I dedicate Admit One to my husband Ralph. He’s not only loved me and encouraged me in my writing for years, but he listened to me read this novel to him (yes, the whole thing!) and provided invaluable editorial commentary. I will always remember him settling into our big green chair and saying, “What did you write today?” Sweetheart, thank you so much for all your help. I love you.

Many thanks also to Dusky, Beth, and Elke for their friendship and excellent editing. Dusky is a “prose pro” at ferreting out even the tiniest writing mistakes; Beth often provided super-fast, comprehensive edits when I needed them most; and Elke pinpointed a subtle plot problem just in time for me to fix it. I wouldn’t dream of writing without their steadfast support and expertise. Thank you, friends!

Any remaining errors or miscues are mine. I hope you enjoy reading Admit One.

 

 

 

Chapter 1

Good Reason

 

 

THE FIRST time Kevin and I had sex, he followed me in his Camry to the Holiday Inn Express where I was staying. I watched his headlights in the rearview mirror, checking to see…. I don’t know what I was checking. What did I think he was going to do—stop, jump out, and shout, Look at us, we’re fags? But his car remained steadfastly, securely behind me.

Usually I would have gone to one of the rooms in the back of the bar with him; it was so much safer. But I’d gone without for months. It was late, I’d been drinking and dancing since I’d walked into Good Times hours before, and I was desperate for a warm, male body to stand in for my own hand. I needed more than a stand-up quickie, and I was willing to take risks I shouldn’t have. My judgment evaporated with my need.

I’d told him my room number, and he came up to the third floor five minutes after I’d let myself in. We didn’t talk. I didn’t want to talk. I barely knew his name. When he’d given me the eye and the last dance of the night, he’d passed the test. He looked healthy and clean, if unexpectedly good-looking for someone who would be willing to go with me; he talked like a sensible on-the-make gay man and not an ax-murderer on the prowl for unsuspecting homos; and he was shorter and lighter than I was by three inches and thirty pounds. I thought I could at least hold my own against him if things turned nasty.

I got down on my knees right there in front of the door, pulled out his cock, and got to it. He was hard even before I slipped him into my mouth, and it didn’t take long to suck him off. When he gripped my shoulders and erupted against my working tongue, I moaned. He was real. Whoever he was, he was real and he tasted like a man, and half of what I’d come to Houston for slotted into place.

We stayed like that for a span of seconds, each of us fighting for breath, and then he hauled me up and kissed me. I hadn’t expected that, didn’t want it, didn’t often get it from my pickups, but in my surprise, I didn’t fight it. His arms went around me too, strong for all he was slender, as if he knew me and cared, and I clutched at him mainly to keep from falling full against him. I thought he might have liked tasting himself in my mouth, that he got off on it. His tongue in my mouth was sweet, like he’d been drinking bourbon and Coke.

Kevin pushed me backward until I sprawled on the bed, and in a sex-drenched, raspy voice, he growled, “Get undressed.” A shiver of unease swept through me at being told what to do; I don’t go in for that sort of thing. I’m an ordinary man with ordinary tastes. But, God, I wanted him on my cock, and so I did it, got my clothes off while he took off his. And though I hadn’t expected this either and wouldn’t have asked him to get naked just for a suck-off in an anonymous hotel room, it was great to see his whole body revealed along with the sturdy-looking cock that had been in my mouth.

He wasn’t buff; with his long legs, he looked more like a greyhound who could run sprints. A black-haired sprinter with a generous sprinkling of chest hair. He was very masculine in a controlled, clearly defined sort of way, just the way I liked my men. When he got on the bed and moved forward to taste me, my eyelids fluttered at all that man-skin bent in service to my needs.

It was a good orgasm, what he gave me. What I took from him.

Afterward, without asking, he flopped down onto the bed next to me and closed his eyes. I thought about asking him to leave, but I didn’t have the energy. We fell asleep next to each other.

Around four o’clock, I got up to take a piss, and on my way back to the bed I put out the light. We had sex again in the dark, where I couldn’t see him and he couldn’t see me, just right, humping against each other until his hand fumbled down between us and held us together. He smelled of the smoke from the club. When he rubbed against me with his thumb, I jetted within a few seconds, not giving it up loudly, only sighing, and he followed me not long after that.

The clock showed eight-thirty when I woke up. Kevin was coming out of the shower with a towel wrapped around his hips. He looked good to my eyes, though maybe a little pale, as if he didn’t see the sun often. I eased my left arm under the sheet where it couldn’t be seen.

He picked up his briefs from the floor and pulled them on, then sat down on the bed and started working his socks on.

“Good morning,” he said in his hoarse voice.

“Sure.”

He finished with the socks and twisted around to look at where I was still flat on my back. “What do you say we go get some—”

“I have to leave soon,” I said.

His eyebrows rose. “Leave?”

“Deadline to meet. Sorry.”

He got the message: I wasn’t interested in anything else. His name was Kevin and he gave good head, period. If I’d given him a false message because we’d gone to a real hotel room and not some rent-by-the-hour dive or the backseat of a car, well, I was sorry. My life was punctuated by infrequent one-night stands, driven by my free choice and forced through hard experience, and that was just the way it was.

I watched him dress the rest of the way and put his wallet in his back pocket. He paused and looked down at where I lay with his spunk crusted dry on my belly. Then he came closer and leaned over me, and I tensed. I was surprised when he kissed me, a closed-mouth kiss with nothing much behind it, merely a brief pressing of lips. He had more to give than I did, that was for sure.

“So long, Tom,” he said. And then he left.

I took my time after that and started the hours-long drive home at noon.

There wasn’t supposed to be a second time when Kevin and I had sex. When I went back to Houston five months later, he wasn’t on my mind. Getting my rocks off, yeah, that was on my mind, and the only reason I ever went to Houston. Work had been stressful, I hadn’t been sleeping well, and the walls of my small house were starting to close in on me. So I’d taken off for the weekend when normally I would have been able to hold off for another month or two. As always, I went carefully, alert to those around me as I walked toward the bar, and I would always, always be careful of how I left it.

I was at the bar, working on my second beer. I’d already walked around, seeing what was on display that night and figuring what my chances were of getting somebody to suck off a middle-aged man without much to recommend him. I didn’t have any illusions about myself. Next to the youngsters strutting their stuff, next to the gym-queens, next to the noses that’d been fixed with surgery and the skin that’d been coaxed and creamed, I was nothing. I was an unassuming man with a degree, a passion for my job, and a need for sex. Before I entered the meat-market fray again, I needed another drink, and so I was up on a barstool, staring without really looking into my glass of Miller Lite.

That was when I felt a tap on my shoulder. My eyes flew up to the mirror behind the bottles of Jack Daniel and Jim Beam, and I saw a familiar face behind me. Blue eyes, a definite chin, close-to-the-skull short hair, heavy eyebrows….

It took a few pounding pulses of the music for me to remember who he was. When recognition dawned and I moved to swivel around and face him, he said, “I’m Kevin, remember?” in the husky voice I’d heard before.

“And I’m—”

“Tom. With the souped-up Mazda.”

It was my only indulgence. Everything else I kept reined in tight, but I did enjoy driving that car. “Right,” I said. He looked like he’d come from a late night at work. His long-sleeved, button-down blue shirt probably had been accented by a tie a few hours earlier, and his pants were of a fine weave that went best with a suit jacket. Kevin, I guessed, was a businessman who worked in downtown Houston.

“Mind if I….” He nodded to the empty seat next to me, and I realized he was remembering how we’d parted before. He was quite obviously trying not to push and, just as obviously, inexplicably wanting to spend some time in my company.

I don’t know why I said, “Okay.” Maybe it was that almost sixteen years had passed since I’d been twenty-two. Lately I could feel a sort of weariness all through me; I was always tired. The way I lived made me tired. Maybe it was the easy way he’d left me before, not making a fuss. Maybe it was the nice smile he had.

Or maybe I was flattered. What the hell, I thought. A beer wasn’t going to change my world.

He sat and ordered a Michelob, and for a while neither of us said anything. The noisy activity of the bar went on behind and around us, and I wondered how far outside my boundaries I was willing to go. Kevin looked good in the remains of his work wear. He had neat, capable hands.

He was halfway finished with his beer when he asked, “You have a football team you support?”

In the heat of a Texas spring, football season was long gone, but it was the perfect safe subject. We talked. The words came from me in fits and starts at first, and both of us were impeded by the music, which wasn’t designed for two late-thirty-somethings to talk over. But eventually we got into a rhythm. We ripped the Cowboys and destroyed the hapless Texans and paid homage to Bill Belichick and the Patriots. Kevin knew his sports way better than I did, but I held my own as we argued the merits of the three-four defense and whether Ben Roethlisberger was worth the contract he’d gotten. By the time we’d exhausted football, the bartender had us on our fourth drinks. On the TV set up high in the corner, an ad came on for Hillary Clinton, and that got us started on her and the presidential race. Kevin was a Democrat, but then again, I doubt there were many gay Republicans around us looking for action that Friday night.

I kept telling myself to get up off the barstool and go circulate, that Kevin was just shooting the shit and that’s it, but I didn’t leave. Talking with Kevin was like the safe conversations I had at home, where I was plain, unthreatening, unsuspected Tom, and it was curiously nonsexual. That was all right. At least for a little while, I could avoid an everyday reality of my life: that I lived alone and had to travel across the state to find someone willing to have sex with me.

That curious bubble of unreality that I stayed in for a few hours with Kevin—drinking and watching the TV and talking—didn’t burst until I got up to take a piss. On my way back a line dance started, one I knew, one I liked to dance to, and when a stranger’s hand reached out to pull me onto the floor, I didn’t resist.

I looked over at where Kevin was, and though he was looking at me with his chin up, he didn’t make any other kind of move. Fuck him, I thought, only then realizing I’d issued a challenge that he wasn’t about to meet. If he wasn’t interested, fine.

Fifteen minutes later, though, the music changed to the occasional slow and sultry number that caught jeers from the crowd at the same time that it drove most of them to the floor. One of the much older men who’d been dancing near me took a step in my direction, but then it was Kevin who was right in front of me.

“May I have this dance?” he asked, perfectly serious. He stood there with his arms out, poised as if to embrace me.

Even in a gay club, I didn’t like to cause a scene, and I would have moved closer to him for that reason alone and not because I wanted to. But I did want to. There was something appealing, even arresting, in the tilt of his head as he asked and didn’t insist. There was sweet seduction—something I’d always been able to resist before—in the way I knew him when I didn’t know anybody else around me. His arms closed around my shoulders, my hands rested on his trim waist, and it looked like we were dance partners. I was suddenly blazingly conscious that we’d had sex before. He moved the same way he had in bed, with a certain grace that seemed to come from the confidence I lacked. Fred Astaire he wasn’t, but he didn’t need to be. All he needed was to touch me the way he was doing, with a man’s surety and a sense of claiming that he didn’t deserve and I wasn’t willing to give, but that nevertheless had me hot in seconds.

We moved slowly to the notes of the song, and his eyes asked me if we were going to have sex tonight. I guess he read the answer in my face and in how our steps in the dance matched. Even though I never repeated my sex partners, at least not since I’d entered the working world, I was going to this night. I tore my gaze from his, looked around, and cynically thought that there wasn’t anybody else waving their hands, asking for the privilege of getting me off that night, was there? So Kevin it was going to be. I looked back at him too soon, within seconds, and watched while a sort of sigh escaped his lips. He pulled me closer and I flowed into him; I could feel he was getting hard. I was too.

We stayed together for that dance and every one after that.

We went back to his hotel room a little past one a.m., me following him through the humid coastal air in my little Miata with the top down. The city-flavored wind felt good on my face and helped me focus through the booze-fog as I drove. I was surprised when we arrived at a Marriott Courtyard hotel not too far from the La Quinta where I was staying that time, but if he was as cautious as I was and didn’t want to take strange men back to his house, I had no place to complain.

Being with him that night was good. Basic, uncompromising sex between two men who wanted it and wanted it right then. I’d forgotten some things from our first encounter—for instance, how he liked to kiss. How he hitched in his breath right before he flooded my mouth and then again when I filled his. How afterward he acted totally comfortable next to me, as if it weren’t awkward at all between us, two mostly-strangers in bed together with the sharp taste of jism against our tongues. Watching him adjust the bedding over us so naturally, hearing him say You don’t have to leave. Let’s go to sleep, made me suddenly remember the things I used to want, and I fell asleep not-quite-satisfied.

We repeated ourselves in the morning, only more deliberately. Before I came close to the end, he flipped around and presented himself to me, his cock a couple of inches from my face, and though sixty-nine isn’t my favorite, I did that. We weren’t even close to coming together, but Kevin kept working on me once he’d finished.

Like each time before, he flopped over onto his back when we were done. A few minutes passed while my breathing evened out, and then the room became silent. Someone down the hall left their room and the door slammed shut, like a small explosion. I followed the sound of their footsteps in the hallway as they came closer, passed the room I was in, and then went down the open stairwell. Outside, someone leaned on the horn of their car, and from further away came the wail of an ambulance siren. I took a cleansing breath and licked my lips. Time to get up and start my own day. The big, anonymous city was all around us, an impartial judge who didn’t blame me for my weakness in how I’d spent the night.

Next to me Kevin stirred and turned over onto his side. Even in the dim light I could see the twinkle in his eyes.

Lying there next to me, naked, he extended his hand in an unmistakable gesture. “Hello,” he said. “I’m not sure we’ve properly met. I’m Kevin Bannerman. Pleased to meet you.”

I took his hand and shook it because I was smoothed out, at least for the moment, still riding the echoes of my coming, and because I was amused. “Hi, I’m Tom.”

“Tom-without-a-last-name?”

He was pushing, but I answered anyway. “Tom Smith.”

There were those skeptical eyebrows again, rising. “Really?”

“Really. My forebears had no imagination.”

“Okay, Tom Smith it is. Not Tom Jones.”

“Nope, neither one of the Joneses.”

“I can guess you’re not a libertine.”

“Or a singer. You wouldn’t want to hear my voice.”

“What do you do, then?” he asked easily. “I’m a banker. A commercial lending officer.”

I stiffened, and he noticed. I didn’t give out personal information.

“Tom,” he said gently, “I’m only making conversation.”

“I’m a teacher,” I admitted, shocked at myself for saying it. “A high school teacher.”

He nodded, understanding changing his expression to sympathetic. “Oh, I get it. That’s a tough one when you’re queer.”

“You’ve got that right.” I rolled over and sat up abruptly, pulling the sheet around me, trying to get it over my shoulders. I was on the left side of the bed, as with all my encounters. With the air conditioning on, it was cold in that room now that we’d stopped going at each other.

Kevin stayed where he was. “You must like what you’re doing to stick with it.”

“I do. The kids make it worthwhile.” Fierce pride raced through me in a second, there and then gone. I was a good teacher.

“I make loans to small businesses, usually with revenues less than twenty million dollars.”

“Those are small businesses?” I said without turning around.

“In this economy they are. How about you?”

“No, I don’t need a loan.”

He sat up next to me. I thought he might have wanted to put a hand on my arm, but he didn’t. “What is it with you, anyway? Why are you running scared?”

I wasn’t going to explain anything. Besides, most of it was pretty obvious. “I just prefer to keep things compartmentalized. Each thing in its own place.”

“You might be taking it too far, but I guess I won’t argue with you. Look, unless you’ve got another deadline to meet, how about we grab some breakfast?”

I wasn’t immune to his charm. His passing reference to how I’d lied the time before to get rid of him was said gently, without rancor and without blaming me. I stretched under the expanse of white that covered me and nodded. “IHOP?”

“I think there’s one a few miles up the freeway.”

“Over by Rice University, right.”

He gave me a speculative look then, as if trying to figure out if Rice was significant to me.

We showered and got dressed in an awkward dance, carefully not intruding into each other’s space. I wasn’t happy to be putting on the same clothes again, my work clothes from the day before, but I thought I’d have the chance to change soon enough. Kevin got into a pair of crisp, expensive-looking jeans, the kind with a crease to them that I couldn’t afford on my salary. A light blue golf shirt with some sort of crest over the breast pocket and a brown belt finished him off. He looked like he was ready for a tee time on the most exclusive country club course.

We went out to eat, getting the morning’s issue of the Houston Chronicle outside the restaurant and sharing the sections between us over eggs and pancakes. He ordered Rooty Tooty Fresh and Fruity—I think deliberately, to get a rise out of me. He sure looked at me devilishly over the top of the menu as he gave the order to the waitress. Kevin could put a world of meaning into those eyes of his.

Breakfast was easy, and I found myself relaxing. We finished and paid and then stood outside on the sidewalk under the cloudy haze that so often is the sum total of Houston’s spring weather. The cars and trucks on Highway 59 whisked by, stirring up a continuous artificial breeze, making me thankful that I didn’t have to contend with the pollution and the traffic of Texas’s biggest city all the time.

“So, you headed home today?”

I shook my head. I’d planned to stay over; Good Times would be hopping on Saturday night.

“Me, neither,” Kevin said, and that was the first time I had confirmed what I’d begun to suspect, that he really wasn’t from Houston after all. He didn’t quite have a Texas accent. His was a bit softer, more rounded, I thought. Maybe Louisiana?

He waited until a family with two little girls walked by us and into the restaurant, and then he said, “Listen, tell me if you’re not interested but… I thought I’d do the tourist bit today. I’ve never actually seen much of the city. Would you want to join me?” He jammed his left hand into a pocket. “It’s not much fun being alone.”

I could vouch for that: not much fun.

I hovered on the edge of saying no, but I didn’t. Maybe because I was tired of my own silences. I had nothing special planned for the day. I would probably just grade some papers and then surf the net from the La Quinta until dinner and going back to the bar.

Kevin noticed my indecision. “I thought I’d go down to the San Jacinto monument, read about the independence of Texas and all that. Maybe keep going south to Galveston and get some good seafood for lunch.”

I’d taught the Texas History course to sophomores, and I knew the story well. But I’d only visited San Jacinto once, when I was twelve.

“If that doesn’t float your boat,” Kevin went on, “there’s the Menil Collection of art that’s open this afternoon…”

I’d always heard of the Menil, though I’ve never managed to get there.

“…and I’ve finally decided now’s the time I’m going to Brennan’s for dinner. You want to come with me there?”

He’d finally hit on something that wouldn’t commit me. Commit too much of my time or my attention. I’d already given more than I wanted to, than I ever had before during one of my weekends, but…. Much as I’d resisted, I liked Kevin. This I could give him, and it was with a sort of relief that I said, “Brennan’s, sure. I haven’t been there in forever.”

“And I’ve never been there. I already have reservations for two.”

“For two? You were expecting to meet….” I left the question hanging.

Kevin answered me with a quick frown. “I wasn’t expecting to see you again, if that’s what’s got you bothered. Come on, Tom, lighten up. I’m not going to turn you over to the loose-dick patrol. I’m like you, remember?”

“Then why—”

“You are a suspicious guy. I was hoping to meet somebody to go out with, okay? Nobody specific, only…. I get tired of the club, how it’s hard to have a decent conversation there, how you never meet anybody real, how artificial it is. Don’t you get tired of it too?”

He was talking in a low, intense voice. Even so, I looked around to see if there was anybody around to hear him.

He made a pointed, exasperated sound. “If you’re not interested, fine. Forget it. I can—”

“No,” I said. “I mean, yes. Yes, I do get tired of the club.” It was a permanent feature of my existence, but I was sick of the way I had forced myself into living, how I never connected on any deep level with anybody. Living where I did, I couldn’t keep my job and my safety and change that, but that didn’t mean there weren’t moments when I regretted it all, everything. When I let myself think for a little while about living a normal life.

And here was Kevin offering me a small slice of time when things could be different. He wasn’t running off into the dark, four a.m. night, or into the cloudy morning either. He wanted to spend more time with me.

