Chapter Thirteen
I’d sold myself a lie, and I was damned if I was going to concede defeat on it.
Parents warned not to expect me home on Saturday night; the weekend shift at the thrift store told to call if the building was burning down, but otherwise muddle through by themselves.
That just left Catherine and Kyle, and honestly I considered simply leaving them in the dark.
“Another busy night at the sex club,” Kyle teased, grinning.
I flashed him an unimpressed look. “You have a far more lurid idea of what gay life is like than the reality. I’ll probably just go to a couple of bars or something.”
“My version sounds more fun.”
Frankly it did, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Or that some app-surfing might also be on my agenda. It wasn’t like either of my friends had issues with casual sex, but I knew they thought it was an unnecessary risk, meeting up with total strangers.
“Does he know you’ll be in town?” Catherine was giving me the sort of stare which says ‘don’t bullshit me, I’ll know it.’
“Who?”
By her sour expression, my innocent act was unconvincing. “Flynn.”
“Why would he?”
The eye roll was well-practiced. “Oh, I don’t know... because you might think to tell an old friend when you were going to be in their neighborhood. Especially if you just reconnected.”
“We hardly ‘reconnected,’ Catherine,” I said, with a snort. “We had dinner, once.”
And coffee. And I’d fucked his boyfriend, while Flynn watched. Only those were details I still had no intention of sharing.
“Are him and his boyfriend serious?”
I made no attempt to hide my bemusement from her. “What kind of psychopath asks something like that?”
Catherine grunted annoyance. “You don’t have to ask outright. You can just... read between the lines.”
“As far as I know,” I told her, “they have everything under control.”
#
It wasn’t that I thought queer couples were any more adept at untraditional relationships than straight ones.
It just seemed like, by the time you’d negotiated who topped, and who bottomed, and what unmissable kinks needed to be satisfied for both participants - often all before you’d even met face-to-face - the possibility of introducing a third to that playtime didn’t seem such a hurdle.
Which wasn’t to say that everyone had the emotional maturity to handle it; just that, as a question, it seemed more likely to come up when it was a couple of gay guys. Unless I was being unfair to our straight counterparts.
Flynn had said it himself, when I’d made a show of myself outside the restaurant. He and William had an “arrangement”: it wasn’t some sort of sexual free-for-all. Unusual, maybe; hard to negotiate, almost certainly. But neither was insurmountable, if you had the appetite for it.
So that part - beyond the shock of it being Flynn there, behind the mask - hadn’t really thrown me. No, what kept setting my brain teetering was how much I wished it hadn’t just been William I’d got to play with.
Flynn had been out of my life, broadly speaking, before I’d started having serious, sexual feelings toward other guys.
The fact that my brain kept blurring together him sitting in the corner watching his boyfriend and I fuck, and Flynn in the truck next to me wearing nothing but his underwear, was an unexpected development.
More than once I’d found myself wondering what might’ve happened, had I reached out and eased my fingers around his muscular thigh.
In reality, just like when we’d kissed, he’d probably have stopped me. Said something flattering and kind; a gentle letdown, wearing that apologetic expression which still left me cringing with remembered embarrassment.
The Flynn of my imagination was more malleable, more eager.
Saw my hand on his bare leg as an opportunity, not a misunderstanding to be corrected.
Would drag it up, perhaps, until my fingers were cradling the heft of his bulge through his underwear.
Encourage me to pull the truck off the road and go exploring.
See what, so far, had been a vague and teasing shape through briefs or sweatpants.
A horn’s blaring yanked me back into the present. I shook my head, gesturing apology to the furious guy in the SUV the lane over from me, and tried to concentrate on staying between the lines.
#
I thought about Catherine’s words, as I inched my way through the city traffic.
It was either that or mutter furiously under my breath at every stop sign and light, bemused at how the drivers here could simultaneously be so aggressive behind you, and then so leisurely when it came to making turns.
More than once, I relied on the age and timeworn look of the old pickup to intimidate my fellow motorists: my paintwork was invariably more scuffed-up than theirs.
