Gay

I was twenty, home alone, and chatting online. I never imagined that stranger would show up at my door twenty minutes later—or what he would leave burned into me forever.

They had set up the screen, served the cider, and endured the whispers. At last alone in the empty square, there was only one thing left to do: go up to the attic.

He’d been seeing him only through a screen for days. When the door finally closed behind us, I knew that night we were going to reclaim every hour stolen by distance.

When my mother found the stains on my underwear, she thought the worst. She didn’t know Marco wasn’t hurting me: he was helping me stop being afraid of who I am.

I thought the hardest part of coming back would be the banner at the village entrance. I was wrong: the hard part was the dinner table, when we started telling the truth.

He wore an impeccable suit, and beneath it, the lace only he could see. When the office latch clicked, Noa stopped being the perfect assistant.

He lost his keys in front of the door of the only neighbor everyone had warned him about, and that summer afternoon he decided to find out why there was so much mystery.

He stayed on my sofa for a couple of weeks, polite and distant, until one Sunday afternoon he dropped the line that woke everything we’d buried in those summers.

That night Eneko broke down, so Unai did the only thing he knew would calm him: he took him to the bed where Mikel and Asier were already waiting awake.

They caught him stealing food in the middle of the night; when they forced him to raise his face beneath that tangled mane, the patrician recognized eyes he thought lost forever.

I’d gone two weeks without cumming and my imagination played a dirty trick on me in the middle of my shift. What I didn’t expect was for someone to notice before I did.

For months I’d been pretending not to look when he came out of the bathroom in his underwear. That Christmas, alone in the flat, I opened the bag of his dirty laundry.

Ten minutes off, a soccer video game, and a ridiculous bet were enough to unravel everything Bruno thought he knew about his friend in one afternoon.

We were late to the academy every morning, but we never skipped that ritual between the sheets. Today, for the first time in weeks, he was the one spreading my legs.

When the officiant asked whether anyone had something to say, the groom raised his hand. Not to say yes, but to confess what he had been holding in for months.

I’d sworn we were only going to watch. But when that stranger put his hand on Eduardo’s shoulder, I knew I wouldn’t be able to stay still either.

I thought I was imagining it, until I found a number written on the wrapper of the wet wipe he handed me when I got off the plane.

I’m thirty-four and I never doubted what I was. Until that seed started growing inside me, silent and persistent, and I could no longer ignore it.

The carriage was empty that late at night. When that man sat almost across from me and started looking at me without hiding it, I knew the ride would be different.

I felt his big body pressing into my back with every brake, and when he whispered, “we get off at the next stop,” I knew I wouldn’t be able to say no.