The Skin of Things

Donovan had Ezekiel stop the car on the corner of Colby.

“The truth is, and you better know it: I live with my family.”

“Oh,” said Ezekiel. Then, “Let me help you pull the moped down.”

“I mean,” Donovan resumed when they’d opened the back and were pulling down the moped, “I don’t want you to think I’m ashamed of being gay, and hiding you from my frat buddies, or anything like that. Not that you’d put up with that crap anyway. But… I didn’t want you to think that was me. So you have to know the embarrassing truth.”

Ezekiel smiled and said, “I get it.”

“Say that again.”

“Say what?”

“Say… ‘I get it’. The way you did.”

Ezekiel frowned at him.

“The way your voice sounded… when you said that. That was just, really… nice.”

“Well, then… I get it.”

“It’s not the same,” Donovan said, mounting the moped and starting it. “But… It’s still nice.”

He pulled Ezekiel’s face down to his, and kissed him on the mouth.

And then he was zooming around the corner, up Colby.

He could still feel Ezekiel’s mouth on his, and on his neck. He could still feel Ezekiel’s chest and stomach against his back, Ezekiel in him, and through him, his penis, swelling and pumping in his mouth, the warm touch of the palm of his hand. He pushed out of his head the thorny reminder that Ezekiel Anders was a decade older than him, and had no idea that Donovan was in high school.

It doesn’t matter. That’s small stuff. Small, small, small stuff. I’ll get past it. I love him. I really do love him.

I love him. I have never really loved anyone before, not like this.

He could love like this because for the first time he had been loved, and so he knew that it would be alright.

While Don is in his hotel room and Cade is out, he types on the computer to Ezekiel, and Zeke tells him about those feelings he had, the night after they made love in a coffee shop, when he couldn’t get enough of him.

Ezekiel tells him how he wished he lived alone because if he did, he wouldn’t have these feelings stuck inside of him. He would be able to shout them out. He and Donovan could fuck them out. Never had he felt so cramped as now, when he had to come back to his place and be Ezekiel Anders who had no life and no love and listen to his roommate go on about his love life, its trials and pitfalls. Not when he had just left Donovan.

And how would Kirk, his semi-friend, feel about the fact that Donovan was so much more fantastic than that pale girl with the glasses and long face he was fooling around with? Would he even have the sense to know a beautiful man was better than a homely woman everyday? He wanted someone who understood his world. He wished he had more gay friends just so they would know enough to be jealous of his good fortune.

“Did you get work done at the coffee house?” Kirk said.

“A little. Met someone.”

“A nice girl or a nice guy?”

Ezekiel had made the announcement, maybe with a little too much aplomb, that he was gay, but it had never taken. Kirk insisted on maintaining the fiction that Ezekiel was bisexual. He’d run into this before. He wasn’t going to press it. His whole early life he’d spent trying to convince people he wasn’t gay. Now that he’d declared it, there was nothing short of being sodomized while standing on his head to convince someone.

“Well, a nice guy.”

“Cool! I’ve thought about trying that out. Don’t tell my girlfriend and all. But, I mean, I like pussy. I really like pussy. But apparently there’s something to the other side. I mean, it seems to work for you.”

Ezekiel shrugged. He wondered if he was Kirk’s gay friend? Kirk was the kind of person who would get kicks out of going home for the holidays and telling his family, “I’ve got this gay friend,” or “My gay friend Ezekiel says…”

“The way Sara’s getting on me about stuff, she wants so much shit. Buy me this, buy me that, and we can’t afford it. I mean I can’t. She isn’t doing shit, well, sometimes I think it would be easier to have a guy.”

Ezekiel didn’t disavow Kirk of the assumption that a boyfriend would be just like having a buddy or a bro or whatever term he was using. A lot of fresh out of the closet or half out of the closet or jumping out to sneak a little action for a bit guys thought that. And that always screwed you up in the end, the revelation that men were about twice as needy and emotional as women, that you, who thought you were so cool and straight acting could so easily be unhinged and rattled by another man when he knew your secrets, when he’d made you moan in the dark and you’d done things to him and for him that you’d laughed at and said you’d never do.

“I gotta be up early,” Ezekiel said by way of farewell. “You mind if I hit the shower?”

“Not at all my man. Give my regards to Dr. Barclay tomorrow.”

