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The sunlight woke them, both men naked and clinging to one another like pieces of driftwood keeping them afloat. The golden light spilled through the plate glass windows and reflected off the paint of his white walls.
Chase stirred first. His lids fluttering to open with the desperation of a moth, but the bright light stung and made his eyes water.
He pushed back his bangs and slid his other arm out carefully from under Aaron’s head, trying not to wake him.
“Don’t leave me...” Aaron said with a sleepy grin and mock-whine.
“I’m just grabbing my shades from my jacket,” he said with a laugh, pulling himself to the edge of the bed to recover his denim jacket from the floor.
“No....” Aaron took hold of his waist and held on to him. “That’s still too far.”
His voice was boyish and playful. His fingers danced on his hip and thigh, and the reach of Aaron’s legs to keep him close began to give Chase another erection. He pulled his Wayfarers out of the inside pocket and slid them on his face, his eyes relaxing to the dark green tint of the glass.
“That’s better,” he said, sliding back against the old headboard and letting Aaron settle back into the nook of his tattoo-covered arm. “So, what do you want to do today?”
He looked down at him and smiled at the sight of Aaron curled up against him, clinging to him and trusting Chase to hold him in place.
He felt good. For the first time in a long time, Chase Sheppard felt like he could breathe. That even the nightmares could be kept at bay. He felt as if the foreplay and the night they spent dreaming in each other’s arms was able to make amends for that night nearly a decade earlier, when he had ran from Aaron and all that it would have meant if he had stayed.
“Not a goddamned thing.” Aaron said, rolling his soft head of hair against his rib. “I just want to stay here.”
He stretched his fingers across his abdomen, and like a creature, it pulled his arm along behind it, crawling across the fleshy terrain of his stomach like it was a desert, burying itself in the soft trimmed blanket of pubic hair.
His cock stiffened, tenting the soft goose down white comforter as it rose. Chase let his head roll back against the head board and he closed his eyes for just a moment as a great sigh passed his lips, and those fingers wrapped around the shaft of his cock like a spider grasping, pulling him into the warmth of his palm as if it were going to devour.
“We have to leave the bed eventually.” He opened his eyes and watched as Aaron’s hand moved in circular motions beneath the blanket.
Maybe they didn’t have to leave, he thought. Maybe they could stay here in this spring morning with those bright blue skies and the freshness of the glossy white walls and the white bed set, naked and in each other’s arms, feeling their hearts drum against the other.
“Lies,” Aaron responded with a laugh.
“Nothing can last forever,” Chase said, leaning down and kissing the top of Aaron’s head, his hand resting over Aaron’s forehead.
“Childhood’s biggest lie,” Aaron said with a snort.
Aaron began to work him more fervently, as if the urgency—the need and hunger for him—to make the most of the moment had taken hold. They both drifted towards that dark pit again, the place where Bailey dwelled, along with every other broken thing of adolescence, and this was too much and brought up too many truths and too many hurts from the past nine years.
At the moment, Aaron’s mischievous grin and the serpentine movement of his body burrowing under the covers was more than just a decade of pent-up lust and desire; it was an act to save them both from that pit.
Chase let out another sigh—another gasp as Aaron’s lips slid down on him, forgetting everything as he sank into the bed, keeping his hand on the back of Aaron’s head and his eyes on the beams of the ceiling.
It was like a spider’s web, and Aaron indeed was the spider, finding the fly caught in his silken net, ensnaring and entrapping him and sucking him dry.
I’ll gladly be the fly, he thought. I’ll be the fly in Aaron’s web and let him devour me a thousand times.
––––––––
“Do you think they’ll be coming down?” Trish asked while eating a piece of toast that was covered in too much marmalade. She was sitting at the foot of the table, the pocket doors of the dining room open and revealing the foyer behind her.
“Would you?” Sandra asked with a laugh and a raised brow, sitting in black shorts and a t-shirt, the glitter from last night still all over her body and making her brown skin shimmer.
