7
I have work to do, but it’s hard. Pun intended. I’m trying to get into what motivated Mallory to attempt the mountain in the first place, but Rocco is under my skin. Maybe it was a mistake to try and work in bed, because the sheets smell richly of last night’s sex, when I pushed a pillow under his ass, rolled the last of the rainbow condoms (blue) onto his cock and rode it, fucking him with slow, teasing movements of my hips until he begged to come.
Not only that, the cat is watching me intently, waiting for me to get so absorbed in my writing that she can leap up on the bed unnoticed.
“I’m watching you right back,” I tell her, and start into my next paragraph. The Mallory money quote, as it were.
“People ask me, ‘What is the use of climbing Mount Everest?’ and my answer must at once be, ‘It is of no use.’ There is not the slightest prospect of any gain whatsoever. Oh, we may learn a little about the behavior of the human body at high altitudes, and possibly medical men may turn our observation to some account for the purposes of aviation. But otherwise nothing will come of it. We shall not bring back a single bit of gold or silver, not a gem, nor any coal or iron. If you cannot understand that there is something in man that which responds to the challenge of this mountain and goes out to meet it, that the struggle is the struggle of life upward and forever upward, then you won’t see why we go. What we get from this adventure is just sheer joy. And joy is, after all, the end of life.”
This is probably the longest explanation we have of Mallory’s passion for Everest. The other is a lot more famous, on account of being pithier and easily mistaken for profundity. The truth – it seems – is a lot more mundane. After being worn down by countless reporters asking him ‘Why do you want to climb the mountain, Mr. Mallory?’, Mallory finally sighed and snapped at the man from the New York Times – “Because it’s there.”
I stop to shoo Rerun, who can’t resist a warm laptop keyboard. “Off the bed. Come on. We’ve talked about this.”
Unfortunately she doesn’t speak English, and even if she did probably wouldn’t pay any attention, being a cat and all. I scoop her up clumsily with one hand and set her – defiant and dangly legged – on the floor beside the bed. I’m so behind with this. I meant to have Mallory and Irvine done by the end of June, but I’m getting to the end of the old material I had on standby to plug the gap.
And now there’s someone at the door. I throw on some pants and go to answer it.
It’s Meg, showing up unexpected. “Have you heard from Matt?” she says, which is an odd question, since none of us are supposed to be hearing from Matt. He’s meant to be incommunicado right now.
“No,” I say, which is an easier answer than getting into our little midnight boat trip a month or so ago. “Have you?”
She frowns over her phone, her blonde hair slipping loose from the clumsy knot I don’t know why she doesn’t learn how to do better. Or just pick a hairstyle that stays put. “I don’t know,” she says. “I got a missed call on my phone and it’s giving me palpitations. Look.”
The bedroom door – which has never hung flush on its hinges – slowly swings open behind me. I think of the rumpled bed, the condom packets on the nightstand and Rocco’s black leather pants tossed across the ottoman. “One second,” I say. “I think the cat’s trying to get on the bed again.”
I shoo the cat once more and shut the door, but that only wafts the smell of sex into the hallway. And my sister is no dummy. Her fingers are on the back of my waistband. “Daniel, is that a hickey?” she says, amused. “Shit, am I interrupting something?”
“No. It’s cool. He’s at a meeting.”
It just slips out. As soon as I say it I realize I’ve given too much away, and Meg’s eyes get as round as the cat’s. “Oh God,” she says, like I’ve just told her I had something terminal. “Oh no. Please tell me you’re not sleeping with Rocco.”
“Not that it’s any of your business,” I start to say, but I know I’m busted.
“Is he even gay?”
“Apparently gay enough.”
She covers her mouth with both hands and sighs. “He’s in recovery, you enormous dumbass.”
“I know. He’s at a meeting right now. And he’s found a therapist in Seattle. He’s taking it very seriously, Meg.”
“Uh, no – he isn’t. Because if he was he wouldn’t be having sex with you. Like, how does that even work?”
“What? You want a diagram?”