“I didn’t even know you knew who Evan Barclay was,” Ezekiel said, heading down the hallway.

“Well, I’ve heard of him. And he gave a lecture I went to. I don’t mean a school one, but one of those public ones, last year. Sara had us go. It was pretty cool.”

“Well,” Ezekiel said, feeling sort of at a loss, “he’s a pretty cool professor.”

He could not think of class right now. What he was thinking of was Donovan. He was trying to decide what type of body he had. Was it a football player’s? He could have played football. Ezekiel wasn’t familiar with the game. He was tall enough, broad shouldered. The way his ass had looked in those old jeans, when Ezekiel watched him walk away, so assured that Ezekiel would follow him. the tee shirt that his shoulder blades shot out of, the back of his dark head. And then, in the bathroom, when he’d greeted him like a lover, kissed his mouth, his strong arms pulling him down. And then the reveal, those jeans coming down to reveal the tender ass, soft and smooth like cream, tight but yielding. Donovan throwing the back of his head against him, arching back his neck to kiss him, Donovan turning around, his thighs tight around his waist, skin to skin, nothing separating them. And later, Donovan’s mouth pulling on him, kissing him tenderly. The two of them in the darkness of the car, driving toward his house, lacing their fingers together quietly, having found something. Was it possible? Ezekiel wasn’t old. Only twenty-eight. But twenty-eight felt old sometimes. He felt like he was too old, like love might have passed him by, crippled and lame in the form of sorry lovers who hadn’t worked out. Was this it? Was this the thing? Ezekiel wanted to ask Donovan about his old lovers, his old wrecks, take care of them, push them away, make something out of the two of them.

He started the shower water, amazed and a little sad:

“I really didn’t think there was anything, any sort of future. Not really. A getting by, a nice career to talk about, but…”

Suddenly, foolishly, Ezekiel Anders began to let himself hope.

Outside, Cademon Richards could look all up and down the street, passing all the brightly lit hotels and apartments by the marina, fairy lights strung over them at midnight, watching the stragglers go through the stores still open this late. Beyond was the rich blue darkness, and the beach with the lights of a few boats. He passed over the train tracks, passed another row of beach apartments until his sandaled feet, in the increasingly cool night, crossed the last empty street and came to the beach.

Cade’s eyes had to adjust to the darkness to see the stretch of sand going to the water, to see, of all things, geese floating on the water, and one small motorboat setting out toward the pier. Across the water, lights twinkled from Michigan City. Cade took off his sandals, laid them on the wet sand and walked further into the water, sinking his feet in the silty sand that passed between his toes. He walked further, until the water was around his calves and then, not quite knowing what he was doing, he stepped back a little, took off his shirt and then undid his shorts and next his underwear, and balling them up, he threw them on the sand near his sandals before sinking into the water, swimming out a pace, burying himself in the cool water, imagining never coming up.

He did, breathing in quick gasps when he remembered he had done this before, done this before, the first time he’d met Andrew, the night when Simon had broken up with him. How could he have forgotten?

Cade came up out of the water, racing to the shore and pulling his clothes back on. How peaceful it was. Different from today when so many had been out here lamenting the coming storm, different from just a few paces off where the tourist town was still alive. He didn’t really want to walk back, but he also didn’t want to sleep on the beach all night. As he passed the long line of apartments he wondered if, inside them, there were other cocaine fueled parties, other men meeting up to fuck in different positions, but the white walls told none of their secrets and, at last, Cade returned to where he was staying with Donovan, who was not at a cocaine fueled party and who, if he ended up at one, would somehow manage to keep his head above water and never have the rough come down. On a Saturday night, utterly untouched by the party life around him, more happy to be by himself than anyone else Cade knew, sitting in front of his open laptop with a cigarette hanging in one hand, was Donovan.

“You back?” he said unnecessarily.

“Yeah,” Cade said. “You need the shower?”

“No,” Donovan said.

“Great,” Cade said.

“You’ll be up for a while?”

Donovan nodded.

“I think.”

Cade went into the bathroom with shorts and a tee shirt. After stripping again, he stood under the water forever and stayed in the bathroom longer, grooming himself until he came out and collapsed on the other bed across from Don.

“You smell like Irish Spring and rebirth,” Donovan remarked, reaching up to take another cigarette.

