“What’re you gonna do about it?” I asked. “My shirt.”
“I live around the block. We could, uhm . . . put your clothes in the wash.”
“Let’s go,” I found myself saying, feeding off his easy energy.
Where’d you go, Ben texted me, sometime after Jake took off my clothes and swallowed me whole. Later, I came too early, his dick still sliding in and out of my asshole. No longer intensely aroused, the bottom half of me went numb from the continued friction. It wasn’t bad, the sex. It was almost nice to know I could find relief so quickly.
After we finished, Jake left to check on my laundry. I texted Ben: I went to my apartment cause I felt sick.
He texted: one of your friends is hooking me up with a VC connection!
I texted: that’s great.
I saw several messages from my sister and ignored them.
DESPITE MYSELF, WE CONTINUED ON, like before, all through those remaining weeks of summer. And, despite myself, I kept sleeping with Jake, covertly and without permission. Ben and I even took a day hike through the Muir Woods at the end of July. I’d been telling him that I was taking long, solitary walks, that I needed fresh air to mull over Moby-Dick passages, but really I was going over to Jake’s. Eventually Ben grew to think I’d developed a passion for scenic strolls, then declared to me that I needed to witness the glorious redwoods. I wasn’t against seeing the trees, but it was just that—it all happened so fast, his planning, the departure, the drive. I barely had time to process any of it. Out of nowhere, he was buying us hiking shoes so our feet wouldn’t blister. He packed enough healthy Cambodian food to feed a whole village.
We spent the first hour of the hike in near silence. With his DSLR camera, Ben took high-resolution photos of every flourish of nature. Panting from the exertion, I was in a daze of bemused fascination at his endless curiosity with bark. At one point, a few butterflies stormed out of a bush, and Ben gasped in astonishment as he furiously snapped photos, his DSLR glued to his face. I had to admit, they were pretty cool.
Once the butterflies cleared the area, he reviewed the shots he’d taken on the camera’s mini HD screen, clicking the little buttons rapidly while squinting his eyes. Then his gaze lingered on a single photo. Rotating the camera, he examined the image at different angles. After that, he looked up and asked me, point blank, “Do you want kids?”
“No,” I answered, a bit thrown, “not at all, actually.”
“Really? How can you be so certain?”
“Why are people always so skeptical about this?” I responded. “Fucking shit, I work with kids. I’m around them all the time.”
“Yeah, but it’s different, isn’t it, when it’s your own blood?” He took a drink of the warm veggie stock in his industrial-grade thermos. Perfect, he’d claimed, for replenishing electrolytes. “Don’t you think we need to give the world more Khmer folk?” he asked, and as he handed me his thermos, I suspected, faintly, that Ben seriously believed he could change my mind on things. Perhaps he even thought my desires were definite enough, pointed and graspable enough, to be overturned with the right levels of persistence. Maybe they were? “That’s part of my motivation,” he added. “Plus, I love kids.”
“How noble of you,” I said, declining the veggie stock. He slipped the thermos back into his bag, and I hoped he wouldn’t take my refusal personally. I just didn’t want to swallow something that hot in this heat. “Shouldn’t you have started making kids like yesterday?” I asked, hands in my pockets. “You’re an old man, a daddy, after all.”
“Probably,” he said, and pulled me close. I couldn’t stop laughing as he nibbled at my ear. I would’ve let him do that for hours, but the camera hanging from his neck was pressed between us, and I started to worry that it would break. For the rest of the hike, I reflected on the differences between Ben and Jake in bed, how Ben’s touch felt warm, never-ending, so different from the crashing rush I inevitably had, later that night, with Jake.
A week later, we were working at my regular coffee shop. Ben was pushing himself to finish his “safe space” app, having successfully networked his way into a pitch meeting with a big VC firm. Nearing the end of his mission, he started to wax existential, the way so many of my Stanford classmates had done a week before graduating.
“I spent so much of my life not making much of anything,” he suddenly said over his laptop, the screen reflecting off his reading glasses. He’d spent the past two hours coding, occasionally conferring with Vinny through a Bluetooth headpiece, never once looking up.
