Taking Chances (19 page)

The question in my mind at that point was, did I have enough of anything to fix what I’d done? Or was really fixing it going to take more than I possessed?

My main asset in life so far had been my body and to deny it would be ludicrous. I wasn’t a Rhodes Scholar; the words in my head were never going to change the world in any noticeable way. I never graduated college so I didn’t have success as other people judged it. I ran the only sporting goods store in a small town and that was it. I was on the wrong side of thirty and not getting any younger. No matter how much I tried to stay in shape, I continued to age just like everyone else.

Matt was smart, successful, and still looked as good if not better than he had in high school. As the plane landed, I added up the pluses and minuses on my mental list and realized there was no logical reason for him to change his life for me. I was one of those pathetic people whose best days were in high school; life after that went into a constant downward spiral. Who would want to date a guy like me? What was the point?

As the plane nosed up, dropped flaps, and started its final approach, I wondered what I was doing on a plane about to land in San Francisco. All my drive and desire to get here had fled, leaving me feeling like a fraud, just another dummy pretending to be a real boy and not even doing that well. I sat there silently as the rest of the passengers disembarked, wondering what I should do.

“Sir,” the attendant said to me. “Sir, we’ve arrived.” The air marshal was standing behind her.

I honestly thought about starting something just so I could get arrested and have a reason not to go see Matt. Instead, I nodded and shuffled off the plane, wondering where my feet were taking me since my mind had no idea.

It turns out my feet thought I needed a drink since I ended up in an airport bar ordering a double of anything strong. I nursed the drink as I tried not to think of what to do next. I had made good time here; in fact, I was pretty sure Matt’s plane had just landed less than a half hour before mine since he’d had two layovers. If I ran, there was a chance I might catch him at baggage claim.

Instead, I just took another sip and started to smooth the ruffled fur of the depression I had long since embraced.

“Long day?” a voice asked from my right. I looked over and saw my Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come sitting next to me. He was maybe six or seven years older than I was, and wearing a suit that would have looked old 30,000 miles ago. His hand gripped the tumbler of brown liquor tightly, as if he was trying to make sure it wouldn’t shake. His smile was genuine, but his breath reeked of desperation along with the alcohol in a way that made something inside me cringe away.

I take that back—he wasn’t desperate. He was just lonely.

His smile revealed his entire life to me. He was past fifty, never settled down, and was losing a fight with his waistline no matter how hard he battled against it. He had enjoyed a handful of lovers but had never found one love. He probably used his job, which consisted of a lot of travel, as the main reason for his lack of a lasting relationship, but the truth was, he knew there was something part shark inside him and if it stopped swimming looking for its next meal, it and he would quietly die. The job was a good excuse at thirty; less so, but still somewhat understandable, at forty. But at fifty, the way he lived wasn’t about his work, and it wasn’t about the guys he had dated.

It was about him.

The thing about knowing you’re broken is that knowing is not enough to fix it. He had no idea why he had never settled down. No one really knows. It all came down to if you felt like a slut or a commitment-phobe because there wasn’t any empirical evidence to support either choice.

So he goes through life knowing he’s sick but not knowing what to take to cure himself. In lieu of a metaphorical medicine, he’s taken any and all remedies that have crossed his path. Younger men or friends with benefits are just snake oils and electrical devices he’s used and uses to try to make himself feel better. More and more he medicated the symptoms rather than finding the actual cause.

What I am trying to say is that he ended up drinking a lot.

That was why his hand was so tightly gripped around his drink. He had been in meetings all day, and there in the bar at the airport was the first time he’d had to stop and have a real drink, so he was getting close to his limit. There were the headaches combined with the shakes, which were his body’s way of reminding him it had been far too long since he’d tried to slowly kill the pain. He was waiting for a flight but would cancel it and fly out tomorrow if I gave him the nod. We’d spend the night in a hotel room where his fucking would be hard and savage, not because that was the way he liked it but because he was mad at himself for giving in to his desires again.

