After playing enough to have scratched the soccer itch, the four of us walked to my house. The plan was for Jordan to meet my parents and probably eat dinner with us. This was our plan; they didn’t know about any of this yet, including dinner. We also hadn’t told them about Mike and Jordan perhaps living with us while the divorce worked itself out—or at least until Jordan’s dad had decided to leave the house so his wife and Jordan and Gail, Jordan’s sister, would have a place to stay. The kicking-out had only worked for a day or two.
It wasn’t the height of summer yet but already warm, and after playing several games, we were all tired and sweaty. Showers were the first order of business.
As noted, our house was much larger than Mike’s. We needed it, of course, with a family of six instead of three. However, my parents were affluent, and a larger house than Mike’s was the result of that. My parents never used that term; they said we were comfortable. Dad was a banker, a senior loan officer, and he was hoping to move up to a higher administrative position eventually. He made a generous salary and a bonus based on the loans he was responsible for, usually a considerable sum. Mom worked, but from home. She hadn’t wanted to be away from her growing family which now included six-year-old twins. She ran her own employment agency, working on her computer, matching companies with people looking for jobs. She did well and her income added considerably to the family finances.
So we lived in a good neighborhood and had a large house. That was good because we needed the three showers we had: two were inside and one outside. The outside shower was off the rear deck and was there because our hot tub sat on the end of the deck, between the deck and the pool. Yeah, we had a pool, too. As I said, both my parents made decent money, and with four kids, they thought a pool would keep us from being inside and underfoot all the time.
House rules said we had to shower before and after using both the pool and the hot tub.
“Youngest goes last,” I said when we were all climbing the stairs to my room.
“No fair,” Jeff said, looking outraged. He had a point. He’d been our equal all day and now was being downgraded. I realized I’d made a mistake.
“Okay, you’re right, Jeff. It isn’t fair. Sorry for that. Let’s draw straws. Short one goes last.”
Which was why I didn’t get to shower till the others were done and dressed.
But there was a bonus. Jeff got the outdoor one by politely allowing the guests to use the inside bathrooms, and so he was stuck using the only one left. The bonus came because, while there was a small cubicle containing that shower, there wasn’t a roof on it, and I could look down into it from the twins’ bedroom.
Okay, look, I’m not a perv. Hey, I’ve even got a girlfriend. But every boy my age is curious, and I hadn’t seen Jeff naked for almost a year now, and I simply wondered how he was doing down there. Any brother would want to know that. Anyone who was ever a fifteen-year-old boy would understand perfectly. So yes, I peeked. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but at eleven Jeff looked very much like he had at nine and ten, ages when I’d had occasion to see him. I guessed puberty hadn’t started yet, at least not down there. Made sense; I’d been a little late getting going, too.
We weren’t all that modest a family, but when the twins reached five, Mom had told us we should start being more circumspect in how we were dressed when they were around. Accordingly, Jeff now wore a towel coming out of the bathroom after showering, which explained why I was curious.
He finished before the others, so I could wait for an inside shower or use the one by the hot tub Jeff had vacated. Easy choice. I was dirty and uncomfortable; I used the one Jeff had been in.
Halfway through, I had a thought and looked up. I saw movement at the window! I grinned. I guess Jeff must have been curious, too. Then I briefly wondered if he’d seen me up there looking down earlier.
I asked Mom if Mike and Jordan could stay for dinner. Mom looked undecided, but Dad said sure. He was barbecuing steaks on the grill outside and had plenty in the freezer; all he had to do was pull two more out and throw two more Idaho baking potatoes in the oven.
Jordan was very quiet at dinner. Mom tried to involve him, but he always answered as tersely as possible and spoke softly without meeting eyes; she caught on soon enough and stopped bothering him.
He was sitting across the table from me, and as he had his eyes on his plate most of the time, I had a better chance to study him than I’d had all day.
He’d combed his hair after washing it in the shower, so it was neater now. Still long, of course, but brushed and a little shiny. It’s rich brown color and matched his eyes.