I looked away, tempted beyond belief. “I guess I….” I shoved my hand into my pocket too, my right hand since it’s easier for me than my left, and there we stood, two gay men who were mirror images of each other, trying to find a way to connect within our comfort levels.

There wasn’t much comfort in any of my levels.

Kevin went off to see the Houston area on his own, but with my promise to meet him at Brennan’s at seven-thirty for drinks before dinner.

I spent the day alone, as I’d planned all along, plowing through the seniors’ papers on the complex causes of World War I and occasionally thinking about where Kevin was and what he was doing. There was a stretch of minutes when I drove out for lunch during which I regretted not being with him, and I wondered what he must think of me and my decisions. But I lived the way I thought best, the same as he did, and that was that. I pushed those thoughts away and later concentrated on how the silence of my room was good after the riotous chaos of a high school and the pulsing music of the night before. I took a mid-afternoon nap and ironed my suit jacket. A jacket was required, I thought, for the elegance of an evening out at one of the best restaurants in Houston. I budgeted carefully all the time, but I would allow myself what was sure to be an expensive meal; my credit card company’s computers would be shocked to see me actually spending money like this on myself.

What I tried not to do was be conscious that I’d handed over some form of control to this Kevin Bannerman by saying yes. I told myself instead that we were far from where I lived and worked, and I’d go back to my regular way of living as soon as I drove away from this town. But in the meantime…. I looked at myself in the mirror as I adjusted my tie. I could enjoy myself tonight, couldn’t I? The problem would be enjoying myself too much. My life couldn’t be like this all the time, but for now, this one night, couldn’t I stop looking over my shoulder? Couldn’t I forget what always seemed to lurk half a turn away from my thoughts?

When I carefully walked up to the entrance of the restaurant, he was standing outside waiting for me, and I got two distinct impressions: that he was relieved I’d actually shown up, and that he had to restrain the impulse to kiss me. I knew his kisses now, at least those few we’d exchanged in the heat of the sexual battle, but not the kind someone might give on a Saturday night at a restaurant.

“Hello, Tom,” he said, with a swift smile, not even trying to hide how glad he was to see me. “Glad you could make it.”

“Glad I’m here,” I said awkwardly to cover up the jolt of attraction that streaked through me. Had he been this good-looking on that first night months ago? Kevin’s smile made him even more handsome, made me think in a flash of him looking down on me in bed. I extended my hand to slide smoothly against his and then away.

“Me too,” Kevin said.

We lingered over drinks in the bar area, but it was too crowded and noisy for us to talk much over our bourbon and waters, and Kevin kept his eyes down most of the time. The sophisticated, quiet dining room the hostess eventually took us to was different, dark red brick enlivened with candles on each white tablecloth. The room looked out over the little street that had been the restaurant’s home even back when I’d visited here with my parents. We settled on a bottle of shiraz, took our time checking out the menu, and then took our time over dinner too, all four courses we indulged in.

When Kevin told me he’d spent his teen years in Little Rock, Arkansas and shared that his mom was an art photographer living in St. Louis now, I was shamed by my instinct toward silence. After the waiter came with our turtle soup and okra gumbo, I found the words I was so accustomed to withholding. I told Kevin I was Texan to the soles of my booted feet, and that my family had deep roots here. He asked what kind of roots, and I searched for something to say that would convey how longhorns and sagebrush ran in our blood without saying too much. I settled on telling him about my brother—not me—who presided over the family-owned ranch out near Amarillo, and then ruined my reticence when I added that I went there for holiday celebrations.

Kevin listened to me talk about this—and everything else I opened my mouth about—with his head tilted a little to the side, so seriously intent. He was showing me a different part of him, not the laughing dancer and not the intent sex partner and not even the man who could coax the devil himself to sit down with the angels, because somehow he’d gotten me here, sitting across from him in the flickering light, when I never, ever did this.

That’s the thing about a really good restaurant with a discerning wait staff. If the timing is right, if the company is the best, a good restaurant can make a man feel as if he’s in a space out of time. The minutes pass differently than anywhere else, and the rest of the world recedes. That’s how I began to feel after a while as Kevin, in his charcoal gray suit and his red silk tie, took in each of my words as if it were a special gift. I wasn’t made of ice, despite how I sometimes felt. I was there, I was talking, I was being swept away by a current I’d never expected to be so strong. The wine we’d ordered might have helped too.

Besides, how could I have thought we could spend those strangely intimate hours together and not share some things I’d believed I didn’t want to say? I was letting down my guard with every minute that passed.

As we enjoyed trout amandine and shrimp Sardou, Kevin told me he’d attended the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville and that he loved the winters there and the sound of a chill wind roaring through the country hollows of the Ozarks outside of town. The way he said it made me realize he loved the land and probably was the kind of man who enjoyed hiking and camping, maybe fishing and hunting. I could see him in sturdy hiking boots, finding his way through a forest along a faint trail marked by blazes on the trees, next to impossible to follow if a man didn’t pay very close attention. I began to see the quiet, understated determination that was a part of every way he expressed himself. It seemed to me that he would never stay lost for long in a forest or anywhere else.

It wasn’t so difficult to tell him I had my teaching degree from Texas State in San Marcos and had taken half a master’s degree worth of counseling courses from Texas Tech in Lubbock, and that the long, dry, isolated drive into Big Bend National Park was my favorite stretch of road in the state.

It turned out that we shared a love of that amazing park, the least visited in the country, and we agreed that we wanted it to stay that way. He knew Big Bend well, and we spent a long time exchanging reminiscences of times we’d hiked one trail or another, how he’d come face to face with a mountain lion one early morning in a box canyon, and how I’d rafted down the Rio Grande river on a perfect spring day.

A perfect spring day. Or evening. I remembered a few, but it had been a long time since I’d added one to the list. Kevin picked up his wine glass and held it for a moment in front of him, a small toast. I did the same, and we both drank.

It was a good dinner.

The night had taken firm hold of the city when we finally left Brennan’s close to ten o’clock. A breeze had come up that whipped our pants against our legs. We’d each parked our cars in the small lot with a crumbling concrete surface at the end of the block, so we walked down there together, where our cars were side by side, though facing opposite ways. We each pulled out our keys and clicked the driver’s doors open, the clicks sounding one after the other.

I turned around to face him, not sure what I wanted. I was a little drunk and a lot confused. I wasn’t even supposed to be here, and none of this should be happening: not the night out or the good company, not the smiles that had been sent across the table or the warm feeling he’d created in my belly, not this had-to-have that sprang up in me as I watched him watching me.

I wanted to kiss Kevin, the way he hadn’t kissed me when we’d met for the evening, and he’d so stripped me of myself that I actually stepped up to him and did it. He kissed me back, his breath catching audibly, and I discovered how his lips moved when we weren’t having sex and how dessert tasted in his mouth. It was damn good. And dangerous.

I pulled away, already asking myself why I’d done that, especially out in the open where anyone could have seen us. Shit! I didn’t want to get involved, never would let that happen, and now that we were out of the clutches of the restaurant, I should have known better. “Good night,” I said roughly, and I jerked the car door open and climbed inside.

But Kevin wouldn’t let me escape; he held the door open and leaned in to where I was stubbornly staring out the windshield.

“Where are you going?” he asked.

“Good Times,” I said. “A few laughs, a few beers, dance a little, find somebody who—”

“You never laugh, Tom,” Kevin said. “I don’t think you’ll do it there.”

“Yeah, well, you never know.” I fiddled with my key without putting it in the ignition.

“If you go, then I’ll go.”

“You don’t have to.”

“Sure I do. I want to get laid tonight too. I’ll play the game just like you will.”

“Fine.”

“But we don’t have to.”

Of course we didn’t. The man I wanted to have sex with was right there talking to me. Was I out of my mind to be thinking of driving away from him? I thought maybe I was.

Kevin came even closer. “Come back to my room with me,” he said quietly. “Spend the night with me. Please.”

I turned to look up at him. “I don’t… I don’t do guys over again.”

“Sure you do,” he whispered.

I had, hadn’t I?

Kevin kissed me then, his lips warm and lush against mine, and I didn’t stop him. I took what he gave me, and it seemed that the kiss, this connection between us, lasted for a very long time. Lasted through my hand coming up to rest on his shoulder and his palm coming down to cup my cheek, and lasted through the time he drew back to say Follow me, and lasted through the Miata starting and finding its way along the streets of Houston all the way back to that Marriott Courtyard, and lasted through the two of us silently walking through the lobby up to his room.

The door closed behind us and we were kissing again, or still kissing, and Kevin breathed against my lips, “Do you do it? Do you? I want to fuck you so bad. I’ve got stuff for it. Will you let me do you?”

I almost lost it right there; my knees gave way for an instant and I sagged against the entranceway wall. It’d been years, but that didn’t mean I didn’t want to be fucked, that I didn’t fantasize about it and sometimes even dream about it, waking up convinced I was spurting with my legs over a man’s shoulders, his cock commanding me. I was used to denying myself the things I wanted, but here he was in the flesh, tempting me. I shouldn’t, I shouldn’t.

God help me, I was going to let him fuck me.

I launched myself at him and pushed him against the full-length mirror, where we heaved against each other as if we wanted to exchange skins right through our clothes. Then I grabbed his shoulders, spun him around, and propelled him across the room to the bed, where he fell backward, startled and laughing. He wasn’t down long but bounced back up to me. I swayed when he hit against me but caught him. My hands went up to his necktie. “Get this damn thing off,” I growled, and I started to yank the silk from its knot.

Booze helped me have sex the way I had to have it, and it was part of my ritual at the club: get hammered and get lucky. But I hadn’t gone to the club. I’d shared a few drinks and two bottles of red wine with this man who’d wanted to spend the day with me. I’d denied him then, but now he wanted what I’d always wanted and hardly ever trusted anyone to give me.

His hands were on my belt. “Let’s get naked,” he muttered, his hoarse voice sending shivers through me. “Show me your cock, come on. Show me everything.”

We wrestled each other out of our clothes, our fingers everywhere, and a few seconds later, we were naked on the bed. I sucked his tongue like I wasn’t going to let it go, making hungry sounds that a faraway part of me was embarrassed by, was alarmed at, but I didn’t pay attention. I so wanted Kevin to lay me.

I wrapped my fingers around his cock. It was thick but not too thick, what I’d seen and felt and tasted before. Now, with new purpose, his cock was different, better. He was gripping my waist hard as we kissed, and he gasped as I milked him. One second we were on our sides, and the next he flipped me over onto my belly and then pulled me up onto my hands and knees.

Now was the time I should have protested, should have said that I didn’t do this. But the carefully constructed person who lived in west Texas and was 2007 Teacher of the Year had been set aside somehow. I hadn’t done it; Kevin had. Besides, he was distracting me with wet kisses on the small of my back, staying there and breathing against my skin, making me tingle and shake and driving a line of sensation from his lips to my cock, lifting it. It jerked and stretched and throbbed, and when I swiped at it—only once, I couldn’t stand more than that or I’d come too soon, way too soon—my palm came away sticky wet with my weeping.

It’d been so long. How had I let it go so long between fuckings? It was as if the lid I kept so tightly capped on my desires had been blown off by some dark-haired guy talking football in the candlelight. Kevin wanting me and me wanting him back.

Nothing better than his hands all over my ass, rubbing, scratching, taking the shape of me. He reached between my legs and pushed, trying to spread me more, and I shifted on the bed, aiming to rest most of my weight on my right hand and knee, but I did it, gave him what he wanted. Up against my balls he went, not gently but so right. I hissed when he palmed me from behind.

He rubbed the side of his face against my back as he hefted my balls, and I would have screamed at him to move up to my cock and touch me!, except all I could do was heave in air, not talk.

“Okay?” he whispered, and he kissed my back again, both his hands moving to lightly rest on my hips. I froze, feeling as if they were holding me in place, and I did not want to move.

“Okay,” I breathed.

I ached, deep down inside where nobody had ever touched me. God, did I ache.

I held my head low as he reached toward his kit on the nightstand. The sound of a rubber being opened and rolled over his erection made me tremble, and then the wet daub of the lube rubbed around my hole made me moan.

I knew what was to come next, and sucked in breath and held it. Taking in a cock was never easy for me. It was the universe thumbing its nose at me, a dramatic irony that it hurt way more than I knew it should have. Kevin put his cock right there and held it just outside, where I could feel its lubricated mass threatening. He shifted, seeking the right angle, and then he shoved inside.

His cock pushed all the air out of my lungs, almost like cause and effect: there was too much of me to admit him and so I had to let something go. I stretched my spine to try to escape the immediate cramping, even though I knew I couldn’t, and I dug my fingers into the mattress, forcing myself to wait, wait, wait…. If I waited long enough, it would get better….

Behind me, Kevin muttered, “Damn,” and then held still, not moving when I knew he must have wanted to. He might have speared me without any thought, could have started fucking right away instead of letting me adjust. One hand went up to my shoulder, and I felt his fingers spread and contract, spread and contract, attempting to ease my discomfort.

Sweat prickled my forehead, and I panted like a woman in labor. Then, finally, the pain began to fade.

Kevin didn’t have to ask if it was time to move. I swayed with relief and demanded, “Go, go!” and he did. With my eyes closed and all my attention focused on my ass, I felt that first thrust of his completely, the controlled, smooth pull-back, and then the abrupt, ravenous shove of his braced legs as he drove inside me.

I sucked in air through my teeth and hissed “yesssss” down to the sheet, half out of my mind with the first thrust. I jerked back, desperate to meet the second one.

“Yes!” Kevin exulted. “God, you’re tight. So good.”

Oh, Christ. It felt so good, after so many times imagining it, to finally have this again. I loved getting fucked, loved cock up my ass. Anything else I could do as a gay man didn’t come close to what I got from that strong warmth joined with me, the movement and the sounds of two bodies pistoning together, the slickness and the slapping, the press and the pull, the weight behind me and the hands on me. I gave myself up to the incredible feeling of being ridden, of being filled.

“Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.” Kevin chanted with every thrust in, and I matched myself to his rhythm. It was easy to do, automatic, because we were after the same thing. Me and this chance-met man from the bar. Kevin, who was real, who tasted like a man, and who was now proving he moved like a man with the sharp snap of his hips that sent my left hand blindly seeking my own cock.

One pull in time with Kevin’s entering, two when he dragged out, and already it was starting, my balls so tight they’d practically disappeared when I ran the tips of my fingers over them. Not long, I wasn’t going to last long, three more maybe. One and my mouth opened suddenly. Two and my lips pulled back. I let go of my cock but I was too far gone. Three and I shook all over, gushing regret that it was over so soon, that I hadn’t even tried to make it last, and that I couldn’t have this all the time.

To have this all the time. The sex, the man, the conversation, the life.

My head spinning from the force of my coming, I pressed my forehead down to the pillow and offered up my ass for however long it would take Kevin to finish, but he wasn’t far behind me. One long groan and then that hitch that I expected now, and I could feel him shuddering as he shot his wad into the condom.

I collapsed straight down onto the small lake of my spunk, and he came right with me, keeping us together. The wet spot soaked into the sheet as he pressed me into it, and it coated my belly and then spread up higher. I tried to live intensely in the moment, him in me, his cock in me—fuel for my fantasies, the midnight hour of my wants—but it only took a few seconds and he was gone.

The sounds of him tying off the rubber came to me. Then he was snugged tight against my back again, pulling us both over to lay on our right sides. I let myself be moved as if I had no will of my own, as if I’d passed it all over to him just because I’d let him do me. Where was the fortitude that Kevin seemed to have forced out of me, the resolve that had shaped my years?

There were his lips, brushing against the curve of my shoulder. “Thanks,” he said, and his arm slipped around my waist as if we were dancing again. The familiarity of his action shocked me out of my lethargy, and I blinked.

I knew Kevin. Almost by accident and surely against my will, but I knew him: his athletic walk, the way he savored wine, his informed enthusiasm about the outdoors, the betraying clench of his fingers when he asked for something he knew he wasn’t likely to get. His innate kindness.

He wasn’t a casual fuck. And what I’d allowed myself—this night—had now come to an end.

Unaccountably, sadness swamped me. I touched his fingers, closed my eyes, and abandoned myself to dreams.

I came back to myself slowly, still curled on my side and under the sheet, feeling lighter somehow despite the ache in my ass. I remembered where I was and what we’d done as if I hadn’t slept at all, as if there’d been no time at all from Kevin breathing in my ear and this moment where I could see sunlight through my eyelids.

This was how it used to be when I’d been with Sean, when I’d slept over at his dorm and we’d fooled around, two not-quite-men with nothing to lose. In that last semester before we graduated, we’d decided we wanted to, yeah, see what fucking was all about, and not only cocksucking. I’d wake up wedged between him, snoring, and the wall, with the smell of old pizza and dirty clothes thrown all over the room. I’d breathe in the rank smell of our coming together, and there hadn’t been anything that made me happier.

“Good morning,” came the sound of Kevin’s voice.

I didn’t want to answer. Answering meant crossing the line between my bittersweet morning-memories of Sean and me and my necessary reality. There was a world of difference between what I wanted and what I could have. Reluctantly, I opened my eyes.

On a chair that was drawn up close to the bed, Kevin was sitting hunched forward with his elbows on his knees, intently regarding me as if I were a prize sculpture in a museum. Kevin. The past two nights with him didn’t feel real. Weren’t they some movie I’d watched? He was a gay man’s dream that I couldn’t dream, naked and with his spread legs giving me a prize view of his cock and relaxed balls resting on the seat.

“Hey, Tom Smith,” he said with the smallest of smiles. He reached out and flicked his thumb against my cheek. His voice sounded a little more hoarse than usual.

“Hey, yourself,” I said.

“You all right?” Kevin nodded in the general direction of my ass.

“I’m good,” I said cautiously. The Teacher of the Year was back in full force.

His gaze flicked toward the bathroom, then back to me. “That was really good last night. The way you moved, the way you looked.”

“Yeah, it was good,” I said, shifting my eyes to look at his feet. He had long toes.

“No, I mean it. You’re a pretty uptight guy, you know that? But you let loose a little last night.”

“Well, yeah, I guess.”

He shifted forward and reached out as if he wanted to take my hand. But my right arm was tucked under me, and it wouldn’t have been easy to produce the range of motion to extend and hold out my left arm. “That was fine, to see you like that,” Kevin said. “You know, it’s okay to let go.”

My eyes abandoned the carpet as I consciously allowed a flare of genuine annoyance to spike in me. He didn’t really know me, and I didn’t need preaching to. “Okay for you, maybe.”

“Geez, you’re as prickly as a cactus. Worse than my ex-wife.”

Right. Sure. I should have known. This guy who came across so sincere, Christ-come-down-from-the-cross, he was just like the rest of us, putting on disguises. Sometimes I thought that half the gay men had taken vows with an unsuspecting woman, and the other half lived with me in the closet.

“Listen, Tom,” Kevin said, oblivious, “I wasn’t blowing smoke when I said yesterday I was tired of the club scene. What do you say we meet up again? I can usually get away—”

“No,” I said definitely. I pushed the sheet aside and sat up in bed.

Kevin sat up straight too. “I know you’re a cautious kind of guy. But every few months, we could meet at the bar, have a few drinks, and then… leave with each other. Get to know each other. Maybe… maybe we can make something more of this.”

“I said no.” My clothes were bunched on the floor, testament to how last night I hadn’t cared about anything but my dick. Well, this morning I was sober and I cared about other things. I got up and grabbed for my shirt, shook it out, and didn’t look at Kevin.

He stubbornly plowed on. “We’re good with each other, don’t you think?”

The shirt sleeves were inside out. I remembered Kevin pulling them off me and jerking at the stubborn cuffs that had lingered on my wrists. He’d laughed.

“Tom? Did you hear me?” Finally, Mister Patient stood up. “You can’t deny it, we’ve had great sex.”

