Taking Chances (23 page)

She sputtered a response, but I could tell she had nothing of value to say. “I don’t want this,” I said, gesturing around us. “I don’t like places like this.
You
do. I hate clubs. I hate cruising. I hate casual sex, and I hate that you think I’m some backward hick for thinking like that. There isn’t a guide book on how to be gay and if there was one, it wouldn’t be written by a fag hag!”

She looked like she had been slapped.

“Hey, did I miss anything?” Coffee shop Boy asked, coming back with our drinks.

I spun and looked at him. “Did she call you and tell you to show up here tonight? Did she tell you I was interested in you or something?” He looked down instantly, and that was enough answer for me. “Sophia, this is hands down the worst thing you have ever done.”

Which was when Tyler came back to the table and grabbed his coat. “I’m done,” he said, pulling it on. “You are free to stay here and dance and flirt and do whatever you want,” he said angrily. “But I’m done for tonight.”

“I just wanted to meet you,” Coffee Boy said to me, seemingly unaware of Tyler’s words.

“What happened?” I asked as my head began to pound from sensory overload.

“Let me guess?” Sophia interrupted. “You went to the bathroom and saw something your Midwest upbringing didn’t allow? It’s okay for you to sneak around and pretend to be straight for all those years, but what these guys do in a gay bar is too much?”

Tyler looked over at her and I swore he was going to hit her. “You know what, lady? You are a complete bitch. I know I screwed up, and I flew thousands of miles to make things right. Matt has every right to be mad at me, but you? You I haven’t done shit to.”

“You hurt him, that was enough,” she responded.

“If I was out to hurt him…,” he began to answer and then trailed off. “Forget it.”

Sophia stood up. She was pissed. “No, go for it. Hit me with your best shot. You have nothing on me.”

Instead of taking the bait, he looked to me. “I’m going. I’m sorry for making you feel the way I did. You’re a great guy, Matt. I hope you find what you’re looking for.”

Coffee Shop Boy looked confused. “Wait, so you were dating someone but just broke up with them?”

Sophia was not going to let it go. “No, come on. You’re leaving, so tell me your big revelation. Show me how you aren’t out to hurt Matt.”

Which was when Whatshisname came running up to the table, breathless. “I wasn’t propositioning him! It was a joke,” he explained quickly.

Everyone turned to look at him.

Tyler gestured toward him and said to Sophia, “If I was an asshole, I would have taken your boyfriend up on the blowjob he offered me in the bathroom.”

She looked at Whatshisname with her hands covering her mouth. She was beyond shocked, and all he could say was “It was a joke?”

She began swatting at him. “You said you weren’t gay! You said you were over it!”

“Wait, you guys didn’t know that guy was gay?” Coffee Boy asked. “He’s always making passes at me.” Which just caused Sophia to start beating her now ex-boyfriend harder.

I turned back to Tyler to tell him this was not in any way what I wanted, that this entire thing had been a series of missed chances, and I didn’t care anymore.

I wanted to say all that, but he was gone.

He was gone and the night was over.

I
WENT
back to my hotel room and threw everything I had bought into bags and dropped my rental car off at the airport. I sat in the terminal until the night sky began to lighten with the hint of the coming day. As soon as the terminal opened, I pulled out my credit card and did something I had not done since I was seven years old and had the wind knocked out of me during Pop Warner practice and couldn’t take a full breath for over ten minutes.

I bought a ticket to Florida and ran home to my mommy.

Brad had been given instructions to just shut the store down after New Year’s, which meant I was in no hurry to get back to Foster. In fact, I knew there was nothing for me back in Foster at all.

That was far scarier than I wished to admit.

My parents were supersupportive, but they knew something was wrong. Your adult son doesn’t show up on your doorstep out of nowhere for a skinned knee. But instead of grilling me, they just kept their distance and let me decompress on my own. Common sense told me that if the first time you go out with a guy ends in disaster, there could be a number of reasons. By the second, and then the third, you began to wonder.

