Best Gay Romance 2012, page 7
“I think about you very often,” Charlie said, close to my ear.
“Me too,” I said. It was true. The memory of Charlie was a kind of background rumble through all my waking moments and had been for all those years.
“Even when you’re doing that?” he asked, and I felt his hand clasp and squeeze my melting dick, to leave me in no doubt about what that meant.
I admitted it. “Occasionally,” I said.
“Me too,” he said, and chuckled, and fell asleep.
We did that again in the small hours, and again just before we got up. But in between those landmark points in time we both half woke when a blade of steel-gray light was prising open the new day. I murmured to Charlie, “I don’t want dawn to come.” He said, “I never want to leave this bed.” We were wallowing in the warmth of each other. Warm tummies, thighs, chests, shoulders and encircling arms. Warm pricks. Newly vulnerable in our shared warm, intermittently wet, nakedness. He said, “Don’t want to go back to Cambridge.” I said, “Don’t want to go to Wales.” But all those things had to happen, and they did.
My phone burned like an ember in my pocket all that day. Which of us would make contact first? How long before we did? What were we ever going to say? Or text?
It was Charlie, at nearly ten o’clock that night, who made the call. Bold, tender Charlie, not for the first time, cracked first. It wasn’t a text. He gave me his voice. “I want to see you, Tim,” he said.
“Me too,” I answered. No other answer was remotely possible. We had unlocked the doors to each other, unlocked the treasure chests, taken apart those Russian dolls, but only so far as to deliver a one-night stand, even if that had been a very lovely one. But there was farther to go, more work to be done, more locks to pick.
The following morning I woke up and saw Charlie’s face immediately, as if it were really before my eyes. I knew already what that meant. I knew I’d see it morning after morning until we met again. As I made my solitary breakfast I imagined him making his and wondered, pathetically, if he was thinking of me. He phoned an hour later. “I saw you in my mind when I woke up,” he said. “Sorry,” he went on. “Do I sound sad? But I just can’t stop thinking about you.” I told him that was just fine and that it was the same with me.
We met in London that weekend. We could have seen a show, gone to a club. Neither of those options appealed to us in the least. We sat talking in a pub, pouring out our lives and thoughts like mountain streams in spate. We drank each other’s words, each other’s intimate revelations, with the sensual joy of parched travelers.
Mutual lust can be great. Charlie and I had acknowledged that during our overnight stay in London a few days ago. But it has a sell-by date, like a cut flower. Only sometimes does it put out roots, become a living plant and start to grow into something bigger than it was when it began. Talking to Charlie, getting to know him better that evening, I dared to believe, just to begin to believe, that something bigger might grow in us.
We ate at a Thai restaurant. We checked into the same cheap hotel. Deadpan, the receptionist gave us the key to the same room. We’d both brought condoms, and we laughed at that. We made love. I was able to think that expression this time: we made love. The previous week I hadn’t dared to think it.
A week later we met in Cambridge. I went to the flat Charlie shared with a young architect, who was straight, but easy around gay men. The following weekend Charlie came to Wales. I too shared a flat, with two young teachers, one of each sex. They too were straight but had no problem with the idea of us—as Charlie and I (though still only privately, separately) now identified ourselves. I showed Charlie round my theater in the dark quiet of Sunday morning. We had a curtain store in the backstage area. We looked at each other and had to smile. Then—tacky was it? Can’t be helped—we went in there and did that, for old times’ sake. (Though we were more careful not to stain the curtains. We were responsible managers now and these particular curtains were a responsibility of mine. I didn’t want some ASM unfolding them and saying, “Dear god, who did that?”) Later I walked with Charlie to the station. This time I was the bold one. “Are we falling in love, Charlie?” I asked.
“You may be,” he answered, poker-faced. Then he grinned. “Me, I’ve already fallen. Pretty bloody hard. Pretty damn deep.” There comes a moment sometimes when two people who thought they’d been in love a couple of times before in the course of their lives realize they haven’t. For Charlie and me that moment had been reached.
