The Pull of Yesterday Read online

  The Pull of Yesterday

  By

  Gabriella West

  The Pull of Yesterday is a creative work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are created from the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual people or events is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2016 Gabriella West

  All rights reserved.

  v.2

  Part 1

  1.

  San Francisco

  January 2011

  There is a room, sunlight pouring in through the open window. A hardwood floor, worn boards. There is the sound of the sea. And an old-fashioned bed in the center of the room, the kind with iron posts.

  Lying there under the white sheet, I try to figure out where I am. Back in my Boston University dorm? It can’t be. This room isn’t dimly lit, poky and carpeted, doesn’t have two twin beds on either side of it.

  The net curtains blow inward and a feeling of peace comes over me. I’m all right. I know somehow that Matt is close by. Matt is coming.

  He walks in, sure enough, fully dressed in a shirt, jeans, and sneakers. Is it the young Matt that I’d known first in 2000 and 2001, or the slightly older version I’d met again last year? It’s hard to tell. He walks with his usual quick, confident step over to the bed. I stare up at him.

  “Why are you here?” I ask.

  “To remind you,” he says, looking down with a smile.

  His toffee-colored hair is tousled and I long to touch it. Soon I feel him lowering himself onto me, fully dressed, his weight delicious. I groan slightly, looking up into his hazel eyes. I want him to kiss me.

  “Not yet, Dave,” Matt says in a sort of whisper. “But soon, OK?”

  “But we can’t do this. I’m with Aaron,” I tell him in a hoarse voice, in a sudden panic. Remembering.

  His full weight is on me now. I’ve missed this, this feeling of being held down by a lover, joyously powerless.

  “Aaron doesn’t know you,” Matt replies, still looking down on me, very serious, yet the pose is so intimate that I can feel his breath on my face, his chest crushed against mine, my hardening cock.

  “Yes he does,” I babble breathlessly. “I love Aaron.”

  “But you loved me first.” Suddenly he is back over by the door and ever so slowly disappearing, like a ghost.

  I sit up. “Matt! Don’t go.”

  “Don’t forget. I’ll see you soon,” Matt replies. And then the door closes, firmly.

  ***

  I gasped, opening my eyes. Aaron was lying on the bed right above me, looking down into my face, not wearing his glasses. The smell of coffee filled his bedroom on Elsie Street. I still thought of it as “his” rather than “our.”

  “Hey. It’s a chilly morning,” he said. “I thought we could use coffee.” He’d put the mugs on the nightstand.

  His eyes were dark. They made his face look somehow haunted rather than pretty. But then, he was haunted. His dead parents, the things he’d done too young. I should never forget that, I thought.

  As he kissed my lips, I pulled away slightly. The dream was still upon me and so was the feeling of despair as Matt slid away. I tried to brush it off.

  “Sorry to startle you, Dave. You woke up as I opened the door,” Aaron observed. “It’s Saturday, by the way. You look totally out of it.”

  Saturday. He didn’t have to work. I did, at the Museum.

  His voice was kind, humorous. I looked at him and for a moment it was as if I didn’t know him, as if I hadn’t chosen to be here.

  “I’m still disoriented,” I mumbled.

  “You said Matt’s name, too,” he told me, taking a sip of his coffee. We sat there in silence.

  “I did dream about him,” I said, clearing my throat. “It’s very weird.”

  He gave me a strange look, part compassionate, part weary. “Is there something you want to tell me, Dave?”

  “No,” I said, after a moment. “I haven’t been in touch with him since last... well, whenever it was. Last August.”

  Remembering dates was never my strong point. The fact that the exact month Matt and I met up at the hotel downtown was blurry in my mind did not mean that the encounter was hazy, though. I often thought about it, especially during the day at the Museum when I was alone in a roomful of strangers looking at art.

  “Maybe that’s the problem,” Aaron said gently. He put his coffee to the side. “Lie back and let me take care of this, hon.”

