Chapter 20
Tristan
Butterflies dance in my stomach for the rest of the shift. Nick and I are getting coffee.
After our text exchange, during which I was crouched in the apparatus bay, taking a break from my chores, and he was somewhere up in the loft, we have a call—a gas leak at an apartment building in the Mission District.
We ride together in the ambulance as if nothing has happened.
We don’t mention our messages.
We don’t mention coffee.
I’m taking his lead on all this, and I kind of like that we’re keeping it—whatever it is—a secret. It feels clandestine, sly, and it makes me feel closer to him.
We’re sharing something, even if I don’t know what.
When we interact during the rest of the shift, it’s completely normal, like there’s no secret between us. We’re just two coworkers getting to know each other. Our routine is normal, and we work well together when we respond to emergencies.
Maybe, when we get coffee, Nick’s just going to let me down easy.
Maybe he’s just trying to be a nice guy and say that, sorry, but we can’t do anything because we work together.
Maybe.
Or maybe not.
Thing is, I don’t think I’m looking for a relationship.
It’s too soon.
I’m still too hurt from Warren’s death. Still grieving. And there’s too much on my plate with Dad and his health for me to even consider opening up my heart to someone else.
But sex?
I could do with some sex.
Maybe that’s what I’ll propose, if I’m able to get a word into the conversation.
Before my relationship with Warren, I had a few “relationships” that were really just sex. Friends with benefits, fuck buddies, whatever it is you want to call it.
Maybe that’s what Nick and I can do.
Obviously, we met at a sex club, so I reasonably guess that Nick is a relatively sex-positive person.
So am I.
I’ve never seen sex as something that must necessarily be tied to a committed, monogamous relationship. Some people believe that, and I respect it, but I’m perfectly comfortable with sex outside of a relationship.
And, well, I want to have sex with Nick.
Like, a lot.
So much so that when he goes into the locker room at the end of our shift to change, I wait until he’s out, because I don’t want to see him without his clothes on.
I don’t think I’ll be able to avoid getting hard if I do.
As he walks out of the locker room, he passes me.
“Good work today, Probie,” he says, and claps me on the shoulder.
His hand lingers for just a moment, and his grip tightens, a firm squeeze that sends thrills through my body.
He leans closer, his breath tickling my neck as he whispers, “See you at two.”
? ? ?
I take a quick and desperate nap when I get home, the kind of nap where there’s an embarrassing amount of drool on my pillow when I wake up.
Bobbie is at work, and Dad’s at the links, golfing. One of his friends picked him up.
Technically, Dad can still drive, but Bobbie drew the line with him after he got out of the car while it was running and let the battery die a few weeks ago.
It’s nice having the house to myself for a bit.
I spent the last year living alone in the apartment that Warren and I had shared—I hated doing that, but we had signed a twenty-four-month lease, and he died thirteen months into it.
Our property management company was a gaggle of gorgons and refused to let me out of the lease early without exorbitant fees, so I suffered through it. Through living in the memories and in the ghosts.
There are different sorts of ghosts here in Dad and Bobbie’s house.
It’s the house I grew up in—at least until I turned twelve, my parents divorced, and this officially became my “every other weekend” house.
Then, Mom lived not far away, so I didn’t have to change schools.
It was nice having both parents around, even if I was constantly worried about them fighting. By the end of their marriage, they couldn’t stand to be in the same room as each other.
Neither of them ever took their anger or hurt out on me, not directly at least, but I was bound to catch some shrapnel from their simmering resentment.
In my junior year of high school, Mom started dating a retired dentist who was twenty years her senior, and they moved to Santa Barbara together.
They still live there. Craig, her partner, is in his late seventies now, and they’re deeply in love.
Craig and I have never been close, certainly not in the way Bobbie and I are, but he’s a good guy and treats Mom well.
I moved in full-time with Dad when Mom left for Santa Barbara.
It wasn’t good for my relationship with Dad, not at first. We both have very strong personalities, and those personalities clashed.
We found a way to make peace during my senior year of high school, and then I was off to college. Distance made our relationship easier, softening the edges of the harder parts of our personalities.
Now that I’m back, sixteen years after my parents’ divorce, I still feel the ghosts of the anger and fights in the house.
I feel the ghosts of my own childhood and adolescent pain and trauma.
I remember wondering back then what I did wrong to make my parents separate.Even if I didn’t consciously blame myself, the subconscious blame was there.
It’s hard, when you’re so young, and your world is still so small, not to take on the blame for such a trauma as your parents’ divorce. You don’t know who else to blame, so maybe you lash out at your parents.
Or maybe you do what I did, and think that somehow, you must’ve messed up.
Maybe you’ll think they divorced because something was wrong with you.
And maybe, you think, it’s because of the growing sense you have that you’re different.
That your body, heart, and soul are growing to feel love in a different way than most of the other boys your age.
That, when all of those boys are talking about what girls they like, telling you about the dirty websites they’ve figured out how to access on their phones, you’re not really interested in the women they show you.
You’re actually interested in other guys.
Maybe that’s why your parents split.
They are, after all, pretty devoted to their Christian faith, and they’ve never spoken up against the hate spewed from pulpits against people who love differently.
Why, you wonder, would they change their views for you?
And so you decide to hide that part of yourself.
To edit yourself into what they need.
To be the perfect son.
To make their lives as easy as you can.
To never cause problems.
But it’s not possible to delete parts of your identity.
You suppress, and you suppress, and you learn to hate that part you’re suppressing.
You learn to punish it, to control the pain you feel, to let it out in sharp little bits.
And then you learn to not just edit that part of yourself, but all parts of yourself.
You twist every aspect of yourself to be exactly what’s needed for any situation. You never want to raise a fuss. You never want to cause a problem.
And it’s exhausting. It’s unmooring.
Even when you eventually learn to share that darkest, most secret part of yourself with those who love you, even when they embrace you with love that you never thought they would, the damage has been done.
By then, you’ve spent some of the most formative years of your life not learning who you are, but learning to be what you think others want you to be.
Instead of learning the valuable lesson that you shouldn’t have to edit and change yourself based on others’ expectations, you’ve learned to perform.
To hide.
To disguise yourself.
And that’s a really hard thing to unlearn.
After my nap, I take a very hot shower.
When I’m done, standing in front of the mirror in the clouds of steam, I look at my vintage safety razor on the bathroom vanity.
For the longest time, I wouldn’t—couldn’t—use a razor like that. I didn’t trust myself with it.
Times have changed, but some scars never fade—both scars on the body and scars on the heart.
I froth shaving cream on my face and begin to shave.