Chapter 25: Learning About God
At lunch the next day I made sure to sit next to Eric at the table. The conversation at first was generic and revolved around the heat. The third consecutive day over ninety degrees ushered in the official heat wave. Everyone had a gripe - they were having trouble sleeping in the little ovens that passed as dorm rooms, no one was hungry, Johnston wouldn't give them a break, the rosin wasn't drying their hands sufficiently. Brad shot me a periodic glance of supreme displeasure, which I returned with a contrite, if coy shrug.
Matt, who was sitting across from me, started playing footsie with me under the table. He had slipped off his sandal, and was stroking my calf with his toe. I smiled at him and raised my eyebrows in feigned shock. Slipping off my own sandal, I took my other foot and tickled his instep with it. He jumped, grinned and withdrew his foot.
"So Eric," I said when general conversation had flagged, "you want to go for a walk later? Maybe visit the lake or something."
"That's okay," he said. "No thanks."
"How about a drive? It's Saturday. You don't have to get up early tomorrow. I can take you out to a movie or something."
He turned to look at me and frowned. I could see his jaw muscle flex slightly.
"I don't think so," he said. "I don't think it's a very good idea for us to hang out together."
"Really? Why so?"
"I'm a Christian." There was immediate silence at the table. All eyes stared at food, while all ears tuned in to our conversation.
"You're a Christian?" I asked.
"Yes." Oh, goodie. This would be fun.
"How wonderful," I said, diving right in. "So am I. What's your point?"
"You can't be a Christian," he said. "You're gay."
"Funny," I replied evenly, "I was just thinking you couldn't be a Christian. You're a bigot."
"I'm not a bigot. I just accept Jesus into my life. Would you like to accept God into your life?"
"In fact," I said, "I think I just began that process last night." Dan did a spit take, some of the milk he was drinking coming out of his nose. The other boys cracked up, though I expect more from Dan's reaction than from any understanding of what I had just said.
"Jesus said you can't be gay and follow him."
"Oh, bullshit. Jesus said nothing about being gay. Not one blessed word, Eric. The only mentions of it - and there are very few indeed - are in the OT and Paul. You want me to quote chapter and verse for you?"
"You can't tell me that you can follow Jesus' teachings and still be gay."
"Jesus said love your neighbor, honey. Hey - we're neighbors, aren't we? As I've loved you twice in the past two weeks, it seems I'm more of a Christian than you are."
Matt poked at his food, smiling broadly. Brad pursed his lips and grinned despite his anger at me.
"Just because I slip every once in a while just means I'm human. At least my spirit is willing. My spirit is willing, though my flesh is sometimes weak."
"Yeah," Interrupted Adam, "and sometimes it's pretty tight too, huh Eric?"
The other boys smiled in an entirely embarrassed, self-conscious sort of way and continued to feign attention to their food. I had to bite my lip to keep from cracking up. Eric blushed a deep crimson, but would not give Adam the satisfaction of looking at him.
"Seriously," I said, "so you think I'm going to hell because I'm gay?"
"Don't worry," he replied, still stinging from Adam's remark, "you'll have plenty of company. And yes, yes I do. God created Adam and Eve," he said, hurling the tired old chestnut at me, "not Adam and Steve."
"Hey! Don't bring me into this!" Steven said. Doug poked him in the ribs as an indication that he should be quiet.
"Well, he also created Cain and Abel," I said. "If that were the way it worked, wouldn't he have created Cain and Mabel?"
"You can't deny the Word, Mark. It's the only truth, and it says that you're damned unless you repent your sins and allow Jesus to enter you."
"But now you're just arguing my case!" I cried in glee. Alas, double-entendre is so frequently wasted on the straight. Only Adam got it.
"Anyway," he said, "I don't think it's a good idea for us to hang out."
"Probably not," I replied. "Though if you get horny again and you want, oh, I don't know...a blowjob for instance...I'll still be happy to help you out.
It's the Christian thing to do, after all, don't you think?" I smiled sweetly at him and batted my eyelashes.
His jaw tightened and he looked at his food. "I don't think that will be happening again," he said.
