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I loved holding the stories of those scars under my fingers. You would breathe differently when I touched them. When my thumb passed across the healed, re-shaped, only semi-sensate place where nipple met plain skin, something would always catch in your throat. And when my tongue touched the shining, stretched pink lines beneath those nipples, you quivered, and shifted, and thought that I would hate the taste of you.
*
It wasn't a date, that first time. Sam has watched him, with what has seemed to him like an endless fascination, for days now, realising glance by glance what this is, like it wasn't obvious from the first time Sam took in the curve of his shoulders and the sound of his voice. On the campaign bus Sam has dreamt, rocked along by the jerks of the vehicle and the impact of uncertain roads of rural America, about some kind of meeting place.
It wasn't a date because both of them are apparently heterosexual men, and besides the kind of heterosexual men who have made it their business to be in politics, for reasons that still seem so important, more than any small, personal desire. So it could never be a date, because they would never be able to exist as anything else.
It wasn't a date but the urge to pull on his hands, swallow his tongue, go down between his thighs, now that it's dark, and now that it's winter, and now that Sam has known him for a month? six weeks? Now that this time has passed it's okay to share a beer with this guy, and talk to him about the Yankees or the Superbowl or why Gilbert and Sullivan isn't a waste of his time, and watch him smoke cigar after cigar, out behind the bus, blowing the smoke into the night. Maybe it's okay.
It wasn't a date because there were no restaurants involved, though the alcohol was suitably plentiful. There were no good clothes or passable imitations of small talk, nor dazzling moments of revelation and recognition over lobster thermidor. There was no coffee, nor was coffee used as a euphemism for what they did afterwards.
It wasn't a date, just a night held between two men. The kind of thing that happens on long political campaigns. The kind of thing Sam can tell, from the way his fingers move and his laugh rumbles at the back of his throat, he is not unfamiliar with.
It was not a date as much as a collision of two bodies. Heat, mass, power -- the inexorable power of dark, bloody love; of bodies and voices and his slow, inquisitive fingers; of the glint in his eyes that seems to say that he is unhappy, even though he loves his wife, and even though Sam suspects he always will be and always will, and there's nothing Sam's own hands and heart can do to change that. The bloodiness of wanting him anyway.
*
You didn't let me touch you, or not with any genuine intent. Not that first time. You kept on all your clothes except your shirt and it was dark so I never saw anything and my fingers found nothing to feel. Except for noting, and teasing, that you didn't have nearly enough chest hair for a grown man, there was nothing I wouldn't have called 'normal'. I just figured you for a Californian. And since you had your mouth caught around my cock for most of the time, I don't think I'd have complained anyway.
The touching, the confessions, the way your held your head so that I couldn't see anything of your eyes but the lashes and made me feel like eight kinds of shit because you should have been looking me straight in the face and daring me to have a problem with any of this but you weren't, and you couldn't because it was me, all that came a little later. When we got somewhere that they have hotels.
*
Sam has said the word and now all that's left to is to see what happens next. Toby's pupils have expanded to dark oubliettes from which, for Sam, there will be no exit. His fingers and his tongue have been inside Sam's mouth for the past half hour and Sam is so turned on, so aware of every single particle of his body, that he suspects it wouldn't matter if Toby were to take one look at him, naked and inescapable, and slam the hotel room door with himself on the other side of it -- Sam would only need to close his own eyes and remember Toby's and give himself a thirty seconds with his thumb and forefinger and leave hating himself until after he's come so hard that it almost doesn't matter.
But that isn't what Toby does.
Toby scrambles over him like a teenage boy getting his first scent of sex. His weight is clumsy and uncomfortable and real. The bed creaks underneath him. His fingers catch in Sam's pubic hair as he pulls at Sam's boxers -- hungry and inelegant, but with a point of deliberation to him, sharpened like his teeth have been against Sam's neck. He presses his mouth against the line of Sam's hipbone, pulling on the waistband of the boxers, on the left, and Sam squirms up into the suggestion of warm flesh under coarse beard and curses, Jesus, under his breath.
Sam's wearing the packer today because he didn't think he'd have anyone scrabbling around in his underwear, and he pulls away instinctively when Toby lays a hand over the bulge, because he's bound to ask, he's just bound to, and it will be excruciatingly free of complete sentences and rich in tacit judgements. But he doesn't. Instead Sam finds himself opening his thighs around the full weight of Toby's head and quivering again, for new reasons, new places, new ways of doing this thing that ought to be the same with everyone, but never is. Toby's fingers go underneath the harness and press into Sam's hot skin, then hold the packer tenderly, inside his fist. Then he's pressing his mouth between Sam's legs and Sam is beyond analysis.
He stops, for a second, and asks with his eyes: is this okay? He means 'is my cock okay to go here, where my thumb is now, where my tongue was a minute ago? or is this a part of you I should deny? should I put a pillow under your hips and fuck you like that, like a man should be fucked? or should I stop, should I use my mouth instead, these fingers, just there?' As he always can, Toby packs a lot into one look.
Sam just nods, and gasps, and manages to say, please.
He leaves the harness in place and the packer he pushes aside, limp against the bulk of his wrist as he positions himself, as he pushes in. It hurts, briefly, because Toby hadn't considered lube as well as the condom and Sam is too wound-up to make sentences, but the hurt subsides and then it's only Toby fucking him, with the smell of his hair filling Sam's throat and the weight of his body crushing Sam's ribs. And it is glorious, and it is all for him.
