by Lanyon, Josh
“You could have gone to the police.”
“How the hell would that have helped? It would just have outed me faster.”
“You preferred to keep sleeping with me even though I was blackmailing you.”
“You’re not hard to sleep with,” he said dryly. “Far from it. And as we — and now everyone — know, I like to sleep with men. And I’m not that choosy.”
I ignored that last comment, although it stung. I pointed out, “And then when I demanded money, you handed that over too.”
“That’s my point,” Ross said. “I gave you what you wanted. Everything you wanted, you got.”
I said bitterly, “Right.”
“What the hell did you not get? You asked for a part in the new play, and I got that for you too. Jesus Christ. I did everything I could think of —”
“That’s right,” I said, and suddenly I was on my feet and furious. “You’re so goddamned afraid that you let me blackmail you into a part in the new play. Was there anything you wouldn’t have done to keep my mouth shut? To keep yourself —”
He was staring at me, mouth slightly parted — not a look I’d ever seen on Ross’s face before. Ross Marlowe was the living personification of Man About Town. The suave sophisticate who knew what to do in every social situation. But I guess confronting your blackmailing ex-lover wasn’t covered in Debrett’s Etiquette and Modern Manners.
“What the hell are you crying about?” he asked.
I wiped my face on my sleeve. “Oh, go to hell,” I said. “If you don’t know by now, there’s no point me spelling it out.”
He was very still.
It took some effort, but I got myself under control while he stared at me with those midnight-blue eyes.
“Look,” I said finally. “You asked why. So here’s why. Part of why. All these plays you write about characters finding their true selves and owning up to who they really are, and making difficult choices and standing behind them — two plays about gay men being true to themselves against the odds — and all the time you’re hiding behind this…façade of Ross Marlowe the brilliant heterosexual playwright.” Tears and my injured vocal cords closed off my words.
He said slowly, “I see. This was for my own good?”
I nodded, not looking at him, mopping again at my runny nose, leaking eyes. “I don’t expect you to understand,” I got out.
“Lucky for both of us.” Watching me, he shuddered and pulled out a pristine hanky — and who the hell carries hankies? Wasn’t that proof to the entire civilized world right then and there that Ross was gay? He tossed it my way. “Jesus, mop your face.”
I took it with muttered thanks.
“So basically,” he said, watching me scrub my face, “You had some idealistic image of me and I disappointed you, and this is your revenge?”
Horrifically the tears started again. It took effort to stop them. I managed. “You never disappointed me.”
“No.” His gaze was intent. “What then?”
I said — and I tried to be matter of fact, “I don’t believe you would have been happy like that, Ross. I don’t believe you —”
“Christ, you’re young,” he said, but he sounded weary, not angry. He set down his glass, rose, and came over to me, taking me in his arms. “Okay, listen, Adam. You’re twenty-three. I’m forty. I think I’ve got the edge in experience here. I believe in the things I write about, but I don’t want to live my life as some kind of gay poster boy for the arts, all right? I like my privacy.”
His arms felt very good around me, strong and kind and familiar. He smelled good too: a mix of rain and pipe tobacco and some overpriced, herbal aftershave you probably couldn’t buy in Vermont. I put my head on his shoulder. I was very tired. I hadn’t slept since I’d done the interview with the reporter from the New York Times Theater section.
Playing Desdemona to Ross’s Othello hadn’t helped much either.
“This isn’t privacy,” I said. “This is…a lie. You’re marrying someone you don’t love.”
I felt the steady, even pulse in his throat against my face. He was past his anger now; Ross was the most civilized man I knew — and maybe that was part of the problem. He said levelly, “I like Anne. I do care about her, whether it meets your…naïve definition of love. It’s a good, working partnership — or it would have been before you blasted it to Kingdom Come with your exclusive to the papers.”
Well, Kingdom Come was where I reigned. I didn’t think he’d find that funny though — I didn’t — and instead I said, “Marriage should be about more than friendship and respect, Ross.”