"No, I should imagine not. And in the meantime," I added, "I'll pray for you."
I took my tray and left the table.
I stopped in my room on the way to the gym. Finding my address book, I dialed a number.
"Hello, Shmu?" I said when the phone picked up on the other end.
"Yo."
"Shmu, it's Mark. Listen. I have a little proposition I think you're going to like a lot."
The idea to call Shmu had come to me the night before while I lay awake worrying. It seemed like a good plan, but good plans often go astray and if this one did, I'd be left with few, if any options.
That scheme set in motion, I headed off to the gym where the boys were changing in the locker room. Adam took me aside.
"Hey, champ. C'mon with me into the weight room."
"Mmm," I said, "gonna have your way with me finally?"
"You wish," he laughed.
"You know I do!" I shot back.
He smiled at me and cocked his head for me to head off toward the room. I did so, and he followed me.
"So what's this about now?" I asked.
"Sweat," he said.
"Oh. Cool."
"I figure I can do a workout. It's hot as hell in there. Should get me going real good. You got something you can collect it with?"
"I'll find something. Be right back."
I rummaged through the various equipment lockers and eventually found two plastic water bottles. Hoping the plastic wouldn't contaminate the sample, I left one empty and filled the other with water. When I returned to the weight room, Adam was on the treadmill in only sneakers and a jock.
"Holy Christ," I said, glad to finally be able to verbalize the effect he had on me in his presence. "You expect me to be able to work with you like that? I'm the one that faints, remember?"
He kept increasing the pace on the treadmill. "How about this," he said, "if you faint, I'll kick you in the nuts?"
"Dan said no cumming," I replied, which caused him to have to hold onto the handrails to keep from falling as he laughed. "Glad to have you on board, champ," he said finally, beginning his run in earnest.
And glad I was to be there! His legs and ass began to pump up with blood as he ran, the muscles on them corded, thick, distinct and mighty. The jock, its material stretched by the size of him, held his dick safely in place in front of him. The weight of it pulled the waistband down into an arc, revealing the top of his pubes.
His pecs began to fill as the pumping of his arms drew blood into them. Although he had hardly begun to breathe heavily, his tanned skin began to take on a slight rose hue as a result of the exertion. His nipples darkened perceptibly and began to inflate along with the rest of him.
I sat down on the machine next to his and watched him run. His face was set again in the combination of determination, concentration and relaxation that characterized his workouts. Though he had gone a third of a mile, he was still dry and hardly panting despite the pace he had set. I would be there for some time.
How had I gotten to that place, I wondered? I had come to study him and yet it was as if, from the start, he was the one studying me - and to better result. No decision I had ever made had felt as right as the one to turn right and knock on Dan's door the night before. I had done it without thinking, without planning, without analysis. How unlike me! And yet the feeling of relaxing onto his strong form while he swam me about in the lake was as close to heaven as I had ever come. Had I always been the navigator?
How could I have not seen how much I had yearned to be taken for a ride myself?
The mind is an extraordinary instrument, I thought. I knew so many friends who repeated the same patterns over and over again blindly setting up the same relationships that had not worked for them in the past in the vainglorious hope that the next time would be different. You walk down the street and fall in a pothole, you're unobservant. You walk down the same street the next day and fall in the same pothole, you're an idiot. You walk down the same street a third time and again fall in the pothole, you're a romantic. And I - so smart, so astute, so erudite - I had spent the majority of my adult life staring at the world from the bottom of a pothole.
Adam was not a god, nor was he a devil. This I had learned in the two weeks I had known him. He had his strengths, he had his weaknesses - his good days and his bad. He saw into me, though, and found things I didn't know were there. I don't know how he did it, I don't know how he knew. But as surely as I had been wrong about him in so many ways, I knew I was right about this: he was right about me.
The more I thought about Dan, the more I yearned for him. I yearned to be held by him, I yearned to be taken by him, I yearned to make him happy, I yearned to give in to him, to give myself over to him. What was it about him that so captivated me? I found myself wondering at the strange fact that I wasn't wondering. Perhaps it was time for Mr. PsychMan to stop analyzing and start living.