“You know what I mean,” she says, although I don’t. “What is he then? Bi, gay?”
“Bi. Obviously. He was married to a woman. What does it matter?”
Meg takes the two steps down into the living area and leans against the back of the sofa with a sigh. “One of the reasons they say no relationships in early recovery is because it’s a big upheaval,” she says, getting slowly more sarcastic in a way I know means she’s about to make a point. And usually a good one. “A life change, if you will. Like coming out as bisexual, for example. That there is kind of a big thing for a regular person, and for someone who is still collecting monthly sobriety chips? Forget it.”
“Well, it’s not like we were planning on holding a parade about it,” I say. “It’s private right now.”
“Sure. Until some creep photographs you canoodling in Starbucks.”
I shake my head, refusing to concede this point, at least. But I know I’ve already lost the argument. “Actually nobody’s photographed him. It’s like he says – he’s not interesting to them when he’s not half-dead from drugs. Look, we know it’s not ideal right now, but we’ve got this under control, Meg. We have. Honestly.”
Under control. Where have I heard those words before? I’m digging my own grave here.
“If you had this under control you wouldn’t be doing it,” she says. “Period. He’s an addict, Daniel. Relationships are like catnip to the addict brain: you’re something new and shiny to obsess about. To him you’re more fascinating than is safe right now, because he’s been walking around like a zombie with burned out dopamine receptors, and then there’s you, willing to make him feel good in ways he forgot existed. And this is Rocco were talking about – he was pretty intense even before he got into the kind of messed up behavior/reward loops that you get stuck in when you’re all smacked out. If this goes south then you’re going to get hurt, and probably badly, but it’s going to be nothing compared to what could happen to him. That’s how a lot of heroin users die, Daniel. They get clean, they’re doing great, and then something painful happens–”
“–I know, okay?” I say, with a brattiness that only demonstrates how far in the wrong I am about this. “We’ve talked about this. A lot.”
“Talk more,” says Meg. “Until you come to the correct answer. And before you do something really stupid and fall in love with him.” She sees the look on my face and groans. “Shit. You did, didn’t you?”
“I tried not to.” I sit down on the step. All along I’ve known I was being an idiot, but it’s different hearing it from her. Not only does she have the authority of big sisterhood, but as a psychologist she knows the ins and outs of rehab.
She doesn’t say anything. Just stands there being disappointed with me.
“Give me your phone,” I say, after a long and awful silence.
“Why?”
“Because I want to check the number on that missed call.”
“Don’t change the subject.”
“I’m not. I want to know why you think you heard from Matt.”
Meg closes her eyes. I can almost hear her mentally counting to ten. “Because that brother never does what he’s fucking told to, either,” she says.
I’m in disgrace and nothing I can tell her will convince her otherwise. It’s not the time to mention that Matt briefly busted out of rehab before Rocco and I saved the day. That was the first night. Our first night.
Everything Meg says is right, but I’m a lovestruck fool, and when she’s gone all I want is Rocco to come in and reassure me that we’re not that unhealthy, especially since we know we have a problem and we’re doing our best to deal with it.
I come down with an epic case of esprit d’escalier, explaining to my absent sister that my relationship with Rocco is actually very, very normal, thank you very much. We don’t only fuck like crazed weasels. Sometimes we cuddle. Sometimes we cook together, or talk about what I’m going to do with the new house (he thinks the master bedroom should be purple, or at least lilac) and sometimes he pushes his bare feet into my lap and calls me baby. He brings me coffee in bed and I tell him my t-shirts look better on him, and sometimes we pass the time in conversations so joyfully stupid that I can hardly even remember what they were about, but I always remember – when I smile half an hour later and realize that my cheeks ache from laughing – that they were fun. We’re not really that much different from any other pair of lovers in the world, and perhaps a lot better off than many, since we actually like being around one another outside of the bedroom.
It’s only when he comes in that I finally climb down off my high horse and realize how late he is. It’s almost six and he left at one.
