A More Perfect Union

by J. Scott Coatsworth

  “What?” He grinned even wider. “You know you liked it. You felt it too. I felt you feel it.” Because they’d kissed two times. The bottle demanded it twice. The second time Dalton’s mouth had lingered on his just a little bit. He was sure Dalton had shivered.

  Dalton shook his head. “No.”

  Lucas nodded hard. “Yes. Yes, you did.”

  Dalton shook his head again. “No.”

  Dalton’s denial was pissing him off. “Oh yes, you did,” he said defiantly. “You’re going to kiss me again too. Not only that, but one of these days you are going to marry me, Dalton Churchill.”

  “No!” shouted Dalton.

  And then he turned and ran down the sidewalk.

  Lucas sighed.

  There was a part of him that hurt.

  But there was a part of him that knew he was right.

  Dalton had liked kissing him. He had felt it.

  And one of these days—legal or not—he was going to marry Dalton. If it was the last thing he ever did.

  Lucas went home. He’d forgotten all about his worries about getting in trouble.

  3

  NOBODY AT school said anything about the kissing. At least the boy-boy kissing. Junior high started without a hitch for Lucas and continued without Dalton’s macho reputation being damaged in any way.

  Everything was status quo.

  Dalton was still skittish around Lucas for a while, and that hurt. But at least once Dalton’s fears were alleviated, he started hanging around Lucas again. For a while Lucas thought Dalton might end their lifelong friendship, worried that perhaps Dalton thought hanging with the “gay kid” would be bad for his reputation.

  After all, Diego snickered with friends when they passed Lucas in the hall. Or ignored him altogether. Or sometimes they would roll their eyes with great exaggeration and say, “Seventh graders!” with great disdain. Lucas thought it was hilarious (although he didn’t voice that thought). As if a one-year difference in age gave them great maturity and wisdom.

  As it turned out, worry about a gay rumor was needless. Lucas wasn’t ashamed and had been prepared for it, but nothing happened. It surprised him. He thought gay was tattooed on his forehead.

  Lucas would study himself in the mirror—with his near-perfect skin (he never drank soda or ate so much as a fun-size Snickers bar), the huge amount of gel he used to give himself the perfect JC/Joey Fatone from *NSYNC hairstyle, his surprising long lashes and how it made him look like he was wearing both eyeliner and mascara (he wasn’t), his ludicrously Disney-animation-character-sized brown eyes—and he’d think, “God, I look so gay!”

  But not one whisper.

  If he’d wanted a girlfriend, he could have had his pick of at least a dozen girls. Girls told him he was pretty all the time. Pretty!

  He longed for a rugged face and body like Dalton’s. Dalton was getting pubic hair. (He’d seen him in the shower room at school—it was his first time seeing Dalton naked since they’d taken a bath together in second grade and… wow-wow-wow!)

  How Lucas had gotten to be twelve without anyone calling him a faggot, he couldn’t guess. But he began to suspect a big part of that was due to Samantha—or Sam, as she liked to be called.

  Interestingly enough they struck up a friendship after the great spin-the-bottle debacle. She’d walked up to him during lunch one day at school—he was sitting all alone—and asked if she could sit next to him, and when he nodded, she sat down.

  “You liked kissing Dalton, didn’t you?” she asked without preamble.

  Then before his filters could kick in, the words came out of his mouth as if they’d been fired from a cannon. “Oh God, yes!”

  She nodded. “I know, because when we kissed, I might as well have been kissing a mannequin. I felt the same way. But oh my God! When I kissed Julie? Explosions! Waves crashing on the beach like that old stupid movie my mom loves. From Here to Infinity or some such thing.” She shivered. “Kissing the boys was… sorta gross. Sorry.” She did something with her mouth that was a strange combination of a smirk and a sneer. “Nothing against you, Lucas.”

  He grinned. “No. I get it.”

  “But kissing Julie? Oh. My. God. My insides turned to jelly.”

  Lucas grinned even more. “I get that too. But about Dalton—not Julie.”

  Sam nodded vigorously. But then she frowned. Let out a long drawn-out sigh. “It’s too bad neither one of our wet dreams is dreaming about us,” Sam stated flatly.

