M4M

by Rick R. Reed

  Table of Contents

  Blurb

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Part One: 2008

  VGL MALE SEEKS SAME

  Part Two: 2009

  NEG UB2

  Part Three: 2017

  STATUS UPDATES

  More from Rick R. Reed

  Readers love Rick R. Reed

  About the Author

  By Rick R. Reed

  Visit Dreamspinner Press

  Copyright

  M4M

  By Rick R. Reed

  Includes brand new novella, “Status Updates."

  Finding and keeping love can be a challenge in the modern world of blogging, social media, and online dating, as one man will learn in this trilogy.

  VGL Male Seeks Same

  Poor Ethan Schwartz. At forty-two, he’s alone, his bed is empty, and his HDTV is overworked. He’s tried bars and other places where gay men are supposed to find each other, but it never works out. Maybe he should get a cat?

  But his life is about to change…

  NEG UB2

  Poor Ethan. He’s received the most shocking news a gay man can get—he’s HIV positive. Until today his life was perfect, with a job he loves and Brian, who could be “the one.” The one to complete him and fill his lonely life with laughter, hot sex, and romance.

  But Ethan’s in for another shock. Could Brian have infected him?

  STATUS UPDATES

  Alone again, Ethan wonders if life is worth living, even with a cat. When an old nemesis sends a Facebook friend request, Ethan is suspicious but intrigued. It seems this old acquaintance has turned his life around, and the changes might hold the key to Ethan getting a new lease on life… and love.

  First Edition published with only VGL Male Seeks Same and NEG UB2 by Amber Quill Press/Amber Allure, 2009.

  For Bruce and our M4M relationship that has so beautifully worked out.

  Acknowledgments

  GRATEFUL THANKS to Amber Quill Press, who originally published the first two stories in this trilogy. And to Dreamspinner Press, my publishing family, for giving it a new home. I’d also like to extend a grateful shout-out to Lynn West for suggesting I write a new third part to this story.

  Part One: 2008

  VGL MALE SEEKS SAME

  ETHAN SCHWARTZ was alone. At forty-two, the state of being alone was almost like having another person by his side, a person he was growing to know more and more intimately with each passing night in his too-big-for-one bed. In fact, Ethan sometimes wondered if being alone was his natural state of being. Perhaps it was simply his fate to spend his evenings in front of his brand-new forty-two-inch Toshiba HDTV, watching classic 1940s movies from an endless queue at Netflix.

  He wondered if his life would ever change. Maybe he would continue to go to work at his job as a publicist for several Chicago theater companies, come home about seven o’clock, nuke a Lean Cuisine, fall asleep in front of the TV, and repeat the routine until he expired.

  He had thought, as he tossed in bed at night, in those endlessly stretching hours slogging their way toward dawn, of getting a dog or even a cat. He envisioned himself walking into his apartment door at night, greeted by a French bulldog’s grin or the slightly harlotish leg rub of a Maine coon. But an animal just didn’t seem like—well, it just didn’t seem like enough.

  In the above scenario, he also imagined a man coming in the same door minutes later and Ethan getting the four-legged companion riled up by saying “Daddy’s home!” No, Ethan knew—in his heart of hearts—he wanted an animal of the two-legged variety, one who would talk back to him, one he could spend long autumn weekends in Door County with, one he could take out to dinner parties and bring home to his family at Christmas. He wanted an animal that wouldn’t shed and would need little housebreaking. Well, at least not much. At forty-two, Ethan had lowered expectations.

  He also dreaded the thought of subjecting some poor tabby or Boston terrier to a solitary existence much like his own. After all, the stand-in-for-a-boyfriend pet would spend most of its time roaming the apartment by his or her lonesome and staring mournfully out the window because of Ethan’s long hours at work.

  He knew from experience that subjecting an unsuspecting animal to an existence akin to his own would be cause for calling out the SPCA.

