Cuddling Read online

  “Didn’t really work out that well,” Matt said, giving a slight grin, though his eyes looked sad. “We pulled away from each other, and I got angry. You could have said a million things that night, walked out of my life forever, but instead you kissed me.”

  Jacob laughed. “I’d never seen you speechless before. If I knew that was the way to shut you up, maybe I would have done it sooner.”

  “Yeah, you always did play dirty,” Matt said, seeming happier than before. He took a deep breath, looking down at the pastry box. “Maybe it’s time I evened the score a little.”

  Jacob wrinkled his forehead in confusion. “What?”

  “So, Walton’s isn’t around anymore, but that bakery on Vine makes pretty good desserts.” Matt pushed the box toward Jacob. “Happy anniversary.”

  Jacob felt a rush of joy, thinking of how much of a sap his boyfriend was. “Really? You got us cupcakes to celebrate?” he asked, running his finger around the edge of the box.

  Flipping open the lid, he saw that there were two huge cupcakes inside, both decorated with layers of blue frosting reminiscent of the ones Matt had shared all those years ago. But the designs weren’t what caught his eye. Sitting atop the mound of sugary blue was a gold band, one on each cupcake, like they were just another decoration the bakery added.

  “What…?” Jacob began, unable to find the words. He looked up, expecting to see Matt across the table from him, but instead his boyfriend was now kneeling beside Jacob’s chair. His eyes widened at the sight.

  “You’ve been my best friend for fifteen years,” Matt began, his voice a bit shaky as he looked up at Jacob. “We’ve grown up and faced every one of life’s challenges together.”

  “And been stronger because of it,” Jacob said, his own voice unsteady as he tried to control his emotions.

  “Every first I had was shared with you.” Matt gave a soft smile. “My first school dance was spent hiding in the corner with you, making fun of all the girls in their ugly pink dresses.”

  Jacob let out a laugh at the memory as Matt continued.

  “My first football game, you were in the stands cheering the loudest.”

  “I think your mom was drowning me out, actually,” Jacob said, feeling like he was on the edge of falling apart, though he didn’t know if it was from joy or anticipation.

  “And the first time I fell in love, real love, I was looking at you,” Matt said, taking Jacob’s hands in his own. “Every day I get that same rush of happiness I had back then, sharing my life with the one person who knows me inside and out.”

  Jacob was silent as Matt released his hold, pushing himself up straighter on his knees to reach the pastry box and pull it toward the edge of the table. He reached inside, grabbing one of the gold bands and pulling it out. There was still a streak of blue icing staining the underside of the metal, but Jacob couldn’t find his voice to point that out.

  “I can’t see my life without you in it, and I don’t want to,” Matt said, lifting Jacob’s left hand as he offered the ring in his right. “I love you, and I would be honored if you would be my husband. Jacob Thomas Nelson, will you marry me?”

  Jacob sat frozen, looking from the ring to Matt’s face and then back again. As the seconds ticked by, Matt started looking unsure, but soon Jacob broke out of his self-imposed silence to answer with a loud, “Yes, of course!”

  Matt starting laughing, his hold on Jacob’s hand shaking as he pushed the ring onto its rightful place. Once the gold band was on Jacob’s finger, his hands went to the sides of Matt’s face, pulling him closer so they could kiss. Jacob wasn’t going to hold off his tears any longer, feeling they were well deserved at this point.

  “I love you, I love you,” he kept repeating as he touched Matt’s lips with his own.

  “Me too,” Matt said, his voice rough, as if he was trying to control his emotions as well.

  Jacob pressed their foreheads together, the sound of their breathing the only noise between them for the moment. He concentrated on that, gathering his own thoughts before he was ready to speak again.

  “My turn,” he said, pulling back. The blue icing from his ring had marked his boyfriend’s cheek. No, his fiancé, he corrected himself.

  Matt looked up at him, confusion evident in his eyes, but that soon cleared up as Jacob reached for the other gold band. He rubbed the metal against his pants leg, trying to clean off the sticky blue that marked it. Once Jacob deemed it okay, he reached for Matt’s left hand.

