Chapter Twenty-Three Answers. Gerard began to tell me his story in of the order of events, myself only cutting in to ask even more questions

Gerard began to tell me his story in of the order of events, myself only cutting in to ask even more questions. Before, when I had interrupted his stories, like the ones about the two poet lovers, he had teased me and told me to wait and be patient. Now, he was accepting my voracious glares and fast mouth, spurting inquiry after inquiry about the many men (and one woman) that Gerard had been with. I didn’t have to ask too many clarifying questions; he definitely gave me enough detail.

“First, there was Simon…” he started. We had made our way under the covers, knowing that we should probably get comfortable. Gerard was almost half a century; who knew how long it would take us to tell all the stories he had accumulated?

Gerard was sitting against the headboard, bare chest exposed, and blankets drawn up to his thick middle. He had his arm around me, pulling me close. I put my head on his shoulder, listening as he spoke. I had my hand draped around his chest so I could feel his heart beating and his lungs expanding with every big mouthful of air he took in. I would look up at him as he went on, watching the way his chin moved at a jagged angle, waiting my turn to ask anything I needed to.

“He was my first,” Gerard started up again, waving his free hand as he talked. “First everything. Kiss, boyfriend, fuck…”

“How old were you when you first had sex?” I chimed in, a question perking up in my mind already.

“Fourteen.”

“What?” I coughed, moving to stare Gerard in the eyes.

Fourteen was so young, especially considering I only just lost my virginity at seventeen, and that was still pretty young. There was such a pressure in high school, especially if you were male, to just get it over with, but even with the pressure, the bragging, and peer stories, many people were still virgins. There must have been at least a fifty-fifty split. The ones who had lost theirs had done so pretty early, but never fourteen - at least, no one I knew personally. I was sure someone had, but they didn’t broadcast it. I was pretty sure Sam said he lost his when he was fifteen, but then again, he could have been lying; he was always so full of shit. I knew kids lost their virginity fairly early for my generation, considering all the sex in the media, but holy fuck. Gerard was thirty years older than me. I thought his generation would have been more conservative, particularly since he was gay. Did people even know how to have gay sex back then? It was such a hidden lifestyle around when Gerard would have just been discovering that part about himself. At least nowadays they talked about shit like this on TV a lot. I couldn’t imagine the frustration involved in liking men sexually, but not knowing what to do with them. Apparently, he had never had this problem. Sex was a natural instinct, and he had managed to figure something out.

Gerard merely smiled at my horrified expression. “Yes, fourteen, Frank. I didn’t make a mistake. I am quite old, but I’m not losing my mind…yet.”

“But… but…” I ignored his joke, trying to grasp my words. “That’s just so young.”

Gerard just nodded his head, and gave a weak answer of, “I know.”

I stared at him awhile, calming down enough to get back into my original position. “How was it?” I finally probed, feeling myself stiffen under his arm.

He laughed again, his free hand going to his face as the embarrassing memory came back to him. “Awkward. Weird. I was freaking out and I was naked. I didn’t know what was happening and then it was over.” He laughed again, looking down at me.

I smiled up at him, my insides beaming. I was somewhat glad to hear that his first time had been a mess. Even though it was long out of the way, I could feel jealousy stirring within me as he mentioned another man’s name. I could tell that this conversation would bring out my possessive and sensitive nature, even if the relationships were over, but I still wanted to know.

“Was that…taking it?” I asked nervously, unsure of saying exactly what I wanted.

“Yes.” Gerard nodded, ceasing all speech.

Normally, he would have gone on and on with the story, but he waited, purposely baiting me, so I would cave and ask.

“How was it when you gave it?”

“A little better,” he continued with a smile on his face. “I was still fourteen and still very naked, but I wasn’t as freaked out. We had done it a few times so I had gotten used to it, but that was from the other end. When I tried to do it to him…” He began to chuckle again, his hand covering his eyes as he shook his head. “Well, this time I didn’t know what I was doing, then it was over.”

