by Xavier Mayne
Bryan gave a mirthless chuckle. “Not that it mattered. I didn’t enjoy meeting them.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that none of them were you. That’s what I went there looking for. You.” His eyes, accusing, bore into Gabriel. “I wanted to meet someone just like you, someone who would make me feel the way you do. But all I saw were gay guys, and I was no more interested in spending time with gay guys at that party than I was any other time. They weren’t you.”
“I think you met the wrong guys.”
Bryan shook his head slowly. “You don’t get it, do you? I’m trying to tell you that you’re the only guy I’ve ever felt this way about. And it’s not some romantic notion I’ve created in my head like a lovestruck girl locked in her pink bedroom drawing pictures of the latest Disney-issue heartthrob. I’ve thought a lot about this. I’ve tried to find a way around it. I’ve had five girlfriends in the years I’ve known you, and you know why I broke up with the first four? Why I’ll be breaking up with Cheryl soon?”
“Oh my God,” Gabriel whispered. “Why?”
“Because. Of. You.”
“You can’t blame me for… whatever you’re talking about. I haven’t done anything.”
“No, it’s not your fault the only time I feel sane is during the summer when I’m working landscape and don’t see you. It’s not your fault when you’re out sick and I drive myself crazy looking around the corridor for you. It’s not your fault I dream about you every fucking night whether I want to or not. And in no way could it ever possibly in a million years be your fault that when a girl is giving me a blow job and I close my eyes, I can only see you doing it.” Bryan’s voice had risen to a brittle pitch, a pained shout. “It is your fault. It’s you. It’s you I fucking see when I’m fucking her and realize that in my head I’m fucking you!”
Bryan fell silent, panting, wild-eyed, his hands flexing into fists and releasing with a frenetic rapidity.
Gabriel’s heart was pounding as hard as he imagined Bryan’s was. His entire world had been upended in this peaceful meadow, the landscape seeming to fold in on him as his secret, laid bare, was trumped by the secrets that came spilling out of Bryan.
He had nothing left to lose.
“Here I am.” He stood, arms extended, offering himself to the man who had been his obsession, his dream, for years. “I’m right here. You don’t have to close your eyes. You don’t have to have nightmares. Whatever you want to do, just do it.”
Bryan stared, looking like Gabriel had just dared him to step off a cliff. His lips began to move.
Gabriel leaned close. “What?” All he could hear was Bryan’s anguished breath, the sound of dry tongue sticking to teeth. He leaned closer, his ear almost touching Bryan’s lips.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?” Gabriel asked, stepping back six inches, no more. “I get that it’s hard to take that leap, to admit for the first time that you’re attracted to a guy.”
“I’m not attracted to a guy. I’m attracted to you. Only you.”
Gabriel took a deep steadying breath, and put his hand on Bryan’s shoulder. This time, Bryan didn’t twist away. He closed his eyes and tipped his head toward Gabriel’s hand, then shrugged his shoulder to brush his cheek along it. It was an electric moment.
And then it was over.
Bryan snapped back upright, eyes wide open. He stepped back, letting Gabriel’s hand fall off his shoulder. “I just need you to stop, okay? I can’t do this.”
“You want this,” Gabriel replied, a statement of fact. This much he knew.
“That doesn’t matter.” Bryan heaved a deep breath. “I can’t live a life like this.”
“A life where you get what you want?”
“No. A life where you define me. Where I don’t fit anywhere except with you. I can’t keep a girlfriend, and guys don’t do it for me. With you in my life, I’m not complete because you define me. So I am asking you, unless you want me to end up at the end of a rope, please, please for the love of God, leave me alone. Don’t look at me, don’t be anywhere near me. Just leave me alone. Please?”
Gabriel hadn’t known what to expect when Bryan brought him out here, but he sure wasn’t expecting this whiplash—he’d been rejected, then told his crush was reciprocated, then rejected again. What did Bryan want from him?
