Chapter 3
I can’t stop thinking about it.
Not the exam itself, not really, not the clinical parts of it. What I can’t shake is his hands. His voice. The way he said my name like it cost him nothing at all, like a man that calm has never once in his life had to work at sounding unshaken.
I’m alone in my apartment, staring at the ceiling in the dark, running the whole thing back like a video I can’t stop replaying.
The pressure of his finger. The way my body just reacted, no permission asked, nothing I could do to stop it.
The way he named it out loud, so plainly, like it was nothing, and how that plainness is somehow the part I can’t get out of my head.
My hand drifts down under the sheet, presses flat against myself through my boxers. I don’t stroke. I just hold, feeling myself half hard already just from thinking about it, shame and want tangled so tight in my chest I can’t tell where one starts and the other ends.
I’m straight. I dated Madison for two years, up until three months ago, when she sat me down at the kitchen table and told me, kindly, carefully, like she’d rehearsed it, that she didn’t think I actually wanted any of it.
Not her, not really. Not the way a guy is supposed to want his girlfriend.
She used the word passionless. I remember hating that word more than I hated the breakup itself.
I never once looked at a guy and felt anything either, not at the gym, not anywhere, so I filed the whole thing under maybe I’m just not a very sexual person and moved on with my life.
Now I’m lying here at two in the morning with my hand over my own dick because I can’t stop thinking about a forty-four-year-old man’s finger and the sound of my own name in his mouth, and Madison’s voice keeps looping underneath it like something clicking into place I really didn’t want explained to me this way.
I don’t tell anyone. Obviously I don’t tell anyone. What would I even say. Hey man, weird thing, turns out I wasn’t passionless, I just needed the right kind of doctor.
Practice is worse than usual that week. My roommate Dev keeps asking if something’s wrong, if I’m sick, if the shoulder thing is bothering me more than I’m letting on, and I keep saying I’m fine in a voice that doesn’t sound convincing even to me.
Coach benches me for the scrimmage because I can’t focus, can’t stop my mind from wandering back to a room I’ve only been in twice, and I sit on the sideline replaying a stranger’s hands instead of watching the match in front of me.
Dev notices too, in his own way, though I lie to him just as easily as I would have lied to Madison.
I tell him it’s nothing, and he lets it go, and some small, guilty part of me is grateful for how easy I’ve always been to lie to people about this stuff.
I never had to work very hard at seeming fine.
I’m starting to understand, lying awake at two in the morning, that maybe that ease was never actually a good sign.
I do the math on the age gap without meaning to.
Twenty-two years. When he was my age I wasn’t even born yet.
He’s old enough that whatever this is, he’s clearly seen it before, clearly has some working theory about it he’s not sharing, and there’s something about that unbothered expertise that gets under my skin worse than if he’d been flustered by it too.
If he’d reacted like it was a big deal, I could’ve told myself it was a big deal, weird, aberrant, a mistake.
Instead he just named it and moved on, and that composure is what I can’t stop circling back to.
I remember the pale line on his hand where a ring used to sit.
I don’t know his whole story, whether it ended badly or just ended, but I find myself wondering about it anyway, turning it over the same way I turn over everything else about him.
Some other life he lived before he ever laid eyes on me. It shouldn’t matter. It does anyway.
Every guy my own age I know performs something, confidence they don’t actually have, jokes to cover for not knowing what to say.
Garrett doesn’t perform anything. He just is what he is, a man who stopped needing anyone’s approval a long time before I was old enough to start seeking it.
I can’t make sense of how much that unsettles me, or how much I want to go back and be unsettled by it again.
There’s a version of this where I tell myself it’s just curiosity, some clinical fascination with a body doing something unexpected, nothing more complicated than that.
I try that version out for a night or two.
It doesn’t hold. What I actually want, lying here alone at two in the morning with my hand pressed over myself, is to hear him say my name again in that same calm voice, like nothing about me could possibly rattle him.
Every night that week goes about the same. I lie awake replaying it. I don’t stroke, I just hold myself there, half hard, telling myself I’ll stop thinking about it tomorrow.
Tomorrow doesn’t come.
Wednesday, Dev and I are at the diner near campus, and he’s talking about some girl from his econ class, and I’m nodding along at what feel like the right moments when he stops mid-sentence and just looks at me.
“You’re not even here, man.”
“I’m here.”
“You’ve said ‘yeah’ to three different questions in a row and one of them was ‘do you think coach is gonna bench Marcus again.’“ He leans back in the booth, studying me the way he studies game tape, looking for the tell. “Something’s up. You’ve been weird for like a week.”
“I’m fine. Just stressed. Shoulder thing, and finals coming up.”
“Your shoulder’s fine, you’ve been lifting normal all week.” He says it easy, not accusing, just observant in a way that makes my stomach drop anyway. “Whatever it is, you know you can tell me, right? I’m not gonna judge you.”
I almost do it. I get right up to the edge of it, my mouth already halfway open around some version of the truth, and then I picture actually saying the words out loud, I think I liked it when a man had his finger inside me, and I lose my nerve completely.
“It’s nothing,” I say instead. “Really. I’m good.”
He doesn’t push, the way good friends don’t push past a certain point, but I catch him watching me for the rest of the meal like he’s still waiting for the real answer. I go home that night feeling worse than before, not better, the weight of not saying it somehow heavier than the thing itself.
The follow-up is Thursday. Wednesday night I almost call and cancel, phone in my hand, his number pulled up on the screen, thumb hovering. I don’t do it. I tell myself it’s because I actually need the treatment to work, because ignoring a real medical thing would be stupid.
That’s not why. I know it’s not why. I just don’t say the real reason out loud, even to myself, not yet.
I park in the clinic lot Thursday afternoon and sit there for five minutes before I go in, unable to say why. I know why anyway.
I do know.