INTRODUCTION. This is the first installment of a serialized story called "Joe College." All remaining chapters will take place during the protagonist's undergrad years and beyond, but in this first episode, we meet the hero as a surprised and frustrated sixteen year old. The schedule of future sections will vary based on personal and work obligations. Thanks for reading.
Joe College
Pt. 1
The ending is happier than the beginning, probably because I didn't want the beginning to happen at all.
In the beginning I was 16, and had brought five friends to my parents' cottage in Vermont. A year or two later it would be the kind of weekend where guys brought girls, along with the extra drama and tension that came with that. At 16 maybe we were nervous liars, or else risk averse as to our new driver's licenses and the liberties that came with them. Bringing girls felt like a gamble, so it was just us. Permission to drive to Vermont and stay at the cabin without parents was sufficiently thrilling. Rick's older brother bought us beers and a liter of vodka, and Andy had some pot. We spent all day with jet skis and kayaks, grilled at night, and then got drunk and stoned around a campfire while playing classic rock albums and arguing about bands and sports.
Except that's not all that happened. At least not where Andy and I were concerned. The stuff with Andy that weekend begins my life story so far, and if the aftermath didn't play out like Andy wanted -- and like I should have been smart enough to pursue -- I did my best to make it up to him later on.
Andy and I decided we'd split a room. I wouldn't share with my best friend Rick because I'm a light sleeper and Rick snores. Andy tended to be more considerate and calmer than the other guys in my group of friends. With him, I wouldn't go to sleep worrying that I'd wake to some dude farting in my face, or find "Slaton's bitch" Sharpied on my forehead. Andy wasn't uptight or anything -- he brought the weekend's dime bag, after all -- it's just that he just tended to be easier than the rest of us.
We were both too fair to tan well, but we both looked good under the sun, tossing a blue Nerf football with the lake's water at our waists. Andy was about 5'8; he had dark red hair cropped short and parted, and small freckles over his nose and cheeks. He had a strong jawline and a little cleft at the base of his chin. Mostly he had prominent dimples and a totally adorable smile. "Adorable" is a word girls used regarding Andy. He was a hot guy, but in a non-threatening way. They could throw an arm around him, kiss his cheek, and not think anything of it. Dimples and a sweet smile do that for a guy. It just so happened that Andy wasn't hardwired to capitalize on female attention.
Girls did not throw arms around my neck casually. When they put an arm around my neck, it usually meant that they wanted to make out. By the time I was 16, I was around six feet tall, and would grow another two inches before it stopped. My braces had been removed the autumn before. If Andy looked like a Southern frat boy, I looked like a New England prep school kid, the kind that probably would have annoyed Holden Caulfield. I had dark brown hair and high cheek bones; brown eyes; and a scatter of freckles on my upper cheeks. And then I had my own smile, constructed via the finest orthodontics that money could buy. In college, one guy told me that my smiles used up half of my face, which he meant as a compliment. With my braces off, I was still in a stage where I dug looking at myself in the mirror, making Joker-like smiles, running a finger over my teeth to feel their smoothness, and pouting in ways that I thought looked sexy.
We were throwing the football without talking much. Neither of us played on the team, but we threw elegant spirals. I'd set up two speakers on the shore and had a classic rock station playing quietly. Further down the lake Rick and Sanjay were on my parents' jet skis, while Ethan and Darren had taken off kayaking. As host I felt an obligation to let everyone else take first pick of activities.
I was happy to hang back, drink contraband beers, and toss a football with Andy. We ran cross country together, and if his even-toned demeanor meant that sometimes Andy missed out on the subterfuge and chaos that Rick and I enjoyed, Andy was solid company.
"Dude," I said to him, after an hour or so of lobbing the football and talking music, "I don't want to ditch you with nobody to hang with, but I'm kind of beat by last night." We'd been awake past 3 a.m.; I woke that day with a tough hangover and a sour mouth. My body wasn't used to alcohol back then, and I was unsteady with my drinking boundaries. "I need a little more sleep if I'm going to be worth shit tonight."
Andy tucked the football under his armpit. "Sounds like a plan to me," he said. "I was checking out the hammock next to your deck."
We threw towels over our shoulders and walked to the house. It was on ten acres adjacent to a quiet lake, used mostly by cottage-owners from Boston.
Being mid-week in July, there weren't many other people around, just fishermen on skiffs and an occasional sailboat.
