by Anna Martin
“There?”
“Fuck.”
“Tell me, Chris. There?”
“Yes! Fuck you, you beautiful bastard. Harder.”
“Shit. God, you’re tight.”
“Yes. And you’re huge.”
“I prefer ‘generously proportioned’.”
“How can you—” Gasp. “—even think—” Gasp. “—of words that long—” Gasp. “—when you’re fucking me?”
“That’s why I went to college. To learn to multitask.”
“Now? Please now….”
“Wait—I’m nearly there.”
“Fuck, Rob, fuck fuck….”
“Yes.”
“Yes!”
I was starting to get annoyed with come stains on my nice sheets, so I got used to the feel of various different fabrics wiping it off my body. Then finding my place in his arms again, long, slow, searching kisses, the kissing marathons we liked to take part in as we curled up together in bed or on the sofa or in the bathroom… or anywhere, really.
Or that one time in the kitchen. It felt like coming full circle, from the first, jerky hand job he’d given me with my back to the fridge, to me bending him over the kitchen table and damaging one of the legs beyond repair.
And the kisses after, when we were both sticky and the window was fogged up with condensation, the heat in the room now at odds with the freezing wind outside.
He broke away, laughing breathlessly. “I’m half-hard again.”
“I’m going to need longer than that to recover,” I said as my hand skimmed down his side. He grabbed a bottle of chocolate milk from the fridge and wandered, bare-ass naked, back toward the bedroom.
“Coming?” he asked over his shoulder with a hint of sass. I liked it.
Back in bed, it felt just right for our sweaty bodies to tangle together as we rode out the endorphin high. When Flea wandered in, I couldn’t help but wonder if he’d been inside for the entire performance, and if he’d watched.
“Do you want to get married?” I asked Chris as Flea butted his head against Chris’s elbow, demanding attention. “Because if you do, I’ll find a ridiculously romantic place and time and ask you.”
“No,” he said but rolled onto his front, reclining half on my chest with his bare feet dangling off the end of the bed. “But tell me anyway where you’d take me.”
I hummed and ran my fingers through his hair a few times. “I could take you back to Scotland,” I said. “To Edinburgh.”
“I’d like that,” he agreed.
“There’s plenty of romantic places there. I think I still hold dual citizenship. We could even get married there, in the registry office in the Old Town.
“Or Paris,” I continued. “Because, you know, it’s traditional. But you’re not really that traditional.”
“I’m not.”
“Then maybe Hawaii. Or the Maldives, or Borneo.”
“I could take you out somewhere and ask you under the stars,” I said, and scratched my blunt fingernails through his hair. “I know it’s cold at the moment, but the sky is pretty clear and you could keep me warm.”
“I’m starting to regret saying no, now,” he said softly. ”You seem to be pretty good at all this romantic shit.”
“I like romance,” I said. “It’s easy to tell someone you love them, and we’ve got the physical side of things down pretty good. But romance is showing someone how you feel for them, and it might be silly or not make much sense, but I think it’s important.”
“No one’s ever done that for me before,” he said. “I mean, fuck, Rob, you wake me up with kisses. I usually get a shove to the ribs and told that I need to get out.”
I laughed and pulled him closer.
“One day,” I said carefully, my fingertips dancing over his bare hip and the sensitive spot just below it, “not now, but at some point, would you wear a ring, if I bought you one?”
“A wedding ring?” He sounded dubious.
“No,” I said, suddenly aware that I was not making my meaning clear. “Just a ring. You wouldn’t have to wear it on your wedding-ring finger, you could wear it on your thumb if that’s what you want. It would just be so I could look at it and know people could see something of mine on you.”
“I think I’d like that,” he said and pulled my mouth to his so we could exchange slow, searching kisses until my jaw ached and my face felt sticky with his spit.
“So,” he said after an indeterminable amount of time. “Have I converted you? Will you bunk off with me all the time now?”
I could tell by the tone of his voice that “bunking off” was about to become a standard double entendre in his vocabulary. Instead of a proper answer, I mumbled something about him being a bad influence and rolled toward the shower.
Chapter 13
WHEN it happened, I knew straightaway.
It didn’t make any sense for me to know, but I did.
Dark had set in hours ago, and I’d finished all of the work I needed to do for the evening and had settled down on the sofa for a quiet couple of hours with a new book.
I heard his motorbike first of all. The sound of the engine was familiar to me now. He hadn’t called or texted me to say he was coming—that in itself wasn’t unusual.
The engine cut out, and I waited for the sound of his shoes on the stairs and his light knock on the door.
He didn’t knock.
I heard his key turning in the lock and called out to him, hello or something similar, although his response was a silent removal of his coat and shoes by the door.
Then I knew for sure.
I set my book down on the coffee table and waited for his warm weight.
Still without speaking, he crawled onto my lap, straddling it with one leg either side of my own, pressed his face against my neck, and determinedly did not cry.
