by David Connor
“La, la, la.” Discussing intimacy with my potential lover’s grandfather was a bit awkward.
“He won’t believe how much better it is when you do it with someone you really dig.”
“Dig?”
“Dig holes,” Aidan said.
“Huh?”
“Grampy used that word a lot. Dig this, dig that. I always said ‘dig holes”. Guess you had to be there, brah. Come on.”
“I really didn’t say skinny dip first, just so you know.”
Aidan took off his undershorts, right there in the kitchen. “I never wear clothes to the pond… just so you know.”
His totally naked body right in front of me was way more enticing than I even imagined—and I had imagined it, many, many times over the twelve months since I’d last seen it. His body hair was thick, dark, and bushy now. It was totally sexy. He’d lost some weight since last year, and yet somehow looked chubbier. He was thinner in the chest and arms and rounder at the belly, adorably so. I wanted him bad.
“Strip off,” Aidan said. “No one can see into the yard.”
“Do it.”
Except the ghost of Christmas pimping, I thought to myself. “Maybe once we get out there.” I stalled.
“Birthday suit yourself.” Aidan headed out the door. I watched him walk off as far as I could see. It was better than good stuff. It was freakin‘ amazing stuff, hair and all! If only I’d had a marker to label it.
“Stay in here,” I whispered sternly, whirling around the moment naked Aidan disappeared behind the brush. “There’s no way we’re gonna…”
“Fuck?”
“Yeah.” I picked up the Shelf Elf. “That.” I spoke to it as if Dr. Wise’s specter was coming through it. “Not that we’re going to.”
“Not with you wearing so many clothes.”
“What I’m wearing has nothing to do with it. He’s disgusted with me now… or something else. He doesn’t even want to have sex with me.”
“Oh, I beg to differ.”
“How do you know? Can ghosts read minds?”
“I don’t have to read his mind. I know him.”
“Well, he said we’re not going to, so…”
“He said ‘probably’. So, change his mind. Convince him you’re not going anywhere.”
“Why can’t you?” I set down the elf, and then picked up my tablet to record what was going on. “You’re the one with… superpowers or whatever.”
“I’m not Batman. And I already told you why.”
“Try again.”
“Who you talking to?” Aidan reentered the kitchen, his “good stuff” on full display.
“Just my tablet.”
“You doing a voice diary now?”
“Something like that.”
“Was that about me?”
“Sort of, yeah.”
“Come on.” Aidan took the computer from my hand. “Leave it inside. Whatever happens, you can write about it later.” He set it down and grabbed a beer. “Beer? Water? JO… OJ?” His smirk said it wasn’t a mistake. “You still do that?”
“What?”
“Say sex words when you’re nervous?”
“Jizz. I mean, juice. Thanks.”
Aidan barked out a laugh and handed me my cold one. “At least take your shoes off. The grass feels good between your toes.” He went back out the door.
“We’re not gonna do it,” I said under my breath, untying my topsiders.
“Don’t be so sure.”
“Not with you watching!”
“I’ll take a nap. Wake me when it’s over.”
“You better.” I whipped off my socks, and then, just to be sure, went back to the counter and stuck the Shelf Elf in the cupboard.
I nearly caught up to Aidan, purposely lagging behind to watch him walk. A dark shadowed line between two pale curves in back shifted with each step. He was a nice, perfect toast color on the top and bottom. The section in between—the good and better stuff—was in stark contrast. I wondered why he had such distinctive tan lines if he was naked all the time.
“Are you out here?” I whispered.
No one answered.
I didn’t want to disappoint Dr. Wise. I didn’t want to disappoint myself, either. The whole way down to Florida, all I kept thinking was, December, 22, 2014, that’s the day Aidan and I will finally make love. Now, I wasn’t so sure, despite what the voice was telling me. .
I looked around the area surrounding the pond as we got close. “Crud!” There were tall weeds all around us. I was sure some of it was poison ivy. I was sure I had poison ivy, and I started to itch. Unless Aidan wanted access to my sexual organs, noticing Achaearanea tepidariorum, Agelenopsis aperta, Hemileuca eglanterina, and Gryllus texensis, “I’d like to keep them covered,” I muttered.
