I am going to make you a cup of coffee.”
“Do you know how to do that?”
“No, but Helen gave me some notes and pointers so I think I should be able to figure it out. It will probably taste like shit, but —”
“You’re trying, I get it. You know you don’t have to try so hard, Patrick. You could just let this go and move on,” he said.
“If I could do that, trust me, I would have. I’m not a martyr. You know that. I’m here because I can’t just sit at home and let this all happen. Especially when I know that it’s at least partially my fault.”
“It’s all your fault,” he corrected.
“Okay, damn! You don’t have to be so blunt.”
“But,” he smiled at me, the first real smile I’d gotten from him in months. “I didn’t realize that you cared this much.”
“Well, still waters run deep.”
We both chuckled and for a moment I felt close to him. Closer than I remember feeling to anybody in a very long time.
“So, what are they doing?” He looked over my shoulder at the team of cleaners who had gotten right to work.
“I told them to start with windows and floors and then I would give them more instructions once I worked it out with you. They brought some boxes for packing. I figured we could sort through what you’re going to keep and what you’re going to donate or throw away.”
“We?”
“Yeah, you and me.”
He looked skeptical again.
“I WANT to help, Marcelo. Please let me.”
He opened the bag and pulled a jelly-filled donut out and bit into it. His eyes rolled in his head and he let out a sound that was positively orgasmic. I immediately became very aware of the fact that he was shirtless and his abs were things of majesty and wonder. I was hoping that a few droplets of the jelly would escape from his lips and land on his torso so I would have an excuse to run my tongue along his….
“They can do the bathrooms as well. Just tell them not to run the vacuum cleaner upstairs,” he said.
“Huh? Yeah, no problem. Why don’t you go ahead and shower and put on a shirt.”
He looked down at his bare, chiseled, amazingly bronzed chest, and smiled sheepishly. I guess it only just occurred to him that he was shirtless and tanned. Asshole.
“Be back in a flash,” he said, turning on his heel and disappearing up the stairs.
Left to my own devices, I began wandering around his living room. There were plenty of photos everywhere. Not the kind you get staged or shot by a professional photographer. They were snapshots taken by family and friends and stuffed into cheap frames from box stores. They showed Marcelo and people I assumed were members of his family doing the kinds of things normal people did. Some showed small kids in swimsuits on the beach, others showed older people celebrating something that required a cake. There were plenty of photos of Marcelo, his mother, and a woman I assumed was his sister standing together holding diplomas, trophies or certificates. From the looks of it, both he and his sister had been overachievers as kids.
“You were a good-looking kid,” I called up the stairs.
“What?”
“YOU WERE A GOOD-LOOKING KID!”
“Oh,” he said.
Oh, was right. What the hell was I saying? I sounded creepy. But, this was the first time I’d ever looked at anybody’s family photos with any interest. I wasn’t really sure what to say. Hey, nice overexposed photo of your baby cousin’s belly fat!
Jesus, I really was a monster. And hearing the water running in the shower up the stairs wasn’t helping the matter. All I could think about was his naked body and the rivulets of hot water that were definitely running down his chest and then converging around his navel before streaming down...lower…
I wondered if he was still shaved smooth like he was before and if he was hard because I was certainly heading in that direction. It was definitely time to put down the photo of a very pubescent Marcelo and walk away. A grown man with an erection carrying a photo of an underaged kid was grounds for assassination. Even I knew that.
But still, I couldn’t seem to pull my mind out of the gutter. That was until I heard the sound of a very large, very dependable upright vacuum cleaner powering up.
In defense of the poor woman who made this mistake, I had instructed them to start