Page 9 of My Brother’s Best Friend

Even when I was young, I was bigger than all the kids in my class. Not just taller, but wider, and I’d barrelled through the world without any regard for where my body was in space, forever smacking into things.

My dad put me in peewee football when I was in second grade, in the hopes that it would teach me coordination, but I hated the aggression. My mom tried ballet the next year, to teach me poise and restraint, but I was just terrified I’d accidentally hurt someone.

I got bullied enough that I started to expect it. I was so conscious of how much I stood out that I clammed up whenever someone so much as looked in my direction, bracing for the cruelty I was sure would come. If not from other people, then from the little voice that lived in the back of my mind and reminded me that this was nothing more than I deserved.

I learned to disappear—mentally, at least. I still lived in my body, but I got good at ignoring it. Not connecting with it. Not feeling like it was mine.

Which was a critical skill, as I got older and learned yet another distressing thing about my body: that it was very interested in other guys’ bodies, and intent on expressing that interest in a rather obvious fashion.

I didn’t have a problem being gay. I had a problem being me. A six-foot-seven-inch giant with tree trunks for calves and hands roughly the size of Miniature Schnauzers. You’d think that having a dick that was more or less in proportion with the rest of my body would have made me feel better, but it just meant more to hide in uncomfortable situations. No one was going to want me, not when I never knew what to do with my body even under regular circumstances, let alone sexual ones.

It didn’t help that after my parents got divorced and my dad left, my mom started telling me how much I reminded her of him. Then she got sick—really sick—and started confusing me with him. Yelling at me for leaving her. Throwing things at me. It was just one more way for my body to betray me, really.

I stayed on Summersea for college, taking online courses so that I could take care of her. My second year, my biology professor mentioned in passing that a term paper I’d written might make a good book. It was about the social dynamics of the common bottlenose dolphin, with some asides about a local dolphin who’d visited Tolliver when I was a kid, developing what seemed to be a cross-species friendship—or symbiotic relationship, if you didn’t want to anthropomorphize—with a local fisherman.

Research and writing were a refuge for me, so I took those words to heart, but I was as surprised as anyone when I actually found an agent and publisher, and even more surprised when the book became a bestseller seven months after I finished my degree.

I didn’t want to do a book tour. Traveling to all those cities? Rooms full of strangers staring at me, hanging on my every word? No, thank you. But I was grateful for its success, and dove right into my next project. I’d been reading and writing ever since.

When my mom died, I’d thought for a brief moment about leaving Summersea. Putting my past behind me, starting over somewhere new. But almost immediately, panic set in. I might have money, but I had no idea how to make friends, how to exist anywhere else.

And how painful would it be if I moved somewhere new, only to have my worst fears confirmed? To realize that there really was something mockable about me. No, it was much better to stay here, where I knew how to keep from being noticed.

The only problem was, I’d become a little too good at that.

I continued to write, continued to turn down publicity opportunities, and continued to act like a hermit, as Levi put it. But in the past year, something had changed.

I’d gotten lonely.

Sure, I had Levi and Deacon. I had my grandparents, who lived over in Palmetto, the third town on Summersea. I even had Quincy, a little squirrel who liked to eat the peanuts I left out on my front stoop and who I was fairly certain was not carnivorous.

But I wanted a partner.

My grandfather had a stroke a few months ago, and things would have been so much worse if my grandmother hadn’t been with him. When I pictured myself at their age, I didn’t want to be alone. But how the hell was I supposed to find someone to sit on a front porch with me when I was eighty when I couldn’t even bring myself to ask someone out?

I could try to take advantage of Levi’s help, but I wasn’t sure that wouldn’t just make things worse. If I came out to him, I knew he’d redouble his efforts to find me someone. He’d assume that being closeted was what had kept me from dating all these years. He’d be unfailingly positive and encouraging and relentless, parading guy after guy in front of me, and that—that was what I was really afraid of.

Because what if I actually liked one of the guys Levi set me up with? What if I wanted to ask him out? Wanted to do…all the things that came after that?

I’d started going on long runs every day. That, combined with the physical labor of building my cabin, meant I was in better shape than I’d ever been. But my stomach still clenched at the thought of hooking up with someone.

What if the first time I had sex with a guy was also the last, because I was so terrible in bed that he laughed in my face, and told all his friends, and soon everyone on the island, everyone in the entire state of Georgia, knew how much I sucked at, well, sucking? There was no point in finding someone I liked only to lose him when he realized I didn’t know my asshole from my elbow when it came to sex.

What I needed, desperately, was a way to get all the physical stuff out of the way before I tried dating. A no-strings-attached hookup. Possibly in the dark, or with the other guy blindfolded, so he couldn’t change his mind just based on how I looked. What I needed was—

A glory hole.

My eyes went wide. What I needed was exactly what Levi had described at The Port Hole. But I couldn’t take Deacon’s assertion that the bar was a gay cruising spot on faith. I’d have to make sure the person on the other side of the wall was a guy. And the best way to do that was to take Levi up on his other suggestion—to make a profile online.

My stomach turned a somersault.

Could I really do that? Make a profile begging to suck someone’s dick at a bar best-known for selling two-gallon blue raspberry margaritas and playing aggressively loud bro-country music? Offer to let them fuck me, or fuck them, as long as they didn’t laugh at my lack of experience?

The Port Hole was the kind of place I avoided like the plague, but if I ever wanted to come out to my friends—and if I was going to find someone to save me from carnivorous squirrel attacks—it might be exactly where I needed to go.

I just needed to find a guy to go with me.

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