Chapter 9

First Date Jitters: The Only Thing I’ll Be Blowing Is Chunks

 

 

“WHY are you nervous?” Sandy asked. “You’ve already made out with him at work and at home, seen him almost naked, slept in the same bed, and spent an entire day with him in your lap. What could you possibly be nervous about?”

“I don’t know!” I wailed, tearing through my closet trying to find that one outfit that would say, Hi, my name is Paul. I’m confident, sexy, and I am not sweating gross buckets under my armpits and at the back of my knees. So far, I was without any luck as every piece of clothing I put on either made me look like an obese rhinoceros or a Vietnamese hooker. Sandy said he couldn’t quite see the Vietnamese hooker, but I assured him that I looked like my name was Pham Dao Lin and I worked at a brothel called the Lotus Flower where I offered hand jobs to men with rubber glove fetishes.

“Well,” he said, frowning at a pair of chaps that came from my wannabe-cowboy-BDSM days, “I would give you a Xanax, but chances are you’d pass out and drown in the soup appetizer. I don’t know if Vince would think that’s attractive. Or maybe he’s got some really weird kink and would think you’re really hot with minestrone dripping off your face.”

“Oh God,” I moaned. “What if he does have weird kinks? What if he wants to put things up my pee-hole while he makes me dress up as Sailor Moon?”

Sandy stared at me. “What the fuck have you been watching?”

“I accidentally googled the word kink,” I told him, finding a pair of Crocs in the back of my closet. I didn’t know where those came from because I was pretty sure I wasn’t a lesbian who owned a bookstore in Ohio. “I thought I could find some slightly sexy things to do just in case… you know.” I couldn’t look at him.

“Uh-huh. And what did you find?”

“So many things,” I muttered. “There are some seriously fucked-up people in the world. Then I started to get turned on and that scared the crap out of me, so I looked up regular porn like normal people.”

“Thank God for regular porn,” Sandy said. “Baby doll, please understand that I love you with all of my heart. I really, really do. But we need to take you shopping in the worst way. I’m pretty sure I just found corduroy, and I’m seriously reconsidering our friendship.”

“Hey, it made a comeback,” I said. “In the nineties.”

He waited.

“The early nineties.”

He waited some more.

“Okay, in March of 1992. But you know I have a hard time throwing anything away.”

He sighed. “I know. But I also know I’m going to turn on the TV one day and find you starring in an episode of Hoarders, and I’ll wonder if I could have done more to save you. By then, I’ll most likely be super famous and living in a palace with a harem of Iranian men who lick my balls whenever I ask, and you’ll be here with your piles and piles of corduroy. I’ll think fondly of you, but your memory would most likely be accompanied with mild disdain.”

“I hope your dreams crash and burn,” I hissed at him.

He probably wasn’t even listening. “Okay, you’ve got thirty minutes before he gets here. Go get in the shower, and I’ll figure out what you’re going to wear.”

“This was probably the worst idea I’ve ever had,” I said, looking around at the disaster that was now my room. “Why the hell did I say yes?”

“Because he was wearing a black jock strap while standing in your living room and you did absolutely nothing about it and this is God’s way of punishing you,” Sandy said. “You must be the only gay boy in the world that would have been able to resist that. If I were you, I’d give serious thought as to what you can do to rectify that situation.”

“It was really hard,” I admitted.

“I bet it was,” he said with a smirk.

“Not like that.”

“Uh-huh.”

“It was so black.”

“How big was his cock?”

“Sandy!”

“What? If I’m spending my Friday night digging through a closet that, if I didn’t know you I would have assumed belonged to a fifty-four-year-old Russian woman who works in a steel mill, then you can sure as shit give me some details!”

“It looked big,” I allowed. “And his nipple is pierced.”

Sandy made the sign of the cross over his chest. “Sweet Jesus. Baby doll, you know I’ve always been in your corner and I’m rooting for you now, but if you mess this up in any way, shape, or form, I can’t promise you that Helena isn’t going to swoop in and take him for her own.”

“You tell that bitch he’s mine,” I snapped at him.

Sandy grinned. “Territorial, hmm? Go shower while I sort through this mess. You have twenty-six minutes.”

