Age and Inexperience

 

 

THEY DIDN’T talk about the backrub.

Kit was unsure how to bring it up.

Hey, I know I’m an overweight loser who still lives with his mother, but, uhm, you touched me, and I’m probably making a big deal out of this because I haven’t been touched since I was, like, in day care, but I’m thinking that it was a special, very awesome sort of touch, but you’re beautiful, and you bring me soup, and you love the one thing that’s kept me sane as a thirty-year-old virgin, and I can’t help wondering if maybe you’re not straight and maybe, just maybe, you like me a little.

And please don’t sue me for sexual harassment.

That last line was the kicker right there.

Kit was pretty sure that if Jesse was actually Jessie-short-for-Jessica, he might be able to bumble his way through a your job does not depend on this, I swear come-on. It would suck, and Jessie-short-for-Jessica would probably quit out of sheer embarrassment, but he could do it.

But coming on to a male assistant, one he’d done all but bare his heart to? Uhm, no.

He slept for an hour that day, and when he woke up, he rubbed his face, reflected that, hot damn! Did he feel better!, brushed the crumbs off his desk, and went back to work. Jesse left before he did (per usual) with not much more than a wave and a “Hope you feel better, boss!” and Kit didn’t have much of a chance to do more than wave back and say “Thank you!” before he disappeared down the sterile beige hallway.

The next day, it had been business as usual—he’d tried to insist that he pay for both their lunches, since Jesse had sprung the day before, but Jesse had simply shaken his head and smiled.

“No—and we’re not eating out. Here. I brought us something.”

He’d proceeded to produce two chicken sandwiches—the kind made with chicken breasts and tomatoes and lettuce and pickles, on plain old wheat bread—and Kit had almost wept.

“These are really good!”

“Yeah—and they’re pretty low-cal. The chicken’s easy to cook….” And he’d proceeded to write the recipe down for Kit.

Kit said, “Oh crap! I have to buy pots and pans and shit!”

Jesse smiled a little. “That didn’t occur to you until just now?”

Kit’s blush covered his entire body. He was going to have to explain this now, or at least part of it. “I’m having all my furniture delivered new. All I have to move is my clothes and some other stuff. It’ll probably fit in my car. I hadn’t thought about cooking stuff—I guess I should have.”

“Okay—man, I haven’t wanted to pry, but that’s just… uhm….”

The blush got worse. Jesse was furrowing his perfect brow at him, and Kit could only stammer through the rest.

“She’s not a nice person, but… my dad walked out on us, and she didn’t have anybody. I just”—edit edit edit—“reached a point where I needed my own life.” He shrugged. “I’ve got plenty in savings—I just….” Don’t know how normal people live. Never had enough imagination to think about a real life on my own. Was asleep, like a giant squishy possum until you looked at me with a basketball under your arm, and I woke up thinking I had to be a better man.

“I just needed to get my grown-up on, I guess.”

Jesse smiled, and it was brilliant. “My home life sucked too. You stuck around, you know, to make it better. That’s nice. I bailed. I’ve been living in shitty apartments since I graduated from high school. That’s why the assistant job—tech school got me out quicker, and I wanted to, you know, have a life and not just be in school.”

Kit blanched. “How old are you?”

“Twenty-three,” Jesse said through a full mouth, and Kit couldn’t decide whether to blow out a sigh of relief or not. “I worked for another firm for a couple of years but….” He shrugged as he let the sentence trail off. “They moved you from person to person, you know? Sort of assistant-by-slut, right? And I had enough moving as a kid. I just wanted to find a good boss, someone I could work for and have fun with and….”

Inexplicably, Jesse blushed.

Kit blinked, transfixed, but Jesse was looking down at the desk and couldn’t see how that one moment of embarrassment started a terrible hot/cold chain reaction of hope in Kit’s chest, like a BENGAY (or Jesse-might-be-gay) poultice around his heart.

“I just wanted to make a connection, you know?” Jesse said at last, looking up, and Kit nodded, in that moment completely understanding. Their eyes met and caught, and Kit had some more trouble breathing. Christ—this was a kid, and Kit didn’t even know if he was gay.

When he heard his own voice, he thought someone might have taken over his body.

“I need to go shopping for cooking stuff this week, but I wanted to go to a movie on Friday. Anything good out?”

The smile that bloomed across Jesse’s face made Kit glad he’d gotten up that morning. He’d been tempted to call in sick and nurse his aching muscles, and maybe watch Danny Fit videos until his cock was sore, but he’d decided that was too pathetic, even for him.

