Every Time I Think of You (2 page)

I would borrow my mother’s car to visit Everett’s rebellious sister in Pittsburgh. I would secretively drive him into the poorer section of that city where, hooded like a gang member, he would purchase marijuana. I would commit several minor crimes in the service of our almost unstoppable appetite for having sex in unusual places. I would collude with Everett to drive his mother to the point of hysteria. I would nearly ruin my chances for a college scholarship by staying up into the early morning hours with Everett the night before a placement exam. I would connive and conspire, break and enter.

I would learn the varying temperature of erratic desire, the caloric output of longing, and the previously undefined and eventually unbearable weight of first love.

Chapter 3

Accepting Everett’s invitation to see his bedroom, my consent was irrelevant as he bounded up the two-tiered staircase of his family’s mansion. As I followed, I became distracted, not so much by the house itself, but the collective history displayed on its walls.

Leading up the stairs, a series of mostly chronological images began with some sepia portraits of men with old-fashioned mustaches and dark suits, and women in laced gowns with doll-like infants on their laps. More recent family photos of his parents’ wedding, baby pictures and formal family portraits included Everett as a toddler, then a young boy, and more recently, his smiling face in a private school jacket and tie. A girl, then a young woman whom I assumed was his sister, projected a carefree disposition. Images of his father, who shared Everett’s dark hair and good looks, were paired with photos of his mother. Amid the changing hairstyles, a somewhat stern and determined look grew over time in her eyes. The last and most recent photos excluded his father altogether.

My perusal of the portraits was interrupted. “Come on,” Everett called from the top of the stairs.

Due to his frequent absence at private school, his room looked more like a boy museum, cluttered up by his recent return visit, as if an indigent had snuck into an archive and taken up lodging. Family photos, framed clippings of sports articles with a team photo, and a school pennant, seemed almost cliché. The only modern element was a poster from the Styx album
Grand Illusion
, which displayed a surreal image of a female face inside the silhouette of a rider on a horse, standing in between some intricate tree trunks.

Everett casually dropped his damp sweatpants on the floor. Helen had castigated him for not immediately changing when we’d entered the house; he’d ignored the command. I prepared myself for, and pretty much expected, another embrace.

Instead, Everett, completely naked, held out his hands like a comedian closing his show in a sort of “Ta da!” moment, then continued getting dressed before I could consider applauding.

I turned away from the sight of his beautiful body to look over his shelf of trophies. I removed my glasses (I’m nearsighted; it’s distances that appear blurry) to see that Lacrosse, Debate Team, and Latin Club President were among his accomplishments, the last of which he proved by reciting something at my request; “
Vescere bracis meis
.”

“Which translates to?” I asked.

“Eat my shorts.”

Because his school was private, and miles away, I’d never read of his deeds in our local newspaper. But it was his last name that struck me.

“Forrester? Are you
the
Forresters?”

“I’m not
the
Forrester. I’m
a
Forrester. My great-grandfather’s the one you’re thinking of.”

Isaac Forrester, with some allegedly ill-obtained funds from investors of questionable repute, had bought up every stretch of land that is now the ritzy section of town and named it all after himself.

The only parts left undeveloped were the public park and the strip of trees separating Forrestville’s residents from the surrounding neighborhoods.

I didn’t feel the need to speak. The few other boys whose bedrooms I’d visited had made me feel obligated to fill the non-sexual awkwardness of budding friendship with chatter about anything and everything. These had been pimpled fellow science lab nerd acquaintances for whom I’d felt no desire, other than to corroborate homework notes.

Despite this, it being his bedroom (I would yet see his dormitory, a more primal and ripe environment, I hoped), I felt what Everett would later bluntly say of my own bedroom, “I wanna sneak in here and hump every surface.”

As he finished changing into a sweatshirt with the name and emblem of Pinecrest Academy, I sat on a chair at his desk, secretively looking for some small memento to pilfer.

“We should go into Pittsburgh. I want you to meet my sister, Holly,” Everett said with sudden enthusiasm.

“We could take the train,” I suggested. “I’ve done that a few times. It’s only, like, an hour.”

Actually, I’d only done that a few times with my mom when I was a kid. We had gone shopping before Christmas while Dad was at work, before she got her own car. I remembered the trips as special adventures as we’d chosen gifts for Dad. I don’t remember ever believing that Santa brought presents, but that they were shipped by rail. Even my own gifts were rarely surprises after the time I was eight. I’d begun making little lists of potential gifts, arranged by price and referring page numbers according to whichever catalogs we had in the house. Clearly, I had inherited my dad’s accountancy skills.

Everett interrupted my thoughts with, “Don’t you have a car?”

I resisted the urge to snap, “Don’t you have a chauffeur?”

“I don’t have a driver’s license, see,” Everett said. “Never got one.” That would prove to be one of many lies Everett told me; inconsequential, all of them, compared to one great lie.

“Why do you want to visit your sister?” I asked, in an attempt to divert him from my uneasiness in asking to take a family car into Pittsburgh. “Why isn’t she here?”

“Oh, she stopped by for Christmas, but she works. She was done with the ‘holly jolly’ jokes a long time ago. And well, you know, sitting around with the family gets tiresome after the big day.”

I did know, but in a different way. My mother’s brother and his wife ended up becoming the most fertile of pairings in our peasant lineage. After their fifth child, they bought a huge home in a suburban development outside of Scranton whose square footage probably matched Everett’s home, but whose design and décor more resembled a Days Inn.

They became the default holiday host, since their assembled entourage didn’t export well. We endured the four-hour trek across Pennsylvania on usually snowy roads. My father’s parents were annually retrieved from a retirement village outside of Scranton. I disliked a few of my much younger cousins, for reasons that involved their habits of screeching, violent dares with toy weapons usually aimed at me, and their infrequent bouts of projectile mucous.

