Date: Wed, 28 Jan 2004 02:40:36 -0800 (PST) From: SJL Subject: Paul & Adam: part 1 This is not my first story, but it is my first post to Nifty. Any and all comments are welcome. If you would like to archive this story elsewhere, you must first ask for permission. I will most likely grant it, as long as your site is FREE for all readers and you agree not to change anything. Likewise, this story is printable and downloadable for personal use, as long as nothing is changed. So, on we go... ______________________________________________________ It's the middle of June and my sister, Caroline, and I sit in the open air porch on the back of our three-story Victorian house and sip iced tea and let the heat seep into our pores. "I'm thinking about sleeping with Mitch," Caroline says as we listen to the cicadas buzz. I wrinkle my nose. "If you do I'll vomit." Caroline takes a sip of iced tea and thinks for a moment. "He's not perfect." She states the obvious. "And he does have a hairy back." I snort. Caroline's sixteen, a year older than me, and the most beautiful girl in our school. Most people are afraid of her, but I'm not. She's never cruel to me the way she can be to other people. I'm maybe the only person at our school who knows that she doesn't enjoy hurting other people, that it's just a defense mechanism she happens to be very good at it. "Why would you give your virginity to a hairy lug with the IQ of a garbanzo bean?" I ask her. She shrugs. "I don't know. I think maybe I should just get it over with." She tucks her dark brown hair behind her ears. "I mean, at least I know Mitch won't talk if I do decide to sleep with him." "I don't get what you see in him," I say, although in a way I do. Mitch may be stupid and hairy, but he dotes on her and takes care of her the way no other guy ever has. "I feel safe with him," she says. "So hire him as your bodyguard," I say. "Don't fuck him." "Maybe you're right," she says. She takes another sip of iced tea. "Oh, you lazybones," my mother says as she comes out onto the porch. She's carrying a plate of shortbread cookies and smiling, so I know she's not really annoyed with us for doing absolutely nothing for the umpteenth day in a row. "You are going to turn to dust one of these days," she says. My mother has a thick French accent, though I can barely detect it since I'm so used to it. It just sounds like her voice. "When I was a little girl," my mother begins, and Caroline and I both groan. Our mother loves to tell us how difficult her childhood in France was, though we visit her hometown in the south of France every year and we know perfectly well that she grew up privileged on a gorgeous vineyard. "When I was a girl, I worked on the farm every school holiday," she says. She calls the vineyard a farm partially because it had a few chickens but mostly to try and make her childhood sound more difficult. "There was never any of this sitting around every day drinking tea, eating cookies." "Thanks for the cookies, by the way," Caroline says with a sparkle in her eye as she snatches up one of the round shortbreads. "Paul?" my mother holds the plate towards me. "Thanks," I say, taking a cookie. My mother makes them from scratch and they're really, really good. After my mother leaves, Caroline turns towards me. "So, OK, maybe I won't sleep with Mitch right now. I think my summer project will be to find you a boyfriend." I groan and eat my cookie. Caroline has known that I'm gay for nearly as long as I have, and every few months she gets a bee in her bonnet about finding me a boyfriend. "You need to have a boyfriend," she says, brushing crumbs off her fingers. "A real boyfriend. No pining after Adam all summer again." I sigh. Adam is my best friend, and she's not kidding about me pining after him. No one could blame me, though, since he's gorgeous and funny and smart and perfect. "I mean, I at least need to get you a first kiss," she says. I smirk, and then try to cover it up but Caroline catches it. "Paul Mathieu Johansen," Caroline says, shocked. "Who have you been kissing?" "Nobody, lately," I say. "I just...last summer I kissed Henri." Caroline is silent for a moment. "Eww," she says finally. "Our cousin Henri?" I shrug. It didn't feel weird at the time. "You kissed Henri," she says again, as if trying to make herself understand it. "On the mouth?" I laugh. "Yes. Jesus." "And he kissed you back?" I nod and look down at my hands. "It