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It’s not often that Matt and Jay get out of the city. Sometimes they’ll make the gruelling trek to the west end to catch a MiWay bus back home when both of them are too lazy or broke to rent a car, but even still that hardly counts when they’re only going to see their families. And, Matt supposes, that going to the island isn’t really getting out of the city, but the use of ferry transportation makes him feel at least a little bit adventurous when he starts to get sick of meticulously avoiding crack pipes and spilled coffee on the TTC. Once, he found the skeleton of an entire rotisserie chicken sitting on the back five seats of the bus. It’s not like it’s a particularly interesting discovery, but it did make him wonder how hungry someone would have to be to eat an entire chicken plain, and, presumably with their bare hands. Regardless, having exhausted his plans for the week, he suggests that he and Jay go on a day trip.
“It could be fun!” he chirps, wagging his brows. “We could have a garbage fire. And I think I still have some fireworks left.”
“MJ, you don’t have to convince me to go to the island. It’s like a million degrees outside. Beach sounds like heaven.”
It’s actually only 25 celsius out there, but in Toronto that might as well be hell-level temperatures. He agrees, even if he kind of doesn’t want to swim in Lake Ontario, that at least looking at it would be pretty refreshing right now. He supposes that if they really wanted to just hang out on the waterfront, they could just take the streetcar east, but it's nice to see the city slip away, to see the skyline all lit up at night, to wander the pretty old neighbourhoods. Besides, the ferry is only, like, five more dollars than bus fare, and he can still milk a student discount.
Clapping his hands together, Matt tells him, “Perfect. Wards?”
“Duh. The only redeemable part of Centre Island is the zoo because of the peacock. And that mean cat.”
Matt smirks. “Don't forget the nude beach.”
Humming disapprovingly, Jay says, “Pretty sure it’s mostly just wrinkly old European men with their wrinkly old junks out and not hot girls, but if that's what gets you going, MJ, who am I to stop you?”
“Eugh, nasty.” Matt shivers. “Okay, so, beach, fire—beer?”
“Yeah, I bought a two-four last week, remember?”
It’s kind of a little bit late to be deciding to go to the island, since it is already four pm, and even though they live, like, three stops away from the dock, he knows they won’t get there until five. But, there’s a ferry at 5:15, so if he shoves all of the necessities into a bag (cigarettes, weed, a towel, munchies, scratched up sunglasses, one firecracker, a crapload of beer, a mini bottle of vodka, and a comic he got for free because someone left it on a table in Queens Park) and quickly changes out of his blazer into a thinner shirt, then they’ll make it before it gets dark.
“Beauty,” Matt says. Then, “...Does Canadian Tire sell firewood? I mean, we can still burn shit, but we kind of need logs, don’t we? Like as a base?”
“Uh,” Jay says, “Probably. I dunno. Home Depot?”
“Bird, where the fuck is there a Home Depot close to downtown? Gerrard East? I’m not going to fucking Leslieville for firewood. By the time we get to Union it’ll be three am. You know what the 506 is like.”
“There’s convenience stores around here. Surely there’s somewhere.”
“Oh.” Matt snaps his fingers. “Grange. Buh. Alright, get changed and meet me at University in thirty.”
Jay doesn’t move from the bench.
“Now, Bird! Go, go, go!”
Jay scrambles like a headless chicken. In the meantime, Matt procures their speaker and snacks while trying to ignore the fact that Jay won’t stop knocking shit over upstairs. He leaves most of the stuff in a pile by the door so Jay can (hopefully) have the brains to carry it for him since he’s going to be hauling wood for three blocks. Outside, he walks leisurely westward down the street, knowing that Jay will probably get distracted somewhere along the lines and make that thirty minutes closer to forty-five. It’s busy for a Tuesday, but it’s always pretty busy down here.
Staring longingly at the Rivoli as he passes it, Matt tucks his hands into his pockets. A shaggy looking skater kid covers up his band’s poster with a flyer for a show at another bar. He thinks about saying something, but decides against it when he sees the kid’s friend grin and ruffle his hair. It’s amusing to him, for a moment, to imagine them using their parents’ printer to painstakingly make a stack of shitty flyers, and using their last bus tokens and expired transfers to hop the transit line all over the west end. He pictures their whiny experimental sound, the nights they’d stay up smoking on the roof. It’s a lot like him at Jay, isn’t it?
Hold onto it, he thinks fleetingly. He shakes his head and keeps walking.
-
It’s hotter on the island than in the city. Sweat dampens the collar of Matt’s shirt and his hair feels like it’s on fire atop his head, but he sort of likes that. Summer has always been his favourite because since he was in school, it meant getting to screw around with Jay doing whatever they wanted. And yeah, it was mostly just stealing shit from Mac's and junk shops and staying up until three in the morning playing video games, but that doesn't mean any of it lacked value. There was nothing better to him than wasting his time if it's Jay who he was wasting it with. And, of course, summer here is unlike anywhere else, he's sure of it. There's just something about this place that never gets old, even if he hates to love it it half the time.
“Dude, look,” Jay says, gesturing vaguely into the foliage that lines either side of the path to the beach. “Frog.”
“That’s a toad,” Matt corrects. He crunches a stick underfoot and the amphibian shrieks, hopping away. Frowning, he hikes his bag further up his shoulder because it won’t stop slipping. He nearly died trying to carry it from the dock, not to mention the fact that the ferry police tried to take his wood away because setting fires is illegal, or whatever. He’d lied and said that his parents lived on the island and he was only bringing them wood for their fireplace. As if he looked like he could have possibly inherited a home there. But, they’d let him through because at the end of the day, no one really gives a shit about what you do in this city as long as you keep your head down about it.
“You scared it, dumbass.”
Matt just snickers and flips Jay off over his shoulder. The beach is surprisingly empty, considering the weather, but he supposes that it is a Tuesday night and normal people do have jobs in the morning. He walks downshore until he finds a suitable spot and then throws all his shit on the ground in a heap.
Throwing an arm over his shoulder, he tells Jay, “Alright, Birdie, let’s get digging.”
“Calm down,” Jay gripes, waving a hand. He shrugs Matt off of him and unrolls a towel. “Let me get, like, one beer in me and then we’ll see about digging a hole with our bare hands.”
“You didn’t grab a trowel?” Jay gives him this look that says, Where the fuck would I get a trowel? and Matt supposes he’s probably right. He sighs dramatically, kicking off his shoes and socks before he plops down onto the ground and rummages for a bottle, even though it's closer to Jay. He hands one over. “There you go, princess. Beer delivery.”
“Why thank you,” Jay tells him, pleased. Matt watches with disdain as he uses his teeth to pry off the cap like a deranged person, as if Matt doesn’t have a bottle opener attached to his keys—a freebie, no doubt, from some stall at Union. Matt’s certainly not the idol of good behaviour, but he does know that it’s pretty fucking dumb to pry open a beer bottle with your teeth. Jay spits the cap somewhere to the right of them, seemingly unperturbed. “You want one, too?”
