Old Cape Cod

by Ian McDuff

In which Lance’s Most Embarrassing Moment evolves from patty-cake to Patti Page. Sort of.

This is for the Lance Slashficathon Challenge. My assignment? As follows:

Name [of who I was writing for]: Jennifer. Yes, that Jennifer, the lovely tallories.

Pairing [that the recipient preferred]: Lance/Jess(i)e. (This – again – must be why they call it a challenge, quoth the McDuff, evermore.)

Two things [the recipient] wants: ‘A plastic Coca-Cola bottle on the nightstand (half full) and breath that smells like spearmint.’ (Ooooookay. Um. Sure.)

One thing [the recipient] doesn’t want: ‘JC, Joey, Chris and Justin.’ So be it, then.

Well, then. Some non-gen for Jen it is.

Old Mrs Terhune, relict of the late suffragan bishop, was the doyenne of the shore, the local Lady Mayoress and beach patrol in one, and had been so since the bishop had been a young (albeit well-bred and frightfully well-off) curate, what time she and he, newly wed, had acquired their summer place there, his mummy and daddy having given them the real property and her mumsie and dear p’pa having paid for the cottage to be built, halfway between the respective in-laws’s summer retreats. For decades, girl, young wife, and whit-leather widow, she had stalked the dunes like a patrician, Kate Hepburnish shore-bird, and with the air of a Proprietress. And as everyone – even the People Who Rented and who would not recognize (or, of course, be recognized) by the Social Register if it bit them in their nouveau riche asses – as everyone well knew, Old Mrs Terhune simply loathed litter on ‘her’ shore. Deplored it, deprecated it, and damned those responsible. Damned them, and was not past frog-marching them to the scene of their depredations and standing grim guard as they Learnt to Pick Up After Themselves Like Decent People.

A watcher, there in the earliest dawn, then, would have seen Old Mrs Terhune’s spare frame stiffen and her stride lengthen angrily when she first caught the glint of the bottle in the sands. Had the watcher been able to follow her progress to the scene of the spoliation, he would have expected an explosion, for beyond the bottle of half-drunk pop was what could only be called a trail of litter, a line of flotsam and jetsam that led inexorably away from the tide line and to one of the cottages currently rented to some Rental People.

It was a positive madness of litter: from the discarded plastic bottle, obscene in the dawn, still half-filled with Coca-Cola (Old Mrs Terhune could probably have borne it with better grace had the bottle been glass or the contents been Moxie), through a dew- and morning fog-sodden trail of hastily strewn garments (possibly, Old Mrs Terhune admitted to herself, even attaining in some cases to 100% cotton, but certainly not garments of the class and condition that she was used to seeing here, with ducks and dungarees, Nantucket reds and madras and worn, faded Izods all being conspicuous by their absence), to a drunken-looking flip-flop half-buried in the sand (Old Mrs Terhune was a firm maintainer of the belief that had Divine Providence wished mankind to wear such devices, He would not have created Topsiders).

A watcher in the dawn would have seen Old Mrs Terhune look long and flintily at the detritus thus wantonly allowed to mar the Best Spot On the Cape, and guessed, perhaps, that she was reading these mute objects’s sordid and déclassé story in her mind, and preparing to descend upon the evildoers who authored this blot on her Eden, breathing fire and slaughter.

But Old Mrs Terhune had recalled, prompted by the Coke bottle, who precisely it was who was renting the Kip-Gifford place. She had, of course, Called when they first arrived (a process unkind residents surreptitiously referred to as ‘the unwelcoming wagon,’ on the grounds that this social ritual, in Old Mrs Terhune’s capable hands, had been made over into an assessment of who would and who would not be allowed to stay without being made miserable). And with the typical contrariness of her age and class, she had promptly adopted the two youths, taken them under her wing, and dared anyone to say an unkind word about their presence, obvious preferences, antecedents, and activities.

Her sudden grin as she looked at the wrack and wreckage would have discomfited the hypothetical watcher.

Her grin, proceeding from a very good guess at the course of events to which the wrack and wreckage bore silent witness, would have discomfited still more the two young men responsible.

