Dangerously Happy (2 page)

I’d already emptied the bottle without realizing how fast I was drinking. “Thanks, but I should get going.”

“
Okay. But play me your song first.”

“
My song?”

“
The one you were going to play for the group.”

“
It’s just a work in progress. It’s not really ready for a premier.”

“
Good. I’ll feel all the more privileged.”

Even though I’m not so great at socializing, I’m not usually shy at all about playing or singing, so I grabbed my guitar and gave it a quick tuning. But as soon as I got going, seeing how intently he was listening and watching me, I got as nervous as I did the first time I played on stage. I didn’t forget the notes or the words, I just felt weirdly exposed. Vulnerable. Maybe it was because the song was more personal than what I usually wrote for the group.

When I finished, after what felt like ten minutes even though the song is less than five minutes long, Dario said, “You really have a beautiful voice,” his tone slightly changed, as if the song had genuinely touched him. “It gets a bit buried under all the instruments, I think, when you all play together. It’s nice to hear you singing like this, no amps, just the delicate—intricate, but delicate—accompaniment of your one guitar.”

“
Thanks.” It felt like a lame reply to such an effusive compliment, but that was all I could come up with.

“
It doesn’t seem like your band’s usual style, but it will probably sound different with the whole group playing.”

“
No, you’re right. I don’t know if the other guys will want to put it in the set.”

“
Ready to branch off on your solo career?”

“
Yeah, right.”

“
Well, you can’t let a group vote kill your darlings.” The way he was meeting my eyes made me feel strangely exposed, as if he could read my thoughts. “That masochistic act of infanticide is for you, and you alone.”

“
I don’t take the music thing that seriously.”

“
Yes you do.” He said it with such certainty, like he knew my mind better than I did.

“
What are you working on these days?” I asked, honestly more to take the focus off of me than out of genuine interest. I confess I’m not particularly literary.

“
A novel. A gruesome tome that will weigh as much as
War and Peace
or
2666
.”

I had no idea what
2666
was. “Do you have anything short I could read?”

“
Sure.” He got up, receded into the distance, took something down from one of the shelves that stretched across half the width and up half the height of the loft, then came back from the vanishing point and handed me a book. “It’s for you. I have extras.” It was the novel he’d gotten published.

I was so flattered I found myself asking, didn’t he have anything really sh
ort, something I could read right then. I suddenly felt like it would be rude not to reciprocate the attention and praise he’d given my song.

“
I don’t usually write short stories,” he said. “I have one thing, but I don’t think you’d like it.”

Instead of asking why not, I said, “Try me.”

“
It’s . . . vaguely pornographic. In the most literary sense, of course.”

“
I can’t remember ever saying no to porn,” I joked, trying to be cavalier and gloss over what I knew he was getting at, but even as the words came out of my mouth I was regretting them. Or not really regretting, but just feeling that they were false. That I was being fake and putting on a show for him.

He said, “I don’t think my kind of porn is your kind of porn,” which of course he meant as a red flag, as if I hadn’t known all along that he was gay, as if I hadn't seen him and his boyfriend at half of the parties Avalyn and I had been at that first year I knew him.

“
Afraid of staining my snow-white innocence?” I joked, hoping it didn’t sound forced, still masquerading as I don’t know what, overdoing it so he wouldn’t think I was uptight, repressed, or even some kind of homophobic asshole.

“
Alright.” This time instead of making the journey cross-country to the bookshelf he picked up the tablet that was on the table next to his armchair, pulled up the file, and handed it to me, now with a slightly coy or mischievous grin instead of his usual affable smile. I started reading. Meanwhile, I heard him get up, then noticed (I don’t think I’ve ever in my life given anything the undivided focus he seemed to give me while I’d sung and played a few minutes earlier) that he was loading a bowl.

“
You don’t have to read the whole thing,” he said, then took a hit. It occurred to me (again, I seem to suffer from some mild form of ADHD) that he might actually be almost as nervous about sharing his short story as I’d been playing my solo number for him. He took another hit off the pipe, then he passed it to me, and even though I wanted to act like my attention was as undivided as his had been for my performance, I took a hit, a much bigger hit than I meant to because I was nervous and I’m not a regular smoker like Dario and my bandmates were, telling myself it was the friendly thing to do, but in the back of my mind I knew the truth was I was medicating my nerves.

I started over from the top. It wasn’t pornographic. Not even vaguely. But it was erotic. Not as in erotica. Just, the language was incredibly sensual, making every image of every interaction between the couple in the story erotic, even when there was nothing sexual going on. And about three pages in, I got the shock of my life because for the first time ever I was finding the idea of two men arousing. Not in some vague, abstract way, but in that immediate, physical way where I knew that if I kept reading, if I didn’t make a determined effort to stop it, my dick was going to get hard. And then that thought—fuck, it was like being in junior high again—that thought was like some kind of lever that opened the dam or something, because as soon as it leaked into in my mind, it started to happen, and after a couple of seconds I realized that for the first time in more than a decade no amount of willpower was going to stop it.

