The Son of Every Man

Chapter 2.3

Miguel followed. He expected Sebastian to return to helping his father (after, perhaps, protesting the handling of the chicken), but instead the boy trudged up to his home above the shop, the wooden staircase squawking noisily underfoot.

"I don't understand my father," he lamented as they passed through the kitchen and into his small, messy bedroom. "I don't agree with him."

Miguel sat beside him on the bed. "It was a mistake to let them pluck a live chicken."

"You think so, too?"

"Of course I do."

Sebastian stared at the floor. "I don't see things the way other people do. Inside my head, they are wrong about so much. The stuff they teach us...it's all wrong."

Miguel wanted to reach out then. He wanted to feel the smooth skin of Sebastian's neck with the tips of his fingers, to press his ear against the boy's bare chest and keep it there. He wanted to see his friend again with no clothes...and then?

But he needed to be sure. He looked over. "Remember that question you asked in seminary? About men marrying men?"

"Yes."

"Why did you ask about that?"

"Because I don't want to be with women," Sebastian replied, unfazed. "I want to be with men."

So, it was that simple. One could just state it. But if Miguel were to repeat the words back to his best friend, would they be true? Was it men whom Miguel wanted to be with, or was it just Sebastian?

Never mind that. What difference did it make? After all, he didn't have to say the words to get what he wanted. He looked up into Sebastian's dark eyes, swallowed, smiled a little.

Sebastian cleared his throat. In a timid voice that was not his own he said, "We don't have a lot of time."

It didn't matter whether Sebastian referred to his father, who would soon come pounding up the stairs looking for him, or to the boys' inevitable parting, now just a month away. The underlying message was clear enough: permission. Permission to act, to touch. Miguel moved into the small space that had separated them and Sebastian met him there, surrounding him with his sweaty limbs, wrestling him onto his back. When Sebastian kissed him, Miguel kissed back with a sort of pent-up ferocity—one whose existence he had not known until that moment. He had never kissed anyone romantically before. He hardly knew what it meant to do so, had planned to postpone the moment for as many years as possible. But now, it felt like the most natural thing in the world, like putting on a favorite old shirt. Instantly he was hungry for more, ravenous, taking as much as he could get, as if the kiss were oxygen and he had just resurfaced from the turquoise depths of the public pool.

Sebastian began to move his waist against Miguel's. Miguel liked the feeling and began moving in the same way. That prodigious sensation, which he had experienced for the first time roughly one year earlier, mounted inside him faster than ever before. Alarmed, he realized he would finish in his jeans. He couldn't stop it. He tried to warn Sebastian, who gave him a helpless look and whispered, "Me, too."

Once it was over, the two boys lay side by side, sweating, breathing, recovering—and not a second too soon. The stairwell sounded its noisy warning as the counselor stomped up to fetch his son.

Late in the evening, the boys found a private moment to sneak away, up to Miguel's attic bedroom. Though unthinkable during the havoc of the years that followed, Miguel would one day smile at the memory of those few wily minutes and shed a happy tear or two: A rusting, three-bladed ceiling fan wobbled above the twin bed where they sat. Sky-blue ceiling dove in accordance with the sloped roof to meet stunted bookshelves built into the walls. His model planes (fifteen in total) hung from wool string at various altitudes all around the room, endlessly twirling, un-twirling.