was the day before we came back, so it's not like we had a chance to do much else. Besides, we were in the barn and we didn't know who could come along." The barn was an old, open building made of stone and rotting wood that my grandfather used to store hay. Henri and I had snuck out there to smoke a joint and we'd kissed and rubbed each other through our jeans until we came, but nothing more than that. I tell this to Caroline. "Well," she says, tipping her head to the side as she considers it. "I guess he is kind of cute. In a weird, incestuous way." "It's not like I was in love with him or anything," I tell her. "I was just stoned and he started kissing me and it felt good so I kissed him back." "Why didn't you tell me this before?" she demands. "I don't know. Because he's our cousin." She makes a face. "And you make fun of me for Mitch." Caroline eventually wanders off to practice the piano and I climb the stairs up to my room on the third floor. It's a small, oddly shaped room with angled windows and a sloping roof. It's the only room on the third floor and I suppose most people would have used it as an attic, but it's been my bedroom since I was little. I stretch out on my bed and think back to it, to that day in the barn with Henri. I think about the way he'd kissed me, his mouth strong and gentle at the same time over mine. I wonder what would have happened if I'd gotten up the nerve to kiss him earlier that summer. I wonder if we would have slept together. I imagine that we would have. I imagine that he would have undressed me slowly and laid me back on a blanket there in the barn. He would have stood over me and stripped, taking his time, knowing that every second he made me wait intensified my hunger for him. I imagine that his cock was uncut and thick, that he'd stand over me stroking it and that I'd kneel in front of him and take it into my mouth and make him gasp as I slid my tongue between the head of his cock and his foreskin. His cock and balls would smell musky and good and the scent would arouse me even further. As I lay on the bed fantasizing about what could have been with Henri I stroke my cock slowly. I'm not really jerking off, just stroking it through my jeans and squeezing it. I unbutton my jean shorts and slide my hand inside, squeezing my hot, hard flesh. I think about Adam, beautiful, blonde Adam and what it would feel like to kiss him. He wouldn't kiss like Henri. He'd be more nervous, tentative. His hands would shake as he reached up to touch my face. He'd moan as I slipped my tongue into his mouth and he'd taste sweet, like cinnamon. "Jesus!" Caroline cries from the doorway. "Shit!" I sit up and button my jeans as fast as I can. "Don't you knock?" "Don't you lock your door?" Caroline has spun around and is facing the hallway with her hands up to her face. "I think I'm blind. God. I'm blind." "No, jerking off makes you blind. Walking in on somebody jerking off makes you go to hell," I say. "Are you done, yet?" "For all intents and purposes, yes. What's so important that you can't even knock?" She turns her head cautiously as if to make sure I don't still have my dick out. She wrinkles her nose and gags as she turns around and leans against the doorframe. "Boys are so gross," she tells me. "Yeah, yeah." "Adam and Mark are here," she says. "Mom won't let them come in because they're muddy. God, you're lucky she didn't come up here herself." "She knows how to knock," I say. I slip on my shoes and head downstairs. Adam and Mark are on the porch and they are, indeed, covered in mud. The mud seems to blend in with Adam's golden tan, but it stands in stark contrast to Mark's pale skin and red hair. "What the hell did you do?" I ask them, laughing. Adam grins at me, then grabs me and wrestles me to the ground. He's only 5'6", a good four inches shorter than me, but he's strong. "Mud wrestling," he says, laughing at my expression. "Come on, Paul, dirt won't kill you." "It's mud, not dirt," I tell him. I don't bother trying to get out from under him. There's mud on his neck and up the side of his face and matted in his curly blonde hair. It only makes him more gorgeous to me. "We're gonna go swimming in the quarry," Mark says from somewhere above Adam. "You're coming." "Well, if you put it that way," I say, vaguely disappointed when Adam gets off me and trots down the steps to the lawn where he'd dropped his bike. My shirt and shorts are covered