Bastards and Pretty Boys Read online

  Just as Kenneth dropped forward, going limp on my back, a tight ache started gnawing at my groin. I shifted uncomfortably, and Kenneth lifted himself.

  “Finish me,” I said. I pulled the pillows from beneath my hips, tossed them against the headboard, and slid out from under him. I turned and settled back, legs spread. Quickly, I wrapped a hand around my dick and began a gripping glide. “I’ve got some unhappy nuts here.”

  “What happened?” Kenneth asked, taking over for me.

  I dropped my head back and closed my eyes. There was my neighbor again, sloshing toward the shore. “Fucking my pillows didn’t cut it.”

  The gnarled heaviness went from tormenting to exciting as Kenneth drew half my cock into his mouth. Unlike his kisses, his blowjobs were precise and workmanlike, each suck carefully executed. I really didn’t care how he did it, though, as long as he saw it through to the end.

  The tightness gave way to tingles as my cock rapidly expanded once more, its core reforming. “Love that,” I exhaled, meaning that I did, not that Kenneth had to. My pelvis jerked in response to the suction. I felt at once weak and tense. My muscles seemed to crawl over each other and want to burst out of my skin.

  I had to shoot.

  The swimmer reappeared in my mind, naked and drenched and sleekly muscled. He held my gaze as he lowered himself to the sand and stretched out, prone, his bare ass to the sky. I knew I could have him if I wanted him. I could bury my cock to the root…

  My arousal crested. I grunted as it broke, my dick pulsing cum into Kenneth’s mouth and the rest of me shivering and reeling like a wave-tossed boat. The orgasm was a minor squall, not a major tempest, but it shattered that godawful fullness in my balls.

  Kenneth got up. I assumed he was going to get a drink of something, since he didn’t like any residue of cum in his mouth—not even his lover’s. That bothered me, too. We never kissed after one of us gave the other head.

  Sighing, I sank into the pillows and draped my arms over my head. There were a lot of things we didn’t do. We never engaged in nipple teasing; for some reason, it made Kenneth self-conscious, as if he thought it was womanish to be aroused in that way. We didn’t laugh during sex. We didn’t play-wrestle or experiment with kink or recite poetry to each other. We took care of business. Predictably.

  Although Kenneth and I had never agreed to exclusivity, I hadn’t been with anybody else since we’d met. Tired of come-and-go encounters, which were all I’d had until he came along, I was grateful to have a boyfriend. I could abandon the whole manic club scene and hours of humiliating, dispiriting Internet trawling. I could be queer safely, in private, and be assured of getting my rocks off on a regular basis with someone who actually gave a shit about me.

  Advantages, there were many. Or so I’d striven to believe. Therefore, I’d made a subconscious vow to be true to him.

  Pairing with Kenneth seemed to legitimatize being gay. He was intelligent and articulate, successful and impeccably groomed, and there was nary a whiff of queerness about him. It embarrasses me, profoundly, to realize I’d once thought that way, but not everybody comes bursting out of the closet wrapped in a rainbow flag and slips right into the pride groove. I’d never been mailed a handbook on the Right Things for Gay Men to Think, Feel, Say, and Do. So I just bumbled along, rejoicing in my finally freed, God-given sexuality, and stupidly thought this nice-looking, respectable man could help me erase any lingering traces of shame and self-doubt.

  Until I began to realize he was the one still soiled with shame. And he’d given up scrubbing at it.

  I got out of bed and pulled on my clothes. On my way to the bathroom, just a few steps from my bedroom, I glimpsed Kenneth in the kitchen, a navy-blue bath towel wrapped securely around his waist. His neatly trimmed brown hair was only slightly mussed, short spikes of it skewed at funny angles. Sure enough, he was sipping at a glass of lemonade.

  I closed myself in the bathroom and did something I normally only did when I shaved and combed my hair. I stood in front of the mirror. You’re so fucking pretty, Charlie golden-boy. So fucking pretty. Yeah, I was. I guess. By most people’s standards.

