Upstairs Bonnie Metzger looked in the mirror. She was eighteen, but looked a little older, he eyes were weak because of tears and also because the mascara she usually wore was gone. She’d dyed her hair black, but that just looked ridiculous now, and she hadn’t bathed since yesterday. She could smell herself. She didn’t care.

“Swain, thank you for being here.”

To Swain, her friend sounded different. Her voice was lighter.

Bonnie just kept running her hands up and down over her stomach.

“I can’t believe it,” she said softly. “Can you believe it’s in me? A person? A baby? How can that be inside me, Swain?”

Swain didn’t answer. She looked at her girlfriend turning slowly in the mirror, Bonnie Metzger aged eighteen, black hair down her back.

“I finally told Addison,” she said. “He’s not pleased at all. He’s potent though,” she laughed a little to herself. “I’m the second girl he’s gotten pregnant in two years. And he always used those Trojans too. Well, not always…”

She went on and on, but there was something not drifting, not shallow about her speaking. As Swain watched Bonnie, watched the girl’s white face, her dark eyes, examining their reflection she saw something that her uncle would have called… gravitas settling on her.

“I’ve thought about what I would do. I’m thinking about it,” Bonnie said.

“Addison wants to leave me. I think we’re coming to a close. He’ll be off in Pennsylvania. I was going to go off to Cartimandua College. Probably screw around. Probably go on doing the same thing I’ve always done.”

She sighed. “It’s hard, Swain, you know. It’s hard.

“I… never liked Becky Angstrom. I don’t really know her, but I never liked her. Me… I never much liked myself. I’ve done every drug you can think of. I spent junior high drunk. Junior high… Smoking, drinking, drugging. God, I’ve fucked more guys than I can count. My whole life is one fucking blur.”

She smiled sadly.

“Maybe… Becky… who is pretty, and beautiful… Maybe she had a life worth preserving, that she couldn’t mess up. So… I understand what she did. But me…” Bonnie looked at Swain and laced her fingers over her flat stomach, “This is the first cool thing I’ve ever done.”

Sully saw Tommy’s truck, and then Tommy was dropped off and so he assumed that either Jill or Addison was driving it. For some reason Sully took a comb to his hair and straightened out his room a little bit before going downstairs. He always wanted to make things look a little better for Tommy.

            Meanwhile he could hear the tail end of his mother’s conversation with Tommy or rather, if he knew his mother, her monologue that Tommy would have been listening to with a polite smile on his face.

            “And I always tell him to bring people by,” Tina was saying. “But he hardly ever does. And now he’s going off to that Genoa school. Do you know about it?”

            “Actually, ma’am, we’re all going.”

            “Really? Even Balliol?”

            “Yes. I’m sure. At least I think I’m sure.”

            “How TV show!”

            “Hey, Tommy!” Sully shouted on his way down, to cut his mother off. He hugged his friend quickly, and dragged him up the stairs.

            “You weren’t over at Mason’s today,” Tommy was telling him as they took the steps two at a time. “We all were. Except for Matt. You would have a had a good time. Jared was there.”

            “Yeah,” Sully said walking into his room, opening the curtains and putting up a window. “Jared’s alright. I guess.”

            Tommy stood quiet for a while.

            “What, Thomas?” Sully said sounding not quite irritated. His hair was sticking up as he took a hand through it.

            “I was sent. I mean, I would have come anyway. But… I’m not doing such a great job of this.”

            Suddenly Sully smiled gently at Tommy. This was the friend who had come to him that night after the first time Chris had broken up with him, who had hugged him when he cried and sat beside him. Who was able to bear the truth about the whole Justin Reily incident before anyone else, when Sully could hardly think about it himself and just moved  through his life without reflection.

            “What’s going on, Tommy?” said Sully.

            “That’s sort of what I’m supposed to find out,” Tommy admitted. “Balliol sent me to just….”

            “Find out a report back to him,” Sully chuckled and looked out the window, shaking his head. “My Bailey.. He sure is something.”

            “I think he just sent me to listen to you,” Tommy told him. “Cause he knew sometimes it was easier for you to talk to me.”

            Sully’s face, still looking out of the window, changed. The sarcasm left and he murmured, “Well, shit… Bailey really is something then. Isn’t he?”

            Tommy nodded.

            Sully sighed and gripped his knees again.

            “You’re going to be mighty disappointed in me, Tommy. Seems like you’re going to always know me as the Sinner.”

            “Whaddo you mean?”

            “The one who’s always slipping up and doing the wrong thing.”

            “Stop,” Tommy said a little sharply. “No one thinks of you that way. You know I don’t.”

            No, Tommy didn’t. The Tommy he’d met long ago had glasses and too much lank hair. This Thomas Dwyer had a goatee, sharp dark eyes and a snug tee shirt on. He was, Sully thought, sort of hot actually, and a little wiser about the world. Not the naïve sixteen year old everyone had thought he was. Still thought he was.

            “When we went down to Genoa that first time, something was in me. I don’t know what. I asked Jared Parker to have sex with me.”

