Chapter 4

Riding Shotgun

 

 

IN APRIL of our junior year, Sean and I drove to New Orleans. We’d only been more or less together a few months, everything casual, nothing any-big-deal, but he had a car and got us fake IDs, I had some money my folks had sent me, and New Orleans was only eight hours away. That was nothing for us. We were young and dumb and full of come, and the whole world was before us. Even though we were faggots, back then we still thought the world was before us. Or at least I did.

We left San Marcos at mid-afternoon on Thursday and pointed the car toward Bourbon Street. I’ll never forget that ride, the high point of my time before manhood, though I’d been convinced at the age of twenty that I already was a man. We rolled the windows down, all four of them, and the air swept through Sean’s clunky old Oldsmobile like some magic carpet that was transporting us to heaven. Heaven. Three days of drinking, finding the gay bars, and sex. Nirvana.

Sean laughed at everything, the dumb billboards and the corny music on a country music radio station and how we were skipping class, and he pulled me right along with him until everything seemed funny and I couldn’t help but laugh with him. We made our way across Texas and then across Louisiana as the sun set behind us, rocketing like maniacs across the long stretch of elevated highway that was Interstate 10, not inching our way over the posted speed limit but blasting through it. When we stopped to take a piss at a McDonald’s outside Lake Charles, we tossed the empty six-pack of Bud. We didn’t stay to eat because we were only two hundred miles from the fabled city on the bayou.

Before we got to Lafayette, Sean grabbed me around my neck, pulled me close, and kissed me while we were going eighty-five. His lips were hard against mine, first and only man so far for me. “I love doing this,” he told me straight into my face, not even seeming to care about the road or being seen. Who cared? “Let’s keep driving forever.”

The road went on and on, and I could not imagine any other way, any other time, any other me.

As we left the outskirts of Baton Rouge, I stuck my head out the window and howled at the moon like a dog. The car behind us suddenly decelerated; I watched its headlights retreat. Sean said, “That’s my man.”

We rolled into New Orleans at eleven-thirty, got to only a few bars before closing time, and staggered down the streets of the French Quarter until past four. The ships trolling the Mississippi let loose their foghorns as if we were actors in an old Basil Rathbone Sherlock Holmes movie. Sean and I liked to watch those late at night with our hands down each other’s pants as we lounged on his bed.

On Friday night we found the bars that were filled with men like us. I got blown by some dude wearing leather in a back room. Sean dared me into it—Go ahead, it’s why we’re here, you know you want to—and the fear and the strange lips on my dick and the sounds of the other guys doing the same thing as we were in the nearby shadows gave me my most intense shooting ever. Then a cop pushed aside the curtain that pretended to shield us from the outside world, growling, “Everybody back up front, let’s keep this place legal.” My instant fear and then relief erupted in a small hysterical hiccup of a laugh; the cop shoved me on the back as I walked past him.

Back where he was leaning on the bar, Sean wanted to know what it’d been like, and half an hour later he disappeared, returning with a smirk and a case of the clap we both had to get treated for two weeks later.

But we didn’t know that then. I changed that weekend from virgin-except-with-Sean to experienced-gay-man, a rite of passage we both had felt we needed. When we drove across the river to our motel, swimming in booze up to our eyeballs, we sang “YMCA” at the top of our lungs, convinced nobody else knew what it really meant—really, really meant—except us.

On Sunday we slept until almost noon and were awakened by the housekeeper banging on the door, shouting, “Get out in thirty minutes or we charge you for another day” in an accent so thick we could barely understand her. We untangled ourselves from each other and then rolled back to the center, me toward Sean, him toward me, each of us suddenly on fire. He climbed on top of me and we humped until I was almost rubbed raw, but seeing him when he came was worth it.

We drove back with everything casual, still nothing-any-big-deal, with the sun shining down on us and everything right with the world.

 

 

THE PALMS of my hands were slippery against the leather-clad steering wheel as I turned onto Darwin Lane in Kenneton just past five o’clock. It was a soggy, humid day in west Texas, but I couldn’t blame my nerves on the sun and the shimmering air. It seemed since the day I’d met Kevin—at least since the second time I’d met him—he’d been edging me away from my comfort zone, where I lived hugging the wall. I was aware of it and was, inconceivably, letting it happen. Not for a second had I considered not meeting him, not driving with him to Abilene, not having dinner with him, or not falling into bed with him later that night, but I had wished I didn’t own the only Miata I’d ever seen in the area. At least it was alpine green, a nice sedate color that didn’t demand attention. I hoped.

Kenneton was a more prosperous town than Gunning, bigger, with the malls and chain stores we lacked. While Gunning had an old-time, traditional Texas flavor—local fiddlers played on the town square every Saturday night—Kenneton could probably have been picked up by a giant hand and put down as a Houston suburb, and it wouldn’t have been out of place. While Gunning citizens gathered at Little Bit’s in the mornings for coffee and home fries, Kenneton boasted the elegance of the Mourning Dove Country Club. The differences between the two towns had grown because of the proximity to the interstate. Gunning was far enough away to have escaped modernization, and it moved at a different pace with a different mindset, more than those who lived in Washington, DC, or San Francisco or even the state capital of Austin could know. You couldn’t get much more middle-American, though some might say backward-American instead.

Driving over to Kenneton always did feel like stepping from one world to another. Kevin’s street was in an upscale subdivision—Gunning had no subdivisions, only the right side of the railroad tracks and the wrong side—with crape myrtles still in bloom along the houses and sharply edged, vigorous green lawns. It was the kind of neighborhood where the only trucks parked in front were the ones owned by the lawn mowing services.

I pulled up in front of Kevin’s house, killed the engine, and without letting myself think, hauled myself out of the low-slung seat of the Miata. My feet took me up the walkway with my judgment in suspended animation, though my heart was beating wildly as I wiped my sweaty palms on my pants. It occurred to me that we could skip the dinner and the driving and go directly to his bed. My body had been turned on since that phone call, simmering on the edge of a constant arousal like the dick-ready, trigger-happy boy I’d once been. But Kevin wanted it this dinner-date way, even though we both knew how the evening would end. Besides, could I envision sauntering over here for sex with no cover, no disguise, no reason other than that he was here and I wanted him?

Not anybody else: him.

A few weeks ago, I’d known the answer to that question. Now, maybe not. I was doing something I would never have contemplated six months before, that I’d considered much too risky. Somehow Kevin had forced me into rearranging what was important. How had he done that?

My thumb pressed the doorbell, the door opened, and part of my answer was standing right there. Sex-on-a-stick. Kevin looked like he’d just come in from running a mile in the Texas heat, in a black T-shirt and white gym shorts and his scruff of a beard, a far cry from the put-together elegance I’d met in Houston. I couldn’t believe that here was the man I’d spend the rest of the weekend with, this attractive, personable man. Not staring at him wasn’t an option.

He mopped the sweat off his face with the hem of his shirt, exposing his flat belly and his navel and the hair that ran straight down. He had to be doing it on purpose, didn’t he? “Sorry I’m running late,” he said. I bet. “Come on in.”

He stepped back from the open door, holding it wide for me. I walked into his foyer that was all chrome and glass and high chandelier and creamy tiles underfoot, and he closed the door behind me. Through the archway I could see newspapers strewn on the carpeted floor and a coffee cup turned on its side next to the sofa. I managed to dredge up, “This is a nice house you’ve got.”

“Thanks. Tom?”

I turned to find he’d come close enough to kiss. He had bluish-grayish eyes with dilated pupils.

I suppose if we’d been younger, it would have been different. Or if we’d been in Houston where the rules of nonengagement while having sex were clearly spelled out, and desperation was the name of the game. I might have shoved him up against the wall, or he might have dragged me down onto his living room couch. That’s what I wanted to have happen; that’s what I was familiar with and knew. But instead Kevin tilted his head and closed his eyes. Awkwardly, I tilted my head and closed my eyes too, and I moved forward, blindly seeking, until our mouths rested against each other.

That was it for a long span of seconds: no movement, no sound… the smallest kind of kiss, the kiss of children who didn’t know how to do it, or of lovers who’d done everything and could encompass the universe with a mere touch. Then Kevin made a noise at the back of his throat, slid his hand to the back of my neck, and slowly traced the shape of my upper lip with the tip of his tongue.

Unfamiliar. Uncomfortable. Sexy as could be. This was a kind of kiss I couldn’t remember exchanging with anyone. It took all my resolve to stand there, take it, and let him do it to me. My tingling lip, his wet tongue, the stroke of his thumb against my neck, my deep, accelerating breathing. It was… a kiss I could associate with no one at all except Kevin.

I needed something to hold onto, because bits of me seemed to be flying off into space. My hands moved to his hips, the folds of his clinging shorts against my fingertips, and then around to his hard ass. I remembered it, small and muscled, the athlete he’d been. My palms gripped, flexed, gripped again, aiming for an elusive anchor I couldn’t quite find, would never be able to find merely in the body. I pulled him full against me instead, releasing myself to the purely physical kick of him wearing so little that revealed so much, while I was dressed in the armor of going out for dinner. I forced him to abandon the delicate, painter-like dabbing against my lip and plunged into a full, open-mouthed kiss. His tongue against mine still tasted sweet, the way it had before.

I tore my mouth away from his before I wouldn’t have the will left to do it. “You slut,” I growled. “You dressed like this deliberately. Did you think you needed the extra to turn me on?”

He kissed the base of my neck, above the collar of my green button-up shirt. “I remember from before, Tom. You don’t need anything extra.”

“You’re right,” I said, and I humped into him.

His eyelids dropped and then fluttered in arousal. “Do you want to….”

Just asking that was enough for him to regain control. He straightened, and only then did I realize he’d sagged against me, that I’d been taking on a lot of his weight with my hands on his ass.

“No,” he answered his own question. “I promised you dinner, didn’t I?”

“Dinner, yes, prime rib. And after dinner, this too.” I released him completely only to palm his basket in front, his half-hard cock and the swell of soft nuts. The yielding cloth of his athletic shorts revealed everything to my fingers.

“Bastard,” he said with real appreciation. “I am so going to bang your brains out tonight.”

If I’d been turned on before, that was nothing compared to the wave of lust that swamped me then. I could imagine it: the sounds we would make, his weight on me, the smell of sex filling whatever motel room we’d find, reaching, reaching to shoot off with every thrust of him in me.

I let go of my hold on his bulge and stepped back, resisting the urge to say Promise? “We’re not going anywhere,” I said, “with you dressed like that.”

He held up both hands. “Okay, okay, watch me fly. I’ll go take a shower and we can get on the road.”

He went past me in a rush and was halfway through his living room when he abruptly turned back. “Listen,” Kevin said. “I’ve been thinking. Would you mind if we took my truck?”

Seconds passed while I processed his words. I was busy taking him in and simultaneously trying to subdue my reaction to taking him in. “What?”

“I said, how about if we take my truck tonight?”

At that moment it occurred to me that I hadn’t needed to come to his house at all, that we could have simply met in Abilene, away from prying eyes. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

I shook my head. “I don’t really want my car sitting out in front of your house overnight.”

“You can put it in my garage out back. What do you say?”

It wasn’t a good feeling, knowing I was retreating from my bold enthusiasm of a few nights before—let me drive us with the top down—to this cautious assessment of realities—let’s hide my car where it can’t be seen. It was hard to picture being comfortable riding in the shotgun seat of his Silverado, not being in charge, but I told myself that with Kevin I didn’t need to be in charge in order to protect myself.

“All right.”

“Good. There’s only one side cleared out to park in, so you switch them out while I shower. The keys to the truck are on the dining room table, and the garage is out back. The code is 4747. Give me ten minutes and I’ll be right with you.”

I did all that and then waited in his living room, listening to the sounds of the shower going, of him toweling off and then dressing. I stared down at my hands a lot, wanting to go in to him: Kevin naked, his skin sleek with water. My throat was dry thinking of the two of us together after a six-month drought, and when he came in fully-dressed, ready to go, I swallowed heavily to see him. Tonight....

 

 

THE DRIVE along the two-lane blacktop from Kenneton to Abilene was beautiful if a person favored flat prairieland, lots of cattle, the occasional windmill turbine twirling along the top of a mesa, and the decorative addition of rocking horse pumps pulling oil from the ground. The sun tracked us to the left, dodging streaks of clouds as it headed for the horizon. Kevin twisted his visor over to shield him from the light, and I noted that his pale eyes must be sensitive.

Sitting next to him as we drove through Kenneton was especially uncomfortable. I fought it, because I didn’t want to act like Ennis Del Mar from Brokeback Mountain, convinced everybody was looking at him and knew his secret. But even so, it was a lot easier once we left the last strip shopping center behind and the highway stretched before us. I put my elbow up on the window rest, reminding myself that a man could keep his own secrets, and be cautious, and still be a man with pride in himself and his decisions.

“So,” Kevin said, breaking our silence. He looked at me sideways and smiled, and it was easy to offer a small smile back.

“So,” I said.

“You’re looking good today.”

Kevin was handsome in a black short-sleeved shirt and gray slacks that were perfect for his coloring. I hadn’t seen him yet not looking good, including without his clothes. I wanted to reach over and rub my hand over his half-a-beard, to know the rub of bristles against my palm, but I wasn’t ever going to succumb to doing anything in public that could expose me, not even on the highway with the nearest vehicle seventy feet away.

“You too. How has your week been? Busy at the bank?”

We talked about his work for the next fifteen miles, and it seemed that with every mile further away from Gunning, I was able to breathe just a little easier. I couldn’t release my perfectly reasonable fears, but it was possible to smooth them down to a manageable level. Maybe it was an automatic reflex, tied to my infrequent trips for weekend sex. Distance equaled safety in my mind. Or maybe it was the company I was keeping.

This was the first time, really, that I’d heard much about what Kevin did every day. The quality of his bank’s portfolio rested on his shoulders, as he was in the process of establishing new lending standards, given the mess the economy was in. Plus the bank examiners were coming within the next few weeks, which was why he’d been putting in extra hours and couldn’t get over to help out with Rent. When Kevin talked about his work, he got serious, his voice a bit deeper. Surely depositors and borrowers alike were impressed with him, and I could understand why he’d been hired. He knew the banking business, he was smart, he expressed himself well, and he was good-looking. They would have been missing out on a sure bet if they hadn’t taken him on.

Most important of all, what I knew and the bank didn’t, he liked men. He liked me. I was still having trouble wrapping my mind around that.

I asked him what kind of office he had and he told me, “A glass cage. Set off from the teller’s row but where everybody can see me. I can’t pick my nose except in the men’s room. Thank goodness I can get out and make sales calls.”

“Better you than me. I can’t imagine walking into some company and asking for their business.”

“And I can’t imagine standing in front of a bunch of sixteen-year-olds and trying to keep their attention for an hour, much less teach them anything.”

“It’s not hard. I like it.”

He clicked on his turn signal, got out into the outer lane, and accelerated past an oil tanker. “How’s the play going? Any more problems? Any more eggs?”

I hadn’t talked to anybody about Robbie, though I had found his locker and had made a point of walking by Friday morning. But nothing had been going on. He’d seen me, frowned, and turned away as if he didn’t want me there.

“What?” Kevin asked. “If there’s something going on that might affect Channing, I want to know about it.”

“No, nothing like that. There hasn’t been any more vandalism. I did find out that Robbie’s been having some trouble at school with kids getting on his case. But I think it’s more about him being, well, the way he is than the play.”

“Kids can be vicious to each other.”

“A reflection of the human race as a whole.”

“How’s Robbie taking it?”

That had been on my mind a lot lately. Robbie did seem to be fine. As fine as he could be, being a widely assumed gay senior in a conservative town’s high school, playing a gay character on stage. It boggled my mind that he was handling it. Boggled my mind that he’d auditioned for the role, accepted the role, and told me he was determined nothing would stop him from playing Angel on stage.

How did he do that?

“Tom? Is it confidential or something?”

“No,” I said slowly. “It’s not that. I’m… thinking about it. He’s okay, I think.” Though I didn’t know how or why he was okay. Was there a secret to it that I didn’t know about? “Anyway, there’s nothing going on with the play to worry about. Channing’s doing fine. She’s good onstage.”

“That’s good to hear. Maybe being in the play will steady her. And, by the way, she was pretty happy with the mark she got on your latest test.”

“Do you talk to her much?”

“Yeah, a couple times a week. And she comes over to the house every now and then. You gave her a B plus.”

“She deserved it. She wasn’t one of those who cheated. You can pretty much tell which ones do.”

“Is that a big problem?”

“You wouldn’t believe. Lately the kids have been taking pictures of the test with their cell phones. They sell the questions or text them to a friend sitting in the school commons with the book open to find the answers.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope, I’m not. If there’s a way to cheat, they find it. I do what I can to stop it, but I know they get around me. It’s not like I was some angel when I was in high school, but they take it far past the corners I tried to cut.”

“There’s a lot of pressure on some of these kids to get into good colleges, you know.”

“That’s always the excuse, but it doesn’t hold for most of them. They’re lazy. They don’t care.”

“Not like you. You give a damn. You really care about the subject.”

“Learning, yes. History, yes. We’re doomed to repeat mistakes if we don’t learn from history. But mainly I care about….” Abruptly, I shut up.

“What?”

“You don’t want to hear this.”

“Sure I do.”

Who else did I have to say things like this to? Had I ever said any of it to anybody? Maybe Grant, my long-suffering older brother, who kept me company one night of every visit I made to the ranch, staying up late with me while we drank our way through bottles of wine. I’d talked like this to him.

I caught Kevin glancing at me. His expression was open, inquiring. He really did want to hear what I had to say.

“Okay, you asked for it. Coming up: stupid mini-lecture on ethics from Thomas Ibsen Smith, nerd asshole supreme.”

Kevin flashed what I was coming to recognize as his Kevin-smile. “Hold that thought. Let me say something.”

“All right.”

