Chapter Seventeen
David
The last thingI remember before I fell asleep last night was holding Joel’s hand as he mumbled away about all sorts of random things until he could no longer string a sentence together and probably fell asleep himself shortly after.
The loud sound of a tractor was enough to jolt me awake, but the awkward position I’d slept in made it difficult to get up fast enough to get out of the car and ask for help. Joel was still asleep with his hair sticking up at all angles, making him look all kinds of sexy.
Being stranded in the middle of the countryside wasn’t how I’d imagined spending the first night of our holiday, but I wasn’t going to complain when making love to Joel under the stars was now the new highlight of my life.
Making love was unequivocally what we’d done. From the moment Joel nodded his consent while making sure I was ready to take the next step, it became more than getting him off and doing something I’d never done to another man.
Exploring Joel’s body, I felt like the Portuguese ancestors who discovered the New World. Land was still land, water was still water, and people had the same number of limbs, but Joel was my New World. His body was so similar to mine but also so different.
He was slimmer and taller, his skin was a lighter shade, no doubt from all the time he spent indoors in the city. The part of Joel that was new was his reaction to each of my touches. For all my tentative and unsure strokes, kisses, and licks, Joel reacted as though I’d been doing this forever. That we had been doing this forever and each time was better than the last.
I suddenly found the confidence I didn’t know I had, but I also knew that I wasn’t suddenly a pro at sucking dick. The fact Joel had enjoyed it so much given my inexperience meant that we were beyond the no-strings-attached summer fling we’d agreed to, whether we acknowledged it or not.
I couldn’t start to unravel what it all meant, so I decided to do the only thing I could. Try to get us back to the hotel.
I gently stroked Joel’s face to wake him up. His eyes scrunched up as though he wasn’t too pleased with being woken up. I chuckled.
“Shut up,” he said with a groggy voice and indignation. “I was in the middle of a dream, and you ruined it.”
“I’d like to be sorry, but we need to find a way out of here before it gets too hot.”
“It was already too hot, but you stopped it, you ruiner of hot, sexy dreams.” He pouted.
I leaned over to his side of the car and kissed him, gently at first, but when his tongue came out to lick my lips, I couldn’t resist having a taste.
“Tell me about your dream.”
“Not as hot as your kiss, even though Matt Bomer was in it.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.” I gave him another quick kiss and made my way out of the car.
It took us a while to figure out how to pop the hood to see if we could find out what the problem was. I didn’t know the first thing about cars, so I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at.
“You’re Portuguese. Can’t you find a way to fix the car?” Joel said as though this qualified me to do it.
“Well, you’re half Portuguese. Can’t you half fix the car?”
We looked at each other and laughed.
I knew what he meant. Most of my friends would know what was wrong with the car just by looking at it. I was sure it wasn’t an exclusive trait to the Portuguese people, but everybody always seemed to just know stuff. I’d recently overheard two middle-aged women in my café talking about the plumbing in their bathroom and how the guy they got to fix it had done a poor job.
The few friends I had who would know how to fix the car had learned those skills from their dads. Growing up without a father meant I learned other skills from my mom. Even my uncle had never been interested in typically male activities. For as long as I’d known him, he’d been attached at the hip to my aunt, working in the café and taking as much of the hard work from her as he could. In my view, it was the only redeeming quality he had.
“Look!” Joel called out and raised his arms, waving wildly at an approaching pickup truck.
The truck pulled up in front of our car and a man in his mid-fifties wearing a well-worn and paint-stained polo shirt and jeans walked up to us.
“Bom dia,” the man drawled in his Alentejo accent, slow and relaxed as though he didn’t have anywhere else to be. “Do you need help?” he asked.
“Bom dia, the car stopped last night. We don’t know what’s wrong,” I explained.
He asked if we could try starting the car. Joel went behind the wheel and turned the key. The engine cranked but didn’t start.
“It looks like your battery is dead. I have the cables to jump-start it. Do you know where you need to go?”
