From what I can infer from the e-mails, as well as my own loose understanding of normal human yearnings, you're maybe thinking that I woke up the next day and felt the clouds parting and the sun shining, and was all, "OMG, I love Chris -- boyfriend???", and mapped out my next moves (vanilla-scented candles, Chablis) and wasn't able to take my eyes off him when we crossed paths.
But you've been following me for this long, so you probably know that it didn't play out that way.
I did, however, refuse to let him leave that morning.
Chris was the fourth guy I ever hooked up with. Each was intense in its own way: with Andy, because it was the first time I did anything; with Canetti, because he was the first guy who knew what he was doing, and because I was flattered; with that guy Ben, because it was my first take-charge moment.
The Chris incident was an entirely different level. First, with Chris, by the time it happened, I knew him well -- almost as well as I knew Andy. The night that Andy and I jerked each other off, the shock of the moment prevented me from letting go. I liked it, but it wasn't quite fun. Now I knew the system, and I hate to sound like a girl, but it really does feel better when you know the person well. Second, with Chris, there was this kind of relief. I mean, at a certain point, I knew. Wrestling with me made him hard; he caressed my fucking face. As much as I tried to compartmentalize it, or pretend it was a misunderstanding, I recognized that this conduct was not mainstream. If it hadn't played out soon, I might have started to go crazy. Third, Chris was the first guy whose body size and proportion was similar to mine. Andy and Ben had more muscles than Chris, and Canetti had more experience, but there was something spectacular about being with a guy whose legs ran as long as mine. His body felt better than I expected. Our runs and the treks to the gym had paid off. Lastly, it goes without saying that I was attracted to him; I didn't think that Chris was merely cute, or fully hot, but had the kind of face that when he walked into the room for the first time, you'd knock something because he was so striking. Throughout the night, we'd had several moments of intense, prolonged eye contact. I was not prepared for what that did to me. My cumshots were nuclear.
So every time he said that he needed to leave and sleep in his own bed, I wrapped him up and dissuaded him. It wasn't difficult. Whenever I tugged at his arm, it immediately counteracted whatever impulse was telling him to go.
He had the nicest lips. And his skin felt so good. Matt might be the best kisser ever, but Chris had slow, heavy lips that you wanted to sink into.
It was like they were meant to be a sexual orifice from the start, and Chris was a surprisingly good kisser in his own right, even if he didn't prolong them for the duration that I would have liked.
"Dude," he eventually said, sometime around 10 a.m., "I really do need to take a piss this time."
"No you don't," I said, pulling at his arm.
"No, I do," he said, slipping out of my grip. As if he didn't want to offend me: "Unfortunately."
"Just, like, go in the empty Gatorade bottle on my desk."
"Stop. That's just weird."
He walked naked across my floor and slipped up his boxers. They tripped him up when he first stepped in. His dick and his balls flapped against his thighs.
Once he was dressed, he said, "All right, man. I'll catch you later."
"Later, man," I said, as he opened the door in my floor and went downstairs.
My bed still smelled like him, though. I pressed my face to his pillow and breathed in. The smell of his evaporated jizz was still on my arm and chest. My fingers and palms smelled like his dick. I jerked off thinking about him, even though when I came again, it was completely dry.
When I woke sometime around 2 p.m., I decided not to shower, because I didn't want to lose his scent. Besides, it didn't matter that I looked like shit. It was exam season.
And really, this was the first thing I thought about when I woke up. Exams.
So instead of thinking, "OMG, I love Chris -- boyfriend???", I thought something like, "Don't let this fuck with your work."
When I walked downstairs to get a cup of coffee, Chris was perched on the couch, wearing my orange hoodie. I loaned it to him the night before because my room was freezing. I hadn't noticed that he'd thrown it on when he left. So there he sat on the living room couch, wearing the orange hoodie that I sort of liked, with a biology textbook spread between his legs and the Titans-Colts game on TV.
He impersonated my posture. That was the way I'd sit when I was in the living room reading, right down to the hoodie pulled barely above my eyebrows.
He ignored me when I walked past. If he felt awkward seeing me, his body language didn't betray it. As if I weren't there. He didn't nod or retract. He just sat.
I sniffed my fingers. They still smelled like Chris's dick.
In the kitchen, Michelle sat at the table with three people I didn't recognize. They had elaborate arrangements of notes and stacked paperbacks and a dry eraseboard propped on the counter. They chattered enthusiastically about the creation of the Federal Reserve under Woodrow Wilson, and Colonel Edward House, and the Zimmerman Telegram. It was like a round of Double Jeopardy! shat diarrhea all over our kitchen.
Michelle wished me a good morning -- a little sarcastic, but mostly enthusiastic.
"You're all getting A's," I said, not looking at them while I poured a cup of coffee and stole someone's bagel from a bag.
"Don't jinx it!"
"Richardson is a super-tough grader. He gives D's."
