Going Left Around the World: Chapter 71
Title: Going Left Around the World
Author: mrs-spamlad
Pairing: Jack/Ennis
Rating: R
Feedback: have at it!
Disclaimer: Brokeback Mountain and the original characters of Jack and Ennis were created by and belong to Annie Proulx. No money is being made from this- I’m just taking them out for a spin!
A/N: An update! And without a nudge (I think - if there was one, I missed it). Sorry for the pause - I was sick, then sick, then sicker… now finally not so sick. I can stay awake past ten o’clock so I can actually do extra things. Maybe one of these days I’ll get something written.
So Jack has made it to Albany - his visit stretches over a couple of chapters (2, maybe 2 ½), so they’re just getting started, haha.
Thanks ever so much to shieldmaid1 for her very helpful feedback on these chapters - I do appreciate it. And thank you all for sticking with this story. Since Jack is visiting in October and I’m feeling better-ish, I’m thinking I may post again this month to finish out his visit. It’s not exactly “real time”, but close.
For now, on with the show - happy reading!
jill
Chapter 71
It wasn’t my first trip to Albany. When I’d signed on with the Landmark Society, they’d had me go on a bunch of the tours they run. Albany, as the capital of New York (snooze), was on the list. I’d been there a handful of times since, so I knew my way to the area well enough. I left early in the afternoon on Friday and got into the city around four o’clock, just in time to beat rush hour.
Ennis lived in a suburb, so I punched his address into my GPS and let it navigate me to his neck of the woods, which were some pretty nice woods. I drove slowly through a new-looking townhouse community until I spotted his house number. I pulled into the driveway behind his car and killed the engine, took a deep breath and let my head fall back against the headrest. I had tried to make a plan, decide how I was going to handle him - us - for days before I left, and I’d come up with exactly nothing. In a last, panicked call to Josh the night before I left, he’d kindly told me to pull my head out of my ass and start acting like a grown-up. There were no rules, no musts or mustn’ts, so shut the fuck up and just go with it already. That’s a rough translation, of course.
So, as I sat with my eyes closed, reaffirming my plan to not have a plan and just go with it, I nearly had a heart attack when knuckles rapped against my window. My eyes flew open and I found myself staring at Ennis’s puzzled face. I rolled down the window, of all the dumbass things to do.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey,” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t know you were here. I was taking out the trash and I saw you… doing whatever you’re doing.”
I rubbed a hand across my forehead. “Don’t even ask.”
He nodded. “So, do you plan to get out of the car, or should I get in?”
“Sorry. I’m getting out.” I rolled up the window and grabbed the overnight bag off the passenger seat.
I took the keys, opened the door and stepped out, face to face with Ennis again for the first time in over a month. He pulled me into a hug and it took my brain a second to catch up: new Ennis, okay with gay. Not that a hug is gay, but he wouldn’t have done that in a million years back in school. I dropped my bag and hugged him back.
“It’s good to see you,” he said as we separated. He picked up my bag and we started for the house. “Don’t get me wrong: calls and texts are definitely better than nothing.” He opened the door and I followed him in.
“But the real thing is best,” I finished.
He set my bag on an end table and turned to face me. “Yeah. It is.” His gaze dropped to my mouth for a split second and we moved toward each other, lips parted and then crashing together, not wasting any time. He pushed me a few steps until my back connected with the wall, and he surged forward as far as he could, not leaving a sliver of space between us. His hands cupped the sides of my face and I slid mine up under his t-shirt, my fingers trailing up over his taut abs.
He gasped into my mouth and his hands worked their way up and tangled in my hair. He pulled me to him and kissed me harder, deeper, and ground our lower halves together. My cock strained hard against my jeans and I felt him right there with me. I shifted a bit to line us up just right and grabbed onto his ass, and it was my turn to moan as he started up a slow rhythm grinding against me. We went at each other, making out like the horny teenagers we weren’t, but when he grabbed my wrists and pinned them above my head against the wall, all bets were off. He’d never done anything like that in all the time we were together, and in that moment, it felt like the hottest thing that had ever happened to me and I was only a few thrusts away from coming right there.
“Jesus!” I said, tearing my lips away.
He hummed a laugh as his lips moved across my jaw and down my neck. “Too fast?” he murmured.