            Tommy nodded clinically and then he said, “And did he?”

            “Yes.”

            “And is he still?”

            Sully felt surprised and relieved that Tommy could cut to the chase like this.

            “Yes,” he said.

            Tommy nodded. Sully felt bad for this. He liked that he could talk to Tommy, but he wished, still that he could protect him. That he could be something a little better for Tommy, or give him something better to talk to him about. He told him that.

            Sully said, “My mom… after my dad left she screwed a bunch of guys and she would tell me about it. She would tell me all her troubles and it grew me up real fast, but I didn’t appreciate that. And I feel bad for telling you some things Tommy because… I think I got too old too quick, did some things too soon and I feel like when I tell them they effect you, when I make you listen to my life without getting disgusted and walking away or something then I sort of make you old too.”

            Tommy didn’t know what to say. Even as Sully told him this, he realized it was true.

            “You know what, Sully?” Tommy said at last. “I just learned today, for the first time, that one of my best friend’s—he and his ex girlfriend got an abortion. Two years ago. I never knew because no one ever thought I could handle it.”

            “Addison.”

            “You knew?”

            “Bailey told me.”

            “Um,” Tommy nodded sadly. “Well, that’s my point. I’d rather get a little old having to be part of my friends’ lives, than be protected from them and treated like—”

            “A baby?”

            “Like an idiot, Sully. That’s the one thing,” he told Sully. “You have never ever hidden things from me. Out of all my friends you’re the one that never treated me like a baby.”

            “Are you mad at Addison?”

            “Yes,” Tommy discovered. “A little.”

            “You should talk to him.”

            Tommy nodded before he spoke.

            “You should talk to Bailey.”

“When are you going back to Genoa?”

            “I was going to head back tonight,” Jared said climbing out of bed while Sully watched his body, the roundness of his ass defined by the dark hair at its cleft.

            “You don’t have to,” Sully told, gathering his knees up. “You can stay the night. Head back in the morning. You can even call me Mason.”

            Sully said it as a joke. But he didn’t laugh.

            Jared turned around and looked at him. Jared had a slight belly, round and covered in dark hair over his sex. Sully went from it, to his dark eyes, back again.

            “I’m sorry for doing that,” Jared said.

            Sully patted the bed tiredly.

            “You wanna be with him, right?”

            “I like Mason a great deal. I think I love him. But how I love him is different than I thought I would.” He shrugged. “I don’t know how. It spills over, I guess. I think about him other ways. I didn’t mean to. I don’t want him to know.”

“He won’t know it from me,” Sully told him as Jared crawled into bed. Sully turned around and kissed him.

“Sully—”

Sully put a hand to his lips.

“Look, Jared,” Sully sounded tired and extremely gay in his own ears. “If you’re about to tell me how you don’t really love me and you don’t want to lead me on and all of that, then we’ve had sex about five times now, four of them in this bed and I know all that.

“When I first saw you… you had that red shirt on and it was snug and your head was all just shaven, and you had that look in your eyes and I think I was hot for you. Hot for your body. By the time I came to you that night… or morning… I wasn’t looking for love. I got exactly what I came for. I get it every time.”

They had began to glide together. This was how it was. Once they’d established that neither one of them was with any one else they’d foregone the whole condom thing. They just kept a little bit of lube, and if there was conversation it was linked together, little by little, through fumblings and strokings, and then eventual gliding. From this moment when they moved together a little bit, sweated and stopped, thing became more intense, if they wanted them too.

“I’m not deluded,” Sully was under Jared, pulling the young man’s face to him and kissing his mouth. “You just look so goddamned good to me and I want to be with somebody. I have to be.”

Jared pushed into him a few times,. He buried his head in Sully’s shoulder.

“Let’s fuck,” he whispered.

Sully’s legs tightened around Jared’s body, he caressed his back, went to his ass, and agreed:.

“Let’s.”

When it was over and they were exhausted, Sully looked up at the ceiling and asked Jared, “Is there someone? Someone you loved?”

“Yes,” Jared said. “My first boyfriend… But I don’t know if we really were that. If he’d call it that.”

“I know how that goes,” Sully sympathized.

“He’s still sort of who I dream about,” Jared said.

He slid off of Sully, who lowered his legs and then they lay side by side. At last Jared turned to him.

“And you? Do you dream about your ex?”

“My ex, who I can’t have, who is screwing a chick right now as we speak, who broke up with me twice, but the second time around I beat him to the punch?” Sully shook his head and smiled grimly. “No… I don’t think about Chris. And he wasn’t my first love anyway. My first sex, yes. But not my first love.”

“See, my first boyfriend was my first love.”

“Your first crush and your first love. He was really all that?”

“Yeah,” Jared said. “And who was yours? Was he some boy in kindergarten who moved away and you never saw him again.”

Sully looked at Jared who was grinning, and he smiled.

“No,” Sully said. “Actually my first love I met in daycare. The guy who would be the end of me, the guy who still does shit to me. And he didn’t move away at all, but he might as well for those purposes. I could never have him.”

“He’s straight?”

“He’s Balliol.”