I finally got the shirt to cooperate and started to pull it on. “That doesn’t mean we have to—”

Kevin took a step closer. “I’m not saying we should move in together, for God’s sake. Why not think about—”

“Are you that hard up?” I rounded on him, my open shirt flapping around me, and snarled. “There are a hundred guys who’ll show up next weekend at the bar that you can pick up. Just leave me alone.” Leave me be to put on my clothes, to resume the order of my days.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” He ran fingers across his hair. “Last night was great, the whole thing, the dinner and—”

“I never implied that we—”

“You barely gave me your real name, if that really is your name, but I thought that we—”

“Forget it,” I said, intending by the snap of my words for that to be my final say on the matter. I snagged my briefs and hauled them on, then picked up my good dress pants. They were wrinkled so that it was going to be embarrassing wearing them out to my car, but I sure wasn’t going to borrow Kevin’s iron so that I didn’t have that spent-the-night-and-just-been-screwed look as I left.

The pants went on one leg at a time like they always did. Nothing had changed. Kevin was silent as I dressed in haste.

Button up the shirt, tuck into the pants. Zip up and engage the catch, then button the shirt cuffs. Look for the socks, one under the bed, and the tie, over by the mirror where I’d shoved Kevin and tried to crawl inside his skin. It was a good thing the mirror wasn’t shattered. That would have been a great way to start some of the best sex I’d ever had, confronting shards of reflecting glass, him and me over and over again in tiny pieces.

I put the tie on and even made a decent knot for it, and by the time I was finished slipping on my boots, I had myself under control.

“Why won’t you give this a chance?” Kevin asked like a kid would, plaintively, as if he couldn’t understand the workings of an unreachable mind. He was over by the window now, looking out on the parking lot through the sheers. “I’m not asking for much.”

My anger, which I was well aware I was using as a shield, drained away, and I was left vulnerable and sad. But I had at least some courtesy remaining, some sense of dignity. I went over to him, came up behind him, but didn’t touch him.

“Look, it isn’t you. It’s….” I stopped myself from saying it was me, because that sounded too much like I was laying blame on myself. “I told you before, didn’t I? That first time. That I like to keep things in their place.”

“Compartmentalize,” Kevin said. “That’s what you said.”

“Right.”

“It’s not that you’ve got somebody at home, a partner or a boyfriend?”

I sighed, and the weariness that lately had become as much a part of me as the necessity to do lesson-planning returned in full force. I felt like I could sleep for a week. “No, I don’t have anybody at home.”

Kevin turned around to face me. “I don’t either. But I’m tired of living like this, and I’m going to make some changes. I need somebody in my life.”

“Good for you, then, but that’s not for me.”

He searched my face. “I think you’re making a mistake. If you reconsider, I could give you my cell—”

I actually backed away from him, as if the very idea of having his number could destroy me. “That’s not going to happen. Whether you understand me or not, I’ve got good reason for what I do.”

“I guess you think you do. Wish I had the chance to change your mind.”

How could he pursue this idea so doggedly after only a few nights spent together? What, did he want to make one good fuck the basis of a relationship? Life wasn’t like that, and personal risks seldom paid off. Like I’d said, there were plenty of men who’d be happy to take Kevin up on whatever he offered; he just happened to have picked the one guy who wasn’t interested. He wouldn’t be alone for long.

He stuck out his hand, and I felt that the least I could do was shake it, though it felt eerie for me to have all my clothes on and to have him standing there bared and exposed.

“So long, Tom,” he said. “Good luck to you. Try to let loose once in a while. It’ll do you good.”

Sure. I’d done that last night, and look at what it’d gotten me. “Goodbye, Kevin.”

I walked to the door, my footsteps almost soundless on the carpet, and I felt like… like the smallest leaf from a tree, fallen and caught in rushing water, inexorably drawn downstream. I paused with my hand on the doorknob.

“Don’t think this is easy,” I said without turning around, my voice low.

My heart pounded in my ear a few times before Kevin said, “No, I don’t imagine it is. But it’s not necessary, Tom. Think about that.”

I left, and I knew there wouldn’t be another time Kevin and I would have sex.

 

 

Chapter 2

Gunning, Texas

 

 

THE FIRE ants were taking over the backyard. There was a telltale black mound sticking up out of the grass over by my abandoned vegetable garden, another one in the corner under the tallest crape myrtle, and a third one peeking out of some leaves that had been blown against the back part of the fence. If I left those mounds there, I wouldn’t be able to walk around in bare feet without the tiny red critters swarming up onto my ankles and biting. I’d already endured a rash of stinging bites earlier in the summer, and I absolutely was not going to tolerate any more.

I stomped over to the door that led from the patio into the garage and into the dark, oil-slicked recesses where my Miata lived. My garage was a mess, but I knew where the container of Amdro should be, off in a far corner on top of a stack of boxes. I dumped some newspapers onto the floor, uncovered the ant-killer, and clomped outside again. The poison should control the ants.

Back in Houston I’d regained control just long enough to say “No” to the best opportunity that was likely to come my way. By the time I was headed out of town that control had flown the coop and hadn’t been seen again. I was thirty-eight years old—as a matter of fact, I was thirty-eight years old this day, exactly, because July twenty-sixth was my birthday—and I’d had the better part of the past four months to regret what I’d told Kevin that stupid, stupid Sunday morning.

Making my way carelessly in my flip-flops, I took the poison over to the dark lumps of dirt and surrounded them with the flecks of feed that would kill the ants in a few days. I upended the canister and thumped it until the last flakes fell out. Then I tossed it up to the patio and watched it skitter across the concrete until it banged against the sliding glass door that led to my tiny house. Who needed more than tiny? I was the only one living there, and it seemed to me that I’d shrunk down to child-size. My yard was a big corner lot, though. It was surrounded by a high, wooden fence that was outlined with swaying, pink-blossomed crape myrtles on one side, glowing red-leaved bushes on the other, and honeysuckle vines in back. I pivoted on my heel and surveyed it all with a jaundiced air. My home and my refuge and my fortress. I could spend as many hours out here drinking as I wanted to, and no one would be the wiser. So what if Mr. Smith, teacher extraordinaire, was finishing off a six-pack a little more often than usual this summer? Nobody knew it was because he’d finally cracked, because one good dinner, one good conversation, one good fuck, and one good man had revealed his careful deceptions and his ordered life for the empty facades they were.

How was I supposed to go back to pretending this life was good enough? My brief burst of energy suddenly drained away; I could actually feel my reserves headed straight for my toes. I slumped where I was standing and ran a hand over the bristles of my early five o’clock shadow. This summer, I’d pulled myself in like a hedgehog rolling into a ball. I’d been brooding, alternately depressed and angry. Kevin had stolen my equanimity back in that hotel room, and I didn’t know how to get it back.

A seen-better-days red oak towered over the patio. Slowly, I walked to it and looked up, as I had most days that summer. I went over the well-worn thought that it might not last another year. The leaves were sparse and small, some of them misshapen. I didn’t know how long the red oak had been standing there, but I guessed it’d been a sapling way back when the town of Gunning had been mostly open prairie.

I didn’t know much about trees, and I kept thinking I should consult the nursery over in Kenneton about it. Maybe it only needed to be sprayed. But I hadn’t been able to stir myself to take a sample of the tree and bring it in for advice. Kenneton was a good twenty-five miles away, and I hadn’t done much traveling lately, except in my head. Sometimes I went back to Houston, saw Kevin at Good Times, pulled my fist back, and decked him with a right jab. Other times… well, other times were hazy. How did men like us make something of what had started with a midnight hookup? I couldn’t wrap my head around any change to the stark realities of my life. I didn’t want to change. I couldn’t. For one thing, there were no gay men in Gunning, Texas. No visible gay men, anyway. Here they didn’t exist, because the community wouldn’t allow them to. That part of me couldn’t be.

A fly buzzed nearby, and I followed its flight until it disappeared over the steamy asphalt roof of the garage. Inside the house, propped on top of my TV, were three birthday cards: one from my brother and his family, one from the sister who lived in London, and one from my mom. Probably my mother would try to call this evening, and she’d leave her rendition of “Happy Birthday” on my answering machine. For sure Grant would call.

They cared enough to remember me on this sultry summer day, but none of them had ever asked me why I wasn’t married, never dated, and had never to their knowledge had a relationship with anyone. Did they think I was sexless? By God, I wasn’t.

Sweat prickled under the back of my shirt as I stood there in the sun. At dawn the temperature had already hovered at eighty-one degrees, and the Weather Channel was forecasting that the mercury would hit one hundred and two by the end of the day. Summer in Texas, just great.

I retreated to the lawn chair next to the gas grill, fished a beer out of the six-pack cooler I had there, sat down, and took a long swallow that made the heat tolerable. Nothing else had made this summer better as I questioned myself ad nauseam over what I’d done in Houston. Why couldn’t I get Kevin out of my head? I’d bedded plenty of men—I didn’t want to think of how many over the years—but none of the others had done this to me.

It felt like he’d forced all the reasonable, mature thoughts of a well-adjusted teacher out of the neat slots in my brain and replaced them with indecision, the emotional ramblings of a teenager, and the bitter recriminations of a disappointed, frustrated gay man who never got enough sex and didn’t have anybody to talk to.

I didn’t want to think of him. What good did it do to think of him? But I remembered what Kevin looked like down to the pores on his nose. I remembered how it had felt to be touched by him that one night when I’d really known who I was in bed with. The sure way he walked. The way he talked. The way he’d tried to give me his telephone number in case I changed my mind.

You see, Kevin, I’m a fool.

The way he’d invited me to join him on that day’s tour, when instead of my precious peace and quiet I could have had a companion, a friend, maybe someone next to me in the place that was always empty.

The way he’d fucked me.

Yeah, I remembered that well. I’d been plastered, and I’d surrendered pretty much completely, had thrown my tough-guy, strong-guy disguise out the window and let everything hidden inside me out. He’d forced his way into me, literally and figuratively, and I still felt the echoes of him there inside. He’d run his hands over my ass and taken the whole shape of me, because he sure had gotten under my skin.

I shifted in the lawn chair, and it rocked back and forth on the uneven surface. My cock was getting hard. That wasn’t any surprise, because lately that was always happening. I pressed the Miller Lite can down on it, just enough to feel it, then put the can down on the concrete, on a crack that ran diagonally from one corner across the square and then under the house. Maybe I had foundation problems.

I closed my eyes and lifted my face to the unrelenting sun. The leaves of the red oak, which used to provide a thick coating of shade, only served to filter out the light now and then, so that it flickered behind my eyelids. I flinched but stubbornly kept my eyelids exposed to the sun, then finally gave in and shaded my closed eyes with my hand. I remembered reading an interview with a Catholic priest celebrating his fiftieth year in the priesthood. He’d been asked if celibacy had been difficult for him, and he’d replied that it had gotten easier as the years went on. The less you got, he’d said, the less you needed it.

It didn’t work that way for me. I carried a deep craving inside me, usually banked through sheer force of will or maybe my own foolhardiness, and it felt as if Kevin had blasted through to the core and set it loose. This summer’s blistering nights had seen me hornier than I’d been since I was a twenty-year-old. Whether I wanted to or not, I ached for that pickup from the bar with the eyes that spoke to me. Or I ached for what he thought he could give me, what we could have made. I wasn’t sure which it was. Probably both.

Kevin had related to me as a person, not a cock, when to my shame I’d done my best to relate to him the opposite way. Ever since I’d driven away from that Courtyard parking lot, I’d been longing for that honest give-and-take—the normal company of other people—even as I denied it to myself.

Such a simple thing, such a complex thing. I could call up a number of people—mainly fellow teachers—and suggest we go out for a movie and a beer, but that wouldn’t provide what I needed. I wasn’t out. Not to anybody. Wasn’t that the crux of it? No one I knew from over the long stretch of years I’d spent teaching really knew me; then Kevin had come along and asked me my last name.

I laughed sourly. Kevin. I’d practically slammed the door in his face as I stalked away from him. He probably had been more than happy to consign me to the dustbin of his mind.

Damn.

Damn, damn.

I stayed out in the heat as long as I could, rationing the six-pack, and then I went back into the house and took a shower. After that, I lay down on my bed and retrieved my jack-off towel from the bottom shelf of the nightstand. I tried to take my time, but my coming burst out of me in a heated, angry confusion that didn’t do much to relieve my aching. And afterward, the familiar lassitude overcame me. I was so tired of being my own fortress.

I turned my head away from the sunlight filtering through the white curtains. Everything would be better when school started again.

 

 

I WAS horrified. “You’re kidding, aren’t you?”

George shook his head in that deliberate way he had. “Nope, the play’s been approved.”

It was September at Gunning High School, and George and I were walking down a hallway during change of class. The usual frenzy of kids rushed by us, and as usual it sounded like they were all talking at once at the top of their lungs, which wasn’t too far from the truth.

I banged my bag filled with senior files against my leg. “But there’s no way that Rent is appropriate for high school students.” My head was buzzing with ways I could convince him of that. Maybe he hadn’t made final plans yet.

“This is the school version. We talked about this, Tom, remember?”

I guess I did. George had corralled me the past April, right after I’d returned from the disastrous trip during which I’d met my personal demon and fueler-of-fantasies. I hadn’t been in the state of mind to analyze anything too deeply then, not when I’d jumped down immediately into a funk.

A few years before, George had staged a production of Bye Bye Birdie, and he’d asked me for help as assistant director. I’d demurred since I had no experience with the theater, but he’d roped me in anyway. I hadn’t actually done much except act as his gofer and organize the supremely talented parent volunteers. The extra pay from the school had been good, but after that I stuck to my history classroom and supported George by applauding from the audience. But in April he’d caught me in my moments of weakness and got me to agree to help out again.

I remember thinking that there was no way the school district committee would approve a play like Rent, which was at the top of his list, and we’d do one of the other plays instead. Gunning was west-Texas-small-town-conservative, even if George wasn’t. Rent, which I’d seen in a gritty production in Dallas a few years before, was filled with curse words, sexual relationships outside of marriage, and drug use. And same-sex couples, HIV, and AIDS. Not exactly The Sound of Music. I’d told George fine, fine, give it a try, and then I’d dismissed it from my thoughts.

The committee filled with God-fearing churchgoers had approved Rent for a cast of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds? It boggled my mind. Rent had onstage kissing between women, between men, and a whole lot more implied. According to the values of the town where I’d lived and taught for the past fifteen years, it was obscene, decadent, and immoral, just like every homosexual man or woman was. None of them, of course, lived anywhere near Gunning.

Dread dropped over me as we walked past the student attendance office. I could not be associated with this play. It might somehow draw attention to me, arouse suspicion. I wasn’t prepared to…. If this play outed me, my life would be destroyed.

I stopped right where I was, and George stopped too. We confronted each other like rocks in the river of adolescents streaming by us.

Better to do this right away. I shook my head and then looked up at him. George towered over me, and I’m not short. “I can’t help out this year, George. I’m sorry.”

He looked a little panicked. “You’ve got to.”

“I’ve got a full schedule this year, and I was thinking of picking up an adult education course over at the community—”

“If you’re not part of it, I’ll have to go back to the committee.”

“What?”

He sidestepped a charging senior. “Their approval is based on your counseling experience. I said you’d be there for the cast, to help them through any problems they experienced during the play.”

My heart sank. “But I don’t have my degree, and I only helped out the counselors those two years when they were shorthanded.”

“Come on, Tom, I’ve got the rights and the scripts, the auditions are set up for next week, and this is a great play for the kids. We’ll have packed houses every night. And I promise you won’t have much to do.”

I already knew George wouldn’t keep that last promise. He always meant the very best but often blundered into problems. And this was a big one, as big as he was. George Keating was an overweight giraffe, with spindly legs, a beer belly, and puppy-dog eyes. He was a man only his wife could love—and every kid who’d ever acted under his direction in the theater department or sang in his choir. He’d been putting on musicals for the past ten years, but I’d never known him to go off the deep end like this.

I rubbed my hand over my chin and frowned.

“You told me this past spring you’d do it,” he said.

“I said I’d help out as your assistant, but it never occurred to me they’d say yes to Rent. I thought we’d be doing something else.”

“Hi, Mr. Smith!” Brenda Salterman hollered at me as she raced by.

“I’ll be right there,” I called after her. I had a freshman World Cultures class that was due to start in three minutes. “Look, George….”

“You can’t back out on me,” he said.

I sure wanted to. “Even if I could clear my schedule, I don’t know that I feel comfortable doing Rent with the kids. It’s all about—”

“It’s about life,” George said flatly. “Have you seen it? Do you know what it’s—”

“Of course I’ve seen it.” I hitched my shoulder in annoyance. “I do get to the big city now and then, you know.” The driving beat of dance music from Good Times came to me, and the body-memory of being tapped on the back, and me turning…. George would have a heart attack if he ever knew what I did, what I was, how Kevin and I had danced the evening away, his arms around me, and how my body had needed that. George thought I was good ol’ dependable Tom, as reliable and dull as the west Texas plains, and about as sexual.

Which was the problem, I suddenly realized. If I said no, he’d wonder why. It would be out of character for me, because go-along, get-along Tom would be the one who’d prevented the play from going on. People would gossip about that. I wanted to groan out loud. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.

“Rent might place certain issues in an urban context that some of our kids will never experience, but that doesn’t make it any less relevant,” George said with the fervor of the true believer. “At the very least they’ve got to understand the lives of others, but the truth is that the play presents life as they’ll have to deal with it on their own in a few years and what plenty of them are involved with right now. To think differently is to bury our heads in the sand. You think there aren’t drugs all over this school?”

I snorted. The students in the back row of my homeroom knew more about drugs than a vice cop.

“You think there aren’t gay kids here?” George went on. I tried not to change my expression at all. “Of course there are, and we both know it.”

“You can’t be seriously thinking of putting on some of those… some of those scenes. I mean—”

“It’s been sanitized for our age group. The language has been cleaned up, a whole song has been cut, several verses are in the trashcan, and—”

“Mr. Keating, can I talk to you about the homework assignment?” A timid youngster I didn’t know, probably a freshman, was standing ten feet away, as if he were afraid to intrude into our heated conversation. He was right to be wary; I felt like a mountain lion trapped in a corner.

“Sure, Jared, meet me after school in the Little Theater,” George said easily, and he flipped his hand, dismissing the kid. He went away looking disappointed that he hadn’t gotten his answer instantly.

The change bell rang as it did eight times a day, but I didn’t move. “No matter what cuts have been made,” I said, “the play is still about… well, what it’s about.”

“Right,” George bobbed his mostly bald head enthusiastically. “And that’s the beauty of it. The message is still there. You know, acceptance. Support. Love.”

I’d felt it too, in the theater in Dallas, though I’d tried to put the feeling down as I walked out alone in the crowd.

“But what happened to Annie Get Your Gun?” I said weakly. “I thought you were planning on—”

George clapped me on the shoulder and steered me in the direction of both our classrooms. “This is so much better. The students will learn from this. I’ll put you on the e-mail list. You’re officially listed as assistant director, and auditions are next Tuesday. I’ll need you there. Okay?”

There wasn’t anybody else in the hallway now except the two of us. I stopped and grabbed his elbow. “As your assistant director officially associated with the production of Rent, I’ve got to tell you that I have serious misgivings about the play. I don’t think it’s the right choice for this town. Folks here aren’t going to understand. Plus you’re going to be casting three students as homosexuals. Have you thought about what that really means? In this town—”

“Four,” he said. “Angel, Tom Collins, Joanne, and Maureen. Although technically Maureen is bi.”

I could see it in his blithe, enthusiastic face. He had no idea what that meant. Not for those of us living the life. Resentment crawled up my spine at the thought that George and some unknown teenagers were going to give a stab at approximating it.

“It’s going to be all right,” George said, as seriously as could be. “You’ll see.”

 

 

IT GOT worse during the casting call.

Gunning wasn’t isolated out on the western prairie. Kenneton was a thirty-five-minute trip away on State Highway 382, and it was twice our size, with an enclosed mall and a multiplex. In the opposite direction, it took under two hours to drive to Abilene. But for day-to-day amusement and to keep the young people out of trouble, our town looked to local church and school activities, like the Wednesday night services and the Thursday night Bible studies, the Friday night football games in the fall, and the twice-yearly theater productions put on by the high school.

