Brian, Summer 2003

For some reason Brian and I are on my kitchen floor. It’s almost 3 a.m. on a Monday morning. My roommate is asleep. It was his birthday and we went out to Sky Bar—which used to be Babylon, which everyone called “Baby Land” because of all the underage kids who would get in to do drugs back when I was in high school and North Carolina was experiencing the tail end of rave culture—for “80s Night” which is code for the club’s gay party. For some reason Brian and I ended up kissing on the dance floor, which was really unexpected because I’ve never once thought about him in a sexual way. I’ve never wanted to have sex with him. He’s a nice guy, a friend of a friend. I usually see him when we go out to gay bars. I guess he’s cute, in an unspectacular, teddy bear kind of way. But he just hasn’t been on my radar. I’ve never wanted to have sex with him.

And now here we are on my kitchen floor. The house is quiet, dark except for the fluorescent light above the stove. I kiss him and his scruffy stubble scratches my face, irritating, hurting. I climb on top of him. I have it in my head that he’ll want to fuck me, but when I ask him about it, whether he likes to top or bottom, he says both. We can do both. But I sort of know, suddenly, intuitively, that he wants to get fucked.

And I do fuck him. In my bed. On his back. He comes and then I climb on top of him, reach for another condom and he fucks me for a little while. I come. There’s not much more to say really. It’s easy. It’s not awkward the next morning, or when we see each other again. Sometimes I wonder if our friend Michael, the friend I met Brain through, knows that we’ve slept together. I wonder if Brian’s told him or if it’s even worth mentioning or if he’d care. Passing thoughts that don’t stick with me. It doesn’t seem important.

There comes another drunken Saturday night a few months later. Warehouse 29. Greensboro’s only fulltime gay club. It’s late, the place is nearly empty and it doesn’t occur to me to wonder why I’m always sticking around longer than anyone else, longer than I should. Brian’s still here, dancing on a nearly empty dance floor choked with baby powder-smelling smoke machine smoke, and before I realize what I’m doing I have my hand down the back of his jeans, my tongue in his mouth and he doesn’t even act surprised. Guess we’re doing this again.

Am I pulled towards this because it’s friendly, familiar? Because it’s easy? It’s warm and cuddly and fleshy, a sure thing. I never expected to have sex with Brian. I never looked at him and thought about his body and I never replay the sex with him in my head, you know, when I masturbate. I think about it so little that the details are hard to recreate, the whole thing a lost incident that even now doesn’t hold much significance. In fact I don’t think about Brian much at all. And in that sense, is this guy a notch on my bedpost that I want? Is he a conquest I’m proud of? A piece of ass I want people to know about? Something I didn’t want but took anyway. I could omit him, take him off the list and no one would know the difference, no one would care. No one’s feelings are getting hurt here.

There’s a sense of accomplishment, a stupid primitive bravado that accompanies the act of having fucked someone you’ve been wanting. Like, an I fucking own the world kind of feeling. When you’ve been thinking about it, planning it and chickening out and then you finally do it. You make it happen. You get what you want. A sense of your own personal cosmic pull.

But I’m not thinking about any of this as we leave the club, my hands reaching for what I can get, acting on a whim. Because I can. We take my car back to my place and I have to drive Brian back to Warehouse the next morning to pick up his car. I don’t make a decision never to have sex with Brian again. We just don’t.