“You have a very sexy asshole. Not nerdy in the least. Okay now, return to what you were saying. A lecture on ethics, remember?”

“Devil,” I said, meaning it. My hole seemed to contract all on its own. I wasn’t sure I liked being teased. But the teasing had been going on for days, hadn’t it?

“Cat got your tongue?” he asked.

“What I wanted to say,” I said deliberately, “is that I care about trying. That’s it. I hate half-assed effort, and half-assed people don’t appeal to me either.”

Kevin was nodding. “That makes sense. No mulligans.”

“That’s it. No do-overs in life, so live it all the way. Even if that means staying up late, studying for a test. At least try. I know people have different life challenges, and some of my students work thirty hours a week in convenience stores helping their families make ends meet. I don’t mean them. We all make compromises, and the older we get the more compromises we make, and I understand the contradictions between what I’m saying and the way I live, so don’t give me shit about that.” I ran out of breath and paused.

“I won’t. I was thinking it, but I won’t say it.”

“Good. The main thing is I hate to see these kids starting with a ‘whatever’ attitude. And don’t even get me started on the drug use.” I pulled the seatbelt forward to loosen it and then let it slide tight again. I could feel his eyes on me. “What?”

“You are so fucking sexy when you get wound up. It’s a shame it’s not ten o’clock at night already.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“Then it would be dark.”

“So?’

He pointed as we drove by a pull-over for a historical marker, “I could stop right there, and we could screw right here in the truck.”

Right away, two things happened. My cock throbbed and lifted, that little bit that said given half a chance it would get hard in a hurry, and I glanced over at the side mirror. Compulsively, I looked as if to check whether the people in the vehicles close behind could hear us, or could read my mind and know how next-to-impossible it was for me to sit next to Kevin and not want to duck down to his zipper, slide it down, and suck on his dick. A burst of saliva coated my tongue, equal parts anticipation—I would do that soon, in a few hours—and what I had to admit was irrational paranoia.

I tore my gaze from the mirror and told myself how ridiculous I was being to worry. We were safe, miles away from Gunning. No one was going to see me and recognize me, or even know why I was with Kevin. And… and didn’t I deserve this evening? I did. I did. All over the world, people would be with their lovers tonight. Or… or their sex partners. Whatever Kevin was to me.

I searched for the thread of our conversation again and came up with, “Oh? Is screwing in the backseat of a truck your idea of a hot date? Is that what you did with those women you took out in Louisiana?”

He tapped with his index finger on the steering wheel cover. “Listen, Tomboy, those women thought I was the ultimate gentleman because I never tried to get into their Victoria’s Secret undies.”

“Or maybe they thought you were still pining after your wife.”

“After a year of marriage and umpteen years of divorce, I doubt it.”

“You think you really fooled them?”

He licked his lips. “Me using them for a cover really bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t have any right to judge you.”

“Maybe not. But like you said about the way you live, you’ve been carrying on your own deception, haven’t you?”

“I know. That’s just the way it is. I can’t imagine….” I looked out the window at the world traveling past us. That was the way to think of it, wasn’t it? We were separate from the limitless landscape of Texas, the cars and trucks around us, and the people who judged us. They were moving, but Kevin and I were unchanging. My trips to Houston, they’d been propelled by a need that no amount of resolve had been able to destroy. The need was real.

I swallowed. “Can you imagine what it would be like if we could be honest?”

He took a breath that I could hear over the road noise. “I think the activists can. They must be able to see it somehow, and that’s what drives them. Thank God for them. I don’t have their strength. Or maybe the men who live in a gayborhood can see it, who can walk down the street holding their boyfriend’s hand and nobody cares. Have you ever done that, ever visited a place like that where we can be free?”

I turned to look at him. “Kevin. I’ve never had anybody I wanted to hold hands with, much less had the chance to visit the Castro or the Village.”

The arch of his eyebrows showed his surprise. “Nobody? You’ve never, you know, had a boyfriend?”

I couldn’t talk about Sean, not even to myself. Besides, he didn’t count. “No.” I resettled myself in the plush leather bucket seat. “No, not like that.”

“You could. Somebody like you shouldn’t have any trouble finding whoever you’re looking for.”

“Oh, yeah, right, I’m Mr. Universe over here.”

“There you go again, putting yourself down.”

“There you go again, talking nonsense.”

He gave me a sidelong look and then an impish grin that made me think of leprechauns. “You found me, didn’t you?”

“Through the most unbelievable set of coincidences.”

“That’s true, Mr. Universe. But I don’t mind. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be looking at spending the night away from that big house of mine and—”

“That big, beautiful house,” I interrupted.

“That big, beautiful, lonely house. I’d much rather be here on the road. With you. Looking forward to the evening.”

“Beggars,” I said solemnly, “can’t be choosers,” and it was good when he laughed.

Our conversation flowed naturally, the way it had when we’d gone to Brennan’s, that dinner-out-of-time that stood clearly in my memory. When, years before, I’d accepted the offer of a job from the Gunning School District in the aftermath of everything that had happened after college graduation, I’d gone underground even to myself. The pickups who gave me sex didn’t give me conversation or company or any way out of the hole I’d dug to bury myself in, but Kevin did. As more than an hour passed, our talk was alternately serious and lighthearted, and under it flowed a long, steady wave of my gratitude. Kevin was an extraordinary man. I was with someone generous-hearted and quick to forgive. I didn’t have to pretend in front of him. He thought I had a sexy asshole, for God’s sake. I really hoped he was going to have a closer acquaintance with it in a few hours.

I looked over at the sharp, defined profile of this very masculine man, and need unfurled in my stomach. Then a little more. And more again. As difficult as it had been to force myself to drive to Kenneton and begin this evening, as much effort as I was expending to put aside my worries that I was making a terrible mistake, still this time was delicious, both the moments now and the anticipation of sex soon. My first evening like it, first date with a man I liked, whom I wanted to spend time with in and out of bed. That one person turned right then to face me, his expression telling me without doubt he was thinking of our bodies together, our hands on each other, and that he was pleased with my company too.

Fifteen minutes later Kevin asked, “How about a few drinks before dinner?”

The opening was too good to ignore. “A few drinks? Are you trying to get me lubricated?”

He groaned as we drove by a sign that said Abilene: 37 miles. And under it Springrose: Next Exit. “Oh, that’s awful. And the man has a sense of humor after all. I knew it. Yes, I’m trying to get you lubricated, in more ways than one, honey.”

We exited, and it became clear that Springrose was a tiny place, probably boasting no more than a thousand souls, the kind of west Texas town where the wind was strong and belief in the literal meaning of the Bible was even stronger. We pulled up in front of the Heritage House Tavern, a two-story, gabled Victorian house.

Kevin turned the key in the ignition and then stepped on the parking brake. “Is this okay? Are you comfortable stopping here?”

Of course he’d noticed my discomfort. Kevin was one perceptive guy. But I really didn’t want to be a Nervous Nellie, tiptoeing through the evening, especially when compared to him. Or compared to Robbie. Lord, couldn’t I have the balls of a teenager? “Sure,” I said, trying to tuck my unease in an imaginary back pocket. It’s not like we had We’re out on a date together tattooed on our foreheads. “No problem.”

We got out of the Silverado and stood together on the graveled lot. The building was on its way to being transformed into a bed and breakfast, but with scaffolding all around there wouldn’t be any sleeping customers for a few months at least. A sign promised five sleeping suites within easy driving distance to Abilene, Coming Summer 2008, which meant there’d been a small delay in their plans. Maybe the noisy gas station with a few roaring diesels going next door had something to do with it.

“No way you just happened to stumble across this,” I challenged. “Admit it.”

The smile he tried to capture made him look like a five-year-old stealing from the cookie jar. “I might have noticed a refinancing package submitted the other day.”

“I thought so.”

“Credit’s dried up from the larger banks,” he said, trying to defend himself. “It’s only small banks like mine that will take a chance on this kind of project. I might have thought it was a good idea to check it out.”

There were three other pickups in the lot, all dusty vehicles used every day for work. We had to walk up a set of wooden steps to a large porch to get inside. Half the house was painted in gleaming white with green trim, but the other half, like the steps themselves, probably hadn’t seen a paintbrush in several decades.

The bar spanned one side of the house in two rooms, with creaking wood floors and oddly brilliant white paneled walls. Big windows would have let in the harsh glare of the setting sun but for shades that muted the light. It was about as different from the kind of bar I expected in a small town as it was possible to be, except for the three good ol’ boys in place, hunched over their drinks in a row along the counter, and the relic of a jukebox that was currently playing Emmylou Harris.

Three genuine cowboy hats were tipped to us as we found our places on stools up by the bar, and the bartender asked, “What’ll it be?”

“I think I’ll live dangerously tonight,” Kevin said, folding his hands in front of him. “Do you make a decent Manhattan?”

“Sure do,” the barkeep said. He had a military man’s bearing and the buzz cut too. “On the rocks or straight up?”

“I really prefer it with the rocks.”

Kevin certainly didn’t look at me, but I knew that had been said for my benefit. Rocks, family jewels, testicles.

“And you, sir?”

There was no way I was going to play the same game, so I didn’t get what I really wanted. “Bourbon straight up, please.” That was almost as bad.

“Jack okay?”

I couldn’t expect much else here. “That’s fine.”

We appreciated the alcohol, watched a little of the college football game on the TV, and listened to the locals talk about how low the country had fallen, because the Democrats might get into office if that Obama fellow won the election. I sipped the bourbon better than the way it deserved and settled in to a radically different version of Good Times, finding I could do it even with Kevin next to me. Or maybe because Kevin was next to me.

Two of our fellow drinkers left and three more came to replace them, and then two couples sat down at a table behind us, and after them came a family with two kids who couldn’t even be kindergarten age. I was aware of them all. The family made a beeline for the table in the bow window up front, and the kids pulled out crayons and coloring books like they were veterans of the place. Our bartender, who we now knew was named Ernie, didn’t say anything about kids not being allowed but brought over peanuts and chips with dip as their parents ordered beers.

Everybody knew everybody else, and soon enough they knew us as well, that we were from south of there, and that the two of us—co-workers and friends—were headed for Abilene for a banking conference that would start on Monday. That was the story Kevin glibly told. Being known in a place like Springrose was unavoidable, and familiar, and a big reason why I had always been so careful—so very, very careful—in conducting my high-school-teacher life.

“No different from Gunning,” I said quietly when Kevin turned back to his drink and me. “Everybody’s in everybody else’s business.”

“Or Marathon,” he said, “though I never lived there as an adult. There’s nothing like a small town, is there?”

I drank from my second Jack. “Not for me there isn’t. The good, the bad, and the ugly. You ready to be going soon? Dinner awaits, right?”

“That’s right. But first, a little something I wanted you to hear. You’ll like this.”

He slid off the stool and wandered over to the jukebox to punch in a selection. A man started singing a song I wasn’t familiar with. But when Kevin came back he said, “Rufus Wainwright,” and I nearly choked on my swallow. Wainwright had to be the only gay singer listed, though of course nobody in Springrose would know that.

The music hadn’t come to an end yet when the door opened behind us and I heard, “Who owns that fancy blue Silverado outside?”

Any comfort I’d managed to feel dropped to the floor. Kevin and I exchanged quick looks, and then he swiveled on the stool and slid to his feet. I did the same thing right after him.

“That’s mine,” Kevin said. “What’s wrong, you want me to move it?”

“Your windshield’s busted,” the stranger said. He was somebody’s grandfather, with a bushy white moustache and a gray suit jacket on over jeans. He gestured over his shoulder. “Just saw it happen. Some eighteen-wheeler cut through the lot from the gas station, and a rock came flyin’ out from under his tires. Hit your truck square on.”

“Damn,” Kevin swore. “I guess he’s long gone?”

“Not sure he knew it’d happened.”

“Thanks for telling me.”

I was already putting money on the bar for our drinks. I drained the glass and said, “Come on, let’s go see the damage. Maybe it isn’t that bad.”

“It is,” the grandfather said as we passed him going out.

He was right. Maybe there’d been a weakness in the windshield already, because there was incredible damage from the golf-ball-sized rock that was sitting in the driver’s seat along with a small cascade of loose glass. A neat but definite three-inch hole gaped in front of the driver, cracks ran crazily everywhere else, and small cubes of safety-glass were strewn here and there from the impact. The truck just wasn’t drivable for anything but the shortest distance, and for sure not on the highway.

Kevin actually kicked the driver’s side front tire. “Fuck! Hell and damnation! Who would’ve thought?”

I stood there, wanting to do the same, feeling like a frustrated kid who’d been told Christmas wasn’t coming tomorrow—tonight—after all. I didn’t care about the condition of the truck except as it was supposed to bring me my one night out. In the past sixteen years, only one night out with a man I knew and liked and lusted after, and I couldn’t have it? My long-enforced habits of control and caution bent and then broke: I picked up a silvery cube of glass from where it rested on the hood, turned on my heel, and threw it straight at a bedraggled tree. Seeing it hit and then bounce down to the ground gave me no satisfaction at all. “Hell,” I said, and I meant it.

“I can’t believe this. Can you believe this bad luck? How could this happen?”

“Chance. Coincidence.”

“Fuck coincidence. I never should have stopped here.”

“You couldn’t know this would happen.”

“We’re caught between Abilene and home, aren’t we? It’s not like we can rent a car in a place like this and keep going.”

“There won’t be anything like that here.”

Kevin banged his fist on the top of the truck. “Shit!” he shouted. And then, a lot lower, looking over at me across the hood, he said, “I had plans. You and me….”

“Nothing compared to my plans.”

“If we don’t get to—”

“Shut up,” I said roughly. “Don’t make it worse.”

We peered into the cab from either side. Kevin keyed open the doors. He started to brush some of the glass off onto the ground, but a voice calling behind us stopped him.

“Wait a second! Don’t do that.”

It was Ernie, still wearing a white towel around his waist. “What a mess,” he said, coming up and surveying the damage. “You two won’t be going anywhere tonight. It’s a good thing your conference don’t start ’til Monday.”

“Oh, yeah, we’re lucky,” I said.

He gave me an odd look and then said, “Even so, it’s a bad thing. You don’t often see the glass shatter that much. How you gonna get this fixed?”

Kevin ran his fingertips through the sparse growth of hair on his head. “I guess I’ll call up my insurance and—”

“What insurance you have? Might be I could help you out.”

“State Farm, why?”

He nodded, looking pleased. “My brother-in-law does work for them, fixing windshields and a bunch of other stuff. I’d appreciate it if you could give him the business. Him and my sister are hard up.”

“Could he get it done soon? I’m not sure what the insurance will be asking for, but—I’d pay him extra to get it done soon.”

“Let’s give him a call and see what Avery says, but I don’t know that he could get to it tonight. Maybe tomorrow, though. We got a motel here, so you folks’ll have a place to stay. We won’t let you sleep out here on the ground. Only thing is, it’s Indians who own it. That okay with you?”

“We don’t mind,” Kevin said quickly.

“I bet we can rustle up a ride to get you over there. It’s on the other side of town.”

I kicked at a rock on the ground to hide my thoughts. If Ernie had known we were men who loved men—Tom Smith whose body cried out to lay with Kevin Bannerman—he would have spit on us, turned his back on us, and probably would have lobbed a rock at the truck himself. Small-town values led to pinched hearts where sexual differences were involved. But Ernie didn’t know about us, and so his essential humanity emerged. It was like I’d told Kevin about the people who lived in Gunning: if your car had a flat tire, or if your kid got sick, or if your house burned down, there’d be plenty of folks stopping by with offers to help. Small town values led to big hearts too.

“That’s real nice of you,” Kevin told Ernie. Then he looked over toward me. “Okay with you?”

We didn’t have any other choice, and at least there was a glimmer of recovering something. A motel, Ernie had said. I nodded. “Okay.”

We went back inside, and I got the chance to see Kevin argue with the insurance people over his cell phone, nicely, insistently, stating his case with clarity. We took our same seats at the bar, and while Kevin talked I was asked three times in succession what had happened, and then I was commiserated with all around. The manager of the local Purina Feed Store told me he was a member of the town council and would take up the issue of the trucks cutting through the lot. I thanked him, though I doubted we’d ever be back in Springrose. That I’d ever be back. Kevin’s eyes smiled when I turned to him, and then he explained to the third person at State Farm that it wasn’t a small crack in his windshield, no, not at all.

I asked Ernie for another round for both of us without checking with Kevin if he wanted a drink. I knew I’d appreciate one, so I guessed he would too. He took his with a grateful nod and stayed on the line.

“Ain’t modern life a bitch,” Jack the feed-store manager told me.

I was developing a real appreciation for Jack Daniels. The rest of the fellows at the bar were too. “It sure is.”

“Your friend there will prob’ly have to fill out a hundred forms.”

“I bet his insurance rates go up,” one of the other men put in, “just cause of this bitty thing that wasn’t his fault at all.”

“And look at how your friend’s bein’ transferred from one dumb person to another,” Jack said. “Everybody givin’ him a hard time. It’s a shame.”

I looked at the friend in question, who was contemplating the bar counter. The corner of Kevin’s mouth quirked up; he was listening to us, I guessed, while he was on hold. He did look good and was undoubtedly up to the task of negotiating with the insurance people. Hopefully he was up to every task he’d be called on to perform this evening, because we weren’t going to be stuck here all night. There would be an ending to this bizarre sojourn at the Heritage House Tavern, and then we’d find that motel. My gaze got stuck on Kevin’s arm, on the way he held his cell to his ear, and at the hair on his forearm. I liked hair on my sex partners. Not too much, not bears, but men like Kevin. I sort of got off on that, on the unmistakable evidence of masculinity on chests, arms, and legs. Quickly, I took a breath and turned back to Jack the Purina man. I had to be careful not to look at Kevin too long, or with too much more than friendly interest. But Jack didn’t notice anything unusual. He started a long story about the last time he’d been rear-ended, and I had to carefully hide my amused reaction.

