December 25, 2009
I guess I don’t know where to find him. It’s that seven-foot-tall rasta dude from Scotland—or whatever his deal is. He wears a kilt, anyway, and his dreads are like four feet long. A bunch of them are purple this year, that’s new. Nice enough guy, kinda sexy in that here’s-a-razor-and-a-bar-of-soap-I’ll-be-back-in-an-hour way, but he’s no Ben.
“Naw, Benny bailed,” he tells me. “Three or four months ago. Benny was my boy, too. I kinda miss the little squirt.” I make to pay for my coffee, but he waves my money away. “It’s on the house, Freckles.” He raises a mug, touches it to my cardboard to-go cup, says, “To Benny!”
“To Benny,” I say. I take a sip of my coffee. I can’t help it now, the way he’s getting all sentimental, gazing off at nothing in the middle distance—I have to ask: “But he didn’t die, right?”
“Naw, he’s cool. He like finished school. Or started school. Wants to build a school? I don’t know, something. Kids today,” he says with an indulgent chuckle. Kids today. He’s like twenty-three.
I slouch away to a table in the corner to watch it snow. It’s Christmas Day, my most dreaded of all days, and I’m mostly hoping that if I drink enough caffeine it’ll whiz by in a jittery blur. At least this year I was smart about it: no boyfriend for me. You gotta date me to dump me, so I quit going out when September rolled around and the dude who begged to fuck me at the sauna still hadn’t called. I haven’t even made eye contact at the grocery store in months. Of course the one time my sex life goes according to plan, it’s when the “plan” is No Man.
I know I sound like a Scrooge; I’m not. I want to like Christmas. I used to love Christmas. When I was a kid I could barely handle Christmas: three weeks of fudge, two weeks off from school, and a house full of presents that were mine, all mine? Okay, and a bunch of pink shit for my sister, but I got to play with all that, too, when my dad wasn’t around—it was a downright bonanza. Happy Birthday, Jesus!
When I was seventeen, I was fooling around with Byron Juarez after school on a pretty regular basis. We understood, Byron and I, that Romeo and Juliet were a couple of chumps who wouldn’t have known real love had it joined them that night on the balcony and, say, yanked off its sweaty T-shirt after baseball practice and let them lick its pits and chew on its tiny brown nipples, the way Byron invited me to do in the back of his Jeep with some frequency. It, therefore, also went without saying that Christmas of 1990 would be the most romantic Christmas, if not ever, then certainly since the one where Mary and Joseph fell in love all over again gazing into each other’s eyes across the manger. I say it “went without saying”—we said it a hundred times a day, and started giving each other trinkety little presents the day after Thanksgiving. We were like living advent calendars, counting down the days with keychains and flavored condoms and Seven Layer Burritos until at last it was Christmas Eve. He had a thing to go to at his grandma’s, but we met up first at a park out south by his house, famous for the dinosaur on its playground underneath which we first got acquainted. We fogged up his Jeep for about an hour, then giddily exchanged the matching gold bracelets we’d bought together the week before and pronounced ourselves Officially Boyfriends.
This caused something of a stir at my family’s Christmas. Nobody cared that I was gay, you understand; we’d crossed that bridge pretty much for once and for all when I was thirteen and insisted on dressing up as Miss Universe for Halloween—for the fourth year in a row. But I kept scrunching up the right sleeve on my sweater to watch my most prized possession glitter and glow in the lamplight, and I gushed on and on about Byron this and Boyfriends that until my dad paid me fifty bucks to stop.
It caused something of a stir at Byron’s family’s Christmas, too, as he explained to me on December 27th when he gave me the bracelet back, its clasp broken. On a topic completely unrelated to the spongy purple shiner behind his sunglasses, he took pains to assure me, his dad had decided Byron would get a better education at the same Catholic boarding school he’d gone to in Managua. He left for Nicaragua, which his parents came from but he’d never even visited, in January, and the Magic of Christmas went with him. Apparently, because I haven’t caught a glimpse of it since.
My freshman year in college, the bus I was riding home broke down, and I spent Christmas at a gas station in Nebraska fighting with a three-hundred-pound twelve-year-old over the last salted nut bar in the vending machine. My junior year in college, I lost control of my car on an ice patch two blocks from my parents’ house and spent Christmas Eve in the Emergency Room trying to push my wayward ulna back inside my arm. When I was twenty-two, the only present my boyfriend gave me was gonorrhea, and I cried every time I had to pee. When I was twenty-seven, I was mugged by a guy in a Santa suit with a baseball bat painted like a candy cane, and the next year my cousin showed up at my grandma’s house for Christmas holding hands with the exact same dude, who followed me into the bathroom and begged me to let him blow me. Year after that I was like, Forget this, and I went to Dubai, where I figured they wouldn’t even celebrate Christmas. My hotel boasted “The Largest Christmas Tree in the World.” Twelve stories tall and draped in “over a million lights!” And on the night of the twenty-third it caught fire and burned the place down.
I know, I know: the Drama! I’m not trying to act like I have nothing to live for, or like that Elvis song Blue Christmas ruined my life. My life is fine. I don’t have cancer, I don’t get migraines; at thirty-six I still have my hair, hardly any of it’s gray, and I weigh what I weighed when I was playing soccer in college. I like my job okay, I travel for fun, I love my dog. I have a cute house in a cute neighborhood close enough to walk to this joint for coffee. My life’s great. Christmas just hates me.
