Unwrapping Hank (8 page)

“My parents are both therapists,” I said. “They don’t ever tell me I
can’t
do something. They only discuss it to death and point out my other options in a sincere hope that I’ll come to my senses and do what they would do.”

“Which you don’t.”

“
Never
,” I smirked.

“Dude.” Micah took one hand off the wheel and held a fist out to me. We did our secret shake thing. “So what about dating? Is there anyone on campus you like?”

“No one in particular,” I hedged. The truth was, I could have dated if I hadn’t been stuck on one particularly massive bundle of muscles.

“Come on, man. You’re killing my illusions. I always thought it would be a lot easier to get laid if you were gay.”

“What?” I laughed.

“Yeah, I mean, with girls they always have to pretend they don’t want it, or hold out til date x or whatever. I figured with two guys it would be a lot more straightforward.”

“It can be. If you both are openly gay and you’re both attracted to each other. Believe me, that doesn’t happen as often as you’d think.”

“Oh, yeah?” Micah took his eyes off the road and gave me an undecipherable look.

“Yeah. I mean, sex, yes, if you just want sex and you don’t care who with, you can find it. But I’m sure it’s the same for you. There are probably bars you could go to where you’d pretty much be guaranteed to get laid, if you didn’t care with whom.”

“You have a point,” Micah said. “There is the matter of quality versus quantity.”

“Exactly.”

“So… there’s no one at school? There’s gotta be some other hot gay guys.”

Jesus, Micah was being persistent. And the use of the word
other
was another barely-audible ding on the strange bell. Was Micah saying
I
was hot? Was it merely an observation?

“Not especially. Just getting my feet under me this past semester. Maybe after the New Year.”

“Fair enough,” said Micah. “So I bet your parents were fun when you came out.”

I barked a laugh and then turned to see if I’d woken Hank; I hadn’t. “Oh my God. You have no idea.”

The mood lightened. With glee, I proceeded to tell Micah the story of my coming out to my parents at age sixteen. I told him about the Kinsey scale diagram that had sat propped up on the dining room table for a month, and the lecture on gay sex my parents had dragged me to at the Sorbonne. The enthusiastic Frenchman who’d given the talk had been flaming, and I’d wanted to die as he pontificated on the correct preparatory procedure and after care for anal sex, illustrated by explicit pictures he put up on a gigantic screen while I was trapped sitting between my parents. I told Micah about the offer my dad had made, at a dinner party with six of my parents’ nearest and dearest friends, to procure me a high-priced female ‘sex worker’ to help me determine whether I might not be ‘slightly bi or pansexual’. I had Micah laughing so hard, it was a miracle we didn’t wake up the dead. But Hank slept on.

“Oh, Gregore,” Micah wiped his eyes. “You are in for such a culture shock.”

I raised my eyebrows at him in a silent question, and he nodded out the window. I’d been so busy talking I hadn’t registered that we’d left the highway. We were now driving through a calendar-worthy landscape of snow dusted crop fields, rolling hills, quaint farmhouses, and old barns and silos. We passed a stone farmhouse with a black Amish buggy and horses out front. I stared out the window and rubbed my thumb over my lips.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“Yeah.”

“This place isn’t, like,
Deliverance,
though. Right?”

Micah started mimicking that Dueling Banjo song.
Dear dear DEAR dear dear dear DEAR dear dear
. I joined in.

Apparently, this was what it took to finally get through to Hank’s snoozing subconscious, because he sat up and yawned, bleary-eyed. “Man, I was having the weirdest dream about a pig.”

Micah and I howled.

*             *             *

Micah and Hank’s house was just outside a little town called Mount Joy. The town was big enough to have a major chain supermarket and an old-fashioned main street, but it was still tiny as far as I was concerned. After passing through all six blocks of shops, we headed down a rural road and then pulled into a driveway.

“This is it,” Micah said.

The driveway was long, and the property hidden by trees, but they were bare this time of year. Through the gnarled limbs, I spotted a huge old farmhouse and barn. It reminded me of some of the French properties where we’d stayed on the weekends, houses hidden away and surrounded by fields and vineyards. But there was no doubt this was pure Americana, from the colonial-style house made from Pennsylvania fieldstone to the hex sign on the white barn and the big old silo.