  I threaded a hand through my hair to put it back in place. A smooth, blonde wave swept from a side-part. Beneath it, a nice cut that wasn’t too long or too short, too shaggy or too severe. I pulled down my mouth—a “Christmas-bow mouth,” Kenneth called it, which would’ve given Carolyn the nellie jits for sure—then twisted it left and right. A shadow had formed. My nose, straight and even, was long enough not to look weak or, worse yet, pert. The seasonal freckling along my cheekbones remained a demure, sparse cascade. I had unremarkable blue eyes and tawny lashes.

  How very Aryan. Hitler sure as hell would’ve liked me. Lowering my head, I shook it and laughed through my nose. At least he wouldn’t be hitting on me anytime soon.

  After cleaning myself up, I left the bathroom and looked for Kenneth. I didn’t have to look far. Dressed now, he stood in the living room and gazed at the lake. Its corrugated surface tossed brazen winks through the screened doors. I thought of my neighbor, of his intimacy with the water. And my fear of it.

  “You know, Charlie,” Kenneth said, turning to face me, “I have fucked around on you. More than once.” Both his face and voice were impassive.

  My gaze fixed on the tumbler he still held. The glass was half empty. “No,” I said, sinking into a chair. Unconsciously, my tone mimicked his. “I didn’t know that.”

  Chapter Two

  To call the rest of that day “strange” wouldn’t adequately describe it. Carolyn returned and did the kitchen. I vacuumed, then installed the air conditioner with Kenneth’s help and got it cranked up. Kris fished, or pretended to, off the end of the pier, until his father took him out on the lake in my two-seater paddle boat.

  Kenneth had been chatty, but I hadn’t absorbed much of anything he’d said. It was weird for him to be so convivial—weird under most circumstances but especially under these. Hell, he’d just confessed to being a cheater or a cock-whore or something equally unsavory, and there he was, acting like he didn’t have a care in the world.

  As Carolyn made a summery quiche, I threw together a salad. That finished, I sat at the kitchen table, chin in hand, vacantly watching her efficient movements. How odd that I never missed our peaceful domestic routines, regardless of how much I still enjoyed her company.

  She sat across from me after setting the table. “Something seems to be bothering you.”

  Of course she’d notice. Women’s intuition and all that. “He told me he’s been fucking around,” I said bluntly, without preface.

  She lifted her eyebrows. “Kenneth?”

  I dropped my hand to the table. “No. Kris.”

  Carolyn made a face at me. “I sure as hell hope you’re using protection.”

  “Of course,” I said impatiently. “That’s not the point. I’ve never…” I stopped myself. Even for Carolyn and me, pals that we were, this was a little too personal.

  She let out one of those I-saw-it-coming sighs. “Well, you know I’ve never thought for a minute that he loves you. Not in any sort of normal way. And certainly not devotedly.”

  I merely nodded. How could I not know? She’d voiced that opinion at least once a month. “That’s never mattered to me,” I said. “I don’t love him either. But when you’ve been seeing someone steadily for five months, you’d at least like to think—” I shrugged. Think what? That some mutual trust and respect were in order?

  Carolyn touched the back of my hand. “I’m sorry, Charlie.”

  Her sympathy was genuine, but I didn’t want it. That’s not what I was after. “Don’t be,” I said, “I don’t particularly care, except that I feel like a chump. It was the way he popped off with it, out of the blue. I hadn’t asked. He just told me. And he was so nonchalant about it.”

  Actually, I was a little wounded—finding out your significant other has strayed always came with a sting—but I left that part out. Admitting to it wou
ld’ve made me feel even more like a chump. And one who somehow fell short of the mark.

  “Hm.” Carolyn idly fingered the napkin ring near her hand. “You know what I think? I think he wanted to hurt you. And scare you.”

  I gave her a befuddled stare. “But … why?”

  Carolyn smiled wanly. “Jesus, Charlie, go stand in front of a mirror.”

  “I just did, a little while ago. So what’s your point?”

  She leaned toward me. “He tried to hurt you because he resents the way you look. And he probably resents the way some people, men and women, ogle you. I’ll guarantee nobody stares at him that way. He’s eaten up with insecurity. So he wanted you to know that men find him attractive, too, hoping that would make you cling to him. He wants you to be afraid of losing him.” Looking as smug as if she’d solved an age-old riddle, Carolyn sat back and lifted her eyebrows.

  “What?” I said.

