A Piano for Matt

Life is more like the game where you spin and stuff is dumped in your lap.  When I was little, I wanted to be like my dad.  He worked hard, but when he came home, he played with my brother, my sister, and me.  He was interested in our day, and at least once a week, he made dinner while we did our homework so my mom could go out with her friends.

My mother would yell at him to take us out of the house; she needed a break. I never understood why she needed a break. We were gone most of the day at school. She sat on the back porch smoking cigarettes. The food we ate was never as good as the food I had at friends’ homes.

Up until I was twelve, my teddy bears were my children, and my large teddy bear was my wife. I grew up telling my siblings that I wanted six kids, three sets of twins. Even at a young age, they thought I was crazy. My brother Frank told me that kids would just tie me down. I’d never be able to travel and see the world. He said there was an operation that could prevent boys from having children, and as soon as he was old enough, he was going to have it done.

My sister didn’t want kids either. I heard her say once that she didn’t want some parasite growing in her like that fly worm she’d seen on a youtube video. I’d seen the video as well, and I knew having babies couldn’t be like having tweezers pull a larva out of your body.

As I said, life is like a spin of the wheel. We’d all received the birds and the bees talk. I even got a private bees and bees talk. My father said that he sensed that I was more interested in boys. I had noticed that I wasn’t interested in girls the way my brother was, and I was worried. But when my dad talked to me and I told him that I was scared to be different, he told me that there are lots of ways to be different.

“Liking boys when you’re a boy isn’t different, James. You’re the same as all the other boys who like boys. It’s not as though you’re choosing one over the other. It’s just the way you were made.”

His talk made me feel better inside, but as I learned more about human reproduction, I realized I’d never have three sets of twins with the person I wanted to marry.

My sister found the guy that she wanted to marry when she was fourteen. His name was Byron. They had their first baby when she was sixteen. At twenty, she had four kids. Mary and Byron were living in a rotting single wide trailer on an acre of land that they got really cheap when she first got pregnant. Byron may not have been smart enough to keep his pecker in his pants or to wait until he could buy a condom, but he was a really hard worker. He was lucky, too. A change in one of the roads made their land go from worthless to valuable. He was able to sell it, buy a portion of his daddy’s farmland, and built a small house that kept the rats out.

My brother fell in love with a girl who said she wanted ten children. He talked her down to two of them. Stella agreed; he married her, and he joined the coast guard. He loves the work, and he is stationed somewhere around a place called Marblehead in Lake Erie.

My brother was still in high school when I became a freshman. My mother seemed to have checked out after I confirmed that I was gay. My father was supportive to the point of telling me about guys who were rumored to be gay, “in case I was interested in dating them.” He made me laugh.

Sadly, there weren’t any guys I wanted to date in high school. Nor did I want to date any of the guys in town. No one piqued my interest. I hoped that would change in college.

Since neither my sister nor my brother went to college, the college savings fund my father had started with the birth of my brother had a hefty sum in it. He had also signed me up for the Texas program that allowed me to pay the tuition in place when I was born. I decided to go to the University of Houston for my undergraduate and hopefully law school.

I’m not sure what to say about my six years in Houston. I had a full course load. I met a lot of interesting people, and I met a lot of attractive guys. I think my mindset was not in sync with that of the other people I met. If I had wanted sex, the kind that you have and then go home and you never see that person again, I could have had that in abundance. I wanted love and romance, and once I was certain that I was committed to him, then I wanted the sex part. I guess that’s why, six years later, I went back home still a virgin.

Mr. Cheatham, pronounced ‘Chath’ with a long a and then an ‘um’ with a short u, had a place for me in his firm. I passed the bar the first time I took it. Then I began to work in the town I grew up in. The occasional gay man would come into the office for the usual mundane tasks of getting a will drawn up or having one amended. Sometimes, there was a power of attorney to help take care of an elderly family member. I dated about once every two months on average. I kept a check on the Grindr app, but most new guys were just ones who wanted to cheat or were just passing through town.

The biggest change in my life happened because of a simple mix-up. My sister had promised to take my nephew Matt to the next town over to get him a pair of New Balance tennis shoes on a day that she had promised the Lutheran Women’s Missionary League that she would be in charge of the Lutheran Girls’ Summer Retreat.

