Honesty

by Seth King

  6

  Romantic movie dates. Sunny afternoons spent crisscrossing the trails of state parks. Occasional trips to gay bars to chat up friends. Shopping excursions to malls and outlet centers. Put-putting. These were the things I thought I would do with Nicky. These were also the things I did not do with him, not by a million miles. They were the ignorant, slightly silly fantasies I’d once had of what two boys would do, how they would act, in a world that let them in instead of locking them out. This what my relationship with Nicky really looked like:

  The day after the hand-holding event started out as a dream and a half. After FitTrax he met me in the alley behind the gym, in real life. The workout class had been a disaster, but seeing Nicky alone made it all okay. It was one of those cool summer evenings when the winds rushed in and rinsed away the bored restlessness of the day, and I was floating.

  “Do you want to come over?” he blurted out, like he was still deciding if it was worth saying.

  “To your house?”

  “No, to the teepee I live in, out in the fields. Yes, to my house.”

  “Why?”

  “Because we should be friends?”

  “Oh,” I breathed.

  “What?”

  “You…want to be friends…with me?”

  He was breathing so hard, I could feel it on my face. “You say it like I offered you cancer.”

  “Both are equally plausible in my mind,” I said under my breath. “And yeah, I’d love to. Sure. I mean, why not. I can cancel my plans. That I had. Because I definitely had plans. With my friends. That I have.”

  Nicky smiled and got up close to me as we walked with our bikes towards the sidewalk, the breeze ruffling his hair so beautifully, his scent cold and crisp in my nostrils, and in that moment I could swear the world had been invented just for us.

  But then he stopped, peering over his shoulder again. A girl was watching, but nobody else. “And Cole?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Could you maybe ride behind me?”

  “Oh. Sure.”

  “Maybe, like…a block behind?”

  And so we rode to his house…separately. I kept my distance, as requested, and when I saw him turn off the street, towards the ocean, my panic grew with every foot closer I got to his house. I learned he lived on the ocean, too, but his apartment building was much more run-down than mine, and was set further away from the beach. We parked our bikes and walked up two flights of stairs, and there we were – in his house.

  I blinked and then drank it in like a cold Miller Lite. I didn’t know what to expect, but it wasn’t this. It was…chic, almost. “So…you live here alone?”

  “Yep. I’m gonna change shirts, hold on.”

  He went into the bedroom…and closed the door behind him. Okay then. I looked towards the sea, and that’s when I saw it: two pairs of shoes. His dirty tennis shoes were next to a pair of women’s embellished flip-flops. Then I looked at the key pegs and saw two sets of keys. In the refrigerator, everything was divided in half. Someone else lived here with him.

  “Sup,” he said, stepping back into the room in a glorious blue tee. “Are you down for some video games or something?”

  “Um…video games…yeah. Great. I love, um, video games.”

  “Yeah? Which ones?”

  “Uh, I love that one…World of Battle Fighting, and um…Fast Racing Cars. Those are my faves.” He hesitated, and I cringed. Ask me about which singer was dating which movie star, and I’d tell you the location of their last date. But toss me a question about “boy” stuff like Fantasy Football or video games, and my motherboard was scrambled like a pan of eggs.

  He looked down, and suddenly he was cringing, too. Then he smiled. “Um…pocket banana? Or excitement?”

  I looked down and wanted to end myself right there. I wasn’t hard, per se, but I was getting hard, and because my filmy gym shorts were so wet with sweat, you could clearly see the outline of what was going on down there.

  “Ugh, sorry, forgot to wear underwear,” I said as I turned around and reached down to fix things. I had no idea how to act around him, and it was so obvious. When I faced him again, his face cracked, and for one second his mask fell off. Longing slid into his eyes and took hold of him, and I could see it so clearly: he wanted me. So much was compressed into that look, a lightning bug in a beer bottle, and for just a second, his face was on fire.

  “I didn’t say it was a bad thing,” he murmured. And the room caught fire.

  He turned away, heat still radiating off him. “Yeah. So. Anyway. Video games it is.” He breathed so deeply his shoulders trembled. “By the way, will you be there tomorrow?”