I thought I had outsmarted it this year, though. No boyfriend means no boyfriend drama means I’m free and clear when I waltz into Bean City and the cute little mop-top asks me how I’m doing. “Fine, thank you, and you?” No whining, no crying, no inappropriate nose-blowing. He asks me out for a drink, I don’t need to invent excuses not to go. It’s like noon. God, what a prude I must have sounded like. Like I’ve never put Kahlua in my morning coffee? No wonder he was like, You know where to find me, instead of giving me his number. He probably knew he was leaving. I guess it doesn’t do me any good to live close enough to walk here if I’m never gonna do it. Three or four months he’s been gone? I’m going home.
I’m not crying—Jesus, not again. I’m just a little…emotional, I tell myself. And it’s my own dang fault. It’s not like we had plans to meet here. It’s not like he’s stood me up. It feels like he’s stood me up, but that’s just because I’ve been obsessing over this morning since like September. Daydreaming about his bouncy hair, his bouncy little butt in those tan jeans, instead of walking up here—it’s eight blocks!—and doing something about it, and now he’s off building a school, according to some stoner in a skirt, and the only thing more improbable than that is a thirty-six-year-old quote-unquote adult man pinning all of his hopes for the first un-shitty Christmas in twenty years on the total stranger he once blew his nose all over.
I’m not crying. It’s possible, though, that I may be expressing some frustration via my eyes when I jerk open the door and plow into the person coming through it. I mumble “Sorry” or something like it—probably—and hunker into pouting position—hands jammed in my jacket pockets, chin tucked towards my belly button—for the slow, self-pitying walk home.
“Oh no, not again,” he says. Before I turn around, when all I see is his hand on my elbow, I know it’s him. Frenchy Le-Cute-Butt. Ben.
Sure enough. His hair is shorter, still good and wavy on top, and he’s wearing heavy-framed glasses, but it’s him all right. The specs throw me for a second, but the big optimist’s grin twitching beneath the cracks in the slapdash veneer of concern is a dead giveaway.
“Shannon, right?” he says. “The Curse of the Christmas Boyfriend?”
“As the Scooby-Doo episode about my life is called.” I smile, madly wiping at my cheeks. God he must think I’m a mess.
“You okay? Don’t tell me it happened again? Let me guess: he turned out to be two elves, one on top of the other in an overcoat, and they left you because they had to get back to Santa’s workshop?”
“You saw the thing they did about it on the news?”
“Dude, you had to suspect…”
“They were very convincing.”
“You poor bastard. Buy you a cup of coffee?”
Ben’s Bean City homecoming is a boisterous and exultant one, with high-fives, butt-slaps, and headlocks all around. “C’mon, Freckles, bring it in…” The barista, whose name turns out to be Seth, commands me to join in, which nets me a noogie, a kiss on the nose, and another free cup of coffee.
“He’s happy to see you,” I pointlessly observe. “How long have you been gone?”
Ben laughs. “I left in August. But I was here the other day. I see Seth like twice a week.”
“He’s a big fan.”
Ben shrugs. Yeah, well…
“So’d you have a good Christmas?” I venture. “Have you been up all night?”
“Kinda. I conked for a little bit after dinner. You know, since I didn’t have to be here. But then I got up and realized I did have to be here, so…here I am.”
“How come?”
He lifts his cup of coffee in answer.
“Right,” I say, tapping the rim of my own. Coffee. That’s the whole reason I’m here, too.
“But I’m glad I didn’t miss this year’s episode,” he teases me. “Seriously, dude, you okay?”
I nod. “I’m fine.”
“You wanna talk about it?”
“Actually, there’s no drama this year. Believe that or not.”
He lifts a skeptical eyebrow, but appears to decide not to say, But I saw you crying…And what am I gonna say, I was crying because you weren’t here?
Moving right along…“So, what are you doing now? Seth said something about school?”
“Third grade,” he says, beaming.
“They’re making you repeat the third grade?”
“That’s exactly what happened. And I couldn’t handle the phonics workload and a job, so I had to quit here. I’m tellin’ you what, though, dude—those desks are small. I barely fit in mine, and I’m a little guy. So most days I sit at the teacher’s desk and boss the other kids around.”
“So you’re a teacher?”
“For all those kids know. I’m getting away with it, too, so far, although I think Austin C. might suspect something’s up…”
“He probably thinks you’re two elves in an overcoat.”
“It’s more common than you think. Well, look who I’m telling.”
He’s got a cute little butt, he makes me laugh, and now there are these sexy glasses involved…I’m feeling slightly less ridiculous about the histrionic weeping from earlier. Not seeing this guy this morning would have ranked as a Christmas disaster for the books.
A spur-of-the-moment lunch date on Christmas Day with the guy who once made you coffee and thinks you’re kind of an emotional wreck still feels kind of absurd to me, but I don’t have to be at my Aunt Sheila’s house until dinnertime, and he insists some place is going to be open.
“This is a place, isn’t it?” He looks around the otherwise deserted coffee house.
“Well, yeah. But there’s nobody here.”
“So? We’ll be wherever we go. What are you, trying to keep your options open? You wanna go someplace crowded in case there’s some dude there who can still dump you before Christmas is over?”
“Some habits are hard to break.”
“Yeah, and ‘eating lunch’ is one of them. Come on.”
We have to search high and low. For about two seconds. After a doleful and dramatic goodbye from Seth, who Ben assures me he’ll see again before the week is out, we’ve walked fifty feet and are still talking logistics—do we walk? Do we drive? One car or two? Where are we going, anyway?—when loops of LED lights begin to dance around the word “Open” in the window of the tiny Thai place on the alley.
“It’s a sign,” I say.
“Santa wants us to have Thai food.”
“We better do what he says.”
