by Xavier Mayne
Fox looked hard at Drew, his face showing how hard he was working to understand what Drew was saying—and what he was not saying because he didn’t have the words for it. Finally, he sighed, and his features softened. “Okay. The way I see it the only possible downside is breakfast in bed, and I heard you order the extra bacon, so that’s not going to be terrible no matter how naked we are.” He shrugged. “I’m in.”
“Awesome,” Drew replied, beaming. He had no way to answer the questions that so clearly still dogged Fox, but he was heartened mightily to feel that they were in this together.
Luckily, he was saved from having to think any further along this line by a knock on the cottage’s door.
“Room service,” a voice called.
“Come in,” Drew called back.
Fox’s eyes widened in shock. “Are you serious? They’re going to see us.”
“Well, yes, they will,” Drew replied. “But if we keep the covers on they’re not going to see much. Unless you want to wag your morning wood at them too.”
“Shut up,” Fox retorted. “I didn’t wag it at you.”
“That’s a relief. I didn’t catch sight of anything, so I figured it was too small to see from this side of the bed.” He had, indeed, caught sight of something. It was in no way small. He did not share this fact.
The waiter appeared at the door to the bedroom, the same one who had served them dinner the night before. “Okay if I come in?” he asked decorously.
“Yes, please,” Drew said. “We’re going to have breakfast in bed.”
“That’s a perfect way to spend a Sunday morning,” the waiter said. He brought a tray over to Drew’s side of the bed.
“So the chateaubriand worked,” he murmured. He glanced over at Fox, who was now sitting up, the covers gathered at his waist. “Good for you.” He winked at Drew.
Drew laughed, which occasioned a scolding look from Fox.
“And for you, sir,” the waiter said as he placed a second tray across Fox’s legs. “Will there be anything else, gentlemen?”
“No, thanks,” Drew said. “This is perfect.”
“Call and we’ll come pick up the trays,” the waiter said. “You won’t even have to get out of bed.” With another roguish wink at Drew, he turned and wheeled his cart back out through the sitting room.
“Yum,” Drew said, eyeing the trays piled high with gorgeous food.
“Just so we’re clear, we’re going to have to do something today to work some of this off,” Fox said. “Oh, and that waiter totally thinks we’re boning.”
“Are you suggesting we find a way to make both of those things come true?” Drew teased.
Fox blushed furiously. “I… no, I…,” he stammered. “Shut up, dickhead.”
“I’ll have to, because my mouth is going to be full of waffle for the foreseeable future.” Drew took a huge bite of waffle and smiled around it.
“You’re impossible,” Fox muttered. But there was a grin on his face as he cut into the pile of pancakes on his tray.
They plowed through the overabundant breakfast Drew had ordered, then sat back and drank not one but two large carafes of coffee. Through the windows they watched seabirds wheel and float over the edge of the bluff.
Soon Drew turned his attention to Fox, searching his face for signs of what he was feeling. What he found was that Fox must be really good at poker, because his expression revealed exactly nothing. So Drew did what he’d only recently learned to do: when it came to Fox, he simply had to trust his instinct. It hadn’t let him down yet.
“Tell me about your first time,” he said, as if this were a normal point of conversation between friends.
“My first time what?” Fox looked puzzled, as if perhaps Drew were asking about the first time he had changed the oil in his car.
“Your first time first time,” Drew said.
“Why do you want to know about that?”
Drew shrugged. “What else is there to talk about?” He knew exactly why he’d asked, and he knew Fox knew exactly why he had asked. Where they were, right now, was about as “first-time” as any experience they were likely to have in their lives.
Fox shook his head at Drew but made no further objection. He took a deep breath and looked up at the birds again for a moment. “It was… awful.”
“I think it usually is,” Drew said.
“No, my first time was more than usually awful. First, it was after the prom, which is pretty much as cliché as it gets.”
“Yeah, no one wants their first time to be cliché.”
“You asked this stupid question,” Fox retorted, “so are you going to listen to the answer or keep interrupting?”
“Sorry. Please, tell me how awful it was.”
“Thank you,” he replied, straightening the covers that pooled above his hip bones. “The second reason it was awful was that the whole thing was set up by my dad.”
Drew, startled by this twist in the story, sat back a little but said nothing.
“It was apparently really important to him,” Fox said, his voice softening, as if he were trying to decide how he felt about what he was saying as he said it. “He arranged the hotel room, let me drive his new car—he even stuck condoms in the pocket of the tuxedo he bought for me. It was like he was giving me this one last chance before I graduated to finally become a man or whatever.”
“So this was, like, a setup? Like an arranged marriage or something?”
“Oh hell no,” Fox answered with a grim chuckle. “This was in no way a girl he would have wanted me to marry. She was nice enough, but the kind of girl that everyone—even my dad, apparently—knew as a ‘sure thing.’ And it turns out he was right.”
“Okay, that’s pretty messed up.”
