Sin, Nebraska

“My roommate’s in Nebraska, but you can’t tell anyone.”

This was the most serious I’d seen Alex. His voice a whisper, his words hardly breathed into my jaw. Eve must have been in real shit.

“What’s she doing there?”

We were glued together in his twin bed. We’d decided to spend spring break in his apartment. Here we could be together, watch Netflix, have sex.

“This is why you can’t tell,” Alex said. “She’s visiting a Mormon man she met on Instagram.”

Alex and Eve lived in a townhouse off the main road, behind a Japanese restaurant and a used-book barn. They shared a one-bedroom, so at best I was her acquaintance, at worst what could sink their friendship if we started sexiling her every night.

Alex had said Eve didn’t mind. We’d been together only two weeks, too little time to make it feel permanent. When I went over, Eve would vanish for nighttime strolls or to study in the library so we could fuck without interruption. We’d slink out of the bedroom, shirtless and sweaty, and there would be Eve, homework done, swiping through Instagram.

The night before spring break, I had joined her on the couch while Alex put on water for tea. He was always making tea. It suited their apartment: its framed paintings of goats, Alex’s trove of gold and antiques on the dresser, armchairs so deep they could swallow you whole. I preferred the couch, so I squeezed beside Eve.

“What are you looking at?” I asked.

Her finger froze on the screen, holding her feed on an ad for planners. “Nothing.” Eve was probably the valedictorian. She and Alex had known each other since freshman year, and Alex would defend her to the death. She’s the best person I know. I would be lost without Eve.

Then she spoke. She placed her phone in my palm. A grid of family photos announced itself in pastels. A tanned couple held armfuls of blond children in church clothes. They stood on steps of churches and among fruit trees in an orchard. Their children drank from coconuts on a beach in Hawaii. “What’s this?”

“I follow Mormon family accounts,” Eve said. She winked when Alex handed her a mug of tea. “It’s my guilty pleasure.” Alex was going back to the bedroom, so I followed him for one more blow job before walking home.

The next morning, Alex had driven her to the airport. I’d thought she was just going home to DC, single and monastic.

I rolled in bed to face Alex. “Is he married?”

“He’s one of the accounts she follows. He has four kids. His wife’s a kindergarten teacher.” Alex traced his leg down my back and squeezed my ass. “I helped her pack. She wanted to seem sexy but ‘pure.’” His finger circled my hole and pinched through. “I want to fuck you,” he said.

A hangnail caught inside me. I batted his hand away so he might not hear me gasp. Alex alternately called himself a greedy bottom or a power bottom. For the past two weeks, I’d liked how neatly we’d fit together. I was a sworn top, didn’t want anybody inside me.

I kissed him instead of answering. We fell asleep spooning while three young children on a show about cat hoarders showed the host scratches up their arms. The glow of the laptop flickered in the gold rings and chains on Alex’s bureau.

Alex and I had first hooked up at a swim-team party during Lent, at the squash house where one of the swimmers lived. He found me by the swimmer’s desk in her bedroom, mixing Coke and rum with my ring finger.

“We haven’t crossed paths yet,” he said.

The gay scene was small on campus. We’d made eyes at each other on dance floors since freshman year, but we’d always slipped away, found other people to hook up with. I gathered sound bites on him all our first year.

He’s a bit of a dick.

He blacked out at Late Night and dropped a tray of nachos.

He’s so hot.

Everyone agreed on that, it seemed.

“We haven’t,” I said. I made him a drink. He yelled that he had swimmer’s ear, so we found quiet in another bedroom and kissed until a fire alarm emptied the house out. We passed partiers awaiting the all-clear on our way to the campus food truck, which made grilled cheese on Texas toast. Alex had a jones for it. Collapsing into the grass to eat, we slid feet up each other’s shins. His sandwich broke open on his vampire canines. I bit into my hot dog, and a chunk of meat slid out of the artificial casing. When he didn’t look, I pinched the hot dog to slide more out. With all the rum, I hadn’t realized how hungry I was.

“I never get to go out on Friday,” Alex said, sighing.

“It’s Friday?” I asked.

“Duh.”

