“Judging me—or your boyfriend—for staying in the closet?”
“He’s not my boyfriend,” I say.
“Because he won’t come out?”
“No,” I protest. “He has good reasons for not coming out. Just like you do. I don’t hold it against him.”
Just because I came out in college—and it was hard enough for me to throw over my own early Catholic education—doesn’t mean that Jason has to. Ever.
“You just don’t want to be in a relationship that you have to hide.” Her tone is matter-of-fact. “I get that.”
I sigh. “I…yeah, I don’t.”
Except that's not quite true, is it? I'd take a hidden relationship over no relationship at all. I'd take whatever Jason was willing to give me. The problem isn't just that I don't want to hide, even though I really don’t. It's also that Jason hasn't offered me anything to hide.
She tosses me a smile after she wipes her face. “I really do get that.” She grabs her water bottles and takes a long swig. “If this film does well, I’ll probably finally stop keeping Wendy a secret.”
I stare at her. “Really?”
She takes another drink, then nods as she wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’m not planning a big announcement or anything. But I should be able to write my own ticket after this film and Wendy has been patient long enough.”
She sits on a weight bench and leans forward, her elbows on her knees, the water bottle dangling from her hands between them. “It’s a weird thing to contemplate, you know. Having to explain yourself to a world that’s as likely to smile on you as shun you, except you’ve no way of knowing which it’s going to be until you do it. I’m already getting fewer great roles just because I’m over forty.”
She’s pushing fifty, actually, but that’s another secret very few people know.
She sighs. “But I think I don’t give as much of a shit as I used to. If the studios already think that I’m a washed-up hag, they might as well know that I’m a dyke as well.”
“They don’t think that,” I tell her. “They wouldn’t have picked you to play this role if they did.”
She casts me a sideways look. “They fought casting me tooth and nail. It’s only because Julio insisted he wouldn’t do the movie at all if they didn’t let him hire me. And because he owns the rights to the project and can take it anywhere he wants.”
It’s a sprawling, epic, romantic, fantasy adventure based on an insanely popular book series and Stella is cast as one of the main characters, a warrior queen. She describes it as “Game of Thrones meets Outlander without the rape or incest” and, while everyone laughs when she says that, she never does. The director had snapped the rights up before the books became runaway bestsellers and when he started shopping the movie project around, there was a bidding war between three of the biggest studios. And that was before he announced the big-name stars he wanted for the project.
“Anyway, all I’m saying is,” Stella continues. “Circumstances change. Maybe, under the right ones, your man will decide it’s safe to reveal himself.”
“He’s not my man, but maybe.” I shrug. I don’t need Jason to march at the head of the Pride parade. I just don’t want to be the reason he gets fired from his job, or leaves the church he loves so much. Even if I think his relationship with the Church is more like a neglectful, if not outright abusive, relationship.
But nothing’s going to change about me and Jason today. Probably never, if I’m honest.
I've told myself that before. After the funeral. After Jason completely ignored me at Kelsey's graduation. After every event over the years where he could have seen me watching him—wanting him—but he didn’t.
But this time it feels different. This time, I actually let myself believe it could be something, and now I have to unbelieve it.
“Let’s get back to work,” I tell Stella.
Thirty-Eight
Jason
Two weeks back from Costa Rica and I haven't texted Victor anything else.
It's not that I don't want to. I pick up my phone a dozen times a day, scroll to his name, and stare at our last exchange. The Buffy quotes. The vague sexual innuendo that he immediately got. The Wish I were there with you.
Then I put the phone down and go back to whatever I was doing. Rehearsals with the Saint Sebastian Six. Choir practices. Planning the music for weekday, Saturday vigil, and Sunday Masses. Walking Barnaby around the block in the gray late winter slush. The small, ordinary tasks of my small, ordinary life.
Barnaby follows me from room to room like he's afraid I'll disappear again if he lets me out of his sight. He doesn't ask questions. But he does look at me like I should explain why I spent an entire week in Costa Rica fucking a man and came back unable to talk about it.
The brownstone feels different since I got back. Emptier, somehow, even though nothing has changed. Leah's been gone for fifteen years; Kelsey moved out when she left for college. I've lived alone in this house ever since and I made my peace with that a long time ago.