“The Fifth Element is playing at the UA—Friday night only.”

Kit’s own smile was suddenly not hesitant at all. “Best. Movie. Ever.”

Jesse shook his head, and his smile turned subtler and almost sly. “Serenity. That was the Best. Movie. Ever.”

The intimate and thrilling moment was over, and they were back talking about science fiction, and Kit was relieved. They would go to a movie as friends. They both seemed to need friends—it would be good. Kit could have Jesse as a friend and Danny Fit as a lover. The mathematical ease of that formula made Kit feel good all day.

It wasn’t until Jesse was leaving that Kit realized people weren’t necessarily as neat and tidy as the figures he used to make his living.

“Uhm, boss?”

Kit looked up from his computer, and Jesse—who always seemed so natural and graceful—was actually fidgeting at the door. “Yeah?”

“Uhm, what do I call you? I mean, it’s not the fifth grade—you’re not my teacher. But all I know you as is Mr. Allen. You go by Chris? Christopher? Topher?”

“Topher?” Were there people actually named Topher?

“There’s an actor that goes by that…. No, seriously. What do I call you?”

He’d die—literally shrivel up and die like a salted slug if this beautiful young man ever called him “Christopher” in the same irritating smoker’s-gravel twang his mother used. “Kit,” he said. He didn’t know how not to make his voice go soft.

“Your friends call you Kit?”

His colleagues called him Chris. “My dad, uhm, called me Kit, before he took off.” His dad had been a good guy, really, but not much could have stood up to that determined, seething nerve bundle of sourness and despair that was currently sucking down Virginia Slims courtesy of her alimony check.

Jesse just stood there for a minute, those big brown eyes wide and limpid, and his mouth set in a half-smile. “Kit,” he said after a moment. “See you tomorrow, Kit.”

Kit nodded, not sure when his mouth had gone so dry. “See you tomorrow.”

That night he made it through forty-five minutes of workout without hyperventilating or falling asleep on the floor. He even managed to take a shower and start going through his clothes for the move. He’d ordered a dresser and a bed from Sears—he could leave his mother the stuff in his room (old and battered anyway) so she could have a guest room, and he could masturbate in a bed that didn’t reek of his own childhood.

While he was packing, his mother wandered by. She was wearing one of those big, all-purpose dresses and flip-flops, with a scarf over her brightly dyed platinum hair. He’d seen a variation of this outfit every day of his life, except a couple of blissful weeks of band camp that his father had paid for.

“What in the hell are you doing?”

“Packing to leave. I told you—I’m moving out on Saturday.”

“You’re moving out the week before Thanksgiving? What kind of bastard does that?”

“I can still come by for dinner, Ma,” he placated. The thought gave him the hives.

“Don’t fucking bother. What? I support you for thirty years, and you just bail on me? Who’s going to take me to the market? Who’s going to take me to church? Don’t you have any fucking courtesy?”

Kit stopped packing and thought about it honestly. “I don’t know, Ma. You’re the only person I see, and you’re not exactly a stellar example.”

His mother blinked at him through poisonous green eyes. Kit had green eyes too—but they weren’t that bright. He thought the green might have been a contact.

“What the hell does that mean?”

Kit sighed and walked over to close his door. “It means that if you wanted me to take you to church or to the market, all you had to do was ask me for my new phone number and pick up the phone. Since you’d rather bitch at me for being ungrateful, I’ll take that as a no.”

The door snicked shut (he didn’t slam it—and was very proud of himself for that) and Kit was left alone, in what used to be a claustrophobic room. It was the secondary room of the house, with a bed, a bookshelf, and an old television, the kind with the regular screen that weighed two and a half million pounds.

Now, with his clothes folded and put in suitcases and his books in boxes around him and his posters (including a Serenity poster signed by Nathan Fillion that he’d had framed) down and in a neat stack in the corner, he felt a curious sense of freedom. The walls were all white—it was like he could stand on the bed and leap and fall into the sky and never land.

Then he thought of painting the walls of his new house (he drove by it every night, opened the door and walked into the echoing space of it, just to dream of what it would look like when all the furniture was delivered) and he thought landing might be very nice too.

When he slid into his bed that night, all showered and clean, thinking of good things for the future, he started thinking about Danny Fit.