There’s a great clatter of bells when he pulls open the door. He stands aside to let me enter, then follows me into what appears to be someone’s walk-in closet furnished with four two-tops, a cash register, and a photo of the king and queen of Thailand, probably from the sixties, slipping out of its gold frame. A stooped, elderly man in a purple Nehru-style jacket and matching trousers appears from behind a curtain holding two menus and tells us, “Sit by the window,” so we do.
“You’ve never been here before,” he announces, setting the menus between us on the table.
“First time,” Ben confirms.
“The Panang curry is very good today. Also you want the shrimp. Two Singha beers to start.” None of these are suggestions or questions, but delivered more as The Plan, so we shrug.
“Sounds good.”
The man picks the menus up un-glanced-at and shuffles off behind the curtain whence he came.
“I never even knew this place was here,” Ben says. “I worked two doors down for like six years.”
“I grew up in this neighborhood, like five blocks from here. It’s been here as long as I can remember. I just never knew anybody came in here.” But it’s bright and it’s clean and really all I wanted was a chance to not have to say goodbye to Ben, so I’m happy as a clam.
After a considerable spell, the man in the purple getup emerges from behind the curtain carrying a large wooden tray, which he sets on the table behind Ben’s chair. From it he plucks a small ceramic bud vase, which he plunks on the table betwixt us, leaving the pink plastic orchid to provide its own fanfare. He sets a beer before me, a beer before Ben, and a plate of crispy-fried dough balls between us. “Christmas wontons,” he says, setting two small dishes of dipping sauce—one red, one green—at Ben’s elbow with the barest flash of a wry grin before toddling back off to his curtain.
If there is anybody else in the restaurant, no indication is given. By the time the clattering of pans and the sizzle of things being tossed around on hot metal begin to waft from behind the curtain, we haven’t seen the man in half an hour, and ours are the only two voices, which makes me want to whisper.
“Is he back there by himself?” I ask Ben.
He shrugs. “It kind of seems like it.”
“I guess that’s one way to keep your overhead down.”
But once we’ve been served the curry and a crackling-hot plate of garlic-drenched shrimp, Ben gushes, eyes wide with the delight of discovery. “But I mean, if this is how you cook, why would you bother hiring someone else?”
“No kidding,” I say, plopping another pile of rice onto my plate to soak up more of the spicy curry. Between heaping, hot bites we grin at each other, and when we’re finished eating, nothing more than a wayward cilantro leaf remains. “He could put your plate back on the shelf,” I tease Ben.
He nods. “Right? He probably does that on purpose. Every plate somebody licks clean is one less dish to wash.”
“You wanna lick mine?”
“What, that one drop of sauce? You did all right yourself.”
It’s true. I giggle. He smiles. The check arrives, and Ben reaches for it, but I beat him to it.
“I got it.”
“But it was my idea,” he says.
“Your idea? What, you invented lunch?”
“This lunch was my idea.”
“And it was a good one. So thanks.”
“Fine,” he says. “But I got the next one.”
Our eyes meet and I smile. “Did you just ask me for a second date?”
He shrugs. “It’s a little early yet to ask for the third.”
I laugh.
He asks me for my phone number, then dials it so I’ll have his. When we’re out on the sidewalk, he says he’ll call me in a couple days. “I hope you have a good rest of your Christmas,” he says.
“So far it’s pretty much the best Christmas ever,” I say.
He smiles. I’ve already turned to go when he says, “You know I have a coffee maker, right?”
I stop and turn back to him. “What?”
“At home?” he says. “I have a few, actually. A French press, one of those good stovetop espresso makers. A grind-and-brew, has a little timer on it.”
“Okay.”
“I’m saying, I didn’t come to Bean City this morning ‘cause I needed coffee.”
I grin. I think I blush. I look at my feet, then at him. “Hey, I’m just glad you came.”
“Good.” He kisses me. Nothing big, nothing cinematic. He just leans in, kisses me on the mouth, says “Merry Christmas, Shannon,” and walks away. I walk away too, of course. As soon as I float back down to Earth, which takes a second.
* * * *
The doorbell’s ringing. My phone’s ringing. It’s not quite seven in the morning, so I answer the phone first because I don’t have to get out of bed to do it.
It’s Ben. “Is your doorbell broken?” he wants to know.
“Doesn’t seem to be,” I say. “‘Cause somebody’s out there ringin’ it to beat the band and it’s still the middle of the night.”
“You need to get that birthday butt out of bed and let that poor bastard into your house. He’s freezing and he wants pancakes.”
I laugh. “Then he’s ringing the wrong doorbell. There’s no pancakes here that I know about.”
“Come on, let me in.”
“I’m pretty sure my birthday doesn’t start until like ten.”
“There’s not gonna be a birthday if we don’t get a move on.”
“Why, what are we doing?”
“It’s a surprise.” He starts up on the doorbell again. “Let. Me. In!”
“But I’m still in my birthday suit.”
“Why do you think I want in so bad? Once you put pants on, I’m over it.”
I laugh. We’ve been together for almost four months—ever since Christmas basically—and any comment from him with even the mildest sexual connotation lights that little fire down deep in my belly; I’m half hard when I get up to go open the door. I stay behind it as I pull it open—my neighbors don’t need to know all that—and he rides a current of cold air into my living room. That’s April in Colorado for you: everybody’s tulips came up last week, you can still see them here and there, poking through the six inches of snow.
“Happy Birthday!” he cries. He pulls me into a bear hug, and I wriggle and squirm to get out of it—he wasn’t kidding, he’s freezing. Encircling me at the elbows with sleeves like Popsicles, he pulls me against the icy nylon of his jacket, shaking snow out of his hair onto my bare shoulders and into my face. He grabs my butt cheeks with frigid wet hands and I squeal.
“Quit it!”
