Candy Man

by Amy Lane

  A sound that wasn’t entirely human ripped from Adam’s lungs.

  He arched his back and ground up against Finn so hard it actually hurt, right in his throbbing balls, but the pain was enough.

  Adam’s orgasm washed white-blind behind his eyes, and he sobbed for breath inside Finn’s mouth as his hips thrashed, caught between the seat and Finn’s unyielding body.

  He must have hit Finn just right, though, because he moaned softly, buried his face in the hollow between Adam’s head and his shoulder, and bit Adam hard on the side of the neck. The edge of pain, Finn’s mouth on his skin, that was enough to send Adam off again, shaking, his come flooding his underwear, making it sticky and cold within moments.

  Finn collapsed weakly on top of him, panting in Adam’s ear. “That’s probably a good place to stop,” he muttered.

  Adam nodded, dazed, disoriented from the force of desire and raw need. “Yeah, sure,” he mumbled. He moved his trembling hands from Finn’s ass to the back of his head so he could smooth his hands through that curly hair again, feel the silk of it between his fingers. “Probably best,” he said, lost in the comedown. He opened his eyes enough to take in the surroundings—the dark interior of the minivan, the glare of the streetlight from far away, the stoop of Rico’s apartment building, where no lights were on.

  The hopeful glint in Finn’s eyes as he stared at Adam and willed him to come back to ground and acknowledge what they’d just done.

  Adam closed his eyes and kissed Finn’s forehead. “You’re amazing, you know that, Finn?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re like magic. Like… like a magic potion, like green goop.”

  Finn choked, his breath tormenting Adam’s ear, and Adam wished they were in a bed or something so he could see Finn’s eyes, that amazing blue.

  “No,” Adam explained. “See, when I was a kid, if we skinned our knee, got a sunburn, whatever, Rico’s mom had what she called green goop. It was, like, aloe and lidocaine. It was great shit, you know? Cured all ills. Nasty burn, get the green goop. Fall off your bike, get the green goop. Well, you’re like that, but better. You’re like green goop for my heart, you know?”

  Finn made a suspicious sound. If Adam didn’t know him, didn’t trust him, he’d say it was laughter. But because he did know him, he knew that it was more like tears. “Those are really good words, Mr. Cartoon Man. I wish you could draw those words for me.”

  Adam smiled because he knew he’d done good. “I’ll try. I’ll bring the picture by tomorrow.”

  Finn kissed his cheek, and then kissed his temple, and then kissed his forehead. And then he pushed himself up on his elbows and kissed Adam briefly on the mouth before rolling over and maneuvering himself into the driver’s seat. Adam pulled the lever and shot the back of the seat straight up, so he had to manipulate it a bit so it wasn’t absurdly upright. Finally he was ready to go, with his hand on the door handle and everything.

  He and Finn met eyes, and he wondered if Finn’s underwear was as icky-clammy as his own.

  “Tomorrow?” Finn asked. “You promise?”

  Well, even Finn would need reassurance. Adam reached out and feathered a touch down his cheekbone. “Yeah. I promise.” He pulled Finn into another kiss, this one lingering for just a breath, before he separated and opened the door to the frigid winter air. “Night, Finn. I had a real good time.”

  “Night, Adam. Me too. Dream of me, okay?”

  “Yeah. No worries there. I don’t got a choice.”

  And he didn’t.

  Not Thankful

  TWO DAYS later Adam let Finn down for the first time, and he wasn’t planning to and wasn’t even sure how it had happened.

  It seemed like such a simple thing, right?

  “So, you doing anything for Thanksgiving in two days?” Finn asked.

  Adam had done another commission, this one for Darby, who had brought her five-year-old in. She wanted a picture of him to give her mother for Christmas. To celebrate, Finn took Adam to the grocery store on the way home. They were wandering Safeway, arguing over whether Adam could afford the decent spaghetti sauce because it was on sale.

