Date: Tue, 23 Jan 2007 19:41:36 -0500
From: Josh Heilig <josh.heilig@gmail.com>
Subject: Blonde October: Why Should I Care (t/t, college)

BLONDE OCTOBER: WHY SHOULD I CARE (t/t, college)
By JoshBabe <josh.heilig@gmail.com>

This work contains depictions of homosexuality and sexual
acts between consenting homosexual adults. If that is
illegal in your jurisdiction, please, do not continue
reading this.

This work is copyright (c) 2007 by JoshBabe. You may
download and keep an unlimited number of copies for personal
use, but this work may not be used under any other
circumstances without the prior consent of the author.
Aesthetic changes (font size, font face, whitespace) do not
constitute a change of the text of the story per se; any
non-whitespace changes to the text of the story require
prior permission.



BLONDE OCTOBER: AN OCCASIONAL SERIES
    - "Happy Birthday"
    - "Why Should I Care"



A BRIEF NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

This story follows "Happy Birthday," my previously posted
story about Adam Vanderhuyden and Josh Heilig, by almost
exactly a year. This is part of a series, which I've decided
to write since I finished "Happy Birthday," one for each
October that Josh and Adam are in college together. For some
reason, everything I write ends up taking place during the
fall, no matter how I try; there's something about the
rhythms and the feelings of fall that resonate in my head,
in a way that no other season does. And that interacts in
such an interesting way with the academic year in the United
States.

I may as well go along with what works. So, welcome to
"Blonde October."

Many, many thanks to all the readers who wrote last time. I
was hesitant to continue writing, but I've gotten a pretty
positive response. Thank you! For those of you who didn't...
the address is <josh.heilig@gmail.com>. You know what to do.
You can also send me an IM at my new-since-I-wrote-"Happy
Birthday" AIM screen name: "Elijah is Hugo."

Incidentally, this story is an experiment in a variety of
different ways. I think you'll see. To that end, I would
also like to extend a thanks, which he will surely never
see, for the amazing classics professor who introduced me to
Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape," which forms the
premise of this story. Thank you. The title is a Diana Krall
song.



WHY SHOULD I CARE

My apartment was deserted, in no small part through my own
interference. I needed some time in an empty apartment, for
the plan to go through without any hitches.

Then, I shuttered the window and flicked the switch on the
wall. A couple of steps, a click of a different switch, and
I had a halo of light around my desk. The ambience needed to
be just right. I was a writer, damn it, and I needed
atmosphere for some introspection. One of my teachers once
told me, "If you have a mismatch, a wrong mise-en-scene,
you'll never get anything done. Maybe you work best in the
mornings. Don't try to write at night, then. Maybe you get
distracted by song lyrics. Have just the accompaniment of
the keys clacking on your keyboard, then."

I closed the lid on my laptop, and waited till it went to
sleep. I put my tape recorder on my desk, grabbed a fresh
tape, and wrote on its little white label:

"On the Two-Year Anniversary. 10/16/2005."

Carefully, I licked the tip of my finger and then affixed
the label to the cassette. I scrawled the same thing on the
case liner card.

Then, with the slow, practiced motions of someone who does a
lot of interviewing, I put the little translucent black
cartridge in my tape recorder. I always insisted on
full-sized cassettes, they lasted longer. Then, I clicked
'Record.'

[Begin transcription]

> On our anniversary. Today is the day before our
anniversary. I'm thinking of breaking up with him.

(Pause: 3 sec.)

> Adam, that is. I love him. I really do. More than anyone
else I've ever dated -- well, what, that would be four, five
people? Two boys and three girls. I dated them all for a
really long time. Like, at least six months. I dated Mara
for a year and a half, in seventh and eighth grade, and we
were completely fucking chaste. Then came...

(Pause: 1 sec)

> Yeah. The first Sarah, for six months, and the second
Sarah, for about eight months. So far, all brunettes. I
think the second Sarah was natural. She was always at the
hairdresser's, though. Still chaste. Then, starting sometime
in ninth grade, Julie. I broke up with her for Alex, who was
truly amazing in bed, which is probably the only way we
stayed together.

(Pause: 1 sec)

(Sniffling, as though crying)

> Fuck, I still hate him for what he did. I go all the way
down to fucking Eugene to visit that two-timing bastard, and
how does he treat me? Like some fucking Kleenex. I get there
half an hour early, I call one of his friends and she brings
me up to his room to surprise him, and I knock on the door.
Sure, sounds fine, right? Well, the door isn't completely
shut, and it swings open. He's fucking some pretty-ass
little waif, like, maybe 110 pounds and 5'3", curly long
blonde hair and everything. He could have been a fucking
girl if he'd had tits. What was I gonna do? I burst into
tears right then and there. He heard me, looked over, got
real surprised. Tried to come comfort me. Yeah fucking
right, Alex Wright. More like Alex Wrong. Fucker.

(More sniffling. Then louder, sobs.)

> What a fucking bastard. I'm still not over him.

(Pause: 10 sec)

> OK, I'm over that now. Maybe I should go back and erase --

(Squeal. Tape recorder noise.)

> Fuck, I still hate him for what he did. I go --

(Feedback.)

> It's over. I'm over him. After Alex came Adam. Oh, my God.
I met him at a party. It was a mixer some BGALA exec board
member put on. What, he shows up at a BGALA party and
doesn't think anyone's going to assume he's a fucking homo?
He was so amazingly hot. I don't know if I remember anymore
what he was wearing.

(The sound of a drawer opening, squeakily. Then, pages
rustling.)

> It's in my diary. I quote: "I met this super hot boy
yesterday at an off-campus party. Like, so hot I thought I
would scald myself on him. He's wearing a really tight red
polo shirt, and cargos. He looks like a boy out of an
Abercrombie catalogue. I saw him and felt like asking if he
would mind me jacking off to him, that I'd clean up
afterwards. What hair. Fuck me, oh, God, so hot. I was so
totally drunk, I was all over him. A little too much Jaeger.
God knows what I told him. Anyway, he comes home with me,
and he was amazing, much better than Alex." Ha, ha. I don't
know about that. He's kind of a one-trick pony sometimes,
Adam. Anyway. I'm quoting. "So this boy, Adam, I drag him
back to my dorm with me. Everybody here knows about me, but
it's deserted, no roomie or anything, thank God. I shove him
into the door, after I get it closed, not real hard but to
prove a point, you know. We start kissing and soon enough I
have him on my bed and his really long cock is in my mouth.
It tasted like I always imagined boys like him, musky and
salty and soapy. But he also kinda tasted like Tabasco. I
dunno, it was weird. He was even nice enough to get me off
too, none of the other boys would do more than give me a
hand job."

(Pause: 2 sec)

> Wow. I was such a slut. Holy God. I quote: "So I wake up
this morning, and my roommate is still gone, and I have the
worst hangover in the history of the world. And Adam is
laying next to me asleep, totally nude, hard as the Rock of
Gibraltar. He wakes up and he's panicked, he's sure someone
knows he's gay. I was, like, 'So what?' He says, 'I'm a
football player, they'll fucking kill me.' I say, 'What,
you're a fucking football player? That's really hot. Do you
have to wear a jock strap?' I know it's stupid but I wanted
to know. He says yes. I'm already really hard thinking about
it, and so is he, so I push him back on the bed and rub my
cock against his until he comes. It's like, fuck, that was
good. But he's still kinda panicked, and so I have to fend
off questions about who was at the party and all that." I
was such a fucking teenager. All that angst. All that sex.
But it was pretty hot.

(Pause: 3 sec)

(The sound of a book closing. Then, drawer opening,
squeakily, then closing.)

> Well, that's not really the point. OK, so the sex was
really amazing. And I still really love him. I just don't
deserve him. I love him so very, very much. I used to think
we were made for each other. Now I don't think so. I think
he's got to be crazy to want me.

(Pause: 2 sec)

> I love him so fucking much. You don't understand. But he
needs to move on. He deserves so much better than me.

(Pause: 5 sec)

(Sniffling.)

> I know, I know. I cheated on him. He's totally amazing.
But this boy Ryan, I met him at a party a couple of weeks
ago, while Adam was gone for a pre-season away game, and I
totally fell for all of his charms. He was really cute,
pretty gay but fucking sexy, and so very, very smooth and
hairless it was amazing. I haven't been that aggressive,
that much of a top, in a really long time.

(Pause: 2 sec)

> But it didn't end there. Oh, God, no. We were still
carrying on, whenever I had the chance, always at my
apartment since Adam so seldom wanted to be there, until
about a week ago. God, I feel like such a horrible person.
I've never, well, no, I take that back. I cheated on Julie.
But, you know what, fuck that, I didn't know I was attracted
to men. But I resisted so many times, held out for so long,
and then this boy comes along. Fucking hell.

(Pause: 5 sec)

> I just... I don't even know where to begin. I think I've
always known I was attracted to men, I don't know what I was
talking about a second ago. I don't know what I was talking
about four years ago. When I was twelve, before we became
Unitarians, I used to pray to God for forgiveness for having
sinned, for having been attracted to men. Lately I've been
wondering if I should pray for something a bit, well,
bigger. Cheating on the man I love more than anyone is
pretty bad. Right? I know it's not quite like blaspheming or
eating shellfish, but I'm not Jewish, I don't keep whatever
they call it or anything. It's time to repent.

(Pause: 2 secs)

> Uhh. Wow. Well, I think that says a lot. I'm so guilty.
Adam, I hope Adam can forgive me, I love him so much. Today
is Thursday, I finally broke it off with Ryan on Sunday. I
told him I couldn't see him anymore. I asked him how he
could fool around with me when he knew I had a boyfriend,
knew how much I loved him, and he said, 'I never knew you
were so hung up on him. It's not like you're married.' But,
fuck, I want to marry him, I want to live the rest of my
life with him, and I can't!

(A scream. It sounds anguished.)

> Fuck! Fuck, fuck, fuck.

(Pause: 5 secs)

> I love that boy so much. He means so much more to me than
anything else. I have to tell him. How could I keep dating
him, after what I did? I feel like such a horrible person. I
can't quite get past that.

(Pause: 15 seconds)

(Sound of a drawer opening.)

> I really should go. I'm supposed to meet him. Maybe I'll
tell him how I feel, tell him how much he should hate me.
Then I'll tell him I'm breaking up with him, that I want him
to meet someone better than me, someone who can love him
enough not to cheat on him.

[End transcription]


At some point, I managed to hit stop. I was still crying. My
eyes were all puffy, and all that, so I put some eye drops
in and then threw myself in the shower. Feeling as guilty as
if I'd killed someone, I entertained a few thoughts of
slitting my wrists, but I never was the kind of person who
could cop out of something by feeling suicidal. I didn't
even feel sorry for myself. I was just so full of remorse
for the hurt I was going to do to Adam.

When I was back in my room putting on some clothes -- the
usual Luckys I loved so much, a pair of 165s I'd worn down
to the point that they showed wear where I kept my wallet
and cell phone, and a lime-green cotton sweater -- I heard
the phone ring. It wasn't the ring for the callbox
downstairs, so I ignored it.

The weather was unseasonably cool, and it was already about
seven, so it was cooling off even further. I grabbed my
leather jacket and put on a pair of navy suede Adidas. I may
have felt guilty, but I wanted to look good. (How terribly
Cher-from-"Clueless" of me.)

And oh, how guilty I felt.

I walked into the kitchen, and reached up to grab a glass of
water, just really quickly. But my hands were sweaty, they
were shaking, and my heart was throbbing from the stress.
With a crash! the glass fell, and shattered.

I looked down. "God fucking damn it. Not now," I muttered. I
reached down to grab the largest pieces of the glass, so I
could get them out of the way and then sweep up the small
bits. Didn't work out; with a sharp, searing pain, I got a
nasty gash across my forefinger.

That was the last straw. I screamed angrily, a primal
"AAAAAAAAAAAARRRRGHHHH!" I grasped a plate and threw it down
in anger, and it crashed against the ground and shattered
into bits of porcelain everywhere. Then, I crumpled down on
to the floor, sobbing miserably again. The tears came out in
bursts, flooding my face, and the spasms from my diaphragm
rocked my body against the ugly, peeling cabinets.

The misery of the last two weeks flooded my senses, in
shameful recollection. My face burned, my head ached as I
saw, felt myself making out with Ryan, saw myself pulling
him by the lapel of his wool jacket into the elevator, heard
myself moaning in desperation as he yanked my boxers off and
swallowed my penis whole into his mouth. I had taken over
then, somehow I had known I would, and I'd stopped thinking.
Had never started thinking. My hand snaked out to my bedside
table, where I kept a box of condoms and a tube of K-Y handy
in the bottom of a half-empty box of Kleenex, and everything
became a blur until I found myself gasping furiously and
spattering cum all over his tanned, lightly muscled chest.

"Why the fuck did I do this? I'm destroying my life, I'm
destroying him, and now I'm destroying myself!" I moaned,
feeling the pricking pain of little glass shards poking into
my jacket, my jeans. I reached into the cabinet and wrapped
a paper towel around my finger.

Once I pressed down, the pain overwhelmed me, and I fainted.
When I awoke, after an oddly pleasant, if incongruous, dream
about swimming, I could feel the floor stabbing at me. Damn
it! That hurt. I started to cry all over again.

I lay there a while, feeling sorry for myself and sobbing
hysterically, and blabbering gibberish in the meanwhile. The
lights were off, my finger was bleeding like insanity
through the paper towel I had compressed around it, and I
was sure I looked like hell. How on Earth could I face Adam?

Out of a daze, somehow, I heard the door click open. "Hi,
guys," I said, quietly. I cringed, at the thought of what
they would say, me laying there in porcelain powder and
shards and bits of glass sobbing.

"Oh, Jesus," someone said. I didn't even look. "What's
wrong? Are you OK?"

Oh, fuck.

It was Adam.

"Hi, baby," I said, the tears still rolling down my face.
"Listen..."

He kneeled down beside me, surveyed the finger, the broken
everything, the damp, salty coating on my face, and he
walked over to the closet and got a broom. He moved me out
of the way, grasping my shoulders with his strong arms and
pulling me along the floor after I resisted getting up, and
swept everything up and threw it in the trash can under the
sink. Then, Adam picked me up in his arms and set me
gingerly on our futon-couch, and curled up behind me.

"What's the matter?" he whispered, softly, looking at me. He
stroked my hair.

"I..." I started sobbing again. I couldn't say it.

He stroked my hair, wrapped his arms around me, and said,
ever so softly, "It's OK, baby. It's OK. Just let it all
go."

Minutes, hours, days, I have no idea how long I lay there in
his arms. It was so comfortable, so warm, so fulfilling to
have someone tell me it was all going to be OK, even if it
wasn't. Even if it couldn't. Every few minutes, I would
start sobbing again, so he just rocked me against him. It
was like being nine again, when I came home angry at
something mean someone had called me and just broke down in
my mom's arms.

Not like the psychoanalyst wouldn't have rolled me out on
his couch and then explained to me that, of course, it was
self-evident that my homosexuality had to do with my abject
lack of a father figure from an early age. Moreover, my
attraction to big, tall, attractive men was clearly a
hang-up on an absentee father; I had idealized everything
I'd ever seen that was good in men and made that into what I
wanted. Of course! Clearly! It was self-evident! Even the
most casual observer would have figured it out! So, why was
I paying $100 an hour to be on the psychologist's couch,
again? I could be spending this $100 on clothing, or a steak
dinner downtown, right?

I can do a better job myself, thankyouverymuch.

At the age of 11, I was informed, really quite casually, by
a neighbor that I was gay. Except, well, he used a less nice
word. "Faggot." And I was, on occasion, referred to in
middle school and early in high school as a "cocksucker." I
have some hangups on that particular word. It always stops
me cold in my tracks. It's been about three years now since
anyone's called me that seriously. But it hurts, big-time.

Around when I turned 16 they switched from calling me
"cocksucker" to calling me "queer." Now, that was all very
fine and well, since at least I knew what it meant and
therefore could pretend, innocently, that I did not, and
enjoy the looks on our own resident dickwad-slash-homophobes
as they attempted to articulate it in the most hurtful
manner possible.

