Against the World - 2. Chapter 2

Halloween. 2006.

Not really Halloween. October 28, 2006. The fifth anniversary of my dad’s death.

We were at the Iota Chi Halloween party.

Or I was. Becker was adrift somewhere in a story.

“Of course, that’s when we lived at the White Hawk Courthouse,” he was telling me, absently rounding out his story, as we waited at the kitchen bar for fresh beers. “Before we moved to DC.”

His story had been about gambling, casinos, something-something Las Vegas. His dad’s small ownership stake in the Mirage.

I was missing something.

“I’m sorry,” I interrupted, “you were living in a courthouse?”

Becker was rattled out of his memories.

“What?” he asked, groggily.

“You said, ‘that’s when we lived at the White Hawk Courthouse’,” I repeated. We picked up our beers from Rob Winslow, dressed as a gladiator. “You lived in a courthouse?”

“No, no,” he said, his face involuntarily smiling. “Our house, on White Hawk Court.” He enunciated each word: “The White Hawk Court house. In Summerlin. When we lived in Nevada.” He giggled. “Why would someone live in a courthouse?”

I wondered if Nick, my brother, had qualified as living in the San Bernardino County Courthouse yet.

J.C., no stranger to the courthouse himself, had lived in and around the Colton Public Library for four months when he was sixteen.

That was before I knew him.

J.C. never told me that. Laura did.

Nick lived in the courthouse and J.C. lived in the library and my dad lived in my memories, but Peter Adam Becker lived on White Hawk Court and his dad went out golfing one morning and came home with the Mirage.

Wealthiest Egyptians could afford to be buried with their jewels.

Becker had moved past this top. Staring out at the mess of Iota Chi guys and Tri-Gamma girls--my closest friends--who were dressed up as Gilligan’s Island, costumes recycled from the private mixer they had last night.

“Why didn’t you dress up with all of them?” Becker asked me.

Becker and I had both come as cowboys.

Lazy costumes.

I had fished an old cowboy hat out of the bin at Bloomin’ Deals Thrift Shop on Freret Street for thirty-five cents. Becker’s invariably cost more.

“Because it’s a stupid holiday,” I told him. “And I’m not an Iota Chi.”

He was still staring at them, his eyes glossy and unfocused, the look he had when he retreated back into his own web of thoughts.

“It’s tough to be left out of things.”

Becker did not realize that other people were not Becker, that they didn’t think like him.

I had helped Chris Baker paper-mache himself into the SS Minnow twice in the last two days, but no, I wasn’t feeling left out. I could have been in Iota Chi if I wanted to be.

Chris had all but begged me to pledge with him last year, after we both got our bids: “Brotherhood is forever. It’s like having a second family. Don’t you want that?”

“You’re my platoon,” Dad would say. “You’ll always have me.”

“We should room together at Berkeley next year,” Matt Barber would say. “Then we can do this all the time.”

There were very few things that actually mattered, in the grand scheme of things.

Temporary things did not matter, as a rule. Do not matter.

“You think that’s the problem?” I asked him. “I hope you don’t think I’m that insecure.”

“Well, I don’t know,” he said, deflating. Except he hit the same point again, with different phrasing: “It’s not easy when you’re not included, right?”

“I don’t like dressing up,” I told him, flatly.

I hoped that would end it. It didn’t seem to be enough for Becker.

Who looked at me, eyes glass, desperately wanting to understand me.

“When I was six--”

I couldn’t believe I was telling this story. It was such a stupid story.

His eyes told me to keep telling it.

Becker had beautiful eyes.

When they focused on you. When they weren’t turned into himself.

“When I was six, I really wanted to be the red Power Ranger, because my best friends were all going as Power Rangers. This was, what, 1993? They were really big then.”

I shouldn’t have started down this road.

I paused. I didn’t know how far to keep going.

“I’m listening,” he assured both of us.

“My mom got this generic knock-off that looked nothing like the Power Rangers, and she made me wear it anyway.”

That wasn’t true.

We couldn’t afford the real costume, which was so in-demand that it had been marked up multiple times from the price on the tag. She went to maybe twenty different stores before she found the knock-off.

I could see the entire scene in my head, still: the little apartment outside Fort Benning, my mom coming through the door. Jumping up and down, demanding to try it on immediately.

And not taking it off for two days--until it was Halloween morning, and I walked right out of the house, proud as shit that me and my four friends were going to be the Power Rangers together.

I took a sip of beer.

Becker didn’t realize, but this was the second most humiliating moment of my life.

Which was stupid. I realized that. Because it lasted part of one day, out of the entirety of my life.

But I was six, you know?

I was six and I could still see that scene too: my friend Grant’s fat face, twisted up in horror, his sneering eyes pointing up at me like I was some disfigured hero of war.

“What are you supposed to be?” he said. And the laughter of the Blue, Yellow, Pink, and Black Rangers.

I couldn’t remember Grant’s last name. But I remembered his face. The timbre of his voice. “What are you supposed to be?”

“I’m never going back to school,” I told my dad, through choked, six-year-old sobs, once I told him what had happened. Because I told my dad everything. Almost everything.

