The house had a porch that sagged on one end and a row of guys on it holding cups, and the bass hit me in the chest before we made the steps. The bass from so many houses before we’d even approached made me wonder if I’d made a mistake even coming here, but Jasper’s hand on my arm was firm ... not so firm that I couldn’t get away, but firm as if saying, “I know this isn’t your comfort zone, but that’s what college is for.”
Jasper went up like he’d done it a hundred times. Maybe he had. “You don’t have to drink anything,” he said over his shoulder, reading me before I’d opened my mouth. “Just hold a cup so nobody hands you one. That’s the whole trick. People only push if your hands are empty.”
So I held a cup. A pink can, actually, grapefruit-flavored carbonated water, a whole sleeve of it left by the door like somebody’s apology to the night. It was sealed when I got it, and I held my drink in a house full of men and worked on looking like a person who belonged in it, which is its own kind of lie – the body kind – and I was good at those, too, like the thumbs-up.
It was warmer inside than I expected. Not the temperature, but the other thing. Nobody was performing. In the kitchen, two guys argued about a movie with their whole bodies, and a third translated for a fourth in Spanish, and somebody’s playlist was bad in a way everyone seemed to enjoy on purpose. A banner over the stairs read ΔΚΣ, and under it, in marker, somebody had written (yes, the Dicks) with an arrow, and under that, in different marker, (we contain multitudes). I’d been bracing all week for ... something. For the thing my whole life had promised me was behind doors like this one. It was just a house. Loud, a little gross by the recycling, and it smelled like guys. A house.
I stood at the edge of the room the way you stand at the edge of a pool you’ve been told is too cold.
A guy came through with a trash bag, collecting cans, and another followed him with a dry-erase marker writing names on a whiteboard by the stairs, designated walkers, it turned out, the ones staying sober to get people home on foot. I watched a tall guy in a cardigan stop a freshman from going up the stairs after somebody, one hand flat on his chest, a quiet word, and the freshman nodded and sat down with some water instead. Nobody made it a scene. It was just a thing the house did, the way my house said grace, except this one was about keeping each other from doing something nobody could take back. Responsible, almost something my mom would approve of. But I didn’t have a frame for a place that watched out for you without also watching you. I kept waiting for the catch.
It took Jasper like, 20 minutes to find someone.
I watched it from the kitchen doorway, not meaning to, the way you watch a magic trick to figure out where the coin went. The lean-in. The laugh, his and then the other guy’s. A hand at a waist, easy as a handshake. And then the two of them were going up the stairs, and Jasper caught my eye on the way up and gave me a look that meant back in a bit; not guilty, not proud, not anything. The way you’d tell a friend you were going for a refill. The way you’d mention rain.
I stood there with my grapefruit fizz and felt something I couldn’t name cleanly. This was closer to grief, which made no sense, so I set it down by the recycling with everything else and didn’t pick it back up. It would be years, I was sure, before I could do what Jasper just did as if it were nothing. A different life, an accident of birth.
That’s when I saw him.
He was the biggest guy in the room and somehow the quietest. Parked on the arm of a couch with a smaller guy talking fast at his shoulder, and he was just listening, nodding, this slow easy smile with a gap in the front teeth that did something to his whole face. Brown arms, a cord necklace, a fade grown out a little. I watched him reach over without looking and steady a lamp some idiot had knocked with their elbow. It was one big hand, barely a glance, and he set it upright like he was always half-catching the things other people knocked over.
I looked at his hands too long, at his legs beyond his shorts, at his neck. I knew I was doing it and did it anyway. He looked up. Caught me. And instead of the thing I braced for, he just lifted his cup an inch, a little hello, friendly, the way you’d nod at someone across a parking lot, and went back to listening.
I looked at the ceiling and counted the lights.
“You’re staring,” somebody said next to me. Friendly.
The guy who’d said it was about my height, brown hair going every direction, a flannel washed into surrender. He wasn’t looking at me like he’d caught me. He was looking at me like he recognized something, which was worse.
“Sorry,” I said, on reflex.
“You’re fine.” He tipped his cup at the big guy. “That’s Tav. Everybody stares. It’s basically why he’s allowed out.” Then, easy, like it was nothing: “You’re a Springs kid.”
It wasn’t a question. My stomach did ... something. “How ...?”
“The ‘sorry.’” He almost smiled. “We all say it like that. Like we broke something just by being in the room because if we don’t then ‘God’ will bring down ‘his’ wrath. It takes one to know one. I get it.” He put out a hand. “Levi.”
I shook it. His hand was warm, and there was a callus along the side of it I didn’t think about. Somebody yelled his name from the next room, a bet about a band that apparently couldn’t be settled without him, and he gave me a small what can you do? shrug and went, and that was it. Under a minute. Another face in the crowd.