“Yeah, sure. Let’s get some tunes, though.”
Matt hooks up the radio and tunes it until he gets to a good station. He tucks his bag under his head as he leans back in the sand. It’s hot against his skin, even through his button up, and though dusk approaches, the sun is still blazing above them, so he pulls his hat over his eyes and listens to Alan Cross wax poetic about music for a while. There’s a crisp crack, then a quiet hiss, and then Matt jumps because Jay is pressing a cold beer bottle to his neck.
“Gah,” he gasps, jerking away. “What the fuck.”
“Thought you wanted beer?”
“In my mouth, not on my neck.”
“Well, good luck finding someone to feed it to you, because I'm certainly not doing that.”
“I should get one of those hats,” Matt says, “You know. The ones they sell at Jays games. With the straw and the beer compartment.”
“Beer through a straw is sacrilege,” Jay insists. “And you’d look like a fuckin’ nerd.”
“Well, I am a nerd, and so are you.”
Jay makes a face at him.
For a while, they just lie there talking to one another about nothing. It’s been so long since they’ve done this that Matt had almost forgotten what it was like, in between rotting in his room while he waited for Jay to come home from work and traversing the city for their latest Rivoli plan, it’s nice to just sit outside and laugh about things that only make sense to them. When it gets dark enough, Matt pulls his last firecracker out of his bag, and nearly blows his fingers off trying to shoot it at the lake. Jay laughs and laughs at him as he whines and sucks on the burn, and he realizes that he probably shouldn’t have done it in the first place because it’s eight on a Tuesday and the only people who live on Wards are eighty year olds who’ll call the island police on them for noise violations. But he only had the one, anyway, so there’s plausible deniability.
He feels, after they’ve both gotten a few beers and a little bit of weed in them, like a little kid digging around in the sand. He supposes that most little kids probably aren’t drinking Steam Whistle and smoking prerolls, but it’s the giddiness, that buzzy feeling that settles into his stomach that makes him feel like he and Jay are at the park playing grounders again. It’s a lot harder than it looks to make a decently sized pit away from all of the dry brush that lines the edge of the beach, but he and Jay manage with only some mild difficulties—those being the fact that he throws a handful of sand at him which in turn causes Jay to chase him all the way to the shoreline. He screams when Jay kicks water at him and cackles all the way back to their spot.
“You’re an ass,” Jay tells him.
“I’m the one who’s wet!”
“Yeah, ‘cause you got me all fucking sandy.” Cracking open another beer, Jay tells him, “As penance, I’m making you get more kindling.”
"What?" Matt asks incredulously. "We brought recycling to burn.”
Clearly trying to for some absurd British accent, Jay insists, “Go, MJ! Your life is riding on this! If we don’t get kindling, we’ll die out here!”
“I fucking hate you,” Matt tuts, pushing himself up from his knees.
He spends a few minutes painstakingly searching for dead wood to burn. It’s cooling off now that the sun is set, and he kind of wishes that he had a flashlight because pretty soon he won’t be able to see his hands a foot from his eyes without all of the light pollution from the city. As he’s tucking sticks under his arm, he’s reminded of when he and Jay would go and make teepees out by the Humber. They were hardly functioning, and honestly probably a little racist in practice, but he had fun back then, making shelters to hang around in. They were too old to play pretend, but young enough that there was a certain charm to fucking around like that where no one could find them.
He thinks about this kind of stuff a lot, he realizes. He thinks about them growing up, about how inseparable they were. He thinks about the gruelling years he spent without being able to see Jay at recess or lunch because he’s a few years older and moved onto high school first, and then the even worse years when he’d moved away for university. It’d been hard, then, to reacquaint himself with people that weren’t Jay. He’d made new friends himself, sure, but they weren’t the kind of people he could sneak out to go meet at the park, or steal candy with, or practice pick up lines on. Matt had been half convinced, then, that when Jay got back he’d have forgotten all about Matt; that he’d get a real job in the States and he’d never want to come back and finish what they started with their band. He’d have new friends and they’d be cooler and more pretentious and Jay would grow out of Final Fantasy and 80s movies and would use an mp3 player instead of a walkman. He would outgrow Matt.
But he hasn’t seemed to yet, and that’s gotta count for something, doesn’t it? Matt doesn’t know. He doesn’t like not knowing things.
When he’s collected a sufficient amount of wood from around the beach, he sidles back over to Jay, who’s leaning on his back with the rest of the blunt hanging out of his mouth. When he was gone, Jay seems to have taken it upon himself to make an, admittedly, beautiful cone of firewood in their sloppy, makeshift pit.
“I’ve done it,” Matt says, doing a much better accent, “I’ve procured the best wood this island has to offer. We shall live to see another day.”
Sitting up, Jay grabs a piece of it and frowns. “This shit is wet, man.”
“What? No it’s not, it’s just cold.”
“No, MJ, it’s fucking wet. I watched you pick driftwood off the shore like an idiot,” he deadpans. As if to demonstrate, Jay presses the glowing end of his spliff to the wood. It sizzles as the moisture puts it out.
“What the fuck? Why didn’t you say something?” Matt dumps the stack of branches to the ground miserably. “Whatever, just pour a beer on it.”
“Beer doesn’t have high enough alcohol content to catch fire, dumbass.”
“Well—” Matt huffs, sitting down. He pats around in his pocket, procuring a 50ml bottle of Smirnoff. “Man, I wanted to fucking drink this, but whatever.”
“Save it,” Jay says, reaching out to stop him from uncapping the booze, “We probably have enough to start the fire. It’ll dry out eventually, right?”
Matt watches him sift through the pile for a moment, pulling out a few pieces of wood that are dead and dry enough to burn. He adds them to the fire pit, then shoves some recycling from the bag into the gaps. It’s mostly junk mail, granola boxes and a particularly boring edition of Exclaim! that he must have picked up walking home one day. He digs into his bag and pulls out a carton of Belmonts. Matt takes one when it’s offered to him, and watches gleefully as Jay gets the fire going.
“Here,” he says, reaching to the pile, “Poking stick.”
“And on the first day…” Jay murmurs.
“Bird said let there be fiyah.”
It takes a little coaxing, but Jay, despite his sheltered and boring upbringing, is pretty damn good at making a fire. Within minutes, it’s crackling and popping, and that vodka is safe and tucked away inside Matt’s digestive system. He doesn’t realize just how buzzed he is until he sees the shadows on Jay’s face—which, to his credit, do make him look like some kind of geriatric monster—and starts giggling.
“What?” Jay asks, but he’s laughing a little too.