“Hey,” he says, hanging his jacket in the hallway. “Look what I got.” He holds out a new sobriety chip – dark blue plastic, but with the same stupid quotation. “Nine month chip. Three more and we’ll be able to go legit.”
I turn the thing over in my fingers. I hate it. The chips never stop feeling like commandments, and I hate them all the more because I know they exist for a reason. They shake the foundations of every argument I make in favor of this thing of ours, even if we are trying hard to be sensible and sane and not to treat love like another drug.
He sits down on the sofa beside me and presses a kiss to my shoulder. “What’s wrong? You’re quiet.”
I hand him back the chip and lean into him. “Nothing. I’m okay.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I say, even as it’s just occurring to me that this is the first lie I’ve ever told him. “Just tired. Hungry.”
“That’s handy. I was thinking we should go to Rosetti’s tonight. See if they still have that wild boar salami on the menu.”
“Sounds good.” My hand – around his waist – stumbles across a patch of bare skin between his waistband and his shirt. Rattled as I am, I still can’t resist the urge to touch, but then I feel something that’s not quite fabric, not quite plastic.
I recoil and see it. There’s a surgical dressing on his hip. The bare hip, the one that’s not already covered in vines. “Oh my God, what did you do?” I say, but I know already. “Rocco, what did you do?”
He gets up and unbuttons far enough to show me. He peels back the dressing and there – looking vacuum-packed under that Saran wrap substance they use to cover fresh tattoos – is my name. “You were the first,” he says, like it’s that simple, and not the kind of thing a crazy person would do. He’s going too high. He’s like one of those mountaineers who gets so fixated on the summit that they forget that they’re going to have to come down.
“You maniac,” I say.
“What? Don’t you like it?”
I get up from the couch, needing to put some distance between us, or I’ll never say this. “I love it. That’s the problem, you lunatic. We’re grown-ass adults in our thirties and you’re getting my name tattooed on your body like an idiot teenager. I should be disturbed right now, and I kind of am, but mostly I just want to bang you into the middle of next week.”
He crosses the room in one stride, presses me against the wall and kisses me hard and deep. “I’m down,” he says. “Obviously I have a meeting next Tuesday but I’m free all Wednesday. Is that middle enough for you?”
“Stop it.”
“Stop what?”
I kiss him anyway. “You know what. I love you so much.”
“I love you, too. What’s the problem?”
“This. Us. Can’t you see we’re getting high as fucking kites off each other?”
He exhales, his body relaxing. His forehead settles against mine and he holds me there, one hand on my hip, the other on my cheek. We’re both breathing too fast and I can feel he’s as hard as I am, because we are ridiculous and we don’t seem to know how to stop. “Meg was here,” I say. “She figured out what’s been going on.”
He takes a step back. “And?”
“What do you think? She read me the riot act.” I head for the kitchen, badly in need of a strong cup of coffee. “All about how I’m in danger of becoming the new obsession you need to take the edge off, and how you’re too intense–”
“–I’m not that intense.”
“Right. Sure. Which is why you just came home with my name tattooed on your body.”
He sighs and pushes back his unruly, streaked hair. “You have a right to be on my body,” he says. “However this ends, you were an indelible experience. You will always be part of my life.”
“Yeah. About that whole ‘intensity’ thing…”
I’m relieved to have the distraction of fiddling with the coffee maker, because I didn’t I think I’d be dragging him to the bedroom by his fly buttons right now. “You have to see,” I say. “That we keep going through the reasons why we shouldn’t be doing what we’re doing–”
“–and then doing it anyway. I know.”
“It’s a problem, Rocco.”
He looks at me and I can tell from the look in his eyes that he’s begging me not to name the solution. We both know what it is. I mash my finger down hard on the coffee maker button and let the hiss of hot water and the smell of dark roast fill the room.
“Therapy,” he says, as the coffee maker dribbles its last. “Why don’t we go to therapy?”
“As a couple?” I’m impressed. It’s not a bad compromise.
“Yeah. I’ll talk to Claudia about it. It’s not like she doesn’t know about my romantic situation anyway.”
