The Mating of Michael (11 page)

“God, I’d be thrilled!” Michael said enthusiastically.

James grunted. “Have you ever thought about writing?”

“Me? Oh, no. I’m a committed consumer. It’s just that I’ve read so much sci-fi. When I was in high school, I read all the time. It was an escape valve, you know? I even read about fifty of those
Star Trek
books. I dream in Klingon.”

“You might not want to admit that out loud.”

“I think it’s best for people to know the worst about each other, don’t you?” Michael said, batting his eyelashes. “I still read a lot of sci-fi, but these days I also read, well, romance.”

James guffawed. “Really? Like roguish lords and buxom serving wenches, that kind of romance?”

Michael hesitated, biting his lower lip in a move that was far too awkwardly endearing. “Um, more like cowboy foreman falls for runaway gay boy sorts of romances. And a little BDSM.”

“Oh-ho!
I
see. Now I’ve got your number.”

Michael looked embarrassed. “No, I don’t really… I mean in real life, I don’t do that. I read BDSM once in a while, but honestly, I prefer the sweeter romances.”

“Sure. I believe you. Bondage Ben.”

“Stop it.” Michael laughed.

“Cracky McCracken.” James flicked an invisible whip.

“I am not! I’m more like Nick Normal.”

“Nipple Clamp Ned.”

“Vince Vanilla.”

James gave him a dubious look and snorted. “I doubt that very much.”

Michael shrugged with an evil little smile. “Well, maybe not entirely vanilla.”

James swallowed. “So… what do you like about sweet romances?”

Michael thought about it. “I like the idea of two characters who are both caught up in their own lives and with their own problems and seeing how they meet and how they figure out they’re meant to be together. I dunno. It sort of fascinates me, I guess. I mean, how do you meet
the one
, and how do you know that you have?”

James made a face. “I don’t really think about it.”

“You don’t?”

James looked at Michael, wondering how he could be so dense. “Not likely, is it?”

But Michael shot him a troubled glance with those big brown eyes. “Why isn’t it likely?”

James got a flash of annoyance so he looked out the window at the passing pine trees. They were off the freeway now, and the scenery was lushly wooded. Pretending to be interested in the view was a good excuse to not answer. He knew Michael wasn’t being merely obtuse, that he meant it sincerely, but it still hurt.

“So sci-fi… what other authors do you like?” he asked, changing the subject.

I
T
TURNED
out Michael’s secret destination was Mt. Rainier. As they wound up the mountain on curvy roads, the views mesmerized James. Sometimes, the road dropped away steeply, seemingly just a few feet outside his passenger seat window, revealing the tops of pine trees and deep gullies. It was stunning.

“Does this make you nervous?” Michael asked.

James looked at the sheer drop and realized it might make some people anxious. But not him. It reminded him of being in a plane or—a spaceship, that sense of exhilaration and freedom, of slipping the surly bonds of Earth.

“I love it,” he said honestly. “I’ve never been here before.”

“Never?”

James shook his head.

“Wow. You need to get out more.”

Tell me about it.
It did feel good to get away from home and see something new. It felt… invigorating. He could feel some of the cobwebs in his mind blowing away.

They parked at Paradise. It was crowded with cars and visitors. Michael pulled in near a set of restrooms, which, James was relieved to see had a blue handicapped accessible sign on them.

“We should probably hit the restrooms first. They have a paved trail we can take to the lower meadows. I brought stuff for a picnic.”

James looked in the backseat where an overstuffed backpack awaited. “You’re starting to worry me. Rainier, a picnic…. How am I supposed to compete when it’s my turn? I’ve got pizza and TV. That’s what I’ve got.”

James was joking, but as soon as he said it, he wished he could take it back. There was no reason to assume Michael would want to hang out again.

But Michael laughed. “Pizza and TV sound perfect to me. Also Heinlein and underwear.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Let’s go.”

U
SING
THE
restroom was something James had worried about ever since Michael invited him for an outing. But it turned out to be fine. James kept a backpack hooked on the back of his wheelchair, and it contained a number of essential items. One was a plastic urinal with a screw cap. But he would rather die than use it in front of Michael. Fortunately, the restroom had a handicapped stall that he could wheel into and shut the door.

