Truth, Pride, Victory, Love

by David Connor

  I spent the daytime hours of New Year’s Eve 2015 with my family and later Devon at the Dover pool. That night I hung with Caryn and Calvin. Cal was renting a double-wide in the same park as Beth and Julius. They were next-door neighbors, in fact, and since Caryn was home from school as well, they were shacking up, as she called it. We started the evening watching Will and Sonny’s gay marriage fall apart on Days of Our Lives, thanks to Will’s infidelity with hunky Asian baseball player Paul. The story played hot and heavy for weeks, complete with sex scenes. Since Caryn had gotten way, way behind, we binge-watched old episodes online, until we got to the part where Sonny left town after Will was murdered by a new set of writers. Murdered—violently so—at the hands of a Price is Right male model turned soap-opera serial killer!

  “Fucking homophobic assholes.” Caryn was pissed the show suddenly decimated all things gay, shoving Paul, the only homosexual character left on the canvas, so far on the back burner he pretty much fell behind the stove. “A fictional character put his hands around Will Horton’s throat, but it’s the bigots at the keyboards that committed a hate crime. I’m never watching that show again!” she vowed.

  “Maybe they got a lot of flack from the public. Maybe Middle America isn’t ready for so much gay in the afternoon.” I thought about my situation. “Quit waving the rainbow flag!”

  “Well, it’s fucking time they get ready!”

  When dinnertime rolled around, I discovered two things. One, Cal wasn’t a bad cook, and two, Caryn had never given up on that idea of a threesome. We sat down to slow-cooker pot roast. The meat was tender, the potatoes fluffy, the carrots sweet, and my hostess quite bold. Thirty minutes in, she said, “After we eat, let’s dive into your sister’s hot tub.”

  “Sounds good to me.” I knew Julius’s mom had the kids at her house, because Beth and Julius were both working. They didn’t get New Year’s Eve off. Maybe I could help them out with money down the line too.

  “No clothing allowed.” Caryn stood right away and started clearing the table, despite the fact I was fixin’ to go back for thirds. One of the side benefits of training so hard was being able to shovel down most foods without guilt or worry.

  “It’s frigging cold out there,” I balked.

  “It’s above freezing. And the water’s hot,” Caryn countered. “That’s why they call it what they call it.”

  I gave in. We went out. Actually, we headed out, but stopped at the sliding glass door in the living room, where my hosts began to strip down. I kept my eyes averted the whole time. Well, I tried to, but Caryn snapped her fingers in my face as if I was a dog. It made her boobs jiggle.

  “Look at Calvin,” she demanded, as Cal slipped off his Special Olympics sweatshirt, and then a pair of sweatpants. I’d noticed early on he had nothing on beneath them, but seeing his jacked body and beautiful dick all exposed got mine pumping up. When Caryn made me watch as she stripped the rest of the way, I thought it would go flaccid, but it didn’t. I’d seen naked women before, and though I was a hundred percent gay, I could definitely see the beauty in her petite, voluptuous body. Still, I was far more comfortable when we were all in water up to our clavicles. I’d crossed the backyard and got in the Jacuzzi with my undershorts on. Had I known the evening was going to end with us all getting wet, I would have worn some more opaque.

  “Will, Sonny, and Paul should have just hit the sheets all together. Then everyone would be happy—except the hate-mongering homophobes who forced the wussy Days show runners to go back fifty years in time and pretend gay people don’t exist.” Caryn was still upset about that.

  “Maybe they’ll bring everyone back someday—even Will—from the dead. It is a soap, after all,” I said.

  “I won’t hold my breath,” Caryn countered. “Anyway, we showed you ours, Reed, now you show us yours.”

  “No one wants to—”

  “I do.” Cal’s hand shot up like a nerdy schoolboy’s. “I want to see it.”

  “You’ve seen it.”

  “I want to suck it.”

  “You do?” I asked. “What’s changed?”