Dr. Wise didn’t argue.
I shushed when Aidan glanced back, so he wouldn’t catch me talking to myself again. I had to shield my eyes to see him. I looked. I took it all in. The paleness between two patches of deep, russet skin in the middle of Aidan’s compact frame was a perfect backdrop to dark, chestnut highlighted pubic fur and his swinging dick. His milky white middle third was no longer tat-free. He had a spray of stars on his side, all the way down his hip that swirled around his thigh. He came closer. Step, sway, step, sway… Good stuff. I licked my lips.
“You want I should go back to the house and come back, so’s you can watch again?”
“I wouldn’t hate it,” I told him boldly.
He stretched out in the grass instead. “Get down here, Kipster.”
I took off my top shirt and sat down beside him. I opened my juice, and he opened his beer. Aidan took a hearty swig, and then laid back again, his arm under his head, like mine was the last time we were next to one another.
“I probably do drink too much,” he said. “I don’t know.”
His penis was half-erect, lying against his thigh. Like the second hand on a clock or a metronome—tick, tick, tick—it grew stiffer, stiffer, stiffer, until it rested flat against his tummy, the head pointing back at his face. I called such an erection a nooner-boner back in my less mature days.
“You’re thinking about what you’re gonna write later on, aren’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“Is it about me?”
“How glad I am to be here, yes. And then something about all the tattoo stars.”
“For Grampy.”
“Cool. Because he was into space?”
“Yeah. There’s a moon too.” He pointed to it. He’d found it with his eyes closed. “Grams called him Moon Man.”
“Cool.”
“What about my nooner-boner?”
“What about it?”
We were meant to be.
“You gonna write about that?” Aidan asked.
“Oh, definitely,” I said.
Aidan smiled. His eyes were closed, aimed straight up at the sky, but he smiled. “The sun is dope. At least take your shirt off,” he suggested. “If you’re, like, too shy to go cock out in front of me.”
“Not just you,” I thought. Plus, I hated the sun. That’s why my skin was the color of printer paper. I pulled off my undershirt, though, rather awkwardly, I feared, and sucked in my gut, even though Aidan wasn’t looking.
“Lie down.”
I did.
“I said it right. Two times now. Did you notice?”
“I did. Hey.” I tapped Aidan bare hip. “Remember when you wrote good stuff and better stuff on me the night before your bio final?”
“Yeah.”
“You picked up the wrong marker. You used permanent ink.”
“No fucking way!” Aidan rolled over, his eyes wide.
“I had arrows pointing at my penis and down my butt in indelible marker for days!”
“Is it still there?” He put his face mere inches from my crotch. His hand—two fingers—ran my hair trail. Then he pulled at one of my belt loops, presumably to look down my pants.
I laughed with an abundance
of dorkiness, because it tickled and because it was silly. “Of course not. It was for a while, though.”
“Sweet!” Aidan reached for his beer. “I tagged ya as my own, brah.” He took a drink. “Did Dr. Barbaro see it?”
“Are you asking me how soon after that night he and I got together?”
“Was I?” He went flat on his back his back again.
“Were you?”
Aidan didn’t volley back.
I watched his slightly round gut move up and down, his penis with it, until it went soft and flopped over to six o’cock. I sipped my juice. “It was months. April. We worked together—”
“And played.”
I gave up.
Bugs kept jumping on and off of me. I cringed every time. Remembering how Aidan rescued moths and spiders in his dorm room back last winter, I resisted the urge to smash them into bug bits against my skin.
“For a biologist, you’re awful squeamish about living things.”
He knew me so well. “I know.”
“Grampy and I had some time to talk that night. Not enough. God, not enough.” Aidan jumped topics again. “I told him all about you way back at Thanksgiving. Before that, even. Not all, but a lot. I told him you loved me right before he died.”
“I love you still.”
“Grampy told me I wasn’t easy to love.”