I gulped air and focused on forming words. “Yes. Uh, no…I mean - don’t want to finish like this.”
He pulled back and I met his lust-hazy gaze. “Bedroom?” he asked.
I nodded, and he kept hold of one wrist as we shot up the stairs and down the hall to his room. I spared a second to look around: a California king bed with a dark wood headboard, dressers and bedside tables to match. There was a door off one side that led to a master bath. My inventory took one second too long, though, because in a blink my feet left the floor and I landed on the bed.
“Shit!” I said with a laugh.
He grinned and climbed onto the bed, hovering over me. He leaned in and kissed me, but it was a different kiss than what we had going on in the hall: slow, soft, lingering. When he pulled away, the haze was gone from his eyes and he studied me with a serious expression.
“What?” I asked.
He speared his fingers through my hair. “Is this okay? I mean, are you okay with it?”
I don’t know if it was my cock talking or if I’d already made some kind of decision that hadn’t yet been shared with my conscious mind, but I came up with an answer without much trouble. “Yes,” I said, and reached down to pop the button on his jeans and unzip him. He didn’t need any more encouragement; he yanked his shirt up and over his head, and slipped off his jeans and boxer briefs. I hadn’t had the chance to really see him that night in his hotel room, so I propped myself up on my elbows to have a look.
He noticed me noticing, and I smiled. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you still play every sport on the planet,” I said.
He reached over and tugged my jeans and boxers off. “Not these days. Just the gym.” He tossed my clothes onto the floor with his and I pulled off my shirt.
“It’s definitely working,” I said as he pushed my legs up on the bed, feet planted against it and legs spread wide.
“Thanks.” He crawled into the space between my legs and gave me a few teasing strokes. “You look good, too,” he whispered, right before my cock disappeared into his mouth.
“Fuck,” I panted as he smoothed his lips up and down my length, swirling his tongue around the head, working all the angles he apparently still knew made me crazy. Before long, I had handfuls of his hair and was thrusting hard into his mouth until I couldn’t hold off any longer. I groaned as I came and then sank boneless back down into the mattress. “Holy shit,” I huffed and released my hold on his hair.
He kissed my inner thigh and swiped a hand across his chin. “Some things you don’t ever forget,” he said.
He stretched out alongside me and I ran my hand lightly over his still-hard cock. He bit his lip and I smiled and bent my head to run my tongue over his nipple. “It’s my turn to test that theory,” I said as I slid down his body and gave as good as I got.
A few minutes later, I crawled up alongside him as he lay huffing, his arm flung up over his eyes. I stopped close, but not too close, and waited for him to catch his breath. He peeked out at me with one eye.
“Damn,” he whispered.
I smiled. “Yeah. I guess we don’t have to start over with everything.”
His arm across the bed. “I guess not. It’s like we never stopped.”
“Mm.” I sighed and stretched.
He reached out and tugged me toward him. “C’mere, babe,” he said.
I froze involuntarily and just stared. Like I said, I’d never let anyone I was with use that particular name. It belonged to me and Ennis back when we were an “us”. And I had never in a million years thought I’d hear it again from his lips.
He furrowed his brow at me. “You okay?”
“Uh, yeah. Just… bathroom. Be right back.” I hopped out of bed, headed for the bathroom, and closed the door behind me. I didn’t have to pee, but I did anyway in case he could hear from the bedroom. I washed my hands and stared at myself in the mirror. Chill the fuck out, I told myself. It’s just a word… an old nickname. If I was called Scooter or something in high school, he would’ve said that.
That was completely untrue, but it’s what I needed to think to go back out there. It’s not like he’d said anything awful, but for me, that was sacred ground. I wasn’t sure if the Jack he’d held and called “baby” the night my mom died was still in there, and it scared the shit out of me to think that he might be. Because if he was, that meant I could get hurt again, badly, and I didn’t think I’d survive it. I sighed and opened the door.
“Everything all right?” he asked as I crossed the room back to the bed.
“Yeah, fine.” I slid under the covers and scooted toward him, all the way, and dropped my head onto his shoulder. His arm came around me like it always did and he pressed a kiss into my hair. I draped my leg over his and let my arm fall across his waist. “What else is on the agenda?” I asked.
