by Laurie Loft
Sebby’s expression went quiet and closed. “Don’t snap at me, Todd.”
“Sorry.” He didn’t feel particularly sorry.
“I can tell that you’re really not mad at me, you’re mad at someone else, probably him, so I’m not taking it personally. I never said you couldn’t do other things, but someone else said that to you?”
“He implied it. Fucking hell.” Todd threw the wad of napkins atop his plate of food, having lost his appetite.
Sebby handed Todd a lemon-scented wet wipe, keeping one for himself. “You said you didn’t hold anything against him.”
Todd said nothing. He tore open the wipe and scrubbed his hands.
“I guess you said it because you’d just had a good fuck and were feeling at peace with the world.”
Stricken, Todd drew in his breath and stared.
“There’s still time left.” Sebby leaned forward across the table. “We could fuck before we go back. Will that help you feel better?”
Todd’s mouth worked, but no sound came out.
“Or I could suck you off. Would that do just as good?”
“Sebby!” Todd couldn’t tell if Sebby was teasing or in earnest.
“How often does it take? Is once a day enough? Do you need it morning and night? Morning, noon, and night?”
“Jesus. You make it sound as though I’m using you . . .”
“Aren’t you?”
“No! I . . . Perhaps I am.” Todd leaned back and slumped. He thought of how he had told Holly that he was bad for people, that he didn’t want to fuck up Sebastián’s life.
“You think you’re using me,” Sebby said.
“I don’t know. Perhaps.”
“You don’t like me at all?”
“I like you a great deal!”
“Then you’re not using me.”
If this was logic, it was of a form unfamiliar to Todd. “The fact that I like you does not, in and of itself, preclude the possibility that I am using you.”
“It’s a fact that you like me?” Sebby’s mouth curved, his dimple making an appearance, and Todd’s stomach tightened.
“As opposed to hypothesis or theory? Sebastián, I . . . Of course I like you! I—” Consternated, Todd stopped. How had the conversation progressed to this point? “You—you—” He sputtered. “You are just impossible.”
“Awww.” Sebby looked as if he wanted to climb into Todd’s lap. “You’re so sweet when you say things like that.”
“Ah . . . I didn’t mean to snap at you.”
Sebby nodded. “I know. Now, tell me, Todd. Tell me everything he said. Just get it out and you’ll feel better. And I’ll feel better.”
Todd’s throat closed up; he tried to swallow.
“Tell me,” Sebby insisted. “Don’t choke on it.”
“He said we wanted different things, that I wanted a nice home and a good income, and ‘there’s nothing wrong with that,’ but that he wanted to volunteer in a third-world country or join the Peace Corps, and Sebby! We’d been together for months, and this was the first I’d heard of it, on the cusp of being dumped! He’d never once mentioned volunteering or wanting to, never once! And he accused me of wanting to be domestic, me! He proposed. He pushed to move in with me, and I contended he must have his own life, his own place. But do I get credit for my restraint? I do not.”
“He sounds . . . young.”
“And he tells me, he says he’s anticapitalist and I’m bourgeois because I’m in advertising. For God’s sake, everybody advertises! The fucking Peace Corps advertises.” His voice fell into singsong sarcasm. “‘Toughest job you’ll ever love.’ You know, some ad man thought that up.”
“He hurt your pride. I’m sorry. Did you tell him? What you just said?”
“I was too busy begging him not to leave me. Jesus, what a loser.”
“Loving doesn’t make you a loser.” Sebby reached for Todd’s hand, and Todd let him take it. Staring off into space, Todd continued.
“I told him . . . told him if he wanted to go, I’d go with him; I told him I wasn’t married to advertising; I told him I’d do anything, I didn’t care what we did. And he said that was the problem, that I’d be doing it for him, that I’d never think of it on my own.”
Sebby squeezed Todd’s fingers. “Would you have?”
