Tales From Cushman Row

by Suanne Laqueur

  “It was my father’s,” Geno said.

  “So was mine,” Roger said. “Apparently fathers are required to own one and pass it down to their sons.”

  “Well, I feel cheated,” Jav said, shrugging into his own jacket, a handsome brown corduroy one.

  Geno dozed off for the first part of the drive, lightly suspended in the hum of three deep, male voices over music. When he woke up they’d crossed the river and were heading up the Thruway.

  He’d never been to this part of New York. The Hudson Valley was pretty under a peach-pink sunset, and New Paltz was a funky little town. The campus was sprawling and handsome, a man-made lake thinning into a winding creek all through the residential area.

  “It’s like Venice or something,” Geno said.

  “One day when you see Venice, you’ll laugh at this moment,” Roger said, grinning.

  A strange and unexpected shyness came over Geno as he was introduced to Ari Seaver. He couldn’t quite pinpoint why, only that it felt like he hadn’t met anyone his age in months. Ari had Roger’s strong nose and jaw, and Jav’s dark hair and slanting eyebrows.

  Geno wandered through the gallery, ending at Ari’s section. He stopped dead, staring at a small, five-by-five canvas. Painted on it was a little red house in the twilight gloaming, golden light streaming out of its windows.

  The voices in the gallery receded into a faint hum. Geno stood motionless, lips parted, falling into the picture.

  There it is, he thought. Just the way I’ve always pictured it.

  “Hey.” Ari appeared at Geno’s side.

  “Hey.” He pointed. “This is… This is kind of my life right here.”

  “Yeah?” Ari’s eyes, so like Jav’s, were full of interest and patience.

  “Yeah. See.” He cleared his throat. “My mother died when I was fifteen.”

  “Mine too. I was seventeen.”

  Gene blinked. “Was she sick?”

  Ari shook his head. “Fell down the stairs and broke her neck.”

  “Jesus.”

  “Yeah.” Ari’s quick smile and shrug was like a club’s secret handshake. “But you were saying?”

  “So her maiden name was Gallinero. It’s Spanish for henhouse and— Do you speak Spanish?”

  “Not well enough to have this conversation. Go on.”

  Now Geno’s shoulders twitched, trying to push off this weird bashfulness and tell a simple story. Ari listened quietly, his eyes flicking from Geno to the painting and back again.

  “Anyway,” Geno said. “It looked like that. Exactly like that. The way the light spills out of the windows, it’s like I was dictating it. I mean, like you reached in my head and put it down on the canvas.”

  “Wow. That’s crazy.”

  “Holy shit,” Stef said over their shoulders. “Am I seeing what I think I’m seeing?”

  “Right?” Geno said. “I’m kind of losing my mind here.”

  “You’re not the only one.” Stef nudged Ari and pointed. “Cleanup on aisle eleven.”

  At another wall, Jav was having his own staring moment. Tearing himself away from the little red house, Geno went over to look.

  This canvas was larger. A ship’s darkened cabin. Boots dropped on the wooden floor. A sword belt hanging from a chair. Two tankards and a wine bottle on a little table. In Ari’s signature style, milky moonlight streamed through a single porthole to splash onto a narrow bed. A man slept there. Bare-chested with an arm thrown over his head and a foot sticking out of the bedclothes. Another man slept beside him, obscured in darkness except for one muscular arm slung across the first man’s chest. The moonlight showed a ship’s wheel tattooed on his forearm. A wheel Geno immediately recognized from Jav’s arm.

  He squinted at the painting’s caption: Verdad de mi sangre.

  “Truth of my blood?” he said.

  “Trueblood,” Ari said, sliding an arm around his uncle. “You like it?”

  “I hate it,” Jav said, his voice gruff.

  “It’s yours. Your birthday present. I’ll bring it home to you after the show closes.”

  Jav ran the back of his hand across his eyes. “You’re killing me.”

  Geno backed quietly away from the intimate moment and returned to his commune with the little red house.

  Roger was staying the night in New Paltz, so Geno rode alone with Jav and Stef in the SUV. Once again dozing in the backseat. Feeling safe with his big brothers navigating. Peeking occasionally through his eyelashes to watch Stef’s hand cross the console and rub the back of Jav’s neck. Jav reached back to take it and drove for a while with Stef’s fingers against his mouth.

