Joe College

Some people want to put their labels on everything, which is infuriating.

Their labels shouldn't matter. They want you to be in their category even if you're not. It's not about the label. Some people are more interesting than others. It's completely random. They're not like you but they like you anyway. Sometimes you think maybe they are like you, but you can't really know. You never know about people for sure.

Let's say this guy named Jamie moves to your neighborhood at the start of sophomore year. He's new, originally from Lansing. His dad got a job here.

He comes to school and doesn't know anybody. You figure out that you live three streets away from each other. As soon as you see him, you think that there's something interesting about him. He looks like somebody you'd be good friends with.

And you are. For the next couple of months you're his only friend in town.

He doesn't know anybody else. He meets your friends. He hangs around your house after school. You do normal stuff together -- get dropped off at movies, watch Pistons games, hang out in each other's basements on Friday nights watching DVDs or Skinemax.

He asks about the girls in your class. You name names confidently. You're good friends with most of the popular ones. Your freshman homecoming rep?

You took her to the Winterfest dance. She was hot. When you saw the shots the photographer got that night, you were like, "Whoah. I'm pretty good looking in a suit." You talk about girls with Jamie. He thinks he's interested in one, but you've never heard of her. She's a junior. She went to a different middle school.

"She's probably okay, man," you tell Jamie, "but she's not really part of a crowd. I don't know anything about her. Have you ever met Jenna?"

Jenna is plenty cute but you know she's boring. She never does things with guys. You don't tell that to Jamie. You simply think it would be better if he eased into the crowd. Where you grew up, everybody knew each other forever. It gets cliquish, but that's life. You've never seen anybody move there and fit in right away. It's too hard to navigate. You like Jamie -- that's why you take it upon yourself to help.

Sometimes Jamie gives you weird looks. You catch him watching you out of the corner of your eye, like he's looking at you while he thinks you're not watching. It feels a little bit nice. He looks interesting. He's shorter than you and skinnier. He has a skinny face, skin with no zits, dark eyes.

When he's not in school, he wears a Tigers baseball cap backward.

One Friday night you're at his house, probably going to sleep over because it's more convenient that way. He's got the Skinemax on. It embarrasses you. You try not to watch too closely, but Jamie gets into it. He asks if you've ever seen real porno. You blush and mumble no. He says he saw one at his second cousin's house and it was awesome.

"You've never even looked at real porno?" he says.

No, you say.

"Not even on the internet?"

No, you say. It's not really your thing. Plus, it would be horrible if your parents figured out. They're not exactly cool with that kind of thing.

If they knew you looked at that it'd be one of the worst things ever to happen to you.

Jamie is disappointed in this. He thinks it's a little weird, but it's cool, he says. Parents suck like that.

He offers color commentary about the softcore playing on TV. The women's bodies look fake. They're disproportionate. They're like huge toys, or like how a computer would make a fake woman look. Their skin looks waxy.

Their boobs look uncomfortably large and muscled. They shave it all off downstairs. It doesn't look human. It doesn't look right. They don't look interesting. Jamie doesn't think that, though, and you're already making yourself sound weird for what you said before about not liking porn. You catch glimpses at Jamie while he talks about what's happening on screen.

You pretend to be enthusiastic. He's intense in how he talks about it.

It's interesting when people are intense.

You don't know what you're supposed to do in this situation. It's not the way your friends are. If you'd been hanging out with your other friends, you'd probably be shooting hoops in a driveway after going to a football game. If it were a nice night you'd be at somebody's place with a pool, but it's fall now and too cold for that.

Sitting on the opposite end of the couch from Jamie, you shift your position. You move your hand to adjust yourself, because it's getting uncomfortable. Jamie glances over at you. It seems awkward.

Jamie says, "Whoah."

You say, "What?" and try to be nonchalant.

"Nothing, man," he says, kind of laughing.

You feel yourself blush. It feels gross.

This wasn't a big thing. It's not like it scarred you for life. In seventh grade gym class, after you ran the mile or had a day of sprints, they'd make you take a shower, which was horrible to begin with. Like, seriously inhumane. It reminded you of videos of what the Nazis did, you thought to yourself the first time that you experienced it. You were only twelve, but as they euphemize it on TV, you started developing early. The first couple of times you suffered that whole shower thing, it was like guys you knew -- guys that you were friends with for a long time -- sort of noticed. Like, they stared down at you for a couple of seconds. It made you feel sick, like you wanted to run away. You were careful about never glancing at them because, number one, that was gay, and number two, invasion of privacy.

There were a couple of comments on it. Not direct things, but awkwardly worded jokes, the kind that made some guys laugh and some of them look embarrassed. On like the fourth or fifth time, you hung up your towel and ran quick to the shower, facing a corner wall and not turning away while the cold water hit you for about 30 seconds, which seemed long enough to get wet and not seem like you were being scared and a freak. Your friend Benjamin took the shower next to you and started talking to you, all normal and confident-like, like you were hanging out in the hall talking by the lockers. It felt rude not looking at him or talking to him at all. It would have seemed like you were acting weird.

When you start talking to him, you peek down for a split second, barely enough to make a comparative judgment so you can get guidance about what was going on. Benjamin had pubes and everything but it definitely wasn't as big as yours. And shut up, man, it's not like you were Marky f***ing Mark in "Boogie Nights," you were simply above average in that respect, and not so far above average that you were a freak mutant genital boy, only further along than your friends and they'd catch up anyway, and the embarrassment of it was way, way, way stronger than whatever might have been flattering about it.

So, yeah.

There was that thing. It was sufficiently awkward that in high school, you never played on any teams because you didn't need people to see that crap.

It wasn't any of their business. It was disgusting.

And then you're hearing Jamie talk about what he'd do to one of the shiny waxy chicks in the porno, and it gets your mind thinking about watching him do that stuff, even though you don't want to think like that. He sees you starting to get a boner in your Dockers, and all of a sudden, he's like, "Whoah."

Then a couple of minutes later, he says, "Dude, Riis, forget watching pornos. You should probably be in one."

It's sort of super-humiliating, but he talks like it's no big deal. You figure that must be how people in Lansing act. He laughs about it.

It seems like Jamie is somebody you can trust. He's not a part of your group. You're pretty much the only person he's friends with at school. You remember Tom Cruise in "Risky Business," about how saying "what the f***" gives you freedom. You feel your face getting hot and say in a soft voice, "Do you want to see it?"

Jamie looks at you like you're sort of crazy. He laughs and shakes his head. He says, "Riis, dude, you're a funny cat sometimes."

That was it.

You only live like five minutes away. You can walk home and run away from it, but that makes it seem crazy instead of joking around. You stay and laugh it off. Jamie doesn't react aside from his comment. He thinks you're kidding. It will be an awful thing if he goes into school and talked about it, but he doesn't.

You probably would have showed him if he'd answered yes. You wanted him to see it. The next day you think about what it was like when he looked at you. You jerk off to it. Jamie has an interesting voice -- pretty deep, and he uses his syllables sharply and crisply. He could have been on TV.

You think about how he talked watching that Skinemax flick and how he looked over to you. It feels interesting. When you stayed over you'd seen him in boxers a couple of times, and that was a little interesting as well.

Not long after that Jamie starts hanging out with the girl he asked about.

You've still never heard of her and don't know anything about her. He hangs out with some of the skater kids in your class, even though he doesn't skateboard. Apparently, that's his new crowd, which is cool. It's good that he has friends now, even if they aren't your kind of people. You say hi in the halls and when the Pistons are in the playoffs, he takes up your invitation to watch the games with your friends. He's a cool guy and everything, but your interests turn out to be different, and you weren't meant to be good friends. That felt, in a very small way, sadder than you expected.

Not that it's a big deal. You have plenty of friends. Your teachers like you, and you never have problems with your parents. You get elected vice-president of your class (an important position, in case the class president is assassinated or impeached) and shoot photos for the yearbook.

All of your best friends are on the basketball team, so you're pretty popular, even if you're not the kind of guy who gets elected to the homecoming court, because you're not on any teams. Some of your friends go crazy with their parents, but that never happens to you, probably because you're the youngest, and by the time you're in high school, they're worn out. Your oldest brother was 15 when you were born. He already has two kids. Being an uncle means setting a good example.

You go out with a few different girls, but it's not really a thing. Nothing ever happens. You make out with one a couple of times and it doesn't feel the way everybody tells you. Like, everybody always tells you how you should feel, like they're you, and you can't tell if you're weird about it or whether they're lying because they feel like they need to sound cool or be part of a category. The problem with girls in real life is that most of them aren't interesting. You like girls and everything. There's no doubt that you're attracted to them. Then, in real life, they're never as cool or fun to be around as you expect. As friends is one thing, but for dating it's something else. They remind you of your sisters. They tell you not to be so nervous, even though you don't feel nervous at all. Most people don't understand the difference between nervous and polite and bored. What are you going to say to a girl? It's all right hanging out with you, but now I want to go home and watch the Red Wings with my parents? That would definitely be weird.

When it's fall of senior year, you only apply to two schools, and one of them is in-state and accepts pretty much everybody. You aren't one of those spazzes who freaks over whether you'll get into Stanford or Harvard. You knew you were going to get into the place that you wanted, and the other school is in case something surprising happened. Then you have a back-up plan.

Sure enough, you get admitted like it's nothing. You're pretty happy about it, but you've never assumed otherwise.

The night after graduation you get drunk for the first time. You're at the lake house of your best friend Ray with about 60 of your good friends from high school. You've always been really strict about parties and things like that. Everything they told you about drugs and alcohol in health class: it scared the heck out of you. Plus, you can't do that crap and look at your mom and dad in the eye when you come home. That's not the kind of person you should be. Even so, you've just graduated, and you're there with everybody in your class, and all of these people who you'd never picture drinking -- the uptight girl who got into University of Chicago, this very religious kid from A.P. History -- they were all getting wasted.

