The Education of Adrian Mercer
A week after Adrian met Darius at the Alpha Delta Phi induction ceremony he received the following text from him:
Dinner, Thursday at 7. Harvest
Fortunately, Adrian knew that Harvest was a restaurant on Brattle Street but was one he wouldn’t have walked into on his own. The menu had no prices on the copy Darius handed him, which Adrian had no idea how to play so he ordered the second-least-expensive thing he could identify and said nothing about it. Darius ordered without looking at the menu and talked about Adrian’s first week as an Alpha Delta Phi with a mix of interrogation and genuine concern. He asked questions and listened to the answers with a patience that Adrian was beginning to learn was simply how Darius operated.
Adrian had never had a conversation quite like it. He’d had mentors in Millhaven, his gymnastics coach, a high school chemistry teacher who labored over an actual letter of recommendation to Harvard, but underlying their recommendation was an anxiety about their investment in the outcome. Darius’s attention had no anxiety in it. He was interested in Adrian in a way that Adrian had never experienced. Friendship? Mentorship? Something more? Adrian had no frame of reference for this relationship, so he allowed it to unfold and take whatever shape it was meant to.
Darius walked Adrian back to his dormitory afterward and shook his hand at the door with the same grip as before, authoritative and certain. He said he’d be in touch.
Adrian spent the next few days consumed by his new world…his freshman studies, the Alpha Delta Phi whirlwind, gymnastics. They consumed his attention, but he found it difficult to get Darius out of his mind. Not just Darius’s attention, but Darius himself. The tone of his voice on the terrace. The hand on his shoulder. The dark eyes that had watched him across a room for forty minutes and found something worth claiming. Adrian had no language for what he was feeling. He told himself it was admiration. He told himself it was gratitude. He contemplated both explanations and tried not to notice that neither of them felt quite right.
As promised, Darius was in touch, in fact the following Wednesday, with a text that said simply:
Saturday. My townhouse. 615 Ware Street. 7PM. Bring nothing
Adrian read it, equal parts curious, confused, and eager, each taking precedence depending on his state of mind.
Adrian’s townhouse was three blocks from campus, a narrow Federal-style building that Darius’s parents purchased for him after freshman year, a residence that was more suitable to his upbringing. The interior was the work of someone with genuine taste: clean lines, good art, a kitchen that suggested actual cooking happened there. Adrian stood in the entry hall and looked at it and, once again, asked himself what he was doing here. He couldn’t answer that and, in a way, he didn’t want to.
Darius greeted him with the same ambiguity with which he always greeted him, an ease that was entirely genuine but a clarity that was entirely withheld.
Darius cooked. This surprised Adrian, who had not expected the Harvard quarterback to be competent in a kitchen, and then felt naive for being surprised, because Darius was competent at pretty much everything. They ate at the kitchen table with a bottle of wine that Darius opened without ceremony and that Adrian drank pretending drinking wine with dinner was an everyday occurrence.
This became the rhythm of the Fall. What Darius did not say, across any of those evenings, was that he had begun to look forward to them in a way that had nothing to do with mentorship. That the sight of Adrian walking, the floppy hair, the body that moved like it had been built for pleasure, the face that was striking and then some, and with each passing week finding it increasingly difficult to stay professional around. He was twenty-two years old and had never been in love and was not, he told himself, about to start now. Certainly not with a freshman. Certainly not with a boy he had taken under his wing. Certainly not with someone who did not yet know who he was or what he was capable of feeling. He told himself these things with great conviction. He told himself these things several times a week.
What he did not say, even to himself, was the thing that sat underneath all those reasonable objections: that he had never, in twenty-two years of knowing his own mind, encountered a person whose company he wanted more. That the evenings with Adrian had begun to feel like the primary events of his week and everything else like the gap between them. He didn’t know where to put this. He filed it under mentorship, under responsibility, under the satisfaction of watching something special develop under his deliberate cultivation. He was good at filing things. He had been filing this since the night of the pledge gathering, and it was not staying filed.
When Darius didn’t have a football obligation, it was dinners at Harvest or his townhouse, the conversation ranging further each time, from Adrian’s coursework to Darius’s senior thesis, from the politics of the Alpha Delta Phi brotherhood to stories of growing up black and wealthy in Manhattan, a combination whose contradictions weren’t lost on Darius. He talked about his father’s surgical practice, the Park Avenue apartment, the summers in the Hamptons, and then, in the same conversation, about his grandmother’s apartment in Harlem, the cousins in the Bronx, the deliberate effort his parents had made to ensure that abundance didn’t produce the blindness it was capable of producing. “My father used to say that money is a very good servant and a very bad master,” Darius said once, over bourbon at the townhouse. “He said it enough times that I eventually had to decide whether it was true. It is.”
