Come Down: II.3

‘Soon’ came four days after the Quartz Club, every one of which saw me checking my phone, conservatively, a dozen times an hour, never mind that I had set up Instagram notifications that straddled the line between excessive and obsessive. On Wednesday afternoon, just as I was opening the door to the ECE library on my final round of the day, Élouan sent me a message containing a place (an address in East Somerville), a time (Thursday night, anytime after seven), and instructions (“wear something that makes you feel sexy”). This last element made me blush uncomfortably hot and sent a squirming feeling through my stomach. It was a welcome confirmation of what the nature of the meeting would be, but I hadn’t expected to be instructed on how to dress myself (did they not assume I would have worn something flattering anyway?), and I felt rather condescended to even as I was titillated by the idea that Élouan might be interested in what made me feel sexy. Though I stopped and leaned on my hand truck to parse the sensations in my body and read the message again, I could not figure out whether I was aroused or embarrassed. I put my phone away and wheeled my crates in. Angus was at the desk.

“I’m sorry about Saturday,” I said, unsnapping the lid to a crate and pulling out a small mountain of board books. Those at the top of the pile seemed primarily barnyard-themed. “No chance of leftovers, I imagine?”

“It’s fine.” Angus waved away my concerns with one large hand as he balanced the board books on the other, depositing them on the counter so he could scan their barcodes. “Everything alright?”

“Yeah, thank you. I’m just an awful lot busier than I expected to be with my theatre class over and the undergrads gone.”

He raised an eyebrow at me. “Cold feet?”

“What?”

“About this.”

I glanced down at the book in his hand -- Doolittle Duck’s Hayloft Hoedown -- before understanding what he meant. “Oh! No, God, no, Angus. I still very much want to be doing this.”

“Alright. You’ll tell me if you don’t?”

“Of course.”

“Good.” He smiled -- white teeth, dark skin, salt-and-pepper beard. He was so handsome. “Get moving, then. I know I’m not your last stop, and I hear you’re awfully busy these days.”

“You’ll text me?”

“Sure I will.”

Leaving the ECE library, back out into the sunshine, relief like helium filled me and my steps became bouncy, almost cartoonish. Angus was not upset with me (not that I had been consciously afraid that he had been, but still, how wonderful that he was not), and he was still interested in me, and he had feared for a moment that I might not feel the same, but of course I did, and furthermore I was to spend the following night with Élouan Gage who wanted me to feel sexy as a prerequisite to the sex we would, evidently, be having, and it was late spring, though it felt like summer, and what in the world could I possibly have to complain about?

~

The following evening I put my itchy, uncomfortable contact lenses in and forced down a bland dinner, mostly rice, that made me feel like a Victorian orphan -- I hadn’t wanted to risk garlic or onions or too many spices, even with a toothbrush and mouthwash available to me three steps from my kitchen -- and considered what to wear. My options were, to put it mildly, limited. I couldn’t do the black tank top again. Élouan had seen me in it already for my final performance as Faustus. Unless I should wear it again and evoke that performance, remind them of how I’d looked when they’d knelt in front of me? When they’d tugged it down, grazing my stomach with their knuckles? But then if I wore the tank top, I really couldn’t wear the same black jeans, and anyway it was too warm for long pants. But did I own any shorts that could be even theoretically construed as sexy? I checked my dresser drawers despite knowing the answer: I did not. I rummaged deeper, coming up with a pair of pre-transition jeans that no longer fit the way they were supposed to, having grown strangely tight in the calves as my body had learned how to retain muscle mass, but that I had, as with most of my pre-transition wardrobe, not gotten rid of because doing so carried with it the nebulous air of hassle, and besides, who knew when the whole ‘passing’ thing I seemed to be doing on a daily basis would stop working and I’d need my old girl clothes back?

It was already nearly seven and I would still need to catch the 88 bus, which was unpredictable at the best of times, to get to Élouan. I took a pair of scissors to the jeans, hacking them off a few inches above the knee and pulling at the loose ends until they looked something like intentional. I yanked them on, tugged them down, and checked myself out in the mirror. Tight black tank top. Denim cutoffs. An inch-wide strip of skin between them, quite a bit of leg (and leg hair, finally -- it had started appearing in earnest during the winter) below the shorts. White socks, my black leather sneakers. I looked like I ought to have been in a sepia-toned album of New York rent boys from the 1970s, like I ought to have been leaning against a brick wall somewhere, like I loved disco and hated cops and went out dancing every night and had a whole stable of closeted married men wrapped around my little finger, like the slightly-too-hot actor they had cast to play the lead role in the Marco Fitzpatrick biopic.

