“Let me suck you off,” he says.

I laugh, but I’m not surprised. I should have seen this coming. And I should already be able to see where it’s going.

“I’ll put on some porn,” he says, and he pops a DVD in.

I don’t really want a blowjob from Timmy. Partly because blowjobs just don’t really do it for me, mostly because I’m not into Timmy, not even a little. But he’s insistent, and since he’s not expecting any sort of reciprocation I figure it’s just easier to let him do it than to argue about it.

And why is that? Am I that lazy, or just astoundingly easily manipulated, easily pressured into doing something I’d rather not? Is it because Timmy’s one of the only people I’ve met so far in New York, and I actually kinda thought we were going to be friends? Or do I just lack enough self-esteem, self-respect, whatever you want to call it, to insist that no means no, even if it means walking out on this little dinner party, or worse still, waiting around for everyone else to show up and then sitting through dinner awkwardly trying to pretend that nothing out of the ordinary happened an hour ago?

Whatever the case, I end up sitting on Timmy’s couch, watching some severely unimpressive porn, and he’s kneeling between my legs, sucking my cock. He takes his out and strokes it while he’s sucking mine. When I’m ready to come, I tell him so, but he doesn’t stop, so I shoot in his mouth and he swallows it. No one’s ever done that with me before. There’s nothing to even wipe up afterward.

Timmy’s friends arrive and we have dinner. And all evening long Timmy is a total dick to me. I get the impression that I’ve served my purpose and that he’s irritated that I have had the audacity to stay for the dinner party he invited me to.

And a few weeks later he invites me over for a Super Bowl Half-Time party—everyone’s already there when I arrive this time—and I get the same treatment. He’s dismissive and rude and says casually hurtful things. He says something smells bad and asks me if I stepped in dog shit on the way over, even though I don’t smell anything. Every comment I make, he contradicts or ridicules. And all night, he’ll occasionally ask if I’m sure I didn’t step in dog shit on the way over.

I’m completely baffled as to why he even invited me to this stupid party, and he must be too, because he never invites me over to he house again after that night.

I’d been in New York less than a month; I still didn’t have a job and I was living in a tiny attic bedroom in Bed Stuy in a house that belonged to one of my favorite writers, a sex columnist and educator whose career I was kinda using as a model for my own at that point. Going to a sex party seemed like something I needed to experience.

A few of the guys I’d met in New York—mostly through friends from college who’d moved here before I did—had heard about this same Park Slope sex party, but had sort of turned their noses up at it. I guess they thought it was trashy or something. Or maybe they were scared. Or maybe it just wasn’t their thing. Any or all of those were good enough reasons not to go. But I wanted to see it. And being pretty much on my own in the city—not knowing anyone, not being known—made me braver, for some reason, like I was unsupervised and what I was doing wouldn’t be seen, unless I chose to write about it. Which I totally intended to do.

The invitation said the party started at 11pm, but I knew better than to show up on time. The epic journey from Bed Stuy to Park Slope—negotiating subway lines and figuring out where they connected and waiting for the trains to show up—ate up some time as well, so by the time I got to the address where the party was held it was already nearly 1am. Two guys were already being buzzed into the building when I arrived. I entered with them, silently, horribly self-conscious, unsure of the etiquette in this kind of situation. What sort of pleasantries are you supposed to exchange with strangers on your way to the same sex party? Turns out it’s the same as riding an elevator: they ignored me and I ignored them.

A door opened at the end of the fluorescent-lit first floor hallway, and a little bald dude ushered us into the apartment. It was by no means the lush penthouse/harem fantasy it should have been. No pool littered with floating blossoms. No rooms filled with cushions and flowing curtains. It was just an apartment: wood floor, kitchenette, furniture shoved to the side to make room for all the naked guys.

I paid the cover that would, I hoped, go toward funding puppet shows for little kids, and checked my clothes keeping my boxers and shoes on. I grabbed a beer, which made me feel slightly less naked, and started to explore. The whole place smelled of skin and lube, not exactly unpleasant, but definitely unmistakable. And there was a hush through out the apartment, the sounds of shuffling feet and expectation, and occasionally the low tones of men talking quietly. I stood in the doorway of a room that looked like it might have been a living room in a past life. There were no lights on and it was almost unmanageably dark. All I could see were dim silhouettes. I sipped my beer and wondered why they hadn’t at least bothered to string up some Christmas lights.

And then someone was touching me. I looked to my right and there was a slight Asian guy, shyly running his hand over my shoulder to the small of my back. I tried to shift away from him, stiffening, gently shrugging his hand off, but he touched my face and said, “I like your hair.” I said “Thanks,” drained my beer and made my way back to the kitchenette for another. When I came back the living room had emptied a little. The Asian guy was gone so I headed for the couch. As I sat down I felt a little squeeze on my ass and my fight-or-flight senses went crazy.

