Boyfriends with Girlfriends Read Online Free Page B

Darrell insisted. “Please?”
    Lance tried his best not to “act gay,” whatever that meant, as he met Darrell’s dad, a glum, unsmiling man, and his mom, an equally stern-looking woman.
    “Don’t tell anyone about this, okay?” Darrell whispered as he walked Lance outside.
    “Okay,” Lance agreed, feeling a little dazed. This wasn’t how he’d imagined his first sexual experience. Shouldn’t he feel like singing as in some musical—or at least humming?
    He had to tell somebody about it. As always, that someone was Allie.
    “Darrell Wright is gay ?” She giggled and gasped. “No way!”
    “Way,” Lance replied. “And he kind of said I act gay. Do you think I do? Come on. Tell me. Be honest.”
    “Well . . .” Allie hesitated, not sure how he’d take it. “ . . . Maybe, sometimes, a little.”
    He perched his hands on his hips and rolled his eyes. “I didn’t mean that honest!”
    “See?” she said. “Like when you stand like that and roll your eyes.”
    “Why, what’s wrong with how I’m standing?”
    “Nothing is wrong with it; it’s just not something most straight guys do.”
    “Okay.” He crossed his arms. “I’ll stop doing it.”
    “Babe, you shouldn’t change who you are just to please Darrell. Maybe you should just wait for a different guy.”
    But it was too late: Lance had already begun to fall for Darrell. Hard. Head-over-sneakers hard. Harder than he’d ever crushed on any boy.
    At school, Darrell avoided any acknowledgment of him beyond, “’Sup?”
    Nevertheless, Lance invited him to sit at his group’s table.
    “Thanks,” Darrell said. “But I don’t want people to get ideas.”
    “Um, what ideas?”
    “About us . . . Look, you can be whatever you want, but . . . I can’t.”
    “Yes, you can. Just come out!”
    “I can’t,” Darrell insisted, and the next time they were together, he explained, “My parents would disown me. Besides, I still want to get married and have kids someday.”
    “You can do that with a guy,” Lance argued.
    “Not with my family.” Darrell gave a hopeless sigh. “And even if I could, it wouldn’t be the same.”
    “But if you’re gay, you’re gay,” Lance persisted.
    “I’m not sure I’m gay,” Darrell said, despite having had his hands inside Lance’s pants. “I’m not going to come out.”
    And yet every few days he once again waited for Lance after school.
    When they were apart, Lance phoned, e-mailed, and texted him constantly: Where r u? Miss u. And an hour later: Sup? What r u doing now? When asleep, he even dreamed about him. He couldn’t get Darrell out of his mind. He loved his foresty smell, his dark-dark skin, his gleaming white smile. He ached to do everything with him, spend every moment together.
    “I can’t help feeling kind of sorry for him,” Lance explained to Allie. “I’m the only person he’s really open to. Maybe with time, he’ll change and accept he’s gay.”
    “Are you sure about this?” Allie asked.
    “No,” Lance admitted, “but I’m sure I love him.”
    Nonetheless, as the days passed Darrell and he got into more and more arguments, mostly about the closety sneaking around and Darrell’s not wanting to be seen with him in public. And yet Lance couldn’t give him up. Instead he decided to try harder. Maybe if he told Darrell how he really felt, then Darrell would change and come out.
    “I love you,” Lance finally told him one afternoon. His pulse beat wildly while he waited for Darrell to say it back. . . . But Darrell didn’t.
    “I can’t do this anymore,” Darrell said and turned away.
    Lance’s heart sank like a stone.
    “What did I do wrong?” he asked Allie over the phone afterward. “I only want to love him.”
    “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Allie consoled him. “It’s not about you. But maybe you should ease up on him. give him some space.”
    Lance cut back on texts and IMs. But even so, Darrell no longer waited for him after school. And he