Dangerously Happy (3 page)

“
You know,” he said, his voice lower and softer now, “my book got a rave review from the
New York Times
. B
ut I like this review better.”

I was nervous. I babbled, “You should actually be really proud, because thinking about two guys has never had an effect like this on me before. Not even close.”

“
No?”

“
No.” I forced myself to finally look at him, and I tried to give him a smile, you know, just to make the whole thing less weird, with me avoiding his eyes. God, the way his big, dark eyes were fixed on me, I could hardly breathe.

“
There’s never been . . . some small experiment? A kiss, maybe?”

The question shocked me. I mean, that literal, physical response where your blood pressure feels like it bottoms out. Except my cock felt like it was at about two hundred PSI. “No,” I said, and it came out weak and warbly instead of like the stern warning I meant it to be. But then when he started to lean in, instead of pushing him away or getting up, I just waited. Waited for him to lean in the rest of the way. When he took the tablet out of my hand and set it on the coffee table, though, that weird moment of surrender ruptured. “I should go,” I said.

“
I want you to stay.”

I blushed. I mean, I felt my face go hotter than I can remember it ever being before.

“
Do you want to stay, Aidan?”

“
I don’t know.” I’ve never been so confused in my life.

“
This is a first for me, too,” he said in that soft low voice I’d never heard before that night.

“
What’s a first?” I asked, feeling like every word was a little life preserver holding me above the thrashing waves of panic drowning me.

“
I’ve never hit on a straight guy before.” I had to turn away from that earnest, searching gaze of his. After a few more seconds he said, “I’d like to touch you. But I don’t want to scare you.”

I almost said something like, “that’s ridiculous. Why would I be scared?” But I was scared. Terrified, even though rationally I knew that whatever was happening between us, whatever might happen, it was fine. He was sitting there, looking at me, trying to read my expression or waiting for me to say no. Or yes. Finally I said, “I don’t know.”

“
What don’t you know?” he asked with a guru-like serenity, his voice making me feel safe, almost like a caress.

“
I think that if you touch me, I won’t want it anymore.” A cowardly way of confessing. Yes, I did want it, even though I was shaking and I felt like I couldn’t breathe. But also true, because I was half convinced that the second he touched me my hard-on would wither.

But he said, “Then I’m going to touch you. I’m going to touch you until you tell me to stop.”

Slowly—it felt like I saw it coming minutes before it actually happened—he laid his hand on my thigh. Half way between my knee and my erection. And that was the second huge shock of the night, because instead of going limp my dick got even harder. And, as he’d said, when I didn’t tell him not to, he kept touching me.

He touched me in a way I’d never been touched before, not by Avalyn, not by any of my high school or college girlfriends or any of the girls I hooked up with on weekends at the loft. He didn’t just do everything slowly and gently. He was touching me so carefully it felt almost tentative, but at the same time with the same easy assurance that was so profoundly part of his way of being and his unusual magnetism. First his hand moving lightly over my trousers, then my alarm and my breathless, aching need went through the roof as his fingers worked the button of my fly open. I heard that unmistakable zipper sound and saw my fly open in a V above his descending fingers. He slipped his hand inside, over my shorts, and I was really trembling as if it were my first time getting felt up, as if just being touched so gently were overwhelming, which it was. He hadn’t kissed me yet but he was nuzzling against my cheek, the warmth of his skin and his soft hair comforting me against that devastating, strange pleasure.

His free hand combed into my hair, cradling my head while he went on fondling me, his hand down my trousers. Then he slipped his fingers through the fly of my shorts, and it was his warm soft skin against my skin, not even really stroking, just caressing. Suddenly the pleasure just swallowed me whole, and I whispered two or three times, quickly, mortified, “Stop, stop,” but it was already too late and the sudden spasm hit. Seizing, spurting, fuck, it was really happening. Another cock-wringing contraction. I’d really let him stroke me off, I was really unloading into his hand, still caressing, oh God, impossible, another gushing expulsion.

Then everything seemed to slow down until it was almost like time stopped, and I was aware of how he cradled my head between the palm of his hand and his cheek, almost like an embrace, and how he sighed, as if the pleasure wringing my body were his pleasure, how his fingers encircled me, gently squeezing me and how that boosted the intensity of it all just when I thought it must be almost over and it felt like the waves would never stop rising over me, me quivering and shuddering and curling in on myself with the spasms.

I was about to apologize, or mumble some excuse, but Dario said, “Be still.” The encircling embrace of his fingers slowly loosened around my unbearably hyper-sensitized cock, then gradually released me, which almost drove a cry of discomfort mingled with . . . I guess sadness that that perfect act had come to an end, and I looked at his hand, covered in my semen. Actually, it was just three of his fingers, the index, middle and ring fingers, that were glistening and gooey. Looking over at me with a playful grin and a stare that pinned me down and made my heart give one heavy thump, he put those three fingers deep in his mouth and sucked them clean. Fuck. Even though I'd just come, an unexpected wave of arousal washed over me at the sight of him doing that.

After that he sat there looking at me for a few seconds, and somehow I wasn’t too embarrassed to meet that earnest gaze. I don’t know what he read in my expression—I’m pretty sure I was sitting there half composing an excuse to flee, and half hoping he’d start undressing me—but he gave me a serene smile and said, very quietly, very intimately, in what echoes in my memory as a seductive tone completely incongruous with his words, “Now I think you should go.”

Totally taken aback I said, “Aren’t you even going to kiss me?” I’d tried to make it a joke, but it came out sounding as disappointed as I felt.