After State Farm gave their okay, Ernie provided Avery’s phone number. Kevin made the case to Ernie’s sister for a weekend repair by her husband, who was out with his dogs in the field and couldn’t immediately be reached. So we had to wait longer, because Avery would be back any minute, Beth said. Ernie asked if we wanted another drink.

“I think this one will do me,” I said. I had plans for later on. For once I didn’t think I’d need the booze to let go, and I sure didn’t want it to impede what would happen. I wanted to be hot and hard for Kevin.

“No, no more for me, either,” Kevin chimed in. “Hey, the music’s stopped. Tom, what do you want to listen to?”

I had the good sense to go for a George Strait album, which seemed to please the guys drinking with us so much that when the four pizzas they’d ordered from the place down the road arrived, they insisted that we join them in finishing them off.

Finally Avery got back to us, and we got the truck repair scheduled. He would replace the windshield, with the insurance company’s blessing, the next morning before eleven, he guaranteed.

“Eleven,” Kevin said into the phone, but his eyes were on me. “That’s perfect. It’ll give me the chance to sleep in.”

The entire population of the Heritage House Tavern listened to his every word until the last detail was finally arranged. A satisfied, self-congratulatory stir went through the bar when Kevin flipped his phone closed and said, “I guess we’re set.”

Grandfather Ray, who’d announced our bad news, was going in the direction of the only motel in town, the Motel 6, and offered to drive us there. Kevin put money on the bar for our drinks, and I got to my feet, feeling the effects of the booze only a little and mildly shocked that Kevin and I were escaping with good wishes, no suspicions, and the most important part of our evening still beckoning. I nodded my thanks to everybody there, and then I followed Ray outside.

The western sky showed the faintest hints of pink and violet left over from the sun that had set a while ago. A single tall lamppost stood guard over the bar’s parking lot. The glass that was still scattered on the Silverado glittered in the artificial light. Ray’s truck was off to the side, a battered GMC that used to be red and now glowed a strange pink. I didn’t mention it; the fellow was doing us a big favor. He got in on his side, shoved a pile of papers onto the floor, and leaned further over to open the passenger side door from inside. “Hop in.”

“You sit in the middle,” I told Kevin.

“I’ll flip you for it,” he said, and he pulled a quarter from his pocket.

“No way, I’ve got longer legs than you do. Come on, get in.”

Ray leaned over again toward us and said, “I don’t bite and I ain’t queer, so you don’t gotta worry ’bout sitting next to me.”

Kevin climbed aboard, but before I could follow, he said, “Wait a minute. We’re going to need our stuff for tonight.”

“Stuff?”

“You know,” he said urgently, “our stuff. In our bags from the truck for overnight.”

Oh, right. Lube and rubbers that I knew I had packed and he probably had too. “I’ll go get them,” I said, not feeling like the sharpest pencil in the box at the moment.

Kevin handed over the keys and I retrieved a gym bag for each of us, mine blue and Kevin’s red, picking off a stray piece of glass first. I transferred them to the GMC, climbed into the still-open door, and said, “Let’s go.” I watched the Heritage House Tavern retreat in the side mirror, not sorry to see it go but knowing we’d been lucky to receive the support we’d gotten there. We’d played the roles of friends—well, we really were friends, weren’t we?—and were escaping with a genuinely nice good old boy guiding us to a safe haven for the night, where I fully planned to perform unspeakable acts with Kevin that would have made poor Ray’s eyes bug out if he’d known. Probably give him a heart attack.

I glanced down at how close Kevin’s thigh was to mine. Not touching. But close. Then up to his face, to find him looking at me with I dare you amusement dancing in his eyes. He shifted, and I felt the press of his knee against mine, there without any doubt.

“Sorry,” he said out loud, and then he shifted away again. I could have killed him for taking the chance, but the danger did nothing to subdue the prickling in my cock.

It didn’t take five minutes to cut through town. Ray talked some, and Kevin answered, and I concentrated on keeping my body away from Kevin’s, when if I’d moved an inch to my left he would have warmed my perpetually cold arm. Highway 382 looped around Springrose like it was taking the town in its loving embrace, the way preachers told people Jesus embraced them, so the Motel 6 was on the north side of town but still on the road to Abilene. We saw its neon sign blocks away; there wasn’t much else lighting up the deserted streets. When we pulled up, there was a white banner hanging from the side of the second story that said Free Breakfast Free Wireless Internet.

“Here we go,” Ray said as he shifted into park. “The only game in town.”

“It’ll be fine,” I said. I leaned across Kevin with my arm extended, offering my hand sincerely. Small town folks: I’d learned to appreciate them over the years, so long as you didn’t let them know the truth. “Thanks for the ride.”

“No problem. You take care now. Maybe you’ll find something good on HBO tonight.”

“Maybe,” Kevin said, taking his turn with a handshake. “Thanks. Good night.”

We got out in front of the office doors as the rumble of the ancient engine faded down the street. There were only a few vehicles in the lot, but the place didn’t look like a dive. There were even chrysanthemums in pots by the entrance, and the small spots of grass were neatly mowed. In the sudden silence I could hear a bird chirping a nighttime song.

Kevin scratched over his ear. “Well. This hasn’t turned out the way I thought it would.”

“That’s for sure.”

He cocked an eye at me. “Are you still game?”

“You’ve got to be kidding.” I answered fervently.

His slow smile was laden with promises, his voice huskier than usual. “Let’s go salvage the evening.”

When we opened the door to the front office, the unmistakable odor of onions cooking stopped me in my tracks. And the sound of a baby crying. And a TV blaring. And young voices shouting. Behind me, Kevin said, “What the….”

Ernie had said the motel was owned by Indians. A little boy chased a little girl down the long hallway of sleeping rooms to our right, each of them in bare feet and screaming at the top of their lungs. I realized Ernie’d meant Indians as from India, and that his caution might not have been the prejudice I’d instantly assumed, but maybe came from the fact that the family seemed to live in the motel and certainly cooked there. I craned my neck as we got up to the desk to see the room directly behind it, door wide open, and there was a family sitting around a kitchen table, eating a late dinner. A mother, a father, a baby in a high chair, two older children, an old man, and an old woman, all of them ignoring us.

“You’re kidding,” Kevin murmured.

It wasn’t off-putting; it was funny. Could the day get any more ridiculous? Even I had to see the humor in it. I’d been cautiously surfing through the hours as the day took a sharp left turn, then a right, then a left, keeping fierce hold of the possibility that maybe, just maybe Kevin and I could have sex after all. In anger and frustration, I might have slapped my hand on the bell innocently sitting on the desk, but there were rooms with beds within sight, and even the aroma of frying onions and green peppers wasn’t going to stop us from closing ourselves inside one of them. Besides, Kevin was doing enough chuckling for both of us.

“Shhh.”

He pressed all ten fingertips to his forehead, looking down to hide his face. “Oh, this is too much.”

“Don’t make a spectacle of yourself.”

The younger man got up from the table and came up to us, asking “Can I help you?” in impeccable English as he wiped his mouth with a napkin.

We registered for two rooms, both of them on the second floor, numbers 202 and 204. The kids who were playing tag zoomed through the lobby at the finely calculated right time and the boy asked, “Take your suitcase upstairs?”

“Of course,” Kevin said, and he handed over the accoutrements for our sex acts to a seven-year-old. I gave mine to the little girl, who was probably no older than four, but it was too heavy for her, so we compromised by each taking a handle and walking up the steps side-by-side.

I gave her a dollar when we got to Room 202. Kevin and I watched the two of them race down the hallway, their footsteps pounding boom boom boom and actually making the floor vibrate. The noise was surely enough to annoy whoever had rented the rooms below them on the first floor. Then the kids disappeared as they turned into the stairwell, and Kevin and I were left alone, holding the keycards.

“Your place or mine?” Kevin asked quietly.

“Mine,” I said. It was further away from the front.

He tossed his case forward and it hit my door with a soft thud. He took a step closer so that his chest almost grazed my right arm, and I couldn’t tear my eyes from his face. His eyes were glittering, desire in them that matched what was sizzling in my belly. Suddenly nothing was funny anymore. This was it, sex at last, Kevin and me together at last. A shiver traveled down to my fingers.

“What are we waiting for?” he whispered.

“Nothing,” I said out loud, and I shoved the card in the slot. I grabbed his elbow with one hand, turned the door handle with the other, and pushed both our bags forward with my feet.

The inside of a motel room was familiar territory, safe territory. As I dragged him into the room, the peculiar smell of carpets and bedding cleaned and cleaned again but never truly fresh was overlaid now with the remembered smells of sex: a man’s hot load and the musky, deep odor that wafted from behind his balls. The room was dark, silent but for the sudden clang as the door shut, but then behind me Kevin must have reached around and flipped on the bathroom light. A muted glow filled the room beyond where I saw the expanse of a bed, inviting.

I turned to him deliberately. I could touch. There wasn’t any reason to delay, to dissemble, to pretend to do something else like unpack or channel surf. Months of forcing myself to wait in my little house, with no Good Times, with lots of self-control, months of not having but needing were finally gone.

I took his face in my hands, the shock of first touch racing through me, along with the shock of touching him only there when my whole body yearned to be stretched out against him, our hips together, our cocks side by side, our legs tangled, our chests pressed close, our mouths pressed close. Need rose like a desperate animal. Here was another man with me, cock and balls and ass for me, and he hadn’t been desperately picked up, and he wasn’t unknown. He was here because he wanted to be with me. What I used to fear, now I abruptly valued.

His dark slash of eyebrows, the strong nose, the high forehead: I saw more clearly as I adjusted to the low level of light. I felt the bristle of his beard against my palms and moved my hands up, down, up, rubbing to know it better.

“Hi,” I said, needing to say something, not knowing what else to say. My voice sounded flat, as if it didn’t travel far. But it didn’t need to.

“Hi there, Thomas Ibsen Smith,” he said, his words enriched by a slow Kevin-smile, what I had barely seen the ghost of in Houston.

He’d heard me say my middle name and remembered it. What cosmic circumstances had shifted so that I’d met Kevin? He was so much more than a random mouth picked to suck my dick.

“You like to kiss,” I said. Let me give that to you.

Delicately, the way we’d done hours before in his house, with our lower bodies not even touching, our lips met in the quiet dark, though the sound of our mouths sliding together sent a lustful chill through me immediately. I opened my mouth and sucked in his tongue, and every thought in my head went whirling away at the wet, solid connection. He moaned and slammed against me, his arms wrapping around my back with fingers spread to keep us tight together. His tongue danced inside my mouth, touching here, there. My erection lengthened; I could feel it as if I held it in my hand, inevitable response to Kevin-here, sex-soon, this change in me so right that it swept away everything else. Kevin pulled back to breathe and then came to me again, mouth seeking. His hardness, too, was seeking, up against me.

“I like to kiss,” he said quietly, licking his lips and then opening them along the line of my jaw. “But I like to screw more. I’ve been waiting all day for you.”

I closed my eyes as something inside me shuddered and abruptly realigned. I’d been waiting… longer. Much longer.

“For God’s sake,” Kevin said, “let’s go to bed.”

Separation seemed impossible. I was so thirsty for the press of him, the touch even through clothes, but the promise of naked skin against my own naked skin was inducement to push him away. I stumbled over one of the bags at our feet and went staggering across the room, catching myself by leaning with both hands on the mattress at the foot of the bed.

Immediately, Kevin was behind me, grabbing my hips and pushing his cock against my willing ass. He rubbed along the line of my crack. Even through the layers of cloth, his cock was blissful iron against me.

I collapsed down onto my elbows, adjusted right away so most of my weight was tilted to the right, bent my knees to maximize our contact, and squeezed my eyes shut. Yes. Yes. My cock throbbed, and I squirmed against him, trying to feel more, more.

Air whistled in and out of his open mouth as he humped me. “I want to ride you, Tom. I’ve barely thought of anything else.”

My head lolled low, my forehead brushed against the bedspread, and every molecule of me wished we were doing it right then, right there.

“Will you let me? Even though I know it wasn’t easy for you before, you liked it by the end, didn’t you? Let me. I was gonna wait, ask you later, but I can’t, I can’t, I—”

I twisted so I fell onto the bed on my back, my fingers hastily unbuckling and unzipping, trying to kick off my shoes with my toes at the same time. He made a sound—exultation, a sudden cry of gladness—and raced back toward his overnighter, dragging it clumsily to the bed as he tried to unbutton himself at the same time.

I pulled off my briefs seconds before he was done, exposing myself completely, with my cock looming up tall and starving. I tried to push up on my elbows, but right away I collapsed back down. “Damn it!” I said, and then instead I wriggled higher up on the mattress. Then I reached down to grab myself and pulled.

“You are so hot,” Kevin panted. “And you don’t even know it. Do that again.”

Kevin stood at the foot of the bed and threw his balled-up shirt across the room to the curtained window. I heaved in breath to see him bare at last, first new-sight of the sturdy cock that had ruled me so thoroughly months before, stretched me with its insistent thickness. I thought of all the regrets I’d poured down with my beers this summer and the fantasies I’d had of him. The memories I’d had of him. He’d never appeared before me like this, though, with his dick at full mast and his hips cocked forward. I stroked my cock again, not because he’d told me to do it, but because I couldn’t help but touch myself.

“You do it!” I said.

In a blink he was pumping himself furiously, jacking himself as if he were right on the edge, but then he abruptly let himself go and spread his arms wide.

His chest heaved. “Now you. Do it!”

My hand was jerking before he finished saying it, and my hips rose with the first stroke, the second, the third—

“Don’t you dare bust your nuts yet,” Kevin said, and he grabbed hold of my right foot. “Wait for me.”

If he hadn’t stopped me, it would have been so easy to keep going and unload everything. But I forced myself to grab my thigh instead of my prick and stared down at him. Kevin waited until he had my attention, and then he leaned over and sucked my big toe into his mouth.

My head dropped back to the pillow. “Oh, Christ,” I groaned, and I threw my hand across my eyes and fought for air. His tongue swirled around the nail, the tip, and then down and up. I’d never had anybody…. What an incredible sensation, where I’d never even thought….

“Do you like this?”

“Hell, yes. You pervert,” I forced out.

He grinned at me up the length of my stretched-out, at-his-mercy body. “Every chance I get.”

He licked again, and then the cool air drifted over my unbearably sensitized toe, and he crouched over my ankle, suck-kissing it as if it were something he really wanted to do. From the sounds he made, he did. His thumb rubbed along the sole of my foot, just this side of tickling, just firmly enough not to send me jackknifing forward, but more than enough to send air rushing jaggedly through my mouth.

“K… K… Kevin!”

I could have tackled him. I could have rolled him over and gone after his dick, filled my mouth with it. I could have shoved him down to the bed and jumped on top of him so we could hump our way to completion. But I didn’t do any of those things, things I was accustomed to doing when I controlled the pace and mood and intensity of my sexual encounters with nameless men.

I’d decided to ride shotgun with Kevin, hadn’t I? Not drive.

“Watch.” Kevin pushed my legs together and said, “Like a mummy.” Then he got onto the bed and licked a long wet line up from my ankle to my left knee, with his hands and legs planted on either side of me. And then he went to work on my knees, licking his way in circles around each one.

His mouth busy, he mumbled, “You taste fantastic.”

I was jelly. I couldn’t stay still. Within the limits of not knocking him over, within the space he’d defined for me, I thrashed on the bed. If he didn’t grab me where it counted soon, if he didn’t give me what I needed, I began to think I was going to shoot right then and there without even being touched.

“Kevin,” I gasped. “Come here, come here.”

“No,” he said, but he moved a supporting arm up next to my side and leaned his weight on it. His other hand reached for his own cock. “This. Hold yourself up like this. Let’s….”

The tip of his cock touched mine when I held myself steady, like his was kissing mine. It was the most maddening sexual experience I’d ever had because everything in me was screaming for pressure, for more contact, for the hot encasement of a hand, a mouth, between his thighs, his ass, anything, but what I got instead was this slow-motion touch guaranteed to drive any gay man insane. Kevin was torturing me.

And pleasuring me and himself. I pounded the mattress with my free hand and heaved up, running the side of my cock against his, trying to jab myself into his pubes.

“I’m not kidding,” I gritted out between clenched teeth. “Fuck me right now or—”

Air rushed out of my lungs as he abruptly dropped his entire sweat-tacky length down on me. “Right now,” he promised, and then he was up and off the bed, battling the zipper of his overnight case, pulling out the lube and a strip of rubbers.

Finally released, I sat up and grabbed the Trojans from him. “Come here. I’ll take care of this.”

Holding the base of his cock, he turned to stand in front of me as I sat on the side of the bed. I tore one packet off and tossed the rest to the floor, and in a second I had that one out and in my hand. I looked up at him, at his needy face. I’d thought Kevin was a handsome man the first night I’d seen him dancing in Houston, but Kevin in a civilized setting was nothing compared to Kevin stripped, with a hard-on, his nostrils flaring, his chest rising and falling noticeably, presenting his weeping cock to me.

I’d been thinking about sucking him since he’d opened his door to me, and I couldn’t resist now. He cried out when my lips went over the head of his dick, over the yielding crown that stretched my mouth, over the jutting ridge, and then below, to where he should be sensitive, where Kevin should love having me suck. I could taste him, salty and hot already, and then his fingers were in my hair, holding me where I was. But I wanted to be there. I pushed against his hip, and he stepped back while I slid forward onto my knees. We did not separate. I did not allow my teeth to nick him or my tongue to stop moving against him, but I stuffed my mouth with him and took him all in.

Had I sucked him when we were in Houston? There was no body-memory of his dick in my mouth because that had been a different, resistant Tom who’d had sex with this different, known Kevin. As if from another world, the thumping beat of music came to me: not the dance-floor tunes that had engulfed me, shaken me, whirled me around, and then deposited me in front of Kevin Bannerman, but some unfamiliar, persistent song that the Indian family must be playing on the floor below.

