement, and I look like maybe I took a wet sack of sand to the face—repeatedly—but it’s nothing a pair of sunglasses can’t fix. Or, you know, conceal. There’s still the festival, after all, even if the thought of the beer bust afterward makes me throw up in my mouth a little every time Ben mentions it, which I finally have to ask him to stop doing.

  We drive toward downtown, but park blocks and blocks from Civic Center, before looking for parking becomes a dizzying exercise in futility. As we straggle by a café, I see three things on the patio that I realize I’ll never be able to live without, namely a bloody Mary, a pile of pancakes with a fried egg on top of them, and an empty table for two in a shady corner. By the time Ben turns around to look for me, I’m waving to him from my seat.

  “So you’re saying you want breakfast?” He’s laughing as the hostess guides him out onto the patio.

  “Yes, please.”

  “I s’pose I could do a bloody Mary,” he says.

  “Yes, please.”

  I’m in no position to booze the day away, but a spicy bloody Mary that’s about half hot sauce hits the spot, and after that the coffee’s all-you-can-drink. I order up my pancakes, my fried egg, and a big plate of bacon. Ben gets biscuits and gravy. I drag my bacon through his gravy, he drenches a biscuit in syrup, and when the server clears our plates we order a basket of pizza fries and settle in to soak up Proud Denver. Our shady set-up on this patio I don’t remember ever even noticing before is far superior to the usual Pride Fest promenade. And if we missed the floats and convertibles full of waving politicians, the parade of Pride-goers streaming along this stretch of Thirteenth Avenue, in their rainbow tutus and cowboy boots and faux-fur Daisy Dukes, does not disappoint. We eat, and we laugh, and after a spell we eat again. Ben has a second bloody Mary, but I’m just as happy to drink my weight in water in the hopes that one day I might be able to open my eyes all the way again.

  We head back to my house pretty early. We bail on the beer bust and forget about boy-lesque, but when it comes time to celebrate our favorite part of being gay, this Pride’s a barn-burner.

  When his birthday rolls around in September, we’re not officially living together or anything. But one of our favorite things is to wake up next to each other, so most nights it’s real hard to think of reasons why he should go home to a twin bed in his mom’s basement. On the morning of the tenth I awake from a suddenly very vivid sex dream to a guilty-eyed Ben with a mouthful of my dick. “It’s my birthday,” he reminds me. “You said I could eat whatever I want. I want to eat this.”

  I shift onto my back and grab a fistful of his hair, shifting my weight from one side to the other until we’re rocking to the same rhythm. “Well then, happy birthday,” I say, and I fuck his face until he’s drunk his fill.

  I’m nobody’s dietician, and I’m not a cop: Ben can eat whatever he wants any old day. Certainly when it’s my cock, it’s not my job to try and stop him. What I told him was for his birthday I’d make him whatever he wanted me to make him, anything in the whole wide world as long as I could get a hold of the ingredients and didn’t have to dig a hole in the backyard to cook it in. “If you want kalua pig that bad, it’s easier just to go to Hawaii,” I told him.

  “Ooh, that’s what I want. I want Hawaii.”

  We’ve been home from Maui for three days, and today we’re both back to work, but a promise is a promise. I was kind of afraid I’d have to learn how to braise an entire rabbit, or coax a soufflé to poofy perfection, or whatever it is French moms get up to in the kitchen, but on the flight home he begged me, like a little kid, to make my Sriracha crockpot meatloaf, which is a piece of cake.

  After he’s enjoyed a second helping of birthday breakfast, I climb out of the bed and into a pair of pajama pants. I pad out to the kitchen, then right back with two cups of coffee. “Get up,” I tell him with a kiss. “I’ll get this dinner together while you’re in the shower.”

  “But I want you in the shower with me.”

  “But I want to make this meatloaf first, then I can just shower and go.”

  “Some birthday.” He pouts into his coffee.

  I laugh. “You begged for this meatloaf,” I remind him. “Now it’s ruining your birthday?”

  “But I want to suds you,” he says. “Come on.” He tugs at the waistband of the cotton pants. “It can count as my present.”

  “Hawaii counts as your present.”