in mud and I'd be pissed if it hadn't been Adam that had gotten me dirty. I'm also jealous that Mark was the one who got to wrestle Adam in the mud, even though mud wrestling is definitely not my idea of a good time. I grab my bike out of the garage and we ride through the streets of town like madmen, taking corners at full speed and jumping curbs when the urge strikes us. We get to the quarry and kick off our shoes and strip off our shirts and jump in at a full run. We pull ourselves out of the water and Adam does a cannonball, as do I. Mark does a belly flop just to show us up and Adam and I groan as he hits the water with a loud splat. "Race you to the island," Adam says, referring to an irregularly shaped geometric column the stonecutters had left for whatever reason. "I'm not going out there," Mark says. It's his typical line. "You know there's, like, giant turtles on the other side of the quarry." "Just the other side?" Adam asks, and I can hear the laughter in his voice. "I'm serious, dude. Mandy Timmons' cousin had her entire foot bit off, and what about that dog that just, like, totally disappeared?" Adam scoffs, and I slip slowly beneath the surface. I let myself sink a few feet and open my eyes in the cool, clean water. Adam's legs are right in front of me, moving lazily through the water. I swim down beneath them and maneuver myself towards where Mark is treading water. Soon, I'm directly beneath him and I look up at his feet. I open my mouth and wait just a moment before the side of his foot is in the perfect position. I bite down on the outside of his foot, hard. My head jerks back as his legs begin to flail wildly and I let myself rise to the surface. "Mother fucker!" Mark shouts at me. Adam's laughing. "You should have seen his face. Jesus. He screamed like a little girl." "That wasn't fucking funny," Mark says, sounding like a brat with wounded pride. "Was too funny," I say, using my arms to push myself away from him. "You bit my foot, you fucker!" Adam looks at me, laughing. "You bit him?" I grin and shrug. "Made it more realistic, don't you think?" "Come on, Mark," Adam says as he starts to swim out into the quarry. "Don't be a pussy. There aren't any mutant turtles, OK?" "Screw both of you," Mark says. "I'm going home." I look at him for a moment, then start off after Adam. I know, as I'm sure Adam does, that Mark mainly doesn't want to swim to the island because he's not a strong swimmer like Adam and I both are. I catch up to Adam soon enough and we splash each other for a minute before continuing on. When we reach the island, Adam grabs onto a ledge and pulls himself up. I float on my back, watching the water sluice off his skin, noticing how closely his wet khaki shorts hug his muscular ass and legs. Adam sits on the edge of the island and dangles his feet in the water, holding his hand out to me. I let him pull me up and we both lay back on the sun-warmed rock. Adam lays his arm next to mine to compare our skin tones. "I'm almost as dark as you," he says, his breath coming hard from the swim. "I've been swimming every day. I've already lost a second on the 400 meter." I don't say anything, just stretch out on the on rock. The sun feels amazing on my skin. My skin is just naturally dark. Our father was Danish by nationality, but ethnically he was Inuit and that's where Caroline and I got our dark hair and eyes, our dark skin. "Think Mark really went home?" Adam asks. "Probably," I say. "You know he doesn't really like to swim." The real truth is that he doesn't swim well, and we both know it. Adam doesn't call me on it. "You going to Tamara Blake's party tonight?" he asks, draping an arm over his eyes to shield them from the sun. "Mmm," I say. "Probably." This is the point where I'm supposed to make some comment about how I hope there will be hot girls there, but I don't. Adam doesn't, either. We lay there in silence for a long time, letting the sun dry us and warm our skin. "My parents are getting a divorce," Adam says out of nowhere. I turn onto my side and prop my head up on my hand. "That sucks," I say. Adam moves his arm up so that he can look at me. "I figured it was coming," he says. His parents had been fighting like crazy for the past year or so. We all knew something was bound to happen. He sighs. "My mom's moving to Denver." "What's in Denver?" I ask, surprised. "She's getting a transfer in her job. They told me last night." My