Zack in the Woods
I met Zack in the woods. Well, I met him online before I met him in the woods. His profile was sparse in the I don’t care about this and don’t need this but here I am anyway kind of way. His bio empty, accompanied by three photos, two of which were clearly taken on film cameras.
He was handsome in a plain way with fair features and what could be interpreted as Rosacea. The clothing in his pictures looked worn out, but intentionally so. They paired together modestly, though with an understood intention. All of these elements combined gave off an aloofness to the aloofness and, despite the dullness of the conversations we had in the lead up to our meeting in the woods, I was intrigued.
We walked along a trail that we assumed was much longer. After several loops, we went the other direction to a path that spit us out into a parking lot of what appeared to be student housing. There was curiously a picnic table, so we sat down and he told me about his roommate who was trying to regrow his foreskin by hanging weights from the skin of his dick. I exchanged a story about my former roommate, Noora from Finland, who drank Sprite in our living room at 6 in the morning and eventually got evicted when our landlord found out her boyfriend had moved in with us. He clarified that his roommate was a good guy, just a strange guy, to which I said Norah was not a good person, but that’s neither here nor there.
I was worried that I was coming off mean, or like the kind of person who talks about how shitty other people are to distract from something they feel deficient in. The impulse to share things about people who were shitty in the past was something I had hoped would stop as I refined my sense of taste in things I had historically neglected and had more to talk about, but my skill in holding onto things prevailed here, I guess.
The conversation progressed in the way these conversations typically do. Hometown, career path, Housewives or Drag Race or both, coming out, the works. Zack’s conversation style was unhurried but not in a I’ve practiced mindfulness for years type of way as much as it was a I genuinely don’t care type of way. Whenever I meet these types of people, I am confused. Everyone in my life is neurotic, clumsy, and anxious. I have a shakiness that was clearly passed down from my mother who got it from her mother, and no amount of deep breathing or meditation could make me calm in a conversation with a stranger at a picnic table in the woods.
We agreed to keep seeing each other in the way that you do on these things. You hug each other, see how that feels, and say something like let’s do this again and discuss your schedule for the next week or so. We did this, exactly, and figured sometime this weekend would be good. We parted ways and I sat in the car and reflected on how taut his body felt when we hugged.
By the time I got home, my Mom had already begun making dinner, so I drank two White Claws and listened to her explain what she had done to the bathroom that afternoon. After dinner, I grabbed another White Claw and ate a square of the THC-infused chocolates I had in our freezer. I turned the air conditioning on high and scrolled on my phone while Real Housewives of New York played beyond my phone screen.
There was always a moment during these nights when a switch would flip in my mind and I would get horny, in a mischievous way. I would open up the apps and see who I could talk to that would match this mood. It typically wasn’t that hard; after all gay men are still men, and men are largely dumb and horny and uninterested in what things we might think we should do before sending nude pictures back and forth on the internet.
I rarely had the intention of meeting up with these men, so I would try out different personalities and approaches to see what landed or didn’t land. Most people would immediately pick up on my general inclination towards submission and tell me how badly they wanted to eat my ass.
I don’t particularly enjoy getting my ass eaten, but I always play along because that’s what good subs do. I loved how quickly I could bring these men to a boiling point, their desperation for sex bursting through my phone screen. It was my own self-serving edging; they thought they were controlling me, but I held the power in denying them what I dangled in front of them. It’s me who decides if you get off, in the end.
When it came to people like Zack, however, I liked to build up a fantasy before we had sex. During our first date, I learned Zack was a beach lifeguard when he was in high school, so I took that and imagined that we were in school together. Him, the handsome and chill beach lifeguard who mostly kept to himself; me, the kid who spoke a little bit too much in class but was generally well-liked, with a reputation for being maybe just a little annoying. We hadn’t spoken much in school that I could recall, but several chance encounters that summer let us build a rapport. I’d notice things, and reflect them to him. He’d shrug, say huh and we’d carry on. Eventually, we’d be hanging alone and he’d suggest we go to his room and before we knew it he’d be on top of me. The weight of his body was enough for me, but of course he wanted more from me, which I gladly gave to him. We did this all summer long, none of our friends knew, our little secret.