When I could actually catch his eyes, I saw he had long eyelashes, long enough that girls would be jealous of them. His face was well-proportioned enough that I thought if he was so inclined, he could do well in TV ads featuring teens. He certainly wouldn’t break the lenses. In fact, he could be a star if the script called for a kid who evinced shyness. He had that down cold.
Mike was eating with gusto. He loved eating at our house. He’d told me they almost never had steak, and if they did, it was tough as shoe leather. His mom thought any sign of pinkness meant the meat was still raw. Dad cooked steaks either rare or medium rare, saying anything more than that, you might as well throw them to the dogs. We didn’t have dogs, so maybe that’s why he didn’t cook them that way. How he did cook them, though—well, they were delicious.
Dad asked what we’d done all day, and Mike, being Mike and enjoying twitting me whenever he could, went into a long spiel about how I got trashed by Jordan’s incredible footwork. By now, it was history, and I only felt a small twinge of annoyance hearing about my humiliation. However, I glanced at Jordan, and while he was the hero of the tale, he was distinctly uncomfortable listening to Mike’s hyperbolic account.
He’d put salt and butter on his baked potato and avoided the sour cream and chives and bacon bits. As Mike rattled on, he was playing with his potato skin, scraping more potato out, fussing with it with his fork, and appearing to be totally absent from what was being said, deep into his own mind. But he was listening, and being fidgety with his potato showed how self-conscious he was feeling.
As I said earlier, I don’t have much patience with or sympathy for shy kids. My feeling is, just get over it and get on with your life. But Jordan was looking so uncomfortable I felt the need to do something. As Mike took another bite of steak, I broke in, saying, “Changing the subject, wasn’t there a movie you wanted to see, Mike? Maybe the four of us could go.”
Mike swallowed and said, “Six. Maryann and Jessica would kill us if we left them out. I’ll call Maryann after dinner and see what’s up with them.”
After that, the twins felt it was their turn to dominate the conversation for a time, and Jordan’s exploits were forgotten. I’d swear he looked up at me and nodded slightly, and his eyes showed something. Could he have known I’d changed the subject on purpose and what that purpose was? Seemed unlikely.
I wasn’t happy about it, but I ended up on a date that evening, even though there were six of us. Jordan seemed happy enough pairing up with Jeff, and Jeff was ecstatic. He was hanging with the big kids going out after dinner. That for him was something like being in heaven. So often, he was left alone with the twins when I went out in the evening, and there are only so many tea parties a boy of eleven can stand. Mom wouldn’t permit anyone to be in any way disparaging of the girls. They in turn ate up all the attention they could get from Jeff and me. Unfortunately, he usually got the brunt of it. Tonight was different, and his spirits were high.
Of course, how it worked was Jordan and Jeff were more or less forced together as Jessica hung on me like a leech, and Maryann, while less obvious, stayed pretty close to Mike. I always thought there was a possibility those two might stay together for the long run, although Mike was smart enough to go to college even if his parents couldn’t afford it. I was hoping he could find a way, somehow. If he did, the odds were—so long, Maryann. Mike was a good-looking boy and hot-blooded, and I couldn’t imagine him going through college celibate. Which in a way was too bad as I really liked Maryann. She was pretty and low-key but with a determined personality, and she wasn’t all clingy like Jessica.
We went to the latest Spider-Man movie. The girls weren’t happy about that, but we were four boys and they were two girls; they got outvoted in a blind vote. No way were Mike and I letting the girls see who voted for what, but with a vote of four to two, it couldn’t be kept secret. I kind of liked that, though. For a time, Jessica was sulking and not all over me.
In the theater, Mike and I got big popcorns and drinks so the girls would be happy. I sat next to Jessica who sat next to Maryann who sat next to Mike. Jeff was going to sit next to me but I saw Jordan whispering to him, and they went and sat by themselves somewhere else in the theater.
It was a weekday night and so not crowded at all. Almost everyone there was a teenager. Several couples were there, but there were also a lot of groups of young boys. I could just imagine parents being delighted to get them out of the house for a spell.
