Something shifted, and I couldn’t have told you when it did. It was only that I noticed after, the way you notice you’ve stopped limping, or the air conditioning or heater shuts off.
I’d started going to Levi’s room. Not for anything specific, and not for “that.” That was the strange part, there was a place I went now where nothing happened on purpose. He’d make coffee from the machine that cost too much, and we’d sit a couple feet apart and talk, or not talk, and I’d come away feeling like I’d set down something I’d been carrying so long I’d stopped registering the weight until it was gone. Neither of us reached. We’d built this whole thing, whatever it was, out of not reaching. Like – well, not like – but, it was “like” two guys who’d shared a joint trauma without ever realizing it, and now had someone to relate to, and maybe help each other. I guess college changes you, if I’m this insightful now.
And, it should have felt like less. It kept feeling like more, and I didn’t examine that like some bio or chem experiment, because examining it meant naming it, and naming it made it real, and real was still the one thing I couldn’t afford. It was like, I thought of him. And what he was going through. And I refused to see myself in it because that would also make it real and maybe make things crack open in a way I just wasn’t ready for.
Levi left the door open and the coffee on and let me come to it, the way you leave food out for a thing you want to tame but don’t want to spook. I came every time.
One night it almost tipped. I don’t know what did it. We’d been quiet a while, the good quiet, the lamp low and his roommate gone again, and at some point I looked up and he was already looking at me, and neither of us looked away, and the four feet between us started to not be empty space. I felt it somewhere. He had his coffee halfway to his mouth and he held it there, and I watched him decide something, watched him set the mug down slow and put both hands flat on the table like a man keeping himself in his seat.
“I’m gonna walk you home,” he said. Final. Calm, but final.
He did walk me home, and we didn’t talk about it, and the cold Boulder autumn air on the walk felt like the inside of a bell that had just been struck. He’d stopped it. He kept stopping it. I understood, dimly, that he was protecting something, that he’d decided the four feet mattered more than whatever closing them would feel like for an hour.
I had no idea what to do with a person who wanted me and wouldn’t take the easy version. Everybody I’d met since coming to CU took the easy version. It was practically the house religion, like the Wiccan book I found at the library: an’ it harm none, do what ye will.
So foreign, so exotic, and that’s part of what kept me at ΔΚΣ. But Levi ... he kept choosing the slow one, the hard one, the one with my actual self in it, and that scared me worse than any hand or any set of lips ever had.
The crash from that photo – and “never forget whose you are” – had passed the way weather passes. Well, the way a hurricane passes: It was gone, but there was extensive cleanup and my emotions were wrecked.
Tav noticed before I said anything. He caught me on the porch one cold afternoon, careful to keep at least a foot away, and he looked at me a second. “There he is. You went somewhere for a while.” Not a question, not a guilt trip. “You good?”
For once I could answer it straight ... or, if I thought hard enough, I could answer it gay. A word I was starting not to jolt from, a word that was starting to not mean immediate damnation to me. God loved rainbows, right?
“Getting there.”
He nodded like that was fine, and he didn’t pry. I mean, it’s not like he was supposed to. He was supposed to make sure I got in the frat and any related issues were taken care of. That’s the point of this mentorship, right? Not anything else, other than I couldn’t touch him. Not in the way I wanted.
And the wanting was still there, the whole ache of him an arm’s length away, but it had stopped being the only weather in my sky, the looming Tav Tornado that promised to take me to Oz and back over the rainbow. But Kansas was starting to earn its appeal. A Kansas with a cup of coffee. And that was the change. There’d started to be more than one thing in me at a time (no, I don’t mean that way).
I’d spent my life being one big feeling in a row, dread, then dread, then dread. Now there was room for two. Or maybe more.
So, I did the thing I could afford. But I did it differently this time than with Marcus a few weeks ago.
There was a guy in my philosophy lecture named Wes. Tall, dry, goofy, the kind who answered the professor’s rhetorical questions out loud to make the room laugh and the professor to roll his eyes because he’d momentarily lost control of us. I’d been aware of him for weeks. And one Thursday, pretending to take notes, I realized I wanted him. Plainly. The way you go to a sandwich shop and have the same one or two or three you get every time, and then, no ... you want to try a completely different one.
Underneath it, something landed harder. Every other time I’d done something with a guy here, it had been somebody else’s want I’d just kinda say “yes.” It’s not that I didn’t want it, but it’s that I didn’t know how to start it. Cole at the party. Marcus in his clean sad room. They had reached, and I had received. I’d been a “yes” my whole life. A good yes, an obedient yes. Asking was for people who believed they were allowed to want things, like you have agency over the situation.
So after class, I caught him on the steps. I asked him to get a coffee.
He said sure, like I’d asked him the time, and the easiness didn’t shrink it, because the enormous thing hadn’t happened out there in the world. It had happened in me. We got the coffee, and we talked, and I made myself hold his eyes when I asked if he wanted to get out of there, and we ended up at his place. I made the moves, all of them, clumsy and deliberate, and I kept waiting for the part of me that steps in to apologize for the wanting. It was there, like my necklace. That same cross, sitting around my neck, trying to tell me whose I was – whose I am. But for the first time I went around it instead of handing it the wheel.
I asked if he was okay with this, I hadn’t done much.
“Dude.” He laughed, though it took a moment for me to realize it wasn’t at me. “Yeah. I’m okay with this. Are youokay with this? You’ve got a face like you’re taking a midterm.”
“I’m good,” and for once those two words were just true, no voice on it, none of the thing I do for my mother. So I kissed him. Me. My decision, my hands, my mouth, and he made a low surprised sound against it like he hadn’t expected me to be the one to move, and I felt that sound go all the way down through my throat and vibrating through my penis. I got his shirt off and put my hands flat on his chest just to feel it, the heat of another person, the give of skin over the surprisingly hard plate underneath. He was warm. That’s the thing nobody had told me, in 18 years of being warned about all of this. Nobody mentioned that another guy would be warm.
