Dex in Blue

by Amy Lane

  His mom and dad stood up then and looked at each other, that wordless communication that people have when they’ve been together for a lot of good years.

  “David?” his mom said, and David closed his eyes at what he saw there.

  “I’m sorry we were late for dinner, Mom,” he said a little desperately. “I’m sorry, the supplies must have been all over the road—”

  “David.”

  David looked up and met her eyes and started shaking all over. “No.”

  Then his dad spoke in that voice that nobody ever crossed. “Son.”

  “No,” he said again, his voice louder.

  “Son, he didn’t—”

  “No!” he shouted. “No, no, no, no, no, no, no….” And he must have yelled it for too long, because they sedated him, which was fine, because sleep was the best hope he had.

  HE WAS actually a little more fucked-up than he’d first assumed when he woke up. He spent a month in the hospital mourning Dex, wondering what to do with his life. He missed the beginning of school in Montana, which sucked, and spent a lot of his time in recovery with a laptop, looking for another school that would take him.

  He wanted some place that would not require him to visit home, even during Christmas break.

  It was terrible of him. He had an older brother, who was working the farm, and three younger brothers and a younger sister, and he loved them, very much so. They visited him in the hospital each and every day. He listened to his eight-year-old brother read, and his eleven-year-old brother talk about sports. His thirteen-year-old sister would complain about her brothers, and his fifteen-year-old brother wanted to talk about girls. His twenty-year-old brother complained about how none of the other kids was working enough and…

  And he wanted to scream at them, howl, because Dex was gone, and they hadn’t just been friends, hadn’t just been brothers, they’d been…

  Oops. Nope. Couldn’t think of that word. Couldn’t.

  Because Sandra was coming by every day to make sure he was okay and talk about their plans to go to Montana State and bring him stuff that she’d cooked with his mom because he didn’t seem to be eating right.

  Because Dex’s girlfriend, Alyssa, was in genuine, true-love-forever mourning, and how could he fuck that up for her? How could he say to himself, “I loved him more than I loved Sandra, and he loved me like he couldn’t love you, Alyssa, and we were just figuring this out, it was just new, when it all came to an end on Highway 87,” when that truth would destroy people who had already been destroyed?

  Running away to Sacramento wasn’t the bravest thing he’d ever done, but it wasn’t the stupidest, either. Sacramento may have been the capital of the state, but it was still a small place in comparison with places like San Francisco and Los Angeles. There was enough farmland nearby for him to feel comfortable, and there were enough exotic locales—like the Sierra Nevada and the ocean and even Southern California and Disneyland—within driving distance for him to feel like it was someplace new.

  And it was far enough away from Montana that he could pretend that the interlude, that sweet, amazing, wonderful, perfect moment with Dex, had never happened. Maybe it was far enough away for him to mourn his friend however he could, instead of the way other people expected him to. Maybe it was far enough away to leave the hurt behind.

  He called the dean of admissions when he saw that the startup date was a week later than MSU and explained the situation—and was admitted, much to his parents’ chagrin. The tuition was considerably higher than it had been at MSU, as was the housing, and David promised he’d find a way to pay for it out of his own pocket.

  After that one moment when he’d needed sedation, he’d been almost frighteningly calm in the hospital. Looking back, he thought that he might have scared his parents enough that they would have agreed to anything, as long as he was talking about the future, and he was grateful.

  He went home for a week and looked around the battered, noisy farmhouse with new eyes. It seemed small and crowded, but it was also the home of his childhood. Every mark on the walls, every dent in the doorframe or scuff on the floor, had been made by somebody he loved. A lot of them were even from Dex.

  Dex was buried on his folks’ property, and although their driveways were ten miles apart, because of the way the properties lay, it was only a two-mile walk from David’s doorstep. His second-to-last day home, he exhausted himself walking out there to look at the shiny new headstone with all of the flowers on it. He crouched down and rubbed his hand on the polished granite and sighed.