The guy sitting next to me laughed and said, “Oops!” It was a boozy, fun-loving chuckle that was completely out of place in this hushed, sexually charged atmosphere. It dissolved the tension. I laughed too, grateful that somebody here wasn’t taking this all so goddamn seriously.

“Sorry,” he said, “I do that sometimes. It’s a great way to meet people.”

“What, like, on the subway?” I asked. There was a window behind the couch and in the blue glow of the streetlights I could tell this guy was kinda cute.

We laughed and sparred back and forth like that for a while. He didn’t creep me out like almost everyone else at the party. He was loud, funny, unafraid. He didn’t lurk in the shadows; he made his presence known and didn’t care what anyone thought. He was a movie buff and kept quoting Office Space, which reminded me a lot of my friend Gretchen, the way she and I interact. It was starting to feel more like a regular party.

After a while people started filtering back into the living room, getting naked. We sipped our beers and watched people fool around in front of us completely unselfconsciously, cracking jokes that no one else seemed to pay attention to.

And then he said, “Wow, I’m getting horny again.”

I pounced on him, carefully taking his beer from his hand and setting it on the windowsill. His skin pressed against mine, slightly cold at first, like the sheets when you first get into bed, then sending pulses of heat through my whole body. He told me my mouth tasted sweet, like lemon drops and beer. He kissed me harder and it was like we were trying to swallow each other’s tongues, savoring those thick, hot, wet things. I kissed his neck and nibbled his earlobes, sliding my hand down his camouflage boxers to find a thatch of soft, unkempt pubic hair. He had the most perfect nipples I’d ever felt in my life. I bit them, gently, and then harder, and he moaned. He asked me to lick his armpits and I did. The thick hair smelled sweet, a subtle mix of deodorant and sweat. He bucked under me, heaving and sighing, “Haaaah, uhhhhh!”

I didn’t leave his side all night. People thought we came to the party together.

“Are you two boyfriends?”

“We’re partners in crime,” I said.

We found our way to the bedroom toward the back of the apartment, where most of the sex was happening: guys standing in little groups groping and fondling and kissing each other. We got tangled up in one of these knots of bodies, feeling our way through, grasping other people’s cocks, grabbing other people’s asses. We made our way to the bed, stripped bare except for a white fitted sheet. I sucked his cock while he ate my ass.

At some point in the night the host of the party had asked us both to come on his face when we were ready, and we both agreed. We found him, and he knelt in front of us while we jerked off. That’s how we came: standing side-by-side, arms around each other, his head on my shoulder.

He’d driven in to Brooklyn from New Jersey for the party, so he offered to drop me off at the subway station. Outside, under the streetlights, I saw for the first time how bad his skin was. His face was covered in acne and I was surprised I hadn’t felt it when I was kissing him. But he was still cute, still fun.

I left that party in Park Slope honestly thinking that Mike and I were going to be pals. I thought we’d stay in touch on Friendster, and he’d give me a call whenever he came into the city and we’d hang out, go drinking, maybe hook up again. And we did keep in touch for a while. We chatted occasionally. But I never saw him again after he dropped me off at the closest subway stop in his huge old SUV, in the wee hours of a freezing January morning, my first week in New York.

“Dustin is totally going to have a crush on you!” she sighed as soon as I walked in the door.

Now, April was not someone whose judgment I would ordinarily have trusted. But she showed me Dustin’s picture and he was actually kinda cute. Kinda. And I hadn’t had sex since August. And, let’s be honest, the opportunity for some kind of sexual adventure, no matter how vague, grants pretty much any situation a little magic, a thrill of possibility. So, I feigned disinterest, skepticism, but I was open to the idea of some bi-sexual guy wanting to make out with me, or whatever.

This party needed that little extra magic, that sexual tension—or it felt like it did, now that I knew it might be there. It seemed like Gretchen had intended for this to be a quiet, cozy affair: a couple close friends, some cocktails and homey, Christmas-y nibbles. April, on the other hand had invited a dozen or more of her friends: white trash, just out of high school types who seemed intent on turning Gretchen’s intimate little get-together into a scene from Kids. The sucked down Jell-O shots, carried beer cans around in the pockets of their cargo pants, wrestled around on the kitchen floor for some reason. And, of course, a few otherwise boring girls made out with each other for attention while the guys whooped and hollered.