  “My life changed when I met you, and it’s been changing ever since. It’s been difficult at times, but everything we’ve done and everything we’ve experienced has led us here.” Jacob took a deep breath, making sure he could get the words out without faltering. “Matthew Edward Brooks, I will love you until my dying day. Will you marry me?”

  “Of course I will,” Matt said, his tone matching the utter joy evident on his face.

  Jacob slid the gold band onto Matt’s finger, then joined their hands together so their rings were touching. Forever and a day, that’s how long he would spend with this man. Best friends to boyfriends and now to husbands, all because of cupcakes. Jacob thought it was the perfect beginning to their story.

  In her youth, K. LYNN could be found in the local library, devouring books that covered everything from WWII to Dr. McCoy’s latest adventures aboard the Enterprise, with some X-Men thrown in for good measure. She also created elaborate adventures that more than once made it to the page. Ink-filled papers gave way to overflowing computer memory as the years went on, but the stories never ceased.

  While in college, K. Lynn increased her involvement in LGBT issues and writing within the LGBT genre. She has become a long-time fan of the authors who seek to explore the commonality that exists within all sexualities and genders. Most of K. Lynn’s work features LGBT characters, many of whom are in established relationships and show how love perseveres through every trial and tribulation that life holds.

  K. Lynn has degrees and certificates from UNC-Chapel Hill in the areas of American History, Religion, Creative Writing, Public Health, and Journalism. She is a member of Mensa and has an extensive writing and editing background. When K. Lynn is not writing short stories, she is working on her novels.

  Find K. Lynn online at http://WriterKLynn.com, on Twitter @WriterKLynn, or drop her a line at [email protected].

  At First Sound

  G.S. Wiley

  “OH, MR. KENDRICK. I don’t know how I can ever thank you for saving my father’s ranch.” Ada Mae Scruggs clutched a white-gloved hand to her breast. Her accent was a strange amalgam of British and Bostonian, made all the more surprising by the fact they were in the Arizona desert. Through the living room window, a saguaro cactus was visible, and a cow’s skull hung above the fireplace.

  “Knowing you’re safe is all the thanks I need,” cattle wrangler Bud Kendrick replied, his voice tinged with the barest hint of manly emotion.

  “Oh, Mr. Kendrick.”

  “Oh, Miss Scruggs.” They came together, their lips pressed firmly and chastely against one another. Bud took Ada Mae in his arms, making sure not to turn either of their faces toward the wall. Ada Mae moved, just a little, and the top of her stiff, high bonnet pushed Bud’s cowboy hat off the back of his head.

  Bud heard it fall to the floor behind him. He held the kiss gamely, hanging on until a voice said, “Cut,” and Ada Mae pushed him away like he was carrying fleas.

  The camera, encased in its huge soundproof box, ground to a halt. Bud—Bobby Carling—stepped back and retrieved his hat. “Again?” Ada Mae Scruggs, now speaking in the dulcet Brooklyn tones of America’s scrappiest sweetheart, Daisy O’Reilly, flung down her bonnet in despair. Rather, she tried to, but the ribbon caught around her throat, leaving her with the bonnet hanging haphazardly down her back. “Mr. Cukor would have had this in the can seven takes ago.”

  “Perhaps he would have, Miss O’Reilly.” The director, Mr. Gish, refrained from sighing. Bobby recognized tha
t as a significant accomplishment. He couldn’t have managed it. “Why don’t we leave it there for today? We’ll take it up again in the morning.” Daisy stormed off scrappily, the bonnet still around her neck. Bobby smiled at Mr. Gish, who pushed up his little round glasses, a look of long-suffering in his myopic, moleish eyes.

  “Well done, Mr. Carling, as usual.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Gish.” Bobby meant it. He glanced off set. Daisy was arguing with her dresser, a portly German woman she treated like an old-fashioned maid. Or a slave. “Miss O’Reilly certainly is—”

  “Scrappy?” Mr. Gish put in.

  “That would be one word for it.” The others couldn’t be uttered in polite company. Bobby wasn’t even going to utter them around the crew, who could surely have handled them.

