“You dunno...” Conrad says. “Well, that’s great. Really, I’m so glad you waited till after I’d fallen in love with you to have this- this fucking revelation!”
Phil’s breath catches in his throat. He wants to say Forget it, never mind. He wants to say I love you, too, but he can’t- he’s pretty sure he can’t say anything at all anymore.
“I can’t believe you’re doing this on the bloody telephone,” Conrad says, his voice dripping with disgust, and Phil really can’t believe it either. He can’t believe this is actually happening, and that he’s the one doing it, let alone in such a horrible, cowardly way.
Maybe his mom was right, when she called him that. Not mom, he reminds himself. It was one of the alters that had always accused him of being a spineless, pathetic excuse for a man. But whoever she was, wherever she came from, maybe she had a point.
“I’m sorry,” Phil says in a broken, barely audible whisper.
One of the truckers (burly, tattooed) is checking him out blatantly now, in a way that Phil’s very familiar with. If he went to the men’s room, the guy would follow him for sure. Maybe the guy would hurt him. Maybe he’d like that.
On the phone, Conrad is sighing. “I’m sorry too, Phil” he says, in a tight, strained voice. “Be careful in the snow.” And then he hangs up, and Phil’s alone.
Chapter 13
Phil figures his sense of self-preservation must still outweigh his sense of self-loathing, because instead of risking his life with the snowy roads or the scary trucker he decides to drive only as far as the next exit on the highway and stop for the night at a Hilton Express with free WiFi. He uses his father’s credit card to pay for it, figuring his dad would probably support the decision.
Once he’s checked into a room, he turns on the TV, curls into a fetal ball on the bed and tries to pretend his life doesn’t exist. It doesn’t work. He can only manage to forget for two or three minutes at a time, and then it will hit him all over again and he’ll feel like he’s going to be sick.
The worst part of it is knowing he’s hurt Conrad, which, like so many other things, he never even considered. It never seemed possible to him, that he could have the power to do that. He’s done it, though, for sure. He could hear it in Conrad's voice.
He’s an idiot- immature and dysfunctional and too self-absorbed to even consider having any kind of real relationship- and he doesn’t know how to fix it, or if he should even try. But he knows he can’t leave things the way they are. It’s too horrible to think of Conrad sitting alone in his house, wondering what the fuck just happened, probably hating Phil’s guts. To think of a miserable conversation in a rest stop McDonalds being the last they ever know of each other.
An email isn’t any better than a phone call, but at least Phil thinks he can express himself better in writing. After a requisite amount of avoidance and self-pity, he finally drags his laptop to bed and boots it up.
He types and erases about ten different greetings (Dear Conrad... Dear Dr. Conrad... Dear Conrad...) then finally decides to scrap the greeting entirely- Conrad knows who he is- and just starts writing.
I’m sorry I’m an asshole. I didn’t intend for any of that to happen the way it did. I guess getting caught was kind of a wake up call and I panicked. The truth is, being with you has been such a fantasy come true for me, I never stopped to consider the reality of what we’ve been doing.
Phil stops and reads back what he’s written, deletes everything but the first line and tries again.
I’m sorry I’m an asshole. I hope you can forgive me for running out on you like that and freaking out the way I did. It probably seems strange to you that I’m only just now considering the possible consequences of our relationship...
And again.
I’m sorry I’m an asshole. I don’t want this to be the end, but I’m not sure what else to do. I can’t be responsible for you losing your job. You say you don’t care about it, but that can’t possibly be true. You’re so fucking good at it, and I know you love it. I couldn’t live with myself, and I don’t know if you’d be able to live with me either.
You were worried about getting fired before you fell in love with me, so it must mean something to you. I guess I wasn’t worried about it until I fell in love with you, so there we are.
There is also the matter of my impending graduation and the fact that I have no idea what the hell I’m going to do with my life. When I’m with you nothing else seems to matter, and I think maybe I’ve been avoiding some important decisions. I think I might just need some time.
I’m not asking you to wait for me or anything like that... I don’t really know what I’m asking, I just wanted you to know that I’m sorry and I miss you already.
Love,
Phil.
He sends it quickly, before he has a chance to second guess himself. He doesn’t expect much of a reply, certainly doesn’t expect one any time soon, but about twenty minutes later, he gets one.
Phil,
I’m glad that you’re all right. You sounded awful on the phone and I was terribly worried.
Of course you should take some time if you need it. I’m sorry I was angry earlier; it was all rather unexpected and saddening, but I do understand your situation and you should be thinking of your future right now.
As to the other, you should know that you’re worth the risk to me. I wish you were able to see in yourself what I see in you.
At any rate, I’ll be here when you’re ready.
Love,
E
It’s probably the best response Phil could have possibly hoped for, so he’s not sure why he bursts into tears immediately upon reading it.
He really is the biggest jackass in the world.
Chapter 14
He spends most of winter break holed up in his room, re-reading the Lord of the Rings trilogy, watching bad porn and sulking. It’s more of a reversion to the past than a contemplation of the future, but he can’t seem to manage anything else.
