by Todd Gregory
BRANDON Joey is coming out of Phil’s room as I walk up the hall and he smiles at me and says hey and salutes me and he isn’t wearing a shirt and I can see his dick is still kind of hard inside his board shorts and there’s a wet spot that’s probably cum leaking out of him and I don’t understand why Phil demeans himself the way he does sucking off these straight boys who would kick the shit out of him before they’d ever admit they love having him suck them off.
I know he’s right, we would have never made it as a couple, one of us would have cheated on the other and then we would have started cheating to punish each other and it would have gotten ugly and we would have ended up hating each other in the end, but sometimes…sometimes I think it might not have gone that way, it didn’t have to, and I realize I’m kind of jealous of Joey.
It surprises me so much I stop with my hand poised to knock on the door and think about it for a minute.
Should I say something to him about it?
No, he would laugh at me and never let me hear the end of it.
He’s such a bitch.
But that’s also why we get along so well.
I knock, and the door opens almost immediately and Phil smiles at me.
I reach up and wipe at the side of his mouth. “You missed some of Joey there.”
“You’re such a bitch.” He steps aside and I walk past him through the office into his room. He shuts the door behind us and flops down on the bed. “If you want a joint, go ahead and roll one. Although I don’t know why you never bring me weed anymore.”
I shrug. “You come to my room, I’ll get you high.”
“As rarely as you change your sheets?” He laughs as I start rolling a joint. “Your bed is a petri dish of STDs.”
“And you say I’m a bitch?” I light the joint and take a big hit. I hold it in as long as I can before blowing it out, feeling a nice mellow taking over my head. “You need to stop sucking straight dick. It’s making you bitter.”
He takes the joint from me and takes a hit. “I don’t have time, he’s convenient and undemanding.” He hands it back. “I spoke to Rubin today—he thanked me for how welcome we’ve made Ricky feel since he got here.” He smirks. “I thought it best not to tell him how whipped his nephew is.”
I take another hit and grind the joint out. “He’s kind of a good kid, you know?”
Phil opens his eyes wide in mock shock. “Is that a conscience you’re growing there? Who are you and what have you done with Brandon?” He starts laughing.
“I didn’t say I felt bad for him, I said he’s kind of a good kid,” I reply. I hate when he laughs at me, but saying something about it will just make him laugh harder. He really is a hateful bitch when he wants to be, and there’s nothing he loves more than sensing weakness in someone else. “I don’t know what the end game with Ricky is.”
He shrugs. “No end game. I just thought it would be fun, you know…innocence perverted and all that. It makes dealing with Rubin and his bullshit so much easier for me, knowing that his precious nephew the ex-priest has turned into such a thirsty cock-slut.”
I know I should be agreeing with him, laughing with him, but it doesn’t seem funny to me anymore.
What’s wrong with me?
“How is Operation Dylan coming along?” He raises an eyebrow. “Any progress?”
“It’s just a matter of time,” I say. I’m confident. I know Dylan has feelings for me, and they bother him. And now that his bitch friend Joni is completely out of the picture—well, there’s no one telling him I’m bad news. He mentioned this afternoon at the beach he was thinking about writing another piece for Out, this time directly addressing people who criticized the monogamy piece and talking about how maybe monogamy isn’t for everyone and really, whatever works best for the couple is what’s right for them, and it was all I could do not to pump my fists in triumph, because whether he admits it or not, I am changing his mind about everything he believed, his values, because he was all about monogamy when we met on Fire Island and now he’s not so sure.
But…for some reason, the victory feels kind of…hollow.
“You’re not going to fuck that boy.” He laughs again. “You may think you are, but you aren’t going to. He’s in love with his soldier boy, and it would make him the biggest hypocrite on the planet.”
I clench my teeth. “I am going to fuck him, and once I do, I am claiming my prize.”
He makes a face. “Your prize?”
“You bet me I wouldn’t be able to, remember?”
He rolls his eyes. “Oh yes, of course, and when you do you get to spend the night with me.” He laughs again. “Well, I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.”
“You need to be fucked hard by someone who knows what they’re doing.”
He starts laughing again. “And that would be you?”
I get up. “You wait and see.”
His laughter follows me out the door. I’m furious.
Oh yes, you little bitch. I’m going to fuck Dylan and then I am going to put you through your headboard.
No one laughs at me.
RICKY There’s no one in the hallway when I reach up and knock on Brandon’s door.
It’s almost midnight and Kenny has gone to bed. We went out to dinner at a Mexican place down near the beach and then to a superhero movie, Kenny really loves those, he has boxes of comic books in his room’s closet, wrapped in Mylar with cardboard backing, and he also downloads tons of them on his iPad, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone so into comic books before, but his enthusiasm is catching and I’m learning about them, the history of the superheroes and the artists and writers and the companies that make them. I think the movie was entertaining enough, but there wasn’t much of a plot—well, what little there was didn’t make sense, and most of it was just an excuse for fight scenes and explosions—but the main actor was gorgeous and he was shirtless or in a skintight outfit most of the time, and I have to admit he was very sexy.