He imagined his body, slimmer, fitter, his muscles defined, and his chest waxed (now that he was thirty, he’d started growing a small sized chest pelt, right between what he was hoping would someday be pectorals but were now man boobs). He imagined Danny climbing in next to him, and the way that perfect body would feel. Danny looked to be about forty—Danny would know what he was doing. He would tell Kit all of the mysterious things about sex with a man that Kit didn’t seem to be able to get off the internet, and he would show Kit what to do to make things feel good. Kit allowed himself to wonder what it would be like to run his hands down another man’s firm, taut ass and grasp a hard (thick, long) cock in his hand. He was sure Danny’s mouth would be soft against his, and Danny’s hands would be hard, and his breath would be minty fresh.

He couldn’t imagine much after that. He’d never experienced the giddy feeling of skin against skin; he could only rub his own body—his padded ribs, soft stomach, tender nipples—but it was enough. He thought that Danny’s mouth might be hot and wet on his cock, and the thought alone was enough to make it start oozing pre-come. He slid his hand under his shorts and started playing with his new favorite toy. His fist tightened on it, and his thumb rubbed the head while he thought of that toffee-dark head bobbing up and down while the lean hands touched him voluntarily.

And then he thought of nothing, saw nothing, just fell into the white-blindness of orgasm like he’d fallen into the freedom of his four white walls.

A few minutes later, after washing up quietly, he was back in bed and trying to imagine laying in someone’s arms, and if that would be like seeing the walls painted in his new house—would it make being gay real? Would it make sex real, to touch someone without the one specific goal? What was touching like, really, when sex was out of the way (temporarily)?

It was a lovely thing to daydream about, and he tried to picture Danny’s face as he pillowed that dark head on Kit’s shoulder and rubbed his chest.

What he saw instead, just as he dropped off to sleep, was Jesse’s young, narrowly pretty face with the big dark eyes and the fall of honey-colored hair, and the expression he had of being desperately eager to please.

 

 

JESSE CAME shopping with him for pots and pans. Kit didn’t expect him to, and almost canceled the trip to the movies altogether.

Jesse left at his usual time that Friday, with a “Meet you there at eight, okay?” and Kit agreed, and left shortly after Jesse. When he got outside, Jesse was leaning against the wall, leaning against the shiny granite of the outer wall and smoking casually in the twilight.

Kit’s heart completely fell to his knees.

Jesse looked at him—that pleasant, eager-to-please expression on his face. “You’re leaving early? I thought you usually stayed an hour.”

Oh God. Calm down. He’s not your mother. This is a stupid thing to get upset over.

“Yeah,” Kit said, trying hard to keep his face neutral. This man had been nothing but nice to him—treating him like a pariah over one bad habit was not something a good person would do. “I thought I’d go shopping first. You smoke?”

Jesse grimaced, and his look at Kit was full of sloe-eyed contrition. “Yeah—old bad-boy habits die hard.” He exhaled then, ground out the butt in the sand tray outside the building, and fell in step next to Kit.

For some reason, not seeing Jesse smoking made it easier to bear. It was like the filthy, disgusting, embarrassing reek of his mother’s tobacco habit disappeared if Kit could only smell the smoke in his own clothes.

“You were a bad boy?” he asked, finding that hard to believe.

Jesse shrugged, tucking his hands in the pockets of his denim jacket. It was chilly—Kit had brought a flannel lined camp jacket, which was probably not what the other accountants wore, but he liked it. Jesse had a denim jacket without gloves or a scarf, and Kit looked at him worriedly. He was going to get sick if he didn’t stay warm.

“I was,” Jesse confirmed, oblivious to Kit’s contrary attack of revulsion and worry.

“What makes you a bad boy?” Kit was honestly curious. He had so little experience being bad himself, he really wanted to know.

Jesse gave him a sly, slanting look from under his eyelashes. Kit was a few inches taller than the younger man, and the expression made him extraordinarily alluring.

“I snuck alcohol in my water bottle,” Jesse said airily. “Snuck cigarettes in the bathroom. Made out under the bleachers when I should have been in English. Lots of stuff in a high school for bad boys to do, you know.”

Kit’s heart tripped over itself. He sounded flirty—and young.

“Who’d you make out with?” Great, Kit. Sly. They were walking toward the parking building on the corner of J Street, and Jesse seemed intent on staying with him, so he assumed the guy (boy—he was a boy, right?) had parked there too.

Jesse’s grin turned coy. “Anybody who’d make out back. Soccer players, cheerleaders, theatre majors, band kids—I was sort of a man whore back then… but since I mostly stopped at third base, it was all fun.”

