by Seth King
I swallowed, the dread plummeting into me. I was so ashamed of how he treated me, and of how I let him treat me, like I was those built-in apps that your phone wouldn’t let you delete, so you piled them into a single folder and shoved it to the corner of your screen. Nothing in me wanted to leave this and walk away, but maybe I needed to. I was out-of-control infatuated with a boy who made me sleep on the floor.
“Nicky?” I said.
“Hmm?”
I wanted to tell him so much. I wanted to tell him he was the brightest part of my dreams, that I’d stop breathing for him, that he was a human photo filter who’d made my moon shine brighter and my waves crash louder. But this was a language I could feel but not yet speak, and I was dealing with an alphabet I could grasp but not yet fully comprehend. So I sighed instead. “It’s not okay, but…I get it. I understand.”
Even though I didn’t. What was happening between us wasn’t wrong, and he needed to stop acting like it was.
A pause followed, a pause that seemed to give new meaning to the term “pregnant.” It was the Octomom of pregnant pauses. Finally I heard ruffling on the bed, followed by his face, beautiful and luminous and sexy as hell in the rainglow, hanging over mine. “Why do you like me so much?” he finally asked. “If I was someone else looking at me, I’d probably drive me crazy.”
“I don’t like you,” I breathed, then my eyes tracked to his figurine. “The thing is…I think you might be my Madonna.”
Another pause. Then he smiled. “Actually, you know what? Screw it. Get up here. No funny business, though. Promise me I won’t wake up to a finger up my butt, or anything?”
As everything inside me heated up, I nodded and crawled up off the floor, slinking myself onto the bed, totally unsure of how to act. I was in bed with Nicky Flores and the Madonna – holy shit. He moved all the way over, staring at me, as I made my way under the covers with him. This was it. Or was it?
I faced him. His eyes were so big I could see myself in them, and he was lit from within like a movie star on a film poster or an angel in an oil painting. I pulled the covers all the way up, concealing myself up to the neck, and finally he calmed. And suddenly I could see past the campus hottie, the gym freak, the alpha he wanted the world to see, and saw the boy within, the boy inside all that, the boy he’d tried to erase. He was running, he was scared, but he wanted it all to stop. He just wanted to be happy, to feel love from someone that didn’t need anything in return.
And I realized that I understood him then – it was like he’d come from my own bones. All he wanted was to feel safe. I studied his beautiful, sad, alive face and only now noticed his cheeks were covered with light acne scarring, the little pockmarks sort of like the craters on the surface of the moon. His galaxy eyes glittered, too, and it was all so beautiful. He was a space kid, my boy on the moon. Liking him was so impossible, so easy. And I never wanted to stop. Being with him just felt warm somehow – not hot or sexy or slutty or anything, just…warm. Warm like fresh socks, warm like getting one last hug from my Nana, warm like barricading myself in bed on a rainy night and opening up Harry Potter to hangout with the Weasleys again and feel like the person I’d been before adulthood happened.
“Coley?” he whispered one last time, watching me, planting dreams with his eyes.
“Yeah?”
“You’re my best friend.”
Something grabbed me, took custody of me, pulled me under. I moved my arm from beneath the covers and held out my hand. He took it – slowly, hesitantly, but still, he took it. Then he closed his eyes, smiled, and started to breathe slower and deeper. The thunder rumbled from somewhere over the sea, calling to me, and that’s when I knew for sure that I was free.
8
I slept like a baby that night – and by that I mean horribly. (I’d babysat my little cousins enough times to know what a load of bullshit that cliché actually was.) I tossed and kicked and sighed, fully aware that I was annoying him, but I couldn’t stop, or calm myself down. I finally passed out at four, and when I rose into the light at what felt like nine-ish, I stopped breathing. Nicky’s arm was around me again.
I froze, nearly choking on my tongue. Then I felt around a little. He must’ve kicked off his underwear sometime overnight, as well, because his bare dick was against my back. He was hard. And in his sleep, he was rubbing me with it.