I'd never really given much thought to the act of sucking
cock until I was 16. It seemed one of those painful
incompatibilities, as incongruous as sticking your toe in
someone's ear; there was an appropriate place for the male
genitalia, according to my mother, and I knew perfectly well
that the mouth was not it. I was in for a pleasant surprise
the first time that my last girlfriend tried that on me,
because by the time she'd gotten my pants off I was starting
to wonder where I had stashed away a box of condoms and I
almost made an idiot out of myself. Since one of those
non-negotiables was that we wouldn't have sex.

When I was 16, of course, I met Alex. Whose cock I most
definitely sucked, often, and enjoyed it. Ironically, just
as I'd started learning how to suck dick, I was revealed to
be attracted to men more or less genuinely. To the whole
school. Thanks, Alex. I got over it, but fuck you. So they
switched from calling me "queer," or "cocksucker," and a
variety of variations on that theme, to calling me "faggot."

Thank God -- or, well, any other deity, I guess -- for
college. Finally, no one called me ugly names anymore. It
felt good.

And it felt damn good to be in Adam's arms, curled up and
feeling the warm strength of a big, tall, strong man. So,
fuck you, Papa Freud. I loved him so much. It tore me up
that much more inside that I had hurt him so much, and that
he was comforting me -- and about to throw me out. Or, well,
to leave my apartment, since he couldn't throw me out.

At some point later in the evening, I had finally stopped
crying and moaning and all that. I was exhausted, and
assuredly disgusting. He looked at me, and gave me a kiss.
"I love you," he whispered in my ear, afterward.

I almost lost my resolve. But I had to tell him.

"You're going to hate me for this, Adam."

He looked at me, a caricature of a confused look on his
face. "Hmm?"

I sighed. "You're going to hate me, baby. But there's
something I have to tell you." I could feel my left hand
trembling nervously.

Adam stared at me. "What is it?"

"I... I... fuck."

He glared at me, not pleased. I don't blame him. "What? What
is it, Josh?"

"I cheated on you."

My beautiful boyfriend, who I loved so much, froze at those
words. I felt my stomach wrench at the thought of inflicting
that kind of pain on Adam, who went through so much on my
behalf.

It would have been so much easier for us to remain casual,
'friends with benefits,' as a terribly closeted football
player, but he had gone out of his way to be a good and
generous boyfriend instead. He did what would make me happy,
because he knew I was still an emotional wreck from my last
relationship and he wanted to show me what a good
relationship could be. Shit, I'm sure he would have been
fine just fucking around. And I'd fucked things up for the
both of us, all because I had all the self-restraint of a
four-year-old with a cookie jar on the countertop.

After a few minutes of him just staring at me, which was not
how I expected him to respond, he began to cry. So, we went
through the reverse, sort of.

It was almost entirely worthless for me to hold him, because
he kept pushing me away. But he was still sitting on the
futon, wringing his hands. "What the fuck?" he said,
finally. "What the fuck, Josh?"

I looked at him.

But before I could say anything, he burst out again. "You
have me fucking cradle you while you cry all the pain away,
and then what? What, you were all torn up inside because you
broke up with your little lover, and then you had to run to
me? Is that how it is?"

I clenched my fists. "No. I've felt so guilty. I had to tell
you. I thought maybe it might make you trust me more."

"Trust you MORE?!" he roared. "MORE?! How in the HELL was
that going to make me trust you MORE? The FUCK? You think I
trust you MORE 'cause you've owned up to this shit? Try
less. A whole fucking lot less."

There were still tears streaming down his face, and I was
tempted to go get a Kleenex. But I was afraid if I tried to
touch him again, he might lash out, and the last thing I
needed was a belligerent, angry football player of an
ex-boyfriend lashing out at me. It was about the only
rational thought I was capable of, deciding against touching
him just yet, because I felt violently ill all of a sudden
and raced to the sink in the kitchen, and started puking up
the contents of my stomach.

For the first time in all the time I'd known him, which was
really only about a week less than all the time we'd been at
school, he made no moves to help out. He sat there on my
futon, crying. That pained me, too, knowing that I'd hurt
him so badly he couldn't even help me out physically.

So I vomited a few times, and then collapsed on the floor of
the kitchen. For the second time that day, I fainted.

Eventually I came to, oddly, in Adam's arms. "What's the
matter?" I said, groggily.

"Fuck you. Do you have to be such a fucking drama queen?"
was all Adam said to me. He cleaned my face off with a
towel, picked me up and laid me down on the futon again.

Adam glared at me. "You know..." His voice trailed off. He
started again, "I love you. I always have, since I first met
you. Well, OK, that's not entirely true; probably since
about twelve hours after I first met you, when you calmed me
down that morning after the party. And then, like the bitch
you are, you fucking disappear for two weeks, have a fling
with some supposedly straight boy, and come back into my
arms when you're ready for it. Anyway, I loved you from that
Sunday morning. And it really hurts thinking about you being
with some other boy," Adam said, his voice practically
shattered with pain. "And if you weren't such a fucking
drama queen, I'm not sure I'd be holding you in my arms
right now. But, probably."

I sighed, and rolled my head back into his hand. "I'm sorry,
baby. I really am. I don't know what ever possessed me. But
I had to tell you. I've lost eight pounds in the last two
weeks! I can't eat, I can't sleep, I can't hold down enough
orange juice to keep my blood sugar up. And I knew what it
was going to do to you, telling you this."

Adam started to cry again, and I reached up and cradled his
face in my hand. "You don't understand," he said, just a
hoarse whisper now. "You can't understand. This happened to
me last time too." He started whistling a tune I knew: "Why
Should I Care." My heart wrenched. I could feel the knife
scraping against my own heart, I felt my stomach thud. In
that instant, I was so miserable for him I didn't know how
to express it in words. It's a little like this:

Was there something more I could have done? Or was I not
meant to be the one? Where's the life I thought we would
share? And should I care?

And will someone else get more of you? Will she go to sleep,
more sure of you? Will she wake up, knowing you're still
there? Why should I care?

There's always one to turn and walk away, And one who just
wants to stay, But who said that love is always fair? And
why should I care?

Should I leave you alone, here in the dark, Holding my
broken heart, While the promise still hangs in the air. Why
should I care?

I was... I don't even know how to put into words what I
felt, when I thought about the words to that song, and the
pain Diana Krall gave it. And, fuck, now I've sent him down
that road. God damn it.

But I was still confused. Last time? Huh?

My puzzlement must have shown on my face, because Adam
looked at me with the kind of care I've always known him to
show, and he said sadly, "My last boyfriend did this to me.
In high school. We were at a party, and he ended up going
home with some boy. I was inconsolable. My parents kept me
out of school for a week, and I was so distraught... God. I
was suicidal, briefly. I was unsuccessful, thank God. I
never forgave him. That's why when you told me what had
happened to you, with Alex, I promised myself, and you, that
I would show you what a faithful relationship was. That you
could trust men again."

I saw the sadness in Adam's eyes. "And now," he continued,
"you did it to me. Again. Fuck you, Josh. Fuck you."

He got up to go. But I couldn't let that happen. I reached
for his arm, and this time, he didn't try to push me off.
"Yes?"

"Adam, I've always loved you. Maybe you have two weeks and a
bit on me, but that time that you met me for that first
date, and you were there wearing exactly what you knew would
turn me on just so it would turn me on, and you took me to
my favorite restaurant in Chicago because I'd casually
mentioned that my mom and I had gone there once, that Sunday
morning, I fell in love with you." I paused, and I took a
breath. I was trying not to start crying. "I love you more
than I've ever loved anyone else. I love you more than I
love my own life, right now. Don't go."

He squinted at me, his eyebrows arched. "And what? I'll fuck
you and it'll all be better? Sorry, babes, life doesn't work
that way."

"No." I said it flatly, and perhaps too forcefully, since he
cringed. "No, no, no. Don't go. Let's try this again."

The love of my life -- something I was only coming to
appreciate, you might say -- would have nothing of it. "I...
I'm going to go home now." His eyes clouded up again. "We
can talk about this later."

He walked out then, slammed my front door shut. I slid onto
my couch, crying pathetically. I hadn't cried myself to
sleep since I was a senior in high school, but I did, that
night.

* * *

The next afternoon, Adam called me. I didn't answer. That's
why God invented voice mail, my mom used to say, as a kind
of joke. We were atheist Unitarians, after all.

His voice in the message was raspy and hoarse, like he'd
smoked a pack of cigarettes -- possible, but unlikely -- and
I could tell that he was feeling anguished. "Josh! Damn it,
answer the fucking phone when I call you! Do you have any
idea what you've done to me? I have to talk to you."

So I poured myself a bourbon and sat down to think about
what I would say. Whenever I'm nervous, I have a bad habit
of stuttering or losing track of my sentences, and the
alcohol tends to loosen me up. My therapist, probably
against his better ethical judgment, told me when I was in
middle school that the best way to build up a little courage
to have a conversation, whenever I was afraid, was to do
whatever relaxed me. Dr. Jacobsen is, to be completely fair,
a sore point among some of my friends, for his curious
tendency to tell you whatever it was that you already knew
and to give you advice. (My friend David, who went to high
school with me and ended up at the same Midwestern
university, once estimated that Dr. Jacobsen made at least
$15,000 over three years (!) by telling him what he already
knew, that he had some anxiety problems. The whole reason
that David was seeing Dr. Jacobsen was for anxiety problems.
He was a nice man, and was great at being comforting, but if
I could be paid $300 an hour to be comforting, do you think
I would be a college student?)

Sitting there on my sofa, alone in my apartment, while my
roommates were in class, with a lowball in my hand, I was
reminded of an earlier time when I had done just the same
thing. My mom kept a bottle of Maker's in the mostly empty
liquor cabinet, for company. I had been going through a time
involving a lot of stress, home for Winter Break last year,
waiting to go to Hawaii with Adam and his family, when I
would meet his siblings for the first time. Meeting his
parents had reduced me to tears just a few minutes before
they were due to arrive in front of his building in a
towncar, sobbing and shaking in fear in Adam's cozy
armchair; and Adam had swooped in to the rescue, wrapped me
up in his big, strong arms until the shaking went away, and
then wiped up my tears, blotted my eyes and wiped them with
cold water until the redness went away mostly, given me
Kleenex to blow my nose, and generally held me together.
Thank God they were stuck waiting for a train crossing on
the way in, or they would have walked in the front door
while Adam was persuading me that his parents wouldn't hate
me.

But, sitting at home a few days before I was due to catch a
plane from Portland to Honolulu, somehow the fear had
magnified itself. The nervousness was something I'd
developed while I was dating Alex, in high school, because
he turned me into a nervous wreck. It's almost a clichŽ to
say that I felt as though I'd been emotionally abused, but I
did: He held over me everything I did, everything I said,
anything that displeased him in the least, as some kind of
reason to break up with me. He was gorgeous, smart and
funny, and the physical chemistry was perfect. Too perfect.
That was really the root of the problem. At any rate, I had
convinced myself that not being together with him more or
less forever would be the cause of certain death for me,
that I couldn't possibly stand being without him, and slowly
I became more and more nervous, more and more cautious about
everything that I said and did. I froze whenever Alex's name
was mentioned, looked around, lowered my voice, even just to
say that we'd gone out on a date the night before. At some
point, one of my friends went to my mother and told her that
she needed to get me to a psychologist before something went
wrong, and that was when she sent me to Dr. Jacobsen.

God, what a scene that was. She -- Elise Fletcher, my mom --
came to me after school, while I was doing my work, very,
very carefully. I couldn't let myself outshine Alex, because
that would result in God only knew what kind of misery, so I
would sometimes deliberately slip in wrong answers, typos,
grammatical errors, anything to keep me hovering at the
B+/A- level. "Josh," my mom said to me. "Josh, honey." She
slid her arm around my shoulder.

I continued hammering away at the Spanish homework I was
doing. Verb conjugations. I was carefully 'forgetting' the
irregular preterite conjugations in the Vd. person. "Yes,
Mom?"

"Honey. Can I talk to you?"

My left hand trembled a little, clenched, unclenched in my
lap. I set down my pencil, carefully retracted its lead, and
then looked up and nodded. "Sure. Hold on just a moment." I
ran my fingers through my hair, twisted at the left forelock
that always grew longer, faster, curlier than the rest,
tried to calm myself mentally. I made a mental checklist of
what she might be trying to find out, but I couldn't think
of anything, so I settled on a cautious approach. Most of
all, no Alex.

I turned around and looked at her. "Yes. I'm not going to do
very well at this Spanish homework anyway."

She sat down on my bed. "Honey, that's... exactly the
problem. What's wrong? Your grades have been off, lately,
and you seem to spend a lot of time acting nervous."

"Nothing's wrong," I said, my voice carefully even. "I'm
fine." My voice caught a little at the end, but I don't
think she noticed it. "What makes you think I'm not?"

To that, Mom laughed. She has the most amazing laugh, a loud
crackling sound that magnified as it went along, like
popping popcorn. "Oh, Josh, sweetie," Mom said, "you must be
kidding. A mother always knows. I promise. Something has to
be wrong, or your left hand wouldn't be shaking."

I looked down, and she was right. My left hand was shaking
uncontrollably against my thigh, as though somehow I had
Parkinson's only in one hand. It was my nervous tick, my
tell.

She said, "I don't care what it is, honestly. Or, well, I
do, within certain parameters, but as long as it's not
pregnancy, methamphetamines, gambling, you know, illegal or
unethical activities, I couldn't care less. But I want you
to talk to someone about it, be it me or someone else. Your
friend David seems to like Dr. Jacobsen. Or I'd be happy to
talk to the minister, or your father's rabbi" -- she
sometimes didn't remember that he hadn't lived in Portland
since 1995, and that the rabbi was now rabbi emeritus and
had been since 1994; but they had been married by him --
"and arrange an appointment for you. But if you sit here and
stew about it, and continue pretending you're Shoeless Joe
in the 1919 World Series, all you're going to do is give
yourself an ulcer. Or something else harmful. The specifics
don't matter."

Somehow, I didn't know what to say. Instead, I got up out of
my chair, carefully, sat down next to her, laid my head in
her lap and began to sob uncontrollably. "Mom..." I said. I
never finished the sentence. I couldn't. I've still never
told her what it was that was eating at me. But she arranged
appointments with Dr. Jacobsen for me, for the next six
months, and that was that. She never knew what had been up.

And the most valuable thing I learned from Dr. Jacobsen, I
guess, in six months, was that whenever my nerves were shot,
a little alcohol would help. So, with lots of time to sit
alone in my room and stew over the vacation and how I felt,
I could magnify it into a real problem. I poured myself...
Oh, I have no idea how many shots of bourbon over those
three or four days. Enough that I was sleeping in my chair,
sleeping in my clothes, waking up in the middle of the night
with the room spinning, vomiting in my bathroom, and
suffering from mild alcohol-induced narcolepsy during the
daytime. It was bad. Miserable, awful bad. When I finally
arrived in Hawaii, Adam slipped me alcohol to get through
the week and then helped me through mandatory detox when we
arrived in Portland. (He'd changed his ticket so he could be
with me.) My mother finally understood, I think, when Adam
sat her down for a private discussion. And she doesn't keep
liquor at home anymore.

In any event, I did: As always, a large bottle of Maker's,
carefully hidden, mostly empty after a year and a half of
college. And it was to this bottle of bourbon I turned to,
in order to get through the conversation with Adam. I
sipped, carefully, at it, put on music to soothe my nerves,
breathed deeply. When I thought that I would be capable of
talking to him without stuttering, I set the glass aside
where I couldn't reach it easily, and picked up my cell
phone and dialed.

He picked up on the third ring. That was about how long it
took him to pull his phone out and answer it. He never paid
any attention to the read-out telling him who called, I
knew.

"Hello, Josh," he said. He sounded a little icy. But who was
I to question him? It was my fault, after all. "Nice of you
to call me back."

I breathed in sharply. That stung. "It's been fifteen
minutes. I was in the bathroom. I'm not permanently on call
for you, you know."

Adam made a clicking sound with his tongue, the kind he
usually made by slipping it between his front teeth and his
lips. Then, there was a pause. "You're right, of course, but
I know you weren't in the bathroom. You've been drinking. I
can tell." He paused again. "You know how I feel about
that," he, finally, sounding like a disappointed father
catching his son with pornographic materiel for the third
time in a year.

Yes. "OK, so I have. I'm sorry. You can understand why," I
said, in measured, even tones. At least, I thought so.
"This is all my fault, and I know that, but that doesn't
make it any easier for me to talk to you. You know me better
than that."

