Romeo had grown pensive. When that happened, he either dipped into his own world by himself or pulled me in with him. That time, he did neither. He popped back up and gave me a mischievous quirk of his lips.
“So, like, you still a virgin, or what?” he asked. There was a steely seriousness to him that didn’t match his words or his smirk.
I considered a lot of what had happened between Romeo and me before I left for college to be sex, but I knew what he meant, so I said, “Yeah. I am.” It was the early rumbling of a conversation, just the bare bones of a dialogue between friends, but there were warnings going off in my spine that made me feel like it might be the exact exchange I’d dreamed of for years. “You?”
He smiled because we both knew the chance of something major happening to him and Romeo not calling to tell me immediately was slim to none. “Yep. Still got it. My cherry’s intact. My V-card is unpunched.” He took a small, careful sip of bourbon. “I’m pure as the driven snow.” I snorted at that. I couldn’t help it. “You surprise me though, Tiger. No girls for you?”
“No,” I said quickly.
“No guys?” There was a lightness to the way he said it. An openness. An olive branch drenched in total acceptance.
Even though what Romeo did later was worse—way worse—that was my opening. That was my best friend sayingIt’s okay if you’re gayandI’ll still love youandLet’s be honest with each other, and I didn’t take it. I lied. The lie wasn’t that I’d been with other guys because I hadn’t. I hadn’t so much as kissed another man. No one but Romeo existed for me. Still, it was a lie. A big, serious lie that was woven into our friendship and would come back to haunt us. I’ve often asked myself why I lied, and the truth is uncomfortable in its simplicity: I lied because I’d played out the conversation we were having a million times in my mind. A million or more. And I didn’t want my coming out to derail it.
“No,” I said even quicker, “no guys.” For good measure, I said it with a little indignance.
“Hmph.” He stared into the bottom of his glass, turning it slowly in one hand as if looking into a Magic 8 Ball. “Lots of girls like you.”
“Probably ’cause I’m so handsome,” I teased.
“You are handsome.” He said it as if it were a fact, and that tilted my entire world on its axis. “I’ve always wondered why you don’t have sex with them.”
“Dunno. Maybe I’m shy.”
“You’re not shy, Tiger.”
He wasn’t wrong. “Nah, I guess not.”
“I had the chance, you know, to have sex.”
“You did?” That was news to me. I was interested. Not jealous exactly, just heightened in the same way I always was when Romeo spoke about things that pertained to his dick.
“Yeah, I did. It was this girl, Laine. She’s a good friend of Kellie’s, and Kellie unequivocally confirmed that she wanted to have sex with me. She wanted it for sure. It definitely wasn’t my imagination.”
I stifled a laugh. “So why didn’t you do it?”
“I don’t know.” His voice had gone huskier than usual. “Maybe ’cause I really am shy.” He looked vulnerable when he said it. Defenseless and unguarded. And, I swear, Romeo’s vulnerability was like crack to me. “I kind of panicked, I think. I was going to do it, and then, I-I just felt like I couldn’t because”—he raised his glass slightly so his mouth was covered, distorted by crystal—“because I hadn’t done it with you first.”
He said it so quietly I thought I’d imagined it. So quietly that it took me a while to piece it together.
If multiverses existed, if there are parallel realities out there, there is a Romeo somewhere that's locked in that moment. A Romeo that saysbecause I hadn’t done it with you firstover and over, and a me that sits on the big exercise ball at my desk in my childhood bedroom, totallydumbstruck. Unable to move or speak. Unable to do anything but look into the pale, ocean eyes of the man I love.
That was it.
That was my moment.
The moment I’d spent so many hours thinking about that, sometimes, I think I somehow invoked everything that happened next.
“I could…we could…we could, like, take turns to…do it,” I spluttered at last.
“Yeah?” He set the glass on my side table and sat up a little straighter.
I was talking fast and thinking slowly. “Yeah. I mean, it doesn’t have to be a big deal or anything. We can just see what it feels like, and then we’ll know, and—”
A kaleidoscope turned. Shyness and uncertainty dispersed and evaporated. Cool, calm, and assured replaced them. “So, who’s going first?”
There was a pencil on my desk. One of those cheap yellow ones schools buy in bulk. I picked it up and snapped it between my fingers. “Long straw fucks, short straw has to take it?”
I couldn’t feel my face when he nodded. I could barely make my hands work. I turned my back and shuffled the two halves of the pencil, lining the splintered ends up evenly and holding them out to Romeo. He was on his feetwhen I turned around, standing less than a foot away from me.
