I was totally unable to come up with a blog post for this month. Somehow, my brain is bouncing between fiction, and politics, with no stops in between for something appropriate. So I thought I’d just post one of my short stories from my YA collection, Rainbow Briefs volume 2 under the pen name Kira Harp. These two collections of LGBTQ+ stories are free, everywhere but Amazon where they are .99 because AZ never price matched. (There is a free mobi on Smashwords.) One of the most fun things to do is take a picture and just let a story spark off it.

Recollections

photo description: Behind a bent, rusting fence, across a lawn full of weeds, stands an elaborate wooden house, abandoned to decay. The lower windows are boarded up, and half the paint has weathered off the siding. The dormers and the pointed roof of the hexagonal tower show missing tiles. A few faded curtains still hang in the upper windows, but the sagging porch and the lean of the tower suggest it may never again be safe to go inside.

Look at that place, Joseph. God, if your mom could see it now? Or your dad? They’d have hammers and paintbrushes and mops in our hands before we could say “boo.”

So sad, but maybe it’s for the best. Let it fall down. Let it decay. Let the memories we made there, the good and the bad, and then the unbearable, turn to sawdust and dirt, to feed the grass and brambles, and maybe a tree one day. Life from death.

Look at that tower room, windows like blinded eyes. Do you remember the first time you kissed me there? We were what, fourteen? No, fifteen, because your brother Mike had gone off to the Army and that’s why we were in there without worrying about him walking in on us.

It was summer…
The sun through the tower windows was warm on my bare back. I sprawled on your bed, while you sat up against the headboard, a pillow between you and the metal frame. You were reading a book, dark head bent over the pages, that lovely look of concentration on your face. Your specs had slid down your nose, and you pushed them up with one finger. I cherished that gesture, the way you didn’t bother to look around self-consciously afterward, when it was just us alone together.

My face was sweaty too. Downstairs in the living room, the big overhead fan would be stirring the muggy, heavy air, while your dad read his paper and your sisters did their homework. It wouldn’t feel like an oven down there. But I’d happily melt into a puddle to be up here, with you, rather than share you, even with your family.

I rubbed my forehead on the hem of your shorts, pretending it was just in play. “You make a good towel.”

It took you a moment to come back from the land of the Hobbits, but then you grinned and shoved my head gently. “Take your mucky sweat away.”

Instead, I did it again, my temple higher against your hip, letting the light gray cotton absorb the sweat from my cheek. “But I’m all sticky.”

You sighed and set the book carefully down on the covers, your finger still keeping your place. “Me too. Want to go down and get some lemonade?”

“Not really.” I slid higher on the bed to sit up beside you and plucked at your damp T-shirt. “How can you wear that? Get comfortable.”

You hesitated, way longer than my simple comment should have warranted. Except we both knew it wasn’t a simple comment. After a bit, you said quietly, “All right.” Then your lips quirked up at one side. “Hold my book. Don’t lose my place.”

I took the novel from you with the care you required. Then I grabbed a slip of paper off the side table and marked your place, and set the book aside. Tolkien might be a God among authors — your words, although I liked his fantasies too — but he was in the way right now.

You handed me your glasses, then pulled the faded blue cotton over your head. Fast, not slow. No different from a hundred other times, when we’d worked in the summer heat shoveling manure or picking rocks in the fields. No different from a dozen times when we leaped into the pond to cool off. But I could hardly breathe, watching.

Your skin was tanned dark on your arms from summer work, with farmer’s lines at your biceps and paler gold above. You had scattered freckles over your shoulders and down your neck. You were smooth and skinny and… perfect.

You reached for your glasses, but I held them away from you. My vision sparkled at the edges, and I let out my held breath and took another.

You said, “Come on, Davy. I need those.”

“Not right now, you don’t.” I set them carefully on top of the book.

Without the specs, your eyes were huge and blue, under dark lashes your sisters envied. You blinked at me, still mild and easy, although I saw the pulse beating harder in your neck. “I can’t see a foot in front of me without them.”

“I’ll come closer.” I still don’t know where I got the courage. I’d been dancing around this moment for a year and I’d figured it would never happen. I knew what I wanted, but I wasn’t sure of you. You, Joseph, my lovely professor with the rational attitude to everything — I’d asked once what you thought about queers, just casual-like but with my heart in my throat. You gave me a lecture about variety in nature which caused me hope and aggravation at the same time. Not an answer. Not quite. But not condemnation either.

Still, I figured I’d end up working on Dad’s farm, and your parents would scrape together the money to send you to college, where you belonged. We’d be friends till then, and drift apart after. But wanting more was suddenly choking me and I had to know. Even if you hit me, afterward. Or looked at me with disappointed disgust, which’d be more your style. Even if you told me to go and never come back.

As I leaned toward you, our bare shoulders touched. We’d wrestled, even slept side by side, but I’d never been as aware of one tiny patch of my skin as in that moment. I stopped, my face a few inches from yours. What the hell was I doing? Did I really want to risk everything this way?

