I was already halfway into the backseat when I awkwardly realized my open fly, the flaccid dick that hung out from it, and the obvious cumstains that were drying all over the front of my jeans. At the same time, it occurred to me that I should’ve rolled the driver’s seat forwards into its original position to make legroom in the back. My momentary disorientation must’ve shown, because Brandon chuckled.

            “It’s okay... We can squeeze,” he said with a laugh in his voice as he reached out and took my hand, pulling me towards him. “And that’s a good look for you, by the way.”

            His charm was intoxicating.

            The air was cool in the back of the car as I sat not knowing what to do or say. He had pulled me into the space right beside him, which still left almost half the backseat empty. We were seated too close—his shoulders pressed between mine and the door, his thigh distractingly bare against my jeans. As dark as it was, looking down into our laps I could still make out the outlines of both our soft penises. The sheen of moisture on them was catching at the murky light that seemed to want to follow us into the backseat; and the inadvertent poetry of that thought saddened me. It felt like a jarring and uninvited truth… We were running from the light. We were stealing the precious hours between dusk and the dawn that would surely come. We had left the steering wheel to take the backseat for a change, where we could be accommodated for awhile without pretending or having to be in control, where we could enjoy this strange and wonderful thing happening between us.

            Was I imagining things again? I mean, he did say that he had enjoyed it, right? He did pull me into the backseat with him… Or is that the only place where I belonged for him? In the backseat… secondary and to be pushed aside once morning rolled us back into L.A.’s bright lights? Was I fooling myself to even believe that I could be ‘secondary’? Wasn’t there already that weird shifting dynamic going on between Illyas and this boy’s wife? Where did I fit in with all of that? Was this it? In a corner of the backseat where this beautiful boy could slip into and join me whenever he…

I realized there wasn’t a thing at all that I had to possibly offer him. So what were we doing then?

             My lungs drew in a breath of gratitude when Brandon disrupted my spiraling confusion, when he placed his hand over mine on my knee. His touch was warm, our skins both clammy even in the coolness of the backseat. His fingers were stroking gently over the ridges of my knuckles, tracing out the lengths of my fingers, even pressing against the tips of my fingers and letting my fingernails drag and dig into his skin.

            “Ever feel like you wanna’ just… scrape off your fingerprints? Like… to lose yourself from the world?”

            The events of the entire evening were suffocating in the stillness of the car. My jaw ached from having been unconsciously clenched since I had fallen into the backseat beside this boy.

            “Sometimes I wanna’… hold onto things… you know? Like I wanna’… scratch someone a mark onto my identity…” Brandon dug my fingernails across his palm. “Onto who I am and who I’m becoming. Sometimes it’s who I’ve been that makes me…”

            He chuckled and released my hand.

            “Sorry… I’m a… I’m a bit of a nostalgic drinker… Which reminds me…”

            He got off his dimpled butt—which was still bare, though he seemed to not notice or give much of a damn—and peered into the passenger seat in front of him. Almost falling into the front seat, he leaned his entire body forwards and over my knees, trying to reach for the bottle of tequila that was unmoved near the retracted clutch of the car’s stick-shift. The position he was in brought his perfectly-formed ass nearly to the level of my eye, and the way he looked—bare-bottomed but still with his translucent shirt on, his skin visible through the thin material that clung to him wetly, his turquoise tie long-undone though even now it remained hung around his neck like that seamen’s myth of the albatross… I turned away. It felt… wrong… to watch him like that. I didn’t want to… see him in that way. It made me think too much of Illyas. I refused to let this boy be a piece of ass to me. I also refused to believe that he was more than that to Illyas. I needed them both—the way I imagined them each to be—too much.

            “Tequila!” he hollered, falling loudly back into the seat.

The sound of his damp skin hitting the leather and the way it resounded in my mind made me feel guilty. Though I wasn’t sure exactly why. I wracked my mind for something to say to ease the tension I felt wallowing in my throat.

“I thought we were done with all the questions…” The boy kept reading my mind.

“Sorry… but…” I chuckled at the silly question I felt myself about to ask. “Do you… Are you… openly… you know…”

“I’m not gay. At least that’s what I’ve told the press… And it’s true to a certain extent, I guess. Plus, once I got married, it seems no one’s interested in who I share my bed with anymore. Which is definitely a plus, ‘cuz it’s hard to come up with coy answers after thirty interviewers all asking the same damn thing.”

“Wouldn’t it be easier to just… come out and say it though?” I realized I was asking the boy for advice. For some reason, it felt too personal to me; and I wished the boy didn’t elicit the kind of spontaneous congestion between my thoughts and my voicebox—that he did so effortlessly with just his presence.

