The Understatement of the Year (20 page)

Skippy pouted. “He’s at the bar, buying the first round.”

“I’ll grab a couple of beers,” Graham shouted from the other side of the table. “What do you like?”

“Anything better than Capri’s piss-water.”

He grinned and disappeared into the crowd.

Skippy leaned over to speak into my ear. “Are you with him?”

I shook my head. “He’s not a member of the tribe.”

My ex tipped his head for a better look at the bar. “Interesting that you’d say that. Because I think your teammate Mike is as gay as a Judy Garland sing-along. You should see his face right now. He looks like a kid getting his first look at the presents under the Christmas tree.”

Skippy’s gaydar was rock solid. Always had been. “Go easy on him, okay? He’s kind of a wreck.”

“Good pick for you, then.”

Well,
ouch
. That stung because it was true. Hanging out with both Skippy and Graham in one night was some kind of weird self-torture. Even though I’d agreed to be Just Friends with Graham, I still felt a big tug every time I looked at him. Heartbreak was pretty much inevitable.

“You’re pissed at me for saying that,” Skippy said, his face propped into one hand. He had long, dark eyelashes. And his dressy black button-down shirt made those big brown eyes as dark as coal. There was something truly magnetic about Skippy, as if he could see right into your soul.

“Don’t want to talk about it,” I said.

“Dance with me instead?”

Now there was a dubious idea. “We’d lose our table.”

He rolled those luminous eyes. “Okay, Dad.”

Luckily, Ross and Graham showed up then with the drinks. Hooray for a little ethanol lubrication. I drank half of the Long Trail that Graham brought me in the first thirty seconds. He’d also bought what looked like two shots of Jack. “Shot?” he mouthed over the music. With a shake of my head, I mimed driving. So Graham drank them both.

“How was Christmas?” I asked Ross, shouting over the song.

“Not bad,” he said with a grin. “My relatives kept the fag slurs down to a couple dozen, so I can’t complain.”

“Ross is from Alabama,” I shouted by way of explanation to Graham.

“And not the nice part,” he added.

Graham put his second empty glass down on the table. As I watched his eyes sweep the room, I wondered what he saw. It was the typical mixed-up scene. There were a handful of exhibitionists in their over-the-top leather getups. (Whenever I saw a man in leather pants, it always made my own balls sweat in sympathy.) For every outrageously dressed queer there were three other guys in flannel shirts and baseball caps. But it was early yet. Those shirts would come off when it got hotter in here.

Daft Punk started singing
Get Lucky
, and Graham’s shoulders found the beat. Skippy poked me in the shoulder, and I leaned in to hear what he had to say.

“I’m sorry I was a dick.”

“You mean a minute ago?” I was primed to forget about it already.

I was granted one more Skippy eye-roll. “Yeah, a minute ago. Was I a dick some other time, too?”

“No,” I laughed. I drained my beer and put down the empty. “Let’s dance. All of us. That ought to shake up my friend.”

Skippy’s eyes sparkled with mischief. He tipped the last of his drink into his mouth, then stood up. “Come on,” he said, tugging Graham’s elbow. “We’re going to dance now.”

Graham’s eyes widened. “I may not be drunk enough for that.”

“It’s just dancing,” Skippy shouted, grabbing Graham’s hand. “It won’t make you queer!”

“Too late,” I said directly into Graham’s ear as Skippy tugged him into the crowd. Graham reached back, pinching my ass in retribution. Hard.

“Ow,” I complained.

He just grinned over his shoulder.

Before I started hanging around with Skippy, I wasn’t a fan of dancing. But not even reluctant dancers could resist him. All you had to do was look at Skippy, and you couldn’t help but move. The music just seemed to pulse up his body, past those skinny hips, up his straight spine and then through two fluid arms.

