Direct Confusion - 1. Chapter 1

My life was perfect. OK, nearly perfect.

My friends say I won the lottery in terms of life. I’m smart, popular, good looking. I’m great at sports and I play for our high school teams for soccer and swimming. When I was fifteen I came out, and I was accepted. The school is cool with it, the guys on the teams are cool with me, and my parents tell me they love me most days. I won the lottery. My school even let me take a male date to Junior Prom, although that wasn’t exactly a relationship which worked out. At the end of junior year, I would have said my life was perfect.

And then there was Jeremy.

Jeremy is my boyfriend. He’s smart, kind of bookish, red hair and freckles in a way that should scream ‘geek’ but to me says ‘hot stuff’. He gives the most fantastic head. This almost makes up for the fact he is still hiding in the closet. And though we dated for the whole summer, we’ve never actually been on a date. I love the idea of dates: gazing romantically across the table into his eyes, holding hands, being frisky in the back of the cinema. My mother worries about me: “You’re seventeen, you should be going on dates,” but I don’t tell her. No one knows about Jeremy, and since school has started again, it’s become annoying. My friends all have boyfriends and girlfriends and I hate being thought of as the single guy. There are other gay people at this school. They just aren’t as brave as me.

So I could say my life was perfect, and I might not be far off in the assumption. After all, most people my age aren’t even out, and even more who are out are bullied senseless by their peers. I am lucky, I won the lottery.

“Luke!” Derrick calls to me across the parking lot, sitting on the hood of hid early graduation present. His father is the school football teams’ main sponsor. Derrick’s car is a sleek and shiny Merc, with leather interior and surround sound. I still prefer my beat up Dodge. It was my brother’s but he’s ten years older than me and went off to join the army. I got his car.

“What up dude?” I catch the ball he flings my way and jog on over. We all got new letterman jackets this summer; cream with bright yellow lettering and green sleeves with black piping, and I love how they look on us. I know Jeremy likes the way I look in it too.

Jeremy… As Derrick begins to hint at his most recent exploits to third base with his girlfriend Cherrie, I wish I could join him in bragging. All my friends think I’ve no experience, they think I’m a virgin. But I can close my eyes as Derrick talks and relive last night when Jeremy sank to his knees and worshiped my cock for an entire half hour before he knocked me on my back and fucked me senseless. Of course, Saturday night I was the one doing the fucking…

“Dude! You cannot be asleep on the first day back.” Derrick knocks my arm as he jumps off the hood and breaks me from my reverie. I sigh and sling my bag over my back. At least today I wore jeans. My semi isn’t completely obvious.

As we walk to the building we are joined by Jim Bryan, the third member of our little posse. We are captains all three. I do soccer. Jim is a tall athletic son of a bitch, he captains the swim team and looks dead good in his little green speedos. Derrick is big and stocky, all muscle, and is football team captain and star quarterback. As you can imagine, this makes his dad very proud.

“Hey McBride,” Jim always calls me by my last name for some unfathomable reason, “We hardly saw you at all this summer, you workin’?”

“Yeah. I got a job at the country house y’know? Did most days in the kitchen. Not glamorous, but it paid well.” Jeremy had gotten a job in the library, and I’d loved sneaking up on him on my days off. Tight bastard that he was though, I’d had to spend about a week wheedling with him before he’d let me feel him up in the stacks.

“Dude…” Jim looks sad for me, “That’s rough.”

“Yeah well,” I grinned back at him, “Some of us can’t spend all our time lazing around our very own pool.”

Jim punches my arm, and regrets it. I hit a lot harder than him. Laughing, we enter the main buildings for a last year of high school. Coming back is good, an hundred familiar faces, many new little shy freshmen, girls with big eyes and boys trying to look cool lounging by the stairs. We walk through the throng like be belong there, because we do.

The sight of Jeremy at his locker is enough to sledgehammer me. We move in rather different circles at school. The one and only time we spent time hanging out in junior year, he said his parents asked him so many questions about me we didn’t try again. Jeremy is into books and music; I hang out with all the sporty guys, my crew of loudmouths and jocks. Over the summer, we spent a lot of time arguing about trying to align our friendship groups so we could hang out at school, but Jeremy managed to back me down with the promise of extra sex and more kisses. But there he is at his locker, looking randomly hot in pale chinos and a shapeless sort of grey jumper. I instantly want to go and run my fingers through his hair and breathe in the clean scent of his shampoo and the fabric conditioner his mother uses.

I can’t even wave to him as I go past, but I nod anyway. He scowls. It’s like getting kicked in the ribs.

The day is dull as shit generally, but awesome at the same time. Despite the sudden lack of freedom after the summer and the realisation of the stupidly high amount of work I have coming over the next year with soccer, swim team and two AP courses on top of my other workload, we are all back together. The guys are drifting into a big raucous group, with the high fives and the knuckle-bumps of friends returning. Our social circle is not exclusively jocks, but there are a huge number of letterman jackets in the centre of the quadrangle. The cheerleaders are still in their summer uniforms, even though the breeze is chill. There are a dozen slim tan legs poking out from yellow and green pleated skirts.

I have last period study hall, which I both love and hate. It’s time to get caught up with homework and have a rest before training. At the same time, being late in the day, the temptation to nap and muck about is temping. Jeremy is in my study hall period. I take my books and sit diagonally across from him. He glowers.

“Alright if I sit here?” I ask him as though we don’t know each other, as if I didn’t spend twenty minutes this morning jerking off in the shower thinking about him. Jeremy nods tightly and I am seized by the overwhelming desire to pull him up by the front of his jumper, haul him over the table and make out in an X-rated manner. It’s so fucking unfair. When the teacher passes around the seating chart, I take a small pride in writing my name close to his.

