by Marie Sexton
“Do you want me to come with you this weekend?” he asked. “I will, if you like. I’ll hold your hand, literally or figuratively. I’ll stand by you while you do it.” He chuckled. “Of course, I’d probably only scare them more. But if there’s anything at all I can do to make this easier for you, I will.”
I imagined my brother’s reaction to Cole and almost laughed out loud. No. Having him there wouldn’t help. But his reassurance meant the world to me. I was still scared. Still tempted to imagine the worst. But he was right about one thing—my parents were good people, and so was my brother.
Everything was going to be just fine.
COMING OUT to my brother proved to be rather anticlimactic. I took him out to one of the bars in Coda. I had a couple of drinks to work up my nerve and finally blurted it out.
“Brian, I’m gay.”
He laughed, shaking his head. “No kidding, kid. Did you finally figure it out?”
I opened and closed my mouth a couple of times but came up blank. Finally, I managed, “You knew?”
He shrugged and took a drink of his beer. “I suspected.” He turned the beer bottle in slow circles on the bar, his cheeks turning red. “Remember Tom?”
Now my cheeks began to match his. How could I forget Tom, his high school best friend, and my first crush? “Yeah.”
“You know you talk in your sleep.” He looked as embarrassed talking about it as I was hearing about it. “Let’s just say you said his name a few too many times to be coincidental.”
I laughed, more from relief than merriment. “So, you don’t care?”
“Care? No. Not the way you probably mean.” He grinned at me. “Don’t get me wrong. I think you’re nuts. I don’t know how you can look at a naked woman and not get tingly in your fun parts. But….” He shrugged again and lofted his half-empty beer bottle toward me in a toast. “To each his own.”
I drank way too much after that. Eventually, Brian drove me home and dumped me into bed.
I woke the next morning to the familiar sound of my brother and my parents in the kitchen together, having breakfast. Brian had his own place now that he was done with college, but it sounded like he’d spent the night too. The house smelled like bacon, and my stomach churned a bit. I followed the noise and found them all around the table.
“Hey, sunshine,” my mother said. “Happy birthday.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
“You’ve been twenty-one for less than twenty-four hours, so I assume this is your first hangover?”
She said it with a wink, and I laughed. My mom was realistic about the activities of college students. “Absolutely,” I said, playing along. “First and last hangover ever, I’m sure.”
“What about you?” my mom said to Brian. “You hungover too?”
“I’m fine. And by the way, since I know we’ve all been wondering: Jared’s gay.”
My mom’s mouth fell open. My dad froze with a piece of bacon half in and half out of his mouth. I wondered if I could reach the garbage can before I vomited.
My mom finally found her tongue. “I think you were supposed to let him say it himself, once he was ready.”
Brian rolled his eyes and pushed back from the table. “Yeah. But that was gonna take forever, and I have to work. I thought I’d save everybody the trouble.” He put his empty plate in the sink and turned to clap me on the back. “You’re welcome, kid.”
He left, and I sank slowly into his chair, unable to look at either of my parents.
“Look, Jared,” my dad said, pointing his bacon at me. “Experimentation at this age is normal. You just need to play the field. Toss a ball on each side of the fence. Try your bread with the butter on the other side once or twice too. Know what I’m saying?”
“Stop,” my mom said quietly.
He held up his hands as if being falsely accused of a crime. “What? You wouldn’t buy a car without taking it for a test drive, would you? I’m just saying, maybe if he took a few out, experimented with both a manual and an automatic, he might change his mind.”
My mother rolled her eyes. “I’m not even going to ask which type of transmission applies to women.” She set her coffee down and reached out to take my hand. “Jared, honey. It doesn’t matter. We love you no matter what.” And then she hugged me long and hard, as if to make sure it was clear.
Cole was right, as he so often was. My parents were great people, and I’d never loved them as much as I did right then.
