Marc takes the train down the coast on the last weekend of August. Emerald pendant from his sister around his neck, legs stretched beneath the seat in front of him, thin ankles crossed. The dead summer sun perches up in the desaturate sky pulsing through the glass like a pale nipple. Limp green streaking by out the window–it hasn’t rained in weeks. He opens a notebook, chews on the cap of a pen, then closes it and puts everything back into his bag. A sliver of ocean appears over the parting of the tree’s canopy and is swallowed up just as quickly. He sends a text: ten minutes out.
Andy picks him up at the train station. Marc can see from the train’s window how Andy leans on the hood of his Porsche, slim and glowing, with something lit between two of his slender fingers. He flicks it to the pavement and darts across the parking lot to scoop Marc up in a fireman’s carry. The gesture is entirely unexpected and Marc lets his bag drop to the pavement in surprise. Andy’s lips press wet against his cheek and laughter swims laps round his head.
One hand on the Porsche’s steering wheel, he uses the other to repeatedly pat Marc’s knee, prod his shoulder for emphasis, fingers squeezing but never searching. Marc keeps his hands to himself. The ocean below the one lane highway dizzies with gravity as though it might beckon the land and the car to fold over and into it. With every lurching turn Andy takes, his stomach threatens to crawl up his throat. He anticipates the calming poison of a cold drink at the house.
The house itself is stilted up in a stand of grassy sea dunes, only a thin copse of scraggly trees separating them from the beach and the heavy blue ocean. The clouds shifting behind the clapboard structure make it appear as though it’s swaying gently in the breeze.
“So,” Andy says as he swings into the driveway, “what the hell have you been up to, dude? I don’t even remember the last time I saw you.”
Marc steps from the car, gravel crunching beneath his feet, shifting shade dappling his dull cheeks. “Me neither,” he lies. “Eight years?”
“Something like it,” Andy agrees, clapping his bare shoulder. The thick rings on his fingers almost sting in the heat. “Well, welcome. Come on in, I’ll introduce you to everyone.”
‘Everyone’ are nine guys with names that do not stick to Marc’s memory, all lounging across an array of gray couches. They are beautiful, carefully constructed men solid as statues yet swaying like seagrass under the influence of a morning clearly spent drinking. Their hair is neat and their scant clothing laboriously branded. Every inch of skin sun-kissed and glowing with vitality. Marc has his height and charming curls but feels more like a boy than a man before these figures who clearly take masculinity as the law of god, a practice with relentless upkeep.
“This is Marc,” Andy says with a hand round his waist, as though they ever once touched each other in that way. “We went to high school together. Be nice.”
Marc watches in real time as each man looks him up and down from the careless wisps of his windswept hair down to his poorly manicured toes atop old sandals, and decide within the second whether or not he is worth the time and attention. Wry grins are mustered up and limp wrists stiffened to vague greeting. One solitary “Hey, girl.” A rope slackens somewhere–Marc is unfuckable.
Unperturbed, Andy asks one of the guys–a Nick or Tyler–to make Marc a drink then gives him the tour while he sips, gratefully, on the cold and bitter concoction, holding the ridged glass close to his chest. The house is Andy’s aunt’s or maybe the aunt’s cousin–Andy seems reluctant to let the ownership fall on someone else and so feigns unsureness to distract from the fact that it certainly isn’t his. There are five bedrooms and many insinuations made about who might share which with who and whether or not the door to that room will be locked or open. Marc leaves his bag in a small room with a messy queen bed that he may or may not be sharing later with Bailey, depending on several factors that are lined up as one complex equation with many answers.
The windows in every room are thrown open with lacy curtains drifting in a salt-crisped breeze. Gulls scream in circles above and children’s laughter carries vaguely from the beach below. Out back is a deck with a covered hot tub and a meager view of the water through the gangly trees.
“Who woulda thought,” Andy says, offering a lopsided grin that is both disarming and startlingly out of place on this face that Marc once knew. “The two of us ending up faggots who vacation on the coast. I never saw it coming.”