  “Oh no, Sam,” Lucas said, shaking his head emphatically. “You don’t understand. Dalton is going to realize he loves me one day.”

  She raised her eyebrows.

  He narrowed his.

  “Don’t say it, Sam. I know what I know. He’s the one. And I won’t hear you say anything to squash my dream. Got it?”

  Sam burst into laughter. “I got it! And if there is anything I can do to help, let me know, okay?”

  From such a beginning, a friendship was forged.

  After that they hung out more and more. It seemed Dalton felt funny about hanging out with a seventh grader at school, but Sam had no such compunctions. She was happy to hang out when Dalton was busy—or grounded—and she often tagged along when they went to see a movie. And of course Dalton had no interest in going to the mall with her and shopping for the things she wanted to shop for, so that was Lucas and Sam alone, and soon everyone assumed they were dating—if what junior high school kids did was called dating. The only trouble had been the fact that she was a year older than he was, and some kids didn’t think that was cool.

  Sam couldn’t care less. She had quite suddenly dropped the bleached-blonde look and dyed her hair so black it looked wet. She wore tons of black eyeliner and took to using a foundation that made her so pale she looked dead. In time she was a full-fledged goth. What did she care about the no-no’s of dating a boy a year younger?

  Even Dalton thought they were boyfriend and girlfriend, no matter how much Lucas guaranteed him otherwise.

  “You’re the only one for me,” he would say, and Dalton would get cross and remind him again and again that they weren’t “fags,” no matter how many times Lucas told him that he was.

  “You can’t know you’re gay when you’re twelve!”

  “Who told you that?” Lucas asked with a laugh.

  “My mother.”

  Lucas looked at his hero, dumbfounded. His mother? “Why were you talking to her about something like that?” Lucas wanted to know.

  “After Diego’s party. I told her you said you were gay.” Dalton glared at him and put a hand on his hip.

  Lucas didn’t tell Dalton how gay he looked doing that.

  “And she said that at our age we’re this raging cauldron of emotions and feelings and hormones and stuff. That we don’t know what we want, and it’s normal for boys to get crushes on other boys.”

  Lucas laughed. “We’re a cauldron? Did she really say cauldron?”

  “Yes!” Dalton’s other hand joined his other hip (and Lucas didn’t mention how gay that looked either). “She said we’re all mixed up, and we don’t know anything, and we get horny and do stuff because we can’t do it with girls. And she said that was a good thing so we’re not getting some girl pregnant!”

  Lucas felt his face flush. He had missed for just a second what “stuff” meant, but when Dalton added the part about not getting a girl pregnant, he realized what his mother was talking about. The very thought of doing stuff with Dalton turned him into a cauldron of emotions and hormones.

  “She said you’d get interested in girls soon enough, and then all this silliness would stop.”

  But Lucas knew otherwise. He didn’t know how he knew, he just did—as sure as a compass pointed north.

  “They don’t understand,” said Sam later. “Straight people like what they like so much, they can’t imagine anyone liking anything else.”

  That was the night Sam told Lucas she had been crying her eyes out because she had finally told Jul
ie how she felt. Julie had not only let Sam know she didn’t feel the same way, but that she thought the whole idea was disgusting.

  “She said I was gross,” Sam said and cried on Lucas’s shoulder—literally.

  Lucas could only hug her and tell her that he didn’t think she was gross and that he could understand how she felt. Dalton thought boy-boy stuff was pretty gross too.

  Which made what happened soon after all the more surprising.

  1999

  1

  THE NEXT spring, Diego—he who had been ignoring or snickering at Lucas for months—invited him and Dalton to a slumber party.

  “He wants me to come?” Lucas asked, incredulous.

  “Yup,” Dalton assured him.

  “Wow,” he said.

  “But he doesn’t want you to broadcast it, okay?”

  Lucas looked at Dalton, hurt.

  “You have to understand,” Dalton explained, fidgeting, which Lucas thought was odd. “Diego is one of the most popular kids in school. He has a reputation. You’re…. Well…. You’re just too….”

  “What?” Lucas asked. Too gay?