He’s a lightweight and Matt knows that by now. There’s a few different versions of Jay drunk depending on what he’s had. If it’s beer, he’s giddy until he hits number six, which then turns him into an asshole. If it’s wine, he’s miserable regardless of how much he’s had. If it’s anything else, the emotional fluctuations depend on the volume of which he’s consumed, but Matt’s known him long enough to be able to tell when to cut him off before he gets whiny or assholish. And if he’s crossed? No man’s land. He has a feeling that tonight will probably be okay, but he’s still not certain.
Matt, of course, isn’t a huge drinker. He does drink, because he doesn’t think he’s met anyone his age who doesn’t, and living with Jay means that he’s grown used to occasionally cracking open a can at the end of a long day of doing jack shit. But it’s not like he’s a stick in the mud, or anything. He knows how to let loose. That’s why he’s had four—no, five (and a half?) beers since they got here, and he’s only just now realizing that he can’t really see straight. Everything is fuzzy like a lens with a thumbprint on it, but he kind of likes that. It makes everything feel soft and dreamlike, and the heat of the fire pulses over him intermittently with the gentle breeze.
He shakes his head, looking down. “Nothing,” he says.
“What?”
“You looked funny, that’s all.”
Jay snorts. “You’re wasted, Matts.”
“Yeah, maybe,” Matt agrees.
He fiddles with his cigarette for a moment. A big hunk of ash breaks off and rolls onto his pants, then down into the pit to join the rest of the ashes. He holds it out for Jay and watches, unblinking, as he takes a steady pull and tips his head back to exhale a thin stream of smoke. He’s always looked cool doing that, Matt thinks, though they don’t do it very often. Matt thinks he looks like a toddler who broke into his mother’s purse. He’s never been cool like Jay.
“You know, I’ve always had this kind of analogy for my life,” Matt starts. “Or, like, my experiences, or whatever.”
This amuses Jay. “Oh yeah?”
“Okay it’s going to make me sound like a bitch, but bear with me, ‘kay?” He doesn’t really know why he’s saying any of this. It’s probably the beers he’d guzzled like water and the garbage fumes. Maybe he’s just feeling particularly human today. He continues, “When I was younger, like, before I met you, I used to go to this park with my siblings. Like, after I moved from the west end to Mississauga."
“Right.”
“And there was this splash pad there and it was pretty shitty, actually, but we would always put plastic bags over the drains to stop the water from draining because it was more fun when there was more water to fuck around in. And it was always freezing but we didn’t really care, ‘cause we were stupid kids, or whatever.”
He glances over at Jay to see if he’s still paying attention even though Matt’s started rambling. Jay’s leaning on his elbow with his head cocked towards him and his shirt is unbuttoned to the navel. His hair’s a little fucked up from lying down on it, but it makes him look like some kind of shitty-good indie band front man. Matt considers, for a moment, on account of the alcohol, that if Jay had never met him, he’d probably already have played the Rivoli. He tosses the idea out as soon as it crosses his mind and takes a drag of his cigarette.
“So, anyways, my mom never wanted us to run out without shoes because teenagers always drank there at night and I guess she was scared of us stepping on glass shards or something. And I always listened, you know, even if I didn’t want to, but I guess that day I just wanted to feel the grass and the wet concrete, so I took them off even though she told me not to. And I stepped on a bee.”
“You stepped on a bee?” Jay asks in disbelief, “Like, it was just on the ground?”
Matt shrugs. “Yeah, I mean, it was dead. Or maybe it was a wasp, not a bee, I don’t know. I was like, six years old. Have you ever been stung by a bee? It fucking hurts. I wasn’t looking too closely at what exactly it was that I stepped on, Bird.”
Jay laughs and holds up a hand in surrender. “Alright, alright. Keep going.”
“So anyways, obviously it was this big I told you so moment from my mom, but she always carries tweezers so we managed to get the stinger out without much of a problem. But my point is, as I got older, I started kinda, like, thinking about that moment and myself in the context of it. And I started… I guess I sort of compare myself to the bee?”
Jay’s brows furrow, even though he’s still laughing a little, like it’s funny. “What?” he asks. “What do you mean?”
“Well, a bee’s stinger is like a defense mechanism, right? Like, it didn’t hurt me on purpose. Even if it was alive, it wouldn’t have hurt me on purpose because it would have killed itself trying. I guess I’m saying that I’m the same way. I don’t know. Is that weird? It’s weird, isn’t it?”
Matt laughs a little too, even though it hurts. It’s stupid. This is so stupid. Why did he even bring this up in the first place? He’s not supposed to have feelings about himself that aren’t purely objective and he’s not supposed to tell Jay about the fact that he feels like an alien and he’s just waiting for the day for everyone to figure him out. Jay isn’t supposed to know that one day Matt is going to explode and they’re not going to come back from it because every little fight they’ve ever had is going to pile up, and up, and up until it’s too big to see over. Jay’s supposed to ignore it and Matt is too.
It's quiet for a moment.
“Do you think,” Matt says, suddenly somber, “Do you think that we’re still going to be doing this when we’re forty?”
Jay puffs air through his nose. “What, hanging out?”
He says it like it’s some kind of joke, or humorous that Matt could possibly consider a universe where they’re not still trying to play the Rivoli together—one where Jay’s wrinkly and in a wheelchair and Matt’s scribbling on the wall of a retirement home, but that’s not really what he means. Then again, he isn’t sure what he means.
He wants to say something like, Will you be sick of me by then? Will I have run out of my stupid plans to keep you around? Will my conniving finally fail and you’ll be able to tell me that you do want to leave? But he doesn’t say any of that. Instead, he says, “I dunno, I suppose. The band, I guess. Watching movies and Mario Kart and stuff. You know.”
“I mean, I don’t see why not. We’ve been pretty much doing that since we were kids.”
“But, like, eventually it has to stop, right? Like, you’re gonna get a real job and then you won’t have time for me anymore. Or you’ll get married and move out and I won’t see you except on Mondays when you need me to babysit your snotty little kid. Which is a bad idea, by the way, since I’d probably teach it every curse and everything I’ve ever liked and then you’ll have a little me instead of a little you. Or… nevermind. Jesus.”
“Matt, what’s the matter with you? Why are you talking like that?”
He scrubs a hand over his face, laughs humourlessly. “Fuck,” he mutters, “Sorry. Fuck, I’m sorry, Bird, I’m drunk. I don’t know what…”
I don’t know what I was thinking, maybe, or, I don’t know why I said any of that, or, I don’t know why you haven’t left me yet.
“Do you seriously think that?”
And Matt can’t help himself: “I know that.”
“Know what?” Jay prods. “What do you think you know?”
“Nevermind.” Matt shakes his head, flicking his cigarette into the crackling fire. “Just forget it.”