There was a long pause. I heard him breathing, a little
rougher than usual. "Josh." Another long, ragged breath.
"Just... I need to talk to you. You may have torn my heart
out and laid it on your kitchen floor, right in front of me,
stepped on it, but you know I love you. I always have." I
couldn't say anything, so there was another long pause.
"Damn you, this would all be easier if I didn't."

I didn't know what to say. What could I say? "I'm sorry,
Adam."

"Can we talk?"

What the hell, I thought to myself. I'm in the wrong here.
"Yes. But not now."

Adam started to say something, I think, and cut himself off
after the first syllable. "You know," he said, finally, "I
don't understand you. All this talk about how you're so
sorry, how you love me so much, how you thought I might
trust you more if you told me this, it's all talk. When push
comes to shove you can't face up to your decisions."

"No," I said. "It's not that. I want you to think about it
first. I want you to decide if I even deserve you. Because
if I don't, you shouldn't even want to talk to me."

He laughed, a bitter, unhappy laugh. "Don't give me that,
Josh. I wouldn't have called if I didn't want to work things
out. I... I don't know what that is, what it means, but I
don't want to end by walking out of your life. Is there a
reason now isn't a good time? Is he there?"

I said, cautiously, "He?"

"The boy who cuckolded me. You know what I mean. Whoever he
is. If this isn't over, if I find out you lied to me, you're
going to wish I hadn't cleaned you up and kept you from
practically bleeding to death on your kitchen floor, Josh. I
mean, it was our fucking anniversary, god damn it, do you
have any idea how many times I had to apologize to the
fucking maitre d' at Charlie Trotter's for blowing off a
reservation like that on a celebration dinner? Do you have
any idea how it hurts to hear of this on your own fucking
anniversary? Fuck you."

I cringed. I couldn't say anything. Without really realizing
it, suddenly there were tears streaming down my face. "No.
I'm sorry, Adam. I am. You have to know that. And it's
over."

Adam didn't say anything for a minute. It was then that he
burst out laughing, his first genuine laugh since before
we'd talked the other night. "Because I'm not Latvian
Orthodox?"

"Huh?" I sniffled.

He laughed even harder. "Come on! Oh, how many times have I
made you watch that episode? Try another: 'Oh, lighten up,
it'll only feel like an eternity!' "

Seinfeld. I should've known. Somehow we were both laughing,
somehow the ice had been broken. " 'And the Christian radio
stations?' 'RESURRECTED!' " I quoted.

"God damn you, Josh," Adam said, then. "I can't even hate
you for the length of a five-minute phone conversation. Five
o'clock tomorrow, at the coffee shop? Let's start over."

I reached over to the coffee table for a Kleenex, blew my
nose. "OK," I said. "Five o'clock. I'll be there wearing
bells."

* * *

Once I felt like I was a little more sober, then, I decided
that I needed to talk to someone about all of this. I got up
off the sofa, and walked over to my desk and woke my
computer up from its slumber. It had been fortunate enough
to miss out on the misery of the last couple of days; like
Rip Van Winkel, it'd been asleep long enough for everything
to change. When it went in, I was busy maintaining a
long-term relationship and having an affair; and when it
came to, I might as well have been single.

It gave me the familiar "ding!" Without instant messaging, I
might've had to go drown myself in drink in a bar, or even
pick up the phone and try to talk straight. Instead, I was
about to do this via computer. It was my friend Laura:

southsideirish7: so, how was the hot date stud
Elijah is Hugh: Uhh. Do you want to know?
southsideirish7: yes!1
southsideirish7: dude!
southsideirish7: wtf of course
Elijah is Hugh: I, uhh, almost broke up with him. Maybe the other
    way around.
southsideirish7: what
southsideirish7: fuck
southsideirish7: why
Elijah is Hugh: You remember Ryan?
southsideirish7: ryan oh yeah that dude
southsideirish7: screams loud as fuck
southsideirish7: oh josh harder right there oh fuck josh god
    fucking damn it
southsideirish7: harder harder harder make me fucking
Elijah is Hugh: GOD DAMN IT! STOP IT! I'm being serious!
southsideirish7: cum all over ur big hard oh fuck yes
    fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck
Elijah is Hugh: GOD DAMN IT LAURA SHUT UP!
southsideirish7: ok fine
southsideirish7: so what about ryan
Elijah is Hugh: I told Adam about him. I told Adam I was sorry.
Elijah is Hugh: I thought he was going to lose it for a bit.
Elijah is Hugh: He took it OK, I guess.
southsideirish7: What does that mean?
Elijah is Hugh: Well. I didn't take it so OK.
southsideirish7: like how?
Elijah is Hugh: Like I kind of passed out twice on the floor,
    crying, broke a dish on the floor, and generally came across
    like I was trying to kill myself.
southsideirish7: ure fucking shittin me
Elijah is Hugh: Do I ever kid?
southsideirish7: no
southsideirish7: that one time it happened i called guinness
Elijah is Hugh: Thanks, Laura.
southsideirish7: np <3
southsideirish7: so what exactly was it
Elijah is Hugh: Well, I kind of had one of my nervous breakdowns
    before he got there, thinking about how I was going to
    proceed.
southsideirish7: that damn tape recorder again
southsideirish7: u know u cant lie to me josh
Elijah is Hugh: OK, fine. So I was tape recording.
southsideirish7: and then u gt upset and broke a plate
Elijah is Hugh: I knew I could trust you to simplify things.
    That's the skeleton of a chronology, sure.
southsideirish7: do i need to know any more than that babe
southsideirish7: how long have i known u again
Elijah is Hugh: Fuck you.
southsideirish7: thanks but you like the cock
Elijah is Hugh: That's true. Quite a good deal.
southsideirish7: such a waste
Elijah is Hugh: Can I swap you for AJ instead?
southsideirish7: ha ha i wish thatd be fuckin hot
Elijah is Hugh: Really?
southsideirish7: id bring my camcorder
Elijah is Hugh: But he likes the pussy?
southsideirish7: i could ask
Elijah is Hugh: You sleep with the boy every day of the year, at
    least twice a day, and you've never broached the subject of
    whether he's also attracted to men?
southsideirish7: he got drunk at a party once and made out with danny
Elijah is Hugh: He was drunk. And Danny is an honorary woman. He
    wears man-panties. He wears perfume. He has shoulder-length blonde
    hair. AJ probably thought he was Carol.
southsideirish7: true dat i can still ask
Elijah is Hugh: Thanks. It would be hot.
southsideirish7: so hes not fucking you anymore
Elijah is Hugh: Who, Adam or Ryan?
southsideirish7: adam
southsideirish7: fuck ryan
southsideirish7: wait no hahaha dont do that
Elijah is Hugh: You should have said that a week ago.
southsideirish7: yeah well maybe u shouldnt have fucked him anyway
southsideirish7: with or w.o. my advice
Elijah is Hugh: Thank you. Bitch.
Elijah is Hugh: Anyway, he wants to talk to me tomorrow. What do I do?
southsideirish7: hey youre the girly one not adam
Elijah is Hugh: I wouldn't be so sure of that.
southsideirish7: i still cant believe hes gay josh
southsideirish7: you i knew the moment i met you
southsideirish7: otherwise youd have been the only man who didnt
    talk to my tits and not to my face
Elijah is Hugh: That's true. Even when I thought I was attracted to women
    I was never attracted to breasts. They seemed awkward. Still do. I
    can appreciate their aesthetic beauty, but they do nothing for me.
southsideirish7: yeah well
southsideirish7: so youre horny basically
Elijah is Hugh: Yes. To be that crass.
southsideirish7: im very crass
southsideirish7: and horny too
southsideirish7: but you want cock
southsideirish7: cock cock cock
southsideirish7: what a fun word
Elijah is Hugh: Are you going to help me or what, Laura?
southsideirish7: what does he want to talk to u abt
Elijah is Hugh: What do you think?
southsideirish7: i do not recollect
Elijah is Hugh: So you're saying, pretend I don't remember what
    happened?
southsideirish7: worked for ollie north
Elijah is Hugh: Are you going to be ANY HELP AT ALL?
southsideirish7: yes gimme one sec
southsideirish7: aj has his hand in my panties
southsideirish7: and two fingers inside me
southsideirish7: hes really mmm good at it
southsideirish7: im going to take a sec and cum first
Elijah is Hugh: I'm going to puke now.
southsideirish7: at least theres no jizz
Elijah is Hugh: This is a virtue?
southsideirish7: go away or im calling u insted
Elijah is Hugh: OK, fuck you. IM when you're ready.

About five minutes elapsed. I really didn't need that.

southsideirish7: ok back now
southsideirish7: i told him to go play w his fleshlight
southsideirish7: and videotape it for u
Elijah is Hugh: I hesitate to ask, but, really?
southsideirish7: yes really
southsideirish7: hes proly hamming it up for the camera right now
southsideirish7: i hear him moaning yes oh yes josh suck on my dick
Elijah is Hugh: Don't say any more, I might come in my pants.
southsideirish7: ok ur loss
southsideirish7: enjoy l8r
southsideirish7: so what u want to know
Elijah is Hugh: I want to know what to do.
southsideirish7: talk to him
southsideirish7: tell him what he wants to know w.o. details
Elijah is Hugh: Will he kill me if I tell him that?
southsideirish7: not literally
southsideirish7: but all u can do now is be honest
Elijah is Hugh: Fuck.
Elijah is Hugh: I can't believe this is happening to me.
southsideirish7: howd he find out
Elijah is Hugh: I told you. I told him.
southsideirish7: why
southsideirish7: 'ive yada yadad sex'
southsideirish7: just omit
Elijah is Hugh: I am not some kleptomaniac insane person!
southsideirish7: 'i mentioned the lobster bisque'
Elijah is Hugh: Does EVERYONE in my life take love-life and sex
    advice from "Seinfeld"?
southsideirish7: no but they shud
southsideirish7: so the sex with ryan was really good huh
southsideirish7: i heard him screaming from apt 3d once
southsideirish7: FUCKFUCKFUCKFUCKFUCK YESYESYES RIGHT THERE AAAAAAH
    IM GONNA CUM IF YOU AAAAAAAAH RIGHT THERE SHIT YES OHMYGODYES
    FUCKFUCKFUCK
Elijah is Hugh: How many times must I tell you that enough is enough?
southsideirish7: hey u did it not me
Elijah is Hugh: Oh, Laura. So you think honesty is the best policy?
southsideirish7: yes
Elijah is Hugh: I think I'm going to go jack off now to the thought of
    giving your boyfriend head, Laura, and then go to sleep. Can you
    handle that?
southsideirish7: sure sure
southsideirish7: tomo ill give u the video
southsideirish7: but u have to watch it w me
southsideirish7: maybe hell fuck u while ure single
Elijah is Hugh: I think that's out of the question. Unless Adam gets
    to watch.
southsideirish7: hes hot for aj too
Elijah is Hugh: No, but he likes watching video of us having sex. As
    long as he gets to watch, I might be able to talk him into it.
southsideirish7: ok good
southsideirish7: im going to fuck aj now
southsideirish7: u might hear us thru the wall
southsideirish7: open ur window
southsideirish7: enjoy ciao
southsideirish7: dont forget to throw your kleenex out
Elijah is Hugh: Mmm. Thanks Laura. I'll CYA. TTYL

I closed the chat window, disconnected and lay down on my
bed. My head was swimming with the evening, overwhelmed, but
I really needed to sleep. Sure, it was a shame that I
wouldn't be asleep in Adam's arms -- but I didn't lose him,
and that's what counted. To help myself fall asleep I
breathed deeply, and just listened to the sound of my
breathing. I was so used to listening to someone else's, I
didn't know what to do with my own. I curled up into the
indentation in my mattress where Adam slept, when he was in
my bed, and continued breathing deeply.

The last thing I needed, at that moment, was to hear Laura
and AJ fucking like rabbits. Which they did, unfortunately,
with some regularity.

Instead, I needed to be reassured, and the only person that
could and would do that, right now, was me. So, I told
myself, At least I didn't lose him. At least I didn't lose
him. What was I going to do now?

* * *

Nyquil got me through the night. I woke up groggy and shaky,
around 10 the next morning, so I called in sick to my
classes for the next day. There was no way I was in any
shape to go to school -- I would've been useless even if I'd
been present. I've been through bouts like that before,
times when I was either too sleepy or too depressed, or any
number of other potential problems, where I would miss a
week or two of class.

When I was in high school, I missed two weeks because Alex
had helped me develop the kind of ulcer that required me
basically to stay in bed and drink milk all the time. I
thought my mom was going to get the axe that she had me use
to cut firewood and go after him herself. She threatened to
call his parents, never to let me see him again. It took
hours of pleading and begging to get her to back down from
that threat, and I've still never been sure whether she did
get to him. Alex was on mostly his best behavior from that
point on, until the day that I decided to surprise him with
my little visit in Eugene.

God, after that, it was even worse. She probably thought I
was going to turn into the grandpa from "Willie Wonka and
the Chocolate Factory," you know, hadn't been out of bed in
years. I just moped for days, and occasionally she would
come in and feed me more eggs and toast, about all that I
could eat at that point.

"You know, I told you so," she said, at some point during
the week when I could barely bring myself to get out of bed
in the morning. I didn't want to hear it, but she was right
that Alex had been bad news from the beginning, and it had
taken me walking in on him having sex with some pretty
little college boy from southern California to understand
why he was wrong for me. (To put it bluntly, he was not
nice. He was a douchebag. And if I'd been able to come to
the level of self-realization that we were only together
because the sex was fantastic, maybe I could have gotten
out.) She went on, "But that's water under the bridge, I
guess. Now we have to get you back in good working order.
The first order of business is that I've taken the liberty
of putting in storage -- without reading, I promise -- all
of the letters and photos and everything that you have from
him. I think you should delete all the email, too. Make a
clean break."

I was inclined to agree with her. But she thought I should
go further. "Also, I want you to throw away those video
recordings that you thought that I'd never noticed, 'hidden'
" -- she made air quotes -- "under your bed. I'm sure
they're wonderful. What, what else were you going to keep
under the bed, labeled, 'A&J'?" She was right. They had been
really, really hot, too. They are now in a box in our
storage locker. "Not only do they put him in legal jeopardy
as far as statutory rape laws are concerned, which is
something even I have no desire to do, but they also expose
you to more of him. They're in the box with your letters.
Someday, maybe, I'll give you the key to the storage locker
and let you go there and reminisce."

I've thought a lot about those words in the two years since
all this took place. And that was what first came to mind,
when I realized what I'd done to Adam. I think, in a way,
maybe that helped me come to grips with what had happened. I
resolved that I would find a way to make it better for him,
in a way that Alex never had for me.

That afternoon, I managed to find enough time to take a
long, hot shower, shave my face, take care of my hair, and
clipper my body in all the peculiar places that a
self-respecting gay man has to, all for Adam's sake. If this
was going to be the first day of the rest of our lives, to
use that old saw, I was going to make it like the first time
we met.

Then, I did a little hunting on Facebook and made a few
phone calls, and got my hands on the photo that my friend
Jason had taken of me at that BGALA party the night that we
met. I wanted to know what I'd looked like. My hair was a
little different then, so I went back to the way it had
looked that night, dug the same tight T-shirt out of a
storage bin, the whole nine yards. I'd seen the gleam in his
eyes when he saw me walk into that room -- yes, I recognize
that I'm semi-unconsciously quoting Carly Simon -- and I
knew what it meant. He'd practically undressed me in front
of a crowd of people, and when I went into the kitchen to
get myself a drink, he had somehow materialized right next
to me, poured for me. (I know, bad idea. I made an exception
and didn't get GHB'ed. I'm very lucky.) By the time he was
done pouring my drink, Adam's other hand was in my back
pocket, sliding up and down, and I could feel a distinct and
pretty impressive protuberance sticking into my thigh. He
handed me the drink, looked me in the eye and made some glib
remark about how he hoped I was looking forward to enjoying
it. I was only there about two hours, he was flirting with
me pathetically the entire time, and when we left, I could
feel his hot breath on my earlobes as he walked behind me,
almost touching me.

Everyone was jealous. I wanted him to remember how bad he'd
wanted me that night, when we met for coffee later that day.
I needed him to remember. I wanted to rekindle what we had.

