“Didn’t have to look far. Apparently you’re dad’s a local celebrity. I saw enough.”
“Which is why you tried to cancel our date,” I surmised.
“Desmond Glass’s boy fucking a male whore.”
I attempted to smile at him. “Are we fucking?” He just scrutinized me with dull eyes. I was trying to read him, but he had this magical, well-rehearsed way of locking out every emotion. “Okay, here it is. My dad’s an asshole. I spent most of my life pissing him off or pleasing him in one way or another. That stopped a long time ago. I also have ambition which makes walking around with a male whore something of a contradiction. I’m doing it anyway. Because I can’t seem to stay away from you. I’ve fucking tried. And I don’t want to want you. That’s just not how things work I guess.” The quiet that followed had me swallowing a lump the size of a coconut.
“I’m hungry.” Was that his way of forgiving me? Did I even need forgiveness for anything?
“For my cock?”
“Unless you’re prepared to have it fried and dipped in marinara before I chew it, I’d think of something else.”
“That sounds painful.”
“Then I guess you’d better feed me real food, Detective.”
“I’ll hazard a guess that you want Italian.”
Lips. That is all.
Peter ate enthusiastically but with a delicacy that surprised me. Every bite he placed carefully in his gorgeous mouth, licking off any remaining sauce from his lips. I barely ate my food because I fixated on the ritual before me. My mouth watered, but not for food.
“When are you going to let me kiss you?” I finally asked.
He sucked at his fork and then set it down. That was on purpose, right? That fucking had to be on purpose. “When you beg for my dick in your ass,” he said a little too loudly.
Plates clinked and a few gasps resounded in the distance, and I blushed. “That was on purpose,” I accused and smiled apologetically at the old couple gaping at us from a nearby table. Change of subject was in order. “Anyway, how’d you know I was a closet case?”
Wiping his lips with his napkin, he set it beside his cleaned plate. Both his brows and lips were lifted in amusement. “Have you ever done anything with a guy?” I shook my head and sat back.
“Guys don’t need to woo or date,” he said. “Most, anyway. We fuck. We suck. We sometimes become boyfriends afterwards. There’s no courtship. Not always true, but for the most part.” He shrugged.
“You don’t think that you have a jaded opinion because you were— of what you…did?”
“Because I was a whore you mean? It’s not that much of a stigma in the gay community, Austin.” I longed to be the glass of water he lifted to his mouth.
“You seemed offended when I called you one,” I pointed out.
“Because,” he stared through the couple at the next table, then back to me. “Because of the way you said it.”
“Maybe I just don’t like thinking of you with other men.”
“Or maybe you classify hustlers as worthless,” he threw back.
“Maybe I did,” I agreed, emphasizing the past tense.
He smiled and took another sip of water, standing up as he did so. “I have to go take a piss,” he announced. The web of his hand blurrily displayed through the glass as he set it down. I locked on to the blue stain—that strange tattoo. Same place, almost the same design.
The first one I had seen was a little less defined, and reminded me of amateur tattoos done with a Bic pen and mom’s sewing needle. Peter’s tat was more refined than Jesse’s, but they were identical in lettering: “ISS”. With the s’s overlapping.
A continuous mental image looped in my mind: Jesse sliding his money onto the table the last time I saw him. I didn’t pay much attention to the tattoo back then, just thought it was weird. I did remember pondering where he got twenty bucks to toss down, so the moment stood out. Dave and I had made a pact. After months of seeing the money we gave him funneled up his nose or down his throat, we decided: no cash. We’d pay his rent, food, anything else, but nothing he could use to buy drugs or booze. Now I knew what we had done—what we had forced Jesse into. He had been whoring himself out. Ten years later, I finally understood a little of what our friend had been reduced to, and maybe, why he gave up.
As Peter walked away, I could almost feel the hiss in my chest releasing thirteen years of oppression. A dawning of understanding washed over me. Peter was the Jesse that could have been. And some piece of me believed the universe gave me a do-over.