Talker

moaning. Brian blushed and looked
    away, and Virginia’s firm hands turned him back to the screen. But
    it was just so embarrassing. The girls… they were using fingers and
    tongues, probing glistening, quivering slits of flesh and puckered
    little anuses—it just seemed too personal to watch.
    Brian squirmed with mortification, but—as Virginia’s hard hand
    at the fly of his jeans proved after one of the most uncomfortable
    moments of his life—he did not get aroused.
    “O kay,” she said softly, when he wouldn’t meet her eyes.
    “Now, phase two.”
    Phase two was a similar video—but this time it was two men,
    neither of whom looked like Tate. Brian glared at her, and she
    turned him toward the screen, and he found himself fascinated. He
    could barely look at their equipment—that just seemed so personal,
    like it did with the girls—but he liked looking at the slope of their
    shoulders, the creases in their thighs, the taut stomachs and tiny
    little navels. E ventual y one of the men ended up on his hands and
    knees and the guy behind him dumped lubricant on his fingers and
    began to penetrate, gently, one finger at a time. The guy receiving
    (bottoming, that was the term) had his eyes closed and his mouth
    open, and he was shuddering with the force of his arousal, and the
    guy behind him reached down and kissed his shoulder, the back of
    his neck, even as that treacherous hand played and stretched and
    penetrated. Brian couldn’t help but watch as the “top” rol ed a
    condom up his cock, and he watched with fascination, because the
    cock was longer and slimmer than Brian’s. Brian’s lips parted, and
    his breath came a little faster, and he wondered what it would be
    like to hold another man’s cock, what it would feel like in his hands,
    and whether it would throb in his palm the way that one looked like
    it was….
    Talker | Amy Lane
    26

    Virginia’s hand on his crotch was welcome, because his cock
    was hard and aching, and he groaned a little and pushed up
    against her. Very gently, she pulled his hand from his side and
    placed it down his pants.
    He didn’t even have to make contact with his own skin before
    he creamed in his jeans, hard and violently. When he was done, he
    was sitting at his desk as the rest of the scene played out in front of
    him, and Virginia very quietly closed his computer and forced him to
    look her in the eyes.
    “Yeah,” she said, her voice edgy, and he didn’t blame her.
    “Let’s have this conversation honestly, okay?”
    They did. But first he needed a shower and a change of
    clothes—and a long, intense bout of soul searching as he was
    cleaning the come off his skin.

    BRIAN remembered that moment—would remember it for his entire
    life, in vivid color—because Virginia had taught him more than just
    his own sexuality. She taught him that sometimes, when someone
    was in emotional denial, they needed proof of how wrong they
    really were. Sometimes they needed actions instead of words.
    Sometimes, they needed someone to make the hard decision or to
    say the painful thing, or they would be lost and locked in their own
    hearts forever.
    With a sigh he flopped backward on his bed, closed his eyes,
    and began to plan. O kay, so the problem wasn’t that Tate didn’t
    believe that Brian loved him, it was that he didn’t understand how
    Brian loved him. What was he doing wrong?
    Brian knew he was gay. After his conversation with Virginia,
    he’d been reluctant to talk to Tate about it because he wasn’t sure if
    Talker | Amy Lane
    27
    he was attracted to Tate because he was male, or because he was
    Tate. Virginia had helped him out with that too. She’d taken him to
    a few parties—the kind that nice girls from the suburbs shouldn’t
    know about but did—and he’d ended up in darkened corners of
    alien rooms, making out with pretty boys who very rarely asked his
    name.
    He had enjoyed them. He’d put his hands on their narrow,
    tapered waists and felt tight ribs and taut, muscular stomachs under
    his palms. He’d enjoyed the feel of hard hands on his chest, and
    strong, rough tweaks to his nipples, and he loved the feel of stubble
    next to his cheek. Touching his lips to a man’s neck actually made
    him shudder with need, in a way that coming inside a woman had
    never done, and he’d walked away from every party more and more
    sure that this was the man he really was.
    But the man he was, really, was the man who always stopped
    these random