by J P Barnaby
Anthony walked past the framed pictures, DVDs, and random spare change thrown carelessly on the dresser. A collection of spoons with names of states hung on this wall, and the cloying scent of incense did nothing to mask the smell of cigarette smoke mixed with pot. Mismatched junk preserved in a cheap shadow box hung on a bit of wall covered in ancient, floral wallpaper. It looked like something his mother would have. Before the world changed, he remembered her collecting little angels. After Aaron came home, she must have lost her faith in them. One more thing Aaron had taken from his family.
“I feel good. Let’s just stay in here for a while.” Chase dropped down to sit on the side of the bed, and Anthony swallowed hard. His dick rubbed against his fly. Yes, he wanted to stay in the bedroom with Chase. He wanted to do a lot of things with Chase. They’d shared a couple of clumsy hand jobs in Anthony’s room when they were drunk, but it surprised him when Chase opened his fly. He had his cock in his hand before Anthony could blink.
“Come here,” Chase said, and Anthony’s dick almost exploded in his pants. God, yeah.
The room seemed so much bigger when he crossed it to stand in front of Chase. They looked at each other for a long moment, Chase with his dick in his hand, Anthony’s stretching the denim on the front of his jeans.
Anthony glanced around the bare room again, trying to find his sanity. He never thought they’d be doing this in a million years. He turned, took two steps in the claustrophobic room, and locked the door. No reason to tempt fate, even if they were graduating in a couple days.
“You got a purdy mouth,” Chase drawled with a wicked grin.
“Shut up.” Anthony turned to face him. “If you want something, fucking ask for it.”
“Suck me off?” Chase asked with quiet, halting words. They were about to cross a big fucking line in the sand, and they both knew it.
Chase’s legs scorched the outside of Anthony’s thighs as he stood between them. A decision hung heavy and harsh in the air. God, he wanted it. He’d jacked off thinking about it for four years. Anthony stared down at Chase, his face flushed and his eyes wild from the pills. The way his jeans cut across the tops of his thighs made Anthony’s mouth water. He’d done it before, trading blowjobs for pills when he’d been jonesing, but that was before his parents stuck him in rehab. Besides, this was so fucking different.
“Fine.” Anthony used a palm on each of Chase’s legs for balance when he lowered himself to the floor between Chase’s feet.
Chase rested back on his hands as Anthony wrapped his own around Chase’s dick and began with light strokes. A moan started deep in the back of Chase’s throat but barely escaped his pursed lips. Anthony leaned in and swiped his tongue across the head of Chase’s dick, eliciting a sharp gasp. He drew the head in, sucking as the swollen mushroom passed his lips. Chase’s moan told Anthony all he needed to know. He had Chase right where he wanted him.
Well, until he opened his fucking mouth.
“Fuck, that’s good. I knew you were a fag,” Chase murmured.
Anthony stopped for just a moment, letting the words puncture a hole in him wide enough for the shock to seep through. He should have seen it coming. Throughout their friendship, they could only trade hand jobs in the dark of night, and Chase would always sleep on the floor when he stayed over, never in bed with Anthony. So many little things to tell Anthony he disgusted Chase. He’d always clung to the delusion that one day they could be more, but it broke into a thousand jagged pieces with Chase’s words.
Still, he couldn’t stop himself from sucking harder, desperate to erase the words from his mind, to impress Chase. He didn’t want Chase to feel only disgust when they touched. Anthony wrapped a hand around Chase’s cock, stroking the bit that didn’t fit in his mouth. He’d done this probably a dozen times before, but it had never meant as much to him as it did then. They were on the razor’s edge—one wrong step and he could lose the best friend he’d ever had. Some days, Chase seemed like the only friend Anthony had ever had.
Anthony pressed his forearms to the bed on either side of Chase’s hips. It was the closest they’d ever been to an embrace. Chase’s deep groan drowned out the sucking sounds Anthony’s mouth made around the dick driving into it. He moved his head, massaging Chase’s length with his lips, increasing the suction, trying anything he could to blow Chase’s mind.