“Can I get one of those?” Cade reached out.

“If you pick your ass up and get it.”

“Be a friend! I’m exhausted.”

“I’m not going to ask what all happened to make you so exhausted,” Donovan said, pushing his case of hand rolled cigarettes over, and then tossing the lighter.

Donovan never would ask, and having been told he would never judge. That was the first thing Cade had learned about him.

“You know, they’re back in town, the people me and Simon were supposed to have that party with. It turns out I know the guy. Like, I’ve been talking to him online but didn’t know my online friend was…. Someone I’ve met in person. We went out for coffee. He invited me to another party. I declined.”

“Oh.”

“You were invited too.”

“That,” Donovan finished typing, “would have been a mistake. I’m twelve years too old and forty pounds too fat for that invitation.”

Before Cade could protest it, Donovan handed over his laptop and said, “I’ve been fucking around talking to people online.”

“I thought you’d be writing a masterpiece.”

Don shrugged. “Can’t do it all the time. Check that one profile out. How do you like her?”

“Uh…” Cade began. “Nice enough.”

“I mean,” Donovan said as he took back the computer, “you can tell she’s a man in a dress, but she’s doing the best with what she’s got and really, in the end, that’s all any of us can do.”

“Is this all you did?” Cade said, turning over on one side.

“I went to the beach,” Don said. “I went to that overpriced gift shop and spent far too much money, but I don’t feel bad because I’ve been so frugal for the last few months. After that, I sat there and watched the sunset, or something like the sunset. I mean, really the sun didn’t go down till almost ten, and did you know there are geese on the water?”

Cade laughed.

“I did see that.”

“Oh,” Cade said, pretending that he did not hurt because he knew he had no right to, “Who is Ezekiel?”

“Oh,” Donovan looked mildly startled,, and then he said, “I loved him once. We were together. It was a long time ago.”

“How long ago?”

Donovan raised an eyebrow.

“Really?”

Cade chuckled a little too hard. His eyes were a little too bright.

He shrugged. “I’m just asking?”

“Twenty years ago. I was a teenager. You were… in third grade. That’s how long ago. Now give me my laptop.”

Cade did so, and then he said, “Twenty years ago, but you still talk.”

“That’s what love’s like,” Donovan said, trying to not be sharp. “You don’t just drop folks. Sort of like… You and Andrew. Or Simon.”

“I haven’t known them for twenty years.”

“You’re twenty-six, you haven’t known anyone for twenty years.”

“We should switch the subject,” Cade said.

“That would be wise,” Don said.

Cade nodded. “What happened when you went to the beach?”

“Uh,” Don was trying to return to a less tense moment, “I saw geese hanging out on Lake Michigan like it’s their private pond. I mean, only in Indiana—though I guess we’re in Michigan right now. But all the same. Yeah.

“So I just sat up there, and thank God there were no sandflies, and I thought, shit, I’m having all these really big thoughts. I wish my notebook was with me. Then I thought, well fuck the notebook, why can’t you just have some big thoughts and let them be big thoughts.”

“Thoughts like what?”

And they had shifted out of that rough moment, just like that, the moment when Donovan began to understand how Cade felt, and he realized in some ways he had never really known, not until now.

“Uh,” Donovan thought as Cade finished up his cigarette, and taking up Don’s roller, made another one for himself. “why do people go to church when they could go to the beach? And I don’t mean that in some bullshit way like someone who has never set foot in a church a day in their lives and doesn’t really believe in God. But I was just like, is there anything more holy than this? And I just began thinking about why we make it so hard to be happy, so difficult to know God, and I thought about how beautiful everything is and all that.”

Smoke trailed out of Cade’s nose, but he said nothing.

“And then I went into the water, and just sank my feet into the sand until they were rooted.”

“Me too.”

“When?”

“Before I got back here.”

“And everything was perfect,” Donovan said. “And none of the foolishness mattered because we were here and this water and this sand was here and would keep on being here.”

“You sound like you had a really awesome night. Deep night.”

“Well, I also came back here, ate the rest of the pizza, got on Grindr and wrote rude comments, then made a fake profile where I’m a transvestite named Ted who plays church organ and has a wife and three kids… So… don’t think it was that deep.”

“Don, do you wanna go to the beach?”

“Not really?” Donovan yawned, stretching. “But I will.”