  So Ethan would have to go on dreaming of meeting Mr. Right in human form and continue to watch as those dreams faded into wispy gossamer as the years relentlessly marched toward old age. Already Ethan found it necessary to use a moisturizer on his face and a depilatory on his back. His dark brown hair he kept buzzed close to his skull in an effort to minimize its traitorous thinning. Starting at around age thirty-two, every year he’d added a pound or two to his five-foot-ten-inch frame, and every year that pound or two became harder and harder to lose, in spite of long, sweaty hours on the treadmill or a diet consisting chiefly of the frozen culinary delights of the people at Smart Choice, Lean Cuisine, or South Beach Diet.

  Heading toward middle age sucked… especially when you were doing it alone.

  Tonight Ethan dug in the Doritos bag for one remaining chip of decent size while glued to the adventures of Ugly Betty. Why couldn’t he at least find a nice nerd, as Betty once had? Why couldn’t he at least have a little drama at work, like the Mexican magazine assistant faced every single day of her charmed life? Ethan’s days were spent trying to chat up theater critics in hopes of persuading them to write a review or feature on whatever play he was pushing that week. Or he holed up in his cube and wrote the same press release over and over, with only the titles, venues, and dates changed. When he had taken the job ten years ago, he’d thought the free nights out at the theater would be a great way to get dates. He’d assumed he would meet lots of handsome actors, and they would all want to cozy up to the publicist who could get them so much press.

  He’d thought wrong.

  Ethan got up and shut off the TV and threw his Doritos bag in the trash. He stretched and looked out the window. His move to this North Side Chicago neighborhood had been another misguided romantic maneuver, one that started full of hope and confidence and had been dashed by cold reality. He felt even more isolated and alone as he looked down from his studio apartment on Halsted Street, the blocks between Belmont and Addison that Chicagoans referred to as Boystown. When he had rented the little studio above a gay bookstore a decade ago, he had reasoned that wrangling a date would be no more difficult than hanging out his third story window with a smoldering gaze and a come-hither pout.

  He had reasoned wrong.

  Shortly after Ethan had moved in and hung his first Herb Ritts poster, Boystown had begun quickly gentrifying itself. Most of the gays moved farther north to Andersonville or even Rogers Park. Sure, gay bars still lined the street, and the teeming throngs continued to taunt him with luscious examples of masculinity on the prowl, but it had been a long time since one of the minions had made his way up the creaking stairs to Ethan’s studio.

  Oh, he supposed he could throw on some jeans, T-shirt, and his Asics and run across the street to Roscoe’s or any of the other watering holes lining the rainbow-pyloned avenue, but he had been to that dry well too many times to even consider it. Every year, it seemed, there was a new crop of gorgeous twentysomethings laughing and drinking… and practiced in the art of ignoring nice but nondescript men like Ethan. One could only endure so long the hours of standing against a wall, Stella Artois in hand, trying to look approachable and then never being approached. It didn’t do much for the ego.

  And it didn’t do much for the wallet. Or the self-esteem. Or certainly the romantic, or even sex, life.

  No, the bars had long ago lost their allure, becoming more and more an exclusive club for younger gays looking to hook up, or dance, or text message eac
h other… or whatever other ways they found these days to make Ethan feel old. Besides, Ethan hoped for a more meaningful connection.

  And with each gray hair, each crow’s-foot and laugh line stamped upon his features, he despaired of ever finding it.

  He padded into the little bathroom and gasped as a cockroach beat a hasty retreat into a crack between the baseboard and linoleum-tiled floor. He shook his head and thought that even the bugs wanted nothing to do with him.

  He looked at his tired face in the mirror and laughed. “Jesus,” he said to his reflection, “you’re pathetic.” He held his aging mug up to the light cast by the overhead fixture and said, “What’s wrong with everybody? You’re not so old. You’re not so bad.” And indeed, Ethan spoke the truth. He looked every bit of his forty-two years, but that was still pretty young, wasn’t it? Didn’t somebody at the office just yesterday say something about forty being the new thirty? And his face, while certainly not Brad Pitt sexy, was pleasing, with a nice cleft in his chin, a strong nose, and deep blue eyes framed by long black lashes. His lips were a bit thin—a gift from his German father—and he could probably use some sun to give his pasty complexion a little pizzazz, but all in all, it wasn’t a face one would run from, screaming into the night. It was every bit as cute as a Tom Hanks or Will Ferrell.

