[ 5 ]
Trent doesn’t return from his weekend with his high school prom queen until about midafternoon Monday, just before I’m heading in for work. He looks like a number’s been done on him. I likely look the same, with all his beer I’ve been guzzling. Hope he doesn’t mind. I’ll consider it a price for not having a car all weekend due to his teenager-lust. In fact, I was about to walk the thirty minutes down the street to work before he showed up.
“Need the keys,” I say as he drops into the couch right where Charlie was two nights ago.
“I almost encountered the dad.” Trent sighs, wipes his face and turns to look at me. “You totally fuck things up with Sandy, or did she forgive you and you fucked her brains out last night?”
This one time back in eighth grade, we went to a party where they played a weird combination of spin-the-bottle and seven-minutes-in-heaven. There were approximately four other boys there, all four of which I would’ve given anything to be stuck in a closet with. I didn’t even know what I’d do with them. I just wanted to be near them, for them to like me. I’d never been kissed, but I was sure I’d like it to be one of them. When I spun the blue hairbrush, which we were using as our bottle, it landed between the adorable punk boy Trent Hollings … and goth Katy Windsor. Boy and girl. Of course, as the way of assumptions go, that meant my “bottle” had chosen Katy. My heart sank as Katy got up and took me to the closet, the hooting and howling of the others meant to encourage us.
Once in the dark, though, she slumped against the wall and sighed. Through the cracks in the slatted door, I could see her face. What’s wrong? I asked her. She told me she really wanted her first kiss to be with Trent, and that’s why she sat by him. I had to smile because I was thinking the same thing. How nice it would’ve been if the group had laughed, played along with the hairbrush and decided that I had to go into the closet with Trent. My heart leapt at the thought. I told Katy it was okay, that she could save her first kiss for a boy she really wanted to kiss. She looked a touch grateful and a touch sad. Then, for the next six and a half minutes, we didn’t touch at all, sitting alone together in the darkness and listening to each other breathe.
“I fucked my right hand last night,” I answer the now-ten-years-older Trent. “But thanks for asking, buddy. I was about to walk to work, but now that you’re here and I got the car back, I have about twenty minutes before I gotta leave. Wanna play Wii? Some Smash?”
“You’re gonna need to walk, actually.” Trent kicks his feet up—two oversized chucks with the laces half-undone—and throws his arms over the back of the couch. He’s wearing a black leather cuff on his right wrist that I’d gotten him last year for his birthday. “I have a job interview at five.”
I come up to the back of the couch. “What happened to your other job?”
“I think my boss is into me. Like, into me. That’s gross and it makes me uncomfortable, so I put in applications elsewhere.”
His boss is a blond-haired man in his forties whose name is Donald, but he goes by Dick. “So, you’re scared of Dick. That’s what you’re telling me. You’re letting Dick scare you away.”
“When Dick’s trying to touch my dick, yeah.” He turns on the TV, tosses the remote on the cushion next to him.
“Never know. You might like it.”
“You might like it,” he jests back. If only he knew. But he doesn’t, and never will.
“You talk about me flakin’ out on dates,” I point out, “and here you are, flakin’ out on a job because you can’t stand someone checking you out who isn’t a girl.”
“Whatever, it’s gross.” He changes the channel, plops the remote back down.
Even after knowing each other so long and having spent years talking about our private lives and wants and fears, I still don’t know if he really knows about me. So every time he says something about gay men being gross, I can’t tell if he intends to hurt me, or if it’s pure ignorance and he might not say those things if he knew. Thinking this, guilt rushes in, and I’m staring at the back of Trent’s head, his spiky black punk hair, and my stomach’s roiling.
Am I in the wrong for keeping this secret from him for so long? Am I a terrible friend, to keep this huge part of me hidden from Trent …?
I imagine how that other night might’ve been, had Trent been the one passed out on my couch, and I was the one latched to his nipple, running my hand up his inner thigh, waking parts of him he didn’t know were asleep.
Staring at the keys he left on the counter, I sigh, resigning myself to the thirty minute walk in this unforgiving summer heat. I have half a mind to grab the keys and drive myself anyway, forcing him to get a ride or walk to his own interview, but as usual, I allow Trent to have whatever he wants, take whatever he wants, get whatever he wants, no matter how much I suffer for it.
I spoil him. I kinda want to spoil him.
“Will you pick me up after work?” I ask. “I get off at ten. I really hate to walk home in the dark.”
“Nah. I’ll be at Kirkland’s. He’s havin’ one of his beer fests tonight, remember? Marked it on the Star Trek.”
I give a tired glance at the Star Trek calendar he’s referring to. He and I jokingly told his mom that we are huge Trekkies, and every year since then, she gets us a Star Trek calendar. I doubt either of us have seen a single episode or movie.
“That’s tonight?” I bite my lip. “But—”
“It’s just three blocks north from your work, ain’t it? Maybe four, five. Come by after you get off. It goes ‘til, like, whenever A.M. His house is huge. There’ll be pussy aplenty. And probably high schoolers, if that’s your thing. Just kidding. Not really kidding. Loud music. Lots of dancing and probably weed, if we’re lucky.” He pushes himself off the couch, comes around the counter to the kitchen.
Watching his ass in those skinny jeans of his, ruefully I say, “We’re never lucky. Not in this fuck-all of a town.” Then, I grab my wallet, shove my phone into a pocket and head for the door.
“Hey, where’s all my beer?” I hear him ask as I shut the door behind me.