Okay, this is not a story with a whole lot of sex. Some will come in here and there, but it is not the central theme. It's a story about love between men and self-acceptance, kinda like all of my stories are.
If you're under 18 or 21 or whatever, be aware that in some odd corner of the universe, you could possbly be breaking the law.
If you like anything of mine, please e-mail me at virtualinsanity78@yahoo.com and I will be very grateful to you and a lot more likely to write faster updates. If you don't like what I write, keep it to yourself. :-)
Thanks for all of the love so far, I will continue to write diligently!
IMPORTANT!!! This story includes excerpts of Paul & Morgan's memoir, which I will separate from the rest of the story with asteriks like the one's below. If this is confusing, e-mail me and let me know and I will try to figure something else out!
Part Three
I didn't want to go to work that day because I just really didn't wanna see Skit again and definitely not that kid Drew or anybody else. I was just out of the shower and half-dressed when I thought of my friend Mike. We hadn't talked much since the summer started and we had said that we would have lunch together downtown. I figured that having lunch with Mike would be a way to kind of stay sane in the middle of the madness.
So, I reached over to my nightstand, picked up the phone and dialled his cell number. He picked up after two rings.
"What's up?" he said.
"Mike, man, how's it going?" I asked and I could hear sounds in the background.
"On my way to work, man, what's up?" he asked.
"Wanted to see if you want to go to lunch today?" I told him.
"Sounds good, I get an hour around noon," he said, relaxing a little. "Where you wanna meet up?"
"The Bagel Beanery on Michigan," I told him. "It's in the middle of everything. I'll meet you there around noon."
"Cool, see ya then," I told him and hung up. I let out a relieved sigh.
At the gay antique shop, I spent most of the morning helping Paul clean out the dock room, moving stuff to the storage room to be sorted out and prepared to sell at some later time and other things I moved into Misti's work room to be worked on right away.
For a gay guy, Paul was pretty strong. We worked well together for a long time without either of us complaining at all. It was good, solid work, so I felt pretty good about it and I didn't have to worry about running into Skit or anybody else...or so I thought.
Skit came in the room a few hours after we started, carrying a sketchpad and walking towards Paul. I stopped what I was doing and watched him warily, his eyes skimmed over me and then fixed on Paul. Skit had apparently gone completely goth for the day because his hair was blond again and he had on all black, black pants that were so huge they hung off of him and a black mesh shirt with metal clamps all over it. The whole style thing was lost on me. What was the deal with the dark colors and why did his hair color have to change every day? I liked the blond better than the others.
Paul wiped his face off with a hankerchief and met up with Skit, smiling. Skit smiled back at him, real wide. I could tell that they really liked each other.
"I finished working on the charcoals," Skit told him and I listened quietly.
"Well, let me see," Paul exclaimed and sat down on a crate. Skit opened his sketchbook and flipped through some pages quietly, then handed it to Paul. Paul peered down at the drawing silently and I felt the hair on my forearms stand on end. Skit liked to draw? I hadn't even known that. I mean, I knew he was in some kind of summer art program, but I didn't know the specifics or anything.
I moved around the room quietly, edging behind them so that I could get a look at the drawing. My breath caught in my chest. It was a charcoal drawing of some guy, just his eyes, really, but the detail was amazing. He was brilliant.
"God, Skit, you've improved so much," Paul began to rave in a deep, sincere way that sent color flying into Skit's cheeks. "You've surpassed the program, I'll tell you that much." Skit had a huge grin on his face as Paul stared at the drawing again. Then, he caught sight of me behind them and his smile dropped. My heart dropped, too.
I wanted to tell him how good it was, but I just turned around instead. I turned around and stared at all the antiques - or junk as far as I was concerned - that we were sorting. I felt like an asshole. I was making the kid stay far away from me, but then I wanted to talk to him. How stupid was that? I brushed the thought aside. I really didn't give a fuck what was going on with Skit and his drawing or anything else. I was just working with them all for the summer and then I was done. I would be back to my old self and my old friends and my old life and the whole thing would be a memory that I looked back on from time to time with amusement and disgust.
