by Daryl Banner
The man opens his mouth, then slaps it shut.
When Dante rises from the bench, he towers over the tall man. “Jared, you went and wasted all of your money and time when you could have just communicated with your unsatisfied boyfriend and asked him what’s up. Then your PhD ass might’ve been informed that he wants a little less vanilla in the bedroom and a little more Rocky Road.”
“Wait a second.” It all starts to dawn on stiff-necked Jared. “You’re just a photographer?”
“Oh, I’m a lot more than that. I’m a landlord, a former professional bodybuilder, a loyal brother and son, and an artist.” He then plucks a card out of the pocket of his jeans he just changed into and offers it to the stunned Jared, who reluctantly takes it with wide eyes. “Maybe he plans to show you the photos we took. Or maybe you’ll feel inspired to come on by Piazza Place and take some of your own. Regardless, he left satisfied and proud of his tight, twink tush.”
Jared stares at the card, still bewildered. Then he squints at Dante suddenly. “Wait a minute here. How do you know who my boyfriend is? Or that he was satisfied at all?”
Dante smirks down at him. “Boy, everyone who walks through my doors leaves satisfied.”
With that, Dante beckons me with a sideways nod, and I push myself off the lockers to head off with him, leaving the still-stunned Jared standing in that spot, jaw half-dropped, Dante’s business card still pinched between his skinny fingers.
Outside the gym, I get a text back from Larry at Aubergines. I grin, stop in place, and text a reply confirming plans for Lena’s bachelorette party.
Dante must notice the text over my shoulder. “Bachelorette party at the eggplant Thursday? You some kinda party planner now?”
“I’m giving my friend’s sister an amazing last-minute bachelorette party for her and her ladies. She likes gay stuff. And you know what?” I lift my chin. “Who knows? Maybe I am a party planner now. Top notch. It’s all about connections. Brett is movin’ on up in the world!”
“Brett is talking about himself in third person.” Dante snorts and shakes his head. “This sounds like you’re going off the deep end again.”
I frown. “Again?”
“If you spontaneously quit Bailey’s again like you did last summer, I won’t be so forgiving about the rent. Don’t think that just ‘cause we’re friends, I won’t evict your ass.”
“I have everything under control!” I exclaim—and even I can hear the “famous last words” feel of that proud, declarative statement. “Promise!”
To that, Dante just gives another snort, wipes his head, then shoots me a warning look. “I’m telling you, don’t quit that job, Macintyre, or else it’ll be Connor looking for a new roommate next.”
12
Everything comes together perfectly.
Though I couldn’t rent the whole venue, Larry at least allowed me to secure a section by the stage for Lena and her bridesmaids to have a good time. It’s quickly made our first outing look like amateur night. Less than one hour in, all of the ladies are hilariously hammered and throwing more dollar bills at the stage than I can count.
Skylar hangs with me at the bar, watching his sister and her friends go at it from afar. “They just don’t have a gay scene like this where we’re from.”
I’ve got my arm around his waist, holding him close to me, our barstools nearly touching. “Wish you did?”
“Nah. It’s not as much my scene, ironically.”
“What is your scene?”
“How it used to be. Like, at the frat house.”
I wrinkle up my face. “Full of straight dudes, unidentified odors, and piles of dirty laundry?”
He quirks an eyebrow. “Maybe it is. Up until a few nights ago, I had thought you were one of those straight dudes.”
“Touché,” I mumble back, then kiss him. Skylar grins against my mouth. I pull away. “Maybe you and I will start our own frat situation in the future. Except it’ll be just us and our closest friends. And we can make up our own house rules.”
“Or better yet: have none.”
“Is it weird that I still miss you,” I say suddenly to him, “and yet you’re right here?”
Skylar peers into my eyes searchingly.
Just then, Connor swings by the bar to pick up a tray of shots in his purple bootie shorts, sparkly bowtie, and boots. “Hey, Con!” I greet him.
He glances at me distractedly, as if not having noticed I’m here at all. “Oh, hey.” He tries to smile, but the stress is evident on his face.
