Date: Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:50:23 -0400
From: jpm 770 <jpm770@gmail.com>
Subject: Joe College, Part 16

Some people want to put their labels on everything, which is infuriating.
 Their labels shouldn't matter.   They want you to be in their category even
if you're not. It's not about the label.  Some people are more interesting
than others.  It's completely random.  They're not like you but they like
you anyway.  Sometimes you think maybe they *are* like you, but you can't
really know.  You never know about people for sure.

Let's say this guy named Jamie moves to your neighborhood at the start of
sophomore year.  He's new, originally from Lansing.  His dad got a job here.
 He comes to school and doesn't know anybody.  You figure out that you live
three streets away from each other.  As soon as you see him, you think that
there's something interesting about him.  He looks like somebody you'd be
good friends with.

And you are.  For the next couple of months you're his only friend in town.
 He doesn't know anybody else.  He meets your friends.  He hangs around your
house after school.  You do normal stuff together -- get dropped off at
movies, watch Pistons games, hang out in each other's basements on Friday
nights watching DVDs or Skinemax.

He asks about the girls in your class.  You name names confidently.  You're
good friends with most of the popular ones.  Your freshman homecoming rep?
 You took her to the Winterfest dance.  She was hot.  When you saw the shots
the photographer got that night, you were like, "Whoah.  I'm pretty good
looking in a suit."  You talk about girls with Jamie.  He thinks he's
interested in one, but you've never heard of her.  She's a junior.  She went
to a different middle school.

"She's probably okay, man," you tell Jamie, "but she's not really part of a
crowd.  I don't know anything about her.  Have you ever met Jenna?"

Jenna is plenty cute but you know she's boring.  She never does things with
guys.  You don't tell that to Jamie.  You simply think it would be better if
he eased into the crowd.  Where you grew up, everybody knew each other
forever.  It gets cliquish, but that's life.  You've never seen anybody move
there and fit in right away.  It's too hard to navigate.  You like Jamie --
that's why you take it upon yourself to help.

Sometimes Jamie gives you weird looks.  You catch him watching you out of
the corner of your eye, like he's looking at you while he thinks you're not
watching.  It feels a little bit nice.  He looks interesting.  He's shorter
than you and skinnier.  He has a skinny face, skin with no zits, dark eyes.
 When he's not in school, he wears a Tigers baseball cap backward.

One Friday night you're at his house, probably going to sleep over because
it's more convenient that way.  He's got the Skinemax on.  It embarrasses
you.  You try not to watch too closely, but Jamie gets into it.  He asks if
you've ever seen real porno.  You blush and mumble no.  He says he saw one
at his second cousin's house and it was awesome.

"You've never even *looked* at real porno?" he says.

No, you say.

"Not even on the internet?"

No, you say.  It's not really your thing.  Plus, it would be horrible if
your parents figured out.  They're not exactly cool with that kind of thing.
 If they knew you looked at that it'd be one of the worst things ever to
happen to you.

Jamie is disappointed in this.  He thinks it's a little weird, but it's
cool, he says.  Parents suck like that.

He offers color commentary about the softcore playing on TV.  The women's
bodies look fake.  They're disproportionate.  They're like huge toys, or
like how a computer would make a fake woman look.  Their skin looks waxy.
 Their boobs look uncomfortably large and muscled.  They shave it all off
downstairs.  It doesn't look human.  It doesn't look right.  They don't look
interesting.  Jamie doesn't think that, though, and you're already making
yourself sound weird for what you said before about not liking porn.  You
catch glimpses at Jamie while he talks about what's happening on screen.
 You pretend to be enthusiastic.  He's intense in how he talks about it.
 It's interesting when people are intense.

You don't know what you're supposed to do in this situation.  It's not the
way your friends are.  If you'd been hanging out with your other friends,
you'd probably be shooting hoops in a driveway after going to a football
game.  If it were a nice night you'd be at somebody's place with a pool, but
it's fall now and too cold for that.

Sitting on the opposite end of the couch from Jamie, you shift your
position.  You move your hand to adjust yourself, because it's getting
uncomfortable.  Jamie glances over at you.  It seems awkward.

Jamie says, "Whoah."

You say, "What?" and try to be nonchalant.

"Nothing, man," he says, kind of laughing.

You feel yourself blush.  It feels gross.

This wasn't a big thing.  It's not like it scarred you for life.  In seventh
grade gym class, after you ran the mile or had a day of sprints, they'd make
you take a shower, which was horrible to begin with.  Like, seriously
inhumane.  It reminded you of videos of what the Nazis did, you thought to
yourself the first time that you experienced it.  You were only twelve, but
as they euphemize it on TV, you started developing early.  The first couple
of times you suffered that whole shower thing, it was like guys you knew --
guys that you were friends with for a long time -- sort of noticed.  Like,
they stared down at you for a couple of seconds.  It made you feel sick,
like you wanted to run away.  You were careful about never glancing at them
because, number one, that was gay, and number two, invasion of privacy.

There were a couple of comments on it.  Not direct things, but awkwardly
worded jokes, the kind that made some guys laugh and some of them look
embarrassed.  On like the fourth or fifth time, you hung up your towel and
ran quick to the shower, facing a corner wall and not turning away while the
cold water hit you for about 30 seconds, which seemed long enough to get wet
and not seem like you were being scared and a freak.  Your friend Benjamin
took the shower next to you and started talking to you, all normal and
confident-like, like you were hanging out in the hall talking by the
lockers.  It felt rude not looking at him or talking to him at all.  It
would have seemed like you were acting weird.

When you start talking to him, you peek down for a split second, barely
enough to make a comparative judgment so you can get guidance about what was
going on.  Benjamin had pubes and everything but it definitely wasn't as big
as yours.  And shut *up*, man, it's not like you were Marky f***ing Mark in
"Boogie Nights," you were simply above average in that respect, and not so
far above average that you were a freak mutant genital boy, only further
along than your friends and they'd catch up anyway, and the embarrassment of
it was way, way, way stronger than whatever might have been flattering about
it.

So, yeah.

There was that thing.  It was sufficiently awkward that in high school, you
never played on any teams because you didn't need people to see that crap.
 It wasn't any of their business.  It was disgusting.

And then you're hearing Jamie talk about what he'd do to one of the shiny
waxy chicks in the porno, and it gets your mind thinking about watching him
do that stuff, even though you don't want to think like that.  He sees you
starting to get a boner in your Dockers, and all of a sudden, he's like,
"Whoah."

Then a couple of minutes later, he says, "Dude, Riis, forget watching
pornos.  You should probably be in one."

It's sort of super-humiliating, but he talks like it's no big deal.  You
figure that must be how people in Lansing act.  He laughs about it.

It seems like Jamie is somebody you can trust.  He's not a part of your
group.  You're pretty much the only person he's friends with at school.  You
remember Tom Cruise in "Risky Business," about how saying "what the f***"
gives you freedom.  You feel your face getting hot and say in a soft voice,
"Do you want to see it?"

Jamie looks at you like you're sort of crazy.  He laughs and shakes his
head.  He says, "Riis, dude, you're a funny cat sometimes."

That was it.

You only live like five minutes away.  You can walk home and run away from
it, but that makes it seem crazy instead of joking around.  You stay and
laugh it off.  Jamie doesn't react aside from his comment.  He thinks you're
kidding.  It will be an awful thing if he goes into school and talked about
it, but he doesn't.

You probably would have showed him if he'd answered yes.  You wanted him to
see it.  The next day you think about what it was like when he looked at
you.  You jerk off to it.  Jamie has an interesting voice -- pretty deep,
and he uses his syllables sharply and crisply.  He could have been on TV.
 You think about how he talked watching that Skinemax flick and how he
looked over to you.  It feels interesting.  When you stayed over you'd seen
him in boxers a couple of times, and that was a little interesting as well.

Not long after that Jamie starts hanging out with the girl he asked about.
 You've still never heard of her and don't know anything about her.  He
hangs out with some of the skater kids in your class, even though he doesn't
skateboard.  Apparently, that's his new crowd, which is cool.  It's good
that he has friends now, even if they aren't your kind of people.  You say
hi in the halls and when the Pistons are in the playoffs, he takes up your
invitation to watch the games with your friends.  He's a cool guy and
everything, but your interests turn out to be different, and you weren't
meant to be good friends.  That felt, in a very small way, sadder than you
expected.

Not that it's a big deal.  You have plenty of friends.  Your teachers like
you, and you never have problems with your parents.  You get elected
vice-president of your class (an important position, in case the class
president is assassinated or impeached) and shoot photos for the yearbook.
 All of your best friends are on the basketball team, so you're pretty
popular, even if you're not the kind of guy who gets elected to the
homecoming court, because you're not on any teams.  Some of your friends go
crazy with their parents, but that never happens to you, probably because
you're the youngest, and by the time you're in high school, they're worn
out.  Your oldest brother was 15 when you were born.  He already has two
kids.  Being an uncle means setting a good example.

You go out with a few different girls, but it's not really a thing.  Nothing
ever happens.  You make out with one a couple of times and it doesn't feel
the way everybody tells you.  Like, everybody always tells you how you
should feel, like they're you, and you can't tell if you're weird about it
or whether they're lying because they feel like they need to sound cool or
be part of a category.  The problem with girls in real life is that most of
them aren't interesting.  You like girls and everything.  There's no doubt
that you're attracted to them.  Then, in real life, they're never as cool or
fun to be around as you expect.  As friends is one thing, but for dating
it's something else.  They remind you of your sisters.  They tell you not to
be so nervous, even though you don't feel nervous at all.  Most people don't
understand the difference between nervous and polite and bored.  What are
you going to say to a girl?  It's all right hanging out with you, but now I
want to go home and watch the Red Wings with my parents?  That would
definitely be weird.

When it's fall of senior year, you only apply to two schools, and one of
them is in-state and accepts pretty much everybody.  You aren't one of those
spazzes who freaks over whether you'll get into Stanford or Harvard.  You
knew you were going to get into the place that you wanted, and the other
school is in case something surprising happened.  Then you have a back-up
plan.

Sure enough, you get admitted like it's nothing.  You're pretty happy about
it, but you've never assumed otherwise.

The night after graduation you get drunk for the first time.  You're at the
lake house of your best friend Ray with about 60 of your good friends from
high school.  You've always been really strict about parties and things like
that.  Everything they told you about drugs and alcohol in health class: it
scared the heck out of you.  Plus, you can't do that crap and look at your
mom and dad in the eye when you come home.  That's not the kind of person
you should be.  Even so, you've just graduated, and you're there with
everybody in your class, and all of these people who you'd never picture
drinking -- the uptight girl who got into University of Chicago, this very
religious kid from A.P. History -- they were all getting wasted.

