by Seth King
His house was dark and quiet and perfect. As soon as we walked in, the air took on some strange quality, like it expected something from us. “Let’s drink,” I said. “I have some vodka in my freezer back home. Should I run and get it?”
He stared at me from under his eyelashes, so long and lush, his eyes playing tricks with the light. Then he inhaled, and it was sharp and perhaps pained. “No need. I’ve got some champagne.”
“What’s the occasion?”
“Us,” he said as he walked away. “Being good friends.”
A few minutes later we clinked glasses and both chugged. Everything. I knew this was dangerous, drinking alone with him while my father was out there, probably aware of his existence now, thanks to Robert. But I couldn’t stop. Even if it meant getting drunk and uninhibited and letting out our inside selves, unleashing all the things we kept in the dark.
“More,” I said. “Please.”
He stepped over to refill my glass. When he bent forward, his face graced the side of mine in an awkward and electric way, and my vision blurred and my skin took flight from my body.
“Ah, sorry.” He stepped back and refilled his own glass. And we drank again. The bubbles spread over me, comforting me, warming me. Nothing disturbed the sound of our breathing until his mom called a minute later.
“Hello?” he asked after a quick, apologetic glance at me.
“Nickicito!” a woman fawned in a very strong accent. “We just wanted to say thanks for having us again, and say sorry for Cha Cha peeing on the new rug! Here, she wants to talk to you, un memento…”
A little dog started yipping in the background. Honestly, I couldn’t understand a lot of what his mom said – she had one of the strongest Hispanic accents I’d ever heard. Soon they lapsed out of English and Nicky spoke with her in Spanish, and it made me so horny I had to control myself from grabbing him right there. I wanted so badly to know his dynamic with her. Moms were the original “fag hags,” for lack of a better term, and they were usually a boy’s best friend until he inevitably branched out into befriending the sassy girls of his grade. But I knew Nicky wasn’t like that. Still I yearned for a relationship with his mother. I wanted to do all the things the girlfriends got to do: I wanted to attend family dinners and go shopping with her and sit and drink coffee with her while he rolled his eyes at our friendship. And the fact that I would probably never do any of that made me ache inside. I was losing something I’d never even had, but it still hurt.
I used the opportunity to grab his eReader, which thankfully didn’t have a passcode, and stalk his reading selections. Ugh, he was so smart…he read historical fiction, nonfiction about the wars, gorgeous and literary YA novels about dying teens – all of it. Actually, his tastes were a little more masculine than mine, but I tried not to think about it too much.
“Sorry,” he said when he came back and tossed the phone down. His back was to me, but I didn’t mind – the back view was just as good as the front one. He was Puerto Rican, after all. “Sorry for making you pretend like you weren’t here. But I know you get it.”
I sniffed. “Not really.”
“What do you mean?”
I didn’t know how to say this. I wasn’t even really allowed to say that I liked him. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t really give a shit at this point. We’re just friends, aren’t we? Why wouldn’t you be able to at least introduce me as a friend? It’s not like she would know.”
“Because she would know,” he said, his head hanging low with shame. “My mom knows me better than anyone. I’m sorry. I can’t…I don’t know how to broach it. She thinks I’m interested in my sister’s best friend, and I don’t wanna crush that dream for her. And there’s a lot you still don’t know.”
“Like what?”
He gulped. “If she knew about certain things, there’s a chance I’d lose everything. Everything. My mom goes to church twice a day.”
“Oh,” I said. If a corpse had a voice, it would sound like me in that moment. “Yeah. It’s fine, Nickicito.” He blushed, but I waved him off. “Don’t be embarrassed, it was the cutest thing I’ve heard in a while.”
“Thanks. My dad is Nicholas, too, so my family’s always called me that – it means Little Nick, basically.”
“What’s your mom like, anyway?” I asked, and he smiled. His eyes looked like they did when he looked at me, whatever that meant.
“She’s a mess. But she’s my favorite mess.”