  I lay back, still drugged-feeling, staring at the ceiling. “This” was my morning wood, which he was stroking lovingly through the blanket with a warm and steady grip. Once I was relaxed, he moved the bedclothes aside and put his mouth on me, swallowing me down to the root.

  I kept my eyes closed, tried to keep from thrusting too hard, from shouting. But I didn’t really succeed in that, and in a minute or two Aaron was laughing, his head resting against my sticky stomach.

  “Fast and messy,” he pointed out with a smile. “Feel better?”

  I just sighed, stroking his fine hair, which felt nothing like Matt’s coarse brown locks. A pang of guilt hit me. I’d tried hard to keep them separated, apart in my mind. Now they weren’t.

  Hell of a way to start the new year...

  Rain pattered gently against the pane. I did feel better.

  “I do now,” I said after a moment.

  “Mmm,” Aaron murmured.

  The two of us were loving, we were close, but there was a strangeness about it. The distance we had—maybe it was just the huge differences in our pasts, in our outlooks—kept the sex hot. Kept us coming back together again and again.

  But I wanted Matt. I couldn’t deny it, and I didn’t know how it was going to work. Matt was married. And I hadn’t seen him for months, not since that afternoon before his wedding. We were still connected on Facebook, it was true, and I knew he’d immediately respond if I wrote to him. I just knew it. Which didn’t make it any easier.

  “Dave, honey,” Aaron said. “It’s OK, you know. If you want to see him. I’ve had time to think about it.”

  He nestled against me. I leaned to kiss him, moving my tongue into his mouth the way he liked.

  He pulled back, gasping. “I actually never expected to be in a monogamous relationship. We got together so fast I didn’t have time to tell you that.”

  I said nothing, flushing slightly. The way Janine had dumped me last summer and the rushed way I had moved into Aaron’s house rankled sometimes.

  “I don’t want to sleep around...” Aaron murmured.

  “Thing is,” I said to him, my tone was almost cold, “I can’t handle the double standard of it. If you did sleep with someone, I wouldn’t be able to take it. But then, to expect you to tolerate my fucking around is unfair.”

  “It’s not ‘fucking around,’” Aaron pointed out. He liked having these discussions, just like Janine had. I shifted restlessly.

  “Look, I’m not blind. You love Matt.”

  I pulled sharply away from him, in shock now. Shocked that he could see it, and that I was so transparent. It was something I had barely admitted even to myself.

  “I think you love both of us.”

  I glanced at him, white-faced, and he shrugged. “It happens, Dave. I’ve been strongly attracted to two people in the past, and been sexual with both of them. Haven’t you?”

  I shook my head. I had no experience of it. Not till now. And even now, I didn’t know if Matt would simply want to hook up with me a few more times—or more than that. Either of those possibilities seemed scary, something I should avoid.

  “I don’t want to mess up his marriage. Or us,” I muttered, gulping my cooling coffee now.

  “What if it doesn’t?” Aaron answ
ered.

  I had no response for that. I just shook my head.

  Aaron was naked now, stripping off languidly, eyeing me with a smile. He threw me the bottle of lube and a condom. I loved him for his boldness, and for his faith that I would get hard for him. Because I was.

  I ran a hand slowly down his back and he moaned. His buttocks were beautiful, so smooth and velvety. Inviting. He didn’t have a grown man’s butt yet.

  “I’m not up for too much,” I said, wanting to keep his expectations low.

  “Just fuck me, OK?”

  I was applying lube to him now, a bit distracted, trying to focus on this act that had once seemed so special. I didn’t want sex to become a performance, with nothing behind it. The day that I just felt lust for him and nothing else—well, that would bother me. I couldn’t conceive a time when I felt neither love nor lust for him.

  I pushed in once with two fingers, my cock seriously hardening now.

  “Oh, baby,” Aaron murmured, tightening around me. “C’mon. Do it.”

