By The Way, I Love You

by Seth King

  Right?

  But soon, I think he started noticing.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked me one rainy morning when we were eating cereal. I realized I’d been leering at him, but who wouldn’t leer at him? He was beautiful and perfect and dazzling.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, turning away.

  “No, seriously. Are you mad about something?”

  “No, I was just…never mind.”

  After that, I tried to keep my reactions to him under wraps. But it was hard. All I wanted to do was be around him. His grandma died in the summer, and when he left for a week, I missed him every day. I’d light up whenever he’d text me updates, and my friends even started noticing that I was acting loopy and dazed. I told them I’d found a hookup who was giving me mind-blowing sex, but I was lying. Tom was the reason behind every distracted smile, every spontaneous laugh. And nobody knew it but me.

  The first time I saw him after the funeral, he did something I can still remember so vividly: he hugged me. It was what my friends call a “bro hug,” and it didn’t last very long, but I can still feel his body against mine. If I could have stopped time and made that moment last forever, I would have.

  One night soon after he returned from the funeral, I got curious about our initial meeting.

  “Can I ask you something?” I said when we were eating butter-free popcorn (his favorite) and watching some home renovation show. “Why were you so shocked to meet me?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When you fell down the stairs and I came down, you seemed almost…disappointed, or something.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t that,” he laughed, blushing for some reason. “And sorry, I guess I made a face. It’s hard to hide my feelings.”

  “I noticed. What was it, then?”

  “Can I be honest?” he said, and I nodded. “It was because you were straight.”

  “Um. Straight? I…I don’t get it.”

  He sighed. “Look, many straight guys are uncomfortable around me, since I’m openly gay and everything. They won’t be outwardly mean, necessarily, but I’ll still get the message: they view me as being sort of different from them.”

  “I had no idea. How can you tell?”

  “Oh, all of us gays can tell, honey. Sometimes they won’t make eye contact if they speak to me; sometimes they’ll keep a distance in group conversations, glancing over at me and smirking. Sometimes it even seems like they see my sexuality as a disease that can be caught, or something. So I just…initially, I was a little uneasy. But you’re totally cool with me, obviously. Which is so fucking refreshing…”

  Another disaster struck one day when I walked in from a session at the gym, and he was just exiting the bathroom after a shower, totally naked.

  “Fuck,” he said as he darted across the hall, “I didn’t bring my towel to the bathroom and thought you weren’t home, sorry…”

  But the shocking thing was how I’d admired his lean legs, his bubble ass, the way his dick swung when he walked. I’d taken a million naked showers with other guy after practices, with nothing sexual to ever report. I wouldn’t even glance at them – penises seemed odd and foreign and kind of ugly. But the moment my eyes landed on his dick, my entire body ignited in a way I’d never felt before.

  He seemed totally weirded out that I’d seen him naked. For some reason he acted awkward for days. Then things started getting even more complicated. I knew something was going on inside me, and the naked sighting was proof of it, but I still didn’t understand my own reactions to things. I started hanging onto his every word, and if he’d maybe say something a little harsh or sarcastic, my heart would break.

  But at the same time I was falling deeper into my own feelings. One time, I brought Tom to trivia night with my straight friends, and I guess we acted overly familiar or something. Afterward, my friend Robbie sort of pulled me aside, all uncomfortable and confused.

  “What’s the deal with that kid you brought?” he asked me. “Isn’t he…um….”

  “Yes? Isn’t he what?”

  “Well, gay?”

  I never forgot the way Robbie said that word – he said it in such a harsh, almost violent way, like it was the worst thing anyone could ever be.

  “Yes, he is. Why?” I asked, and he shrugged.

  “Because, um…why would you bring him around, then?”

  Needless to say, I never spoke to Robbie again.

