There was a knock on his door, and Russell was sure it was one of his parents, probably Thom. But he wished it was Cody. Somewhere in the back of his mind, he wanted Cody to come and make sense of this. Up north, in the little clubhouse by the synagogue, everything had made sense. In the intervening two weeks, as winter turned to spring, and the purple weeks of Lent turned toward Easter, things became hazier. He had been trying to make sense of it all day. He waited until the second knock, and then decided he was being rude. The sense that had not come all day was not about to come in the space before the next knock.
He opened it and Ralph was standing there, his wide hazel eyes worried, his tawny hair that he was so careful with, parted and partially out of his face. He smelled like he’d just showered and he was in joggers and a tee shirt under his parka.
“Ralph,” Russell remembered now, “Jason called me. He said something was wrong.”
Russell stopped talking, his eyes searching Ralph.
Ralph looked, to Russell, injured. Russell embraced him and felt Ralph’s body untense, felt Ralph sink into the hug and this was for all of them. It was for Cameron. It was for Cody who he could not have. It was for Jason who he couldn’t love the way he should. It was for Mark still living with Joe’s death. It was for poor, poor Chris Knapp, and as he rocked Ralph, Ralph’s hand cupped him and began stroking him. The change from friendship to this more than friendship didn’t shock Russell, not exactly, but it changed him. They embraced tighter while Ralph kneaded him and Ralph’s tongue slipped hungrily into his mouth.
Russell reached behind Ralph and locked the door. He looked very desperate, like he was about to do something that he wasn’t sure about, and then, all in a moment, his hands reached for Ralph’s waistband, and he pulled down his joggers and Ralph wasn’t wearing underwear and so Russell got on his knees and began to suck him.
Ralph’s eyes went wide, and then he closed them, gasping. He didn’t say anything. He couldn’t. He leaned back against the door, not knowing what to do with his hands. At last, as he felt Russell’s hands on his hips, reaching back to cup his ass, Ralph’s hands buried themselves in Russell’s hair. He blinked once, seeing the great windows of the room, curtains open, wondering if anyone could see, not caring as he felt himself getting longer and firmer, felt himself becoming his cock, felt Russell’s tongue, his mouth so warm, bathing him like he was a baby, nursing.
Ralph didn’t think about things. He didn’t know how. Feelings frightened him and doubts he put out of his mind. He knew what he wanted and what he didn’t and these things usually happened in the moment. Now and again he could screw up his wits and his courage to come to a great purpose and make an important statement. Mostly he did not have to. Friendships were few in his life. School was made of buddies. He cared about Jason, but he loved Russell. Russell had been gone the first two times Ralph called, presumably with Gilead, and right now he had found him, sure from the look on his parents’ faces that they had no idea what was going on in their son’s life. But then, what parents did?
So, when he and Russell undressed, except for closing the curtains and turning off the large light, there was no thinking, and Russell had done those things, so no thinking on Ralph’s part at all. Ralph was shallow breath, one hundred seventy pounds of varsity football player, tan skinned, sandy haired, broad shouldered, pretty in a bruiser way. Ralph was the desire for someone he’d cared for more, much more than he could ever say, and a penis, thick and rose headed pointing forward like a compass. He half stumbled after Russell, climbing onto the bed, and he had done this before, done it with Cody the night his little niece was born, learned to lift legs, learned to lube the knob of his cock, learned to, oh God, slowly and with a slow grit, push, push, enter, learned the moment of mutual shock, and then, slowly, slowly, quicker now, the fucking, the kissing, the kissing, the hands planted on shoulders, the legs encasing him, the being the possessed, the possessing.
He didn’t want to come. He told himself he was kind of a slut for knowing how not to come, for knowing how to do this so well, how to please Russell. Oh, God, how he wanted to please him. He couldn’t talk to anyone about this, couldn’t even talk to himself, but this didn’t feel like a sin. This felt like the best thing ever. This felt like nothing else mattered. When he swore and said what he knew was silly…
“You like this… you like me inside you…. You like old Ralph in you… You like my cock in you… you like this dick? Like it. You like the way I fuck? You like how I kiss you… Kiss me…. take that… Take…. That…”
His heart and his cock swelled when Russell answered that he did love it, when he knew he wanted Russell to fuck him.
Russell had stopped trying to predict the future, or understand who he was anymore. There was a freedom to being this new person who wasn’t afraid. He’d once been scared of being called a faggot and been unable to even conceive of touching another human beyond a hug. Now, in his bedroom, he was frantically fucking Ralph who lay on his stomach, eyes closed, his fist pounding the mattress, and Russell pounded him, as they urged each other into something more intense than they had experienced at the beginning of winter.
