Against the World - 1. Chapter 1

AGAINST THE WORLD

CHAPTER ONE

“Kevin, you’re gay,” says Aaron, turning abruptly to me. “Hot bartender: gay or straight?”

The words stuck to me: Kevin, you’re gay.

Tossed out, so cavalier, by someone I had known for 48 hours. Without judgment. Without interpretation. A fact.

The hot bartender is hot.

Obviously.

Though I have no clue about his sexuality.

“I don’t know,” I reply.

“Useless,” goes Nina, shaking her head.

“Straight?” suggests Ross, heterosexually.

Aaron mugs at Ross with mock hostility. “Ross, if you don’t suck dick, you can’t play this game.”

“Oh, whatever,” goes Ross, bends the pull-tab on his Kronenbourg back and forth, one, two, three times. “Just because Kevin’s gay doesn’t mean his opinion matters more.”

Just because Kevin’s gay.

The lazy mention.

And this whole thing: it’s like, what was even the big deal in the first place?

I had officially come out to the world on December 9, 2007. Four weeks ago.

By checking “Interested In: Men” on Facebook, switching off my phone, and stealing away with Veronica Tandy to the 25 cent martini lunch at Commander’s Palace.

Where we somehow managed to drink six bucks worth over the course of an hour or four. I didn’t count when I was drinking.

I don’t remember very much of the day after that, which was the intention.

I do remember: my closeted ex-boyfriend tearing over to my house in a panic to demand why he wasn’t consulted. Standard Adam Becker, who lived not in New Orleans with the rest of us but cloistered inside his own head, where his own struggles were apocalyptic, everyone else’s melodramatic.

And I remember: Veronica and I split the chateaubriand for two. We were already sloshed by the time we got it.

Only the general public found out that day on Facebook, I should add. I’m not heartless. I told the people who mattered. Who matter.

My family--my brother Nick and my mom Linda--found out in a letter.

I have, as of today, January 18, 2008, not received a response, though Nick didn’t defriend me on Facebook; we’re still bonded together digitally if no other way.

I never much enjoyed talking to him or Linda anyway.

And I had spent the preceding week before the big reveal, telling my close friends in person: Brett, Tommy, Rowen, Dana, Maddie. The marching band guys, as a group. Chris already knew, Ben already knew, Veronica already knew.

What I did not tell them: that I had been dating a closeted mutual friend for the previous nine months.

That I’d sneak him in the side door of the house on Broadway.

That I had ended things with him because our relationship could maybe survive the distance or the truth, but not both.

That I was in love with him.

Am. Had been. I don’t know the conjugation.

At any rate.

The whole coming out process was less messy than I had thought it’d be. Which makes me feel stupid for waiting as long as I did.

Aaron folds his arms, is staring down Ross Garabedian, smile on his face. “No, I don’t trust the gaydar of someone wearing that shirt, sorry.”

And Aaron’s smile grows, at his own catty cleverness.

Aaron Ackerman is also a Tulane kid, though I had never seen him around in New Orleans. I would’ve noticed him if I had.

He’s cute when he smiles. Very white teeth. Faint dimples, like Becker’s. Curly hair, short, dark auburn. A handsome face, an expressive face. He speaks with his hands and his eyes, in a way that reads to me as gay--not flamboyant, maybe, just comfortable.

I had never been comfortable. I’m not a comfortable person.

Ross looks down at his shirt, brown plaid with yellow stripes. One of his buttons, third from the bottom, has a two-inch length of brown string dangling from it. “What’s wrong with it?”

“It’s uglier than a genocide,” Nina tosses, as she lazily picks up her Kronenbourg. With a smile, she adds, “We were all thinking it, right?”

I had noticed Ross’s shirt earlier, when he was getting dressed in front of the mirror in our shared bedroom. I hadn’t said anything.

The shirt is, in fact, uglier than a genocide.

To use Nina’s words.

With the brown string hanging out from the third button from the bottom.

Ross looks over to me, as if I should defend his honor, roommate-a-roommate, but then deflatedly looks back down at his shirt when he realizes I won’t. “Holocaust bad, or just like a Kosovo sort of situation?”

Aaron Ackerman studies, like he’s thinking real long and hard about this. “Armenian.”

“Oh, so the worst genocide of all time,” replies Ross Garabedian, stiffly. “Is what you’re saying.”

Nina and I lock eyes, debating stepping in before they whip it out and start measuring their genocides.

Instead, Rachel Rosen saves us. Approaching our table, a sly smile on her face.

That’s Rachel Rosen’s natural expression: sly smile.

Like she was just on the cusp of saying something biting and cruelly hilarious, but decided to keep it to herself. Catlike, vaguely amused by her inferior prey.

Ross is staring up at Rachel, eyes glazed with love, suddenly vacated of Armenian slaughter.

He desperately wants to jump Rachel’s bones.

Rachel is, slyly, aware of that. And aware that he’s inferior prey. Vaguely amusing.

They both go to NYU. No one had yet commented on this situation playing out between two Manhattanites named Ross and Rachel.

Rachel takes a second to study the situation, and with another sly smile and a hint of an eyebrow raise, keeps whatever she had been thinking about Ross and Aaron’s flirtation with genocidal one-upmanship to herself.

“Are we going, or should I get a drink here?”

“Drink here,” Ross tells her. “Pub crawl’s not until nine, and Kevin’s friend is on his way.”

“Allegedly,” I add. “He’s on Carver time.”

“Gaylight Savings,” echoes Aaron.

“Okay,” Rachel says, wrinkling her nose. Not the answer she had hoped for. “Just one more drink though. I don’t want to miss the Sandemann’s pub crawl because we’re at the bar that’s literally inside our building.”

We’re at a bar called Le Manifeste, which does, in fact, occupy most of the ground floor of our dorm: Hôtel le Yé-Yé, brand new and self-consciously hip.

Except the bar is not. It's dimly lit, smoky with red lightbulbs, every inch wallpapered with old communist propaganda posters and photographs.

Because what study abroad program wouldn’t rent out an Ikea showroom attached to a Marxist saloon?

“I mean, we were all down here waiting on you, sweetheart,” Aaron tells Rachel.

Rachel sticks out her tongue playfully. She went over to the bar, to order from the hot bartender.

Ross, of course, watches her go.

Conversation abandoned, Aaron also turns his attention towards the bar, to continue ogling at the hot bartender. Who, at that precise moment, bends over to retrieve something off the floor.

“God,” says Aaron, to no one, “the things that guy could do to me.”

The hot bartender’s lean, toned. Fills out a tight black t-shirt. Sandy blonde hair, neatly cut. I haven’t seen him cut a smile, but I could imagine his face lighting up with pleasure.

“They don’t make them like that at Berkeley,” Nina agrees.

Berkeley.

Nina goes to Berkeley? I hadn’t realized that. She had said she was from the Bay Area. She hadn’t elaborated beyond that. I had met her this morning.

I almost don’t ask, I swear I almost don’t, but I do: “Do you know Matt Barber? He’d be in our year at Berkeley. Business major, I think?”

“Tall guy, blonde?” she asks. “Kind of, what’s the word?”

Mormon’s the word. Kind of Mormon.

In temperament. Not so much in faith.

I nod without answering.

“Yeah,” she continues, picking up her beer again. “He’s a good guy. He actually dated my roommate Ava last year. I mean, he dumped her after a few months, but still.”

