Archive of Our Own

4:30 PM

ON A SATURDAY

PHILADELPHIA, PA

The landline shrieks, and Mac’s mom makes a complicated series of grunts that roughly translates to Shut that shit up!

“Sorry, ma!” Mac says, ducking under the cloud of his mother’s cigarette smoke. He lifts the phone and answers, “Wassup?”

“Mac,” says Dennis. His voice blurs at the edges in a way unattributable to the capturing of his voice. Mac concludes Dennis is already tipsy, or at the very least on his merry way toward inebriation. “You’re not doing anything tonight, right?” 

Mac does have plans. He was going to head to the train tracks to throw rocks and not think about Dennis. Replacing those plans is not a hardship. “Okay?”

“Well, man, now you do! My, uh–– I’m on the phone, wait your fucking turn, Dave! –– my frat’s throwing a party tonight. You’re coming.”

“Hell yeah,” Mac says. He always jumps at the chance to see Dennis. They talk on the phone often but don’t see each other in person as much as they did in high school. Mac misses him. “Should I invite Charlie?”

The line goes dead for a long moment. Mac strains to hear something, picks up on only white noise, the background hum of his mother’s TV show, and, faintly, Dennis breathing. Finally, like he’s trying to press meaning into the syllable, Dennis says, “No,” and hangs up. 

Mac’s heart constricts like a vise in his chest. They haven’t really spent time alone, since… well. He thinks about Dennis’s mouth and how his lower lip glistens when he licks it. Thinks about the weight of Dennis’s cock in Mac’s mouth. Mac inhales sharply, chides himself for conjuring memories of that sin, and then pats his pockets down for his keys. He finds the shape of them bulging his pocket beside his wallet. 

“Hey, Ma, I’m gonna go to church real quick, okay? I’ll bring back cigs for you.” He drops a kiss onto the coarse gray nest of his mother’s hair, and the waft of cigarette smoke she replies with makes Mac’s eyes sting. 

The tightly crosshatched screen that separates Mac from the priest reminds him of the latticed top of a pie. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” Mac says. “It’s been, uhh… two days?   Since my last confession.”

The baseboard of the confessional peels back from the wall a little. Mac kicks it with his toe, swallows hard, and resents the dry click of his throat working. “I’ve, um. I’ve got this friend. He’s… when I’m around him, I think things I shouldn’t. I do things that… that shame the Lord.”

He’s quiet for a moment. Listens hard for the sound of the priest breathing. He wants some acknowledgement that will make him feel less alone. 

“It’s been a while since we’ve, like, done anything, and it was only the once, like, a year ago, almost,” Mac babbles, rubbing his palms back and forth across his jean-clad thighs until his skin starts to burn from the friction. “I think about it all the time, though.”

Panic starts to vignette Mac’s vision, his eyesight turning to a burrowing point, the rest masked in shadow. “I know it’s a sin for boys–– for men to want each other, to be together like, uh, that.” What remains clear of Mac’s eyesight glosses over with tears, then. “I just–– I don’t understand why it’s wrong, if it feels, like… right? Like, not just the sex–– not, like, sodomy or whatever, I’m not gay–– but, like. I don’t know. Sometimes, I feel like…” Mac takes a wobbly breath and wraps his arms tightly around his chest to keep himself from sobbing. “Sometimes I feel like if what I feel for him isn’t love, then I don’t know if I’ve been in love, you know?

I have nightmares about… about being with him. About being inside him. Or the other way around, sometimes. And it’s–– good, until I… until I tell him I… well, I tell him... and he’ll turn hot underneath me, like red hot, like he’s on fire. Like, uh... like a star's been yanked from the sky into my bed, y'know? And then he'll burn the sin from me, and then I'm just salt in some bedsheets. 

“So, um. That’s one sin,” Mac sniffs hard and wipes at his eyes with the back of his hand. Then, he adds, “Oh, I ate all the Ritz crackers after I got too high, so gluttony’s one of my sins too. Lotta profanity also. But it’s mostly, uh… the lust thing. Yeah. That’s all I can remember. I am sorry for these and all my sins.”

Mac waits patiently for the priest to give him penance, and then he waits impatiently for it. A minute passes, and Mac’s heart starts to pick up pace. Maybe he’s been so bad, so evil, so foul and sullied in his soul, that the priest is still thinking of an adequate way to punish him. More time passes, and Mac begins to worry that his sins were so disturbing that the priest has simply keeled over in the face of such an affront to the Lord. 

“Father?” he asks. 

Knock knock!

Mac just about jumps free from his skin. Someone knocks once more, gently, against Mac’s confessional door. He pushes the door open to find an old nun with a spine curving like a question mark, smiling at him with a finite level of politeness.

“Hi?” says Mac, confused. 

“Father Thomas is not holding confession right now,” she informs him. “You can find his schedule on the bulletin board.”

Mac feels like he’s swallowed television static. “Oh. Sorry.”

“Not to worry,” says the nun, and her smile reveals a cracked tooth. “Return when the Father is in, and he will grant you penance. In the meantime, follow the word of the Lord to the letter and He will guide you.”

“Yeah,” Mac says, making his way out of the booth. “Thanks.” 

Mac leaves the church. He remembers pulling a bag of months-expired baby carrots from the back of the fridge once, recalls how they were soft and fuzzy with rainbows of mold. The sense memory of them floods his sinuses with the sugary, overripe funk of their scent. 

That’s how Mac feels right now. Sweet with rot.

It’s dark out when Mac drives up to the frat row of Penn, searching for the Delta Omega Lambda house and, more importantly, Dennis. His shitty car rattles down the street until he slams the breaks to avoid a group of drunk sorority girls who stumble across the road in a cloud of glitter and giggles. 

He drums his fingers against the steering wheel and remembers the phone call he and Dennis had, how Dennis responded when Mac asked if he should invite Charlie. Recalling the exchange, it feels important. It takes on the layers of subtext and context— the blood and viscera of desire, the muscle and sinew of shame— that all memories of Dennis do when they’re removed from the immediate moment. Mac thinks of Dennis, thinks, I know what you taste like. Thinks, you want me with you, alone, and that could mean nothing. Then, it will mean nothing as soon as you say it does. 