“I don’t know about you, but I could do with a nap right about now,” he said, followed by a yawn.
“Sounds good,” I said, and resettled myself against him. As I drifted off, I felt his soft snores ruffling my hair.
I woke up a couple hours later, my back warm from being pulled snug against Ennis’s chest. It was a strange sensation; once upon a time, it happened almost daily. Somewhere between once upon a time and that day in his bed, I’d worked my way around to being okay with knowing it wasn’t ever going to happen again, yet, there we were. I lay there, pondering over the unlikelihood of the whole situation, circles and cycles in life - you know, the deep stuff - while I waited for Ennis to wake up.
“What are you thinking about?” he murmured in my ear as he shifted against me.
I glanced at him over my shoulder. “How’d you know I was up?”
“I can feel it in your muscles - they kind of twitch and jump when you’re awake.” He pulled me closer to him. “If you remember, we used to do this a lot.”
I rolled over to face him. “I remember.” We met halfway in an unhurried kiss. “So, what’s the plan for tonight?” I asked when we separated.
“Well, as far as planning goes, I tried to land somewhere in the middle of ‘control freak’ and ‘go with the flow’, so I have some ideas, but we can do other things if you’d rather.”
“What’s the idea for tonight?”
“It’s not much of one, really. I thought you might be tired from the drive, and I worked until mid-afternoon, so I thought maybe we would just stay in. Order take-out, get a movie.”
I smiled. It sounded like something we would’ve done in college. “Sounds great,” I said.
We rolled out of bed and I grabbed some track pants and a t-shirt from my bag. Ennis pulled on some well-worn jeans and a shirt.
“I should give you the official tour,” he said as we headed for the stairs. “I guess I was kind of a bad host when you first got here.”
I smirked at that. “No complaints here.”
He showed me around his condo - modern without being over-the-top, trendy but not quite Architectural Digest. And it seemed like just enough room for two people. I didn’t dwell on that thought for long because I wasn’t sure where I was going with it. I trailed behind him and nodded and asked questions until we wound up back in the living room.
“I should call for the food. What are you in the mood for? Pizza?” He led me to the kitchen and whipped out an array of menus for nearby places with such ease it made me think he must do it often. After some discussion, we decided on Chinese for something different, our tastes more mature than the old standby, pizza. Not that mature, of course; we both had favorites from the Chinese menu we found in under thirty seconds. He called in the order and we settled in to wait for the delivery on the couch, bottles of beer in hand. He turned on the TV and flipped through channels, stopping on some baseball highlights.
“Who do you like for the World Series?” he asked, and we fell into casual conversation until the doorbell rang and dinner arrived.
Once the food was spread out, we both realized we were starving. There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation beyond, “Try this one”, “Fried rice?”, or “Holy shit! Spicy!” We finished, an army of white cartons scattered across the coffee table, mostly empty, and the two of us, sagging against the couch cushions, mostly full.
“That was good,” I said, and drained my beer.
“Glad you liked it. I cook a little but not often, so I’m on a first-name basis with most of the carry-out places nearby. Shit, I almost forgot!” He leaned forward and shuffled through the cartons.
“Forgot what?”
He held up two plastic-wrapped fortune cookies. “Dessert.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Yuck. It’s like eating cardboard.”
He tossed me one. “You don’t have to eat it, but you have to get your fortune. It’s, like, a rule.”
“Whose rule?” I asked with a laugh.
“Mine,” he said with a grin and tore into his cookie. He broke the cookie and extracted the little paper, then held it at arm’s length to read. “Need my glasses,” he grumbled.
“You have glasses?” I asked, my mind unable to conjure that image.
“Just for reading,” he said, defensiveness tinting his tone. “But I can see this.”
“So? What does your future hold?”
He laughed and read, “It is better to have a hen tomorrow than an egg today.”
“Ah,” I said, scratching my chin like I was deep in thought. “So… chicken?”
“I guess so. It could be worse than chicken. Your turn.”
I cracked my cookie, peeled out the paper, and read. And read again. I totally don’t believe in those things; I don’t even eat the fuckers. But I had to admit, that one time it threw me for a loop.
“So?” Ennis questioned.