I smiled, beaming even more inside because none of our sexual experiences together had been like that, and hopefully never would. Maybe I wasn’t as naïve as I thought. I snuggled up closer to him, nudging him with my head. “Keep going.”

He nodded, kissing the top of my forehead before continuing on, finishing up the little details about Simon. His voice took on a story-teller quality, bringing me right back to the small, red brick house where he had grown up.

“He was my next door neighbor. It was the summer before I started high school and my mother insisted that I go and talk to this boy about what it was like. He was sixteen and already attending the school I was going to go to come September.” Gerard paused for a second, just as my mouth hung open.

I had been a bit shocked at the age difference; two years was a lot when you weren’t even in high school yet. And to be having sex so young with someone in a different level of schooling was a lot, too. I couldn’t imagine losing my virginity before high school. That sounded too scary to me, considering I had barely finished puberty by that time. I still had yet to have my growth spurt, and looking back now, I really didn’t think my spurt consisted of more than three inches. I could remember my first day of high school and how all the other guys around me where so much bigger, taller, and stronger than I was. The school corridors were dense, with most of the kids in the town being fed into the Godforsaken place. That first day, I had crashed into someone in the hallway. He loomed over me; his breath hot in my face as he yelled at me to get the fuck out of his way. Recalling the memory in Gerard’s bed, I was pretty sure he was sixteen years old. I couldn’t imagine losing my virginity – up the ass, no less – to someone like that. It would be so… awkward, to use Gerard’s delicate wording.

I looked back at Gerard, about to mention something about the alarming age difference between Simon and himself, when I recalled the situation we were in. Gerard wasn’t in a different level of schooling, but decades older. Three decades older, consisting of thirty fucking years. That was some age different right there; enough to be illegal. Somehow though, this disparity was in a much better context. I was growing up, and maturing more and more, while Gerard, though middle-aged, did not have the bitter resistance towards life that other adults had. We may have been lifetimes apart in numbers, but together, we balanced in age. I didn’t understand how – I couldn’t form words to explain why we, as a whole, were so much better than Simon and him, so I didn’t. I kept quiet and Gerard continued, unfazed.

“I didn’t want to go over to see him at first. He didn’t seem like that nice of a kid. Your typical good-looking high school prick, or so I thought. Tall, skinny, and golden blonde hair. I used to see girls going in and out of his house all the time. I never thought he would want to associate with me.”

“What changed?”

“He caught me staring at him.” Gerard smirked, closing his eyes in embarrassment and clucking his tongue. “Even though I didn’t think he was a nice person, ever since my mother had wanted me to go over and talk to him, I had been staring at him to work up the nerve. And all this staring led to the birth of a small crush. Apparently though, I wasn’t alone in this venture. He caught me sneaking peeks as he mowed the lawn one day. He came right up to me and asked me over. He was a confident little bugger, but so was I. I said yes, of course, just as unashamed as he was, though secretly inside I was cowering, hoping that he didn’t hurt me or call me a fag for what I had been doing. I had just recently begun to notice that my same sex tendencies were unaccepted… My father had started to bash the two ‘pansies’ at his work who were getting too close, and when I had asked what was wrong with that, he belted me for well over an hour.”

Gerard grew quiet for a moment, reflecting on the story, having suddenly veered into the depths of a horrid childhood memory. I could feel the abrupt heaviness in the air from the comment, and my heart ached for him. I knew my own father would never, ever accept this relationship with Gerard, whether he had been my age or not. There was some hope in me though, that if I ever chose to tell him that I was gay, he would eventually come around. I was still the same person after all, and it wasn’t like I was growing up in the culture Gerard had been raised in. People were more accepting of gay relationships now. My dad had never said anything out right awful about gays, but I could tell they made him very uncomfortable. We had rented a movie once about a year ago, and when he found out that a secondary character was gay, I could see him shifting his weight uncontrollably on the couch. The character’s role wasn’t even that big, nor was their orientation, but anytime they appeared on the screen, my father would clear his throat, twitch, and then make some excuse to get up. He must have gone to the bathroom sixty times during that eighty minute movie, just to avoid indirect contact with the issue.