“
God, yes,” he said, the words like a pensive, hopeful sigh. “If you want me to. But not tonight.”

I was so stunned I don’t think I said anything. Him kicking me out without even attempting to get off with me was the last thing I’d expected given how easily I’d succumbed to his seduction—if you can even call it that—and that, added to my embarrassment at coming so quickly, and my confusion over what I’d just done caused a chemical reaction that melted my brain and turned me into a zombie. I barely remember leaving the loft, except I do remember he walked with me to the door. I don’t remember the drive home, either. I suppose my head was just churning with images of what we’d just done, and the downtown streets, the cruise down the 10—traffic flowing steadily at that hour—the last leg of my commute into Culver City just didn’t register, as if I’d beamed home in a transporter instead of driven.

In the lingering euphoria of that unfathomable, over-the-roof intense experience, high on an adrenaline buzz of having transgressed a line I’d never dreamed of crossing, that night I felt stupidly proud of myself for being so adventurous, and was 70 percent sure that I would call Dario the next day and arrange to come back to his house to pick up where we’d left off, if nothing else, at least to see what it would be like to kiss him. Who knew, maybe even to stroke each other off. But when I woke up in the morning I had the sickening feeling of having turned myself inside out, like I’d done something that had completely warped who I was, or who’d I’d thought I was, and I was actually afraid I wouldn’t be able to find the courage to ever go back there, which would mean quitting the band because how could I explain to the guys that I wanted to walk away from the ideal rehearsal space—acoustically excellent and free to boot—and the only steady and lucrative weekend gig on offer? The next day after that, my view of things changed drastically about five times an hour. I went from feeling like I had no option but to quit the band and maybe leave the city, to being about to call Dario and ask if we could talk—not even pretending to myself that that idea wasn’t really about setting up a situation where we could hook up again—to a rational but cautious decision that I would call Dario, tell him that I hoped my never-to-be-repeated impulsive behavior wouldn’t hurt our friendship or working relatio
nship, and try to carry on with the rehearsals and the gigs as if nothing had happened.

In the end, I did nothing. Just kept vacillating back and forth between every possible course of action and every possible outcome—punctuated once or twice a day by jerking off, sometimes frantically, sometimes slowly and gently, trying to recapture the feeling of being touched by Dario—until the weekend came and it was too late to tell the guys I couldn’t make it to the gig. I showed up at the last possible second, so there wasn’t a minute to spare before our set and I had no time to m
ix and say hello to the people I knew, but just barely had time to set up my amp and tune my guitar, and our set started.

Up until that night, I realize now, I’d kind of been phoning it in when we played—during rehearsals, when we had a paying audience—that I’d long since written off the beautiful dream that had sustained me from age fifteen until I was twenty-two or twenty-three, that our music,
my music
, was special. Extraordinary. But that night, playing, and especially singing, I fell under the spell of the music the way I had when my whole heart had been in it, when singing felt almost as good as fucking. Well, depending on the song, on the girl, maybe even better than fucking. And, at moments, worse than dying, but dying a gorgeous, soul-expanding, mind-blinding, poetic death. And now and then, or maybe the whole time, woven into that pleasure and pain the hope that he was watching and feeling the music the way I was feeling it, that my voice was moving him the way it had moved him that night when I’d sung practically a-Capella, practically a serenade. But with the lights in my eyes and the crowd filling that huge space almost wall-to-wall, I had no idea if he was there amidst that dense chaos of bodies undulating like leaves in a storm, listening and watching, or up on the roof terrace or hidden away in his sleeping loft where he sometimes escaped the throng for an hour or two.

When we finished our set, when the music stopped pumping through me like my own blood flooded with adrenaline, the anxiety that had crashed over me a thousand times in the four days since it had happened was suddenly drowning me. I hurried to stash my gear away and get out of there as fast as possible, before I inevitably came face to face with Dario and had to figure out how to act with him, what to say. I hated the sickening feeling seeping into me, that anxiety that saying nothing and fleeing without even saying hi to him was a very clear message, a message I wasn’t at all sure reflected what I wanted to convey to him.

But that’s what I did.

During the brisk walk to my car I felt elated, as if I’d successfully escaped from prison or eluded a school bully during recess. But the moment I was on the freeway I felt like shit. Like a coward and the most ungrateful asshole in the world, after Dario had been so great about letting us use his space, how effusive he’d been about my voice and my music, after he’d basically saved me from my own recklessness when he could have probably convinced me to go a fair bit further that night. By the time I got home I realized, well, that was it. We’d keep rehearsing and playing our gigs at the loft, and for however long all that might last, to Dario I’d always be the immature jerk who couldn’t just be a man and say, “Hey, man. It was fun but I’m not queer, so let’s just be friends,” even though I was dead certain he would have been absolutely cool about it.

I spent the next three days pretty much hating myself. To the point where I skipped our next rehearsal, as if I was relishing being as big an asshole as possible and not only treating Dario badly, but my
bandmates as well. To the point where, when later that night when the intercom buzzed, and I knew Tom was down at the entry ready to give me an earful, I almost didn’t answer. The next day I’d tell him I’d been asleep, perfectly in accord with my lie about being sick, which was perfectly in accord with my lie about not feeling well which I’d used as my excuse to flee the loft the second we’d finished our set on Saturday night. But I was already getting so sick of myself and my petty betrayals that I made myself pick up the receiver. I don’t know whether it was a thrill of excitement or terror that hit me when I heard Dario’s voice, but whichever it was, it ripped all the air out of my lungs and I barely managed to say, “I’ll buzz you in.”