Plus, "American Pie" is set where you grew up.  Everybody's still excited
about it.  You're always comparing yourselves to the characters in "American
Pie."  Their consensus about you, it's that you look like you're a Stiffler
but act like the nerd character.  It only seems right that you should loosen
yourself up.  It seems like you should give yourself a memory before you
leave and it's too late.

Your best friend Ray keeps egging you on, and sometimes Ray seems very, very
interesting, even though you don't officially consider him interesting.
 You've known him too long to think that he's *purely* interesting.  Ray
keeps grabbing you around the shoulder and hugging you.  He's a little
drunk.  Over and over, you keep talking about how you're best friends, with
stupid stories about things from like fourth grade or the time you covered
up for him after he chalked the old substitute teacher who fell asleep at
her desk.  As Tom Cruise observed in "Risky Business," saying "What the f***
gives you freedom."  You try beer first, but it tastes awful.  The mixed
drinks taste awesome.  You spend the night mosquito-bitten and lying on the
grass next to a campfire, but what the f***.

It's very late and some of them go skinnydipping.  You wander to the side of
the lake as Ray gets himself naked in like five seconds while he harrasses
you into following lead.  No way.  That is a line you won't cross.  Maybe if
it had been you and Ray, but not with all of those people.  You watch his
body as he trots down to the water and hits the surface stomach-first.  A
couple of skinny girls go in after him, and then another, and then a couple
more dudes, but none of them are as interesting as Ray.  You start to feel
like a perv or a creep, standing on the lake looking at naked people while
drunk with a Sprite and vodka in your hand, so you go back up to the
campfire, where everybody wears clothes.

The next morning you're hung over, but it's not as bad as you anticipated.
 You're just there on the floor of Ray's cottage with your friends.  The
drinking wasn't so bad, after all.  You decide that maybe when you get to
college next fall, you should try to do more stuff -- cut loose a little.
 Say what the f***, because that's what gives you freedom.

You know the campus pretty well because all of your older siblings went
here.  Plus, your parents have had season football tickets basically your
whole life, and when you were getting older and started to understand
football, you were heading down with them for nearly every major home game.
 When you were 12 you stayed the night in one of your older brother's dorm
rooms.  You've slept on your sisters' couches on visits.  Outside of Grand
Rapids, you probably know the school better than anyplace else.

At first it's lucky that you feel at home on campus, because right away,
you're freaking out.  Doing well in high school isn't the same as doing well
in college, and from the first lecture, chemistry is kicking your ass.  Your
roommate seems friendly enough at first, but then standoffish, kind of
uptight, which is unusual, because in your experience, *you're* the one who
everybody thinks is uptight.

When you're not with the uptight roommate, most other people you see go
wild.  There's booze around, and pot.  They all get together in somebody's
room to drink, then go to the huge frat houses, where open parties start at
ten and most of them stay late through the night.  They're nice enough, but
you don't entirely get it.  All of them judge you because you don't fit into
their categories.  On first impression, it seems like the school is cut
between people who study all the time and don't even make eye contact in the
hall, or else it's people going absolutely crazy -- getting drunk, smoking
pot, hooking up with each other. The dorm keeps a jar of free condoms by the
desk where you get your mail.  This blows your mind.

Nobody seems that casual.  It's like they're all trying to outdo each other.
 Even when it's normal conversation.  They're into bands you've never heard
of.  They're obsessed with The Sopranos, which you've never seen.  The ones
who come from big cities talk about how they miss their big cities and
compare the relative merits of New York and L.A. and Chicago.

Then, one night you meet Joe.

Your first thought is, "Whoah, that guy looks like how I picture Superman."
 A girl from down the hall named Alicia has a crush on you, and she invites
you to this dorm room where two guys from Florida are having people over to
drink.  You've had those kinds of hang-out nights before and it never
clicked.  When you walk into that dorm room, it already feels like everybody
is friends and you're the weirdo who crashed their little party.  One of the
Florida guys starts giving you a hard time about not having alcohol, but you
know it's only because you're a guy, and they think you're going to draw
from the population of cute and available girls.

Suddenly a crazy-looking British guy is like, "Don't worry, take a seat and
drink as much of my stash as you like."  You immediately like these guys --
the crazy-looking British kid and his friend Joe, who looks like Superman.
 It seems like they've been friends for years, but right away, they let you
in.  When you try to be funny, they laugh, and when they ask you the boring
small-talk questions that everybody asks, they actually listen to the
answers, and then play off of you and each other.

You start talking to this guy Joe, and he's definitely, like, interesting.
 He has dark brown hair that's parted to the right, but it's long enough
that it curls up in the same way that Superman is drawn with a cowlick.  He
has freckles across his nose and his cheeks.  The way his face is built,
it's like somebody designed it with a ruler.  His nose and chin and cheeks
all line up with sharp, short edges.  Below his cheeks it's like an
upside-down triangle.  He keeps smiling at stuff, like he's looking for an
excuse to show off his teeth, and every time you say something vaguely
funny, he keeps smiling at you.

That night you go to a frat party with them and find yourself trashed in a
way that's never happened before.  You're in a great mood and you don't want
the night to end, so to maintain momentum, you keep drinking.  It's not how
you usually do things, but everybody's out to get drunk.  You stop noticing
the taste of beer.  Every time you glance over at this guy Joe, it's like
he's looking at you.  You know you're a terrible dancer, but you take this
girl Alicia, and you start dancing anyway.

At some point you know you've had too much to drink.  Like, way too much.
 It seems like Joe is still watching you.  You're pretty sure that you're
about to get sick for the first time since you had a flu in junior high.
 When nobody's looking, you run out and get sick in the bushes.  Some
frat-looking guy tells you that smoking a cigarette always makes you feel
better after you puke, even if you're not a smoker.  You take one from him,
but the effect is exactly the opposite.  You feel far worse than before.
 This is how you imagine it feels before dying.  You realize that he lied.

Joe and his English friend are on the porch with the girl who has a crush on
you and they say it's time to go home.   That they see you in this condition
seems like a genuine disaster.  If you thought that they'd be your new
friends, they'd be your friends no more.  Not after seeing you like this.
 You apologize and you swear a lot, because they swear so much themselves
and you think this will remind them how similar you are on the inside.  When
you start walking, you know that you're going to get sick again.  They can't
see you like that, so you start running to get away from them.

You remember how the dorm smelled when you walked in, but the next thing you
really remember is waking up in a strange room only wearing your boxers.
 Your mouth is disgusting.  You mumble a sweary comment because the crazy
British guy is in the lower bunk talking to you, and he swears like nobody's
business.

You don't glance up but you can tell that Joe watches you from the top bunk.
 He talks you through it.  He tells you that it's okay.  When you wake up
for good a little later, Joe lets you take one of his T-shirts and his
basketball shorts because your own clothes are putrid in a garbage bag.  You
never tell him this, but for the next week or so, you sleep in the shirt and
shorts until it's time for laundry.  Then you fold his clean clothes and
return them to him.

When the frats start rush, you decide that you should check it out.  What
you really want to happen is that Joe and Sam will go with you and that
you'll pledge the same place.  That way you'll cement things.  It means that
you'll see them all the time and that you'll be their friends for the rest
of college.  Two of your older brothers were in a frat here.  Joe and Sam
don't want any part of that, though, and at first it pisses you off.  You
don't understand what their problems are.  You think it's meant to be a
rejection, like you're pushing it too far and it's time to back off.

But then, no.  Instead they're calling you all the time.  Joe calls you
before he goes to the cafeteria for dinner.  They e-mail you when they're
going to head for a house party.  Sometimes they e-mail you even when
they're not going to a party, only because there's something funny to say.

You're eating dinner one night with Joe.  It's the two of you, alone.  He
talks about running.  He says that you should come with him sometime.
 You've never been an athlete.  You know that if you try, you're going to
look stupid in front of him.  He pushes you on it.  It'll be weirder if you
don't go than it will be if you go and look incompetent.  It can't be that
hard anyway.  You see old guys running all the time.  You're clearly in
better shape than they are.

Instead, it sucks.  You've barely started and it's already killing you, but
from the beginning it feels like you've been running for an hour.  Weird
muscles start to hurt.  They get tight in your lower back and in your butt.
 Your shinbones ache.  You're like, "People actually do this?  For fun?"
 You barely get anywhere before Joe jogs slow with you back to the dorm and
heads his own way.  After you've taken a shower, your whole body feels
better.  You feel lightheaded -- almost giddy.  Unfortunately your roommate
is around staring at his computer with the headphones on.  He detracts from
your surprisingly good mood.

Your legs hurt for a couple of days, but you go again.  It's partly because
of how you feel afterward, but also, it's nice to be with Joe without
anybody else.  When you go running with him he's not talking your head off
about a band or something that happened in class.  It's the two of you,
calm.  You listen to how he breathes when he runs and you emulate it so that
you breathe the same way.  It's partly for training, but also because it
feels interesting to be in sync.  You're not strong enough for your strides
to match, but you try.  Even though it's getting cool out, when you run
behind him you see sweat trickle down his hair and the back of his neck.
 You're both quiet and calm.  You study him.

It's more than that, though.  You realize how out of shape you are compared
to him.  It's not like you're fat or anything, and the same had been true
when you compared yourself to most of your friends in high school (not
playing sports does that) but this difference in your bodies makes you feel
slightly inferior.  You don't want to be in better shape to impress him.
 It's more like if you were in better shape, you'd feel more like you were
equal.  It's like if you're trying to have a conversation with someone who
speaks fluent French and you only know a few words.  You'd want to get
better at it so that you could have an actual conversation.

Now you're not so put off by people at school.  They've calmed down from
when they first arrived.  Except for the burnouts and loser, everybody is
more concerned with classes than parties.  They're not so worried about
themselves or whether they're being impressive.  They don't brag about where
they're from or put themselves into a certain category or label.  If at
first it seemed like you ended up at a school for crazy people, now it feels
like the opposite.  Everybody seems smart and nice.  You've been going to
football games with them every Saturday.  On the away games you get together
in somebody's room, just a bunch of you, and you watch games all day, until
people are feeling drunk or tired and it's dark outside.  They're debating
whether to go to a party, and if so, which one, and you're always invited.
 Nobody's ever been a dick to you, ever, except maybe your roommate, and
that's because everything in his life equals stress.  When you say something
weird without realizing it, they never call you out -- it's almost like
you've said something smart, and they're nervous because they think you know
something that they don't.  Even if they have the wrong impression, it feels
pretty good.