Todd had been over and over this in his mind, so many times that he was sure he’d worn a groove clear through the surface of his brain. “That is not the point! The point is that I was willing to be flexible, to consider other possibilities. I mean, no, I wouldn’t have thought of it, but so what? Any person that you encounter may put new ideas into your head. But, Sebby, I was trying to be a ‘nice young man with prospects’! For his sake! And then he shoots me down for being just that.”
Sebby stroked Todd’s rough hand as if it was made of velvet. His eyes watched the movement of his own fingers as he spoke. “If you’re not going to stay in construction and you don’t want to go back into advertising, what are you going to do when the season is over?”
Todd took a deep breath and wrapped his fingers around Sebby’s thumb. “I’ve applied to the Peace Corps. I’ve sent in my recommendations. I’ve spoken with a recruiter. I’m waiting for my interview, and if they’ll take me, I plan to join.” He stared at Sebby defiantly.
A troubled look came over Sebby’s face. “The Peace Corps is a big commitment.”
“It is.”
“You’d be gone for, what? A year?”
“Two years. Plus three months for training.”
Sebby hesitated, and his mouth worked. “I’m just asking. Why? Do you want to get out of the country; is it not big enough for the two of you?”
Todd growled in the back of his throat.
“You’re trying to prove something to him, I think. D’you think that’ll win back his love?”
Todd’s face went hot, then cold. “I’d be gone for over two years. And either I’d be over him by then, or . . . Viv would be almost twenty-one. He . . . will have matured.”
“I understand, but those aren’t the right reasons for going into the Peace Corps. Do you think they are? The Peace Corps is for helping people, and you’d maybe see poverty or injustice or disease, many sad things. Your reasons, they’re selfish.”
Todd waved this away with a broad gesture, nearly sweeping his water glass from the table. “What difference do my reasons make? If I do see those things, maybe I’ll learn something. I need to gain perspective; perhaps then my pain won’t seem so great.”
“You want to put your pain in perspective.” Sebby considered this. “Why don’t you volunteer here? There’re so many things you could do: teach English as a second language, help adults learn to read. There’s no need to be so drastic.”
Letting go of Sebby’s hand, Todd knuckled his eyes. “But I’m not myself anymore: I don’t act the same; I can’t think the same; I just— I— What am I supposed to do?”
Todd felt a nudge and opened his eyes to see that Sebby had moved to sit beside him. Sebby brushed his fingers over Todd’s cheek before taking his hand. “You have the world around you. You’re young and strong and healthy. You can do anything. What do you want to do?”
Todd regarded Sebby’s hand in his own. He noted the long, slender fingers, the rounded fingernails, the pink half-moons, the soft fingertips, so unlike his own broad hands, which were blistered and calloused, the nails split and broken and bruised with labor. “I don’t care what I do. I just want Viv back. There, I’ve said it.”
He tried to drop Sebby’s hand, but Sebby wouldn’t let go.
“If I could get him back for you, I would.” Sebby laid his cheek on Todd’s shoulder, and Todd’s stomach was lost to butterflies and confusion.
“You’re seeing an awful lot of that kid.”
Todd rocketed to his feet from where he’d been crouching pulling weeds. “Kid?! He’s twenty-five, Lloyd!” He hurled the trowel away. It landed soundlessly on the thick lawn.
Lloyd shrugged, not looking up from adjusting the dial on his fertilizer spreader. “You guys are kids to me. You’re my kid brother.”
“Apologies. I’m a little sensitive regarding age scenarios.” He fetched the trowel and went back to digging.
“I’m just saying. You can’t keep this up and not get outed.”
“Yeah.”
“What’s his name again?”
“Sebby.”
“Sebby. What kinda name is that?”
“It’s a diminutive of Sebastián, which is a Spanish name. His mother was Mexican.” Todd smiled to himself, thinking how appropriate the word diminutive was in the case of Sebby, who was himself so diminutive. He cleared his throat. “I was thinking . . . if it’s quite all right with you and Donna . . . I’d like to invite him over for the Fourth. If you wouldn’t mind.” He had never brought a boy home to meet any of his family.
Lloyd frowned. “Yeah, that’d be great, we’d like to meet him. But if you’re inviting him over, that means you’re getting serious.”