I hand him his coffee. “And she hasn’t already told you to break up with me?”
“Of course she has. That’s why I stick with her.”
“You stick with your therapist because she tells you to break up with me?”
“Yep. That’s how I know she’s a real therapist, and not one of those knob-slobbing goons you get back in LA, the ones who want to get paid simply for flattering your self-obsessed ass instead of fixing it.” He takes a sip. “What do you say? Want to give it a shot?”
*
There are two sofas in the corner office, both tasteful beige and set at ninety degrees to one another. As soon as I enter the room I feel assessed. Do Rocco and I sit down on separate sofas or do we both take a seat on the same one, the one facing Claudia’s chair? I feel as though she’s going to take notes on my choice.
I sit down next to Rocco, close enough to touch. He holds my hand and I feel like this, too, will be observed. It’s a nice room, with large windows screened from view with flowering shrubs, but the plate glass and the foliage has the unfortunate effect of making me think of a zoo enclosure, something you peer into in the hope of seeing something rare and unhappy nesting among the leaves.
“So,” says Claudia, tweaking the seam of her pants suit as she crosses her legs. “This would be…the situation?”
“This is Daniel,” says Rocco.
“You did not refer to me as The Situation, did you?” I say, to hide my pleasure at the way he says my name. “Wasn’t that one of those terrible Jersey Shore people?”
Claudia laughs politely. “Well, how about we just go with Daniel?”
“Yes, please. Let’s go with that.”
“So, from what Rocco has told me I’m guessing that the two of you have–”
“–yep,” I say, not sure if I’m ready to hear us described in clinical terms just yet.
“A lot,” says Rocco.
“We’re sorry.”
He frowns. “Are we?”
“No. Not really.” This is easier than I expected. “And that’s kind of the problem.”
She gives a small sigh. “Okay,” she says. “I guess you know what I’m going to say, right?”
“That I need to be single so I can work on my recovery.” He’s rehearsed the line so often that it come out like an NA platitude or a prayer. “I know that, but we’ve discussed this, and we’re in this, and I need…”
He trails off, realizing he’s given himself away.
“Need is a strong word, Rocco,” says Claudia, but she doesn’t pursue it. Not just now. Instead she tucks a strand of ash-blonde hair behind her ears and changes tack. “Daniel – would you like to tell me about your relationship?”
“Uh, well, it’s not like I came out of nowhere,” I say, immediately realizing I sound defensive. “We’ve known one another since we were kids. I’m his best friend’s brother.”
“Okay. And was there always an attraction there?”
“No,” says Rocco, in the very same instant I say, “Yes. Always.” His eyes go wide.
“And when did you first become intimate?”
Intimate. I hate that word. It sits uncomfortably between cutesy and clinical, but somehow my body responds to it. Or maybe I’m just remembering how my hand shook when I tried to take a naked picture of myself. Remembering that febrile mixture of lust and fear and insanity as I opened the door, and then…oh God…him. All over me. “It was late April, I think,” I say.
“I came onto him,” says Rocco. “It was my fault.”
“Yeah, and I sent you…that text. So. I’m also very much to blame.”
“And how would you characterize your relationship?”
“Adventurous,” says Rocco, his fingers grazing the inside of my wrist. Jesus, I’m getting a boner in front of a psychiatrist. There is no way this is healthy. “Loving. Erotic.”
Adventurous. Like the time in the kitchen when he swatted me on the ass with a wooden spatula and – half joking – suggested I should maybe drop my pants. I furtively adjust my shirt to cover my crotch and try to picture the meanest nuns from my elementary school all frowning at me at once.
“And what about you, Daniel?” asks Claudia.
“Um…yeah.” Nope. No good. Not even the specter of ancient, long dead Sister Immaculata can douse my fire. My cheeks – both sets – blaze with the memory, and my asshole clenches with delicious shame at what came next. “I guess it’s a lot different to what I’m used to,” I say, meeting Rocco’s eyes. To my horror it’s like he can see into my head. I feel sure he’s also right there with me on the kitchen floor, puddles of yoghurt everywhere, and him rubbing extra virgin olive oil into my glowing – and far from virgin – butt.