“Just kiss him,” said a voice he recognized. It was his own. He turned to see a cliché miniature version of himself dressed as a Halloween Satan. He gestured at himself with a tiny pitchfork. “He doesn’t know what he wants, and you have to show him. Just kiss him. Do it.”
“Don’t throw yourself at him,” another version of himself said, just as he’d expected. He turned to see a tiny Gabriel with a tinseled halo glittering above his head. “He says he doesn’t want you to touch him, and no means no.”
“Fuck that,” the demon Gabriel grunted. “He knows you’re going to do it anyway. He expects you to. He’ll think you’re a pussy if you don’t do it.”
“Don’t you dare,” admonished Saint Gabriel. “Be a good friend to him. Be patient. And then when he blows you, it’ll be because he wants to.”
The demon and angel versions of himself high-fived over his head and disappeared in a puff of purple smoke.
Gabriel shook his head to clear it. He closed his eyes for a moment, trying to formulate exactly what it was he wanted to say. Finally, he opened his eyes. Bryan stood before him, bereft, his lower lip trembling. Gabriel saw him for what he really was in that moment: a scared boy, terrified in the face of a force that, though it was within him, was alien to him and threatened to upend his life. Gabriel knew what he wanted, but he also knew that he couldn’t be the thing that destroyed what Bryan wanted—needed—his life to be.
“Look me in the eyes and tell me,” he said quietly. “Tell me you don’t want to be with me. Tell me you don’t want to be near me. Tell me….” His voice failed, and he had to clear his throat and try to forge on. “Tell me you never want to see me again. Tell me, and I’ll go.”
“I can’t go on like this,” Bryan said, his voice low and soft, like a prayer. “I can’t live another day like this.” He wiped his eyes. “I’m sorry, Gabriel. I’m sorry I’m not strong enough. You’re like a cancer I have to cut out.”
Gabriel willed his heart to start beating again. He let the pain sear through him, the utterly brutal blow resound through his body, and then he brought himself up to full height, back straight as a ruler. He nodded to Bryan, knowing words would be too much right now, fearing he would say all of the hateful, loving, desperate, wounded things that were bouncing around inside his aching skull, his empty heart.
He turned and walked away from the meadow, toward home. He heard Bryan calling after him, but he kept walking, and when Bryan’s car pulled up next to him, he began to run. He ran across the fields where the roads don’t reach, away from the yawning pit that Bryan had opened under his feet. He ran until he was completely exhausted, and he kept on running anyway.
Chapter Nine
Overnight
Dreamwork
DONNELLY JOLTED awake. In an instant he was upright, breathing hard, every muscle straining. The pillowcase was damp, as was his cheek, and it started to come back to him. A field, a fight, a gap that could not be bridged. It had something to do with a dream. He sat for a long moment, the only sound that of his harried breath.
The room was in gentle motion, as if the sea itself were encouraging sleep. It wouldn’t be coming back for Donnelly, this much he knew.
The dream had shattered with his awakening into shards of emotion—mostly dread—that he would never fully be able to reconstruct.
Not that he wanted to.
He got up and put on a robe. In the dim night-light, he found his way to the door and opened it slowly, listening for the sound of breathing—or something more strenuous—but heard nothing. Sandler must not be back yet. Donnelly padded across the floor to the balcony doors, then slipped out
into the night.
At the balcony rail, he looked up into a moonless sky that twinkled with more stars than he had ever seen. Somehow, seeing himself to be an infinitesimal part of such a vast universe calmed him a little. He took a deep breath of the sea air and let it out slowly.
BRANDT FELT Kerry pull back the covers and slip into bed, wafting along with her the rich perfume of the bubble bath provided by the hotel. He knew exactly what would come next: she would take three slow breaths, then sigh deeply, clutch her pillow to her chest, and fall right into a peaceful slumber.
He listened to her long, regular breaths, envying her for the effortless way she fit into the world. Her relationships with men might be complicated, at times, and she certainly had made some bad choices in the past, but she knew what she was looking for, and what would make her happy. All she needed was one good straight guy and a host of gay ones and her life would be complete.
