Chapter 4
652 Words
Chapter 4Simon
Seven days. In only seven days, I had worked myself up to an almost unprecedented state of lust. Couldn’t remember being this horny since I was about fifteen. Evan had an excellent mouth to go with those sultry blue eyes and the hair. He was an inch or two taller than me, maybe five foot eleven to my five nine. Probably around the same weight, despite the added height, because his bones weren’t as massive as mine. At least, judging by his wrists and hands, notably graceful beside mine, which look like a bricklayer’s hands.
Anyway, we’d done enough kissing to be sure of three things. First, we wanted to take it further. Second, while both of us were down to f**k, neither of us was a Now or Never kind of guy. Third, we both really f*****g liked it. I mean the kissing. I couldn’t remember doing this much kissing since I was about fifteen, either. Once you start having s*x, you kind of always go directly to s*x, right? A person only has so much time, and getting off in an efficient manner was a high priority for a lot of years.
Come to think of it, my current state of horniness was undoubtedly related to the kissing. I hoped we wouldn’t stop kissing after we f****d.
Funny thing. Before I sold the screenplay, I wrote slice of life literary fiction about young men finding themselves. Young gay men, usually, but outside the context of romance, so I skirted the edge of outing my characters. And without tragedy, despite the urgings of my agent, who knew that readers of literary fiction love them some tragedy. I didn’t like writing tragedy, and I particularly didn’t want to write about young gay men and tragedy. I was born in 1970 and you know what that means: I was a horrified teenager during the AIDS crisis, watching my community go down in flames while the world looked on with indifference at best, open hostility and vicious satisfaction at worst.
Evan, a couple of years older than me, had similar observations. Over dinner that first night, we talked about our histories in a roundabout kind of way. He asked me then if I started letting my characters have love affairs because the movie was a success. I said, well, of course.
And yet here I was at fifty-two, more successful than most novelists, with a long string of well-received if not universally beloved books which I was not ashamed to call romances (even though they’re still being marketed as literary fiction! Cracks me up all the time!), having never had the kind of love affair I write about.
I’ve never had that instant recognition, instant infatuation, instant connection thing before. Not until the day Evan looked up from the computer screen and smiled at me.
Thus I was seriously invested in what happened tonight. If the s*x was even a fraction as good as the kissing, I was going to throw myself at this guy in every possible sense of the word.
So, was it good? Yes. Yes, it was good. It was so good that we never really got out of bed. We f****d, we heated up dinner and ate it in bed, we fooled around some more, we slept. In the morning after coffee and a snack and some freshening-up, we had more s*x.
“Fair warning,” Evan said around noon, when we were both stirring (though with reluctance) because he had to get down to the bookstore to take over from Sanaa at two, “if we still feel this way after the store closes, I’m likely to suggest you pack up your cat and come to live with me.”
It was all I could do to suppress the “Why wait?!” and say, instead, “Perfect, I need to declutter my apartment anyway.”
- Writer