“Because you were in the closet for so long?” I joked, closing my copy of Moby-Dick. I’d been lesson-planning the chapter “A Squeeze of the Hand,” drafting summaries of how Ishmael reaches into a tub of sperm oil and squeezes, accidentally but with elation, the hands of his crew members. I was trying to figure out a way to prevent my students from devolving into vulgar laughter, but it seemed like a lost cause, to think they could appreciate the tragic beauty of that brief, fleeting moment, of finding unexpected kinship through this opaque liquid, without someone cracking a cum joke.
Ignoring me, Ben leaned forward, his whole face now catching the blue light. “Anthony, I’m this close to achieving my goals, isn’t that wild? Of course, this is making me realize a lotta freaking things. For example . . . we don’t have the privilege of wasting time—not anymore—not with the stuff we’ve survived. Man, I wish, I really do, that I had someone in my life that told me how important it was for me—for us—to work hard.”
“That’s why you’re making a safe space app?”
“It’s why I’m with you.” He reached over his laptop, over the table, and grabbed my hands. “It means something for us to be together. You know? I hope you realize that.”
Impulsively, I withdrew from his grasp. He looked hurt but didn’t say anything, and before I could stop myself and pause, before I could even begin to understand why I wanted to yell at him—for being weak, for making me feel weak—I was leaving the table and heading for the bathroom, a knot of dread vibrating in my gut. Then I sat down on a toilet and thought of calling my sister, but had no desire to explain my feelings, nor did I care to hear about her life, so I stared at the posters pasted all over the stalls. The stickers saying QUEERS HATE TECHIES had been replaced with advertisements for a Google-sponsored event headlined by drag performers. I wondered if it was possible to resist something as immense as Google, if only for the sake of being uncertain.
I did eventually talk to my sister—about Ben, about Jake, about everything—that night. She listened intently over the phone, providing the appropriate intermittent comments. She took no moral high ground. She wasn’t frustrated that I had no idea if I wanted to stay with Ben, that I kept joking about my standing in front of a luxury salon that specialized in grooming pure-bred dogs, which occupied the storefront next to Ben’s apartment. “The city’s fucking doomed,” I repeated. “We’re suffocating it with rich puppies.”
“Just tell him the truth,” she said, “but if you really need it, I’ll buy you a ticket to visit New York.”
By the weekend, after Ben had pitched his “safe space” app, I felt normal again. We were eating a late breakfast at his apartment—brown rice and quinoa congee, pickled mustard greens sautéed with ground turkey, hard-boiled tea eggs, but with the yolks thrown out to preserve our cholesterol levels. “By the way, I invited Vinny over for dinner,” Ben said, staring into his bowl. For days, he’d been anxious about the results of his pitch meeting. “I promised him a home-cooked meal,” he continued. “To celebrate, you know, finishing the app.”
“That’s fine,” I said, even though a wave of discontent was lapping its way over me. Suddenly I wanted to hurt Ben, to provoke him into finally snapping on me the way I surely deserved. Then my sister’s advice came back to me. “I’ve been fucking a guy since Fourth of July,” I said, mushy rice dripping out of my mouth. I had no end goal in mind for this confession.
Ben dropped his spoon. Eyebro
ws pushed together, he stared at me as if trying to figure out if I was joking.
“I thought I should tell you,” I added, deciding right then to omit the fact of Jake’s whiteness. In his expression, I saw Ben register the reality of my words. He crossed his arms, leaning against the back of his chair. “I guess,” he said, “we never did have a serious discussion about, you know, us.”
I waited for him to keep talking, even as I felt terrible for not saying anything, for keeping him suspended in my confession. After a moment, I started eating again, though I could no longer taste the food. I began to regret the past few weeks, all the moments of intimacy Ben and I had shared—intimacy that extended beyond the confines of sex itself. This felt, in retrospect, like the cruelest thing I’d done to Ben, letting him think that nothing was wrong, that I was willing to overlook any problems we may have had.
