The Kiss Principle (Hazardverse: Sidetracks)

10

Somehow, Zé hadn’t quit and left after I’d been a total asshole to him. Even more miraculously, we’d settled back into our normal routine. A week went by. And then another. Although, it wasn’t quite normal. Something was different with Zé. Maybe. A new reserve, like he was holding part of himself back. Or, maybe not, because I wasn’t sure if I was imagining it.

It was so minor, if it was there at all, that it was hard to point to any specific example. He smiled. He laughed. He sent me goofy videos of him and Igz, even when they were in the other room—one, with Igz dressed in one of his Hurley T-shirts and a pair of Wayfarer sunglasses, was so fucking cute that I spent the next hour figuring out how to get it printed. He had that usual relaxed, happy Zé energy that, I’d started to realize, I was enjoying way too much. I caught myself making excuses to talk to him. I wandered out of my home office (officially, the dining room) between calls, and we’d shoot the shit while he played with Igz. I’d go into the kitchen for a snack, and half the time, he’d already have something ready for me, and I’d end up talking to him for way too long. At night, I found stupid reasons for him to stay and watch TV. I swear to God, one time I heard myself say, “You’ve got to see this commercial,” and a tiny piece of me died. But he sat and watched, and then he stayed. It was like basking in the sun, I thought. Like it had been winter for so long. Which was a strange thought for someone who lived in southern California.

But every once in a while, it was like I turned a conversational corner too fast, and a wall would come up. I’d ask him if he had plans for the weekend, and his silence lasted a beat too long before he mumbled a vague answer. Or once, I asked him about swim lessons for Igz, and I swear to God I saw the shutters go down. But those moments were so short, and there was never any sign of them after, that it didn’t take long before I convinced myself I’d imagined them. Because he was Zé, and apparently, in an entire universe of people who found me un-fucking-bearable, he had some sort of magic immunity to my assholery.

It was Friday night, my back was killing me. To be more specific, it felt like someone was stabbing me with an icepick. I barely made it through dinner, sitting on the hard kitchen chair. When I stood to clear the dishes, the sharp pain ran straight to my brain. All I could do was stand there, balancing plates in my hands, and try not to fall over or curl up or, let’s face it, whimper.

Zé noticed, of course. Concern was written across his face.

“I’m going to do these tomorrow,” I said. I put the plates in the sink. “I want to get Igz down.”

“I’ll do them.”

“It’s the weekend, and you’re off duty, so don’t you fucking dare.”

For some reason, that made him smile. But when I reached to take Igz, he was slow to release her. “Are you feeling okay?”

“My back’s a little tight,” I said. “I’ll take something after I put Igz to bed.”

“Fernando, go lie down.” He tried to take her back. “I’ll take care of Igz.”

“What part of ‘off duty’ don’t you understand?”

His smile got bigger. “Go stretch out. Take something for your back.”

“It’s a good thing you’re pretty,” I said, “because somebody went to town on you with the stupid stick. Here, I’ll say it more clearly: go have fun. Get out of my house. And don’t tell me you don’t have plans; until five minutes ago, you were looking at your phone every five seconds, so I know you’ve got plans.”

He opened his mouth.

“Don’t you dare fucking lie to me.”

“Don’t swear in front of Igz!”

I cupped her head as I held her to my chest, and finally he released her. “She likes it. She swears like a fucking sailor.”

“She does not. She’s a lady.”

“Get out of my fucking house!”

He grinned and pushed tousled hair back. “You’re sure—”

“Go!”

He grabbed his keys and wallet and then came over to where Igz and I were standing. He bent, and for a moment, the way his face came toward me, I had this panicked thought that—what?

But instead, he kissed Igz on the cheek. Then he checked me, frowned, and said, “You can’t even stand up straight.”

“Yeah, but I can still beat your ass. How does that sound?”

“Do you hear the kind of abuse I put up with, Igz?”

“You’ve got until the count of ten. If you’re still dicking around, Igz is going to see me open baby’s first can of whoop-ass.”

“I’ve never heard someone say that in real life before. Only on TV, you know. Old TV.”

“Ten.”

“Maybe I should take Igz with me.”

“Nine.”

“I could go pick up smoothies and come back.”

“José Teixeira, I hope you don’t think I’m going to go easy on you because you’ve got a booboo on your knee.”

Laughing, he backed toward the door, hands raised in surrender. “Call me if you need me.”

“I hope you have a miserable fucking night, you selfish son of a bitch.”