When he danced, Skippy closed his eyes, as if taking orders from some celestial plane. And when he was dancing, it was easier for everyone else to enjoy it, too. You could just watch him and imagine that you moved as well as he did. And somehow it became true. Because you were having fun, and that was the big secret to dancing, anyway.

Tonight Ross was wearing a T-shirt that read:
Boys Will Do Boys
. He moved around behind Skippy, curving one big arm around his chest. And somehow the two of them didn’t even look ridiculous. Because Skippy was just that good a dancer.

As one song morphed into the next, I heard a squeal in my ear, even louder than Lady Gaga. “Rikker!” I turned around to find Rachel and Daphne, friends of mine from high school.

I gave each of them a quick kiss on the cheek. “What’s up!” I shouted over the music. When Daphne jutted a thumb towards Graham, I said, “My friend from school.”

They both gave him appreciative looks.
Good luck with that, girls
. But the company of a couple of girls was just what Graham needed, apparently. When Daphne stepped in closer to him, he seemed to loosen up. He smiled, and began to move in a way that was less self-conscious. Daphne sidled up in front of him, and he put a hand on her waist.

Even though Graham was touching Daphne, his eyes worked the room. The place was heating up in every possible way. The guys around us on the dance floor were losing their shirts one at a time. While torsos writhed with the music, hands slid over skin and fabric. Denim to denim, hips pulsed and ground to the beat. We were a giant undulating mass of bodies, sweating through songs by Macklemore, and for the older crowd, Depeche Mode.

When the music slowed, Rachel put her arms around me so we could have a catch-up chat. “I saw the articles. What made you go public?” She was one of the friends I was out to in high school.

“No choice in the matter.”

She gave me a peck on the cheek. “Somehow I knew you’d say that. A few people at school mentioned it to me. Like Petey, for one.”

Petey was the co-captain of my high school team, now playing for UVM where Rachel went to school. “Yeah? What did he say?”

“He said he always had a hunch.”

I chewed on that for a second. “I guess that doesn’t make him a genius, right?” It was a pretty small school, and I hung out with Skippy all the time, even if we never touched anywhere near school. Then again, Skippy was popular with lots of straight people, too.

Rachel put her mouth next to my ear. “Maybe it’s something that people say, because it sounds better than ‘I’m totally clueless.’”

I kissed her cheek again. “Whichever.”

“You know, I don’t like seeing Skippy with another guy,” she said.

I took the high road, as usual. Although it was getting old. “I met Ross over the summer. He seems like a pretty good guy.”

Rachel smiled. “I’m sure you’re right, but I was trying to be loyal. Is your friend straight? Daphne is working it pretty hard.”

I took a peek over my shoulder, where the two of them were slow-dancing. “Not sure where he stands,” I said.
And neither is he
.

Eventually the music picked up again, and we all danced ourselves silly. It had been a while since I’d had a night out like this, and I’d forgotten what dancing was for. It was such a release. (Like sex, only not as messy, and with less heartbreak.) The music coursed through me, and I stopped thinking and let myself just feel.

When we needed a break, Graham bought a couple more beers. Standing side by side, we propped up a wall beside the dancers, alternately swallowing the beer and pressing the cool bottles to our faces.

When Graham tipped his chin up to drain the bottle, I had an involuntary flashback to the sight of those lips wrapped around a certain part of my anatomy.

Dayum
. That image was burned on my brain, and chance of a repeat was slim. But at least I had the one memory.

We stashed our bottles on a ledge when the Communards version of “Don’t Leave Me This Way” started up. Like Gaga’s “Born this Way,” it had been adopted as a gay anthem. Skippy boogied over to me with a serious look in those smoky eyes. Back in the day, we’d danced to this song all the time.

He yanked me by the hand, and I went along with it. Dancing to this track meant raising your arms up every time the vocalist shouted “Awwwwwwww BABY!” With hands in the air, there were a lot of hip collisions, and frat-style beer gut bumps. It was sweaty and silly and glorious. Dancing wasn’t supposed to take itself too seriously. Skippy was in front of me, and Graham was behind me. I could feel him up against my ass. That was a new development. So I slipped a hand behind me and gave Graham’s fly a single caress. If he wanted a night at the gay bar, I’d make sure he got the whole experience.

