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  I thought I heard Willa murmur an Oh dear, but what she said to me was, “And you just found this out? That’s why you had a panic attack?”

  Although she couldn’t see me, I nodded once.

  The message must have gone through nevertheless, or Willa knew my habits too well. “Any thoughts of hurting yourself, or hurting someone else? Or are you just anxious?”

  “Don’t worry,” I assured her. “I’m not going to do anything to fuck up my program. I just… I couldn’t breathe and I had to take the Xanax, and then I left Hugh’s and came here. But now I need to talk to you.” That sounded entirely reasonable to me. This is why I’ve been here so long—three months ago, I doubt I’d have been able to keep myself from falling apart all over again. Now I have a better idea of how to act, how to hold it together until I can lose my shit in a controlled situation, like under Willa’s supervision.

  “Well, Phel,” she began, “I’m happy to meet with you at any time, you know that. But if you’ve taken 0.5 mg of Xanax already, my concern is you might be in need of some sleep before we really get a chance to talk about this. You might feel more comfortable if you have a rest and let the effects wear off a little bit first. Then we can sit down and have a proper chat. What do you think?” This was something else Willa always did, asking me my opinion on matters in which I had little to no say.

  “I could sleep,” I answered neutrally, because neutral was about all I had in me right then. I’d only broken into my emergency stash of Xanax once before, only a single 0.25 mg dosage, but I could more or less remember being overcome by tiredness after a couple of hours, to the point I couldn’t keep my eyes open. No doubt Willa had too many patients to see that day to deal with someone falling asleep on her in midconversation.

  “Okay. That sounds like a good bet,” she agreed. “How ’bout you drink some water and go lie down, and I’ll come by in a few hours to check in, see how you’re doing?”

  For a minute I chewed my lip, considering. Then I said, “Alright. I’ll leave the door unlocked.” I was pretty sure she had a key anyway, but we’re all about the appearance of normalcy here. Even though some patients aren’t allowed cutlery in their rooms, or windows that open.

  I suppose I must have slept through the rest of the day and all of that evening, because I didn’t meet with Willa until the following morning, when she greeted me over breakfast with a smile. Despite my earlier urgency, this suited me fine. Thanks to the Xanax, I’d had no dreams, no opportunity to dwell upon what had happened the previous afternoon. What might still happen.

  We remained in the quiet sanctuary of my apartment for almost three times our regular session length, and the threat of further anxiety attacks kept me inside the rest of the day—that, and the fear of whom I might run into. For three days I refused to leave the safety of the compound in spite of Willa’s urging to carry on with my life as normal, but today’s the day the hiding ends. We met again this morning for a couple of hours before I ventured outside and down to the beach, late enough that I could be reasonably sure of having missed Hugh. And Nate, of course, though I was doing a pretty good job of not thinking about that.

  The difficulty is how to avoid thinking about him now, even as I concentrate on making my cutbacks and bottom turns on the wave as neat as possible. I’m getting pretty good at those, although my duck diving still needs some work. My progress across the face of the wave is swift and steady, a good amount of spray following in my wake. The day is so warm that I ditched the wetsuit in favor of board shorts, and the water feels amazing against my bare skin and between my toes. The tubes are beautiful and the weather is stunning, bright and sunny and clear, and yet all I can think about is Nate and what Willa had to say on the matter.

  Naturally, she wanted to know how I felt about seeing him, not counting the panic attack and the terrified hiding, and I think my initial answer was something along the lines of “Angry and scared shitless and totally fucked.” Her response? To ask if I still had feelings for him! Of course I responded in the negative, cheeks flaming.

  This look came across Willa’s face that was exasperated and knowing and sad all at once. “Do you really think you would still feel those things so intensely, if that were really the truth?” she challenged. “Furthermore, why do you feel it’s necessary to eradicate your love for him completely?” Fucking therapists.

