Chapter Sixteen Comfortable and Confident 9 страница

He started with my head, messing up my hair with his palm, and ended at my toes, on his knees again in front of me, looking up with wide eyes as he dabbed my feet. I smiled, appreciating the act, sexual nature completely removed. It was all about care this time, and I noticed that this care took a lot more time and effort than the sex we had just had only moments, maybe really hours, ago.

When we finally stepped into the rest of Gerard’s apartment, the less dense and cooler air washed over me, along with a huge wave of tiredness. The heat and steam from the shower, coupled with the sexual nature of our entire day hit me like a ton of bricks, smashing my kneecaps so I could barely stand. Gerard was by my side though, and seeing my brief stumble, he wrapped his hands around me quickly. His brows knit with concern as he looked down at my surprised and tired face. I had crushed my eyes closed when I staggered, shocked that I had actually let myself fall. When I opened them and saw Gerard’s expression, I tried to give him a smile, showing him that I was okay, just drained. My grin displayed this weakness, especially as I still tripped over my feet in the few paces we went forward. I was fucking wasted and it was probably well into the early morning by this point. Gerard’s grip tightened around my waist, purely in concern rather than urgency this time, shaking his head and rolling his eyes, chuckling slightly at my obvious (and failed) cover-up.

“Let’s go to bed,” he breathed quietly into my ear as he steered me to the left, through his black bedroom door. I had no objections, as well as not much strength left, so I let myself be led.

His room was dark, void of any light, except for the small inverted shadows of florescence from the main part of the apartment coming through the door and displaying themselves on his bed, light sliced like oranges. His hand was on the small of my back as he led me to the sheets, peeling them back like the skin of a fruit and holding them up until I got under, mingling with the layers of fabric. He kept the door ajar so light still etched its way into the room, allowing our night vision a lapse in its hard work.

He slid in next to me, his thigh grazing my exposed front and sending heat throughout my already flushed body. He pulled the sheets up to both of our shoulders as he lay down on his back, but they eventually fell and drifted further down. A sigh escaped his lips as he looked up at the ceiling, sinking into the bed in utmost relaxation. It looked as if he could fall asleep right then and there, but he blinked his eyes open a few times, refusing sleep as a nocturnal aid, and settling for meditation instead. I had been lying on my back as well, but shifted to my side, grazing my hand along his arms, which were folded haphazardly over his thick chest.

Though I was weak from the steam draining me, my mind still raced. My eyes burned from tiredness; I temporarily shut out the flame of pain when I closed them, but I refused to do so for too long. I could fall asleep if I wanted to, but I couldn’t find it in myself to just close my eyes and have that be it for the day. So much had happened and I still needed to process it before my subconscious took over, turning and twisting it into dreams with seemingly no meaning.

Sleep seemed like such a waste of time right then, just like Gerard had said it always was. It was unimportant and took him away from his work. I could totally sympathize with that now, only Gerard was my work and I wanted to do as much as I could with him before my body finally gave up again and forced me into slumber.

I was too physically tired to have sex again, and I didn’t think I had anything left inside of me to give to that action. Gerard seemed pretty exhausted too, especially after supporting me in the shower like he had. His arms looked as if they weighed a thousand pounds the way he kept them draped over his chest, sinking into his skin. They also appeared to be throbbing, but it could have been the darkness and my tired eyes confusing me. I let my hand drop over one of his arms, no longer grazing as my eyes took over the roaming action.

I began to look at Gerard, really look at him. The thin white sheets that he merely threw on his bed fortuitously were by our waists, the shadow of the place in-between them visible in the dim light. Though I had seen Gerard naked many times now and I had let him touch and taste me while being naked against him, I had never really looked. There was only that small and brief time when I was learning about confidence, but that didn’t last too long because of my sheer nervousness over the act. We had seen each other when we came, but that was different too. I had gained the confidence I needed now, if not fully, then enough to continue looking – no, studying - what I saw.

