Stumbling Toward Maybe

“Joey. You gotta come over, man.”

“Uh, okay. Sure. Gimmie five.”

Lash, also occasionally known as David DeCosta junior, hung up the phone and glared at himself in the mirror. He’d intentionally made his voice sound rich and brimming with amusement when he’d called Joey, also known as ‘Speed’, to make it sound like he had something hilarious or incredible to tell him that could only be done in person. But the truth was, he was just kind of lonely. His mother and father had just spent the last hour sniping ever so subtly at each other across the dinner table, but Speed had been exposed to his snotty, doting parents numerous times. By now they were boring.

“Going outside. Joey’s coming,” he said flatly to his mother as he crossed the front lobby of the DeCosta home, (which was quite a large, impressive, well-furnished home—his parents were professional yuppies). His mother, with her bleached-blonde hair and frosted lipstick, the woman with the hundred-dollar manicure who could wheedle her way into—or out of—any situation. David DeCosta senior had never worked a day in his life, and all of the family’s money and their expensive home was thanks to the inheritances that his mother and father had collected from their respective dead family members. These days, they busied themselves with the stock market, tennis and yacht clubs, as well as relishing the fact that David was their only son.

He decided to sit out on the brick wall that surrounded their grounds just inside the elaborate black-iron gate, as the porch swing or the one in the gardens looked too queer for his tastes. True to his word, a few minutes later Lash caught sight of his best friend’s portly, lumbering form coming up the sidewalk. He was wearing the same green t-shirt under the black-and-white athletic jacket and tattered jeans that he wore every day, and this made David feel a little better about things.

“Hey, fat-ass,” he said brightly, hopping off the stone wall and approaching where Joey was standing in front of the gate and tapping one of the metal bars with a vicious smirk. “Maybe I’m not gonna let you in, what do you think of that?”

“But you asked me over,” Joey said dumbly, struggling to piece together his friend’s logic. David sighed heavily.

“Dumbass, you’re supposed to get pissed off.”

“But you’re my friend.”

Lash sighed once more, pulling the gate open and letting Speed in. The other boy made his way in, taking off his off-white baseball cap as if he’d just entered a church. Joey was shorter than him, and much fatter, too—as solidly round around as a beach ball with cellulite, with a severe double chin and closely-buzzed dirt-brown hair that matched his dull brown eyes. He was so different from Lash, who was already abnormally tall for his age, and painfully thin, with long, graceful limbs and dark shaggy hair, and intelligent, angry hazel eyes. David often found that comforting, somehow. He was special, he was one of a kind, like Mom and Dad always told him whenever they were bending to his every whim. They gave him whatever he wanted to shut him up, and they told him how wonderful he was all the time so that they could internally justify it. They ignored all of the calls and reports of bullying from school, and doted on him because they didn’t feel like giving him any actual parental guidance or love.

He fucking loved it.

Or at least he told himself he did, which was good enough.

“C’mon. We’re going up to my room,” he said suddenly to Joey, who he’d known since he was six years old, who had helped him shake down the other first-graders for their change and lollipops. Contrary to popular belief, it wasn’t powering up that had turned David into who he was—he’d always been that way.

Speed didn’t bother asking why, but simply nodded and followed David up to his bedroom. On their way through the lobby, Mrs. DeCosta looked up and smiled her plastic smile at Joey.

“Hello, Joey! Would you like something to eat while—“

“Fuck off, Mom. Thank you.” Lash said sharply, flipping his mother off rather expertly as he led Joey upstairs. With a sigh, she turned back to her nails, blowing on the pink polish as delicately as she ever did anything.

“What’re we looking at?” Joey asked once they were upstairs, once David had shut his bedroom door behind them. His room was a classic mess—clothes all over the place, worn band posters curling away from the walls, a stereo blaring The Ramones at the two boys, a computer buzzing quietly on a corner desk. Playboy magazines were scattered across his bed, along with a hastily-discarded box of tissues peeking out from under it. He’d been casually masturbating before he’d called Joey, out of a lack of anything better to do. It just hadn’t been going well for him tonight though, nothing had really felt all that good to him, none of the pictures in his magazines had managed to get him all that hot or bothered.

But then he’d thought, I should call Joey over, and he’d come so hard it had nearly hurt. That had scared him enough to not want to be alone, but the only friend he had at Sky High was Joey. So he’d stuck with his original plan.

“Nothing. Just get in here,” he said sharply, turning off the stereo with an easy stretch of his super-rubbery arm. Joey sat down at the foot of his bed obediently, looking around with a rather stupid expression.

“What are we doing?” He finally asked, and David kept his back turned to him for a long few moments, staring down at the stereo. He wasn’t sure how to go about it—he and Joey weren’t exactly the most open with their feelings. But it was something he’d been thinking about for literally weeks now, turning it over and over in his mind like a word repeated until it lost all meaning, and now he just finally decided to say it, in classic David DeCosta fashion.

“Wanna kiss?”

Joey blinked slowly at him, those dull brown eyes widening until he had the look of a startled rhinoceros. It took him a good two minutes to process what he’d asked and respond.

“Uh. What?”

“You heard me, asshole.”

Lash finally turned around, rubbing one black-and-white-striped sleeve that was too long with his other hand. He met Joey’s eyes defiantly, daring him to say something.

“Dude. It’s not…”

Joey seemed to be unable to decide how to finish that sentence, and so David did it for him, as always. He kept taking steps forward until he was standing right in front of where Joey was sitting like a mountain at the foot of his bed, and put both hands on either side of him so he could lean forward. His face still held that angry, defiant expression, and Joey didn’t say anything.

“If you want me to stop, you’d better say it now.”

“Uh…”

“Shut up.”

He leaned forward the rest of the way, experimentally closing his eyes as he did so. He found that this made it difficult to tell where to kiss though, so he let his eyelids flash open for half a second before he pressed his lips to Joey’s. His friend had his eyes closed too, both meaty fists clutching his striped comforter in a death grip. He looked like he was facing a firing squad, but he grunted slightly when they finally kissed. Joey’s lips were soft and thick, like pancake batter, and tasted like a ham sandwich, a little salty. It wasn’t so bad.

He opened his mouth when David let his tongue flick against those lips, as obedient as always, and made a sound that sounded suspiciously like a moan when he ran it over his teeth. It took a good three minutes or so of this sort of kissing before Speed finally got the hint and kissed him back, slipping his thick, wet tongue into his mouth clumsily and running it around the inside. Joey smelled like raw earth and sweat this close up, and tasted salty like ham sandwiches and David was pretty sure his masturbation routine wasn’t going to require any more Playboy prompting from now on. This was going to keep him going for quite a while.

And it wasn’t like Joey was good-looking, even if he had been a fucking queer. No, Joey was fat and stupid and doggedly loyal, with a dumbass buzz cut and that stupid hat and a tongue that was pressing against his…

David groaned, before putting both hands against Joey’s solid chest and pushing him away. “Get the hell out of here, would you?”

Joey paused, blinking confusedly at him. David couldn’t blame him.

“Huh? Is stuff…okay?”

“I said get the fuck OUT!”

Hoisting his massive body off of the bed, Joey lumbered his way out of his room and didn’t stick around to watch the Mighty Lash collapse onto his bed on his back, his breathing shallow and labored. He didn’t even use his super-speed to get downstairs or out of the house, and part of David had to admire him for that.