June - The Liars 18 страница

But if that really was the case, then what did it matter? It was still there, and it was still bothering me. It was still itching away underneath my skin and making me absolutely crazy around Daniel. He was something that I could not explain given the system I had used to view myself in before and I still couldn't do it when I backed myself out of the room. I began to panic for the morning as we lay in bed then, not fifteen minutes post-orgasm, where I would have to face myself and what I had done. Daniel said I didn't have to call myself gay, or bisexual, or whatever, but I felt like I did need to pick something. In the eyes of the real world, they wanted and demanded an explanation and solid, never changing answer. What box do you check off? Are you married or single? Children? Man or woman? I was beginning to be able to answer some of those questions, but the answers still stared back at me as all wrong. You just couldn't explain sexuality. No, I corrected myself, you couldn't explain relationships with nice little words. Everything was circumstantial and it built off one another and it all linked with something else. It was a mess, a web, and there was no explaining it with a check box. You just had to love the way you loved and hoped it was good enough.

I looked over at Daniel and I wondered if this was good enough. I didn't think I could love him. No, absolutely not, a part of me still blocked out that reality. But I wondered if our bodies together, doing what we had done before, if that was enough. I wondered if I could just not take a name for now and leave that part of the form blank, and if we could not be ourselves together, for just a little while.

But when I kissed him, I could feel him getting hard against my thigh again and I felt that doomed feeling within me. I touched his chest hair, and went to his neck, to his nipples, and I held him in my hand. When I let him pass between my lips, and I bobbed up and down like I knew how to do, he said my name as he played with the hair on the back of my neck, I had to stop. I had tried to forget what I was doing, even though I wanted it. I wanted it so badly that I had to do it, but I needed to pretend I wasn't there. It sounded so incredibly fucked up to me, and Daniel told me that it was okay.

"We don't have to do everything tonight, Frank. It's fine."

I wanted to yell at him, yes we do! Yes we do! We need to do it all tonight so I can't go back from it. So I can't turn around and run away and keep going when I get to the cows. We needed to fuck that night, to go through with it all the way, because I didn't know if I would have the strength to go up to his room again and face this desire inside of me.

But we would always be surprised at what we could endure.

I gave it a few days, but I did go up to see him again. This time, we had no books to distract our attention from one another. Although he started the conversation briefly about asking me how I was doing with "things" we moved on right away. I asked if we could take our clothes off, and if I could look at him closer. He sighed a bit, but eventually conceded. He told me he wouldn't answer those horrible stereotypical questions of "where did your scars come from?" I assured him that was okay, because I wasn't going to ask. I just wanted to touch him, to see every part of him. I went over the lumps of his skin, the toughened areas from age and healing, and the small stretch marks he had on his thighs, too. I touched the underside of his skin on his balls, the space in between, and I fingered him for a bit as well. He said he didn't want any more penetration than that tonight, but that was fine with me. I wanted to know the geography of his body, as if I could discern more about the act of sex from the sheer terrain.

When I thought I had exhausted my resources, I told him to explore me, too. I asked him to look and look, but he was lackluster about it. I lay on my back on his mattress after I pulled off my shirt and he straddled my hips. I rubbed my hands over his knees and down his long calves. I marveled at the shape and dexterity of male legs, so much different than the female form with all its fullness. Men were barren landscapes, it seemed, completely covered in hair and muscle and tough skin, but completely unable to support life. I despaired at not supporting life, except for in the most fragile of places. Daniel touched my balls a bit the way I had touched his, before he pulled my hands away from his legs and placed them on his chest instead. I flicked his nipples, his exploring session for me over, and our lips met again. He hiked himself further up my body, and I propped myself up on my elbows. He looked down on me, breathing heavily as I grabbed his ass and brought him closer, taking him inside my mouth. I was able to go down on him this time around, though we eventually shifted positions into a more comfortable one, and finish. I swallowed his come, noticing the difference even in taste and smell between the men I had been with. I catalogued the difference in my mind, with many other things, and then we switched. It was a lot harder to give myself over to him this time around, especially since he lowered himself down over my body and all I had were his strong hands on my hips and his head bobbing there to ground me into what was going on. My mind kept wandering and I kept squirming, reaching out for something to grab that was not there. He pinned my hips down at one point and its shock sent me over the edge in a small murmur. The entire ordeal was not as heated as our last embrace and exchange, but I was so much more satisfied with it. We lay down together again, staying naked. Daniel confided that he loved to be naked, but only in his room, in private, around only a few people.