  “Me. I’m older… more comfortable… I’m living in my truth, as I’ve heard you say. My new-age therapist says it too. I’m bisexual and proud of it. I like boobs and I like dick! I hope to be in love with Caryn for the rest of my life. At the same time, both of us love you enough for me to suck you off without it wrecking that, or messing with my head.”

  I had to laugh. “Wow. That’s a lot. And good for you.”

  “Bisexuality isn’t any different than anything else, really. If a person is in love, they’re in love with a person, often one gender at a time. If it’s a kinky Christmas three-way, and I’m lucky enough to be in it and everyone else is onboard, well, yeah good for me.”

  “You’re single, right?” Caryn asked.

  It had been months since I’d literally closed the door on a relationship with Mathias—a Russian hotel elevator door. Yes, I considered myself single, and I told them that.

  “Then there’s no reason not to experiment a little, right?” Caryn nodded. Her mind was made up, even if mine wasn’t.

  I looked to Cal. His brow went up. “None that I can think of, I guess.” So I raised myself and dropped my shorts.

  “Nice. I want it inside me.” Caryn grinned, and I sat right back down. “Fine. I want it inside him.”

  “You do that?” I asked Cal.

  “Toys.” Caryn answered.

  “Never one that big,” Cal said. “I’m not even sure I could, Wats. Doesn’t mean we can’t try.”

  “Start by sucking him off, then, Calvin.” Caryn’s hands were underwater, and I’d have sworn she was squirming beneath the surface. When neither Cal nor I made a move, “Okay, shy boys. Come here,” she said. Then she patted the bench on either side of her, making ripples and splashes. “Sit.”

  We slid around on the circular seating until the three of us were in a row, Caryn in the middle. I jumped when her hand wrapped around my hard-on.

  “Settle. Hmm?”

  “What?”

  “She’s comparing,” Cal said. Apparently, he was in her other hand. She started stroking both of us; I could tell by the motion on Cal’s side and the feeling in my dick.

  “Now that I got you started, it’s your turn, baby.” She stopped and stood, moving across from us, but not before rubbing Cal’s cheek. I had noticed all evening how they randomly touched one another, almost involuntarily, faces, hands, legs under the table. Cal’s hand was on Caryn’s ass a lot while they worked in the kitchen. That was love, I thought.

  “Get closer,” she told us. “Do what I was doing.”

  I’d done it before. I liked doing it, though I did recall the ambivalence last time, because of my feelings for Mathias. There was no more of that, though. At that moment, I swore I was over him. When Cal’s hand touched my boner, I shivered, and not just because it was cold above the water.

  “Nice?” he asked.

  “Mmm.”

  “I should have done this a long time ago,” Cal said.

  “Fuck me.” I was ready.

  “Whoa! If you’re going to do that—” Caryn shot up like the malfunctioning animated Santa we had back home, who popped up out of his cardboard chimney way too fast these days. “I want to see it. Let’s go inside. Better lighting.” She climbed out quickly and grabbed her clothes—and also mine and Cal’s. “Come on.” Pausing only a moment to call back impatiently, she ran across the small lot completely nude. The porch light was on, and when she got to the sliding glass door, I could see her quite clearly. Once inside the trailer, she wrapped my unzipped jacket around her. Late December weather could go either way in New York, from minus ten to an almost balmy forty, which was what we had that night. “Hurry up!” she yelled.

  “Shh.” Cal stood. “I guess we gotta.” He pulled me up by the hand, and we ran for the house together, giving the neighbors a show if any were at the window, since the trailers were pretty close together
.

  “How about a towel, babe?” Cal asked once inside.

  She reached for the fridge handle and tossed him one for dishes. “Bedroom. We’ll clean up later.”

  Cal obeyed. I followed. It was obvious who wore than pants in their relationship, even when no one was. We made it to the bedroom, most of which was taken up by a huge waterbed.

  “So, bed or…?”