“Tomorrow’s another day,” he told me, holding me close on the couch. “Remember how I told you we’re moving in a month?”

I looked up at him, through tear-streaked eyes, nodded.

“In a month, you’ll have new friends and a new school,” he told me. “You just have to be a big boy for a little while longer. Only for a little while, and then everything will be different and better. It’s only for a little while. It’s only temporary.”

“I hate you,” I told my mom, the instant she walked through the door, throwing the balled-up Halloween costume at her. “How could you let this happen?”

I took another sip of beer, and downplayed the story for Becker.

“Well,” I told him. “You need to have a really creative costume that makes everyone think you’re hilarious, or you just need to follow the pack and wear something completely generic like a fucking cowboy hat. And because, like 90% of Americans, I slot somewhere on the spectrum between creative and generic, it’s a retarded holiday.” It was maybe too unvarnished. So I gave him just the tiniest smile, to signal that this was light-hearted. “I’m a little bit crazy, sorry.”

Becker’s eyes were still fixated on me.

Trying to see through me. And maybe they had already seen through me.

Maybe not. Becker was not nearly as perceptive as he thought he was.

But it was the first real moment we shared. The two of us.

In another world, I’d have kissed him right in the middle of Iota Chi.

Instead, Brett Morton, dressed as the island from Gilligan’s Island, came barreling through the crowd towards us.

“Hey, Brokeback Mountain,” Morton hollered at us. “You guys are up at beer pong.”

This was the second Brokeback Mountain reference we’d been handed today. Each one sent Becker retreating back into his mind, hashing out whether it was frat bros being frat bros, or frat bros being insightful.

It was the former.

Becker could not tell.

There was always this moment with Becker. When he stopped looking at me, stopped looking at anything.

When an Iota Chi brother walked through the room and Becker retreated behind his smoke and mirrors, replaced himself with someone straight and unsentimental.

That was the dance. Through October. Through November.

Until the day before Becker was about to leave for winter break, the day before. A post-finals afternoon of drinking and smoking had whittled down to just the two of us.

I had handed him my fake ID, which he turned over in his hand several times, like Indiana Jones surveying an ancient relic.

“Do you make these?” Becker asked me, finally.

Kevin Malley. Tulane’s resident outlaw.

“I’m not a criminal,” I told him. Probably a little more offended than I should have been. “I was just seeing if you wanted to use my fake, because Veracruz is 21 plus. That’s a real ID.”

"Oh," he said. He always looked slightly alarmed whenever he said something to someone that got a less-than-positive reaction. "Yeah, that’ll work. Thanks."

I told him we were meeting Dana, Maddie, and Veronica--the girls from our floor freshman year that we dubbed “the DMV.”

"Ring a ding ding," Becker told me, smiling heterosexually.

The two of us completely alone for the first time ever.

Well, me and the husk of Becker, the straight person he thought he could trick everyone, including myself, into believing he was.

Meeting three girls? Ring a ding ding.

I was just drunk and high enough to lean into him, to whisper: "Oh, come on.”

And there he was.

Becker. Real Becker.

Terrified, of course. Terrified that I had ripped out three months of subtext, highlighted it, underlined in red three times.

I leaned back. And I hedged: "Veronica’s not exactly my type.”

There was a long pause.

You know my type, Becker.

Say it.

He inched closer: "What kind of girls are you into, then? I mean, everyone else talks."

“You don't talk,” I told him. I amended, for solidarity: “We both don't talk.”

Becker looked away from me.

Not physically, but mentally.

Becker was not going to meet me halfway. He would not move; he would only be moved.

"I just assumed we were both…” I said.

No. I couldn’t use the word “gay.” Not with Becker.

I could imagine those three letters. G-A-Y. And I could imagine him standing up and getting flustered and saying that I had the wrong idea, how could I think that, sorry dude, I like the women.

“...shy,” I finished.

He liked the crutch. He needed the crutch.

I didn’t need the crutch. Becker wasn’t the first friend I’d come out to. But he needed the crutch.

He stared at me. Actually stared at me, present in the moment.

"I figured you were," he replied slowly, “shy.”

“And you are too,” I confirmed.

He gave me a whiff of a smile, maybe relief beyond all the terror.

“I can be pretty shy.”

Three hours later, drunk and stumbling back from Maple Street, I invited him back.

And he came back.

I put my hand on his thigh, and I leaned in, and I kissed him.

Softly, at first. Then harder.

I kissed him just behind his ear. His hair smelled like shampoo and cigarettes, from the bar, like Matt Barber’s would.

My lips moved down his jawline, and he moaned involuntarily. He wasn’t the first boy I had tried that on. Kissing him and working my hand down his stomach, down to his pants, to his rock hard dick that was already tenting his jeans.

His dick was already poking up from above the waistband of his boxer briefs, a drop of precum glossy just under his belly button.

“And here I was, thinking the biggest thing about you was your vocabulary,” I whispered.

Becker watched me as I sat back on my knees and peeled off my shirt. Studying my body with his eyes, then stretched one hand out to my chest, rubbing it slightly to make sure it was real.

To make that boy smile.

To be the one who could make that boy smile.

