The Good Doctor 12

Just a normal family out for an after dinner stroll. Me in Levi’s and a pink tee shirt, Pete in dress slacks, white shirt and loosened dark blue rep stripe tie and walking between us or rather sometimes skipping between us and sometimes dawdling between us, Jase, pale blue little boy sweat shirt and tan little boy cargo pants. The kid dresses better than I do.

Jase runs ahead for a second and then runs back and wraps his hand around my fingers. What is going through his mind? Why did he instigate this? It occurs to me that I’ve never been in Pete’s house. That’s pretty stupid. Well, the houses on the street are pretty much alike and he always comes over to our house. The thing is that I’m not thrilled with going to his house. I want him to forget about his house!

Eleanor’s gotta be goin crazy if she’s watching us!

I can tell by the drapes that I can see hanging in the living room window that this place is gonna make ours look like shit. Every time Pete takes a step you can see the bulge of his cock in his pants pushed off to the left. Why are we doing this?

Since he’s not driving his car and doesn’t have the thingy to open the garage door Pete lets us in through the front door. The foyer is floored in different but similar colors of slate tiles.

Holy fuck! This house may be “kinda” like ours but this is unbelievable. All the colors are kinda the same and yet at the same time they’re different and everything seems so fucking elegant and………..well…………planned.

Jase takes off running through the house but something on my face must have alerted Pete because he pulls me into the kitchen. Kitchen! Fucking granite counter tops!

Pete pushes me back against the counter in an attempt to control my attention and keep me from getting spastic. His arms are hot on my arms and his body is pressed close to mine as he tries to gentle me.

“My fucking god, Pete, this place is…………..! Kiss!

“unfucking believable! You never……………...! Kiss! With tongue.

“told me that you lived like this! Shit our place…………..! Kiss! With tongue and caressing.

My house is decorated in 1960’s Italian American, pretty basic. Lot’s of formica.

Pete pulls me away from the counter and wraps his arms totally around me. Mostly to try and calm me down and keep me from seeing all the other neat stuff that I don’t have at my house.

He’s holding my face in his hands. “Eric, don’t glower at me!” I don’t glower! “This is just something that designers did!” My mom was my designer! “This was THEIR idea of how a doctors house should look!”

It’s not the money, although this cost him plenty, it’s the taste, something that I obviously have none of and if I don’t have any taste how long can I expect him to keep loving me when he obviously does have taste, like in spades.

“I could afford to do this too ya know!” Yeah like that’d happen!

Jase screaming. “Dad, the shower has got a whole bunch of places where the water comes out!” A multi-head shower! I bet that it’s all glass too with beige marble walls! I can hear Jason running around.

I feel like I’m quivering and then Pete speaks softly to me. “I know that you can afford to do this. Do you think I’d have brought you over here if I thought that it was gonna be a problem?” I start to open my mouth but he kisses me again. Well, it’s not the worst way of shutting me up.

“Eric, you gotta understand how little this place means to me. It’s just somewhere that I came to when I left work, a place where I did laundry. It was never a home. Mostly it was a place that I sat and tried to think of a way to meet you.” He was playing with my hair, twisting it. “I was sooo lonely here.” How can a person look like Pete does and feel lonely? Yeah, I know, it’s possible.

Jase comes running into the kitchen and grabs my arm. “Come on, Dad! You gotta see this place.” Then suddenly he stops and looks like he’s just realized something. He looks up at Pete and tightens his grip on me.

“Pete, I don’t want you to live here.” He looks at me. “We can make our house look nicer can’t we, Dad? I don’t want Pete to come back here to live.”

I kneel down in front of Jase. “I don’t either, Jase.” Jase has maneuvered us into a moment of truth. I look up at Pete. I can’t read him. “But this is adult stuff and its something that Pete and I have to talk about.” I rub my hands on Jase’s arms. “There are lots of things that have to be decided, Jase.” Great! I’m supposed to be an adult?

I stand up, touch Pete’s arm and whisper to him. “You have any porn mags or dildo’s or stuff like that around here?” He actually blushes!

“No, no, nothing like that!” I’m amazed because if I lived alone the place would be awash in it.

“Nothing? None of that?”

He tilts his head and grins at me. “No, the place is………….well……..clean.”

“Oh good.” I hunker down in front of Jase.

“Sweetheart, I want you to go play in Pete’s bedroom. Go through the drawers and report back.”

Jase’s eyes light up and he yells. “Okay!” He takes off, little boy running.

I stand up and look at Pete, he’s so handsome and is standing there with a somewhat perplexed look on his face. He looks hangdog tired but he’s smiling.

