The Lord Won't Mind (The Peter & Charlie Trilogy) (7 page)

Peter’s mouth worked before he spoke. “I tried to stop you. Oh, God, just thinking about it almost makes me come all over again. When I first knew I wanted you that way, I thought I’d lost my mind. I never dreamed you’d do it to me.”

“I tell you, baby. It’s the same.” He stroked his hair. “Next time, do you want to be the one to do it—the other way? I mean, with us the other way around, you inside me?”

Peter dropped his arm and looked at him with stunned eyes. “No. Oh, no. It wouldn’t make any sense. I want you inside me all the time. You having me. You—is it all right to say fuck? You fucking me. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

“Sure. That’s what it is.”

“I want you to fuck me always. Never the other way around. I want to be the best fuck you’ve ever had so you’ll forget all the others.”

“Good lord, do you think I’ve ever had anybody like you before? You’re fantastic.”

“Am I? The way you make me feel, it’s as if my whole body were made for you.”

“Do you want me to fuck you now, baby?”

“God, yes.”

And again …

“Haven’t you really ever been in love before?” Peter asked. They lay on their sides facing each other, arms and legs intertwined. Peter was tracing Charlie’s eyebrows with a finger.

“Not the way I feel with you. Oh, I suppose once, long ago. The last year of school. With the captain of the football team, of all people. We didn’t discover it until Graduation Day. That is, I didn’t discover he felt the same way, and then it was a bit late. We met once after we’d both started college, but it didn’t work out.”

“Met how? Tell me.”

“He took a room for us in New York. I remember I had to sell some books to pay for the trip. I went up from Princeton and he came down from New Haven.”

“Golly. You actually did that? Why didn’t it work out?”

“Oh, I guess we’d both worked it up into such a big thing in our minds that it was bound to be an anticlimax. It just wasn’t any good.”

“Did you suffer a lot?”

“Suffer? Why? It just happened and that was that.”

“I’d kill myself if anything went wrong with us.”

“You’re crazy. My crazy baby. How do you know you’ll even like me a week from now?”

Peter lifted his arms in the air and wriggled his body in closer against Charlie’s, making a deep animal growl of lust and longing in his throat. He dropped his hands on Charlie’s shoulders, still growling, and kneaded his neck with strong fingers and ran them through his hair. “I know,” he said, smiling into Charlie’s eyes. “I love everything about you. Your looks, of course, your huge cock, but lots more than that. I love everything you say, I love your voice, I love the way your lip curls here when you smile.” He put a finger on the spot. “And that’s just the beginning. That’s just the first day. Think of all the other things I’ll find to love. Golly, when I got out of that train this morning and saw you, I knew something tremendous was happening. Darling, dearest love, dearest, beautiful lover, precious love, my champ.” The words poured from him in a gentle croon as if they had been locked away for years, saved up for this occasion.

Charlie had always shrunk from endearments. There was something ridiculous and distasteful about men calling each other “dearest” and “darling,” but Peter was somehow, apparently, an exception. The words were undeniably sweet on his lips. Charlie warned himself not to be beguiled into reciprocating. “That’s enough of that,” he said. “You’ll hate me in the morning. I suppose we ought to be thinking about sleep.”

“Oh, no. Not yet. There’s still so much I have to find out about you.”

So the night passed. They went back and forth to the bathroom, sometimes they showered together, somehow eventually they went to sleep without knowing they had done so. When Charlie woke up, the first pale morning light was in the window. His eyes made a slow, drugged inventory. The golden head was nestled in the hollow between his shoulder and chest. A leg was thrown across his, and Peter’s sex thrust up hard against Charlie’s thigh. A hand was clinging to his own sex. His arm ached, but he was so enchanted by what he saw that he scarcely noticed it. His chest was suddenly bursting with happiness, tears pricked behind his eyes, his throat tightened. A sob that was also laughter burst from him. He ran his finger down the tilt of Peter’s nose and across his lips. They stirred in the motions of a kiss. My boy, my lover, my baby, my love, he thought, so befuddled with exhaustion and happiness that he didn’t know his mind was singing a litany of treacherous endearments.