Understandably, my parents and I spent the remainder of our holiday recovering by reading books and generally enjoying a rather non-Christmasy Christmas.

It was Wednesday. The new year approached on Sunday, and a new semester would begin the next week. I’d just abruptly become a man, of sorts. I hadn’t left the town border in months, aside from a Kansas concert at Three Rivers Stadium with a herd of the guys on the cross country team.

Everett beguiled me with his sudden anticipation. The fact that he was so quickly adhering me to his family, his life and his plans, was heartening and so unlike the post-coital rejection I’d expected.

While that opportunity had little appeal to me, the potential trip posed a problem. How was I to explain the request for my mother’s aged Plymouth? I’d borrowed it for countless errands, done more for her with it, and never so much as scratched or dinged a fender. A few times, Dad had cautiously let me drive his newer Pontiac, but the majority of those trips had been local.

I enthusiastically shared with Everett the scheme that a visit to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History would suffice. I would have to check on their holiday hours, be sure of which exhibit we’d pretend to see, then perhaps actually stop by and purloin a brochure as evidence.

I would invent, and perhaps even create, an extra credit report needed for what I suddenly foresaw, and hoped for, as compensation for a spring semester full of delinquent exploits with Everett. I’d have to take notes to prove my research was well done. As a part-time stenographer for a small law firm, my mother often perused my homework notes for their efficiency. I wasn’t getting a possible full scholarship without years of mildly persistent parental coaching.

As all these concocted plans ran through my head, I failed to notice that I was being casually seduced by my host.

Everett had turned on his stereo, preset with a small stack of LPs. Fleetwood Mac’s
Rumors
began to play. He flopped down on his bed, bounced up once while scooting to one side, patted the other, coaxing me to join him like some newly trained pet.

Glancing down at the damp remnants of melted snow at my pants cuffs, I remembered that he did have a housekeeper, after all, and with an attempted gesture of élan, I plopped myself down beside him.

I didn’t want to force myself on him again. But after a few minutes of the both of us simply staring at the ceiling, our legs and elbows touching, Stevie Nick’s nasal voice warning that ‘players only love you when they’re playing,’ I did.

Leaning up and over, I brought my lips to his, and with equal abruptness, Everett’s face and mine collided. A chuckle, a lip wipe with tongues, and our mouths slurped together like sea anemones.

Everett slipped his finger between us to wipe away a liquid that I realized was dripping from his nose. Our bodies were literally melting after being outdoors.

Our embraces led to some awkward fumbling on my part. I instinctively understood Everett to be the more experienced. I understood sex, having read pretty much anything I could find in books. Two years earlier, I’d gotten a special library card at the local branch of Penn State given to high school honor students. From what I’d read, I knew what I was, and what men did with each other, in theory. In practice, I fumbled.

Our hands, much warmer now, and not gloved, grasped each other’s erections while under the confines of undershorts, and in Everett’s case, a fresh pair of sweat pants.

He being the host, and more nimbly fitted for undressing, Everett pried himself from me, rose up to kneeling, shucked down his sweatpants, his erection bouncing free. But as I grasped it like a handle, he scooted awkwardly off the bed, sweatpants at his knees in a comic waddle, softly locked his bedroom door, waddled back, and directed his cock at my face.

The next few minutes were an unrefined series of positions that failed to make my mouth accommodate his stubby girth and my lack of oral technique.

Sighing with mild disappointment, Everett pulled out of my mouth and seemed to decide that I could learn by example. He straddled over me and clamped his mouth around my dick. I hadn’t a clue about relaxation or sexual response delaying techniques, nor, I suppose, should I have. His version done to me felt much more enthusiastic.

Everett shoved his mouth down further upon me, my moans of pleasure silenced by him stuffing himself atop my mouth, his legs shifting to either side of my head. After a few yanks of his sweatpants, finally, we fit together. This gave me an up-close view of his butt, which enticed me to explore that option. But before I could share more than a few playful rubs and finger-pokes, we were busy exploding.

The act of swallowing his bursts shocked me at first. Despite my attempt to move my hips away from his face, he was determined to do it to me. Besides, I would have otherwise left his bed splattered with evidence. Most important, he tasted pretty good, like glue, salt and sugar.

His appreciative gesture made me laugh with relief. Everett collapsed opposite me, then used his tongue to wipe his mouth. “Mmm. Cream of Reid.”

We were partially clothed, arms wrapped around each other, half-sleeping in a tingling bliss, the stereo already on to another LP (Steely Dan) by the time Helen knocked on the door to announce that she had his laundry. Everett calmed me with a shouted, “Leave it outside, please,” a cozy faux-yawn, and a sleepy smile, followed by a soft kiss.

I hastily dressed, then found my glasses, looked around for my boots before remembering they were downstairs in the doorway. The thought of facing his housekeeper, wondering if she would know or conjecture what had happened between us, worried me.

“So, stay for dinner?”

“Uh, no. Thanks.”

“So, then. Saturday?” Everett was already preparing to escort me downstairs, as if he’d known that enduring dinner with his family, or whatever there was of his family, would be preposterous. I longed to walk back through those woods and stomp in the snow for joy, to lick my lips with what, or whom, I’d eaten. I wanted to avoid contact with other people, to savor this sacrament, my belated holiday gift.

As if sensing my apprehension at more introductions or staff encounters, Everett quietly led me down the stairs and through the momentarily empty kitchen.

“Shh. I was trying to–” Everett looked me up and down like a coach whose rookie player left him slightly disappointed. “I’ll come to visit you tonight. Helen’s cooking leftovers anyway.”