Robin and Ruby (9 page)

Then George tilts his head just the slightest degree, a tiny but unmistakable surrender that sends a shudder through Robin. At last he closes his eyes, he bears down, he accelerates. Little pecks become one complete kiss, mouths open, tongues moving, and time disappears into their bodies. Their hands are moving, nervous but unstoppable, finally dropping into each other’s laps, groping for hard-ons.

Which is when Robin feels himself hit a limit. “Wait, wait,” he insists. “Needle off the record.” He takes George by the shoulders and gently lifts him upright.

George blinks. His lids are heavy, drowsy, like it’s morning and he’s waking from a dream. Robin can see that he’s still inside the kiss. “Greetings,” he says, with a grin.

“I just want to be sure you want to,” Robin says.

“Duh.”

“Because this is out of the blue, right?”

“Not exactly.”

“But, we’ve never…”

George stares at him. “I’m pretty sure that I’ve been dropping hints.”

“Like dancing naked in the apartment?”

“That was just a coincidence. Other things.”

A week ago, back home after a murderous dinner shift, George gave him a backrub that felt so good, and ranged so far and wide that Robin had to cover up his hard-on. George noticed and made a joke that “A happy ending costs extra.” Robin was so flustered all he said was, “You better get yourself a boyfriend, Georgie. Don’t let those hands go to waste.”

But this is different. Not a reaction to something; an intention.

There’s the sound of an engine starting up. Across the street, a pickup truck pulls out of a spot and rolls alongside them. George stares at it. “Hey, look! It’s the guy who hit on me that time.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, see that, above the turn signal?” Robin looks there, at a diamond of bent metal, shining in the light. George says, “I remember that dent.”

Aglow in the passing headlights, glasses off, shirt unbuttoned, mouth raw from contact, his friend is absolutely not, Robin sees, Little Georgie from high school. He tries to recast him: not as his best friend but as a sexy stranger, a hot opportunity arising out of nowhere. When he thinks of it this way, there’s no hesitation. No emotion to get in the way. Yeah, he realizes, I’d have sex with this guy.

George leans in for another kiss, which gets Robin stiffer. He hasn’t actually softened up since this started. If the kiss is any indication of what actual sex would be like, that just might be reason enough to push this further. He scans ahead to tomorrow. He doesn’t work on Sundays. He can’t remember if George works brunch or dinner. That could mean the two of them home all day, figuring out how to deal with what happened the night before. And what if Peter calls? Will there be some last-ditch attempt to make things right again? Does what’s happening here have anything to do with Peter, or is this completely separate?

Neither of them speaks as they begin the drive back to their apartment. But the silence seems to hum, like the resonance of amplified music after a speaker has cut out. Maybe it’s too much for George; he flips on the car radio, tuned to the community radio station he listens to lately. Right now there’s a Bob Marley song playing. Robin has never really understood reggae, but right now, with his head still thrumming from the joint they smoked an hour ago, it seems to fit the mood.

George finds a parking space on their block, and Robin lets out “Yes!” as they pull to the curb. Parking the car sometimes means walking the worst blocks in the neighborhood, unlit, mostly empty stretches where muggings are a fact of life. The zone where the university bleeds into the neighborhood is the worst of it, because college students are known to carry wallets full of cash, and wear watches and gold chains, and to carelessly shut out the world with headphones attached to a Walkman. Robin’s years living in cities have stripped him of all of these, even his wallet (ever since he was pickpocketed on the New York subway, he has used a money clip, kept in his front pocket), but that doesn’t make him any less a target. George warned Robin about this before he agreed to move here, and every time he feels his stomach clench, he remembers that he said, “If you can handle it, Georgie, I can handle it.”

They shuffle down the sidewalk with a meter of empty air between them, hands stuffed in pockets like school chums. The walk carries for Robin memories of late-night treks to other apartments, those penultimate steps when he finds himself barely able to contain his excitement, or, on less successful nights, when he is overcome by last-minute doubt and scrambles for a way to back out. But this walk is unlike any of those, because it feels so absolutely ordinary: Robin and George are simply going home.

