Homecoming night, the line for the bathroom at the Tin Cup goes past the jukebox, and every guy in it wants to tell me something.
“Micah! My man!” That’s a linebacker from the ‘18 team who now owns three Sonic franchises. “You still here? They still got you?”
They still got me. I’m twenty-six. I’ve been at Weller State since I was nineteen and hauling water coolers as a student manager, in shorts the whole equipment room had feelings about. Now I’m a grad assistant in football ops, which means I make the travel binders, I know the hotel block in every Big 12 city, and I know every assistant coach’s wife by her first name and her dip recipe. When we won the conference in ‘23, the D-line hoisted me up in the locker room and somebody filmed it and the athletic director reposted it with a heart. That’s been my performance review for seven years.
The real job opens in January. Assistant director of operations. Salary. Benefits. An office with a door that closes. I want it so badly I don’t talk about it.
So I work the room. I’m the gay one everybody’s proud of. I do the liner, I do the voice, I remember your kids’ names, and nobody in this town has ever once had to imagine me naked. That’s the arrangement. It’s not a bad one. On homecoming night I was keeping up my end of it at the rail with a Coors Banquet, laughing at a story about a bus breaking down outside Lubbock that I’d been on the bus for.
The Tin Cup has a mechanical bull nobody’s ridden since a kicker broke his wrist on it in 2014. It’s still plugged in. The little red power light on the control box glows all night, and I’ve always thought it looked like the bull was waiting.
Colt Wren came and stood next to me at 11:30.
Colt played tight end from ‘15 to ‘19. He’s the guy in the framed photo by the Tin Cup register, laid out sideways in the end zone against Baylor with the ball on his fingertips, the one where you can see the ref’s hat flying off. Six-four. Two-forty now, and most of it still where it used to be. He sells commercial insurance in Tulsa. His wife Kelsey runs a cycling studio. Two boys, four and two. He showed me their pictures before I’d finished my beer, the older one in a T-rex costume at a Walmart, the little one asleep face-down on a golden retriever.
Usually with alumni it’s a three-step thing. Man, I always thought you were cool. Then something almost like a compliment. Then back to the wife, and I make a joke on his way out so he feels good about the whole exchange.
He didn’t do any of that. He asked about the January job. He knew about it, which nobody does. He said Tulsa was fine, but the way he said fine told me it wasn’t. He said the boys were obsessed with dinosaurs and he’d learned more about the Cretaceous in a year than in four years of college. He laughed from his chest. He was easy to stand next to.
Then he looked past me at the bull, at the little red light, and said:
“How long did it take you to get good at it?”
“Being out?” I said. “God. Years. Honestly, I’m still—”
“No,” he said. “The—”
He lifted two fingers to the outside corner of his own eye and drew a line. Tiny. A flick. Then his hand went right back around his beer like he’d touched a burner.
My beer stopped halfway to my mouth.
First I thought he was making fun of me. But Colt Wren smiles at everything, he’d smiled at the bartender for a napkin, and he wasn’t smiling.
Then I thought it was a pickup line. But he hadn’t looked at my mouth once all night. He’d looked at my eyes, every time, a beat too long. I’d assumed it was that straight-guy thing where they hold eye contact to prove how relaxed they are about you.
It wasn’t that. He’d been looking at the liner. All night.
He didn’t want me. He wanted to know how to be what I was.
I’ve been scared of men like Colt my whole life. Not that one would hit me. Nobody’s hit me since high school. Scared of how they stand in a room, how a whole town tilts toward them and you learn to live in whatever space is left. And here was the biggest one of them all, in a letterman jacket with a wedding ring, asking me how long it took.
“Wing or tightline?” I said.
“What?”
“The liner. Wing’s the flick. Tightline is along the lash. You did a wing.”
His ears went red. I didn’t know ears could do that at twenty-eight.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Whatever you do.”
I gave him an out. You always give them an out. I said, “Kelsey would kill you,” and laughed, so he could laugh, so we could both put it back in the box and he could go home and I could keep my evening.
He didn’t laugh.
He set his beer down on the rail. He said, quietly, not looking at me, looking at the bull:
“I’ve thought about it since I was fifteen. I’ve never said it to a person.”