One of the drunk sorority girls stops at the front of Mac’s car, lays a hand on the hood, and bends down to adjust her shoe. Irrational ire burns in Mac, and he slaps his palm against his horn until the drunk girl releases his car and, wobbly, flips him off. Mac doesn’t let off the horn until all the girls are off the road. The screech of the horn feels appropriate. He can’t scream, but he can do this. 

“Go fuck yourself, buddy!” hollers one of the drunk girls from the sidewalk.

Like a bubbling soup pot, Mac boils over. “You go fuck yourself!” he shouts, using his horn to punctuate his words. He speeds off down the road, sideswiping a few trash cans that topple and drop trash bags on the asphalt that explode on impact like overripe plums. The destruction satisfies something with sharp, gnashing teeth that lives deep inside Mac. 

He feels closer to normal when he spies the ΔΩΛ symbols on the roof of the frat house up ahead. When he and Charlie first visited Dennis at the frat to help Dennis move in, they’d had a lot of difficulty finding it. It had gotten so bad that they broke into one of the sororities to call Dennis from their landline. “It’s a triangle, then a circle with feet, and then an upside-down vee,” Dennis had said, exasperated. “I cannot believe you people don’t know the Greek alphabet. I’ve befriended savages.” So now the letters are seared into Mac’s brain. 

The party is already in full swing when Mac pulls up. He can hear the music pounding from here, growing louder whenever the double doors open and undergrads spill out, looking for somewhere to smoke. 

Mac parks poorly, his back right tire perched awkwardly on the curb, but feels no need to adjust his car’s placement. Before leaving the vehicle, he tucks a carefully rolled joint behind his ear and puts another in his pocket. He hopes, sick with shame and want, that Dennis will want to shotgun with him again. He hopes more will come of it. He should let it go.

He approaches the frat house with damp palms. Usually, Charlie is with him when he visits, and Mac feels a little less out of place when they’re a pair. But now, with his t-shirt with the sleeves ripped free and his unruly stubble, he feels a bit like an alien landing on a foreign planet. The frat bros passing joints and cigs around the bonfire out front are all wearing pressed shirts buttoned up to the neck, even as they’re sloppy-drunk and slurring. Mac doubts he owns a button-up, much less one with sleeves. 

As he approaches the entrance to the party, he narrates his surroundings to himself like a nature documentary, trying to soothe his nerves. A gang of Fraticus Doucheicus, in its natural habitat, he thinks. He passes inside, and the animal kingdom of the party rages around him. He spies a boy in a striped shirt attempt a keg stand and then, puffing his chest with baseless pride, approach an unimpressed brunette. Known for their striking pinstripe plumage and bizarre mating rituals, Mac thinks, what the Fraticus Doucheicus lacks in intelligence, it makes up for in unfounded confidence. 

Mac slips through the party like a shadow, trying to avoid the attention of the undressed sorority girls and the suspicious frat bros who seem to clock he’s in the wrong habitat. Finally, he spots Dennis, nursing a beer in the kitchen, chatting up some blonde girl in a tiny tank top. 

He knows he should say something, greet Dennis, whatever, but Mac takes a good, long moment just looking at him. Dennis’s skin looks sunlit from within even in the low light, and his smile— calculated and dazzling— is aimed at the blonde girl with lethal precision. She responds by clasping her elbows underneath her bust and giggling, forcing her breasts forward for Dennis to ogle appreciatively. 

Bile burns in the back of Mac’s throat. Maybe he shouldn’t be here. Maybe he shouldn’t have come. When a lion invites you into its cage, well, the smart move is to run. 

Mac’s never claimed to be smart, though. Not when it comes to Dennis. 

“You got any drinks in here, or I am gonna have to find ‘em myself?” Mac tipping his chin up, strides over to Dennis and the girl. Dennis must be drunk because he gladly turns his radiant smile on Mac and ditches the girl to throw his arms around Mac. Mac, surprised, stiffens under the touch. Dennis doesn’t seem to notice, and then Mac melts into Dennis’s embrace, and it’s like the party has gone–– for one long, blissful moment–– completely silent and deserted, the world winnowed down to the two of them. 

“You came,” Dennis says against the shell of Mac’s ear. 

“Sure,” Mac replies. “You told me to.”

Dennis is the first to let go, because he always is. “Good to see you, man. We gotta get you some shots or something— you hafta catch up!”

From behind them, the blonde girl pouts, put out. “I thought we were gonna shots, Denny.”

Mac barks out a laugh. “Denny?”

Dennis rolls his eyes and waves his hand, and Mac understands this kind of nicknaming is an allowance only hot girls are afforded. “I’m sure you can find someone else to do shots with you, Sara.”

“Kara,” corrects the blonde girl. She hikes her shirt up, covering her cleavage protectively, and storms out of the kitchen. 

Dennis leans into Mac’s side and watches the girl go with faint amusement. Mac holds himself still, not wanting Dennis to notice and end the lingering moment. “Guess you’ll need to find someone else to go home with,” Mac says. 

Dennis snorts and leans further into Mac’s side. “Wasn’t gonna fuck her, anyway. Just bored.”

“Yeah?” Mac asks, leaning into Dennis too, just a little, to see how he’ll react. 

“Yeah,” confirms Dennis. “Glad you’re here. Dave’s being such a dick tonight. It’s good I’ve got you.” He turns his megawatt smile at Mac then, and Mac turns to putty. Dennis lowers his voice, like they’re sharing a secret. “I stole Dave’s room key so he can’t stay in the room tonight. Serves him right, yeah?” And then Dennis leans forward and hooks a finger through a fray in the armhole of Mac’s shirt, his skin cool against Mac’s shoulder. “I’m glad I’ve got you,” Dennis repeats.

