21. Brooklyn
21
brOOKLYN
“ W atch where you’re going!”
I swerved to dodge the angry driver of a red BMW as he turned the corner I was approaching at a dangerous speed.
He wanted me to watch where I was going? He was the one driving in the bike lane and making a right turn without so much as looking over his shoulder, let alone signaling. He’d practically run me over.
Any other day and I might have yelled something back, but I was late to meet Gabe and I didn’t feel like spoiling my good mood. I’d been over on Summersea this morning, helping Julian’s class at Adair Elementary with their community garden. Now that I was coming down to the wire with my dissertation and interviews, it was nice to have some time to get out of my own head.
Plus, digging in the dirt was always fun. There was something immensely satisfying about working with my hands that way. Add in a little Mycobacterium vaccae , the bacteria that lives in the dirt and acts like Prozac, and I was in the best mood I’d been in since the last time I’d had Gabe panting underneath me in bed. Seventeen hours and eleven minutes ago, to be exact.
Especially since I’d had to drag myself back out of bed after he went to sleep to put the finishing touches on the final draft of my dissertation and send it out to my committee. I’d agonized over it for hours before finally hitting send. And now I had two weeks to panic until my actual defense date.
Except that I’d also just found out that three of the nine jobs I’d applied to wanted to interview me, so I needed to panic about those first.
I should have been elated. Eastern Nebraska University, Redwoods College of Coastal Oregon, and Gadsden State down in southern New Mexico were all great schools, if all a little rural and remote. But I’d be lucky to teach at any of them, even if only for a semester or two. I knew Jeff would be thrilled when I told him about it this afternoon.
So why wasn’t I thrilled? Why, instead of feeling excitement and triumph at the news, did I just want to crawl into bed until it all went away? I’d thought I’d feel better once I had a job lined up for the spring. But the closer that came to becoming a reality, the worse I felt.
I hadn’t even brought myself to respond to the interview offers I’d gotten yet. How fucked up was that?
I hopped off my bike in front of the Ogeechee Diner, wondering what it was that Gabe had wanted to talk about so badly. He’d called me this morning while I was still out on Summersea and asked if we could get lunch before I met with Jeff. He’d been insistent about the timing for some reason.
I wondered if it had something to do with whatever secret project he’d been working on last night. He’d gotten a phone call from Niya after dinner and had walked outside to take it, despite the fact that it had been raining, saying that he didn’t want to bother me. Which was nice, if a little baffling.
I pushed open the door into the restaurant and smiled when I caught sight of the back of Gabe’s head. How was it possible that just seeing his scruffy blond hair tugged at something inside of me? I walked up behind him as quietly as I could and put my arms around his neck, giving him an awkward hug as he sat there in the booth.
“Help! Security! Some weirdo is mauling me!” Gabe laughed, reaching up to pull me into a kiss. He slid his tongue along my lower lip until I parted my mouth to let him inside. He pulled back after a minute, breathless. “Mmm, you forgot to shave this morning.”
“I know.” I grimaced. “I don’t know where my head was. Weird day, I guess.”
He grinned. “Well, on account of your weird day, maybe I can ask security to wait fifteen minutes before escorting you off the premises, so we can go find a back room somewhere and put that stubble to good use.”
I laughed as I slid in on the other side of the booth. “Is that why you insisted on meeting me here? You know if you wanted a quickie, I could have met you at home.”
“Yeah, but then you’d want to be all sweet and slow and tender. What if I just want you to ruthlessly bang me into pieces in the stockroom?”
“You’ve been having gay sex for all of two weeks and you’re already bored of my tricks? I need to step my game up.”
“Nah.” Gabe smiled. “I don’t think I could ever get bored of you.”
Warmth flashed through me at his words, but it left behind a tinge of hesitation. Would he still feel that way in another month, once the novelty wore off? Once I had to move to the middle of fucking nowhere and ask him to come with me?
I’d been shocked when he’d told me he liked me. Part of me still couldn’t quite believe it. Gabe was hot. And young. And wanted the world to be his oyster. He shouldn’t have to spend the next nine months of his life trapped in whatever tiny town I ended up in.
