Jon From High School

by Jeremy Jenkins

“No…” I said.

  I was not going to give up. Not now.

  All of my thoughts about pretending to be straight and how important it was, blew away. It all sank under the fact that I needed Victor’s dick.

  I needed to reclaim this part of myself; the part I’d been ignoring for all of these years.

  “Keep going,” I said.

  He pushed in another millimeter.

  I groaned.

  It was painful, sure, but there was an overwhelming undercurrent of deliciousness to that pain. And I wanted to keep hurting. Maybe this would help me atone for my sins.

  He slid in a little further.

  I knew it was still the tip; I hadn’t felt that little bit of give that I knew I’d feel when he got his whole head in.

  I felt his warm hands land on my hips.

  The touch filled me with… with validation. I didn’t know the fuck why, but it was there.

  He pushed in another millimeter—

  “Stop,” I said through my teeth.

  He pulled out.

  My ass was burning.

  I changed my mind. I couldn’t do it.

  Not tonight, anyway.

  I flopped over on the bed.

  He laid down next to me.

  I felt guilty. Like I owed him something.

  Again, was this how women felt?

  I turned to him.

  The only thing in his eyes was confusion.

  It was up to me to punctuate this session; to let him know that he was desired. I didn’t want him to think of me as some pathetic asshole who couldn’t handle him.

  Fuck, I could handle anything.

  And as soon as I did that, as soon as my mind changed everything to a competition, it was on.

  I lunged over to him, peeled his condom off, and plunged my lips onto his cock.

  “Oh—oh!” he cried, arching his back.

  It filled me with delight knowing he wasn’t expecting that.

  He tasted like rubber from the condom.

  I didn’t care.

  I still had something to say to him. And I’d say it with the bobbing of my neck.

  He moaned as I took him into my mouth, gagging all over his fat cock.

  Spit dribbled out from my mouth as I choked, trying to take him into me.

  Trying to prove something.

  I was fucking him, in a way, with my mouth.

  I was the one on top. I had the power. Even though I was sucking his dick, I was the one with control.

  It occurred to me that this might have been how he felt in that dark band room, all those years ago.

  “Yeah… keep going,” he said.

  Oh, how things had come full circle.

  I reached underneath my body and started jerking myself off.

  It was so hot, this… this power. Maybe that’s all sex was; an exchange of power.

  Was that the essence of being a lover?

  His cock plunged into my mouth and touched the back of my throat, and that fucked the thought right out of my head.

  I gagged and pulled myself off him, dribbling spit everywhere.

  “You like that?” he asked through gritted teeth.

  “Yeah…” I said, still jerking myself off.

  Victor glanced at my cock, then his eyes flicked back up to mine and narrowed.

  I knew he wouldn’t touch it. I knew it was my turn to give to him.

  Hell, I’d taken from Victor. I’d taken so much.

  But dammit, I was going to come on him. I was going to erupt all over those abs, watch my sticky goo flow down the crevasses of his beauty—

  Suddenly, he shoved me aside.

  We rolled so he was on top.

  I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything when I was with him.

  I was too close to the edge.

  Then victor looked down at me with dark lust in his eyes, and grabbed his monstrous cock. His fingers didn’t touch around the shaft—that’s how big he was.

  But, he looked into my eyes and started stroking himself all the same.

  His mouth came open slightly.

  I was jerking myself off.

  He was jerking himself off.

  Somewhere in there, we switched.

  My hand was on his shaft, and his was on mine.

  We were moaning; fusing our sounds together here in this dark room.

  “Fuck Jon, I’m gonna—”

  “Me too!”

  And just like that, both of our cocks erupted at the same time, spewing sticky white lassos though the air.

  “Oh! Oh! Oh!”

  I wasn’t sure if it was him or me that made the noise, but the air was filled with the moans of pleasure.

  There was endless sound. Endless come as we kept spewing and spewing our collective semen like a squirt gun.

  It landed on my chest, and I felt something hot under my neck. Fuck, it must have gotten there, too.

  But I was too transfixed on Victor’s face to take stock of how the come was spewed all over me, drawn in a squiggly line like a Jackson Pollock.

  All I knew was that finally, finally, I’d gotten what I came for.

  I had my fingers closed around the thing I’d been searching for my entire life.

  I’d found the answer to my question.

  Victor collapsed over my chest, gluing us together with our mixed come.

  It felt like… well, it felt magical. It felt like the cum was just a symbol for our bond.

  We were sealed together, Victor and I.

  Glued.

  Stuck.

  More than just physically.

  Victor had been trapped in my mind for all these years while I tried to shove the memory of us and my desire for him under the surface.

  This was just the physical manifestation of those desires.

  There were no words.

  We didn’t need them.

  I moved my hand down his smooth, muscley back, gently.

  He was breathing.

