Boyfriends with Girlfriends (13 page)

“I
’m just not ready to talk to Jenny or anybody else about this yet,” Allie complained to Lance over lunch at one of the school’s outside picnic tables.

“Then don’t,” Lance soothed her. “You don’t have to tell her.”

“But I feel like I’m being a crappy friend. And what if she told someone else? You know how people would start to talk. Plus, it wouldn’t be fair to Chip. I’ve got to sort things out with him first.” Allie brought a hand to her forehead. “Sometimes this starts to feel too overwhelming. Can we change subjects? So, when are you going to call Sergio?”

“Why hasn’t
he
called
me
?” Lance replied, pushing his french fries around his plate.

“Come on, babe,” Allie said. “You can do this.”

He knew she was right. That afternoon during swim practice, he psyched himself up with each lap.

When he got home, he started to dial Sergio’s number. But then he decided to eat something first and made himself a PBJ sandwich. Then he checked to see if maybe
Sergio had e-mailed him. While he was online, Leo IM’d him for help with their English homework, and Lance did his own homework along with him. By the time he finished, his mom was calling him to dinner. After eating with his parents and helping to load the dishwasher, he got a text from Allie.
Have u called him?

Too embarrassed to tell her no, he closed his bedroom door, deposited himself on the bed, and dialed.

“What up?” Sergio answered, sounding out of breath. “Hang on a sec.” He turned the volume down on the video he was watching. “I’m learning some new steps to teach at Dance Club.”

“Cool,” Lance said, recalling his dream of one day dancing with a guy. “How’s it going?”

“Good.”

They both avoided discussing what they most wanted to find out. Instead they chatted about dancing, school, and friends, while Sergio continued to practice dance steps, excited that Lance had finally called. Maybe he wasn’t dating that Jamal guy, after all.

“So, um, who was that guy you were with at the chick-flick the other night?”

“Jamal? He’s a friend from school. We’re on the swim team together.”

“Only a friend?” Sergio asked.

The question took Lance by surprise. He hadn’t considered that Sergio might think Jamal was a date. Lance didn’t even know if Jamal was gay. One time he’d asked, but Jamal had merely mumbled, “I’m not sure yet” and
changed the topic. After that, Lance had never brought it up again.

“Yeah, he’s just a friend,” Lance now told Sergio. “Why?”

“Just askin’,” Sergio replied. He sounded a little jealous.

Lance gave a nervous giggle. He’d never experienced a guy feeling possessive of him. He kind of liked it.

“So, um, who was the girl you were with?” he asked Sergio.

“Serena? She’s a new girl in Kimiko’s creative writing class. . . . She asked me out.”

“You mean . . . like on a date?” Lance nervously ran his hand across the bedspread. Even though he’d imagined that Serena might be a date, having it confirmed made him feel all jumbled and jealous and hurt.

“Yeah . . .” Sergio stopped dancing as he became aware of Lance turning quiet. “Since you didn’t call me after our date, I didn’t know if you were interested in going out again. I asked you out last time, so I figured it was your turn to call.”

Lance took a breath, trying to clear his head. He felt angry with himself that he hadn’t called sooner, like Allie had told him to.

“I’m sorry I didn’t call,” he told Sergio.

Sergio wiped the sweat from his brow. He felt bad hearing the regret in Lance’s voice. “Well, I’m sorry I didn’t call you, either.”

“So, um . . .” Lance grabbed a tube of hand cream
from the nightstand and tossed it in the air. “Are you going out with her again?”

“No,” Sergio said. “She doesn’t really do it for me. Like in my car afterward, she was sort of waiting for me to make out with her. But I didn’t want to, so I didn’t.”

Lance let out a sigh of relief. At least Sergio hadn’t kissed the girl. That was some consolation. He recalled his own make-out session with Sergio and suddenly wanted to repeat it more than anything in the world.

“So, um . . .” Lance continued to nervously toss the hand cream. “Would you like to go out again?”