I waited until they were done talking and Skit was on his way out of the room before turning back around and I just caught of glimpse of the small, black apparition disappearing through the double doors leading out of the dock room when Paul snapped me out of my thoughts.
"Vicki tells me that you're pretty good at English," Paul told me from his seat on the crate. I nodded slightly. English was my favorite subject and Deneghy would know that because she'd taught me freshmen year and during the first semester last year for Creative Writing. She knew that I had tested out of high school English and was going to be starting the college sophomore course at the Grand Valley State in the Fall. It wasn't something that I liked to talk about, though.
"Morgan and I are writing a memoir," Paul told me as he stood up and went back over to our piles. "It's probably boring stuff, but it would mean a lot to me if you could take a look at it. Maybe go over it with a red pen and let me know if my grammar is completely horrendous. A chapter at a time? I'll throw a few extra bucks in your paycheck for the time?"
I looked at him. Extra money for doing what I loved to do. Why not?
I was done for the day by noon and I drove to the tiny, cramped Bagel Beanery parking lot and battled it out with a guy in hospital scrubs for the last parking spot. Mike's beat up Ford Ranger was already parked haphazardly in a corner. I tucked the file folder with Paul and Morgan's first chapter under my arm and headed inside.
Mike had already grabbed a small booth and was munching on a sandwich when I walked in. He waved at me and I headed over to him, grinning.
"What's up, fucker?" I said as I sat down and he grinned at me.
"I only have like twenty minutes," he told me. "I've been here for like twenty-five minutes already. They're doing an emergecny surgery on a dog at 12:30 and I have to be back there to man the front desk. Here, I ordered for you."
I nodded and dug into the food. Mike knew what to order for me at most places because we ate out a lot whenever we ditched class or snuck out of school to eat real food for lunch. We had been to this restaurant a dozen times and I always orded the same thing. An all-American club, chips and a frosty latte.
"So, how is it working at the clinic?" I asked before taking a huge bite. His eyes smiled at me as he munched.
"Awesome," he told me. "I work with this doctor named Alyssa and she's amazing, man. You wouldn't believe her. She can diagnose in like two seconds, just by looking at the patient. And she's really smart, she finished vet school a year earlier than most people do."
"She sounds cool, how old is she?" I asked. I had never heard Mike rave about anybody and I could tell by the way he talked that he had a little crush on this lady. Too bad she was probably a decade older than him.
"I don't know," he told me, shrugging slightly. "Thirty-five, maybe forty." He looked a little down about that. Mike had turned seventeen on his last birthday like five months before. I doubted sincerely that the Alyssa lady would be interested in Mike like that, but it was nice to hear him excited about her anyway.
"But she's not old or anything," he assured me and I nodded in agreement. "She listens to Jay-Z and the Red Hot Chili Peppers." Like that explained it all. I smiled at the earnest expression on his face.
"What about you?" he asked suddenly. "You like your job?"
I shrugged. "It's better than sitting on my ass all day playing video games," I told him, which was basically what my dad had said verbatim when I told them everybody I worked with was gay and that I didn't wanna work there anymore.
"Fucking queer ass Skit Tyler works there," I mumbled at him and he looked at me quickly and then away.
"I kinda like that kid," he told me, suprising me. "He used to live down the street from me a few years ago. He drew funny pictures of me and my sister whenever we asked him to. He's kinda quiet, though. He used to hang around the neighborhood a lot, then they picked up and moved when his mom died of cancer when he was like eleven or twelve. My mom said there were too many memories in that house and his dad wanted to make a fresh start. Anyway, he's alright. You should give him a chance."
Now, I felt even worse!
"Anyway, I gotta go," Mike said, all of a sudden in a rush after he glanced at his watch. "Call me this weekend and we'll do something." He picked up the last of his sandwich, the rest of his espresso and headed towards the door. I turned in my seat.
"I owe you seven bucks," I yelled at him and he nodded.
"I'll hit you up this weekend," and he was gone.