Despite that small incident, he had never done anything disrespectful towards gays. He may have tried to avoid them at all costs, but there was still some fraction of hope that he wouldn’t avoid me either. He wouldn’t be happy, but God, he would never beat me like Gerard’s father had. Especially for something I couldn’t help. I was his child - he may not have liked me or what I did all that much, but I knew deep down inside, he would never touch me. He had never given me a reason to think otherwise. Even after I had come home after shoplifting, he did nothing physical. He yelled at me until he was blue in the face, took away my things, and grounded me for about a year, but he never hit me. He never touched my mom either, or yelled at her all that much. They had fights, but they were small, petty arguments, usually ending with my father scowling in a corner.

On the other hand, if my dad found out about Gerard, that was something he could help. I didn’t think he would beat me for seeing Gerard, but I was fairly certain he would be a little hostile. There was no doubt in my mind that he would go after the other man perpetrating the action. My dad was never a violent person per se, but he certainly held a lot of anger inside of him. He had a big booming voice that was designed for yelling, and he practiced this act quite frequently. If he thought I was in jeopardy, however, he would definitely turn violent to those who he thought meant harm. I was sure of it, and just the thought of Gerard hurting even more made my stomach jump.

I looked up at the artist suddenly, realizing that I couldn’t get lost in my own memories, when he seemed to be trapped in his. I touched his chest gingerly, letting him know I was still there.

“I had red welts all up and down my body,” Gerard reflected, his voice not even talking to me anymore; he was getting lost in himself. “My brother had to take care of me for three nights after because I couldn’t move very far without hurting. I was always the one who took care of him; it was a total role reversal and it shocked both of us so much. He was only ten.”

Not being able to take much more of Gerard’s despondent behavior, I removed my hand from his chest (since it seemed to do nothing), and touched his face instead, running my hand against his cheek and bringing him down to look at me. His eyes were dark and somber, but when he saw my face, he perked up, realizing that he could no longer be hurt or punished and that he never deserved to be in the first place. He knew all along that his actions were never wrong; being gay was not a crime or a reason to hurt someone. It was because of times like these as a child that Gerard came to realize that some things were worth being penalized for. He didn’t deserve to be, but if he had to give it all up or be punished, then he would much rather take the penalty.

He held me closer as he told me this, pressing his lips to my forehead in a painfully intimate embrace. The things he had told me about saving myself in all of this if we were caught, and his lack of caring if we were, finally started to make sense to me. Gerard knew that what we had was worth getting punished for and right then in his small little apartment, it didn’t seem to matter if we were ever caught.

“So what happened with you and Simon?” I asked, breaking the heavy tension between us. We needed to get back on topic, to less weighing subjects. Though I loved talking to Gerard, some things (especially about us and our ultimate demise) I just didn’t want to think about. I didn’t want to worry about the future. If the present was all we had, then we were going to live in it now.

“Ah, yes,” he breathed, smile on his face, the pleasant memories returning. “I went over to his house and the moment we were inside, he started to kiss me. We kissed for a long, long time. And did many other things, of course.” Gerard leaned back on the head board, his eyes half-closed and small smirk on his face, feeling very satisfied.

“How long did it last?” I asked.

“The sex? The first time, I swear only five seconds, though it felt like five hours.”

I sighed, “That’s not what I meant, Gerard.”

“I’m well aware.” He shot me a devious grin, and I shoved him playfully.

“How long did you guys last together? As a couple?”

Instead of answering, he screwed up his face, letting out a repulsed, “Ugh. I hate the word couple; it’s too old sounding. Couples are the people you see every day at the supermarket in matching clothing, looking alike, and buying everything in bulk for their house. They live boring and mundane lives with each other, and that’s the only thread of romance keeping them together. They don’t fuck – they barely kiss. They sleep in the same bed as if they were related, hovering on the opposite ends. They only stay together because they don’t know how to live apart, but they don’t actually touch each other enough to fully be together.”