  About three months into the…friendship, or whatever you call this, I stayed home all night waiting for Tom to come home. He’d gotten me into watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, and out of nowhere I fell in love with the show. The colors, the joy – I’d never seen anything like it. Our viewing party became a little tradition, and we’d have some drinks and talk about which girls we liked and which ones we wanted to get sent home.

  For the finale I stayed in on a Friday, waiting for Tom and expecting him to just show up like he normally did. But he never came, and I didn’t want to text him and act clingy and hurt. He wouldn’t understand, since we’d never even verbally agreed on watching it together, anyway. But that night, I missed him so much I felt physically sick.

  I fell asleep on the couch, and after midnight he stumbled in, drunk, with some date. I was instantly irate, and I didn’t understand why. When they had drinks in the kitchen they weren’t loud at all, but I still stomped around the house, making distractions for no reason at all. Who did Tom think he was, anyway, parading some guy around in front of his friend like this?

  And his new date was totally wrong for him. He just looked…well, wrong, and I didn’t know why.

  As I got ready for bed, I heard Tom approach me from behind. “Hey, is something wrong?” he asked, totally nervous. “I tried to introduce Matt and you…well, you totally ignored him, actually.”

  I turned to him halfway. “I watched the show alone. Fantasia LaRue won the season, for your information.”

  “Um, thanks for spoiling it! And ugh, I wanted Natasha to win, Fantasia was such a bully. But I’ve been avoiding Twitter so I wouldn’t see!”

  “Maybe you should’ve watched it with me, then,” I said, unable to stop myself.

  “Hey, what?” he asked, sounding hurt. “I didn’t even know…did you want to watch it with me, Evan?”

  I tried to stay casual. “I don’t know. I kind of thought we had a little thing going…I stayed in and waited.”

  “You should’ve texted, then! I had no idea. I, um, I met this guy from Tinder, and we hit it off pretty well…”

  “Oh, I noticed.”

  “What does that mean?” he asked, anxious, and I didn’t respond. “Look, what’s the problem? Do you not want me to bring guys here?”

  “I don’t care about what you do.”

  “You don’t like him, then? He seems totally normal. What’s wrong with him?”

  I smirked. “He looks…nice. I don’t know. Doesn’t really seem like your type.”

  He seemed mystified. “And what is my type, then?”

  “I don’t know. You just need someone on your level. He seems…well, kind of like a loser.”

  “You literally exchanged zero words with him!”

  “It’s not that. It’s…nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “You’re right. I don’t. Have a good night.”

  I slammed my door and tried to fall asleep, but the next thing I knew, my worst nightmares were coming true: the sounds I heard from his bedroom next door became quieter, then changed in tone.

  I couldn’t believe it: Tom was about to hook up with his date, and there was nothing I could do about it.

  I contemplated flicking the fire alarm, then decided to just put on some John Mayer and ignore it. But I couldn’t. I kept listening in, just to torture myself. The idea of Tom hooking up with someone under our roof felt like a betrayal – I was horrified and disgusted and also really, really turned on for some reason.

  But mostly I was just fucking jealous.

 
; Part of me, really deep down, wanted to get up and throw open the door and stop the whole thing. Part of me wanted to confess, to tell him he was the only thing I could ever think about, to tell him I was addicted to his face, to beg him to stop in his tracks and take me instead. But I couldn’t. That would’ve ruined everything.

  As I listened to the delicious and horrifying sounds of his moans and groans and whispers, I took my dick in my hand and started imagining other things:

  What if was me?

  Why had he chosen this random guy instead of me?

  And what if I was the one doing those things to him?

  I imagined my lips on his lips, his lips on my dick, my cock going in places it had never gone before. I imagined our bodies writhing together, kissing and sucking and touching. Would I ever do that? Would I ever want to do that?

  I stroked myself and imagined looking down and seeing his eyes in that position as he sucked me. It made me feel confused and stressed and also hornier than I had ever been in my life.