"It's good you're one of those people," he said sincerely. "I don't like to be naked like this with just anyone, in spite of what I may display when I have showers in the morning." He smiled then, and I did, too. I was holding his hand, even as he gestured with it. I was quiet after sex, while Daniel was usually quiet during, I also noted. To try and rouse me from my withdrawn state, he told me that we should have a shower in the morning together, like always. "But come in the stall with me. Keep me company. What do you say?"

I felt my face falter with his remark. I remembered all the showers that Gerard and I had together; all the fumbling of sex inside his crappy shower and with taps that felt like code-cracking to get the right temperature and how cramped and important those memories were. I did not want to write them over, and I had already been worried about how close I had been these past few weeks. But I wanted to take up his invitation. How was I supposed to keep all of these experiences straight if they never stopped? I began to worry that if my urge with Daniel was now satisfied, would it keep going and move onto other men? Once the exception lie was dislodged, I had no idea where to place myself. Daniel's body was immense. So were other men's bodies, and by putting them together with my own, it seemed as if it went on for infinity. I found myself getting anxious if I were to shower close to Ray or Korey in the mornings. Would I want to look? Were they thinking I was going to look? I knew I logically wasn't attracted to them, but that didn't make the anxiety ease.

Daniel saw my expression change, and asked me about it. "You don't have to tell me what's up, but I'm curious. Is this what you want to be doing with me? I said I liked you. But you never really said it back."

"I like you," I told him. "I like you a lot. Too much."

"Why is it too much? Is Jasmine an issue?" he asked, knowing that that could have never been the reason or response. Jasmine was so supportive of this. When I had not come back to the silo the first night, she knew exactly what had happened and was relieved. Anytime I didn't go back to Daniel's after dinner, she asked me if I was sure that I wanted to spend the night with her. She loved me and embraced me, but she also saw this change happening and she knew me well enough to know that it was a difficult one. In our own intimate moments together, she would often take my face in her hands and tell me to not be afraid again. She repeated it so often, sometimes staring right at me, that I began to wonder if this chant was for herself, too. We both had these huge things weighing on ourselves, though we barely spoke words when we were together, by ourselves, anymore. Our intimate space had developed into signs and symbols, hands and small nods. It was the closest I had felt to her in such a long time, probably since our note passing in high school, because of it. She knew enough about Daniel to know what was happening here, and she knew it would be good for me in the end. "Go, go!" she would say in rare vocal moments, usually in the kitchen, waving her arms. "I'm fine. I have people to talk to and books to read. You have the opportunity to bond with someone. That is fantastic. Go, go!"

"No, Jasmine is great. Wonderful, actually," I told him, and he nodded as expected.

"So, there is something you're not telling me. You don't have to tell me. But you know, it may be a lot easier for me to help you - if you want help - if you do let me in on it. There are a lot of ifs in that statement, but that's okay. There are a lot of conditionals in life. Including myself. We don't have to happen if you don't want us to." He smiled, welcoming me and being supportive. He had lived in the community too long, I thought. He was thinking in speeches to make people feel more included.

It had worked, though. I sat there in silence for some time, before I opened my mouth again. "When I was seventeen, something happened..." I started. I told him about Gerard, about being in love with another man before him, and about all that man had taught me. Daniel never blinked at the age difference, and he never criticized the contents of the relationship. He didn't make fun of the dove metaphor and how Gerard had kept me until I was okay to be free, telling me it was too trite and overdone. He didn't tell me I was still stuck in a cave, even now, when I was still in love with the same man seven years later. But I found my own story turning and twisting, going from love and euphoria for the first part, to nostalgia and relief for Paris and us reunited in the second, and then to final bitter resentment for this past month. I loved this man so much that I needed to forget him. That didn't make sense to me as I said it out loud and I became so entrapped in my own story that I could only see its flaws. I confessed, even to myself then, about what a failure I felt like, and how I was tinged with regret.

