by Xander Simmons
It’s just Dan and I, roaring back from town with the wind behind us. We’re loaded on pints of insipid lager poured right to the top of the glass with no head. The wind is so strong we barely have to pedal. Our only obstacle is the dry sand that has been swept up onto the pavement from the beach below. The best thing is not to slow down. Weird to think how far we’ve come since those awkward mornings
riding the bus to the all-boys school. I’m so shy I can hardly talk to him. One day, Dan says he’s going to give me conversation lessons. He says I should ask more questions, things like: “Where are you going on holiday this summer?” He asks me and I answer, by way of example. There’s a silence before I repeat the same question back to him. He sighs and points out that maybe I should think of a different question. We pass the rest of the journey in silence.
Not tonight though. Tonight, we’re drunk and free, sailing along the promenade, dodging sandbanks while dismantling our friends’ personalities, lungs full of air, shouting lazy suppositions to be carried off by the sea wind. He’s an oddball, Dan, different from the rest, and a conversation with him proceeds as if from the pen of Joel and Ethan Coen, always ironic, often surreal, at times sublime. We share everything together—music, films, books—but our most important conversation is about sex. Although I claim to be out there pursuing women in all directions, the fact is I’ve not been able to get him off my mind all year. A year of separate universities, separate bus rides with strangers we don’t have seven years to get to know. As we near the end of our ride, I’m wondering whether tonight will feature another episode of forbidden love or whether he’s gone off the idea. He’s not gay, after all. But in fact, it’s him who brings it up. Perhaps we can stop off at our friend’s beach hut and “do something” in there, he suggests. This is the bland, sexless code we’ve adopted since last summer: “do something,” as innocuous as playing a quick game of chess to pass the time. But it’s not without risk, I think, remembering the very first time, here,
at the beach, stumbling back along the shoreline with our bikes after a drunken confession at a friend’s house party pushed us across the Rubicon and into each other’s arms. At some point we decide to stop pushing our bikes and take our chances on the sand. But we’re only afforded a few minutes of kissing and grinding before a pack of angry boys emerges out of the night, hurling abuse at us and chasing us back to our bikes. They’re only a few metres away as we mount and push off. Seconds later, Dan dares to cast a look over his shoulder and sees one of them sprinting after us. The wind is at our backs and he knows the guy will never catch us, so he holds up his middle finger behind his head and shouts something obscene as I pedal to safety as fast as I can.
Tonight, we have better plans. Tonight, we have the safety of the beach hut. It must be three or four in the morning by the time we arrive. To our right, the beach, empty and windswept, sea foaming up conspiratorially along the shore. To our left, a double tier of colourful wooden shacks lining the bottom of the cliff. We carry our bikes up the stone steps that take us to the upper tier, wheeling them to the end of the row of huts until we find our friend’s shack, unlocked as usual. I’ve still got the beat of 50 Cent’s “In Da Club” throbbing in my ears and I’m wishing we’d just come here at the start of the night and cut the pretext of McClubbing even if, yes, we’re nineteen years old and, yes, this is exactly the kind of sexy fun we’ve been waiting to have for years. But it’s his lean, muscled torso that’s the real fun, his stubbled kiss, his tall, circumcised dick. It’s taken me all the years of my adolescence to even begin to realize this, and it will take me five more to fully accept it. It’s a thought that was never available to me
at the all-boys school, even though everyone keeps joking that I’m gay. This is a word I hear hundreds of times every day; why should I take it seriously? Gay is for people like Tristan Lovejoy, for the real losers in the class, not me. At the Year 9 disco, I French-kiss ten girls to prove them all wrong. All the alphas go around joking that I’m a stud for a few days—they even write it on the wall—but it doesn’t take long for things to go back to normal. “Look at that little gay boy sucking on the teacher’s knob till he throws up his jizz all over the floor. Fucking gay boy.” Dan doesn’t join in. But he doesn’t defend me either.
The hut’s four wooden flaps unfold to form a small front deck and a roof that sits above it. The interior is tiny, less than thirty square feet. Dan notices a plastic curtain hanging in the corner; he pulls it across to seal us inside, revealing a kitsch sunset beach. We find a few half-burnt candles and place them strategically around us. “Very romantic,” I say, trying to pierce the awkwardness but instead drawing attention to it. It’s not the first time we’ve come here, but we’re still essentially school friends who sat next to each other on the bus for seven years barely talking to each other. Back at school,
he defines himself against what he calls my “effeminate flamboyance,” and what everyone else is calling “gay.” He isn’t like that, so he isn’t gay, he tells himself. Even if he’s had that experience with his best friend under the bed, even if he’s the youngest of three brothers and has read theories about family dynamics on the internet, and even if he goes to an all-boys’ school and fantasizes about his classmates, sometimes, none of that can make him gay. He just likes sex. Who doesn’t like getting their dick sucked? After all, you can easily close your eyes and pretend it’s a hot girl doing it.
He’s already established that he doesn’t like kissing, so we start by hugging tightly, pushing up against each other, getting hard. There’s no romance to it, despite all the candles. We don’t have any lubricant and he suggests using the sunscreen we’ve found under the sink. He’s always more game for anal sex than I am. I ignore his suggestion and start taking off his trousers and boxers. I’ll suck his dick and take his mind off it. As I manoeuvre my head up and down, I remember him asking me some days earlier,
“Do you actually like sucking dick?” Without hesitating, I reply, “No. I don’t like it.” A silence. “What about you?” I offer in exchange. “Do you like sucking dick?” He winces and shakes his head. “No way. I’m just doing it so you’ll return the favour.” Another silence. I try to come up with another question. Before anything comes to mind, he says, “That proves we’re not gay.”
I’m imagining this scene as I suck him off, falling into an unconscious rhythm that makes our mutual detachment bearable. But it’s this state of detachment which means I don’t hear the curtain being pulled back; his sudden lurch away is, I assume, a tremor of pleasure, the first I’ve managed to tease from him. In a brusque reshuffling of reality, I realize he’s actually recoiling from a beam of light that swings across the scene until it settles on my face, pressed lovingly against his penis. Beach security has arrived on the scene, thinking they were apprehending a break-in. There’s two of them, one tall and silent, the other short and yappy. The short one’s trying his best not to vomit all of his palpable disgust over our obscene nakedness as he instructs his partner to call the police. “Get dressed!” he spits at us. As the angry little man scolds us, the big one skulks on the sidelines looking embarrassed, wishing it was a burglary so he could at least be called upon to restrain someone. I keep my eyes turned down, feeling like the same naughty schoolboy who was
told to stand facing the wall at the back of the classroom, hands on head. I can hear Dan giggling at his desk, delighted that he’s got me in trouble. I never get in trouble. I’m a good little gay boy with all the right answers. Soon he’ll be persuading me to skip classes. We’ll sneak out the fire escape to catch the bus and hide out at McDonald’s, eating Big Macs washed down with chocolate milkshakes. We’ll go back to my place and play Jenga while listening to OK Computer, talking about who we’d like to fuck from the girls’ school down the road and not once will I think that it’s him I’d rather fuck, that everything is exactly as it should be right now, just us, complicit in this stolen moment.
Xander Simmons
Xander Simmons is a queer writer, composer and podcaster based in Tiohtià:ke/Montreal. He is particularly interested in the relationship between text and sound, which he explored in his first immersive storytelling podcast, Synchrony, released in 2022. He is currently pursuing an MA in creative writing at Concordia University.
Headlight Anthology 