California Sun

Brandon’s older brother had a Puerto Rican girlfriend. I don’t remember her name but she was always hanging around at Brandon’s place with her jangling bracelets and tattoos, calling Brandon and I ‘carajitos’ and asking if we wanted one of her cigarettes before smirking and saying that we were too young. I hated the way she did that (also because we didn’t need her to give us cigarettes) but never had the words with which to refute her sneer. I regarded her with a heady mixture of resentment and lust.

Brandon’s brother told us that her tits tasted like ocean water. He made a show of pulling her into his room and then noisily having sex with her before strutting shirtless through the lounge to the kitchen and then back into his bedroom, leaving us to sit mutely on the worn couch.

In this way we spent the summer of 1996; simultaneously bored in the stifled air of Brandon’s mother’s apartment and constrictedly aroused by the girlfriend’s withering hips.

It was another nameless afternoon in the apartment when Brandon and I decided that, rather than just listening to the sound humping through the door, we’d hide in his brother’s closet with the intention of catching a glimpse of her imagined pussy at the receiving end of his thrusts.

When we saw his brother’s car pull up in the parking lot we rushed into his room and secreted ourselves in the mouldy closet between the hanging shirts and piled shoes. I was taller than Brandon and slipped behind him as we shifted ourselves around in the cramped space.

The apartment front door open.

“They’re not here,” Brandon’s brother’s voice registered satisfaction, “You know what that means, baby!”

There was the sound of grabbing and pushing and pulling, and then her voice “What’s it mean big guy? You gonna get tough on me?”

Again his voice, “Today I’m fucking you out on the balcony for the whole world to see!”

“That’s a lot of talk for a guy who lives with his mom!”

And then there was the sound of him chasing her through the apartment. Brandon and I remained frozen in the dark of the cupboard as we traced their movement with our ears. Jeans were discarded amid the jangle of bracelets and laughter turned to hissed words as the mattress on the bed groaned under their crashing weight.

And all the while Brandon and I remained motionless in the blind cupboard, suddenly trapped in its confines and without a plan for what to do as the sounds of clumsy but forceful sex grew beyond the door.

Eventually I leaned forward to prompt Brandon to open the cupboard door. His hand came up to the door and pushed cautiously at it. A thin shaft of afternoon light fell across his face and I leaned into him furtively.

The sound of his brother and girlfriend’s sex mixed with the rustle of hung clothing in the cupboard. And we stood there, trapped; unable to see any of it.

But what remains with me to this day is not the hips of the girlfriend, not the jangling of her bracelets — not the promise of her unseen vagina. What remains with me is the fresh scent of Brandon’s hair that wafted into my brain and the shaft of Carlifornian afternoon sun that fell across the pale skin of his cheek as I leaned into him.
And I stood there behind him; for the first time letting myself feel the closeness of his body and not wanting it to end.