The Big Dumb Jock Who Wasn't

The morning was a blur. Mark got up unceremoniously (read: he didn't kiss me. I wanted him to) but he did take his still-warm blanket and put it over me. I rolled over into the spot where he was and felt his lingering warmth. He sat at his computer and flipped it on, put on some more Pearl Jam, and didn't say anything.

"Good morning," I got up, folding the blankets. "Guess we should put this back up?"

"Yeah," he grunted and got up to help me with his mattress. I could have eventually done it by myself, but he made it look effortless. He stood there and I moved closer to him, wanted to hug him again and kiss him. But I felt the smallest resistance, like when the same ends of two magnets are just close enough to be at the edge of their fields. I put my head down, and he leaned over and pecked me on the top of my head. Then he tweaked my nipple.

"Aahh, fucker!" I swatted his hand. He snort-laughed at me, like he always did.

The rest of the day was spent doing schoolwork, hanging with friends, going to eat, the usual things. Part of me wanted to stay in the room the entire day with Mark, but I knew that wasn't going to be what happened, even if I asked. I definitely wasn't as engaged with my friends or studies as usual. My mind was still vibrating.

That night I hurried back to the room after dinner, pretending to "study in my room" (I never did that) and trying to tell myself that I wasn't waiting for Mark to come back. Hours went by, no Mark. When he finally did show up, it was about 10:30, and he was wearing a backpack full of books. My excitement to see him came out as-

"Hey! Where've you been?"

"Uhh, studying? Mom?"

"Oh. I. Um..."

"You were waiting fer your husband to come home to dinner?"

I cast my eyes down and could feel my face blush - or did it run white? My breath sank to my toes. It must have been obvious.

"Uhh, I'm sorry," he said, cuffing me on the shoulder. My mind was reeling and I was talking to myself: Just don't fuck this up. You don't have any clue or the slightest idea of what to do. Just. Sit. Breathe.

We sat in our respective areas in the room for a while in silence, Mark doing stuff on his computer and me pretending to do anything, but just waiting. After a while I heard the characteristic sound of him turning off his computer, then his desk lamp, sounds I had become so familiar with meaning "I'm going to bed." He went to brush his teeth at the sink next to my desk, where I was pretending to read. My heart raced, then sank. He climbed up into his loft. There was probably no room for me up there.

"'Night, Butt-lick."

"Yeah, 'night." I brushed my teeth too, took out my contacts, turned out my light, and climbed into my upper bunk. My jelly knees would barely do the job of getting me up there. Staring across to his loft - they were perfectly on a level - I could see him wrapped in his blanket with his back to me. I had the thought that we had essentialy been sleeping next to each other the whole year. I had the further ridiculous wish that my arm would stretch long enough to reach over, and find its way under his blanket and around his chest. Such a thought had never crossed my mind before, and that in itself was kind of funny to think about. But my heart ached right now.

"Mark?"

Snort. Grunt. "Yeah?"

Christ, I was a mess inside! What was I going to say? I thought about a million options. Can we sleep together again? Do you wanna talk? Can I rub your back? Would you fill my mouth with your massive tongue again and never take it out until we get old? All of these ended, in my mind, with No.

"Nothin, sorry."

He rolled over to look at me from his loft. His eyes reflected some of the light from the hall. I hoped he couldn't see mine, which were wide with anxiety, or that I was breathing a little harder, or that my heart was doing that ridiculous Looney Toons bounding out of my chest so hard it could smack him in the face across the room. How can you have the experience I had and then sit and look at the person it was with, who is lying across the room and not touching you, by his own choice? What was going to happen tomorrow when Rick came back? How the fuck was I going to sleep in this room again?

My mind raced through a hundred thoughts - what if he didn't want to be gay? What if he wasn't gay? Wasn't "bi" a "gateway drug" for straight dudes? What if he hooked up with a girl? Jealousy. Hurt. His lips on mine. Scared. Tweaking my nipple. Sinking. His head on my shoulder. Breathing.

He was still looking at me. I could make out that his eyes were open, saw him blinking. Could he see mine? I sniffed, took a deep, deep breath and let it out slowly as silently as I could, but it caught in my throat and I coughed a couple times.

Mark sat up slightly and swung his legs out of the loft, jumped down, ignoring the ladder like he usually did. I watched him grab his mattress, slide it out, put it on the floor. He threw his blanket on it, then stepped over it to my bunk, folded his arms up high and leaned on them on the edge of the bedframe, looking at me.