“My parents are into the homesteading thing,” Micah said. Before I could ask what he meant, two people and three dogs burst through the back door of the farmhouse.

The Springfields were nothing like I expected. I guess I’d expected a conservative-looking middle-aged couple, with a mom like the ladies in the PSU admin department who wore their hair permed and their pink and blue cardigans extra-large, and a dad who’d look like one of my professors. The Springfields were not that. The woman, who had to be Hank and Micah’s mother, hugged Micah for a long moment with spontaneous ejections of holiday bon mots while their father all but pulled a slow-moving Hank from the backseat and hugged him just as tight and hard.

It was weird to see the man who’d raised Hank Springfield show such affection, and to see Hank return it unabashedly. Hank’s father was lean and looked strong, like someone who worked hard with his hands. He had long auburn hair, tucked behind his ears and tinged here and there with gray. He also had a big, full beard, which was almost solid steel in color. He wore old faded jeans and a flannel shirt under a beat-up khaki coat. He was good-looking for his age, honestly. Now I knew where Hank and Micah had gotten their looks.

Great. I was spending Christmas in a
house
of bears. My existential identity crisis was bound to be complete by New Year's. Thanks for that, Universe.

When Hank’s dad finally let him go, they gave each other a kiss on the cheek, then the parents swapped places so they could each hug the stuffing out of the other son.

If Mr. Springfield hadn’t been what I expected, Mrs. Springfield surely wasn’t. She had straight, dark brown hair pulled back in a braid that hung down to her waist. She had sharp cheekbones and wore no makeup. She looked like an old-fashioned farmer’s wife, like a black-and-white candid of a 1900s prairie family or something. She was sturdily built and wore jeans and a hippy long sweater that was woven of some kind of nylon yarn in rainbow colors. I wondered if she’d put on the rainbow for my benefit.

It was easy to see how Micah, Mr. Cool, had come from this unconventional pair, but not Hank. Funny. I’d assumed it would be the other way around.

“Welcome!” their mom said to me, letting Hank go. She wrapped me up in a hug just as rabid as the ones she’d given her boys. I was used to French greetings so I hugged her back and gave her the standard two-cheek peck.

She
giggled
. “Oh, aren’t you adorable! I’m Lilith and this is Karma.”

Lilith and… Karma? No way.

“Sir,” I said, holding out my hand. But Karma Springfield pushed it aside and pulled me into strong arms.

“Karma,” he insisted, straight into my ear, “Or just Kar is fine. Merry Christmas!”

“Yeah, um, Merry Christmas.” I tried to gasp for air inconspicuously once he let me go. “It’s so generous of you to allow me to spend the holidays with you.”

“Oh, Sloane,” Lilith cooed. “Any friend of Micah and Holden’s is more than welcome here. We would hate for you to be alone at Christmas.”

Wait. Micah and
Holden
? As in Holden Caulfield? I turned to give Hank a knowing smirk, but the slippery devil was already escaping, bungling toward the back door of the farmhouse with two big suitcases.

Micah knelt down and was inundated by the eager dogs. “And these guys,” said Micah, “are Cutter, Grinch, and Samson.” He pointed to an older basset hound, a white bulldog, and a golden retriever in turn. “They’re all big old cuddle bugs.”

“Hey, guys.” I squatted down, which must have been a canine signal for ‘I wish to pet you now’, because all three dogs were on me in a flash. They were cute, and friendly, and about fifty times more excited than I knew how to deal with. I stood up.

“I’d better help unload,” I said, grabbing my two bags from the back.

I gamely followed Hank into the house. “What a cutie-pie,” I heard Lilith say behind me. “You’re in the blue room, Sloane!”

“Thank you!” I called back with a smile.

The farmhouse was rustic inside, with simple wooden furniture that fit the feel of the old stone house. It was decorated for Christmas with red and gold baubles and swags of bare pine boughs. The Springfields had made an effort to have the house cozy for the holidays, which I deeply appreciated. It felt homey in a way my parents’ apartments never had. I soaked it in like lotion on dry skin. I passed through a dining room that had one whole wall of stone and exposed beams and followed the
clomp
of Hank’s boots up an enclosed staircase. Grinch, the bulldog, followed me. I wondered idly if the dogs divvied up monitoring duties and, if so, why Grinch had gotten stuck with the total stranger. Was he the alpha and thus given the most dangerous assignment? Or was he runt of the pack, given the clueless guy who probably wouldn’t pet much? I didn’t mind. He had an entertaining waddle.

