by David Connor
Knock, knock.
“Come in,” I heard through his front door.
I noticed the glorious aroma the moment I stepped into warmth. “Where are you?”
“Follow the trail,” came from above.
There was a paper plate on each step of the staircase just inside Patrick’s front door.
“Oops.”
“What?” Patrick called down.
“Wilbur,” I said looking upward. “Whatever is on these plates is edible, I hope.”
“Absolutely.”
“That’s enough, little guy.” I scooped him up anyway, already at a second goodie before I’d even closed the door to the outside. “Wilbur likes it here. There’s always something tasty.”
“Wait ‘til you taste what’s waiting up here.”
“On my way.” My voice sounded too loud, but I wanted to be sure it was heard.
“Hurry.”
Heading up toward the landing, I had to adjust my little boy twice and the huge red shopping bag I was lugging three or four times.
A
P
P
I
L
Y, I read as I climbed, one letter on one pancake on one plate per step. “I love pancakes.”
“I know. Plus, rose petals have been done.” Patrick’s voice was quite loud, too. I was closer to him now and worried his neighbor might complain again.
“True that,” I said with my mouth full of pancake E. By then, I’d caught on to the message, even though Wilbur had gotten to the H before I had.
V
E
R
I ate one more, an A, after breaking off a small bit for him, and then picked up the bag I’d had to set down to do it.
“You got quiet,” Patrick yelled.
“I’m chewing.” The mumbled words would leave no doubt. “And I’m close, now. You don’t have to shout.”
“Good.”
I followed the last four red heart plates to the door to Patrick’s bedroom, where the R in “After” had been laid. “Happily ever after,” I said.
“Yes. It’s nice we both love pancakes.”
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.” My Patrick was stationed at the foot of his bed, its burgundy duvet dotted with more pancakes on plates. Honestly, I’d been expecting to find him buck naked. Instead, he was standing there in cupid boxer shorts and a white undershirt. One more plate he held at crotch level had yet another pancake on it, one shaped like a camel. “It’s supposed to be a heart,” he said. “Looks more like a…”
“Camel,” we stated together.
“It’s awesome.” The pancake had a honey heart with a G inside of it. Writing letters over ours had already become a tradition. “I brought you something, too.” I set down Wilbur and moved the small ladder Patrick had bought to make it easier for little dog legs to get up onto a rather high bed. “Stay down here for now.” That was something we didn’t want to make easy at the moment.
“Can I get on the bed?” Patrick asked.
“In a minute.” I traced a G just below the rib neck collar of his undershirt, before showing him his gift. “You’ll have to set down the love camel to take it.”
“Hmm.” Patrick held the plate to the bulge in my black jeans. “That should be your new nickname, Love Camel.”
“One hump or two?”
“Let’s see where the evening goes.” After a little eyebrow dance, he laid the plate upon the bed. “Gimme.”
I’d gone the traditional route, with the biggest heart-shaped box of chocolates Cost-Mart carried and a fuzzy, stuffed bumble bee with “Bee Mine” embroidered into its tummy. I’d added a heart on him one could possibly call embroidery as well and stitched a G inside of that. I’d also covered all the letters in the brand name on the candy box, as well as the words “assorted chocolates,” all but the first O, which I’d added a stem to in order to make it a P. It was so lame, I’d torn off all the red duct tape and had tried to scratch out the stupid stem, ruining the beauty of the cardboard heart. That meant I had to buy a second one, to start all over, when swinging back the other way to figuring it was sweet and romantic. Apparently, that was true.
“Aww. It’s a P.”
“And a bee with a G.” I showed him, struggling to do so with Wilbur back in the crook of one arm. He was only back up there, I figured, because he hoped I’d put him on the bed with the fluffy, syrupy smorgasbord, which now included a buckwheat love camel.
“I love him,” Patrick cooed. “Because of my bees, right?”
“Yes. I got confused as to whose initial is supposed to be on gifts from me to you, so I put a different one on each.”