Normally an audition for a play pulled in about seventy, eighty kids. For Rent, the auditorium overflowed with more than twice that number, but George and I quickly found out that most of them weren’t there to try out for the play; they were curious onlookers eager to see how much of the play would be re-enacted in the try-out scenes. Would we ask our girls to prove they knew how to shoot up heroin? Would Mimi re-enact a pole dance? Would we ask the boys to kiss, to prove they had the guts to do it?

“See?” I muttered to George as I walked by him, escorting two of the more raucous seniors out into the corridor.

“But I want to play a drug dealer,” one of them piped up.

George made everybody sign in, indicating what role they wanted to audition for. That got rid of the dilettantes, leaving the core of serious theater students and a few determined newcomers in the suddenly quiet seats in front of the stage. Theater directors, I’d learned, had a good idea of who they wanted to cast in a play weeks before the auditions, but George had told me he was going in this time with an open mind.

Right, I’d cynically thought. At the end of a grueling four-hour session—I was already sick of hearing five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes sung by eager young voices—George presented me with a cast list I’d both expected and feared.

“You can’t do this,” I said flatly, and I dropped the yellow legal pad he’d handed me onto his desk. We were in the glass-enclosed office he kept in the back of the Little Theater, which was what everybody called his classroom, since it mimicked the real thing.

“Sure I can. What’s wrong with it? The only problem is that there’s just one black kid in the cast, playing Benny, and it would have been better if he’d had the pipes to sing as Collins. But it’s probably just as well. Even I know this town can’t take an interracial gay couple.”

“Thank God you do.”

“I think Johnny’s right to play Mark, and Sam will do fine with Roger.”

“And you’ve cast Robbie as Angel, the pivotal role of the drag queen.” I pushed out air. I was positive that George had never seen a drag queen in person. I’d danced with one the year before and ended up in bed with her.

George looked off to the side, down to the stack of class papers piled on the floor. “Robbie’s perfect for the role.”

“And that’s the point, isn’t it?” I tried to rein in my temper. The big institutional clock on the wall showed seven-thirty-eight, and I was tired. The red beans and rice meal I’d nuked for dinner in the teacher’s lounge wasn’t sitting well.

“George….” I prompted when it was clear he wasn’t going to say anything. I pulled up the rickety folding chair and sat down.

“Okay, okay. Tell me what you think.”

“I don’t think Robbie should be Angel. Mark or Roger, that would be all right, or a smaller role, but—”

“Robbie has the talent to pull Angel off.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s got a great voice and the boy can dance. And he’s got the experience. He did fine in Bye Bye Birdie, and—”

“And he’s gay.”

George’s head came up. “Not every boy involved in theater is homosexual. Don’t succumb to stereotypes.”

“George,” I said wearily. “If Robbie isn’t gay, I’ll eat my teacher’s certificate. Come on, you know it. This is typecasting.”

“Well, okay. So he’s gay. So what?”

“You think so, and I think so, but has Robbie figured it out yet?”

George stared at me like I’d grown a set of antlers. “Has the boy looked at himself in the mirror lately? Or listened to himself talk?”

“Sometimes it takes time for these things to come to a person. I think it would be cruel to cast him in a role that we know he’ll take some flak for anyway, when it will expose him to—”

“Tom, you’re borrowing trouble. Besides, Robbie’s strong.”

“What?”

“Have you ever had him in a class?”

“Just in homeroom.”

“The kid has it all together. I think you’re wrong that he isn’t aware of his sexuality. Isn’t there some sort of statistic that says when those boys figure it out? Isn’t it really young?”

I’d been ten.

“Besides, this is why you’re here, to help him out if he needs the help. This might be exactly the right experience for him, don’t you think? Now, what do you think of Channing Carlton for Maureen?”

I backed down for the moment. “She’s okay. She’s got the voice and the long hair you were looking for. She moves well.”

“She’s beautiful. But she’s playing a bisexual bitch. Any concerns about her? Or how about Sandy for Joanne?”

Truthfully, I could hardly imagine any problems the girls might have playing lesbians. Bitterly, I acknowledged to myself that women with alternate sexualities were treated differently by our society than gay men were. The dykes versus the fags, but every straight man in the U.S. who watched porn wanted to see two women getting off together. Lesbians held a unique place in the intolerant American psyche; it was the men who lay with men who challenged the words of the Holy Bible. It seemed to me that the women got a sort of peculiar pass.

“I’m not worried about the girls,” I said.

“But how about Steven for Tom Collins? He’s okay?”

Steven was the pitcher who’d led the Gunning baseball team to the state semifinals the previous spring. It was rumored that the Chicago White Sox were scouting him already, and in the fantastical world of adolescents, a lot of the students believed that. The entire school would give Steven a pass if he danced naked on the front steps while jerking off. “Are you kidding? He’s fine.”

“So it’s only Robbie you’re really concerned about.”

“I’m not going to be able to convince you, am I?”

George folded his hands on the desk. “I really don’t have anybody else who can do Angel. Did you see anybody else out there who could?”

Any other boy who could jump on top of a desk while wearing a miniskirt and a wig? And dance? No, our town didn’t seem big enough to hold two of those kinds of people, and I wearily said so.

“You’re going to have to up your energy quotient,” George told me. “Even though we’ve started early, we’ve got just ten weeks to pull this off. Play season is tough.” He rummaged around in his top drawer and plunked a small bottle on the desk blotter. “Have some vitamins.”

 

 

ONE THING I’d insisted on and that George agreed with, claiming that he’d thought the same thing, was that all the parents of the kids chosen for the play had to attend a meeting. We’d ask them to give their written, informed consent for their child to play an addict, a fag, or one of several irreligious, neglectful children who never returned their parents’ phone calls. It wasn’t hard to imagine the complaints, and it would be best to deal with them early.

We called the meeting for Saturday morning at ten, a time we thought we’d get the best parental participation, and I promised George I’d give him most of the day for whatever needed to be done. I got to the Little Theater at nine and spent the time arranging the chairs in informal clumps, not rows, though with all of them facing more or less toward where George and I would be sitting. No desks, no tables, nothing between us and the moms and dads who deserved to have all the information.

Once I was finished with the room layout, I retreated to the back office and started going through the parent volunteer forms that had already been returned to us. This was mainly a new group of kids, different from the one I’d worked with four years before, though one family was the same, the Robertsons. I was relieved to see it. They had a supremely talented daughter who’d played the lead in Bye Bye Birdie, and now their son Johnny was playing Mark, Maureen’s ex-boyfriend who shared a drafty loft with Roger.

Johnny’s father’s hobby was woodworking, his mother was an artist, and they were the perfect theater parents, not too pushy but involved. They were willing to spend real time and talent on the sometimes-backbreaking backstage work that was essential to every production. With some relief, I put them down on the list I was starting. It was a good thing the creative department for Rent wouldn’t be relying on the assistant director to paint backdrops, because I had no talent at all for anything except dissembling about my sexuality and stupidly warding off men I wished I’d been able to get to know a whole lot better.

I wasn’t even halfway through the forms when the room filled with the adults and a few of the students. I put the papers aside and came out of George’s office to quietly sit a little behind where he was standing, bracing myself for what I expected to be a contentious, difficult meeting. I saw the Robertsons, and they waved at me. I waved back. Behind them was Robbie, our problematic Angel, rock-star thin with a shock of black hair and pale skin. Sitting still, he didn’t look gay and wasn’t dressed all that flamboyantly, but I’d seen him move. He was one of those unfortunate kids who betrayed their sexuality with every flat-footed step, every over-the-top gesture. I guessed he was with his parents: a plump, petite woman who looked like she might feel most comfortable wearing an apron and a tight-lipped, iron-jawed man sitting with his arms folded already. That wasn’t reassuring.

My gaze roamed over the rest of the crowd. I knew a few of the adults, but not well. That didn’t matter. This was George’s show, not mine, and I was glad of it. If it’d been up to me, I would never have wanted to direct this play. Even if I hadn’t been gay, Rent had too many challenges for the school environment, especially in red-state Texas.

George started talking at ten on the dot, beginning by welcoming everybody and asking if they each had a copy of the script, because he’d sent them home with the kids and asked the parents to bring them. Of course half of them hadn’t, so he asked me to give out our extras to anyone who needed them. While I got up to do that, he went on with a basic description of what the play was about and the changes that had been made for the high-school version.

I took the stack we still had and began moving around the room, handing out the scripts that had come from Musical Theater International, the licensing firm in New York. “Take care of these,” I heard George say behind me. “We’re contractually obligated to return all the scripts when we’re done with them.” A few more parents came in while I was doing that. I stood at the door and offered a pamphlet as each came in, one at a time, and I got a “no,” and a “yes, thanks,” and a “no,” and then…. “Tom?”

My name came in a whisper from a voice that I’d remembered too often the past months, and my gaze flew up to see who…. It was Kevin.

Panic ripped through me, and I barely managed to prevent my jaw from dropping. For a wild moment I wondered if I were mistaken and here was only a man who resembled him, if I’d conjured him up from my well of discontent and thwarted desire. But it really was Kevin, with black-black hair cut skull-short and pure blue eyes—though he had facial hair now, more than scruff, less than a beard. Standing there in a striped Izod shirt and navy blue Dockers, he was as devilishly attractive as the day I’d met him.

We stood looking at each other, equally thunderstruck, while George went on about how much of the profanity had been removed from the lyrics. Kevin recovered faster than I did. I watched while he swallowed and seemed to gather his resolution.

“Hi,” he said, no longer whispering, though his voice was rich with irony. He stuck out his hand. “I’m Kevin Bannerman.”

I did not believe in improbable fables come true, or happily-ever-after, or pots of gold at the end of the rainbow. I’d metaphorically kicked myself many times since Houston, but even so, I didn’t feel adequately punished for my prime asshole performance there. And I wasn’t a religious man. I did not pray.

And yet standing here in front of me was the second chance I hadn’t even thought to ask for—and wasn’t sure I was courageous enough to take.

For what felt like a multitude of heartbeats, I didn’t move. I probably thought more in those few seconds than I’d obsessed under my red oak tree with my beers, with every scenario possible racing through my mind, including Kevin-flat-on-his-back-with-his nose-bleeding-and-a-vengeful-Tom-standing-over-him, as well as Kevin-flat-on-his-back-naked-holding-the-base-of-his-cock-waiting-for-Tom-to-lower-himself-onto-it. Nobody, it seemed, confused me like Kevin did.

Of course I shook his hand. We were in the middle of a room full of people, and even if nobody seemed to be looking our way, I couldn’t take the chance that they weren’t. It would look odd if I turned away from him. So, once again motivated by fear and hating the fact that I was, with nothing else but that clear in my own mind, I reached forward.

His fingers were warm and dry, nothing different from anybody else I’d ever greeted this way, though everything was different.

“Hello,” I said, and I was pleased that my voice was calm, even. Better than his had been. I could control this situation. I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t want to do, and Kevin certainly wasn’t going to be the one to betray my secrets. “I’m Tom Smith, history teacher and assistant director.”

“Oh,” he said. “Smith. Really?” I couldn’t take my eyes off his rising eyebrow. “Right. I’m Channing Carlton’s father.”

Channing. Our Maureen, the attractive, contentious bitch whom Joanne and Mark both loved. Of course. Channing didn’t have her father’s air of quiet confidence, which I’d found so attractive I’d thrown all my cautions out the window, but now that I knew the relationship, I realized she did have his nose and mouth.

I shot a look over my shoulder. “She’s over there with… I guess that’s her mother.”

Kevin grimaced. “Right, my ex. I’d better get…. Nice to meet you, Mr. Smith.”

And as quickly as that he left, striding up to where there was an empty seat next to Channing, undoubtedly saved for him. A woman came in right behind him, and she took my last script. Anybody else who needed one would have to share. Kevin, who hadn’t taken one, would have to share with his daughter and ex-wife.

I went back to the front the long way, edging my way around the group, and sat down behind George, who was now expounding on the musical virtues of the play. This was the worst thing I could imagine happening: that a man I’d slept with would show up in my professional life. I’d have to be very careful without letting it appear that I was being careful. But… here was the man I’d thought about—for no reason that I could really understand—since April. My summer of regret had changed me. I’d made an exception for Kevin back in the spring, and I’d slept with him again. Could I…. It was hard to even think of it. Could I make another exception here in Gunning? I’d told myself I couldn’t, ever, but….

“If you’ll turn to page twenty-seven of the script,” George droned on, “you’ll see that.…”

I glanced in Kevin’s direction and immediately looked away when I saw he was looking at me. Was he interested? Was I? I hadn’t been back to Good Times since the spring. I’d tentatively thought of heading over there next weekend, but Hurricane Ike had hit Houston a few days ago, so that trip was definitely out while the city recovered. Kevin was here.

“My assistant director, Mr. Smith, will be—Tom, stand up so everybody can see you.”

I stood up and nodded. I allowed myself to pan my sight from one side of the room to the other, as I think I would have done normally. Kevin was looking at me again with a serious expression, but I couldn’t interpret it.

“Among other things, Mr. Smith will be working with the parent volunteers on the behind-the-scenes preparation, which I hope you all know is critical. I couldn’t direct this play without his unfailing assistance and dedication. If you haven’t filled out a volunteer sheet yet, please see him at the end of this meeting. We can use all the help we can get. If anybody can make a run to Home Depot today for basic materials and has a pickup, that would be excellent. Now, does anyone have….”

I stayed standing next to and slightly behind George in subtle support as he opened the meeting to questions. He hadn’t wanted to cede control by doing that, but I’d told him it was necessary. First there were the expected queries about scheduling and rehearsals and car pools. George announced that there wouldn’t be weekend rehearsals, and everybody seemed to approve of that. Then the baseball player’s mom, Steven-who-was-playing-Tom-Collins, stood up and asked that we please not advertise the play with a photo of her son in any, uh, “uncomfortable” position. The other adults in the audience all seemed to shift in their seats or let out a collective exhalation. Mrs. McDavid meant she didn’t want him shown touching his play-lover, Angel, or kissing him, God forbid, though she hadn’t said that. Next to her, her son Steven put his hand over his face.

George quickly outlined the photo publicity plans, and she seemed satisfied.

Then one of the fathers got up. I thought his son was playing an extra. “How are you going to handle the drug scenes?” he wanted to know. I wasn’t sure what he meant by that, whether he wondered if we were going to have real heroin on the stage or what, but George reassured him.

Two more parents asked questions that weren’t hard to answer, and I was beginning to think that we’d get off easy, when Mrs. Porter, the mother of Sandy, who was going to play Joanne, shot her hand into the air.

“Yes, ma’am?” George said easily.

She stood up and I saw right away she was an impressive woman. The kind of tall woman who didn’t hesitate to wear heels, the kind of educated woman who didn’t mind showing she had a fine mind.

“Let me get this straight,” she said. She was also the kind of woman who believed in getting right to the point. It wasn’t difficult to tell that she was going to be trouble. She fairly trembled with disapproval. “This play is about eight friends.”

George nodded. “Seven friends and one who used to be a friend but who is now outside the group. He married rich and abandoned the bohemian ideals the others live by.” He ticked the names off on his fingers. “There’s Mark, Roger, Tom Collins, Angel, Mimi, Maureen, and Joanne. And Benny, he’s the married one.”

Her upper lip positively curled. “One married person in the play.”

“Of the principals, right. But it’s an ensemble production, really. All eight will get star billing.”

“And among these people, they’re all friends. The ones who aren’t homosexual are easy friends with the ones who are. Forgive me if I’m not getting this correct, Mr. Keating, the play is confusing. It sometimes seemed to me that all the friends are homosexual, as they are exceptionally friendly. Is this a play about the radical left gay agenda?”

Someone in the audience laughed, then caught herself and changed it into a cough. Otherwise, it was dead silent.

“If you’ll read the play front to back,” George started off, speaking gently, “I think you’ll find that it’s not. The play is about acceptance, and—”

“Pardon me, I did indeed read this play.”

George smiled at her. “Then you will have noticed that there are four major characters who aren’t gay. Mark and Roger, who share a loft, and Mimi and Benny. Mimi is attracted to Roger.”

“I understand that this is the case in the literal sense. But I had expected them to…. If they are truly friends with the others, then surely they would attempt to get their friends to change such destructive lifestyles. Why doesn’t Mark, for instance, try to get his friends to live a more God-fearing life? He seems the most sensible one in the group. Certainly the most normal.”

George had the patience of a saint. “That would indeed make for an interesting theatrical experience, and perhaps other plays have been written with that theme. But Rent—”

“By the end of the play, one of the homosexuals dies. The one who dresses up as a woman. And the woman who is addicted to heroin also dies, or at least appears to. So the play must be a cautionary tale about the dangers of such lifestyles. Am I not correct?”

“I suppose if a person wanted to view it that way, those conclusions could be drawn.” George wasn’t smiling any more, and my own blood was boiling. What was Mrs. Porter trying to do? “Was there a specific question you wanted to ask?”

“Of course. I want your reassurance that you will stage the play in such a way that it’s clear the actions of the characters are to be condemned.”

“Mrs. Porter, I don’t know what—”

“I also have an objection to the scenes where the characters refuse to answer the phone when their parents call. The play does a thorough job of ignoring family values, but these scenes are an outright assault on them. I request that they be cut in their entirety.”

George took a deep breath. “I’m afraid I can’t do that. Rent is about totally different lifestyles than what we are accustomed to in Gunning, but that doesn’t mean—”

“One last question. Were you planning on enacting a kiss between the two lesbians on the stage?”

“Yes, I was.”

“If you are going to allow such a disgusting display, then I’m sorry to say that I will not give permission for my daughter to appear.”

A young girl’s voice from the audience rang out. “Oh, no!” It was Channing, Kevin’s daughter, who would have played opposite Sandy Porter. When I looked her way, she had her hand up to her mouth. Her mother put an arm over Channing’s shoulder. Kevin was sitting with a stone face; I wondered if I looked the same way. I hoped so. I could never allow myself to react to any gay slur, any assault on what I truly was.

George turned around to his seat, where he had a clipboard. He picked it up, took out the pen that was clipped on top, and held it poised over the page. “Sandy won’t be joining us, then?”

“No, she won’t. I’ve already told her that, and her father is in agreement.”

George very elaborately crossed off something on the sheet, presumably Sandy’s name. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Mrs. Porter. She’s very talented. We’ll regret not having her in the cast.”

For the first time, Mrs. Porter’s voice trembled. I imagined she’d had quite a scene at home, telling her daughter she couldn’t be the star of stage and screen. “Yes, well, I regret that you haven’t chosen a more suitable vehicle to showcase the talents of our high school students.”

She turned on her heel and walked out with her head held high, and I imagined she’d planned her exit for days. Everybody in the room swiveled their heads to watch her leave. Even though I wasn’t really in favor of Rent, either, it wasn’t because of the content so much as I’d been concerned about reactions from people exactly like her. The door closed behind Mrs. Porter and everybody returned to looking at George and me. Mostly George, I hoped. I waited for the next shoe to drop.

“Well,” George said with his hands on his hips. “Is there anybody else who feels like Mrs. Porter does? Now’s the time to say it if you do.” He surveyed everybody in the room. “No? I’m not going to pretend that this play will be like every other musical we’ve done in the past or that you might have already seen. Rent was groundbreaking when it opened off-Broadway in 1995, and it’s still topical today. Mrs. Porter asked if I was going to stage the play to emphasize destructive lifestyle choices. The answer to that is no. I will stage it to emphasize what I believe are the core values that Rent teaches: acceptance, love, and support. Yes, these values will be presented within the context of drug abuse, homosexual relationships, and people who are dying of AIDS. But that’s the story as the playwright gave it to us, and that’s the play that your children will work with me on staging.

