"Well, well, two such beauties," the waitress said. "This must be my lucky day."
She poured the coffee now and leaned in to whisper, "Yes, gentlemen, I know who you are, and I'll be expecting a big tip."
"Count on it, Ruby Senior," Tam said, glancing at the name on the pin that held her frilly uniform handkerchief in place but saying it as if he'd known her all his life. He had that gift, Quinn thought — the uncommon common touch.
"Sorry I'm late," he said sheepishly to Quinn. "They have me doing these early-morning-after-the-Super Bowl calls. I don't think I slept an hour."
He certainly didn't look the worse for wear, Quinn thought, a ripple of pleasure washing over his groin.
"No worries. You should enjoy it. You deserve it. Everyone will want a piece of you now." Including me, Quinn added to himself, but would they love you as I could? Before Tam walked in, he was ready to flee. Now he couldn't imagine leaving. Isn't that when you knew it was right?
"I guess," Tam said. It took Quinn a minute to realize Tam wasn't responding to the question in his head but to the idea that he deserved all the adulation. "Frankly, I'd rather forget all the hoopla and concentrate on the reason I asked you to meet me."
Heart pounding, mind racing, stomach dropping, body ready to bolt through his hot skin. Chris Isaak's Wicked Games playing ironically on the jukebox. What god of mischief—perhaps Eris, the goddess of discord—put it in the mind of a patron to select that?
Saved by Ruby Senior. "What'll it be, boys?"
It was a double order of eggs over easy, bacon, whole wheat toast, blueberry pancakes and sausage; a pitcher of pineapple-orange juice; and more coffee with cream.
"Lord, if I ate like you fellas, I'd be two of me six feet under. Life is so unfair."
"Why, Ruby Senior if you ate like us, that spectacular figure would be in jeopardy," Tam said.
Ruby waved him off in a way that suggested she was pleased.
"That's right, boys, you keep slinging those compliments, and I'll keep refilling these cups."
"So the reason I invited you to breakfast," Tam said, suddenly shy.
"Yes," Quinn said, drawing the word out humorously as he hoped against hope.
"I was hoping you'd agree to take part in the pro-am tournament for my foundation later this month. We do so much for children through the arts. It's really the perfect San Fran charity, and it would mean so much to me to bring one of the NFL's young guns into the mix."
Quinn was alternately flattered and crushed. Tam didn't have to take him out to breakfast to invite him to a golf outing. He could've emailed or texted him or had his people call Quinn's people, not that he really had people except for the mother hens of an agent and a financial planner. There had to be more to breakfast than, well, pancakes. Or was desire trumping Quinn's better judgment?
"Good, I'm glad that's settled," Tam said, looking genuinely relieved as Quinn nodded. "I figured you've become such a big celebrity that the demands on your time must be extraordinary."
"Me?" Quinn paused to consider whether Tam might be mocking him. But though a playful sort, ridicule wasn't in his repertoire. "I'm just the backup quarterback."
"Is that how you see yourself? Because I gotta tell you, you're the real deal. And don't you let anyone tell you otherwise. Pat Smalley—what a jackass. Props to you, though, for putting up with him and turning the Temps around. I couldn't have done it."
"Well, I'm sure you could do anything. But thanks, that means a lot coming from you."
They fell into a comfortable silence, savoring their blueberry pancakes. That was how you knew it was love, Quinn thought. It didn't require chatter or action. It could just be pancakes. When Tam finally broke the spell, it was with the kind of mundane question that a long-married couple might share: "What for today?"
"Mm?"
"I was wondering how you're going to spend the day?"
Quinn was startled, not because he had no plans but because people rarely asked him anything personal—how he was, what he was doing for lunch. He was so used to being on his own, entertaining himself, or caring about others that he was both pleased by Tam's interest and ashamed at how emotionally one-sided his life was.
"I thought I'd do a little sightseeing, take a little time to relax. We rush from city to city so much during the season that I thought it'd be nice to stop before catching a flight back to New York tomorrow."
Tam grinned. "I'm the same way. I like to get to know a place, even during the season, else what is this life for?"