When April introduced me to Dustin it was obvious that we’d both heard about each other already, but it wasn’t clear what he thought of the situation. He was either playing it aloof, or he was shy. Or he just wasn’t as interested as April had expected him to be, which wouldn’t have been surprising at all. She was a dim little thing, eager to seem worldly, eager to impress in that way that all teenagers are. But in a way it was kind of sweet what she was trying to do. She wanted to be a matchmaker, to feel her own influence and intuition by directing people toward each other, with the added exoticism of matching up to guys. So cosmopolitan of her!

“No fair! I wanna see some guy on guy action!” she whined, hand on her hip, head cocked to one side, watching two of her girlfriends lip-locked on the kitchen floor. This was her idea of hosting: manipulating her environment, accommodating the events she wanted to see happen—getting Dustin and I from point A (two guys who’ve just met and don’t really have much in common) to point B (two guys snogging the night away). She might actually be good at this, at flirting, at working a room, if she could manage not to get pregnant and drop out of school before finishing her sophomore year.

I could see all this, and I could see Dustin glancing at me across the room more and more as the night went on and he got deeper into his case of Bud Light. I was on home turf; I could afford to be bold.

I grabbed Dustin and pulled him into April’s bedroom—a semi-curtained off area that you had to walk through to get from the living room to the kitchen—telling him there had been a request for a little guy-on-guy. His eyes lit up and he laughed. He seemed relieved for some reason, like he wouldn’t have been able to do this without an excuse, without being pushed in the right direction. He took off his baseball cap and put his arm around my waist and kissed me kind of artlessly, sticking his tongue right into my mouth. The girls whooped and hollered as we rolled around on April’s—his ex-girlfriend’s—bed. They behaved the way I imagine middle age women do when they go to see Chippendales.

Dustin smelled of skin and clean laundry. Guy smells. He wore a baggy t-shirt with the sleeves cut off and baggy painter’s pants. There was something sexy about that foolish, adolescent bagginess. It made me want to crawl into his shirt with him.

There’s only so much you can do with a guy with six or seven girls watching, so I cut things short, before the novelty of two boys kissing wore off and before the party derailed too much further. But I did manage to pull Dustin into Gretchen and April’s bathroom—the smallest bathroom I have ever tried to have sex in in my entire life.

We kissed and groped, and his clothes slowly started to come off. He was not, by any means, what you could call fat, though his body had a certain doughiness to it. He had the body of a real guy, someone who didn’t try to sculpt himself into a celluloid heartthrob at the gym. He was well shaped, without being muscley or even particularly toned. He was soft, fleshy in spots, but sturdy, solid, a man not easily moved. And his ass was down right chewable. The black tufts of hair under his arms and curling out from the waistband of his boxer shorts seemed that much sexier since his body was mostly smooth.

Later that night, when the party had dissipated, when Gretchen and April had gone to bed and everyone else had gone home, Dustin and I tried to fuck on the old pull-out sofa in the living room. But try as I might, I couldn’t keep him hard. We ended up falling asleep without even cumming, that heavy, naked body rising and falling beside me as he breathed. I don’t remember him waking up to leave the next morning.

April told me later that he’d said I was the only guy he’d ever been with who had managed to keep him hard as long as I did.

Chase is online. We’re chatting and I’m suddenly more horny than bored.

He’d approached me in a diner one night a couple months back, in the wee hours of Monday morning after a Sunday night spent dancing to 80s music at Sky Bar with my friend Michael—my freshman year roommate, a former rival and now my favorite going-out buddy. I’d felt exhilarated when the DJ played “Dancing Queen,” drunk as I was, probably on cosmos or dirty martinis, though it’s hard to remember what I drank in those days, and entirely self-possessed. I’d smiled at Michael and shouted over the music, something like, “Imagine how much less fun we’d have if we were straight!” We’d left the club at 3a.m. happy to be ourselves, by ourselves.

But then, an hour later, in this diner off of Wendover—why were we so far from downtown at that hour?—this boy who I’d met earlier that night, and who, Michael had informed me, had a distracting lazy eye that I still couldn’t detect, was approaching me. It struck me as brave. I could almost feel the rush of adrenaline, the plunge when you find yourself moving from contemplation to irrevocable action. I felt myself as a wall he was confronting, and I decided not to make this hard for him.

Chase asked for my phone number and called me the following week. We went on a couple dates, and then ended up in bed together. He’d made it clear at some point, I don’t exactly remember how, that he was a bottom. I was trying to be gentle, to loosen him up with my fingers, to ease my cock—lubed up, condom on—into him slowly, to be respectful of what a delicate, precarious thing it is to get fucked in the ass. But he thrust his pelvis forward, forcing me all the way inside him, all at once. Gentle didn’t seem to be what he needed.