I stared straight ahead, out the window, as my heart pounded in my throat. I’d never felt desire like this before. Ever. Having him this close to me swamped me in feelings I could only describe as red, and I wanted to stay right there forever. As we lay there I pictured him waking up, digging his face into the back of my hair as he cracked up with the morning giggles, then turning me around and getting to work…
No. That wasn’t going to happen. I knew he would be furious if he snapped awake and found us like this. Would he blame me? Would he accuse me of arranging us in some sexual position, of stripping him in his sleep? I had no idea what to do, so I swallowed too hard, and it made a sound. I felt his eyelids open against my neck.
“The hell?”
He jumped out of bed, and as he kicked off the covers and walked to the bathroom naked, I fell into the deep end. I didn’t know whether I wanted to masturbate or kill myself – he was out-of-this-world gorgeous.
Once I could feel my face again, I turned over and huffed. So we were back to this – he wouldn’t even look at me.
“Bro,” he said a minute later, sticking his head out of the bathroom as the shower steamed up the space behind him. He’d put up a gate in front of his face, but still, something about him looked curious. I sort of took a detour into his eyes for a minute and envisioned padding into the shower while he lathered off, stepping into the steam as the water slipped down our bodies, placing a kiss on the back of his neck before tracing my tongue up his jaw, then doing other things I’d spent my life dreaming about…
His closed-off voice snapped me back to reality. “I’m taking a shower, but there’s coffee in the cupboard above the stove, if you want it. I’ll be out in a minute, help yourself.”
He turned back into the bathroom, and the door closed. And it was that simple: I’d been banished.
But then he opened it again.
“Coley,” he murmured from behind the door, and everything in me stopped moving. “Wait.”
“Yeah?”
Our only guest was the white noise of the shower as steam poured out of the doorway. He inched into the light from the bedroom, and I saw that he was holding himself. No…he was rubbing himself.
I stopped breathing.
“Do you want to…come in? With me?”
My throat closed. “Oh, um…I…”
I finally got my muscles to work and started for the bathroom, but he held up a hand. Then he rubbed himself, up and down, around in a circle. “Coley,” he whispered…
I closed my eyes for a second. I reached down and took myself in my hand, then opened them again.
But I was too late: something was already dripping from the door handle, and he was retreating into his shower as fast as his body would take him.
~
True to form, my dad called as soon as I got home that afternoon. The “awkward small talk” phase of the conversation was alarmingly short, so I knew he had a whammy to get to. And a whammy it was:
“So…we heard you were at the library the other day…with someone?”
I winced, because after recent events I didn’t even know if I had the energy to lie. “Um…yeah. And?”
“Relax, big guy, we think it’s amazing. You’re finally making some male friends.”
“I, um…I am? You do?”
“Hell yes! It’s about time. How about we go on a hunting weekend to the Gatling’s hunting camp down in Live Oak in a few weeks? You, me, and your friend? I’ll make some turkey chili – it’ll be awesome. Just us boys, how does that sound?”
I shivered a little. I felt so dirty whenever my dad tried to shove his Normal, Masculine So
n Dreams onto my unwilling shoulders, and I couldn’t really explain why. I almost felt bad for him, too. This was a fantasy that was never going to happen. I would never be the son he wanted me to be. Not to mention the fact that I wanted to reach my hand into Nicky’s pants and hunt for dick, not sit in a tree stand and hunt for animals to randomly kill…
“Yeah, Dad, sounds great,” I finally said. “What else did you call for?”
He inhaled a little more sharply than usual. I got a weird, uneasy sense then. He knew I’d always sealed off part of my life from him, but in that moment I think he sensed I was hiding more than ever before. It made me feel further from him than I ever had, which really said a lot. “Well, you know the divorce has gone through, right?” he asked after a minute.