  “Where?”

  “FitTrax.”

  “Oh. I mean, sure. Probably.” Obviously I’d go anywhere he was, and it made me feel pathetic and breathless, and also a little giddy.

  “Okay. Meet me after class, then, at the same place. Same time. And maybe the day after that, too?”

  He couldn’t see me, but my eyes were as big as the sea. “You got it.”

  He sat on the couch, and I used the opportunity to scan the room. For some reason I wanted to remember every detail, inspect everything I could. I saw a tank with what looked like a large snail inside. “Why snails?” I asked him.

  “I just like them. They’re cool. Nobody can ever mess with them. They’re too…protected.”

  I glanced at his blinds, which were shut in the middle of the day. Then the curtains on the back door, which were closed. And I think I understood him a bit more. He was so weird, but I liked it. I was so used to being bored by people. Even interesting people were interesting in all the same ways, like those quirky teen novels that tried so hard to be unique, they all ended up sounding the same. But not Nicky.

  He saw my eyes, and what they were noticing. “Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “You don’t know me yet.”

  “What do you do for fun,” I asked, “when nobody’s watching?”

  He hesitated, then pointed to the magazines on his table. Architectural Digest, Modern Kitchen, all the big design magazines were there. “Really?” I asked. I was memorizing every fact about him that I could gather on the phone – his favorite song was Closer by Kings of Leon, he hated green beans, he was terrified of big dogs – but this had never been mentioned.

  “Really. I love for things to look clean, orderly, for everything to be in the right place.”

  “That’s not your major, is it?”

  He looked away. “Nah. I’m in more of a general art program – my family says interior design isn’t ‘suitable’ for me, in their words.”

  “Oh. Gotcha.”

  I stared at him for a second.

  “Maybe this is just me,” he asked soon, “but does the world ever feel like a-”

  “Prison?” I asked, and he licked his top lip as I thought about the wars we kept inside ourselves, the secrets that killed us. And suddenly all of the feelings I’d never let myself feel before exploded inside me at once.

  ~

  As the world slipped into the summer, Nicky and I started hanging out in person more and more – as “friends,” though. First we went to the dog park, then we went to the beach, finally we went to a matinee. He kept me at an arm’s length most of the time – Michael Jordan’s arm length, actually, avoiding anywhere his friends frequented like the plague multiplied by the bird flu. That didn’t leave many places for us to go, of course, so the red-rose dates were out of the question. He’d come over and then follow me straight through the dunes to the beach, always looking over his shoulder, always maintaining an almost bizarrely wide berth. If we went back inside to eat or something, I’d keep the curtains drawn at his request, and sometimes he wouldn’t even walk into the bathroom without peering through the window first, since it faced the walkway. I knew I was being a kept a filthy little secret, but I didn’t care enough to try to change it. The pros were massively outweighing the cons. Because something was happening. Something was sparki
ng. He was letting me into his world, and it was reinventing mine – even if I needed a heavy dose of wine and Adele every night to forget how bad it made me feel every time he denied me.

  Suddenly I was falling in love with my dumb little town, and felt like I hadn’t seen nearly enough of it. I’d never seen any of it, really. He made the world seem like a whole new place. We’d bike down the avenues, so beautiful in their rundown-ness, and get froyo at a cheap place with rickety, falling-apart picnic tables. We’d sit at hipster bars and drink gross beers and make fun of how shitty the local magazines were, and all the while I’d be drowning in him and be totally unable to mention it. We’d bodysurf, never touching or cavorting, just riding the waves, drowning in what was possibly deepening between us. But my favorite thing was to get on his golf cart with him and just ride. It was one of those expensive gas-powered ones, and sometimes it went so fast it made me dizzy. Nicky made me sit in the back, of course, and he usually wouldn’t bring it out until the sun was about to go down, to ensure nobody would stare. “Two dicks on one vehicle is just out of the question,” my dad used to say, and I assumed Nicky’s father was the same. But on that golf cart, we didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to look around, didn’t have to think about anything. We could just ride.