Plus, "American Pie" is set where you grew up. Everybody's still excited about it. You're always comparing yourselves to the characters in "American Pie." Their consensus about you, it's that you look like you're a Stiffler but act like the nerd character. It only seems right that you should loosen yourself up. It seems like you should give yourself a memory before you leave and it's too late.

Your best friend Ray keeps egging you on, and sometimes Ray seems very, very interesting, even though you don't officially consider him interesting.

You've known him too long to think that he's purely interesting. Ray keeps grabbing you around the shoulder and hugging you. He's a little drunk. Over and over, you keep talking about how you're best friends, with stupid stories about things from like fourth grade or the time you covered up for him after he chalked the old substitute teacher who fell asleep at her desk. As Tom Cruise observed in "Risky Business," saying "What the f*** gives you freedom." You try beer first, but it tastes awful. The mixed drinks taste awesome. You spend the night mosquito-bitten and lying on the grass next to a campfire, but what the f***.

It's very late and some of them go skinnydipping. You wander to the side of the lake as Ray gets himself naked in like five seconds while he harrasses you into following lead. No way. That is a line you won't cross. Maybe if it had been you and Ray, but not with all of those people. You watch his body as he trots down to the water and hits the surface stomach-first. A couple of skinny girls go in after him, and then another, and then a couple more dudes, but none of them are as interesting as Ray. You start to feel like a perv or a creep, standing on the lake looking at naked people while drunk with a Sprite and vodka in your hand, so you go back up to the campfire, where everybody wears clothes.

The next morning you're hung over, but it's not as bad as you anticipated.

You're just there on the floor of Ray's cottage with your friends. The drinking wasn't so bad, after all. You decide that maybe when you get to college next fall, you should try to do more stuff -- cut loose a little.

Say what the f***, because that's what gives you freedom.

You know the campus pretty well because all of your older siblings went here. Plus, your parents have had season football tickets basically your whole life, and when you were getting older and started to understand football, you were heading down with them for nearly every major home game.

When you were 12 you stayed the night in one of your older brother's dorm rooms. You've slept on your sisters' couches on visits. Outside of Grand Rapids, you probably know the school better than anyplace else.

At first it's lucky that you feel at home on campus, because right away, you're freaking out. Doing well in high school isn't the same as doing well in college, and from the first lecture, chemistry is kicking your ass. Your roommate seems friendly enough at first, but then standoffish, kind of uptight, which is unusual, because in your experience, you're the one who everybody thinks is uptight.

When you're not with the uptight roommate, most other people you see go wild. There's booze around, and pot. They all get together in somebody's room to drink, then go to the huge frat houses, where open parties start at ten and most of them stay late through the night. They're nice enough, but you don't entirely get it. All of them judge you because you don't fit into their categories. On first impression, it seems like the school is cut between people who study all the time and don't even make eye contact in the hall, or else it's people going absolutely crazy -- getting drunk, smoking pot, hooking up with each other. The dorm keeps a jar of free condoms by the desk where you get your mail. This blows your mind.

Nobody seems that casual. It's like they're all trying to outdo each other.

Even when it's normal conversation. They're into bands you've never heard of. They're obsessed with The Sopranos, which you've never seen. The ones who come from big cities talk about how they miss their big cities and compare the relative merits of New York and L.A. and Chicago.

Then, one night you meet Joe.

Your first thought is, "Whoah, that guy looks like how I picture Superman."

A girl from down the hall named Alicia has a crush on you, and she invites you to this dorm room where two guys from Florida are having people over to drink. You've had those kinds of hang-out nights before and it never clicked. When you walk into that dorm room, it already feels like everybody is friends and you're the weirdo who crashed their little party. One of the Florida guys starts giving you a hard time about not having alcohol, but you know it's only because you're a guy, and they think you're going to draw from the population of cute and available girls.

Suddenly a crazy-looking British guy is like, "Don't worry, take a seat and drink as much of my stash as you like." You immediately like these guys -- the crazy-looking British kid and his friend Joe, who looks like Superman.

It seems like they've been friends for years, but right away, they let you in. When you try to be funny, they laugh, and when they ask you the boring small-talk questions that everybody asks, they actually listen to the answers, and then play off of you and each other.

You start talking to this guy Joe, and he's definitely, like, interesting.

He has dark brown hair that's parted to the right, but it's long enough that it curls up in the same way that Superman is drawn with a cowlick. He has freckles across his nose and his cheeks. The way his face is built, it's like somebody designed it with a ruler. His nose and chin and cheeks all line up with sharp, short edges. Below his cheeks it's like an upside-down triangle. He keeps smiling at stuff, like he's looking for an excuse to show off his teeth, and every time you say something vaguely funny, he keeps smiling at you.

That night you go to a frat party with them and find yourself trashed in a way that's never happened before. You're in a great mood and you don't want the night to end, so to maintain momentum, you keep drinking. It's not how you usually do things, but everybody's out to get drunk. You stop noticing the taste of beer. Every time you glance over at this guy Joe, it's like he's looking at you. You know you're a terrible dancer, but you take this girl Alicia, and you start dancing anyway.

At some point you know you've had too much to drink. Like, way too much.

It seems like Joe is still watching you. You're pretty sure that you're about to get sick for the first time since you had a flu in junior high.

When nobody's looking, you run out and get sick in the bushes. Some frat-looking guy tells you that smoking a cigarette always makes you feel better after you puke, even if you're not a smoker. You take one from him, but the effect is exactly the opposite. You feel far worse than before.

This is how you imagine it feels before dying. You realize that he lied.

Joe and his English friend are on the porch with the girl who has a crush on you and they say it's time to go home. That they see you in this condition seems like a genuine disaster. If you thought that they'd be your new friends, they'd be your friends no more. Not after seeing you like this.

You apologize and you swear a lot, because they swear so much themselves and you think this will remind them how similar you are on the inside. When you start walking, you know that you're going to get sick again. They can't see you like that, so you start running to get away from them.

You remember how the dorm smelled when you walked in, but the next thing you really remember is waking up in a strange room only wearing your boxers.

Your mouth is disgusting. You mumble a sweary comment because the crazy British guy is in the lower bunk talking to you, and he swears like nobody's business.

You don't glance up but you can tell that Joe watches you from the top bunk.

He talks you through it. He tells you that it's okay. When you wake up for good a little later, Joe lets you take one of his T-shirts and his basketball shorts because your own clothes are putrid in a garbage bag. You never tell him this, but for the next week or so, you sleep in the shirt and shorts until it's time for laundry. Then you fold his clean clothes and return them to him.

When the frats start rush, you decide that you should check it out. What you really want to happen is that Joe and Sam will go with you and that you'll pledge the same place. That way you'll cement things. It means that you'll see them all the time and that you'll be their friends for the rest of college. Two of your older brothers were in a frat here. Joe and Sam don't want any part of that, though, and at first it pisses you off. You don't understand what their problems are. You think it's meant to be a rejection, like you're pushing it too far and it's time to back off.

But then, no. Instead they're calling you all the time. Joe calls you before he goes to the cafeteria for dinner. They e-mail you when they're going to head for a house party. Sometimes they e-mail you even when they're not going to a party, only because there's something funny to say.

You're eating dinner one night with Joe. It's the two of you, alone. He talks about running. He says that you should come with him sometime.

You've never been an athlete. You know that if you try, you're going to look stupid in front of him. He pushes you on it. It'll be weirder if you don't go than it will be if you go and look incompetent. It can't be that hard anyway. You see old guys running all the time. You're clearly in better shape than they are.

Instead, it sucks. You've barely started and it's already killing you, but from the beginning it feels like you've been running for an hour. Weird muscles start to hurt. They get tight in your lower back and in your butt.

Your shinbones ache. You're like, "People actually do this? For fun?"

You barely get anywhere before Joe jogs slow with you back to the dorm and heads his own way. After you've taken a shower, your whole body feels better. You feel lightheaded -- almost giddy. Unfortunately your roommate is around staring at his computer with the headphones on. He detracts from your surprisingly good mood.

Your legs hurt for a couple of days, but you go again. It's partly because of how you feel afterward, but also, it's nice to be with Joe without anybody else. When you go running with him he's not talking your head off about a band or something that happened in class. It's the two of you, calm. You listen to how he breathes when he runs and you emulate it so that you breathe the same way. It's partly for training, but also because it feels interesting to be in sync. You're not strong enough for your strides to match, but you try. Even though it's getting cool out, when you run behind him you see sweat trickle down his hair and the back of his neck.

You're both quiet and calm. You study him.

It's more than that, though. You realize how out of shape you are compared to him. It's not like you're fat or anything, and the same had been true when you compared yourself to most of your friends in high school (not playing sports does that) but this difference in your bodies makes you feel slightly inferior. You don't want to be in better shape to impress him.

It's more like if you were in better shape, you'd feel more like you were equal. It's like if you're trying to have a conversation with someone who speaks fluent French and you only know a few words. You'd want to get better at it so that you could have an actual conversation.

Now you're not so put off by people at school. They've calmed down from when they first arrived. Except for the burnouts and loser, everybody is more concerned with classes than parties. They're not so worried about themselves or whether they're being impressive. They don't brag about where they're from or put themselves into a certain category or label. If at first it seemed like you ended up at a school for crazy people, now it feels like the opposite. Everybody seems smart and nice. You've been going to football games with them every Saturday. On the away games you get together in somebody's room, just a bunch of you, and you watch games all day, until people are feeling drunk or tired and it's dark outside. They're debating whether to go to a party, and if so, which one, and you're always invited.

Nobody's ever been a dick to you, ever, except maybe your roommate, and that's because everything in his life equals stress. When you say something weird without realizing it, they never call you out -- it's almost like you've said something smart, and they're nervous because they think you know something that they don't. Even if they have the wrong impression, it feels pretty good.

