Going the Distance (29 page)

Nothing.

I clenched my eyes closed harder and tried to imagine a million different girls, all types, there for my taking.

More nothing.

I let go of it and leaned my head against the cool tile of the shower, cursing my life. I wished Nate was there. A flash of him crossed my mind, shirtless in the hide-a-bed in Amy’s house, the way he’d smelled as I hugged him, the feeling of him next to me…. Looking down, I saw my cock almost fully hard, and I felt the shame in my chest as I glared at it. Why didn’t anything work out the way it was supposed to? What was wrong with me?

The night of graduation, Emma and I finally had sex.

We went to a party at one of her friend’s houses and midway through, she pulled me upstairs to celebrate me leaving. Though buzzed, I wasn’t drunk enough to actually forget I was with a girl and enjoy the fact I was having sex. Luckily she had no idea how drunk I was, so when I didn’t get hard no matter how hard she tried, she blamed it on the alcohol. She told me to wait and went downstairs for something. I wondered if I should get dressed and leave. I mean, what was the worst that could happen? She could say that we were going to seal the deal and then I’d run away like a little baby, and she’d tell every single person she knew that I couldn’t actually fuck her.

There was nothing at all pleasurable about this moment to me.

She came back and handed me two pills and a bottle of water. “Here,” she said. “Take those.” She popped another pill into her mouth and dry swallowed it.

One of the pills was blue, and the other looked like one of those kid’s aspirin except it had an apple imprinted on the surface. “What’s this?” I asked her, trying not to sound nervous.

She grabbed my hand and put it up to my mouth. “Fun. Swallow,” she ordered, watching me the entire time.

I took a sip of water and thought about spitting the pills into the bottle, but she was watching me like a hawk. Swallowing, I wondered what exactly I’d just done. She took the bottle from me and set it aside. I leaned back as she kissed me. Again it wasn’t horrible, just not pleasurable. It was a set of lips on mine and a weight on top of me as she lay on my chest. I went through the motions, moving my hands across her back and over her ass, but it did nothing for me. It was like giving a real ineffective massage.

About ten minutes into it, I started to feel flush.

My face was warm, and not from being embarrassed or anything. I was just warm. I tried to ignore it, but my legs started to tingle, and I knew something was happening. “What was that?” I asked as my body began to react to something.

“Calm down, silly,” she said, trying to nibble on my ear. “It was a Viagra and a hit of X. In a few minutes, you’ll be feeling no pain.”

“What?” I said, grabbing her shoulders. “You gave me Ecstasy?”

She giggled. “Danny, you need to lighten up.”

My heart began to race, and I felt my fingers start to tingle as she kept trying to distract me. “Can you feel it?” she whispered.

I didn’t say anything as my vision got blurry and the room spun around me. I laid my head back on the pillow and closed my eyes to stop from getting sick. She kept moving on top of me, her hands rubbing my unit in hopes of getting me hard. It felt like I was falling for a second, as if the bed had dropped out from under us, and I was tumbling down into a hole I was never going to get out of.

I opened my eyes, and I saw Emma staring down at me, smiling.

“You’re feeling it,” she said rather than asked.

I opened my mouth to say something, but there was nothing wrong. No doubts, no cares, nothing at all. I felt happy, really happy, and it was insane. I smiled up at her, and she rubbed me again, and now I started to get hard. “See?” she said. “Fun.”

I kissed her, not because I wanted her but because the way her skin felt on my lips was, like, the best thing I had ever felt. Everything was a thousand times better than it normally was. The bed was softer than a cloud. Her on top of me was like a million small sparks of electricity moving over me. She pulled her blouse off and tossed it across the room.

“Touch me,” she breathed. “You never touch me.”

I put my hands over her breasts, and they seemed impossibly small compared to my hands. She unbuttoned my jeans and pulled them off me as I looked up at the ceiling, wondering how it floated above us so easily. “Did you bring protection this time?” she asked.

I nodded, still staring up. “Wallet,” I said, my voice sounding like a cartoon mouse.