That only made him laugh harder. I could hear him after he shut the door.

Igz was giving me a look.

“What?” I told her. “He likes it.”

Sitting with Igz, with my back screaming at me like this, wasn’t an option, so we hobbled around and pretended to listen to the TV until she fell asleep. I got her in her crib, and then I retreated to my bedroom. I didn’t keep anything stronger than Tylenol in the house because of Chuy, so I popped a couple of those, laid out my heating pad, and stripped down to my boxers. I cracked a window, stuffed a towel under my door, and got into bed. I even managed not to scream, cry, or moan in the process.

The initial injury had been a mountain biking accident, and honestly, it could have been so much worse. For the most part, I was fine, but I carried stress in my back, and since I was almost always stressed—well, you get the idea.

I got a joint out of the nightstand and toked up, which isn’t super easy if you’re lying in bed, to be honest. But, since I’m a pro, I managed. It didn’t take long for the weed to hit me: pulses of cloudy warmth, like a dragon was sitting inside my chest and breathing big, smoky breaths. That image made me giggle. Maybe it was hitting me harder, a distant part of me thought, because I’d been cutting back around Igz. Maybe I was becoming a lightweight.

But maybe not. Because usually, taking a couple of Tylenol and getting blazed would be enough to help me fall asleep, especially with the heating pad. Tonight, though, the pain seemed worse, and I found myself lying there, staring at the ceiling between hits. After a while, I grabbed my phone and started watching porn. I pushed my boxers down and took my dick in my hand. It felt good, every inch of my skin alive with the contact, but most of that was the weed. I watched the girl in the video and pumped myself for a while, but the closest I got was a semi, and then even that went away. It was embarrassing to admit, but more often than not, that had been the way of things. I’d read about it online. Stress, of course. Every fucking thing in my universe comes back to stress. Oh, sure, they talked about other things. Recreational drugs like cannabis might make it difficult to sustain an erection. Well, fuck that. And they talked about depression. I’m not depressed, I thought as I looked up at the ceiling. I massively need to nut and can’t get a boner. What’s depressing about that?

The knock at the door made me scramble to pull up my boxers. It took me two tries to stop the video on my phone, and a part of my brain was trying to calculate if someone on the other side of the door would be able to hear the moans of “Oh, Daddy,” and “I’ve been a bad girl.” When the fucking thing finally stopped, my heart was pounding, and sweat covered me, and the weed was about to send me into a panic attack.

“Fernando?” Zé called through the door quietly. “Are you awake?”

“Uh, yeah.” And that weed-soaked part of my brain told me, a moment later, I was an idiot—because why hadn’t I pretended to be asleep? “One sec.”

I managed to lever myself up from the bed. I found a T-shirt, and of course, it was one that Augustus, with his trademark classy humor, had given me: SAFETY FIRST it said, orange letters against black. DON’T STICK YOUR FINGER WHERE YOU WOULDN’T STICK YOUR and then a traffic cone that was clearly supposed to be a dick. It made me giggle as I pulled it on, and I was still laughing when I opened the door. It only took me three tries before I remembered the towel.

Zé stood in the hall, staring at me. I was still giggling, and he seemed to process me in stages before he said, “Good God, Fernando, are you high?”

His eyes were a little wider than I remembered, and I wanted to check, but he caught my hand and said, “My eyes are the same size they always are, Fernando.”

But they looked bigger.

“They’re not,” he said, and I wondered if I was saying everything out loud or if he could read my mind. His eyebrows made little fuzzy mountains. “You’re saying everything out loud.”

Somehow, he was holding my hand again, and the corner of his mouth pulled into a smirk. He hadn’t shaved for a day or two, and his stubble was thick and dark, and he looked more like a man and less like a kid.

“That’s because I’m not a kid,” he said in a low voice, his hand tightening around mine, and something had changed in his face. “You need to remember that, Fernando.”

“You’re supposed to be on a hot date.”

“Why do you always think I’m going on dates?”

I was too smart to answer that.

He burst out laughing. “You’re so smart, huh?”

In fifth grade, we had done a report on an animal of our choosing, and I had picked a red-tailed hawk, and I remembered the pictures: the tawny body, and the bands at the ends of their tail-feathers, the reddish-orangish brown that gave them their name. And that final, darkest band of brown. And that was the color of his eyes.

He shushed me and said, “Fernando, please.” He swallowed. “Stop talking.”

