Talker (3 page)

Tate had looked at Blaize like he was a last, best hope, called

“Be good to him, Virginia!” down the hal , and then twitched out of the house with a flirty little wave and a hopeful wink, leaving Brian to wander into the bedroom in a daze.

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Virginia looked up from the movie she was watching on his laptop and smiled. She was casual y dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, and her feet in their little bobby-sox were swinging over her bottom as she lay on her stomach across the bed. Her dark hair spil ed from a ponytail—she was as sweet a girl as he had ever met.

“Yo, Brian? Your goldfish die?”

Brian jerked his attention away from the closed door down the hall and his worry for Talker. “G oldfish?”

“Uhm, yeah. You look, you know, a little depressed?”

Brian shrugged, not sure he could put words to his uneasiness. O f course, words weren’t Brian’s thing anyway. “He…

he didn’t look strong enough,” was what he said, and Virginia turned to him, surprised.

“Strong enough for what?”

Brian sighed and sat down on the bed next to her. He liked touching her—her skin was soft and she enjoyed the simplicity of a hand on the smal of her back. That wasn’t why he cared about her, though. What he real y liked was her kind soul, quick wit, and incredible patience when Brian took his time following that quickness with his own methodical brain. Virginia was good people.

“He needs someone strong,” he said after a moment.

“Someone he can count on. I don’t think this guy can count on himself to brush his own teeth on a regular basis.” He shook his head. “Talker can do better.”

Virginia had grinned gently. “Well, baby, it’s not like he can clone you, right?”

Brian never knew what was in his smile at that moment, but Virginia’s expression altered subtly, and she reached up to kiss him with hunger. He returned the kiss, and they made love. She started Talker |
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out starving, voracious, begging him for passion, and he returned with technique. It was what he had.

Somewhere between the two, it turned into good-bye.

In the aftermath, they were lying in bed, facing each other, and Virginia touched his face. “I would have married you,” she said softly, her eyes shiny in the light from the streetlamp outside.

He frowned. “Are we breaking up?”

At that moment the front door opened, and they could hear Tate moving around in the hal way. He was trying to be stealthy, but he failed at it—too much pent-up energy for that. Besides—

even the racket of his combat boots couldn’t stifle the sound of his quiet sniffling.

Brian straightened up in bed and frowned at Virginia. “O h geez… I wonder what happened.”

“We broke up,” she said quietly, but he scarcely heard her—

and certainly didn’t credit her. He started searching for his sleep shorts and a T-shirt, to go deal with Tate, and Virginia sighed and sat up in bed.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he mumbled, and one corner of her mouth lifted in a faint smile.

“Won’t be here….”

She probably said something else, but he was out the door by then, and Tate was sitting on the ugly plaid couch, watching a F riends rerun on their little living room TV and eating ice cream.

Brian sighed and grabbed some tissue—if Talker wasn’t careful, he was going to get guyliner in the ice cream, and it was Brian’s favorite flavor: green.

“What happened?” he asked softly, handing over the tissue.

Tate took the tissue and gave Brian the ice cream. Brian took some makeup-free bites while Talker was cleaning up his face.

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“It was a big old clusterfucking fight for the bottom,” Tate sniffled. “He wanted me to be al alpha and shit, and I… I can’t do that. Someone’s got to take charge, someone has to say what goes where, and he kept expecting me to do it and I don’t know what I’m doing anymore than he does, and next thing I know we’re having this big old bitchy fight and he cal ed me a spazz and I just… just left. Al he wanted to do was screw, but we couldn’t even get that down. I could have even just watched TV or gone to a movie, but we had to get into a big ol’ fight on the pitcher’s mound, you know?”

Brian took a bite of ice cream and reflected that he had no idea what his roommate was talking about, and he said so.

Somewhere in the middle of Tate’s explanation of who “pitched”

and who “caught” in man-on-man anal sex, Virginia came down the hallway, completely dressed.

