Taking Chances (11 page)

Matt assured me everything was okay, but it was pretty obvious it wasn’t. His family spent the rest of the night talking and catching up while Matt sat in the corner and nursed his eggnog. John let out a huge yawn and announced it was time for him to hit the sack, and the rest of us used it as a signal the night was over.

“I’m going to stay over at Tyler’s,” Matt told his parents as they cleared the dishes out of the dining room.

His dad raised an eyebrow but said nothing, while his mom tried to pretend she didn’t care but hid a smile nonetheless. “Well then, you boys be safe,” Mr. Wallace said after a few seconds. Matt got red and his father coughed. “I meant getting home.” They both tried to recover from their embarrassment while all of us tried to figure out what to say next.

“It was nice seeing you again, Mr. Wallace,” I said, trying to break the tension.

“It’s great seeing you too, Tyler,” he replied, quickly shaking my hand. “Say hi to your father next time you talk.”

“I will, thanks,” I assured him as Matt ran upstairs to grab a change of clothes.

Mrs. Wallace reappeared from the kitchen with a covered plate. “I packed you some leftovers,” she explained as she handed me the dish. “No one should be without a home-cooked meal around Christmas.”

I might have argued with her if her cooking wasn’t as good as it was. Instead, I thanked her and took the plate. “Thank you, ma’am, this is very nice of you.”

Mr. Wallace looked at her. “Ma’am? Someone raised the boy right.”

I chuckled at that. “My dad is big on manners.”

Just then, Matt clattered downstairs carrying a duffel bag. “I’m ready.”

“Thank you again for having me over,” I said to them. “It was very nice of you.”

“If we were nice, we would have waited until you weren’t here to fight,” Mrs. Wallace said pleasantly. “You boys have a good time.”

“But not
that
good a time,” his father added. He glanced at Mrs. Wallace, and they both smiled mischievously. I think they’d waited a long time to be able to say that to Matt, and they were enjoying it.

We, on the other hand, headed for the door before we died of embarrassment

The night air was crisp and we walked quickly back to my house. If it had been any farther away than a couple of blocks, the cold would have been damned uncomfortable. I had the advantage of a warm plate full of leftovers to keep my hands from turning into ice cubes. Matt shoved his hands into his jacket pockets and kept up with me, walking silently. I could tell he had a lot on his mind, but he didn’t say anything until my house was within sight. “Do you think I’m making a mistake?” he finally asked me.

“In coming over?” I asked him back, confused.

“In the whole thing, I just don’t know what I’m doing with my life anymore. Every decision I make usually ends up being the wrong one. Then that decision leads to another decision and another until I’m stuck with a big pile of steaming….”

I had heard rants like this before, usually coming from my own mouth. There were days I felt like I was the worst-case scenario of my life than the actual person living it. Like if you had looked at my life and came up with every bad decision a person could make without dying, that would be me. I wasn’t a real person, I was a cautionary tale for another me somewhere when the ghosts of Christmas Past showed up. But my meeting Matt felt different. Better. I wanted him to know it too.

So I kissed him.

At first, he didn’t react. Then, slowly, he began to melt into me, responding to the caress and, hopefully, forgetting about his unhappiness for one small second. I unlocked my front door and dragged him inside. Still kissing and nuzzling and nipping each other’s necks, we kicked the door shut, dropped our jackets, left the plate of food on the little chair in the hall, and headed for my room upstairs. By the time we made it there, we had left a trail of clothes on the steps. I kicked my bedroom door open and backed in, still kissing him.

I turned him around and pushed him back onto my bed. For the moment, I smiled and forgot about all my doubts and fears. Pulling off my shirt, I moved toward him, giving way to the desire I’d felt since I saw him in the store.

We stopped just before actual intercourse, not from lack of interest but because we both ended up finishing well before things got that far. Normally that wouldn’t have been an issue, but instead of working ourselves into another session of sex, we lay there with each other. He curled himself into my arms and I held him close, just enjoying the feeling of someone sleeping next to me.