They enter the apartment as they usually do. George unlocks the door, kicks off his sneakers, and nudges them to the wall. Robin steps past him to the bathroom and leaves the door open while he pees.
Exhibitionist
. He avoids the mirror as he washes his hands. He doesn’t want to tempt the truth his eyes might reveal (apprehension? eagerness?); he just wants to move without deliberation into whatever comes next.

He hears the refrigerator door open and close, another familiarity. George is forever searching their generally empty fridge for a snack or a sip of something. Robin always comes upon him staring into the shelves as if patiently awaiting an arrival.

Robin goes into the living room and looks to the answering machine. A little rectangle of red light strobes.

“Wait,” George says from behind him. “You don’t need to talk to him now.”

Robin pauses, index finger poised above the play button. “You think it’s Peter.”

“Who else?”

George hands him the newly lit end of the roach, and Robin steps away from the answering machine. Strange to realize he’s not going to listen to whatever Peter’s left on the tape. That he’s going to wait, so he can be with George.

He is still holding smoke in his mouth when George leans into him. The onrush of the high and the wetness of the kiss meld into a surge that sets Robin’s hands in motion. He raises George’s T-shirt and caresses his back, brushing lightly up his spine. George shivers. “You need to warm up these mitts,” he says, reaching around to cover Robin’s hands with his own. He guides them down his back, past the elastic waistband of his scrubs and over the slope of his ass, which is hairless and hard. George mutters, “Hot damn,” with a deeply satisfied growl that Robin registers as the most unguarded expression either of them has allowed thus far.

George shoves Robin onto the lumpy cushions of their beat-up couch. Robin locks arms and legs around him. Their differently angled cocks slip across each other under layers of fabric, hard against hard.

A pillow wedged under Robin’s head shoots over the armrest, knocking the answering machine from the end table. The device dangles on a wire for a moment, then dislodges and clatters atop the carpet. The ejected microcassette is a tease: Is Peter’s apology recorded there? Robin’s eyes meet George’s and then they both laugh: at Peter’s expense, at Robin’s, at all of this.

No longer is he imagining George a stranger. His own awareness of the moment won’t allow it. And yet: this is George, but not the George he knows. George’s mouth is all over him, clothes are coming off, little giggles are emitted as they shuffle and adjust and gasp at each new sensation, but there’s something serious running beneath it all, some intensity of purpose. Robin reaches between George’s thighs and wraps his fist around a shaft swollen thick. He strokes to the root and back up to the damp tip. Then he dives forward and sucks George into his mouth. “Oh, yeah,” George says, which inspires Robin to give it his all.

Above him, he hears George say, “Don’t worry, I won’t come. And if I get too pre-cummy, just stop.”

It takes Robin a moment to understand what George is trying to communicate:
how to have sex in an epidemic.
This is how it’s supposed to go now, how it should have gone with so many other guys. A plan: voiced, agreed upon. An understanding of what they won’t be doing.

Though part of him wants to taste it.

“You better hit pause on this tape,” George warns, seizing up until Robin relaxes his grip. George’s mouth hangs slack while he holds back his breath and a premature burst. He stands up, naked and erect, wearing only tube socks, white with red stripes. “This couch is working against us,” George says. “It’s not wide enough, and it’s not long enough.”

“Your place or mine?” Robin asks. Robin has the wider bed, a double to George’s twin.

But George guides them to his room, saying, “Let’s break mine in.”

Their rooms are identical in size and laid out in mirror configuration. But where Robin’s is tidy, George’s is a mess. The furniture came with the rental: a banged-up table, now cluttered with opened envelopes, unopened textbooks, crinkled bills and scattered coins from shift-tips; a wooden chair draped in George’s hideous robe; a tall shelving unit crammed with summer clothing and crowned with an emerald-green bottle of Polo. A pile of unwashed laundry spills out of the closet and fills the air with body smells: pits, feet, dirty underwear. Near the bed is a white tube of K-Y Jelly and a balled-up hand towel.

George has pushpinned above his bed a handful of postcards purchased in a gift shop on South Street: Albert Einstein lit celestially from behind, Harry Belafonte with his shirt blown open, Prince looking slick and sleazy, doe-eyed Sal Mineo dreamily hanging on Elvis’s every word. The last image is a dark-skinned black man in a dress shirt and tie loosened at the neck, a cigarette poised impatiently, eyes wide as dollar coins, a man not lovely but formidable. “Remind me who he is,” Robin says.