I didn’t need to talk. It felt good enough to stand there, every inch of me loose, happy that he was here, enjoying the unfamiliar roughness of his hand around mine. A distant part of me was aware that I was still rattling off everything like I was reading from a teleprompter. Aware, too, of the distress growing in his face.

“I wasn’t going on a date,” he finally said, cutting across the flow of words. “I was—it doesn’t matter, I guess. I was doing something dumb. And then I thought about your back, and I decided you might be doing something dumb too. So.” He took a deep breath. “How’s your back?”

It hurt like a motherfucker, but I didn’t say that.

“Are you always like this?” he asked. “It’s like a truth serum.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that, but I could feel myself smiling—a big, loopy smile. Because Zé was here. Zé was home.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m home,” he said. He held up a towel and a small bottle, which I hadn’t noticed before, and said, “Take your shirt off and get on the bed.”

“You were having a night. You were having a nice night.”

“I wasn’t, actually. I’d like to have one now, but you’re making it harder than it needs to be.”

“You’re the nicest person I know. Why are you sad? You’re so nice, you should be happy. Assholes are the ones who shouldn’t be happy. Assholes don’t deserve to be happy.”

“Fernando, get on the bed, please.”

Having used it a time or two myself, I recognized the end-of-my-shit quality of his voice, and I shuffled over to the bed. After he spread out the towel, I lay down.

Zé rubbed his eyes.

“What? I did what you said.”

“For God’s sake,” he said under his breath. And then, with a definite tone: “Take your shirt off. And lie on your stomach.”

He had to help me sit up, and he turned me out of the shirt. Then, his hands warm on my shoulders, rolled me so that I lay facedown on the towel. It was a regular towel, one of the ones we’d had forever, and it had been washed a million times and was nice and soft. But right then, with every inch of my skin hypersensitive, I thought I could feel every single thread scratching pleasantly against me. Against my chest. Against my belly. Against my nipples.

“How in the world am I supposed to take you seriously the next time you yell at me,” Zé asked, “after listening to you go on and on about your nipples?”

I had an answer for that, but before I could dig it up, the mattress dipped under new weight as Zé sat. His hip bumped mine. Then the soft click of a lid opening broke the silence, and Zé touched my back.

I flinched.

He drew his hand back. “I think this will help your back, but are you okay with me touching you?”

“I’m okay with everything. I’m okay with everything you do. You’re the best, and everything you do is perfect.” And then, because it seemed like pertinent information, I added, “I’m ticklish.”

I thought I heard a soft, amused breath, but all he said was “You didn’t think I was so perfect when I made you eat those baby carrots for a snack.” But his hand moved in a long, slow stroke up my back. Then his hand lifted away, and I heard a liquid sound. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I saw your eye twitch when I told you I’d thrown away the potato chips.”

I opened my mouth to tell him I wasn’t a nut-rabbit and didn’t eat carrots, and I was already starting to giggle. Before I could get the words out, his hands returned to my back, warm and slick with oil. The pressure was light, and the strokes were slow and long, and the oil smelled like pine and sage. An earthy smell. And I thought about how he smelled, coconut wax and the driftwood earthiness—not quite the same, but blending pleasantly with the scent of the oil.

I groaned. I heard myself, and even high, I was shocked at the noise I made. But not shocked enough to stop. Because it felt good. It felt so good. It had been—God, I didn’t want to think about how long it had been since someone had touched me like this, more than accidental contact or—rarely—a hug from Augustus.

“How does that feel?” Zé asked in his quiet way.

“How the fuck do you think it feels?”

He laughed. “I guess the other Fernando is still in there.”

“There’s me,” I said as he continued to move his hands lightly over my back. Another moan escaped me. “I’m me.”

Zé made a considering noise. “I think there’s a lot to Fernando Lopez that I don’t know. Maybe nobody knows.”

For a while, neither of us said anything. The light, soothing touches made my body light up in ways that I’d almost forgotten—a rush sensation and pleasure that, combined with the weed, turned me into putty. Then the movement of his hands changed. He kneaded my muscles, applying more pressure, lifting and pulling at sore muscles. I groaned again at the pleasurable discomfort of it. His hands were so strong, and he was so quiet and calm, and I thought about how his face looked in the morning, the light coming in through the kitchen window, the stark clarity of it: his jaw, his mouth, the brown of his eyes, that stupid hair that somehow managed to look windswept when he hadn’t been anywhere but bed.