I took Aidan’s hand. “It’s easy for me.”
“Liar.” He shifted some and opened his eyes. They still looked up, though, not at me. “I told him I loved you too.” They met mine then. “I think I still do.”
I stretched so I could kiss him.
“I’m… afraid, though.” He kissed me back.
“You’ve lost so many people. It’s not fair.”
Aidan lay back down. “I lied, Kip.” he said after a while.
“About what?” My heart was in my throat. Had he lied about loving me?
“I keep my undies on outside, mostly.”
“Oh.” I chuckled. “That’s why you’re so pale around…”
“My good and better stuff.” Aidan reached over and touched my shorts. “There’s always yard work here. It fucking storms non-stop. And then decorating the house…”
“I can’t wait to see it lit up,” I said.
“Bare assed on a ladder, I was like, ‘What if I fall?’”
“Lucky EMS worker.”
Aidan snorted—a little laugh. “This is good, though. Grampy and I used to swim naked all the time when I was younger. He was an old hippie kind of guy. It was never any big thing him being naked in front of me or me in front of him no matter how old we were.” Aidan touched my shorts again. “It’s nice doing it with you.”
“Yeah.”
“So you like teaching?”
“It’s alright.”
“You still at SUNY?”
“Naw. I teach middle school now. Eighth graders suck.”
Aidan laughed again. What a wonderful sound. “Do they?”
“Not all of them, I guess. Some.”
“Hormones.” He touched my shorts a third time without looking over. I took the hint, and also a deep breath. I unbuttoned them, and then unzipped the fly. “I like them ones,” Aidan said. He hadn’t looked over, but he knew what I’d done. No surprise, he was familiar with the sound. “You still got them ugly paisley ones?” he asked.
“I gave them to Good Will,” I said, dropping trou.
“I bet they gave ‘em back too.”
I expected Aidan to look at me. He didn’t. My heart sank a little. “I got to work with the junior drama club on the winter musical,” I told him, slipping the shorts off over one foot with the other one. “That was cool.”
“Hair?” Aidan asked.
“Hardly.” I smiled. “Scrooge. We did it right before break. What have you been up to?”
Aidan reached over and felt up my underpants. Oh boy!
“Odd jobs here and there,” he said. “Every one of them sucked. Got fired from all of ’em too. I didn’t hate the last one, actually. Still fucking got canned, though. I can go back if I want… after I straighten up.”
“What kind of work?”
“I think my manager meant grow up.”
“What kind of work?” I asked again. I didn’t want to ask about the bad stuff.
“Bakery department at A&P. I don’t get to do much actual concocting there.” He touched my fabric covered dick. “Everything’s premade somewhere. Frozen.” His hand went away. “We just throw it in the oven. Cheat baking. Customers could do themselves. We could just sell the dough, you ask me. I’m gonna apply to a real bakery, I think, in January. There’s a couple in town.”
“Here?”
“New York.”
“Neat. What about school?”
“Your boyfriend said I can take the bio final when I’m ready to go back. If I pass—”
“You’ll pass.” I ignored the jab.
“I’m not going back.”
Aidan’s hand went up my boxer briefs. I shivered. I wasn’t cold. “No?”
“I fucked everyone there. What’s the point?”
I chuckled, one quick, single beat of sound. “There’s a new crop every few months.”
“Little boys. I’m old enough for men now.” His finger stroked my rectus femoris.
“I see,” I said.
“Not as old as Doc Barbaro, but way too old for freshman dick. Maybe a teacher… like you. Not like you are, but like you did.”
“You know, if you have a problem with that—with me seeing Nick—just say so. Don’t keep being so passive aggressive about it.”
I expected him to look at me then, to yell or something. He just kept silently fingering my inner thigh for the longest time. “At one time, Grampy and Doc Barbaro were trying to fix us up,” he finally said.
“Yeah. I know. Wait. Your grandfather too?”
“Yup. They were in on it together.”
“Oh. Dr. B… Nick, I mean, he never mentioned your grandfather. He urged me to… you know… get with you.”
