Chapter 11 Stamina
Matt huddled over Evan, his face buried in Evan’s crotch, his mouth bobbing on Evan’s cock.
Matt thought of Greek mythology, specifically the Ouroboros: a coiled snake consuming its own tail, a symbol for the eternal cycle of life.
Death and rebirth. Unity with nature. And here they were, Matt and Evan, connected, each consuming the other’s cock.
Each inside the other. One ending where the other began.
It was beautiful, symbolic, and cathartic, and was exactly what Matt needed to recenter himself.
After Gay Chapel had ended, he had seethed with fury. Fury towards the school for their bigotry. Fury towards Colton Langley for having triggered Gay Chapel.
Fury towards William most of all.
Matt felt like he had been set up. Betrayed. By William. He needed to find him and confront him.
Matt parted company with Paul, the only other gay freshman remaining on campus. The shared trauma of Gay Chapel had forged an unlikely bond between them. He felt bad abandoning Paul like this, but there was nothing more he could do for the kid at this time.
He asked Paul for his phone number, promised to call later. He reminded him that if anyone asked, Paul was tutoring him. Tutoring provided a plausible way for them to stay in contact.
Paul blinked awkwardly in the bright sun. He pushed his glasses back on his nose as a sort of farewell.
Matt skipped his afternoon classes and ditched soccer practice.
He set out in his Jeep, Don Quixote tilting at windmills, searching for William off campus, when William was most likely to be in class.
There was a certain madness in Matt’s method.
Confronting William on campus would be messy and could have dire consequences.
It was safer to search for him where he wasn’t than where he was.
Matt drove to Johnnie’s, site of their first date, looking for William among the elderly patrons and empty tables. He went to the country road where they had hooked up, aching at the memory of William inside him. Despondent, he showed up at the clubhouse at #24 Shadowood Court.
William wasn’t there either.
Evan was. Evan Montaigne, who had worn the Pirate mask during Matt’s interview for membership in the GM.
Evan was vacuuming, languorously pushing and pulling the machine in long, slow arcs. He was shirtless, wearing only swim trunks.
Matt remembered those washboard abs.
“Hey,” Evan said, looking up. He reached down and shut off the noisy machine.
“I didn’t peg you as a housekeeper.” Matt tried, but failed, to sound lighthearted.
“It’s on the schedule.” Evan jerked his head towards the entertainment center, inside of which was the binder with the club rules. “Something tells me you haven’t read those yet.”
Matt shook his head impatiently. “I’m looking for William. Do you know where I can find him?” He had not had time to read the rules. Now he didn’t want to. The rules had been written by William.
Evan studied Matt’s face, surely seeing the dried tears, surely sensing the hurt. “Is this about Gay Chapel? This year’s was the worst I’ve seen.”
Matt shook his head. “I made it through that because I was warned it was happening. No one warned me about Colton Langley and SGA—certainly not William.”
That was not even the worst part. Less than two days earlier, when they had all been in this townhouse celebrating Matt’s birthday and presumed election victory, William had told them Colton had been the person who ratted out Adam to the dean.
That would have been an opportune time to tell Matt that Colton was president of the SGA!
No reasonable person could have expected Matt, a freshman who had been a student for all of two weeks, to know that information. Not telling him felt like betrayal.
Evan’s eyebrows rippled with expression. They were dark brown and punctuated his face like longer, wider versions of the hash marks the French use to denote pronunciation (l’accents aigu et grave). “I’ll get us some wine,” he offered.
He reappeared a minute later with two glasses of white wine. He handed one to Matt.
“Follow me.”
Evan led Matt upstairs, to the larger of the two bedrooms. It had its own fireplace and a king bed, which Matt had seen on his hasty birthday tour of the townhouse.
Matt guessed where this was heading. He steeled himself to rebuff Evan’s advances. Shaking hands was not on today’s menu.
Evan breezed past the bed, opened the French doors, and stepped out onto the balcony. He sat in one of two wicker chairs and motioned for Matt to take the other.
Matt sat, careful not to spill his wine, peeved by Evan’s disinterest in the sex he would have refused.
“I’m supposed to attend my first SGA meeting tomorrow evening,” Matt fretted. “What if Colton figures out I’m gay? Won’t he try to get me expelled too?”
Evan sipped his wine and savored it, mulling an answer.