But it didn’t last, me and Chase. There really wasn’t much to him, and it didn’t take long for me to get bored with him, the way I’m bored with everything else these days. We’d walk around Tate Street, with its coffee shops and campus watering holes, and there really wasn’t much to say. He talked about going to ECU in the fall and it didn’t bother me that would be moving to a different city.

Now here I am, a couple months later, stoned and horny and thinking about the way he pulled me inside him, taking my cock in one surprisingly deft movement of his hips. He’s in Greensboro, he says. (Is it a holiday weekend? Did he actually go to ECU?)

I’m stoned, I type. Come over.

This image enters my mind, of Chase bent over the side of my couch, of me fucking him there, his ass smooth and white and super receptive, his mouth gone slack, opened in silent groans and little gasps.

He laughs, LOLs, catching my drift. So we can exchange some hastily delivered fluids? Can’t. Sorry. Maybe some other time.

There’s a boyfriend, I think, at ECU. (He did go to ECU, I decide.) Have we chatted about him before? Either way, I hadn’t anticipated the resistance. I’m already hard and it doesn’t seem worth pursuing further. I jerk off, stoned and feeling very uncharacteristically sensual, my skin all warm and alive and awake-feeling. Crawling, but in a good way. I’m thinking about fucking Chase bent over my couch, the way I could slip right into him, and when I cum it’s really fucking intense.

“You’re not gonna make me get wood,” he says.

I’m playing with his cock, which is shockingly, disappointingly small. Normally cock size doesn’t really matter to me, but I’d always imagined Domenic’s cock to be perfect. A fat, red beer can cock, not too long, but thick. A rhino’s horn, curving up. I’ve been lusting after Dom since I was a freshman, this short-ish, stocky Italian-American guy with dark sleepy eyes and bee-stung lips. Everyone says he’s dirty, he’s been around, but to my mind that just makes him sexier. Lazily sexy. Dom looks like sex to me, and I’d imagined his sexual prowess to be a fucking force of nature.

Dom is straight. I have no idea why he’s letting me play with his cock, but he doesn’t seem nervous or freaked out or anything. Maybe he’s just really drunk.

You’re not gonna make me get wood. It’s less a warning and more like he’s reassuring himself. I take it as a challenge. I start sucking his cock and rubbing his hairy taint, expecting him to pull away at any moment. But he doesn’t. I take his balls into my mouth and squeeze his shaft. It begins to stiffen. I’m hoping that he’s bigger when he’s erect, but as his cock gets harder I can see that’s not the case.

“That looks like wood to me.” I smile at him. He doesn’t say anything, so I start blowing him again. My own cock is straining against my jeans, hard and, I can feel, dripping pre-cum, but I don’t take it out.

I’m massaging his taint and I keep expecting him to shift subtly away, or tell me to stop as my fingers move closer to his asshole. But he doesn’t. I reach that puckered button of flesh, smelling of hair and faintly, sweetly, of carrion, and I rub it gently with the pad of my finger. Dom spreads his legs ever so slightly wider. I put my middle finger into my mouth, wetting it, and when I touch his hole again, it slips in easily.

Domenic’s friends—good natured, crumudgeonly hippie guys, comic book intellectuals—joke about him being gay and I’ve never really understood why. Of all of them, he’s certainly the most attractive, the only one without a beard or a beer belly or dirty, unkempt hair. He cares about his appearance, but not in an overly metrosexual kind of way. He’s a sweet guy, really; they all are. But I’d never describe him as overly sensitive, or particularly in touch with his feminine side. And yet here he is, getting his cock sucked by another guy, getting his ass fingered. I wonder if it was something his friends picked up on, something they’re more attuned to, like gaydar for straight guys. Maybe this sort of thing has happened before. Maybe his friends’ gay jokes have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I’m stroking him, sucking him, moving my finger so gently inside him. I want to see him cum so badly. I want to see him lose control, those pillowy red lips gasping. His eyes are closed, but I know he hasn’t passed out. His cock is still hard. Still, I can’t tell if he’s actually enjoying this.

And then he asks me if I want him to fuck me.

I think about taking him into my bathroom, away from our other four sleeping friend, and getting into the shower with him. I think about my body and I think about the sort of bodies he wants. Women’s bodies. I wonder if whatever is driving him here in the dark, in my bed, could survive the awkward logistics of trying to fuck. And it occurs to me for some reason that he’s doing this for me. That he’s not simply drunk and horny, but that he may think he’s being kind to me by letting me suck his cock. That he’s enduring this, going through the motions because he’s fond of me, because we’re friends, and why not?

I want him to fuck me. I want him to stay with me, wrap his arms around me after we’ve cum. I want to lay my head on his chest and sleep. But fucking would cross a line, somehow. What we’re doing now is fun, playful. Even fingering his ass feels like no big deal. It friendly. Fucking would be too intense, too intimate. I know I shouldn’t take this any further, and I actually don’t want to.