Andy and I went into the room we were sharing and closed the door to change.
Right away, he dropped his swim trunks. Between running together on the cross-country team, gym classes, and swimming at each others' houses, we'd changed in front of each other hundreds of times.
Something about this felt awkward, though. It felt too close. I recognized that right away, and the intimacy of it threw me.
Maybe because the room was small and the wooden shades were drawn so we seemed cordoned near each other in a kind of amber light, or maybe because I'd instinctively locked the door behind me, or because he yanked off his trunks so quickly. Suddenly I had a little room that seemed full of my buddy Andy, and unless I made a dramatic show of looking away, it was impossible not to see his body. It was a clean-lined, rigid body, which is what you'd expect from a guy who also ran track and was on the swim team.
His arms and pecs weren't huge, but they were defined, and he had a set of abs that drew tight against him. Freckles coated his shoulders, but below that, his chest and stomach was smooth and unmarked by any blemish or hair, except for the light run of copper-colored hairs between his navel and auburn-colored pubes.
I didn't want to look at him when I removed my swim trunks. I stared down at my own body. I had a dusting of dark chest hair between my pecs and the trail that ran from my navel down to my pubes. I'd had to do some weight training for basketball and baseball, and it showed. You could discern just a little bit of a tanline from the top of my swimming trunks, but I'm so fair-complected that it didn't show much. My torso was more muscular than Andy's and I was a few inches taller -- his eyes were roughly at the height of my shoulders. Naturally the cold water had drawn my cock and balls, just as it had for Andy. My legs looked tan to me; I pretended to be distracted by my tan.
There was no forethought to it; it hadn't even entered my mind before. I can't source the logic behind those minutes where we faced each other, unclothed, looking at each other's bodies, and why our mutual study happened on that day instead of during some unsupervised afternoon at one of our houses. We were both still wet; water dripped down my thighs and lower legs; my pubic hair was still damp from the lake. The primary sound was our breathing set to the background of water drops. As I stood dripping, I traced my vision down from one of his nipples, down over his ribs and his six pack, and fixated back and forth between looking at his abs and his cock -- as if for some reason occasionally staring at his navel, rather than his cock uninterrupted, made me subtler and more socially acceptable.
He inspected me, too. Both of us were getting semi-hard. Eventually, when I looked to his dick, it no longer pulled tight into him, chased scared by the water. It hung out over his balls, with more heft to it. The head looked big. There was a pink shading to the length of his shaft, which was maybe four inches in a semi-erect, quasi-lumbering state. Looking down at myself, my dick shifted whenever I exhaled. Suddenly I saw my own body in the abstract, through another person's eyes.
I had no idea what to do with this. There'd never been an occasion where I studied the body of another guy since I hit puberty, just occasional peeks in the locker room. Andy and I had open, mutual inspection, and neither of us seemed self-conscious about that.
"Hey, Andy?"
"What's up Joe?"
"Hey, my bag's behind you, just back on the right. Mind tossing it to me?"
"Sure dude. Sorry that I was blocking your way."
"No problem," I said, watching his rounded, hairless ass and the back of his leg muscles as he turned from me and bent to grab my duffel bag. I saw the webbing of his balls and the silhouette of his cock when he leaned forward; I felt a small volt in my own dick. The semi was a few gestures from becoming a hard-on. Andy tossed the bag to me and I turned my back to him, holding the bag at my waist as I retrieved a set of black boxer-briefs and hurriedly stepped into them, secure when my penis was safely encased.
When I turned back Andy was struggling to step into his own boxers, while his cock dangled like a saber. I kept my eyes on him while I put on my khaki shorts and three-button shirt.
"You know, if it's okay," Andy said, "I might take my nap in here. I don't know if I could sleep well out in the hammock."
"That's cool," I said. "Whatever's comfortable."
"Yeah, if that's cool with you," Andy said. "Unless you wanted to crash in here, too. I don't want to horn in on your space."
"Nah, man," I said. "I'm taking the couch."
And with that, I picked up our soggy swim trunks to throw over the shower rod, closed the bedroom door behind me, and stumbled to the living room couch, where I curled into the fetal position and closed my eyes.
All I knew was that I was fucking horny, and boned. Before the other four guys could come in from the lake, I locked myself in the bathroom. It took only a few tugs before I lobbed lines of jizz against the bathtub tile.
