Something to miss

a short story

Sep 03, 2025

Sam wrenched my arm with her bulldyke grip and dragged me from the dancefloor. “You have to meet my new friends,” she laughed in my ear, eyes rolling under a cocktail current of uppers. I looked back over my shoulder but the guy I’d been dancing with had already careened into the hips of someone else and they warbled, hot and fluid beneath the pulsing light. I let her steal me away.

Sam’s new friends were out front beneath a midnight misting, passing a joint which they offered to me as a greeting. I took a pull and handed it back to the tall one who smiled sloppily at me.

“Jon,” I said.

“Nolan,” he replied out the corner of his mouth. He was holding smoke in his lungs. “This is Anthony.” He nodded to his friend who offered only a noncommittal little wave doubling as a request for the joint. His pull was long and gratuitous and he used the exhaling of smoke as an excuse to turn away from us and watch the cars creep by with their winking taillights.

“They’re husbands,” Sam explained, words slipping too quick over her sticky tongue. “They live in their little blue van and drive it all over the country and go wherever they want. Isn’t that sick?”

I noticed then the tidy gold bands they wore and tried not to show my disappointment. Nolan was cute. He seemed to be doing the mid-70’s rugged beatnik thing that lots of gay guys were doing lately with the skimpy mustache and shaggy almost-mullet, loose jeans and oversized flannel slipping off one shoulder. On second glance though Anthony might have been more handsome, albeit in a less effortful way. His thick hair was neat and carefully styled, close to the scalp. His eyes were so dark I could not discern the pupil from the iris in the shoddy sidewalk light. Faint tattoos were just legible against his brown skin, tracing hallucinatory lines up his biceps. Sparkly earrings tugging at his lobes, tiny round glasses on the bridge of his nose.

“Pretty cool,” I said. “How long you guys been on the road?”

They exchanged a mathematical glance, then Nolan replied, “Three years, I guess. It was supposed to be a honeymoon road trip but then, well, we didn’t wanna go home after.”

I took another hit and felt my feet lift off the pavement slightly. I’d mostly just been drinking all night and the buoyant weed was a welcome alternative to the syrupy slog of rum and coke. “So what brought you to our beautiful city in particular?” I asked.

Nolan said, “Maybe we came just for you.”

“Alright,” Sam groaned, regretfully. “I’m going back in.”

We perched on the curb and talked for the next hour in listless loops. I made Anthony laugh twice but he spoke little in a way that was almost charming. The mist turned to a rolling fog and his hair grew dewy, sparkling under the streetlights. These two men carried an incredibly transitory spirit with them. I thought if I turned away for just a moment they’d be gone when I looked back.

“Where are you headed next?” I asked.

Anthony said, “We’re here for a while, I think. We try to hang around and get to know a place before we ditch it.”

Nolan put an arm around my shoulder and said, “We like to leave people with an impression. Give them something to miss.”

I swallowed my grin and leaned into the side embrace. By the time the club was closing up shop in the wee hours of the morning, I’d offered the two of them the spare room in my house as an alternative to van sleeping and once Sam was safely shepherded into her Uber, I followed them to the van and Anthony drove us home. It was a no frills sort of van, baby blue on the outside, clean on the inside but clearly lived in. Nolan and Anthony sat up front and I sprawled out on their mattress in the back. The sheets and pillows smelled like men, like sex. I wouldn’t mind sleeping there.

My house was about thirty minutes outside the city and we rode with the windows down, cool air combing the sweat from my dance-slicked body. Already I’d forgotten the man I’d met on the dancefloor, his hands on my hips, though my need had not waned. Beach House was dazzling through the old speakers and Nolan lit another blunt in the passenger seat.

I was stoned out of my mind by the time Anthony pulled into my driveway. My keys turned cryptic in my hands and I struggled to let us inside. It was no longer clear to me if anything was happening between the three of us and I was too tired to sort it out so I showed them their room, apologized for its clutter and lack of character–a work in progress, I called it–then told them I was just down the hall if they needed anything.

Sometime in the night I woke from my heavy sleep to a body sliding beneath my sheets, warm arms winding round my torso. I tested the feeling of rolling my lazy hips in circles and made sleepy little noises at the body’s response. Lips trellised their way up my neck, a tongue teased the stubble on my jaw. I never opened my eyes and whichever husband had joined me made no small talk as he slipped beneath my briefs and quickly inside. It was nice. I fell back asleep with him still inside me, sighing contentedly.

In the morning I was alone and unsure if I’d dreamed the encounter but my sore ass was evidence enough. Anthony was in my kitchen making breakfast, Nolan in the bathroom with the shower running. Their shoes by the front door struck me as strangely melancholy. Over breakfast on the back deck neither mentioned coming into my room and fucking me to sleep and I didn’t press the matter. Nolan asked what there was to do in the area so we got dressed and walked down the bike path that wound through my neighborhood and sprawled out in the sun by the meager brook and its neat trickling. It was a sleepy Sunday and not many people were around so the tall trees could be heard whispering and hushing, everything a little damp from the previous night’s misting but the sun rising high and making it all sing. A loon crowed an afternoon lullaby. In the grass, Anthony draped a leg over Nolan, with his back to me.

