Taylor woke to the feeling of an arm draped heavily across his stomach. In a split second, the events of the evening, though hazy, came flying back into his brain. Every touch, every kiss, every new experience came back and he found himself frozen there, held in place by that arm. The arm belonged to Dominic. A month ago, Dominic had been a face that Taylor had seen on an occasional billboard or magazine ad. Two weeks ago, Dominic was the first guy to hit on him when he had actually cared to pay attention to such a thing. Two nights ago, Dominic had been his first homosexual date. And now, as of last night, Dominic was officially Taylor’s first gay sex partner. Taylor’s brain wanted to venture into an epic bout of self-questioning about whether or not Dominic would be Taylor’s first gay sexual partner or his only gay sexual partner, but his stomach lurched and stopped the thought process point blank. He shoved Dominic’s arm off of his bare stomach and dashed for the bathroom, too nauseous and panicked to care that he was fully naked. The bathroom door didn’t fully shut behind him, but he dropped to his knees and emptied the contents of his stomach into the toilet. Once he had flushed it away, he closed the lid, which he finally noticed had been left up. Taylor knew that he did many things in his own home, but he definitely never left the toilet seat up.
Choosing to ignore the part of his brain that wanted to be annoyed with Dominic for leaving the seat up, he looked at himself in the mirror, inspecting every inch of skin that he could see. A few glaring red marks decorated his neck and chest and they were quite easy to spot and would therefore be quite hard to cover, he noted.
“Fucking hickeys,” he muttered, a mixture of embarrassment and annoyance in his voice. He touched his fingertips to the reddened skin and thought with a sigh that he hadn’t had a hickey since he was seventeen and that had been the work of an overzealous fan he’d made the mistake of bringing back to his hotel room. Back then, he’d been excited about his hickeys he had intentionally worn shirts without collars so his brothers would see them and ask about them. They hadn’t. He’d been pissed and had never let anyone suck on his flesh long or hard enough to leave a mark again. Until now, it seemed.
“Are you okay?” Dominic asked, sticking his head in the room, “Hungover?”
“No, I’m not hungover,” Taylor replied honestly. He wasn’t, not at all. There was no throbbing headache or remains of a churning stomach. There was, however, a continued feeling of complete and total hysteria that was shocking its way through every vein and nerve in his body.
“Then… why with the vomit?” Dominic asked, hesitating before asking the question he was obviously dreading asking. Taylor shut his eyes and allowed his fingers to grasp the edge of the counter while he allowed his deep, slow breaths to calm him. He heard Dominic take a few brave steps into the bathroom, so he simply held up a finger indicating to Dominic that he needed a minute to compose himself. And so Dominic waited, a step away until Taylor decided that a full on panic attack wasn’t coming.
“I’m okay,” Taylor said, not quite lying but not exactly telling the truth either. He wasn’t bad. In fact he was far from it. The night before, though completely new and strange, had also been really great. That thought alone made his heart race quicken and his skin flush.
“Are you freaking out?” Dominic asked, “Because if you want me to, I can go…”
“No! Don’t go,” Taylor said, turning to face Dominic and look him in the eye for the first time that morning.
“Then, how about you get the hell out of here so I can go to the bathroom?” Dominic teased, grinning and smoothing his hand down Taylor’s back before pushing him gently back into his bedroom. Taylor took another long breath, this one hitching much less than the ones in the bathroom had. He looked around the room and saw clothes strewn everywhere and he noted that the room still had the musky, unmistakable scent of sex filling every corner. He quickly lit a vanilla candle on his dresser, found his dark grey boxer briefs in amongst the mess and went into the kitchen, ignoring the mussed bed that he usually would have made before leaving the bedroom.
Instead of dwelling on the incredibly awkward and potentially messy situation that had just occurred in his bathroom, he flew around the kitchen making coffee and searching for any kind of breakfast food that could be thrown together quickly. Cooking had never been Taylor’s forte and baking was the worst, as had been evidenced by his pie baking extravaganza. So, anything that required an oven or microwave was out of the question, forcing him to choose the only pathetic offering in his cabinets: a box of granola bars that may well have been past their expiration date.