His hands moved lower. He said something under his breath, and he gripped me by the sides, fingers curling around me to press against my belly, and he adjusted me on the towel. And it happened. It fucking happened, okay? One minute, I was lying there, half-asleep as the pain in my back faded. And the next, I was wide awake, feeling like I was sixteen again, my dick hardening. It was trapped between my thigh and the mattress, and now it seemed to have a mind of its own. Every time Zé touched me, I got harder—or that’s what it felt like, anyway. And he was constantly touching me. Years ago, weed used to make me horny, but for a long time now it had had the opposite effect. Maybe we’ve come full circle, I thought. Maybe we’re back where we started.

“What are you mumbling about?” Zé asked.

Please God, a tiny part of me thought. Please, if there is a God, please do not let me talk about my boner.

Somehow, I managed to slur, “Feels good.”

“It’s supposed to feel good. How’s your back?”

I didn’t trust myself to open my mouth, so I groaned again, and Zé laughed.

My situation didn’t improve. He was so strong, and he was touching me, and he was so gentle. I thought about how careful he was with Igz, but that only made things worse. I told myself not to think about anything, and instead, I saw him, those mornings I’d walked in on his yoga, and seen him doing downward dog, seen his ass in those tiny shorts pointing up in the air. I thought about how he looked when he fell asleep on the couch, how long his eyelashes were, about the time when we’d both been moving in the kitchen, dancing around each other, and he’d put an arm around my waist without even seeming to think about it. It had only lasted a heartbeat, long enough for him to keep me out of his way while he got a bowl out of a cabinet, but it had been—well, I remembered it, didn’t I? It had been something I’d never had. The casual intimacy of people who shared a space with no inhibitions.

And now, every time he pressed and rubbed and pulled, my body shifted in tiny increments against the mattress, and I realized, with a kind of growing horror, that I might actually be able to get off like this.

“Okay,” I said, the word syrupy in my mouth as I raised my head. Drool made a shining strand from my lips to the pillow, and I wiped it away, but I was sure he’d already seen. “That’s good. My back feels better.”

“I just started.”

“Yeah, yeah, I’m good—”

“Knock it off. Jeez, why are you so tense?”

He pushed, and he was strong—I let him force me down, his hand flat between my shoulder blades. I had seen that move before. All he had to do was bring my hips up, spread my legs, curl his fingers around my nape. His fingers probed my back again, and I whimpered.

Once again, his technique changed. He dug into sore, tight muscles with fingers and thumbs, and now the discomfort bordered on pain. It was like walking a tightrope, and somehow, Zé seemed to know exactly how to balance between too much and not enough. I still embarrassed myself a few times with grunts and little, shocked noises, but the intensity was actually a relief—my dick went down to a semi, and I didn’t appear to be in danger of messing my shorts in the immediate future.

“We should do this more often,” Zé said as he worked. “You have to be consistent with massages or you’re right back where you started.”

I would die. If we ever did this again, I would die. Hell, at this point, I’d probably die if I ever had to be in the same room with him again.

After a while, he returned to those long, gentle strokes. The bulldog in my pocket perked right up again. Then Zé shifted his weight, and the mattress moved under me, and I wanted to groan because it wasn’t fair. But I was so caught up in my determination not to hump the mattress like a teenager that I didn’t notice, until it was too late, Zé swinging one leg over to straddle me.

He weighed more than I expected. And I was painfully aware of how our bodies lined up. If I hadn’t been hard before, I was ready to drill down to China now. The new position must have given him a better angle because now he ran his hands from my shoulders to the small of my back.

When he broke the silence, it startled me, and I flinched. “You realize these are the straightest of straight guy underwear, right?”

And then, before I could process what was happening, he slid a slick finger under the elastic of my boxers and snapped it.

If you thought I’d flinched before.

But Zé didn’t seem to notice. He sounded amused as he said, “Blue plaid, Fernando? Seriously?”

I mumbled something.

“I expected something a little more interesting after those booty shorts I saw you in.”

A groan escaped me that had nothing to do with the massage. The night Igz had been sick. The night I’d panicked about her breathing and rushed out of the house in those stupid, cock-strangling shorts. I had been trying to forget about that. I’d definitely been hoping Zé had forgotten about that.

“Sorry,” he said. “That was inappropriate.”

I shook my head, but it probably didn’t look like much with me melted into a puddle on the bed.

“How’s your back?”

My back, I thought, is definitely not the problem. But all I said was, “Good,” and I could hear myself from a long way off, how I sounded, like I was drunk on his touches.

