Poster Boy

by Anne Tenino

  “You seemed kinda stressed today,” Jock said instead. “I mean, I know the shit with Noah and Gomer was serious—”

  “Ish.”

  Jock tipped his chin. “Yeah, but even after we left the clinic, you were kinda tense. I guess I was afraid it was, I dunno . . .” Jock kicked at the gravel. “Me.”

  You really think you’re that important? But he was. “It’s my thesis, too,” Toby said, spreading the blame for his behavior around. “It’s not really coming together well right now, and I have to be done with it by the end of the term, if not before.” Just like the first time Jock had blown him off, Toby’s mood had affected his ability to work.

  Jock squinted at him, smirking lopsidedly. “So, you’re here for school, too? You don’t just sit around all day in town drinking, waiting on us?”

  “Oh, I do.” He answered Jock’s smirk with a smile. “But I’m working on my paper at the same time. That’s why I have a ‘no beer before two’ rule.”

  “What’s it about?”

  His thesis? “You really want to know?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  “If I’m going to talk about that, I’ll need some wine. We could go to my place. Sit out front and have a glass or two, and I’ll tell you about it.”

  Jock nodded, tilting his head and looking at Toby from under his bangs. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

  Toby had a cool dark blue painted-iron table with two matching chairs that sat in front of his little cabanon, as he referred to it. Jock’s French was rusty, and he’d never been to the country with the intent of learning it, but, “Doesn’t that mean ‘shed’ or something?” he asked when Toby came back out of his little hut with a bottle of wine and two glasses.

  “I think so,” he said, grimacing. “I don’t know why Madame B calls it that, but maybe it’s a local colloquialism. They do say some things differently around here. When I was at the campus two years ago I knew a local guy named Gilles, but he pronounced it ‘zhee-lay.’”

  Jock had learned it was normally pronounced without the second syllable. At least he thought so. They learned names the first year or so, and he’d started taking it as a freshman. Three more years of a language he only heard for forty-five minutes a day tended to cancel out some of the early stuff.

  “You all right with red?” Toby asked. “I have white but it’s not open, and not cold. The fridge in that place is only so big.”

  “I can’t believe you even have one.” Jock eyed Toby’s little cabin. It barely looked tall enough to stand in.

  “It’s about dorm-sized, at least if I remember dorms right.”

  Jock snorted. “I remember dorms well; let me have a look at it.”

  Toby met his eye. “Anytime you want an invitation inside, let me know.”

  Tension balled in Jock’s gut, then migrated south to his groin. He licked his lip, staring into Toby’s liquid brown eyes, considering the consequences of having a physical encounter while he was still thinking over the ramifications of emotional ones.

  You’ve already decided you want it.

  “Sorry,” Toby said, breaking their connection by looking down at the village.

  “I have to tell you something.” Shit, was that really his voice? He sounded like he was at the bottom of a well.

  Toby’s attention was riveted back on him, eyes wide. “What is it?”

  Jock traced the design on Toby’s table a second, feeling the edges of the iron bite into his fingers. Listening to his pulse thump in his ears and trying to decide where to start. “What if I said that it wasn’t, like, totally unexpected?”

  Toby didn’t answer right away, and when he did, his voice sounded very careful. “I guess I’d ask what you meant.”

  “When that dude took that picture.” He had to stop and swallow. “I could have taken his phone away from him. If I’d held it over my head he couldn’t have jumped high enough to reach it.”

  “But you didn’t.”

  “No.” He shook his head. When he glanced over at him, Toby’s brow was wrinkled up.

  “So, it wasn’t a boyfriend or someone you were seeing who took it?”

  “No.” Jock slid his hands off the table, slumping back into his chair. “I had a friend, Max, and we sort of had an agreement. We traded blowjobs sometimes when we were desperate. Other than that it was pretty much dumb luck, finding some guy, and that only happened a few times.”

  “Is Max the guy that took the picture?”

  “No.” He closed his eyes, laying his head on the back of his chair. “I don’t even remember that dude’s name.”

