Date: Sun, 7 Mar 2004 21:08:08 -0800 (PST)
From: SJL <geekwriter143@yahoo.com>
Subject: Paul and Adam: Chapter Eleven

As always, I adore any comments you care to send to me.  The address is
geekwriter143@yahoo.com

Don't read this if you shouldn't read this.  Be a nice person.  Eat more
vegetables.

On to Chapter Eleven, from Adam's point of view.

-----------------------------------------------------

"So, what's in Chicago?" Laura asks as we head up towards Waterloo.  She
doesn't have air conditioning in her car so the windows are open, and that
and the noise of the wheels on the gravel makes us have to almost shout to
hear each other.

"My, uh, aunt and uncle," I say.  There's a pack of Winstons on the
dashboard and I reach to pick it up.  "Do you mind?" I ask.

"They're my mom's," Laura says.  "But she won't notice.  I didn't know you
smoked."

I place the cigarette between my lips, lean down and cup my hand around the
end as I light it.  "I don't," I say after exhaling.  "Just, you know, when
I'm stressed."

"What's going on?"

I shrug.  "Nothing."  I gaze out the window at the fields of soybeans and
corn flying past.  I can smell a hog confinement farm somewhere nearby and
the dust from the road smells thick like limestone.

"Your dad was supposed to drive you in this morning?" she asks.

I nod.  "Yeah.  But he spaced.  Work's crazy, lately.  And, you know, he's
got his new girlfriend to worry about.  Thanks for taking me.  I called my
dad, but he was already so busy-"

Laura slams on the brakes and jerks the wheel, sending the car spinning
around 360 degrees.  If I wasn't wearing my seatbelt I would have probably
flown out the window.

When the car stops spinning the gravel dust floats through the open
windows.  My heart is hammering in my throat.  "Jesus," I whisper.  "What
was that?  Rabbit?"

"Fucking piece of shit liar is what it was," Laura snaps.  She turns the
car off and looks at me.  "What is going on, Adam?"

I stare at her.  I still haven't caught my breath.  "You almost killed us
on purpose?"

"I didn't almost kill us, I just did a donut.  Jesus.  And what's with
this?"  She snatches the cigarette out of my hand and tosses it out the
window.  "Coach would blow a gasket if he knew you were fucking up your
lungs."

"You did that on purpose," I say slowly, trying to wrap my mind around it.

"It got your attention, didn't it?  Now what the hell is going on?"

"With what?  I'm gonna miss my bus if you-"

"Don't give me that going to Chicago to visit your aunt and uncle crap,"
she snaps.  "I know you weren't planning on going anywhere this morning
because I saw you leaving the pool on your bike.  You wouldn't have been
there if you hadn't been expecting to have practice.  Are you running
away?"

"No."  I pull my knees up and rest my chin on them.

"Adam," she says softly.  She reaches out and touches my arm.  "Look, if
things are bad I'll help you, but I am not helping you run away.  I'm more
than a little pissed off that you asked me to."

"I didn't ask you to help me run away."

"No, you lied to me, instead.  Do you even have an aunt and uncle in
Chicago?"

I sigh and shake my head.  "No."

"So what were you going to do when you got there?"

I shrug.  "I don't know.  Disappear."

Laura strokes my hair and I close my eyes as I feel her fingers against my
scalp.  "Do you want to tell me what happened?"

I don't say anything.  I'm dangerously close to crying.

"You have a fight with your dad?"

"He thinks I'm gay," I whisper.  I'm surprised I told her, but it feels OK
once the words are out.

"Are you?"

I look over at her and shrug.  "I don't know.  Probably.  Or bi.  I don't
know."

She pulls her hand away and looks out the windshield.  "So you called me
for help?" she asks.  She sounds pissed.  "Jesus."

"Laura, I..."  I have no idea what to say to her.

"You couldn't have called Jake?  Or is this some kind of sick joke the two
of you cooked up?  Hey, wouldn't it be hilarious to humiliate Laura even
more than she already is?"

"What are you talking about?"

"Do you laugh about me?" she asks.  "Do you think it's funny that the two
guys that I-" She breaks off and closes her eyes, shakes her head.

"Jake's gay?" I ask.

Laura looks over at me for a moment, then puts her hand to her mouth.  "Oh,
my God.  You didn't know."

I shake my head.  "When did this happen?  I thought you guys were dating."

Laura shrugs.  "He told me last week.  You can't tell him I told you.  You
can't tell anyone."

"Like I would," I say.  "Are you really pissed at me?"

She shakes her head.  "For what?  For being the second guy I like to turn
out to be gay in less than a week?"  She rakes her fingers through her
hair.  "Oh, my God.  I'm going to need therapy.  It wasn't me, was it?"

"No."