Obviously.

Obviously, Matt Barber had dated Ava and dumped her after a few months.

Because this’s Matt Barber and, no matter how much time passes, I know Matt Barber. Knew Matt Barber. Will always know Matt Barber.

Conjugations. Again.

“I really think you should go up and flirt with the bartender,” Ross says to Aaron, “because when it turns out you’ve been flirting with a straight guy, I would find that really, really amusing.”

“Oh, he’s gay,” Aaron says, broad smile on his face. “Believe you me. Look at how he’s not even almost checking out Rachel’s rack. Even I check out Rachel’s rack.”

Ross flickers at the words “Rachel’s rack.” Caught with his mind in the cookie jar.

“He’s working,” Ross replies, bitterly. As if there’s dishonor in suggesting a man wouldn’t eye-fuck the shit out of Rachel Rosen.

“Working,” Aaron repeats. “He’s a bartender, not a monk. I’ve been out for six years. My gaydar is a finely-tuned machine by this point.”

Aaron’s 21. It’s hard to imagine someone our age being out for six years.

When I had been out for four weeks.

“You’ve been out for six years?” I ask.

“Yeah,” Aaron replies, absently squeezing his half-empty Kronenbourg, denting the can. He sets it back on the table, the top taunting towards me at a rakish angle. “I was fifteen, and one of my friends--all of my friends were girls, which should have been everyone’s first clue--asked me if I had a crush on Rebecca Emery, and I was like, no, I have a crush on Travis Rogers, who was on the swim team with me. And that was it.”

Perplexing to me that someone’s coming out could be so quiet.

I try not to look at the disfigured can.

“And nothing happened?” I ask Aaron, trying to sound only mildly curious.

Not that mine had been especially dramatic.

Aside from my family’s silence. Nick and Linda’s silence.

I wonder what they were doing at this exact moment, at noon Pacific Time at our little apartment in the middle of the California desert.

No. I don’t.

Linda would be drinking.

Nick would be lost somewhere, doing things I very specifically don’t involve myself in these days.

J.C. would be lost right alongside him. Inevitably.

And several hours to the north, Matt Barber would be sitting in a Berkeley classroom on Facebook, and several states to the east, Adam Becker would be sitting in a Tulane classroom on Facebook.

And everyone else would be scattered across the country, the world, wasting away a winter Friday. Like we’re doing here in Paris, in Le Manifeste.

Or they wouldn’t be.

They don’t exist anymore, not really. Object permanence snuffed out by distance.

Across the bar, Carver walks back into my life.

Carver Alexander, who cuts a tremendous profile: a bouffant, bleached platinum since the last time I’d seen him. Horn-rimmed spectacles that I know don’t have a prescription in them. A hot pink cardigan over a black t-shirt and black destroyed skinny jeans.

Carver. The artist.

Or so he fancies himself.

Carver’s a graphic design major at Parsons in New York, spending this semester in a program at an art school on the Left Bank.

Which I suspect he chose only so he could say things like, “When I was in Paris, attending an art school on the Left Bank.”

That’s Carver.

He smiles when he noticed me. A flat smile. He never smiles with his teeth.

“Well, I wouldn’t say nothing happened." Aaron is still going on. “Typical stuff. The neanderthals on the football team were jerks sometimes, called me a cocksucker, that kind of thing. But I was pretty popular, so it wasn’t too bad. And, of course, word got back to Travis, who was actually in the closet at the time, and we wound up fucking for the next two years in the backseat of his Dodge Stratus.”

“Ew,” says Carver, appearing behind him. “I’d never hold sexual congress in a domestic car.”

Aaron whips his head at the sudden intrusion that is Carver Alexander.

“I’m sorry,” Aaron says, his mouth, his eyes, his entire face descending into amused suspicion. “Who are you?”

“Carver Alexander,” he says, extending his hand to shake, though neither Ross, Nina, nor Aaron took him up on the offer; it hangs there for a couple seconds before he quietly lowers it back down. “I’m a familiar of Kevin’s. For the pub crawl.”

Carver’s an acquired taste.

Though I hadn’t expected him to explode like the Challenger so soon after lift-off.

“We interned in New York over the summer,” I tell everyone, quickly. “Both here this semester.”

Aaron says nothing. He briefly studies Carver, decides he doesn’t care for him, and turns his head back towards me, Nina, and Ross.

“Well, anyway,” he goes. He pauses. “Sorry, what was I talking about?”

“Oh, you weren’t listening either?” Ross asks. Aaron punches him in the arm.

“Travis Rogers,” Nina retrieves.

“Who’s Travis Rogers?” Rachel asks, reappearing with a can of Kronenbourg.

“Guy Aaron used to do the nasty with in high school,” Ross says.

“I could never do it in a car,” says Nina, shaking her head. “A backseat’s just too small. I like to really stretch out.”

Rachel curls into a sly smile. Says nothing.

“What, did you have those cool, hippie Pacific Northwest parents that bought you a king bed and your first condoms and all that shit?” Ross asks. In falsetto: “‘It’s going to happen anyway, and I’d just rather it happen under my roof.’”

Nina scowls, does not dispute. “I refuse to believe I’m the only person at this table who can talk about sex in a mature, adult manner.”

Aaron smiles at me, tosses me the conversational hot potato. “So, Kev: who’d you bump uglies with in high school?’

“Women?” offers Carver, with another thin smile.

“Oh, I bet it was women,” Aaron says, pale green eyes still fixed on me. “Was it women?”

I ignore the bit about women. “I had a... friend.”

The group whoops dramatically.

“That’s all you get,” I say, because I have no intention of even entertaining that topic, so distantly embedded in the past, back in California, and uncomfortable. “I’m getting another drink.”

Rachel hollers after me about our time-sensitivity.

Carver follows me.

As soon as we’re away from the group, he snaps his head over to me. “Okay. I want you to tell me everything that went down between you and Richie Rich. Dish.”

I stare at him, blankly. “‘Kevin, so great to see you for the first time in five months. I’m so glad we’re in Paris together!’”

“Great to see you, long time, Paris,” Carver says, flippantly. “Now dish.”

In the four months since I’d seen Carver, I had forgotten how irritating he could be.

And still, it’s good to see the guy.

He’s like alcohol. Full of toxins, not bad company.

I attempt to make eye contact with the hot bartender.

Carver doesn’t let me go that easily.

“So, recap,” Carver goes, “In August, old Stick-Up-His-Ass and you’re freaking obsessed with him. And every time I try to corner you on AIM, he’s just on his way over for some clandestine intercourse and you’ll have to message me right back, which you never do because you’re shitty at keeping in touch. And then, boom, it’s January, and you just nonchalantly text me: ‘Boarding my flight and oh yeah, I broke up with the love of my life.’ And now, you look away as if the hot bartender is going to save your ass. No. Rejected. Dish.”

“Stop saying dish,” I tell him.

“No,” he says. He pulls an electronic cigarette out of his pocket, raises it to his lips. Holding it flipped upwards, like Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, which knowing Carver has to be intentional affectation. “It’s good to see you, Kevin.”

“It’s good to see you, too.”

He drums his the fingers on his spare hand along the edge of the bar, his ring, middle, and index finger in a pattern, one, two, three, four sequences in a row.