  “Did you see how Ari signs his work?” he said.

  “Gil deSeaver,” Stef said. “That’s awesome.”

  A bit of silence. The two men let go hands.

  “Kind of makes me want to change my name back,” Jav said.

  “So do it.”

  “I don’t know. Two name changes in a career is a lot.”

  “If John Mellencamp can do it, you can,” Geno said.

  Jav laughed, glancing in the rearview mirror. “Good point.”

  Stef was checking his phone. “Oh boy, dude,” he said. “You’re trending on Twitter.”

  “I am?”

  “You and Rog.” Stef turned his phone and Jav gave a quick glance.

  “I can’t… Read it to me.”

  Geno unbuckled and hitched forward to read over Stef’s shoulder.

  OMG, @gilrafael and @thetreehouseguy spotted at #Newpaltz art show. Underwear just exploded. BTW, anyone else know GR was gay?

  Attached to the tweet was a blurry but unmistakable picture of Jav and Stef, standing in the gallery. Their hands clasped behind Stef’s back. Roger stood at their side, arms crossed, his expression thoughtful.

  “She totally outed you,” Stef said. “Us, rather.”

  Jav shrugged.

  “It’s not cool taking someone’s picture secretly like that,” Geno said. “In my biased opinion, obviously.”

  “No, it isn’t,” Stef said.

  “She didn’t even get my good side,” Jav said.

  Stef barked a single laugh. “That’s your best side, Landes.” Then he glanced over his shoulder at Geno. “Buckle up, junior.”

  “Mail call,” Juan said, rattling knuckles on Geno’s door. He held a small, flat package.

  “For me?” Geno said, getting up.

  “None other.”

  The return address read A. Seaver in New Paltz.

  “No way,” Geno said under his breath, already knowing what was in it. He slit the taped flaps and cleared away balls of newspaper. Cut through bubble wrap and brown paper, then the little square canvas with the red house was in his hands.

  “Dude,” he said. “Oh man…”

  A small card was tucked in the back of the frame. Aaron Seaver with a phone number and email. A note crammed onto the back in small handwriting:

  Geno,

  It was great meeting and talking to you. I’ve been thinking a lot about your henhouse story. To the point where I want to give this to you. I feel like art and stories are meant to be shared and when one bumps into another the way ours did… I almost didn’t hang that painting in the exhibition. I had a blank spot on the wall that bugged me so I grabbed that canvas to fill it.

  Some things are meant to happen and call me nuts, but it just seems like this piece is supposed to be yours.

  I come to the city a lot to visit my dad and Jav so maybe I’ll see you around.

  Take care,

  Ari

  Watching the Birds Move

  In March Stef went to a week-long psychology conference at GWU. It was the first time they’d been separated since they started dating.

  It didn’t go very well.

  “Dude, this sucks,” Jav said. “And it’s only Tuesday.”

  Stef laughed, while his bones moped. He was unprepared for t
his. He knew he’d miss the guy but he didn’t know he’d miss him to the point it hurt. It was almost embarrassing. The more he told himself to knock it off and deal with it, to man up, for fuck’s sake, it was just a week…the more it sucked. He felt lopsided. As if he’d gone deaf in one ear.

  “I seem to have gotten used to you, Landes,” he understated.

  “Honestly, I thought I was going to enjoy the solitude,” Jav said. “Be an unwashed, unshaven hermit for a week, eating while standing over the sink. I keep looking for you. And Roman’s glaring at me all the time, like he thinks I buried you somewhere.”

  A bit of mournful silence curled over the phone line.

  “Oh well,” Jav said. “It is what it is.”

  “I’ll be home soon,” Stef said. There was nothing else for it.

  It was a good conference. The lectures were superb, the workshops excellent. The time away was well-spent, it just seemed to drag on painfully. Turning every corner to bump into a brick wall spray painted with I miss you.

  God, what if something happened to him? Stef thought, alone and wide-awake in his hotel bed. Then he had to fight like hell to get the fuck away from that thought.

