I told myself the porch light was a coincidence.
My dad’s house has had the same yellow bulb out front since before I could drive, and the switch for it is inside by the coat hooks, and nobody had been inside that house in four months except the lawyer and a woman from the auction company with a clipboard. So when I turned onto Alder at ten at night, rental car smelling like gas station coffee, and saw the light on, I figured the timer. Dad had a timer. Dad had a timer for everything.
Then I pulled in and there was a man sitting on the top step with a thermos between his boots, and the timer theory died right there.
“Hey, Corey,” Wes said.
Not hi. Not surprise. Hey, Corey, like I’d gone to the store.
I sat in the car with the engine off for what felt like a long time. He didn’t get up. He just sat there under that bug-yellow light with his forearms on his knees, a gray work shirt with sawdust ground into the cuffs, and he looked older than the last time I’d seen him, which was a long time ago, and also exactly the same, which was the problem. It had always been the problem. Some people you carry around like a stone in your shoe and you stop noticing the limp.
I got out. My knees were stiff from the drive.
“You left the light on,” I said, which was the stupidest possible thing.
“Your dad’s guy gave me a key. I’m doing the bathroom floor before the sale, it was soft by the tub.” He tipped his head. “Figured you’d drive straight through. You always did drive straight through.”
“How’d you know it was tonight?”
“I didn’t.” He picked up the thermos, looked at it, put it down. “I just left it on the last three nights.”
I want to be honest about what that did to me, because I’ve been dishonest about it for years. It hit me low in the stomach, hard, like missing a stair. Three nights. A grown man sitting out here in October with a thermos, on the chance.
“That’s insane,” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Wes.”
“Yeah, I know.”
I came up the steps and sat down next to him, not touching, our shoulders maybe four inches apart, and I could smell him. Cedar and sweat and that cheap green soap from the dispenser at the hardware store. I hadn’t known I still had that smell filed somewhere. Everything in me went quiet and loud at the same time.
We talked, because that’s what you do. He had his own crew now, three guys and a truck with his name on the door. His mother had moved to Arizona. He’d bought a place out past the quarry and was gutting it a room at a time, never finishing, he said, because finishing was the sad part. I told him about the city, the job I didn’t love, the apartment with the radiator that screamed. I told him Dad had died in his chair with the TV on and that the lawyer said it was quick, and he nodded and said, “He was a good guy to me,” and that was when my voice went, just went, in the middle of a sentence about the funeral flowers.
He didn’t say anything. He put his hand flat on the back of my neck and left it there. Warm, rough, heavy. The way you’d steady a horse.
I leaned into it like an idiot. I leaned my whole head into his palm and shut my eyes and breathed.
“I’m so tired,” I said.
“I know.”
“I didn’t want to come back here.”
“I know that too.”
“Except for this,” I said, and it came out before I could stop it, “I think I wanted to come back for this. For like, a second. In the car. I was kind of hoping.”
His thumb moved behind my ear. “Yeah?”
“Don’t make me say it twice.”
“I wouldn’t,” Wes said, and his voice had gone rough, and I opened my eyes and he was looking at my mouth.
We never did anything, back then. That’s the thing nobody believes. Just a summer of him in my passenger seat with his knee bouncing, of both of us pretending the radio was the interesting part, of one night at the quarry when his hand was an inch from mine on the hood of the car and neither of us moved it for an hour. Longing. It was only ever longing, and I’d carried it around for so long I’d stopped knowing what it weighed.
Now his mouth was on mine and it weighed everything.
It wasn’t graceful. His thermos went over and rolled down two steps, and we both flinched and laughed against each other’s teeth and then didn’t stop kissing. He tasted like coffee gone lukewarm and something under it, just him. I got my fist in the front of his shirt. He made a sound in his throat I’d imagined a thousand times and had gotten completely wrong, it was lower, almost a growl, almost embarrassed, and it went straight to my cock.
“Inside,” he said into my mouth. “Inside, Corey, or I’m going to do this on your dad’s porch.”