I can’t take another day of this. “Connor, what is going on with you?”
“It’s nothing, it’s nothing.” He starts to lift the tray onto his shoulder.
I reach a hand to his arm. “Is it Alan?”
Connor sets the tray back down and appears to take a long, slow breath. Then he faces me. “No. It’s Zak.”
I squint. “Zak? Our Zak from across the hall? He’s not even working tonight.”
“I know, and that’s great, because his stalker is here poking around for him.”
“Stalker?”
“Yes! No one’s taking it seriously.” Connor sits on the barstool next to me. “Least of all Larry, who thinks I’m overreacting. Oh. Are you Skylar?” he asks suddenly, his eyes going wide.
Skylar brightens up. “You must be the roomie Brett can’t stop talking about!”
“And you, his old roomie from the frat days!” Connor exclaims cheerily. “Likewise, he won’t shut up about you.”
Skylar laughs. “Nice to meet you, Connor.”
“Your sister is bad-ass! Oh, and she invited me and Alan to the wedding, so it looks like I’ll be asking for Saturday off! They sure know how to party. I’m bringing them their fifth tray of shots!”
“Well, don’t let me stop you!” I tell him with a playful swat at his ass. “By the way, who is this stalker, and does he need his ass kicked?”
“Don’t worry about it. I’ve got my eye on him, and he’s not gonna—” Connor gazes around the dim, crowded room, confused suddenly. “Where’d that fucker go? Shit.” He grabs his tray and hurries off toward the sister’s party without another word, his purple bootie wagging in his tiny shorts.
I peer at Sky, finding his expression lost again. “Something on your mind?”
He gives me a distracted look, then puts on a very tight (and unconvincing) smile. “You’re on my mind. And—maybe if I’m being more honest—that night we shared in your apartment is also dancing around my brain quite a lot.”
I can’t fight the grin on my face—convinced or not that Skylar is actually okay. “I can’t stop thinking about it either. I’ve been bouncing everywhere I go all week. The next morning was amazing, too.”
Skylar bites his lip, as if remembering when we woke up in each other’s arms. Of course, I had actually woken up half an hour earlier than he did, and I just lay there in that bed, enjoying the feeling of having my buddy scooped up in my arms, his back against my chest, my face buried in his neck. We were sweaty and our bodies felt fused, but I didn’t want that moment to end.
But even after it did, the morning only got sweeter and sweeter as I took him out for breakfast at the diner on the corner before getting him a Lyft back to his hotel. The morning seemed to last the length of a hundred of the sweetest mornings, and yet it was gone in a snap.
Sky meets my eyes. “Maybe we can do it again tonight?” he suggests. “I’m pretty sure my sister is planning to take all her ladies back to their hotel where the party will go on into the morning. I hope Emilio isn’t pissed she’s been given an epic party that makes his bachelor party look sad and lame.”
“He can blame me,” I assure him, smiling. “I’m kind of the devil on everyone’s shoulder.”
Skylar chuckles, then kisses me tenderly. That kiss turns into something deeper, and it isn’t long before our hands are all over each other’s bodies.
And whatever troubling thought was clouding Skylar’s face is long forgotten.
“I’ve never actually been to a wedding,” I admit.
Skylar turns to me. We’re lying on my bed.
“Seriously,” I insist. More specifically, we’re on our backs on my bed, totally naked, the bed sheets and pillows somehow kicked onto the floor, and our bodies utterly spent from having driven each other over the edge—twice in a row. “I was invited to a few. But never actually been to one.”
“They’re a lot like funerals,” Skylar tells me. “You have the first part everyone is obligated to endure. Then the second part where everyone lets down their hair and all the truths come out.”
“Sounds promising.” I chuckle. “Never been to a funeral, either.”
“You’re lucky. I don’t like seeing things … end. Whether it’s a life. Or a party. Or a school year. Or a …” Skylar’s mouth scrunches up as he stares up at my ceiling. His eyes change. “You should get that spot inspected.”