Jess had a vice. (No, not that one. Old Mrs Terhune, who was possessed of a tongue like a bradawl, would have perforated anyone who dared suggest that his and Lance’s preferences were a vice.) Models, to almost the same extent as flat-race jockeys, are slaves to the scale, and exist in a state of perpetual starvation. And models, quite as much as cinema actors, are slaves to their dentists, forever haunted by the need for the whitest of teeth. Nonetheless, in his own quiet rebellion, Jess had a weakness for Coca-Cola. And not the unleaded type, either: pure-D caffeine and sugar. Lance teased him about it mercilessly, threatening to Southernize him by putting peanuts in the bottle, and trying to convert him to the Church of Dr Pepper, but Jess was adamant, in his quiet way. There was always a bottle of Coke within reach, on end tables, in the cooler, even on the nightstand: usually half-empty, lukewarm, and slightly flat, because Jess never finished more than half a bottle at a time. (When that fearsome old grande dame, Old Mrs Terhune, had Paid A Call on them, Lance had shuddered, expecting to catch pluperfect hell once her somewhat beady eyes had taken in the litter of Coke bottles on every available surface. But the old girl had surprised him: surprised him greatly, in that a long experience with the Southern avatars of the Old Mrs Terhunes of the world had left Lance with the ability to spot, at some three hundred yards, the sort of old lady who could ‘go bear-huntin’ with a switch.’)

But that was just one of the quirks that made Jess, Jess: and that suited Lance right down to the ground. It was so very Jess of the boy to have a final, nightly, bedside swig of Coke and obsessively to chase it with some sugar-free, dental-miracle-working spearmint gum, and to wake in the morning and repeat the process even before he had his eyes fully open, much less had gotten out of bed to brush and floss. Lance had gotten very happily used to the sudden waft of spearmint that told him Jess was near.

He was comfortable, sleepy, and content when the minty-freshness of Jess breezed his cheek and ear.

He was awake, heart pounding, sitting bolt-upright when what Jess had to say into that ear got through to him.

The night before, under the moon and stars that gave an illusion of magic privacy, had been one thing. In the light of day, though….

He could see it without looking.

The Coke bottle that had been forgotten as Lance had suddenly drained his own Diet Dr Pepper and said, ‘You intoxicate me.’

The shirts that had been discarded as Lance hungrily licked and kissed and sucked his way all over Jess’s torso.

The trunks, further up from the tide line, that had gone the way of all trunks when he had carried a half-heartedly objecting Jess, half-laughing and half-struggling, desperate not to wake the whole shore but protesting about sand and public places and ohmyGodLance, and had rimmed the boy into insanity in the scrubby vegetation.

The whole trail of forgotten, cast-off clothing and towels and general detritus and impedimenta that had been left in their wake as he had kissed, rimmed, blown, and fucked Jess in stages from the shore to their own cottage lawn.

And now it was pitiless morning, and all of the night’s secrets were lain bare, and Old Mrs Terhune was sure to be on her self-appointed rounds and –.

They had just managed to throw on some clothes, knocking a half-empty bottle of Coke off the nightstand in the process (fortunately, the cap was on it), and Lance had purloined a stick of Jess’s omnipresent spearmint gum in lieu of brushing, and they were clattering down the stairs, when the doorbell rang.

Pale with horror, knowing, just knowing, who their caller had to be, Lance eased the door open.

Old Mrs Terhune, in full fig, ramrod straight from straw hat to faded madras espadrilles, solemnly handed over their clothes and towels, perfectly folded, atop which, between Jess’s flip-flops, proudly stood a half-full bottle of Coke.

‘I believe,’ she said gravely ( but her eyes danced as she said it), ‘these are yours.’

And before they could stammer any response, before Lance was finished blushing, even, she winked, and executed a smart about-face, and was striding away, down the path and back to the shore, past the dunes, her shoulders heaving. Jess and Lance looked at each other in embarrassment and concern, and in dread of what those heaving shoulders might signify, until, when she was past the dunes and only the crown of her straw hat was visible, they heard unloosed, clear even at that distance, peal upon peal of silvery, patrician laughter.

END