"Why regret? With me?" Daniel was not taking it personally, but he had covered a bit of himself up with the blanket. He wasn't covering up his genitals, though, I noticed. He covered the scars on his knees, the skin that was twisted like roots.

"Yes with you, but not just you. I'd feel this regret with anyone else male that I'd sleep with, because that means Gerard is no longer an exception then. Sleeping with you and wanting to be with you, it removes the whole point of Gerard from my life."

"No, it doesn't" Daniel countered. "I'd still say he was a pretty big exception. The circumstances, at least, permitting you two to be together were exceptional. Time does not change those circumstances and the experience that you had then. You can look back on it now and realize, oh, okay. I like men now too. Or you can still view him as an exception. It's your life, Frank. You can see it however you want. Just because one thing changes right now does not mean you need to devoid the past in order to live honestly."

I looked up at him in shock; this had not been the response I was anticipating. I didn't know what I expected, but it felt as if Daniel had been able to see inside of me and been able to guess Gerard's existence without me confessing. He got it. He knew what I meant, what I felt, why I needed to hang onto it, and why I was having a problem dealing with reality now. It was that sense of honesty and authenticity that drove my life, but those same sensations had been becoming too hard to pin down. I wanted to be seen as who I was, but I was juggling so many selves that I didn't know if I only revealed one, whether or not I would be telling a lie. I had been surrounded by so many liars that I had just wanted to forget myself. I thought that losing myself and becoming anonymous meant that I could avoid these feelings and I could maintain that perfection from before. But Daniel seemed to be deliberating ushering me out of that train of thought. He used my name, persistently addressing me, and making me realize who I was. He refused to let people just be humans without realizing who they were and how they formed their experience of the world as the first stage. If I used my name like he was, it meant I had power. It meant I was in charge. It meant I was still honest, and I could do whatever the fuck I wanted to. It was a bonus if other people got it too. It meant they were worth keeping around.

"This is one of the reasons that I don't associate with the gay community anymore, not that I ever really did. But this moniker of gay, straight, bi or whatever, they simply don't exist. People saying that they were born this way and that they can't help it is ridiculous. It denies the possibility of cases like yours that are heavily influenced by circumstance and outside force. This unified identity, what Paul calls being whole and what Tonya calls always being a woman, even if she was born with a penis and raised a boy, it all denies the evolution of the self and the perpetual learning that we must all go through. We don't just get a pass because we've 'always been this way.' It's ridiculous."

In spite of some of his harsh words and definite personal experience he was tapping into, I understood where he was coming from. I was reminded of what I had realized on the car on the way into The Bear, that every single one of us were broken people. We all wanted to be whole, and we were at one point in time. Maybe like in the Symposium, it was when we had four arms and four legs; I wasn't really sure anymore. But what I did know, was that in spite of what Alex said and what I had tried to do with Gerard and Jasmine, we weren't going to fix ourselves. Doing that would require a time machine, to go back to the beginning, before anything was ever really known. I asked Daniel at one point that night what the story behind The Bear community had been; not just about the name of the place, but how long it had been around, why it was started, and who started it, but he had refused to answer. We were beyond origins at that point in time. They just didn't matter anymore. He had wanted to avoid reinstating that belief of this is how things always were, and always will be with the community itself and with his own personal life. He was adamant about that.