He frowned at the box, hating its existence. Why hadn’t he been raised to take care of himself rather than having other people get him whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it? Why was he so helpless in so many ways? Hell, he couldn’t even figure out his own sexuality without hired help. The only things he was good at besides making music, he mused, were keeping a clean house and looking good. One finger swipe along the windowsill proved his first point as true, and a look down at himself in his underwear proved the second. He smiled to himself and kept busy while Dominic did god knows what in the bathroom by tidying up the mess they’d made in the living room, picking up his jeans and tank top and taking the Chinese food to the garbage can. Once that was finished, he started pouring two cups of coffee when he heard the one noise that he didn’t want to hear: a key in his front door’s lock.
“Dad! Give me my keys back! You can’t just barge in Taylor’s house!” he heard Isaac shout from the front porch causing his eyes to open to a previously unexplored width. He wanted to call out to Dominic, to warn him, tell him to hide, whatever. But all he could do was stand there with a coffee pot in his hands. His feet took him out to the living room and if he had been in a less shocked state of mind, he would have thought of how ridiculous he looked standing there in his underwear with a pot full of steaming coffee in hand, a supremely blank look on his face paired nicely with a slack jaw.
“There, now you can have your keys,” he heard his father say and the keys noisily passed hands before they all headed towards him. Taylor wanted to throw the coffee pot up in the air and disappear in a trail of smoke like a cartoon character escaping a terrible situation. He considered chucking the coffee pot at them, hoping that the spray would deter them briefly while he had the chance to jump out the window and run away. But it all happened too fast and all he could do was stand there and wait for them to come.
“Taylor! What is this about?” his mother asked, holding out a copy of US Weekly towards him, one with the now infamous picture of himself and Dominic displayed on the front.
“I made coffee,” Taylor said dumbly, holding out the pot in their direction as if they were supposed to drink from it or something. His mom ignored his comment and thrust the magazine at him again as if he would take notice this time, but he didn’t. All he could do was look into Isaac’s eyes which were looking at him both pleadingly and apologetically.
“I’m sorry,” Isaac said over their parents’ incessant rambling, “Taylor, they took my keys and I could either sit there in my place wondering what was happening over here or I could come along. I’m so sorry.” Taylor couldn’t respond. Even though part of him wanted to beat Isaac over the head with a large blunt object, another part wanted to run up and hug him. To tell him that it was okay and that he didn’t blame him for the fact that their parents were there. He really didn’t, which surprised him. Even though he and Isaac hadn’t always been on the same team, he knew that Isaac had meant every word he’d said in the car the day before. Finally, after more than twenty years of being at mostly civil odds with each other, his big brother had his back.
“Well… are you?” his dad asked Taylor, ignoring everything Isaac had just said and getting back to the point.
“Dad-” Taylor started when his newly realized worst nightmare occurred. Dominic came out of Taylor’s bedroom looking down at his cell phone, smiling with a bounce in his step, wearing only a pair of short red boxer briefs.
“So, are you going to throw me out now or are we going to-” Dominic started, stopping short when he saw the strange scene in front of him–Taylor in his underwear still holding the stupid pot of coffee with Taylor’s angry parents and terrified looking brother all standing there now staring directly at him. “Um…” His mom looked down at the magazine and started jabbing her finger right in the middle of Dominic’s forehead on the page, her finger doing all of the talking her mouth was apparently incapable of saying.
“So it’s true?” his dad asked. Taylor wanted to answer more than anything, but found himself unable to decide what to say. Obviously, it was not the right situation in which to claim his heterosexuality to his parents, but he still wasn’t sure what to say to them. Did he want to comfort them? Did he want to say something outrageous just to make them more uncomfortable as payback for coming uninvited into his home and ruining what could have been an otherwise interesting and potentially pleasant morning?
“I’m just going to go…” Dominic said, disappearing back into Taylor’s bedroom with the obvious intention of getting dressed and getting the hell out of there.