I kissed him again, and grabbed him by the collar of his polo, pulling him up to me, without breaking the kiss. Pulled at the hemline of his shirt and yanked it over his head.

Our bare chests were touching, Becker’s hands sliding around my sweaty back with a hunger that I knew was there but hadn’t seen until this very moment.

I didn’t know how far he’d go. But I slid down his jeans, his underwear, and he didn’t stop me.

Becker threw back his head when my mouth wrapped around his dick.

Moaned again. I could taste precum, the saltiness of it. An imminent imminence.

Becker felt it too, how close he was; he grabbed my hair, pulled me off his dick, and pulled me in for another kiss.

I felt his hand, hovering around my dick, unable to make any progress on the belt or on the button or on the fly.

I stood up on the edge of the bed, to down my pants off and my underwear.

Becker couldn’t take his eyes off my dick.

I wondered if he had ever seen a dick before. In real life.

“Holy shit,” he whispered, his eyes wide with innocence of a first time.

I climbed back onto the bed, lay down next to him. Becker wasted no time, rolling over so he was on top of me, kissing down my neck, down my stomach, mimicking the moves that I had done before.

He was new to this sort of thing. Tentative with his tongue.

Started with balls, beginner level, licked one, sucked on the other one, discovering what he could do, what he could ger away with.

And then he summoned the courage for the next rung. Tried to take as much as he could in his mouth, and I was big and I knew I was big, the patience of Mother Teresa, as he tried to take it, inch by inch.

What he lacked in finesse or experience, he made up for in lust, in enthusiasm.

He kissed back up my torso, to my lips. We made out again, and then I whispered, “What do you think about me fucking you?”

Real Becker screeched to a sudden stop.

“I’m a top,” he said. Matter-of-fact.

Lies.

I debated my options. To slink back to the blowjob, or to give him one last push.

My hand caressed that smooth, round ass.

“Yeah, but,” I whispered in his ear, “you have an amazing ass, and I have this big dick, and I just think we should play to our comparative strengths given those circumstances.”

Becker stammered something about how he didn’t fuck on the first date. If he fucked at all. If he had done anything with a boy before.

Which I wasn’t convinced he had.

I kissed him. Went back down on his dick, Becker writhing on my bed.

He tried grabbing my hair again. He was close.

“I’m getting close,” he confirmed, but I didn’t stop; I started sucking him off, faster, until Becker gave a primordial shriek, from his primordial mound, and drowned my throat in his hot cum.

“That was quite a show,” I told him, as I wiped the last bits of him off my mouth.

But Becker was quickly draining out of Becker, his eyes suddenly uncomfortable, his lust turning to the oh-shit-what-did-I-just do, but I wasn’t letting him off that easily.

“It’s not usually that much,” he stammered. There was an indelicate pause, as his eyes glanced across the room, as if there was a chance we weren’t alone. “But that’s because my sock isn’t usually as sexy as you are.”

“Well,” I whispered, leaning down to kiss him just behind the ear again. “Sometimes you get a nice sock. Argyle. Maybe even a Gold-Toe.”

Becker smiled. Just a little smile, but enough that some of him came back to me.

“Nothing turns me on like a good Gold-Toe,” he said, and he kissed me again.

 

“I don’t mean to sound insecure,” says Aaron Ackerman, wrinkling his nose, “but they’re totally going to look at me and give that fake-polite, ‘Oh! You brought someone!’”

“They are not,” I tell him. “What’s wrong with bringing a friend?”

We’re walking from Oberkampf station to the Bataclan, to the show Sébastien invited me to, on an unexpectedly chilly night: -2 Celsius, roughly below freezing. We’re both bound up like mummies, both suffering for it, one New Orleanian, one Southern Californian.

“Well, they want to fuck you,” he says, “and when they decide they’re going to fuck you, I’m suddenly dead weight. You know what happens to the extra friend who gets brought along unannounced? Remember what Voldemort did to Cedric Diggory in Goblet of Fire?”

“Please, you’re here to make sure I don’t get murdered.”

Aaron breathes heavily through the cold, cracks as much of a smile as he can.

“Girl, I’m your muscle?” he asks. “There’s a thought. If you wanted someone to fight off two guys for you, you should've brought along a scary macho type, like Nina.”

“What makes you think you’re the first person I asked?”

His smile grows. “I’m a mensch and you know it. Plus, what, you’re going to have Ross Garabedian stand sentinel while you get groped by two guys on a dance floor? I had no choice.”

Instead, it’s me watching Aaron getting groped on the dance floor.

Dancing in a sandwich with Sébastien Szábo and his friend, Boubou Tossoukpé.

“Sébastien loves to dance,” Duncan, Sébastien’s boyfriend, tells me, as he leans back against the bar. “Do you dance?”

His voice, rich and throaty with an Australian accent, is free of bias or invitation. He says things and they simply exist, like an anchorman on the local news.

Duncan Rinehart is nothing like Sébastien Szabo.

Nothing like his cherubic, chiseled boyfriend, with the arrogant and conventional beauty that insists on itself from across a crowded room.

Duncan’s handsome, certainly, but he’s humbler than that. Roguish, brambly, a day’s worth of unintentional stubble and an aquiline nose. Very dark hair and pale mint eyes, sagacious eyes.