I nodded my head in approval, pretty sure I had seen one of the couples Gerard had been talking about before. My parents could even fall into that category. I couldn’t recall the last time I had seen my father kiss my mother, and I doubted they ever had sex. Then again, those were good things. I didn’t want to see or hear or think about them doing… that. As far as I was concerned, they had sex once and that was to get me. When I removed myself from the situation though, I saw where Gerard was coming from. There was no passion in that. Love needed passion; not normalcy and routine. There was nothing routine about the way we acted, though I wasn’t sure if what we had was love yet.

“All right,” I agreed with a quick head nod. “Then what should I call you and Simon?”

“Lovers, Frank!” Gerard raised his hands in the air overdramatically, rolling his eyes. “Artists have lovers. I thought we already went over this?”

“Ah, you’re right. How foolish of me,” I played back, surprised at how easy this all was. We were so relaxed, making no effort and just feeding off the other’s creative and emotional high.

“So how long did you and Simon last as lovers?” I enunciated properly, and Gerard went back on with his story.

“Not long. Just the summer.” He paused, biting his lip in deliberation on if he wanted to tell me the next part. “Before I went back to school, we were caught kissing in his house. His mother found us, thankfully. I don’t think we would have been able to survive if one of our fathers had found out.”

“What did she do?” I questioned, feeling my heart race.

His and Simon’s relationship was a lot like ours, in a way. There was the age difference; no matter how small theirs may have been, in emotions and status, it was still big. I may have told myself all the time that the age difference between Gerard and I wasn’t too bad because I was almost an adult, almost done growing. Though that was true in the physical sense, the mental was far off. In my own head, I was still very much a baby, or at least had been when I first came into the apartment. Gerard outnumbered me in mental age like he did with numerical value, but instead of taking advantage of that like so many people would have done, Gerard took care of it. He made it okay for us to be together by allowing me grow up in so many ways. And since he refused to get old himself, there were some days, especially like this right then, buried in his side as he talked about his love life, where it didn’t seem like we were so far apart.

“She did nothing, at first,” Gerard answered my question, looking off to the side to find the memory, as if it was written in the walls. “She opened the door to his room without knocking while Simon and I were lying in his bed. We were going to have sex that day – we pretty much always tried to whenever we had enough time – but we were still fully clothed. His hand was up my shirt, I believe, but nothing more than that. It had been plenty, however, considering our lips were practically fused together as one.

“We didn’t even notice she was in the room at first. Simon just stopped kissing me all of a sudden, and when I opened my eyes, I saw his mother standing in the doorway, looking as if she had seen a ghost. Simon and I both couldn’t move. We stopped kissing, and he took his hands off of me, practically shoving me across the bed in the act. We couldn’t say anything to defend ourselves. How do you defend that, anyway?”

I shrugged my shoulders, unsure if it was a rhetorical question or not. Gerard barely noticed, and pushed on.

“We all stood there in silence for the longest time, before his mother just shut the door and left. Simon and I stopped kissing for good, and didn’t have sex. We stayed in his room, just staring at each other and exchanging very little words, wondering what the fuck to do next. Our whispered words never got us very far. When I finally had to leave and go home, she said nothing to me. Simon told me the next day she said nothing to him, too. ”

“Then what happened?” I probed. There was so much suspense in the story, the detail Gerard was putting in, and I knew it just couldn’t end here, so prematurely.

“Nothing,” he stated bluntly, proving me wrong. Some things were just that simple, I figured. “School started the next week, and Simon and I were done.”

Just as quickly as we had started talking about the blonde haired boy next door, we moved on. Gerard continued to tell me about the other people he had been with, none of them as significant as that neighbor who took his virginity from him. He and Simon had remained friends throughout most of the duration of school, but it had to be in secret, and they were never lovers again. They couldn’t be, Gerard tried to explain, but I just didn’t get it. How could he give himself to someone so easily, and then not care if they were there in the same way anymore? In some ways, it almost sounded like Gerard was a slut, moving on so quickly. I knew it that couldn’t be the case; that just didn’t fit his personality. He loved sex, and he had many lovers, but he wasn’t a slut or whore about anything. He philosophized sex so much that he couldn’t be a slut; there was too much thought behind it. He pondered over each and every single person he had been with; he remembered each of their names and why he had wanted them in that specific moment in time. When he had sex with someone, it meant something, even if it was small.