He laid himself out on the couch. He was so graceful, so fluid, while I moved like all of the bones in my body hated each other. Soon he changed the channel and paused on something. It was Flashdate, on MTV. Two gay guys were out on a blind date, and they had to decide whether they wanted to meet again. Nicky froze up very quickly and changed it to a rerun of SNL. I reached over and changed it back. I knew this was perhaps a step too far, but I couldn’t stop.
The date heated up, and the guys got a lot closer. Nicky tried to resist, but soon he was into the show. Very into it. Until he realized I’d noticed.
“Enough,” he said, changing the channel again.
“But-”
“But nothing,” he said. “Enough of all this. I like girls anyway, you know. A lot.”
He turned away, indignant. I filled with fire and stared out the window. I was three feet away from him and yet we were a galaxy apart. I puffed up my cheeks, then blew the air angrily out. I liked him, and I thought he liked me, too, and yet here we were, playing “friends” in a dark, deserted living room. We’d been blown so far off course, I didn’t even recognize the map anymore. The world was not going to let us be together. Never was there a tale of more woe, I thought. We weren’t Romeo and Juliet, we were Romeo and Julio.
“The thing you have to remember is…I like pussy,” he said, his voice low. “It’s not, like, some excuse, or some ruse or something. I really like it…in my face, on my dick, everything. So I don’t think I’m totally…you know, that thing, that you want to say I am.” His eyes track out the window. “But then, obviously, you know, other things happen…and I can’t be open about it, because no girl would ever touch me if they knew.” He sighed. “Everyone looks at people who like both sexes as being dirty, soiled, damaged goods…one girl on Twitter said she would never date a bisexual because he would get AIDS and die. Not even to mention the unspoken gender code of society, in general. No homo, yo! What does every leading man in every movie act and look like? Tall, muscular, athletic, deep voice, aggressive demeanor, ‘straight’ characteristics. Nobody makes a place for softer, artsier kids who don’t necessarily give off the lady killer vibe…and if you can’t stand it, you’ve got to take it.”
I winced. Then I wondered if he was being honest, about the thing with girls. I was occasionally attracted to women, myself, just not as much as I hoped to be. I’d certainly rubbed one out to lesbian porn. A lot of times, really. I’d hooked up with four girls in the past, and I’d enjoyed it, and I’d had orgasms, too. I just enjoyed watching men on the Internet a lot more. Nothing had ever compared to how I’d felt for guys.
And honestly, there was a lot about the gay community that made me uneasy. Most of the gay men in my town were not exactly living my dream. They maintained cheesy gym bodies far later in life than any man should ever maintain cheesy gym bodies, and they lived in cold, soulless, immaculate condos that were spotlessly clean and completely devoid of love, maybe save for a few pictures of a niece they barely saw. They cheated on their partners relentlessly, they drove age-inappropriate sports cars well into their sixties, and every weekend they left town to attend corny Miami-area nightclub parties with theme names like Wet-N-Wild Foam Night or Naughty in South Beach (Day-Glo Edition). I didn’t know what I wanted out of this life, but I knew it looked nothing like that. I wanted a real life, not a loveless day-glo one. Also, a lot of gays acted like being gay was the best and most important and most definitive thing about them. One guy on the news had even said that being gay was the best thing he’d ever bee
n, and ever would be. Um, no! I wanted to be a lot of other things, and also gay, all at the same time. I just didn’t know how to say any of this without sounding like an asshole.
Nicky twitched once, then twice. And finally he turned it back to Flashdate, despite it all. As the show went on, the rumbling of the thunder got closer, and soon the sky started dumping so hard we couldn’t ignore it anymore. It was a real Florida storm, the kind that shook the windows and lit up the room in grey scale like an X-ray. I wrapped up in a blanket and looked over at him as the TV lights danced on his face. This was what I’d always wanted. Since I was a kid, I’d wanted this.