  Do I still love Nate? I so desperately want not to, and yet, Willa’s right. The past four months filled me with hope that I’d finally moved on and made real headway in putting him out of my mind once and for all, just as he was out of my life. But in the quiet moments of honesty I sometimes allow myself, I know this isn’t true. Seeing him framed by Hugh’s doorway brought that home for me in an instant, a rush of grief and loss and need sweeping across me like, well, a tidal wave. The subsequent panic attack had as much to do with being face to face with him as my realizations to this end.

  Pretty much from the beginning, Willa has been a strong proponent of the idea that I get attached too easily; she blames it on my perceived lack of approval from my parents growing up, approval I thought I’d lose if I ever came clean about my sexuality. According to her, the person I fell in love with wasn’t Nate Fessenden as he existed in reality, but my vision of him and how he saw me. In his eyes, I was someone strong and successful and desirable, and that—that person who so valued me—was who I wanted to be with.

  Perhaps this has merit, but I’ve never considered myself particularly fond of attachments, and I’ve always tried to avoid them. I can honestly say Nate is the only person I wanted to be with for real, and even then, I bucked the relationship at first, thinking him no more than a weekend fling. I suppose Willa’s idea comes from the fact that I let myself love someone who hid so much of himself from me, loved him in spite of the warning signs that presented themselves. What I think she sometimes fails to consider, though, is I hid an awful lot of myself from him too, out of wariness and sheer force of habit—at least at the beginning.

  Despite my thorough enjoyment of our first weekend together—after two days with Nate, I could barely walk, let alone drive to Chicago—I deleted his number from my phone as soon as he left. That he gave me his contact information at all seemed charming, naïve, and I reciprocated with a kiss good-bye and a vague promise to call. Clearly he didn’t do one-night stands often. Although I felt bad for leading him on in that respect, it was difficult to rob him of the charade that we’d see each other again. We just… couldn’t. That wasn’t me. He didn’t even live in Columbus. Sure, I spent a few days thinking about him afterward, feeling both aroused and wistful at the memory of our time together; Nate left an impression, to be sure. But that was supposed to be the end of it.

  Two weeks later, I found him waiting on my doorstep as I returned from a dinner with the account people from my firm. The sleek black motorcycle was the first thing I noticed when I rounded the corner. Then Nate swung himself off the driver’s seat and rounded the bike to lean against the front handlebars, hands pushed deep into the pockets of his jeans. I stopped dead at the sight of him, right there in the middle of the sidewalk. As with most things too beautiful to be real, I thought he was a mirage. That is, until he said my name.

  “Hey, Phel,” he greeted with some awkwardness. “Remember me?”

  He seemed to be playing it cool, or trying to. After a second his mouth twitched and broke out in a huge grin, but, appearing self-conscious, then ducked his head to try and hide it. I’m not prone to smiling like that myself, but the moment I saw Nate lit up with such happiness—happiness over seeing me, wonder of wonders—I caught myself beaming back, my arguments about flings and relationships forgotten. I never really found them again.

  We started seeing each other almost weekly, work permitting and when Nate could make the trip down to Columbus. Sometimes he came on his own, sometimes for business. I kept telling myself it was a convenient arrangement, a reliable source of sex with someone whose smile sent shivers down my spine, but…
maybe Willa has a point, and I was more of a goner than I thought. Long gone, in fact, before I realized it.

  Our encounters became about much more than sex and hiding out in my apartment or Nate’s hotel room. Like two wary animals circling each other in the woods, we seemed unwilling to acknowledge that, more often than not, we each spent weekdays and lonely nights thinking about our next time together, both of us playing at some ridiculous pretense that each meeting might be our last.

  Quietly, almost too imperceptibly to notice at first, the nights became longer and bled into days, shifted to include dinner and coffee and breakfast in bed, or the occasional movie where we made out or groped in the back row like teenagers. Novel as the concept seemed at the time, eventually I had to concede we were dating. Personal details grounded our conversations, secrets we had no one else to tell. We started to learn things about each other beyond what we enjoyed in bed, though there was plenty of that. Almost as if by accident, Nate stopped being a regular fuck buddy and started to feel like something else entirely: a friend and a confidant. A lover.

