Brett

by Daryl Banner

I can’t believe he’s finally coming to my place.

  All of the nerves that chased their way through my system that first night we met at Dino’s make a vengeful, fierce return.

  Every step up the stairs to the fifth floor twists my stomach more and more until I wonder if I can even manage a moment alone with Skylar.

  Especially after learning what he’s learned.

  Has he made conclusions? Does he wonder if I had a thing for him back then? Or if I have a thing for him now? Well, he agreed to come over to your place, didn’t he? He can’t be that uncomfortable or freaked out.

  “And here we are,” I say, presenting my place as I push open the door.

  Skylar steps inside ahead of me. His eyes scan the couch, the mismatched coatrack, the windows, the TV, and my table full of knickknacks. “Wow. Pretty sweet pad,” he decides to say as he strolls in. His eyes land on the fridge. “Boob magnets …?”

  “It’s a bit of an ongoing thing my friends won’t let go of,” I explain. “When I first moved here, everyone thought I was lost … and straight. A guy downstairs named Lex got me a welcome-to-the-neighborhood gift of a magnet with giant boobs on it, and the joke just kinda caught on.” I follow him into the kitchen. “Want a drink?”

  “Uh … sure.” He smiles and leans against the counter, his eyes taking everything in.

  After a quick back-and-forth, Sky and I decide on a couple beers, which I fetch from the fridge right where Connor left them. We crack them open and drink right there in the kitchen. The silence of my empty place seems earsplitting after being in the loud and noisy Dames & Dudes for however long.

  “Where’s your roommate?” he asks suddenly.

  I glance at the French doors off the kitchen, which are open, showing Connor’s empty room. “No idea. Maybe with his boyfriend in Uptown. I think something’s up with them, but he won’t say what. Boy troubles,” I add as a joke. Sky gives me a chuckle of understanding, then the two of us draw silent again.

  I wonder if it was a mistake to come out to him the way I did, like a splash of cold water without any warning. Of course, if I hadn’t, then we would not have ended up on my side of town, and Skylar wouldn’t be standing in my apartment right now.

  Maybe things work out one way for a reason.

  I nod at the couch. “You wanna kick back for a bit? Throw something on the TV? Chill?”

  “Yeah, uh, sure. Totally. Let’s do it.”

  We relocate to the living room. Sky plops onto the couch so surprisingly close to me, our arms are pressed together. He seems like he’s about to scoot over to give me space, but after I grab the remote, turn on the TV, and settle back into place on the couch, he seems to stay put, our sides touching.

  “Just like the old days,” Sky teases anxiously.

  “Yep,” I agree. My heart is thumping as if I’m running for my life. I want to put my arm around him, but I know that’s not a good idea. “Just us.”

  “Hanging on the couch.”

  “With a couple beers. And all the frat guys are busy in the basement playing pool.”

  “Or fucking girls in their rooms, even though it was prohibited.”

  “Or studying for exams—whatever that is,” I add as a dumb joke. Then I squint. “Wait. Fucking girls was prohibited?”

  Skylar shrugs. “I think they weren’t supposed to be upstairs during parties? I don’t know. I never paid attention to the rules,” he admits, and we both laugh, then go silent too fast.

  This isn’t weird, right? This is going fantastically?

  He glances at me which, considering our close proximity, puts his face very close to mine. “I think you could’ve succeeded in college if you really put your mind to it, Brett.”

  I quirk an eyebrow at him. “Uh, what’s with the spontaneous motivational poster slogan?”

  “I just … I still feel a bit bad about how we left things the other night. What I said. And that look on your face. Ugh …” He sighs. “I felt like an ass when I went back to my hotel. Dwelled on it the whole night.”

  By total instinct, I throw an arm over the back of the couch, almost scooping him into my side like a boyfriend. For a split second, I experience alarm. “Don’t sweat it,” I make myself tell him, my heart now beating twice as fast as before. I try to ignore it and act normal. “You had a point. And I heard it.”

  He looks stiff. “I … had a point …?”