Adrian listened and talked and found the distance between Millhaven and Cambridge widening, perhaps to a degree that would someday be insurmountable to bridge. He was learning to see his own history from the outside, which was both disorienting and, in some way, liberating. He had grown up assuming that the world he knew in Indiana was the primary world and everything else was a variation on it. Harvard had corrected this impression quickly and somewhat brutally. Darius was correcting it more gently, more completely, and somehow becoming the center of Adrian’s new world.
Darius was also, Adrian became slowly aware over the course of those evenings, doing something else.
It was not anything he could have pointed to specifically in the early weeks. Attention that sometimes crossed from mentorship into something with a different vibe. The way Darius looked at him when he was talking, abandoning his mentorship role to something warmer and more personal. The physical ease between them that had developed with a speed that surprised Adrian, the hand on the shoulder that had become, by November, a hand on the back, or an arm around him briefly in the cold between the restaurant and the car, gestures that were entirely natural in the moment and that Adrian would sometimes think about afterward with the same warmth he’d felt walking home from the pledge gathering in October.
Adrian didn’t examine it closely because then he’d have to acknowledge its presence. But the warmth of it was undeniable, and the way he carried it home on those October and November evenings, turning it over, returning to it, finding that it hadn’t diminished overnight, was starting to tell him something he wasn’t ready to hear.
What he knew, though, was simpler and less threatening: he looked forward to these evenings more than he looked forward to anything else in his week. He was performing at a level in his coursework that surprised himself, and he knew deep down that his performance was partly a function of having someone he wanted to be accountable to, someone whose opinion of his work mattered to him in a way that his professors’ opinions, respected as they were, did not quite reach. He was, in the oldest possible sense, trying to impress someone. He just wouldn’t allow himself to acknowledge who that someone was and draw the obvious conclusion.
***
December arrived with Cambridge’s unique brand of cold, damp and insistent, coming off the Charles with conviction. Exams ran through the second week of the month, and Adrian moved through them with an efficiency that his study group found slightly inhuman and that he thought of simply as preparation: you identified what the exam required, you built a structure that produced it, you executed the structure. He finished his last exam on a Thursday afternoon and emerged into the gray December twilight feeling he’d nailed it.
Darius was waiting outside.
He was leaning against the building with his hands in his coat pockets entirely at ease, apparently unbothered by the cold, looking like something that had been placed there for aesthetic purposes. He straightened when he saw Adrian and smiled the real smile.
“How’d it go?”
Attempting to conceal his elation of finding Darius waiting for him, he replied casually, “Fine. Good. I think.”
“You think,” Darius repeated, with the expression that meant he already knew the answer and found the modesty either charming or unnecessary, possibly both. “Come on. We’re going to dinner.”
He had made a reservation at Alden & Harlow, which was not the kind of place that took reservations from people who called that afternoon, but gave Darius a table in the back corner apparently knowing who they were dealing with. The room was warm and candlelit and full of energy. Adrian sat across from Darius and felt, settling into the warmth of the room after the December cold, oddly content.
“This feels like a date,” he said, and then heard himself say it, wondered how he could take it back, but felt the back of his neck go warm.
Darius looked at him across the candlelight. He didn’t rush to fill the space the sentence created. He let it sit there for a moment, which was a very Darius thing to do, and then he said: “Does it.” Not a question. A statement of mild, entirely comfortable interest.
“I just meant…” Adrian stuttered.
“I know what you meant,” Darius said. He picked up his wine. His eyes were on Adrian’s over the rim of the glass with dark, settled attention. “Do you want it to be?”
Adrian had no prepared response. What he had instead, arriving without his permission, was the answer, the real one, the one he’d been holding at bay for two months, sitting right there in the candlelight, entirely accessible, waiting for him to either look at it or look away.
He looked away.
“I…” he said.
“Don’t answer that,” Darius said, lightly, as though rescuing him from something he’d tripped on, but the eyes hadn’t changed. “Tell me what you’re going home to.”
Grateful for the reprieve, he started. The farm, his parents, his younger sister who was a junior in high school and who had been running the household with increasing competence since their mother’s back surgery in October. The friends from high school who would be home from their various state schools and with whom he would feel, he already suspected, a distance that one semester at a place like Harvard could produce.