Start living. Start experiencing without critique. Start listening to the world around me...the voices...the voice...
Adam was talking to me.
"Huh?" I said, jerked back to the present in a most jarring way.
"I'm sweating," Adam said.
"Oh." I looked at him shine. It was as if you had taken a marble statue and oiled it. Small, transparent pearls bejeweled his body, catching the light in prismatic glory. I followed one just below his right pectoral muscle as it swelled, hesitated as if shy, then finding the courage to do so, boldly set off on a voyage of discovery across the canyonlands that were his abdomen. I became aware of an overpowering urge to lick it. "So you are," I said distractedly.
"Hey - snap out of it," Adam called angrily. "Get your ass over here and help."
I hadn't even felt myself fall into the fog that time, but I was certainly aware of the difficulty I began to have fighting it. I stood up and almost rushed. Determined to collect my wits, I took the empty bottle, twisted off the cap and brought it to his skin, running one lip over his abdomen to catch the little rivulets of sweat as they rolled down him. I glanced over at the display on the treadmill.
"You've been running for three miles?" I exclaimed.
"Yeah. Why? Where have you been?"
"London," I said, catching another drop as it was about to fall from his chin.
"How much are you going to need?" he asked.
I handed him the full bottle of water. "How much you got?"
He smirked his asshole smirk - or what I had used to think was his asshole smirk. It was just his response to a challenge, I now thought. How easy it is to misread people when we are too sure of ourselves. My Advisor used to tell me that all the time. I had always assumed he was talking about other people.
After another two miles, I began sweeping his body with the lip to direct the flow into the bottle. The pleasant tingle in my nose reminded me of why we were there. I was, by that point, so used to having a crushing erection when I was around Adam that I didn't even take note of it. Instead, I reveled in the smell and feel of him allowing myself for the first time - eager, in fact - to fall effortlessly and completely into his spell.
When he hit ten miles, he slowed the machine to a walking pace. "That's it," he said. I ran the lip over his body one last time, shepherding the sweat into the bottle.
Time became disjointed when I was around Adam. One is so used to cause and effect, temporal linearity. And yet I found that when captivated by him, when in the fog, holes appeared in the continuum. My brain processed information out of order. So it was that I noticed that he was looking at me strangely before I noticed that having finished collecting for the bottle, I had swept his skin with my hand, had put my hand into my mouth and was sucking my fingers. Salt, sour, bitter, sweet. I froze and grinned, caught like the proverbial kid with his hand in the cookie jar.
"Sorry," I said, taking my hand from my mouth. "That's pretty weird, huh?"
He smiled. "I'm used to it by now. This forty-year-old chick came up to me one time when I was twelve and just licked my face. That was weird. I'm not weirded out by anything anymore. At least not by sixes."
"Ten, thank you very much," I replied, trying to sound offended. He smiled. His breathing was back to normal already. His fitness astounded me.
"That enough for you?" he asked nodding toward the bottle.
"No, actually. Another taste, please."
He cuffed me on the back of my head. I smiled sheepishly, screwed the cap onto the bottle and shook it. There was a fairly good sample. This would make Sharon very happy. Sharon! What an idea! My plan took a twist for the better.
"Listen," I said, "we need to take a road trip after practice."
"We do?"
"Yeah. I asked Johnston this morning if we could go. He said it would be all right."
"Who's we, and where's the road trip to?"
"You, Dan, Matt and me is the we, and it's to a mall. It's so we can get out of the heat."
"Include Doug and lose Matt," he said.
"Doug's in," I replied, "but Matt has to come." He frowned. "I understand what you were talking about before with Matt," I added, "but I didn't understand in time."
His frown deepened. "Fix it," he said.
"I know. I know. That's what I'm trying to do. That's why he has to come."
He surveyed me with his eyes. An alien anal probe could not have been more intense or penetrating.
After hours or possibly just seconds of scrutiny, he nodded. "Okay," he said, "but if you hurt that boy, so help me God..."
I returned to my room with the bottle and put it in a Ziploc bag. Getting my address book out again, I made another phone call.