by Kris Ripper
Except I wasn’t, not really. It wasn’t intelligence that kept me out of their bed that night, it was fear. Of them, of myself, of change. I hated being a coward, but I couldn’t seem to be anything else.
Chapter Seven
WE FOLLOWED THE plan the next morning, eating early, painting all of our pre-cut treads and risers in the living room, then leaving the doors and windows open in the house and taking a walk on the beach.
For most of my life I’d shied away from the beach. Alex and I were from the desert down south; I’d always said I didn’t need more sand in my life, though that was mostly a line. The beach as a destination seemed like such a cliché and I felt no specific pull toward it.
But that was before the Saints house. Apparently ready access to a shower and a change of clothes improved the beach a great deal.
To say nothing of the company.
The two of them, paint-spattered and giddy with accomplishment, danced in the surf, white spotted grown children twirling one another around and laughing with their heads back, throats bared. I swallowed, at first pretending not to watch so they wouldn’t know I cared. Then, when it became clear they were lost in each other and the moment, I slowed my own trudging steps and eyed them covertly.
Alex had pulled his hair back, but the wind was doing its level best to defeat the hair band. His T-shirt bubbled around his chest, rising past his belly, making me want to drop to my knees and lick that strip of skin each time it was exposed. He leaned back, arms outstretched, grasping Jamie’s hands and spinning at the edge of the water, where they screamed when waves hit their feet.
She was in wildly short cut-offs, even though it was November, legs disappearing under fringe in a way that enticed me, wondering what she’d do if I slipped fingers beneath the fabric and stared into her eyes. I didn’t think she’d stop me. I wanted to touch the full, round curve of her ass, tease her with my fingertips.
It was no accident that I imagined being at their feet. Suddenly I could see it so fucking clearly it was hard to resist doing: I’d stride over, confident, because I knew them, and they knew me, and we all felt this thing between us. I’d meet their eyes, unashamed and unafraid, and drop down, and the icy chill of the water would be shocking on my skin, the heavy wetness of jeans would tug at my waist, and I would ignore it.
I’d want to look into their faces, but even in the fantasy of it, I was bashful, lowering my head. They would touch me, of course. Coax me past embarrassment, meet me in a place of mutual exposure, of shared vulnerability.
For years I’d been avoiding it, but now, with them, on this sparking cold morning, I imagined giving in, letting their affection wash over me, warmer than the sea and sand. My heart was pounding. I took a step forward, then another, keeping them in my peripheral vision even though I could have stared outright and they wouldn’t have noticed. There were scattered people on the beach, but no one close.
They were spinning now, laughing. My heart seemed to be keeping a quickstep beat, jumping in my chest. My dick stirred, not hard, but online, ready and willing.
When I was still ten feet away—hungry for the shifting sand under my knees, the icy thrill of the water, their hands on my neck, in my hair—they stopped spinning and broke apart. Alex dug in his pocket and pulled out his phone.
His fucking phone.
For emergencies, I was grateful for the cell tower not far away. But part of me wished it didn’t exist, that the Saints house could be a true oasis away from the rest of our lives. It almost was.
Alex turned away, shaking his head, pressing fingers into his non-phone ear, trying to better understand whoever he was talking to.
My steps slowed, fantasy draining away. Jamie looked up and caught my eye.
“Work.”
The slump in my shoulders was reflected in hers. Alex worked for a fancy frozen yogurt bar owned by a twenty-five-year-old married couple with too much of mommy and daddy’s money, and no training or business sense of any kind. Since he basically ran the place—and they were terrified of trying to get by without him—he could get weekends off when he wanted. The flipside was that when they called, he always came running.
I couldn’t hear his conversation, but I didn’t need to.
Jamie grabbed my hand. “Oh, lad. Happy fuckin’ Thanksgiving.”
“This is just like America: one day of bullshit gratitude, then back to jumping when some dumb rich kids can’t figure out how to get the chocolate chips out of the vanilla chips container.”
She squeezed. “I had plans, you know. For today.”
