Chapter Nine
Banks
“Prepare, Vixen, for the bite of your life!”
Banks grinned from ear to ear, watching the goofy, high gloss, over the top antics on the screen and painfully aware that, right next to him, Harper was beaming as well.
The vampire hunter, all decked out in a frilly pirate blouse with poofy sleeves and a swashbuckling hat to match, waved a tinfoil cross at a slinky vampire temptress wearing a gauzy nightgown, for some apparent reason. “Silence, Tramp. The walls of this ancient castle harken not for thee!”
They both snorted at the over-the-top dialogue, the lavish set design, the ham-fisted acting and not for the first time.
With the vast theater all to themselves, and the garish 1970s technicolor Vampire Virgins from Mars 5 spilling out on the screen before them, all go-go boots and high collars and pale breasts and hairspray galore, they felt free to both admire and heckle the cult classic openly.
And, of course, never less than charitably.
Banks could hardly believe his good luck.
Not just to have Harper all to himself, and this impromptu private screening of a low-budget, B-movie gem, but to have finally discovered someone to share his passion for “so bad they’re rad” movies with.
Why he’d never bothered to stick his neck out and try and find someone to share his love of movies before was beyond him and, yet, at the same time perfectly understandable.
“Perfect,” Harper murmured with glee, nibbling the last of his popcorn between big, poofy, gleaming lips. “Just. Perfect.”
“Why are they in a castle again?” Banks felt the need to lean close to Harper to openly whisper, despite the rows of empty seats in front of them.
There was something so much more intimate about doing it that way, his lips close to Harper’s softly blushing ear, dusted with the wisps of his dirty blond ponytail.
Harper rolled his eyes, as if perhaps Banks had asked him what popcorn tasted like instead. “The only way the vampire virgins can get back to Mars is with the Lithoneum crystals buried deep beneath the castle vault, remember?”
Banks chuckled. “How could I forget something like that?”
Harper met his eyes, so close in the flickering darkness of the intimate theater they might as well have been peering into his very soul. “Probably because you’re so infatuated with the vampire virgin’s boobies, that’s why.”
As if on cue, the vampire hunter tore the dress of the main vampire, her big, flouncy, poofy white breasts bursting forth and filling the screen as the director zoomed in on them, soft pink nipples 70-feet high on the screen in front of them.
He admired them the way he had all the different breasts he’d encountered in high school—perfunctorily, like a chore to be done or an assignment to be turned in, part of the social contract of remaining under the radar while secretly scoping out all the hunky, sweaty guys on the football field or, in particular, the locker room afterward.
He was aware that Harper was watching him, and so he gave a slight little “meh” face accompanied by a telltale shoulder shrug, as if forcing himself into a place he’d never been before.
Then he glanced from the wiggling, jiggling breasts on the screen to Harper’s blah reaction right next to him.
“So, you’re telling me, those do nothing for you? ”
Harper snorted, setting his popcorn bucket aside and wiping his salty, greasy hands on the sides of his off-white linen pants, the ones that went so well with his casually wrinkled, plum colored button-down shirt, loose and breezy and untucked, as if just waiting there to be unbuttoned, one slow, sensual button at a time.
“Those breasts in particular?” he teased, sliding a last Red Vine from the crinkly package on Banks’s lap and waving it at the giant, voluminous, bulbous breasts currently onscreen. “Or, you know, any breasts?”
“Both? Either?”
Harper met his gaze curiously, nibbling thoughtfully on the Red Vine before answering. “No, Banks. Is that... going to be a problem?”
“Never?” Banks was undeterred. “Not even a little?”
Harper cocked his head, still nibbling. His lips were shimmering in the flickering light from the scene playing on the screen high above, the very one they no longer seemed interested in.
“Not even remotely, Banks.” Banks nodded, but Harper’s eyes still searched his for something more. “Does it do something for you?”
Banks was going to issue his usual jock response of, “Duh! Fuck, yeah! Tits! Ass! Booyah!” But then he remembered: he wasn’t back home drinking beer around some bonfire with his bro buds.
He was here, with Harper. Sweet, beautiful, wounded Harper.
They were alone, in a new place, on a new campus, starting a new life far, far away from the old one and sitting there, quietly, in an empty theater.
Just the two of them. No one else around to hear, or see, or judge, or snort or laugh or give him a wedgie—or far worse than that—if he answered the wrong way.