“In what way?”
Kitchen utensils? Impromptu spanking? “I guess it’s different because Rocco has never been with a man before.”
“Always wanted to try it, though,” says Rocco, with the same straightforward sexual confidence that makes my head spin. “It’s not like the impulse came out of nowhere.”
“And did you want to try it with Daniel?”
“I would have,” says Rocco. “But I had no idea he was into me. In theory we could have started doing this years ago.”
Oh my God. It’s like he knows about all my elaborate teenage fantasies, the ones where I’d meet him backstage and he’d be all noble about it and say he couldn’t take my virginity, because I was his best friend’s little brother. And then we’d do it anyway, because we couldn’t help it.
Claudia settles her notes on her knee. “Daniel, I’d like to come back to the difference between this and your previous relationships. How would you describe that?”
I clear my throat. Rocco catches my eye and squeezes my hand, in a way I think is supposed to be encouraging, but then his gaze does that flick between eye and lip, the one that sets me on fire every time. We are hopelessly broken. This is supposed to be a therapy session, but instead we’re like those monkeys in the zoo – the ones that always start boning the moment you push grandma’s wheelchair past the cage.
“Rocco is a very confident lover,” I say, slowly. “He’s curious, inventive and…not what I expected. I thought I’d be teaching him a thing or two, but he just…did me.”
He gives me a look that makes me imagine I can feel the ends of my eyelashes frizzle in the heat. I can’t help what I’m saying – it’s the truth. “To all effects and purposes he was a virgin,” I say. “But he didn’t apologies for it, or even mention it. He just went at it on pure instinct, and it was astonishing. Just this…this beautiful force of nature. When I’m with him it feels as though I’m learning to love again from scratch.”
Rocco draws in a short, ragged breath and pulls my hand to his lips. He kisses my knuckles, his eyes shining. My heart is threatening to spill out of my eyes again and I can hardly believe it’s possible to love someone this much. Was talking about it like this supposed to make it better? It doesn’t feel that way. If anything it feels like confiding in a stranger has only given further life to my feelings for him.
“You see our problem here, Doc?” says Rocco, with a small catch in his voice. “We’re really…in this.”
Claudia gives us a moment to breathe, to rearrange our hands and knees so that we look like normal clients and not like a pair of lust-crazed maniacs who keep trying to crawl under one another’s skin. “You mentioned the word ‘adventurous’, Rocco,” she says, and just like that my filthy mind is back on the kitchen floor, reliving the moment when we got weird with it and Rocco penetrated me with a well-greased carrot. “Adventures can be very rewarding.”
“And dangerous,” I say.
“He knows,” says Rocco. “He does a podcast about people dying up mountains and things. It’s fascinating.”
“Sounds interesting. You must give me the link,” she says, and steers us back on course. “But Daniel has a point, Rocco. With reward comes risk, particularly the risk of how you’re going to cope when the rewards are no longer as great as they are right now. Right now I can see that you’re very much in love, but love is part of a behavioral reward that evolved to cement the pair bonding process in humans. It stimulates dopamine production in the brain…”
Rocco holds up a hand and sighs. “I know. I get it,” he says, with a sudden weariness. “I’m a busted lab rat chasing brain tingles – I know.”
“You also used the word ‘need’ earlier,” she says. “Were you about to say that you needed something pleasurable as a reward for working on your recovery?”
“No. Look, didn’t we talk about how I needed to treat normal life as both the end and the reward for being clean? I’m doing that. Love is part of life.”
“You’re splitting hairs,” says Claudia, shaking her blonde bob. “Yes, love is part of life, but the first flush of it isn’t normal, not by any stretch of the imagination. It’s absorbing and intense and all-consuming, but you’re also not functioning on a normal level when you’re in love. Right now you are literally drugged. You are swimming in some of the happiest neurochemicals the human body can produce – serotonin, dopamine, oxytocin.” She ticks them off on her fingers and spreads her hands. “I’m not saying you should swear off it for life, but as your therapist I have to tell you that I think love might be too strong a substance for you to cope with so early in your recovery.”