One of his hands slid down to my ear, but the other came to my lips and slipped a finger inside as I went down on him again, so I held his cock and his finger in my mouth together. It broke my suction and my concentration, and I pulled back reluctantly, gulping air, feeling the stretch at the corners of my mouth.

With hands under my arms, he urged me to stand in front of him. Moments of awkwardness passed as we did not touch, though our naked bodies were scant inches from each other. As I swayed toward him, he brought a finger up to trace a line down the side of my face. I turned and caught it with my teeth, nipped at him, kissed his knuckle.

He lifted his face to the dark ceiling and offered a long sigh. It was as if his spirit were spreading upward, filling the room, imposing stillness and an odd kind of calm I hadn’t lived with for a long time. And then he looked back to me.

“Put the glove on me, Tom.”

I’d never rolled a Trojan on anybody but myself, and so I looked down while I did it. My own dick jerked as if I were touching it. I couldn’t help but wrap my fingers around him once I had him sheathed; the hot pulsing of blood in his prick, trapped and defined by the latex, made my blood pulse too.

His fingertips landed gently on the back of my hand, keeping me there. “Wait,” he whispered. “I need….”

He raised his face to mine and sought my lips, and I offered them to him, everything between us reduced down to this, our mouths connecting and our fingers joined on his cock.

I discovered that I needed this simple union too, just as much as the wild, fulfilling sex I knew we were about to share. I ached for it, reached for it, and then….

What I had been looking for back at his house, the elusive anchor not of the body. Suddenly it was there, flicking through my awareness in rich, startling seconds of Kevin and Tom, banker and teacher, the seeker and the cautious one, and, yes, the top and the bottom too. We exchanged ourselves back and forth, and I was breathless. So much in just a kiss. I took him in through his breath brushing against my skin, through his unmistakable taste, through the rasp of his hand on the back of my neck.

We parted slowly, our lips clinging through our mingled spit, our gazes locked as we expanded this moment another second, and another.

He didn’t resist when I moved my hand to the base of his cock. His hand moved with mine, and then I stroked the circle of my fingers from the base of him to the tip. I watched the pleasure bloom in his eyes as we did that, us together.

“You,” he said. “Right now. You.”

Kevin forced me back until I was up against the bed, and down I went, with Kevin over me, pushing me this way and that until my head was on a pillow.

“Up,” he said, reaching under my knees and pulling, and only as I bent my knees to my chest did I realize he had the lube.

Before, he’d simply rubbed the lube around my hole and shoved inside, the way the very few men I’d done this with had. Including Sean, in his heated, careless need. With Kevin in Houston, I’d suffered through the sharp stabbing pain that always accompanied the first minutes any cock was in me, my body’s revenge for craving it so much. I was ready for that now, to give us both what we wanted. But this time was different. I felt his finger outside, daubing the slickness around my traitorous ring of muscle… and he didn’t immediately move away. He lingered, massaging, playing there, and I shifted against the bed. A new and subtle form of heat, one I hadn’t felt before, unfolded from where his fingertip was moving. It spread. It felt….

I lifted my head, an effort while holding my knees up. “What’re you doing? That feels—”

“Shhhh,” he said, and his other hand rested on my ankle. “It wasn’t easy for you last time. I thought if I took my time getting you ready, it would help. Is it helping?”

I didn’t know what to say. “It doesn’t hurt.”

He pressed a fervent kiss on my asscheek. “Lay back and enjoy. Feel good.”

I let my head fall back against the pillow and closed my eyes. The seconds ticked away. Kevin tongued all over my ass but his finger never left my hole as he skimmed it, stretched it, slipped barely inside, withdrew, applied more lube, as I lay there and listened to his heavy breathing, as I allowed the sure touch of him on me. I felt the difference not only where his finger was, in my discovery of how that could tingle, could shoot to my cock and make it harder, but in the quality of the night: Kevin taking his time.

Or trying to. “Damn,” he whispered on the hitch of quick breath. “I don’t know if I can…. Time to move on.”

His finger found my center. Pushed in. Went all the way in with its load of slick gel, and I pushed my head back against the pillow. It felt… excruciating. Violating. Wonderful. In my sexual encounters, so carefully managed—just so much and not more, unless it’s you, Kevin Bannerman—I’d never had a man’s finger up my back alley. The few times I’d let myself be fucked, I’d never trusted enough to ask for it, and so I’d never received.

“Okay?”

His wide eyes stared down at me. This was what having sex with someone you knew led to: his finger reaching ever higher into me. I didn’t know how to stop that. I didn’t want to stop that. Then there were two fingers stretching me, or maybe more—I didn’t know in this delirium of exposure. I arched back against the pillow, loving it.

“That’s it,” he whispered. “I want you to feel good.” Kevin’s husky voice fell over me like a blanket, covering both of us and separating us from the whole rest of the world. “You are so…. You look so good. Is this okay?”

I felt drugged, like the two of us’d had a toke, or maybe that my asshole had. “Okay?” I half-laughed. “Oh, God, yes.”

Kevin pulled his fingers out, wiped them on the bedspread, and then knee-walked until he was between my spread legs. I lifted them higher and straightened them so the inside of my calves rested against the outside points of his shoulders. They seemed to fit naturally in that position. He leaned forward, planting his palms flat on the bed so his arms rested within the crooks of my knees, and that exerted pressure on my legs, helping to hold them up. My pelvis inched up as he rocked forward, and suddenly there it was, his cock pressing against where it belonged.

“Ohhh.” He breathed out a long exhale. “I’ll go slow. At least I’ll try. Relax, relax. Push out, that might help.”

Before I could do anything he nudged inside, and then he froze.

I gasped, and for a few agonizing seconds I felt as if I’d been truly stabbed by a knife, straight into my guts. Not that long of a knife, but one that was wide and commanding. And then, just as quickly, the pain receded like the swift retreat of a wave.

Kevin was gasping too, and his arms, pressed against my legs, were trembling. “Okay? Okay?”

It wasn’t painless. I still throbbed, but as my ass folded itself around the tentative advance of Kevin’s shaft, it was nothing like I’d expected and had been resigned to endure. “Good, it’s good. Try more. Come on.”

He pulled back, not completely out, and then pushed in more and held himself there.

With every second that passed the cramping faded. “Come on. A little more. Move, you can move.”

His hips flexed. Out and then back in he went, and then out and back in, and out and back in, tiny taps that brought him deeper each time, smooth pull-outs that never completely separated us. I could feel his wider cockhead stretch me as it threatened to leave through my sphincter muscle, which had miraculously slackened for him.

His expression was intent as he hovered over me, his eyes wide, his mouth half-open. The play of his muscles as he moved in the dim light caught me; the push against my legs when he thrust in captured me. It was so good to see his face. Already I could feel I was opening up, and his passage in was smooth, welcoming. I pushed back using the minimal leverage I had and heaved into him, meeting his thrusts.

“Oh, yeah!” he said. I remembered the sounds he made from before, the grunt with every push in. “Yeah, do that. Come on, honey, do it.”

I did, shoving myself toward him as he drove into me, then over and over and over we rocked together. The feeling he was giving me: good, indescribable, because it wasn’t only that my cock was pulsing where it was trapped between us. There was something more that moved in me, that was spreading from the pit of my stomach, that tightened my chest as well as my balls, that was unknown and yet strangely familiar. My arms had been bent on the pillow, curled around my head, but now I stretched them to either side, straight out, and stared up at him. I didn’t know what this was. I’d never understood why I was a gay man who wanted to be filled like this, but Kevin was giving it to me just right, just right.

“Oh,” he moaned. “I’ve gotta, gotta, can’t help it.” He speared me with a fierce snap of his hips, and I met him. Everything narrowed to his swift slide that finally filled me completely, his cock forcing me open, on and on and on in decades-long split seconds until finally he grunted and stopped.

We stayed like that for a hovering moment, two, three….

“Up,” he insisted. “Up.”

A buzz sounded in my ears when I realized what he wanted—closer, higher, impossibly deeper—and a tickling thrill danced straight down my spine to my prick. His hands went under my butt, forcing me up, lifting me and settling me even more firmly onto him. I went willingly until my legs were hopelessly hoisted up and over his shoulders, my only point of contact with the bed the braced line of my outstretched arms fingertip to fingertip. It seemed the only thing holding me to this world at all was Kevin thrust up inside my ass.

Hated it. Didn’t I? Hated it, me who’d always been so certain to be in charge. Kevin had me where he wanted me. I could barely move, as curled up on myself as I was, caught and held. My cock, now freed from where it had been pressed between us, wept with grief, with excitement, and my pre-cum literally dripped down into my pubic hair. I wanted to jerk myself off but couldn’t because my one good arm wouldn’t support me. I was hard like a man who hadn’t had any sex at all in nearly half a year, who’d spent the summer wanting exactly what he’d gotten here, now. How I wanted this.

“Let’s go,” I growled, and I pushed onto him as best I could.

“Yes!” Kevin exulted. “I’m close already. Take it. Take it!”

I couldn’t keep his face in focus. We moved too fast, the time was too intense. My need to come rose even higher when I knew I wouldn’t come until he was finished and could touch me. Even so, perversely, I wanted him to last a lot longer, to let me grab these memories and store them: Kevin pounding into me, his grunts and ragged inhalations, his fingers digging into where he was holding onto my legs, the stiffening of his thighs, his unmistakable, quickening thrusts.

I looked up into the raw slashing of his eyes. “Now!” I urged him. “Come on, come on, now!”

He shoved in and stayed in, his cheeks stiffened, his mouth rounded, and I followed everything, felt it as if in my own body, felt the tightening of balls and the supercharged flaring of the cockhead. And then he jerked and howled. His gravelly voice filled the room, and the heat of his jism flooded the rubber. My cock shuddered, wanting desperately to explode.

“Uhn. Uhn.” Four times he thrust as he came, as I held myself open for him.

When he was finished, his head sagged, but then he looked down at me, out of air, with a sheen of sweat on his forehead. Victory sparkled in his eyes. “Oh, yeah.”

“My turn,” I demanded.

Kevin grabbed my knees more tightly and grinned. “You sure?”

“Bastard!”

He lowered my legs and pulled out at the same time, his cock making a wet, sucking sound as it left me, and then right away he leaned down to take my cock in his mouth.

Two good sucks, that’s all he managed to give me before I clamped my hands in his hair and erupted, two, three, four, and one final fifth time.

Right away, post-sex exhaustion swept over me, and I couldn’t keep my eyes open. Kevin had taken everything I had to give. I slept.

 

 

I OPENED my eyes to the kind of stillness that drifts over the skin and tells you it’s the middle of the night. I lay there for minutes, half-awake, half-asleep, drifting in and out of awareness, not entirely sure what was real but still knowing that all was right with the world. Cool air drifted across my face. Overhead a jet sliced through the sky far over Texas.

A sheet covered me. Languidly, I turned my head toward the clock on the nightstand. It glowed three oh two in green numerals. I was in bed in the town of Springrose. My left leg was pressed against something warm and yielding, and with a thump of my heart I realized that it was Kevin’s leg. He was the one next to me; his soft breathing was a reward for living.

Sunday. A new day and week that I was starting with Kevin. The world had been remade.

I thought of retrieving Kevin’s truck from Avery-the-windshield-man. We’d do that together, just two guys who needed a ride to Abilene when we were so much more than just two guys. I thought of paying for two rooms in this motel when we were only using one, and how that didn’t make a lot of sense. I thought of Robbie and the life he might lead, and then of the life he was leading right now. Was he reluctant to go to class? Had anyone ever shoved him to the ground or threatened him? Did he dream of going to a place where he could be honest and live free? Would he ever awaken in the middle of the night the way I just had and know the goodness and rightness of who he was because the man next to him had shown it to him?

I thought of Kevin and how he’d made penetration easy for me, and I was filled with a sense of wonder. I didn’t know how to respond to such a gift, or how to act with a man who was that considerate, who cared for my comfort and showed it in the most tangible way possible. What he’d done had really helped. Why hadn’t I insisted my sex partners always do that, so I could have been having the kind of sex I’d been wanting all along? But that would have meant finding somebody I trusted the way I trusted Kevin, and I couldn’t imagine that happening. Kevin had muscled his way into my life and almost forced me into that trust, but it was real in me right now.

I turned over to see him. The light that had illuminated us when we’d had sex was still on, so my dark-adjusted eyes could make him out clearly.

He was on his back, one arm across his stomach. I couldn’t see where the other one was. His legs were spread, his right one crooked at the knee to touch my own. The sheet had slipped down to his waist, so I could appreciate the slow inhalations and exhalations that raised and lowered his chest. What an amazing man. How had he done this to me? Turned me to mush, for sure, with my mask of a strong, defiant, self-protective man who managed his life precisely stripped away.

Kevin was so easy on my eyes, and I let my eyes range down his body, linger on the sheet-covered package between his legs, and then settle on his face again. I could imagine him, years younger, on the football field—not better-looking, just younger, maybe even thinner—or better yet, stripped and taking a communal shower with the rest of the team, maybe stealing glances at and lusting after that offensive lineman he’d said he liked. Kevin stripped, yes. Despite how we’d already made love that night, my cock stirred at the thought, and I wanted him again.

It was harder to imagine him in that first and only year of marriage to his wife Julianne, doing his best in the conjugal bed but without heart, without passion. That’s how it must have been, because I knew how he was with a man, with me, and the essential rightness that we each had brought to this bed and to each other. Kevin had been born to make love to a man, the same way I had.

I could imagine him waking up every morning with somebody he cared about, yawning and stretching, then turning over with a smile and kissing that someone awake—that lucky someone. Kevin wouldn’t hold back on the smiles, the laughter, the quick concern, the easily given confidence, the love. Kevin was an emotional man, a caring man, and I knew he was looking for somebody to share his life with.

Against the warm cotton of my pillow, my fingers curled. I wanted to touch him so badly, but I didn’t let myself. At least I had that much control. I needed to let him sleep.

For all that the sex between us this night had been so different for me—out-of-my-head exciting, but different in a host of other ways too—still it had seemed so natural. Comfortable and valued. Maybe that was always how it was for men with friends who would willingly scratch their itch, but I didn’t think so, and Kevin wasn’t that kind of friend. Plus he had a knack for making our times together seem extraordinary but easy at the same time.

I hadn’t been easy in my mind or my body in years, not since Sean and that one night that had changed everything. My life had been a struggle between my commitment to my profession and the raw needs of my body that I couldn’t ignore. What I had needed beyond that—waking up every morning with someone I cared about—I had shoved aside as a failing I could not afford to indulge. I had convinced myself I would never have it and that only weak men wanted it. Not men who lived in the real world, who felt the real, brutal consequences of being gay, and who had been forced into black-and-white choices.

And now… I wasn’t so convinced. Was there any middle ground?

Kevin—good, interesting, compelling, wildly attractive—already had a strong hold on me, on my thoughts, on my body, and in the way I was changing because he quietly demanded that I change. What we’d done hadn’t just been screwing; it had been different from any night or afternoon I’d spent with a pickup, different even than those times in Houston I’d spent with him. More of me had been present with Kevin from the very beginning, and it seemed that he was coaxing the rest of me to appear: with kisses at his front door and maybe just by being himself.

I couldn’t possibly be the one he was looking for. Could I be?

I shivered, though I didn’t know whether from fear or excitement or the ground shifting out from under me. Maybe I could. Maybe I wanted to be. In the best of all possible worlds…. But life in Gunning, Texas was far from that best world. How could there be a Kevin and me together?

I forced myself to roll away and stare up at the ceiling instead of at him, trying to empty myself of thought, of feeling, the way it had always been safest for me, tried and true for the long span of my teaching career. But even when I could control my thoughts and deny my feelings, I’d learned the body couldn’t be shut out. As I tried to simply lie there, a subtle ache in my ass insisted on calling to me. I ached just enough to know that I’d been fucked—body-knowledge that I’d been stretched and taken there—and it was the best feeling I’d had in a long time. Kevin had done me good. Six months since we’d done it first, and now this time… and when next?

When next?

Rebellion that I had not allowed for sixteen long years blasted past my defenses and rose in me, hard and strong. I wanted the ache, the sex, nights like this, and contented mornings all the time. I thought… I thought I wanted Kevin. I did. Why could some men have this when I couldn’t? Why could the straights have the intimacy, the comfort, the easy companionship that Kevin offered me when I had to turn away from it? Why did they reach for love and find it, when I’d walked down a long, difficult road feeling myself forced to deny it?

“Why can’t I have it?” I whispered.

After a while my full bladder forced me up and into the bathroom. I could tell from the wet washcloth and the tied-off condom in the wastebasket that Kevin had been there before me, cleaning himself from the realities of our kind of lovemaking, and yet the light had been left on. After I pissed and cleaned myself, my hand hovered over the light switch. It was the middle of the night and we should be sleeping. But maybe Kevin had kept it on for the same reason I did; I wanted to be able to see him.

When I got back to the bed, Kevin had turned onto his side. I tried not to jostle the mattress as I got in beside him again. The bed wasn’t overly large for two men and the use we had made of it. I settled in under the sheet and turned my head toward him, letting the sight of him fill me up across the few inches that separated us. I didn’t care about sleep. I wanted to take this all in because I feared this night, this feeling, this man might go sliding away, sucked into that other world I usually lived in. Here, now, everything was different. Hope lived here, and Kevin, sleeping, was beautiful.

The sight of him soothed me, and though I blinked to keep myself awake, eventually I couldn’t keep my eyes open. I feel asleep to the sound of him breathing and the knowledge that, regardless of what else happened in my life, this night was real. My dreams were good.