Darius listened. He asked questions. On its surface, the dinner moved through its courses like their previous evenings, but underneath Adrian couldn’t shake the fact that the world had shifted with Darius’s unanswered question, Do you want it to be? still hanging, unanswered. Darius was doing the thing he sometimes did, the barely perceptible thing, the shift from mentor to that other thing that Adrian couldn’t name. He leaned forward when he talked. He refilled Adrian’s wine without asking. When Adrian said something that made him laugh, he let the laughter reach his eyes in a way that he rarely revealed in public.
And somewhere between the first course and the second, his foot found Adrian’s under the table.
It rested there. Not accidentally. Not withdrawn. Simply present, warm even through the leather of both their shoes.
Adrian did the most purposeful thing he’d done since meeting Darius. He did not move his foot.
He picked up his wine. He continued the conversation. He was aware of his heartbeat in a way that he’d never been before, and of the fact that the room felt warmer than it had fifteen minutes ago which he was not moving away from and which was doing something to his body he had no words for.
By the time the check arrived, which Darius handled with a card produced and returned before Adrian had registered it happening, Adrian was in a state that he would have described, if pressed, as comprehensively aware of Darius Whitfield in a way that had nothing to do with mentorship.
“Come back to the townhouse,” Darius said, outside on the sidewalk in the December cold. Not a question.
“Yeah,” Adrian said. “Okay.”
The townhouse was warm and quiet. Darius opened a bottle of bourbon, Blanton’s, which Adrian would drink for the rest of his life always remembering this evening, poured two glasses and set them on the low table in the sitting room. He sat beside Adrian on the couch rather than across from him, and for a while they talked about nothing in particular. The bourbon was warm, the room was quiet, and Adrian couldn’t shake the feeling that the evening was moving toward something. He didn’t know what or when, but something was coming.
Darius set down his glass.
He turned his body toward Adrian and rested his arm across the top of the couch, his fingertips just touching Adrian’s hair. He asked in his characteristically direct way: “I want to ask you something. And I want you to answer honestly, not with the first thing that comes to your head.”
Adrian nodded.
“When you think about what you want,” Darius said, “physically, intimately, what do you think about?”
The room was very quiet. Adrian was aware of Darius’s proximity, Darius’s fingers touching his hair, his own breathing and the bourbon glass in his hand. It became clear that he had been avoiding this exact question for three months and that Darius had just walked directly into the territory he’d been cordoning off and asked him, plainly and without apology, to look at it.
He looked at it.
What he found there did not entirely surprise him. What surprised him was that it didn’t surprise him more.
“I think,” he said, slowly, “…about…” He stopped. Started again. “For a while now. Since October, maybe before. I think about…” He looked at Darius, “…you,” he finally said. He stopped, afraid to go further, inviting Darius to fill in the silence and unintentionally opening a door.
Darius looked at him for a moment with the expression that was the truest one, warm and certain and entirely without surprise, because this had been Darius’s plan all along.
“I know,” he said, and added, “Come here.”
He gently cupped the back of Adrian’s head and pulled him next to him so there were face to face. Darius stared into his eyes, wordlessly communicating, Can I go further?
Adrian answered, with the slightest of head nods, Yes.
Darius leaned over and kissed Adrian exactly how Adrian would’ve expected him to if he’d given it any thought; not urgent, not tentative, simply complete, and entirely sure this was the right decision. Darius pulled his face away but held Adrian’s face with both hands, allowing him to peer directly into his eyes. Once again, they spoke wordlessly.
Darius: I’m going to kiss you again…and more.
Adrian: Yes, please. Don’t stop.
Adrian pulled him back in for another kiss that made the first one chaste by comparison. The passion was unleashed. Their tongues met and danced together and then each went on a search mission inside the other’s mouth.
Darius’s hand gripped the fabric of Adrian’s shirt and seamlessly pulled it over his head. Adrian cupped both sides of Darius’s head with his hands and climbed on top of Darius to straddle him where they continued to kiss and grind their pants-covered cocks together.
Adrian stopped, not because he wanted this to end, but he needed to take stock on what was unfolding. It was moving so fast he wanted to make sure he was aware of and savoring the moment. With Adrian now straddling him, Darius pulled Adrian’s head down to his and they continued their war of tongues. Then Adrian, unhappy that he was alone in his shirtlessness, deftly unbuttoned Darius’s shirt and pulled it off. Adrian now felt, for the first time in his life, real man-on-man, skin-on-skin contact, and his throbbing cock left no doubt about what his body thought of it. A door had just been opened. There was no going back.
