He looked down the stone path that led to the street. Seth and Dad were walking toward Dad’s SUV parked in the space in front of the house. “He won’t keep us apart!” Nick shouted, laughing when both Dad and Seth jumped, looking around wildly. “I’ll find you, my beloved! No matter where you are, we will be together. Nothing will ever come between us!”
Dad glared up at him. “Kid, I’m warning you.”
Nick blinked innocently as he leaned forward on his elbows, breath streaming from his mouth in a thick fog. “Why, Father! It’s not my fault if the neighbors hear us and think you’re trying to keep my boyfriend from me.”
Dad slid a single finger pointedly across his throat as Seth looked as if he wished a sinkhole would open up underneath him and swallow him whole. Rude. Nick was being romantic.
But then Seth looked up at Nick and said, “We’ll be together in this life or the next,” and Nick knew it was quite possible they were meant to be.
Dad sighed dramatically before steering Seth toward the SUV.
Unfortunately, it was about this time that Nick realized two things: he was alone in the house and he was still thrumming with arousal.
He didn’t think as he turned away from the window to reach for his phone. He typed in his passcode (Seth’s birthday) and opened the internet browser. He created a new incognito tab just to be safe and typed in his favorite porn site. The screen filled with stills of men in quite a few different positions that should’ve been anatomically impossible. He swiped through until he found his favorite category, a recent addition gaining traction.
Extraordinary porn.
He sat on the edge of his bed, ready to make the most of his time alone. He clicked on the third video on the list, one he was intimately familiar with. In it, a skinny man in a ridiculous costume who went by the name Boner Boy saved a rough-and-tumble dude who worked at an oil derrick that had exploded. However, since the budget for this particular piece of cinema verité didn’t allow for an actual explosion (or an actual oil derrick), it only showed the aftermath: the man covered in artfully placed smudges and most of his clothing ripped off as Boner Boy felt him up under the guise of tending to his fictitious wounds.
Nick hit play, already anticipating the first lines of dialogue.
“You’re safe now,” Boner Boy would say woodenly. “But I should check you for serious injury. Take off your pants.”
“Yes,” Rough-and-Tumble would reply. “You should check very closely as I take off my pants.”
Except no sound came from his phone.
Oh, the actors were doing their acting, and the sex was most certainly happening on-screen, but he couldn’t hear a single thing. Nick frowned, clicking the button on the side of his phone. The volume was already turned up all the way. It should’ve been loud.
He frowned. “Goddammit. I just got this phone.”
A horn honked outside, but Nick ignored it as he lowered the volume and then turned it back up to no avail. Nick was about to throw his phone down and grab his laptop when his gaze darted to the upper right corner of the screen. A little symbol blinked at him—one he knew very well.
Bluetooth.
His phone was connected via Bluetooth to … to …
He raised his head slowly in abject terror. He stood slowly, as if in a dream, and drifted toward the open window as the horn honked again. He looked out to the street below.
The windows of Dad’s SUV were rolled down. Seth’s face was in his hands. Dad was leaning out the window. As soon as he saw Nick, he waved up at him and reached over to the dashboard to turn up the volume of the sound system in the SUV.
“Yes!” Rough-and-Tumble shouted from the speakers, echoing in the street around them. “Superpound me with your Extraordinary penis! Fill me with your superqueero power! Yes! Yes!”
A neighbor looked over at the SUV before practically running away. That certainly wasn’t necessary. What a disproportionate reaction.
Nick closed the tab. Rough-and-Tumble and Boner Boy’s passionate love affair was silenced.
Nick looked back down. Seth was banging his head against the back of the seat. Nick would have felt bad if he wasn’t already filled with fiery outrage. Before he could demand that his father apologize for ruining his life, Dad spoke first, shouting, “Get your coat, kid! You’re coming with us. I think it’s time we had a talk. You. Me. Seth.” He grinned. “Bob and Martha Gray.”
Seth snapped his head toward Dad, mouth hanging open, blood draining from his face.
Nick scoffed. How bad could it really be?
2
And that’s how you make a dental dam,” Dad said at the end of a twenty-six-minute demonstration where he took scissors and cut multiple ziplock bags into large squares. Martha and Bob Gray sat on a couch in their living room, watching Dad with no small amount of interest. “I learned about it shortly after Nick came out and was saving it for a moment like this.” He jerked his head toward Nick and Seth, who were sitting in kitchen chairs they’d dragged out to the living room with the pace of prisoners in a gulag. Nick didn’t know what Seth was doing because his own mouth had dropped open, tiny sounds of pain pouring out.
Bob Gray—a barrel of a man with a devious twinkle in his eye and perpetual grime under his fingernails from his job as a super—leaned forward. “Dental dam, you say? And what’s it used for?”
“No,” Nick whispered. “No, no, no.” Seth grabbed his hand, holding on tightly.
“Protection during oral sex,” Dad said. “But not for penises. This is strictly for cunnilingus and anilingus.” He frowned, stretching one of the squares in his hands. “Or, as the kids call it these days, rimming.”
“Oh my,” Martha said, picking up one of the squares. Normally a kindly older woman with fluffy white hair and a quick wit, she’d obviously decided in the past weeks that her mission in life was to make teenagers more miserable than they already were. “Rimming. So, you just … what, put this over the genitals and it makes it safer?” She lifted the plastic square up to her face, and Seth made a sound like his intestines were being removed through his nostrils.
“These will do in a pinch,” Dad explained, as if he weren’t ruining his only son’s life. “Even cutting open a condom would work. But it’s better to use dental dams made for that express purpose. They’re usually latex or polyurethane. I don’t know if you can buy them at the grocery store, but they’re sold online.”
“Or,” Martha said, glancing at Bob, “we could shop local and support the community. There’s that one shop down on Ninth. You know the one—it’s always playing loud music and has those mannequins in the window with the fun little red balls that go in mouths and attach to the head with black straps. I bet they’d have all kinds of dental dams.”
Nick had never seen a soul depart a body before, but it looked like that was exactly what was going on with Seth.
So, naturally, Bob decided to make it worse. Or better; Nick wasn’t quite sure. Bob said, “Isn’t Seth’s Pyro Storm costume made of some sort of latex? If it comes down to it, he can put that on before he and Nick … you know.”
Nick, forgetting where he was and who he was with, whispered, “Yes. That. For safety.”