The first time you see each other naked in the lockerroom, it's like something changes. It's not sexualism. It's simply interesting. You've seen Joe shirtless a couple of times, but you've never seen him naked. When he faced away from you and took down his shorts, you were, like, captivated.

Not interested, necessarily, but it's different seeing another guy's body like that. You've never thought about it this way before. It isn't like you want to touch it. You only want to look at it and think about it.

Being naked in front of him doesn't seem weird. This isn't seventh grade.

You're adults now. People know how to handle themselves. In this tiny way, it makes you feel closer. Like neither of you has anything to hide and you don't really care. You see the muscles in his shoulders and back when he wraps a towel around himself. When he faces you in the shower you catch him glancing down at your stuff for a split second, but he doesn't react.

He turns away. He isn't being super-talkative, but this isn't the place for that, and sometimes Joe talks too much, anyway.

This probably sounds weird to some people, but there's a part of you that looks forward to this. A, you never realized how good it feels to exercise, and if you did, you would have been doing it for years before this, but B, once you guys were done working out, it was cool being around Joe. Maybe it sounds pervy, but it's not. It's not like you're checking out his d*** the whole time. You're just with him and seeing each other in a way that other people don't. It's like now you share a secret.

After you get back to your dorm room from morning classes, there are times when you lock the door and think about it. Thinking about it makes you jerk off. It isn't sexualist. It's more, like, a closeness thing, and you know enough about biology to know the kinds of hormones and chemicals that go off in your body after you've been working out. Like, your whole body feels extra-alive and alert in a way that's new to you. The first time you do this, it leaves you feeling guilty. Then it doesn't. It's how your body handles it.

Sometimes Joe does this stuff where he touches you. Not in a weird way. He grabs you by the shoulder when he's excited about some point he's making, which is often. You'll be walking somewhere and he taps you between the shoulderblades, like the thing he's talking about is so interesting to him that he needs to touch you to make sure that you're alert and paying attention. You nod like you're listening. When you walk together he walks close to you. Your elbows or shoulders or hips glance every few minutes.

When this happens, it's like his voice vibrates deeper in your ears.

On the last night before you break for summer, it seems like he keeps grabbing you, but he's doing that to everybody. He's drunk and happy. He keeps telling people how much he'll miss them, even if it's a person he doesn't know. He keeps his arm around your shoulders for like five minutes while he talks about how he'll miss you over the summer and how awesome it's going to be when you're living together in the house next year.

"You, man, are the best," he says to you. "You're, like, hilarious and cool and awesome and you so don't even know it."

"Ha, thanks buddy," you say. "I'm sure you're just saying that because you're drunk."

"See, it's like I said, you don't even know it," he says. He squeezes you tight around the shoulders. "Seriously, man, it was awesome hanging out with you this year. Every day of it. I bet you'll miss me when you're stuck in Michigan over the summer."

And you think to myself, God, yeah, of course I'm going to miss you. Are you nuts?

Then you're all gone. Sam and Joe are e-mailing you all the time. They're cc'ing you on e-mails even when you they don't remotely involve you. You get so many e-mails from them that you can't keep up. Every time you try to start an actual conversation with them, they write back trying to be funny.

They make fun of themselves all the time, and they make fun of you. Like, seriously, can't they ever throw the off switch? Once in awhile Joe says something nice like he means it, and then five minutes later it's back to being crazy. Like if he's not constantly entertaining you, you're going to get bored right away. Because of this, there are times when you feel slightly sorry for him.

There are all of these things they don't understand about you. For instance, they act like you're a serious Christian, when in reality you're a normal Lutheran, and not, like, devout. They only think you're a serious Christian because when you're back home with your parents, you go to church, but that's only a social thing. Or maybe it's because your full first name is Christian, which you never go by, and that's your name because your dad is Danish – haven't they heard of Hans Christian Andersen? Your housemates, they're either Catholic or Jewish or atheist -- and whatever Trevor and Michelle are, because you're not sure. You do not remotely care about their religions, but, like, they don't understand that you're not some Bible-thumping person who's obsessed with Jesus. Sometimes it's like you're a character for them, and if pretending that you're a fundamentalist Christian makes you seem more hilarious, that's what they decide. If push comes to shove, yeah, you agree with most of the stuff you were brought up with, but it's not like you're Dutch Reformed or a Pentacostal barking about sin. This distinction seems mostly lost to them.

Or take the politics. Yeah, you're a Republican, but it's not like you talk about it as a normal topic. You're not like them. They walk around in their politics like a robe, confident in their virtue and the delusion that they automatically have the right answer to everything. When the housemates get each other wound up about politics, the basic theme is that everybody else is stupid and we're the only ones who know the answers, which is a ridiculous way for anybody to think. They think that they're liberal and open-minded, but in the end, they're want everybody to be a part of their label. You don't really care. It would never occur to you to talk about Iraq or abortion or taxes as a casual interest on a Tuesday night. Not so with them.

So yeah, you tweak them for that. You say things in order to rile them up.

At first it was sincere, but when you tried to actually talk to them about it -- not argue, just figure out how they think -- they went ballistic.

It's like you said you wanted to kill their families. Your only goal was to consider basic premises and explain why there are two different, possibly valid ways of looking at an issue. Now when you mention anything political, it's to watch them go crazy, and they almost never disappoint. That's how the whole O'Reilly thing started. You were there in the living room studying the chemical processes of mitochondria, and you switched over to Fox News. It wasn't because you wanted the news on. You only wanted to see them go berserk. When Sam walked in he started screaming at you for being a f***ing fascist Aryan douchebag, and then Katie got in and tried to intervene, like she wanted you and Sam to make peace while also being concerned about what was wrong with you. And yeah, you were angry and started arguing, but it was less about their opinions than how they talked to you.

Then there's the whole business about "earnest." They use that word about you all the time. Like, who do they think you are? Do they think you don't notice things or are clueless about life? You'll be the first to admit that you haven't been to Paris, eaten great sushi, seen all of David Lynch's movies or read every word of Shakespeare three times, but what does that have to do with anything? None of them could list every bone in the human body by alphabetical order or meaningfully explain photosynthesis.

Sometimes you can't decide if they legitimately like things, or if they like things because liking them brings a status.

You aren't mad about this. There's a part of you that likes to be the weird one now. If you're living in a house with six other people, and they have occasional tendencies to act ridiculous and smallminded, you don't mind being the one who flicks them. Hence, you find yourself using phrases like "crimes against nature" or "attacking them there so they don't attack us here." You care maybe one-fourth as much as they do, and maybe it makes you a bad person for it, but even so: it's quietly hilarious to see how easily you can make them get crazy.

The only time their whole attitude seriously pisses you off is that day when you're running with Joe. Everything you said was true. Michelle sincerely is interested in people. She's not a gossip and she's not judgmental. It's more like she wants to figure out what makes everybody tick. She asks you a lot of questions about yourself. Some nights you go into the bathroom to brush your teeth, and Michelle is sitting on her bed reading with the door open, and you end up talking to her for an hour about all kinds of things.

It feels good to talk to people. Michelle seems like the least judgmental person you've ever met.

She asks you if Joe is gay, and it's so surprising that you don't even know what to say. She tells you why she thinks this. She says that he's really good-looking and smart, and that even if he's a little obnoxious sometimes, he's basically cool to be around. She's never heard him talk about dating or girls. Sam told her that in high school Joe went with a girl who's at Berkeley now, but he never talks about her. Michelle says that Sam knows Joe better than anybody, and that he called Joe, quote, "a black hole inside a black hole." In Michelle's eyes, it's very unusual that as far as anyone knows, he's never even expressed interest in a girl.

You've never thought about this before, and as she explains it to you, it's kind of interesting. Maybe you never noticed because you have a hard time figuring out girls yourself, but at least you've made out with them at house parties and gone on a couple of dates. Joe hasn't done anything.

Still you tell Michelle, "No way. You already see how he is. He's just, like unique."

"That's basically what I think, too," Michelle says, like she needs to back off her observation, "but it doesn't quite add up. He seems like the kind of guy who should have girlfriends, but no. Like, he's dormant. Extremely, extremely dormant."

Even though you'd never tell Michelle, her thoughts make a little sense.

You find yourself thinking about it a lot, actually. When you hang out with him, you look for cues to support or refute Michelle's hypothesis. You get nothing. You can't make comments to Joe about girls yourself, because if you do, Joe will make fun of you, like he did that time when you called Katie cute -- and your comment about her meant nothing.

Of course you're not going mention that wrestling incident when you were going crazy over Vice City. Joe hadn't even done anything weird with that.

You were the one who was weird. Like, you'd been legitimately pissed about how he talked to you -- that was true. It's like he thinks he can tell you what to do about everything. When it got physical, it felt funny and fun. As messed up as it might sound, it felt pretty good having his body pressed against you. Like, you'd seen his body so many times by then but had never touched it. When you had him pinned down on the floor at the end, the skin of your legs was pressed against his. He felt extremely warm.

You held his shoulders down, and even though Joe was stronger than you, it was as if he let you keep him pinned. For a second, when you were maneuvering, you had hold of part of his shirt. The back of your hand slid against his bare spine. It felt strong and tight and alive. You thought you were going to pull him out of his shirt, and if you did that, you might have hugged him around the chest and held him down as long as you could.

That day when you're running with him, you know you shouldn't ask, but you can't help yourself. Since you had that conversation with Michelle, you think about it almost every time you're with him.

Then you ask, and he goes crazy on you. Later on he'll tell you that from the look on your face, it was like he punched you. That's how it feels. If he'd been a more normal person, you could have said, "Dude, I don't care. I wasn't asking to make fun of you. You're my friend either way." You're not someone who talks that way, though, and Joe isn't someone who wants to hear those things. If you'd said that, he probably would have clobbered you.

