Chapter 28
Elijah’s house has real hardwood floors and a significant number of plants—in the windows, in large pots on the ground, even hanging on the wall.
Everywhere is green and lit by warm lamps on tables and shelves.
No bright overhead lights. The living room has two big couches facing each other.
The kitchen counter is filled with big bowls of fresh fruit.
“We probably have an hour until my mom gets home.” Elijah opens the fridge. “Do you want some seltzer?”
I stop at a framed, professionally shot photo of Elijah and his parents. He and his father look identical in shirts and ties. His mother is shorter with a bright yellow dress and thick purple glasses. Her big hair comes down in tight curls. She smiles wide with a gap between her teeth.
“Does she always work this late?”
“Only if she’s on call and there’s an emergency. Usually it’s for a ruptured appendix, which doesn’t take long.”
He passes me a glass, and I take a sip.
“Seltzer is bubbly water.”
He laughs. “Yes.”
His white T-shirt is tucked into his beltless jeans. He leans his butt against the countertop, and the jeans tighten around his hips.
I take a big sip of seltzer and it hurts my throat. “Where do you get your jeans?”
His face lights up. “I had to search.” He sticks out one leg. “Most new jeans are pre-distressed, so a machine adds fades, but those fades won’t match with how the jeans actually bend on your body, so the result is visually confusing.”
“I never thought of that.”
“If jeans are vintage, then the fades naturally occurred where the denim was creasing.” He demonstrates by lifting a knee up and out so fade lines stretch across his thigh. “See what I mean?”
Maybe I’m overly sensitive to visual stimuli, but only with these jeans.
“And they were cheaper because they’re used?”
“They were way more expensive.”
“Oh.”
There is who I was onstage tonight, someone eloquent and brave, and then there is who I am right now, someone who doesn’t understand pants.
Elijah laughs and puts down his glass. “Come on.”
He takes my hand and leads me to the stairs. There are little rugs on each step, and none of them slip. Upstairs is a bathroom, a room with a yoga mat, a closed door, and an open door to a room with a neatly made bed, a shoe rack of sneakers and boots, and a set of barbells.
He takes out his phone. “I’m setting an alarm for thirty minutes. Five minutes after that, we should be in my car driving you home.”
“I’m not ready for sex-sex!” I shout, and follow it with, “Sorry.”
“Is sex-sex a straight thing? There’s no hierarchy of sex.”
“Either way. I might need to take it slow.”
“That’s okay. I might too.”
I exhale.
Our shirts come off in a blur between the door and the bed.
“It seems more efficient this way,” I say as I shimmy out of my jeans.
“Life is short,” he says as he takes off his socks.
Street light through the blinds falls across his clavicle and chest. He places a hand on my bare waist and brings me closer to him. He places his other hand on my lower back at the top of my boxers and brings me closer again, until I’m pressed against the front of his jeans.
It’s a feeling of inadequacy, that I don’t know how to find such cool jeans, but even if I did find them I wouldn’t be able to afford them.
Maybe it’s not that I don’t know how to wash my face, but that I’m not able to buy the more expensive face wash and moisturizers.
Though I’m sure there are people who know how to look good without spending much.
We kiss, and it’s so fast and wet I don’t know what to think about it.
“Can I go down on you?” Elijah asks.
“I appreciate the straightforward question.”
He moves his face in front of my eyes, which means I must’ve been looking away.
“Oh.” I tell myself to say yes. “Sure.”
It’s nice to be the object of desire, a passive recipient.
And a relief, because I don’t have to worry about the right way to take the lead.
This is one thing that feels different from being with a girl, which I can’t help but make comparisons to, even though a girl, certainly, could also see me as an object of desire.
And I’m tired, either way, of seeing everything through the lens of gender, when we’re all just humans trying to get by.
Either way, when Elijah moves to the bottom of the bed and pulls down my boxers, it’s clear I’m too nervous to proceed forward appropriately.
I almost laugh. “I guess it’s not that I’ve been secretly gay this whole time. It’s just that I’m even more awkward than I realized.”
He looks up to find my eyes. “Are you okay?”
