“Hayden put the light back on and we sat up side by side on his bed and we…uhh…gave each other handjobs, and it was…” Quinn trailed off into silence.
“It was…?” I prompted.
There was a long pause before he quietly said; “It was a lot of things. Maybe even all of the things. Like, I just don’t know how to tell you how completely different touching another guy’s dick is, compared to touching your own – but…yeah, I don’t need to, do I? – not with you.”
Not with you. I felt the weight of his confidence, the beautiful burden of it, and accepted it for the gift that it was.
“Not with me,” I promised.
A stunner of a smile in return. “Well, we get to the next night,” he continued, “and we’re back in our room, and it’s the last night, have to get up at five in the morning for flights out, and Hayden’s like, ‘so, you in?’ – and all day, all day I’d been trying to tell myself that I only got such a buzz from that because it was different, taboo, whatever. Not because…
“Anyway, I said yes even though I’d been going to say no, and straightaway he asked if he could go down on me, and I…I hesitated, I guess, and he was like, ‘you don’t have to do it back, you don’t have to do it back’, so I agreed…and he did it, and afterwards he thanked me – he thanked me – and then went and shut himself in the bathroom, presumably to bust one out, then he came back and got into bed and fell asleep-”
He looked at me, right in the eye, as he tapped his chest. “Whereas this dumbfuck? He spent the whole night lying awake after it was too late wishing he’d grabbed that golden, golden opportunity right by the balls that were on offer and just gone for it…
“I got home,” he said. “I went back to work, back to normal. I expected to forget about it, but I didn’t. I thought about sucking dick continuously – honestly, it was like some kind of illness – and eventually I decided I wasn’t gonna get this out of my system without actually, y’know, trying it. Which meant I needed to save up and go on another holiday.”
At that point I did laugh. “Let me guess – Adelaide?”
Quinn shook his head, still in my lap, then turned a little more to nuzzle at my junk through my jeans. “Nah – Gold Coast, actually.”
“And did the Gold Coast provide you with a cartload of delicious Aussie dick to sample, beautiful?”
“Um, well…two? Which was – I didn’t need to break any records or anything, I just wanted to try it. I wanted to know.” He swallowed. “I came home again, I went back to work, I thought about dick. And I realised I didn’t actually have a lower sex drive than the guys around me, I just…”
“Just what?”
For the first time, he shut his eyes to me. “I just…like…different…things…”
His lids stayed closed, but I could see the eyes flickering, fluttering, underneath – unrestful, disturbed. This new-but-not-brand-new reality of his, it hadn’t fully sunk in yet. Recounting isolated episodes? – fine. But confessing, more globally, that he was turned on by different things? – still tough.
Looking down at his shrouded, troubled face, I felt a rush of understanding, of empathy for his experience, so far removed from mine in every way. I never found being gay to be anything but awesome, but I grew up in the right kind of town and the right kind of house – and crucially, I never had anything to compare it to. Whereas if you assume you’re straight and then discover you’re not? Sure, there’s something to gain – the sex doesn’t lie – but there’s also a lot to give up, maybe even to grieve, alongside…
With my thumbs, I stroked his eyelids, gentle as I could. “Are you okay in there, baby boy?”
He nodded. “Yeah…”
“You sure?” I probed. “I’m worried here. I kinda made you discuss this, and now you seem…”
“I’m okay,” he assured me. “It’s just-”
I petted his hair. “I’m listening…”
“I…I moved away from home, because after that second holiday I realised things would never go back the way they were, and actually I didn’t want them to. But I also didn’t want to pretend all the time. You only get one life, why waste it pretending?
“I had the job before I moved and I thought that was the key to it, that everything else would just fall into place so long as I could support myself financially in a context where it’s fine to be…yeah…gay. And sure, it’s easy to get a fuck here. But…I don’t have, y’know, a network built up. I don’t know anybody, the housing situation’s been shit from the beginning, and…okay, so this is weird, but it doesn’t completely feel like honest work, selling twelve thousand dollar taps…”
God, what a darling. What an absolute, utter darling…tying himself up in knots about his complicity in propping up the luxury-goods industrial complex…
His eyes opened and sought my own. “In any case,” he whispered, “you’re a bright spot…”
I bent over as far as I could, twisting and cricking my spine, and just managed to kiss my forehead to his. “You are too,” I breathed. “You’re such a bright spot – and I thought I lost you. I was going mental, hunting for you on station platforms week after week…”
He laughed quietly. “I went back to that rubbish bar a bunch of times and you never showed…”
“Fuck! I can’t believe I didn’t think of that!”
“I sat in the cafe opposite every weekend morning for two months, watching and hoping, and never got a glimpse of you. Where do you get your coffee, man?”
My heart skipped a beat at the thought of him, watching and hoping…
“Um, here? In the kitchen. My folks have a coffee machine.”
He fixed with those deceptively innocent eyes. “Damn. You owe me quite a few coffees by this point, Jeremy…”
Seeing as it was after five, I convinced him to take a rain-check on the coffee and cooked us some dinner instead. Then we cleaned up and watched some Netflix, took a shower together, went to bed and fooled around some more – and fell asleep before we could have one of those stupid ‘are you sure/ yes it’s fine/ but are you sure’ conversations about staying over that always turn into a thing…
In the morning we shuffled sheepishly out to the kitchen together and I made him the first of the coffees I apparently owed him, standing behind him with my own as he drank it on the window seat, looking out over the moody beach.
It was comfortable like that, being rather than doing, watching together with my free hand on his bare shoulder. It felt really…normal. Like something we’d always done, which obviously…but from that point on, he kinda never left. I mean, in a purely literal sense he obviously did – but if we weren’t at work or busy with other commitments, he was pretty much guaranteed to be at my house.
I’d sit with him between my legs the way I’d imagined, as often as I could – but I’d always have to disengage after a while because I was overheating. Quinn. He was always so warm. So warm. Too warm to spoon all night long, for sure. On the upside, he’d still be toasty any time we returned from a walk on the beach or a spell on the bike, so I could wrap myself around him to defrost my extremities…
The beach seemed to exert a kind of pull on him, in the same way the bike did with me – the novelty of it. He was continually wanting to explore no matter the weather, and dragging me along – just like I was always angling for another opportunity to indulge my new-found appetite for speed…