  Ethan pulled his toothbrush from the medicine cabinet and decorated its bristles with orange gel—when had toothpaste gone orange?—and gave his teeth a savage brushing, even though his dentist always admonished him about that, telling him a slow, gentle course was the way, lest he wanted to erode his gums entirely away. But Ethan had never been able to dissuade himself from the idea that the harder the brush, the whiter the teeth.

  He spit and wiped his mouth on the hand towel and headed back into the common area to pull out his queen-size—hush!—futon for another night of lonely slumber.

  Tomorrow, he thought, he had to do something about his depressing state. And he did not mean moving out of Illinois. Somewhere there had to be a companion for him, just waiting. His dream man wasn’t in all the places he had fruitlessly checked, like the bars, backstage, and in his office. But he was out there, and like Ethan, he too was pulling the covers up by himself and thinking the answer to the riddle of how to escape a solitary existence was just within reach.

  Just before he fell asleep, he wondered if his mystery man also cynically told himself the same thing every night.

  “Shut up!” Ethan cried into the darkness. And then whispered, muffled into his pillow, “Tomorrow will be different. I just know it.”

  AND IT was. Ethan was just finishing a victorious game of Spider Solitaire in his cubicle at LA Nicholes and Associates, the entertainment publicity firm where he toiled, when he overheard the office receptionist—a bleached-blond waif of a boy no older than twenty—talking to the payroll clerk.

  “Girl, if it worked for me, it can work for you!” The receptionist, even though he ostensibly possessed a penis and a supply of God-given testosterone, had a voice Ethan would swear was an octave above that of Miss Beverly Sills. “I have met, like, so many guys on this site. I have, like, a jillion dates lined up. I don’t know how I’m going to find time to come in to work!”

  The receptionist and the payroll clerk did what seemed to be a carefully choreographed twitter duet. Ethan stared at his screen, moving a queen onto a king, and listened as the receptionist waxed rhapsodic about an online dating site he had found. He had shrieked that it “wasn’t like all the others,” that it “was more than just for quick hookups, like so many of those sites, okay?” and that it was simply “a lonely girl’s best friend.”

  That was all Ethan needed to hear. Well, no, actually, that was not all. And even though Ethan could stand no more Spider Solitaire or Free Cell and was more than ready to call it an honest day’s work, he had to sit in his cubicle for twenty minutes more while “Bubbles,” as he secretly called the receptionist, prattled on about this wondrous—and apparently no-name—dating site. Finally, frustrated and absolutely unable to endure one more hand of Hearts, Ethan stood and peered over the wall.

  Almost immediately, the blond receptionist swiveled his head around to peer at Ethan. “Yes?” he hissed. The payroll clerk, a portly woman of Latina heritage, eyed him with suspicion. Together, they both seemed to be saying “How dare you interrupt us?” with their eyes.

  Ethan applied his most sheepish grin and began to stammer, “Sorry to interrupt, but I couldn’t help but overhear what you were saying… you know, about that dating site. But I didn’t catch the name of it.”

  The blond and the Latina exchanged knowing glances, and Ethan, even though he would never claim psychic abilities, could read their minds quite well, thank you. They were telepathically saying:

  “And who does Miss Mary over there think she is?” Bubbles asked.

  Latina replied, “I don’t know, but if she thinks she’s going to have the same kind of success that you did just because she logs on, she better think again.”

  Snap!

  “Hello?” Bubbles was staring at Ethan, head quizzically cocked, and Ethan grinned, realizing he had let his imagination run away with him. He might have just missed his only chance to learn the name of the dating site in question, the one that apparently had men lining up for the affections of a nelly nineteen-year-old who probably didn’t weigh more than a hundred pounds sopping wet and whose dubious intellect most likely rivaled that of a Chihuahua.

  “Sorry? I missed that.” Ethan felt heat rising from his neck to his face.

