Ten
Marriage
Dylan was quiet the whole way to Union Station.
“You better put a smile on your face when we see Lance,” Elias said. “He’s not going to want to be eclipsed by the new love of your life.”
“Huh?” Dylan shook his head. “What’s that?”
“I’m just playing with you,” Elias told him. Then he shrugged.
“But you hardly heard what I said.”
“I really didn’t,” Dylan said with the ghost of a smile.
“I said Lance wouldn’t—”
“Oh,” Dylan laughed, shaking the fogginess out of his head, “I heard you. You know how it is when you think you weren’t paying attention, and then the stuff comes together later?”
“No.”
“My dad does it all the time. Tom.”
“It must be a musician thing. Anyway, I was just teasing. I know you miss Thackeray.”
“Even though he’s back home with our parents. Even though that’s where he should be, I feel like I’m abandoning him. I just found him,” Dylan said.
“And… it’s like there was this missing part of me, and it’s Thackeray.”
“I thought I was your missing part,” Elias said, in a wounded voice.
“I can never tell if you’re being serious or not.”
“Sometimes I can’t either. But… I don’t think I was.”
“Well, you’re not a missing part of me,” Dylan said. “I had to come to you whole. You don’t want half a Dylan do you?”
Elias chuckled.
“Besides, you’ve been around my whole life. You… I don’t know how to describe you, Eli.”
“Last night you called me the biggest smart ass in the world.”
“That’s not really something you want to put on a Valentine’s Day card, though.”
“I think Thack is going to be good friends with Matthew,” Elias said. “I hope so. I mean, not that Matthew doesn’t have friends. But he doesn’t have a lot of them, and I always feel like I’m not doing him right. Like he needs something. I dunno. Let’s stop talking about our brothers and concentrate on Lance.”
“Please,” Dylan begged as they turned off of the highway. “Whatever you do, don’t start talking about the chart right away.”
The waiting seemed to go on forever and then, coming off the train was Lance, with a giant duffel bag over his shoulder.
“Is he taller?” Elias wondered, going toward him with Dylan.
“I think he’s thinner,” Dylan whispered.
Lance Bishop, at his last year in college, was as tall and large foreheaded as ever. His blue eyes and the smile on his face were mellow and pleased, but he did seem thinner than usual. The two smaller boys fell into his embrace, each taking a bag from him and he kissed them on their heads and hugged them. They squeezed each other, and then Dylan and Lance pummeled each other a little and they shifted so that Elias was in the middle.
“We need to get your other bags,” Elias said.
Lance smiled at him incredulously.
“If you know it, I know it,” he said, wrapping an arm around Elias. “Com’on. Let’s go.”
Lance strode as lightly as he could with his arm around someone a foot shorter. Elias always wondered what people thought when they saw the three of them. All of them were dark haired, cleared skinned and blue eyed, but a very close inspection of how they behaved would have allowed only for the most incestuous of brothers.
“What would it be like to have dark skin?” Elias wondered out loud.
“To be Black?” Dylan said.
“No, I meant to be able to tan.”
“I can tan,” Lance said.
“Red is not tan,” Dylan told him.
Lance opened his mouth, but Elias said, “He’s got a point.”
“We all really look alike,” Elias noted.
“No we don’t,” Lance and Dylan said together.
Elias listed off their similar features and Lance said, “Well, that’s like saying that a stove, a refrigerator and a toaster look alike because they’re all white with black and silver trim.”
“Which one of us is the stove?” Elias said.
“Please, can I be the toaster?”
They’d made it to the parking lot now.
“How did we get to this conversation?” Lance wondered.
Suddenly Elias bum rushed him with a great hug from the side.
“I love you.”
“I love you too, Eli,” Lance said. “But how in the world did we get into this nutty conversation?”
“Because Dylan won’t let me talk about the chart.”
“That goddamned chart!”
“Tell me, honestly,” Elias said as they came toward the car, “that the both of you don’t get a little bit stiff when I bring up the chart.”
“I haven’t had sex in over a month, so a stray breeze gets me a little bit stiff,” Lance told him. “Give me that bag, kid.”
Elias handed it to him and Lance hefted the bag into the trunk.
“Tonight you stay with Dylan—” Elias began.
“And he’s off,” Lance murmured as Dylan nodded his head.
“We already coin tossed,” Elias continued.
“Because he made me,” Dylan interrupted.
“And we came down with Dylan tonight, and then I drew up the whole chart based on that.”
“I think you’re nuts,” Lance said. “I think you’re great. But I still think you’re nuts.”
“Not so nuts, maybe,” Dylan murmured later on. The sky was darkened by an early evening brought on by the rain.
“You want me to shut the window?” asked Lance who was lying beside him.
“Not just yet,” Dylan leaned into his chest, and Lance ran a hand over his side.
“God, I miss you,” Lance said, kissing his shoulder.
