After Lorna

Gideon Strand is trying to hang his funeral jacket in a hotel closet built for a much smaller man when he hears Ellis Reeve say his name from the bedroom doorway of the suite.

“Gideon.”

He doesn’t turn around right away. Lorna’s wake is nearly over, the last six guests are on the sitting-room terrace passing around the bottle of mezcal she left in her will, and he’d hoped to get through the evening without being alone in a room with this one. The jacket slides off the hanger. He catches it against his chest and finally turns.

Ellis is leaning on the frame with a glass in his hand and his tie pulled loose. The face that sold a hundred and twelve episodes of a cop show has gone grey at the temples, like a studio note he never argued with, and in the black suit and open collar he looks like what he is, a man of forty-nine who stood at a graveside for two hours and meant it.

By six Gideon had shaken a hundred hands and been asked twice by agents whether the fund had anything coming up. He’d said no, politely, and gone out to look at the view from the terrace where he met his late partner, the night Lorna dragged him to a premiere party in this hotel because she said he looked like a man who needed to be seen by other people.

Her will had been read at noon, in the back room of a steakhouse on Ventura, by a lawyer who cried openly. She left the mezcal to the terrace and her seat at Musso’s to anyone who could prove a studio had fired them twice, and she left Gideon her reading glasses with a note that said you’ll need these for the small print on everything you pretend not to care about, and he’d put them in the breast pocket of his jacket, where they sit now against his chest like a small dry joke.

“You left the church early,” Gideon says.

“You left the cemetery early. I counted.” Ellis comes in and closes the door with his heel. “I didn’t want to talk about Lorna in front of those people. They keep telling me she’d have loved the turnout. She’d have hated it. She’d have wanted fewer agents.”

“She’d have wanted a bar tab.”

“She got one.” Ellis puts his glass on the desk. “You paid it.”

“She once got me a table at a restaurant that didn’t have one.” Gideon sets the jacket over a chair and undoes one cuff, rolling it back over a forearm gone soft with fifty-seven years. The vest has been too warm all day and strains over the belly he stopped apologizing for long ago. He rubs a hand down the beard that went white before he turned fifty. “What is it, Ellis?”

“You know what it is.”

The air in the suite is cold from the unit by the window. Ellis stands there with Sunset Boulevard glittering through the glass behind him and doesn’t smile.

“Twenty-two years ago,” Ellis says. “Lorna’s house in Los Feliz. She put me on your couch because I’d had four vodkas and couldn’t find my car.”

“I remember.”

“You were thirty-five. You had that partner, the architect. You told me in the morning it couldn’t happen again, and you made me eggs, and you never called.” He says it without heat, like he’s reading it off a card. “I got over it by about the second year. But I’ve been in rooms with you at a lot of premieres since, and every time you shake my hand you hold it a half second too long, and I’ve started counting those too.”

Gideon has nothing prepared for this. He thought the evening’s work was done.

“I’m not asking about the movie,” Ellis says. “Put that down in front of everything else. You know I’m not. I came into this room because I’m tired of standing at graves with you and not saying it. I want to take you to bed. I’ve wanted to for twenty-two years, and I think you know that. I’d just like to hear whether you want it too.”

The sentence lands low in Gideon’s body like something he’s been waiting for all day. God knows he wants it. He’s wanted that mouth since the night on the couch, when Ellis was twenty-seven and half asleep and said, mostly to the ceiling, you smell like a warm library. His hands remember the width of those shoulders. His body is already rising to this room, to the dim lamp and the man in it.

The trouble is how much.

“No,” he says.

Ellis blinks.

“Not tonight.” Gideon’s voice comes out rougher than he planned. “I want to. I want you to hear me say that part first. But on Monday morning at nine I’m sitting at a table with the studio people, voting on who plays the lead in The Lighthouse Years. My fund holds forty percent of that picture. Your name is on the short list, and I’m one of the five people who decides. If I take you to bed tonight and then walk into that room on Monday, I won’t know whether I voted for you or for this. Neither will you, or anyone who reads the credits.”

“The part has nothing to do with it.”

“I know that. I believe you. It still has to be true in a way I can prove.” He shakes his head slowly. “I’m not going to lay a hand on you while I’m holding your name in the other one. I’d rather go home and wait.”

For a second Ellis’s face hardens, and Gideon thinks he’s about to be thrown out of his own wake. But Ellis only takes in a long breath through his nose and lets it go. He looks at the carpet, then back up.

“That’s the most honest no I’ve gotten in this town,” he says. “It’s annoying.”

“I thought it might be.”

“Is it a no forever, or a no until Monday?”

“It’s a no until I can say yes without a conflict.” Gideon is already pulling his phone out of his trouser pocket. “Give me ten minutes. Stay here. Have another drink. Don’t leave.”

He steps out onto the little balcony off the bedroom with the sliding door pulled shut behind him and the whole basin of the city spread under his feet. Cold air. A siren, far off. He opens his email and starts typing to Marguerite Aldous, who runs the studio and has known him for thirty years, and to his own general counsel, and does it fast before he can talk himself out of the grace of it.