The first time you see each other naked in the lockerroom, it's like
something changes.  It's not sexualism. It's simply interesting.  You've
seen Joe shirtless a couple of times, but you've never seen him naked.  When
he faced away from you and took down his shorts, you were, like, captivated.
 Not interested, necessarily, but it's different seeing another guy's body
like that.  You've never thought about it this way before.  It isn't like
you want to touch it.  You only want to look at it and think about it.
 Being naked in front of him doesn't seem weird.  This isn't seventh grade.
 You're adults now.  People know how to handle themselves.  In this tiny
way, it makes you feel closer.  Like neither of you has anything to hide and
you don't really care.  You see the muscles in his shoulders and back when
he wraps a towel around himself.  When he faces you in the shower you catch
him glancing down at your stuff for a split second, but he doesn't react.
 He turns away.  He isn't being super-talkative, but this isn't the place
for that, and sometimes Joe talks too much, anyway.

This probably sounds weird to some people, but there's a part of you that
looks forward to this.  A, you never realized how good it feels to exercise,
and if you did, you would have been doing it for years before this, but B,
once you guys were done working out, it was cool being around Joe.  Maybe it
sounds pervy, but it's not.  It's not like you're checking out his d*** the
whole time.  You're just with him and seeing each other in a way that other
people don't.  It's like now you share a secret.

After you get back to your dorm room from morning classes, there are times
when you lock the door and think about it.  Thinking about it makes you jerk
off.  It isn't sexualist.  It's more, like, a closeness thing, and you know
enough about biology to know the kinds of hormones and chemicals that go off
in your body after you've been working out.  Like, your whole body feels
extra-alive and alert in a way that's new to you.  The first time you do
this, it leaves you feeling guilty.  Then it doesn't.  It's how your body
handles it.

Sometimes Joe does this stuff where he touches you.  Not in a weird way.  He
grabs you by the shoulder when he's excited about some point he's making,
which is often.  You'll be walking somewhere and he taps you between the
shoulderblades, like the thing he's talking about is so interesting to him
that he needs to touch you to make sure that you're alert and paying
attention.  You nod like you're listening.  When you walk together he walks
close to you.  Your elbows or shoulders or hips glance every few minutes.
 When this happens, it's like his voice vibrates deeper in your ears.

On the last night before you break for summer, it seems like he keeps
grabbing you, but he's doing that to everybody.  He's drunk and happy.  He
keeps telling people how much he'll miss them, even if it's a person he
doesn't know.  He keeps his arm around your shoulders for like five minutes
while he talks about how he'll miss you over the summer and how awesome it's
going to be when you're living together in the house next year.

"You, man, are the best," he says to you.  "You're, like, hilarious and cool
and awesome and you so don't even know it."

"Ha, thanks buddy," you say.  "I'm sure you're just saying that because
you're drunk."

"See, it's like I said, you don't even know it," he says.  He squeezes you
tight around the shoulders.  "Seriously, man, it was awesome hanging out
with you this year.  Every day of it.  I bet you'll miss me when you're
stuck in Michigan over the summer."

And you think to myself, God, yeah, of course I'm going to miss you.  Are
you nuts?

Then you're all gone.  Sam and Joe are e-mailing you all the time.  They're
cc'ing you on e-mails even when you they don't remotely involve you.  You
get so many e-mails from them that you can't keep up.  Every time you try to
start an actual conversation with them, they write back trying to be funny.
 They make fun of themselves all the time, and they make fun of you.  Like,
seriously, can't they ever throw the off switch?  Once in awhile Joe says
something nice like he means it, and then five minutes later it's back to
being crazy.  Like if he's not constantly entertaining you, you're going to
get bored right away.  Because of this, there are times when you feel
slightly sorry for him.

*    *    *

There are all of these things they don't understand about you.  For
instance, they act like you're a serious Christian, when in reality you're a
normal Lutheran, and not, like, devout.  They only think you're a serious
Christian because when you're back home with your parents, you go to church,
but that's only a social thing.  Or maybe it's because your full first name
is Christian, which you never go by, and that's your name because your dad
is Danish – haven't they heard of Hans Christian Andersen? Your housemates,
they're either Catholic or Jewish or atheist -- and whatever Trevor and
Michelle are, because you're not sure.  You do not remotely care about their
religions, but, like, they don't understand that you're not some
Bible-thumping person who's obsessed with Jesus.  Sometimes it's like you're
a character for them, and if pretending that you're a fundamentalist
Christian makes you seem more hilarious, that's what they decide.  If push
comes to shove, yeah, you agree with most of the stuff you were brought up
with, but it's not like you're Dutch Reformed or a Pentacostal barking about
sin.  This distinction seems mostly lost to them.

Or take the politics.  Yeah, you're a Republican, but it's not like you talk
about it as a normal topic.  You're not like them.  They walk around in
their politics like a robe, confident in their virtue and the delusion that
they automatically have the right answer to everything.  When the housemates
get each other wound up about politics, the basic theme is that everybody
else is stupid and we're the only ones who know the answers, which is a
ridiculous way for anybody to think.  They think that they're liberal and
open-minded, but in the end, they're want everybody to be a part of their
label.  You don't really care.  It would never occur to you to talk about
Iraq or abortion or taxes as a casual interest on a Tuesday night.  Not so
with them.

So yeah, you tweak them for that.  You say things in order to rile them up.
 At first it was sincere, but when you tried to actually talk to them about
it -- not argue, just figure out how they think -- they went ballistic.
 It's like you said you wanted to kill their families.  Your only goal was
to consider basic premises and explain why there are two different, possibly
valid ways of looking at an issue.  Now when you mention anything political,
it's to watch them go crazy, and they almost never disappoint.  That's how
the whole O'Reilly thing started.  You were there in the living room
studying the chemical processes of mitochondria, and you switched over to
Fox News.  It wasn't because you wanted the news on.  You only wanted to see
them go berserk.  When Sam walked in he started screaming at you for being a
f***ing fascist Aryan douchebag, and then Katie got in and tried to
intervene, like she wanted you and Sam to make peace while also being
concerned about what was wrong with you.  And yeah, you were angry and
started arguing, but it was less about their opinions than how they talked
to you.

Then there's the whole business about "earnest."  They use that word about
you all the time.  Like, who do they think you are?  Do they think you don't
notice things or are clueless about life?  You'll be the first to admit that
you haven't been to Paris, eaten great sushi, seen all of David Lynch's
movies or read every word of Shakespeare three times, but what does that
have to do with anything?  None of them could list every bone in the human
body by alphabetical order or meaningfully explain photosynthesis.
 Sometimes you can't decide if they legitimately like things, or if they
like things because liking them brings a status.

You aren't *mad* about this.  There's a part of you that *likes* to be the
weird one now.  If you're living in a house with six other people, and they
have occasional tendencies to act ridiculous and smallminded, you don't mind
being the one who flicks them.  Hence, you find yourself using phrases like
"crimes against nature" or "attacking them there so they don't attack us
here."  You care maybe one-fourth as much as they do, and maybe it makes you
a bad person for it, but even so: it's quietly hilarious to see how easily
you can make them get crazy.

The only time their whole attitude seriously pisses you off is that day when
you're running with Joe.  Everything you said was true.  Michelle sincerely
is interested in people.  She's not a gossip and she's not judgmental.  It's
more like she wants to figure out what makes everybody tick.  She asks you a
lot of questions about yourself.  Some nights you go into the bathroom to
brush your teeth, and Michelle is sitting on her bed reading with the door
open, and you end up talking to her for an hour about all kinds of things.
 It feels good to talk to people.  Michelle seems like the least judgmental
person you've ever met.

She asks you if Joe is gay, and it's so surprising that you don't even know
what to say.  She tells you why she thinks this.  She says that he's really
good-looking and smart, and that even if he's a little obnoxious sometimes,
he's basically cool to be around.  She's never heard him talk about dating
or girls.  Sam told her that in high school Joe went with a girl who's at
Berkeley now, but he never talks about her.  Michelle says that Sam knows
Joe better than anybody, and that he called Joe, quote, "a black hole inside
a black hole."  In Michelle's eyes, it's very unusual that as far as anyone
knows, he's never even expressed interest in a girl.

You've never thought about this before, and as she explains it to you, it's
kind of interesting.  Maybe you never noticed because you have a hard time
figuring out girls yourself, but at least you've made out with them at house
parties and gone on a couple of dates.  Joe hasn't done anything.

Still you tell Michelle, "No way.  You already see how he is.  He's just,
like unique."

"That's basically what I think, too," Michelle says, like she needs to back
off her observation, "but it doesn't quite add up.  He seems like the kind
of guy who should have girlfriends, but no.  Like, he's dormant.  Extremely,
extremely dormant."

Even though you'd never tell Michelle, her thoughts make a little sense.
 You find yourself thinking about it a lot, actually. When you hang out with
him, you look for cues to support or refute Michelle's hypothesis.  You get
nothing.  You can't make comments to Joe about girls yourself, because if
you do, Joe will make fun of you, like he did that time when you called
Katie cute -- and your comment about her meant nothing.

Of course you're not going mention that wrestling incident when you were
going crazy over Vice City.  Joe hadn't even done anything weird with that.
 *You* were the one who was weird.  Like, you'd been legitimately pissed
about how he talked to you -- that was true.  It's like he thinks he can
tell you what to do about *everything.*  When it got physical, it felt funny
and fun.  As messed up as it might sound, it felt pretty good having his
body pressed against you.  Like, you'd seen his body so many times by then
but had never touched it.  When you had him pinned down on the floor at the
end, the skin of your legs was pressed against his.  He felt extremely warm.
 You held his shoulders down, and even though Joe was stronger than you, it
was as if he let you keep him pinned.  For a second, when you were
maneuvering, you had hold of part of his shirt.  The back of your hand slid
against his bare spine.  It felt strong and tight and alive.  You thought
you were going to pull him out of his shirt, and if you did that, you might
have hugged him around the chest and held him down as long as you could.

That day when you're running with him, you know you shouldn't ask, but you
can't help yourself.  Since you had that conversation with Michelle, you
think about it almost every time you're with him.

Then you ask, and he goes crazy on you.  Later on he'll tell you that from
the look on your face, it was like he punched you.  That's how it feels.  If
he'd been a more normal person, you could have said, "Dude, I don't care.  I
wasn't asking to make fun of you.  You're my friend either way."  You're not
someone who talks that way, though, and Joe isn't someone who wants to hear
those things.  If you'd said that, he probably would have clobbered you.