And so it was that Quinn found himself driving with Tam improbably to the Grand Canyon. Quinn didn't have an overwhelming desire to see it. Even when he found himself before this cathedral of God—humbled by its vast, terra-cotta, prehistoric mystery—he could conclude only that it was very Grand Canyon-y. But he loved being on the road—especially with Tam. It was Tam who made it different, Tam who made it seem exciting and new. Later when he was gone, Quinn would remember something that being with Aunt Lena had taught him: It wasn't where you went or what you did but whom you were with.
"Think of all these rocks have seen," Tam marveled. "We come and go. They remain."
Tam notwithstanding, Quinn didn't quite see it that way. He saw the remnants of a river—soft in its overwhelming power, powerful in its soft currents—that had carved fissures in the earth over time. People were like those now-phantom waters, wearing away the bedrock of your soul.
Not Tam, though. He didn't have it in him. There was no malice about him. How Quinn longed to present him to Mal, Smalley, Sydney and Chandler—indeed to the whole world—and say, here's my lover. He's kind and funny and sweet and gentle and he chooses me above all others. Me.
It was just a fantasy, of course, wasn't it? When Tam said that he had put his family on a plane for Philly in the wee hours of that morning—how blissfully normal they sounded, with their medical practices and teaching positions to go home to, Quinn thought with a sigh—he wondered if there were a girlfriend on that plane, though Tam didn't mention one. He would've mentioned one if there had been, wouldn't he?
Of course, if there were a boyfriend, he would hardly have mentioned that. Besides, Mal—who flew away, perhaps even on the same plane, as easily as he flew into Quinn's life—would never let him go, particularly to a hated rival. Mal would not quit the field that Quinn would become. And even if he did, where was the place for Tam and Quinn amid the brutal beauty of the NFL?
"You're the first person I've seen shiver in the desert," Tam said later back at the Sonora Inn.
"Oh, that," Quinn said, covering for his desire and fear. "That's because I'm in awe of your prowess at miniature golf."
"And well you should be," Tam said, "because I'm the Jordan Spieth of the mini course. Let me show you something."
He lined himself up with a shot at a tiny windmill. Then he took a beige print bandana from his pocket and tied it around his eyes. He paused, oscillating the club, and putted: Tam came within an inch of the hole, a wondrous example to Quinn of how a superb athlete retains a sense of his body even in sightless space.
"You try," Tam said.
He tied the bandana around Quinn's eyes loosely, then guided him to the hole.
"Relax," he said. "You're too tight. Trust me."
Moving behind him, Tam directed Quinn using only the voice that commanded the best O-line in the NFL. How to describe a voice, Quinn wondered? It was as ineffable as music and just as indispensable, something that was often overlooked in a visual culture, yet nonetheless worked its magic nonetheless subliminally. Tam's dusky baritone was like everything else about him, easy and fluid.
Sightless, Quinn was aware at first of that voice alone, and that naked distillation sent an erotic shock coursing through his body. But then everything about Tam became heightened for him– his tone, his heat, his powdery sandalwood cologne. He longed to lean into him, savoring his warmth and heady scent, and meld with his honeyed muscles if only for a moment. A moment would be enough, Qui
nn lied to himself.
When he whipped off the blindfold, he saw that with Tam's vocal prompts, he had sunk the put.
"High five," Tam said, clasping Quinn's hand and quickly weaving his fingers through Quinn's.
"I had help," Quinn said.
"Everyone needs a little help now and then," Tam said, smiling.
Back in his suite, he guided their lovemaking, too.
"I can't, I don't, I," Quinn said as their lips reached for each other, their arms still holding back, bent and taut, as they tasted that first kiss.
"Yes, I know, I understand," Tam said, finally embracing him gently. "We don't have to rush. We don't have to do anything you don't like."