“Get me drunk enough, and I’ll dance,” I tell him.

He angles himself towards the bartender, holds up two fingers. “Deux coups de Johnnie Walker Black, s’il vous plaît. Merci.”

I don't exactly need Rosetta Stone for that.

“That wasn’t an invitation,” I tell him.

He hands me one of the shots of whiskey. “Cheers, mate.” We clink, we shoot.

I haven’t exactly sniffed out what Duncan is after.

Sex, obviously. Because you don’t invite along the college student your boyfriend hooked up with last night for the scintillating conversation.

Or so Carver seemed to think, when I called him earlier tonight:

“Do I misconstrue your words: ‘Should I try to get out of it?’” he had demanded. “You held sexual congress with a prepossessing Frenchman in his place of employment, and now he wants you to meet his boyfriend for a menage-a-trois? ‘Should I try to get out of it?’ You are a merry-andrew, Kevin Qantas Malley.”

I had actually called Carver to invite him to the Bataclan. My “muscle.”

But I couldn’t bring someone along who used the phrase “merry-andrew” in front of strangers, and so a new friendship with Aaron Ackerman was born.

Duncan hasn’t gotten sexual at all yet.

In fact, he hasn’t done anything beyond basic pleasantries.

As Boubou, Aaron, and Sébastien grind up on each other in front of us.

“Do you two do this a lot?” I ask.

Duncan’s looming over the club like someone’s dad chaperoning a school dance. Right down to his white cricket sweater and khakis.

Subversive, somehow, in his respectability.

“Come to the Bataclan? When Sébastien likes the band.”

That isn’t what I meant.

But I don’t push it. Duncan looks at his watch, back on to the dance floor. The band, the “next big thing,” was supposed to come on at eleven, but it’s now after midnight, and the DJ is still going strong.

“So, not your choice.”

“It’s Sébastien’s world, and the rest of us just live in it,” he says, with a shrug. “But it’s nice when we both have a Saturday off at the same time.”

“Oh, are you a bartender too?”

“Lord, no,” he tells me, setting his empty drink down on the bar behind us. “I can barely pour water. I’m an obstetrician.”

“Wait, really?”

He smiles devilishly. “Why does every gay react like that?” He puts on a bad pastiche of an American accent: “‘Wait, really?’” His smile grows broader. “Yeah, last year of residency at the Hôpital Américain.”

There’s a moment of silence.

Symbolic silence, of course; the thump of bass continues to ricochet around us.

“So you have an interest in vaginas that Sébastien didn’t disclose,” I tell him, finally. “Interesting.”

“Only professionally,” Duncan tells me, with a smirk. “My parents were in Médecins Sans Frontières, and I always wanted to go into medicine. But I wanted to bring people into this world, not watch people leave.” He picks back up his empty glass, looks at it for a second, then sets it back down on the bar. “You’re wondering how a gay man can be down there all day, aren’t you?”

That had, in fact, been my next question.

How he spends each and every day pretty deep into the, for lack of a better term, Land Down Under.

Something I hadn’t done since junior prom. Lena.

The backseat of Matt Barber’s Mitsubishi Eclipse.

“It’s not that hard,” he tells me. “It’s probably easier if you’re not thinking about fucking them. I went to medical school at the University of Chicago, and I wasn’t the only gay boy in gynecology, I can tell you that.”

The way he says Chicago, with a short “a,” almost like he’s from there, is jarringly at odds with the rest of his measured Australian accent.

I smile at that.

He doesn’t know why I smile; he keeps smiling, but his eyes turn slightly suspicious, inquisitive. “What?”

“You say Chicago,” I tell him. “Chicago.”

“I didn’t even realize I did that,” he says, with a smirk. “Chicago. Chicago. Chicago.” He pronounces it the same way each time. “What a funny word.” He smiles, almost absently. “Mark had a Chicago accent, that’s probably why.”

“Mark?”

“Oh, my ex,” he clarifies. “Before Sébastien. You remind me of him. A little bit.”

“He was also young?”

“Ha ha,” says Duncan, rolling his eyes, those barely-green eyes. “He was bloody handsome. Is what I meant.” He shook his head. “He was young too. We were both young. Three years together, and my student visa never dawned on either one of us. And it’s not like we could’ve gotten married.”

He looks like he’s about to say more on the topic, but doesn’t.

Instead, he studies Sébastien, Aaron, and Boubou. “Relationships are hard, either way.”

It’s another anodyne observation, as Sébastien slips his hand down Boubou’s pants.

“They are,” I agreed. “I broke up with someone six weeks ago.”

“You wanted to fuck around Paris, ay?”

“I wanted to come out,” I tell him, “and he didn’t.”

The abridged version of the story.

And memories:

The last time Becker and I were together as a couple, at some sorority girl’s birthday party, and he wouldn’t go dancing with me at the gay bars.

Or his face every time I forgot for even a second that we weren’t allowed to be anything but indifferent to each other in public.

When all I wanted to do was find a rooftop to shout it from.

No. I don’t want Becker here.

Not in Paris.

