Act VIII

Saturday.

I woke up the morning of the recital having not had any sex the night before.

Nothing unusual there.

What wasn’t so normal was the shame.  If shame were a bear I’d have been covered in bear claw marks.  If shame were a swarm of bees I’d have been covered in shameful bee stings.  I was too ashamed to come up with a decent analogy.  Sorry.

It was difficult to wrap my head around what had, or rather hadn’t happened the previous night, but let me try.

I had an opportunity to have sex with the most incredibly beautiful girl ever.  Turns out she’d had other plans.  Plans to include two other girls in on the action.  That was supposed to be a good thing, right?  What guy doesn’t dream about getting it on with three supple, young virgins at the same freaking time?  All dancers, too?

I freaked.  What was wrong with me?

Why couldn’t I respond?

Worse, what did they think of me, now?  A guy is supposed to be ready all the time.  He should be able to respond to a female.  Shouldn’t he?

Ready on command.  Except I wasn’t.

That should have been the most exciting thing to ever have happened in anyone’s life.  It was the kind of thing they make videos out of for greasy fifty-two-year-old men to yank themselves to, and I just couldn’t do it.

Lame.

Yup.

You know, I was planning at some point to let all the girls at dance know I was straight.  I couldn’t do that now; I had no other excuse for my failure.  No, I would hide behind that faux homosexuality and say to Rachel and Corey and everyone else who’d have undoubtedly heard tale of the event, “you just weren’t my type.”

And there was Sara.  What a disappointment, aye?  She was expecting something to happen.  She’d said as much to me not once but twice; “I want to have sex.”  And did she get what she wanted?  No she did not.  And why did she not get what she wanted?

You know why.  I failed to get it up, that’s why.  I failed to perform as a man.  Maybe if I hadn’t been such a prude.  Maybe if I’d just taken some time to relax and get into it.  Just go with it, you know?

But I chickened out instead.  I got nervous and I couldn’t do anything.

What a wuss.

Tell that story to any of the guys at school: this dude had a shot at three pretty girls at the same time and he couldn’t get it up!  What a fag!

Do you know what she did after Rachel and Corey left?  She apologized ten times and left.  We didn’t have sex.  I may have mentioned that already.

Ugh.  I could go on.  Basically, I felt ashamed.  That feeling carried me through breakfast.  Even the make-it-yourself Belgian waffle bar and the candied blackberries and real whipped cream didn’t diminish that feeling.  No, it stayed with me well into the recital hall.

I guess you’d like to know how the recital went, huh?

Sitting in the auditorium, I got to witness kids dancing for all eternity.  There was the first studio I went to, the one I got kicked out of.  Their names were Gia, Zoe, Shaylee, and Andrew.  Do you remember them?  I remember Gia especially, fourteen and exceptionally cute with long, brown hair, and likely the one who got me kicked out for acting like an obsessed animal.

I saw that one guy up on the stage and forgive me, but I wondered if he’d had a chance at all three of those girls at the same time, and if so, was he able to respond?

I dunno.  It was entertaining, the routine they’d put together.  He danced with one of them while the other two looked on in jealousy, only to switch and dance with the next one.  They kept this up the whole time, all the while the girls’ reaction to his shenanigans grew more and more pronounced and I could hear the audience laughing at the absurdity of it.  Finally, the three girls tugged and tugged at the guy, scratching at one another violently, until they all died at the end.

Crazy.

Next was a pair named Casey and Francisco, and didn’t they look the perfect pair—a football player and a cheerleader.  Don’t see a lot of girl football players, do you?

Sorry, just kidding.

No, she was really cute; of course you know that’s what I noticed.  Dude, how long have you known me?

They did this crazy routine that had a lot of him pushing her away only to have her leave and then he pulled her back while she pushed him away, and it was a lot of back and forth.  The tension they created was amazing; it made me think of Sara and me, of the time we’d spent together and the push-pull we’d put each other through when we both wanted the same thing.  I needed to talk to her.

I wanted to take her out of the hall to somewhere we could talk about what was going on but I couldn’t stop thinking we were going to be next.

Three boys did a routine that was absolutely spellbinding.  Their names were Daniel, Russel, and Demetrius.  One of them was really ripped, too.  I mean, they all were built, but you know.  I glanced over at Sara wondering if she noticed.

Uh-huh.