Afterward, you wish you'd said something better, but he looked so angry,
like you'd betrayed him by even asking.  Then he says things that seriously
piss you off.  Like, really?  He thinks you're still worried about fitting
in?  You want to tell him that you're more "in" with these people than he
is.  Joe doesn't know much more than where they're from and maybe what their
favorite albums are.  And he's talking to you like *you're* a bit of a
misfit?  The "black hole inside black hole" wants to lecture *you* about how
to act?

When you're back at the house, he acts so weird that you don't know what to
do with it.  It wasn't obvious.  You know he's uncomfortable by his body
language and the way he's not looking at you like he usually does.  You know
you didn't do anything that horrible, and you don't know if he feels bad for
yelling at you or if he's still mad about what you asked him.  You think
about raising it with him, but you're not going to apologize, and you don't
need to see him get crazy on you for a second.

The next night he comes down to brush his teeth earlier than usual.  When
he's done he goes into your room and closes the door.

"Hey dude," he says.

"Yo."

"I don't know how big of a deal it was, but in case it is, I'm sorry again
about how I flipped out at you yesterday.  It was dickish.  All of it."

"I'm not mad at you, man," you say.  "It's just, like, I thought we were
good enough friends that you wouldn't need talk to me like that."

His whole face sinks.  He nods and says, "Yeah.  We are.  I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

He shakes his head slightly and stares at your floor.  He rolls his eyes to
himself and moves like he's going to leave the room.

"Don't worry about it too much though," you say.  "We all get kind of heated
once in awhile.  In a couple of days we won't even remember it."

What he does after the ice cream truck is crazy and amazing.  It's like
you're watching a scene in a movie.  His lies to the cops flow so easily.
 You feel like you're seeing something forbidden and brilliant.  Joe
describes the false version of the accident and you see it as he lies it.
 You're troubled by the lies, but they're of no consequence, anyway.  It
feels like Joe's sending you a secret signal: Don't worry about it.  I'll
take the fall for you.  I'll be sure you never get in trouble.

You have a blast at your party that night.  In the basement by the beer pong
table, you have a long conversation with a girl who likes you.  You can tell
because you have a sixth sense about these things.  She's not interesting.
 Still, you're super-polite.  You talk to her for at least a half hour but
probably longer.  When you finally get bored, you say, "Nice talking to you.
 Good luck with sociology," and walk away.

You go upstairs looking to hang out with Joe.  Nobody's seen him for awhile.
 Monica from the Next Door Girls hears an eighties song that she likes and
starts screaming and yanks you to the dance floor.  It's a total girl song,
about how girls like having all the fun after their workday is done.  Monica
dances silly with you.  Her boyfriend laughs.  You dance silly back.  You
don't know what you're doing.  You've never taken dance lessons or whatever.
 Apparently it's entertaining, because people form a crowd around you and
Monica as you throw your arms around in the air and slam butts against each
other.  At one point you almost knock her over with your butt, but she
recovers her balance and literally doubles over laughing.

The next time you see Joe he wears a different shirt.  He always looks nice
in a T-shirt.  You talk to him for a minute, and he's not rude or anything,
but distracted.  He says that a drunk b**ch dumped beer on his other shirt.
 You say that the girl is probably friends with Jessica.  Joe laughs but
then sulks away.

Later on you see Matt Canetti, who you remember from when you wanted to
pledge his frat. You've always liked that guy.  You wish that you'd stayed
friends with him.  Matt reminds you of Joe and Sam: smart, but funny and not
a complete dork.  Matt seems happy to see you.  He says that guys are still
devastated that you guys didn't pledge, but they're starting to get over it.


You're still fairly blown away from Michelle telling you that he's gay
because he so doesn't seem the type.  He doesn't have weird mannerisms, wear
tight clothes, pierce his ears, etc.  He's not what you think of a gay
person being.  You want to confirm it without offending him, so you say, "I
guess you know Michelle from College Democrats?  She says that you're gay.
 That's pretty impressive."

Matt laughs out loud.  At first you think that Michelle pranked you, but
then he says, "Thanks man.  That's cool.  Nobody's ever told me that it's
impressive, but I'll take it."

You think to yourself, how interesting.  It's very interesting that someone
who looks and acts like him could be gay.  It's not how you think of the
label.

You say, "I didn't mean it to sound weird.  I've just never known a gay
person before.  I never would have guessed."

"It's cool, buddy," Matt Canetti says.  "You probably know some gay guys,
somewhere, and just don't know it.  Like, you've probably got a casual
friend from high school or from here who is.  They've just never told you.
 Sometimes it takes awhile to figure out."

"I've never thought about it," you say.  "You know, you see it on TV, and
the ones on TV are super-extreme."

"TV isn't real," Matt says.  He drinks from his beer.  "So what's going on
with you, buddy?  How's life treating you?  How are classes?  Is Joe as big
of a pain in the ass to live with as I'd guess?"

You banter with him for a few minutes, but you're still heavily preoccupied
with his gayness.  You want to ask more questions about what it's like, how
he got that way, why he's not like so many of the ones you've seen.  That
would seem weird at best, and likely rude, so you end up talking to him
about classes and parties and football.  You're watching Joe because it
looks like he's about to make out with Katie.  When he does, it's hilarious.

"Oh my God," Matt says.

"I knew it," you say.

"He's so ridiculous," Matt says.

"Yeah?  Does he hook up a lot?" you say.

"That's my impression," Matt says.  "I think he just feels a need to be
subtle about it."

"With who?"

Matt shrugs his shoulders.  "With whoever."

You talk to him for a couple more minutes, but Matt says that he's tired and
needs to stop by a party on his way home.  You say that you hope you guys
will hang out again soon, and Matt's like, For sure.

The Katie incident seems triumphant to you, but afterward, Joe is extra
weird.  You think that Joe and Katie have liked each other for the last two
months, but after they've kissed, Joe acts like it's a rash that he needs to
scratch off.

When the party's over, a few people still hang inside, watching TV and
drinking what's left.  Joe's alone on the front porch.  It's like he's half
cleaning up but mostly smoking and looking out at the rain.  He's pretty
drunk.  You've seen him drunk plenty of times, but not as a moody drunk.
 He's mostly a silly drunk, relentlessly chatty, sometimes a little shouty.
 He looks all slow and sad.  You know he doesn't want company but it doesn't
feel right to leave him alone.  Sometimes you want company even if you think
you don't.

"Hey," you say.

"Hey," he says, not looking at you.

"Are you, like, okay?" you say.

"I think I'm just tired," he says.  His voice sounds resigned.  "And too
drunk."

You watch him bend over to pick up empty cups.  The base of his T-shirt
lifts when he does this.  You see a crescent of pale skin and notches on his
spine.  You remember how it felt when you touched his spine a few weeks
before.  You want to stay with him in order to keep him company, so you
start collecting the cups, too.

You move next to him to add the empties to his stack, and suddenly he has
his arm around your shoulders.  It's cold and his arm feels cool at your
neck but you feel the heat of his torso.  It takes you by surprise.  He
feels so warm and solid that you want to lean into him because it's so
comfortable.   For a moment you think, "Whoah, is he trying to kiss me?"

"Hey," Joe says.  "Really, I'm sorry if I've been a dick."

You're not sure how to respond.  You blush and say, "Ha."

"No," he says, "you're never like that to other people."  He squeezes you at
the shoulder.  "I wish I didn't act the way I act sometimes."

His tone is so apologetic, and it's like, even at his most obnoxious, he's
never done anything seriously bad.  You've known people who say worse things
as a matter of habit.

"It's okay," you say.  "I'm sorry if I said anything that made you feel
bad."

"You were right," Joe says.  "I deserved it."

You reach up an arm and link it around his shoulder.  It pulls him closer to
you.  Your heads almost touch.

"Really," Joe says.  You can smell the beer and cigarettes on his breath.
 "I'm going to try to be nicer and not act like such a jerk."

"You're never really a jerk," you say.  "You shouldn't feel like that."

"Yeah I am," he says.

"No you're not," you say.  "You're just a little distant.  Everybody loves
you, so stop worrying about it."

His body goes completely loose when you say that.  You hadn't realized how
tense and tight he'd been.  His neck and his shoulders go soft against the
support of your arm.  Your hand is near the side of his face.  Since you
first saw it in that dorm room, you've wondered a few times about what his
face must feel like.  You press your index finger and middle finger against
the top of his cheekbone.  You don't look at him -- you look out at the rain
and listen to it, how quiet it seems after being in the hot and crowded
house all night listening to people scream along to songs and laugh at each
other.  The rain sounds coax you to sleep.  Joe might think you're weird for
touching his face but he doesn't say anything.  You slide your fingers down
his cheek, going with the grain of his stubble, like your fingers are a
razor.  The stubble is rough against your finger but his skin is dry and
hot.  His skin feels tight at the jaw bone.

Your hand is steady but you feel like it's shaking.  Your face and chest run
hot, like a good kind of sick.  Any minute he's going to tell you to stop
being weird and elbow you back, which will be fine because you can laugh it
off as being drunk and stupid.  He doesn't though.  You lets the back of
your fingers rest next to his Adam's apple, where you can feel his heart
beating at the artery of his neck.  It's beating faster than you would have
guessed, which is probably due to the cigarettes and alcohol.  You think
you're going to pull away now, but then Joe does this thing with his hand,
where he touches the back of your head, like he's feeling out your hair.
 You're not sure why that feels so nice, but you picture yourself as a cat
stretched out and sunning in a spot of light.  He holds onto the back of
your neck and gently squeezes like a small massage.  You slowly move your
finger back up the length of his cheek to where it started.  Joe doesn't
move or jerk away.  Instead, it's like he's leaning closer into you and
you've got hold of each other.

Then, poof.  It stops.  He lets go of you and goes back to kicking piles of
cigarette butts.  He's leaning forward again and you get more glimpses at
the skin of his back.  It feels like you should say something but that would
be too weird and you don't know what you're supposed to say besides.  It's
one of those drunk things, and it's cold and wet out, and for a few seconds
it felt nice to be extra close to someone.  Ten minutes later you're both in
the living room with everybody else.  Joe sits on the floor next to the
coffee table eating pretzels and drinking Diet Coke and not giving any
indication that something happened.  He looks drunker and more tired than
you appreciated before.  That explains a lot.

