On a Friday night, my mom took my sister, Kevin, and me to a drive-in movie theater to watch an Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton film, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a movie I neither understood nor cared to. To me, Taylor and Burton came across as a couple of drunks who detested each other and their shitty marriage. Kevin and I sat in the car’s shadowy backseat, which was a fairly tight squeeze for two long-legged teenage boys, and because I was bored, I bounced my knees and cracked my knuckles. I drummed my fingers on the windowsill beside me until my mom turned and told me to quiet down, that I was disturbing her concentration on the movie.
I rolled my eyes and rocked my head against my seat back. I stared at the car’s fabric roof while I crossed my arms at my chest. Would the movie never end? Why would anyone pay money to watch such drivel?
I can’t wait to—
Kevin’s knee touched mine. We both wore shorts, and I felt the warmth of his skin. Right away, my pulse accelerated. When I looked at Kevin from the corner of my eye, his gaze was fixed on the movie screen. His expression was impassive. We shared a box of buttered popcorn, and when he passed the box to me, seconds later, I placed it in my lap. I ate a few handfuls while I savored the feel of Kevin’s skin against mine.
I wasn’t quite sure what to make of the situation in the backseat. Was Kevin making a pass at me, or was he simply trying to relax his leg? I decided to take a chance, to make a subtle move, so I rubbed my knee up and down against Kevin’s knee; I did this three times. Then I stopped and held my breath.
Seconds passed. Then Kevin rubbed me back: once, twice, three times. By the third rub, my heart hammered against my ribs and my breathing had quickened. I stole another glance at Kevin, but his gaze remained fixed on the movie screen as before. I returned my gaze to the movie as well, feeling totally confused. What was going on? Was my imagination running away with me?
It wasn’t.
Kevin seized my wrist. He lifted my hand and brought it to his crotch, where something warm and rigid bulged beneath the flimsy fabric of his shorts. My eyes bugged; I swallowed noisily and trembled like a kid in a spook house. I’m sure Kevin felt the trembling because my knee chattered against his and my hand shook between his thighs.
I turned my head to look at Kevin, and this time he swung his gaze to meet mine. He gave me a wink, ever so subtly and placed his hand on mine that rested between his legs. He gave my hand a squeeze. Then he turned his gaze back to the movie. We sat like that for the duration of the film, probably forty-five minutes, and Kevin remained stiff the entire time. Of course I was stiff as well, so rigid I feared I might bust the zipper out of my shorts. But then the film ended, and after Kevin withdrew his hand from mine, I removed my hand from Kevin’s crotch before my sister or mom could see what we were up to in the backseat.
My thoughts raced during the ride home. What had it all meant? Did Kevin want me the same way I wanted him? And what, if anything, would happen next?
Back at home an hour dragged by before my mom and sister decided they would turn in. Mom extinguished lights in the living room while Kevin and I headed to my room. After I closed and locked the door, we both undressed without saying a word to each other. I tried to imagine what sort of thoughts dwelled in Kevin’s head as he slid beneath his bedcovers. I switched off the floor lamp that stood between our beds, then crawled into my bed. I lay on my back with my fingers interlaced behind my head and my elbows jutting. I listened to waves smack the nearby shore. I heard the breeze stir needles of an Australian pine outside my bedroom window. Tires hissed on asphalt when a car passed on Gulf Boulevard. After my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I turned my head to look at Kevin. He also lay on his back. One of his knees was raised beneath his covers and he rocked the knee from side to side.
Go on: say something.
“You awake?” I whispered.
Kevin turned his head to look at me. “Yeah, of course,” he said. “I’m not really sleepy at all.”
“I’m not either.”
Kevin pulled aside his covers. He swung his feet to the floor, and his knees crackled when he rose. His erection tented the pouch of his white briefs. He came to my bed and sat on the edge of the mattress, close to my chest. Already I smelled his piney scent. He stroked my cheek with a fingertip a time or two. Then he ran his fingers through my hair while my heart chugged like a locomotive climbing a hill. After Kevin reached for the edge of my covers, he lifted them.
“Can I?” he whispered.
My voice croaked when I answered. “Hop in,” I said.