Not where he doesn’t belong.

“That’s tough,” he says. “Do you miss him?”

Do I miss Becker.

Holding a bottle of $100 pink champagne as he looked down on me in the driveway of the Colton house.

“I like to live in the present,” I tell him. “He was the last series of moments, and now I’m in the next one. It’s just how life goes.”

Duncan takes a sip of his whiskey. “As someone who turned thirty in November, let me tell you: fuck as many men as you can while you’re in your twenties.”

“That’s the plan.”

“So I hear,” he says. With a smile, “Sébastien told me about your romp last night, and it sounded deliriously hot.”

I have to smile at that too. That the two of them were talking about me.

Deliriously hot.

“What’d he say?”

“Just that you fucked him on the floor of Le Manifeste with your massive gorilla dick.”

“Well, that’s certainly a lie,” I tell him. “It was in a booth.”

“A booth,” he repeats. “Reckon I’ll wear latex gloves next time I stop in to that bar.”

“Oh, you’re into latex?”

Duncan’s smile grows. He loves that line. “Also just professionally.”

But he doesn’t take the flirting any further. Instead, he glances back out at the dance floor. Sébastien is cupping Boubou’s ass with his hands, nuzzling his dark neck with his nose.

“I’d like to get married,” he says, finally. “Not that it’s legal, of course, but I wouldn’t want to end up like my parents.”

“They were just so deeply in love you couldn’t handle it?”

He grins. “Not quite. Divorced when I was eleven. My mum moved back here--she’s French--and I came summers to Paris, but my dad raised me in Perth.” He takes another sip of beer. “I just remember them fighting. We were living in Sri Lanka, at the height of the civil war, and they were just fighting constantly. I don’t remember the Tamil Tigers, but I remember that.”

My mom’s an alcoholic, my dad had an Irish temper, a ying and yang of antagonism. I wished for a divorce on more than one birthday cake.

I don’t remember the Tamil Tigers, but I remember that.

“I don’t want to end up like my parents, “ I tell him. “I don’t talk to anyone in my family anymore.” I don’t know why I tell him, except that I’m a little bit drunk and I trust him, in his warm sweater on the edge of the dance floor.

Duncan looks surprised, so I add just enough details to give context:

“I came out to them in November. And now I don’t talk to them.”

“Oh,” he says. “I’m sorry. Lord. Religious?”

“No. Selfish.” Promise me one thing. “Either they are, or I am. I haven’t figured out which.”

“You’re not selfish,” he says. “I don’t believe that for a second.”

I’ve paid 61 months of rent on the Colton house.

And how many times had I been told that I was selfish anyway?

I want you to have something special.

“I don’t mind it,” I tell him. “It’s nice to not have to put your own happiness second for a change.”

He smirks, takes another drink. “So you’re definitely not looking for a relationship, then.”

Neither of us say anything more.

Not that we have time to: Sébastien, Boubou, and Aaron are all coming back towards the bar.

Aaron and Boubou are holding hands, something that is clearly not lost on Duncan and Sébastien, who exchange collaborative looks.

Having killed Cedric Diggory.

“The DJ’s packing up,” Sébastien tells me, finally. ““The show’s going to start in maybe twenty minutes? Late.”

Duncan checked his watch. “J’ai trente ans, mon canard.”

“It’s past Dr. Rinehart’s bedtime,” Boubou tells me, with a smile. He adds, in a terrible, high-pitched imitation of an Australian accent, “Don’t be a sook, mate.”

Sébastien smiles. Duncan frowns again.

“What our fair Abdoulaye Tossoukpé means to tell you,” Duncan says to me, “is that, while I was pulling a human out of another human at four o’clock this morning, he was belligerently dancing shirtless on a table top in some frightful little bar in Le Marais.”

“Guilty as charged,” agrees Boubou. He flashes me a smile. “Though I understand I wasn’t the only one enjoying a table last night.”

Duncan and I both look to Sébastien, who specifically does not look at either of us.

“It was in the booth,” Duncan replies, acidly, his voice pointed for the first time since I met him. “From what I hear.”

We sort of just fall into each other.

Me, Duncan, Sébastien. Back at the Szabó-Rinehart apartment.

Our limbs tangling along everyone else’s body like a sexual hydra.

And Sébastien’s body was glistening in the moonlight--Sébastien’s beautiful body that I had been too drunk to really take in yesterday: his chest, and his arms, and his shadowed abs.

My hands wandering.

Duncan’s sweater is gone but he’s still fumbling with the top button of his shirt, more tentative than anything.

Fuck it. I want him.

I break my kiss with Sébastien. I turn to his boyfriend, and grab Duncan’s collar, and tear the shirt off of him--buttons popping off, buttons falling to the floor.

“Fuck,” Duncan whispers seductively, as I run my hands down the light dusting of hair on his chest, down his flat stomach. He grabs the back of my head and pulls me in for a kiss.

With a hunger that Sébastien didn’t have.

Our tongues wrestle in each other’s mouths. My hands continue to roam Duncan’s body.

Slimmer than Sébastien’s, less built, but strong shoulders, nice biceps, a firm chest.