“You should go,” I say, running my fingers through his bush, over his belly, in his chest hair. I don’t want to let him go, this perfect example of everything that I want.

He gets dressed and I wake up the other four.

It is never weird between us after that night. When we see each other at bars and at parties he doesn’t avoid me. He always treats me like a favorite younger brother and I love him even more for that. But we never mention that night, ever again.

The guys agree to hit up a gay bar with me, but first we pop into literally every Irish pub between the loft we’re staying in on 24th and Park and Chelsea. I can’t quite wrap my head around why the guys want to go to five bars that are exactly alike. But it’s whatever. We’re nice and liquored up by the time we get to the gay bar we’ve chosen. Barracuda. New York Magazine’s website says it’s chill, not too cruisy. Years later I’ll discover what a lie this is, but tonight it sounds perfect. We order drinks, plant ourselves at a table in the back. The guys, who are all generally very liberal, progressive types, start complaining almost immediately. I can’t really blame them. They stick out, beards and bellies in Chelsea before art bears made that look trendy. And this bar isn’t really that much fun, honestly.

Somehow I end up talking to this guy—another Tom—and his friends. We talk until my guys want to leave and I tell them I’m gonna stay and Tom buys me another drink. And then his friends leave and he sticks around, says he’ll make sure I find my way back to the loft, which is good because I’m drunk and have no idea where I am. We stumble past Madison Square Park and we make out at the door to the loft. I invite him up even though we’re not allowed to have guests.

He’s sitting on the sofa, naked in front of these huge windows over-looking 24th Street. His cock is huge, beautifully proportional in the way that tall guys’ cock usually are. I straddle him, and it hurts, but I manage, and we’re both sweating, just feet away from the room where the couple who runs the loft are sleeping. He comes and then we shower, his broad naked body kind of amazing to me, a mountain I want to climb again. I make him leave, a little worried about getting caught, but no one wakes up. I don’t remember going to bed.

The next evening, we’re sitting around the loft and the guys have no idea I brought Tom here. So I tell them, bragging, thinking they’ll high-five me for being the only one of us to get laid on the trip. But they’re pissed because they say I could have gotten us all in trouble with the couple that runs the loft, which is really annoying. I decide that if it had been one of them that got laid, if one of the straight guys had brought a girl back and banged her in the shower there would definitely have been high-fives.

I spot Tom ordering a drink at the bar. Tall. Dark, shaggy hair. Sexy, in a vaguely midwestern, puppyish sort of way. That’s pretty much it. There’s no one else I’m interested in here. I point him out to Christian, which is what you do when you’re out with friends and see a cute guy. As if voicing your interest will somehow make something happen; as if whoever you say this to will know exactly what you should do to get the guy’s attention. Except that I don’t need anyone to tell me what to do, because I’m already making my way through the fog toward Tom. I say, “Hi,” and before much else is said he’s kissing me and I’m telling Christian that I’m going back to Tom’s hotel with him.

He’s a surprisingly nice guy, goofy and sweet, in town for someone’s wedding or bachelor/bachelorette weekend. Something like that. I end up fucking him for a really long time that night. Morning. And the next evening, I meet up with him again at his hotel to hang out and I fuck him again before we head our separate ways, on separate adventures on Bourbon Street. He shows up at my hotel the night before Christian and I leave to say goodbye. Christian is there so we don’t fuck. We just sort of cuddle on my bed for a while and then I make him leave.

He stays in touch for a few weeks. A month or so. He lives in Texas, or he’s moving to Florida or something. He’s a sweet guy and he seems to like me, but it doesn’t take long for us to lose touch.

This was a first for me, the way this all-consuming crush resolved itself with the simple realization that the guy was a moron. Up till then I would have said that I’d never really gotten over any guy that I’d been into. Some part of me held onto those feelings—the longing, the heartbreak, the lingering attraction—because…well, just because. But not with this dude. Christian and I became friends. And then I realized what a spectacular tool he was.

You’d think this would be one of those proverbial “What was I thinking?” scenarios. But no. I know exactly what I was thinking.

* * * *

He was in a tank top the first time I saw him. Blond hair down to his shoulders. Lean muscles and aviator sunglasses. It was August and I spotted him on campus at Guilford College. I was there signing up for a queer film class, arranging for credit to be transferred to my school.

Cute guy, I thought, and got in my car and drove away.

Turned out he was the TA in that queer film class.

* * * *

Queer Cinema 101, or whatever it was called, was an evening class. Once a week I drove across town to the Guilford campus and sat in an auditorium watching and discussing gay films for three hours.

