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Chapter 4: Pyramids
We spent the rest of that afternoon in Patrick's room.
My shirt got wet on the floor of his bathroom, and he lent me one of his. It was slightly too big, which I liked. We sat on his floor and ate chips and watched TV streaming on his laptop. Neither of us paid much attention to it. We just kept talking over it. It was even more fun than I expected, and neither of us paid any attention to the time. It wasn't like either of us had anywhere to be.
That was the thing about that summer. It was probably the last summer of my life that I wouldn’t have anything urgent to do. The days were already stretching long, feeling like an endless stretch of time until the next school year would start. My afternoons were especially wide open. It felt almost inconvenient having this much free time. There were only so many reels I could scroll. But part of me knew I would find something to fill them with.
I had signed up for two online classes through the local community college, intro stuff that would look good on a transcript, and they required maybe two hours of my attention on a good day. The rest of the time I was home, on my floor, lamp on, window cracked.
I had other friends, I guess, but there wasn’t much impetus to head all the way across town to find them. They would find me, eventually.
Patrick had a part-time job with his dad's construction company. I knew his dad ran a decent-sized operation, commercial stuff mostly, and Patrick had been working summers there since he was sixteen. He left early in the mornings, before eight usually, sometimes in his dad's truck, sometimes in his own car. He came back in the late afternoon with dust on his pants, looking tired. It was clear that he actually used his body all day. I had started to notice when he got home.
As I sat there with Patrick in his room, after finally having released our seed onto each other, our thighs touching while something played on his computer, I found myself idly thinking about Caden. I figured he was around somewhere. He probably had something athletic going on, something that kept him around the school and its facilities. I could picture him in the weight room or on the field, sweaty and large and lean and muscular. Confident, with people around him the way there always were. I thought about that for a moment and then scooted closer to the sweet guy next to me. Caden had popped my cherry, but it only made me hornier for Patrick.
At some point, he reached over without looking at me and took my hand, his thumb moving slowly across my knuckles, and I looked down at our hands on the carpet and left mine exactly where it was.
We stayed in his room all day, and all night, until we heard his parents' car in the driveway. He walked me to the front door and leaned against the frame and looked at me sweetly.
"Tomorrow?" he asked, a gentle question, but with masculine tone that reminded me who he was.
"Yeah," I said.
I turned and made the short trek to my front door, and when I turned back, he was greeting his parents. He looked back at me once, smiling before he closed the door.
I stepped inside, with an uncontrollable grin on my face. Mom was in the living room with some murder documentary show playing. I found my laptop in the kitchen and opened it. I had too much energy to go to sleep yet.
A few minutes later, Mom stopped in the kitchen doorway on her way to bed, and looked at me with a sort of amused expression.
"It's really nice," she said, "seeing you spend time with Patrick."
I looked up from my laptop.
"I always thought you two should’ve been closer," she said. "I don't know why it took this long."
I looked back at my screen. "Yeah," I said. "He's cool."
She smiled and left and I sat there with that for a minute, just thinking, before I went back to what I was doing.
—[]—
Patrick and I each moved our beds that night, without discussing it, sliding them up against our respective windows so we could see each other more clearly across the gap. I had noticed him doing it from my side and he had noticed me doing it from his and neither of us texted about it. It was just a thing that happened simultaneously, which told me something that I didn't have the capacity to acknowledge yet.
I took off the shirt I was wearing, and remembered it was his. I tossed it under my bed. I didn’t want to give it back yet. I liked having something of his to hold onto.
—[]—
Over the next few days, we quickly started seeing each other often, in a pattern that just barely started to feel like a rhythm.
Patrick would leave in the morning and I would do my coursework. And then at some point in the afternoon, he would be back and either tap on the glass of my window or I would see his light come on and go over through the front door like a normal person. We watched things. We talked. We lay on my moved bed and looked at the ceiling and the conversation went wherever it went.
And, we got off together a lot. Not every time we saw each other, and not like it was the point of being in the same room, but when we were in close proximity for long enough, something always built between us that neither of us ever resisted. I hadn't wanted to rush anything after the disappointment of Caden, and Patrick seemed to understand that without me saying it.
He wasn't pushing me toward anything. But every day, after being near each other long enough, our bodies made the decision before our heads did. I would feel the warmth in my crotch, almost like a telepathic signal from his body to mine, a restlessness in my skin would transfer from me to him, and then an awareness of exactly how close his chest was to me. Then I would look at him and he would already be looking at me, and that was usually all it took.