I ran out of my room, tripping on a discarded pair of jeans (stonewashed, no less; why the hell was my closet an interdimensional portal to the previous century?) and almost running into the wall. I grinned sheepishly at Sandy, who just shook his head and muttered something I couldn’t quite make out but sounded suspiciously like “he better love you.”

I hadn’t actually spoken to Vince since I’d dropped him off at his house the day before. He had texted me a few times today, telling me a knock-knock joke that I still didn’t get and telling me he’d pick me up at my house at seven. I had asked him where we were going, and he told me not to worry about it, which, of course, made me worry about it even more. I told him it was important because I needed to know what to wear. He told me I could wear absolutely nothing and that would be okay. Then he started to try and get me to have text sex with him again and I told him that I had to go to a meeting, when in reality I was sitting at my desk, trying to figure out how to get rid of my boner. Speaking to customers on the phone when I had an erection was not the best part of my day.

I was only in the shower for a few minutes, almost slipping and falling when Sandy leaned into the bathroom and shouted over the water, “Do you need to trim your bush?” I screamed at him to get the fuck out of my bathroom and that no, my bush was perfectly fine. I heard him chuckling to himself as he went back to my bedroom, and I glanced down just to make sure my pubes didn’t look like they were Rastafarian. They didn’t, and I breathed a sigh of relief. I didn’t think I would be able to put a razor near my junk with how my hands were shaking, and asking Sandy to do it seemed to be stretching the boundaries of our friendship. Friendship should never be about asking your friend to hold your balls out of the way so you can shave your taint.

By the time I was done in the shower, I had worked myself back up into a mini freak-out. I wiped away the foggy condensation from the mirror and stared at my wide-eyed reflection. My eyes looked blown out, like I was witnessing something so shocking that I’d never be the same. And, to be fair, I was getting ready for a date with the hottest man I’d ever seen, so it wasn’t too much of a stretch.

“What am I doing?” I whispered to myself.

Reflection Paul didn’t respond except to grimace at me like he was nauseated. Which he just might have been. I know I was.

Then I made the mistake of trying to do my hair. And, of course, every time I ran my fingers through it to smooth it out and let it do what it normally did every day, it would start sticking up in random spots. I would smooth down one and another tuft would pop up as if my very follicles were mocking me. I scowled at my hair as I squashed it down with both my hands and then it was sticking up everywhere, and Sandy must have heard the sharp buzz of the hair clippers and figured I wasn’t trimming my pubes and was able to stop me before I shaved my head.

He made me sit on the toilet, removing anything sharp from my immediate vicinity, nodding slowly as I babbled at him how my hair was out to destroy me. He put his hand on my chin and made me look up at him, eyeing my hair with an empirical look. He turned and dug through my cabinet and wouldn’t answer me when I asked him what he was doing. Then he whirled around and assaulted me. Well, I said he was assaulting me, and he said he was just applying some kind of gunky, pasty crap that he’d found on one of my shelves. I told him in a very clear voice that I didn’t like gunky, pasty crap in my hair because I was now thirty, not some douchey twenty-year-old who thought I was better than everyone else. He responded that he was well aware I was thirty because parts of my hair were falling out while he was trying to style it. It took him five minutes to calm me down after that, telling me to just breathe, that he was just joking. I called him the evilest bitch who ever existed, and he preened at what he considered a compliment. I told him our friendship wouldn’t continue on past tonight and that I was pretty sure there was a special place in hell for him. He smiled at me and made me stand to look in the mirror. And somehow, someway, he’d been able to make my plain, old, boring hair look like it was the greatest thing that ever existed. It had this trendy, spikey, faux-hawky thing going on.

“Holy shit,” I whispered.

“Right?” he grinned. “Stylish. He’s not going to know what hit him. Now, let’s go get you dressed. We don’t have that much time left after your meltdown.”

“That wasn’t my fault. You told me I was going bald!”

He didn’t even bother responding, instead grabbing my hand and then pulling me back to my bedroom, which was still somewhat of a disaster area. “Now,” he said, “I couldn’t find any sexy underwear, so this will have to do.” He threw a pair of black boxer briefs at me.