Tam took him for the virgin he wasn't, Quinn thought. But perhaps it was possible to be a virgin reborn, like Aphrodite rising from the sea, a male Venus on the half-shell. Quinn knew how to fuck—Mal had made sure of that—but he didn't know how to make love. He had never been kissed, not properly anyway. Tam knew how to suck Quinn's bow-shaped mouth, slowly teasing apart his parched lips with his tongue. Quinn thought kissing the most erotic thing in the world, next to the way Tam slowly circled his nipples with a moist fingertip or drew back the hood of his stiffening cock or the way he did everything—gently laying him back on the bed as he settled on top of him, stroking his cheek, talking to him as he entered him, his dancing eyes never leaving Quinn's face.
He wasn't used to being the center of someone's delighted attention, and the effect was narcotic. Quinn couldn't get enough of Tam. He rose to meet him—stroking his back, cupping and parting his buttocks as he drew him deeper inside himself, the pain in his ribs creating a sharp intake of breath as their bodies strove together.
"I have an idea," Tam said, breathless, turning them on their sides to face one another. "There, that's more comfortable, isn't it?"
They were complements, Quinn thought as he considered Tam's lightness of being—his beauty, poise and goodness. And what did Tam see? Quinn wondered, a figure as brackish and opaque as the canals of Jakarta, a mystery, a fraud.
After, Tam lay on his back, relishing the moment, while Quinn curled up beside him but apart, eyeing him like a dog unsure of his master's affection. He needn't have been.
"Come on," Tam said, smiling at him, holding out an arm. "Come on, scooch over."
Quinn brightened, snuggling in his arms.
"I wasn't sure you liked to cuddle," he said.
"Are you kidding?" Tam said, laughing. "Listen: After what we've shared, I think we're past formality."
Quinn carried the memory of Tam's touch back to New York, to the other side of the Hudson where such tenderness was in short supply.
As he finished cleaning out his locker for the season with a few other players, a bouquet of white roses and hydrangeas arrived for him, laced with savory sprigs of rosemary.
"That's for remembrance": Quinn thought of Ophelia—mad for love, lost to it. This was madness—a lover who would never let him go and a great love that might not be but would not be denied.
He read the card. "I love you. T."
"Ooh, somebody's got a girlfriend, somebody's got a girlfriend," Derrick sang as he grabbed the card from Quinn's hand.
Somebody's acting juvenile, somebody's acting juvenile, Quinn thought.
"T. Let's see—Toni, Terri, Tonya, ooh, Tiffany. Could it be supermodel Tiffany Turkova?"
"Ooh, could it be that someone should mind their own business," Jeremiah said.
Turning to Quinn, he added, "I'm happy for you, man. And you don't have to share the lady with no one."
At his spare Manhattan digs—where canoe paddles, a gamelan and other Indonesian artifacts stood out against the ascetic backdrop—Quinn thought of his "lady" as Mal, blown in like a late-season nor'easter, buffeted him.
"Who's T?" Mal said, contemptuously flicking aside the card from Tam's bouquet, which graced a night table.
"Tante Josie back in Misalliance, Missouri," Quinn lied readily. "Tante is French for aunt. Our family is part French."
"Mm," Mal muttered, neither interested nor entirely convinced but unable to penetrate the lie and Quinn both at once. "No one's ever sent me flowers."
He drew Quinn back against himself and, wrapping him in a chokehold, bit him on the neck and hissed, "You be my rose."
Twelve
May brought mini-camp and maxi uncertainty. After a moment of desert bliss, Quinn wondered if that was all he and Tam were meant to share. He played in Tam's pro-am, which was fine professionally but frustrating romantically.
Golf was golf. He really didn't like it, even though he had learned to play as a high school caddy in Misalliance. Made good money, too. But he didn't understand why it was a sport, all those paunchy guys in polo shirts riding around in golf carts only to strike a ball for a second and then retreat to the clubhouse, where they downed more than a few drafts and popped more than a few beer nuts. Golf was a game rather than a sport, pool played in wide, open spaces. Tam liked it, though. The tournament got a lot of publicity. And Quinn was paired with Tony Herrera, one of the greats of the game, er, sport.
