Declan swallows audibly, then, in a voice brimming with vulnerability, asks, “Are you turned off now? Freaked out?”
I sit up straighter and answer from the gut. “No. God no. I’m not. I’m just trying to . . .” I trail off, searching for the words, then finding them easily. “Understand you.”
“Good,” he says, in a softer tone, like he’s grateful for my answer. “And honestly, I did it because I was attracted to him. I think I knew I was gay. I think I knew I was only attracted to guys. But we were all out one night, drinking. And they made me an offer. They said, ‘We’ve been wanting to do this.’ Her parents were out of town, and they asked me to come to her house, and I was so—I don’t know—intrigued by him that I said yes. So, I had sex with both of them.”
“Did you regret it in the morning?”
A long sigh is the first half of his answer. “I guess I could say I felt used, but honestly, I chose it. I said yes. I was into him, and I was very, very curious. But yeah, I regretted it when they went at each other right after and said I could leave.” He ends on a note of annoyance, but one of shame too.
“Jesus, man. That sucks,” I say, feeling a pang of sympathy for him and his less-than-great first time.
“It did. But I learned a lot too.”
“Like what?”
“That I liked touching him. That I liked it when he touched me. I’d been pretty sure I wasn’t bisexual at all, but that encounter solidified it for me. But the next morning, I did regret it.”
I relax, feeling free. Unjudged. He’s speaking so openly with me, and I’m into it. “I’m sorry you regretted it,” I say.
“Regret sucks,” he says, then pauses. “Your turn. Why did you wait? No opportunities in college or some other reason?”
I flash back to the way I grew up, to the noise and the fury, the moans and the groans. The things I overheard that went beyond sex. Now’s not the time to unload chapter and verse of the I had shitty parents saga, but he was frank with me, so I give him some of the same. “My parents had me when they were young. They were teenagers. And they fought all the time. And fucked all the time. And it was just . . . hard . . . really hard. I didn’t want that—the kind of relationship you wind up regretting.”
“That does sound rough.”
“I also didn’t know right away what I wanted. I fooled around with girls first, back in high school. Mostly because it was easy,” I say.
“Because that’s what society expects?”
I shake my head, picturing those days, those times. “Not really for that reason. Honestly, it was because I spent a lot of time with girls. I’ve always had a lot of female friends. My closest friend is Reese—she’s two years younger, and our grandmas are best friends, so we pretty much grew up together. Nothing happened with her, but I was friends with a lot of her friends and always enjoyed hanging out with them, talking to them. So, I thought, maybe I like girls. I mean, I could tell who was pretty, but I guess in the same way I could tell a sunset was pretty. So, I went on some dates to see if I was straight.”
“How’d that work out for ya?” he deadpans.
“Fan-fucking-tastic,” I say, smiling, then I continue. “And after that, I thought maybe I was bi.”
“Are you?”
It’s funny that he asks. I want to say, “Dude, can you not tell how much I love dick?”
But that’s not the point. You can love dick and love pussy too. But I only love one.
“No. My dates with girls were pretty so-so. Fooling around with a girl always felt like a shoe on the wrong foot. Or like I was standing in front of a crowd and didn’t know what to do with my hands.”
He laughs at that last one. “Like Will Ferrell in Talladega Nights. ‘I’m not sure what to do with my hands?’” he says, imitating the movie star’s race-car driver when he does his first TV interview.
“Exactly.”
“And what does messing around with a guy feel like?”
That’s easy—so damn easy. “Like playing baseball. Like hitting a home run. It’s not at all like looking at a sunset.”
I can hear him smile. Hell, I can feel it. “Mmm. Couldn’t have said it better myself.”
“And I figured out I was into dudes and only dudes at the end of high school. That’s why I got the piercing. Just kind of a personal marker, to honor what I’d learned about myself.”
“That’s a damn good reason.”
“But it’s not like I was showing it off to guys all the time. College was insane. I was on scholarship and wanted my degree before I entered the draft, so I was trying to finish in three years. I was either studying or playing ball. It sounds cliched, but I barely had time to breathe.”