Superhero

by Eli Easton

  The thing that was so weird was that, if I had never met Jordan, I would have been perfectly happy with the life behind door number one. I don’t get my sexuality. Maybe it would take a team of head-shrinks to figure me out. I liked girls okay and not many guys did a thing for me. But Jordan, he pressed all my buttons.

  Maybe I was a really picky gay guy? Maybe I was bi. Maybe I was Jordan-sexual. Maybe I just thought Jordan was sexy because I loved him so much. The point is, I probably wouldn’t have even thought about being gay if it weren’t for him. Maybe I never would have been happy in a normal marriage. Maybe I’d have met some guy when I was forty and had a midlife crisis. Or maybe I would have met the girl that made me crazy about breasts and vaginas. I’d never know.

  I looked at the lists for a long time. I got on Google and looked at images of NYU. I even looked up NYU’s wrestling team just out of curiosity. They were one of the thirty-two schools that had sent me an offer letter, even though I’d never applied, but I’d barely glanced at it. On their website I saw they were twenty-eighth in their division last year, and their top guy ranked was number seven in individual rankings. Not even close to the Badgers but not terrible.

  Not that it really mattered. They wouldn’t want a gay wrestler.

  I realized I was actually considering it, this alternate life in New York. And I was swamped with a sense of terror. The idea of giving up the incredible opportunity wrestling had given me, that I’d worked at for years… it was enough to make me want to throw up.

  The light of dawn was just starting to spread through my bedroom window when I finally lay down. I had an idea. I scooted over on my bed and rolled onto my side. I closed my eyes and reached my hand out to touch the place in the bed next to me.

  No matter what you do with your life during the day, there’s always that moment when you have to wake up with yourself, with yourself and with the person that’s sleeping beside you. That’s the person that you make a home with, discuss life’s big decisions with, share your finances, eat, shop, maybe parent with. That’s the person you share your body with forever, kiss, touch, the one you sit on the couch with and watch movies, the one who gives you a hug when you’ve had a rough day. That’s the person you put up a Christmas tree with and arrive home with for the holidays, the person you watch grow old and who still loves you when you’re not as nice to look at, the one who holds your hand when you’re dying. And none of that had anything to do with wrestling.

  I touched the covers and closed my eyes.

  Jordan

  Someone was banging on our front door. I hoped my mom would answer it already. I’d hardly slept the night before for worrying, and I wanted nothing more than to sink back into sweet oblivion and escape reality for a few hours more. The banging finally stopped, only to be taken up, a moment later, on my bedroom door. The door opened.

  “Jordy?”

  It was Owen. I looked at the clock. “Tell me you’re not waking me up at 7 a.m. on a Sunday.”

  He came over and sat on the bed. “Sorry.”

  I started to fall back asleep. He rubbed my shoulder. “Hey. My folks are gone ’til tonight. Will you come over?”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah.” He kept rubbing my shoulder. I frowned and squinted up at him.

  “I need to talk to you. Please.”

  His face was serious, but not in a bad way like the night before. There was an excited calm about him. He looked into my eyes as his thumb rubbed my shoulder. He looked at my mouth. I felt a wave of heat roll over in my gut. I glared at him. “What?”

  He smiled a little. “Come on, doofus. Get up and throw on a pair of jeans. You can sleep at my house if you want.”

  He stood up, picked up a pair of jeans and tossed it at me. He took a sweatshirt out of the closet and threw it on the bed.

  “Somebody’s caught a case of the bossy flu,” I grumbled, but I sat up. There was something about the way he was acting. As determined as I had been to pull away last night, I found my resistance was lacking this morning. Maybe it was in the half of my brain that was still asleep.

  I pulled on my clothes. I went to the bathroom and brushed my teeth. I looked at myself in the mirror for a minute. I silently told myself to be strong.

  We pulled up at Owen’s house ten minutes later.

  “Do you want coffee?” he asked me, as we walked into his kitchen.

