Eden

Gasping and stretching,catching hands and holding on, holding a hand over the mouth and a ballet dancer’s slow twist on the mattress, the sweat of the taut body, the bunching up of brown thighs, cream colored legs thighs covered in black hair.

A gasp that turns to a shout.

“Be quiet!” he says between reprimand and laughter.

Jason Henley reaches up over him, his neck stretching out. Isaiah pulls him down, trying to catch hold of his back, slippery with sweat. Holding, holding, bringing Jason down to him, Jason’s mouth to his; kissing, taking, drinking.

“Oh… God—” he starts, and they hold each other tighter and tighter like a fusion bomb until they explode.

“Are you going to tell me it’s bad for me,” Isaiah said reaching for a cigarette.

“No,” Jason leaned over him, covering him in the moist warmth of his body. “I was going to tell you to give me one too.”

“Just…” Isaiah said, “stay like this.”

“Like what?”

“Over me, your body over me. Holding me.”

Slowly, Jason pulled him back to the bed, cigarette abandoned, and they lay, Isaiah spooned into him, wrapped in him. Never, until they began making love, had Isaiah realized how much larger Jason was. When Jason was over him in the bed, hands planted on either side of him, he reached up to hold onto him and attempt to comprehend the country of his flesh. God, how he felt contained by Jason now, as if Jason Henley was the thing he belonged in.

He is my home…

He is my home

That was what Hagar had said about Milkman in The Song of Solomon. He’d just started reading Toni Morrison that year. Hagar’s grandmother, Pilate, had responded:

He’s a man, not a house.

But Pilate was wrong. Or Morrison. Wasn’t it possible that a man could be a house?

Isaiah turned to him, and Jason gave him that goofy, dimpled smile, the adoring smile. Isaiah touched the hair under his bottom lip while Jason drew him closer.

“How did we get here?” Jason said.

“Well,” Isaiah said at length, “I live here, and you got here in your SUV because I said that everyone was going to Chicago for the day, and—”

Grinning Jason put his hand over Isaiah’s mouth.

Grinning, Isaiah bit his hand.

“Ow.”

“How we got here,” Isaiah said, “is after half a year of your pining after me—”

“I do not pine!”

“And me being silly and stupid, you finally took me out.”

“I didn’t think it was a date.”

“I was pretty sure it was. That was good, you know? I wanted it.”

“I was nervous enough,” Jason discovered. “I should have known it was a date.”

“I was nervous too.”

“You were not. Nothing makes you nervous.”

“You don’t know me as well as you should, then. Everything gets me nervy, and I was so close to you. I’d never been that close. I could smell you, and I knew for the first time, I think, how I felt about you. I knew… vaguely, I wanted a boyfriend. Or something. I knew that I had a crush on you. But, I never really knew until that night. Right next to you.”

Jason was the kissy sort. He liked to kiss every five minutes, which was easier than talking. He kissed Isaiah wetly on the mouth. Sex with Jason was something Isaiah didn’t ever get tired of. Sometimes in school, when he saw him coming with his boys, it was all he could do not to jump him then. Once they had fooled around, very briefly, in a closet in Vincent Hall. But the kissing was another matter. If done too frequently, too quickly, Isaiah discovered he got enough of it. Jason did not, and since he loved Jason—he realized he really did love him—he endured it. In fact he sort of rejoiced in the enduring of small things for the sake of love because they made Jason happy.

“Did you really like me?” Jason said. “And that night of the play… The way I looked? I looked really silly.”

“You looked old fashioned. With the part down your hair.”

A part through all those thick wild waves on Jason’s head. When they were finally and officially lovers, Isaiah made him grow his hair out. He liked to reach up into his hair and hold onto those locks. Wine colored locks, that’s what they were called in literature. That’s what they were. Damp from the sweat of fucking all afternoon, kissing, loving.

At the end of that first week, when the play was over, Isaiah had said something to Jason, and Jason had said in a fit of pique, “You know what? I stood up for you last year. When all my friends said you were gay I said, no you aren’t. You’re a nice guy. And this is the thanks I get.”

The shift on Isaiah’s usually kind face, the look of an Isaiah Jason had never seen before told him he’d gone too far.

“Let’s get one thing straight,” Isaiah said. “Firstly, I’m not a nice guy. I’m duplicitous, vindictive and putting a toe out of line would be very stupid so you would be very smart to stay on my good side, all right, Jason? Secondly, There’s nothing straight about me. I like men. That’s the way it is, probably the way it’s always been. If you can’t be a man, or if that bothers you, you should clear out now. Let’s never have this discussion again.”

But Jason didn’t clear out. And they never did have that discussion again. Jason stayed around a great deal, and when they parted for Thanksgiving break, Isaiah couldn’t believe how much he missed him, how important the silly boy with the backward baseball cap had become to him.