If Marc flinched, he doesn’t think Andy noticed. He offers a meek cheers to their renewed friendship and the day unfurls from there in cold sips and streaks of radiant sun, water glistening on hard bodies and white teeth gnashing in the form of charismatic grins. Marc tries to keep up but it seems these men speak a different language than him, fast and referential and clipped, every sentence breaking apart into group laughter before Marc can parse apart where it was going or if there is any meaning to the words beyond shared reference. He drinks to make up for his incompetence and feels the mixed liquor heat up inside his unchiseled stomach and send little pangs of nausea all through him. The guys break up the drinking with white lines and fragrant smokes but Marc declines.
Down by the water in the afternoon, the guys strip to second-skin speedos and fill them out with ease, everything moving and swelling as it is supposed to. Marc is in loose pastel trunks. All through the hot August day there are lips pressing and sweat tracing divots, fingertips lingering on all the skin but Marc’s. It’s difficult to blame them. These men have worked hard on their bodies and he is not immune to the desire to press his hands against the sweat-slicked muscles just to see if they give to his touch or if the skin is unyielding as marble. But he keeps his hands to himself, his knees to his chest on the beach to guard his flagellating crotch.
In the evening they drive into town for dinner, on the water again as everything down here seems to be. Seafood by the sea, predictable, but inarguably delicious. Marc tries to make idle conversation with his roommate Bailey but cannot seem to match the boisterous energy required to hold his attention–he drifts over and over again to the golden-haired Wesley on his other side and by the time Andy is loudly announcing he’ll be paying for the whole table, as per some unnamed tradition, Bailey leans close to Marc’s ear and, speaking well above a whisper, says, “The bed is all yours tonight.”
It is a sick relief but a shameful one as well. He hadn’t even noticed the way in which the men had begun pairing off throughout the day, as if it were the divine purpose of this trip–and maybe it is. Maybe they do this every year, arriving single and driving back to the city with a new beau for the Instagram grid. There are eleven of them anyhow so someone had to go unpaired and Marc isn’t surprised that it’s him. He asks the waiter for another drink–he’s not paying for it anyways–and swallows greedily, drowning the oysters in his stomach, returned to the briny sea.
Riding in Andy’s Porsche back to the house with four men crammed atop each other singing some song he’s never heard, Marc watches the sun melt hot and sickly orange into the ocean and wonders how on earth he ended up here. He only wanted to know if it would be different, and it is, but somehow terribly the same as well.
With the sun’s departure, a chill settles in over the house and the hot tub’s cover is pried back. Clothes are shed once more, lines cut, tongues growing looser, Marc huddling further into his tense and wiry frame. Every growing nighttime shadow suggests the inevitable move toward an hour of determined sensuality. While the guys settle into the water, spreading legs and knocking knees, Marc meanders down to the beach to watch the moonlight licking the crests of waves to stiff meringue peaks. The sand is cold beneath his feet, all the day’s noise and movement dispersed with the heat rising.
Sitting hard in the sand he tries to call his sister but the signal is spotty or she’s busy. Displaced now from the general air of drunkenness and joviality, Marc finds he is both shockingly sober despite a day of drinking and swollen with a sadness he cannot find the words to name. It feels both old and new, a sharp melancholy nestled like barbed wire around his heart that won’t stop beating. The waning moon is the same moon he sees back home, the same he’d once sat beneath on a drunken prom night thinking himself to be brave and bold. He is old enough now to see that he’s only ever acted out of fear.
“You always were a lone cowboy,” Andy says, sitting down fluidly in the sand next to him.
Marc shrugs. “Sorry. I’m not being a very good guest. I’m having fun, I promise.”
Andy tilts his head, eyes paled by the moonlight but narrowed by drunkenness. “I always wondered what happened to you. You really went off the grid after graduation. You’re exactly the same though, aren’t you?”
He pulls at the hair on his leg, embarrassed in a way. “I had some stuff to figure out. I was surprised you reached out to me, honestly. I figured you’d forgotten me entirely.”
Andy scoffs. “Forget my first boy kiss? I think not.”
The water makes hush and murmur against the old shore, humming past-lives to the present. Marc half-whispers, “It’s not like it was exactly reciprocated.” He tries to laugh but it comes out bitter and sad, even to his own ears.