I checked my watch. It wasn’t even midnight. My friends had stayed in, so I’d allowed myself an extra drink or five. I stuck two fingers down my throat and vomited into the grass.

“Jesus!” he squealed. “What the hell?”

I shook my head, hiding my mouth in the lawn, wiping it clean but looking like a cow in pasture. “I’m not eating meat on Fridays.” I flipped the paper basket over the hot dog so I didn’t have to see how I’d mutilated it.

When I looked up, he’d shifted. Later that night in his room when we stripped, his eyes would flicker as they caught the cross I wore. I’d fling it onto the floor and say, “I’m not really religious.”

He pulled back the paper basket and was eyeing the hot dog, eaten from the inside out, bun crumbling like a sandcastle. “You’re an animal, Aidan.”

My dorm had closed for break, so my decision to stay with Alex was, at least somewhat, out of necessity. While I was there, my only other hiding place was my car, whose faux leather crackled and squeaked. We went to school outside one of those midsize cities in New England that wasn’t up-and-coming. If people tried really hard, they could think of a gem or two, some singular element of local cuisine that set it apart—buffalo wings, pizza, a good Eritrean place. Otherwise, it underwhelmed.

That next morning, when I got into the city, I parked behind the court-house and walked two blocks to the café, claiming a window seat and unloading notebooks and textbooks and electronics to charge.

I’d snuck out of Alex’s before nine. I woke up feeling like an angry ogre was raging through my intestines, and I needed fresh air. On my way out, he’d slipped his hand down his underwear, and by the time I arrived, I’d received a photo of ejaculate up his abs. I flipped the phone over and pulled out a reading for class, Barthes. We were learning about pluralities, layers of text and reader experiences.

Across the street, opalescent light flickered into the Gold 4 You sign. I passed by the shop every time I visited the city, its storefront so generic I’d never thought twice about it. These places usually advertised something in exchange for gold, Money For Gold, We Buy Gems. That it was Gold 4 You seemed an uncanny inversion. I decided I wasn’t going to study anyway, packed up, and went over.

There were fake bricks of gold in the shop windows. I walked down a set of stairs, descending into a fluorescent haze of cigarette smoke. A man in a purple polo shirt stood behind the counter. His shag of white chest hair muted the jingling of the gold cross around his neck. A faded poster of the city in 1999 hung on the wall. The shop was underground—how had the poster gotten so sun faded?

“What can I do you for?” the man grumbled without looking up from the baseball game on his phone. A fan whined in a metal cage above the counter. Sweat looped under his armpits.

“Just browsing,” I said. Gold necklaces tangled at the end of one display case. A rainbow of birthstone bracelets fanned across the velvet. I found the ruby for my birthday and realized I didn’t know Alex’s. Eve had been religious in her study of the Mormon and his family. She’d know his birthday. Maybe they were celebrating at an Applebee’s in Lincoln.

Looking at the cheap jewelry under the glass, I remembered I wasn’t shopping for anything. Was I supposed to be buying or selling gold to this man? The man appraised me over the wires of his aviator glasses. “Browsing for what? You got a girlfriend?”

“Not quite,” I said.

The man indicated the birthstones. “You know when her birthday is? The ladies love these.”

“Are you buying or selling?” I asked.

He fumbled the key from a band around his wrist and slid out the bracelets on their velvet tray. “You have something to show me?”

I shook my head. “I just always walk by here.” “When is her birthday? I’ll give you a deal.”

“I’m all set.” I started backing away. My phone buzzed. Alex had texted a peach and eggplant emoji, a salivating face. I wanna fuck you.

“You come back with gold, I’ll give you a good price, yeah?”

I slipped my phone back in my pocket and nodded. Once I left, I realized the shop had smelled like the inside of a ham sandwich. I stopped at the sex shop next door and bought a douche. I paid cash. The cashier didn’t bat an eye.

This was everything I knew about Eve.

She came from a pressure-cooker public school outside DC. Somebody else from her graduating class wore a shirt that simply said I survived around campus.

Her parents were college professors; while she was growing up, she’d travel with them to Europe and Australia on research trips.

She sang in an a cappella group and soloed all the folksy songs. The timbre of her voice wasn’t the poppy, affected twang of other a cappella singers; it filled the campus chapel like a jar of honey.