“We can be open if you want,” he finally said, and clasped his hands together on the table, as if offering me a stock option package. “I just . . . if you want to have see other guys, I can be flexible with that. But I believe we should . . . work a little harder at this. Staying together.”
Bitterness pulsed through me. “Stop that.”
“Stop what?”
“Making it seem like we have to be together, like it’s our fucking duty.”
“What’re you talking about?” He made a face as if he’d changed his mind about something. “What do you even want from me, Anthony?”
I looked at him angrily, offended, only to realize how reasonable the question was.
“I just think we want different things,” I said, ashamed that I had nothing concrete to offer. “I guess I want to live in a world where every action doesn’t need to get us somewhere. And you . . . you want to be impactful, always.”
“What about the book you’re teaching,” he said, the defiance in his voice sliding into desperation. “I mean, look, we both have ambitions. We both care about things.” He threw his arms out in exasperation. “Why are we even talking about this? What does it have to do with you fucking a—”
“I can’t be with a Cambodian guy just to be with a Cambodian guy.”
Slowly, Ben’s faced dropped at the words I spit out, the words that rushed out of me in single steam of sounds. He looked down at his stomach, shaking his head. For the first time in weeks, I noticed how much older he was than me—the fatigue deepening the circles around his eyes, the laugh lines accenting his mouth. I had started the exact conversation I wanted to avoid.
“I’m sorry,” I continued. “It’s not about you, specifically, or even Cambodian people . . . it’s, like, a moral thing.”
He sighed and turned away from me, grimacing in the direction of the window. “We don’t have it like that, do we? None of us can afford to be moral.”
“Maybe moral isn’t the right word for it.”
“I don’t think you realize how much we owe each other,” he said, his voice now diminishing to a whisper, as though his power source were about to die. Standing up, he started to gather our half-empty plates. “Are you done?”
I nodded, handing him my bowl. “I do realize— I mean, I know our history,” I said, but he was already walking to the kitchen sink, and this last excuse of mine could only fall against his back.
That afternoon we stayed in bed, not quite knowing what to do, where to go, if we should keep talking about our relationship or just give it a rest. After a couple of hours, we started kissing, our hands reaching into each other’s pants, but we progressed no further than that. It felt impossible to leave our current state of dissonance.
We were still in bed when Ben’s phone went off in the early evening. He left the room and I could hear him mutter choppy sentences. Ten minutes later, he returned looking pale faced, giddy yet terrified.
“I just . . . I just got five hundred thousand in VC funding.”
“Holy shit,” I said in disbelief. “That’s great, right?”
“It’s more than I ever imagined.”
“We should, like . . . do something.”
He stuttered incomprehensibly, his brain undergoing some sort of information overload. “Yeah, sure, we should!” he finally got out, before he shut his eyes, centered himself back into his body. “Shit,” he said suddenly. “Vinny’s coming over.” He looked at his phone, then at me, then back at his phone, and so on. “I’ll cancel.”
“No, don’t.” I smiled. “This is a big deal. For Vinny, too! We should have fun.”
Vinny arrived an hour later, and we told him the news, which prompted him to holler so loudly I was sure Ben’s neighbors would file a noise complaint. In all the excitement, one thing led to another, and the three of us found ourselves on the bed, buzzed from white wine and talk of the future.
“You guys are gonna revolutionize safe spaces,” I said, genuinely, hot from the alcohol, and both of them laughed. Then I kissed Ben while stroking Vinny’s thigh. And then I surprised myself by kissing Vinny. When I unlocked my mouth from Vinny’s, I glanced over at Ben, who seemed at once confused and enthralled. “It’s okay,” I assured him, biting his ear softly and pulling Vinny closer to us.
Soon each of us was devouring another part of someone else. My heart was beating so fast I swore it was the sole audible thing in the room. We took turns in each position, in each role, to the point that we became interchangeable, mere parts of an improved system of fucking. I experienced such intense moments of pleasure I could barely breathe, and the only thing preventing me from passing out, from gasping for air, was looking at Ben, our eyes locking every few moments, even as we were both intertwined with Vinny’s perfect, sculpted body.
