Five Dares

by Eli Easton

  Why wouldn’t I be in love with him?

  Nope. I didn’t want Andy to know I was bisexual. That would reveal a whole murky hidden pool of stuff I couldn’t bear for him to know about. That stuff was my secret pain or buried sin or whatever, and I was taking it to the grave. Also, there was no way him knowing wouldn’t change our friendship. Not that Andy would ditch me immediately. But. Maybe the Andy and Jake Show would slowly dissolve, eaten away by awkwardness. It was true, we were going to be apart soon anyway. But that made me even more determined to keep things unchanged between us for as long as possible. I’d held my secrets for this long. I wanted to go out with honor.

  Even more important than my honor was my sanity. I’d struggled with my feelings for years. I’d put myself through so much torture in the past. I’d finally gotten to a good place with it. I was fine now. I’d compartmentalized. I’d moved on. We were still friends, best friends, but I had emotional distance these days. I had a life full of other things. I didn’t pine for Andy anymore.

  Now he wanted to suck each other off? Because it was an easy mechanical solution to a logistical problem? No. No way. I’d never be able to keep my past feelings a secret if we did that. Not to mention the fact that getting my hands—or mouth—on Andy for real would probably trigger another four to five years of unrequited hell. I was like an addict who’d finally gotten clean. I wasn’t going to do that to myself again.

  Even if the idea of being sexual with Andy in the real world—like, it actually happening—was unbearably tempting. Even though I’d never reneged on a dare. I wasn’t doing this.

  Goddamn it, Andy. I wanted to hate him. I really did.

  Andy

  So. That’d been a massive fuckup. Jake barely talked to me for the rest of the day. He took a long walk without asking if I wanted to go along. And when he got back, he stayed glued to his Kindle.

  We didn’t talk about it. I didn’t know what else to say. Seemed like any way I tried to minimize it, play it off as no big deal, would only make it a bigger deal. I couldn’t see why Jake was so upset in the first place. All he had to do was say no. I knew for a fact he wasn’t as inexperienced as he was pretending to be. Why was he acting so pissed off?

  It frustrated me. And it stung too. So we both just didn’t talk about it. We moved around each other in the microcosm of the cottage and pretended nothing was wrong.

  I should never have suggested it, but it’d seemed like the perfect opportunity to figure some things out. Things that had been bothering me for a long time. See, the real problem began with Kevin.

  It happened last year, the fall semester of our junior year. One weekend in October, I had to go home to Boston because it was my mom’s birthday. She was being honored by some professional women’s association, and she wanted me and my dad at the awards dinner.

  My mom’s family was Jewish, though non-practicing. My dad was raised Protestant or something like that, but he wasn’t religious now. Mom’s a lawyer, crazy smart. She worked for a big law firm in Boston doing corporate law, but her passion was her pro bono stuff, usually cases involving women—sexual harassment, wrongful termination, pregnant women’s rights in prison, whatever. She worked all the time. When I’d been younger, I’d resented it. I’d felt as though my mom was so focused on helping total strangers that she didn’t have time for her own kid. Sometimes I’d thought that if I had been born a girl, it would have been different. My mom was so into women’s issues. But because I was a boy, and not abused or in prison, I didn’t register to her. It was fucked up, I knew. I didn’t really think that anymore. I guessed she was just into what she was into.

  Anyway, that weekend, I woke up Sunday morning after her awards dinner and just couldn’t hang around at home anymore. I was in the car by 7 a.m. to drive the four hours back to campus. Jake wasn’t expecting me back so early. When I tried to go into our dorm room, I found the door locked. I figured Jake had gone somewhere and locked the door, so I dug out my key.

  “Who is it?” I heard Jake call from inside the room.

  “It’s me, genius. Open the door.”

  “Hang on.”

  I heard banging and whispers. I leaned against the wall and waited, grinning. So Jake had picked up a girl. Nice. He’d been studying too hard. There was only one other time I’d been cast out of the room by the proverbial sock on the door—and that was because of Jeanette, a Jake girlfriend that had lasted a few months our freshman year.