Matt was understandably upset, but he said he understood. I had stopped by to give her a couple of baking dishes I had borrowed from my mother and never returned. Mary said he was ‘out pouting by the barn,’ so before I left, I went to check on him.

He told me he was fine, but he’d been crying. When I pressed him, he said he felt he always took a back seat to the other kids and all the other things his parents were involved in. Stamp “sucker” on my forehead. I volunteered to take him for the fucking shoes. OK, I didn’t actually call them that, but I was thinking about it. Shit, why couldn’t he just walk to Walmart and buy himself a pair of shoes? No, these were special. Blah, blah, blah. So I told Mary I was taking him, and off we went. I shouldn’t have been so pissed about taking him, but I had big plans to go home and sit in front of the TV and wallow in my loneliness, and this kid was going to make me have a great time.

We stopped at the shoe store and got his shoes before going into Target. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular; I was just in the mood to buy something. Matt seemed drawn to the electronic pianos.

“You like those, huh?” I asked him as I watched him run his fingers over the keys.

“Yeah, Uncle James,” he looked up at me, smiling. “They’re cool. I get to play on a real piano at school.”

“That so? Are you taking lessons at school?”

“Sort of, but they aren’t like real lessons.”

“Can you show me what you’ve learned so far?” I reached over and turned on the keyboard.

He played for about a minute; it was a piece of classical music that I recognized but did not know the name of. When he finished, he looked up at me and grinned. I hugged him.

“How’s this different from a regular piano?”

“The number of keys is different, and it feels different when you play. The real ones have pedals.”

“Hmm. So a real one would be better than one of these.”

“A real one doesn’t need batteries,” Matt said, “but a real one is a lot more expensive.” He took a step back. “And these are expensive enough.”

“I think we should check it out.” I took out my phone and searched. “Hey, there’s a music store just down the road. Let’s go.” We were parked in front of the store within ten minutes. When we walked in, I could tell Matt was overwhelmed by all the musical instruments, but he went straight to a beautiful cherry colored upright.

I went for this beautiful hunk of a man who came out of the backroom and asked how he could help us. Life suddenly went into slow motion. Dress jeans and a plaid short-sleeved shirt clothed a man with curly brown hair, brown eyes, and evenly tanned skin.

“My nephew needs a piano.”

He smiled.

“And I need a date.”

“I can help you with the piano, but as my wife is expecting me for dinner, I can’t help you with the date. Besides, I think my sister is seeing someone. Sorry.”

“Hey, Steve, I’ll help them. You can go.”

I turned and faced a man with porcelain skin, blue eyes, and jet black hair. He stood almost six feet tall with a body that was the combination of a swimmer and tennis player. While his polo shirt with the company logo was a tad tight, it did show off his muscular chest. I wondered whether this place only hired hunks.

“So, you need a piano and a date. The first is easy; take your pick. As for the second, I’m not a matchmaker. But is it a special occasion?”

“I guess that depends upon him.” I smiled, and as I did, I noticed the wedding band.

Matt began playing the song he’d learned at school.

“I’m not really expecting you to set me up. I only said that because your partner is so handsome, it just slipped out. I will admit that you’re even better looking.”

“If you’re trying to get me to lower the price, the piano is already on sale; I’ll throw in free delivery in exchange for that compliment. My name’s Ethan.”

“My name’s James,” I told him. “And that’s my nephew Matt. He’s showing an interest in piano. I thought we should look at some uprights so he can play on the real thing.”

“We have used as well as new ones. He’s sitting at a used one. It’s a truly nice one. Many used ones, even when they are in excellent playing condition often have many nicks and scratches. This one is near perfect.”

“Do you like that one, Matt?”

“Yeah. It’s pretty, and it sounds better than the one at school.”

Matt started to play ‘Yankee Doodle’; he restarted several times. “I’m nervous, I guess.”

“Will he start taking lessons?” asked Ethan.

“I’m going to talk to his music teacher about that. He seems to like that one, and you’re telling me it’s a good piano. Let’s get it.”

“Come in the back,” said Ethan, “so we can fill out some paperwork.”

Twenty minutes later, I’d helped him load the piano onto the delivery truck, and I’d given him directions to my sister’s house. He’d called his brother Eric to do the delivery, so Matt and I headed home. He had a pair of new shoes and a piano. I had $3500 less in my savings account. A bargain if Matt or one of the other kids took to playing. I realized I hadn’t considered the cost of the lessons; I’d be paying for those as well. I felt a rush of sadness come over me as I was realizing my paternal desires through being an uncle.