For the duration of our three-way, I saw the possibility of existing in a dynamic in which every pleasure received, every favor granted, every dick sucked, every bottom filled and every top gratified, could energize you to give back more than what you had in the first place. I saw clearly Ben’s ideal vision of the world, a way of being that could sustain communities, protect safe spaces, and ensure that political progress kept happening. I felt euphoric, high, blood rushing to my head. I felt unbearably hopeful.
Then we started to unravel, our mouths tired from sucking, our asses by now chafed and sore. Our dicks ached, our wrists gave out. We came. We finished. We detached ourselves from our positions, collapsed onto the bed, and returned to our bodies as three different men, each of us exhausted from all this pleasure.
“That was intense,” Ben said to the ceiling.
“Hell yeah,” Vinny responded, and sprang up from between us, his hands touching both of our thighs. “Ben, let’s hire Anthony to work for the startup.”
Ben laughed. “Be more specific.”
“A safe space tech company led by an all–Southeast Asian team? I mean, how awesome would that be? We’d be profiled by Forbes, Business Insider, maybe freaking GQ. Think about it . . . our headline could read ‘From Refugees to Silicon Valley: The American Dream.’”
“What would I even do?” I asked.
“I don’t know, man,” Vinny answered. “You can write the instructions and copy for the interface, or, shoot, be the head of HR.”
“I’ll need to consider all the qualified candidates,” Ben said, flicking my ears.
Vinny jumped to his feet and slapped his stomach. “We can talk salaries over food. There’s a new sushi bar on Valencia.”
“Sounds good,” Ben said.
He sat up and motioned for us to leave. But I shook my head.
“Anthony,” he said, softly. “Come.”
“Don’t worry about me, I’ll be here.” I rose and rested my head on Ben’s shoulder. “I just need . . . to think,” I whispered into his neck.
Disappointed, depleted—I could tell—he wrapped his arm around me. He kissed my forehead, leaving his lips connected to my skin, and we lingered in this position, in silence, as Vinny went to the bathroom. Ben’s breathing remained steady, deep, strong. I closed my eyes, listening to its rhythm. I felt it resounding th
rough his chest, and also into mine.
AFTER THE TWO OF THEM had showered and set off to the Mission, I drifted, naked and covered in cum, to the living room. Utterly alone but at peace, I looked out of the window, taking in the lights of the Bay Bridge, until every ounce of my former impressions had fallen away, or had maybe faded, or dissolved, into the depths of my mind. That fight between me and Ben appeared so distant now, as if it had occurred ages ago, before we had even met.
Then I put on my clothes, gathered my copy of Moby-Dick, my keys, my wallet, and made my way to the Embarcadero Station. The process of catching the N train struck me as surprisingly seamless, despite my phone having died in my pocket. I had forgotten how easy it was to return home.
Summer break was about to end, and it was senselessly cold, as San Francisco always got in August. In a couple of weeks, I would begin my second year as a teacher. My workdays would resume. Watching the hilly streets of Victorians pass me by, I thought of my lesson for the first day of school. Even though I still planned on teaching Moby-Dick, I would pose the same question I’d started last semester with: What’s the point of this class? I remembered my old students’ answers, their tentative convictions, their stabs of belief that all knowledge might be reduced to dumb platitudes. We’re learning how to be citizens, they tried. Everyone needs to be socially engaged. Everything is political.
The train came to my stop, so I stepped off and started walking. A dense fog from the ocean had crawled through the neighborhood, pulled in by the valley heat of my childhood and Ben’s prior life. I couldn’t see far ahead, but I knew where I was going, and I was reminded of Ishmael “working” on the masthead of the Pequod, Ishmael dozing to the cadence of his dazed reflections, diffused into the clear sky, the total opposite of my current waking moment. As I waded through the fog, I wondered, then, at the impossibility of my existence. Here I was! Living in a district that echoed a dead San Francisco. Gay, Cambodian, and not even twenty-six, carrying in my body the aftermath of war, genocide, colonialism. And yet, my task was to teach kids a decade younger, existing across an oceanic difference, what it meant to be human. How absurd, I admitted. How fucking hilarious. I was actually excited.
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