She studied neuroscience and had dissected a brain.

She’d always been single, too busy for love.

She was obsessed with Mormon family photos.

She also left no trace of her existence in their apartment. Alex let things accumulate—receipts, handouts from class, mugs of tea, Happy Meal toys, strange jewelry and family heirlooms in his bedroom. Alex was from Greenwich, Connecticut. He paid for dinner out, whenever we wanted it, with his black credit card, which was really his parents’. He never said anything about the rings, chains, and golden baubles on his dresser. He never wore any of them either. Every time I pulled Alex’s shirt over his head, his neck was nude, unadorned. Mine was too. I’d left my chain in my dorm before spring break.

That night, I felt his things creeping toward us while we watched the cat-hoarder show in the living room. The host, a middle-aged woman with an endearing lisp and Missouri twang, visited the barn of a woman in Arkansas who ran a dairy bar. Customers would pet the few cats nearby while they ate, but little did they know there were thirty felines prowling the premises. The Arkansan detailed their various cat alliances. She pulled back her sleeves to reveal scratches up her arm, as everyone liked to do on this show. They’d flash a close-up of the scratches and score it to reality-show sound effects, whooshes and pounding drums. The host licked an ice-cream cone and talked to the woman’s children on a picnic bench. “We just want her to get better,” they said.

“God, this lady’s insane,” Alex said. “She reminds me of my sister.”

“Why’s that?” I said. Alex never really talked about his family. He’d hinted at a bad reaction when he came out. I was always checking myself from talking about my family too much. I didn’t want to create an imbalance.

“Insane,” Alex said. We sat on the couch in only running shorts. We had no control over the heat, and when I got home from the city, it had risen past eighty, dripping condensation down the windows. He reached a hand up my thigh, and it settled on my cock, cupping, squeezing, stroking. I traced my ring finger on his thigh, catching stubble regrowing from swim season, and we kissed. He was on his knees, pulling my penis from my shorts and taking it in his mouth. He sucked and sucked, gripping my thighs hard as usual, so hard sometimes bruises pocked my flesh. Over Alex’s head, transitional shots of hissing cats flashed. I hit pause through the meowing and scooped him by the armpits.

“Let’s go to your bed.”

He pulled off his shorts and strutted into his room. Alex had a swimmer’s body and an Irish pallor. His hair parted down the middle in a way that was sexy on a very few guys but otherwise dorky. Somehow, he was on the sexy end. Loose strands would flop up and down when I thrust into him, and he’d comb the sweat with his fingers in our postcoital collapse.

Tonight, his hair blew back with each thrust into me. He was lubing me up and kissing me everywhere. I gripped his headboard, and he licked my armpits. He pushed farther than my massager did. The skin of his face so tight above me, fixed like a mask.

“Fuck, Aidan,” he moaned. “That was amazing.”

I could feel the ache. He hadn’t lubed enough, too caught in the excitement. He slid out and moaned. “Shit.”

It smelled. Cupping my hole, I ran to the bathroom, rolling toilet paper over my hand and ran back, dick wagging, to wipe him clean. His eyes clamped shut, and he breathed through his mouth.

I’d left the douche in the car. I always topped. I didn’t think that Alex was serious in his texts, thought that he was just a brat in a power play.

He showered while I washed the sheets, stretched on new ones by myself. They were satin, from his mom. He came back into the bedroom in a towel and dabbed on cologne from his dresser. “Aren’t you going to shower?”

My stomach twisted. The cramp in my asshole pinged. I sighed. “Yeah.”

“Don’t get all huffy,” he said. “I mean . . .”

I drowned him out under the stream of hot water. I scrubbed his natural soap over my body, lathering, rubbing away between my legs.

At our confirmation retreat in high school, we’d washed each other’s feet. We got on our knees and took our classmates’ gross toes and heels in our hands, dumped cups of water over them. Playing cards with a ragtag group of church friends that night, I laughed with them about the foot washing because I hadn’t known how to say that maybe I liked it. Maybe I believed in some part of the cleaning.

