Second You Sin (5 page)

“Be on time,” I told him. We kissed and said good-bye.

I headed back to my one-bedroom apartment in Chelsea. My semi-boyfriend was coming over, and I needed to get ready. I didn’t get that much time with him, and I tried to make the most out of every opportunity.

It was late in the afternoon and the air was getting colder. I shivered in my leather jacket and wondered if my sweatshirt was dry enough to wear yet. I decided that even if it was, wearing dried piss wasn’t that much better than wearing it wet.

It was a ten-minute walk to my place; I strode briskly to stay warm.

Could Freddy be right? Could Randy’s accident have been . . . not an accident? There were suspicious elements, but the whole thing seemed far-fetched. Freddy loved drama; this was probably a product of his overactive imagination.

Of course, that’s what my semi-boyfriend said when I told him I thought my friend and patron, Al en Harrington, had been kil ed last summer. Turned out I was right.

Could Freddy be, too?

My head was spinning. Had I taken my medication this afternoon? Yeah.

Tony was my semi-boyfriend due to his total inability to commit to me. Worse, he was unable to commit to being gay. Since we both had dicks, that made being with me a problem for him.

Tony was my first love. We grew up together on the same street on Long Island, New York.

I always wanted him.

Tony was—is—absurdly handsome, with dark Italian skin, darker eyes, and the silky black hair of a pony. His strong cheekbones point the way to plump, kissable lips that any Hol ywood starlet would endure endless Botox injections to have.

His body, which grew more muscular and defined with each passing year, was always lean, hard, and graceful. When we were kids, I remember being fascinated by the way he walked, bicycled, played stickbal , and wielded a joystick.

Even his smel was a turn-on for me. I remember once, when I was twelve and he was fifteen, he was kicking a soccer bal around with some friends on a fal day that surprised us al by suddenly turning warmer.

“Would you hold this for me, Kev?” he asked, tossing me his denim jacket. It was redolent with Tony’s scent—like just-mowed grass with a little musk—and I got a little dizzy inhaling his pheromones. I also got an erection so intense that I immediately understood something about myself that up til then I had just suspected.

Not that it was huge problem. I had grown up on MTV and around my mother’s beauty shop, both of which were always ful of gay men. Stil , it’s hard to be different, to know that you don’t quite fit in. While the other boys were hanging up posters of Beyoncé, Shakira, and some girl from a Disney musical whose nude photos surfaced online, I had on my wal a signed eight by ten of Barbra Streisand from
A Star
Is Born.

OK, maybe it seems weird that my early crush on Tony is inextricably entwined with my love for Barbra.

Like I grew up on Tony, I also was weaned on
La
Streisand.
Literal y. My mother told me that she’d often play Barbra’s
Greatest Hits
while nursing.

(BTW, while that information may have helped me understand my obsession with Babs, I wish my mother kept it to herself. Any reference to the fact that I once suckled at her oversized breasts makes me a little dizzy.)

My mother was—is—a huge fan of Barbra’s. In her shril , piercing soprano, she constantly sang along to the soundtracks of
Hello, Dolly!
and
Yentl.

When I sat down and watched my first Barbra movie,
Funny Girl,
at the impressionable age of eight, I immediately related to her. Barbra often played the smart, wisecracking girl who, despite her charm and offbeat appeal, was never good enough, or sufficiently pretty or, in one way or another, not quite
appropriate
for her leading man.

Yet, in the end, through her seductive manner and sheer force of wil , Barbra took those men and she
made them
love her.

That’s the power I wanted. I, too, grew up around boys and men I desired and couldn’t have. Straight boys who dazzled me with their easy athleticism, broad shoulders, and confident strength. My seventh grade science teacher, Mr. Smith, with his carrot red hair and the pale blue eyes; Adam, who played soccer and lacrosse and who cut a swath through the neighborhood girls wider than the Lincoln Tunnel; Richard from the debate team, whose fierce intel igence and prematurely deep voice made me sign up for that club despite the fact that any kind of argument gave me a stomachache.

But at the top of my wish list was Tony Rinaldi, who lived just a few houses down the street. I sensed Tony had a thing for me, too. It was nothing I was certain of, and it wasn’t enough to embolden me to take action, but sometimes I’d see Tony looking at me in a way that seemed kind of . . . hungry.

Take a bite,
I’d think, but he never did.

Even though I was three years younger than him, he always let me hang out with him. I was a cute kid, but short and slight, and when the other kids would tease me, Tony would run to my defense. He’d rumple my hair or pat my butt, and I’d swear that his hand lingered a second longer than it should have.

Sometimes, we’d play-wrestle, and I felt that if I shifted just so, if I only had the nerve, I could turn the hold into an embrace.

I was sixteen when I made my move. It was a hot summer day and we were hanging out in his room.

Earlier, we had been swimming in the aboveground pool in his backyard, and we stil wore our bathing suits. He was lying on his back, his hands behind his head. The position made his biceps look bigger, exposed his vulnerable armpits. I could smel his sweat mixed in with the scent of the cheap sunscreen his mother bought at CVS. We’d been baking in the sun and I felt heat rising from him, like the radiant warmth of a just-fired clay pot.

There was no seduction, no finesse. I didn’t offer to rub his back or tel him a dirty story or suggest we find some porn on the Internet—al strategies I’d previously considered.

No, one minute he was asking me if I wanted a soda and the next I was lying on top of him, pressing my mouth to his while grinding myself against his crotch. I heard moans escape like smoke around my lips.

I wasn’t sure if the sounds were his or mine.

I’d spent years trying to build up the nerve to do this, but when it happened, it took no thought or courage at al . It just happened. It felt inevitable, like fate, like fal ing, like giving in to gravity.

