Direct Confusion - 10. Chapter 10

The rest of the week passed quickly. Between training, classes, extra cardio training with Jameson for my phys ed report, going over match schedules with the team and planning for the party, it’s all Erin and I can do to grab quick kisses in the stacks and before training. After what Coach said, I am super careful about touching Erin in the locker rooms. Friday we have a hard but short practice before everyone gets let out for the weekend and I breathe a sigh of relief as we trudge back in towards the locker room. Derrick knocks my shoulder with his helmet and yawns.

“Jim wants to know if we fancy a soak.” Derrick rolls his shoulders. “Might be a nice idea.”

“Sure.” Derrick always keeps his phone on the bench during training, just in case Cherrie needs him. I’m sure there’s a message waiting for me on mine, but it’s in the bottom of my locker. “Let me tell Erin where I am.”

“I already invited him. He played really well today.” Derrick grins at me over his shoulder. “You’d best behave yourselves.”

Being in the pool with Erin and company is some kind of new ecstatic torture. We jump into the showers, and as the team begins to vanish, sagging and tired after practice and eager to get to their weekends, we change into our swim gear and slip off to the pool. I could have gone for board shorts, but I choose my non-regulation red speedo’s with the white trim. Erin is walking behind me towards the side of the pool. Jim is doing laps almost entirely underwater, slick tight turns at either end of the pool, rising through the water and breaking the surface like a dolphin.

“Jim!” Derrick shouts before jumping into the pool, splashing water everywhere with his dive bomb. Jim frowns and splashes him as he surfaces.

“Dick. Hey McBride! Looking good dude!”

Erin turns at Jim’s words, and looks back to me. He blushes, but I know it’s not my imagination which shows the twitching in his own green speedo. I grin back at him, knowing I look like a cocky bastard.

“Derrick said you were good on the field.”

“He’s lying.” Erin rubs his hand over his hair. “I think I spent most of practice watching you. You’re amazing.”

“Thanks.” I blush in return, which is handy, because it diverts the blood from its fast track towards my groin. “Come on, let’s go.” I jerk my head towards the sauna door.

Only us, as team captains, and the staff are allowed to use the sauna, and it’s fairly handy that none of the staff ever seem to come here. Jim lifts himself out of the pool as we pass and shivers in the sudden coolness of the air. Derrick lounges in the water for a bit, then hauls ass out and beats me to the sauna by two paces. The sauna is like a little slice of heaven, tiny, quiet, hot and damp. I fall onto the bench with a sigh. It’s stupidly hot in here, but that will only make the swim later more satisfying. No one says anything once the door shuts, and Derrick and Jim slump on the other bench, leaving nowhere for Erin to sit but next to me. He half turns, and we end up with our shoulder blades pressed together. It’s hot and sticky, but strangely comfortable. The heat makes it easier to think about what Erin is packing under his suit, and the gloom and silence are sort of welcome.

Apart from one flash right after he’d come, I’ve never seen him naked. The idea of Erin nude has been keeping me up at night. I watch him breathing from the corner of my eye, the steady slow rise and fall of his chest, the tightness across his pecs and his abdomen. I have never tasted his body. My eyes drift downwards to the soft bulge in his speedos, the curve of cock and balls nestled between his thighs. Either Erin has no body hair, or like everyone on the swim team, he lies about shaving. When Jim coughs, I twitch and glance up, trying not to look guilty. He does not look like he approves.

“Time for a swim chaps. Let’s go.”

It’s suddenly cold and refreshing in the pool, and my muscles seem to be made of jello as I swim one length sloppily in nothing like my usual form. I tread water at the deep end and duck myself under as Jim approaches, still moving cleanly through the water like a hot knife through butter. He’s still there when I surface.

“Hey McBride.”

“Hey Jim.” I hook my arm onto the side of the pool and hang off the smooth blue tiles. “Thanks for the invite.”

“No worries. It’s been ages since we hung out properly. Everything all set for tomorrow?”

“Yup.” And it is. The keg is it the kitchen, there is a secret stash of decent alcohol in my room for me and my good friends. There are snack foods overflowing in my living room and my parents have cleaned the entire ground floor of the house of breakable objects and precious family mementos. Happily this includes all of the photos from the walls. “Jim, is everything all right?”

“Sure.” I can always tell when my second oldest friend is lying. I wait. “I feel weird about you and Erin.”

“Why?”

“I dunno. He looks at you like he’s hungry or something. And like, he watches you all the time.”

I know it’s not the intention of his words, but what Jim said make my head spin. The idea Erin watches me is erotic as hell.

“You know you’re going to have to get over that right?”

“Trying. He seems like a nice guy. His brother is odd though.”

I punch him in the shoulder without force.

“Don’t talk shit about Jameson, he’s a good guy.” I shake my head, drop under the water, pushing off against the wall to go back to the shallow end. I’m less relaxed now, and I swim better, streaking through the water with swift clean movements. When I surface at the other end, Erin is watching me. I grin and swim over.

“Hey you.”

“Hey.” I push the water off my stubbled head with one hand and grip onto his shoulder with the other. “You OK?”

“Yeah. Luke? Is it cool I’m here? I mean, you three are friends and-”

“It’s fine.” I rub the back of his head softly. “I’d quite like it if my friends and my boyfriend to get on. Mom said you could stay over after the party. I gotta find a way to get rid of the guys though.”

