When dinner was finished, Fenn announced that civilized people had coffee, and night was drawing on. They had that, and dessert, and then Dylan’s father said that he and Todd would go upstairs, and Dylan was actually about to remark that this never happened, that Todd and Fenn always stayed in the kitchen and usually friends came over.
“No one’s coming over tonight,” is all Fenn said.
“You might as well watch movies in the library,” Todd said.
“Which really makes it a den,” Fenn noted. “I worked so hard to make it a library too.”
“Whaddo you wanna watch?” Dylan asked, and Lance said, “Doesn’t matter to me,” as he climbed onto the couch.
“We could just talk.”
“Talking’s good.”
“Let’s watch something deep,” Lance said, then. “Deep and really long. It helps talk.”
Dylan smiled and went through the movies pulling out The English Patient.
“Are you chilly?” Dylan asked.
Lance hugged his bare arms and said, ‘Now that you mention it.”
“You wanna get a sweatshirt? Or I could just get a blanket?”
“Get us a blanket,” Lance said.
Dylan nodded and went back upstairs.. He returned with the old comforter, and once they were both under it, they pressed together and Lance laughed nervously, almost stupidly.
“It’s just like old times,” he said.
“I know, right?”
Then Dylan said, “I’m so sorry, Lance.”
“What?” Lance looked at him, worried.
“I was so bad to you. I’ve missed you so much.”
“Well, Dylan, I was pretty fucking bad to you too.”
Neither one of them said much and then Dylan said, “I just wanna start over.”
“With us?”
“Yeah, but with everything. I kept thinking about how I wish you didn’t know me. How… I wish I was pure, and not what I’ve been.”
“I don’t care about what you’ve been.”
“I’ve slept around.”
Lance didn’t say anything and Dylan said it again.
“I mean, I’ve been sneaking around under Dad’s nose, getting with guys.”
“Getting with Ruthven?”
That old bone of contention.
“Guys,” Dylan insisted, “and then I saw you, and I was like, what the fuck am I doing? You’re the only guy who ever mattered. Us, right here, just sitting together. That’s all that matters, and when I think about the stuff I did, just to forget you, or how I thought of you… I mean, thought that you were doing stuff so it was okay for me to do stuff.”
“I was doing stuff,” Lance said.
“Yeah,” Dylan shook his head. “But I made it trashy, so that I could excuse being trashy. And now all I feel is trashy. And dumb.”
“You’re not dumb.’
Dylan chuckled then and said, “But I am trashy?”
“Stop!” Lance commanded.
“You wouldn’t understand,” Dylan said. “You’re good.”
“After what I did to you?”
“You’re still good, Lance. You’re the best guy I know. And you always loved me and I never saw it. I never saw how much I loved you.”
“You’re making me a little too innocent.”
“I went around and screwed other guys to make myself not care about you.”
“I fucked girls and went through a pregnancy scare to prove that I was straight.”
They looked at each other and Lance made a frustrated snort.
“Look, I’m not the kind of Catholic that confession makes feel better, and I don’t really like talking about this shit. You’re not perfect and neither am I. But it felt perfect, when we were cooking and eating, and right here. And I guess we’ve both done some really shitty stuff. But… I felt innocent when we’ve been together. I feel so innocent and not fucked up with you. No matter what I’ve done or what we’ve done when I’m with you I feel like a little kid again.”
“Do you like the word cuddle?”
“Huh?” Lance said. Then, “I hate it.”
“What about the word snuggle.”
“It’s a little better, but I don’t like that word either.”
“Do you want to do it. though?”
Lance looked at Dylan, and gave him his jack o lantern smile. He put his arm around him and pulled him close, so close Dylan could smell the cologne on him, the milk smell of his breath, the slight salt of his sweat. Lance kissed the top of his head and said: “Um hum.”
He loved his father, and he knew his father understood him. But there were things he did not dare ask him until some time later. He and Lance sat in that library that night, sixteen and seventeen and feeling like they had lived through so much and been so tarnished. Now they felt pure again and while the night went on set to nuzzling, hugging squeezing, kissing. Dylan wanted to touch Lance so bad. He wanted to touch him there. He used to touch him there all the time, but things had changed, and if he did touch him there, then what did that mean? What did that say to Lance?
But even as he wondered, Lance’s hand that had—under the blanket—been on his knee, suddenly went between his legs, resting lightly on his sex, and then Dylan did touch land there, and it was an odd feeling, not as if he was touching Lance, but as if he was becoming Lance’s hand, and Lance’s hand was touching Lance. They sat there, not paying attention to the movie, not even looking at each other, mouths half open while they massaged each other in the most secret places and then Dylan’s voice was high and cracked and he said, “Do you want to go to bed?”
“Can we?”
“Of course we can,” Dylan said, feigning innocence. “It’s a sleepover.”
