Sheridan didn’t know where he was when he woke up. He was so comfortable, and Logan’s body pressed to his, his arms around him, the smell of him was so good. Quickly, memory filtered back to him, and as it returned he tried to block it out. He tried to block out the pressure in his bladder.
He looked at the clock. It was dark, but it was six in the morning. Of course it was. He hadn’t come to Logan until nearly one. He disentangled himself from Logan and went to the bathroom. When he came out, Logan was sitting up.
“I have to get dressed,” Sheridan said. “I have to go.”
“No you don’t,” Logan told him. “Stay with me.”
“I’ve got classes at nine.”
“Forget class.”
Sheridan wanted to say something sharp, something like, how could Logan possibly appreciate class and college? But instead he just said, “I’m going to class. I’m going to be there at nine.”
“Alright,” Logan said, shrugging. “But right now it’s barely six. There’s more time for us. You’re only a half hour away from Loretto. It’s Loretto, right?”
“Right,” Sheridan said.
“Stay with me?” Logan said. “A little longer? Let’s eat something, stretch a bit and then make love a little longer. It’s been so long.”
It couldn’t have been that long for Logan, and Sheridan pushed out of his head the fact that he’d just had sex with Chay yesterday. But he understood what Logan meant, so he said, “Alright.”
“Good,” Logan told him. “I’ll throw some clothes on.”
Logan came out of bed, but Sheridan didn’t want him to put clothes on now. Despite his reservations, it was just like last night. Their bodies snapped together like magnets. They were linking and kissing and Logan felt so good, and Sheridan felt so sexy, so loved, so special when Logan was attending to him this way. With Chay he was, for lack of a better word, the man. But with Logan he always felt like he was the one who would be picked up and carried over the threshold, the treasured girlfriend, and it made him feel so good. With Logan he thought, this is what it really feels like to be gay. This is what men wish they could feel like, this being kissed and cherished by another man, this being a grown man’s sweetheart.
“Then you’ll stay a little longer?” Logan said. He sat on the edge of the bed, his arms around Sheridan’s waist, and he had been sucking on him, kissing on his stomach, sucking him again.
Sheridan’s voice was light. He felt like he would fly away. “Yes,” he said.
“Good,” Logan pressed his face into Sheridan’s stomach. He said with an earnest intensity, “I want to fuck you so bad.”
Sheridan’s trembled from his bowels to his toes. “Yes,” he said.
Logan released him, lightly.
“I’ll go down and get some condoms,” Logan said. “I always want to use a condom with you. Don’t want you to ever have to worry. I’ll be right back.”
Sheridan lay on the bed, pulling the sheet over himself, watching Logan dress. Logan winked at him and then shut the door behind him.
For a moment he was so sad. He and Chay never used condoms because they didn’t have to. He wanted, once, for Logan to fuck him with nothing between them. He wanted nothing between them. And what was this? He wanted to know, for once, what something was.
But then practicality made him put that idea away, and he went to the hotel room looking for something, a hose, or a hot water bottle, to do a quick clean up job. Logan wasn’t going to short change him, all of the things anyone had ever seen Logan do in a video, he was going to do to him when he got back, and that required a certain level of… Sheridan sighed thinking of the word… maintenance.
The door opened softly as Sheridan finished cleaning the bathroom after cleaning himself, and he came out. When he saw Logan and Logan saw him, they went straight toward each other.
“Shower with me,” Logan said. “Let’s wash each other.”
The first time they’d done that had been when Sheridan saved him after that man had attempted to rape and kill Logan, so long ago. That time it had been sweet in its tenderness. Now it was sweet in its fierceness and there was as much tasting and kissing and biting as there was scrubbing and then, still kissing and only half dry, Logan led him back to the bed and they didn’t stop until eight o’clock, until it was time for Sheridan to go to class. All of those times with girls, Sheridan had been trying to make himself something, and in those few times with guys he didn’t really know, there had been some holding back. But with Chay, and with Logan right now, there was this complete openness where everything was possible and every desire was entertained and every wish was granted. When it was over that last time, they lay exhausted, splayed on their sides, heaving, fingers linking, bodies perspiring. But it wasn’t for the first time. They’d taken several rests.
“And now you need to get dressed,” Logan prompted. When he was dressed, Sheridan stood at the door with Logan, whose hands were jammed into his pocket. “We didn’t take care of anything,” Sheridan said. “I think we took care of a lot.”