The long-distance phase of our relationship lasted over a year. The transport costs were dismaying, and at times during the winter the rail network fell apart due to heavy snow, and one or other of us would be stranded for half a weekend at some remote and unheated railway junction. (In Britain the rail companies excuse themselves in this situation by explaining that the wrong type of snow has fallen.) We each spent our twenty-four-hour Christmas—the maximum that theater life allows—with our respective families, who lived only two miles apart, but there was no time for the upheaval and explanations that would have been involved in meeting up. Though we made up for that with a private feast of our own in Cambridge a few days later. Meeting me off a train on one of those snowy weekends, Charlie complained, “It’s like bloody Brokeback Mountain. Talk about high-altitude fucks four times a year.” On top of our long working weeks those weekends of tedious travel would have left most people exhausted, but it wasn’t like that for two young men in love.
Then the front of house manager at Charlie’s theater gave her notice in. She too was moving up the chain, going on to a bigger job somewhere else. Now it was my turn to be the bold one: I told Charlie I planned to apply for the vacancy created by her going. “You can’t,” he said. “It’d wreck your CV, spell the end of your career.” He meant to sound shocked, but I heard other things in his voice: a kind of thrill; something like awe. I said, “So what?”
“No, but really…”
“Too late,” I said. “My wrecked CV is already in the post. It’ll land on your desk tomorrow morning.”
I got the job, of course: the interviewing panel consisted simply of Charlie and his director of productions, an older gay man. It meant a big pay cut, and a lot of explaining to my parents, but there you go. I thought there’d be a lot of explaining to do at the theater in Wales, which I was leaving after little more than a year, but I was wrong. Apologetically I explained the situation to my PA. “Of course,” she said, and took my hand. “We all knew. You silly goose. Best thing that could happen.” I tried to give her a peck on the cheek by way of thanks but she wasn’t expecting it and I ended up kissing her nose.
I moved to Cambridge and Charlie and I lived and worked together, day in day out, for a year that passed as quickly as a holiday. Then Charlie took a proposal to his board: for the post of front of house manager to be abolished, for as long as Charlie and I both worked at Cambridge. We’d combine our two jobs and share them, splitting the salaries equally. This was coming out at work in a very big way: it not only startled the board, it got a column or two, and a picture of the pair of us, in the local rag. But the proposal was passed, and now we take it in turn to wear the evening bow tie, take it in turn to face the assault course of the morning. It is an assault course, as all jobs are. We handle it okay. Better than okay, in fact. Being together gives us a strength we couldn’t manage on our own. It’s the strength that only one thing can give you: the strength that comes from love.
Cambridge is unique among British theaters, at least, among the ones I know, in that it provides a small apartment within the main building, for the front of house manager’s use. That apartment is now ours. On Sundays, in the quiet time, it’s almost as if the whole building is our home. A great eccentric mansion, furnished with several hundred chairs, a dozen mirrors in ormolu and gilt, and as many swords and costumes as anyone could wish for. Actually, we don’t. We haven’t turned into batty theater queens, and we don’t hang around the building when we’re free. We get out and go places, do things, just like anybody else.
On the other hand—I write this with a certain amount of embarrassment, and can already imagine smiles—there is a sizeable, often untidy, curtain store behind the stage. And just occasionally, very occasionally, for old times’ sake, for the sake of memories which are silly and sentimental but also nice… I think I’ll leave it there.
THE PRISONER
C. C. Williams
I surveyed the items arrayed on the stark, utilitarian bedspread of the guest room: khaki T-shirt; camouflage fatigues; a sandy, dun-colored officer’s cap. Tucked neatly beneath the bed stood black combat boots so highly polished it was as if they were carved from obsidian. I guess we’re doing some paramilitary scene.
Charley waited for me in his bedroom; he’d approached me earlier that night.
