Contemporary Gay Romances (4 page)

Shaun saw her looking, and turned and looked right at her, then at Mike, who was trying to pull Cara back from being so close to them in the front seat, and she thought that Shaun had the loveliest and most innocent look on his face as he…well, as he came, she guessed.

A few weeks later she tried to do the same thing Debbie had done to Shaun to Mike. It didn’t work. He was just too big. Her mouth was too small. They couldn’t find the right angle. Oh, everything went wrong and he had to finish himself by hand. She apologized and all, and Mike kept saying, “Don’t worry. I’m okay. Don’t worry about it.” But she felt she was failing him and because she was still so insecure—it must all be a
big
mistake—he’ll find someone like Debbie who
could
do it, she thought. There goes True love…True love.

Some weeks went by and as it was fall semester, finals week, with the team playing two games every weekend one game after another, Cara began to worry about Mike and her. One day she went to his house. Mrs. Strong was waxing the kitchen floor and said, “I think the boys are outside, practicing moves or whatever they call ’em.”

They weren’t in the big backyard. She thought they might be in the screened-in summer bedroom way out of sight behind the garage where she’d gone a few times with Mike.

Mike was there, stretched out on the day bed with his shorts off and the lower part of his body bent off the edge of the bed. He had his arm thrown over his face. First she thought he was asleep. Shorts and undershorts off too, she noticed, second. And third, that Shaun Hunt was crouched over Mike’s lower body, doing what Debbie had done to him, and what Cara just couldn’t do to Mike. And Mike was probably thinking of her all the while.

She walked away without bothering them, thinking, it was her fault. He had to ask his best friend to do it. And because Shaun and Mike were best friends and knew each other since second grade and were inseparable, Shaun did what Mike asked. Because she couldn’t.

Well, if she and Mike Strong had True love, True love, then it was time for her to prove it. She made a decision: even though she’d earlier promised just the opposite to her mom, and herself—she would lose her virginity to Mike. The very next time she saw him.

They were alone together in her house making out and she was going nuts because of his hand down there, she grabbed his thing, his boner, they called it, and handed him a condom.

“Really?” he asked.

“I can’t do the other thing. Might as well do this. But go easy. Okay?”

Well, she had no idea what it would be like, did she? He’d covered her body, he was almost twice as big, with his own sweet-smelling, warm, nicely muscled body, and he cradled her and he invaded her, but he kept asking if it was okay what he was doing and he did everything, just as she’d wanted, and when they were done, she knew why Mike Strong had chosen her, and that it wasn’t a mistake after all ’cause he was so happy.

“You are…you are…” he panted afterward, “great!”

And she’d liked it okay and she thought she would come to like it even more.

True love…True love.

And so they got married.

*

She awakened in the middle of the night, suddenly freed of all pain.

The digital clock read 3:30 a.m. Cara suddenly felt very light, very free. She didn’t understand why, perhaps it was the end coming sooner than anyone had predicted. But she felt she ought to enjoy the freedom while it lasted. She got out of bed, feeling light as a feather—she weighed so much less now than anytime since she was a teenager—put on her robe and slippers, and quietly left the room.

Her daughter Amanda was asleep, clutching the pillow, having kicked off the blankets. Let them stay off. Poor thing must be warm.

Downstairs was dark, and she kept it so until she reached the kitchen. It was amazing how light and free she felt. The refrigerator was well stocked. Shaun and Amanda would see to that: the two of them seemed to always be hungry, and she’d awaken and hear them coming in from the market after he’d picked her up from school, with cartons of groceries and produce.

Mike was so impossibly helpless at things by himself that when her cancer returned and then got worse, Shaun had agreed to move in. He’d broken up with his second wife anyway and was living in some apartment near the business he and Mike owned together for the past ten years. Their son, Neil, hadn’t liked the idea of Shaun moving in, but then Neil didn’t like anything at age thirteen, except smoking marijuana and playing with small pistols. “They’re collector’s items,” he’d insisted, while she screamed, “Get these guns out of my house!” And so Mike sent their son off to military school, and Amanda, who was seven, loved Shaun, who was her godfather anyway, and so after Cara’s third recurrence, with the chemo and the radiation and the exhaustion and all, Shaun just moved in for good and pretty much took over the house.

Thankfully. Because of Shaun being there, taking care of things, there were these cute little caramel puddings in plastic containers in the fridge: not too much for her like most things nowadays, just enough, so she sat at the kitchen in the dim bulbglow with more light from outdoors beaming in through the door window and she scooped a pudding into her mouth. It tasted sweetish, and rich, and she looked outside at the street light flickering and the Werners’ garage-hung night light, and she thought, I’m almost in another dimension now, aren’t I? I’m in the world of the very, very ill. I have different needs and responses. I’m awake at different times. I’m like one of those men who guard big office buildings all night long. I’ve become guardian of the neighborhood, protector of the house.

The elation she felt continued even when the fatigue made its appearance, not long after she’d finished eating and washing the spoon. She continued to wander the house checking everything, guarding, protecting. Upstairs she used the loo though very little came out anymore, and her once-beautiful lower torso looked so thin, the hair down there so enormous now that she wasn’t taking the chemo—she would cut it back in the daytime, she decided, just like trimming a hedge.

On the way to her bedroom, she stopped at the other bedroom door and pushed it open. This is where they’d placed the queen-sized master bed when her room was filled up with that metal hospital contraption. Mike would sleep there and Shaun would sleep in Neil’s bedroom or on the den couch. But Neil had complained bitterly about Shaun in his bed and the den couch was too short for Shaun’s long frame and so here they were, the two guys, in the big bed and see, there was plenty of room for two, just like she had told them.