The movie was so-so. What was annoying was Jessica found it so so-so that she spent time either whispering to Maryann in her less-than-discreet whisper or cuddling with me.
Hey, I’m a teenage boy. I like making out as much as anyone. The thing is, though, doing it in a crowded theater doesn’t really appeal to me. What I mean is, if and when you get hard, it can be terribly embarrassing, especially if Maryann glances over into your lap. Maryann was a lively girl with an over-developed sense of humor, and looking over, her eyes focusing on my crotch, knowing how embarrassed I’d be, was something she liked doing.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been embarrassed. Both girls knew boys got hard; they had Sex Ed, too. So, I got hard; I was supposed to get hard. Why be embarrassed? I think it was because, at my age, a boy wants to be super cool. To be totally in control. To be able to manage his emotions. Being obviously hard, exuberantly hard, wasn’t showing any control over anything. Getting hard showed the girl he was with that she was in charge of his emotional well-being. It wasn’t him! No young boy wants that.
My not getting hard would have pissed off Jessica. But that wasn’t a major worry. She knew just where to put her hand and just how to move it so that not getting hard wasn’t in the picture.
She liked to go too far, though. She wanted to pull it out! She thought that would be daring and exciting. For her, probably, but not for me. I wasn’t an exhibitionist. Not at all. I was probably an anti-exhibitionist. Thoughts of the preferred way of killing her ran through my mind while I was busily protecting my modesty.
Somehow, we got through the picture with my virtue and clothing intact. Jessica wanted to go somewhere where I’d be more willing to let her have her way with me. Mike wasn’t against the idea. He’d told me earlier that Maryann had been telling him that her friends were planning to surprise their boyfriends with oral sex sometime during the summer, and both she and Jessica had discussed it. They didn’t want to be left behind their friends. If their group at school was giving blowjobs, well, so should they. She’d told Mike she’d asked the girls who’d already done it whether it had been icky or had it been fun for them. She said nothing she’d heard had put them off and that Jessica and she were going to go for it when the opportunity arose. She said she was eager to do it with Mike.
Mike had been excited about it ever since he’d heard this from Maryann. He was pretty sure tonight would be the night if we had a place to go, and even if the four of us were together for the event, as long as we weren’t on top of each other and had at least a modicum of privacy, that wouldn’t make any difference to him at all. He was as eager for this as any boy our age would be.
Okay, earlier, I said Mike and I didn’t discuss sex much. I might have misled a little. Mike didn’t mind at all discussing his sex life, which so far had been about as nonexistent as mine. He knew the subject was uncomfortable for me to talk about, but for him to talk, that was no problem at all. So I knew what Jessica had in mind; she was on the same page as Maryann. They wanted to do this. This was to be the night.
So, yeah. Sounds great, huh? Well, not to me. There were several reasons why not, some of them only vaguely formed and not wholly thought through, but I didn’t want to do it for the first time with others listening in or, heaven forbid, watching. I also didn’t want to do it if much of the reason why Jessica would be doing it would be to strengthen the bond the two of us had. And, though I wasn’t sure why, I had the thought that Jessica just wasn’t the one with whom I wanted to take this step. Who that person was, I had no idea. But I was pretty sure it wasn’t Jessica. I didn’t have deep feelings for her, and for something this intimate, I thought I should have those. Was that me being weird? Probably. But it was what I felt.
In fact, during the movie, during the time she was handling the goods, I was getting more and more sure that what I wanted to do was break up with her. That thought was comforting to me for some reason. I didn’t know why, but that she was as aggressive as she was had to be part of it. For the time she’d had her hand inside my pants, skin to skin, I was thinking about breaking up! Yeah, right! Who’d think that way? But I had. Thinking of breaking up just gave me a feeling of relief. And now I knew she was thinking about giving me a blowjob. I couldn’t let her do that while thinking about breaking up, could I? What kind of person would do that? Only a very self-centered jerk.
