Page 28 of The Sound Of Us

“Okay,” I say without commitment.

“You deserve a guy like that.”

I laugh. “C’mon, don’t start, Ben.” I grab the flattened boxes and carry them to the back room. Ben follows.

“You deserve a guy who’ll make all your deep, dark fantasies come true.”

I dump the boxes in the corner of the room, against the wall. Ben leans against the door frame with a rotten smirk on his face.

“Firstly, I was drunk,” I say defensively. “It doesn’t count. And secondly, you were just as drunk. How the hell do you remember when I don’t?”

Ben laughs and mimics my voice. “I want a guy who will fuck me right into the stratosphere. I want him to eat my ass like it’s the last meal he’ll ever have. I want it dirty and nasty and hot and—”

I pick up a book, aiming at him.

“Hey, hey,” he wheezes. “We don’t throw books around here.”

“Then shut up. I don’t remember saying those things and even if I did, I was stupid and young and drunk out of my mind and I just got the green light from the doctor that maybe I wasn’t going to die immediately, okay? So, I got a little carried away.”

Ben turns serious, and honestly, I prefer him making fun of that stupid drunken incident than when he gets serious about it.

“It was a few months after you got married, Ax. You knew you shouldn’t have gone through with it even then. He stole your light, Axel. You weren’t like this. Even when we thought you wouldn’t make it, even when we thought for sure you were on your last days, you were—you were fucking alive. The day Frank came into your life, it was like something worse than the cancer got you. You know, it’s almost like you were forced. The Axel I knew would never have chosen a guy like Frank.”

Ben isn’t wrong. And while my best friend knows every tiny thing about me, who refused to leave my side when I got so sick, there is something—one tiny little thing—Ben doesn’t know.

There’s a term for it. I learned it on a YouTube video: forced choice. A choice you make because it’s the most right thing to do, even if everything in you says it’s wrong. The lesser of two evils.

“Come sit by me,” Frank had said that night at the park. It was New Year’s Eve, and the church had been camping out at the park, going into the New Year with outdoor praise and worship. A bonfire had been going on in the area demarcated for such things, and I’d been on the grass forcing back tears, thinking about my mother.

The weather station had predicted the best snow-less New Year River Valley had ever seen and, being the devoted Christian community that we were, we all made an event out of it. I should have been at home, sleeping my way into the New Year. My mother was gone. I’d finally gotten a response from my dad on a message I’d sent him on Facebook, telling him I was sick. He'd said he was sorry but he couldn't make it home and that he hoped I'd get better soon. Like I had the flu.

I’d felt so alone.

I shake the memory away, but it persists.

“Hey, Axel,” Frank had called again.

I’d smiled and waved him away politely. I’d have been useless company. Frank was a good guy. He checked up on me a few times at church. Even got me McDonald’s on two separate occasions when he gave me a ride back home after band practice. I used to play the piano at church every Sunday until Frank decided that too many people were ogling me from the pews and he didn’t like people looking at his boy. I’d been shocked at the endearment. I hadn’t even been aware there was something between us.

I’m a little ashamed to say I found his attention a little… off putting. He was a good-looking guy—nice and tall, a nice neatly trimmed beard, and all-round nice guy. Plus, he had a good job across the river and one of the nicer houses up on the hill that he inherited when his parents died. He’d told me all about it while we waited in line at the drive thru.

And, I had eaten his McDonald’s twice already, so when he’d called me a third time to join him under his blanket at the back of the park, I’d agreed. And then we listened to the reverend deliver his last sermon for the year. Good meat for the seasoned Christians and strong milk for the still-growing ones:

Be faithful to your spouse because only when the sanctity of marriage and family is upheld can the world be a better place.

Cast the devil from the high places and resist his temptation as Jesus resisted in the wilderness. Sometimes the Spirit will lead you to the wilderness to be tempted, the reverend had said, to test you, but you must resist, as Jesus had resisted.

And:

Your body is the temple of God Almighty, consecrated to God and to the one partner intended for you.

I’d thought back to James then, and wondered why it was so bad that we responsibly enjoyed each other’s bodies for a moment in time. Even if we’d broken up, I didn’t regret that part. But listening to the reverend, I’d begun to feel that I should have. If James and I had been intimate and we didn’t end up together, then we’d defiled each other. I didn’t think James cared much, but the more the reverend spoke, the more convinced I’d become that James and I should’ve gotten back together, especially after what we’d done together.

The reverend must have gone on for a while and Frank’s blanket had been warm and soft. I’d dozed off and somewhere in that time, I’d gotten myself in a comfortable sleeping position.

It had been this feeling of warmth that roused me from my sleep. At first, it was so good, somewhere between dreams and waking and then—

The unmistakable grip of a man’s hand around my cock registered.

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