It was one thing for him to agree to that back in September, when this was all still hypothetical. But would he still want to hold up his end of the bargain when it meant packing up and heading to Bumblefuck, Nebraska? And could I ask him to do that, if he didn’t want to? I wasn’t sure that was fair.
“You like the beef pho here, right?” Gabe asked, pulling my thoughts back to the present moment. “I feel like you said that. And I was starving, so I went ahead and ordered for both of us.”
“Yeah, I do.” I smiled, surprised. “I can’t believe you remembered that.”
“Pssh. That’s nothing. Stalking 101. I’ve got a file with your social security and credit card numbers too.”
“I mean, we are married, so that wouldn’t actually be that weird.”
“So now you’re saying I’m the one who has to up his game?”
“Nah, your game’s pretty good too. Anyway, why’d you insist on lunch, if it wasn’t so I could fuck you in the walk-in freezer?”
He blushed, then pulled his laptop out of his bag. “Well, maybe it was partly that. But mostly, I wanted to catch you before you saw Jeff again. You’re meeting him this afternoon, right?”
I nodded. “Interview prep.”
“Oh, shit, right. Aren’t you supposed to find out who wants to interview you soon?”
“Yeah.” I thought about telling him then, but the whole topic just tired me. “But we can talk about that later. What’s up?”
“Okay, well, I wanted to talk to you about Human Nature. More specifically, how I think that with a few changes, you guys could not only stop struggling to stay afloat, you could even expand to more sites. I remember when we met, you told me you thought there was potential for that. And I’ve been looking at how you’re set up and I think you’re right. If you reworked a few things, you could thrive, to the point where you wouldn’t even be relying on grant funding anymore.” He grinned. “Or marrying relative strangers for money.”
“Wait, you’ve lost me. You want to talk about Jeff’s charity?”
Gabe nodded, flicking his laptop on and turning the screen towards me. As I watched, he pulled up a PowerPoint with Human Nature’s logo on it.
“So basically, remember the day I got stuck in the Cleveland airport for a while? Well, I had a few hours to kill, you weren’t exactly talking to me at the time, so I got to thinking—”
“Uh oh,” I laughed. “Should I be worried?”
“Shut up.” He smiled and kicked me under the table. I grabbed his leg in between my two and held it hostage. “So I pulled up your website, and one thing led to another, and I, uh, kind of made a business plan for you guys.”
“You what?” I blinked. “Gabe, that’s a lot of work. Why?”
“Because the work you guys are doing is amazing. But you’re not selling it well. Your website is years out of date, it’s not presenting what you do in a way that’s easy to understand. It doesn’t even have a donate button, for Christ’s sake. It’s almost like you guys have never talked to a management consultant before.” He laughed, and after a second, I joined him.
“I don’t even know what to say.” I shook my head. “Is this what you’ve been being so secretive about for the past few days?”
“Secretive?” He cocked his head to the side.
“Yeah, you know. Your private phone calls with Niya that you take outside, not letting me see what you’re working on.”
He flushed. “I didn’t realize I was that transparent. I just didn’t want to show this to you until I had time to do more research and put it together. But if you like it, I thought you could bring it to Jeff and show him this afternoon.” He pushed the laptop towards me. “Here, you can look at it while we wait for our food. Some of these changes would actually be really easy to make, and the bigger ones, well, you could make plans for implementing those over time.”
“This is amazing,” I said absently as I flipped through the slides in his presentation. A whole new look for the website, a series of white papers on the work we’d been doing, a direct fundraising campaign. I glanced up. “I mean, it really is. But wouldn’t this require a lot of work? Like a full-time program manager or something?”
Gabe shrugged. “Maybe. A lot of this is stuff I could set up in my free time. But yeah, hiring a manager probably would be a good thing, in the long run. It’d be an investment in the organization’s success, not just an expense.”
“I don’t know if Jeff would go for it.” I thumbed my bottom lip. “But I suppose I can ask him. He’s the first one to admit that he’s not the most organized guy.”