That weekend I drove over to Zack’s apartment, not far from the student housing and the picnic table we hung out on earlier in the week. I had spent about an hour in the bathroom douching just in case, telling my mom that it took me a while to trim my beard just right. When I arrived, Zack was holding a Brooklyn Lager in his hand and invited me in. What’s up was the first thing he said before he sat down on a chair that immediately reclined back. His roommate Kevin, a different roommate from the one who was trying to regrow his foreskin, was on the couch that, by process of elimination, was my place to sit.
Zack and Kevin were dressed quite similarly — distressed t-shirts that were, at one point, likely uniforms for some sort of blue collar job that neither of them had ever worked, and never would. These were paired with loose fitting, straight legged pants, and dirty looking socks with holes in them. They revealed that they were friends since 8th grade and had lived together throughout college and the ensuing years after, so the convergence in style made sense.
Kevin was more cheerful than Zack, asking questions that indicated he was enthusiastic about the pending response. During the first couple minutes, Zack was scrolling on his phone indicating that he’d already heard what I was telling Kevin and he didn’t necessarily wish to participate again. He continued to sip his beer, and I continued to glance back at the dirt that had accumulated all of the bottom of his socks, feeling both disgusted in myself (I should have higher standards) and turned on (I’ve always loved dirty feet).
As the first couple of hours unfolded, I wondered if they had ever fooled around with each other. Kevin was attractive, too, but in the goofy way that leads you to be somewhat surprised when you notice your attraction to him. He was taller than Zack by several inches and he worked as a software engineer for an insurance company. I wondered what Zack had told Kevin about me, if anything at all.
As our conversation continued, I realized that the three of us were hanging out together, not just me and Zack. Had I douched for nothing? I was trying to keep my mind open, inviting new ways to build my fantasy further.
Eventually, after reporting nearly all the basics to Kevin that I covered in my first date with Zack, the plan materialized that we should have a drink somewhere. We found our way to a dive bar that had a subtle year-round Halloween theme. Kevin and Zack ran through their greatest hits from eighth grade on while I slowly sipped an IPA, nodding along.
I wondered how often they did this. Was this the precursor to a group sex situation or did they simply have an immature, boundary-less friendship where they never left each other alone. The latter option was, of course, boring, so I started to convince myself that they were circling around the idea of the three of us fucking. Once we had a few more drinks in us, maybe we’d all go back to their apartment, Zack joining Kevin and myself on the couch, our leg hair forced together, transferring our body heat in a way that would immediately turn the mood erotic.
It was nearly 11PM when we ambled back to their apartment, putting this fantasy to the test. Zack unlocked the front door and threw his hand in an upwards motion, igniting an overhead light that immediately killed any sense of eroticism from the evening. He flopped back into the chair next to the couch and put on the season one finale of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City, which aired earlier that week. We watched in a silence, laughing occosionally, indicating our collective end-of-day malaise and, as the credits rolled, I announced my departure and we made plans to hang again in a few days or so.
I spent the next five days combing through the events of the night, wondering if this was a good second date or Zack’s way of gently letting me down. Was inviting your roommate to tag along a normal thing to do that, perhaps, people who were generally more relaxed than me did with regularity, or was this Zack’s way of firmly placing me in the friend zone? I contemplated these questions while continuing my usual routine: drink a few White Claws, eat dinner with my Mom, get a little stoned, and scroll Grindr while watching Housewives.
Each night, usually right before bed, I’d use Grindr’s explore feature to see if Zack was online. I’d briefly look at a square with a lithe, hairless torso, with a small green dot, indicating that this torso was online now. My heart would sink, assuming it was Zack. I’d slug down the remnants of my White Claw and force myself asleep.
