by David Connor
“You’ll pass,” I reiterated. “I’ll work off the clock.” I pretended to ignore his thing this time, what he’d said—and his other thing, the one that streaked precum through the fur on my upper leg. “You’re my last appointment. My finals are all done. We’ve got all night… after you tell me your life story.”
“You won’t get in trouble for staying out past bedtime? Your minister father won’t be, like, having me arrested or something?”
“Ha-ha,” I said, without humor. If only Aidan knew how often Dr. B. and my father duked it out in my head, like the angel and the devil on one’s shoulder. My dad might be surprised which one he was.
“Sorry,” Aidan said. He stopped rubbing his penis on me. “I’m a jerk. More psychology… I… I hurt you before you hurt me.”
“I’d never hurt you.”
“You won’t fuck me either.”
“My resistance is waning.” I put my hand on his tummy and wondered if I was joking.
“I won’t fuck you now.”
“No?” I pulled away.
“No. For the same reason I can’t love you.” Aidan reached up to stroke the hairs on my arm, the one beneath his head. His voice was tired and the mood had suddenly switched from sexual to intimate.
“Which is what exactly?” I toyed with one of his earrings—not the one resting on my muscle, one of three in the other ear—while I waited for an answer. When none came, I tried to fill in the rest on my own. “Is it because you think I’ll leave you if you do? If we love each other, I’ll hurt you? That’s what you’re afraid of… hypothetically?”
He repeated my last word. “Hypothetically.” I wondered why. “My grampy loved my grams, like, more than what I ever saw two people love each other, right?” he finally asked.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. They would have been married forty-five years last year. And they didn’t marry ‘til grampy was twenty-nine. Except grams died before their thirty-fifth.”
“I’m sorry, Aidan.” I knew the story, from Dr. B.
“Car crash. The Tuesday before Thanksgiving. She hated Black Friday, Grampy said. She and my moms were Christmas shopping, getting an early start. My mom died too. Grampy lost the only person he ever loved and I lost two, all at once. Well, him too… my mom… his daughter. He lost two too.”
I thumb-swiped his tear and Aidan burrowed deeper into my arm. “That’s terrible,” I said. “But…”
“But what? But you’re gonna tell me it wasn’t their fault, right? That they didn’t leave me on purpose.”
“They didn’t.”
Aidan snorted out a laugh “They still left. And my fucking father, who shoulda been there, he did leave on purpose. He’s worst of all, because he’s still alive, but may as well not be.”
“You don’t see him?”
Aidan offered another snort. “He don’t see me.”
I watched a wet spot on the blanket grow wider and darker from a tear that fell upon it.
“‘It’s too much for me,’ my dad told my grampy when he dropped me off to live there. He meant I was too much. A fourteen year old brat. The very definition of juvenile delinquent, maybe. I was scared. Fucking petrified. My whole world had exploded. I loved my Grampy, but my home was with Mom and Dad, our house, and our yard, and our furniture, and our stuff. Asshole Asher took that away too. Mom was dead and Dad was fucking dropping me off somewhere else to live two weeks before Christmas. Bless his fucking cold heart, I guess. He at least tried to keep me a whole two weeks, right?” Aidan fidgeted. “‘Oh, he’ll be back,’ Grampy promised. ’Cept he never was. That was three people, all when I was a little kid. A fucking little kid. It fucking sucks.” Aidan’s wounds seemed pretty fresh, even after more than a decade. “He’s got other kids now. Knocked some chick up a couple months after. Within a couple more, he had two, then eventually four. I still don’t see him much. He calls, maybe emails or texts on my birthday, and sends a fucking Christmas present a week fucking after. I bet Santa arrives when he’s fucking supposed to for the new kids.”
Forget healing, the wounds had grown deeper, because Aidan still picked at them. I couldn’t blame him.
“You have brothers and sisters?” he asked.
“Yeah. A younger sister. She just turned eighteen.” I tried to smile. “I figure my parents only ever had sex twice—seven years apart. Recovery time.” I swallowed hard.
“She a good girl? You a good boy all your life?”
“Mostly, I guess.”