"C'mon."

"Mark I know it's stupid, this is dumb and there's no way yer gonna be my boyfriend or something, but you're the first guy-"

"Tom. Shh. Stop. C'mon."

There was the verbal equivalent of that pressure with which he grabbed my wrist the night before, turning me on my back. Gentle but strong, safe but unyielding, irresistible. I felt myself swinging my legs down from the bunk and floating to the ground as though he were carrying me. Eyes transfixed on Mark, I grabbed my blanket without looking back at the bed, and lay down on his mattress. He took my briefs off, then his boxers. He went to get the lube. Then he rested his full weight gently on top of me and filled my mouth with his tongue. So overwhelmed, I instantly wanted to cry, but got control because crying would just get in the way of what I wanted more in this very second than anything I had ever wanted in my life. This was my drug, he was my dealer, and here was my next hit.

The rest of the night was more or less a play-by-play repeat of the previous night. Which was just fucking fine because, I mean, God - that was the best thing I had ever physically experienced. But tonight Mark decided to run the option instead of the standard play of turning over and going to sleep. After we had gotten cleaned up, he sat down cross-legged on the mattress, with a blanket around him, and motioned for me to come closer.

"Sit down on my lap, but face me." I did as requested. My legs were sort of bent around him and his around me. "Now, take a deep breath, and kiss me, and when you do, breathe out all the way. Then just follow my lead, and keep kissing me."

He wrapped the blanket, and his muscular arms, around us both. I didn't care what he said before and after "kiss me" - I would have done anything, so long as that was included.

Deep breath as requested, our lips met and locked together, open-mouthed. I breathed out, and my breath disappeared into him as I felt his chest expand. Then nothing happened for a few seconds. The world stopped. I started to feel fainter than I already was, and wanted to-

Breathe.

The world spun again. Mark breathed back into me, warm, full air that satisfied the increasingly pressing need of my lungs and heart. My light-headedness gave way to a feeling of floating, suspended in his arms, like a superhero had caught me falling from a building and was now flying us both over the top of it, over the whole skyline. I opened my eyes and saw his closed, waited a second, and breathed back into him, closing my eyes again.

We went back and forth like that a few times, sharing breath, a closed system of just the two of us with no entry of outside stimuli, forget the whole world. I couldn't see, didn't hear, didn't want anything but breath from the beautiful boy attached to me and holding me so close.

It was clear that our lungs were extracting the available oxygen from the air we shared, and each breath seemed to satisfy less, grow smaller. Mark pulled back after he breathed into me the last time, and I heard him take a new, deep breath of the air between us. He was coming towards me again and I quickly exhaled and kissed him to catch-

Breathe.

His breath filled me again. Maybe we did it a few more times, but eventually just transitioned to slow, gentle kissing, with tongue, and teeth, and ears, and jawbones, necks, and back to just lips. At some point we had lain down facing each other, still kissing. Our lips were getting chapped. And it was truly late, and we were getting sleepy.

"What...where did you learn that? Prom chick again?" I wondered, starry-brained.

"Nah, I duno, I think I thought about it when we had to practice CPR for lifeguarding. Kinda weird, huh?"

"No. Um. That's not the word I'd use." I gave up, figuring that telling him how it made me feel would just be more "boyfriend language." We lay in silence a little longer, then I broke it again.

"Mark?"

"Yeah Tommy?" He dispensed with the nickname and used my real name. Even better, an affectionate version that nobody called me.

"What happens when Rick comes back?"

Silence. The superhero and his rescue crashed to the ground.

"Wull, he'll just have to walk around the mattress to brush his teeth." I could hear the eye-rolling in his voice.

It hurt, a little, but I managed a smile. Then back to a frown. "I'm scared how I'll feel."

"I tried to get you used to it but you started boo-hooing in bed, so..."

I pushed away. "Oh, thanks for all the fuckin favors, dude."

"I told you I don't want a boyfriend."

My heart searched for validation, mutuality. "Will you at least tell me you got out of your bed because you wanted to, and not to stop my 'boo-hooing?'"

He took a deep breath and sighed. He kissed me forcefully, almost bit my lip, then relaxed slowly, parted my lips with his soft tongue and filled my mouth with it once again, pulled it back, and so slowly as to be almost imperceptible, eased up until we were no longer kissing, but close enough to.

He spoke. "I'll take 'There's yer answer' for $200, Alex." Again, with him, that was probably as good as I was going to get, verbally. Good enough for now. And I certainly liked the non-verbal portion.

