BUT FIRST we dressed and went into my cabin. I made coffee, not giving a shit that I wouldn’t be able to sleep. Hell, there was always the whiskey.
We sat on the front porch, and I remembered the morning with Cole…. Was that today? Yesterday? Yesterday, yes.
I asked Amy if she thought I had hobbit feet, and she laughed until she choked.
“I’ve always thought so,” she said. “Even before the movies.”
Somewhere around then we left behind carefree banter, and I began to talk.
I was eighteen before I truly realized I was attracted to men and the incident with George at church camp, the incidents, hadn’t just been some kind of experiment. Looking back, I don’t know how I couldn’t have known. All I had to do was see a man take off his shirt on TV and my attention was riveted to the screen. Locker rooms were both a nightmare and the fuel for wet dreams. Photographs of a nude South American man or an Aboriginal in National Geographic held far more promise or excitement to me than a Penthouse magazine, unless there was a special spread showing a woman and a man together. A glimpse of cock was all I needed and I was excited and masturbating, and like most red-blooded teenage boys, I masturbated a lot. How could I have not known I liked men? How had I convinced myself otherwise? How did I delude myself into believing that I liked women? I don’t know.
I suppose it was fear.
No. No supposing about it.
It was fear.
Attracted to men.
I was attracted to men.
And damn! There was that school counselor. The one who told me that it was perfectly normal for boys to fool around with boys. “Experimenting” was the word he used. Funny how I so suddenly remembered that. Experimenting.
“What was it exactly you two did?” he had asked me, sitting so close to me our thighs touched. And that hand on my shoulder.
Mr. Morcant. His name came to me then, hard and fast, and I felt nauseous. Like I might puke.
He’d gotten me to tell him all about what George and I did—had pressed for details. He’d told me that what the two of us had done was perfectly normal. He’d told me all about my raging hormones and that boys my age couldn’t—shouldn’t—fool around with girls. He told me that would be wrong, and that I could get a girl pregnant—and that there was nothing wrong with us “helping each other out.”
“In fact,” he’d said, “it’s beautiful.”
And then he’d laid his hand on my leg and I saw the front of his dress slacks were all bulged out, and I knew just what that meant.
He was hard.
Mr. Morcant was excited.
Somehow I got out of there. Was it a phone call? His intercom?
I never went back. He’d only proved to me what I’d read in Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). That homosexuals were depraved. That all they did was search and search and search for the perfect penis—that’s why they were so promiscuous—and that they would never ever find the perfect penis because the perfect penis was their own penis and what they needed was a vagina.
“My God,” Amy said. “This happened when you were in junior high school?”
I nodded.
“Thank God you got away from him.”
As if God had anything to do with it one way or the other, I thought, fighting back a sneer. I didn’t want her to think I meant it for her.
After that day in Mr. Morcant’s office, I held desperately to the thought and hope that one day I would get married and would want her vagina, and I’d want to be sexual with a woman and I would think that beautiful.
But that didn’t happen.
As much as I loved Emily, as much as she was truly my compass, always pointing me north, I never felt for her what I had felt for George. Or Jack.
I was, am, a white male, and decent looking. The world should’ve been my oyster.
But I was different.
And dammit, I didn’t want to be different!
So I tried to forget things. Pretend they didn’t exist. That they never happened.
Like those issues of National Geographic.
Those issues of Penthouse.
Dirk Benedict.
I was only a kid when I saw this movie called Sssssss one night late on television when I thought my mother had gone to bed. There was this scene… I wish I could explain it. Terrible movie, I realize now, but for a kid, it was awesome. Young man gets turned into a giant snake by an evil scientist. What’s not for a boy to love?
The thing is, there was this scene where the hero, played by Dirk Benedict, was going skinny-dipping with this girl. And she had these thick glasses. The two undressed, and as he dropped his pants, she took off her glasses, and the movie went out of focus. I remembered crying out, hurt by it.
Then to my horror, I saw my mother standing there. She’d happened to be going through the room when it happened. We stared at each other for… forever. She turned off the TV. I was so upset. I didn’t understand what was going on inside me, but Mother did. She got down on her knees and made me pray for forgiveness. I didn’t even understand what I was asking forgiveness for.
