Chapter 2 – Chapter 2

The first time that summer that Kyle came back to me was in late July. I was standing in front of a stack of cantaloupes at the open-air market, perched on my crutches and running my hands over one of the melons, squeezing it a bit and rubbing the stem indent, trying to determine how ripe it was. The tinkling laugh hit me simultaneously with the smell of lemons.

I jerked my head up in the direction the laugh had come from. His presence was unmistakable. Kyle was standing across the crowded street, a lone stationary figure amid a swirl of people. It couldn't have been anyone but Kyle—the spiky, nearly platinum hair; the startling cornflower blue eyes; the boyish, almost feminine face. He was smiling but giving me that half-admonishing, wholly amused look he gave me when he caught me in one of my not-so-socially-acceptable habits. Squeezing fruit in the market was one of those.

My eyes went wide and I opened my mouth to call out to him, but my arm being jostled caused me to look around to my left—and into the face of an elderly black woman. She was smiling too, but she had a "tsk, tsk" etched on her face too.

"If you squeeze that any harder, sir, you is gonna bruise it. And then ain't no one, you or no one else, who is gonna want it."

"Um, sorry," I said. "I was daydreaming."

She was holding a net bag in her hand with a good half dozen lemons in it.

I looked back around to the street, but Kyle was gone, lost in the bustle of the people moving along the line of stalls on this side of the narrow, cobble-stoned street.

I decided that I must have been daydreaming, the connection to Kyle set off by a similar laugh and the old woman's bag of lemons. I say I decided that, but that was only intellectually. Emotionally, I was sure that Kyle had come back to me—that our parting had been too abrupt for him just as it had been for me. Our bond had been too strong to be cut in an instant like that.

The next time Joseph came to my house, he opened the refrigerator door, only to have three cantaloupes fall out onto the floor.

"What's this?" he asked. "Are you cornering the melon market?" The three melons that had fallen out of the refrigerator were just a few of what had been stuffed in there. I'd gone back to the market every day that week, retracing my steps precisely, doing exactly what I'd done the day Kyle had come to me—squeezing and buying cantaloupes. But he hadn't appeared to me again.

"Hit a cart when I backed the car out into the alley the other day," I told Joseph, intoning the excuse lamely enough that even he, who could be obtuse with the best of them, gave me a skeptical look. "I felt so sorry for the old woman pushing the cart of melons that I bought all that fell on the ground."

Joseph didn't pursue that, specifically, but he used it as an opportunity to return to an argument of the past few weeks that I was moping around too much and needed to become more active socially.

"When I'm off the crutches," I said.

"You'll turn into a hermit crab before then," he countered.

Joseph knew, of course, why I was moping around. That I was in mourning. But none of that could be discussed between us. He had pretended that Kyle didn't exist when Kyle was still alive. He certainly wasn't prepared to knowledge him in death. But of course he knew.

And of course I couldn't say that I'd been back to the market every day that week because I wanted—no, needed—to see Kyle again, to connect with him. I'd felt Kyle's presence now and again ever since the accident, but that was all in my mind. This was the first time he had materialized to me. He was trying to convey something to me, I was sure. And he couldn't be at rest until he'd done so.

And it was tearing me apart that he couldn't be at rest. I couldn't be at rest either until he was.

"We need another interior decorator," Joseph said, the closest he would come to mentioning Kyle, whose loss was why we needed another interior decorator on staff. "There's a designers' convention in Savannah on August 10th. I can't get away for it, but I'd like you to go down there and see if you can hire a new decorator for us. There will be a job fair included."

"I can barely get around on my own, Joseph, and I can't drive the—" I had to stop. I'd just told him I'd hit a fruit cart that week when backing the car into the alley.

"Courtney will drive you," he said briskly, referring to the office secretary who was still trying to land me even knowing I was gay. "It's either you or me who has to hire a decorator and you're not doing anything at the office at the moment. The opportunity is too good to pass up. Then when you come back to Charleston, I want you to go out to the beach house until you can walk without the crutches."

"Yes, Joseph," I answered. I felt too overwhelmed to demure, and I knew now that another cantaloupe trip to the outdoor market wasn't going to make Kyle materialize.

But then he appeared at the convention, and I was exhilarated by the second appearance. That meant the first one wasn't an anomaly. And that, surely, there would be others. Either he would come more often and stay longer each time or I would sink into madness. At that particular moment I didn't really care which it would be.

I was standing in the Savannah convention hotel lobby they'd set aside for business talks and impromptu job interviews, getting close to offering the decorator's job to a young man whose flamboyance and toss of his head of golden curls reminded me a bit of Kyle, when I heard the sound of a throat being cleared.

I knew in an instant it was Kyle. It's just the way he did it—delicately as if embarrassed he had to do it—and then had to do it again because he hadn't been forceful enough the first time.

I looked up into his eyes where he stood across the room, by a set of French doors. He was bathed in sunlight coming in through the doors to the point that he didn't look solid. But it was Kyle. I knew it was him. I smiled and he gave me a tight little smile and turned his head several times to his left. I turned my gaze to where he seemed to want me to look.

