Truth, Pride, Victory, Love

by David Connor

  MATHIAS PUT me in a guest bedroom right beside his. He moved a couple of pieces of furniture and then slid the queen-size bed to the wall, making a ton of noise and scraping the wood floor when the frame moved off the edge of the carpet it was centered upon.

  “Dude!”

  “No big deal.” His response annoyed me. Was it no big deal because someone else would refinish it, or was it no big deal because money was no object and an expensive floor was just one more thing he took for granted? Once he revealed his plan, I was a bit more forgiving. “I’m going to push mine against my wall, and it’ll be just like we’re sleeping side by side.”

  Mathias offered a quick peck and then decided he had better go, before we broke the only rule we’d been given as teammates so far. I heard his bed slide and cringed at the thought of what it was doing to the wood finish.

  Good night, Reed, he texted once the moving sounds stopped.

  Sleep tight.

  Coach didn’t say we couldn’t jack off separately.

  He did not. But no pics, I added as an afterthought.

  You’re no fun.

  I’ll prove you wrong in four years, I promised.

  Can’t wait. And by the way, I’m playing with myself already.

  I listened for the sounds of him doing it while staring at the tiny animated naked dude with a boner on my screen. Mathias’s costly phone had some great emoticons. The image was pretty jerky and a little freaky looking, kind of pixelated. I was surprised it had come through as clear as it had on my junky one. I definitely got the gist, and it was hot. His fancy house was too damned big, though, and his walls were too thick. Whenever I masturbated at home, I was pretty sure it caused vibrations in the kitchen. I wanted to hear him so badly—I tried so hard—because the emoji’s damned cock actually twitched, and it was turning me on.

  “Ahhh.” I wasn’t at the point yet to moan, but I wanted him to hear me too.

  Why can’t we jack off together? What’s it going to hurt?

  I got up out of bed, still fully dressed, because that was how I’d decided to sleep.

  We’re going to. So there!

  I went to the door, where I stopped. My thoughts went back and forth like the pendulum swinging behind the glass of an antique clock in Mathias’s foyer, a word he’d pronounced as if it ended in a-y. Masturbating in a house in which I was a guest felt all kinds of wrong, but that was what also made it really hot.

  In the end, I returned to my bed, where I could put my free hand on the wall part of the time, in case he could sense it there. Such dorky teenage romance. I ended up finishing ahead of him.

  His Damn! That felt good! came a good minute and a half after.

  I had to clean my phone off with my sock to see it. I figured I could put on my Jordans in the morning without them.

  I got another text after that, following some knocking on the wall. I knocked back—random taps—and then he answered, something more deliberate, before he sent another text, just a bunch of periods and lines. Yet more knocking followed, but I still didn’t get it, not until he sent the Morse code translator link.

  Duh! They were dots and dashes, not periods and lines.

  I love you.

  That was what he’d written, I deciphered. The tapping on the wall had said the same, I assumed. It was adorable!

  I learned this when I was little. Texting is way easier. :) Mathias sent that next.

  U R sweet.

  That was my answer. I added a heart—a less-than sign and a three—when I texted it, because it would have taken me all night to type out or tap I love you too in dots and dashes. We were like Civil War prisoners in love, communicating through our cells. Only I was a lazy one.

  “AS YOUR coach, I’m going to be up in every bit of your business.” We stood in front of him at the Dover community pool in our skimpy swimsuits at sunrise the next morning. “You can release your sexual tension in the pool.”

  I held back a snicker as Mathias and I exchanged glances.

  “Not like that, perverts. I want you so horny you can’t stand it. I want you so frustrated a race will feel just like getting fucked.”

  Mathias moved his hand to his crotch. Apparently he was getting hard too.

  Olympic Coach Keller sure was different than high school Coach Keller, but his training methods worked. I went home from every practice so aroused I had to lock myself in the bathroom for fear I would explode at second breakfast if I didn’t. The schedule was mad already. Mathias and I had to be at the pool at five after that first day. We trained for three hours, and then I had to get to summer school for two. After that, it was home so my father and Julius could go to work. Dad had gotten him in as a groundskeeper too. Late afternoon, we swam again, and then I went to work some nights. By bedtime, I was exhausted. I could only imagine how grueling my schedule was going to be once college started.

  After a week or so, Mathias moved in with us for the rest of July and much of August because of the early hours. Coach had suggested it. Otherwise, Mathias had to leave his house before three. Surely the Webbers could have put him up in his own place, but since he was technically a minor for another couple of weeks, Coach thought it best he have an adult guardian.

  “I rarely have one at home,” he had said.

  “I lived with another family while I trained,” Coach told him. “That’s just how it works most of the time.”

  “I’d love to stay with Reed… with the Watsons, but I insist on paying my own way.”

  The whole thing was awkward and caused quite a strain on our relationship. My father had too much pride to take Mathias’s money at first, according to what I heard through our way-thinner walls—I hoped our new boarder would beat off often, by the way—but Coach Keller talked Dad into it. I’d heard that discussion by listening in from our foyer, which rhymed with lawyer, and was actually just a hall.