Patrick used the bee to brush my messy hair from my forehead. “Always thinking, my intelligent love camel.” Then, he kissed me there.
“You don’t have to keep him on your bed or anything. That’s not, you know, very macho.”
“We don’t do gender stereotypes here.” Patrick set the bee on his pillow. “He can keep my New York Yankees batting helmet company.”
Patrick was a baseball fanatic. We’d already made plans to hit up the batting cages someday and to sit on the couch with a beer in our grips watching the season opener just weeks away in March.
“Wanna break into the chocolates?” Right then, I couldn’t wait for the feel and taste of caramel melting on my tongue, even after eating several pancakes.
“You wanna break into the chocolates.”
“Maybe.” I’d already polished off the first box I’d messed up. “But I got them for you.”
“Because it’s chocolate,” Patrick said. “Chocolate good.” His caveman voice was sexy as fuck. “No further reason required.” He fingered the letter P that used to be an O. His fingers were sexy, too. I wanted to feel them do things to me.
“We were thinking alike again, like we always do.” Except for that whole marriage proposal thing, I added subliminally.
“What am I thinking now?” Patrick asked.
“We should put the pancakes up high, so Wilbur can’t get them, take our clothes off, and get in that bed with this candy?” I reached for Patrick’s T-shirt.
“Umm…before we do.” He stopped me from pulling it up. “I did something else. I did a couple more things. Come here. Look out the window.” He guided me toward it. “See there?”
I saw something, basically a pile of metal rods and an area marked with string and little orange flags attached that flapped in the February fourteenth wind chill. “What’s it gonna be?” I asked.
“A greenhouse.”
“For the bees to visit?”
“For us. See, I could have gone with a dozen roses, but I wanted you to have more, like two dozen, ten dozen.”
“I think I only own one vase.”
Patrick chuckled. “We’ll get a pottery wheel and make some more with Calvin and Jefferson.”
I sang a bit of “Unchained Melody” and imagined shirtless Calvin, Jefferson, and Patrick taking turns sitting behind me while I worked in clay. “Nice.”
“Actually, the rose thing isn’t even my idea. I stole it from Calvin. I want to plant a rosebush for us out in the yard, one for every year we’re together. I put in a bid on the neighbor’s, the one who hated my serenade.”
“You did?”
“Uh-huh. We’ll have room for an entire rose garden, a hundred years’ worth of bushes. I’m hoping we can propagate them…hybrids, that are only ours. I assume it’s pretty hard, but we’ll try. The…the Gatrick Rose, or the Poose.”
The way I scrunched my face was a dead giveaway as to what I thought of Poose.
“We’ll work on it,” Patrick said, folding me into his arms.
“It’s a great idea.”
“Maybe not all roses, but something, something to mark our anniversaries, something that will live on long after we’re gone, even if I don’t plan on that happening for a very, very long time.”
“Nice.” I showed my gratitude with a kis
s and went for the shirt again.
“Before we do that…” Once again, my gratification was delayed. “Promise you won’t laugh.”
“At?” I asked.
Patrick raised his undershirt.
“Oh.” I touched his chest and tummy in several spots, the slick, bare skin on his chest and tummy. “All the hair is gone. It’s different, but I’m not going to laugh.”
“Do you like it?” Patrick fixed his glasses, possibly to better read my expression.
Did I? I wasn’t sure. I’d liked him the way he was. “This could be temporarily fun, I think.”
“It was an accident. It’ll grow back.”
“Either way, you’re the sexiest man I know, but…how exactly does one accidentally shave his entire upper torso. It is just the upper torso, isn’t it?”
I got my answer when Patrick dropped his boxer shorts.
“Oh.” This time, I did almost laugh. Patrick looked like my sister’s Ken doll from childhood. On sick days home from school, during my pubescent years, I’d get a charge out of taking his pants off, even if he was just shiny and smooth down there. Now, Patrick was shiny and smooth, too, except with a big, thick cock.