Shaun was on the left, lying on his right side, in almost a straight line, his hands in front of him, faced away from Mike. While several feet away, hogging the space as usual, Mike was on his back, his hands out on either side straight out, so one hung off the bed, while the other just brushed Shaun’s back.

She was about to withdraw when Mike became turbulent in his sleep, moving about and mumbling something, becoming more and more agitated. Certain he would wake Shaun, who seemed to be sleeping so soundly, she almost interfered.

Before she could, though, Mike rolled over to Shaun’s half of the bed, and after a few minutes he fitted himself closely into Shaun’s body, chest to back, torso to rear, legs to legs. She was certain Shaun never really woke up, but he somehow got hold of Mike’s still mobile hands and trapped them in his own hands, and held them in front of himself. Mike continued to move about and mumble, then Shaun raised Mike’s hands to his mouth, Mike’s big hands, and held them there and Mike settled in, nuzzled against Shaun’s neck, and was inert.

They lay like that until their snoring began to synchronize. They slept deeply.

Looking at them, she was filled with the greatest peace.

She had worried so much about Mike, how he’d react when she was gone, what he’d do, if he’d act crazy and go off the deep end, and drink and whatnot. She feared that the most, since theirs had been—unexpectedly and so long—such a True Love.

Now she knew she didn’t have to worry anymore. Shaun was here and Mike would let Shaun take care of him, as he had let him take his hands and calm him while they slept.

*

Although she woke up late in the morning after they were all gone, and she felt terrible again—that pain throbbed no matter how she lay—she got up, nuked the remaining coffee, and called their attorney, chewing on the vicodin and morphine pills together. “What’s the worst it can do?” she’d asked Shaun. “Kill me?”

She had to explain to Samantha that a decade before, when Mike’s hardware and garden center was faltering, he’d signed over all of the house into her name to protect it, in case the business went belly-up. The business had survived, once Shaun joined as partner and began to manage, and in fact it had even flourished, but they’d never changed the deed back to the two of their names. Besides a few pieces of jewelry, the house was really all Cara possessed: she wanted to make sure it was disposed of properly.

“Does your husband know you want the house shared equally between him and Mr. Hunt?” Samantha asked.

“Mr. Hunt is my husband’s best friend since second grade. He’s responsible for us keeping our business and for me being able to stay in the house while I’ve been sick. I want him to have half.”

“Okay, as long as you know what you’re doing! I’ll draw this up and be over when? Tomorrow afternoon? I’ll need to bring two witnesses for the signing.”

That night she woke up again in the middle of the night, painless, and enjoyed a few hours of wandering about. Once she thought, I’m already kind of a ghost, aren’t I? This amused her more than she could say.

She looked in on Amanda and of course looked in on the men before she went to bed again. The guys slept together, on different ends of the bed, facing away from each other. Even so, one of each of their legs crossed the other’s at the ankles. Seeing that she began to giggle and pulled out of the room so as to not wake them.

That afternoon, she dressed for the attorney. She put on a little makeup. Samantha hadn’t seen her in a year and was terribly shocked, even though she tried to cover it up by coughing and pretending she had a cold. The witnesses waited in another room, watching daytime TV while Samantha went over all the terms of the will. Both witnesses were elderly, and the man touched her on her wire-thin upper arm when they left, and said, “Better, this way.”

She already knew that.

Three weeks later, her ghost nights ended abruptly when she blacked out during Sunday breakfast. Amanda and Shaun were making pancakes, her daughter counting out the number of blueberries in each one, being precise as only a seven-year-old could be. Mike was setting the table, going back and forth from the kitchen to the breakfast table. Although she pretended to be poring over the newspaper’s TV guide, she saw that the two of them managed to brush against each other or physically engage in some way, each time Mike passed Shaun. She suddenly thought, that’s what it’s like to be in love, isn’t it? You can’t leave him alone, can you, Mike? I couldn’t leave you alone, remember?

They’d finished eating, and she’d declared, argued really, that she’d help with the dishes, when she suddenly saw big, irregularly shaped, cartoon-comic, electric green and yellow stars in front of her face, reached out for them, and went out like a light being shut off.

*

It was all pretty vague and hazy except a lot better than the throbbing pain, and she had to rally with great effort inside the intensive care unit to tell them, no, she wanted no extra efforts: Hadn’t they read her living will? Get her out of here.

In the regular room later—the next day? She wasn’t sure—Mike was sitting next to her and talking. She looked at him and thought, you know, he may be thirty-eight, but he still looks great. He probably has another good forty years left in him, doesn’t he?

She remembered him and Shaun in that screened-in summer room, and realized: they’d been doing that ever since. Maybe long before he’d met her. But definitely ever since.

Hmmm.

She must have fallen asleep, because now the intern and a nurse were doing something with her body, using tubes and machines and who knew what foolishness, looking pretty frantic and Mike was standing at the back of the room, sobbing, and she thought, Oh Christ I can’t let Mike Strong cry like that. That’s not manly. I’ll have to do something, something, but what?

When behind him, there was Shaun Hunt. Shaun put his hands around Mike’s front and held him there, and Mike let him hold him like that, and he stopped sobbing and she thought, you see, God, I’ve done something good in this life. Maybe only one thing, but it was a good thing.

Because she had to admit she’d never
really
believed what had happened to her at that school dance so many years ago. She’d always known that it had to have been some kind of mistake—she was so out of Mike Strong’s league. She was.

Only it hadn’t been a bad mistake, but instead a good one.

Without her, they’d never be together, would they? Society wouldn’t let them, back then. They wouldn’t let themselves be together, back then. But now, now, they could be together, for all kinds of reasons. They
were
together. They were even legally bound together through the house because of her.

Her work was done.