They keep playing this game: Dennis gives just enough, forges enough little intimacies, to keep Mac loyal, to keep Mac from moving on, because Mac’s a good dog. Obedient. Mac resents that he feels he belongs here, by Dennis’s side, even when Dennis digs claws into his soft spots.

“Yeah, you got me,” Mac confirms, clearing his throat a little, and something like stained glass shatters inside him.

Dennis takes a step away, then lightly, playfully smacks his palm against Mac’s cheek until Mac waves him away. “Alright, let’s get you some tequila, killer,” he says.

Long, nimble fingers circle Mac’s wrist, and then Dennis drags Mac out of the kitchen and into the fray of the party. This is the closest they’ll ever get to holding hands in public, Mac knows. He takes it as a victory and then feels quietly pathetic about it. Dennis leads him to the crowded dining room to the sticky wooden table laden with cheap, plastic bottles of liquor, and drops Mac’s wrist to assemble shots for them. 

Mac stands a little behind Dennis, who hunches over the table, and watches the fine knobs of Dennis’s spine undulate as he works. 

A girl in a plaid miniskirt and glitter on her eyelids sidles up to Mac, lays a hand on his forearm. She leans in closer than she needs to and shouts over the music, “Hi! I’m Lindsey!”

“Okay?” Mac shakes his arm a little until she releases him, looking put-out, and wanders away in search of a more willing target. 

“Shots!” declares Dennis, turning from the table to Mac. He holds out a shot that Mac takes and then downs dutifully. Dennis’s expression sours. “Dude!”

“What?” asks Mac, still holding aloft his now-empty shot glass. Tequila traces a line of warmth down his throat and into his stomach. Dennis snatches the glass from Mac’s hands and refills it, handing it back to Mac. Mac swallows the new shot, and Dennis’s expression turns livid. “What?” asks Mac again, dumbfounded. He doesn’t know what he’s doing wrong. 

“That’s not how you take a tequila shot, dumbass!” 

“What do you mean? I took the shot!”

Dennis flicks Mac’s forehead hard. “You’re an idiot.”

“What the fuck!” protests Mac, rubbing at his forehead. He flicks Dennis right back. “You’re an idiot, idiot!”

Dennis waves away the comment and Mac’s hand, unperturbed. “Watch me, asshole. This is how you take a tequila shot.” And then Dennis raises his hand, locks eyes with Mac, and licks a broad stripe down the back of his hand. 

Mac chokes a little on his own spit. 

“First is salt,” Dennis says, then pours a shaker of table salt across his freshly-licked skin. Once the skin is sticky with sodium crystals, Dennis laps the salt up, still looking at Mac. His eyelashes are fine and slightly translucent, like spun gold. “Then shot,” Dennis says, then takes his tequila shot. His mouth puckers up a little at the taste, and something in Mac’s chest begs for mercy it will not find. “And then lime.” Dennis bites down hard on a lime wedge. He smiles at Mac with the lime in his mouth, the green rind masking his teeth. 

“My turn,” Mac says, making grabby hands. “Gimme the salt, bitch.”

Dennis relinquishes the salt and pours Mac a new shot of tequila. Mac does the little ritual— lick, salt, lick, shot— and then waits for his lime. Dennis presents the half-moon of lime to Mac, who takes it from Dennis’s fingers to his mouth. Mac bites down, acerbic juice coating his tongue and souring his throat. He winces and spits out the lime rind on the floor, tells Dennis, “I don’t think I like limes, dude.”

“Too fucking bad,” Dennis says, presses a fresh shot and the saltshaker into Mac’s hands. “We’re doing tequila shots, motherfucker. They're not tequila shots without lime.”

Lick, salt, lick, shot, lime. They do shots until they’re both laughing a little too loudly, bumping up against one another a little too freely, drawing the attention of the other partygoers. Mac doesn’t know anyone here besides Dennis, and he doesn’t care to— the undergrads that populate this party might as well be ghosts, for all they exist to Mac. They’re smudges in the background; they’re greyscale where Dennis is technicolor. 

Eventually, breath hot against the shell of Mac’s ear, Dennis leans in and asks, “Wanna see my room?” 

Mac’s seen Dennis’s room before. Mac and Charlie helped Dennis move in— they packed his shit up, drove it to the frat house (when they found it), bullied it inside the confines of his small, shared room. Mac had laid on both of the bare twin mattresses to determine which was worthy of Dennis’s nights, and they’d left the dud behind to become the property of Dennis’s dick roommate, Dave Chernin. Dave Chernin, who doesn’t have a key to the room tonight. The room he and Dennis share. The room where Mac and Dennis will be alone. “Yeah,” Mac says, and his voice cracks a little. 

Dennis’s grin splits his face like a cracked egg, and then he drags Mac by the wrist through the crowd, heading for his room. 

As they ascend the stairs, Mac keeps his free hand on the sticky banister and recalls the Greek play shit that St. Joseph’s and Notre Dame put on for their joint performance last year. Dennis and Mac had wanted to ditch, but Charlie insisted on attending so they could watch Dee dress in a bedsheet toga and try not to hork up a lung with nerves despite only being in the ensemble. 

Mac remembers little of the scenes they’d performed to entice the audience of unimpressed high schoolers, but he does remember the bit where Orpheus leads Eurydice from the underworld. Orpheus isn’t supposed to look back, but for one reason or another, right as they reach the precipice of the mortal plane, he steals a glance back at his wife, losing her forever. 

The Gang had argued, half-heartedly and high, over the significance of that moment: Charlie insisting Orpheus was an idiot for turning around (and for having a name that sounded like a sneeze), Dennis emphatic that Orpheus turning back was the truest act of devotion a man could muster (“He did all that for her, pulled her outta freakin’ hell, and he’s not expected to make sure his babe’s following him? That’s bullshit,” Dennis had said. “Love is looking back.”), and Mac staying uncharacteristically quiet. 

Following Dennis up the stairs has Mac remembering Orpheus and Eurydice. Has him thinking, Look back. Has him pleading silently, desperately, Look back. 