At the end of the date, one of the guys got drunk and started crying and confessed that his father had disowned him and hadn’t spoken to him in three years. I inched away. We listened to the wind outside, and it seemed to carry all the things we couldn’t say, everything we couldn’t fix. It was a funny thing, when you let someone into the little world you’d created for yourself and then realized you’d suddenly become incapable of imagining it without them.
“Why not just…tell everyone?” I whispered soon. “This is so dumb. Aren’t you sick of it all? Aren’t you sick of believing you have to hide from them? Even if you’re just bisexual?”
“You don’t get it,” he said, his eyes becoming suddenly interested on something in his lap. “And you never will. Not really.” He took a breath. “I hate myself because of all this. And sometimes it makes me hate everyone else, too.”
I didn’t know whether to grab his hand or turn away. “You’re wrong,” I said. “I do get it. I hate myself just like you. Always have, pretty much.”
He said nothing. The date on the show wound down with both of the guys drunkenly making out on a dirty little back porch. The whole show was a sad cliché, and it made me feel sort of icky. As the credits rolled, Nicky seemed to snap out of whatever evil gay trance that had allowed him to watch a homosexual dating show on a couch at night with another boy. He got up and stretched, but it looked more forced than anything. “Damn, it’s getting late. Your bike is here, right? I’ve got so much stuff to do in the morning…”
I looked at the ground. I could take a hint. I was being dismissed. “Okay. Yeah. I’ll go.”
Lightning exploded above and beyond us, sending out white feathery tendrils into the sky. He stared out the window, his galaxy eyes seeming to see nothing at all. “Oh, damn, I forgot it’s raining.”
“Yeah, but it’s fine. I’ll survive. Probably…”
“Okay, cool. Feel free to wait a minute for it to calm down out there.”
He grabbed the remote and started flipping channels again. I hated him for being so casual, for brushing me off so easily, like I was nothing to him. Soon he got to Fox News, which was showing an infomercial about a service for old people to get cheaper dentures – but then it segued into a breaking news report. A group of guys had been caught on a department store’s security camera beating down two gay dudes on the sidewalk, calling them fags and cock suckers while they kicked them down an alley and stole the cash from their wallets. The attackers had been identified and tracked down on social media and had finally been arrested earlier in the evening. Of course this had happened in Rhode Island and nowhere near here, as the police probably wouldn’t have cared enough to find the perpetrators down here. The evening news was full of stories about gay-bashing cases that had gone cold with mysterious swiftness, cases of transsexuals being gunned down in their own driveways on sunny mornings only to have the police simply stop investigating after a few weeks.
I stopped breathing, but I wasn’t surprised. I should’ve known. On one channel was an unabashedly gay dating show, and on the other, a report about hate crimes. Everything was colliding, old and new, and didn’t make any sense.
Nicky changed it as quickly as he could, but it wasn’t fast enough. That story was still the only thing in the room. Besides the thunder, which boomed from over the ocean with more ferocity than ever. And my heart…
He turned a little closer to me. “Okay, sorry. Maybe you can’t get home right now. I’m not thinking straight.”
“Neither am I,” I whispered. “I’ve never been able to do anything straight. That’s the problem…”
He laughed. For real this time. Gallows humor was still humor, I guessed. “So,” I said. “What should we do?”
He didn’t answer. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I’d wanted it all my life. I took a sip of champagne, and then I reached my hand closer and rested it beside him. He stared down at me, both of our hearts pounding. He was hard now. It made me hard, too. But he didn’t say anything. I just looked at his hand for a second, but soon I couldn’t control myself. The alcohol hit me in shimmery waves, and soon my insides were storming harder than the skies.
“Nicky,” I said, “what are we? What is this? You say you just want to be friends, then you spend all your time with me, touch me, tell me all your secrets, pay for my food…”
He scooted away, leaning over his lap to hide what was going on down there.
“This is happening,” I said. “You know it’s happening. I feel you in the pit of my stomach, all day, every day. Stop turning your back on that.”
“I’m not changing my rules,” he whispered. “No matter how I feel. You don’t understand what’s at stake. My whole stupid life would come crashing down.”