“I mean, I was trouble,” Aidan said. There was a slight smile in his tone, despite the pain. “If you can imagine such a thing.”
I sort of could.
“I can see my dad being frustrated. I frustrated Grampy too. I got in so much trouble at school, but never really bad trouble. This one time, we broke in after hours and took everything out of Mr. Friedman’s room, right?” Aidan turned to me and grinned. This was a happy story. “We pulled out everything… desks, shelves, books, the trash can, the maps… four of us as a group. There wasn’t a speck of chalk dust or a thumbtack left when he walked in the next morning. He busted me right away. I wouldn’t give up my accomplices, though. No way. The principal called Grampy in a huff.” Aidan put on a high-pitched voice. “‘I don’t know what to do with him, Dr. Wise.’ She was ready to expel me, except somehow, I charmed my way out of it.”
“I can see that.”
“All I got was detention for a week—which I only attended one day. ‘You’re like Houdini,’ Grampy always said. ‘You get yourself in such impossible predicaments but always come out unscathed.’ Poor guy. I wish I could take all the trouble back.”
When Aidan rolled away from me, I took his hand in mine and brought it to my lips. I kissed the back of it. “I’m sorry.”
“We had a ton of good times too, though. Grampy was a better dad than Asshole Asher any day.”
He somehow managed not to look at me, though our faces were millimeters apart. Then he did again, and we kissed. It wasn’t the kind of kiss I would picture whenever Aidan would tire of discussing human reproduction and start talking about sex instead. It was a long kiss—not one uninterrupted kiss, but a series of short, tender ones. My free hand was on his cheek, one of his was gripping the blanket. The other one grabbed my wrist—not hard—but as if he was holding on, maybe, for fear I might leave him in the middle of it all.
“That’s her?” I asked, when finally we stopped. I traced my finger around the heart over Aidan’s. Where I guess his heart was, because it was under the covers. “R. W.? That’s your mom?”
“R. W.,” Aidan said. “Rori Wise. Victoria. She and the asshole never married. Pity I got stuck with his name. Aidan Asshole. Maybe it fits. Maybe I’m an Asshole too.”
“No.”
“Hers stayed Wise,” Aidan explained. “And M. W. is Grams. Technically A. W. ’Cept no one never called her Amanda. My grampy never did. Mandy, that was her name.”
The lights went out then. I gasped. Aidan sort of jumped. We both got up on our knees to look out the open window. It was freezing now, out from under the covers, because it had been open so long. The lights flickered—on, off, on, off. The tree in the courtyard flashed as if covered in blinking lights instead of steady ones.
“It got windy,” Aidan said.
“Yeah.” Both of our heads were out the window. It was barely big enough, but we managed. The storm had intensified. “And it’s snowing harder,” I said. “Maybe I should stay over.”
“Maybe,” Aidan agreed.
White puffs escaped his mouth with each syllable in the cold. I sort of tried to capture them, so a part of him could enter me. “I bet the streets are bad.”
The tree came on.
“And your roommate already left for the holidays, right?”
“Yeah.” Aidan told me he had.
The tree went off.
“I’ll have to call my dad.”
The tree came on.
“How’s that gonna go over?”
“I don’t care,” I claimed. “I can do what I want. I’m almost thirty,” I reminded him.
“Not as almost as me.”
I laughed. A big puff of white escaped. Aidan chomped at it. He’d had the same notion as I.
“I can do whatever I want,” I insisted. “I wonder if still being in school makes us feel younger than we are.”
“You maybe. I’m just immature.”
I laughed, and kissed his chilly cheek.
The tree went off—and stayed off. The room inside was pitch black. We pulled our heads in and kissed. Aidan’s hands were on my underwear. I wondered if he was about to take them down. Suddenly, the emergency generator kicked on. Small, yellowish lights in the ceiling covered Aidan in a sort of golden glow as he raised his hands as if under arrest.
3
My ugly shorts were on the floor, along with my shirt, my socks, and my navy blue long-legged briefs, each item neatly folded, and stacked—shorts, shirt, underwear, rolled socks—just like that. I stood in front of the mirror, as Aidan, proud of his work, sat on the edge of the bed awaiting a verdict.
