A Softcore Life

It was New Year's Day. Midnight had long since gone, and I was sitting on a sofa with my best friend Alex. His boyfriend's family had hosted the party, and they were all upstairs, either fast asleep or passed out. That included Alex's boyfriend Karl. The two of us had vowed, as we often do, to keep the party going for as long as we could. It had been 2010 now for five or six hours, and we were comparing war stories. And when I say war, I refer of course to our love lives.

I thought I'd win this game, being the token single friend, and a bit of a lush at that, but Alex both surprised and impressed me. Sure, he had been with the same man for two years, which to me seemed an incomprehensibly long time to be in a relationship, but he'd had a lot of fun before settling down. I was halfway through telling my kinkiest story (it involved a tutor from my university days and a bout of spanking), when he interrupted.

"Sorry," he slurred, "but I can beat that."

"Go on then," I said, a little miffed that he'd butted in. I loved my spanking story.

"This one guy I dated really liked watersports."

"Huh?" I was drunk, so forgive me if I was a little slow on the uptake. "What does jetskiing have to do with sex?"

Alex looked at me like I was retarded, and made a "pssss" noise. I slowly figured it out.

"You pissed on him? Ew!" A second later: "Awesome! Did he piss on you?"

"Yeah."

"How was it?"

Al shrugged.

"Warm. Wet."

I sniggered into my wineglass, saw that it was empty, and reached for one of the bottles on the floor. There were several.

"Top up?"

"Fuck yeah," Al held his glass out. "Karl had better be in the mood to be drunkenly raped when I go up there."

"Who wouldn't," I joked, but it's probably true. Al is possibly the gayest man I have ever met, but he is also cute as a button and a randy bastard. The two of us are a great example of how terrible timing can result in great friends. We’d met online, back when I was living in Montreal and craving English boys. We arranged to meet up when I got back, for a drink. I’m fairly sure that I’m not the only guy in the world for whom “a drink” is code.

When I eventually came home, Al had started seeing Karl. Karl and I just happened to be at the same university, and so I kept running into the two of them more or less on my doorstep. While I didn’t care too much for Karl (he was handsome, but bored me to tears), I instantly loved Al. Not in any way that was romantic, or even sexual. It was more one of those happy, inexplicable occurrences where you meet a kindred spirit. I found myself wondering how I could have gone all those years in my hometown with him just roads away, living almost identical lives.

"I'm glad we never did it," I said out loud. "We couldn't talk like this if we'd done it."

"You're right," Al said. "You'd have got yours then be gone with the wind. Fuck and run."

“What?”

“You know,” he tilted his head and raised one perfectly groomed eyebrow. “It’s what you always do. If we’d got together, it would have been for one night only. That’s your expiry date.”

"I don't always do that," I protested. But it was no use, he was right. Al challenged me to count the number of sexual encounters I’d ever had in my life. I told him that I was far too drunk and not equipped with the appropriate machinery to do that sort of arithmetic. The corners of his mouth twitched, which meant that he knew exactly where he was going with this.

“Fine,” he said. “Just tell me how many of those encounters took place within the context of a relationship.”

“Two,” I said lamely after a moment’s thought. Both back when I was eighteen, when having a boyfriend had seemed the only way to prove to my parents that being gay was not just a phase.

“What’s your point, anyway?” I asked. “You know I’ve never been that fussed about having a boyfriend. I like my life the way it is.”

“I know you do, and I’m not about to start telling anyone they need a partner. But sex on tap is pretty nice.” Al paused and finished his wine. I was about to say that I had no complaints on that front, but the truth was pickings were pretty slim, and had been for a while. I had more or less exhausted our town’s supply of single gay men who weren’t illiterate or deformed.

Al looked into the bottom of his glass. “And…”

“And what?”

He wouldn’t quite meet my gaze as he spoke.

“I just think that maybe you’re closing yourself off from an experience which is pretty great.”

I knew then that he wasn’t talking about just having someone to take round to Mum’s for Sunday lunch or have on my arm at parties. He was ever so subtly referring to the confession I had made earlier that night, while playing “I Have Never”, a game I excel at.

I have never been in love.

“I know, I know,” he said, before I could protest or get defensive. “It’s just not happened for you. But perhaps… you could be more open to the idea?”

“You sound like my mother.” It was true. For a woman who had once been horrified by the idea of her son being gay, she seemed even more against the prospect of having a son who was twenty-two and permanently single.

“Who needs love when you have lovers?” I asked.

“That doesn’t count unless you’re French,” Al told me. “Why don’t you make a resolution?”

“A New Year’s resolution,” I echoed, “to fall in love? Al, even my heart isn’t so robotic that I can just tell it what to do.”

“That’s not what I meant. Just get out there more, you know? Shake it about a bit.”

I wondered suddenly if Al had his own reasons for wanting me to do this. Did he see me the way some of my other friends did? The ones that had found their true loves pretty early on and were now all moved in. Like I was the Peter Pan of the group, stubbornly refusing to grow up and get a civil union and adopt a rainbow child from some war-torn country.

“Are you tired of introducing me as your single friend?” I asked.

“Of course not,” he feigned outrage. “You’re my fabulous friend.” The sheer queerness of this statement made me cringe and laugh simultaneously. This caused me to spill my wine.

Al glanced at his watch as I was ineffectually trying to lick some of the Chardonnay from my wrist.

“Time for bed,” he sighed. He pulled his drunk ass up off the sofa and gave me a hug. “Just promise me you’ll think about it?”

“I will,” I nodded, and smiled, then turned him around and gave him a gentle push towards the door. I could hear him calling Karl’s name as he climbed the stairs, and I felt sorry for whoever was crashing in the bedroom next to theirs.

I also felt what may have been the tiniest pang of envy. When I went into the last empty guest room, the bed I crawled into was as cold as the grave.