When I came out, Alex was back on the couch, watching TV. I slid into shorts and slipped a gold chain from his dresser into my backpack.

After break, Eve would tell Alex that the Mormon had met her at the airport, holding a poster-board sign with her name. They drove through the city to the hotel. The Mormon worked for an insurance agency and did most of his business in Lincoln.

“I’ll wine and dine you,” he’d said. He took her to Lincoln’s best restaurants, waiting for her to emerge from the hotel bathroom in the dresses Alex had helped her select. He rested his hands on her hips and drank her in. “You’re stunning.”

Eve had wanted more of a connection with the man, not only sex. When she told him this, he grew horrified with himself. Of course that was what he wanted too. “We’ll take it slow. We have a week.” Eve felt the walls of the business hotel grow cold. She’d be wined and dined every night—the man would wait her out. She felt like he was seeing her as some sin and wondered if he’d agreed to this meeting because of her name. Every night while he called his wife and kids in the hotel lobby, Eve watched whatever was on TLC, scrolling through the family’s Instagram feed until he returned.

“She said he has the biggest cock,” Alex would say when he told me, and then lick his lips. “Maybe we can get in on it next time.”

So afterward, when I’d see Eve in their apartment or crossing the campus quad, I would want to ask her about the Mormon, Nebraska, his cock. But instead, I kept my oath of silence. For all I knew, she’d gone home to the suburbs of DC, bowling with her high school friends at night, visiting museums alone.

The coffee shop was an excuse to visit Gold 4 You again. Also, to leave the apartment. Alex hadn’t showered and was just beginning to experiment with not using deodorant because of aluminum and cancer. His musk overwhelmed the bedroom in the morning. I picked through my clothes strewn over his floor and slipped out before eight.

I drank an iced latte in the window seat. Pedestrian commuters stopped by on their way to work, but otherwise the shop was quiet. It was the kind of café that was cozy but not very cozy, hip but not very hip, the paint not quite the right shade of yellow, the art a bit too amateur. The coffee was okay, and when you left, the smell of some cooking oil hung in your clothing. I never ate their food—once I’d gotten their breakfast sandwich, greasy chorizo slicking the foil, and it gave me the shits.

I pulled the Barthes reading from a folder in my backpack. Alex had teased me for being the kind of person who used folders, a way to neg me without acknowledging that he kept an accordion folder in his backpack and recorded every lecture on his phone.

I’d barely made any headway. Barthes was all about pluralities, multiple readings of a text existing over each other, all remaining true.

My story with Alex was a honeymoon, a “take that” to the two months we had left in school, a lusty retreat into a sex cave where we relished every minute.

My story with Alex was out of necessity; I didn’t have anywhere else to go.

My story with Alex was the beginning of the end, when we realized this couldn’t go on much longer.

What could I call this? The stories were all true. I waited for a text, a groggy good-morning. I watched my phone, refreshed my email, and found only spam. I ended up on social media, checking if the Mormon had posted any pictures from Nebraska, but that would be off-brand. The Mormon had two kids but was actually young, maybe twenty-eight. On Valentine’s Day, his wife had posted a Boomerang of her shaking a sonogram of their next blessing like a Polaroid.

When the Gold 4 You sign turned on, I packed my books and ran across the street. Slush slicked off the tires of passing cars. The cuffs of my jeans had stiffened with salt. When I pulled the door open, a gust of heat blew overhead. As I descended, the chill settled. The shop had been an icebox all night, the better to guard the gold, the better to congeal the large man inside. He was behind the counter, watching baseball-game recaps on his cell phone. “You came back,” he said.

I plopped my bag on the counter and unzipped the compartments, picking through notebooks and loose paper. “I brought you something.” I pulled the chain up from the bottom. On the glass counter, each joint dinged the surface. The man swiveled in his chair and nudged his glasses up his nose. He crinkled the chain between his fingers and drew it to his eyes.

“European,” he said. “Very fine. Very nice.”

Alex would have gotten it on the Ponte Vecchio, a piece of throwaway gold to commemorate a family vacation. Or else summer in Greece, a stay at a villa, a languid day of post-siesta shopping.

“How much can you do it for?” I asked.