"It sounds like you're getting A's," I said, before they went back to gesticulating about the Paris Peace Conference of 1919.
Staying in that house, I wasn't going to get any work done. Not with the history nerds chirping in the kitchen, Chris Riis wearing my clothes on the couch, and my hands and bedding smelling like him. I walked into the living room and remained standing, devouring the bagel (Christ, I was starving) and burning my tonsils with hot coffee as I forced myself to wake.
"Yo," Chris said, monotone and nonchalant.
"Hey man," I said, the same way.
Chris shifted on the couch and said, in a slightly quiet voice, "I hope it's okay with you that I told Trevor about what we did last night."
Have you ever been on a totally smooth flight, maybe on the verge of nodding off, when a patch of turbulence slams the plane? And even though you know better, your hands immediately go cold, and you imagine yourself seconds from bloody dismemberment?
This was like that, but more shocking. It didn't take a second for a wave of sweat to prick my whole body. My mouth suddenly seemed dry and disgusting. I swear that my vision went blurry, like my contacts turned to paste.
This space of five seconds suffocated. I didn't even glance at him. My first response was that I needed to figure out the most plausible and convenient lie to dispute Chris's sudden madness.
"You know," Chris said, "about how we went down to his room and how I smoked his stuff with you. And then how I learned about Wilco."
My heart shrank to normal weight, still raging in my chest. "Jesus Christ," I said.
He smirked on the couch, chewing the end of his pen, my orange hoodie still pulled over his forehead. I wanted to punch him and dry hump him at the same time.
"Is that cool? I assume it isn't a big deal for you."
I laughed, but not a normal laugh. "That's fine," I said. It seemed like I should have said something clever. I couldn't figure out what it was.
He shrugged. "It's something people do."
"Wait, but." I was grasping toward reality. "We're talking about Trevor's weed. Yeah?"
"Uh, yeah," Chris said. As if this were completely obvious. "Stop being such a spaz. You're always such a spaz about things."
I sniffed my fingers.
I had to put my cup of coffee down, because, I swear, my hands were trembling from the stress and confusion of our conversation. An hour later, I think I felt impressed.
I think we all overestimate how much other people are just like us. There's nothing wrong with that. It's an empathy thing. We see pieces of ourselves reflected in other people, so we overassume. We conclude that we all share the same basic drives and insecurities, with certain adjustments on the margins. I mean, it's probably good that we do this as a general practice. Otherwise it would be world of object-strangers and blank slates.
To the extent that I felt myself holding back that night with Chris, it was because I remembered myself with Andy, and how our initial hook-up made me fear and resent him afterward. I repeatedly asked Chris if he was okay with this, to the point that it was condescending, and did so perhaps less out of genuine concern for him than the worry that blowback would follow.
Even when I was in the middle of hooking up with him -- when, for instance, he'd nervously rubbed the tip of my right nipple into the oversized slit of his oversized dick -- I was imagining the ugliness that could follow. Cold shoulders. Recrimination. A flat-out meltdown. Tears of rage. On the far extreme, I could picture him moving out of the house or leaving school -- remote possibilities, but possibilities. Like, could he plausibly confess his wrongdoings to his parents and transfer to a Christian college in Michigan, for all I could picture.
When these scenarios occurred to me in the moment, I cared, but it was outweighed by the oh-fuck-it, live-in-the-moment drives. I was having too much fun fooling around with him to feel frightened by the negative scenarios. If he was going to get scared and freak out, it was already too late to go back. The fail-safes crashed by the time we grinded our boners against each other while we still had jeans on.
I was ready for Chris to be a sullen, resentful wreck; I wasn't ready for him to chew a pen, steal my orange hoodie, and mislead me into thinking that he'd just outed us to Trevor. When I got over my initial relief (sweet, no Bible college for him) and maybe a small dose of disappointment (I figured that I'd get to play the worldly, experienced elder for at least a little while) it made me wonder what the hell I'd gotten myself into. What was that? Where did this confidence come from? Had he been fucking with me all along, or had I misjudged him? Abruptly, I felt like Chris had gained an upper hand, even though I told myself that I was reading too much into it.
And speaking of reading, that's almost all I did for the next week. That's what I was like during exams; I still I get the same way about work once in awhile. There are times when it's all I want to think about, and all else is a petty distraction. I was, to be specific, fairly obsessed with scoring an A in Arabic 101. Influenced by world events, the Arabic language sections had been in high demand that fall, until the difficulty of the language trumped their curiosity. My section dropped from 30 to 18 by the drop/add deadline. Between quizzes and the midterm, my semester's grade was just below the B+/A- border. I'd be damned if that was my first B since junior high.
Because visions of Chris distracted me, I stayed out of the house for the next week. When I went to the gym, I went alone. Michelle was the only housemate I could reliably study with, so we decamped to the library or to a coffeehouse; I did the same with a couple of friends from the newspaper.