Amy had been holding my hand through this part of the story and she was doing what she did best. Listening. Barely said a word. Not that she couldn’t talk the leg off a chair. But right then listening was what she was doing.
She stopped me only so she could go refill her mug.
Amy, who could easily drink a pot of coffee a day. Sometimes two.
WHEN SHE got back, I told her what had happened a year later when I was in fourth grade.
My friend Rod and I—“That really was his name,” I told her—snuck into an R-rated action flick at the local theater when we were supposed to be seeing a Disney movie (the only thing Mom would let me see). There was a scene where the hero somehow wound up tied down in his underwear and tortured. I don’t remember which actor he was or even the name of the movie. All I know is I couldn’t stop staring at his bare chest and the mound in the front of his underwear.
As it turned out, Rod was spending the night at my house, and we decided to reenact the scene. It turned out Rod liked it as much as I did. First, Rod played the hero, and I tied him to my twin bed with a jump rope and an extension cord. Like the hero, all he was wearing was his Fruit of the Looms, and I couldn’t keep my eyes off the small bulge in those undies. I wanted to touch him there, and I was so excited, but I didn’t know why.
Then it was my turn to get tied to the bed. Rod didn’t bother to get dressed. We were both hard as could be, tenting out the front of our underwear, when my mother—without knocking—walked into the room.
There was this frozen moment, and then she sort of went insane. She started screaming about sin and hell, and she was hitting me with this belt, and I couldn’t move. I was still tied to the bed. The buckle… she hit me with the buckle end. Rod ran for home. Not long after, there were police. They took me away for a while—the childhood memory isn’t clear. Was it a few days? A few weeks?
I sort of blotted it all out after I was allowed to go home. I never saw Rod again, and pictures of Jesus replaced the posters of Tarzan and Superman in my room.
How did I not know I was attracted to my own sex?
How did I not know?
IT WAS my turn for coffee then, and Amy used the opportunity to go ahead and top hers off. After I went to the bathroom to relieve myself. Coffee went right through me.
Then we settled at the kitchen table.
It was closer to the coffee.
Amy urged me to continue. She knew my story was far from over.
Years after my night with Rod, on my eighteenth birthday, my friend Jack, who I’d gotten buddy-buddy with in track, decided to make my birthday one I’d never forget.
He was right. It was a birthday I would never forget.
I wanted to be around Jack whenever I could. I always looked at him in the shower after track—his smooth chest, his round ass, his long penis—and here was another example! How did I not know I was attracted to my own sex? At first, Mom was okay with Jack. He was very masculine, and his parents were cornerstones of the church she went to at the time. She said he was the sort of influence I needed.
What do they say about preacher’s daughters? Jack wasn’t the daughter of a preacher, but the principle was the same. Jack was a sex fiend. If he wasn’t lying, he’d lost his virginity at twelve. And he loved to tell me the stories. In detail. Stories that gave me all kinds of fuel for my late-night masturbation. But in my imaginings, there were no girls around. Just me and Jack.
Jack couldn’t stand that I was a virgin, and he decided to take care of it. He got us double dates with a couple of girls who had reputations for being wild. Their reputations were valid. At their instigation, we got to playing this strange board game they’d gotten from Spencer’s. To Jack’s delight, it was a sex game. You moved your pieces around the board and rolled dice and had to do what these little cards told you to do.
One of those cards said that one of the girls (I can’t remember her name) had to kiss the person sitting across from her. That turned out to be the other girl. To our surprise they laid a lip-lock on each other that made Jack howl with joy.
“Oh my fucking God!” he shouted.
Several drinks later, and halfway through the stack of cards, half our clothes were off—the game demanded that too—and I was both terrified and excited at the same time. My erection was plain, but that was okay. Both girls were in their underwear and one had just, without blinking her eyes, taken off her bra.
But then one of the girls drew a card where she could make any two people kiss. She chose me and Jack. When he told her there wasn’t any way he was going to do that, she—I think it was his date—declared that was “No fair!”
“Wha’ do you mean?” he slurred. The beers were kicking in.
“I kissed her,” she whined, pointing to her friend.
“You want me to fucking kiss Neil?” He laughed.