“Yeah . . . ,” Sergio replied and started to dance again. “Would you?”

“Yeah,” Lance said, sitting up in bed. They agreed on a date for dinner Saturday, and both were able to relax a little. After that they talked for a while about dancing, swimming, and working out. As soon as they got off the phone, Lance speed-dialed Allie and told her about the call.

“Super!” she exclaimed. “I knew you could do it.”

“Yeah, but if he and I are going to keep dating, I think we should agree to be exclusive. Don’t you think?”

“Babe, this is only your second date.”

“But this feels so weird. If he wants to go out with other people, then I don’t want to date him. He’s got to decide on one or the other.”

“Hmm . . .” Allie thought about that while she painted her toenails. “ . . . The danger with an ultimatum like that is: What if he says no? Then what do you do?”

“Well, then I won’t go out with him.”

“Really?” Allie asked.

“I don’t know,” Lance admitted. “Why does dating have to be so complicated?”

Later that night when he took Rufus out for his bedtime walk, Lance’s mind wandered back to thoughts of Sergio. Hopefully one day he’d be able to dance with him.

“I need the car for Saturday,” Sergio told his parents at dinner the following night.

“Are you going out with Serena again?” his mom asked eagerly. “When do we get to meet her?”

“No, things didn’t work out with her,” Sergio said, slicing into his pork chop. “I’m going out with Lance instead.”

His mom and dad stared across the table at each other, obviously wondering if he meant going out as friends or on a date. He decided to let them wonder.

Whether they figured it out or not, on Saturday his mom didn’t give him any
churros
to take to Lance, and his dad didn’t slip him a twenty.

“I wish my folks could be more like yours,” he told Lance when he picked him up. Once again Lance’s parents had invited Sergio to sit and chat. It felt so great to be treated as if dating a guy was the most natural thing in the world.

When Lance climbed into Sergio’s car, he handed Sergio a bag of jelly beans tied to a little white teddy bear. “Here. I got this for you.”

“Wow. Thanks, man.” Sergio stared at the unexpected gift, recalling when Zelda had given him a teddy bear—a little brown one. After their breakup he’d buried the little bear inside his closet, along with a ukulele and the love notes she’d given him. He now propped Lance’s bear onto the gearshift console between them and opened the jelly bean bag. “Want some?”

“Sure.” Lance held out his hand but instead he got a jelly bean pressed into his mouth. “Thanks! So where are we going?”

“It’s a surprise,” Sergio said and drove to a nearby strip mall that Lance had never paid much attention to.

“Have you eaten here before?” Lance asked when they parked and walked toward a storefront restaurant called Zanzibar.

“Nope. A chick was handing out half-price coupons at the mall. It’s Ethiopian. Where the hell
is
Ethiopia anyway?”

“Um, Africa.” Lance had never eaten African food.

Inside, the restaurant had an herby spicy smell. Exotic music played over the speakers: drums, bells, flutes, and horns. . . . A tall dark-skinned waitress in a white sequined gown led them to a low, round woven-basket table. The place had no chairs; they had to sit on floor cushions.

“Are you okay?” Sergio asked, watching Lance shift and wobble on the floor cushion, trying to get comfortable. His long legs made it difficult.

“I’m good,” Lance said, not wanting to be a spoilsport. He pointed at the trophy animal heads of antelope,
oryx, gazelle, and ibex mounted on the walls. “Is that what we’ll be eating?”

“Yeah.” Sergio gave a laugh.

When the waitress returned to take their order, she recommended the “Sampler for Two” entrée and brought them a basin of water for washing their hands.

That’s weird
, Lance thought until he realized there wasn’t any silverware. This was nothing like any restaurant he’d ever experienced before, not something he would’ve ever tried on his own.

The food arrived on a huge plate—a tray, really—that fit into the round tabletop. A big pancake-type thing was piled with six different-colored baby food–like mounds. A side plate contained more pancake thingies folded like napkins. The waitress explained how to tear off a piece of the spongy
injera
flatbread, grab some food with it, and pop it into their mouths.

