Love is Always Write Anthology Volume 8

from closing the distance. Instead he said, "Go on."
    "The next day I freaked. I pretended it never happened. But by then I already knew a couple of other gay guys. I'd known Stef was gay. It wasn't this horrible idea. And a couple of weeks later we got drunk again. By the end of the term I was spending a lot of time with Stef without having to be drunk, and I wasn't even looking for a girl. He was fun and smart and totally crazy in bed. But he told me up front he was never going to be a one-man kind of guy."
    "Did you want him to be?" Trey held his breath, because this was the question he'd wanted to ask. Are you settling for me? Am I just conveniently here instead of some other lover you couldn't have?
    Josh shook his head slowly. "At the time I thought so. We were together for almost a year, and for half of it I was exclusive. But in retrospect I wasn't as jealous of his other guys as I should have been. I was mad that they were taking up his time when he could have been with me, but it didn't bother me to think about them fucking him."
    "And Linda?" Was it better or worse to think about Josh with a girl? Trey wasn't sure.
    "She was sweet and nice. She was as close to the girl I could take home to mother as I was ever going to get. But I got bored. In bed and out. I was never going to have to keep her from jumping out of a hayloft."
    "I'm not sure that's the best example to use."
    "Climbing the water tower then."
    Trey couldn't help grinning. "The whole town read about Donny O'Reilly wetting his bed in glorious six-foot letters."
    "You were a maniac." Josh leaned his chin on his knees and looked at Trey. His smoke-grey eyes looked dark in the fading light. "I wasn't really jealous with Stef or Linda. But I'm finding I'm jealous of every man who ever touched you. But I still want to know. After all that shit we went through, how did you manage to come out okay? Was it counseling, or really just a guy?"
    Trey hesitated, watching the shifting of the filtered sunset light flickering in Josh's eyes. "I thought you brought us out here so I could ask my questions."
    "I don't think getting to know each other goes just one way."
    "Yeah, but your crap sounds like it was easy." It was a good thing Trey had his eyes fixed on Josh, or he might have missed the flinch. Trey said slowly, "It wasn't really that easy, was it?"
    Josh's head shake was just one millimeter past nothing.
    "Linda or Stef? Or someone else?"
    "Stef. I might have condensed things a bit."
    "You want to uncondense them?"
    "Hell no. When did we become the kind of guys who needed to talk about our feelings anyway?"
    "About the time you decided to say you loved me forever with two days left in our vacation."
    "Some vacation." Josh closed his eyes for a moment and then turned away from Trey to look out to sea. Trey rolled to his knees to look too.
    The last moments of light played their way out between the layers of cloud. A hint of rose or a wash of crimson would just brush the edge of the sky for a moment and then fade, as if the sunset was trying to give them one last show before the dusk closed down. Now and then the darkening waves tossed back the color as they rolled in. The wind pulled foam off the breakers in ribbons of white, dimming to grey as the light died.
    Trey moved behind Josh, sitting back on his heels with his legs spread to enclose Josh between his thighs. He wrapped both arms across Josh's chest. After a second of tension, Josh leaned back into his hold and tipped his head against Trey's shoulder.
    Trey said, "Stef?"
    "What I told you was true, about the beginning and the end. I might have left stuff out of the middle." Trey stayed quiet and Josh put a hand over Trey's arm where it crossed his pecs, and took a breath. "There was a bit in there when I thought maybe I was really in love and for a while he did try to be only with me."
    "What happened?"
    Josh shifted against him. "It's embarrassing, okay?"
    "You don't have to tell me."
    "I didn't like it."
    After the silence had dragged on more than long enough Trey prompted him, "Like what?"
    "Some of the sex he wanted. This was before Felix was in college, when my little brother was still pretty messed up. Mom would tell me about his nightmares and how he'd gained a whole ton of weight and stuff. Anyway, maybe it's an excuse but what happened to him kind of screwed me up too."
    "It's not an excuse. It messed up all of us," Trey breathed in his ear. "Go on."
    "So it wasn't this big thing but we