“Uh-huh,” she said, her voice dripping with sex, before she stunned us by dropping her hand to her crotch and rubbing herself through her panties. Above that, her breasts jiggled, and her nipples got hard right in front of us.
Jack looked at me, looked at her, looked at me again, and then looked at her hand. Before I knew what was going on, he’d leaned over the game, grabbed me by the back of my neck, and pulled me into a quick kiss. I was hardly aware it had happened, but my cock grew even harder, and I began to leak so heavily it left a wet spot on the front of my khaki shorts.
“Too fast,” Jack’s date protested. Donna. Her name was Donna.
Too fast, my mind echoed. Way too fast!
“Tough shit,” he said and gave me a look I had no idea how to interpret.
There were no same-sex kisses for several rounds, and by then, both girls and I were in nothing but our underwear. Jack was the only one still in jeans.
“He’s so hairy…,” said Donna’s friend—my “date.” And I feel so bad that I cannot remember her name.
I blushed. How often had I thought about shaving my chest?
Jack looked at me and then down at himself.
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” he asked, and I nearly cringed waiting for her answer.
“A good thing,” she all but panted.
Jack laughed and then looked at my chest—a little longer than I would have expected. It made things happen… down below, and I shivered. “I guess it’s a good thing you’re with him, then, huh?” He laughed again and told Donna to draw.
Donna read a card and somehow, suddenly, the girls were kissing like they were auditioning for a lesbian porn movie. Jack “whooped” through the whole show, and I could see the bulge in his jeans was straining to burst from its confines. He even had his own wet spot now—and that was through denim.
When the girls ended their kiss, Donna turned to him, eyes flashing. I could see the “I dare you” in those blue eyes. Her hand was working inside her panties, and Jack moaned in excitement.
“Kiss him,” she gasped.
“Huh?” he said with a groan.
“Kiss him.” And she was working that hand in earnest now. She brought it out and licked her fingers, and without a word, Jack spun on me, grabbed me, and this time the kiss was no quick peck. I struggled for only a second and then melted into him, my heart slamming inside my chest. When his mouth opened and his tongue demanded entry into mine, I let him in without hesitation. It was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to me in my life. My head was swimming, and I could taste the beer on his mouth and feel the stubble on his upper lip against mine like sandpaper, and it was exhilarating. I thought I would have an orgasm without touching myself. I heard moaning, and it was only when Jack finally pulled away I comprehended it was me.
Jack’s eyes were dark, his pupils huge as he stared into mine. “I think Neil liked it,” he said. He turned to our dates. “Don’t you, girls?”
“Fuck, yeah!” said Donna. Her hands were still playing inside her panties. Her friend was rubbing herself as well.
“I think you liked it too,” he told my date. Anne. It was Anne. Or Annie….
“Hell, yes,” she exclaimed. “Gay sex is fucking hot!”
“How would you know?” he asked her as I sat there in a daze.
“We snuck one of her brother’s gay magazines,” Donna said, pointing to Anne/Annie, “and looked at the pictures of the dudes doin’ it.”
Jack’s eyebrows shot up. “What’s he got stuff like that for?”
“’Cause he’s queer, you dumb shit!”
Jack’s eyes darted back and forth between their crotches. “That works you two up, doesn’t it?”
“Oh yes,” Donna all but shouted. “We hid and watched her brother and his boyfriend fuck once. It was so damned hot. Got me so goddamned horny we fell out of the closet. Shocked them good! God, I wanted to jump in, but neither of them wanted me. I even offered my ass.”
Jack’s eyes grew huge. “Your ass? You’ll take it in the ass?”
I couldn’t believe the look on Jack’s face—pure lust. Like he’d died and gone to heaven.
“I might,” she said teasingly, drawing the two words out forever.
“What would I have to do to be able to tap me some of that?” he demanded.
“Suck his cock,” she said without hesitation, pointing at me.
He laughed. “You want me to gobble my buddy’s dick?” His voice was incredulous. He looked at me, and there was electricity sparkling, crackling in his eyes. His face was flushed.
“God yes,” Donna said.
“You know neither of us is a fag, right?”
“That makes it even hotter,” said Anne/Annie. “Straight men doing it? Oh. My. God!”