Michelle comments on your prowess as a dancer.  You know she's being
sarcastic but you like the attention.  You do an improvised breakdance move
with your hand and your leg and your butt, and then jump up off the floor.
 They're all laughing.  Joe doesn't quite laugh.  He looks at you with a
smirk.  Lips closed, eyes half-lit.  He grins and nods.  He makes eye
contact with you and you feel yourself go deep.

*    *    *

All you did was feel his frigging face.  It's not like you licked his elbow.
 When you think about what happened on the porch it's about how you're the
weird one, and thankfully Joe was too drunk or too oblivious to realize what
happened.

It's also possible that touching faces is more common than you appreciate.
 You wouldn't know.  You've never done it before.

You keep expecting him to mention it but he doesn't.  This makes you shaky
inside.  There are times when you feel tense and scared around him, even
though he's being way nicer than before.  Sometimes hours pass where he
doesn't make fun of you, and when he does, it's about the mildest stuff,
like the messiness of the notes you scrawl in textbook margins or "your
shameful futility as a Lions fan."  You sort of miss the way he used to go
after you, because at least that was intense at times.  Now it's like he
takes care not to be upsetting.  Even when you say stupid things on purpose
in hopes that he'll make comments, he doesn't go all out.  He wrinkles his
face and says something like, "Chris, stop pretending you're on a tryout for
Big Brother."

Nothing real has changed but it still feels like you've lost a closeness.
 The two of you go to the gym two or three times a week -- sometimes for as
long as 90 minutes, and sometimes Trevor comes along.  You don't shower and
change at the gym with Joe because your morning schedules don't line up in a
way that makes that necessary.

One morning you lie in bed waiting for him to come down to the shower.  You
hear his door open and his footsteps to the bathroom door before it closes.
 You wait until the shower's been running for about five minutes until you
get out of bed and knock on the door.

"Dude," you say through the door, "I need to take a piss."

"Go ahead!" Joe shouts.

You step into the bathroom and close the door.  The room is full of Joe's
steam and the smell of his soap.  Sometimes you wash up with his soap, just
because.  You take a leak and draw it out, then leave your stuff out for a
few extra seconds, hanging over the top of your basketball shorts, regarding
it for no particular reason.  It's still slightly engorged from your morning
sleep.  When you go to wash your hands, you take an extra long time.  You
can't see Joe naked through the shower curtain or anything, only shadows of
a silhouette to his arms and his torso from time to time.

Brushing your teeth might be pushing it, but Joe hasn't yelled at you to get
out, so you run your brush under the faucet and paste it up.  You're
brushing your molars when Joe turns off the faucet and steps naked out of
the shower.  You glance over at it -- it's pinkish and looks longer than you
remember, probably from the hot water of the shower and from having woken
up.  It drips water and the cloud of dark hair around it is matted from the
shower.  Joe walks behind you -- close enough that you almost touch -- in
order to get his towel off the rack.  The mirror is fogged over, so you need
to look at him in order to see his butt.  He dries off his hair first and
then the top of his back, then slides the towel down between his buttcheeks.

"Are you in a rush this morning?" Joe says to you.

"Yeah," you say, your heart beating fast.  You stammer a little.  "I need to
get out.  Get some coffee, study.  Quiz at noon."

"I'll be out in a sec," Joe says, turning to face you.  He towels over his
chest.  His stuff is visible to you again.  It swings back and forth while
he dries off.

You take off your basketball shorts so that you're both naked in front of
each other, with your bathroom full of steam and smelling like Joe's soap
and shampoo.  He gives you a look down.  Yours sticks out slightly little
more than usual, because of the whole sleep and morning issue.  You turn
away so that your butt faces him, and you start the water running.  Joe
shaves while you're in the shower.  You hear him tap the razor clean before
he leaves the bathroom.

"Good luck on your quiz," he says.

"Thanks man," you say.  "You too," you add, even though he hasn't mentioned
a quiz.

You almost never do this because it's shared space, but while you're in the
shower you jerk off real fast for the sake of convenience.  It'll be hard
for your mind to settle if you don't.  You splash water to clear your mess
off the tile, thinking how disgusting it is that you just did that in a
place where other people live, too.

*    *    *

The Saturday night when that one thing happens, it starts out that you're on
the couch eating a pear and watching an old Sopranos episode on DVD.  It's
Saturday.  The semester's classes ended the day before, but reading period
lasts until Wednesday.  On Friday night you hit four parties with Sam,
Michelle, Katie and Jessica.  Trevor was MIA.  Joe wasn't with you either.
 Nobody was sure where he went, and calls to his cell went straight to
voicemail.  The next morning, he says he was at a party with friends from
the newspaper.  He says he drank a bunch of Jack Daniels straight, which
messed him up because he only drinks beer.  He didn't come home until after
4 a.m.

"I'm not going out tonight," he says, curling up in the living room with a
comforter around him.  "I'm never drinking again."

Everybody in the house was supposed to go to a party hosted by some guys who
lived in your freshman dorm.  It's cold, in the lower 20s, and light snow
falls on and off throughout the day.  Joe looks tired and comfortable on the
couch, in his blanket's cocoon of sloth and hungover vulnerability.  You
think it might be nice to stay home and hang with him.  Maybe you'll order
dinner and shoot pool and watch a DVD.

When people start dressing to go out – the short hallway off the living room
spreading the smell of Katie and Jessica's hair products and perfume – you
curl up fetal on the love seat and pretend to fall asleep.  You then drift
off for a few minutes.  When it's time to go, you stretch and yawn.  You say
that you're still tired from last night.  Sam mutters something
incriminating about Grand Theft Auto and acting like children.  He wears
cologne.  Somebody should tell him not to do that.  You say you need to
study.  The girls whine at you but then they leave.

Then it's just you and Joe.

You periodically glance to his perch on the couch.  He's half-awake, staring
wearily at the TV.  Somehow this seems interesting to you.

"Hey," you say.

He looks over at you with an arched eyebrow.

"Do you want to order dinner?"

"Nah," he says.  "Let's just eat pears and Hot Pockets."

"And then play Vice City?"

"Possibly.  If you promise to behave this time."

You guys order pizza a few minutes later.  You pay because Joe won't pull
himself off the couch to get money.

After a couple of slices, you say, "So, I want to ask you something, and if
we do this, I need you to promise that you won't tell anybody."

He raises an eyebrow and smirks.  "Oh, this sounds good."  He's being
sarcastic.

"No, seriously."

"All right," Joe says.  "Prank calls?"

"No," you say, squirming.  You feel yourself blushing.  "Do you think Trevor
would care if we used up some of his pot?"

Joe laughs and keeps your eye contact.  "Are you for real?"

"Everybody else has done it," you say.  "I've always wondered what it's
like."

"Yeah, we could do it," Joe says sitting up, showing signs of life for the
first time in a couple of hours.  "But it probably means that I should tell
Trevor afterward.  He won't tell but he'll probably be excited that you
wanted to try it."

"I guess that's okay," you say, feeling your heart racing.  "I like Trevor."

"Me too," Joe says.

The two of you go downstairs.  Joe finds a little wooden box on top of
Trevor's dresser.  There are unopened condom wrappers next to it.  This
embarrasses you. Trevor keeps his drugs inside the box.  Joe puts some of
the pot into the bowl of a small metal pipe.

You secretly like how it smells.  It's like cigarettes mixed with incense
and spicy cooking.

"You know, I haven't done this in awhile," Joe says.  "Not since August.
 With a high school friend."

He lights the top of the bowl with a blue lighter and inhales.  He holds it
in his lungs and exhales slowly.

You sit on the edge of Trevor's bed.

"Do you want to try it?" Joe says, handing out the pipe.

You breathe in.  The smoke gags you and you immediately cough it back.

"It's okay," Joe says.  "Just try again."

This time you hold more smoke in before coughing it back.  You don't feel
anything except the discomfort of smoke in your lungs and throat.

Joe takes the pipe back and smokes some more.  You see his upper chest puff
up as he inhales deeply, then sink in as he exhales.

"Try it again," he says, passing the pipe back.

This time you take a few deep breaths first, like you're practicing to hold
your breath underwater.  When you inhale you manage to keep most of it in
this time.  You count out five seconds before you choke and cough the smoke
up.

You can't tell whether the pot has a slight effect on you or whether it's a
byproduct of the discomfort of smoking and inhaling.  It isn't much.  It's a
touch of dizziness.

"It'll take a few minutes before it affects you," Joe says, like he can read
your mind.  "Maybe you shouldn't do any more for now."  He leans against the
door, light the bowl, and inhales again.  Then he rests the smoking pipe on
Trevor's dresser.

"It does different things to different people," Joe says.  "It makes a lot
of people hungry.  I never get hungry.  Some people talk a lot and get
creative, but I know some who don't want to talk at all and it just freezes
them up.  I've got one friend who gets really warm whenever he does it.
 Some people get paranoid.  It sort of calms me down.  If you start getting
crazy thoughts, don't let it get to you.  Just, like, reason through it.
 Remind yourself that you did this and it's just the chemicals talking to
you."

"Honestly?" you say.  "I kind of wanted to try it just to try it."

Your words sound slightly distant, like you're listening to somebody else.
 It's not like you're hallucinating that or anything.  It's only a different
sensation of your own voice.  Hearing yourself makes you laugh quietly.

"And there you go," Joe says.

"It's not anything weird or crazy," you say.  "It's just like, `Wow, now I'm
somebody who's smoked pot.'"

The thought of yourself as a hippie prompts you to laugh to yourself as you
lean back in Trevor's bed.

"All right," Joe says, "let's clear out of his room."  He extends a hand and
helps pull you off from the bed.
In the living room, he picks up the half-empty pizza box and says, "So you
want to go up to my room and play Vice City?"

"Sure," you say, the word coming out slowly and deliberately.

Up in his room, he leaves the pizza on the floor next to his futon and fires
up his Playstation.  He hands you the controller.

"You go," you tell him.  "I just want to watch."

Joe plays for five or ten minutes.  Then he dies when a cop shoots him.
 It's more boring than you expected.  You say that you still don't feel like
playing.

"Yeah," he says, "my heart's not really in it, either."

"Let's just, like, sit here and listen to music something," you say.

Joe goes through his CD collection and puts on a disc that's very mellow –
it's like folk but rockish, with sound effects and weird background noises.
 The singer has a soft deep voice.  It seems like music someone would listen
to when stoned.

"Who's this?" you ask.

"Will Cove," Joe says.

"Never heard of him."

"It's not a him.  It's a band.  W-I-L-C-O.  They're from Chicago.  Do you
like it?"