And Lance went along with this and said, “I should probably take a shower then. I’m a little smelly.”
Dylan wanted to say, “I’ll take it with you,” but that was too much like a bitch panting in heat, so he said, “I’ll use Fenn and Todd’s shower.”
His father and stepfather had a private bathroom in addition to the main bathroom, but for common sense’s sake, they had cut a second door in it so that it could be entered from Todd’s office as well. Fenn, always concerned with privacy, had locks on both of its doors so Dylan was glad to find, upon cutting through Todd’s office, that the bathroom was open. He wanted to shower quickly. But he did it slowly and carefully and then left, returning to the hallway the same time Lance was coming out of the main bathroom, both of them with white towels wrapped about their waists. Dylan looked down the hall. To the right, his father’s door was closed, and that large bedroom was over the kitchen, at the back of the house. The long hall was interrupted by the stairway and across from it, Todd’s office. At the very end, over the living room and library, was Dylan’s room. They came into it now, shutting the door, and Lance looked down at him, and Dylan looked up at him, and then they wrapped their arms around each other and kissed, pulling away their towels as they moved to the bed.
WHAT DYLAN WOULD HAVE asked his father was, “Did you intend for us to have sex? Did you want that to happen?”
It seemed a strange thing for a modern father to want.
“It’s not that I wanted it to happen,” his father explained some years later. “It had already happened. I had been happening for years.”
“But—”
“I wanted you to be together. I wanted him to be your best friend again. In a way it is a lot like if your parents divorced, wanting them to get back together, though I admit I never wanted my mother and father to get back together. But I digress. You wouldn’t be campaigning for them to have sex, but once you put them back together, successfully, truly, in love, you knew that’s what they would be doing. You just don’t think about it. I chose not to think about it. To leave room for it, but not to think about it.”
“And we chose to be unheard. Unquiet as possible,” Dylan thought. “We didn’t want you to think about it.”
“Are you sure it’s okay?” Lance asked. He was kneeling naked on Dylan’s bed, and Dylan lay before him, his knees pressed to his chest,
“I am completely sure it’s okay.”
“But your dad. Would your dad like it?”
“I’m sure he wouldn’t,” Dylan said, looking up at Lance, “and I’m sure he knows its going to happen.”
“I’m so scared of hurting you,” Lance murmured. “I don’t want to hurt you.”
His penis was thick and it pointed earnestly, straight like a thumb to Dylan.
“You’ve already hurt me,” Dylan said. “We’ve hurt each other. The time for worrying about that has passed.”
When Lance still knelt there doing nothing, Dylan got up. He lightly pressed Lance to his back and he straddled him. Holding Lance under him, closing his eyes and grateful Lance hadn’t pushed inside of him, he lowered himself onto Lance, accepting bit by bit his cock. Being fucked was always like this. It always hurt a little. One always had to get used to it. He sat down slowly, anus aching, his eyes watering a little, Lance’s mouth open, Lance not moving as he allowed Dylan to find his way, to navigate the initial pain and move, gently into pleasure. In the end, Dylan, rocking back and forth, fucked him. They moved like that a long time until Dylan climbed off of him and invited Lance between his legs, before he lay on his stomach, and Lance lay across him, fucking him, slowly and then harder and harder, Lance’s large hand reaching down to grip Dylan’s smaller one, Lance’s mouth on Dylan’s throat, Dylan turning around to kiss him, to thrust back. Dylan pushed his own face down into his pillow, burying mouth open, giving way to Lance and Lance and Lance.
Their love had always been hard like that. It was rough and incredibly gentle. When he entered a party once, Dylan blushed to see Lance in khakis and a blue pullover, and he came to him and murmured, “You look so nice,” and Lance went red and barely squeaked out, “You look nice too.” And though they were afraid to be a couple again, to call it anything, everyone knew they were together. They were sweethearts. It was sweet and they had each other’s hearts. And in the evenings in their parents dens they watched movies and laughed under a blanket and at night, the desperate longing, loving gave way to a savage sex, Dylan’s hands gripping the window sills while Lance rammed him from behind. Lance riding him long into the night on the floor because they didn’t want the furious bedsprings to give them away.
That night, that first time in a long time, they slept in each other’s arms and neither one of them said a thing. Dylan wanted to say something about how he hadn’t felt this safe in a long time, and he wanted to say something about how he didn’t love anyone nearly as much as Lance, and he wanted to say how sorry he was for everything. He sensed Lance beginning to say the same things. But in the end they both knew there was nothing to be said and surrendered to lying together, stroking the curves of each others bodies, passing into sleep.
But it had been the brutality of their first claustrophobic relationship they were afraid of. It kept them holding each other at a distance. And so when Lance was a senior getting ready to go to college, they decided as much as they loved each other to be merely friends who occasionally came together in furious desire. It was through the cracks in this crooked relationship that Elias Anderson entered their love life.