Then as often now, I wore my heart on my sleeve. Turning over, I pulled Mark's arm over me and held it. It was heavy, and his smooth, fair skin was a thrill to touch the way I wanted. I launched into a story.

"There's this episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation where Data makes a daughter, Lal. She eventually develops emotions, but it's too much for her circuits, and she basically melts down. Before she dies, she tells him she loves him, but of course he can't feel that for her because he doesn't have emotions. So she says she will feel it for both of them."

My heart raced and I gathered my will.

"I love you Mark. And I feel enough of it for both of us."

"Jeeezis yer a nerd Hind-lick."

My circuits were melting down. I wasn't hopeless - my story was nerdy, on purpose, and I was intellectualizing a bit, trying to distract my mind from the emotions that were taking it over. But I also meant - felt - what I said, and as much as I anticipated every word of Mark's reply, it still stung a little. In retrospect I should have given him a break. He wasn't ready to deal with these feelings any more than I was. We both were good at hiding them, but the difference was I could no longer hide them around him. The floodgates weren't open, they were blown off the hinges.

"Yeah, well," I managed, "you are too, even though you pretend you're not." I worried after that was out of my mouth that the potential double-entendre was too much, but he didn't say anything. We drifted off.

As would happen a few other times in my life, when I was particularly anxious about something I felt was really a Big Deal, I woke the next morning with my heart rate at 120. The words rushed to my mind, "Rick comes back today." My stomach twisted, my heart began to bound. Maybe that's what made Mark stir, because his arm was still tight around me.

His huge, strong hand moved to cover my chest where I would've had a pectoral if I had any muscles. I knew from looking in the mirror, you could see the impulse of my heart through my skinny chest even when I was calm, and Mark felt it now.

"D'you sneak out and go for a run or somethin, dude?"

"No just...." I shrugged. Thumpthumpthumpthumpthump.

"Are you always like this?"

"Only when it feels like the world's gonna end."

"Tommyyy...." He leaned up. That pressure of his hand on my shoulder this time, that felt like it could move mountains but gently turned me over towards him on my back. I looked up at him, swallowed hard. I was so, so scared. I needed someone who knew what to do, just to tell me. Someone merciful, smart, and with circuits more like Data. The universe came through for me this time.

"Tom. Dude. We're going back to the way everything was before this weekend. Yer gonna be my roommate, our other roommate is coming back, and we're gonna give each other the space we have been all year. I got a project due Friday and it's important. But next Saturday we're gonna go for a walk and talk, okay? And I don't want you sittin at your desk doin nothin until then, waitin for me. You got plenty of shit t'do too. Can ya do that?"

I nodded. Mark laid out a clear plan and goals, a way forward for just the next week. I don't know what would have happened to me if my first experiences with a guy were with someone different. It still causes a twinge of hurt sometimes, to think back to how I regarded him the first months of that year, with fear, contempt, dismissiveness. Every one of us is infinitely more complex than we appear outwardly, and beautiful in ways that often, others never see.

And Christ, giving myself a break, no fucking wonder I was overloaded at the time, and imagined things like wanting to spend the rest of my life with him!

The week went by and I followed the plan, interacting with Mark and Rick as occasionally as ever, though when I was in the room with Mark my brain wouldn't stop humming, my heart would pound a bit harder than usual, and I think I just gave up on breathing. My friends made a couple comments about how I seemed distracted or quieter. The truth is, this was taking up all my CPU power, and the heat sink and internal fan were working hard. Every night I lay in my bed, staring across at him, watching him breathe, listening to him snore, with the fifteen feet between us feeling like a million miles.

Okay, fine, I fucked the plan up. Early in the week I saw an old campus flyer tacked up for a Valentine's event, that had big red hearts on it. I grabbed it and shoved it in my backpack before I knew what I was doing, and went back to our room. No one was there, so I pulled the flyer out, cut out the biggest red heart on the page, drew a smiley face on it with the tongue sticking out, and put it in Mark's desk drawer that I knew he used frequently for pens and things. I figured, it's playful, a heart, says a few things, nothing too serious, likely from me, deniable if accused, we left our door unlocked a lot, could have been left by anyone. Not too risky. The rest of the flyer went in the hallway trash can. In the dorm basement.

There was an email in my inbox from Mark the next day: "dude, please don't." Once again, 100% anticipated, and 100% devastating. I started to compose an email back, typing and typing, and when were we meeting on Saturday? And what are we gonna talk about? and... then erased it. More wasn't going to help.