  I didn’t know what it was about that moment: the vulnerability, the bond, or the catharsis of finally telling the truth about myself—physically, anyway—but I knew in that moment that I wanted to spend every moment here.

  I needed him.

  And that scared me to death.

  So, I stayed the night.

  We tried to have sex two or three more times, but each time, it hurt too much.

  I kept trying because I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it. There was an instinctual urge within me that told me if I didn’t have sex with Victor now, I might not ever get another chance.

  As the night wore on, a voice in the back of my head grew in volume. The voice that said, “Oh my God, Jon, you’re such a fag!”

  It was the voice of my teenage years, coming back to haunt me. It created fear inside of me; told me that no one would ever love me. I’d lose everything if this ever got out, and I was making a terrible mistake.

  That voice hadn’t bothered me in years.

  But tonight… seeing Victor again, talking to him, connecting with him like this—it trudged up all those old feelings.

  I felt like an insecure high school kid again.

  Finally, after the third attempt to have sex (and the fourth time we both came), Victor laid next to me, exhausted.

  I nestled next to him and draped my arm across him.

  We were spoons; nothing more. Our bodies were just utensils we used to scoop this amazing connection into our souls.

  I lingered there a while, my nose in his hair, taking in his scent.

  It was the scent of memories. Of everything that should have happened over the past ten years, but didn’t.

  And it only didn’t happen because I was too much of a chicken shit to make it happen. I was too afraid to lose everything I’d worked so hard for.

  As Victor’s breathing eased, I couldn’t help but think of the sunk costs fallacy, and what it had ended up costing me.

  All this time.

  But then again, in
the end, there was only time. Money, status, power, reputation—it was all irrelevant.

  Time would crumble them all anyway.

  So how did I want to spend the rest of my time?

  The next morning when I woke up, Victor was already gone.

  I grasped at the empty sheet next to me, as if hunting for scraps and evidence of what happened the night before.

  Did it… did it really happen?

  I thought it would be like waking up with The Fear from a drunken night. That oh-so-familiar anxiety that pounces on you when you know you’ve sinned, and you have yet to take stock of how bad it was.

  But there was only a divine feeling of rightness.

  Slowly, the memories loaded. I remembered everything: the bar, feeling that connection again like a breath of fresh air, the connection between us, and everything else.

  Everything in the spaces between was thrown into stark contrast. It felt like I was living an inverse version of myself, if that made sense.

  Fuck, nothing made sense anymore…

  I sat up in bed, resisting the urge to check my phone. Resisting the urge to confront the outside world yet.

  I could stay here, in this womb of happiness for a little longer.

  Just a little longer.

  Still, my eyes flicked to the nightstand.

  There was a note waiting for me, folded with a pristine crease on its edge.

  I seized it and read it.

  At the gym. Be back at 8:45.

  Then I glanced at my phone and saw the time was only quarter past eight, and a bunch of texts from my group chat with Kyle, Terry, and Phil showed up underneath.

  That gave me pause and filled me with doubt.

  If they all knew I was gay, that might change things between all of us. They would re-think all of the times we’d been close. Cast a different light on the times we had sleepover parties in middle school. They would all be thinking that I secretly had gay crushes on all of them.

  They might direct their hateful words at me, instead of at all the people they thought of as outside our group.

  Gay. Fairy. Faggot.

  As I read through our group chat, I could feel the labels fluttering around my head, threatening to tattoo themselves on my body.

  I frowned.

  I could sense a choice coming. And everything in me told me to run.

  There was still time—Victor wouldn’t be back until half an hour from now. That was plenty of time for me to get my shit and leave.

  I tore from the bed and searched the floor for my clothes.

  Fuck, they were nowhere to be found—

  Right! We’d… we’d started doing the deed out in the living room, next to the window.

  Where anybody could see.

  I walked into the living room buck-ass naked.

  Dazzling morning light blasted through the window, illuminating all of my sins from last night.

  But I felt the resounding echo fo peace reverberate through my bones.

  I felt like I’d done the right thing. I’d lived my truth.

  I didn’t want to hide in the shadows anymore.

  It felt right, being in the window like this.

  So, I left my clothes on the floor and marched into the kitchen, still nude, and made myself a coffee. Then I stood stark naked in front of the window, sipping it victoriously.

  I felt like a victor.

  Half an hour later, Victor hustled through the door.

  I’d put my clothes back on by then, having reveled in the nude moment to my satisfaction.

  Victor’s mouth came open. “I… I thought you’d be gone.”

  “No,” I said.

  The word resounded through the air, the period after the two letters echoing throughout our conversation with finality.

  Something crossed through Victor’s eyes that I couldn’t read.

  Hell, my dyslexia had gotten better, but I still couldn’t read faces for shit.

  “I gave you time to leave—”

  “I didn’t want to,” I said, letting my eyes comb him up and down.