We arrived at my sister’s and found several of the Lutheran ladies conversing in the living room and the children playing quietly in their rooms. Their meeting was coming to an end, and after they left. I told my sister about the piano. We made a place for it. I don’t believe she realized that I’d seen her roll her eyes, but I didn’t care.

The delivery truck arrived, and I spent the next fifteen minutes trying to hide my erection. Eric was a few years younger than his brother, and although they might have looked like twins, Eric was even more handsome, friendlier, sexier. He was also very serious and went right to work, and after he was finished, he retrieved some paperwork for me to sign.

“Will you sign here?” He pointed to the bottom of the page, and as I signed, he said. “My brother told me that you’re gay.”

I looked up into his beautiful eyes. “Yes, I am.”

“So am I.”

We stood there just looking at one another.

“How about we go out? Maybe now. I haven’t eaten.”

This Adonis just asked me out. I gave him his pen and grasped his hand. It was more than his good looks that excited me. I felt something new as I held onto him. “Yes, I’d like that. I’d like to get to know you. Let’s take your truck to my place, and then go get something.”

He smiled at me. I smiled back.

“How about barbecue?” We both said it at the same time, and then we both chuckled.

We ordered combination plates, and as we ate, he told me that he’d attended the local community college, received his associate’s, and continued to work for the family music shop, teaching piano and making deliveries. His one relationship was with a computer science professor at the college. “It never had the spark that I had always imagined a relationship would have, but we were comfortable with one another, and enjoyed the other’s company. He got a job somewhere else, and he never asked me to go with him.” Eric didn’t seem sad as he told me this; it was as if it were just another fact in his life.

He was quite surprised when I told him that I was still a virgin, and he was embarrassed to discover how attractive I found him. He admitted that he saw himself when he looked at his brother and simply saw his own flaws duplicated.

“I see only a very handsome man.”

“You need glasses,” he joked. “My eyes are crooked; one of my ears sticks out more than the other.”

“Don’t be silly,” I told him. “Those are minor variations that add to your sexiness.”

He reached out his fingers and brushed them against mine. “Are we going to be just good friends, or do you think there might be more?” he asked.

“I know for sure that we’re going to be friends,” I said. “But you make me tingle inside, so I’m hopeful that there’s more.”

He smiled and formed some dimples. “I’m glad because you make me feel something, too. It’s a feeling that I’m not sure I’ve ever felt.”

“Then we need to figure it out, don’t we?”

“Yeah. We do,” he blushed a little.

I moved my hand to get my napkin and knocked the bowl that held my green beans. They spilled into my lap. “Can’t take me anywhere.”

“Then next time, I’ll get it to go.”

I looked up at him, and he was so serious that I knew at that moment that I wanted him to make love to me. I wanted to look into his eyes as he filled me.

“What’s the matter?” Eric asked.

“Will you drive us back to my place?”

“Of course.”

We got up and made our way to my car. I pushed him against the car and kissed him. He kissed back. I wanted him to stay the night. Would he? We got into the car and I sat on a towel. My pants were dripping with bean juice. The entire bowl landed on my pants.

Eric found it funny, and I probably would have as well, except that my underwear was now wet, too. We made it back to my place without further incident. “Come inside? Stay the night?”

“I have to get the truck back. Can I come back tomorrow?”

“Of course,” I laughed. “Anytime.” Every time, I thought. I smiled and waved as he drove off in the delivery van. I felt overwhelmed with despair as he disappeared from view. Why did I do this to myself? I imagined a whole evening and night with him before even finding out whether he was ready or even able to stay. I felt rejected, but he hadn’t rejected me. He had obligations, and I was being an asshole by wanting to come before those obligations. No wonder I was alone.

I sat on a lawn chair in my underwear and t-shirt. I was inside the house, in the dining room, with the windows open, feeling the cold air blow across me. I was cold, but I didn’t close the windows or get a blanket. I stared into the darkness on the other side of the screen. Craziness reigned in my brain. By the time I nodded off, I had convinced myself that Eric, although he found me attractive, wanted to get to know me better, and might even sleep with me, had found my spilling the green beans to be an act of buffoonery and would only now want to be distant friends. Either that or when I asked him to stay the night, he realized I was a slut and probably lying about being a virgin.