It was becoming a ritual; he again turned from his bottle of tequila and looked at me… through me… He understood me as if I were an open book to the inquisition of his eyes and his already-knowing sort of perception. When he didn’t answer my question, it slowly became clear to me that I was asking for more than an opinion, more than the advice even. The boy had read all the secret meanings in it—in me—before I had meant them. For a moment it felt like I was sitting with the Oracle from The Matrix, and it gave me a nervous smile.

The mechanical buzz of the window being wound down unsettled me even more.

“Calm down, love... I just need a cigarette. You got one?”

Cold air blew in from the open window. I pulled out the crushed pack from my pocket and unthinkingly handed him a crooked, almost-flattened stick. He just chuckled and took it, putting it to his lips and then looking at me with a raised eyebrow.

“So… You got a light?” His tone was more sarcastic than his expression. I was so in love.

I fumbled to find my lighter in my pockets.

“Take it easy, babe… You need to relax a little, y’know that?”

He passed me the bottle of tequila—which I took with both hands to then stare at stupidly.

“For the love of… Gimme’ that…” He snatched the bottle back from my hands. “Would you get out the light first, if it’s not too much trouble, that is…”

He was shaking his head with a sigh, a smile kept on the corners of his lips, to the side of the cigarette that hung loosely from his lips. I grinned a shy apology then managed to find my lighter. Cupping one palm over it, I brought the flame to the end of his cigarette, the soft orange glow casting a dance of light and shadows onto his face. For a moment, he looked like a child in a room with the lights switched off, squinting at a birthday cake with a dozen candles flickering in front of him.

A soft tap of his finger on my hand blew the candles out. Blinking, I moved my quivering hands from his face, then couldn’t take my eyes off the trail of smoke that thinly curled from his lips. Brandon took another long drag and blew the smoke out the window. It seemed to mingle momentarily with the mist outside, only to be caught by a breeze to then disappear.

“The guys in the band… They know about my… Well, they don’t know about… See, I had a bit of an affair with a friend of my drummer, way back when we first started getting together to play music… It wasn’t… kinky or anything… So yeah, the band knows I like dick. And that’s about all they know. In fact… though I shouldn’t be saying this ‘cuz it involves other people… but… my guitarist Dave and I… Well once he found out about my little thing with Rod… We’ve kinda’… messed around a bit… I mean… We do get majorly trashed on the road sometimes…”

Brandon laughed, then took another puff of his cigarette.

“I am so off-topic… I forgot the point…” Laughing again, he handed me the cigarette; I took a drag and returned it. “What I wanted to say was… The guys and our management… We just… They don’t think the public is really ready to understand… And I agree. I mean… It’s a hard bit to digest, you know? Being gay isn’t like… It’s not all there is to it, you know? I mean… Fuck, I’m a Mormon rockstar, and even that is hard to fit down people’s throats, you know what I mean? I don’t think I could… sit through an interview and have to… explain how I can be married and all… when I bring guys back to my hotel room after a good show… I mean, it’s a little… trying… to have to play it coy with the press and the lyrics…”

I watched the cigarette butt flick out the window

“Well it all really works out great. It lets me do what I love and still have the cash for a plane ticket to be with Illyas whenever I want…”

The sound of Illyas’ name seemed to cast a discomforting echo to the sudden impounding of silence. After a moment Brandon glanced at me, but for what seemed like the first time all evening, I managed to avoid his eyes.

“Sorry…”

“It’s fine… Please go on…” I wanted Brandon’s voice to deafen me to the sound of that name. I didn’t want Illyas in the car with us. If I could have this boy for one night… to myself… But I knew before I could finish the thought that whatever I was about to think… It would always be a lie I’d have to tell myself.

“Well…” Brandon swallowed down more tequila. “I guess I’ve just never felt like I needed to come out to the world. I don’t feel gay… Whatever I need sexually, or… whoever I find myself attracted to… It’s my own thing… It’s personal, you know?”

I nodded, then gave in.

            “Illyas is okay with… the other guys…?”

            Brandon laughed, almost snorting out his mouthful of tequila. “Illyas? Let’s not even go there… We have a fucked up understanding between the two of us…”

            The boy’s jaw suddenly clenched with his last word. It seemed like every time Illyas’ name was mentioned, there were no masks left to hide behind. I saw it in the confliction on Brandon’s face—the way his brows furrowed slightly, the fine lines that creased into his forehead, the way his eyes fought between a mist and a downpour as they avoided mine… His lips were pursed defiantly again, and I remembered the look from the courtyard.

            “I don’t want to go back there tonight.”

            The window started winding up, the sound again sending a shudder through me. Brandon twisted the cap back onto the bottle of tequila and slipped it into passenger seat. Then he reached for my lap. His fingers had agendas I wasn’t privy to, but before I had a chance to wonder, they had tucked my dick into my boxers. It felt strange to feel his hands on me so casually, as though touching another person there was hardly unconventional in the least bit.

            “Don’t want you to catch a cold,” he smiled, though his eyes were still lowered.