Afterward, you wish you'd said something better, but he looked so angry, like you'd betrayed him by even asking. Then he says things that seriously piss you off. Like, really? He thinks you're still worried about fitting in? You want to tell him that you're more "in" with these people than he is. Joe doesn't know much more than where they're from and maybe what their favorite albums are. And he's talking to you like you're a bit of a misfit? The "black hole inside black hole" wants to lecture you about how to act?

When you're back at the house, he acts so weird that you don't know what to do with it. It wasn't obvious. You know he's uncomfortable by his body language and the way he's not looking at you like he usually does. You know you didn't do anything that horrible, and you don't know if he feels bad for yelling at you or if he's still mad about what you asked him. You think about raising it with him, but you're not going to apologize, and you don't need to see him get crazy on you for a second.

The next night he comes down to brush his teeth earlier than usual. When he's done he goes into your room and closes the door.

"Hey dude," he says.

"Yo."

"I don't know how big of a deal it was, but in case it is, I'm sorry again about how I flipped out at you yesterday. It was dickish. All of it."

"I'm not mad at you, man," you say. "It's just, like, I thought we were good enough friends that you wouldn't need talk to me like that."

His whole face sinks. He nods and says, "Yeah. We are. I'm sorry."

"It's okay."

He shakes his head slightly and stares at your floor. He rolls his eyes to himself and moves like he's going to leave the room.

"Don't worry about it too much though," you say. "We all get kind of heated once in awhile. In a couple of days we won't even remember it."

What he does after the ice cream truck is crazy and amazing. It's like you're watching a scene in a movie. His lies to the cops flow so easily.

You feel like you're seeing something forbidden and brilliant. Joe describes the false version of the accident and you see it as he lies it.

You're troubled by the lies, but they're of no consequence, anyway. It feels like Joe's sending you a secret signal: Don't worry about it. I'll take the fall for you. I'll be sure you never get in trouble.

You have a blast at your party that night. In the basement by the beer pong table, you have a long conversation with a girl who likes you. You can tell because you have a sixth sense about these things. She's not interesting.

Still, you're super-polite. You talk to her for at least a half hour but probably longer. When you finally get bored, you say, "Nice talking to you.

Good luck with sociology," and walk away.

You go upstairs looking to hang out with Joe. Nobody's seen him for awhile.

Monica from the Next Door Girls hears an eighties song that she likes and starts screaming and yanks you to the dance floor. It's a total girl song, about how girls like having all the fun after their workday is done. Monica dances silly with you. Her boyfriend laughs. You dance silly back. You don't know what you're doing. You've never taken dance lessons or whatever.

Apparently it's entertaining, because people form a crowd around you and Monica as you throw your arms around in the air and slam butts against each other. At one point you almost knock her over with your butt, but she recovers her balance and literally doubles over laughing.

The next time you see Joe he wears a different shirt. He always looks nice in a T-shirt. You talk to him for a minute, and he's not rude or anything, but distracted. He says that a drunk b**ch dumped beer on his other shirt.

You say that the girl is probably friends with Jessica. Joe laughs but then sulks away.

Later on you see Matt Canetti, who you remember from when you wanted to pledge his frat. You've always liked that guy. You wish that you'd stayed friends with him. Matt reminds you of Joe and Sam: smart, but funny and not a complete dork. Matt seems happy to see you. He says that guys are still devastated that you guys didn't pledge, but they're starting to get over it.

You're still fairly blown away from Michelle telling you that he's gay because he so doesn't seem the type. He doesn't have weird mannerisms, wear tight clothes, pierce his ears, etc. He's not what you think of a gay person being. You want to confirm it without offending him, so you say, "I guess you know Michelle from College Democrats? She says that you're gay.

That's pretty impressive."

Matt laughs out loud. At first you think that Michelle pranked you, but then he says, "Thanks man. That's cool. Nobody's ever told me that it's impressive, but I'll take it."

You think to yourself, how interesting. It's very interesting that someone who looks and acts like him could be gay. It's not how you think of the label.

You say, "I didn't mean it to sound weird. I've just never known a gay person before. I never would have guessed."

"It's cool, buddy," Matt Canetti says. "You probably know some gay guys, somewhere, and just don't know it. Like, you've probably got a casual friend from high school or from here who is. They've just never told you.

Sometimes it takes awhile to figure out."

"I've never thought about it," you say. "You know, you see it on TV, and the ones on TV are super-extreme."

"TV isn't real," Matt says. He drinks from his beer. "So what's going on with you, buddy? How's life treating you? How are classes? Is Joe as big of a pain in the ass to live with as I'd guess?"

You banter with him for a few minutes, but you're still heavily preoccupied with his gayness. You want to ask more questions about what it's like, how he got that way, why he's not like so many of the ones you've seen. That would seem weird at best, and likely rude, so you end up talking to him about classes and parties and football. You're watching Joe because it looks like he's about to make out with Katie. When he does, it's hilarious.

"Oh my God," Matt says.

"I knew it," you say.

"He's so ridiculous," Matt says.

"Yeah? Does he hook up a lot?" you say.

"That's my impression," Matt says. "I think he just feels a need to be subtle about it."

"With who?"

Matt shrugs his shoulders. "With whoever."

You talk to him for a couple more minutes, but Matt says that he's tired and needs to stop by a party on his way home. You say that you hope you guys will hang out again soon, and Matt's like, For sure.

The Katie incident seems triumphant to you, but afterward, Joe is extra weird. You think that Joe and Katie have liked each other for the last two months, but after they've kissed, Joe acts like it's a rash that he needs to scratch off.

When the party's over, a few people still hang inside, watching TV and drinking what's left. Joe's alone on the front porch. It's like he's half cleaning up but mostly smoking and looking out at the rain. He's pretty drunk. You've seen him drunk plenty of times, but not as a moody drunk.

He's mostly a silly drunk, relentlessly chatty, sometimes a little shouty.

He looks all slow and sad. You know he doesn't want company but it doesn't feel right to leave him alone. Sometimes you want company even if you think you don't.

"Hey," you say.

"Hey," he says, not looking at you.

"Are you, like, okay?" you say.

"I think I'm just tired," he says. His voice sounds resigned. "And too drunk."

You watch him bend over to pick up empty cups. The base of his T-shirt lifts when he does this. You see a crescent of pale skin and notches on his spine. You remember how it felt when you touched his spine a few weeks before. You want to stay with him in order to keep him company, so you start collecting the cups, too.

You move next to him to add the empties to his stack, and suddenly he has his arm around your shoulders. It's cold and his arm feels cool at your neck but you feel the heat of his torso. It takes you by surprise. He feels so warm and solid that you want to lean into him because it's so comfortable. For a moment you think, "Whoah, is he trying to kiss me?"

"Hey," Joe says. "Really, I'm sorry if I've been a dick."

You're not sure how to respond. You blush and say, "Ha."

"No," he says, "you're never like that to other people." He squeezes you at the shoulder. "I wish I didn't act the way I act sometimes."

His tone is so apologetic, and it's like, even at his most obnoxious, he's never done anything seriously bad. You've known people who say worse things as a matter of habit.

"It's okay," you say. "I'm sorry if I said anything that made you feel bad."

"You were right," Joe says. "I deserved it."

You reach up an arm and link it around his shoulder. It pulls him closer to you. Your heads almost touch.

"Really," Joe says. You can smell the beer and cigarettes on his breath.

"I'm going to try to be nicer and not act like such a jerk."

"You're never really a jerk," you say. "You shouldn't feel like that."

"Yeah I am," he says.

"No you're not," you say. "You're just a little distant. Everybody loves you, so stop worrying about it."

His body goes completely loose when you say that. You hadn't realized how tense and tight he'd been. His neck and his shoulders go soft against the support of your arm. Your hand is near the side of his face. Since you first saw it in that dorm room, you've wondered a few times about what his face must feel like. You press your index finger and middle finger against the top of his cheekbone. You don't look at him -- you look out at the rain and listen to it, how quiet it seems after being in the hot and crowded house all night listening to people scream along to songs and laugh at each other. The rain sounds coax you to sleep. Joe might think you're weird for touching his face but he doesn't say anything. You slide your fingers down his cheek, going with the grain of his stubble, like your fingers are a razor. The stubble is rough against your finger but his skin is dry and hot. His skin feels tight at the jaw bone.

Your hand is steady but you feel like it's shaking. Your face and chest run hot, like a good kind of sick. Any minute he's going to tell you to stop being weird and elbow you back, which will be fine because you can laugh it off as being drunk and stupid. He doesn't though. You lets the back of your fingers rest next to his Adam's apple, where you can feel his heart beating at the artery of his neck. It's beating faster than you would have guessed, which is probably due to the cigarettes and alcohol. You think you're going to pull away now, but then Joe does this thing with his hand, where he touches the back of your head, like he's feeling out your hair.

You're not sure why that feels so nice, but you picture yourself as a cat stretched out and sunning in a spot of light. He holds onto the back of your neck and gently squeezes like a small massage. You slowly move your finger back up the length of his cheek to where it started. Joe doesn't move or jerk away. Instead, it's like he's leaning closer into you and you've got hold of each other.

Then, poof. It stops. He lets go of you and goes back to kicking piles of cigarette butts. He's leaning forward again and you get more glimpses at the skin of his back. It feels like you should say something but that would be too weird and you don't know what you're supposed to say besides. It's one of those drunk things, and it's cold and wet out, and for a few seconds it felt nice to be extra close to someone. Ten minutes later you're both in the living room with everybody else. Joe sits on the floor next to the coffee table eating pretzels and drinking Diet Coke and not giving any indication that something happened. He looks drunker and more tired than you appreciated before. That explains a lot.

Michelle comments on your prowess as a dancer. You know she's being sarcastic but you like the attention. You do an improvised breakdance move with your hand and your leg and your butt, and then jump up off the floor.