I decided that he was a great guy; maybe he was better off without me. Maybe I should get dressed and go down to the bar at Main Street and the highway. I’d heard that the guys who didn’t pick up anyone were often good targets for desperate gay men. What should I wear? I couldn’t decide.

I fell asleep with dreams of being chased by pianos. The strings had come loose and grabbed me. They cut into my skin. The doorbell rang, and I awoke. The clock on the oven read 11:07; it was late, but not midnight yet. The house was freezing cold. I should have closed the windows. I went to the door and peeked out. The porch light illuminated a shivering Eric, still wearing his work clothes from earlier.

I opened the door, and he stepped in. “I know you’re going to think I’m crazy, but I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. I wanted to turn around and come back. I kept thinking how you’d ask me to spend the night, and when I said getting the work van back was more important, I thought you might think I was using it as an excuse to get away from you. I wasn’t. I dropped the van off and came right back. I was worried you wouldn’t want to see me again. And I want to spend the night with you.”

I wrapped my arms around him and held him tightly to me. “Maybe we’re both crazy, and maybe we’ve just found something special. We can decide that tomorrow. Right now, let’s close the windows and snuggle under a blanket. I want to brush my teeth first, though.”

“I need a toothbrush,” said Eric. “I didn’t bring one.”

“I’m a neurotic,” I told him. I buy them when they’re on sale. I’ve got a drawer full of them.”

“You’re my kind of guy.” Eric kissed me hard and passionately. When he pulled away, I could hardly catch my breath. “I’m going to need a shower, too.”

“You smell OK,” I told him.

“No, it’s not that. I want you to fuck me. I wanted you to when I first saw you, but I told myself that I needed to wait, but I don’t want to wait.”

I went to shut some windows. “I don’t have condoms.”

“Oh, fuck. I should have stopped to get some. I got tested after Thomas left, and I haven’t done any anal since, but still…”

“I trust you,” I told him. “If you say you’re clean, I believe you.”

“I am,” he said.

“And, I’ve never, so…” my voice trailed off. Would I be making love to this stud with no protection? Would I feel his skin against mine?”

He closed the last window. “Let’s shower.”

I led him to the bed after drying him off. He sat at the edge, and I got down on my knees and pulled his dick into my mouth. It was already hard, and I liked the way it felt as the head rubbed against the roof of my mouth and then slipped into my throat. I was glad I had practiced with the dildo I kept inside my nightstand. The ‘oh, fuck, yeah’ that came from Eric told me that he enjoyed my technique. It was a technique that I had dreamed about, fantasized about, and practiced.

Eric’s hand pushed me away. “I’m close. You need to stop. Wow, I can’t believe how good that felt.”

I reached down and touched my hard cock. It dripped with precum. I wanted to climb onto his dick and move up and down until I shot my load. Would he let me? I pushed him farther back on the bed.

“Like this, James?”

“That’s perfect,” I said. I moved so I could lower myself onto him. Just because his cock was the perfect size for my mouth did not mean I wouldn’t need to stretch to accommodate him. I’d left his dick wet, and I had applied some Vaseline to my ass as it was the only lubricant I had. I guess it was a good one since his cock slipped in very easily at first. There was some pain past the first inch or so. I tried to relax and allow my body to slowly ease down as he impaled me.

My deep breaths continued as I slid down and had him completely inside me. I looked down on him, and he smiled. I think at that moment, I was the happiest I’d ever been in my life. His hands moved up and we interlaced fingers. I could tell his hips were beginning to pivot. His cock moved slightly in and out. The frequency and amplitude of his motion increased. He was hitting the right spot; my balls tightened up. My dick got harder. I locked eyes with him and gripped his fingers with more force. Eric’s eyes widened as he pushed up into me and released his seed. The pressure inside me and inside my balls exceeded my ability to hold back, and I spurted my cum over his head and against the wall. I fell forward.

Eric rolled and we faced one another, side by side. I could feel his seed drip from my hole as he grasped me in his arms and pulled me to him. Our lips met again in a fury of kisses. Although out of breath, Eric was able to say, “That was incredible.” He moved his hands up and pushed my wet bangs out of my eyes. “That’s what it’s supposed to be like.”

I smiled broadly and kissed him. “It’s what I always imagined and more.”

“James? How long before you can fill me?”

“Not as long as you might think, you sexy man.”