I had stopped by Tony’s Bar & Grill after a late night at work and sat nursing a Tanqueray while a bored go-go boy gyrated to Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” At first I hadn’t recognized Charley; he’d changed so much from our days at the academy. Gone was the vulnerable boy’s face, shadowed with inexperience and bright with expectation. His face had filled out; ten years of life lay like a mask across his features. But the voice, soft and insistent, had remained the same. I had a hard time listening to him. While he spoke of joining the Marines and doing several tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, I shut my eyes. And there I saw his young eighteen-year-old face as it had been when we had lain together in the dark—intelligent and beautiful but innocent of the evil that men do.
Stripping off my jeans and polo, I began to don the military gear. Pulling the fatigues up over my thighs, I was surprised to find that we now wore the same size pants. In college I had always out-massed Charley, but our bodies had fit just right; his wiry sprinter’s form merged with my wrestler’s build, like muscle and sinew entwined on bone. The shirt stretched tight across my more muscular chest and biceps; a tear on the right shoulder opened wider as I pulled on the shirt. Lacing up the combat boots, I noticed a few milky stains around the toes. The spots marred the glossy blackness, and I thought of wiping them off. But I considered they might actually be part of the scene that awaited me. I put on the starched, sweet-smelling officer’s cap and tucked some stray hairs behind my ears. I recalled the last time we had been together—a beautiful night, an awful night…
I had returned to our dorm room, worn out after wrestling practice, wanting just a shower and some mindless TV. I switched on the lights, tossing my gym bag on the floor.
“Leave ’em off.” Charley’s voice was thick and emotional, clogged with something raw. “Please.”
Clicking off the fluorescent fixture, I looked to his bed where he lay on his belly, naked. The parted curtains let a splash of moonlight fall across him. He looked like an artsy postcard—except for the welts and livid bruises on his lower back, arms and legs.
“Oh, my god!” I rushed forward and knelt at his bedside. “Are you all right? What happened?”
“Nothing. I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Can I get you something? Water? Aspirin?” I blurted out, panicked, concerned. “We should go to the infirmary—”
“Shut up, just…” Charley sighed and broke down.
I fought a creeping sense of distance, a feeling of abandonment that pressed on my heart. “Should I leave you alone?”
He reached out, grabbing my hand. “No! Please don’t.” He squeezed my hand hard.
“What do you want me to do?” I climbed up and sat on the edge of his bed.
After a painful silence, he whispered, “Show me you care.”
Just like so many times over the last eight months, I laid my hands on him, marveling at his satiny skin, pressing my fingers into the lithe muscles of his shoulders. I rubbed his back, and he moaned softly. My long fingers crept up his neck to tangle in his dirty-blond hair—it was longer than regulation and needed a trim. I massaged his scalp. Lowering my lips to the small of his back, I kissed around the red, inflamed skin, a crawling sense of dread nibbling at my mind. Dark thoughts invaded me, gray worries of the unknown scudded across my mind like clouds before the moon. Usually, I was breathless with wonder as I reveled in the sensations of his body, awash in a mixture of fear and joy, that stomach-fluttering feeling when you stand on the diving board, before surrendering to the cool breeze and the water that swallows you up.
My hands came to join my lips at his waist. Before I massaged his gorgeous butt, he winced. “Not there—not…tonight.”
Sitting upright, I wiped his forehead. “Tell me what happened.” I kissed his cheek, nuzzling at him, loving the softness of his day’s growth of beard.
“Not yet,” he breathed. “Love me everywhere, but not there tonight. Just love me, Jake.”
Still dreading the silent unknown, yet moved by the aching need in his voice, I took him in my arms and picked him up from the bed. Cradled like a baby, he clung to my neck and shoulders, embracing me as tightly as he could. We kissed, our mouths open, panting into each other. We drank from the saliva we exchanged; our tongues dueled for supremacy.
Breaking from the kiss, I licked at him, running my tongue over his lips, his chin, tasting the salt on his tear-stained cheeks. With pursed lips I pecked his cheekbones and eyebrows, blew cool air on his closed eyelids. I covered his nose with kisses, lapping at the bridge, his nostrils, again tasting the saltiness of his pain.