I flicked my eyes up to his and then back to the fortune, my mouth dry as I read, “You will take a chance in the near future.”
We stared at each other for a few seconds. “Oh,” he said softly.
It was like the implication from that stupid fortune cookie came into the room and took a seat between us. “Jesus,” I muttered. “Do you want the cookie?” I asked and held the two halves out to him.
He shook his head.
“Why not? You ate yours.”
He looked at me, his expression an odd mix of sheepish and serious. “Because… if you don’t eat it, it won’t come true.”
“Says who?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just what I’ve heard about fortune cookies. Maybe read it somewhere.”
My mouth twitched with a smile. “So, you want me to eat this thing that I’m pretty sure isn’t even food so this,” I held up the paper, “will come true?”
The look in his eyes about killed me right on the spot. “Yes,” he whispered.
Fully aware we were no longer talking about cookies, I popped one half of it into my mouth, crunched, and chased it with the second half.
We cleaned up the mess without saying much, then reconvened on the couch in front of the TV.
“Still up for a movie?” Ennis asked.
“Sure. Any suggestions?”
He rattled off a bunch of titles, a few of which I’d seen, a couple I didn’t want to see. We agreed on the newest X-Men movie, which seemed appropriate since we’d seen the first ones together back in the day. He clicked through the steps to order the movie and sat back.
“Want anything?” he asked.
“Nope. I’m good.”
While the opening credits rolled past, I grabbed a throw pillow from behind me, tossed it on his lap, and dropped my head there as I stretched out on the couch. I hadn’t put much thought into the action, and I felt him go still around me. I looked up at him.
“Is this okay?” I asked.
He nodded and swallowed hard.
I furrowed my eyebrows at him. “If I’m squishing you or crowding you, you can tell me.”
“No, you’re fine,” he said. “It’s just… we used to sit like this. Before.” I nodded and he sighed. “Never thought I’d see it again.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I squeezed his knee and turned back to the movie. A few seconds later, his hand dropped down and across my chest. I shifted around, making myself comfortable, and laced my fingers with his. I waited, anticipating a freakout on my part, or at least some kind of internal conflict. It never came.
today
yesterday
Author: mrs-spamlad
Pairing: Jack/Ennis
Rating: R
Feedback: have at it!
Disclaimer: Brokeback Mountain and the original characters of Jack and Ennis were created by and belong to Annie Proulx. No money is being made from this- I’m just taking them out for a spin!
A/N: An update! And without a nudge (I think - if there was one, I missed it). Sorry for the pause - I was sick, then sick, then sicker… now finally not so sick. I can stay awake past ten o’clock so I can actually do extra things. Maybe one of these days I’ll get something written.
So Jack has made it to Albany - his visit stretches over a couple of chapters (2, maybe 2 ½), so they’re just getting started, haha.
Thanks ever so much to shieldmaid1 for her very helpful feedback on these chapters - I do appreciate it. And thank you all for sticking with this story. Since Jack is visiting in October and I’m feeling better-ish, I’m thinking I may post again this month to finish out his visit. It’s not exactly “real time”, but close.
For now, on with the show - happy reading!
jill
Chapter 71
It wasn’t my first trip to Albany. When I’d signed on with the Landmark Society, they’d had me go on a bunch of the tours they run. Albany, as the capital of New York (snooze), was on the list. I’d been there a handful of times since, so I knew my way to the area well enough. I left early in the afternoon on Friday and got into the city around four o’clock, just in time to beat rush hour.
Ennis lived in a suburb, so I punched his address into my GPS and let it navigate me to his neck of the woods, which were some pretty nice woods. I drove slowly through a new-looking townhouse community until I spotted his house number. I pulled into the driveway behind his car and killed the engine, took a deep breath and let my head fall back against the headrest. I had tried to make a plan, decide how I was going to handle him - us - for days before I left, and I’d come up with exactly nothing. In a last, panicked call to Josh the night before I left, he’d kindly told me to pull my head out of my ass and start acting like a grown-up. There were no rules, no musts or mustn’ts, so shut the fuck up and just go with it already. That’s a rough translation, of course.