He and Simon’s time had passed, he tried to explain; their passion had died, providing it was even there to begin with. Simon had been a test run, an act of desperation to finally grab onto someone who shared the same feelings for men as the other did, but not necessarily for each other. Once in high school, Gerard realized that he and Simon weren’t the only gay people, and there was no need to go back to him. High school changed people, and even if Simon’s mother hadn’t caught them, they still would have broken up.

Simon’s mother had not told anyone about what she had seen them doing, but she was gravely affected by it. She tried to ignore it by never speaking to her son about it, but it was buried inside her, and came out in other ways. She acted differently around him, not touching him or really caring that much anymore. It was as if he was infected now, and she couldn’t bear to catch his disease. She gave him the basics like food, clothing, and shelter, but she was no longer a mom; just a mother.

I bit my lip as Gerard brushed over these details quickly, wondering if my mother would ever do the same. She had come into her mom role so quickly and so recently, that she could easily recede out of it just as fast. But as Gerard kept talking, those thoughts evaded me.

In high school, he had had a lot of girls fawning over him. Despite his chubby and nerd-like appearance, he was in a lot of the female oriented classes, such as art and home ec, and they flocked to anything that had a penis. He brushed most of them off, befriended a few, and dated very select girls, nothing going beyond a kiss. He needed to date women, he explained, to try everything once; to see if he liked it.

He didn’t.

The female body just didn’t excite him like the male did, and though not many male dating relationships had come out of high school, the appeal of men in his life certainly had. He told me embarrassing stories of random boners in his science class over his young, just-out-of-school teacher with dark eyes and curly hair. The text book had been his best friend in that class – not to read it and actually do the homework, but to conceal his secret behind a barrier so no one else would notice how good of a morning it really was to see Mr. Brundage. He told me other stories of being sneaky in the gym change room, catching looks at the boys around him as they horsed around, completely naked.

“Thank God phys ed was only mandatory for one year,” he sighed, rolling his eyes at his awkward teenage life. “I don’t think I could have lasted undetected if I had to watch that all four years.”

Male fantasies aside, the homosexual life at Gerard’s high school was almost nonexistent. Almost. Gerard kept dating a few other girls, just so no one asked too many hard questions, but his eyes were always open, hoping for something new and innovative to come along and challenge the system. He would have done it himself, he assured me, but it was too risky to go into something alone. If he had someone by his side, he could do it.

No one ever came forward.

There had been a few gay teens at the school, it was just that no one was completely out of the closet yet. There were always rumors and name calling around the topic (something Gerard had been subjected to, but it was nothing in comparison to the hell he put up with from his father) but there was no solid evidence that someone was indeed gay. And if you were, you rarely confessed it, unless you were fearless. Gerard thought he had found that fearless person one day to lead his rebellion with him. There had been a boy he had started to befriend in that science class he loved so dearly. A tall, thin kid with sad eyes, he described, named William. Though he had confessed one night to Gerard that he could be gay, when Gerard saw this as the perfect opportunity to revolt and went to kiss him, William freaked out and ran away. And then, he never spoke to Gerard again.

“Didn’t that hurt?” I asked him, adding salt to the old wound.

“High school in general hurts, Frank,” he quipped remarkably fast, probably having thought this theory out for a long time. “Relationships hurt - even if they’re good ones. Pain is there for a reason. This kid was just too afraid to feel it.”

I could see the anguish in Gerard’s eyes as he mused, and though I wanted to touch him and make it all better, I let my hands rest at my sides. His high school tales ended soon after those quick remarks, and the story took a turn for the better. He moved out during the summer, going to New York – and that was when his love life came alive.

“New York was just going through a renovation of sorts,” he explained, getting very into his story. His eyes began to dance and light up, matching that of the disco ball in the gay bars he spoke of.