  “Just some guy,” Toby said, voice as soft as Jock’s had been. “And you knew the chances of him outing you were good, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah. A guy Max had hooked up with was having a party, and we went because we knew there’d be lot of guys there, but, like, anyone could have gone. Anyone could have seen me. And seriously, I don’t want to sound egotistical, but hockey is big at Avalon—”

  “I understand.”

  Jock barely heard him. “But the thing is, no one did see me, or no one cared. And I was drinking a lot that night, which I wasn’t supposed to do—I signed a contract with the athletic department and everything—but I was just kinda done.” He straightened back up, opening his eyes finally and staring out over the vineyard. “I didn’t want to hide it, or, like, deny it anymore—”

  “I get it,” Toby said, standing up, then walking behind Jock’s chair. Jock held his breath, not sure what the fuck was going on, not until Toby laid hands on his shoulders, squeezing. “You don’t have to tell me any more unless you want to.” His voice wasn’t loud, but somehow it reverberated in Jock’s chest.

  He gulped a breath, because he wanted to get it all out. “That guy was a prick. The one who took the picture. I think that’s why I chose him, I mean, subconsciously. I picked the guy who was dissing the closet cases, eyeing me and Max because he knew. And then I let him take that picture of me while I was on my knees.”

  “Oh,” Toby said. “The knees thing.”

  “I didn’t, you know, plan it. I didn’t even think about it after that, not consciously, but when I walked into the locker room after Christmas and that picture was everywhere? I wasn’t surprised. At first I was . . .” He had to force the damn word out. “Relieved.”

  He felt Toby’s body heat coming closer, then his arms sliding down, wrapping around Jock. “You regretted it later, though.”

  “About five seconds later and every minute since.” Jock sighed, feeling the weight of Toby on him. Holding him even though Jock had confessed his most shameful secret. Which, now that he’d told two people, sounded like less of a thing than it used to.

  And Toby was touching him. He hadn’t gotten mad at Jock for lying or looked at Jock like he was dog shit on his shoe or any of the other things he might have done.

  He’d done it.

  “Everyone comes out in different ways, and some of us screw it up,” Toby said, voice right next to Jock’s ear. “It’s not like anyone sits gay kids down when they’re little and tells them how to go about it, or encourages them to plan it out like some girl’s play ‘wedding.’”

  “That’s for fucking sure,” he murmured, reaching up to touch Toby’s arm where it crossed his chest for a second. “Girls do that?”

  “That’s the way I understand it.”

  “Thank you.” He dropped his hand, and Toby stood, his touch slipping away. Jock didn’t know how to feel about that. He was still freaked, leftover adrenaline making him shaky.

  Was he supposed to stand up now and get it on? Pull Toby into the little hut and find a horizontal surface? “So tell me about your thesis subject,” he blurted.

  After a second of silence, gravel crunched as Toby went back to his own side of the table, pouring them each a glass of wine and sitting. Then he started talking in a totally normal voice. Like he was telling the TAG boys some facts about a historical site.

  It took a few minutes for Jock
to be able to concentrate on what the guy was saying. Something about a basilica built inside the Roman amphitheater at Tarragona.

  “In Spain?” Jock clarified. Welcoming distractions.

  Toby nodded. “Southwest of Barcelona, an hour or two by train. Have you been to Barcelona?” he asked it carefully, as if not wanting to assume too much, but not wanting to insult Jock by suggesting he wasn’t well traveled.

  “Yeah. My mom’s a women’s clothing buyer for a major chain store in the US. She used to take me to all the fashionable places in Europe with her. No wonder I’m gay, huh?” Okay, weak joke, but he was trying to get things back on an even keel. Be normal. Ignore his still shaky nerves.

  “Your mother is a style maven so she must have a gay son? What a disappointment for the parents who are into couture and have straight kids.” Toby was smiling.

  Jock took the comment like a gut punch, probably a little harder than he would have if he hadn’t just confessed one of his deeper secrets. “What, like it’s not genetic?” It’d fucking better be.

  Toby reared back and looked at Jock from under his brows. Maybe he’d yelled? “Of course it’s genetic—or at least it’s prenatal—but it’s not that simple.”