“No. I just want to spend the Fourth with him, and I want to spend it with my family. I don’t think we’re serious. I just got out of something serious. It would be a mistake to get right into something serious.”
“You’re trying too hard to convince me. Look . . .” Lloyd gave the dial a final tweak and straightened. “You oughta find another job.”
Todd could see where this was heading. He tossed a weed into the bag and moved to the next one. “I’ll get around to it. When the season’s over.”
“I wouldn’t wait that long. Why don’t you try to get a real job, one in your field? Before the gang figures out you’re gay and decides to hold a blanket party.”
“A what?”
“That’s what they call it in the Marines when a guy in the unit won’t behave. In the middle of the night, they grab him, roll him up in his blankets so he can’t see what’s happening, and beat on him.” Lloyd mimed rolling his arms and then clutching one hand as if holding something and pounding on it with the other.
“Jesus!”
“Construction guys are basically the same as Marines. They want to think it, anyway.”
Todd couldn’t imagine Dean or Rob or any of the crew being so homophobic as to want to hurt him. “Lloyd, I appreciate your concern, but when did you last work construction? When were you last in the Marines, for that matter? Twenty years ago? Things are different now; people are different, more progressive and tolerant.”
Lloyd set off across the yard with the spreader. “It’s the same guys working construction. They’re just twenty years older.”
Todd spoke to Holly about the situation. She thought that quitting a job so soon after quitting another job would look crappy on a résumé. Todd speculated that he did not need to include construction work on his résumé. Holly pointed out that gaps had to be explained.
Standing apart from the crew and sipping coffee, Todd spoke to Sebby in a low voice. “Lloyd thinks I should quit.”
“I would miss seeing you every day.”
“You don’t seem surprised.”
“If you don’t want them to know . . . then, yes, you should quit.”
Todd eyed the group over the rim of his cup. If he thought his coworkers wouldn’t mind, why was he going to so much effort to appear straight? Partly, he thought, it was habit. Growing up in a small Minnesota town, it had been years before Todd had come out even to his closest friends, and during summers spent working construction with his father, Todd had become used to hearing gay slurs.
College in the big city of Minneapolis had been a different world, multicultural and diverse. He’d found a freedom he’d hardly dared imagine. Nature had taken its course, and Todd fit himself comfortably into the Minnesota queer culture, but summers meant home, meant working construction, meant pretending to his parents that he had a girlfriend, meant shame and guilt and inward seething. What a relief it had been when he acquired a real job in the city, an internship in a fun and fascinating field, where he could be himself. The occasional visits home had spaced themselves further apart as time went by, and though he’d come out to his father, his father had forbidden him to tell his mother. “You’ll break her heart.”
So why had he put himself back into a hated situation?
Sebby cajoled Todd into watching a scary movie. They cuddled together on Sebby’s sofa, sharing a bowl of organic popcorn. “It’s an old one. I promise there’s not one single drop of blood in it, but it’s very scary, about a haunted house. It’s one of my favorites.”
“Very well, but I warn you I’m prone to screaming.”
“Oooh, I love screamers.” He poked Todd’s stomach.
Soon after the opening credits Todd let out a yell. “That’s Riff!”
“Shhh. What’s Riff?”
“Riff, Riff! From West Side Story!”
Sebby scowled in thought. “I don’t know that movie.”
“Good Lord. Your education has a monstrous pothole in dire need of fill.” Todd could not resist breaking into song. He turned toward Sebby, flinging one arm and one leg away from the sofa in a dance pose as he belted out the Jets song. Sebby’s eyes went wide with alarm, and he leaned away from Todd, who jumped up from the couch and into an impromptu and energetic rendition of the gang dance. He punched the air: pow pow pow!
Sebby clearly did not know what to make of this display. He smiled uncertainly. “You’re a Jet, but I’m the other team? I’m Latino.”
Todd plopped next to Sebby on the sofa. “Romeo and Juliet, that’s us. But the Sharks were Puerto Ricans, not Mexicans. Play on! Riff was in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers as well as West Side Story. I thought he only did musicals!”
