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Chapter 3: Lemonade
They say you never forget your first love, but maybe it’s the first two that leave a mark.
—[]—
The first text from Caden came the day after Patrick threw a bagel at my head.
Caden: Hey
That was it. I stared at it for a while, wondering why I didn’t feel anything when I saw it. I put my phone face down. I saw him in the hall at school, and we didn’t acknowledge each other. That afternoon I got two more texts.
Caden: You around?
And five minutes later: Lmk if you wanna hang
I didn't respond to those either. But I didn't delete them. And I didn’t block him.
I spent the next few weeks keeping to myself, and thinking about boys. I’d finally had sex, and after starting to come to terms with the fact that he was an asshole, I let myself be excited with the fact that I had done it. And there were good guys in the world, too. Patrick was proof of that. If Caden was a force for evil, Patrick was the angel that gave balance. I had thought constantly about the cuddling session we had, the warmth of his hard chest against my back, making me feel small even though I’m tall.
I had thought about the weight of his arm across my ribs, and the scent of himself that he left in the bed when he was gone. I thought about the bagel flying through the window and hitting me in the head, and him standing there smirking.
The world was open to me, and I wasn’t in a rush.
—[]—
Finals came and passed without much drama, and then it was Summer.
I saw Patrick again, through my window one morning. He was in the narrow strip of yard between our houses with a push mower, shirtless, working in slow even lines along the grass. I had seen Patrick shirtless before, but it was usually through the window, across the gap, in the dark mostly, a shape moving around his room.
This was the first time I saw him since the night he slept over, and it was in the full morning light. And it was close enough that I could see the definition across his shoulders when he pushed the mower forward, the way his back tapered down to the waistband of his shorts, a light sheen of sweat catching the sun across his shoulder blades.
He was lean but not slight. He had a different kind of build than the jocks at my school. He didn’t get this from the gym or sports. I got the sense that his muscles came from actually working with his body. He had long arms and a flat stomach and a chest that I had somehow never properly registered before. It was two mounds of meat with the lightest dusting of brownish blonde across the center.
I noticed I had been staring from my window for longer than I needed to, before I went downstairs to my kitchen and poured lemonade from my fridge over a glass of ice, and walked swiftly out my front door.
He heard my door close and looked up. He killed the mower and pushed his hair back with one hand, the same gesture I had watched Caden make a hundred times, but on Patrick it looked different. It was less of a performance. He was just moving his hair out of his face.
"Hey," he said.
"Hey," I said. "Hot out."
"Yeah." He looked at me for a second, then down at the glass of yellow sweetness in my hands.
"This is for you," I said, holding it out for him.
His face was cool as he smiled warmly. “Wow. Thanks.”
He took the glass and chugged half of it in seconds, his throat glugging away.
We stood there for a moment across the low fence between our yards. Up close I could see the sweat at his collarbone, the slight rise and fall of his chest from the exertion. I looked at him and then looked at the fence post.
"My parents are gone until tonight," he said casually as he handed me the mostly finished glass.
"Cool," I said, swigging the end of it myself.
He looked at me. "I need to shower after this."
I felt my stomach drop, in the specific way that had become familiar lately around males. I looked back at him.
"You want some company?" I said with a nervous gulp.
He held my eyes for a second, the corner of his mouth slowly curling upward. Then he reached down and grabbed the handle of the mower.
"Give me ten minutes," he said.
—[]—
It was the longest ten minutes of my life as I leaned on the fence, watching him slowly manicure his lawn. His shirtless form was a dream, and he was in this new world of male bonding with me. He was like me, and he liked me. I had shot my shot, and it had paid off, for now at least.
He stowed the mower and jogged up to his porch, then nodded at me to follow him as he opened his front door.
I had been in Patrick's house hundreds of times as a kid. It smelled the same, clean, but a different kind of clean than my house, and faintly like wood, his mom's candles probably, a smell I had stopped noticing years ago and now noticed again all at once.
He led me upstairs without saying much. His room was at the end of the hall, which I knew from the outside but had never seen from the inside. It was neater than mine, and much neater than Caden’s had been. I found myself comparing them in my head.
His books were on a low shelf, a desk with a lamp, set up immediately below the window that looked across to my room.
I stood in front of that window for a moment. I could see directly into my own personal space, much more clearly than I could see his room from mine. I could see everything, my desk, my floor lamp, the majority of my bed.
"Weird," I said.
"What."
"Seeing my room from here."
Patrick looked across the gap. "I've seen it so many times it stopped being weird a long time ago."
“I mean,” I said, not sure how to put it, “I didn’t realize you could see… everything.”
“You mean how much you beat off?” he said, chuckling.
I smiled nervously, looking at him. “Well… yeah.”
“Yeah, but like, we’re both guys. I was doing it as much as you over here.”
“And you knew I was doing it… right over there.”
He just nodded, smiling coolly.
The thought made my face warm.
"We used to see each other all the time," I said. "When we were kids."
"Yeah," he said.
"It was different then." I looked at him. "Like brothers, maybe. But brothers who just… didn't really talk much."
He looked back at me steadily. "It's different now," he said, reaching for his waistband. “We’re older.”