The first couple weeks I didn’t talk to him. I sat by myself and didn’t really talk to any of my classmates. But I did talk a lot in class. I raised my hand a lot. I had a lot to say about identity and the cinematic gaze and all that stuff. But during breaks in class I just kinda hung around, hoping that Christian would talk to me. Which he didn’t. At this point I wasn’t even sure if he was into guys or not. Though I had a feeling.

Then I ran into him at Sky Bar, this club in downtown Greensboro that had a gay party on Sunday nights. It was my 21st birthday. So I said hi. I invited him to the epic party I was planning for the following weekend and then my roommate got the bartender to pour all of us some kind of flaming shot for my birthday and Christian sort of got absorbed back into the crowd and I probably kept an eye out for him the rest of the night. I don’t remember whether he showed up to my party the next weekend. But communication was established.

* * * *

I was probably two months into the semester before I finally asked him out on a date. Every week I’d look forward to Queer Cinema 101. Every week I’d drive across town listening to Fleetwood Mac and telling myself that I was gonna do it, I was gonna ask Christian out to dinner or something. And then I didn’t do it. I didn’t do it the week we watched Hedwig. I didn’t do it the week we watched Boys Don’t Cry. I didn’t do it the week we watched Chasing Amy. Maybe it was the week we watched The Celluloid Closet, I don’t know. But after weeks of making chit-chat during smoking breaks and talking bullshit about subjectivity and objectivity and trying really fucking hard to seem all smart and shiny and amazing, I finally just kinda asked him to go to dinner with me.

He got this really creepy twinkle in his eyes and smiled really slowly, like he’d just figured something out about me that was in some way valuable, the way villains in movies look when they realize how they can finally take the hero down.

“Yeah. Ok,” he said.

Since the date was my idea, it seemed like it was up to me to decide what we would do. I picked him up at his apartment and we drove all the way back to my side of town to hang out at my favorite bar. We sat at a table in the front window and talked about the things we were both preoccupied with: Queer Theory, post-structuralism, gender identity. He talked about his ideas about his own sexuality and gender, in a way that only Gender Studies majors do. He told me he was wearing women’s underwear and it didn’t freak me out at all. I wanted someone challenging. I wanted a freak.

When I dropped him off at his apartment later kissed me, playfully, off-handedly as he got out of the car.

* * * *

The first time we almost did it was at his birthday party. Late in night, his bedroom turned into a half-hearted mini orgy, with he and I sort of at the center of it all in his bed. At one point he looked at me and asked, “What do you think of my dick?”

It didn’t seem like boastful or dirty, like he was trying to turn me on. It seemed like he was asking for something like reassurance.

I looked at him and smiled.

“Have you ever seen one like mine?”

It wasn’t especially remarkable. It was a perfectly normal looking penis. It wasn’t hard.

“It doesn’t really work for me all the time,” he said.

The orgy didn’t really go anywhere, aside from a couple Guil-Co girls getting naked and straddling some naked straight guy who seemed to be passed out. After everyone left, I tried to pick up where he and I had left off, but he wanted to get breakfast instead.

This became a sort of pattern in our relationship. We’d brush up against the act and then he’d pull away. We made out every now and then, and sometimes he’d sleep in my bed. But it never went further than that. And I just kept obsessing over him, more in love, for some reason, than I thought I would ever be with anyone ever again.

Then came the night he told me he’d started seeing a girl. Megan. A dowdy, fag hag kind of girl at Guilford College who didn’t mind that her boyfriend wore panties and liked to get fucked and wasn’t sure if he was transgendered or not. I went home and took a shower and cried and cried and cried.

But we stayed friends. And the strangely almost-sexual aspect of our relationship remained. We fancied ourselves libertines. In my mind we were Louis and Lestat—I had long dark hair, he had long blond hair—amorally roaming the night, looking for trouble. We went to strip clubs together the night before Christmas Eve. We ended up in bed with a group of my girlfriends.

One night I ended up at a party at his apartment on mushrooms. I sat watching Smashing Pumpkins videos and he put the dildo that Megan fucked him with in my hand. I wandered into his bedroom and couldn’t tell if I was looking at his girlfriend asleep in his bed or if I was just hallucinating. I tried to explain this to my friend A and ended up saying that I thought there was a body in his bed. She laughed and charged in there and came out giggle a little more skittishly and apologized because it really was his girlfriend asleep in his bed.

* * * *

It must have been my idea of us as vampire soul-mates that made me suggest we go to New Orleans together for Spring Break. That and the fact that I knew he’d be up for it. And that he’d be up for anything I would want to do in New Orleans. We’d explore the seedy bars and strip clubs together. We’d get lost in that decadent city full of voodoo and frat boys, and we’d both want to see the same things.