“Taylor! What the hell is going on?!” his dad demanded.
“Explain yourself right now!” his mom chimed in. They kept talking, kept insisting that he respond, kept adding to the buzzing swarm of sound circling around Taylor’s head. He tried to make sense of it all, but just grasped for straws. The coffee pot dropped from his hand and collided messily with the carpet, the dark brown liquid immediately marring a huge section of his otherwise perfectly clean carpet. His now free hand joined the other and they both worked to cover his face as he backed up until his back hit the wall.
“Shut up…” he said against his palms, his words completely lost on the crowd. He felt Dominic pat his shoulder before ducking out of the room and once the door shut behind him, Taylor felt a little surge of self-confidence emerge from somewhere deep within him. With Dominic gone, he could finally be honest, because when he had been there, there was no way Taylor could say the things he needed to say.
“Are you… are you… are you….” his dad stammered, attempting to get the word out, his ability to say it as absent as Isaac’s had once been.
“Am I what, Dad?” Taylor asked, his voice immediately rising to levels he knew didn’t suit him, “Gay?”
“Yeah,” his dad replied, looking at a nondescript place on the wall instead of into Taylor’s eyes, “Are you?”
“Say it! I’m not answering unless you say it!” Taylor shouted.
“Taylor, there’s no need to yell. Let’s keep this civil,” his mom said.
“Oh no, Mom. You guys gave up the right to a civil conversation when you came into my home without an invitation and yelled at me in front of my guest!”
“Guest? Oh, is that what you call him?” his dad asked snidely.
“Yeah, it is. Why… do you want to hear me call him my boyfriend? Would you like that better?”
“Of course I wouldn’t,” his dad said disgustedly.
“How did this happen, Taylor?” his mother asked, taking a step towards him, “Did we do something wrong?”
“Well, you gave me this DNA, so if you have a problem with this then yeah, I guess you did something wrong,” Taylor responded snippily, too angry to care that he was saying something truly disrespectful to his mother.
“Don’t spout off about being born like that. It must’ve been something about the fame or all the time of the road… I don’t know…”
“Then why am I straight, Dad?” Isaac chimed in, stepping over to flank Taylor’s left side.
“Ike, you don’t have to,” Taylor said, crossing his arms over his chest in a feeble attempt to mask his near nudity. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in his underwear in anyone’s presence other than someone he was going to have sex with, and this was not anything close to his idea of a great time to change that. Isaac just nodded that he in fact did have to and kept standing there.
“Have you thought about what this is going to do your family? To the band?” his dad asked.
“Of course I have, Dad,” Taylor said, “And I still don’t know whether or not I’m gay. That’s why I hadn’t told you yet. I was hoping that I would get everything all figured out before I sat down and had a civilized conversation with you about it. But I can’t control who sells pictures to magazines and I refuse to not live my life the way that I want to live it just because someone might take my picture or start a rumor about me!”
“Come on, Taylor! There was a guy in his underwear in your apartment, Taylor! Do you honestly expect us to believe that you two didn’t… I mean… that you and he didn’t…”
“Have sex?” Taylor asked, avoiding answering the question and turning it back around on his father’s inability to make any definitive statements about the situation.
“Well… did you? I mean… did he…?” Isaac asked curiously.
“Do you really want to know?” Taylor asked.
“Not really,” Isaac admitted after a few moments, both of them laughing lightly despite the fact that their parents were still looking angrily at them.
“I can’t believe you… that you would do this to us,” his dad said, waving his hand dismissively at Taylor before turning and walking towards the door.
“Dad! Don’t leave!” Isaac said, “We all need to talk about this!” But apparently their parents were through with talking. His mother obediently followed, dropping the magazine to the floor before exiting the condo completely. Once the door had closed behind them, Taylor kicked the coffee pot so hard it violently crashed against the wall, shattering into a million pieces and covering the ground with shards of glass.