Brandon opens the door and smiles at me. “I was wondering if you were coming by tonight or not.”
“We went to a movie and we had to talk about it a bit before I could get away,” I say as I step inside and he closes the door behind me. I reach down and grab him. He’s already hard in his underwear and I want him inside me, I want him to fuck me deep and hard, and I press my lips against his and his tongue darts inside my mouth and I massage his dick with my right hand while I grab his ass with my left, the index finger probing inside the crack of his ass through the underwear the way he showed me and he grins at me and pushes me back toward the bed and I take off my shirt and throw it aside and slip down my shorts and I am naked under them, when I know I am coming down to Brandon’s room I don’t wear underwear and I know he still has that pair I left behind the first time I was with him in one of his drawers and that gives me a kind of secret thrill and there’s only a small part of me that still thinks this is wrong and unfair to Kenny but my desire is so much stronger than that voice there’s no need for me to even listen to it anymore, I don’t care and Kenny has never brought up anything about being serious and exclusive and we still only kiss and I think it’s kind of sweet. I asked him about doing more than kissing once and he told me he was a virgin and he wanted to take it slow because it meant something to him, and I wanted to tell him he was wrong, that it can be fun and amazing and you don’t have to love someone to have sex with them, that was just puritanical church talk, but Dylan believes that too he even writes about it, but he seems to be changing his mind, too, and I moan as Brandon takes me in his mouth and I don’t think about anything anymore…
DYLAN “What?” Marc is asking me from half the world away, a shocked look on his face, and my heart plummets and I wonder if I’ve lost him forever.
“Do you love him?” He looks bewildered, and sad, and my heart is breaking and I wonder how I could be doing this to him.
But what kind of relationship would we have if it wasn’t based in honesty?
>
Not telling him would be lying, too.
“I don’t love him,” I reply. “I know that, but I do feel something for him, Marc. I don’t know what it is…it’s not like what I feel for you but there’s something there. Maybe it’s just attraction, I don’t know. Oh, maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m so sorry.”
“Give me a second, okay?” He gets up and walks away from the computer. All I can see is the tent wall behind him, and I again wonder what kind of a monster tells his fiancé in the military putting his life on the line for his country in a war zone on the other side of the planet that he might have feelings for another man.
And Joni said Brandon was an awful person. I am the awful person.
She was right about me.
I don’t deserve friends I don’t deserve Marc I don’t deserve anything good in life.
I want to get drunk.
I want to get stoned.
I want to do something anything that will help me forget what a horrible piece of shit I am.
Marc sits back down in front of the laptop camera and gives me a weak smile. He doesn’t look happy. I want to say something but I can’t. I feel like he should tell me how he feels before I do anything, before I apologize, before I beg him to forget I said anything and I’ll do anything to make it up to him and will spend the rest of my life—
“I can’t say I’m happy about this,” he says.
Oh shit.
“But I have a lot of time over here to think,” he says, so slowly, like it’s hurting him to talk and I feel like even more of an asshole, “and you know, it may surprise you, but I’ve actually thought about this before a few times, and you know what, I don’t care.”
WHAT?
He laughs. “You should see your face.”
“I don’t—I don’t understand. You’re not mad?”
He exhales loudly, and there’s feedback for a moment and I wince. “No, I’m not mad, Dylan. I do love you and I want to marry you and have the house with the two kids and the dog and the picket fence and to live happily ever after, but I’m halfway around the world and I’m going to be gone for a long time, and you get lonely just like I get lonely, and I’m not going to throw everything we have together away just because you get lonely and meet some guy you like.” He takes a deep breath and goes on. “And I love you and I want you to be happy. I don’t want you to be miserable or sad or lonely. And if you meet someone—at any point in our lives, even after we’re married—that you love more than you love me or you think will make you happier than I can make you, then I want you to be with that person. I don’t want you to be with me because you feel obligated or something, you know?” He wipes at his eyes. “All I want is for you to be honest with me and know that you can always be honest with me because that’s what love is all about, you know?”
I stare at his face, not able to say anything because I can’t believe what I’ve heard, and I love him so much more in that moment it feels like my heart might explode in my chest.
“I love you so much,” I hear myself saying.
“And I love you.” He smiles at the camera. “Look, babe, I have to go. But it’s okay, you know that?”
I nod.
“I love you.”
“I love you.”
The screen of my laptop goes black, and I close it. I lean back in my chair, unable to believe how lucky I am to have someone so kind and loving and understanding to love me the way he does, to put my own happiness before his own the way he just did, and—
Wait a minute, he said that he gets lonely, too.
No, don’t be silly. That didn’t mean anything, that’s the kind of thing Joni would say to you, make you doubt him, to cause trouble and—
Maybe the reason he’s being so understanding is because maybe there’s someone in his unit…
Stop that right now.
He would tell me, wouldn’t he? He said that as long as we were honest with each other—
I’m projecting, that’s all this is.
