Page 13 of A Man for the Holidays

“Oh. What’s sex?”

Another long silence fills the dark room, and I wait for Spencer to laugh, or say something, but when he remains quiet, I let out a sigh of frustration.

“Are you sure you want to know?” he asks.

“Oh, yes please,” I beg.

I spend the next several minutes listening to Spencer describe to me the many variations of sex. It all sounds rather long and complicated, but also very entertaining and interesting. Not to mention, funny and pleasurable. He describes it as a sport, and who would have thought that there’d be so many positions involved. There’s talk of doggy style, a number sixty-nine is thrown in there too, then there’s something about a blow job and sucking and I have to wonder if these people get their ideas from Henry Hoover, and I only know about him because it’s the label on the noisy machine that Olivia uses to clean the display. He goes on to describe something called oral and anal, which sounds rather painful if you ask me, but he assures me that it’s actually quite spectacular once you get used to it. He describes the use of a rubber that most men roll onto their dicks to protect themselves and their mate from something he calls a Sexually Transmitted Disease. But the part that really fascinates me is when he finishes with the mention of a substance called lube, and the word bareback.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“Yeah. It’s just, I’ve never experienced anything like that before, well not until now anyway. And you say people do all this for fun and pleasure.”

He nods.

“Seems like a lot of work for just a little bit of fun,” I say.

“It’s more than a little bit, Quinn. People can go at it for hours, sometimes three or four times a day.”

“Sounds exhausting,” I tell him.

He lets out another chuckle, and I lean forward and whisper, “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. I think I’m going to take that shower now, unless there’s something else you want to talk to me about?”

“Nope,” I say, shaking my head.

He gets to his feet, then opens the door and walks through it, closing it behind him, leaving me once again to ponder through all these confusing thoughts going through my mind. I stand from the bed, and pull the covers down, then slowly slide beneath the sheets and lie flat on my back as I pull up the covers and stare up at the dark ceiling. I try and forget about everything that Spencer has just told me about sex, but my head is full. As I try to relax; I finally close my eyes with only one particular thought on my mind… Spencer.

“This is the funniest food in the world.”

I turn around to see Quinn place a piece of popcorn into his mouth as we usher our way through the theater and take our seats in the back row.

“It’s popcorn,” I say, “You’re not supposed to eat it one by one, just throw a whole bunch in your mouth at once.”

He takes the seat beside me, then reaches into his box of popcorn and throws a handful into his mouth. Much of it ends up all over his top and on the seat, and I can’t help but laugh at his incompetence. As we make ourselves comfortable, the movie theater begins to fill with patrons who each take their seats in front of us.

“What exactly are we doing here?” Quinn asks.

“You’ve never heard of a movie theater?”

“You mean one of those places with a really big television and loud noises that move around the entire room? Yeah, I’ve heard Olivia talk about them a lot with her boyfriend. Apparently, it’s where everybody goes on a Friday night and weekend.”

“Yeah, they do. Except it’s not a large television, it’s called a screen. And that noise you’re talking about, is called surround sound. It works like the volume on a regular television set, except it’s much, much louder and clearer.”

“And where is the button to turn on the screen?” he inquires.

I laugh and place another handful of popcorn into my mouth, then take a sip of my soda. “There is no button. It comes from a room up there,” I tell him, pointing at the small window mounted on the wall above our heads. “There’s this machine called a projector, they used to hold a really big reel of film that looked like a negative from an old camera back in the day. These days it’s all digital.”

“Digital?”

“Yeah. Through electronics.”

“Oh, I see. So, what do people do in these theaters? Do they just sit here and watch the movie on the screen?”

“That’s one reason why people come here, yes. But there areotherreasons people come to a movie theater.”

“Oh?”

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