Blind hearts-ManxMan-boyxboy

Alex does some thinking

Alex would say definitively that Frank was short—just to piss him off mostly—anything to get Frank’s auburn eyes to arc a hard and pretty left was always a win. In middle school, Alex tried to console Frank about his height with a tale of the little emperor Napoleon Bonaparte rampaging through Europe, to which Frank replied, “Who’s Napoleon?” And that was the start of a friendship. 

Several times, Alex thought he would never get to see Frank’s horrid bowl haircut again, like on the last day of their sophomore year of high school when Alex blurted he was gay.  He could still remember the sensation of pebbles rumbling in his throat as he floated away from the lobby and lost himself in the parking lot.  He had thought the reveal would lead to a long exhausting summer, and hopefully by the fall, Frank would have gotten over hatred and settled into a cool disregard. But three weeks into the summer at Manhattan Beach, he ran into Frank, sporting a surfboard, a bronze hard torso, and a girl in a swimsuit made of strings.

Frank’s cheeks rounded into fleshy rumps, and his eyes sparked lively and exciting, as he crowed about his new girl, his new pecs, his surfboard.  All the while, Alex was gulping down boulders. The girl skipped ahead into the waves, and there proceeded a distinct changed in Frank’s mien. A hand went to chin, setting up a stance for a serious pose—this Alex always found ridiculous from the wannabe Napoleon.  

Frank had asked, “So, who’s looking hot this summer?”

Alex thought it was another Frank’s miserable jokes, but there was his eyes drilling him down.  Frank complained,  “Fuck, I tell you everything, and I know nothing about you.” Alex softened enough to give a list of jocks, to which Frank exclaimed. “God, you’re cliché. Is there guy you have a real chance of fucking?”

“You only want to nail porn stars and women who are too tall for you,” Alex retorted.

“Sandy,” Frank pointed the girl kneeling into the water, “Is shorter than me… Give me someone real here. Fuck, I even told you about the fat chick I wanted to nail in seventh grade. Why did I fucking tell you that again?” Why indeed? 

Alex remembered his body buoyed lighter with every roar of the ocean waves, its rolling chariot of foam, and Sandy, askew in it, slanted into it, delighted with it, and then the half smile on Frank’s face and his realization that by the summer’s end, Frank was so not going to get to third base with Sandy. He knew Frank. His ridiculous goals, like how he wanted to ride every bus on the LA metro. The incessant preening on his bicep width and his perfect commanding look like Napoleon. And the refining and ruminating on the machine specs of a bottle rocket. He knew Frank. How his black hair would bunch up around his large ears.  Or the triple of prominent pimples on his left cheek that never would never go away despite Frank’s concoction of potions.

Frank said, “Some guy came onto me the other day in the gym. Looked a little like you.”

“Great, all gay men looked like me now.”

“He was a red head, and all curly hair like yours,” His voice was balled up in defensive hurt. “But taller, bigger, and a smarmy greasy fuck.”

“So what if it had been me?” Alex blurted.

Alex remembered not waiting for a reply, perhaps walking away furiously, he couldn’t not recall. But he did remember feeling as if he were swimming on the sand, the sand itching his toes, his fingers grimy with the dusty sand, and he growling rabidly against the idea of a beach.

But Frank flagged him down, stopped in front him, his eyes quivering. “Wait, you don’t—”

“Of course not!” 

Later, Alex begged his parents to spend the rest of summer with his grandparents in Phoenix. He claimed the 110 degree heat would be good for his moral fiber.