You and me both. I couldn’t say it or I’d have to explain, and now, in the stark light of avoided risk, I felt foolish for picturing myself kneeling in the water. How dumb would I have looked? And in public, too.
I shook off the lingering buzz of excitement and lust. “Is that right?”
She tugged me in for a hug, but I knew it wasn’t a hug. That was its disguise. Jamie’s lips brushed my ear. “I thought we’d play strip poker. Only instead of all of us stripping, it’d just be us stripping you. And when you were completely naked we’d be able to touch you instead.”
My mouth felt bone dry, as if I’d just inhaled the fucking beach. “What about when I won? Would I get to touch you?”
Breathy laughter. “You’d have to tell us where you wanted our hands. Or feet. Or choose your own body part. You, sitting there, naked, cold, begging us to touch you just how you wanted it. God, I’m so wet right now thinking about it.”
I shuddered against her. “You bitch.”
“I know. I am the worst. I would have made it so good for you, Jus.”
I slid my hands up her back (over her shirt for the sake of propriety, and also because I wasn’t quite daring enough to touch her skin), pressing my face into her neck. Hiding, really.
“It would have been so good. You would have hated it and been so fucking turned on.”
She was right. I hated the thought of it, and I would have fought her, I would have appealed to Alex and forced his complicity. This particular dance with power was a lot closer to the two of them pulling against one another in the waves than it was any organized waltz: weight and counterweight, constant tension in each direction or it all fell apart.
I would have demanded Alex side with me, thus forcing him to overtly participate in my humiliation and arousal. Oh god.
“What if we burn the yogurt place down?” I murmured.
She laughed and hugged me harder, swaying a little. “We have time for all the rest of it. Probably. Statistically speaking. As long as none of us dies.”
“Oh, nice, Cork. Real happy fuckin’ thoughts.”
“Uh, guys?”
I clutched her for a second longer, taking one more breath with my eyes against her skin.
Jesus, the world was bright. “What’s the bad news?”
Single strands of his hair had come loose, feathered by the wind, a sort of lopsided halo. “I gotta go back. Sorry.”
Both of us reached for him at once, and I would have pulled away—surely comfort was the girlfriend’s job, not the best friend’s—but his entire face changed, eyes going wide, lips curling up, brows raised, an almost imperceptible glow on his cheeks.
We reeled him in to our hug as if we’d been doing that forever, even though our years of friendship had never particularly involved hugs.
“It’s all right,” Jamie said. “The house will wait.”
“I told them I couldn’t get back until the afternoon, but even with both of them working, they need coverage for closing.” He paused, that half-breath informing us there was more. “And they need me all day tomorrow.”
So there would be no reprising of our trip. Not this weekend. No ludicrous kneeling in waves. No desperately humiliating poker games.
No hands in my hair. On my body. No licking Alex’s belly or teasing Jamie.
I made my voice dry. “Oh, good. I have so much reading to do at home. This whole thing really put a crimp in my far
more desirable plans of sitting alone in my apartment with a book.”
“But we were going to—”
Jamie kissed him. “I told him. I almost had him hard on the beach thinking about it.”
I couldn’t help looking up, meeting Alex’s eyes, chasing down a thin thread of submission and…offering it to him. Free of charge.
His lips parted as if he was going to speak. But he didn’t.
“It’s only a matter of time,” Jamie said, voice low. “We are going to play that game. And you won’t know when, either. You’re gonna be thinking about it, waiting, letting the anticipation build, trying to find a way out of it, but there isn’t one. It’s gonna be so hot.”
Tempting as it was to respond with a lecture on my rights to withdraw consent for any and all activities, regardless of how turned on they made me standing on a beach, I didn’t. Because Alex might think I was serious. In the desire minefield we walked, Alex’s doubts and my fears made up most of the Bouncing Betties. I wouldn’t add to them.
I cleared my throat instead. “Do we need to leave right away? What will we do with the steps?”
