Chapter 3
SAM
I am in Adriana’s bedroom.
It’s the one in her parents’ house in Hialeah.
I know it is, because I’ve been there many times.
Making love to her when her mom and dad were gone and sometimes when they weren’t, taking the utmost care to be quiet.
We’d muffle our moans and sighs with hands or pillows, sequestering ourselves beneath the blankets.
I kneel on that familiar bed with its ever-present frilly blue spread, the sheer, gauzy curtains in the open window fluttering on a sultry breeze. Adriana’s beneath me, her long brown hair spread across the pillow as she gives me a coquettish smile.
“Stop teasing, Sam,” she mewls, reaching for me. “Come on. Do me.”
So many times I’ve seen this exact expression on her face, been in this exact position above her.
It could be real. It feels real enough: kissing her, deep and ardent, as I hook a finger into her damp panties and slip them down her bronzed legs.
My arousal strains against the front of my jeans and she helps me out of those, too.
Maybe this is real. Maybe the events of the last twenty-four hours have been a nightmare. Hell, the last several weeks. Maybe she never moved to Connecticut after all, never broke up with me and it’s all just been one big, bad dream.
“I had the craziest fuckin’ dream,” I murmur to her.
“Yeah?” She’s watching me, head tilted as she playfully bites her lip. “Tell me.”
“It’s so dumb. You were going to Yale, of all places, and I drove up alllll the way to see you one weekend. And then we—”
She winds one of my curls around her finger. “Broke up?”
I lift my head slowly. “Yeah, actually. How did you…?”
Which is when her face morphs, quite suddenly, into Ash’s.
Now it’s his dark gold locks fanning the pillow, his thighs I’m parting as I move over him, and I don’t question it at all, for some reason.
Don’t so much as fucking hesitate. His beautiful eyes lock onto mine as he sucks in his lower lip, and my hands slide under his hips to draw them up to mine.
He reaches between us and wraps his hand around my cock, guiding me until I enter him.
Our gasps are twinned.
He feels so incredibly fucking good.
And the need I’m feeling is also so real, so desperate, so intense, like acid in my mouth. His body pressed to mine, our flesh a slick contrast as I thrust slowly into him. He presses his mouth to my ear with a soft, shivery moan that licks all the way down my spine.
And just like that, I come inside him.
I awake, breathless, to the sight of a popcorn-textured ceiling and the old alarm clock on the nightstand reading 7:43. And the sensation of something warm, wet and sticky in my boxers.
Oh, you have to be fucking kidding me.
A wet dream. Un-fuckin-believable. I haven’t had one of those since I was like, I don’t know, fifteen?
A million goddamn years ago. I can hardly believe it, and as I sit there in mortification I almost hope that it’s piss instead.
As if that’s somehow better, pissing the fucking bed at the age of twenty-five.
I’m waiting for the dream’s residue to fade and hoping that this feeling will fade along with it but no, now the clock says 7:45 and it’s still as real as ever.
Face scrunched, I slide a hand beneath the blankets and into my boxers.
Even as I swipe my fingers against my still-sensitive cock I’m still in denial of what it is—until I bring my hand up to my face. It’s unmistakably semen.
“Christ,” I mutter, and then I remember there’s someone else asleep not four feet away from me. I freeze, my eyes darting sideways. Ash is unmoving, though, and I can’t see much of him at all, burrowed beneath the blankets as he is. Except for a hank of his golden hair.
The dream comes back to me in one big rush. The way it was Adriana and then it wasn’t Adriana and I was literally fucking him, in my dream. What the fuck even was that?
I wipe my fingers on my chest and throw back the covers, tossing up a quick, fervid prayer to whatever deity might be listening that Ash doesn’t wake up until I am safely sequestered in the bathroom.
I shuffle rather uncomfortably across the carpet before I kneel—which gives me a whiff of my own cum through the gape in my boxers and another wave of shame rolls on through me—to paw through my duffel bag for clean clothes.
Ash sighs and rolls over. In terror, I skitter to the bathroom and shut and lock the door.
Standing there with my heart doing double-time in my chest like I’ve almost been caught doing something truly awful, I decide that it’s not even worth cleaning any of this shit up so I simply remove the shorts and shove them way down in the tiny trashcan by the toilet.
I wad up a bunch of toilet paper to toss over the top until the stained plaid is mostly obscured.
Easy. Problem solved. Out of sight out of mind and whatever.