I feel Sébastien behind me, nibbling at my neck, his naked torso touching my naked back. His hands reaching down to undo my belt.

The three of us, locked together.

Duncan pulls me closer. Our chests up against each other, his hands clawing at my shoulders, our lips devouring each other.

Sébastien kisses my jawline, my cheek. Waits for an opening to my lips, which Duncan doesn’t immediately give; Sébastien kisses him out of the way, finds my lips. Kisses me strongly, lustily.

Duncan goes down to his knees, and he pulls down my briefs.

“C’est énorme,” he says, breathily, presumably to Sébastien.

I don’t need Rosetta Stone for that one either.

Duncan takes my dick in his mouth. With practiced ease. Takes the whole thing. He’s no beginner.

And then, a second later, I feel Sébastien kissing gently down my spine. His hands on my ass. Pulling my cheeks apart.

And his hot, wet tongue on my hole.

I give a warning groan. Don’t do this. Maybe not warning enough; he continues to probe my hole with his tongue.

I had done everything with a guy. I had done everything but that.

But, fuck. Sébastien’s tongue diving into my hole, Duncan swallowing my dick.

The two of them seem to have a rhythm, seemed to be working in a rhythm.

Magic tongues. Both of them.

I can’t help but moan. I can’t help but moan with the sensation on both sides of my body.

Sébastien stops. I saw, out of the corner of my eye, him reach into the nightstand for a condom, which he proceeded to unroll onto his dick.

“No, no,” I tell him. “I only top.”

Sébastien looks at me, surprised by that. “You don’t want to be the middle?”

It takes me a second. Geometry.

To realize that Sébastien wants to fuck me while I fuck Duncan.

And I’ve bottomed exactly once. For Becker. And I don’t even remember it, because I was so absolutely blasted out of my head, but no.

Not a bottom. Absolutely not a bottom, and even with a sexy Hungarian bartender’s big cock pressed up against my ass.

Duncan, on his knees, smiles up at me. “Don’t you want to be inside me?”

He reaches over for a condom, slowly rolls it onto my dick.

Regular-size. A very tight fit.

Which Duncan seems to realize, smiling at me with lusty satisfaction.

He turns around so he can grind his ass against my cock, inviting me to enter, and I’m of course more than happy to oblige.

“Oh fuck,” Duncan moans, turning to look at me. “It’s so fucking huge.”

I move slowly. Cautiously. As I always have to do when I’m fucking a guy, especially for the first time.

I hold Duncan’s chest with my hand, pull him back onto me. Kiss his neck. And whisper in his ear, “You know you fucking love it.”

And when I’m all the way in, before I can even buck my hips, I feel Sébastien up against my own back again.

“Eiffel Tower,” I tell him, and maybe that’s not a thing in French, so I amend: “Let him suck you off. And we fuck him from both ends.”

Sébastien looks only briefly disappointed, before he goes around Duncan to fuck his boyfriebnd’s face.

Sébastien doesn’t wait. He grabs Duncan’s chin, and knocks it down, and then plunges his dick all the way into his boyfriend’s mouth.

And then. We make eye contact.

And Sébastien suddenly gets it.

Smiles at me. As I grab Duncan’s ass cheek, and we both pull ourselves deeper.

Sébastien starts fucking his face, and I start fucking his ass at the same speed.

A unit, again.

We work until we develop a rhythm, hammering Duncan’s ass to the same beat that Sébastien hammers the back of his throat.

And Sébastien’s groan suddenly becomes louder, more guttural. And so do Duncan’s muffled ones, and I know Sébastien is cumming down his throat.

I continue to fuck, keeping up the same rhythm even as Sébastien’s dick falls out of Duncan’s mouth.

“I’m going to fuck you so hard,” I whisper to Duncan, not just because I am but because I’m fully back in the proper place.

One hole. My dick. Me and him.

Home.

I force him down into the mattress, just slightly, and I pick up speed. And force.

Pulling my dick almost all the way out, before I slam it back into him.

Sébastien watching us, playing with his flacid, cummy dick.

And Duncan is letting out almost one continuous purr of noise. His eyes rolling back. Complete ecstasy.

As I fuck him harder, faster. Duncan still groaning, punctuating every beat with a deeper moan.

I know I’m not going to last long like this. And I have my hand on his dick by now, stroking it to the same rhythm, until I feel his hole squeeze around my cock.

And that sends me over the edge. We cum together.

I felt Sébastien return, stealthy, behind me, his lips on the back of my neck, his one hand cupping my ass, as he whispers, “Aren’t you glad you came out?”

 

I had a premonition the day it happened.

No. I didn't. I don’t believe in those.

But something in my mind told me I shouldn’t go to school. The day it happened.

I remembered sending an AIM message to Matt Barber soon after I woke up, dread in my head: “I’m going to play hooky today, I think.”

And then sending him a follow-up message five seconds later, “Nvm.” We were selling to six kids after school.

Matt Barber, who didn’t wake up until about twenty minutes before the morning bell because he lived up the hill from school, had sent back: “Dude, no, we’re selling to like six people today.”

Which I didn’t receive until I got home.

Long after it happened.

A relic from a simpler time of peace and prosperity.

