“You…fuckin’ animal…” I mumble.
He bumps his hips, and I hiss like a spurned cat.
“I’ll do it slowly, I just wanted to feel you.” He promises. “I won’t even move if you don’t want me to.”
“Nngh, just…give me a second, Christ.” I lift my face to look at him, and his expression is much more mellow than I thought it’d be. He’s leaning back against the headboard. “That doesn’t count, you know. Coercion.”
He smiles, and it isn’t Machivellian or full of lust. It’s just…a genuine smile. My breath catches. He’s so…handsome, it’s sickening. Who needs to be that attractive? For what purpose?
“I’ll have you sayin’ it all the time, I won’t even have to ask.”
It’s the beginning of our first summer. In my mind, I’m pretty sure it’ll be our only summer. Dean spends more time at my house than I’m comfortable with, at least four nights a week. He does a lot of odd jobs around town, including a few shifts at a garage. If he isn’t working or at my place, he’s monopolizing the good squat rack at the gym or badgering his latent teammates into practice. The only people he’s told of his acceptance at CSU, excluding myself, are his father and closest friend, Jacob Hamm. He’s got less to pack than I do, but even I’m not bringing my entire house along. Most of my belongings will find a fresh start in storage.
Dean will be moving into Fresno State’s student housing, while I’m once again mooching off my mother. She has a condominium that’s normally used as a rental property, but she’s emptied it for my sake. She offered to let me stay for free, but I refused. My pride wouldn’t allow me to pay nothing for a place she’s still making payments on. Berkeley is a posh city, however, so I did accept her second offer of a discounted rate. It took Dean the entire month of July to convince me to take the same flight as him.
While he’s relaxed in some ways, he’s tense in others. He’s almost clingier than he was during the school year, and I think it’s because he knows we won’t be able to spend this much quality time together once our respective semesters start. No more showering together, eating together, and sleeping in the same bed. The sex, too. Dean’s basically an Incubus. He acts like he’ll actually die without regular sex, and we fuck a lot more than regularly. It’s excessive. He makes me feel like I’m sixty instead of thirty, I can barely keep up. The lumbar pain is all but chronic.
I don’t verbalize my anxieties to him, as he’s already said his piece on it, but I can’t imagine his loyalty lasting through the autumn and winter months. He’s clearly a man of…needs, and I just won’t have the time to satisfy them like he’s used to. There’s the distance, too. It’s not practical for either of us to make a two-hour trip multiple times a week just to satisfy an urge. It’s reasonable to think he’d be tempted to get his rocks off with someone the next dorm over, someone his own age, someone just as attractive as he is.
He talked a big, big game after graduation, and I couldn’t help but put stock in it then, but as the weeks pass us by, clarity returns. I allow myself to bask in this time with him. I lose myself in all of it: the amazing sex, the comfort of his chest warming my back while we sleep, his surprisingly delightful cooking, his silly commentary on movies and television series, his presence in the same room while I work. I can only appreciate it as much as I do because I keep reminding myself it comes with an expiration date. I don’t believe that absence makes the heart grow fonder, at least not for him.
I think my absence from his life will reset this obsession he has. It’s going to suck, hard, but not as much as if I was stupid enough to believe him. When he stops looking for me, I’ll drown myself in coursework, maybe try a little harder at maintaining friends. I wouldn’t have been so susceptible to him in the first place if I had a healthy support network, probably. Or not. He’s a bewitching bastard.
July burns into August, and by this time, we’ve taken a few trips out of town. I refuse to be seen in public with him when everyone knows the answers to each other’s security questions, so he badgers me into a few weekend getaways. When we go up to Chicago for the first time, he tells me the reason he decided to double-down on his pursuit of his English teacher. I came up to Chicago during the last Christmas break to reconnect with an old flame, and little did I know, Dean was in the city with his father.
“You saw that?” I groan, horrified.
“Mm, who was that motherfucker? Did you come all the way up here just to see him?”
We decided on a stroll through Millennium Park, as I’m living on a highschool teacher’s meager salary and Dean needs to save every penny earned. It’s one of the few inexpensive things to do, though I didn’t imagine having this conversation while passing under the infamous bean [a big, ugly chrome sculpture one’s forced to pass beneath to get into the park].
“Would you believe me if I said a Tinder hook-up?”
“Nah.” He says immediately. “You looked way too familiar for that. Was he an ex? Does he live up here?”
“Why?” I huff. “Are you looking to bust up his kneecaps?”
This time, he doesn’t reply. He looks lost in thought. “Hey,” I shove an elbow at him, and he finally glances over. “No murder fantasies.”
“What, I’m not allowed to fantasize now?” I can’t even tell if he’s joking.
“He’s an ex. We weren’t together last year, I just came up to visit.”
“To get laid.”
“What, am I not allowed to get laid now?”
“Not with pricks like that.”
“You don’t even know him!”
“Tell me about him.”
“You really want to hear about my ex?”
“Yup, every detail.”
We continue onto Lurie Gardens, a fragrant oasis in the midst of the Windy City. It’s over two acres of perennials, bulbs, shrubs, and trees that form dense, sheltering hedges and wide expanses of vibrant movement. There are benched hideaways here and there, and a narrow canal to perch by. Birds of broad species thrive here, patiently waiting for stray crumbs to drop from the lunches of inattentive visitors. We take to a bench with one such lunch, trays of individually sliced pizza. I feel like it’s safe to admit to Dean:
“I hate Chicago-style pizza. New York is better.”
He clutches his metaphorical pearls. “Enjoy your freedom while it lasts, I’ll be alerting the proper authorities.”
I laugh, careful not to jostle my slice out of the box.
“Why the fuck did you get it if you don’t like it?”
“Mm, not sure. Maybe…state pride?”
“Yeah, the great state of Illinois.” He snorts.
“You like it, don’t you? The pizza, I mean.”
“Pizza’s pizza to me. Crust, cheese, sauce. Who gives a shit about the order or quantity?”
“Wow,” I lift my brows. “That’s almost more blasphemous.”
“For our crimes, you’ll go to prison, and I’ll get the death penalty.”
“My God, too soon. I feel like a criminal just breathing the same air as you.”
He busts a laugh at my genuine discomfort. We take a pedestrian bridge from Millennium to Maggie Daley Park, where Dean damn near loses his mind at the prospect of climbing one of the two 40-foot rock walls. It’s free, so there’s no real reason not to, except he’s apparently never done it before. He isn’t bothered by my unwillingness to join him, opting for the more secure ‘top rope’ climb. He takes to it like a fish in water, grappling with the artificial rocks and ledges like he’s done it a million times. I start to think he was only pretending to be an amateur to showboat. He’s wearing skimpy, athletic clothes to beat the heat, and it’s like an anatomy lesson. Defined as he is, I can see every muscle contract with effort.