  “Another mouth to feed, more electricity, water, etcetera… it makes sense,” Coach Keller had said.

  “I don’t know….”

  “And you’re doing the kid a favor. A family atmosphere is important. I’m sure he’d be happier here than at my place. Your house feels so full. From what little I have seen of the home life he has, I think he could use some of that. It will make him a better young man and a better athlete.”

  And so it was done.

  The best way to get to know someone is to live with them, I’d once read, and boy, that was the truth. I quickly came to understand why marriage was a fifty-fifty proposition as I fell in and out of love with Mathias a hundred times a day. He annoyed me with comments about the size of our water heater—“Good thing I am always in need of a cold shower”—or about a lack of food—“There’s no wheat bread?” When he went to the store to get some, though, he came home with flowers for my mom and my favorite gum. We’d never talked about gum, but he must have noticed, and that made me fall in love with him again, at least until he went and asked for half-and-half.

  “This milk is all you have?”

  Um, yeah. We bought 2 percent by the gallon. That was what my parents put in coffee and I put on my cereal and mixed with Hershey’s syrup for chocolate milk.

  “I’ll add it to the shopping list,” my mother said.

  “Oh. Don’t go to any trouble, Mrs. Watson,” Mathias told her. “This is fine.”

  The way he’d said it didn’t make it sound fine. I don’t think Mathias meant to come off as haughty or superior, but he often did. Not only that, he sucked at chores. He always put the dishes away not quite all the way dry, which made the cupboards smell musty. He never picked up his towel after an allegedly cold shower, and though I enjoyed the visual as he mowed half the lawn with no shirt on and saggy, loose swim trunks, the lines were so crooked I eventually told him to take a break out of frustration and finished the grass myself.

  None of us felt comfortable commenting, though. We’d never asked him to do any of those things in the first place, since he was a “paying customer.” He always ju
st pitched in. He tried to, anyway, and that made me feel guilty about judging his lack of skill. The fact he had none wasn’t really his fault. Life with us, as Coach Keller noted, was quite different than what he was used to.

  During a raucous Watson Sunday dinner, it became quite evident Mathias felt as out of place in our environment as I had in his. The whole brood crowded around the kitchen table, five guys, two women, and Shemar, who dribbled milk as we all laughed and built upon and embellished an old running anecdote at my father’s expense.

  “The dance moves,” I said. “That was the best part.”

  Beth sang Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night,” into her fork, dancing from the ample chest up, mocking how our dad allegedly busted a move the time she’d caught him singing along to the tune Devon played all the time.

  “It never happened,” Dad claimed.

  “Yes, it did,” the three Watson siblings countered.

  We stuffed our faces with mom’s baked macaroni and cheese, rudely reached across for seconds, cut each other off, and talked with our mouths full, and the more we did it all, the more Mathias folded in upon himself in his mismatched kitchen chair. When he got up to take his plate to the kitchen, I followed.

  “You okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I’m going to get fat.” He spoke to my reflection in the window over the sink as I rubbed the small of his back up under his shirt in a clandestine manner. “Your mom is an excellent cook.”

  “We get rowdy.”

  “It’s fun.”

  “But a bit much in such a small room… especially for someone who spends a lot of time all alone in a big house.”

  Mathias turned and forced a smile.

  “You homesick?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Not really.”

  “Want to take a walk? Just the two of us… unless you’d rather go alone?”

  “No. Two is always better.”

  The sexual frustration grew as well. I often visited the field just across the street for quiet. A footpath ran the entire perimeter. It was a New York State Department of Environmental Conservation wildlife refuge, where people could stroll or set up a tent back in the wooded part. There were a lot of trees, and I wondered if—

  “Trees,” he said. “They’re singing for you, because you’re too shy.”

  “I’m shy now? Since when?”

  “About some stuff.”

  “Maybe. What are they singing?”

  “An old song… from the theater, I think. You were in drama club, right?”

  “For a while.”

  “I’m hearing… ‘As Long as He Needs Me’ from Oliver.”

  “I was in that. I was Oliver when the high school did it and I was only in fifth grade. How did you know that?”

  “The trees told me.”

  “They did not.”

  “How else would I pick that song… out of thin air?”

  “I don’t know.” My heart was fluttering. Then it dawned on me. “The playbills on my wall.”

  “Naw,” he said. “It was the trees.” Mathias tapped out I love you on the trunk of one of the chatty maples. “We should camp out sometime. While it’s still warm at night.”

  I imagined tent sex, first with Mathias and then with Cal on prom night. “Maybe we better not.”

  Walking the entire way around equaled about three miles. There were only two other people out there that night. They didn’t walk, but rather sat on the tailgate of a pickup truck at the entrance, each with a beer and a cigarette held in the same hand. They nodded as we entered, and we answered with “Hello.” Once we got a safe distance away, Mathias took my hand. We did two laps like that, except when we got to where we could see the truck again, and then, instinctively, we just let go. Maybe they were doing the same—holding hands and letting go when we got close. Though somehow I doubted that was the case.

  “I wish I was braver,” I said.

  “There’s a time and a place?” It was a question, the way he phrased it, and I didn’t have an answer.

