“Hey, Kerm,” Matt says into the phone. “You wanna come over?”
It’s a Saturday this time, so at least I don’t have to fight the powers that be about my whereabouts. And it’s a relief, in fact, to know that he still wants to spend time with me.
“Sure, yeah.”
We have yet to play laser tag. It’s been all I can do this week to just get through each day of school. Matt’s been super attentive, nodding to me in the hallway between classes, giving me a ride home every day after school, but he hasn’t suggested we try an outing again, and I don’t have the energy to initiate.
At home, I retreat to my bedroom as much as humanly possible, apart from the obligatory dinner appearance.
I might have been wrong about my parents not being able to stop talking. We don’t talk much over the dinners. Mom tries, Dad eats like an automaton and then disappears into the den.
Falling into Matt’s car and being whisked away from Griefland is a refreshing change of pace. We don’t speak, either, but it’s still a relief.
“Hi,” he says when we’re standing inside his garage, his hand on the doorknob to the house.
“Hi,” I answer. Is this a thing with us? Pausing by doors to have a moment?
He touches my arm. “I’m glad you could come.”
When he speaks now, I only hear double entendres. So I smile. “I’m glad you wanted me.”
“It’s like Minus-One,” he says. “Sometimes I just want to be around someone who knows how it is.”
“How what is?” I ask.
“Never mind,” he answers.
We go inside. It’s a big house, much like Steve’s across the way. Living room, dining room, sitting room, den. A kitchen that gleams like the command bridge of a spaceship.
We gather snacks from a pantry that’s like a walk-in closet. Then we fold ourselves away in Matt’s room and let the afternoon disappear.
I feel safe here. Protected. Like I’ve been whisked away to another planet, where my every move isn’t being scrutinized, and even if it was I wouldn’t be found wanting. Even if he knew the truth, I’m certain: He wouldn’t send me away.
I know how it is in my head, and my heart. But even though I’m sitting here, talking to him, and we’re close, and it’s just us, and it’s safe, I can’t really figure a way of saying it out loud.
We sit and play Madden and chat about nothing, and then we switch to Mario Kart and race through a cartoon landscape, and then we switch to an arena combat game I’ve never played before where we choose hunky avatars in skimpy so-called battle armor and send them to fight to the death in rotating exotic environments, and we sit there duking it out on screen until my thumbs ache but amazingly nothing else does, and the afternoon couldn’t possibly get any more perfect, and then Matt goes, “Look what you can do on this,” and his avatar suddenly lowers his fists and walks toward mine. My guy kind of freezes, I guess because I freeze, and Matt’s guy is close now. He raises his arms, his huge muscled cartoon arms, and puts them around me, and my guy can’t do anything but stand there and let him. They’re kissing now, and Matt’s guy has his hands in my hair, going up and down my back with his strange jerky motions. There’s music in the background, new music coming from somewhere, in the game or in the room or in the back of my mind, and it’s surprisingly sexy, and I swallow my fear, because it’s not real, but it is real, and my real body starts straining against the fly of my jeans. And Matt whispers a keystroke and I do it and my guy lifts his arms and starts hugging him back. And they go at it, these ultimate versions of ourselves, and apart from the music and the light click of our thumbs, the room is quiet, but then comes our breathing, which gets louder, on edge.
And the fear is back now, because I don’t think I can hold myself in, and my hands slip, sweat-slick, and I’m going to have to excuse myself and run, but then Matt breathes, “Don’t stop,” and so I don’t stop, and on the screen we are locked in one another’s arms, and Matt drops his head back and lets out this low scratchy moan. And easy as that, I’m going, going, gone, and it all comes out of me, into my boxers and my jeans, a hopeless mess, but it doesn’t matter because it was beautiful.
And I’m not crying or anything, but it feels like I might have, in the middle of it, in the part where I became not me but this other tiny person being touched by a boy, and Matt looks at me. In the real world he looks at me, sitting on the beanbag chair on the floor in his game room, and says, “I didn’t think we would take it that far,” and I say to him simply, “How did you know?”