“Good point,” Trish responded.
“So, what happened with Andy?” Tammy asked.
Sandra shrugged.
“I don’t know, I went into Scott’s room, and she was in there crying on the bed.” Scott was the portly gamer nerd whose bedroom Andy had disappeared into the night before.
“Oh, geez,” Christy said. “About what? Aaron?”
Sandra threw her hands up and shook her head. “I don’t know. I saw that mess and I was like, ‘nope, not on my birthday,’ and ran back out to the dance floor as fast as I could.”
The girls giggled and then stopped abruptly, as if knowing they shouldn’t laugh at Andy’s expense.
“Do you think she’s in love with Aaron or something?” Trish asked. She was the one who spent the least amount of time in the house as she was always doing rounds for her internship in the trauma ward of Saint Joseph’s Hospital.
“Oh, yeah, it’s so obvious.” Sandra said.
Tammy nodded and echoed it, bringing her coffee mug with the state of Colorado on it to her lips, her honey hair thick and wild with her curls.
“Do you think Aaron knows?” Christy asked.
“Well, if he didn’t before, I’m sure he would be putting the pieces together now. If he had seen her crying, which I don’t know if he did.” Sandra said with a shrug.
“Well, you’re the closest one to him. Has Aaron ever thought Andy had a crush on him?” Trish asked Tammy.
Tammy shook her head. “I don’t think he had or has any clue.”
She looked away for just a moment. The love and care she had for Aaron was evident on her face and the way her eyes looked off into some phantasmal distance.
“Yeah, no,” she shook her head, bringing herself back to the discussion in front of her. “I think Aaron knows nothing, and all I know of Aaron is what he lets me see.”
Christy said nothing. She did know things. She had spent her entire life in Bellingham and had been a grade higher than Aaron when he arrived at Mariner High School in December of 2000, a strikingly beautiful teenage boy with a shiny soft curtain of brown hair and hazel brown eyes that reflected a constant sadness.
She had never talked to him, and by the end of March, rumors about him began to spread. Some girl named Don claimed to have heard it from Aaron himself, though the ‘who’ and the ‘when’ and the ‘how’ never made it around by the time it reached Christy’s ears in the classroom.
Aaron had walked across the breezeway and passed the windows, and one of Christy’s classmates leaned in and asked, ‘Did you hear about that new kid?’ Christy had told her ‘no’ and from there the tale spilled out. He had killed a kid in middle school. He had been in love with the boy and tried to kiss him in the bathroom and when he defended himself, Aaron had slammed his head into the sink.
The only reason he had gotten away with it was because it had looked like an accident, and Aaron had claimed he was trying to catch the kid and help him. He was covered in the dead boy’s blood. As far as the cops were concerned, it was an accident. The boy slipped and hit his head.
But kids who went to school with him and were there that day said that everyone knew that Aaron was a homo and was always around the dead boy and the dead boy was some really popular kid who had played a lot of sports. As if that would have somehow meant something in regards to Aaron Christopher’s guilt or the dead kid’s innocence.
Christy had never believed it. She knew that for straight people, one person’s heterosexuality versus another’s homosexuality always won out. If they were homosexual and the victims, then they were asking for it, and if a golden god died and a gay kid was involved, even for simply being there, they were guilty. They were desperate and depraved and demonic sexual predators.
Guilt was always presumed.
That was the poison of homophobia and heterosexism. That was the thing that made even liberal-minded straight people second guess leaving their kids alone with—or to sleep over at—a gay friend or relative’s house. That seed of hate and bias by culture for two thousand years, which said that homosexuals were the worst abomination. That they were perverts, deviants, pedophiles, killers, and mentally ill. It was inside every straight person, and for many queers, it was deep inside of them as well.
Christy knew about golden gods. Mariner High School had been a caste system. Their entire culture was built around beauty, strength, and wealth. It never got uglier than when pedigree was involved. South Hill was a different world entirely in Bellingham. Where old-moneyed families lived in their grand Victorians, Tudors, Craftsmans, and Colonials perched atop the hillside overlooking the original shipping port of Fairhaven with a view of the San Juan Islands across the dark and icy waters of Bellingham Bay.
