“We could be together,” the first boy said, and his eyes then were so focused, so brave. When his words reached me, they felt heavy, both with their meaning to me and to him; heavier in our arms which were not yet strong, still young and in the throes of puberty. “Not even boyfriends, we don’t even have to say anything, to anyone. We could just be together.”
Levi loved his car and loved me in it, riding shotgun. He was waiting for me in the parking lot of my high school, making goofy faces at me through the windows of his precious jeep as he started the car, the obnoxious revving of his engine cheering me into his passenger seat. I love driving you home, I love taking you to work, I love taking you to my place, he said; he loved a lot of things. Before we ever reached our destination, his hand would migrate from the gear shift to my thigh, and higher, because he loved that––and he loved when we pulled over to the side of the road, submitting to our hormones, shedding our clothes and cautions. Our sixteen-year-old bodies cried out for something we didn’t yet understand, but Levi believed we might find it in the backseat.
The carpet beneath me is soft and expensive, each strand of it is thick and luxurious and it practically hugs my kneecaps––it’s possibly the softest carpet in a linen closet in the entire state of Texas. Above me, Kyle is cursing under his breath, four-letter words that were not allowed in the Catholic school where I first learned to kneel, but which are said often in the videos I’ve seen online. On the other side of the door, I can hear girls whisper-shouting to each other, gathering in a huddle to listen because someone had seen Kyle pull me in, someone had heard what he said to me. Later they would ask me Can you show me on this water bottle? I did.
Quentin’s eyes were blue-green, and after sex they welled with the threat of tears. He looked into a bright blue ceiling speckled with not-quite stalactites, and I was frozen in place, lying as close as he would let me, leaving him to whatever thoughts circulate in the moments after sex. If I moved, spoke, or sighed it might stop him and this moment, and he might decide again he’d be “better off straight.” We talked about girls, about comic books, about escaping home. He used to ask if he could move in with my family, to escape the pieces of him he saw in his kin. I told him that my family, too, is made of mistakes and fuck-ups; despite that warning, we were family, for a while.
“I am not a faggot,” Marcus said. He seemed to truly love that word. He’d said it before, in hallways before pushes and on football fields after lost high school games, as if it could defend against failure and his fast-evaporating virility; it was a favorite of his insults. He chanted the word like a mantra, his prayer, even when he cornered me at a party. Faggotfaggotfaggot. His breath was like gasoline when he told me to go upstairs. In a stranger’s bedroom, he pressed his body into mine, and in my ear he hissed it again like a cartoonish tagline––I am not a faggot––even as he took my body in his hands, a football player’s calloused hands, and showed me otherwise.
I remember the day, the place, the gaudy Abercrombie shirt he was wearing when Austin announced to our entire Spanish class that it would be best if “all the gays” were exported to an island and exterminated. It was our second year of high school, and I found his obnoxious assholery to be sexy in my own self-hating way; I found it sexy again, in our last year of high school, as he looked at me with glazed-over eyes, across the room at someone’s else’s house. He was high, tweaked out and drunk on a careless regimen of pot, coke, and Fireball. Still, I could see his eyes were hungry, and I knew what that meant. We met in the bathroom and fucked with our jeans just barely pulled past the important bits, insatiable, selfish boys shedding our affections the only way we knew how––the way that leaves us both sweaty and uncomfortable afterwards. For moments we hide from our classmates in the too-small half-bath, our only company the memories of our former selves, two years ago in Senora Dixon’s class.
Tommy held the paracord in one hand and a blindfold in the other as he stood naked in his bedroom amongst the life-size photos of basketball players I did not recognize. He’d grown bored with the blindfold, he said, which I knew would happen eventually, as he insisted upon wearing it every time we were together. He looked at me expectantly, and so did the thick, neon-orange rope in his hand, which begged to be wrapped around him, tied tightly across his chest, binding his wrist and feet. Tommy liked restraint––he wouldn’t even bring himself to peek from under the blindfold––and now he said he thought his girlfriend might, too, and that bondage might make an excellent surprise for prom night. Of course, at eighteen, restraint was a faraway idea.
I woke up one morning in someone else’s bed, and for the first time, that was okay. The smell of coffee cut through the scent and sizzle of bacon his dad was cooking in the small apartment kitchen. For a moment, I wanted to leave, climb out a window and down two stories to safety, avoid the inevitable discomfort; I was good with parents, but boyfriends are new territory—meeting his dad seemed like a scene out of a Lifetime film. Even then, I knew it was all too good for me. Carter devoured a stack of waffles from his far-away position across their kitchen table, happy to let his father gently interrogate me, unfazed by my boy-ness, and when Carter glanced at me between too-large bites I forgot that other boys existed, I forgot that I was supposed to breath, I forgot not everyone is as perfect as they seem. The heat of his eyes makes my cheeks burn red, and I wonder if he can see the hickeys he left me peeking out from my clothes, if he can pick out the ways he’s marked me.
When I met Dante he was an artist, pierced and moody and older than me by one year. He was the first college boy, the first uncircumcised penis. He stared at my ass in the hallway as we walked to the door of my dorm, he grabbed a cheek as he locked the door behind us. I looked at him and felt my infatuation grow, felt the unrecognizable nag of wanting to be with and also wanting to simply be. I wanted to ask him questions; I wanted to know about him, his ambiguous ethnicity, his bisexuality, and his art—graphic design. I wanted to wrap myself in his faux-artist persona and make it, temporarily, mine. While he sketched away on his computer, I glared at myself in his mirror, trying to replicate his icy, empty stare and failing, only finding myself looking meanly at things I could not fix.
I looked up at Nick and then back down at his erection, lopsided and still like a pale, dead fish. Not long before that, he’d asked for my opinion, “as a dude who likes dudes,” and then he’d asked me to take the razor in my hand and shave him smooth, as per my recommendation. I unbuckled his jeans and lathered patches of his wiry hair with shaving cream, and we both watched as I cut away the evidence of his puberty. I used a worn wash rag to reveal his new, bare skin, the goose flesh, and the cool rush of his breath on my neck then felt more suggestive than the last, or maybe I imagined that. His eyes met mine then, and I wrapped my hand slowly and carefully around him. Should I stop? I asked, but Nick shook his head no.
“I’m sorry, but I just can’t,” Jon said, and the words burnt a hole into my pride; they were too honest, too empty. When this truth reached me, it was heavy, weighed down by every refusal I’d delivered when he still wanted me, by every door I’d found locked moments too late. “I won’t leave him—but I’ll always be around when you need me, when you want me. We just can’t be together.” I was twenty, and by then I’d learned thoroughly how men become lovers.
I looked at him and felt my infatuation grow, felt the unrecognizable nag of wanting to be with and also wanting to simply be.
Emery Isip is a peddler of creative nonfiction, a native Texan, and an all-around decent guy. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Split Lip Magazine, SunDog Lit, Redivider, The Cincinnati Review, and Wildness, among others. He prefers wine from the box. You can stalk him on Twitter at @HGeosits.