Instead, he just got Chase’s load.
“Fuck….” Chase moaned as he shot into Anthony’s mouth. Color blossomed high on his cheeks as his eyes slammed closed. Anthony watched through long bangs and hooded eyelids, swallowing against the bitter taste of pain as Chase jerked forward, pushing Anthony off his prick. Anthony stretched up and realized an instant too late Chase had turned his head away from the kiss he wanted so fucking badly.
“Dude, I’m not fucking like you,” Chase spat, pulling his jeans up as he stood. “Get up off the floor, man.” Chase waited just long enough for Anthony to regain his feet before he exploded out of the bedroom.
Tears stung Anthony’s eyes, and a burn that had nothing to do with Chase’s cock wound its way up his throat. God, he fucking hated Chase some days.
The bathroom door was open when he walked out of the bedroom and back up the hall. Without waiting to see where Chase went, he ducked into the small room, tugging the door closed behind him, and popped open the medicine cabinet. He thanked God for the lack of drugs, because right then, he might have been tempted.
Fuck rehab.
Instead, he grabbed the toothpaste. His finger worked as a makeshift toothbrush, if for no other reason than to get the come off his tongue. He wished he could wipe the remnants of Chase’s hate from his mind as easily.
He dropped the toilet lid and sat down. In all the years they’d been friends, Chase had never bothered enough to get to know him. No one could miss Anthony’s sexuality—he didn’t hide it—and he certainly took enough shit at school for it. How could Chase not have known? Did he really pay so little attention to Anthony? Did he not care at all?
Anthony remained sitting in the bathroom, his head in his hands, for what seemed like hours. A hammering on the door told him he’d been in there for a while, though, so he flushed the empty toilet and washed his hands as he gathered himself. Finally, when Anthony could stall no longer, he opened the door to a red-faced girl and stepped aside just in time for her to puke all over the closed toilet lid. He left her to it and went to refill his drink.
A crowd had gathered in the living room, and Anthony stepped around it, uninterested in whoever was under the beer bong or who had a mouth on someone else’s body part. Instead, he bypassed the gawkers and wandered into the kitchen. Only Skylar’s wraparound chick stood among the mostly empty bottles. Anthony grabbed the Absolut he’d brought and tipped it to his lips without stopping to wonder whether some sick fuck had added anything else to the mix. All three swallows went down easy, and he embraced the burn around Chase’s semen.
“Hey.” The girl turned her bleary gaze toward him. “Have you seen Chase?”
She cocked her head as if she’d be able to hear him better at an angle. The vodka scorched his nearly empty stomach. Remnants of the frozen pizza he’d had for dinner hours before were clearly no match for the booze, and his image of her blurred a little around the edges.
“You mean that guy you came in with? The one with the hair?”
“Yeah.”
“Dude, he’s right there.”
Anthony followed the direction of her raised hand as it pointed the way to his own heartbreak. There, in the middle of the living room, Chase sat on the low, stained couch with Jenny bouncing on his dick as the rest of the party cheered them on. In their position, Anthony could only see her back, but the fiery red hair gave her away. The intensity in Chase’s face, visible from the side vantage point, made the vodka rebel against his insides. Clearly, he enjoyed her sexual attention. Nothing like the discomfort he’d had with Anthony in the bedroom a little while before.
Anthony wondered wit
h detached interest what he’d taken to get it up again so fast.
“Pffft… I love pussy. Downer doesn’t know what he’s missing.” Chase’s gaze fell on Anthony, who wondered if Chase could see the wind knocked out of his lungs by the bold statement delivered in front of the crowd. The vodka burned his esophagus as it tried to come back up, but Anthony ignored it. He looked away, not wanting to encourage Chase to make any more hurtful remarks. As much as he’d love to tell Chase to fuck off and walk home, they were too far away. He had to watch and wait for Chase to have his fun before they could think about leaving.
For a split second, he thought about calling someone to get him. Fucking Allen and his fucking Purdue fucking education would have been his first choice, but he could walk home faster than Allen could get there. Aaron had moved off with Spencer a few months back, so they were too far away too. His parents would flip their shit and send his ass back to rehab.
