My contribution: David Crouse

Here's the sex scene I promised Kevin during a nice conversation at the President's house recently. - David C. When the cameras stop rolling and the day cools Lane returns to the small room he’s renting at a local motel. It’s late, but teenagers are hanging out in the parking lot drinking beer, and when Lane drives by them they call out to him like a friend. He’s not sure if it’s mockery or just the unnamed spirit of the evening, but if it’s sincere then Lane decides that he feels similarly—buoyant and open hearted, like he’s been away for a long time and returned a changed man with stories to tell. He glides down the second floor walkway, key loose in his hand, past the icemaker, past the room where the television is always playing too loud, until he reaches the room where Oliver is waiting. It’s dark—the sensor light near this corner of the building is broken—and Lane has to find the right key by feel, running first one and then the next under his thumb. “Hi,” Oliver says from the dark when the door opens. The voice comes from the room’s only chair. The TV is on—people read their lines, try their best to occupy the scene, the jungle behind them lush and artificial—but the sound is off, and John Fahey is playing as Oliver’s substitute soundtrack. Lane has heard this tape over and over—he recognizes the song almost instantly. The guitar picks out lonely little figures that Lane knows are much more complicated than they sound; he’s seen Oliver try to play them and mutter swear words under his breath when they don’t come out exactly right. They sound exactly right to Lane, though, every time, and the perfectionism seems a little scary, to the point where the sound of John Fahey has become a sign that Oliver is in one of his brooding, I’m-not-good-enough moods. “Hey, movie star,” Oliver says. “It’s not a movie,” Lane says, as he sets the keys on the air conditioning unit. They’ve lived here two weeks and Lane can already move through the room in the dark, but he slides the blinds open a few inches, so that a shaft of light divides the room. “So serious,” Oliver says. “Are you hungry?” “Are you naked?” “Should I answer your question with a question too?” Oliver is naked, Lane notices, except for his underwear, but this probably has much to do with the heat than anything. Because the air conditioner is broken—when they turn it on it clicks and whirls and blows out warm breath—and Lane guesses it will be for a while. Supposedly someone is coming to look at it tomorrow or the day after, but all the rooms are full, and they’re taking twenty bucks off the room in the meantime. Discomforts always bring with them small pleasures anyway, like the Cokes they drink in plastic cups with ice each evening, or the snap of the sheet and then the cool feeling of it settling over your body. “There’s some left,” Oliver says, indicating a pizza box on the bed. “What did you do today?” “The fight scene,” Lane said, as he opens and closes the pizza box. All there except a single slice. He turns to Oliver and says, “We’re having some difficulty with it.” “The whole thing is fight scenes,” Oliver says. His thin body is lit by the TV. From the yellows and oranges flickering across Oliver’s chest Lane can tell that the scene has changed, and he’s right. When he pivots his head he finds a sunrise on a golden plain, a family posed in the foreground, the man’s hand resting on the boy’s head. “Mostly,” Lane says. He could fall on the edge of the bed, unbutton his shirt, and fall asleep in his clothes, but he won’t let himself. He is twenty-seven years old and his legs feel like pipes. “I’m sorry,” Oliver says. “I know how much this means to you.” “It doesn’t mean anything,” Lane says. “That’s the problem with it.” Oliver rises from the chair and stretches his arms wide, bringing his shoulder blades together in a stretch that always looks painful to Lane. But it must feel good, because he makes a sound like he’s in the middle of something private and a little dirty. His body is thirty pounds lighter than it was three months ago and Lane is always telling him to eat better, to exercise a little, to treat himself okay, so Lane is a little bothered that he suddenly finds this thin body so beautiful, like some distilled version of the old Oliver, who as thin to begin with. His ribs are like great hands holding him together—Lane can see them, even in the dark—and his spotty beard half-covers sunken cheeks. So it’s with a mix of lust and guilt that Lane says, “Come here.” But Oliver being Oliver, he doesn’t do it the easy way. He doesn’t fold himself into Lane’s arms, or step forward and pull down his underwear to his knees, push himself into Lane’s slowly opening mouth. That would be the expected thing, so Oliver mounts the bed sideways, spins around until he’s behind Lane, hovering over him like a gargoyle on the edge of a building, and reaches out and rubs his shoulders. “You had a bad day,” he says. “Yes,” Lane says, although he feels guilty about that too. Oliver settles behind him. He arms slide around his belly, meeting at the front in a kind of clasp, and his cheek falls on his back, just below his neck. They stay this way for a little while. Oliver, Lane realizes, is listening to him breath. “I love you,” he says. “You too,” Lane answers. “Don’t feel like have to do any work.” Oliver’s fingers move down to the zipper of Lane’s Kakis and opens him up, first the zipper, than the button, then the little pocket of his boxer’s. He unwraps him like a gift, carefully—the gentleness is designed to tease him—and he’s hard by the time Oliver is curly-cuing his index finger around the tip of his cock. “That’s good,” he says. “That’s very nice.” The TV is dark again. The credits are rolling. He scrapes his shoes off and flips them with a little shuffle kick. Oliver’s other hand is on his stomach, slid Napoleon-like through the side of his shirt, touching his stomach, then a nipple, like he’s searching for something. It’s that meticulous. “I was going to do this slowly,” Oliver says, “but I changed my mind.” He’s pumping his fist now and Lane realizes he has something greasy there—vaseline or baby oil—and that he had planned all this. He imagines him sitting mostly naked in the chair, waiting, his right hand wet and shiny, and it’s that thought—the idea of his patience—that releases Lane, and his body shudders and now comes the best part, because Oliver cuts the strokes in half and pushes two fingers hard, coaxing as much as he can out of him. His good pants are sticky and warm, his shirt too, and it’s like Oliver is proud of him, even though they’ve done this a thousand times before. He’s stroking very slowly and whispering little stupid words of love and longing, but when Lane says, “Let’s do it again. I want to be inside you,” Oliver tells him no, he’s tired, and it’s all about Lane tonight anyway. The music has wound to a stop; a new movie is beginning. It’s 1988 and they have their whole lives ahead of them.