The man pulled open drawers behind the counter until he found a pad of sticky notes and a pen. He jotted down a number, watching me, shielding it from view in his palm, smirking. He folded it and slid it across the display case. I opened and nodded. “It’s yours.”

The man spread the chain over a black velvet tray while he did the paperwork, and I wondered if it was too late to change my mind. Once he handed me the money, I didn’t wonder anymore. I counted the bills in the vestibule, fingers stiff in the cold. I could treat Alex to dinner, a weekend trip, instead of wasting away in his apartment until spring break ended. But Alex already had the power to do those things, had chosen to remain campus-bound. I went into a secondhand shop and picked out a bomber jacket like the one Eve wore. The lining glided over my sweater and rustled with each micromotion on the way back: flicking the blinkers, turning the wheel, toggling between songs when none sounded quite right.

When I came in, Alex had the cat-hoarding show on. “Hey.” His hand was down his running shorts, the other holding a squat beer bottle.

“You kept watching?” I asked.

“You were out. I had nothing else to do.” Except clean his dishes and do his laundry and work on his thesis, which, he was always complaining, wouldn’t write itself.

I opened the blinds. They rattled into each other as light swelled into the living room. It washed out his boyish chest stubble and exposed his abandoned tea mugs, strings dangling over the lips like rag dolls. “Jesus,” he said. “Someone’s coming in hot.”

Alex was repulsive, crabby, childish. But in that moment I wanted to roll him over, yank his shorts off, and slide inside. I wanted to fill him completely, make him gasp, moan, say my name. I pulled off my jacket and slung it on the back of the desk chair. When he saw me leaving for the bathroom, he called, “Want to do something today?”

My fingers clutched the threshold. He’d paused the show. His lips turned down. He’d gone puppyish.

“Yeah,” I said, softening. I could afford for him to feel bad a moment longer. “You come up with something.”

So I unboxed the douche in the bathroom and rinsed it, the rubber hard, resistant to my squeezes. I pinched its belly to suck in from the stream of tepid water. Alex, somehow, was always clean. He never talked about cleaning but was always ready, his libido and discreet douching in sync.

My fingers scrambled to turn down the volume on the first instructional video I found. An Australian man and woman mixed rock music with incorrect facts about anuses. In the next, a gay couple demonstrated sizes, from pencil to showerhead. I rolled the tip of mine in a puddle of lube in my palm and inserted it. The water had cooled and ran down my leg, pattering the linoleum. I planted myself on the toilet seat and waited for my body temperature to readjust.

Two years ago, I’d had a colonoscopy. The night before, I drank two small bottles of lemon-lime laxative that fused me to the toilet for over an hour. The results were inconclusive. Maybe I had some early signs of colitis. In some dark corner of my mind, I wanted the diagnosis—just to be told right then what the future held. There was nothing for them to label yet. We’d wait, check in, see later. I grew aware of public bathrooms, which dining-hall meals to skip, and dry-swallowed preemptive Dulcolax whenever I felt off.

My mom had drunk jugs of more potent, less flavorful solution when I was a kid. She’d sit on a barstool at the kitchen island, holding the jug with one hand and bracing her chest with the other, so I felt pathetic now for not being able to eat lemon-lime Italian ices anymore.

When I was even younger, she was couch-ridden for a week, a colostomy bag under her blanket. I’d fetch her water from the fridge and sit on the floor next to the couch so she could pet my hair, curling it in her fingers while she watched her soaps. Her dad had just died from complications from Crohn’s, a diagnosis he’d received after her own.

Douching wasn’t lemon-lime, wasn’t poison jug, or hospital visits. Alex wasn’t telling me what to eat or not before sex. He’d done his best not to shame me. With one hand against the bathtub, I bent over and inserted it again, holding the water inside for the recommended ten seconds before expelling, expelling again. Each time the floorboards in the hall shifted, my mouth opened to call, Just a minute, I’ll be right out. A call-and-response of fear; with water to purge, this cleaning was just another ritual. I had everything to hide from whoever lurked beyond the door.

