The semester had a different feel as October turned to November, the transition sparked by what I’d always been told was the most demonic of holidays.
I hadn’t realized it was the end of October when it happened. That night, the one I’d felt the weight around my chest ... I woke in a cold sweat, maybe 4am. Jasper was snoring, but the dream I’d had was what had woken me up.
I’d felt my chest, felt it missing. Then I remembered. I reached over, grabbed the cross, and hooked it around my neck again. I’d thought I was ready.
And, maybe I was. But not for that. Not yet.
The demons that had haunted my dreams told me I wasn’t prepared. Even if some part of me was beginning to doubt their reality.
The nights at ΔΚΣ – the parties – had a different feel, like the whole house knew the road was running out and wanted to use up what was left of it. Left of rushing, left of the fall semester, left of the last of the aspen trees shaking and rattling and the yellow leaves drifting down like so much faith in life and summer and growth being relinquished for the reality of the coming cold.
Or of going back home for Thanksgiving. Back to where the cross stayed on and the thoughts manifest in other mens’ bedrooms had no safe harbor.
The parties: I was different at them now. I noticed it the way Jasper had said that morning, pointing at me with his spoon and a tiny dribble of milk on his chin. It was the absence of the thing, the flinch that used to live in my shoulders any time a room got too full of men. What I didn’t tell him was the panic. I didn’t tell anyone.
I stood in the middle of the kitchen at the biggest party of the term, loud and warm and packed wall to wall, a drink I’d actually opened in my hand, and I realized I wasn’t trying to manage anything. I wasn’t watching for who was watching, what my face was doing, how far the nearest door was, nor counting the seconds until I had to move my eyes because it was no longer straight to stare more than 2 seconds.
I was just ... at a frat party. Talking. Laughing at something Ken said. I was a person at a party, the most ordinary thing in the world, which I’d honestly believed a few months ago was a country I’d been issued no visa for.
Levi was there, early, like many of the other full members. He was on the good couch with a beer he was barely drinking, doing the thing he did where he held still and let the room arrange itself around him. We didn’t talk long, the party was too loud for the kind of quiet we did well together, but he caught my eye when I came in and lifted his chin, a “Hey, you,” and it hit me that we shared something that other guys just couldn’t. Because other guys wouldn’t understand. Would think we’re crazy. And, I spent more of the night than I’d ever admit keeping a loose track of where in the house he was. He left before midnight, up to his room; he blended with the wall as he walked up the stairs, one last look at the party and then head down, back to his coffee machine. I watched him go, and the room got a little less interesting, and I told myself that was the Shirley Temple talking.
It was November 10. I’d left the cross in the dorm. I just ... I wanted to see if I could. I was safe, I was surrounded by the frat that had taken me in and accepted me, Tav was watching out for me, Levi was a holler away, Jasper maybe somewhere if I needed him, Emilio – Levi’s roommate, also the frat safety officer – was hovering, clearly sober. And I’m sure Nik was there to enforce the Big-pledge rules. Lurking. I was safe. My soul was ... I was safe. I could leave it off for one night.
So, when it happened, it happened easy.
Because I felt safe. And I was.
Two guys I knew a little, both members, both good company (”they’re good people”), and somewhere past midnight and my fourth Shirley Temple it turned from talking into the other thing, the three of us, upstairs, in a way that a year ago would have had me on my knees in the bad way, praying for my own soul on a bathroom floor.
We checked in with each other like the adults the house had quietly taught me to be. Everybody sober enough to be sure, and one had even grabbed a handful of condoms.
Their names were Michael and Amir (I think? yah, we’ll go with it). At one point, I’d hauled a couch with one of them, and some other week awhile back I’d been quizzed on dead alumni by the other, which is a stupid thing to be thinking about with a guy’s tongue in your mouth, but that’s what went through my head: I know these guys, and this is okay. Michael got my shirt off before the doorway, and Amir laughed at how fast he did it and then just kinda did the same thing to Michael. There was this stretch of maybe a minute where all three of us were just pulling at each other’s clothes and laughing – actually laughing – in a bedroom, doing this.
Nobody had told me it could be funny. 18 years of being warned and not one person mentioned that you might laugh during sex, or foreplay, or whatever the seven stages of this sin were. I got Amir’s belt undone with hands that weren’t shaking anymore: Progress. Towards my goal. Which in this case was his penis head I almost got into my mouth before Michael picked me up.
I didn’t realize how strong he was, and I felt up his biceps and his deltoids and lats while he carried me to the bed and plopped me down on the bed. Amir followed and knelt next to my head and I swallowed my prize like a lollipop while Michael’ mouth was sucking my hardness into his own mouth. And I did it because I wanted to: I was really sucking another man’s peni— another man’s cock and it was good, while a third man was inhaling my own pe— my own cock and making me squirm because the sins of the flesh just felt so good.