MID-JANUARY, I came home from class to find Cole and Tony squared off in the living room. In the years I’d known Cole, I’d seen him ecstatic and heartbroken, amused and disgusted, but I’d never seen him as angry as he was at that moment. His face was so red, I wouldn’t have been surprised if the fire alarm went off.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
“Shall you tell him, darling, or should I?” Cole asked Tony.
Tony opened his mouth but seemed to think better of whatever it was he was about to say. He turned on his heel and pushed past me to get out the front door, slamming it shut behind him. Cole went from rigid to limp, falling with a dramatic sigh onto the couch.
“Good lord, how do I get myself into messes like this?”
“Blatant promiscuity?”
He laughed. “You should try it sometime, honey. It’s more fun than you make it out to be.” His amusement faded quickly. “He’s stealing from me.”
I tossed my backpack into the corner and took a seat on the opposite end of the couch. “You already pay for everything.”
“I know. I suspected all along he was more interested in my money than in me. Now I know for sure.”
“Then why bring him home with you? Why put up with him at all?”
“Because I’m stupid and weak.”
He wasn’t stupid or weak. Loneliness had gotten the best of him. “Are you sure he’s stealing?”
“Positive.”
“So what will you do?”
“Send him back to Brighton, I guess. I can put up with a lot of things, but not this.” He shrugged with a forced casualness and adopted what I’d come to think of as his “brave face”—a well-executed facade to cover how close he was to tears. “It doesn’t matter. I’ll be happy to see him gone.”
“I can tell you’re upset. Your eyes give you away every time.”
He put his hand to his temple, blocking my view of them. “That’s what Bryan used to say too. I really need to do something about that.”
I laughed. “Like what? Never look at anybody again?”
“Maybe just never let anybody else know me that well.”
The thought made me sad. “You don’t want that. Not really.”
He sighed and dropped his hand. “Maybe you’re all I need.” He scooted closer on the couch and took my hand. “We’ve hardly talked since before your birthday, Jared. I’ll be happy to have Tony gone for that reason, if nothing else. I miss the time we used to have together.”
The confession surprised me. “Me too.”
“I know you won’t miss Tony. You never liked him, did you?”
“I was willing to put up with him if he made you happy, but I don’t think he did.”
He ducked his head. “Well, he made me forget Bryan for a while. That seemed like enough at the time.”
“You still miss Bryan?”
“Every single day.” He squeezed my fingers and forced a lackluster smile. “So tell me about this boy you spent the summer in bed with? Greg, I think his name was. Have you kept in touch?”
“Not a bit.”
“Why not?”
It wasn’t something I’d intended to talk about, but Cole had a way of asking pointed questions. I thought it was more about keeping the focus off his own life than actual curiosity about mine, but the result was the same. Before I knew it, I was skirting the edge of the real issue. I wasn’t quite able to blurt out “He wanted anal sex and that scares the hell out of me,” but Cole had always been annoyingly perceptive.
&nbs
p; “So you’ve never…?” he asked, letting the question trail away. Cole was blunt and direct, but rarely crass.
I shook my head, feeling my cheeks burn. “Have you?”
He gave me a smile that was somewhere between flirtatious and embarrassed. “Honey, I’d rather catch than pitch any day.” He laughed. “As long as we’re solidly in the world of innuendo, that is. If there’s an actual baseball involved, you can count me out altogether.”
If my cheeks got any hotter, I’d start losing brain cells. But who the hell else could I have a conversation like this with?
Nobody on the entire planet, that was who.
I took a deep breath and made myself ask the question that had been plaguing me since summer. “So, it can actually feel good?”
He grinned, his eyes taking on a mischievous glint. He leaned closer. “Listen. We’re friends, right? No matter what?”
I nodded, unsure how it related to my question. “Sure. Of course.”
“If we were meant to be more, we’d know by now, right?”
This I could answer without hesitation. “Absolutely.” I had a great time with him, but I’d never considered trying to make it romantic.
