the new guy?” I asked.
“Funny. Smart. Good style.”
“Is he cute?”
“Not as cute as you.” Plup went the cork.
I shook my head. “You don’t have to say that. I can handle you working with a cute gay guy, Woody.”
He poured me a glass and changed the subject. “I had to threaten one of the slackers today. He’s this close to being fired. I swear, he’s always stoned.”
I thought about how many hours I’d spent stoned since I visited Anton, hours I’d kept hidden from Woody, who rarely joined me in my favorite vice. It was my turn to change the subject: “Sit and start eating. It’s all getting cold.”
He flattened a cloth napkin in his lap. “You’re mad that I’m late.”
“Not after tasting this wine I’m not.” I sat down and held my glass aloft.
“Here’s to being back together,” he toasted. “And to true love.”
“Sure, here’s to.” I felt my face flush even before the wine went down.
His eyes were fixed on me. “Even after a year, that makes you uncomfortable.”
“No. Well, a little.” I started cutting my food. “Come on, eat. Tell me how it tastes.” He was staring, waiting. “I love you too, Woody. I’m just not so good with the words.”
“You write words in your journal all the time.”
“Speaking them is harder.”
“How about this,” he said. “Speak to me about your trip. Tell me something you haven’t told me yet.”
An image of Rick at the urinal flitted by like a sprite. I washed down the food with more wine. “Well…I found out that my high school fuckbuddy is married with children.”
“Eric-something, right? Was that a surprise?”
“Considering everything we did together, plus the fact that he went into the Navy after high school, yes.”
“It’s a mystery to me how you managed to have sex with boys in high school.”
“Sex wasn’t the mystery for me. Friendship was, friendship with other guys.” I paused. “This is what I was trying to explain to you, about why I got so interested in my father’s friendship with Danny.”
He wiped his mouth, then reached across the table, surprising me by taking my hand. “You know, I’ve been wanting to raise an issue with you.”
“Uh-oh. The I-word.”
He sighed. “Annie mentioned a friend of hers who lost a parent recently, and this person decided to see a therapist.”
I slid my hand out of his, tried to joke this away. “I cried at the wake. In the bathroom. I told you that, right?”
“Annie thought this therapist might be a good candidate. If you were looking.”
“Um, I haven’t even talked to Annie about my father.” In addition to being a good friend of Woody’s, Annie was Brady’s girlfriend. I cringed at the idea of them sharing a dinner like this one, trading theories about me and my issues.
Woody said, “Your friends care about you.”
I gathered up a forkful of the ratatouille. “You haven’t tried the squash yet.” I leaned in close and brought it to his lips. He frowned, then blew on it, and I felt the tickle of his breath on my cheek. I watched his eyelids lower as he chewed. His lashes so lush for a guy. His concentrated brow so elegant.
“I wish I was as good as you in the kitchen,” he said.
“Wormy, I know you’re looking out for me. But the idea of therapy makes me feel like this ugly damaged thing.”
“Baby,” he said, a smile returning, “you’re a beautiful damaged thing.”
We spent the rest of the meal staying away from the I-word.
After dinner, walking backwards down the hall, he peeled off my clothes. My T-shirt, ripe from hours in the kitchen, went over my head. He planted his lips on my chest, his tongue on my nipple. My weakness. He pulled me by my belt loops and then slid my pants down. I nearly fell into him, eager for his kisses. We hadn’t had sex since I’d returned from New Jersey. I’d been avoiding it. For months we’d been fucking unprotected. We’d been tested, we were both negative, we were monogamous; we didn’t need condoms to have safe sex. But I’d crossed a line with Rick: My lips had been winter-chapped, he could have been HIV-positive, that tablespoon of cum in my mouth could have been the instance of transmission. Now I was going to give it to Woody.
He pushed me onto my bed, pulled my cock through the fly of my boxers, wrapped his warm hand around it. In a moment he was down on his knees in front of me. I hooked my fingers under his armpits, tried to raise him back up. I needed to be the bottom tonight. He wasn’t having it. He was hungry, determined, inspired by half a bottle of wine. I watched his lips wrap around the head of my dick and slide down its length, his eyes closed, his eyelids like two gentle smiles, his blonde curls bobbing. I fell back on the pillow and stared up at the ugly light fixture over my bed.
Stop him. Tell him.
I can’t tell him now, not right here in the middle of sex.
Tell him now, before you give him AIDS!
Rick didn’t have AIDS.
You don’t know that.
Woody won’t get HIV from oral sex.
Are you certain? Really certain?
But that would mean I have AIDS, too—
The amazing sensation of being deep down Woody’s throat, my thighs tickled by his hot breath, my body held in place by the weight of him. He was servicing me and dominating me all at once. I don’t know that I’d ever felt so physically close to him and so mentally far away at the same time.
The physical won out. I didn’t stop him to confess. I squashed the conversation inside my skull: It was based on guilt, not medical information. The odds were against this being dangerous: I did not get HIV from a couple of seconds of aerated semen on my tongue. It’s only unsafe for Woody if I have HIV, and I don’t have HIV! I repeated this like a mantra, not sure where rationality ended and wishful thinking began—a familiar, unwelcome confusion that I could trace back to the late eighties, when penetration was new to me and AIDS truly was capital-letter deadly. This panicky mind-chatter went back to every time I’d read reports of a study claiming the virus might in fact be transmitted by oral sex; to every article claiming a new, more virulent strain of HIV had been discovered; to every time someone I knew seroconverted. I shut out the studies; I focused on all the anecdotal evidence to the contrary. I slammed the lid down on the cauldron and just breathed the humid mist of the moment. I gave in to Woody’s effort.
He lifted me farther back on the bed and then undressed. His long, lean torso—broad bony shoulders, broad flat chest, a slanting ridge of muscle highlighting his lower abdomen. Skin the color of parchment. His cock rigid without either of us touching it. I watched a crystal bead glistening at the tip drop to the floor, a filament stretching and vanishing. I would be on my hands and knees tomorrow, looking for the spot that sacred drop had blessed. He sucked me some more and I watched the elongated slope of his lower back, his ass raising up like a cat’s hoping to be scratched, more of that golden skin, gleaming exquisitely. And when he planted a knee on either side of my ribs and lifted himself up, and dropped back down onto my lap, and guided me up inside of him, I let it happen. I fucked him, as he clearly wanted it, the way we always did this. Bareback. I looked up and met his eyes and I told myself, It’s going to be okay, and then thrust up until he groaned and we found the rhythm.
I said to him out loud, “I’m yours.”
He matched the intensity of my