            His fingers crawled up to my waist, hooking themselves into my jeans and then tugging. Curiosity tinged with my susceptibility to him, and I lifted myself for him to pull the denim down. He moved without a hint of urgency or where he was going. Leaving my boxers on, he lowered my jeans to my ankles, pulled off my loafers, then finally shook the trousers off my feet. Bending down at his waist, he reached for his pants that were scrunched at his own ankles.

            He was moving with such calm that I was given a moment to panic. Had he just gotten me comfortable before he pulled up his own pants to leave? Had I asked for too much, with my directionless questions, or with my wish for a night with him?

            “To think that I got these pressed just for you,” he mumbled—I could see the smile on his cheeks as he tugged at his pinstriped shackles. And when he kicked them off, we both seemed to simultaneously exhale a sigh of relief.

            A moment was let pass before he raised his head, his forearms still resting on his knees from when he had bent to remove his pants. He turned and looked at me, but his eyes were a bloodshot stare. I knew the swollen veins were flammable with all the tequila that was running through them, but they were too glossed over—like flooding riverbanks—to catch a spark tonight. But I still felt the fevered burn. His eyes were like a hot iron brand as they bore into me.

            Sitting up suddenly and grabbing my collar, he pulled my torso closer towards him, then turned his back to the door and slid up against it. I let myself be led by his eyes—my collar immaterial—towards the promise of a horizon where the sun would never again peek out from. And he led me on top of him, my palms moving to press on the leather at both sides of his hips to bear my weight as his legs lifted onto the seat. His legs slid beneath mine and directed them to outstretch and tangle with his. When he released my collar, he put both hands on my cheeks, stroking them with his thumbs. His palms pulled my ears back when his fingers reached for the back of my head, his hands firmly cradling my face in front of his. There was such silence in his eyes, as if that song in him had been muted or taken off the radio-waves.

            I couldn’t help myself and leaned my face towards his lips, but he dropped his eyes and lowered his chin.

            “Just lie down with me?” His whisper was hoarse.

            It wasn’t a question, but still I nodded. He moved his hands to my shoulders and urged me onto my side while making space on the seat for me to lie stretched beside him. Then he released my shoulders and scooted himself away from the door, lying back onto the seat. The seat was too narrow for the both of us, but we managed to have our bodies angled in a way that let us both be reclined, with our bodies closely pressed. My head was slightly lower than his, and I nuzzled my face into his neck. His skin had a cold dampness over it, but beneath that was a warmth I could hear pulsing. I felt a comfort I had never imagined possible. All my thoughts had been abandoned much earlier, but I didn’t need to think twice before being certain of what I knew in that moment.

            His lips were soft and affectionate against my forehead when he kissed me. And when he left them pressed there, his nose grazing my skin as he breathed... It made me shudder though I didn’t want to move; it made me tilt my neck back, his lips dragging over my temple and onto my cheekbone, where he kissed me again. My eyes were closed but fluttered open when I felt his finger on my chin.

            Our parted lips pressed without agenda. It wasn’t a kiss as much as it was just the holding of our lips together, because neither of us moved in the slightest as a blanket of stars blindfolded and blinded me under my eyelids. And when he finally did pull back, he did it so slowly that I had no chance to feel the pang of its loss.

            “Goodnight, love.”

            With his body angled to face mine, he scooted lower on the seat, his legs squeezing among the tangle of our lower limbs to get comfortable. Our skins there were bare, warm, folded and wrapped over each other's.

            “Goodnight, Brandon,” I whispered as he face pressed into my bicep, his arm creeping across my chest. My arm between our bodies was for the most part immobilized by the way he was pressed against me, but I bent my wrist in an awkward twist to place my hand on the soft skin of his thigh.

            What was I doing? At that moment, I didn’t want to know. Like the boy had said, ‘I don’t want to go back there tonight.’

            The twisting dull agony that had kept making its recurring appearance throughout the evening was being lulled away by his gentle breathing into my arm. And as the tormenting reminder of reality fell peacefully asleep, I too suddenly felt the weight of my heavy eyelids. I was entirely spent. But still, something in me fought back. Not yet, I kept telling myself. Please don’t fall asleep yet. I looked up; the ceiling of the car was reassuring with its felt-covered limits. Then I tilted my neck back to be punished by the view of the distant night-sky—blinking with its dotted stars—through the condensation accumulating on the window.
 

 

            I couldn’t tell where I was, the backseat of my SUV gradually crowding into view... I had never spent a night in the back of a car before. Rolling off my side, I sat up and yawned. My mind cleared a little despite the exhaustion I felt numbly through all my limbs. I yawned again. I was alone. And that realization churned everything from the night before forwards into my memory.

            Brandon. His name seemed to explain it all.