“You can feed each other, too,” she told them. “It’s a tradition called
gursha
. We believe that those who eat from the same plate will never betray each other.”

Sergio scooped up some food, leaned forward, and plopped it into Lance’s mouth. His fingertips brushed Lance’s lips. And as the waitress strode away, he licked his fingers one by one, grinning at Lance.

Lance blushed and glanced around to make sure nobody was watching. Sergio laughed.

Lance wasn’t sure what he was eating, but maybe that was a good thing. Some of the food tasted sweet, some salty, and some was really spicy, but it all tasted delicious.

As they ate, Lance worked up his nerve for what he’d planned to talk to Sergio about. “So, um, I’ve been thinking . . .”

“Uh-oh,” Sergio said, smiling out of one side of his mouth.

“If we’re going to keep dating,” Lance continued, trying to maintain his momentum, “I think it would be a good idea for us to be exclusive. You know: so that we don’t have to worry about running into each other like at the movie theater and stuff. So, what do you think?”

Sergio thought for a moment. Although he liked Lance a lot, after Zelda, he wasn’t ready to commit to anything serious so fast.

“This is only our second date, man. I’m not ready to be a couple.”

Lance stared across the table, recalling what Allie had said about the danger of an ultimatum. So . . . now what? He didn’t want to give up seeing Sergio. He enjoyed hanging out with him, he liked how Sergio got him to try new things, and it totally turned him on to watch him lick his fingers. He felt stupid for having brought this up. He wished he’d listened to Allie.

“Well, um, when do you think you’ll be ready?” Lance asked.

“I don’t know,” Sergio said. “Can’t we just chill and see how it goes?”

Lance shifted uncomfortably on the cushion, frustrated with the conversation, with Sergio, and most of all, with
himself
. “Okay,” he said meekly.

“Great,” Sergio said and hand-fed Lance another bite of some sweet orange goop.

Even though it felt hugely sexy to be fed like that, it also made Lance feel even more like a kid.

“Do you want to go somewhere?” Sergio asked when they went back outside to the car.

“Sure,” Lance replied, still trying to sort out his jumbled feelings. “Like where?”

“I know a place,” Sergio said. He drove them to a little poplar-lined lane he knew of alongside a nearby golf course. It was the make-out spot where Zelda had taken him to fool around. And as he now pulled beside the curb he wondered: How far would Lance be willing to go tonight?

He’d found that one difference between dating girls and guys was that a girl usually adjusted the speed of the relationship—pumping the brakes, shifting into neutral, or moving faster. But without a girl on the scene, it seemed like guys could go from zero to warp speed in seconds—almost as if on a dare as to who could get into whose pants faster.

Sergio shut the engine off and Lance glanced out the car windows.

It was Lance’s first time to actually park in a lovers’ lane. The scene seemed perfect: a latticework of tree branches blocked out the street lamps; the fairway stretched beyond them, still and quiet; and in the distance the moon shone nearly full. Without being aware of it, he began to hum “The Man in the Moon” from
Mame
and then caught himself. “Whoops. Sorry.”

“I like it,” Sergio said. Through the darkness, their gazes met and held. Sergio leaned across, and within seconds they were making out as feverishly as last time,
lips pressing tight, tongues probing, hands moving across shoulders, sliding onto chests. . . .

As much as Sergio loved to explore the curvy softness of a girl, he loved just as much to touch the lean firmness of a guy. He ran his hands over Lance’s abs, picturing the little bricks in the online photo, while Lance let his own hands grasp and squeeze Sergio’s pecs. Sergio wasn’t as built as Darrell, but he was definitely toned from working out. Lance’s hands moved hungrily across his torso, wanting to feel every part of him. And sensing his desire, Sergio took hold of Lance’s hand and moved it down from his chest to his zipper, giving him permission to explore there, too.