During exams week, I ran across Matt Canetti three times, and all three times we ended up sitting together and reading. Conversation didn't turn personal. Pondering my sex life would have distracted us from the matter at hand.
Between that Saturday night and the start of Christmas vacation, I only had one brief moment where it was just me alone with Chris. It was about 1 a.m., and I'd come home with a cup of coffee. I was in my room on the futon, skimming condensed notes from my Russian history class, which I probably already knew by heart. Chris knocked on my door and walked upstairs.
"Yo," he said. "Hey, can I just borrow some CDs? Stuff for when I'm studying?"
"Yeah, of course," I said. "Take whatever you want."
I had several hundred CDs at the time, which have long since been uploaded to my iPod and boxed in my parents' house. He spent a few minutes perusing them. I wondered if he'd send a subtle signal in his choices, but they were all neutrals -- Beck, Eric Clapton, The Clash.
"Ha," he said. "You own a Will Smith album."
"I think it was a Christmas present."
"Big Willie Style? Ha. So for all the crap you give to everybody for their taste, you secretly love Will Smith."
"I think it was in my Christmas stocking," I said.
"Welcome to Miami. Bienvenido a Miami."
"How humiliating," I said.
For a half second or maybe three we made eye contact. It never would have seemed awkward before -- just a couple of slick, normal bros, getting all ROTFLMAO about Big Willie Style. Then it seemed slightly prolonged, so I looked away, sat up straight and drank my coffee. Chris glanced at his selection of CDs and made a face like he was satisfied with his choices. A few minutes later, London Calling played downstairs.
Sam Frost finished his exams first, and flew out Friday morning for Christmas with his parents. My Russian History exam wasn't until Monday, I finished my Arabic final on Thursday and had all weekend to do a take-home on 19th Century American Lit.
Michelle had a friend whose birthday party was on Friday night. They were going to dinner at a pizza place near campus and then heading off to someone's apartment to drink. For whatever reason, Trevor and Katie decided to go, Chris decided to tag along, and I concluded that it was a time for a break.
It was a huge, overlit restaurant that was always packed on football Saturdays, but manageable on the last Friday of the semester. We were in a party of 20. Michelle's friends were the kind of people who dressed nicely in order to go to a pizza restaurant on a Friday night. They were peppy and liked small-talk. The birthday girl was a sophomore from the New Jersey suburbs of New York. We briefly bonded over geography until she moved on to her real friends.
Chris, Katie, Trevor and I self-segregated at the far end of the long table.
The rest of the table was loud and chattery. A group on the opposite end kept laughing loudly. It was like all the cheerleaders and student-government types from high school had converged on a niche in college. I'd spent the past week in self-imposed isolation -- studying Arabic's nominative, accusative and genitive cases, reading coursepack essays about agrarianism in 18th Century Russia, thinking deeply about Young Goodman Brown -- such that a crowd of chipper ladder-climbers hit me like a fist of snow.
I felt like we were party crashers even though we'd been invited. We half-shouted to hear each other over the din of the restaurant and the classic rock playing overhead.
I spent most of that dinner trying not to stare at Chris. I wanted him to talk, regardless of his comment, because it provided an excuse to glance directly at his face, and maybe make some eye contact. This was around the time in my life that I began to think about topics such as the texture of his eyebrows and their gradation of blondness from the blond of his hair, and the length of his eyelashes, and the bridge of his nose, and began to think words like "manly" when I glanced at his earlobes.
Before the pizza came, the Rolling Stones song "Let's Spend the Night Together" came on. It's a song that I've heard a couple of thousand times, and it wouldn't have registered to me, if Chris hadn't started doing a headbob to the beat of it. At first it was kind of subtle, but when Trevor remarked on Chris's enthusiasm, he started to get into it. His head swayed at the base of his neck. His shoulders syncopated. In my past experiences, Chris and rhythm weren't a match. If his physical engagement in the song wasn't earnest, it wasn't entirely sarcastic, either. He wasn't making a spectacle -- it was the body language you'd see in a passing car when a driver was feeling a song -- but his nodding gesture and the slight bounce of his shoulders were semi-liquid, and shockingly skilled. And Christ, he looked sort of gay -- or maybe metrosexual, however you define that. He was unselfconscious but smooth. When the lyrics registered themselves to me and I watched him move like that, I immediately became fully hard in my jeans. It was an uncomfortable experience, like something out of junior high, to be sitting in the middle of a crowded pizza restaurant at a table with 20 people, and abruptly suffer a cramping boner. There was nothing to do but scowl and try not to look at him.
"Check out Pieces," Trevor said.
"Pieces is a big Rolling Stones fan," Katie said.
Pieces. That was his new nickname. Like Reese's Pieces -- Riis's Pieces.