“I won’t. You left me standing out there like a penguin, and I want revenge.” The ice-cold finger he tickles my hole with actually feels kinda nice, and my dick bounces its approval. He laughs. “See, you love it.”
“I’ll tell you what I don’t love…”
“Oh boo hoo, it’s seven o’clock. What, are you gonna get too much birthday?” He turns me towards the bedroom and smacks my ass one more time. “Now go throw some shit in a suitcase, son, we got plans.”
“Suitcase plans?”
“Calm yourself, it’s not Paris. But you need a swimsuit and tomorrow’s undies. Train’s at eight-thirty, and, as I may have mentioned, I want pancakes.”
I’ve lived in Denver all my life. Naturally I knew we had a train station—its freshened façade is the city’s official mascot for urban renewal. I just didn’t know trains still went to it. And yet at five after nine, as we’re sipping birthday mimosas at one of Union Station’s trendy new bars, here comes Amtrak’s California Zephyr chugging down the track.
“California?” I remark. “Should I have watered my plants?”
“We’re not going quite that far,” Ben assures me. “But on the way to California, this train goes through the mountains, wherein your surprise awaits.”
And yet the woman who takes our tickets directs us to a sleeping car, whose conductor escorts us down a tiny hallway to what appears to be our own private phone booth. The door slides open to reveal two chairs facing each other across a fold-out table up against a window the size of a movie screen.
“And how does the bed fold out?” Ben asks.
“Aren’t you only going to Glenwood Springs?” the conductor says, letting the cat, if not the answer to Ben’s question, out of the bag.
“We’ll figure it out,” Ben says. The conductor trundles away.
“Glenwood?” I clap my hands together with glee.
“Surprise.”
“Oh, but that is a surprise! I love Glenwood.” A mountain town tucked into the Western Slope once frequented by Teddy Roosevelt and his crowd, Glenwood Springs has been famous for a hundred and thirty years for its gigantic mineral pool and surrounding hot springs. A ritzy celebrity spa in the 1890s, now it’s more of an RVer’s roadside attraction, but it has a water slide and a hot tub the size of a basketball court, so while it’s unlikely to pop up on TMZ, it’s as popular with “just folks,” as my dad calls us, as it ever was with the rich and famous. “Oh, baby, thank you!” I give him a hug and big kiss, then slide him a sideways look. “But how long could that possibly take? What do we need a bed for?”
He doesn’t say “duh,” but in the raised eyebrow, it’s implied.
Now, I’m as happy to bottom as the next guy, and, as I discovered on New Year’s Eve, Ben is easy to take and very easy to enjoy. He fucks me frequently, and I’m a fan. But it is my birthday, so I get to pick, and once we figure out how to get the chairs folded and tucked right, I ride his two little grapefruits into the mountains next to that picture window like I’m starring in a silent film about the Pony Express. The second time I come in him I’m so excited about it I fall off and land on the floor with a thud.
“They got a lot of nerve calling that there a ‘bed,’” I say, laughing.
“Technically, I think they call it a ‘berth.’”
“Technically, I’m pretty sure it’s called an ‘ironing board.’”
Eventually we find our way back to the two-chairs-and-a-table arrangement, although we’re just as happy snuggled up in the one chair. Glenwood isn’t but a three-hour drive from Denver, but the train takes more like eight to snake through the mountains, and we spend them pressed together, making very occasional chit-chat, but for the most part content to sip on the champagne he thought to bring and watch the trees scuttle past the window.
Naturally there’s a limit to how long we can sit flesh against flesh in a rhythmically rocking lounge chair and discuss current events. I’m astride his dick, working on bouncing him to climax, when the train slows into the station. “Glenwood Springs!” the conductor hollers, rapping on the cabin door.
“Don’t come in!” I cry. Much louder than would ordinarily be necessary, but Ben comes just then with a laughing bark I hope to mask.
“Don’t you worry,” the conductor calls back. “Just don’t miss your stop.”
We scramble into our clothes and shoulder our bags. We hurry down the hall and jump to the platform, flushed and laughing, just as the train is starting to pull away.
It turns out Glenwood is the perfect getaway by train. The station is an easy walk to the little Main Street, which is right across the highway from the pool and the historic stone pile of the Hotel Colorado, to which Ben suggests we head.
“Fancy,” I say.
“Hey, we’ve only been going out a few months. I’m still trying to impress you. Next year you’ll be lucky to get a card.”
We start across the bridge over the highway. It’s pushing six o’clock, and it has started to snow. Heated by the springs, the pool sends up a seductive curtain of steam; if the overpass was closer to the water, I’m pretty sure I’d strip and swan dive from here.
The hotel is very stately, if not especially updated. Its high ceilings and gilded mirrors and ornate sweeping stairway are all very Olden Days. The room is darn near spartan, but it has a bed in it sure enough, and I can’t imagine what else we might require. Out the window, we can see the pool. It’s practically deserted on account of the snow, but if you can brave the trip from the locker room to the pool—or more importantly, the wet dash back—the hot springs are welcoming even on the chilliest night, and we hurry to shove our trunks and a couple towels together into his backpack.
Snow is falling thick and fast, but it’s not a January blizzard. The big flakes stick to the trees and the grass, but the streets and sidewalks have already been warmed by two weeks of spring and the snow melts on contact. It sits in Ben’s curls while we’re walking, but when we get inside to buy our tickets, those flakes evaporate, too.
In the locker room, we strip. We shove all our cold damp clothes into one locker, wriggle into our suits, then hang the towels together in another locker closer to the pool. The huge hot pool is closest to the locker rooms, and on a night like this is definitely the main attraction. I can’t see the surface of the water for the steam as we scamper gingerly across the wet deck, but its warmth shoots through me at the first dip of the first toe.