But Dennis doesn’t, of course. He just holds Mac’s wrist tightly in his fingers, ferrying Mac through the partygoers like Charon ferrying the dead across the River Styx. 

Dennis leads Mac down a hallway, and the crowd thins the further they move. After struggling with the lock for a moment, Dennis manages to get the door open and ushers Mac inside. 

Inside, the room looks clean, but it’s hard to tell as the only light comes from a table lamp and the slant of moonlight through the window. 

“Nice room,” Mac says, trying to make a joke of it, but then the door clicks closed, and Dennis crowds Mac against it. Mac’s spine thumps solidly against wood. 

Dennis has ice-blue eyes, and they glint cooly in the low light. His hands bracket Mac’s hips like parentheses.

Hot breath fans across Mac’s face. Scant centimeters separate their lips. Mac’s gaze flicks down to Dennis’s lower lip, and a pink tongue snakes out to wet it. Mac wants to do it for him. Mac wants to die. Is God watching me, Mac thinks, or is He closing his eyes?

“What’re you doing, dude?” Mac asks, but his voice betrays him, turning intimately quiet. He tries to tilt his chin forward defiantly, which succeeds only in bringing their mouths closer together.

“Don’t be stupid, Mac,” says Dennis. 

“I don’t, um,” Mac swallows hard. He remembers the confessional, the soothing crosshatched barrier between him and the priest that wasn’t there. Follow the word of the Lord to the letter, and He will guide you, the nun said. “I don’t think we should.”

“Don’t think, then,” says Dennis. 

“No,” Mac repeats firmly. He pushes a little against Dennis’s shoulders, and the other boy moves away fluidly, his mouth folding into a frown. “We shouldn’t, Den. The Bible… the Bible says it’s wrong, so we shouldn’t.”

Dennis grins the way he does when a plan comes to fruition. “You’re talking about that passage, that one about how gay people should die, right? Leviticus?”

“I guess?” Mac allows, watching as Dennis flits about the room, throwing open desk drawers and perusing bookshelves, in search of something. “And I’m not, I’m not gay, dude,” Mac adds, somewhat half-heartedly.

“Shut up, Mac,” Dennis tells him. Then, “Aha!” as he locates a small, leather-bound Bible. There’s one bookmark in it, and Dennis flips open the book to that section before presenting it to Mac. "Knew this would come in handy." He points to a highlighted sentence. “Read that.”

“Okay,” says Mac, accepting the Bible. It’s heavier than it looks, but that might be in Mac’s head. “Leviticus 20:13,” he reads, “A man who lies with another man should be stoned.”

Dennis asks, “Didja bring a J?”

Mac taps the joint tucked behind his ear. “I brought two.” He pats at his pockets, feeling for the second one he rolled.

“Excellent,” says Dennis. “Well, smoke that and then you can fuck me, yeah?”

Every atom in Mac screeches to a halt, all at once. “What?”

“I’ve come to a conclusion,” Dennis starts, and then he starts unbuttoning his shirt, like that isn’t crazy. Every inch of newly exposed skin glows gold in the low light. “I’ve concluded that I should know how to take it up the ass. For science.”

“What?”

“It’s all very logical, Mac. What if, someday, down the line, I participate in a threesome, or a foursome, or some other -some iteration? Or, what if a girl wants to peg me? Practice seems entirely practical.” Dennis finishes unbuttoning his shirt and drops the fabric in a puddle on the linoleum floor. The diffuse light makes the shadows under his pecs more dramatic, making him look like some sort of sculpted Greek demigod.

Mac has to tap his tongue against the roof of his mouth a few times to dispel the dryness at the sight of Dennis half-nude. “That’s–– that’s nuts and you know it,” Mac protests. 

Dennis huffs once, annoyed, and then steps into Mac’s space to root through the pockets of Mac’s jeans. Mac lets out an undignified squeak, trying to cant his hips away so Dennis won’t feel where he’s gone half-hard in his jeans. “Aha!” goes Dennis, withdrawing a lighter. He tosses his prize to Mac and steps away. “Light that joint,” he says. 

Mac’s hands shake as he brings the joint to his lips and lights it. He inhales deeply, exhales curilcues of smoke that twist and writhe like gray dragons across the popcorn ceiling. Smoking is a familiar, grounding vice: Mac feels the chemical relaxation infect his cells, feels his diaphragm expand and retract reassuringly. 

Dennis, still shirtless, pulls a bottle of lube from his bedside table and drops it unceremoniously on his checkered comforter. He looks back at Mac, asks, “You stoned yet?”

There are two halves to Mac’s mind, and they are both passengers waiting at a train station. One half crosses itself and screeches half-coherent religious adages on sin and sinners, on damnation. The other half waits patiently, obediently, its train ticket sending him where Dennis directs. Only one half boards the train as Dennis walks slowly toward Mac, swinging his hips in a way Mac recognizes from watching Dennis pick up chicks, and the loud part of Mac goes quiet.

He’s a good dog. Dennis will lead, and Mac will follow. 

“Yeah,” says Mac. “I’m stoned.” He isn’t, not really, not yet–– years of usage have blunted his tolerance. Still, it’s easy to make believe, to let Dennis hook nimble fingers through Mac’s belt loops.

The party rages downstairs, the blanket of white noise providing a comfort veil of anonymity. No one can see them or hear them. They’re alone, truly alone. For once, Mac even feels like God has closed his eyes tolerantly, the way a parent might humor a child during hide and seek. 

Dennis reels Mac in until they’re nearly pressed against one another from sternum to groin. The fluttering, fluctuating space between them feels like a crack in a dam; a small, steady stream that promises disaster. Dennis leans in and nudges his nose against Mac’s until they’re sharing breath. 

Like a tongue seeking out the familiar pain of a cavity, Mac prods at the place inside him that aches when he does things like this. The shame, fear, and anger that jolt through him are milder, quieter than usual. 