The jukebox was playing Shania. I remember that because I remember thinking it was too perfect, and that nobody would believe me if I told them.
“Okay,” I said. “Okay. Not here.”
I live in an attic over a detached garage behind a house owned by a retired chemistry professor who thinks I’m a lovely young man and has never once asked what I do after eleven. It’s a ten-minute walk from the Tin Cup. It was forty-one degrees and Colt kept his hands in his jacket pockets the whole way, like he was afraid of what they’d do if they got out.
We didn’t talk. Once, crossing Fourth, he said, “Kelsey knows I’m out with the guys,” and I said, “You are out with a guy,” and he laughed, finally, a short one, and it steamed.
The stairs to my place are outside and they ring when you climb them. He had to duck under the door frame. My ceilings slant on both sides and he stood in the one place in the middle where a man his size can stand upright, and looked around at my apartment like it was a church in a country he didn’t speak the language of. The fairy lights. The rolling rack of clothes. The full-length mirror I bought off Marketplace from a woman who was divorcing it.
I took his jacket. I didn’t ask. I just held my hand out and he shrugged it off and gave it to me, and I laid it on my bed, W up.
“Bathroom,” I said. “It’s got the good light.”
It does. I made sure of that. I replaced the landlord’s bulbs with 5000K daylight the week I moved in, because I’m not doing my face in yellow light like an animal.
I sat him on the closed toilet lid. His knees came up nearly to his chest. I stood between them, which put us almost eye to eye, and I opened my makeup bag on the sink and I took out a pencil, a cheap one, a Wet n Wild, because you don’t learn on the good stuff.
“Close your eyes,” I said.
“I thought you were going to teach me.”
“I’m going to show you first. Then you do the other one. Close.”
He closed them.
Colt Wren has long eyelashes. I don’t know why that surprised me. There’s no rule that says a tight end can’t have eyelashes.
I put two fingers under his brow bone and lifted, just slightly, to pull the lid taut. He flinched.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Don’t be sorry. Breathe.”
“I am breathing.”
“You’re holding it. Stop holding it.”
He let it out. It came out shaky, and I felt it on my wrist.
I did his left eye slowly. I talked the whole time, because that’s how I was taught, by a drag queen in Oklahoma City named Sable Grande who did my face for my first Pride in 2018 and talked me through every stroke like a flight instructor. Start at the middle. Little dashes. Don’t drag it, you’re not signing a check. Connect. Now we walk it out to the corner. Look at the ceiling for me, baby.
“Look at the ceiling for me,” I told Colt.
He looked at the ceiling.
I did the flick. Clean. First try. I’m very good at this.
“Okay,” I said. “Your turn.”
I gave him the pencil.
His hands are enormous. I mean that plainly. The pencil disappeared in them. He held it the way people hold a thermometer they’re afraid to break. He leaned toward the mirror, and there wasn’t room, so I stepped behind him and to the side and put my hand over his, on the pencil, and guided it.
“Little dashes,” I said.
He made a little dash. It wobbled.
“That’s fine. Again.”
Again. Again. I could feel his pulse in the side of his hand where it pressed against my palm. It was going fast. I don’t think I’ve ever felt a man’s pulse go that fast with his clothes on.
When we finished the right eye it was a little heavier than the left and the wing flicked up at a steeper angle, like it was surprised. I didn’t fix it.
“Look,” I said. He looked.
I’ve watched a lot of people see themselves in a mirror with liner on for the first time. Drag kids, friends, one very drunk groomsman. It usually goes one of two ways: they laugh, or they pose.
Colt did neither.
He looked at himself for a long time and he didn’t know what to do with his face. You could see him trying things. A little smile, and it was wrong, and it went away. A serious look, and that was worse. His mouth opened slightly. His hand came up like he was going to touch it and stopped an inch from his cheek.
And I realized I was watching him have the experience I had at seventeen, in a Walmart bathroom in Enid with a stolen pencil, eleven years late, at two hundred and forty pounds, with a wedding ring on.
“Hi,” I said, to the mirror. To him.
“Hi,” he said. His voice cracked on the one syllable.