The day we left, I was already irritated with him. He was late waking up and we almost missed our flight. By midday we were wandering the French Quarter, exhausted from the trip and unsure what to do until nightfall. We napped and dressed and roamed Bourbon Street, popping into co-ed strip clubs and gay bars, the day’s tension gone in a haze of tequila and cheap plastic beads.

That night, drunk and far from home in our four-star hotel room, we tumbled into his bed together, naked and I fucked him.

* * * *

By the end of our week in New Orleans, I couldn’t stand the sight of him.

I can’t say exactly what it was. Suddenly he wasn’t the magical animal I’d thought he was, and I don’t know what caused this…transformation? Revelation? He was lazy and narcissistic and hopelessly pretentious, but I’d known that already. In New Orleans he seemed somehow helpless. The ballsy, shamelessness was gone. Maybe it had never been there. While I made friends at the bars we went to—something that I probably wouldn’t have been able to do at home—he seemed neutered, unable to hold his own in this environment. I started to see his swagger for the fraud that it was. And everything he said sounded like pseudo-intellectual schlock. It was like watching something I’d created out of clay crumble in front of me.

I found myself being actively cruel to him, snapping at him at dinner, ditching him for cute boys I met on Bourbon Street. I saw that he was hurt, but I just couldn’t bring myself to care.

Driving home from the airport back in North Carolina we barely said a word to each other. When I finally dropped him off at his apartment, I’d never been so happy to have someone out of my sight before.

* * * *

I didn’t see much of Christian after New Orleans. We’d run into each other at bars around town, and when we did I was friendly. I didn’t hold any resentment. He hadn’t done anything other than not be the guy I’d convinced myself he was.

He on the other hand seemed irreversibly wounded by the trip. I’d been a jerk, I knew that, and he had every right to hold a grudge.

The last I heard of him, he’d been living in a house with some people I knew from UNCG and he’d accidentally burned the house down.

His house was in a reassuringly residential neighborhood, all cul-de-sacs and storm doors and yards with Big Wheels overturned in the driveways. He took my jacket and hung it in a closet in his foyer, betraying a slight fussiness that didn’t seem to fit the description of someone who would invite a total stranger to his home to fuck.

He’d been playing beer pong with his roommate and her boyfriend in the rec room—this house seriously had a rec room, down a small flight of steps, probably a converted car port, from when a real suburban family had lived there. I was dismayed and at the same time maybe a little relieved when he invited me to join the game. So this was, what? Seduction? An icebreaker? A fun, getting-to-know-you activity? I’d thought we were just gonna fuck. Did he actually want to hang out? Or was he just trying to get us drunk enough to take the edge off what we were going to do?

The roommate and her boyfriend were off-putting as well. Not exactly personally—they didn’t leave much of an impression on that count—but their presence was disturbing. What had he told them? Who did they think I was? Why did they think I was here? I was getting a smirking, begrudging vibe from them; they didn’t see the point in pleasantries either. Besides which there’s always something about the presence of a straight guy, even an only marginally attractive straight guy like this one, that tends to put me off all available gay guys, making them seem somehow inferior, counterfeit versions of men. It’s not something I’m proud of.

So here the four of us were, playing beer pong, subtext simmering just beneath the surface. It was a slasher flick waiting to happen.

There was nothing flirtatious about the game. Two people having met at a party, and discovering that they like each other, and sensing that they will inevitably sleep together that night, would have played very differently. There would have been a lot of giggling, a lot of unnecessary touching. There would have been teasing, like tasting each other’s humor. This wasn’t that kind of game.

And to be honest it didn’t feel like much of a game at all. It was more like a minor ordeal, something we had to get through, awkwardly, before the roommate and her boyfriend said good night and disappeared into other parts of the dark, quiet house. Before we headed to the bedroom, where he made a point of removing and carefully folding his down comforter—that fussiness again—before letting me onto the bed. He even went so far as to lay a towel under himself when we got to the point when condoms and lube were necessary. He lay on his back, on his towel, and I fucked him. And when I tried to move him, to change positions, he wouldn’t let me. He was quick to cum, thankfully, and when he was done, I pulled out and jerked off on his chest.

Afterwards, he said he would ask me to stay the night, except that he had an early class the next morning. I hadn’t thought about sleeping there, but the fact that he was actually hustling me out the door seemed especially rude. I took my time getting dressed and talked about seeing him again, asking him if he had plans that weekend, enjoying watching him squirm as he made up excuses.

I drove back to Greensboro, listening to an old Tori Amos CD on the way.

That’s the way I remember it anyway.