When Jason returned he made a beeline for Isaiah, and Isaiah didn’t hide his excitement though, at first, he wanted to. Jason told him, “I’ve been looking everywhere for you.”

“Well, you’ve found me, Jason. Did you have a good—?”

“Shut up, I need to talk to you.”

“It’s good to see you too—” Isaiah began.

But just then, Jason grabbed him by the hand and pulled him quickly down the hall.

Jason stopped in the lobby of Vincent Hall. To his right were the doors of the auditorium, to the left the doorway out to the parking lot and the little benches. Isaiah stood there waiting with a strange look on his face.

Jason Henley made some sort of decisive noise, and then pulled Isaiah into the auditorium. In the darkness of the empty hall, Jason turned around and kissed him fiercely, pulling away and leaving him spluttering.

“I… I should have asked first. I know,” Jason began in the dark. “I’m stupid. You should just hit me if you want to. You should—”

Because he was smaller it was harder, he had to pull Jason’s head down to return the kiss. At first Jason stumbled, not knowing what was happening, and then, suddenly, with pressure, Jason fell into the kiss.

They kissed for a long time. It was new. Neither one of them had ever kissed another boy. Isaiah had never kissed anyone. Jason’s tongue twisted with his, his teeth knocking lightly against Isaiah’s, holding onto his face. Everything that was supposed to be sexy, but that Isaiah had privately thought would be kind of gross, was so good.

“When is your next class?” Isaiah said after a while. They were both on their knees, kissing and clasping each other.

“I came real early. I needed to find you,” Jason said, parting from him and then kissing him again. “It’s not for an hour.”

Isaiah stood up and took Jason by the hand, down the length of the auditorium, walking the dark path until they bumped into the stage.

“What are we doing?” Jason said.

“Whatever we want to,” Isaiah said with a lightness he’d never felt. “We’ve got that whole cluttered stage, and tarps, and blankets and-”

“Isaiah!” Jason said, sounding shocked and Republican. “We can’t.”

Isaiah pulled him by the hand up the stairs, and Jason did not resist much for a young man nearly six feet tall, and a hundred seventy pounds.

They fell behind the thick curtain, and Isaiah reached up to kiss him.

He asked Jason: “We can’t?”

In the darkness Jason looked a little lost, a little heady, his eyes half closed. He kissed Isaiah’s head and then his lips and, shaking his head, said: “We can.”

In bed together, stretched out against each other, toes pressing together, hands pressed together Isaiah said, “I like it when you look at me like you adore me.”

“But I do adore you,” Jason said, running a hand over his shoulder.

“What about next year?”

“What about next year?” Jason echoed.

“Why don’t you stay at Monserrat? The art program will be there.”

“Monserrat doesn’t have a great art program,” Jason said, sitting up.

“Neither does Citeaux. It’s not like you knew what you wanted. You just wanted to go to Citeaux cause it was Citeaux. Well, go to Monserrat. Because it’s me.”

“I don’t know,” Jason said, after a while.

“Well, of course it’s up to you,” Isaiah said. “But, I just thought I would throw that out.”

“No matter where I go,” Jason said, looking at him, “or where you go… we’re still together.”

Before Christmas, at final exams, Isaiah had gone to the back of Vincent Hall, where Jason was painting for his exam. He was the only one in the room, an Aeropostale impressionist, his ball cap turned back, his Old Navy sweatshirt on while he held paint brush to easel, tongue on his soul patch, seeing something Isaiah could not.

He heard the cough and turned around.

“Isaiah!”

Stepping away from the painting he approached him and said, “You’re sick. Why are you here?”

“Final exam,” Isaiah said. “Had to be here. And yes. Sick, really sick.”

“Let me finish this. Then I’ll take you home.”

“I was going to call Sharon and—”

Jason made that shushing movement that was charming and annoying at the same time.

“I got it,” he said. “I’m just going to add this,” he said, making a simple black line against the edge of a tree that, to Isaiah’s surprise, changed it, bringing the painted picture to sudden life.

They were winter trees, bare beeches in a grey sky. Most people in art classes painted for reality, to reproduce things like a photograph. But Jason was different.

“Jason, it’s winter. I mean, it’s what a winter tree feels like. It’s not realistic, like a photograph. It’s… the soul of it.”

“Julie Taynor says that the job of an artist is not to show you yourself, but to show you the back of your head so you say, ‘I didn’t know I could see this.’”

Jason grinned at Isaiah and said, “You didn’t think I had that in me, did you? You thought I was just another dumb jock.”

Isaiah said, “I wouldn’t be surprised by anything that came out of you.”