Chapter 18 #2
“I’m not talking about that,” Fields snaps.
Sammy is sitting bolt upright in his chair, his dark eyes fastened on me.
“I’m talking about what happened after that. The review board.”
“Oh, when the review board cleared me? That’s the problem?”
“Of course not.”
“After I tracked down a killer. And might I fucking add, the killer of a boy nobody was even looking for.”
“You know goddamn well what I’m talking about!”
“If you’re talking about when I got roofied, and I was a fucking victim, then fuck you, fuck your money, and fuck this fucking game of trying to get me to squirm around because you’ve got a blank check.”
And I disconnect.
Sam’s breathing fast, but he only says, “Are you okay?”
I grunt and toss my phone on the desk.
It starts to vibrate, and it’s Fields again.
I reach for the phone, and Sam puts his hand on my arm. When I start to shake him off, he tightens his grip—not hard, but holding on. He says, “Deep breath.”
I do. And it helps. And I even smile at Sam as I pick up the phone.
“I’m not doing whatever you want me to do,” I say as I answer the call. “You can either help because you know WISP is important and doing good work, or you can take your money somewhere else.”
Fields’s breathing is harsh. A second ticks past. And then another. And then he bites off “Detective Dulac—” But he stops. And then he does this half-laugh, and he says, “What am I doing calling you back to pick another fight? God damn it, I am turning into a cranky old bastard.”
“Self-awareness is a fucking joy.”
He laughs again, a little more strongly this time.
“Detective—Gray. I’m sorry. I’m not unaware of what you’ve done for this community.
And I’m sorry if how I approached the topic was insensitive.
I do like the work you’re doing. But I also feel like my concerns are legitimate.
And I don’t think I’m out of line in wanting a little reassurance from you before I hand over a—” His voice turns dry as he parrots my words. “—blank check.”
I open my mouth, and Sam squeezes my arm again.
“All right,” I say. “It would help if I knew what those concerns were.”
He’s quiet for several seconds. When he speaks again, his voice is lower, and he sounds tired more than anything. “It’s a very different world we’re living in now. I don’t think people your age know what it was like. What it used to be like. You have an idea, I’m sure, but you don’t know.”
I wait.
“I’ve worked very hard to be taken seriously,” Mr. Fields says.
“For my colleagues to treat me as an equal. Not to be seen as a deviant or a predator or some sort of freak whose father didn’t pay enough attention to him, or who got touched by a priest, or who was some sad, genetically incomplete fairy.
I understand things are different. I understand that young people today have different views, and they seem to think pretty much everything is acceptable.
But I’ve lived long enough to know that some of that is bullcrap, if you’ll pardon the expression.
People are people, Gray. They don’t change all that much.
And I’ve spent my whole life trying to show the world that homosexuals are kind, decent, hard-working people who love their families and want to live nice, normal lives.
And I don’t want to beat around the bush, so I’m going to tell you that I think a lot of the fags running around out there, shaving their assholes on YouTube and crawling around like dogs in Pride marches, they’re undoing everything I’ve spent my whole life trying to make better.
They can’t see that. And maybe you can’t see that.
But it’s the truth. It’s their world, understand?
And we have to live in it. Everything else is a fantasy.
” He stops, and then he says, “So, that’s my concern. Your lifestyle.”
There’s so much I want to say. So much about the heteronormative mindfuck he’s talking.
The kink-shaming. The assimilationist bullshit, like if we can all pretend the tops are tradmasc and the bottoms are tradwives, the straights will leave us alone.
And a part of me is sorry for Fields—sorry for what he went through, and sorry that it hurt him so badly, and sorry that he can’t be happy now that the world is a different place.
But I’ve worked so hard for WISP.
It takes a lot for me to say, “I guess I need to be honest and tell you I don’t believe any of that. And if you expect me to start using WISP to spread that around, it’s going to be a hard no from me.”
This time, it’s Fields who waits.
“But,” I say, “if you want to know that I’m not who I was a year ago, or two years ago, or five years ago, well, I’m not. I didn’t like that person. I didn’t like a lot of what he did. Not for the reasons you gave, but that probably doesn’t matter. What matters is I’m trying to be a better person.”
Sam is clutching my arm.
“I’ve spent the last year cleaning up my act. I’m good at my job. I’ve got a great boyfriend. Fuck, Mr. Fields, I’m a fucking upstanding citizen, and let me tell you, nobody is more shocked than me.”
He laughs at that, and I’m surprised that I’m laughing too.
“WISP is important,” I say. “I hope you’ll support it.” And my throat is unexpectedly tight when I say, “I’m not perfect, but I’m trying to do better.”
“Invite him,” Sam whispers, and he pushes the stack of papers toward me, all his planning materials for the Greek Life outreach.
“We have an event coming up,” I say. “It’s at Wroxall; I know you already do a lot of good work there. Why don’t you join us? See what Sam and I are doing. Then you can decide.”
His breathing is soft and measured. And then he says, “I think I’d like that.”
I give him the details, and he disconnects, and I stare at Sam.
“Holy crap,” he says.
“Holy fucking crap.”
And we both start laughing. We laugh so long and so hard that it’s hard to tell—for me, anyway—if I’m actually crying.
When Robin comes to check on us, the look on his face sets me off all over again, and when he slams the door, I actually slide out of my seat to lie on the floor.
Sam’s right there too, his head on my stomach.
It’s a good night.
But it’s not just WISP. It’s not just the fact that somehow, against every reasonable expectation, we’re actually pulling this off.
Sam’s there for everything, all of it. Like he’s hardwired into my life.
We start going to the gym together. It’s an experience.
Sure, because Sam is hot and because spotting him means standing over him, my dick hanging in his face—or for that matter, that big old donkey dick hanging over my face when he spots me.
And sure, because lifting weights gets all sorts of crazy endorphins going, and there’s something about Sammy with a pump, Sammy with a light layer of sweat, every muscle popping, that turns my crank.
It’s not the first time I’ve had to adjust an inconvenient semi in this gym. But it’s definitely the longest.
It doesn’t help that I’ve been going to this gym for a while.
That there are guys here, other guys, from before I’d stopped catting around, who liked it—in the showers, or in the sauna, anywhere we could find a moment of privacy.
A few of them ignore me. Others, though, swim around me and Sammy like sharks, and all I can do is pretend not to notice.
When Sammy finally asks me if I know one of the guys because he won’t stop looking at me, I play dumb because, for some weird reason, I’m embarrassed, and I don’t want Sam to know.
I mean, he knows; it’s not like he’s an idiot.
But I don’t want to have to tell him. I want both of us to be able to keep pretending.
There’s one day when we’re at the gym, and everything has been shit, everything, all day.
Work has been shit—a woman who was trying to escape the station pissed herself, and pissed all over me in the process, and Palomo was riding my ass about some paperwork, and I hit a curb and blew out a tire because I was answering a call about WISP and I wasn’t watching the road.
That wasn’t all—we had a mini-meltdown at WISP, too, with some mid-level Wroxall bureaucrat throwing a fit that we weren’t paying enough rent for the space they were loaning us, and one of our crisis-counselors-in-training breaking down during a call, and some micropenis must have followed his girlfriend to our offices because he came back with an airsoft gun and shot out half the windows.
You want to see people freak out, start shooting anything—even a water gun—on a campus.
It’s the worst day I’ve had in a long, long time.
And that’s saying something. All the walls and rules and restraints I’ve put up for myself, I can feel how thin they are.
Dysregulated. That’s the word. I am very fucking dysregulated.
A year ago, that would have meant fucking or fighting—preferably fucking.
And now it means—well, now it means trying really fucking hard not to do that.