“You think he might go for it if you were the manager?” Gabe asked, leaning forward and pressing his arms on the table.
“Me? The manager? But I can’t—”
“Think about it for a second. Who else would be a better candidate? You know the organization in and out, you’ve been helping Jeff run it since you started your program at Chatham, plus you know the science stuff. You’d be the perfect guy for the job.”
“Yeah, but I don’t want the job.” I shook my head. “I see what you’re saying, but just—ugh. All my days filled with office work?”
“And networking. And fundraising. Communications, outreach, public relations. There’d be so much more to it than just scheduling volunteers—though that could be a part of it, too. It could actually be fun. And you could really make it whatever you wanted.”
“But I don’t—I mean, I can’t—” I sighed. “I appreciate the thought. I’m just not sure it’d be a good fit for me.”
“Hey, I’m not trying to force it on you,” Gabe said, raising his hands defensively. “I just thought, you know, you’d been kind of down on the whole PhD process recently. Maybe this would be something that sparked your interest. But it doesn’t, and that’s okay.”
“It’s a really sweet idea though.” I reached across the table and squeezed his hand. “And I will take this to Jeff, I promise. If he goes for it, we can probably find someone who’d be a better manager than I ever could hope to be. And then I can leave knowing Human Nature was in good hands.”
“That’s right.” Gabe’s face brightened as he grinned at me. “You said you had some news about interviews. What’d you find out? Did they all just offer you a job on the spot?”
“Hardly.” I laughed. “But we don’t have to talk about it.”
“Why wouldn’t we talk about it?” He looked confused. “Did something happen? Wait, did none of them want to interview you?”
“No, no, nothing like that.” I ran a hand through my hair. “I heard back from three of them, saying yes.”
“That’s awesome!”
“Yeah. I guess.” I sighed.
“That’s the least enthusiastic ‘ awesome ’ I’ve ever heard,” Gabe said. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t know.” I shifted uncomfortably as he raised an eyebrow. “Really, I don’t. It is exciting, objectively. I just don’t feel excited about it, if that makes any sense. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Gabe looked the schools up on Google Maps as I rattled off their names, putting in enthusiastic comments about each of them. But the more cheerful he was about it, the more depressed I became. There was no way he’d be able to maintain that sort of enthusiasm if he had to move to any of those places. The guy wanted to move to Paris, France, not Paris, Oregon, population twelve.
“Let’s just talk about something else,” I begged, tugging on his wrist. “Come on, please. I’m going to spend the rest of my afternoon dealing with this stuff with Jeff. Let’s just have fun now instead. Tell me how Aiden’s plan to meet Tyler Lang is going.”
Gabe gave me a strange look but finally closed his laptop screen. “It’s progressing slowly,” he said with a grin. “Apparently, one of his new apartment-mates knows someone who was on the same TV show as Tyler ages ago, and goes to this one hot yoga class. So now Aiden’s trying to act like he cares about yoga so that he can ‘ accidentally ’ meet this person, but the first time he went, he almost passed out from the heat, so he was too tired to talk after, and the second time he went, they weren’t even—”
“Oh my God, it’s you! From online!”
Gabe and I swiveled our heads in unison at the sound of an excited voice breaking into our conversation. Our waitress had just walked up to our booth, two steaming bowls of pho in her hands, and was staring at us, shocked. She managed to set them down without spilling, thank God.
“Uh, yeah.” Gabe grinned. “Hi. I’m Gabe. This is Brooklyn. My husband.”
His eyes flashed when he said that, and he stuck his hand out towards the waitress. It took her a second to stop bouncing with excitement and register that she should shake it. She squealed when she did, and Gabe shook his hand out surreptitiously when she let go. The wince on his face said she had a strong grip.
It’d been two weeks since we’d found out about the Instagram account Aiden had created and decided to let him keep it up. I’d been not-so-secretly hoping that the excitement would die down once people got sick of us. Internet fame didn’t even usually last the full fifteen minutes.