He props his head in his hands, elbows on knees. I rub the back of his shoulder, as if to say that we knew this was coming.
“So what do you suggest we do?” I ask. “Assuming that ending it isn’t an option.”
“Can you put it on hold?” she says. “Where are you at, Rocco? Eight months?”
“Nine, now.”
“Okay. So three months. Are you still roommates?”
“I’ll move out,” he says, raising his head. “Tonight. Whatever it takes.” He sits back and takes my hand again. “We want this, Claudia. We want to make it work.”
“Moving out is a good start.”
“A start?”
She gives one of those soft, medical intakes of breath that say bad news can’t be far behind. “I’d advise abstinence,” she says. “At least until you get that twelve months chip. If you’re still going to date, do it in public, and do not go home with one another. And try to keep your texting clean. Pretend you’re Amish, basically.”
“Fuck that. I’m not growing one of those beards with no mustache. They make men look like trolls.”
The flash of humor is welcome, easing some of the tension in the room, but not all of it. When we’re done Rocco is quiet – too quiet. We get the elevator down to the parking garage and it’s like he’s afraid to even look me in the eye.
“Say something.” I need to know what he’s thinking. I feel as though I’ve been run over by a truck full of emotions.
He gives me a quick sidelong look. “‘Always?’” he says. There’s so much going on in my head right now that it takes me a second to realize what he’s referring to.
I stare straight ahead at the metal doors. Maybe I’m still stuck in some kind of auto-truth mode, because I can barely believe what comes out of my mouth next. “I learned to masturbate thinking about you.”
Rocco exhales. He doesn’t look at me, but I feel his fingers brush the back of mine, sending a staticky charge all the way up my arm and down my back and renewing the weird buzz I got from talking so explicitly about our sex life. We hold hands on our way back to the car and I’m tingling with the sense that something is about to happen. Something we’re not supposed to do any more.
I release his hand so I can unlock the car. He falls into step behind me. For a moment I’m almost disappointed that he’s going to do as he’s told, but then he hooks his fingers into the back of my jeans and yanks me into a pool of darkness between the concrete pillars at the side of the parking space.
His mouth comes down hard on mine, hot and greedy and absurdly welcome. He goes straight for my belt and his ferocity sends a rogue thought skittering across the surface of my brain – what if I couldn’t stop him? I cry out as he pulls my cock from my pants and he covers my mouth with his other hand. Great. I’m not five minutes out of a therapy session and I have a head full of rape fantasies while exposing myself in a parking garage.
“I had an erection in front of my therapist thanks to you,” Rocco whispers.
Oh no. This is not all on me. “Yeah, well – you should have thought of that when you decided to fuck me with a carrot.”
“With a what…no, never mind.” He kisses me again and I devour his mouth right back. His hand is on me and I can feel something wet in his grip. Figures I’m leaking; I feel harder than a diamond. Every single one of my senses is on red alert as I scramble to open his fly, my ears straining for the sound of footsteps on concrete.
And then he goes down on me.
I hold my breath, already braced for it to feel good, but what I don’t count on is how it sounds. The sound of his mouth on me is obscene beyond imagining, and there’s an echo. I stifle a whimper and clap a hand over my open mouth, once again barely able to believe this is really happening. I’ve never had sex in a public place up until now and I’m just not ready for this. Rocco Ponti – yes, that Rocco Ponti – is on his knees blowing the hell out of me in a parking garage.