“What do you think about that, buddy?” He looked at me. “She wants me to suck your crank.” Jack turned back to her. “I suck his cock and you’ll let me fuck your butt?”
Donna grinned. “I want to taste his cum on your mouth when you kiss me,” she said.
“You want me to take his cum?” he cried. “I ain’t fuckin’ doin’ that!” Funny thing was, Jack looked anything but disgusted. He still looked pretty damned excited to me.
“Baby,” she said, “you do that for me, and I’ll do anything you want.”
“Anything?” Jack said.
She grinned lasciviously. “Little pervert like you? I bet you got all kinds of nasty fantasies.”
His eyes got even wider. I could see the wheels in his head spinning. “Will you lick my crack?” he asked. It was almost a gasp and a whisper at the same time. He was practically drooling.
Me? I couldn’t move. It was like all this was happening to someone else.
Donna nodded vigorously. “Oh, yeah.”
“You’d do that? Lick my asshole?”
“No problem! In a fucking heartbeat.”
Jack moaned and, to my shock, he was on me like a pouncing animal. He shoved me back, ran his hands roughly through my chest hair—Anne moaned at that—and tore at the crotch of my underwear, letting my rigid erection spring into the open.
“Oh, yeah, look at that!” said one of the girls. “So hot!”
“Jesus, dude.” Jack reached out and grabbed my cock. I thought I would have an orgasm on the spot. “This thing is huge,” he said, and I looked down just in time to see him take me in his mouth.
I nearly screamed in pleasure. I’d never felt anything like it. Jack’s mouth was so wet, hot, and tight, and he worked me like a calf sucking its mother’s teat. The girls were urging him on, and that only seemed to inspire him. To my shock, Jack was moaning. He seemed to like what he was doing! In seconds, I was ready and tried to warn Jack, but I couldn’t speak. Then I was unloading deep into his throat.
At first, I don’t think he even knew what was happening. He’d nearly swallowed my cock, and I was shooting well past his taste buds. He must have figured it out, though, because he suddenly pulled back, and I finished shooting all over his face and my chest and belly.
“Fuck, man,” he said and began to spit. Despite that he looked at me, his eyes flashing. “Wow, Neil. You could’ve warned me.”
“I’m—I’m sorry.”
Eyes still flashing, he began to wipe my cum from his face.
“No, don’t,” Donna yelled and she was on him faster than he’d pounced on me, licking at his face.
I fled.
I pulled on my clothes and was out the door faster than any race I’d ever run in track.
What happened next ensured I was never with another man again.
“What did happen?” Amy said.
“My mom tried to kill me,” I whispered.
“What?”
I nodded, unable to say it again.
“Jesus,” said Amy.
“Don’t even fucking say His name,” I barked.
Amy flinched at my words. “Wh-why?” She was rubbing my back. “Tell me, babe. What happened?”
I felt my eyes well up with tears again. Damn. I was some big fucking baby, wasn’t I?
“Neil?”
I closed my eyes, fought back the tears, and wondered if I could answer her question. I had not told this story in twenty years. It was something I didn’t like to think about, a memory I didn’t like to recall; of course, the memory was always there.
I took a deep breath, let it out, took another. “I went home,” I finally said. The hair on my arms was crawling as I continued. “I walked in the door, and she was fucking waiting for me. She’d pulled up a chair right in front of the door.”
“Oh my God.”
“Somehow she knew. She just knew. She stood up and did this sniffing thing. She said, ‘I can smell it on you. Beer. And sex. And man. I can smell his stuff on you.’” I shuddered. “She knew.”
“My Go—” Amy said and then stopped herself.
“Then she walked up to me and said, ‘You can’t shake it, can you? The demon named Homosexual. The demon that makes you want men.’
“I remember stepping back, telling her I was sorry and I’d do better, that I wanted Jesus to love me and I didn’t want the demon. And you know what she said?”
Amy let out a sob. “Tell me, babe.”
“She said it was too late. She said Jesus couldn’t save me. That He didn’t love me anymore. She said she was going to help me and told me it was better I was dead than live like that. And then she came at me with a knife.”
“Neil! You can’t be serious.”
I nodded. I was serious all right.
