Author's Foreword: This series has themes of romance, sex, friendship, humor, safe and consensual BDSM, and above all, intimacy and the concept of memory. Any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental. I want you, reader, to come away with more empathy, appreciation, and joy for yourself and others than you began. As I did when writing this.
Note on Part 8: Thanks for your patience in waiting for and then in reading this somewhat drawn-out (but fondly written) story. As always, your comments, likes, favorites, email contacts, and follows are greatly appreciated and motivate me to keep writing in my scant spare time. So if you want to read more, let me know somehow! Next installment has already started. Stay safe and kind out there.
***Today***
Memories keep coming back the more I write. My coffee goes cold or my beer goes flat while I stare into nothing and let my mind wander. It wasn't all sex and desire and awakening. A lot of it was, but thankfully not all. It was the "everything else" about that time that made it something besides an endless one-night stand for me and Erin. Like being told we had just over three months to live.
The small evening campfires on the beach, shale and pebbles clinking under us as she snuggled against me and the gulls screamed in their lonesome, covetous way. Walking on the bluffs, watching the trains and ships come and go in our dirty old town. Museums. Movies. Jokes. Awkwardly chatting with each other's friends while clearly not being seen as someone they had to really get to know. Music. So much music. In cars, on burned CD's for each other, in the background behind our passions, live shows that made our lungs quake, slow dances, and amateur pluckings from buskers that she always gave some money to as we strolled by.
And more. Afternoons spent staring at the ceiling or at quaking aspen leaves on the lawn outside as we silently digested some read-out-loud bit of writing or old poetry, then launching into debate. The love notes written on anything and everything, left in purses and pockets and scattered pillows, the words mawkish or steamy or both, all of which I still have in a shoebox with far less dust on it now. Dressed-up dinners where we toyed with our wine and giddily waited for the check to come, for the next part of the evening to start. The way we surprised, delighted, and wounded each other by caring so much in such a short time.
And among my favorite memories were the small, sunrise breakfasts in bustling cafes, holding hands and coffees, silently ignoring the bill on the table for a little while longer.
***
***Late Summer***
I walked quickly out the back porch door, trying to outpace the goddamn mosquitoes and keep up with my friends. It was raining softly in the long twilight, droplets pattering on the grass, on the broad leaves of a plant that would reveal too much to name properly in this story, and on the impenetrable gray of the gelid lake-water. We made it to the sauna and shut the outer door behind us. Once inside, Grant slapped me viciously on the back.
"Got it!" he crowed. I knew there was a broad handprint on top of a mashed bug on my shoulder blade. Little fucker had probably already bit me.
"I'm sure you needed to hit the skeeter that hard, jackass," I groused. He cackled in reply, and Alex joined in.
I'd been friends with Grant about as long as Alex. Grant was undoubtedly different, but someone you'd call first if anything went wrong or right. The three of us were a damn good team. As fit and capable as each of us was apart, we were a force in unison. Alex the reflective, forward-thinking, gregarious hermit; he of the dry humor and slow temper. Grant the talented, playful, solidly built artist; our risk-taker and mountain-mover. Me, the... you'd have to ask them, because I've never been able to figure it out. We'd serendipitously found one another at just the right time between leaving childhood and trying to become adults in our own idiosyncratic ways. We're still close, and take ourselves far less seriously now. Thank goodness.
"Just be glad I didn't think it needed a double-tap. Bloodsuckers are seriously big this year," Grant said with his easy, toothy grin. Alex nodded in sage agreement with him while peering at the thermometer set in the interior wall.
"Looks good," Alex said, "Time to go in." He unslung a strange little shoulder bag and set it to the floor, then flicked the light switch that would give us a single bulb's worth of illumination once we got properly inside. We all quit screwing around and disrobed before quickly trooping through the interior door to the actual sauna.
Back home, it always seemed like Summer was a week to a day and a minute to a week. At the end of the season, such dreamy times could often have an unexpected Fall before a predictably long Winter, so a good sweat session was a welcome thing most nights of the year. Grant's grandfather's house backed up to a lake, and he had built the little shoreside sauna himself. I was never clear on which 'Old Country' he was from, but he sure knew how to use his tools.
"Hooo-lyyyy shiiiit," Alex exclaimed when he got a good look at my naked body, partly shadowed by the single dingy light bulb set near the door, "You pickin' fights at the fuckin' zoo, man?"
"Can't help it," I said with a grin, twisting to demonstrate my trophies and taking the opportunity to flex, "I like the wild cats exhibit too much."
"Fuck me. Safe to say your debt is paid," Grant said to Alex, "Luke's all kinds'a clawed up. Ass to Adam's Apple. And look how the lines and teeth-marks and whatever else criss-cross? Layers of 'em! Wait... not just layers, but different sets! I'd say our boy's been at it!" The two of them laughed and glared at me in equal measure.
It was infernally hot in that little old-school sauna, more so when Grant cast a handful of water. We sat in companionable silence for a long time, the only sound being the sizzle of the rocks and ticking of the stove.
"So," Alex grumped at me after a laconic interlude, "Let's hear it."
"About what?" I asked, playing dumb.
"Motherfucker," Grant laughed, throwing his hands up in tandem with his eyes, "Don't even try that. Come on, dude; we've suffered through all your depressed writer bullshit for years, so now you gotta give us the good stuff! Tell the tale of the *tail,* man!" Like nearly all young men, we were insufferably crass when alone, but convinced ourselves we earned some leeway and entitlement to it by trying to be marginally clever about it.