"Gwen may have some physicist mumbo jumbo to refute this, but time is linear. We can't go back and unlearn what we know now. So the only real decision to make is to keep learning. We can't just give up because that's how things are, even if those things are ourselves. We would be nowhere without progress, and you need to start it on the micro level before the macro," he went on. We were sitting up in the bed now, and he was gesturing with his hands. We had his sheets covering out waists, but we continued to talk with our shoulders touching. It was a rich discussion, and I felt the gears inside my head moving and all of the assumptions I had before being uprooted. I felt parts of myself being uprooted. The broken piece of myself that I had tried so desperately to heal had been Gerard. It was clear that forgetting him was only going to deny the existence of pain that I was in, that we all were in, because there was only one direction out of this mess: forward.

"How did you progress?" I asked Daniel, realizing that I only knew segments of his story, but not how everything fit together. There seemed to be three volumes of his life: foster care and abandoned houses, the bank protests and anarchist circles, and then The Bear. Each thing he had told me about himself could be located in those places, but they were all so distinct in how they managed the world. I wanted to know how his line of progress went. In seven years, he had changed more than I could even fathom.

"How does anyone progress? You realize something is broken and then you try to fix it. You get bored and you try something out. The best discoveries are by accident, and all that other junk they tell you." He smiled, and then turned to me. He ran his hand through my hair, and kept his palm at the back of my neck.

"You ever read 1984?" he asked, and I shook my head. "In the book, one character proclaims, we have always been at war with Eurasia. I think about that statement anytime anyone tries to deny a part of themselves, no matter how evident, in favour of an idealized version. I've had sex with women. Gwen and I had a weird thing in the winter. I couldn't describe it, and neither could she, and I knew it was because we had gotten too tangled inside our perceived identities. I'm not gay, anymore than you are. Gerard sounds wonderful, quite frankly, and whatever else you may do with your body does not negate the impact he had. It never can be negated because it already happened, it's done. But you're still here. You can cherish that memory, but you don't have to live there. You can progress, too. I think he would want you to, from the amount that he's been responsible for teaching you."

I stared at Daniel a long time. He kept eye contact with me, and didn't lose his composure. His hand on the back of my neck grew hot, and then eventually our lips met again. I kissed him with a renewed force and an easier burden to bear. My secret was out, I thought. All of it was there and shared with another person, and it was okay.

"Thank you," I told him. "Thank you for seeing him that way, too."

"Not a problem, Frank," he said with a smile.

We leaned close to one another, and began to kiss again. I had been gaining more confidence during our discussion and thought, maybe tonight, maybe tonight we could do that one thing more. We could keep going, and keep evolving together as we explored our bodies. I wanted that further step - the next level in my own transformation. But when I began to touch him, he pulled away and asked me another question.

"You said you felt like a failure before, when you were talking about Gerard. What did you mean by that, if you don't mind me asking?"

"Like..." I began, feeling as if I could say whatever I wanted and he would understand it and have some answer for me. "Like if I didn't believe in Gerard as this person that was huge in my life, as if he was the only one, then I would lose everything associated with him. Like my art..." I looked down at my hands, still not wanting to bear their burden yet. "Or school. I failed out of school, and even now I still think it’s following me around. I somehow managed to get this awesome opportunity to get lessons from a professor, and I bombed them. I think it all went over my head and I left before I could be failed again."

Daniel replied, "Some people aren't meant for school, and there is a damn good reason why they fail out." He looked down at me, somewhat appalled, and realized that I had interpreted him wrong. "No, no, Frank. I didn't mean you personally. You probably take wonderful photos. But think of the people who live here. We stay here for a reason, because we got erased in the outside world. It's not that we can't live in the real world, it's that the real world can't live with us. This is absolutely not an easy way out for us. It's the only option available for us. And that's not our fault that the world treats us this way, but it was our responsibility to find a better way to deal with it."

