The Dance.

It was the three of us together, but she just held his hand and sang and watched as I helped him rid himself of his innocence. Everything so gentle. He was coddled into a kind of sexual awakening. We were his friends. I was, perhaps his best friend. We had slept on a mattress on the floor and I had listened to him on so many occasions.

"Could I be gay? What if I'm gay? How will I know if I'm gay?"

How will you know for sure unless you sample every option, any option. I had tired of his perpetual virginity. He was the yin to my yang.

"How do they do it? Gay men? What are the machinations of the act?"

He listened to my detailed explanations and he groaned.

"See I don't know if I can do that."

"You don't have to do that."

"Well what will I do then? Tell me what I should do?"

We put the music on that he would like. We fed him. I had slept with her before and together we lay on the same mattress and listened to the same hopes and fears.

"What if I am? What if I'm not? What am I then? What if I am nothing or everything or if I will never have the opportunity to make a choice."

We did it without speaking. There was no planning, no signal, no negotiation. We stripped him of his clothes and when he was naked there was only the music, and our hands, and her humming. It was like a dance, which was something we were all comfortable with. We had danced together many times. This naked dance, and his erection, bouncing it's questions between us.

I kissed him in silence. I kissed his penis and there was music to regulate my rise and fall. When the music stopped we froze, all three of us, as if we were just children playing games. The first note of a new song and I relaxed onto him, took him into my body. This first time, gently.

It was a moment of grace between us. The last moment. Years later we would intimate that we both knew what had happened between us.

He came, and I swallowed gently, careful not to frighten him. He would need to base his ultimate decision on what had occurred between us on that night. He stroked my hair. I noticed the sideways curl of his penis, the coy turning away from me, and wondered if this was always the way with him, or if he had tucked it too tightly and the curl was just the memory of a comforting dressing to the left.

We kissed, the three of us, and later, when he had gone, we mentioned the delicate curl of his penis. I had never seen one like that before. I seemed to be always retreating from my touch like a frightened animal.

He liked boys. It was decided. He walked away from us into a brilliant career and never once looked back. I was momentarily disturbed by this. I felt abandoned. We had been constant companions, but there would be others. There are always others.

She and I joked that he liked my head job so much that he never slept with a girl again, and then we quarrelled, this girl and I, and she never slept with a girl again and I was left to wonder why I was always their first, and always their last.