What transpired during the next hour was nothing short of magical, at least for me. When our briefs came off and our bodies intertwined, I felt the heat of Kevin’s flesh, the firmness of his muscles, the softness of his lips, and the wetness of his tongue. We did things I’d never thought of doing with boys, intimate acts that felt entirely natural and right. Toward the end, when Kevin thrust inside me and his warm breath blew into my ear, I shivered with an excitement so intense I nearly screamed. And when it was over, I lay on my sweat-soaked sheet, staring up at the tongue-in-groove ceiling while Kevin snored in the other bed. Even today, whenever I smell the coconut scent of a certain skin lotion we used that night, I’ll remember my first time with Kevin as clearly as though the moment happened yesterday.
We didn’t say more than two dozen words to each other during our sex. Mostly Kevin spoke, telling me what to do or how to do it or what he planned to do to me next. But I’d never felt closer to anyone. I thought back to that summer morning in the Corrigans’ garage, when I’d first discovered my desire for Kevin’s flesh, and I could not believe how events had led Kevin and me to this. My limbs felt like jelly. I ran my fingers through my damp hair while I marveled at the memory of Kevin’s techniques, his tenderness, and also his creativity. Who knew that Kevin’s tongue twirling in my ear could make my heart sing?
And now I knew something else: a place in the world existed where I belonged. My need for another male’s touch might be deemed wrong in most quarters—I’d have to be careful who I shared those feelings with—but at least I knew I wasn’t alone.
The Surf Motel was only a few blocks from our house, and the night after our first sexual encounter, right after we’d finished doing the dinner dishes, Kevin and I strolled down Sunshine Lane, a graveled alley leading to the motel, where we’d play pinball. We passed beneath the glow from streetlamps, both of us wearing Bermuda shorts, T-shirts, and flip-flops. The evening breeze tossed Kevin’s wavy hair about while it blew my bangs into my eyes.
We had risen that morning around eight. Kevin woke first, and his stirrings in the room woke me. When I turned onto my side to watch Kevin pull his swim trunks up his legs, his gaze met mine and gave me a wink like he had in the car the night before. The wink meant something, of course. It signaled me that our sex the previous night had not been a one-time thing. It also meant that now we shared a secret and a new bond between us.
As always, we had spent several hours surfing at the sandbar. By now our days on the water had left my skin as dark as alligator hide and my normally brown hair sun-bleached to a golden hue. Kevin’s hair was almost white. His usually fair skin was now the color of creamed coffee, and his shoulders were as freckled as a robin’s egg. Neither of us had paid for a haircut since May. We looked like two boys from the movie Lord of the Flies.
There on Sunshine Lane, we both walked with our hands in our pockets, listening to traffic pass on Gulf Boulevard. Neither of us had mentioned our sex a single time that day, and I began to suspect that the taboos we’d shattered the previous night were something we would never discuss outside of my bedroom.
Maybe, I thought, guys never talk about that sort of thing. The sex just happens, but it’s not discussed.
That was when Kevin asked me a question that seemed to come out of nowhere, something having nothing to do with sex. He said, “Has your mom told you what’s wrong with my mom?”
I shook my head.
“It’s what they call cervical cancer,” he said, then pointed to his groin area. “It’s in her private parts.”
I crinkled my forehead. “Is it serious?”
Kevin nodded while he kept his gaze on the gravel before him. “She might make it, or she might not. The doctors don’t know.”
I licked my lips while I tried to process the information Kevin had just shared with me. Mrs. Corrigan has cancer? Mrs. Corrigan might die? The ideas seemed preposterous. She’d been such a large a part of my life in my early years, and she wasn’t that old, maybe forty at most.
I cleared by throat. Then I said, “What happens if…?”
We kept on walking while Kevin talked.
“My dad couldn’t take care of me on his own,” Kevin said, “and I couldn’t take care of him either. He’d go to a nursing home, I guess. I have an aunt in Boston—she’s my mom’s sister—and probably I’d go up there to live with her.”
A weekly television series aired at that time, a cop show that took place in Boston. I’d watched a few episodes, and all I could remember was how cold things seemed up there. People wore overcoats and scarves, and the men wore wool fedora hats. Everyone spoke with those curious accents where they said “cah” instead of “car” and “bah” instead of “bar,” and nobody, it seemed, had a yard in Boston. They lived in row houses with aluminum siding or in red brick apartment buildings with nary a shrub or architectural feature. I tried to imagine Kevin living in such a place, and I couldn’t. He loved the outdoors; he was made for a warm-weather climate. Up in the frozen North, he’d probably wither like a corn stalk after harvest. And if Kevin moved to Boston, I’d probably never see him again, would I?
I tried to imagine myself in Kevin’s position.
He’s probably scared as hell, and who wouldn’t be?