“GOD DAMN IT!” Taylor shouted, his fingers pulling hard at his hair as he stomped across the room towards his bedroom. A few moments later, he heard Isaac talking in hushed tones on the phone as he furiously ripped the sheets off of his bed and shoved them unceremoniously into his hamper. The scent of vanilla filled his nostrils and while he would have normally found it calming, it instead made his tongue twist and the taste of stomach bile fill his mouth. With a great rushing breath, he expelled the flame and pulled on a pair of clean jeans and a sweatshirt, far from his wardrobe norm, and sat down in the middle of his now bare mattress. Isaac came in a few minutes later and sat down in the leather chair that sat a few feet from Taylor’s bed. Taylor knew full well that Isaac was avoiding contact with the bed for several reasons, but Taylor also knew that Isaac would have avoided that chair like the plague had he known exactly what had happened in it the night before. Taylor groaned let his head drop forward. Even though one of the worst moments of his life had just transpired, he couldn’t help but think back to those moments he and Dominic had spent together in that room, doing things that should have made Taylor uncomfortable with their newness, but they didn’t at all. Taylor couldn’t comprehend it all, but he knew that he didn’t have any sort of negative feelings towards the evening.
“So, you two did…?” Isaac asked.
“Yeah, we did,” Taylor said, spotting Mr. Spanky crammed between the mattress and the footboard and liberating him from the stronghold in one forceful pull. For some ridiculous reason, Taylor felt more comfortable and confident holding the stuffed giraffe in his lap. He knew that he must have looked like a child, sitting there in a big oversized hoodie clinging to a stuffed animal, but he didn’t care because he felt safe.
“How was it?”
“Isaac, I never told you about my straight sex life so I’m certainly not telling you about my not straight sex life,” Taylor said.
“Oh thank god,” Isaac breathed, sounding genuinely relieved, “I’m trying to be supportive, but I don’t think that I’m ready to be quite that supportive, I’m sorry!”
“It’s fine. Even though I’m okay with it, I’m not sure I’m ready to, you know… talk about it,” Taylor said.
“When you are, I’ll listen if you want me to.”
“But you’d rather I didn’t?”
“Please don’t take it the wrong way, Taylor. I’m trying really hard here,” Isaac said.
“I know you are, Ike, and I appreciate it,” Taylor said sincerely, “But who were you calling a minute ago?”
“Zac. I told him what our psycho parents did and he’s heading over.” Taylor groaned again and collapsed dramatically onto the soft surface of his pillowtop mattress. He lay there, staring at the wall until they both heard the front door unlock again. Isaac came over and stood next to the end of the bed until Taylor finally conceded and got up so they could go meet their younger brother together. Taylor didn’t even bother to mask his irritation when they saw that Sheridan was with Zac, a bitchy and self-satisfied look on her face.
“Are you okay?” Zac asked, though he looked like he didn’t care about the response. He mostly looked like he wanted to get the hell out of there and go back to whatever he and Sheridan were doing before he was beckoned.
“I’m fine,” Taylor said, not wanting to utter a single incriminating syllable in front of Sheridan, “Why is she here?”
“She’s here because she’s my girlfriend and she was with me when Isaac called,” Zac replied, continuing to sound completely disinterested in the situation at hand.
“Nice place,” Sheridan said, obviously not meaning a word of it as she looked around with a thoroughly judging eye. Taylor wondered briefly what she was looking for? Dildos? Gay porn? Maybe a closet full of leather pants and mesh tank tops?
“So, what’s going on? Did Mom and Dad disown you or what?” Zac asked.
“No, of course not!” Taylor said.
“Then why am I here?” Zac asked exasperatedly, “So Mom and Dad saw all the gay stuff in the magazines. Who cares?”
“Well, they do, Zac,” Isaac said, obviously trying to say as little as possible in front of Sheridan as well, “And it kind of got messy.”
“Why aren’t there any sheets on your bed?” Sheridan asked as her snooping gaze brought her eyes to his bedroom doorway, “Rough night?”
“You could say that,” Taylor said, crossing his arms across his chest, “Or you could say that it was a great night.”