The water’s quite hot, actually; prickly against my cold skin until I’m in it up to my neck, at which point the world’s cares rise off me and into the evening. I’m floating on my back when Ben materializes from behind a wall of steam; he holds out his arms and I drift into them, let him rock me and carry me, as close to weightless as I’ll ever get, to and fro around the pool. He tows me over to a corner, near where the water bubbles in at its hottest from the spring, and we snuggle up like every other couple in the pool. If anybody cares that we’re a couple of dudes, they keep it to themselves, and before long we’re as kissy as the rest of them. The moon creeps over the mountains, shiny and three-quarters full, and as the breeze shifts the columns of steam, stars dance in and out of view—first one, then three, then dozens, then a whole sky-ful the likes of which we rarely see in the electrified twenty-four/seven city.
I float into his lap and put my arms around his neck. He wore his glasses into the pool and they’re all fogged up; I slide them onto his head the way my mom always did with her sunglasses. It takes his eyes a second to focus, then he smiles into mine and says, “Hi.”
“Hi,” I say. “Thank you for a wonderful birthday. This was a good present.”
“You’re welcome.”
Today I am thirty-seven years old. I’ve never said this to a guy before, but I realize it’s true, so I say it to Ben. “I love you.”
His voice catches. Mister Always Got A Comeback can’t squeeze it around the lump in his throat, bless him, until his third try. “I love you, too.”
“I think that’s about the sweetest thing I ever saw.” Somebody’s grandma is trudging through the chest-deep water towards the stairs in her flowered bathing cap and she chimes in. “I lost my son in 1991,” she says to whoever cares to listen. “Bein’ fruity was killin’ boys in them days.”
We look at each other, Ben and I. Do we say something? What do we do?
Grandma coaches us. “Well go on,” she says to me. “Look at him. That boy needs kissin’.”
Ben laughs, then nods gravely at me, so I kiss him.
“That’s more like it,” she mutters as she hoists herself from the pool. She needn’t have worried—hell, we’re probably still going at it when she gets home.
We don’t have the Sleeper Car on the train the next day, just two seats in the upstairs. Which is funny, because what with one thing and another we’ve been up most the night, and we sleep the whole way home. We agree, though, that what we got up to on it on the way up was a much better use of that little bed.
* * * *
We have big plans for Pride. We’re going to get up on Sunday morning, watch the parade with a gang of his friends, go to the festival, and see who comes out to be seen. Some one-hit wonder diva from the disco era is on the main stage at three, the beer bust starts at four, and there’s an angels-and-demons-themed boy-lesque show downtown at nine promising the hottest strippers this side of Hell’s eternal fire. I bought a cute little striped T-shirt that fits me like a glove; I got a pedicure the better to highlight my new flip flops; I even found a magic pair of shorts at an outlet mall that makes it look like I might have an ass. Oh, we’re doing this.
Thing is, we hit Saturday night like a ton of bricks. A low-key barbecue in his friends’ backyard starts to get kind of rowdy around the time the gin-and-tonic Jell-o shots make their third pass around the patio. Music gets louder, laughter gets louder, his friend Antony brays the retellings of his hilarious capers even louder, so the next time the shots wobble by, someone turns the music up. A neighbor who we’re sure has come across the alley to complain instead invites all comers to the dance party in his basement. He’s been running around with a DJ, Ben’s friends tell us, so we roll across the yard en masse. Carrying trays of food and bottles of booze, we squeeze down the stairs into a concrete disco dungeon. The air thrums with the bass, people are sweating and stripping and humping and bumping, and by the time Antony has four mostly-naked dudes carry him over and tells me I have to do a shot out of his ass, it seems like a perfectly sensible idea, and I lick whiskey out of his crack until the upended bottle runs dry.
Or so says Ben in the morning. For me the night starts to get a little fuzzy right around the Boney M Soul Train Line, and my memories of anything past the mashup of every Cher song ever are what you might call indistinct. Antony certainly struck me as the type who would consent to being carried around and licked by a bunch of people, and I never say no to a nice butt. Decorum dictates that I call Ben a liar to his laughing face, but it was that kind of night.
“What time is it?” I mumble. My eyes aren’t so into the whole “open” thing just yet.
“It’s early.”
“How early?”
“It’s go-back-to-sleep early.”
“Where are we?”
“We’re at your house. You don’t remember driving home?”
My eyes are open now. In fact I’m a little surprised they don’t pop out and roll across the floor. I gasp so hard I choke on it.
Ben pats my back, laughing. “Sorry, baby. You okay? You didn’t drive home, we took a cab. We took a cab there, too, remember?”
I admit that I do not remember that, and this leads to the revelation about the butt shots. “Drive?” he says, chuckling. “It was all I could do to get you out of the cab. I’m just glad we didn’t have to sleep in his backseat.”
“I don’t feel all that hungover,” I marvel.
“That’s ‘cause you’re still drunk. Now go back to sleep.”
“But the parade…”
He laughs again. “We’ll see about the parade.”
“But we want to go to the parade.”
“Do we want to get out of bed?”
I growl and burrow into the sheets.
“Right. So we’ll see about the parade.”
By the time getting up out of the bed is anything other than a hilarious pipe dream, the parade has long since marched by, but we rally the wherewithal to leave the house. My cute shirt looks cute, and my cute shorts looks cute; my pedicure is a little the worse for wear after dancing the night away barefoot in some dude’s unfinished basement, and I look like maybe I took a wet sack of sand to the face—repeatedly—but it’s nothing a pair of sunglasses can’t fix. Or, you know, conceal. There’s still the festival, after all, even if the thought of the beer bust afterward makes me throw up in my mouth a little every time Ben mentions it, which I finally have to ask him to stop doing.