  The hangouts continued. Before long he became the highlight of my being alive, his light shining into every corner my life. I didn’t know how else to put it. I waited all day to see those galaxy eyes. For someone whose solo “Netflix and chill” sessions usually devolved into “overanalyzing my life choices and quietly slipping into a state of vague panic on my couch while not chilling” sessions, having a friend around all the time was sort of maverick to me. I never had to be alone anymore. I even started waking up to texts from him, and it felt like an explosion in my chest every time. He’d rant about his obnoxious neighbor or maybe complain about his mother, but I didn’t really care what he was saying, just that he was saying it. He was confiding in me, only me, and that made all the difference. One strange thing was that we did not talk about “the gay subject” one more time. Not directly, at least. But it was enough for me. He was enough. For now. He was undoing everything everyone else had ever done to me, and I never wanted it to end.

  I still had no idea how to conduct myself around him, though. Not a clue. I’d never been so self-conscious. When I acted like a friend it felt all stiff and wrong, and on the other hand, if I ever tried to get flirty, I’d scare him off. I’d never really had a close male friend before, and sometimes even I had to laugh at how awkward I was at the whole back-slapping, high-fiving, burping-in-public part of Being A Dudebro. We came across some of his guy friends once or twice, and when I attempted to slap hands with them, I usually missed and hit empty air. This was usually followed by several seconds of dead silence. Every time I tried to act like Nicky, or like Nicky’s boyfriend, I felt like I was trying to stick a laptop charger into an iPhone. It was like trying to read a book by a bad writer. Writing was a born skill, something you either could or couldn’t do, and the reader picked up on this immediately. The harder a non-writer tried to write, and sound like some artist or master, the more awkward and forced the reading experience became. Trying to figure out how to act just made everything worse. The most frustrating thing was that all I wanted was to act like myself. I was falling for him, and he was just a friend. Or was he a friend? What was he? What was this?

  I started looking forward to our hangouts with everything in me. Stepping into his world was like being inside a firework. He was the most spontaneous person I’d ever known, and he seemed to enjoy being alive more than everyone else did. So many people went through life half-asleep. I’d tried living once, and it sucked, so I’d gone back to my books and my photography. But he was different. If he wanted to do something, he’d do it. If he wanted to go hiking, he’d go. If he wanted a frozen coffee drink, he’d get up and get one. And I was just lucky to be along on the ride. During our days together, a lifetime of aloneness just melted away – I finally felt like I didn’t have to go through the world alone anymore.

  One random Saturday, we rode bikes from my house to Atlantic Beach, talking about all the different houses we liked. He liked traditional and I liked contemporary, but I was willing to overlook this in the sake of how sexy his hair looked in the sun. On Sunday he drove us to Lemon Bar, this outdoor bar on the beach, to use our fake IDs to get some beers. Drinking around him terrified and thrilled me, but so far he hadn’t really let the friend thing drop, even when he was drunk.

  In the meantime I was doing everything I could to make myself more desirable. I got layers in my hair, I stopped eating candy, I tried to grow out my facial hair a little to look mysterious. None of it worked. I knew exactly what I wanted, and had no idea how to get there. Still Nicky called me “dude” and “bro” and sometimes talked about girls he thought were hot. There was a strange airiness to him when he talked about females, his eyes looking like the vacant apartment buildings downtown. If he was an actor, he’d win worst performance of the year during these speeches. I didn’t say anything, though. We were all allowed to have our delusions, and also, what if I was actually the delusional one? What if he really was intent on being straight, and this was all a massive dose of wishful thinking on my part, just like usual?

  At night, when I was alone, I would lie on my couch in the light of the TV and imagine what our love would look like, if it were allowed to bloom. If I couldn’t have him, I would have the Him of my fantasies, and for a book nerd that was almost as good. I was good at it imagining, after all, as the only real relationships I’d ever been in had occurred exclusively within my head.

