XOXO, Santa - Spencer Spears

1

Blake

Phone calls are awkward, right?

I’m 20, which according to the internet puts me solidly in Gen-Z, and according to my mom puts me solidly in the category of people who are pathologically afraid of the telephone and, “Why can’t you make your own dentist appointments, Blake, you’re allowed to buy cigarettes and porn and vote and get killed in the army and you still need your mom to call Dr. Papazian for you?”

I’d like to clarify that it’s not the telephone I’m afraid of, but the awkwardness of talking to strangers and making a fool of myself. And that extends way beyond talking to the dentist. I’m afraid to make a fool of myself in just about every situation you can imagine.

Afraid of looking like an idiot in front of my soccer teammates? Check.

Afraid of embarrassing myself in front of all the other students in my econ class? Double check.

Afraid of humiliating myself so spectacularly when I finally work up the nerve to acknowledge that I might be gay and might be interested in hooking up with a guy that I have to burn down my apartment, change my name, and move to Micronesia?

So many checks I could be a shirt from J.Crew.

Which was probably why I was putting that last bit off for as long as humanly possible.

I’d had suspicions about myself since early this fall, when I was in the locker room with some of my teammates and—you know, you can probably fill in the rest of the details on your own.

It was like the set up to every gay porn ever, which I know because I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every gay porn ever in the last few months. My porn site of choice probably has a file on me in a special ‘IP addresses we have concerns about’ directory.

But in my defense, watching gay porn really did start out as a research question. I’d been watching straight porn since—well, way before I was allowed to buy it, let’s just put it that way. And I’d slept with girls. More than I’m proud of, to be honest. All evidence would point to me being straight.

Until my friends Matty and Dev had a literal dick-measuring contest in the showers one day. Matty grabbed my dick and put it next to his and I yelled at him and laughed—and then had a wet dream about him jerking me off that night like a freaking middle-schooler.

I tried to brush it off. Tell myself it was just because I hadn’t gotten laid in a while. Convince myself it was the kind of thing that could happen to any completely straight, completely non-questioning college guy with friends who didn’t respect personal space.

Until I dreamed about it again.

And again.

And again.

And each night, the dream changed a little. By the end of the week, it wasn’t just Matty giving me a handy, it was Matty on his hands and knees in the showers with me behind him, eating his ass—something I hadn’t even done with a girl.

I couldn’t look him in the eye for the rest of the semester—not knowing the kinds of situations my brain had concocted for the two of us. Not when I could still hear the way he whimpered—or the way my brain had decided he would whimper—as I sucked him off.

Definitely not.

I couldn’t handle it. I could not have a crush on a teammate, I could not be thinking about him naked, or any guys naked, or any guys at all. This had to just be a weird kink.

A humiliation fetish, maybe. Like maybe I wanted to be embarrassed, and hooking up with a dude was the most embarrassing thing my brain could come up with.

Or maybe it was the fact that it felt forbidden. Maybe I was just turned on by anything that felt wrong, like public sex and shit like that.

Or maybe, actually, Matty was secretly a trans girl and just hadn’t come out yet, but I was somehow picking up on it on a subliminal level and the fact that I’d been having dreams about the two of us together was just an example of how non-transphobic I was, that I was so straight, so attracted to women, that I was even attracted to them before they’d transitioned.

All of those things were theoretically possible, right?

I was taking a chem class that fall as a general education requirement, and that must have been what inspired me: I would tackle this problem with the scientific method.

Hypothesis 1: I had