I mean, you can't even imagine how flattering that was: It's
amazing, the sensation that your every move and reflex are
being carefully observed. My face was like the sidewalk in
Phoenix in July, hot to the touch, but inside I felt
strangely serene. Feeling desirable, feeling wanted, gives
you the same overall sense of well-being that running five
miles every morning has to offer, plus the emotional lift. I
found that, when I was around him, I felt better about
myself, for most of the time that we'd been together... and
that whenever we weren't, I didn't feel that way.

It's funny sometimes how intertwined two people's lives can
become. You start out, two completely separate people, with
separate habits and separate lives, but you creep toward
each other, seeking for the equilibrium where you can remain
more than one person but less than fully two. The moment of
recognition is delayed, long past the point to which it is
obvious to all of your friends, so that one day you're
sitting at dinner and you realize you've begun to wipe your
mouth the same way he does, that you talk differently or act
differently as a consequence. You mention this to a friend,
who says, "Well, duh!" and makes an irreverent crack about
how you have essentially become one person. From there, the
pendulum will swing backward, as you seek that elusive spot
on the scale where the two sides are in balance -- because
it is not necessarily at half.

I was there a few months before. We were. God, I've already
separated us. One morning, I woke up a little early and
found myself watching Adam sleep. He roused while I was
watching, and rubbed his eyes in precisely the same way that
I always did -- and not at all in his usual way, which was
slower, languorous, less anxious. (There's a metaphor
there.) He'd been watching me, I supposed, and had somehow
unconsciously assimilated the way that I woke up into his
own levŽe.

And I knew, then, thinking about this, that I was going to
set out to accomplish what I needed to. To re-woo Adam, I
suppose.

I stretched myself into the T-shirt I'd worn that day,
pulled on those jeans, slipped into the same pair of shoes.
Then, I took a turn in front of the mirror inside my bedroom
door. I looked perfect. Positively scrumptious. How could he
resist?

I smiled. Everything was going according to plan.

* * *

The day had turned bright and cheerful, and it was warm and
sunny. On some level, this town was always beautiful -- I
might be a West Coaster at heart, but I'd fallen hard for
the Midwest -- but that day was just spectacular. My walk
from the apartment to the coffee shop was a stroll under a
spread of enormous elm trees, leafy and verdant in late
summer, where it was relatively cool and shady underneath.
The sidewalk was a little cracked, and there were a few of
the seeds scattered around, the little helicopter seed pods.

All around were the lovely prewar stone buildings of the
south end of town, often magnificent Chicago-style or
Italianate edifices with massive facades and crumbling
interiors. Like the post office, this enormous white stone
building which had once housed a bustling operation and was
now reduced to endless corridors to nowhere. The coffee shop
was in the ground floor of an old-school brick walk-up,
which, like the stone, was a legacy of the Great Chicago
Fire, when Mrs. O'Leary's cow brought an American metropolis
to its knees. A lot of the city looks that way, still, with
magnificent Indiana limestone or red-brown brick all around
the city.

The front door, on the other hand, was metal and glass, a
modern addition to the building, probably an anti-theft
device. I saw Adam inside, from across the street, so I
stretched out my shoulders and pushed them back, felt the
stretching across my chest giving me a broader span across.
He liked that. Then, I crossed the street, slid the door
open and walked in.

Adam looked up, then, and smiled at me, and I felt myself
melting in his gaze, like a stick of butter under a
magnifying glass. The proprietor gave me a hello, from the
counter, so I winked at Adam, just a half-wink, and went up
to the counter to get a cup of coffee. Without asking for
anything -- Chris always knew what I got -- I handed him
three dollar bills, two crisp like they were just off the
press, and the third crumpled like an old, retired
construction worker's face after a lifetime of sun and
cigarettes. I got 27 cents change, and dropped it in the tip
jar. He'd started the milk frothing when I came in the door,
because I really was that predictable, so right after we
conducted our little microeconomic exchange, in which I
purchased approximately 40 cents of goods for
two-bucks-fifty-one of my hard-earned cash, Chris had turned
back around and was already producing a little work of art
in frothed milk in a mug when I looked up. He handed it to
me, with the usual caution ("It's a little hotter than
usual, bud, this old machine's never been what she was since
that electrical storm in 2003"), and I held the mug in two
hands while I walked over to our table.

Because I was supposed to be playing it coy, trying to make
Adam fall back in love with me, trying to find a way to get
him to forgive me, and because I wasn't sure I could make
eye contact with him and not forcibly remove him from the
coffee shop and take him home and ride him until his knees
fell off at the joints, at this particular moment, I looked
at the mug. Each one was different, hand-painted with
pre-Renaissance northern Italian motifs in earth tones, but
they were the perfect physical dimensions for a latte, which
suggested to me that they were of American provenance. His
espresso demitasses were the real McCoy, worn old pieces of
porcelain he'd brought back from the now-closed Roman coffee
shop where he'd bought the espresso machine. But, as Chris
always said, Italians don't drink lattes (though I prefer
them), so I imagine their mugs aren't the right size for a
latte. Mugs seem to be a Germanic and British thing, the
better to drink your cold beer or hot tea from, and they
certainly didn't invent espresso.

I took a sip, just as I arrived at Adam's table all the way
at the far end of the coffee shop. I knew that, given what
we were going to be talking about, he would want to be as
far away from the hubbub as possible. And, since I was
supposedly playing it about as straight as I could... I was
going to have to walk a fine line between being flirtatious
and still looking, to the casual observer, like two straight
guys having a cup of coffee -- or at least one straight guy
and a gay friend of his, rather than two slightly estranged
lovers. So I breathed deeply, taking in oxygen and latte at
the same time, hoping that it would clear my brain for the
task ahead.

Just then, my eyebrow began to twitch a little, the way that
it always did when I was really nervous. I took another deep
breath, steeled my eyebrow to stop twitching and prayed that
my stomach wouldn't start twisting and curling like a flag
in a stiff Lake Michigan wind.

"Hi, Adam," I said, setting the mug down on the table,
cautiously but not gently, the way straight guys always seem
to. I put my hands on the tiles mounted unevenly on the
center of all the tables, and felt the sun warming my back
as it poured in the nearest window. "I'm glad you could meet
me here today." I was making an effort to keep my voice
level and deep.

He smiled at me, a pleasant smile, but not his delicious,
delicate smile, the one that I was used to seeing spread
from one cheekbone to the other when he was glad to see me.
Was he acting? Or was he simply not feeling for me now?

I looked at Adam. "So, what do you want to know first?"

"Excuse me?" He squinted at me, trying to figure out what
I'd meant.

I spread my shoulders out a little for him, giving him a
show. For all the times that he'd told me he loved me just
as I was -- which I was less sure of than ever; his facial
expression was still the kind that your best friend gives
you whenever you're having lunch and he realizes that he has
absolutely no idea what you're talking about, and isn't sure
he wants to ask -- I knew that on some level he wanted a
big, hard, ripped, muscular jock-boy like himself. We'd
talked about some of our more interesting fantasies, a long
time ago, and I had disclosed how jealous I was of a friend
of mine from high school whose boyfriend had snuck her into
the soccer team's locker room at his college, for a good,
quick fuck after a game. Adam had told me how he wanted to
take one of his teammates, it didn't really matter which but
I saw the lust in his eyes when he looked at the
quarterback, and rough him up a little, you know, hold his
jaw open while our pretty-boy captain was going down on him,
and then pulling on his hair while he was fucking him.

At that point in our conversation, my eyes had probably
bulged out a mile, because Adam could be aggressive in bed,
he'd never shown any inclination for roughness or control or
humiliating a partner, something which he knew was capable
of driving me through the roof. (I don't mean to suggest
that I had a less-than-fulfilling sex life, but we all have
fantasies that we want to live out on occasion. And some of
my fantasies involve being... dominated is the right word,
though it suggests leather straps and chains and torture
devices. I just mean physically subjugated.) God, we had the
most unbelievable sex after that discussion, wild,
unbridled, clothes-tearing, wall-grasping, pillow-gnashing,
put-in-your-earplugs-neighbors sex that lasted for half an
hour. I was sore for days, with life-sized handprints
embossed into my ass.

And then there was the time that he actually went through
with that, arranged for us to use the football field. We
were... well. You can read all about that, I'm not going to
rehash it.

I have digressed. "You strongly implied, the other night,
that you didn't think you knew me as well as you do now.
It's true that I have been keeping secrets from you. For
obvious reasons. You know that I am sorry beyond all
recognition for that, and you know that I want to do what I
can to mend that rift," I said, carefully running through
the script I'd tried to think through beforehand. My throat
tightened, then, but I resolved not to cry. "I want to tell
you whatever you want to know about me. I don't want to keep
secrets from you anymore." I lowered my voice. "I love you
with all my heart, Adam, and my heart won't forgive my body
for what I've done. If I could wipe the slate clean, I
would. But I'm trying to do the next-best thing. I'm trying
to get rid of all the secrets."

Adam laughed softly, looked over his shoulder in the nervous
way that every closeted boy knows, even after the last year,
when everyone's known; turned back, reassured I guess, and
smiled at me. "Do I have to?"

"Yes. We're starting over, right. You know me, but how well
do you know me? I'm even more complicated than Janus. I have
four faces."

Adam squinted. "Four? You're going to have to run that one
past me," he said.

So I took a sip of my latte and explained my theory of
myself to him. "Well. Three private and one public. I'm very
self-assertive, very much in control in public. When I'm in
private, I can be similarly in control, or want to be
completely out of control entirely, or I can be laid back
and fun. You've learned how to guess at my mood, most of the
time."

"Oh, really? You've always been a little mysterious to me,"
Adam said. "I just wait to see how you respond to something
I say or do. I can watch your eyes and tell you if you want
to have sex or not."

That took me by surprise, I have to admit. "Do I not always
want to have sex?"

Adam chuckled a little, then leaned in over the table. "How
should I know? The look in your eyes doesn't exactly suggest
it. If I stretch out, raise my arms over my head and pull my
chest taut and your eyes don't follow along, I know you're
not interested. And I get over it. I don't need it all the
time, contrary to popular opinion."

I stared at him, and then burst out laughing. Careful, I
told myself. I glanced over his shoulder to see if anyone
was watching, lowered my voice again. "Maybe if you hadn't
been pretending to nail all those girls, all the time, for
so many years now, you wouldn't have a reputation for being
a sex fiend! How did you get them to cover for you, anyway?"

"Cover for me?"

Oh, that was the last straw. I reached across the table and
punched him in the arm. I think it looked like the banter of
two ordinary guys, personally. "You'd better not still be
fucking those girls, bitch."

He grinned at me, giving me that devilish look. Suddenly I
was drowning in an ocean of pheromones. That boy knew how to
push every button. Adam said, in a stage whisper, "No, but
don't tell them that."

We laughed, he and I. It felt good to be breaking down the
walls separating us, now, as though I was removing the
weights that had been holding me at the bottom of the
swimming pool while Adam floated merrily above.

"Seriously, babe," he said, quietly, but, indeed, seriously,
 "I alwayas told them, I have this very rare condition that
keeps me from getting an erection sometimes, and the
medication fucks with my ability to play football. They buy
it every time. They would apologize profusely, they'd say
they're kind of glad I'd chosen the team, and I would pay
for the fancy dinner and tell them I wanted to go out with
them again sometime. That I liked them a lot, and maybe
someday I'd be taking the medication. Yadda yadda."

It was just too rich! "I can't believe that ever worked. I
guess, as long as you tell them the same story... What, this
very rare condition is called impotence?"

"Nah, I did my homework first, thankyouverymuch, Josh. Some
kind of kidney disorder. I can't remember anymore, it's been
so long, baby. A year?" I nodded. Practically to the day.
How did I remember beating Ohio State better than he did?

Adam paused then. "I was worried about you, you know," Adam
said. He gave me his best worried-about-you stern-father
look.

I sighed and slid down in my chair, playing along. "I know,
I know. I was worried about me too. About my immortal soul.
Can you ever forgive me, Father? Or at least, have me say a
few Hail Marys?"

"For that crack, you fucking godless communist child-eating
atheist quarter-Jew, I'm going to make you regret it. Make
some more fun of my religion, why don't you? I think that's
a winning strategy." In spite of his angry tone, Adam was
clearly stifling his laughter. I felt myself swooning,
wanting to reach out and grasp him tightly to me; somehow, I
was emotionally falling into a deep well, and hoping that
Adam would be there at the bottom, waiting to catch me.

Eventually, Adam and I finished our coffee, and we walked
back toward my apartment. I'd felt the kind of connection
with Adam that had been so lacking of late. I mean, I know
this is going to sound insane, but as much as I loved that
boy, I hadn't really wanted to be near him over the past few
weeks. Now, I felt differently.

Of course, as happy as Adam had seemed, I could tell he was
still hurting. So I didn't press the issue when he went home
all alone, after dropping me off unceremoniously in front of
my building. He gave me a light, friendly kiss, and then, he
coasted off, waving behind me.

My heart was pounding, though, in my chest, as I went
upstairs to my apartment, and my palms were sweaty. He was
such an attractive boy, so pretty and tasty and all of those
adjectives I associate with what I find appealing in men,
and he was so ... understanding, really. He wanted to see me
again! He didn't, you know, leave me right then and there,
when I told him what had happened. Instead, he listened to
me. He listened to me. He listened to me!

I was swooning over the tiniest things. His hair, the
flax-like water of life; his gorgeous eyes, as deep and as
blue as the ocean; the way he stood, shoulders held broad
and high to puff out his perfect pectorals; the way he
looked at me when he talked and touched my knee under the
table while I was talking in the coffeeshop. Just thinking
about it gave me a shiver, and a giddy excitement I hadn't
felt in months.

I guess I was falling in love all over again, indeed. Just
as I intended for him to.

In the elevator, and then as I walked into my apartment, all
I could think about was Adam. Then I walked in, and was
instantly greeted by a load grunting noise. I quickly shut
the door, a sinking sensation in my stomach suggesting what
I was about to be subjected to. Our apartment was laid out
like Vietnam, with a giant living room and kitchen at one
end and then a long hallway with two bedrooms on one side,
and then a bedroom at the far end. But, because we were
college students, and therefore cheap and chronically broke,
we had a futon in the living room. No one ever slept on
it... but I had had my suspicions that certain other
activities which normally required a bed had been going on
in here...

Lo and behold, my suspicions were correct. What should I see
but clothing scattered all over the floor in the hallway --
a pair of shoes here, another there; a couple of shirts, a
little closer to the living room; a pair of
awkwardly-torn--looking red thong panties and a pair of baby
blue boxers lying a little closer still; and at the end of
this trail of clothing, a television tuned in to C-SPAN and
my roommate Greg and his girlfriend Vanessa loudly fucking
doggy-style on our red futon-couch. (At least they'd had the
presence of mind to put a sheet on the futon, probably as a
concession to me.) They were making fairly interesting
noises, even for people having sex; Greg was making some
kind of "ungh ungh ungh" noise through his nose, and Vanessa
kept shrieking, "Eeeeh eeeeh eeeh eeeh eh eh eh eeeeeeh eeeh
eeh eeh," occasionally punctuated by shrieking, "AAAAGH
RIGHTTHERE BABY! FUCK ME YEAH!" He had his hands wrapped up
in her long brown hair, and one hand around her waist, the
motion of which suggested at least he was pretty generous in
bed for a straight guy.

The fact that they hadn't noticed me -- they were facing
away from the entrance and the blinds were thankfully all
shut -- allowed me to appreciate, hardly for the first time,
Greg's attractive, slim chest and delicious-looking ass.
Hmm. And Vanessa, as it turned out, had surprisingly nice
and pert breasts when viewed from a 90-degree angle, though
I didn't especially want to have found out.

There was this, well, odd thumping noise coming from the
futon, which suggested to me that the people on the floor
below, too, were probably less than thrilled with this turn
of events.

Eventually, Greg looked over, saw me standing there and
nodded at me. "Hey, Josh," he said, between gasps.

Vanessa turned her head and smiled at me, after Greg let go
of her hair for a bit. "Hi, Josh! Haven't seen you in a
while."

They were awfully nonchalant about this. I'd heard them
having sex so many times I assumed they were pretty, well,
exhibitionist about it, between the shower and practically
every imaginable spot in their bedroom, with Vanessa gladly
vocalizing whatever he was either about to do, doing, or
just since done to her. But... this was another level
entirely.