  There was probably some sense in her analysis—there almost always was—but I didn’t get a chance to sift through the verbiage and find it. The patio doors hissed open. I’d have to ponder Kenneth’s motives in private.

  “From now on, shoes off!” Carolyn called out before Kenneth and Kris stepped inside. They obediently shed their footwear.

  “Dinner’s ready, boys,” Carolyn said with brightness so brittle, I was surprised it didn’t shatter and fall to the floor.

  More small talk as we ate together. Again, I barely paid attention. I did keep watching Kenneth, though, still trying to penetrate the mystery of his behavior. And of Carolyn’s explanation for it.

  After-dinner cleanup meant good-byes were imminent. I crept out onto the deck while Kris played some handheld video game and Kenneth went to the bathroom.

  Within moments, he joined me. The sun, still far above the horizon on this June evening, was practically blinding. I hiked up the patio table’s umbrella and tilted it toward the west. Kenneth and I sat facing north. The yellow smudge of another cottage was visible through a line of lilac bushes.

  “So,” Kenneth said, crossing his legs, “think you’ll be able to stay busy this week?”

  “Easily.” Staying busy certainly wasn’t the point of being on a lake, but I didn’t know how not to stay busy. “I have to clean up that beach, go shopping for equipment and supplies, wait for the satellite-TV guy to show up, get more work done around the house and yard, find some local handymen to do things I can’t do.”

  “Mind if I come up next weekend? Kris is going to be with his grandparents.”

  I slid Kenneth a glance. “Are you sure you won’t be too busy fucking around?”

  “Come on, Charlie, I was just being honest with you.”

  “Why now?” I asked.

  “Why not?” His expression got haughty, and he turned his face away from me. “I didn’t have to tell you at all, you know.”

  I kept watching him. I wasn’t feeling much of anything, but my mind was clicking along. It kept returning to what Carolyn had said. “Yeah, that’s the part that hangs me up.”

  There was more to Kenneth’s sudden, cool confession than a burning need to come clean. Part of the answer seemed to lay in that paradox—burning didn’t result in coolness. And since when had Kenneth been so keen on honesty? He worked for an accounting firm. I knew damned well that honesty was only a good thing in his book when it was expedient.

  Maybe Carolyn was right. Maybe less honorable and more psychologically tangled motives were at play.

  Tired of the whole thing, I got up. Kenneth abruptly sprang from his chair and grabbed my arm. He led me down the deck’s steps and off to one side, where we couldn’t be seen from indoors.

  “Hey, don’t be angry.” Kenneth’s hands swept down either side of my head from hair to neck. “The others don’t mean anything to me.” A kiss followed his smile, and both were mercifully light and brief. “You’re still number one. Nobody moves me like you do.”

  These declarations didn’t move me at all, except to leave me a little queasy. “Why do I move you, Kenneth?”

  His only answer was a foggy smile and another swipe of the hand over my hair and cheek.

  I knew the answer to my question. Hell, I’d always known. For Kenneth, having a “pretty” boyfriend took some of the discomfort out of being gay. For me, having a “respectable” boyfriend had once done the same. We’d been like balm to each other. But I’d grown past the need to make my sexuality acceptable, to myself or anybody else, and I’d begun to see that Kenneth and I were two very different people.

  I didn’t need a partner who played mind games to hang onto me. I didn’t need one who liked to look at me rather than dig beneath the surface, where all the real treasure was hiding … mingled with all the trash. True appreciation of a person stemmed from understanding, and understanding sprang from intimacy, and intimacy only came about through the excavation Kenneth didn’t want to bother with.

  I suspected this week could prove pivotal for us, that I might realize my relationship with Kenneth wasn’t reclaimable. Or that I wasn’t willing to try reclaiming it. There was no escaping the fact that far too many essential elements were missing.

  * * * *

  My quaint cottage on Cloud Lake felt empty. No guests, no television to watch, no neighborhood bustle. Just me, a Blackberry, a laptop, and a motley assortment of still-boxed books and skin magazines in a handful of small, clean rooms. I couldn’t remember if I’d brought my iPod and didn’t feel like rummaging through the house or going out to my van to look for it.

