Shy (3 page)

“You needed to cheat.”

“Call it what you will.”

Pedro still had his eyes closed but I could hear him growling deep in his throat. Even he was getting mad, God love him. Loyalty wasn’t
completely
dead in the world.

“And the party?” I asked, clipping my syllables like a grumpy florist snipping stems. I already knew the battle was lost, but I wasn’t about to admit defeat with grace.

“Thanks for the coffee, hon,” Jerry muttered, obviously to someone other than myself.

“
Is he there?
” I ranted. “
Is Stanley there? Put the son of a bitch on!
”

From a distance a happy voice lilted through the line as if wafting up from the bottom of a well. “Hi, Tom! Good mo-o-orning! Don’t worry, it’ll be fun! Frank will be there in a couple of hours. Thought you two might like to get to know each other before the party starts!”

My heart immediately stopped thumping. The squirrel must have died. I sat straight up in bed and hissed, “
What did he say?
”

For the first time, Jerry sounded a little uncomfortable. “Well, see, Stanley thought it would be easier for you guys, since you’re both a little shy—Jesus,
there’s
an understatement—to maybe meet each other before the party starts. That way you can come to the party together and you won’t be so rattled about meeting everybody alone.”

“
What do you mean, ‘meeting everybody’? Don’t I know these people? And what did the dick mean when he said, ‘He’ll be there in a couple of hours’? Did he mean here? Is his brother coming here? To my apartment? Uninvited?
”

“He
was
invited. Stanley invited him. I mean,
we
invited him.”

My toes were cold and my ear was twitching again. The squirrel in my chest lurched back to life, stomping around like Bigfoot, kicking ribs and uprooting organs. One unhappy rodent. “Stanley talked you into this, didn’t he?
You
knew it was a bad idea sending his brother over here.
You
knew I’d be upset. But since that’s what Stanley wanted, you decided to let him get away with it. It was easier than arguing, right? You’re such a wuss, Jerry. God, I can’t believe I ever loved you.”

“You still love me.”

“
Not now I don’t!
”

Jerry tsked.
“
Double negative.”

“
Fuck you! What time is he coming? Never mind. It doesn’t matter. I won’t be here. I’m moving.
”

Jerry laughed. “He’ll be there at four. Party’s at eight. I’m sure the two of you will get along just swell. Oh, and one other thing. You might want to lock Pedro in the bedroom. Frank’s allergic to dog hair.”

“
What? What?
”

I heard Stanley chuckling in the background as Jerry hung up the phone. The dick.

I
WAS
out of bed and scrubbing the toilet bowl before my cell phone had stopped sliding down the hallway like a hockey puck. It was sliding down the hallway because that’s where I flung it. I ruin more phones that way.

God, Jerry was infuriating. Stanley was
beyond
infuriating.

There I was in my tighty-whities with my morning hard-on still poking up and a toilet brush in one hand and a can of Comet in the other. Pedro was looking worried and feigning sleep as he squinted at me from the bed through slitted eyes, like maybe I was going to toss him a rag and order him to start cleaning the windows or something.

The apartment was already spotless. I knew that. Aside from the occasional mound of Chihuahua poop, the apartment was
always
spotless. So don’t ask me why I was scrubbing the toilet. I don’t know why I was scrubbing the toilet. It’s just what I do.

During my five years with Jerry, he never once scrubbed the toilet bowl. When I confronted him with that fact, he said he couldn’t scrub the toilet bowl because I was always in the way, scrubbing it myself. If
he
wanted to scrub it, he’d have to go
through
me to
do
it. Please. It’s not like I was
always
scrubbing the toilet bowl. Sometimes I scrubbed the kitchen sink.

Five years ago, I met Jerry at the Brass Rail on a night when, unlike the evening before, I had actually dredged up the courage to sneak my way past the gauntlet of horny gay guys hovering around the front door. Inside, Jerry was leaning against the wall, drink in hand, with his shirt unbuttoned all the way down to his navel, checking out the bar as if it were his own private domain. I had never seen him before in my life. Lord, he was sexy. Trim, black-haired, tall. And green-eyed. It was the eyes that made me fall in love with him. I have a thing for green eyes. Some people like ice cream. I like men with green eyes.