Some of his statements were tinged with bitterness, and he bit his nail on his right hand. Nicole had left the community earlier that day, and I wondered if part of that issue had spurred this conversation and the analogy he was using. Nicole could not handle it here. It was too much for her. But it was her ability to live in the real world with ease and comfort that made this place seem barbaric to her. She had the privilege of not knowing something far worse that using sawdust to cover the smell of toilets. She didn't know the trauma of everyday life and stepping outside and feeling erased. This wasn't her fault, not at all, and it wasn't anyone else's fault who did know that trauma. But it was everyone's own responsibility to not carry the weight of the world on their back, but to understand that we all thought we carried it. We all thought we were broken and were desperately trying to find any way to heal or fix ourselves, only to realize it was a constant effort. But learning was the responsibility. Evolution was. This was the closest thing to the origins of The Bear community I was going to get. It wasn't my fault I was white and I didn't always get certain things that Daniel had experienced. But I felt the burden of existing in other ways, in the way I tried to keep my desires bundled up into a tiny little fist. My art and my sexuality were too closely linked because of it. I could not think of one without the other, and I was still working through them both, to hopefully evolve to the other side of this, completely new.

"Well, not completely new," Daniel said calmly into my ear. I was resting on his chest now, his hands crossed over my bare back and torso. "No one ever changes entirely. There is always something left over from before, even if it's the tiniest particle of our former selves. Even if no one can see it, we know it's there."

He asked me a few moments after that, "Right Frank?" but I could only groggily nod. It was getting to be a late night, and Daniel saw how overwhelmed I had become, my distant selves coming together and meeting up in order for them to move on. He rubbed my back, humming a strange tune I could not place, until I fell asleep.

Chapter Four

In the morning, we had our first shower together. It was nervous and awkward, and a pretty public declaration of our relationship to other people, but I was okay with it. We didn't have sex, but we did wash one another's hair and run our hands down one another's back. We touched and tugged, and under the stream of water we lapped at one another's neck and mouths, but that was it. I wanted to jerk him off in the shower; hell, I wanted to get on my knees in front of him. It was hard to explain how much power, not subservience or domination, I felt while being on my knees and having him look down on me. He was rougher when we did certain things more so than Gerard and he liked to go a lot faster, but there was still that sense of safety and certain equality evoked with Daniel. I didn't feel inferior or extremely sexualized going down on my knees in front of him or if he pinned my arms down while we were in bed together. I knew that he would not hurt me, so his hands on me didn't feel constricting. If anything, when he pinned my arms in bed, or against the side of the shower that morning, it produced more desire, as prohibition always did. While Daniel was faster with his movements over my body, the things we did with our bodies took a slower progression. When I got on my knees in front of him, he pulled me up after we locked eyes and whispered into my ear.

"Not now, Frank. Take one step at a time," he told me and barely touched the head of my cock. The water was too cold for us to stay in much longer, and the outside July heat was descending on us quickly in the afternoons. We needed to get to work, but he was finding more excuses to come over to me during the day and more reasons to touch me and show affection without prompt. If people didn't expect anything before, they did now. Daniel kissed me goodbye anytime we talked for a few moments, similar to the way that Jasmine and I now did. We never had in the past. It was usually a quick hug, especially if we were in public. But there were layers of safety being built up. Public displays of affection took on a different quality, even if they were against the grain of "typical" sexual encounter. Being gay wasn't an issue here, neither was being straight. As Daniel had explained to me, those categories never really existed to begin with; only circumstances did. Everyone here was in the same circumstance, and from that, like a chemical reaction, people just clicked and grew from there. I did not hear the insults faggot or cheater once, even when everyone was aware that Daniel and Jasmine were both with me. It was okay here. Paul, while being monogamous said that he didn't quite understand how "your heart is not ripped out on a daily basis," he approved as much as he could. And Daniel's response to the matter was the best that I had ever heard.

"Who says it's not also restored, renewed, or strengthened? Who says pain like that is always detrimental?"

Though he and I did not talk about love, very pointedly, his words sent chills up my spine.

We spent more time indoors, under the shade, and at night together in his bedroom when we weren't working. He, Jasmine, Gwen and I were all still cooking dinner along with a few other people and those moments were especially intense between us all. Jasmine had hinted about liking Gwen, but although Gwen identified as asexual, the two of them cuddled, talked, and kissed one another quite a bit. They would spend nights together occasionally too, but nothing too serious was happening.