  “Girly,” Dalton said, and then at least he had the class to flinch.

  “Girly?” Lucas asked, surprised. He slumped. Girly? He’d never thought of himself that way. Geeky, maybe. He did think he looked gay. But a girl? “You don’t think that, do you, Dalton?”

  Dalton quite suddenly looked miserable, and Lucas’s heart sank. He does. Lucas was prepared to be called gay or faggot or fairy. But he’d never considered himself girly.

  “Well, you’re certainly not a stud,” Dalton said.

  “And you are?” cried Lucas and gritted his teeth so he wouldn’t. How would that look?

  He knew the answer, of course. Yes. Dalton was a stud. He was as manly a man as a thirteen-year-old could be. Not only was Dalton getting pubic hair, his legs were starting to get hairy, and so were his armpits. Lucas would find himself staring at Dalton’s legs when he was wearing shorts, gazing at his pits when Dalton’s arms were raised. The hair fascinated Lucas, and he found he longed to touch it. To see if it was as soft as it looked. But it was more than that. Dalton was starting to get more muscular, his chest was getting broader, his biceps bigger. Yes. A stud. Dalton really was turning into a man. It was very exciting and made Lucas’s tummy all fluttery and filled with apprehension.

  “Oh, Lucas,” Dalton said, and the look on his face hurt Lucas all the more. It was pity. And the last thing Lucas wanted Dalton to do was pity him.

  “Well, if I’m girly, then why does he want me sleeping over?”

  Dalton looked away. Cleared his throat. “He likes you, Lucas. He just doesn’t want other people to know he likes you.”

  The words hurt. They physically hurt. “Do you feel like that, Dalton?” Like me but don’t want people to know you like me?

  Dalton looked back at him, and then to Lucas’s relief, a steely expression came to his face. “No,” he stated firmly. “You’re my best friend.”

  His best friend! Lucas’s heart leapt.

  “I don’t give a shit what people think about it either.”

  Lucas laughed. Joy filled him. At last! What had changed? “Thanks, Dalton.”

  “You got it, tiger!”

  Tiger?

  Lucas’s heart leapt again.

  2

  THEY WENT skinny-dipping as soon as Diego’s parents left for the evening, making them promise to be good and not to get into the liquor cabinet—

  “I’ve taken stock,” Diego’s father had said, “and I’ll know if anything’s missing!”

  —and not to have any girls over.

  Fat chance of that.

  Lucas hadn’t expected the pool to be open. Sure, it was spring, and the temperatures had been in the seventies for some weeks, but he hadn’t been prepared, hadn’t brought his trunks. But then Diego announced that no bathing suits were allowed in the pool tonight—this was guys only after all—solving that problem, but Lucas became so anxious he thought his heart would explode.

  He hadn’t seen Dalton naked except for that mere glimpse in the shower room at school, and now that he could really look (although surreptitiously at first), what Lucas saw that evening was amazing. Dalton had gotten so… big. And he was so hairy down there. Sure, it was dark out, but the lights coming up from the pool were enough for Lucas to see.

  Lucas could not ever remember being so stimulated.

  He’d been very shy to take off his clothes in front of the two older boys. But then Dalton smiled at him so warmly when he finally stood naked before them, and Diego looked at him in a way that made him begin to get hard. That made him seriously blush until he saw the same thing was happening to them.

  He wasn’t as big as them down there, but then Diego wasn’t as big as Dalton either—a fact that made Lucas immensely proud of Dalton. That was the way it should be. Diego also had foreskin, which Lucas had never seen in real life, and he thought it made Diego’s penis look kind of funny, like an elephant trunk or something.

  But then the time for checking each other out was over—and Lucas somehow knew they were all doing the same thing, it wasn’t just him—Diego let out a holler and dove into the water.

  It was wonderful. The pool was heated, so even though there was a chilly bite to the air, it didn’t bother them. They swam, and Lucas found it exhilarating to be swimming without a stitch of clothing on—vulnerable and yet powerful at the same time. So freeing. He wasn’t sure why. Shouldn’t it be like taking a bath? But it wasn’t.