He had no one. No one at all.
Instead of listening to Chase’s grunts and Jenny’s high-pitched cries, Anthony turned and walked into the backyard, closing the door behind him. The glass door deadened the sound of chaos and partying on the other side. While he could make out rhythmic chanting, he couldn’t decipher the words. He would have to wait for Chase to tire himself out, to prove his heterosexuality, with any girl at the party who would spread for him.
The predawn air worked its way through his clothes, chilling every part of him. He couldn’t decide if the freeze came from the cold or his own heart when he replayed Chase’s words again and again in his head.
Hate would keep him warm.
In the moonlight pooled near his feet, a plastic birdbath lay on its side. Anthony wondered if Skylar or his mother thought the birdbath gave them a bit of respectability or if it had simply been on sale during one of their drugged-out afternoons. Movement caught his attention, and he watched a possum as it scurried between patches of tall grass. Anthony froze as it stopped and turned in his direction, its glassy eyes glowing in the reflected porch light.
“Hey, little guy,” Anthony whispered, not wanting to break the tenuous peace between them. He’d felt so alone sitting under the stars, waiting for the end of a lifelong friendship. The possum skittered to the right about a foot and stopped again. Anthony felt ridiculously desperate to keep his companion out there in the dark.
He held a quiet, one-sided conversation with the possum while he waited.
It took a long time for Chase to fuck himself straight again.
After he’d spent about an hour talking to a wild animal and tracing the lines and imperfections in the plastic birdbath, the door opened behind him.
“Come on, loser, let’s go shopping.” Chase’s voice cut through the stillness with sharp precision. Anthony took one last look around the yard, but his furry companion had skittered off in fear. He understood that, so he pulled himself to his feet.
Heat scorched his face when Chase led him back through the kitchen. People stopped midsentence to stare and start whispered conversations as he passed. It shouldn’t unnerve him, but it did. He had to live there. He had to start college with some of them in the fall. Worse, he had to walk past them to get to that diploma in a few days. God, what kind of insults would they scream for everyone to hear?
Silence sliced through the tattered remains of their friendship on the drive back to Anthony’s house. They didn’t talk about the enormous Indian elephant stuffed in Chase’s backseat, its trunk hanging out the window in the dark. One street turned into the next, and Anthony couldn’t find his balls long enough to confront Chase about the venom and hatred he’d spewed. In truth, he didn’t want to hear more. Instead, he stared out the window, watching the familiar landmarks of his youth roll past in the muted light of the periodic street lamps.
When they reached his street, Anthony didn’t hesitate. Even before the car came to a complete stop two houses away from his own, he flung the car door open. The short screech of overused brakes preceded the slam of his car door only by seconds. Anthony didn’t even turn when Chase sped off, leaving him alone on the side of the road.
Beyond caring about recklessness, Anthony didn’t try to quiet his reentry to the house as he fell through the window onto his bed. No sound came from the upper floors. No one even knew he’d gone. Most of the time, no one knew he was there either.
His clothes landed on the floor in angry disarray. Sleep shorts forgotten, he more fell into bed than climbed. The weight of the evening pushed him onto the mattress.
The more he tried to close his eyes and sleep, the more oblivion eluded him. Defeated, Anthony grabbed a gaming controller from his side table and powered on the Xbox at the foot of his bed. Mindless building of a vast cubical world generally relaxed him enough for sleep. As a bonus, his friends, the ones who really understood him, resided in that world. He’d found them through online parties and cherished the nameless, faceless people all over the country who didn’t judge him or ignore him.
Sometimes, they were more real to him than the flesh-and-blood people in his life.
Within five minutes of logging into a game, he had a chat message from Jay. If he still believed in the concept of best friends after tonight, Jay would have come in a close second to Chase. They talked every night after Anthony got home from school. The conversations ranged from school to gaming to boyfriends and recently turned into something else. Jay started coming on to him, sending him pictures that made his cock stand at attention. He loved the shy way Jay looked at the camera when he took naked selfies for Anthony. Jay probably saw the same shyness in the pictures he sent back. He’d never sexted anyone before, but it made him feel wanted for the first time in his life.