“Sexy underwear?” I asked, somewhat bewildered. “Sandy, what about me suggests to you that I would wear sexy underwear?”

“Everyone should have at least one pair of sexy underwear,” he replied, as if that was totally obvious. He turned away.

“Why?” I asked as I dropped the towel and slipped on the boxers. “And what the hell is sexy underwear?”

“Like, skimpy briefs.”

“Gross. I don’t want to wear that. Well, okay. I would if they had like X-Men or Transformers on them, but that makes it sound like I’m a pedophile, so I think I’ll just stick with the underwear I have.” I snapped them up and Sandy turned back around, giving me a critical look up and down. You want to know what it means to be self-conscious? Try being slightly overweight and standing in nothing but black underwear while your best friend, who is the skinniest person in the world, stares at your crotch as if it holds the secrets of the universe.

“Your penis looks good in those,” he said finally, giving me a nod of approval.

“Oh joy,” I muttered. “It’s a good thing that’s what I was going for. Penis fashion is all the rage these days.”

“Judging from your wardrobe, you wouldn’t know fashion if it fucked your mouth and came on your face,” Sandy said with a glare. “I didn’t realize how appalling the state of your closet had gotten. This’ll all be rectified very shortly, so you may as well accept that now.”

“You’re gonna be rectified,” I snapped lamely.

“Ouch,” he said. “Put these on.” He tossed me a pair of jeans he’d bought for me on a trip to Austin two summers ago. I’d never worn them because I always thought the ass pockets looked like they’d been bedazzled. And not in a good way. Well, come to think of it, I don’t know if there is a good way for something to be bedazzled.

But Sandy had that “don’t fuck with me” look in his eye, so I put the pants on without protest. They had a button fly, too, which I always found tedious and completely ridiculous. Sandy must have seen the reaction on my face because he huffed to himself. “Button flies are delicious,” he said sternly. “There’s nothing hotter than going up to a guy and using one hand to rip them open before going down on him.”

“That’s not going to happen,” I assured him as I sucked in my gut inconspicuously so I could finish buttoning up. “I have too much self-respect to let someone go down on me on the first date.”

He found this hilarious and laughed until I was sure he was going to choke on his tongue. I crossed my arms against my chest, trying to look intimidating, only to realize I was standing shirtless in a pair of shiny designer jeans and my nonsexy underwear.

“Is this the entire outfit?” I grumbled at him.

He wiped his eyes. “It could be, if you wanted. I’m sure Vince would appreciate the view.”

I poked my stomach and watched it dimple. “I highly doubt he wants to see what happens when you eat too many burritos from Los Betos. Am I allowed to complain that I’m having a fat day when I’m always fat?”

Sandy clucked his tongue. “You’re not fat,” he said seriously. “You’ve got some padding. There’s a difference. It means that you can get fucked pretty damn hard.”

“I’m not going to have sex with him!”

“Why not?”

“I have principles.”

“Fuck your principles. Put this shirt on.”

He tossed me a fire-red button-down collared shirt that I hadn’t seen in forever since it had shrunk a bit in the wash and I didn’t feel comfortable wearing it out in public. I thought about protesting, but it wouldn’t have mattered. I slid it on and buttoned it up. Sandy then came over and straightened the collar and rolled the sleeves up my forearms. I tried to take shallow breaths to avoid having the shirt explode like I was Bruce Banner and I’d just gotten very, very angry.

Sandy stopped fussing and took a step back, looking me up and down. He let out a low whistle, causing me to blush. “You clean up nice, Auster,” he growled, a little bit of Helena slinking through. “You’re gonna get balled.” He grabbed me by the hand and pulled me in front of the mirror.

Reflection Paul looked moderately resigned for a split second, but then his eyes widened and his jaw dropped. “Holy crap,” I said. For some reason, I looked good. Like, way good.

“Told you,” Sandy said smugly.

“I look ripped,” I breathed, starting to flex my forearms in the mirror. “Ish.”

“Er, let’s not go that far,” Sandy said, pulling me away from the mirror, lest I became betwixt by my reflection and started macking on the glass. “And don’t do that in front of Vince either.”

