Eden

When Rob’s father had the stroke, Rob came back home. Looking back it had never been a hard decision, living alone had not been that pleasant. For all of a week, caring for his father, helping his mother, had been his only concern, but when he was sure that his mother could handle enough on her own, and that his father was as well as he was going to be, it made it easier for him to sneak away and get motel rooms. One night, even though he had been expecting it, the knock on the door still came as a surprise.

Rob ‘s legs seemed to unfold and stand up of their own accord, and then he came to the door, trembling.

“Hello?” he said on the other side, and then answered it, not wanting to seem crazy.

“Come in,” he said. He stretched out his hand manfully as he opened the door and hoped he didn’t look too eager. “I’m Rob.”

The other young man looked around the apartment. It was on loan for the day. Sal never asked questions. Rob watched this guy lick his lips nervously and Rob was instantly hard. His heart was thumping. He couldn’t really feel the ground beneath him.

“I’m Him,” he said.

“Cool,” Rob sounded breathless. “That’s what you said.”

“Yeah,” He said dumbly.

Rob’s apartment consisted of the cozy living room, a breakfast nook with a window threw it and then a short hallway to what should have been a bedroom. He was looking around, His hands shoved in His pocket.

“So,” He said, “where do we do this?”

Suddenly Rob didn’t want to do this. The breathless excitement was merely on his end, he realized. There was that wonderful surprise sex, often when you’d been talking to a guy for a long time, missing appointments, meaning to get together but not doing so, or maybe just the heat right away that kept relationships going and friendships going long after the sex. In that kind of thing a guy came to the door eager as a puppy and before you had looked, his hands were all over you, his tongue in your mouth. You could order sex, but you could not really order passion.

“Over here,” Rob said, sounding smaller. “That couch is a bed. It lets out.”

If this was going to be business, then Rob added, “Did you bring anything?”

“I got a condom. If that’s what you mean.”

“That’s what I meant.”

He asked him, “Do you want me to fuck you?”

Well, just out there, like that.

“Do you want to fuck me?” Rob asked him.

“Yeah,” He said, his voice dull.

Rob sort of hated him right now. Rob said: “All right.”

He undressed slowly, and climbed onto the bed, on hands and knees and arched his back like a cat as He entered him. He realized that here was a good looking young man inside of him, on his birthday, and he hadn’t ordered up a wonderful companion or a friend, or a lover, he had ordered a fuck. and there was no point in being all hurt because that was all this fool was. He felt good in him and Rob was, after all, the master of the house, so he pulled him out and sat on the bed looking over His’s body. His penis was thick in the midst of dark hair going all up the side of His thighs, spreading to His stomach and chest.

“Sit down,” he told him. and The Guy obeyed.

“Get on your back,” Rob said.

Rob, erect now. was powerful for the first time all day, and he felt sexy for the first time in he didn’t know how long. He was long and slender and blond and somewhat good looking. He knelt down and took The Guy in, deep inside of him, and then he began to ride Him, his hands pressed to The Guy’s chest, running over His breast, over His nipples making Him moan , feeling the piston throb inside of him shake him, He reached up now and again as their bodies bucked.

And then The Guy’s mouth opened. The Guy kept leaning up, leaning up. He wanted to kiss him. Suddenly, Rob let Him. His tongue was like a whip. It lurched in his mouth and pulled him down. His handTisHhe pulled Rob, His body came pressing against Rob’s. Their bodies pressed together and The Guy’s hands were in his hair, demanding. Rob turned over so that the dark haired stranger was on top of him.

Rob put a hand up. For a while went down on Him, while moans escaped from the other young man’s mouth. And then He bent down, and kissed Rob quickly and went down His belly and took him in His mouth. He shocked Rob, Rob bucked up and down, and He lifted His head, looking up at him.

“Are we going to to this?” Rob said. “Are we going to do this properly like two people who don’t have issues?”

“Yeah,” the Other Guy said, eagerly.

“Alright, then,” Rob lay on his back, he pulled Him between his legs. “Alright.”