I held him close to me, rocking him gently, and ran my fingers up and down his back. The physical exhaustion seemed to roll off him in waves, flowing out of his skin and sinking into my own.
His hair smelled of my shampoo where he’d washed it last in my shower. It would only take a few moments of searching to see his effect on my life, and the clear effect I had on his. Some of it was etched in ink that was not going to wash off.
When he sniffed, I realized the effort it was costing him to not cry, which was sometimes more exhausting than actually crying in the first place. I wanted to give him permission to let it go, just let it all go, Chris, but if he didn’t want to cry in front of me, that was okay too.
“When?” I asked after a period of time long enough to make my thighs go numb but not yet fall asleep.
“Not this weekend, the weekend after,” he said. His voice sounded hollow. “One last goodbye gig and then out on Sunday morning.”
“Okay,” I said, because really, what else could I say?
“Tell me not to go,” he said, pulling back from my shoulder and gripping my arms tightly. I got my first good look at his face since he’d come in, and he seemed wrecked. Totally emotionally wrecked. “Tell me to stay here with you and I will.”
“I can’t do that,” I said gently. Removed his hands from my arms and set them back down by his sides. “This is your life, Chris, not holed up with someone who can only hold you back by the sheer nature of our relationship. How long would it take you to start resenting me?”
“I need you more than I need them.”
“But do you need me more than you need your music?”
He couldn’t answer that.
“You know where I am,” I said softly. “I’ve got no plans to move. So if you ever need me, come back and find me.”
He scrambled back and stood frowning down at me. “I can’t believe you’re not going to fight for us.”
Standing too, I took his hands in mine. “If I thought there was any chance I could win, I would fight,” I said quietly. “You need to go and do what it is that you’re meant to do. And I’ll do the same.”
His voice
was barely more than a whisper when he asked, “Can I stay?”
“Come on,” I said, tugging him through to the kitchen. “Let’s have a cup of tea.”
IN THE week that followed, I helped four musicians load up a camper van and trailer that was surely disproportionate to their needs.
“The drums take up a lot of space,” Lexi explained as I helped her wrap and box up their small amount of kitchen equipment. “And Chris won’t ride his bike if it’s raining too hard, so there has to be space on the trailer for that as well.”
“Where did the camper come from?”
She laughed and pushed her red curls back from her face. “My grandmother bought it when she retired with the intention of traveling across the country in it. She’d never left Florida before. She got as far as New Orleans and decided she liked home best after all. Technically it’s on loan from her until we get back home, but I don’t get the impression she’s too bothered if we keep it.”
“Who drives?” I asked as I taped up another box.
“We take it in turns,” she said. “There’s only really sleeping room for three; a compartment over the driver’s seat and the back bench pulls out big enough for two. If we stop for the night, then we draw straws for who has to sleep with the passenger seat cranked back.”
We started on the next lot of drawers, carefully wrapping the breakables in newspaper.
“We can live out of the van for about two weeks before we start trying to murder each other in our sleep,” Lexi continued. “We learned that going through Virginia.”
The goodbye gig was well promoted. Several local bands played in support, and I almost got into the music, almost, until the significance of the night dawned on me and the fog of melancholy settled around me again. I was trying so fucking hard to stay upbeat, or at least normal, because Chris was taking our impending separation to heart.
Despite all my best efforts, there were moments when I looked at him and felt another little fracture spread through my heart.
That night I knew he ached from the way he held his arms, and I tried my very best to kiss the pain away.
Neither of us slept particularly well.
There was an urgency to experience everything that we possibly could before he left, our kisses soft and sweet and searching, hot and passionate and needy. He was going to leave bruises on me, of this I was sure but didn’t care. I would wear his marks with pride.
We took it in turns to demand attention, our fingers ripping the sheets from the bed so at times we lay tangled in them, sleeping only on the bare mattress. Then we woke again and wanted something else, him in me, over me, riding me, under me until we were breathless and sore and hurting in an entirely different way.
The next morning he refused to shower.
“I want to smell like you,” he confided in a hushed whisper.
The few things that were left to pack took no time at all. Lex and John took the van down to the club and packed up the last of the equipment while Danny and I loaded trash bags with bedsheets to be washed when they stopped next. Chris sat on the porch and chain-smoked, refusing to help. He had always excelled at sulking and making his point.
The van came back.
John loaded the bike onto the trailer.
And Chris stood on the front path, the house all locked up, and clung to me for dear life.
I wanted to comfort him, to whisper lies into his hair that would make our parting easier. We’ll talk every day. I’ll see you again soon. You’ll find someone else. Or the things that weren’t lies at all but still impossible to say. I love you. I’ll never forget you. Please don’t forget me.
To give them their due, his friends gave us our privacy as for the first time I saw him cry, his hot tears soaking the front of my shirt.
We had to break away eventually.
His kiss tasted of salty tears and the sort of pain that breaks you apart inside and cigarette smoke and Chris.
“I love you,” he said, his forehead pressed to mine, his hand tightly wrapped around the back of his neck so he could tug at his own hair. His eyes screwed closed.