I commenced this new field of analysis, this new lesson on my own, but still using Gerard to teach me. The more I looked, the more I saw that I had never seen before. I noticed the way his skin, in some patches, took on a different texture, overexposed to chemicals and the sun. And by age. His skin, for the most part, was smooth and a creamy white colour, especially on the backs of his hands, but there were some areas that seemed to scream his numerical value at me. I could have sworn there was a forty-seven written somewhere on him, just put there to taunt me as I looked more and more.

Ignoring the supposed omen, I took his hand in mine, furthering my investigation into something more tangible. He noticed me staring at him, but chose not to comment on it, a first for the man who I probably could not pay to shut-up. He merely narrowed his eyes and watched as I watched, waiting for his perfect moment to step in. His eyes fluttered open every once in a while, blinking slowly as he breathed deeply. It was clear that Gerard was tired too, but he probably had the same thoughts as myself; that sleeping was a waste, but me ogling him at four in the morning wasn’t.

I felt his palm in my own as I gripped him, and took note at how it was abnormally clammier than before, but chalked it up to the water we had just been in. I noticed how thick his hands were, how the flesh was distributed evenly on the front, small veins raised up when held at certain angles. I noticed the creases in his knuckles, where his flesh gathered into pudge, giving him a sturdier grip. His hands were almost always warm from this abundance of flesh and it always made them seem so much bigger in my own. I unlocked our fingers at one point, lining up our hands perfectly, creating a warped five-pointed star in the shadow as I watched his extra skin take over my hand. He was just so much bigger than me, and when we clutched each other once more, I was pretty sure I saw my hand disappear inside his.

The only place on Gerard’s hands that didn’t match the creamy whiteness were the fingertips. They were stained a putrid yellow colour, like the ceilings of his apartment, damaged from nicotine spilling into his pores when he smoked. Other than the minor tinge, his fingers and hands were gorgeous; stout and chiseled into real artist’s hands. They weren’t perfect, but used, giving him that artistic edge that most other people I knew lacked.

Gerard had no hangnails or cuts (unlike me), but his nails were in awful shape. The fleshy tips where the nail bed sat was round, the enamel curved into that shape. I saw paint buried under some of the surfaces, put there so many times it almost seemed like a permanent marring. Most of the nails appeared to be flaking and chipping away, bitten down to the nub and stained a fairer shade of nicotine honey.

Despite the slight unsightliness the yellow tinge had to it, I still found his smoking habits awe-striking. I watched him smoke a lot of the time, still with just as much reverence as I had been in the first weeks at his place. The danger element to it all came out again, only with a much deeper-rooted meaning, particularly when we were both naked as I watched. Even when he wasn’t smoking, we were still consuming danger at every turn. When we kissed, I could barely taste the tobacco lining his mouth unless he had just had a cigarette. It was just slightly bitter and it eased away the more we kissed.

I probably wasn’t tasting a lot of the vexation because I smoked occasionally myself now. It was hard to taste a difference in someone when you had the same flavor yourself. I didn’t smoke nearly as often as the artist did, but that was because I didn’t need to as much anymore. I had the art that I had wanted to create with the thin stick and I was holding it in my hands right then. I could taste a cigarette on Gerard if I wanted to anytime now. I didn’t need to smoke to hide my feelings because they were all out in the open; naked and displayed on his bed, his hand in mine.

I glanced away from his stained fingers, back to the unique features of the base of his hand. I gripped him solidly for no real reason other than to see how his skin oozed between my own, and I felt him do the same action back hard, sending a message of understanding. I looked up to him from the grip I had started, eyes lingering as we locked together.

“I love hands,” Gerard stated alluringly. He broke our gaze, taking control and contorting my hand around so he could look. I gave a weak wrist and let him mold me the way he wanted.

He studied my smaller hand, noticing the same veins on me that I had on him. My skin wasn’t as pudgy as his was around the knuckles, nor my fingers as short. They were slightly longer, the flesh spread out, giving my hand a more delicate appeal. My fingernails were chewed down to the nub like his too, but were littered with hangnails and bloodied nail beds, giving me the flawed appearance that smoking did to his hands.