George points to a book splayed facedown on the pitted carpet, scarlet and navy letters on a cream-white dust jacket:
Another Country, a novel, James Baldwin.
“Oh, right,” Robin says. “Dorothy has this book.”

“Please don’t mention your mother while we’re…”

“Sorry.”

As George fusses with a fitted sheet that has come undone from the bed, Robin flips the book over and scans the opened page: someone named Vivaldo is about to bottom for someone named Eric. Robin reads aloud, “
He whispered into Eric’s ear a muffled, urgent plea.
There seems to be gay sex going on here.”

George says “Here, too,” taking Robin’s prick in his hand.

Robin grabs George the same way, as if they are enacting the handshake of a secret society. George’s dick is the same length hard as it is soft; sex hasn’t made it longer, just stiffer, fuller, unlike Robin’s, which nearly doubles when he’s aroused. “I’m a grower. You’re a show-er,” Robin says, looking downward, comparing himself to George with a self-conscious pang.

“Don’t you start talking about my ‘beautiful black penis.’”

“It
is
beautiful.”

“I like yours, too.”

He looks him in the eyes and says, “Now what?”

“OK,” George starts, “I know this might sound weird and unexpected”—he bobbles his head nervously—“but can I ask you to do something?”

Robin says, “Sure,” but worry grips him, mindful of the equilibrium they’ve maintained thus far, fearful of the irreversible act, the one that will ruin everything.

“Can I watch you?” George asks.

“Watch?”

“Just you. Masturbating.”

“You mean, instead of…?”

“Just for a little while.” George forces an uneasy laugh. “I warned you. I’m a voyeur.”

“I thought that was just…”

“What?”

“Something you said so you could explain why you haven’t gotten laid.”

“No, that’s what I wonder about. How another guy jacks off.”…The memory again of the piano teacher, Mr. Morris. He wore a musky cologne that would linger on Robin’s clothes after their lessons. His large hands seemed too weighty to move so quickly on the keys. Robin wondered how they would feel on his skin.
I can’t touch you,
Mr. Morris said,
but you can show me how you touch yourself.
And later, when Robin hesitated, when he questioned whether he should once again take his clothes off and stand apart and touch himself for money, whether there wasn’t something wrong about it, Mr. Morris told him,
Beauty is a blessing to be shared, like a talent for music
…

“Will I be watching you, too?” Robin asks.

George shrugs.

“OK, then,” Robin says, as if something has been decided.

They climb onto the bed, one at the head and one at the foot. Legs stretched, nearly touching. Robin frowns, trying to figure this out. “You start,” George says. “Just do what you do.” Robin nods seriously, and grips himself, one hand wrapped tight, the other roaming, stirring up extra sensation. He slips into a kind of privacy, his eyelids fluttering, drooping, squeezing shut…. Morris had a lover who had been some kind of artist, had made collages of illustrations cut from Time/Life how-to guides, history books, gay porno magazines, all that shredded, varnished paper. But the lover was gone, something had happened to him, the art was all that was left behind….

He comes back to the moment, looks at George, who says, “Close your eyes again.”

Robin does as he’s told, but something has shifted. He senses that to be watched and wondered at could be a peril perhaps more risky than their back-and-forth groping thus far. It strikes him as out of balance. He can hear the sound of George stroking himself and wonders why he can’t watch, too. And this has the effect of increasing the hunger he feels, feels for George, just an arm’s length away. George says, “Tell me what you’re thinking about.”

“I’m trying to picture you right now.”

“I’m touching myself.”

“I like the way your voice sounds,” Robin says. “Really deep and confident.”

There was giggling earlier but not now. Now his heart is beating so fast. He and Peter have never done anything quite this purposeful. All their sex was the same: horizontal, sweaty, lots of rub-a-dub. It always just
happened.
But this, George is making this happen.

George continues to speak, to instruct. “Do that, touch there, don’t stop.” He gets more commanding the longer Robin keeps at it.