“Zygomatic, Scapula, Patela, Carpals, Phlanges, Fibula, Femur…” I frowned, then smiled and turned. “There’s no K in Coccyx, knucklehead.”
The knucklehead’s smirk, readable in low light, suggested he was well aware of that.
We’d talked. We’d cuddled, and Aidan had cried. I had offered to go down on him. “I want to be even closer to you,” I’d said. “I want your warmth inside me.” But Aidan had refused.
“You’ve waited, Kipster, for something special. This feels like it. It does, but I can’t promise anything about after. This may be the most mature thing I have ever done in my life so far. I’m turning you down.”
So, we’d put that all on hold, all talk of sex off the table, the occasional purposely extra dirty letter in certain skeletal parts notwithstanding. We’d gotten back to work, only stopping while Aidan took a very brief nap, one he continued to deny.
“You fell asleep.”
“I did not!”
“You were snoring.”
“I was not!”
“It was adorkable as heck. All soft and sexy rumbly, like a stick-on-a-picket-fence-sound, until you let out one of those really loud animal snorts.” I imitated the sound. “That’s what woke you. You don’t remember that?”
He’d told me he didn’t, but I was pretty sure he’d just wanted to bicker.
We’d come up with the new study method after the small disagreement. It was Aidan’s idea, naturally. I would have been just as happy to simply hear the answers listed, or for Aidan to point. “I’m gonna have to label a diagram on the test,” he’d argued. “May as well practice like that,”
“I could print out a sheet,” I’d suggested.
“Or I could just label you and your sexy body.”
He’d called me sexy, which seemed the perfect point to stop debating. Speaking of calling, I also called my father. “Stay put and stay safe,” he’d said. “No shenanigans.”
“It tickles,” had been my only complaint thus far, as Aidan and I continued to engage in something certainly shenanigan adjacent. I had gotten really good at reading backwards, and the erasable marker thankfully was, through the circulatory system, the lymphatic system, and now—“Toss me the wet wipes.”—the skeletal system as well. “I hope these words wash out of your underwear,” I said. I was wearing Aidan’s. They had to be white, so Aidan could write on them. So far, we were crossing words out after each labeling.
“I don’t wear ’em anyway,” Aidan said. “They’re kinda big.”
Which explained why they almost fit me. I tugged at the tightness across my butt.
There had been another option suggested, but I thought the white bicycle-shorts-style boxers were a better plan. I was bound and determined not to let distractions, frivolity, and exposed, aroused genitalia interfere with learning. There was no reason for my penis to be out if I wasn’t going to use it, even if it did appear in several human biological system groupings. Aidan was covered too—sort of. He had wrapped the bedspread around his shoulders, but was mighty careless about keeping it closed.
“On to the digestive system?” I asked, scrubbing bone names from my semi-nude body. The sophomoric learning game was goofy, most definitely erotic, but it was working. Aidan was doing remarkably well. “What are the six steps in digesting food?” I put the marker in the cup on the desk and picked up Aidan’s half-empty Cheetos bag. “Visual aide?” I chomped one.
“Let’s do the reproductive system instead.” Aidan whipped open the bedspread, like a Grand Central flasher. He flexed his semi-hard penis. “Visual aide?”
“You’re getting tired and punchy.” I worked hard to maintain eye contact. “Maybe another nap?”
“I didn’t—”
“Okay, you win.”
“I always do.” Aidan closed the short distance between us in two steps. He dropped to his knees, and reached for a marker from the cup. “Close your eyes.”
“Huh?”
“Just school work.” He looked up at me from the floor.
“It seems you have more on you mind, young lad.” His dick was starting to grow, like a horny Pinocchio.
“Shush. And close your eyes,” he said again.
“Why do I need to close my eyes this time?”
“Just to prove you trust me.”
I raised him up with a strong hold on each shoulder. I kissed the top of his springy, chocolate head. All I got was hair. “I do trust you.” I kissed his head again. The second time, I got some… so to speak… after which I guided Aidan back to his knees. “Behave down there,” I instructed, because I only trusted him a little.