The Bible says this is okay, as long as they're stoned. Mac's stoned enough. 

Mac slots their mouths together, swipes at Dennis’s lower lip with his tongue. Dennis tastes like weed and shitty tequila and spearmint toothpaste. Mac cups one wide palm on the side of Dennis’s jaw and slides the other to Dennis’s lower back, pulling him closer and closer, eradicating the space between them. The press and caress of their lips together burns with a cosmic newness, and Mac feels a galaxy comes to fruition within his ribcage. He licks into Dennis’s mouth, kisses him harder, hungrier.

Mac kisses Dennis, and it feels like worship. A truth Mac’s known since high school goes like this: being with Dennis is the closest Mac’s ever felt to God. 

“I want you to fuck me, Mac,” Dennis whispers against Mac’s mouth. “Do you want that?”

Mac lets out a wounded-animal whimper. “Yeah,” he says, and means it. “I want what you want. Anything you want.”

“Good,” says Dennis. “Take off your clothes.” He pulls away from Mac and starts worrying at the button of his pants. 

Mac obliges quickly, sheds his shirt and jeans like discarded snakeskin. His boxers he keeps on, snapping the elastic against his waist as he watches Dennis shimmy out of his pants. 

Every new centimeter of Dennis’s skin that is revealed to Mac is a revelation. The one time they fooled around before, it had been rushed and mostly clothed. Mac’s never had the opportunity to look at Dennis, all of him, before. Mac is heady with the sight, drinking in the gentle scoop of his collarbone, the muscled shape of his thighs, the fine golden hair darkening to brassy-gold where it leads down from Dennis’s belly button and disappears under the waistband of his underwear. 

Mac stares openly at Dennis until Dennis gets fed up and spreads his arms out to his full wingspan, inviting Mac to admire him. “If you’re gonna ogle me,” he says as a means of explanation. “Might as well get the best view.”

For a moment, the T-shape of Dennis’s body goes funny, like Mac’s taken the glasses off at a 3D movie. Superimposed over Dennis’s golden body is Jesus on the cross. Mac’s heart hammers like it’s trying to break free from his chest. He tries to think of something to say, considers crossing himself, but the moment passes and Dennis drops his pose to climb nimbly onto his bed and spread out like a jungle cat, watching Mac with feline eyes. 

Mac feels bovine-clumsy in comparison, but he approaches the altar of Dennis. “I wasn’t ogling,” he mutters.

“Were to,” grins Dennis, a little nastily. He bends his knees and plants his feet on the bedspread so Mac can clamber onto the bed between the vee of Dennis’s thighs. 

“Was not,” says Mac, acquiescing. He gets over Dennis, drops a palm on Dennis’s pec, trying to feel for his heartbeat. 

Dennis gets a hand around Mac’s wrist and starts leading him lower, further from the only real gauge of Dennis’s interest. “Touch me,” Dennis says. 

“I am touching you,” counters Mac, but he knows what Dennis is asking for. He reaches for the waistband of Dennis’s boxers and peels them down, standing up to yank them free from Dennis’s legs and toss them to the ground. 

“You too.” Dennis nods meaningfully toward Mac’s boxers, then reaches up to grab a pillow to shove under his ass. 

Mac sheds his boxers, and he’s hard enough to hammer a nail. He climbs back on the bed and gets in close to Dennis. He shoves a knee under Dennis ass, pulls a giggling Dennis toward him by the hips until the triangle of Dennis’s sacrum is positioned over the meat of Mac’s thigh. Mac peels Dennis’s legs apart like flower petals, places one on either side of his hips. 

The spread of Dennis’s legs reminds Mac of angel wings. He drags his fingertips in reverent crop circles through the golden down on Dennis’s thighs until Dennis makes an impatient noise and tosses the lube at Mac’s head. 

“You’ve fucked a girl before, right?” Dennis says, and Mac is struck by panic. He remembers how Dennis held Mac at arm’s reach after they’d fooled around the first time, how cold, distant days spiraled into weeks and then into months. He remembers how angry he’d been watching the easy laughter between Dennis and his prom date, remembers how her hand had lingered against Mac’s for too long when they smoked during their pre-game. He remembers sneaking off with the girl later, fucking her hard against the stairwell, closing his eyes and thinking of Dennis so he could finish. He remembers using Tim Murphy as a scapegoat, because fuck that guy (not that he was jealous of Dennis's friendship with Tim, of course not). He remembers going home and puking in the sink because he couldn’t make it to the toilet in time–– he blamed it on the drink, but that wasn’t why, not really. 

“Yeah, I’ve fucked a girl before,” says Mac. He cups Dennis’s slim waist in his hands, slides his grasp down until his thumbs ghost over Dennis’s hipbones. 

“Ever done anal?”

“No.” He drags his thumbs lower, presses them hard into the soft, thin skin of Dennis’s inner thighs. Lifts his thumbs to watch Dennis flush, Mac’s touch trapped like pink flower petals under Dennis’s skin.

“Okay, well, it’ll be different than with a girl. You’ll have to get me ready first,” Dennis says, and Mac picks up the bottle of lube.

“You’re saying I hafta finger you,” Mac says, clicking open the bottle. The lube smells like strawberries. Classy. He squirts some onto the fingers of his right hand, rubs it between his fingers to warm it. 

“Yeah,” says Dennis. 

“Think I can manage,” Mac says, and he takes Dennis’s cock in his left hand, dragging the pad of his thumb up the vein that lines the underside. He won't allow himself to freak out–– though part of him shrieks, You're touching a dick! You're touching Dennis's dick! He jerks Dennis off loosely–– just enough to distract him, not enough for more–– letting the quickening of Dennis’s breathing, the little puffs of air from his lips, guide Mac’s movements. Mac tips the slick pointer finger of his right hand down until he’s tracing Dennis’s hole in tight, teasing circles. 

“It’ll be different than anal with a girl, anyway. Closer to with a pussy," Dennis says. 