"Yeah," you say.  "I like it a lot."

"You can borrow the CD," Joe says.

You lean back and stretch in the futon.  Its center of gravity tilts
backward.  Joe's room is extremely cold.  He keeps his windows open.  He
says that he likes the cold and because he's on the top floor, if he doesn't
open the windows in winter, the room suffocates him.  "If it was up to me,"
he said before, "we wouldn't turn on the heat at all."

He takes a hoodie out of his dresser and throws it to you.  You put it on
and pull the hood over your head.
Joe lies on the floor of his room, stretching out with his hands behind his
head, looking up at the ceiling while the music plays.  He seems so calm and
content.  If this is what it's like when you're high together, you think,
you guys should probably get high all the time.

"Are you feeling okay?" he says.

"Yeah," you say.  "It feels pretty good.  Like, warm inside."

"Interesting."

"Like, calm, and a little dizzy."

"And a little giggly for you," Joe says, "but not, like, ridiculously so."

That makes you laugh a little.  Joe smiles.

A few minutes later, you say, "Hey.  You don't, like, have any porno DVDs,
right?"

"Oh my God," Joe says.  "I guess this is your night to cut loose."

"Nah," you say.  "I've just never seen one.  I thought it might be
interesting."

"I don't have one, unfortunately," Joe says.  "Sam might.  But it would
probably be, like, horses fucking fat girls or something like that."

"Gross."

"Not really," Joe says.  "No.  I'm not being literal about fats and horses.
 But I don't want to go around Sam's room looking for a porno DVD."

"I've never seen any," you say.

"Some other time, I guess," Joe says.

"Really?"

"We'll see."

You know he's humoring you, but something about the way he says it and the
look on his face, you think along the lines of, "Aw, I love this guy."

"Hey," you say.

He looks over at you.  You rise from the couch, feeling your balance teeter,
and get down on the floor, lying on your back about two feet parallel to
him.  You lie with your hands behind your head like he does.  You notice the
pace of his breathing and try to breathe the same way.

A song comes on and the first words are, "Jesus don't cry."

"I probably shouldn't talk about this," Joe says, "but this song makes
everybody think about 9/11.  They think that it was written about 9/11 even
they recorded it before it happened, because of the lyrics about tall
building shaking and skyscrapers scraping and voices singing sad, sad songs.
 You and I didn't even know each other when that happened, but my dad works,
like, five or six blocks away from the Trade Center, and even though he
doesn't usually get in until around ten and the planes hit before nine, it's
like, you never know.  I wasn't able to get through to his phone because the
networks were jammed.  It wasn't until eleven that he called my mom from a
payphone and said that he was stuck at Grand Central, but even then it was
scary, because these planes kept crashing and it seemed like Grand Central
would be a target, and then all of a sudden, like, `Boom.  Dead dad.'"

That last line – it's like he's direct to the point of being horrifying.
 It's not your life, though.  It's not your experience.  You shouldn't judge
it.

"Whoah," you say.  "I had no idea."

"Yeah, I know," Joe says.  "It's not, like, nice conversation.  This song
just reminds me of it.  If I weren't a little stoned and this song weren't
on it wouldn't have come up."

"It's a good song, though," you say.

"It's a great fucking song."

"You shouldn't feel, like, so weird talking about yourself."

"Whatever," he says.  "Easy for you to say."

"I mean, we don't need to fight about it again," you say.  "I just mean it
in a nice way.  Like, everybody really does like you.  You don't need to be
an extreme character all the time for people to like you."

"I'm not being a character," he says.  "It's just the way I am.  And nobody
likes long, boring conversations about feelings.  Except for girls.  Ugh."

"Sometimes that's the only way you know what people are really like."

"That doesn't matter," he says.  "At the end of the day we all have weird
thoughts.  If we all knew about the things that go on in each other's heads,
all we'd do is sit around thinking about how weird everybody else is."

"By being so concerned about being weird," you say, "that makes you the
weird one."

"Probably," Joe says.  "I can live with that."

He looks at you, grinning, showing all of his teeth.  You remember the first
night that you met him at the dorm party, how he smiled at almost everything
you said.  It seemed like he was the most smiley person you've met, and his
teeth were so straight and white, like they were the product of a carving.
 How could you fail to love, as your best friend, a guy who smiled at you
like that?

You touch above his elbow, on the lower part of his bicep.  He wears a thick
cotton sweatshirt.  The muscle in his arm feels obvious.  You don't need to
press or squeeze.  It's just there.

When you touch his arm, his face pauses for a second, but his smile doesn't
break.  He glances below your face.

"How does that feel?" he says.

"Like you have a muscle," you say.

He reaches over to touch your arm.  He squeezes where your bicep should be.
 It's like your entire arm tingles and goes numb when he touches it.  This
is what pot does to a person.  It makes every touch feel important.

Your face feels hot, also probably from the pot.  It's cold in the room.
 The smell is like it's snowing
outside.

"So," Joe said, "you wanted to watch a porno tonight, huh?"

"Not really," you say.  "It was just a thought."

"Because you know that when guys watch porno, they usually jerk off."

"Naw," you say.

"No, they *do*."

"Have you ever done that?"

"Jerk off?  All the time."

"No, like, watch that kind of stuff with another guy.  And, you know."

He exhales and considers his words.  "Sometimes in life, things just happen.
 And they surprise you."

"Ha," you say.  "What does that mean?  You're always so general."

"I guess it means yes.  Those kinds of things have happened."

You still have your hands on each other's arms.  You squeeze his arm.  Joe
looks down at your hand for a couple of seconds, and then pats it with his
free one.  He keeps his hand on yours.

You roll over on your stomach so that you're closer to him, since you're
starting to pop a boner in your jeans.  It would be embarrassing for him to
see that, even though you know he wouldn't be grossed out or judge you.  You
prop your arms under your cheek like a pillow, facing him.  You're only
about a foot apart.  You can see his face in profile.  He's staring at the
ceiling.  When he smiles, you wish you could feel his teeth.

He props himself on his side, facing you.  He touches the back of your head.
 When he does this, your nervous system trembles.  You watch his eyes, and
it's like he's looking down the whole length of your body.  Your boner
wedges against the floor.  Its angle pinches.  You tilt your hips enough to
let it take a natural degree.  From Joe's face, he knows what's going on.
 He slides the back of his hand against the notches of your neck and then
down to your spine.  His eyes look intense.  He's not smiling anymore.  You
look at each other's eyes for a few seconds, and then he looks back down the
length of your body, like he's looking at your lower back or your butt.

"Are you okay?" he says.

"Yeah."

"I just want you to be okay."

You want to hug him more than anything.  You don't.  You change how you're
laying and free your arms.  You put a hand on his side.  His ribs are
pronounced, way more than yours.  Like, you could play the xylophone on his
ribs.  Over his sweatshirt, you slide your fingers over the valleys of his
ribcage.  It makes him arch his back.

His boner presses at his jeans, at an angle against his thigh.  You sneak
glances down, not wanting to be too obvious.  Touching him is enough.  You
don't need to see that.  You mostly want to know how he feels.  You run your
arms up and down the side of his torso, feeling his ribs and the slight bulk
of his chest, then down to the softer line of his stomach and the top of his
hipbone.  Your hand moves slowly.  You could do this for hours and it would
still feel interesting.

Joe keeps a hand on your back, barely above your hips.  He doesn't move it.
 Occasionally he pushes down.  Every time you glance up at him, he's staring
at your face.  He likes how you touch him.  It's obvious from the expression
and the way that he occasionally arches his back, pulling away with his hips
before pushing them forward.  When you look down, you can practically see
his boner pulsing.

You feel his cheek like you did that night on the porch, except with the
sensitive side of your index finger.  You're watching each other's eyes
while you do this.  You trace the hair of his eyebrows and touch his
earlobe.  You hadn't realized how soft earlobes are.  You feel out the curve
of his ear's cartilage.  He bows his head and exhales through his nose.  Joe
stretches a leg over and hooks it.  He slides it between yours.

Joe pulls you at your lower back.  "Come here," he says, in a shakingly way.

You roll up on your side.  Your hard-on is practically breaking out of your
jeans.  It actively hurts, like the pressure is bearing halfway down the
shaft and on the underside of the tip  You inch forward as Joe pulls you at
the waist, then loops an arm around his armpit so that you're hugging each
other.  By your instincts, you feel like you should keep your hips apart,
but Joe presses his up against you, intertwining your legs and tangling you
closer together.  His forehead is at your chin.  You smell his hair and his
scalp.

Your nerves buzz like a muzzle of bees inside your bones.  It's like
something is fighting to break free and bust out through your skin.  Your
whole body feels like it's shaking, but you don't feel nervous anymore.  You
don't know if it's the drugs affecting you or it's because you're with Joe.


His angles are solid and strong.  You feel his boner against your thigh and
yours pressing against his hip.  Occasionally he makes small thrusts so that
it slides against you through your pairs of jeans.  He rubs his hand up and
down your back.  He keeps touching your hair and stroking it.  God, he must
really love your hair or something, the way that you feel about getting to
touch his face.  Wherever you touch him, it feels like you should touch
someplace else, if only to know how he feels.  When you're touching his
shoulderblade you want to touch his collarbone, and when you're touching his
collarbone you want to touch his spine.  You feel his breath at your neck,
and it's so cold in his room, it's like when he exhales the moisture almost
condenses on your skin.  It would be easy to kiss him on the forehead, it's
so right there, and you're not sure if he wants that.  He might think it's
weird.  You're not talking or doing anything even sexualist, really – only
hugging each other.

Joe slides an arm under you and links his hands around your back.  He hugs
you against him, squeezing tight.  Even through your sweatshirts, it feels
like you're the same.  The girls you tried to be with, none of them felt
this way, but that's because they weren't interesting and sometimes it's all
about the person.  You squeeze back at Joe.  He loves this.  He half-moans,
half-groans and hugs you even tighter.

"Hey, Chris?"

"Yeah?"

"Is the door to your room closed?"

"No.  Why?"

"Maybe you should close the door to your room and turn out the lights, then
come back up."

For a second you think he's telling you to go away and go to bed.  Your
heart throbs, and you question whether he's going to tell them about how you
acted.  Then you retrace his words slowly and think that you misunderstood
him.

"What do you mean?"

"Go close your door and turn out the lights to your room," he says.  "If
anyone looks when they come back, they'll either think you're asleep or
you're out.  Not that you're up here with me."