“Hey, gorgeous,” I said to the Marco in the mirror, both of us grimacing at how disgustingly cheesy we were being, even if the line was the appropriate conclusion to a dress-up montage, and then I threw on my jacket, its pockets already pre-stocked with free condoms that I had swiped from a sexual health display in the medical library during my courier runs, and left.

~

Élouan’s was one in a series of clapboard homes in neutral colors, all of them sagging gently in the orange light, on an untroubled one-way street. Its distinguishing features were that its dirty white siding was in need of a power wash and that, unlike its neighbors, it had a driveway, in which sat a low-slung car obscured by a blue tarp. The stairs up to the porch were creaky but sturdy. The front door led to a vestibule from which ascended two separate staircases behind two separate locked doors, and, not having received further information from Élouan about how to proceed, I messaged them on Instagram to let them know I had arrived.

They read the message. I waited. A few minutes passed -- I stuck my phone back in my pocket so I wouldn’t know how many and could pretend it had only been a few, so I would be neither tempted to leave nor embarrassed at not being tempted to leave. I leaned on one of the porch posts and glanced up and down the street, at the woman in leggings and a sports bra jogging with an enthusiastic Weimaraner’s leash clipped around her waist, at the jumbled garbage bins lining the sidewalk, at the blue shadows cast by the trees and the chain-link fences in the light of the setting sun. Finally, I heard the faint sound of someone descending a wooden staircase behind me but did not turn to look until the front door squeaked open and Élouan said, “Come on up.”

They were barefoot, plain grey t-shirt tucked into long black skirt, green plume swaying as I followed them up the narrow staircase behind the left-hand door into an equally narrow entryway filled with shoes -- I spotted their black boots kicked off and lying half-atop a pair of purple Crocs.

“We’re a shoes-off household,” Élouan said, and I toed my sneakers off and added them to the pile.

They gave me a perfunctory tour. The kitchen was straight out of the 1980s, dark wood cabinets and white laminate counters, sink piled high with dirty bowls in bright plastics, a mesh bag of onions sprouting beside a gigantic coffee machine; the living room featured an L-shaped sectional in worn brown leather, a large TV hooked up to a variety of game systems, and a clawed-to-shreds cat tree atop which perched a haughty ragdoll cat by the name of Adelaide who deigned to let me scratch her chin; the bathroom was small, with a toothpaste-spotted mirror and a pair of soft pink hand towels that both said HERS dangling from a ring by the sink. Passing back through the kitchen, which seemed to be the central hub of the apartment, they pointed out the doors to their two roommates’ bedrooms. There was no reason for me to be surprised that Élouan, ten years my senior and ostensibly successful, lived with multiple roommates -- a successful actor is, after all, still an actor -- but the extra bedroom doors nevertheless sat uneasily within the narrative of Élouan Gage as I knew it.

The roommates, I was told, were two visual artists in a committed queerplatonic relationship and were jointly responsible for Adelaide the cat, whose devotion to the pair of them was so great that she would become offended and stalk away if Élouan so much as attempted to feed her. This was the last I was told about the roommates, or indeed about Adelaide. Élouan led me into their bedroom and shut the door behind me.

The room was not large, and it was a mess, the latter fact exacerbated by the former. The entire back half of the room, save a narrow walkway of floor made treacherous by abandoned clothes, was taken up by a king-sized bed whose foot faced the door. Its sheets were black, and it was canopied in the kind of hanging black fabric, patterned with white stars and crescent moons, that I associated with the college dorm decor of girls who existed at the intersection of wealth and Wicca. At the foot of the bed were a stack of what looked to me like toolboxes, durable red plastic perched atop an age-stained metal chest. Against the wall on one side of the door was a large dresser topped with a dizzying array of candles and cosmetics and tins and bottles and bags; on the other side was a metal desk cluttered with books and multiple twisty blown-glass bongs but dominated by a computer monitor and keyboard that both glowed softly in undulating rainbow colors. The only illumination in the room came from the computer until Élouan fumbled around the dresser for a small remote and clicked it. Strips of LED lights taped around the upper edges of the walls blinked to life, and Élouan poked at the remote a few more times until the LEDs turned bluish-purple. With the extra light, I could see a small flat-topped hamper beside the head of the bed -- the source, or the destination, or both, of the clothes on the floor -- that was doubling as a bedside table: a packet of tissues, a phone charger. There was also, I realized, a window behind the head of the bed; it was obscured with blackout curtains, but it must have been cracked, because there was a faint breeze that carried with it the sound of a car driving by. The room smelled much like the kitchen had, scorched oil and chili powder, but also a little bit like sweat and a whole lot like weed.