I had an unpleasant habit of chewing at my nails and skin when I was nervous, or just plain bored. In the summer my hands always looked amazing because I wasn’t in school, and therefore, not bored out of my fucking skull. It was the middle of the school year now, and the pattern was starting all over again.

I hadn’t been playing guitar long enough for my skin to develop calluses, but I was already covered in scabs and red marks that were still healing. I thought Gerard would cringe when he got to a particularly nasty red welt on my thumb, but he only brushed over it slightly with his own thumb, then brought it to his mouth to kiss it, his eyes locked on me intensely as he performed the action. He moved on to my other fingers, taking the fleshy pads in his mouth, kissing and sucking on them lightly, his eyes drawn thinly shut.

“What’s so important about hands?” I asked, feeling a bit awkward under his embrace. I had never come across someone as passionate at Gerard, and though most of the time I welcomed his affection, this was a little strange. He was kissing my hands and fingertips with the same ferocity as he did my face. I couldn’t see why. I wanted to pull my hand away and replace it with my lips, but I could tell this meant a lot to him. As I queried, my voice came out hoarse, nearly as weak as I felt.

“Everything about them is important. They’re so fascinating,” he stated swiftly, with more emotion than I could have mustered just then. He had taken my hand away from his mouth, but still gripped it tightly, his eyes not wavering. He was looking at my palm, starting to trace up and down the deep groves rooted there. His eyes were narrowed and poised down, staring intently.

“They can tell a story,” he started up again, now taking my one hand in two of his own, sandwiching it in warmth. “Every body part tells a story. Hands especially. They show a person what they are passionate about.” He shifted his weight to look at me in between my splayed fingers, absorbed in his new task. “You are passionate about so many things. That’s why there are cuts and scrapes everywhere.”

I somewhat scoffed, hearing the explanation for my sheer and utter boredom come out of his mouth. I couldn’t let him get away with calling me passionate. I still wasn’t convinced on that fact, but he could keep encouraging me. Being passionate had nothing to do with those cuts though, unless mutilating myself to pass the time in chemistry counted as a passion.

“Have you been playing your guitar again?” he inquired excitedly, ignoring my scoff. He rubbed his thumb over a small scab, which he had mistaken for a callus that was beginning to form. My hand went rigid in his grasp, unsure if this discovery was good or not. For the first time, he broke his intent gaze and just looked at me, cocking an eyebrow as he persisted. “Have you?”

“Umm, yeah.” I finally gave in, not caring if he called me crap again. I took a deep breath, preparing myself for the blow, but nothing came.

“Good,” was all he said, taking his eyes back down to me, a sly smile spread on his face. I let out an awkward deep breath and he started up his philosophical discussion again. “Hands also tell you how old a person is. You can see the fine lines and details; they tell a story, just like wrinkles. Passion is threaded all throughout our lives and you can see that story in a person’s hands.”

I waited for him to give me yet another interpretation of my own hands, but when he merely spread out my palm and interlocked fingers with me again, I was left feeling empty. He smiled at me, knowing exactly what he was doing.

“What about me?”

“You’re too young to have your story completed yet,” he informed, grin still persistent on his face. I widened my eyes at him, not wanting to get tormented and needing more to go on. He brought our hands together to his mouth, kissing quickly before he went on. “But you have a very wonderful start. No story can ever be complete, however. I’m still going.”

He held out his own hand, extending over my own, waiting for me to analyze him.

We unlinked our fingers, but never our grasp as I took him ungracefully, unsure of my actions. I had studied his hands before just to do it, but now that I had a task, I was nervous. Gerard wanted me to tell him his story, and though I had heard it at the kitchen table that one day, I didn’t think I could recall it, especially when given his fucking flesh to work with. I thought words had been hard enough to remember concisely; his skin and wrinkles had no beginning, middle, or end to them. How was I supposed to come up with a clear story when I was just given a chaotic mess?

Then again, Gerard had told me that chaos was import. And so was this.