“There’s no ‘if’ here,” Evan eventually said. “Colton will sense that you are gay.”
Matt felt queasy. “Should I just resign from my office? I could say that I’ve realized I’m overcommitted, that I can’t do soccer and SGA.”
Evan’s eyebrows furrowed.
Matt imagined the neurons in Evan’s brain lighting up, sifting and sorting what to say next, imagined the many tiny muscles involved in tugging those eyebrows into their various contortions. He wondered what shape they took when Evan climaxed.
Evan directed his gaze beyond the balcony. “Check out that pool,” he said, pointing with his chin.
Really? Matt was flummoxed that so much brow wrinkling on Evan’s part had only produced this non-sequitur of a sentence: “check out the pool.”
All the same, Matt gazed out at the pool. Townhomes overlooked it on all four sides, walling it in. It was early afternoon. The sun’s light glinted off the clear water. A few people sunbathed and frolicked. There were no particularly hot guys.
“Notice anything unusual?” Evan asked.
“No.” Matt wasn’t in the mood to play Where’s Waldo with Evan.
Evan stretched his long legs, eased back in his chair. “Apartment complexes don’t have pools even a quarter that size. Most cities don’t either.”
Matt didn’t give a shit about the pool. Three things dominated his thoughts.
First, what to do about SGA? Second, why had William betrayed him?
Third, why was Evan disinterested in him.
Did Evan rate himself as being a “10” and think Matt was beneath him?
Just because Evan had a Mediterranean’s olive complexion, just because his hair and facial features were more Gallic than Greek did not make him some gay god.
Evan’s posture—legs stretched and askew—seemed suddenly arrogant to Matt. Matt sipped his chilled wine. It was refreshing in this heat. At least there was that.
Evan continued. “For decades this was the largest pool in the state. It has room for a thousand people.”
That got Matt’s attention. He saw the disparity now. The pool predated the complex—by decades. And it was huge. He was curious despite his anger. “Who built this pool?” he asked.
“It was part of the Wedgewood Village Amusement Park,” Evan said. “There were rides, games, even a roller coaster. The park closed in the late sixties. The pool and the pond out front are all that remain.”
Matt looked down into his wine glass. Hopefully now they could return to the topic of Colton Langley.
“Places have histories that follow them,” Evan said. “This giant pool only makes sense if you understand its story.”
No shit, Matt thought. That was probably true for most places.
He was beginning to regret coming here today.
He hadn’t found William. He’d been stuck with Evan who viewed himself as too hot for a hookup with him.
And, oh yeah, he’d had to endure a history lesson about the Wedgewood pool!
Throw in Gay Chapel and this was proving to be a banner day.
Matt felt Evan’s eyes boring into him. He looked up from the well of his wine glass, made eye contact.
“People are like that, too,” Evan said, emphasizing his words. “They have histories that follow them.”
So that was it, Matt thought. The whole pool story had been a parable to pave the way for the real topic: someone’s dark personal history. It must be a doozy of a story to merit the pool parable.
Matt hazarded a guess. “These histories that follow people. Are we talking about you?”
Evan shook his head.
Matt tried again. “William?”
Evan gave a Mona Lisa smile. “Have you noticed the ring that William wears on a chain around his neck?”
Matt started to shake his head, but then remembered having glimpsed something shiny hanging from that chain.
“He never takes it off,” Evan said. “It was a sort of promise ring his first love gave him their senior year in high school. William is from Bartlesville, you know. His dad is a bigwig in Phillips Oil, which is headquartered there.”
“And?” Matt prompted. There was obviously more to this story.
“And do you know who else is from Bartlesville?”
“No.”
“Colton Langley,” Evan said.
Matt listened to the story of William and Colton, the history that followed them even now, informing their actions like their own private Zodiac, causing reverberations and ripples that spilled over into other people’s lives.
Adam Maxwell was one such casualty. Matt felt like he was another—or was about to be, albeit on a much smaller scale. This was troubling news.
“What should I do about SGA?” Matt asked again.
Evan shrugged. “William obviously has a plan. You can trust him. In the meantime, you go to SGA meetings, don’t make any waves, and do what you do best.”
“Which is?”
Evan gave him a quizzical look, then grinned. “You’re either a shrewd actor or incredibly na?ve. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt for now and go with na?ve.”
“Incredibly na?ve,” Matt corrected him.