“No, Matt, you can’t just say stuff like that and then—”
It’s really stupid, and probably self sabotaging, because it’s just going to make Jay leave even faster, but Matt’s drunk and the firelight makes Jay look so warm. So he kisses him. Kind of violently, actually. He grabs his shirt so hard he’s sure it’s going to tear, yanks him forward, and lays a fat one on him. And for a few moments Jay doesn’t move a muscle, doesn’t even breathe. But Matt’s kissing him and it feels like he’s hopped right into their garbage fire, like someone’s replaced his blood with 40 proof and thrown a match at him.
“Fuck,” Matt curses as he pulls back, slapping a hand over his mouth. “Fuck, Bird, I’m sorry, I don’t know why—I didn’t mean to—”
And then Jay grabs him, knocks his stupid hat off his stupid head and kisses him back.
For a moment, their positions have swapped. Matt is frozen stiff, shocked, maybe, that Jay could do something like this. He’s looking for some kind of explanation, a prank or a gotcha. Jared will come out and they’ll have the whole thing on video, and then everyone will know that he’s a fag. Except he’s not, not really, but it’s not like the video evidence would disprove that. It’s just Jay. He’s always felt like Jay is a piece of him that got severed somewhere along the lines. Like a dog that goes missing for weeks and still comes home. Jay is the best thing that’s ever happened to him and Matt tortures him and leashes him and keeps him distracted so he won’t wander too far. And when he does wander, Matt always knows just the right thing to reel him back in. One day he’s not going to. But maybe he won’t need to, after all.
Jay is a good kisser, which makes sense. He’s had more girlfriends than Matt has, and he’s got confident hands. Matt’s are shaking, but it might be the cigarette. Or the trash fumes. Or the anxiety. Either way, all he can do is sit there and flounder for a moment before he reaches for Jay’s shoulders and tries to eat him alive.
“Bird,” he rasps, “You—”
“Shut the fuck up,” Jay tells him, dragging him back down again.
Jay’s hands are everywhere. In his hair, which has gone a little frizzy from the humidity, on his shoulders, tugging his shirt to the side so violently it exposes his shoulder and he can feel one of the buttons come a little loose. And he’s no better, either, sliding his own hands up Jay’s shirt until he can feel the prickly hair on his abdomen and the tacky skin of his stomach and he’s pretty sure there’s sand in his mouth but he doesn’t fucking care. Jay tastes like beer and weed and Bits and Bites and it’s probably gross but it doesn’t matter because Matt must taste the same.
He thinks about when he suggested they do this, probably at fifteen, maybe younger, tried to convince Jay, who was older and yet much less wise, that no girls wanted to kiss them because they didn’t know how, and so they should practice. And even to this day, he doesn’t know why he said that—besides the obvious. It’s not like there was a world, especially then, where Jay would have ever agreed to something so outrageous. And it had played out then like every outrageous thing that Matt says: they’d made it a joke, made it something they could laugh about so they didn’t have to think too hard about why their cheeks were red and their palms were sweaty, or why people would call them names when they walked home together every day. And Matt doesn’t care about any of that stuff, not really. He knows what people say about them. Even their friends, their neighbours call them Bert and fucking Ernie. But they brush it off, still, roll with the punches, laugh awkwardly when people are surprised that they bring girls home.
There have been no girls for a while now, though. Matt would argue that there probably won’t be any in the near future, either.
He’s not sure how long they make out for. Long enough that his mouth feels syrupy, that’s for sure. Long enough that he’s pretty sure there’s no blood in his brain anymore because it’s all travelled southward. Long enough that the crickets start singing at them. And especially long enough that he doesn’t realize until a minute too late that he’s shoved his leg into the fire pit and set his jeans on fire.
“Fuck!” he yells, jumping up, quick to roll around until the fire is extinguished. And Jay just laughs at him, laughs and laughs like it’s the funniest shit he’s ever seen in his life. He assesses the damage to his jeans, checks for burns, hardly relieved to find that he’s in one piece but his pants aren’t. Not that they really were before he set them on fire, but whatever. He scowls at Jay, but the corners of his mouth are fighting not to turn upwards just at the sound of Jay’s laughter. He grits, “It’s not fucking funny.”
“It’s a little funny.”
There is nothing funny about getting set on fire after making out with your best friend of over a decade. Actually, maybe it’s a little funny—there has to be a joke in there somewhere. Flamer, he thinks. Matt covers his mouth, stifling his own laughter.
“See?”
Matt insists, though his voice betrays him, “It’s not.”
Jay pokes him with his foot, jostles him when he doesn’t immediately break. Matt cracks up.
“Okay, fine,” he wheezes. “Fuck, that’s so stupid. That was god playing tricks on me. I liked these jeans, man, fuck.”
“You’ll still wear them anyways.”
And yeah, he probably will. He throws an arm over his face. “God,” he says. His belly aches.
“I’m not going anywhere, Matt,” Jay tells him.
“Okay.”
“I mean,” Jay says, “I might wander a bit, yeah. But I’ll come home. You know that, don’t you?”
Maybe he does, now. He figures it’ll probably take a lot of convincing. Regardless, it’s nice to hear. Home. Does that make Matt his home?
He nods, then realizes Jay probably can’t see that from the angle he’s flopped over at. He murmurs, “Yeah, Bird. Okay.”
“Good.” Jay checks his phone, then groans. “Aw, fuck. The last ferry’s in ten minutes. We should probably catch it, because I don’t want to get stranded on Wards overnight. We’re going to get eaten by a sea monster.”
“There’s no sea monsters in Lake Ontario,” Matt tells him flatly, kicking sand into the fire pit to put it out. He only realizes how dark it’s gotten when he has no firelight to illuminate the surrounding area. His eyes have adjusted to Jay, though, still leaning on his elbow with his shirt all fucked up. He looks handsome, but he usually does. He jokes, “Only lake monsters, duh.”
“Well, I’m not getting eaten by a monster regardless.”
“Bird?” Matt asks. His voice shakes a little.
“Yeah?”
“When we get back can we, uh—”
“Yeah,” Jay tells him. “If you want to.”
Right. Matt flushes down to his neck and picks up all of their empties so he doesn’t have to think about the fact that they’re going to ferry back to Toronto so they can get back to their apartment and have sex. Part of him is glad the inherent terror of being set on fire willed his erection away, because it would be pretty fucking awkward to walk all the way back to the port pitching a tent in his charred up jeans.
“Cool,” Matt says, then sniffs and looks away as he extends a hand. Jay takes it.
“Cool,” Jay agrees. He lets Matt pull him to his feet.
-
Outside of the station, they stop to get a hot dog because Jay is hungry, and Matt could eat too but the anxiety twisting in his belly makes him feel nauseous, so he just steals a bite of Jay’s instead. It’s a mistake, because Jay always loads up on too many pickles and not enough mustard and the only thing that makes him feel some semblance of normalcy is that Jay tries to snatch the hotdog right back when Matt takes it, perpetually protective of his food.