  Soon they were laughing and splashing each other and playing grab ass, and Diego even grabbed him somewhere else, and Lucas’s heart had nearly leapt from his throat.

  A boy! Had touched his penis! God. If only Dalton would touch him there! He wished he had the nerve to touch Dalton there. But of course he didn’t.

  Then when it was time to get out—they were all turning into big human prunes—because it had gotten even chillier, they scrambled across the deck and through the sliding doors into the family room—the very same room where a game of spin the bottle had once been played. After drying off with huge, obviously expensive, and luxurious towels, Diego and Dalton made no move to get dressed. They simply sprawled casually on the love seat and the couch as if they lay around naked together all the time.

  God! Maybe they did!

  Lucas found he didn’t like the idea.

  Diego jumped up, turned on his parents’ big stereo system, and said he would get them all something to drink, and Lucas worried it would be vanilla vodka again, but luckily it was just some Pepsis.

  After a bit Lucas got over his worry about sitting around without any clothes on—stopped worrying that Diego and Dalton were comparing him to themselves (and that he didn’t measure up) and in no time found it began to feel quite natural to be naked.

  They started talking about the normal things boys talked about.

  Sports—which Lucas cared little for but pretended he did.

  Cars—Diego liked Camaros, but Dalton loved Mustangs—he was a Ford man all the way.

  Music—Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” (which as far as Lucas was concerned was the only good thing about the movie Armageddon) was playing on the stereo, and all thought it was a hot song, even if it wasn’t as cool as the Run DMC version of “Walk This Way.” Lucas was disappointed that Diego gave the thumbs-down on Savage Garden’s “Truly, Madly, Deeply.” But then Lucas had a personal reason for liking that one—it made him think of Dalton. Diego did like “You’re Still the One” even if it was country because Shania Twain was a fox. And then they all sang along with Will Smith’s “Gettin’ Jiggy Wit It,” which was fun and somehow… well… sexy. Because Lucas had a deep suspicion that getting jiggy wasn’t only about dancing.

  Movies—Diego loved Armageddon, but Lucas preferred Deep Impact and was happy as could be when Dalton agreed.

  Television—they all agreed that Bart on The Simpsons was too funny�
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  “Eat my shorts!” cried Diego.

  “Ay caramba!” exclaimed Dalton.

  “Don’t have a cow, man!” Lucas added in his best imitation of Bart (and he was thrilled when everyone roared with laughter).

  —and The Sopranos was really cool (and Lucas got a clue and didn’t mention how much he liked Touched by an Angel or Buffy the Vampire Slayer).

  Then somehow the subject changed to girls.

  Because by then Diego had brought up Buffy himself and couldn’t stop talking about how much Sarah Michelle Gellar turned him on and how he would like to stick her with his stake, and he thrust his crotch out and wiggled his penis.

  “You’re not going to stick anybody with it floppin’ around like that,” Dalton observed.

  “Don’t worry,” Diego informed him. “I can make it plenty hard.”

  Lucas flushed at that. Flopping penises and talk about getting it hard struck something deep, deep inside, and anxiousness swept over him again.

  Dalton said that it was Jennifer Anniston that got him hard, and then they looked at Lucas and he blurted, “Gillian Anderson,” because he couldn’t say David Duchovny, of course, even though Lucas got all excited whenever the actor for X-Files smiled.

  “Oh, yeah!” Diego said. “That red hair! And those boobs!” He held his hands cupped out in front of him as if the actress had breasts bigger than Dolly Parton’s. “I wonder if her hair down there”—he pointed at his own pubic hair—“is as red as up here?” And then he was fluffing a nonexistent bouffant.

  And how gay did that look?

  That’s when they started talking about “real” chicks. Diego asked Dalton about someone named Rebecca, and Dalton said, “Ah, she’s okay.” And Diego said, “Didn’t you take her to Dairy Queen last week?” and Lucas couldn’t say anything—his mouth simply fell open when Dalton replied that yes he had, but it had been no big deal.

  Rebecca? Lucas closed his mouth quickly. Who was Rebecca, and why hadn’t he heard about her before?

  Dalton gave him a guilty look.