Evidently, we were the exception.
The attention our profile had gotten had only grown. Last week, someone had even written a Buzzfeed article about us. I still wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about our newfound fame, so I’d mostly been trying to ignore its existence. Usually, that worked, but I had been noticing more and more people staring at me as I biked through town these days. And this wasn’t the first encounter we’d had with a total stranger who was thrilled to meet us.
“I’m Lainey,” the waitress said, practically vibrating with excitement. She smiled at Gabe. “I thought you looked familiar when you first came in, but I didn’t know from where. Oh my God, seeing you together is so exciting! You’re like, real people.”
How the hell were you supposed to respond to something like that? Thankfully, Lainey didn’t seem to expect us to say anything. She just went right on with her side of the conversation.
“Seriously, you guys are so cute. My friends are going to freak out when I tell them I met you. We’re all obsessed with you. God, the picture of you two in bed? Like, the hottest thing on the planet.”
The English language needed a word for the feeling of being both flattered and uncomfortable at the same time. German probably had one, sixteen syllables long.
How could people think it was normal to objectify you to your face? I didn’t get it. But on the other hand, how could I not feel a little flattered at how adorable she found me and Gabe?
Gabe was fucking adorable, so that much I understood. But it was nice to know I wasn’t dragging the adorable quotient down too far on my end of things. And honestly, I had no one to blame but myself. I was the one who’d told Gabe to take that picture of us all sweaty and post-coital in bed. What had I expected?
“You don’t—that is, you can totally say no, but do you think I could take a picture with you guys?” Lainey asked, looking back and forth between the two of us.
I shrugged and looked at Gabe.
“Well, we haven’t taken our picture yet for today,” he said. “Come on, get in here with us.”
“Oh my God, yes!” Lainey squealed as she and Gabe squeezed into my side of the booth for a selfie, first with Gabe’s phone, then with hers. I thought she might hyperventilate when she looked at the result and started bouncing again. “This is like, the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
“Glad we could help you out.” Gabe grinned.
“Seriously, thank you guys so much.” Lainey jumped up and down a few more times for emphasis, part-human, part-pogo-stick. “Okay, I’ll let you guys eat now, but thanks for putting up with me and being so cool.”
“Best thing that’s ever happened to her?” I said, shaking my head in wonder as she walked away. “Man, fuck my PhD. This is a way easier way to make a difference in the world.”
“Yeah, screw charity too.” Gabe laughed as he typed something on his phone. “You’re too busy spreading the joys of gay sex to be bothered with, you know, actually helping people.”
“When you think about it, we’re basically teaching a joint section of Gay 101 for the whole internet.”
“Not all heroes wear capes,” he said, smiling as he slid his phone across the table. “Aiden gave me the log-in info for the Instagram account so I can post there directly. How’s that for a caption?”
I glanced at the screen. Beneath the picture of the three of us in the booth, he had written:
Getting some pho-cking amazing food at the Ogeechee Diner with B and Lainey now that B’s back from volunteering with Human Nature, the bad-ass nonprofit he helped found.
#phontimes
#baephorgottoshaveandnowhisphaceisphozzy
#mypunsarephonomenal
“Pho-ntastic?” I ventured.
“Terrible,” he snorted. “Leave the puns to me, please.”
“Are you sure we should mention Human Nature, though?”
Gabe nodded emphatically. “Definitely. People are going to be so curious about it. And if Jeff approves my business plan, we can have a place for people to start donating before the weekend’s over.”
“Babe, you have your own work to do. Don’t get me wrong, I think this is fantastic, but I can’t ask you to take this on when things are so busy with your job.”
“I don’t mind. Really. I wouldn’t have suggested this if I did.”
I smiled at him. “You’re amazing, you know that, right?”
“I do, but you can keep telling me if you want.”
“I’d rather show you.” I let my smile widen. “If you finish your pho fast enough, we might actually have time to swing by the apartment before I meet with Jeff.”
“Or we could go looking for that walk-in freezer.”
“I knew I liked you for a reason.”