[Jay]: Hey babe, I missed you. Good party?
Anthony smiled, warmth returning to his fingertips for the first time in hours. He grabbed the micro keyboard and popped it into place on the bottom of the controller. Jay didn’t have a Kinect like everyone else on the planet, so they couldn’t video or audio chat. He only existed as words on a screen, but he was more real to Anthony than any other friend he’d ever had.
Well, except Chase. Fucking Chase.
[Anthony]: It sucked.
Understatement of the year, Downer.
[Jay]: What happened?
Shame welled in the pit of Anthony’s stomach as he thought about it.
[Anthony]: I blew Chase at the party and he called me a fag.
[Jay]: What a douche. You deserve better than that.
His heart lifted, and he sat up a little higher on the bed. Another message indicator popped on the screen, and he opened it.
[Jay]: If you were with me, I’d never hurt you.
God, if only that were true. It didn’t really matter, though, because Jay lived in Detroit. He might as well have been on the moon. They couldn’t date in any real way, but after Chase and the party, he wanted to be wanted.
Jay’s face flashed in his mind, and he grabbed the laptop from his bedroom floor between the bed and dresser. It took a minute to power up, during which Jay stayed silent on the screen. Anthony entered his password, clicked around into the folder structure, and opened his special folder titled System Files. He’d chosen the name because it was something his mother would overlook if she ever got into his laptop. In a subfolder marked Jay, he double-clicked his very favorite picture, and Jay appeared on the screen.
He said they’d been at a family event, and he stood arm in arm with someone the camera didn’t catch, maybe his dad. They stood behind their house in a summer explosion of green. Anthony loved the soft, shy look on Jay’s face. He wasn’t smiling, but his expression could have broken into a smile given a chance. Long lashes rimmed his dark eyes, and short brown hair ended in subtle curls around his face. A smattering of freckles dusted his upper cheeks and nose, making him look younger than seventeen.
[Jay]: Are you still there?
Anthony grabbed the controller from next to him on the bed.
[Anthony]: Yeah, I was o
pening one of your pictures. I wanted to see you while we talked.
It seemed like such a lame thing to say. “Yeah, sorry, I wanted to see your eyes while we talked so I didn’t feel like such a fucking loser.”
[Jay]: I have a picture of you open too.
[Anthony]: You do? Am I naked? Lol
[Jay]: No. But I like those too.
[Anthony]: Yeah?
[Jay]: God yeah, I jack off all the time thinking about things I want to do with you.
[Anthony]: Me too. I wish there were a way we could see each other.
The screen stayed still for several minutes, and Anthony traced the lines of Jay’s face with his fingertips. Finally, the words moved with a new message.
[Jay]: You have a car, right?
[Anthony]: Yeah.
[Jay]: Come see me.
[Anthony]: I can’t just come to Detroit. Are you crazy? Where would I stay?
[Jay]: Stay with me. My parents won’t care. They barely even notice I’m here. They won’t care that you’re here.
Anthony stared at the screen, his jaw resting somewhere around his knees. It was crazy. He couldn’t just pack up and drive to Detroit. Though now he thought about it, he could have offered Jay the same thing. Jay could stay down there in the basement with him all summer and his parents wouldn’t even notice. Once Aaron moved out, they’d found other things to occupy their time. Dad had his pet projects at work and his golf games. Mom had her charities. They didn’t need him.
[Anthony]: Your parents aren’t going to flip if I just show up?
[Jay]: Nah, they never come down here. And they’re at work all day, so we can do whatever we want. ;)
[Anthony]: You want me there?
[Jay]: Every day.
Anthony stared around at the bare cinderblock walls and thick panes of glass on the windows. He’d been underground for so long, light and happiness had become a distant memory. They haunted his dreams and his memories of a time before the world turned dark.
