It wasn't a question of my boss discovering I was gay; I was already out of the closet at work as well as in the rest of my life. My dilemma, in sitting up on my towel and looking out at the water, came from seeing my boss in a skimpy yellow bathing suit walking toward me with his wife. I turned my gaze to the left, saw their destination, and calculated that his trajectory would invariably cause them to pass right by where I lay to reach that one spot of bare Ibizan sand large enough for them to lay out two towels.
I looked again at that skimpy yellow bathing suit, trying to get a sense of what lay beneath. I looked down into my own lap, where no bathing suit left anything to the imagination.
This was my dilemma.
Many factors come into play, on arriving at the beach, in the decision to go nude or not: how big your dick is, who you're with, if you're trying to hook up or not, etc.
Around us we'd already seen a little of everything: normal guys and Adonises, naked men, men in bathing suits of every imaginable type, logo queens who kept putting on and taking off their suits to draw attention to the fact that they were from Dolce & Gabana, and even those guys who were like Russian dolls, peeling out of item after item only to reveal another skimpier layer underneath: jeans, shorts, speedos, thong.
My boyfriend Rafa doesn't like tanlines. I'm of the opposite opinion, thinking that those white shadows, outlining the cheeks of the ass, are quite sexy. But since Rafa looks at my ass more than I do, I'm happy to make that small concession for him.
But I hadn't imagined I might run into my boss, and even worse, with this difference in nakedness further underscoring the power inequalities between us. If we'd both been naked, or both dressed, I wouldn't be worrying myself like this.
I outlined my choices to myself:
A) I could roll over and pretend to be asleep, hoping he had not yet seen me. I did not think my boss—unlike a hundred or so fags back in Madrid—would be able to recognize my naked ass, and would pass by without further incident.
B) I could try and put on my bathing suit before they noticed me. Complication: the embarrassment if they came upon me while I was still trying to get my genitals covered would be even worse.
C) I could do nothing.
I elbowed Rafa to get his attention. 'That guy walking toward us is my boss.'
Rafa picked a fourth option that, despite the Mediterranean sun beating down on us, left me cold. He stood up and held out a hand to help me up. 'Well, introduce me,' he said.
Lawrence Schimel's latest book, the graphic novel Vacation in Ibiza, was a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. For the past half-decade, he's lived in Madrid, Spain.