But the nickname made me think of Riis's pieces. Even before we first hooked up, the phrasing hit a certain imagery. Instead of hard-shelled, orange brown and yellow peanut-butter candies beloved by the Extra-Terrestrial, the idea of Riis's pieces made me flash thoughts of Chris's dick and his balls: Riis's pieces. As a result, I discouraged the nickname, but Chris didn't seem to mind, and it quickly caught on with the housemates
"Stop calling him Pieces," I croaked uncomfortably, as I shifted in my chair. I'm positive that I was blushing. My face and crotch were sweating.
"That's what an old lady would name her cat."
"Awww, Pieces likes it though," Trevor said.
"A sick, fluffy cat."
"Pieces, this must be your favorite Stones song," Katie said.
"Nah," he said, thankfully, stopping his synchronized posturing. "That one's easy. Street Fighting Man."
"Good choice, Chris," I said.
"Why thank you. That means a lot coming from you."
"It's not my favorite, though."
"Of course not. Yours needs to be as obscure as possible."
"Not true," I said. "Under My Thumb. Not that obscure."
"Figures," Katie said. "That song's incredibly misogynist."
"Don't care, Katie. It still sounds good. All the best songs are misogynist. For instance, `Bitches Ain't Shit.'"
"You're such a dick," Katie said.
"You ever notice how such a dick' sounds like suck a dick' if you're not paying close attention?" Trevor said. "It sounded like you just told Joe to suck a dick."
"Suck a Dick is one of the tracks they didn't use on Some Girls," I said.
"Oh, good one," Trevor said. "I read someplace that the original title of Under My Thumb was Under My Cum."
"I don't know why all of you didn't end up in some shitheel fraternity. I mean, all of you."
"Right," Trevor said. "If we were talking about nice shoes, you'd fricking kill yourself."
"There's nothing wrong with shoes," Katie said. "Without shoes, we'd all have frostbite."
"Ever hear of boots?"
"You ever notice how boots sounds like boobs if you're not paying close attention?"
I'm pretty sure that Katie had crushes on all three of us. I mean, she'd kissed me; she'd done more than that with Trevor, even though I wasn't clear how much and how often; and she loved touching Chris's hair and shoulders.
Even so, Trevor was the only one who could make her blush and affected the way she laughed.
I glanced at Chris. By now, my boner was dying down. I resumed my normal sitting posture in relative comfort.
After dinner came and we were dropping cash for the bill, we decided to go back to the house. It seemed rude to bail, at least we wouldn't be appropriating someone else's booze while trying to avoid the chattering class. This decision met statements of polite disappointment, but we begged off with exams and exhaustion. Michelle would later, halfheartedly, accuse us of thinking we were too cool.
"Are we really going home?" Katie said, once we were a block from the restaurant.
"I guess."
"We could go to a movie."
"Two Towers, or Gangs of New York?"
"Or The Hot Chick."
"Fuck Rob Schneider."
"I actually want to see Two Towers," Chris said.
I pictured sitting next to Chris for three hours in a dark movie theater.
My dick wouldn't have handled our arms and legs brushing.
"It's way long, dude," Trevor said. "We could just, like, rent a movie and go back to the house. No Christmas movies, though. "
"I've always wanted to get stoned and see if The Wizard of Oz actually matches Dark Side of the Moon," Katie said.
"I don't want to do that without Sam," Trevor said. "He'd be fucking hilarious for that."
We went into the DVD rental place, where we bickered for 20 minutes about what movie to get, so we left with Days of Heaven, Wonder Boys and Boogie Nights, but then, after we left, we continued bickering about the selections.
"You guys didn't even listen to me," Chris said. "I mean, Stand By Me?
Goonies? Indiana Jones?"
"Pieces, you could have picked something, too."
"There's no point in picking something that not everybody wants to see, because now we're just going to go back and argue about which one to watch, and we're never going to watch any of them."
"Yeah," Trevor said, his voice now argumentative, "but no one wanted to watch your 80s kids' movies, either, so that's why we have Boogie Nights.
As opposed to Joe's movie where Richard Gere learns to farm."
This answer sufficiently frustrated Chris that he grabbed a handful of snow off the ground and whipped it into Trevor's face.
"Goddammit, Pieces!" Trevor said.
It was Trevor's second winter. His whining about winters in the Midwest was relentless. I swear that he secretly visited a tanning salon. He was Indian, so it wasn't entirely obvious, but I think that I could tell.
Trevor gave Chris a soft shove to the shoulder. Chris intended his shove back to be gentle, but Chris was significantly bigger than Trevor. The push caused Trevor to stagger sideways, one leg shin-deep in snow. He nearly toppled.
"Whoah," Chris said. "I didn't mean to shove you that hard."
"Fantastic," Trevor said. "Live with white people for four months and suddenly they attack the brown kid."
"Wait, you're brown?" Chris said.
"Wait, I've only lived with you for four months?" I said.
"Crazy," he said, brushing snow off his cheeks and wiping it off his eyes.
"My brothers from another mother."
"Wait, we don't have the same mother?"