The second floor of the house had a narrow hallway and low ceiling with a maze of rooms off it. The original building had to be at least a few hundred years old, and the floor and ceiling both tilted a little. Micah hadn’t been kidding when he said they had a lot of bedrooms. I passed a room with blue walls that was likely my assigned abode, but I ignored it in favor of torturing Hank.

I followed him into his bedroom and thunked down my stuff. So this… this was the fountainhead of Hank, aka Holden, Springfield.

I flopped down on his bed and tried to absorb the vibe. Grinch settled with a grunt by the door, watching me.

Hank had not one but two posters of Arnold Schwarzenegger. And not
Terminator
or
Predator
Arnold either. One showed a young bodybuilding Arnold, in a gym lifting weights. A second poster showed him taking the oath of office as California’s Republican governor. There was a black-and-white graphic print that had a stark black cross in the middle of it and yin-yang symbols in the corners. There was a statue of a Catholic saint on the windowsill. There was what looked like an old baseball trophy and a picture of some huge Russian-looking weight-lifter guy lifting an enormous barbell, maybe at the Olympics. There was a shelf of books next to the bed. I had fun trying to decipher the titles upside down while I titled my head back to look at them. They included a section of mysteries with some beat-up Agatha Christie and PD James, and four paperbacks of Nietzsche.
Nietzsche
for fuck’s sake.

Jesus, no wonder I couldn’t figure this guy out.

“You have a habit of throwing yourself on my bed,” Hank grunted at me.

“If not me, who?” I quipped profoundly.

He was already unpacking his suitcase and sorting the mass of dirty clothes he’d brought home—because,
finals
—into piles for the washer. I was sure he was doing this as an excuse to ignore me rather than an urgent need for clean underwear. But I was here for the holidays, and I was not going to let him be awkward for the entire break. Aversion therapy by repeated exposure. That was the ticket.

I watched him work. Hank looked particularly at home in this setting, with his backward baseball cap and his beard a bit scruffier than usual thanks to finals week. He’d worn a thermal shirt, which was tight across his massive chest and biceps, and his jeans were pushed low in the front, like usual. It always looked like his waistband was caving under the pressure of an invisible beer gut, or was shirking away from the manliness of his thick abs. His room was in the back of the house with a window that overlooked the barn and had cutesy cotton calico curtains. They made me want to start singing “Oooooklahoma!” The ceiling was low with thick wooden beams, and the door of his closet was made from rough barn wood. He looked like an all American farm boy standing in this room.

And why was that so fucking hot? I was supposed to be getting past this.

“So were you switched at birth? A changeling? Kidnapped by aliens and reprogrammed?” I asked.

“What?”

“You don’t seem a whole lot like Lilith and Karma,” I pointed out.

Hank blushed. “Yeah, um… wonder what room Mom wants you in.”

“She said the blue room.”

“This way.” Without waiting for me to answer, Hank picked up my suitcases and led me back to the blue room. Grinch padded after us.

We stood awkwardly in the doorway. “Thanks,” I said. I felt a twinge of guilt for getting on his case so early in my stay.

“Sure.”

He turned to go, but some devil got into me and I put my hand on his arm and pulled him back hard. “Merry Christmas… Holden.” I whispered breathlessly.

His eyes narrowed. “You tell anyone, and I
will
kill you.” His ears turned bright pink.

I grinned. “Your secret’s safe with me.”

*             *             *

Micah and Lilith took me on a tour of the farm. Grinch padded along after me like he was tethered to my ankle by bungee cord. We started in the barn. There was a big stall in the back that was open to a fenced pasture. I could see a few tan-colored cows out nosing through the snow to get grass. Micah whistled, and they looked up. One of them started trotting over eagerly. The other two followed.

Micah climbed over the gate and greeted the approaching thousand-plus-pound animal with no fear.

“Hey, True!” The animal—definitely a she—stopped in front of Micah and rubbed her jaw against him like a cat. He was smiling an all-out sunny smile as he scratched her chin and shoulder. “Hey, baby. How’s it goin’?”