“You could…you two could stay, probably get the whole thing done. I’ll just come back tomorrow after work.” And oh, that kindling hope in his eyes almost destroyed me.
Stay at the house, me and Jamie, no Alex. We’d been friends for years, we’d spent thousands of hours alone together, but not like this. Not now, when all the rest of this shit was on the table. I stared hard at my toes in the sand, panicking, and I had no idea why, not really. I wasn’t scared of Jamie.
“Uh, I made this weird. I mean, you two could…you know. Without me. I swear, it’s totally not a—”
“It’s a bad idea,” I interrupted, looking up. At Jamie, who’d be nodding, because obviously she and I having sex without Alex was a bad idea, I didn’t have to stop and think about it.
She wasn’t nodding. In those few taffy-stretched seconds before she shielded her expression, I saw raw, rough-edged pain. Her eyebrows drew down, lips compressed.
Then it was gone. She shoved his shoulder. “Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d be jerking off in our bed thinking about it. Anyway, you’re not getting out of stair-building that easily, right, Jus?”
“Right,” I echoed.
We started walking back to the house. Alex wringing his hands on the way. “I’m really sorry. They need to hire more supervisors, but neither one of them feels confident training after that whole summer fiasco, so…”
He was nervous-rambling. They’d talk about this later, about what all of us had said, about my reaction, about the idea of different configurations between us. They’d process and overthink and someday it’d all spill over in my vicinity, and I’d be on the hook for stepping into a therapy session already in progress.
And the worst part of it was how almost jealous I felt. How much I wanted them to demand answers, even though I knew they wouldn’t.
They’d assumed I’d spooked because Cork had a vagina. Hell, if I didn’t know better, I’d assume that, too.
I stared out the window all the way back to civilization, wishing it was that simple.
Chapter Eight
I DREAMED OF an echoing, moon-dazzled park, strewn with bodies. I recognized the place not from photographs or videos, but from my own imagination; this was the made-up location I’d visualized when I read Enrico Hazeltine’s essays about cruising at night in parks.
In the age of Grindr and decriminalized sodomy, I’d never cruised anyone in the shadows—not out of necessity, anyway. But I’d worn this place through in my fantasies, dreaming of encountering a dead man whose words had fanned some banked fire in me to flames.
They were all dead in my dream.
Not all men. All queer, though. Not visibly loud with it, but because it was my dream, its warp and weft spun from my subconscious, I knew my people when I saw them. The grass beneath my feet had a distinctly crunchy quality, as if covered in thin sheets of ice I broke with each step as I walked from body to body, fearing Alex’s face, or Jamie’s.
I didn’t find them, and I didn’t reach the edges of the park. It was endless, the horizon infinite. I passed gunshot victims, people beaten until their eyes were lost in puffy skin. My mind critiqued the portrayal as if this were a cop show: if you died from your injuries, did your eyes have time to swell like that before your blood stopped pumping? It likely depended on how long it took you to die, right?
I turned away and kept walking.
A copse of trees held bodies of all ethnicities dangling like Christmas ornaments and some racially insensitive turntable in my head played Billie Holliday, singing about magnolias and burning flesh. In the dream, I wiped my eyes and moved on.
Eventually I came to my destination with the vague sense of having arrived, though I didn’t at first understand it. Here was another body. Again: not Alex, not Jamie. Not anyone I’d ever met. But as I studied him further, I realized I knew him all the same.
Enrico Hazeltine. Skinny like a dying man, skin two sizes too big, cheeks hollow. Dark hair cut close to his head (he’d been self-conscious about his hair in life, always finding someone to cut it when it got long enough to be messed up by running his hands through it, a habit he’d never successfully broken; only in my fantasies had his hair ever been unruly). He had the sweetest smile on his face, more open and enchanting than in any picture I’d ever seen, as if greeting a lover of whom he was especially fond.
No visible trauma. The disease had killed him from the inside out, caving him in little by little. He’d documented it in a series of photographs, leaving instructions for the ones he’d asked his friends to take after he died. Curating his death as he’d curated his life.