“Respect and friendship — companionship, shared interests — that’s a good basis.”
I shook my head. “It’s not enough.”
“You’re the expert now?” His tone was dry. “What’s the longest steady relationship you’ve had?”
“We’ve been together one year, eight months and twenty-seven days,” I said.
He didn’t have an answer. After a moment he couldn’t even meet my eyes.
I added, “Depending on how you use the word ‘together.’” I pulled out of his arms.
After several minutes Ross said quite gently, “Did you feel I used you? Is that why?”
I shook my head.
I could feel his gaze on my profile. “It was never my intent. From the moment I saw you I…wanted you,” he said honestly.
Yeah. No question. I still remembered looking up from reading for the part of George Deever in All My Sons and meeting those smiling, blue eyes. Ross, who was good friends with the show’s producer, had been sitting in on the auditions that day. Every time I’d glanced up from the script I’d seen him watching me from the almost empty sea of chairs.
I hadn’t got the role. Apparently I didn’t look like either a lawyer or a veteran. But as I’d left the audition, Ross had followed me out of the theater. He’d offered to buy me a drink. And, as consolation prizes went, I’d have taken a drink with Ross over eating for the next three months easy.
We had cocktails at the M Bar in the Mansfield Hotel. Mahogany bookshelves, and a domed skylight. It had been raining that night too, glittering down like a fake downpour on a stage set. We drank and talked and then he took me upstairs to a luxurious suite and fucked me in the clouds of down comforter and pillow-topped mattress. In the morning he fed me cappuccino and croissants and put me in a taxi. I never expected to see him again.
I figured he did that kind of thing all the time.
Two nights later he had called me, and after a painfully stilted and painfully brief conversation, he’d asked me out. We’d had dinner at 21, and he’d taken me back to the Mansfield. And in the morning Ross had let me fuck him.
After that I’d seen him a couple of days almost every week. Stolen hours. Borrowed time.
The best had been the week we’d spent here at his cabin in Vermont just on our own.
That had been four months ago — in the summer. We’d swum in the lake and fished and sunned ourselves. We’d barbecued the rainbow trout we caught and drank too much and watched the stars blazing overhead as it got later and later. We’d talked and laughed and fucked and laughed some more. He’d let me read his new play. I told him I’d been offered a job in Los Angeles, and he told me not to go.
That was the happiest I could ever remember being — because I’d been sure Ross was falling in love with me. But the next week he’d announced his engagement to Anne Cassidy. I read it in the Theater section of the New York Times. Anne was an entertainment columnist for the Daily News.
Ross apologized for that, and said he had planned to tell me himself, but Anne had got a little overexcited about the upcoming nuptials. I told Ross that if he broke it off with me I’d go to the papers too. He’d laughed, but he’d kept seeing me — though not as frequently.
Their formal engagement party, a month later, received quite a bit of coverage in the local papers. I was still reading about it when Ross called and asked if I was free fo
r the evening. I told him I wasn’t free, and that if he didn’t want me to tell his fiancée he was queerer than a postmodern production of Not about Nightingales, he would have to pay me a hundred dollars a week. He had been less amused but he’d given the money and he’d kept sleeping with me, and the wedding plans sailed smoothly along.
A month ago I’d told Ross that if he didn’t get me a part in his new play, God’s Geography, I’d go to the papers. He’d given into that too — granted, a very minor role — although he didn’t sleep with me for two weeks after that escalation of hostilities.
He’d finally called me late one night, sounding faintly sloshed. I’d insisted that he come to my place, for once, and he had. He’d shown up at my battered apartment door with a bottle of Napoleon brandy, and fucked me long and hard in my blue and white striped Sears sheets while we listened to my next-door neighbors quarrel with each other to the musical accompaniment of their kid wailing in the background.
“I even want you now,” he’d said, when he had rolled off me. It wasn’t a compliment.