“It’s like something out of that movie Carrie,” Amy cried. And she was crying. “Why didn’t you ever tell?”
“I told Em. She told your parents. That’s how I got to stay with you all.”
The look of shock on Amy’s face was priceless.
“So I guess Em didn’t tell you everything?” I said.
“I guess not.” She sagged like a puppet with its strings cut. “Jesus.”
“I asked you not to say His name.”
She looked back at me. “Why?”
“Because I rejected Him. He’s supposed to be our savior, but He let that happen?” I shook my head. “No. Screw him! I gave Him up. Mom said He hated me and I was going to Hell. So why should I have anything to do with Him?” I shook my head again. “I don’t know how I got out of there without her stabbing me, Amy. Adrenaline, I guess. Like you see in movies. Or read about where some mother lifts a car off her kid. Time slowed down. She was moving in slow motion, and I grabbed her and slammed her for all I was worth against the wall. And then I ran. And I left Him there with her.”
“Oh, Neil.” Amy shook her head. “I don’t think He hates you.”
“She disappeared,” I said. “She moved away, and I never saw her again.”
“Oh, Neil,” she said again and laid her head on my shoulder. “I had no idea.”
Neither of us said anything for a while, and then she said, “And Em knew about all of this?”
“Some of it.”
“Oh, my friend.” She sighed. “My dear, sweet friend. No wonder….”
“No wonder what?”
“You’ve made the choices you’ve made.”
I pulled away. “What’s wrong with my choices?” I asked, anger rising inside of me. “Could I have had a better companion than your sister?”
“N-no,” Amy said.
“I miss her!” I cried. “Your mom says it gets easier? Well maybe. But not really. I miss her every fucking day. She was my best friend. I still forget. Something happens at work, and I want to call her and tell her. I see a movie preview on television and I think, Em would like that. A button comes off my shirt, and I realize she’s not there to fix it, and I know it will take me an hour to do what she would have done in a minute. I miss her. And I don’t regret the decision I made to be with her. Ever.”
“I didn’t mean that, babe. I just meant….” She looked at me with those huge blue-green eyes.
“What did you mean?” I snapped.
“Oh, sweet Neil, if only—”
“If only what?” I shouted.
She flinched again, and a part of me felt shame.
“If only your mother hadn’t been like she was. If she’d been accepting, your life would have been so different.”
“Is that a bad thing?” I cried. “If I’d become some homo, I wouldn’t have had Em. Or Crystal. Or this family. You wouldn’t be in my life. Would you want that?”
Amy sighed. “And all those things are good things.”
“So what, then?” I was almost crying once again, and I hated it.
There was a long silence again, and just as I thought Amy was never going to answer me, she said, “I wonder what it would have been like if the two of you had just been best friends….”
“Huh?” I asked her. What did that mean?
“Do you miss her friendship? Or do you miss her as a lover?”
The words stunned me.
I looked at her then, my soul aswirl with emotions.
And confusion.
“Wh-what’s the difference?” I asked.
“There doesn’t have to be,” she replied. “But I wonder if it’s time for you to have a lover. I wonder if it’s time for the person who shares your bed to be everything that you need and not just a friend.”
“What are you saying?” I asked, the confusion mounting. “That what Em and I had was a waste? That it wasn’t good enough?”
She shook her head. “No. I think maybe it is exactly what you both needed. Like I said before. Em and I were very different. What she wanted more than anything in the world was friendship and companionship. She was never really into sex. Maybe a bit more than you, but she never regretted what the two of you had. And you?” She shrugged. “Like you said. If you hadn’t gotten together there would be no Crystal. And no us.”
She laid her hand on mine.
“But now? Now I think it’s time for you to have more. And you aren’t going to get that with a woman, Neil. You owe it to yourself.”
I didn’t know what to say.
“She wanted you to be happy, Neil. That was what she had made up her mind to tell you. That as long as she had your friendship, she was happy. She wanted you to have what she couldn’t give you. She knew you needed to be with a man.”
Stunned.
I was stunned.
“She loved you, Neil.”
In a blink, I was crying again. Damn it! I was some big old fag, wasn’t I?
She pulled me into her arms once more and… and it felt good.
