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He didn’t answer right away.
I might’ve held my breath.
Then he shifted, sat up a little, and reached over and cupped my cheek with his beefy hand. He turned my face so I had to look at him, and there wasn’t a wall anywhere nearby, just that steady warmth he almost never let all the way out.
“Mark,” he said. “I spent thirty-nine years talking myself out of things, out of wanting, out of reaching, out of every good thing I could ever have. You’re the first thing I didn’t have to talk myself into. You’re the thing I finally stopped talking myself out of.” His thumb moved along my cheekbone. I found myself leaning into his touch, willing it into me. “My father’s voice is my father’s. His fears are his. My mother’s worries are hers. They come from love, but they’re still hers. I’ve spent my whole life carrying other people’s feelings about who I’m allowed to want, and I’m done carrying them. I set them down when I kissed you at that bar, and I’ve never once, not for a second, wanted to pick them back up.”
“But—”
“There’s no but.” He said it plainly, the way he said the truest things. “I’m not okay with you despite what you are. I’m okay with you including it, all of it, the gray, the size, the ghostly paleness that we could do something about.” He chuckled, letting me breathe a little easier with his smile. “Let’s not leave out the fact that you can’t work a phone and the whole aggressively mammalian catastrophe that is Mark Delgado.”
“But—”
He leaned down and kissed me, soft and tender. I nearly melted into a puddle right there in my bed. “Mark, you listen to me, and listen good. There’s nothing to talk myself into. There’s just you and me, and I want you. The only thing I flinch at in a room is the thought of that room without you in it.” His mouth softened. “You’re not a thing I settled for or worked around. You’re the thing I’ve been saying, ‘No,’ to my whole life, and I finally got a lick of sense and said, ‘Yes.’ Don’t you dare lie here worrying you’re a compromise. You’re the opposite of a compromise. You’re the one I broke every rule for and will keep doing so until you walk away.”
My throat had gone tight. “That came out a lot better than mine.”
“I rehearse. You should try it.” He leaned down and kissed me again, slow and sure and completely without hesitation. He kissed me like a man proving a point he’d already made. I felt the last of the worry drain out of me, the small, mean voice that had been whispering, “He’ll wake up and remember what you are.” It just quieted under the weight of a man who’d looked at all of me and said, “Yes,” on purpose.
He was quiet another moment, emptied out in a way I could feel. And then, because he was Dante, because the only way he knew to get off his own subject was to hand the floor to somebody else, he turned it around.
“Your turn,” he said, and I heard him gather himself. “Tell me what really happened with Wes.”
And there it was, my own closed and very well locked door.
Of course, Dante knew Wes existed. Everybody at the bar knew the shape of it, a man I’d loved, a man who’d left, the reason I’d gone quiet and stayed quiet for two years, but the shape wasn’t the story, not really. Dante had just handed me his whole family in the dark, his mother and his father and his brother, and there was no version of me that could accept all that and hand him back a vague shape.
“We met at a resort. Finn dragged me there after winning the trip in a drag show lottery. I was there against my will, being a statue in a lawn chair while Finn narrated my misery to strangers. Oh, did I mention it was a nude resort? Finn left that part out. And before you ask, no, I didn’t get naked.”
Dante smiled against my chest again. My heart did its flippy-flop thing.
“This photographer walked up out of the water with tat sleeves down both arms and no interest whatsoever in whether or not I wanted company.” I felt myself smile at the part that didn’t hurt. “Wes Calloway was a live wire. He was everything I’m not. I planted myself; he moved. I nested; he traveled. He’d been everywhere, Lisbon, Bangkok, some village in Peru he talked about for a year. He collected places the way I collected people. Somehow, the two of us fit anyway. He moved into this house, and Tampa was where his bags stopped between flights. He put his stuff on these walls.” I gestured at the dark, at the brighter rectangles I knew he’d clocked walking in. “We were happy, Dante. It wasn’t a lie that went bad. It was real, and it was good, and I thought it was the rest of my life.”
Dante was listening with his whole still self.
“And then one day, I came home from the bar,” I said, “and he was gone.”
The fan turned.
Somewhere outside, a neighbor’s dog barked.
Dante didn’t move. I don’t even think he breathed.
“There was no fight, no other guy, nothing I could point at. I came home, and his stuff was off the walls, his clothes out of the closets, the bathroom sink emptied of his toiletries. The only trace of him was a note on the kitchen island.” My voice did something on the word “note,” and I let it. “He’d written four lines. Four. That’s all he gave me in parting. He said he loved me, but he couldn’t stop moving. He said he’d known it a while, and he was sorry. He wrote if he stayed, he’d start to disappear, and he didn’t want me to watch that happen. ‘Take care of yourself, Mark,’ he wrote. That was it. The whole thing, four lines on the counter, and I never heard from him again.”
“Never?” Dante’s voice was quiet.
“Never. No forwarding or anything. I don’t know what country he’s in. I don’t know if he’s alive, though I assume he is. The world keeps a man like that, but I don’t know for sure. I guess that’s the part that got me, because I fixed things, or I thought I did. The problem was what I was, and there was nothing to fix. He didn’t do anything wrong, and neither did I. We just wanted different lives. Mine had a foundation, and his had wheels. You can’t fix that. It was over with no reason I could hold in my hand, so I decided I must be the kind of man people leave, that there was something in me a person could love and still walk away from without even looking back. I carried that around for two years.”
Dante’s arm tightened across me.
“There’s more,” I said, because he’d given me all of his, and I wasn’t going to hold back the last piece of mine. “A few weeks ago, right before all this, before you, I went to a bathhouse in search of—well, fuck if I know. That night is its own humiliating story Benji will tell at my funeral. Anyway, I was there, and right when I was about to leave, I saw a man across the swimming pool. I only saw him from behind. He was drying off. He had dark hair, tat sleeves down both arms, and he was standing the way Wes stood.” I heard my voice go careful and sad, and I didn’t try to hide it. “I thought it was him. For one second, I was sure it was Wes, back in Tampa, thirty feet away. And I ran, Dante. I didn’t cross the room, didn’t find out, didn’t call out his name, because if it was him, I knew I’d have to survive it, and if it wasn’t, I’d have to survive being the kind of man who sees a ghost in a stranger’s shoulders. I didn’t want either answer, so I put my head down and fled. I’ll never know if it was him. I made sure I never would.” I let out a breath. “That’s what really happened with Wes. He left a note, and I’ve been haunting bathhouses for the back of his head ever since, like an idiot.”
Dante’s weight shifted, but he didn’t move from my chest.
The fan turned.
I’d said the whole of it out loud for the first time to anyone, and it had cost me something, more than I could’ve imagined. It also weighed less now that it was out in the world instead of locked in my chest.