  “I wonder if my parents know you’re gay.”

  No answer came to that either.

  “Devon has a sense. He must. Or maybe he just thinks I love you as a friend.”

  We were hardly ever alone in my house or at the pool. That walk was bliss, but also torture, because I wanted to take him behind the trees and show him how I really loved him as they sang romantic melodies or hummed some sort of thumping disco porn music beat. “I guess we should get back. There’ll be dishes to dry,” I said as the truck became visible again and we unlaced our fingers.

  He risked a quick peck, on my cheek. “I hate to, but okay.”

  The next Saturday evening, since we had Sunday mornings off from training, Mathias and I headed back to the field with that tent—and my brother. No showers, no change of clothes, we planned on being gross, smelly, and hairier by morning. Devon still adored Mathias, and Mathias seemed to truly enjoy being around him. They played cards while it was still light enough outside to see. I was pretty sure Mathias let Devon win by not saying “Uno” when down to one card.

  “Pick up two!” Devon cried out joyfully.

  “We don’t do that,” I said later, offering Mathias a gentle caress at the nape of his neck as we looked at a silver sky quickly darkening to black. “Dev can kick ass at most card and board games all on his own,” I whispered so Devon couldn’t hear from inside the tent. “He’ll get you next time fair and square. Truth. Wait and see.”

  “You guys coming in?” The twilight had Devon ill at ease.

  “We should, huh?” I offered Mathias a final good-night kiss, with hours ahead of us before we’d go to sleep.

  A grocery sack we’d stuffed with every snack food in the house was already half-empty. We passed a couple hours by looking at stars through the unzipped flap and then singing a line from a song for every letter of the alphabet.

  “I’ll go first,” Mathias said, and he chose the A song I knew he would pick, the one the trees had picked for him days earlier. His voice was deep and strong. It caressed me like I wanted his hands to. He sang the whole thing, and I could have sworn he meant every single word.

  “I’m not singing a whole song,” Devon announced.

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  “I had to,” Mathias said.

  My last offering was a few bars of “Xanadu.” Mathias continued the old-timey Olivia theme with “You’re the One That I Want.” After Devon belted out several measures of “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” we decided to call it a night.

  “I can see the streetlight from my bedroom,” Devon said, only that, nothing more, just as I began to drift off.

  Still optimistic about my odds of getting to touch Mathias, even as I struggled to stay awake, I remained silent, hoping Devon might be as sleepy as I was.

  “Even with the shade down, it’s still not all the way dark.”

  “Try to sleep, Dev.” I couldn’t get too aggravated. I was the moron who’d forgotten the lantern, something Devon had pointed out when we’d first arrived.

  “Can you go get it?” he’d asked then.

  He had dropped it right after, when I’d said I would later. Unfortunately, I’d completely forgotten. Having Mathias pressed up against me now with our sleeping bags unzipped—quite stealthy, we thought—I’d stripped down to no pants and had already popped a woody. I really didn’t want to move, but I figured I had no choice. As I struggled to find my underwear somewhere down in the bottom by my feet, the tent lit up in green as if radioactive.

  “Check out my watch,” Mathias said. “You want to wear it?”

  As he passed it to Devon, over on my other side, his hard dick almost entered me. “Fuck…. Damn, Mathias!”

  “What?” Devon asked.

  “Nothing.”

  Mathias settled back beside me. “What?” he asked. I could sense his smirk, though it was too dark to see it.

  “You know.” I found my underwear and put them back on.

&
nbsp; He snuck a kiss to the back of my ear and tapped something back there that wasn’t I love you.

  “What was that?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “It worked,” I whispered, when we went a good ten minutes without a green flash and I heard Devon snoring. “The watch, I mean. And it is dark. There’s no moon, no ambient light from the neighborhood… we’re so far back. I’m kind of used to the red glow of my clock radio, so I can see where Dev might have a problem.”

  “You want me to hold you?”

  “Yes. And tell me what you tapped.”

  “I tapped I need you.”

  “Oh.”

  “And I do.”

  We slept in each other’s arms.

  DAYS LATER, Devon was still wearing the watch. “Don’t forget to take that back,” I said as the three of us did more yard work.

  “I told him he could keep it.”

  “Mathias….”

  “It wasn’t expensive. And I have a hundred watches.”

  Of course he did.

  Either way, as summer continued, Devon seemed as attached as I was, not only to the watch, but also its original owner, and the adoration went both ways. Cal, on the other hand, never did join the Mathias Webber fan club, nor was he overly friendly with me.

  It was Caryn’s birthday, July 21. “Long time no see.” I greeted Cal with a smile. Caryn had told me he was coming. “Maybe not, if he knows I am,” I’d said, but there he was.

  “Abandonment’s a joke now?” That was Cal’s response to my salutation.

  My smile went away.

  Caryn was turning seventeen and was weepy and emotional about how we were all leaving her behind. Part of the day, I felt like a teenager myself. At other times, it seemed my adolescent youth was long gone. Looking ahead to 2016 for so long, I often felt like I was already twenty-two years old, with Rio just months or weeks ahead, not four whole years.