“Stop that,” I say.

He does. He looks up at me with the beginnings of an impish smile. “So: how exactly did your relationship with Her Royal Highness the Countess of Becker implode? Leave nothing out.”

Carver has no business dragging Becker to Paris with us.

When you leave someone in the past, in a different place, they’re supposed to stay there.

Carver starts drumming his fingers again, along the edge of the bar, one, two, three times before he looks up at me, realizes he’s doing it, and stops.

“You wanted to fuck French boys,” he suggests, moving on with the conversation with or without me. “And you were staring down the barrel of sticking your what-I-hear-is-considerable penis in nothing more than a tube sock for eight lo-o-ong months. Meanwhile, Becker is across the world telling his frat brothers how much he’s into the puss-puss.”

What I do not want: Carver to bring Becker here.

What I also do not want: Carver insinuating that there was some cheap reason, that I broke up with Becker because I couldn’t keep it in my pants for eight months.

It’s not that. He’s not here.

“‘You can’t take all of it with you,’” I tell Carver, some straight-up Michael Malley drag. “Look, long distance is hard. And I wanted to come out, and he wouldn’t. And for months, I thought I could be okay with that--that he just needed some time to get shit together. But he’s no closer to coming out than he was a year ago, and I couldn’t lie anymore. Kant tells us--”

Carver gives a very theatrical eyeroll.

I skip over Kant.

“Lying is bad,” I simplify, “and lying to the people you care about is worse. I thought a lie of omission could be morally sound, but it’s not. And once people started knowing--I mean, you knew, Veronica, Ben, my family, all the New York people… Once people started knowing, the lie just became less and less sustainable. I didn’t want to open the next chapter with a lie.”

Carver has already lost interest. By this point.

“And you wanted to fuck French boys,” he tells me again, lazily.

“Shut up, Carver.” I pause. “Do you think I did the right thing?”

“Oh, no way in hell am I answering that,” goes Carver.

“You have an opinion on everything.”

“And even I’m not dumb enough to tell you whether dumping your boyfriend was a good or a bad idea,” he says. “I only met the kid once, but Becker was so far in the closet he needed Ruby Slippers to get out of there. And if you were dying in the closet, that’s that. You don’t need my approval.” Carver inhaled from his e-cigarette, blew vapor in my face, and his lips curled into what qualified, for him, as a smile. “You thought you could fix him. And that he could save you. But you can’t fix anyone until you fix yourself, and no one can save you but you, and you’ve never figured that out.”

I bristle. Such an obnoxious thing to say. Typical full-of-shit Carver.

“Go suck a dick, Carver.”

Carver maintains his smile, increasingly unsettling the longer it stays etched on his face. “Following that train of thought: hot bartender. Did you call dibs, or can I go after him?”

My eyes move quietly in the direction of the bartender, in time to catch his head turning back at us.

How much English does this guy even understand?

He smiles at me. Not a good omen.

Or a very good one.

Depending.

“Sorry,” he says, hurrying over to us. “Can I get you drinks?”

He has a nametag, gold: Sébastien. Sexy Sébastien.

About six feet, about my height, the chiseled jaw and broad shoulders of an Abercrombie bag.

“Pour moi, un Kronenbourg,” I tell him, in embarrassingly rudimentary French, pointing to myself. “And…” I motion to Carver.

“Vodka-soda,” Carver finishes. He turns back to me, abruptly ignoring Sébastien, who set off to prepare our drinks. “You know, all this talk about you and Richie Rich, and you haven’t even asked me how my love life is.”

“I know how your love life is,” I reply. “Non-existent.”

Carver pursed his lips. “I wouldn’t say non-existent, no.”

“Do you really think you don’t spend ninety percent of our AIM chats talking about yourself?”

“Like I could ever pin you down long enough to have an actual conversation,” Carver says, his mouth creeping into a wispy, smug smile. “Mr. Busy. Clearly I neglected to tell you about my very torrid affair with Antony.”

“You did tell me about Tony,” I tell him. “That’s how I know your love life is non-existent.”

His smile falters, and his eyes narrow. “First of all, it’s Antony. Not Tony.”

“That’s not what his Facebook says.”

Carver ignores that. “I had to end it. The sex was wonderful. And it’s so hard to find a reliable top at Parsons. But ultimately, the bevy of mixed signals he transmitted was maddening.”

Tony had been the creature of Carver’s obsession for most of the fall.

Carver and I didn’t chat all that often, but he would enlist me from time to time to help him dissect selections from their AIM and text messages.

The alleged “bevy of mixed signals.”

As if Tony saying, “I like fucking you but I don’t want to date you,” was delphic and indecipherable.

Carver had told me I was “misunderstanding the nuances of the palaver.”

It was not the first time I suspected he used a thesaurus on our AIM conversations.

At any rate, I have no intention of going down that road again.

“You’re the one who ended it?”

“It was very, very mutual,” Carver amends, and he opens his mouth as if to say more but Sexy Sébastien saves me, coming back into frame with drinks.

Carver tosses his credit card on the bar with scripted carelessness. And as it falls, I catch the name--I snatch up the credit card to make sure I wasn’t mistaken.

“Wait,” I say, holding the card up to the light in the dim Bolshevik bar. “Your name’s not actually Carver Alexander?”

The horror on Carver’s face.

Then he snatches the card back from me.

“Carver Alexander is my nom de plume,” he says, finally, more than a little frazzled, absently handing the credit card to Sébastien. “You’re not an artist. You don’t understand.”

I shake my head. “Alexander John Carver. You’re right: that’s so much more boring.”

Carver folds his arms in annoyance. “It’s more pleasing to the ear to reverse the names. It lends mystery. Alex Carver is someone who stands next to you in a checkout line. Carver Alexander is an artist.”

“Carver Alexander is pretentious, is what he is,” I reply. “Alex.”

“Excuse me,” interrupts Sébastien.

We both look back to him. He’s slightly flustered, like he’s not exactly sure how to interject himself.

And oh-so-hot when he’s flustered.

He hands Carver back his credit card. “Cash only.”

Carver glances down at the empty wallet in his hand, and back up at Sébastien. “ATM? Cash machine?”

Sébastien points down the hallway towards the bathroom. Carver goes off.

For my part, I put down a crisp euro. I had asked the lady at Travelex for new bills. Somehow, a puddle of spilled liquid has already spontaneously pooled around it.

“Stop me if I’m saying too much,” he tells me, in a silky accent, vaguely European, his English almost British, as he scrapes the bill off the wet bar top. “But I don’t think you should worry about being single in Paris. It is a very good city for handsome gay boys. Believe me.”

Which I guess confirms how much English he was understanding.

And that pesky question of his sexuality.

It’s an almost surreal experience: to be getting hit on, so publicly and openly, by the sexy bartender, our first Friday night in France.

When, what, six weeks ago, I had been closeted. With a boyfriend.

Who responded with nuclear force when I asked him to steal away with me to a gay bar.

“Oh yeah?” I say, in what I hope is a sexy voice. Because of course I’m going to bite. “I bet you’re a great tour guide.”

Sébastien looks amused.

“Well, tomorrow night,” he says, leaning over the bar, so he was just a few inches from my face. He lowers his voice, like a secret: “Saturday night. I’m going to a friend’s band at this club in the Marais. They’re supposed to be the next big thing. If you’re looking for something to do.”