Okay, so maybe that was going overboard. I knew what kind of person would do that. Ninety percent of boys my age would do that. That was who. They couldn’t all be jerks, could they? I wasn’t sure about much of anything right then. I was tempted to throw all this thinking out the window and just go along with what Mike wanted, Maryann wanted, and Jessica wanted. And, truthfully, my body wanted. It was just my damn brain that was rebelling. Or maybe my brain and my morals. I was just mixed up and feeling damned uncertain of anything.
And then I was saved the torment.
Jeff and Jordan joined us while we were leaving the theater, and Jeff said, “I’ve invited Jordan to spend the night with us. He’d be sleeping on the couch at Mike’s house and we’ve got room.” Then he looked at me, and his eyes had a defiant glint in them. He knew I wanted to get to know Jordan better before he stayed with us. But right then, I just grinned, which confused the hell out of Jeff. He was expecting a fight. He wasn’t going to get one from me. Too bad, Jessica!
We all stood together in a loose group outside the theater, waiting for Dad to pick us up in our SUV. What we usually did after dates was go back to our place, and we kids would hang in our basement. My dad had told me we’d be left alone in there as long as the four of us were together. He said he didn’t expect things would go too far that way, and he didn’t have any objections to us learning firsthand about light sexual foreplay. He did think Mike and I were too young to be going all the way with any girls yet, but moving in that direction was something all boys needed to do.
I had a very understanding father. I didn’t, however, know his feelings on blowjobs. That’s not something that’s easy to discuss with a parent. Even thinking about how to start that conversation made my head hurt. I thought I could make a pretty good guess, though, that he would include that on his list of things that he didn’t consider a group activity.
I pulled Jessica apart from the others. “I have some bad news. Here you’ve got me hot and bothered and eager for tonight and whatever would happen, and I just found out it isn’t going to happen. Mike and Jordan are going to stay at our house tonight, and we need to go straighten out the sleeping arrangements now while my parents are still up. Real bummer, I know, but what can I do? Jeff just told me about this. He arranged it with Jordan. Now I have to break it to Mike? Raincheck?”
Mike wasn’t happy, either, when I called him aside and told him Jeff had invited Jordan for a sleepover, and that meant he should be there, too, and I’d just told Jessica the evening’s plans were now on hold. He wasn’t happy, but when I said if this worked out well tonight, I’d then be able to support his idea of making this a long-term thing with him and Jordan at our house. That calmed him and his libido down a bit.
When Dad drove up and we were getting in the car, I told him he was to drop the girls off and take the rest of us home. I managed to do this outside of the girls’ hearing. No reason to make Jessica any madder or letting her be even angrier at me during the ride in an enclosed vehicle.
We had to figure out where everyone was going to sleep. Mike and I had had many sleepovers, and until we got too big for my bed, we’d slept together. A couple of years ago, it began to be a little crowded, and I think Mike was getting tired of waking up occasionally with a pointy object impaling him in the back. My mom had bought a twin-sized mattress, and we kept it under my bed to pull out whenever he slept over now.
So, the easiest thing would be for him to sleep in my room and Jordan to sleep in Jeff’s. I could tell while discussing this with the other three that Jeff was all for it. I’d been sneakily watching Jeff; it appeared to me I was no longer his hero—or at least not his only one. He’d played soccer with Jordan, eaten dinner with him, sat with him at the movies, and I guessed Jordan had been very friendly with him. It doesn’t take all that much friendly attention from a kid a few years older for an eleven-year-old to idolize him. It looked to me like that was what was going on now.
Jeff said, “You won’t even have to sleep on the floor, Jordan. There’s plenty of room in my bed. Mike and David shared his bed when they were my age. It won’t be crowded at all.”
Jordan didn’t seem delighted by the idea, but Jeff was so happy that I could see Jordan holding his objections in and not letting Jeff see them.