They're all laughing. Joe doesn't quite laugh. He looks at you with a smirk. Lips closed, eyes half-lit. He grins and nods. He makes eye contact with you and you feel yourself go deep.

All you did was feel his frigging face. It's not like you licked his elbow.

When you think about what happened on the porch it's about how you're the weird one, and thankfully Joe was too drunk or too oblivious to realize what happened.

It's also possible that touching faces is more common than you appreciate.

You wouldn't know. You've never done it before.

You keep expecting him to mention it but he doesn't. This makes you shaky inside. There are times when you feel tense and scared around him, even though he's being way nicer than before. Sometimes hours pass where he doesn't make fun of you, and when he does, it's about the mildest stuff, like the messiness of the notes you scrawl in textbook margins or "your shameful futility as a Lions fan." You sort of miss the way he used to go after you, because at least that was intense at times. Now it's like he takes care not to be upsetting. Even when you say stupid things on purpose in hopes that he'll make comments, he doesn't go all out. He wrinkles his face and says something like, "Chris, stop pretending you're on a tryout for Big Brother."

Nothing real has changed but it still feels like you've lost a closeness.

The two of you go to the gym two or three times a week -- sometimes for as long as 90 minutes, and sometimes Trevor comes along. You don't shower and change at the gym with Joe because your morning schedules don't line up in a way that makes that necessary.

One morning you lie in bed waiting for him to come down to the shower. You hear his door open and his footsteps to the bathroom door before it closes.

You wait until the shower's been running for about five minutes until you get out of bed and knock on the door.

"Dude," you say through the door, "I need to take a piss."

"Go ahead!" Joe shouts.

You step into the bathroom and close the door. The room is full of Joe's steam and the smell of his soap. Sometimes you wash up with his soap, just because. You take a leak and draw it out, then leave your stuff out for a few extra seconds, hanging over the top of your basketball shorts, regarding it for no particular reason. It's still slightly engorged from your morning sleep. When you go to wash your hands, you take an extra long time. You can't see Joe naked through the shower curtain or anything, only shadows of a silhouette to his arms and his torso from time to time.

Brushing your teeth might be pushing it, but Joe hasn't yelled at you to get out, so you run your brush under the faucet and paste it up. You're brushing your molars when Joe turns off the faucet and steps naked out of the shower. You glance over at it -- it's pinkish and looks longer than you remember, probably from the hot water of the shower and from having woken up. It drips water and the cloud of dark hair around it is matted from the shower. Joe walks behind you -- close enough that you almost touch -- in order to get his towel off the rack. The mirror is fogged over, so you need to look at him in order to see his butt. He dries off his hair first and then the top of his back, then slides the towel down between his buttcheeks.

"Are you in a rush this morning?" Joe says to you.

"Yeah," you say, your heart beating fast. You stammer a little. "I need to get out. Get some coffee, study. Quiz at noon."

"I'll be out in a sec," Joe says, turning to face you. He towels over his chest. His stuff is visible to you again. It swings back and forth while he dries off.

You take off your basketball shorts so that you're both naked in front of each other, with your bathroom full of steam and smelling like Joe's soap and shampoo. He gives you a look down. Yours sticks out slightly little more than usual, because of the whole sleep and morning issue. You turn away so that your butt faces him, and you start the water running. Joe shaves while you're in the shower. You hear him tap the razor clean before he leaves the bathroom.

"Good luck on your quiz," he says.

"Thanks man," you say. "You too," you add, even though he hasn't mentioned a quiz.

You almost never do this because it's shared space, but while you're in the shower you jerk off real fast for the sake of convenience. It'll be hard for your mind to settle if you don't. You splash water to clear your mess off the tile, thinking how disgusting it is that you just did that in a place where other people live, too.

The Saturday night when that one thing happens, it starts out that you're on the couch eating a pear and watching an old Sopranos episode on DVD. It's Saturday. The semester's classes ended the day before, but reading period lasts until Wednesday. On Friday night you hit four parties with Sam, Michelle, Katie and Jessica. Trevor was MIA. Joe wasn't with you either.

Nobody was sure where he went, and calls to his cell went straight to voicemail. The next morning, he says he was at a party with friends from the newspaper. He says he drank a bunch of Jack Daniels straight, which messed him up because he only drinks beer. He didn't come home until after 4 a.m.

"I'm not going out tonight," he says, curling up in the living room with a comforter around him. "I'm never drinking again."

Everybody in the house was supposed to go to a party hosted by some guys who lived in your freshman dorm. It's cold, in the lower 20s, and light snow falls on and off throughout the day. Joe looks tired and comfortable on the couch, in his blanket's cocoon of sloth and hungover vulnerability. You think it might be nice to stay home and hang with him. Maybe you'll order dinner and shoot pool and watch a DVD.

When people start dressing to go out – the short hallway off the living room spreading the smell of Katie and Jessica's hair products and perfume – you curl up fetal on the love seat and pretend to fall asleep. You then drift off for a few minutes. When it's time to go, you stretch and yawn. You say that you're still tired from last night. Sam mutters something incriminating about Grand Theft Auto and acting like children. He wears cologne. Somebody should tell him not to do that. You say you need to study. The girls whine at you but then they leave.

Then it's just you and Joe.

You periodically glance to his perch on the couch. He's half-awake, staring wearily at the TV. Somehow this seems interesting to you.

"Hey," you say.

He looks over at you with an arched eyebrow.

"Do you want to order dinner?"

"Nah," he says. "Let's just eat pears and Hot Pockets."

"And then play Vice City?"

"Possibly. If you promise to behave this time."

You guys order pizza a few minutes later. You pay because Joe won't pull himself off the couch to get money.

After a couple of slices, you say, "So, I want to ask you something, and if we do this, I need you to promise that you won't tell anybody."

He raises an eyebrow and smirks. "Oh, this sounds good." He's being sarcastic.

"No, seriously."

"All right," Joe says. "Prank calls?"

"No," you say, squirming. You feel yourself blushing. "Do you think Trevor would care if we used up some of his pot?"

Joe laughs and keeps your eye contact. "Are you for real?"

"Everybody else has done it," you say. "I've always wondered what it's like."

"Yeah, we could do it," Joe says sitting up, showing signs of life for the first time in a couple of hours. "But it probably means that I should tell Trevor afterward. He won't tell but he'll probably be excited that you wanted to try it."

"I guess that's okay," you say, feeling your heart racing. "I like Trevor."

"Me too," Joe says.

The two of you go downstairs. Joe finds a little wooden box on top of Trevor's dresser. There are unopened condom wrappers next to it. This embarrasses you. Trevor keeps his drugs inside the box. Joe puts some of the pot into the bowl of a small metal pipe.

You secretly like how it smells. It's like cigarettes mixed with incense and spicy cooking.

"You know, I haven't done this in awhile," Joe says. "Not since August.

With a high school friend."

He lights the top of the bowl with a blue lighter and inhales. He holds it in his lungs and exhales slowly.

You sit on the edge of Trevor's bed.

"Do you want to try it?" Joe says, handing out the pipe.

You breathe in. The smoke gags you and you immediately cough it back.

"It's okay," Joe says. "Just try again."

This time you hold more smoke in before coughing it back. You don't feel anything except the discomfort of smoke in your lungs and throat.

Joe takes the pipe back and smokes some more. You see his upper chest puff up as he inhales deeply, then sink in as he exhales.

"Try it again," he says, passing the pipe back.

This time you take a few deep breaths first, like you're practicing to hold your breath underwater. When you inhale you manage to keep most of it in this time. You count out five seconds before you choke and cough the smoke up.

You can't tell whether the pot has a slight effect on you or whether it's a byproduct of the discomfort of smoking and inhaling. It isn't much. It's a touch of dizziness.

"It'll take a few minutes before it affects you," Joe says, like he can read your mind. "Maybe you shouldn't do any more for now." He leans against the door, light the bowl, and inhales again. Then he rests the smoking pipe on Trevor's dresser.

"It does different things to different people," Joe says. "It makes a lot of people hungry. I never get hungry. Some people talk a lot and get creative, but I know some who don't want to talk at all and it just freezes them up. I've got one friend who gets really warm whenever he does it.

Some people get paranoid. It sort of calms me down. If you start getting crazy thoughts, don't let it get to you. Just, like, reason through it.

Remind yourself that you did this and it's just the chemicals talking to you."

"Honestly?" you say. "I kind of wanted to try it just to try it."

Your words sound slightly distant, like you're listening to somebody else.

It's not like you're hallucinating that or anything. It's only a different sensation of your own voice. Hearing yourself makes you laugh quietly.

"And there you go," Joe says.

"It's not anything weird or crazy," you say. "It's just like, `Wow, now I'm somebody who's smoked pot.'"

The thought of yourself as a hippie prompts you to laugh to yourself as you lean back in Trevor's bed.

"All right," Joe says, "let's clear out of his room." He extends a hand and helps pull you off from the bed. In the living room, he picks up the half-empty pizza box and says, "So you want to go up to my room and play Vice City?"

"Sure," you say, the word coming out slowly and deliberately.

Up in his room, he leaves the pizza on the floor next to his futon and fires up his Playstation. He hands you the controller.

"You go," you tell him. "I just want to watch."

Joe plays for five or ten minutes. Then he dies when a cop shoots him.

It's more boring than you expected. You say that you still don't feel like playing.

"Yeah," he says, "my heart's not really in it, either."

"Let's just, like, sit here and listen to music something," you say.

Joe goes through his CD collection and puts on a disc that's very mellow – it's like folk but rockish, with sound effects and weird background noises.

The singer has a soft deep voice. It seems like music someone would listen to when stoned.

"Who's this?" you ask.

"Will Cove," Joe says.

"Never heard of him."

"It's not a him. It's a band. W-I-L-C-O. They're from Chicago. Do you like it?"