“Shh,” I said. “It’s okay.” All I wanted was to roll forward in a world that was pulling us back. But Nicky wouldn’t let me.
He got up, looking disgusted. “No, no, no. Ugh, look at us, Coley. It’s not okay. We don’t know what the hell we’re doing.” He started for his room. I knew he’d closed the window, and this thing was done. “I’m over this – I’m going to sleep. You can crash on the floor, I guess.”
“The floor?”
He paused, looked down and to the side. “My dad has a key, and if he came over…”
“Doesn’t he live, like, hours away?”
He didn’t respond.
“Fine.” I got up and started gathering pillows and a throw blanket from the couch, since I knew he wouldn’t have anything in a closet for me. All his closets were full. “Fine fine fine. The floor it is.”
I followed him into his room, admiring his walk all the while, despite myself. I’d never been allowed in here before, and I drank it in like a frozen margarita. It was what I expected – straight. Ish. He had all kinds of sports equipment in the corner, and it was messy and smelled like sweaty clothes. All kinds of academic plaques and certificates from high school decorated the top of his dresser, and it didn’t surprise me when I saw that he’d been in the accelerated program. An enormous pile of grooming products in the bathroom was the only thing out of place for someone so “hetero.” And also…
“Is that my shirt?” I asked, pointing at the yellow shirt bearing the logo of my high school on the table by his bed. I’d left it on his porch after a beach session and had never even realized it.
He looked away. “Oh. Yeah. It is.”
“…Why is it there?”
I heard him swallow. “Because I was gonna give it back to you. …And because it smells like you.”
And everything in me stopped moving.
“Ready for bed?” he asked. That boy glanced at me one last time, guilt in his eyes at my sleeping situation, then got into his bed. I looked at his glorious ass one final time and then laid myself out on the floor. His carpet was surprisingly soft and clean, and knowing he stepped on it every day made me want to sink into it and never come out. Did this stupid carpet know how lucky it was to get stepped on by Nicholas Flores every single day? Ugh. “I sleep in my underwear and no shirt,” he said. “Is that okay?”
I was too choked by lust to respond – oh, sure, strip in front of me, it’s not like I’m horny enough already! – but he didn’t wait for an answer anyway. I could hear him kicking off his clothes, and it made me want to die.
We lay in the darkness. I was hard, and I had to t
wist on my side to avoid crushing myself. I tried as hard as I could to ignore the fact that I was a few feet away from Nicky Flores, but he was the only thing in my brain. As the rain sloshed against the windows, the silence turned neon, electric. I could feel some force splintering into the air from his body and reaching out to me, pulling me in, begging me to touch him. I even felt my body realigning to be more in line with his. There was no getting around it: this thing was gravitational.
Lightning cracked, just like it did in the movies and the books, and I looked up and saw the Madonna above his bed. And not the gay Madonna, either, Our Lady of Refusing to Age Gracefully. It was the religious Madonna – the Holy Mother, with the baby and the manger and everything. Ugh, seriously? He’d been telling the truth about his family’s religious crap. He was so Catholic, and he would never let me in with shit like this surrounding him. Intolerance literally stared him in the face every night while he slept. Maybe this thing was useless.
“Cole?” he said into the blackness, and I self-destructed, because that was the first time he’d called me Cole, just like my mother used to.
I propped myself up a little so I could see him. He was staring at Mother Mary.
“Yeah?”
“I just want you to know I’m sorry.”
I lay down again, too overwhelmed to function. I thought I would break his resolve and open him up, not push him further into the closet. I wrapped my legs around a pillow at the knee and squeezed hard, staring at his dust ruffle. Then I thought about the word “sorry.” A word could hold so much in it. There were so many things wrapped up in his version of “sorry:” I’m sorry we are who we are. I’m sorry the world is like this. I’m sorry we have to pretend to be friends. I’m sorry we’ll never work out. I’m sorry you have to love me in the dark. And I knew he was sorry. Because I was sorry, too. But that didn’t change it, didn’t help it, didn’t fix it.
