Walter Mosley - Fortunate Son

“I love only you,” he said at last.

Her anger at Eric and the pathetic bleating of Drew came together in Christie’s brow.

“It has nothing to do with you, Drew,” she said, affecting a gentle tone. “It’s just that...”

“What?”

“It’s just that Eric is so wonderful.” She felt a perverse satisfaction seeing the pain entering Drew’s face. “It’s not just that I love him, but he’s got everything a woman could want in a man. That day he beat you on the tennis court I called him. We went for a drive, and I told him that I loved you and I wanted to be just friends. But he took me in the backseat and made love to me until I was completely his. I didn’t even want to be with him, but he made himself my man.”

The tears flowing from Drew’s eyes were a balm for Christie’s ragged heart. She loved hurting Drew, but at the same time she told herself that it was for his own good.

“Stop,” he said.

“From that first night, we got together whenever I could get away from you,” she continued. “You remember that stain on the roof of my car? That was Eric. His dick is the biggest thing I’ve ever seen, and when he came it was so hard that I could feel it inside.”

“Stop, Christie.”

“You can leave whenever you want, Drew. You’re telling me how much you love me. I’m just telling you how I feel.” She expected him to jump to his feet and run from the apartment. She wanted to make him run, to feel the pain that she felt. She realized that she really did blame him for not being man enough to keep her.

But when he did stand up, it was only so that he could fall to his knees and press his face against her skirted lap.

“Why are you doing this?” came his muffled cry.

“You’re always calling me,” she said in the same removed tone Eric used when he told her he loved her. “Telling me how you feel. But I’m not the person you think I am. That whole summer after we graduated, I fucked Eric every day. Sometimes I’d be with him and then come to be with you for a while, and then I’d go back and Eric would fuck me again. I didn’t want to be with him, but I couldn’t help it. I had to go. And I didn’t care about what I was doing to you...”

As she spoke, her voice became a whisper; she leaned over him and her skirt slowly rose from the movement of him shaking his head, trying to deny her words.

“You wanted me to kiss your dick, and when I finally did you didn’t know that I had been doing Eric like that since the first night in my car. He didn’t ask me if I would, he just shoved it into my mouth and held my head so I couldn’t move.”

Drew slammed the arm of the chair with his fist.

“No!”

Christie realized that there was a new person coming out of her. She’d never talked like this, never tortured anyone like this. She felt Drew’s hands on her naked thighs and she liked it.

When he looked up at her she said, “Put your head back down.”

“When my parents were gone he came to my house,” she continued. “When you called on the phone I was in the bed with him. When I answered sometimes I was licking his cock while you went on and on about Yale and what you would do there.”

That was when Drew pushed her panties aside and pressed the flat of his tongue against her clitoris.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Once... once he came in my mouth while you were asking what kind of tux you should wear to the prom.”

Some of the things she told him were true, others the product of her imagination. When he tore off his clothes and fell on top of her she whispered, “And he has a really big dick and he could fuck for hours before he’d come. He’d have me coming again and again and begging him to come for me.”

This last part was too much for Drew. His orgasm was a painful, wrenching thing. He pounded so hard against her that one of the legs of the chair broke. She laughed and he kept pounding. She knew that he was past feeling it but didn’t ask him to stop. And he didn’t stop. He kept going until he found the feeling and came again.

And when he was finished and lay beside her on the floor, she asked, “Why didn’t you do me like that when you had a chance to keep me?”

Christie called and asked her grandmother to keep Mona for the next three days.

Drew suggested that they go into the bedroom, but Christie said, “No, that’s his bed,” and sneered as if daring Drew to respond. He dragged her in and mounted her from behind.

“Did he do it like this?” he asked.

She nodded, half in ecstasy, and said, “Only his was much longer and thicker, and when he did it he fucked my ass.”

All that night and for the next three days they made love like feral cats. Christie didn’t say one kind word in the first forty-eight hours. It wasn’t until the third day that she admitted that there were things she liked more about Drew than Eric. But even then she said that she was with Eric now and Drew should move on to someone new.

They slapped each other, pulled hair, and had deep orgasms that Christie never knew were possible. Drew had brought out an angry passion that fed on itself in the ex-cheerleader’s secret heart. She tied him facedown to the four-poster bed with an arm and a leg attached to each corner. Then she got the Vaseline and a thick and muddy, blunt-tipped carrot from the farmer’s market. He screamed when she drove half the length of the root into his rectum.

“Stop it!” he cried, flailing around, trying to get free.

She didn’t remove it, only brought her lips to his ear and said, “Do you want me?”

He went still and nodded his head.

“Then you have to take it all the way,” she said.

She pressed the full length in and then left the room to have her private orgasm on the couch outside.

She untied him an hour later and told him that she’d be his. They’d take Mona and move to Connecticut. Eric wouldn’t mind. She really didn’t think he would. He didn’t love like other people did. There was something wrong with him. He couldn’t get close.

But now, as she entered the Palm Desert with the sun rising and shining through the red blooming ocotillos, Christie understood that Eric really did want her. He wanted to marry her and live together forever. He woke her in the middle of the night, as beautiful then as he had been on that tennis court years before. All of her anger disappeared in the morning, and she knew that she’d never leave Eric for Drew. All of that sweating and swearing, that wild abandon, was just a short phase, a transition, a shoehorn to help her slip into her real life.

It was on the fourth day that Eric walked in on them. Mona had gotten back that afternoon. Christie and Drew were making plans to leave. She was to meet Drew the very next day — today — at two. He would have bought tickets for her and him and Mona. They would fly to New York City, where they’d be married and begin a real life.

But Christie wouldn’t be going to his house in Laurel Canyon, she knew that now. Drew had always been her backup, her second choice.

She had never let him be a man. He would never be a man while he was with her or even just thinking about her. Eric was her man. That’s all there was to it.

“Eric Tanner Nolan,” Thomas said into the receiver.

“N-O-L-A-N?” the information operator asked.

“Uh-huh.”

“Yes?”

“Yes.”

“I have an ET Nolan on Wilshire. Hold for that number.”

After getting the number Thomas was afraid to call.

What if Eric didn’t remember him or if he didn’t answer the phone? What if Eric did answer and told Thomas not to call anymore?

Thomas felt that this was his last chance, that he hadn’t so much been wandering as looking for his brother, his lost life. He couldn’t let that hope rely on the chance of a single phone call.