She passed her eyes over to me shyly, and then looked down with a smirk on her face.  I wasn’t upset; how could I be?  It’s only fair.  I looked at the girls, so then maybe she probably looked at the guys and pretty much felt kinda the same thing.  Maybe.  OK, so this guy, I mean, he was really… you know?  The light gleamed off the muscles in his legs, and you know if I were to pick out a guy… you know?  Geez.

I’ll get there, you’ll see.  Sara was entranced by this routine.  The way she sat perfectly still with her hands clasped together between her legs, I think maybe she um… really liked it.  And I resolved to get there.  I could do it.  Build myself up to look like one of those guys so she could run her fingers all over my body and give her some crazy feelings like that.  She’d have appreciated that, don’t you think?

Another group was all little kids.  Their names were Charlotte, Daniel, Olivia, Josephine, Dylan, Madeline, Catherine, Chase, Jesse, Ana, James, Grace, Emilie, Jack, Noah, Caroline, Jessica, Avielle, Benjamin, and Allison.  There were a lot of them and they were just children, only six or seven years old.  The music had a rhythm that sounded like a hammer hitting nails while the whole stage filled with smoke.  Off to the side I could see their teacher biting her nails, probably wondering if they would remember what they were supposed to do.  And from what I could tell, they certainly did not.  One child stood in place, only to get tugged by another and put where he was supposed to be, another couldn’t stop swaying back and forth.  Others in the back row would watch the kids in the first row to see what they were doing and follow later.  Then I think I heard one kid say “I don’t want to be here” and my heart wept for him.  Sometimes when I close my eyes I see them dancing together and it’s beautiful.

This thing was huge.  I had no idea just how international it was; there was a school from Winnenden, Germany, another from Tuulsula, Finland, twelve kids from Rio, and a college in Baku, Azerbijan.  There was another in Canada, and yet another in Argentina.  There were so many it would be impossible to name them all, but I believe they’re still dancing.

As for Sara and me, we were alright.  We did our thing.  Sara was not her usual self, though.  We danced, and every time she touched me, she was so gingerly about it and she looked like she was going to cry.

As for my part, touching her felt weird.  Every time my hands met her body, my mind raced with the reality that I’d let her down.  She jumped into my arms, just as we’d practiced, and I was on the verge of tears.  I wanted to have something I could say to her but there were no words for what went down the night before.  Instead, when her eyes were supposed to meet mine, I couldn’t bear to stay with her and ended up looking at the floor.  She ran into me again.  Just as we’d practiced.  Then her hand lifted my gaze to her, and a solemn line of tears fell down her face.  I felt my lip quiver and my heart couldn’t keep with the rhythm we once bathed each other in.   At last, she spun away and fell to the floor to finish our bit, and we were done.  We’d completely screwed the whole thing up.

Made sense.  The whole world was fubar anyway.

Then unwilling to listen to all the dead bodies, we made our way off the stage when one of the panelists stopped us.  “Wait.  That was… incredible.”

“Yeah,” someone else echoed.  “Who did your choreography?”

“We did,” she wept, wiping her cheek of another tear.

“Mostly she did,” I added.

“We did it together,” she cut me short.

Silence.  She looked up at me again and I couldn’t handle the pain in her eyes.  I tried to smile for her.  I wanted her to know how sorry I was for letting her down.

“Well, that was amazing.  You two have… incredible… incredible chemistry.”

She sniffled again.  “Thanks.”

And with that, we were done.  The rest of the class wanted to go out for pizza when it was over, so I figured that gave me a little time to talk with her and get some clarity on us.  We left the auditorium and found a corner of a long hallway tucked away from everyone else.  There, we sat and stared at the speckled purple carpet for a while before she broke the silence.

“I am so sorry about last night.”

“Why are you sorry?” I said.  “I’m the one who let you down.”

She glanced at me with her eyebrows drawn together.  “You didn’t let me down!”

“I didn’t… I couldn’t… I…” was ashamed.  I failed to perform as a man.

“You didn’t do anything wrong!” she said.  “You tried to tell me you were uncomfortable and I didn’t listen.  That’s me; I don’t listen.  Just like my mom says…”

“Don’t do that,” I interrupted her.

She took in a deep breath and studied her fingers as they shook.

“I’m sorry,” she repeated.  “I thought you might like it…  I don’t know what I was thinking.  I was so stupid.”

“Come on!” I said.  “Thinking you were a lesbian, that was stupid.  Last night doesn’t even come close.”

That made her laugh.  It was nice to make her laugh.