  “You know,” he said conversationally, “I can’t even blame you. I wouldn’t have been looking for the fucking deer either.” The plot was watered and the grass was soft, so he sank down at the edge of it and tried to put things in perspective, but he couldn’t.

  “Twelve years,” he said softly. “My whole life, I thought you and me were the same person. That last day, we even became sort of the same person, and that’s what was so great about it. The being together so tight, we didn’t know where the other one left off. Remember….” He had to smile at the memory. “Remember when you got the idea to build a sail scooter and take it across the stubble fields?” David laughed, remembering that. They’d worked on it for weeks, using big fat tires from an old bicycle and making sure they were oiled and suspended just right. David had learned how to use his mom’s sewing machine, and they had cannibalized old tarps and waited for one of those days when the wind sweeping out of the mountains had just seemed to level anything its path. Then they’d both hopped on the platform and….

  “God, Dex. It was flying. We ended up halfway to Forsyth and then had to take the sail down and walk back, but it was worth it.”

  They’d done that in the seventh grade and told the story all through high school. Usually when they told that story, Dex was the one who talked about ending up halfway to Forsyth, because the truth was, they’d barely cleared Dex’s property before one of the tires blew. But Dex’s story had so much more power, and David hopped on board that story in the same way he’d hopped on board that sailboard. Dex had always been able to help him fly.

  “I… I’m not brave. I’m not a leader. I’m… you were strong, and you were the leader, and… and now I’m just going to be left, wondering how to live my life like you were there with the good ideas.”

  And for the first time since that panicked moment in the hospital, he felt the void of his best friend, his brother, his—and he could say it out here, with no one to listen to his head—his lover, and he felt it as real.

  He didn’t scream hysterically or stand up and kick the headstone or any of that. He put his face on his knees and listened as the wind from the mountains mercilessly leveled everything in its path. He remembered the person who had helped him fly with the wind instead of being beaten down by it, and he cried quietly into his knees, finally knowing how the big of the sky could make a person feel as alone as a heartbeat in space.

  BY THE end of the year, his parents were out of money, and David didn’t want to go home. He’d broken up with Sandra before he left—she’d understood, and he’d been relieved—so he had a new girlfriend now. She was a wide-hipped, uninhibited girl named Kelly who would do things in bed on a whim that David used to have to spend weeks with flowers, chocolate, and sweet talk to get Sandra to do even reluctantly, and (even better) Kelly would be the one to come up with those things.

  “You could always do porn,” Kelly said one night after a particular bit of holy-hell-orgasmathoning in her dorm. She was laughing as she said it, but he found that his cock started to get hard again just thinking about it.

  “Porn?” He managed some skepticism. Of course, every boy liked to think he had the stuff of a porn star, if not too much class.

  “Naw,” Kelly laughed and shook her head. “Naw! I couldn’t share you with another girl, sweetie.” She pinched his cheek and wiggled her wide hips. “You are just too cute—and too good in the sack! No. But….” Her eyes, bright b
lue with wickedly arched eyebrows, grew even brighter.

  “What?” he asked, because that was the look she’d had when she’d first had him go through the back door, and he’d loved that, so he was starting to enjoy the hell out of that arch of her eyebrows and twist to her plump red mouth.

  “There’s always gay-for-pay,” she said, laughing, and for a minute, David got mad.

  “I ain’t gay!” he snapped, sitting up in bed and glaring. Dex had been dead less than a year, and sometimes it seemed that his time in Sacramento had been a dream, all of it suspended between that breathless hush between the two of them, looking at each other after making love on a hot windless day.

  But Kelly didn’t get mad. Not much made her mad, actually, and David both liked that about her and didn’t. It was a great quality in a girl, but it meant that he was never sure if he had pleased her truly or if she just liked everything, and not just in bed, either. Clothes, perfume, jewelry, books—she was happy with it all, and he didn’t trust it. Dex had been so specific….

  David shook that thought off and concentrated on what she was saying now.

