Summer, Eighteen

Alexander Chee

When I was eighteen, I was living at home in Maine for the summer, in between years at college, cycling twenty to twenty-five miles a day, trying to be a vegan vegetarian. So I was tan, mostly on my back from cycling, and had big cycling legs, and broad shoulders left over from swimming in high school, no chest to speak of, and was getting skinny. I wore my dark hair short in a way that stood up. I liked to ride my mountain bike on the beach, and then go swimming in the ocean and not shower after. And I had a requisite dumb summer job, as night manager at a seafood co-op on the restaurant side in a beach town that should remain nameless, on the southern coast of the state.

The co-op had two sides, my restaurant side and then a lobster pound side, and the lobster pound side was run by this guy Steve. Steve had been in the Navy and was out now, had blurry tattoos on his arms, was deeply tanned, and stood slightly shorter than me. He had big-curl biceps and a kind of Prince Valiant haircut. He was part Filipino, part white, with almond-shaped eyes that were bright green, and big white teeth. He smoked a cigarette in the mornings and made coffee in the big coffee-makers on the restaurant side, drinking all of it throughout the day before the restaurant opened at 4 P.M. I know, because I found the remains of his cigarette and the cold grinds. But I didn’t mind. Our paths didn’t cross much at first because of our schedules, him mostly needing to be there late mornings to early dinner, me, dinner to midnight. And then one day, the deck needed painting.

By now it was July, and I had been there a month. I knew he had half a mind to like me because I was half Korean, and to hate me because my mom was rich. I didn’t really care about putting him at ease, and certainly once I found out he had a girlfriend, I stopped thinking of pursuing him, for all the way we had a certain chemistry that was the reason I cleaned up after his morning coffee. So I really didn’t have him on my mind as I rode out there in my car dressed in rugby shorts and a T-shirt and began painting the deck. I’d forgotten to bring a long-handled brush, and being naturally flexible I bent over. I remember thinking it was ridiculous, but I didn’t really dwell on what it looked like until I paused when I got hot, pulled my shirt off to get some color, and then felt more than sunlight on me.

There in the dark smudge shadow of the order counter, behind the mosquito screens, I saw the orange light of a cigarette ember. I saw a big smile. I smiled back. We didn’t say anything.

I went back to painting. I felt him watch me turn. The deck wasn’t very large, really—just four picnic tables outside of a picnic shack that had more picnic tables inside, the whole thing basically being the sort of place where you eat lobster, fried clams, and fries with a view of the ocean. I hosed it all down on a regular basis, high-pressure water and soap. The point the restaurant sat on was really beautiful: slate water, robin’s-egg sky, and clouds going by the size of mountains, like a race of giants running home someplace on the far side of the horizon. Of all of the things I could see, I think I loved the clouds the most, for the way they suggested departures larger than the ones I could make.

He was still watching when I finished the deck and finished looking at the clouds, and so with my shirt in my hands I went in to the takeout area to get some coffee and see if what I thought was happening was really happening. I liked Steve’s flat, angular muscles, his tight T-shirts, liked his green eyes. I pushed the screen door open.

“What’s up?” he said. He pushed his cigarette out and brought a finger up to his lip.

“Coffee,” I said, knowing there would be some, and poured myself a cup. He was looking down, to my sneakers, I thought, but then saw his eyes were a little higher. I crossed my arms on my chest, leaving a thumb under my nipple, for emphasis. There wasn’t a lot of room back there and in order to leave, I realized, he had to pass me. He smiled, as if he could read my mind just then.

“I gotta go back and see what’s going on over there,” he said, and he leaned in close to pass me, and as he did so, he turned to face me, his eyes down, and his left hand steadied himself on me, touching my right hip, the point of it, the fingers spread on my lower back, the thumb pressing into the nerve I didn’t know was there. Something electric left him and burned into me. He walked off, grinning. “See ya later.” The screen door slammed shut. And then I breathed again, shorts heavy, awake.

I washed down the deck and picnic house on weekends. I came in early Sunday that next weekend. I wore big rubber wading boots, big rubber gloves, and an old Speedo bathing suit to do it, and it was actually, truth be told, my favorite part of the job. Part of it was knowing how ridiculous I looked, part of it was that I wasn’t above enjoying the hose spray on a hot day. So I filled buckets with water and detergent and in the muggy early morning I set to tossing the soapy water around the room and deck, took the big brushes and scrubbed until I was sweating, the tables and the floor and the deck, and then started filling the buckets again to rinse. My breathing was returning to normal, and I was aware that my suit was dripping onto the deck under me from sweat, when I became aware of the feeling I now recognized. I didn’t turn this time, though.