With a sigh that racked my entire body, I tried to set aside my own inextricable contemplations and focus on the new patch of creamy white skin, instinctively biting my lip in nervousness. I looked at the skin I had been studying before, the deep ridges and valleys of incalculable whiteness, until I finally found something that didn’t belong.

It was on his left hand, the one I had not been examining before. I thought both of his hands would have been essentially the same, but I was proved wrong with the discovery of his apparent flaw. It was a small brown dot, rigid in its circular formation, too big to be a freckle and too light to be a mole.

“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the mark I had yet to understand.

Gerard didn’t even have to look down at what I was referring to. He kept his eyes locked on the ceiling, his head pushed back in the pillow. He had just automatically known what my sudden captivation was and he rolled his eyes back, sighing as he answered calmly. “An age spot.”

I nearly dropped his hand at the statement.

An age spot? I thought, my mind going into a disordered frenzy. I had never seen an age spot on anyone before that had not been related to me. And even then, it was on my grandmother, someone much, much older than myself.

When I was younger, my parents and I used to go and see her in her nursing home every Sunday. She had always been my favorite older relative, which wasn’t a hard thing to be in my family, full of drunken delinquents on my father’s side and delusional guilt-trippers on my mother’s. This grandmother was from my father’s side, and one of the very few people to not pick up the bottle in all of her eighty-two year existence. She had always been my favorite for that fact (and the fact that she dished out hard candies like oxygen but I treated them like gold), even after her death. Out of all the memories I had of that woman with her blinding white curly hair clung in rollers to her scalp, I choose to recall the time she had taken care of me just after Christmas.

My father had been on a business trip and my mother had gone to see her sister upstate, leaving my grandma as my baby-sitter. There had been a particularly bad ice storm, sending thermometers plummeting down to scary temperatures, but I still wanted to go outside. Everything else around the situation was vague in my mind, except for her doing up my coat, zipping it to the chin, her small fragile hands getting in the way. Her hands were the only things I could remember clearly at that moment in time, infinite on Gerard’s bed.

Her skin was slightly more tanned than mine just from heritage (being on my father’s side she had more Italian in her), but it was even darker on the backs of her hands because they were riddled with age spot after age spot. The brown dots littered her hands, some even forming ugly masses together that looked like small islands in a sea of wrinkles.

This initial memory of that winter day was a catalyst. I began to recall more and more of this woman, all with a central theme focused and concentrated like those Godforsaken brown dots.

When I was much younger and had a lot more energy in me, it was my grandmother’s job to calm me down, grasping me in her lap and holding me in place. Her hands were always visible then, and I tried to play a Pictionary game with the markings. I had thought I found a dog in her hands at one point, but I was never too sure; there had been too many spots to choose from.

Looking at Gerard’s spot just then sent chills down my spine, memories attacking just as plentifully as the marks on my dead grandmother’s hands. My grandmother had been in her eighties when she died last year, but had always had those age spots for as long as I could remember. Even in pictures I saw of her way before my time, there was always some kind of discoloration on her then unwrinkled skin. It boggled my mind just then, for the sheer fact that Gerard was old enough to get those spots. I didn’t know how old my grandmother had been when she first got them, but Gerard was only forty-seven and he was starting his collection. He was starting to get old.

But then it hit me, I stopped my train of thought, backing it up on the tracks back to the last station I had been at. Gerard wasn’t starting to get old.

Gerard was old.

I had suddenly found a flaw in the artist I had been looking up to, and now sharing a bed with, all this time. He wasn’t young like me, or even like someone in their twenties or thirties. Hell, Gerard was even old for his forties, just narrowing the cusp of that decade, finishing it and reaching half a fucking century in a little under three years now. I had always known that the artist was never my age, and even if he had been, I treated him like he was older. He had more respect in my mind, more regard for humanity because he was my mentor and teacher. Even when I started to develop stronger feelings for him, I still kept in mind that he was older and forty-seven; it was one of the reasons I wouldn’t allow myself to be with him, at first. His whole being had managed to change my perspective on his age (and being with a man, too) because one fact was pure and simple.