  Bubbles closed his eyes and held them shut for a beat to indicate his distaste for, and impatience with, his coworker. Speaking slowly, as if he were talking to someone hearing-impaired, Bubbles enunciated carefully, “The name of the site is bootycall dot com.”

  The Latina held a hand over her mouth to artlessly—and unsuccessfully—hide her giggles. Ethan noticed her nails were shellacked a lurid red, topped with dragon designs, and so long they curved back at the top. And this woman managed to handle the challenges of a computer keyboard?

  “Oh, okay,” Ethan said, staring down once more at his monitor, which had gone to a screensaver of Barbara Stanwyck movie posters. Sorry, Wrong Number seemed like an apt title at the moment. Ethan might be possessed of a dazzling intellect, but even he knew when his leg was being unkindly pulled. He had just sat back down and was powering off when Bubbles’s voice fluttered over the beige partition. “It’s wingpeople dot com.”

  Ethan perked up. “That’s a funny name. Where did they come up with that?”

  “How should I know?” There was silence as the Latina presumably walked away and Bubbles returned to his own game of Solitaire, miffed at being disturbed when it was so obvious he was hard at work.

  “I’ll let you know how it all works out for me.” Ethan gathered up his messenger bag and Levi’s jacket and stood to make his exit.

  Bubbles, from behind him, mumbled, “Whatever.”

  Jesus, Ethan thought, I’m like Rodney Dangerfield. I get no respect. As he rode down in the elevator, he wondered who he would find on wingpeople.com. Certainly, if they had certified Bubbles a hit, they would view someone like Ethan as a prize, even a force of brute masculinity. Relatively speaking, anyway.

  Making his way out the door onto a bustling rush-hour Belmont Avenue, Ethan also was curious about the name wingpeople.com. Was it because they were angels, delivering poor unloved souls like himself from their individual wells of loneliness?

  NO. WINGPEOPLE.COM was so named, as it said right on their home page, because the concept of wing people came from the term “wingman,” the person who was expected to act as support for a “pilot” in situations of romantic attraction. “Ah, I get it,” Ethan said, rolling his eyes and remembering back to his bar days, when he often played the role of wingman to some aspiring back-door Lothario with whom Ethan was often secretly in love. He would run interference for the Lothario, who usually ended up going home with some delectable morsel of ma
sculinity while Ethan rode the “L” home alone, comforting himself with the thought of the Hostess Twinkie awaiting him when he got there. The wingman, Ethan supposed, was sort of a flunky to the alpha male, helping him hook up. “It’s really not all that great of a name. I liked it better when I thought of them as angels.”

  Ethan clicked his mouse to get past the home page screen and onto the registration page. He stared at the orderly rows of boxes waiting to be filled in and wondered aloud, “So you’re really going to do this?” With trepidation, he gazed down at the little box that implored users to upload a recent photo, with its easy “browse” button to facilitate choosing just which photographic image would “pull” the best. Ethan supposed a photo of him taken fifteen years ago in Cozumel would pull the best but abhorred such deceit, even though he had heard many men used older pictures of themselves to attract and seduce online. Dishonesty and integrity aside, what did these unfortunate souls do when the moment of truth arrived and the object of their affection opened the door to them?

  For years, Ethan had observed the hoopla surrounding the internet and its supposed ease of getting people together for sex, romance, half-price books, and even cut-rate psychotherapy, but never thought he would traverse its well-traveled highways to meet a man. Somehow it all seemed too cheap and easy, almost tawdry. Ethan wanted to meet a man through a mutual friend, at a dinner party, perhaps, where the assembled group—all attractive upwardly mobile professionals and artists—were enjoying paella and whimsical cocktails like sidecars or Tom Collinses. Their eyes would meet over the olive tapenade, and they would exchange phone numbers while waiting for the host to bring them their coats. Or even better, they would meet in a bookstore—no, not that kind!—where they would both be reaching for a copy of the latest David Sedaris at the exact same moment, and then would laugh and insist that the other take the shelf copy first. Or maybe he would discover his intended as he rode alone on Lake Michigan’s bike trail, and his future beloved would help him when he got a flat tire. It was a story they would tell their grandchildren.