“Is that it?” Cody asked. But Nate could tell by his voice that he knew it wasn’t.
“No.” Nate didn’t want to say the rest though. If the comment about Cody’s mom made him this angry, he didn’t want to know how Cody would respond to the slurs against him. He fiddled with his class ring, wondering whether he should tell Cody to forget it.
“Go on.” Cody’s voice was quiet. “You can say it.”
Nate blinked, stunned at his sudden realization: Cody already knew. This wasn’t about Cody finding out what they’d said. He’d faced it all before, God knew how many times. This was about making Nate face it.
“They said that you’re . . .” He wasn’t sure what to say. He didn’t know how to word it.
Cody did though. “A faggot?” He didn’t seem angry. If anything, he seemed detached. They might have been discussing lunch. “A homo? A queer?”
“Yes.”
Cody sighed, and for the first time, he ducked his head, looking down at the toes of his sneakers. “That part’s true too.”
It took a minute for those words to register. They were the last ones Nate expected to hear. Denial, anger, resentment, yes. Those he was ready for. But not this quiet acceptance.
“Really?” Nate asked, and immediately kicked himself mentally for asking something so utterly stupid.
Cody took a deep breath, as if gathering his nerve. “Three years ago, there was another boy here. His name was Dusty. His family only lived here for a few months. It was right at the end of the oil boom, and he never quite fit in. Tried to hang with the Grove group, but they never really took to him. The hicks didn’t want him. He thought he was too good for the burnouts, and he sure as hell wasn’t going to hang with the Mormons. And I guess I was the last option left. We had almost every class together, and he was cool to me. So one day he shows up at my place with a bottle of schnapps he’d swiped from his dad’s cabinet. My mom was working, and we sat in my room and drank that bottle.”
It was strange, listening to him. Nate’s heart was pounding. He wanted to know what Cody would say next. He wanted to hear it in a way that made his cheeks burn. It made his palms damp and his stomach flutter.
Cody’s eyes were still on the distant promise of the highway, but his focus was inward. “We finished the bottle, and then he started touching me. And kissing me.” The image was vivid in Nate’s head. He could imagine Cody in the bedroom he’d never seen. And thanks to his dream, he could imagine the look on Cody’s face. The heat in Nate’s cheeks spread, down his spine, past his anxious stomach, to settle into a deep, low hum between his legs.
“Oh?” he tried to say, trying to prompt him. God, he wanted to hear more.
“He was all over me. And fuck, Nate, I could tell you it was just being drunk that made it feel so good, but I’d be lying. I came so hard, I saw stars.”
The hum between Nate’s legs grew. He fought to keep his breathing normal, pulling his jacket tight around himself to hide the growing bulge at his groin.
“For three weeks, it was like that. He’d go try to hang with the others, but at some point, he’d be lonely, or maybe just horny as fuck; I don’t know. And he’d find me. He’d knock on my window just after sunset, and I’d let him in.”
And do what with him? Nate wanted to ask. Tell me exactly what you did. Tell me everything you did together. But his tongue was glued to the roof of his dry mouth, his voice gone.
“But then, his parents decided to split. He had to move away with his mom, even though he wanted to stay with his dad. And I don’t know if he was mad at me, or mad at them, or just mad at the world, but he went out one night with those assholes from the Grove, and he told them everything. Except, you know, not everything. Because he made it sound like it was all me. Like I’d come on to him, and he hadn’t ever wanted it. He made it sound like I showed up at his house, instead of him showing up at mine. He told them that I begged for it. Even that I paid for it. He told them all what I am.
“And then he moved away.”
That tantalizing ache in Nate’s groin seemed to waver. His desire to hear more of what Cody had done with Dusty, alone in his room, in the middle of the night, warred with the anger that swelled in his heart. He could imagine all too clearly how it had been in Cody’s room—the lights out, the frantic, desperate touches, the whispers and the stifled moans as they fought to keep from being heard. He could picture it with a clarity that made him breathless. But how could anybody do that with Cody, share that kind of intimacy with him, and then turn around and betray him? How could Dusty take those private, stolen moments and turn them into something ugly? It made Nate angry. It made him want to cry for Cody. It made him want to reach out and touch Cody and tell him he’d never do what Dusty had done.