Brian looked up from his ice cream and offered her a bite, and she shook her head with an incredibly sad smile, then bent over the back of the couch and kissed his cheek.

“I’l bring back your shirts tomorrow,” she whispered, and he looked at her, surprised.

“We really are breaking up?” he asked from the couch, very confused. Virginia just patted his cheek lightly, gave Tate a long-suffering look, and said, “We’l talk tomorrow.”

Brian had spent the rest of the night consoling Tate, only a little curious about what had just happened. By morning, he knew what a “fight for the bottom” meant. By the afternoon, he and Virginia had talked and cried and yel ed and fought and hugged, and he final y realized why he should care who “pitched” and who

“caught” when two men were naked and panting and in the mood to have sex.

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VIRG INIA. That was Brian’s first thought as he picked himself up off the floor and wobbled into his room. He put his running shoes away and changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. That was it. Plain and faded jeans. G ray T-shirt, laundered so soft it was thin in places. Brian liked things plain and simple. Tate was the most complicated thing in his life. E ven Virginia was simple—but he was positive that Virginia could help him out with this.

Why not? Virginia had been the one to help him out of the closet—why couldn’t she help him with Talker?

Her sister answered when he called her house. Apparently Virginia couldn’t help him with Tate because she was away for the weekend with her new boyfriend—her straight boyfriend, Alex, who looked a lot like Brian except he wouldn’t leave her naked in bed for his distraught male roommate for a mil ion dollars and change.

O h crap. He closed his eyes and tried to think—he wasn’t very good at it. Tate was the one who could think of things. Tate told Brian which days to ask off, so they could see movie premieres together on a matinee price. He helped Brian with his papers—

E nglish or History, Talker was there, asking Brian a thousand questions until Brian could write the paper and not feel like a complete idiot. Tate figured out the budget and clipped free coupons, so they could occasional y afford pizza, and so Brian could buy something besides Top Ramen and potatoes at the grocery store.

Tate’s light-speed-twitch-o-matic brain could talk a stranger to spattering come across the back wal of a public toilet in a crowded club, and Brian’s fly-in-the-oatmeal gray matter couldn’t find a way to say “I’m gay and I love you,” and make it stick.

Wonderful. F ucking wonderful.

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He took a deep breath and sat on his bed and tried to think about Virginia—she was always so kind and had so much common sense. Parts of their discussion the night after Tate had his heart broken (the first time) had been priceless.

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P a rt IV

The Pain of Almost Touching

“VIRG INIA… come on….”

Virginia had rolled her eyes. “You think I’m full of shit?”

“I just care about the guy… he doesn’t have anyone else.”

Virginia sighed and rubbed her red eyes with the heel of her hand. They were both tired: Virginia apparently because she had been up thinking about him, and Brian because he had been up talking to Tate.

“Brian, do you have any porn?” she asked at last, seemingly at random.

He flushed. “No.” He didn’t have any porn. It just seemed…

odd… no matter how personal his computer was supposed to be.

“O kay—here. G ive me five minutes and your computer—I want you to see a couple of things.”

Was there anything more embarrassing than having your soon-to-be-ex-girlfriend pulling up porn on your computer? Brian wasn’t al owed to watch what she chose, but when he came back in the room, she said, “Let’s call this an experiment in heterosexuality, babe. Here.” She clicked “play” on a smal video, and then stood up and moved back to let Brian sit at the desk and watch….

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Watch two women, licking each other’s pink and swollen vulva with joy, gusto, and a lot of moaning. Brian blushed and looked away, and Virginia’s firm hands turned him back to the screen. But it was just so embarrassing. The girls… they were using fingers and tongues, probing glistening, quivering slits of flesh and puckered little anuses—it just seemed too personal to watch.

Brian squirmed with mortification, but—as Virginia’s hard hand at the fly of his jeans proved after one of the most uncomfortable moments of his life—he did not get aroused.

“O kay,” she said softly, when he wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“Now, phase two.”