That’s when I kissed him. Or he kissed me. I’ve gone back and forth about it and I think it was simultaneous, which I didn’t know was possible, and which I resent a little because I’d like to know whose fault it was.
I have a white button-down that’s too big for me on purpose. I got it from the men’s section at a Goodwill in Norman. On me it’s a dress. On Colt it wouldn’t button past his sternum, and he stood in my room in it with the front hanging open over his chest, and his jeans unbuttoned, and his letterman jacket on the floor where it had slid off the bed, and he looked like the best idea I’d ever had.
Size doesn’t mean anything if you know how to stand. I put him on the bed on his back. I got on top of him. I’ve been underneath men like him my whole life in every way there is, and the whole trick of the rest of the night was that I wasn’t.
The mirror is across from the foot of my bed. I didn’t move it. I didn’t plan that. I’d just like to point out that I didn’t move it.
“Look,” I said.
He looked at me.
“No. Look at yourself.”
He turned his head to the mirror and then away, fast, like it had hit him.
“Colt,” I said. “Look.”
He looked.
In the mirror there was a huge man on a small bed in a shirt that didn’t close, with his jeans open and his cock hard and dark against his stomach—thick, heavy, curving slightly toward his navel, the head flushed and shining—and liner on, one eye neat and one eye surprised. And on top of him, straddling his hips, a boy half his size in nothing but a pair of black briefs, with one hand flat on the middle of his chest like he was holding him down. Which I was.
“That’s you,” I said. “Say it.”
“That’s me,” he whispered.
I kissed him again. Slower this time. I kissed his jaw and his neck and the soft place under his ear, and he tipped his head to give it to me like he’d done it a thousand times, like his body had known how all along and had just been waiting for someone to ask. I ran my hand down his chest, over the shirt and then under it, over his stomach, down, and wrapped my fingers around him. I couldn’t close them all the way. He made a sound I felt in my knees.
“Look at yourself,” I said, and stroked him, slow. He looked. His hips came up off the bed into my hand.
“Micah. Micah, I don’t—I’ve never—”
“I know.” I leaned down to his ear. “Do you want me inside you?”
It was very quiet in the attic. Downstairs, a car went by on Fourth with its bass up and faded out.
“Yeah,” he said. “God. Yes. I’ve thought about it—” He stopped. His voice broke on it. “Yes.”
“Then you’re going to do exactly what I say.”
I got the lube from the nightstand. I made him bend his knees and plant his feet, which put his heels almost at the edge of my bed and his thighs up and open, and I watched him watch himself do it in the mirror, a 240-pound man with his legs spread for me, and I watched his whole face go red. I didn’t let him look away. I slicked two fingers and I touched him, just touched, just circled, and he grabbed the sheet in both fists.
“Breathe,” I said, the way I’d said it in the bathroom. “You’re holding it again.”
He let it out. I pushed one finger into him while he was letting it out, and he gasped at the ceiling.
I went slow. I went so slow. One finger till he stopped clenching, then two, crooked up, looking for it, and I knew when I found it because his whole body jumped and his dick leaked onto his stomach and he said “oh” in a voice that was nobody’s from Tulsa. I worked him open with my fingers for a long time. I kissed the inside of his knee. I told him how good he looked. I told him to look in the mirror and see how good he looked, and he did, and he moaned at himself.
When I finally put my cock against his hole and pushed into him, I held his face and turned it to the mirror and made him watch.
His ass was so tight I had to stop halfway. I held there, shaking a little myself, with my forehead against his, both of us breathing hard, and I felt his hole relax around my cock a little at a time, and then all at once.
“Good,” I said. “Stay with me. Look at yourself.”
He did. I slid the rest of the way in, and he said my name like a prayer he’d forgotten the words to.
Then I fucked him. Not hard, not at first. Long and deep and steady, holding his thigh against my hip, his heel digging into the backs of my legs to pull me in. The bed creaked. The fairy lights over the headboard swung a little on their tacks. His hands didn’t know where to go, so I put them where I wanted them: one on my waist, one in his own hair, pulling. In the mirror I could see all of it. A little femme boy with his hips snapping between the thighs of the biggest man in the Weller State record book, and the biggest man in the Weller State record book taking it with his mouth open and his eyes wet and liner running.