I sat there for a long moment after he left, thinking about what he had said and half-eating my sandwich. Finally, frustrated at myelf, I turned to the file that Paul gave me and flipped it open. The red pen was tucked inside and I uncapped it and held it over the paper, poised to correct any grammar errors and to take my mind off of Skit:
Paul & Morgan - 1
The day I met Morgan, it was raining outside, the water came out of the sky in huge, fat drops and I, walking home from the five and dime where my best friend Sammy worked, was caught up in its ferocity in nothing but a white t-shirt and tan slacks, which was my everyday wear. It was one of those days when the sun blazed out of the sky so brightly that it was hard to look around without squinting. I figured that it was going to be a sunny day, never counting on the deep, dark clouds gathering in quickly.
I stood underneath a tree in old lady Hansen's yard, one with wide branches and sweeping leaves, hoping that the ran wouldn't get me. I had no such luck, of course, with the rain falling like it was. I was drenched to the skin in minutes and I stood there, my back pressed against the bark of the tree, my teeth already starting to chatter.
I was there for a few minutes, blinking and wondering if I should race the three blocks home or stand there getting soaked when ^Ö like I had imagined it all ^Ö the rain just cleared up. I literally stood there, peeking up through the still-dripping branches and watched the clouds recede to let the sun come back out to play. I didn't realize at the time that this weather was God sending me a metaphor of what my life would be like in the years to come.
The only evidence I had that it had even really poured down with rain was the shirt that stuck to my skinny chest like a second skin and my slacks that were practically see through. I scuttled the rest of the way home, thinking of warm, dry clothes and the fact that it was Pot Roast Wednesday.
My mother lived by a schedule even before the invention of the Covey planner. She would diligently mark down our meals for each day and shop and cook accordingly. It was 1961 and housewifery had come down to an art, a fine science that she embraced and fine-tuned into perfection. I wish I could have told her at the time that folding my clothes neatly at the edge of my bed, hoovering the floors two times a day and making sure that there was always a freshly cooked home-made meal on the table for me would not effect the fact that I am queer one tiny bit. As a matter of fact, no matter how much my mother saught to perfect the lives of me, my older brother Ryan and my older sister Louisa, we were going to end up doing exactly what we wanted to do. That's just the way life works...but at the time I wasn't aware of that.
At the time, I did everything in my power to be like my older brother Ryan. I played baseball because it was the all-American thing to do. It didn't matter that my hitting and throwing skills left something to be desired. I could run like the wind and if I should be lucky enough to actually hit a ball, there was no way that I couldn't make it to first base. I wore my hair in the same low-cut style that he wore his in and I even talked about all of the things I heard he and his friends talk about. I learned to talk about how choice Betsy Richards looked in her frequently tight sweaters and rarely did I say what I really thought - that her blood circulation had to suffer from the tight cashmere.
Fitting in with my brother and his crowd was of supreme importance to me even though the fact that I was three years younger ensured that I would never really have a place with Ryan and the guys.
When I turned onto our street, I could smell the pot roast and I quickened my steps so that I could get there that much sooner. I launched up the steps and through the screen door straight into the living room, which was where the stairs led upstairs to the bedroom I shared with my brother Ryan. The sight of Morgan Anderson sitting on my living room couch stopped me in my tracks.
The fifteen year old image of Morgan is etched forever in my memory to be recalled and salivated over for the rest of my life, I guess. Morgan was perfect, in every way. From his low-cropped dark, almost black hair to his steely gray eyes to the solid mass of him seated so calmly a few feet away from me, equipped with an arsenal of charms to smash all of my hopes of pretending to myself and everybody else that there was nothing queer about me.
I stood frozen under his gaze in the center of the room like a deer in headlights, peering uncertainly in front of me. I would have stayed like that for several minutes I'm sure, if my brother Ryan didn't snap me out of it.
"Hey, spaz, come meet my new buddy," Ryan called out to me, good-naturedly. I took two uncertain steps and then stood there. That Morgan was new to the neighborhood was obvious. He was someone that I could never have had the chance to forget meeting.
"This is my brother Paul," Ryan said, a little dismissively. I managed a tiny wave, minuscule really, hoping that would be the end of it and I could go up to my room and try to recover some of my normalcy before dinner, forgetting all about the fact that a moment ago I had been starving and that I was still dripping wet on my mom's floor, but Morgan stood up and took the steps it would take to stand in front of me and I was frozen again.