Then I wiped it with a fistful of toilet paper. I nevertheless remained boned. I brushed my teeth, rinsed my mouth with stinging mouthwash, and washed my face before my penis settled down to a reasonable condition, one where I could curl beneath a light blanket and drift to sleep.
I was on that couch with the window open and the lake breeze occasionally hitting me. I slept lightly but woke up every few minutes, thinking of Andy's skin, just how clean and good it had looked, and how turned on I felt while we faced each other.
At that age I was still a virgin. I'd shot my load dry-humping with a girl, made out with numerous girls, and had gotten an unhappy handjob from a girl, who didn't know what she was doing and furthermore had long nails and thus brought to mind a hermit crab attacking my cock.
When I was fifteen my girlfriend let me finger her, but the feeling was so foreign -- disgusting being the best word -- that I withdrew my hand quickly, like I'd accidentally touched a hot burner or a dead animal. The girlfriend made a hurt, nervous face. I didn't want to be responsible for a female's lifelong complex regarding the allure of her own vagina, so I went back to kissing her. I told her that we shouldn't go that far in another person's car at a house party; that if I was going to do that with her it should be someplace private, where it would be special for us. Instead, we broke up a few weeks later, partly because I didn't like the feel, and partly because I didn't want her to learn how I didn't know what I was doing.
Guys hadn't materialized before. I'd compared myself in locker rooms ever since they made us start taking gang showers in sixth-grade gym class, but that had been scientific. I'd never looked at another guy with concentration. What I'd seen in Andy had been that skin and that muscle and the way his bones aligned. We were both sexually mature white guys with British surnames, but there had been a different shape, the way that Andy's body cut like a vertical line, narrow from chest to thighs, while mine was more like a V, with a big ribcage and a stomach that narrowed down to my hips. More than noticing the distinctions, I'd been fascinated by every inch of him. I'd wanted to reach out my hand and touch him: Learn whether the skin on his chest felt as smooth as it looked, and to pinch the muscle at his forearm. I wondered how it would feel if he pressed up against me.
The way his dick swung out and hung heavy, I'd wanted to lift it and test the weight.
I went into the bathroom and jerked off again.
The jet skis pulled up to shore. Rick and Sanjay removed their lifejackets by the lake. I pressed down at my crotch to satisfy myself that boner action would not be visible to a disinterested observer.
"Dude, what's for dinner?" Rick said when he lumbered in and cracked a beer.
Because Andy and I took naps while the other four rowed and swam under the sun, by 10 that night the two of us had significantly more energy than the rest of them. We'd downed a few beers and passed a joint. They looked sunburned and exhausted, but Andy and I were lively in front of the campfire, having an elaborate, stoned discussion about Bob Dylan's influence on Green Day lyrics. Starting in eighth grade, he and I sometimes shot pool at his parents' house while we unpacked the words to "Desolation Row" and "Like a Rolling Stone," and if you think that sounds like a dorkfest, I'd loathe you in real life.
"I can't fucking take any more of this," Rick said, yawning around midnight and lobbing an empty beer can into the darkness. "I'll have to reconsider this in the morning. Joey, thanks for the day, and Andy, thanks for the weed, but I'm unfortunately fucking exhausted."
"Dude, you can either stay up late drinking and smoking, or you can go to bed at a reasonable hour and spend your days outdoors," I said. "If you try both, it'll catch up with you."
"Thanks for the wisdom, Threepeeyo," Rick said. "Under either scenario I have time to kick your ass."
"Not when we're near open flames," I said. "Burns injure worse than bruises."
"Strong point. Hot coals are no joke."
Ethan and Sanjay and Darren separately followed not long after. It was back to me and Andy. We'd been making eye contact that night. He'd begin talking and I'd lock my eyes on his, even if he was addressing somebody else. We had been staring at each other while we talked to other people.
"Back to Dylan," I said.
"Definitely," Andy said.
"Is there any more weed down here?"
"Nah, it's back in our room. I can get it if you want."
"Don't sweat it. It'll make me more tired at this point."
"Why? Are you tired? If you need to crash, we can call it a night."
"I'm good," I said. "Unless you're tired. We can call it a night whenever."
"Let's have another beer," Andy said, so we did. Then, after we finished, he said, "You holding up okay?"
"I'm relatively drunk and fairly stoned," I said, and I was -- my neck muscles felt weak, such that I was strongly aware of my head posture. My eyes kept focus on Andy, but they occasionally drifted -- down to his hands or his freckled knees or the outline of his calf muscles lit by the campfire. I felt tingly. "I'm not sure whether I should drink more."