On Eve’s fourth night with the Mormon, they ate veggie burgers, and she let herself get drunk. The Mormon was okay with nonmonogamy, but he didn’t indulge other vices. He sipped Sprite while he bought Eve drink after drink after drink. They cut through parking lots back to the hotel. She took one of his hands, and he rested the other on her back. When she asked him to dance with her, they settled into a rhythm between SUVs and pickup trucks. He kissed her neck, and she gasped a night breath, the tuft of air like a pillow shredded into black. When she said, “This is what I’ve always wanted,” he said, “I’m coming again next month. Join me.” She kissed across his cheeks, his neck, his forehead, even got his nose, and it was all she could do not to say I love you.

We finished the cat-hoarding show after Alex fucked me again. We’d gone out to dinner—he’d treated, said, “Nice bomber coat”—and when we got back, he pulled off my clothing one piece at a time, tender kisses down my neck, chest, belly button, and crotch as he exposed me. When I got on my belly, he slipped inside, starting slowly. He smooched me on the cheek after finding he’d come out clean. It was an ecstatic kiss. I came on his chest and said it felt amazing, so good, you feel so good.

In the last episode, the host visited a Texas witch, a woman with translucent gems on silver rings, a graying blond braid trailing to her denim skirt. She had moved from Texas to Kentucky to live near a man she’d met at a botany convention. She got wistful in the greenhouse, rubbing her nose against pussy willow as she revealed that he’d died in a motorcycle accident. She filled the hole he left with more cats.

“Jesus Christ!” Alex wiped his finger over the host’s face on the laptop screen. “Could they make this any more clichéd?”

I wanted to shrug, pet the cats for the woman, prune the plants she’d neglected. “Maybe her feelings are real, though. Maybe sometimes people feel like clichés.”

“They have a crazy cat lady for the fucking finale?” He slid the computer onto my lap. “I’m making tea.” He passed his bureau without noticing that his chain was missing. He waited in the kitchen as the cobalt light bubbled in the electric kettle. I didn’t understand what made her different to him. Wasn’t this show about crazy cat ladies? I watched townspeople take her cats one by one. They all got to look at her, see what they wanted. I’d seen them see her. I’d seen her see them see her, had seen Alex see them see her. How did Barthes apply now? What did any of this mean?

When Alex came back to bed, he handed me a mug of tea, rested a pint of banana ice cream on his laptop keyboard, and sighed over the credits. His eyes rolled back as he chipped away the first bite. “I don’t understand you, Aidan.”

I pecked his neck and decided to say I love you.

There had been more to it when we first hooked up. We ran down the main street of town as best we could, holding each other steady against slicks of ice. We pounded into his bedroom, kissing each other against the walls as we slipped shoes off with our toes, pulling off shirts and pants and adding them to the tea mugs and Happy Meals littering the floor.

The sex was so amazing we came again and again. Alex texted Eve and told me she’d found somewhere else to spend the night, that she’d told him to enjoy it, it had been a dry semester.

Before I left his bedroom in the morning, before I passed by Eve sleeping on the couch, fingers dangling over her phone on the floor, Alex curled into my ear. “You’re an animal, Aidan.” And already the meaning had changed.

I wanted Alex to notice the chain missing. I wanted him to notice that I’d also taken an old ring he’d bought at a vintage shop in Bermuda. It went missing a week after he told me the story of its purchase, which he’d shared only because the ring had fallen into some briefs in his underwear drawer and snuggled against his balls when he slipped them on.

He never noticed. It was almost like I’d done him a service by relieving him of the ring, the chain, the gold objects I would take and take until graduation. The man at Gold 4 You smiled, vulpine, when I pulled open the door. “Hello, my friend.”

The ring plinked on the counter. He appraised it with glasses on, the Red Sox screeching through the warped cell-phone speakers. “It’s worth less than the chain, but I like it.”

Again, he wrote down a number. Again, he folded his arms across his chest after counting the bills. “The gemstone bracelets. They’re all fake. They are worth nothing to me. You take one for your girlfriend. Customer loyalty program.”

I ran my fingers over them. The surface of the gems was plastic, nothing more than kids’ mood rings stuck on the wearers’ last emotions—cool, relaxed, lovable, passion, mixed.

“Aquamarine,” I said. Today was Eve’s birthday.

Read more from Issue 20.2.