I stood over him in my dream, wishing I had a camera to fulfill the dead man’s wishes. Suddenly I did have a camera. The instant Polaroid kind I’d never used in real life, old fashioned, boxy. I took a picture of Enrico Hazeltine and studied the film as it cleared, my fingers gripping the plastic frame.
Only it wasn’t Hazeltine in the picture. It was me.
* * *
I should have stayed home, a hermit alone with his thoughts and his creepy-ass dreams. Except I was trying to repress my dreams, and my thoughts were all jumbled snatches of skin and sensation, mostly wishful thinking with just enough actual memory thrown in to make it impossible for me to distract myself.
If only I was at the Saints house with them right now. Or with Jamie. We could have come down in the morning, had coffee, talked about our plans for the day, how we’d get the stairs done without Alex, how he’d be impressed when he arrived later.
After a nightmare of dead bodies it would have been nice to wake up with someone, at least in the same house.
I didn’t even know why I’d called it a bad idea. Jesus, what the hell was wrong with me? As if I was afraid of having sex with her, when I wasn’t in the least. It was a hell of a lot more accurate to say I was somewhat fixated on all the things we hadn’t done. I’d never gone down on Jamie, but I’d tasted her on Alex, and now I was preoccupied by the idea. I had no fucking idea what to do with a woman, how to play her with lips and tongue and teeth. (Were you allowed to use your teeth? And if so, how?)
When Miguel texted, Getting together with the kids, I’ll pick you up at ten, I didn’t even make him work for it. I sent back a bland Fine and took the kind of shower a man takes when he thinks things might be moving in a direction I had no reason to expect things to move in on this particular night.
I could have been with them right now. Not exactly true.
I could have been with her. Undeniable.
My stupid, masochistic brain refused to shut the hell up, and I couldn’t even hide my lack of ease. I did two shots of tequila the second we got to the bar. I fucking hate tequila. It seemed like a fitting punishment.
I carried a third to the table where, sweet Jesus, there were already four goddamn people. When I balked, Miguel shoved me from behind.<
br />
Making friends is not one of my strong suits. These people were not exactly friends. We had, after all, met at a damn “BDSM and Dating” workshop, which was exactly as mind-numbing and useless as it sounded. Somehow the rest of them all felt positively bloated with togetherness. For me it was more like I’d recovered from a bout of temporary insanity, and they were the witnesses.
I’d gone because Jamie and Alex thought it’d be good for me. In what sense, they didn’t clarify. More accurate to say I’d gone to get them to shut the fuck up about things they thought would be good for me. Except in a sense, the workshop was the reason I’d made an offhand comment about how I was supposed to be more open to intimacy, which led to…this.
Damn everything.
Resentment flared as I took a seat beside Paul (dominant cis dude in wheelchair) with Avery (submissive trans guy) on the other side of Miguel. I tried to get away with waving at the rest of them, but Ally (sweet and naive straight girl) came over to hug me tightly. At least the last member of our happy band, Madison (dominant, well-adjusted lesbian), settled for a chin-raise.
I consulted my internal political correctness monitor, who couldn’t decide if I should be more ashamed of noting Paul’s wheelchair, Avery’s transliness, Ally’s heterosexuality, or Madison’s relative well-adjustment. I settled for not being ashamed of any of it.
“We were just talking about the wedding!” Ally said.
Avery raised his hand. “And I’m totally happy you guys are doing what you want to do, I’m only saying that if it was me, I’d pick up a bunch of tacos from Taco Bell, a fuck ton of Doritos, and a lot of beer. Done.”
My stomach turned. “I hate Doritos. But I’m with you on the not having a big to-do.”
“Not that we’re judging,” he added.
I didn’t particularly like being included non-consensually in first person plural statements, but I decided this one time I’d let it slide. It did happen to be true. I could imagine Paul and Ally having a huge wedding full of loving family members and kind, inoffensive friends who all sincerely wished them well. Definitely not my kind of thing, but I didn’t begrudge them their fairy tale.