Olive Juice

David lifted his arms above his head.

For a moment, he stood there, looking ridiculous, a middle-aged balding man with a slight gut, arms raised while he dripped on the floor. But then Phillip’s hands were on him, pulling the sweater up and over his head. He grimaced when the wet fabric rubbed against his face, too surprised to do anything more than grunt a little in outrage. He was blinded for the briefest of moments before the sweater was up and over his head. He lowered his arms just a little when Phillip couldn’t reach to pull it off the rest of the way, even when he stood on the tips of his toes. The sweater came off completely, and Phillip dropped it to the carpet.

“You’re going to catch a cold,” Phillip scolded as he began to fuss with David’s tie. “You know how you get when you’re sick.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” David mumbled.

“Bullshit. I’ve never met a whinier human being than you when you’re sick. It’s like you’re a child.”

David didn’t know what to say to that. Because they were so far past reminiscing, weren’t they? They had been reveling in it all night long, the memories of their shared life together. David didn’t know why he’d tried to fight it in the first place. It’d been inevitable, really. He could see that now. So he said, “I spent a lot of time on that tie, you know.”

Phillip rolled his eyes, the backs of his fingers brushing along David’s chin. His tongue was poking out from between his teeth, that thing he did when he was really concentrating on something. “It’s not a noose, David. I don’t know why you have to—aha! Got it.” And he had; the knot was coming loose. He pulled the ends back out of the loops, and David remembered how he’d felt, standing in front of the mirror for that hour, practicing what he was going to say to Phillip when he saw him, that everything was fine, that he was fine, that he was okay, thanks for asking, Phillip, how are you? There were things he absolutely forbid himself to say, those things said between longtime lovers, the feeling of familiarity that came with decades of knowing and loving someone. Sure, David had told himself, Phillip texted I want to see you, but that could mean any number of things.

It’d taken two weeks from the day they met before they’d undressed each other with purpose, the tiny bedroom heated, their skin already slick with sweat. There had been fingers on skin, and tongues trailing along chests, cocks gripped in one hand as David slowly jacked them both off, Phillip’s head tossed back as he said, “Yes, please, David, right there, please, just right there—” Later, spunk drying on David’s chest, Phillip had climbed on top of him and rode him right into the fucking mattress, calling his name, hips rolling under David’s bruising grip. David had whited out at the sheer force of his second orgasm, another little death that pulled a rough shout from his throat.

It’d taken him a few minutes to come back into himself, but he had, Phillip stretched out beside him, a grin on his face like he’d known what he’d just done to David. They’d both been a mess, tacky with come and lube, the used condom still on David’s dick, but they’d looked at each other, smiling, smiling, smiling until they were laughing and kissing, and anyone who has ever laughed and kissed would know how impossible it was, how wonderful it felt. David had never laughed and kissed at the same time before, lips scraping together, huffing out sharp breaths, chuckling into someone else’s mouth. He’d never felt so alive, his body so electric.

It wasn’t the same now.

&

nbsp; Phillip wasn’t undressing him to fuck him.

It wasn’t passion or urgency.

But there were still the little pinpricks of light when he felt Phillip’s fingers against his skin. There was still the buzzing in his brain as Phillip unbuttoned his dress shirt, one right after the other. It was surreal, this feeling, having Phillip so close after so long. If he wanted to, he could pretend that this was any one of a thousand normal nights they’d had in their life together, Phillip fussing over him and David begrudgingly allowing it even though they both knew he not-so-secretly loved it.

But that wouldn’t be right, would it?

Because they didn’t have normal nights. Not anymore.

They hadn’t in a long time.

Phillip slid the dress shirt off David’s shoulders.

He had an undershirt on, still partially tucked into his dress pants. He looked down between the two of them, his forehead brushing against Phillip’s wet hair. The undershirt was wet, sticking against the gentle slope of his stomach. He’d always been a bigger guy, thick with muscle buried under a thin layer of fat. He’d been hard and soft in all the right places, Phillip had said that first night, and many nights after.

