Chapter 38
Thirty-Eight
Jason
Two weeks back from Costa Rica and I haven't texted Victor anything else.
It's not that I don't want to. I pick up my phone a dozen times a day, scroll to his name, and stare at our last exchange. The Buffy quotes. The vague sexual innuendo that he immediately got. The Wish I were there with you.
Then I put the phone down and go back to whatever I was doing.
Rehearsals with the Saint Sebastian Six.
Choir practices. Planning the music for weekday, Saturday vigil, and Sunday Masses.
Walking Barnaby around the block in the gray late winter slush.
The small, ordinary tasks of my small, ordinary life.
Barnaby follows me from room to room like he's afraid I'll disappear again if he lets me out of his sight. He doesn't ask questions. But he does look at me like I should explain why I spent an entire week in Costa Rica fucking a man and came back unable to talk about it.
The brownstone feels different since I got back. Emptier, somehow, even though nothing has changed. Leah's been gone for fifteen years; Kelsey moved out when she left for college. I've lived alone in this house ever since and I made my peace with that a long time ago.
I like my solitude. There’s a baby grand piano in the middle of the parlor floor, where most people have a dining table. I don’t need a dining table that seats six. I eat at the kitchen island, or more often, while sitting on the sofa, watching television or listening to music.
And it's not like I'm actually alone. Barnaby takes up more than his fair share of my queen-sized bed, and between his sighing and snoring and rearranging himself throughout the night, I always know he’s there. But he's a dog.
He’s not someone who demands to be spooned while we fall asleep. He doesn’t sing old love songs in the shower or look up at me from on his knees with a wicked grin and puffy lips.
With Leah, I’d had a full share of intimacy, of partnership, of waking up next to someone who knew me. I'd been lucky to have her. Not everyone gets the kind of love we shared. I wasn't waiting for it to happen again.
Except that the night we put her in the ground, I reached for Victor in our living room and took something I had no right to take. And then I spent the next fifteen years telling myself it was grief, it was temporary insanity, it was a sin I could bury if I just never looked at it again.
I built my solitary life on top of that burial ground. I convinced myself I was content. And I was, mostly. Because the alternative was admitting that what happened with Victor wasn't just grief. That it meant something. That I wanted it to mean something.
Costa Rica dug it all back up.
Now I lie awake after Barnaby has settled, staring at the ceiling, aware of all the space in the bed that a seventy-pound dog somehow doesn't fill.
I catch myself pausing in doorways, waiting for something.
I notice the second toothbrush holder in the bathroom, still empty after all these years, and it feels like an accusation instead of just a fact.
I know what changed. I just don't want to look at it directly.
Because if Costa Rica meant something—if Victor means something—then that night fifteen years ago meant something too. And I've built my entire life around pretending it didn't.
Thursday night rehearsal is a disaster. We're working on the Gesualdo Tenebrae Responsoria, challenging pieces even when everyone's focused, which tonight, no one is.
Calvin Kuliesczak, our second tenor, keeps coming in late on his entrances.
Julian and I clash on the tempo in the third section.
And I snap at Ben Calloway, our second baritone, for a pitch issue that, in fairness, was probably my fault for not giving a clear enough cue.
“Good Lord, Jason, what's gotten into you?" Julian asks during our break. The others have scattered to the coffee station in the parish hall or the restroom, leaving us alone in the chancel of Saint Sebastian.
"Nothing," I mutter. "Long day."
Julian gives me that look he's been giving me since grad school. The one that says he knows I'm full of shit but he's too polite to call me on it directly. "You've been off since you got back from Kelsey's wedding. Everything okay with her?"
"Kelsey's fine. She's great. Married life suits her."
"And the trip? How was Costa Rica?"
I think about the hot springs. Victor's smile when I suggested we spend the week allowing ourselves what we’d been denying for so long. The way he looked at me across the pillow in our shared casita, like I was something precious. The airport goodbye, his lips moving silently as he backed away.