  “If you’ll let me go back to sleep, no. If you have any other plans whatsoever, yes.”

  He gave me a funny look and started the coffee maker. I sat down in one of the dinette chairs and looked blearily at the pool out back. I put my head on my arms and maybe fell asleep.

  He touched my hand and slid a cup of coffee into it. I raised my head, blinked.

  “Hey, my folks aren’t due home ’til late. If you want to go back to sleep I can wait a few hours.” He tucked some hair behind my ear.

  His touch felt… different. I looked up at him in surprise and then down at the coffee cup.

  “I’m good,” I said stupidly. I drank the coffee. I was confused, and he hadn’t even said anything yet. But suddenly, my heart was beating faster, and I was wide awake.

  I took a few sips, and then he took my hand and led me into the living room and over to the sofa. I stood there looking at him, coffee cup in one hand, his hand holding my other.

  I looked down at our joined hands. “What are you doing, Owen?”

  “Sit down.”

  I pulled my hand away and sat. I took another sip, eyeing him warily.

  He sat down close to me and looked at his hands in his lap.

  “Jordan, last night you made me see how hard this has been on you—us. Me. Emily. I’m sorry, and I want to change it. I hope you’ll give me a chance to change it.”

  I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. “You can’t change it.”

  He took my hand again and pulled it into his lap. He held it in both of his. “I’ve already talked to Emily this morning. I told her it was over between us. Jordan, I want….” He swallowed. “I want to be with you.”

  I wasn’t able to process what he was saying. It was like he was speaking in Klingon or something. I stared at him.

  “I don’t want to lose you, Jordan. We’ll be together, everything you want.”

  I sputtered. “Have you been infected by an alien brain virus?” I thought about it. “Wait, have I?”

  “Jordy—”

  “You can’t just have sex with me to keep me around. You’re not gay! That’s like me trying to have sex with Emily.”

  He laughed and pulled my hand in tighter so it was against his chest. “I promise you, it’s not. I’m not as straight as everyone thinks I am. I think about that night we were together all the time. All the time, Jordy.”

  His eyes were hot with something I’d never seen in them before. But I had a hard time allowing myself to believe it. Because I’d been there all, oh, three-hundred-and-some fricking days since that night, and he’d never acted like he wanted me. I shook my head.

  “God, Jordy! The only thing that’s kept my hands off you for the past year has been knowing, knowing, that if we were together I’d have to give up wrestling. You don’t know what it was like for me when you came out. People acted like it was a cardinal sin that I had a friend who was gay, but everyone, everyone, made it absolutely clear that I’d better not be gay myself or my career was over. I had to stay with Emily, and I had to stay away from you.”

  What he was saying sank into me slowly. He’d wanted to do it again?

  Of course, I guess I’d always known that if Owen had been gay, the wrestling would have been difficult to impossible. But he wasn’t gay so that was a moot point. Unless it wasn’t.

  He was rubbing my hand with his thumb. He raised it to his mouth and kissed my palm. The feel of his lips was like a zap of heat straight to my dick, but I snatched my hand away and scrambled backward on the couch.

  “Owen, stop it. You just said it yourself—you can’t give
up wrestling, so what’s the point?”

  He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket and unfolded it, put it down on the coffee table with a slam of his palm. “Yes. I can.”

  I looked at it. A wrestling career and marriage were on one side. On the other side was an English degree—and me. My heart started to pound. I felt scared, really scared, at the magnitude of what that sheet of paper represented. I’d sat in those bleachers watching Owen become a star for the past six years. I knew he lived and breathed it. It was way bigger than me, maybe bigger than both of us.

  “That’s not fair to you,” I whispered.

  He scooted toward me until our knees were touching. He took my face in his hands and made me look at him.

  “Listen,” he said. His eyes were rock steady on mine. “I. Love. You. Thinking about you with someone else… it makes me certifiable. I… I wanted to kill that guy last night. And then you told me you were moving to New York…. I’ve thought about a life without you, Jordy, and I don’t care how many damn championships there are in it, I don’t want that life.”

