by Kris Ripper
God. Alex. Rubbing off on me. I shuddered again.
One of his hands slid up my thigh, over my abs. “Please?”
That fucking word again.
“Okay.” I should have done better than that for them, better than a word that sounded grudging, even though it wasn’t.
“Lie back.” Jamie’s voice was slightly deeper now, all intensity and dimension, like I could take it in my mouth and taste it, as I had her palm.
I lay back and raised my hands over my head. When she gripped them I could only grasp at her fingers and tremble, all stretched out for them, a live wire that might ignite anything that came into contact with it.
Alex followed us, kneeling beside my legs. “Oh god, I’m uh…you are so…um…”
“And he’s all ours,” Jamie added, sliding her body down my side, keeping her hand over mine. “Do it, Alex. I want Justin completely naked.”
Despite a few years in a committed relationship (and an open one at that; I’d heard stories of the other lovers they’d taken, awkward encounters and playful ones, each of which made me more bitter than the last), Alex still fumbled with the physical coordination required to pull off my shorts. I lifted my ass and watched him carefully tug them over my dick like it was armed and dangerous, then somehow snag on my thighs.
Jamie grinned at me, and smiling wasn’t pretty on her, it was vibrant, alive, engaging. Charming as hell, even if you didn’t go in for that as a general rule. “He won’t do this with anyone else. Only us.”
“How does it work with other people, then?” I didn’t know why I was asking except that suddenly it made a difference. Suddenly I needed to feel like I was more than their one-off thirds, more than a friend who played with them for a night, even though this couldn’t go further than sex.
“Oh, you’re free to join us next time. Alex prefers to touch me and be touched by others.”
“Jeez.” He’d finally made it all the way to my feet. “You gotta say it like that?”
“No shame, babe. Jus?”
I glanced up at her. “Yeah?”
“Is kissing on the table? For you and I, I mean.” Her lips were pink, plump, devoid of lipstick.
I reached for a light tone. “Cork, I’ve had my dick in your cunt. Shocking as I still find it. Certainly we can kiss.”
Which should have been enough yes for anyone, but she shook her head. “I don’t take things we did while drunk three years ago as continuing consent.”
“Oh for fuck’s—” I tried to kiss her, arching up, straining the hell out of my neck, but I couldn’t make up the space between us without the use of my arms.
The girl wasn’t slow. She leaned in, kissing me hard enough to push me back down to the bed, one of her legs hooking over one of mine. I could feel her breasts, and the lace of her underwear against my hip.
And dammit, I was gay, I had always been gay, I’d carved my entire identity out of being gay, a marble monument to certainty and experience, so having a woman pressed against me should have shut everything off.
It should have been a wet blanket on a fiery inferno, but it wasn’t. Jamie kissed me as she pinned me down, and my lips grappled with hers for who was in control.
Alex moaned, and then we were smiling into each other’s mouths, Jamie’s quite serviceably attractive hazel eyes staring down at me.
“You think we should let him touch?” she murmured.
“I thought he didn’t touch.”
“Oh, he touches you. He can come at the thought of touching you and a little bit of pull on his cock.”
And shit, shit, nowhere to hide from that, nowhere to look that wasn’t one of them.
She kissed my cheek. “You ever come thinking about Alex?”
The answer—yes, of course, obviously—was slightly more complex than that.
“Both of you.” I sighed. “You’ve completely fucked me up, Cork. I’ve had to renounce my membership to the gold star gay club.”
“Big loss, was it?”
“Ha. No. Bunch of elitist assholes. Didn’t want to be on their team anyway.” Which was true, had been true, for a very long time. I’d been captivated by a certain type of older gay man when I was younger. He was often angry, with a chip on his shoulder, and a firm belief that gay men stood alone at the outskirts of sexual oppression.
God, how fucking insufferable. The woman in front of me—queer, dominant, not at all monogamous, tantalizing curves in place of the skinny frame she’d once aspired to—surely knew her share of oppression.