  “Reed’s good with water,” Caryn said. “Hold up, though.” We got bath towels, then. She went for them and came back. “Dry each other off.” We both laughed. She didn’t.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Cal started by gently rubbing the towel behind my ear. I wasn’t wet there, but I didn’t say anything. He moved down my shoulders, rib cage, and hips, and I did the same to him. When he reached around to my back, the move pressed our bodies together in front, with my towel between us. I rather regretted that as our dicks came together, grinding through a terry-cloth barrier. Cal started down my back. He cupped my buttocks in the towel as I continued to rub against him. I truly wished I could have seen his face, because he sort of lingered there, and I wondered what he was thinking. He turned me around, like a dance move, so his back was to the bed where he sat. His towel hit the floor, and then he took mine and threw it aside. With one hand on my ass, he brought me toward him.

  “Here goes.” Cal licked his lips, his gaze transfixed on my hard cock. “I’ve wanted to do this since that day I shaved all your hair off—I guess before, when we were barely old enough to.”

  “It looks all prickly,” Caryn commented. I had let it grow out since August. “Is it?”

  “Some,” Cal said.

  “Can I feel it?”

  “Sure.” She did, and I laughed, because she tickled me.

  “All right. Go down on it, baby.”

  I closed my eyes, readying myself for Cal’s mouth on the tip, maybe just there, or would he take as much of it as he could until he gagged as I fucked his face? I imagined that—with Cal—and then with Mathias. Nothing happened, though, so I opened one eye. “What?”

  “What were you thinking about?” he asked.

  “Getting my cock sucked.”

  “By who?”

  I looked him in the eye. I looked at his dick. I wanted it, but I couldn’t lie. “Sorry.”

  “Still? Damn, yo!”

  “I don’t think you’ll ever be over that guy,” Caryn said. They knew, even though I hadn’t revealed a name.

  “You fuck him?” Cal asked.

  “No.”

  “That’s the problem.” He smacked my dick gently, as if it was to blame. “You’re still wondering what that would be like more than anything else.”

  “He is not.” Caryn got on the bed. “They’re in love.”

  “Bang him, dump him, and then come back here. That’s what I say.” Cal scooched up the undulating mattress too.

  “They’re in love,” Caryn repeated.

  “Then fucking bring him too. You got anything against the number four?” Cal asked her.

  I was pretty sure she almost climaxed right then and there. “Get the laptop, Calvin.” He sprang from the bed. “So, Reed,” Caryn asked, “you ever watch a chick masturbate?”

  I laughed. “Not in person.”

  I crawled in beside Cal once he returned with the computer. Watching him walk away—the roundness and plumpness of his ass was amazing—and was only outdone by his return, as his huge erection swung side to side. We giggled like a bunch of virgin teenagers through a porn video called Three Men and a Lady, at least until the scene where the lady found out she wasn’t the only one banging someone else in the cast. When all four met up in one bed, it was way too hot to be funny. Four scenes later, Cal wiped what was left of my cum off his beautiful flesh and then passed me the washcloth for what I had left of his. “How come that’s okay, but blowjobs aren’t?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted. “I don’t make the rules.”

  “Everyone’s are different.” Caryn rolled over and gave me a kiss on the cheek, near my lips, where some of Cal’s essence had been before I finished swiping and licking it off. Cal’s climax had come with hers. It was hot and sweet, and proved they belonged together forever. That was what I told them and they exchanged looks quite noticeably.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Come here,” Caryn said.

  “What? Just tell me.” I didn’t like the shift in mood.

  “Come sit between Mommy and Daddy.” Caryn slid over and patted the space beside her. Cal took my hand, and guided me back to the bed, between them this time.

  “We have to tell you something,” Cal said.

  “And it might upset you.”

  “What?” Three times and I still didn’t know.

  “You know how you had a four-year plan, how when you started on your journey, back in 2012, you were looking ahead toward going to the Olympics?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well….” Cal picked up the story. It was another relay, like when they’d told me how they ended up together, only seemingly not so happy. “Now we have one,” he said.

  “With each other?” I asked him.

  “Sort of.”

  “You’re breaking up?”

  “As great as these past few years have been,” Caryn said, “we both agree we might eventually feel like we’re missing out on something if we commit to one person—no matter the gender—so young.”

