Page 67 of Two Marlboros

Harvey placed his cigarette on the ashtray and exhaled, after which he shifted and moved closer to me until our noses touched. I could feel his smoke-impregnated breath end up on my face, and for the first time I found that smell really disgusting. Alan darted through my thoughts, and I wondered what he was doing at that moment. Dinner, or perhaps laundry. That image reassured me as Harvey’s lips parted to say something. My heart lost a beat, but it wasn’t for emotion.

“Alright, I’ll go slower. Although you know I like it that way.”

He placed his lips on mine and initiated a rough, bitter-tasting kiss, just like any of his other outpourings. His lips were kissing me voraciously again until I felt his tongue tapping on my teeth. I made room for him, and the kiss became passionate and messy; he thrust his hands into my hair and tousled it, caught up in the heat. I felt a twinge of pleasure with each touch of our tongues, although it was early to have another intercourse; despite this, however, the pain down there already seemed like history, his selfishness became of little consequence, the desire increasingly overwhelming.

After a while we did it again. Same style, same brutality - and no need to be accustomed to it. No attention for me, apart from a few more intimate caresses.

Everything was consumed quickly, just for him.

Theencorehad exhausted me. All the excitement of that evening had given space to a sense of melancholy and something else that I did not know how to define. All I knew was that it made me ashamed to be naked in front of him, and maybe that was why I stood with the blanket pulled up to my waist. I didn’twant him to have the feeling that he had made me his, nor did I want there to be any complicity between us.

Harvey was always confident about too many things, but it wasn’t’ with sex that he would win me over. He had succeeded with the naiveté of my seventeen years, perhaps because he had taken my virginity and it had seemed like a dream to me to have done it with someone like that.

At that moment, however, I longed for more. A relationship, perhaps. The only thing I was sure of was that I did not want to be treated like a little boy, nor did I want him to think he could do that. There was nothing transgressive for me anymore, nothing that could elevate him above other boys. We were now equals.

The shower water turned on: Harvey was washing himself.

He had immediately run to the bathroom to clean himself and barely kissed me. It wasn’t so out of this world that he didn’t want any contact after sex: he never had. At that moment, though, some cuddling would not have bothered me, nor would any other confirmation of what those moments had been for him.

I threw myself back on the pillow and waited for his return. I reached out a hand to the other side of the bed and felt, under my fingers, a smooth, shiny surface, which I recognized at once as the print of the T-shirt Alan had lent me.

For a moment I saw it there. I twisted my body to turn around and reach it, and the sheet slid down from my buttocks, leaving me naked. I looked around hurriedly, but Harvey was still in the bathroom.

I grabbed the shirt and climbed back on my back, bringing that fabric to my chest. I clutched tightly to me what was nothing more than a piece of fabric, yet I seemed to smell, between the fibers, soap and fabric softener. I thought of Alan once more:always so neat, in mind as in life, and indeed, if one excluded Oliver’s accident, he had everything one could want.

Would I have found in Harvey the same ability to bring order even to the mess in my room?

The bathroom door opened. I put the sheet back over my body, covering my nakedness, just before Harvey re-entered the room. He didn’t even look up at me and began raking through the clothes we had thrown on the floor just over an hour earlier. I followed his movements one by one, waiting for the one that involved looking in my direction and smiling at me, kissing me, asking me if I was happy.

He just emptied his balls.

A sudden, cutting thought I didn’t want to believe. I just had to accept that Harvey was like that. That he was putting his clothes back on while looking at an undefined spot in the room, and that he was only ready to devote a glance to me once the last button of his shirt was closed and his pants zipped up. A smile broke out on my face that made me forget what I had thought just before, a doubtless stupid thought.

He sat down on the edge of the bed and leaned over me. He began to lick my lips and leave little kisses on them, but I was too exhausted for any reaction. Nevertheless, I let his tongue slide over mine, giving me the thrill of knowing that he still wanted me even after sex and that I was inflaming him even though there could be no practical conclusion.

I tossed Alan’s shirt aside, which I still wore on my chest, and pushed Harvey’s head back until we were both seated. I had been waiting for words, but I should have known that they would not come, and that he would instead give me a roaring kiss, a testament to what those moments with me had been. All the bleakness I had felt had just been washed away.

I almost thought I loved him, but I didn’t tell him just because it was perhaps a little early. Three years had certainlychanged us more than I had imagined, and I could not throw away three such important words. I would think about it some more, but at that moment I wanted nothing more than to be by Harvey’s side every moment. To make love to him, to kiss him, to share our days.

He pulled away from my lips and watched me with a mischievous smile, while I must have had a lost look on my face, because he chuckled.

“I have to go, Nate.”

My happiness vanished. “What do you mean?”

“I’m sorry. I had a setback.”

“So, we’re not eating together?”

He shook his head, looking heartbroken, but that expression seemed false to me.

“Not tonight, but there will be other occasions. Don’t do that face, come on.”

I disappeared like a bloated balloon that had just been punctured.

He got out of bed and perhaps expected me to do the same. Instead, I sat there where I was, my fingers firmly on the sheet that covered me at least partially from that humiliation.

I continued to stare at him without saying anything, while he turned the car keys back over in his hands, until he let out a “Bye”, without all the contrition I had expected to find. He left the room and, when he was out of my sight, I thought I heard him inhale sharply.

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