June 22, 1995
The last day of seventh grade started strangely. Eric and I got on the bus, and the decibel level dropped noticeably as we sat down a few rows back behind the driver. The girl in front of us turned around. I knew her, Amanda, but we weren’t friends. She had a reputation of being something of a loud-mouth.
“So Bobby, do you like to wrestle?” she asked loudly. All the girls in the seats immediately surrounding us giggled.
“I, uh, I guess so,” I said. More giggling. The hair on the back of my neck started to stand up. I hated being made fun of, and this was starting to feel like that.
“Do you wrestle with Bobby?” Amanda asked Eric.
“Yeah, sometimes,” he said.
“Where?” Amanda asked.
Eric and I looked at each other. “I dunno, in the backyard, in my room sometimes,” he said, truthfully.
“Do you wrestle in bed?” Amanda asked. The bus exploded with high-pitched laughter. I think I turned a bright shade of red, and I don’t think Eric quite understood what was happening, because he started to chuckle too.
“Sometimes, I guess,” he said. Laughter turned into screams. Someone yelled he said it!, followed by someone else yelling they admitted it! followed by they bed-wrestle! followed by the bus driver yelling HEY! KEEP IT DOWN! Amanda turned back around, satisfied that she had extracted the confession and created the scandal she wanted.
“What was that about?” Eric asked.
“They think we’re gay,” I said as quietly as I could on a diesel bus filled with screaming teenagers. Eric just shrugged. “You don’t care?” I asked, perplexed.
“Do you?” Eric replied.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t really have an answer. I just tried to survive the rest of the bus ride to school without further interrogation. When we got there, Andy and Cory were rushing to meet us. Andy’s face was beet red, either with shame or anger — or more likely a combination of both. “What the fuck,” Andy said. “Everyone’s talking about us. I thought we agreed this was our thing we kept to ourselves.”
“I swear I haven’t told anyone,” Eric said.
“Me either,” I said. “Who would I even tell?”
Cory looked at the ground. We all looked at him.
“I … I might have an explanation,” Cory said. “I was … I was trying to get Lauren to, you know, wrestle with me, um, a few days ago, and —”
“Oh, shit,” Andy said.
“I might have,” Cory raised his eyebrows and flicked his finger up to indicate he got an erection, “and she was teasing me, saying that, oh, I bet that never happens with your other friends, and —”
“Oh, shit,” Andy repeated.
“I said, ‘well, sometimes,’ and I told her about our sleepover in January, where Andy and I went to his room after everyone fell asleep because we couldn’t sleep.” Andy turned away from Cory and put a hand on his forehead. “I said we were, like, doing practice moves on his bed, and that was it, I swear.”
Andy turned back around. “That was it. That was it, though, right?” Cory nodded and put his hands out in front of him in a signal that he had no more information to give.
“Well,” Eric said, “Amanda was being weird on the bus this morning and asked if Bobby and I wrestled in bed.”
“What the fuck?” Andy said, apoplectic. “Did you answer?”
“I don’t know, I said sometimes,” Eric said.
“Oh my god this is a nightmare,” Andy said, putting his head in his hands. The bell rang, a shrill, long electronic beep that commanded us to class. “Let’s just … let’s just get through finals.” We speed-walked to class. I couldn’t help noticing the looks now. Guys and girls were looking at the four of us askance, and we just put our heads down.
The schedule for the last week of school had been reconfigured to allow longer periods for finals, so we had a morning final and an afternoon final separated by lunch. Our morning final was Social Studies, and mostly surrounded European history, which I was fine with. At lunch, we tried to find a place to eat away from everyone else, and went to a shaded spot we knew behind a portable building where we could eat unbothered.
“It’s the last day of school, nobody will even remember,” I suggested as we unpacked our lunches.
“They think we’re fucking each other,” Andy said, his voice hollow with despair.
“Well … aren’t we?” Eric volunteered gently. “I mean, ‘practice moves’?”