As a man, it was not very easy to pee while sitting on a toilet, and even with the bars in the handicapped stalls, it wasn’t all that convenient to get in and out of the chair. He could do it when he absolutely had to, but it was a bit of overkill for peeing. Neither could he stand to pee like any other man. The small urinal he carried was basically a clear plastic jug with a thin neck and cap. It allowed him to pee in his chair. He did that, then poured it into the toilet and flushed it down. Normally, he would rinse the urinal in the sink afterward, but he wasn’t going to do that in a public restroom, especially not with Michael anywhere in the vicinity, so he just screwed the lid back on tight and put it in his backpack.

Michael was waiting for him, leaning up against the wall. James felt a flash of disappointment that he had missed Michael using the regular urinals, and perhaps a chance to get a covert glimpse. He thought it and then immediately kicked himself in the ass for thinking it. He made his living from his imagination, but sometimes, it got a little too randy for his own good. He rolled over to the handicap sink and washed his hands.

“Ready to go?” Michael asked.

“Lay on, MacDuff.”

A ranger pointed out the accessible trail into the lower meadows. They went up the trail for a quarter mile or so. There was a slight incline, and Michael teased James about taking it easy by using the electric chair, so James leaned back, put one arm over the backrest, and drove with his other thumb like he was cruising in some big-ass old car.

“You’re just begging for me to get in your lap, you know,” Michael said coyly. Flirting, it was called. Damned if it wasn’t.

“The motor is only certified for five pounds more than me,” James deadpanned.

Michael snorted.

“So I have to be very careful whilst grocery shopping. Or bowling.”

Michael just laughed.

They found a good spot, and James watched as Michael unzipped the ponderously pregnant backpack he carried and took out a blanket, spread it, and then removed a couple of paper-wrapped sandwiches and a few small bags of Sunchips and cans of soda.

“I wanted to bring wine, but I’m honestly such a lightweight. I figured driving down the mountain sloshed was not a good idea.”

“I appreciate that. I always hoped that when my time came, I could die in battle.” James rolled the chair as close to the blanket as he could and looked at it—and suddenly felt a bit ill. He could crawl out of the chair onto the ground. But it wouldn’t be graceful or pretty. He wondered if he could get away with staying in the chair.

“Can I give you a hand?” Michael asked.

“Um….”

“I’m stronger than I look.” Michael leaned over the chair and put his hands on the arms. Inches away, he stared into James’s eyes.

James’s protests, which were about to come out fast and furious, disintegrated on his tongue. Fuck. Michael’s baby browns reached right down inside him and flipped the switch on his inner furnace, just like that.
Whoosh.

“Besides, I
am
a nurse,” Michael said. He made a funny face, crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue, which immediately took the sting out of it. James laughed despite himself.

“Uh… I… suppose?”

James sounded exactly as hesitant as he meant to, but Michael ignored that. In a flash, he ran his hands under James’s arms and around his back and pulled James up. For a brief moment, James was on his feet, chest to chest with Michael, feeling the solid warmth of him against his front. He was taller than Michael by several inches, and Michael’s gaze seemed to be fixed on his lips. Michael hesitated a few seconds longer than he should have, long enough to make heat flush James’s body, but then he turned and lowered James gently to the blanket and released him.

James steadied himself with his hands, his pulse racing. God, that had been way, way,
way
too much—too embarrassing, too feeble, too much contact and… it had felt too good to be pressed against Michael even for a moment. So good he couldn’t even be mad about it the way he wanted to be. God, he was such a pathetic virgin.

“So… what’s for lunch?” he asked, refusing to look at Michael.

Michael sat cross-legged on the blanket and unwrapped the two brown parcels. “For sandwiches, I’ve got ham and lettuce or cream cheese and veg. I wasn’t sure what you liked.”

“Either is fine.”

Michael rolled his eyes. “Oh, no. You must choose, padawan.”

James pulled a coin from his pocket. “Let’s leave it in the hands of the gods. Shall heads be cheese? Cream cheese, that is?”