The bed would be destroyed as we lay there covered in a fine sheen of sweat, both of us staring up at the ceiling, each of us wondering why we had just done what we’d done. The euphoric high that comes from shooting a load would drift away, leaving us with the ugly reality that the other person was still in the room. He would get up and shuffle toward the bathroom, his unspoken but clear desire for me to get my stuff and leave. If I was still there when he came out in a robe, there would be a story about how he needed to make a conference call before bed, but if I wanted, he could try to call me next time I was in town.

As soon as I was gone, he’d sit there in that empty room, the smell of sex thick as he looked down at his hands that were just starting to tremble again. He might take a few shots from the minibar before crawling into bed and turning off the light. And as the sound of the air conditioner filled the room, he would ask himself why he’d pushed me out the door so quickly. He would cradle the extra pillow and wish it was me as he drifted off into another sleepless night of misery.

The next morning it would start all over again.

I pushed away from the bar so quickly my stool fell out from under me. I crashed to the bar floor and my glass shattered next to me. The man, who was just an older me, reached down to offer me a hand. His face was full of concern and he spoke in a calm and empathic tone, but I couldn’t hear anything over the blood rushing in my ears. My hands jerked away from him as he tried to help me up. I was pretty sure if we made contact with each other, one of would cease to exist.

The sad part was, I didn’t know if I did or did not want it to be me who vanished.

This was who I became if I let Matt slip away. This old and battered man whose eyes held the same sadness I imagined in cows as they stumbled down the ramp in a slaughterhouse. It wasn’t that they were sad about their impending doom; they were sad, and he was sad, because they and he had no idea how to stop their doom from swallowing them. I would end up in Foster, maybe grow addicted to online porn, maybe find random Internet hookups with married and confused guys to fill the time. If I kept myself fit, I could coast off my looks well past fifty, but it wouldn’t change the fact that I was a fifty-year-old man trolling the Internet for love and or sex.

“Are you okay?” the other me asked as he pulled his hand away.

“No” was all I could spit out as I found my feet and backed away from him. I reached into my pocket and threw some bills at the bartender. “Keep it,” I said as I turned and raced out of the airport bar. I forced myself to not look back at the other me.

Because I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be there.

I had reached the point where the paths diverged and had turned toward the one less taken. I was going to follow the one that led to Matt.

I was jogging to the front to grab a cab when I dialed his cell again. I heard the muffled sound of the cartoon mouse singing to the moon. I froze as Matt’s phone went to voice mail and the singing stopped. I had teased Matt relentlessly about his choice of ringtones the first time I heard it. The ringtone was the movie version of “Somewhere Out There,” not even the Linda Ronstadt version but the one actually sung by the mouse. I held my phone out and pushed redial.

Fievel began to sing again.

I moved toward it and heard the tail end of a conversation. “…idea what it is. All I know is that it won’t shut up.” There was a steward talking to an attendant, their luggage rolling behind them. The man was holding up Matt’s phone in frustration. “This is what I get for being nice. I should have just left it on the fucking plane and….”

“I’ll take it,” I said, stepping in front of them and turning around.

They both paused and gave me a look. I could tell neither of them knew what I was talking about. Gesturing to the phone, I said, “I know whose phone that is. I’ll take it.”

The steward’s face went from mild surprise to stark disbelief in half a second. “Oh right. What a coincidence,” he said to his friend. They both started to move around me.

I pushed redial again. Fievel began to sing about out there again.

“Seriously, that’s me calling. I know whose phone that is,” I said holding my phone up. He still didn’t believe me and answered it to make sure. “See? I’m not lying.”

He sighed and hung up. “Fine. But tell your
friend
his fag hag is a fucking bitch.” Without another word, he deposited the phone in my hand and walked away.

I held it tightly, knowing this was a sign from up high that I was on the right path.

H
E
WAS
standing there. He was really fucking standing right there.

“I found your address under your settings,” he said, still holding my phone out to me. “You know, in every romantic comedy, this is where you throw your arms around me and we kiss.”

That broke me out of my stupor.