Maybe it was the pot, but then I had the thought that maybe that was the best compliment I could pay Dario; a straight guy getting hard reading his homoerotic story had to be better than anything someone could say, at least better than anything I could ever come up with, just because I’m really not good at that kind of thing. And then I thought—again, I think the pot had a lot to do with it—how big of a coward would I be if I stopped reading his story just because I was afraid to let the author see how it affected me? Especially after he’d been so vulnerable with his reaction to my song?

Thinking about it now, I really can’t believe I did it. Screw the pot. But I did. I kept reading.

I kept reading, my dick swelling with every paragraph, the arousal getting me hard from some confusing mix of the eroticism of the story, and my self-consciousness about letting it happen with Dario sitting there, watching me. Not watching my crotch, but watching my face as if he was studying a chemical reaction in a microscope, as if he was deciding whether he’d succeeded or failed as an author based on what he saw in my expression.

The moment I finished, the second the story wasn’t there to hold that part of my awareness, I panicked because I was embarrassed, not even by the fact that a story about two guys had given me an epic erection, but because I’d gotten hard in front of Dario. I just mean in public, in front of this guy I’d been intimidated by through three years of rather distant socializing, and the first time we hung out just the two of us here I was getting a boner in his living room. I let my arm drop suddenly to my lap, faking a gesture of boredom or exasperation or maybe even disgust, just so I could cover my stiff dick with the tablet so he wouldn’t see it.

“
That’s okay,” he said quietly, smiling but not quite masking the disappointment in his voice. “I didn’t expect you to like it.” Then he stood up and started to walk off to some far corner of the loft. The second he started walking away my embarrassment turned into shame and suddenly the most important thing was not letting him think I’d hated the story.

“
It made me feel like I was there,” I said, but because I was nervous the words barely came out of my throat. I heard him stop, and a few seconds later the sound of his footsteps as he started walking back toward me.

“
What?”

I cleared my throat and said it again.

Then I heard his footsteps again, circling around the couch, and now I could see him, standing there, looking down at me, studying me under the microscope again. Then he sat down, not in his armchair this time, but right next to me on the couch. “How do you mean?” The way he asked it, his voice quiet, his words heavy, somehow, it felt like we were sharing a secret. Or like he was asking for a confession.

“
I feel like I heard the timbre of Ferdinand’s voice. Like I could . . .” I could feel myself blushing as I said it, but suddenly, because I felt on the spot, embarrassed, all the other examples slipped my mind, “. . . . smell Jordi’s skin.”

“
Really?” Dario sounded so happy. So happy, I wanted to give him more.

“
That moment when they let the tablecloth they’re folding slip out of their hands, that moment of suspense, waiting for their fingertips to meet, it’s so maddening.” I had to stop. I didn’t know why saying those things was exacerbating that aching throbbing in my cock.

“
Maddening,” he mused. “In a good way? Or a bad way?”

I tried to keep my voice even, to meet his eyes without blushing again. “Well, like I . . . the reader will want it to happen.”

“
Want what to happen?”

I couldn’t get my breathing back to normal. “They’ll want them to touch. To . . . be together.” Fuck. That smile. Triumphant as a conquering warrior. A conquering king. Which was strange when I thought about it, because I’d more or less told him something was missing. And strange because I couldn’t tell if that triumphant smile made me feel like I was beside him, doing the conquering, or if it made me feel like one of the vanquished.

“
Because I told you it was pornographic and you were expecting sex?” he asked.

“
Because they’re in love.” God, he suddenly looked moved. Vulnerable. So much so, it was like holding his beating heart in my hand. “Are you still going to add that part?” I asked, maybe to make him think about something else so he’d stop looking at me that way.

It worked. That vulnerable, searching look melted back into a slightly diminished version of the vanquishing grin. “In this case, I think delayed gratification is ultimately more satisfying,” he said in an intimate tone that made me as uncomfortable as if he’d been sitting there naked. I couldn’t meet his eyes but in my peripheral vision I could see that he was watching my face closely as he said, “You don’t need to be embarrassed.”

“
About what?” I immediately regretted asking because I was sure he was going to say, “your hard-on.”

“
About liking the story. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone.”

“
I’m not embarrassed,” I said, obviously lying.

“
No?”

“
Of course not.”

“
That’s good,” he said, his magnetic confidence suddenly back in his voice. Then he touched my wrist. Never in my life have I felt such a sudden, physical jolt of panic, because I knew the next thing he was going to do, and, still staring kind of down and in front of me, trying to escape that probing look of his, I let him do it. With no force at all, almost as if it were me doing it instead of him, he pulled my wrist toward him, so the tablet wasn’t hiding my hard-on anymore. And as soon as he did it I realized he’d known the whole time that I was hard, and his little comment about me not liking the story, him getting up and walking away had been his way of letting me get away without confessing what the story had done to me. He’d given me a pass, and I’d squandered it.