He sobers on the walk home. He’s always liked the way Queen looks at night, when all the storefronts are lit up and he can hear the music bleeding through the walls. He likes that sometimes Jay will see something stupid and knock his shoulder against Matt’s to get him to look too. He likes watching people record their videos in the speaker’s corner. He likes the quiet solace of a bustling city, but tonight he feels like his bones are too big for his body.
He’s still waiting for Jay to tell him this was all a big joke, and that he’s stupid for even considering there’s a world where they could ever be like that. He’s going to walk through the door of their apartment and Jay is going to slide over the lease with his name removed. When he wakes up in the morning, all of Jay’s things will be gone and he’ll have moved away somewhere without him, and they’ll never have movie nights or inside jokes or a show at the Rivoli. And then Matt will be left kicking his can again like always until he can find a poor imitation of him to fill the void.
“Matt,” Jay says at the corner as they wait for a walk sign. Something in Matt’s chest balls up tight, strangles his lungs and heart and esophagus, and he can’t speak or breathe or think because Jay’s looking at him. His eyes are soft, inquisitive. “You okay?”
He looks away. Watches someone puke in front of McDonalds. He nods and crosses the street.
Halfway across, over the dissonant drone of traffic and some guy on the corner doing a horrible rendition of Love Will Tear Us Apart, Jay says, “Race you!” and then takes off.
“What the fuck!” Matt calls. “You bitch, you got a head start!”
Despite himself, Matt chases after him. It’s an easy way to flip Matt’s mood, because Jay’s never been able to outpace him—but it is fun to watch him try. They used to do this a lot. Actually, Matt’s pretty sure they did this yesterday. It’s normal. Almost like nothing has changed. By the time he makes it up to their apartment, elbowing and making a feeble attempt to trip Jay up the stairs, Matt’s got a stitch in his side. He folds over in the kitchen, heaving exaggeratedly.
“Motherfucker,” he pants, swallowing. “Don’t ever do that after a day like today. Fuck. So much cardio. I’m gonna die.”
Jay laughs, breathless, leaning against the door as he catches his breath. The whole apartment is silent, save for their breathing. It intertwines, dances and syncopates until eventually it peters out. After a few moments, Jay says, “Hey.”
Matt stands, awkward and listless. His fingertips buzz like guitar feedback and he’s pretty sure he looks ridiculous right now because there’s no way he isn’t blotchy and windswept. He’s not used to caring about stuff like that. He doesn’t move.
“Come here.”
Matt goes there. He’s not sure what he’s expecting, but he’s also not sure why he’s surprised when Jay takes him by the face and brings him in once more for a kiss. It’s not like how it was at the beach, not by a long shot. Instead, it’s cautious, as if the initial desperation has worn off and all that remains is years and years of waiting. He falls into it, leaning his weight against Jay as he tucks his fingers into the loops of his shorts to draw him in closer. Always closer. Matt’s never once felt the desire to crawl inside someone more than he does right now. And even if he did, he thinks it still wouldn’t be close enough. Maybe that makes him crazy. He’s not sure. His eyelids feel heavy when Jay pulls away.
“Is that weird?”
Matt shakes his head viciously. “No,” he insists. He considers it for a moment. “Well, actually, yeah, it is kind of fucking weird, but it’s not like we were ever normal, were we?”
Jay scoffs a laugh. “No, I guess not, huh.”
Matt wants to say something else, but Jay’s already pulling him upstairs by the wrist, so there’s little he can do but follow. The thing is, he’s been in Jay’s room before. He’s slept in Jay’s bed. He’s probably seen Jay naked more times than he can count on both hands and yet somehow he feels strange in here, like he’s intruding. But he knows that it’s better that they’re in Jay’s room and not his, because Jay is the one who actually gets girls. His room is cleaner and Matt knows that he has everything they could possibly need tucked into his bedside drawer. He doesn’t have comic books strewn over his mattress or week old coffee cups on his desk (though there are some empty Coke cans on the dresser). His bed is made. Matt suddenly feels like a little kid going over to Jay’s house for the first time, dressed nice to make a good impression on his helicopter parents and still failing miserably.
Jay must notice his apprehension and misunderstand it, because he says, “Matt, we don’t have to do this if you don’t want to.”
“I want to,” Matt tells him plainly. “I’m the one who asked.”
“I mean, it’s cool if you’ve changed your mind or something. I’m not going to get mad because you’re freaked out.”
“Oh, my god, Jay, I’m not freaked out,” Matt barks, despite the fact that he is, very much, freaked out. “I’m so normal. I’ve never been more normal in my life. Stop being so fucking considerate, it’s obnoxious.”
“I’m obnoxious?”
“Yes!” Matt says. “Yes, you’re obnoxious. You’re treating me like I’m some… some innocent girl in a chick flick. I’m a grown man. I’m not fucking delicate.”
Jay purses his mouth as he moves to sit on the edge of the bed. He folds his hands in his lap for a moment, flexing his fingers intermittently before he pats the space next to him. Matt doesn’t move, glued to his spot across the room.
“Sit,” he says, patting the bed again. “I’m just assuming that you’ve probably never done this before.”
“What?” Matt scoffs. “Gay sex? Yeah, obviously I’ve never fucking done that before. And you have?”
“Uh, no,” Jay says. “But, I mean, I understand the principles. I think. I’m just trying to not overwhelm you.”
“Well, I’m sufficiently whelmed. Way to go, Jay.”
“Matt, would you please just sit the fuck down. Your pacing is freaking me out.”
Matt hadn’t even realized he’d been pacing around Jay’s room like that. He stops, stares across at Jay for a few seconds, then moves to sit next to him. Jay spreads his legs so their knees are touching. That nausea comes back in full swing, but Matt has made a solid effort not to have a full meltdown, so he lets it happen and doesn’t move his own leg away. He likes the feeling of it, anyway, the heat radiating off of Jay’s bare knee as it brushes against the part of his own, exposed from the rips in his jeans.
“Okay fine, you got me,” Matt admits from absolutely zero pressure whatsoever. “I’m freaking out a little. It’s just a lot to wrap my fucking head around, my first time—”
He pinches his thigh. Idiot, he thinks. You fucking idiot.
It’s like all of the air got sucked out of the room and he’s now stuck in a void with Jay. If he turned his head instead of burning holes into his mismatched socks, he’d have seen that Jay’s eyes have widened exponentially and that his cheeks have gone a little red. Well, redder than they’ve been since their kiss broke downstairs.
“Your first time, what?” Jay asks flatly.
“Nothing,” Matt says, then, “Homo experience. My first homosexual encounter.” Because that’s the plausible answer here.
“MJ.”
“No.”
“Matt.”
“Jay, shut the fuck up, please.”
“Are you a virgin?”