“The underground club circuit was just starting in New York, and that changed everything. Being gay not only was becoming accepted, but fucking flaunted in everyone’s faces. There was gay bar after gay bar, drag clubs, and kink clubs. It was a fag boy’s candy store, and there were rainbow candies galore.”

He smiled and winked at me, before carrying on in a more demure manner. “I wasn’t really into flaunting my sexuality in the way they were. I had gone to a few clubs just to get my sexual aggression and frustration out. These acts had never been accepted where I was from. I thought I was in heaven when I first got inside. Little did I realize, it was hell in velour and plastic.”

Gerard had gone on to tell me of the heavy drug use inside the clubs, most of the homosexual behavior not actually being legitimate love, but drug induced orgies. That was not what he wanted. He didn’t need love to have sex, but he needed a person who actually gave a fuck about him. The first week going to clubs, he had hooked up a few times. He had gone from one extreme to the other, without stopping in the middle. From being caught by his best friend’s mom, to openly having sex with another man in a public washroom. He didn’t even know if there was a middle point he could stop at. There was always that gray area, and in this scenario, it was not to be feared. It took pulling himself out of the gay clubs, out of the night lust, and into the day time at the local cafes where he discovered the right amount of shading he needed. Once he uncovered this new horizon, he stayed there. He told me he had found a few people to have short, brief relationships with, but there was nothing too spectacular. He made friendships more than anything, finally being able to bond with other gay men about their experiences, and finding out that half the shit he had put up with was next to nothing.

“I met one guy whose boyfriend had been killed,” Gerard stated solemnly. “The reason for his death had been deduced to robbery, but you do not bash someone’s head in with a baseball bat for ten fucking dollars. My belting scars seemed like nothing after he told me that.”

My breath hitched in my throat, just thinking of the horrific crime. I had been in fist fights before, but I couldn’t imagine ever actually killing someone; taking a baseball bat to someone’s head and ending their fucking life. No matter how much I had wanted to hurt people on some occasions, and the amount of times I had mumbled the threat under my breath, there was a huge distinction between words and reality. In reality, I could never kill someone – especially over something as trivial as orientation. Apparently, other people begged to differ and saw this as a justified cause for murder. It scared me so much what some people were capable of, just because they didn’t understand.

There was something else in Gerard’s story that made me pay attention - belting scars. I was just being made aware of his past life of abuse, but those memories had only been manifested through the words he chose to share with me. But was there a visual aspect to this? Did Gerard say he had scars on his body from this horrific act?

I started to touch his skin tenderly and frantically at the same time, my hands a blur of white fingers and open palms. I felt out his chest and stomach to see if I could touch and reveal these markings he had so casually mentioned. Gerard paused his talking, seeming to understand what I was doing. He sat quietly while I searched, and shifted his weight to the side to help me along. I had never been looking for something like this before; I had always accepted Gerard’s body for all that it was, never asking questions. It never occurred to me to look for scars or markings, aside from wrinkles, and even then, I never questioned them. I should have been; I should have been asking question upon question – it was what Gerard had wanted me to do, and what I was supposed to be focusing on.

I thought it would take me ages to find anything marred against Gerard’s skin, but now it jumped out like it was still as fresh as the memory in his mind. When I found the mark, so small and no longer prominent from years of being untouched, I ran my finger over it. I knew there were more of them, I could see the flecked pattern of rose against his skin now very distinctly, but this one was the biggest. It was right above his hip and only about two inches long, faded through time. I traced my finger over it slowly, and suddenly didn’t fight the urge to bring my mouth over the marking as well. I kissed and sucked gently on the spot that I once thought to be a wrinkle. Gerard played with my hair and neck, eventually pulling me up so I could kiss him instead. I went willingly, but still kept my hand on his side, on that spot. I didn’t want to let it go. I didn’t want to let him go.

