This is another departure for me, a single story, no chapters. As always, I like hearing from readers.
*****
I was lucky enough to have a "clerk summer," which was a third summer for law students lucky enough to land prestigious clerkships. I was spending mine in Chicago, interning for the nation's most litigious law firm.
I needed a place to live.
I flew in and spent a weekend looking for apartments. Late in the day on Saturday, I looked at a "Laverne and Shirley" basement apartment in Lincoln Park. It was well-done, but overpriced for what it offered.
But, my tour guide was a 6'2" boy, aged eighteen, who had the blondest hair and the bluest eyes a boy could have. His hair was long, I later learned for Lacrosse. It was called "flow."
He looked very much like Nathan, from Queer as Folk, the import, not the American remake. The Nathan who would later be Jax on "Sons of Anarchy" and who would turn down the lead in those horrid "Fifty Shades" movies.
He was not my type. I liked dark eyes and dark hair and dark skin. I was more Brazil than Nordic.
He was the opposite. There was nothing dark or swarthy about him. He had light eyes and light hair and creamy white skin, but for a few blemishes here and there that betrayed his youth. He was the personification of innocence. Or so I thought.
He asked about my move to Chicago, and I told him. He stared into my eyes while I talked. It was unsettling. No one I knew maintained eye contact like that.
"To where did you go to college?" he asked, the "h" in where clearly spoken.
"Notre Dame."
"In what did you major?" again hitting the "h," this time in what.
"Latin."
He looked like he may burst. "Please," he demanded. "Please take this apartment. I need help with my Latin. It's destroying me."
He was about to be a senior in a preparatory school and claimed to be oppressed by Latin. I'm not sure why he thought his oppression may entice me.
He was big and floppy, like a puppy. I couldn't tell him no.
I didn't like the apartment, but I took it. I was placing myself in harm's way. By the time the tour was over, I wanted a puppy.
My first night there, he was at my door with his Latin book. I was unpacking, so Latin would have to wait. Happily, he offered to help me unpack.
He moved clumsily, like a foal that had not yet found its footing. He had large hands, and his fingernails were too long. Men should not have long fingernails.
He had juicy red lips, a nose that was a bit too small for his face, and bright blue eyes beneath surprisingly dark, thick eyebrows and framed by the longest lashes I had ever seen on a man. If they hadn't been on his clunky frame, I'd have described them as feminine.
He had a sinister smile. It was a little crooked, showing the teeth on the left side of his mouth, but not the right. When he smiled, he had dimples that would have made Eddie Cibrian envious.
He was downstairs the next night and the night after. He was an only child, and his parents were too busy living the high life to fret over him. He was living the dream, wealthy and young and, more importantly, free. He could do whatever he wanted, so long as he was neither heard nor seen.
He was at a year around school. Our morning schedules were similar, and I often met him on the stoop, my ascent and his descent coinciding. I was in a suit, my firm atavistic. He was in khakis, a blue blazer, and a rep tie, his school equally so.
He was eighteen only in how he moved. Having spent his life primarily with adults, he spoke like one. Having been educated with the best and the brightest, he was erudite and knowledgeable. I had gone to Notre Dame and Stanford, but I was hard pressed to raise a book he hadn't read or use a word he didn't know.
He was smarter than I was. And preternaturally assured.
He was happy to have an audience. He was figuring out what he thought, and he wanted to talk about it.
I didn't have anything else to do, so I listened. I was in Chicago for too short of a time to play like it would be longer.
I felt at first like a predator. I was twenty seven, almost a decade older than he. I had to be in charge.
I was not. I realized quickly I was prey, not predator.
He was after me.
The realization titillated me. I had played both roles. I was more comfortable in control. I was pretty sure I wasn't with him.
He started to touch me. There is nothing like the first touches, the hand on my shoulder as I made us dinner, a knee against mine as we worked at the table, a hand on my arm as we said goodnight. They jolted me.
He wore less and less. He had first visited in his school uniform. He now visited in shorts and t-shirts, his bare feet large, arched high, and, as with his hands, with nails too long.
Like the first touches, there's something about the first revelations of skin, especially skin you don't usually get to see. An upper arm. A side or stomach. A foot. He was showing them all to me, slowly. He certainly knew what he was doing and what it was doing to me.
I casually mentioned that long nails on a man repelled me. The next day, all of his were trimmed. I'm certain he'd hoped I'd notice it and mention it. I noticed, but I didn't say a word. I was trying not to arm him. He couldn't know I noticed.
He teased me. He asked me to start running with him. The first day I did, he ran shirtless. He was built better than it appeared when he was dressed, his clothes too loose and hiding what lies beneath. His chest had definition but was bald, the way blonde's often are. His arms were thick. His waist was narrow. There was a light trail from his navel into his running shorts, which were far smaller than the gym shorts he wore when visiting me. His muscled legs were hairy and sinewy.
I should have known he would be built. Lacrosse is a brutal game; you have to be strong and physical to play.
I was compact and small and ran like it. He was gangly and long and ran like it. Matching me stride for stride, he was all arms and legs. He looked as much like he was flailing as running. It reminded me he was, in the end, still a kid. The dissonance between his conversation and everything else was laughable, his body not matching his brain.
I tried to talk myself out of where we were headed. I knew right from wrong, and he was too young to be right.
Still, I researched the age of consent in Illinois. I was looking for a reason to avoid what I knew I couldn't and, ultimately, wouldn't.
He was old enough to consent. I pretended to be disappointed.
One Friday, I arrived home to a "Please join us upstairs tonight for dinner" note on my door. Expecting his parents, I left my suit on. He answered the door in shorts and a t-shirt.
"My parents are in New York," he said, turning and walking away from me down the hall, almost certainly to show off what he almost always showed off. "It's just the two of us."
I removed my tie and opened my shirt. I shouldn't have. I shouldn't have done anything to signal I was comfortable with what was developing around me.
Maybe I was. I didn't want to be, but maybe, just maybe, I was calling his bet, at least a little.
"Then who was the 'us' in the note?" I asked.
"Why, me and Cali," he said coyly, pointing to the large, orange cat lying on the window seat. As if on cue, Cali raised her head, looked our way, yawned as widely as she could, and then looked back away, her head returning to where it was before she heard her name but received no treat.
"He thinks something's going to happen," I thought to myself. I knew better. I was going to summon all of my will and ward him off. "He's just a boy," I reminded myself.
He served wine like he'd been drinking it his whole life, the way Europeans β and apparently the American rich β do. It was fantastic wine.