Or someone to do? I’m tempted to add.

I’m not that smooth.

Sébastien leans back away from me, and smiles, a gorgeous smile, a perfect row of white teeth.

Awaits my answer.

Yeah. Probably going to sleep with the fucker.

And I do not think of Peter Adam Becker. He is not in my head. He’s in New Orleans.

“Maybe,” I tell him, glancing sideways back at my group, who are listening an Aaron Ackerman story, told through wild arm movements. “I’m Kevin. Malley.”

“Sébastien,” he said. He grabs a cocktail napkin, writes in thick block letters: “SÉBASTIEN SZABÓ,” and underneath, his phone number, and hands it back to me.

“If that maybe becomes a yes,” he says, his entire face erupting in light. “Kevin Malley.”

Well. There you go.

Carver comes back from the ATM, immediately assesses the situation, as I fumbling fold up the napkin. He’s cool as a cucumber, he hands Sébastien a tumble of euros, and barrels back towards the group barely able to contain a smile.

I give Sébastien a quick and uncomfortable wave, storm off after Carver.

“Kevin’s got the hot bartender’s phone number,” Carver bursts.

The group whoops again.

“I told you he was gay,” Aaron tells me, craning his neck to look at Sébastien. “Does he have any hot friends?”

“We’re going to a concert tomorrow night,” I say. “I’ll let you know.”

“A concert!” Carver exclaims, plopping down next to Nina, who glares at him and scoots as far away as she can towards Aaron. “Who are you seeing?”

“The next big thing. Apparently."

 

The first time I met Peter Adam Becker was October 14, 2006.

I have a very good memory for dates.

It was a Saturday, it had rained earlier, we were at a bar in Uptown New Orleans called TJ Quills.

I wasn’t supposed to be drinking. I had a cough and the Tulane Student Health Center had given me a Z-PAC in lieu of a diagnosis.

Chris Baker had lured me anyway.

Largely with guilt.

And the promise of a free drink.

Chris was awful with insecurity. A shame because he was a cute guy and a sweetheart. Once you got to know him, and he stopped being all-consumed by the fear that he was making a bad first impression.

It was October, and Chris’s fraternity was in the throes of dirty rush. Even though it was months away, Chris was already desperate to get selected as someone’s frat big brother.

He was afraid he’d be the only sophomore in Iota Chi that no freshman wanted.

Or so he confessed to me one night in mid-September, after eleven Miller High Lifes.

He had also outlined his plan to secure a little brother: pick one early, and groom him from the start.

I suggested that was how priests selected altar boys, a point that went unremarked upon but unappreciated.

At any rate, Chris’s mark was Adam Becker. This preppy little snack.

Skinny, nice shoulders, like he could get jacked if he worked out. I liked him twinkish. Cute face, dimples when he smiled, a shy but inviting smile. Dark hair, meticulously parted. I appreciated neatness.

Becker was wearing a red polo with the alligator on it, a blue and white knit belt, shorts that hit just above the knee, a uniform. A uniform that underscored his place in the sun, his commitment to looking and acting and feeling a certain precise way.

But it was painfully obvious to a trained eye that this boy was gay and closeted.

It was painfully not obvious to Chris or any of his frat brothers.

I found that amusing.

Especially when Peter Adam Becker confirmed it by eye-fucking me continuously from across the bar for the better part of an hour.

An hour that he also spent pretending to be super-interested in stories of heterosexual conquest, told and shamelessly embellished by the Iota Chi brothers who descended on the prospective pledges like vultures on carcass.

Finally, Becker screwed up the courage to accidentally run into me up at the bar, to do some old-fashioned flirting.

Which he had clearly never attempted before with a person of any gender.

He stood there, a polite smile on his face, palpable nervousness, trying to summon a pick-up line like an ancient incantation.

He settled on: “So, what’s the name of your band?”

What he meant to say was, I’ve always wanted to fuck a guy in a band.

I was not in a band. I was in the Tulane University Marching Band.

Chris like to use the generic “band.” He thought it sounded cooler to leave some mystery.

It would have been cooler. For what it’s worth.

Becker was adorable when he smiled.

Becker is adorable when he smiles.

“Marching band, actually,” I told him. “I play the trumpet. I’m not nearly badass enough for anything north of the Tulane Fight Song.”

I added a polite, inviting smile: I might not be a rock star but I’ll still fuck you like one.

There were several seconds of dead air. As Becker tried to look for another synonym for, You could be in the Puppy-Killing Nazi Marching Band, and I’d still want to see you naked.

He didn't find one. Becker was terrified of this whole conversation. He hadn’t studied for this exam.

He was sheltered--so sheltered that he hadn’t even realized he was sheltered. He was like Matt Barber in that way. At least Matt Barber before everything happened.

Becker was a rich kid. Not even like Matt Barber nice-house-with-a-pool rich, but rich rich.

Chris had told me, in advance of our outing to TJ Quills to anoint Becker as Chris's fraternal altar boy: Becker’s father was David Becker, the U.S. Senator from Nevada and perennial Vice President short-lister.

A Republican. Who never met an Arab country he didn’t want to flatten; who officially but not convincingly supported the “biblical definition of marriage,” presumably involving the exchange of goats for brides, et al.

In press parlance, a “moderate.”

Or so I read.

“So what are you drinking, Becker?” I asked him, a life preserver. How many drinks do I have to buy you before you let me put my dick in you?

Becker looked down at his drink, studied the contents as if they were tea leaves that might lead him out of this conversation and into my bedroom. He squeezed his plastic cup one, two times.

“Screwdriver,” he said, finally. Beats me, I only started drinking yesterday.

“I’m getting you a gin and tonic,” I told him, without smiling. Here’s how this is going to work: you’re going to do what I say, when I say it. “You’ll love it.” And you’ll love it.

I didn’t think it would happen right here in the bar, but I thought we were on track for something.

Until one of Becker’s floormates, the Tai Fraser of Sharp Hall, came toddling over to suck the mood out of the room.

Becker collided with reality, instantaneously. You could see it on his face.

This metamorphosis. The mask of the preppy, straight, Republican Senator’s son hauled back over his handsome face emotionlessly and wordlessly, like a car window rolling up.

He was closed to the world.

He was closed to me.

And it was maybe then that I decided I would be the one to break him open.

 

Matt Barber leaned against my locker, a toothpick dangling from his mouth like a cigarette.

Matt was too health conscious to smoke. A Southern Californian. He liked the swagger.

“Okay,” he said, taking out the toothpick and holding it between his thumb and index finger. “So don’t look behind you, but that’s Kyle Owens over there. We have third period chem together, and he’s our inside man with the burnouts. He said they’d probably all be down for buying from a new guy, but only if it was cheaper. Like, a lot cheaper, because his parents found his stash and they’re cutting his allowance in half.”

I leaned in, lowered my voice, as if the locker row wasn’t full of teenagers screaming as they were suddenly on parole for lunch. “What’d you tell him?”

“I told him that of course we’d be cheaper,” Matt replied, rolling his eyes. “Obviously.”

I glanced discreetly over at Kyle Owens, who cut the profile of a Las Palomas High School pothead: a Volcom trucker hat, a black hoodie, sagging jeans.

And a pair of leather Rainbow flip-flops on his feet. The one commonality that brought all Las Palomas students together.

