The Agony of Pete’s Ecstasy
That summer of love in the corn
I don’t know who started the making out. Probably me. I usually started things that summer, my first summer as an adult. The summer I sometimes can’t bear to remember.
When Jason pulled off his sweaty tee shirt, I told him he was an idiot. “Not here in the corn, fool. You’ll get paper cuts all over your skin.”
I might have been kissing him already when I said that, the hot-sweat perfume of him filling me up, the comfort of his forever-ness completing me. I shouldn’t have felt chills in the hot-towel air, but I was shaking and cold even though I knew 90 degree temps were brewing up a storm.
I could smell it.
“Might be a tornado coming,” I said, pulling back just a little from Jason’s lips to eye the bright sun. “Feel it?”
He moaned, not loud, just enough to prickle up my skin. He ran dry lips down my cheek to my neck and ruined everything with true words. “I love you, Pete. You know I always have, right? For as long as I can remember.”
I didn’t mean to jump. I didn’t mean to say, “Fuck that!” I especially didn’t mean to tell Jason I hated him. But I did.
I did mean to turn and run, to get as far away from my best friend as fast as I could. Damn him! Our secrets were supposed to stay silent in the corn. I ran down one row, slipped into another and ran some more. I heard him chasing after me, calling, stumbling, sounding like he was crying.
Damn him!
I kept crashing across rows until I almost ran out of cornfield. But he just kept coming, sounding like … like a god damn girl, for fuck’s sake.
Everybody always said me and Jason were like brothers. Our moms were best friends when we were born two weeks apart, and they stayed best friends. We lived in identical little vinyl-sided houses in a tiny town on a little street bordering the corn and the creek bluff.
Jason is my first memory.
Something about playing in his driveway on our Big Wheels. No matter what happened later, nobody can take that from me. Not even Jason.
I remember when we went to school for the first time, me with my Ninja Turtles backpack, him with a Barney lunchbox. We were both scared, and I cried when our moms left us there, but then it was all right because I was with Jason and that made everything normal and safe.
So when he called out through the corn, “I can hear you, I know you’re there. Do you really hate me?” what was I supposed to do? Of course I didn’t hate him. I never did, no matter what anybody tells you.
I sighed and told him the truth, even though I couldn’t see him through the corn. “I never hated you, I hate me. Please just leave me alone.”
“The creek’s only a few rows over,” he said, his voice as hot and accusing as the sun. “Can’t we just cool off and pretend I didn’t say what I said? I didn’t mean to!”
“Fuck it!” I said to myself, calling out something only slightly more friendly to him as I worked my out of the field. I was so covered in sweat and sticky yellow pollen I was desperate to cool off.
I stepped on a field mouse mound as I broke into the open, little rodents scattering everywhere as they squeaked and squealed. When I lifted my eyes from the terror my Keds caused, Jason was standing right there in the crabgrass and thistles.
His poor chest was pink and crisscrossed with red corn cuts. I sucked in my breath. “I told you not to take your shirt off. That’s gonna sting for days.”
It just came out, me protecting Jason. Looking out for him is what I did, as automatic as breathing. But the way he was looking at me! I hated myself so much! How could I ever admit I felt the same way he was looking?
He was too damn beautiful for words, only I wasn’t supposed to think like that! I loved how he made me feel and hated that I felt it.
He tried to tell me he was sorry for saying he loved me, but I shut him down. I’d known it was true forever, but if we talked about it, it’d be way too real. No way could I EVER tell Jason how much I loved him.
How fucked up is that?
His sister had been waiting for me to say the same thing to her for two years. The night before had been hell. We went out driving, picked up soft custard cones at the Dairy Barn, and talked until midnight.
Talked? We parked is what we did, at a deserted campsite off an unmaintained road nobody knew about except for high school kids looking for privacy. Somebody’s old Buick was already parked under the pines when we pulled up.
She kept inching closer, smelling like perfume and powder. Somewhere underneath all that she smelled like Jason, which just confused me. All I could think about was how Jason and I never had sex until a few weeks before. The summer we turned into adults.
When I touched him for the first time, he jumped like I’d stuck his finger in an electrical outlet. I don’t know why I did it. We’d just graduated and we snuck a bottle of brandy into the fields, stepping over ankle high corn. We fell on our backs drinking and counting shooting stars until my hand just did what it did, reached out and caressed his chest like it was the most normal, natural, wonderful thing in the world.
