“Uh, no,” Scott said, and Carver laughed. “Anyway, I wrote this song that’s like… It’s not bad, it’s just me feeling sorry for myself. Stuff about sitting awake at night, feeling like I was the only person in the world.” He cleared his throat. “That, uh, that part was about you. When I first got out there, the nights felt really long, and I just… I regretted that we parted on shitty terms, ‘cause I didn’t even feel like I could pick up the phone and call you, and I wanted to. Not with an agenda, just to talk to you.”
“You could have,” Carver muttered.
“I almost did on 9/11,” Scott said. “I knew your parents both still worked in the city, and I wanted to make sure you guys were alright. But I pussied out, I called Letty instead. Sometimes I wonder about, you know. If I’d called you.”
A melancholy settled over them. Scott fell quiet, and Carver stayed that way, feeling twisted up in his chest. The roar of crickets took back the air.
“I wouldn’t know how to respond to that either,” Scott added, his tone lighthearted.
“You could have called,” Carver murmured.
“Yeah? You’d have picked up?
“Yeah, I’d have fucking — on 9/11? Yeah, man.”
“Alright. Good to know, I guess.”
They sat in uncomfortable silence for a moment.
“You know,” Carver burst out, “I’ve been hearing a lot about you and women. Any men ever break your heart?”
“Just you. The guys after you were just hookups.”
Carver turned to him, closed the distance between them and kissed him again. Scott kissed him back, reaching up to grab him by the face. They fell down into the grass together, and Scott climbed on top of him.
This time it felt like a dream. Scott got the pants off both of them with such finesse that it was as if they just fell away. Suddenly the cool grass was against Carver’s ass, and he spread his legs, and Scott’s hard dick slid into him again while he gasped. Scott wasn’t even using spit, he was using his own cum as lube. Carver ached but he loved it, he could not distinguish the ache from the deep satisfaction of taking Scott into himself.
Scott started to fuck him hard again, and Carver dug his nails into his back, raking them downward. He didn’t mean to talk dirty again but couldn’t help it; they just spilled out of him, these incoherencies about his body belonging to Scott. Now Scott said them back, his voice hoarse, and Carver’s dick throbbed. For the moment they could say this shit and mean it. On these three acres of land they had property rights to each other. Scott wrapped himself around Carver as he fucked him, stroking his hair and face, seeming hungry and greedy the way he had before.
It dawned on Carver slowly — like he was recognizing someone walking toward him from a distance — that he could tell how much Scott liked him by the way he was fucking him. This was not how you fucked someone you were attracted to but didn’t like or merely tolerated. Carver had fucked and beenfucked by people for whom those feelings were mutual, and this was a different beast. The power animating Scott’s body was a tender and reverent one, and he was clearly trying to make this last, willing himself not to come.
What bewildered Carver was that he felt the same way. He’d expected to see Scott and not know him anymore, or to encounter the moderately deranged caricature he’d made of him in his head over the years — a sentient guitar slathered in pussy, a cigarette riding a moped, Bob Dylan without the fame or credentials. Maybe he’d even hoped for this, because if Scott had stiffened into caricature then Carver could have dismissed him easily.
But maybe Scott liking him back meant he hadn’t stiffened into caricature either. Suddenly Carver wanted to believe that he was still soft, just as sincerely as he had always wished to become hard. He wanted to be loose and free and pliable. He loved feeling Scott this deep in him, working him open from inside out. They had fucked their way into a beautiful new stage where Carver felt each thrust as a hard pulse in his own dick, like Scott was somehow jerking him off from inside himself.
Then Carver shifted in the grass, lifting his thighs, and got them in a position where Scott was pounding right into his prostate. He clawed Scott’s back and bit a vicious hickey into his shoulder to stop himself from screaming, even though he wanted so badly to. As much as he had forgotten about his family, a primordial instinct in his brain continued to warn him there were enemies down below. Instead he moaned and gasped and panted and bit and clawed until he came, and then he went white-hot everywhere and clung to Scott trembling while Scott moaned in his ear as if this had brought him to the brink too.
The tremble in Carver subsided as he rode petering waves until they released him onto the shore. As his orgasm faded it left sparkling smears against the backdrop of his closed eyelidsand a sweet tingle in all his muscles. This ease was a far superior cousin to the kind Xanax gave him — that dry, chemical sedation which felt like a nap at the lip of death. A good orgasm was invigorating, heartening, like exercise endorphins. He felt the way he did when he finished running a race and was led to a chair and given a space blanket and banana, then congratulated and petted and allowed to rest.
Scott groaned and tensed all over, his muscles flexing, then collapsed on Carver and buried his face in his shoulder. Carver reached a hand up to stroke the back of his neck, tangling it in his long wavy hair. Scott’s weight was crushing in a delightful way — a warm slab of man ballasting him to the cool earth. Carver continued to stroke Scott’s hair and body as he stared at the treetops overhead, which were faintly illuminated by ambient light and the crescent moon. Their breathing and heartbeats slowed back down in tandem.
As their sweaty skin cooled, they started to get cold at the same time. Scott pulled out of him, leaving him devastatingly empty again, and rolled off him so he could start putting on his clothes. Carver followed suit, suddenly feeling numb in his extremities, his hands clumsy. His hair, which he’d so carefully swept back from his face and fixed in place with product about ninety minutes ago, was all fucked up and falling in his eyes now. Scott beat him to getting dressed and leaned against a tree, smoking another cigarette.
“Alright,” Carver said as soon as he’d superficially put himself back together. Under his clothes he didn’t feel gathered at all. He was, as his maternal grandmother liked to say, at sixes and sevens. “Uh, just to make sure, you’re clean, right?”
Scott exhaled smoke. “Good question to ask after I came in you twice.”
“Uh-huh, uh-huh. I didn’t see you looking for a condom, buddy.”
“Because I knew I didn’t have one,” Scott said, and Carver laughed. “Yeah, I’m clean. You?”
“Yeah. And you’re still the only guy I’ve ever fucked raw.”
Scott gave him a low-lidded look, then pulled the collars of his shirt and flannel aside to expose his left shoulder. “How bad is it?”
“It?” Carver got closer, taking his phone out, but Scott grimaced.
“Don’t shine that thing in my eyes,” he muttered. “Here…” He got the lighter back out and flicked it on so the flame illuminated his lat muscle. In the center of it, right above Scott’s collarbone, there was an ugly maroon hickey forming around a bite mark.