  Friday finally came but of course, Fate had to be a cunt about it, and delay Stef’s train leaving Union Station. Then it had to cause some kind of trouble on the tracks that made them sit for an hour and a half in the middle of Maryland. Stef thought about abandoning ship and hitchhiking home, he was that desperate. At last though, he was at Penn Station. Rather than gamble the subway for three stops and risk getting trapped in a tunnel, he walked ten blocks downtown and risked getting hit by a cab.

  Better odds, he thought.

  Fitting his key into the door at Cushman Row, he felt like a soldier returned from war. The apartment was dark and sleepy. Roman gave a single yip and came jingling over to him, panting and licking and turning circles inside Stef’s arms.

  “Hey bud,” Stef whispered. “Yeah, I missed you too. I’m home. Shh. Go back to sleep. Go on. Go to bed.”

  He heeled off his shoes, put his jacket over the back of the couch. Moved on socked feet to the bedroom. The little lamp on his corner altar threw a circle of light on the ceiling. Jav was asleep, the covers pulled up high, just the top of his crown visible.

  Stef could smell him already.

  He sat on the edge of the bed and put a hand on Jav’s back. “Hey, you.”

  Jav made a small noise.

  Slowly Stef peeled the edge of the comforter down from Jav’s head. He leaned and softly bit Jav’s ear. “I’m home.”

  “Mm.” Jav’s eyes stayed closed but the corners lifted. Stef kissed the radiating smile lines as his hand moved the covers down more. As Jav's bare shoulders were revealed, Stef drew a slow breath in, his heart beginning to race and his eyes narrowing.

  The skin on Jav’s back was filled with tattooed blobs of yellow and black and white.

  Stef leaned closer, fingertips hovering but not touching. From Jav’s right shoulder blade, in a diagonal under Trueblood’s coordinates and across his spine, little inked birds swooped and flew and perched. One, two…four…six goldfinches in all.

  “Oh man.” Stef’s mouth formed the words without a sound as he stared at the charm of finches on Jav’s back.

  “This for me?” he whispered, as finally his fingers touched.

  “For me,” Jav said. “So I don’t miss you so damn much next time you go away. You like?”

  “I love.”

  “Get in here.”

  Stef pulled off his clothes and slid into the warm cave of the bed. Jav was hot as an engine and hard like iron, wrapping arms and legs around Stef and pulling him in tight. “Missed you bad,” he said against Stef’s face.

  Stef’s hands couldn’t get enough. His mouth couldn’t get enough. He pulled free and rolled Jav down on his stomach. Enough light came from the corner lamp to make the goldfinches visible. Stef ran his tongue along them, gently licking the healing skin, kissing each bird.

  “You don’t know what it means to me,” he said, his forehead pressed to the small of Jav’s back.

  “Yeah, I do.”

  Stef lay down again, now pulling Jav’s heavy heat on top of him.

  “Got another surprise for you,” Jav said, sucking on Stef’s neck.

  “What?” He tilted his chin back, crazed, wanting Jav to mark him.

  “You’ll see.”

  “No, what?”

  “You’ll see. You’ll find it.” He was kissing Stef then. A kiss for the ages. A kiss that tore him slowly in half, made him want to whimper like a baby, moan like a whore, cry like a widower. His hands clutched in Jav’s hair, slid down his back and curved around, pulling him in tight. Wanting to be one with that hot, hard energy.

  His hands slid up the crack of Jav’s ass, gently working in. His mouth pulled away from Jav’s kiss as his fingers found a hard edge. The silicone base of a…

  “You’re wearing a plug?” he whispered.

  Jav gently bit Stef’s bottom lip. “Surprise.”

  “How long you had it in?”

  “All night.”

  “Holy shit.”

  “Yeah.” The wicked word breathed into Stef’s mouth. “Thing’s been rubbing me for hours now. I’m so fucking ready for your cock.”

  The covers exploded open as Stef rolled over onto Jav, pinning him down. They kissed like tigers, teeth and tongues, devouring. Stef eased the plug out and tossed it, then Jav reached for the top drawer. His slippery hands slid along Stef, then along himself. “Come on. Come here.”