The next issue being that I have to drag out all the bloody towels Ash left soaking in the tub overnight before I can shower myself off. They’ve turned a faint pink but, as I wring them out and toss them back on the rack, I don’t think it’s noticeable. Or incriminating.
(And again, have to wonder what insanity I’ve gotten myself into.)
The main problem, I think, as I finally step under the hot spray—the water pressure sucks—is that Ash sort of reminds me of Gabriel.
And I’m sort of feeling the way I felt around Gabriel, all the way back then.
But thinking about Gabriel makes me sad, so I shut down that train of thought.
I hit the brakes hard and it comes to a screeching, deafening halt.
I try not to think of anything as wash my hair with the little shampoo bottle. I try to make my mind blank. It’s not fucking working, though, because if my brain isn’t allowed to think of Gabriel then it just latches onto Ash and the stupid fucking dream.
I’m surprised I can remember it at all. I never remember my dreams, good or bad.
Don’t recall any erotic dreams of nocturnal emissions past. Certainly I can’t remember the details of the very first one I ever had in my early teens, only the shameful horror I felt upon awakening.
And then later, when I tearfully related the incident to my dad in fear that something was wrong with me, his booming laughter and the resounding slap he’d given me on the back.
Ya eres un hombre1, he said.
He wouldn’t have said that if he knew the dream had involved a man. If it had. Which it almost certainly hadn’t, but I don’t know, because I don’t remember. And I would not have told him that even if I did. Wouldn’t have divulged those sorts of details.
Not that I have a problem with gay people or the concept of being gay; Miami is blooming with such culture.
Growing up in my Miami Beach neighborhood I saw it take foothold—queer marielitos arriving by the thousands during the infamous boatlift in my youth.
The bold, effeminate men who wore women’s clothing in the street, enduring catcalls and insults both.
I remember wondering, as a kid, what kind of insanity must take you to willingly offer yourself up to such abuse when you could conform instead?
Only later did I know it as bravery.
And that’s thanks to Gabriel, too.
Okay, if I have appreciation for the male form on occasion—occasion being the key word here—that’s as far as it goes.
It’s certainly nothing I ever acted on. I mean, not really.
Not in ways that counted for anything. Stuff I am pretty sure a lot of guys have done at some point or another—experimenting with shit, curiosity getting the best of you, sort of thing. Nothing ever spoken of again.
Just, you know, the once or twice. Or several times. With Gabriel. Nothing that didn’t mean I wasn’t straight, necessarily, because I haven’t done any of that since. I got with Adriana right after and I was a devoted boyfriend ever since. Y’know, til she dumped me.
Not that my brain is really cooperating with this. It’s still thinking about the stupid fucking dream and how hot it was, or how hot it thinks it was, because I’m not consenting to this. My brain’s its own thing.
And my body, too, because now my traitorous dick is joining in, even though it’s already had its goddamn fun, going firm and twitchy and impossible not to notice as I begin soaping up.
“Fuck off,” I mutter. “Just fuck off.”
Because that works. Not.
And it’s still fucking raging by the time I want to get out, and maybe this is just pent up because I didn’t get with Adriana like I’d been planning, or that bartender from last night—Sarah?
Sabrina? Sylvia, that was it—and you’d think that the stupid wet dream would be enough for it, but no.
It’s here, in my face and begging for attention.
I’m not even consciously horny. Just the rest of me is.
I slide my hand down my stomach, fingertips following my thick happy trail. Just rub one out real quick, why not? Evidence easily disposed of and it won’t bother me all day, which will get really fucking awkward if I’m trapped in a car with Ash.
Stop thinking about Ash, dipshit.
I wrap my hand around my cock and suck in my breath.
Try to think instead of—who? Not Adriana, because that’s just depressing, so…
Sylvia. Full, lipsticked mouth parted as she’s on her knees in front of me.
I tilt my head back as I pump myself, slowly at first. Her eyes roll up towards me and they’re… I don’t remember what color.
Blue. With brown and gold flecks. Blue-hazel.
Bzz. Wrong. That’s Ash, for fuck’s sake.
Okay, someone else then. I don’t remember enough about Sylvia. Fuck, I’m flipping through mental images of ex-girlfriends and flings like a goddamn sex Rolodex and finding no inspiration there, either.
Okay, what about Mariah Carey? No, too angelic, feels wrong somehow. Winona Ryder? No—way too unobtainable, even in my friggin’ dreams. Alicia Silverstone? Maybe…?