The theme of my 21st birthday party was “porno glam.” The invitation bore a the logo from my college sex column—livid red lips curled back over white teeth in a playful sneer—and encouraged everyone to dress like a porn star going to the Academy Awards. Most people didn’t really follow through on the dress code, but it set a tone. There are photos of me getting spanked by each and every one of my friend; of straight guys having their dicks painted with edible body paint in my kitchen; of my friend Dana holding my arms behinds me with my pants down for some reason.

Of all my friends, Dana and her boyfriend Trevor were always the most willing to get naked and do ridiculous things. They were the kinkiest people I knew at the time. They were swingers, they were hedonists, sadists, masochists, all that. I was constantly amazed by the lengths to which they pushed each other, sexually. And I was constantly jealous.

Dana and I were close, and Trevor and I had a playfully antagonistic relationship. But there was nothing flirty about it. I knew he was bisexual. I’d actually had a brief, non-sexual…thing with his ex-boyfriend. But as far as I knew, there was no sexual tension between us. I loved Dana too much, and he, more often than not, was too cruel to her to be anything more than my friend’s bad boyfriend, the guy we all knew she’d be better off without.

Knowing this, however, didn’t stop most of our circle of friends from ending up in bed with the two of them—or just with him, as we found out years later. He was the devil none of us could resist, a cruel little man whose sexuality dwarfed all logic, tricking us into ignoring his softening belly, his obvious misogyny, his utter lack of style or taste.

It was a sort of sisterhood, the girls that did it with Trevor and Dana. Occasionally a boyfriend would be invited to watch or they’d do the whole wife swap thing. But I wasn’t aware of any guys getting involved with them. It seemed to me that Trevor’s bisexual phase had run its course, and he just dredged the fact of it up every now and then to sort of reaffirm his shameless pervery.

* * * *

I’d always imagined sex with Trevor as a sort of act of self-degradation. I’d imagined him lording over us with his cock, using it as a weapon, his love feeling a little bit like spite, like punishment for something his mom or some dude in high school did to him. I’d imagined him dominating, humiliating, owning. But in my bed he lay on his back and whimpered.

The three of us—Dana, Trevor and I—had snuck away to my bedroom as the party died down. People were leaving, buttoning up their flies and stumbling home, while we plunged a little deeper into whatever wickedness my 21st birthday party had loosed on the air.

Dana lay at her boyfriend’s side, stroking his cock while I slipped on a pair of black rubber gloves. She was gorgeous, naked and confident in a way I’d never seen before, bathed in the warm glow of this tacky red light bulb I’d put in my bedside lamp for the party. We’d played with her first. I’d wanted to feel her clitoris and her G spot, the urethral sponge that mirrors a man’s prostate. Trevor had shown me, guiding my hand with his, our fingers inside her, and then I’d watched him eat her out.

Now he lay naked at the foot of my bed, his legs spread, his cock hard, while I knelt on the floor in front of him.

During the Inquisition, they said that the devil demanded that witches kiss his asshole. So that’s what I did. I pushed Trevor’s thighs back, and licked his hole while Dana dripped lube into my outstretched, gloved hand. She took his glasses off his face.

There was no discussion about what we were about to do. It simply happened, because no one said, Stop. It was where we were being lead.

I slid my index finger inside Trevor, pressing gently again the tight pucker of his ass with the flat of my fingertip and slipping it in. I inserted a second finger and a third, and his breath caught and he asked me to slow down. By the time I had four fingers in him, he was moaning and arching back slightly. My hand was in up to the knuckles, the widest part, and I slid my thump in and out of him.

It’s his moaning I remember most vividly. The soft, helpless little cries that sort of crept out of him, involuntarily. The way this feeling almost infantilized him, this man who had seemed so formidable, who, I realized, I’d always been a little bit afraid of. He suckled at Dana’s breast, and I wouldn’t have been surprised to see him suck his own thumb.

When it became clear that we couldn’t go any further, we all crawled up to the head of the bed, nearer the pillows, and Trevor surprised me by sucking my cock. After a few moments he sat up, stroking himself and said he wanted to cum all over Dana and I. But he couldn’t. None of us came that night.

* * * *

The years have changed the way I think of that night.

A few months after I moved to New York, Dana sent me a text message in the middle of the night saying that Trevor had beaten her and that she was scared. It was something we all should have seen coming. She’s left him now, after four years of back-and-forth. But the memory of that night still chafes. I wonder if the others, our friends who slept with Trevor and Dana, feel the same way: as if somehow we were complicit in what happened to her. As if by sleeping with them, we were a part of their destructive relationship. We allowed her to stay with him. We let him abuse her, emotionally, psychologically, and in the end physically. I wonder if they carry that guilt as well.