Elroy always paid for everything ahead of time without asking questions. They never progressed beyond calling each other by their first names and neither one of them went into details about their personal lives. When they were together in a hotel room, they removed their clothes and jumped into bed. They fucked so hard and so often Elroy had bruises on the back of his legs for days at a time. After that one night in Provincetown, they never spent a full night together again. When they were finished doing all the things they did to each other, they got dressed and went in different directions.
While Elroy spent his time bending over for Ricky, Kyle started dating Lev Godwin on a regular basis. Elroy and Kyle spent a good deal of time together in their room and Elroy made a point of following Kyle's every move-without letting him know this. He would check Kyle's cell phone while he was showering to see his incoming, outgoing, and missed calls. He read his text messages, he followed his Twitter feed, and he even searched Kyle's desk one night to find out his passwords and usernames for e-mail and social media. He stalked him without a glimmer of guilt. He logged into Kyle's Facebook account and read all his private messages to see if Lev Godwin had sent him anything intimate.
To his surprise, he found nothing other than sugary-sweet comments and private messages about math class or the latest movie they'd seen. In fact, Kyle's private messages would have been nonexistent if dorky Lev Godwin hadn't sent messages about math or movies. The text messages Kyle shared with Lev were more of the same dull content. Elroy even checked Kyle's photos to see if he'd taken pictures of his dick and found nothing.
This was all in direct contrast to the way Elroy treated social media, e-mail, and texting. He'd "sexted" so many men he'd lost track of who they were. Sometimes he sent photos of his dick to virtual strangers he'd met online just to get a reaction from them. He was always sending nude photos and sexually verbal texts to Ricky. Ricky told him that when they weren't together he would stare at the photos, read the messages, and jack off thinking about him. This made Elroy smile; it made him feel in control. While he was doing all this with Ricky in text form, he was still sending nude photos through private messages to guys he'd never even met in person on Facebook. The public photos he posted on Facebook were usually shirtless, or something sexually provocative. He didn't take it seriously and he enjoyed the attention. The older gay men on Facebook were extremely thankful for the slightest hint of nudity. Some offered to send him money for more detailed photos, and one actually said he'd pay fifty bucks for a pair of Elroy's used sweat socks.
Although Kyle refused to be Elroy's Facebook friend because he didn't like the provocative photos Elroy posted all the time (sometimes Elroy made Kyle take photos of him in his underwear for Facebook), Elroy found a way around this by inventing fake online identities. He created trumped-up profiles for both Twitter and Facebook and he sent Kyle friend requests so he could see what was going on with Kyle's online identity all the time.
It always worked out the same way. He would send a request with a fake identity and Kyle would respond with this message: "Do I know you?" Elroy would respond with the fake name and say, "Not personally, but I go to Harvard. I'm a really nice guy." In this regard, Kyle seemed to be more trusting than Elroy would have been. He would not only accept the friend request, he would thank the fake identity in writing, on the fake's timeline. It was all very entertaining and amusing for a while. But then something happened that caused Kyle to rethink his decision to accept friend requests from guys he didn't know.
It happened on a cold Friday night in November. Most of the leaves had fallen by then and Kyle had a big math exam on Monday. Elroy told him he was meeting Ricky at a hotel that night and didn't know what time he would be home. Kyle responded the way he usually did: "Have fun with the married man."
But instead of meeting Ricky, Elroy went to a cafein Boston and found a private table in a corner against a brick wall. He knew Kyle studied with his laptop at his side all the time, and he knew he constantly checked his social media accounts for activity. By this time Elroy had sent Kyle three friend requests with fake accounts. They were all handsome young men with photos Elroy had pilfered from stock photos on the Internet. They all went to Harvard and they all pretended to be as sweet and innocent as Kyle. Elroy wanted to see how Kyle would respond to a provocative comment on Facebook, so he ordered a latte and logged into one of his fake Facebook accounts.
When he was logged in to the fake account, he went directly to Kyle's timeline and found one of Kyle's typical status updates. He usually posted a deep heartfelt quote or a cheesy photo with an emotional saying a few times each day. On that particular night, Kyle had posted a photo of a deep green field with an elegant tree in the background. The saying read, "Always follow your dreams."