  “Sleeping in,” Adam said promptly, putting the cheap sauce in his cart and scowling. “Dosing the cat. Taking the dog for his twice-daily dump.” Adam actually enjoyed exploring the neighborhood. It wasn’t fantastic—some of the sidewalks were cracked, and not all the lawns were kept. The cars on the street were older, and there were a few oil stains. But it wasn’t a shithole either. There were no working girls on the corner, no drug addicts in the alleys, and the homeless were polite and didn’t knock over the trash cans. Adam had started to leave a half a sandwich on top of the can every morning, like he had down in San Diego, because he knew that if Rico hadn’t given him this break, he’d be the guy looking for food.

  “So, since you’ve got all that planned, do you have any time to go to my parents’ place for Thanksgiving? They live, like, ten blocks away from you, up on Twenty-First and H.”

  Up where the neighborhood started getting considerably better. “Wow—that’s actually pretty close. Me and Clopper probably passed the place.” Adam started wondering which one it was. He had a vague idea of a bunch of houses with bright stained glass and pastel paint jobs, wind chimes from the eaves and doohickeys on the lawns. He could only imagine that people who spawned a Finn would live in one of those places—it was inevitable.

  “So, do you want to go?”

  Him? In one of the Willy Wonka houses? Oh no. No no no no no. “Finn, you and me, we’ve only been, uhm, what are we doing?”

  “Dating, Adam. The kids call it dating these days.”

  “That’s not funny,” he said wretchedly. It should have been, but it wasn’t, because he didn’t know, because he didn’t know from dating, and that was his point. “But it’s only been a little bit of time. Maybe, you know, wait some before you bring me home to Mom and Dad, okay?”

  Finn’s grunt sounded unmistakably hurt. “Lots of people are coming. I mean, nobody will worry about how long we’ve been dating. It’s just… food, family—don’t you want that?”

  “Just because I want it doesn’t mean I know how to have it,” Adam grumbled. Coming out to his grandma and mom the Easter after he’d been discharged had so not been a great idea. He’d carried the cut on his head from the door slamming in his face for a month. “I’m not—not a good person to have around your family, Finn. Not right now. I—you know, I barely remember the names of the people at Candy Heaven.”

  “That’s not true,” Finn snapped.

  Adam put his pasta in the cart and soldiered on. He needed more milk, and maybe some salad mix. He was missing greens, and he’d finished off the bag of apples. “It’s… I’m… you just don’t know, I mean, family shit…. I… it doesn’t end well, Finn. It’s not….” He closed his eyes and stopped moving. “I just got into town a week and a half ago. I hope it’s okay if I stay home and think of you happy, instead of go to your family’s house and maybe make you uncomfortable.”

  When he opened his eyes again, Finn stood right next to him and was regarding him steadily from their five-inch height difference. How did he manage to make Adam feel small? “I can live with some discomfort, Adam. I’m not sure how much longer you can live being lonely.”

  Adam twitched his lips and hoped it passed for a smile. “Well, one more holiday is going to have to do it, okay? Right now you and me are—we’re a sketch. And we could be a real great picture someday, with ink and oils or watercolor, and hell, we may even be a movie. But not right now.”

  Finn narrowed his eyes. “I swear to God, Adam, every time I think this is hopeless and I was deluded to even try to get close to you, you say or do something that is so fucking beautiful it’s like I’ve got no choice.”

  Adam risked a look down into those beautiful blue eyes. “You got a choice. You always got a choice. I’m just glad you picked the other thing so far.”

  Finn nodded. “Me too.” He str
etched up on his toes then, and Adam was the one with no choice but to close his eyes and bend down into a brief kiss that grew longer, involved more hands, and eventually Adam wrapping his longer arms around Finn’s tight, fit body for real.

  The sound of an infant crying broke them apart. Adam whipped his head around to see an ungainly woman wearing flannel cat pajamas and a weary expression, pushing a cart with a screaming baby in the car seat carrier in the front.

  For a moment they stared at each other, and then Finn spoke up. “Uhm, colic medication is, like, three aisles down.”

  The woman nodded, lines and sags on what was probably a young face giving a new meaning to the word “exhaustion,” and said, “Thanks. Oreos?”

  “One aisle over, by the freezer,” Finn supplied helpfully. “Milk’s down at the end, with dairy.”

  “You’re a lifesaver.” The woman nodded at Adam, just to be cordial, probably, and resumed her push of the crying baby. When Adam looked down again, Finn’s expression was pure compassion.