“This is not a movie,” I snarled as I took my phone back. “And if it was, trust me, it would not be a romantic comedy.” Though I wanted to do nothing more than slam the door in his face, there was no way I could bring myself to do it. He had flown all the way out here, and though my cell phone was not a glass slipper, in the twenty-first century it was a close equivalent. “Well, you might as well come in before my neighbors think we’re haggling over the price of sex or something.”

He quickly rushed inside before I could change my mind. “I can’t believe you pay for sex, much less haggle over the price for it,” he said as I slammed the door.

“Don’t!” I said, turning to face him. “Do not come in here and be all charming and shit.” The smile on his face vanished, and I tried to banish the image of an oversized puppy looking guilty after being caught peeing on the carpet. “I get it. I was stupid and rushed things and it freaked you out. Fine. But do not come in here and start flirting with me all over again because I can’t take it, Tyler. My heart just can’t….” I took a gasping breath as I struggled to hold back tears. He edged toward me with his hands out as if he was going to catch me, but I held up one finger that froze him in his steps. “I am not in need of saving.”

“Matt, I am so sorry…,” he began to explain.

“I know! You’re sorry, I’m sorry, who cares? This is where we are now.” I looked at him as I fought the physical desire to touch him again. “If you came looking for forgiveness, Tyler, fine. You’re absolved. Now go and sin no more.”

He was silent for several seconds before uttering quietly, “I came here for you.”

There was an actual pain in my chest as I felt my emotions begin to stew in anger. “Goddammit, stop!” I screamed. “Just stop trying to….” I fought to find the words and failed pretty badly. “…to do that thing you do. Stop being adorable, stop being hot, and stop looking at me like that. I can’t handle this.”

“Matt,” he said in a careful tone. “I didn’t just come here to apologize, which I do, by the way. Yes, I freaked, but that’s on me, not you. I wasn’t ready for you to be so honest about how you were feeling and instead of talking about it, I just tried to ignore it. I don’t know how to deal with feelings like that.” I gave him a wary look and he added, “I’m serious! Every relationship I have ever had with a guy was some form of emotional chicken. They were just a series of endurance tests to see which of us would end up admitting they liked the other one first. In my entire life, I had never had a guy just come out and say ‘I like you’ before.”

“Well, now you have,” I said, knowing I was pouting before the words even came out of my mouth.

He gave me those sad, sad eyes and asked, “We really can’t get past this? I came all this way to get you.”

I exploded. “You shouldn’t have let me go in the first place!” It was a toss-up as far as which one of us was more startled by my outburst. I was betting on me. I forced myself to take a deep breath and try again. “I wanted you to tell me to stay when I was leaving. This isn’t coming from a place of love, Tyler, this is you reacting to an ultimatum. I mean, who were we fooling? We didn’t even date. We met in an electronics store and then spent the next week hiding in your bed. That’s not much of a relationship.”

I saw his eyes get wide as something passed through his mind. “You’re right, so let’s fix that. What are your plans for tomorrow night?”

That came out of left field. “Um, nothing. Why?”

My “nothing” seemed to stun him. “No seriously, what were your plans?”

“I don’t have any,” I said slowly, trying to impart onto him the vast nothing that was my tomorrow night.

He ran a hand through his hair, a sure sign he was confused. “I thought that was why you left when you did.”

“I left because I was tired of feeling like I was stalking you,” I said as my voice got harsher.

“No, I got that,” he said sounding as if he was trying to figure out who killed Ms. Scarlet in the study. “So you really weren’t going to do anything tomorrow night?”

“Oh for fuck’s sake! Why would I?” I exclaimed.

“Because it is New Year’s Eve, dumbass,” he answered, sarcasm coating every single syllable.

Now I felt stupid. “It is?”

He ignored my question. “Okay, so look, I screwed up. I should have said something in Foster, and that is on me. But I did come thousands of miles to chase you so that should rate me at least one date, right?” I nodded slowly, not sure if I understood what he was saying. “So let me take you out for New Year’s Eve. If at midnight you don’t want to kiss me, I will respect that and head home the next day. But if you do kiss me, you admit there is something here between us.”