It felt like how it had felt when I was very young and my mom would hold me, back before Pop left. Before she found Jesus big-time and filled the house with His pictures and made sure we went to church every Sunday morning and every Sunday night and every Wednesday night. Before she forced me to go to church camp and so many other things.
The moment with Amy was magic beyond magic. I was a little kid being held against a mother’s breast. Safe. The way it was supposed to feel. Safe. Not scary. And not the tiniest bit erotic. Not one bit. And I told her so.
“Neil,” she finally said, “I don’t want to hurt you, but surely you know your mother was sick?”
I wanted to protest, but how could I? Of course Amy was right. My mother. She had been sick. Mentally unwell. And it took being held by a mother, by a real mother, to finally admit it to myself.
My mother was insane.
Instead of it hurting, like it had hurt for so long, the acknowledgment did something inside of me. The pain… lessened. Because the problem had been hers… not mine. Could it be that simple?
“Neil?”
And Amy’s words.
She said I needed more than friendship. She said I needed to be with a man.
Was she right? Part of me wanted to fight it… but then I realized that part was my mother.
Because I did want more.
I did want a man.
I had tried to convince myself—for the most part I had—that friendship was all I had ever needed. That it didn’t make any difference what package it came in, what kind of body, that love surpassed that.
But as I thought about Cole….
Dear God….
What he did to me with a simple look.
What had happened to me when it had been something as simple as our fingers touching as we passed a flask.
What had happened when he taught me to fire a rifle, and how just leaning into me had made me feel things I had never felt with Emily….
And I realized it was time to let her go.
What had Amy said?
“Neil?”
“Yes,” I said after a long, long time.
And then something happened. I couldn’t explain it. Something… lifted. It was like that phrase I’d heard a hundred times in my life. The one about a weight being lifted from your shoulders. I figured it was like saying “He laughed all the way to the bank.” That it was just a saying.
But right then I felt it. I felt this… this weight… this very real weight… just lift away. Felt it in my shoulders.
The weight of my mother. Of my imagined failures. That I had failed Emily. The weight of fighting my… homosexuality. That I was…. That I was gay.
“Neil?”
I looked at her in amazement.
“It’s time for you to let her go,” she said.
“God, Amy,” I said, feeling almost high. “I think I just did.”
“Really?” she said, eyes wide and filled with hope.
I nodded. Then knew it. I had.
How? Why?
Was it the telling?
And yes, I realized. It was.
She squeezed me all the tighter. “Oh, Neil, I love you!” she said once again.
Tingling all over, I told her that I loved her too. Because I did.
“Neil?” she asked, while I floated like that hawk. “I think it’s time for you to do something else.”
“Something else?” I echoed.
“I think it’s time you talk to Cole.”
I pulled back. “Cole?”
She smiled. “The boy wants you. And I think you want him.”
“Amy!” The old self-hatred threatened to rear up again. I could feel it too. And dammit, I couldn’t allow that. If I did I would be lost forever. But the only way I could see that I could defeat it once and for all was to….
“Honey, if that boy wanted me, I’d go for him in an instant.”
“I can’t believe you’re saying this.” She might as well have told me to pursue a presidential campaign.
“Why not?” she asked me, her eyes dancing.
“Wouldn’t I be betraying my whole life if I were to do that?”
“Why? You followed through. You were a good husband, and you’ve been an excellent father. You made promises and you kept them. Neil, Em is gone. You aren’t. It’s time, more than time, for you to live for you. Do it, by God!”
“By God?” I asked before I knew the words were even coming out of my mouth.
“Em would want it.” Amy smiled. “Oh yes. She wanted you to be happy. Be happy, Neil. Haven’t you been haunted by what you thought you should be long enough? Haven’t you been possessed by your mother long enough?”
Yes! I had. The demon that was my mother’s illness had possessed me. That was the demon, not me.
Because right then Cole’s face came to my mind. His beautiful dark eyes. His smiling mouth. The trim, almost nonexistent goatee. The hair that looked so soft and begged to be touched. His arms, popping with muscles.
He was not a demon. He was the furthest thing from.
My heart started to pound. “You mean this, don’t you?”
Amy’s grin was huge, and she nodded with excitement. “Oh, yes.”