Barring myself.

Kyle's parents lived on the golf course.

I looked back at Matt, who had stuck the toothpick back between his lips. “I mean, how much cheaper did you tell him? What’s he paying now?”

Matt shrugged. He hit the heel of his own Rainbow flip-flop against the pavement, one, two, three times. What he did when he didn’t know what to say. “I don’t know. Cheaper. We should undercut the competition. Basic economics.”

I wracked my brain for a polite way to remind Matt Barber, whose parents also lived on the golf course, that we were slinging pot to turn a profit. We weren’t Amazon. We didn’t have the luxury of operating at a loss for a decade.

Matt Barber only vaguely perceived money. The way a human might vaguely perceive oxygen. You didn’t notice it when you weren’t asphyxiated.

The Malley family had fiscal emphysema.

We didn’t have a final prognosis on my dad. But either way, the near-future didn’t look cheap.

Correcting Matt Barber would involve admitting that I did, in fact, need this money. And that I needed it for more than movie tickets.

I didn’t want to go down that road.

I was not willing to go down that road.

We’d been at school for a month and I’d managed to maintain a large amount of the new kid enigma. Rebel without a past. From an undisclosed socioeconomic caste.

I was also good-looking, which made me more readily accepted without a lot of interview questions. I wasn’t too humble to admit that.

Regardless: ideal situation. I had no business being at a place like Las Palomas High School, and the longer it took everyone else to figure that out , the better.

“Tell him it’s forty bucks for an eighth,” I said, finally, as if I had a strategy or insight. “This shit’s good. This shit’s from the hood. He’s not buying oregano from some country club lifeguard.”

Matt Barber smiled at me, his innocent smile, his child-on-Christmas-morning smile.

“You don’t even smoke weed, dude,” he said.

I was about to point out that he didn’t even drink caffeine. “The Mormon and the Gay” was not the world’s most menacing marijuana distribution team, even if no one in the world knew I was. Gay.

But I lost all focus when he stretched his arms overhead, yawned.

Inevitably.

I could suddenly smell his cologne.

Matt Barber wore cologne. Fierce by Abercrombie and Fitch, the one with the shirtless torso on the bottle. I would find out later.

Matt Barber was no boy. He was a man.

The hem of his shirt came up, exposed an inch or two of skin of his flat, pale stomach, the tiny dusting of hairs underneath his belly button.

I tried to not look like I was looking.

Tried not to think the thoughts that I was thinking.

“But, okay,” he said, lazily. “If the price works out, I told Kyle to meet us up the hill at Dante’s Pizza after last period.”

“Dante’s? That’s pretty public.”

“If you know of a flipping back alley, be my guest,” replied Matt. “I was thinking around the corner, by the pay phones? No one uses that stuff anymore. And do you have two? He wants two.”

“Two what?”

“Two,” he said, “weeds.”

Matt Barber was adorable when he got embarrassed, his brow crinkling, his blue eyes ashamed, like an apologetic beagle.

Was I corrupting Matt? Was he merely Mormon-bad, and I was making him full-on Colton-bad?

“Two eighths, yes,” I told him. “I have two eights.”

“That’s one-fourth,” Matt clarified.

“Glad we have you around to reduce the fractions,” I said. “Taking Algebra 2 by storm.”

Matt was unamused. “So we’re on for Dante’s after school?”

I had an hour and seventeen minute bike ride back to Colton after school.

Though I hadn’t told anyone that. Let alone Matt Barber.

Matt knew I biked home. He knew Colton was vaguely far. He just hadn’t bothered to piece any of it together.

Matt Barber was empty of curiosity.

Which made him a good accomplice.

Matt Barber was my accomplice, which I hadn’t intended to have, but I didn’t want to cold call pot sales and risk getting expelled.

Matt Barber knew everyone. He could flit effortlessly between the jocks, the burnouts, the drama kids, the AP Asians, greeted by each like he was coming back from war.

“I feel like doing something crazy,” he had told me, second week of school, when we sat in the middle of the quad, waiting for the rest of the guys to buy lunch. “Like shoplifting or something. Just for the adrenaline, you know?”

“You mean, like, drinking a Pepsi?”

He smiled. “Don’t you think it’d be fun?”

“Well,” I had said, finally. “There are more lucrative ways to break the law. If you really want to know.”

“You better trust this motherfucker with your life,” J.C. had warned me, when I pitched him on using Matt Barber as an introduction service, later that evening. “Roll on your ass the second his parents threaten to take away the Beemer.”

“He won’t roll.”

“He’ll roll,” J.C. assured me. “He’ll roll, and then you’re fucked, bro. I’ve seen it a million times.”

“We’ll be fine,” I told him, and J.C. bit his fingernails but said nothing else.

He was concerned for me, because it J.C., but he was more intrigued about the possibility of us muscling our way into the Las Palomas High School marijuana marketplace.

The rich high school.

A place where I didn’t belong, because I had tricked my way in, in the first place.

For what it was worth.

I was supposed to go to Valencia High School. A daytime prison, epicenter for drugs and stabbings. My dad had heard from someone who heard from someone that you could do an inter-district transfer if your local school didn’t offer the class you wanted.

“I’ll drive you every morning and pick you up,” my dad promised as he signed the paperwork, but that was before he got sick.

And I wound up at the richest public high school in the Inland Empire, in second period Latin.

Where I met Matt Barber.

Who was taking Latin because his parents thought it would better prepare him for the SAT Verbal.

How else would he get that full ride to BYU?

His parents, who lived on the golf course. Who tithed.

“Shoot, I can introduce you to everyone who smokes weed,” Matt had told me, gushing with excitement, once we met at Dante’s up the block and he realized I wasn’t full of shit when I suggested we could sell J.C.’s weed to the kids at Las Palomas. “We can make so much money at this.”

Matt was getting twenty percent, and taking zero percent of the risk.

I couldn’t tell if he had realized that. Or if he was in denial about that. Or both.

“Maybe we should speak in code,” he told me, as we stood by the payphones on the side of Dante’s Pizza, waiting for Kyle, who was two minutes late. “Latin?”

“Well, we’ve only had four weeks of Latin,” I reminded him. “I think we’re a little far from being able to use it to arrange covert transactions.”

“Salve marijuana,” he said, with a smirk. “Meum nomen marijuana est.”

I looked out at the parking lot. A woman with blonde highlights coming out of Dream Nail, across the Las Palomas Village shopping center. Staring at us.

Or maybe just in the direction of us.

Maybe I was just being paranoid.

“Maybe we should get food so it doesn’t look like we’re waiting around to conduct a drug deal,” I told Matt. “Is this dude always late?”

“Look at you,” Matt said, his smile turning slightly enigmatic, with a mix of pride and anxiety. He put on a gruff, vaguely-Jersey voice: “‘If he’s late again, he’ll be swimming with the fishes.’ It’s 2:42, dude, give him some time to get out of the student parking lot.”

We didn’t get food. Kyle came by about thirty seconds later. He had a black Civic with spinning rims.

I looked to Matt, to see if he thought we should approach, but Matt didn’t move. Matt didn’t know. J.C. had given me tips, but those had gone right out of my mind once I saw the black Civic with the spinning rims.

And I was nervous. Heart pounding.

Because what if I got caught, and then they called my dad, and the last memory he had of me was me destroying my life?