I didn’t know how long I’d slept, but it felt like a long time when I woke up again. It was still night, though. The bed dipped and the sheet lifted behind me as Kevin stirred. I’d rolled away from him during the hours, onto my right side. A moment later his arm was around my waist and his knee pushed within the bend of mine. The point of his chin brushed my back. “Hey,” he said, and then he cleared his throat and said it again, louder, with his voice not as husky. “Hey, do you mind this?”

To prove I didn’t, I rested my left arm over his and squeezed. Then I settled with my fingers spread over his tendons, his knuckles, the strength of his hand that matched my own. He took in a small, just-heard breath and let it out slowly, and the sound of the effect I had on him about did me in: my own private swell of good feeling crashed over me, and there where he couldn’t see me, I smiled. He edged forward until the rest of him was pressed against me, I wriggled back to help, and it was perfect. I relaxed on my side against the pillow and let him hold me.

“You must be feeling okay after what we just did,” he said. “You’re not hurting, are you?”

Not unless hurting meant everything was better.

His flaccid cock pushed against my ass. We’d never touched like this without both of us wanting sex. As close as we’d been during sex, the way we were now seemed… more. Closer. We were pressed against one another without the driving urgency, just because we wanted to be. Yes, I wanted this too.

Don’t think about how impossible it will be to continue this, and how the wide world waits. Just feel.

“Did you think I’d break?” I asked lightly, drumming my fingers once against his knuckles.

“No. That’s one of the things I like about being with a man.”

I gripped his hand hard, then settled my fingers between his. “Me too.”

We were quiet for a while. I felt myself sinking not into sleep again but into the pillow, the mattress, the silence, and him, into the wonder of being with him like this. I wanted to turn over and see him again, to touch his face and let him touch mine, but this was good too, good enough to keep me where I was.

But eventually he moved. Kevin untangled his hand from under mine and rested it instead on the point of my left shoulder. I couldn’t help but tense. Kevin traced the length of my damaged arm, his fingers dancing against my scars, ending by resting lightly on my wrist.

“Does your arm hurt all the time?” he asked softly.

Nobody else asked me questions about it, but I should have known that Kevin would. I hid my arm, and I compensated for it, and I tried to forget it. For a long time it had made me feel like less of a man.

I swallowed against my instinct to dissemble. He deserved an answer. “No. Well, sometimes.”

“You don’t have much strength in this arm. Or mobility.”

“I have enough. I manage okay.”

“Yes, you do. Most folks wouldn’t even notice. I didn’t, for a while. It’s amazing you can play golf with it.”

He didn’t say anything more, for once not tapping against my ineffectual boundaries. As if to prove that there was some strength in me and that arm, I turned my hand over to grasp his and roughly pulled him back to where the two of us been before, with him embracing me from behind.

“You know how I wasn’t ready when you came over?” he asked right away. “I wasn’t leading you on, being dressed like that.”

I was happy to talk about something else. “No?” Kevin knew how he’d looked.

He laughed softly. “Well, not much. But I had a good excuse. I was just getting ready to do some yard work when Channing and her boyfriend drove up and surprised me. She wanted to introduce me to JJ, because I think she’s getting serious. Isn’t that ridiculous, at her age? But I sat and had a daddy-talk with them, and then when they left, I hopped outside and took care of the yard.”

I’d walked up to Kevin’s front door a lifetime ago. Even so, my stomach clenched just a little at the timing. If they’d been later, if I’d been earlier…. “Kids. They don’t think their parents have any lives of their own.”

“Or teachers too, right?”

“Or teachers. You should tell her to call before she drops in.”

“I should, yeah. But I’m rebuilding a relationship with her, and I don’t want to put any barriers between us. She can drop in on me any time, that’s what I’ve told her. It’s nice that she wants to see her old man.”

“Old man? Were you forty when you fathered her?”

“I was twenty. And desperately trying to pretend I was straight.”

I bumped back against him. “You’re not.”

“Thank heaven for that. I finally figured I had to succumb to the inevitable.”

The air conditioner clicked on, sounding like the ocean’s roar. There were a million questions hiding under the waves, so much I wanted to know about him.

“Your voice,” I said. “Did something….” I stopped. I couldn’t ask him what I wouldn’t answer myself. Wanting to know about him didn’t extend to telling him everything about me.

“I sound like I’ve swallowed a frog, don’t I?” he said lightly.

“Not all the time. Sometimes you sound like a cicada.” Even so, his words were easy to listen to.

“That’s a new one. Nobody’s ever called me an insect before, at least not to my face.”

“Still not to your face,” I said, tugging at his arm.

“Turn around and say it, then.”

I did, and our hands found each other again in the space between us. Kevin and his capable hands. “Cicada,” I teased.

“Professor,” he shot right back.

“I don’t mind that.” I liked that, but not as much as I liked Kevin.

“I was tackled during practice with an arm across my throat. I thought I’d never breathe again. When I finally was able to talk a week later, this is what I sounded like.”

“It’s not bad,” I told him. “It’s distinctive.”

“At least I can talk at all. It could have been a lot worse. A gay man without a voice, that would have been a disaster. In case you haven’t noticed, in the right circumstances I can talk a lot.”

“Not me.”

“You listen a lot, don’t you? But when you have something to say, people listen to you. They know what you have to say is worth saying.”

“Maybe.”

“No, it’s true, I’ve seen it. You’ve earned a lot of respect at the school.”

“You don’t have much of a data pool.”

“If Channing says it, then it’s so. And Danielle. You’ve got a fan club.”

“You’re hallucinating.”

He squeezed my hand. “I’ve never been so lucid in my life.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, and so I said nothing at all. I lay there and looked at him, and I felt his eyes on me too. Despite the dark, he saw me.

“Already I’m thinking about next weekend,” he said softly. “Do you want to do this again?”

Yes, I really did. “Okay.”

He gave a little laugh. “That’s great. Come over to my house, spend the weekend with me? A little music, a little wine, my nice king-sized bed, way bigger than this thing.”

“You already know the answer to that one.”

“You can’t blame a man for trying. So, somewhere else?”

The answer popped up as if I’d been planning it for weeks. “Fredericksburg. Maybe three hours, three and a half hours from your place. It’s a tourist town.”

“I know it.”

“I bet we could find some cabins outside town in the hill country. They might be private enough.”

“I know you need your privacy.” He touched my wrist with his fingertips. “Should I find us something then? Or do you want to do it?”

The balance of our relationship teetered on the edge of realigning—Kevin was the one who called, who drove, who pushed, who topped. Either do it or walk away, I thought, the way you already did once in Houston. Walk away? Pass up the best thing, the best person that’d ever happened to me? “All right,” I said. “I’ll make the reservations.”

Next weekend again with Kevin, great sex, a chance to get away from school… getting to know him better. I smiled.

“Hey,” Kevin said, “that’s really great.”

“What?”

Kevin’s fingers traced my lips, tickling with a light touch. “Right here….” He poked my mouth at the left corner. “And right here….” He poked me at the right corner too. “Oh, the rarest vintage, Tom Smith smiling at me. I think I want to bottle your smile and take it home with me.”

“Imbecile,” I said most sincerely, but I was chuckling as I said it.

“And he’s got a fine vocabulary too.” Kevin was smiling twice as widely as I was.

“Moron.” I felt about twelve years old, but it was such a good feeling. Light.

“I love it when you call me names.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever called you names, but I’ve got plenty. I’m a college graduate, you know.” I grabbed him around his waist.

“Amazing. Give me some more.” He bucked against the sheet and inched closer. His skin against my fingers made the base of my spine tingle.

“Nincompoop. Idiot. Uh….”

“Jerk?”

“Not quite the same. Fool,” I said, maybe a little fondly.

“Tomfool?” His amusement ground to a sudden stop. “Oh, yes,” he whispered, and then he breathed against my lips. “I’m a Tomfool. I’m a fool for Tom, absolutely.”

He kissed me, a quiet, full pressing of his mouth against mine. I could hardly let myself believe it was really happening, but it was.

I pulled away before we were finished because suddenly, maybe irrationally, I had to know. “What’s your middle name?”

“Nothing interesting like yours. Mine’s boring. Robert.”

Boring? Anything but. Kevin Robert Bannerman.

 

 

FREDERICKSBURG WAS a Saturday morning hike up Enchanted Rock after a long, difficult week, with both of us triumphant when we reached the top, grinning at each other like loons. Fredericksburg was good German food for lunch in town, and our easy conversation about books we’d read and shows we’d seen, and what we really thought of Obama’s chances in the upcoming election. It was a simple, effortless afternoon out on the deck with our feet up and beers in our hands, watching the birds in the sky and a solitary deer that came to greet us as I felt my stress and worry over the play recede because I was there with Kevin. It was the Jacuzzi inside the cabin filled with hot water and both of us laughing as we slid against each other, the incredible feeling of Kevin slick in my arms, the warm taste of him, reaching for him and finding him reaching for me.

Fredericksburg was steaks on the grill with sweet, sweet corn. It was the look on Kevin’s face when I pulled out my laptop after dinner inside, set a CD to playing, and stood there with my arms extended. “Dance with me?” I’d racked my brain trying to find a way to say thank you for the special care he’d given me the weekend before, and this was the best I’d been able to come up with.

What I’d guessed from the nights in Houston was right: Kevin loved to dance. What I’d remembered from Houston was confirmed: We danced together pretty well. We slow-danced through the album, laughing together when the music turned up-tempo and we refused to part in order to do it justice, but then I’d carefully picked moody, evocative ballads when I’d put the music together.

“This was the best idea,” Kevin whispered in my ear.

We finally fell onto the bed to the sound of k.d. lang singing “Crying” in a duet with Roy Orbison, but we’d already made love four times that day—after waking in the morning, right before lunch, twice in the Jacuzzi—and so contented ourselves with touching and kissing until the baseball game came on. I was almost sorry when it did.

“Wait a minute,” Kevin said, and he slid out of bed to pad over to a backpack he’d brought into the cabin the night before. He pulled out two brand-new baseball caps and tossed the Boston Red Sox one to me before he got back on the mattress. “This one’s for you,” he said as he settled a Dodgers cap on his head. “I thought we should do honor to the game. You’re a Boston fan, right?”

I put it on and adjusted the back to fit, pleased past what I should have been that he’d thought to do this. “How’d you know?”

“You were talking about it at the bar in Springrose, remember?”

I did remember, but it’d been when he was on the phone with State Farm. He must have been listening to me talk with the other men there.

We watched the sixth game of the playoff series between the Red Sox and the Tampa Bay Rays propped up, eating popcorn, and with Kevin’s arm around my shoulders.

As we left on Sunday afternoon, I leaned back against the headrest in Kevin’s Silverado, and I remembered what he’d said the night before. After the fifth time we made love.

“Let’s do this again,” Kevin whispered as we lay in bed facing one another, forehead to forehead. “Again and again. Every weekend.”

Oh, God, yes. If I could just keep this time with him set off from everything else and stop myself from dwelling on the impossibility of it being anything other than what it was, then again and again, all the time. The days in the week when I was Mr. Smith, teacher, had nothing to do with who I could be—who I was—with Kevin.

“Come over to my house?” he asked as he turned onto the highway. We were three hours from home. “Wine, music, no women, a big bed? Probably more baseball we can watch together.”

I grabbed the overhead strap as alarm shot through me to think of the two paths of my life intersecting. Even if the picture Kevin painted of how it would be at his house—just like this past weekend in the luxury cabin—was tempting beyond belief, I still had to say no. I could go just so far… and no further.

So instead, the next Saturday we finally made it to Abilene. We put the Privacy sign on the door of one of the rooms we’d paid for, called for room service when we were hungry, and stayed in bed to use as many condoms as we could. Kevin licked me from head to toe and back again, and I quivered for hours. We squeezed the lube flat and started on a second tube. I couldn’t get enough of him.

When we drove away that time, again in Kevin’s truck, I looked over at him. His eyes were intent on the road. I thought: my lover. My weekend lover. He was.

Everything had changed except the voice that told me none of this could happen in the real world.

 

 

Chapter 5

Those Who Wander

 

 

THE NIGHT before Kevin left for a conference in Phoenix, we talked for almost an hour on the phone. After three weekends in a row out together—getting to know that he was a fan of John Barrowman in Torchwood but didn’t think much of Doctor Who, that he had a passable singing voice, that he’d tried to learn French and couldn’t, that he took his coffee black, and hundreds of other things that made him distinctively who he was—we wouldn’t be seeing each other for a while. He’d be in Arizona visiting his cousin this coming weekend before attending a genuine bankers’ conference the next week. I’d miss him, though I didn’t tell him that. Kevin and I didn’t say things like that to each other. At the same time, it was almost a relief to have some time off. I hardly felt familiar to myself anymore, and I needed the time to take a breath and think.

Even though it was late once we said good night, past Leno and time for sleep, I couldn’t be still. I walked around the house looking for something to release the nervous energy Kevin had roused in me and ended up spending an hour going through some of the junk overflowing my garage. I managed to go through just three of the boxes filled with old paperwork from years before; I dumped all of it in my big trashcan. After that I was able to sleep, and I woke up the next morning to the sound of Kevin’s voice—his hoarse, damaged, sincere voice—ringing in my ear. I didn’t know what he’d been saying in my dreams, but he’d been there for sure.

As I drove to school that Thursday morning, the day before Halloween, I felt strangely bereft. A few fucks and Tom’s an easy mark, I thought to myself. I was a pushover for a little attention. I was so lonely I’d be happy with just about anybody. I was emotionally stunted.

There were kernels of truth in all those thoughts, but I pushed them aside. Besides, Kevin wasn’t just anybody.

Like I did a few times a week, I made sure to walk by Robbie’s locker that morning before first bell. Steven was there, as he was sometimes, wearing not his Gunning High School maroon baseball cap but the flat cloth hat that distinguished Tom Collins on stage. He and Robbie seemed to be deep in a serious conversation. Despite what seemed to me to be Robbie’s obvious crush on Steven, they’d developed a friendship that I was pleased to see. There was no sign of kids gathered to pray over the misbegotten faggot, and I didn’t think the boys noticed me. I walked on to let them be, but a voice called, “Mr. Smith! Wait up.”

I turned to find that Steven had come up behind me. Like most star athletes, he was physically mature beyond his years, almost as tall as I was at over six feet and with the walk and shoulder set of a grown man. It would be a few years before he filled out, though. But he was a good-looking kid with brown hair that he was wearing short for the play, to serve as a contrast to Angel.

“Have you seen the paper, sir?” he asked anxiously. “Rob has a copy. Come on back to his locker, please.”

There was time before classes started, but more importantly I felt Steven’s urgency as he literally pulled me back the way I’d already come by tugging on my sleeve. I saw the glint of withheld tears in Robbie’s eyes as we got close.

“What’s the matter?”

Steven took the newspaper that had been clenched in Robbie’s hands and handed it over. “Here. It’s awful.”

The Gunning Gazette’s Thursday edition was turned to page seven, where the editorials and the letters to the editor were usually printed. There were two letters that day, and as I scanned the headings, my mouth twisted in distaste. I looked back up at the boys. “They’re against the play?”

“Go ahead,” Robbie said, though he put his fist up to his mouth. I didn’t know if it was to cover up fear or anger or what. He looked even paler than usual. “Read them. We’ll wait.”

“WHERE ARE THE VALUES IN PLAY AT GHS?” was the headline for the first letter.

 

Dear Editor,

Its been years since one of my kids was up at the High School but I’m worryed that the School will be putting on Rent in December. Who got such a bee in their bonnet? Rent might be good for the Crowd that goes to New York and sees the latest nonsense on Broadway but there’s no Place for it here in Gunning. We don’t want Drugs here we don’t want the Homosexuals here & we want to raise kids with good respect for their parents. Its hard enough in this day and age to raise Boys that will be a credit to their Fathers without High Schools pointing out all the wrong things & turning them into sissys. Why can’t we put on a different play that will uplift our Spirits? Whose the idiot on the School Board who thought a play about homos in high heels and dresses was all right for Gunning? They sure won’t get my vote next time if thats the sorts of things they do at the Board Meetings. Nobody has any sense of shame any more. When I was a student the School stood for decency & I was proud to graduate. Now I’m shamed of that School. What’s happened to the folks up there? What are they thinking?

Yours,

Lynda Whitman

 

If that had been it, I could have dismissed the letter. One opinion from an older woman, probably set in her ways, who maybe hadn’t learned as much from her English teachers when she’d been at school as she should have. But I couldn’t ignore the second letter.

“BOYCOTT PLAY AT GUNNING HIGH SCHOOL” it started.

 

Dear Editor:

As an elder of the First Baptist Church of Gunning, I feel it necessary to alert the citizens of Gunning to the forthcoming production of Rent at the Gunning High School. Anyone familiar with the play knows it is totally unsuitable for a high school presentation, as it focuses on the glorification of the drug culture. Even worse, a play that makes no moral judgment on the evils of homosexuality is not suitable for impressionable teenage minds. At a time when it is ever more imperative to convey biblical teachings to our youngsters, the choice of Rent is more than unfortunate, it is counter to everything that our community stands for.

If Hiram Watts, principal of GHS, and George Keating, director of the show, don’t withdraw the production, then I sadly but boldly call for all citizens to withdraw their support from the play. Show your Christian values and boycott Rent at Gunning High School.

Yours most sincerely,

William Tate,

Elder, First Baptist Church of Gunning

 

My three-weekend bubble burst almost audibly in my head. To my shame, I didn’t think of the kids or the good the play might do or George’s probable distress: I thought of myself.

I didn’t want the spotlight like Robbie and Steven did. I was content to labor backstage in anonymity. I had wrapped anonymity around me for years, and even my name helped me blend into the background: Mr. Nothing-Special Tom Smith. But letters like these two turned harsh, exposing lights on everybody involved in the play, and I couldn’t afford that. I had a lot more to protect now than I’d had at the start of the school term. I had Kevin now. Would George’s bulk be big enough for the two of us to hide behind? If people began looking at me, would they find Kevin? My stomach clenched into the granddaddy of all sickening knots.