Soon, my hips were grinding against something hard in his shorts, something hot, and something that, at the time, seemed impossibly big and getting bigger by the second. I was on him for maybe a minute when I felt his strong arms wrap around me, flip me over, and then he was on top, humping me, holding me, making me crazy.

He growled like a bear and threw back his head. I felt a flash of fear—was he mad at me? Did he hate me now?

“I didn’t,” he began. “We shouldn’t . . .” But even as his words tried to murder his feelings, he humped against me, his bigger body making me feel safe and surrounded, sexy but a little scared.

“Just this once,” I panted beneath him. I wrapped my legs around his butt and pul ed him closer, feeling wetness on my thigh where his excitement leaked on me. His eyes opened wider, and for a moment I saw he didn’t know if he was going to pul away or dive in.

A smal shift of my pelvis and my hands slipping into the back of his bathing suit seemed to make up his mind.

His head ducked to one of my nipples and he latched on, teaching me for the first time just how connected those brown nubs were to my crotch. It was my turn to growl, and when I did, Tony looked up at me and smiled. I knew he had never been with a guy before, but he’d had plenty of girls, and I think he was pleased to see that on this new playing field, al his old moves stil worked.

“Please,” I said, my voice smal and weak and winded. “Please.”

I didn’t know what I asking for, but for the next three hours I got pretty much everything he had to give.

It was heaven.

We had a few unbelievably hot and passionate weeks together, in which it wasn’t uncommon for us to sneak away three or four times a day for sex. It was al good until one day, after an explosive fuck that left us half dead and blissed-out in each other’s arms, Tony told me he loved me. It was the happiest moment of my life, and had you asked me right then, I would have told you we’d be together forever.

I’d have made a lousy fortunetel er.

Not soon after that, I felt Tony pul ing away. Two weeks later, I got an e-mail in which he told me it was over between us. We had to be “just friends.” If there are two more deadly words in the English language, I haven’t heard them.

Plus, he broke up with me by e-mail, which is just wrong.

I spent the next few years getting on with my life. I finished high school, went to col ege, started hustling, dropped out of col ege, and never entertained the possibility of fal ing in love. The closest I came was Freddy, but that affair was doomed from the start. I built wal s around my heart so high that not even Rapunzel’s prince could have scaled them.

Tony came back into my life this summer, when he turned out to be the chief detective investigating the death of my friend, Al en Harrington. After insisting that he was married and not interested in me in “that way,” we were sleeping together again within a week.

That was months ago and things hadn’t progressed much since. Tony loved me but didn’t know if he wanted the “lifestyle.” He was fresh off a painful divorce and didn’t think he was ready to make any commitments or major life decisions. He couldn’t imagine a future without a wife, kids, and a house in the suburbs.

But he loved me. He did tel me that.

As much as I sometimes wished I didn’t, I loved him, too.

At his insistence, we had an “open relationship.” He told me he wasn’t sure if he could ever give up sleeping with women, and I didn’t want him to. I didn’t real y care where he stuck his dick when I didn’t need it, as long as he was safe and came back to me in the end. So to speak.

I remember watching a documentary about a group of AIDS activists in the 1980s cal ed Act Up. I fel in love with those boys and girls. Their energy, their commitment, their Doc Martens . . . they were my heroes. I wished I’d been around to march alongside them.

In my heart, though, I wasn’t real y a political person. I didn’t real y want to Act Up. I wanted to Settle Down. With Tony. But every time I brought it up, he acted like I was proposing we restage the Stonewal riots.

Tony grew up in the same world I did, but he took the more conservative values a lot more seriously than I did. Hey, he became a cop, right?

Somewhere along the way, he learned the inherent contradiction some straight people maintain to justify their fear of homosexuality: Either they hate us because we’re so different from them—

shameless hedonists who just want to have kinky sex and take drugs—or they hate us because we dare to be like them, wanting legal unions and the right to raise children.

Damned if we screw and damned if we marry.

No wonder Tony was so confused.

We saw each other as often as Tony could get together. Which is to say, not enough. Tony’s work as a homicide detective frequently cal ed him away.

That I understood.

There were lots of times, though, when I knew he wasn’t working but he stil couldn’t see me.

Sometimes, he’d mumble a halfhearted excuse; more often, he’d just avoid talking to me. I assumed he had dates those nights, with women, but that was part of our deal. So I dealt.

What else could I do?

Besides make myself irresistible,
I thought. I got to work.

6

Love in the Afternoon

I got home, showered, shaved al the usual places (face, chest, bal s, butt), liberal y applied a handful of Aveda Rosemary Mint Body Lotion to my skin, and rubbed some Jonathon Product Dirt Texturizing Paste into my shaggy blond hair to give it a little body and shine. Not bad. I ran my fingers through my do to loosen it up a bit, so that it would, every few minutes, fal into my eyes.

I knew Tony liked brushing it away when it did that.

I finished with a splash of Tom Ford for Men behind each ear, a cologne I didn’t real y love, but Tom Ford was so crazy sexy that I felt better every time I wore it.

I threw on some low-slung 7 For Al Mankind jeans and a tight old Abercrombie T-shirt. Tony was a total nipple man and I knew he’d like the way mine poked through the thin fabric of the worn cotton.

I also straightened up my bedroom. When Tony and I first got back together, my crazy mother was living with me after she left my father for
not
cheating on her (you had to be there). In one of the few ways that my mother
doesn’t
resemble a vampire, she didn’t need an invitation to enter my home . . . in fact, after conning the superintendent of my building into letting her in, she moved into my bedroom and displaced
me
to the couch.

Now that I had the place back to myself, Tony and I were no longer consigned to the sofa, with its thin mattress and creaky springs.

It was one of five thousand reasons I was glad my mother had reconciled with my dad.