I took a long, shuddering breath. This was too much to believe.
“You are attracted to Cole, aren’t you?” Amy asked.
I looked at the Cole in my mind again—his smile, his flashing eyes, and felt a stirring in my loins. “Oh, Amy, you have no idea.”
Sudden fear jolted through me. Could I do it?
“Tell him,” Amy said.
Could it be that easy?
Easy?
Easy, hell!
What the fuck was I supposed to do? Walk up to him and say…. What? “Let’s fuck?”
“Well, I hope you’d be a little classier than that,” Amy said.
Damn! I blushed more fiercely. I’d said that out loud?
“Neil, you only get a few chances in life. You’ve waited long enough. Don’t miss this opportunity.”
“You think Cole could want me?”
Amy broke into laughter. “Oh Christ, Neil, I think so! I think so in a big way. Ooops! I said ‘Christ,’ didn’t I?”
I laughed too. “Don’t worry about it.”
Amy sighed, reached out and touched my cheek again. “I don’t know if you know this, but Cole was hurt pretty badly a few years ago. Every time we ask him if he’s dating again, he tells us no. I was shocked to see him flirting with you. It was the last thing I was expecting.”
There was that story again. Someone had hurt Cole. How could anyone hurt him? I found I was getting angry just thinking about it.
“I’ll admit part of why I wanted you here at Black Bear was to meet him.”
“What?” I said, my eyes going wide.
She nodded. “Not so you could bed him, mind you. I wanted you to have a positive role model. As sad as Cole has been, he’s still so happy in himself. I wanted you to see gay men could be happy and normal. They’re not all perverts, Neil. No more than any group of people. Men. Women. Gay. Straight. Lesbian. Bisexual. Whatever. That supervisor you once had. The way he treated you? It wasn’t because he was gay. It was because he was an asshole. Men have treated women that way for years. Shit, for centuries.”
“Yeah, maybe so. Mom would have said it was because all men are filled with the original sin of lust.”
“Fuck what your mom thought,” Amy said, and I looked at her agoggle. I wasn’t sure if I had ever heard Amy say that word. “All gay men aren’t like that supervisor.”
I shuddered at the memory, but thoughts of Cole banished it.
“You aren’t like that.”
“You know,” I said, “for a man who’s not supposed to be a pervert, Cole sure has been coming on to me.”
Amy laughed again. “I know. I can’t believe it!”
I looked away, closed my eyes, let Cole fill my mind again.
Fuck! Could I do this?
My heart started to pound again, and I looked back at Amy.
“You’d be a fool not to,” she said.
“Amy.” I sighed. “He’s so young. He could be my son.”
“Well, he isn’t,” she reminded me. “And what’s age anyway? My mother is fifteen years younger than Pop.”
“Cole’s twenty years younger than me.”
“So what? Besides, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Just because you two have the hots for each other doesn’t mean wedding bells are chiming.”
I hid my face in my hands. Wedding bells? I wanted to giggle.
This was crazy!
How could things have changed so much in less than a week? It seemed impossible.
When I’d seen Cole’s picture on the website, I’d been enthralled. I couldn’t deny it. But then, when I realized he was gay, I was outraged to discover Black Bear Guest Ranch let him be a wrangler. Within seconds of meeting him, though, he’d begun to affect me.
And now?
During a short conversation in a hot tub, I’d let my mind go to schoolgirl fantasies of forever. “I’m acting like a teenager,” I said through my fingers.
Amy took my hands in hers and pulled them down, looked at me, smiled. “Babe, in a way you are. You never pursued what was natural to you when you were young. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s part of why you’re attracted to Cole. It’s your inner twentysomething dying to get out.”
“You psychoanalyzing me, Amy?”
“Isn’t that what I’ve been doing for the past hour? I’ll bill you.”
I shook my head. “Now you’re being silly.”
I looked away, and saw Cole’s smiling face before me. Was I seriously considering this? Could I be sexual with a man after all these years of denying myself what I’d wanted? What if my mother’s fucking ghost showed up right in the middle of things and I couldn’t get it up?
“This isn’t going to be easy.”
“There’s only one way to find out,” Amy replied. “And you know what? I think Cole’s the kind of man with the patience to help you work it out.”