  “There’s an interviewer here for you, Bobby.” The second assistant director, a gangly young man with an Adam’s apple the size of a cantaloupe, came up beside Mr. Gish. “From Movie Photo Digest.”

  “Of course.” Bobby couldn’t keep these magazines straight. He didn’t know his Movie Mirror from his Photoplay Pictorial, but his agent told him they were good for business. He couldn’t doubt it, even if it did give him a strange, awkward feeling in his stomach when they sent him the issues and he saw his own face beside the likes of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert. “I’ll get my makeup off first. Would you tell him to give me ten minutes?”

  “It’s a her,” the second assistant director corrected, leering. “And a heck of a her, if you ask me.”

  Bobby had been at the studio longer than Daisy O’Reilly, but his dressing room was smaller. He could have made a fuss about that—it was the sort of thing his agent was always telling him he ought to make a fuss about—but Bobby couldn’t bring himself to care. It had all he needed. There was a sofa for lying down on breaks, a comfortable chair for guests, and a dressing table. Two posters from earlier studio productions, neither of which had featured Bobby, hung on the walls, put there by the studio. The only personal touch was a photograph of Bobby’s Saint Bernard, Freya, stuck into the frame of the mirror.

  Bobby wiped off the thick layers of makeup using a cloth and a bowl of warm water. He ran a comb through his hair, in case the lady from Movie Picture Screen or whatever it was called wanted to take a photograph.

  Bobby knew he was very handsome. He wasn’t naive. He knew that was why he’d been popular in school, even though he was smart and loved books; he knew that was why his agent, Joseph Goldstein, had noticed him at the beachside soda fountain where Bobby once worked as a waiter. He knew it was why he had a mansion in the Hollywood Hills, with a swimming pool and a movie screen and three brand-new cars, when other men his age were picking oranges for starvation wages or standing on the breadline. Still, he didn’t feel any pride in his looks. They weren’t an accomplishment; they were an accident of birth.

  “A gift,” Bobby’s best friend Soren called it, one afternoon when they were lying out by the swimming pool. “Like being very intelligent, or being very good at baseball, ya? You should be feeling happy about it.” Bobby tried to, but there was no escaping the little voice, forever lurking in the back of Bobby’s mind, that asked What will you do when your looks fade?

  When Bobby was ready, he opened the dressing room door. A knot of people had gathered in the hallway, all men. Bobby squeezed past gaffers and best boys, set dressers and carpenters and a few of the minor actors, until he came face-to-face with the woman at the center of it all.

  She was young—younger than Bobby, who was twenty-six—with a Betty Boop figure and bright-red lips, wearing a white cloche hat and matching shoes. When she looked up at Bobby, she batted thick, long eyelashes. Bobby knew at once why every man in the studio had chosen this moment to congregate in the hallway.

  “Mr. Carling?” At once, Bobby felt the jealousy of every man there as if it were a palpable thing, weighing on his shoulders. “I’m Jeanette Theodore. From Movie Photo Digest.”

  “Of course.” Bobby gave her his most charming smile. She held out a hand covered in a white lace glove. Bobby took it. His first instinct was to shake it, like he’d shake a man’s hand, but that didn’t seem appropriate somehow. A more courtly man, a man like Soren, would kiss it, so that was what Bobby did. He planted the lightest of pecks on the back of Miss Theodore’s glove. “Will you come inside?”

  “You’ll need a chaperone, won’t you?” Bobby looked up and saw Charlie Gregson. He’d worked on several films with Bobby, always as a background actor. Bobby didn’t know him particularly well, but on occasion they shared a cigarette between takes or an early-morning coffee on set.

  “I’ll leave the door open.” Bobby made his tone just a touch roguish. Miss Theodore laughed and followed him into the dressing room.

  Miss Theodore’s gaze landed on the photo of Freya first. Bobby supposed that was natural. There wasn’t much else of interest in the room. “Oh, how sweet. Is it yours?”

  “Yes,” Bobby said. That was the simple answer. The more complicated, and truthful, answer was that she was Soren’s dog, but Bobby lived with her.