So, as I sat with my eyes closed, reaffirming my plan to not have a plan and just go with it, I nearly had a heart attack when knuckles rapped against my window. My eyes flew open and I found myself staring at Ennis’s puzzled face. I rolled down the window, of all the dumbass things to do.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hey,” he said with a laugh. “I didn’t know you were here. I was taking out the trash and I saw you… doing whatever you’re doing.”
I rubbed a hand across my forehead. “Don’t even ask.”
He nodded. “So, do you plan to get out of the car, or should I get in?”
“Sorry. I’m getting out.” I rolled up the window and grabbed the overnight bag off the passenger seat.
I took the keys, opened the door and stepped out, face to face with Ennis again for the first time in over a month. He pulled me into a hug and it took my brain a second to catch up: new Ennis, okay with gay. Not that a hug is gay, but he wouldn’t have done that in a million years back in school. I dropped my bag and hugged him back.
“It’s good to see you,” he said as we separated. He picked up my bag and we started for the house. “Don’t get me wrong: calls and texts are definitely better than nothing.” He opened the door and I followed him in.
“But the real thing is best,” I finished.
He set my bag on an end table and turned to face me. “Yeah. It is.” His gaze dropped to my mouth for a split second and we moved toward each other, lips parted and then crashing together, not wasting any time. He pushed me a few steps until my back connected with the wall, and he surged forward as far as he could, not leaving a sliver of space between us. His hands cupped the sides of my face and I slid mine up under his t-shirt, my fingers trailing up over his taut abs.
He gasped into my mouth and his hands worked their way up and tangled in my hair. He pulled me to him and kissed me harder, deeper, and ground our lower halves together. My cock strained hard against my jeans and I felt him right there with me. I shifted a bit to line us up just right and grabbed onto his ass, and it was my turn to moan as he started up a slow rhythm grinding against me. We went at each other, making out like the horny teenagers we weren’t, but when he grabbed my wrists and pinned them above my head against the wall, all bets were off. He’d never done anything like that in all the time we were together, and in that moment, it felt like the hottest thing that had ever happened to me and I was only a few thrusts away from coming right there.
“Jesus!” I said, tearing my lips away.
He hummed a laugh as his lips moved across my jaw and down my neck. “Too fast?” he murmured.
I gulped air and focused on forming words. “Yes. Uh, no…I mean - don’t want to finish like this.”
He pulled back and I met his lust-hazy gaze. “Bedroom?” he asked.
I nodded, and he kept hold of one wrist as we shot up the stairs and down the hall to his room. I spared a second to look around: a California king bed with a dark wood headboard, dressers and bedside tables to match. There was a door off one side that led to a master bath. My inventory took one second too long, though, because in a blink my feet left the floor and I landed on the bed.
“Shit!” I said with a laugh.
He grinned and climbed onto the bed, hovering over me. He leaned in and kissed me, but it was a different kiss than what we had going on in the hall: slow, soft, lingering. When he pulled away, the haze was gone from his eyes and he studied me with a serious expression.
“What?” I asked.
He speared his fingers through my hair. “Is this okay? I mean, are you okay with it?”
I don’t know if it was my cock talking or if I’d already made some kind of decision that hadn’t yet been shared with my conscious mind, but I came up with an answer without much trouble. “Yes,” I said, and reached down to pop the button on his jeans and unzip him. He didn’t need any more encouragement; he yanked his shirt up and over his head, and slipped off his jeans and boxer briefs. I hadn’t had the chance to really see him that night in his hotel room, so I propped myself up on my elbows to have a look.
He noticed me noticing, and I smiled. “If I didn’t know better, I’d say you still play every sport on the planet,” I said.
He reached over and tugged my jeans and boxers off. “Not these days. Just the gym.” He tossed my clothes onto the floor with his and I pulled off my shirt.
“It’s definitely working,” I said as he pushed my legs up on the bed, feet planted against it and legs spread wide.
“Thanks.” He crawled into the space between my legs and gave me a few teasing strokes. “You look good, too,” he whispered, right before my cock disappeared into his mouth.
“Fuck,” I panted as he smoothed his lips up and down my length, swirling his tongue around the head, working all the angles he apparently still knew made me crazy. Before long, I had handfuls of his hair and was thrusting hard into his mouth until I couldn’t hold off any longer. I groaned as I came and then sank boneless back down into the mattress. “Holy shit,” I huffed and released my hold on his hair.
