For Dan

Troy had crawled into bed next to us. We had been naked and kissing for an hour, two hours, forever and not long enough, not long enough to withstand an interloper. Our host had jettisoned him from the main party upstairs down here to the den—or the “cat room” as it was called since when it did not house naked, groping, heedless men, it housed the mangy felines otherwise corralled by the lattice-work toddler barricades placed about the doorways in the house. Troy wanted me. You wanted me. I had fallen into an envelope of bliss and greed, the two twisted and twinned together, my fingers at once clutching them as sacred and prying them apart each time I touched your face to reassure you my letting Troy inside me was simply a gesture to make sure he didn’t feel excluded, as excluded as he would feel when you and I headed back to your place as I knew we would when you let me kiss you, just moments after our host had shown me into the room and you and I saw one another, you holding the pipe and me holding the book I bring everywhere with me, hoping one day I will find a man who asks about it without a sneer in his voice.

Your mattress lies on the floor. I lie on top of your chest. You’re neither fit nor fat. You’re what men our age come to realize as attainable, after the hard-bodied and hard-souled boys of our past reveal themselves as oases borne of no one’s imagination but their own. The springtime blue of your eyes is even more transparent, more haunting with your pupils reduced to pinpoints, identical destinations on two identical maps of you. You’ve programmed a list of songs on your computer—sometimes I miss the fuss of radios—and we swoon over them as we swoon over each other, each ballad another peek over a moss-laden cliff over which one cannot be pushed but must leap.

It’s a recording from one of Tori Amos’ concerts. She sings “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” I’m glad it’s just us, the other boys and the drugs just so many accessories, designed to obscure the boy who wears them to the point of passing himself off as anyone—or no one at all.

“I knew you liked her,” you say as her voice reaches a crescendo.

I nod, feel my hair bristle against your chest. Yes, I do. Yes, Paul, I do. Yes yes yes yes— “I love her,” I say, only one word away from what I wish to say.

You stroke my hair and I sense a question bubbling inside you, and I want to answer. I want to throw you my devotion like Mardi Gras beads from a float full of color and decadence.

“When did you know about me?” you ask.

“Know what?”

“That this was going to happen.”

“Us here, right now?” I ask.

I snuggle closer and lift my head from your chest to look at you. (“Your eyes,” you had told me back in the cat room. “They’re so dark. I can’t tell where the centers end and the rest of them begins.” I smiled because what else can one do when told something like that?) “Troy had just joined us,” I say.

“Forced on us.”

“He wasn’t so bad,” I say and toss you a smile. “Just inconvenient.”

“So what was it?” you ask again. “Tell me.”

“Troy was there and he told us he was positive, and he—he was so awkward about it.”

“I know—what was with that?”

“And you just looked at him and said—we were all naked and you said, ‘Congratulations.’”

“Really?”

We’ve spent the last two days hitting ice from a pipe whenever reality became too intrusive and we needed to fortify our distortion of it. Perhaps that’s how the term ice came into use: someone noticed that at any moment, your mind, your life, can freeze and if you’re not afraid, if you focus on your helplessness instead of fight it, there’s a heaven—however brief, however hollow—and you live there.

I’m excited now. I lay one hand on your chest as the other snakes its way into your hair. “We were all high, and naked, and diseased and—and when you said that, it was okay. Everything was okay.” I smile at you. Shock flickers across your eyes but then I see the first, shy curl of a smile.

You run the outside of your fingers against my cheek. “I was just saying what needed to be said,” you say.

Now you know how you won me and you kiss me and roll me on my back, this night a sudden series of heavens, and I tell myself, Congratulations, you won. You lucky son of a bitch, you won you won you won—

© 2007 Thomas Kearnes - Contributor's Bio