Every Time I Think of You (4 page)

“Yes, they did. And I mean you’re very charming. My parents don’t easily take to new people. I think they’re happy I finally have a friend who isn’t a mouth-breather.”

I had smoked pot on three occasions, each of them while en route to rock concerts at Three Rivers Stadium with fellow teammates and a few older boys. Despite my quiet nature, I wasn’t a complete stick in the mud.

“Yes. This–” He shoved himself close to me, forcing a kiss, another cold one. I was beginning to develop a preference for visible exhalations and frozen snot. As our lips parted, he kept his arms around me, cocking his head back to gaze at my face with a jaunty admiration. “I want to have adventures with you. I want more.”

“Okay.” I hesitated, but refrained from glancing around warily. In the middle of the field and the safety of its darkness, I embraced him again fully, kissed him open-mouthed, both of us humming with pleasure, satisfaction and anticipation.

“Besides,” he added, as we finally pulled apart to merely hold gloved hands. “Stoned sex is so fuckin’ amazing!”

He darted away, then turned back toward me in a playful tackle that led to us rolling around in the snow, which was fun until he shoved a handful of it down the back of my pants. As much as I suddenly adored him, laughing, I had to say goodnight and excuse myself, since I was almost literally freezing my ass off.

Chapter 6

I had hoped our drive to Pittsburgh would provide an opportunity for some lengthy intimate conversation that would bond us, and it did. I had also hoped we might even pull over at a rest stop and take advantage of some mythical erotic playground in the woods nearby. That distant possibility had hatched in my mind through some vague innate instinct, and the recent spate of public indecency arrests that had been documented in our local newspaper. It was probably for the better that nothing like that happened.

After a call from Everett’s sister Holly about our accommodations, and the promise of an alcohol-free environment, my mother seemed relaxed about our overnight road trip.

My father expressed some doubts about potential “funny business,” but nevertheless gave me twenty dollars for gas. My mother handed me another twenty, which I discretely palmed, “For food or whatever.” I was also given a stern warning about not drinking, at least while driving. They knew I’d indulged a few times, but remained only mildly concerned, since I’d failed to return home from those few teenage parties completely drunk, and never while driving.

My journey began with picking Everett up at his home. I had hoped to ring the doorbell and be welcomed in like a reputable suitor, in a meager imitation of his previous dinner performance at our house three nights earlier.

Before I had even put the car into park, Everett came dashing out of the front door and down the driveway, wearing a parka with a small duffel bag over his shoulder. He tossed it onto the back seat as he hopped in, slammed the door, and impatiently drummed the dashboard, hooting, “Let’s roll, my man!”

We instantly agreed to shift the meager car stereo away from my mother’s preset stations of public radio and classical music to a few nearby rock stations. Everett’s futile attempts to hone in on a distant university station that he said played jazz (it seemed he actually liked it) resulted in more static than saxophones.

My hints at physical affection, my hand on Everett’s thigh, and my repeated longing glances toward him as I drove, were at first met with a calm acceptance. The purpose of the trip was being together, so why was he so aloof?

I knew quite well which directions to take to get to the highway and which probable exit to take once we approached the city; I-76 to I-376 west, or just I-376 west. My dad said it was more scenic, but my mom said he took the route to avoid the toll roads.

I then understood. Many of the locals in Greensburg, but in particular people in parts of the entire state, had a certain twangy accent that we fortunately lacked. Even in his attempt to cheer me, Everett did it at someone else’s expense. I shook my head, grinning nonetheless.

Was this what having a relationship would be like, backing down to keep the peace, enduring bad jokes? I had no such example from my parents. As long as I could remember, they had never argued. They did tell quite a few bad jokes, though.

“Sort of.” I’d asked a handful of girls out when formal dances required such ruses on a seasonal basis, but none of them more than twice.

“What about the guys on your team?”

“What? Oh, hell, no. They’re … they’re too much like me; loners, kind of. There is one guy, really popular, a pole vaulter. He lives near you, I think.”

“All of us rich brats are jerks in one way or another.” Seemingly determined to change topics, he said, “So, nobody on your team ever…?”

“Oh, no.”

My cross country teammates were vaguely divided into two categories, stoners and nerds, with one lone devout Christian who thankfully limited his preaching to outside practices or tournaments. They never expressed doubts about my sexuality. I never got a hint of flirtation from any of them, possibly because I didn’t offer it myself, and wouldn’t have known how. None were close friends, and I was far from a star athlete, so they didn’t seem to care what I did or didn’t do.

But I wanted Everett to care. I wanted to care about him, and find a common ground that would settle my freshly unleashed affection toward him.

Everett shifted to telling tales of family conflicts and dramas, and the peer pressure and scholastic competition at his pricey school.