A guy named Cole found me on the back steps, where I’d gone to breathe and nurse a second pink can.
He was a sophomore, undeclared, and he had a Coke, the actual red can, sweating in the cold. “I don’t drink,” he said, when he caught me looking it. No defensiveness in it at all. “Makes me feel like I’m wearing a coat indoors. I just come for the company.” He sat a careful arm’s length away on the step, and we talked about nothing. His hometown in Nebraska. The cold coming down off the foothills. Whether the dining hall eggs could legally be called “eggs.” He was easy in a smaller way than Jasper, less of a current and more of a porch light, and somewhere in the nothing I stopped doing the math on if I should be here or not.
At some point the nothing ran out, and he looked at me, and didn’t look away.
“Can I ...?” he said, and didn’t finish, and I knew the end of it anyway.
And I thought to myself, what the fudge? I mean, there was that first night, it was a thing, and Jasper never mentioned it. Maybe he really had just been sleep-masturbating. Was that a thing? And sleep-talking. And I know I’m at college, and I’m supposed to be trying new things. And we’re both sober. I prayed. If God didn’t want me to do anything, give me a sign. Any sign.
I looked around. I listened for a moment. I heard no blaring of trumpets, felt no hellfire, saw no angels moving in to stay my sin.
I put a hand on his chest first. To be sure my own hand still worked, that it would do a thing I told it to in front of another person. “You’re not, um.” I couldn’t make the sentence go. “You’re okay? Like, you’re good to.”
“Stone sober. One Coke and the company.” He waited. He really waited, hands to himself, until I let mine drop, and the waiting was the thing that hit me more than any move could have.
So I let him kiss me.
I’d thought about what it would be like for my whole life; I’d gotten every detail wrong. I’d thought it would feel like falling. It felt like the opposite. Like the first warm in a room after you’ve been cold so long you stopped calling it cold and started calling it normal. His mouth was careful and then less careful. His lips felt warm and sweet and slightly sticky from the soda, and so gentle. My hands didn’t know where to go and then they did, and the not-knowing turning into knowing was its own quiet astonishment, like finding out you can read a language nobody ever taught you.
And I was the hardest I’d been my entire life.
And I told myself that someone had relabeled the drink. Or that it was the atmosphere. Or Jasper’s fault. Or adrenaline or something else and whatever this was was a sin.
But we ended up in his room, his roommate gone for the weekend, the door shut, a desk lamp on because neither of us reached to turn it off. What happened there was soft. I think that’s the best word.
He asked if I was good. He asked again, quieter, later. When he put his mouth on me I made a sound I had never made in my life and pressed the back of my hand against my own teeth out of a reflex I didn’t know I had. The ceiling didn’t open, and no one came up the stairs, and the lamp just kept being a lamp on a desk with a cactus and a calculus book on it, and I couldn’t hear my parents praying through the wall.
And all we did was touch. And if one of those touches was his mouth in a place I’d been told was a sin, that was his and not mine.
After, he got me a glass of water and walked me to the door of his hall like I was an ordinary thing that had happened to him. Because ... I was? That was almost the strangest part. To him this was a nice night. Not a cliff. Not a crossing. A nice night with a quiet guy from the Springs.
I walked back to the dorm under the cold and the pines with my whole skin awake, and I braced. I kept waiting for the floor to come up and meet me. The lie I’d owe, the prayer, the cold drop, the wet-coat certainty. To him this was a nice night, but for me ... I don’t know what this was. My first weekend at school. My escape from home. Wasn’t this what I wanted? I passed a house that had a “69” in its address and I reflexively said a short prayer. A prayer for a number because the number felt more dirty than what I’d just done. Was this my first time? Should it have meant something more?
The Flatirons sat up there in the dark, not caring one way or the other. A sprinkler ticked on somebody’s lawn. The dorm door buzzed me in on the second try. Jasper wasn’t back yet. The world kept turning, not caring about what I’d just done.
Nothing happened. That’s the thing I carried up four flights and lay down with and couldn’t put down. I had done the unforgivable thing, the kissing and the rest of it, twice now in a week, and the sky had stayed exactly where it was, indifferent as a ceiling, and I lay there in a room that was somehow already a little bit mine and could not for the life of me tell whether that was mercy. Or whether it was just the truth, finally getting a word in, after eighteen years of being talked over.
I took off my shorts and put them in my dirty laundry bag. I turned off the light and wrote “sleeping” on the small dry erase board we’d put on the door. I lay there with my hands behind my head, staring up at a different ceiling, and the cross around my neck didn’t burn, wasn’t heavy, and at least for now, it was just ... there.
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