"The male bonding tonight is out of control," Katie said.
I threw snow in her face. She punched my shoulder.
"Ow!" I said. "Don't punch me."
"Then don't throw snow in my face, asshole."
"Punching's not fair," I said. "Guys can't punch girls, even as a joke."
"It's deterrence," she said.
"Ooooh, deterrence," Trevor said. "Somebody takes a poli sci class, and all of a sudden she's throwing out technical terms. Madeline Albright."
"No kidding," I said. "What's next? Are you going to school us on game theory?"
She punched my shoulder again. "You're the only pompous one, Joseph: `This Dylan bootleg reminds me of Kafka. Isn't that great?' Gag me. Besides, everybody knows what deterrence means. It's not obscure."
"I guess I don't know what deterrence means," Chris said, kind of mumbly and low. "I thought it was the same thing as, like, omission. It's not?"
We paused in alarm. Katie and I had tense eye contact. I looked at him, prepared to accuse him of being a retard. His eyebrows popped and he made this soft smirk.
"The fact that we even stopped and thought that you were serious," I said, "tells a lot."
"Oh, Pieces," Katie said. "You're a hoot."
"The funny thing about all of you guys and me is how wrong you all are," Chris said.
"I mean, good for Andy, though," my friend Rick said at the 3 a.m. diner, a couple of days after Christmas. "Not that I'm shocked. I've wondered that about him."
"Seriously?" Sanjay said.
"A little. I didn't spend a ton of time on it."
"I never thought he was gay," Sanjay said. "I remember in seventh grade when Serena was his girlfriend, and I had a huge crush on Serena in seventh grade. Maybe that shaded my thinking. I wasn't too attuned, but I figured him as kind of a ladies' man."
"He was always well put together. Never had a girlfriend. Kind of uncomfortable whenever people talked about sex."
"That kind of applies to our man here, though," Sanjay said, pointing a thumb at me. "He's not gay."
"Hell no," I said.
"But Joey gets laid," Rick said. "He's just not talkative about personal stuff."
"It's boring," I said.
"I mean, you were always better friends with Andy than we were," Rick said.
"Yeah, he told me this summer," I said, nonchalant.
Talking to my two best friends from high school, I wasn't lucid about my hypocrisy and dishonesty. When I was with them, I wasn't gay. That Joe was a different person. This present Joe -- who played varsity shortstop, who got invited to all the parties and puked on all the front lawns -- was Real Joe. There was Real Joe and Gay Joe, and Gay Joe was a forgotten character in a book I'd read a couple of weeks ago.
Plus, I was better friends with Andy than Rick and Sanjay were. I'd hung out with Rick and Sanjay almost every weekend between sixth grade and high school. Andy was in the same circle, but he hadn't been in the core clique.
"It was right before he came out to his parents. I guess everybody at Berkeley knows he's gay, but nobody here did, so he told me. He didn't seem nervous. It was just kind of like," I paused, extemporizing, "I'm still the same person, and I'm not doing anything crazy, and I hope we'll be friends like always. There's just this other thing about me now."
"That's nice, actually," Rick said. "It must have been flattering that he told you first."
"Yeah, I guess."
"Andy didn't seem too weird about it when it came up tonight," Sanjay said.
"It was similar."
The topic ended, and we moved on to high school friends who'd dumped old girlfriends once they started college.
On New Year's Eve, I was with Rick and Sanjay again, along with Andy Trafford, our friend Danielle and several dozen other people. I was blitzed by eleven and puking by two. In between I drunk-dialed about fourteen people from college to wish a happy 2003. Some calls lasted 20 seconds, some a few minutes, most were funny and leavened with shit-talk, but a couple of them -- my call with Michelle and the one with my editor at the school paper -- were surprisingly warm.
As I worked my way through the cell phone contacts, Chris Riis's name was near the end. When I called him, I felt slightly nervous. I was in the capital of Real Joe world, and this call was forcing a few moments of Gay Joe.
"Joseph," he said, when he picked up the phone.
"Hey man! Happy New Year."
He laughed. "Where are you?"
"At a party with my high school friends. Where are you?"
"With the family. Watching Dick Clark."
"Rocking."
"Give me a second." There was a pause. I heard sliding doors open and shut. "Wow, it must be, like, eight degrees out."
"Yikes."
"You sound wasted," he said. "I didn't want to say that in front of my parents and brothers."
"I am indeed."
He laughed again. "It's nice being with my family. They're letting one of my nephews stay up to midnight. You're probably having more fun, though.
"Yeah, yeah," I said. "I'm having fun."
"Everything's cool with you, though?" he said.
I didn't know if he was talking about the holidays or speaking in a broader sense. "As always," I said.
"That grand," he said. I wondered where he came up with that phrase.
Probably from an old movie.
"Quite grand," I said.
"So..." He paused. "See you in about a week?"
"Certainly. It'll be grand."
"Happy New Year. Don't drive drunk."
