Casey didn’t leave Joshua Tree until 5 pm on the Friday of Presidents Day weekend. There were just too many things he didn’t want to be left undone, including walking the entire site to make sure that anything loose was tied down in case the wind picked up over the weekend. So he had to slog through Riverside and San Diego traffic and was lucky to be pulling into La Jolla just after 9 pm. The party was at Matt’s fraternity house, which Casey had been to several times over the previous summer. It was a nice house in a residential neighborhood and definitely not a traditional fraternity house, as was the custom at UCSD. Casey’s own fraternity, which he had gladly departed back in the Bay Area and nearly forgotten at this point, was much more typical and on a fraternity row across the street from campus.
He parked a block away and strode on foot in the dark,towards the house, a sliding rhythm repeated in his head, causing him to glide more than anything else. Mason had given him a cassette tape to listen to on the drive, a bootleg recording of a Grateful Dead show from Red Rocks, which Mason had recorded himself. Casey had never listened to the Grateful Dead before, but the concert bootleg played like a single song, an epic orchestration surfing a seemingly never ending wave. He understood this, and the vibe it had created on the drive stayed with him for the rest of the night.
He walked in the open front door and immediately saw some of Matt’s friends that he knew. After they dispensed with earnest welcomes and high-fives, he was pointed to the backyard where Matt was getting a small bonfire started in a metal fire pit. Casey walked through the house, pausing just inside the kitchen door, which opened to the backyard, to get a look around before heading out. He spotted Matt, already tending the fire and animatedly telling a story to his girlfriend Heather, who Casey knew, and another girl who Casey didn’t know. Matt was smiling and laughing, in full swing, gesturing with his hands and arms and then his whole body, both the girls were laughing and wrapped in attention. Casey loved watching Matt holding court. He knew Matt could be an introvert too, and he remembered how quiet Matt used to be in high school, even just two years ago, before he joined the fraternity and started dating Heather. Casey loved that this happened, he was smiling now too and moved slightly to lean on the doorjamb so he could keep watching, when the girl standing with Matt and Heather, that he didn’t know, looked directly at him. He put his finger up to his lips as if giving the quiet signal and then exaggeratedly crept out the kitchen door towards them and into the shadows of the yard like a ninja. He crouched low behind a large potted cactus, just peaking his head around its spines and keeping eye contact with the girl who shrugged and held her hands up slightly as if to ask him what he was doing. He followed up with the shhh signal again and then pantomimed for her to tap Matt on the shoulder and point to something in the opposite direction so he could sneak up behind Matt. Casey and Ani hadn’t met yet, and didn’t even know each other’s names, but they were already having a conversation and an adventure.
Ani played along, and Casey proceeded to sneak up on Matt, tiptoeing across the yard before softly wrapping Matt into a giant bear hug from behind. Matt seemed to only startle for a split second, and despite being completely unable to see who was hugging him, started beaming and said, “Ahhh!! Yes!! I was just talking about you. Casey Kennedy has arrived!” Casey let go as Matt turned around for a proper hug, “In the flesh!” Heather smiled, seemingly amazed, and said, “How did you know it was him?” before joining in on the hug. Matt laughed, “Nobody hugs like Casey.” Heather laughed too, “That is true.” The three of them were still hugging, but Casey, a bit taller than Matt, was looking over at the other girl who now said, out loud but really to him, “Well, I don’t want to miss out on that, so I’ll be waiting right here.” With only those words, Casey instantly fell into a sort of mini moment and felt weightless, maybe even a bit dizzy, he closed his eyes. The sound of her voice had given him goosebumps. She did have an accent and was very sweet too, but it was something else entirely, something not explainable at all.