  “Yep. I need to take my life more seriously.”

  “Brett …”

  “And I’m going to. I want to be someone you’ll be proud of. Someone you can respect.”

  “I do respect you. I am proud of you.”

  He hasn’t pulled away from me. My arm is still over the back of the couch, an inch from resting on his back. Every single fiber in me wants to pull this guy against me and snuggle him to death. I want to put my lips on his and pray that the bartender was right. I want to do so many fucking things right now.

  We go quiet again. A movie is on, but I get the sense neither of us are really paying attention to it.

  “You were gonna say something at the club,” I remind him yet again.

  He snaps out of it, turning his head to me once again, his lips inches from mine. “Huh?”

  “On the dance floor. Remember?”

  “Oh.” He shrugs, and with his body so close to mine, I feel every bit of it. “It was nothing.”

  “Nothing?”

  “Yeah, nothing.” He chuckles, as if to laugh it off. “I even forgot what all that was about.”

  I have a suspicion he didn’t forget at all. “You can tell me. Whatever it is, Sky.”

  He kicks a foot up on the coffee table in front of us, then leans his head back against the couch. It rests on my arm unintentionally. “Either the drinks I’ve had tonight are doing a number on me, or it’s getting late.”

  I turn my head to him. His eyelids are growing heavy. “Dude, if you don’t want to trek back to your hotel … I mean …”

  “Hmm …?”

  I swallow. My unblinking eyes are on him. My heart is still racing. “You … can crash here.”

  He doesn’t say anything for a moment. Did he hear me?

  “I mean, if you want,” I quickly add. “I don’t want you having to call a cab this late. It’s gotta be a half-hour ride or longer to your hotel.”

  After a sudden yawn comes out of him, Skylar finally nods. “Yeah, alright. Okay. I’ll crash here.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thanks, man. I appreciate it.”

  My heart is combusting into glorious flames of excitement. I’m not sure yet if it’s a good feeling. “I can pull down some blankets and a pillow, set you up on the couch out here. Or I can give you my bed and I’ll take the couch, or—”

  Skylar’s eyes fly open suddenly and he turns to me. “Wait a sec. Do you still have it?”

  I blink. “Have it? Have … what?”

  “The book,” he states. “The book. Our book.”

  I feel at once like I’ve fallen through a hole in time, my body plummeting deeply into a memory I didn’t even realize was there. “Holy fucking shit,” I hear myself say, overcome. “The book.”

  “The book,” he breathes, fully awake, wide-eyed.

  “The fucking book.”

  I’m off the couch the next instant. Skylar’s right behind me. I go straight down the short hall and to my room, where I plunge into my closet and pull down a box off the top shelf. Ripping it open, I sift through mementos, souvenirs, and a half-cracked Frisbee until I at last find it.

  “You do still have it,” Sky breathes from behind me, astonished.

  It’s a spiral notebook with the Greek alphabet drawn in big block letters across its cover with a Sharpie. The original cover is a yellow smiley face, which you can see through the block letters. In its pages is an assortment of secrets that members of our fraternity had anonymously confessed. There was a tradition of making the pledges add secrets in it, and then weekly, some of the secrets would be outed at
a party, but the tradition got confused and warped over the years before (and during) my time there, and eventually no one really knew the point of the book other than to drop funny secrets into it.

  And it would still be with the frat if it weren’t for a particularly foolish game of pool the president of the fraternity challenged me to. With a crack of the eight ball into a corner pocket, I won the book.

  And left with it.

  “How many secrets did you have to put into it?” Skylar asks as we bust it open on my bed. “I’ve got to assume there is some seriously whacked-out controversy in these pages.”

  “I only read the first three or so pages. Really, when was the last time I ever voluntarily picked up a book and actually read it?”

  Sky snorts. “You’re a walking irony. A guy … who works in a bookstore … who doesn’t read.”

  “Hey, to be fair, I work in a coffee shop that just so happens to be located in a bookstore.”

  “Sure, true. Though, I’m not sure that makes it sound any better.” Skylar gives me a look. “So are you saying you … didn’t … read the whole thing?”