“If I don’t keep a four-point-oh, if I don’t get into a ‘top-notch’ school,” his mother’s term, he revealed, “like Carnegie Mellon, I’m sunk. I’d have to go to some state school –no offense– plus, it’s bad enough that neither my sis or me are destined to marry or breed, so we’re basically the end of the family tree, which disappoints them even more.”

“The Forrester tree,” I joked.

He barely smirked in reply. “Which is why,” he scooted closer, turning on the charm, “I do so enjoy a little R and R with my new studly skinny dude.”

“Hey, I’m not skinny.”

He smiled, rubbing his hand on my thigh as he furled his eyebrows with a sort of Groucho Marx innuendo. “I bet you wanna pull over now, doncha?”

“I bet I do,” I replied, slowing the car down, signaling as I pulled to the right lane in between the sparse weekend traffic. The roads were clear of snow, but coated in a crust of road salt.

Everett reached for the radio dial, turned down the volume, and suddenly blasted in a bright a cappella, “Anticipation! An-ti-ci-pay-yay-shun, is makin’ you wait.”

While the Carly Simon song was memorable, it still brought to my mind the ketchup commercial. Like the song, I waited.

For the rest of the drive, I let Everett tell stories that were less serious, laughed at his jokes, asked more questions, fascinated by him as I stole glances at his handsome face. While he continued acting relaxed, I would notice him fidgeting or repeatedly tapping his legs to the beat of the music. Perhaps he was as nervous as I was.

As we approached the city, after a half-serious argument over directions, Everett relented to my preference. Route 30 was the easy side way in, but for the big impact, I cut across one of the bridges, back around through Mount Washington, then drove through the Fort Pitt tunnel. He saw the reason for my determination. We cheered at the fantastic view of the skyline from the front with the three rivers’ convergence into an actual point.

He raised the volume, searched back and forth, half-heartedly fumbling the lyrics to a few hits, until a new mutual favorite’s tinkling piano intro played, The Babys’ “Every Time I Think of You.”

Everett’s singing was so open-throated, so honest, unlike his somewhat rehearsed demeanor with my parents. He turned the volume up high, coaxing me to sing the back-up vocals, albeit a few octaves lower, as he belted out each high note with fervor, occasionally marred by a cracked note, which only endeared him to me more.

“People say a love like ours, will surely pass…”

Hearing him so close to me, the pure mutual joy we shared, must have been what led me to realize I was falling in love with him.

“And every time I think of you…”

“Every time…”

“Every time I
think
of you…”

“Every single time…”

“It always turns out goo-ood!”

Our eyes met for brief moments mid-song. Somewhere in my heart, deep down in my gut, in that moment, in the middle of our hurtling drive through that tunnel, shedding my forgettable previous existence, I became determined for the first time in my small life –and not again, it would turn out, for a long time afterward – to learn how to have and to be a boyfriend.

Chapter 7

Holly’s apartment was less than stately. My assumptions, based on her family’s home and apparent wealth, had misled me. When we arrived, I at first mistook the looming Victorian as entirely hers. Snow lay thinly on lawns and roofs of other homes along the tree-lined block.

As Everett led me into the large foyer of the house, I realized my mistake. The front hallway had a row of half a dozen mailboxes inserted into a wall opposite the stairs. Along the hallway, what had been rooms in an expansive home had been divided into several apartments. Everett led me up the stairs and to one of several other doors that had numbers placed on each one.

It felt both odd and comforting to enter the home of someone I had yet to meet. A few casually placed French Impressionist posters shared wall space with a series of framed photographs of Paris street scenes and costume sketches which were presumably Holly’s work. Plants sat on tables and a few standees by the large curtained windows. Late afternoon sun gave the room a bright warm feeling.

I heard the clink of Everett tossing his keys onto the kitchen table. His “Ah-ha,” drew my attention through the doorway as he pulled a note from a magnet on the refrigerator.

“‘Singing animals may keep me late,’” Everett read, slightly confused. “‘Make yourselves at home.’ Huh. I guess the opera she’s working on has a zoo.”

He turned to me, peeled off his coat, tossing it casually over one of the kitchen table’s chairs. “So.” That flirtatious leer again. “Let’s get comfy.”

With that, he was on me, wrapping me in his arms before I’d removed my coat or dropped my own duffel bag. His mouth tasted of the burgers and fries we’d eaten at a drive-through burger place along the highway. That didn’t stop me from returning his kiss.

Still connected, Everett lightly shoved me backwards to the living room. After bumping into a table, prone on the couch, he burrowed under my sweatshirt to hover and press his lips along a route that went up to my chest. I was about to pull off my clothes, the excitement softened by a feeling of relaxation, what with no housekeepers or woodland creatures to interrupt us.

But then Everett pulled himself from me, peeled off his own clothes down to his underwear and socks, and to my surprise and disappointment, began digging into his duffel bag.