“Oh god! I’m so sorry. Anika this is Casey, Casey, Anika” Matt said as they unlocked their 3-way embrace and Casey, still sort of stunned, took a step forward and held out his hand like he worked at a car dealership. Anika laughed, tilting her head sideways, and said, “I’ll have to insist on one of these world changing hugs, that is, if you’d oblige me.” Her voice did it to him again, but this time he felt giddy and in his body, and turned on. “I most certainly will oblige” he answered, already in motion, and wrapped his arms around her. She was smaller than she looked, and her frame fit easily inside his broad wingspan. They both seemed to exhale at the same time and sort of folded together like a bat tucking in for some rest. “Hi,” she whispered, tilting her neck up to reach his ear. “Hi,” he whispered back. They released at the same time, and as he pulled back, he kept his hands on her shoulders for a moment; she reciprocated, keeping her hands on his elbows. “I’m Casey” he said. Matt and Heather smiled and exchanged glances with each other. “Hi Casey, I’m Ani.” They spent the next hour sitting next to the bonfire, learning some of the basics, sharing stories, flirting, but more than that, just sort of fitting.
Anika was from Denmark and in the middle of a year abroad, studying marine biology at UCSD. She and Heather were roommates and close, she already knew a bit about Casey from Heather and Matt. She was petite but had a sturdy and expansive energy that made her seem bigger. She was also warm and funny, her humor careened between dry and absurd. She and Casey were playful in the same way. Heather and Matt had secretly hoped they would hit it off, and on paper, they certainly were a sensible match, but their connection turned out to be more electric than anyone would have guessed. Although Anika and Heather had to leave at 10:30 to attend a sorority event, making their interaction brief, Anika was smitten.
After the girls left, Matt tried to convince Casey to come out with them on Saturday night. Casey resisted, he was looking forward to seeing Daniel, plus he flirted with a lot of people and had a lot of moments too, so he just kind of willed himself to downplay the whole interaction. The rest of the party would eventually join them at the bonfire, where they drank consistently for nearly 4 hours until they were all drunk, reasonably drunk, but never rowdy. After most of the people had left the party, they moved to the kitchen and proceeded to eat half its contents, making tacos, and cookies, and a full breakfast at 4 am with pancakes, eggs, and sausage. Casey slept soundly on the couch with an extra blanket from Matt’s bed until 10 am when he jolted up and ran outside to puke in the backyard. He fell back asleep until 2 pm when Matt finally emerged, they were both starving and drove to Law Street to eat burritos on the cliffs. They ended up staying until sunset. Casey caught Matt up with all the details about Alturas Tranquilos, including Mason, the outdoor showers, which Matt found amazing, and the Grateful Dead, which Matt was decidedly not into. When they got back to the house, Casey helped clean up the backyard and hosed off the puke before finally heading down to the Quonset Hut.
Casey knew Daniel didn’t close the cafe until 8 pm on Saturdays, but he planned on keeping him company and then helping close. They were delighted to see each other but somehow fell into an impromptu routine like they didn’t know each other but seemed to have so much in common. A couple of girls sitting by the counter had been eyeing Daniel for nearly an hour, ogling him. He had been doting on them so flirtatiously they were determined to figure out which one of them he liked. That is until he started doing the same thing with Casey, which ended when Daniel hopped up and sat on the counter and then pretended to faint into Casey, who feigning startled, caught him, “Ma’am! Ma’am! Are you okay?” Daniel laughed and wriggled himself out of Casey’s arms, landing his feet on the ground and exaggeratedly proclaiming, “Do not Ma’am me, Casey Kennedy!” before breaking into a smile and leaning in for a publicly polite, but also on the lips, kiss. The girls were astonished, like they were watching a burlesque show, the closest one couldn’t take her eyes off of Daniel’s hands, which were now resting on Casey’s butt. The boys were putting on a show but also somehow barely noticed that they had an audience at all. In truth, they really were just goofing around, even though it looked more R-rated to the girls.
