by Seth King
Suddenly I remembered I hadn’t brushed my teeth in twelve hours. “But I-”
“Shut up,” he grunted, and then he sort of pushed me up against the wall, and I gave in to him.
Lots of people have described what it feels like to be kissed for the first time by the person you dream about. Millions, probably. To me it felt something like soaring, and also stopping, falling from the sun like Icarus into cold air, undoing damage.Nicky made contact with my face again and moved his tongue into my mouth, and it felt stubbly and good and right. We both wrapped our arms around each other like there would never be enough of us to touch, and I felt like I was flying, or falling, tumbling into something I’d never known before. And right then and there I knew with certainty that this, whatever this was, I would never be able to walk away from it.
I leaned into his ear. “Did you hear that?” I asked, brushing his lobe with my lips.
“Hear what?”
“The last lingering shred of my heterosexuality, leaving the building.”
We stumbled for the bedroom, discarding a shirt here, a sock there, a pair of underwear over by the bathroom wall. I pushed him down and then crawled on top of him, and even though every inch of me was touching him, it wasn’t enough. I wanted more. I needed it all.
And maybe we really were built to fall apart. Maybe we needed each other more than we actually liked each other, and we were clinging to a sinking ship to avoid jumping and taking our chances in the open water. Maybe it was a done deal, and I was just chasing beautiful pipe dreams. But he was worth every minute of that stupid chase. The fire in my chest told me that much.
He kissed me again, and then we started doing things I’d never done before. Things that made me regret every day of my life before he’d entered it. I was making sounds I’d never heard before and he was saying words I’d only heard in videos. We weren’t perfect, but we were eager – we were exploring, breaking new ground. And the way I moved with him, so in sync, made me swear I’d known him forever.
He grunted, leaned closer, and licked my ear, and that’s when someone knocked on his door.
We both stopped.
Someone was here. In his house.
With us.
9
Nicky jumped away, literally jumped, like someone from a Jackie Chan movie. I heard a big, booming voice that was big and dumb in the same exact way all of the FitTrax meat heads sounded big and dumb. Telling them apart was like taking a two-second glance at the sky and closing your eyes trying to remember what each cloud looked like. There was no point.
Nicky stopped and stared at me, eyes and hair wild. I stared back – I had no idea what to do, either. Finally he crept over to the door and opened it just an inch. “Yeah?”
“Yo, I forgot my wallet. Any ideas?” The guy paused. “And what’s up? You’re all messy-haired and shit. You got a girl in there, boss?”
I could practically hear Nicky’s heart pounding. “I’ve um…yeah. Got someone. A girl.”
He tried to walk past. Nicky held tight. He looked over Nicky’s shoulder. “Ah, really? Lemme watch.”
More heart pounding. Why were straight guys so much gayer with each other than gay guys were? “Nah, you sicko. Go away.”
“Who is it?” the guy asked. “Stephanie, the bitch with the big titties from Sunday? You guys were all over each other.”
Now my heart was pounding. So that’s why he’d stepped away and stopped texting me. The realization made my face feel like it was melting off and my chest was caving in on itself. I hated everything, starting with him.
“Yeah, it’s her. I haven’t seen your wallet, maybe try the floor of your golf cart?”
A minute later the guy had finally left. After locking the door behind him, Nicky padded back into bedroom where I was waiting, looking like a dog who’d been caught tearing apart the kitchen trash.
“Well that’s just great,” I said once we were safe and sound and alone. “We can’t even do anything without flipping the hell out when someone gets close. That really speaks well for the future of…whatever this is. And Stephanie? Something you need to tell me? Bro?”
He wrapped his towel tighter as his eyes left me. “Yeah…yeah. I made out with someone. But before you get mad, I only did it to shut down my friends’ suspicions or whatever, and it felt like kissing porridge, and I hated it, and they basically made me do it.”
I was staring at him and I didn’t know what to say, because this was it: the moment I realized he’d fully taken control of my mood. And I hated him for it. He was remaking everything about my world. I never knew what it was like to wake up in the morning and feel giddy about living, and if that ever stopped…if I ever lost him and had to go back to that…I didn’t even know how to finish that sentence. I’d rather die, probably.
“Are you dating someone?” I asked. He looked at the window. “Is that why you’ve been so absent? Nicky, are you dating someone?” The thought of him kissing and loving and screwing someone else already made me want to end myself.
“No, I’m not dating anyone. I just told you I liked you. I just kissed her.”
“Well, whatever. Same thing. Stephanie – what a whorish name. And why are their girls’ shoes in your house? And yogurt and granola bars and other girl foods?”
“You think I have a girlfriend? Coley, all that stuff is my sister’s. She comes down here all the time.”
“What? Why didn’t you just say that, then?”
He looked away.
“Tell me.”
“I just didn’t want you to know about her…I didn’t want you to ask to meet her.”
I closed my eyes for a split second, but still I saw him. And that was the problem. I would probably always see him. I wasn’t mad at that, just heartbroken.