“And then you got with him. Swapping spunk, eatin’ butt. You shot your geyser right up the geezer, didn’t ya?”
“Aidan...”
“How many Viagra did it take to get his wrinkly, fogey cock hard?” His grin was annoying. “Did he have arthritis in it? Did he blow you without his dentures?”
“Knock it off, jerk!”
Aidan actually shuddered, like if he’d been standing, he might have jumped.
“Fifty isn’t that old.” I turned my back. “We’re more than halfway there ourselves, you know. You’ll be thirty in two years.”
“Sorry.”
“Not that you act like it.”
“I do sometimes,” he swore. And then he said, “Nooner-boner.”
“Jerk.” It came on a snicker.
Aidan’s grin was all teeth as his face pointed straight up toward the baking sun with closed eyes once more, as if he couldn’t get enough. “Jealousy.” The smile faded with one word. “I wanted to be your first.”
Was he serious? “You still can be. No one has been at my… better stuff.” I cringed, even before the last word.
Aidan made one of those amused barking sounds, like mine. “I’m not good enough for you,” he said right afterward.
“Says who?”
“Doc Barbaro and Grampy.” Aidan sat up a little. Only his shoulders were off the bug-lousy grass as he tilted his head in my direction. “Nice.”
It was hard to keep up with his train of thought. My underwear, or maybe how I looked in them, I assumed.
“Fuck what Barbaro thinks, ya know?” Aidan said. “But Grampy… he knows I’m a mess.”
“You’re not a mess.”
“If I ask ya nice, will ya wear ’em in the water?”
“What?”
“Your underwear.”
“Oh.” It was like topic ping pong—back and forth, back and forth. “Sure,” I said. “If you ask me nicely.”
&n
bsp; Aidan sat up the rest of the way. “Please and thank you.” He grinned, and I suddenly felt as if I’d do anything he asked.
“Now?” The feeling passed quickly, replaced by anxiety.
“No time like the present.”
“Oh. Okay.” I stood, but then hesitated. I wondered what kind of living organisms were swimming about in the greenish, stagnant water. Sometimes knowledge wasn’t power. “You first,” I said.
Aidan scrambled to his feet. “If you say so.” He ran at the water full force, sprinting in, then flopping onto his belly. His white butt cheeks spread apart as his legs V’d and bent at an obtuse angle at the knees. I was too far away to see anything distinctly, other than the widening of the division, but I could imagine what was there, as it finally disappeared beneath the surface, and then came back up all shiny and wet.
“Holy fuck!” he squealed. The visual and exclamation almost made me come. Aidan turned. He bounced up and down, showing his entire upper torso and the crown of hair above and most of the length of his penis, before going under to his nipples. His arms were wrapped around his upper chest, like when he’d come in from smoking wearing just those stupid looking boxers.
“That cold?” My nipples stiffened, my scrotum shrank just imagining it.
“Only for a sec or two.” The way Aidan rubbed his hands together told me he was lying. “C’mon, Kipster. I’ll count you down. Three.”
I took a deep breath and struck a runner’s start position.
“Two.”
I raised my arms. “Oh.” And I took off my glasses.
“One.”
I was off. A grinding sound came out of me as my arms pumped and my legs slipped in the humidity-sodden grass. It rose to such a high octave when my bare feet first hit the frigid water I thought I could play Maria Von Trapp in an all-guy Sound of Music stage production. I hit the water. “Fuck!” And I was only in up to my shins.
I hadn’t even realized I’d cursed, not at first. I figured the huge grin on Aidan’s face was because I’d splashed enough water on myself to make a bull’s-eye at my crotch, a see-through white fabric circle outlined in red piping that showed off the circumcised tip of my penis.
“Nice.” Aidan squatted.
The pond was clearer than I first thought. Above water, I saw his dripping dreads, down to half of his chest, just to the top of the tattoo heart. What I saw below—the wide-legged crouch with the huge, dangling dick floating in between—it made my dick hard. I only wished I had my glasses on, so I could see it even clearer.