The Road to Amazing (21 page)

"Come on," I said.

"I don't know," he said.
"It's what I was saying last night. I want people to take our
wedding seriously, because I want people to take our
marriage
seriously. But
who's going to take it seriously if everything's all screwed
up?"

"Yeah, but I think maybe that was
wrong."

Kevin tilted his head back toward
me.

"Seriously," I said, "isn't that what
everyone finds so annoying about weddings? That they have to be
'perfect'? But there's no such thing as perfect, so everyone ends
up getting all bent out of shape over stupid little
things."

Kevin stiffened a little in my arms.
"You think I'm being stupid?"

Okay, so maybe I
didn't
always
say
the right thing to make Kevin feel better.

"No, sorry," I said, "bad choice of
words. But I think we were wrong about weddings. We were talking
about how the point is for the couple to show their friends and
family how much they love each other. But I'm wondering if maybe we
didn't have it backward. I'm wondering if a wedding isn't more
about the friends and family being able to say to the couple: we
love you and we support you. That's why weddings are
important."

Mostly, I was pulling this out of my
ass, trying to calm Kevin down. But the more I talked, the more I
realized I was onto something.

"Think about it," I said. "This was a
fantastic night. First that great bachelor party, then after the
power went out? All the things they said?"

Kevin nodded. "It was. We have an
amazing group of friends."

"And even the whale — orca. When that
happened, everyone immediately went into action to try to find us
another place for the wedding."

Kevin thought about it. "You make a
good point."

We unwrapped ourselves from each
other, then undressed and crawled into bed. I couldn't help
noticing (again) how big and soft the mattress was.

"I know I said this
before," I said, "but this bed is
incredible
. What is it made of?
Like, memory foam on top of kittens, on top of marshmallows, on top
of actual angel hair?"

"Back home, we sleep on a two hundred
dollar futon. What exactly do you expect?"

I leaned over and kissed Kevin. I felt
him relaxing under me, spilling into the bed like melted candle
wax.

"That's nice," he said, and I
nodded.

I kissed him again. The first one had
been an "I love you" kiss. This was a "Do you want to fuck?" kiss.
Kevin kissed me back a third time. His kiss said, "Yes."

Full disclosure: as great as the night
had been, I'd been horny ever since Nate's lap dance. I'd tried to
ignore it, but ignoring horniness has never really worked for me.
It was like trying to ignore an itch inside a cast — basically
impossible.

Now, of course, I could finally
scratch the itch.

I pulled back and, smirking, looked at
Kevin. "One other important part of this weekend?" I said. "We
never would've known how incredible Nate looks in a
Speedo."

Kevin blushed a little.
"Well, I actually
did
already know that. Roommates, remember? And, uh, I know what
he looks like
out
of a Speedo."

I covered my face with my hands. "Oh,
don't tell me, I don't want to know!" I peeked out through my
fingers. "You know I'm not serious, right? Tell me everything.
Spare no detail!"

Kevin laughed. I'd long since learned
that one of the best parts about being in a same-sex relationship
was sometimes discovering you both find the exact same things and
people erotic. It was real a turn-on, sharing secret desires with
the person you were with, and knowing he felt them too.

"What's so strange is that Nate is
probably the straightest guy I know," Kevin said. "Which is a good
thing, because if he hadn't been, I would've fallen madly in love
with him."

"I can totally see that," I
said.

"I think that's what made me so
embarrassed about the striptease. It was like my fantasies of him
were finally coming true, like he knew what I'd been imagining all
these years."

"Except in your fantasies, it doesn't
exactly stop with a striptease, huh?"

"How did you know?"

"Should I be jealous?"

"Incredibly."

I laughed and leaned in to kiss him
again. He was totally relaxed now, completely knocked out of his
wedding-related funk.

We kissed for a second longer, but
then I pulled back.

"Something occurs to me," I said
slyly.

"Huh? What?"

"This is the last time
we're going to have unmarried sex.
Premarital
sex."

Kevin scrunched up his face. "We've
been having sex for something like ten years now."

"Still," I said, smirking, "don't you
think it's kind of hot?"

"What?"

"That we're having premarital sex! You
know, what people say is so sinful and illicit."

"You're crazy. You know that,
right?"

I felt the crotch of his
boxer briefs, which, not surprisingly, was rock-hard and leaking
precum. He'd been just as turned on by Nate's striptease as me.
"Yes,
I'm
crazy,"
I said. I thought for a second. "We should do something
different."

"Different how?"

"I don't know. Something we've never
done before. Sex-wise, I mean."

"I knew what you meant.
But there's
nothing
we've never done before. At least not anything that
I'm
interested
in
doing."

On one hand, Kevin had a
point: there were plenty of things that I had no interest in ever
doing sexually either. On the other hand, after tonight, I was
going to be having "married" sex for the rest of my life, the kind
of sex that everyone says is so boring — the kind of thing I'd been
talking about with Min. I guess I couldn't say for sure I'd never
have sex with anyone else ever again (Kevin and I were monogamous,
and planned on
being
monogamous, but I'd listened to enough Dan Savage podcasts to
know that you can't ever say never). Even so, I wasn't crazy about
Kevin's attitude, especially after I'd so deftly talked away his
wedding anxiety. What was that old saying about how you don't know
if you like something until you try it?