That was what Donnelly had, he realized as he stared at the ceiling. Would that be enough for him?
As gently as he could, he pulled back the covers and slipped out of bed. He picked up his robe from a chair, tied the sash around his waist, and tiptoed to the balcony doors.
The streets of Paris at this hour were mostly empty, though the odd flower-delivery truck plied its trade far below. The Arc de Triomphe glowed in golden floodlight to one side while the top of the Eiffel Tower stabbed into the sky on the other. He stood for a long while, leaning against the ornately carved balcony railing, wondering how everyone else in the world seemed to be able to go about their daily lives free of the agonizing self-reflection with which he was saddled lately.
If only Donnelly were here, he thought. If only.
DONNELLY TURNED away from the rail and sat down on one of the plush loungers. He lay back and cast a lonesome look at the empty lounger next to him, the one that Brandt should have been lying on right now. He reached out his hand and stroked the cushion, imagining what it would be like to share this balcony, this star-filled sky, with him. It was what he wanted more than anything in the world.
A chill ran down him.
Was this what Brandt would want? Something in the back of his mind—a fragment of the nightmare that awakened him?—tugged at him with the heaviness of doubt, of dread. A straight man in the honeymoon suite with another man—the very idea was ridiculous.
Donnelly knew he was the only man Brandt had ever loved, or even felt attracted to. He was, in this sense, unique. Donnelly had somehow convinced himself that his unicorn status made their love special, unprecedented, impervious.
But here, tonight, staring at the empty chaise next to him, it felt empty, deluded, impossible.
When he looked back up at the sky, the stars had blurred.
BRANDT STEPPED back from the railing and lowered himself onto one of the ornate wrought-iron chaise lounges—the very one on which he had spent his first sleepless night in Paris. From here, with the monument floodlights blocked by the stone balcony wall, he could see the few stars that were visible through the glare of the city.
Across the balcony, the mate to the chaise he sat on lay unoccupied, as it had since they arrived from across an ocean.
Donnelly should be here.
Brandt flashed back to the football pitch at the park this morning, and how he would always be the one who sticks out, the one who isn’t like the others. He would always be the straight man, and he was only now starting to feel that he had reached his peace with that reality.
But what about Donnelly? Didn’t he deserve to have a partner with whom he shared something as basic as sexuality? Was it fair to saddle him with the only straight guy?
He wanted Donnelly here. But is that what was best for him?
Entre’Acte
ACROSS THE sky, a shooting star left a golden, sparkling tail in its wake.
He watched it cross the night, blazing, spectral, miraculous.
“I wish…,” he said, closing his eyes and yearning with his whole heart, “to be the one who makes him happy.”
Chapter Ten
Morning Light
Waking
“GABRIEL?” SANDLER stepped out onto the balcony. “You out here?”
Donnelly stirred, shaking off the restless drowse he had fallen into. “Yeah—yeah, I’m here. What time is it?”
“Almost two. Were you planning on sleeping out here?”
Donnelly rubbed his face, trying to clear his head of sleep and the shards of that nightmare. “No, I must have just dozed off. Came out here to look at the stars and be miserable for a bit.”
Sandler sat down on the other lounger. Brandt’s lounger, Donnelly thought. “Gabriel Donnelly, miserable?” He looked back at the door to the suite. “I must have stepped into an alternate universe.”
“Sorry. I had this awful nightmare and couldn’t shake it off.”
“What was it about?”
“Well, as Freud was fond of saying, dreams aren’t about what they are actually about. I was back in high school, I think, but I was completely different. I… I was gay, I think. In high school, I mean.”
“Ah. From what you’ve told me about the town you grew up in, I imagine it didn’t go smoothly.”
Donnelly considered this for a moment, wondering whether the rattled state in which he’d woken up had been due to a dream of being bullied or worse. But that didn’t seem to be it. “No, it didn’t, but not because I was gay. I think it was because I’d fallen in love with a straight guy.”