“Kiss me again, lady. Show me the ways of your people.”
“What, women?”
“The Irish. I’ve always wanted to bang an Irishman.”
She grinned again. Then she kissed me, and god. God. I wanted my hands back so I could touch her, but I didn’t, because everything was better when I was immobilized. Even briefly and somewhat provisionally.
Alex cleared his throat. “Just, uh, in case you guys forgot, I’m still here.”
“I’m just warming him up for you, slugger.” She raised an eyebrow at me. “Should I act out his fantasy? It requires you being a toy between us, which I think I can make hot for you, but I don’t want it to like—”
“Oh my god, we’re not gonna stop every five seconds to process, are we? I’m a big fucking boy. If I don’t like it, I’ll tell you.” I humped air, going for comedic and landing somewhere in the realm of desperate. “Just fucking do something, would you? A guy could grow old waiting for an orgasm around here.”
“You’re telling me,” Alex mumbled. “I want to try it, Jame.”
“Okay, lads. Let’s do this thing.” She adjusted her hold on my wrists and captured my leg in both of hers, pulling me open a little. Then she reached for my dick, pressing it to my stomach. “Start here, boy.”
Here was my balls, and I watched Alex reach out as if everything was in slow motion, his fingers outstretched, descending, finally making contact on my sac.
I shivered, wishing I could hide my face against my arm. It was too much to watch, but in the absence of hiding, I couldn’t look away. His fingers pulsed, caressed, slipped around and beneath, one thumb rubbing a featherlight circumference around each testicle, and I wanted to be bound, I wanted his fingers to trace ropes all over me, to keep me enslaved to him, to both of them. I could have lost myself in the fantasy of truly being at their mercy, except Jamie dragged the edge of one nail so fucking lightly up my dick, I shuddered.
It was a horrible thing, to need so much. To be given a little thimble full of water and to need a cliff dive into a lake so deep I’d never come up. Or want to.
“Use your lips,” she said.
And Alex obeyed.
Seconds stretched like rubber bands: into minutes, and longer, with some part of me always braced for the rebound that didn’t come. I didn’t start to regret this when my dick slipped into his mouth, or when she bit my lower lip and told me not to come, or later, when she opened him while he groaned, still trying to suck me. Pleasure didn’t turn to ash when I entered him, or when I watched him go down on her, with traces of me still left on his skin.
I kept waiting for the inevitable, because it was all in crystalline clarity. Because without the insulation of alcohol in my bloodstream I could feel far too much, see too much. Though—just like insulation—being drunk was laced with tiny sharp things, and I’d outlived the days when I could achieve oblivion without paying a price.
Jamie looked at me over Alex’s lowered head, with nowhere for me to escape. “Everything we have is yours.”
It should have been laughable, a punch line.
Or it should have been a dream come true.
I ran my hands over Alex’s skin and did what any coward would do: said nothing.
It was the worst best night of my life. An endless nightmare of sweetness and kissing and quiet giggles. It was the most fucking alienating display of romantic bullshit I’ve ever had the bad luck to be at the absolute center of, with two gorgeous,
intelligent, loving jerks completely devoted to me.
If I’d been drunk I would have been able to drift away, maybe with Alex curled up against me, the heat of Jamie’s lips still cooling on my cheek. That’s what I wanted, even though I knew it would only make things more difficult when it came time to pretend everything was normal.
I wasn’t drunk.
I slipped out of the bed after they’d turned off the lights, under no illusion either of them was asleep, and dressed in the dark.
“Jus.” Alex’s voice was soft, bleak.
“I’m sorry.” And I was. But I had to get out of there before I ripped myself apart on the ragged edge where pity met love and became…whatever the hell we’d just done.