“Yeah. But it’s also absolutely who he is. He didn’t seem to take much of an interest in me when I was growing up, except the few times I didn’t hit some milestone he had in mind for me. The day I turned sixteen, he took me to get my driving test, and when we got home there was a car waiting for me in the driveway. Which was nice, but I didn’t really need a brand-new car so I could drive it to school and back. Plus, it was a BMW, so I had to park it way the hell out at the far end of the school lot so no one would knock a door into it. He never cared about the classes I took or the papers I wrote as long as I kept my GPA high enough to get into the university whose football games he still goes to. And apparently it would have been some kind of crime against his humanity if I’d graduated high school without having sex. So he made the arrangements, and then, as he said the next morning when I got home, I ‘became a man.’”
“Wow,” Drew said. He could not imagine what it must have been like to grow up with a dad like that. “That’s really, really messed up.”
“He’d been doing shit like that for so long I didn’t even consider it that fucked up at the time. I guess I was glad he was paying attention to me—any kind of attention. But it did kind of mess with my head when it came to dating. It’s like I didn’t trust myself to be able to find the kind of woman I wanted to date because there was this voice in the back of my head warning me that I was only choosing the kind of woman my dad would want me to date, and then I’d get all frustrated by the whole thing.”
“And that’s when you made your first spreadsheet,” Drew added.
Fox’s mouth dropped open. “How did you…?”
Drew shrugged. “I guess I know you pretty well. You’re analytical, and you want to make your own decisions in life, so it makes sense that putting relationship issues into numbers would be the way you’d solve your dad problem.”
“You’re just… amazing,” Fox said, shaking his head.
“I’m not. I’m your perfect match is all.” He batted his eyes like Daisy Duck trying to get Donald’s attention.
“Fuck off,” Fox said, laughing and giving Drew’s shoulder a shove.
“So that was your first time,” Drew said.
“Yep, and once I got fucked, I stayed fu
cked for the rest of my life. I mean, look at where I ended up.” He gestured to their romantic cottage. “This is the culmination of having spent the next decade searching for the perfect woman. I end up in bed with your sorry ass.”
“Fuck off,” Drew said, shoving Fox’s shoulder right back.
They shared a good long laugh.
“Can I ask you something?” Drew said when their laughter subsided.
“Sure?” Fox didn’t sound sure.
“You said it was awful. And I get that the context was awful, since you were pretty much having sex to make your dad happy—”
“Thanks for laying that right out there,” Fox interrupted, his expression horrified. “But yeah, you’re right.”
“But you had a hotel room, and it was prom, after all—I’m sure you were improbably handsome in a tuxedo even at that age—so was it really awful? I mean, the actual thing itself. How was that?”
“We’re really going to talk about this?”
“It seems kind of ridiculous for us to have things we can’t talk about… you know, after the breakfast in bed.”
“Fair point,” Fox conceded. “My actual first time was… brief. I’d never actually had a condom on before, so that was awkward to figure out in the moment, and then I wasn’t sure I had it on right, so I was more nervous once I had it on. On the plus side, I probably would have lasted about twelve seconds without it, so the fact that I could basically feel nothing through the condom meant I was able to perform for more than a minute. The first time.”
“There was more than one time?”
Fox laughed. “You remember being eighteen, right? I may have been on a hair trigger, but I had more than one shot in the magazine. The second time was actually immediately after the first—I don’t think she noticed the first, by the way, because I didn’t make a big deal about it. The condom, which was literally strangling me, wasn’t budging, so I kept going. That time took me like three minutes, which seemed longer than she expected. Then I really did need some time to recover, so I spent a few minutes seeing to her… needs.”
Drew smiled. “You were a perfect gentleman from the very beginning, weren’t you?”
“And you thought I was content to simply be improbably handsome. Anyway, we did it one more time for good measure. After that, we got back in the car, and I had her home by midnight.” Fox shrugged. “And that’s the story of my first time.”
“That doesn’t sound all that awful.”
Fox shook his head. “It was awful because it didn’t mean anything. It didn’t mean anything to either of us. We never spoke again, and I haven’t seen or heard anything about her since graduation the following month. We didn’t love each other—we barely even knew each other. It was something I felt I had to do, and I honestly have no idea why she was doing it.”
“Will you stop that?” Drew scolded. “I am certain that at eighteen you were already the charming, suave, improbably handsome man you are today. She probably considered herself lucky to be with you.” He swallowed hard. “I know I do.”
Fox blushed again, his brilliant smile contrasting with the red in his cheeks. “Now turnabout’s fair play. You get to tell me the story of your first time.”
“It’s much worse than yours,” Drew said grimly.
“I’ll be the judge of that.”
Drew collected his thoughts for a moment. It wasn’t a story he told anyone, for obvious reasons. “I was a sophomore in college,” he finally began. “Guess you’d call me a late bloomer.”
“I’d call you a lot smarter than me. Good for you for waiting until you were ready.”
“It didn’t really help,” Drew said, still summoning the courage to describe what had happened to him his first time. “We met in a sociology course. One of those classes where you work in small groups and then have intense conversations about race and gender while nursing a small coffee all night in a café. We got to know each other pretty well, and after the midterm I asked her back to my dorm room. I had a single because I was working as a resident assistant, so we could have some privacy. Well, we got to my room, and things got heated pretty quickly. We had sex—we had really bad sex, compared to your first time—and then we lay there and talked for hours. About all kinds of things. I thought at the time that it had gone pretty well for a first time.”