At my age, the only common factor left was me.

Maybe I just wanted to be single. Maybe deep down I never wanted to be in a relationship, so I went out of my way to sabotage myself when I was in one. Maybe I was just one of those people who were destined to be alone. Maybe it was all part of God’s plan.

And maybe if I kept repeating all of the maybes, I would believe myself.

My mom made up the spare room without one question, which led me to believe Matt’s mom had been talking to her. My dad started telling me about the local football in the area while I looked around their living room. There was a wall of pictures of me, from baby pictures to a photo of me in my college uniform. I had seen these pictures my entire life, but I really looked at them now.

I was smiling in each one, and in each one it was a lie.

Most had a girl next to me who had no idea who she was standing next to. The wall of pictures was a monument to a lie that had consumed my early life. I thought about what Patricia had told me about my straight disguise and could see what she’d been talking about. I was basically wearing the same outfit I went to the Spring Formal in when I was fifteen. The only thing that had changed was I could admit I was gay when I was backed into a corner.

“You okay?” my dad asked, coming up next to me.

I shook my head no, though I couldn’t explain myself.

I spent the first few days just sitting in their backyard, watching the ocean play tag with little kids who populated the beach with their tourist parents. Their laughter sounded fake to me, which confused me until I realized it was because they were genuinely happy. There were no conditions on their glee, no restrictions on what they allowed to make themselves feel joy. They were happy because they wanted to be happy.

I wondered if that was true for being miserable as well.

Finally, after a week, my dad sat down next to me. He offered me a beer, which was his silent way of informing me we were about to have a conversation whether I liked it or not. I opened it up and took a long drink, since I was pretty sure this was going to be like a root canal and this beer was the only novocaine I was going to get.

“Did I ever tell you what I was going to college for when I met your mom?”

I opened my mouth to answer and then paused. I had heard the story about how they met in college at a mixer and hit it off famously. She ended up getting pregnant with me, and she dropped out while he finished the semester before they both moved back to Foster. I knew that story well, but who my dad was before he met my mom was a mystery. I was just getting comfortable with the fact my parents were people outside of being my mom and dad. The thought that they might have wanted to be other things than my parents and owners of a sporting-goods store kind of blew my mind.

“I was going to be an architect,” he said wistfully, looking out across the water.

As soon as he said it out loud, it made perfect sense to me. My dad’s whole life was about math and logic, which was why when I came out, he kind of had a short circuit for a while. On paper, I was a perfect straight jock. I was handsome, athletic, hardworking, not effeminate, the girls liked me. In his mind, my life was locked in. I would be straight, married, and have kids by twenty-five. The world was like that to him, all math and numbers, which would make perfect sense to an architect.

“I was so sure I was going to go on and design bridges and skyscrapers,” he said between sips. “I had my whole life planned out. Live in the city, have one of those bachelor apartments with a bar and a balcony. I would be the young-but-intelligent mastermind who would take the city by storm. I already had the pose I would use on my first magazine cover.” He looked at me and put his hand on his chin with a seriousness that made me smile.

“So what happened?” I asked, thinking I knew the answer.

He looked over at me. “I met your mother and my life started over again.” I felt my heart stop for a moment as I saw the love in his eyes. “Once she entered my life, I realized that all those plans were meaningless because they didn’t include her. That’s what love does, Tyler. It makes you realize how meaningless life can be alone. It just walks in and reorganizes everything the way it wants, and you sit there wondering how you ever got along before.” He stared me right in the eyes, and his voice grew serious. “If you think doing something for love is too embarrassing or too demanding, then it isn’t love. Love has no ego, it has no limits, and it should never make you feel smaller. If this thing with the Wallace boy made you feel like that, then it wasn’t real. You have to believe that.”

My eyes began to sting as I realized that was what I had done to Matt.

