The Last Time We Met

11

When I got to Cedric's house he whisked me upstairs and shut the door behind us, twisting the lock. "Where's Nic?" I asked.

"Sleeping at his friend's house," Cedric managed to reply before I stuck my tongue in his mouth. When we came up for air, he added, "Wait a few minutes until my parents leave."

I relinquished my hold on him so he could get up and queue up some music. "I made us a mix tape," he told me, popping a cassette into the tape deck of an old boombox. He returned to my side and took my hand. We grinned at each other stupidly until Cedric's dad called out, "We'll be back in a few hours, don't wait up!" and the door slammed.

I didn't know what came over me then, my need to kiss him like I did. My mind went someplace else, a place where only he and I existed. The music sent me back in time. I hadn't had many memories of that life as Brent and Chris – it was more of a feeling, a remembrance of how I'd felt then. Like we were in love and all that mattered was being together.

Cedric seemed amused by how aggressively I was sucking on his neck and gripping him close to me. The amusement was replaced by a sucking of breath when I hauled down his pants and took him in my mouth like I'd done this a million times before. "James, have you been watching porn again?" Cedric gasped, distantly.

My mouth knew what it was doing, knew exactly what he would like. As if in a dream that song came to me, and if I closed my eyes I got confused about who I was and where. Through my eyelashes I would catch glimpse of colored Christmas lights taped to the walls and a thin mattress beneath me, then I would blink and I'd be on my knees on the Cedric's bottom bunk bed, the walls half covered in 80's band posters and the other half with Nic's death metal band posters.

Then, in one hazy moment, I looked up and I noticed Cedric's arm, where his birthmark was. Or should have been. There was nothing there, and when I blinked it was back, and then it was gone, and glancing up it was Brent looking down at me, his black hair turned pink and purple by the Christmas lights, and that song kept playing, and it wasn't me at all, it was Chris, I was Chris, and that made it all okay.

After, when I climbed up to lie beside him, it was Cedric's pink hair and gray eyes, and I had a moment where I thought he might not want to kiss me after my mouth had been down there. But it was the first thing he did: a long kiss that felt like he could keep us together forever from the pull of it.

He held my face in his hands. His eyes were so dark. "James, you need to show me some of this porn you're watching," he said.

I laughed, breathlessly. I couldn't explain to him where I'd learned to do what I just did. Then I realized the song was still playing. "This song," I said, at the same time that he slipped his hand down my pants.

"What song?"

A smile played over his face as I stuttered, trying to hold onto my train of thought. "This song, you know, it's our song. I've been trying to figure out what it is—"

"Our song?" Cedric drawled. "I didn't know we had a song. I didn't know you knew any music after, like, 1920." Turning back to me, he gave me another squeeze. "This is Yazoo. The band, I mean."

I wanted to tell him about the song and how it had been playing the first time we met, only it was more like the last time we met, because that hadn't been us. It had been us. I might have babbled something incoherent, because Cedric's hand was moving up and down, and soon he was returning the favor and words completely escaped me.

"Only you," he said, flopping onto his back. I pushed up his shirt sleeve and kissed his birthmark. "What about that song makes you think of us?"

I shrugged a little. No, I needed say something more. I didn't want to freak him out about the past lives thing, but if we were going to be together for much longer he needed to know. Besides, I told myself, he already knew I remembered past lives. I had been keeping too much of that from him, and I didn't want to anymore.

"I think it was our song in a past life," I murmured against his arm.

"A past life? Like your Victorian girl?"

"Henrietta," I told him, daring to look up at the smile I'd heard in his voice.

"Oh, she has a name now?" He was still smiling, like this was a joke.

How would he react if I told him he had been Henrietta? I pressed my lips to his birthmark again. I know I would have a hard time accepting it, if I hadn't had visions of myself as other people already. As both men and as a woman.

Cedric's fingers combed through my hair. "Okay, so a different past life. That's rad. Tell me about our past life in the 80s club scene," he whispered.

Keeping my eyes half shut, I tried to explain it. "I can't remember much. Just... the first time we met, that song was playing. We were at a club in LA. In 1985."

"That's... specific."

I decided to blow his mind with more specifics. "My name was Chris, and your name was Brent."

Cedric barked out a little laugh. "Seriously?" He rolled onto his back. I dared to look at his profile, guessed at what he was thinking. "Brent. Nice. A solid 80s name. I mean, Chad would be better, or Cory... What else?"

"I don't remember much else. It's just, like, one moment. Except..."

Closing my eyes, I felt that moment where I held Brent and knew there was something wrong.

"Except what?"

"I don't know. I mean, obviously, if it was a past life, we both died and now here we are. And that's good, right?"

Cedric sat up a little. "You remember how we died?"

"No, no. I mean, sometimes, when these memories come to me, I get this bad feeling. Like foreboding. I don't know how we died. I just figure, we must have died to be here now."

Cedric's eyebrows rose. "I mean, I guess. Geez. That's something to think about."

"Well, if we were eighteen in 1985, and we were both born in 2001, then we were both thirty-four when we died." Saying it out loud made it worse.

"Yeah, we definitely died young. Yikes."

I exhaled. "Sorry, I didn't mean to be a downer."

"No, it's okay." Cedric turned back to me and tilted my face toward his. "It's pretty awesome that you can remember stuff about past lives. Is that where you learned how to give the best blow job of all time?"

Laughing, I snaked my arms around his neck. "The best of all time?" I asked, smirking.

"Yup. Better than any past life I remember."

I grinned as I kissed him, again and again, until his parents came home, and I was still smiling as I drove home.