“Okay. Stay here. I’ll be right back.” He disappeared into his room and came out with a tube of lubricant in his hands. “Take off your pants.”
“Uh….” That was the best response I had. Going from “we’re friends” to “take off your pants” was alarming enough. The lube he held spoke volumes. My heart began pounding, the fight-or-flight instinct telling me to get the hell out of there—with my pants on.
Cole put a hand on his hip and rolled his eyes with over-the-top exasperation and enough melodrama to almost make me laugh. I had a feeling that was exactly what he was going for. “Look, honey. You tutored me in both math and physics our freshman year, right?”
“Yeah, but—”
“That’s all this is. A tutoring session. Now. Drop your drawers.”
I gulped, torn between curiosity and outright terror. “What if Tony comes home?”
Cole laughed and knelt between my knees. “That would almost be a blessing in disguise at this point.” He unzipped my jeans and began tugging at my waistband. My pants weren’t moving, though. I had my ass glued to the couch. Cole sighed and looked up at me through his lashes. “Trust me, Jared. You’re going to wish you’d asked me to do this a lot sooner.”
I wasn’t sure if that was true or not. One thing I was sure of though—I wasn’t going to get a chance like this with anybody else in the near future. I lifted my hips and let him slide my jeans off. I felt ridiculous sitting there on his perfect couch, naked from the waist down, with my best friend kneeling between my legs.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now, I’m going to get you to relax.” He bent over my groin and kissed my stomach. His soft fingers found my cock, which up to this point had been rather uninterested in the proceedings. Suddenly, it began to take notice.
“Uh… Cole?”
He ran the tip of his tongue up my length, making me shiver. All the blood that had been on its way to my brain and other critical organs did a quick about-face. Just the warmth of his breath on my private parts was enough to send rational thought out the window.
Was this really happening? A minute ago we’d said we were only friends. Now here he was, about to give me a blow job?
“Jesus, Cole? Are you sure you want to do this?” What I meant was “Are we sure we want our friendship to go in this direction?”
“Trust me, Jared,” he said, stroking me the rest of the way to full-mast. “Just a tutoring session, remember?”
“I’ve never had a tutoring session like this.”
He laughed. “I guess you’ve never had the right teacher.”
With that, he sucked me in deep, and I gave up fighting. I hadn’t been with anybody in months. Friends. Tutoring. Tony. None of those words held any meaning for me at that moment. All I knew was it felt amazing. It was immediately clear that Cole had done this far more than any of my previous partners. He made them all look like bumbling amateurs.
Which, I supposed, they probably had been.
He stopped once, looking up at me as he messed with the tube of lubricant. “Don’t come yet. We haven’t even gotten to the good part.”
“This isn’t the good part?”
“Not even close.” He leaned closer again. “Try to stay relaxed, okay? Concentrate on being open.”
“Open?”
“You’ll see what I mean.”
He put his mouth back to work, and my brain once again ceased functioning at full capacity. The coldness of the lubricant made me jump as his soft fingers found my back door. My gut instinct was to tense up. I tried to concentrate on the blow job as he continued massaging my rim. A few more minutes and relaxation became a lot easier to achieve. It wasn’t long before the rhythm of it—the back-and-forth between my cock and what his fingers were doing—began to feel good.
Really good.
I was glad I’d jacked off in the shower that morning, otherwise I might have come before we got to “the good part.” It was a new, unexpected kind of pleasure, and I sank into it, focusing only on his fingers, and the wonderful pressure there. The more I thought about it, the more I wanted only that. I found myself holding my breath, bearing down—
And suddenly, it was clear.
Open.
Just a soft relaxation of muscles I wasn’t used to relaxing. Cole made a quiet sound around my cock—a sort of “umm-hmm” that told me this was what he meant.
A second later, the tip of his finger slipped inside.
It was too many things at once. Foreign. Wrong. Intrusive. Gross. Embarrassing.
