Chapter 25
Jack took my hand and sat me at the table, then he dipped his finger in the chocolate frosting. Holding my chin, he spread it on my lips and kissed them. We licked the chocolate off our lips at the same time, and laughed at our moment of childish joy. I got a knife from the old cupboard on the other side of the kitchen and cut off two large slices. The dough was soft with a rich taste, and I ate slowly, in silence, enjoying every bit.
After wiping the dish clean, I looked up at Jack and said, “This was heavenly”.
“It must have tasted even better because you were starving”, he winked, “I had a plan when I asked you to swim all the way to the opposite shore of the lake and back”.
“That’s wicked!”, I exclaimed, laughing again.
Letting the past out and washing it away with long due tears had a liberating effect on me, and now I felt light as I hadn’t had for years.
I chose some salty tarts and ate them voluptuously, with my eyes closed. Jack ate little, observing me with a smile concealed between the soft curve of his lips.
“We’re doing this backwards”, I said, licking the crumbs off my lips and brushing them off my fingers.
Jack arched his brows.
“We started from the dessert and we are ending with the appetizers”, I explained.
“Ah well”, shrugged Jack, “My life has been following a very random logic in the last years, and I’ve stopped worrying about the right order”. “And talking about randomness, I want you to come see something”, he continued, getting up from his chair.
In the bedroom, beside Jack’s undone white and green bed there was a large box wrapped with newspapers and decorated with a rope tied up to form a rustic ribbon.
Jack pointed at the box and said, “Go ahead, open it”.
“Oh boy!”, I exclaimed, “What else did you get? I had even forgotten about my birthday…”.
“This is something I had wanted as a kid and I know you always sit on your porch till late at night, so...we’ll share this, it’s not all yours”, he said smiling.
I stopped unwrapping the box and glanced over my shoulder at Jack, who was wearing a vaguely mischievous expression on his face.
“Come on, keep going”, he said, accompanying the words with hand gestures.
It was a telescope.
“We’ll drink lemonade on your porch while we look at the stars”, Jack told me with a satisfied grin.
This was so unexpected, I would have never thought of buying a telescope myself but now that I had one the excitement foamed inside me quickly and spilled out, “Oh wow!”, I almost shouted.
We brought the telescope over to my place and mounted it on the patio I had on the upper floor. So far I hadn’t used it much, preferring the porch for some reason, but now I would change this habit, I thought. We stood out in the air filled with the voices of the cicadas, looking at the stars far away in the summer sky till past midnight. By then my eyes were sore and I said, “Let’s go inside”.
The wooden floor squeaked under our bare feet as we moved in the dark, to which our eyes had grown adapted by staying out in the night for so long. I leaned Jack against a wall, and began caressing him under the shirt, breathing him in. He had a smell of salt, as if he had been swimming in the sea, and the marine scent was mixed with faint leathery notes, the residues of deodorant and laundry detergent.
“I love your smell”, I said, pulling up his shirt.
Jack’s nipples were firm in my mouth, I licked them till he let out a weak moan and I felt his body shiver against mine. We explored each other slowly and let our desire climax in a memorably intense night.