"You feel like hitting the sack?"
"Nah. Not yet. Let's, just, like, sit here, and appreciate nature," I said, making a show to turn my face toward the night sky -- damn the extra weight for my stoned tingly neck muscles. We were far from city lights so the sky was black and clear. We all grew up in Westchester County, just north of New York, and this kind of darkness had the power to impress and intimidate me. On certain nights a person could discern the light glow of the Milky Way. The lake's surface was still, and from my angle I made out the moon's reflection, as well as the reflection of a campfire on the opposite shore.
"Hey, Joe?"
"What's up Andy."
"I just saw a bat, dude."
"That's cool. Bats eat insects in mid-air. Bats are pretty fucking awesome when you think about them. I'd fucking love to be a bat, man."
"I think I'm ready to hit the sack man," Andy said.
"Awesome," I said. "Me too."
We extinguished the fire with a bucket of lake water.
There are only three bedrooms in my parents' cabin. They'd bought it when I was a little kid, and even though they could have upgraded to a bigger place or bought a house on the beach, it retained sentimental value for all of us, so we kept it. The room Andy and I shared was smallest, but I took it because it was traditionally mine during family trips, and I'm a creature of habit. Upstairs was the bedroom that belonged to my parents, and next to it was a room with the bunkbeds normally occupied by my two younger brothers.
In the ground-floor bathroom, I brushed my teeth and removed my contacts while Andy took a leak behind me. (This kind of conduct wasn't unusual or remotely erotic in my circle of male friends.) When it was my turn, I pissed for a few seconds, then held my dick in my hands. Already it had chub. I pretended that I was giving it a couple of clean shakes, but really, I was checking myself out again. When Andy cleared out of the bathroom, I ran a cold washcloth over my face and enjoyed my reflection; I tested smiles and pouty expressions, and felt content with the results.
This time, when I locked the bedroom door, I was conscious of it. Rick and Sanjay watch too much "Jackass," I reminded myself, and it'd be a nightmare if I woke with a sack of flour dumped on my head.
The previous night Andy and I slept in boxers and T-shirts. Adhering to the practice employed when two guys shared a bed, Andy slept above the covers in a sleeping bag. This shielded against late-night intersections while dudes slept.
Now Andy was shirtless in blue boxers, with his back turned to me. He'd been wearing a three-button polo like myself, which he'd thrown into a corner. Lit by the bedside lamp, I saw the outlines of Andy's back muscles as he leaned over his bag. The top of his glutes and the crevice of his ass were visible at the sagging elastic of his boxers.
Christ, there went my dick again.
I turned my back to Andy as I dropped my khaki shorts. Through my black boxer briefs, I maneuvered my dick so that it rested upward against my thigh and wouldn't be horizontal as the blatant semi-erection that it was. I peeled off my shirt. Again, Andy was blocking the path to my duffel bag, which held the T-shirt I'd slept in the night before.
Instead of asking him to hand it to me, I dropped shirtless into bed. I was drunk; I was stoned; I was tired. The bed looked good to me, and I was reckoning with the intensity of how good Andy looked to me, too. To conceal my hard-on, I quickly threw the sheets and comforter over myself. I rolled up to a fetal position facing Andy and his overnight bag.
"Your shoulders are sunburned," I said.
"Yours too. Hopefully we don't get skin cancer."
"What are you looking for?"
"I think I left my T-shirt by the lake this morning." He dropped his overnight bag to the floor and crawled shirtless into his sleeping bag, careful to keep his back turned to me. This gave me another view of his back and a close-up of the top of his ass slipping out of his boxers, something approximating a quarter-moon. "Fuck it," he said, zipping up his sleeping bag and rolling onto his back. He reached over and turned off the lamp.
A little moonlight came through the wood-slatted blinds. Andy kept sighing through his nose. Facing him in my fetal position, I measured my breathing carefully, trying to sound like I was asleep but watching the silhouette of his face through squinted eyelids. He crooked his right arm behind his head and kept his left arm inside the sleeping bag. I liked the angle of his jaw; I noticed when he licked his lips and then exhaled sharply through his nostrils.
"If you're having a tough time sleeping," I said, "you can turn on the light and read."
"Thanks man," he said. "I should be okay after awhile."