He kissed me first, which began the most ecstatic, agonizing summer of my life.
In the car, when his sister reached out to touch my chest, reached out like I’d reached out to him, I couldn’t think about anything but him. I responded … at first. I kissed her and pulled her in a little close, ran my hands over her back, but when my fingers crossed her bra straps, I shuddered.
She sat up straight. “Take me home, Pete.”
“What? Why?”
“Just start the damn car and take me home.”
She was sweet enough about it once we pulled into her driveway. His driveway. “This is supposed to be our last summer,” she said. “You go away to college in September and I start senior year. I’ve wasted … spent … two years hoping you’d look at me the way you look at Jason. I’m done trying, OK? Let’s just be friends and leave it at that.”
She got out of the car and walked up the walk with dainty little steps that held no anger. She even turned and waved before she opened the door. Which only made me feel worse.
Am I a monster for pulling around the corner then sneaking back and climbing through Jason’s window and into his bed? For not even telling him his sister and I had called it off?
That’s all I could think about the next day in the corn grown so high it was taller than both of us.
Jason’s scratched-up chest wasn’t the object of just my pity and concern. It was the object of my desire. My lust. I knew if I didn’t do something quick, I’d walk over and run my hands over his hot skin. I needed to feel the electric ripples I raised when I touched him. I needed to merge into him and make him part of me forever.
Instead, I looked down at the field mice still scurrying away from the wreck I’d made of their home. I shook my head, yanked my tee shirt off and ran toward the bluff that hid the creek.
I jumped without looking first, not knowing if the water was deep enough to break the twenty-foot fall, not particularly caring whether I’d crash into rocks or splash and sink into cool.
When I hit the water and drifted toward the bottom, I held my breath and dreamed. I pretended nobody would care if Jason and me were boyfriends. I pretended we’d go off to college together and just be a couple, like it didn’t matter. I pretended we’d come home for Thanksgiving and Christmas and tell our parents everything. I pretended we’d all go to church together and everybody would smile and be happy with us.
I pretended I didn’t know how people would really treat us. I pretended I was as strong as my best friend who I loved so much it hurt.
When my head finally bobbed to the surface, he was screaming from way up on the bluff. Scared for me. Which just made me annoyed again. I called him a drama queen and told him to fucking jump already.
He fell into into the water feet first, kind of slid in like a knife, toes pointed and eyes open. When he came to the surface, we fought, bobbing around in the water and calling each other gay.
“I’m not gay!” I yelled.
I can’t be gay, I insisted to myself. I love Jason because I always have. Because he’s as much a part of me as I am of him.
We fought about his sister as we made our way into knee-high water. We fought about each other and about having sex as we watched the storm roar in like a freight train, black clouds belching low on the horizon, deafening us with drums that pounded one on top of the other, over and over.
When rain finally sheeted down and churned up the creek, something inside me snapped. I felt the spray stinging his face like it was stinging me. I felt the cuts on his chest like they were my own private agony.
I knew what I had to do. “A do-ever!” I screamed over the storm. “Let me say it first!”
He picked me up by the waist, groaning. Then he put me down and told me were supposed to kiss first. He started it that time. He started a real kiss that lasted and lasted.
But I didn’t forget what I’d started. I whispered it first into his ear. “I love you, Jason.” Then I shouted it over the thunder. Again and again. “I love you, Jason, and I don’t care who knows!”
But when he asked me what we were going to tell his sister, my ecstasy faded. I took his hand and told him the truth again, as hard as it was. “I don’t think I can do that. Even though I really love you.”
That’s when I knew our ecstasy wasn’t going to prevent more heartbreak. Love isn’t always enough, even though Jason and I tried so hard to make it be.
But please know this, no matter what anyone tells you, we really did love each other that summer in the corn. The words we spoke were true, no matter what came next.
James Finn is a long-time LGBTQ activist, an alumnus of Queer Nation and Act Up NY, an essayist occasionally published in queer news outlets, and an “agented” novelist. Send questions, comments, and story ideas to [email protected].
Want to read Jason’s side of the story? You figure out who’s the more reliable narrator. They each think they’re telling the unvarnished truth.
This story is a response to Prism & Pen’s writing prompt The Agony and the Ecstasy.