We drive toward downtown, but park blocks and blocks from Civic Center, before looking for parking becomes a dizzying exercise in futility. As we straggle by a café, I see three things on the patio that I realize I’ll never be able to live without, namely a bloody Mary, a pile of pancakes with a fried egg on top of them, and an empty table for two in a shady corner. By the time Ben turns around to look for me, I’m waving to him from my seat.
“So you’re saying you want breakfast?” He’s laughing as the hostess guides him out onto the patio.
“Yes, please.”
“I s’pose I could do a bloody Mary,” he says.
“Yes, please.”
I’m in no position to booze the day away, but a spicy bloody Mary that’s about half hot sauce hits the spot, and after that the coffee’s all-you-can-drink. I order up my pancakes, my fried egg, and a big plate of bacon. Ben gets biscuits and gravy. I drag my bacon through his gravy, he drenches a biscuit in syrup, and when the server clears our plates we order a basket of pizza fries and settle in to soak up Proud Denver. Our shady set-up on this patio I don’t remember ever even noticing before is far superior to the usual Pride Fest promenade. And if we missed the floats and convertibles full of waving politicians, the parade of Pride-goers streaming along this stretch of Thirteenth Avenue, in their rainbow tutus and cowboy boots and faux-fur Daisy Dukes, does not disappoint. We eat, and we laugh, and after a spell we eat again. Ben has a second bloody Mary, but I’m just as happy to drink my weight in water in the hopes that one day I might be able to open my eyes all the way again.
We head back to my house pretty early. We bail on the beer bust and forget about boy-lesque, but when it comes time to celebrate our favorite part of being gay, this Pride’s a barn-burner.
When his birthday rolls around in September, we’re not officially living together or anything. But one of our favorite things is to wake up next to each other, so most nights it’s real hard to think of reasons why he should go home to a twin bed in his mom’s basement. On the morning of the tenth I awake from a suddenly very vivid sex dream to a guilty-eyed Ben with a mouthful of my dick. “It’s my birthday,” he reminds me. “You said I could eat whatever I want. I want to eat this.”
I shift onto my back and grab a fistful of his hair, shifting my weight from one side to the other until we’re rocking to the same rhythm. “Well then, happy birthday,” I say, and I fuck his face until he’s drunk his fill.
I’m nobody’s dietician, and I’m not a cop: Ben can eat whatever he wants any old day. Certainly when it’s my cock, it’s not my job to try and stop him. What I told him was for his birthday I’d make him whatever he wanted me to make him, anything in the whole wide world as long as I could get a hold of the ingredients and didn’t have to dig a hole in the backyard to cook it in. “If you want kalua pig that bad, it’s easier just to go to Hawaii,” I told him.
“Ooh, that’s what I want. I want Hawaii.”
We’ve been home from Maui for three days, and today we’re both back to work, but a promise is a promise. I was kind of afraid I’d have to learn how to braise an entire rabbit, or coax a soufflé to poofy perfection, or whatever it is French moms get up to in the kitchen, but on the flight home he begged me, like a little kid, to make my Sriracha crockpot meatloaf, which is a piece of cake.
After he’s enjoyed a second helping of birthday breakfast, I climb out of the bed and into a pair of pajama pants. I pad out to the kitchen, then right back with two cups of coffee. “Get up,” I tell him with a kiss. “I’ll get this dinner together while you’re in the shower.”
“But I want you in the shower with me.”
“But I want to make this meatloaf first, then I can just shower and go.”
“Some birthday.” He pouts into his coffee.
I laugh. “You begged for this meatloaf,” I remind him. “Now it’s ruining your birthday?”
“But I want to suds you,” he says. “Come on.” He tugs at the waistband of the cotton pants. “It can count as my present.”
“Hawaii counts as your present.”
“And didn’t we shower together there?” He wobbles his eyebrows.
Indeed we showered together in Maui, for about an hour and a quarter. My prostate reverberated from showering together in Maui for like two days, the memory of which gets it humming again. I rip my pants in my hurry to hop into the bathroom.
“I like Birthday Ben,” I eventually gasp from where I am sprawled in the bathtub under an icy shower I’m too delirious to know how to turn off. He’s upside down and underneath me, and we both pant and gasp for anything that might even hint at a return to equilibrium. He’s the first to rally, and he turns off the shower as he slithers out of the tub. I lay and watch him towel off: his hair, his string-bean torso, his perfectly bite-sized balls. The corners of his eyes gather like the daintiest feet of the tiniest crow when he squints ever so slightly to examine himself in the mirror. He works a palmful of product into his hair; from the tub I can’t see the gray that’s just starting to crest the waves, and without his glasses on probably neither can he. He slaps a coat of deodorant under each arm, frowns gently, and gives the little smile of tummy-pooch that’s just starting to gather under his belly button a pinch. Then he turns sideways and smiles at his ass, then at me.
I smile, too. “I sure am glad you were born,” I say.
In response he backs up two steps and squats down til his swollen booty is right in my face. I kiss one cheek, then the other, then I smack them both until he stands up straight. “Help me up,” I command, and he does.
I’m still deep in my own mirror process—is my tummy starting to pooch? I mean, sure, it’s cute on Ben…I grope for something to pinch—when he breezes into the bathroom to kiss me goodbye.
“I’ll see you at Good For What Ales You?” he reminds me. The beauty of the crockpot: we can meet his friends for all the beer we want and still come home to the dinner of his dreams. Oh shit—speaking of which…
“Wait, you’re leaving?”
“Leaving? Miriam had to cover my homeroom, it’s eight-thirty.”
“Ack.”
“So I’ll see you later?”