THE summer had begun. They quickly established a routine, with the club and Charlie’s room as its centers of activity. They played tennis, at which they were closely matched. They swam. Invitations to parties accumulated, and there were weekly dances at the club.

Despite Peter’s indifference, Charlie insisted that they should take an active part in the social life of their age group. Peter was a welcome addition; they lived in the midst of laughing, playful youth. This communal life stimulated their passion. Aside from the long nights they shared, Peter was always ready with sexual improvisations whenever they found themselves briefly alone. In broad daylight on a deserted beach, at night, on the grounds of the club, in the guest room of a neighboring house where they were attending a supper party, he celebrated his adoration of Charlie’s body, finding in these dangerously public acts a sort of public sanction of their love. Charlie was an enthralled and enthusiastic partner, but at the Saturday night dances, he insisted that they should go their independent ways, attaching himself to girls, dancing and flirting to the exclusion of everybody else in a continuing need to assert the normalcy of their situation. Peter quickly came to loathe Saturday.

In the first few days, C. B. made good her promise to outfit Peter. They all went in the stately Packard to the local shop and bought slacks and summer jackets and shoes and shirts and various accessories.

“Nobody’s ever been so wonderful to me,” Peter said on the way home. “I’m going to stay with you forever.”

C. B. took his hand. “Darling Peter. You can’t imagine what pleasure you give me.”

“Hey champ. You hear that?” The nickname was an endearment he could use with impunity in public. He used it constantly. “I’m going to live with C. B. We’ll let you come for dinner every now and then.”

Shopping had been a hot business, and they raced upstairs to change for a quick swim before lunch. A colorful beach robe was one of Peter’s acquisitions, and he flung it over his shoulders. Charlie carried one like it. They encountered C. B. crossing the wide entrance hall on their way out. She stopped and threw up her hands in a characteristic gesture of admiration.

“What a glorious color you’re both getting. I can see heads turning as you two walk down the beach. You look more alike every day. I’m soon going to find it difficult to choose between you. You’re both such superb specimens. Which of you do you think has the better physique?”

They both began to speak at once and looked at each other and laughed. Peter eyed the swelling pouch of Charlie’s trunks, amazed not for the first time that he was allowed out in public. Only the blind could fail to be aware of his majestic dimensions. He was both proud and jealous of the display. He wondered what C. B. thought of it.

“I’m stronger than he is,” Charlie asserted.

“Ha. I very much doubt it,” Peter countered.

“We’ll have to battle it out. We can set up a ring on the lawn and sell tickets.”

“And risk spoiling your lovely faces?” C. B. protested. “Not on my lawn.” She looked from one nearly naked youth to the other. “You’re very powerful looking, my dearest, but you’ve never had Peter’s grace. He’s so exquisitely made, without, of course, the slightest trace of effeminacy. Heaven spare us effeminate men.” She turned to Peter and took his hands. “I think I’d have to award the prize to you, my darling.”

“The champ bites the dust,” Peter exclaimed with glee.

C. B. moved from him to Charlie, prepared to offer him a conciliatory embrace. He saw it coming and gave her cheek a quick peck and moved away. She had always been prodigal of caresses, but for reasons he couldn’t quite define, perhaps because of the intense physical life he was sharing with Peter, he had become sensitive to all such contact. He was beginning to find C. B. too insistent. He gave Peter a quick jab. “Come on, dope.”

Peter jabbed him back and danced out of reach. “Watch who you’re hitting. We haven’t any tickets yet.” Charlie went for him and they rushed from the house, sparring and romping and shouting with laughter.

C. B. stood for a long moment looking after them when they were gone, a thoughtful but not dissatisfied smile on her lips.

THEIR routine was disrupted a few weeks later on one of the Saturdays Peter had come to hate. The announcement was made by C. B. after lunch, when Henry had removed the empty coffee cups from the veranda. (Its repercussions were to echo through their lives, though at the time it seemed only a small domestic crisis.)

