I gulp down the rest of my drink and stand.
“Back to the cabin already?” Matthew asks. “Let me finish my drink first.”
I hold out my hand. “May I have this dance?”
Ed gives a gasp of surprise. For once Gene is speechless. I can’t read the look on Matthew’s face.
“Are you serious?” he says.
“I can’t talk to you while we’re dancing because I’ll be counting the steps in my head,” I say. “And you’ll have to let me lead.”
And then it appears, the face I dream about, the one I’ll do anything to keep smiling like it is now.
Matthew takes my hand and stands. I can smell the olives from his martini on his lips as he leans in close. “It’s your lucky night, sexy man. When it comes to dancing, I go both ways.”
We walk onto the floor and face each other. The room is alive with couples in motion, and an elderly couple shuffles by us like they’ve been dancing to Ol’ Blue Eyes for decades. From the corner of my eye I see that Laurel and Diane have spotted us. I watch them dig in their purses for their camera phones as they realize what we’re about to do.
“Hey, look at me,” Matthew says, and I do. He picks up my right hand with his left, wraps his right arm around me and puts his hand on my back.
“I’ve got you,” he says.
And then we start to dance, and it’s true. Matthew’s got me and he gets me and he wants me. We’re facing each other like the first time we made love. I lead and he follows, he leads and I follow. Two lovers in perfect step. On the largest dance floor at sea in the arms of the man I love, a band serenades us with Sinatra, and I’m keenly aware for however long it lasts this is one of the greatest moments of my life.
Matthew stops dancing suddenly and holds me tighter. He sees something over my shoulder and I fear the worst. Have we angered our fellow passengers? Does the band refuse to play? Is Julie Our Cruise Director rushing toward us with her arms flailing through the air? Captain Stubing wants that gay shit stopped now! Now! NOW!
But when I turn my head I see what Matthew sees, and it makes me hold my boyfriend tighter, too. Gene and Ed have left our table and joined us on the dance floor.
They are dancing.
AFTERWORD
Sometimes when I read a collection of stories or a novel, a song will emerge from my memory to become its theme. With this collection, it was Bruce Cockburn’s 1983 “Lovers In a Dangerous Time.” I suppose any time feels dangerous when we risk our hearts, as the men in these stories do. But men who love men take on the additional challenge of a world that can be hostile toward them because of who they love.
Urban squatters. Young professionals. Boomerang kids. Writers and actors and students. These characters’ times are made more dangerous by the consequences of visibility. By poverty. By alcohol and drugs. By illness and injury and disability. By secrets kept and lies told. But still they fumble toward first love, hope to rekindle lost love, and hold tightly to new and true love. Whether their romances are carried out with grace, wit, tenderness, missteps or anxiety, they dare to love in dangerous times.
To paraphrase poet Theodore Roethke, love isn’t love until it’s vulnerable. As Timothy and I read, considered and accepted stories for this collection, it was the vulnerability of the characters that most often struck me. No matter what, they open their hearts. And open them again. And again. In doing so, they open mine, and long after I’ve turned their pages, I find myself wondering, Will he be okay? Will they be okay? Will it all work out?
I think so. I know so. I hope you do, too.
R. D. Cochrane
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
SHAWN ANNISTON has worked with lawyers, gamblers and other odd folk. His first short story was published in Fool For Love. He’s been rewriting the beginning of a novel for several years.
Born and raised in Chicago, N. S. BERANEK worked in professional theater for nineteen years. As part of the tenth annual Saints & Sinners Literary Conference in New Orleans, she read a selection from her story “Thou Shalt Not Lie” from Saints & Sinners 2013: New Fiction from the Festival.
JAMES BOOTH is a writer and book blogger living in Virginia with numerous cats and his awesome best friend. He has run the young adult book blog Book Chic (bookchicclub.blogspot.com) since 2007 and has been quoted on several book covers.
PAUL BROWNSEY is a former newspaper reporter and former philosophy lecturer at Glasgow University, Scotland. His approximately fifty short stories, most of them gay themed, have been published in the United Kingdom and Europe, as well as in North America in Chiron Review, Not One of Us, Harrington Gay Men’s Fiction Quarterly, Dalhousie Review and Antigonish Review. He lives in Scotland.
