Page 40 of In Frame
“—and then Sam was so—he’s so—he was nothing like I expected, and everything that I wanted to say yes to, and I think I like him, not just the sex, I actually like beingwithhim, but I don’t evenknowhim. I met him for the second time literally a day ago. I’m very confused.”
Colby and Jason did some more silent communing. Jason asked, “You had sex with him, you said?”
“I definitely did that.” Inarguably so. Wonderfully so. Repeatedly so.
“You said you were confused. But you did it because you wanted to, right? He asked whether you wanted to? And it was good?” Jason, Leo noticed, had a hand holding Colby’s.
He knew why Jason would be the one to ask that. Not all the details—Colby never had talked about his ex-boyfriend publicly, nor what’d happened the night that’d all finally come crashing down—but Leo had seen the difference. The Colby Kent he’d first met, back during the filming ofThe Far Cry of Guns, had been young and hopeful and eager to please, self-deprecating and anxious about getting everything right but irrepressibly bubbly. The Colby he’d met several years later at the auditions forSteadfasthad grown thinner and quieter, and flinched away from even friendly touch.
Leo had never previously wanted to hit anyone in anger, had no clue how he’d even go about it in non-filming life, and nevertheless had imagined putting his fist into the face of the man who’d done that. He would’ve tried, if Colby’d ever indicated any desire for revenge.
Everything had changed again when Jason Mirelli had gently bought cinnamon bagels and asked permission before touching Colby, on set and off, with those large callused action-hero hands.
Colby looked at Jason as if perpetually amazed that suchkindness had landed in his life. Jason looked at Colby the exact same way, only maybe with even more sunshiney awe, Leo decided.
He said, “I absolutely wanted to. He did ask. I said yes. And it was spectacular.” It had been. And he wanted to reassure Colby, and by extension Jason’s muscles. “I would like to do it more. But I do still quite like women. Or I think I still do. Should I find a friend who’d be willing to test the hypothesis? We didn’t say anything about being exclusive. Except I don’t want to have sex with anyone else at the moment, even if she is a friend. I do want to have more spectacular sex with Sam. And only Sam.AmI properly gay, then? Or is this some sort of thirty-three-year-old bisexuality crisis? Should I feel awakened or enlightened?”
“Do you?” Colby inquired.
“I don’t know. Should I have slept withyou, ages ago, to help figure it all out? Except your type is human Mount Everests and I wouldn’t’ve known what I was doing, so it likely wouldn’t’ve worked at all and I’d’ve ended up thinking I was in fact straight.”
Colby was outright laughing now.
Jason, with a hint of protectiveness but also pleasure because Colby was laughing, rumbled, “You’re still not his type. And being bisexual doesn’t have to be a crisis. I should know.”
“It feels as if I’m having one,” Leo pointed out dolefully. “Shouldn’t I at least be allowed one graceful swoon onto a fainting couch? Colby, do you own a fainting couch? If not, can I buy you one so that I can bisexually swoon onto it?”
“Hmm,” Colby said. “I’m afraid this is a bit outside my area of expertise, given that I’ve been very much attracted to only one option, ever since I first realized I appreciated large men with delicious muscles. But I can leave you in Jason’s brilliant and capable hands and go and make French toast if you’d like.”
Leo perked up. “With your brandy whipped cream?”
Colby gave him the smile that only a few people, certainly not red-carpet interviewers, got to see. “Anything for you.” Getting up, he touched Leo’s shoulder, offered a fleeting grip, a squeeze. That gesture, given in defiance of a scarred and healing past, spoke whole monologues about love, and just about shattered Leo’s heart with gladness for his friend.
To Jason, therefore, he overexaggerated pathetically, “Help me.”
“I think you’re doing okay,” Jason said. “You like him, you said. And from what you’ve told us, he seems like he’s being good to you.”
“He is. He’s very…well, he’s…experienced. But nice! Very nice. I felt…all sorts of things. Good things! I mean the things he got me to feel. Emotionally. But also with my hands. There was definite feeling of things. It’s just…I like how he felt. But I also like women. I like breasts. Theoretically I do. What if I’ve forgotten how to like breasts?”
Jason performed the most dramatic eye-roll Leo’d ever seen from a mountain. “You do know what bisexual means, right? Or we could maybe say pan, but let’s not confuse your brain more.”
Leo stuck his tongue out at Jason, flopped backwards on the marvelously comfortable sofa, grabbed a convenient throw pillow, shoved it over his face, and said, “Argh arghargh,” with great force into it.
“Don’t tease him too much!” Colby called over from the kitchen. “His brain’s clearly having a moment of difficulty. Leo, cinnamon and pear sauce all right?”
“I love you as much as your pet Hercules will let me!” Leo yelled back, still under the pillow.
“Okay, look, seriously.” Jason waited until Leo tossed the pillow aside and pushed himself up on elbows to listen, thenwent on. “There’s no secret test or entrance exam or seal of sexuality approval or whatever. If that’s what you feel, and that’s how you want to identify, then you are. And it’s okay if you don’t know right away, or if you need a while to figure it out.”
“Ugh,” Leo told him. “Why’d you have to make it sound so reasonable?”
“Because it should be.”
“All of us know it isn’t.”
“Trust me, I know.” Jason gave him a sympathetic shrug. Muscles performed a brief continental drift. Leo spared a moment of empathy for Jason’s shirtsleeves. “I knew about me back in, um, junior year of high school. I sort of assumed I was straight, I went out with girls, and if I ever had other thoughts, I didn’t think about them. If that makes sense. And then I ended up tutoring Dustin Thompson in history for a peer-mentor thing, and I just remember looking up and looking over at him and right in the middle of the Civil War I couldn’t help noticing the color of his eyes, the gold in his eyelashes, the way he grinned at me when I said something that made history make sense, and I kinda went, oh shit, y’know?”
“And you, what, asked him to the big dance and made a fairytale night of it?”