He kissed my inner thigh and swiped a hand across his chin. “Some things you don’t ever forget,” he said.
He stretched out alongside me and I ran my hand lightly over his still-hard cock. He bit his lip and I smiled and bent my head to run my tongue over his nipple. “It’s my turn to test that theory,” I said as I slid down his body and gave as good as I got.
A few minutes later, I crawled up alongside him as he lay huffing, his arm flung up over his eyes. I stopped close, but not too close, and waited for him to catch his breath. He peeked out at me with one eye.
“Damn,” he whispered.
I smiled. “Yeah. I guess we don’t have to start over with everything.”
His arm across the bed. “I guess not. It’s like we never stopped.”
“Mm.” I sighed and stretched.
He reached out and tugged me toward him. “C’mere, babe,” he said.
I froze involuntarily and just stared. Like I said, I’d never let anyone I was with use that particular name. It belonged to me and Ennis back when we were an “us”. And I had never in a million years thought I’d hear it again from his lips.
He furrowed his brow at me. “You okay?”
“Uh, yeah. Just… bathroom. Be right back.” I hopped out of bed, headed for the bathroom, and closed the door behind me. I didn’t have to pee, but I did anyway in case he could hear from the bedroom. I washed my hands and stared at myself in the mirror. Chill the fuck out, I told myself. It’s just a word… an old nickname. If I was called Scooter or something in high school, he would’ve said that.
That was completely untrue, but it’s what I needed to think to go back out there. It’s not like he’d said anything awful, but for me, that was sacred ground. I wasn’t sure if the Jack he’d held and called “baby” the night my mom died was still in there, and it scared the shit out of me to think that he might be. Because if he was, that meant I could get hurt again, badly, and I didn’t think I’d survive it. I sighed and opened the door.
“Everything all right?” he asked as I crossed the room back to the bed.
“Yeah, fine.” I slid under the covers and scooted toward him, all the way, and dropped my head onto his shoulder. His arm came around me like it always did and he pressed a kiss into my hair. I draped my leg over his and let my arm fall across his waist. “What else is on the agenda?” I asked.
“I don’t know about you, but I could do with a nap right about now,” he said, followed by a yawn.
“Sounds good,” I said, and resettled myself against him. As I drifted off, I felt his soft snores ruffling my hair.
I woke up a couple hours later, my back warm from being pulled snug against Ennis’s chest. It was a strange sensation; once upon a time, it happened almost daily. Somewhere between once upon a time and that day in his bed, I’d worked my way around to being okay with knowing it wasn’t ever going to happen again, yet, there we were. I lay there, pondering over the unlikelihood of the whole situation, circles and cycles in life - you know, the deep stuff - while I waited for Ennis to wake up.
“What are you thinking about?” he murmured in my ear as he shifted against me.
I glanced at him over my shoulder. “How’d you know I was up?”
“I can feel it in your muscles - they kind of twitch and jump when you’re awake.” He pulled me closer to him. “If you remember, we used to do this a lot.”
I rolled over to face him. “I remember.” We met halfway in an unhurried kiss. “So, what’s the plan for tonight?” I asked when we separated.
“Well, as far as planning goes, I tried to land somewhere in the middle of ‘control freak’ and ‘go with the flow’, so I have some ideas, but we can do other things if you’d rather.”
“What’s the idea for tonight?”
“It’s not much of one, really. I thought you might be tired from the drive, and I worked until mid-afternoon, so I thought maybe we would just stay in. Order take-out, get a movie.”
I smiled. It sounded like something we would’ve done in college. “Sounds great,” I said.
We rolled out of bed and I grabbed some track pants and a t-shirt from my bag. Ennis pulled on some well-worn jeans and a shirt.
“I should give you the official tour,” he said as we headed for the stairs. “I guess I was kind of a bad host when you first got here.”
I smirked at that. “No complaints here.”
He showed me around his condo - modern without being over-the-top, trendy but not quite Architectural Digest. And it seemed like just enough room for two people. I didn’t dwell on that thought for long because I wasn’t sure where I was going with it. I trailed behind him and nodded and asked questions until we wound up back in the living room.