“I believe that the actors we’ve chosen have the maturity level to deal with this material. But if you disagree with me, or if anybody is uncomfortable with your child being in this play, please, talk to me now. Or call me or e-mail me. All the information to get in touch with me is on the school’s website.”

He stopped there to take a breath. A sheen of sweat was showing on top of his head and his forehead, and he carefully pulled out a handkerchief and patted himself dry.

“Now,” he said, “you’ve all met Mr. Smith. He hasn’t worked with the counseling department for a while, but he has experience in that field. He’ll be available if you or your children want to talk to him about anything. His contact information is also on the school website, plus we’ve sent all that pertinent information home with your children.” He smiled slightly. “I know that doesn’t always get into your hands, though, which is what the website is for.”

A ripple of laughter swept through the room, way out of proportion to George’s small joke, but people were uncomfortable and looking for ways to relieve the tension left in the wake of Mrs. Porter’s accusations.

“So,” George continued, “anybody have anything more to say? To me, to Mr. Smith?”

But nobody did, and I was surprised by that. Robbie’s parents, who I really had expected to object, remained quiet, even though his father projected a stern, Marine-sergeant-tough attitude simply sitting next to his son. It was hard to believe that all these adults were comfortable enough with the content of the play that they weren’t walking out en masse. With a church steeple jutting up into the air in just about every direction a person could look in Gunning, it would be hard to overestimate the influence of the churches in the town. But maybe the parents here had allowed Mrs. Porter to speak for them and were content with that? Or, even more cynically, I thought about stage mothers and stage fathers, or how kids could make life at home a living hell if parents opposed something the child really wanted to do.

George dismissed the crowd by reminding them that after-school rehearsals would start the coming Tuesday. He asked for volunteers again. A few adults came up to me saying they’d help, and I added them to my lists. The temporary crisis of defending the play slipped away, and I became hyperconscious of Kevin again. He was standing in the aisle near where he’d sat, talking with his ex-wife and daughter. I wondered if he’d leave right away. My life would be much less complicated if he did leave. But if he stayed…. Under any other set of circumstances that could possibly have played out, except what had actually already happened, I would not have seriously considered talking to him about spending any time with him at all. But I wasn’t about to repeat the mistake that I’d already made when I’d walked out on him in April.

Eventually Channing went home with her mom, leaving only Kevin and a few other stragglers. I talked with Mrs. McDavid about her son the baseball player, and assured her that we would do everything we could to protect his dignity, whatever that meant. She seemed oddly reticent to go, and I began to wonder if there was something else she wasn’t saying: that she was considering withdrawing her son from the play too. But she never said that, just looked over my shoulder a lot as I talked with her, and eventually she said goodbye and went away.

That left George, Kevin, and me. Kevin had stayed. He stood with one hand in his pocket, diffident, uncertain. I looked at him and he looked at me, and it was as if he had been waiting for that from me, a signal of a sort. The smile he produced then transformed him in a way I remembered. I nodded back to him, trying to subdue my reaction. My body remembered him so well.

“Hi,” Kevin said to George, transferring the smile from me to him. “You said you needed a pickup to go shopping today? I’m free, and I’ve got the truck outside. What did you need? Oh, by the way, I’m Channing’s father.”

They shook hands while I watched, and George said all the expected things about his talented daughter. Then he pulled out a typed list from his back pants pocket. “We need paint, brushes, plywood…. Well, everything I’ve put down here.”

Kevin scanned the items and nodded. “Okay. How do I pay for it?”

“We’ve got an account set up with a debit card. Tom will go with you and use that. Okay, Tom?”

I’d promised George I was his for the day, hadn’t I? There wouldn’t be anything unusual about what I was about to do. This was my job.

“Sure,” I managed to say, though I felt as if maybe it was somebody else saying that, somebody braver than me. I’d never even imagined this scene that was taking place. In my wildest dreams, I ran across Kevin again in Houston, and we had hot monkey sex all weekend long… and then parted. Add a few months and repeat. Then repeat again. My uncertain imagination and inexperienced heart had never been able to go beyond that and had surely never contemplated Kevin-in-Gunning.

Kevin flicked a glance at me, then away, then toward me again. “Are you ready to go now?” he asked carefully. “Or do you want to wait? We can do this later.”

Groundhog Day, I guessed. Let’s give this another try. “No, let’s go now.”

Outside, the parking lot held scattered trucks and cars owned by teachers who were in for a few hours over the weekend, like George and I were. As I walked across the striped blacktop with my hands jammed in both my jeans pockets, Kevin strode next to me with equal concentration. Teaching was so much more than a full-time job. It was an avocation, a dedication to a certain life of service and giving, and one that I loved. I’d thrown myself into it, the life, the demanding rhythms of the weeks. There had been no way to merge my sexuality with teaching; I’d accepted that. I’d welcomed it. But maybe that’d been an excuse for hiding.

Kevin was driving a late model blue 2500HD Silverado with an extended cab. I thought of asking what had become of the Camry, but I wasn’t sure that was the way to start our conversation, by reminding both of us of that weekend. As he climbed in on the driver’s side, I hauled myself up into the cab and smoothed my hands flat on my thighs, carefully not resting my left arm along the console because pressure on it like that would always make it ache. We were silent as he turned the ignition, drove to the exit of the school parking lot, and then out onto Gillette Street.

“Do you—”

“How—”

He let out a chuckle after we’d talked over each other. “Me first. I don’t know this town too well. Which way to the Home Depot?”

“Turn left at the corner. You… don’t you live here?” Disappointment settled in my stomach.

“I’m leasing a house over in Kenneton, but I just moved there a couple of months ago. July.”

“Oh.”

He threw me a glance as he turned the truck onto the main drag of Gunning, which cut through town. As I’d noticed before, his actions were neat, economical, giving the impression that he was in complete control of his body, as I wanted to be in control of my life. “I didn’t come here with the intention of stalking you,” Kevin said.

“No?”

“I moved to be closer to Channing. Julianne has been having trouble with her lately, and I wasn’t too crazy about my job in Baton Rouge anyway. First National of Kenneton had an opening, so I took it.”

“I’d wondered if you had Louisiana roots.”

“You did?”

“Yes.” I looked out the side window at a Kentucky Fried Chicken, propping my right elbow against the door. “The way you talk. Your accent’s a mixture. I tried to sort it out.”

“I was born in Marathon, but I’ve lived for long stretches in Arkansas and Louisiana too. But Marathon’s home.”

That little town was one of the most isolated in the state of Texas, far to the south. “That explains why you know Big Bend Park so well.” Marathon was known as the gateway to the park.

“Right.” The light turned red and he braked until we stopped. The truck was a big one, powerful, with a V-8 turbo-diesel engine. Vibration subtly shook my body. I was very aware of how close Kevin and I were, how we existed in this enclosed space, and that we’d had sex. I wasn’t hard, far from it, but conscious of my cock in a way I normally was not. Kevin had sucked it….

Kevin kept his eyesight trained out the windshield, straight ahead. “This is quite a coincidence.”

“That’s for sure.”

“I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

“Me either. So… how have things been with you?”

He flashed a grateful smile, and I was glad that I’d given him that opening. “All right. The move was easy, but fitting into work hasn’t been. There’s lots of politics in that bank. Now we’ve got the economic downturn, and even though I’m the most recent hire, I’m pretty high up on the totem pole. There’s some resentment of me going on.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“How about you? How was your summer?”

Filled with thoughts of you. I bet you find that hard to believe of me. I hope you find it hard to believe, that instead I come across to you as a reasonable, mature man. But that’s how my summer was. Is it reasonable to have thought of you, as if I knew we would meet again?

I cleared my throat. “Boring. My summer was boring.”

He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “I haven’t been back to the club. Have you?”

“No. I haven’t.”

“I don’t go there all that often, anyway. Actually, I don’t want to go back at all.” The light turned green, and he pressed on the accelerator.

“Right. You sort of implied that. Before.” I held onto the strap overhead as he accelerated through the intersection.

“I’ve got to admit, I was surprised— Am I going the right way? Keep going along here?”

“Right, it’s about three or four more miles straight north. You won’t be able to miss it. It’s in the middle of our only major shopping center, on the outskirts of town.”

“Okay. I was shocked when I saw you today, but even more so because you’re involved in this play. Rent. It seems that it’s all about us, in a way. I imagine half the rednecks who live around here will think that the Angel character represents all gay men. I’ve never put on a dress in my life.”

“Or Tom Collins,” I said seriously. “I’m a law-abiding citizen. I haven’t hacked into an ATM recently.”

“Does he do that in the play? Sorry, I haven’t read it or seen it.”

“Yeah, at the end. His lover is Angel, the drag queen, and after he dies, Tom hot-wires an ATM and sets it up to spew out money with ‘Angel’ as the password.”

Kevin chuckled. The rich sound of it filled the cab; it rounded over me and settled on my skin. I found myself relaxing in the same way I’d relaxed with him during that long, wonderful night at Brennan’s. Just two guys enjoying each other’s company.

“Extra cash like that would sure come in handy,” he said.

More for me than for him, I thought, because it looked like he was doing pretty well for himself. The truck was top of the line and must have cost $40,000 with all the extras it had on it. My little Miata I’d bought used four years ago for $15,995, and I was still paying it off.

“Anyway,” he went on, “knowing how closeted you are, I would have thought you’d be too careful to be involved with Rent.”

I scratched the back of my neck, acting the way we wanted the students to act for the play, trying to look casual. “Normally you’d be right. It’s sort of complicated, though.”

“And I’m surprised you’re with me right now. Talking to me. You made it clear that you didn’t want to have anything more to do with me.”

I took in a breath. Here was the cautious question he was asking of me. “That… isn’t really true.”

“It’s not?”

“No.”

“No as in you don’t mind working with me if I volunteer for the play, or no as in you wouldn’t mind getting to know me better?”

I turned a little in the seat to see him, though I still clutched the hanging strap. “You said in Houston you wanted to…. Haven’t you met anybody around here yet?”

He gave a short laugh and steered around the beginnings of a pothole. “There isn’t exactly a gay scene in west Texas. At least not one I’ve found.”

“Abilene’s not far,” I pointed out. “There’s a bar there.”

“Let me guess. A bar that you’ve never been to because it’s too close and there’s too much chance of being seen by someone you know.”

He had me figured, but then it wasn’t that difficult to do. It wasn’t like I had enjoyed the hours-long trips to Good Times. The Texas landscape was flat and uninteresting, and there were only so many times a man could listen to his favorite CDs or the endless drivel of talk radio. But those were trips I’d needed to take.

“I’m not interested in Abilene,” Kevin said with a quick shake of his head. “I’m interested in… life. Living normally, with someone I care about. Not being so hard up for sex all the time that I’ll go off with just about anybody.”

“You can’t live like that here,” I said. “You can’t be out; it would be suicide. Professional suicide and social suicide. Your daughter would suffer for it, and everyone else you’re close to would too.”

“I know I can’t be out here. It doesn’t change what I want, though.”

The shopping center appeared, up on a hill to our right. Kevin sent the Silverado toward it and turned the truck into the parking lot. He found a spot in the middle of the crowd of other vehicles already there, pulled in, pulled the parking brake on with a loud crank, and then turned the key in the ignition. The engine quieted right away, and the vibration of its power left too.

Kevin stayed where he was, and so did I. We couldn’t continue this conversation in aisles stocked with two-by-fours and hammers.

Kevin went back to gripping the steering wheel and steadily kept his gaze on me. “You haven’t answered my question.”

I looked down at my fingers and then back at him. “I know.”

“I’d really like to get to know you better.”

At that point, I felt as if I didn’t even know myself, whether I was the person who could answer Kevin the way he wanted to be answered or not. Until I said the words. “I don’t really know how to do this.” That was true enough. “This relationship thing.” I’d never let it happen to me. “I’m not sure it’s possible in this town. We’d have to be so careful.”

Outside I could hear someone shouting, “Wait up!” and the sounds of a Home Depot trundle cart passing behind the truck. A whole world was moving on outside this tiny space that encapsulated us, but I didn’t look away from Kevin’s blue eyes, didn’t allow myself to be diverted from what I was trying to say. “Do you understand?” I said, conscious of a catch in my voice but unable to stop it. “If I’m outed at school, I’m destroyed. I won’t let that happen.”

Kevin nodded. It looked like he tried to smile, but his lips only quivered. “Okay,” he whispered. He reached across the seat and grazed the back of his hand against my thigh.

If life had been fair, or a freely flowing river from thought to feeling to body and back again, right then and there I would have leaned across the center console and taken his mouth, doing what this community that surrounded us considered unspeakable. I could never kiss another man here in public, even in thankfulness, even in a rush of sexless affection because I’d been extended understanding I hadn’t ever expected to receive.

Kevin pulled his hand back. “So, how do we do this?”

I looked out the window for a long while as he waited patiently for me to sort through my thoughts. I wasn’t ashamed of the way I lived, because I did think my decisions showed my own form of strength. I wasn’t a coward, even though there was a form of terror—sharp-edged, new, and throat-clogging—growing in me at the thought of what I was willing to do in order to be with this man. The only gay man living nearby that I knew, not counting Robbie from the play.

A form of strength, a form of terror.

Finally I stirred. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m comfortable with. The situation here is impossible.”

“Maybe things aren’t as bad as you paint them to be.”

“You haven’t lived here,” I said. “Don’t get me wrong, the people here are good folks. If your tire blows on the road, you’ll have half a dozen stop to offer to help. But they’re narrow-minded. They’re afraid of change, and they’re afraid of us. Fear turns into persecution and hate. Matthew Shepard could have happened here.”

Kevin spread his hands. “Okay, I defer to your experience. Mrs. Porter wasn’t encouraging. But….”

“Let’s take it slow.”

He nodded, as serious as I was. “That sounds good. Let’s do that. But I want you to know, I’m not in this for a casual fuck. I’m past that.”

“I hear you.”

“So. What’s next?”

“Find some way to…. But I don’t know how to—”

“What do you do?” he interrupted. “Besides teach school, that is.”

“That’s pretty much it,” I admitted. “That and helping with the play, which is going to take up a lot of my time. It’s just going to get worse as we get closer to the performances.”

He didn’t look happy with that, and suddenly I wasn’t either. I was committed to Rent now and couldn’t get out of it, but maybe I could wish that I had the free time it was going to fill. Maybe.

“Do you have any hobbies?” Kevin was asking.

I used to play on an intramural baseball team. I had attended poetry readings in the days before poetry slams got started. I’d been an avid supporter of the local rugby team. I’d gone out and gotten drunk with my friends and thought everything was hilarious.

Years before, in college. Since I’d launched my adult life, far from where anybody knew my younger self, I stayed home and read—my house was filled with bookshelves—or brooded. Occasionally, I went out to a decorous dinner.

“I don’t think—”

“Do you golf, by any chance?” Kevin snapped his fingers like he was abruptly remembering something.

My brother was an avid golfer and dragged me out onto his local course every time I visited. “A little.”

“Even, uh, even with your arm?”

I hitched up my shoulder. My good shoulder. “Yeah, I’m okay for golf.” The therapists had told me it would be excellent exercise for my arm, improve my range of motion, and the first few years afterward I’d dutifully played, and it had helped more than a little. But when I occasionally played with Grant, my arm always ached afterward, and on the course my disability was painfully obvious. Did I want to….

“Then how about joining me tomorrow? If you’re going to have obligations with Rent, we should— Is tomorrow too soon?”

Yes, tomorrow was too soon, but next week or next month or next year would be too. Postponing the day wouldn’t erase my uneasiness. I wasn’t being paranoid about this situation. Being out and open worked in big cities, maybe, sometimes, but would surely never work here. Would never work with me.

Golf. Nobody would blink to see men together on a course; it actually worked the opposite, that men playing with women would be unusual.

“I have a lousy swing,” I said, stating the obvious.

“I haven’t played since I left Louisiana,” Kevin returned.

“Aren’t we going to burn up the course.”

“Maybe we will,” Kevin said. “Maybe we will. Then we’ve got a date? At the Gunning municipal course. Ten o’clock? Before the churchgoers get out.”

A date. “Sure. Ten o’clock.”

“Okay then, Tom Smith. Thomas Smith.” A wistful smile appeared then on Kevin’s lips. “Want my cell phone number now?”

Late that afternoon Kevin finally left the school, and half an hour later I found that my car was the last one in the parking lot. We’d spent the day sedately working together with George on scenery and costume planning, and Kevin was now an established part of the team. George accepted his help with pleasure, without hesitation, and without questions.

I unlocked the Miata, got in, and pulled on my seat belt, experiencing an emotion totally unlike anything that had ever accompanied me when I’d started one of my weekend journeys to Houston. Kevin was in town.

I drove down Gillette Street. Thomas Smith: equal parts terror and exhilaration.

 

 

Chapter 3

Act One

 

 

I LIKED what I saw of Kevin on the golf course. Not only the clothes he wore—simple black pants and white golf shirt—or the par he shot on the first hole, but the way he firmly shook my hand when we greeted each other on the practice tee, not holding my eye or my hand too long. And I liked the way he conducted himself as we were paired with two other men by the starter to make a foursome. Especially on the first few holes, I was very, very careful not to look at him too often, not to let my gaze linger on his neat, athletic body as his club swung back over his shoulder and then drove down on the ball, as he finished up high in a way that would have made Tiger Woods proud, the whole stretched line of his body revealed. Kevin Bannerman might not have been the best golfer in the world, but he looked like a million dollars to me.

Of course we had a golf cart together. That was expected, just like Matt Rivers and his brother Jim, playing with us, also shared a golf cart. The brothers were beefy men who produced monster drives, and they sat squished next to one another. Kevin and I sat apart, making sure our knees and elbows did not touch and, as we drove away from the first tee, we said nothing to each other but the murmured, “Good shot.”

I’d sweated bullets before I even got to the course, convinced this was a very bad, embarrassing idea that would unavoidably highlight my physical deficiencies, even though I was wearing my typical long-sleeved shirt. It was an even worse idea for a gay man determined to stay closeted, but somehow I’d forced myself to show up anyway. As I’d sat in the open door of the car and laced up my golf shoes, and then as I got my not-new golf clubs from the trunk, it had seemed that a finger from heaven was pointing down at me: Look, queer on the course! Going to meet another queer! A shade off-balance, I’d lifted my golf bag, staggered, and then righted myself, telling myself I had as much right to play the ancient game of the Scots as anyone else.

Matt and Jim wanted to bet after the second hole, and I couldn’t blame them, considering the way I’d just inelegantly double-bogeyed. “The two of you,” Jim said, his fingers flicking back and forth between Kevin and me, carefully avoiding pointing to my arm, “against us.” No man would pass up the challenge, pride wouldn’t allow it, and so of course Kevin and I said yes. Betting was common on the course, and I’d prepared myself by slipping an extra twenty into my wallet from my savings jar. They wanted to play a dollar a hole with an accumulated score.

“You mean stroke play?” I asked.

“Sure. We do it all the time.”

That was one of the more unusual ways to bet on the links that I knew of, but Kevin didn’t protest, so I didn’t either.

“You know we’re going to lose,” I said to him as I drove the cart down the third fairway, letting the other two go on ahead of us. Kevin hadn’t contested my desire to drive. I felt a lot more comfortable having something to do with my hands, something to hold on to.

He stuck his hand out from under the cart’s canopy so that his palm was bathed in sunlight. “Great exercise, great weather, great company. I don’t give a damn if we lose. It looks like you might be a good putter. You didn’t miss that last one by much.”

After only two holes, he’d noticed the best part of my game. Well, the only good part, considering I’d always have a parody of a swing. “You know how to get the ball into the air in your drive.”

“Put us together and we’d have a scratch player. We could go on the tour,” he said casually.

Putting us together was what this game we were playing was all about. I focused on my hands gripping the steering wheel and wondered what Kevin thought of them, if he remembered my fingers wrapping around his cock.