They had the café closed up by 8:45 and a plan too: showers, taqueria, then to a bar to drink and play pool. Casey knew the Aero Club, although he had only been there once, it was memorable. A dive bar on San Diego Avenue in the shadow of the freeway. A big rectangular building with hanger like ceilings. The long bar stretched half the length of the place with high shelves filled with hundreds of types of whisky. Across from the bar was booth seating, and then two pool tables at the back by the bathrooms. Despite the extensive whisky collection, it was, in fact, a dive bar, in the sense that people only went there to get drunk or play pool, sure, hookups happened, but that’s not why you went to the Aero Club. As soon as they walked in it was obvious that Daniel was a regular, and apparently a pretty good pool player, enough so that he kept his own pool cue behind the bar. Casey recognized the bartender as a regular from the Quonset Hut, a cute guy named Scotty, who was usually drinking espressos and working on a moped. “Casey!” he said as he peaked his head around Daniel, “You back from Joshua Tree? Welcome!” Scotty gestured to cheers, holding up a beer he had just finished pouring before setting it down in front of a customer. Casey smiled, wondering how Scotty knew he was in Joshua Tree at all, but then, sorting it out in his head, accepted that it made sense. If Scotty was spending his days at the Quonset Hut and then Daniel was spending his nights at the Aero Club, he tilted his head to himself as if accepting the explanation he had just made up and then answered the question as if it was normal for people to know that he was living in Joshua Tree, “Just for the weekend, then back up.”
They drank at the bar for a long time. Casey watched Scotty work, pouring drinks, making change, laughing, and touching people on the arms and hands, he seemed sweet, and fun. Casey wondered if Scotty and Daniel were hooking up, which made him feel jealous, and then gave him some sort of permission to remember and fantasize about Anika. He thought that Scotty definitely seemed straight though, so maybe they weren’t hooking up. Then he fantasized about Anika and Scotty hooking up. Daniel seemed to be talking the entire time, and Casey was responding, but he wasn’t listening, he was thinking about Anika now, and about how Scotty seemed too straight for Daniel, but also about how people always thought he was straight too, and wondering if Anika knew that he wasn’t straight.
They drank long enough that the pool tables started heating up, and some regulars insisted that Daniel get into the rotation. Daniel accepted, and the next few hours flew on repeat, by 1 am they were both pretty drunk. Scotty told them to lock the mopeds in the side storage area and he would call a taxi, Daniel seemed to have done this routine before. They hadn’t sobered up at all by the time they got back to the boat and immediately started fucking, sloppy fucking. Daniel was wound up, and he wanted to be fucked. Casey liked to fuck, especially when he was drunk, so he was into it, and it was generally hot, drunk too though. At some point, Daniel started commenting on how much more muscular Casey was since Joshua Tree, which was true, but it was also making Casey feel self-conscious and unknowingly surfacing things about being objectified that he didn’t know existed, much less have any way to deal with. And anyway, he was enjoying fucking, it felt good, so he closed his eyes. Plus he did feel more muscular, and strong, more like Scotty, and he imagined Scotty and Anika together and finally just him and Anika, and then he just connected with the pleasure and had fun. He came much more loudly than he usually did, his orgasm and his voice felt unnaturally penetrating coming from him though, and in the awkward silence that followed, his ears rang, and he just sort of fell out of his body. He felt lost, and disoriented, and still drunk. Then, he momentarily sobered up, and if following some automated script that he hadn’t written, kissed Daniel on the lips and pulled out. He reached for a towel, handed one end to Daniel and scrunched the other end around his dick. He laid back down and spooned Daniel, both of them breathless, before whispering I love you in Daniel’s ear like someone else was saying it.
Daniel didn’t have to work the café until noon the next morning, and they slept in with proper hangovers. They smoked a cigarette inside the boat, sharing it and holding it out one of the porthole windows between puffs. The hangover masking any uncomfortability between them well, so everything was fine. At 11 am, Casey went up to the kitchen and made Daniel a breakfast sandwich, which he brought back down to the boat with two lattes. The gesture was sweet and smoothed over the unspoken tension that seemed to now just exist between them. After Daniel had gone to work, Casey properly relaxed. He smoked on the deck before going down below again, this time stripping off all his clothes, including his underwear, which he had slept in, and laying down in Daniel’s bed. He still felt nauseous, and it was stuffy on the boat, so he tossed and turned for a long time until he finally just jerked off and then fell in and out of a heavy sleep for the rest of the afternoon.