I rub my thumb against my other fingers to see how far away they feel.
“Oh.” I shrug. “You know.”
I don’t have the internal monologue telling me to be a man and get over it, so that’s progress. I’ve learned how to be an emotional mess without the baggage of masculinity.
“Sean?”
I was probably in this same state in bed with Christy when I cut myself off from the experience, but I’m not cutting myself off like that anymore. Another good sign of progress. I no longer run away from how I feel. I let myself live inside it, swim in it, drink it up.
“Sorry.” I close my eyes. “I’m trying.” I almost laugh again.
I sit up and Elijah sits beside me. He’s still in his jeans and I’m fully naked.
“Is this like what happened in your story onstage?” he asks.
“Hm?” I want to know who vacuums his bedroom. How is the rug so clean? Once, Tony slept over and got a thumbtack stuck in him. Once I pulled a bin of LEGO out from under my bed and in the corner was an apple core covered in ants.
“With Christy,” he clarifies.
“It’s similar. Yeah.”
He takes my hand. “I thought you were going to tell us at the end why you couldn’t let yourself cry, but instead you made that joke. I wanted to know the answer.”
Elijah’s smart. Drawing me back to reality with a topic I can’t resist—my performance onstage. “That reminds me,” I say, “of how I wanted to know what Joe Johnson was really going through, but instead he told jokes. The jokes were so good, though, that maybe he was right.”
“But why do you think you couldn’t let yourself cry?”
His window is closed but I feel a cool wind touching my arms. Or I’m cold because I’m naked.
I shrug. “There are parts of myself I don’t really have access to.”
“What would happen if you allowed yourself to have access to them?”
Heat rises from my belly up to my throat and spreads across my face. My words come out in a whisper. “I don’t think I want to do that.”
I imagine him letting go of my hand and moving himself away.
I imagine him drawing his legs into himself and wrapping his arms around them, resting his head on top of his knees and closing his eyes, frowning.
I’ve taken someone joyful and bold, I think, and simply by showing him who I really am, I’ve turned him into someone sad and alone.
But this isn’t what happens.
He stretches out his legs and says, “Let’s pause.
” He leans back on his elbows, the curve where his hips meets the top of his jeans a perfect place that I apparently cannot appreciate without having a nervous breakdown.
“I was so glad when you were still outside the diner,” he says.
“I wanted to ask you all day to come over after the show, but I was nervous.”
“ You were nervous?”
He shrugs. “I told you what happened with me and my friend.”
“But I’m not him.”
“I guess I just require a lot of reassurance that someone really wants to be with me.”
We keep talking, and Elijah seems truly happy to chat. I’m happy to do the same, until I feel comfortable enough that I start to think I might like to do something else.
“Okay!” I put my hands together. “I need it to be acceptable if I’m not ready to have sex of any kind. For whatever reason, I get anxious. I think I might be anxious about everything all the time, but this is the place I can’t really hide it.”
“We could do anything, including nothing, and it would be fine with me,” he says. “We could peel potatoes and it would be great.”
This feels freeing, like there’s not some unspoken target I’m trying to hit.
We lie side by side, parallel, his body the same shape as mine.
“You are still wearing your jeans, though,” I say.
“Should I not be?”
“I can’t think of a reason why you should be.”
He pulls his jeans down and I touch my heart.
He’s wearing tighty-whities.
I don’t feel pressure to get things right because he clearly doesn’t.
His kisses are sloppy and fast, and he spends a long time making out with…
my shoulder? But it makes me happy, like he either has no idea what he’s doing or he doesn’t worry about it.
It gives me permission to do the same, to have fun.
I tap my finger from one of his nipples to the other.
He laughs. “What are you doing?”
“I’m figuring out the secret code.”
I poke a finger in his belly button and he squirms away.
“Are you real?” I ask. “Let me see your butt. I want to make sure.”
“You can tell someone is real by their butt?”
“It’s the only way to know.”
He faces away so I can see his long back, and he slips off his briefs.
I nearly pass out. I press my hips against him gently and he presses back against me, but I panic and pull away.
When he turns toward me, I see his penis.