I was assailed by the uneasy roommate feeling, magnified tenfold: this burnout goth teenage inner sanctum was where Élouan lived? Where they slept and dreamt? Where they dressed and undressed? Where they memorized lines? Where they had sex with Dolly? Where I was about to have sex with them? 

That runway-model Dolly would consent to be ravished in this room seemed more absurd, actually, than me doing the same. Élouan having stayed over at her place the previous weekend was making more sense by the minute.

“Get you anything to drink?” Élouan asked.

My mouth was dry, but I shook my head.

“Good.” They took a step towards me, took me by both shoulders, and gave me a little push towards the foot of the bed. I sidestepped the toolboxes and sat down, sinking into the too-soft mattress, which was thick and plush but not, I imagined, particularly supportive for their spine.

I took a deep breath. I was not supposed to be thinking about Élouan Gage’s potential back issues, not when they were walking toward me, looking down their long sharp nose at me, and never mind my dry mouth because it was starting to water, my jaw tightening, and when they reached me they gave me another backward shove so I would lay down, which I did, and they planted a knee on either side of my hips and a hand on either side of my face and rounded their spine, cat pose -- yoga might help if they do have back problems -- and bent to kiss me.

I reached up, one hand in their mane, the other trailing along their back, each vertebra discrete and spiky under their thin shirt, and, wanting more, wanting all of them at once, wanting to block out entirely the purple LEDs and the dirty clothes and the roommates and the cat and the sound of the street behind my head, the terrible ordinary mundane intimacy of it all, I pulled at their soft hair and pushed on their bony back until they collapsed their whole weight atop me and I was warm, half-suffocating, angling my hips up so I could feel them grow hard between my legs, and we kissed, and I became lightheaded. And the lighter my head, the more they rocked against me, the better it felt, and to keep my mind from wandering to the externalities of the situation I repeated the facts in my head like a mantra: Élouan Gage (Lord Darlington, Mephistopheles, my professor, for God’s sake) was on top of me and it felt so good that I couldn’t think straight.

They shoved their hips forward, hard, with a low grunt, and I let out a strangled little noise of surprise and pleasure, and they put their lips against my ear and said, “Yeah?”

It was an odd voice, higher than their usual gravitational baritone, and it filled me with that reflexive, squirmy heat, maybe arousal, maybe humiliation, that I couldn’t understand until they thrust against me again and I moaned again.

“Yeah? You like that?”

It was the tone one would take when talking to a dog.

Despite myself, I recoiled, and Élouan pushed themself back up onto their hands and knees and gave me a long look. There were a few strands of bright green hair sticking to their forehead, and, in an effort to replace the moment with a better one, I lifted a hand and brushed the strands away. Their lips twitched into something less than a smile.

“I’m going to have a smoke,” Élouan said, rolling off of me. I propped myself up on my elbows and watched as they selected one of the bongs, the tube already half-full, from the desk, pulled a lighter from among the clutter, and lit it. The water in the bowl bubbled softly as they took a few deep drags, one after another, letting out long whistling breaths in between. By the third inhale they sat like a marionette with cut strings, limbs every which way, eyes half-lidded, thin pink lips wet. I looked away from their face to their hands, still cradling the bong, their long fingers. That those fingers were not yet inside me suggested that the evening had gone horribly, but not irretrievably, off-script, and through the hazy air I grasped for my next line.

“My turn,” was what I found, sitting up and gesturing at the bong.

Élouan arched an eyebrow. “I was under the impression that you don’t smoke.”

“I never used to,” I said.

“And now?”

“People change.”

They rolled their eyes, equine, unsettling. “No, they don’t. Come here.”

I did, and they lit the bong for me. I mimicked what they’d done, having never before experienced a bong personally enough to have developed my own technique, and squeezed my thumb inside my fist so I wouldn’t gag or cough -- an old trick that may have only worked due to the placebo effect, I wasn’t sure, but I managed to keep everything inside my lungs for a slow three-count before exhaling. At once I felt better: floaty, detached, expansive. I took another hit, breathing in and holding it for as long as I could stand, and the world began to melt, sweet and full and dripping. We passed it back and forth once or twice more, and my last inhale went up through my head, opening it and blowing through it like the breeze through the window.