I wanted to say, "Please. Don't do any more damage to my
brain. I'm going blind already." I did not. I said, "Hi,
Greg. Hi, Vanessa." I couldn't seem to move. They turned
away from me, and Greg's breathing grew more irregular and
his treatment of Vanessa rougher as he went on, driving in
and out, continuously. I have to admit here that I was
impressed with their ability to do this without ever
breaking a rhythm, though the thought of having sex for at
least five to ten minutes at exactly the same rate made my
head ache.

Eventually, their strange exclamations and the odd squishing
noises of heterosexual copulation started getting to me, and
I snapped out of my weird mesmerism with their sex acts. I
shook my head and walked away.

Thanks to Greg and Vanessa, I had just been reminded of what
a misereable loser I was. I had just lost my entire sex
life, at least for the time being, having broken things off
with Ryan and having very nearly lost Adam.

Sadly, I sat myself in front of my computer and pulled up
Adium, waiting to see if any of my friends were around.

Of course not.

Well, it was a Thursday night at 11. There was always some
time to jack off, I guessed, before I went to bed.

Just as I was getting ready -- quick procedure: shut door,
windows tightly; take off shoes, put in closet; remove
socks, put in hamper; peel out of shirt, fold, lay on bed;
remove belt; step out of jeans, fold, lay on bed; sit back
down in chair and load reliable websites; click and rub for
fun, pleasure and profit -- I heard Vanessa wailing for what
I estimated was probably her third orgasm of the night. And
my cell phone rang. Well, I didn't have anything better to
do. I grabbed a Pacifico out of my fridge, cracked it open
and sat down in my chair, having put my dick back in my
white 2xist boxers.

It was Kirsten, demanding to know what had happened. I said,
"I'm really, really sorry. It's just not my place to talk
about it."

She shouted, "BULL SHIT! You're going to tell me everything.
I'm coming right over there."

That was unacceptable. "Kirsten, hon, you can't. Uh, Greg
and Vanessa are kind of ... in the living room ..."

"Oh, Jesus fucking Christ in Heaven," she said, always
irreverent. "Are they going to be done any time soon?"

"I... sure hope so," I said, rolling my eyes and wondering,
indeed, how much longer Greg could possibly last. Most
straight guys only had five or ten minutes in them, at least
by reputation, but I knew perfectly well that Greg had the
better part of an hour in him. Our third roommate, Jason,
and I used to call them "three Vanessas" and "four Vanessas"
and "five Vanessas" nights, depending on how many times we
heard her wailing that she was coming. "The thumping on the
floor from the couch is starting to slow down. That usually
means about ten minutes. Do you want me to call you?"

Kirsten lived a couple of floors down, on the other side of
the hallway, so it wasn't like if there was a false alarm, I
would be forcing her to walk back to her own building or
something.

I kicked back and put on "Autoamerican," on my record
player, to kill the time while I was waiting for Greg's dick
to finally finish with Vanessa. That moment came more
quickly than I expected it to, pun intended, when I heard
him grunting loudly, "HOLY FUCKING SHIT YEAH," followed by
the sound of what I really, sincerely hoped wasn't the legs
of my futon couch collapsing underneath the two of them, and
her wailing in one final gasp. It really was amazing, I had
to admit, that they had all but mastered the art of mutual
orgasm, even though she would come three or four or five
times, or more -- on one memorable occasion, when I was out
of town, Jason counted nine, the last of which featured her
hoarsely screaming and then an anguished kind of combined
long yell from both of them, for about fifteen seconds, like
the kind of piss you take when you wake up after a night of
drinking beer -- but also kind of disgusting. I don't often
envy women, other than that Adam notwithstanding, they
always end up with the hot guys, who are always straight;
but I've always envied their ability to have a lot of
orgasms, some more than others.

In any event, I heard the sounds of them shuffling toward
Greg's room, where they would probably start back up again
in twenty or thirty minutes -- but by that time, Kirsten
would be in my room. She was used to hearing them. Seeing
them would be a different matter, and I wasn't not really
sure Greg and Vanessa would be OK with that anyway.

I waited a couple minutes, then called Kirsten to give her
the all-clear. "Hurry," I said. "Knowing Vanessa's fucking
insatiable sex drive, more isn't far off."

"She really is something," Kirsten said. "Has he ever
considered giving her a dildo or something?"

Oh, Jesus no, I thought. "That would be baaaaaaaaaaaad," I
said, quietly, so only Kirsten could hear. I realized I was
being a bit too loud, before. "She'd just spend the whole
day in bed, on the weekends, whenever she had a day free,
you know, wailing and screaming. She's such a fucking
nympho. I've seen her in bars, when Greg is studying for an
exam or whatever, trying to pick a guy up just so she can
get off, and then, when it's over, she does it again."

"Like a gay guy on the club circuit or something," Kirsten
said.

"Just get the fuck up here.  I don't appreciate that, but we
can bicker about it later. Right now I just want you inside
my front door before you have to see her spread-eagled on
the kitchen table or something."

* * *

The infernal alarm clock went off at 8:45 like it did every
morning. A few days had gone by, without seeing Adam at all.
Thankfully, I was a clock-radio kind of person, so I got
Karl Casell, Renee Montaigne and a cheery Morning Edition.
Oh, NPR, thank you for making my day almost-not miserable.

I rolled over and out of bed, pushed my comforter back into
place so it looked, like, well, I'd slept in it and tried to
make my bed afterward. Ergh. Kirsten was still asleep, since
she never moved in her sleep, and waking her required a
Pearl Harbor-level effort. I brushed her hair back off her
forehead, and then proceeded into the shower.

Standing under the hot water, which I will not deny I was
enjoying, my mind drifted back to Adam again. 'I wonder what
he's doing?' I thought. I grabbed a bar of soap, and
imagined Adam pulling it across my chest, lathering me up.
And you can only guess what that did to me. But my stomach
tightened, as I started to pull up and down on Josh Jr., and
I was suddenly sick.

Oh, fuck. This again? This had happened to me the last time
something had gone wrong with Adam, a few months ago. I
hadn't been able to come for days, had had to avoid Adam and
make up a line about how I had the flu and didn't want to
give it to him. It was like my brain was all twisted up with
my genitals, somehow, and every time I touched myself, my
gastrointestinal system lurched.

I sat down in the tub, with the water running, and tried to
regain my composure, after retching a few times. Thankfully,
I didn't puke. That would have been gross.

And all that did was conjure up images of Adam's arms around
me. I could almost feel his warmth, his constant body heat,
his smell, the tang of his sweat and the delicious taste of
his cock. I licked my lips, and stood back up. I resisted
the urge to jack off, as I forced myself into an even worse
punishment than he could have dreamed up, fantasizing about
him without any recourse at all. It was funny, I'd spent
almost no time in this position, dating someone almost all
the time. And now, I wasn't letting myself jack off, either.

"Mmmm, Adam," I moaned. I was watching him strip his
undershirt off now, after practice. He was sweaty, and I
inched my way down from the head of the bed to the foot, so
I could lick at his sweaty chest and tease his nipples with
my teeth. He cradled my head against his beautiful
pectorals, ran his fingers through my hair, and my heart
throbbed with the joyous arousal of being so intimately near
the man I loved so much. I could feel him breathing, shallow
breaths now, and I could feel his heart, his pulse racing.
Mmm-hmm. Delicious. I inhaled deeply, smelling the delicious
scent of my hunk, swooning over every touch and every sound
he made. I slid my hand down between his legs, felt the
massive hardness straining against his damp jock strap,
giggled and pressed my hand in under the waistband. Reveling
in the smoothness, the velvetlike texture of something so
engorged and gigantic, I stroked my fingertips up and down
along the length of the shaft. He threw his head back and
moaned softly. His sweats were around his ankles, his
sandals across the floor, and I had to stifle the urge to
immerse myself in his pheromones. Oh, Adam.

All of a sudden, one of my roommates pounded on the bathroom
door. "JOSH! Are you ever going to finish with the shower? I
have class too, you know," Greg said, his voice, muffled,
piercing through the door all the same. Fuck.

I sighed, mumbled something to no one in particular, and
stood up again. "Yeah, I'll be out in, like, two minutes,
Greg," I shouted back. "But I'm going to need to brush my
teeth and all that, you'll have to start while I'm doing
that." The door to the bathroom opened no more than ten
seconds after I shut the water off, and I was glad he and I
were more or less O.K. with each other's nakedness, or we
would have had quite an embarrassing moment.

Quite deliberately I did not allow myself to fantasize about
Greg, because that, too, might have led to masturbation. As
horny as I was that morning, the thought of him and Vanessa
getting it on on our futon might have even been arousing
rather than disturbing. Instead, I pushed everything aside,
brushed my teeth and went about my business. I put some gel
in my hair, washed my hands and then crossed the hall to my
room.

I'd always loved our apartment, from the moment I first saw
it, since we had a view from the living room and all of the
rooms were gigantic. It was also as hot as a sauna
sometimes, like now, and that was nice when you'd just left
the hot bathroom. Who wants to be cold?

I got dressed, and I put on a pair of Sevens and a charcoal
sweater. I wanted to look good for Adam if I got to see him
that day... my mind immediately drifted to the excitement of
seeing him. Maybe in the central plaza on campus, maybe in
passing on the way to class, maybe at the student union. We
could share some quality time, under one of those pretty
deciduous trees that I could never identify, elms or
something, sitting on the sun-dappled grass in the autumn
light. It was infectious, and autumn always changes my moods
for the most positive -- sitting outdoors doubly so. So I
grabbed my Docs, which were the only shoes I could justify
wearing in this kind of glorious but slightly cool weather,
and a messenger bag, and headed out the door. Class, you
know. Kristen knew to let herself out whenever she felt like
leaving.

Not like I paid attention to a word my professor had to say.
I'd occasionally hear bits and pieces of the lecture,
floating in and out of my reverie. I had to pinch myself a
couple of times, to stay conscious of what was going on. I
didn't want to start murmuring things in class, but the
thoughts running through my head were intense. I missed him
so much. It hadn't been all that long since I'd seen him,
but in the mood I was in, it hurt to go even a few minutes
without seeing him. I couldn't take my mind off him.

Finally, the lecture was over, and I walked out. Not even
thinking, with the white earbuds in and blaring "Another
Park, Another Sunday" in my head, my thoughts drifted to
Adam.

Sitting in the room, staring out the window, And I wonder
where you've gone, Thinking back on the happy hours just
before the dawn. Outside the wind is blowing, It seems to
call your name, again: (Ooooooo) Where have you gone?

It helped that this particular Doobie Brothers track always
evokes a lot of fall-ish sentiment in me -- it must be the
melancholy sound and the faint rustling noise in the
background. It's a beautiful song. Slowly, a smile spread
across my face. I rocked my head in tune with the music,
tapping my fingertips against the side of my legs, where
those studs are on your jeans that hold the seam and the
pockets together, and wandered merrily through campus,
oblivious to everything around me. I hardly noticed anything
below the level of the leaves on the trees, floating through
my commute to and from campus, which was not short.

I'd gotten fifteen minutes into my twenty-minute commute
south when I heard a loud whistle behind me. Someone
shouted, "JOSH! HEY JOSH!" Then another whistle.

I turned around. Who on Earth could that be?

My heart stopped. Adam! I'd never been more glad to see his
face. Adam! You're gorgeous, babe, and you know it! I raced
over to the silver M3, gazing longingly in those azure eyes
as they got bigger in front of me, until I had my hands on
the windowsill, or whatever it's called when the window is
rolled down. I stuck my head in.

"Hi, babe," I whispered. I pulled my head out. "How's it
going, Josh?" I had to pretend to act vaguely straight, for
Josh's sake. I knew how touchy my relative gayness was for
him. I had never made any secret of my attraction to men, of
course, but it wouldn't be very seemly for the big manly
wide receiver to be friends with an especially effete gay
boy. We were very fortunate that we went to a sufficiently
progressive school that he could be friends with me, meet me
for coffee, and all that jazz, without feeling like his
masculinity was threatened. But it wouldn't do for me to
forget to keep my legs uncrossed at my coffeeshop, or to
actually make reference to my physical attraction while he
and I were together. We had a code -- I'd borrowed it from
"The Broken Hearts Club," a marvelous movie with a very hot
Andrew Keegan, and, funny enough, a not-very-hot Zach Braff
-- and one of us would say "meanwhile" whenever a hot boy
passed. He was almost always horrified when it was one of
his teammates, unless it was our delicious quarterback, but
we couldn't talk about it until we were safely ensconced in
one of our apartments.

And after a year of at least theoretically acknowledging to
the world that he was gay. What a fucked-up world we live
in.

So I set my knees and my arms at just the right ankle,
grateful that I was wearing sunglasses, and I leaned my head
in. "What's up?"

He looked at me. I recognized what that look meant. "Get
in," he muttered. "Go on, just do it. Fuck. Come on."

I popped the door, listened to the beeping in the car and
the honking of the people behind us upset that we were
blocking half of the major north-south artery near the Lake,
and then pulled the door shut. He managed to gun the car off
and close the window at the same time, a feat of
coordination that impressed me. So I was a little
predisposed to be impressed by him.

Adam glanced over at me. "I want to be spontaneous. Do you
have a bit?"

I pushed up the sleeve on my sweater, took a quick look at
my right wrist, where an 18th-birthday-gift watch from my
dad enjoyed its regular spot, and then nodded. "Yes. I'm
free for the day now. By the way, you're buying, I'm broke
till Friday," I added. "I can pay you back if you like, but
I have, like, $7 to my name till then."

He slipped his hand under his ass -- I forced myself not to
stare as he did that -- and pulled his wallet out. He
reached in and grabbed two twenties. "Here. I don't want you
to be without money. It's not like I spend all the money my
dad gives me every month, anyway. You have any idea how much
he thinks I spend in a week?"

That got a laugh out of me, loud and happy. "I don't want
to. You already spend more than I do in a week. If you're
spending less than he thinks you do, where does the rest
go?"

Adam gave me a funny look. "Huh?" His voice sounded a little
shaky.

I smiled sweetly. "Well, let's pretend I'm naive and stupid
-- no comments or you're never getting laid again, Adam
Vanderhuyden -- and your dad is giving you $50 a week. You
spend $40 of it. What do you do with the remaining $10?"

He snorted loudly. "$50 a week? You really do live in la-la
land. I spend about $175 a week. He gives me, like, $300 a
week. What the hell do I need $300 a week for?"

"You're not answering the question, Adam, darling," I said,
putting a little more saccharine in my voice. I was quite
astonished, really, that his parents gave him more a week
than I was budgeted for a month. No wonder he hated it when
I insisted on paying for something myself. He knew I
couldn't really afford anything extravagant, and vehemently
resisted it whenever I had the crazy idea of taking him out
somewhere on my own dime. Either he paid, or we split the
bill. $300 a week. I didn't pay that much in rent, food, and
utilities, combined. I knew his rent was a lot -- I had a
hunch it was probably $2000 a month -- but I can't imagine
paying $2000 a month and $1200 a month in allowance. It
occurred to me briefly that Adam was on an athletic
scholarship, so it wouldn't be that much sweat off his back
for a high-powered lawyer, corporate counsel for a Fortune
500 company like his dad, to pay what he would already have
been paying to send his son to school, when the kid's
education was paid for. I was willing to bet the extravagant
expenses would continue in graduate school, though. I still
wanted to hear Adam's answer.

"Can we talk about this another time? Just trust me," he
said. He growled a little with that, so I backed off.

But we were now on Dempster, going west past the El. There's
not much west of the train line, just residential property,
and then Skokie; so unless he'd decided we were going to
have a little heart-to-heart at Poochie's over the charred
salami sandwich, not the sort of thing my football player
sort-of boyfriend usually ate during the season, I had no
idea where he was taking me. "Where are we going?"

Adam looked over his shoulder, as we coasted past Dodge and
the Interstate came into sight, put on his turn signal and
got in the left-hand lane. "You'll see," he said. And then
we were merging onto the Edens, toward downtown. He grinned
devilishly at me, and then reached past me into the back
seat of his car, fished around for a minute, pulled out an
Art Institute events calendar. "I saw this," he said,
pointing at the centerpiece, an exhibition called "Seurat
and the Making of 'La Grande Jatte,' " which was apparently
going to be open for another week or so, "and I knew how you
loved that painting. So I decided we'd go, if you were
free."

