Bad Stereotypes - 25. Tuesday 13th June 2012

Zachary Sarver and I did the two man four hundred metre relay and came in first. Zachary Sarver and I won gold and silver for every race we entered. Zachary Sarver and I spent all our time together. And at the same time, I hated him.

I hated the fact that I lied to him so often. Small things, how I was feeling, when and where I’d been running, who I fancied at college. Zach was busy making a reputation for himself as a player, which meant that apart from when he was smoozing girls, he had plenty of free time to spend with me. People always expected us to be together, and we hung out all the time, and he had no idea how torn up the inside of my head was.

I hadn’t been back to the city since the evening when I needed to make use of my running skills in order to preserve my health. Now I spent Saturday nights either out with Zach, or out running. I spent a lot of time out running.

At seventeen, I hadn’t jerked off in nearly three weeks. Not since… not since I’d nearly had a guy practically rape me out the back of a club in the middle of the city. I woke up hot and sweaty and twisted in my sheets, sometimes hard, sometimes sticky, and usually with the image of Zach in my mind. Except for the times it wasn’t Zach. The times when I woke up convinced I had previously been in Jim-Boy’s car; sitting in the seat with him leaning over me; kneeling in the foot well in the back and sucking him while he smoked. Or I remember being out back in that alley, but not getting away, and my brain would twist everything up inside my brain until I woke scared and shaking.

And so I ran. Running at night was different, colder, darker, much more silent. And I got to witness the things that go on at night; foxes stalking through the streets, cats singing each other songs, the soft rustling of beetles. Every once in a while there would be a person or a car; drunk’s arriving home, people returning or leaving for red-eye flights, shouting, sometimes a baby wailing in the dark. I steered clear of habitation and ran under the cover of proper darkness, without street lamps and without a sound. All I had was my breath and my pulse and the memories and images I tried to vanish from my skull.

That Tuesday I woke with a physical jolt to find myself on the floor of my room. It was the worst way to wake up, hot and sticky, knowing I’d soiled the sheets and remembering why. This image was new, and it was not one image. I was in the back of Jim-Boy’s little red car. I was sitting in his lap, but I was older, so we were now the same sort of age. He was smoking a roll up, breathing smoke past my ear, making these so-soft noise with his lips and tongue that made my whole body shiver. I wanted to kiss him but he would let me turn around. His cock was thick and hard against my butt, somehow we were naked having been dressed. When he penetrated in my dream I heard Zach’s voice in my ear, loud and clear, saying words that Alex had said to me on the hill.

‘You can’t run away forever. You can’t run away forever. You can’t run away forever…’

I showered and washed the sheets, ate a pear over the sink and went for a twenty minute run before I ended up at school. Zach met me at my locker. Seventeen looked good on Sarver. He had grown up and filled out across the shoulders, and was developing the sort of body that made all the girls in the school go wild. Me too. He’d buzzed cut his hair and stood there relaxing against my locker eating an apple noisily in a college branded t-shirt and knee length jean-shorts with tennis shoes.

“Morning Bay,” Zach’s voice was like molten honey over my skin and I shivered visibly, “You OK bud?” A warm, soft hand on my shoulder; and I wanted to lean in against his touch so much in made my head hurt, “You look tired. You’re running too hard.”

I pulled away and looked at him. Zach was the best sort of friend, and he looked genuinely concerned for my welfare. For several long heart beats I almost told him, almost said the words which would damn me totally. The moment passed, and I shrugged it off.

“I’m fine. You know, up late with the internet.”

“Dude,” Zach jabbed me on the shoulder, then grabbed my neck in the crook of his arm, his growth spurt had put him a head over my measly height. It felt nice to be safe and warm in tucked into his side, “We gotta get you a real girlfriend to keep you up late.”

I nearly snuck my arm around his waist, but the ease and joviality of the contact ended and we ended up just walking side by side.

“At least then you’ll have a decent excuse to fall asleep in physics.”

“It’s physics,” I grinned, showing humour I did not feel, “That’s excuse enough isn’t it?”

Diagrams of electromagnetic currents passed over my head as I sat in physics with Zach on my left, slumped over the desk with his head on one arm, doodling over his work book. When I slumped in my seat, our thighs touched, and when he didn’t pull away I decided not to. Being Zach’s friend was delightful and difficult, and I felt I deserved a little break from my iron like self-control after my dream.

My run had not been long enough to sort out that dream, and the images, the smell of the rolled cigarette and the sound and texture of Zach’s voice in my ear were all still too fresh. Unfortunately now that it was summer and we back in athletics there wasn’t going to be any time for running later. If I was going to sort this out, it was going to have to be now. Zach chose that moment to sit up, stretch and then lean back in his chair with his head on my shoulder and doze while our teacher scurried around the front of the room and said something complex about waves being measured by the length of the universe and being used to spectroscopically probe the characteristics of matter. I was lost.

I had dreamt of being fucked by Jim-Boy, who was at the same time Zach, and I hated the fact that the dream had turned me on enough that I’d come in my sleep. Guys who got fucked were the girls in the relationship, the weaker parties. No one had ever… and I had never thought about being on the receiving end of anal sex before in anything other than back alley associated nightmare. Something inside my head had liked the idea. And what was all that shit about not running away forever. I hadn’t run away from Jim-Boy; he had chucked me out of his car into the cold.

Why Zach? Why did the idea of Zach being in charge not scare me senseless? Any other man, every other man doing that to me made me want to simultaneously crawl inside my own skin and die, heave my guts all over the place and punch some body. But with Zach, the idea of Zach with his arms wrapped around me, nuzzling into the back of my neck, breathing in my ear…

I jerked upright as a hot hand landed on the back of my neck. Zach shook me awake just as our teacher arrived at my desk, arms folded, looking unhappy. Oh well, there went lunch…