My passion increased as I worshipped him, fired by the feel of soft skin covering solid muscle. Entranced, I bit his neck, licked his shoulders and swallowed up each of his nipples. Straining my back and biceps, I covered his chest and belly with wet, hungry kisses; then lowered my mouth to his erect cock.
“Oh, yeah!” Charley gripped my hair. “Eat me up, man, eat me alive.”
I sucked at his swollen cock head, swirling the tip of my tongue around the slit and nipping at the curve, clean cut around the edges. He bucked his eight-inch cock against my face, begging with his body to fuck my mouth. I’d become a pretty good cocksucker in the last eight months. Having had only fantasies, I had been inexperienced, but my slightly more experienced roommate had proven to be an excellent teacher.
“Put me down, Jake. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.” I obeyed, lowering him to the floor. Charley leaned against our dresser, spreading his thighs with a wince. His pale cock stood tall, curving out from his sandy bush. Grabbing his sinewy legs, I dove for his crotch, taking him in with every gulp of air I inhaled. Charley withdrew to some place in his head, arms behind his back, legs spread. Once he stroked my cheek. Once he grabbed his briefs and wiped my nose before snot ran down and mixed with my spit and his precome.
Jerking his rod, I gnawed on his hips and thighs; my nose pressed into his crotch. He smelled like woodsy air, boy sweat, and sex. Testosterone fired my brain, burning away my worries with bright desire. I still wore my wrestling singlet, and my stiff cock strained for release from my jockstrap. Like a dog I rubbed my dick against his calf.
“Yeah! Hump my fucking leg, boy. Hump away while I fuck your hand with my cock. Don’t stop, asshole. Don’t you dare stop.”
Charley was unusually aggressive in his love talk, so I wondered what was playing out in his head. Who are you talking to?
“God, I want so much for you to fuck me right now. To bend me over and spread my white ass. Hock a big gob of snot down on my crack, and poke it in me with your thumb—running that thumb around my hole, opening it up for your big, veiny cock. You thrusting in and fucking me harder and harder. I’ll pretend, yeah, pretend that you’re going to fill me up for the rest of my life.”
Unsure of what I was hearing, I looked up. “Do you want me to?”
His body writhed, and he grimaced in the moonlight. That meant he was getting close. “No! Just keep loving me hard like you’re doing now. Aww, shit—”
Shuddering, he collapsed against me. His dick erupted, shooting a ropy load up onto my neck and shoulders. He continued to orgasm, letting go a second and third time, thickly coating my hand with his white cream. Never had I seen him shoot more than twice. Before I could grab for a towel, Charley was licking me clean. He seemed to have returned to the moment; he sighed. “I’m sorry. I was selfish. Let me suck you off.”
“No,” I replied. Standing, I pulled him up and hugged him. “I just wanted to make you feel good,”
“You sure did that!” He licked my jaw. “You’ll never know how much.”
Pushing away from him, I held him at arms’ length. “Charley, tell me what happened—now!”
“I need a drink first.” A moment later, dressed in his tattered bathrobe, he sipped whiskey from a Dixie cup. Contraband whiskey I kept far back under my bed. His fingers tapped on the cup as he paced the room. I stood by the dresser, confused, feeling embarrassed, still smelling of sex and wrestling practice. He took a deep breath. “You know Trey Hauser.”
“The dumb-ass bully? Of course!” Hauser, a rich, legacy senior, regularly sought out and bullied the scholarship guys. He and his little gang were two years ahead of us.
“He’s been harassing me for a while now—most of the year.”
“Shit.” I sat on my bed and poured myself more whiskey.
“He’s been leaving notes in my books, my gym locker, even under the door. Notes that say things like Cocksucker or Ass Licker. He’s cornered me after lunch, between classes, grabbing at my uniform and messing it up. He’ll say, ‘You’re mine, fag,’ or ‘One of these days, I’ll get you.’