Oh shit. All those answers were gender neutral! And wait—wasn’t third base oral? How many blowjobs had he given? Gotten? From whom?

They started walking up the parking garage and got into the elevator together. Jesse asked him what his high school had been like, and while he was fumbling an explanation of why the fucking Sousaphone was not sexy, the door opened, and they both got out and headed for Kit’s little blue Honda Hybrid.

They got there, and Jesse went to the passenger side, grinned impishly, and said, “So, boss. Where are we going?”

Kit gaped at him, completely caught off guard. He was a bad boy? He smoked? Kit had a fleeting moment of disdain—Danny wouldn’t do any of these things. Danny kept his lungs and his nose clean, and, in his dreams at least, Danny was 100 percent hella-fucking-gay. The silence grew awkward, and Jesse looked away, his hurt unmistakable.

“I…. You know, since we’re going to the movie and everything. Never mind. I didn’t realize you had other plans before….”

“Shopping!” Kit said quickly. Jesse’s hurt was terrifying. The idea that Kit could wipe the easy smile off that pretty face completely boggled him. “We’re going shopping for cookware.”

Jesse turned one of those shining grins toward him, and Kit smiled back gamely. He’d just ask nicely for Jesse not to smoke in the car.

 

 

TURNS OUT, Jesse didn’t ask, and his help with the cookware thing was invaluable.

“What’s that called again?” Kit asked. It was a pan with a slotted cover. All he really knew was that it was shiny.

“A broiler pan.” Jesse was holding back a smirk, and Kit realized he must seem pretty silly to someone who’d been cooking on his own for five years.

Kit looked at the thing doubtfully, but when Jesse added, “It’s so you can cook meat without grease,” Kit dropped it into the basket so quickly it clattered, and both of them hunched their shoulders and grimaced as the echoes died down through the expensive cookware store in the K-Street Mall. The basket already weighed a ton, and Kit wondered if he did a couple bicep curls with the thing, would it help make up for the fact that he wasn’t going to work out that night.

He must have grunted, because Jesse said, “Oh Jesus—here, give it to me and go look at plates and stuff. You’ll need a place setting for eight, at the least….”

“I don’t know eight other people!” Kit protested, not realizing how pathetic that sounded until it came out.

“Yeah, but I know at least three, so plan on that!” Jesse shot back with good humor as he trotted the basket up to the front so they didn’t have to carry it.

Kit had a fantasy, then, as he looked sightlessly at seven different, brightly colored sets of stoneware. Him and Jesse, sitting at the kitchen table he’d just ordered, having cooked a dinner that was healthy and good, with an open bottle of wine and Jesse’s as-of-yet faceless friends. A part of him tried not to choke on the sap in this vision, but most of him was swooning at the perfection of it. It was… it was like his fantasies of Danny Fit, going down on him. It was grown-up and happy, except, unlike Danny Fit, this one seemed as close as the man (kid) chatting up the sweet young thing at the cash register.

The fantasy changed, and now it was Jesse and the sweet young thing, over for dinner, and Kit’s misty vision changed, and he was their lonely gay friend with the cat.

He sighed and settled on the stoneware in the different dark colors—burgundy, navy, forest, and earth. Well, at least he was in his own home and Jesse had helped him cook.

Jesse came up behind him and bumped shoulders. “So, boss—you got something in mind? Cause I want to get to the theatre in time to buy popcorn!”

Kit realized his stomach was grumbling too. “Crap,” he muttered. “I was going to stop and get something to eat.”

“Popcorn,” Jesse said decisively. “You can eat healthy any other time, but movies demand popcorn. Now let’s go ring this up and schlep it to the car.”

“Schlep?”

“Yeah, schlep. My history teacher used to say it all the time. Great word. Now come on.”

Jesse made friendly with the checkout girl, and Kit had to admit she was pretty cute. He had a friend now—a friend with a past, sort of, and even Kit knew that was more fun to deal with in a friend than a lover.

Again, it was all mathematical in its simplicity. He could have his grown-up cake, his friends, his wine, his something-not-fried dinner, and he could have Danny Fit give him imaginary blowjobs on a regular basis. It was good. Nobody would get hurt, and Jesse would be happy. He liked that.

Of course, he would have liked the new and improved body he had planned even more—especially when he and Jesse each took an equal share of the pots, pans, and stoneware to “schlep” back to the car.

“Oh God,” he panted. “I’ve got to stick to that workout thing!”

