WAITING FOR A SIGNAL by Jeffrey Dale Lofton

WAITING FOR A SIGNAL by Jeffrey Dale Lofton

He didn’t say anything. Our fingers intertwined in a way that made me think of Church and Steeple. “Here is the church, here is the steeple . . . Open the door. . . .” And if we opened our hands only two fingers would appear, his and mine. Come this time tomorrow night, our hands, our church of two would be empty. Him here at home, me off at college.

As soon as he released me from the interlaced hand hold, he stepped out of the back seat and reached his hand to me, palm up and vulnerable. I took it, and as I climbed out and stood up, he wrapped it behind me and leaned us against the side of the car with my back arched in the same slant of the window. The hard metal and glass were so cool in contrast to the heat from him, the softness of him. I was standing, we were standing, but I felt as though I were lying down, flattened by him. He kissed me on the top of the head as he had two years ago. But this was a different kind of kiss, not the brotherly gesture but open-mouthed with a word, a bite into my hair, a sound that I couldn’t spell but knew the meaning.

He wants me. This boy actually wants me.

The walk back through the woods to the lake, the first time and place he kissed me, was slow, and I counted our steps, the pace so different from our trip from the lake earlier that evening. The heat of him rushed us so that he could usher me into the back seat and press his face to mine and whisper into my hands, “I missed you so much, Keebler.”

Now, we only had a goodbye waiting for us when we got back to the lake. We’d have to have a last kiss there. Someone might see us if he touched me on the side of the road where I left my car. But halfway through the woods he stopped. The moon wasn’t full, but it was bright. My eyes had already adjusted so that I could see. He leaned against a pine tree, his hands behind his head with his elbows splayed out, open and unprotected.

“You look like a TV antenna,” I whispered into that little dip in the center of his collar bone that had fine golden-brown hair curling out of the opening of his shirt. I knew they were there because I had memorized the way the setting sun tinted them and their tendency to peek out, each of them almost alive as they tickled my lips.

He finally said, “TV antennas can’t talk.” Then, “They wait for a signal.”

Then it was my turn. No matter how far I go from this town, home for all my years, I’ll always remember the sensation when he pressed me into the corner of the back seat—the weight of him metamorphosing me from a dull lump of something common into a fine, special thing that felt alive. He waited, still as the tree behind him. His breath was the only movement, and it gently stirred my hair much as a night breeze barely disturbs the fine tender pine needles sprouting high above.

I put my hands flat up to his chest, his heart quiet, but there, steady and well protected beneath the shirt and hair and skin and muscle and cage of bone between it and me. I ran my hands up to his neck and out to his upturned arms. I fought the sudden and surprising urge to press my face into the damp I felt where his arms connected to his body. Instead, I held fast on his eyes and cupped the knot of his elbows in my hands.

“I won’t forget where you are.”

And I marked this spot and this tree and him in my heart and promised him and me without words that I’d always know the way back. And I would come back. I said it in my head and my heart, and it was as real and as indelible as if we’d taken his pocketknife and carved ourselves into the bark of the tree.

Jeffrey Dale Lofton hails from Warm Springs, Georgia, best known as the home of Roosevelt’s Little White House. He calls the nation’s capital home now. During those early years he spent many a night trodding the boards of DC’s theaters, including the Kennedy Center, Woolly Mammoth, Washington Shakespeare Company, Signature Theatre, and Studio Theatre. He even scored a few television screen appearances, including a Super Bowl halftime commercial, which his accountant called “the finest work of your career.”When he stepped away from acting for other, more traditional work (much to his parents’ delight and relief), he also focused on pursuing post-graduate work, ultimately being awarded a Master’s degree in Library and Information Science. Today, he is Senior Advisor at the Library of Congress.Red Clay Suzie, his debut novel, was recently named a Lambda Literary Most Anticipated LGBTQIA+ Book and awarded the Seven Hills Literary Prize for Fiction.*Author photo credit Alyona Vogelmann