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moments we would have together. But we sat, with our backs to it, in our own silence. “I can’t talk or I’ll cry,” Rachelle said, breaking the silence.
    â€œYou’ll probably get Tybalt,” I said to Peter.
    â€œNo. Too good-looking,” said Rachelle. “He’ll get Paris and a really good role in something new.”
    â€œSomething new?”
    â€œMark my words.”
    Soon my thoughts shifted to the future, my future. All I could think about was getting to Daniel, and sharing another celebratory bottle with him. I didn’t want to drag this out any longer. Rachelle would get weepy if she had any more to drink—there was still a stocked mini-bar after all—and Peter was probably just thinking about his next role. I’m sure I’d already departed as far as they were concerned. We kissed, hugged, I took my bags and my cheesecake and tried not to run into anyone else, as I ran to him.
    Â 
    When I got to Daniel’s, we celebrated the Company’s departure and my new life. In the moonlight on the bed, after Daniel separated the seeds from the stems, we smoked and then we stuffed ourselves on cake and each other. We lay on our backs looking out into the treetops and he told me about an abusive father and a doting mother as he traced his fingers through the shadows above our heads. I told him about the big empty house in Edmonton and the anticipation of siblings who never arrived—how my father’s family humiliated my mother until it was revealed it was father who was reproductively challenged. (Was I a one-shot deal? If not, who was my real father?) Father appeased his guilt, starting with her first mink coat and continuing with her very own convertible—that woman drove a shrewd bargain. As a result, my mother referred to me as her “perfect boy.” The term was loaded with, “Since I can only have one, then he is perfect; in fact he is the only perfect male in this house…”
    There, in the dark, was something I had never shared with another person. We weren’t hiding in a closet or a motel room. He stayed on the bed and I moved to the floor, leaning against the bed. He touched the top of my head with his long fingers. We were two men, two complete and naked physical beings, comfortable with ourselves.
    â€œIt’s time,” he said. “I want to make love to you, properly.”
    â€œSoon.”
    â€œI want to.”
    â€œNow?”
    â€œYou sound surprised.”
    I hoped the marijuana might make it easier, but the pain was excruciating. I always thought it would be so natural with the right person. But I ended up with my face pressed into the pillow, biting hard into it, trying to suppress a scream.
    He gave up and dropped, deadweight, onto me. I whispered to him, “Thank you for being so understanding.” Then he sighed and rolled off.
    Old thoughts about my inadequacy now haunted me. My mother drove me, her perfect boy, in her new Cadillac to the doctor’s office while I sat bent over, a seven-year-old with a searing pain in my abdomen like something was stuck inside. The pain stopped my breath, a herniated something, an incomplete something else, a testicle that hadn’t dropped. It was a series of trips to the doctor and operations in hospitals.
    It always started with me standing on a small box in the doctor’s examination room, my pants around my ankles while one or two doctors poked my abdomen, stared at my penis, or shoved their dry fingers behind my scrotum and up into me so hard that they raised me up off my little snow-soaked socked feet. The efforts to find the source of that pain and rip it out blinded me. They laid their big fingers on my stomach and pressed here and there on my naked body, staring at my front, touching me.
    I was innocent until a fifth visit and that one doctor looked up at my face and our eyes met. He looked like one of the ballet princes, and I retracted my