  “Are you bisexual too?”

  Caryn answered my question with a question. “Are you crying?”

  “No.” She handed me the Kleenex from the nightstand anyway.

  “I’m going to California… UCLA,” Caryn said, “to continue premed. By the time I start my residency, we should both be ready for whatever feels right.”

  “But four years is so long.”

  “How many days until Rio?” she asked.

  “208.”

  “How many were there when you started, say back that night Coach Keller talked to you and Calvin at your parents’?”

  “I don’t know,” I told her.

  “Yes, you do,” Cal insisted.

  “1,564.”

  “I knew you’d know.”

  “I can’t do it random… not all the way back. That would make me Rain Man.”

  “I was just making a point,” Caryn said, “about how fast 1,300 days or more can go by, and sometimes, no matter how many do, two people never fall out of love.”

  It didn’t seem like she was only talking about her and Cal anymore.

  “Now you ready for night-night, little buddy?” Cal kissed me on top of my head. “After the ball drops and we do what we did maybe one more time?”

  I crossed my arms across my chest. “No.”

  “Tantrums mean no dessert.”

  “What’d you make?” I asked him.

  “Brownies and ice cream.”

  “I’m really going to miss Calvin’s cooking,” Caryn said.

  “And his ass, I bet.”

  “That too. No matter what, Calvin and I will always love each other and—our wittle Reed.”

  My smile told only half of what I was feeling. “Okay.” I sighed. They seemed fine, so I figured I had to be too. “I’ll be good—if we can masturbate and eat ice cream at the same time.”

  THE MOMENT I hung the 2016 calendar on the kitchen wall in my college apartment a few days later, I put a big red circle on August 5, the opening date for the Rio Games. Before long, the first several landscape pictures were ripped off and everything shifted into high gear as college graduation and then the Olympics were fewer and fewer pages away.

  As I jetted down the lane at the Cloverton pool, no one on either side of me, I called up my mantra and favorite mental imagery to get me to the wall. Out of breath, I looked up at Coach Keller. The guy showed a lot of wrinkles when he smiled. The bigger the grin, the more lines appeared. His face was a fucking roadmap.

  “You did it. Reed! You did it!” He jumped into the pool with me, fully dresse
d.

  “Dude!”

  “You fucking did it six times now!” He sort of hugged me. It was more like a body slam into concrete. “It’s no fluke. You can beat him.”

  What I had done was best the fastest times in the sport, the ones my top contender had put up at his latest official event after some time away. We’d never gone head-to-head. He’d been banned from the 2015 World Championships because of his out-of-water antics, and though I hadn’t topped his best numbers while there or at Winter Nationals before that, I’d gotten faster in the time since.

  “What if he’s improved too?”

  “I’m sure we’d have heard if he had. And he might. For now, you’re on top. What’s different? You fucking Webber?”

  “No. Still not speaking to him, actually.”

  “Then that’s what works. Keep it up.”

  It didn’t work for long. By the time March came off the calendar, I was starting to think 1:54.73 was a fluke for individual medley, or that Coach Keller’s stopwatch had been jacked up. When April came off, I crumpled it up and tossed it toward the trash, missed—six times total—then chucked it across the room and kicked the fucking wastebasket after it. I kept my times low, but not as low as what I’d reached that day, certainly not as low as my mood. Something was off.

  The media specialist had become an official member of “Team Watson” somewhere around the waning days of winter. What exactly she’d been doing for me, I had no idea. When I finally met her face-to-face sometime after Easter, she criticized me for my timid voice again and mentioned how my teeth were distracting.

  “That’s a good thing. Though it might not hurt you to hit a tanning bed now and again. I’ve never seen such a white man of color.” Had she not been told I was adopted? “Your mantra for all interviews should be ‘It only matters what happens in the water.’” A test followed. She asked me about my sexual orientation, and when I started to answer, cut me off with “I don’t want to know. You should make yourself attractive to both sexes. Swimming has its token gay boy now. You certainly can’t compete with Mathias Whatever His Name Is there.”