Laura closes her eyes and rests her head against the back of the driver's
seat.  "What happened with your dad?" she asks after a moment.  "He kick
you out?"

I shake my head.  "No.  He just...I got home from practice and he was going
through my room.  He was looking for evidence, I guess, not that there's
much to find."

"OK," she says.  "And then?"

"And what?" I ask.  "And he's a selfish son of a bitch who only pays
attention to me when he thinks I'm fucking up."

"Was he mad when you told him?"

"I didn't tell him."

"So then why Chicago?"

"You wouldn't understand."

"Not if you don't tell me, I won't."

I reach out and touch the delicate Black Hills gold cross Laura wears
around her neck.  "Aren't you going to tell me that I'm going to hell?"

Laura looks down at her cross and sighs.  "I don't know who's going to hell
and who's not.  I talked to Reverend White about Jake for a long time.  A
lot of the things he said surprised me-I thought he'd be more cut and dried
about things.  Is that why you stopped coming to church?"

"I just stopped going when my parents did," I say.  "It wasn't really a
conscious decision."

"You should come back," she says.  "We have a group that meets every
Thursday night to pray and just hang out.  It's a lot of fun."

I shake my head and look out the window.  I want another cigarette but I
don't reach for one.  "Not exactly my scene," I say.

"Come on.  We're meeting at Chuck's tonight."

I laugh.  "Hanging out with Chuck Anderson on purpose.  That'll be the
day."

Laura looks confused.  "What's wrong with him?  I thought you guys were
friends."

"I just laugh at his jokes, that's all," I tell her.  "Despite myself."

"What's wrong with his jokes?  I mean, besides the fact that he can't tell
them very well."

"Then you don't listen to them," I say softly.

Laura's still gazing at me with a quizzical look on her face.

"How do you fit four fags on a bar stool?" I ask her.  "Or, um, how many
fudge packers does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

Laura sighs.  "He doesn't mean it like that."

"Oh, right, he's a friendly fag hater."

"He's not like that," she says.  "He just...he just tells stupid jokes
sometimes.  It's not a big deal, Adam."

"You only think that because the jokes aren't about you."

"They're not about you, either."

"Yes, they are.  Maybe nobody knows it, but they are."

"Christ.  Jake's his best friend, you know."

"What does that have to do with anything?" I demand.  Finally, I reach for
the pack of Winstons and light another cigarette.  "You tell Coach about
this and I'll kick your ass," I say.

Laura takes the cigarette from me, but instead of throwing it out the
window she takes a drag, then hands it back.

"Why would Jake still be his friend if Chuck was such a homophobe?" Laura
asks.

"Does Chuck know?"

She shakes her head.  "Not yet.  But, I mean if things were as bad as you
say they are, why wouldn't Jake say something to him?  Why would Jake still
hang out with him?"

"Because he's scared," I tell her.  "Because you just smile and laugh and
die inside when the Chuck Andersons of the world tell their stupid fucking
jokes.  Because you can't do anything else without the risk of exposure,
and that's..."  I shake my head.  "I can't imagine anything worse than
people knowing," I tell her.  "Jake probably can't, either."

Laura's silent.

I tap my fingers on the door handle.  "Can we get this thing moving again?
I feel like I'm baking, here, like I'm one of Caroline's cookies or
something."

Laura starts the car and turns it around, heading us back home.  I know
without asking that she won't drive me to the bus station.  I don't really
want her to, anymore.  I don't even know what I was planning on doing if I
did end up making it to Chicago.

"You should be careful with her," Laura says as the car begins to pick up
speed, a cloud of dust rising behind us.

"Who?"  The wind feels good against my face.

"Caroline.  You're so worried about Chuck and the people that actually care
about you, but she's the one you have to worry about."

"You don't know her," I say.

"I've known her my entire life.  So have you, so don't play dumb.  If you
let her find out, it'll just be another weapon in her arsenal.  I don't
care if you are friends with her brother, she uses everybody's weaknesses
against them."

"She knows," I say softly.

Laura looks over at me.  "What?"

I don't know if she didn't hear me or if she can't believe it.  "She
knows," I say more loudly.  "And she doesn't give a shit, so don't tell me
what she'd do.  You don't know her."

She silent as she speeds around a slow moving combine.  Her face looks
tense and she's chewing on her lower lip.

"Look, Laura," I say.  "Thank you."

"For what?"

"For listening to me.  For trying to look out for me.  I know you don't
like her.  I can't blame you.  I didn't really like her before, either, and
I know I can't talk you into liking her because Paul spent years trying to
talk me into it and it didn't work."

"He's the one you're seeing," she says.  It's not a question.

"What?"

"When we...before, when we kissed, you said you were seeing someone.  It's
Paul Johansen, isn't it?"