Now, though, his chest was sunken, his arms thin and a little flabby. It wasn’t as bad as it’d been six months ago. He was in better shape now, those nights spent at the gym instead of sleeping starting to pay off. He wasn’t as young as he used to be, so his body had other ideas on how it would react to sudden exercise after it’d been flooded for years with stress and rage. The morning after he’d gone the first time, he thought he was going to die. Everything had hurt, and he’d given a lot of thought to never going back, but then he couldn’t sleep that next night and found himself in the gym again, grunting as he lifted weights, pushing through the incredible burn as he jogged on the treadmill.

So he wasn’t at his worst, but he still wasn’t where he’d been before. He didn’t know if he’d ever be, and he was embarrassed at the sight of himself. There’d been no one else since he’d left this house. He’d hadn’t even thought about it. The last person who’d seen him in any stage of undress had been his doctor, who’d told him to get his ass to the gym if he didn’t want to have a heart attack in the next five years. He hadn’t told Phillip that, not wanting to worry him, but maybe thinking too that Phillip wouldn’t worry because he didn’t care. He had Keith, after all. Keith who would never let himself—

Phillip’s hands were on his belt buckle.

“Whoa,” David said quickly. “It’s not—”

“I’ve seen it all before,” Phillip said, dry as dust.

And—okay. Yeah. That was true. But David was uncomfortable, unsure of what was happening. He’d never been shy, for fuck’s sake, and maybe all Phillip was aiming for was a pity fuck, a once-more-for-old-time’s-sake sort of thing. Maybe they’d collapse in on each other like a dying star and the bed would shake and they’d whisper encouragement in each other’s ears, breath hot and panting, and then tomorrow there would be no waffles while they danced around in their underwear, singing “Rhythm is a Dancer” like they were young men again. Because David knew better than anyone else that you could never go back to the way things once were. All of that was dead and gone, and he could never get that back.

“Fine,” Phillip said, taking a step back. “Just… get out of those clothes. You’ll catch your death in them. I have some sweats you can borrow. I’ll toss everything in the dryer.”

He waited until David nodded slowly before he turned toward the walk-in closet. David watched him walk away, suddenly sure he’d messed something up somewhere. His hands were on his belt and he pulled at it until it cleared the loops. He dropped it on the floor. He played with the hem of his shirt for a moment before gritting his teeth and pulling it up and over his head. He was exposed, more so than he’d been in a long time, and his nipples were hard little pebbles on his chest, gooseflesh prickling along his arms and shoulders.

He picked up the towel off the bed and rubbed it over his hair, and tried not to whimper at that familiar smell of detergent and fabric softener that Phillip always used. He’d never been allowed to touch the laundry, not after he’d accidentally ruined a cashmere cardigan of Alice’s (“Daddy, what part of dry clean only did you not understand?”) (“Honestly, David, did you even feel the fabric when you just threw it in there with your socks?”). They’d teased him a lot about it, and he’d taken it all in stride, but knowing they’d come to him when something needed to be fixed or hung, as the last time Phillip had used a hammer, they’d ended up in the ER for four hours while waiting for a broken thumb to be set, Alice trying to muffle her continuous giggles while her papa sat grumpily next to her, his hand wrapped in a hand towel filled with melting ice. They’d been a team. The three of them.

He left the towel resting on his shoulders as he flushed slightly, hands going to the front of his dress pants. He heard Phillip moving in the closet, and he didn’t dare look up, not knowing if Phillip too was getting undressed. It was intimate, almost unbearably so, and he didn’t know how to deal with it after having let it slip through his fingers with words he hadn’t meant, a culmination of all the fury and the horror he’d felt since he received a phone call on an unusually warm spring afternoon in March.

He pushed down his pants, bending over to push them past his hips and thighs. His boxers were wet and clung to his groin, but he ignored them for now, stepping out of the pants, almost falling over onto the bed as he tried to maintain his balance. He got them off and left them in the growing pile on the floor.