"Never!"
Another pause. Like each of us waited for the other to say something more.
A girl screamed and squealed and laughed somewhere behind me. I heard a loud thud.
"Sounds fun," Chris said.
"It is," I said. "I'll see you soon, Cups."
There was the standard folderol at midnight. I was near my friend Danielle.
I kissed her on the cheek and lifted her in the air when I hugged her.
This was mainly to throw off a couple of girls we didn't know who'd separately been eyeing me all night.
Andy was in another room, but before the moment passed and things went back to normal, I was sure to seek him out. I sort of bear-hugged him. He hadn't expected it.
"I'm so proud that you're my friend," I said, squeezing him around the shoulders.
He didn't say anything. Like he thought I'd follow up with a put-down.
"No, really," I said. "I'm proud of you as a person, and I'm lucky to know you. You're a genuinely great guy, and I hope you have a good year, and I wanted to tell you that just one time, all right? You make all of us better, and I admire you. That's all. No ulterior motive."
Andy smirked when he blushed. He didn't look me in the eyes.
"Wow," he said. "I think somebody spiked the sangria with acid. Or maybe I'm just hearing voices. Did you just pay me a bunch of compliments?"
"Shut up," I said, giving him another platonic hug and slapping his shoulder when I let go. "You know I mean it. I'm not just saying this because I'm drunk."
"Thanks, buddy," he said, positively beaming. I had no idea that I could have that effect on a person. "It actually means a lot to me."
I considered lingering and letting the moment of niceness expand. But fuck it -- it was New Year's Eve, dude. I poured myself a pint glass of cheap champagne, resolved to be a better man, and promptly blacked out.
Once I was back at school, weeks passed and nothing happened. My interactions with Chris were tension-free. I jerked off to him two or three times a day, and I gave him long looks when no one could notice, but shooting the shit with him didn't feel weird. His conversations with me didn't seem pregnant with consequence. He was just Chris again.
True, he'd stolen my orange hoodie, and wore it around the house a couple of times a week. That felt like a bit of a taunt, and there was a principle involved, but I didn't know how to ask for it back without bringing up that night, which I didn't want to do. I let it slide. This, I cursed under my breath, but when I was in bed alone and couldn't sleep, I thought about Chris wearing it, and the notion that something I'd worn a few dozen times was rubbing against his skin, and that the hood of it got damp from his wet hair when he showered in the morning. The inside of it smelled like him.
That thought made me cum, and I forgave him for ganking my shirt until the next time I saw him wearing it, and I'd feel territorial all over again.
Matt Canetti and I were taking a class together that semester. It was his final college semester, and back in November we signed up for the same Dante class. The professor was one of the most popular on campus, but Matt had never taken a class with her, and, as he explained it, he had a gap in his knowledge when it came to the classics.
We sat next to each other in lecture and in our discussion section, and we met in a coffeehouse to do the reading, but that was about it. We talked about La Vita Nuova and Dante's visions of hell. He didn't know that I'd done anything with Chris. That conversation in November -- after I hooked up with Katie, when he told me his skepticism about Chris -- might have changed more than I realized. Matt wasn't aloof or passive aggressive: Instead, it was like he'd reverted back to the polished, gregarious fraternity brother who I met at a fall rush party.
Like I said about Real Joe and Gay Joe, in Matt Canetti's case, there was Real Matt and Socialite Matt. I'd spent the last year in Real Matt's tics and neuroses, but now I was exiled back to Socialite Matt, who was pleasant and poised and rarely uttered an unpracticed thought. It might have seemed passive aggressive if Socialite Matt weren't so fucking pleasant. I couldn't decide whether this was his version of a cold shoulder, or if he was intending to woo me back -- even though we hadn't had a direct conflict that demanded wooing.
If that was his plan, it sort of worked. Instead of feeling guilty or tense about Chris, I looked forward to seeing Matt. It wasn't just that I loved the Dante class, the prof, and everything we read, but it was nice having a schedule where I'd predictably see him. Before class, he was like an athlete getting ready for a game. He was enthusiastic about whatever was going on. He'd rave about the lecture, or about Dante's canto about Paolo and Fracesca and its depiction of lust and reading.
We were both dorks like that. If there was one disappointment I had in college, it's that everybody wasn't the same way. Before I arrived, I had a vision that I'd be around serious, impassioned scholars, but no place is really like that, except maybe the nerd warehouses like MIT or The University of Chicago. Everyplace else -- even especially the Harvards and the Princetons, let alone my own college -- people just wanted to get the easy A's. They cared about internships, grad school applications, job prospects. They got to know professors so that they could score rec letters, and not because they couldn't get enough of the subject.
Yes, Matt and I were dorks, but it was something that I loved about Matt: that kind of relentless, unselfconscious interest and curiosity. It wasn't for status. He just loved books, ideas and arguments for their own sake.