You don't want to move away from him, but he's probably right.  When you
stand your legs feel weak.  You won't look down at him as he lies on the
floor, partly because you feel suddenly self-conscious but also because
seeing his face as he lies there will make you feel annoyed about being
away, even if briefly.

After you close your bedroom door, you have to take a leak, but your boner
is so bad that it won't die down.  Trying to go standing up proves
impossible, so you end up sitting and holding down your aim.  This is not
comfortable.  You leave your jeans and boxers down at your thighs while you
wash your hands in order to air it out before you go back up.  When you zip
your jeans, it hurts again.

Ascending his staircase, you imagine that he'll maybe be naked when you come
back.  He's not, though.  He's just taken off his sweatshirt.  He wears a
plain white T-shirt and stands in front of his CDs, trying to pick out
something.  His boner is still blatant but he doesn't seem to care that you
see it.  You stop feeling weird about your own.

"Is there any music you want to hear?" he says.

Looking at him, you feel too tense to talk about music.  Some half-dead
pizza sits in a box next to the futon. You're dying to have a piece but
resist because you're not sure what that would do to your body right now.

"Not really," you say, your words sounding leaden and foreign.  "Play
whatever you want to hear."

"It's a different Will Cove album," Joe says, putting the disc in.

"Cool," you say, standing at a distance.

You're not sure what you're supposed to do now.  It's like getting up and
leaving him dissolved your courage.  It felt normal and good about four
minutes ago but now you see yourself as weird and awkward.  You wonder to
yourself what you're going to do.  You have no idea how these things work.

"It's kind of weird, right?" Joe says.

"Yeah," you say.  "Just a little."

"It's okay," Joe says.  "We could just hang out.  We can, like, play Vice
City some more."

"Nah," you say.  "I don't want to play Vice City right now."

You're not sure how it happens, but you've grabbed Joe behind the shoulders.
 Not like in a hug.  Just like you're stabilizing him.  He pulls your lower
back toward him so that your hips are join again.  The length of his boner
mashes up against yours.  Even inside of their jeans, both of them are
alive.

Joe puts a hand into the top of the rim of your jeans.  A fingernail and the
tip of his index finger poke at the top of your dick, and he slides the tip
of his finger against the top of it.  You expect him to dart his hand away,
but he doesn't.  He leaves his finger there.

"Do you want to see it?" you say.  Your voice crackles on "see."

His face is a couple of inches away from yours.  He looks at your eyes, then
looks down at your waist.  Eyes, waist, eyes, waist.   "Yeah," he says, "if
you want to show it."

Your heart goes crazy when you inhale.  Your fingers feel uncoordinated and
they bungle at the button.  When you snap it and pop the zipper, you're not
even thinking about Joe seeing it -- it's freeing to have it unencumbered by
the jeans.

Joe slides down your boxers.  They're strangled around your knees with your
jeans.  Your dick flips upward and strikes at the hem of your shirt.  You're
still wearing Joe's orange hoodie.  It's a turn on, knowing that your dick
is resting against a piece of his clothes.

He doesn't try to jack you off or anything.  He runs his fingers down the
length of your hard-on, stroking it softly, like it was fragile and he was
blind.  Joe keeps his eyes on your face, occasionally glancing down at it.

"Do you want to see mine?" he says.

You nod and say, "Yes," even though recesses of your cortex shout that this
answer is wrong.  Joe looks like he's the one who feels relieved about
whatever's happening.  He steps back and out of your grip, and in a swift
move, pulls off his jeans and boxers in one gesture.  He stands in front of
you, naked except for a T-shirt.

It's the first time that you've seen another guy's hard-on, aside from a few
glimpses in photos on the internet.  Seeing someone else's is whelmingly
different than seeing your own.  His looks at least four times bigger when
it's hard.  That's not as true for you: yours is about equally long no
matter of condition.  Yours changes as a matter of texture, not length.  His
balls droop and his rod jumps upward in a slight curve, standing at a
contrast against the white of his tee-shirt.  The blackness of his pubes and
the thickness of it seems manlier than yours.  Yours are dark blond and not
as thick.  Joe's branch out around his groin, down to the inner thighs,
while your own bloom out more wanly around the perimeter before fading away.

He puts his hand down on yours.  He holds it near the base and leaves his
fingers looped around it.  He doesn't tug or jerk you.  His fingers stay
steady like a flesh ring.  You slip your hips forward on impulse.  Yours
twitches upward.  The whole tip of it tingles.  Joe stares down at it, his
mouth ajar.  He looks up at your face and the two of you hold eye contact
briefly before you go back to staring down at his and he returns to staring
down at yours.

The first time Joe kisses you he presses his lips dry against yours.  He
hasn't shaved that day.  The stubble prickles the skin around your lips.
 The surface of his lips is so soft, though, and the feeling is pure
contrast.  Like touching hot and cold at once.  You both breathe heavy out
of your noses.  His air hits your upper lips and he squeezes you around the
lower back.

You start to lose yourself.  You're aware of your body but not in a
self-conscious way.  You're not flinching with every gesture or thought that
comes to mind.  You're more focused on Joe than on yourself.  He slides his
hands up below your hoodie and T-shirt.  His fingers slide against the
length of your torso, going over your ribs and up to your chest and nipples
then sliding them up to the hair of your armpits.  His warm arms snake the
length of your chest.  He hugs you from inside.  Your boners glance against
and bounce off each other.

You lift off your shirt and kick your pants off your ankles.  You're naked
in front of him.  Then Joe's shirt is gone.  Even though you've seen him
totally naked plenty of times, his body never looked so complex.  Because of
how his bones and muscles line up in the light, he flutters with shadows.
 His boner bobs and veers as he moves.  You cup your hands at his chest and
press on it.  You've never thought about the hair in the middle of his chest
or around his nipples, or about body hair on a guy in general.  It feels
better than you would have guessed.  The texture of his skin feels different
from yours.  Yours is somewhat soft.  His seems dryer and more textured,
like it's tougher.  His skin feels thicker than yours except when you touch
on his collarbone and shoulders, where it feels paper thin.

It was never a moral thing with you.  If you'd ever been asked or had
reflected on it privately, you would have thought that it was gross.  Like,
all of it.  Guys' boners, their butts.  It's all weird, and, like,
undisciplined.

But then it's not, and it's not like a universal thing for you.  It's not
like you're going to go crazy when you see random guys.  It's comfortable
and fun because you know him in a unique way, and in the end, it's all about
the person, not the labels or the way other people try to make you think.

We kiss again.  The ways we breathe feel good.

We have the same bodies.  Like, vivid.

For a long time we're touching every inch of our skins above the waist,
feeling out the variations in the bones and muscles.  Everything about us
feels more solid than our own bodies.  It's not only that one of us used to
be an athlete and the other is more normal.  It's something about how our
bodies are constructed.

Our skins sing.

He pulls you by the waist, and you don't lose your balance, but still you
topple a little and land hard on the sheets of his bed.  The bed makes a
slight cracking sound.

"Whoah," you say.

"I guess that was a boxspring," Joe says.  "Oh well."

He lies in bed next to you.  The rough hair of his legs runs against yours.
 The top of your boner touches his forearm.  Almost involuntarily, you move
your hips so that it rubs against the side of his arm.  You could nut
already.

Joe puts his face down to my chest.  He puts his mouth on my nipple.  The
sight of his tongue and his teeth and the feeling of them make my heart go
crazy.  I pull at the back of his hair, then press his face hard at my
chest.  His dick jabs at my thigh.  It feels harder and hotter than how I
thought of my own.  He finally threads his fingers through my pubes and
pivots the angle of my dick with his spread-open fingers.  The length of my
shaft aligns against his arm.

"Can I touch yours?" I say.

"Of course," he says, like it's been obvious all along.

His pubes aren't only thicker than mine.  They're coarser and curlier.  The
texture is almost rough.  His dick feels different, too.  It *does* feel
tighter and harder than mine.  He's been leaking precum, which I know
already.  I'd felt it on my hip when he pressed it against me.  For about
half a second it seems gross, but then it was cool.  Like, flattering.  I
don't want to touch it when it's fresh in the slit of his dick, but then I
do.  It's sort of watery and only slightly sticky.  Not like jizz.  He
exhales and shivers when I touch it.

"Are you okay?" he says, looking up to me.

"Yeah," I say, feeling myself blushing.  My face is hot.  It's sweating.  So
is my chest.  "I don't know."

"I just want you to be okay," he says.

"Yeah, I'm okay," I say.

"I don't want you to freak out afterward," he says.

"It's all right," I say.  I pause, trying to think of something to reassure
him.  "It doesn't have to mean anything.  It's not like I do this all the
time."

"I know you don't do it all the time," he says.  "Or, like, ever."

"Yeah.  Ha.  Never."

"You just can't freak out afterward," he says.  "That's the only rule."

"I'm already freaking out a little," I say.

"It's okay," he says.  "Me too."

I didn't believe him about that last part.  I think back to what Michelle
said to me.  Maybe it turned out that he's been gay all along and was lying
about it.  I don't know.  At that moment, I don't really care.

We sit so that Joe has his legs spread out on either side of me, and mine
crook upward at the knees.  This way we can see everything.  Joe only seems
to be looking at my face or at my dick and balls.  I look at him all over.
 Every part of it is fascinating to me, even the muscles in his leg,  I must
have spent 10 or 15 minutes feeling his shins and his knees and his calf
muscles.  When I do this, I notice that Joe's dick twitches like crazy, even
though I'm not touching it and neither is he.  Mine sits hard against my
stomach, but Joe's slacks a little and then twitches up against him.  It's
pink and the head at the end of it was plumped out round and purple.  A vein
runs along one side of it.  It looks solid and fully hard, and then I slide
a hand against the back of his knee or pinch at a tendon, and his boner pops
upwards, like it wants to answer the question.

When he shoots, neither of us are even touching it.  He has his hand on my
dick, and I move a hand to the base of his spine, right at the very top of
his butt.  There's this line of thin hairs that runs vertical at the top of
his crack.  I'd noticed this in the locker room with him and had spent some
time thinking about it.  When I slide my fingers down to them, his dick
immediately starts spraying.

The momentum and the distance of it is crazy.  It spurts up by his neck and
shoulders.  If he'd been lying down, it easily would have shot past his
head.  It comes out in five or six loads, each one a little shorter than
what comes before.  The last couple are these kind of cute white spurts than
land in the dark nest of his pubes.  By then he has a hand on his dick and
guides the spray against his skin.  When he first started to shoot, he said
something like, "Yow!", like it took even him by surprise.  It runs silvery
and shiny all over his chest, and the familiar smell of it hits me a few
seconds later -- musty and bleachy.  Again, for a second it grosses me out,
and almost as quickly, I decide that I liked it.  The smell of Joe shooting
starts to drive me a little crazy, actually.  It makes me hornier.  He
reaches down to the floor to pick up the T-shirt he'd been wearing and uses
it to mop his chest.

