Page 13 of Sean's Sunshine
Sean’s mouth twisted. “Well, it’s been a while since I had regular sex, so I wouldn’t know either.”
Billy cocked his head. “Mr. I-Stole-Your-DVDs didn’t put out?”
Sean raised his free shoulder. “He was a fireman and still in the closet. He saw me when he could, and then I’d get the hose.”
Billy’s eyebrows went up. “Booty call? You were booty call?”
Sean sucked air in through his teeth. “I wouldn’t put it likethat—”
“That don’t make it not true!” Billy protested. “Man, that’s dirty. You shouldn’t have to be a booty call.”
Sean simply stared at him and raised his eyebrows, and Billy rolled his eyes in return.
“Yeah, so I just had sex on camera for money, but that was my choice. If I hadn’t liked the guy, I could have told Dex no—we have that right. It’s in our contracts. But this guy, he just calls you up when he’s off and says, ‘Hey, buttercup, let’s have a relationship’? That’s not right. I did that to a girl for a little while.” He grimaced. “Not my finest hour.”
Sean blinked.Thatwas a curveball. “Bi?” he queried, feeling lost at sea.
“Questioning, I guess.” Billy shrugged. “At least right after I started porn. I’d had exactly one relationship before porn, and I was like, ‘This don’t feel like what sex is supposed to feel like. Maybe I’m not gay.’”
“And…?” Sean couldn’t help it. He wasdyingof curiosity about something that was absolutely none of his business.
“And I had an on/off thing with a girl I met in school. And when we were on, we went to movies and shit, and we had a good time. And the sex was meh, but she was great—which was why it was off and on, I guess. But….” He shrugged and, for the first time in Sean’s recollection, seemed embarrassed. “I lived in the flophouse. There was sex and guys who wanted no strings ontap.And if you weren’t having it, you were watching someone else have it. Eventually I had to concede, you know? That when I wanted it, and it was for fun, I’d rather it be one of the guys at the flophouse than this really awesome girl. I finally had to turn her loose, but it was hard.” Another shrug. “I still miss her. If I hadn’t fucked the whole thing up with sex, she would have been a really good friend.”
Which was more than Sean could say about Jesse. “He was a fireman,” he admitted. “You don’t expect a fireman to be a douchebag.”
Billy laughed softly. “I hear you. But hey, you should know by now. Any guy can be a douchebag. My old man was a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army, but he was an asshole with a heavy fist at home. Yeah, he looks like a hero on his service record. Me and the little kids, we got to see the wrong side of that coin, you know? Anybody can be a douchebag. The trick, I think, is to walk away from the people who are.”
Sean had seen his share of domestic abuse survivors when he’d been a beat cop—had, in fact, been on first-name terms with the social workers assigned to his beat. “Not so easy to do when you’re a kid.”
Billy looked away. It was his turn to shrug. “No,” he said quietly. “But it does give you something to shoot for when you grow up, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Your old man was a good guy?” Billy asked, almost wistfully.
Sean suppressed the urge to deflect. “He… well, yes. Mostly.” It served him right. Wanting to know about Billy. Prompting him to talk. There was always stuff about your own life that was hard to share.
“That was committed,” Billy said, raising his eyebrows above those cynical eyes.
And it was the cynicism that did Sean in. He couldn’t change his relationship with his father—his father had been dead for going on ten years. But hecouldkeep his relationship with this young man honest.
“He was not comfortable with me being gay,” Sean said bluntly. “He tried. I mean, I think if he’d lived longer, he would have gotten it. But he was still at the point where if my sister was razzing me about a crush, he’d shut down the discussion, when everybody else’s love life was fair game. When I said I wanted to major in criminal justice, follow in the old man’s footsteps, he….” Sean shrugged.
“He told you it was maybe not for you people?” Billy hazarded.
“Close. I mean….” He grimaced at Billy, knowing he’d still had it good. “Wasn’t a beatdown. Could have been worse.”
Billy nodded thoughtfully. “Still hurt.” He rubbed his chest. “Am I right?”
“Yeah.” The silence hung heavily between them in the dim room, and Sean realized how… howhappyit made him that Billy came in to talk.
He would have to continue to be candid and real to make sure he did it again. “So to answer your question, my dad was a good guy. I wish he could have lived longer so he could have learned to understand me, but what I had wasn’t bad.”
Billy gave him a shuttered smile. “That’s… I gotta say, that’s good to hear. I mean, after the stories from the flophouse. There’s not many stories in a gay-porn studio that start with, ‘My dad’s a great guy and he loves this job so much!’”
Sean’s laugh surprised even him.“Yeah, that would be a tough sell. Even supportive parents might be a little bit, ‘Oh, honey, I can pay your tuition, you know….’”
Billy nodded. “Yeah, although thereisthe occasional Mrs. Bobby’s Mom.”