Kevin and I had planned to go hiking at San Angelo State Park the next weekend, so there were nine more days until I saw him again. I deserved to see him, damnit. Because I wanted to go hiking for a day, because a man deserved a weekend off after working sixty hours a week on school and the play, because I wanted to spend time with my friend. Because Kevin had reawakened something in me that had been slumbering, and I needed to make love with him. Or maybe this startling need I had for him was brand new, and he’d created it all himself.

Christ. Why had I ever told George I’d help him out? Without Rent going on, I wouldn’t have to be worrying about anything except where Kevin and I would meet next. Now…

I bit my lip and then released it immediately; the kids needed to see that the adults leading them were resolute. Besides, I was jumping the gun. If we were luckier than we deserved to be, Elder Tate would be called out of town on important church business and forget all about us. There might be no reason for my fears, and so I set about doing my job. All the years of hiding had given me plenty of experience in feeling one way and pretending that I felt another. I was probably the best actor in the school.

“Do you know either of these people?” I asked, lifting the paper into the space between the three of us.

“Nope,” Steven said, and Robbie shook his head.

“I don’t either. Gunning has a lot of people in it, doesn’t it? Five, six thousand, something like that.”

I watched as what I was implying sank in. The boys were standing side by side, close together, as if giving each other support. Steven had on jeans and a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt, but Robbie stood out by what he was wearing, as he did in so many other ways. He had on brown pants with thin black stripes, and a black muscle shirt that barely conformed to the school’s dress regulations.

“Here are just two opinions,” I said. “I think it’s important that we not make more of this than it really is.”

“But he’s calling for a boycott, Mr. Smith,” Steven ventured.

“That’s right,” I said as I folded the paper and tucked it under my bad arm. “Did you really think that a play like Rent wouldn’t get some sort of attention in our town?”

Robbie had been looking truly distressed, but now he pushed his black hair away from his eyes and frowned. “But it won the Tony Award.”

“That doesn’t mean anything in Gunning,” I said gently. “Broadway might be something you follow, but to most people here it’s far away, and maybe an example of how they don’t want to live. You’ve got to understand how others are thinking.”

Steven snorted and swept his hat off his head. “Oh, yeah, sure, I understand. I understand that they live with their heads in the sand, and they don’t want to give anything new and different a chance. Trying new stuff is what life’s all about. They’re just a couple of homophobic bigots!”

“Name-calling never solved a single problem in this world,” I said as mildly as I could.

I’d been through my own period of wanting to call names, during the time when my family had turned their backs on me just when I had needed them most. If my brother Grant hadn’t helped the way he had—though we’d never talked about what was most important—I had sometimes thought I would have put a gun to my head. But what would it have gained me to scream at the people who were afraid of the differences I represented? I had pushed the angry words down so deeply that they’d never, ever emerged, not once in all these years. They were still there though, captured.

“The people who might agree with these letter-writers are your neighbors,” I said, “your friends, and the people you live with every day in Gunning.”

“Not my family,” Robbie said.

They sure had been mine. It’d been years before my father had talked to me again. For half a second, I wondered about Kevin’s family. “Maybe not, but—”

Steven interrupted me. “What should we do?”

“What do you want to do?”

He scowled and scuffed a shoe against the institutional tile on the floor. “I want to shove the paper down their throats.”

“Now tell me something realistic, because I don’t think you really want to choke a little old lady, do you? Besides the fact that you’d be arrested and go to jail for it.”

“I want to—”

“Mr. Smith,” Robbie butted in as if Steven weren’t talking, “you don’t think that Mr. Keating will cancel the play because of this, do you?” His voice was distressed-high, but it seemed even higher because of the contrast to Steven’s determined rumble.

“Only Mr. Keating can speak for himself, but I certainly don’t think you need to worry about that. Just for a couple of letters? So tell me, how do you realistically want to respond to this?”

“Keep going,” Robbie said right away.

Steven gave him a disgusted look. “Well, yeah, Rob, sure. He means something else.”

“I want to hear whatever you want to tell me.”

“I want to write back,” Steven said. “I could tell them to go to hell.”

Robbie shoved him in the chest. Steven didn’t even blink as he was forced back a step. “That wouldn’t help, numb nuts. Didn’t you hear what Mr. Smith said?”

“Okay, okay. So I get sincere and tell them we’re, like, working hard, and it’s a play with a good message, that sort of thing. Just because somebody’s gay or a druggie or spreads her legs too easy doesn’t mean there can’t be a play about them, you know?”

“Admirable sentiments, Steven,” I said. “Though maybe it would be wise to wait until next week and see if there’s any response to these letters, don’t you think? And consult with Mr. Keating. Remember, just two in the whole town.”

While we’d been talking the hallway had cleared out, and now the first bell rang. The boys grabbed their backpacks, and Robbie slammed his locker shut, but I told them, “Come with me to my classroom so I can write you excuse slips for being tardy.”

As they trailed along behind me, I heard Steven say quietly, “Don’t listen to that old lady. You aren’t a sissy.”

 

 

ON THE night before I was supposed to meet Kevin in the parking lot of the San Angelo State Park, I sat in my kitchen with my cell phone in front of me on the table. I needed to pick up that phone, dial him, and tell him I couldn’t make it. The past three issues of the bi-weekly Gazette had each printed letters against the play, with only one solitary supporter. The cast and crew were understandably upset and restless. A reporter from the paper had left a message at the school that she wanted to interview George, but George hadn’t answered her yet.

Principal Watts hadn’t said a word to us; I suspected he was waiting to see if the school board stepped in. Teachers stopped me in the hall, wanting to talk about the play and asking whether I thought it should be staged. Even a former student who was working at Safeway had asked me about it the night before in the produce section. He’d specifically wanted to know if there was going to be same-sex kissing onstage. At least he’d had the courage to put the question into words. Everybody else wanted to ask the same thing but had gone at it sideways, and I’d been able to slip away from answering.

I was trying to look at the situation rationally, not go overboard, and trying to take the advice that I was giving to the kids. But I’d developed a lot of knee-jerk, self-protective habits since that Saturday night long ago—my face raised to the night sky, the sound of an engine revving, “Faggot!”—and they told me to make this call to Kenneton and cancel.

I hadn’t seen Kevin in two solid weeks, since we had kissed goodbye in his garage after coming back from our sex-drenched weekend in Abilene. I’d thought I wouldn’t be able to get it up for days after that, but the next night in my own bed all I’d had to do was think of him licking wetly at my ear, re-imagine the slippery sounds of our bodies moving against each other, remember the force and salty taste of his come flooding my mouth, and I’d reached for my aching cock.

I half-groaned, half-laughed right there in the company of my microwave and my toaster. How had I ever managed to go without sex for months at a time? I couldn’t imagine going back to that self-imposed celibacy.

I’d been shocked at how much I’d missed Kevin the past weekend. Maybe I didn’t have the body of a twenty-year-old anymore, but I wanted Kevin as much as I had wanted Sean back in college: night after night, quickies between classes, during study sessions, and even after wild college parties when we’d been drunk out of our minds.

What was I going to do? I was flat-out spooked by the letters to the editor and all the talk they’d stirred up, and the safest thing to do was to go back to my simple, hidden life. The only problem was that I didn’t want to.

Sitting staring at my phone wouldn’t solve anything. I got up and wandered through the living room, ending up over by the sliding glass door to the patio. I pushed the curtain aside and looked out into the night, but I couldn’t see much. It was drizzling and overcast, and the lights behind me reflected against the glass so that it was my own image that stared back at me. Sandy hair growing a little too long, prominent, narrow nose that only a mother could love, thin lips that didn’t smile enough. Eyes that I knew didn’t look straight at people the way they used to.

Somehow I’d gone from my solitary life to wanting Kevin all the time. He’d found my “ON” switch, flipped it with just a touch, a kiss, a few words—“Spend the night with me, please”—and kept it turned on now for weeks. I’d jerked off like a teenager the weekend before when Kevin had been out of town, feeling as if I were being deprived of something that was my right. But even more than the sex, I’d missed the sudden, vivid color he’d brought to my days.

I reached out and touched the glass with my fingertips, drifting them across my lips. It made no sense, my feelings about Kevin. I didn’t love him. How could I love him? Gay men like me didn’t traffic in the softer feelings.

But I could love him. I could.

“You really like this, don’t you?” George asked as we went out to the parking lot late one Wednesday night.

“What do you mean?”

“Directing, working with the kids for the play.” He shrugged as he pulled open his car door and threw his briefcase on the front seat. “Lately you’ve been a lot… a lot happier. I can really see a difference in you. You should do this with me every year.”

The image of a man in the glass shook his head. No, George, it isn’t my delight in working on your misguided, dangerous pet project. You see, I’m different—happier? definitely happier—because of this guy I picked up in a gay bar, who has this way about him of listening to what I say, who understands my life, who’s got this gravelly voice that I still want to listen to all the time, whose touch makes me hungry-crazy for more, who’s handsome and intelligent and is the best company I’ve ever had. Ever. He’s brave, too, trying to make changes in his life that I can only dream about—am I dreaming about those changes? And he wants me.

“Wants me,” I whispered against the window. Out of all that was most improbable in the world, he did. This thing between us: it was a two-way street.

But I wasn’t just happier. I was scared now too. I was worried about the controversy over Rent. Where would it lead? Straight to the assistant director, who had more knowledge of what the play was about than anybody supposed?

I stood mired in my indecision for a long time, long enough for the drizzle to end and then start again, and for the moon to peep out from behind the clouds and then disappear. I was in the middle of an impossible situation, propelled there by my own wants, my own decisions, and I couldn’t blame anybody else. Thinking for years that I’d had myself under control: what a joke. All it took was the first man to come along and really test me, and my control disappeared.

Well, maybe not the first man. I’d danced with plenty of others, had sex with them. But that first breakfast with Kevin at the IHOP in Houston, that had done me in good. I remembered how he’d looked eating pancakes and sipping coffee as clearly as if it had happened yesterday, and as if every second of that meal were somehow meaningful.

How did I expect this to end? Happy ever after wasn’t in the cards. Happy for a year wasn’t in the cards. I knew that. Hard reality, Tom Smith, face it.

Hard reality was wanting to see Kevin this weekend even when I knew I shouldn’t.

I’d told the kids to have faith. I had to try to have the same.

 

 

HIKING IN west Texas wasn’t anything like walking through a lush, green, picture-postcard park. San Angelo was on the edge of the arid, almost-desert Trans-Pecos region where rain was a stranger, the dirt was a hard-packed yellow-brown that resembled puke, and the flat land could fall into a cutting, dangerous gully at any time. What vegetation managed to live under the haughty sun didn’t dare lift its head very high; the trees and timid bushes pulled in on themselves. Green wasn’t the green of golf courses or rose gardens here. It was an almost-green, an off-color green with lots of brown and even a hint of blue to it that reflected the cloudless skies. And it was still hot here. Even in early November, hiking out into the backcountry of the park brought out sweat on my forehead and across my shoulders.

Kevin and I walked along the Horny Toad Trail to start because he’d insisted. I’d protested that it was out of our way, he’d asked me where was my sense of adventure and fun, I’d told him he was acting like one of my students, and he’d raised his eyebrows and said that no student had better think about me the way he thought about me or he’d knock them down with his good left hook. Or right jab. Or maybe a two-by-four.

“Oh, shut up,” I’d said, but I was smiling.

We’d met at the park at nine that morning, and it had felt awkward and just not-right to shake hands instead of embrace. I suddenly and deeply resented the fact that I couldn’t act naturally with Kevin. I wanted to kiss him, and from the look on his face, he wanted to kiss me. Maybe in Massachusetts I could have, or in the gay neighborhoods of some big cities, but for sure not in west Texas. It would be a cold day in hell before Texas joined any other states in tolerating the public expression of affection between men, and it’d be the end of the universe as I knew it before I’d ever be able to marry….

I shut that thought down and released Kevin’s hand.

After putting on hiking boots and suntan lotion—even with the long sleeves I was wearing, I needed it with my fair skin—we set out at an easy pace. One of the park’s simple cabins was reserved for us for the night, and we had nothing to do and nothing to prove between now and then. We’d walk as far as we wanted to and then turn around and go back, and that was it. My worries about the Sunday edition of the Gazette that would be waiting for me when I got home faded with every step. This was the alternate version of the real world, at least on Saturday it was, my time-with-Kevin that stood apart from everything else. I’d been insane to consider canceling. What had I been thinking? Here, with Kevin, I could drop the act and just be myself.

We encountered more than a few people the first hour on the Horny Toad trail, but when we took the turnoff by the sign that said Desert Loop Trail, Primitive Camping, No Fires, we left the other hikers behind. For a solid hour we passed no one and no one passed us, and that was fine with me. The farther away from the world and the sudden complications of my life in it, the better.

“Hey,” Kevin called from behind me, “wait up.”

I stopped by a prickly pear cactus, and he came up with long strides. There was a line of sweat down one side of his face, but that didn’t suppress the little jump my body gave at the sight of him. He looked good enough to eat in his lace-up boots, shorts, and gray T-shirt that said Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost. “I thought you said you weren’t in good shape,” he protested.

“I’m not. Sorry, I guess I was thinking about getting away,

and—”

“And off you went racing, leaving me in the dust. Come on, let’s walk together.”

Most of our hike so far had been single-file because of the trail, but here it wandered across a wide, flat expanse that was mainly sagebrush and cactus, and side-by-side was possible. I took a swig from my Ozarka water bottle, Kevin sipped from his Camelbak, and off we went.

“So, professor,” Kevin said, “you’ve been quiet. What’s on your mind?”

I tucked the bottle back in my pocket. “Oh, the play. I’m worried about this boycott.”

“If all the proposed boycotts actually happened, the whole world would have come to a screaming halt years ago. Don’t let it get you down.”

“It’s not me. I don’t care. I never wanted this play to begin with. It’s the kids.”

He looked at me almost quizzically, as if he were trying to figure me out. But he knew me, didn’t he? “It’s always about the kids with you, isn’t it?”

“What? No, it isn’t.”

“I think it is. All kids and no Tom.”

“They deserve some consideration, don’t you think? This last round of letters, some of the kids were really upset and crying.”

“Was Channing?”

I was sorry that I’d mentioned it, but I wouldn’t lie to him about his daughter. “Yeah, she was. Sorry.”

Kevin hitched up the straps of his Camelbak, settling it higher on his shoulders. “She’ll get over it. Time for her to grow up and face the real world. Not everybody will like what she wants to do or what she believes in.”

“That’s a hard approach to take, coming from her father.”

“I want her to be tough. The world hasn’t exactly been easy on you and me, has it? Channing’s almost old enough to be on her own. It’s about time she learned nothing’s going to be handed to her, and that the good guys don’t finish first.”

“That’s for sure. If they did….” I kicked a rock out of my way and watched it roll through the sandy dirt. “If they did, you’d be president of some big, multinational bank somewhere.”

He laughed softly. “Definitely, that’s me. I’ve been waiting for the call, considering how I like banking so much. But if life were fair, not only would I be some bigwig interviewed by CNN, you’d be president of Harvard.”

I snorted out a laugh despite myself. “Idiot.”

“You sure do like to call me names. I’m smart enough to know a man who’d be perfect as a university president when I meet him.”

“A few advanced degrees might help. Experience, knowledge, knowing the right people.”

“I bet you wouldn’t like all the schmoozing that a job like that involves, would you? Back-clapping and all that stuff.”

I shuddered, exaggerating it. “Especially since I’m such a social person and love crowds.”

“So, no university presidenting for you.”

“Presidenting? That’s not even a word.”

“So give me an F. Maybe you’d be a best-selling author of history biographies, like that guy who wrote the book about John Adams. What’s his name?”

“David McCullough, and you’re nuts.”

“Tsk, tsk, tsk. Sticks and stones may break my bones. I bet you’ve read that book.”

“I have, but I bet you have too.”

“Guilty as charged. But tell me what you think. If the good guys finished first, what would you be doing? Assuming of course that you consider yourself a good guy.”

I stopped to wipe more sweat from my face with my arm. Global warming was alive and well in Texas. If the weather kept up like this, the public pools would be open for swimming at Thanksgiving. “You ask annoying questions, has anybody ever told you that?” I said when we started walking again.

“Everybody. Constantly. But I usually get my answer, and questions are a great way to get to know somebody. So, tell me. What would you be doing?”

I took my time and thought about it, enjoying the fact that Kevin had asked. “I think I wouldn’t change,” I said finally. “I’d be doing exactly what I’m doing now.”

“You do love teaching. But you’d change one thing, right? You’d be able to be honest about yourself.”

Sure, while we were talking fantasy, why not? “And what would you be doing?”

He answered right away. “That’s easy. I’d be asking you to please come over to my house this weekend.”

“Kevin….”

“I can promise you my nice king-sized bed, where I’m way too lonely, and the best possible company. At least, I’m assuming you think I’m the best—”

Not one but three lizards went skittering across the path and paused right in front of us, going into the defensive if I don’t move you won’t be able to see me freeze that made no sense unless you were a dumb animal. I grabbed Kevin’s arm to stop him and he pulled up short, skipping a little to keep his balance and finishing up pressed against me, surely not by accident.

He stayed there, looking into my eyes as I looked into his.

“What do you say?” Kevin whispered.

I swallowed against the dry air. I’d told him about the letters to the editor over the phone the past week. Surely he understood what that meant for the two of us. “I….”

“Dear professor, please come to my house.”

“I… I don’t think so.”

Despite the disappointment that appeared instantly in those eyes that matched the sky, Kevin erased the distance between us and pressed his lips to mine. I closed my eyes and gave him that kiss, because even though I was desperately grateful for what we had—these meager hours together away from it all—in the best of all possible worlds I’d be knocking on his door every day. Did he understand that? I tried to tell him so without words.