Chapter Two
I AVOIDED THEM the rest of the weekend, gave one-word answers to their texts, didn’t answer my phone. Then it was Monday again. A return to status quo. The air tasted the way it always did on Mondays: a little stale, like the other half of a cigarette tucked away to be smoked later. You’d think Mondays would be fresh and full of promise, but they never are. The weekend has too many holdovers.
I’d thought, at the very least, I might have…not changed. This was not an after school special, The Misanthrope Learns to Love, for fuck’s sake. But after that night…I don’t know. Not that I believe in redemption, but if it were possible, it’d be because of something as shattering as sex with Alex and Jamie. I thought perhaps my perspective might have shifted, just a little. A lens switch, a filter. The same me underneath, but with slightly softer edges.
No such luck. Just me bitching at other drivers, cramming my car into a crevice between two delivery trucks, and walking into the subterranean workshop where I spent my days.
It was only partially subterranean, in reality; the long, narrow building stretched like a train car along the street, roughly a quarter of it carved into the hillside. Windows lined the side that wasn’t, with a single garage door at the end that we left open during the day.
I don’t have any artistic skills whatsoever. Most people say that, but what they mean is they don’t paint, or draw. I mean I don’t do anything. I don’t bake a mean loaf of bread, or doodle clever single panel comics in the margins of notebooks, or get creative with how I bag my groceries. I have no generative artistic skills. I can follow a recipe. If you show me step by step instructions, I can copy someone else’s drawing. But my brain does not invent.
My brain does certain other things. Like inventory and sort and track data. Which is why I hole up in the window-side back corner of the workshop, listening to jazz loud enough in headphones to drown out the rabid conservative talk radio my boss blasts while a TV on mute glares out at us and he makes Art.
Sculpture, actually.
And despite being a flaming bastard, he’s incredibly good at it.
My job was nominally to keep the shop in order and do research and interface with the outside world. The real reason Chad Dickerson* (*not his real name; he actually chose to go through professional life as “Chad Dickerson”) hired me and employed me full time was because he liked to have someone around to talk to, and he was too big a douche to have friends. Thus Justin Simos, assistant, was created.
Actually, that was the one thing I was arguably good at inventing: myself. I was once the lonely kid, the only five-year-old on the playground who did not seek others, either from fellow feeling or from sheer instinct, to avoid being alone. I was once the kid who protected his strange best friend, the odd little boy who was always letting bugs crawl over his hands, whose glasses were broken more than once by bullies. After we met, I made sure Alex got to keep his glasses.
Reinvented again, years later, in a hospital room, staring at the ceiling while they explained non-purging bulimia to me as if I wasn’t aware that the talk shows all had episodes about this thing that to other people was a list of pity-frowning statistics and to me was a lesion on my psyche that it hadn’t occurred to me to fight.
I gained clarity in the face of diagnosis, not because it helped me understand myself, but because it helped me understand what other people felt when they looked at me. My mother: heartbroken, wondering what she’d done wrong. My teachers: pity, disgust, fear they’d see themselves in my reflection. But not Alex, who looked at me the same way he always had, like I was a mangy guard dog who only bit others.
And now here I was, sitting here at the high counter in the corner of Chad’s workshop, checking Monday morning emails, triaging my list for the week, when a few days ago I had been virtually taken apart by my friends, held down and exposed and seduced by them. Two people who knew all the sides of me and foolishly didn’t worry about being bitten no matter how close they got.
Every dog who savages a kid is followed by an owner who says, “He’s never done anything like that before!” But no one who knew me could be shocked when I was an asshole. Being an asshole was my stock in trade (and why I got along with Chad so well).
And it wasn’t like I hadn’t hurt them before. You know that cliché about the teenage girl who needs her boyfriend to move super slowly and says, “If you love me, you’ll wait?” Well, I was never that teenage girl, and neither was Jamie, but Alex definitely was. For years. Into college. He could recite statistics about mayflies and reproduction, but the idea of even making out used to send him into cold sweats.