It was something that Chris Riis couldn't come close to approaching. If I had a conversation about this with Chris, he would probably have been baffled. He wasn't a humanities or a social sciences guy, so maybe studying was more of a workmanlike duty. That didn't resolve the question. Like, what did Chris really love and care about? What excited him? His family, and a golden retriever named Handsome; the professional sports teams based in Detroit; Hot Pockets and pears. He was energized by Vice City when we were in the Grand Theft Auto stage, but that wasn't important. For me, my mood for the day could rise or fall based on something in the news, something I read for a class, hearing the right song at the right moment. I think there were times when I mistook Chris's apparent blankness as stupidity, or laziness. That wasn't accurate. Still, I had no guess as to what made him feel alive.
There was a Friday night in late January or early February where we had about 25 or 30 people at the house. It wasn't meant to be a party, but it kind of turned into one, even if it was small. A pool table makes people want to hang out. Trevor had three or four friends over, and they ended up drinking and shooting pool. Katie had some girls over to pre-party, but they stayed at the house that night, flirting with Trevor's admittedly attractive friends. We called over the Next Door Girls. I got on the phone and invited some friends from the newspaper. Nothing crazy was going on, but it seemed like everybody was in a great mood. It was what you imagine college being like -- drinking games in the kitchen, a few people leaned up against the wall around a cigarette-scarred pool table, some guys on the couch shouting at an NBA game while rap and indie rock played on the stereo.
Periodically, people went to the front porch to smoke a cigarette or light one of Trevor's bowls.
Chris was a pretty excellent pool player because, he explained, he'd spent so much time in friends' basements in high school. Beating up on guys at the pool table had him in a good mood, and lightly cocky by his standards.
He'd rock a tough shot and half-whisper something like, "Oh, that was perfect," and smile without directly looking at his opponent. The softspoken bragging seemed more infuriating than a shout and a fist pump.
That bastard was wearing my orange hoodie again. He fiddled with the hood all night. He'd tug it over his forehead before he made a shot, then pull the hood back when his turn ended. He tinkered with the top of the zipper, jerking it up and down, while waiting for his opponent to shoot.
When he leaned forward to shoot a ball, my dick plumped. Chris's jeans were baggy, but not so baggy that they totally concealed the outline of his butt.
Even though it wasn't sculpted or muscled, it was still the butt that I liked, and the position conjured reminders about times that I observed his balls from behind.
I was drunk enough that night, so I kept looking at him. My face was more glowering than longing -- I'd shouted "fuck" several times while he beat me -- but the glowering was not real. Even though my newspaper friends were gathered in the kitchen playing Three Man and shouting, I stayed at the pool table, drinking bottles of Rolling Rock and regarding Chris.
Whenever I needed to take a piss, I went to the upstairs bathroom out of habit. It was an unwritten rule that you didn't use Katie's bathroom on the main floor, and the bathroom that Sam and Trevor shared in the basement was beyond filthy. When it was time, I lumbered upstairs. From thinking about Chris, my dick was half-fluffed. I briefly considered going up to my room to jerk off, but that would have been dysfunctional. Someone had come bounding up the stairs and was apparently waiting for me to exit. I zipped up, washed my hands slowly under cold water and regarded my drunk face in the mirror.
When I opened the bathroom door, Chris stood outside, waiting his turn.
"Hey!" I said.
"Hello."
"That," I blurted, "is my orange hoodie."
He was a horrible liar. He made a confused face and looked down at the hoodie. He fingered the cloth at the hem, as if to confirm a theory.
"This?"
"Yes!" I said. My tone was more amused than confrontational. "My mom gave it to me for Christmas last year."
"Oh. Interesting." He looked me in the eyes, playing stupid. "I wonder how I got it?"
"I mean, I'm not mad or anything," I said. "I don't mind. Just don't get weird stains on it. Any weird, Hot Pocket stains on it."
"Huh," he said, still feigning confusion. If I'd never met him, I would have known he was faking. "But you don't mind if I keep wearing it?"
"I guess not. Just, like I said, no stains. And get it back to me eventually."
"Wait," Chris said, "do you want to borrow one of my shirts? For, like, balance."
I almost said no and made fun of him for dressing like a golf caddie. But that wasn't accurate anymore, and before I reflexively teased him, I thought to myself that it might feel nice wearing something of his. Maybe just a T-shirt. A shirt to sleep in, perhaps while not wearing pants.
"Okay," I said, and we went to his room.
Then Chris closed the door. I thought to myself, "Something is happening."
My dick experienced a moderate throb.
He opened the second drawer of a dresser. There were a lot of plain white T-shirts with pit stains of varying intensities, plus a half-dozen shirts with our school's name on them. He owned some plain gray and navy-blue tees, but he liked wearing them, and looked good in them, so I didn't want to take those away.
"What do you have in your closet?" I said, my voice sounding too soft and quivery to be just a question of borrowing a buddy's shirt.