I spread my books over my side of the table, get sucked into European History for a while, and write most of a good essay about the effects of Henry the Eighth on the shape of modern religion, then take a break to text Jeremy under the table.

Me: Missed you today.

Jeremy texts back quickly.

Jeremy: Sorry, I had a lot of catching up to do.

I grin at him across the table.

Me: I’m still thinking about how good you look naked.

Jeremy drops his phone into his bag and glowers. The shape of his lips when he mouths across the table is a kick in the head.

“Do not fucking do that!”

I go back to my essay and when Jeremy gets up to leave at the end of the period, I ignore him. I can leave for the day, because practice doesn’t actually start until next week, but most of the central pack have randomly congregated on the concrete bleachers around the school’s mostly unused baseball diamond.

Derrick and Jim have claps on the shoulder for me when I get there, and it feels good to get bear hugs and smacks on the back from my team, the boys who are like my extended family. I hate the fact they are more accepting of me than my own boyfriend seems to be.

“McBride!”

“Dude! Looking good in the new duds!”

I jump up on the highest bleacher and grin, sticking my thumbs in my pockets. I am so not shy as I turn a little three-sixty view. Like I said, I love the new jackets. Chase, our junior goalie, wolf whistles incredibly loudly.

“Hey maybe now you’ll be able to score, boss!”

Jim clips him around the ear, but it’s funny, and I laugh. He didn’t mean anything by it. The only two people who had any negative reaction to my coming out graduated and left the team last year. I was captain then too, and even though they didn’t like it, it didn’t matter. With almost no fuss whatsoever, all these guys, who might have been the worst, have been the best support system anyone could ask for. Today I need the reassurance that people care about me. We shoot the breeze until the wind whips up and it starts getting cold. I bro-fist each of my guys, my squad, many of whom like me cross over into other sports, and head towards my car. Derrick follows.

“So you get into any action over the summer?”

I weigh up my answer. Until now, I have out and out lied to all my best friends about my exploits. I might desperately want Jeremy to come out of the closet and despite his attempts at reasoning I still have no fucking clue why he’s still in there. Outing someone is a shitty thing to do.

But I’m sick of lying to my best friends, sick of them thinking ‘the gay kid’ can’t get a date. OK, I don’t go on dates, but that don’t mean I’m not getting lucky. I go for half lying instead.

“Well, yeah actually,” I turn as I realise Derrick has ground to a halt in shock, “Dude!”

“Sorry, sorry,” Derrick jogs to catch up with me, “So… er, who was it?”

“I can’t tell you.” I stick my hands in my pockets when I reach my car, “He’s not out. We got together last year actually, at the end of the semester.”

“Luke…” Derrick sounds genuinely hurt, “I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”

“Sorry. It’s been great but horrid. He’s not out at all, not at school, not even to his parents or his friends, no one knows but me.”

“What’s in it for you?” Derrick has his head on one side, frowning gently. He loves public displays of affection, sitting Cherrie in his lap and snuggling into her neck. It’s saccharinely sweet.

“Really good head?” I arch one eyebrow at my best friend as I smirk, “He might be reserved as hell about his sexuality but he’s a firecracker in bed.”

Derrick is still staring, slack jawed.

“Have you guys like done…” His words are apparently failing him.

“Have we fucked?” I laugh, “Dude we’d had sex before you and Cherrie even made it to second base.”

He jabs me on the arm, and I sort of deserve it.

“So do you… does he?” Derrick is a real stand-up guy, but up until this moment he’s never had to develop a vocabulary for dealing with gay sex. I don’t blame his awkwardness.

“What position do I play?” He nods at my clarification. I smile, and tell him exactly what I told the head coach when he first discovered I wanted to play two different sports and finish in the top fifteen percentile of my academic school grades. “I’m versatile.”

When I get home, Jeremy is waiting for me. He doesn’t have a car and rides a vintage scooter from the sixties around. It’s parked in my driveway.

I am lucky, because my brother was much older than me. My parents built a little annexe to our house with its own kitchenette, bathroom, and open bedroom and lounge area which I also inherited from my brother when he left. My mother comes to check on the ‘state of the floor’ about once a week, but I’m fairly clean for a teenager, and I don’t have to hide things from my parents. Well, everything except Jeremy. I hate he’s made me lie to them. Jeremy is waiting at the back of the driveway with his hands hidden in the sleeves of his jumper. He looks sort of rumpled and kissable. I’m still pissed at him, but I let him in the back gate and he follows me into my place.

“Luke…” He grabs me around the waist and pulls me back against his long torso as the door shuts behind us. We are nearly the same height, for all that I have broader shoulders and generally more muscle. “Talk to me,” his lips are right under my ear, touching my neck, making me shudder. It’s my greatest weak spot and I can feel my knees turning to jelly already. “Babe…”

I wriggle away from him.

“Talk to you? You spent the whole day ignoring me.”

“We were at school!” Jeremy’s hands are back on my hips, sneaking into my jeans, “You know I couldn’t say anything.”

I sigh. We’ve been over this same territory a dozen times or more, and gotten nowhere. Despite telling Derrick the smallest of truths, it’s been a tiring sort of day. The idea of letting Jeremy have his way with me is sorely tempting.

“Fine,” I relax into his touch, letting my forehead settle onto his shoulder, my fingers running over his chest. Jeremy’s kiss is hot and soft on my neck. His fingers are quick on the fly of my jeans and my cock is hard and eager to meet him. “Whatever.”

“Luke…” There’s the sweet little whisper again. Jeremy’s teeth nipped at my skin, a delicious contrast to his soft lips. “I’ll make it up to you.”

Jeremy runs his fingertips under my shirt and his other hand curves around my cock. I kiss him back, and decide to immerse myself in this as much as possible. Because apparently it’s all I’m going to get.