  “You don’t have to be gay, sweetie! That’s the point.”

  David had looked at her blankly, and she rolled her eyes.

  “Here, wait a sec,” she said. She sat up and pulled her phone from the dresser, then started texting madly. She got a reply almost immediately, and David squinted.

  “Who are you texting?”

  “My roommate,” she said briefly, then put the phone down.

  “Isn’t she in the next room?” David asked, seriously confused. He’d been pretty sure Andrea was with her boyfriend. That’s what she and Kelly did on their weekends—had their boyfriends over and fucked like lemmings.

  “Ignore that for a second,” Kelly laughed. “Just close your eyes,” she said, and he did. “Okay, now, I’m gonna touch you places. Don’t worry, you’ll like it.”

  He felt a gentle touch on the inside of his arm then and tried not to giggle like a kid. Her fingers weren’t soft. She played the guitar and rode horses and went rock climbing in the gym, and generally didn’t hang back and pamper her wide-hipped bosomy body like it looked like, so he knew those fingers were hers.

  “Okay,” she said quietly, tracing a firm path down from the inside of his arm to his waist to his thighs.

  With his eyes closed, he found the touch stunningly erotic, and he became lost in it, lost in the touch and touch alone. His erection started to return, and he felt those rough fingers trace his length, then wrap around him, then stroke. He smiled a little.

  “Kelly,” he said breathlessly, “if this is the way to convince me I’m not going to notice it’s a guy, this isn’t the way to do it.”

  Kelly’s body shifted on the bed, and she put her lips close to his ear. “Trust me, Davy. You’re totally going to change your mind in a minute.”

  He was concentrating on her voice, and although he heard some rustling in the background, her voice was soft and her lips were soft against his ear, and the smell of their sex was in the air, and he wasn’t going to be distracted from the swelling in his cock for all of the noises in the world.

  “Okay, baby,” she whispered. “Now I’m gonna stroke your cock just the way you like it, okay?”

  Her hand was hard and firm, and he moaned, willing to play her game because she was so good at this. She moved around next to him, and suddenly he could feel her mouth on him and her hair brushing his legs, and he was well on his way to a second orgasm when she pulled her head up and a man’s voice said, “Come for me.”

  He startled—and did. He was so surprised his hands splayed out and his body shook and he let out a pained grunt before spurting all over the hand on his cock, and then he opened his eyes in outrage and saw—Kelly. His girlfriend. Looking at him wickedly, without another person in sight.

  He glared at her and sat up, grabbing the covers and pulling them around his waist, sputtering with complete bafflement.

  “What in the fuck!”

  She shook her head, her auburn hair falling over her face as she licked her hand. She looked like one of those girls in the porn videos. “Keep your panties on. I just had the guy stick his head in here and say something. It’s nerve endings and perception, sweetie. If you think it’s a girl touching you, it feels good. If you think it’s a boy touching you, you tell yourself it doesn’t, but it all feels the same. Human touch is human touch.” She smiled evilly through the come on her face. “Do you want to see what else feels good to be touched?”

  David shook his head no, although he was suddenly gripped by this idea. It wasn’t like he was too ugly to be on camera, right? He had blond hair and blue eyes, a small nose, a long square jaw (but not too long), and girls had been telling him he had a nice smile since he was a baby. A part of him pinged sadly: Dex had especially loved David’s smile.

  And that’s what decided him. “How would you even go into gay for pay?” he asked, pitching his voice just right, and Kelly laughed.

  “Baby, there’s a place right here in town.”

  And that’s where David found out about Johnnies.

  LATER, John would be doing everything on computer and not just sell the porn there, and he’d have an office suite outfitted to look like different locales, complete with a courtyard with a gazebo and a hot tub. When David applied, however, all he had was a nice respectable little house in a respectable little neighborhood, with a heavily enclosed backyard and a small pool.

  It was May, and the sun was bright and hot, so after a phone interview and a downloaded picture, John took David inside and had a little chat.