  “Sorry, not following.” Jock took a full-on swig of his wine, then grabbed the bottle to pour himself more.

  “My mom brought home the bacon and my dad fried it up in the pan.”

  Yeah, that still worked with his theory. “And?”

  “I had a stay-at-home dad, and my mother worked. No wonder they had a gay son.”

  “Uh-huh.” Still didn’t explain shit. He took another slug of wine.

  “My twin brother is straight.” Toby tilted his head, like he was waiting for Jock to put two and two together.

  “But you aren’t identical.” Toby’d told him that the night they met.

  “And yet his father was a stay-at-home parent, too.”

  “Hate being outsmarted,” Jock muttered, twirling the stem of his wineglass. Feeling calmer now.

  Toby laughed. “I bet it’s pretty rare. You’re way too smexy.”

  “Huh?”

  “Sorry, doing it again.” Toby looked away. “It means smart and sexy.” He drew in a breath and then exhaled slowly. “I’ve been on the scene too long. I mean, everything is an opportunity to come on to . . . someone I’m into.”

  “So you’re still into me?” Jock asked, because Toby hadn’t actually said it. “I mean, after what I told you?”

  “Yes, but not casually,” Toby answered immediately. Then he swallowed, his Adam’s apple perfectly illuminated in the dusk, sliding down his throat and up. Throats were so suggestive.

  “So Tarragona,” Jock said, to give himself space.

  “Yeah.” Toby nodded at his lap. “It was the capital of the province in Roman times, and the amphitheater was really active. Lots of games and gladiators. And then after 313 AD . . .”

  While Toby talked about the Roman Empire, and the fight between Arian and Athanasian sects (“normal” Catholicism, as Toby termed it) and which part of the Iberian Peninsula was under the rule of which belief system when, Jock saw him getting all intellectual and waited for the itching to start. It didn’t. Toby cared about this shit, and that made it interesting. Or at least momentarily captivating. Besides, he got to watch the dude talk. Which he never would have thought he’d be into, but he liked how Toby’s eyes nearly glowed when he got excited, and he liked the way Toby’s jaw moved under his scruff-covered skin, and he liked to see him throw his hands up in the air or gesture with them. He had thin fingers, especially for a guy his size. He wasn’t super skinny, but if someone only saw his fingers, they might think so.

  Eventually he talked himself out, though, or talked himself out of his thesis. “So the question I’m looking at for my thesis is which parts of the basilica were built by the Visigoths and which were built by Romans before that.” He frowned. “It’s boring as shit.”

  “Can you change it?”

  He shook his head and poured more wine. “I need to be done with it. My mom thinks I’m going to be a professor of history like she is, and finishing my master’s is just a step on that road, but I’m going to have to disappoint her.”

  “So, you don’t want the degree?”

  “I used to, but lately? No. I’m too close though. It’s stupid not to finish.”

  “You spend a lot of time telling yourself that?”

  “Every. Freaking. Day.” He half smiled at Jock over the table.

  “What’s the worst thing that could happen if you quit now?”

  Toby winced. “I’d feel like a failure. It’s getting dark out here,” he said, standing and stretching out his arms.

  Jock sat back in his seat, not sure he was ready to be done hanging with Toby, but not sure how to extend their time without saying something like, I’d like that invitation into your place now. Because he didn’t know if he was ready for that, yet.

  When did I become such a weenie?

  Cut yourself some slack, dude.

  “I’ll get some illumination going,” Toby said, turning toward his door.

  So, they weren’t done? Apparently not, because Toby came right back out with a wax-caked wine bottle that had a candle stuck in the top. Jock laughed at it. “Nice.”

  “You like?” Toby grinned, his teeth catching some ambient light. He set it down and started fiddling with a box. “I spent the first three days I was here dripping different colors of wax on it to make a pleasing design.” The match he’d struck hissed and flared up, and as he held it to the wick, soft yellow and midnight blue picked out the different planes and lines of his hand. It looked like a cubist painting.

  “I like.”

  Toby looked at him a long second over the candle, and Jock realized this was his moment. He could stand up and come around the table, place his hand on Toby’s belly before kissing him, and then Toby’d invite him inside. But he didn’t move.