I press my back into the seat and look out the window, take a long drag on
my cigarette.

"It figures.  First Caroline steals Mitch from Stacy, and then Paul..."
She sighs and shakes her head.

"Paul what?" I ask.  "Steals me from you?"

"Never mind," Laura says.  "Forget it."

"I'm sorry.  I was...I shouldn't have kissed you, OK?  I don't know if
it'll make it better or worse, but I was involved with him even before
you."

She laughs bitterly.  "Great.  So I was, what?  An experiment?"

"No.  Jesus, Laura, no."

"What, then?"  She's starting to cry.  I feel like an asshole for not
knowing how much she liked me.

"I did like you," I say.  "It was just...it was bad timing."  It sounds
lame, even to me.

"They're not like us," Laura says as she takes the corner by the Haskell's
farm onto the blacktop.  "It's not...they just don't have the same values
as we do."

I frown and look over at her.  "What?"

"It's not their fault," she says.  "It's just...it's just in their genes to
be deceitful.  That's just the way Asian people are, you know?  There's
nothing they can do about it."

"Inuit," I say.

Laura looks over at me.  I can't believe I ever thought she was pretty.
Maybe it's just what she's saying that makes her so ugly all of a sudden.
"What?"

"They're not Asian.  Their dad's family was from Greenland.  And I don't
see what that has do to with anything."

She shrugs.  "I don't mean anything by it, I'm just saying.  And if you're
so worried about people finding out, then you probably shouldn't hang
around him so much.  I mean, everybody knows he's gay.  It's obvious."

I hate the way girls fight, the way they say things you could almost think
were friendly if they didn't have such sharp razorblades hidden inside
them.  With guys it's so much easier.  You piss them off and they punch you
and then it's over.

Maybe Laura knows that she's pissed me off, because she doesn't say
anything else on the ride back into town.  "You want me to drop you at
home?" she asks finally.

"Yeah," I say.  It's the last place I want to go, but I don't want her to
drop me off at Paul's.

"You sure you don't want to come to the youth group tonight?" she asks as
he pulls into my driveway.

"Yeah," I say.  I get out of the car and lean down to look at her through
the open window.  "Thanks, though."

She smiles and shrugs.  I step back and watch her pull out of the driveway,
watch her drive away, make sure she's gone before I pick my bike up off the
front lawn and head over to Paul's.

I laugh when I see that Paul's still asleep.  He's on his back, now, one
hand resting on his chest, the other arm stretched across the bed.  I pull
my clothes off and climb over him, nestling myself between his body and the
wall.  "What are we going to do?" I ask softly, stroking his high
cheekbones with my fingertips.

Paul stirs and turns his body towards me in his sleep.  I wrap my arm
around his shoulders and pull him close.  "Tell me what I'm going to do," I
whisper.  "Tell me that it's all going to be OK."

Paul stretches and his eyes flutter open.  "Hey," he whispers, his voice
thick with sleep.

"Hey," I say, kissing him.

He runs his hand down my side, rests his fingers on my ass.  "You're
naked," he says.

"Mmm."  I kiss him again and keep my eyes open, look into his eyes, so dark
brown they almost seem black.

"How was practice?"

"Cancelled.  Coach's wife is having the baby."  I'll tell him about my
father later.  I'll probably even tell him about trying to get Laura to
drive me to Waterloo, about wanting to escape to Chicago and disappear.
I'll tell him that I came out to her, but I won't tell him what she said.

I forget that he's not white until someone reminds me.  I guess I can tell
that he's not, that his eyes are different, that even when he's pale his
skin is tan, but he just looks like Paul to me until someone says or does
something stupid.

We were probably in third grade before I was even conscious of it.  That's
when Hannah Kinder started calling him chocolate cake face.  Caroline, who
was fierce even at ten years old, cut off one of Hannah's braids and
started calling her jiggle butt, a name that people still use sometimes
behind Hannah's back.

That was the year he almost died.  He mixed ammonia and bleach and rubbed
it on his skin because he didn't want to look like his father, who'd left
and who Paul had just realized wasn't ever coming back.  I wonder how I
could have forgotten something like that.

I want to ask him if he thinks about it a lot, if, unlike me, he's always
aware that he's different.  I wonder if it hurt his feelings when Hannah
called him chocolate cake face or when in the seventh grade Jason Randolph
did an impression of Paul by taping his eyes into a slant and jumping
around in what was supposed to be a war dance.  We've never talked about
it, which seems strange to me now.

I want to ask him about it, but I don't know how to bring it up.  "I love
you," I say.  I say it because it's true and because I like how happy it
makes him to hear it.

"I love you, too," Paul says, stroking my bare thigh with his fingers.  "I
love it when I wake up and you're next to me."