We would undress each other slowly, no urgency, just hands finding hems and waistbands and pulling things loose. His pecs pressed against me was something I never got used to, it was so sexy every time. There was a specific feeling of warmth from him, the light dusting of hair on his chest that I had started to feel around for with my fingers every time we got close. We would press together, both of us firm and revved up, and the first contact of it still made me inhale sharply every time, a specific, electric friction of our bodies wanting each other, hard.
We humped and groped and kissed in his bed or mine, one time on his couch, and once in his parents’ bed, for some reason. His hands would move across my back, scratching me lightly like he was curing an itch I didn’t know I had. His palms would move down to my ass and grope me while I pressed harder into him, both of us building toward it without rushing. He would get a finger inside me most of the time, making me release little whimpers I had never made before.
His hands were everywhere, and mine were on him, feeling the muscles of his shoulders, the curve of his ass, the weight of his balls, the thick warmth of his love muscle between us. I would reach down and wrap my hand around both of us together the way he had done to me the first time, his girth filling my palm on its own. I would use both hands and work us slowly until we had lubricated ourselves with the early signs of impending climax, while his mouth found my neck or my collarbone or came back to my mouth, and that would put me over the edge, every time.
We always ended up breathing hard, our foreheads together or his face pressed into my neck, a sheen of summer sweat on each of us, gripping each other through the last of it until we were emptied, loose and still. Whatever mess we made, we didn't worry about it for a while. We would just lay there in the specific quiet calm that came afterward, his chest rising and falling against some part of me, neither of us talking, until one of us, usually Patrick, would stand up and grab a towel or a dirty shirt. I loved watching his butt as he walked away, and the rest of him when he walked back, tossing me the rag first.
It was different from the time with Caden, slower and less urgent and somehow more intense because of that. It built up naturally, not pushed from some horny jock who had some unruly impetus to get it in. With Caden, everything had moved like it was on a quick schedule. With Patrick, it was like time didn’t exist. We had the whole summer and nowhere to be, like we were just in our own temperate garden of Eden, and he seemed genuinely content to just be in the room with me, which was something I was still getting used to being on the receiving end of.
—[]—
Even though we could see each other from our beds, Patrick always found a way to make himself even cuter and more adorable. He started sending me photos at night. There was nothing planned about it, just him in bed, phone held above his face, sometimes already half asleep. I would send on back every time, just my face, which looked plain and boring to me, but he always seemed to like it. Pictures of us went back and forth, just of ourselves lying in our separate beds on opposite sides of a narrow, suburban gap, sending each other the same image from different angles, sometimes with a little bit of my butt in the background if I was lying on my stomach. I looked at his face on my screen and felt something special. I already felt like it was love, but I wasn’t ready to let myself get that excited about it, not after the other guy I had thought I “loved”.
One night, while I was lying in bed looking at Patrick's face on my phone, wondering how his cheek bones could possibly look that perfect, Caden texted me again.
Caden: You up?
I chuckled for some reason, even though I didn’t really like receiving the text. Then a minute later he texted again.
Why you ignoring me?
I looked at the texts for a moment. I thought about it. I kind of had an urge to respond, but nothing too thought out. I thought of something that might drive him crazy. I hearted the second text, then muted notifications from Caden, and put my phone face down.
I looked back across at Patrick's window. His light was still on. His silhouette was there, lying on his back, his laptop on his stomach as he worked on something, his breath slowly lifting the computer up and down.
I went to sleep.
—[]—
When Patrick left early one morning, about a week after we had first come together, I got up when I heard his car start. Even though I was yet to fully wake up, I walked down to my kitchen and watched his car leave out the window. I don’t know why exactly, but I thought it would be cute to just… watch him go.
He drove off, like he did every day. I stared at the leftover coffee my mom had left in the pot. I didn’t drink coffee. She was already gone for the day, and I was home alone.
I looked out to the back yard. There was a hummingbird at our feeder. I listened to the neighborhood outside, a lawn mower somewhere, a car passing, birds doing their loud things in the trees. I was almost ready to grab my laptop and start my schoolwork when I heard it.
A horn. Short, two taps, from the street directly in front of the house. It was weirdly familiar.
I walked slowly to the kitchen window that faced out the front of the house. I could see the front through the narrow glass panel next to the door before I reached it, just a sliver of the street, enough to see the front end of a white Tesla parked at the curb.
I stopped at the door and looked through the glass.
Caden was in the driver's seat. He was looking directly at the front door, his window down, his arm resting along the door, a smile finding me through the glass like he had known exactly where I would be standing when I came to look.
I stood there with my hand on the doorknob and didn't open it yet.