He walked a few steps toward his closet door. Before I opened it, I felt his hand on my elbow. And it wasn't a soft, gentle touch. It was a grab, just short of a yank. My dick went from a throb to a full-throated pulse.
Startled, I jerked my neck back and looked at him. He stared at my face.
THIS IS HAPPENING.
He maintained his grip on my elbow, and maybe it lasted two or three seconds, but it felt like hours, with scenarios and urges and futures lighting through me. It was like he waited for a confirmatory signal, so after I didn't struggle to break his grip, and gave him the subtlest of nods, he slammed his body against me. Like his grip on my elbow, this was not remotely subtle. He grabbed me by the shoulders and shoved me against the closet door, with the full force of his torso and the strength of his hips cracking against mine. The sound of us hitting the door was like a board snapping, but I'm sure that my senses exaggerated everything. It was forceful enough to hurt.
We both were completely hard. He didn't kiss me or move at my zipper.
Instead, he pinned me against the door. He thrust at me with the leverage of his legs. I touched his lower waist, lifting up the hem of his white T-shirt and my orange hoodie that he stole, fingers digging into the skin of his lower back. His nose and mouth squished at my ear and the base of my neck. I pulled his very manly earlobe into my mouth. His face was sweating before we'd touched each other. He breathed heavily and moaned lightly, and every time his breath shot low and deep into my ear canal, my spine went hot.
There wasn't any groping, just a lot of body pressure. He had me vertically pinned. I couldn't have moved without a struggle, but I didn't want to move. What was happening -- THIS IS HAPPENING -- hurt. I was straining in my lower back, my shoulders and my neck. I gripped at his head, squeezing him harder at my ear and my throat. His head was hot; the skin of his scalp was sweaty. The cartilage of his nose slid against my jaw bone.
The sweat of his face rubbed off on my face. I hugged tighter at his head.
My teeth touched his scalp. The scent of his body smelled amazing; I wished I could have bottled it. He rubbed his thighs and his hips against mine in slow, long, thrusting motions. I wanted to arch my back and push forward on him, but it wouldn't have been possible without a struggle, and I didn't want to struggle. His body had taken control; I would let it do what he wanted.
I wasn't surprised when he made the same soft, high-pitched whimper that I remembered from a month and a half before. He emitted the sound directly in my ear. It was a satellite feed from Nirvana. I could tell by his rhythm that he was cumming in his jeans. He didn't even try to undo them. He just came inside them. He stopped thrusting at me and loosened his grip at my neck. His bones and muscles, which he'd been applying with so much force, suddenly slacked. Instead of forcing me against the wall, it seemed like I was helping to hold him up.
"You're going to need to change," I half-whispered. My chest and stomach were on vibrate. I don't think I had sensations in my extremities. "There are all those people downstairs, and we need to go back down."
"I know," he whimpered in my ear, holding my shoulders as if for balance.
He pulled back away and looked me in the eyes. I would need to cum before I went downstairs.
I rapidly undid the top button of his jeans and yanked down his pants and boxers in one move. His dick was at a 60-degree angle. It was drenched in his jizz. Some of it splattered with my gesture. It was grayish-white and dripping down the length of his shaft, and mixed in with his fine, blond pubic hair. His boxers were a soggy mess.
When I moved to undo my own jeans, I almost came myself, just from the slight stimulation of the brush of my hand. I kept my eyes on Chris's wet cock, dripping down on his jeans. It was like someone had sprayed the room with jizz-scented air freshener. My dick wasn't out for three seconds when I sprayed a line of cum onto his hardwood floor. Not to brag, but it was like a pornstar's cumshot. I blew my wad in a long arc that went several feet, and the succeeding four or five shots were almost as impressive. It landed quicksilver and shiny on his floor. I didn't make a sound. The floor, we could clean, but I didn't want to change my clothes, so I was careful with my aim. My jeans and boxers were down at my knees, and when I knew I was done, I squeezed what remained from the length of my shaft, letting it drip down between my feet.
"Holy crap," I half-whispered, half-laughed, trying to gauge his response.
His face was flushed and sweating, but he didn't look fazed. He looked hot whenever his face went pink; maybe even hotter when he was wearing my orange hoodie with a shining dick sticking out underneath it.
I put my dick back in my boxers and zipped up.
"See you back downstairs in a few minutes?" I said, trying to sound casual and cool.
Chris looked at me, a little disoriented, but also smiling. Smiling like he'd pulled off some kind of win.
"You can clean this up okay, right?" I had violated his floor in a gruesome fashion -- an ejaculatory Jackson Pollock.
"Yeah,' he said, breathing heavily, still smiling. "Just give me a couple of minutes. I just need to sort this out. I'll be back down. Tell Alexander, tell him that I want next game against him."
I was about to hop out to repair myself in our bathroom, but before I did, I opened the door to his closet and grabbed the first shirt I saw: a light-blue Oxford button-down.
This is when life started to get weird.