  We talked about his job and the smallness of Mount Vernon, how much Nate sometimes longed to take Lucy out on the road and do nothing but drive around the country; he confessed his real name was Fessenden and not Smith, though this surprised me almost not at all. Smith never suited him. Nate admitted he often felt like he wasn’t doing enough good in the world, or that he wasn’t smart enough in comparison to his brother, about whom he spoke little but with overwhelming affection when the subject came up. I told him about my family and the pressure of hiding myself from everyone but Aurelia. With more passion than I knew I possessed, I told him how I often daydreamed about storming into my father’s office in Manhattan and announcing, “I’m a fag: love me or leave me.” Nate said he knew the feeling, though both his parents had died before he had a chance to come clean. He thought his mother would have accepted him without hesitation.

  The first sign of trouble was when Nate shyly kissed me in line at my neighborhood café, a quiet response to my having remembered his order without prompting. While not a particularly romantic or demonstrative person—actually, I sensed bouts of anxiety over what was developing between us, nervousness not so different from my own—that small expression of gratitude, the way he blushed furiously but gripped my hand afterward, said more about his feelings than words could have. Nate wasn’t one for big speeches; that’s not how he would confess himself to me, I knew. Sure enough, later that day, when he took me to bed, I started to understand the palpable difference between fucking and making love.

  Nate, by then, had already expressed the opinion that I was the only person around whom he truly felt he could be himself. This terrified me, but not so much as the realization I felt the same way: I couldn’t fathom being like this with anyone else. I didn’t know what it was about Nate, who wasn’t cultured or educated or terribly sensitive, but nevertheless always seemed to understand how I felt and thought. He changed how I interpreted the world, how I interpreted myself.

  I first entertained the idea I might be falling in love one afternoon a few months after we met—September maybe, or late August—and we were in bed doing what we did best. Although when we first started up together I could tell Nate was a little inexperienced with men, before long his technique was so magnificent he could render me speechless with a single touch. That is, when I didn’t think he was trying to suck my brain out through my cock. I’d barely recovered from his mouth and was reaching for the lube when he closed his hand around mine, stopping me.

  “What?” I asked in surprise. “Don’t you want to—?”

  He swallowed a little and pulled me on top of him, hands firm against my ass so I was nestled between his legs and unable to go very far. The press of his cock against mine made me squirm and gasp. “I know we haven’t talked about this yet,” he began, “but I think I’d like you to fuck me instead.”

  Not that he sounded hesitant, but the request alone made me pause. Nate was right—we hadn’t ever talked about it, since I was all too happy to bottom and he’d never expressed the desire to change it up. Topping was rare for me, but certainly not a pleasure to which I’d object. I’d never quite worked out Nate’s feelings on the subject. It seemed to make him shy. A finger up the ass while I went down on him was something he loved, no doubt about it, but until that point I assumed he was one of those gay men who never bottomed for anyone. I guess it’s true what they say, that every top secretly wants to bottom.

  “Why the sudden change of heart?” I asked, sliding a hand into his hair. “In no way is this an objection, but I didn’t realize it was even on the menu.”

  Nate shrugged. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot—for a while, actually. Things have been unbelievably good and it’s not really a big deal, but this is something I want to try. And obviously I want you to be the one to do it.”

  The words made me push myself up on my elbows to look down at him, eyebrows raised in alarm. “Wait, you mean you’ve never—”

  “No.” Nate shook his head. The flush in his cheeks deepened. “I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that Mount Vernon is a small town, man. My opportunities to experiment have been kind of limited. Before you, there weren’t really a lot of guys; almost none, actually.” He flashed the kind of smile usually reserved for getting himself out of trouble, but I caught the edge of anxiety in his expression, fear of rejection or something else. “Call me a late bloomer.”