“Yeah, you will. I might already be drunk by the time you get there, though, if I get fired.”
“‘K, well, at least get us a good table if that happens,” he says. Thirty seconds later, I hear the front door creak open, then click shut.
I mean, I work in admissions, not the E.R., but still—with dinner yet to make, a nine A.M. showtime looks unlikely. I wriggle into the closest pair of khakis, which I think are Ben’s, but an extra inch of ankle isn’t the scandal it used to be, so I don’t bother to wriggle out of them. I toss on the first shirt I come across with a collar on it, then slide into the kitchen in my stocking feet and get to gettin’ on this meatloaf. Chopping an onion at eight-thirty in the morning…Will cologne make me smell better or worse after this? I take a rolling pin to a sleeve of crackers to make my breadcrumbs, add another splash of Sriracha to the meat after pretty much every step, hack up a potato. I get the crockpot up onto the counter, plug it in, plop the lopsided loaf into it, put the lid on, and run for the door. It’s not until I reach for my car keys that I even remember to wash my hands. It’s five ‘til, it takes me ten minutes to get to work, fifteen in ridiculous traffic; we’ll call it “flex time.” Everything’s cool.
My boss is gay, and has a huge crush on Ben. “It’s his birthday” is a better excuse than I had a flat tire or the dog ate my alarm clock.
“You could have taken the whole day off for that,” he says. “That’s a man worth celebrating.”
“Then you won’t mind if I bail at like four to go meet them for birthday drinks?”
His face says he might mind a little bit, seeing as how I just took the whole last week off, but nobody asked him to offer. I turn the screw. “Ben said to invite you. You should totally come.”
“Oh, well…” he flusters. “I don’t know that they can spare both of us, but you go. Tell him I said Happy Birthday.”
“I will. Thanks!”
I stay until four-thirty to show that I’m a sport, then walk the half-mile to Good For What Ales You. It’s our current favorite of Denver’s dozens of craft breweries precisely because it’s fallen out of favor with the fickle hipster beer bandwagon, so you’re pretty much guaranteed a seat on the patio. And their Arnold Palmer Pilsner tastes like summer in a pint glass, which hits the spot on this golden afternoon.
Three other teachers, Ben’s principal, and Jaroslav, the school’s slightly awkward custodian who seems to only speak Polish, are toasting the birthday boy when I arrive, and his sister Clémence breezes onto the patio ninety seconds behind me. There’s beer, there’s presents, there’s Jaroslav performing an elaborate card trick that results in the heavily-inked waitress, amidst much oohing and aahing, setting the four of clubs as the coaster under Ben’s third beer, and then we go home.
“My mouth has been watering for your meatloaf all day,” he says as we’re mounting the five steps to the front porch.
“Not the worst euphemism I’ve ever heard,” I say. “Not the best.”
He laughs as we swing through the door. The air is thick with the tantalizing aroma of…not much. If I really sniff, I can smell a hint of my gym shorts from the bedroom, but in terms of onions and sweet roasted meat and birthday deliciousness: nada.
TV’s where it’s supposed to be, I glance and see both our laptops on the coffee table, I don’t have any jewelry—would someone really break in and only steal the crockpot? I make for the kitchen.
“What’s wrong?” Ben asks, scurrying into the kitchen behind me. Presumably at the sound of my wailing lamentation.
“Some asshole forgot to turn the crockpot on,” I moan.
“That would be very assholian,” he says. “You sure it wasn’t just you by accident?”
“What good does it do for it to be an accident?” I pout. “We can’t eat that.”
“Could we put it in the oven?” he suggests. Grasping at straws to save his birthday, I realize. My disappointment is out of all proportion, but it’s not like I want to start crying.
“It’s been sitting on the counter all day,” I whine. I try to push the tears back with the heel of my hand. “Raw meat. With an egg in it. Under a lid. With the sun coming through the window. I don’t even know if it’s safe to throw it away.”
“Honey.” He’s trying not to laugh. He puts his arm around my shoulders and kisses me on a wet cheek. “It’s okay. You just forgot. We got pretty…distracted this morning. Please don’t cry, it’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.” Why am I inconsolable? “I just wanted you to have the perfect birthday, and I wanted to make you your birthday dinner, and my birthday was the best birthday ever because of you, and now your birthday is ruined because of me and there…isn’t…any…meatloaf.” These last words I can barely manage to sob out.
He just hugs me. Squeezes me good and close, kisses my cheek again, after a few seconds gently whispers, “Shh.” My devastation washes out as abruptly as it flooded in, and shortly I gather my wits about me. “Honey,” he says again when my breathing settles down. “It’s fine. It’s just meatloaf.”
“Just meatloaf?”
“Shh,” he says, giving my shoulders a squeeze before I start up again. “Shannon. You already bought me beer. And something else, too, I think…what was it…? Oh yeah, a trip to Hawaii. I’m not trying to get all competitive about it, but I’m pretty sure I’m having the best birthday ever.”
“Yeah?”
He laughs. “Yeah. The meatloaf was icing on the cake, baby, that’s all.”
My eyes go wide. “A cake!”
He laughs again. “We don’t need a cake. We do need something though, I’m about ready to eat. You?”
I nod. I’m enjoying being comforted so I stay snuggled up to him, although I’ve regained my composure.
“You know what my very favorite food in the whole world is?” he asks me.
“Raw meatloaf?”
“More favorite than that.”
I shake my head. No. “What?”
“Birthday pizza.”
I consider this. “We could have pizza.”
“Right?”
I nod. “You love pizza.”
“I do love pizza.”
“Can I buy you a pizza?”
He shakes his head. “No. Sad people can’t pay for pizza. I’m buying pizza.”
