Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 5

tried making myself look more generic for a while, but that didn't change jack, so I just do what feels natural now. Which means I look like a pretty weirdo.
    I'm fully aware that this career has a shelf-life, too. No one wants to hire a model with gray hair and crow's feet unless it's to do Viagra commercials, which, no thanks.
    Sam smiles at me. "And someday, you're going to be in just your underwear on a billboard in Times Square and we'll both be able to retire."
    "Ha," I say. "You'll have to settle for me walking during Fashion Week." I rattle off the names of the designers I booked shows with.
    Sam's eyes widen. "That's amazing. Congratulations!" Then he laughs. "I do love telling people that my boyfriend is a model. You're so hot, of course they booked you." Sam kisses my cheek.
    Matt glares.
    ****
    SAM
    We didn't sleep together the first night. When we got back to my room, Jess got bashful. We didn't sleep together after our first official date, either. Jess begged off. After that kiss the night we met, we didn't even kiss again until after the second date. I started to wonder if I had bad breath or something. And then I figured it out.
    On our third date, I took him for ice cream at the local creamery. I watched him lick ice cream off his fingers and the cone and it was about the most erotic thing I had seen in my life to that point. He was so goddamn beautiful it hurt to look at him. In those days, his light brown hair was always artfully disheveled, and he had a light dusting of freckles over the bridge of his nose. Plus, I really liked him. A lot of that was intangible and tangled up with lust, but he was affable and had a self-deprecating sense of humor. These were all qualities I admired.
    So I said, "It's okay to admit that you're a virgin."
    He almost dropped the cone, but I reached out and grabbed his hand before he could. Ice cream dripped onto my fingers, but I didn't care. He just stared at me.
    "I want to be the man who... shows you," I said.
    He continued to not say anything, although he turned his intense stare toward his ice cream cone and my hand, which was still cupped around his.
    "I know that all the gay guys on this campus act like they're total sluts," I went on, "but most of them have even less experience than you do, I'm guessing. I know it can be intimidating, but the guys around here are all talk."
    Jess hadn't blinked in at least a minute, as far as I could tell. He looked back at me. "But you're not a virgin," he said quietly.
    "No."
    He nodded slowly.
    "But I think it's better this way," I said. "This way we won't both be just fumbling in the dark. I know a few tricks I think you'll like."
    He smiled faintly, but his shoulders relaxed. He pulled his hand away and resumed eating his ice cream.
    Not that I was even that worldly, but at twenty, I thought I had it all figured out. And what I knew then was that I'd known that fear once, had gone through these first steps into really owning my sexuality already. I knew that, to Jess, everything must have felt capital-I Important.
    I wanted to treat this like it was no big deal, but my stomach was churning, too. Jess wasn't just some guy. I had real feelings for him. I saw our relationship going somewhere.
    I wanted this to be no big deal because that's how the first time was for me. My first lover had been some guy I'd met when I was seventeen and so horny my skin itched.
    And yet.
    "We could have something great," I said. "We could be great together."
    "Yeah?" he said, taking a bite out of the cone.
    "Yeah. You and me. Love story for the ages."
    He smiled, genuinely this time.
    ****
    JESS
    During his last two years in college, Sam lived in a standard-issue off-campus apartment with three roommates and a big shaggy dog. He had his own room, luckily. I had that room memorized. I knew where the floor was scuffed, where the wall was nicked, where Sam had a tendency to toss his shirts when he took them off. We were in that room the afternoon I helped him pack for a three-week trip to upstate New York, where he'd be playing Biff in a summer stock production of Death of a Salesman . We'd been dating about three months by then.
    I was terribly sad that he was leaving. The semester was winding down, but my parents lived thirty miles away from campus, so I wasn't going far. I'd gotten a job at a bookstore in town, in fact. The plan was for Sam to come back after his summer stock gig and work as a counselor at a theater camp nearby, so we'd still