I’m recusing myself from the lead casting vote on Lighthouse, effective now. Personal conflict, disclosed here. I will not see the short list, the notes or the decision until it’s announced. Please record it. Gideon.

He sends it. Then he stands there with his heart going hard and lets the siren die away.

When he slides the door open, Ellis is sitting on the edge of the bed with his glass between his hands and his shoes off. He looks up.

“Done,” Gideon says. “I’m out of the room on Monday, and I’ll be the last person in town to hear who got the part.”

“You wrote to the studio president from a balcony.” Ellis’s voice has gone a bit unsteady. “At a funeral.”

“After a funeral. I’d like it noted I waited.” He sets the phone on the dresser, face up, and doesn’t look at it again. “Ask me again.”

Ellis stands up. He’s several inches shorter, and he has to tip his head back. “I want to take you to bed, Gideon.”

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“Yes, God, yes. I’ve wanted that for twenty-two years too.” He lets his hands find Ellis’s face, the stubble coming in grey along the jaw. “If at any point you want to stop, or you’d rather it was tomorrow, or you change your mind completely, you tell me. And if I go too fast, tell me that.”

“You’ve never gone fast in your life.”

“There’s a first time.”

Ellis laughs, a ragged, shaking laugh, and kisses him.

The kiss is long and tastes of mezcal, and it goes on until Gideon’s back is against the closet door. Out in the sitting room the last guests call goodnight to nobody and the suite door thumps shut. Ellis fists a hand in Gideon’s vest and pulls, and the buttons go one by one under his fingers, and then the shirt, and Ellis’s mouth moves down his throat into the white chest hair, and a low sound comes out of Gideon that he hasn’t made in years.

“You’ve got more of this than I remember,” Ellis says into his skin, and licks across a nipple and bites it gently. “I like it. I’d like it better without the trousers.”

They get through the rest of the clothes quickly, laughing once when Gideon’s belt buckle catches in his sock. Then Ellis is on his back in the middle of a very large bed with his arms over his head, lean and hard across the chest, his cock thick and flushed against his stomach, and Gideon stands over him and just takes it in.

“Come here,” Ellis says, and lifts a knee, slowly. “Get over me. I want your weight.”

Gideon climbs onto the bed and lowers himself over him, belly to belly, and they both groan. The press of his bulk makes Ellis gasp and wrap both legs around his thighs. They kiss again, wet and hungry, and Gideon rolls his hips down so their cocks slide together through the slick between them.

“Say it, then,” Gideon says against his jaw. “I’ve been waiting a long time to hear it.”

“I want you inside me.” Ellis says it plainly, with his eyes open. “Properly. I want to feel you stretch me out, and I want your hands on me the whole time, and I want you not to be careful.”

“I’ll be a little careful.”

“A little. Fine.”

There’s lube in the nightstand, because the Marlowe is a hotel that thinks of everything. Gideon finds a water-based bottle and warms it in his palm. He kisses his way down Ellis’s body, over the ribs and the soft dip of his stomach, and takes the head of his cock in his mouth just briefly, because it’s there, and Ellis arches and says Christ, Gideon, in a voice scraped down to nothing.

“Easy,” Gideon murmurs, and slides one slick finger down behind his balls.

Ellis’s knees fall open at once. The first finger goes in on a long breath, and the second takes a little longer. Gideon keeps one hand flat on Ellis’s belly and talks him through it until the clench turns into a slow rocking push.

“There,” Ellis says. “Right there. Fuck. How are you good at this?”

“I pay attention.” Gideon curls his fingers and Ellis shakes. “It’s most of what I do for a living.”

He takes so much time that Ellis starts to swear at him, inventively, in the voice he used for the cop show’s season-four finale, and the swearing gets more broken until he’s begging. “Please. Gid. If you don’t put it in me I’m going to do something drastic.”

“What kind of drastic?”

“Call Marguerite and recuse you from this too.”

Gideon laughs out loud, helpless, and gets the condom out of the drawer. He rolls it on and slicks himself, and when he settles between Ellis’s thighs he lifts both of those long legs and folds them back until Ellis’s knees are up by his chest and his ankles hook over Gideon’s forearms. The sight of him like that, open and flushed and shining with lube, goes straight through Gideon’s chest and settles in his cock.

“Last chance to say no,” he says.

“Ask me again and I’ll throw a shoe.” Ellis’s eyes are very bright. “Yes. Go.”

The head of him presses in and Ellis cries out, a short startled sound, and Gideon stops at once, holding still with the thick crown just inside him.

“Breathe,” Gideon says. “I’m right here.”

“I’m okay. It’s a lot of you.” Ellis laughs through his nose. “Keep going. Slow.”

It takes a long minute, with Ellis’s fingers clutching the sheets, until Gideon’s weight settles against him and he is seated all the way inside that tight heat. For a few seconds neither of them moves. Ellis tilts his hips, testing, and moans. “Move, Gideon. I want your balls slapping my ass. Move.”