"You can shoot without touching it?" I ask.

"Not usually," he says.  "I'm not sure if that's happened before."

"Are you okay?" I say.

"I'm real good," he says.

"Cool," I say, my voice muddy.  "Me too."

He edges closer to me.  His dick is still hard.  When he gets closer, he
smells of sweat and semen, and in the cold of the room, the body heat from
his chest hit me in a wave.  It's so cold that his body might actually have
been steaming on the skin.  That's how I think of it.  I'm not sure if
that's true.

Joe moves to kiss me again.  Our dicks and balls touch each other.  I feel
the hair of his balls tickle my own.  He keeps his lips closed tight and
dry.  I press my face up against his because I like the feel of his stubble.
 I open my lips, enough to cover his.  When he darts his tongue against my
mouth, I start full-on Frenching with him.  I think of how big and white his
teeth are.  When our upper lips get wet from our kissing, a faint smell of
marijuana goes into my nostrils.

When he pulls away, he says, "Wow.  Enthusiastic."

"Was it okay?"

"Very," he says.  "When I thought about what it would be like to kiss you, I
imagined that it'd be like getting licked on the face by a sheepdog.
 Should've known you'd be better at it than that."

"Ha.  So you thought about kissing me before tonight?"

"No," he says.  I don't believe him.  "That's just how it looked when you
made out with girls."

"Whatever," I say.  "You're such a liar."

He laughs.  When he leans in like he's about to kiss me, I lick the side of
his face, like a sheepdog.  The stubble of his cheek takes a tissue sample
of my tongue.  I hold his head with both hands.  He tries to squirm away,
but not very hard.

"*This* is exactly how I imagined it," he says.

"See.  You imagined it."

"Yes.  When we were running and had that argument, I should've just smooched
you."

"That would've been something," I say.

I kiss him correctly.  His face turns intense and serious before I do this.
 We flash an eye contact that makes my ribs flicker, and then we're kissing
again.  Joe's more into it this time.  We kiss slow.  His face stubble
scrapes up and down my chin.  His teeth are at my lips and my tongue presses
behind his teeth.  Maybe that's gross but I don't care.

I'm not thinking about myself anymore.  I'm thinking about Joe and wondering
what it's like to be inside his skin.  He lies on his back and locks our
legs together with his bones and muscles, almost like it's a wrestling move.
 I'd never realized how hot the human body is.  Like, his chest and his head
are hooked to a radiator.  When he touches my butt, I don't think it's weird
that he's the first person who ever touched my butt or the first one to
touch my dick.  Instead I think that it's Joe who's the one doing that and
remember how his face looked before he kissed me.  I think of how he looked
like Superman the first night I met him, and of how I woke up on his floor
the next morning and didn't want to look at him in the top bunk because of
how hung over I was and how bad it felt.

I've never had a boner that stayed so hard for so long.  I lift my stomach
and my hips so that some air separates us, and look down the length of Joe's
torso.  I press my hips back down and slide them against him, in the motion
I'd have used if I'd been giving it to a girl.  I press my face at his cheek
so that my nose breathes in from his skin and my lips sink into his skin.

"You can cum on me if you want," he said.  "It's okay.  I want you to cum on
me."

I don't know if it's his words or the feel of his voicebox vibrating against
my neck and rumbling through my ears.  If I'd had a button on my chest that
said "cum" in big red letters, it would have been as effective.  The way his
voice carries through me, whatever he says might have brought the same
result.  Seconds later, I shoot on the spot.  Through my forehead I see the
same splashes of light that can happen after I stand too fast when
recovering from a long run with Joe.  Wet sparkles shimmering in my field of
vision.  Joe's lips suck the breath out of me.  I grunt and yell.  My butt
arches up and then down.  His big toenail digs into the side of my foot.  I
feel it all shoot out of me, like a busted-open pipe unloading all that
pressure.  I shout a vowel sound.  It all comes out of me.  It goes for
several seconds.  Toward the end it's like I want it to keep going.  I push
myself up and arch my back in the air, moving in and out like I'm going at
something that's not there.  I feel the drops splash up at my stomach but
most of it gathers in the crevices and angles of Joe's chest and stomach.
 Looking down at him shining with all my stuff, part of it makes me think
that he's crazy, then part of me says that it's the hottest thing I've ever
seen, when he smirks enough to show part of his teeth and looks down at all
that stuff of mine, dripping and sliding over his chest.  The T-shirt on the
floor is still plenty damp from Joe's own spray, and he uses it to absorb
mine.  I want to ask if I can hold it, just so I can touch it, but that
would seem weird, so I don't.

After I shoot, I feel dizzy, and even disoriented.  It's like waking up.
 Like it wasn't me that lived that, or it was a crazy dream that lingers
with you for a couple of hours in the morning.  Standing there with my boner
hanging out and Joe looking up at me from his sheets, his hard-on still
pressed at his stomach, I think something like, "This cannot possibly be
happening," and then, "What have I done?", and, "It was just because of the
drugs," and, "There's no turning back."  There are certain threshes of
experience that people get, and once you have it, it's irreversible.  This
is one of those things.

Also, I'm exhausted.  It's almost 2 a.m.  Whatever Joe and I have been doing
to each other, we've been doing it for more than three hours.  I feel like I
should get dressed and leave right away, but the rules for these things are
mysterious.  Like, I need to sit down alone someplace and think over what
I've done.

"Are you freaking out?" Joe says.

"No," you say.

"Yeah you are."  There isn't any doubt in his voice.  "Don't worry about it.
 It was only me."

I don't know what he means by that, but it sounds good anyway.  He slides a
couple feet away in his bed, his boner bouncing with his hips when he does
this.  "Just come back," he says.

That's what I do.  I lie back in Joe's bed.  His sheets are smoother than
mine.  His mattress is softer than mine.  I don't want him to touch me but
he does.  He puts his hand back down on my dick.  It's as hard as it would
have been if I hadn't shot.  When he touches it, it feels good all over
again.  He nestles up next to me, with my arm around his neck and his head
against my shoulder.  We're naked on top of the sheets but I'm cold in the
air.  He sleeps under two huge, heavy comforters.  I lean down to pull them
up so that they cover us.  It's, like, cozy.  I wish that I could still see
his whole body, but the heat of being under the covers with him more than
makes up for it.

I think I'm going to fall asleep when the front door slams shut.  You can
barely make out the thud.  I bolt up in bed.

"Calm down," Joe says.  "I'll just turn out the lights."

"What if they come up here?"

"They won't."

My heart beats fast.  Joe stretches and climbs over me to get out of bed.
 When he stands his naked butt is a couple of feet from my face.  His butt,
his back, his shoulders: I guess you spend so much time facing a person that
you never think about how they look from the other side.  He looks
interesting when he stands.  I wish I'd asked him to stand like that for
awhile, before the roommates come home and he stands to turn out the lights

He walks through the dark and slides back into bed.  He lies so that his
back faces me, and he pulls my hand and arm over him, so that I hold him
across the chest.  My boner presses against part of his butt.  My chest
touches his spine.  I breathe in through his hair and the back of his neck.


Some nights they come home and everyone's loud and yelling and laughing.
 Some nights other people come home with us and the house is active until
four or five.  Tonight, I hear Michelle's lonely steps going toward her
room.  This is a relief.  It means that no one's going to be rowdy.  There's
no way they'll look for us.

I kiss Joe from behind, where his jaw meets his neck, and a couple seconds
later we're full-on making out again.

"I hope this doesn't sound weird," I say, "but I think I need to nut again
before I fall asleep."

His chest and stomach shake against yours when he laughs.  "Me too," he
says.

He holds his boner tight against mine.  His balls are pressed up against my
shaft.  He presses his hips up and down.  I remember the last time he shot
and grab his butt again.  I can feel its muscles get tight and then relax as
he rubs his up and down against mine.  He strokes the side of my face with
his free hand and we're kissing again.  Our tongues are all over each other.
 My heart and my breathing go crazy.  I feel the shudder in the pit of my
stomach and my balls, and I'm shooting again.  I yelp another high-pitched
vowel sound.  After what happened before, I can hardly believe that I've got
any left in me.  I smell the heat of our bodies and the fog of my shooting
rise from under the comforters.  I hold Joe's chin with my mouth when he
shoots a few seconds after me.

He picks up his dirty, dirty shirt from the floor.  We wipe each other off
but the sheets and part of the comforter stay damp.  I apologize for the
mess.  He laughs at me.

Joe falls asleep not long after that.  I can tell he's sleeping by the way
that he breathes.  I'm still hard, and in his sleep, so is he.  My heart
races too much and my mind won't shut off.  While he sleeps I keep touching
him.  I move a hand down to his lower back or to his navel.  I move my hand
over the arc of his buttcheek or lightly cover his balls.  This doesn't wake
him.

Every couple of minutes I find myself thinking crazy thoughts, and then
decide that this is really no big deal.  Like I've always thought, it's not
about the label.  It's about the person.  Joe could as easily have been a
girl, and if we'd clicked in the same way, I'd be doing the same things.  It
so happened that he wasn't a girl.  Most people don't understand that, but
it's how it works.  I satisfy myself of this, but then a few minutes later
have the same line of thoughts, before I need to work through the logic
again to calm down.  It runs on repeat.  There's no way I'll have a normal
sleep.

I doze off around three, but wake up again when it's about 5:30.  When your
skin is pressed against another person's for awhile, it gets sweaty and
starts to stick and itch.  I move to let air between us.  It must have made
Joe wake up, because he groans and rolls over, so that we're facing each
other.  I smell his breath and don't mind.  He grabs my hand puts it on his
boner, then nudges up against me so our legs are tangled.  I'm not going to
be able to sleep like that.

Sometime around eight I wake up again.  Snow covers his skylight.  I sit up
in bed and look at our clothes spread over the floor.  I need to dress and
go to my room so that I can sleep for real.  His room must be below
freezing.  When I move, Joe wakes.  I can't bring myself to get out of his
bed.  We make eye contact.  Our hands are on each other's hips.  I curl up
to him.  He feels so comfortable and natural that I settle into his mattress
for a little longer.  I think to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice if you could
spend the rest of your life not doing anything, just lying here like this."