I sigh. I’m suddenly incredibly tired too. I reach out and place the palm of my hand against his heart, it’s beating strong and it comforts me.

I don’t know how to say this, how to make him really understand. I looked at him and tilt my head. “You probably won’t wanna do this but I need you,” Take a breath! “need you to live with me…………..with me and Jase. I can’t live without you but I can understand why you wouldn’t wanna do that, to commit yourself to that.” I’m rambling and I’m not making sense and I know that but I can’t shut up. I just keep fucking talking! “I know………..I know that you’re spending most of your home time with us and that’s been wonderful but we’re probably freakin you out. Hell we even freak me out and I certainly couldn’t blame you for not wanting to leave a place like this because I sure as shit woul…………………..” He didn’t let me keep rambling. He shut me up with another kiss…………..a kiss and a tongue down my throat. Geez, he’s got a long tongue!

Pete’s body is pressed to mine pushing me back against the counter and his face, now that we broke the kiss is pressed to mine. He speaks very quietly in my ear.

“You’re fucking nuts you know.” Shouldn’t doctors say like maybe, fornicate, instead of fuck?

I nod yes, my cheek rubbing against his neck. I answer just as quietly but I feel calmer now. “I know. I’m not usually this stupid.” A lie. “It’s just that where you’re concerned it’s like things get kinda short circuited in my brain.” His arms are around me and they feel warm and good. I can feel him breathing.

He turns his head and looks around. “I’m gonna lease this place out. No point in selling it the way property values are going up around here.”

I pull back in a panic and search his face. “You’re not leaving town because of what I said?” This is really my mom and dad’s fault. They made me this nuts. “You don’t have to move in!”

He wraps his right hand around the back of my neck. Geez he’s got big hands.

He stares straight into my eyes and then slowly shakes his head. “Eric…………nobody’s going anywhere. I’m moving in with you and Jase….permanently…like a family…like we are.” He starts shaking his head again. “How can you not understand how much I love you?”

Good question! “I don’t know, Pete. I was a scrawny kid that looked like shit on my best day. I guess that I never got past that.”

He pulls my head to his chest. God this feels good, warm and safe. “You’re not a scrawny kid anymore!” He kisses the top of my head. “I know that I’ve already harped on about how great your butt is but beyond that you’re a fantastically handsome guy.”

I snuggle my head more firmly against his chest. I guess that I really oughta listen to what he has to say. “Yeah……..right! You sound like my mom.”

I hear Jase come pounding through the house and then he bursts into the kitchen. “Dad, Pete has got really cool stuff!” He grabs my hand to get my full attention. “He’s got a flat screen television in his bedroom too!” He’s pulling on me. “Come on, Dad, you gotta SEE this stuff!”

I look back at Pete. “That comes with you doesn’t it?” Okay, so I can be bought, big deal!

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“Honey, you’re gonna give Eleanor a fuckin heart attack!” Vintage Rose.

“Rose, if she minded her own business it wouldn’t even be an issue. Besides she’s gotta have known that Pete was on the verge of moving in. He was like spending every minute at my house.”

“Well, Sweetheart, is it finally official? Has he actually moved in?”

“Yeah, pretty much. We carried over most of his clothes last night. That’s when Eleanor was running from room to room watching us. I couldn’t tell if she had a phone in her hand but I’m sure that she was passing the info on to my mom. Mom called this morning. She actually sounded happy.”

“Well, Babe, she got her wish, now she doesn’t have to worry so much about you fucking things up…………relationship wise.”

“I won’t fuck this up, Rose. I’ve never felt this way before.”

Rose laughed wickedly. “Yeah, sore! What’s he doin, porkin you two, three times a day?” She laughed again. “Oh you lucky boy! I’m jealous!”

Oh this woman! “I wasn’t talking about sex, Rose! Not everything is about sex! That’s all that you think about and by the way shouldn’t you be taking medication for that or something?”

“Honey, you mean to tell me that you’re not getting any? I woulda thought a stud like that’d be plowin you steady.”

“He is, Rose! He’s fuckin me all the time! My god, if he was fucking me any more I wouldn’t be able to walk!” Why am I telling her this? How the hell does she get me to talk about this stuff? Geez she’s a dirty old lady!

“And how is Jase handling all this? He doesn’t resent having an extra dad, does he?”

“No, Jase likes Pete better than he likes me.” But I’m still his dad!

“What’s he think about his dad sleeping with another guy? Can’t be that anything prepared him for that.”

“I know, Rose and believe me that I’ve thought about all of that. It’s not just his dad sleeping with another guy but also the whole occasional nakedness thing but he just seems to ignore it. But then we’ve been goin to the gym together for a year or so and he sees naked guys there and it doesn’t seem to faze him. Still, he sees us kissing and stuff, not that we make like a public display of it or anything but he does see it but if it bothers him he doesn’t show any sign of it.”

