Chapter Two
Jess awoke Saturday at about 11 a.m. His thoughts immediately flashed back to Wesley’s e-mail. He had said that he was 15, about 5’10”, had long, light blonde hair, had gray eyes, and had a slender but slightly defined body. He had also included a picture of himself in the email (in which Wesley was shirtless and looked really hot) and said that he wanted to meet Jess. But now, Jess was unsure. Was he really ready to acknowledge to himself and everyone else that he was gay? Was he really ready to meet Wesley? And all the fallout that could follow? What would his parents think? Or would they still not pay attention to him? He sat thinking for a long time, turning things over in his head.
Finally, Jess turned on his computer, opened his e-mail, and replied to Wesley. “I would like to meet you too”, Jess started. “Where do you live? I’m about five minutes from Wilmington.” He looked over his brief e-mail and thought it looked too short and tried to add more to it, but the words didn’t feel right, so he just sent what he originally typed. Then his thoughts wandered toward how he and Wesley had first met each other.
(A few weeks ago)
Jess had been at a friend’s house and hadn’t charged his phone the night before so he was borrowing his friend’s phone to look up answers to a homework problem when the phone beeped, signaling a new text had been received. He accidentally opened the text and saw that it was from someone named Wesley.
“Hey dude, someone named Wesley just texted you”, I said.
“Ok, let me see”, Justin said, reaching for the phone.
“Who is he? Does he go to school with us?”, I asked.
“No, He’s an old friend. To be honest, I’m pretty sure he’s either bi or gay”, said Justin.
“What makes you say that?”, I asked.
“Just the way he acts sometimes. He can be really flirty occasionally.”, he said.
“Does it bother you that he acts that way?”, I said.
“No…I mean its like…whatever. If he is, it doesn’t bother me, but I don’t see the appeal.”, said Justin.
“I will have to talk to him”, I thought to myself.
“Anyway, lets get done with this homework. I’m going out with Kate tonight and I’ll be too busy to do it later tonight.”, he said with a sly grin.
That night, Jess sent Wesley’s contact info to himself from Justin’s phone. He was nervous about talking Wesley at first. He wondered if it would be really awkward. Like, what would he say, “Oh, hi I’m Justin’s friend and he told me you might be gay and I might be too, so I wanted to talk to you”? He decided to look him up on facebook and twitter and see if they had anything in common. After looking up Wesley, he saw that they actually had a lot in common (friends, music, interests) and he got up the courage and sent him a simple e-mail.
“Hi, my name’s Jess Knight. I’m a friend of Justin’s. I kind of stalked your facebook and saw we have a lot in common. I was wondering if you might want to hang out. I know Justin is having a party in a few weeks, maybe meet up there?”
They sent many e-mails to one another over the next week and started to become as good of friends as you can by only e-mailing each other and having never met each other before. One of the e-mails, Jess intentionally steered toward sexuality and both boys found out a lot about each other. Like that they were both, at the very least, bi-sexual. After that e-mail, Wesley suggested that maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea for them to meet at Justin’s party.
“Hey, Jess. I’m starting to think that we should meet, but let’s not do it at Justin’s party. It might be a little awkward. How about we meet up just by ourselves somewhere?”
(Present time)
Wesley received Jess’ reply back and said that he wasn’t far from Wilmington either. He suggested that they meet at a restaurant called the Oceanic in Wrightsville Beach and that they could meet tomorrow if that was ok with Jess. A few hours later, Jess saw Wesley’s e-mail and quickly sent him a response.
“That sounds great! Tomorrow works fine. How about seven o’clock?”