Page 111 of The Locker Room
You see anyone here you like?”
Xander would have loved to right then. His gut roiled with
bitterness and jealousy, with a black mix of self-hatred and anger with
Chris and putrid, furious disgust for the microscope that had done this to
them. He would have loved to have found a girl and figured out what in
the fuck to do with her, and gone to see Chris smelling of another
person"s sex, just so Chris could share this moment with him the way
they had shared every other goddamned thing for the last ten years. But
he couldn"t. He couldn"t. Because the last thing Chris had said to him
had sounded lost and young and frightened.
“I"ll call you in a little while. Come get me, okay?”
It was the “Come get me” that kept Xander in his seat that night,
that started the pattern of every other third-home-game-of-the-month for
them.
Chris had asked him to do something, had pleaded for him to do
something, and dammit, Xander would do it.
So Xander could probably have slept with any girl there that night,
fueled with anger and the vision of Chris, naked and alone with another
human being, faking his way through heterosexuality in the same way
they"d faked their way through being single for the past ten years. But he
didn"t. Instead, he"d taken a pull on his beer, looked at Sammy, and
shrugged.
“I"m picky too.”
The Locker Room
95
The next third-home-game-of-the-month had been his turn. He"d
sat on almost the same stool with a pocketful of rubbers, and looked at a
little bubbly blond girl with big brown eyes. Almost desperately, he sent
a begging look to Chris. Chris threw back his third drink of the night and
closed his own brown eyes in pain.