I tossed the buckets of water around, and then took the hose and sprayed the foam off the tables and floors, chasing it into the drains, and then went out to the deck, spraying there, still not looking, spraying down the tables and floor there and then turning the hose on myself, raising it above my head, spraying myself down. The cold water took the sweat off me and the soap, and then I shook my head like a dog and looked into the window, where I smiled before bringing the hose up and aiming it through the screen at Steve, catching him full on.

“Fuck!” I heard what sounded like a coffee cup hit the floor and splash. The door swung open. He came around toward me, walking into the full spray of the hose I aimed at him, and I was laughing, backing up. He pushed up to me, knocked me flat on the top of the picnic table behind me, and with an arm pinning me across my chest he pressed all of himself down on me, reaching his arm out the length of mine and grabbing the hose from my hand. He hooked it inside my swimsuit and hit the lever, sending water shooting inside, down the front of us both. I yelled and he put his hand on my mouth. He was rubbing his crotch into mine now, grinning fiercely, and I was pinned to the table, the boots heavy with water now and sliding off, pinned there by my crotch under his and his hand on my mouth. He took the hose and sprayed my chest, hitting the nipples with hard spray blasts. And then he looked around.

“Get in the picnic house,” he said. He let me up. As I turned and he followed, he hooked a finger into the suit, hooking it and pulling it tight as we went inside, and when the door closed, he yanked hard, and it came off. He bent me over the first table inside and pressed me into it, a hand on my neck, his other hand pressed in between my buttocks. He bent down close and ran a tongue along my right butt-cheek and then bit down on it. “Fuck,” he said. “Fuck.”

I heard him undo his buckle. His jeans were soaking wet, his shirt too. He pulled them off, not needing now to hold me down. I looked over my shoulder and he looked deeply back, while he got naked.

He was beautiful, a honey color all over, shiny and smooth. A very little bit of sparse hair crawled up his flat stomach from his wiry bush, where his dick swung out, heavy, brown, and uncut, a pale-pink head showing. “Get on your back,” he said, and I did, and he walked over to where my head was. He tipped my head back off the table’s edge, cradling it in his hand. “Open your mouth.” His dick bobbed up and down and I watched it until it landed in my mouth. He slid it in, and my mouth was dry, I could tell, and he could too, because right then he opened his mouth and a thick string of drool fell out to land on his dry brown dick and splash my mouth, my face. The sudden slipperiness almost made me come. He fucked my face, playing with my body as he did so, running his hands across it until he came back to my crotch. He inserted two fingers then alongside his dick in my mouth, spit down, and then took them and slipped them inside me.

He was filling me from both ends now, trying to get more of himself in my mouth as he widened my hole. And then he pulled out and stood up, looking down at me. Spit was sliding off his dick onto the wet floor, and for a moment it seemed as if the room were wet all over from the play.

He went around to the other side of the table again, picked up his jeans, and pulled his wallet out. He pulled out a condom, ripped it open with his teeth, and slicked it on himself quickly. He grabbed my ankles, pushing them back in one move, and sank his mouth onto my ass, and I felt his tongue plumb through and then him spit inside me. He stood up again and, letting my heels meet behind his neck, he drilled into me, his hands running up and down my thighs as he eased himself inside me, his thick dick sliding in slow and steady. My eyes closed and he pulled me back, my back sliding along the table, and then he climbed up on the table. My knees on my shoulders, he pushed down on the backs of my knees with both hands, lifting my ass into the air, and he shoved again, and then pulled back, and then went on, finding a rhythm. I don’t know how long it went like that, but he fucked me on that table, riding into me hard, and then finally he leaned down and that tongue found my mouth. As his tongue slid all the way into my throat, I came, across my stomach, his chest, and then he pulled out and whipping the condom off sprayed my stomach also, spreading his come with his hand on me, shining me up. He slapped his dick on my thigh three times. “Get up,” he said. “You little fuck.” I stood, somewhat unsteadily, and then he picked up the hose and hit me with it again.

“Ouch! Fuck!” He threw my suit at me. “Put this stupid shit on and clean this up.” He slid on his wet jeans. “We got to work, for Chrissakes.” I pulled the suit on, shivering, amazed, picked up the hose and sprayed down the table, picking the condom up and rolling inside it with my fingers.

I went into the kitchen afterwards, to get a hot coffee, where I found Dave, one of my motorhead heavy-metal-dude kitchen crew members. Lanky, seventeen, long hair, thin mustache. Long lashes around big brown eyes. He stared as I came in. I knew who was going to clean the picnic house next. “Yeah,” I said, telling him about it. “This is what you’ve got to wear.”