In retrospect, I probably could have been helpful. Make that: it’s possible that scaring off literally every single person he was ever interested in wasn’t what a good friend would have done. But I was young and stupid and in love with him and jealous as hell. Once we met Jamie, who encouraged him to go out, even when he was nervous, things did get a little easier. For him. Much fucking harder for me.
To me, sex had seemed like nothing more than a pastime I wanted to get good at, something I practiced diligently, with as many people as I could, sometimes—yes—stupidly, but for the most part I’d been safe. And confident. I’d never needed anyone to move slowly, and I had either never been with someone who did, or failed to notice.
I really hoped it was the former, not the latter. That I hadn’t assumed some other tentative Alex was more ready than he was. I’d occasionally been on that side of things with men—going along with instead of fully participating in scenes that were too extreme for me at that time, or just on that night. I used to tell myself I was protecting him from things like that, but of course it was just a rationalization to make me feel less shitty about being a monster.
Maybe Alex had some mutated form of Stockholm Syndrome. Maybe we’d been friends so long he didn’t realize how badly I’d treated him. I hoped he never would.
I shook off the uplifting nature of my thoughts and tried to focus on the screen. I’d beaten Chad to work—I always did on Mondays, and normally the rest of the week as well—so I drank my coffee in peace with my music on low.
Before you go getting the impression I’m the kind of person who knows anything about jazz, let me be clear: I don’t. There are some tracks I’m drawn to, where the instrumentation climbs and falls and knots around itself in a way I admire, but I don’t know them by name. I couldn’t tell you the artists. And I stick to the non-lyric sort. There might be a word for that. I wouldn’t know.
I do know that Chad despises instrumental tracks, with a special loathing for jazz that’s probably racist in origin, though he’s never said anything like that. He considers it “elitist shit.” Before I started working with him, I’d primarily listened to political punk rock and queercore. I’d randomly queued up a jazz station one morning thinking it was basically the least controversial music imaginable. But I was wrong.
And of course, having suffered through a lecture on “elevator music” and “only pansies listen to this crap,” I had no choice but to devote myself to it.
Five years later I had no regrets. I played it on the weekends when I was with Alex and Jamie, as well. Coffee pairs well with instrumental jazz. So does company.
I’d come in through the side door
, but of course Chad did everything with the most amount of activity and noise he possibly could, hauling the old garage door up on its chains, slamming it back, stomping inside.
“Need you to look up a guy. Enrico Hazeltine.”
I blinked. Chad always skipped the “good mornings” and “see you tomorrows,” and often had an order for me the second he got to the shop. But to date he’d never ordered me to research a dead AIDS activist, artist or not.
“All right,” I said carefully. One doesn’t want to spook unpredictable beasts. “Did you see a piece of his somewhere?”
“You’ve heard of him?” Chad’s eyebrows-raised surprise might have grated if I’d ever thought of myself as a consumer of the arts.
He was a prolific painter, mixed media artist, and essayist I once fell in love with through his writing before discovering he’d wasted away from AIDS-related illness before I was ten years old. “The name’s vaguely familiar.”
“Yeah, well, I had the news on like I do, and they showed this one piece—” he waved a hand in no way descriptively “—an outline of a body, with all this bright shit coming off the left side and dark shit coming off the right. Here, I even took a fuckin’ picture for you.”
I came around to peer over his shoulder at his eternally greasy phone screen, where one of the more famous Hazeltines was pictured on a conservative news television station with a title NEA: your wasted tax dollars.
Chad didn’t like the “mainstream media talking heads” on television, so he always listened to the radio and had the TV on for color, an arrangement that consistently drove me mad. I’d rearranged my corner so as to face away from the television he watched while he worked.
“You see that shit? I want to make something like that. And I want to see what else this guy’s done.”
Lots of line drawings of blowjobs. “I’ll look into it.” I pulled up that particular piece on the computer—The Longest Day, oil on canvas, 1989—and Chad leaned in close to see it better, our faces side by side.