My face flushed, probably a thousand different shades of
vermilion, like those magnificent ancient striations of rock
in Sedona, and I found myself brimming with excitement. I
felt like a little kid whose mother had just told him she
was taking him to McDonald's on a Saturday afternoon, and
that he could play in the playground while she picked glumly
at a so-called salad.

But then it occurred to me: Spontaneous my ass. I was so
flattered, I decided not to make a big deal out of pointing
out that he'd just tipped his hand. But I could've.

"Thank you!" I found it in me to blurt out, between my
childish enthusiasm at seeing the exhibition and my more
adultlike compulsion to avoid wrapping my arms around him
and squeezing tightly and kissing him, since we were on the
Interstate, after all. "You're going to regret this,
though," I said.

"Why?" he asked, curious. He looked so darling when he
didn't know what I was talking about, his long, ordinarily
smooth brow wrinkled like linens left un-folded for too
long, and the little crow's-eye creases at the corners of
his eyes just led me to want to stare into the beautiful
South Pacific iris each eye contained. Hiram Powers, a
19th-century American sculptor, wrote, "The eye is the
window of the soul; the intellect and will are seen in it."
I have long found that I am capable of simply staring at
Adam, for what feels like hours at a time, like when he's
asleep, but the best part is just staring in his eyes.
They're magnificent, as deep as the ocean and as blue as the
desert sky.

I looked over, grinned at him then. "Because I'm going to
make you stand there in the gallery in the back while I
stare at the Chagall stained-glass windows."

Adam leaned over and whispered just past my ear, breathily,
while he kept his eyes on the road, "I'll stand behind you
and look at that perfect ass of yours. Sounds like a fair
bargain."

That gave me goosebumps all over my arms, all over my face.
His hot breath massaged the nape of my neck.

"I thought you might like that," Adam said, beaming like a
child. "Now, to the museum."

He put on the radio, and soon enough he was humming along
cheerfully to one of his favorite songs: Led Zeppelin's "The
Wanton Song," from "Physical Graffiti." It was almost too
much Adam, the whole album, all loud-rock guitar riffs and
attitude. But while I would always choose "Trampled
Underfoot," if I were asked to pick a song I liked on that
album, it was "The Wanton Song" that really got Adam moving,
head bobbing and fingers thrumming on the steering wheel as
he flew down the Interstate. The way he drove, you'd think
there were a hurry to get to the museum, since we must have
been going 75 in the express lanes and weaving through
traffic. I've told him a thousand times that the highway is
not a football field, that there's no deep route the
quarterback's running that we have to stay on, and we can
stay at the speed limit. When I drive, I usually go 55 or
60, you know, sane speeds.

But Adam had always liked to go as fast as possible. I guess
that's why I drove an '87 Caravan my uncle had given us
without complaint, and Adam had a brand-new M3.

C'est la vie.

He knew his way around the city, so while I was busy ogling
all the big buildings, he was navigating his way through
downtown. We could probably have taken the Drive, since we
were going to the Art Institute and it was right on the
lake, but he hated L.S.D., said it was too trafficky and
slow. That it was further to take the Edens, but that we'd
make up the extra distance and then some if we just took
Washington instead of Congress.

That took us through the heart of the Loop. More than a
streets geek, I've always been a building geek, so I enjoyed
watching the buildings go by. They're skyscrapers, you see,
the real McCoy, in downtown Chicago, like nothing you'll
ever experience anywhere else. In New York, all of the
buildings are crammed together so tightly that, with the
exception of the Empire State Building or the Chrysler
Building, or, in the olden days, the World Trade Center,
very few stand out enough for them to be individually
discernible. But in Chicago, the skyline stretches out along
the lake for miles and miles, with the end result being a
massive and magnificent outline in which you can outline
almost each individual building for the six miles or so of
downtown.

And in the daytime, on a weekday, the Loop is humming with
activity, people running left and right in suits or courier
uniforms, with briefcases or coffee or trench coats folded
over their arms. It's a much quieter place at night, of
course, with just the theaters and a smaller number of
restaurants open; but in the midday, there's very few places
livelier in the world. You can feel the activity humming in
your fingertips, in your toes.

Then we burst through onto Lake Shore Drive, and Adam slid
us across four lanes of traffic into the parking garage
under Millennium Park, just a short walk from the Art
Institute. It's very abrupt, but across eight lanes of
traffic and a median, you can observe the mayhem of a major
American business district while you picnic, or stroll
leisurely. As enormous and empty as Lake Michigan is, the
expanse of parkland along Lake Michigan is like New York's
Central Park combined with the beach in St. Pete, in
Florida.

We took a nice little amble around Millennium Park, and, as
we passed the Bean, Chicago's enormous coffee bean-shaped
sculpture-pop-art monument, Adam pushed me down on the
ground and sat beside me. He reached in his pocket and
pulled out his digital camera, and extended his arm. I felt
a little bit of a poke, and then --

I shrieked! I was being tickled! I squirmed and screamed,
and Adam leaned in and placed his lips to my cheek, and I
heard the shutter click, in my physical mayhem. He stopped,
and I caught my breath. "Fucker," I grunted, loudly, as I
tried to regain my composure. People were staring at us, but
I didn't really care.

Adam swiveled the camera around, showed me the photo. It was
pretty damn cute, I had to admit, Adam kissing me on the
cheek while I had my mouth open, laughing hard, and I was
flushed like I was happy.

He leaned over and stroked my hand. "I love you, baby," he
said. "You may have torn my heart apart, but your hand's
still on it."

"I'm sorry," I said. My throat grew a little tight, just
then. "I'm so sorry."

My beautiful, amazing boyfriend, who I realized then that I
loved even more than I'd known, turned my head toward him
and kissed me, hard. I pulled myself away, caught my breath.
"I love you, too, Adam." A smile grew across his face, as
wide as I'd ever seen. "I love you so very much."

He clicked off his camera.

"Thank you," I said.

Adam squinted at me again. "What for?"

"I think you know."

* * *

The Art Institute is really one of those amazing museums
that you can get lost in. Like a lot of downtown Chicago,
the building is a literally palatial neoclassical structure,
a massive expanse of white limestone between Lake Michigan
and downtown that is left over from the 1893 Columbian
Exposition, the event that made Chicago what it is today.

Daniel Burnham, the man who was responsible for the
Columbian Exposition, helped form the city of Chicago; it
was his Exposition that brought the first El line, what is
now the Green Line, to the Southeast Side, and two of the
buildings that he masterminded are still in use today, the
Art Institute's and the Museum of Science and Industry in
Jackson Park. Chicagoans owe an enormous debt to him for
that. But the Exposition also brought an even more massive
increase in the population of the city than it had already
had, which meant still more beautiful brick and stone
buildings since this was after the Great Fire, and little
details like the world's first Ferris Wheel, which is no
longer in operation, and Jackson Park itself, which was
intended as Frederick Law Olmsted's gift to Chicago, like
Central Park.

Parks large and small dot the city, as a matter of fact, a
testament to Olmsted's visions. Woodlands and manicured
parks are to Chicago what lakes are to Minneapolis or
Orlando; they're everywhere, part of the landscape. Olmsted
is most famous for Central Park, and rightly so, but he
deserves credit for the vision that established the Midway
that runs through Hyde Park and the University of Chicago,
making that neighborhood Chicago's stateliest. If not for an
accident of history, the Midway and Jackson Park would rank
up with Central Park, San Francisco's Candlestick Park and
Portland's Forest Park among the nation's greatest municipal
parks. They're two sides of the same coin, Jackson Park an
enormous, seemingly unbounded park like Central Park, and
the Midway a manicured stretch of lawn and sidewalk, and
they're lovely.

But Jackson Park and the Midway are both on the South Side,
which, in 1893, was where the city's wealthiest denizens
lived -- the remnants, the beautiful but worn-down mansions
in Hyde Park and on Prairie Avenue at Eighteenth Street, are
testament to that fact. It's ironic that Burnham's genius
was also the reason for the death of Olmsted's great gifts
to the city: Rapid transit made it possible for the city to
expand further from the core of downtown, which meant that
living near downtown would lost its cachet for almost 100
years. Geography played a role as well; Chicago's lakeshore
is shaped like an 'L,' at the southwesternmost tip of Lake
Michigan, so the great majority of the city's land mass is
on the South Side. The railroad nexus that made the city
great is, therefore, on the near South Side, along with the
former slaughterhouses, and in the early 20th century those
wealthy Chicago families joined many of their compatriots in
fleeing up the North Shore to Lincoln Park, and then Rogers
Park, both of which have been left with a smattering of
mansions and beautiful brownstones, and eventually to
Evanston and beyond. Middle-class and working-class whites
followed, came and left, and then, poor African Americans.
(The same thing happened in Lincoln Park, which has now
re-gentrified, and Rogers Park, which hasn't yet, mostly
because it's at the far end of the city's longest El ride
and abuts vastly more prosperous Evanston.)

The consequence of the demography, today, is that, with the
exception of the Art Institute and the Museum of Science and
Industry, the genius of Burnham and Olmsted is inaccessible
to Chicagoans today. The vast majority of Hyde Park's
denizens are either poor or affiliated with the University
of Chicago, although many of those mansions are owned by
upper-middle-class and wealthy black families today; and
Jackson Park abuts Woodlawn, whose population is mostly
living on public assistance.

But having the Art Institute makes up for all that. It is a
family jewel, the kind of possession with which I simply
can't imagine Chicago parting. In many of the world's major
cities, there are a lot of art museums, all different places
to see different kinds of art, so in Madrid one must go to
the Prado, the Thyssen-Bornemisza and the Reina Sof'a to get
the full breadth of Spanish art, and in New York, that
city's grand and magnificent art collection is split between
the Met and MoMA. But Chicago has no 'other museum,' only
the Art Institute. Its collection is so vast -- medieval
armor, pre-Columbian Native American art, ancient Egyptian
artifacts, Impressionist painting, Expressionist painting,
De Stijl, pop art, the whole megillah -- that it really
takes several days just to glance at everything, much less
absorb any of it.

I was magnetically drawn to it as soon as I'd first come to
Chicago. Even as a child, I've always found art museums
soothing, a way to contemplate the existence of the world
and its curious machinations. That's why I've always been
drawn to prewar art; modern art is a completely blank canvas
in a lot of ways, onto which the viewer is supposed to paint
his own ideas. There's a lot of tension between the audience
and the art, in other words. All the gobbledygook we read in
art books and newspaper articles, about "dialogue," or
"participation," or whatever this week's fashionable term is
obscures the fact that in modern art the artist's intent is
unclear. But Kandinsky, my favorite artist, just as a
for-instance, isn't asking his audience to do very much. He
just wants them to look, to ponder, to think. Chagall asks
you to consider your subconscious, and our cultural
subconscious. More than anything else, I guess, I am a late
arriver to the Expressionist ball; painters like Kandinsky,
Chagall, Paul Klee, and the early Cubists sing to me in a
way that neither the Vel‡squezes nor the Warhols ever will.

And I like to stand in front of paintings, to dissect every
stroke, all the gradations of light and shadow, see the way
that they interact with their surroundings as they change.

Poor Adam's been with me a thousand times to the Art
Institute, now, but I'm always like a little kid whenever I
set foot inside that museum. He stands there behind me, like
a bodyguard, watching me more than he looks at the art. I
know that he'd rather watch people than paintings, since it
was he who told me that I fidget with my left hand when I'm
nervous and with my right hand when I'm bored, and that when
I'm interested in something I stand at a thirty-degree angle
to it, turned to my left. He says that I've been known to
stand in front of paintings, especially something massive
and complex like "Paris Street, Rainy Day," for instance,
one of the Art Institute's Impressionist masterpieces, for
fifteen minutes, staring at every minute intricacy.

Eventually, I turn around, done absorbing a painting, and
sometimes I catch his eye. His little gestures, like the
fire I see smoldering in his eyes when he's been watching
me, the warmth and also the barely concealed passion, were
always an important sign for me. I suppose, on some
conscious level, I've always known how Adam felt about me.
Sometimes, I'll wake up in the mornings, if I sleep in, and
I get the feeling that he's been watching me; and when I do
wake up, it becomes an all-consuming conflagration. He'll
push me back on his bed, kiss me hard as though I've been
away on an aircraft carrier during a tour of duty in Iraq,
and then straddle my head while I give him a blow job. It's
always a bit rough, more than a little animal, my jaw
stretched open as far as it'll go while he moans loudly, my
tongue flickering over the head of his cock quickly, sliding
tip of my tongue gently along the shaft while I suck on the
head further back in my mouth -- it's a work of art in its
own right, a good blow job. After a few minutes of that,
he'll reach down and hold my jaw open with his thumbs, while
he controls the pace, sliding in and out of my mouth; that
only lasts a little while, and all the while I'm working as
hard as I can. The smell of Adam is intoxicating in the
morning, especially this time of year, male musk and a
little of the salty tang of sweat, mixed with the sticky
feeling of a night in the humid air without air
conditioning. So I don't really mind. And soon enough, it's
over.

He likes watching me afterward, too, though. Or in general.
I used to tease him about it, but he's always been very
sensitive about it. My mother, she of the seemingly infinite
wisdom, once told me that when it comes to keeping a romance
alive, it's better to marry down than up, as it were: If
you're with someone who loves you far more than you love
him, you're the one who is in the driver's seat.

I have absolutely no idea what Adam sees in me, no idea at
all, but whatever it is, I recognized, while we were at the
Art Institute, that day, that I was definitely in love with
a boy who loved me far more than I loved him. As
pathetically Adam-centric as I'd become, in the year we had
been dating, I knew that day that it was like I was the sun
and he was the moon, you know?

There's a badly clichŽd scene in almost every movie with a
romantic subplot, in which the lovers stroll or browse or
run through an art museum, a bookstore or an antique shop,
or anywhere else where they can ponder and look good for
each other, like two offbeat Michel Gondry heroes who are
destined for each other but still have to find it out for
themselves. The gold standard is probably Godard's "Band of
Outsiders," in which its characters attempt to set the
record for running through the Louvre; but my personal
favorite will always be John Hughes' "Ferris Bueller's Day
Off," and not just because it takes place in the Art
Institute. It's scenes like that that help Hughes show his
genius, which is filming genuine, light-hearted interaction
between the adolescents of the period.

We were like that, sort of.

Adam instantly pulled on my hand, as soon as we were past
the gate, and soon I found him dragging me through the
museum. "I'm taking you to look at my favorite paintings,"
he said, with a stupid-looking grin on his face.

"What about the 'La Grande Jatte' exhibition?" I asked. I
mean, not that I really minded the idea of seeing some of
his favorite paintings, after all these times that he'd
stood there, patiently, watching me looking at mine; but
he'd said that was why we were here.

He turned, looked at me over his shoulder, smiled at me.
"Later, babe. Just pay attention, now."

This seemed sane enough at first, but there was no real
logic to what we looked at. We'd walk past some of the
paintings I'd always figured he would like, and then spend
five minutes looking at, you know, the sort of scratching
that I didn't think he'd ever be able to stand. It was
really a very strange experience.

At some point, he pulled me through a side door that looked
like it didn't go anywhere in particular, and we were in a
very long corridor with just a door at either end, like a
back alley -- or an abandoned hall in an airport, maybe. He
grasped my hand and started running toward the far end. I
shrieked loudly, tried to resist, but Adam just laughed hard
and pulled me along with him. He has more lively in him,
sometimes, than I can bear, because I just don't have as
much energy as he does. He can, and will, wear you out.

I gave in and played along, and the corridor must have
stretched along the entire length of the side of the
building, or so it seemed. We ran and ran, and eventually we
could only just barely make out the far end of either
hallway. He stopped, leaned against the wall and caught his
breath. Even for a football player, running from a dead stop
while pulling someone else, for at least a hundred feet,
will knock the wind right out of you.

After several minutes of this, just sitting there, we stoped
panting. Adam looked over at me, having caught his breath,
while I was still a long way from OK -- he was the fit one
of us, after all -- and said, "Fun, huh, babe?"

"I hate you."

He laughed. Loud, booming, masculine. It echoed in the tiled
hallway. "No, I know you don't," Adam said. He reached out,
grasped my forearms and pulled me up against him, closer and
closer, and then kissed me. I was swimming in an ocean of
hormones, at that moment, confused about where I was or what
I was doing, except that I needed him to kiss me more. He
leaned in and whispered in my ear, "You know, we're all
alone here..."