“We’re to be without a cook for the next few days,” she said, looking over her shoulder and putting a finger to her lips. “I’ve been dying to tell you. It seems we have a great singer in our midst.” She twinkled with contained mirth.

“Really? Who’s that?” Charlie asked, responding to her high spirits.

“Sapphire, if you please. Mrs. Hall, as I think we must call her from now on. She’s to have an audition with the Metropolitan Opera on Monday morning.” She uttered a peal of laughter.

“No, seriously,” Charlie interjected, laughing with her. “What’s she up to?”

“Ah, that remains to be seen. I understand the darkies so well. I pretended to take it all absolutely seriously. ‘That’s very nice, Sapphire,’ I said. ‘How long have you been interested in an operatic career?’” She erupted once more with laughter. “‘I’se always sung in de church. Mr. Otto Kahn, he say I got a big future. That’s what he say.’ She was very severe with me. I’d made her sit down. There’s nothing that flusters them more than treating them as equals. Mr. Otto Kahn! I suppose she’s read his name somewhere in the paper.”

“And you’re letting her go?”

“Of course. They’re like children or very nice animals. It’s a scientific fact that their craniums are smaller than ours. One must humor them up to a point. Since she isn’t taking Henry with her, I presume she intends to return. I can’t wait to hear all about Mr. Otto Kahn’s reaction.” She and Charlie laughed together some more. “There’s the dance tonight. You two had better go early and have dinner at the club. Rosie can manage something for me.”

Later, when the boys were alone, Peter returned to the subject. “Darling, why does C. B. think it’s so funny for Sapphire to be a singer?” he wondered out loud.

“Oh, I suppose she knows it’s all just a fake.”

“I don’t see why it should be, necessarily. Lots of Negro singers have started out as somebody’s cook. I don’t think she should laugh at her.”

“Naturally, she doesn’t laugh at her to her face,” Charlie said with a dismissive tone. He didn’t like criticism of C. B., and he was accustomed to Peter taking conversational directions from him. “You heard her. She said she treated the whole thing completely seriously.”

“Yes, but—well, I know Negroes too. They’re not necessarily like children.”

“Oh, come off it. She’s letting her go, isn’t she? Lots of people would’ve made a big stink about it.”

“Yes, I suppose so.”

The brief conversation left a little cloud between them that dinner at the club did nothing to dispel. Peter loved any new experience with Charlie, and dining out tête-à-tête with him was a major one, but it was Saturday and it didn’t turn out as he had hoped. Peter had come to feel that if they could get through Saturday without disaster, they could count on another week of perfect harmony. They were surrounded by people from the moment they arrived. Charlie table-hopped, and others returned the visits. Peter had acquired many admirers of his own without being aware of it; nobody really meant anything to him except Charlie. Together they proved a powerful magnet. As the meal was ending, Peter pressed his knee against Charlie’s. “Let’s go look at the tennis courts,” he said. The line had particular significance for them; it referred to the time they had indulged themselves on the lawn.

“Don’t be silly,” Charlie replied curtly. “I have a date with Betty Pringle.” He threw down his napkin and was gone.

Betty was a pretty girl in an ordinary, rather doll-like way, but she was a good dancer and had a reputation for being fast; that is, she was said to be willing to neck and pet more boldly than most of the girls. As the evening progressed, Charlie found himself devoting all his attention to her. The dance floor was soon crowded and other youths frequently cut in on them, but he returned and she welcomed him with giggles, accepting him as her special date for the occasion. When the music was slow, she pressed herself against him in a way that immediately aroused him. He knew that she must feel it. They danced, they paused for cold drinks, they danced again. He caught glimpses of Peter from time to time, but whenever he seemed about to approach, he took Betty by the arm and led her back to the floor.

They were dancing a slow tango and she clung to him; Charlie responded more positively than ever. She made an extra little pelvic movement, acknowledging him. He broke away and smiled down at her.

“What about going for a drive,” he suggested.