The next hole, Kevin was the only one of the four of us on the green in regulation. He stood over his thirty-foot putt and shook his head. “Tom?” he called.

I’d been not-looking at his ass, very carefully not. I was strung up tight as a senior convinced he was going to flunk his final exams. “Yes?”

“Come help me line this up, would you? Since we’re on the same side and all.”

Like hell he didn’t give a damn if we won or lost. I stood rooted to the ground while scenarios danced in my head, and I wondered whether I dared do it. But then I realized the sense of it. It would be normal, right? I glanced toward Matt and Jim, down at the neck of the fairway. “Okay with you two?”

Matt waved his hand at us, the picture of unconcern. “Sure, go ahead,” he called.

So I did it, tentatively, acting like the caddies did on the pro tour as I paced off the distance and noted the breaks in the surface, and then bending over right behind Kevin as he squatted to try to read the undulations in the green. If I’d wanted to, I could have said anything into his ear and not been overheard, like last night I thought about the way you fucked me or I don’t think I can do this or how come a man like you wants to date a man like me? Of course I didn’t, I didn’t even consider it, though it was strangely, subtly arousing to be leaning over him in public like this, knowing what the two of us were and what we wanted from each other, when no one else did.

And I was going to make sure nobody else knew, that was for sure. “It breaks about three feet to the right for the first twenty feet,” I said, “and then it should go left a foot.”

He turned his head and looked up at me from over his shoulder. “You’re kidding, right? You read the greens that precisely?”

I shrugged and remembered that I needed not to fall into him. I straightened. “My brother really is the scratch golfer the two of us together might be. He’s taught me a lot, only I never take the time to practice.”

I backed off and watched Kevin come within five inches of holing his ball. The rest of us double-bogeyed, so that was one stroke up for our side.

During the rest of the round I read the greens for both of us, though I started to carefully measure the distance between us and never got as close to Kevin as I had the first time. Twice I asked him to hold the flagstick for me, and he asked the same of me. We helped each other track our shots in flight, because in the glare of the Texas sun it was easy to lose a two-inch spinning ball against the bleached-out sky. After my ball went wildly right during my drive on the seventh hole, Kevin asked as we took the cart after it, “Do you mind if I give you a tip for when you have the driver in your hand?”

His suggestion—or suggestions, as he had plenty of them—would never be able to cure what ailed me, but he’d noticed a problem with my feet placement, so what he said did help. After that, at least I started hitting them straight again. Ninety minutes later, as we approached the sixteenth hole, we were only two down.

All four of us were on the green, with me being furthest out, at least fifty feet away. I lined up, stood over the putt, and hit the ball, then watched while it traveled up, down, over, and around, and finally into the cup.

“Fantastic!” Kevin exulted. He hauled ass crossing the green to get to me, his hand already raised in congratulations. I stepped back and then forced myself not to look toward the other two. I met his high five with one of my own. Our hands connected solidly, the slapping sound echoing across the grass, and the world did not end because we were touching, our fingers wrapping around one another for a few more seconds. The finger pointing from heaven must have curled in on itself.

As the four of us approached the seventeenth tee, Matt was obviously not happy that he and his brother were only one up on us. He stepped up to address his ball with determination oozing from every pore, a person could see it. He reared back with his Big Bertha club and then drove down with a grunt and all the might in his two-hundred-fifty pound frame. It worked. He hit a big league drive—straight to the right and out of bounds.

Immediately he pulled a second ball from his bag and bent to place it on the tee. “Mulligan,” he muttered.

Kevin and I looked at one another. Throughout the round we hadn’t mentioned mulligans—basically a do-over shot that amateurs often played with—and nobody had taken one before. But there was nothing that said he couldn’t take one.

Kevin shoved his hand in his pocket, looking like a photo from Gentlemen’s Quarterly. “Sure,” he said, but I noticed his eyes were narrowed.

Matt’s second drive split the fairway and went a country mile. He had an easy chip shot to the green and beamed when he drained a birdie, boosting him and Jim to two up. Basically, right there, the game was over.

Kevin and I shook hands with each of them right after the last ball fell into the eighteenth cup. They weren’t bad fellows. Determined, yes, and glad they’d won our little bet, especially when Kevin and I dug into our wallets and handed over the money. I could afford to be generous in my thoughts because this round was over, and I’d survived. Neither of the brothers, I was sure, had a clue they’d just spent four hours and forty-five minutes in the company of two homosexual men.

“Assholes,” Kevin muttered as we hefted our bags and walked around the clubhouse to the parking lot. On the asphalt, our spiked shoes made a crunch-crunch sound.

I allowed myself an amused smile, my first of the day, but it was so much safer now, off the course. “I’m sure they’ve each got one.”

“I hate that kind of gamesmanship.”

“What? The mulligan?”

“No, the key rattling, mainly.”

“What?”

We got to his pickup and he put down his golf bag by the tailgate, and I did the same. He wiped sweat off his forehead, leaving glistening streaks of perspiration. September in Texas was hot. “Didn’t you hear that? When you were putting on the last three holes, Jim was rattling his keys in his pocket each time you were over the ball.”

That was considered the worst kind of gamesmanship by my brother Grant. “You’re kidding. No, I didn’t hear anything.”

Kevin seemed to check whether I was serious, and he must have decided I was because he gave a little laugh. “You really have powers of concentration, you know that? I should have guessed.”

He heaved his bag into the bed of the truck without much care and then said, “We did okay, didn’t we?”

I shook my head. “One hundred and eight for me, ninety-six for you. We didn’t exactly set the world on fire.”

“Lucky for us neither one of them knew how to chip the ball or we’d be hanging our heads in shame. But I didn’t mean okay on the golf game. You’re not outed yet, are you?”

I couldn’t help myself, I checked around to make sure nobody had heard him speaking in what seemed to be a football-arena-announcer voice.

“Sorry,” he said quietly. “You’re right, I shouldn’t have. Sorry.”

The Miata was a few spots down from his truck, under a Bradford pear tree with gorgeous, lush foliage. I clomped down there and clicked the tiny trunk open, where there was barely enough room for my Taylor Made irons and woods. Kevin followed me in silence, and then trailed around to the side when I sat down once again in the driver’s seat and began to take off my golf shoes.

“I’ll be more careful,” he said. “Okay?”

“All right.”

“I’m not used to this dating thing, either, you know,” he said as quietly as I could have asked him to speak. “I’ve only ever dated women before.”

I looked at him, blinking as sunlight escaped between leaves overhead to dazzle my eyes and obscure my view of him. I knew so little of him, really.

“Your wife?”

“And one beard or another. I needed them for the job after the divorce.”

That was disappointing to hear. At least I’d never done that to a woman, made her think she was in a real relationship. I’d retreated rather than do that, and I didn’t think I’d be very good at dissembling anyway. I pulled off my right shoe and picked up the Reeboks I’d left in the well of the front seat.

“I noticed you didn’t play any of the games those two did,” Kevin said.

“I guess not. It’s never seemed reasonable to count your strokes, except for the worst ones.” I finished tying the one sneaker and tackled the laces of the remaining golf shoe. “I noticed you didn’t call for a mulligan for yourself on the twelfth hole. You could have. How come you didn’t? It’s common enough.”

He tilted his head to the side and got this look on his face like he was a ten-year-old caught in the act of doing something nice for his little sister. “Ahhhhh…. Because you’re a good influence?”

“Right.”

The shoes were on, the game was completed, the afternoon was more than half over, and it was time for me to go home and do some work. I needed to plan as far out into the semester as I could, since so much of my time would be taken up with the after-hours work of the play.

Kevin stepped back, and I pulled the door closed, but then he motioned for me to roll the window down. I didn’t want to. That would look odd, wouldn’t it? I checked again for innocent or devious eavesdroppers, turned on the ignition, and pressed the button that brought down the glass separating us.

He leaned in toward the window, both his hands on his knees.

“Don’t,” I said.

He pulled back a little, but not nearly as much as I thought he should have. “Can I call you?”

“Sure.”

“In the best of all possible worlds, you know, this wouldn’t be the end of our day together.”

Silent, and tensed to cut him off if I saw the flicker of another person anywhere near us, I simply looked at him.

“In the best of all possible worlds, we’d…. ” His voice had turned low, sultry, sexy, and instant heat streaked through me. “We’d go have a beer with those guys.”

I ferociously grimaced at him and growled, “Now who’s the asshole?”

He backed up, chuckling and holding his palms up. “Hey, I was just saying. Doesn’t that sound good? A cold Bud. Wait a minute, you’re a Miller man, aren’t you?”

“Every day of the week.”

“Will you be wanting any help with the rehearsals this week? I could come out and lend a hand.”

I nodded. “Sure. We start on Tuesday this week, though the rest of the time it’ll be Monday through Thursday, beginning at three o’clock.”

“Okay, I’ll try to make it out a time or two this week, maybe combine the trip with some customer visits.”

He’d have to drive over from his bank to help, so I wasn’t going to count on it. Still, hearing that my lousy play on the golf course hadn’t turned him off was reassuring. “That’d be fine,” I said. “If you can do it. I’ve got to go.”

Kevin straightened and slapped his open hand on the side of the car as if to send me off, but then he was back down in my face one last time. “Do you like Australian?” he asked, his voice a whisper I could barely hear. “I’d like to do that to you someday.”

Shit! I gunned the engine and got out of there, not sure what to think about the man who’d said he’d be careful. He was pushing me too far with that. It was a relief to get away, but also a triumph that the day was finished. I’d done it.

That night, I fell into bed after the TV news, but sleep was off somewhere at the North Pole, not in my bedroom. Finally I gave in to my wildly twisting thoughts and got up without turning on the light to activate my laptop. The wireless connection took me to a GLBT website, where in thirty seconds I found out what Australian sex was. The words glowed in the dark as if imprinting themselves on my chest and belly, and then plunged, sizzling, directly to my cock.

I closed my eyes against my arousal, and swallowed. To be touched….

I didn’t get to sleep until past midnight, helpless before my imagination even after I’d jerked off: Kevin was licking his way very, very slowly, over and over again, down my spine.

 

 

“TODAY’S TEST has three essay questions about the nineteen-twenties. We’ve covered all of this in class, so pick two and do your best.”

My announcement in my first history class of the day was met with a chorus of boos and groans—crap, I forgot to study! and why can’t it be multiple choice? and I hate Tuesdays, he always gives tests on Tuesdays—but I was used to that. Those groans didn’t have the sharp edge of despair. Over the years I’d learned to tell the difference between those and this lingering discomfort, when the kids were being pushed by the hard-ass teacher to study and learn more than they wanted to. It was good for them to be stretched.

“No cell phones,” I said right before I gave out the test, and then I stood in front of the blackboard to watch them fidget, chew on the ends of their pens, and stare up at the clock. A few of them went right to work, though. When five minutes had ticked away, I sat down at my desk and looked at the requests for college recommendations that had already come my way. Those were always challenging, because I wanted to give the students the best chance they had to get into a good college, but I tried to be as truthful as possible too. It was an odd source of pride for me that I always had more recommendations to fill out than I wanted to do. I thought the kids trusted me. I hoped so.

Going back to school after my weekend, making my way through the tunnel of students to my classroom, seeing them pour in for the first class of the day and then calling the roll: it had been like returning home. When I’d left the classroom on Friday, my life had been one way. Now it was turned on its head, and it seemed to me that I was a different person. But the school, and particularly my classroom, was still an oasis of sanity and security. I’d feared the back of my neck would prickle with self-conscious guilt and wondered if everybody would know. I truly did feel more than a little shell-shocked that I was willing to move out of my much-treasured, hard-fought-for safety zone. But as far as I’d been able to tell over the past two days, nobody had noticed any difference. I was plain Mr. Smith. Anyway, to the kids I existed only in the school. It wasn’t hard to remember when I’d been a teenager and been astonished to run across one of my teachers at the community pool or at the grocery store.

In the teacher’s lounge during my free period, George reminded me that Danielle Robertson was coming in to start work on the scenery that afternoon. Over my roast beef sandwich I considered, chewed, swallowed, and then, in as commonplace a tone as I could muster, I reminded him in turn that Kevin might show up too. It seemed a good idea to link his presence with Danielle’s. They were equally non-threatening, weren’t they?

I stayed in my classroom for half an hour after the last bell released the students for the day, as I often did, to give the students the chance to talk to me in private. Over the years I’d counseled them on all sorts of academic problems, talked sternly to a few on the verge of flunking out, and tutored some who wanted extra help. And like most other teachers who tried to make themselves accessible, there’d been a time or two that had broken my heart, when kids had come to me with troubles that weren’t easily fixed. My classroom had seen confessions of anger and despair, but not that day. I spent the thirty minutes grading the tests and then packed up and headed for the auditorium in the arts wing of the school.

I loved our high school auditorium. It wasn’t youthful anymore, showing its age through the stains on the acoustical panel walls, and the broken chairs here and there with orange plastic taped across the seats, and the linoleum floor with missing tiles the kids loved to jump across. For the next three months we’d be using every nook and cranny of the auditorium—the seats for storage, the aisles for work sessions, the wings and stage for rehearsals, and the backstage for, well, staging—as we put all the different parts of Rent together.

There’d been talk of a bond package to present to the voters next year in order to upgrade the place. Secretly I’d been glad when the economic downturn the nation seemed to be entering scotched the idea. I liked the comfort of things the way they were; the lumbering, kid-friendly auditorium was a known quantity that worked fine for study hall and band concerts and play presentations, and of course play preparation. Known quantities were good for a man who needed the safety of the rut and the preconceived notion.

Almost three hours later, the sound of “Seasons of Love,” the opening song for Rent, came from the stage behind me as I strode up the center aisle. Because George was choir director as well as the theater teacher, he was acting as musical director and stage director for the play, and that represented an enormous burden even for his energetic talents. Most of the play was sung, not spoken. It was, after all, loosely based on and certainly inspired by the opera La Bohème.

Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes, the actors sang. They sounded good already.

Danielle Robertson looked up at me as I approached her own personal domain in the very back section of the auditorium. She had huge rolls of paper spread across the floor behind the last row of seats, and already I could see the outlines of New York City as it would appear on the stage in early December. Tiffany Davis, our art teacher, had already sketched a lot, and it seemed Danielle was adding to that.

“Doing okay?” I asked, focusing only on her and doing my best to act completely natural. I’d made up my mind and had come to see her for a reason. And then, craning my neck to admire the art at my feet, I added, “You’ve done a lot of work already.”

She pushed a strand of honey hair behind her ear. Danielle was squat like a fireplug, matter-of-fact, and had more talent in her little finger than I had in my whole body. No wonder her kids got leading roles.

“We need to work fast,” she said. “Kevin’s helped. If we could get more hours out of him, that would be good.”

“Sorry that I have to work for a living,” Kevin said. He straightened from where he’d been coloring in what looked like a tree in a park scene, and I squelched any reaction to the sight of him, the fine sight of him. Reactions were for other places and other times, definitely not for school.

Kevin had arrived forty-five minutes earlier, around five o’clock, which meant he must have left the bank in Kenneton no later than four-thirty. He’d shown up wearing the same suit that had rested so well on his slender body at Brennan’s. Now he stood with his white shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his collar unbuttoned, and his weight distributed evenly on both feet, as if he were ready to spring into action for any emergency.

Danielle was saying, with one hand out to him, “No, of course I didn’t mean you should quit your job. I’m grateful for whatever time you can give us.”

Kevin bent again to place the paintbrush he was holding on a metal splash plate. “I don’t know how often I can be here, but I like to help. Plus it gives me a chance to show Channing I care about what she does.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Danielle said, “I forgot which one was yours. She’s a lovely girl, if a little on the wild side.”

“Meaning you wouldn’t want your son Johnny dating her,” Kevin said with a wry twist of his lips.

“I’m sure if he wanted to we’d have no objection. But he’s really busy with his church youth group. Besides, I thought Channing already had a boyfriend.” She snapped her fingers as she tried to remember. “Uh….” Snap. “Uh….” Snap.

“JJ,” I supplied. “JJ Russell. First period history, he comes in hungover on Mondays.”

“He does?” Kevin asked, and his frown was deep.

“It’s better than not showing up at all,” I said philosophically. “And he’s a good kid at heart. Listen, George doesn’t want us working past six. So roll up for the evening, okay? And thanks for coming, we really appreciate the help.”

Danielle would be getting a credit in the program as the show’s assistant art director, even if it was unpaid, and she’d be showing up almost every day to help the art teacher. It still didn’t hurt to express our gratitude. I planned to do it as often as I could. Parents like Danielle and her husband John were the backbone of the schools. They were solid, good-hearted people.

“So,” Kevin said, “are you done for the day too?”

Kevin and I hadn’t exchanged a private word since he’d arrived. “No,” I said, “George and I are having a strategy dinner at Little Bit’s down on Fifteenth. Would the two of you like to join us? Sometimes it helps to have a third and fourth point of view.”

As I had counted on her doing, Danielle shook her head. “Thanks, but no thanks. I’ve got a family to feed, assuming the slow cooker hasn’t failed. Kevin, why don’t you go? You’ve seen what I’ve started here. You can represent the art department.”

He tilted his head, measuring me. “Sure that’d be okay with George?” With you?

“I’m sure.”

He nodded decisively. “Okay, then, I will. I’m driving Channing home, so I’ll meet you two there.”

Little Bit’s restaurant was a neighborhood/school/town meeting place out on highway 382, about ten minutes from the high school. We didn’t have any chain restaurants in Gunning besides the Dairy Queen on the east side and the Kentucky Fried Chicken on the north side. The owner of Little Bit’s had put four kids through the school system and never failed to have some sort of supportive message on the board outside. When I drove up, close to seven o’clock, it said, “Go Mustangs! Beat the Panthers!” Football would continue to be king until the last drop of oil was extracted from the folds of land under the prairie and probably after that. George never scheduled rehearsal on Friday afternoon; if he had, all the cast members would have skipped to attend the pep rally for the football team.

When I stepped into the rustically paneled, low-ceilinged dining room, Ellie, the manager, was there to meet me, the soul of efficient, down-home charm in a grandmotherly package. She’d make sure her customers enjoyed themselves at her place even if they didn’t want to. She didn’t know me by name, but she did by sight, and she greeted me warmly. “Meetin’ somebody?” Her voice always sounded hoarse, a little like Kevin’s did, as if she’d spent all day shouting at the waitresses.

A small voice that I hadn’t heard in years sounded in my head: Wouldn’t you like to know? My mouth opened and then closed as I was stunned into momentary silence. Where had that rebellious thought come from? No, she absolutely would not want to know. Nobody in town wanted to acknowledge behavior outside the norm that would challenge their understanding of reality. Everybody was like everybody else here.

“I’ll need a table for three, please,” I said pleasantly, once I’d made a show of covering up by scanning what I could see of the diners already there. George had said he’d be a little late because the principal had wanted to talk with him, probably about the budget for the play. And Kevin wasn’t in sight. “Better yet, is the booth in the back available?”

She led me to the last booth along the side of the main dining room, which on a Tuesday evening was less than half full. I picked the side of the booth where I could see the front door and be seen by those coming in, ordered a sweetened iced tea she said the waitress would bring, and then I pulled the game set over in front of me. The set was why I’d suggested to George that we meet at Little Bit’s instead of at the Red Top Barbecue or at Fran’s Home Cooking. Years ago, plastic Eight-Games-In-One sets had appeared at every red-and-white swathed table in the restaurant. Chess, checkers, Parcheesi, backgammon, and more were available for every harried mother to shove at her kids to keep them quiet.

There was seldom a complete set of pieces at any one table. At the back booth, the white king and the black queen were missing, along with a pawn from each side, and so I went in search of them, going table-hopping until I got what I needed.

I returned to my own booth as the tea was being delivered. The twenty-something waitress I didn’t know plunked it down and held out a menu. “Want me to bring drinks for your friend?”

“No, I don’t know what they’d like. Two others will be joining me.”