  But when the door opened, Jake walked out with his coat on, and following him was a guy.

  “Hey,” Jake said casually, slinging his backpack over his shoulder. “You’re back early.”

  “Yeah. Um. Decided to get back.” I glanced at the guy. I’d never seen him before. He had longish dark hair, a bit of acne, pale-blue eyes. He was a hipster type. He wore a navy sweater and jeans. There was a humorous look in his eyes as he stared at me, like he thought something was funny.

  “Oh, um, Kevin, this is my roommate, Andy. Andy, this is Kevin. He’s in comp sci too.”

  “Hey, Kevin,” I said.

  “Hey, Andy.” Kevin bit his lips like he was trying not to smile. He looked down at the floor, his lips twisting wryly.

  I gave Jake a look—What the hell is going on? He ignored it, but he had a manic glint in his eye and a red blotch on his neck like he was nervous. “We were just heading to the library to study. See ya.” They left.

  I went into the room, shaking my head.

  Jake’s bed had been hastily made. The room smelled like sex. Like serious come-smell. I opened a window. I grunted a huh, dropped my bag, and sat on my bed, thinking about it.

  Had Jake really been having sex with a guy? Minutes ago? In this very room? It sure looked and smelled that way.

  Was Jake gay? If so, why had he never told me?

  But the more I thought about it, the more I had a hard time believing that. I’d seen Jake with girls. I’d seen Jake making out with girls. We’d traded porn links. I knew about the folder he had on his hard drive with pictures of Jaclyn Swedberg, a brunette-and-brainy Playboy Playmate. I’d witnessed his legit crush on May Alderson our senior year. I was ninety-nine percent sure all of that hadn’t been faked.

  So not totally gay, then. Was he just experimenting? Had he decided to try gay sex for the hell of it? Or was he bi or pan or something I didn’t even have a term for?

  I had no clue. Later that night, when Jake got back, I asked him about Kevin. He gave me a long-winded explanation about them being in his components class together and how they were working on a project. Since he was obviously going out of his way not to admit it—hey, Andy, I had sex with that guy—I let it go.

  Jake never brought Kevin back to our room again. They went . . . somewhere. Jake admitted he was going out to “study with Kevin,” avoiding my eyes when he said it. A few times he stayed out all night, claiming he’d slept on Kevin’s couch. And I never said, “So how is the gay sex, then, Jakey?”

  I didn’t understand, though. Why Kevin? What was so special about him? And why wouldn’t Jake tell me? It bugged me. It bugged the shit out of me. It got to the point where any time Jake said he was going to study with Kevin, I wanted to hit something. Jake’s girlfriends had never felt threatening to me, but Kevin did. He could be everything to Jake—friend and bed bunny, lover and someone to hang out with. He could give Jake something I couldn’t, and I didn’t like it.

  I wasn’t sorry when, about a month later, Jake casually mentioned they weren’t hanging out anymore. I literally went into the hall and did a little victory jump and high five. I wasn’t proud of it.

  Ever since then, things had gotten more and more twisted up in my head. It was like that old story about opening Pandora’s box and not being able to put the stuff back inside and close the lid again. For as long as I could remember, I would sometimes look at Jake, in some random moment, like in the hall in high school when he was leaning down to get a drink of water from the fountain, and I’d have a little reaction
in my belly and, farther down, that little thrill. And I’d be like, Wtf, man. That’s Jake!

  As the years went by, I wrote it off as a horny-guy thing. Or maybe a cross-wiring thing because we were so close. There was no one I was closer to than Jake, and no person I liked as much, not even the girls I dated. Especially not the girls I dated. So I figured it was natural to feel “a little bit of something” like that, even though that wasn’t what I really wanted. It was like getting an urge to eat a yummy-looking piece of cake, even if you weren’t hungry, even if you didn’t like cake all that much.

  Because even if I liked cake—even if I loved it, and I didn’t—cake was bad for me. I wasn’t gay, and I didn’t want to be. I liked girls. My future life made way more sense with a house and a wife and kids and all of that. And, besides, Jake had showed no interest in that either when we’d been in high school. He liked girls. And that was that.