So as I stared at him in the shadowy firelight, I said, “I know. You never made any secret about it.”
He said — not looking at me, “I wasn’t going to dump you. You must know that. I didn’t intend to stop seeing you.”
“Is that supposed to make it better?”
His eyes widened at my anger. “I didn’t mean to…tried not to…take advantage of you. Of your…youth, your generosity.” The words seemed difficult for him. “Did you feel used? Is that why?”
The playwright always wanting the loose ends neatly tied up. Living in fear of the critics?
I said, “I don’t think you used me. I think you fell in love with me.”
He was silent for a long time. I thought my heart would shatter into pieces like an asteroid waiting for him to say something. In the end all he said was, “And for that —?”
I stood up, hugging myself against the cold, although between the brandy and the fireplace, the room was warm enough. “And I fell in love with you,” I said. I wanted to sound strong and convincing, but I just sounded pained. “The second morning at the Mansfield, the first time you let me fuck you. I made some stupid joke, and you laughed, and you kissed my nose. I’ve never wanted anyone or anything as much as I want you. I would give anything —”
He looked away at the fire and a muscle moved in his jaw.
“And I couldn’t stand there and watch you marry Anne Cassidy. It’s not right. It’s not fair to any of us. Not even to her.”
He said impatiently, “Anne knows exactly what she wants. And so do I.”
“Then why are you settling for companionship and respect when you could have all that and love and passion as well?”
“Because you’re twenty-three years old and queer — and what the hell does that make me?”
“Older and queer!”
He put his head in his hands.
I stared at him. “Well, that’s that,” I said. “Anyway, you’ll be okay. It’s New York. It’ll be a nine days wonder and then no one will even remember.”
He looked at me with something close to dislike. “You don’t think so?”
“Hell, I don’t know.” I rubbed my face. “I’m sorry. Sorry to hurt you, but not sorry to have stopped it.” I added, “If it is stopped.”
“Oh, it’s stopped.” He sounded sour.
And that really was that. All at once I was out of ideas — and energy. I said, “I can’t keep saying I’m sorry. I guess…you know where to find me.”
I started for the door and he said harshly, “Adam, if you thought you were in love with me, why didn’t you say so?”
At that, I had to smile. “I did Ross. I said it in every way I knew. If I’d said the words, you’d have broken it off. You didn’t want to know.”
“You think I do now?”
I shook my head. “No. You’d still prefer to think it was just sex.”
Ross said slowly, “But you came here anyway. Drove all the way up here on the chance that this is where I would come.”
“Yeah.”
“Knowing how I would feel about you after this.”
I admitted, “I couldn’t stay away.”
Neither of us said anything. The fire popped sending sparks showering.
His voice was very low as he said, “I could have hurt you very badly; you know that.”
“You could have killed me,” I said, “And it wouldn’t have hurt as much as watching you marry someone you don’t love just because it fits your image or whatever the hell it is with you.”
It wouldn’t hurt as much as watching him marry anyone who wasn’t me.
“You’re so sure it’s you I love?”
“I am, yeah.” I said it with a sturdy confidence I was a long way from feeling — but that’s what acting is all about. “I think that’s why you kept giving into my demands, because you didn’t want to break it off either. I don’t think you’re that afraid of me.”
“I wasn’t, no.” Astonishingly, there was a thread of humor in his voice. “But then I didn’t fully grasp what you were capable of.”
To my surprise he held out a hand. I took it, and he drew me down onto the sofa. For a moment he sat there, absently playing with the fingers of my ring hand. My fingers looked thin and brown and callused next to his own manicured ones. When I didn’t have a paying acting gig — which was usually — I worked as a bicycle messenger for a courier service. Yeah, safe to say eHarmony probably wouldn’t have set us up as the perfect match.
He said, “Has it occurred to you that if I did love you, you destroyed it with your actions?”
I swallowed painfully. Nodded.
“And you still don’t regret it?”