I had an Altoids tin in each hand, gripped tightly.

And Kyle walked towards us, across the parking lot, looking significantly more intimidating than he did on campus, even though he was a good few inches shorter than both me and Matt.

“Hey, Matt,” he said. He looked at me. “I’m Kyle.”

“Kevin,” I said. Should I have used a fake name?

No. That was stupid.

“I’ll let you two chat,” said Matt, and he power-walked around the corner to plausible deniability.

Kyle and I were facing off in silence.

I didn’t know really how to begin.

So I just lamely handed him the Altoids tins, and he popped one open, then popped it back shut.

“Forty each, right?”

I nodded.

Kyle reached for his wallet. Counted out one, two, three, four twenties, all new and crisp, in my hand.

“Cool, man,” he said, putting the two tins in the breast pocket of his zip-up hoodie. “I’ll text Matt if anyone else needs shit. So much easier than my guy in San Bernardino.”

And without another word, he turned around and went back across the parking lot.

That was that.

It was that easy.

Too easy.

I arranged the four twenty dollar bills so they were all facing the same direction. They were to be treated with care--when had I ever had eighty dollars, in cash, in my hand?

For about twelve seconds worth of work?

Eighty dollars. An electric bill. Ten movie tickets. Thirty-two slices of Dante’s pizza.

Matt came back around the corner, looking grave. Like he had witnessed a murder.

“Dude,” he said.

We stood there in silence, watching the Civic with the spinning rims roll out of the parking lot, too fast. Matt Barber hoisted up a terrified smile, and plucked one of the twenties out of my hands.

“Division of labor,” he replied, which was supposed to be lighthearted but his voice was still heavy with alarm.

“That’s not twenty percent,” I said. “That’s twenty-five percent. Good with fractions, bad with percents.”

“I know, I owe you four bucks,” he replied. “Genius. I’ll buy you a slice and a soda, and we’ll call it even?”

I was starving. I had made the hour and seventeen minute bike ride without eating lunch for four weeks, but my stomach knew I had money.

“Deal.”

It was nearly dark by the time I got back towards Colton. It was the first time I thought about what would happen in December, when the sun started setting at 5 o’clock. Riding a bicycle down the shoulder of a dark freeway for an hour seemed to be an easy way to get killed.

Despite the encroaching darkness, I didn’t go straight home.

I went to Macy’s at the Inland Center.

I had only been at that Macy’s once--last spring, to knock over a display in the men’s shoe department so J.C. could walk out with a pair of Nike Dunks.

I took a pair of brown leather Rainbows off the rack in the men’s shoe department.

And I did not steal them.

I went right up to the cashier, put them on the desk, and said, “I’d like to buy these, please.”

The cashier didn’t say anything; she rung them up in steely silence, and I paid for them with two of the twenties I got from Kyle with the Civic with the spinning rims, and that was that.

I wore them out of the store.

Hopped on my bike.

And still didn’t go home, but instead, to J.C.’s.

“Good,” he said, leaning back on the couch. “I told you, it’s not hard. And now that you have capital, you can buy in advance like everyone else.”

I did not have any capital.

I had a pair of forty dollar leather flip-flops on my feet.

“Oh,” I said. “Well, I actually need you to front me again. Just one more time.”

J.C. scowled, but didn’t protest. “You better have bought your dad a fucking kidney, Kev.”

I glanced down at my new flip-flops.

So did J.C., then he looked disapprovingly back up at me, shaking his head.

“Shoes,” he said, shaking his head. “Okay. We’ll call that lesson number one in the series, ‘Don’t Fucking Make Stupid Mistakes.’”

“What do you mean?”

“Like spending the money you owe to your distributor,” he said. “For starters. Like selling people you don’t know and can’t vouch for. Like selling on school property.” He paused. “Do you know what would happen if you got arrested?”

“I’d go to jail,” I told him.

J.C. smiled, exasperatedly. “You’re fifteen, you’re going to juvie for two fucking seconds. But you’ll have a juvenile record, and if you have a juvenile record, you’re not getting into fucking UCLA. So ‘Don’t Fucking Make Stupid Mistakes.’ You can be book-smart as fuck, but that’s the one thing you need to know.”

I scoffed. “I’m not going to UCLA anyway, believe me.”

“Yeah, yeah,” said J.C. “I just don’t want you to fuck things up, because you’re a good kid. You’re at that fancy-ass high school. Taking fucking Latin. Reading for fun. You’re planning to go somewhere. No one fucking reads for fun.”

I didn’t say anything. I looked out the window, at our house across the street, which was quiet and dark.

“You can hang here for a while, Kev,” he said, his voice suddenly slowing down from its usual rapid-clip, “if you don’t want to go back yet. Or whatever.”

My head snapped back to him. “I didn’t say I didn’t want to go back.”

J.C. said nothing. He picked up a can of Pacifico that was sitting on the coffee table since before I got to his house, took a sip, and set it back down. “Dad still hanging in there? You can talk about it.” He looked uncomfortable, like he specifically didn’t want to talk about my sick father. “Or whatever.”

I didn’t say anything. I caught myself looking back across the street.

“It’s good that we’re doing this,” I told him. “Selling this shit. This’ll be good.”

J.C. smiled, picked back up the can of Pacifico again. “You know, if we worked for fucking Eli Lilly, we’d be doing the exact same job, except we’d have a pool and a Ferarri and shit.” He took another sip. “But it sure beats anything else.”

“You know, I was reading—” I began. I stopped myself.

J.C. caught me. He was laughing. “For fun, right?”

I flipped him off.

“Go home, Kevin,” he told me, with a smile on his face. “See your dad. Get more customers. Pay your fucking distributor in advance. ‘Don’t Fucking Make Stupid Mistakes.’ I want that fucking etched on your fucking tombstone.”

Our house was dark.

It wasn’t empty.

My dad in his room, sleeping off the chemo.

My fourteen-year-old brother on his stomach at the foot of his bed, eating a bag of Doritos and staring at Danni Ashe’s pixelated tits on a piece of computer paper.

“Please don’t jack off while I’m in here,” I warned, throwing my backpack at the foot of the bed.

Nick and I had never not shared a room.

In the fourteen years he had been alive, in the nine different cities we’d lived in together, I’d never once gotten used to his room’s constant state of volcanic activity.

Papers, from who could imagine where, were scattered like snowflakes. Stacks of unopened school books. Candy wrappers.

“It’ll just be for a year or so,” my dad told me, in June, when he retired after his 20 years in the Army and we moved from Pendleton to Colton. “Everyone wants to hire a veteran. And then we’ll get a bigger place. Your own room. Maybe a pool.”

Then he got sick.

A few weeks ago, I had put a duct tape line right across the middle of the carpet. To mentally shut out Nick’s chaos.

It worked. Sort of.

Nick looked away from Danni Ashe, and up to me. “Why do you have a shoebox full of loose Altoids?”

I froze.

Bad breath? What could I say?

Nick didn’t give me time to come up with any words. “You selling weed for J.C.?”

I specifically told J.C. that I didn’t want Nick to know that. And J.C. wasn’t the kind of guy who would breach trust. Not with me. One of his comrades, maybe. The type of element that was trying to win Nick over.

I debated lying.

I always debated lying. I very rarely lied.

“Just a little,” I told him, as if quantity mattered. “You can thank me when our lights stay on.”