It was still early enough to hold off going to bed for another hour or so. I asked if anyone wanted ice cream—a silly question to guys our age. I made everyone sundaes with chocolate syrup, peanuts, whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top. After that, we played some doubles ping pong. I’m pretty decent at that because we’ve had the table since I was 8 and I’d played with my dad a lot. Jeff wasn’t bad, but just his size made him not as good as Mike and Jordan, so I teamed up with Jeff, and the partnerships were not that badly matched. We had a lot of fun.
We went upstairs. Mike and Jeff went up first because Jordan grabbed my arm and held me back.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“Okay. Upstairs?”
“No, here, alone.” He wasn’t being so shy now. “Uh, look, I don’t quite know how to do this other than just say it. I’m gay. I can’t sleep in bed with Jeff without you knowing that—so you can prevent it if you want. No, wait; let me finish before you say anything.”
It was like I was seeing a different Jordan. This was the boldest I’d seen him. He was looking directly at me, no eye-dropping at all. He wasn’t speaking under his breath, either. There was a no-nonsense tone he was using, and that alone had me doing what he asked.
He eased up a little, but only a little. “Look, David, I’m not a pervert or a sex fiend or molester or anything like that. I’ve never had any gay encounters with anyone. But I’m gay. I know that. No one else does, and I don’t want them to. I’m too shy to approach anyone, and so I haven’t been active with anyone. Now, as for Jeff, he’s a great kid. I wish I had a younger brother. You’re so lucky. But the thing is, I’m not a bit sexually attracted to him. Or any kid that age. I get turned on by boys my age or slightly older. No one else.
“I’d never do anything to hurt Jeff. And I don’t want him knowing I’m gay. It would make things awkward. But I had to tell you this. If you don’t want me to sleep in his bed, I understand. You have to trust me with him, and you don’t know me at all. All you know is that I’m a better midfielder than you are.”
“HEY!”
He laughed. “Sorry. Had to ease the tension,” he said, and then he did his thing again: he blushed and dropped his eyes. I guess making a joke took about all the courage he had; now, he had nothing left.
Wow! What was I supposed to do? We were still in the basement, and I sat down. I had to think.
He was right; I didn’t know him, didn’t know if I could trust him. But he was wrong in saying I didn’t know him at all. I knew him a little. He’d stopped to tell me this when he hadn’t had to. There was an honesty there that I could recognize.
As shy as he was, I’m sure he didn’t want anyone to know he was gay. Teasing would be something he’d have a hard time dealing with, and in high school, even a good school, there are frequently a few real jerks. There can be some teasing or bullying gay kids. Some of it’s meant playfully, but some isn’t. Just laughing it off or ignoring it—Jordan would have a problem with that.
So, he didn’t want it known he was gay but he still told me, and he knew less about me than I did about him. He didn’t know how I’d handle this piece of unexpected info. He hadn’t even told me not to tell Mike. He was going to trust me not to out him and if, instead, I did that, he knew he’d have to find some way to live with it.
What should I do? Well, should I trust him not to do anything with Jeff? Instinctively, I thought I could. Practically, if he did do anything with Jeff, we’d find out, and if Jordan didn’t want to be outed, that in itself would prevent him from doing anything.
But I realized I didn’t need that extra knowledge to make a decision.
I stood back up. Jordan was standing where he’d been, just looking at me, his face blank.
“I trust you, Jordan. You’re right, I don’t know you, but still, I trust you. Just be aware, Jeff isn’t the most inanimate sleeper in the world. At least he wasn’t when we slept together in the same room and he’d have nightmares. I’d take him into my bed, and, man, the bruises I’d have in the morning! So I have more worries about him abusing you than you having your filthy way with him.”
I grinned at him. I saw him take a deep breath, then another. Then he shocked me by taking a long step forward and giving me a big hug.
It was quick, and then he stepped back. “You’re the first person I’ve ever told. If everyone accepts it as well as you just did, maybe I can stop living in the shadows so much. Well, no, I can’t, but thank you, David.”
I nodded and we walked upstairs. I was still getting used to the thought that I’d just had a first, as well: the first time I’d been hugged by a gay boy. And I hadn’t minded. It had just felt like a hug, and it had felt nice.