Michelle corners him after a couple weeks of this, and asks him what the hell happened to him.
“You seemed so happy at Thanksgiving,” she says. “Did your boyfriend dump you or something?”
“No,” Phil tells her. “I dumped him.”
He tells her the story, as much as he can stand to rehash of it, and she stares at him in disbelief, shaking her head.
“You really don’t wanna be happy,” she says. “It’s like you think God’s gonna strike you dead if he sees you smiling or something.”
“I don’t believe in God,” Phil says. “It’s not like that at all.”
The next day, he makes an emergency appointment with his therapist- a nice middle aged woman who he hasn’t seen since the summer before his junior year. She never really “got” him, but he likes talking to her. She’s very soothing.
He tells her about Conrad (an abridged, PG-rated version) and he tells her what he did, and she nods and smiles encouragingly.
She tells him he did the right thing, that he made the mature, responsible decision. It’s exactly what he expected, exactly why he came, and he’s happy to fork over the two hundred dollar fee for the session.
On New Years’ Eve, he drinks half a bottle of champagne, swallows two valium, and tries to ignore the fact that he’s never felt lonelier in his entire life.
Chapter 15
Once the spring semester starts, things get a little easier. He has his work to concentrate on (four classes, an independent study, and the senior thesis he’s been neglecting for months) and he visits the career center frequently. He barely has a free moment to himself, no time to think, let alone brood, and that suits him just fine.
He manages to avoid Conrad entirely, and after awhile their time together starts to feel like something distant and imagined. They were barely together a month, a brief blip of insanity that barely ought to register in the grand scheme of his life. If he feels a pang in his chest occasionally (whenever he sees a chalkboard or a soap op
era or an orange dog), he just pushes it down, tells himself it will pass, and it usually does.
The only things he can’t control are his dreams, and those haven’t changed much at all. The ones he remembers are all about Conrad, and he wakes up nearly every morning with a horrible, sinking feeling of disappointed realization. It’s like being kicked repeatedly in the gut, every single day, but he doesn’t write them down anymore and it’s easy enough to put them out of his head during his waking hours. He figures those will pass too, eventually.
In March, he starts meeting with recruiters. In April, he gets an offer from a psycho-pharmaceutical company in Los Angeles. Seventy thousand dollars a year to start, and they’re willing to pay all his relocation expenses and contribute to his graduate studies, if he decides to pursue that. It’s exactly the sort of job he imagined himself getting before he met Conrad, before he started working at that stupid dream lab, and he’d be a fool to turn it down. His father would probably disown him.
He accepts it without a second thought.
Chapter 16
About a week later, he runs into Angie at the on-campus Taco Bell. It’s the first time they’ve seen each other since that day before winter break, and she corners him by the hot sauce, wanting to apologize for “the incident”.
“I hadn’t slept in, like, ten days or something,” she says. “Sorry if I was a bitch. It’s totally none of my business.”
“It’s okay,” Phil tells her. She was right.
“I hope I didn’t screw anything up...” The look on her face tells him that she knows it’s screwed up, and he wonders what exactly Conrad has told her. He can’t afford to worry about that, though. It doesn’t matter anymore.
“It’s fine,” he says. “Listen I gotta go...”
“Did you hear he got tenure?” she asks. He hadn’t heard, but he can’t really afford to think about that either.
“Yeah, that’s great,” he says. “I’ll see you around.”
He leaves her standing by the condiments, and only realizes when he gets to his car that he’s left his food sitting on the counter.
Chapter 17
He’s pretty sure Conrad will be at graduation. Most of the professors go, but so do about fifty thousand other people, so he’s hoping he’ll be able to get lost in the crowd.
The day is unseasonably hot, and feels even hotter because of the heavy robes and stupid hat he’s forced to wear. His mother shows up as one of his least favorite alters, an obnoxious, ridiculous socialite named Anastasia, and he’s not even a little bit surprised. It’s a big day, an important day, a day when she’s probably feeling old and depressed because her baby boy is graduating college and moving across the country and he’s so shut down, he can’t even bring himself to feel guilty about it. He’s just annoyed.
After the ceremony, they’re milling around the field with all the other families, taking pictures and trying not to die of heat stroke. Anastasia is talking about the day she graduated from Bryn Mawr (his mom went to Florida State) and how some Kennedy or other wanted to date her, Michelle’s trying to get Luna to stop crying, and Phil’s father is texting someone on his Blackberry.
Phil’s wishing his plane had left already, or that the ground would swallow him whole or something, when he spots Conrad just a few yards away. He’s walking towards them, looking unfairly, obscenely gorgeous in his academic regalia. Phil’s heart jumps into his throat and Conrad starts to wave. It’s basically a confluence of all the most horrific things Phil can imagine happening.
“S’cuse me for a minute,” he says, ducking away from his family and jogging ahead to cut Conrad off at the pass, before he can meet any of them. By the time he reaches him, Phil’s breathing hard and sweating like a pig.
“Hey,” he says, wiping his forehead with the sleeve of his robe.
“Hello,” Conrad says. He’s smiling and sweat-free. He looks comfortable and relaxed and Phil feels ridiculous. “Congratulations,” he says. “Summa cum laude, very impressive.”