“The original plan was to shave the letter G into my chest hair, right over my heart. Right here.” Patrick showed me in the hollow between his hairless pecs. “I screwed it up, so I tried again, closer to where the heart actually is. Here.” He formed the same letter a little to the left. “The second time, I kind of forgot the thing about mirror images being backwards. Anyway, I botched it so many times, I looked like a mangy Irish setter, so I had to buzz it all off.”
I was biting the inside of my cheek.
“So, then I thought I would do it…down there.”
“Here?” This time, I touched the spot.
“Yeah. I tried to leave just a G, a hair G, by shaving off everything around it, like in art class in middle school, when we worked in clay, and the teacher said, ‘Take away everything that doesn’t look like a Wookiee.’”
“A Wookiee?”
“Yeah. Anyway, it didn’t look much like a G, so off it all went.”
“From orange to pink. All for me.” I moved Patrick back toward the bed. “It’s the thought that counts. Thank you.”
“Can you make love to a fuzzy wuzzy with no hair?” Patrick fell back onto the mattress with a bounce and a loud puff. The one that escaped his lips when I landed on top of him after setting Wilbur down on the floor was even louder, and powerful enough to stir my wavy hair.
“I think I can.”
I could still count on one hand the number of times I’d been close to Patrick with no clothes on. Currently, that hand was tangled in the only plush hair he had left from top to bottom, as his head moved up and down with his mouth around my hard-on. After the bed was cleared of food, and Wilbur was settled in the hallway just outside the bedroom door, we got right to it with few words and not much more eating. I had Thursday nights off from the store. Patrick usually tried to be out of the pharmacy by eight at the latest those evenings. We’d met up close to nine this time, since he’d put me off an extra fifteen minutes to make pancakes.
“Slow down,” I said breathlessly.
“I’ll try.”
“I was talking to myself.”
He teased me to the edge several more times, pulling away when I’d start to squirm, as the telltale tickle in my shaft meant my climax was close. Patrick could read me without words—maybe some sounds—and I could read him, even when my sight path was interrupted by my own leg up in the air, blocking his face, once he’d gotten behind me.
His grinding was gentle against my open ass, with his mouth at the back of my knee. I played his game, pulling back when I felt his teeth. I did it twice, prolonging his wait. The third time, Patrick didn’t let me, choosing instead to grab me at the hip and pull me into his hard dick.
“Holy fucking fuck!”
“In a good way?” he asked.
“Good holy, good fucking, good fuck, good good!”
“Just wanted to make sure.”
He’d held off and had loosened his hold in consideration of my feelings and leftover hang ups from past abuse. Bless him for that. Then, he came hard, grunting on a long exhale closer to my ankle than my knee.
Coming while being fed chocolate was a first for me, and something I would eagerly endorse from that moment on. Chewing the first half of a succulent cherry cordial, I coated Patrick’s stroking hand in cum, as he pumped me fast then slowly. When two of his fingers came at me with the other half, I took them with it, enjoying a little something extra. “So fucking good.”
“Now, some for me.”
“I ate the whole thing.”
“I’m not talking about the candy, Love Camel.” Patrick gave his hand and my tender, twitching cummy cock a lick. “Better than chocolate,” he muttered.
Breathlessly, I settled back onto crisp, white sheets, the silky duvet against my bare hip. “Love Camel.” I smiled. “Our Hump Day is Thursday.”
“How many hours until another one comes?” When Patrick furrowed his brow, his head beside me on my pillow, nearly nose to nose, I wondered what he might look like with those shaved off, too.
“Like, 168 or so,” I told him.
“That’s a lot.”
“Good thing this one’s not over yet.”
Patrick made the little fluted candy cups rustle as he reached for more than one piece at a time. “If we’re going again, we need sustenance.”
“Full rations, boys!”