What are friends for, right?

A moment later, his hand landed on my backside, tracing the seam of my pants. Oh, man. Payback was a bitch. So I took an experimental half step back, tucking my ass against his crotch. If he didn’t like it, all he had to do was move away from me.

He didn’t move away.

Faster than you could say “horny much?” his hand slid onto my hip. And then a Maroon Five song came on. I leaned back against Graham. And as Adam Levine’s voice crooned from the speakers, Graham and I were giving each other the
Moves Like Jagger
.

It was a sweaty, heated business. I ground my hips to the beat, and Graham’s body went right along with me, pulsing wherever the music took us. One song dissolved into another, and then another. Around us, glistening bodies torqued and jived. The longer we moved, the hotter I felt. It was getting late, but I didn’t want the night to end. I’d never danced with Graham in my life, and I probably never would again.

But eventually the DJ decided to take things down a few notches. The music slowed to a heartbeat pace, and Madonna began singing an old one, “Crazy for You.” All around us, couples curled into one another, arms finding purchase. Lips finding lips.

“We should split, right?” I panted into Graham’s ear.

He nodded immediately, as I knew he would. There was no way we could go full-frontal in a slow dance and still pretend that tonight was just some crazy when-in-Rome kind of situation.

I wanted to, though. I wanted to pull his chest to mine, and press my face into his neck.
It’s just dancing
, I could tell myself. But it would be a lie. No matter what label I put on it, and no matter how stupid it made me, I still wanted Graham.

Yep. Time to go home.

“I’m going to tell the other guys that we’re out of here. Meet you by the door?” He nodded again. So I threaded through the crowd, finding Skippy and Ross beside our old table, guzzling water. “We’re going to head out,” I said.

“Stowe tomorrow?” Skippy asked between gulps. Then he refilled the glass from a pitcher they’d acquired somehow.

“I dunno,” I said, wondering if there was time for snowboarding. Probably not. “I’ll have to see when Graham wants to get back.” I snagged Skippy’s water glass from his hand and brought it to my lips. But I’d only managed a sip when his fingers closed tightly around my wrist, his eyes going wide. I didn’t understand why he’d object to my getting some water. “You have a whole pitcher,” I argued.

But water was not Skippy’s problem. “
What
did you call him?”

Oh, fuck
. I tried to shrug off the question, shaking his hand off me and draining the glass.

But Skippy wasn’t having it. “You
cannot
be serious.
That’s
your Michigan guy?” He took the empty glass from my hand and set it down. Then he took my face in both of his hands. “You cannot get involved with a guy who fucked you over when you had three broken ribs and internal bleeding.” His dark eyes glittered with righteous indignation.

For a second time, I pushed his hands off me. “Guess what? You don’t get to tell me what to do anymore.” Fuck, that sounded bitter. And we both knew it.

He blinked at me for a beat. “Rikky,
Jesus.
Be careful.”

“Yes,
Dad
.” Even though I knew he really did care about me, I still didn’t want to hear it. We can’t all have a Skippy and Ross love story, with a cute apartment and a poodle curled up on the rug. Their Instagram selfies were so cheerful that I could hardly look.

From a few feet away, Ross was watching us, a wary look on his face. I was too pissed off to say a polite goodnight to either of them. I gave Ross a kind of salute, and Skippy a look of irritation. Then I made my way back through the dancing bodies toward the door. Graham pushed it open when he saw me coming.

Outside, the temperature had descended to negative freeze-your-nuts-off, but it felt good against my sweaty skin. As we approached the truck, I noticed that there were two gay couples bookending it — one making out against the car parked behind us, and the other lip-locked beside the car parked in front of us.