"Fine," I say. "It was fine."
Julian's eyebrows lift but he doesn't push. He's known me long enough to recognize when I've hit a wall. "Okay. Well, if you want to talk about whatever's not bothering you, I'm around."
"Thanks." I mean it, even though I have no intention of taking him up on the offer. What would I even say? I slept with my dead wife's ex-boyfriend, who's also my stepdaughter's biological father, and now I can't stop thinking about him, but I'm too much of a coward to pick up the phone?
Julian would probably take it in stride.
He's not Catholic and he doesn’t attend Mass here.
He only agreed to found the Six under the aegis of Saint Sebastian because it was more convenient for formation and tax purposes.
He wouldn’t intentionally betray me to Father Gabriel but I’d have to ask him to keep my secret and that feels wrong.
Not to mention that saying it out loud would make it real, and I'm not ready for that.
Will I ever be? I have no idea.
Sunday Mass feels different now, too.
I've played organ and directed this choir for over twenty years.
Through Leah's illness. Through her death.
Through the long, gray years of raising Kelsey alone and rebuilding a life I never expected to have.
Saint Sebastian's has been my anchor through all of it.
The music, the liturgy, the rhythm of the church calendar marking time when time felt meaningless.
But today, Father Gabriel's homily is about love.
Not romantic love. He's talking about agape, the selfless love of God for humanity and the love we're called to show one another.
He quotes First Corinthians, the passage everyone uses at weddings.
He talks about how love requires us to be vulnerable, to risk being hurt, to open ourselves to another person even when it's terrifying.
I think about Victor, three thousand miles away. I think about the way he held me at the airport, fierce and tender at the same time. I think about the text I haven't sent, the call I haven't made, the silence I've let calcify between us because I'm too afraid to break it.
Love is patient.
How patient? Fifteen years patient? Another fifteen years?
Love is kind.
Is it kind to let Victor wait for me to figure my shit out? Is it kind to myself to keep pretending I don't know what I want?
I miss the rest of Father Gabriel’s homily. I go through the motions of Communion, the taste of wine and wafer familiar on my tongue, but my mind is elsewhere. When Mass ends and the choir leaves after the recessional song, I stay at the organ bench.
I should go to confession. I haven't been since before Christmas, and there's plenty I could confess now. Not just the sex with Victor, but the anger I've been carrying, the unkindness at rehearsal, the lie of omission every time someone asks how I'm doing and I say "fine."
But confession means talking about it. Confession means admitting, out loud, to another person, that I had sex with a man. That I wanted it. That I still want it.
Him. Victor.
That I might want him for the rest of my life.
I gather my coat and leave the church without stopping at the confessional.
That night, I lie in bed, Barnaby’s head on my leg as usual, and stare at my phone.
Victor's name glows on the screen. I've typed and deleted a dozen messages.
Hey.
Too casual.
I've been thinking about you.
Too vulnerable.
When are you coming to New York?
Too demanding. Especially when I’m not even sure what I’d do if he were in New York.
I miss you.
My thumb hovers over the send button.
What happens if I send it? What happens if he doesn't respond, or responds with something polite and distant, or tells me that Costa Rica was fun and all but he can’t be with someone who can’t be out like he is?
What happens if he says he misses me too?
That's the thing I can't quite face. Not Victor's rejection; I could survive that, probably, the way I've survived everything else.
It's his acceptance that terrifies me.
Because I can’t ask him to hide for me. It’s not fair to either of us. Especially not to him.
But if Victor wants me, if this is real, if we actually try to build something together, then everything changes.
My job. My place in the Church. The careful, controlled life I've built around the absence of risk.
I delete the message and put the phone on the nightstand.
Tomorrow, I tell myself. I'll figure it out tomorrow.
But tomorrow comes and goes, and so does the day after that, and the day after that, and the silence stretches on.