Always Have, Always Will

Chapter One 6:57.Three minutes left. The big red numerals still glowed despite the gray-blue frost that leaked into the room around the cheap plastic Levolor-look-alike miniblinds Michael had gotten for next to nothing with his employee discount at the Big Q store. He had three minutes. Then the alarm would go off and it would all start again. He closed his eyes and debated whether to wait for the alarm, or turn it off and get up, or just turn it off and try for a few extra minutes. "The party," he sighed as he remembered. He'd have to get up; too much to do to start the day behind. If he started out fifteen minutes behind schedule, the whole day would run fifteen minutes behind schedule, and there would be too many people jamming his minuscule apartment at eightish to spare fifteen minutes. He peeked.6:58.He still had two minutes. He squeezed his eyes shut and ground his morning erection into the pillow he'd wrapped his legs around. He pulled it to his chest and pretended he wasn't alone in the bed. The thought made him sad. "It's just another day without you," the DJ's voice cut into the blue darkness of Michael's bedroom from the speaker in the radio alarm. "The latest from Jon Secada here at BZZ 93.7 FM just our way of saying good morning, Pittsburgh, it's seven o'clock.""Morning alone," Jon sang into the hazy blue room. Michael put the pillow over his head as much to dry the tears suddenly on his face as to block out the way-too-apropos sound track that was beginning his day. "I breathe a little faster, every time we're together," Mr. Secada managed to interject into Michael's morning before Michael hit the snooze button and shut him off.He put his feet on the cool wooden floor and his face in his hands. He yawned violently and ruffled his hair ferociously as if to force the sleep from his body. "Great," Michael sighed, and fell back onto the bed, his feet still on the floor. "I'll be singing that in my head all day now," he said out loud in an effort to dispel the haunting lyric from the room. "Don't want to hold on to never, I'm not that strong," Jon sang in his head. 7:02. It had all started again. "Oh God, oh God, oh gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa..." The strangled cry trailed off as Brian put a pillow over the face of the guy who was doing the screaming. It was too early, and the guy's bedroom technique had mainly consisted of reciting the dialogue from Powertool. I gotta find another place to crash tonight, Brian thought, his mind wandering as he continued to plow the porn star wannabe moaning into the pillow beneath him. Brian's dorm privileges had ended three weeks earlier following graduation, and he had been in no mood to return to the arms of the family he had neither seen nor spoken to since the sophomore-year Christmas-tree incident. He smiled thinking about the looks of horror on the faces of those present when the tree went up like a torch as Brian touched it with the tip of the flame from his Zippo. His father had been in a drunken rage, and after smashing all the still-wrapped presents, he had shoved his son into the tree, nearly toppling it, so that he could slap his wife, a frequent enough holiday occurrence to be a Kinney Christmas Eve tradition. Brian had felt foolish saving the tree from falling as the blow landed on his mother's left cheek and knocked her backward into her favorite chair. "I know you don't appreciate it, you little bastard," Brian's father had said, gesturing grandly, raising his half-filled glass of whiskey. "There may be no presents under the tree for you today, you ungrateful son of a bitch," he went on, turning to direct the word bitch directly at Brian's mother. "But I've worked all my life so that someday, someday, all this will be yours." Setting fire to the Christmas tree had seemed the only possible response to that, it being his house and all. He lit the tree and then aBrockton, Quinn is the author of 'Always Have, Always Will' with ISBN 9780743476140 and ISBN 074347614X.