And it hit me, right at that moment, at that very second. I was happy. I was truly and completely happy. There was a contentedness in my heart I hadn’t felt in… well, ever.

Which was, of course, the very instant I started to panic.

“I’
LL
move? Who the fuck says that?” I whined into my cell phone.

Sophia’s laugh was half Margaret Hamilton from
The Wizard of Oz
and half Maleficent, voiced by the flawless Eleanor Audley in
Sleeping Beauty
. “Apparently you do, cupcake!” Her cackle was pure evil and chilled me to the bone even though she was thousands of miles away.

I normally hated her more than the Republican Party, Fox News, and those stretch pants that look like jeans combined, but never more so than when she was right. And once again, she was fucking right.

I had been in lust with the boy who lived down the street since I was old enough to know what lust meant but had never done anything about it as a teen. I had built this entire fantasy around who this boy was and what he would be like if I met him, so much so that it had ended up screwing up any actual relationships I’d tried to have. Now we’d ended up spending Christmas and the next few days after together, acting as if we’d been a couple forever and everything was perfect.

Except the ghost of my words, “I’ll move.”

“What am I going to do?” I moaned into the phone, hoping my voice didn’t carry outside my room and wake my parents. It was already midnight in Foster. People who were awake at midnight in Foster were treading into something akin to no-man’s land as far as the general populace was concerned. Since only bad could come from no-man’s land, being awake and doing strange things like making phone calls was considered a mortal sin, even if your body was still on California time.

“You think Obama has a witness relocation program for hopeless gay people?” she asked, far too much satisfaction in her voice.

“I hate you,” I snapped, using the word since it had the distinct honor of simultaneously being both honest and succinct. “Do you think he knows I was joking?” I asked in exactly the tone a blonde bimbo in a B-grade horror flick uses when she calls “Is anyone out there” to a darkened room right after she’s had slutty sex with her rebel boyfriend on a dare. It wasn’t so much a question as it was a declaration of my own mortality, because I knew the truth was out there in the darkness, just waiting to pounce on me.

“I am sure he’s out registering at Bath, Barn and Beyond or whatever hick-ass stores you guys have out there.” Sophia’s mutant ability allowed her to make even the most insulting of comments without enraging her target. “So have you screwed yet?” she asked. I pictured her leaning forward, one of her Lee press-on nails in her teeth as she waited breathlessly for my answer.

“You
do
know someday a fresh-faced teenager is going to throw a bucket of water on you, right?” I replied somewhat weakly after a few seconds.

“That’s a no!” she howled. I felt what was left of my patience dwindle to zero.

“This is serious!” I exclaimed over her hysterics. Her lack of empathy was seriously frustrating me.

Before she could answer, the wall to my right tried to cave in under the force of my father’s fist. His muffled, but unmistakably angry, voice called out, “Matthew! Do you have any idea what time it is?”

Suddenly I was twelve years old again. “Sorry, Dad!” I called out to the wall.

“This is serious!” I hissed into the phone, while images of my dad bursting into the room to tell me that tomorrow was a school day danced in front of my eyes. “What am I going to do?” I stood by my door and listened for my father’s footsteps.

“Have you, I don’t know, tried
talking
to him about it?”

“Talking is what got me into this trouble in the first place!” I whispered harshly into the phone, my paranoia making phantom sounds come from under my door.

“Honey, you have to talk to him.” Sophia’s voice lowered into unfamiliar territory, sounding almost sympathetic. “What if he’s freaking out as bad as you are?”

I sighed and slid down the door until I sat listlessly on the floor. “No one can be freaking out more than I am right now,” I said quietly.

“I
AM
seriously freaking out.”

Linda laughed as she signaled the bartender for a couple more beers. “You’ve been saying that for almost a week now, Tyler,” she commented above the music. “Is it that bad?”

I shrugged as Pete slid a cold beer in front of me. “I’m of two minds,” I said, taking a long swallow of Shiner Bock.

We walked back to our table, maneuvering between the small clumps of people dancing to the music from the jukebox. “So one mind says?” she asked once we sat back down.