On my seventh cocktail, I found the courage to approach him. Before my eighth cocktail, Jerry and I were in my car heading for the next five years of our lives.

I think he thought my shyness was cute and charming at first. But after a few years, it wasn’t so cute and charming anymore. Too much upkeep on his part. Too many evenings spent at home because I was too nervous, too insecure, too
frightened
to step outside the front door and confront people.

It’s not like I just sat back and accepted the fact I was fucking nuts. I tried group therapy. Too many strangers judging me. I tried one-on-one therapy with a shrink, but it was too expensive. Plus, I was pretty sure the shrink was judging me. I tried a free experimental study with the University of San Diego, where I was introduced to Xanax and the magical world of impotence. Didn’t care for that much. The cure seemed worse than the problem. Plus, the Ethiopian janitor who was always mopping the hallway when I arrived for my evening session seemed to be judging me as I headed for the university’s Lunatic Department. One night I was pretty sure I even heard him snicker.

So here I was, single, resigned to my fate, twenty-seven years old, cleaning my bathroom with a boner that was still poking out like a tent pole, nervous because I was about to meet someone who was (supposedly) cute, (apparently) gay, (probably) a nice person, and (most assuredly) just as screwed-up as I was. You’d think I’d be thrilled to death, but no-o-o-o. Not me. I’ve spent my whole life looking gift horses in the mouth. Not likely to stop now.

After the toilet bowl, I scrubbed the sink, bleached the tub, emptied the hamper, threw the clothes in the washing machine, dusted all the picture frames throughout the apartment, also the tops of all the light bulbs, then I hunkered down and dusted everything else with lemony furniture polish until I could hardly breathe for the fumes, vacuumed (twice), fluffed up the throw pillows, watered the plants and wiped their leaves, changed the sheets on the bed in my room
and
the guest room, realigned the throw rugs using everything but a yardstick and a carpenter’s plane to get them straight, shook out the doggy bed, flapped the curtains a bit in case they were dusty too, then I headed for the kitchen and attacked it like G.I. Joe hitting Omaha Beach. That took another hour.

When I was finished, the apartment looked absolutely pristine and my hard-on was long gone.

One job left. I washed the dog. Pedro’s least favorite thing in the whole wide world. He paid me back by peeing on the couch. No sulky silences for him. Revenge, that was his motto.

I spent another ten minutes scrubbing the couch then blowing it dry with my blow-dryer.

After one last glare in Pedro’s direction, I jumped in the shower, did the ablutions thing, jumped back out, dried off, threw on a pair of my rattiest, most comfortable sweatpants, and went to my desk where I sat down to write a note. “Dear Frank. Sorry I missed you. Even sorrier your brother’s a dick.” I taped the note to the front door, slammed and relocked the door, went to the kitchen to build myself a ham, beef, tomato, lettuce, potato chip, pickle and mayo sandwich on rye, ate it standing at the sink so I wouldn’t make crumbs, polishing it off in nothing flat while Pedro stood below begging for scraps and intermittently humping my leg, then I stood there for five minutes rescrubbing the sink. I went to the door, tore off the note, wadded it up and threw it in the wastebasket. Then I pulled it from the wastebasket, smoothed it out, read it again, sighed, and wadded it up once more and threw it back in.

Then I collapsed on the sofa because I was so damned tired I couldn’t see straight but had to jump back up because the sofa was still damp where I had cleaned the dog pee from it earlier. So glaring once more at Pedro, who was busy licking his nuts and not giving two hoots that I was glaring at him, not that he ever did, I dropped into my new chair, the one Pedro had pooped on the night before, and settled in to think about what I was going to do.

I thought about it so long that I fell asleep sitting there half naked in nothing but my scruffy, baggy sweatpants, and I only woke up when the doorbell rang.

Holy Mother of God! It couldn’t be four o’clock! It was. Four o’clock to the minute. Apparently time passes at a different clip for insane people. Funny I hadn’t figured that out earlier.

Not knowing what else to do, I unlocked the front door, took a deep breath, and yanked it open.