I heard the crinkling of a package, and then I gasped as she put it over my dick. I had thought her blowjob in the car was the best thing ever, but her touching me was, like, a billion times more than that. I wondered why I wasn’t cumming yet, but I didn’t care. She got it on and then moved up to kiss me.

“You don’t do anything, okay?” she said. Her hair dangling down tickled my face. “The only way this is going to work is if you let me do all the work, okay?”

I nodded, not even knowing what she was talking about.

She straddled me, but I didn’t care. Nothing bothered me right now, and I doubt anything could. It didn’t matter that she was a girl and I wasn’t sexually attracted to her. I didn’t care that the main reason I was doing this was to prove my masculinity to people I didn’t even know. I didn’t even care that there were half a dozen other people I’d rather be doing this with.

Right now everything was perfect.

She lowered herself on to me, and once again my mind was blown. You imagine how great sex is going to be when you’re growing up, but let me tell you, nothing prepares you for the actual feeling when it happens. I might have made a sound, but I was too out of it to even notice. I just had flashes of her moaning and telling me I was huge, but it seemed like it was so far away. The room had become nothing but her, and I felt like my head was going to explode. For a second I thought she was calling out my name in passion, but I could see she was no longer on top of me but instead slapping my face, trying to get my attention.

Not even that mattered as I blacked out.

I woke up in a hospital room. From where I was lying, it looked exactly like the last one I had been in. This time I had tubes running into my arms, and there were actual machines behind me beeping with each of my heartbeats. I looked around and saw my dad talking to one of the nurses, and he didn’t look worried at all. In fact, he just looked pissed—really pissed.

They noticed I was awake, and the nurse came over and gave me a smile. “You with us, Danny?”

I nodded, my head feeling like it would float away if I moved it too quickly.

“Thirsty?” she asked.

And I was, like, crazy thirsty.

She began to pour me a glass of water and my dad stopped her. “Can you give us a second? I’ll give him the water.”

She nodded and gave me another reassuring smile. This one was a “Good luck with this, kid” kind of deal, and I knew I was in for it.

As soon as the door clicked shut, he glared at me. “You know, I let it go when you started getting into God.” His voice was rough with emotion. “Did I think you were doing it for the right reasons? No, but I let it slide because I thought, how much damage can faith do to someone? I didn’t say a word when you started dating Emma, because what do I know about being gay? I mean, in my day we said it was just a phase so I thought, well, maybe it was just a phase.” He locked eyes with mine. “Do you realize how bad you screwed up tonight?”

I really just wanted some water.

“Not only did you pass out because your blood pressure was through the roof, but when they brought you in, they took blood. What do you think A&M is going to say when they find out you were on X? You think that’s something they let slide with guys they’re spending thousands of dollars to play for them? You didn’t think that doing drugs might fuck up your free ride?”

I could hear the machine behind me begin to beep faster as his words began to terrorize me.

“Let me tell you some truth, Danny. You’re eighteen years old. That means the sound of running water should give you a hard-on. Thinking about linoleum should give you a hard-on. There is no reason someone your age needs something like Viagra to get hard unless they’re trying to fuck something they aren’t interested in.”

His words slammed like sledgehammers into my head.

“When you get out of here, we are going to talk about your sexuality, and I promise you, if I don’t like the words coming out of your mouth, I’m going to tell A&M they can shove their scholarship up their ass, because I’m at the point where I no longer think you have your best interests in mind. If liking guys is screwing you up this much….”

He paused, not sure how to follow that statement up.

“I’m sorry,” I croaked.

He sighed and handed me the glass of water. “Drink up and pray this doesn’t ruin your life.”

What happened at the party didn’t ruin my life, but it was close. Turns out that since I wasn’t an actual student yet at A&M, they couldn’t punish me for doing drugs. There was a clause in the contract that said before I actually signed up for classes they could drop me for any reason whatsoever, but they were going to give me a break, since I wasn’t the first guy they’d recruited who took X at a graduation party.