“Yeah, like you and Bobby didn’t do it on the couch,” Andy said, his anger rising briefly. I gave Eric a look that telegraphed he’s not wrong. Andy sighed and shrugged. “Cory couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t sleep, we just, you know, gave each other a helping hand. I prefer to think of it as … like … creative masturbation.”
“Hmm,” Eric said, more a derisive sound than a thoughtful one. “Well, how about now you can’t get upset anymore at Bobby and me when we do stuff together, deal?”
“Deal,” Andy said, having finally been cornered. “Does this mean we can’t do stuff as a group? Like we’re pairing off?”
“I’m not pairing off with you, dude,” Cory said. “I’ve got Lauren.” Andy scoffed.
“Bobby and I talked about it and we’re still cool with doing stuff as a group, that hasn’t changed,” he said. I nodded in agreement.
That seemed to satisfy Andy. There was a pause while we ate. “What do you do together?” Andy asked Eric and me.
Eric and I looked at each other. “We usually start off wrestling,” I said, “but, I don’t know, we kind of reach this point where we both know we’re horny, and —”
“We take our clothes off,” Eric said quietly. “One of us gets on top, and we, you know, get off.”
“We’ve done … other stuff, too,” I said carefully. “Mouth stuff, hand stuff,” I said vaguely. “We’ve actually gotten pretty fast at it,” I said. “I mean, like, not fast, but —”
“You called it efficient once,” Eric said with a giggle.
Andy laughed. “Of course Bobby perfects efficient sex. Can’t let it get in the way of homework!” I had to laugh too, because it was true.
Another pause. I tried to reassure my friends. “Let’s just … let’s just pretend today didn’t happen, with Amanda and Lauren and everybody looking,” I said. “Just … we’ll come back next year, probably be in different classes —”
“Oh whoa, that’s right,” Andy said. “We’re gonna be in totally different classes.”
“Table Four is no more,” Eric rhymed, somewhat wistfully. “Hopefully nobody’s in a class next year with Amanda,” he added, widening his eyes.
“Amanda always stirs up trouble,” Cory said after a long pause. “She and Lauren are … I don’t know, Lauren says they’re friends but I think they’re more rivals than friends. If we’re really lucky she’ll just move away.”
“I wouldn’t count on that. I just don’t think anyone will care in two months,” I reiterated. “But …” I paused, not really sure how to put it. “But let’s, like, not let this scare us out of sleepovers and stuff still. I still want to hang out with you guys and, you know, wrestle. Really wrestle, but also … you know, wrestle.”
Andy said “cheers,” and we all nodded and clunked our nearly empty soda cans as a toast. “I guess let’s enjoy it while it lasts,” he said. The bell rang, and we collected ourselves up to head back to class.
The last final of the year was math, and it was the one I was dreading. I was never strongest in math, and the final was not at all collaborative, so I couldn’t lean on Eric (who was much better at it). I struggled through, though, and feel like I did a middling job. I was pleased that I knew for sure that I got the extra credit querstion right, so Mrs. Stinson at least knew I tried.
And with that last arithmetic whimper, the school year ended. If anyone learned about whatever scandal started the day, perhaps it had fallen out the bottom of their brains by the afternoon. It was a Rotary night for Eric and me, and Eric’s parents were fine with me coming over, even if we didn’t have any homework to do or anything to study for.
Eric was straddling me on his bed, our fingers interlaced. “Are you going anywhere on vacation this year?” I asked up at him.
He pressed down, and I used the opportunity to roll him over, straddling him in the same position. Eric’s bed groaned. “We’re actually going to the Grand Canyon this year. Two weeks in August,” he said between grunts. “We have some relatives in Flagstaff that we’re visiting.”
“It’s going to be hot,” I said. “I mean, like, temperature hot.”
Eric nodded, sighing. “I’m not looking forward to it,” he said, as he relaxed his arms, letting them fall to the side.
“I’ll miss you,” I said softly. “Two weeks is a long time.”
Eric pawed at my knees, feeling the downy hair on my thighs. “Yeah. Hey, so why did what Amanda said on the bus bother you so much?”
I took a deep breath and put my hands on my hips, still astride Eric’s thighs. “I … I don’t know, I just felt like she was making fun of me. Of us. Like she made it sound like what we were doing — what we are doing, I guess, right now — is wrong and bad.”