Is it embarrassing to admit that at the ripe age of twenty-three, Matt’s never gone past second base? If he can even consider whatever the fuck happened to him second base, because the way he remembers it was freaking out and running away when Anna Macintosh from high school tried to put her hand down his pants at Dance Cave two years ago. And yeah, sure, he’s definitely met girls and brought them back to the apartment, but more often than not they get weirded out by his running monologue and awkward hands and action figures so they end up climbing off of his lap, finishing the movie they’d been pretending to watch, and leaving without ever calling him again. And though he always talked about wanting that kind of stuff, he’s always sort of been glad when he just gets to watch a movie for the twentieth time. It’s cleaner that way.
So yeah, Matt’s never had sex before, but it’s not like that makes him a loser. Maybe socially, or societally, or even just generally it does, but it’s not like that ever mattered to him. Why did he need to go out of his way to be intimate with some girl who wouldn’t even like him in the first place? At what point does debasing himself for the benefit of societal expectations diminish his worth? And it’s not like he’s never wanted to have sex, or that he doesn’t think about it. It’s just not really that important to him.
He buries his face in his hands. Matt doesn’t care if all of Canada and half of their southern cousins think he’s a loser. He cares if Jay thinks he’s a loser.
“Shut up,” he repeats, muffled. “Shut the fuck up, don’t make me say it.”
Jay’s hand finds his thigh. “Matt. It’s fine. Seriously.”
“It’s not fine.”
It’s not fine because I won’t know what I’m doing and if I don’t know what I’m doing then it’s going to be shit for you, and if it’s shit for you then it’s a million times worse for me.
“It is,” Jay insists. “Dude, it’s, like, so fine. Who cares? Really, who gives a shit?”
Matt’s hands feel clammy. He didn’t realize that having a conversation with Jay could be so harrowing. But they don’t talk about this stuff, not really. Ever since they were kids, there’s never really been any need to have the hard conversations, because he knows what Jay’s thinking and Jay knows the same. Matt’s always likened himself to a record that won’t stop spinning. He can talk for hours and hours and not tire or get lost in a dull moment because he’s always got something to fill the silence with. But that stuff, it’s pointless. His brain goes a mile a minute, a never-ending stream of consciousness so violent that he has to spill his guts or he’ll die. But never about the important things, like his sense of self and his career and how he feels about the people he cares about. Those are the things that he finds himself at a loss for. Because really, what is he to say?
“This is so awkward,” Matt mutters. “Should I just—should I just go to my room?”
Should we just pretend this never happened, like every time your hand brushes my thigh on the couch? Should we pretend that I don’t see the way you look at me? Should we just move on with our lives like always?
Jay grabs his head, turns him so that he has nowhere to look but his stern, unamused face. His eyebrows pitch upward and he tries to squirm away but Jay doesn’t give him an inch to move.
“Sex is awkward,” Jay tells him. “It’s not like porn.”
“I know that!”
“Then why are you embarrassed? It’s just me, MJ.”
And Matt supposes that he’s right. He’s usually wrong, so that’s probably why he didn’t consider the fact that they’re living in a universe where Jay could be right about something.
“I’m sorry,” Matt says. “This is just…”
More important to me than it is to you.
“Do you think that I don’t also think it’s crazy?” Jay asks. “You think I’m also not freaking out about it? Stop overthinking everything and just take your stupid clothes off already. And lie down. God.”
“God,” Matt parrots, but he’s already shimmying out of his clothes. “What, are you gay or something? Trying to get me naked?”
“Well, I didn’t have to try, did I, smartass?” Jay asks, but he’s stripping out of his clothes too.
Matt grins. “You know, you’re a pervert, Bird. Trying to deflower me, trying to get me naked so you can satiate your disgusting fantasies. A real, honest, homo pervert.”
Jay looks like he’s about to say something, but ultimately decides against it in order to drag Matt down onto the bed. He’s got a shittier mattress than Matt does, and he knows that it’s because his parents bought his but Jay got his on a super-markdown at Sleep Country. But it’s not really like he cares about how comfortable it is when Jay’s slotted himself in between his gangly legs and started kissing him senseless again. He still feels a little clumsy, still doesn’t know where to put his hands, more cautious now that there’s so much bare skin at his disposal. He lets Jay kiss him until his face feels heavy and his fingertips are buzzing again, until he’s moaning quietly and his dick is nudging incessantly at Jay’s hip. He feels a little shy about it—getting hard so fast from virtually nothing—but then he shifts and finds that Jay is no better off.
I did that, Matt thinks, giddy. God, he’s so lame.
It’s only after they’ve started rolling around a little that he lets his hands wander. They slip up into Jay’s hair, tugging a little when his head tips to redirect him, and finds, gleefully, that Jay moans a little bit from it. He finds that dragging his nails down Jay’s back elicits the same response. It’s not unlike the quiet sounds he’d hear, with his head tipped shamefully back against the wall, when Jay would have a girl over. It was a rare occurrence because Matt would, more often than not, find some way to sabotage it so the girl would leave them alone. But sometimes Jay would bring a girl over when he thought Matt was sleeping, and he’d hear him shush her as she giggled up the stairs. He’d crane his neck and listen, and the walls were so thin that he could hear the buckle of Jay’s jeans hitting the floor, the gentle wheeze of the bed as they sank down onto it. And underneath those annoying, girly sounds that Jay would so expertly coax out of her, Matt would find his, tangled up and choked because Jay always had a hard time letting loose. Matt would always get hard, too, uncomfortable in his flannel pants, but he wouldn’t touch himself. Not often, at least.
Now, though, it seems like it’s more than welcome.
“Bird,” he pants, chin tipped back to the popcorn ceiling as Jay kisses wetly along the column of his neck. His beard is scratchy but his lips are soft and the juxtaposition has Matt’s brain spinning out of control. “Can you—can…”
He whines when Jay takes him in hand. He’s sensitive and leaking and the immediate rush of relief is enough to combat the embarrassment he feels from a new set of hands on his body. He jerks, palming the bedclothes until he can get a fistful and throwing his other arm over Jay’s shoulders. It’s different than when he does it to himself, which is typically a clinical, reserved process. He’s found he never really does it for the inherent reason he assumes the general population does, but instead simply as a way to fall asleep when he’s restless. He never was the kind of kid who’d hide skin mags under his mattress or shamefully sneak into the back of a video store to rent some bullshit on tape. And it’s not like he’s an idiot, or a child—he has the internet and he knows how to use it, but it’s just means to an end. An endorphin rush, the same kind he gets after a cigarette or a plan well executed.
But Jay’s hands give it a whole new meaning. It’s the same feeling he gets when he’s sick, when he can feel every nerve ending, every fibre in each piece of cloth that touches his bare skin. Jay’s hands are soft for a guy and he has long spindly fingers and they feel almost cold against where Matt is burning up, but he likes that. He does this thing where he swipes his thumb rhythmically under the crown, so casual and collected yet somehow still mind-numbing, and tied with the feeling of Jay’s mouth on him, Matt feels like he could ignite at any second.