And then, just when I think the whole thing can’t get any crazier, I hear footsteps moving towards us. Rocco obviously hears it, too, because his throat rumbles with one of those low, appreciative moans he often makes when my dick is in his mouth. A car alarm chirps somewhere and I buck, helpless, as the footsteps approach. My jeans are halfway down my thighs and the concrete is cold on my ass, the contrast making his mouth feel even hotter and wetter and softer. Oh God, they’re coming, and so am I, so am I. Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, I’m coming and he’s swallowing and the wet, filthy noises we’re making just got even dirtier. I hear a car door open and as the engine starts Rocco scrambles to his feet, pushing his dick into my hand and his tongue into my mouth. He tastes slickly of me and – because I can – I moan softly into the kiss as the car roars away. He catches my bottom lip between his teeth and bites, hard. I taste salt and metal as he comes, his sperm so hot it feels like it could scald me.
Oh my God.
My first impulse is to yank my pants up, but my hand is covered in him, so I shove my fingers into his mouth. “Clean up your mess, you slut,” I say, and he smiles around my fingers as he laps his own come from them. This is so not what the doctor ordered.
We get in the car in a daze. “Your lip’s bleeding,” he says, and wipes the blood from below my lower lip where he’s bitten me. He looks at the little red smear on his thumb for a moment and then – looking me in the eye – licks it off. I feel a ripple of fear, and then shame because I know that he’s clean. All those tests were part of his rehab, another set of consequences he had to face. He said he never shared needles, as far as he could remember.
I snag a Kleenex from the glovebox and hold it to my lower lip. The silence between us has a tang of repressed hilarity, like a giggle in the middle of High Mass. We are both such total Catholics: the instant someone in authority says ‘Don’t do that’ we get boners up to our noses with the desire to do it.
“So,” I say. “Abstinence.”
“Yeah,” he says slowly. “Oops.”
“That was totally your fault. All through that therapy session I couldn’t stop thinking about that fucking carrot.”
He smothers a smile. “I’m not responsible for what goes on in your head.”
“You spanked me with a spatula, ate key lime pie flavored yoghurt out of my ass crack and then penetrated me with a greased up root vegetable. You are absolutely responsible for how I feel about those things, Rocco, being as you did them to me.”
He laughs and shakes his head. His lips are still red from sucking and I could die from how beautiful he is right now. “Right,” he says. “Like you weren’t howling for more and riding that carrot like it was Hugh Jackman’s dick.”
Wait – did I tell him that? “How do you know I was into Hugh Jackman?”
Rocco rolls his eyes. “Uh, because everyone’s into Hugh Jackman. I’d go gay for Hugh Jackman.”
“You went gay for me.”
“Yeah. You and Hugh Jackman. Oh, and Idris Elba. I’d fuck him for the accent alone.”
“Doesn’t Hugh Jackman have an accent? Is this like an accent kink? I don’t have an accent.”
“No,” says Rocco. “But you kneel on the kitchen floor and let me eat yoghurt out of your ass. There’s no contest.”
I laugh, but I know we have to take this seriously. “You do know we just had sex again, don’t you?”
He shrugs. “Technically I haven’t moved out yet.”
“Rocco…”
“Right.” He sighs and takes my still slightly sticky hand. Between the two of us we’ve made the inside of my car smell like the inside of a gay bathhouse in seventies San Francisco, minus the poppers. “I’m going to check into a hotel tonight,” he says. “Especially since you brought up that carrot thing. I can’t be trusted; I’m already going through the contents of the vegetable drawer in my head.”
“We’re out of carrots. I think there’s a yam, but that’s a hard no.”
“There’s a cucumber.”
“Fuck off. It’s huge.”
“Hey, I’m game,” he says, appalling me with the strength of my wrongheaded lusts.
“No,” I say. “Absolutely not. This is why we have to take Claudia seriously. We do need some space, otherwise we’re just going to…”
“…keep trying to insert vegetables into one another,” says Rocco, with a wistfulness that makes me dissolve into laughter. I love the way he looks at me when I laugh, like he’s almost childishly delighted that he can make me happy. And he does.
“You make me so happy,” I say, leaning across to kiss him. “I’m so in love with you.”
“I know, baby,” he says, his hand on my cheek. “I love you, too. That’s why we have to make this work. Because it’s good. Because it’s there.”