I push him onto his back and start kissing his neck, kiss my way down his
chest and slide his t-shirt up so that I can kiss his bare stomach.  He
smells faintly of cum and I stroke his him and smile up at him.  "You jerk
off last night?" I ask.  My tongue darts out to taste his skin.

"Yeah," Paul whispers, gazing down at me.

"I can smell it on you," I say.  "What were you thinking about?"

He blushes and looks away from me.  "You."

"Yeah?  What about me?"  I start to tug on the waistband of his boxers.  He
lifts his hips and lets me slide them down his thighs.  His cock is just
starting to get hard, lolling to one side as it starts to swell.  I run my
tongue along it from base to head, pull his foreskin together with my lips
and suckle gently.

Paul gasps and reaches down to slide his fingers through my hair.

"What were you thinking about?" I ask.  "You thinking about fucking me?"

He nods.  "Yeah."

"You thinking about how I love your cock?" I ask.

He blushes again.  I love how easy it is to make him blush, how every time
he blushes his cock throbs.

I lay my head on his hip and gaze at his cock as I start to stroke it,
gently pulling the foreskin back, then pulling it back up to hide his cock
again.  I bend his cock to the side and peer into the circle his foreskin
makes around his cockhead.  "Hello in there," I say, making Paul laugh.
"Come on out and play," I say, sliding his foreskin back slowly.  I kiss
the tip of his cock, tongue the slit.

"I think he's shy," I say to Paul as I let go of his cock.  It's mostly
hard, now, the dark pink tip of his dick just beginning to poke out from
beneath the cover of his foreskin.  "Maybe he doesn't want to come out and
play."

"He does," Paul says.  "Trust me."

"I wish I wasn't cut," I say as I stroke the hot, silky skin of his cock.

"I like your dick just like it is," Paul says.

"Yeah, but still," I say, straddling his thighs and gazing down at him.  "I
can't imagine how fucking amazing it would feel if I didn't have scar
tissue, you know?"

"Well, here," Paul whispers, reaching for my cock.  He bends it down and
places our cocks head to head.  "You can borrow mine."  I groan as he
slides his foreskin up around the head of my cock.  It's so hot, so soft,
feels so amazing to be enveloped by him like that.

"Jesus," I murmur.

Paul smiles up at me, his eyelids still heavy with sleep.  "I always wanted
to be cut," he admits.

"What?  Why?"  I gaze down at our cocks, at his gorgeous foreskin stretched
over the head of my dick.

He shrugs.  "Because everybody else is."

I lean down to kiss him.  "Why the hell would you want to be like everybody
else when you can be better than everybody else?"

Paul blushes, clearly pleased.

I pull back, then stretch out next to him.  "You are, without a doubt, the
sexiest," I kiss his jaw, "hottest," I kiss the soft skin of his neck,
"most amazing guy I have ever known," I kiss the hollow of his collarbone,
"in my entire life."

I don't even have to look up to see if he's blushing.  My fingers are
against his face and I can feel the heat of his skin.

"I love everything about you," I whisper.  The air conditioning is cool
against my skin, so I pull the covers over us and curl up in his arms.  "I
love your voice, and the way you smell, and your skin, and the feel of your
fingers in my hair."

We're rubbing our cocks against each other, but it's slow and lazy and not
about getting off.

I slide my fingers over his chest, lay my head over his heart.  I can hear
it, can feel it beating against my cheek.  "My whole life is fucked up," I
whisper.  "Everything's fucked up except you."

Paul strokes my hair.  His hand is warm against the back of my neck.

"I came by earlier," I whisper.

"When?"

"A little after seven.  I went home after practice and found my dad going
through my room."

Paul strokes my hair gently.

"He knows.  I denied it, but he knows."

"How?"  Paul asks the same question I've been asking myself all morning.

I sigh.  "You know how easy it was to hear my parents fighting?" I ask
softly.  "How easy it was to hear my dad and Rebecca the other day?"

"Oh," Paul says.

"Yeah.  I guess I never thought about it working the other way around.  I'm
sure he heard us."

"Oh," Paul says again.  He knows as well as I do that the noises we make,
the things we say-the things I say-aren't things anybody wants their
parents to hear.  Christ.  He probably heard me begging Paul to fuck me
with his big cock.

"Is he pissed?" Paul asks.

"Yeah."

"Did he believe you when you denied it?"

"I don't know," I admit.  "In a way I don't even care.  He can think
whatever he wants."

"Are you going to tell him the truth?"

I shrug.  "I don't know."

I close my eyes and let my head rise and fall with the rhythm of Paul's
chest.  His arms are warm and strong around me, and I imagine that we're
just waking up in our own bed in an apartment somewhere, and it feels good.