Phase two was a similar video—but this time it was two men, neither of whom looked like Tate. Brian glared at her, and she turned him toward the screen, and he found himself fascinated. He could barely look at their equipment—that just seemed so personal, like it did with the girls—but he liked looking at the slope of their shoulders, the creases in their thighs, the taut stomachs and tiny little navels. E ventual y one of the men ended up on his hands and knees and the guy behind him dumped lubricant on his fingers and began to penetrate, gently, one finger at a time. The guy receiving (bottoming, that was the term) had his eyes closed and his mouth open, and he was shuddering with the force of his arousal, and the guy behind him reached down and kissed his shoulder, the back of his neck, even as that treacherous hand played and stretched and penetrated. Brian couldn’t help but watch as the “top” rol ed a condom up his cock, and he watched with fascination, because the cock was longer and slimmer than Brian’s. Brian’s lips parted, and his breath came a little faster, and he wondered what it would be like to hold another man’s cock, what it would feel like in his hands, and whether it would throb in his palm the way that one looked like it was….

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Virginia’s hand on his crotch was welcome, because his cock was hard and aching, and he groaned a little and pushed up against her. Very gently, she pulled his hand from his side and placed it down his pants.

He didn’t even have to make contact with his own skin before he creamed in his jeans, hard and violently. When he was done, he was sitting at his desk as the rest of the scene played out in front of him, and Virginia very quietly closed his computer and forced him to look her in the eyes.

“Yeah,” she said, her voice edgy, and he didn’t blame her.

“Let’s have this conversation honestly, okay?”

They did. But first he needed a shower and a change of clothes—and a long, intense bout of soul searching as he was cleaning the come off his skin.

BRIAN remembered that moment—would remember it for his entire life, in vivid color—because Virginia had taught him more than just his own sexuality. She taught him that sometimes, when someone was in emotional denial, they needed proof of how wrong they really were. Sometimes they needed actions instead of words.

Sometimes, they needed someone to make the hard decision or to say the painful thing, or they would be lost and locked in their own hearts forever.

With a sigh he flopped backward on his bed, closed his eyes, and began to plan. O kay, so the problem wasn’t that Tate didn’t believe that Brian loved him, it was that he didn’t understand how Brian loved him. What was he doing wrong?

Brian knew he was gay. After his conversation with Virginia, he’d been reluctant to talk to Tate about it because he wasn’t sure if Talker |
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he was attracted to Tate because he was male, or because he was Tate. Virginia had helped him out with that too. She’d taken him to a few parties—the kind that nice girls from the suburbs shouldn’t know about but did—and he’d ended up in darkened corners of alien rooms, making out with pretty boys who very rarely asked his name.

He had enjoyed them. He’d put his hands on their narrow, tapered waists and felt tight ribs and taut, muscular stomachs under his palms. He’d enjoyed the feel of hard hands on his chest, and strong, rough tweaks to his nipples, and he loved the feel of stubble next to his cheek. Touching his lips to a man’s neck actually made him shudder with need, in a way that coming inside a woman had never done, and he’d walked away from every party more and more sure that this was the man he really was.

But the man he was, really, was the man who always stopped these random men from reaching into his jeans and getting more personal than just necking at a party.

The first time someone had tried it, he’d experienced a jolt of actual shame. It had felt disloyal to Tate. The last time he’d gone to a party with Virginia, he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to even kiss another man—and he’d been right. He and his chosen target had ended up drinking tequila al night long, and Brian’s only memory of the night was of spil ing out his painful, bleeding love for his roommate on the table in front of a total stranger.

Which was the reason it was his last party, really. And the next morning had been a revelation to itself.

“WHY don’t you tel him?” Virginia had asked the next morning as she nursed him through a hangover.

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“I did. I told him that I loved him.” He’d had to. It had been necessary. Tate had been getting ready for work, absolutely gushing about the cute customer that Tate was absolutely sure was coming in for Tate and Tate alone, and Brian had said, “Why do you need him? I love you!”