That sent shivers up my spine, tingling all over. My face
flushed. I knew that tone of voice, the way it was a little
raspy and hoarse whenever he had something dirty in mind,
and I didn't know if I would have the strength to resist
Adam's appeal. I straightened up, momentarily stiff, trying
to resist; but I gave in when I could feel a certain, er,
localized region straightening. "Oh, Adam," I said. "We
shouldn't do this."

Adam laughed, a different laugh entirely now, half-sarcastic
and half-mocking. "Hey, baby, why not? Is there something
wrong with it?" He made it sound as though everyone had sex
in the hallway of a museum, during normal business hours, on
occasion.

Oh, gosh, I can't imagine why. "Because we could get caught?
Just for starters."

"Sure," Adam said, "we could get caught. That makes it
better, doesn't it? You think the only thing that got you
going in that football stadium, a year ago, was that I was
wearing a football uniform?"

It was my turn to laugh. "Actually, yes," I said. "You think
you know me that much better than I know myself, now, when
just the other day you said you thought you didn't know me
all that well?"

He leaned in, and I could smell that overpowering smell that
Adam always had. "I don't exactly have to," he said. "You
get this... look on your face, when it comes to my football
gear, and this was a different look. The risk of being
caught was what kept you going."

Fuck... was that true? Was it really the risk that had kept
me going? I tried to imagine what it would feel like, having
sex in this hallway, down on my knees in front of the man I
loved so much, and who also was so gorgeous, so stunningly
beautiful. I was immediately as hard as a rock, and a little
woozy from the rapid rush of the blood out of my head. I
tried to pry out a little more cognizance, before that was
it: "OK," I said, quietly, "I'll do it. But we keep our
clothes on."

My boyfriend -- ex-boyfriend? prospect? -- smiled at me,
turned me around and pressed me up against the wall, hard.
"Yeah," he said. "But you have to tell me what you want to
do." I could feel him grinding against me, pushing his
pectoral muscles hard into my chest, little beads of sweat
budding on his forehead. He was, to say the least, not a
small man in any regard, and I could tell pressed between
his muscular physique and a concrete wall.

I whispered, "I want to give you a blow job, here."

"That's not good enough," he said, much more loudly. I tried
to signal that he should be quiet, but he acted like he
hadn't heard.

So it was going to be time for me to plead, it seemed. "OK,"
I said, a little tiredly. "I want to go down on you here in
this hallway, where anyone could walk in at any moment and
see it. I want you to give me the privilege of swallowing
your sticky, thick come, right here in the Art Institute."

Adam grinned, and I felt his dick twitching. "Fuck," he
whispered. "That's hot." He ground up against me, one last
time, and then pulled away from the wall, spun us both
around. He rested against the wall, more leisurely than I
had been.

I slid my hands down his chest, feeling the hard musculature
of the man I loved. I ground the palm of my hand into his
pectorals, pinched his nipples through his shirt. Then, I
kissed my way down his chest -- I hate the taste of T-shirt,
but it really turned him on -- slowly, just teasing him.

Then, at long last, I undid his belt, and, with just one
hand, managed to unbutton and unzip his jeans. My mouth
watered at the thought of tasting, after so long, that big,
long, hard dick that I'd been missing. I could already smell
the musky smell of his body, trapped inside all those
clothes all day long and looking for any excuse to escape.
It was intoxicating, the smell of a powerful man mixed with
the pheromonal after-effects of exercise and exertion.

So, I took a deep breath and felt my body quavering with
excitement. I pulled Adam's jeans down around his ankles, so
that he was left standing there in just his tight-as-always
T-shirt and a pair of slim-cut green plaid boxers. Fuck, he
looked so hot in them.

"I want to suck your dick," I said. My dick twitched hearing
the words come from my mouth. He breathed, deeply. "Go
ahead," he said.

I did. I pulled his boxers down, pushed them down to where
his jeans were resting, on top of his shoes. Then, I kissed
my way back up his left left, slowly, savoring the salty
taste of sweat that built up on them. One kiss at a time,
with a little tongue and some suction. That drove Adam wild,
and I could feel him thrashing a little, squirming in
pleasure. The sensation of his muscles twisting as I kissed
them was unreal.

Once I made it to the top of the left leg, I moved right
back down to the ankle of the right leg, just above where
his jeans were. I gave that leg the same treatment as the
left, and as I was making it to the top of his right thigh,
and starting to twist inward, I heard Adam moan softly. And
good sex is like a feedback loop: Hearing him make sounds of
carnal pleasure made me that much hotter. I could feel my
blood pressure rising, especially in localized parts of the
body, thudding in my ears.

"You like that, huh?" I said. Adam nodded. He looked like he
was lost in a trance, so I decided to soldier on.

I slid my tongue out from between my lips, and then slowly
licked my way up the inside of his thigh. Here, he tasted
even more strongly of sweat and male pheromones, which was
just fine by me. Without any hesitation, I slid my tongue
all the way up the inside of his leg, until I could slide it
down his perineum. He whimpered, loudly, a kind of
stage-whimper. My tongue went back the other way, forward,
toward his balls, tasty and tangerine-sized and full of
sweet juice, and then I slid one, then the other, in my
mouth. I could feel his flaxen, coarse pubic hair scraping
against my skin, but it wasn't a sensation I would give up
for the world. His skin was so tan, burnished like it had
been rubbed with oil, and I could watch his muscles
straining as I stared up his torso, right into his eyes. A
drop of his precome landed on my forehead, and it looked
like there was another forming. Adam brushed them off; he
looked down at me, eyes burning with passion, and I knew
what I needed to do.

At that, I let go of his balls and slid my tongue up his
long, hard cock, at last getting to taste what I'd been
missing. It's a funny experience, because it's not so
different from sucking on his finger, really, yet what a
difference the details make. I could taste the warm, musky,
salty precome in the back of my mouth and on my tongue, from
the instant the head slipped past my lips. I took it a
little at a time, teasing him, swirling my tongue around the
shaft as one inch, two inches, three inches slid between my
lips. Somewhere in the neighborhood of four inches, when the
head was pressing on the back of my tongue, Adam reached
down and pushed my jaw open a little wider, then held my
head as he slid the remaining four inches or so in. I felt
the head brush up against the back of my throat, and at
that, he grunted, "FUCK! Yeah! Take it all!"

I began to swirl my tongue, to start really sucking away,
moving up and down and jacking him with my left hand in
concert. It didn't last long. I guess it'd been a few days
since we'd had sex, to say the least, and after two or three
minutes of that, while I sucked and pulled furiously on his
cock and felt my own straining hard against my zipper, the
teeth grinding into me slightly, Adam gasped, "Oh, fuck!" He
reached down, grasped the back of my head, and began to pull
it forward in a faster motion than I had. I could feel his
strong hands holding on to my head, fucking my mouth with
abandon, for just a few seconds, and the he grunted, loudly,
"FUCK! I'm going to come!"

Adam did, then, giving me enough semen to paint a monochrome
masterwork on the ceiling of the whole length of the
hallway. I struggled to swallow it all, and in the end, a
little dribbled out onto my lip. He reached down, pulled me
up against his hard, slightly sweaty body, and licked it
right off my lower lip, where it had settled. "Fucking
hell," he said. "That was the best blow job I've ever had."

So I grinned. So sue me. I was being grasped tightly against
my blonde football player boyfriend's hulking body, almost
completely naked, in a cold, airport-like hallway at the Art
Institute. "I take it you like the exhibitionism?"

"No," he said. "I'm here for the paintings."

We both laughed, Adam's voice an octave lower than mine,
booming and ringing. He began to pull his clothes back on.
"Yeah," I said, trying to stifle a laugh mid-sentence. "Like
you read Playboy for the articles."

He finished putting his clothes back on, gave his hair a
quick brush-through to make sure it was all in position,
reached into my front jeans pocket for my handkerchief, took
it out and wiped the sheen of sweat off his forehead.
"You'll get your reward later. For now, let's go see that
exhibit."

"Did you plan this all along?"

Adam smiled at me, a devilish smile. "Do I have a newfound
reputation for being spontaneous?"

* * *

When we left the Art Institute, it had clouded over and was
raining. Adam had an umbrella in his bag, which he'd checked
at the front door, but I was completely unprepared, so we
squeezed under his pocket-sized umbrella and raced quickly
from the steps to the sidewalk. Just as I was about to turn
left, to go to the parking garage to get his car, Adam
pulled me forward. There was a man in a black town car
holding a door open, and Adam grasped my hand and pulled me
in. The athlete that he was, he somehow managed to fold up
and hand the umbrella to the driver, all the while getting
into a fairly small space.

I took this in stride, but once we were in the car, I turned
to Adam and whispered, "Why aren't we driving?"

"My car's being picked up. Don't worry about it."

That didn't answer the question, and I told Adam so. I don't
like being ignored.

He turned and looked at me, furrowed his brow like he always
does whenever he's searching for an answer that won't make
me angry. "We have a hotel room," he said, slowly. "I
thought you might enjoy a little night out on the town. This
way I don't have to valet the car."

I'm sure my eyes were as wide as saucers, at that moment.
Wasn't I supposed to be the one wooing him? Was I missing
something? How was it that he was putting all the planning
into this?

A few minutes later, we stopped in front of the Drake Hotel,
one of the most magnificent hotels I've ever been to. It is
the swankiest hotel in Chicago, and one of the city's oldest
and most magnificent institutions, to boot, a massive
structure on the lakeshore. It's where Adam's dad likes to
stay, when he's in town. He had already checked in, because
when we walked in, his driver behind us with the bags, he
took me straight to the elevators, and then right up to the
top floor, using a room key in his wallet.

While we were on our way up, I turned to face him, slid my
arms around his waist and kissed him, passionately. I should
say, really, that I attacked him, pushing him toward the
back of the car in the process. Our tongues wrestled, I
could feel his firm lips pressing against mine, and I slid
my hands up and down his back, kneading at the taut muscles
and feeling his heartbeat thudding against my chest.

We arrived with the clunk of the elevator reaching the end
of its long cable, and the door opened right onto our hotel
room. So this is what the penthouse suite looks like, in an
expensive hotel. I disentangled myself from Adam and got out
of the elevator, before it could take us all the way back
down to the lobby -- or, worse, have some tourists from
Wichita interrupt our kissing.

We were in an enormous suite of rooms, with a front room the
size of Adam's apartment and furnished completely unlike the
rest of the hotel's rooms, like the inside of the Harvard
Club in New York, mahogany panels, worn black leather and
ancient ivory. We walked into the living room, and I sunk
down into the sumptuous couch, feeling a little overwhelmed.
But Adam walked purposefully to the far wall, and threw back
the curtains. The light in the room had been diffuse,
before, coming in from smaller windows along the southern
and northern exposures. But this was the western wall, and I
gasped at the sight of the entire city of Chicago spread
before us. It wasn't at all like the view from the top of
the Sears Tower, but it was astonishing. I pried myself from
the couch, and stood mesmerized a few feet from the windows,
scanning the horizon for my favorite buildings.

Adam threw open the curtains on the far side, and Lake
Michigan was off in the distance, twinkling in the
reflection of the sunset from the other side of the city,
off on the horizon in the prairie.

He then came to me, picked me up off the couch -- he was,
after all, the athlete, not me -- and carried me into the
bedroom, which had been lavishly furnished and had a king
bed, to boot. I squealed, I squirmed, because it brought
back unfond memories of my pitiful attempts at playing
football in gym class in high school, but Adam just laughed
at me, pulled me in closer so I couldn't squirm. He had put
on his poker face, but I knew that he wanted to drop me on
the floor or something, just to see my reaction. I knew him
that well.

My boyfriend set me down on the bed, and I found that I
could breathe and did so, shallow, for a few seconds. Then
he came after me with the passion of a tiger. His hands, his
mouth, were all over me -- in one instant, we were kissing
desperately, trying to see who could go the longest without
oxygen, and the next, he was kissing my neck, my shoulders,
my back. He laced his fingers through my hair, pulled my
head closer to him. I could feel his cock straining against
his jeans, trying to burst out of his zipper and into the
open air, and pressing up against my pelvic bone.

That hurt. Adam was probably an easy 30 pounds heavier than
me, all muscle weight, and having most of that difference in
mass placed on one part of me was not comfortable.

So I rolled us over, lay on top of him, began to slide my
hard cock against his chest. I moaned softly, looked up at
the ceiling, feeling a profound hunger for Adam coming over
me. Unlike him, I hadn't come already, hadn't gotten a blow
job in an out-of-the-way hallway in the bowels of the Art
Institute, so I had to be careful or I would ruin things
before they began.

It's amazing, the things that run through your head, rapidly
but also in slow-motion, when you're having sex. Somehow,
you can still think, for instance, "If I'm not careful I'm
going to come soon," even while your body is trying to do
everything in its power to make that happen as soon as
possible.

I leaned down, looked him square in the eye, and said, "I
want you to fuck me."

"Do you?" he said, the bemused look of a man used to getting
what he wants.

Actions speak louder than words, so I got up, and, in just a
couple of swift moves, took off my shirt, shoes, jeans,
socks, and underwear, and, standing naked in front of Adam
with an erection the size of the Hancock Tower, I could feel
his big blue eyes scanning me. He pulled off his clothes,
then, right on the bed, pushed them off to one side. I
crawled back onto the bed, slid myself slowly over his body,
and kissed my way all the way up, like before at the museum,
except this time I started with his toes. He squirmed, he
gasped, he made the world's most ridiculous and yet
attractive noises, and I showed no mercy. I wanted to make
sure that he could feel every touch; I wanted him to have
goosebumps over every inch of his skin by the time I was
done with him.

We kissed passionately, once I made it through a few minutes
of worshiping all the awe-inspiring musculature in his
chest, and then his neck, kissed for a few minutes. I felt
his hand, distantly, sliding up and down along my cock. I
began to do the same to him, and his breathing grew ragged,
his cock slick with precome.

"OK," I said. "Fuck me, Adam."

Second time's the charm, it seems. Adam fumbled around in
his jacket pocket and retrieved a condom and two pillow
packets of lube. He laid them down on the bed, reached out
and grasped me by the hips, and pulled me toward him. My
brain just about exploded from serotonin when, a second
later, I felt his tongue licking my ass, and I knew what was
coming. He gave a savage rim-job, and he wasn't afraid to
use his teeth, to pry my sphincter open with his fingers and
slide his tongue inside, to use his hands on my hips to give
himself better leverage. There was nothing else in the
world, only the waves of pleasure every stroke of his tongue
sent through my body, only the feeling of his jaw against my
cheeks, his hands gripping my hips, his tongue working its
way around in my ass, and of my cock throbbing and dripping
precome like a leaking faucet onto the sheets of the hotel
bed. I'm sure we weren't the first.

For occasions just like this, I kept my ass groomed, the
hair carefully clippered and scrubbed carefully with soap,
like the rest of me, and I figured he appreciated it. Adam
had always loved to rim me; sometimes, when we were in the
right position, I could feel his cock actually growing from
its already ridiculous size as he licked away. There's a
fine art to using your tongue on someone's butt, a clear
distinction between just sliding your tongue around and
actively working on it, and Adam was always in the second
category.

I felt myself getting close to coming, without even touching
my cock. My entire body tensed, and the heat that was rising
from my toes and my arms into my groin was definitely a
sign. I managed to gasp, my voice hoarse, hardly recognizing
myself, "I'm going to come, baby, stop, not yet."

Adam did. He let go of me and I collapsed onto the bed, so
he leaned forward, turned my head sideways and kissed me
from behind, while I could feel his rock-hard cock sliding
between my cheeks, the head grazing my sphincter. It was a
rough kiss, all passion and no love, and I loved it, slid my
tongue out as far as I could into his mouth.

With the sound of a quick rip of plastic, while we kissed,
Adam opened the first packet of lube, so I pulled myself
back up onto my hands and knees. He got his forefingers wet
with the gel, rubbed them together so it would warm up a
little, and then started working in concentric circles
around my hole. All I needed, all I needed in the whole
world, in that instant, to feel complete was to have him
slide that enormous cock inside of me and fill me up with
it. It was so long, so massive, that it made my entire body
warm and flush.

Soon he had one finger, and then a second, and then a third
inside of me, all the while stroking in and out. He was
leaning over me, kissing me from over my left shoulder, and
my knees were trembling from the excitement.

"You're ready," he said, and it wasn't a question. He was
right. He always knew.