“He’s awesome and I love spending time with him,” I admitted truthfully.

“Considering this is the first time I’ve seen you guys apart since you hooked up, I would say that’s a no-brainer.”

She was right. Matt had spent every night with me since Christmas and so far, it had been incredible. I felt uncharacteristically domestic, but being domestic had its points.

“But?” she prompted me out of my silence. “The other brain says?”

I tried not to look panicked as I answered. “Who says they’ll move before we even have a date?”

“Maybe it was a joke?” she offered, though the expression on her face made it clear she didn’t believe it either.

“A joke usually has a punch line; this was a statement,” I said, taking an even longer drink of my beer. “What if he’s serious?”

This time she shrugged. “What if he is? Would that be so bad?”

I put my head on the table as I moaned. “I don’t know.”

She put a hand on my shoulder in sympathy. “You know, you can’t be a slut your entire life.” I looked up in shock, and she burst out laughing in response. “I’m kidding!” she added quickly. “Tyler, if you had asked me before Christmas, I would have said you were the one man this side of the Mississippi in most need of a good lay. I think you and Matt are a good thing.”

“We just met,” I protested, wondering when exactly I ended up sounding so whiny.

“And?” she countered. “You’ve known each other since we were kids.”

That was true and false at the same time, and she knew it.

Matt and his brothers were legendary in their day as kings of high school football around Foster. The Wallace brothers were, as I have put it once, sex in sneakers, and most of my teenage life had been spent fantasizing about one or more of them.

“This is just too fast,” I said to the table.

“Can I ask you a question and not get my head bit off?” she asked after a few seconds. I nodded. “He said this before Christmas. Why are you freaking about it now? I mean, has he even brought it up again?”

He hadn’t said a word about it, but I knew it was on his mind as well. It was like an elephant that sat between us on the couch as we watched TV. A giant, uncomfortable elephant that refused to go away but neither one of us wanted to talk about.

Linda said nothing as I sat there with my head down, wondering why this was freaking me out so much. When I didn’t think, which had been most of this week, everything was great. We had enjoyed exploring ourselves as a couple, which was a completely new thing for me, since the longest relationship I had ever been in was a year and a half, and that had been with a woman. Guys had fallen into the hit-and-run category and lately not even that. When I lived in Florida, I had cruised the web for hookups with other closeted guys and had done pretty well, if I do say so myself.

And then my knee exploded and I moved back to Foster.

I didn’t so much hit a dry spell as I realized I had moved into a desert. The closest place that even had a gay bar was a drive away and, after Riley, I was terrified to step foot into it again.

Crap, I hadn’t finished explaining that to you, had I?

O
KAY
, so for a while things were pretty cool, because I had gay friends for the first time in my life. Riley would call me a couple of days a week and ask if I wanted to head up to the Bear’s Den with him and Robbie. Which was an incredible gesture on Riley’s part, because he had to know I would have never gone without them. Robbie never said a word to me, but I had the sense he was just barely tolerating me always going with them. However, for Riley’s sake, he was staying quiet.

That alone should have won him a Nobel peace prize in my book.

They slowly immersed me in gay culture, coaxing the real me out of the closet step-by-step with equal parts of alcohol, music, and promises of sexual encounters with guys that lasted more than one night, which would be one more night than the ones I’d had before. It was a hard sell, but they kept at it; Riley coaxed me with social carrots, and Robbie wielded a pretty sharp verbal stick when I balked.

“You do know you aren’t getting any younger, right?” he’d say to me when I tried to find an excuse for not going. “You’re, like, a couple of years away from your body realizing it’s midnight and then, trust me, you’re going to wish you’d used what you had when you had it.”

I would give him a wry grin. “And what exactly do I have?”

In return I’d get a small pause and a not-small glare and sneer. “Fuck you. I am not feeding that already Godzilla-sized ego you possess. Stay here and get old.
We
are going out.”

I’d follow him and Riley out to their car. “No, come on, tell me what I have now! I want to hear you say it.”