  We’re lying on our stomachs on my bed like a pair of schoolgirls who found our older sister’s diary. “Nope. But one of the first entries was a confession about someone who still wet his bed as late as junior year of high school. Oh, and on the second page, there was a confession of this other guy who fucked his brother’s girlfriend.”

  “Wow. That was probably Brian.”

  I laugh. “C’mon. Brian wouldn’t do that. It was more likely Tyler or Jackson. Who knows.”

  Sky keeps eagerly turning the pages, in a very obvious search for something juicy. He lands on a page, reads a confession to himself, then gasps. “This guy had a hard-on for Professor Brown!”

  “Can you blame him? She was hot and only in her thirties. Didn’t she teach poli-sci?”

  “Yeah, I think so.” Skylar turns more pages.

  The memories continue to pour out of the little timeworn book as we dissect secret after secret. Just like that, all the awkwardness from before is gone, and we’re almost back to our old selves, laughing at everything, cutting jokes, and gawking at how many crazy weirdos were in that fraternity of ours.

  In fact, we decide to get even more comfortable by kicking off our shoes and pants and lounging on the bed in just our loose shirts and boxer-briefs.

  Teary-eyed from some other ridiculous thing that just cracked us up, he turns a few more pages and stops. When his eyes take in whatever secret is written there, his face changes.

  I notice. “What’s up?” I ask, wiping a few tears of hilarity from my eyes.

  He tosses the book to the floor suddenly, then rolls over onto his back. “I think I’ve filled my eyes with enough of my frat brothers’ secrets.”

  I roll onto my back as well. Our heads are at the foot of my bed, and our feet by the pillows. One of the pillows was kicked off the bed, I guess, when we were laughing too hard at something. I don’t care. “Getting tired?”

  He stares up at my ceiling awhile. “I miss this.”

  I stare up at the ceiling, too. It’s bumpy, the left side looks unintentionally lower than the right, and there’s a discolored spot that might be a leak. “It’s nice … having you back in my life again.”

  “Dude, I never left.”

  I chuckle. “No. I did.”

  He doesn’t say anything to that.

  I listen to the soothing sound of him breathing deeply and evenly, in and out. My mind is taken back on another unexpected journey through time, hearing him breathe next to me. “Hey, Sky?”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  Okay. I’ll just assume he’s listening. “I don’t know if you remember, but … I’ll never forget it. The night after our first hell week together, when we watched all of the new pledges trying to prove themselves, desperate to become a part of our frat. You and I had so much fun, but we were kinda the ones with the hearts … the ones who kept assuring the new freshmen that we weren’t one of the ‘bad frats’ that hazed and did bad stuff. We just liked to have fun, the way real brothers razz each other.” I listen to him breathe a moment longer, wondering if he’ll say something. “And after that long week, when we finally had a night to ourselves, we slowly fell asleep next to each other in that dusty room up in the attic of the frat house, all alone. The sound of you … breathing …” I close my eyes. I’m there all over again. I can even smell the old books and the boxes of musty, obsolete frat robes we used to wear during induction ceremonies. “At one point, I could see a glimpse of the full moon through that big circular window … the one window in the attic. You remember that window? I poked you in the ribs and tried to get you to look at the full moon. You turned and looked at the moon, and do you remember what you said? You said—dude, you were probably still drunk—you said to me: ‘If you were a werewolf, bro, I’d want to be in your pack.’ You remember that?”

  He doesn’t answer.

  I turn my head halfway toward him. “For a while after that, I wondered what you meant. Were you saying you wanted to be part of my crew? Or did you mean … you worried if I was a werewolf, and that big moon through the attic window made me change, you’d be in danger?” I smirk and shake my head. “I can tell you right now, you would never be in danger around me. Not ever. I’d …” My lips form a proud smile. “I’d protect you, Sky. No matter what. You’ll always be part of my pack.”

  I glance at the side of his face. Skylar’s eyes are closed. His breathing remains slow and deep. Still, he says nothing.