  Soren had encountered the word stepmother recently, probably listening to Painted Dreams or some other serial with Lupe, and he’d been intrigued by it. “You are Freya’s stepmother, ya?” he’d said to Bobby as they lay in bed one lazy Sunday morning, Freya snoring on the floor beside them.

  “Maybe stepfather.” Bobby conceded. That sounded a bit better.

  “What’s the dog’s name?” Miss Theodore took a seat on the chair. Bobby sat on the sofa across from her. She pulled a pen and a notepad from the leather bag over her shoulder.

  “Freya.” He spelled it out, and Miss Theodore wrote it down.

  “That’s just the sort of thing our readers love. Little details about a star’s life.” She smiled. Her teeth were perfect, even and white. Bobby would have asked her if she’d ever thought of becoming an actress, but he didn’t know how to phrase it without sounding like every lecherous Joe in Hollywood.

  Instead, he said, “What kind of details?”

  Miss Theodore rested the end of her pen against her Cupid’s-bow lips. “What do you like to do, when you’re away from the set?”

  Several answers sprung to mind. All of them were inadvisable, and most of them would end his career. “I love going to parties.” He lied. “I’ve got a lot of friends, and they throw some real juicy parties.”

  “Is that so?” Miss Theodore’s smile grew. “Can you give us any names?”

  “Barbara Stanwyck.” She had so many parties, not even she would know whether he went or not.

  The interview went on. Miss Theodore asked the usual questions, about Bobby’s childhood in Orange Tree, California, and about being discovered at the Coconut Shack. They talked about his past films and those he had upcoming, and then Miss Theodore asked The Question, the one Bobby hated but which they all got to eventually. “I hope you won’t think this too personal,” she began, and Bobby knew immediately that he would, “but our female readers would love to know if you’ve got a special lady.”

  He didn’t. Bobby had a special gentleman. They lived together, they loved each other, they shared a dog, and he would never be able to breathe a word of that to anyone. Instead, he told Miss Theodore what he told everyone who asked the question: “I’m always hoping I’ll meet my kitten one day.”

  Miss Theodore finished writing and began to pack up her things. “Are you doing any photographs?” Bobby asked.

  “Our photographer will be at your house tomorrow.” She looked up. Bobby’s alarm must have shown on his face, because she went on. “We arranged it with your agent. I would have done the interview then too, but I’m meeting Clark Gable.” A dreamy look came to her eyes. Bobby couldn't blame her.

  “Of course. That’s fine.” Bobby stood to see her out. She hesitated for a moment at the dressing-room door.

  “You’ll probably think I’m a dumb Dora.” She looked Bobby in the eye. “But if you like good music, th
ere’s a keen juke joint on Hollywood Boulevard. Max’s Place. I go there all the time.” Her meaning was unmistakable.

  Bobby’s cheeks grew warm. “That’s nifty.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you there one night.”

  “Maybe.” Never. Miss Theodore left. Bobby waited a minute or two, so he wouldn’t have to run into her again, and did the same. As he passed Daisy O’Reilly’s dressing room, he heard her shriek, “And tell my goddamn agent this is the last picture I’m working for anyone less than Curtiz, or he can look for a new goddamn job!” There was a crash of something heavy hitting a wall. Bobby flinched, thanked God yet again he wasn’t her agent or her director or her maid, and walked on.

  GROWING up in Orange Tree, California, in a tiny house with two bedrooms and five siblings, Bobby had dreamed of owning a mansion. He’d never expected his dream to actually come true, but there was no other word to describe his home. It had been built especially for him, carved into the Hollywood Hills. Bobby liked that. He liked the idea that in a hundred years, or fifty, or whenever everyone had forgotten about him and all his films had turned to dust, he would still have left his mark in some way.

  Bobby parked his bright-blue Cadillac Twelve inside the heavy iron gates. Rather than go inside, he went around to the back of the house, passing through the grove of orange trees until he came to the swimming pool. He knew that was where Soren would be.

  Even after sixteen years in California, Soren was still amazed by the weather. “You are not understanding, darling Bobby,” he’d explained once, and Bobby’s heart had swelled at the endearment. “In Sweden, it is always cold. Even when it is warm, it is cold. Why are you thinking Garbo is so icy?”