“I miss you,” Dylan said. “And then you come back, and I miss you even more. I know that doesn’t make sense, but it’s like no matter how much I miss you, however big the memory is, it doesn’t measure up to the reality. It’s like I forget just how much I love you.”
Dylan turned around so that he was face to face with Lance.
“Is it true Bennett married Maia?”
“Absolutely.”
“Fuck,” Lance swore and it turned into a laugh. “Well, maybe Mr. Anderson will lighten up on you.”
“What about on you?”
“I’m pretty sure he hates me,” Lance said, “and I’m pretty sure I don’t care. It’s the two of you who were always close.”
“I can’t do anything about that,” Dylan said, philosophically.
“You know if I was gone from the picture he’d be okay with it.”
“That’s sort of not an option,” Dylan told him.
“And when do I meet this brother of yours?”
“Saturday. He’s excited to meet you.”
“Does he understand us?”
“He’s fifteen, not two.”
“It might be easier if he was two.”
“True,” Dylan agreed. Simultaneously, both young men lay on their backs and steepled their fingers over their chests.
“But he loves me,” Dylan said. “Isn’t that the weirdest thing?”
“Well, he is your brother.”
“He’s my twin brother,” Dylan reminded him. “But… I never had a brother. And then here’s one I just met. And he loves me absolutely. He completely accepts me. Doesn’t even question anything. He’s just like… that’s the way it is. Why can’t more people be like that?”
Instead of answering, Lance ran a hand over Dylan’s shoulder and said, “I scratched you.”
“And I’m sure I scratched you,” Dylan said, negligently. “We tend to be that way with each other.”
“What will Elias say?”
“He’ll say, ‘where the hell have you been?’ You need to go see him before you drift off to sleep.”
Dylan continued, “Chart or not, even if he made it, he misses you as much as I do, and he’s in his room right now trying to pretend he’s okay with you not coming to him tonight.”
Lance was already out of bed and pulling his boxers on.
“If I go to him, I’m going to end up sleeping there tonight,” Lance yawned.
“You think I’m complaining?” Dylan turned over on his stomach. “I get a nice snuggly bed to myself, and I already got the best part of you.”
Lance smacked Dylan on his naked ass.
“Was that a punishment? Cause you know how I am.”
“I miss that ass,” Lance said fondly, running his hands over it.
And then he kissed Dylan and said, “I’m off.”
Lance tapped on the door lightly, and then pushed it open.
“Are you asleep?” he whispered even though the little lamp on the bureau was still on.
“Not quite,” Elias told him.
Lance climbed onto the bed beside Elias and threw his arms around him.
“Did Dylan kick you out?” Elias jested.
“A little bit.”
Elias chuckled and Lance pressed his forehead into the small of Elias’s neck.
“It’s so good to see my Elias,” he murmured. “I think about you everyday.”
“I hope you do.”
“You’re so damn prickly,” Lance told him. “I hope you know how lucky you are. I hope you know only the two of us could read between your lines.”
Elias turned around and faced Lance. He held Lance’s face in his hands.
“You smell like him,” he said.
“Who?”
“Whenever you’ve been with Dylan, you all smell like each other. You’ve got him all over you.”
“Dylan has a smell?”
“It’s just a different scent of sweat than yours. Sweat and something else,” Elias said, running his hand down Lance’s arm, lifting it a little, to smell.
“You’ve made me self conscious now.”
“No,” Elias said, shaking his head. “I lie in bed, and I can hear the two of you in the next room. It’s so private. But it’s not, because I can hear it and when it’s over one of you’s going to come to me. And then when you do come here I can’t describe how I feel.”
“But you like it?”
“It’s almost like both of you are here.”
“Come to bed with us,” Lance said. “Let’s all be together tonight.”
Even though the shorter boy was sturdily built, Lance lifted him up like a child and stood him on his feet. He took Elias by the hand and they crossed the hall.
In the other bedroom, his bare ass soft and round, pointing to them, Dylan lay facing the wall.
“I thought you were staying with Eli.”
Lance pushed Elias into the bed and then came after him wrapping his arms around him, touching Dylan. Dylan turned around.
“The way it should be,” Lance said.
Dylan wrapped his arms around Elias, and he smelled like Lance. They all turned around so that Lance faced the door and Elias’s arms were about him, and then Dylan’s were about Elias. In the dark room, in the warmth of the two of them, Elias felt whole. Dylan’s body pressed against his, him pressed to Lance. The stiffness of Dylan’s penis innocently pressing his buttocks while his balls and his penis pressed into Lance. Their heartbeats went through him. Lance’s hand took Elias’s and pressed it to his stiffening cock and the warm weight of his balls. They were one body, half sexy, half sleepy, all innocence.
“I’m home,” Lance said.
“We’re all home,” Elias murmured into his back, “now that you’re here.”