He never acted his age.
He was so full of youth, laughing and joking around, destroying his paintings for the sheer sake of it. He was unlike any other adults I knew, actually following his passion instead of settling for a menial and repetitive job. He talked eloquently, but still had the mind of a teenager, focusing on two major priorities: what he wanted, and sex. It was because he acted like a teenager so much of the fucking time that I never seemed to fully comprehend the fact that he was thirty fucking years older than me.

Gerard, I began to realize, in another thirty or more years could be just like my grandmother, when I would be only just catching up to him. He could be old and gray, covered with wrinkles and those fucking age spots like she had been, just a big, brown mess and no more of the creamy white skin I had been so used to clutching in my own. He could be in that horrid nursing home they shoved my grandmother into when she got too old to tell the difference between night and day, rotting away in a rocking chair on the porch, waiting for a family that only came on holidays. I recalled the last time I had seen my grandmother, a month before her death. Her knees were weak and she could barely stand up, her skin stretched down her face from the force of gravity and sheer age.

God, Gerard was aging right before my very eyes. I could have sworn he had more wrinkles now than he had displayed when I first came over and we sat across from each other drinking wine. He was aging, and he was getting old. Fuck, he already was old. I couldn’t picture Gerard in the same place as my grandmother. I didn’t want to picture him in a cold and desolate place, losing his mind with the person moaning in pain in the next bunk. I couldn’t and I wouldn’t picture Gerard as old in my mind.

I crushed my eyes closed, willing it all away, but when I opened them again, I was greeted with his hand, the brown spot staring at me, mocking me. My throat felt like it was being closed off, air turning to dust in my lungs. I let go of his hand, almost throwing it out of my grasp. He went limp, fingers falling away like the years on his body.

I swallowed hard, looking up at his face and trying not to show my fear as my gaze locked on yet another feature of his age: the crows’ feet around his eyes. Gerard was also old enough to get wrinkles; he had a lot of them. Even his hands in some places creased from age and sun exposure. He didn’t seem to notice my sudden horror-filled state just yet, and I hoped it stayed that way. I didn’t want to upset him, I really didn’t, but I just couldn’t help not comprehending it all just yet.

Aside from not acting like a middle-aged man, Gerard didn’t look that much like one. He dressed in casual clothing, tight pants and black button up shirts, accentuated with scarves and the occasional pair of sunglasses. What kind of adult dressed liked that? He owned no business attire, and everything was purely based on comfort and style. His hands, the objects that I had drawn the startling conclusion from, had never looked old before, until I had found that damned spot. God, I wished I never had looked and asked because I found myself searching his body for more and more of the markings, anything really to grasp his actual age in my hands.

And the more I searched, the easier the items were to find, invisibility melting away with knowledge and intent. Now that I was looking for something, it was getting easier to find it. It was like being blind to something for your entire life and then when someone points it out, you see it everywhere. I was seeing Gerard’s age everywhere now, and though it scared the shit out of me, I had to keep going.

I rubbed my hand over his chest, going slowly to ease back into the intimate pattern we had had before, as I felt the different textures of skin. The way his skin sagged and bunched together, elasticity gone from his weight fluctuations over the years, came to my eyes, and I scanned it for greater meaning. He had experienced enough in his life to have his weight change drastically, proved by small, almost unseen stretch marks lining his side.

I had never had my weight change before. I was always a chubby kid, cheeks consistently red from aunts pinching the padding. As I grew older, my weight never really changed, but spread out more. I was still a little chubby, but it had disappeared from my face and worked its way to my sides, forming love handles and a bit of a belly, running into strong thighs. When I touched and prodded those hued lines on Gerard’s side, it looked as if he had been very big at one point in his life. He was never fat in my mind, but he carried more weight on his hips, his curves almost feminine looking. I traced my fingers over the markings, cupping them in my palm along with some mass, blocking them in my mind and working with something else.