He had deep and powerful dreams, first of Joshua Tree and the tribal elders. More than a new dream, he felt like he was reliving the original dream as if he were in Joshua Tree and on Daniel’s boat at the same time. It was uncomfortable and it seemed like he had woken up inside of the dream, it felt more like hallucinating than dreaming. Then he had a dream about Anika, she was on the boat with him, but it was his boat. They were super into each other, but there was no sex, they were just flirting, like at the party. He felt connected to her in his dream just like he had at the party, and then she started saying some of the things that Daniel had said while they were having sex the night before, like the exact same things and in the same way, but hearing her say them felt different than when Daniel said them, he liked it when Anika said them. Then, in his dream, sitting on the bed with her, he looked at her and realized that these were Daniel’s words. He was instantly awake, but not awake in real life, he was still sleeping, but now he was awake in the dream itself. He remembered the night before that when he and Daniel were having sex, he was fantasizing that Anika was the one saying the things that Daniel was saying, and that’s why he came so intensely. He explained this to Anika in the dream, and she held his hand and said, “I think I fell in love with you last night when we met.” he said, “Me too,” and then she leaned in, and they started kissing, which caused him to jolt awake, sweaty and gasping for air. He looked around the boat, dazed, and needing to see who was there, Daniel or Anika, seeing neither he oriented himself that he was apparently now out of the dream. He took a couple big breaths and surveyed the room, and then swung his legs out of the bed to get a notepad so he could write all of this down, the dreams and the dreams inside dreams. As soon as his feet hit the floorboards, and the sheet fell off of him, he saw that his cock was soaked with pre-cum, not like he had had a wet dream but so much that he had to towel it off. This had never happened before, he was actually shocked and trying to understand, he mumbled to himself while wiping his dick off “woah, fuck.”
Casey filled six pages from a legal-sized notebook Daniel had, tore them out, and folded them in quarters, putting them into his bag in the salon, before going back outside to smoke on the deck. He collected himself and took a shower, talking himself through it in his head. He committed to not telling Daniel about any of the dreams, or Anika, or his thoughts about Scotty, or his experience with the sex the night before.
He went up to the café at closing to help wrap up. Daniel was in good spirits and didn’t seem hungover at all. After he took a shower, they made plans for the night. They took the bus to pick up the mopeds from the Aero Club and then drove to dinner in North Park. Neither of them drank, and dinner was easy and casual, but at the end, Daniel mentioned that his ex-boyfriend was coming to town to stay on the boat and wanted to check in with Casey about that. Casey was taken aback slightly, but mostly because when Daniel first said it, he said boyfriend instead of ex-boyfriend. Casey didn’t mention it, and after that, Daniel only said ex-boyfriend. Daniel overly explained that he and his ex were just friends now but that he still wanted to check in with Casey to see how he was feeling about exclusivity or non-exclusivity. Casey’s dream with Anika flashed in his head, and his nearly wet dream situation too, which he still didn’t understand, then he coolly agreed as if Daniel was suggesting non-exclusivity. There, they were on the same page. They were free to fuck other people.
There was one extra exchange on the subject for absolute clarity, and then they moved on. They ended up having a decently nice and adult feeling night, certainly in context to the night before, and they both felt that. There wouldn’t be any sex, they were both exhausted, but they did spoon each other to sleep, and when Casey tenderly kissed Daniel goodbye at 6 am at first light so he could head back to Joshua Tree, Daniel pulled Casey into a hug on the bed and whispered I love you in his ear like a goodbye.
New Readers!
Here’s a link so you can start at Chapter 1.
The boys still friends at least, that's nice - still a little heartbroken that things fizzled between them...