  “But—”

  “I don’t want that life.”

  I was shaking. Somewhere deep in my lizard brain hope was waking up and unfurling and sniffing at the air tentatively. But I was also terrified. I didn’t know if this was the best of all possible outcomes or the worst. Possibly it was both.

  “I want to be with you, you and me, together, as a couple,” he said, using his absolutely committed-Owen-Nelson voice. “Because that’s for the rest of our lives. And that’s more important to me than anything else. I can live without wrestling.”

  “Oh, God,” I whispered. “But it’s your gift. You’ve worked so hard for it.”

  “I have worked hard for it. But you, Jordy….” He pulled my hand to his chest, as if willing me to hear him. “You are my gift.”

  I was in a complete brain freeze. I wanted to believe him, but I wasn’t sure I should. What kind of person would I be if I let Owen give up his dreams? Even if he did want me like he said he did, and I was still totally on the fence about that one, at some point he’d hate me for taking away his big shot. Wouldn’t he?

  “Say yes, Jordan,” he said, shifting closer.

  “No,” I said.

  Owen smiled. “Close enough.” And then he kissed me.

  His lips were soft on mine, gentle. I told myself I should pull away, really I did, but it probably would have required a team of wild horses and a shot of Thorazine. Owen Nelson was kissing me.

  All the things he’d said were rattling around in my brain, and I knew the discussion was far from over. But as he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me against his chest, all warm and safe and stronger than a mighty locomotive, and as he teased my lips with slow, sucking kisses, everything faded away except for one bright shining thing: he wanted me.

  Okay, two, two bright shining things: he wanted me and… he was really getting into kissing me.

  I was frozen in a state of shock for about a minute as he softly kissed and gently sucked at my lips—slow and sweet and sensual. I didn’t kiss him back even as my body went wild internally, blood being police escorted to certain extremities, endorphins diving out of my pituitary gland like they were in a Busby Berkeley musical, my heart going all heavy metal.

  Then I snapped with the program. I made an embarrassingly loud animal sound and scrambled into his lap, my legs going wide around his hips. I grabbed his head, tilted my own and kissed him. This time, I was taking no prisoners. I laved my tongue along his lips and tongue, opening him up and kissing him deep and wet and erotic, the way I’d dreamed of doing a million times.

  He made a yummy sound deep in his chest, and pulled me tighter. One hand went to my lower back and one between my shoulder blades. He pressed me sweetly but firmly against him. God, Owen had never touched me like this before. The combination of gentleness and power in that restrained touch was like gasoline on my electrical fire. I could feel that he was hard. I could feel the trembling passion and desperation in his kiss. More than anything he’d said, or ever could say, that made me believe him—Owen wanted me. My heart exploded like a bottle rocket.

  Because if Owen really, truly wanted me, then pigs could fly, I’d get my window desk at DC, and life could be unbearably fucking wonderful.

  He tugged at the hem of my sweatshirt. I broke the kiss only long enough to pull it over my head. Back to kissing, then I tugged blindly on his shirt—I had to feel him. His T-shirt came off with a yank and our mouths locked back together. My bare chest pressed against his chest. Good God, just shoot me now if anything could ever get better than being pressed against that gorgeous chest and abs. I squirmed in tighter. He pulled me closer. I could feel his erection in my crotch. I was hard down the right leg of my jeans so I couldn’t really rub it against him, but I didn’t care. I rocked on top of him, just getting off on feeling him like that, on stroking him with my ass. Now that I had him, I couldn’t get enough.

  “Jordy, we should—” he said, trying to pull out of the kiss. I kept sucking off the syllables.

  My hands were roaming over the sides of his ribs. I was in an ecstasy of skin and muscle. He tried to push me up.

  “Bedroom. I want you naked,” he rasped out, even as my hands locked on his neck and I kept kissing him.