  “My oldest sister—man, both her boys. Colic until six, seven months. Constant screaming. I mean, we’d all go over to her house and clean and rock the baby and give her a chance to sleep, but it’s hard. She used to tell me that she’d put them in the car and just drive around until they fell asleep, but by then she’d be so tired she wasn’t sure if she could get back. She’d stop at the market and buy cookies and milk to keep herself awake.”

  “God,” Adam muttered. “That’s rough.”

  “Yeah. Her husband would take his shift too. They were good at sharing the misery, you know?”

  “That sounds more like cutting it in half, but that’s real nice. You got a good family there.”

  “Yeah, I’m lucky.” Finn smiled tentatively, his open face just inviting confidence, but Adam didn’t want to give him too much of his own family bullshit.

  “You are. Not everyone gets that.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “No.”

  “How did your family take your coming out?” Finn asked, proving once again he was fearless.

  “By slamming a door in my face,” Adam muttered. “How about yours?”

  Finn regarded him carefully, and together they started walking through the store again. “Well, honestly, they came out to me first.”

  Adam had to laugh at that. “As what?”

  “As flaming liberals. They called the whole family into a circle when I was about twelve, and sort of addressed all of us—there’s five—and my mom started talking.” Finn did a good job of impersonating a mother, speaking in that low, singsong, controlled voice Adam had heard from television moms but not from his own. “Okay, we know that you are all at the age when your peers start to ask certain questions, and in this town, everybody is going to make certain assumptions about us politically, but we need you to know something.”

  “What?” Adam asked, hooked in spite of himself.

  “We want you all to know that we’re liberals. So in spite of anything your peers might be afraid of from their parents, perhaps there are things you may want to confess to us that we won’t be quite so upset about. Would anybody like to start?”

  “And you said you were gay? At twelve?”

  Finn laughed. “No, no. My oldest brother, Peter, who was in college, said he’d tried marijuana but he hadn’t liked it. My other brother, Christopher, said he didn’t want to study law, he wanted to study environmentalism, and since he was still in high school, who really cared. My oldest sister, JoBeth, said she was planning to run away and get married the next week because she was pregnant.”

  Adam couldn’t help it. “Oh my God! Really?”

  “Yep. She was twenty at the time, and she’d been dating Greg for a year, so it wasn’t that big a deal. And my youngest sister, Mari, who’s about two years older than me, said, ‘You guys, you all know this was supposed to be a way to let Finn come out of the closet, so you idiots and your bullshit just screwed all of that up!’ and my mom turned to JoBeth and said, ‘You were going to elope?’ and Dad turned to Pete and said, ‘We knew about the pot, son—we flushed it and substituted oregano.’”

  By this time Adam was laughing so hard, he forgot what he was shopping for. He had to stop on the endcap aisle and hold on to the shopping cart while he tried to pull himself together. “Oh my God! Oh my God! That’s… that’s—”

  “Fucking hilarious, I know. But it’s not perfect, right?”

  Adam gulped in a breath. “Christ, no.”

  “Yeah.” Finn snaked a hand around his hip and stood up on tiptoes to kiss his temple. “We’re not perfect. Nobody’s perfect. It’s a shame you don’t want to come to my family’s house. You’d like them.”

  Adam closed his eyes. “Christmas,” he said gruffly. “If I don’t screw this up by Christmas, I’ll meet them then.”

  Finn kissed his cheek and they resumed their trek around the grocery store.

  That night, they necked some more in the car. Right when Adam thought his head was going to pop off, he felt Finn’s hands worming under the waistband of his jeans.

  He almost hurt himself unlocking the door and rolling out of the minivan.

  In the car, Finn shoved himself up from the floor, where he’d fallen and almost gotten wedged, and glared at him. “You could have just said no!” he snapped.

  “Yeah, I could have, if I didn’t want it so bad!”

  “Well if you want it that bad, why don’t you pretend we’re grown-ups and ask me in!”

  Adam grunted. “Uhm….”

  Finn shook his head and waved his hand. “No. Never mind. That’s my bad. You’re trying to be smart and take it slow, I get it.”