“We’ll need it when Dad dies,” Nick said, staring back down at Danni Ashe. “Is what you mean.”

Those words. So lazy from Nicky.

I couldn’t believe he said them.

When all I was trying to do, all I was trying to do every moment, was not think them.

“He’s not going to die,” I managed.

Nick was unmoved. “You hear him coughing in there?”

“He’s sick,” I replied. “He has cancer. It doesn’t mean he’s going to die. Where’s Mom?”

“She’s still at work,” Nick said. “She picked up overtime. Because she knows Dad’s going to die.”

“Jesus,” I said. “Stop saying that, will you?”

Nick scrambled to sit up. “I want to sell for J.C. too.”

“First of all, no,” I said. “Second of all, no.”

Nick narrowed his eyes. “I’m only a year younger than you, you know.”

“Sixteen months,” I said. “And I didn’t say it was because of your age. It’s a no just because it’s a no.”

He glanced out the window, as if he was looking at J.C.’s house but he wasn’t; our window faced the backyard, a tangle of weeds and dead grass that had gone native since my dad wasn’t able to take care of it anymore.

“I’ll go talk to J.C.”

“Like hell you will,” I told him. “I already told J.C.: if he gets you involved, I’m not touching any of his shit anymore. And believe me, a guy selling weed at Las Palomas is way more important to him than another punk-ass kid selling it in Colton. I’m important, and you’re not, so get the fuck over it.”

Nick knew he didn’t have an easy way to victory in this situation.

Which made him angry.

We were both survivalists, in vastly different ways. We didn’t like being backed into a corner by anyone. You back a Malley boy into a corner, and we fight back dirty.

That was, maybe, the one thing both of us inherited from our dad.

“You’re a fucking lunatic,” he replied, anger seeping away.

He had no other recourse.

The last thing I wanted for Nick was to watch him fall into the dead-end world of J.C. Cardenas.

Not ever, but especially not at fourteen.

I wouldn’t tell him that. It was too cliche, too big brothery, too stupid.

“One is enough in a family,” I told him. “When you’re older, maybe.”

No. Not even when you’re older, Nicky, sorry.

Nick seemed to realize I held all the cards. Seemed to realize I was kicking the can.

“Fuck you,” he said, and he picked up Danni Ashe and his Doritos and carried both of them into the bathroom, slamming multiple doors behind him, one, two.

I stared at the closed door to our bedroom for maybe ten or twenty or thirty seconds, and then I figured he wasn’t coming back. That this fight was over.

That I had, at the very least, a pyrrhic victory.

I sat down at the desk, between our two beds but mostly located in my duct tape zone, and pushed Nicky’s shit off onto the floor and tried not to think about it.

And I opened my AP World History textbook, because homework didn’t sleep for sick fathers or bike rides or drug deals or shitty little brothers.

The shape of the Egyptian pyramids closely resembles the primordial mound from which Egyptian mythology claimed the earth was created.

Primordial mound.

What the fuck was I doing in AP World History, anyway. I had been the product of the shittiest education systems in the shittiest parts of this whole shitty fucking country.

The fact that I could even read was a testament to my dad, who dragged me and Nicky to the library every Saturday to get books. Whether we wanted to or not.

I being the wanted to, Nick being the not.

Before he was sick.

Inside, the tombs contained a large number of secret passageways and false doors, in order to trick would-be graverobbers and protect the body of the Pharaoh.

There was a sudden hacking cough from the other side of the wall, and a yelp in pain.

That was new. The pained cry. The last week or so.

Dad was coughing blood. I had looked it up on the school computer. Esophageal cancer. I had it printed out, folded in the front pocket of my backpack.

As the esophagus shrinks, the patient may suffer from dysphagia, or difficulty swallowing. This may also result in a painful cough.

My dad had been in combat. Kuwait, Afghanistan, Iraq.

And it was something in his throat.

Throughout Egyptian history, Egyptians were buried with goods that they believed would be necessary to use in the afterlife. This included everyday objects like pottery, bowls, combs, and even food.

“You can’t take any of that with you,” my dad had told me, each of the nine times we moved, when I inevitably packed too much. “Take only what you need.”

As a corollary, albeit in a different context: “You have me,” he would say, when I inevitably complained about leaving behind my friends. “And your mom, and Nicky. We’re a platoon.”

Cliche aside. My dad loved military metaphors. He had spent his entire adult life in the military.

You can’t take any of that with you. You have me.

I was an optimist. Even if Nick was a pessimist.

Wealthiest Egyptians could afford to be buried with jewelry, furniture, and other valuables.

I never found out what my dad planned to do when he left the military.

He said we could live off his final basic pay for six months, maybe a year, if we were smart. While he interviewed for something. He didn’t know what, or he didn’t tell me what.

We were smart, but we were not lucky.

And I didn’t know how much final basic pay was left in the bank by this point, but considering the frequency my dad was going to the doctor’s, it couldn’t be all that much.

I suspected even at fifteen that a very large part of him had been left behind in the Army, a little bit in Pendleton, and Fort Sill, and Fort Bragg, and Fort Leavenworth, and so on and so forth.

Michael Malley would never admit that.

He had told me, each of the nine times we seasonally shed our lives, that you never leave a part of yourself behind.

That you might scatter furniture and silverware and old clothes into the wind at a yard sale but no matter what you leave behind, there’s no part of anyone that still exists in the past.

That living room futon isn’t your living room futon. It’s now just someone else’s living room futon.

I heard Nick come out of the bathroom, apparently having satisfied himself with Danni Ashe.

He came back into our room, grabbed his backpack, and left without saying another word to me.

I closed the bedroom door behind him. Locked it.

In the desk drawer, I kept a back-issue of Penthouse that J.C. had given to me.

I kept it in the desk drawer because I wanted it to be discovered.

To get me in trouble for a wholly better reason than the truth.

I flipped open to some decorative blonde, just in case someone walked in.

I wouldn’t dare to have anything else in front of me. But I didn't need it.

When I closed my eyes, there was the little strip of pale skin under the hem of Matt Barber’s t-shirt.

 

I stumble back to the Yé-Yé by myself, maybe a ten minute walk from the club where the pub crawl ended.

Wasted. Naturally.

Ross Garabedian had gone home with a girl. Carver Alexander had gone home with a boy.

I left Rachel, Nina, and Aaron dancing together at the club, and went home on my own.

I don’t mind being on my own. Who could mind being on their own?

And there’s Sébastien. Through the window at Le Manifeste, wiping down the counter with a white rag.

Oh, what the hell.

I knock.

And he looks up. It takes him a second to realize, but he smiles, he comes over to unlock the door.

“Kevin Malley,” he purrs, that gossamer accent. “How was your night?”

I don’t answer. I’m too drunk to string together words; I only have emotions.

Sébastien Szabó is not looking for words at this portion of the evening.

He moves aside. I step in the bar. He locks the door behind me, because he knows.

“Fun,” I tell him, finally.

Sébastien, lowering the blinds.

Sébastien, smiling at me.

Sébastien, knowing.

He leans in. He kisses me.

“You came back alone?” he asks. “Didn’t bring home a sexy man?”

I hadn’t been able to pinpoint any gay men in the herd of people we were drinking with.

And I’m still new enough to this that I didn’t want to hit on a man I wasn’t positive was gay.