"Yeah," you say. "I like it a lot."

"You can borrow the CD," Joe says.

You lean back and stretch in the futon. Its center of gravity tilts backward. Joe's room is extremely cold. He keeps his windows open. He says that he likes the cold and because he's on the top floor, if he doesn't open the windows in winter, the room suffocates him. "If it was up to me," he said before, "we wouldn't turn on the heat at all."

He takes a hoodie out of his dresser and throws it to you. You put it on and pull the hood over your head. Joe lies on the floor of his room, stretching out with his hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling while the music plays. He seems so calm and content. If this is what it's like when you're high together, you think, you guys should probably get high all the time.

"Are you feeling okay?" he says.

"Yeah," you say. "It feels pretty good. Like, warm inside."

"Interesting."

"Like, calm, and a little dizzy."

"And a little giggly for you," Joe says, "but not, like, ridiculously so."

That makes you laugh a little. Joe smiles.

A few minutes later, you say, "Hey. You don't, like, have any porno DVDs, right?"

"Oh my God," Joe says. "I guess this is your night to cut loose."

"Nah," you say. "I've just never seen one. I thought it might be interesting."

"I don't have one, unfortunately," Joe says. "Sam might. But it would probably be, like, horses fucking fat girls or something like that."

"Gross."

"Not really," Joe says. "No. I'm not being literal about fats and horses.

But I don't want to go around Sam's room looking for a porno DVD."

"I've never seen any," you say.

"Some other time, I guess," Joe says.

"Really?"

"We'll see."

You know he's humoring you, but something about the way he says it and the look on his face, you think along the lines of, "Aw, I love this guy."

"Hey," you say.

He looks over at you. You rise from the couch, feeling your balance teeter, and get down on the floor, lying on your back about two feet parallel to him. You lie with your hands behind your head like he does. You notice the pace of his breathing and try to breathe the same way.

A song comes on and the first words are, "Jesus don't cry."

"I probably shouldn't talk about this," Joe says, "but this song makes everybody think about 9/11. They think that it was written about 9/11 even they recorded it before it happened, because of the lyrics about tall building shaking and skyscrapers scraping and voices singing sad, sad songs.

You and I didn't even know each other when that happened, but my dad works, like, five or six blocks away from the Trade Center, and even though he doesn't usually get in until around ten and the planes hit before nine, it's like, you never know. I wasn't able to get through to his phone because the networks were jammed. It wasn't until eleven that he called my mom from a payphone and said that he was stuck at Grand Central, but even then it was scary, because these planes kept crashing and it seemed like Grand Central would be a target, and then all of a sudden, like, `Boom. Dead dad.'"

That last line – it's like he's direct to the point of being horrifying.

It's not your life, though. It's not your experience. You shouldn't judge it.

"Whoah," you say. "I had no idea."

"Yeah, I know," Joe says. "It's not, like, nice conversation. This song just reminds me of it. If I weren't a little stoned and this song weren't on it wouldn't have come up."

"It's a good song, though," you say.

"It's a great fucking song."

"You shouldn't feel, like, so weird talking about yourself."

"Whatever," he says. "Easy for you to say."

"I mean, we don't need to fight about it again," you say. "I just mean it in a nice way. Like, everybody really does like you. You don't need to be an extreme character all the time for people to like you."

"I'm not being a character," he says. "It's just the way I am. And nobody likes long, boring conversations about feelings. Except for girls. Ugh."

"Sometimes that's the only way you know what people are really like."

"That doesn't matter," he says. "At the end of the day we all have weird thoughts. If we all knew about the things that go on in each other's heads, all we'd do is sit around thinking about how weird everybody else is."

"By being so concerned about being weird," you say, "that makes you the weird one."

"Probably," Joe says. "I can live with that."

He looks at you, grinning, showing all of his teeth. You remember the first night that you met him at the dorm party, how he smiled at almost everything you said. It seemed like he was the most smiley person you've met, and his teeth were so straight and white, like they were the product of a carving.

How could you fail to love, as your best friend, a guy who smiled at you like that?

You touch above his elbow, on the lower part of his bicep. He wears a thick cotton sweatshirt. The muscle in his arm feels obvious. You don't need to press or squeeze. It's just there.

When you touch his arm, his face pauses for a second, but his smile doesn't break. He glances below your face.

"How does that feel?" he says.

"Like you have a muscle," you say.

He reaches over to touch your arm. He squeezes where your bicep should be.

It's like your entire arm tingles and goes numb when he touches it. This is what pot does to a person. It makes every touch feel important.

Your face feels hot, also probably from the pot. It's cold in the room.

The smell is like it's snowing outside.

"So," Joe said, "you wanted to watch a porno tonight, huh?"

"Not really," you say. "It was just a thought."

"Because you know that when guys watch porno, they usually jerk off."

"Naw," you say.

"No, they do."

"Have you ever done that?"

"Jerk off? All the time."

"No, like, watch that kind of stuff with another guy. And, you know."

He exhales and considers his words. "Sometimes in life, things just happen.

And they surprise you."

"Ha," you say. "What does that mean? You're always so general."

"I guess it means yes. Those kinds of things have happened."

You still have your hands on each other's arms. You squeeze his arm. Joe looks down at your hand for a couple of seconds, and then pats it with his free one. He keeps his hand on yours.

You roll over on your stomach so that you're closer to him, since you're starting to pop a boner in your jeans. It would be embarrassing for him to see that, even though you know he wouldn't be grossed out or judge you. You prop your arms under your cheek like a pillow, facing him. You're only about a foot apart. You can see his face in profile. He's staring at the ceiling. When he smiles, you wish you could feel his teeth.

He props himself on his side, facing you. He touches the back of your head.

When he does this, your nervous system trembles. You watch his eyes, and it's like he's looking down the whole length of your body. Your boner wedges against the floor. Its angle pinches. You tilt your hips enough to let it take a natural degree. From Joe's face, he knows what's going on.

He slides the back of his hand against the notches of your neck and then down to your spine. His eyes look intense. He's not smiling anymore. You look at each other's eyes for a few seconds, and then he looks back down the length of your body, like he's looking at your lower back or your butt.

"Are you okay?" he says.

"Yeah."

"I just want you to be okay."

You want to hug him more than anything. You don't. You change how you're laying and free your arms. You put a hand on his side. His ribs are pronounced, way more than yours. Like, you could play the xylophone on his ribs. Over his sweatshirt, you slide your fingers over the valleys of his ribcage. It makes him arch his back.

His boner presses at his jeans, at an angle against his thigh. You sneak glances down, not wanting to be too obvious. Touching him is enough. You don't need to see that. You mostly want to know how he feels. You run your arms up and down the side of his torso, feeling his ribs and the slight bulk of his chest, then down to the softer line of his stomach and the top of his hipbone. Your hand moves slowly. You could do this for hours and it would still feel interesting.

Joe keeps a hand on your back, barely above your hips. He doesn't move it.

Occasionally he pushes down. Every time you glance up at him, he's staring at your face. He likes how you touch him. It's obvious from the expression and the way that he occasionally arches his back, pulling away with his hips before pushing them forward. When you look down, you can practically see his boner pulsing.

You feel his cheek like you did that night on the porch, except with the sensitive side of your index finger. You're watching each other's eyes while you do this. You trace the hair of his eyebrows and touch his earlobe. You hadn't realized how soft earlobes are. You feel out the curve of his ear's cartilage. He bows his head and exhales through his nose. Joe stretches a leg over and hooks it. He slides it between yours.

Joe pulls you at your lower back. "Come here," he says, in a shakingly way.

You roll up on your side. Your hard-on is practically breaking out of your jeans. It actively hurts, like the pressure is bearing halfway down the shaft and on the underside of the tip You inch forward as Joe pulls you at the waist, then loops an arm around his armpit so that you're hugging each other. By your instincts, you feel like you should keep your hips apart, but Joe presses his up against you, intertwining your legs and tangling you closer together. His forehead is at your chin. You smell his hair and his scalp.

Your nerves buzz like a muzzle of bees inside your bones. It's like something is fighting to break free and bust out through your skin. Your whole body feels like it's shaking, but you don't feel nervous anymore. You don't know if it's the drugs affecting you or it's because you're with Joe.

His angles are solid and strong. You feel his boner against your thigh and yours pressing against his hip. Occasionally he makes small thrusts so that it slides against you through your pairs of jeans. He rubs his hand up and down your back. He keeps touching your hair and stroking it. God, he must really love your hair or something, the way that you feel about getting to touch his face. Wherever you touch him, it feels like you should touch someplace else, if only to know how he feels. When you're touching his shoulderblade you want to touch his collarbone, and when you're touching his collarbone you want to touch his spine. You feel his breath at your neck, and it's so cold in his room, it's like when he exhales the moisture almost condenses on your skin. It would be easy to kiss him on the forehead, it's so right there, and you're not sure if he wants that. He might think it's weird. You're not talking or doing anything even sexualist, really – only hugging each other.

Joe slides an arm under you and links his hands around your back. He hugs you against him, squeezing tight. Even through your sweatshirts, it feels like you're the same. The girls you tried to be with, none of them felt this way, but that's because they weren't interesting and sometimes it's all about the person. You squeeze back at Joe. He loves this. He half-moans, half-groans and hugs you even tighter.

"Hey, Chris?"

"Yeah?"

"Is the door to your room closed?"

"No. Why?"

"Maybe you should close the door to your room and turn out the lights, then come back up."

For a second you think he's telling you to go away and go to bed. Your heart throbs, and you question whether he's going to tell them about how you acted. Then you retrace his words slowly and think that you misunderstood him.

"What do you mean?"

"Go close your door and turn out the lights to your room," he says. "If anyone looks when they come back, they'll either think you're asleep or you're out. Not that you're up here with me."