  Adam scrubbed his face with his hand and leaned into the car so he could be face to face with Finn. “I want it,” he said gruffly. “But slow. Please? I’m getting there. I’m getting used to this being my life now. And that I can keep making changes. We get paid next week—I’ll submit my application to Sac State and one of the junior colleges then, okay? And then I’ll be on my way. I’ll be, like, committed here. I won’t be a drifter who lucked into a place and a job, okay?”

  Finn reached out and touched his cheek. “Yeah. Okay. It’s a good plan. It’s got hope. I like that in a plan.”

  Adam smiled a little. “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” He kissed Adam one more time, chastely on the lips, and Adam got into the backseat for his groceries and went. He knew the routine by now: medicate the cat, take the dog for a walk, and plan, just plan how he was going to take Finn out on a real date, and maybe make him spaghetti and salad, and maybe kiss him on a couch until they had their hands down each other’s pants. Then, maybe, if he did all that right, he’d get to see Finn naked, eager in the moonlight, stretched out on the bed and wanting, and Adam could have him, the beautiful boy who wasn’t really a boy, had always been a man, and he could be Adam’s for real.

  It was a nice dream. As grand, in its way, as a college education, but even better, because it was Finn.

  Adam thought he could have that dream—it was as hopeful as he ever got.

  The next day they got off early, and Finn had time to take him home but no time to hang out. Finn had to help his parents with the predinner preparations, and he said he would have asked Adam, but he figured if Adam was reluctant to go to the actual dinner, the predinner would probably be a nightmare.

  “I don’t mind a little work,” Adam said, knowing it was stupid to feel hurt.

  “Darrin’s going to be there tomorrow,” Finn told him. “Just commit to tomorrow and then you can come help us tonight. It’ll be fine!”

  “Darrin?”

  “Yeah—half of Candy Heaven is coming. My parents are getting propane heaters and everything so people can go out into the backyard. Are you sure?”

  Adam thought of all those people, and a part of him wanted to be with them, and a part of him shuddered. He leaned in and kissed Finn’s cheek. “You’ll have to tell me all about it,” he said gruffly, and he
made sure Finn was out of the way before he shut the car door and went inside.

  THE NEXT day he did everything he said he was going to do. He slept in, he took care of the animals, and he cleaned the house a little. He took the old bread and made some peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, wrapped them in bags, and put them on top of the dumpsters on the corner for the people who might not be so lucky to have a home or a family or someplace to go. When he was done, he made himself some sandwiches and sat down to watch the football game, and listened, the whole time, to the silence inside the apartment.

  In a way it really was nice—no clatter of the boardwalk, no voices bouncing off the lacquered floorboards of the store. No clamor of customers, no city sounds. The dog sat on the floor and rested his chin on the couch so Adam could reach out and scratch him behind the ears, and the cat? Well, Gonzo had been sitting on the back of the couch and kneading his hair. It was peaceful, he decided, dozing there with his sketchpad on his knee and his phone on the table.

  He missed Finn, but it was real peaceful.

  He was not prepared for his phone to buzz at three o’clock. He picked it up and read Finn’s text, then read it again.

  You’d better not be naked, because we’re almost to your place with dinner. Don’t worry, I mingled with the fam, but Candy Heaven and I are on our way.

  He bolted upright, and the cat latched on to his neck and slid down, claws extended. While he was still crying bloody murder—and dripping blood—the doorbell rang.

  He opened his door and a Bing Crosby movie flooded into his cousin’s apartment, armed with grocery bags, a boom box playing Christmas music, and a case of beer.

  Finn was the leader of the gang, which didn’t surprise him, but Darrin was second banana, and Darby with her son, Joni, Ravi, and Anish followed in short order, as well as a man who looked like Finn’s older brother, and the woman Adam had first seen in the store that one day, holding a toddler tightly by the hand.

  “What in the holy fuh-llllaming cow,” Adam corrected, staring at the toddler and the five-year-old at the last minute, and clutching the dog. The boy he knew already, a thin boy with dark eyes in a mocha face and a surprising, sudden smile. The toddler—a pudgy kid who probably looked a lot like Finn had when he was that age, with strawberry blond hair and big blue eyes—was new, but when Adam stared, he stared soberly back.