Part Two
Adventures in Love
Chapter Five
BIRDS DO IT
Around the same time that Dena Affren was getting bigger and bigger with the impending birth of Rob, over five years ago, Nell called the house and asked Fenn in a hushed whisper, “Is Todd around?”
“He’s around, and why are you whispering?”
“I don’t know,” she continued to whisper. “I… can you put him on the phone? I’ve got news for him.”
“Bad news? Oh, never mind. Let me go get him.” “Thanks, Fenn.”
Todd had been playing with Maia, and now he came to the phone, the smile still half on his face.
“Todd, it’s about Dad.” “Dad?”
Philip Meraden had been as absent from his son’s life as Leroy had been from Fenn’s. He had left Todd and Nell’s mother a few years before Nell’s disastrous first marriage, and he had married some woman they’d never seen and had a life they didn’t know anything about. On dim occasions, Fenn remembered Todd had a father somewhere, but then he also remembered that it was something Todd might like to forget. And so he did too.
“Here?”
“Yes, Todd. At the house. At my house.” “Should I come over?”
“Absolutely.”
“Well, how do you like these apples?” Dena was saying when Todd arrived. She looked like an apple, round and ripe, and she sat on the couch between Meredith and Milo, a stuffed animal perched on her belly. Todd didn’t ask. It didn’t matter. There was a funny looking tall blond guy with rings around his eyes and a reddened nose and finally Fenn gestured to Todd with a hooked finger and said, “He looks like a blond version of you.”
“He looks like Shaggy off of Scooby Doo,” Todd protested.
Todd has always been tall, thin, messy haired and vaguely unshaven and slightly stoop shouldered with dark ringed eyes. Fenn did not point this out.
“I’m your brother,” Shaggy came toward Todd.
“That is more and more apparent as I keep looking at you,” Dena said as an aside.
Todd, still a little taken back, said, “I’m Todd.” “I’m Ryan Meradan.”
“They look just like each other,” Dylan said from behind Fenn.
When Todd looked at him, sharply, Dylan clarified, “Except for you’re not blond.”
“I’m thirty-eight, so that must make us about the same age.”
Todd was trying to get himself together, and be a somewhat civil person.
“About,” he said. “I just turned—”
And then a tall, blond boy ran into the living room, tagged Dylan on the head and said, “You’re it.”
“Ven!” Ryan said.
“It’s another kid,” the boy justified his action. “Someone else to play with. And he’s It.”
“No, I’m Dylan,” Dylan said a little sharply, rubbing his head.
“Great,” the boy said, indifferent to Dylan’s reprimand. “I’m Ruthven.”
“So how did you get that name?”
“My dad says it’s Scottish and our family is part Scottish so…” Ruthven shrugged.
“I think it’s a cool name.”
“I don’t. He calls me Ven so that nobody calls me Ruth. But really, wouldn’t it have just made more sense not to name me Ruthven in the first place?”
“My name is Welsh,” Dylan said. “Are you Welsh?”
“I don’t think so,” Dylan frowned. “But I do like my name.”
“How old are you?” “Ten.”
“You seem older.”
“Well, I’m almost eleven and my dad lets me stay up late.” Ruthven nodded.
“How old are you?” Dylan asked him.
“Thirteen. I’m in junior high.”
“Do you kiss girls?”
“A few. I have some friends who…” Ruthven stopped.
“What?” Dylan perked up.
“Well,” Ruthven said, turning red, “you ever seen a dirty movie?”
“No,” Dylan said.
“Well, don’t,” Ruthven said, sternly, and Dylan had the sense that the course of the conversation had been changed. “But… I know some friends, and…. they’re already having sex.”
The word sex electrified Dylan. It shot a bolt down to his groin and melted him there. He’d only heard of it, seen it in pop up books and, yes, heard it from the bedrooms of his parents.
“Do they like it?” Dylan had read books that he didn’t tell anyone about it. They were full of “penetrations”, “meltings”, “explosions” and “comings” that made his face hot.
“I think so,” Ruthven said. “But they don’t talk about it.”
“Um,” said Dylan. Because this was all he knew to say.
“Hey,” Ruthven went on, “you wanna be friends? Because my dad was like, we don’t have any real family, and after my mom left he was like, let’s come up here so we can meet our family. And houses are cheap in Indiana so, he’s just going to move up here, I think.”
“Yeah,” Dylan said. Then, “I don’t really have a lot of friends.
“Your mom left?” Dylan clarified.
Ruthven nodded, playing with the toe of his sneaker.
Dylan said, “Mine left too.”
Having two fathers, Dylan Mesda always assumed he would be gay. After all, the closest thing he had to a sister had two mothers and a gay father. And when he went to school, Dylan also realized that things that came naturally to his mind, the words would naturally fall out of his mouth, were not welcomed. Coming to eleven, reaching twelve, he knew the way he felt about Ruthven, and he knew the way he felt about the tall, high foreheaded Lance Bishop.