As I drifted to sleep I wondered what he was doing at that moment; probably talking to some boy with abs and a cooler demeanor than mine, sending him his address amid other one word responses. I traveled along a spectrum of emotions from jealousy to arousal as I imagined him with someone other than me. We hadn’t even kissed yet, but I could vividly see how he’d take this imaginary boy’s shirt off, how he’d kiss his neck, how he'd stick his fingers inside of him, how he’d leave his dirty socks on. Suddenly, I wanted to be there, watching Zack fuck this boy he barely knew, ignoring me in the corner while I watched him give this boy what he wouldn’t give me. I’d stop myself here, tell myself to think about something else; you’re too damn high, and Zack fucking sucks, anyway.
On the sixth day, I was walking through the park near my house when I felt my phone buzz. A new text from Zack:
sup?
My heart lurched. I read this one word over and over, and, despite telling myself to wait 20 minutes or so, replied immediately:
Hey! Not too much, just on a walk, haha. How have you been?
We exchanged five or so texts back and forth, Zack offering a vague explanation for his silence (work stuff) which didn’t quite make sense (he was in grad school… did he ever mention having a job, too?). He invited me over that evening and before I knew it, we were standing on his fire escape, passing a joint back and forth.
Outside of my nightly THC-infused chocolate square, I hadn’t been smoking much weed, so I got very high, very quickly. My surroundings, an old, dilapidated house that had been chopped up into several apartment buildings for undergrad students, came into that stark, almost frightening view that I could only access when I was too high. I began to ask myself what the hell I was doing hanging out on a college campus, even if Zack was technically in grad school.
We went back inside and I began to explain some movie that I saw recently, but I quickly realized that Zack wasn’t listening and I couldn’t really follow what I was saying. We finally found ourselves on the couch together, our legs touching, the apartment vacant except for us – Kevin was away visiting his parents and the foreskin stretcher had moved out, information that clued me into the fact that their lease was up at the end of the week and Kevin and Zack would be moving to the next town over.
As we sat on the couch, I stared at Zack with a smirk, trying to pull something out of him. He gazed ahead, seemingly absent, not in a bored or sad way, but in a generally calm, thoughtless way. That’s not to say he was dumb; he was smart, getting a Master’s Degree, after all. But he wasn’t excited or particularly passionate about anything, it seemed, but he definitely noticed nothing around him which in this moment included me.
Despite the way that I felt almost too high to distinguish my body from the cushions on Zack’ couch, I started to get really horny as I often did when I was stoned like this. Within the instant that my mood shifted, he looked over at me and asked me if we should go to his room. I croaked back, yes, and then, taking in the surroundings of the apartment, the wall that didn’t quite reach the floorboard, the nearly empty pack of cigarettes stationed by the door, returned to my fantasy of running into Zack at the beach.
Once we made our way into his room, we made out with our bodies pressed together as close as possible; something made necessary by the size of his twin bed, which was not made revealing navy blue sheets that smelled slightly musty. We continued in this position for 10 minutes or so when I maneuvered him aside, his back onto the bed, lifting my leg over his hips, straddling him.
As we continued kissing in this position, the room began to spin and my vision started to blur. Something in my face must have told him that I wasn’t feeling quite alright, because he asked me so, to which I said, can we stop for a minute. The borders of my body continued to pulse, getting mixed up with whatever surfaces it touched for the next several hours, until Zack drove me home and swerved out of the way when I tried to give him a kiss.
I spent the entire next day laying in bed, watching Housewives, and lamenting the fact that I still couldn’t figure out how to be one of those guys who can smoke weed in the afternoon and fuck the guy who got him high.
Eventually, around 5PM, Zack texted me:
last night was fun
I didn’t think it was fun, but his complete ignorance of what I thought was a very obvious freakout convinced me otherwise.
Yeah it was :)
Let’s do it again soooooon.
Another five days or so went by without a word from Zack when I decided to reach out.
Whatcha up to tonight? I typed, my wrist watch reporting a time of 1:30PM. The hours slowly ticked by, until we were firmly in the “tonight” of my question, which was clearly answered by his silence.
I never saw Zack again; not in his apartment, not in the woods. Only on the illuminated screen on my iPhone, looking at a thumbnail of a torso, wondering who Zack had found to spend the night with, and how they might be better than me.