He pulled me into the bathroom and spritzed me three times with my cologne and was about to open his mouth to say something when the doorbell rang. Wheels starting barking like we were under attack, his little cart squeaking as he rode the ramp down my bed and tore into the hallway.

“Oh sweat balls,” I whispered, starting to panic

“Now’s not the time to freak out,” Sandy warned me. “Paul. Paul!”

“What if he realizes just how boring I am?” I said, ignoring him. “What if we’re sitting there, trying to have a conversation, and it just peters out into nothing because we can’t think of a single thing to say to each other? An awkward silence will fall where we’ll just look at each other and he’ll wonder just what the hell he was thinking asking me out on a date and then he’ll do the whole ‘Oh, sorry. Looks like my neighbor just texted me and my apartment was destroyed by a turbine that fell off a plane, so I need to take you home and, oh, by the way, I’m moving to Alaska tomorrow, so we won’t be able to see each other again.’ But no, because we work together, I’ll have to see him every day, and then that motherfucker Tad will be all like, ‘Oh, hey, Vince! I heard about that god-awful date you were forced to go on with Paul where he didn’t even wear sexy underwear and had jeans that made his ass look like a disco ball! I’m all tight and hot and perky, so you and I should go fuck on Paul’s desk and laugh at him while you put your dick up my butt.’ God, I hate Tad so fucking much, that stupid little whore!”

Then I realized I was talking to myself. I heard the front door open and Sandy exclaimed, “Vince!” quite loudly. “How lovely it is to see you again. How are you feeling? I certainly hope you haven’t gotten hit by any more cars!”

I ground my teeth together, planning intricate revenge plots that would end with Sandy framed for the murder of an English baroness.

“Hey, Sandy,” Vince said cheerfully, and my traitorous heart stumbled in my chest.

“You’ll have to bear with us a moment,” Sandy said loudly. “Paul’s in the bathroom talking to himself in the mirror about sexy underwear and plane turbines.”

“Plane turbines?” Vince asked, sounding adorably confused. “I have a lot of pairs of sexy underwear.”

Of course he did.

“He’s worried a turbine will fall on your apartment, the poor thing,” Sandy said, raising his voice even louder.

I gripped the countertop tightly, trying to remember that Sandy and I had been friends for more than twenty years and that someone somewhere would miss him if he was buried in the desert in an unmarked grave.

“I think I have renter’s insurance,” Vince said. “But I don’t know if that covers planes.”

“I’m sure it does,” Sandy said smoothly. “Paul? Oh, Paul? Are you done talking to yourself? You have a guest!”

You can do this. You can do this. You can do this.

If this were a movie, this would have been the point where some cheesy-ass song would play as I walked down the hallway into the living room. The music would swell, blaring something about kissing or loving or fucking or some other romantic bullshit, and then Vince would see me for the first time, a grin growing on his face, a hint of lust blooming in his eyes like fire, all because of me. I’d walk into the living room and all the rest would fade out around him and he would only have eyes for me. Sandy would disappear, my house would disappear, the world would disappear, and he’d breathe my name because I was the hottest thing he’d ever seen. And, of course, I would be the hottest thing he’d ever seen, and he wouldn’t even be able to remember a time he didn’t know me because I’d be his whole fucking world. The music would reach its screeching chorus and he’d step toward me and murmur, “Fuck the date, let’s just go to bed so I can do naughty things to your butt,” and then we’d live happily ever after.

The end.

Okay, but that’s not the end. Because that’s not what happened.

What happened was I was halfway down the hall when Wheels heard me coming and started yipping excitedly. After all, his three most favorite people in all the world were standing under the same roof for the first time ever and the universe needed to know about it! “Daddy!” he was barking at me as his claws scrabbled along the tile, his wheels squeaking. “Daddy! I’m coming to you because I’m so excited I could just shit!”

And me, of course, being wrapped in my own neurosis, didn’t see him until the last second, when he was right under the foot I was about to step down on. And as my foot fell and I heard his happy little bark, I could already see the headlines: Gay Man Distracted By First Date Steps on Two-Legged Dog and Kills Him and Canine Lovers Everywhere Demand Dog Killer’s Testicles and The Christian Right Says, “This Is Why Gay People Are Evil; They Kill Handicapped Dogs To Satisfy Their Immoral Lust.”