“Wh…you what? You were fighting about money, like, a month ago. That divorce was nuclear. What happened?”
He sighed, drawing out the drama. “Well, your mother says she wants to move on with her personal life, and I do, too, and so we rushed some documents through the system.”
“Okay?”
“Which brings me to the condo issue. We might just sell it if we need to. The extra money can’t hurt, with all the lawyers’ fees. I guess it all just depends…”
Of course – here it was. He was dangling it over my head – he owned the floor I was standing on, and he decided the rules. My parents could barely afford the upkeep on this place, their former weekend home, but since it was still cheaper than campus housing, I’d been allowed to stay temporarily until they worked out the last of their divorce-y type money issues. I thought I’d heard a threat there, an ultimatum, but I wasn’t sure. What did he really know? Was he watching me? It sounded like he was saying mess with a guy, and you’ll be homeless – or was I just imagining it? Whatever the case, I knew he wouldn’t drop this for long, and I had absolutely no idea what to do about it.
I hung up the phone and screwed up my face a little. I tried to get into this book I’d been reading, but I couldn’t concentrate. All I wanted to talk about was Nicky and how he was making my life burn brighter, and soon I realized I had nobody to talk to about him with. Nobody even knew I liked guys. My female friends didn’t know about me, dad would castrate me, my few male friends would nod and then quietly excuse themselves from my life.
Actually, I suspected that many of my female friends knew about me, but I avoided this subject like I avoided Wal-Mart on Black Friday. Whenever someone came out to most girls, they immediately threw their hands up in the air and squealed “OMG, let’s go shopping!” as if gay guys deliberately chose difficult and persecuted lives simply for the sake of becoming prototypical gay BFFs who would tell them they were pretty and hold their shopping bags for them in some Victoria’s Secret while they tried on bustiers. My gayness didn’t make me want to be some girl’s sassy sidekick any more than any other guy’s straightness did. Or they’d tell me that they had another gay friend they wanted me to meet, like I had anything to do with anyone else just because I was gay, as if there was some law that said all of us were obligated to meet…
That night I did the lonely heart thing, buried myself in pillows and tried to get into some Netflix show. But none of it meant anything, because all my thoughts belonged to Mr. Nicholas Flores. It somehow hurt me to know how much I needed him. He could slap someone’s grandma while reciting misogynistic chants at a puppy killing party, and I’d probably still come running. How sad.
Waiting for him the next day felt like purgatory. But he never texted me. He didn’t the next day, either, or the next, and by day four I was in a panic. What had happened? Had I gained weight overnight? Was he retreating into the closet again? Had I asked for too much, gotten too close, scared him off? The line went dead, the wifi stopped connecting. And soon I knew it: I’d scared him off, done too much too soon, and he was done.
On the fifth night I dreamt of Jonathan, the one and only boy I’d ever liked before. Even thinking about him these days made me collapse inside, made me mourn the love he’d never let himself give me. I met him on the second day of seventh grade. (He was the new kid, of course, and he’d skipped the first day out of boredom.) There was a stir around school the second he walked in, because he was inhumanly beautiful and wore a necklace and a tight-fitting sweater. It was like my eyes were made for him, and all I ever did was stare at him. I was small, but I was already all grown up inside because of my problems at home. I had seen misery, and that made me wise. So when I looked at him and knew that I could love him, and that he was capable of loving me back, I knew it was true.