  John seemed nice enough, if a little young—barely older than David, actually. He had longish auburn hair and green eyes; he dressed super trendy and used all of that tacky slang that was about five minutes out of date, even by Sacramento standards, and they were still using words like “hella” and “yanno” pretty much to fucking death. He asked a series of questions printed on a clipboard in front of him like he was trying to be official, but the questions seemed to make John as uncomfortable as David—and most of them were sexual: Have you ever beat off with another boy? Have you ever touched another boy’s cock? Have you ever had sex with a boy? Has your girlfriend ever anally penetrated you? Finally, David lost patience.

  “Oh my God! It’s like the questions are worse than having sex on camera!” he said with only half a laugh. “I’ve got a stiffie and I’m not sure whether to pull my pants down and prove it to you or run into the bathroom and beat off!”

  John burst into giggles and grabbed the sheet off the clipboard, crumpled it up, and tossed it in the trashcan at the end of his desk. He shook his head. “I’m sorry. Seriously. I started this business about three months ago, right? And I just really don’t want it to be sleazy. I mean yeah, everybody’s having sex on camera, and it’s porn, but….”

  John turned to look at him intently, almost like a new acquaintance would, and he ran a hand through his carefully maintained red hair. “Look, I know you’re straight, and you’ve probably figured I’m gay, but the thing is, do you remember the first time you saw porn?”

  David blushed. It had been about two months ago, when he’d first started having sex with Kelly.

  “Yeah,” he said, laughing uncomfortably. Oddly enough, he found it wasn’t John’s sexuality that was making him uncomfortable. In fact, it was the thought of having sex with girls when he was in this perfectly nice gay man’s house.

  “So, what’d you think?”

  David blushed some more. “It was….” He looked around and couldn’t seem to spot an escape hatch anywhere, so he soldiered on. “It was sort of nasty. I mean, it was girls, but they just looked so… I don’t know… like they were trying to make it dirty and….” Oh God. Most uncomfortable conversation ever. “I just wanted to get hard, right? I didn’t need the props or the costumes or the stupid dialog and they didn’t need to make it dirty, like she was bad and needed a spanking or, you know!�
� Geez, this was hard to put into words. “I just wanted to see people getting it on so I could get it up. Is that so damned wrong?”

  John was guffawing now, giggling so hard that he had to put his hand over his mouth. “Oh my God. That’s it. That’s exactly it! I’m so tired of sex and sexuality being dirty! Why can’t it just be… I don’t know, good? Fun. I mean, yeah, good sex can be really raunchy, but it can also just be, I don’t know. Physical activity. You just need human contact, right? I mean….” John sobered a little and finished his thought. “People who don’t like each other fuck all the time. I want people who like each other to fuck—and I don’t want the ‘Do they really swing that way?’ thing to get in the way. I just want it to look good, and be happy, and make people happy to watch. Seriously.”

  “So the questions?” David asked curiously, and John nodded.

  “Yeah. I can’t figure out how, but I want to find guys who can think of it the same way. I want it to be fun, and hell, lucrative, right? But I want the guys to talk to each other and have human connection, even if they wouldn’t date each other outside the office, you know?”

  David thought about it for a moment and remembered that moment, him and Dex, eye to eye. There hadn’t been any words for it, but he thought it was probably love. He didn’t expect to ever have a moment like that again in his life, but if he couldn’t? Why couldn’t it be fun? Why couldn’t it be friendly? Why couldn’t it be just a good place to work?

  “Maybe just talk to us,” he said, thinking about it. “Get a feel for us, see if we’ve got the attitude or if we seem too needy or too weird about it. You know, we’re your employees, right? Maybe just see if you’d like to work with us, and think about it that way.”

  John looked at him in surprise. “That’s a real good idea, David. I think I’d like very much to work with you. Would you want to beat off on camera for me today?”

  David chuckled and then sobered. “Yeah. If you can pay me, I think I could have a lot of fun doing that.”