  “And didn’t we shower together there?” He wobbles his eyebrows.

  Indeed we showered together in Maui, for about an hour and a quarter. My prostate reverberated from showering together in Maui for like two days, the memory of which gets it humming again. I rip my pants in my hurry to hop into the bathroom.

  “I like Birthday Ben,” I eventually gasp from where I am sprawled in the bathtub under an icy shower I’m too delirious to know how to turn off. He’s upside down and underneath me, and we both pant and gasp for anything that might even hint at a return to equilibrium. He’s the first to rally, and he turns off the shower as he slithers out of the tub. I lay and watch him towel off: his hair, his string-bean torso, his perfectly bite-sized balls. The corners of his eyes gather like the daintiest feet of the tiniest crow when he squints ever so slightly to examine himself in the mirror. He works a palmful of product into his hair; from the tub I can’t see the gray that’s just starting to crest the waves, and without his glasses on probably neither can he. He slaps a coat of deodorant under each arm, frowns gently, and gives the little smile of tummy-pooch that’s just starting to gather under his belly button a pinch. Then he turns sideways and smiles at his ass, then at me.

  I smile, too. “I sure am glad you were born,” I say.

  In response he backs up two steps and squats down til his swollen booty is right in my face. I kiss one cheek, then the other, then I smack them both until he stands up straight. “Help me up,” I command, and he does.

  I’m still deep in my own mirror process—is my tummy starting to pooch? I mean, sure, it’s cute on Ben…I grope for something to pinch—when he breezes into the bathroom to kiss me goodbye.

  “I’ll see you at Good For What Ales You?” he reminds me. The beauty of the crockpot: we can meet his friends for all the beer we want and still come home to the dinner of his dreams. Oh shit—speaking of which…

  “Wait, you’re leaving?”

  “Leaving? Miriam had to cover my homeroom, it’s eight-thirty.”

  “Ack.”

  “So I’ll see you later?”

  “Yeah, you will. I might already be drunk by the tim
e you get there, though, if I get fired.”

  “‘K, well, at least get us a good table if that happens,” he says. Thirty seconds later, I hear the front door creak open, then click shut.

  I mean, I work in admissions, not the E.R., but still—with dinner yet to make, a nine A.M. showtime looks unlikely. I wriggle into the closest pair of khakis, which I think are Ben’s, but an extra inch of ankle isn’t the scandal it used to be, so I don’t bother to wriggle out of them. I toss on the first shirt I come across with a collar on it, then slide into the kitchen in my stocking feet and get to gettin’ on this meatloaf. Chopping an onion at eight-thirty in the morning…Will cologne make me smell better or worse after this? I take a rolling pin to a sleeve of crackers to make my breadcrumbs, add another splash of Sriracha to the meat after pretty much every step, hack up a potato. I get the crockpot up onto the counter, plug it in, plop the lopsided loaf into it, put the lid on, and run for the door. It’s not until I reach for my car keys that I even remember to wash my hands. It’s five ‘til, it takes me ten minutes to get to work, fifteen in ridiculous traffic; we’ll call it “flex time.” Everything’s cool.

  My boss is gay, and has a huge crush on Ben. “It’s his birthday” is a better excuse than I had a flat tire or the dog ate my alarm clock.

  “You could have taken the whole day off for that,” he says. “That’s a man worth celebrating.”

  “Then you won’t mind if I bail at like four to go meet them for birthday drinks?”

  His face says he might mind a little bit, seeing as how I just took the whole last week off, but nobody asked him to offer. I turn the screw. “Ben said to invite you. You should totally come.”

  “Oh, well…” he flusters. “I don’t know that they can spare both of us, but you go. Tell him I said Happy Birthday.”

  “I will. Thanks!”

  I stay until four-thirty to show that I’m a sport, then walk the half-mile to Good For What Ales You. It’s our current favorite of Denver’s dozens of craft breweries precisely because it’s fallen out of favor with the fickle hipster beer bandwagon, so you’re pretty much guaranteed a seat on the patio. And their Arnold Palmer Pilsner tastes like summer in a pint glass, which hits the spot on this golden afternoon.