“Logan.”
Logan grinned and kissed him.
“We were supposed to talk. We were supposed to rationally hammer out something.”
“Did you really think that was going to happen when you came back here?”
“Did you bring me back here just to fuck?”
“Yes,” Logan said, straight faced. “Because I had to travel three thousand miles and call you up just to get laid.”
Sheridan just looked at him.
“Look, Sheridan. I’m not a long term planning person. I asked you to come back so you’d stay with me cause I didn’t want you to leave. I was so glad to see you.”
“But we haven’t taken care of anything—”
“This is bullshit, Sheridan.”
“What?”
“Are you serious?”
“Yes.”
“There’s… there’s a lot more.”
“Like what?”
“Like… a lot. Like commitment and… I dunno. A lot.”
Logan, who usually acknowledged that Sheridan was the smarter one, just looked at Sheridan like he was pitifully stupid, and shook his head.
“What?”
“I tell you what,” Logan said, opening the door, and pushing Sheridan gently out, “why don’t you tell me all of the other important stuff when you come back tonight?”
“What? I’m not coming back. I have things to do. I—”
“I’ll see you tonight,” Logan told him, and turning his back, he closed the door and left Sheridan standing there looking at a peephole.
As he drove to class, he went from being effusive to flat out drained and tired. By the time he reached Loretto, he wanted to go to sleep, but this thwarted the purpose of leaving Logan. He got his books and went to class. He even participated. He was thinking of how he should have been exhilarated after such a night, but he was tired and he wanted class to be over. He was sorry for Mondays and double booking them for the pleasure of free afternoons, and he yawned his way from Renaissance Lit to German and then dozed in the back and stumbled through the wide main floor of the Arts and Letters building out of the west entrance toward his car.
“Sheridan!” Oh shit.
He contemplated ignoring whoever was calling, and then turned around. There was no pretending he hadn’t heard his name and there were no other Sheridans he could pretend people were calling?
“Dr. Babcock?”
Bryant trotted toward him. “Good to see you, Sheridan.”
“I’m back here,” Bryant said. “I just got the job as chair of the music department.”
“Well…” Sheridan’s wits were slow, “that’s great.”
He wasn’t terribly close to Bryant, though he used to fuck his niece, something Bryant didn’t know and didn’t need to.
“You doing well this semester?”
Please let me go!
“I’m alright,” Sheridan said. “I can’t complain.”
He affected a yawn that turned out to be real enough and said, “I was up all night.”
“Oh, yes,” Bryant said. “So was I.”
Sheridan looked Bryant Babcock up and down. He was still a handsome guy, and it was well known he’d gotten with Chad North when he was the same age Sheridan was now. Bryant’s up all night could have been as wild as Sheridan’s. He put that out of his head.
“I should let you go,” Bryant said, touching him on the shoulder. “It’s good to see you, Sheridan. And maybe I’ll see you in a class.”
“Don’t count on it,” Sheridan said gracelessly, and covered his mouth.
Bryant cracked a smile.
“I mean… what I meant is jazz is more my style. I mean, I like it, and I only had one music credit to do, and I used it for jazz last semester.”
“Jazz?” Bryant said.
“Yeah,” Sheridan told him, stifling a real yawn this time.
“Who teaches jazz here?”
“Professor Jay,” Sheridan said. “He’s great.”
And then, because Bryant didn’t seem to be going anywhere, Sheridan bowed his head, and headed toward his car.
He lived on the other side of campus and when he parked under his apartment, he ran in as soon as possible and threw himself face down on the bed. There would be another class at two, the last of the day, and that was a while off. He wanted the radio. He wanted the bathroom. He reached forward and fumbled with the radio. He didn’t go to the bathroom because it was too far off. At last, as Diane Rhems went into her second, warbling hour, his bladder and bowels won out, and dizzy and half blind, he stumbled to the toilet. He came back, passed out into blackness, and was surprised when he felt his shoulder be shaken.
“Hey, wake up!”
It was the most beautiful face in the world. Cream colored, brown eyed, red lipped, curtained by his thick dark hair, little, smelling faintly of a cigarette. Chay. His Chay.
“Come on.”
“Come on, what?”
“We’ve got lunch with Meredith.”