  You’re still scared.

  Yup. Petrified, obvi.

  Toby tilted his chin, then sat back down, pulling his wine glass closer and idly tracing its curves with a fingertip. Effectively ending their moment. “What’s this beer terrorist thing the boys are always on about?”

  Jock forced his brain into this new gear. “It’s kinda involved. And you know, if I told you . . .” Nice. Another lame, totally predictable joke.

  “You’d have to kill me.” Toby smiled. “So, just tell me, are we under imminent threat of beermageddon?”

  “Beermageddon?” Danny’s voice boomed out from somewhere in the dark. “That’s awesome, Tobes.” He waltzed right into their little circle of lamplight and togetherness. He had mad interfering skills. “Can I use it?”

  “Be my guest,” Toby answered, waving his hand. “I probably won’t ever say it again.”

  “So you guys coming to eat with us? Families that eat together communicate more, you know. They’ve done studies and shit.” He stood next to the table, head bouncing from one of them to the other and back. Over and over. “Uh, unless you guys want some alone time?”

  Shit. He’d obviously decided something was going on. Jock’s thigh muscles tensed like they wanted to vault him out of this chair, but the rest of him was annoyed. Annoyed with Danny, but also done with worrying about what the other guys thought about it if he and Toby wanted to start something.

  “I think we’ve had plenty,” Toby said, glancing at Jock before standing up. Jock got the message—Toby was doing him a favor. Letting him off the hook for the night.

  He cringed inside at how grateful he felt about that.

  Jock wanted to be with him. Toby felt certain of that now. Such a huge fucking relief. He’d seen the evidence in Jock’s eyes right after he lit that candle Tuesday night in front of his place. Toby had also seen what was holding Jock back: fear.

  At least he could understand Jock’s fear, or some of it. It had taken him a while, sitting in the dark by himself after dinner, but he thought
he’d untangled the mystery. It wasn’t an ex who’d fucked Jock over, it was Jock who’d fucked Jock over. Sort of. And if Toby’s reasoning was right, Jock was afraid of fucking himself over again.

  No wonder the dude was so cautious.

  Unfortunately, only having that one psych class as an undergrad—which he’d barely managed a “C” in—he could be way off. But he knew something for certain: everything had changed. In a good way, he thought. Hoped. Jock had really opened up to him.

  Hopefully he could help Jock surmount his fear. Because the sooner Jock surmounted, the sooner Toby could mount him. Thoughts of that kept him in the shower longer than normal every morning for the rest of the week. It also encouraged him to take a hard look at his situation. Ask himself what he wanted and what he was willing to settle for.

  The answers were simple. He wanted as much of the boy as he could get, and he was willing to settle for humiliatingly little. He’d take friends-only (no benefits package), certainly. It was what he had now. He’d also settle for another night of sex with no promise of future nights. The one thing he wouldn’t put up with was Jock leaving before morning.

  In case he’d been wondering about himself, that confirmed the depth of the romantic nature he’d been stifling the last few years. Like the old Bonnie Raitt song, he’d take a night of lying next to Jock as a sop to his very involved heart. Then in the morning he’d do what was right. So yeah, he’d take pure sex with gratitude, and ask for next to nothing in return, just a few hours of pretend.

  Plus he had a minimum orgasm requirement for that single night that he wasn’t willing to negotiate. And he wanted Jock to fuck him. He could see it if he closed his eyes. Jock looming over him, that perfect body covered in sweat, panting, thrusting into him, watching himself fuck Toby with wide eyes. A do-over of their first time, but this time they’d both know the whole score.

  Thinking of that night invariably led to the extra long bathroom visits. Not that he couldn’t jerk off anywhere, but cleanup was so much easier in there. The spray from the shower pretty much covered the whole room, as long as Toby didn’t hit any higher than about six feet, and he just hadn’t been born with the necessary hydraulics for that. That led him to wondering about Jock’s hydraulics, which led to the bathroom . . . it was a cycle that, while not vicious, consumed more of his time than it had since his teenage years.