Later, much later, they crash out on the bed. Toby's chest and neck are covered in sweat and Sam amuses himself by rubbing his fingers in it and then tasting his fingers, and trying to catch the smell and work out exactly why it makes that pleasant dropping sensation appear in his belly. Love, he supposes. Toby lies motionless for a while, breathing very shallowly, his eyes firmly shut and hanging a Do Not Disturb sign on his face. But gradually he stirs, makes motions towards a form of gentleness in Sam's hair, stroking it back and forth under his fingers -- it is too short, and sticks up from Sam's head in a way that will need to be seen to before they leave this room. But Sam is happy, glowing with happiness, feeling rich and warm, because it will be impossible to forget this, whatever happens next.
*
I wanted you enough that it confused me. It would have confused me if you'd been born a man and I do try to explore as many ways as possible of offending and causing pain to my lovers. I would look at you sometimes, in your white shirts with the monograms, in the pants that were just a little too tight at the waist, at the way the sweat formed under your armpits when you'd be working out or playing ball with Josh, and see nothing but someone I found beautiful. Insufferable, but also beautiful. Someone I wanted. Someone I have kept on wanting.
*
"Is it that you can't sleep with me, or you can't sleep with a man, or that you can't sleep with a man like me?"
"Sam -- "
"What happens on the bus stays on the bus, I know. I've heard that one too."
"I can't sleep with anyone!"
"Oh no?"
"I'm married, Sam."
"I can't say that it stopped you before."
"I can't say it exactly stopped you either."
"It's okay, you know. It's okay to be freaked out."
"I'm ... I'm not freaked out." He sighs, deeply, from his belly. "When we get into the White House, when it's January and we have one hundred days to fix America, we can't -- "
"We can't do this. I know. I'm not a kid, Toby."
"It's not ... it doesn't have anything to do with ... with your thing."
"Yeah, I find your inability to say the word 'transsexual' really comforting right now."
"Sam."
"Toby?"
"Don't make this -- "
"What? Harder than it has to be? Just say what I know you're going to say, Toby. It's fine."
Toby looks at him, for a long moment. He blinks, exhales, and lets his head twitch up and to the side in that way that means he's uncomfortable with what he has to say next. And then he opens his mouth.
"This is it, Sam. Enough."
Sam nods. "Okay," he says, and walks away.
*
He writes notes in the margins of all the early speeches. They are corrections, in red pen. They pick apart his grammar, his inadequate punctuation, his over-use of adjectives, his weak verbs, his occasional slips into the passive voice. They say, underneath the words, things like I'm sorry, and you are better than this, and not for me, and I still think about the sweat on your skin, and the color of the hair on your thighs. And Sam keeps them, the drafts, the notes, the memos, the emails, the discarded legal pads. He keeps them all.
He writes notes in all Sam's margins. Underneath the top surgery scars he has written his bewildered desire, under the weight of Sam's cock, in its folds and swellings, he has written his unthinking masculinity. With Sam, in the tender rooms they shared, he tried not to make it complicated. He never does seem to realise that it is always complicated.
Even when his wife divorces him and Sam hangs around his misery, trying to pick up at least some of the pieces, he doesn't understand 'complicated'. He thinks this is Sam's crush, this is his tender-heartedness getting in the way. And he's right, in a way, but wrong in another.
*
Now it's the night of the State of the Union. The big one. You look so tired. But then we all do.
You've pulled your tie apart and undone the first button of your collar. You've even slipped off your shoes, which is a piece of vulnerability too far -- I can't look at your ankles, the smallness of your feet. You are sprawled on my couch like some kind of unearthly teenage prodigy, some refugee from the Math Club, some ex-Secretary of the Princeton Gilbert and Sullivan Society. And I want to kiss you, very much. I should have forgotten all this, I should have kept to the promise I made you keep. But I want to kiss you too much.
*
How about we make a tradition? Toby says, quietly, looking at nothing in particular. Sam is so tired he could fall asleep right there on Toby's couch, like he has a few too many times this year, holding onto the black and white cushion tight enough to spasm the muscles in his fingers.
Huh? he manages.
A tradition, Toby says, again, resting his eyes on a point about an inch above Sam's head this time. Sam watches for his eyes flicking back downward, and when they do he knows what this is actually about.
Toby locks the door; Sam draws the blinds. Sam murmurs something about what the hell happened to 'what happens on the bus?' and Toby chuckles, that low liquid noise that bubbles in Sam's mouth -- a champagne laugh; he gets drunk on it. Toby says: I figure after the First Lady's ouija board and C.J. becoming a wolf person how much worse can it really get? Sam presses his mouth against the soft, unbearded skin underneath Toby's jaw and says you forgot about Laurie and Toby shoves his hand down the front of Sam's pants and says, no, I didn't. Sam gasps and bucks into him, pushes himself into the openness of Toby's hand and rubs himself there a few times, hard and soft. Oh, it's been a long time, but Sam hasn't forgotten.
Sam pushes him away after a while and goes down on his knees and brings Toby off quickly and massively and worries in a distant corner of his head what the hell he's going to say caused the cum stain now lurking on the front of his shirt and across his tie. So Toby has to get creative for Sam's orgasm because there's just no way he's getting hard again after that. He pushes Sam down on the couch, head first into the cushions, and pulls off his pants, pulls down his boxers and spreads Sam's ass and gets his fingers and then his tongue into the hole and when Sam is speechless and squirming, he pushes his hand round again, and palms Sam's cock and cushions the impact of Sam jerking himself limp against his fingers.
They sleep at Toby's place that night. They drink beer and toast themselves and their President and do not find it incongruous that they curl up together, in Toby's empty-looking double bed.
And the next year, they do it all again, differently.
*
So this is our tradition. I fuck you once a year and in the meantime I try to live with how I know you feel, and how I feel about my ex-wife. And if that makes me sound like a less than exemplary man then I agree, but I'd miss you, I will miss you when you go.
I'm leaving this in the bottom drawer of my desk. I won't give it to you yet and when I do you'll laugh because you already have a copy. It's just a dictionary. But there are notes in the margins.