The movie played, the drama unfolded, and Todd grew increasingly uneasy. The tension onscreen grew, and he clutched Sebastián more and more tightly. As the screen characters huddled in the dining room while an unseen entity pounded down the hallway outside, Todd hid his face in Sebby’s hair and prayed for the film to end.
At last it was over. Sebby sat up and stretched. “Very scary, yes?”
“Who enjoys this sort of thing? What is wrong with you?”
Sebby laughed, shut off the television, and stood up. He stretched again, like a languid cat. “It’s the feeling of fear when you know you’re safe. Adrenaline. It’s fun to be scared.” Taking Todd’s face in his hands, he pressed his lips to Todd’s temple.
“You’re insane if you think that’s fun.” Every one of Todd’s muscles had tied itself into a granny knot.
Sebby insinuated himself into Todd’s lap. “And when you get so scared and tense, then you need some release, no?” He sneaked a warm hand under Todd’s T-shirt and stroked his abdomen.
“They need to burn that house to the ground,” Todd said with feeling.
“It’s not a real house.” Sebby put a finger under Todd’s chin, tilted his head up, and placed a kiss on his throat.
Absently rubbing Sebby’s back, Todd gazed at the ceiling. “You have decorative moldings. Similar to what they had in the film.”
“Not so similar.” Sebby pressed his face insistently into Todd’s neck and drew Todd’s hand to the inside of his, Sebby’s, thigh.
“You can see faces in it if you look.”
“You can see faces everywhere, if you look.” Sebby squirmed. “Don’t you wanna go to bed?”
“All right. Yes.” Todd allowed Sebby to hop up and lead him down the hallway, up the narrow staircase, and into the bedroom. “Leave the light on?”
Sebby beamed, and Todd was distracted by his dimple; he pressed his lips to it, poking his tongue into it as had become his custom. Sebby stepped away to peel Todd’s shirt up and over his head and came back to run his hands down Todd’s chest.
Todd pulled Sebby close against himself, relishing the feel of Sebby’s shirt buttons pressing into Todd’s bare skin. He smoothed his hand down Sebby’s back, over the curve of his buttocks, and between Sebby’s legs from behind.
Todd stood up straight and examined Sebby consideringly. “Prepare to be—” He stopped and turned. “What was that?”
Sebby blinked. “What? What’s what?”
“I heard something.” Todd nodded toward the bedroom door.
“Shh, there’s nothing. It’s an old house, it creaks.” Sebby unbuttoned his jeans and began to slowly unzip. “Ven aquí. Bésame.”
Todd couldn’t concentrate, and every little noise unnerved him: the wind in the trees outside, the house popping and settling. His head crawled with the sounds and images from the film: the faces in the wallpaper, the statues that appeared to move, the unintelligible voices muttering in the night. Finally, Sebby propped himself up on his elbow and tapped Todd’s chest in exasperation. “Dios mío, you’re never allowed to watch a scary movie again. You’re no good to me at all until daylight now, are you?”
Todd felt ridiculous. “Oh, well . . . I wouldn’t say I’m no good, but, very well, yes, I’m no good. Sorry, French Press.”
Sebby rolled out of bed and shut off the light. He let out a long sigh and settled himself against Todd, idly running his fingers over Todd’s chest.
“I made you watch the movie, you told me you don’t like horror, so it’s my own fault, and anyway, what do you think I am, insatiable?” He laughed and patted Todd over his heart. “Next time we’ll watch that dance-fight movie.”
“West Side Story?” Todd cleared his throat, and struck by inspiration, he softly started a bit of West Side Story lyrics, switching out Maria for Sebastián. He repeated the name in song multiple times, his voice rising in crescendo: “Sebastián . . . Sebastián, Sebastián, Sebastiááán!”
Sebby fell into helpless giggles, and Todd relished the sound and feel of his laughter and how it seemed to thrill through both their bodies.
“You’re sooo silly!” Sebby laughed some more and then sighed, and Todd sighed.