"You can get out of the sleeping bag if it's making it harder to sleep," I said, careful to keep my modulation casual. "It's no big deal."
"You sure?"
"It's cool man," I said. "Don't worry about it."
He hesitated. It might have been ten seconds before he said, "Fuck it," again, and unzipped the sleeping bag. He slid out of it and kicked it to the floor. In the seconds before he crawled under the covers, I got a clear angle of the hard-on jutting against his boxers. At that sight, my dick started going wild. Both of us were shirtless in our shorts, boned up, and just a of foot from each other under the same sheets. We remained in our positions, with me curled on my side facing Andy, and Andy on his back, right arm crooked behind his neck and left arm under covers.
Even at this point, I'm not sure I was thinking in terms of gay, but if I was, I didn't care. All I know was that there was this body next to me, and it appeared to be many varieties of awesome. I felt a little bit of Andy's body heat; the spatial separation was killing me.
"Hey, Joe?" he said.
"What's up Andy?"
"Do you feel pretty stoned right now?"
"Yeah man, I'm pretty messed up."
"I keep wanting to move," Andy said.
I lifted a hand and put it on his shoulder. "You're not moving," I said.
There was a few seconds' pause. "No, dude," he said, "I don't think that I'm moving already, I mean that I want to move."
"I know, man," I said. I moved my hand to his upper chest and left it there. His skin was smooth and hairless. I felt a layer of thin, hard muscle underneath it, and pressed down slightly. "What I mean is that you're not moving."
His posture slacked. He breathed loudly. The right arm behind his neck, the one that stretched and provided me an eye-level view of his armpit hair, nervously reached out until its hand was on my shoulder, working my muscles in an awkward-angled massage. Andy glanced toward my face. He looked fucking adorable to me, with his dimples and chin and blue eyes. We made eye contact, which I think was the last time that I looked directly at his face until morning.
We inched together until our bodies touched. His face was at my shoulder and my chin was at the top of his head. He smoothed his hands over my chest and stomach while I caressed his back and shoulders. I pressed my legs against his. His skin felt lean and clean and familiar, not like my cushiony, pillowy, impatient fumblings with girls. Not that I knew what I was doing with Andy, but I just knew that it was comfortable, and I wanted more of it. Our chests pressed against each other. In the poorly ventilated room free of cross-breeze, the sweat of our chests stuck us together. I slid so that our chests rubbed. With his face near my neck, I could even smell his breath, with its dry traces of beer and marijuana.
That smelled hot to me, too.
"Are you okay?" I said.
"I think so," he said. "Are you okay?"
"I think so," I said. "Is this the way you wanted to move?"
"I'm not sure," Andy said, "but it feels pretty great."
"Yeah, it's pretty nice," I said. "Do you feel like anything else?"
"Like what do you mean?"
"I'm not sure," I said. "But if you want to think about it and see, that'd be real cool by me."
"Umm," he said. He was breathing hard against my neck and shoulder. His breath was practically condensing on my skin. He pressed his lips against my shoulder. Andy's hand paused before it slid to the elastic of my boxer briefs. The way that we'd positioned ourselves, our pelvises weren't touching, just the tops of our chests. Tentatively, he slipped a finger below the rim of my shorts. It slid against my pubes until it touched the side of my cock, where it rested.
"Is that okay?" Andy said.
"Yeah, man," I said. "Feels awesome. If it's cool with you, you can keep feeling it."
"It seems pretty big," he said.
"I don't know," I said. "I've never seen another guy's hard-on, or at least one that's not in porno."
"Well, if you want to check mine out," Andy said, "just to see what it's like."
"Cool," I said.
I wasn't going to be as tentative as Andy. My hand jumped into his boxers.
When I wrapped my fingers against his rod, he thrust his hips a little, fucking lightly against my palm. I think he was between six and seven inches, and it felt amazing. Something like that didn't naturally occur in nature, I thought to myself; it required the finest minds in design and engineering. Andy's erect dick in my hand reminded me of being a kid and tearing an action figure out of the box, the way you'd run your hand over it to feel the modeling and shapes. There was no way that mine felt that good, I told myself; his seemed so muscled and responsive, the way the head was rubbery and the shaft felt like cartilage, and when I pressed my thumb against the slit of his dick it was lubricated with pre-cum and made his body tremor against mine.
