Autoboyography
Page 38

“Hey.”
God, we are idiots, grinning like we just won a gold medal the size of Idaho. His eyes are impish, and I love this side of him. I wonder who else sees it. I want to think what I see right here in his eyes is his one, pure truth.
“You brought water?” he asks.
I turn halfway to show him my CamelBak. “The big one.”
“Good. We’re going up today. You ready?”
“I’ll follow you anywhere.”
With an enormous grin, he turns, charging up the path and into the thick, rain-damp brush. I follow close behind. The wind picks up as we climb, and we don’t bother with small talk. It reminds me of going to a seafood buffet with Dad when he took me to a conference in New Orleans. Dad got this intensely focused look on his face. Don’t eat the filler, he said, meaning breadsticks, tiny sandwiches, even the beautiful, tiny-but-flavorless cakes. Dad made a beeline for the crab legs, crawdads, and seared tuna.
Breathless small talk right now would be breadsticks. I want to feel Sebastian’s body right up against mine the next time he says anything.
Most people hiking Y Mountain stop at the enormous painted Y, but after we arrive there a half hour into our hike, we continue, leaving the town sprawling below us. We head where the trail narrows and continues south, then turns east into Slide Canyon. Everything is more rugged here, and we watch our step more carefully to avoid stinging nettle and scratchy brush. Finally, we reach the area of the mountain where there is pine tree cover. We need it less for shade—it’s getting colder, in the high twenties now, but we’re bundled in jackets—and more for privacy.
Sebastian slows and then sits under a thatch of trees overlooking Cascade Mountain and Shingle Mill Peak. I collapse beside him; we’ve been hiking for well over an hour. Any question I had about whether we’d be here together at night has been put to rest. This is farther than we’ve hiked together on a weekend, let alone a weekday, and it will take us at least another hour to get home. The sun hangs low in the horizon, turning the sky a heavy, seductive blue.
His hand slides into mine, and he leans backward, pressing our joined fists to his chest. Even through his puffy jacket I can feel his body heat. “Holy . . . that was a hike.”
I stay seated, leaning back on my other hand to balance and stare out at the canyon. The mountains are dramatically green with patches of white snow. Their sharp peaks and smooth rock faces are dotted with trees. It’s so unlike the valley below us, where everything seems to be dotted with TGIFridays and convenience stores.
“Tann?”
I turn, looking down at him. The temptation to crawl over him and kiss him for hours is nearly impossible to resist, but there’s also something pretty great about being able to just sit here and hold hands
with
my
boyfriend.
“Yeah?”
He brings my hand to his mouth, kissing my knuckles. “Can I read it?”
It came at me so fast. I was expecting it, but still. “Eventually. I’m just . . . It’s not done.”
He pushes to sit. “I get that. You just started it, right?”
The lie is starting to turn me black inside.
“Actually,” I say, “I’m having a hard time beginning. I want to write something new. I do. But every time I sit down at my laptop, I write about . . . us.”
“I get that, too.” He goes quiet for a few breaths. “I meant what I said. What I read was really good.”
“Thanks.”
“So, if you want, I could work on editing it? Making it less recognizable?”
I’m sure he’d do an amazing job, but he’s busy enough as it is. “I don’t want you to worry about it.”
He hesitates, and then squeezes my hand. “It’s hard not to, though. You can’t turn that book in to Fujita. But if you don’t turn in something, you’ll fail.”
“I know.” Guilt flashes cold across my skin. I’m not sure what would be worse: asking for his help here, or trying to start all over.
“I like thinking about us, too,” he tells me. “I think I would like editing it.”
“I mean, I could send you what I have in chunks to work on, but I don’t want to send it to your BYU e-mail.”
I can tell that a separate e-mail address had never occurred to him. “Oh, right.”
“You can make a new Gmail account, and I can send it there.”
He’s already nodding, and it accelerates as the implication of this seems to hit him more fully. I know exactly what he’s thinking: We could write e-mails to each other all the time.
He’s so adorable, I hate to burst his bubble.
“Just be careful what you do at home,” I tell him. “My mom created the Parentelligentsia software. I know better than most how easily they could track every move you make.”
“I don’t think my mom and dad are that tech savvy,” he says, laughing, “but point taken.”
“You’d be surprised how easy it is,” I say, half proud, half deeply apologetic to those in my generation who’ve been hosed by my mother’s first invention. “It’s how my parents found out about me . . . and my interest in guys. They installed the software in our cloud and could see everything I’d searched, even if I cleared my history.”
His face goes ashen.
“They came to talk to me about it, and that’s when I admitted I’d kissed a boy the summer before.”
We’ve alluded to this but never spoken about it freely.
Sebastian shifts, facing me. “What’d they say?”
“Mom wasn’t surprised.” I pick up a rock, tossing it over the edge of the cliff. “It was harder for Dad, but he wanted it to be easy. He deals with his feelings on his own time, I think. The first conversation, he asked me if I thought it was a phase, and I said maybe.” I shrug. “I mean, I honestly didn’t know. It’s not like I’d been through this before. I just knew that I felt the same when I looked at pictures of naked guys as I did when I looked at pictures of naked girls.”
Sebastian flushes bright red. I don’t actually think I’ve seen his face this heated before. Has he never looked at naked pictures? Have I embarrassed him? Amazing.
His words come out a little garbled: “Have you had sex?”
“I’ve been with a few girls,” I admit. “Only kissed guys.”
He nods, as if this makes sense.
“When did you know?” I ask.
His brow furrows. “Know what? About you being bi?”
“No.” I laugh, but bite it back because I don’t want it to come off as mocking. “I mean, that you’re gay.”
The confusion on his face deepens. “I’m not.”
“Not what?”
“Not . . . that.”
Something seems to catch in the spinning wheel of my pulse, and it trips. For a breath, my chest hurts. “You’re not gay?”
“I mean,” he says, flustered, trying again, “I’m attracted to guys, and I’m with you right now, but I’m not gay. That’s a different choice, and I’m not choosing that path.”
I don’t even know what to say. The sensation inside me feels like sinking.
I let go of his hand.
“Like, you’re not gay, you’re not straight, you’re . . . you,” he says, leaning forward to catch my eyes. “I’m not gay, I’m not straight, I’m me.”