Free Wrestling This by Dan Sexton

Chapter One
    W hen I first met Eric, I had no idea I would fall in love with him. I guess that’s how the coming out process works for some of us who’ve struggled with our sexuality.
    Sometimes it’s a curse when you think you’re so straight.
    Until the spring of my sophomore year at FSU, certainty reigned true that I liked girls. I believed it like I knew how I could be best in the wrestling squad. Not that I’m cocky—well, let’s save that for later—it’s just that I’m focused and determined in my pursuits. Liking—let alone loving —another man seemed unfathomable.
    I’ve dated good-looking girls, lost my virginity at sixteen, and while I’d had thoughts of other guys—yes, even that way—I thought everyone occasionally did. “You’ll grow out of it,” I told myself. I just needed to find the right woman. “Two men couldn’t make a home,” I remember saying one time, long ago, to a friend.
    Boy, was I wrong.
    I found the right companion, but not the one you’d bring home to Mom. That is, if my mother were still alive.
    “Quin,” Tamara, my sister, would say, “someday you’ll find the perfect one. She’ll knock that Red Sox baseball cap right off that gorgeous, sandy-brown haired head of yours.” She tried to console me every time I broke up with someone—six months had been the longest I’d dated anyone.
    As far as I knew, no one suspected Quintin Lee Flynn liked guys. Not even me.
    I’m also a big sports fan: baseball, football, soccer, and, of course, wrestling. “It’s not normal for someone like me,” or so I foolishly thought, “to be gay.” I don’t mean that to be stereotypical—that gay guys don’t like sports. I’m learning my assumptions about people are sometimes flawed.
    Life has a way of smacking reality across your face.
    While Aalam Eric Palak—only his mother called him by his real name; everyone else chose his Americanized middle name—made my heart throb, Dylan McCormick, my roommate, brought us together. Dylan should be a junior, if his grades weren’t so friggin’ bad—at this rate, my sixteen-year-old sister will have her master’s before he ever gets out of undergrad.
    I shouldn’t give Dyl any shit. He’s a good guy, most of the time. Though, he has a tendency to get the dudes on the wrestling team to do all sorts of shit that would make our upper-middle class parents fender-bend their BMWs if they’d heard. For instance, one time we stole a bunch of campus police uniforms from the guard shack and busted a sorority party. Another time, Dyl dared us to play strip poker and nude wrestle. Twelve drunk, straight, macho guys paraded their junk about. For fifty bucks, Dyl got his dick hard and rubbed against another guy’s ass.
    A week later, Dylan and Henry had a contest—amid another all-male beer party—to see who could shoot their wad the farthest. Dyl lost one-hundred dollars when Henry’s spunk hit the wall.
    Dylan would do anything on a dare.
    Unlike a lot of us, he wasn’t raised wealthy. I like that about him.
    He’s simpleminded, comes from a small town south of Boston—I can never remember where, though I should being I’m from neighboring New Hampshire. From what he says, his parents sound like good folk: Dad works construction and Mom waits tables.
    Dyl’s lucky he still has her. My mother’s death in a car crash five years ago still haunts me.
    Apparently, the university bunked Dyl and me together, figuring two New Englanders would bond. For once, they got something right.
    Dylan’s good for me, in a strange way, pushes me to do things I’d most likely not do on my own—and not just things like “borrowing” my ex’s Mustang, by “accidentally” happening upon her spare keys, while she vacationed with her parents in Mexico. I had it for a week and wound up having to have it detailed because Ted, the FSU quarterback, had one too many beers one night and blew chow all over the backseat.
    No, I credit Dylan as the reason