“Is that wise?” Erin looks doubtful. “I mean, my brother will be there and all the guys from the team and stuff. It’s not exactly romantic.”

“Whoa!” I realise his brain has jumped several step ahead of my own. “I just want to be able to hug you for once. You know how it is at parties: everyone ends up sleeping in their clothes.”

*

I end up driving Erin home, which is a delight all in itself. We have similar tastes in music, which is good, because if he liked the ridiculous reggae crap which Chase put on this morning I might have had to break up with him. I remember the way to his house, but he gets me to take a dead end turning just before his road, and we end up parked outside a little green space, the swings and see-saw abandoned in the chill of the autumn evening.

“Erie?”

“Feels like we haven’t been alone in ages.” He sighs and his breath starts to fog the front window instantly with the engine and air-con shut down. “I like your car.”

“Thanks. It was my brother’s.”

“Right. He joined the army or something didn’t he?”

“Yup. He’s over there right now, another eight month tour. He’ll be back for Thanksgiving, but gone again by Christmas. It makes mom sad.”

“So your family is all cool with you being gay?” Erin turns to face me properly, curling one leg up on the seat, temple against the head rest.

“Yeah. Really good actually. Though I think mom may have had a tiny heart attack when she realised I’d finally brought a guy home to meet her.”

“You never brought any of your boyfriends home before?” Erin seems surprised.

“The only other boyfriend I ever had was so deep in the closet I think he might have found Narnia.” I laugh softly. I don’t want to be talking about other boys when I’m alone with my boyfriend in a warm car in the dark. “It doesn’t matter.”

“I’ve never had an actual boyfriend before.” Erin slumps back in his seat, staring at the misted windshield. “It’s nice not being single.”

“So where’d you learn to kiss like that?” I ask lightly, hoping to turn the joke into something soft and delicious on my lips.

“Around.” Erin crosses his arms over his chest. “I’m not a virgin Luke.”

His words freeze me, and my heart goes a dozen miles an hour.

“I never had an actual boyfriend, not someone I wanted my parents to meet, but there were guys. A couple at school in secret and a couple of older guys from the community college outside the town we came from.” He shrugs, like it’s not a big deal.

I find myself asking a question I do not want to know the answer to.

“H-how many?”

“Six.”

“Oh.”

“Luke…” He reaches out to touch me and then pulls back, his hand resting on the centre console between us. I take his palm in my own, stroking the thin skin of his wrist with one thumb. “It’s OK right?”

“It’s not like you could change it if it wasn’t.” I let out a little breathy laugh. “It’s OK, I didn’t figure you had is all…” The idea of Erin with other boys makes me uncomfortable in my skin. It does at least explain his confidence in the showers.

“It was just… casual.” He bites his lower lip, looking flushed and guilty. Embarrassed. “I never wanted to be that guy y’know, who got all the way through high school still not knowing how his body worked. And then I ended up being that other guy who sleeps around on the quiet.”

“Oh.” I can’t find anything good to say, so I don’t say anything at all. I sit there staring through the misted up windshield, focused on nothing at all.

“Luke.”

I turn at the sound of my name in his voice, a shiver of desire running down my spine. His lips are right there, half an inch away. Blue eyes are hooded but bright, and a tiny frown mars the space between his brows. I kiss him, and it seems like the most natural thing to do.

By the time Jeremy and I had our second ‘date’, we’d already screwed each other every way we could think of. It had never been anything other than rampant horniness and desire. Now I kiss Erin softly, one hand cupping the side of his neck, my thumb rubbing across his cheek. So what if he’s been with a bunch of other guys? We’ve already established this, what we’re doing here, is just between us and there aren’t any other people involved. I’m going slow with him because I care about him, and the knowledge hits me in the head like a hammer. High school relationships never last, but Erin kisses me back like the sweetest honey. We end up more or less both in the passenger seat, pushed together but without our hands in each other’s clothes. Eventually we have to come up for air. The inside of the car seems brighter for the dilation of my pupils.

“Luke, I think I-”

“Shh…” I put my finger to his lips, and he kisses the digit softly. “Don’t say it yet. One of us will freak out.”

“OK.”

“I never cared about anyone the way I care about you.” I can’t look at him and say the words, because it’s all too overwhelming, and I choose to look at the now heavily fogged windshield instead. “We’ve known each other like two weeks, its nuts.”

“Hey, maybe it’s just chemicals?” Erin lets out a little laugh, and I can tell he’s trying to soften the tension of the words we haven’t said.

“We’re going to have to get through the entire party tomorrow without doing anything too stupid.” I shuffle back into my own seat and adjust the steel bar of my erection none too subtly. “Oh god…”

“The guys won’t actually, like, mind though will they?” Erin looks concerned.

“I’d rather not push the entire teams’ tolerance by getting caught doing anything more than kissing.” I shrug. “Last time we had a party at Jim’s and he caught Derrick and Cherrie doing slightly more naked stuff in the pool house, he nearly blew a gasket. It’s just a respect thing.”

“Sounds fair. I wouldn’t want to walk in on Jame and some girl either.” I run a hand across his hair. “Anything you want me to help with tomorrow?”

“It’s all sorted.” I kiss him, a quick peck. “Just show up and look pretty.” As though he could be anything else.