  But at the same time I didn’t even know where to begin. How did gay sex work? Who was on top? Who was in charge? The dynamics were so confusing to me, but at the same time, I was obsessed like nothing in my life before.

  That night I realized I couldn’t deny at least one part of this mess: I was sexually interested in him. As their chattering turned to steamier sounds, it hit me like a summer gust of wind: I was probably bisexual.

  ~

  I tossed and turned until four in the morning. That evening Tom went to his sister’s birthday dinner, and I got lonely and Googled the phrase what to do if you think you might be sexually confused. It led me to a twenty-four-hour hotline for LGBT+ youth, and I took a deep breath and dialed the number. But it turned out I had nothing to worry about. The person who answered turned out to be one of the funniest people I’d ever met, a real “character.”

  In a molasses-think Southern accent he told me his name was Alton Lawton, Junior, and that he had escaped a Mississippi childhood to live through the turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s in gay San Francisco. Since his husband died last year, he’d given his time to charity work. After he regaled me with a series of his stories, he asked me why I’d called, and I told him the basis of my conflict.

  “I ain’t got a thing to offer you on the friendship front, young man,” he began. “See, my Joseph and I were lovers from day one, so I never saw anything like that back in my day. But with the whole gay issue, I can tell you to chill the fuck out.”

  I blinked. “Um. Excuse me?”

  “It’s easy. Chill the fuck out,” he repeated in a hilariously frank tone. “Sometimes guys like guys. Sometimes girls like girls. Sometimes guys like girls. Ain’t nothing special to any of it. It is what it is, and that’s it.”

  “Well, thank you,” I smiled, “but…if this thing is real, I want to just make sure I get it out of my head that it’s…you know. A bad thing.”

  “Tell me, then. When did you decide heterosexual love was a bad thing?”

  “Oh, I didn’t.”

  “Exactly. Because the world never told you it was. So why should gay love be any damn different?”

  I was stunned into silence for a few moments. “Wow. That really…kind of helped.”

  “Yes, sir. And along the same lines, when did you decide to love the first girl you ever dated?”

  “I didn’t. I just…dated her.”

  “Yup. Hearts didn’t decide gay love was bad. Humans did. And those are two totally separate things. So all you have to do is go back to the first moment the world told you gay people were bad, and just tell that voice to shut the fuck up.”

  We talked a little longer, but I left the call looking at sexuality with brand new eyes. But when Tom got home, our fight flared up again. I was still so hurt, and I didn’t know how to put it into words.

  “You were up late last night,” I said as Tom foraged through the freezer looking for the vodka, unable to stop myself. His face turned white, and in that moment I felt like an absolute dick for embarrassing him. I wanted to rush over and hug him, but obviously I couldn’t.

  “Oh…fuck. Don’t tell me…don’t tell me the walls are that thin. I wasn’t sure…”

  I didn’t respond.

  “I’m sorry,” he said soon. “I’m really, really sorry. That is…excuse me, I’m gonna go shut my head in a hole, I can never look at you again.”

  “Tom,” I said, and he turned to me. I wanted so desperately to tell him – that I was falling for him, that he’d turned my whole world upside down, that every single night I only dreamed of him. The words burned on my lips, and yet I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t make myself.

  So I turned away instead. “It is absolutely fine. Live your life. I’ll just get a noise machine soon.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “If you want me to move out, I will.”

  My whole body clenched up. “Tom? What?”

  “You want me to move out, right? No straight guy wants to hear that.”

  My heart broke for him, right then and there. But I was also confused. “No, I would never do that. Do you want to move out, though?”

  “No. Never. I just…I thought you wanted me to…”

  “Not at all. Like I said, I’ll get a noise machine, and we’ll be good to go.”

  But I knew the truth: no noise machine in the world would overpower the growing chorus in my mind, the chorus screaming Tom Carlile’s name.

