THE SILENCE IS DEAFENING, but that’s not the only cliché in the room. There is also the subplot of the playboy and his prey.
I look at my lover and find he is looking directly at me. I am splayed in his DNA and panting hard, and a bit taken aback by what just happened, as my intention was to come over and cuss his triflin’ ass out and say I was not going to see him again. Nine months before, I had helped him move into this apartment—all that heavy-ass shit: couch, sofa, appliances, and the bed. The bed was the cruel part. He had said, “Me and you are gonna be spending a lot of time in this apartment together,” and then he stopped returning my calls.
Soon after that the pictures started appearing of him and this boy together; they went everywhere, clearly this was his boyfriend. Like, why didn’t he make his bitch help him move? I understand that life is by design a competition—okay, this other bitch won, that’s fine. But it was twisting the knife to make a boy who you are leading on carry the bed you and your boyfriend are going to fuck on every night. It was this act of hubris, this Agamemnon dancing on the red carpet moment, that made my hatred real.
Now he is smiling deeply at me. I want to smash his pretty fucking face into a car hood.
But then it happens, that moment where all the hate evaporates and it just feels good to see him again, smell him again, feel the weight of him on top of me. He fucks good. Is that all he’s good for? In this instant the answer is yes. Our first date had been a year ago—he had ignored me online for a year before that until a mutual friend of ours (who we were both fucking) gave him a solid recommendation for my skills for taking dick. (“He can really take some dick,” said the mutual friend to him.)
We sat in bed, postsex sweaty, the first day we met. He said to me, “I’m from the mountains,” and picked up a globe off his bookshelf and spun it and pointed to where. “The Andes,” he said.
“I’m from the mountains, too.” I took the globe from his hands, gave it a spin also, stopped it with my index finger, and pointed. “I’m from the Appalachians,” I offered. He smiled at me. “Awww, we’re both mountain boys. Cute.”
“I grew up surrounded by coffee trees. You?” he asked.
“I grew up in a cotton field—lots of roaches and rats. It was gross,” I shot back. He started giggling and eventually we fucked again and again and again until I was convinced that he liked me and that I wanted him. I let him charm me more, I let him let me think I was special—I knew at my core that he was waiting to unzip his face. I’m blindsided by how abruptly it all happened, how fast he left his phone off the hook.
I look at him now and actually laugh to myself. My horrible taste in men is fucking hilarious to me. I blurt it out. “Why didn’t you call me back?” I’m grossed out by myself before the sentence fully leaves my mouth.
He answers, “I just wasn’t feeling it,” and I get that feeling of wanting to break him again.
“Y’know, I know what it’s like. I’ve been in your shoes, too,” he adds nonchalantly, making hand gestures and looking to the ceiling. He starts talking, and I zone out. His level of compassion (or seeming lack thereof) is killing me. The emotional distance between us is as wide as the distance between the respective mountain ranges we grew up in—or maybe, even, much, much further. He begins to talk about some boy he fucked before me, someone who refused him, but I guess he can now forgive this person because he’s passing the rejection my way. He keeps talking and I tune in just in time to hear him say, “… and everybody is left with the ghost of somebody else, aren’t they?” I stop to ponder this. If this is true, then there have to be one hundred ghosts in this room already and that’s just the baggage I’m carrying. Lover boy for sure has twice as many. I imagine one hundred ghosts in the room (and one hundred only—I don’t give a fuck about his ghosts). There are too many men here and it doesn’t feel like a sexy gang bang. No, this feels like something that’s a lot more fucking annoying.
“One hundred boyfriends,” I say, deep in thought.
“What did you just say?” he asks, looking at me like he has just been rudely interrupted.
“I didn’t say anything,” I whisper, as I roll over and turn my back to him.
I begin trying to move past petty emotions and think about this scientifically.
What are the mechanics of desire? In what feels like all of three seconds my mind spins into a hard flashback on past lives—men I loved, some who I eventually hated; they are all still there somewhere, all hovering around. I called them “boyfriends,” though this was not always the case. But they were all like pieces of bubblegum you chew hours after the flavor leaves and that you accidentally swallow, and then (supposedly) sit in your guts for seven years. It was like the woman in the eighties who always swallowed her chewing gum and one day the doctors had to surgically remove the tennis ball–sized wad of gum from her intestines—this was the level of exorcism I needed.
I look at the picture of his boyfriend on the nightstand. He is young. He looks very studious. He looks like a young Black man who respects himself. I love him for that because I personally couldn’t be bothered with all that at his age. He also looks innocent in a way; perhaps the right word is fragile. I myself am lots of things—petty, jealous, a danger if provoked, certainly sensitive—but not fragile. I could fuck a crocodile and I could survive an atom bomb. This boy who I’m looking at in the picture—not so much. He looks like a child, like he needs a blanket. It’s as if he picked this kind of boy just to corrupt him—was that the game? I can tell that this boy doesn’t have a clue about the level of whore his boyfriend is. I was called here because this man is bored. Some part of him after nine months is bored with fucking this fragile boy.
My sixth sense tells me that there are aspects of the truth his boyfriend would shit himself over if he knew. This child has probably never seen his boyfriend high on drugs getting fucked by five guys—but I have. What sides of himself does he show this boy that he refuses to show me? I banish the thought as soon as it pops up. I’m sure it would not help me to know, and I want out of here.
I look at the cheater boy and he is snorting lines of cocaine off a hand mirror and watching Black and Latino–themed porn on his computer. He has a hard-on and he looks over at me like it’s time for me to bend over again. I sigh internally and feel something that might be like self-esteem—but probably should be more accurately categorized as wisdom—well up in my bones. I’ve answered every question I needed to hear.
His boyfriend comes in from work early—he failed to tell me that, of course, and I can hear the lock of the front door jostling. I’m beginning to think he did this on purpose; he wants to let his two puppies sniff at each other. I’m feeling violence in me again, but I’m vulnerable because I’m still naked on the bed and feel no great desire to get dressed in a hurry.
His boyfriend walks through the door and sees the lines of coke on the mirror, the porn on the computer screen, and his boyfriend and me naked. He rolls his eyes in this manner that lets me know he has walked into this scene before. Perhaps this boy is not as fragile as I thought. He gets undressed by the bed and says to me, “I need you to sleep on the couch”—I pause for a second and remember that I was the one who helped bring the couch in, too. I had some form of sympathy at first but now realize that I don’t like my “lover’s” boyfriend and that I also can’t stand him. Knowing is always half the battle.
I get dressed and, in hating neither the player nor the game, I let my checkered-print Vans pitter-patter softly toward his door. “It’s ok, young man, he’s all yours,” I say, passing the boy.
There is secret sanctimony in me as I close the door and walk away. I would be lying to myself if I believed for a second that I wasn’t going to fuck him ever again; I would, for sure. But this next time, my role would be clearer. I would be the ghost who haunted his sex, not the one who haunted his heart.