Eventually, we went back to talking. Gerard held me closer, my head tucked under his chin as he ran his hands up and down my back while my hands were on his marred side. He talked a little more about the café where he had met a few friends, but he didn’t dwell on it. When he was in New York, he was more concerned with art than anything else. He was still poor and living in a shitty apartment, trying to find a way to make it to art school. When he did make it there, everything he thought he knew about love and sex had changed forever.

“Art school was the most sexual time in my life,” he stated seriously, a huge grin present on his face. He had started to become giddy talking about it, and I ran with the sweat drenched and paint-filled memories right alongside him, grateful for something pleasant.

“Why?” I probed, wanting to hear the lurid details that I knew Gerard would not skip on.

“It was art school, and art, in itself, is a purely sexually cathartic experience,” he explained, drawing out his story and explanation, motioning with his hands and creating a delicate picture of this place in my mind. “We were asked to create things over and over again. We were taught how to paint, how to draw, and how to make art. Essentially, we were taught how to breathe again.” He took a deep breath seriously, to emphasize his point. “We were taught that art is life. And our life at that time was sex. It was college; the whole fundamentals of that place are based on sex. But this time, it was a safe environment where experiments and experiences were encouraged, drawn upon, and put on a canvas. Anything was possible…and I mean anything. ”

Gerard looked down at me, a fire lit in the color of his eyes. He placed a passionate kiss on my lips, our tongues darting together so fast, creating art itself, before he continued on.

He spoke to me of drunken parties, where wine and flesh was the main thing they all consumed. He spoke of nude models, and gay love triangles within dorm rooms, but most of all, he talked about Vivian.

“She was the first girl I had ever actually had feelings for,” he said seriously, conjuring up the image in my mind of the cheery, dark strawberry redhead I had seen naked on his couch. “All of the other girls from before, I had felt nothing for. They were just there because they had to be in my life to keep from getting beaten. I had only ever felt for men before; I loved men. They were what gave me my passion in life. But when I met her, everything changed. Well, not exactly.” He halted for a moment, furrowing his brow to find the right words he wanted. “Everything stayed the same – I still loved men, but she single-handedly made me divert from my pathway in life. She tempted me and I very willingly took the bait. There was just something about her; the way she carried herself, her laugh, her carefree nature… I wanted to be near her. At first, I thought as a friendship, but when I convinced her to model for me naked, there was just no going back. I knew I wanted her more than anything I ever had in my life to date. And I always got what I wanted.”

I stared at Gerard as he talked, trying to picture him with a woman. He was just so fruity and artistic that I couldn’t do it. He was gay; he had had sex with me. He was supposed to like men and he did like men. I could maybe understand it all a little better if he had said he was bisexual, but he wasn’t. I asked him and he laughed it off, stating that he liked men and only men. There was no going in between the two extremes for him. He wanted one clear pathway and took it. I was still confused as to how Vivian fit into all of this. I knew she was a woman for sure – I had seen her naked – but I didn’t bother to ask. He was dead set on being gay, but still declaring his undying love for this woman.

I had to admit, I was jealous. Even if I didn’t understand it to its full extent, hearing him talk about her with that spark in his eye made my stomach contents leap to the forefront of my gut. I was almost glad I didn’t quite understand it, because I knew I would have been so much more envious if I had. I tried not to let my disdain show through, and gave Gerard my complete attention. He skimmed over a lot of the details about Vivian and their life together, probably because it was still going on. Out of all the people, friends or lovers, he had mentioned thus far, she was the only one who had retained a permanent spot inside the artist’s memory and real life. I found it fascinating, and though I wanted to know more, the main preoccupation for knowledge took the form of how Vivian went back to being just a friend from a lover.

“Ah well,” Gerard started to answer my question, shifting his weight and getting comfortable again. “Art school ended for me. I graduated and I was no longer around the constant sexed-up atmosphere that I had been used to. I was now just surrounded by the passion of painting. Vivian and I had started to have sex less and less, and before I knew it, we were back to just friends, no longer ripping each other’s clothes off. We only kissed once in awhile, to show affection for the other. But that’s all it ever was; affection. We had started up in a lust and sex-filled atmosphere, letting the art with our bodies drive us, but that’s all we had been doing. Making art. We loved each other as friends, and once art school was out of our system, friendship came in the form of affection. Things changed, but it was for the better. She was interested in other men, and so was I by that point.”