Sandler looked at him skeptically. “I would say that’s the oldest sob story in the book, but then again you are in love with a straight guy in real life, and the two of you seem nauseatingly happy, so what do I know?”
“I don’t think it was working out quite as well in the dream.” Donnelly closed his eyes, trying to will the dream back into his consciousness. “I’m trying to piece it together, but there’s only one thing I can really remember. At one point he said to me, ‘you’re a cancer I have to cut out.’”
“Ouch,” Sandler replied. “So, not a very romantic ending.”
“No.” Donnelly studied the hem of his robe for a moment. “I guess I must be working through some stuff, huh?”
“Or you’re missing him so much that you’re spending all night worst-casing your relationship.”
Donnelly rolled his eyes. Plotting out the worst-case scenario was usually Brandt’s job. “I just hope I can be the person he needs—the person he wants to spend his life with.”
“I think he told you that when he accepted your proposal.”
“But I can’t give him what he could get if he were with a woman.”
Sandler shook his head. “You can’t give him love? Commitment? A best friend? Amazing sex? I just don’t see what he’d be missing by choosing you over any woman in the world. He’s lucky to have you.”
“I’m the lucky one. But he’s straight—how long will my luck hold? How can he really want to be with me?”
Sandler took a deep breath, and his voice was calm and even. “Gabriel, you need to listen to me. Ethan chose you. He chose you over everyone else in the world, regardless of gender. He didn’t just end up with you because you fit the general model of what he was looking for in life—he chose you because you make him happy. Honestly, I’d rather be with someone because they chose me, not because we look good on paper, or because our sexual orientations aligned perfectly. Everyone I’ve ever been with after Trevor has been out of convenience. We happened to be in town at the same time, or shared a cab and hit it off. We fit each other’s opportunity, and it lasted as long as a layover. Trevor, though—he chose me, and we discovered who we are together. Ethan’s with you because you awakened something in each other, something that only the two of you understand. You did that. You’re not a cancer—you’re a four-leaf clover, you’re a unicorn, you’re what he didn’t know he was looking for. But he found you, and he chose you. Take a deep breath and let that soak in. He’s with you only because he wants to be, not because y
ou are what he was programmed to find.”
Donnelly consulted the stars for a long moment, looking up into the depths of the universe. “There’s a part of me that knows you’re right—”
“Yes, yes I am,” Sandler added with a grin.
“But I’m coming to realize there will always be a part of me that’s going to worry about whether I’m the right person for him.”
Sandler sighed. “That’s life, buddy. We don’t get any iron-clad guarantees, and even marriage licenses aren’t carved in stone. But I’m convinced that knowing that is more than half the battle. He’s been honest with you that his sexuality doesn’t fit into a tidy little box. Don’t view that as a problem, view it as a blessing. No one’s sexuality is tidy, but almost no one is honest about it. Love him for all that he brings, and he will do the same. Because you are beautiful and amazing, and he knows he’s the lucky one.”
Donnelly smiled, embarrassed at the flattery but warmed by it as well. “Thanks,” he said softly. “Thanks for being here to coach me through my midnight doubts.” He stood and stretched. “I should get back to bed. Is Ankur coming over?”
“He should be here any minute.”
“You two have fun.”
“We almost always do,” Sandler replied with a wink.
“I THOUGHT we were over the whole ‘sleeping on the balcony’ thing,” Kerry said, crouching near Brandt and holding out a cup of coffee.
“If it makes any difference, I didn’t sleep much,” he replied.
She sat back on her heels and regarded him quizzically. “You, Ethan Brandt, are a puzzle. Your face to the world is the epitome of stoic masculinity, but dark complexities roil under the surface.”
“That’s far too Proustian a sentence for this hour of the morning.”
“Sorry. I dated a poet once who told me that I roiled. I’ve been waiting to use it on someone.”