I’d have backed off with a joke and a laugh, but you raised a hand and touched my face. The barest brush of your fingertips along my jaw, but it gave me courage. I leaned in, and kissed you.

For a moment we stayed like that, lips barely touching. I had no clue how kissing went. I’d sneaked a look at Wendy and her fiancé, courting in the parlor. But her man was a cold fish, who barely pecked her on the cheek and held her hand. Mum and Dad exchanged a fast smooch in the mornings… and I wasn’t thinking about family now, with your mouth under mine.

You moved your lips against me, pressing gently, no more assured than I was. But the sweetness of it made me gasp. Your hand in my hair was hotter than the summer sun. Your bare shoulder against mine made all of me come alert, shaking, wanting. I pulled away before my intensity could scare you. “Was that… all right?”

Your smile was far more serene than I felt. “It was exactly all right.”

“You don’t hate me?” I hadn’t meant to ask, but waiting for the answer took the breath from my chest.

“Of course not.” Your eyes sparkled. “I’ve been wondering what a kiss would feel like for a long time.”

“Oh. Um. Any kiss? Like, an experiment?”

“No, you numbskull. Kissing you.”

“Really? You’ve thought about it?”

“Lots.” You reached out again, running your fingers from my jaw, down my damp neck, till you lost courage somewhere above my nipple. You pulled your hand back, and I saw a shadow cross your face. “Kisses and more. But I don’t know if I’m ready for more.”

I caught your hand in mine and raised it to my lips, trying to be gentle, trying to light that spark in your eyes again. “Don’t worry. There’s no rush. We have time. Heck, we have years and years, before you go off to school. I can wait.”

You met my gaze, the blue of your eyes darker, worried. “What if I never want to do anything else? What if I’m too chicken for anything past a kiss?”

I swallowed, loud enough for us both to hear. I wanted more, I surely did. But I said stoutly, “Then that’s all we’ll do. You’re my best friend, Joseph.” I had no other word for what you were to me. “I’m not going to ask for anything but that.”

Your smile was a bit watery, a little shy and tentative. But you turned your hand that I still held, so your fingers brushed my lips. “I guess we’ll see. Perhaps you should kiss me again, for incentive.”

I could do that. I did. With my heart in every clumsy, fumbling moment. Then we stopped. Without a word, you reached for your specs and I rolled off the bed and stretched. But I felt a golden cord stretched between us, my heart to yours.

And before you took up The Two Towers again, and bent over its pages, you said, “We do have years. Who knows what could happen. Anything’s possible, from rapture to death.”

I must have looked grumpy, because you grinned at me then. “Come on, Samwise. It’ll be an adventure. Like any real tale, we don’t know our ending yet, and wouldn’t want to.”

I figured you might be quoting. You’d read the books many more times than I. Plus I really did kind of want to know, right damned now, how this tale would turn out. But I could never resist you in your fey moods. I smiled too, and faked a British accent. “We’ll adventure together, Mr. Frodo.”

***

Perhaps it was just as well we didn’t know our fate ahead of time. Would you have had the courage to finally take me to bed that first time, a year later, knowing that your sister Rose was eventually going to find out? Knowing that the fights and the anger and the misery would tear your family apart, and separate us for ten long years?

And yet if you hadn’t, would we have remained together through the strains of growing up gay, or even found each other again, the way we did?

We were two battered young soldiers, home from the war in Vietnam, when we met again at my father’s funeral. Your arms around me kept the dark at bay then. They’ve done it ever since. You held me though my nightmares, I nursed your bad back and cheered your good ideas, days and weeks and years together since that funeral in 1974. We left this bleak, judgmental little town and never looked back. The GI benefits made you Dr. Joseph, and made a reporter out of me.

It’s been a good life.

So look at that old house, and don’t grieve, my love. It’s an inheritance, not a prison. We won’t stay here long, just till your brother’s in the ground and all the paperwork is done. Then we’ll go home to our little brick house and the cats. They’ll shun us for two days and vomit in your shoes for leaving them with the pet sitter. Our life’s waiting there.

If you can’t tear your eyes away from this ruin, then look at that tower room. I’ll take your glasses, your specs, like I used to before kissing you. The lines’ll blur, the boarded windows will fade. Look at the shape, the point of that high roof, the bay of the curved front room.

Remember your single bed there under the roof. The heat in summer, the chill in winter.

Remember reading books together, with just your shoulder against mine. Remember kisses, fast and slow, my skin on yours, your hands on me, through the seasons. Don’t think about that last day.

Remember how we loved each other, two boys, laughing and wanting and needy and clumsy, and unashamed, in that high tower room, when we were young.

And remember all the wonder and the love of our lives, ever after. Come on, Joe, your back must be getting stiff standing here in the weeds. Let’s go home.

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