I bit my lip as I watched him lower his pants. He had a man’s bulge beneath a pair of red briefs with white trim. His thighs had more hair than mine. He stepped out of his pants and walked toward the bathroom. I followed him, still fully clothed, as I watched his butt oscillate with each step.
The bathroom was small, and warm. He reached in and turned the shower on and let it run while he turned back to face me.
I reached down and pulled my shirt over my head and dropped it. My thin frame appeared less built than his. I had spent less years doing yard work and physical activity, but I had spent less years on Earth, so maybe I just hadn’t caught up yet.
He looked at my chest and my stomach, and then lower to my growing bulge, and then back up to my face. His expression was genuine pleasantness.
I reached for the waist of my pants and pushed them down and stepped out of them, and my underwear came with them, and I stood there and felt the warm air of the bathroom on my skin and felt his eyes on me without looking directly back at him yet. Then I looked up.
He had an expression I would think about later, something careful and wanting at the same time, and then he pushed his own underwear down and stood there in front of me and we were the same, even if he was bigger, in every dimension.
I looked at him as he stepped closer, closing the gap between us. He was taller than me by a few inches, and he had to look down at me. He was fully hard, and his dick touched me before anything else. I was fully hard too, and I pressed forward as soon as I felt him, and both of us raised our hands to each other’s sides, holding each other gently. The steam started to fog up the glass of the shower door.
He reached behind himself and put his hand in the water, testing it. He reached for the second knob and rotated it a quarter-turn, then put his hand back in the water. It was good.
“After you,” he said, gesturing to the shower.
I stepped in, my body shaking a bit. The steam was already filling the space. He got in behind me and nudged me into the empty spot at the edge of the shower, and he pulled the glass door closed.
We were close immediately, our bodies rubbing against each other, and it felt good as he adjusted his stance in the space. He turned to face me under the water. He put both hands on my shoulders, just resting them there, and looked down at me for a moment. His wet hair was pushed back off his forehead and the water ran down his chest and his stomach and I watched it flow. He had abs, and I had never realized them before today.
He reached for a bar of soap, and rubbed it between his hands, and I smelled the masculine scent of it. He made a lather and then put both palms on my shoulders and started moving them slowly down my arms, across my chest, down my stomach. He was deliberate about getting every inch.
I rubbed the residual suds back onto him, reaching up to his arm pits and feeling the meat of his pecs, all while our hard dicks touched each other.
He was not rushing, and neither was I. His hands were warm even against the hot water and I stood still under them and felt every place they moved as a separate and distinct thing sending tingles radiating out from where he touched me.
When his hands moved around to my back I turned slightly to give him room and he worked his fingers down my spine like he was giving me a massage, and it felt like heaven. I almost thought this was better than sex, but then I remembered that there were higher peaks to reach.
His hands were flat and moved slowly down to my ass. He spread his palms across it and held them there for a moment, feeling the weight of it, and I heard his breath change just slightly, just enough.
"I see why people lose their minds over this thing," he said quietly.
I didn't say anything. I pressed my face slightly toward his shoulder and let him keep going.
He worked his hands across me slowly, thoroughly, and when he finally handed me the soap I took it and did the same for him. I started at his shoulders, his chest, the flat plane of his stomach. I moved around behind him and ran my hands down his back, feeling the muscle beneath my fingers, and then I reached his ass and gave it the same attention he had given mine, rubbing slow circles around each globe, feeling him tense slightly under my hands and then relax.
I reached around and ran my hand down the front of him, from his stomach to his happy trail, to his pubes, to his thick hard-on. I wrapped my hand around him. He was girthy and hard and warm, and I felt his heart beating in it. I squeezed it firmly, and he let out a slow breath that I felt more than I heard.
He turned back around to face me and we were chest to chest in the small space and both fully hard as the water ran over us.
He put one hand on my jaw and kissed me.
It was slower than I expected, and sweeter than anything I had felt before. I put both hands on his sides and kissed him back.
We pressed into each other, our hips forcing themselves forward in arrhythmic jerking motions, the friction of it making me grip his sides harder until I was holding onto his ass, pulling him harder into me. I thrust forward and he thrust back, and our meat poles grinded up and down against each other. His hand slid down from my jaw to my neck to my chest and then reached down between us and wrapped around both of us together, his hand big enough to hold us both, and he started moving it rapidly. I dropped my forehead to his shoulder and breathed through my mouth as I held onto him. His other hand held my ass, and I felt a finger pressing against my hole.
It built slowly, his hand steady, both of us breathing harder, the water running over our shoulders, and I lifted my face back up and found his mouth again and we shoved our tongues into each other.
He pressed his soapy finger inside my hole, and I moaned into his mouth. I had crossed the edge, and I felt myself finishing, only to feel his own large gland pulse back against mine. We finished like that, together, our mouths moving against each other and his hand working out all of our warm juices until neither of us had anything left.
We stood under the water for a moment afterward, foreheads together, catching our breath as the water rinsed us clean.
"Hey, um," he said quietly.
"Yeah?" I said between breaths, the air suddenly too hot for me to take.
“Thanks for the lemonade,” he said, smiling at me.
I smiled back.