I suppose one of the most defining features of my life has to be monogamy. I've always gone from serious relationship to serious relationships, with little or no time in-between. Perhaps I needed the emotional stability, perhaps it took women a long time to endear themselves to me. To get used to me, used to the more-then-occasional upchuck reaction. Perhaps I was just lazy. Whatever the reason, it'd always been that way, ever since I was a kid. Ever since fourth grade. When most kids were calling cooties, avoiding girls like the plague, changing their relationships once, twice, eight times a day, I was staying put. Christ, I dated my elementary school girlfriend for six years.
When we finally did break up, for "reals and for goods this time" my singleness lasted all of a two weeks. I met my high school girlfriend in chemistry class; we dated until graduation. The first week of college, I met my forgettable college girlfriend in Business 101; we dated until she, graduated, moving to Pasadena for some tedious admin job. I got over that surprisingly fast. She didn't tell me I'd been dumped until the last box had been unpacked in her unimpressive, rent-controlled apartment. She didn't tell me she seriously meant it until she'd met Greg, my much-improved replacement. It'd been yet another pointless round of meaningless 'I love you's', half-hearted talks about marriage. It was the same, faked, hyperbole happiness. It felt like they all fell, like everything was just a badly-written play. A game of going through the motions. The rhythmical ebb, the get together, the messing around, the drifting apart, the attempts to rekindle, and the break-up. It'd been a routine since Wendy. A melodramatic, pointless routine.
Three weeks into my new job at Alliace and Reichmons Financial, I met my first fiancée. She was a receptionist, she was older than me, three years, she had a history, a past, a child. She was all insubstantial peroxide and screeching drunkenness, all questionable clothes and questionable parenting. I proposed to her after two years, because it was expected. Because her boy had bonded with me. And because I'd actually bonded with him. He was a pretty great kid, in spite of his mother. He liked it when I took him to feed the ducks. He liked it when I helped him tie his little red boots. He liked to watch the Bronco's on TV, sitting next to me on the couch. Clapping at the touchdowns. Any touchdown. He just liked the sport, he didn't understand the game. She cheated on me a year later, cuckolded me for a C.E.O with a six-figure salary and a stream of empty promises. Just like I'd expected, really. I quit my job the next day. I was hired by one of Alliace and Reichmons competitors six weeks later. I never saw her son again. That hurt more then anything.
I was single for a year or so after that. I dated, yeah, a few occasional dinners, non-starter coffees, tedious movies, but nothing, nothing, ever came of them. The women were all insubstantial, overt, clichéd. Shadows of the mistakes I'd already made. The bold-hearted Wendy, who cared too much about deep sea trawlers and endangered monkeys. The forgettable Melissa, all sensible shoes and Business 101, the girls who saw me as a meal ticket, a steppingstone as she waited for her Greg. Her one. I steered clear of the ones that reminded me of Amy, of the ones that smacked of bad decisions and gold-digging tendencies. Of the ones that looked like they might hurt. All the girls I dated, they were like bad sequels. Round after round of deja-vu. None of them clicked past the goodnight kiss. None of them were handed a rose.
Then my elementary school girlfriend hosted an eco-conscious New-Years-Eve-party-slash-save-the-poor-endangered -monkeys-fundraser, and I ran into the guy who'd been my childhood best friend. My childhood super best friend.
We'd drifted apart, not for any malicious reason, just simple clichéd indifference. You always say you're going to keep in touch. But it's always just words. Things always become nothing more than the occasional, big-news Facebook update. The occasional Birthday wish. The occasional passing comment from an overly involved parent. Whilst I'd spent high school throwing around a football and fucking my girlfriend, he'd spent high school heading the debate team and studying Latin. Hence the reason I went to college at a so-so in-state school on a so-so sports scholarship, hence the reason I ended up doing something boring and monotonous, pushing papers in some boring, monotonous insurance company. Hence the reason he disappeared to the East Coast to speak Latin and wax lyrical about fallen civilisations in a school with a presidential alumni and an internationally revered reputation.
We'd run into each other every few years, we'd chat, we'd catch up, we'd remember why we'd had such fun as kids, we'd rekindle that cement bond, we'd make promises about staying in touch, we both knew we wouldn't really, and we'd say goodbye. We'd send Christmas cards, note each other of family deaths, major relationship changes, house moves and jobs, but it was hardly a friendship. We were just a couple of kids who owed it to our history to keep up the awkwardly positive Christmas letters. To pretend like we weren't separated by too many miles, Americas Great Plains.
Anyway, at Wendy's party we'd hit it off reminiscing. We talked about our past, the present, we talked about stuff that happened, that in-between stuff, why he came back to Colorado, why I never left. He'd just broken up with an on-off boyfriend again, some dick I'd used to know. He'd just stormed out of his flat, packed his shit into his car, driven for days, driven back across state lines. He was going to go home. He had nowhere else to go.
