Free The White Stag by Jamie Freeman Page B

lips.
    At the top of the stairs, Jude stopped suddenly. He turned so quickly that I ran into him, and he had to reach out his hands to steady me. “I’m really glad you came, Joshua,” he whispered, kissing me gently on the cheek and then turning back and starting off down the long hallway.
    My cheeks flushed pink. I watched his round, muscular ass under molded denim and longed to plunge my face between the twin furry globes again, longed to slide my tongue along the wrinkled ridge behind his cock until the tip touched the smooth skin of his puckered—
    “Are you coming?” Jude asked, his hand on the doorknob, his face impatient.
    “Nearly there,” I said, grinning.
     
    *  *  *
    I met Jude in the spring of 2002 at a support group for families of the people who had died on September 11. His best friend Brian had been killed in one of the Los Angeles-bound passenger planes, and my sister Dana had died at the Pentagon. Jude had reluctantly joined the group three or four months after its formation and, after months of glances and unspoken connection, we had drifted into a tentative friendliness.
    I think initially Jude was as afraid of my youth as I was of his dark, brooding eyes and startling intelligence. I had just turned twenty-two, and I later found out he was thirty. If someone had asked me to guess at his age, I would have guessed an incredibly well-preserved thirty-eight or thirty-nine. He had a young face and smooth hands, but his eyes were wise and darkened by his journey through life.
    At meeting after meeting, our eyes found each other, locking silently in the presence of sad and barren grief. Most nights, Jude left as soon as the group concluded, stuffing his hands in his pockets and slipping out into the hot Florida darkness, eyes watery and downcast.
    I watched him sometimes, in the parking lot before group as he waited, his fingers tightly pinching a clove cigarette or leaning against the wall finishing his latte, eyes squinting against the sun reflected off the hot asphalt, face so still and distant. I thought about approaching him, but he seemed foreign and exotic to me. I could no more approach him than I could have spoken to Paul Newman or Prince William.
    During group, on the rare occasions when he opened up, he spoke in unfragmented speech that sometimes sounded scripted, not insincere exactly, just precise, as if he had composed his thoughts in advance and was now spilling them out in tightly crafted phrases that bespoke extraordinary control. This was a man whose words were characterized by a streamlined precision that, in his finest moments, left no facet of his grief unexplored or unexpressed.
    All these wrenching declarations were uttered from beneath a pair of brooding, brightly mismatched eyes, one blue and one green. And when the weight of his grief drew tears out onto his long, trembling lashes, the power of his emotion drew us all breathlessly back into our own dark, tearful places.
    He was the kind of man who, in different circumstances, could be called upon to produce effective, emphatic sound bites. Of course, I would later learn that this was Valor’s legacy to her son. Like his mother, Jude wielded words so skillfully that I felt myself stammering and gasping in his presence, hoping vainly to stumble upon some combination of syllables that would not make me sound vapid or ignorant or trite. I was terrified of him.
    As spring melted into summer, the sunset came later and later; the heat lingered in the parking lot and wafted through the poorly air-conditioned meeting room, giving everything a humid, pressurized feel. With the heat pressing down upon us, we found ourselves speaking in longer, less-focused streams, as if the very air around us was melting and elongating our words.
    On one of those hot summer nights, I talked about Dana. I talked about my beautiful blue-eyed sister in a long, rambling string of half-formed stories and feelings that poured from me until I could feel the