“You bet. I have, like, ten big boxes like this we can get at the pharmacy for practically nothing.”
“Another advantage of loving you.”
“Between leftovers at my store and your discount at yours, we can live like kings on Valentine’s, Halloween, Christmas, and Easter chocolate for life.”
“Ha. I like the way you think, too.”
“Maybe I’ll stock some Independence Day chocolates this year.” Patrick popped a peanut cluster into his mouth. “Just so we don’t hit a lull.”
Still chewing my fourth piece a few seconds later, looking up at the ceiling first, and then Patrick, spent dick to green eyes, I asked, “What does your happily ever after look like for real?”
“Much like this,” he said without thought. “Coming home to you at the end of the day, or you coming home to me and our six kids.”
“Six?”
“At least. I imagine retiring someday, before I’m too old to enjoy it, when one of those kids can take over at the pharmacy. You and I, we take a month to see the world, holding hands at each of The Seven Wonders and all the big tourist attractions everyone talks about, just because we should see them in person, if we can.”
Anxiety built just at the thought. I didn’t even have a passport. Hermits had no need for those.
“We sleep in a tent wherever it’s allowed, but then we come back here, or someplace we choose together, where we raise all those kids to be the kind of people who want to see The Seven Wonders up close, too.”
“A giant house?” I tried to ignore my thoughts.
“Uh-uh. A small one, if that’s okay.”
“Sure.”
“Three bedrooms, so the kids have to share. I think they bond better that way.”
“Shell and I had our own rooms but ended up in each other’s a lot.” I gently strummed the smoothness on Patrick, where hair used to be. “I’d sleep on her floor to protect her from thunder, even though I was just as scared. She’d sneak in and sleep on mine when I was sick or, somehow, she’d know if I had a bad dream.”
“That’s beautiful.”
“Yeah.”
“Big outdoors, though,” Patrick said. “So we go out there a lot. I’m picturing a farm, like you described Jefferson’s, with a ton of animals, a place to grow everything, and with all my best friends within walking distance, so we can exchange tomatoes for cauliflower and zucchini for fresh corn.”
“Nice.”
<
br /> “I want to learn new things—pottery, and horticulture, and Mandarin. Maybe I take singing lessons and learn how to sail. How does that sound?”
“I want to do those things with you. How does that sound?”
“Like heaven,” Patrick said.
I wanted to do them but wondered if I could.
Patrick sounded drowsy as he said it again. “You and I together forever, here and there.” He kissed me once more, then snuggled down, for sleep I presumed. “It sounds like Heaven.”
Chapter 3
Eventually, the snow melted away, bringing a promise of longer days and March and April showers to prompt the May flowers I never imagined I might not be around to see. Now, it was Monday, April 1, 2019, the date that might end up on my tombstone after the dash. No fooling.
I’d never been one to hate Mondays, not like a nine to fiver, who had to return to work after the weekend. Man, those people would have little to complain about if they knew how much this particular Monday was going to suck for me.
The beginning of the day held promise. Patrick and I had recently missed a couple of Hump Day Thursdays. Two in a row. I’d had a twenty-four-hour stomach bug, just my luck, on my night off the third week in March. Patrick had offered to come and bring me soup, but I didn’t want to risk passing the pukies on to him. The next Thursday, just a few days ago, he’d been out of town for a conference, one that was supposed to last five days. By the time I saw Patrick face to face again, it had been nearly 25,000 minutes since he and I had last love fucked, not that I was counting. When he showed up at Cost-Mart just about the time I was ready to head for home that morning, I had everything I could do not to remedy that on register four.
The tap on the door had startled me at first, but once I saw his face through the glass, I melted and literally ran to open it.
“Surprise!”
“It is. How are you here?” I threw my arms around him before he could give me an answer, doing my best to encompass his big body and puffy orange coat in my not-so-large wingspan.
“I brought you something.” He held out a little box with a red satin finish.
“That kiss?” I asked after one.