With my free hand, I pressed his tentative hand against my boner, and then slipped out of my boxer briefs. He felt out my dick and cupped his palm under my balls. Andy let out a soft moan and pushed down his boxers. We moved our bodies so that we pressed against each other, touching from necks to knees. Our dicks abutted each other. I cradled all four of our balls in my hand. Andy licked the skin of my shoulder.
"Our dicks feel like they're about the same size," I said.
"Really?"
"Maybe it's just tougher to gauge when it's your own," I said. "That's why mine seemed big to you."
"Yours feels amazing."
"Yours does too," I said. "So do your balls. They're, like, so loose. I can kind of feel the sweat on them."
"Ha," he said. "Happens to the best of us."
"Yeah, it's stuffy in here," I said. I shifted so that our cheeks were against each other. Both of us were sweaty, and the sweat of my face slid against Andy's. The idea of looking at his face weirded me out, but I pictured it, with his lips full and red, his eyes closed with a relaxed intensity. I sniffed at the skin behind his ear. It smelled like suntan lotion, shampoo, and sweat. "You smell amazing, man," I said. I kissed him at the neck. "Fuck, you feel amazing, Andy."
"Dude, you feel awesome, too," he said. "It was good to kind of study you this afternoon."
"Better now though," I said.
Andy reached down and squeezed our dicks together. The undersides of our dickheads kissed. With his thumb he mixed our pre-cum and felt the slit of my penis. Andy licked the palm of his hand a couple of times and then jerked our cocks together with his spit-lubricated fist. It didn't take much. He jizzed first, with his cum spraying on our lower stomachs and hitting part of my arm, which I'd wedged between us.
"Hot, man," Andy said, and a couple of seconds later, I blew my load, too.
There was a lot of power behind that. I held my breath while I jizzed, and when I exhaled, felt vaguely lightheaded. It was the most intense orgasm I'd ever had, and the runner-up wasn't even close. I let out some nervous laughter, and then rolled over on my back.
I looked down and saw our cum all over my stomach and arm, thickening and matting up my treasure trail, streaking off my skin onto the sheets. It didn't take long before an overwhelming sense of disgust and guilt washed over me. Suddenly it seemed like all of that build-up had been for nothing.
I felt the blood rush out of my head.
"Hey man," I said, "could you hand me a few kleenex from off the nightstand?"
As I wiped our semen off my stomach, I concluded that I was becoming a disgusting, pot-smoking, sexual deviant. It was time to reevaluate my priorities! Perhaps I would even stop being an atheist, I thought to myself, as the smell of semen and sweat filled my nostrils.
Fortunately, I was so stoned and exhausted that I managed to sleep anyway.
But I wasn't so disgusted that I felt a need to dress. In fact, before going to sleep for good, I got out of bed naked to make sure that the bedroom door was solidly locked. The next morning I woke up at about 7:30 a.m. because Andy's leg was rubbing against mine. My hard-on pressed against his bony, naked hip. His grin was adorable, his dimples were just that adorable, and I indulged myself with a few seconds of looking into his adorably tired blue eyes before I hugged his shoulders. I was so disgusted that I had no choice but to get off with him, holding hard to his asscheeks while our dicks shot off in near unison. So digusted that afterward we stayed on top of the sheets for maybe two hours, just looking at each other's bodies and feeling each other's muscles, dicks and hair. Only when footsteps sounded from upstairs did I toss on my swimming trunks and run out to the lake so that the water could wash all the dried disgusting male ejaculate off my torso.
"You smell amazing, man. Fuck, you feel amazing, Andy."
Those words tormented me for months.
Not because they were repeated to anyone else (I don't know if Andy even remembered them) but because in my mind, those words made me gay. They elevated the encounter to something more significant than a pair of guys who needed release and got carried away, which is how I badly wanted to frame the story to myself. In my sixteen-year-old mind, that sort of talk forced me into a realization: horny guys need to get off, but only a gay guy would think that way.
And because I couldn't handle that, I turned against Andy. I convinced myself that he'd ensnared me.
So what should have happened didn't.
What should have happened is that for our junior and senior year proms, Andy and I took dates, ditched them when the dance ended, and stayed up until sunrise, blowing one another. What should have happened is that at house parties, Andy and I "got tired" early, went back to his place, and stayed up until sunrise, blowing one another. Handjobs at lunch hour, his cock in my mouth when we "studied" after cross-country practice. Staying up until sunrise every Saturday morning, blowing one another. "Nothing like a good blowjob at sunrise," I might have said while we 69ed, at which point Andy would pause to concur.