“But…”
“No. You bought Hawaii, I’m buying pizza.”
“But today’s your actual birthday. I want to get you something for your actual birthday.”
“What, like a present?”
I nod.
“Shannon.” He takes a step back and squares himself to face me, takes my hands in his. “I woke up next to you this morning, and I’m going to get into bed on top of you tonight,” he says. “Nobody’s ever gonna give me a better present than that.”
And I believe him. Because he acts like it’s true. And because it feels true to me, too: this everyday love of ours as a gift. I love getting into bed with him at night, and I love having coffee with him in the morning, even if it’s two quick gulps before work. I love the way he’ll wake me from a bad dream; I love having someone around to do all the chopping when me make dinner; I even love the way he never ever—Never. Not ever—picks up his raggedy old misshapen underwear off the bathroom floor. Okay, maybe I don’t love that, but I haven’t choked him with any, not even with the poop-skiddiest pair, and whether he knows it or not, that’s a gift, too.
I’m so in love with this funny little man that when Santa Claus starts singing about Coming to Town, I get swept right up in the spirit. I buy Ben a handsome sweater, two books that I know he wants, and the after-shave lotion that goes with his cologne—which I think I should get a discount on since the only way they can charge seventy-five dollars for it instead of twenty-five is because they call it après-rasage, and for Ben, French words aren’t fancy, they’re just regular, but the fragrance maven at Macy’s sticks to his guns. Then I drag Ben off to the lot behind the Target to pick out a tree so I can have something to put it all under. We put up lights and Ben makes eggnog and the whole house smells like cinnamon and I forget there was ever such a thing as the Curse of the Christmas Boyfriend.
Until Ben invites me to midnight mass. Actually, the invitation itself was innocuous and quite natural. We’ve been together a year, we’ve been as good as living together for six months—why wouldn’t I spend Christmas Eve with his family? And church is fine, too, although if you ask me they could punch up the presentation a little bit if they really expect you to stay awake for an hour and a half in the middle of the night. Ben laughs when he wakes me. “Claude is carrying Louis out to the car,” he says. Clode, his brother. Lou-ee, his little nephew, age three. “Would you like me to carry you?”
“Yes, please.”
“Too bad.”
I am enticed from my pew with promises of refreshment, and we caravan to the house he grew up in in Park Hill. When the clock strikes two, the kids have opened presents, the grown-ups have opened wine, and Clémence has opened the oven and from it produced a turkey the size of a Volkswagen so golden and crispy that Martha Stewart herself would choose to go back to jail before she tried to improve upon this bird. I think surely the smell of rosemary and oranges and crackling firewood will wake the neighborhood, and I wonder if that’s happened before and they’ve all paraded over with plates, for there’s easily enough food for the whole block. There’s soup and there’s bread; there’s meat and there’s cheese; there’s wine and chocolate and coffee. There are aunts and uncles, friends from France, and friends from work, kids asleep under the tree, kids running around the table, and for a while there’s a cat in my lap, even as Ben insists there’s no such animal in the household.
Ben speaks French with his mother, English with his brother and sister, and a dizzying ratatouille of the two with his nieces and nephews, who, at ages like three and six, give the impression there’s no language you could throw at them that they couldn’t bend to their will. Sitting still in her chair, his mother looks like a modern European queen, with a scarf tastefully draped over her cerise blouse and her hair tucked into a demure chignon, as if she set her crown on a side table when she arrived. But she’s the first to call for more wine and, judging from the reactions of the people gathered breathlessly around her end of the table, seems to have a bottomless supply of hilarious anecdotes, which she interrupts only occasionally to art-direct the flow of the party.
When, at about half past three, she calls for quiet, she gets it. She has dispatched Claude to the kitchen, and assigned two cousins to assist him in opening the bottles of champagne with which he returns. As flutes of the silvery bubbles are being passed, Ben whispers something to his mother, then bends to pull a small package from where it’s tucked beneath the tree. When he comes and shoos his sister out of the chair next to mine, Madame LaChance lifts her glass—not high, but she lifts it off the table—and the chatter drops dead, in some cases mid-sentence. She smiles recognition that her unspoken request has been honored, then says simply, “Benoît.”
All eyes on Ben, he stands up, holding the festive little box, and clears his throat. He starts to say something but doesn’t quite squeeze it out, and clears his throat again. “If you’re here with us tonight,” he finally manages to address the group, “it’s because you’re family to my family.” He puts a hand on my shoulder when he says, “Or soon will be.”
He lowers himself to one knee before me. I go from bone dry to soaked in sweat in the blink of an eye. Clémence takes my glass of champagne, which has started to slosh in my shaking hand. Ben’s so handsome and sincere, I gather that he’s been practicing this, and I laugh because I’m too nervous to know what else to do. He hands me the box, which I suddenly have no idea how to open.
I fumble with the ribbon, pick daintily at the taped seam of the wrapping; the second time I drop the box, Ben picks it up and rips the paper from it. It’s hinged, and he eases it open to reveal two hammered bands of silver. He takes one from the box, sets the box on the floor, and takes my left hand. “Shannon, I love you so much I really don’t know what else to do about it,” he tells me. “Besides ask you, will you please marry me?”
Whether it’s from his burning love for me or—admittedly more likely—what’s left of the candles on the dinner table, his hook-nosed, sharp-cheeked face is radiant. His little chest is puffed like a bird’s, and his eyes are so swollen with hope I have to tear mine away from them. He has to do this right now? God, I hate Christmas.
“Oh honey.” I put my hand on his cheek, then I take his hand in mine. I close it around the ring. I can barely whisper “No.”
When I run for the door, no one makes a move to stop me.