“I should call for the food. What are you in the mood for? Pizza?” He led me to the kitchen and whipped out an array of menus for nearby places with such ease it made me think he must do it often. After some discussion, we decided on Chinese for something different, our tastes more mature than the old standby, pizza. Not that mature, of course; we both had favorites from the Chinese menu we found in under thirty seconds. He called in the order and we settled in to wait for the delivery on the couch, bottles of beer in hand. He turned on the TV and flipped through channels, stopping on some baseball highlights.
“Who do you like for the World Series?” he asked, and we fell into casual conversation until the doorbell rang and dinner arrived.
Once the food was spread out, we both realized we were starving. There wasn’t a whole lot of conversation beyond, “Try this one”, “Fried rice?”, or “Holy shit! Spicy!” We finished, an army of white cartons scattered across the coffee table, mostly empty, and the two of us, sagging against the couch cushions, mostly full.
“That was good,” I said, and drained my beer.
“Glad you liked it. I cook a little but not often, so I’m on a first-name basis with most of the carry-out places nearby. Shit, I almost forgot!” He leaned forward and shuffled through the cartons.
“Forgot what?”
He held up two plastic-wrapped fortune cookies. “Dessert.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Yuck. It’s like eating cardboard.”
He tossed me one. “You don’t have to eat it, but you have to get your fortune. It’s, like, a rule.”
“Whose rule?” I asked with a laugh.
“Mine,” he said with a grin and tore into his cookie. He broke the cookie and extracted the little paper, then held it at arm’s length to read. “Need my glasses,” he grumbled.
“You have glasses?” I asked, my mind unable to conjure that image.
“Just for reading,” he said, defensiveness tinting his tone. “But I can see this.”
“So? What does your future hold?”
He laughed and read, “It is better to have a hen tomorrow than an egg today.”
“Ah,” I said, scratching my chin like I was deep in thought. “So… chicken?”
“I guess so. It could be worse than chicken. Your turn.”
I cracked my cookie, peeled out the paper, and read. And read again. I totally don’t believe in those things; I don’t even eat the fuckers. But I had to admit, that one time it threw me for a loop.
“So?” Ennis questioned.
I flicked my eyes up to his and then back to the fortune, my mouth dry as I read, “You will take a chance in the near future.”
We stared at each other for a few seconds. “Oh,” he said softly.
It was like the implication from that stupid fortune cookie came into the room and took a seat between us. “Jesus,” I muttered. “Do you want the cookie?” I asked and held the two halves out to him.
He shook his head.
“Why not? You ate yours.”
He looked at me, his expression an odd mix of sheepish and serious. “Because… if you don’t eat it, it won’t come true.”
“Says who?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s just what I’ve heard about fortune cookies. Maybe read it somewhere.”
My mouth twitched with a smile. “So, you want me to eat this thing that I’m pretty sure isn’t even food so this,” I held up the paper, “will come true?”
The look in his eyes about killed me right on the spot. “Yes,” he whispered.
Fully aware we were no longer talking about cookies, I popped one half of it into my mouth, crunched, and chased it with the second half.
We cleaned up the mess without saying much, then reconvened on the couch in front of the TV.
“Still up for a movie?” Ennis asked.
“Sure. Any suggestions?”
He rattled off a bunch of titles, a few of which I’d seen, a couple I didn’t want to see. We agreed on the newest X-Men movie, which seemed appropriate since we’d seen the first ones together back in the day. He clicked through the steps to order the movie and sat back.
“Want anything?” he asked.
“Nope. I’m good.”
While the opening credits rolled past, I grabbed a throw pillow from behind me, tossed it on his lap, and dropped my head there as I stretched out on the couch. I hadn’t put much thought into the action, and I felt him go still around me. I looked up at him.
“Is this okay?” I asked.
He nodded and swallowed hard.
I furrowed my eyebrows at him. “If I’m squishing you or crowding you, you can tell me.”
“No, you’re fine,” he said. “It’s just… we used to sit like this. Before.” I nodded and he sighed. “Never thought I’d see it again.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I squeezed his knee and turned back to the movie. A few seconds later, his hand dropped down and across my chest. I shifted around, making myself comfortable, and laced my fingers with his. I waited, anticipating a freakout on my part, or at least some kind of internal conflict. It never came.
today
yesterday