No teenage guys -- gay or straight -- might have had it as good as us.
In my radical-activist hypothetical, Andy became my first serious boyfriend.
We came out together at the end of our junior year. We grew up in such a limousine-liberal enclave that the school district would have thrown a formal celebration. They would have called it "Joe and Andy Day," with a ticker tape assembly followed by a formal speaking tour of the elementary schools and a reception at the junior high.
But none of that happened.
Instead I directed a few months of hostility toward Andy. I hurt his feelings gratuitously and unnecessarily, in hopes of extracting some kind of atonement and correcting myself. It was the meanest, most self-defeating thing I've ever done.
Not only did I forget that he was a person, but I forgot about the kind of person he was and the sort of friendship we'd had for ten years. We'd been friends since kindergarten. He bought me the really cool remote-control tank for my eighth birthday; when we were even younger I went with his family on a beach day, and his dad held me on his shoulders while the ocean waves hit. Andy was growing up to be incredibly smart and independent, with all kinds of interesting and original thoughts rattling around his head.
Everybody loved him. He was our class president and would sit on homecoming court senior year. He deserved all of that.
But after that night together, I wanted as much distance between us as possible. Andy called a few days after we got back from my cottage and asked if I felt like coming over to swim. I didn't return his call, and I didn't return a subsequent call asking whether I felt like meeting up to play tennis, or the third call asking if I felt like hitting up a rock show in the City. Eventually he got hold of me, and I said I couldn't meet up -- my mom was making me mow the lawn. He saw through my lie, I could tell, but didn't call me out on it. His voice sounded so sad right then, so dejected.
Andy thought that he'd stumbled onto a boyfriend, and at that point my strongest interest was to escape him.
When cross-country practices got underway, I picked the gym locker farthest from his. I didn't joke with him any more; we no longer coordinated rides; if I found myself in a group conversation, I refused eye contact with him and never addressed him directly. In school we ran in the same tight circle, which made my avoidance even harder. At the same time, I told myself that if I pissed him off too badly, he had the power to humiliate me.
What mattered most was that I strongly signaled my disapproval, and that nothing happened between us again.
In an October session of AP Chemistry, the teacher assigned me and Andy to the same lab group. Immediately I pressured an eager-to-please girl to swap places. I glanced back at him. His adorable face was dark red.
He called late that night, using the carefully chosen words and modulation that guys generally employed when they called girls.
"I just wanted to tell you that I'm more sorry than you can ever know," Andy said, "and that it's something I'll never talk about, not with you again, or with anyone else. I don't know how it happened or what came over me, but I don't blame you for hating me because of it. It's the worst thing I've ever done. I'm sorry, Joe, truly sorry. I'll never live it down. If you don't accept my apology and if this is how it has to stay, I understand, but you've been one of my best friends since first grade, and I'd feel like shit if that had to stop just because I did some fucked-up stuff when I was stoned out of my mind."
His voice had cracked at a couple of different points, and nervous pauses were rare for my well spoken friend. Listening to him, I felt just awful, as bad as I've ever felt about anything. I pictured him on the other end of the phone, his adorable face turning red, his eyes fighting back tears -- I'd hurt and humiliated this guy who deserved it least, just to prove the impossible to myself. Whether he said those words and took the blame merely to placate me, or whether my cruelty had tricked him into believing that he'd manipulated me, it hardly mattered.
"Don't worry, man," I said. My voice was quiet. Picturing his face, everything collapsed for me. I'm pretty sure that if this discussion had been face to face, I would have been making out with him by this point, just as a preliminary reparation. "I know you didn't mean for that stuff to happen. I shouldn't treat you like that. We were pretty messed up when it started. We'll never talk about it again."
I went on like that for awhile. My forgiveness made him feel better.
Framing it as a confused, intoxicated mistake let us both retain our dignity.
But I knew that every word of Andy's apology was unnecessary; that accepting it merely compounded my hypocrisy.
Because for three months, I jerked off several times a day thinking about Andy. When we passed in the hall, I felt my cock slide hotter against my thigh. After cross-country practice, my locker was far from his, but every day I tried to get a look at him in the showers, and when I couldn't, I drove home disappointed. By the time we talked on the phone that night, I no longer had any doubt about my situation.
It would be more than 20 months until I had the nerve to revisit that initial night. We'd graduated high school by then, and I made it a small mission to redeem myself in his eyes.