“Morning,” my dad whispers to me, his voice hoarse and labored. He could barely speak anymore, his esophagus eaten by disease, but he'd been pushing himself to talk anyway. “Off to school?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “Unless you want me to stay.”

“No,” he replied, giving his head just the tiniest shake. “School.”

Movies never made death look like this.

Cruel.

Gray, his skin putty. Muscles hanging off his frame like deflated balloons because he lost so much weight in such a short amount of time. Rotting away from the inside, until there was nothing left but nothing.

It was the beginning of August when he got the diagnosis.

A week or so before my birthday.

Had that only been three months ago? My birthday?

When he appeared with the candy apple red Schwinn, with a white bow on it?

He had a cough then, but that was it. He still thought he could beat this.

Ten-speed, hand brakes, only gently used, a scratch or two in the glossy paint.

I was just beginning to understand the family finances. He and my mom had just begun to clue me in. And I told him it was too much, with everything.

“No, you need it,” he told me. “I might not be able to drive you to Las Palomas every day, with treatment and everything. I got a good deal on it, and I want you to have something special.”

Maybe he wanted me to have something special because he would never give me another gift ever again. Maybe he never thought he could beat this, despite what he told me and Nicky.

There was no better gift than hope.

October 28, 2001, and I couldn’t look at him, at his gray body, but I had to look at him because I couldn’t bear the thought of no longer looking at him.

He was so thin. His cheeks puckered.

“Okay,” I told him. “I’ll go to school.”

“Just,” he said. And he stopped. And he blinked, like he had to take a second to compose himself. Every word was a struggle, but he managed: “Promise me one thing. That you’ll take care of your mom and Nicky. They’re not strong like you are. Promise me you’ll be strong for them.”

I didn’t know how to tell him that I wasn’t strong.

I couldn’t tell him that I wasn’t strong.

“I promise.”

I kissed him on the forehead, and he closed his eyes, and I don’t know if he ever opened them again.

I never asked that.

“He needs to sleep,” Mom told me, assured me, as I packed my backpack. She was already in her uniform from the diner, gold name tag perched on her blouse. “He won’t be alone long—I’m just working the lunch shift. I’ll be home by three.”

It was 3:03, and Matt Barber and I were waiting for Kyle in front of Dante’s, who was late again.

“You’re antsy today,” Matt said, as we sat on the curb by the pay phones with our slices of take-out pizza. “Are you nervous?”

Nervous because it was a big buy?

No.

It wasn't that big of a buy: we were selling six eighths to Kyle and his friends.

Or three-fourths, in Matt Barber’s reduced fractions.

“Family stuff,” I told him. “You know.”

Matt Barber looked sympathetic. But no, he didn’t know.

“Well, if you want to talk about it,” he told me. “We’re friends, I mean. That’s what friends are for.”

I had known Matt Barber for two months, but he was here, and this was now.

I had known so many other people for longer. People whose faces I couldn’t remember, whose names I couldn’t even remember. From Fort Bragg, from Fort Sill, from Fort Benning, from everywhere.

People who made me feel so much good and so much bad and then dissolved into a nonspecific past. The graveyard of memories.

How did you tell someone that your dad was dying?

That he could be gone at any minute?

That he could be dying right now, and I wasn’t there because I was selling drugs to Kyle Owens with the rims on his Honda Civic who could never keep an appointment, even with his drug dealer.

“My dad has cancer,” I told him.

“Oh, shit,” Matt said. He didn’t know what to say either. I couldn’t say the truth and he couldn’t supply the answer. “Is he going to be okay?”

I was still for maybe a second or maybe an hour, and then I slowly shook my head.

“Oh,” he said. More quiet. “Are you religious at all?”

I cracked a smile. To lighten the mood. “Don’t you have to be wearing a white short-sleeve button-up and a tie to ask me that?”

He smiled back, a polite smile that didn’t really signal joy so much as empathy. “I only meant, if you’re religious, you know he’s going to a better place. Where there’s no suffering.”

Where there’s no suffering. My dad was just supposed to sit on a cloud, watching everyone who loved him suffer, and not feel any pain?

How could you ever be at peace when you were still haunted by the memories of all you left behind?

Or did you just forget everything? Wouldn’t you have to?

You’ll always have me, you’re my platoon, but what the fuck did he know about anything real?

He would be so ashamed of me.

Sitting here with Matt Barber, slinging pot.

“You don’t have to apologize, it was only a thought,” Matt replied. “You know me. I only believe in the big stuff.”

“Yeah, I mean, you’re drinking a Diet Coke. You rebel, you.”

“You’re a terrible influence.”

“I know.”

“Naw, I’m kidding--we’re both the good guys, dude.” He picked at his teeth with his toothpick. “You know, aside from the drug dealing.”

I didn’t have time to respond. The Honda with the spinning rims spun into the parking lot, pulled up in front of us.

And I rode my bike as fast I could, back to Colton.

Where, in the dying light, October 28, 2001, 4:20pm, the house was still.

An ambulance in the driveway. Lights flashing.

I couldn’t remember if there were sirens. Everything had gone soundless and colorless and motionless, like a scene from a movie.