The sand shifts all around his hand as Andy slips his fingers into Marc’s and pulls the hand into the warmth of his lap. “Come on,” he says.
Marc follows his old friend in a daze. The hand holding his is stronger than he’d ever known it. The one that had pushed him away on prom night was still a boy’s hand, an extension of unacknowledged self-hate. It had still managed to leave a bruise. The same hand pulls him now up the beach and over the needles beneath the trees and past the hot tub which is emptying out and the three left behind getting on just fine together.
Andy locks the door behind them and pushes Marc to the bed, still unmade, still smelling of the man who’d slept here the night before. Is this happening, Marc wonders as a weight comes down on him, wet tongue pressing past his lips and making room in his mouth. Marc hasn’t had sex in–he can’t say how long. He’s instantly hard and Andy is laughing against his wet lips, rolling his hips to show that he’s noticed, that he is entertained by Marc’s easy, boyish desire.
The ocean’s distant hush is all in Marc’s ears as Andy’s tongue teases and explores. He feels practically incompetent. He feels he might cum fully clothed from just the contact, the closeness, the heat. His hands moving up Andy’s back, testing the firmness of the skin, the movement of the muscles–he is not marble but flesh, flesh he is being allowed to touch now. Marc is so soft and so unprepared–he can’t help but remember the resistance of this very body. The way it allowed him only a moment of contact before pushing him to the dirt. Before pursing its lips and spitting on him. Before the snarl and the admonishment, the fiery eyes burning with misdirected hatred. Had the feeling washed away for Andy? It’s fresh in Marc’s chest.
“Give me some enthusiasm,” Andy breathes against his neck. “I know how badly you wanted this. You can have it now.”
Marc can’t trust himself to speak–all of his thoughts are trained far away. The feeling cannot be shaken–he is waiting for Andy to hurt him. To look him in the eyes and crush his desire before he can make sense of it. The feeling of being a kid again—that he never stopped being anything but a child—seizes in his chest and his hands grow hard, they grip Andy’s arms and wrench him over so Marc hovers above him like a deity, wild in the eyes and righteous. His chest heaves with heavy breath and all he wants is to transfer this feeling, to no longer own it and all its ugliness. It never should have been his to hold.
Andy looks up at him, curious. “Go on,” he says. “Do it.”
He could. It would close a loop. Cruelty to cruelty, and this time erotic on purpose rather than as uncomfortable byproduct. The shame is red-hot, throbbing, erotic as the tides baring wet, naked sand. The spit compiles behind the calcium floodgates of his uneven teeth. He could rain it down in a shower of words until now unsaid. Andy opens his mouth for it like an apology but he won’t—apologize. And this is not forgiveness.
Marc sits back, released. No use in repeating dead history. No use in giving it life again. Men are not statues but changeable flesh, softer than marble. And Marc is not a child. It is no longer horrible to want.
“Turn over,” he says.
When it’s done, Andy kisses him on the cheek and turns on his side to sleep. Marc allows himself ten minutes of abstract pity and loose triumph before he slips back into this clothes, gathers his bag, steps quietly down the stairs and out the front door.
He walks for a long time through the cool night, long enough that his eyes grow wet around the rims and then dry again and his feet begin to swell and blister in his sandals. After three miles he catches enough signal to call his sister and she finds him at dawn with his knees to his chest on a bench outside a McDonald’s watching the sun press the first hot tendrils of day across the sky.
He looks up at her, dark gulls in the indigo sky making a halo round her head.
“I thought it would be different,” he says.
“It will be,” she replies.
She helps Marc to his feet and into the passenger seat, sand materializing on the dashboard. Turns on the radio and holds his hand the whole way home.
Ohh the Nicks and Tylers and Wesleys. We’ve all been there.
So good!!!
read this on the train and wanted to get back home immediately to type this up. I am ashamed to admit this is my first James Worth story. But I am unashamed to admit that this is stupendous: a tender queer coming-of-age which bares its heart on its sleeve and bleeds it blue with every line. There is care placed not merely on its deceptively simple story structure but also on the stories' subjects. It is sensual but never sensationalised, threading the needle between realism and pictorialism with quiet yet powerful grace. More than worth your time.