“Bird,” he urges, “Bird, I’m trying not to be a fucking virgin about this right now but I swear to god if you keep doing that, I’m going to last five seconds.”
“That’s fine,” Jay says, like that’s the point. He doesn't want to go off in five seconds. He kind of wants to be here all night.
Matt moans pathetically. “I mean, can we do the real thing so I don’t feel like a loser?”
“You know, if you came once you’d probably last longer afterwards,” Jay tuts, but, thankfully, he stops touching him. Matt jerks again, then relaxes. He hadn’t even realized his hips had left the bed, eager for more. Jay sits up a little, wipes the spit from his mouth. “Uh. You really want to? You know. Real sex.”
Real gay sex is what he means. And Matt considers, since he hadn’t really thought about it until now, what that actually entails. He knew, of course, the basic principles, even if he didn’t entirely understand the logistics of how it isn’t the most uncomfortable thing in the world. But he’d never really given much thought to how exactly it would work with Jay when the only thought in his head was that he needed to get in Jay’s pants ages ago.
“I mean,” Matt says. “Yeah. I guess?”
“Right.” Jays nods. “Well, one of us is going to have to… you know.”
Eloquently, Matt surmises, “Take it up the ass.”
“Right,” Jay says again flatly. “I guess, you know, since it is your first time, or whatever…”
“Shut up.”
“I can, uh,” Jay swallows. His face has gone a little red. It brings out the freckles on his cheeks. Matt feels not unlike a piece of meat when Jay’s eyes trail over his body. “I can do it. It’s just… You’re a little…”
Matt follows Jay’s gaze downwards to his dick. “Oh.”
He’s bigger than Jay, even though Jay’s taller, and it used to be a point of contention between them but now it just seems to be a roadblock. He doesn’t really know how people decide this kind of thing. In his head it’s the more feminine one, maybe, or the smaller one, which would be him, would it not? But maybe it’s not about any of that. A coin flip, then? Or alternating days? It humours him for a moment to imagine them scheduling it like that. Matt really wasn’t betting on being the one taking it, but he supposes that Jay’s probably not super stoked about it either. He’s a good person, though, sometimes, so he reluctantly suggests, “Um, it’s fine. I can be the girl. If you want.”
“There is no girl,” Jay deadpans.
“Would you prefer ‘bitch’? Or ‘receiver,’ maybe? Catcher? Gays like sports, don’t they? Baseball? Wait,” Matt clicks his tongue, “that’s lesbians.”
Jay frowns. “I’d prefer it if we stopped talking about it. Sex is awkward but it’s not this awkward.”
As if Matt being a chatterbox is any surprise to him, even in something like this.
“Well, uh,” Matt says, “I’m just saying. If you’re, you know, nervous, because I’m too big, then I guess I don’t mind taking it…” Even though he does mind, a little bit. Maybe he won’t so much in the future, if there is a future, but right now he’s pretty sure that if Jay went anywhere near his ass he’d probably blow up, and not in a good way.
Jay shoves his knee. “Oh, fuck off with that. Don’t make this a competition.”
“I’m not!” Matt says, even though he most certainly is. “I’m just saying, it’s natural to be intimidated by a well endowed fellow like me.”
“You’re disgusting,” Jay says. Matt would argue, childishly, that he’s just jealous. “Switch with me.”
He gets up with haste, suddenly eager once again, and watches Jay fish a condom and a bottle of lube out of his bedside table. See? It’s good that they’re in Jay’s room, because Matt’s pretty sure he has one lonely condom and it expired in 2005. He lets Jay settle as he sits back on his haunches and regards him for a moment, the flat of his chest, his thin, shaking stomach, the jut of his hipbones and the unkempt hair that grows between them. Jay’s always looked like such a man where Matt’s always looked like a boy. It was weird growing up, that he was handsome, but in the kind of way that everyone knew he’d only get better with age. And even before he was nineteen, he was buying beers for them both. Matt’s twenty-three and still gets carded. He looks perpetually awkward, not quite man and not quite teenage either. Not quite handsome but not quite ugly. A weird middle-thing. Not that it’s ever bothered him, really. Not more than anything else ever has, at the very least.
Jay is, in equal parts surprising and unsurprisingly, a decent teacher. He takes Matt’s wrist and squirts more lube than Matt thinks anyone has ever needed for anything onto his fingers, then forces him sternly to warm it up because, Jesus fuck, MJ, that’s cold. He guides his hand with an unskilled, yet effective precision, ignoring Matt’s offhanded comments about how weird it is to have his fingers in another person’s body.
“It’s supposed to be sexy,” Jay had grit, grimacing at the (assumedly) uncomfortable feeling of Matt poking around in him, “The fact that you have a non-stop monologue makes it significantly less sexy, just saying.”
But even though he was complaining, Matt could hear the fondness in his voice. Jay’s such a bad liar it honestly impresses Matt sometimes. He tips his head back and lets his grip go a little more slack as he instructs Matt to twist his fingers just so, yeah, there, a little higher, and then he makes this sound like a dog that got its paw stepped on and Matt knows he’s struck gold. Whatever he’s doing, Jay likes that, so he keeps doing it, keeps prodding, stroking, flexing his fingers in such a way that it cramps his wrist but he can’t even be bothered to care because Jay’s tossed an arm over his face in a feeble attempt to quiet himself, or perhaps to pretend that he doesn’t like it. But his body tells the truth, of course, and Matt knows that because his legs have fallen open and his chest is heaving and his dick is literally drooling where it lays, hard and untouched against his stomach.
Matt realizes a little belatedly that he probably should have been jerking Jay off to distract him from the initial discomfort. But Jay seems more than happy now, white knuckling the pillow under his head with one hand and gnawing on the knuckles of the other like he can’t stand not having something to do with his mouth. Matt’s own mouth has gone a little slack watching him, enamoured by the way he twists and twitches and makes whimpery little noises that he seems hard pressed on not allowing to escape. Matt wants all of them, all to himself forever, so sick of having been condemned to hearing them through layers of plaster and drywall for the past few years. Jay is easy. He’s like a girl and Matt feels this sickening thrill jolt through him at the thought of it.
He stretches Jay until he’s urging Matt to stop. It takes a lot of willpower, especially when Matt has just had the realization dawn on him that maybe sex is something he can actually have a good time doing, but he does reluctantly pull his fingers out. Jay groans, displeased.
“What the fuck,” he mutters.
“Was that… good?”
“Weirdly, yes,” Jay tells him. “Come on.”
His eyes have gone glassy and his face is all blotchy, glimmering with spit. Matt knows he looks no better with his pupils blown and his mouth permanently stuck half-unhinged. He swallows thickly when Jay draws his knees up, watches with eager eyes as he tears open the condom and beckons him closer. It’s a little romantic, or maybe just cliche, that Jay rolls it on for him. He’s harder than he’s ever been in his life and isn’t sure he’s going to last more than three strokes, but he knows that Jay doesn’t really care about that. He lets Jay slick him up, too, and notices that Jay’s hands are shaking. When he presses Jay’s knees back, he notices that his are too.