He lingered too long before replying, which he knew to be an answer in and of itself.
“Do you want the honest answer?” he asked, turning slightly as if they were back in the Campus Café’ and not witnessing a pseudo-sexual fight scene between a topless vampire and her pornstache sporting vampire hunter.
“Or the one I’d give the guys back home? ”
“I already know the one you’d give the guys back home,” Harper said quietly. “I want the answer you’d give to the guy who wore a Pride shirt to freshman orientation and waited four years to do it.”
Banks nodded, heart pounding more than it had when they’d walked into the empty theater and he knew he’d be sitting next to Harper for the next two hours. “I... I think you already know the answer, Harp.”
“I guess I want to hear it from those lips of yours,” Harper said, both flirtatious and challenging at the same time.
Banks nodded again. Swallowed, hard, and took the plunge. Fuck it, he thought, meeting Harper’s eyes with steely resolve even as they pleaded for mercy. What’s the worst that can happen, right?
“I mean, would I be sitting here, alone, in a theater with you when I could be doing shots at a frat party and watching chicks lift up their shirts for free beer if I honestly, actually cared about tits and ass?”
Harper beamed, shaking his head. “Then ... I mean ... how could you...”
“Sleep with all those chicks back home?” Banks finished for him. “I mean, I didn’t sleep with all of them. Not even half of them, by my count.”
“But the stories I heard every Monday? About what you’d done all weekend, or who you’d done? They couldn’t all be bullshit, right?”
“They weren’t, Harper. Not at first. I mean, when you grow up like I did, football star dad, football star brothers, pennants all over the house, trophies instead of books lined up on the shelves, what else are you gonna do?
For most of high school, freshman and sophomore years for sure, I talked myself into believing I liked tits and ass.
Pussy, too. So I was a man-whore and then some.
But later, eventually, I had to admit to myself that it was more of a chore than I cared to admit.
That I was going through the motions. That none of the girls I’d slept with excited me as much as showering with the guys after practice or checking out their bulges during grey sweatpants season.
By then I already had a rep to protect, and scores of notches on my bedpost and, after that, I just kind of coasted through junior and senior year on my reputation alone.
The girls didn’t seem to care. They were just there to be seen on my arm, or any footballer’s arm, for that matter.
If all we did was a little heavy petting in the car after the game, or if they passed out on some rando family’s bed after a party I could just say we had a great time, and they’d believe it. And all the while, I just ... just...”
Harper had inched closer by then. Or, perhaps, Banks had.
“Just what?” Harper nudged, but Banks just shrugged.
“Pined away?” he finally admitted. “Crushed on guys from afar? Wandered around feeling like I was living in someone else’s skin?
Started searching for colleges, any colleges, where all my bro friends weren’t going?
Started looking forward to the day when I wouldn’t have to hide who I really was anymore? ”
Harper nodded quietly, eyes moist but his smooth, hollow cheeks dry. “How can your story sound so much like mine when we couldn’t be more different, Banks?”
Banks swallowed. Heart pounding, palms sweating, nodding quietly in the flickering glow that bathed them both in its chaotic, yet vaguely comforting, light.
“Because I guess we’re not so different after all, Harper.
Because you can’t hide who you are forever, and if I don’t start living the life I want now, when will I ever? ”
“What does that look like, Banks?” Harper was close enough to kiss, and Banks could only imagine what the two of them might look like, sitting there in the back of the theater, faces aglow from the movie magic high above, turned gently toward each other, gazing into the other’s eyes, and faces mere inches apart.
“I have no idea, Harper,” Banks croaked. “I wasn’t even sure I could start my new life, ever, until I looked over at the pep rally and saw you, sitting there, so close and yet so far away.”
“I’m here now, Banks. Right here. So. Very. Close...”
“Yes, you are, Harp. Close enough to kiss.”
Harper chuckled dryly, popcorn and Red Vines breath warm as it caressed his face. “So kiss me then.”
Banks thought he was bluffing. Sweet Harper, shy and aloof, in his baggy flannel shirts and banged up sneakers, slinking along the walls as if he could literally disappear into them. “Don’t threaten me with a good time, bro.”
“It’s not a threat,” Harper croaked, hand inching closer to his on the varnished wooden armrest they’d been sharing. “It’s an invitation. An offer. A ... beginning.”
“Of what?” Banks croaked back, hardly believing he could still speak.