            I slipped my feet into my loafers, and the nagging sense of something awry returned. I looked around for my jacket... Saw it crumpled in a bundle on the floor beneath the glove compartment.

            I opened the car door and got out.

            It was cold, misty... It was hard to make out more than ten yards in the fog. My breaths were forming more little clouds in the air. I opened the passenger-side door and retrieved my jacket, throwing it quickly on. I looked around. I was alone.

            My shoulders sank before my fists clenched knots in my gut. Had I expected more?

            Yeah... I had.

            I returned to the backseat to find my jeans, and I put them on, standing in the cold. Then I went around the car to the front seat. I opened the door, but couldn’t make myself get inside. I had expected more.

            “You’re not going to leave me here, are you?”

            I spun around.

            “Oh, don’t look so frazzled, Matthew. I’m not going anywhere... I’m not really fit to, now am I?” The boy seated on the ground a couple of yards from me punctuated his sentence by kicking the empty tequila bottle at his feet.

            There was a fog that seemed to encircle him. He wasn’t looking at me. He had both arms around a propped knee, his other leg outstretched, limp where it was left after he had kicked the bottle. His head was hung down; the oversized button-down shirt he had on pulling taut against a side of his upper frame as a chill breezed past. Even in my jacket, I shivered. Brandon didn’t seem to flinch.

            “Hope you don’t mind. Found the shirt in your trunk... in your little... emergency-escape bag...” No wonder that the shirt had seemed familiar.

            His casual tone was returning. “You never did tell me what you were running from.”

            I looked around me for the first time. Through the mist of the early morning, I saw the bluff we were on. Everything was clouded in gray. I could hear the waves sounding from below the drop. I didn’t dare look over it.

            “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

            Familiar words. I turned my eyes back onto him; he was wiping dew from his face with the sleeves of my shirt, raising his shoulders to do so and rubbing his face into his biceps.

            “There’s a beach down there... God, you hear the quiet here? Nothing and no one to bother with... I could stay here forever.”

            I nodded to the sound of his voice, the salty mist getting into my eyes and stinging.

            “But I’m hungry. You wanna’ go get some breakfast?” He was already standing up. “It’s fucking freezing out here.”
 

 

            The hours spent on the drive back to L.A. seemed like the best time of my life. There are no memories I can recall quite as vividly, quite as fondly. We had breakfast at a diner, seated at a booth across from each other and surrounded by truckers and the aromas of their coffee, bacon and eggs. We laughed when the waitress with the grease-stained apron gave Brandon a funny look when he ordered a Coke and asked if they could put in a shot of tequila. ‘Guess it’s not Vegas!’ he had exclaimed with his arms in the air once she had left with our order. We shared a short-stack of pancakes that he doused in syrup; he kept insisting that I tried dipping my fork into his glass of Coke before I took each bite. When we left, he blew a kiss to the waitress and bowed to the big beefy truckers who had turned to watch his antics. We left an extra-large tip.

            At a gas station he bought more candy bars than we could’ve possibly eaten. We only had a couple of hours. But Brandon was charmingly intoxicated and wasn’t caring.

            We had driven through a small town, looking for a clothing store. When we found one, Brandon ran in and tried on twelve different shirts—all of which fit too tightly. I put them all on my card. We also went into the same Warehouse Music where I had bought his band’s album; he made me pick up something by a band called The Strokes and the latest New Order album I hadn’t known was released. He had a comment for everything; he would say the funniest things and always with a straight face. And when he did smile or laugh—over cd racks and shirts he held up in front of him—it always threw me off-balance.

            I hadn’t wanted to ever return to L.A.

            “You can drop me off anywhere... Just someplace I can get a cab to where I gotta’ be...”

            “Where do you have to be?”

            “A dry-cleaners to get these pants starched again.” He flashed that smile of his and I almost drove through the red glare of a stoplight.

            “No, really. I’ll drop you off. It’s no problem... Where do you have to be?”

            He didn’t reply immediately, and I realized I knew the answer.

            “Matthew... I had a really great time...”

            “It’s okay... You don’t have to... explain, or anything...” I had known all along what it would come to.

            “No, listen... Pull over, I wanna’ talk to you.”

            I kept driving and he kept quiet. Before I knew it, I had turned onto a road I knew by heart, a heart that choked me when I pulled up the driveway. I stopped at the front gate, gripping at the steering wheel and staring straight ahead at the cast-iron bars and the well-kept landscaping of the hedges and bushes behind them.

            “Matthew, listen...”

            I wasn’t listening. But I heard the car door and the shuffle of clothes in the seat as Brandon climbed out of the car. He had barely shut the door behind him before I was backing up off that driveway and ready to speed away. At the first intersection on the road though, my cellphone buzzed. It was a message from the boy that read: “my record. track 7. then throw the cd away. and go back to what you were running from.”

 

            I listened to nothing but that song on repeat for weeks after.