“I know what you were trying to do,” I continued.  “I appreciate the idea, believe me, I do.  That was… um… a very kind thing for you to imagine giving me that kind of experience; I wasn’t expecting that at all.  I’m sorry I… I feel like I let you down.”

“You didn’t let me down,” she said.

“I did.  I couldn’t get it up.  You didn’t want me to be all soft and floppy, I know that wasn’t what you had in mind.  So you know how ashamed I feel that this was the moment I was waiting for, that you were waiting for, and I couldn’t get ready for you “

“You shouldn’t be ashamed about that; you were uncomfortable.  You can’t do anything when you’re uncomfortable.  At least… not when you’re human anyway.  Thinking back, I’m actually glad you couldn’t get into it.  It means you have feelings and you care.”

“Well I’m usually comfortable around you.  I don’t know, I should have been comfortable last night.”

“Don’t do that,” she stopped me.  “Girls do that all the time, they tell us if we’re not comfortable with something it’s OK to feel that way.  You shouldn’t try to force yourself into a situation you’re not comfortable with.  I guess guys need to hear that, too, huh?”

That made me smile a little.  Maybe we did.  Maybe we did.

She smiled in turn.  “I guess you’re not into having three pretty girls at the same time, huh?”

I blushed.  “If you’d asked me the day before… I guess you never know until you’re in that situation.”

“Are you OK?” her eyes pleaded with me.

“I am.  What about you?”

She nodded.

“I’m more afraid you won’t want to be with me anymore.”

She waved me off.  “I’m more worried you don’t feel comfortable with me anymore.”

“I do.”  Two words I was about ready to start practicing, if you catch my drift.

“Do you still want to have sex with me?”

What the hell kind of question was that?  “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes yes, yes, yes, yes.”

“That sounds like…”

I interrupted her.  “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

She snickered.  “I like your…”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

She gazed at me in silence for a moment.  “May I…”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

She waited again.  “One…”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.”

Then another minute with a big smirk across her face.  Then she shook as though trying to ask me something non-verbal.

“Sorry,” I was just excited, you know?

“My mom…“

“Yes.”

“I’m going to slap you!”

“Sorry,” I grinned.

“If you don’t stop, you won’t get any.”

That shut me up for good.

“I was saying, my mom checked herself into rehab; she won’t be back until Monday.  Do you want to come over?”

“Yeah!  Absolutely!  What time?”

“As soon as you come over, we can have sex, and the later you can stay, the more sex we can have.”

Uh-huh.  You know that corner of the hallway was secluded enough for my taste.  It did have a stale, musty smell poorly covered up with bleach, but that didn’t matter to me.  Unfortunately, someone was trying to call me to find out where we were.  I didn’t answer, and so they tried her phone.  Apparently, everyone thought they’d seen the last act, and then another school from Santa Fe, Texas went up.  But for sure that would be the last one.

Never before or since have I been so disappointed to go out for pizza.

Not even one with spinach, feta cheese, banana peppers, Greek olives, and big, fat slices of eggplant.  Sara and I sat together hip to hip, as usual.  That was our usual way of sitting.  I hadn’t noticed just how unusual that had been; you remember the rest of our dance class still thought I played for the other side.

Except maybe Rachel.

She looked at us with a blank expression as I tickled Sara’s side making her crack up.  Sara told me to stop, but she didn’t say it in a serious way, so I told her ‘stop what?  What are you talking about?’ and did it again.  We had fun.  It was a fun experience, and for the most part I remember everyone else smiling and having a good time; Meathead even accepted a dare that involved him eating a pepper the Aztecs used to call xhochithuil, which means kiss your white ass goodbye.

Should I have been concerned about the way Rachel looked at Sara and me?  I wasn’t.  I figured I’d never told her or anyone I was gay; I just didn’t deny it.  So it was her assumption from the beginning.  It didn’t occur to me to ask how she felt about the previous night given that Sara had basically peer-pressured her into almost partaking in group sex and then openly lied about how I would have taken the thing, after the girl had already said she was saving herself.

Nope, no reason for her feelings to be off.  None at all.

Her staring got to the point I was feeling uneasy.  You know she did touch me there that night.  Rachel looked over at Corey, whose expression seemed to indicate greater amusement at the waterfall of cheese from her next slice than any concern over having nearly been sexually traumatized, and then turned back to Sara.  And then lunch was over and we left for home.