“I don’t care if you like men or women.” He paused. “Well, okay, I don’t care now. All I want is for you to be happy, and I honestly don’t know what to do to help you.” He looked at me with such sympathy, with such sorrow, that it took a second for me to realize he felt sorry for me. “What can I do to make you happier, Tyler?”

For the first time since I arrived, I began to cry for my loss. And for the second time in my life, my father held me and told me it was going to be okay. The first being when I busted my knee in college and was told I would never play ball again. I felt tired, I felt drained….

I felt defeated. I felt lost.

T
WO
days passed before I heard from Sophia again.

I should mention that I hadn’t tried to contact her at all. I had been too busy trying to get Tyler on the phone. I was pretty sure the only way this entire experience could have ended up worse was if I had killed his dog or if I left a severed horse head in his bed. My first impulse was to apologize, but after a couple of days passed, I realized there wasn’t much more to say.

Which was when Sophia ended up knocking on my door.

I opened it, and she gave me a huge smile that did nothing but make her look like a reptile exposing its teeth. “So where are we going tonight?”

Only eighteen years of my mother’s upbringing prevented me from slamming the door in her face, and even then, it was a close call. “What do you want?” I asked her, imagining my breath fogging from the ice in my voice.

She paused. “What’s wrong with you?” She tried to move past me, but I refused to budge. “Matt. What is wrong?”

My mind boggled that she had no idea. “Are you fucking kidding me?” I almost screamed at her. “You ruined my date.” Which really meant “You ruined my life.”

She rolled her eyes. “That jerk? Please.” She looked at the arm that was still barring her entrance. “Are you going to let me in or just pout at me in the doorway?”

“Are you really clueless as to how mad I am?” I asked her, not moving my arm.

“About the asshole who walked out on you during New Year’s Eve? You’re mad at me for that?” She genuinely sounded surprised.

“You attacked him the entire night!” Now I
was
screaming.

“Because he was a dick. And I’m pretty sure he proved that by leaving.”

“He left because your boyfriend tried to suck his dick in the bathroom.”

She rolled her eyes again. “He offered. He didn’t try to or anything. Besides, that’s over. So let’s go get messed up and complain about our love lives while we cruise boys.”

It took me a second to realize she was not being sarcastic or ironic—she was really saying we should go do that for fun. Then I realized it was what I had been doing since I moved here, and up to now, all it had done was make me miserable. My mind began showing me night after night, like a flip-book of my entire life. It was just us going out every night we could, getting drunk, hitting on the wrong men, and then being miserable about it. Suddenly the older guys who looked like they had died on their barstools that populated every club made sense. These weren’t losers or desperate people.

They were me in ten years.

People say the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. If that was true, then being single and gay was the craziest thing in the world. This hadn’t made me happy, wasn’t making me happy, and sure in the hell was never going to make me happy. I had been so sure Foster was my problem and once I was beyond the city limits I would somehow magically find happy. Maybe it was just a Midwest thing, but the Dorothy complex seemed to dominate the way I thought life would be like.

I would leave on a tornado of my making and find myself in a magical land of color and song, where finding happiness would be as easy as following a brick road to a place where a faceless stranger would grant all my wishes. Of course, at the end of the story the hick realizes she just wants to go home.

“Are you even upset that you may have just run the best guy I’ve ever met out of town?”

It was a stupid question, but I had to hear the words come out of her mouth. “Me?” she asked, placing a hand on her chest. “No, that wasn’t just a me-thing. We both did that. You wanted to tell him to go to hell, but as usual, Little Matty Wallace didn’t have the balls so he needed big, bad Sophia to do it for him.” She glared at me angrily. “So before you start blaming people, you better make sure it’s a table for two.”

“Are you even upset for me?”

She laughed. “I don’t see you broken up that my boyfriend turned out to be gay.”

“
You knew that
!” I screamed at her. “Everyone in the world told you that, and still you ignored it. You’d have to be insanely stupid or some part of you wanted this to happen just so you could be….” My words trailed off as the final shoe dropped in my mind.