You don't want to move away from him, but he's probably right. When you stand your legs feel weak. You won't look down at him as he lies on the floor, partly because you feel suddenly self-conscious but also because seeing his face as he lies there will make you feel annoyed about being away, even if briefly.

After you close your bedroom door, you have to take a leak, but your boner is so bad that it won't die down. Trying to go standing up proves impossible, so you end up sitting and holding down your aim. This is not comfortable. You leave your jeans and boxers down at your thighs while you wash your hands in order to air it out before you go back up. When you zip your jeans, it hurts again.

Ascending his staircase, you imagine that he'll maybe be naked when you come back. He's not, though. He's just taken off his sweatshirt. He wears a plain white T-shirt and stands in front of his CDs, trying to pick out something. His boner is still blatant but he doesn't seem to care that you see it. You stop feeling weird about your own.

"Is there any music you want to hear?" he says.

Looking at him, you feel too tense to talk about music. Some half-dead pizza sits in a box next to the futon. You're dying to have a piece but resist because you're not sure what that would do to your body right now.

"Not really," you say, your words sounding leaden and foreign. "Play whatever you want to hear."

"It's a different Will Cove album," Joe says, putting the disc in.

"Cool," you say, standing at a distance.

You're not sure what you're supposed to do now. It's like getting up and leaving him dissolved your courage. It felt normal and good about four minutes ago but now you see yourself as weird and awkward. You wonder to yourself what you're going to do. You have no idea how these things work.

"It's kind of weird, right?" Joe says.

"Yeah," you say. "Just a little."

"It's okay," Joe says. "We could just hang out. We can, like, play Vice City some more."

"Nah," you say. "I don't want to play Vice City right now."

You're not sure how it happens, but you've grabbed Joe behind the shoulders.

Not like in a hug. Just like you're stabilizing him. He pulls your lower back toward him so that your hips are join again. The length of his boner mashes up against yours. Even inside of their jeans, both of them are alive.

Joe puts a hand into the top of the rim of your jeans. A fingernail and the tip of his index finger poke at the top of your dick, and he slides the tip of his finger against the top of it. You expect him to dart his hand away, but he doesn't. He leaves his finger there.

"Do you want to see it?" you say. Your voice crackles on "see."

His face is a couple of inches away from yours. He looks at your eyes, then looks down at your waist. Eyes, waist, eyes, waist. "Yeah," he says, "if you want to show it."

Your heart goes crazy when you inhale. Your fingers feel uncoordinated and they bungle at the button. When you snap it and pop the zipper, you're not even thinking about Joe seeing it -- it's freeing to have it unencumbered by the jeans.

Joe slides down your boxers. They're strangled around your knees with your jeans. Your dick flips upward and strikes at the hem of your shirt. You're still wearing Joe's orange hoodie. It's a turn on, knowing that your dick is resting against a piece of his clothes.

He doesn't try to jack you off or anything. He runs his fingers down the length of your hard-on, stroking it softly, like it was fragile and he was blind. Joe keeps his eyes on your face, occasionally glancing down at it.

"Do you want to see mine?" he says.

You nod and say, "Yes," even though recesses of your cortex shout that this answer is wrong. Joe looks like he's the one who feels relieved about whatever's happening. He steps back and out of your grip, and in a swift move, pulls off his jeans and boxers in one gesture. He stands in front of you, naked except for a T-shirt.

It's the first time that you've seen another guy's hard-on, aside from a few glimpses in photos on the internet. Seeing someone else's is whelmingly different than seeing your own. His looks at least four times bigger when it's hard. That's not as true for you: yours is about equally long no matter of condition. Yours changes as a matter of texture, not length. His balls droop and his rod jumps upward in a slight curve, standing at a contrast against the white of his tee-shirt. The blackness of his pubes and the thickness of it seems manlier than yours. Yours are dark blond and not as thick. Joe's branch out around his groin, down to the inner thighs, while your own bloom out more wanly around the perimeter before fading away.

He puts his hand down on yours. He holds it near the base and leaves his fingers looped around it. He doesn't tug or jerk you. His fingers stay steady like a flesh ring. You slip your hips forward on impulse. Yours twitches upward. The whole tip of it tingles. Joe stares down at it, his mouth ajar. He looks up at your face and the two of you hold eye contact briefly before you go back to staring down at his and he returns to staring down at yours.

The first time Joe kisses you he presses his lips dry against yours. He hasn't shaved that day. The stubble prickles the skin around your lips.

The surface of his lips is so soft, though, and the feeling is pure contrast. Like touching hot and cold at once. You both breathe heavy out of your noses. His air hits your upper lips and he squeezes you around the lower back.

You start to lose yourself. You're aware of your body but not in a self-conscious way. You're not flinching with every gesture or thought that comes to mind. You're more focused on Joe than on yourself. He slides his hands up below your hoodie and T-shirt. His fingers slide against the length of your torso, going over your ribs and up to your chest and nipples then sliding them up to the hair of your armpits. His warm arms snake the length of your chest. He hugs you from inside. Your boners glance against and bounce off each other.

You lift off your shirt and kick your pants off your ankles. You're naked in front of him. Then Joe's shirt is gone. Even though you've seen him totally naked plenty of times, his body never looked so complex. Because of how his bones and muscles line up in the light, he flutters with shadows.

His boner bobs and veers as he moves. You cup your hands at his chest and press on it. You've never thought about the hair in the middle of his chest or around his nipples, or about body hair on a guy in general. It feels better than you would have guessed. The texture of his skin feels different from yours. Yours is somewhat soft. His seems dryer and more textured, like it's tougher. His skin feels thicker than yours except when you touch on his collarbone and shoulders, where it feels paper thin.

It was never a moral thing with you. If you'd ever been asked or had reflected on it privately, you would have thought that it was gross. Like, all of it. Guys' boners, their butts. It's all weird, and, like, undisciplined.

But then it's not, and it's not like a universal thing for you. It's not like you're going to go crazy when you see random guys. It's comfortable and fun because you know him in a unique way, and in the end, it's all about the person, not the labels or the way other people try to make you think.

We kiss again. The ways we breathe feel good.

We have the same bodies. Like, vivid.

For a long time we're touching every inch of our skins above the waist, feeling out the variations in the bones and muscles. Everything about us feels more solid than our own bodies. It's not only that one of us used to be an athlete and the other is more normal. It's something about how our bodies are constructed.

Our skins sing.

He pulls you by the waist, and you don't lose your balance, but still you topple a little and land hard on the sheets of his bed. The bed makes a slight cracking sound.

"Whoah," you say.

"I guess that was a boxspring," Joe says. "Oh well."

He lies in bed next to you. The rough hair of his legs runs against yours.

The top of your boner touches his forearm. Almost involuntarily, you move your hips so that it rubs against the side of his arm. You could nut already.

Joe puts his face down to my chest. He puts his mouth on my nipple. The sight of his tongue and his teeth and the feeling of them make my heart go crazy. I pull at the back of his hair, then press his face hard at my chest. His dick jabs at my thigh. It feels harder and hotter than how I thought of my own. He finally threads his fingers through my pubes and pivots the angle of my dick with his spread-open fingers. The length of my shaft aligns against his arm.

"Can I touch yours?" I say.

"Of course," he says, like it's been obvious all along.

His pubes aren't only thicker than mine. They're coarser and curlier. The texture is almost rough. His dick feels different, too. It does feel tighter and harder than mine. He's been leaking precum, which I know already. I'd felt it on my hip when he pressed it against me. For about half a second it seems gross, but then it was cool. Like, flattering. I don't want to touch it when it's fresh in the slit of his dick, but then I do. It's sort of watery and only slightly sticky. Not like jizz. He exhales and shivers when I touch it.

"Are you okay?" he says, looking up to me.

"Yeah," I say, feeling myself blushing. My face is hot. It's sweating. So is my chest. "I don't know."

"I just want you to be okay," he says.

"Yeah, I'm okay," I say.

"I don't want you to freak out afterward," he says.

"It's all right," I say. I pause, trying to think of something to reassure him. "It doesn't have to mean anything. It's not like I do this all the time."

"I know you don't do it all the time," he says. "Or, like, ever."

"Yeah. Ha. Never."

"You just can't freak out afterward," he says. "That's the only rule."

"I'm already freaking out a little," I say.

"It's okay," he says. "Me too."

I didn't believe him about that last part. I think back to what Michelle said to me. Maybe it turned out that he's been gay all along and was lying about it. I don't know. At that moment, I don't really care.

We sit so that Joe has his legs spread out on either side of me, and mine crook upward at the knees. This way we can see everything. Joe only seems to be looking at my face or at my dick and balls. I look at him all over.

Every part of it is fascinating to me, even the muscles in his leg, I must have spent 10 or 15 minutes feeling his shins and his knees and his calf muscles. When I do this, I notice that Joe's dick twitches like crazy, even though I'm not touching it and neither is he. Mine sits hard against my stomach, but Joe's slacks a little and then twitches up against him. It's pink and the head at the end of it was plumped out round and purple. A vein runs along one side of it. It looks solid and fully hard, and then I slide a hand against the back of his knee or pinch at a tendon, and his boner pops upwards, like it wants to answer the question.

When he shoots, neither of us are even touching it. He has his hand on my dick, and I move a hand to the base of his spine, right at the very top of his butt. There's this line of thin hairs that runs vertical at the top of his crack. I'd noticed this in the locker room with him and had spent some time thinking about it. When I slide my fingers down to them, his dick immediately starts spraying.

The momentum and the distance of it is crazy. It spurts up by his neck and shoulders. If he'd been lying down, it easily would have shot past his head. It comes out in five or six loads, each one a little shorter than what comes before. The last couple are these kind of cute white spurts than land in the dark nest of his pubes. By then he has a hand on his dick and guides the spray against his skin. When he first started to shoot, he said something like, "Yow!", like it took even him by surprise. It runs silvery and shiny all over his chest, and the familiar smell of it hits me a few seconds later -- musty and bleachy. Again, for a second it grosses me out, and almost as quickly, I decide that I liked it. The smell of Joe shooting starts to drive me a little crazy, actually. It makes me hornier. He reaches down to the floor to pick up the T-shirt he'd been wearing and uses it to mop his chest.