Mac makes a face. “What the fuck are you talking about, dude? You don’t have a pussy; you have an asshole. I am touching your asshole, right now.”

“Yeah, no shit, Einstein!” snaps Dennis. “I’m just saying–– you know how girls have that spot inside, the G-spot, that makes ‘em feel really good?”

Mac has not done enough research on the subject to have discovered this quirk of anatomy. “Duh,” he lies. 

“Dudes have one too.”

“Bullshit,” says Mac, shifting from circling his finger around Dennis’s hole to pressing it lightly in a staccato rhyme, letting Dennis’s body grow used to the idea of being breached. “You’re telling me I have a clit in my ass?”

Dennis huffs in frustration, balling his hands into fists and pressing them over his eyes. “Not a clit, a prostate, you imbecile.”

“Isn’t that where the cancer goes? And, and how do you even know all this?” Mac asks, and apple-green envy bolts down his spine like lightning. Has Dennis fucked other dudes? Who the fuck does Mac need to hunt for sport?

Dennis pulls his balled fists away from his eyes and fixes Mac with an exasperated look. “I’m a scholar, Mac.”

Whatever the fuck that means. Mac decides it’s an excellent time to push his finger inside Dennis to the first knuckle. When Mac’s finger breaches him, Dennis inhales sharply and his chest puffs like a proud bird’s. Mac works his finger in further, stroking lightly in come-hither motions against Dennis’s velvet-soft insides. 

Dennis makes a soft noise in the back of his throat and squirms a little on the bedspread.

“Is that your man clit?” Mac asks. 

The glare Dennis levels Mac with would set another man on fire. “Prostate,” he hisses. “And no, I think it’ll be obvious if you find it.”

“Can’t you just tell me where it is?”

“I dunno where it is, dude!”

Mac makes a face, wriggles his pointer finger deeper, and starts to press his middle finger against Dennis’s hole to see if his body can admit more. “Have you touched yourself here before? Or, like, experimented with someo––” Mac doesn’t want to know that. “–– just, uh. Experimented?”

Dennis gestures to their bodies with exasperation. “This is the experiment, Mac.”

Mac nods, chastised. He’d let himself forget, for a moment, what this is. He’s let hope take over, filling his vessel up to bursting like a water balloon. “Right, right.”

“Gimme another finger,” Dennis tells him, and Mac obliges, sliding his middle finger past the ring of muscles to join his pointer. He strokes the fingers, searching, until he touches somewhere that makes Dennis hiss and arch his back. “Fuck, that’s––”

“There?”

Dennis’s face softens with pleasure. “Yeah, yeah, there.”

Mac works his fingers over that spot, relishing in Dennis’s moans and the spasms of pleasure that wrack his frame. He’s trying to melt Dennis from the inside out. Maybe it’s even working–– Dennis has started to glisten with sweat, which makes him look more like a real person than a statue. Mac adds a third finger, hoping it'll take Dennis apart further.

When Dennis coos a little and then bites the noise off with a hard clench of teeth, Mac starts to fuck his fingers in and out of Dennis, hooking on Dennis’s prostate on the instroke. 

“Oh, shit –– uh, uh, Mac, I––” Dennis babbles, scratching at Mac’s shoulder blades. Mac hopes that Dennis’s nails leave hot, red lines behind. Dennis bats glassy eyes at Mac, drool pooling a little in the corner of his mouth, and Mac leans in to lick it off his lips. 

A filthy delight runs through Mac as he fingers Dennis and listens to the sloppy sounds of their joining over the rage of the party downstairs. He watches his fingers disappear inside Dennis’s pink hole and feels a bit lightheaded. 

Having Dennis under him like this, pinned in place by Mac's fingers like a captured butterfly, is an intoxicating and foreign feeling to Mac. There's a control to it that Mac rarely experiences. He lives life by other people's rules–– God or Dennis fighting for first, whoever is loudest dictating the doctrine by which Mac lives his life. With God closing his eyes and Dennis closing his mouth, Mac feels frenzied with power. 

Dennis makes a noise like Mac's sucker-punched him, then says, “Jesus, gimme a sec,” pushing a little at Mac’s wrist.

Mac pulls his fingers free from the clutch of Dennis’s body immediately. “You okay, man?”

Dreamily, Dennis grins up at Mac. “Yeah. You’re good at that.”

Mac prickles with pride but doesn’t know how to respond to that. ‘Thanks’ seems simultaneously bizarre and insufficient. “Then, um. Why’d we stop?”

Dennis pants a little, the high points of his golden skin kissed with a rosy hue. “Didn’t want to c–– not without––” Dennis clears his throat. Mac watches as Dennis attempts to gather composure while nude underneath Mac on a twin bed. The artifice of it is more apparent than usual, and he wants Dennis to drop it. Dennis lifts his legs up, hooking his knees over Mac’s shoulders, effectively folding himself in half. Mac wants to scream. “Inside me,” Dennis commands. 

Mac swallows, hard, and reaches for his neglected cock. The first brush of his fingertips down his length makes him hiss and buck his hips in anticipation. 

“Inside me,” repeats Dennis.

“Slow down.” Mac pours a little more lube on his palm and slicks himself up. He presses the head of his cock over the wet furl of Dennis’s hole, applying slight pressure, looking for a give. “I dunno if I’m gonna fit if I don’t stretch you out more, bro.”

“No, no,” says Dennis, hooking his ankles behind Mac’s neck, bringing Mac even closer. “Wantchu now, yeah? Wanna feel you. Now, Mac.”

“Okay, okay,” says Mac. He pauses anyway to add more lube to his dick until he’s dripping with it, even though Dennis bitches and moans about it. 

“C’mon, Mac!” says Dennis.

“You’re so impatient, man,” Mac says. He pushes, gently, until Dennis’s ring of muscles spasms and sucks in the head of his cock. The sensation of being surrounded by Dennis so suddenly–– hot, tight, Dennis, Dennis, oh God, Dennis–– is so overwhelming that it bowls Mac over. 