“The way you say that makes me think there’s a surprise twist coming up.”
“You’d be right,” Drew said. He took a deep breath. “It wasn’t until the middle of the next week that it happened. I got called to the Dean of Students’ office, and when I got there a campus police officer was standing next to her. They told me that the woman I’d been with had gone to the rape crisis center and said she’d been assaulted. By me.”
“What?” Fox’s voice was indignant.
“She told them that I’d persuaded her to come alone to my room and that I had coerced her into having sex with me. Now, I’m the guy who listens to all of the public service announcements about consensual sex, and to get the job as RA, I had to spend like a full week doing role plays and presentations about how no means no and all of that. So I’m the absolute last guy on earth who would commit sexual assault—even by accident. I tell them all this, and they look at me like I’m trying to cover my ass so they don’t expel me and file criminal charges.”
“That’s awful,” Fox said.
“Yeah, it was pretty bad. The campus had this program where, for nonviolent cases, they get the two people into a room with some mediators to try to open a dialogue about what happened. So we did that, and she got to tell her side of the story. Which, once she told it, was not all that different from mine, to be honest. She said we were caught up in the moment, and she felt she had agreed to have sex because she sensed I wanted to, and she’d been pressured by other guys before, and one had hit her when she said she didn’t want to have sex with him. To her, then, what happened in my room—even though she agreed to it—was a kind of sexual assault because once we got there, she was afraid to say no.”
“That makes no sense at all.”
“That’s what I thought at first, but the more I listened to her, the more I realized that, for a lot of women in our society, sex and violence—or the threat of violence—are inextricably linked. It’s not my fault, because I’ve never pressured a woman to have sex with me, and I’ve always respected the right of any woman I date to decide whether she wants to have sex or not. But in a sense that doesn’t really matter, since by being male I’m complicit in the system that oppresses women into consenting to sex even if they would have made a different choice if the genders really were equal in our culture.”
“What you’re saying is that no one can ever have sex because women can never really consent to it.”
“That’s kind of an extreme version of it, but that’s the basic idea.”
“That’s insane. You didn’t assault her—you did everything right.”
“But her consent was conflicted, and that was something I had never considered before. Anyway, once we talked it through, she realized I wasn’t some kind of monster who’d coerced her into having sex with me, and the whole matter got dropped. But it was honestly terrifying until it got resolved because it could have meant the end of my college career—there was no way my scholarship would have continued, and I would have had to move out of the dorms. That would have been the end of the line in academia for me, and I’d be a greeter at Walmart today.”
“Wow. That’s a horrible thought.”
“Right? Now you see why I was baffled by your ‘awful’ first time. Yours, at least, didn’t dangle you over the precipice of losing all of your hopes and dreams.”
“All right, you win. Your first time was worse than mine. Happy now?”
“Ecstatic. There’s nothing better than being the worst at sex.”
“And that’s why you only date super strong women who are aggressively assertive about their sexuality. The kind who break coffee tables. Because then you know fo
r certain that they consent because they’ve taken control.”
Drew was shocked to hear this tidy summary of his dating history. “That’s… exactly right,” he said, amazed.
“Like you said, I’m your perfect match,” Fox said with a laugh.
“I’m not so sure. You only break lamps.”
“The lamp’s on you, buddy. You’re the one who tackled me.”
“After you shoved me out of bed!”
Fox grew more serious. “You really surprised me when you did that.”
“I kind of surprised myself,” Drew admitted. “I’d worked really hard to get into this bed, and there was no way I was going to let you push me out of it without a fight.” He noted the expression of surprise on Fox’s face. “We’re being completely honest with each other, aren’t we?” Fox nodded. “Okay, then I can admit that the whole dinner thing, and the whole not drinking thing, was my plan to get us back into bed where we could face this thing between us.”
“I think we have different ideas about what’s between us,” Fox said gently.
Drew shook his head slowly. “I think we are at different stages in acknowledging what’s between us.”
Fox fell silent for a long moment, but his eyes never left Drew’s. Then, suddenly, he seemed to snap out of his trance. “You know what would feel good right now? A long walk before we head back home. There’s this awesome trail along the top of the bluffs. You’re gonna love it.” He leapt out of bed and was in the bathroom before Drew could say a word.
Drew lay back and stared at the ceiling, trying not to feel hope curdle into loss.
THE FRESH air and sun cleared Fox’s head, as he had hoped they would. Nothing like a good hike to help get some perspective. He turned and looked at Drew, who was one stride behind him as they picked their way along a winding footpath on the edge of a bluff. Below them, the sea roiled angrily against the rocks.
The path opened onto a small clearing, a promontory looking out over the ocean. Fox stopped and pulled out his water bottle for a drink, and Drew did the same.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” Fox asked, turning his face into the bracing wind that rose off the shore.