"She's fun," Jasmine would tell me in the moments we had together. "She's just full of random facts and information, and if they don't keep her on as a fifth member, it'd be a loss. But we mostly talk about the things we like to one another, and she asks about the baby a lot." Jasmine touched her stomach as she said this, and I noticed she had grown more attached and responsive to the girth in front of her. She rubbed her stomach more, talked about how she was feeling, and seemed to mention Paloma a great deal, and not even just to me anymore. She would talk about the baby at dinner some nights, even going around and getting people, if they wanted to, to feel her kicking. She had started to move more within the night, too, and sometimes Jasmine would crawl upstairs to my bed if I was not already with her, and wake me up just so I could feel our daughter. I could not tell if she was speaking up for herself more because she was in an environment that finally made sense to her, or because she was really starting to feel the burden of the pregnancy, but she also sat down a lot. She put her feet up, and apparently, Gwen was good at taking care of her. Other than her exhaustion in the heat some days, Jasmine was doing well. We were both getting tans and had stopped shaving. I had developed more of my beard and her legs wore blonde fuzz as she walked around in old pairs of my shorts. She wore my clothing a lot of the time now, and something about it almost made me stop and stare. Her belly pulled the shirts taunt and de-accentuated her growing breasts. Her feet stuck out from sandals with painted toe nails (Gwen's doing), and under my clothing, she wore hairy legs and underarms. Her hair was long, past her breasts now, and it had turned blonder from the summer sun. She was gaining weight with her belly, filling out her legs and face, while I was losing my extra pudge and gaining stamina and strength. She was absolutely stunning, and on the nights that I did not spend with Daniel, she and I were together.

Her pregnancy belly made it a bit hard to have sex, but we tried new positions without the aid of Mikey and Alexa's book. She liked being on top, but in the summer heat even that became difficult. She bent over and I came up from behind a lot; it ended up being our favorite position. Hitching my hands over her waist and touching her thighs, her knees, her hips and stomach as I rolled my hips into hers gave us both a sense of power and satisfaction that we hadn't had before. Sometimes she'd leave one of my shirts on while we had sex, saying it made her breasts feel better since it somehow gave them less freedom to move around and hurt, and it was nice to have the fabric to grip onto. She would lie down on the bed and put her legs over my back as I stood and used the height of the mattress for positioning. The bed in the downstairs area was actually quite high off the ground and it worked wonders for this position. The cot that was upstairs barely ever got used except for afternoon reading; either she and I slept together in the same bed, or one of us was gone with another person.

We didn't always have sex when we were together, though. Sometimes Jasmine still got nauseous (gluten was a hard thing to get out of food, apparently) or she'd feel gross because of the hormones and heat, so I would rub her back, or just go down on her. She'd lay on the bed the same way as before from the previous position, and I'd get on my knees. It felt good, so good and I traced the outside of her opening and sucked her until her voice changed in the back of her throat. She would occasionally come with me to the showers, and because of sheer dynamics, we couldn't really have penetrative sex there. Early one morning, we both skipped the writing or the run we did on our own and went there instead. I used my tongue all over her aching body to distract her from any discomfort and we both used our hands as we watched one another. This was something that Daniel liked to do, too. More often than not, we'd both reach for the other person and use our hands, sometimes our mouths, and kiss or just put our foreheads together as we brought one another to orgasm. He was becoming more vocal when we were together now, something I did not anticipate but relished as it happened. Even Jasmine became more vocal as the month of July went on, and she had been relatively the same in bed, at least in terms of how frequently she moaned, for seven years. I could not believe that after that much time together, something could change, and it made me excited for the future. I didn't think this was possible, and even after so short of a period of time with Daniel, that he was changing in front of me, too. He was now grunting more and talking to me as we jerked one another off. He whispered in my ears as he pinned me some days and it made my eyes involuntarily roll into my head. No matter what he said, the way his voice became husky when he was aroused was enough to send my mind and body reeling. He swore a lot, too, usually letting go of expletives as he came.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-14