Back when the lights had first gone out, Aidan had asked me how I knew that I loved him. “You sure you’re not just horny?” he’d proposed. He’d wondered if it was even possible for two “dudes” to fall in love in such a short period of time. “How well do we even know each other, Kipster?” A month-and-a-half, two hours twice a week, though it was mostly work and sexual innuendo, we had gotten to know each other quite well, I thought. Mannerisms: Aidan chewed his lip when he concentrated. Reactions: I cringed when Aidan started to give an incorrect answer. I’d have made a lousy poker player, but it proved how much I wanted Aidan to succeed. He’d noticed right away, back at the beginning, and would change his response accordingly. That night, as we studied for his final, he’d mentioned that. “You want me to do good,” he’d said.
“I do,” I had told him, resisting the urge to correct his grammar.
We’d gotten to know each other’s habits. My satchel was as neat as a filing cabinet, everything I needed in its proper place. Aidan hadn’t changed his sheets since September and his room always looked as if he had just been desperately searching for something.
Nutrition: I drank bottled water and carried trail mix—always healthy. Aidan made deliciously decadent dessert-like concoctions in a tiny microwave from Raman noodles, chocolate syrup, handfuls of my “nuts and berries”, and coffee cream powder from a jar.
“Oh my God!” My eyes had rolled back in my head the first time I’d tasted it.
“That what your cum face looks like?”
I bet it was close.
Music: We’d accidentally swapped phones one weekend after a session. When Aidan used the phrase “High as an elephant’s eye” to describe his weekend antics during the next one, I had learned that he didn’t mind an occasional Broadway tune, and also occasionally partook in smoking cannabis. His player had everything from hardcore rap, to Motown, to pure 80’s.
“For birthdays and Christmas and stuff, my grampy is always giving me CDs from his and my mom’s generations,” Aidan had explained. “He says I need to know music from every decade. There’s some good stuff from back in the day.”
I agreed.
I had witnessed Aidan’s kindness. He never killed a bug. Every spider or moth that invaded our study session was gen
tly picked up and safely put out the window. That told me a lot. And I knew, long before the discussion that snowy, cold night, or even before Dr. B. had told me, in fact, that Aidan carried something in his heart when it came to his family. During a review of the chapter on patterns of inheritance, those traits received from one’s parents, Aidan, who was always boisterous, lively, dirty-minded, and jovial, had become quiet and withdrawn, reciting answers, but nothing more.
Devotion: Aidan called his grampy every night at precisely 9:00 p.m. We had a lot of nighttime study sessions, and we always stopped for ten or fifteen minutes so they could talk. I hadn’t known Aidan long. That was true. But I did feel as if I knew him well, despite what I had told Dr. B. on the subject. I had done the math in my head after the word “love” had been spoken earlier in the evening. While Aidan was scribbling the parts of the human heart on my chest, I’d counted up the hours we had spent together. Starting in October, we’d met three times a week for twelve whole weeks, two hours at a time. Had it been dating, that would have been a lot of dates. Cumulatively, it came out to be approximately seventy-two hours—three entire days, give or take. Imagine spending three whole days with someone. You’re either going to love them or hate them by the end of it, I figured. I loved him! I definitely did.
“Open your eyes.”
I looked down. “Done already?”
“I abbreviated.”
I stepped to the mirror.
GOOD STUFF.
It actually showed up correctly. Aidan had written it backwards, not on the tight, long-legged shorts, but just below my navel, GOOD STUFF, with an arrow, the shaft of it in black derived from coloring the flaxen hair trail down my gut. The very tip of the arrowhead was hidden by the underwear. I had felt the point of the marker go inside. I’d recited the fifty states alphabetically when it had, in order to stop the parasympathetic nerve fibers from releasing nitric oxide, which would result in the relaxation of the smooth muscles in the arterial walls, releasing the constriction of penile arteries, allowing blood from the previously constricted arteries to flow into the erectile tissues and, at the same time, the arteries to relax, so the penile veins would then become constricted, thus restricting flow of blood away from the penis, causing it to become engorged. In other words, I tried really hard not to pop a woody.