I shrug at it. “Probably just a leak. Are you alright?” I prop my head up with a hand, my elbow digging into the mattress. “You’ve seemed … kinda strange ever since the bachelorette party.”
“Seriously. You shouldn’t let problems go.” He squints at me. “Don’t you have roof access? Isn’t this the top apartment?”
“Through Connor’s room, yeah. Fire escape.”
Skylar hops off the bed and yanks on his pair of pants without underwear, then hurriedly kicks on his shoes sans socks. “Come on!” he encourages me as he makes his way out of my room. I sit up, put on my boxers and shoes, then run after him.
Slipping through Connor’s window onto the fire escape, we climb up to the roof. The cool night air sweeps over our shirtless bodies like a silken blanket as Skylar inspects the smooth tar roofing surface roughly over my bedroom, then nods with a discovery. “Yep, thought so. I’m pretty sure I can see a crack here. Pinhole.”
“Dante’s usually good at keeping up with the maintenance of this building,” I say automatically. “His dad gave him the place to run on his own. I think if there was a hole, even a pinhole, he’d—”
“My dad’s in construction. I see these things.”
Oh, I’d forgotten. “Well, still, my bedroom never actually leaks. Maybe it’s evidence of an old leak? I don’t see what the issue is.”
“The issue,” Skylar tells me, crouched by the alleged tiny pinhole I still don’t quite see, “is that you’ve gotta be proactive with these things. You don’t want to wake up one day with water dripping on your nose while you’re asleep, do you?”
I stare at him. “Is this when I answer, ‘No, Daddy’ …?”
Skylar’s brow furrows. “I’m being serious.”
“So am I. What’s with the sudden lecture? You don’t think I’m proactive enough?”
“I just …” He presses his lips shut and glares down at the roof and its rough, uneven texture.
I come toward him. “Is this the real issue?”
He pushes himself up to his feet. “What do you mean ‘real issue’ …?”
“Is there some problem I’m not addressing? I mean, other than some imaginary pinhole. You didn’t really address my question from before … from the party.”
“It’s not imaginary. And … what question?”
“Why you seemed so distant.”
Skylar gives me a frustrated look, then turns and walks away to the edge of the building where he stares out at the world pensively, for a moment looking like some jeaned, shirtless superhero, his messy hair flapping dramatically in the wind.
“It’s because I am distant,” he finally answers.
I come up to his side. “Huh?”
“Literally. Distant. Far away.” Skylar crouches by the four-foot concrete parapet lining the roof and rests his hands on it, staring down below at the flashing neon high-heel sign of Dames & Dudes. “I live so many hours away, Brett. I’m … distant.”
“So?”
He stares up at me incredulously. “So?? What are we going to do after Saturday when the big day is over and it’s time for me to go home? What am I supposed to do when I want to hang with you again? Or … do more?” he adds, a touch quieter, as his doe eyes drop to my chest.
After several attempts at forming a sentence, I realize rather disappointingly that I don’t have an answer to give him. Defeated, I crouch down right next to him, our knees gently touching. “I guess I honestly haven’t given it much thought.”
“See? You’re not proactive. You just … leap in however you want with no regard to consequence.” Sky looks away. “You’ve always been like this.”
“Have I?”
“Yeah. Didn’t you notice how I was freshman year, when you first met me? I’m not a guy who ‘leaps headfirst’. I plan. I think of the future. You kinda have to, when you code like I do. But you?” He scoffs, unable to look at me. “You get bored and you drop out of college. That’s what you do.”
“I didn’t drop out because I was bored.”
“It doesn’t even matter the reason, because it doesn’t change the fact: You left. I don’t think you gave two thoughts to how that decision of yours affected so many. Not just me. You left a gaping hole in the fraternity. It wasn’t the same afterwards. It lost its fun. It had no soul …” He sighs. “I even considered leaving the frat right then. I … couldn’t bear to be a part of it without you. There were many times I would lie to the other brothers and sleep in another friend’s dorm room just because I couldn’t stand being in the house. I’d even go all the way home on weekends sometimes.” He looks down at his hands. “I think you took more than just that book of confessions with you, Brett.”