Rob never knew quite how he felt coming back home from these encounters. The fucking, and then later the being fucked, was exhilarating. But by the time he was home he felt blank—not ashamed—just blank. And then, sleeping alone, he felt more alone, more hopeless than ever before. But the moments of sex were moments of intense freedom and when things had been going on like this for some time, he met Alex.

The house is dark and this night, Frey has coughed what? A handful of times. They are in total darkness except for the tall lights that line the train tracks beyond and the air is cool enough that even the air is off. Side by side, black and white, they lay, Isaiah scooped up in Rob’s arms.

“You’re not the first to tell me to use my head,” Rob says.

“I don’t mean to be as harsh as I am sometime.”

“I love every bit of you, even the means bits,” Rob kisses his head.

Frey knows better than to make a big deal out of Rob saying he loves him. He reaches back to touch his hip.

“So often I am shut down before I even begin,” Frey said. “Too waspish. Too snappish. But people say stupid things.”

“Then you ought to be snappish.”

Rob sat up and he looked down on Frey.

“What’s the dumbest thing someone has said?”

“So many dumb things.’

“Well, just one.”

Frey lay on his back and said, after a moment of thought, ‘I’ve never been with a Black guy. Or, you’re my first Black guy. In which cause I’m not, cause I’m done.”

Rob shrugged.

“Well, you’re not my first Black guy.”

Frey did not betray his surprise. After all, Rob had hit on him the first time online. He had to have seen Frey’s pictures. But where, in this place? He knew so little of him.

Frey said none of this. Instead he said, “And you’re not my first red head.”

That night they were completely in the moment. Later on, Isaiah Frey said that many other times he thought about the future, about the past. But with Adam he thought of Adam’s fingertips, of the light hair up and down his thighs, of the wetness of his mouth, of the pressure of him, entering him gently, like a lover asking permission. His own being pulled in, being fiercely welcomed and overwhelmed.

When it was over Adam said, “It’s funny but I didn’t know I wanted that. Not until we did it.”

Frey said nothing. Adam stopped talking after awhile. Frey said everything with his hands, gently moving across Adam’s breast, his stomach, under his stomach where the hair went from red to deep black like the earth, then he up again, kissing him.

There was a night when he and Adam lay together.

“I can’t wait to see this book,” Adam told him as he was getting dressed in the morning.

Was it his imagination, or were Adam’s eyes penetrating him? Was it possible that once someone had penetrated you, everything in him did? No, Jason didn’t. It was all Adam. It must have been the other way around, not that Adam’s eyes bore into him because his penis had the night before, but rather both had happened because Adam was Adam and they’d always, really, borne into each other.

“I want to help any way I can,” Adam said while he and Chet were getting ready to go. “Then I can say I knew the two of you ‘back when’.”

For now, Melanie had made it clear that all she needed from Chet was a little child support. He’d brought up dating and all that, and she’d put the whole idea away.

“I don’t know if I can do it right now,” she told Frey.

Frey’s mind turned to the matter of books. It actually never occurred to him to look for a regular publishing house. Somewhere in his mind was the idea, not that they wouldn’t have him, but that they shouldn’t. And he needed The Immortals to come out now. He skipped the vanity presses, thinking he would make something immediate the way the school used companies to put together creative writing magazines. For the cover he used a company outside of Chicago, and then he assembled all of Melanie’s poems—behind her back—into a book, not exactly knowing what he had in mind. They went to a local printer. It would cost part of their student loans to get it done. That whole second semester he waited like someone in labor for the books to come.

“I have a book?”

“You have a book,” Frey said. “And so do I.”

He showed her that first copy of The Immortals.

She held it in her hands like it was a new baby, and then she had a real new baby and called her Natasha.

“It’s so heavy,” she marveled over the book.

“It’s so... It’s so real,” she said. “Not just something in our heads. Not just... something we’re thinking about doing. We’ve done it.”

Natasha began crying, and Melanie went back to get her. Dancing the baby up and down, Melanie said, “Frey, do you think we could do a little cross country thing with the books?”

“Just leave them around?”

“Yeah,” Melanie said. “I know it sounds strange. But... What if we did?”

That first copy of The Immortalswas thick and white covered with a black and white image of Monserrat College in the autumn.

“Almost a decade,” he murmured. And then he said, “Yes. Yes, we should do it.”