He moves. A long, slow, deep stroke, withdrawing almost completely and pushing back in until Ellis’s mouth falls open. Then again. The bed takes their weight without a sound, and the only noises in the room are skin on skin and Ellis saying his name.

“That’s you taking me,” Gideon says, low. “All of it, and you’re still asking for more. Greedy.”

“Yours,” Ellis says. “Keep it coming.”

“Faster. Fuck me like you mean it.”

“No.” He slows even further, grinding in deep and holding there. “Not yet. I want you to carry this one out of here.”

“You bastard.” But Ellis’s hips are rolling up to meet him. “I love it.”

He angles Ellis’s legs higher, almost to his shoulders, and the next stroke drags across the place that makes Ellis shout. Gideon feels it as a ripple through the body under him. He does it again, and again, a long steady rhythm, and every time Ellis’s cock leaks across his stomach.

“Don’t touch yourself,” Gideon says. “Hands on the headboard. Still okay?”

“God, yes. Please.”

Ellis reaches over his head and grips the slats, and the stretch lifts his chest, and Gideon bends and licks along his throat and collarbone. He picks up the pace until the bed starts to knock against the wall, and then he stops dead, deep as he can go.

“Gideon…” Ellis’s voice is a plea. “Don’t stop.”

“I haven’t stopped.” He kisses Ellis’s mouth, slow, and rocks forward in the tiniest circles. “You’re about to go over. I can feel it, and I’m not letting you yet.”

Ellis whimpers into his mouth. Gideon watches color climb his chest, and keeps it up until Ellis’s thighs are shaking against his arms.

“I wanted this back on that couch,” Ellis whispers, “and I want it more now.”

“Then let me have you.” He starts to move again, deeper, long strokes with a little roll at the end. “I’m going to come in you, and then I’m going to take care of you with my mouth. All the way to the end.”

“Oh my God. Gideon, go. Please. Let me feel you.”

Gideon lets go. He braces both hands on the mattress on either side of Ellis’s ribs and drives into him, steady and powerful, all that weight behind it, the slap of his belly against Ellis’s thighs loud and wet. Ellis cries out with every thrust. The headboard bangs. The light from the city sweeps across the ceiling.

“Come on,” Ellis pants. “Fill me up. I can feel you getting thicker. I want it all, Gid. Do it.”

“Here it comes.”

Gideon’s back bows, and the orgasm rips up through him from the soles of his feet. He groans, deep and long, and pumps into the condom with short hard thrusts, shaking, Ellis’s name breaking out of his chest. Ellis holds him and keeps him in.

For a moment he can’t move. His whole weight lies on Ellis, who is stroking his back and murmuring I’ve got you, I’ve got you. Then, slowly, Gideon rises on his elbows and gently withdraws.

“Don’t move,” he says.

He takes care of the condom in one motion and drops to his knees at the foot of the bed. He pulls Ellis down to the edge by his hips, holds his thighs wide, and takes his cock into his mouth, all the way, without ceremony. Ellis makes a sound Gideon has never heard from him on screen or off.

“Oh, fuck. Gideon, I’m going to…”

He sucks hard, one hand cupping Ellis’s balls, the other thumbing the hot seam behind them, and Ellis’s hips come off the bed. Gideon hums. He takes him deeper and swallows around the head. The thighs in his hands go to stone.

“Now,” he says, pulling off for just a second with his lips shining. “Let go.”

Ellis comes with a shout that bounces off the glass. It fills Gideon’s mouth in long, hot, bitter pulses, and he holds him through all of it, swallowing, rubbing slow circles on his hip until the shaking stops and Ellis goes limp on the bed with one arm over his eyes.

Gideon climbs up the mattress beside him. Somewhere down the hall a door closes, and the city hum rises faintly through the glass.

“Lorna would have wanted notes,” Ellis says at last, into his arm.

“She’d have said you overacted the ending.”

Ellis laughs until he’s wiping his eyes. “She left us both something, you know,” he says after a while. “The lawyer pulled me aside at the cemetery. A card. She wrote it in March.” He leans off the bed, fishes in the jacket he dropped on the carpet, and comes back with a small cream envelope, soft from his pocket. He holds it up to the lamp. “It says, Ellis, you’re fifty next year. Ask him already. L.“

Gideon takes it and reads it twice. Her glasses are in his jacket on the chair, so he holds the card at arm’s length and squints. “She knew.”

“Lorna always knew.” Ellis takes the card back and tucks it under his pillow like contraband. “She’d have been unbearable about this.”

“She’d have sent a fruit basket with a note that said finally.“

He turns on his side and lays a hand flat on Gideon’s chest, over the heavy white hair. “Stay,” he says. “I mean it. Stay the night.”

“I wasn’t planning to be anywhere else.”

At three in the morning the room is quiet and the lamp is off. Down on Sunset a delivery truck beeps its way into reverse, and a leaf blower starts up somewhere with the confidence of a man who has never been to a funeral. Ellis is asleep with his face pressed into Gideon’s shoulder and a leg thrown over his belly, snoring faintly, entirely unglamorous. On the dresser the phone lights up once, a brief rectangle of blue, and Gideon reaches over without waking him and turns it face down.