He got me out of my shirt and I let him, and then he stopped and looked, which I wanted to hate and didn’t. I was used to being looked at as a project, an example, a soul in progress. This was a guy on his own bed looking at my chest and my stomach and the trail of hair going down and clearly liking what he saw based on a lump forming underneath me. That it did something to me that I still can’t get all the way into words.
He put his mouth on my throat. Then lower, on my collarbone, and he wasn’t careful about it, and I heard myself make a noise I’d never made in front of anybody in daylight. He moved the thin chain to the side and went again, and then, “Can I take it off so it’s not in the way?”
I don’t know what he saw on my face, but he quickly said, “Never mind.” It slid sideways against his cheek, and he let it, working around it, going back to what he was doing. For a few moments, I tried to think what the problem was, because I was so ready for this, but apparently something in me wasn’t. But that thing he was doing with his tongue on my chest ...
I got his jeans open. My hands were shaking, but I did it anyway, and when I got a hand around him he swore the f-word quietly at the ceiling and said my name, which almost stopped me on its own. It was my name, said by a guy who wanted what I was doing to him and liked what he was doing to me. His penis was hot and heavy in my hand and I learned about six things in like ten seconds: how much pressure, how he moved into it, the way his breath sounded when I did a particular thing with my wrist that he liked.
I’d thought about this so many times in the dark, braced, listening for a step in the hall, with a verse running underneath like a ticker, but it was with my own. There was no verse. And I wasn’t holding my own in my hand.
There was a guy on his back saying “yeah, like that, don’t stop,” and me finding out I was good at something I’d been told was the worst thing about me.
Then he sat up and got his hands on my belt and asked, out loud, if he could, and I said yes a little too loudly, and he smiled. He pulled my jeans and boxers down and just went at it and several psalms went through my mind as my eyes rolled back in my head. His mouth was wet and warm and I lost time at some point. My hand ended up in his hair. I remember the sound of him sucking, and the way he hummed, and my hips going without my thinking about them and telling them to. The small, clear part of my brain was still keeping notes: I am here. I am in this room, in this body, and I did not leave. With Marcus I’d gone up to the ceiling and watched from a corner like a bad angel. Here I stayed. Every second of it happened to me, actually to me, and I let it.
And my cross hang down from my neck, but did not weigh on my chest, just floating in air. Still there, but inching away.
I pulled him off before I finished, which took almost more than I had. I got him on his back and put my mouth around him because I wanted to. He tasted like skin and salt, and I only knew I wanted to keep doing it. His hands went gentle in my hair when he liked something, and he told me so out loud in a way that made me feel proud that I was good at making someone else feel good. He said “you’re good at this,” and I felt it in my chest before I felt it anywhere else.
He started to pant and told me he was close and asked where I wanted it. I pulled off, almost ashamed, but I put my head down on his stomach and looked up to his eyes that were closed, and his mouth that was open.
I felt the shudder go through him, and he said my name again. I stayed there, and I felt him clench, my own hand on my own penis, and I felt a tiny weight and then some wetness seep onto my head. Several. And that pushed me over, and I shuddered, too, and I caught it all in my hand the way I had learned to for years so that nothing could be found, no record, no visible sin.
I breathed heavily, his hand stopped, and he looked down at me and smiled. He pulled me up weakly, but I let him and helped, and he kissed me, and then he looked at my hand and he gently brought it to his own mouth and licked my palm and sucked my fingers.
I was erect again and unholy words went through my mind. He pulled my head down and licked my hair which I thought was weird, and he must’ve too, because then he reached over and grabbed a discarded sock and wiped his seed off.
He kissed me. And said “that was fun,” and then went on his phone.
I guess sex didn’t have to be Christmas services, it could also just be a Thursday.
The next morning, Jasper gestured at me with his spoon, the way he had weeks ago. We were eating cereal out of mugs, still no bowls, a running bit by now. “You’re different. You stopped doing the thing.”
“What thing?”
“The flinch. You used to flinch when somebody looked at you just a tiny bit too long, like you were waiting to get caught at something. You don’t anymore.” He shrugged and went back to the cereal. “Dunno what happened.” He chewed and swallowed. “Keep doing it.”
It was the closest Jasper came to a speech. I didn’t tell him it was a guy with a coffee machine and a plant on the windowsill. A guy in my philosophy class. Telling Tav that I was getting better or working things out or some shi... some such thing.
I didn’t have the words yet, and some things you want to hold a while before you hand them over to be named. But it had rained that morning, and off to the west over the mountains, beyond the parking lot, I saw a rainbow, God’s promise.
Later, I told Levi about Wes. That was the part I didn’t see coming. I went by the House the next day and just told him, not bragging, because he’d somehow become the person I told things to, and he listened with his coffee and nodded and said, “good, that’s good, Si, you sound different about it.” There was nothing under it, no jealousy I could find anywhere, and I was almost disappointed, and then ashamed of the disappointment, and then confused by the shame, the three of them stacking up in me in a way I wasn’t used to. Multiple emotions at the same time.
I could ask Wes for what I wanted. I’d just proven it, I could stand up and want a near-stranger out loud in the daylight and live through it.
That night, I lay awake and finally understood why they call it confession. You only ever confess the thing you’re still ashamed of. Nothing I’d done this week was something I needed to confess.
And I realized that there was something pressing against my chest. That yesterday, I’d decided what I was doing and going to do and it was fine. I reached behind my neck and pressed a clasp. Pulled. Re-fastened it, and put it on the post of my bunk bed. It caught the light, I’m sure of it, but my eyes were already closed.
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