It’s different from mine but it’s the same.
I look down at myself. If his body can be desirable and inoffensive—even beautiful—can’t the same be true of mine?
“I’d like to go down on you,” I say. “But I don’t really know how.”
“I can talk you through it if you’d like?”
He tells me, kindly, what to do with my mouth and my hands. He tells me when to go faster or slower. It’s more challenging than I anticipated, but it seems like it’s going well. Then it’s quite clear that it went well.
“It worked!” I say.
He laughs.
Soon he moves me so I’m lying on my back and he starts to kiss down my chest.
“Wait.” My heart pounds. “I think I’m too nervous.”
We talk about how he wants to learn to cook and so he’s starting off by making eggs for breakfast every morning.
We talk about his favorite documentary, Ballet 422 , which follows a new choreographer putting together his first piece for the New York City Ballet.
We talk until my breath slows and I feel safe again.
When he does go down on me, I close my eyes and try to notice if it feels different being with a guy than being with a girl.
It doesn’t feel different at all. Afterwards, though, when he lies beside me and I rest my head on his chest and his heart beats loudly in my ear, that doesn’t feel like anything I’ve ever known.
“I’m so glad you moved to Long Island,” I say.
“I’m so glad you’re gay.”
“I appreciate that.” I hold up a finger. “But! For what it’s worth, I think I’m bi. Or pan. Or just queer. Those are the words that feel good to me right now.”
He laughs in a way I don’t understand. “Take your time.”
I press my ear onto his body and listen, as though his insides could clarify.
Soon he stands and I watch the curve of his back disappear under his T-shirt.
His alarm hasn’t gone off, but he must be one of those people for whom being on time means being early.
I watch his butt disappear into his tighty-whities.
“Why did you laugh just then?”
His mouth stops halfway to a smile. “It’s okay to be confused.”
“I wouldn’t say I’m confused.”
He does that same laugh.
“I thought you might be bi or pan too,” I say.
“I told you I’m gay.”
I pull the blanket around me. “You agreed it would be nice if it were the norm for a girl to make the move.”
“Yeah. Politically, that’s a concept I agree with.”
“You said you were glad a girl kissed you.”
“For her. She wanted to do it, and I’m glad she did.”
I blink.
“Sean. You’re gay.”
I touch my eyebrow. “I understand you’re trying to be affirming, but—”
“Why are you scared to say it?”
I straighten my back. “I may have had awkward moments with Christy, but unless I’m lying to myself I am attracted to girls. When I listen to who I really am, I know I can love people of any gender. Honestly, I don’t understand how that isn’t everyone’s feeling.”
He rolls his eyes with his whole head. “Corporations like to say love is love, but that’s not true. Queer love is queer love.”
“Isn’t love between any two people different from love between any other two people?”
He waves a hand. “Whatever.”
“Why are you being like this? I’m not that friend you used to hook up with.”
His face hardens. “I told you that story because I trusted you.”
He doesn’t sit and I don’t stand.
I’m reminded of how Christy said that seeing her as perfect meant I’d never seen her.
Did I see Elijah as perfect? I admired him.
But to think of him in the past tense now, even while he’s directly in front of me, literally within arm’s reach, means I must not be able to see him.
I can’t see anything beyond the inside of my skull, I think.
He tucks his shirt into his jeans. “I don’t want to be another straight boy’s secret.”
“I didn’t say I was straight.”
“I don’t want to be with a boy who isn’t proud of who he is.”
The alarm goes off.
Elijah picks up my clothes and holds them out to me.
I don’t take them. “I’m fine with meeting your mom. I’d like to meet your mom.”
He places the clothes on the bed. “I didn’t invite you to meet her.”
I put on my underwear, jeans, and T-shirt. I think of the stack of books I bought from the LGBTQ+ shelf at Housing Works and then left untouched in a tote beside my bed.
Am I lying to myself? Am I not accepting that I’m gay?
I would like to be certain of who I am. I would like to be proud of who I am.
I would like to be many things that I’m not.
It’s only when I get outside that I remember I don’t have my car.
“Bummer,” I say, and start walking.