I should be working on my new op-ed, but I can’t focus. I get up and look at the clock. Eight thirty. I pick up my iPhone and there’s no texts, no messages. I told Brandon I had to talk to Marc and then I was going to work on my op-ed, so I wasn’t free to do anything tonight.
It would be shitty of me to see if he didn’t have plans, wouldn’t it?
But I want to talk to him, and it’s not like I expect him to break any plans he might have made.
I start typing out a text to him but delete it instead of hitting send.
I’ve got to—I know, I’ll just go get a soda from the machine in the lobby. I scrounge up some quarters and head down the hallway and down the stairs. The house is deserted and weirdly quiet, no one’s in the lobby and no one’s in the big room and the television is off and there’s no music coming from anywhere and it’s weird, I’m not sure, and for a minute I think oh this is like one of those zombie movies where the hero suddenly realizes there’s no one else alive or a scary movie where the maniac with a knife is waiting just around the corner and I laugh and put the quarters in and hit the button for Diet Coke and the machine makes its clunky noise and the can pops out at the bottom in the slot. I pick it up and head back for the stairs, and just as I go around the corner, the door to the office opens and I almost jump out of my skin.
“Whoa! Didn’t mean to scare you!” Phil says, and he’s not wearing a shirt and his shorts are hanging down low and I can see his plaid boxers in the dim light coming from behind him in the office. I can vaguely smell pot and I hesitate for just a minute, but if I’m out of line I don’t care.
“Do you have any—” I stop and shake my head.
“Any what?” He smiles back at me and tilts his head to one side, and I’ve never noticed before how nice looking he is. He’s not blow-your-mind hot like Brandon is, and he’s in good shape but not overly muscled—he’s more toned than anything else—and the way the light is coming from behind him, it makes his blond hair glow like a halo.
Why not?
“I was wondering if I could talk to you, if you had a minute?”
“Sure.” He smiles, and he has perfect teeth because of course he does, everything about him is perfect and I feel insecure, awkward, ugly, and stupid and it’s overwhelming and he gestures for me to go inside and says, “I just need to run get a soda,” and I feel a bit of relief because he drinks soda, too, so he won’t judge me. I walk into his room, the presidential suite, and it’s nice.
The president’s room at our chapter at UCLA wasn’t nearly as nice as this one, which is about twice as big and has a private bathroom. The door is open and I can see it’s got a huge shower with one of those waterfall spigots in the roof and it’s glass, and he’s got posters up of beautiful places like the pyramids at sunset and the Parthenon at night, and there’s also some movie posters, Thor and Guardians of the Galaxy. I sit down in a chair near the bed and I can see there’s some roaches in the ceramic ashtray on his nightstand, and it does smell a lot like pot in here and I wonder if he’ll offer me some because I really need to relax, and maybe I’ll just be forward and ask and the worst thing he can do is say no and think I’m an asshole, and I don’t care, I really don’t care I know he and Brandon are close but I want to ask him his opinion.
He comes back in, shuts the door behind him, sits down on the bed, and opens his Coke—regular, not diet or caffeine free—and he smiles at me and says, “I allow myself one of these a day, they’re really terrible for you and I shouldn’t even have the one, but it’s kind of a treat for me even if it’s murder on my waistline,” and I just kind of laugh in response and say he has nothing to worry about on that score, he could probably have a six-pack a day, and as soon as I say it I’m mortified and I can’t believe I said it and could bite my tongue off and just want to run and hide in my room.
“You’re very sweet,” he says, taking a drink and then burping and laughing again, “sorry, but the burp is sometimes the best part,” and I s
tart laughing with him but he’s relaxed and I’m laughing nervously and being stupid and idiotic and I wonder if the floor would just do me a favor and open up a big hole to swallow me whole.
“I’ve not really done a very good job of welcoming you,” he is saying now, “but you got here right before the Baby Bash, and I’ve been trying to get the budget for the new semester until control and I have a paper to write for a class I’m taking this summer, but that’s really not an excuse.”
And I smile and tell him it’s no big deal, I’ve been settling in just fine, which is true, and I look over at the ashtray.
He reaches over and retrieves the biggest roach, it’s half a joint, and he says, “Do you?”
I nod and he lights it and hands it to me and I take a nice hit and hold the smoke in. It’s very good stuff, I should have known he’d have the best, and I don’t know what to say and I blow out the smoke and say, “I need some advice, do you mind? I just need someone, you know, to talk to.”
“Of course, that’s what I’m here for, I’m always available. What’s going on? Is there something I can do to help you?”
And I take another hit and everything is pouring out of me, how I feel about Brandon and how bad I feel about betraying Marc and then talking to Marc on the phone and how Marc reacted and I’m not sure how to feel about that and I don’t know what I should do, and he raises an eyebrow and listens, and he really is listening, he’s looking deep in my eyes and listening and it’s so nice to actually have someone really listen and now I understand why he got elected president because if he listens to everyone like this, really pays attention to people, that’s a rare quality and it makes me feel special, makes me feel like he cares and I keep talking, blabbing on and on and take another hit from the joint and then he stubs it out and I am stoned, really stoned, and it feels good and I sit back and wait for him to say something.