“Oh…”
“Remember?”
“What time is it?”
“One.”
“I… I’ve been asleep for two hours?”
“I guess so,” Chay said. “Are you alright?”
Sheridan sat up.
“Do I smell bad?”
“Your breath is kind of rank. You know what? I’ll let you sleep. I’ll just tell Meredith that you’re tired.”
But as Chay was walking away, Sheridan caught his hand.
“No.” Sheridan used Chay as a lever. “I’ll be right back.”
He went into the bathroom, rinsed, gargled, and came out.
“Chay,” he said, tenderly. He stooped down, pulled Chay to him and kissed him on his mouth. “I love you.”
“I know that. I love you too.”
“Come on. How soon are you moving in?”
“Uh…” he shrugged. For some reason, maybe because of his little shoulders, when he shrugged, Sheridan was reminded of his fine bones, of the smoothness of his perfect cream colored body, of the laughs they shared, of the strange chemistry of living with Chay and being his very best friend. Who knew him like Chay? Who opened him and opened to him like Chay?
Chay cocked his head.
“You look sweet like that,” he told Sheridan.
“Come on,” Sheridan told him. “Let’s go eat.”
“So,” Meredith took a sip of her drink and looked from Sheridan to Chay, “when are you guys moving in together?”
“Why’s that so fascinating to you?” Chay wondered. “Is Sheridan even awake?” Meredith looked at him. Sheridan made a vague gesture while yawning, and Chay said, “He was up all night.”
“Oh?” Meredith raised an eyebrow.
“Hey, none of that!” Chay said. “I was in bed by ten. All he could do was study.”
Sheridan felt his skin pricking and sweat lifting up on his head. He wondered if anyone could see it. He couldn’t let the lie go, not completely.
“I wasn’t studying,” he said. “I just couldn’t sleep.”
“And now all you want to do is sleep,” Meredith said. “Chay, you should have told him to stay in bed.”
“That’s exactly what I told him,” Chay said. “But he insisted on coming.”
“Ah, Sheridan. I would have understood. Just cause we don’t have the same classes this year doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have understood.”
“How’s that marriage thing going?”
“Oh?”
“Yeah,” Sheridan said, waking up a little. “Let’s shift the convo from me and Chay to you. By the way, Chay’s coming to live with me tonight.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Chay said, but he looked like he had forgotten.
“Well, I don’t know,” Meredith said. “Not about you all. That’s great. About me and Mathan, I mean. At first I wondered why I didn’t want to do it. I mean, I seriously thought about how I didn’t really want to do it. And now I just feel like I’m too young.”
“Have you even told Mathan any of that?”
Meredith shook her head and took another sip. “Not a bit.”
When her friends looked at her she said, “Yes, I should I know.
“Ouch—” Chay said.
“Ouch what?”
“She said the inevitable, didn’t she?” Sheridan smirked.
“What’s that mean?”
“It’s just…” Chay said. “There’s no… steam in that. It’s not hot.”
“Do you all have heat?”
Before Chay answered, Sheridan squeezed him and said, “You have no idea.”
When he watched Chay blush, Sheridan realized how true it was. Whatever Logan and last night had been, it was a fluke. What he had with Chay was the real thing.
But as he was thinking that, his thigh buzzed and he thought of ignoring it, but Meredith said, “You better get.”
Sheridan shrugged and pulled it out. “Who is it?”
It was Logan, of course, and Sheridan immediately lied. “It’s work.”
“Then get it, goof,” Chay said, shoving him out of the booth.
Irrationally, Sheridan was irritated with Chay, and he flipped open the phone saying, “Hello.”
“Hello,” Logan affected a constipated voice.
“Are you making fun of me?”
“Yeah. I’m missing you, boy. So… I just called to make sure you remembered to come over tonight.”
“Uh…” Sheridan looked back at Chay, who was chatting with Meredith. “That can’t happen.”
“Why, because of Chay? Look, I’ll talk to him.”
“No!”
“We were friends. But you were with me, Sheridan. I want to see you tonight.”
“It’s not like we’re going to just talk.”
“Well, maybe we will.”
“Doubtful.”
“Come over,” Logan said.
Sheridan took a breath, but didn’t respond.
“Sher…” “Yeah?”
“Tonight. Around nine. Like we said… Come over,” Logan said.
Then he hung up.