ROB BYRNES is the author of The Night We Met, Trust Fund Boys and the Lambda Award–winning When the Stars Come Out. His mysteries include Straight Lies, Holy Rollers and Strange Bedfellows. A native of upstate New York, he works in Manhattan and lives outside the city with his partner Brady Allen.
TONY CALVERT ([email protected]) is an amateur chef, avid fisherman and lover of folktales. His first short story appeared in Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction. He is currently working on a novel.
JAMESON CURRIER is the author of the novels Where the Rainbow Ends, The Wolf at the Door and The Third Buddha, and four collections of short fiction. Currier founded Chelsea Station Editions in the spring of 2010.
LEWIS DESIMONE, author of Chemistry and The Heart’s History, has been published in Chelsea Station, Best Gay Love Stories: Summer Flings, I Like It Like That and My Diva: 65 Gay Men on the Women Who Inspire Them. He lives in San Francisco and is working on his next novel.
ERIC GOBER (ericgober.com) is the author of the novel Secrets of the Other Side (Regal Crest Enterprises). He holds an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University. He lives in L.A., where he’s working on a new novel set amidst California’s marriage equality battles.
ALEX JEFFERS (sentenceandparagraph.com) has published six books, most recently the novel Deprivation; or, Benedetto furioso: an oneiromancy, and forty-plus works of short fiction, most of them gay, many romantic. Originally from Northern California, he has lived in New England a few too many years.
KEVIN LANGSON is a transient writer of short fiction and film reviews currently based in Austin, Texas. Much of his inspiration comes from traveling to new places. He recently spent a year and a half teaching English in Istanbul and returned with many stories to tell.
GEORGINA LI’s short stories can be found in Best Gay Romance 2010 and 2013, Chroma: A Queer Literary Journal, Clean Sheets, Collective Fallout, Federations, Queer Fish and Wilde Stories 2010.
FELICE PICANO is the author of more than twenty-five books of poetry, fiction, memoirs, nonfiction and plays, including Tales: From a Distant Planet and Art & Sex in Greenwich Village. Picano also began and operated SeaHorse Press and Gay Presses of New York for fifteen years. Picano teaches at Antioch College, Los Angeles.
DAVID PUTERBAUGH received his MFA in creative writing from Queens College, CUNY. A lifelong New Yorker, his stories have been published in numerous anthologies, including Best Gay Romance 2010, Fool For Love and Foolish Hearts. Follow him on Twitter @DavidPuterbaugh.
JORDAN TAYLOR is the author of short fiction, nonfiction and poetry published by independent presses in the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland. By day a dog trainer, photographer and World War One enthusiast, Jordan spends as much time as possible reading books by the currently deceased.
ABOUT THE EDITORS
TIMOTHY J. LAMBERT (timothyjlambert.com) lives in Houston with his dogs Pixie P. Lambert and Penny D. Lambert. With R. D. Cochrane, he edited Cleis Press’s anthology Fool For Love: New Gay Fiction in 2009 and Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction in 2013. He selected stories and introduced Cleis Press’s Best Gay Erotica 2007, edited by Richard Labonté. As part of the writing team Timothy James Beck, he wrote It Had to Be You, He’s the One, I’m Your Man, Someone Like You (a Lambda Literary Award finalist), and W
hen You Don’t See Me. He cowrote The Deal and Three Fortunes in One Cookie with Becky Cochrane. His short stories were anthologized in Alyson’s Best Gay Love Stories 2005 and Best Gay Love Stories NYC Edition, as well as Cleis Press’s Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction. He’s not in love, so don’t forget it.
R. D. COCHRANE (beckycochrane.com) grew up in the South, graduated from the University of Alabama and now lives in Texas with her husband and their two dogs, Margot and Guinness. She was coeditor of Fool For Love: New Gay Fiction and Foolish Hearts: New Gay Fiction, both with Timothy J. Lambert. She cowrote five novels under the name Timothy James Beck, wrote two novels with Timothy J. Lambert and has authored numerous short stories and two contemporary romances, A Coventry Christmas and A Coventry Wedding. She currently has two novels in progress.
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