  Fuck. Did he fall asleep? Did he not hear any of that?

  I guess it’s alright. I’ll tell him in the morning.

  With a grunt, I roll back onto my belly to take hold of the spiral notebook on the floor and put it away. When I pick it up, however, my eyes land on the last entry Skylar read:

  This isn’t easy to write. I guess nothing in these pages is and that’s the point. Anyway, I just came back from a very embarrassing game of mini-golf, which I lost—badly—and my fingers are numb because it’s cold outside, and so here goes my humiliating confession: I am in love with my best friend. He’s thinking of dropping out after this semester, and I really don’t want him to, but he needs to follow his heart. Fuck. This sucks so bad. I’m still drunk from our post-game celebration thing, and I guess that’s why I have the courage to write this at all. I do hope he finds what he’s looking for. It’s clearly not me. And maybe writing all of this down will help me forgive him more for leaving. Because right now, I fucking hurt. Ugh. I love him. Love sucks. I hate love, but I love him. There. It’s confessed. Maybe Dionysus will read this and send me some wine to drown out my pain. Or better yet, Aphrodite, or her dumb arrow-shooting son, because I sure as fuck need their help right now, and I have a bone to pick with the cruel son.

  I stare at the page.

  I’ve never read Skylar’s confession before. It’s obviously his. That mini-golf game was with me. I’m the one who left.

  I’m the one who caused him pain.

  I drop the book, then flip onto my back again, staring at the ceiling with a whole new heaviness of despair sitting on my chest.

  Skylar is gay, too.

  And he had a thing for me back then. A big one.

  That’s what he meant back at the nightclub, I realize. If he’d known years ago, we could’ve been so much closer. He was in shock to learn that I’m gay, too—that we could have fulfilled our fantasies back then.

  If only he realizes just how much a part of each other’s pack we really were—and still are.

  “Skylar …” I whisper, emotional.

  Just then, he grunts in his sleep, turns over, and throws an arm over my waist to cuddle against my side. Then, after mumbling under his breath in that groggy way he always does in his sleep, his hand absentmindedly journeys south and takes a rather firm grip of something lovely just below my waist.

  Namely: my cock.

  9

  I freeze.
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  Well, this wasn’t exactly how I anticipated us approaching a discussion of our feelings.

  Do I say something? Do I wake him up? Do I just let him continue to hold my cock through my boxers like a teddy bear he’s gripping in the night?

  And it’s a firm grip, too.

  Like he’s angry about something.

  Or maybe he’s having one of those dreams where he’s on American Idol, and my dick is his microphone. I could fully believe it.

  With him gripping it like that, it’s not going to be much longer before …

  Never mind. My dick is already getting hard.

  Yep. Now it’s fully, completely hard. Swollen and throbbing in my boxer-briefs—and his hand.

  When I realize I’m holding my breath, I let it out gently, then turn my face towards his.

  His eyes are closed. His face is right by my shoulder, half buried behind it, and his lips dangle open, gently drawing air in and out.

  I try to move a leg, as if to test the waters.

  His hand squeezes.

  Oh, fuck, that feels good.

  I do hope my roommate Connor really is with Alan tonight, because my bedroom door is wide open, it’s a direct view to the front door, and this would surely be an awkward scene to walk in on.

  Also, I kinda don’t want it to end.

  This isn’t exactly the fantasy that’s been playing out in my mind for the past few years, but—

  Sky groans, presses against my side even more firmly, then pulls on my dick, still gripping it.

  It flexes in reaction against his hand.

  I resist squirming, despite crackles of electricity coursing through me at his touch.

  Fuck, that was like half a stroke of my cock.

  I turn my face toward him again to shoot him a frustrated glare. Do you have any fucking idea what kind of torture you’re putting me through right now, Skylar?

  I guess, after reading how he felt all this time in his confession, I deserve it at least a little, don’t I?

  Another thought occurs to me. Is he pretending to be asleep? What if he deliberately left the book open to his confession, knowing I’d read it? No, he wouldn’t do that … Or would he?