  He was on his hands and knees, his back arching. Our bodies joined. I tried to go slow, but that didn’t last very long. Anyone watching would have thought I didn’t feel tenderness for him.

  There were little things I did during sex that I knew he liked. They were gestures that demonstrated control without me having to do very much, or get too kinky. It was a compromise we had, because I knew he liked kinky sex and my comfort zone had always been on the vanilla side. I just put my hand firmly on the side of his throat near his shoulder, held on there. Occasionally I swept my hand over his hair, tugged it. He was completely zoned out, in another world. We just fit together well and our bodies took over. I was glad, yet choked up because, as with Janine the previous year, I could see it ending now. I could see us ending. Not with certainty, but it was another option on the table, and I could suddenly see the whole deck of cards, if that’s what it was, spread out before me.

  Some of the cards hadn’t been turned over yet.

  Aaron gave a deep, sobbing sigh. We had done this enough times now that I knew instinctively when he had come. This had been a good session for him, I thought, hating my own detachment. Still moving, rocking deeply inside him, I watched as his shoulders shook. He cried sometimes after sex. I’d thought only women did that because the idea of getting visibly emotional after sex was so foreign to me.

  “I’m almost done,” I whispered, trying to convince myself that it was true. This lag in orgasm never happened; usually we were right there with each other.

  The image of Matt came into my mind. We’d stood in a shower stall together and he’d taken me, hard and vigorous. Fiery. Shooting into me. I tried to concentrate on that moment. Shooting into me. Oh God. Yes.

  “Yes,” I moaned, crashing down onto Aaron, who shifted so I could kiss him as I always did afterward, his face damp.

  We huddled together, warm and sleepy. There was nothing more to say except “I love you,” which, this time, neither of us said.

  2.

  About a week later—a Tuesday, it must have been, because I had Mondays off from the Museum—I was waiting nervously for Janine at a booth inside Mel’s Diner on Geary Street. Instead of looking Matt up on Facebook I had decided to meet my ex for the first time since the breakup six months before. We had been together for five years when I met Aaron and things had rapidly collapsed between us. Was I a glutton for punishment? Perhaps, but I felt for some reason that only she would be able to advise me now. If she was willing to meet me. Which, strangely enough, she was. I still had her number saved in my phone, and when I texted her I got an almost instant reply. We met up in the early afternoon before either of our shifts started. She still worked at The Lucky Shamrock pub.

  I had had a few chats with Wendy, my boss Mike’s wife, in which Janine’s name was mentioned, but only in the context of her being my ex—Wendy’d never let on that she knew that Janine had been seeing Mike for a while. It wasn’t something I wanted to bring up. The whole thing seemed sordid and increasingly surreal. And I wasn’t meant to know about it, either. It would embarrass Wendy. Leave it in the past, I thought. My relationship with Mike had gotten oddly better—in fact, every time I took a break to walk and talk with Wendy, he regarded me with obvious approval. These walks and chats of ours had become almost weekly affairs. But it was always a long week at the Museum, and it broke up the monotony.

  If I confided in Wendy about Matt, I was sure that she would tell Mike. I wasn’t sure how he’d take it. I could imagine him muttering, “Two-timing your boyfriend, are you?” at some inappropriate moment. Such were my guilt-ridden thoughts as I waited for Janine. Suddenly, I swallowed hard a couple of times.

  A pretty girl was making her way toward me. I stood up. I couldn’t believe it. I hadn’t thought of Janine as pretty for years. She was at least twenty pounds lighter than when I’d last seen her, clad in a denim jacket lined with sheepskin that suited her, and jeans. Any casual, slightly folksy look always suited her curves. Her hair was long and sleek, darker than I remembered. Her candid blue eyes fringed with black lashes lit up warmly as she approached me. We hugged a little stiffly, not the full hug that she would have given me in times past. But that was OK.

  “You look great!” we both said in unison. That helped break the ice and we sat down, staring at the menus, both laughing a little. I felt something loosen inside me.