  “Oh, Nicky,” I’d say as we snuggled together in my daydreams. “You’re such a softie. The real version of you is so much better than that bro-ish hologram the world created of you.” He’d say nothing, nuzzling my neck instead, healing ancient wounds, as we settled into an all-night marathon of Will & Grace. We’d laugh at every joke, not feeling dirty or sinful for it at all, like when my dad had walked in on me watching the show after his divorce and called me a “queer” and turned off the TV. And some nights – okay, most nights – I would dream of Nicky, and it was always the same. I’d be driving along a random road on a stormy day, and a tornado would storm into my rearview mirror. It would chase me to the ocean, and then I’d have to ditch my car and swim away from the twister as it chased me down. Each time, I’d reach an island of safety, and the only person on that island would be Nicky. Only Nicky.

  And okay, maybe he wasn’t totally straight. Soon some cracks started showing in his resolve, however small they were. I was skeptical at first, but before long it became almost undeniable. At first it was just looks, like when I’d catch him checking out a guy in a restaurant, or even checking me out as I walked to the bathroom. A few times I’d catch him singing along to a “girl song” until he’d notice me and pretend like he didn’t know the words. But soon the big thing happened. After he biked over one night, we jumped around on my neighbor’s trampoline she kept by the sand dunes for her grandkids who visited maybe once a year. Soon we fell down in the middle of the net and started talking, and before I knew it, we were yawning.

  Was this normal? I wondered, fully aware that we were in plain view of all my neighbors. I had no idea what that word “normal” even meant anymore. Before this, my life had existed in terms of black and white, right and wrong, gay and straight, faggot and jock. But now we were sliding into the grey, whatever it contained. Every time we touched I felt an earthquake, every time he accidentally bumped into me, my knees wanted to buckle. I don’t know when or how we got sleepy that night, all I know is that I had never felt more comfortable, easier, than I did with him on that net. My old life suddenly seemed a million years ago – here I was, wonderstruck, lying around in my dead-end town with a kid I liked more than anything in the world. Who was this dream person I was becoming?

  “Nicky?” I asked when it became clear we were crashing outside for t
he night.

  “Hmm?”

  “Why’d you take so long to talk to me? After the app, and everything?”

  He was silent for a while. I was getting so bad at hiding my affection for him, and I knew I had to at least pretend to play the game, but I couldn’t.

  When he did speak, his voice was gruff and muffled and a million miles away. “Because I didn’t want to admit I was me yet.”

  I tried to creep closer, overcome by some deep and unexplored yearning for him. He felt like nothing I’d ever felt before.

  “Don’t touch me,” he groaned, rolling away.

  “What? Oh, I was just…finding a more comfortable spot. That’s all.”

  “Well please don’t.” For a minute I just heard the wind, but then he took a breath, his back to me. “Sorry, I know I’m weird about that. My father never touched me or hugged me growing up – not once, ever – and so touching is still, like, ‘a thing’ for me.”

  “Okay,” I said, turning and facing the sea. “Okay. Fine.”

  He put his head up, and I could tell he was half-asleep. “You’re not leaving, though, right?”

  I smiled, and suddenly I felt like I was not tethered to the ground anymore. Gravity was gone. “Nah. I’ll be right here.”

  As he fell asleep, he relaxed, even rolling a bit closer to me again. And everything in me unclenched just a little bit more.

  That night I dreamed about swimming to strange blue islands in pink oceans. I woke abruptly at five in the morning, still on the trampoline. A thin blue line on the horizon spoke of a sunrise that was about to break, but the world was still grey and muted. I looked around then, at this scene I’d woken up to a hundred other times, the grass giving way to the rolling dunes and the ocean beyond, but suddenly I felt like I’d been transported somewhere else. Suddenly everything looked different. Everything felt better. The grass was greener and crisper, the dunes were glowing with the light from the stars, the ocean was no longer this featureless black puddle but a living, teeming ecosystem full of animals and shells and boats and hurricanes. Even this early, my body felt jumpy and electric and revived. It didn’t matter if Nicky was keeping himself away from me in every way possible – I was so used to waking up and staring a muted world with dead eyes. Nicky was making my life feel new.