“Darling, you think that you’re gonna survive this evening?”

“Oh, you heard about us taking mom and dad out to dinner?”

“Yep, you goin to Mary Chang’s new place?”

“Yep, it’s supposed to be great. She and I were in high school together, we were pretty good friends, still are. She seemed to adjust to the whole gay thing pretty well, she probably knew that I was gay before I did.”

“Honey, everybody knew that you were gay before you did!”

“You know, Rose, you have a very cruel streak in your nature.”

“Who’s gonna watch Jase for you tonight, or are you taking him with you?”

“He’s coming! Jase is my insulation. He guarantees that my mother won’t kill us all, which, believe me, is always a consideration.”

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Pete is wearing tan light wool slacks and a dark blue shirt. The blue of the shirt really accentuates the blue of his eyes and they seem to be incandescent, almost electric. I’ve got my new Dockers on and a red Polo shirt. Pete comes up to me and straightens my collar. While he’s in the neighborhood he bends down and kisses me.

He drapes his arms over my shoulders and pulls my face close to his, when he talks his lips are brushing against mine. “You look really handsome.” Now that he pretty much committed himself to me, us, he’s kinda gotta say stuff like that. I want to just bury my face against his chest and have him hold me for the rest of the night. But there’s no way that that’s gonna happen.

“It’s not too late. You could still have an emergency at the hospital.” This is Friday night and the possibility of his actually being called to the hospital is real as are the phone calls that he’ll receive this evening from patients, pharmacists and nurses at the hospital. You can’t tell by watching him whether or not all of these intrusions bother him, he smiles and goes on like they didn’t happen. Tomorrow at least he’ll be able, probably, to stay home, no office hours and only the phone to interrupt him. Tomorrow we’ll stay in bed until maybe nine, sending Jase to watch television and we’ll make love, slowly, completely, with the door locked.

He tightens his grip on me. “Nothing bad is gonna happen. We’ll buy your mom and dad dinner, dodge as many questions as possible and be back here as early as possible.” He runs his fingertips lightly over my eyes.

“Thank god for Jase! He’s our ticket out. Can’t keep a little boy up too late.” I hope that this kid doesn’t grow up and ask me to explain all this.”

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Mary Chang met us wearing a Chinese red cheongsam and a six-carat diamond solitaire
on her left hand. The Chang family was very good at managing restaurants and even better at managing money.

She strode forward, the high slit in her dress showing a well-formed leg, reaching out she took both of my hands in hers and presented her cheek to be kissed.

“Eric, I have sooooo missed you!” I opened my mouth to speak but she had already turned towards Pete. “You muuuusst be Pete.” Damn that Rose!

Jason touched her arm. “I’m Jason!” Nobody will ever accuse Jase of being shy.

Mary hunkered down in front of Jase. No small trick with the high spike heels she was wearing. “Oh, Sweetheart! It’s so wonderful to meet you. I went to high school with your mother.”
+
“ You knew my mom?” Guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt, guilt!

Mary’s jet black hair drops forward and she sweeps it out of the way with a red lacquered fingernail. She nods. “We used to eat lunch together every day, in the cafeteria.” Reaching forward she touches Jase’s face lightly. “You weren’t born then. You’re mom wasn’t even married then but she knew that she wanted you, wanted a little boy just like you.” Jase is staring at her entranced. I can feel a smile frozen to my face.

Thank god my mother came hurrying towards us. I never thought that I’d be this happy to see her and I really shouldn’t be because Mary was just telling Jase about his mom and that shouldn’t be a big deal worry thing but I guess that it is. Guilt.

Mom actually looks great! Weird, I usually, like always, see her in an apron, cooking but now she’s actually dressed up like a normal person and she looks good. Thanks to Miss Clairol her hair is a pretty auburn color and is carefully styled, she’s wearing a beige suit with a gold blouse.

She stops four feet away. “Doctor O’Connor!” Oh lord! “I aaammm sooooo happy to meet you!” She clasps her hands together in delight and then moves forward and takes Pete by the arm, totally ignoring me, Jase and Mary. She gonna end up liking him better than me, I can see it all now. Mary stands up and gives me an eye roll. She’s known my mom for a long time.

After his talk with Mary, Jase grabs my hand with a vice like grip. Looking down at him I get the feeling that he’d really like to be picked up and held but I know that given where we’re at that would embarrass him so I just ruffle his hair and pull him against my side for a moment in a guy hug. Mom is already twenty feet ahead of us pulling Pete along.