Dennis seems similarly affected, his hands scrambling wildly across the bedsheets, searching for purchase. “Fuck! Oh, oh Mac––”

Mac sucks in a breath through his teeth. He fights the avalanche of thoughts and feelings and sensations as best he can: Dennis’s lithe, golden body underneath him; being inside Dennis; oh, God, he loves Dennis; Dennis’s lips are pink and wet from their kissing, from the way Dennis bites his lip; the thump of music from the party raging below them; Dennis’s icy blue eyes; oh, God, oh fucking goddammit, he’s so in love with Dennis, it burns inside him like he's swallowed a hot coal.

Forming words is an exercise in futility, but he eventually manages, “Can I–– move––”

“Yes, yes, Mac, c’mon,” encourages Dennis, his voice thick and syrupy as honey. 

Mac eases in, inch by tentative inch, forcing himself not to just bury himself in Dennis to the hilt. Dennis’s walls flutter and constrict around him, and Dennis makes the prettiest noises in the back of his throat. He takes a moment when he’s sheathed fully to get used to the sensation, despite Dennis moaning brokenly and clawing at Mac’s back. 

“More,” says Dennis, “more, more.”

“Okay, okay.” Mac rocks his hips forward, back, trying to get a rhythm, trying to tilt Dennis’s hips in such a way that when Mac pulls out, his cock will drag hard against Dennis’s front wall. 

Mac fucks Dennis harder, faster, he follows Dennis’s instructions like a champ. Eventually, he figures out how to angle his upstroke to hit the spot inside Dennis that makes his curse and shudder like he’s been struck by lightning. 

“I’m close,” gasps Dennis. 

Mac is too. Something sharp and bright blooms inside him. The hot core of Dennis sucks him in, fights to keep him there on the pullout, trying to keep Mac with Dennis in a desperate way that Mac knows Dennis would never admit with words. 

Still, the hot clutch of Dennis’s body and the way he moans, high and thready, feels like a kind of confession.

“Mac, I’m so–– fuckfuck ––” whimpers Dennis.

It happens just like his nightmares: Mac looks down at Dennis underneath him, writhing in pleasure, and whispers devoutly, “I love you,” as he buries himself to the hilt inside Dennis. Mac can’t help himself; the knowledge of it conquers him; he loves Dennis, and he’ll keep quietly giving and giving away more of himself as tribute to the black hole of hunger that Dennis embodies. He knows this. He knows this in the same way he knows that now that he has said it, Dennis is unlikely to ever let him close enough to say it again.

Mac knows Dennis heard his confession by the way his blue eyes go a little wide with panic, and by the way his walls flutter around Mac’s cock. Mac can’t help but make the most of the opportunity while it lasts, so he gasps desperately, a little louder, still jackrabbiting his hips, still palming messily at Dennis’s weeping cock, “I love you, Den.”

Dennis takes Mac’s bicep between his teeth, right over his feather tattoo. If he says something as he comes ribbons over their stomachs, well, that’ll stay a secret between Dennis and Mac’s skin.

Mac’s so close now, but he forces himself to slow, to start to pull out.

Dennis tolerates none of this, swiftly smacking Mac’s back with his heel. 

“Ow!” protests Mac. 

“You’re close?” Dennis confirms. 

“Y-yes.”

“You remember what I told you? The first time?”

Something in Mac winds up tight, tight, tight. I’d want you to fuck me, Dennis had said as he jerked Mac off under the St. Joseph’s bleachers. Raw, so I can feel you drip out of –– and then Mac had come so hard he’d seen stars. “Yeah, I remember.”

“Go on, then,” Dennis says. He won’t meet Mac’s eyes, his cheeks flushed red. 

It’s easy to slip back inside Dennis, to fuck back into the pink, hot bud of his hole. Dennis rewards Mac by moaning and shivering with overstimulation, chanting lowly, “C’mon, Mac, give it to me, c’mon, man, c’mon.”

Mac fucks into Dennis, chasing his release. He looks down at Dennis and knows that Dennis doesn’t love him–– not in the same world-encompassing way his affection for Dennis rules Mac’s life. It’s futile to wish for a love so celestial to be reciprocated. Mac knows better than to hope for that. Ice-blue eyes meet Mac’s. Be mine as much as I’m yours, hopes Mac as he looks at Dennis. Be here, with me, because you want to be, not just because you can. 

Mac ducks down to rest his forehead in the humid juncture between Dennis’s shoulder and neck. He does it to hide that right before he comes, buried deep inside Dennis, he closes his eyes and imagines Dennis whispering back, just as low and thick with emotion as Mac's confession was, “I love you too.” 

Mac collapses bonelessly atop Dennis, softening inside him. Dennis tolerates it, and they lie together, Mac’s head pillowed on Dennis’s chest, listening to the frantic butterfly-flutter of Dennis’s heartbeat. 

Something fragile blooms and dies inside Mac, like a stop-motion movie of a flower.

Dennis makes Mac pull out and then dabs at the mess Mac made inside him with a wad of tissues. Mac watches, lying passively, feeling too big for his own skin. The drawer of the bedside table rattles as Dennis opens it and retrieves a cigarette. He also hangs himself half off the bed–– still lithe and golden and nude–– to search through Mac’s pockets to find his second joint. 

When Dennis finds it, he tosses the joint to Mac and lights his cigarette. Mac puts the joint between his teeth and leans in to light it off Dennis’s cig’s smoldering cherry. 

They’re silent for a moment. Mac marvels at them, the two of them, together like this. Pressed against each other. He can look at Dennis and not feel guilty.

If all it took for God to be cool with this is for them to be high, then Mac is at a loss as to why they haven’t done this before. They’re high all the time. They could have been doing this for years. 

Mac says, brimming with joy, riddled with fear, “I think I want to be a priest, bro.”

The air feels charged and electric. Dennis stares at him blankly. From downstairs, something crashes loudly to the ground and the crowded party roars with delight, and Dennis blinks sharply, like his software has rebooted.