“Okay.” She put two more menus on the table and wandered off. Then she came back to ask me if I wanted any onion rings for an appetizer.

The sound of the door opening made me look up from positioning the white pawns on their squares. Kevin walked in, holding his suit jacket slung over his shoulder with one extended finger. He checked through the tables and saw me, lifted his other hand in half a wave, and started toward me.

I made a conscious decision to look away, to not allow myself to feel anything at the sight of a good-looking man, as I’d done so many times over the years that it’d become automatic. But this good-looking man was coming to join me. I knew him. The whole point of maneuvering things so he could join us for dinner was to acknowledge him for what he was: a past and potential sex partner, someone I could spend time with as my real self. A man I had decided I could allow myself to be interested in.

I looked up and tried to release the manacles I’d placed on my body, but it wasn’t easy. Kevin was a sinful temptation coming closer, a promise of pleasure, of arching up in the body’s mindless explosion, and he was a man whose eyes were focused exclusively on me. He stopped at the table with his hip cocked to one side and smiled artlessly down at me.

Devil, I thought, though I didn’t think he knew the picture he painted. “Sit down, for God’s sake.”

He gave me a quizzical look and then tucked himself into the seat opposite me while giving the restaurant a good going-over. “I feel right at home,” he said with a smirk. “There’s a place like this in Marathon.” He nodded toward the sign that said Sometimes I wake up grumpy, and sometimes I let him sleep. Little Bit’s walls were covered with sayings like that, and they were changed out every few months too. That kept the customers guessing and happy.

“Doesn’t every Texas restaurant have a possum sheriff?” I asked. A stuffed possum with a tiny six-shooter in one paw and a one-quarter gallon hat on its head hovered over our table.

“If it doesn’t,” Kevin said totally seriously, “it’s got a jackalope.”

“There’s one of those here too, behind you.”

Kevin twisted around to chuckle at the sight of the jackrabbit with the antlers of an antelope. “That’s great.” He turned back to me. “Louisiana has its idiosyncrasies, and I enjoyed the music, but there’s no place like home.”

“No place like Texas,” I agreed. “Good people here. Good senses of humor.”

“Yep. So.” He nodded at the board set up between us. “Do you play?”

I picked up a white and a black pawn and held them out in front of me, one hidden in each fist. He tapped my left hand, and I opened to show white.

He picked it from my palm. “Offense.”

I placed the black piece where it belonged and turned the board so black was on my side. “Defense.”

Golf might have been his game, but I knew a little something about chess. Years before, my mother had given me one of those Radio Shack computerized chess sets so I could play against the machine, and during more than one evening I’d wanted to throw the thing against the wall for presenting yet another way to pin me in a corner.

Except for Kevin saying, “I’m going to assume your sense of humor—which I presume you’ve got—doesn’t involve hiding a Chess Grand Master’s certification,” we played in silence for the first few moves, each of us concentrating. I watched while Kevin hovered over a piece for only a few seconds and then decisively pushed it forward with two fingers. I took a while thinking before advancing even my pawns, but he didn’t wait even thirty seconds before moving. White gave a decided advantage to anyone who knew what they were doing, but after five minutes, it didn’t seem that Kevin was especially skilled. He played with bravura, but with a simple, direct strategy that was more suited to the boxing ring than the grand game of kings.

“So what’s good to eat here?” he asked as I was reaching for my bishop.

“Try the catfish platter,” I said. “It comes with green tomato relish.”

“Okay.” He wasted no time bringing his knight out into play. “Channing tells me she has you for class.”

“That’s right.”

“How’s she doing?”

“All right. She’s a solid B student. She probably would do better if she didn’t goof off.”

“She told me you were a good teacher.”

“I try.”

“I bet you really are. Dedicated. So how did you get into education?”

“I don’t know. Seemed like a good idea at the time.” I raised my eyes from examining the board to look at him. “How did you get into banking?”

His eyes actually sparkled. How did he do that? I couldn’t imagine looking as alive as he did right then, just sitting in a restaurant playing chess with me. “I’m not sure,” he said. “How does anybody find a profession? It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Humph,” I said, because I didn’t want to react to what he said, though I suspect my lips twitched.

We exchanged a few more moves. I was already closing in for the kill, since I was better at the boardplay by about the same degree that he was better than I was at golf. I moved my rook up, preparing to maneuver him into an indefensible position, and he knew right away he was in trouble. He said something low and probably slanderous.

“What was that?” I asked, leaning forward to rub it in. “I didn’t quite catch that.”

He didn’t say anything, instead pointed to something behind me. I turned and there was one of Little Bit’s signs that said Yes, I admit it. I got a thinkin’ problem. It was either that or the one that proclaimed No Sushi.

“You’re a goner,” I told him.

“Probably.”

He rubbed his neck as he concentrated. I asked, “Are you sore from our game?” I’d had to resort to my prescription painkiller.

“Yeah, I had to take two Advil before I got to sleep. I’m not in the good shape I used to be, that’s for sure.”

“You look like you might work out.”

That brought his gaze flashing up to me. “Mainly I jog. Nothing like before.”

“Before?”

“I was on the university football team. Years ago. Another life. How about you, any aftereffects from the golf? Your….” He nodded to where my arm rested against my side, like it usually did. “Your… everything okay?”

“Sure,” I said roughly, and I looked away across the room. What was, was, and nothing I could ever do would change it. I was lucky to have the use of my arm as much as I did. In most settings I could conceal the limited range of motion, and I didn’t wear short sleeves outside even in the summer, so the scars weren’t visible. It was only because Kevin and I had grappled naked in hotel rooms in Houston that he’d seen them.

He was overtly surveying the board when I looked back at him. “I think you’ve got me trapped.”

“Checkmate in a few moves.”

“Do I give up now?” He suddenly smiled. “Or should I fight on?”

But we didn’t have the chance to play through because George was there, looming over the table. “Sorry to interrupt your game, gents, but here I am.”

“You aren’t interrupting, you’re preventing a massacre,” Kevin said.

“Then I came at the right time. Move over, Tom.” While I shuffled over toward the wall, he called out to the waitress for a Coke. Once he was settled, he extended his hand to shake Kevin’s over the table. “Hello, there. I heard you were helping Danielle. We sure do appreciate it.”

“My pleasure.”

“So, what did Hiram have to say?” I asked.

“It sure wasn’t about the budget. You’re not going to believe this, but Mrs. Patricia Porter wasn’t satisfied with what she had to say on Saturday. She came to officially complain to him about the play this afternoon.”

“You’re kidding,” Kevin said. “Is that serious? A problem?”

I took the long spoon and vigorously stirred my tea, trying to mask my unease. The ice cubes made a clinking sound. “There’s always one in every group,” I said. “You can’t be a teacher for long without running into the self-important parent.”

“Especially in theater,” George said, rolling his eyes. “Spare me from the theater mom. But Hiram said she threatened to take her complaint to the school board.”

“I guess she doesn’t have anything better to do with her time.”

“It won’t come to anything,” George said. “You know that.”

“I thought the board had already approved the play,” Kevin put in.

“No, that was the committee the superintendent set up,” I said.

Kevin shrugged. “Same thing. Anyway, she pulled her daughter out of the play. What right does she have to complain?”

George unrolled his silverware and put the paper napkin on his lap, tucking it into his belt. “She thinks it’s unsuitable for the community, a bad influence, presents the worst kind of morals, you know the drill.”

“What did Hiram want you to do?” I asked.

“Nothing, really.”

“Nothing at all?”

“He wanted to make me aware of what she’d said. He did say to make sure all the parents were on board with us, and I told him they were.”

“Mrs. Porter has a point, you know,” I said quietly as I moved the chess set, with the pieces still in play, over next to the bottles of ketchup and Tabasco sauce. I knew Kevin’s eyes were on me. “This might be a good time for you to step back and re-evaluate some decisions. I told you this might not be the best play to stage. I’m surprised he didn’t ask you to cut the kissing scenes. Remember, those are optional in the script, and—”

“No, he didn’t, and he didn’t ask me to downplay the drugs either.” George spread his hands flat on the table. “What would be the sense in staging Rent if those scenes weren’t in it? Angel’s death has to mean something, has to stir the audience emotionally, and it won’t do that if we don’t clearly establish his relationship with Tom Collins. The best way to do that is with a nice, chaste, ordinary kiss between them. And if we don’t show the heroin use for Mimi, then—”

“Ordinary?” I interrupted him. “George, take your blinders off. No kiss between men could possibly be considered ordinary. And you’re asking high school boys to perform it on stage.”

I couldn’t interpret the look he gave me then. “Do you really think we should cut the kissing from the play?”

I sat against the booth’s cushioned back. “From what we’ve been given to understand from Musical Theater International, that’s the intention, and the way other schools have gone. You don’t have to include either kiss, George, and you know it.”

“No,” he said emphatically. “I’m not going to do half-measures. If we do this play, then we do it the way it was meant to be performed and with its complete message intact. Don’t let Mrs. Porter spook you, Tom. So, Kevin, how’s life in the art department?”

The waitress came then with George’s Coke, we ordered dinner, and we didn’t mention Mrs. Porter again. By the end of the meal it was pushing eight-thirty. George excused himself to go to the men’s room as we left, so Kevin and I walked out to the parking lot without him. Kevin shook my hand when we got to his truck. “Thanks for the invite. This sure beat a cold sandwich alone in my house.”

“You’re welcome.”

He lowered his voice considerably as he released my hand. “Are we doing all right? You’re still comfortable?”

Comfortable wasn’t exactly the word I would have used. His palm had been warm against mine, and his voice soothed and aroused me in equal measures. I thought of what he’d said on Sunday, that in the best of all possible worlds the day would not have ended with us parting. Kevin was making an extraordinary effort that I could never have imagined anyone would ever make… for me. How was that possible? For me.

“Sure,” I told him. “We’re good.”

“That,” he said, “depends on how patient a man is. It’s been a long time since you and I got together at Good Times, Tom. Months. Don’t you want to—”

He broke off as a Mercury Cougar drove up and parked one spot away.

Once again he offered his hand, and I took it, though this time he squeezed my fingers tightly, even if briefly, and I found myself squeezing back, meeting his intent gaze.

“Later, okay?” he said.

“Later,” I agreed.

 

 

ON THURSDAY evening, I was watching the opening of a new episode of Supernatural when my phone rang. I put the TV on mute, picked up my glass of Dr Pepper, and ambled over to the wall phone in the kitchen.

“Hello?”

“Hello, Mr. Chess Grand Master. It’s me.”

I sat down abruptly in the chair. “Kevin?”

“In the flesh, buddy-boy.”

I snorted over my gratification that he’d called. “Not hardly. You sound like you’ve had a drink or two.”

“Or three or five. Just enough, I’d say. Sorry I couldn’t make it over the past two days.”

“That’s okay.”

“No, no, I really want to help. I was hoping to see your pearly whites today, but a client came in at the last minute I couldn’t ignore.”

“Pearly whites? You’ve got to be kidding.”

“I’m dating you for your teeth.”

“Right.” I turned my back on the two Supernatural brothers, who couldn’t really be brothers with the way they flirted. More like poster boys for out and proud. It was amazing what the TV networks could get away with these days. “Danielle asked about you today.”

“Good for her. Have you found out what Australian is yet?”

“Bastard,” I said with feeling. If I hadn’t had the self-discipline of a saint, I would have been thinking of that kind of sex with Kevin all day. Any kind of sex was beginning to sound really good to me. Any sex with Kevin. “Sneaky bastard,” I added, because he’d wound me up on purpose. “Yes, I have. A couple websites had it. I bet you were the one who put the definition up there.”

“I like licking. You have any objection to that?” There was the faintest slur to his words, and a freedom, a sort of recklessness that I hadn’t heard from him before. Had he needed the liquid courage to call me?

“No objections so far. We’ll have to see.”

There was the sound of a drink sloshing and then Kevin swallowing. Then, “Yes, we will, won’t we? But not this weekend.”

I was surprised at how disappointed I was to hear that and how relieved that I’d been provided more time to adjust to the basic idea of what was going on. It’d been less than a week since the parents’ meeting over Rent. My emotional experience of a sexual partner had been abruptly put on hold my last week of college, so I tried to forgive myself for the rush of conflicting impulses that wrenched me back and forth: couldn’t wait to have sex with Kevin, wished he’d never shown up, couldn’t wait to have sex with Kevin, wished he’d never shown up.

“Not this weekend?”

“I’m flying up to St. Louis to see the mama. Command performance that I totally forgot about, sorry. Her birthday.”

“Sure, I understand. You can’t ignore her birthday.”

“Ain’t that the truth. So tell me, Mr. Smith, are you really against putting on this play you’ve got my daughter in? The play, I’d like to point out, that will have her kissing another girl on stage. Maybe fondling her ass too. I don’t know what wild idea George is going to have about the way lesbians behave.”

It was the experience of talking to him without seeing him, and his own openness, that unstopped my tongue. In the safety of my own home, who else could hear me? “One of the props,” I told him, “is a strap-on.”

“O-ho! That’s the way to get men into the theater.”

“Armed with pitchforks, probably.”

“Don’t joke, that’s my daughter we’re talking about.”

“You with a daughter. How did that come about, anyway?”

He gave a short laugh. “The usual way, with a twist. Every time I fucked Julianne, which was just barely enough to make Channing and no more, I closed my eyes and pretended she was Paul Newman. I’m queer all right, but I was able to fake being a husband for a whole year.”

“You can’t blame me for wondering. She has a different last name than you do.”

“Julianne remarried ten years ago, but he died.”

“That’s a shame.”

“Yeah. Channing’s a good kid when she’s not running around with the wrong crowd. And, no, she has no idea that her daddy is hot for her history teacher.”

I looked at the phone, not willing to accept Kevin saying that. “No, you’re not hot for me.”

“What? You think this is a marriage of convenience?”

“Come on, we’re the only two gay men in Gunning. Or Kenneton. Who know about each other, anyway. Who else are we going to—”

“If I had been able to find out where you were living,” he said, and now he sounded really drunk, like he’d lurched to his feet and was holding himself upright with one hand against the wall, “I would have moved from Louisiana and camped on your doorstep.”

“Now tell me something I believe.”

“You don’t believe me?” He was aggrieved, like a child wrongfully accused. “I’ll show you. Someday. You haven’t answered my question.”

“Which one? I’ve lost track.”

“Are you really against the play? What are you doing as assistant director if you are?”

“I’m not against it. It’s just not ideal for this community. We’re lucky it’s only been Mrs. Porter complaining. I’m concerned about the actors and how they’ll be treated for playing gay characters.”

“So you’re worried about them being harassed in school.”

“That.” I thought of Robbie and the question of his sexuality. “And other things.”

“Channing hasn’t mentioned any problems so far. She’s enjoying rehearsals.”

“Just wait until we’re days from tech week and she still doesn’t have her lines memorized,” I predicted. “So, are you still going to be dating women?”

I blinked in surprise. Where had that come from? I hadn’t intended for that submerged question to escape from my unruly lips. I wasn’t the one who’d had one too many beers.

Kevin didn’t seem to be fazed by the abrupt invasion of his privacy, though. “Nah. I told you, I’m through with that. I want to get cozy with some fine man who’ll give me good loving for about forty years or so.”

“You’d be, ah, seventy-seven?”

“And the man scores a touchdown.” More sounds of swallowing, so I took a swig of my drink too. It still had plenty of fizz left. “But I won’t be scoring touchdowns at that age.”

“Right, you said you’d played football. Arkansas is a big-time program. You’ve got to be really good to get on that squad.”

“Not good enough. I was a back-up free safety, and I played exactly seventeen downs the entire four years I was there. In games, that is.”

“That had to be frustrating.”

“Ball-busting, brother, you have no idea. Especially when I was doing my damnedest to get into one of the offensive linemen’s pants. Do you know how hard it is to hide the fact that you’re gay on a football team?”

I tugged at the curtain right next to the table, straightening it out. I could imagine Kevin fifteen years younger, flat-out gorgeous, full of life and running onto the football field with so much energy he was jumping out of his skin, set and determined that he’d contribute to the team that day. That overlaid the Kevin I was getting to know, the serious man, the resolute and steady one. Somehow, it wasn’t hard to see the one morph into the other.

“You really want to settle down.” I didn’t ask it as a question.

“I do,” he said more soberly than anything else that had come out of his mouth so far. “I hate living alone. Don’t you?”

I paused on the verge of saying no, I was used to it. “I don’t know.”

“Open your eyes, Tomboy.”

To what? I didn’t even have a cat for company, and I didn’t want to talk about it. “How did you go from football to working at a bank?”

“Executive vice president of small business loans, I thank you very much.”

“Sure, that.”

“Finance and statistics major.”

“And….”

“Worked a summer in D.C. on an internship with the Federal Reserve.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. Slid from that into a training program in St. Louis with the biggest bank in the city, though it’s all gone now. None of the regional banks have survived. But from there it was up, up, and away for yours truly.”

“You don’t like what you’re doing, do you?”

“Hate it,” he said cheerfully. “Why do you think I’m trying to sneak out to help with the play? Gives me a reason to wake up in the morning.”

“I thought you were coming to see Channing.”

“And you. Don’t forget you. Wish you were here right now. Bet you could teach me a thing or two, professor.”

“Or maybe you’d teach me.”

“How’d you learn that?”

“What?”

“How’d you get into teaching?”

“I never wanted to do anything else. I was an education major from the day I took my first class.”

“What about the counseling thing?”

Even drunk off his ass, Kevin remembered that. “I never completed that degree. I guess if you’re born to stand in front of a classroom, nothing else will do.”

“Soooo.” He drew it out for seconds.

“What?”

“So I’m going to guess that you like what you’re doing.”

“Yeah. I do.”

“How much?”

“Enough.”

“I get it. You’re pretending to be one of those strong, silent types who won’t ever admit how he feels. That’s for straights, Tom. You don’t need to put up the front with me.”

“Shut your mouth,” I said congenially.

“I can’t lick you until you’re screaming if I shut my mouth.”

Until I was screaming? A ripple of arousal danced across my shoulders and then down my back, where Kevin said he wanted his tongue. I closed my eyes. “You can’t lick me over the phone either.”

“That’s true. What do you say you get into your sexy little car, and I get into my big truck, and we meet halfway out on the highway. We can have hot, wild sex out on the range.”

Outside my window, I heard tires on the street, some vehicle passing by. “Sounds prickly to me.”

“I’ll bottom, I promise.”

I took a breath. “What if I don’t want you to?” I didn’t. I remembered that night, the long, slow slide of him into me.

He didn’t even pause. “Then we’ve got a match made in heaven, I’d say. I don’t suppose I could talk you into having phone sex.”

When I opened my eyes, it was just the table in front of me, and my everyday kitchen. “I think you know the answer to that one.” Though I didn’t know why. If my home was my castle, if no one could hear me, why not?

“Pretend I don’t know. Tell me.”

“Have you ever heard the old joke about the Texan who died and went to hell?”

“Don’t think so. What does this have to do with having phone sex?”

“He died and when he got to hell it was frozen solid, with icicles hanging from the ceiling and everybody shivering. He took one look, threw his arms up into the air, and ran around whooping, ‘The Texas Rangers have won the World Series!’”

It took a few seconds of stunned silence, but then Kevin chuckled out loud. “Oh, that’s a good one. So, when hell freezes over?”

“You’ve got that right.”

“My cautious professor. Scholarly, brilliant teacher by day, wild gay man who stalks men on the dance floor by night.”

“I don’t stalk.”

“True. If anything, I stalked you that first night. What’s in your garage?”

“What?”

“I said, what’s in your garage? By their garages will you know them.”

“You’re crazy.”

“Nope, a little bit drunk. And crazy, yeah, that too. I’m in the mood to be crazy and there’s nobody else around to be crazy with except you. So, you tell me what’s in your garage, and I’ll tell you what’s in mine.”

My garage was a disaster. I hadn’t tossed anything out of it since I’d moved to Gunning. “My Miata.”