My beautiful boyfriend, he of the blonde hair, blue eyes,
and massive pecs, turned me over, then, using just his bare
hands to flip me 180 degrees onto my back. I saw him then,
in full, the powerful muscles working, and all  Adam laid me
there and tore open the condom packet lying on the bed, then
the second lube packet, slid the condom on and then slicked
himself up. He leaned in, kissed me, pushed my legs up one
at a time with his free hand, and then reached down and bit
my lip just as he started sliding the head in.

I gasped, froze. Fuck, it had been an awfully long time, too
long, for that enormous piece of meat. All eight inches of
it. I felt the end of the enormous flare of the head, as it
passed inside of me, and I lay there, willing myself not to
hurt.

After ten or fifteen seconds of silence, just our rough,
uneven breathing, I started to feel the warmth that comes
from good sex. I motioned for him to begin sliding in and
out, and, like a good boy, Adam indulged me. He knew how to
play me like a violin, and he was masterful that night, like
Yitzhak Perlman at the top of his form.

I liked the incredible depth of penetration that Adam could
give me, with his physical presence, his enormous cock, and
his willingness to do whatever it took to get more of him
inside of me. I growled, loudly, every time I felt his
pelvis pressing against my ass, feeling the head of his cock
buried deep inside of me, and I gasped louder still each
time he pulled almost all the way out, held my hips and
slammed himself back in all at once. He was everywhere,
sucking on my neck, gnawing on my ear, kissing my shoulders,
and all I could do was tug on his hair and grasp at his
back. I was desperate, and the entire world was reduced to
getting as much of his cock inside of me as humanly
possible. We didn't say anything: He just grunted loudly
with each stroke, and I made the kind of grating, gasping,
squealing noises that I always make, just louder.

He began to drive in and out faster and faster, like the
piston in an engine accelerating, and I wailed loudly in
time with his strokes, as I felt his balls slapping against
my ass harder and quicker. I laced my fingers through the
forelocks of that blonde hair, pulled his head down and
kissed him, desperately, said hoarsely, "I want you to
fucking make me come, Adam. Make me come."

Adam knew what that meant. He reached out for the headboard,
grasped on to it with one hand, and slid the other around
the shaft of my cock, which was soaked wet and throbbing
like a vibrator. He pulled his cock all the way out, until
only the tiniest bit of the head was in, and then shoved his
way in all at once, pulling on my cock in rhythm, while he
leaned in and kissed me. At the very end, in this position,
I could feel the head stabbing at my prostate, and I felt my
body convulse.

The second time he did that, I shuddered, thrashed, screamed
obscenities. I wailed, "FUCK! FUCK ME!" so loudly it could
probably be heard from airplanes.

The third time he stabbed my prostate with the head of his
cock, the entire world turned white, and I felt my body
tense up. I came so hard, then, my entire body simply out of
control, that there was jizz spattered all over our bed, his
clothes, the floor, anywhere it could land.

Adam pulled out in a hurry, pulled the condom off in one
deft move, pulled my head toward him, and slid his cock
between my lips. I was exhausted, but I managed to swirl my
tongue around the head for a few seconds. I reached out and
stroked his balls, slid my forefinger up to rub his asshole.
He was sweating profusely, his entire torso shining, and he
shouted, "FUCK YEAH, I'M COMING!"

I felt the first shot hit the back of my throat, then more,
and more, and more. I was struggling to keep up with
swallowing everything, but I knew I would regret it if I
didn't. I couldn't do anything about it though: Soon enough,
there was some dribbling out of my mouth and onto the bed.

He reached out, helped slide some back into my mouth. He
never did like it when I wasted any, or so he said.

"Fuck," I said, after I finished swallowing everything and
caught my breath. I collapsed back on the bed, and Adam slid
himself down and laid beside me, cradling me in his arms.
"That was unbelievable," I added.

Adam reached out with his fingertip, flicked my nose, and
gave me a kiss. A tender kiss. Not animal, not passionate.
The kind of kiss you get from your boyfriend after sex, I
suppose. "It was," he said. He wiped the sweat off his brow,
and I leaned in to smell him, an even better kind of sweaty.

I moaned.

"You are such a fucking animal," he said. I looked down at
his chest, and there were bite marks all over it.

So sue me, I thought, and I grinned devilishly. "Yeah, well.
You'll get over it."

"I'd better," he said. "We have dinner reservations."

At that, Adam stood up, completely naked, deflated cock
swinging between his legs. He towered over me, and really
did have little red welts all over him. "I'll shower first,"
he said. "Alone."

I made a pouting face.

He rolled his eyes at me. "If we shower together," he said,
"we'll never make it out the door. Now, take that pretty ass
and go get dried off."

God, I loved that boy. "I love you, Adam," I said.

Adam smiled at me, and I saw the crow's-feet around his eyes
he always gets when he's really happy. He turned around, and
I heard him say, as he walked away, the words interrupted
with laughter, "Just go use the shower in the other
bathroom, Josh."

* * *

That night, we did end up going out for dinner, and having a
night out on the town. Adam had the whole evening planned
out, in a level of detail that was highly unusual for him:
Dinner and a couple of bottles of rioja at the bar at
Blackbird, two tickets to the Lyric Opera, snacks and wine
with the lively after-theater crowd at Quartino. It was like
something from a movie. He even got my roommates to pack a
small duffel for me, and had his driver pick it up! Talk
about being swept up off your feet!

The next day I sat down, picked up the phone and had a long
conversation with my mother. I'd tried to keep her in the
loop as to what was going on between Adam and me, and she
had reminded me periodically that there were other boys in
the world. All I'd wanted was him. When we talked, that
morning, I cried when I told her that he had taken me back,
and I knew, when I could hear her sniffling a little, that
maybe I was right after all. "Josh, sweetie," she said, "I
know how much you love him. You're going to have to remind
yourself that it would have been your fault if you'd lost
him. But you didn't. He loves you so much."

"How do you know that?" I asked.

She responded, plainly, "Because he told me so. He called me
and told me that he had to find a way to get you back."

I was agape. "You were in on this and never told me
anything?"

Elise, my mother, laughed then, the kind of laugh that gets
louder the longer it goes on, until I had to hold the phone
away from my ear. "Would you have gone along then?"

She had a point.

* * *

The next few weeks were a blur, full of spending many hours
lying by Adam's side in bed, doing work or reading the
newspaper, or just plain having sex. We were like a newly
minted couple, and the days merged into one another.

But I do remember, vividly, that two weeks later, on a
Friday night, Adam asked me if I'd like to have dinner with
him. He picked me up around 7:00, and he looked so good,
wearing a navy trench coat over tight-fitting navy slacks
and a box-check oxford, that I could have eaten him up right
then and there. I felt like a slouch, in a pair of charcoal
dress slacks from a job interview and a French blue dress
shirt, but he was insistent that I looked fine, so I didn't
run upstairs to change.

We pulled up to our town's only four-star restaurant, a
nouveau French place with pretty provincial-style decor.
Now, I knew something was up. It was dinnertime, but I was
curious. We'd eaten here before, but not recently. How odd.

He tossed his keys nonchalantly to the valet, as we pulled
up to the curb in front of the restaurant, on a quiet, leafy
street just a few blocks from the lake and more or less in
the middle of a residential neighborhood. One of Adam's
favorite actions on Earth was handing the keys to a valet.
We strolled in to the restaurant, where the maitre d'hotel
recognized us, probably because we were "that cute young gay
couple from the university," and gave us a table right by
one of the palatial windows. The place was about half-full,
but it was just a sampling of the idly well-to-do townies,
the kind of people who don't like cooking and think going to
a bistro for dinner seems sane.

I smiled sweetly at Adam, and then we ordered lunch,
quickly, talking over the light thirties jazz I always
enjoyed there. At one time we had eaten here quite often. I
ordered the venison, and Adam, the roast chicken, and chips
and dip and an olive salad for each of us. The waiter smiled
sweetly at us, and then Adam ordered a bottle of wine.

We chatted a little about our mornings, and about class. And
the weather, which was absolutely magnificent, especially
considering it was supposed to be muggy and miserable right
now. Apparently we'd been spared the worst of a Midwestern
summer, just as it was turning into fall.

Over salad, we enjoyed the first glass of wine. He'd chosen
a good wine for the two of us to have, a rioja of which I
was quite fond, the MarquŽs de Caceres. Even if I was a bit
quaky-in-the-boots over the idea of drinking at a restaurant
like this. We clinked our glasses together.

I saw a gleam in Adam's eye.

"You look like the cat that swallowed the canary," I said,
perplexed. "Come on, spit it out, tell me what it is. What
do you want?"

Adam gazed at me, his eyes betraying nervousness. I hadn't
seen Adam nervous over anything that didn't involve a
football game in a really long time.

Neither of us spoke for a few moments.

Then, he cut through the heavy silence. "I've been thinking
about all the things we've said and done over the last two
years, baby. I think I was wrong to react so badly to all of
this... When you told me you'd been cheating on me. I wanted
to apologize, Josh, you have to understand."

I smiled. "Adam, babe, I understand completely. You were a
bit taken aback, and I think you were right, to be blunt.
You reacted in an understandable way. Are we past it yet? I
still love you."

At that, I saw his face shake a tad. "Yes. I love you. Very
much." He fidgeted a little with his right hand, slid his
hands down into his lap. "I want to try this again, baby. I
really do. You know how much you mean to me. The thought of
losing you makes me more nervous than anything I can
imagine. You mean the world to me, and I don't mean that
facetiously."

"Thank you, baby," I said. I could feel a blush spreading
across my cheeks, hot and flushed and red. "You have no idea
how much you mean to me. I thought I'd destroyed whatever
chance I had of being happy again."

Adam smiled at me. "Well." He fumbled with his right hand,
and removed something from the pocket of his trench coat.
"That's what this is all about."

He set an envelope on the table. "Go ahead, open it, Josh."
I was completely stunned. What should I make of this? An
envelope?

What could be in it? Was it some kind of a letter, a
proposition, a lawsuit -- just a few weeks after we almost
broke up? What could it be? Is this a creative way of
dumping me, he's going to get my hopes up and then--

My hands trembling, I reached out and took the envelope in
my hand. I opened it up slowly, pulling the top up with my
left hand, and then I flushed when I saw what was inside.

There was a black-and-white photo of the two of us, sitting
together happily, on a bench under the trees, in the middle
of campus. This must have been a couple of weeks ago, and it
was absolutely magnificent, not to mention it looked
spontaneous and yet totally posed; the look of adoration on
my face was unmistakable. I loved that boy. I was utterly
engrossed in the photo.

When I looked up, finally, Adam was standing next to me,
instead of seated across from me. I looked up at him, gave
him a funny look, opened my mouth to say something. I
couldn't figure what to say, so I shut my mouth again.

Adam just gave me that "I swallowed the goldfish" look. He
reached into another pocket, and pulled out a velvet box and
set it on the table in front of me, a little cautiously.

I felt all the air swoooooosh out of my lungs, and I gasped
for oxygen. My eyes watered up, and soon I felt a hot bead
of salty water trickle down my cheek, followed by another. I
didn't have the power to say anything.

"Adam..." I finally managed to croak out.

He looked at me. I saw he was concerned, I could read his
eyes that well. "Just open it, baby."

So I reached out, cracked the box. In it was a ring, a
silver band, the kind of classic, understated ring I guess
he would expect I'd wear. My heart raced a thousand times
faster still, and I began to cry much harder.

Adam stood up, went over to my side. "Josh," he said. "I
love you. Will you marry me?"

Tears were now streaming down my face

I tried again. "Adam. This is the most beautiful, most
wonderful thing anyone has ever done for me. I love you more
than anything else, in the whole wide world. I don't know if
I could ever love anything, or anyone, as much as I love
you. When I thought I'd lost you, I despaired. I was
seriously considering killing myself, you know. I'm glad I
didn't go through with it." I paused, my lip quavering. "I
want to be with you forever, baby. Yes. I will marry you."

He looked over at me, and began to cry with me too. I leaned
in, and kissed him, in spite of the tears. It was a tender
kiss, his lips soft against mine, with only love, and no
lust.

The kind of kiss straight people routinely enjoy in a
restaurant. Of course, I was kissing a boy. And at some
point, it dawned on me that we were, after all, sitting in a
restaurant kissing. Fuck.

I slowly pulled my head back from Adam's and looked around.
To my astonishment, all the women and many of the men looked
very happy and a bit misty-eyed. The woman sitting at the
table nearest ours leaned over and said to me, "You sound
very lucky. Congratulations, young man." She smiled and
patted my shoulder.

My gaze went from the ring to Adam, to the smiling and happy
crowd at the restaurant, back to Adam, and then back to the
ring in its box, still sitting on the table. Then, I burst
into tears.

* * *

Somehow, we made it home safely, after an uneventful rest of
the meal. It's funny, I remember every detail like it was
yesterday. How often do you get engaged? We spent the rest
of the meal talking about it. When the wedding would be --
since we were both juniors, we'd wait until we graduated;
what we would serve; what we would wear; and, of course,
where it would be -- I was insistent that we should get
married at Council Crest Park, in Portland, on a hilltop
with the city off in the distance, but he had a vision of us
being married on the beach in the backyard of his parents'
home in Del Mar. I teased him that we'd be able to see the
illegal immigrants sneaking into the U.S., if we were
married on the beach so near the border. We eventually
settled on the most picturesque location of them all:
Washington Park, where the International Rose Test Garden
is, on the side of the hilltops overlooking downtown
Portland. It's the iconic photo of Portland, and, as I told
Adam, if we were married in July, it would be the most
picturesque wedding he could imagine.

And I figured we'd have a pretty lavish wedding. With his
parents' money, what wedding wouldn't be? "I may be the
bride," I said, "but you are not bankrupting my mother on a
wedding." Adam thought that was funny, and said that he
figured his mother would insist on planning it anyway.
"She's been planning my wedding ever since they found out
she couldn't have another child. She always wanted a
daughter. She'll have a great time planning it."

Now I certainly knew where the rest of Adam's money went. Of
course, he didn't have to pay for the meal himself; he
pulled out the credit card I'd only seen him use a few times
before, the silver American Express. Daddy's tab. Now I knew
why the people at the restaurant liked us so much. Thanks,
Mr. Vanderhuyden... he paid for the car, he paid for the
king-sized bed, he paid for dinner, and he probably paid for
the condom I heard crinkling in Adam's pocket. Fuck, that
was an exciting thought. About the only thing he didn't pay
for was the ring.

Ah, yes, the ring. I asked Adam, over dinner, and he told me
that he'd been saving up all of the extra allowance for all
the little extravagances over the past few weeks. I guess
that's why he was a little touchy when I started asking all
those questions, on the way to the Art Institute, about
where all that money went. He didn't want me to know that
he'd bought me a ring. It didn't even occur to me to sleuth
and find out how he'd paid for the hotel room, the dinner
the other night at Blackbird, whether he'd paid with Daddy's
card or with his own money.

Adam and I walked home after the meal. It was a beautiful
night, no clouds to be seen and a light breeze rustling the
leaves, but he was a little cold -- what a Californian -- so
I let him try to wrap my jacket around his shoulders. He had
deliberately parked somewhere where we could leave the car
overnight, although we stopped to double-check on the way
back. We were giddy, like high-schoolers in love for the
first time, on the way back, holding hands and giggling. I
can't remember the last time I was that happy.

It was a short walk to Adam's apartment, and then we were
all over each other in the elevator. Finally, the elevator
made a cheerful sound and deposited us on Adam's floor. He
fumbled with his keys, anxiously struggling to open the door
to his apartment, and then pushed me inside and shoved me up
against the door, as soon as he'd closed it, kissing me
roughly and running his fingers through my hair. He moaned
in my ear as I grasped my hands on his ass to pull his
pelvis closer to mine, and then gasped when we felt our
cocks connect. The sensation was overwhelming. I softly
touched his head, then raked my fingers through the back of
his neck. "Oh, my God, Adam," I whispered softly.

"I love you, baby," Adam whispered hoarsely in my ear. "You
know that, right?"

I reached over to the wall and flicked off the switch, and
then I smiled devilishly at him in the greenish half-light
from the window. "Of course. I love you too. Now get your
pretty little ass over here."



CONCLUDING NOTES

If you made it this far, you can read these last six
sentences. Which means you should email me. How? Open your
email client, and send a message to:

<josh.heilig@gmail.com>

Tell me how much you liked it, or didn't like it. And thank
you, every one.