  As the sun lowered, I turned off the air conditioner. Its hum was annoying, and the closed windows and doors made me feel even more insular than the setting alone made me feel.

  I’d been digging through the books when I heard voices outside. Two men, arguing. Words rose and fell. Some were caught and bounced around by air moving over water, their volume boosted and their tone sharpened. Most, though, were unintelligible, muffled by the surrounding stands of trees and shrubs.

  I didn’t pay much attention at first … but soon realized how out of place the sound was. According to my realtor, Cloud Lake was known for its serenity. There was a modest campground on the northwest shore, but the voices weren’t coming from there; they were too close.

  Getting up from the floor, I went to my road-facing door and listened, then to the deck doors and listened. What I heard wasn’t a violent altercation. It wasn’t alarming enough to warrant calling the police or dashing outside to investigate. But there was obvious emotion in the voices—tension, obstinacy, frustration, an ominous hint of ultimatum and threat.

  “…enough… For God’s sake, let it go.”

  “…can’t just ditch … promised…”

  “…wrong!…”

  “…think twice … consequences…”

  And then, for several minutes, silence. A screen door slammed. Thwack. It sounded like one of those old wooden doors with gingerbread brackets at each corner and a spring to keep it closed. A car engine growled to life. No mistaking the location of that sound. It came from the next property to the south. When I reached the back door, I glimpsed a silver subcompact spitting up a dusty wake as it headed down the dirt road to the two-lane highway.

  * * * *

  The fire of sunset glazed Cloud Lake. Low ripples—occasionally concentric, where submerged mouths snatched at swimming insects—made the surface shiver like a burn victim. I sat on my deck nursing two fingers of Chivas on the rocks. A large fish jumped into the air, made a twisting arc, and slid back into the water.

  I felt mellow. And very receptive to the new element that entered this idyllic scene.

  My neighbor, the one who liked to swim and quarrel, strode down the low incline that led from his cottage to the water. Without pausing, he walked onto the pier. Not a single plank creaked beneath his weight; not a single screw squealed in the wood. He seemed like an apparition, a brooding, dark swatch laid against the blaze of the setting sun.

  He stopped at the end and stood motion
less, facing the shimmering lake. A breeze ruffled his slightly curled hair. The sun sank lower and seemed to target him, one bright ray gilding his still form.

  I thought of Jay Gatsby, gazing across a Long Island bay at the green light marking Daisy Buchanan’s dock. Maybe my neighbor, too, yearned for a lost love, although she likely wasn’t in Pumpkinseed Campground across this expanse of water.

  He wore faded jeans and a short, dark jacket. His hands, tucked in the pockets, pulled the jacket snug around his waist. Again, I couldn’t help noticing the mound of his butt. It was in perfect proportion to his slim hips.

  A telltale squirming in my groin nearly made me groan in dismay. For crying out loud, I was only looking at a man, and a fully clothed one, from afar. The sight shouldn’t have moved me at all.

  “Damn it,” I whispered. Why here? Why now? I had to resolve my shit with Kenneth. The last thing I needed was the daily appearance of a guy with a great ass stirring my hormones.

  I wondered vaguely how Bucky the twink would have explained this.

  Wise and jaded beyond his years, Bucky was something of a fixture at a certain bathhouse in a certain large Midwestern city. I used to patronize the establishment whenever a business trip took me within ninety miles of it. This was, of course, after my separation from Carolyn and before I met Kenneth.

  “You’re still in the candy-store phase,” Bucky had told me offhandedly, after remarking that I looked like a bead of water on a hot skillet—all steamy and skitterish.

  But I should’ve been out of that phase. Five months of regular sex with Kenneth should’ve pulled me out. Even Carolyn was starting to treat us like a married couple, as much as she recoiled from that image.

  Besides, the odds were in favor of dark-haired dude being a typically homophobic blue-collar guy who’d come up to do a little fishing. Maybe some buddies or a girlfriend would be joining him. Or maybe they’d already been here and left, and he himself would be leaving tomorrow. Vacationers almost always headed for home on Sunday.

  Whatever the case, I had to get a grip and start keeping my eyes to myself. I still had Kenneth to deal with, and even if I didn’t, not every perfect chest or ass or dick was mine for the taking.