This is what you get for coming up to me outside the club that night last spring, in the parking lot, when it was hot and damp and just after two. This is what I get for standing by myself, a little drunk, a little disappointed, for seeing you look at me, look past your buddies, who I could tell even then were young, younger than me. This is what I get for smiling back when I saw you and suddenly one of those tragic girls who only consort with the pretty boys who will never love them back approached me and asked me my name, and I told her, I told her and never stopped looking at you. This is what your fag hag gets for skipping back to you in her horrid, pointlessly short skirt and torn midriff, skipping back and telling you I was nice and my name was Russ and I was cute and now she might be going home alone. This is what I get for getting my hopes up that night, especially after you came up to me right after you got her okay, came up to me and kissed me, kissed me sweet and ruthless as cocaine. This is what you get for pulling an older boy close to you in the parking lot, in front of everyone, letting his arms envelop you like new property. This is what you get for going out on a school night.

This is what I get for writing my phone number on your smooth, flat belly after you couldn't find a piece of paper. This is what I get for running my hands across your abs, taut from soccer and hyperactivity, after I wrote my number and the ink from the laundry pen whose presence in my pocket still mystifies me, the ink smudged beneath my fingers, streaking with the languor of a white lie around to your side until you caught my hand in yours. This is what your fingers get for being dry and delicate like discovered bones. This is what I get for not insisting you come home with me, and damn your mother and damn your classes and damn your friends, eager to solidify their own loneliness over coffee and generic cigarettes at the all-night pancake house downtown.

This is what you get for being a beautiful boy. This is what you get for imagining the world as your mirror. This is what I get for seizing beauty in the parking lot of the city's one gay club in the early hours of a weekday morning, hearing the gravel shift and cough beneath our feet as you pressed your mouth against mine. This is what I get for listening to the drone of the tires driving home alone after that kiss and imagining it a stolen serenade.

This is what you get for actually calling. This is what I get for answering the phone. This is what we get for being a generation apart. This is what we get for talking for hours in nothing but the sticky, embarrassing lexicon of lurid fantasies. This is what I get for having a sexual imagination that shimmies down the corridors of voyeurism and emotional perversion. This is what you get for getting off on the novelty of me, after so many afternoons bending over closeted teammates and confused underclassmen. This is what I get for mistaking enthusiasm for passion. This is what you get for not being able to sneak out of your house.

This is what you get for not paying your cell phone bill. This is what I get for never asking your last name. This is what we get for never discussing the groggy, sepia-tinged sameness of our daylight hours. This is what I get for easing with surprising gratitude back into the belief any call after midnight is cause for alarm.

This is what the months get for passing, unnoticed and unmissed like distant relatives, like kisses in a field before the wash of headlights exposes us all.

This is what you get for not having a car. This is what I get for having nowhere to go on Saturday night. This is what your friend gets for just wanting to get rid of you and snapping at me to help him find the cell phone you lost somewhere in the yard beside his house in the still, colorless hours of the morning. This is what you get for having lousy friends. This is what you get for not being old enough to realize only housewives mix alcohol and mood stabilizers. This is what you get for sliding into the car of a man you hadn't spoken to for months. This is what you get for agreeing to go to my place first. This is what I get for allowing myself to believe the same idea hadn't occurred to you.

This is what I get for not keeping my apartment clean. This is what I get for kissing you, with the television on and the room stinking of cigarettes. This is what I get for being an opportunist. This is what you get for having no other way home.

This is what we get for leaving our clothes scattered along the hallway like the breadcrumbs of a doomed child. This is what you get for flicking off the light I had left on in my bedroom. This is what you get for not letting me inside you. This what I get for lying facedown on the bed and you climb on top of me and begin to shunt back and forth like a boy on a coin-operated rocking horse outside the supermarket. This is what I get for looking behind me and watching your face, lips drawn tight, eyelids fluttering, lost but not just inside me. This is what you get, Kyle, this is what you get. So take it, take everything and take it again.