A presidential alumni can only get you so far sometimes. Sometimes you just get unlucky.
So I offered him my couch, and he graciously accepted. And it was fun having him around, really fun. It was irritating, a little bit, a whole lot, actually. Really fucking irritating, the different way he'd do things, the mess he'd make, the way he worked. Stacking and manic, vague disorganisation and organised mess. The piles of paper that took over my living room. Books on terracotta pots, on aqueducts, on mythology and dead gods. But it's lonely, living on your own, it's empty and depressing. It certainly wasn't empty with him there. It really wasn't empty with him there. And that was pretty awesome.
Kyle's something intangible. He's an entity, an illucid force of nature: he all that and more. The stupid Jewish customs he only half sticks to, the shrillness, the way he gets himself worked up over the stupidest of things, the way he never lets anything go. He's a bitch for historical accuracy. He loves nothing more than correcting the morons on the history channel. I'd forgotten how impossible he can be, how impossible it is to stop him once he starts. How easy it is to wind him up. Occasionally I'd play stupid, muddy my Greek and Roman mythology. Occasionally I'd throw in a bit of Norse, just to watch the mini fit he'd have. Just to watch him sit there, his thigh pressed against mine, for two hours. Just to have him correct me.
I'd forgotten his compassion. How he feels everything, the way he cares, his rigid morality. It was all stuff I remembered, the stuff that had got us into trouble, the stuff that had got us out of trouble. He drove me insane at times, the way he'd doubt himself one moment, yet be so cocksure the next. All this shit I remembered, it was still all there, ingrained into him. All there and more.
He knew how to party now, he'd always known how to strip down to his underwear and strut it up and rock concerts, he'd learnt that trick when he was eight. But he'd finessed the art in college. He'd amassed a very impressive drinking list, he quietly boasted very impressive friends. He was dry, wry and quick, an institutionally honed wit. He said the most guttering things sometimes. And he had one hell of a history.
He was lusty, he was wild, he could be all over the place. He was all over the place. One night, at a Christmas party thrown by one of my boring colleagues, he pulled me into a bedroom, he crashed onto my lap, this drunken force of nature, this heavy, short, this smooth, soft limbed force of nature. He was bucking, rutting against me, I was crying and moaning into him, clutching skin, fabric, clutching everything I could. It was a sexual revolution. On some poor fuckers bed, some guy I shuffled paper with at work, he gifted me a messy sexual revolution. A drunk, sloppy sexual revolution. Then he passed out flush against me, whilst I was still choking back dry sobs, rammed half up inside him. He didn't give a damn.
And it was like something slotting into place. A few more weeks passed, and Kyle got a job talking about deities painted on dusty old bits of crockery, stored safely behind glass at some dusty old museum. He loved those dusty bits of crockery: those relics of ancient history. I'd come home to find him in the flat, reading a "fascinating" book about long-dead legends. I'd come home to the reassuring warm presence of another human being, the feeling of actually being missed. I'd come home to the flat, I'd cum inside him. Then he'd fall asleep curled up on the sofa.
A month passed, a month of dancing this weird limbo. A month past, and he told me he had a steady enough income, he told me he was willing to move out, let me get back on with my life. He told me he was ready to disappear back into the wind if I wanted. So I pinned him against the bedroom door, I did everything I could to make him promise to stay.
And life went on, months and months, years, and it became about more then just an old friend and casual sex. He started sleeping plastered against me, his face buried into my neck, my face buried into his hair. He calmed down, slowed down, he settled in. I started coming home to lurid cushions and throws, new furniture, historically accurate reconstructions of boring old jugs, his awful choices in interior décor. He started making dinner, he started doing the shopping, running errands, we became a couple. We set up shared banking, sorted out insurance. I brought him home to my family again, he brought me home to his. The awkward, juddering re-introductions to parents, siblings, to friends. The dull realities of life, the money, rent, the food and bills. All offset against the intensity of what we had, the manic nights, gripping and clutching, whimpering and moaning.
And I realised he was the one. I realised, hey, this was it. It was him. I'd always been him. I was so goddamned monogamous, I'd spent my life devoted to the boy I fell in love with in kindergarten.
A/N – Just a pointless little drabbleish thing. I'm clearing up my fiction folders and deleting the half-started, scrapped stories I started writing before realising I hated to make way for a Sherlock thing I might try. This was the introduction to something bigger and far more crack-de-fuck that involved magical playing cards and getting a redo on your life, but that was weird and pointless, so imma gonna take that and put that with my own non-fan fiction where weird pointlessness runs rampant. But hey, this introduction stands up on its own, so I figured I might as well post it.