  Until Kevin. The thing with Kevin had flicked some switch in my brain, opened up new possibilities. When Jake came back from the showers and was standing there looking through his closet wearing a towel, or when he was asleep on his bed with the covers off wearing only briefs, I’d look at him and think, He had sex with a guy. My imagination would start trying to picture it. Jake with a guy. Jake naked. Jake having sex—with another hard body.

  A few months later, after the Kevin thing, Jake started dating Kimmy, a cute, smart-mouthed Asian girl who was a journalism major. He was obviously really into her, at least until she transferred to London and they decided not to do the long-distance thing.

  So.

  I’d thought I’d get over the whole Kevin thing. I hadn’t. I still thought about it—about Jake and Kevin. About Jake and guys.

  About Jake and me.

  If he was bisexual, why had he never tried it on with me? Hell, we’d never even wanked in the same room, nothing like the stories some guys told. We didn’t even really talk about sex that much. If I so much as mentioned jerking off, Jake always got quiet and didn’t reply, like he was uncomfortable. I figured he was a bit of a prude. It made sense—Jake was so serious about things.

  Now here we were, stuck together for the summer. All summer. Our last summer. Our last summer ever.

  Why did I suggest the mutual-blowjobs thing? It absolutely made sense, problem-solving wise. And once I’d thought about it, I liked the idea more and more. Because it was a chance—a chance to try it out, sex with Jake, without it being a huge deal. I’d never experimented with a guy. What if I really wasn’t into dick? What if I hated it? It was like taking your first bite of yogurt, you know? I didn’t want to start something with Jake and then not be able to do it, hurt his feelings or piss him off. If we did it like this, as a mechanical solution to a problem, it would be easy to shrug it off as a short-term thing if I couldn’t do it.

  Besides, it was the last chance. If it didn’t happen this summer, it never would. And that idea made me feel a little wild. I was getting that itchy urge inside me, the one that insisted I do something risky, cross a line, cross a dozen.

  But, apparently, even when I handed my dick to Jake on a silver platter, he didn’t want me. He’d wanted Kevin, but not me.

  Okay. At least now I knew.

  Andy

  I woke up Monday morning hard as an iron post, the kind they put up in Boston to make sure cars didn’t enter pedestrian zones. I’d been dreaming about sex, though I couldn’t remember the details. God damn, but I had to get off. I was becoming seriously irritable, especially being around Jake all the time. He could have ended this so easily, not only the physical torment itself, but the questions that were starting to drive me crazy. And yet he hadn’t even acknowledged I’d suggested we get each other off since he’d first walked away on Friday morning.

  Fine! I’d figure out another way to do it, then.

  I went into the bathroom. It was too difficult to turn the lock on the door and, anyway, if Jake walked in on me, that was his problem. I couldn’t even piss with my aching hard-on, and I was so done with this. The sink in the bathroom was free-standing and had a curved porcelain edge. It was at the right height that I figured I might be able to rub off against it. Of course, cold porcelain wasn’t exactly conducive to comfort. I bent over and grasped a towel off the rack with my teeth. I tried to drape it over the basin. What I wanted was a clean double fold so there would be two thickness of terrycloth between me and the porcelain. But the towel dropped twice, forcing me to get onto my knees to pick it back up in my teeth and use my elbows to get back on my feet. Then I could only get a single layer of the towel in place, despite spending ages trying to fold it with my elbows.

  Finally I gave up and just tried to rub off against it, but the surface was still too hard. And it was bunched up all wrong, making uncomfortable folds. I got more and more pissed, still hard as a rock and in desperate need. I found a spot on the towel that wasn’t too uncomfortable, and was just starting to rut in earnest when I heard the door and voices in the main room. Walter’s voice. I’d apparently slept right through Emily’s visit, and now Walter had arrived for our morning shower and bandage change.

  I swore a loud, hearty motherfucker and let the towel drop to the floor. I scooted my gym shorts back up against the bathroom wall, having to work it over my woodie. Whatever. I didn’t care. My T-shirt was long enough to mostly cover it. I used the back of one bandaged hand and my knee to turn the bathroom doorknob and stomped out.