It wasn’t that I couldn’t imagine myself living somewhere else, that it was an impossibility.
More like I only had one example of what “Oli’s existence” was to work from: there was no way to easily overlay that atop, say, a city apartment and the life which came with that.
It was like my truck, amid the polish of the sleek luxury cars around me.
Very obviously a visitor, not something which belonged here.
Parking up, in the underground lot, felt like shedding a skin.
Setting aside the pickup-driving, small town dwelling, still-lives-with-his-folks version of myself.
A weird sense of liberation: just some twenty-something guy with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder.
One who could stake a claim to being here with just as much validity as anybody else.
I wondered if Flynn had felt that way when he’d moved.
How long it’d taken before he was no longer a visitor, a guest, but a resident.
It wasn’t the sort of thing you could just text someone and ask, not out of the blue.
Certainly not the way I’d left things with him the last time we’d spoken, anyway.
The hotel was charmingly anonymous; the room either identical to the one I’d had before, or the differences so bland that my memory struggled to identify them.
On a different floor, to the right of the elevator not the left, but the furniture was the same, and the anodyne artwork above the bed and in the bathroom seemed designed to skirt attention.
Sitting on the edge of the mattress, I couldn’t help but wonder if there was an identical Oli in all of the other rooms, too.
Just another item ordered in bulk from some catalog: “cliched young out-of-town queer/male” to be delivered by the dozen.
Fooling himself into thinking his problems, his conundrums, were something unique or special.
I grit my teeth, annoyed at myself.
There was a pool in the basement. The woman at reception had mentioned it in her long, well-practiced spiel of the facilities: gym, and room service, and a business center should I desperately need to send a fax.
I’d not swum the first time I’d stayed; hadn’t thought to bring anything to wear, a mistake I’d rectified this time around.
It was mid-afternoon, and part of me was insisting it was still too early to open the apps and not feel like a completely sex-obsessed loser.
I unlocked my phone anyway. Telling myself it was just to let the location update; that I wasn’t going to actually browse through the list. Not yet, anyway.
The locker room had that trying-too-hard day spa feel: bowls spotted with floating flower heads and a big glass jar of fruit water.
I ignored the sign above it - and its suggestion that “Hydration Is Nature’s Best Secret” - and stripped off my shirt and jeans, instead.
Stuffing them into an empty locker, followed by my boxer-briefs.
I didn’t swim much, these days. The only place locally was the open-air pool, outside of the rec center, and that was closed for the winter season. My parents had taken Flynn and I there when we were kids; in my memories it was vast, practically an ocean, though the reality was far more mundane.
Anyway, as a result my swim shorts were a little too short, and a little too tight, frankly.
Nothing obscene - more discrete, certainly, than a Speedo might be - but still enough to leave me somewhat self-conscious.
That mood lingered until I followed the signs to the poolside, and realized I had the whole thing to myself.
It wasn’t huge; smaller, even, than the public pool back home. Maybe four lanes wide, mosaic tiles shimmering through the blue-tinted water. It almost felt wrong to lower myself in, and upset the soft ripples which sashayed with a dreamy rhythm from one end to the other.
The temperature was just right.
I pushed off with my feet, relying on muscle memory to take over. Arms sweeping in front of me, a lazy breaststroke. Tracking my progress by the dimming, then brightening, then dimming again of the warm overhead lights.
Not a particularly graceful turn at the opposite end, but enough to send me slicing back down the way I’d just come. Focus slipping in, now, as the patterns returned to me. Like an engine long unused, gradually figuring out the order of its motions.
I did eight laps that way, then switched to front crawl.
Relishing the feeling of my arms arching up, then scything down to cut into the water.
Still not fast, but maybe more graceful, I decided.
An improvement, anyway, even if I’d been good enough at 15 to catch the attention of our high school coach and offered a spot on the swim team.
I’d turned it down, of course. The thought of more opportunities to inconveniently bone up, surrounded by barely-dressed guys, outweighed his “it’ll look great on college applications” argument.