  ~

  When I was eighteen or nineteen I had this friend, Katherine. Except she wasn’t a friend – not in her mind, at least. We were in the same study group, and I never even really noticed anything until we all went to a bar one night and she got drunk, broke down, and told me she had developed feelings for me and didn’t know what to do anymore. I watched her heart break on her face, because the truth was that I didn’t love her. And I couldn’t make myself. I let her down as gently as I could, but she was devastated, and our friendship never really recovered.

  That’s what I was certain I was heading toward with Tom. I started acting gruff and moody around him. We had our first knock-down, drag-out fight a few weeks after the date incident. A new guy came to the door asking for Tom, and I have no idea what came over me, but I lied and said he was out of town, and sent the guy on his way.

  Tom found out, of course, and didn’t understand why I had meddled in his life like that. The shit really hit the fan when I told him to stop hooking up altogether. It wasn’t because he was gay, it was because I wanted to be the one hooking up with him, but clearly he didn’t know that.

  “Well maybe you shouldn’t be doing this,” I said, making him gasp.

  “What?” he asked, and I didn’t say anything. “Come on,” he said. “Say that again. I dare you.”

  “You heard me. Maybe you should slow down your whole dating life. Maybe it’s too much. A distraction. I don’t know, just my two cents.”

  “And maybe you shouldn’t fucking shame me for being gay,” he said with a viciousness I’d never heard before.

  “What?”

  “You know exactly what I’m talking about. When straight men are sexually active, they’re patted on the back and called the big guy on campus. But if I dare to try to go find a hookup, I’m treated like some disease-ridden whore, and it’s the biggest double standard in the world.”

  I turned away. “I’m…I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”

  But the fight didn’t end. We kept going at it. I was so jealous, I didn’t know what to do with myself. We screamed it out in the hallway, and didn’t talk for two days.

  Every day was hell, and then on the third day I got a text from him that made my heart drop:

  Hey. I got in a little accident on Third Street by the Taco Bell. Do you happen to have a AAA membership I can use?

  But I didn’t help him with calling AAA. I instantly ran to my car and rushed to the scene. Every moment felt like a new nightmare – if something happened to Tom, anything at all, I would lose my fucki
ng mind. I saw horrendous visions of his body on a gurney, of me sobbing by the hospital bed…

  I showed up in a rush and found that it was a fender bender, and that Tom was absolutely fine, and was just trying to get his car towed for free.

  “Geez,” he said afterward. “I know they say it’s good to have friends in bad times, but when you ran up, I thought someone had died, or something…”

  I cried myself to sleep that night, and the truth hit me like a truck: no matter how hard I’d been trying to push back, to run and deny and lie, I was in love, and there could be no turning back. It wasn’t just a fleeting sexual obsession – it was the kind of love that was taking over my whole life.

  And I knew there was only one person who could help me, one person who’d had a more disastrous love life than mine:

  My mother.

  2

  Tom Carlile

  “What a freak. Hey, look at this…”

  On New Year’s Eve I’m standing in line on the plane, waiting to deplane, when I hear the comment coming from some snotty-faced kid who couldn’t have been older than thirteen. He motions at my Lady Gaga shirt and then nudges his little friend, who starts smirking and giggling.

  I slide on my headphones and play a Beyoncé song to try to feel fabulous. It doesn’t work. I try not to let it in, the hurt and the shame and the embarrassment, but it comes anyway.

  This happens all the time, and I still never know how to react to it. It’s a special kind of shame to be humiliated by someone half your age, and still be too petrified to even respond. I wish I could be like the boys in the movies and have the sassy, bitchy, devil-may-care attitude about it. Sure, I am fine with myself in many ways, and many parts of me are fabulous. I enjoy being me: I’ve never met a room I couldn’t re-decorate, my knowledge of Lady Gaga’s career is nearly encyclopedic, and my orange- blonde hair is styled for the gods every day of the week. And yes, I know these people are just hating me out of their own ignorance, and because of issues they have with themselves, and not me.