“But do you think it’s wrong and bad?” Eric asked.
“No! I — this is some of the most fun I’ve had my whole life. You’re, like, my best friend, and —”
“Really?” Eric asked. “You’re my best friend too,” he said.
“Aw, thanks — you’re my best friend, and I … I like, I guess I’m just afraid of, like, people finding out and ruining it for us,” I said, “because the way Andy reacted was, like, he was really mad.”
“Yeah, I get that. I guess it’s more for me, like, they can think what they want. We don’t have to change because some girls on the bus think, I don’t know, that making each other feel good is bad and wrong. That’s bullcrap,” Eric said, adorably censoring himself. I kind of liked the way we didn’t swear around each other.
I leaned forward and interlaced our fingers, lightly pinning Eric’s hands near his ears, making the bed squeak anew. “Cory’s girlfriend, man, what the eff,” I said.
“Lauren knew Amanda would spread it around. So stupid. It just means Cory’s never going to tell her anything again. She’ll get bored and dump him,” Eric predicted. “Oh! So we finally found out what Cory and Andy did at the sleepover!”
“I knew they were doing stuff,” I said. “I bet that wasn’t the first time. The way Andy was talking about how Cory wrestles, how he doesn’t put up a fight.”
Eric nodded, and then smiled a wry smile. “Do you think they kissed?”
“I don’t know, is kissing a ‘practice move’?” I asked, imitating Cory’s voice on the last two words.
“He wanted to practice blowjobs that one time, maybe he wanted to practice kissing,” Eric replied, and we both giggled.
After the giggles subsided, the unasked question hung in the air between us. “Do you want to practice kissing?” I asked with a tiny smile. Eric nodded eagerly, and I made a whew sound and basically smothered him. I crashed my chest into his as my tongue found Eric’s, exploring every nook and cranny of his mouth as our lips got soaked with spit.
Our cocks were getting hard, too, and we didn’t skip a beat. Eric pressed his hips up into mine, and wrapped his legs around me. “Wait, our clothes are still on,” I said, and Eric unwrapped his legs with a quiet oh, right. We quickly undressed, and I pulled my shorts and underwear off, revealing my erection with a thwap against my tummy. I found Eric’s lotion in his nightstand and squeezed some out on my hand, stroking my cock, and stroking Eric’s. Satisfied, I returned to the same position as before.
“Much better,” Eric said, the last word a little mumbly as my tongue found its way back into his mouth. We humped madly, passionately, without a care in the world other than to make each other cum, and cum hard.
I shifted my position slightly to find a comfortable place to feel Eric’s cock slide next to mine. The bed creaked angrily with every thrust, but we didn’t care. “Mmf,” Eric groaned, our lips still locked together. His core spasmed with his orgasm, pitching his chest up, his forehead suddenly cracking into mine.
“Aaagh,” I grunted, but it was too late — we were simultaneously dazed from whacking our heads together as we were from cumming, because my orgasm started a fraction of a second before impact. I groaned, my weight quickly relaxing into Eric as I de-interlaced my right hand and held my forehead. I came up in a cobra position on top of Eric, our cocks still throbbing cum. “Am I bleeding?” I asked, feeling a bizarre simultaneous sensation of pain and pleasure.
“No, I don’t think so,” Eric said, inspecting my forehead. “Sorry, I can’t control it. Am I bleeding?”
“No,” I said, and we started to laugh. “When I get a knot there I can just say we were wrestling and you head-butted me,” I giggled. I moaned a little because it did hurt.
I rolled off Eric and laid down next to him, and we both held our foreheads for a minute, moaning periodically, our shrinking cocks wet with lotion and cum.
“Do you want a girlfriend?” Eric asked finally, as our breathing returned to normal.
“Maybe someday,” I said, “but not now. Not really.” I waited a beat. “Do you want a girlfriend?”
“They seem like they just get you in trouble,” Eric said. “I think we’re better off without one.”
“Yeah,” I said, seeing his point. “I think so too.”