He pulled away slowly so that our mouths clung to each other for a second or two, and when we parted, I daringly kissed him again. Quickly, but I wanted him to know that I liked his kisses too.

Kevin flicked his thumb against my cheek and went on as if we hadn’t done anything to interrupt our conversation. “I’d cook you breakfast on Sunday morning. Scrambled eggs with cheese, bacon, cinnamon buns from Sara Lee….”

The lizards were long gone. I resettled my Red Sox baseball cap and started walking again. “What do you want to do, smother me with cholesterol?”

He caught up with me easily. “I’ll serve it to you in bed. And afterward, we can make slow, sweet love. Or hot, quick love, whichever fires your jets. I’ll treat you good.”

I knew he would. “Kevin…. You know I can’t.”

“No, I don’t. I know you won’t. There’s a difference.”

A desert willow bush, big by the standards of the park, had grown in the middle of the hardly-there path we were following. I turned to go around the left side of it, but Kevin roughly grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the other side with him instead.

Annoyed, I yanked away from him. “Damn it—”

Wordlessly, he turned and pointed. On the side of the path where I’d wanted to walk was a coiled rattlesnake, just raising up in warning, and now rattling in a way nobody ever forgot. Even though I’d killed my share of rattlers when I’d been growing up on the ranch, I’d just as soon avoid them when I could.

“Uh, thanks,” I said.

“Sure.”

We didn’t talk after that for a while. I was embarrassed, and maybe Kevin was pissed at me, I didn’t know. I sure couldn’t blame him if he was. After five minutes of silence I dropped back to where he was walking behind me. “This wouldn’t be the best day if that rattler had buried his fangs in my leg.”

Kevin cocked an eye at me. “The best day, huh?”

“Yeah.” What could compete with the time I spent with Kevin? Drinking beer in my yard? Finishing a book and not having anyone to talk to about it? Planning another desperate trip to Houston?

“Me too,” he said.

“Right. Beats old Star Trek reruns.”

“I like Star Trek. What’s your favorite episode?”

And as simply as that we were back together again.

The rest of the morning was great, a lot like the relaxing, natural weekend we’d spent in Fredericksburg. The sun got as high in the sky as it was going to get, and then it began its long slide down to the horizon before we stopped for lunch. I spread an old, lightweight blanket I’d packed under a lone, stunted mesquite tree. It’d grown on the edge of one of the slashes in the land, which must have been filled with rushing water in the spring. The tree was on its last legs, about as bad as the one in my backyard, but it was clinging to life, and there were clumps of leaves overhead that provided deep shade. I checked for snakes first and then made sure the blanket took in as much of that shade as possible. I knelt down on it and opened up my backpack to pull out lunch. That included a corkscrew and a bottle of pinot grigio in an insulating wrap. I looked up at Kevin, who was sitting across from me next to his own backpack with an odd expression on his face.

“I thought we might have some wine with lunch,” I said, aiming to sound off-handed. “You, ah, you like this, don’t you? White wine?”

“We’re going to regret drinking this much,” Kevin said, and he unwrapped a bottle of chardonnay, sweating in the hot air just like my bottle was. “Great minds think alike?”

We decided to drink the grigio and keep the chardonnay for dinner. I uncorked and poured it into red plastic glasses that Kevin held out. Kevin held up his glass for a toast. He waited until my cup met his, stared at me meaningfully, and then broke into a grin. “Cheers,” he said.

“Salud.”

Kevin drank, and then he rested his arm on his bent knee and held his cup in the air again. “May we get what we want,” he intoned, “may we get what we need, but may we never get what we deserve.” He took another sip, more slowly this time. “This isn’t bad wine. Okay, now it’s your turn.”

A pebble under my ass forced me to shift on the blanket while I thought. Clever toasts hadn’t ever been my specialty, but I’d heard a few, and I strained to remember one. “May you live to be a hundred years, with one extra year to repent.” Belatedly, I touched my wine to his, and we both drank.

“That’s a good one,” he said. “How about ‘Here’s to us. May we never drink worse.’”

“Six on a scale of ten. Maybe five. Yep, five.”

“You really are a hard marker. Don’t the kids ever complain?”

“Constantly.”

“I can see why. Okay, do you have another one?”

“Uh….” I made a show of scratching my head, loving this little game that had sprung up between us. “May we both be alive this time next year.”

Kevin made an elaborate face. “Yuck. Negative fifty-seven for that one.”

“Hey! You do better.”

“Thanks, don’t mind if I do.” Kevin got nimbly to his feet, though he looked down as he spilled some of the wine in the process. “I hate feeding the ants. Okay, here’s a good one I learned in college. My second week in Fayetteville, as a matter of fact.” He cleared his throat—not that it would have any effect. “Here’s to you and here’s to me, may we never disagree. But if we do, then fuck you, and here’s to me.” He chuckled and looked down at me. “It’s the ‘fucking you’ part I always liked, though I never let the other guys know it.” He flopped back down next to me and sat cross-legged, though carefully safeguarding the wine this time. “Score?”

“Any toast that has fucking in it has got to earn big numbers. Eighty-six.”

“Not sixty-nine?”

I choked on my wine. “You have the mind of an adolescent sometimes.”

“And the truth comes out. Will you still date me, you old graybeard?”

“Date?” I asked lightly. “Is that what we’re doing?”

“That’s right.” He tapped me on my knee. “You know what they say, don’t you?”

“No, what?”

“Here’s to those who wish us well, and those that don’t may go to hell.” Kevin pushed his legs out straight. “That’s an old toast. At least in my family it is. My father used to give it every New Year’s dinner. So, are you ready to eat?”

The wine had been my small attempt at offering something to him, and I thought that he’d done the same for me. We ate sandwiches—he’d brought leftover chicken, I had deli ham—and apples and chips, food made special by the company. Afterward we lay back, side-by-side in the small patch of shade, and watched some birds spiral up higher and higher into the sky. I reached over and took his hand in mine, but what I really wanted to do was roll on top of him and look into his eyes. Maybe find in them what I was looking for, or maybe just… look. For the pleasure of it. For the freedom of it.

We clutched at each other’s fingers while the birds climbed so high that even the black specks they’d become disappeared. How long and how high would they go?

“There’s been something I’ve been wondering about,” I said.

Kevin’s voice was low and drowsy-sounding, as if he were on the verge of a nap. “What’s that?”

“Nothing. Later.”

He struggled up onto his elbow and twisted around to see me, shaking his head as he did. “No, tell me. Or ask me. What?”

The hand he’d been holding made a good pillow for my head as I stared up at the insubstantial wisps of a cloud. “How is your family about you being gay? I mean, you say you want to live out, eventually, but have you even told them? Does your mother know?”

“Yeah, they do. Even my favorite grandmother did before she died.”

“And they’re okay with it?”

He gave me one of his quick grins. “I didn’t say that now, did I? My mom’s your liberal’s liberal, and she’s always acted like she’s delighted to have a gay son.” His expression turned contemplative. “But she’s brittle, you know? I’ve never believed her. She’s too forced, too jolly. But it’s better than being cut out of the will.”

“And everybody else?”

“My dad died a month after I married Julianne, so he never knew. My sister, she’s great. The year I divorced Julianne and told everybody why, that whole year afterward Bridget would call and have long conversations with me, asking all sorts of impertinent questions.” Kevin snorted. “I guess that part runs in the family. But she asked, and I answered, and by the end she knew more about me than I did, I think. She gets it. So, yeah, Bridget and her husband are great.” He sat up. “She’s always said that she wants to meet my partner. Except, of course, I don’t have one. And before you ask, yes, Julianne knows too.”

“That must have been difficult, telling her.”

Kevin rubbed the back of his neck. “It wasn’t easy. The hardest thing I ever did, I think. Except, you’ve got to know, the marriage was a mistake for all different reasons. Even if I’d been straight, it wouldn’t have lasted.” He looked down at me. “And how about you? I don’t suppose you’re out to your family.”

How to explain when I didn’t want to talk about this at all? But then why had I brought up the subject if I wanted to avoid explanations? But not with Kevin. Somewhere in the back of my mind, the thought had been there for a while, that I could tell him, at least some part of it.

“I am and I’m not.”

There was compassion in his voice, his face. “Tell me.”

Just a little bit. I could get that out. I never talked about this; who would I talk to? But for years all the parts of it had crashed through my mind like boulders tumbling down an endless mountain. Young men always think they’re invincible, the surgeon said. You’re not. You should have known this would happen. As if it had been my fault. As if he would only begrudgingly operate on my arm. Faggot, after all. I focused on a tree branch overhead.

“I know they know. Something….” I took a breath. “Something happened a while ago. A long time ago, so that there’s no way they couldn’t understand what I… the truth. They’ve got to. But since then, they’ve always just looked the other way and not talked about it. I mean, my father barely said two words to me for years after that, had barely started talking to me again before he died. My mother… fussed. She’s always fussing and nervous around me, but never asking me anything about my personal life. It’s like I don’t have a personal life, just… school.”

Kevin’s hand settled on my knee. I still didn’t look over to him, but the contact felt good and maybe gave me the little something I needed to keep going.

“My older sister is just like my mother. Her husband slaps me on the back too hard and talks about sports every second I’m around him, like it’s a defense against what I am. I give their kids gifts every birthday, but they don’t know me. My other sister doesn’t count. She lives in London and I hardly ever see her. She comes over every three or four years to join us for holidays at the ranch, and I’m a sexless bachelor uncle for her and her kids.”

The light was too bright, the sun too high. I pulled my hand out from under my head and shaded my eyes instead, shaded them really well, covering them completely and plunging me into darkness. “It… it would be one thing if they didn’t know. If they were just guessing. But they know. How could they pretend?”

In my head, I heard Kevin’s voice, what he didn’t say but surely must be thinking. And aren’t you pretending too? Have you ever forced them to get to know you the way you are?

He was rubbing my thigh with the flat of his hand, around and around against the stiff fabric of my jeans. “I don’t know, Tom,” he said, his voice low and thick. “It’s wrong.”

Nobody had ever comforted me like this, and I felt the deep rush of emotion threatening to come forward, clogging my throat. But I wasn’t going to break down in front of him. I had a little dignity left, didn’t I? “Not my brother,” I managed to get out. “He… well, at least sort of.”

“Grant, right? Who golfs with you.”

Without looking, I lifted my left arm. “Even with this. Yes.”

“Hey. You do all right with that arm.”

“Grant wouldn’t let me slack off. He made sure I did rehab, he pushed me when I didn’t want to be pushed.” And invited me to the ranch when the rest of them didn’t want me there, when my father turned away from me. Let me get to know his kids from the days they were born.

“He sounds like a good guy. I’d… I’d like to meet him someday.”

And that was the crux of the matter, wasn’t it? What was I going to do about Kevin? Where did he fit in my life? Abruptly I sat up and put my arms around my knees. “I don’t know—”

“You don’t know that you can do it, I know.”

“You must be tired of hearing that.”

“Frankly, yes. But I keep telling myself that—”

“That it’s early days with us, and that I’ll change.”

Kevin scooted closer to me so that our thighs touched and he could grasp my shoulder. “Come to my house next weekend,” he said, not so softly this time. “We can’t keep meeting everywhere except where we live. What’s next, San Antonio? Going back to Houston? Flying to the moon?”

I quirked a sad, discouraged smile. “There aren’t any beds on the moon.”

“But there is one at my house.”

“Kevin, I want to. I really do. But my job, and now the play….”

He released me, not cruelly and not impatiently. “Think about it, okay? Don’t say no just yet.”

“All right. All right, I’ll think about it.”

“We can be careful for you. I’ve permanently cleaned out the second spot in my garage so you can park there right alongside my truck, and I won’t have to put that outside. Nobody needs to know you’re there. I want you there.”

He was really pushing now, in a way I suddenly realized that he hadn’t pushed when I’d been telling him about my family. He hadn’t asked about what I wouldn’t talk about, but the issue of spending time at Kevin’s house, maybe even staying overnight there, was a huge stumbling block between us, and it really mattered to him. If I couldn’t say yes….

“I’ve been wondering if you’d like to spend Thanksgiving together,” I said quickly, the words tumbling out of my mouth. “At Big Bend. You like that, don’t you? We could hike and maybe camp out. It should be warm enough. It’d be a long drive, but we could get there by midnight if we left right after work. All day Thursday and Friday and Saturday at the park, and then drive home on Sunday.”

He didn’t answer right away. Instead he looked out to the horizon, where a low escarpment showed that some long-ago earthquake had transformed the land. He squinted, and my heart sank.

“Thanksgiving,” Kevin said slowly. “I thought you always went to the ranch, to Grant’s.”

My mouth was dry, so I grabbed the water bottle and drank from it. “I usually do, but I don’t have to this time.”

Kevin looked at me directly, steadily, and very seriously. “It won’t make up for the other, you know. Are we going to be fuck buddies on these weekend trips, or are we going to make more of what we’ve got? I want more with you, Tom. And I need more. If you can’t do this….”

What? If I couldn’t, would he just say goodbye, so long, it’s been nice knowing you but I’ve got a life to live, so off I go? “I said I’d think about it, okay? I will. I… maybe I can…. Give me a few days.”

“Okay.” Suddenly he was shaking his head, and a small, wry smile appeared. “God, you drive me crazy, you know that?”

I was beginning to drive myself crazy. “I guess it’s a specialty I never knew I had.”

“Big Bend for Thanksgiving. Yeah, I want to do that with you. That would be fantastic.”

Relief made me weak, but I didn’t let him see. “You mean fabulous, don’t you? Any gay man worth his salt would say fabulous. Haven’t you ever watched Queer Eye?”

 

 

THAT NIGHT in the cabin, we pushed the two single beds together and made love. Then we lay pressed against each other in the solid darkness. The temperature had fallen and it was cold. We were warmer together, with our arms around each other and with his breath gusting in my face.

I was drifting toward sleep when Kevin said, his voice low, “If you come over next weekend, I promise you a massage you won’t forget.”

Next weekend. I was trying not to think about that when I’d promised I would. I didn’t need this, him pressing, and the play too. I kept my reply light, disguising my turmoil. “I thought you liked licking.”

“I do. And touching. And all sorts of other things. What do you like, Tom?”

The answer was so clear in my mind that I didn’t even try to stop it from coming out.

“You,” I said roughly.

He moved within my arms, restlessly, as if some charge went through him so that he couldn’t stay still. Then he stopped and whispered, “Perfect. Because I like you too.”

 

 

THE CAST and crew seemed determined to bring in each edition of the paper, cut out the letters, and tack them on the Little Theater bulletin board with a nervous, brittle defiance. Kids. One of them had brought in electrical tape and made a black-bordered box around the letters. All in all, they were doing pretty well, handling their anger and worry in healthy ways, I thought, but then it was still three and a half weeks to opening night. We hadn’t heard from the members of the school board yet, which was a small miracle, and I didn’t think they’d stay silent for much longer.

That afternoon my last class was out on a field trip with the biology teacher to count the number of saplings in a local nature preserve, so I got to the Little Theater for rehearsal work early. The room was deserted. George was teaching voice lessons in the choir room, which gave me time that I needed to work on schedules. He and I had worked up a comprehensive listing of what needed to be accomplished when. I agreed with him that it was the only way we could keep track of whether we were on top of getting the play ready for audiences by the first weekend of December.

I settled myself at George’s desk, powered up my Dell, and started going through the list. Costumes, check. Every single one was already hanging in the back wardrobe room. Buy stage makeup, no check. But we had it on order and it should arrive soon. Choreograph “La Vie Boheme,” three-quarters of a check. That was the middle-of-the-show blockbuster song-and-dance scene that ended act one. We were close, but it was a work-in-progress.

I chewed on a hangnail and stared at the screen, seeing what wasn’t there. Decide if you’re willing to just be fuck buddies with Kevin or if you have the courage to reach for something more. Definitely not a check.

If I turned away from him, I was a fool. I knew that. Somebody—a wonderful man—was offering me the kind of intimacy I had always craved and always denied myself, and I desperately wanted that with him. Not anybody else. Him. But if I said yes, then I was begging for the destruction of the small, secure life I’d built so carefully; I couldn’t see how we could keep our relationship a secret. I knew Kevin didn’t want that anyway, him with his invitations to his house.

Here we were, our lives intersecting during an unexpected and magical few months, when my eyes had been opened and my heart touched. But he was aimed right and I was aimed left. While I admired what he was determined to do, and even deep down wanted it for myself, I didn’t have the courage to reach for that golden ring.

I hadn’t slept well the past few days, as I asked myself if I could try with Kevin when my only other attempt at a serious relationship had ended in more pain than I ever wanted to endure again. I had no answer, so alone in bed, I’d let the anger out: Didn’t Kevin get it? What right did he have to demand this of me? I’d already given him more than I had ever imagined I’d give. Forget it. I didn’t need him. If he didn’t understand what I was risking, then it wasn’t worth being with him.

My anger was always short-lived. Kevin had turned my life upside down. Like a dumb teenager struck by an infatuation that he’s convinced is love, I wanted to be with him all the time, wanted to hear his voice on the phone, and I couldn’t imagine saying goodbye. I hurt even considering it and could barely touch the thought. Except I wasn’t a teenager. I was a grown man, and shouldn’t I be past all this emotional rigmarole?

How had I gotten myself into this situation?

The phone on the desk rang. I glared at it, but it kept on ringing, reminding me that I was George’s assistant and I’d promised to help, and that even if this was the paper calling, I could at least take a message. I grabbed the phone and caught myself before I growled into it. “Hello?” I said as moderately as three nights of interrupted sleep and an insolvable problem allowed.

“I want to talk to George Keating.” A man with a deep voice was talking. Middle-aged, solidly middle class.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Keating is not available. May I take a message?” I opened the desk drawer and pulled out a pen.

“Are you involved in the play too?”