But all Zé did was rub my back again, a caress this time instead of a massage, and it felt like long moments passed before he whispered, “Good.”

He shifted his weight. The mattress sank. My body, pulled by gravity, moved fractionally. And my dick, hard as fucking steel, touched his knee.

My personal hell lasted for approximately an eternity.

And then Zé got to his feet, the movement awkward because of his bad knee. We made eye contact (which is always, under every circumstance, a terrible fucking decision), and he gave me a weird, waffling smile with a bug-eyed level of freaked-the-fuck-out-ness. With exaggerated slowness, he picked up the bottle of massage oil, put it down again, grabbed a second towel, dried his hands. He still had that awful smile on his face. He straightened his tee. He looked around the room. I looked around the room too. It wasn’t a mess, but it was—well, I was suddenly ashamed that it was drab and dusty and had an echoing emptiness. Although, of course, that was secondary under the topcoat of panicking humiliation. All in all, I thought it would be nice if somebody would shoot me in the head.

“Well,” he said.

“Uh, thanks.”

“Uh huh. Uh huh. Uh—” He seemed to catch himself. “Yup.”

Yup, I thought. Where was a home intruder when you needed one?

We stared at each other. Fucking eye contact again.

“Let me get you some water,” Zé finally said.

“No!” It came out more sharply than I intended. “No, I’m good. I feel so relaxed, I’m going to go to sleep.” I smiled, and I thought I probably looked like I was insane. “My back feels great.”

“You need to drink some water, Fernando.”

“I’ll drink some, I promise.” And then I thought I should say sorry, but then I thought an apology would only make it so much worse. Maybe Hallmark made cards that said, Sorry about my raging accidental erection . “And then I’ll go straight to sleep.”

He twisted the second towel in his hands. His eyes still looked a little wider than usual, and his lips were parted, and it took me longer than it should have to realize that he was genuinely freaked out—and, worse, that he didn’t know what to do.

“Zé,” I said.

He started.

“Thank you.”

He let the towel hang from one hand. “Fernando—”

“I’m going to call it a night.”

“Right. Right, gotcha. Okay. Your back?”

“My back is fine. Thank you again.”

“Good.” He smiled, and it was his real smile, slow and sweet. “I’m glad, Fernando.”

“Goodnight.”

“Night.”

He shut the door on his way out.

I waited until the sound of his steps had moved away. His door clicked shut. Then I got out of bed, turned off the lights, and locked the door. I used the towel to get as much of the oil off my back as I could; I hadn’t been lying when I told him my back felt better. It felt great, in fact. Better than it ever had since the accident. Then I spread out the towel and lay down again. I closed my eyes. I told myself to go to sleep.

I lasted about five minutes.

I dragged my boxers down around my thighs. My dick was still hard, and my hand was slick with oil. I found my phone. I was already right on the edge, so I just held my dick and scrolled.

It wasn’t the first time I’d watched gay porn. Sometimes, it hit right. Maybe that made me bi. Maybe it made me curious. I didn’t know, and I didn’t particularly care. One afternoon, when I’d been twelve and babysitting Augustus, I’d beat off with Cesar Davila, and I’d let him finish me. He’d liked it, liked the way I came in his hand. And even back then, I’d been smart enough to know it didn’t matter if the other person was a guy or a girl as long as you liked it, you wanted it.

When I settled on a video, I refused to think about why. One of the guys was white, muscular, a daddy type. The other was Latino, with a mop of dark hair and full lips and a smile that spread across his face like honey. It started with a blow job, and when the daddy type pulled the Latin kid off his cock, the younger guy looked blissed out, his lips swollen and shiny, his chin glistening with spit and pre. The daddy turned him over, held him by the back of the neck, and fucked him hard.

I wasn’t even sure I moved my hand. One second, I was holding myself, fingers aching. The next, I started to come, my oily fingers tight around my dick, giving stiff, frantic jerks as I moved too late into the orgasm.

I caught the edge of it and wrung myself through the finish. For a moment, every inch of me was alive and shining. And then it was past, and I felt loose and relaxed, the smell of my load mixing with the piney-sage fragrance of the oil. The video was still playing, the bottom whimpering. His voice was too high, I thought as I fumbled to turn it off. He doesn’t sound like that at all.

After cleaning myself up, I didn’t last long. Sleep trickled in, filling all the quiet spaces around me. My last clear thought was: You are a fucking idiot.