“Who was here?” Zac asked. Isaac and Taylor looked at each other through their peripheral vision, neither wanting to comment.
“Don’t worry about it,” Isaac stated in his older brotherly tone.
“I knew it,” Sheridan said softly, but victoriously.
“You knew what?” Taylor spat.
“I always knew that you were nothing more than a stupid, egomaniacal, silly faggot who has been hogging the spotlight and the attention for years. And now that Zac’s finally starting to get some of the attention you’ve been harboring, you had to pick now to come out of the closet.”
“What did you call me?” Taylor asked at, surprisingly enough, the exact same time that Zac asked “What did you call him?”
“What? Like you haven’t been thinking it,” Sheridan rolled her eyes. Zac looked at her questioningly before taking a step away from her.
“I may not agree with Taylor’s decisions, but I would never call him a faggot,” Zac said sternly.
“Why not? It’s what he is! Why are you being so weird, Zac? You never act like this when we’re alone!”
“No, Sheridan. You never act like this when we’re alone.”
“Well, maybe you’re just always too busy having sex with her to notice what a rancid bitch she is,” Taylor said.
“Are you going to let him talk to me like that?!” Sheridan demanded, looking at Zac expectantly.
“Yeah, I guess I am,” Zac said. Sheridan glared at him before storming out of Taylor’s condo. The three brothers stood there in a deafening, yet strangely comfortable silence, for almost a full minute before Zac spoke again. “Okay… maybe Sheridan is a bitch.”
“You think?” Taylor asked, going over to sit down on the couch.
“What the hell happened earlier?” Zac asked, turning to look at Isaac, “I can’t understand your ‘urgent whisper’ voice over the phone at all.”
“Mom and Dad showed up at my apartment, hijacked my keys, and came over here, letting themselves into Taylor’s apartment when he had… company.”
“A guy? You had a guy over here?” Zac asked, groaning and sitting down next to Taylor when he nodded, “I can’t believe it…”
“It’s been a rough morning, Zac, would you lay off him?” Isaac asked, sitting down on Taylor’s other side. They just sat there before a few seconds before Zac couldn’t help himself.
“I mean, god Taylor… didn’t it hurt like hell?” he asked.
“Didn’t what hurt?” Taylor asked, too mentally exhausted to figure out exactly what Zac was referring to.
“You know… when he…” Zac said, making a strange movement Taylor supposed was intended to be a humping motion.
“Zac!” Isaac exclaimed, reaching behind Taylor to smack Zac on the back of the head.
“What?! I’m curious!”
“It didn’t hurt at all because he didn’t do what you’re talking about,” Taylor said.
“You mean you… really?” Zac asked, not even completing a thought process but getting his point across nonetheless. Taylor just looked at Zac before dropping his head into his hands. He hadn’t wanted to talk about the night to anyone, especially not his brothers, because he didn’t think that they would really want to hear about it. Sure, they were trying to be supportive and claimed that they wanted him to get it all figured out, but he never figured that they would want to hear any details.
“Do we really have to talk about this?” Taylor asked.
“Please no,” Isaac said, “This is just a lot all at once.”
“You can say that again,” Taylor replied, reclining back to let himself sink into the cushions, hoping secretly that the leather would open and swallow him alive. He imagined that getting eaten alive would be somehow less terrible than talking about having sex with Dominic with his brothers.
“Did I just break up with Sheridan?” Zac asked.
“I sure hope so,” Isaac replied honestly before sinking back into the couch as well.
“Huh…” Zac said dully, joining them by leaning back as well, “And it’s only ten in the morning.”
“Longest hour of my life,” Taylor stated, supremely thankful when Zac reached over to grab over the remote so he could turn on the TV. Anything to fill his head that didn’t involve thoughts of six-pack abs or the disappointed looks on his parents’ faces or the gnawing hunger coursing through his stomach that only a stale granola bar could remedy, was welcomed fully in his mind. Any venture into the surreal had to be less complicated than his currently reality because after everything that had just happened, he still didn’t know the answer to that one crucial question.