Excerpt from ADMIT ONE by Jenna Hilary Sinclair

A flashback from ADMIT ONE

In April of our junior year, Sean and I drove to New Orleans. We’d only been more or less together a few months, everything casual, nothing any-big-deal, but he had a car and got us fake IDs, I had some money my folks had sent me, and New Orleans was only eight hours away. That was nothing for us. We were young and dumb and full of come, and the whole world was before us. Even though we were faggots, back then we still thought the world was before us. Or at least I did.

We left San Marcos at mid-afternoon on Thursday and pointed the car toward Bourbon Street. I’ll never forget that ride, the high point of my time before manhood, though I’d been convinced at the age of twenty that I already was a man. We rolled the windows down, all four of them, and the air swept through Sean’s clunky old Oldsmobile like some magic carpet that was transporting us to heaven. Heaven. Three days of drinking, finding the gay bars, and sex. Nirvana.

Sean laughed at everything, the dumb billboards and the corny music on a country music radio station and how we were skipping class, and he pulled me right along with him until everything seemed funny and I couldn’t help but laugh with him. We made our way across Texas and then across Louisiana as the sun set behind us, rocketing like maniacs across the long stretch of elevated highway that was Interstate 10, not inching our way over the posted speed limit but blasting through it. When we stopped to take a piss at a McDonald’s outside Lake Charles, we tossed the empty six pack of Bud. We didn’t stay to eat, because we were only two hundred miles from the fabled city on the bayou.

Before we got to Lafayette, Sean grabbed me around my neck, pulled me close, and kissed me while we were going eighty-five. His lips were hard against mine, first and only man so far for me. “I love doing this,” he told me straight into my face, not even seeming to care about the road or being seen. Who cared? “Let’s keep driving forever.”

The road went on and on, and I could not imagine any other way, any other time, any other me.

As we left the outskirts of Baton Rouge, I stuck my head out the window and howled at the moon like a dog. The car behind us suddenly decelerated; I watched its headlights retreat. Sean said, “That’s my man.”

We rolled into New Orleans at eleven-thirty, got to only a few bars before closing time, and staggered down the streets of the French Quarter until past four. The ships trolling the Mississippi let loose their foghorns as if we were actors in an old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie. Sean and I liked to watch those late at night with our hands down each other’s pants as we lounged on his bed.

On Friday night we found the bars that were filled with men like us. I got blown by some dude wearing leather in a back room. Sean dared me into it—Go ahead, it’s why we’re here, you know you want to—and the fear and the strange lips on my dick and the sounds of the other guys doing the same thing as we were in the nearby shadows gave me my most intense shooting ever. Then a cop pushed aside the curtain that pretended to shield us from the outside world, growling, “Everybody back up front, let’s keep this place legal.” My instant fear and then relief erupted in a small hysterical hiccup of a laugh; the cop shoved me on the back as I walked past him.

Back where he was leaning on the bar, Sean wanted to know what it’d been like, and half an hour later he disappeared, returning with a smirk and a case of the clap we both had to get treated for two weeks later.

But we didn’t know that then. I changed that weekend from virgin-except-with-Sean to experienced-gay-man, a rite of passage we both had felt we needed. When we drove across the river to our motel, swimming in booze up to our eyeballs, we sang “YMCA” at the top of our lungs, convinced nobody else knew what it really meant—really, really meant—except us.

On Sunday we slept until almost noon and were awakened by the housekeeper banging on the door, shouting, “Get out in thirty minutes or we charge you for another day” in an accent so thick we could barely understand her. We untangled ourselves from each other and then rolled back to the center, me toward Sean, him toward me, each of us suddenly on fire. He climbed on top of me and we humped until I was almost rubbed raw, but seeing him when he came was worth it.

We drove back with everything casual, still nothing-any-big-deal, with the sun shining down on us and everything right with the world.

Copyright 2009 Jenna Hilary Sinclair
From the novel ADMIT ONE by Jenna Hilary Sinclair, published by Dreamspinner Press as eBook and paperback
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