But also…
Seriously awesome. Especially paired with the warmth of his mouth around my length. Especially when he began to slide his finger in and out, in and out. He didn’t push deep. Just teased me with that tiny bit of penetration.
I moaned, letting it take over. My legs spread wider of their own accord, my ass pushing toward his hand.
He went in farther. The sensation was indescribable. I kept thinking he couldn’t go deeper, but he did. It felt like he was taking up way too much space in my body, but it was only one of his delicate fingers. Finally, he stopped. He stayed there, focusing again on sucking me, giving me a chance to breathe. To adapt. To accept.
Yes, this was strange, but there was no denying it felt good too. A slow tension built between his finger and his mouth, a pressure inside me begging for more. I whimpered, and he began sliding his finger slowly out then back in, out then back in. One spot in particular made me gasp each time. I gripped the couch cushion, wondering how much longer I could hold out. He added a second finger, going slow again as he’d done the first time. The stretch of it was almost painful, and I began to panic.
He let my cock fall from his mouth. “Breathe,” he said quietly. “It feels too big, but it’s only because you’re not used to it. Just breathe like you were before.”
I let my head fall back against the couch and did as instructed. He was right. This felt like more than my body could take, and yet nearly any man’s penis would be wider than his two fingers held together. It was only because it was new. Because it triggered some innate instinct to contract.
His warm mouth once again wrapped around my cock. The pressure of his fingers continued, slow and gentle. And I concentrated on being open.
Open. And willing. And desperate.
God yes. How had I ever doubted that this could feel good? The pressure was intense but amazing. And that one spot…. Each time his fingers crossed over it, I moaned, feeling the urge to ejaculate. I imagined what it would be like to be fucked. Not by Cole, but by some man I had yet to meet. Some man who was dark and masculine, tough as nails, but still gentle. Somebody with broad shoulders and strong, rough hands.
And just as I thought I was about to lose control, Cole’s fingers found that extra-sensitive spot, focusing
on it, pushing and caressing—
“Oh Jesus!”
I grabbed his head without meaning to, trying to push deeper as everything in my body tensed and spasmed. I figured there was no such thing as a bad orgasm, but this gave “good” a whole new meaning. It was a strange kind of madness that went way beyond anything I’d ever felt. It left me trembling, my fingers knotted in his hair.
I barely even had the energy to look up when the front door opened and Tony walked in.
“Oh my God,” he cried, his hands going to his head. “What the fuck, Cole? Has this been going on the whole time?”
“Of course not.” Cole unabashedly wiped his hand on my T-shirt. “Just a little tutoring session between friends.” He smiled up at me. “I think you’re going to pass that test with flying colors, sweets.”
TONY LEFT without ceremony the next day. Cole didn’t shed a single tear over him, which made me feel better about how glad I was to have him gone.
Cole and I quickly found a new stride together. We made friends with our straight but open-minded apartment neighbors, Terry and Michael, two practical jokers who were always trying to one-up each other. It wasn’t necessarily a close friendship, but we spent plenty of evenings with them, watching TV and drinking beer (except Cole, who always drank wine, sometimes of the Boone’s Farm variety). Cole also started letting his bangs grow out, and sometimes, I could have sworn he was practicing letting them fall in front of his eyes at just the right moments.
Cole renewed our lease at the end of the school year, before once again disappearing. With him, Terry, and Michael all gone for the summer, I found myself once again spending time with Bryan. I wanted to hate him for hurting Cole, but I couldn’t. The truth was, we got along well in every other way. I found myself remembering how good of a friend he could be. I’d barely seen him at all the previous year, and I was surprised to learn he’d broken up with Josh after only a couple of months of living together.
“He was a good guy,” he told me one evening after we’d had way too much to drink. “I kept telling myself I should be happy with him, but….” He held up his hands, as if he couldn’t explain what had happened. I thought I knew, though. Despite everything, he still loved Cole.