  It happened so quick. Stef sunk in easy. It was like nothing. Past the initial resistance, a tiny pause where both of them took a breath. And then one slow magnificent slide until he was balls-deep in Jav, his hips right up against him, his chest laid out on Jav’s beating heart.

  “God, man.”

  “You don’t know,” Jav said, gasping.

  “Tell me.”

  “I was out of my mind tonight, waiting for you to get home. This whole week. Feeling like an arm was missing. I couldn’t stand not being able to touch you. I needed it so bad.”

  “I’m home.” Stef pulled his hips back and carefully pushed in again. He could feel a wall torn down, a barrier broken and a fuck no longer given. “I’m home now.”

  “Feel good?” Jav whispered. “Tell me.”

  “So tight and hot.” Stef rubbed his forehead along Jav’s temple. “There’s nothing like it. Nothing feels like this.”

  “You can go harder.”

  “You sure?”

  “Try.”

  He carefully pulled out. “Turn over for me.”

  He fell forward on his hands and slid his cock back into Jav’s ass. Balanced and braced on his arms, he ran his mouth up Jav’s spine. Closed it around the nape of Jav’s neck and gently bit as he moved further in. Jav’s fingers curled down in the sheets and a moan popped out of his chest.

  “All right?” Stef whispered, licking along the path of the goldfinches.

  “Mm.”

  “I love watching the birds move on your back.”

  “That’s why I put them there. God…”

  “Hurt?”

  “No, it’s just intense.”

  “Spread your legs more,” Stef whispered. “Let me in deep.”

  “God…”

  “Let me fuck you.” Stef leaned on Jav’s wrists, moving in and out of him. “Let go and just take me.”

  Jav was arched and open like a strung bow, ready to fire. “Put it in me,” he said, raw and exposed. “Everything you got, Finch, give it to me.”

  Stef pulled his lover’s wrists down, held them behind his back and buried himself over and over in the heat. Jav’s name, over and over in his mouth, huffing out with every exhale, morphing from Jav into have, have, I have you now, you are mine and I have you…

  Jav yanked himself free from Stef’s grip, planted palms and his knees in
the mattress and rocked back onto Stef, fucking him. His fingers closed around Stef’s wrist and guided that hand to his cock.

  “Come,” he said hoarsely. “Come now and take me with you. Do it.”

  Matching the rhythm of his thrusts, Stef stroked Jav over the edge and leaped after, his open mouth against the goldfinches. “I love you,” he whispered, crossing forearms over Jav’s collarbones.

  Jav’s head fell back, lolling on Stef’s shoulder. “I love you so much.”

  “Jav, you’re…”

  “I know,” Jav gasped. “I know…”

  “You’re everything,” Stef whispered, rocking the two of them on their knees. “You are everything, everything, everything to me…”

  Words Matter

  Jav drove up to New Paltz to take Ari out to dinner for his birthday.

  “Think you’ll marry Stef?” Ari asked, as they drove back to campus.

  Jav smiled. “Would you be all right with that?”

  “Me?” Ari laughed. “Why does what I think matter?”

  “Because it does.”

  The moment curled between them, strange and touching. Each Gil deSoto realizing the other’s opinion meant something.

  “Anyway,” Jav said. “I’m still trying not to trip on ‘boyfriend.’”

  Ari’s lips twisted. “Well, neither of you are boys.”

  “Not age-wise.”

  “How do you like to refer to him?”

  “Slave.”

  “C’mon.”

  Jav exhaled. “Boyfriend’s too adolescent. Lover is fine in private but sounds affected and pretentious in conversation. I like partner. It has a two-ness sound to it. It captures the together thing. Me and him. Going along. Friends first and foremost.” He shrugged. “I’m a writer. Words matter.”

  “No, partner’s cool. That’s what I use. When I talk about Stef, I mean. I say ‘my uncle’s partner.’”

  Better than my uncle’s nephew, Jav thought.

  “Anyway,” Ari said. “I’ll be there.”

  “Where?”

  “There. If you marry him, I’ll be there. And if you don’t marry him, I’ll still be there.”

  Don’t fucking cry, Jav thought. Don’t you fucking ruin this by crying, you sentimental sap.