She must have been in her late fifties and couldn't have been dressed more out of style and color coordination. She was downright dumpy and was looking around the room with a scowl. I realized I knew of her. It was Frieda Fischer, who was conducting one of the interior design seminars later that day. I'd overheard at lunch that she was looking for a job change—that she was interested in warmer climes. Boca Raton had been mentioned. She was a New York City designer, which I knew from an Architectural Digest article she'd been mentioned in some time back and that Kyle had nearly had an ejaculation over as he described the article to me. Another New York designer, just like Kyle.

When I looked back at the French doors, of course Kyle no longer was there.

Joseph was absolutely delighted when I returned to Charleston with the news that I had hired Frieda Fischer. I, of course, didn't tell him that I had done so at Kyle's direction. And not only that, but that telling her I'd known and worked with Kyle had been the clincher for her in accepting the position. She worked out a charm in the position, and Joseph almost treated me as an equal partner at the firm thereafter.

* * * *

I sensed I was being watched as I ate breakfast in the gay B&B Kyle liked to go to on Sullivan's Island. In late August, my crutches discarded, I gave into Joseph's demands to take a vacation on the island. But I didn't go to the family's beach house. I knew Kyle wouldn't materialize there, and I ached to have contact with him again. It had been nearly two weeks since I'd last seen him.

It wasn't a painful ache now, though. The summer had moved on. I didn't cry most of the time I thought about Kyle as summer drew to a close. Now it was more a bittersweet experience when he lifted himself up in my mind—which, thankfully, still was often. It was more sweet than bitter now.

But Joseph was still saying I was moping around too much, so, to get out from underneath his well-meaning badgering, I removed myself to Sullivan's Island. But it was to someplace Kyle might appear to me that I retreated.

And I proved to be right.

I looked up and across the B&B's breakfast room to see a young redheaded man, who I'd exchanged smiles with the previous afternoon when I checked in. There was no one sitting with him in the breakfast room. Everyone else there was blocked off in couples. He was almost embarrassing alone. He looked more alone than I felt. I was still having discussions with Kyle in my mind, discussing with him previous visits we'd made to this B&B.

The redhead gave me a shy smile. He was quite handsome and well formed. A good four inches shorter than I am—about the same height as Kyle. And about the same musculature too. Twinky, but not skinny by any means. A good build for a smaller guy. And the red hair came naturally—somewhat of a surprise at a gay hotel where most of the guys were bottle blonds. He had freckles on his face, which were charming on him, and on his forearms as well. His skin was white as alabaster, which raised a parental concern in me immediately. If he went out on the beach too long he'd be burned to a crisp. This mildly proprietary concern pulled me into slight arousal too.

But I wasn't here for sex. I had decided to give that up. I couldn't see wanting any other man after Kyle. I would swear off men, maybe even marry Courtney and try to lead a normal life. I was finishing my breakfast and he had just started his, so, with just a slight nod of recognition and another smile, I rose from my seat and went up to my room and changed into a bathing suit.

I had been out on the beach for nearly an hour and was ready to come back into the B&B when I moved into a half doze. Of course I dreamed of Kyle. Of the two of us making love on the beach. Kyle on his back on the beach towel, his legs bent and spread, his pelvis rolled up to me, and his hands digging into my bare buttocks, as I sank deeper and deeper inside him. No one had been able to take me as deep as Kyle could.

I felt his hands on my knees—a strange sensation, he could not have done that from the position he was under me in my dreams. I opened my eyes, and discovered that I was the one on my back on the beach towel. My legs were bent and spread, and Kyle was kneeling between my feet, which were dug into the sand on either side of the towel.

He was smiling down at me, capturing my eyes with his blue orbs, his long eyelashes fluttering. His sensual smile that always told me we were going to fuck. I shuddered as his hands slowly glided down the inside of my spread thighs, meeting at the center of me. The fingers of both hands moved under the waistband of my Speedo, and he pulled the material down to underneath my cock—fully erect—and my balls.

Still holding my eyes captive with his, he encircled my cock with one hand and began to stroke me. His other hand entered my right leg hole and his fingers found my hole and teased it open and sank inside as he stroked. I moaned and ran my fingers through his spiky platinum-blond hair, as, after I heard him speak for the first time since the accident, he lowered his mouth on my cock and sucked me off while his fingers penetrated deeper in my ass and found my prostate.

I exploded in ejaculation, as his words, only murmured but echoing through my mind, ran over and over again. "I don't want you to give this up. Just give me a thought every time you have sex."

I lay there, panting, after having cum. I was staring up into Kyle's face, which was becoming blurry because the sun was behind his head, not just giving him a halo, but also making his features fuzzy.

When I had cooled down, he stood and reached down with a hand, taking one of mine in his and coaxing me to stand and then to follow him into the B&B.

At some point, I don't know when, his eyes had turned from cornflower blue to hazel and his hair from platinum to red. His skin was an alabaster white with a smattering of freckles.

We went to my room in the B&B, where he gently pushed me onto my back, hand-stroked me into another erection, and then mounted my cock, facing me, with his hands working my pecs and nipples, as he rode me to a shared ejaculation.

The redhead from across the breakfast room spent the night in my arms, punctuated by fuckings in various positions throughout the hours of darkness. I had not had sex since the auto accident, and had plenty of cum to give. He drained me dry, though.

When I woke up in the morning, he was gone. When I checked with the B&B manager, he couldn't quite place who the redheaded guest had been.