For some undefined time the room was just me breathing in cock and tasting precum and wet sounds coming from three of us mixed with moaning, and someone’s hand finding somebody’s hair. I couldn’t keep track of whose hands were where, I’m not even sure what mine did but I hope I was at least a little honorable. That was the part I hadn’t expected, how quickly it stopped being an equation with three variables that had to balance in fairness, but it instead turned into one warm, loud thing that I was inside of. Two guys, on either end, and Michael did something with his tongue that made my hips come off the bed and I made some weird sound around Amir’s cock that made him swear at the ceiling. There was a moment in there where I understood that I was making two other people feel good at the same time, that I was the reason, that this was a thing my body could do for people instead of the thing my body was going to damn me for.
And, I felt release. (No, not that ... yet.) An emotional wellspring that just burst and I felt like I could just give in so much more than I realized I had.
We traded around. Amir ended up on his back and Michael got him in his mouth and I kissed Amir while he did it, swallowing the noises he made, my hand working Michael at the same time, and somebody said “Just like that!” and I honestly don’t know which of them it was but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me, and nothing – no weight around anything – got in my way while I sucked and licked and kissed.
We didn’t use the condoms. We didn’t go there. I didn’t realize that sex could be sex even if you don’t go there.
Michael finished first, one hand pushing on my chest to stay steady, and Amir came across my cheek a minute later with my hand on my own cock. The scent of it splashing across my face carried me across the finish before he’d even stopped shooting. I came into my own fist, purely out of habit, with two guys who could not possibly have cared less. Then we just lay there in a heap, on someone’s bed, the three of us sprawled sideways across a bed too small for it (I hope it was one of their beds).
We were all sweaty and out of breath, and Michael eventually said “ow” because his arm fell asleep. Then Amir hunted around the floor for a shirt that turned out to be mine, and somebody’s phone buzzed and we all ignored it. Nobody left. Nobody prayed, and no demons rose through the floor to carry me to The Pit.
We lay there like three guys who’d just done something ordinary and good, and after a while Michael said something about the party still going, and we got dressed, and went back down to it. And I could still smell the cum, even though we’d wiped my cheek. I don’t know if it was a real thing, or just in my imagination, but it smelled good.
Jasper found me on the landing after, both of us still in the frat house. He seemed flushed and happy himself, and he just held up a hand, and I high-fived it, and neither of us said anything. We didn’t need to. I could tell that he could tell what happened, and vice-versa.
And it was good.
I should have been on top of the world. In a way I was. That was the high point, and I knew it even then, the way you can sometimes feel a summit while you’re still standing on it, because you see a calendar stretching before you and what it means. That was always in the back of my mind these days.
But right now, the hallway emptied out, and Tav was there.
Tav and I hadn’t been alone, not really, the whole semester. The rule had seen to that, and we’d both followed it. But the party had thinned and the upstairs hall was dark and the bass was a floor down and it was suddenly just the two of us in just a hallway-width of space, and the entire fall of wanting him suddenly crashed across me like my orgasm maybe an hour earlier.
He looked at me. I looked at him.
It would have been so easy. That’s the part nobody warns you about temptation, that the danger isn’t that the thing is hard to resist, it’s that it’s the easiest thing in the world, standing right there. He was close enough that I could feel the heat coming off him. I watched him not move and felt myself not move and the inches between us screamed at me in silence.
“Si,” he said. Low. Just my name, like a hand laid flat on a door.
“I know,” I said. “The rule.”
“The rule.” He breathed out. And then he did the thing, which was smile, the gap-toothed one, rueful, kind even here, even now. “It’s a good rule,” he repeated for the billionth time since Bid Day, and this time I heard the rest of it, the part under it, that the rule was the only thing holding the line and we both knew it. And out of the corner of my eye, I saw Nik down the stairs. And I didn’t care.
Here’s what actually wrecked me, standing in that dark hall with the one body I’d ached for all fall: I didn’t want it the way I’d thought I did. Somewhere – sometime – it had changed on me. I still wanted him, my body was very clear about that, but the want had gone quiet and specific, a craving for a particular thing, and under it, louder now, was a different wanting. It was a soft one, one that didn’t exist here at all, but a floor away. I was standing just inches from the fantasy and thinking about a guy a few feet across a table with a coffee machine and a plant. I’d rather be walked home in the cold by Levi than have this, the actual this, the thing I’d have traded a year of my life for back in September.
Secrets. I’d gotten good at keeping secrets. Even from myself.
Tav stepped back first. Gave me the gap-toothed smile and a little tap of his knuckles against the wall instead of against me, the same careful not-touch from the porch on the first day, and he went down the stairs into the noise. Nik turned around and walked away. Tav would probably never know what he’d done, or rather what he hadn’t. He thought he was being good. He was. But ...
I went out onto the porch into the cold. No cross, but yet, a new one I felt I was bearing. I had a phone full of texts I’d answer or not. The party loud behind me and the mountains dark and indifferent in front, and I stood there and let myself, for one whole moment, finish the sentence I’d been refusing to start since October.
It scared me. I’d gone and let somebody matter, and there’s no condom for that. No rule from Nik to hold the line. No talking it back at a gas station. I’d finally done the one truly dangerous thing a person can do. I’d let somebody else become someone ... I’d let them in.
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