  “It’s been a while,” Janine said. “Dave, I should tell you I’ve met someone.”

  “Just in case I run screaming?” I enquired. “No, that’s great. Who? Do I know him?”

  “You don’t know him,” she replied. She seemed so calm, so at ease with herself now. I liked it.

  A waitress popped by with a carafe and filled our two old-fashioned white mugs with coffee before we could say anything.

  “I’m actually just going to have a chocolate milkshake,” Janine said ruefully after she had gone. “I love the ones here, and I’m kind of on a diet...”

  I laughed again. I didn’t remember her making me laugh so much. It was freeing to laugh with her, I thought.

  She smiled wickedly. “What I’m trying to say is that I’ve been cutting carbs, so instead of having a burger and fries, I’ll just have that.”

  “I’ll have the burger and fries, then,” I said. “And I’ll drink your coffee if you don’t want it.”

  “That’s OK, it’s good to warm up,” Janine answered, shaking her head, her hands clasped around the mug.

  We ordered when the waitress returned and then there was silence again. I felt I should pump her for information about her new boyfriend, but I didn’t want to rush it. I just wanted to stay in the moment with her if I could, stay with this comfortable feeling.

  “He’s called Guillermo,” Janine finally said, glancing at me. “He’s Brazilian.”

  “Brazilian...not Mexican. Oh, I see,” I said stupidly. She shook her head slightly.

  “I can see why you’d be confused, but they’re very different cultures.”

  I nodded.

  “He’s lovely. He’s a waiter at a restaurant downtown. He’s all flirty, so he doesn’t mind if I’m flirty.”

  She took a picture out of her wallet and showed me a darkly handsome man, his smiling face loving and expressive.

  It was all she had to do. I could see that she was in love with him just by the fact that she carried a picture. She’d never carried one of me. There’d been a few snapshots of us on her phone—I wondered if they were gone now.

  “I took it with his digital camera,” she added. “We printed it out at home.”

  “Does he live with you, on Lake Street?” I felt like I was almost stuttering. It had only been a few months. I knew she would move on fast, but this was a bit much!

  “He... no. He’s allergic to Tom.”

  We both laughed again. Tom was Janine’s cuddly old black cat. His winter coat always got huge, I remembered.

  I sighed. “I miss Tom, actually.”

 
; Our orders came. The waitress left speedily, as if she knew we would have no further use for her.

  “You should come back and see him sometime,” Janine said idly, but I wasn’t sure how much she meant it. I also felt uneasy being alone with her in the apartment, I realized. With a few drinks in us, I could see us sliding back into the bedroom, and that was something that I had never imagined would happen again. But this new calm, happy woman before me might have no interest in rekindling things with the ex who broke her heart, I thought. I was foolish to visualize it.

  “You’ve probably been wondering if Guillermo and I are monogamous,” Janine said, as if she’d read my mind. She took a slurp of her milkshake.

  “I can see you’re in love with him,” I said swiftly.

  I was flushing slightly. The conversation was moving on to intimate territory. I didn’t want to talk about her and me, but I couldn’t be sure she was done with me in that way until she actually said it.

  “I am.” She started spooning the milkshake into her mouth and I watched, chewing on my burger. She’d always had funny ways with food.

  “I’m happy,” she continued, “but we’re nowhere near a total commitment yet. He has women from his past that he hangs out with, and maybe some guys too, cuz he’s hinted at that. As I say, he’s a big old flirt. So everyone stays friends with him and loves him. And he’s not jealous of my personal life.”

  I found myself sweating. Shit, I knew where this was going.

  “It would be OK with him if I saw other people,” Janine said slowly. “But I haven’t yet, because I’ve been really happy.”

  I glanced at her, nodding.

  The conversation stayed hanging there. I made up my mind to speak.

  “I’m in a dilemma right now, Janine.” That sounded a little blunt. She glanced at me curiously.

  “I’m really happy with Aaron,” I continued.