“Dad’s porch has seen worse.”
“Don’t talk about your dad right now.”
“Okay. Okay.”
He got the door. The house smelled like it always had, floor wax and old books and the faint burnt-toast ghost of every morning of my life, except now the furniture had little colored stickers on it. Blue for the auction, green for the cousins, orange for the dump. Everything I grew up with, priced. Wes shouldered me against the wall by the coat hooks, right under the light switch, and slid his hand up under my shirt, and I felt the calluses drag across my ribs and I swear to God my legs almost quit.
“You’re thinner,” he said.
“You’re not.”
“No.” He pressed his hips into mine so I could feel exactly how not. He was hard already, thick against my thigh through his work pants, and I rocked into it without any shame at all. “I’m real not.”
I laughed, helpless, and he kissed the laugh off me, and then his hands were at my belt and I was fumbling at his, the two of us clumsy and rushed and breathing like we’d run here. His shirt came off over his head and there he was in the hall light. Broad chest, gray starting in the hair on it, a pale scar across his ribs I didn’t know about. I put my mouth on the scar. I didn’t ask. He shuddered and shoved his fingers in my hair.
“Where,” he said. “Corey. Where.”
“Upstairs. My room. It’s still, they haven’t touched it, it’s still my room.”
He went still. Just for a second. “Your old room.”
“Is that weird?”
“It’s the most—” He stopped, shook his head, grinned like he was in pain. “Christ. Yeah. Yes. Go.”
The stairs creaked in all the same places. He was behind me with his hands on my hips, mouth on the back of my neck, and the fourth step groaned the way it did when I used to sneak down for water, and he whispered “that one still sings” against my skin and I had to stop and grip the rail.
My room was a museum of a person I’d mostly stopped being. The narrow bed, the dumb poster of a band I wouldn’t admit to now, a model airplane on the dresser with one wing glued crooked. A green sticker on the lamp. I didn’t care. I pulled him in and kicked the door shut and he walked me backward until my knees hit the mattress and the springs gave that old tired squeal.
“Jesus, that bed,” Wes said.
“It held up.”
“Not for what I’m going to do to it.”
He put me down on my back and stood over me, chest heaving, and just looked. I’d been looked at by plenty of men in the city. None of them had ever looked like they were checking whether I was real. He got my jeans open and dragged them down, my underwear with them, and my cock sprang up against my belly, flushed and leaking, and he said “fuck” very quietly like a prayer.
Then he was on his knees on the floorboards and his mouth was on me.
I’m not going to pretend I lasted. He took me in slow, hot, wet, his tongue flat under the head and then working at it, his stubble rasping the inside of my thighs, and I put my arm over my face and bit my own wrist so I wouldn’t wake the whole street. He hummed around me. He pulled off, spit shining on his chin, and looked up with his eyes dark and said, “Let me hear you, nobody’s here,” and went down again, deeper, one hand cupping my balls and the other pushing my thigh wide, and I heard myself, a ragged broken stream of his name and please and oh fuck, right there, don’t stop.
“I’m gonna,” I said. “Wes, I’m gonna, I don’t want to yet.”
He pulled off with a wet sound. “Then don’t.”
He stripped the rest of the way, boots and work pants and all of it in a heap on my carpet, and climbed over me, and his cock hung heavy and dark between us, and I took it in my fist because I had to. He bucked into my hand with a groan. We kissed again, and I tasted myself on him, and that broke something loose.
“I want you in me,” I said. “Please. I’ve wanted it for so long it’s stupid.”
“It’s not stupid.”
“I haven’t, not in a while, not like—”
“Hey.” His forehead came down on mine. “Slow. I’ve got you. I’ve got all night. I’ve got three nights’ worth of porch light.”
There was some awkward, funny fumbling, him spitting into his palm, me saying that’s disgusting and then groaning when he did it again, and then I was on my stomach with a pillow under my hips and his wet fingers working me open, one and then two, his other hand spread warm on my back, his mouth following it, kissing down my spine one vertebra at a time. I pushed back against his fingers. I couldn’t help it. I was making noises into my old pillowcase that I didn’t recognize.
