Page 87 of My Own Kind of Person

“I appreciate the straightforward question.”

He moves his face in front of my eyes, which means I must’ve been looking away.

“Oh.” I tell myself to say yes. “Sure.”

It’s nice to be the object of desire, a passive recipient. And a relief, because I don’t have to worry about the right way to take the lead. This is one thing that feels different from being with a girl, which I can’t help but make comparisons to, even though a girl, certainly, could also see me as an object of desire. And I’m tired, either way, of seeing everything through the lens of gender, when we’re all just humans trying to get by.

Either way, when Elijah moves to the bottom of the bed and pulls down my boxers, it’s clear I’m too nervous to proceed forward appropriately.

I almost laugh. “I guess it’s not that I’ve been secretly gay this whole time. It’s just that I’m even more awkward than I realized.”

He looks up to find my eyes. “Are you okay?”

I rub my thumb against my other fingers to see how far away they feel.

“Oh.” I shrug. “You know.”

I don’t have the internal monologue telling me to be a man and get over it, so that’s progress. I’ve learned how to be an emotional mess without the baggage of masculinity.

“Sean?”

I was probably in this same state in bed with Christy when I cut myself off from the experience, but I’m not cutting myself off like that anymore. Another good sign of progress. I no longer run away from how I feel. I let myself live inside it, swim in it, drink it up.

“Sorry.” I close my eyes. “I’m trying.” I almost laugh again.

I sit up and Elijah sits beside me. He’s still in his jeans and I’m fully naked.

“Is this like what happened in your story onstage?” he asks.

“Hm?” I want to know who vacuums his bedroom. How is the rug so clean? Once, Tony slept over and got a thumbtack stuck in him. Once I pulled a bin of LEGO out from under my bed and in the corner was an apple core covered in ants.

“With Christy,” he clarifies.

“It’s similar. Yeah.”

He takes my hand. “I thought you were going to tell us at the end why you couldn’t let yourself cry, but instead you made that joke. I wanted to know the answer.”

Elijah’s smart. Drawing me back to reality with a topic I can’t resist—my performance onstage. “That reminds me,” I say, “of how I wanted to know what Joe Johnson was really going through, but instead he told jokes. The jokes were so good, though, that maybe he was right.”

“But why do you think you couldn’t let yourself cry?”

His window is closed but I feel a cool wind touching my arms. Or I’m cold because I’m naked.

I shrug. “There are parts of myself I don’t really have access to.”

“What would happen if you allowed yourself to have access to them?”

Heat rises from my belly up to my throat and spreads across my face. My words come out in a whisper. “I don’t think I want to do that.”

I imagine him letting go of my hand and moving himself away. I imagine him drawing his legs into himself and wrapping his arms around them, resting his head on top of his knees and closing his eyes, frowning. I’ve taken someone joyful and bold, I think, and simply by showing him who I really am, I’ve turned him into someone sad and alone.

But this isn’t what happens.

He stretches out his legs and says, “Let’s pause.” He leans back on his elbows, the curve where his hips meets the top of his jeans a perfect place that I apparently cannot appreciate without having a nervous breakdown. “I was so glad when you were still outside the diner,” he says. “I wanted to ask you all day to come over after the show, but I was nervous.”

“You were nervous?”

He shrugs. “I told you what happened with me and my friend.”