“Vehicles don’t count.”

“My old camping stuff.”

“Me too. I got a Camelbak from Channing this past birthday, but I haven’t used it yet. What else?”

“Lots of boxes.”

“What’s in them?”

“Junk. Stuff.”

“Come on, play the game.”

On the TV, the brothers were running away from somebody. Or maybe they were running toward something, I couldn’t tell, since I hadn’t been watching until now. “Old bills. Bank statements. Papers. You know the drill.”

“Old love letters?”

Love letters. Even if men like us ever felt that way, there weren’t any of those in my life and there never would be. “Listen, Kevin, I’ve got to go.”

“So soon? I’m barely started.”

“Nope, no more now.”

“Who am I going to talk to if you hang up?”

“Get a dog, Kevin.”

“Okay, I see where we’re at. I’ll see you next week, okay?”

“All right. Have a good trip.”

“I don’t think I will. You’re driving me nuts, you know that?”

I stopped halfway to hanging up and then slowly pulled the receiver back to my ear. “No, I’m not.”

“Would you stop that? If I say you are, then you are. You’re always assuming that you’re not…. Just stop it.”

“But I couldn’t be—”

“You don’t have any idea of how I feel. This isn’t so easy, you know?”

I grabbed the telephone cord. “It isn’t exactly easy for me either. I’ve never done this.”

“And you’re nothing like the women I’ve dated, so we’re in the same boat. Don’t look at me like I’m the expert.”

“Okay, I won’t.”

“Look, you want to go. Don’t let me keep you.”

“All right.”

“I’m going to go jerk off. My cock’s as stiff as a baseball bat. You go have a nice night, do whatever it is teachers like you do. Good night, Tom.”

I reached behind me to hang up the phone, but the dial tone was already buzzing.

 

 

I ACTUALLY liked most of Rent. There was something about its willingness to face up to the way things really were that appealed to me. What I had a hard time accepting was the ending, with most of the cast still standing, singing, even though several of the characters would likely die soon. The truly effective AIDS drugs hadn’t hit the market until the mid-nineties. Rent took place in the late eighties. The play’s grittiness was leavened by more than a sprinkling of an odd sort of hope in the face of the worst adversity that Roger and Mimi and Tom Collins would all face. That Angel, by the end of the play, had already faced.

It was four o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, and I had been helping George block out the scene where Tom Collins staggers on stage after being mugged and meets Angel for the first time. Now I sat in the audience to watch Robbie and Steven try it. The tireless piano player was working with some of the others in the Little Theater, so the boys were going without accompaniment here in the auditorium.

Angel sang, It’s Christmas Eve. I’m Angel.

And then Collins replied in his deep voice, Angel, indeed. An angel of the first degree. Friends call me Collins, Tom Collins. Nice tree.

“Wait a minute,” George called from where he was standing downstage. “Turn more toward him, Steven. A step closer. Closer.” Striding quickly, George went up to the two boys and literally pushed Steven toward Robbie with a hand on the small of his back. “Come on now, he’s not going to hurt you. You’ve got an instinctive trust of Angel, you know? Haven’t you ever felt that way when you meet somebody, that you just know you’re comfortable with them?”

Steven threw a quick glance toward Robbie. “Uh, yeah, I guess so.”

“Then imagine it happening here, and act that way.” George stepped back. “Again.” He blew into the pitch pipe for the right note.

When Angel sang, Let’s get a band-aid for your knee, I’ll change, there’s a Life Support meeting at nine-thirty, Yes—this body provides a comfortable home For the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, I made a note on my pad that he wasn’t enunciating as well as he might have.

Half an hour later the boys still weren’t comfortable with the scene. Steven was awkward as Collins; watching him stand so stiffly on the stage, a person would never guess he was a gifted athlete. Maybe he’d had second thoughts about the role. I hoped not. Having to recast the role that Sandy Porter had given up as Joanne had been difficult enough. The new girl, Marie, didn’t look nearly sophisticated enough for the part, but as George had said, beggars couldn’t be choosers, and if we had to cast sophomores like her, than that’s what we’d do. If Steven backed out on us as Collins, the quality of the show would suffer. He was perfect for the role, if only he could figure out how to be himself on stage: jaunty but sensitive, a facing-forward kind of man.

George dismissed the two of them for the day and left for the Little Theater to work with the boys playing Mark and Roger. Steven jumped directly down from the stage without using the side steps and landed with a huge thump that echoed all through the auditorium. “See you tomorrow!” he yelled back toward Robbie, and Robbie hollered, “Sure!” in return. Steven raced past me with a panted “Bye, Mr. Smith,” moving as quickly as if he were diving for a pop fly on the baseball diamond. I watched him run up the aisle, but then something made me turn around.

Robbie was still up on stage where their last scene had left him, and he was staring after Steven. I watched while he watched, until I heard the swinging doors leading out to the lobby open and then close behind me.

Now I got it, why the two boys weren’t meshing on stage together. Steven must have caught on somehow that Robbie liked him. Should I say anything? I surely didn’t want to, but this was part of my job description, wasn’t it?

“Robbie?” I called.

Startled, he looked down at me. “Yes, Mr. Smith?”

“Come on down here for a minute.”

He bobbed his head and took the same route Steven had, jumping straight down into what served as our orchestra pit, though not nearly as gracefully.

“If you break your ankle doing that,” I said mildly as he came up to me, “you’ll be sorry.”

His look of utter incredulity reminded me that I was, surely, a hundred years old, and that nothing bad ever happened to exuberant seventeen-year-olds with four times my energy. They were immortal too, weren’t they? I’d thought that once.

“Did I do okay?” he asked right away. He didn’t lisp. “I know it’s early, but I think I know how to do this role, you know?”

“You’re doing fine.”

“I hit the wrong note in that ‘band-aid’ line. But my mom’s helping me with rehearsing at night. She plays the piano. I’ll get it.”

“I’m sure you will. Robbie, is everything going all right?”

“All right?” He pushed the hair out of his eyes. George had told him not to cut it, so he could look more feminine as a drag queen. It wouldn’t take much to complete that illusion. “What, you mean with the play?”

“That and everything else. I mean....” I struggled to say the right thing. “You know I’m here to talk to if you’ve got anything you want to discuss.”

“Oh, I get it.” He looked around as if searching for someone, but there wasn’t anybody left in the auditorium except for Danielle far to the back, working on her scrims. “You mean if I’m freaked out because I get harassed all the time ’cause of me playing this role. Angel the drag queen.”

“Yes, that’s what I mean. Have there been problems?”

“No. Nothing that bad.” His gaze slid off to the side, and I didn’t believe him.

“What do you mean?”

He shrugged in a way that said a thousand words: Yes, it was that bad and, no, he wasn’t going to let it get to him and, yes, it was hard to cope with it but, no, he didn’t know what else to do. And then he compressed his lips, as if he’d pledged to keep a secret.

“Are the other students giving you a hard time?”

“They always do,” he said simply. “I’m used to it.”

“We don’t allow bullying in this school.”

“Easy to say. Listen, I can cope. It’s no big deal. I really want to do this play, Mr. Smith, and nothing’s gonna stop me, especially not some dumb jocks.”

“It’s the athletes who’ve gotten on your case? Because you’re acting with Steven?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Not really, not just them. The past couple of weeks, I’ve been prayed over a lot, you know?”

“Prayed over?” I asked sharply.

“Like this morning. Before class some of the kids stopped at my locker with their Bibles, and they held a little prayer session over me, hoping that I’d return to God and all that. They want me to give up the role, renounce the play and all its evils, stop being gay, that sort of thing.”

Stupidly, I said nothing, though I was shocked. George had been right. Robbie was aware of his sexuality. And the other…. That sort of thing could go on in the hallways of my school, and no adult knew about it? There hadn’t been a whisper of these prayer sessions in the teacher’s lounge, and I surely hadn’t noticed anything like them happening. But we were a big school with lots of hallways, like the streets and alleys of a small city. Like the alleyway where Collins had been mugged.

“You’ve got to think of it as a compliment,” Robbie said, though he sounded uncertain. “That they care that much about me. At least, that’s what my mom says.”

The press of responsibility that had abruptly landed on my shoulders eased; if Robbie was talking to his mother, then I had less to worry about, surely.

“I know we’re asking you and Steven to do a lot,” I hazarded. “Playing men who fall in love with each other. It’s got to be difficult to pretend when it isn’t part of your experience, and it’s not really happening to you.”

He tried to shove his hand in his pocket, but his jeans were so tight that he could only get his fingertips in, and his elbow jutted out from his body awkwardly. “Yeah, I know.”

“Being on stage requires acting on your part,” I said carefully.

“Mr. Keating says it takes imagination. That we have to imagine how that feels, to fall in love.”

“And still know the difference between reality and script, right?”

He frowned at me. “If you say so, Mr. Smith. Listen, I promised my mom I’d meet her outside for my ride at four-thirty, and it’s past that now. Can I go?”

“Sure. If those, uh, prayer sessions get to be too much, you can always—”

“I’m okay.”

He took off in an enthusiastic, lumbering gallop, a boy not grown into his own body yet, though in a few years he would be a beautiful gay man. Not like me, not in any way, because if I’d been Robbie this morning with those kids and their Bibles….

My hands literally trembled to think of it, a combination of rage and fear as much for myself as for him: How dare they condemn me? How dare they know my truth? My fingers curled into fists.

It was a foregone conclusion that Robbie’s classmates assumed he was gay, even if he hadn’t come out, even if he wasn’t holding hands with another boy as he sashayed through the hallways. They thought he was rubbing their noses in that fact because of the role he was playing, and so they responded by praying.

Aggressive praying. Prayer aimed not so much at healing or helping, but used as part of a teenager’s deadly arsenal to humiliate and exclude. The kids were hiding behind their religion to shield them from any accusations of doing something wrong. Oh, yes, I could imagine what that early-morning prayer session had been like. If I’d been Robbie, I’d have erupted with a volatile mixture of rage and fear, and I would have wanted nothing more than to lash out at someone, anyone. He seemed strangely serene. Certainly not distressed. I was the one who felt that way. I never would have heard about this if I hadn’t asked, because Robbie hadn’t thought enough of it to come to me, or to anyone, and complain.

Slowly I walked through the auditorium’s side doors and headed for the Little Theater at the back of the arts wing. There wasn’t anything I could do, I didn’t think. Objecting to a prayer session before school would be a very dicey proposition in this highly religious community, and I couldn’t afford to call that kind of attention to myself. I’d try to keep my eye on Robbie, though. Maybe I could find out where his locker was and strategically pass by it at some appropriate times.

I was working with the piano player, a member of the school’s orchestra, making some recordings for the kids to take home with them and practice from when my cell phone vibrated in my back pants pocket. I pulled it out to check who was calling with no intention of actually answering, when I saw I had a text message from Kevin.

My throat constricted. I hadn’t heard from Kevin or seen him since that out-of-sorts phone call. Now I stared down at the phone in my hand with an odd resentment. That call, so unique for me, had lodged under my skin, irritating and caressing me simultaneously, and I wasn’t used to that. I wasn’t used to anyone occupying my thoughts and driving me nuts. Kevin had said I was doing that to him.

I wanted to ignore this message, and I would have during school hours.

“Just a minute,” I told Marianne, and I stepped to the side of the room and scrolled to see what he had to say.

Come 2 back door now dont bring kids important.

I frowned, and then managed to smooth my expression. “Can you play ‘One Song Glory’ for Sam, please? I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

The back door was the way almost everybody came and went for work in the theater department. The main entry to the arts wing, on the opposite side, led to the band hall, the orchestra hall, the small soundproofed rooms for practicing, and the choir room. The corridors and classrooms where we were doing our Rent work after hours were closest to the auditorium and a step away from a small side lot where my car and most everybody else’s cars or trucks were parked. Robbie’s mom undoubtedly had picked him up on that side of the building.

I hurried through a sun-filled hallway with windows that admitted the light of the late afternoon Texas autumn, my footsteps clacking against the old linoleum. The sounds of the band practicing for the football game drifted to my ears. If Kevin was pulling a joke, a Texas-Rangers-have-won-the-World-Series joke, I wasn’t going to laugh.

The double doors were heavy, painted a dark blue that had chipped with age. They squeaked when I pushed them open and kept them open, as if I were granting Kevin only a minute from my busy schedule. Kevin stood a few feet away on the striped asphalt, next to a red Mustang, in another one of his banker-correct suits.

“What’s going on?” I asked, and not pleasantly either.

“Watch out,” he cautioned, and he pointed down to the ground.

A broken egg was at my feet, splattered all over the sidewalk. There were more shattered shells and yellow yolk and strings of thick egg white, still glistening and wet, in an arc around where I stood.

“Turn around,” Kevin said. “Close the doors first.”

On the outside of the doors, somebody had thrown what must have been a full dozen eggs against the metal. The tracks glistened moistly where they had dripped down to the ground. A full, intact yolk, looking ready for frying, quivered smack in front of the center pole.

“What the hell?” I said out loud.

“Is this the sort of thing that happens around here all the time?” Kevin asked, stepping up next to me.

“Never. There’s been some vandalism associated with the homecoming game against North Central High, but that’s it.”

“Is it homecoming time now?”

I shook my head. “Not even close. I guess you saw this when you drove up?”

“Right. Not five minutes ago. It must have just happened. Do you think there’s any chance this isn’t directed against the play?”

I ran my fingers through my hair. “I suppose there’s a reasonable possibility, but I doubt it. What do you think?”

“You’re the teacher who knows. I wanted you to see this before I went in search of a bucket of water to clean it up.”

“We’ve got to show this to the principal first. You stay here and I’ll go see if Hiram is still in his office, all right?”

“Sure, I’m here to serve.”

I turned to go and was stopped when he tugged on my sleeve. “Hey,” he said, “this isn’t any big deal. You know kids, letting off steam. They probably drove in, lobbed their weapons, and didn’t even get out of their truck.”

“Sure,” I said evenly. “Sort of like shooting your new twenty-two at a stop sign to see if you can hit it. I’ll be right back.”

Hiram wasn’t hard to track down, since he was standing in the school lobby talking to a man in an expensive dark suit. I ducked into the counselors’ office and waited a few minutes until Hiram clapped the fellow on the back, shook his hand, and escorted him out the front doors. He came back looking like a man ready to go home to his supper, but I stepped out and told him what had happened. I didn’t want to. Mrs. Porter, Robbie, now this. Waiting, I’d made up my mind not to tell him about the prayer sessions going on in his school.

Hiram Watts was an old-school educator, deeply entrenched in the community, a social man who nevertheless ran the school efficiently. I had a mild liking for him and had never had occasion to cross swords with him, but I had no idea what his views on homosexuality were. Maybe he’d think praying over the gay students in his school was a good thing. Maybe he’d join the kids the next morning. Just because he’d given George the go-ahead for the play didn’t mean he was ready to endorse gay marriage in Texas or even understand the difficult path kids like Robbie were forced to tread.

Of course I was forced to introduce Kevin to Hiram, though I didn’t want to. The “parent volunteer” was also a professional man, a banker who was concerned and responsible as he relayed what little he’d seen. Kevin knew how to conduct himself—except maybe, sometimes, with me.

Hiram took the egging in stride and didn’t make a big deal of it. I was grateful for that, as I didn’t want to make a big deal of it either. Kids would be kids, the three of us agreed, each of us deliberately being casual about it. Hiram said there wasn’t any need to make a report to the police, then said he’d go look for Randy the custodian and ask him to take care of the clean-up job. He thanked us, made some remark about theater people keeping longer hours than the principal, and took himself off.

“Well,” Kevin said, and he massaged the back of his neck. “This school is a barrel of laughs, isn’t it?”

“Every day. How was your trip to see your mother?”

He eyed me carefully. “If I said it was maddening because I’m hornier than hell and I didn’t want to be there, would that be going over the line?”

I looked away. “Yeah. Saying that here is over the line.”

“Damn, this is frustrating.”

“Welcome to my world.”

“Your world, where the kids are probably wondering where Mr. Wonderful Smith is.”

“Right. Let’s get going.”

I was so tempted to stomp on the broken eggshells as we went up the few steps and opened the doors, but I didn’t, because teachers didn’t give in to their frustrations that way. Kevin and I walked back to the auditorium, where he took off his jacket and draped it over a chair in the back row before joining Danielle down on her knees, painting what I thought was a detailed portrait of a skyscraper. I left him there with her and went back to George and the kids and the piano player, telling myself that no part of what had happened this day was a big deal.

 

 

AT NINE o’clock Wednesday night, I grabbed the cordless phone from the handset in the living room and kept lugging my load of dirty clothes toward my laundry room. After tucking the phone under my chin, I said, “Hello?”

“So now I’m telling you that my visit to my mother was frustrating because I’m hornier than hell and I didn’t want to be there. Okay?”

I heaved the laundry basket up on top of the dryer, leaned my good elbow on the pile of clothes, and said, “Okay, okay, I can’t really disagree with you.”

“No, you can’t. I’m the one who knows how I feel.”

I’d thought a lot over the weekend and come up with no real answers. “Kevin, why are you and I—”

“Why aren’t we going immediately to bed and screwing like minks in heat?”

“No, why are you interested in me?”

“You were the one who said it, right?” His voice reverberated with rich irony. “We’re the only two gay men who know one another in a queer’s wasteland. That’s got to be it.”

“Come on.”

“Can’t I be attracted to you? Can’t I like you?”

“Kevin, I’m just an ordinary—”

“Let’s go out to dinner together.”

I didn’t even stop to think. “I can’t.”

“You didn’t let me finish. Let’s go out to dinner in Abilene. Can you do that? Two businessmen consulting over steaks on Saturday night? It’s more than a hundred miles away, and nobody you know will see us.”

“Businessmen?”

“I don’t know that I have the patience to keep dancing around you like this. It’ll take a hundred years for us to get to know one another when I can only exchange two words with you at school, and when I can only get away on Tuesdays.”

“You were the one who said you weren’t in this for a casual fuck,” I said.

“Right now a casual fuck sounds great, doesn’t it? Like we had back in Houston? Remember them?”

I pushed away from the laundry basket. “You’re good in bed.” I could feel his ghost-hands on my ass.

“Give me the chance to remind you of that.”

“I thought you said you wanted to go out to dinner.”

“And something afterward. Only if we feel like it. A motel. A city like Abilene has hundreds of them.”

I rubbed my arm across my face, my bare arm, because in the privacy of my own home I had put on one of my few short-sleeved shirts. Who was I trying to fool? There was no way I was going to pass this up; I was hard simply talking to him.

“Yes,” I said. “Why should we stop fucking just because you’ve got some weird idea of dating each other? It’s not natural. Let’s do it.”

“You like having sex in a different city, don’t you? You get off on it.”

“Yes,” I said again. And then, “No.” This really was scary, chill-up-my-spine, cock-stiffening scary. What was I agreeing to? Abilene was right up the road, where the mothers of my students went to shop for Christmas.

“Saturday. I bet you don’t want me to pick you up.”

“Let me drive you in the Miata.”

“You do love that car, don’t you? With the top down.”

Could a thirty-eight-year-old man feel giddy? “With the top down. I’ll come get you at your house.”

“I’ll make reservations someplace nice. Come at five o’clock? Saturday?”

“I’ll come,” I growled, wildly emboldened, “every chance I get.”

Kevin groaned. “If you don’t want phone sex, you’d better hang up right now. I’m busting out of my shorts.”

“Goodbye, Kevin,” I said wickedly.

“Bitch. See you soon. All of you.”

I spent the rest of the evening wondering what it was about him that so pulled me out of myself that I’d agreed to a date in the city that was the home of Abilene Christian University, one of the most conservative schools in the state. Around ten-thirty my cell buzzed with a text message from him.

Forgot address 237 darwin. Can’t wait.

Ten minutes later another one came through.

No mulligans No beards.

Fifteen minutes after that came another.

Forget top down. Know you won’t want that. Good night sleep tight.