“Look at you,” he said, ragged. “Look at you taking it.”
“More.”
“Corey.”
“More, Wes, I mean it, I can take it.”
He gave me a third, stretching, the burn good and sharp, and I gasped and ground down into the mattress. And then his fingers were gone and the blunt hot head of him was pressing at my hole, and he stopped there, shaking, I could feel him shaking, and said my name like a question.
“Yes,” I said. “Yes. Come on.”
He pushed in slow. God, he was big, a thick stretching ache that went on and on, and I whimpered and he held absolutely still, breathing hard against my shoulder blade, until I pushed back and took the rest of him myself, all the way, his hips flush against my ass. We both stopped breathing.
“Fuck,” he whispered. “You’re so tight. You feel so good, baby, you feel—”
He caught himself on the word. I felt him go stiff with it.
“Say it again,” I said into the pillow.
“Baby.”
“Again.”
He said it again, and moved.
It was slow first, long deep drags that made my toes curl, his arm hooked under my chest holding me up against him. Then it wasn’t slow. The bed was shrieking, the headboard knocking the wall in the exact rhythm it used to knock when I was alone, and I thought, distantly, somewhere in the fog, that this was the most important thing that room had ever witnessed. Wes was driving into me in hard wet slaps, one hand clamped on my hip, the other reaching around to fist my cock, and every thrust hit that spot that turned my vision white. I was babbling. I was begging. I think I said I love you, I think I said it into the pillow where he couldn’t be sure, and his rhythm stuttered, and he bent over me and said very clearly in my ear, “I heard that.”
“Didn’t say anything.”
“Yeah you did.”
He pulled out, flipped me over like I weighed nothing, and pushed back in with my legs over his shoulders so he could see my face. That was worse and better. His eyes never left mine. Sweat dripped off his jaw onto my chest. I wrapped my hand around my own cock and he batted it away and took over, stroking me in time, rough and fast and slick with my own mess, and I felt the pressure collapse in on itself and come up from my spine.
“Wes, Wes, I’m—”
“Come on. Let me see it.”
I came hard, striping my stomach and my chest, up to my collarbone, clenching around him so tight he swore and lost the rhythm completely. He drove in twice more, deep, groaning something that wasn’t a word, and then he was spilling inside me, hot and pulsing, his whole big body locked over mine, mouth open against my knee. We stayed like that. Shaking. Slick. The window had fogged over.
I woke up to gray light and the sound of a nail gun somewhere down the block, and for about three seconds I was a kid in that bed and nothing had happened to anyone.
Then Wes shifted behind me, a big warm arm across my waist, and everything came back in order. The sale at ten. The lawyer at two. The orange stickers. My father’s chair, downstairs, tagged blue.
My ass ached in a way I was not sorry about. There was a dried streak on my stomach and a bite mark on the meat of my shoulder I could feel with my tongue against my teeth, like I’d done it to myself.
“Don’t,” Wes mumbled into my neck. “I can hear you thinking.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re thinking about leaving.”
“I’m thinking about the sale.”
“Same thing.”
I turned over. He had pillow creases down one cheek and his hair stuck up on one side and he looked about as unguarded as a person can look. He didn’t pretend to be asleep. He just watched me.
“I’ve got a bathroom floor to finish,” he said. “It’ll take me, I don’t know. Most of the week. I’m slow. I’m real thorough.”
“That so.”
“Mm. And I could use somebody to hold the flashlight.”
I laughed, and my eyes stung, and I kissed him instead of answering, soft, a little morning-sour, his stubble scratching my chin.
“I’ll hold the flashlight,” I said.
Downstairs, through the floor, I could hear the house ticking and settling, the way it always had. Out front the porch light was still burning in the daytime, small and ridiculous and yellow, and neither of us got up to turn it off.