The young man standing on my doorstep looking nervous and fidgeting around was not only gorgeous, but it took me all of two seconds to realize he had green eyes. Green eyes surrounded by long black lashes. My bête noire. Oh Lord.

Neither of us said a word. He eyed my bare tummy and drooping sweatpants while I stood there lost in those fabulous green eyes.

It wasn’t until I began to think that one of us should be saying
something
,
that I noticed the suitcase in his hand.

Green eyes or not, I didn’t much care for the look of
that
.

W
E
BOTH
said “Hi” at the same time. Then we both stopped and apologized at the same time for interrupting each other. I was reminded of Chandler Bing on
Friends
. “Could this
be
any more uncomfortable?”

I’ll say one thing for Frank Wells. He. Is. Beautiful. Perhaps a little shorter that I like, but put together very, very nicely. Black hair flopping around on his forehead. Olive skin. Fuzzy arms. And a really sweet face, with a tiny cleft in the chin and one dimple on his right cheek. There was no physical resemblance at all to his brother, the dick. That was a nice bonus.

And those eyes. The irises were as green as the gleam of sunlight through a young leaf. The black lashes surrounding them were thick and long and dark as kohl. The whites were so healthy and clear as to seem tinged with blue.

It took me a minute to pull back from the shock of those light green eyes, and to stop admiring them long enough to see the discomfort and the
fear
that was lurking in their depths. Good grief. The guy was scared to death. The only word I could think of to describe how Frank Wells looked as he stood there on my doorstep was—lost. The guy looked lost. He was still staring at my bare stomach, but he didn’t seem to be staring with any sense of interest. He wasn’t cruising. There were no lascivious thoughts going on inside his head, dammit, or at least I didn’t think there were. My bare tummy and sagging sweatpants were only a place for him to direct those perfect eyes to avoid looking me in the face. I
hoped
he liked what he saw, but there was certainly no hint of it in his manner.

I understood the lost look on Frank Wells’s face instinctively. I knew exactly what that aversion of the eyes signified. I have known myself to do the same thing a million times, to look everywhere but at the face of the person in front of me, to be absolutely incapable of doing anything else. It’s not just a matter of fear, but the result of a deeply imbedded doubt in one’s own self-worth. I also understood instinctively that Frank’s discomfort at our meeting was greater than any discomfort I had ever labored under in similar circumstances, and that his opinion of himself was lower than my opinion of myself had
ever
been. This guy’s anxiety problems made mine look positively inconsequential. I whined and railed and kowtowed to SAD. Frank Wells truly
suffered
from it. The simple fact that he had brought himself to my doorstep was an incredible act of courage on his part. That much I knew for a fact. And it had only taken a second for me to realize it.

The man was an open book. With a really nice cover.

Suddenly, it was very, very important to me to put the guy at ease. It actually hurt me to see him so damned uncomfortable. My mothering instinct took over before I even knew I had one.

I reached out and grasped his hand. In his surprise, he dropped the suitcase from the other hand. When it hit the landing, it sounded heavy, like maybe everything the kid had packed up and hauled away from Indiana was squeezed into that one beat-up old piece of Samsonite luggage.

Before he could reach for it, I scooped it up, swallowing a grunt when I did—the damn thing must have weighed fifty pounds—and pulled Frank and his worldly possessions through the door, not unlike the proverbial spider and the poor innocent fly.

A look of surprise shot across the young man’s face as I dragged him into my living room, and then that look of surprise twisted itself into a bewildered grin, when he looked down to see Pedro humping his leg, something I rather wished I had thought of first.

Frank Wells bent down and kindly wagged a finger in Pedro’s humping face as if to say, “Now, now, mustn’t do that.”

Only then did I remember the guy was allergic to dogs. Oh, well. Too late to do anything about it now. If he started sneezing I’d give him a hanky.

To my amazement, Pedro released Frank’s leg, looked up into his face with what can only be described as a shamefaced moue—rather like a child with his hand caught in the cookie jar—then gave his tail an apologetic little shake. And he did all this while still humping the empty air. It always took a while for Pedro’s motor to die down.