I set up the opportunities for us to become friends, and we did, even though he was a stratosphere above me, socially speaking. Kids like us weren’t supposed to come together, but in the halls of my middle school a miracle bloomed. He invited me over for a sleepover one weekend, and our friendship only picked up from there. Whenever I was with him I was breathless and dazed and overwhelmed, like when you finished your new favorite book for the first time and felt like you were experiencing every emotion in the world at once – it was almost like I was full of shooting stars or something. But he could never admit he liked me back. Soon I became desperately infatuated with a coward, and we embarked on some sick, parasitic pseudo-relationship. It was so messed up: I would do his homework and fill out his study cards and clean his room for him while he just sat and watched. He would dangle affection in my face, talking about girls or guys he liked while resting his hand on my leg, before yanking it all away again and watching my death throes. But I was a moth drawn to his misery and his perfectly-gelled hair, and I could not leave him alone. Every time we hung out was just another chance for him to insert the knife, twist it and watch me suffer. It was sick, but I needed the pain like water. I fell into the worst kind of love, and it broke me. I gave away too much of myself to someone who’d never even asked for it, and I knew I would never get it back. I wanted to leave, but there was nothing to take. He had all of me.
I never told him a word. He knew, and he liked me back – we could both feel it in the air. Being with him was like settling into a warm bath and turning off the world. But he would never acknowledge it. He was much better at “playing straight” than I was, that pathetic whole song and dance, and as our friendship started to fall apart I’d see him out at birthday parties or pizza places with his baseball friends, and I would be like vapor to him. Having my best friend in the world look past me, through me…it made me feel like I was nothing. He was ashamed of me, and I never got over it. Afterward I could do nothing but sit and watch our times together over and over again in my mind, hoping for a different ending like when you catch Titanic for the eightieth time on Netflix and pray that Rose would let Jack onto the floating board and let him live. But she never did. She never scooted over, and the ending never changed.
Gradually Jonathan and I lost touch. As time went on I became even quieter and more withdrawn and, let’s face it, gayer, while he doubled down on the illusion of who he wanted to become, and morphed into a jock times a million. By the time we started high school, he wouldn’t even look at me in the halls when we crossed paths. We never spoke again after all this. Ever. Our strange “relationship” was something neither of us would admit, and would probably ever admit, out loud at least. It was puppy love, but he still broke my heart, and for years I was lightly depressed. Not living, but drifting. On the lowest days I’d tell myself I’d imagined it all, and that the memories of our “relationship” were all as one-sided as duct tape. But he liked me too – my soul knew what my brain was too weak to admit.
I’d found some solace since then, of course. I still had a chance at happiness, and he didn’t. While I was tiptoeing closer to the truth of who I really was, he was miles away, and running further every day. I knew he would never live in his truth, never look into the eyes of a boy he loved and smell his hair and savor what their love felt like. He was too arrogant, too weak, to admit he was different, and that made me feel a little better, warmed my cool insides l
ike the sick asshole I was. He would never be happy, and I was happy and sad about it. But the memories would still hit me sometimes like a rogue taxi in the night. Jonathan wore Cool Water by Davidoff in middle school, and every time I smelled it on a passing stranger it would hit me like a summer storm. I’d close my eyes and let it take me back, back to what I’d lost, back to what I’d never really had at all. I hoped I never smelled that boy again.
These days he was “straight,” refusing to hook up with his girlfriends until marriage because he was “staying pure for God,” or so I’d heard from a few of his frustrated exes. Just seeing him now, at the gas station or at random birthday parties or whatever, felt like being stabbed in the stomach. The worst thing I ever did was let him let go of me, let him fall out of infatuation with me. I would do anything in the world to never feel like that again – I would not survive another Jonathan-sized heartbreak. I was sure of it.
So why was I perhaps running towards another Jonathan all over again?
None of this changed the fact that without Nicky, my life was crumbling. So when the text came Thursday evening saying simply Hey, come over, it felt like a fantasy. When I got there he opened his door and just smiled at me. His eyelids were crinkling in the corner, and his eyes brought me home. God – so there really was magic left to find out here in the world. And here I thought I’d turned over every stone.
“Well,” he smiled. “It’s you.”
“Wow, that’s a warm welcome, I thought you were still mad about…hey, have you been crying?” I asked when I noticed his nose was runny and his eyes were a little red. He turned around and led me in. I didn’t care about any of the past few days – I only cared that I was back in his orbit.