I looked at him. Something strange flashed in his eyes, something almost malicious. But then it went away. “Well, whatever. I did what I did. And you don’t get what it’s like, to hangout with them. They’re ruthless. They circled around me and egged me on. One of them even said, ‘What’s up with you, you don’t like chicks anymore?’ People are talking, Coley. I’m with you all day, every day. I thought maybe they’d seen me with you, so I panicked. I was just trying to protect…this. Us. The longer they don’t know about this, the better.” He stared at me. “Coley, say something.”
The truth was, I had nothing to say. I only knew a few things for sure about this, and they were different and absolute. I hated the way he treated me. I hated the way I let him treat me. I loved the way I felt around him. I hated the way I felt when I wasn’t around him. I hated the way I could never walk away from him when I knew I needed to. And all those facts flew at each other and collided and exploded in my mind like nothing I’d ever faced before. I had no idea how to like him any less. Maybe I didn’t want to.
He stepped forward and kissed me – but this time it was soft, like a promise, or an apology. Someone walked by outside, though, some stranger that could not see us or even hear us, and their faint shadow passing the window doomed my fantasy a premature death. He pulled away a little and wiped his lip, chastened, chastised by the world like a mother with a wagging finger. As he loosened his grip around me I closed my eyes and bid farewell to the moment, knowing his heart had closed, and no sex would transpire between us tonight. And I tried to remember how this felt, for the sake of posterity, to be wrapped in the sinewy arms of someone I’d never even expected to touch me.
“I want to hangout with you, as…as whatever we are,” he said, and a jolt shot through me. “And pursue this. And do what we just did, like, every single day, basically.”
“Pursue what?”
“What we both feel right now. But under one condition. You can’t tell anyone. Seriously. Not ever. You saw how bad that was, and he didn’t even see anything. There’s still stuff you don’t know…the stakes are so high with me…”
And then things were falling in a way that didn’t feel breathless at all. Just shitty. He pulled his h
and away, and I could see how deeply he was hurting about this. He was me, a year ago.
He closed his eyes. “God, I’m horny again. Ugh. Drama turns me on, apparently.”
My entire body jolted a little. “Let me do stuff, then. I promise I won’t kiss you.”
He breathed, and I thought again that we shouldn’t do this. This could get us both beaten.
Or this could remake both of our worlds.
“Okay,” he said. “Just wash me, then...”
And so I did. He turned off the lights, and I followed him back into the shower. I took the rag hanging on his rack and rubbed it slowly over his chest after it was wet, never making direct contact with his skin. He tensed up, but let me proceed. As I continued, letting my hands go further south, he angled away a few times, but I kept going. Slowly he gave over to what he was trying to resist. I never touched his skin directly, but I didn’t need to. He felt me all the same.
“Harder,” he moaned in that sexy voice of his, detonating me. It was the hardest thing I’d ever done not to touch him, not to kiss him, not to love him. But I did it. When we were done he grabbed a towel, hiding himself, and ran into his darkened bedroom. But as I turned back and washed myself in the water, I knew there would be no running from this. We would never be cleansed of each other.
10
Nicky and I didn’t question many things after that night in the shower. Or I didn’t, at least. We would hangout as friends, cloaked in secrecy all the while, but I was hopelessly infatuated with him and wasn’t really trying to hide it anymore. I’d laid it all out there, and he knew. He didn’t mention that day we’d hooked up, but I didn’t care. Out in public, the “friend” thing was the rule, but as soon as that boy closed my door and entered the safety of my house, that all ended, and he would rush to me, and the little world we were creating together would open up. Soon I no longer recognized my own life, in the best way possible. I never knew I could feel so alive and aroused and on fire, and I never knew there were so many places on a human body you could love. To my shock, I didn’t feel dirty or guilty or wrong or sinful about them. I couldn’t change, and for the first time, I didn’t want to anymore. We didn’t talk about it, didn’t even acknowledge it, but he blew my life open.
For the first time ever I wasn’t waking up sad. This secret world bloomed inside my life, a world I was forced to keep separate from the rest of the areas of that life, and the effect was both comforting and bizarre. It was like having a raucous party in one unit of an apartment building late into the night, and trying to tamper the lights and sounds and happiness so the party wouldn’t bleed over into any other units. Every time I saw an old friend and busted at the seams wanting to tell them about what a thrilling carnival my life had become, and then remembered our “secret” status and shut my mouth, I started to realize more and more just how dangerous it could be to live your life in compartments. He made me keep my giddiness a secret, and what was kept in the shadows could not flourish – wasn’t that an Aristotle quote or something? We were strapped into a jolty, panicky, start-stop nightmare of a fantasy, and most of the time I didn’t even care whether we ended up in clouds or in flames, just as long as we ended up there together.
We read magazines together, we watched Netflix on my bed, we screwed on my coffee table. At night, the real fun would come – we’d break onto my neighbor’s roof deck and eat oranges from his potted trees, we’d skinny dip in the ocean, we’d get on his golf cart and raise hell in the neighborhood. When we were apart, I could not think about anything or anyone but him. I would count down the moments until I could see him, and then I saw him, I’d dreadfully count down the seconds until we had to part ways, and I’d have to go back to dreaming. I didn’t even care what we did, just as long as we did it together. Mostly he would lead me straight to a bedroom – mine, or his. I longed to go on dinner dates, maybe go to the movies or the park or do whatever the hell normal couples did, but our activities usually only involved Netflix and mattresses. Our world existed in dark rooms and quiet cars and deserted movie theaters. If anything, the near-miss with his wallet-losing friend had pushed him further into paranoia.