In the van, things started out chatty for most of us.  I did notice Rachel sitting in the back row looking out the window the whole time, and of course Cassie and Meathead were all cuddled up together, Isaiah had his headphones, and others calmed down after a while and took a nap.

Before long, I found myself leaning back against the wall of the van while Sara rested on top of me with my arms around her.  She closed her eyes and fell asleep.  I couldn’t sleep.  For all my thoughts, for all my aspirations and all my precautions, I had fallen for this girl.  I sated myself in the sound of her breathing while I held her.

We stayed that way for most of those four hours and I still noticed Rachel didn’t move.  While everyone slept, she stared out the window at the trees passing by.  I wanted to talk to her, reach out to her.  Make sure she was OK and tell her thank you for giving Sara and me a chance to be alone when things went awry.  But she was too far away, being three rows behind us, and I didn’t want everyone else to hear what we were talking about.

“HEY RACHEL!  LET’S TALK ABOUT THAT GROUP SEX WE ALMOST HAD LAST NIGHT!”

No, I don’t think that would have gone over well.

No matter, I had more pressing matters.  I sent a text to my mom in hopes of resolving things.

Can I stay…

No, got to think more carefully about this.  It depends on how you say such things.  If I make it like I’m asking for something, that opens it up for scrutiny.  If I make it like I’m doing her a favor, much better.  No?

You don’t have to pick me up. I can get a ride to a friend’s house and then I’ll come home in the morning.

Maybe there was a better way for me to say that.

Which friend?

OK.  Now this called for a little creativity.  ‘Mom, I’m going to stay the night at a girl’s house because her mom isn’t going to be there,’ was just a little too direct.  Let me think.

From school.

That made more sense.  If I’d said ‘one of the kids from dance,’ she would have calculated a high probability that I was referring to a female friend.  So then, a friend from school should have been closer to 50-50.

Who? I need a name.

Except a name was the last thing I wanted to give her.  Damn probing questions.

Sara.

No reply.  I waited almost ten minutes before texting her again.  Assume the sale.  Assume the sale.

OK so I’ll see you tomorrow.

Sorry, I didn’t think you were serious.

What was that supposed to mean?  I thought she liked Sara.  One would think that as my mother, she would care enough for my well-being to appreciate and encourage me spending time with someone who was a positive influence on my character development.  Wouldn’t you agree?

What’s wrong?

Fine I’ll play. What’s her mother’s number?

Now why on Earth would she want Sara’s mom’s number?  Did she really need to call the woman?  I mean, surely she was busy, especially you know that getting clean was very important so it was paramount importance to not interrupt her from her important work.  I didn’t see why it was so important to bother her, interrupt her from what she was doing with petty questions like ‘is it alright if my son comes over to your house and spends the night alone with your daughter?’

But seriously though this presented an obvious dilemma.  If I were to provide the requested information, then my mom would have called to verify, and then inadvertently passed along information that the woman’s daughter was planning something, which would have alerted a potential response for someone else to possibly come in and ‘check in on her’ to ‘make sure she’s OK.’  And that was a problem because it would have ruined any potential alternative plans, such as being able to come over during the day which was relatively easy.

Now I know what you’re thinking.  I think.  Just find someone with an adult-like voice to pose as Sara’s mother and redirect.  This, however, presented multiple problems.  First off, it would mean going beyond lying to perpetuating a fraud against my mom, and I value my mom so I didn’t want to go there.  But even if I could go there, the potential for blowback was immeasurable; I wanted Sara for the long term, and that meant, hopefully, years in which our mothers would inevitably get to know each other and get each other’s numbers and maybe sit down one day talking about ‘hey do you remember that night my son stayed at your house?’

Let me not go there.  There had to be a way around this.

It’s just one night. Is it really that important?

I just need to make sure you’re safe, that’s all.

She had to do better than that.

I have my phone with me.

I know, but you’re still my baby boy. I just need to talk to the adult who’s going to be there, that’s all.

Really?  Why was that so important?

I felt Sara’s body tremble as she laughed through her nose.  And I thought she was asleep.

“Just come by tomorrow,” she whispered.

But I didn’t just want to have sex with her; I wanted to sleep with her.  Make love to her.  Wake up to her, and make love to her again before breakfast.  I wanted to shower with her and scrub her whole body clean, kiss her all over and fall asleep skin to skin, wrapped up in each other’s arms.

“But I want to spend the night with you,” among other things.  Many, many other things.

She craned her neck up and met my lips with hers.  “We have our whole lives together.”