  He looked… so hot in those gym shorts and that tight v-neck. I could see the ridge of his collarbone poking out, and thought to myself that I’d never seen anything so sexy.

  “You stayed—”

  “We’re not done. And I’m not running anymore,” I said, standing up.

  He watched me with amazement in his eyes as I approached him.

  “I’m not done with us. We’ve never been done.”

  Victor’s thick eyebrows came together, confused. “But… I thought you were—”

  “Things are different now,” I said, ignoring the voice of fear in the back of my head. The voice that told me to forget about this; to keep living a lie.

  I found that the longer I spent in Victor’s presence, the more sure I was that this was the right path. Everything that wasn’t Victor-based was just floundering around with my mouth open, looking for scraps.

  I lowered my voice and gave him the most intense look I could muster.

  His eyes widened.

  “It’s always been you,” I said.

  Then we kissed again, slow and delicate this time.

  Our kiss last night in the bar meant, “I’ve missed you,” and it bordered on friendship. When we came back here, the kiss was filled with lust. It meant, “I want you.”

  But this? This kiss meant “I need you. Please believe me.”

  And from the way his lips melted around mine, I knew he did.

  He believed me.

  We spent the rest of the day in each other’s presence, in and out of that hotel bed.

  He had a meeting to get to later, he said, but until then, we could lounge around in bed all day and explore each other’s bodies.

  And God, I milked that.

  Every kiss we shared, I lingered on his lips just to maybe get a little more.

  We sucked each other off a few times.

  We experimented with anal again—still no dice. He was just too big.

  But I knew there would be times—plenty of times in the future for things like that.

  We ordered room service, watched TV, and overall spent a lot of our time making out.

  Making up for lost time, more like.

  The longer I spent around Victor, the better I felt.

  I ignored my group text with the guys; my phone forgotten on the bedside table, plugged in.

  The outside world could wait.

  Me and Victor weren’t finished.

  We’d never be finished.

  Somewhere in the blurred memories of us making out, I vaguely wondered if this was what heaven felt like. Because by comparison, whenever I wasn’t with Victor, I was in hell.

  I’d been searching for this my entire life, and I hadn’t even known it.

  Finally, after we shared some ice cream from room service and watched some basketball on TV, Victor said something that felt like a slap in the face:

  “I didn’t know when to bring it up…” he began.

  I hung on his every word, feeling like my ears were tipping toward him.

  Every syllable that came out of his mouth was sacred.

  He was sacred. To me, at least.

  He’d always been sacred.

  “I’m only in town for today,” he said sadly. “I’m still on tour.”

  I nodded slowly, feeling a plunging sensation in my chest. I knew our time together was limited; just two segments of time, touching for only this moment in our lives.

  The air around us grew heavy under the weight of the inevitability.

  There was nothing I could say or do that would compel him to stay.

  There was nothing I could say or do that would make me deserve him staying.

  Asking him to stay would be selfish.

  And dammit, I was done being selfish.

  I was finally mature enough to recognize the importance of everything we shared. Because a bond like this? It didn’t just happen.

  Somet
imes you met your person early on. Some people were lucky, and met their person when they were ripe and ready to get married when they were about to venture into their thirties. Some had to wait until they were old before they found their soulmate.

  But mine? Mine was right in front of me.

  Mine was this man next to me on the couch.

  And compared to him, nothing seemed to matter.

  I turned off the basketball game and looked him in the eye. “I know you have to keep moving around. You’re on tour and everything. You have a fan base, and that’s your career. I don’t expect you to give that up for the likes of me, not by a long shot.”

  He stared at me unblinkingly.

  “I just want to say that… that I felt something. I feel something with you, even if you don’t for me.”

  He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it.

  “When you leave, I’m going to start living my truth. I’m going to come out of the closet. Because when we… when we’re like this…” I tucked a lock of his dark hair behind his ear. “It’s the most alive I’ve felt since that night we shared by the campfire. “When I’m around you, I’m living my truth. My eyes have been opened to that. So thank you.”

  Victor stared at me for a little while, then nodded.

  He seemed to be struggling to find the right words.

  “You don’t have to say anything.”

  And he didn’t. He didn’t have to touch it.

  13

  Victor

  So I left.

  I kept touring. Kept making music. But Jon from high school lingered in my head, bleeding through all of my thoughts.

  Just like when I was a teenager, I’d lay awake in the middle of the night and think about him. I wanted to text him, I wanted updates on his life, but I didn’t know what to say. There was an invisible barrier between us again, that was re-erected as soon as we left that hotel room.

  On the other side of this membrane, the air was cold.

  Sure, I still had countless guys trying to get in my pants after my shows. So many people wanted to sleep with me; so they could get a taste of the realness in my music.

  But no one knew the truth about my music:

  The realness was inspired by all of the pain I felt from Jon, back in high school. The seeds of hatred winding around with… with other things, formed a vine that twisted around my soul and wormed its way into my creativity.