Free Across a Green Ocean by Wendy Lee

want to grab a bite on this side of the street?”
    Michael only looked at him for a few more seconds before agreeing. He wondered how long this man had been following him before picking him out among so many fine, shirtless specimens. It felt good to have been chosen.
    Over lunch, at a fancy place he’d walked by many times but had never gone into, he found out that David was a lawyer and had grown up in Connecticut, and that his father, now retired, had also been a lawyer. Michael didn’t say anything about his family, not even his sister’s profession (Emily’s work was such that he didn’t think she and David were of the same tribe). By the end, when David took out his wallet, Michael let him pay.
    On the street outside, when David turned to him, Michael expected him to say he’d had a good time, maybe even suggest that they do it again sometime. Instead, David said, “You want to go back to my place?”
    In the cab, Michael reflected that this wasn’t so different from a normal hookup, of which he’d had a few—in college, when it had been new and exhilarating, and then after he’d moved to the city, where it seemed like a cliché. It was a bit strange, though, to be doing it not after an evening of drinking, to be seeing the other person’s face clearly, to be removing your clothes in the light rather than the dark. It was stranger still to wake up in that other person’s apartment, not in the middle of the night or in the grainy regret of morning, but with late-afternoon sunshine stippling both your naked bodies.
    David was still sleeping, and Michael looked at him more closely. Without his glasses, his face looked younger, and he slept with one hand curled under his cheek, like a child. His body was long and concave in the middle, where the smattering of fair hair on his chest turned thicker and curlier. His penis was somewhat unremarkable, except for how quickly it had lengthened in Michael’s hand; now it was curled up against the inside of his thigh like a snail.
    Michael got up to get a drink of water, but it was really a pretext to examine the rest of the situation he had found himself in. The apartment was several times the size of his own, and appointed sparsely with modern-looking furniture. What looked like actual art, rather than prints, hung on the walls. More significantly, the place looked like it belonged to an adult, an adult with money. At twenty-five, Michael was still used to secondhand furniture and multiple roommates, buying expired items and day-old bread from the grocery store in order to make the next rent check. He had only just started living without a roommate, because more than one person in the space in which he lived would be considered a fire hazard.
    When he opened David’s refrigerator, he found little food, but a great deal of condiments and individual glass bottles of sparkling water. He opened one of the bottles and took it back into the bedroom, where David was awake and smiling lazily at him. Without asking, David took the bottle from him and drank long and hard. It struck Michael as a more intimate act than any of the ones they had experienced with each other.
    In the month that followed, he found himself spending most nights with David, or on rare occasions, if they were downtown, back at Michael’s place. At first, Michael was ashamed of his apartment, its cramped size and lack of air-conditioning, the unscrub-bable stains in the bathroom. There was nowhere to sit except on the frameless futon, as if it were a life raft. So, they usually ended up at David’s, and if Michael came over early, he’d hang out in the bar next door, because he didn’t have a key to David’s place and he thought the doorman looked at him funny.
    One day, Michael had just finished sucking David off, David’s taste still in the back of his mouth, when his cell phone rang. He wasn’t going to pick up, but he saw that it was Emily. Clearing his throat, he answered. Her voice was