Paul stood in front of me, staring up at me with this look in his eyes. I can't really explain except to say that the way he looked at me - the way he still looks at me - burns me every time. That first time, though, it scared the living hell out of me.
At that point, I was in complete denial that I was anything close to gay. I had fooled around with a guy in my old town from the time I was ten, but we both equated it with curiousity, boys playing games. By the time, I was fourteen, what Tim and I did to each other peetered off bit by bit as I started dating girls and hanging around with other kids.
To me, it was a natural progression. I was supposed to start dating girls and caring about the way they looked, smelled and felt, so I convinced myself that I did care. The reason that Paul shook me to my core was that I couldn't convince myself that the look he was giving me didn't matter. I knew instinctively, at some gut level, that it did. It mattered tremendously and I never wanted him to stop looking at me that way. Not ever.
"Hey, I'm Morgan," I said and patted him on the shoulder the way a lot of the guys did. I wanted to touch him. He was dripping wet, his sandy hair was plastered to his head and his skin was damp. His breathing was uneven. I stared at the rapid rise and fall of his chest and felt my gut clench as the darkened areolas of his nipples turned to hard pebbles underneath the shirt. I wanted to touch him.
"P-Paul," he said shakily and looked away. At the loss of the hazel eyes, I felt bereft. I wanted him to look at me again. I wanted to be at the center of his attention. I had forgotten all about Ryan sitting a few feet away from us. I forgot about the fact that I was standing in his parent's house. I only knew that I was with him. I was connected in some way that I had never been connected to anyone before.
"God, you two are oddballs," Ryan said from the couch. He had witnessed something and he wasn't sure what it was. Later he admitted to me that what he saw there between Paul and I frightened and confused him, but at that moment, he was doing his best to gloss it over, to make everything seem peaches and cream. It was a trait that he would exert for many years.
Paul's mother, Mrs. Langley, came into the room and I dropped my hand from his shoulder, drawing his eyes back to me, almost accusingly.
"Paul, what happened?" his mother exclaimed, turning him around. "You're soaked to the skin and you're shivering. Did you get caught in the rain?"
Paul nodded at her and she ushered him onto the first step on the staircase.
"Well, go on up and change," she commanded, shooing him with her hands. "Dinner will be ready in five minutes and I want you completely dry by then." Paul started up the stairs one at a time, his chin against his chest. I stood next to his mother, watching him distance himself with each and every step upwards. I wanted to follow him.
When he disappeared around the corner, I remembered that I was at a new friend's house and that his mom was standing next to me. I tried a polite smile, which was warmly recieved.
"You boys can set the table," Mrs. Langley said. Ryan and I shuffled to the dining room behind his mother but my mind was on the boy upstairs.
I read the last line of the chapter again and then closed the file folder that Paul had given me, suddenly aware that most of the lunch crowd at the Bagel Beanery had died down and I was one of only a few people remaining. I ached for the next chapter, swallowing hard.
My insides were shaking just a little in the wierd way that they had been doing since I got into the whole mess with Skit Tyler in the first place. I squeezed the bridge of my nose with my right hand, suddenly bone tired.
There hadn't been a lot of grammar errors. There wasn't a single red mark on any of the pages, but I figured that was more from me being caught up in the story than really paying attention to the grammar. I would have to go through it again.
I was also going to have to figure out a way to get the next chapter without seeming too eager...but for once I looked forward to going back to the gay antique shop, I looked forward to seeng Paul and Morgan again. I wanted to know how Morgan dealt with his feelings for Paul, how they ended up together. How they stayed together. I was filled with a burning desire to know.
I hope I somehow managed to make this clear. There are lots of transitions. The gist of the story will be told from Eric's perspective, but when he reads the memoir, both Paul and Morgan's voices will come in. Let me know how it flows.
To be continued.......................virtualinsanity78@yahoo.com
I am Virtual Insanity and my Nifty stories are: Wade and Christian - high school 2004 The Prick - high school 2004 Mannie the Marine - military 2004 Summer Of Change - high school 2004