I hoisted myself up more on the bed, running my free hand through his hair, flicking the spider-leg like strands out of his eyes to see the forehead wrinkles and crows’ feet more distinctly. Gerard’s hair had always been a jet-black shade of coal, like the charcoal he used to draw with, falling forward on his prominent forehead in loose bangs, or to the side. His mane was fairly long, and when I studied it more I should have been aware of the unnatural darkness of his locks, but was much too distracted with the whole other new appearance he took on, once his bangs were no longer in the way. I saw how large his forehead was, not from a natural eminence, but from losing this jet-black hair. He was in his forties and his hairline had already begun to recede. It wasn’t too much, and it wasn’t even noticeable unless you pulled everything back (which was probably why Gerard kept his hair coifed in the front most of the time). His hair was thick and lush, but it was slowly fading from its original state, some places reduced to baby fine strands.

When I pulled back his hair more I took note of his roots. I had to tilt into his head more, my nose nearly pressed up against his now rather large forehead until I could see the colour distinction. I always knew that his hair was probably too black to be real, but I never really thought that he actually dyed it. No men I knew ever did that. Here was the proof though; small but distinct roots of a chestnut brown colour coming up. And as I looked even closer at all of Gerard, him not saying a word, I realized something else.

There was a gray hair, more than one actually, especially as I started to look for them. White was mixed in with the chestnut, which was hidden underneath fake blackness, making everything fucking gray. I hated gray; it wasn’t black or white, wrong nor right. It wasn’t a clear answer to anything. But this gray that littered Gerard’s hair was. This had an answer, even if I didn’t want it. It told me that Gerard was old. Really old. Forty-seven years old. Thirty more years than me, and thirty times more the nervous anxiety I was used to feeling.

Gerard didn’t seem to notice my small groping fit with his hair; he was lying back on the pillow, his neck arched and neck exposed again. His eyes were closed, and he breathed happily when my fingers entangled in his mane. He was enjoying this, but it was only scaring me. I removed my hand, slowly dragging it down his body and finally letting it rest on his chest, right over his beating heart. God, even his heart felt old, it beating slower than my own. Then again, a mouse’s heart on speed would have been beating slower than my own.

“You’re old,” I suddenly said, not realizing that the words had fallen out of me. When they hit the air and filled my ears though, I wanted to grab them and shove them back into my mouth. They were so strong they would probably knock out my teeth.

Oh God, I unexpectedly thought again. What if Gerard lost his teeth? Could he lose his teeth? My grandmother had owned dentures, but I thought that was just for the really aged. Did Gerard suddenly fit into that category now? Oh God, I thought again. I was having a lot of biblical moments, but I wasn’t even close to finding the light. Oh, someone save me.

“Thanks,” Gerard scoffed sarcastically. I felt his chest rise under my hand as he chuckled a bit, shaking his head in mock agitation. He wasn’t mad, but I could tell it wasn’t the best thing he had ever heard about himself. He kept his eyes closed as he moved a hand to interlock with mine on his chest.

“I mean,” I quickly countered, hoping to better explain myself. I ran through my perplexed thoughts for some reasoning, but came up with nothing. There was no reasoning in age. It just happened. And I wasn’t around for most of Gerard’s life to provide an explanation. “I don’t know. I just…Oh, God.”

Hallelujah, I thought bitterly in my head.

I looked down at him, his eyes still closed. Apparently, he had blind faith.

“You’re forty-seven, Gerard…” I breathed out the last part, unsure I would be able to take another in.

“I am,” he agreed in a clear voice that I could decipher no emotion from. “And you’re seventeen, Frank.”

The way he said his words, so acrid and tactful, spouting facts along with a harsh reason made me quake, until he finally opened his eyes. There was a serious tone reflected in the back of the olive shade, but I could still see the humility that set me at ease. He swallowed hard, continuing his thoughts. “I already know these facts. What else are you finding new?”

“I don’t know…” I trailed off, feeling like a complete idiot. And a jerk. I could feel the embarrassment welling up inside of me, creeping its way across my cheeks in an unwanted scarlet hue. My thoughts felt vapid and conceited, but I said them anyway. “You have gray hair.”