So, yes, she had known all about golden gods and it made her side with Aaron all the more.
It wasn’t long after that that the rumors caught up with Aaron and he left Mariner. He ended up transferring to Bellingham High School, but it didn’t take long for the rumors to reach him there as well.
Everyone knew—or knew of—everyone else in the Whatcom School system and from what Christy remembered from kids she knew at Bellingham, as soon as the story reached their school, Aaron Christopher was phased out of student life. He was shunned by everyone and was often seen eating his lunch alone beneath the steps in the side stairwell.
After that, Christy didn’t know.
He had made it through the school year and she had moved on to spend the summer abroad before returning to start university. She had reflected on him a couple of times, and when he had come knocking on her door to interview for her old room, she had realized who he was almost immediately but had kept her knowledge of him to herself.
Perhaps if she had been out, she would have stood up for him or extended her friendship to him, maybe he would have stuck around.
She did know things and she suspected Chase Sheppard knew things too. If he was able to take away that shadow of pain, then she was glad, and she would continue to protect what she knew, never sharing it with anyone, not even Trish. Whatever his past, he deserved to live a life that was not constantly covered by it, like it had been all that time ago.
There was a distant creak, and then the thudding of bare feet coming down the stairs, growing louder and louder before landing on the first floor and padding in their direction.
They all looked up to see Chase Sheppard enter the dining room, his sculpted body covered in tattoos, most of them portrait work, zombies and horror screen monsters covered his left quad, and Christy could see that it led up under the leg of his tight red briefs, his junk stuffed inside the pouch, and his black bangs covering the sunglasses on his face.
“Morning, ladies,” he said with a playfully confident smirk, as if trying to act as if he wasn’t completely embarrassed by running into all of them hanging out around the dining table with him in his undies.
“Good morning!” Tammy and Sandra said with a laugh.
They all watched him standing there with his back to them as he poured the coffee. His muscular backside was covered in one great scene depicting a swirl of crows in black moving in a torrent of talons and feathers around a great tree with naked branches and dozens of skulls hanging from the limbs.
At the foot of the tree was a great monument—like a gravestone—chipped, cracked, and splattered red, with the Roman numerals IVXIVMCMXCVIII engraved in the stone. Everything was shaded in black with the exception of a deluge of deep red droplets that came down on everything.
“So, don’t take this as me suddenly switching teams, but you got a great butt!” Sandra remarked.
Chase let out a laugh and flexed his buttocks, the red cotton pulling up slightly and revealing the contours of his ass.
“Sandra!” Christy shouted. She closed her eyes and pinched the bridge of her nose while snickering.
Chase turned halfway around on the ball of his left foot and grinned at Sandra.
“Why, thank you.” He pulled his glasses down from his eyes and gave her a wink before sliding them back up on his face and grabbing the two mugs full of coffee for Aaron and him.
As Chase made his way quickly back through the dining room, strutting with the confidence of a man who knew he had nothing to be ashamed of and that the women held no carnal interest in him, Tammy sat up and shouted his name.
“Yeah?” He stopped and looked at her.
“We’re all going to go to Dos Padres later. It’s in Fairhaven. Been there forever. We usually go there on Sunday nights to let it all out before the Monday grind. You should come.”
Chase smiled and gave his head a nod. “If it’s cool with Aaron, I would love to.”
“Great.” Tammy said with a smile and then she took another sip of her coffee.
They watched him walk away, and then listened as his feet stalked up the steps and waited till he was out of earshot before speaking again.
“We’re gonna grill him, right?” Sandra asked Tammy.
“Oh, definitely.”
They all broke out into a chorus of laughter and continued to talk about Sandra’s party the night before, all of them glad that Aaron had found someone to help fill up the silence, or to silence the things that seemed to never shut up.