He told himself not to compare, but when it was over, when the orgasm seized him from the base of his balls to the balls of his feet and his toes curled, he knew he loved Ralph more than he loved Jason, and loved having sex with him more.
“We should never have stopped,” Russell said, half exhausted.
To Ralph, fucking girls was different. All fucking was wrong, a sin, but fucking girls made him feel safe. It was easy. They were available. It confirmed something, but he wasn’t sure what the something was, and maybe Russell could have told him because his mom was a shrink. But fucking guys, or at least fucking Cody, had been something else altogether. It had been urgent, more…. Maybe more real. Certainly more unsafe. He had felt completely unsafe, completely like he didn’t know who he was anymore, but also more real, more alive.
And fucking Russell, the urgent, but completely coordinated movements they made on this bed, was another thing from that. It was nothing like Vanessa or… others. It was all of him. It was everything he wanted.
“I’m so out of control,” Ralph said, exhausted, looking at the ceiling.
“I didn’t used to be like this.”
Russell looked at him.
At last Russell said, “I’m sort of out of control too. I don’t exactly know myself anymore.”
Part of him wanted to be having sex all the time, and the other part missed the him who didn’t know anything about it, who had lots of time to himself and never thought of running down the street to climb into Jason Lorry’s bed. He missed his virginity. He missed himself.
“Maybe,” Ralph allowed, “but at least you had the sense to be out of control with guys.”
Russell waited for an explanation.
“Guys don’t make babies. No matter what you think happened bad with a guy, it doesn’t matter for a life time.”
“No…” Russell said, not quite comprehending what Ralph was saying.
Ralph, holding one of Russell’s pillows turned around and Russell was surprised by the beauty of his back, the globes of his ass, his powerful legs, his tawny hair, the strength in his arms, his fragility. Ralph suddenly burst into tears crying into Russell’s pillow.
“She’s pregnant, Russ.”
Russell’s whole body went cold. His face froze.
“Vanessa?”
Ralph sobbed uncontrollably, and Russell looked at the door, knew it was locked but hoped he really knew, and put his hand on Ralph’s shoulder.
“No,” Ralph said. “Tasha Bell.”
Russell stopped himself from asking who the hell Tasha Bell was.
“I’ve been fucking around. She was some cheerleader at Lourdes.”
Russell remembered seeing Ralph fuck some girl against the wall of the fieldhouse. Was that her, or was it someone else?
“I feel so stupid.”
Or did it even matter?
When Russell had seen five seconds of the teenage shows on TV where twenty-five years olds were sleeping around and pretending to be seventeen, he’d been disgusted. But here he was, not yet seventeen, in bed with someone who had been in bed with numerous people and going to be with that guy’s best friend who might or might not be sleeping with girls. Here he was in love with his own brother.
Something had to change.
The night winter ended was the night Chayne Kandzierksi made the caramel apple cake. The icicles were melting, crashing on either side of the house, and the patches of white on the ground were getting smaller, revealing the spinach brown earth beneath. Chayne had gone down to the store to buy the ingredients for Faye Matthison’s grandmother’s famous caramel cake, and finally resolved to give it a try.
He had not begun until it was almost time to sleep, and he knew for two hours earlier that he should have been in bed. As he mixed the cake batter he had yawned, and then between baking it and preparing the frosting, Chayne had napped, and waiting for the cake to cool and the frosting to get cold enough to use, he slept too, and between coats, for you needed many coats of frosting, he also slept and behold, at two in the morning he woke up and Rob came after him, silent and shambling, and Faye, who had been sleeping in a chair, came into the kitchen, and Anigel came down from her room where she had been sleeping, and they cut the cake and ate the cake and praised the cake and smoked cigarettes, and then Rob and Chayne looked at each other, and before Faye or Anigel could say anything, both men went to their individual computers and began to write.
For two weeks, Rob had written nothing worth finishing, and Chayne had written nothing at all, but for the next two hours, back to distant back, on either side of the living room, they wrote almost furiously as the dark part of night went to another dark part of night, and they yawned and smoked and Chayne thought that, as much as he loved sleeping with Rob, this felt even more intimate, and the two men stood up and yawned and cracked their backs at the same time and Chayne said to Faye who was reading in the easy chair by the window overlooking the front porch, one leg crossed over the other, “I’m throwing you guys a wedding.”
“What?”
“I’ll be your maid of honor,” Anigel called from upstairs.
“Will you give me away?” Faye asked Chayne.
“Of course.”
“Rob, you feel like being a maid of honor too?”
“Uh… We could make it work.”
“And Jill. Jill too. And Russell a ringbearer?”
“Russell would go for it.”
“Jewell could be my matron of honor. Or Shannon. Or both. I had thought Patti—”
“But she used to sleep with Chuck.”
“Yes,” Faye said sourly, but not as sourly as one might have thought.