“Better,” I said, and it was.

“Alright then.” They took the bong from me, set it back down in its original place on the desk, and reached out to unbutton and unzip my shorts. I shimmied them down my legs and stepped out of them, then pulled my tank top and socks off for good measure. Élouan, still sitting in the desk chair, ran their hands up and down my sides, fingers on my ribs, fingers on my hip bones, fingers on my thighs.

“You’re such a twink,” Élouan drawled, smiling warmly at me, and I couldn’t tell if their mouth or my ears or both had slowed down. Their hand dipped between my legs, and then they were pulling my underwear off too.

Back on the bed. There were steps in between, but they were insignificant, and they glided through my memory without leaving anything behind. Élouan mostly naked on top of me -- ropy arms, smooth chest, a little more of a belly than I’d realized, cold toes -- and then, thank God, at last, their fingers, two of them, curling at an angle that must have been tied to some kind of perfect mathematical ratio, and after I came they pulled the last of the fabric from their body -- tattoos on their hips, tattoos on their upper thighs -- and pushed inside me, no condom, which I would have under ordinary circumstances objected to but which felt, in the moment, entirely correct: finally nothing separated us, not a stage and not a phone screen and not a classroom desk and not a yard of black tulle and not my brand-new cutoff shorts. They fucked me for a few desperate minutes, not fast but hard, low grunts that escalated into “yeah”s, ever higher pitched, that dog tone again, but I was beyond minding, beyond a lot of things, high and breathing deeply and feeling everything twice, once like it was happening to someone else and once right after like it was happening to me, all of which was getting me close again, and I said so, murmured on repeat, pleading, but then they were withdrawing, hand wrapped around themself instead.

When they came on my stomach, they squeezed their eyes shut and pressed their lips together like they were in pain.

They clambered off the bed to grab the tissues from the top of the hamper and wiped me down, then crumpled the used ones and tossed them I didn’t see where.

“Satisfied?” Élouan asked.

“Not quite,” I said, honestly, angling for teasing, unsure if I hit the mark. The room was breathing around me.

“I didn’t think so.” They rolled their neck, a series of pops and cracks. “How about I tie you up? Would you like that?”

I wanted Élouan on top of me again, and I wanted to melt into the soft bed and never move any of my heavy limbs again, and being tied up sounded like a wonderful excuse for both of those things to happen. I nodded.

They pulled a black velvet bag from under the bed, guided me toward the center of the mattress and tugged my wrists gently over my head, then spent several minutes untangling the bag’s contents -- a few long, silky braided black ropes -- and looping them between the bedposts and around my wrists, pulling not tight enough to cut off blood flow but not much looser than that. I laid, pliant, sleepy, absorbing the sensations as if they were a massage. When they were done, I couldn’t move my hands more than an inch or two in either direction, and at once I became aware of an itch on my cheek. I lifted my shoulder and rubbed against myself like a cat.

Élouan chuckled, low, amused, and asked, “Comfortable there?”

“Very.”

“I can tell.” They leaned against the bed, still naked, the black sheets blurring into the tattoos on their thigh, and placed one hand, flat palm, on my sternum, then dragged it down the center of my chest and my stomach, over my navel, letting it rest between my legs for a moment. I shifted up into the touch, and they lifted their hand and walked away, scooping up an oversized hoodie from the floor as they did so. They pulled it on and sat down in the desk chair, propping one foot up on the seat and wrapping their long arms around their folded leg, resting their chin on their knee.

“Aren’t you going to…” I didn’t finish the sentence. Too many synonyms bobbed to the surface of my mind at once and I was helpless to choose among them.

“Soon,” Élouan said.

“Okay.” I squinted at them, trying to take an inventory of their tattoos, but they were too far away. I couldn’t think of anything else to say, but with my head open and breezy, it didn’t matter half as much as it ordinarily did, and what little matter was left over blew away as Élouan began to talk.

“You saw the car when you came in, I imagine?”

“It was under a tarp. But yes.”

“She’s my baby. I’ve been fixing her up for years now.”

“What, uh, species is she?”

Élouan let out a disdainful snort, eyes sparkling. “You’re looking for the phrase ‘make and model.’”

“If she’s your baby, I would argue ‘species’ feels more appropriate.” I wasn’t sure why I was being combative other than that the rhythm of it rang better, to my ear, than acquiescence. I didn’t feel combative. I didn’t feel much in particular.

“She,” Élouan said, entirely in their stage voice now, rich and low, proud, magnetic, “is a ‘66 Plymouth Barracuda. I’ve been working on her for years.”