If I’m insecure, I play it smooth.

Uncharacteristically smooth.

“I knew there’d be a sexy man waiting for me here,” I tell him.

Sébastien smiles.

He knows.

We kiss again.

He doesn’t kiss like Becker.

Which is not a judgment. Just not like Becker.

Who is not here. Who is nowhere near here.

Sébastien’s hands, on my rib cage.

Sébastien’s hands on my waist, Sébastien’s knees on the floor.

And his hands on my fly, pulling down the zipper.

His hot and wet mouth on the fabric of my boxer-briefs.

I can feel myself getting immediately hard over him.

Over the sexy French bartender in the tight black t-shirt, on his knees, in the communist bar.

Sébastien Szabó.

“In the bar?” I whisper.

Sébastien doesn’t answer.

Sébastien doesn’t answer in words, but he pulls on the waistband on my boxer-briefs, and my throbbing dick pops out.

He looks momentarily startled, then elated.

Startled, then elated, is par.

I’m not small. Down south.

“Wow,” he says. “Twenty-one, twenty-two?”

I don’t understand. I don’t care to understand.

“Suck it,” I tell him. I don’t want any more questions from his lips. “Put it in your mouth. And suck it.”

Sébastien doesn’t need to be told twice. He takes my dick in his mouth.

And damn.

He runs his tongue along my shaft, and then pops the head in his mouth. Just a little bit. Then he takes more. And finally, he’s deep-throating the whole thing.

It doesn’t take me very long to feel something. To feel close.

To feel like I could rocket lube down his throat at any second, but I didn’t want to do that. I would rather fuck that ass.

“Do you have lube?” I ask. “And a condom?”

My dick drops out of Sébastien Szabó’s mouth, and he’s again startled then elated.

He nods, and then he gets up and retrieves them from the ether, from somewhere behind the bar.

I pull my jeans off, so i don’t have to waddle over to the booth, the booth where I had sat with Ross and Aaron and Nina and Rachel and Carver, six hours before.

Where Aaron had said, “Kevin, you’re gay. Hot bartender, gay or straight?”

Hot bartender is naked, on his knees, on the booth, and Kevin, you’re gay.

“You’re going to wish you lived your entire life like this,” said Veronica Tandy, on her third or eighth 25 cent martini, Commander’s Palace, December 9, 2007.

“No,” I told her, as we clinked glasses. “I am living my entire life like this.”

“Tell me how badly you want this,” I tell Sébastien Szabó.

“I want you in my ass,” he says, dropping down onto all fours. “So fucking bad.”

“No,” I tell him. “That’s not good enough. I want you to beg for my cock.”

“I’m on my bed,” texted Becker, Christmas, three weeks after we broke up. “I’m on all fours. I’m in my jockstrap.”

“No,” I had texted back, on my third or eighth beer, alone at the bar at Johnny White’s on Bourbon Street. This is wrong. We shouldn’t be doing this. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want you to want me do this. “Beg.” You little bottom whore.

“Please,” begs Sébastien Szabó. “Please, Kevin, fuck my tight little ass.”

I pull on the condom. It had been six months since I used a condom, since Becker and I stopped using condoms, since I started cumming in Becker’s ass.

No. I pull on the condom. I focus on the matter at hand.

Sébastien Szabó.

I focus on Sébastien Szabó.

I squirt the little bottle of lube onto my dick. And I squirted some onto my finger, rammed it against his puckering asshole. And Sébastien moaned, moaned like a little bitch in heat, moaned.

“You want it,” I tell him. “No one wants it as badly as you.”

And he can’t say anything. He moans again, moans against as my index finger penetrates his tight little hole. And he moans as my middle finger, and my ring finger, each join him, until I’m three digits deep in that hole.

I lean over his naked, sweaty body, in the booth at Le Manifeste.

“You ready for my big cock?” I whisper.

Above Sébastien’s head, there’s a picture of Young Stalin, in his scarf, in the wallpaper.

Sébastien still can’t speak.

But he moans again.

He moans again, and that’s fine.

He doesn’t get a say.

I spread his ass cheeks as far as they’ll go. And I line up my dick.

And I slowly, slowly, slowly, begin to penetrate him.

He takes the head. He groans.

I’m thick. I know I have to go slow, the first time.

I stop, and I wait.

We both wait. And a second, two seconds, three, four, and then he relaxes.

And I go another inch, two, three.

And he grunts again.

So I wait again. I wait, and then he consents, and I go in one, two, three.

Three at a time.

Twice, until all nine inches are buried in the puckering pink ass of the hot bartender is hot, Kevin, you’re gay.

Fuck. Damn. Sébastien.

Tight. “Oh, my fucking God, Sébastien.”

“You like it?”

“I’m not going to beg,” texted Becker.

The bartender at Johnny White’s took my empty pint glass. “Then you’re not going to get fucked.”

“Fuck me hard,” groans Sébastien Szabó. “Fuck me like an animal.”

Oh. I don’t have to be asked twice.

I pump my hips. Faster. As fast as I can, as hard and methodical as I can until I’m ramming that ass and he’s grunting and he’s screaming and we’re both moaning.

I claw my fingers into his pale, naked back.

I slam his head into the vinyl booth.

I lock eyes with Young Stalin and I say, fucking hell like you never did this once in your life, Young Stalin.

And I pick up the pace.

I’m fucking Sébastien Szabó harder than I fucked anyone before.

Hard. He can take it. Oh, you can take it, can’t you, you little French bitch.

“I can,” he tells me.

And he’s grunting.

Oh, he’s loving this.

Sébastien Szabó, you’ve never had a top like Kevin Malley.

“No, never,” he grunts. “I’m going to, I’m going to...”

I wrench his hand away from his dick, to tell him to wait until I tell him he can cum.

No. I’m too close.

So I start jacking him off from behind.

I’m the one to do it. Not him.

“Yeah,” he groans, “you’re the one to do it.”

You touch your dick again, and you’ll be sorry.

He grunts. In approval.

And I feel his cock pulse in my hand, and he lets out another grunt.

An animal.

I grunt, and I shoot my load into the condom just as Sébastien shoots his virulent strands of hot cum high above the back of the booth, onto Young Stalin’s awaiting face.

Young Stalin enjoys the hot bartender is hot.

Young Stalin enjoys a mouth full of hot French cum.

I collapse on Sébastien Szabó’s back. I slowly pull out my dick.

Which looks shrink-wrapped in the regular-sized condom. Which is filled with cum.

Which is filled with a lot of cum, actually, the downside of having an immediate roommate for the first time in two years.

We’re both breathing heavily, like we just ran a marathon, which we did.

Sébastien grinds his ass back onto my crotch.

“Next time, I top you,” he whispers back to me.

“Not a chance,” I tell him, kissing him just under the ear. “You like bottoming too much.”

He smiles. He turns his head. We kiss. “Or you and I both top Duncan.”

“Who’s Duncan?”

“Duncan? My boyfriend?”

He drops that so casually, I swear something had been lost in translation.

No. It had not been.

I don’t even know what to say. My dick shrivels into shame. The rest of me, into shock.

“You have a boyfriend?” I finally manage to sputter out.

He leans backwards, kisses me on the cheek, his naked body glistening in the dim light from Le Manifeste. “You’ll meet him tomorrow.”