The sharp, cruel sound of Dennis’s laugh is painful to Mac’s ears. “You can’t be serious,” Dennis says.

 Mac flinches like Dennis slapped him. It might be better if he had. “Of course I’m serious.”

Dennis gestures to their naked bodies slotted beside each other, tight as sardines in a can, on Dennis’s dorm room twin bed. “What, you think the church is just gonna get cool with a bunch of things, super quick?”

“But, but you said it was okay,” protests Mac, his heart starting to hammer with panic. “You said this was okay if we were stoned. What about the, the Leviticus thing?”

“Are you serious?! I was so clearly fucking with you, dude,” says Dennis, voice acidic. “That passage meant stoned like stoned to death, you idiot.”

Mac feels flayed open–– red and bloody and raw. Futilely, he says, “You said it was okay!”

“News flash, Mac— I’m a fuckin’ liar!”

Mac hops off the bed, still naked, cum still dripping from his flaccid cock. He shakes his hands anxiously, starts pacing in tight circles on the worn carpet. “Fuck. Fuck.”

Dennis makes a noise of profound exasperation, which Mac can’t even begin to parse. Dennis has damned them. Handies are one thing, a bro-job or two is forgivable, but Dennis has made them into sodomites tonight. God doesn’t care if they’re high or not; they’re sinners.

Bile burns the back of Mac’s throat. “We’re gonna–– we’re going to hell, Dennis––” The hysterical half-choke half-laugh that Dennis releases makes Mac want to throttle him. “This is serious, dude, we’re damned, dude––”

Dennis groans. “Mac. Shut up.”

Mac bristles. “Damned, dude!”

Dennis half-sits up, then opens his arms up to Mac. Welcoming him. Mac feels a little sick. “Come here, Mac,” Dennis says. 

Mac shouldn’t. He really, really shouldn’t. He should try to find an open church. He should find a way to repent. 

He climbs back on the bed. He lets Dennis wipe the come off him with some tissues. Lets Dennis redress them both in their underwear. Lets Dennis fold Mac up in his arms, lets Dennis drape a blanket over the two of them. At some point, Mac starts to sob, biting viciously at the insides of his cheeks, trying to contain the pained noises. Dennis doesn’t acknowledge it–– he just drags his fingers through Mac’s slicked-back locks until they both fall asleep. 

The sunlight that slants through the windows feels drawn thin and oily. Or maybe that’s just Mac. 

Mac wakes to Dennis fussing over him, holding a bowl of water in one hand and rubbing a wet sock in circles against Mac’s cheek with the other. It’s a bizarre enough sensation that Mac doesn’t immediately notice what is written in Sharpie on Dennis’s forehead, but once he sees it, he can’t focus on anything else. 

I CHUG DICK, it says in bold, black marker. 

There’s a thick snore from somewhere, and Mac looks over to see the other twin bed is now occupied by Dennis’s bitch-ass roommate, Dave Chernin. 

“Dave broke in sometime in the night,” Dennis explains, keeping his voice low. “To sleep in his own bed. Bastard.” He pulls the sock away from Mac’s cheek, dips it back into the bowl of water, and then starts to scrub at Mac’s cheek again. “Some of the brothers got in here and saw us. That's the graffiti.”

Mac’s heart turns iron-cold in his chest. “What?”

Dennis bulldozes on as if Mac hadn’t said a word. “If anyone asks, we passed out after playing strip poker with some girls. That’s what I said.”

“Did they believe you?” asks Mac. 

Dennis points to his forehead. I CHUG DICK.

“And where’d the girls go?” Mac asks. 

“Out the window. Fire escape. I dunno, don’t make it complicated.” Dennis drops the sock into bowl with a wet splat. “Think that’s the best I can do.”

“What’d they draw on me?” Mac asks. 

“A dick,” Dennis says. "Creative stuff. Don’t worry, I got most of it off.”

Mac points at the words on Dennis’s forehead. “What about you?”

“I’m going to do a face mask. I have a skin barrier to restore–– it’s very involved stuff, Mac,” Dennis says, and then his expression turns stormy. “When I am done, I will remind these, these taggers, who their God really is.”

“Okay,” Mac says, pulling on last night’s clothes. He wants to believe Dennis but recognizes empty promises when he hears them. Beside one of Mac's boots is the bookmarked Bible Dennis used to convince him to... to...

Dennis is a liar. 

Once he laces up his boots, Mac stands in front of Dennis, not sure what to do with himself. The bedroom door is slightly ajar and Dave Chernin snores on, so kissing Dennis is out of the question. Not that he would, or should, or wants to. He can’t hug Dennis either. Shaking his hand is too strange to even fathom. 

He flounders there, uncertain, for too long until Dennis looks up and says–– as if he’d forgotten the other man was still there–– “Bye, Mac.”

As Mac leaves the frat house, he repeats Dennis’s lies like a mantra in case he gets questioned. Girls. Strip Poker. Left through the window. It doesn’t matter anyway; most of the frat bros ignore him entirely. The ones Mac has the misfortune of making eye contact with regard him with the same disdain Mac reserves for himself in the mirror.

Someone’s written DOUCHEBAG on Mac’s back window in hot pink lipstick, ostensibly due to his shitty parking job. Mac can’t bring himself to worry about it–– not when the open sky above him makes him feel claustrophobic, as if God’s eye is upon him from every angle.

Mac drives home feeling sated and sinful, pig-sty dirty. 

He parks carefully when he arrives, drops a quick kiss to his mom’s wiry gray hair when he enters the house, and then beelines to the King James Bible he keeps on his bedside table. He flips through until he finds the passage he’s in search of: Leviticus 20:13. 

“If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination;” Mac reads aloud, his voice wobbly and small. “They shall surely be put to death; their blood is upon them.”

Mac puts the book down on his bedspread. He inspects his hands for a full hour, keeps thinking he’ll find blood crusted in half-moons under his fingernails. 

If loving Dennis is a length of rope, Mac keeps choosing to hang himself with it.