I frowned and pushed the drawer closed by rolling the chair forward and shoving it with my belly. “I’m the assistant director, Thomas Smith. Are you one of our parent volunteers?”

“I wouldn’t be caught dead volunteering for that play.”

I looked at my laptop and bit my lip. “Is that the message you want me to write down?”

“No, I…. Listen, I’m sorry for saying that. It’s just… this play has me all riled up.” I imagined him running his hand through his hair. He sounded genuinely upset. “This play is all about drug addicts and faggots, right? The scum of the earth. Why would there be a play about them?”

I’d constructed my life so that nobody would ever call me a faggot to my face again. But he wasn’t calling me that. This man on the phone had no idea he was talking to one of the scum, just like nobody in the school knew it.

“There is drug use in Rent, yes,” I said firmly, putting on my teacher voice to cover up my anger and a sense of injustice that was suddenly brimming over. And a little bit of fear. I didn’t think I’d ever get rid of that; it was buried in me, along with the metal rod in my arm. “Though of course the drug use is simulated on stage. And there are homosexual relationships among the characters. But that’s not what Rent is about.”

“How could it be about anything else?” he challenged.

“It’s about how these young people have learned to make their own community. They live with each other, they fight with each other, they make bad choices, but ultimately they learn to support each other.”

“That’s not what Pastor Hunnicutt said.”

We had three Baptist churches in town, and Hunnicutt led the flock of the most conservative member of the Southern Baptist Convention. “Has he seen the play?”

“I guess. Sure, he must have.”

“Then I guess we’re involved in a disagreement in interpreting the play, and that’s certainly possible.”

“Not when there are Biblical principles involved.”

There was absolutely nothing I could say in direct response to that. I’d left the Presbyterian church my parents had raised me in the first week of college, and I’d never wanted to go back where I wasn’t accepted and didn’t belong.

“The way the school is presenting Rent is that the characters are all ugly ducklings in one way or the other,” I said, “rejected by society, in part on the outskirts because of some of the choices they’ve made. But they haven’t lost a vision of something better that they’re trying to construct themselves. Do you know what the ending lyrics are for one of the biggest songs? It says ‘Measure your life in love.’ That’s the ultimate message of the show.”

“Love, huh?”

“That’s right.”

He snorted. “Love’s all well and good for storybooks, but I’ve got to deal with the here and now. Look, I’ve got a daughter in this school, and she’s all worked up because we’ve told her she can’t go see the play with her friends. She’s a freshman, just fourteen. Her mother had to sit down and explain to her why homosexuals are perverted. What, you know, what they do. No mother should have to describe those godforsaken acts.”

I could hear the disgust in his every word. Men kissing. Sucking each other off. Ass fucking. What I did with Kevin, what I was driven to do and what I loved doing with him, part of what had made these past weeks so great and what had caused George to notice that I was happy. Any and all of that was so horrible that this man could barely bring himself to talk about it.

He was still talking. “Irene wouldn’t have had to explain all that filth to Janey without this play.”

I couldn’t sit and just take this. I jumped to my feet, pushing the chair back on its rollers, though once standing I had no idea what else to do and simply stood there facing the wall. But I knew what I had to say. Every closeted gay man, I suspected, knew how to dissemble. Or to lie outright, denying what was essential to himself.

“I can understand how speaking about homosexuality with your daughter might be uncomfortable, Mister….”

“I’m Ed Walker.”

“Mr. Walker, you certainly have the right to—”

“But it’s the school’s fault, see? Oh, forget it. I’m talking to the wrong person. You don’t have any say in this, do you?”

“I do support the production of Rent,” I said carefully. Carefully, but not entirely truthfully. Another half-truth.

“I bet you do. Pastor Hunnicutt said you’ll be having boys kissing boys on stage. That’s disgusting. That’s sick. It’s everything a good Christian should be against.”

I wasn’t going to debate theology with this man. “I really can’t comment on the specific directorial choices that will be made about staging the play, Mr. Walker.”

“Which means you’re going to do it. You’ll be run out of town.”

My heart was thumping, and I hated myself for the fight or flight response this well-meaning bigot was drawing from me. I had to change George’s mind about the onstage kissing. A peck on the cheek would do as well, right? With the opposition to the play rising, surely he would see the reasonableness of it.

“I’ll be putting in a call to the principal about all this,” Walker all but snarled, his earlier politeness having dissolved in his frustration. “Keating doesn’t have to call me back because I’m going straight to the top. Goodbye.”

I slammed the phone down. “Damn it!” Self-righteous, arrogant, narrow-minded, poorly informed—

“Tom?”

“Jesus!” I said as I whirled around, startled out of my wits. A large, looming figure stood not ten feet behind me in the doorway, both arms raised as if ready to strike. For a breathtaking moment I thought I’d have to defend myself, that the strength of my own arms would be put to the test and inevitably be found wanting, that once again I’d find myself down on the ground….

But it was just George, all six foot six inches of him. He’d hooked his fingers onto the edge of the overhead doorjamb and was sort of hovering there, an astonished look on his homely face.

“Sorry,” he said right away, swaying, and then he finally pulled his arms down and stuffed his hands into the pockets of his lumpy brown sports coat. “I didn’t mean to…. I thought you knew I was here all the time.”

“I didn’t,” I snapped, and felt ashamed of myself for it. I heaved in a breath and calmed myself. This was embarrassing.

“Another phone call from a concerned citizen?” George asked. “Threatening to talk to Hiram?”

“You’ve had others? You haven’t told me about that.”

He shrugged. “What would be the use? Only two others, though.”

“George—”

He held up a hand to stop me. “It’s just the way it is. There are people who disagree with what we’re trying to do here.”

“What we’re trying…. George, what are you trying to do? I thought you were putting on a school play. Is there more? Is this some crusade you’re on?”

Before answering me, he moved over to the desk, saying “pardon me” as he passed. He picked up a book and then bent over to stuff it into his briefcase on the floor. I stepped back to where he’d been in the doorway.

“Well?”

He straightened and faced me. “Tom. Come on. I think it’s obvious.”

“No, it’s not, at least not to me.”

“People are just people. Folks are folks. Right?”

What was he talking about? Suddenly I wanted to punch him. “What?”

George spread his hands. “I want our students to understand that. To know that we’re all here together, and we’re not all the same. Not everybody lives in Gunning and thinks like the people here. I’ve gotten really tired of the students who come through here not understanding that there’s a world of options and differences out there.”

“We aren’t here to teach—”

He talked right over me. “And I’m sick to death of directing inoffensive, outdated Rogers and Hammerstein when there are so many other musicals we could be putting on that are challenging and thought-provoking. I’ve been wanting to do something new and innovative for a couple of years now. For myself, for the kids, for the community. For you too, because I wanted to work with you again as assistant director. When I saw that Rent was available in a school version, I figured for sure you’d want to be involved with that, so I jumped at the chance.” He shrugged. “I thought we might as well go for broke. Once the community sees Rent, anything else won’t even make them blink.

“So, that’s what I’m after, a double agenda. Better plays for me to direct and teaching what you of all people should know the truth of, that people are just people.”

I was blinking. And terrified. Was George saying…. What was he implying about me? I had to know what I was dealing with. I could barely get it out, but I asked, “What do you mean, me of all people?”

He looked at me hard, as if parsing exactly what I’d said, and a few endless seconds passed during which I could imagine him saying the worst. He finally answered, slowly, drawing it out. “Well…. I guess I mean how well-read you are. How I’ve sort of figured out you have an open mind. You’ve got to be a liberal. Aren’t you?””

Then he didn’t know… of course he didn’t know I was gay. I’d been careful. I was safe. Wasn’t I?

But he’d somehow guessed my politics, and I didn’t know how that had happened. I’d never discussed what I thought of the political scene with anybody in Gunning. The town was a hotbed of conservatism, both politically and socially. There’d been McCain for President signs everywhere. Keeping my political views to myself—except when I got to talk about them with Kevin—was common sense and part of the role I’d been playing. So how did George know I was one of the few in town who’d quietly celebrated when Obama had been elected the week before?

“Yeah,” I said slowly. “But that doesn’t mean anything one way or the other when we’ve got to deal with the protest against the show. What are we going to do?”

“Keep on keeping on,” George said, reminding me of what Robbie had said. “Unless the school board closes us down, and I don’t think that will happen.”

I wasn’t so sure, and I couldn’t imagine the kids’ reactions if it did. But oh, how it would simplify my life.

George opened up the desk drawer, pulled out the whistle he used to keep rehearsals in order, and draped it around his neck. I turned around and preceded him into the Little Theater, which in a few minutes would fill up with cast and crewmembers. “So you picked a play about AIDS, heroin, and homosexuality just so you could crash through the barrier and put on… what next year?”

“Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street,” he said promptly.

I stopped in my tracks. “You’re kidding. Gunning High School, cannibalism, and slitting throats for fun and jollies? It’ll never happen.”

He clapped his hand on my shoulder, thankfully not too vigorously. “And you never thought the committee would approve Rent. The world is changing, Tom.”

We couldn’t talk anymore because the kids started pouring in, chattering about their day, complaining about homework assignments, dumping their books and backpacks in the corner of the room we’d designated for that. A few of them started drawing on the chalkboard. So long as it wasn’t obscene, I usually let them do that, and right now I wasn’t up to playing disciplinarian. I needed to get my head back together after that phone call, and most especially after the scare that George had given me. I went over to the piano we always had there and sorted through sheets of music, but I barely saw what passed through my hands. Slowly, I calmed down. If I started jumping at every little innocent remark made by a fellow teacher…. I had to get hold of my fears. It was bad enough to have them threaten my time with Kevin. I couldn’t let them expand to fill the school hours too.

After five minutes or so most of the kids were there, so George blew his whistle to get their attention and started reading from the schedule I’d drawn up that morning and e-mailed to him before first class started.

Some of the crew always did the same thing—scenery or props work—and some rotated, especially the core of eight actors playing the Bohemian friends and their one outcast, Benny. George dismissed everybody but those eight and turned to me, saying, “Would you stay here for this? I want to talk to them about Roger.”

There’d been some problem the last few days over a few scenes with Roger and his roommate Mark, or maybe it was Roger and his heroin-addict, HIV-positive girlfriend Mimi, I wasn’t quite sure which. When the room emptied, George looked the remaining kids over—Robbie and Steven, who played the gay couple Angel and Tom Collins, Johnny Robertson and Sam who were Mark and Roger, Channing and the sophomore Marie, who were going to scandalize the audience as Maureen and Joanne with their same-sex affections onstage, Sarah, who knew how to play the sincere but nevertheless sleazy Mimi, and finally Preston, who had the smallest role of the group as Benny.

“We’re just three and a half weeks from opening night,” George began. He was immediately interrupted when Johnny starting groaning, and once one started, the others all had to join in. He let them get it out of their systems and then kept going. “No, no, don’t worry, we’re doing fine. Mr. Smith has a detailed schedule of everything that needs to get done before then, and we’re right on the button.” He turned around to me and lifted an eyebrow. “Right, Mr. Smith?”

I stepped up next to him and nodded. “Better than that. We’re ahead on most things, a little behind on just a few others, but nothing significant. Overall, it’s very good. It’s excellent. You should all be very proud of yourselves for what you’ve accomplished so far.”

The kids took that in with a grain of salt, I could tell. Everybody there knew that they’d be working long, grueling hours to become as perfect as possible before opening night. Steven clapped his hand on his forehead theatrically and falsetto-sang, “Good for us!” sounding like a chipmunk. The others laughed at him except for Channing, who was looking a bit pensive. She barely reacted at all.

“Before we start for today,” George went on, “I wanted to address…. Wait a minute. Let’s sit down and get comfortable.” The kids sat right where they were, on the cleared, carpeted floor. George and I pulled up some orange plastic chairs, the same ones that I’d put out for the parents’ meeting what seemed like an eternity ago. Most of them we kept stacked along the edges of the room, but there were always a few left out.

“Okay, that’s better. I wanted to talk about understanding and believing your parts. I know we’ve concentrated on singing, but don’t forget that you’re acting up on stage too. If you don’t believe in what’s going on, then we can’t expect the audience to. They won’t be moved by this story unless you present it convincingly.

“Now, Sam, I’m going to use you as an example, but all of you should do this and examine your character’s motivations. Really get to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. Sam, in the beginning of the play, why do you think Roger hasn’t left his apartment for six months?”

Sam was a gangly redhead with a voice from the heavenly choir. His rendition of “Your Eyes” at the end of the show, when Roger believes Mimi is dying, would bring down the house. If there was anybody in the house to start with, anyway. He’d been struggling, though, with convincingly portraying Roger outside of the specifically staged songs.

Sam shrugged in the classic seventeen-year-old-boy-almost-a-man fashion. “Uh, because he’s depressed?”

“Yes, that’s right. Depression can paralyze a person, sometimes closing them down so they can’t make decisions. But there’s more. What’s going on in his life?”

“Nothing much. He’s sad ’cause he’s lost his girlfriend.”

“And….”

“Uh, she killed herself because she had AIDS.”

“Right. We don’t know from the script for sure, but it would be interesting to think that he might have actually seen her do this. Or, more likely, maybe found her body.”

“Oh, gross,” Marie said.

“That’s a traumatic, upsetting thing to happen. Unexpected violence leaves its mark on people.”

I could certainly testify to that, though I never, ever wanted to. I resisted the urge to shift in my chair, because no movement could get me away from my memories. Booze didn’t help either, not really, no matter how I’d tried.

“Don’t forget that since the girlfriend had AIDS,” Steven put in, “Roger has it too. She gave it to him. Sam, that’s part of it.”

“And AIDS back then was a death sentence, to a slow and awful death not far in the future,” George said. “That’s something that the four of you who are portraying the HIV-positive characters need to remember. That kind of death is what Roger is inevitably facing. But here’s the thing. Is Rent a real downer of a show? Are these characters moaning about their fate? Are they half-living? Or are they going about really living?”

Sam raised his hand at the same time that I raised my head and gave George a hard look. He’d always given good pep talks, and I thought he was a good director, but all of a sudden I was seeing more of the man and the way he looked at life. He knew I was liberal? He wanted to direct Sweeney Todd? What else was in this genial hulk of a man?

“Well,” Sam said, “until he goes outside, Roger’s sort of moaning. You can’t really live stuck in an apartment.”

“And now we get to the heart of the matter. Roger is frightened, isn’t he? Can you imagine being that scared and that sad that you pull in and don’t even go anywhere?”

“It’s like being closeted,” Channing said, finally looking more like herself and speaking up.

“What?” asked Preston, who was a little clueless. “Closeted?”

“You know,” Channing said, tossing a lock of her dark hair behind her shoulder, hair the same color as her father’s. “Like the gays. Hiding. Cutting yourself off from society.”

“Pretending you’re somebody you’re not,” Johnny added.

“Oh, that,” Preston said. “Because they’re scared of the gay-bashing, sure. But wait a minute, Roger’s not gay. He’s got HIV from, you know, regular, uh, regular fooling around. Not from being with a guy.”

Steven hunched forward and planted his palms flat on the carpet. “But it’s the same thing,” he said intensely. “It doesn’t matter if you’re gay or straight, it still doesn’t make any sense to shut yourself off like that.”

He looked directly across the group to where Robbie was sitting to one side, and all the other kids did too.

“Hiding in the closet is for cowards,” Steven said. “The brave people step out, or never go inside to begin with. I think it’s really cool when somebody’s brave like that.”

Robbie flushed scarlet and turned his head, but there was a smile on his face.

“But Roger does go out after a while,” Sam pointed out. “He doesn’t stay shut in the closet.”

“Yeah, good for him,” Channing said.

“It’s the only way to do it,” Johnny said. “Just get out there and deal with it, whatever it is.”

Marie chimed in. “Yeah, whether it’s being gay or having some bad disease or, or, or….”

“Or freaking out ’cause his girlfriend killed herself and he saw all the blood,” Preston said with a certain relish.

“Right,” Marie said. “All of that. You can’t let any of that stuff get you down, can you?”

“My dad says Rent’s a good play,” Channing put in, “because the characters don’t run scared from what they are and the things they believe in. Though it’s true Roger plays the wimp in the beginning.”

“I’d have a hard time playing a character who was that scared,” Steven said. “That’s one of the reasons I like Tom Collins. He’s gay, and he’s cool with it.”

“I’m glad you like Collins,” George said, “but right now let’s finish up with Roger, who’s a really interesting character because he does indeed change. Sam, you’re right, Roger does overcome his fear and his depression. That’s courageous, just like Steven says, because whether a person is gay like Angel and Collins or straight like Roger, change is a hard thing to accomplish.”

Sam stuck out his tongue in Steven’s direction. “Roger’s cool too,” he said.

“I think they are all fascinating characters,” George said firmly. “It takes Roger a while, but eventually he, uh, shows his coolness. I want you to really understand that so you can portray his courage in leaving the apartment and finding Mimi. Despite the inevitability of his death, Roger decides to embrace life, doesn’t he? He’s brave, and there’s joy in him, in all of them, when they break into the song ‘La Vie Boheme’. Part of that joy is Roger’s victory. Get it?”

Sam nodded vigorously. “Sure.”

“Good,” George said, and he stood up. “Let’s head for the big stage now.

I let them all leave without me; I felt as if I didn’t have the strength to get up from my chair. They didn’t have a clue what they’d done, none of them did, but they’d cut me open, dissected me, judged me, and thrown me out with the trash.

Is that what they thought about life in the closet? These teenagers who hadn’t lived much sure thought it was despicable, my life. It wasn’t so easy to leave where it was safe, damnit! They didn’t know about Mr. Ed Walker and men like him, and how much my life would change if people like him knew.

George stuck his head back into the classroom, holding on to the doorjamb. “Are you coming, Tom? I could use your help.”

Sure, I would help out. I stood up and took that one step forward that I needed to take. I’d call Kevin this evening, and let him know that, yeah, I’d be at his house this Saturday after all.