Late at night Kameron would pull up outside my house, leave his truck running, and wait for me to crawl out of the second-story window. It was our ritual, even though we never did much. We listened to top-ten country as he drove us around our small Texas town in his chrome-lined truck. When he got bored, we’d pull off into a back road and fuck in the back of his pickup, the speckled black sky hanging over our heads like a dark veil.
I never knew what he got out of it. Sometimes I thought he was into me, but just not willing to be out of the closet. Other times, it felt like some weird obsession; some longing for power or control. He had no innate desire for men, he simply called me up because he could. Because he knew I would pick up. Nothing else really mattered.
But we didn’t always fuck. Though, we did more often than we didn’t. Sometimes, when it was cold and each of our breaths split the air with a patchy rash of white, we’d just listen to music and talk about our days. A few times we smoked weed in an abandoned playground. Once or twice we got drunk and I had to pretend I was too sick to go to school the following day.
Once on a Friday, I asked him and he just shrugged, turned the music down, and invited me back to his place. It was a surreal experience: to be invited in, willingly. He parked his car in the driveway and opened the front door and the two of us walked normally up to his bedroom where he closed the door behind him and fell, face up, onto his king-sized bed.
“You can spend the night if you want.” He said.
”Only if I want?”
”You know what I mean,” he said, throwing a pillow at me. “That is if your parents will allow it.”
My parents wouldn’t care. I doubt they’d even notice I was gone. I was at the age where I was all angst and annoying hot air: constantly screaming at them and demanding they shut up. They decided to call my bluff and mostly left me alone, so long as I wasn’t breaking any laws.
Kameron stripped and crawled into bed. I didn’t know what to do. He didn’t really direct me. I kept clothed and laid down next to him, flat on my back, staring up at the ceiling. He fell asleep quickly, leaving me alone in the dark, the rickety movement of the ceiling fan keeping pace with my breath. I don’t know how long I stayed awake like that but eventually, I fell asleep. When I woke up, his arms were wrapped tight around me, and fearing he’d move the moment I stirred, I kept perfectly still.