He cried at some point. Not a lot. His face just went wet while he was looking in the mirror, and the liner I’d done on his left eye survived it and the one he’d done on his right didn’t, and it ran in a thin gray line toward his ear.
I didn’t stop. He didn’t want me to stop. He said so. He said “don’t,” and then “don’t stop,” and I didn’t. I put my thumb on the gray line and followed it back up to his eye.
He came with my hand on him and me deep inside him, in long shaking pulses up his stomach and onto the white shirt, and the sound he made I’m never going to describe to anybody. I came a few strokes after, buried in him, with my face in his neck, and he wrapped both arms around my back and held me there like I was the one who needed holding. Maybe I was.
“You’re okay,” I said.
“I know,” he said, and he sounded surprised by that more than anything.
At four in the morning he stood at my bathroom sink in his boxers with my cleansing balm, washing his face.
He did it slowly. I’d shown him how: warm it in your palms, press, don’t scrub, you’ll pull your lashes out. He watched it come off in the mirror. The good eye and the bad eye, both dissolving into the same gray on his fingers. When he was done he stood there with water on his face and didn’t reach for the towel.
“You can’t tell anyone,” he said to the mirror.
Then, before I could answer, he closed his eyes and said, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I asked that. That’s—I know what that is. I’m sorry.”
Out of everything he did that night, that’s the thing I think about most. Seven years in that town and not one of them has ever apologized for asking.
“I wasn’t going to tell anyone,” I said.
He nodded. He was relieved. I could see it in his shoulders.
He turned around. With the makeup off, his face looked younger and more tired and more like the photo by the Tin Cup register.
“Seven years,” I said. “Everybody in this town tells me everything. Whose husband, whose DUI, who’s pregnant before their mama knows. And nobody’s ever told me a secret that was theirs.” I shrugged. “You think I’m giving the first one away?”
He didn’t say anything for a while.
“I love my wife,” he said finally. “I need you to know that. I’m not—this isn’t that I’m unhappy. I’m not unhappy. I love her. I love my boys.”
“I believe you.”
“I don’t know what this is.”
“You don’t have to know tonight.”
He dried his face. He put on his jeans and his shirt and the letterman jacket, which I’d picked up off the floor and hung on the back of the bathroom door at some point without noticing I was doing it.
At the door, he stopped.
I’d put a ring on him at three. I don’t remember deciding to. It’s a thin gold band that I wear on my pinky, nothing special. I got it at an estate sale in Guthrie. I’d taken it off to do his face and it was on the sink and at some point in the night I’d slid it onto his pinky and he’d let me and neither of us said anything about it. On his hand it only went down to the second knuckle.
He looked at it. He started to twist it off.
“Keep it,” I said.
“I can’t.”
“Kickoff’s at one,” I said. “See how long you last.”
Homecoming kickoff was at one. Forty-one thousand people, a flyover, the band in their plumes, the whole town in red.
I was on the sideline with a clipboard and a headset I don’t need, because they let me stand there. I saw him at the alumni tailgate before the game, across the lot by the Wrens’ family tent, in the jacket, with Kelsey in a red sweater and one boy on his shoulders and the other one attached to his leg.
He didn’t wave. I didn’t wave.
He was holding a Solo cup with his right hand. His left hand was on his son’s sneaker, keeping him steady up there.
The ring was on it. I could see it from forty yards. Maybe I couldn’t. Maybe I knew where to look.
He found my eyes exactly once, across all of it, through the smoke off somebody’s grill. It lasted about a second.
He kept it on for the whole game. Four quarters. A rain delay. The alma mater. I know because I looked, every time the camera cut to the alumni section on the big board, and every time his left hand was somewhere where a thin gold line caught the light.
He wore it home to Tulsa.
I know that because on Sunday night I got a text from a number I didn’t have saved. No words. Just a picture of a steering wheel at night, a big hand at ten o’clock, and on the pinky, down to the second knuckle, the ring.
I didn’t answer. I didn’t need to.
In January I got the job. Office with a door. The first thing I put on the desk was a Wet n Wild pencil in a coffee mug, and nobody’s asked about it, and nobody will.