Darius scooped up Adrian and carried him into the bedroom. Never losing eye contact, Darius stripped off his clothes revealing, at six feet four, a magnificent college quarterback. His body was extraordinary, wide shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, every muscle group distinct and full, the dark skin smooth across a chest that belonged on a statue. The pecs were deep and squared, the kind built by ten years of serious lifting rather than vanity, sitting above a stomach that was a study in definition, each abdominal ridge distinct, the obliques cutting a sharp V toward his hips. His arms were the arms of a quarterback, the biceps thick and full even at rest, the forearms corded with the kind of dense, functional muscle that came from actually using them. His legs were pillars, the quadriceps broad and striated, the hamstrings pulling taut as he moved, the calves the specific solid mass of a man who had been running routes and squatting serious weight since he was fifteen. And then he turned, reaching for something on the nightstand, and Adrian saw his ass, full and high, the glutes dense and rounded, the dark skin flawless, the kind of ass that rewired your understanding of what the word meant. The sight of those strong, rounded glutes sent Adrian to a place he’d never before experienced. It was a night of firsts.
Adrian stood motionless, not saying a word, having totally surrendered to what was occurring. Darius, now nude, dropped to his knees in front of him, and reverently unbuttoned his pants and slid them down and off his legs. What he found made him pause, a long, unhurried pause, the kind Darius almost never took. Adrian’s body was the gymnast’s body in its purest form. Not the broad, packed mass of a football player but something more precise, the musculature stripped to its essentials, every line clean and intentional. His chest was defined without being large, the pectorals flat and sculpted, the stomach a tight ladder of muscle above narrow hips. His arms were ropy and dense, the shoulders round and capped, the kind of strength that expressed itself in control rather than size. His legs were a marvel of proportion, the quads sharp and striated, the calves tight, every muscle visible beneath skin that was pale and entirely smooth, hairless from the neck down in the way of men whose bodies are instruments rather than ornaments. And at the center of all of it, already fully hard and angled upward with the urgency of a twenty-year-old who had been wanting this since October, a cock that made Darius’s mouth water, long and pale, thicker than the lean frame above it suggested with a bloated mushroom cap waiting to explode. Darius looked up at Adrian’s face and then back down, and then up again, knowing he had been proven right about something important and taking a moment to fully appreciate it. Still on his knees, Darius looked up into Adrian’s eyes one last time and then, without permission or acknowledgement, swallowed Adrian’s thick, veiny cock in one gulp.
“FUCK!” Adrian yelped, clearly having never even imagined a sensation remotely this powerful. Darius didn’t stop. He grasped Adrian’s glutes for leverage and pulled his throbbing member deep into the back of his throat. Adrian, speechless, grabbed Darius’s hair and helped pull him into his mouth as he thrusted. Out of breath, Darius pulled off and looked up to Adrian and smiled, “You like this don’t you?” he smirked.
“Fuuuucccckkkk….” was all Adrian could answer, completely at a loss.
Darius immediately spit on his cock and went down on him again picking up where he left off. He gulped and pulled Adrian as deeply into him as he could. Once again, he pulled off, spit and went at it again. This continued until Adrian’s groans filled the room. Darius pulled back once again, dramatically spit on his cock and announced with some fanfare, “I got you good and wet because now you’re going to fuck me.” Without saying another word, he climbed on the bed, doggy style while Adrian watched helplessly. He was in a blur it was happening so fast. An hour ago there were drinking wine and having dinner. Now Darius, his mentor and the Harvard football quarterback was ordering him to fuck him.
“Climb behind me, spit in my hole, and use this lube if you need it..” he said as he nodded to a bottle of lube on the bedstand.
“Darius…” Adrian choked, “are you sure?”
“FUCK ME, ADRIAN,” he ordered. “Give me your cock”
Adrian tentatively climbed up behind him and cautiously lined up the tip of his cock to his hole. Sensing his hesitation, Darius dropped his head to the mattress to free his hands and used them to spread his cheeks. “Here it is, boy. I’m giving it to you. Just like those girls you fucked in high school…but better, I promise.”