So I had. I felt nothing. Weightlessness. It was just a fact, death a location on a map: the grocery store or the mall or Kuwait.

I had seen him this morning. I would see him again. It had not been that long. He was never gone for that long.

My mom came running out of the house, barefoot, still in her uniform from the diner.

“It happened while I was at work,” she cried, her voice pleading.

That was all she said. It happened while I was at work.

She was pleading for herself. For penance, from me.

She wasn’t pleading for it from him.

And there was a tumbler of something brown in her hand. Her eyes glassy, like this wasn’t her first one.

Promise me you’ll be strong for them.

If Dad knew she had been drinking again.

She couldn’t have gotten home more than an hour or two before, and she was already on her second, eighth, nineteenth, who knew how many.

I hate you. How could you let this happen?

And maybe I caught her off guard, or maybe her reflexes were shot from an afternoon of booze, but I ripped the tumbler out of her hand without very much effort, and launched it as hard as I could at the side of the house.

The tumbler exploded into a million little stars, shattering the calm, falling to the dirt. The whiskey staining the wall, baked immediately into the stucco by the hot desert sun.

She turned to look at me. Mouth agape. Didn’t have words.

I didn’t either. No words. Only action.

Because I wanted to throw another glass. And another glass. And open the fridge and throw every bottle at the wall too, until the whole ground was covered with glass and the whole wall was stained with booze.

The paramedics were still in his bedroom.

Were you supposed to call the paramedics? What could they have done?

Who were you supposed to call when you knew it was death, knew he was permanently gone, knew there was no chance they could bring him back?

The tape line, between mine and Nicky’s halves of our bedroom. Untouched like it was still yesterday or the day before that or four months ago when my dad had only time ahead of him.

Except for his spelling test, dated yesterday. 90%, misspelled “irretrievable.”

“You only have to share with Nicky for a little while. Once I get a job, we’ll move somewhere bigger, and you can have your own room. I promise.”

I tried to think that he was in a better place, that he had forgotten all of this, forgotten the pain of everything.

I didn’t like seeing him like that. Gray skin, twisted face, the smell of rot.

But I knew my last memories of him would be exactly that. The cruelty of everything.

Would anyone want to be remembered like that? The skeleton, splayed out on the bad, rather than the strong soldier who could pick me up when I was little, put me on his shoulders?

I tried to think of him in a better place, a place where he could forget that we were left behind.

It was still light outside, just barely, the dying embers of October 28, 2001, when Nicky got home.

“I went down to the riverbed to be alone,” he told me, sitting on the edge of his bed, his voice quieter than I had ever heard it before. “I was the one who found him.”

Neither of us said anything for the longest time.

I imagined Nicky coming home. The spelling test in his hand. Everything right but “irretrievable.”

“Look, Dad! I—”

Neither of us said anything for the longest time, until Nicky suddenly burst into tears, loud and choked. Pained, wretched sobs.

Promise me one thing.

“Don’t cry,” I told him. “He wouldn’t have wanted you to cry.”

But Nicky continued to cry. And I could feel the hot lump in my throat, the rising tide of tears.

I wouldn’t cry in front of Nicky.

As much as I wanted to. Embrace him, and sob onto his shoulder, and let him sob onto mine.

No.

Instead, I watched.

Fixated on my little brother’s eyes, red and stained with tears. Puddling down his face like whiskey on stucco, staining his cheeks even if he washed them off.

And I didn’t know what to say.

I didn’t know how to be strong. Except to be stoic.

Except to not cry. No matter how much I wanted to.

Nicky continued to sob. For maybe a while, or maybe not. I had lost the concept of time. The sun hung limp, dying, in the window, the room reddened. It maybe moved, it maybe did not move.

I let Nicky cry.

Until finally, as abruptly as it all began, Nicky wiped his eyes and left the room, and I heard the bathroom door close behind him.

I curled up into bed, and pulled the cover over my head, and I thought of everything sad in the world and I thought of Dad on his cloud, forgetting us, but I couldn’t cry. He was at peace and his mind was blank and I would never have to see his gray body again.

I did not cry. I did not sleep.

But I must have done both of them at some point because suddenly it was morning and my eyes were blotchy, stinging, red.

Maybe, in the back of my mind, I thought I'd wake up and it'd be a different chapter.

Like the first morning of waking up a new apartment, a new city, my dad flinging the door open and doing his best to make us enthusiastic: “Get excited! The first day of your new school! The first day of the rest of your life!”

Not literally. Mentally.

I hadn’t. The desert sun came through the window, just like it had yesterday morning. The tape line, the spelling test, the piles of Nick’s clothes. Unmoved.

Nick was in bed, asleep.

Mom was on the couch, asleep.

The door to their bedroom, her bedroom, his bedroom, was closed and I couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to go in there ever again.

I opened my backpack. I counted out four Altoid boxes of pot, and put them inside the little compartment in the bottom of my bag.

And for the next one hour and seventeen minutes, I rode the candy apple red Schwinn all the way to Las Palomas High School. In the parking lot two minutes before the morning bell.

Get excited for the first day of the rest of your life.

October 29, 2001, was nothing but the day after.