  That was the first time it really occurred to me to ask what kind of history Nate had behind him—had he only recently started to question his sexuality? Was I a phase?—but the urge was largely overridden by the warmth I felt. Not only did Nate trust me to be his first, but I was a pioneer for him in other ways as well. We both had that in common, it seemed. I was determined not to let him down, surprising myself with how much I wanted to be the one to stay with him forever in memory.

  “I had no idea.”

  Nate smirked up at me and wrapped a hand around the back of my neck so he could pull me in for a kiss. The stubble around his mouth teased at my lips so deliciously that I groaned; I’d felt that electric scrape against my thighs not moments ago. “Not all gay men are as slutty as you,” he teased.

  “Says the late bloomer,” I shot back. I gave a small thrust of my hips, rubbing our cocks together until Nate’s eyes rolled back and he moaned. So easy. “Besides, you always seemed to know just what you’re doing.”

  He gasped as my tongue found the pulse point in his throat. “What I lack in experience I make up for in imagination,” he mumbled. Braver now, he asked, “So are you gonna fuck me or not?”

  “It’d be my pleasure, obviously.”

  I realized I was working my way down his body before the words were even out of my mouth. Finding my lips level with his nipple, I closed my teeth around the small nub and tugged until Nate’s hips bucked and he cursed. He had the most sensitive nipples of anyone I’d ever met, the pair of them like a couple of on/on switches and just fleshy enough for biting.

  I laughed at his response. “I can make it so you won’t know why you waited so long. Is that what you want?”

  “No, I’d rather talk about it some more,” he gritted out. I felt his fingers weave into my hair and gently press down, encouraging me to make the rest of the journey without delay.

  Maybe this was a first for him, but I’d been on the receiving end so many times that he had to know what was coming; I took it as a personal challenge to exceed the talent of Nate’s fingers and the cleverness of his mouth, sliding down his torso until I was able to press kiss after kiss to the crease of skin where thigh met groin. Mouthing at the sensitive area with the occasional nip of teeth, I got my hands on the bottle of lube again. This time I poured a generous amount into my palm with the intention of using it on Nate instead of myself.

  Obligingly, he lifted a leg toward his chest when I nudged at his flank, his eyes fluttering to meet mine with complete trust and only a hint of nervo
usness. The expression on his face made my mouth go dry. With a sharp inhale at the sight of him exposed to me so unquestioningly, so eagerly, I rose up to brush my lips against the back of his knee, a quick flash of encouragement as I let my hands settle lower.

  The first touch of my slick fingers against his hole made Nate gasp and twitch, not, as I saw it, with apprehension, but anticipation of my circling gently and pressing inside to the first knuckle, then the second. In a split-second decision, I leaned in to flicker my tongue over the same spot, licking and teasing, tasting lube and traces of soap from his recent shower. Nate gave a moan so loud I smiled against his skin. So it went for the next several minutes, me working him loose to the point of incoherence with my tongue and fingers, tapping against his prostate to wring delirious cries from his throat while my other hand pumped his cock. I could feel how close to the edge he came, and exulted in his responses. It’s quite something to see a man reduced to that point, especially one as masculine as Nate, and the sound of my name shouted in that deep voice made my own cock leak without any help from my hand.

  “You’ve made your point, Phel,” he chastised hoarsely when I got up to three fingers. Strangely enough, my mind wandered to all the times my father had preached the evils of homosexuality and sodomy; but how could a body hunger so much for something supposedly so wrong? Nate was excited to the point that practically all the work was done for me, so hot for it that his muscles were nothing but responsive and relaxed. Not, of course, that it stopped me from enjoying myself.

  And I did, immensely. The first time someone ever did this for me, I was sixteen and with a much older lover; despite my trepidation, those fingers of his were so skilled that I begged to be fucked by the time he was done. I very much wanted Nate to have that experience, to feel that same zeal each time we broached the subject of who would be on top. This yearning I felt for someone to desire me that way, with equal intensity, was something else I’d yet to experience with a partner before Nate.