"You can shoot without touching it?" I ask.

"Not usually," he says. "I'm not sure if that's happened before."

"Are you okay?" I say.

"I'm real good," he says.

"Cool," I say, my voice muddy. "Me too."

He edges closer to me. His dick is still hard. When he gets closer, he smells of sweat and semen, and in the cold of the room, the body heat from his chest hit me in a wave. It's so cold that his body might actually have been steaming on the skin. That's how I think of it. I'm not sure if that's true.

Joe moves to kiss me again. Our dicks and balls touch each other. I feel the hair of his balls tickle my own. He keeps his lips closed tight and dry. I press my face up against his because I like the feel of his stubble.

I open my lips, enough to cover his. When he darts his tongue against my mouth, I start full-on Frenching with him. I think of how big and white his teeth are. When our upper lips get wet from our kissing, a faint smell of marijuana goes into my nostrils.

When he pulls away, he says, "Wow. Enthusiastic."

"Was it okay?"

"Very," he says. "When I thought about what it would be like to kiss you, I imagined that it'd be like getting licked on the face by a sheepdog.

Should've known you'd be better at it than that."

"Ha. So you thought about kissing me before tonight?"

"No," he says. I don't believe him. "That's just how it looked when you made out with girls."

"Whatever," I say. "You're such a liar."

He laughs. When he leans in like he's about to kiss me, I lick the side of his face, like a sheepdog. The stubble of his cheek takes a tissue sample of my tongue. I hold his head with both hands. He tries to squirm away, but not very hard.

"This is exactly how I imagined it," he says.

"See. You imagined it."

"Yes. When we were running and had that argument, I should've just smooched you."

"That would've been something," I say.

I kiss him correctly. His face turns intense and serious before I do this.

We flash an eye contact that makes my ribs flicker, and then we're kissing again. Joe's more into it this time. We kiss slow. His face stubble scrapes up and down my chin. His teeth are at my lips and my tongue presses behind his teeth. Maybe that's gross but I don't care.

I'm not thinking about myself anymore. I'm thinking about Joe and wondering what it's like to be inside his skin. He lies on his back and locks our legs together with his bones and muscles, almost like it's a wrestling move.

I'd never realized how hot the human body is. Like, his chest and his head are hooked to a radiator. When he touches my butt, I don't think it's weird that he's the first person who ever touched my butt or the first one to touch my dick. Instead I think that it's Joe who's the one doing that and remember how his face looked before he kissed me. I think of how he looked like Superman the first night I met him, and of how I woke up on his floor the next morning and didn't want to look at him in the top bunk because of how hung over I was and how bad it felt.

I've never had a boner that stayed so hard for so long. I lift my stomach and my hips so that some air separates us, and look down the length of Joe's torso. I press my hips back down and slide them against him, in the motion I'd have used if I'd been giving it to a girl. I press my face at his cheek so that my nose breathes in from his skin and my lips sink into his skin.

"You can cum on me if you want," he said. "It's okay. I want you to cum on me."

I don't know if it's his words or the feel of his voicebox vibrating against my neck and rumbling through my ears. If I'd had a button on my chest that said "cum" in big red letters, it would have been as effective. The way his voice carries through me, whatever he says might have brought the same result. Seconds later, I shoot on the spot. Through my forehead I see the same splashes of light that can happen after I stand too fast when recovering from a long run with Joe. Wet sparkles shimmering in my field of vision. Joe's lips suck the breath out of me. I grunt and yell. My butt arches up and then down. His big toenail digs into the side of my foot. I feel it all shoot out of me, like a busted-open pipe unloading all that pressure. I shout a vowel sound. It all comes out of me. It goes for several seconds. Toward the end it's like I want it to keep going. I push myself up and arch my back in the air, moving in and out like I'm going at something that's not there. I feel the drops splash up at my stomach but most of it gathers in the crevices and angles of Joe's chest and stomach.

Looking down at him shining with all my stuff, part of it makes me think that he's crazy, then part of me says that it's the hottest thing I've ever seen, when he smirks enough to show part of his teeth and looks down at all that stuff of mine, dripping and sliding over his chest. The T-shirt on the floor is still plenty damp from Joe's own spray, and he uses it to absorb mine. I want to ask if I can hold it, just so I can touch it, but that would seem weird, so I don't.

After I shoot, I feel dizzy, and even disoriented. It's like waking up.

Like it wasn't me that lived that, or it was a crazy dream that lingers with you for a couple of hours in the morning. Standing there with my boner hanging out and Joe looking up at me from his sheets, his hard-on still pressed at his stomach, I think something like, "This cannot possibly be happening," and then, "What have I done?", and, "It was just because of the drugs," and, "There's no turning back." There are certain threshes of experience that people get, and once you have it, it's irreversible. This is one of those things.

Also, I'm exhausted. It's almost 2 a.m. Whatever Joe and I have been doing to each other, we've been doing it for more than three hours. I feel like I should get dressed and leave right away, but the rules for these things are mysterious. Like, I need to sit down alone someplace and think over what I've done.

"Are you freaking out?" Joe says.

"No," you say.

"Yeah you are." There isn't any doubt in his voice. "Don't worry about it.

It was only me."

I don't know what he means by that, but it sounds good anyway. He slides a couple feet away in his bed, his boner bouncing with his hips when he does this. "Just come back," he says.

That's what I do. I lie back in Joe's bed. His sheets are smoother than mine. His mattress is softer than mine. I don't want him to touch me but he does. He puts his hand back down on my dick. It's as hard as it would have been if I hadn't shot. When he touches it, it feels good all over again. He nestles up next to me, with my arm around his neck and his head against my shoulder. We're naked on top of the sheets but I'm cold in the air. He sleeps under two huge, heavy comforters. I lean down to pull them up so that they cover us. It's, like, cozy. I wish that I could still see his whole body, but the heat of being under the covers with him more than makes up for it.

I think I'm going to fall asleep when the front door slams shut. You can barely make out the thud. I bolt up in bed.

"Calm down," Joe says. "I'll just turn out the lights."

"What if they come up here?"

"They won't."

My heart beats fast. Joe stretches and climbs over me to get out of bed.

When he stands his naked butt is a couple of feet from my face. His butt, his back, his shoulders: I guess you spend so much time facing a person that you never think about how they look from the other side. He looks interesting when he stands. I wish I'd asked him to stand like that for awhile, before the roommates come home and he stands to turn out the lights

He walks through the dark and slides back into bed. He lies so that his back faces me, and he pulls my hand and arm over him, so that I hold him across the chest. My boner presses against part of his butt. My chest touches his spine. I breathe in through his hair and the back of his neck.

Some nights they come home and everyone's loud and yelling and laughing.

Some nights other people come home with us and the house is active until four or five. Tonight, I hear Michelle's lonely steps going toward her room. This is a relief. It means that no one's going to be rowdy. There's no way they'll look for us.

I kiss Joe from behind, where his jaw meets his neck, and a couple seconds later we're full-on making out again.

"I hope this doesn't sound weird," I say, "but I think I need to nut again before I fall asleep."

His chest and stomach shake against yours when he laughs. "Me too," he says.

He holds his boner tight against mine. His balls are pressed up against my shaft. He presses his hips up and down. I remember the last time he shot and grab his butt again. I can feel its muscles get tight and then relax as he rubs his up and down against mine. He strokes the side of my face with his free hand and we're kissing again. Our tongues are all over each other.

My heart and my breathing go crazy. I feel the shudder in the pit of my stomach and my balls, and I'm shooting again. I yelp another high-pitched vowel sound. After what happened before, I can hardly believe that I've got any left in me. I smell the heat of our bodies and the fog of my shooting rise from under the comforters. I hold Joe's chin with my mouth when he shoots a few seconds after me.

He picks up his dirty, dirty shirt from the floor. We wipe each other off but the sheets and part of the comforter stay damp. I apologize for the mess. He laughs at me.

Joe falls asleep not long after that. I can tell he's sleeping by the way that he breathes. I'm still hard, and in his sleep, so is he. My heart races too much and my mind won't shut off. While he sleeps I keep touching him. I move a hand down to his lower back or to his navel. I move my hand over the arc of his buttcheek or lightly cover his balls. This doesn't wake him.

Every couple of minutes I find myself thinking crazy thoughts, and then decide that this is really no big deal. Like I've always thought, it's not about the label. It's about the person. Joe could as easily have been a girl, and if we'd clicked in the same way, I'd be doing the same things. It so happened that he wasn't a girl. Most people don't understand that, but it's how it works. I satisfy myself of this, but then a few minutes later have the same line of thoughts, before I need to work through the logic again to calm down. It runs on repeat. There's no way I'll have a normal sleep.

I doze off around three, but wake up again when it's about 5:30. When your skin is pressed against another person's for awhile, it gets sweaty and starts to stick and itch. I move to let air between us. It must have made Joe wake up, because he groans and rolls over, so that we're facing each other. I smell his breath and don't mind. He grabs my hand puts it on his boner, then nudges up against me so our legs are tangled. I'm not going to be able to sleep like that.

Sometime around eight I wake up again. Snow covers his skylight. I sit up in bed and look at our clothes spread over the floor. I need to dress and go to my room so that I can sleep for real. His room must be below freezing. When I move, Joe wakes. I can't bring myself to get out of his bed. We make eye contact. Our hands are on each other's hips. I curl up to him. He feels so comfortable and natural that I settle into his mattress for a little longer. I think to myself, "Wouldn't it be nice if you could spend the rest of your life not doing anything, just lying here like this."