Phil shrugs self-consciously, surprised that Conrad even noticed. Surprised that he’s still paying attention.
“Didn’t make that number one spot though,” Phil says. Stupid A- in German.
Conrad shakes his head. “Such a perfectionist,” he says. “You know you wouldn’t’ve wanted to make a speech anyway.”
Phil laughs a little and wipes some more moisture from his face. It’s true, he wouldn’t have wanted that at all.
He can’t believe they haven’t seen each other in over four months- it feels like nothing.
“So...” Conrad says. “What now?”
He’s holding his cap, Phil notices, and after he asks, he looks down at it and turns it around in his hands. Maybe he’s feeling a little self-conscious, too. Then he looks back at Phil with something so hopeful and open in his eyes, and Phil realizes what he’s asking. Phil realizes that he has been waiting. He’s backed off and stayed away out of respect for Phil’s wishes, not anger or disinterest, and now he wants to know- what the hell is Phil going to do.
I could still have him, Phil thinks. Oh, God.
He licks his chapped, dried out lips and swallows the lump in his throat. “I, uh... I’m moving to California,” he says.
Watching all the anticipation and happiness draining from Conrad's expression is the one of the worst things Phil’s ever experienced. He feels like his own insides are dropping out of him, spilling all over the field and burning up in the sun.
“Cali... fornia,” Conrad finally says. “Well.”
“Got a really great job,” he says, hurriedly. “Lots of money. And they’ll pay for grad study. So.”
Conrad scratches his head and looks past Phil, off to some unknown point in the distance.
“It’s a lot of money,” Phil says again, stupidly.
“Well,” Conrad says. “You can’t beat that, can you.”
“No,” Phil says, and regrets it immediately. One corner of Conrad's mouth twitches up in a sad, bitter half-smile and Phil wants to say Yes, yes I can. You beat it, you beat everything, but he just stands there like a slack jawed moron.
Conrad looks back at him and their eyes lock for a long moment. Phil can smell Conrad's cologne, and suddenly he misses him so much that it’s an actual, physical pain.
“Are you sure about this?” Conrad asks.
Phil’s not sure about anything, but this is a job, a real job, and real money and opportunity and how can he give that up for a guy he dated for a month? How?
“I...”
“Darling!” a woman’s voice- that horrible voice his mother uses for Anastasia- calls out. “There you are!”
“Oh, god,” Phil says. And then she’s there, next to him, in her awful yellow sunhat. Like an absolute fucking nightmare.
“Is this the new beau?” Anastasia asks. His mother might not know about him, but this one does. She likes to remind him, frequently, how sophisticated and “progressive-minded” she is.
Phil can’t believe he ever thought, even for a second, that Conrad meeting his family would be anything other than a complete catastrophe.
“Ah, I’m the professor,” Conrad says, and smiles his charming, fake smile. “And you must be the proud mum.”
“Moi? Oh, heavens no,” she says.
“Sister then, hm?” Conrad says.
“Now that’s more like it,” Anastasia says. She touches Conrad's shoulder, and Phil wants to die. He feels like it might actually happen- a heart attack or a stroke or just death by abject humiliation. It’s all entirely possible.
“C’mon, dad’s waiting,” he says, tugging at her elbow and trying to physically extricate her from Conrad.
“Your accent is divine,” she’s telling him. “London, yes?”
“Yes ma’am, South London,” Conrad says. So polite, always so polite, and he’s not even giving Phil any nervous, “get this crazy lady away from me” type looks. But then, he is used to dealing with crazy people. It doesn’t make the situati
on any less mortifying.
“Come on,” Phil tries again. “We have to go.”
She rolls her eyes at Conrad, like Phil is the nuisance here, but she does let go of him finally and allows Phil to start leading her away.
“It was lovely to meet you,” Conrad says, and she waves flirtatiously at him over her shoulder.
“Phil,” he calls out, when they’re a few steps away. “If you change your mind...”
Phil turns back to look at him, shading his eyes with his hand. Conrad's well-mannered smile is gone again, and he looks so terribly sad standing there alone with his hat in his hands. Phil has no idea what to say.
“Just... call me if you change your mind,” Conrad says, and then he turns and walks away.
*******
“You’re a freaking moron,” Michelle tells him, for the five hundredth time. They’re packing up his apartment. She doesn’t want him to leave.
“You’re gonna miss everything,” she says, pointing a frying pan at him accusingly. “Luna’s gonna be in high school the next time you see her.”
“Uh huh,” Phil says. He’s heard it all before.
“That guy really loves you,” she says. “I could tell just looking at him.”
“We only dated for like, a month,” he says.
“Who cares!” she shouts at him. “God, you’re so lame!”
He knows. He knows.
Chapter 18
In the cab, on the way to the airport, he thinks This is it. This is where my real life begins.
It’s more than a job; it’s a chance to start over. To become someone new. Anyone he wants to be. It’s what he’s wanted for as long as he can remember, what he’s been working so hard to achieve.
Dreaming of You: M/M Gay Romance Page 12