His words are like a surprise kick to the balls.
The kind you feel up in your throat.
“Skylar …” I make a move to take his hand, then hold back, thinking twice about it. “I know it might seem like I … don’t take responsibility for anything. But I’m going to prove to you that that’s not who I am.”
“I don’t need you to prove anything to me.”
I meet his eyes. I’m still feeling the kick to the balls, by the way. “What do you need, then?”
He eyes me. “I just need you to fix this fucking hole before it floods your apartment someday.”
A moment passes where the cars below do all the talking in the form of horns, rumbling engines, and distant sirens. Even on a Thursday at almost three in the morning, the city is loud and alive.
I notice him shivering suddenly, a chill catching him by surprise. I throw an arm over his back and hug his crouched body against mine, rubbing him.
His attitude changes. “Or maybe you’re right.”
“About what?”
“Leaving the hole alone. It not being a big deal. Me making an issue out of … out of nothing.”
I wrinkle my face in thought. Turning everything into a metaphor isn’t really in my mental skillset. “Are we still talking about an actual leak? … Or us?”
Skylar doesn’t answer my question.
Instead, he turns and kisses me.
His kiss is desperate and hungry. I topple over, falling onto my back—Ouch. Skylar crawls right over me, devastating me with his lips. Our bare chests press together. In the cool night air, we make heat as we engage in round three of exploring our bodies, not caring about the discomfort of the cooled tar roof beneath us as he pulls down my boxers.
I feel his lips around my cock, which makes me moan so loud, I’m certain everyone in Mayville hears me—asleep, awake, or otherwise. I take a big handful of his soft hair as he consumes me whole, working me right up to the edge one more time.
With our every fevered taste of each other, the reality of this last weekend together becomes more and more apparent. He’s savoring his last bit of me because he knows this is going to end soon, and we know how he hates when things end. He won’t say it. I won’t say it. But perhaps even from the first instant I heard he was coming into town, I already knew I wouldn’t be able to get enough of Skylar before it was t
ime for him to head back home.
I don’t care about a pinhole in my ceiling. I want this boy to flood right in. Every bit of him. I want to drown in my perfect, precious Skylar.
14
The wedding could not go better. Lena is a gorgeous and pristine vision in white with subtle lilac accents. Emilio is a handsome Latino charmer in a tux. The room is full of tears of happiness—unmatched by the Maid of Honor Maria, of course, who is downright sobbing—when the young couple at last say the words: “I do.”
Sitting with Connor and his boyfriend Alan, I keep sneaking glances at the front row where Sky is with his parents. He hasn’t stopped smiling, and his eyes are glistening with tears of joy for his sister.
I bite my lip as I watch, anguished somehow.
Is it possible to be both floatingly happy and crushingly sad at the same time?
“He really is a cutie,” remarks Alan later at the reception, sparkles in his warm eyes.
The three of us are at a table in the back of the room. You know, the one full of plates of half-eaten cake and a saucer of strawberry stems, since all of the chocolate-dipped strawberries (Sky’s favorite, in fact) have been eaten. At the end of the dance floor stands the DJ I hooked them up with, who spins his thumping tunes, to which it appears Emilio’s spritely grandparents are getting down and dirty together, much to the crowd’s riotous and joyful entertainment—and his parents’ clear mortification.
“Who’s a cutie?” I mutter distractedly.
“Your guy Skylar.” Alan takes a sip of wine. “I can definitely see why you’re into him. He’s kinda like the cute boy-next-door mixed with the class clown. And yet he’s also somehow the perfect guy you want to take home to Mom and Dad.”
“Oh, they met him back in the day,” I tell him. “And yes, they’re in love. He’s totally Mom-and-Dad-approved.” I let out a bitter chuckle. “If only they had realized I could’ve brought him home as my boyfriend and not just my ‘college buddy’.”