We stripped our clothes and splashed around in the shallow water for a bit, then walked home with our shirts off, slick with late summer sun. Anthony’s back was etched with a dozen tattoos all shifting with the movement of the muscles beneath his skin. He looked over his shoulder at me then shied and looked away.

At home we smoked the rest of the day away. Anthony liked my record collection and would put one on the player only to change it a few songs in upon finding one he wanted to hear more. I liked watching him peruse and the way his long fingers so delicately took each record from its casing and laid it out so carefully, dropping the needle precisely to the lacquered vinyl. There was reverence in his eyes and so much softness. It was him the night before, I decided. Those were the hands that touched me.

“Anthony was in a band when we met,” Nolan told me. “They broke up but he’s still got the punk rocker’s spirit.”

Anthony had been pretending not to hear us talking but he looked back then, very seriously, and said, “Fuck the man.”

“Fuck every man you can,” Nolan replied.

They told me a lot about themselves; their meeting on another coast, the courting and the romance, the bathroom blowjobs and blown tires on desolate interstates. They didn’t ask much about me but I was happy all the same not explaining my bachelor pad and the events that had led me to it. They brought a new energy to my stagnant house and though no one spoke it aloud I knew they would stay another night. I woke again in the crisp night to a different pair of arms finding me in my soft sheets. The other husband, whichever hadn’t fucked me the night before, fucked me then. He was harder and his moans gruffer against my ear. I came before he did and he seemed content stopping there and we slept to the cicada chatter out the window.

A week passed. One of the husbands came to my bed each night. When I went to work, they got in their van and drove into the city to do whatever it was they wanted to do. Only at my office desk did it strike me as strange what was happening. I’d never done something like this before, had never had the opportunity. How we’d gone from sharing a joint on the sidewalk to sharing beds and fluids so quickly eluded me. I couldn’t bring myself to question it though many questions arose. It was late summer. It was nice to have someone around.

One night we were drinking wine and playing cards and I made the vague suggestion that the both of them could come to my bed, together.

“If you wanted to,” I said.

Nolan looked to Anthony but he did not return the glance and Nolan slapped down a winning card and grinned, drunk. “Who can ever predict the course of a night,” he said. Later he laid me on my back, alone, and made my legs shake like the shivering cicadas in the deep woods out the open window.

Sam called that weekend to make plans and I explained that me and the guys were driving out to the mountains to hike and maybe take shrooms under the high alpine trees.

“They’re still there?” she asked, salacious and bewildered.

“Yeah,” I said, nonchalant. “They’re sweet. Fun.”

“Do they, like, live with you now?”

“Of course not.”

“So when are they leaving?”

“I don’t know, it’s–I’m not worried about it, man.”

She was quiet for a while. “What happens when they leave?”

I forced a face that she could not see. “They’re here for now. It’s just nice not being lonely, Sam. It’s nice for now.”

The weather was gorgeous for our hike. The sun perched at the very top rung of sky and lazy white clouds spent the day kissing its golden rays and scattering them down on us in stringy drippings of warmth. We hiked for a few hours until, sweaty and content, we came upon the perfect lake. Nolan went charging into the water, startling a great heron up out of the reeds and into the great blue beyond. Anthony dropped a hand loose around my waist and shook his head with a soft smile.

We ate lunch on a rough blanket laid out on rough sand. Each of us took a shroom and placed it on the other’s tongue. Under the bitter taste of dirt was the salt and sweat from Nolan’s fingers. The breath in my chest grew big and wide like the throbbing green canopies ringing the lake. I put my head in Nolan’s lap and when I, inexplicably, started crying he ran his fingers through my hair, lightly razing the scalp. The gesture made me feel both tiny, like a child, and old like the earth. When the tears were done, I brought my lips to his and kissed him with an open mouth.

Anthony got up and wandered off then. I watched him toe the edge of the lake with bare feet and startle all the fish into evasive loops. He squatted and got lost in the movement.

With my head on Nolan’s shoulder I muttered, “I don’t know what you both want from me.” And when he said nothing in reply, feeling I was speaking to no one anyhow, I added, “I think I could love you.”

Nolan tip tapped his fingernails up my spine. “You’re stuck on someone else,” he said and I did not refute him.

On the ride home, Anthony and I sprawled out on the mattress in the back and he took my hand and placed it on each tattoo while he told me their meaning. His life had been ugly for a long time and he’d been making his body as beautiful as he could muster, like a ward against the past. He fell asleep with my hand in his.

That night no one came to my bed which was fine enough–I was tired. In the morning, the comedown from the trip left me feeling treacherously sad and vulnerable. I took a long time getting out of bed and when I drew the blinds, sometime before noon, I found the baby blue van was no longer in the driveway. The bed in the spare room was made and I blinked at it, slow, trying to conjure recent ghosts. The dishes were done and the shoes by the door were mine alone.

A sudden hot panic swelled up from beneath the depression inside me. I rifled through every drawer, my wallet on the kitchen counter, my desk where I stored all important things. But they hadn’t taken anything. Just a bit of my hope.

The sun was low in a hazy September sky. I made coffee and sat on the deck watching the day begin again and twisted the skin around my bare ring finger. The yard was big and empty. I missed my dog. A plane drew its arc over the planet high above and I thought, oh well. It was nice while it was nice.