Emma never called me again, which was good, since I was pretty pissed at her and the situation I had let myself get involved in. I mean, no, it wasn’t all her fault. I was the idiot who took the pills, but she was the one who went and got them, and I wasn’t going to forget that for a while. The other person who didn’t call me was Nate, which hurt far more. My dad said he had called Nate and told him what happened, and all he said back was to let him know if I got worse.

So all in all, I screwed the pooch in about fifty different ways.

There was a basketball camp for the team during the summer, so when I got out of the hospital, I had about a week to get my stuff packed to head out. It was the most uncomfortable week I could remember, since my dad was still pissed at me but knew I was a couple of days from leaving for most of the summer, and he didn’t want to waste any of the time we had left screaming at me.

We agreed I would drive up to College Station and catch the team bus from there, so I had to leave sooner than later, which meant he had one dinner and half a breakfast to say what he wanted to say before I was gone. We sat at the table with a bucket of fried chicken and eighteen years of emotional baggage between us. I would say I was so upset I couldn’t eat, but I’d be lying. There was rarely a time I couldn’t put something in my mouth.

Wow, that sounded kind of dirty.

“When do you get back from camp?” he asked without emotion.

“August,” I answered between bites.

“I’ll take some leave and meet you up there, so we can buy you whatever you’re going to need for your dorm.” Again, his voice had all the emotion someone describing the weather might have.

I couldn’t take it anymore. Putting my chicken down, I looked at him. “Dad, I’m going to be all right.”

He looked up at me, and it looked like he hadn’t slept for weeks. The dark circles under his eyes made him look a thousand years older than he already was. “No, you’re not, Danny,” he said in that same controlled tone that made the words that much worse. “You ended up in the hospital and almost lost your scholarship, all to prove to yourself you liked girls. That is about as far away from all right as you can be.”

He shook his head, and I had never seen him look so sad before. “I know it’s my fault, but I have no clue how to make it better. I can’t get it through to you that you need to be who you are without worrying about all the rest of this crap.”

“That’s over, Dad. I’m okay and I’m still going to college. I won’t use anything like that again, I promise.”

“Do you honestly think it’s the fact you used drugs that has me bothered, Danny?” I paused because I had been thinking that exact thing. “Yes, I’m upset you used X, but I’m more concerned about how far you’re willing to go to try to change yourself. You don’t drink, but you’re willing to swallow a handful of strange pills just to pretend to be straight for a night?”

“It was two pills, and I am straight.”

His expression went from sad to furious in seconds flat. He opened his mouth to say something and then closed it with an expression that made it look like he was close to slugging me. “I don’t know what to do with you anymore, I really don’t.” He got up from the table and stomped out of the room, his hands still clenched into fists. I finished the chicken and went to sleep, wishing desperately I was someone else for once.

When I woke up, he wasn’t there. An envelope of twenties was on the table next to a note that said to call him when I got there. I had never felt more miserable as I put my stuff in the car and drove off base. This should have been the best day ever, but instead it was one more in an ever-growing pile of days in which I’d made my father regret ever having a kid.

Once I got out of Corpus, I turned up the radio and tried to clear my mind. I was eighteen, owned my own car, had a wad of cash, and was on my way to play basketball for A&M. There was nothing so wrong in my world that I couldn’t fix it later. This was my life right now, and I vowed to enjoy every second I could of it.

When I was younger, I never understood the allure of driving. I mean, sure, it was cool to be able to take off whenever you could, but the love of it, the whole mystery about hitting the open road and just driving, made no sense. But as I passed Victoria and headed north, I finally got it. The feeling of freedom, the motion, the music, everything was perfect no matter how bad I had fucked up. I was driving away from my problems, not toward them, and that made all the difference in the world.

The parking lot wasn’t that full, since it was only the basketball team along with the support staff—people like trainers, coaches, equipment managers, everyone who was working toward making this the best season we’d ever had. That was one of the best things I liked about basketball. No matter how badly you did last season, it was all brand new the next. A chance to redeem yourself from whatever failures you had last time. I parked and grabbed my bag and headed toward the bus, a growing feeling of euphoria coming over me.