Michael chuckled. “Naturally. And that leaves tails for meat. That works.”

“You’re sick.”

“You have no idea. Flip it.”

James did, caught it, and smacked it on his forearm. “Tails. I’ll take the ham, please.”

Michael waggled his eyebrows. “I wasn’t hoping you’d take my—”

“Don’t say it.”

“—ham sandwich,” Michael finished innocently. “What?”

James rolled his eyes. “That was way harder than it should have been.”

“That’s what he said.”

James took half the veg-and-cream-cheese sandwich and stuffed it into Michael’s mouth to shut him up. Michael grinned around the bread and then ate with an air of absolute virtue.

They ate in silence for a bit, and James started to calm down enough to really take in the view. He could not believe how stunningly beautiful the place was, with the white peak of Rainier
right there
against the deep blue sky, the purple and pink wild flowers, green pines, and stunning view over the rolling valley and distant jagged peaks. It was hard to believe it was real. It made him feel happy to be alive in a way he hadn’t felt in a very, very long time. And he was here with a beautiful boy, too. Even if this was as good as his life could get, he’d sign the contract with the devil right now.

“Is it a spinal injury?” Michael asked softly, breaking the peaceful quiet. “If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s fine.”

Weirdly enough, James found he didn’t mind talking about it. Maybe it was looking at all this majesty, at the heights nature could achieve. It gave him a sense of being just one more tiny instance of life on this earth, imperfect but created nonetheless. It gave him a little bit of distance from which to view himself as a curiosity.

“It was polio.”

“Wow. Really.” Michael sounded surprised and sad. “I didn’t know people our age got polio anymore.”

James cleared his throat. “My mother was a free spirit, a hippie. She loved to travel. I was born in Tibet, actually. She specifically went there to have me due to the spiritualism of the place, I guess. She says I was conceived in Spain, or it might have been Majorca. She wasn’t real sure. I never knew my father.”

“She sounds like quite a character.”

“Yup.” James fiddled with his soda can. “She traveled with me papoose style when I was a baby. We hung out in Austria for a bit, on a small commune. Then when I was five, she took me to India.”

“Oh.” The weight in Michael’s voice said it all.

“Yup. That’s where I got sick.”

Michael scooted closer and leaned a forearm on James’s shoulder. It was something James maybe would have objected to, normally. But sitting in the sun in this beautiful spot talking, it just felt sort of companionable—and comforting without being pitying. James let him keep it here.

“Both of your legs were paralyzed by the polio virus?”

James nodded. “Polio is weird, you know? Some people who get it don’t end up with anything worse than flu symptoms. Others spend their lives in an iron lung. When it infects the spinal cord, the damage can end up in different parts of the body, like a bloody roll of the cosmic die,” he finished dryly. “Someone once told me I was lucky, but I’m disinclined to feel fortunate.”

“Did you and your mom come back to the States afterward?”

James finished the drink and crushed the can. “Yeah, we did. Uh, maybe now would be a good time to say ‘I don’t want to talk about it.’”

M
ICHAEL
WANTED
to push, to learn more about James’s family, to hear about what it was like growing up with his disability. But James had suddenly gone stiff, his voice remote, and Michael knew any more questions would be unwelcome. So he took a couple of breaths to let his curiosity go.

Without really thinking about it, he took James’s hand. It was a sort of
I’m sorry if I pushed
and, Michael hoped,
I’m sorry about the polio too, but it doesn’t matter to me
. Whatever message James chose to read into it, he didn’t pull his hand away. But he did turn his head aside, as if he didn’t want Michael to see his face.

There was something so vulnerable about James in that moment. His guard was down, and Michael saw it, saw the bottomless well of loneliness that James hid behind his mercurial mask. Michael’s heart responded immediately, swelling with compassion and practically leaping out of his chest onto James’s lap. The man was so fucking intelligent and so… good at the core, the living heart of him that beat in his writing. Michael could see his shining soul, even if James wore a prickly shell to disguise it. He deserved so much. And Michael wanted to be the one to give it to him, to ease that loneliness, more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life.