I had no frame of reference by which to judge such a car, or indeed any car, but I nodded as if I were impressed, because I wanted to be impressed. Élouan, hands spotted with grease, under some gorgeous vintage convertible (the 1966 Plymouth Barracuda, I learned later and must now note at the risk of your immersion in my perspective, is not a convertible), lovingly restoring it to roadworthiness, was a paperback romance novel cover come to life. The breeze was growing cooler. I shivered on the bed, trying to shimmy myself under the sheets, but they were kicked too far down for me to reach in my restraints.

“How many years?” I asked.

“Four or five, on and off. Since my father died,” Élouan said, too breezy for such a statement.

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is, et cetera.”

“To have a thankless child?”

“If you asked him.”

“And if I ask you?”

“To have a shitty dad. No disrespect to Lear, of course.” They readjusted their hoodie, tugging the sleeves down over their hands, and my goosebumps reasserted themselves. “Masshole to the core. Devout Irish Catholic, beer on weeknights, whiskey on the weekends. Screaming at the Sox on TV was the closest he ever got to expressing an emotion. He genuinely, unironically referred to himself as a ‘man’s man.’ Your name is Fitzpatrick, you know the type.”

I nodded, half-surprised at the direct address; Élouan was by that point talking more to themself than to me.

“Which, of course, meant that he was desperately ashamed of me. Possibly the queerness or the acting would have been acceptable on their own, but both together? And not taking over the family business?” They sighed. “To his credit, I believe he kept me around as long as he could stand to.”

“He kicked you out?”

“My eighteenth birthday.”

“What was the family business?”

“He was a mechanic. The man was compulsive about working with his hands. When he wasn’t at the garage, he always had a couple of junkers in the front yard to tinker with when he got home. I knew the names of all of his tools and which ones to pass him before I knew how to read.”

“Which is why you’re working on the -- uh -- on your baby?”

“The ‘Cuda, yes. Aside from the money, she was the only thing he left me in his will.”

“An apology?”

“A ‘fuck you,’ more likely,” Élouan said with a wry smile. They looked strangely bug-eyed in the purple light, although I may have been attributing to them the odd swollen feeling in my own eyes. I was very tired. “But if he was trying to make me feel bad, he did a pretty terrible job. I love that car, and working on her hasn’t made me any less queer, and it hasn’t made me any more ashamed of myself. You know?”

“I think so.”

“Shame is poison. And just because he spent his whole life drinking it doesn’t mean I have to.”

“Right.”

They eased themself up from the desk chair, an audible crack resounding from their bent knee. “Well, you’ve been very patient,” they said. “I think I’m just about ready for round two.”

Right. Anatomy. Thence the monologue. I thought of Touchstone, the fool, spinning out a meaningless lecture on the semantics of quarrelling at the end of As You Like It to give the women time to change out of their male disguises backstage, and I giggled, and my giggling made Élouan laugh as they climbed back on top of me, and I felt their laughter resonating in my own chest. Many of the designs adorning their chest and thighs, I realized, were likely auto parts -- there were pistons, or at least what I thought might be pistons, and screws and gears and tubes, the inside of a car on the outside of their body, and as they pressed against me that laughter vibrated like the roar of an engine.

They were not quite as ready as they claimed to be, but after a few minutes of grinding against my thigh and watching me playact straining at the ropes around my wrists, they were able to push inside me again, and they fucked me until I came, and I laid back and took it all with pleasure, imagining myself from Élouan’s perspective, helpless and bound, desperate to touch, imagining all the things I might do with the use of my hands if I had it, finding the imagining more arousing than any of the actions would have been in reality. 

I was, as it happens, quite fond of that prattling Touchstone speech. Your “if” is the only peacemaker; much virtue in “if.” My housemates and I would quote it back and forth to each other in college nearly anytime someone made a conditional statement.

~

While I was waiting for my Uber home (Élouan had made clear, gently but firmly, that I would not be spending the night, and I didn’t dare risk the bus for fear that I would fall asleep, throw up, or both -- the weed had left me bone-tired and wobbly with vertigo), I lifted the tarp that covered the ‘66 Plymouth Barracuda in the driveway. It was charcoal grey, stripped of its tires and propped up on cinder blocks. It looked shiny and well-cared for. It was missing a taillight. Between the darkness and my lack of knowledge about anything automotive, that was all I could discern about it. I have never really understood the appeal of old cars.

Might Makes Write and all the writing shared herein are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.