  Walter and Jake were in the living room, talking. Walter gave me a nod, though he didn’t smile or say hello. He’d probably heard me cursing. I glared at the two of them and went into the kitchen.

  Emily had left me a large coffee travel mug on the counter with a straw in it. I took a sip. It was cold. I thunked my head against the fridge, breathing hard.

  I was so done. Normally, I could laugh about it or take it as a challenge, but not this morning. I was frustrated and horny and resentful.

  “Andy?” Jake came up behind me, his voice quiet. I heard the sink in the bathroom turn on. Walter was in there setting up for our showers. As if I’d let him near me with this fucking hard-on.

  I growled, not lifting my head from the fridge. “What do you want, Jake?”

  “What’s the matter?”

  I heard the worry in Jake’s voice. He honestly didn’t know? “My coffee is cold, my dick is hard, and I want to punch something. Any more questions?”

  There was a smirk in Jake’s voice. “So your coffee is frigid and your dick is rigid? I hate when that happens.”

  I smiled despite myself, though with my head on the fridge, I didn’t think he could see it. But at the same time, part of me wanted to tell him to fuck off. The way he’d told me to. But I didn’t. Jake wasn’t doing anything wrong. He had every right to say no to my little plan. In fact, he was probably smart to say no. I was the fucked-up one. Why did I want this so much?

  I sighed and slumped even more against the fridge, feeling defeated.

  Behind me, I actually heard a gulp as Jake swallowed. “Hey, listen . . . I’ll do it.” His voice was low and gravelly, as if he didn’t want Walter to hear.

  I stood there, not saying anything. But my heart started pounding harder. Did he mean it?

  “You said no,” I finally managed. “If you don’t want to do it, you shouldn’t.”

  “I just said I would.”

  “Maybe now I don’t want to,” I argued, some gremlin inside me still hurt that he’d said no in the first place.

  “Don’t be such an emo!” Jake huffed. “Like you said, it’s an expedient way to get off. It’s not a big deal.”

  Oh thank God. My woodie had finally been starting to go down, but now it perked up again at the idea of getting some action. A warm mouth. Jake’s mouth. Oh God. “Okay,” I said breathlessly. “When?”

  Jake snorted. “Eager much? We’ll have to wait until Walter leaves, obviously.”

  That soon? Oh God. “Okay. After Walter leaves.”

  “Want me to ask him
to nuke your coffee before I get in the shower?”

  “Yeah. That’d be great. Thanks.”

  Jake walked away.

  How did he manage to sound so cool about it? What had changed his mind?

  Holy shit. Jake and I had just agreed to get naked together and suck each other off.

  October 2011 - Eleventh Grade

  Jake

  “Dare me to do it,” Andy slurred, waving around his Solo cup.

  I narrowed my eyes and looked him up and down, as if considering it. I shook my head. “Nah, bro. You’re drunk. You don’t wanna be doing that right now.”

  “I’m fine!” Andy took a wobbly stumble toward me. “I have the skateboard in m’car. Dare me!”

  There was a middle school football game in progress across the parking lot, but no one in our group was paying attention to it. We were all hanging out and drinking until the real Friday-night parties began. It was already dark, being around 7 p.m. in October, which made our drinking less obvious. Not that any teachers were around to see it.

  My girlfriend, Denise, hugged my arm. She didn’t look happy. “No way, Andy. It’s a totally stupid idea to skateboard off the roof of the school, even if it were daytime, even if you weren’t drunk! That’s whacked.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, kissing her cheek. “Forget it. Just chill out and have fun.”

  “No! I can do it! I bet anyone thirty bucks I can. Anyone?” Andy spun in a slow circle, pointing to our friends. “Ray? Nate? Thirty bucks. Come on.”

  Ray shrugged. Nate and a couple of other guys shook their heads.

  “No betting! No one bets. He’ll break a leg. Or his neck.” I spoke lazily, like I didn’t really think he’d do it. I pretended to be focused on Denise. It wasn’t a hardship. She was a cutie, five foot three, dark hair and eyes, and a sassy mouth. I liked her.