It feels so fucking good. I cover my shiver by asking a question I don’t mean to ask. “How did your wife feel about you being bi? She seems like she was an asshole about everything else.”
“It never came up, so I don’t think she knew.”
“Seriously?”
Jax shrugs. “Yeah. I mean, I was committed to her, so I didn’t think about other dudes any more than I thought about other women. It’s not like that for me. I’m not torn between genders. I’m with who I’m with.”
“Makes sense.” I twirl my cider glass on the table. “It’s like that for me too. At least, it is now. When I was younger I was all about the chicks. The dude thing came later for me. I was twenty-one before I hooked up with a guy.”
“And you’re what, twenty-eight now?”
“Yeah.” I wonder how he knows that. If he’s as interested in every detail about me as I am about him. I hope he’s not. I can’t be a details man anymore—unless it’s about him because I apparently have rip-roaring double standards these days. “What about you? When did the dude thing come around?”
“I can’t really pinpoint it. I guess it was always there.” Jax smiles. “I lost my virginity to a boy in the back of a VW campervan. It was a year before I took a girl up those cliffs.”
“How old were you?”
“Sixteen. Just.”
“You started young, huh?”
“Not really. This dude was just super nice. Easy to be around, you know? And it felt right. It took me longer to find a girl I felt that way about.”
I shrug. “I never stopped to think about how I felt. I was just a horny teenager. And then with dudes…I was an adult, so it was different. I knew myself pretty well, so I had no fear.”
“Good. It’s not nice to be afraid of intimacy.”
“Are you?” I throw a pointed glance to where he’s still drawing pictures on my skin. “You don’t seem to be.”
“I’m not scared of intimacy withyou, but I was scared of myself for a while. It’s hard to explain, but when you’ve let someone make you feel inadequate in every way for such a long time, it fucks with your head in ways you can’t predict. I mean, I didn’t have a sexual relationship with my ex for years before we split, but she still fucking haunts me.”
I hate his ex. Rage flares in my gut and I want to tell him so, but what good would that do him? My anger is selfish and all about me. Besides, he’s talking, and I want to listen, not get caught in my own feelings. “When did you split?”
“A year ago.”
“You’ve been in Burlington for a year? No fucking way. I’d have seen you.”
Jax laughs. “I didn’t come to Vermont until four months back. Before that, I was literally hiding in a tent so my in-laws couldn’t find me and sue me or something. Sad, huh?”
It is sad, but not for the reasons he probably thinks. “Tell me about this tent. Where was it?”
“In the desert. I was off-grid and filming kit foxes for a startup YouTube channel. It was as much fun as I’ve ever had.”
“Why did you come to Vermont, then?”
“The YouTube channel bombed, and they never paid me, and Eve said I needed to learn how to people again, so I reconnected to the matrix and answered Jerry’s ad to come here.”
“She says that peopling bullshit to you too? Man, I thought it was just me who got that lecture on a weekly basis.”
“You people every day. And you’re good at it.”
It’s cute that he thinks that. I don’t correct him. What’s the point?
* * *
Jax
Tanner is a fun date. If that’s what we’re calling it. And if we’re just two mates out for some touchy-feely drinks, I’m okay with that. He wants to know how I got into filming wildlife for a living, so I give him the Cliff notes version. I want to know how he wound up working mountain rescue in Alaska, and why he came home, but I don’t ask, and he doesn’t tell me. He doesn’t tell me anything, he just listens, so I guess I’m okay with that too.