“How’s that going?”

Kit gave him a sour look. He sounded revoltingly perky.

“Every night!” Every night Kit turned on the DVD, and Danny Fit made him hurt. Then he jumped in the shower, climbed under the covers, and Danny made him hurt so good.

Jesse gave him one of those sideways looks again, and if Kit wasn’t sweating and out of breath already, the look alone would have done it.

“It’s showing, trust me.”

Kit almost walked into the concrete pole at the parking garage, and Jesse laughed good-naturedly while he tried to orient himself. He was too embarrassed after that to speak until they got to the car.

But then they were heading for the movie theatre, and that was all good. Popcorn, sodas, talking about how Luc Besson must have had a very active knight-in-shining-armor complex as a child—and The Fifth Element? Enough said.

Or it should have been, but they kept talking—just like they talked at work, except longer. They talked through coffee and through the ride in the darkened city to Jesse’s car. They talked in the car for a while, in the dark, and Kit could study Jesse’s features—could drink in his expressions, the way he tilted his head, the animation that took over his eyes when he was talking about science fiction and computer games and World of Warcraft and the things he loved.

At one point, as the conversation finally wound down, Jesse gave him one of those sideways looks. “So, what are you doing for Thanksgiving?”

Kit smiled a little. “Unpacking. Learning how to cook a little tiny turkey. Thinking about getting a cat for Christmas. Why?”

Jesse looked away. “I’m actually visiting the evil ex.”

“The evil ex?” Ex-what? Ex-boyfriend? Ex-girlfriend? Ex-cat or ex-turkey? Jesus, Jesse—can I buy a pronoun?

“Yeah… a cheating slut bag, if ever there was one—but the slut bag’s got a little sister who’s sick.”

Seriously, Jesse. A pronoun. Would it fucking kill you? “How sick?” Kit asked instead.

Jesse shrugged and looked away. “Leukemia sick. Pat’s a bad person, but Emmy—she’s the best. Odds are good she’ll get better, you know? But she asked me to come visit, and as much as I hate home, I’ll go.”

“Where’s home?”

“Truckee.”

Kit whistled. Truckee was a small town/area between Sacramento and Tahoe—it was a long drive and an even longer culture gap. “Hope you have your cold-weather gear.” It was already snowing in Truckee. Truckee was, in fact, where all the news people went during ski season to tell you how cold it was and how impossible the snow was to get through. It was like the last stop between where things got shitty and things got too shitty to drive.

“Yeah,” Jesse sighed, looking out the window. “In more ways than one.”

“You staying with your parents?” Jesse had mentioned them briefly—“mom and step-fuckhead du jour” being his exact words.

Jesse shuddered. “Hell no. Emmy asked her parents to put me up—they’ve always loved me, so I get the couch.”

Kit couldn’t help it. He put a hand on Jesse’s shoulder, just to sort of take up some of the melancholy he saw there. “Sounds dire.”

Jesse turned to him with a suddenly brilliant smile. “It’s all good. I can tell them I’ve got a new job, and a new friend—and he’s a little bit weird, but, you know, so am I. It’ll be fine.”

Kit dropped his hand and ducked his head a little, embarrassed and pleased. For a moment, he forgot all about his private arrangement with Danny Fit and concentrated on squashing that little zing that thrilled under his skin at the idea that Jesse thought he was worth mentioning.

The zing traveled straight to his groin, and all the social easiness that he’d had for the last few hours started gasping for breath as all his blood rushed to his cock.

So much for squashing a damned thing.

The silence stretched between them, and Kit looked up, realizing it was his turn to say something. “I hope you enjoy your visit.” The answer scored zero points for originality, interest, or even relevance. He was going to see a little girl sick with cancer—how much fun could Jesse have?

Jesse’s mouth quirked, wry and somehow disappointed. “Well, I’ll see you at work before then. I hope you enjoy your move.” He’d moved a little, leaned forward, maybe to see Kit’s expression in the dark.

Kit nodded and swallowed. The swallow didn’t take, because his mouth felt like a sandbox, and he had to try again. He found that his smile, though, was incredibly sincere.

“I’ve been looking forward to that for most of my entire life!” He managed to say fervently. Jesse laughed, and the strange, awkward moment was broken.

“See you Monday!” he called, getting out of the car, and Kit waved and watched him unlock and start his little yellow Corolla.

Suddenly work on Monday sounded even more fun than getting out of his mother’s house on the weekend.