I still didn’t really know how to date, or whatever this was. Even secretly. Sometimes I’d do the stuff I’d seen in movies – hold open the door for him, write him little notes and stuff, maybe steal a kiss when he wasn’t looking – but all of it felt weird and forced and “too much.” But that’s not to say I didn’t like that boy. I grew to protect him above all else, put him before anyone or anything in my life. I grew attuned to the slightest change in his emotions – if he was in a bad mood, I was inconsolable. If he was happy, I was flying a million miles above him. I knew I was a fool, but I didn’t really care just as long as I was his fool, as dumb as that sounded.
A sticky Florida summer marched on. As our love exploded, he retreated further into the closet while simultaneously appearing to fall in love with me. The public hangouts became increasingly rare. He steered us clear of anyone he knew, to the point where he was dragging us across the place whenever a girl looked at him. I tried not to notice it. There were a lot of things I was trying not to notice. On the rare occasions that we did go out on “dates,” he’d only take me to deserted restaurants at completely crazy hours – a pizza place at eleven in the morning, a Mexican place at midnight, etcetera. He said he was claustrophobic and hated crowds, and I tried to believe him at first. He’d rush me through the restaurant to the corner, never making eye contact with a single soul, and then he’d scoot across the booth and barricade himself against the wall and immediately order a beer with his fake ID to calm himself.
We still got looks everywhere we went, especially from older people. One time when we were crossing the street, an old man stopped his motorized scooter and gaped at us open-mouthed like we’d killed his firstborn child. It made me feel icky and dirty and less than human, and I knew Nicky felt the same. Most people were more polite and surreptitious, but they were still gawking. What right did these people have to assert their opinions on us, anyway? Two guys hanging out at the gym or a bar was expected – normal, even. But two guys sitting at a dark table in a restaurant or walking through a mall together on a shopping trip sometimes elicited open stares. Some people would assume we were gay and go out of their way trying to act like they didn’t care and weren’t paying attention, but their deliberate avoidance of us just made things even more awkward. And one night, as Nicky forced us to scoot to the very end of a bar that had a grand total of two people sitting at it, I knew I couldn’t ignore it anymore. He wasn’t avoiding crowds, he was just ashamed of being seen in public with me. Still – after all this time. We existed in a bubble, and any threat of intrusion of the real world into that bubble scared the living shit out of him. He kept entire rooms of his life off-limits from me – he hated talking about his family, he refused to talk about his past dating life, his eyes glazed over when I asked about his friends. He gave me a truncated version of himself, the fun-sized version, and I wasn’t breaking him down fast enough. I knew I had to change this, to figure out how to pivot this from “friends” to whatever was beyond friends. I had to make him love me – I just didn’t know how.
But this is what kept us going: as soon as we came together, he’d sort of collapse next to me and then hold me close, and the affection that flowed through us would shock me every time. He understood every cell of me, and that’s the only way I knew how to explain it to myself. The sex was sometimes painful, occasionally gross, but always explosive. Being able to touch and adore my dream boy, even in the dark, felt too beautiful to be true. Afterward he’d hold me almost desperately, flesh to burning flesh, and the current was almost electrical. This world between us would open up, ColeyAndNickyVille, and we’d disappear into it, whoosh into the void and not come up for air until we had to. I could sense that he felt it, too – I’d never met someone who understood all of my fears without me even having to say them, felt all my pain without me even have to tell hi
m where it hurt. When we lay together, even in the austere darkness, the world and all its complications just didn’t matter. Everything could still be spinning apart out there, and uncles could be bigots and women could stare at us in shops and “homosexual activities” could still be labeled as criminal in nine states, but in Nicky’s messy bed, his galaxy eyes kept me together. Those eyes could save anyone, after all. The person he saw when he looked at me – that’s who I wanted to be, always. I always wanted to be the boy he adored. And if he couldn’t adore me in the right way all the time, I would wait. Because I knew the hard way that burying your feelings was like burying a lit match in a pile of gas cans – something had to blow eventually.
It just killed me a thousand times that every time we had to go out into the light again, our little world would disappear, and I’d be his “bro” again.
One day when I was feeling low and alone, plagued by some vague anxiety I couldn’t quite trace or pinpoint, he texted me:
I miss you
The message felt like sitting down next to a hot fireplace on a cold day. All the fear, all the heartache, just melted away. He could be so sweet when he wanted to, like when I’d caught him staring at me and asked him what was wrong. “Nothing,” he’d said. “You’re just making me live.” He could set my day on fire with just a sentence.
You do? I asked. Why do you miss a friend?
Shut up. I’m coming over.
An hour later he brought over a pan of cinnamon rolls. He’d made a heart shape with the icing.
“Ah, my favorite!” I said as I took the plate with wide eyes. “Ugh, and calories were the last thing I needed, too. Why’d you do this?”
