“Martin,” he said sternly, “be real with me for a minute, man.”
I turned back around. Why was he challenging me like this? “I am being real with you. I was worried sick about you.”
“You like me, Martin?”
The truth: I liked him too much, so much that it scared me. “Yes, of course I do.”
“As a friend?” He crossed his arms and looked at me skeptically.
“Yes, as a friend.” And much, much more.
He hissed through his teeth. “I see the way you look at me, Martin, like you’re hungry. I feel you all day long. It’s like this balloon that keeps getting bigger. I know you want to get with me. So, what’s the holdup?”
I didn’t think I was that obvious, but everything he said was true. And apparently, I wasn’t hiding it very well. Something about him felt so inevitable.
“You’re young,” I said.
“I’m out of school, out of my dad’s house, working my ass off. I’m grown, Martin. And I’ve been with dudes way older than you, trust me.”
I really didn’t want to think about it.
“You’re not ready for a commitment,” I argued.
“Man, why you say shit like that? Speaking for me? Why don’t you ask me instead of assuming shit?” He spoke with his whole body, his arms curling and uncurling like a boxer warming up for a match.
“Are you ready to settle down, Andre?”
“I mean, I’m not looking to get married or anything, but all I’ve ever had is random hookups and fly-by-nights. Maybe I am looking for something real.”
Something real. My feelings for him were the realest, strongest emotions I’d ever had for another person outside of my grandfather. I’d spent the past two weeks convincing myself of all the reasons we shouldn’t be together. I was tired of fighting it. I liked him… a lot.
“You want to be my boyfriend?” I asked him.
He opened his arms wide in mock astonishment. “You want me to be your boyfriend?”
I smiled. So, he was young. Fuck it. I was young enough. “Hell, yes. I want you to be my boyfriend.”
He grinned, wide enough to split his face. “All right, then. But only if I get to sleep in your bed. I know you got that high-end shit up there. Making me sleep on that rickety-ass futon. Shit makes my back hurt.”
I laughed. “Done and done.”
10. Miami
IT DIDN’Tusually happen this way, where I got to know a guy first. Like how I knew Andre liked ketchup on his scrambled eggs and hated it when his cereal got soggy. How he flipped past commercials unless it was an ad for food or cars. The way he paused before passing a mirror to check himself out. His smile, his laugh, the way he gestured with his arms when he was excited about something, his sense of humor. He was like a pointillist painting where you needed all the individual dots to form the complete picture.
In my past relationships, it always started with the physical attraction. Sex came first, intimacy second, and sometimes, not at all. So when I found myself faced with the prospect of being physically intimate with Andre, without even a shot of alcohol to embolden me, I was nervous as hell. It seemed the bar for getting this right was set pretty high. I didn’t want to fuck up what we had going.
The first thing he did, after discarding his clothes on the floor of the loft, was to jump into the middle of my bed and make a snow angel, his arms windmilling across the sheets. “Yasss,” he said with a satisfied grin.
Where does one even begin, with someone they truly care about? I stood over him, paralyzed by doubt, overthinking my every move, while he stared at me expectantly, one arm thrown casually behind his head, his arrow tattoo pointing toward his elbow. I took off my clothes and sat down beside him, touched the point of his arrow.
“What’s this about?”
He glanced down at it, rubbed it tenderly, as though it were a bruise. “You don’t want to know.”
At the risk of sounding obsessed, I admitted, “I want to know everything about you.”
He shrugged like it was my gamble to take. “Like I said before, it was hard to find… affection where I’m from. My first few times were pretty rough. The guys I was with….” He shook his head and didn’t finish. “I thought maybe it was my fault. Like if I didn’t have this condition—”