But there was no time for Quinn and Tam to be together, let alone intimate. Quinn didn't know what he expected—for Tam to take him on the seventeenth hole? He had a tournament to run, for God's sake. Still, having experienced love, Quinn wanted it all the time. And the old insecurities that dogged him like a golem kept insisting he might never have it again. Even when he received a thank you from Tam, a Swarovski crystal golf ball paperweight, he told himself Tam's foundation probably sent them to all the participants, until he saw what it was wrapped in—Tam's tawny print handkerchief.
Bet the other guys didn't get one of these, Quinn thought, grinning.
He carried the hankie with him everywhere as a talisman against the bad days. And there were many bad days, with Lance back in camp—his leg "99.9 percent," as he kept telling the press—and Smalley saying, "Now things can get back to normal," plus a challenge from newbie QB Nero Jones out of the University of Tennessee. Not only was Quinn probably not going to be the starting quarterback, he was probably not going to be the backup quarterback either. Whenever Quinn started feeling sorry for himself, he went to the one place where he knew it would be impossible to experience self-pity—Dave Donaldson's home.
The former third-stringer had several feet of his intestines removed and a colostomy. Quinn recoiled at the thought of what that meant—shitting through a hole in your gut into a bag you had to empty. He had read all about it, knew it had improved since the early days of the procedure. But still, jeez.
And he looked like shit, to stick with a metaphor—thin, ashen, hollow, sunken-cheeked, a husk of the football player he had been. One look at Dave’s wife, Kelly—a blonde whose prettiness was worn with care—and their kids tiptoeing around, far too somber for preschoolers, and you knew that the family's otherwise typical split-level Jersey home was nothing but a death house. Dave must've known it, too, for he kept crying and apologizing.
"Dave, look, man, you don't have to apologize," Quinn said. "How you feel about your illness is how you feel. You want to cry, cry. You want to talk, we'll talk. You want me to leave, fine. Or you want just to sit and be, that's fine, too."
Sometimes they'd talk—about the team, the weather, anything to get his mind off his cancer—and Dave would nod off, then come to with a start, embarrassed.
"It's OK," Quinn would say. "Take a snooze, and I'll watch you."
Once when Quinn rose to leave, Dave grasped his hand and kissed it.
"Don't forget me," Dave said.
Quinn kissed the top of his head. "I never will. Pray, and I'll pray, too."
He kept up the pressure on the Temps to remember Dave—with cards, visits, texts, tweets, and posts. He even enlisted Brenna to write a column about Dave's battle with a foe greater than any he had encountered on the gridiron. The support, Kelly texted Quinn, was one of the few things keeping her husband alive.
Not long after
the column ran, Brenna got the idea for a cancer fundraiser in honor of Dave.
"We'll get my parents to sponsor it at their Park Avenue place. They're very cause-y."
Dave was too weak to attend, and Kelly had her hands full with him and the kids. But Quinn was there, as were Greg, Derrick, and Jeremiah. Quinn wondered if they were thinking what he was: I so don't belong here. The duplex was filled with 20th century masters, photographs of Brenna's parents with various presidents, and guests who, knowing one another, treated Quinn and company like an exotic species.
"I think he's part Polynesian," he heard one guest whisper to another behind his back. "There was some family tragedy. I'm sure I read about it."
The way Quinn figured it, life was a series of concentric circles, and you were lucky if you were born into the one your heart desired, because the chances of making the leap to another were slim and none.
Oh, some did, like Brenna's father, a newspaperman who married into the Van Duzens. But they were the exceptions that proved the rule.
For his part, Quinn knew how to leapfrog, never alighting in one place too long. Years of behaving himself during his brief appearances at Sydney and Chandler's parties had taught him how to talk to anyone about nothing while making it sound like something. Now he stood smiling, holding a china plate with a piece of chocolate mousse cake in one hand and a cup of latte in the other, surrounded by admiring ladies, who, he soon realized, were content just to gaze at him.
"Excuse me, ladies," Brenna said, extricating him. "I need to borrow this gentleman for a moment."
"Poor you," she added as she led him to her father's study. "How would you ever eat dessert? My mother, what a hostess. My father wants to talk to you. At least in here you can have your dessert in peace. I hope you don't mind the smoke. It's the only place in the apartment Dad can."
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