stomach is a tight knot. Denver's at least a two-day drive away. "Are you...are you going to Denver with her?" "I don't know," he admits. "They say it's my choice who I go with. Fucked up, right?" "Definitely," I say. I look at him, at his slim, tanned body and sun-bleached curls and his beautiful, angular face. I want to tell him that he can't leave me, but I don't. The knot in my stomach is only getting tighter. I don't know what I'll do without Adam. It's not just that I'm in love with him. He's also my best friend. "Did you have to choose when your parents split up?" he asks softly. I shake my head, then realize he can't see me because his eyes are closed. "No," I say. My voice sounds foreign to me. The knot is spreading from my stomach up through my chest into my throat. "My dad just split." Adam nods. "Do you remember it?" "Yeah." He opens his eyes and turns his head so that he can look up at me. "Jesus," he says, "you look sick." I swallow hard. "It doesn't still fuck you up, does it? Him leaving? I'm sorry I brought it up." I don't know how to tell him that I don't care about my father leaving. Well, I do care, but not at the moment. All I care about is losing Adam. "Paul," he says, sitting up. He offers me a smile. "Hey, man, it's OK," he says. I feel like I'm going to cry. "Look, it's his damn fault he left," he says softly. "Like it's my parents' fault they're getting divorced. We don't have anything to do with it, you know? We're just caught in the crossfire." He touches my shoulder and shakes me playfully. And then I just do it. I don't plan it, I don't even think about it, really, until I realize that my mouth is over Adam's and that I'm kissing him. Adam pulls away from me and raises his hand to touch his lips. I try to read his expression, then decide that I don't want to know what he's thinking. I stand and dive off the island. I swim towards shore as if one of Mark's giant turtles was after me. When I reach the shore I pull myself up without looking behind me to see if Adam's following me. Mark has filled our shoes with rocks and dirt, and I shake my shoes out as quickly as possible before shoving my feet in them. I snatch up my t-shirt and throw it over my shoulder as I get onto my bike. I pedal fast towards home, trying not to let myself think. Stupid. I'm so fucking stupid. How could I have kissed him? He's never going to speak to me again. Or, if he does, it will be just to call me a faggot and threaten to kick my ass. Maybe he will kick my ass. He's not violent, usually, but he can fight if he doesn't have a choice. He's really strong for his size. I get home and run up the porch steps and into the house and my mother screams at me because my shoes are muddy, but I barely hear her. I just run up the steps and into the bathroom and lock the door and turn on the shower. I lean my hands on the counter and look at myself in the mirror. My shirt isn't over my shoulder anymore. It must have blown off when I was riding home and I never even noticed it. The shower is hot and steam begins to fog the mirror. I pull back and look around the bathroom for something to kill myself with. I pick up the pink razor Caroline uses to shave her legs, but it's a safety razor and I know the cut won't be deep enough. I pull open the medicine cabinet. My heart is pounding. My life is over. I kissed Adam and disgusted him. Even if he doesn't go to Denver I've already lost him. I know that he won't ever be my friend again now that he knows what I am. There's a giant bottle of Tylenol in the medicine cabinet. My mom's thyroid medication and half a bottle of the pills she uses when she can't get to sleep. Caroline's Effexor and Zoloft, her Xanax and BuSpar. There's more than enough to kill myself, but as I reach for the bottle of Xanax I stop. If I killed myself, Caroline would definitely need her meds. It wouldn't be fair for me to use them to do something that would hurt her so deeply. I look around the bathroom futilely, then kick off my muddy shoes and yank down my damp shorts and step into the hot shower instead. I kneel down under the water's spray and wrap my arms around myself and start to cry. Adam. My beautiful, beautiful Adam and I ruined everything. He hates me. Adam hates me. I sit in the tub as the water crashes down around me and hug my knees to my chest and cry until I can't anymore, until the water runs cold, until I'm too exhausted to do anything but ache.