  “No.” The transition period to get from here to there was unthinkable. He might as well have been talking about traveling to another galaxy and entering deep stasis. I wasn’t stopping.

  So he pushed up and slung me over his shoulder. Crap, he was strong. He headed for the stairs.

  “I swear to God, Owen, if you sprain your back in the next twenty seconds and we end up in the ER instead of in bed, I will disembowel you!”

  He laughed. “Believe me, not even a herniated disc would make me stop now.”

  “Let’s not test that theory, shall we?” I had the advantage of ungainly limbs. I wriggled until he put me down. We raced each other up the stairs, which is not as much fun as it sounds with a raging hard-on.

  In his bedroom we both shucked our jeans and underwear like they were on fire. I stopped and stared at him.

  Holy Greek gods, Batman. Owen had bulked up more this past year, but it was all muscle. He looked like a figure from a naughty version of Mt. Olympus standing there, with his broad shoulders and carved pecs, rounded thighs and erection curving up toward his stomach. He was looking at me with as much hunger as I felt. Self-consciously I put my arms across my chest.

  He came over and pulled them away. “Jordy, you are perfect. I can’t imagine wanting anyone the way I want you.”

  “Male or female?” I asked doubtfully.

  “Uh-huh. And vegetable or mineral.”

  “Glad to hear I can out-sex zucchini,” I quipped nervously.

  “Don’t forget the pumice,” he teased.

  He stepped very, very close to me but not quite touching, so that his erection just gently brushed against mine. He trailed the tips of his fingers softly up my bare sides and stared into my eyes with a slightly amused, not so slightly heated look. Oh, God, Owen looking at me like that. It was like I’d hit the fantasy jackpot, and all the nice shiny coins were pouring out. A shiver shook my whole body.

  “Shut up, Jordy,” I told myself, and I wrapped my arms around his neck and kissed him.

  Owen

  How could something feel so scarily new and exciting and yet so familiar and inevitable at the same time? Jordy was a fantastic kisser. The way he sucked and licked at my mouth like he was starving for it—it was nearly enough to send me over the edge right there. And then there was the feel of him in my arms, not tiny and soft like Emily, no, he was warm and solid and lithe and strong and all boy. I could crush him against me, press him tight. It felt so exactly right.

  The feeling of his hardness against me fascinated me—the heft of it, the way it so clearly showed his desire, the way I could make him groan and squirm by pressing against it just so. Jesus. Everything about him turned m
e on so much. For years I’d been fighting a physical attraction to him, telling myself it wasn’t there. Now that I’d surrendered to it, need crashed through me like a herd of elephants escaping the circus. My body vibrated with the thunder of it. Jordy.

  I pressed him back against the bed. I wanted badly to climb on top of him, but first I had to explore, touch him, kiss him, the way I hadn’t allowed myself to do last time. I needed it. I crouched over him on all fours. When he bowed up to meet my mouth, I pressed him back down with a forearm across his upper chest and pinned him there.

  “Bastard,” he said, squirming, still trying to kiss me, even though he wasn’t even close.

  “I seem to recall someone licking me to within an inch of my life,” I countered, as I tongued a long path up his chest and across one nipple.

  “Hngh. I want….” lick. “Wanna hold you.” swirl. “Owen, please!”

  “Mmmm,” I said neutrally as I licked and kissed my way down his flat stomach. I loved the tone of his body, so lean and sleek and tight, his skin so soft. It drove me crazy.

  He gave up struggling against my forearm and started thrusting up his hips instead, seeking contact. Naughty. I pinned his upper thigh down with my thigh, trapping him down on the bed.

  “Oh, God,” he groaned, “I’m having sex with a wrestler. Not fair.”

  “Mmmm,” I agreed as I nibbled and sucked at the soft skin of his belly. Oh, yes. This was good. This freaking rocked. I loved that I could hold him down, be just rough enough to excite us both, that I didn’t have to be careful with him physically, and that he knew me well enough that I could be exactly myself.