So at the very last second, I launched my foot forward with a squawk, the heel of my foot sliding along the right wheel of his cart. Naturally, this made me lose my balance, and I went forward, stumbling to the end of the hall, then careening into the living room and smashing into the far wall. But it was okay! Instead of the obvious solution of stopping my forward momentum by pressing my hands against the wall, I took the extremely radical approach of stopping myself with my face. Into the wall.

Silence fell over the room.

Then: “Sandy?” I asked, my face still pressed against the wall. My nose and right cheek hurt like a son of a bitch, but I wasn’t bleeding. Not yet.

“Yes, Paul?” He sounded somewhat shocked, but like he was also trying very hard to keep from laughing, a breathless sound that reminded me why having a best friend was never a good thing.

“Will you do me a favor?”

“Yes, Paul.”

“Will you look up the nearest Taiwanese restaurant for me?”

“Of course, Paul. Can I ask why?”

“You may. I’d like to see if they would buy my dog.”

“Wheels, Paul? You want to sell your dog?”

“Yes, Sandy. To a Taiwanese restaurant. So they may cook him and serve him to a table of four. I may even give him up for free.”

“Table of four. Got it.”

“Sandy?”

“Yes, Paul?”

“Did you both see me trip and smash into the wall?”

“Yes, Paul.”

“Has Vince run screaming yet?”

“No, Paul.”

“Would you tell him it’s okay to do so now? I’d like to take the rest of the night to die of embarrassment and look up recipes for the Taiwanese restaurant. I’m thinking something with cayenne pepper. I feel it would complement the taste of mutt on the palate.”

I didn’t even hear Vince approach, didn’t even notice him until he was right up on me, pressing up against my back, putting his arms around my waist, holding me close. “You okay?” Vince murmured in my ear.

“Sure,” I said. “I just wanted to teach this wall a lesson by headbutting it. It’s always giving me dirty looks and I just got sick of it. Thought it was time to man up, you know?”

He chuckled near my ear, his lips almost on my skin. “Anything broken?”

“Aside from my pride? Nope. Nope. Everything else seems to be just peachy.”

“Why don’t you turn around and let me make sure?”

“I’d really rather not do that. I think it may be better if you leave and go to the U of A.”

“The college?”

“Yeah.”

“Why?”

“Because I need to see if you can find a physicist there and ask him how long it will be before time travel is invented. Because I really would like to travel back in time to when this house was being built so I could have stopped the builders from putting up a wall here, and then I would travel back to right now and instead of being face-planted against the wall, it would have looked like I was showing off some really sweet dance moves in a long hallway.”

Vince snorted in my ear, which I found to be rather gross, and yet was okay with him doing it anyway. He turned me around in his arms, and even though I tried to avoid looking at him, he wasn’t having any of it. He gripped my chin and forced me to look up, inspecting my nose and cheek. They throbbed a bit, and I felt my face heat up under his careful gaze. I was proud of the fact there were no tears in my eyes, even though such a facial smash deserved them. I was manly, after all, I reminded myself; manly men didn’t cry after getting tripped by their two-legged dog and running into a wall with their face.

Vince poked my cheek. “Ow!” I snapped at him.

He shrugged. “Doesn’t look like it’s broken. Nose, either. Probably will get a black eye, though.”

“Oh, thank you, Dr. Taylor,” I said, rolling my eyes.

He grinned at me, dimples exploding like fireworks. “Did you notice how I didn’t laugh, even though it was pretty funny?”

I glared at him and then heard a choking sound. I looked over to where Sandy stood in the middle of the living room. He had his hand over his mouth, squeezing tightly, tears streaming down his face as his body shook.

I stepped away from Vince and his hands fell to his sides. I pointed at Sandy, who I was pretty sure was going to burst at any moment. “You can go home now,” I scolded.

He nodded once and grabbed his keys off the coffee table. He almost made it completely out my door before he couldn’t hold it in anymore and starting howling with laughter, the sound ringing back to us as he closed the door.

“This can’t possibly be a good way to start things,” I muttered.