Lance Bishop’s family had locks on everything, and a control on the computer as well as controls on the television. Everything was a world of thou shalt nots. Dylan didn’t know anything about that. Everything was open to him, but now he began to realize that some of the things that were open to him must have been powerful. They must have been so dangerous that the Bishops shut them off from their son. One night, staying up late at Tom’s house, he stumbled across the first of the dangerous things, startled by the man and the woman undressing. It was a foreign film on cable, not porn. He sat in the night darkened room, growing stiff as a board as he watched them make love, saw the man’s naked buttocks as he slid in and out of her, and her thighs twisted around him. Hands involuntarily in his pajama pants, he pressed himself to the pile of blankets he’d made and lightly humped it until he felt asleep.
“Chay, can you show me sex?”
“Show you what?”
Chay sits up while Dylan explains, “Well, you work for Casey, right?”
“I worked for Casey.”
“Didn’t he used to be your boyfriend?”
“Yes, and it used to be a secret,” Chay told him.
“Well,” Dylan disregarded this, “I just want to know what you know about sex. Or about porn. Or about any of it. I want to see it.”
Chay stood up. He was the same height as Dylan now, though Dylan was only twelve.
“Hold on.” He put out a finger.
Dylan noticed all sorts of new things about Chay now, about how, even though they were the same size, Chay had a man’s body, about the way Chay’s faded jeans fit to that body. He imagined that if he touched them, if he ran his hands over them, the fabric would be so soft.
A moment later Sheridan came out and Chay said, “We just want to know what brought this on.”
Sheridan shook his head,
“Growing up brought it on, Chay. Dill’s got feelings and stuff, and he’s curious.”
See, yes! Sheridan understood him.
“Sheridan, how old were you?”
“When I had feelings like you’re having?”
“No, when you started having sex.”
Sheridan went red. Dylan could pick up on his discomfort. He added, “My cousin Ruthven—who isn’t really my cousin— he says that there are kids he knows who are thirteen who are already doing it.”
“Dylan, have you talked to your parents? I mean either one of them?” Sheridan said. “They would both tell you what you need to know.”
“One thing you need to know is thirteen is too young,” Chay said.
“Oh, I know,” Dylan said, quickly, though privately he had been thinking about how close he was to thirteen, and how it might not be that young at all.
“And fifteen is too,” Sheridan added. “And eighteen. There’s something to be said for being a grown up. That’s really the ideal time to even worry about all of this. Not when you’re still a kid.”
“Were you a grown up?” Dylan asked.
When neither one of them said anything, Dylan said, “I know you weren’t. I’m not stupid. Everybody thinks they can keep me in the dark.”
“Dylan, no one’s trying to keep you in the dark. We’re all just trying to protect you.”
“Well, stop trying to protect me,” Dylan said. “And start telling me the truth.”
They were both very quiet, and Chay and Sheridan looked at each other. Then Sheridan said, “No, I won’t tell you the truth. Because there’s no way you’ll understand it.”
Dylan opened his mouth, but Sheridan put up his hand. “You might be a little too like us,” he continued. “We were fast. I was fast. You didn’t ask anyone else about this but us, did you?”
Dylan shook his head.
“I could tell you to slow down and not be stupid, Dylan. You’re smart and you’re curious and you would break your parents hearts if they knew you were running around doing stuff.”
“I’m not running around doing anything!”
“But you want to,” Sheridan said. “I started when I was as young as possible, and it screwed me up so bad, and you don’t want to hear that and you’re not going to get it until it screws you up too. I thought I had to have sex so bad it was the most important thing in the world, and then I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
“I’m tired of hearing about it,” Dylan said. “And the only stuff I see is guys and girls. On TV. Late at night. I want to see a boy and a boy. I want to see what you all do. I want you to show me that. I just want to see it, alright?”
Chay muttered something and put a hand over his face.
“You were the same age,” Sheridan reminded him.
Chay shrugged.
“You’ll show me something?”
“I’m not going to take you by Casey’s house to see it in person,” Chay said. “But yeah.”
As Dylan left, he heard Sheridan say in a worried voice, “What’s wrong with us? We’re showing Fenn’s son porn?”
“Well, that’s it,” Sheridan said in a business like way, shutting his laptop.
“Do you guys do stuff like that?”
“To each other?” Sheridan said, as he took the laptop away. “Yeah.”
“Yes,” Sheridan said, baldly. Whatever questions about his past sex life did to him, he was completely secure about the present.
“And it feels good? Like it felt to the guys in the video?”
“Yes,” Sheridan laughed, putting a hand on Dylan’s shoulder. “It feels very good. Because we’re in love.”
“Those guys weren’t in love.”
“No, I guess not. But it was Kirk and Brent, and they like each other.”
“So liking is enough?”
“For porn being paid is enough. But for sex, for enjoyment, yeah. Liking someone is sufficient.”
Dylan nodded.
Sheridan waited for him to say something more, but he didn’t. Whatever was in the twelve year old’s head he kept to himself.
That night Dylan went home and positioned himself on his bed, around his pillows over and over again, trying to get to sleep, trying to be comfortable. At last he made a mound of the pillows and fucked them till he came. That night, slick with the semen he’d never seen before, he slept.
