At first I just figured he was lonely and wanted an office friend, so I resigned myself to being okay with having an outrageously hot straight friend to make small talk with, who also happened to make my whole brain stop working.
And then he hit on me, and I couldn’t deny what was happening anymore.
It went like this: one day we were talking about our weekend plans, and I mentioned I didn’t have any because I’d just broken things off with some loser. He leaned in and asked about my ex. But I couldn’t go there, I figured it was boring and he wouldn’t care, so I tried to shut it down. I’ll try to remember the following exchange exactly as it happened:
Me: “Listen, I’m really happy for us to be friends. But I don’t think we should talk about that. It’s kind of…weird.”
Chandler: “Yeah, um, here’s the thing: we’re not going to be friends.”
Me: “Oh. Is that so?”
But all he did was smirk.
From there, things happened quickly. I still remember the day he asked for my Snapchat. He was messaging me on there within minutes, and I remember feeling like my chest was too small for my heart. I got drunk off wine and teasingly asked him about his sexuality, and we started flirting. He said he’d never been with a guy, never even talked to a guy, but had just been dumped by a girl and felt like doing something crazy. And that’s it – I took another sip and sent him my address.
From the moment he walked into my house, I was gone. He was, and is, the most beautiful person I have ever seen, and will ever see. I also knew he was telling the truth about being straight. He was terrified, jerky and twitchy and nervous, and he needed half a bottle of wine just to look me in the eye. I think we both know what was coming next.
I sucked his dick the first night. He came in two minutes and said nobody had ever moved their tongue like me, and we fell asleep and then woke up at dawn and did it again. He didn’t go home. He never really did. It really was like a movie.
We hooked up that whole first day, on and off. In between we watched sucky Netflix movies and talked about our families. I wanted to ask – literally the whole time – what this meant, and whether he’d ever openly be with a guy, or whether I was some weird little experiment. But I knew it would overwhelm him, so I never broached the subject.
He slept over again, and the next morning was Monday. Before work, he took a lock of my hair in his fingers and said something I knew I would never forget: “I know this is weird, but I like who I am with you, and I want to keep getting to know this version of me. I hope this is okay, but I don’t want to stop knowing you yet.”
So I didn’t let him. I made him keep knowing me. And…here we are, I guess.
Gradually he slipped into this new life. This gay one. Not that it was easy. Everyone in his life, every last person, was confounded. But he never went backwards or hid me or lied about me, not once. I still admire him for that. I’ve dated enough people who kept me in the dark part of their lives to know how fucking hard it is to stand in the light with someone.
We did break up once, though. His homophobic dad found photos of us on Facebook and called him in a rage, and Chandler called me crying and told me that “maybe he couldn’t do this.”
The separation lasted three days, and every second hurt me down to my toenails. I couldn’t eat or sleep or think or breathe. He showed up on the third night, tears covering his face, and told me he would die without me.
We never spent more than a day apart again.
I just have a problem, like I said before. I want to fuck his ass. He turned me into a bottom, sure, but I wasn’t one before, and every night I fall asleep coveting the feeling of his asshole around my dick…
~
When I come back from the shower, Chandler is naked on the bed, his legs open and a defeated look on his face. And even after eleven months, he still makes me nervous.
“Hey, what’s wrong?”
Chandler pushes the vibrator away. “I tried, and I can’t do it. It wouldn’t fit inside me.”
I sit down beside him. “Chandler. That’s normal! You’ve never even taken a finger. You don’t start with something this big! Ugh, I feel bad now, for not explaining it.”
But he still looks sad. “What if I can’t?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if I just don’t want to, and you still do, and this makes us sexually incompatible? What if I can’t give you what you want?”
My heart breaks, right there. So I take his hand and put it on my chest. “Chandler, maybe I sent the wrong message. I love you forever, even if I never so much as touch your ass with my fucking pinky finger. You are mine, I am yours, and that’s it.”
Chandler’s eye gets glassy, and he wipes it.
“Seriously,” I ask, “what’s wrong?”
“It’s obviously something you want, or else you wouldn’t have brought it up. And it scares me. What if I can’t give you that? When we got together, you told me you accepted me for exactly what I was. Did you not mean that?”
“I just – I was-”
“And then last night you basically call me some self-hating homophobe.”
“I did not!” I cry. “Chandler, this is a journey for everyone. For two years after I came out, I listed on Grindr that I wasn’t into anyone who was ‘fem,’ because I was still totally uncomfortable with myself. That’s disgusting and hateful, and I regret it, but it’s true. This stuff takes time, and you’ve only been ‘out’ for less than a year!”
But he turns away.
“Maybe I went too quickly,” he says. “Maybe I went too far, too fast…”
“Chandler. Do you really mean that?”
“I don’t even know what I mean anymore,” he says, grabbing his backpack he takes to work every day. “I love you. I’ll call you later.”
And for the first time since the fight we’ve ever had, he walks out on me.
4
Chandler Mendes
I check the time on my phone. It’s 2 PM, which means I only have about six hours to decide whether I want to lose my virginity tonight. So I swallow hard and get to work.
Oh, one other thing: I made a gay friend, Scott. We like to work out together in my company’s gym on our lunch hour, and that’s where I am when he asks me a question that totally throws me off:
“So how’s your day going?”
“Good, just gotta stop by the store later and get some wine for Valentine’s.”
“Oh, damn,” Scott says. “Pulling out all the stops?”
“Ehh, I don’t know. Something like that. And speaking of all that, I have a weird question for you.”
“Okay?”
I bite my lip. “Do you and your boyfriend…do you flip-fuck?”
Scott sets down his weight and glances around. “Well, then. Really starting off slow today, huh?”
“Sorry, River asked about it, and I’m kinda thrown. So, do y’all flip?”
“Um. No. Because I’m a top. And he’s a bottom.”
“How did you know that?” I ask.