It’s hot. Unbearably hot. Matt feels not unlike he did earlier when he’d shoved his foot into the firepit, that sharp burst of heat that was unlike anything he’d ever felt before. Jay is tight and his body is clearly unsure of whether or not it wants to reject or welcome the intrusion, but Matt is so distracted by the fact that it feels like he’s shoved his dick into a vacuum that he hardly even notices.
“Oh, fuck,” he whispers. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
He’s barely even halfway and yet somehow he feels like he’s been pushing in for ages. Jay’s making this face beneath him, brows pinched and eyes squeezed shut. A grimace of some variety, perhaps, due to the unwelcome nature of putting something up where things are supposed to come out. But he hasn’t told Matt to stop, and the dizziness is affecting Matt’s ability to think rationally, so he doesn’t stop. Their whole apartment could come down around them, some infrastructural mistake or a faulty wire or freak accident with a derailed streetcar, and Matt still wouldn’t stop. He whines, hips unsteady, and jerks forward a little too fast, which in turn makes Jay choke on a sound that Matt can’t distinguish.
“Sorry,” he says, even though he’s not, not really. “I’m sorry, am I hurting you? Should I pull out, or—”
“No,” Jay insists, strained. “It’s fine, shut up. Just keep going.”
As if Matt wasn’t just trying to appease him—as if there was a universe where he could somehow find the willpower to give up. He presses in for hours, until his vision is spotty and his ears are ringing, until the world is nothing but this tiny room in their shitty apartment and it’s only when the skin of his hips meets the backs of Jay’s thighs that he remembers to breathe. He falls forward, shoves his face into Jay’s neck. He doesn’t dare move, because if he did he’s sure he would come immediately, as anticipated. He’s really regretting the fact that he hasn’t been proactive enough with his jerk-off habits, because maybe if he did it more than once every time he was bored, he might not feel like such a quick shot.
“You dead?” Jay asks him. He’s aiming for humour, but the shake in his voice relays to Matt that he’s also struggling to contain himself.
“Yeah,” he agrees, nodding. He’s drooling onto Jay’s shoulder a little bit and he’s almost certain that he bit him somewhere along the lines, but he can’t remember. He’s not sure how long they sit here like this. It’s probably only about a minute but he’s gotten lost in the syrupy feeling of everything and then Jay is patting him on the back and telling him that it’s okay to move again, like Matt had stopped on his account. But Matt is eager to please, he always has been, so he draws his hips back and presses in with one steady motion, inadvertently mimicking every suave guy from every shitty porno he’s ever had the pleasure of watching, and it must do something because Jay moans like a girl.
He sounds pretty, like how he does when he croons at his piano. It feels like victory, somehow, beyond all of the weird feelings of, This is so fucked up, that Matt still can’t shake. Because, sure, Matt’s never had sex with anyone before, not really, but Jay’s never had sex with a guy before. And he puts himself in this situation where he’s bending to Matt’s will—though Matt would argue the push-and-pull of it is equal, if not slanted in Jay’s favour—and he still clearly likes it. Or, at the very least, he’s making a bonafide effort to like it for Matt. Of course, Matt likes it too. It would be kind of hard not to, when Jay is burning up around him, because there’s a thrum in Matt’s spine and he can’t keep quiet either. He probably sounds like an idiot, whimpering into Jay’s neck and muttering strings of words that really make no sense at all. Jay just pulls his head up and kisses him again.
It’s hard to keep moving his hips when he’s trying to focus on moving his mouth too. It’s why he never could sing and play guitar, or read a book with music in the background. It makes him clumsy, prone to mistakes. He’s just not wired for multitasking. What ends up happening, though he really does try to kiss Jay back, is that he starts panting into Jay’s mouth, slack jawed and drooling. And his nose is pressed maybe a little too hard into the hard ridge of Jay’s cheek, because it sort of aches in his septum, but Jay doesn’t seem to mind and so Matt doesn’t either.
He’d like to say he lasts for longer than five minutes, but he hardly lasts one. It’s hard for him, after all, when he’s so overwhelmed with feeling that he’s honestly not sure he’s ever felt anything in his life, and he wants to say something like, I love you, but he doesn’t think he would live through the aftermath. So instead, he just screws Jay until his stomach gets tight and he whimpers and definitely doesn’t cry when he spills into latex. And Jay doesn’t complain either, just swallows his moan and reaches a hand down to touch himself for a while until he spills over too, jerking under Matt like he got zapped.
Again, they pant in unison. Matt almost wishes he’d thrown on a tape or something for sound in the background, but then realizes he doesn’t really know anything about music, and he’s pretty sure that Ginuwine isn’t really that sexy when you’re actually having sex. He lets his forehead fall to Jay’s collarbone, and then, though he can’t really explain why, starts laughing.
“What the fuck,” he says in disbelief. “What the fuck.”
Jay starts laughing too. Real, honest laughter, even as Matt pulls out and flops over next to him, the soiled condom hanging off his softening dick like a flag at half mast. They laugh until their bellies ache, until Matt’s eyes are watering and he can’t catch his breath.
“What the fuck,” Jay parrots in between gasps, shoving his face into his hands. “I can’t believe—”
“Yeah,” Matt agrees. “Fuck, yeah, I know.”
Jay sobers as he reaches over for some tissues to clean them up with. Matt ties off the condom and misses when he tosses it across the room toward the trash bin. He pulls the sheet over them so they’re not lying there with their dicks out, and stares at the ceiling for a moment as he processes the fact that he and Jay just screwed. Not that he thinks he’ll ever be able to fully compartmentalize it, but it's worth the effort to make a solid attempt at it. Very quickly, he comes up empty.
After a while, Jay asks, “How long have you…”
Matt makes a noise, pondering. “I dunno. The whole time, maybe. I try not to think about it.”
The endorphins make him honest. The fact that it’s now two in the morning doesn’t help. He hears Jay hum beside him, then shift a little bit so he’s facing Matt.
“I think it was always on the table, to some extent,” Jay admits, yawning. “I mean, I probably would have freaked out a bit more if you came to me, like, three years ago. But, I mean, yeah. Fuck. This is so...”
“We don’t have to talk about it,” Matt says. He’s not prepared to have the conversation where he admits that maybe he is a little bit gay, even though he’s not. It’s too much brain power that he doesn’t have, figuring out his sense of self while still reeling from 1) hooking up with his best friend and 2) already going through one crisis today. He adds, “I actually don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Alright.” After a moment, Jay asks, “Wanna crash in here?”
“Yeah,” Matt says softly. “I do.”
Jay doesn't hold him, but he does press his foot to the back of Matt’s calf after he’s turned the small light off, and somehow, that’s enough for him.