“I love you too.” I didn’t realize until that moment that I was crying too.
It was easier to keep my eyes shut as he kissed me again and, with a sound of absolute distress, pulled away.
I didn’t want to watch him climb into the van and pull away, and then I did.
My last memory of him was seeing him curled up on the passenger seat of the van with his head on his knees.
And then he left.
Intermission
IN THE weeks since he left, I’ve changed. Considering all the ways I’ve changed since first meeting Chris, this isn’t such a surprise, but these are changes that only those closest to me have noticed.
I could have thrown myself into my lectures, but there was no passion there for me. Instead I picked up the battered manuscript that I’d been working on for nearly six years, the pages and pages of notes and scribbles and research, and poured myself into making something new.
Before he left I had just started to see myself in terms of him; I became Chris’s partner, Chris Ford’s boyfriend, even, and as terrifying as those terms were, I embraced them.
Without him I feel lost again, and the only way I can find myself is to redefine who I am, this time not in terms of Chris but in terms of myself and my own achievements. I want to be able to call myself a published author and a specialist in my field. From all the research I’ve done over the years, I know that nothing like what I’m working on exists out there. Maybe there’s a reason for that; maybe no one wants to read it or buy it or sell it, but maybe no one has ever thought of putting it together before.
After six years of research, it takes me a little over six weeks of work to turn that pile of scrapbooks and notes into a tangible manuscript. I’ve considered asking the university for a sabbatical, but having something at home to go back to and work on is even more exciting, like I have a secret identity. Like Superman.
Only Superman never walked around in a daze. Superman never got to the grocery store and had no idea what food was in the cupboard and what he needed to buy. And I bet Superman never pulled over on the side of the road with a paper bag on the passenger seat full of cereal and cat food and cried until he thought his chest might break.
The missing him is intense.
But, as they say, life goes on. Mine certainly has.
Christmas came and went with the usual festivities that I felt strangely distant from. New Year. More snow. The big thaw. The inevitable flash floods. My daughter. Holding it together for Chloe. Because Chris had helped me to reestablish a relationship with her that I’d thought was nearly impossible.
Then I go home and miss him some more.
Tiptoe toward spring, tentative, baby steps as the days start to get lighter and my mood starts to lift, little by little, day by day.
I’m not ready to go back out into the big wide world again yet and start dating, as Marley has been suggesting I should. But I chance a night out at the gay bar, even though I know it will remind me of Chris. It’s not as bad as I thought it might be. There are other people my age there, as well as the deluge of young, beautiful people.
The offer of swapping numbers with someone is enough to nudge me the next bit further along the path to healing, to moving on. I don’t take it but buy him a drink instead. We agree that if we see each other again, it might progress to a dance.
Baby steps.
One Saturday afternoon, I agree to take Chloe and Cassie to the movie theater to see the new Disney film. It’s getting me out of the house, according to Lu, and I know that she worries about me so I do it without too much fuss. Of course, I can’t do it without any fuss at all or she’ll ask me to do it all the time, and I’m definitely not yet ready for that.
Cassie asks if her Uncle Chris is going to come too, and I have to explain that Uncle Chris isn’t here anymore. Children are so perceptive, and she comes and gives me a hug. I’
ve never been quite so touchy-feely with her; we don’t hug all that often, so it means a lot that she does it.
I spend more time with my sister. Attempt to reconcile with my parents, although that venture is dismissed after just one meeting with my mother. The miserable old hag.
The tattoo on my arm serves as a reminder, although not for what I thought it might. It’s not a reminder of Chris, or of Edinburgh, although sometimes it does act as both those things. Instead it’s a proof that sometimes when I step out of my comfort zone, good things can happen. It’s a symbol of my own strength and an indelible way of telling my own story. This is who I am. This is where I came from.
There are moments when I think I’m managing, that I’m doing okay without him. It’s okay, he was just one lover, I can move on from him like I moved on from Brett. It’s bullshit, of course. Sometimes I cry so hard I can’t breathe and the little capillaries under my eyes break, leaving tiny red splotches.
Bloody tears.
Part Two
Chapter 14
WHEN January melts into February, the pain in my chest starts to ease off. I’m not breathing easy again yet, but I am breathing.
I consider updating the car. Dismiss the thought. Look at taking a job somewhere not in Boston next year as a touring lecturer, in New York, maybe. Somewhere different, just for a year. The truth is, for all of my hard work trying to get over him, Chris is everywhere I look, and it’s suffocating.
Not that I’d be able to move until the summer anyway.
That idea, too, is dismissed.
I find myself spending my evenings sorting through notes and scraps of paper, ideas for the book that were abandoned in the first draft. Most of them are good ideas, they just held me back on the direction I wanted to take at the time, and I’ve got a vague idea of reworking them into a second volume.
When there’s a knock at the door, I very seriously consider ignoring this rude person calling at such a late hour; then, sighing, I gather all of my papers into a pile and stack them on the coffee table before going to answer it.