Saturday morning came and Mark was up early. He showered, dressed, grabbed books and his backpack, and left, presumably to the dining hall. I had no plans, so I turned back over and tried unsuccessfully to have a sex dream. Rick woke and got going - I usually was up and out before him. He went through the same motions, and I was alone.

Sex dream unsuccessful, couldn't sleep. I had an idea. Dismounting and wandering over to Mark's clothes bag, I found the shirt he had been sleeping in. It was the same one from the hallway race a week ago, soft, and slightly damp. I buried my face in it, trembling a little. Deep breaths that would normally calm me filled my lungs with the scent of Old Spice and Mark, and made my head spin and my face flush. Locking the door, I took off my t-shirt and put on his. Trembling a little more, I was starting to get hard.

I paused for only a second before finding his boxers in the clothes bag. Fuck it, I buried my face in them also, and his pungent smell was there. I hadn't been sure how I felt about it before, but now it made my heart beat faster. I got back up in my bed and lay down, rubbing my thin chest through the soft, musky t-shirt.

Throbbing now, I grabbed my cock with one hand and put the boxers over my face with the other, pushing them into my mouth. I inhaled through my nose and mouth, stroking faster and faster. I was so hard I felt like I would run out of skin. Taking the boxers off my face I shoved them under my balls, imagining Mark's forceful spear between my legs. I pressed them rhythmically into me, licked his scent off my lips and prepared to cum. Carefully pulling up his shirt and moving his boxers, I looked down at my red, angry knob and watched it pump out strands of white cum that pooled in my belly button. Fuck I loved being a dude.

Get up, clean up, put Mark's things back, shower, go eat. I blushed when I saw my friends, who asked why I was late. After breakfast, I went to a computer lab to check my email, and there was a message from Mark. Subject: Dude (what else would he type?) Body: hey down by the lake there's that island you can get to by swinging around the gate. some friends are going to meet us at 2:30.

That was distressing. He had said we'd go for a walk and... I stopped myself and smiled a little. What the hell was I thinking, that we were going to meet in our room, and walk out of the dorm hand-in-hand to the quad and talk about the sex we had last weekend? Maybe we'd ditch the friends, I don't know, but it was better than hearing nothing.

It was 1:30 now, so I had some time to read for class next week. The weather was unseasonably warm in the upper 70s, and though I was wearing my usual jeans and t-shirt, I was cold in the computer lab and figured outside would be better. I wandered to a quad nearby and found a bench. Time check: 1:35. The campus lake was a fifteen-minute walk away, so I pulled out a book, opened it, and stared right through it. There was no focusing on anything right now except the swirling thoughts making my mind hum.

Mark's head on my shoulder, his weight on top of me, breathing into me, his tongue, his arm around me; I basically ran through the entire two nights we spent over and over. My heart was quicker than usual. Time check: 1:38. Fuck.

I was going to burst out of my skin. I got up and walked, aimlessly zig-zagging the paths across the quad. Anyone who had been watching me close enough might have thought I was nuts. Walking to an adjacent quad, I did the same zig-zagging thing on the paths there. There were large shade trees that made intricate patterns on the ground with the sun streaming through. Birds chirped, people laughed, and my head vibrated. Time check: 1:46. Jesus!

Maybe I could just walk to the lake right then, but no, I didn't want to seem pathetic. He would roll his eyes at me waiting for him there. Maybe I could show up late all casual and be like, yeah, I had some things to do.... but I didn't think I could pull that off either. He would see right through it. Screwed either way, I just decided to be on time. Luckily there were more quads. And I could walk slower I guess.

As I approached the lake, walking along the slightly downward-sloping road that approached it, it winked back at me, glittering in the sun. It was surrounded by trees and there was a path that went along its edge. As stunning as the natural beauty was, few students actually spent much time walking the paths, or at the lake itself. The place Mark mentioned was this curious oval island, maybe a hundred feet long, about twenty feet offshore. People knew about it, but like the lake itself, it didn't seem to be frequented. A narrow concrete path had been built through the shallow water to it, about two feet wide, and in the middle of the path had been placed a wrought iron gate, always locked, about five feet wide and as tall. It was almost comical, and no one could figure out why it had been installed - all you had to do was hold onto the bars and swing around it, and you were past. Time check before executing this maneuver: 2:26. There was no one in sight. Fuck, I didn't want to be early. Nothing for it now. I swung around and continued on the path.