“Maybe I will.” I met his eyes and tried to smile. “Right now I’m sort of numb.”
“That’s two of us.” He leaned forward, finding my mouth, kissing me. I slid back into the cushions, surrendering to whatever he wanted. He kissed me softly, and then harder. His mouth bruised mine, a punishing grind of lips and teeth, but I opened to it, opened to him, and almost immediately he gentled. His hands moved under my sweater, pushing it up.
His touch was warm and sent a tingle spreading beneath my skin. I murmured approval.
“I have never known anyone like you,” he said.
“But that’s good, right?”
He snorted and sat up, but his fingers went to the buttons of his tailored shirt.
I yanked my sweater up, banging my head on the arm of the sofa as I pulled it over my head, dropped it. I humped up, wriggling out of my jeans.
Ross was hurrying to undress too, and it was a relief to know that the desire between us remained intact. It was always like this, hungry and hurried — and then sweet and satisfied. It was…nourishing.
Because, regardless of what Ross told himself, it wasn’t just sex — and it hadn’t been for a very long time.
I kicked my legs free, kicked my jeans away. Ross stood up, unzipped, and stepped out of his trousers. I brushed his long, lightly-furred thigh with my hand.
Naked, he lowered himself to me and I ran my fingers through his hair that was drying in soft silky black strands smelling of rain and firelight. I pressed my face to his throat and licked him, licked at the little pulse beating there. He exhaled a long breath. Relief? Resignation?
I said, “It wasn’t easy. Just so you know — it —”
He pulled back a little. “No. I know. When you opened the door you looked…” He considered it and then said, “Terrified and sick and hopeful all at the same time.”
“That pretty much sums it up.” I wanted to make a joke of it, but it wasn’t funny.
Everything that mattered to me was going to be settled in the next few hours. Maybe minutes. I didn’t know if this was a hello fuck or a goodbye fuck. Maybe even Ross didn’t know.
“I love you so much,” I said, and my voice shook.
“I know.” He sounded pained. So…good-bye the
n?
I kissed the underside of his jaw, and he tipped his face to mine and found my mouth in hot, moist pressure. Something as sweet and simple as kissing: mouths moving against each other, opening to each other, the sweet exchange of breath.
His tongue slipped into my mouth, a teasing little thrust, and I sucked back. He tasted like Ross with a brandy chaser.
I kissed him, and he whispered, “You’re fearless, aren’t you? Going to the papers, coming here tonight, opening up to me now. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone as fearless as you.”
I moved my head in denial. “I’m scared,” I said. “All the time. I’m just stuck in drive. When it comes to you, I don’t know how to stop or how to reverse.”
He shook his head a little, his mouth found mine again, nibbling my lower lip, moving his mouth against mine in feathery, teasing brush. I nuzzled him back and his kiss deepened. I liked his weight lowering on me, warm and solid, I liked the roughness of his jaw against my own, I liked his taste and scent, and the feel of his fingers against my cheek — and the insistent prod of his cock in my belly.
I put my hands on either side of his face and said, “Can you just tell me if this is hello or good-bye? I just want to know, so I can stop…hoping.” The alcohol and exhaustion made it easy to be honest, to accept whatever the truth was going to be. If the answer was no, then in the morning I would deal with it but tonight we were going to make love.
A little grimly, he said, “What if it’s good-bye? Are you planning to write a book about me next?”
I shook my head. “If it really is good-bye, I’m all out of ideas.”
Ross raised one eyebrow. “No ideas at all?”
“Other than the obvious: make this a night you won’t forget.”
His face softened. He said, “There isn’t one night with you that I’ve forgotten. Nor a single day. You must know that much.”
“I know how it is for me.”
And then we said nothing for a time, communicating by touch. I thought, he does love me, he does — even if he hasn’t realized it, hasn’t accepted it — he does — hissing a little breath of pleasured surprise as he pinched my nipples, making them stand up in tiny buds.