"That's a fair point," I said. "Still,
I'm serious. This is an important moment. The sex should be
special."

"Okay, okay." He hesitated. "What does
that mean exactly?"

I thought about it. "Well, for
starters, it means I should take a shower too."

He gestured to the en-suite bathroom
with both arms. Maybe it was my imagination, but he seemed a little
impatient with me.

As I was showering, I
thought to myself:
How
can
we make this sex special?
What could we do? And as I soaped myself up under
the water, I started to get some interesting ideas. Yeah,
technically, we'd done it all before. But not necessarily in the
exact order I was planning. It was a little like a good screenplay:
sure, every possible story has already been told in one form or
another, but that doesn't mean
Me, Earl,
and the Dying Girl
wasn't a really good
movie.

I dried myself off, then flossed and
brushed, and slipped into a pair of clean briefs — the closest
thing I had to Nate's Speedo.

I stepped into the doorway of the
bathroom, standing in my sexiest, most Nate-like pose.

I started walking toward the bed in my
best possible straight-boy strut, not graceful, not polished, but
confident and cocky and real.

Halfway to the bed, I heard
snoring.

I stopped and stared. So much for one
last night of hot, premarital sex: while I'd been taking my shower,
Kevin had fallen asleep.

CHAPTER TWELVE

When I woke up the next morning,
something immediately felt wrong.

For one thing, everything was quiet.
It was strange after the rain (and occasional thunder) of the night
before, to not hear anything at all outside. There weren't any
other noises either. Was everyone gone? Or maybe it was only what
I'd noticed the morning before, about how Vashon Island is so much
quieter than Los Angeles.

But the world wasn't just quiet. It
was still — still, but not calm. There was something about the air,
the pressure. Was it high or low? I didn't know, but it felt like
something was going to happen, something big. It was almost like
the changing pressure was the reason I had woken up.

That and the fact it was ten-thirty in
the morning, according to the clock. Wow, I'd slept in late, even
in a room with no curtains. I really must have been wiped out. And
it was light out, but not nearly as bright as it had been the day
before.

Kevin was gone — I was alone in bed.
That was another thing that was weird. I'd been living with Kevin
for over a year now, and we often woke up at different times, and
it never felt strange. But this was our wedding weekend, so somehow
it seemed odd not having him next to me.

The
wedding
, I thought. It was now only a few
hours away.

I pulled on some clothes and made my
way out into the rest of the house, but it all looked deserted. It
was cold, and in the front room I could smell the lingering scent
of burned candles from the night before. But I noticed that someone
had cleaned up all the glasses and beer bottles, and washed the
dishes in the kitchen too.

"Hello?" I said. "Is there anyone
here?"

No one answered.

Somehow I knew that it
wasn't like the morning before, when I was up early and I'd sensed
that everyone else was still in bed. This time I could tell the
house was empty. So where the hell had everyone gone? Was it the
same thing that had happened to the people of Amazing? Had everyone
committed ritual suicide by lining up on the porch and jumping out
into the bay? Or maybe they'd been abducted by aliens. What would
that be like anyway? Would they have ships with long, articulated
arms like the aliens in
The War of the
Worlds?
Or would they just beam them up
like on
Star Trek
?

I stepped into the kitchen, and saw
Min and Ruby sitting at the dining room table with their earbuds
in, reading and listening to media devices.

"Oh!" I said. So much for the house
being empty. It was yet another reminder that I made a really
shitty Veronica Mars.

They saw me and pulled out their
earbuds.

"Morning," Ruby said. "Hey, four more
hours! You ready?"

I smiled. "Yeah," I said. "Uh, where
is everyone?"

"They all went into town for
breakfast," Min said.

I smelled coffee. It tells you how big
the Amazing Inn was that I hadn't smelled it earlier.

I poured myself a cup. "Well, thanks
for waiting."

"You were imagining we'd all been
abducted by aliens, like at Amazing, weren't you?" Min
said.

I smiled. Sometimes it can be a little
embarrassing how well Min knows me.

Min and Ruby exchanged a glance, then
Ruby started to stand. "Oh, hey," she said, "I've got some stuff to
do."

This was sweet. They both thought Min
and I might want to be alone, to talk about my feelings about the
wedding. Maybe that would have been true yesterday, but I felt
different about Ruby now, after what she and everyone else had said
the night before.

"It's okay," I said. "You don't need
to go."

She looked back at me, trying to
figure out if I was only being polite.

"Really," I said.

She smiled, then half-shrugged and
sank back down again.

"How are you doing?" Min
said.

How
was
I doing? I had to think about
that. It's (still) not that I had second thoughts or last-minute
jitters about the wedding. When it came to my feelings, nothing had
changed: I wanted to marry Kevin, full stop.

But I felt weird about something —
something more than the atmospheric pressure — and I couldn't quite
figure out what it was. It wasn't the fact that Kevin had fallen
asleep before we could have hot, premarital sex — that was such a
small deal it wasn't even worth mentioning to Min and
Ruby.

"Well, I'm still not being
neurotic in
any
way," I said, and Min smiled, and Ruby grinned too when she
realized this had to be some kind of in-joke between us. "Honestly,
this weekend has been fantastic. Seriously, last night? That was
incredible. I felt so connected to everyone."