“That’s great,” Matt told him but then turned back to me. “Mind if I sit down for a minute?”
“Of course I don’t mind.”
He slid into the booth next to me. “Jared, I owe you an apology for what happened at dinner—”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“My dad—”
“I don’t really care what your dad thinks of me, Matt. You were right. He’s an angry, belligerent, antagonistic asshole.”
“Eventually you’ll learn that I’m usually right.” His eyes crinkled, like he was almost laughing, so I knew that was a joke. “No hard feelings then?”
“None at all.”
“Thanks, Jared.” He sounded enormously relieved and clapped me on the back hard enough to knock the wind out of me. “You know, we’ve got a table over there. Why don’t you boys come and join us?”
I looked in the direction he was pointing. Two cops and three women. In other words, complete hell. One look at Ringo’s face told me he wasn’t any more excited about the idea than I was.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Sure it is! Come on! Save me, please. I’m not sure how I got sucked into this dinner. I thought I was having drinks with the guys, and now I find out I’m on a blind date.”
“Jesus!” I laughed at him. “Then I’m really not going over there!”
“Can I stay here then?” He gave me the look I was starting to think of as the pseudosmile: one eyebrow cocked, the corner of his mouth twitching up.
“You’re joking, right?”
He rubbed a hand over his close-cropped dark hair and said tiredly, “Only partially.”
“Is she that bad?” I looked over at the table. One of the women was definitely keeping her eye on him. She was decent looking, with red hair that was obviously dyed.
“I’m sure she’s very nice,” he said quietly, “but we have absolutely nothing to say to one another. I’ve just sat through the most awkward forty minutes of small talk ever. I’ll have more fun if you’re there. Just come over, and we can talk football until they get bored and leave.”
“Matt, there’s no way those guys are going to accept me sitting with them.”
“Sure they will.” But he didn’t sound sure.
“They won’t. Are you going to tell me that they haven’t already given you a hard time for hanging out with me?”
I could tell by the flush in his cheeks that I was right, but he didn’t give up. “That’s part of the point, Jared. Maybe if you spent some time with them, they would realize—”
“Trust me. It’s a bad idea. Anyway, I owe Ringo here a celebration pizza.”
He glanced over at Ringo in surprise, as if he had forgotten he was there, but then conceded with a dramatic sigh. “Fine. Send me to my doom. They won’t leave me alone until I’m engaged. I’ll send you an invitation to the wedding.”
“I would offer to host your bachelor party, but I don’t think you’d like my choice of strippers.”
He actually laughed at that. I had never heard him laugh before, and I foolishly found myself thinking that it was the most wondrous sound in the world. “See? I told you. You’re more fun.”
CHAPTER 9
A WEEK later, Matt showed up on my doorstep just after five o’clock. He still had his uniform on. I was glad to see him.
“Let’s go,” he said as soon as I opened the door. “I’ll buy you dinner.”
Once we were in the Jeep, he said, “I need to stop by my place on the way. I want to change.” I hadn’t been to his house yet and was curious to see how he lived.
It turned out that he didn’t live in a house at all. He pulled up in front of a strip of apartments. Had it been bigger, it might have been called a condo. It was a long narrow rectangle of white brick, containing four claustrophobic one-bedroom flats.
We walked in the door, and I was stunned by the sterile emptiness of the place. Most of the tiny living room was taken up by one of those giant strength-building home gyms you see on TV. In addition to that, there was one metal folding chair, an old wooden end table (being used as a coffee table, in front of the one chair), and a TV sitting on a milk crate. And it was the cleanest bachelor pad I had ever seen.
“Wow. Nice place. The prison cell motif is really working for you. Very feng shui.”
He gave me the pseudo-smile: cocked eyebrow and one side of his mouth twitching up. “Here I’ve been thinking you weren’t really gay, and then you go and use words like ‘motif’ and ‘feng shui.’” I had to laugh at that. “Make yourself at home,” he called over his shoulder as he went into the bedroom to change.
The cliché sentiment sounded ridiculous; nothing had ever felt less like a home.
Behind the living room, next to what passed for a kitchen, was a nook that couldn’t quite be called a dining room. It held a rickety card table and another metal folding chair. But I was surprised to see that the entire back wall was taken up by a large book case stuffed full to bursting. I walked over to browse the titles. They were crammed in every which way, but I soon realized that they were sorted by genre and were roughly alphabetical by author. Talk about neat and tidy. One shelf was law-related, police procedurals, and criminal justice textbooks. Then more non-fiction, mostly related to war and the military, but also a few biographies and a huge assortment of fiction—mystery, horror, sci-fi, Westerns, and even a few graphic novels.
Matt emerged from the bedroom, dressed in his usual jeans and T-shirt. He stood beside me, tall and straight with his hands behind his back, looking at those books. I felt like I had found a tiny window into his heart. Or a shrine, but I didn’t know to what.
“You never struck me as much of a reader.”
He was silent for a moment and then said quietly, “I’m alone a lot. Sometimes it’s hard to fill the hours.”
Those words and the hint of tired resignation in his voice, struck a chord inside me—they echoed my own loneliness so completely. “I know exactly what you mean.”
And in that moment, something passed between us. We didn’t speak, but I knew we both felt it. It wasn’t anything as trite or romantic as finding one’s soul mate. It was simply a silent recognition that we truly were kindred spirits. That we had both been alone for a long time and maybe we didn’t need to be anymore.
“SO YOUR family doesn’t mind that you’re gay.” It was more a statement than a question.
We were at Tony’s. Matt refused to go to Mamacita’s, where he risked running into Cherie. It wasn’t really much better here. I was sure we were the only table that had two waitresses rushing to serve us. He didn’t seem to notice.
“It bothered my dad a little. He thought, like you did, that I just hadn’t tried hard enough. He would actually say things like, ‘You just need to take one or two out for a test drive, son.’ My mom took it pretty well. But sometimes it makes her sad, because she knows I’ll be missing out on having kids. And she hates seeing me alone. Brian does his best to be cool with it, although it still freaks him out a bit, I think. Back when I came out, he was the one I was most worried about. I always looked up to him, and I was sure he would hate me. I decided that he had to be the first person I told, and it took me forever to get up the nerve. So, I took him out to a bar—I had just turned twenty-one—and had a couple of drinks to get up my courage, and I finally said, ‘Brian, I’m gay.’ And, he laughed. He actually laughed, and said, ‘No kidding, kid? Did you finally figure it out?’” I laughed again, thinking back on it. Of course Brian, who always kept his eye on me, had figured it out sometime between my Steve Atwater outburst and my infatuation with his best friend and my twenty-first birthday. “It was all rather anticlimactic, but it was also a relief to know that I hadn’t changed in his estimation. I couldn’t have handled that.”