“Really?” I offered, a foolish smile appearing on my face at the mention of another lover and yet again another story. We had been talking now for well over an hour and though my side felt slightly numb from remaining in the same relative position, and my bladder ached because it was full, I was so comfortable and warm that I didn’t want to move. “Who’s next?”

“Alexi,” Gerard stated, grinning hard. “The man who reminded me why I was gay in the first place.”

After some giggles and quick kissing, Gerard proceeded to tell me the story of a Russian man he had met while trying to sell one of his paintings. He was an art collector, coming directly from Russia to live in the states for a while to acquire some good pieces for his collection back home. He spoke fluent English, but, according to Gerard, his accent was so thick you could walk on it.

“I’d fuck his voice if I could,” he oozed at one point, his tone dripping with lust.

“I thought you didn’t fuck, Gerard,” I teased him, patting his shoulder.

“ We don’t fuck,” he corrected me. “But for the most part, all I did was fuck. The pure and raw animalistic urge to just get off. I fucked Alexi, for seven long months before he had to go back to Russia. He said he would phone me, or at least come back for a few more months, but he never did. I never wanted him to. Our relationship had been physical, and though I was glad it happened, I’d rather just keep the memory as is.”

I nodded, completely understanding where he was coming from. I had never had any lovers before him, but I could relate to his feeling through friendships I had acquired, and then subsequently lost. My one and only female friend, Jessica, from grade nine had moved a few towns over by the end of that school year. We were nothing more than friends out of sheer desperation, meeting in our English class and getting by on alternating doing the homework every other day. She had four brothers and was a tomboy, so she wasn’t as feminine as the other girls I knew, and that was what had attracted me to her in the first place. I was usually very nervous around girls (anyone, actually) but she made things easier by being really down-to-earth. We hung out outside of school a few times, going out to a comic book store and arguing over who the better superhero was. We were never as close as Sam and I were, but that was my fault, and I knew it. She gave me her number the last day of school, knowing that she’d be moving in a few weeks, and insisted that I call her. I kept the number with me all day in my pocket, the small piece of English note paper burning a hole through the fabric of my jeans. When I got home and finally released the number from its confinement, I only tossed it into the trash can. I didn’t want to talk to her anymore. Long distances always ruined things. She had been a good friend, offering me advice whenever I had asked and listening to me bitch and moan about my parents, but I needed to let go. Sam had always given us such a huge hassle for hanging out together all the time at school. He made snide remarks and sexual comments, so much once that Jessica had even kicked him in the nuts to get him to shut the fuck up. He had spent the rest of the day at the nurse.

I did see her again after she moved, at the same comic book store we used to always hang out, but I never said hi. I didn’t want to. I still had the image of Jessica, the tough as nails fourteen-year-old chick who had made Sam cry, in my head and I wanted it to stay that way. I didn’t want to hear that she had gotten a boyfriend or made new friends, because as far as I was concerned, we were still innocent, fourteen years old, and discussing The Teen Titans.

This was exactly what Gerard had wanted with Alexi. He wanted to remember the Russian with the fuckable voice – not the Russian who may or may not have come back ten years later with forty more pounds and significantly less money.

“I fucked a lot of people after Alexi,” Gerard continued, snapping me out of my own nostalgia. “When people would come to see me and ask about my art, about eight times out of ten, we’d end up having sex. Sometimes right on the art itself. None of them were women. I had a few come onto me, but no one could change my mind the way Vivian had. I never fucked her. We made art, just like you and me.” He nudged me with his elbow, drawing me in closer to his chest. I smiled up at him, meeting with his lips as he brought them down over my ready, open mouth again.

“Was there anyone else you didn’t just fuck?” I asked after the embrace, my curious nature taking over once again. I almost wished I hadn’t asked the question, because of the somber nature Gerard gave off as he whispered a faint, “yes.”