Adrian understood theoretically that gay sex existed from a handful of mental images assembled from sources he had paid little attention to, but he’d never contemplated the mechanics of it. The fact that Darius, who was larger than him by four inches and sixty pounds and who possessed in every other context the unambiguous authority of a man accustomed to being in charge, was telling him to—
“You sure?” Adrian said.
The look on Darius’s face was unambiguous. “Adrian,” he said. “I’m sure. Fuck me NOW”, he bellowed, running out of patience.
What followed was nothing like Adrian had imagined and entirely better than anything he had imagined, which was quickly becoming a pattern with Darius.
He had lost his virginity to a girl from his high school in the back of a truck on a July night when he was seventeen, and the experience had been warm and mutually enthusiastic and had left him thinking that sex was a pleasant thing he looked forward to having more of. What happened in Darius’s bedroom on the last night of his first semester at Harvard lived in entirely different universe.
With great caution, he lubed his cock, Darius’s hole, aimed, and pushed. “FUCK….” Darius groaned as it slid in.
“Oh…my…fucking…god…” Adrian whispered, experiencing a feeling that he had no way of imagining. Darius’s chute was so tight that Adrian thought he’d cum within seconds. He instinctively paused to prevent that and pushed in more slowly until he felt his pubic bone press against Darius’s muscled glutes.
“That’s my boy…” Darius whimpered. “Fuck your daddy, fuck him hard. Fuck him like the man you are!” Darius cajoled him.
The sensation of actually penetrating his mentor and having him acknowledge the sexual act verbally was too much for Adrian. It immediately put him over the edge.
“I’M CUMMING” he shouted, having lost complete control
“That’s it my man!” Darius shouted as he pushed back on Adrian to milk every drop out of his young cock.
With Adrian unloading hot rope after hot rope up Darius’s hole, Darius quickly reached behind him to grab Adrian’s hand and use it to stroke his own cock off.
“Get me off boy”, he croaked as Adrian shot into him. Despite the shock of actually gripping another man's cock for the first time, Adrian had no choice but to grab it and work it. After only three strokes he felt Darius's thick cock gushing load after load into their hands.
The two convulsed, jerked, twitched, spasmed and shuddered until, finally, they both were still. Adrian’s head was spinning. On one hand, he had just experienced the most meaningful physical experience of his life. On the other, his world had just irrevocably changed. He had fucked another man, but not just anyone, his revered mentor.
For his part, Darius knew this day was coming. He moved toward it slowly and deliberately and would’ve abandoned the plan had Adrian given him any reason to. Darius had led him here, and Adrian had willingly followed.
Afterward they lay in the dark, Darius’s arm around him, and Adrian stared at the ceiling of the townhouse bedroom and took stock of himself and the situation. He found no confusion there, which was itself a kind of answer. He felt like he’d walked through a door opening into a room you hadn’t known was part of the house but that felt, once you were standing in it, like it had always been there.
“You okay?” Darius said. His voice in the dark was the same voice as always, low, certain, present.
“Yeah,” Adrian said. “More than okay.”
“Good.”
“Darius?”
“Yeah.”
“Thank you.” He said it simply, because it was simple. “For all of it. The whole semester.”
Darius was quiet for a moment. Then his arm tightened briefly. “Get some sleep,” he said. “You’ve got a flight tomorrow.”
Darius lay awake after Adrian’s breathing slowed and steadied. He tried to ignore what he was feeling because he suspected that facing it would produce a result he wasn’t prepared to act on. What he knew, lying in the dark with Adrian’s weight against his side, was that the evening had delivered something beyond what he’d planned for, and that the warmth of it, not only the sex, but the authenticity of Adrian’s “thank you for all of it”, had settled into him someplace he didn’t know where to put.
He had decided, years ago, about the shape of his life. He had made it clearly and without self-pity or regret. A black man in American corporate leadership carried enough variables already. He did not intend to add another. He had watched what happened to men who made different choices and decided he would not be among them.
He looked at the ceiling. He listened to Adrian breathe.
He told himself the warmth he was feeling was mentorship. He told himself it was the satisfaction of a completed thing. He told himself it was Blanton’s and December.
He was, in twenty-two years of knowing his own mind, an exceptionally good liar to himself.
***
Adrian slept soundly. He flew home to Indiana the following afternoon and spent Christmas in Millhaven with his family, working the farm in the mornings and sitting with his parents in the evenings, and found that the distance he had anticipated, between the person he’d been when he left and the person he’d become in four months, was larger but more manageable than he’d expected. He didn’t have a name for what he was yet. He had time.
-To be continued-
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