The man who answered didn’t look happy to see me. “What are you doing here?” he asked.
TRUE CONFESSIONS
Mike stood before me in a pair of ragged athletic shorts and nothing else. “You stalking me now?”
“In your dreams.”
He looked behind me. “Where’s your truck?”
“Invite me in, and I’ll explain.”
Mike’s house was nothing like I’d imagined it. First of all, it was a mess, and I’d always had the idea he was a neat freak. Second, it was nondescript, and I’d thought he’d have beautiful, simple things.
Maybe he wasn’t as gay as I thought.
“Want a beer?” he asked, leading me into the living room. Newspapers were scattered everywhere, along with dirty clothes. The place had an unpleasant smell, too-sweat overlaid with dirty dishes and garbage that hadn’t been taken out.
“How many have you had today?”
He turned around to face me. “Fuck you. You come up here just to harass me? Gonna tattle on me to my folks again?”
“Somebody had to. Jesus, Mike, you can’t bring a bottle of vodka with you to work at eight o’clock in the morning.”
“I needed a little pick-me-up. What’s it to you?”
What was it to me? Before I could think, the words spilled out of my mouth. “Because I still fucking love you. I don’t want to see you kill yourself.”
Mike grabbed me and kissed me hard on the lips. I kissed him back, not considering the consequences or deliberating the reasons why it was a bad idea. I just knew that I wanted to kiss him more than anything. We were all over each other, my hands slipping down in the waist of his shorts, his grabbing onto my ass and pulling me into him, when the front door opened.
“Michael, you left your door unlocked,” his father said, walking in. “Your mother and I are-”
He froze in the doorway, and Mike and I pulled apart and turned to face him.
“I didn’t realize I was interrupting,” Dr. Riccardi said. “Detective, I wish I could say it was good to see you again.”
“I’m thirty-five years old, Dad. Get a grip. Blame anything you want on me, but leave Kimo out of it.”
“You may be thirty-five, but you’re still my son. You expect me to stand aside while you ruin your life?”
Maybe that walk down to Aiea Park really had been the better idea. “I’ll leave you guys alone,” I said, starting toward the door. Kissing Mike had been an impetuous act, and one I knew was only going to lead me into trouble.
“Stay where you are,” Mike said, reaching out to take my arm. “Dad, I’ll talk to you later. You can go.”
“Don’t take that tone with me, Michael. Have you been drinking again? My God, boy, do you ever stop?”
“Out. Now,” Mike said.
His father turned and walked out the door, closing it gently behind him. “He won’t even slam the fucking door,” Mike said. He shook his head. “Jesus, to think I’m the product of his sperm.”
He looked at me and tried to smile. “How about that beer now?”
“I’ll take one.”
He went into the kitchen and returned with two Bud Lights. “At least you’re watching your weight,” I said dryly.
“Sorry about that,” he said, popping the top on his beer and waving it toward the front door. “My dad still thinks I’m about twelve.”
“Maybe if you acted like you were thirty-five he’d think you were.”
“Don’t you start.” He knocked a dirty T-shirt off a chair and sat down, then motioned me to the sofa. “Make yourself comfortable.”
I looked at the sofa. One end was piled with rumpled newspapers, the other with dirty jeans, socks, and T-shirts. Feeling like I was channeling my mother, I piled the papers neatly on the floor and then sat down.
“I don’t remember you being such a priss,” Mike said.
“We going to do this all afternoon? Snipe at each other?”
“What do you want to talk about?”
I sipped my beer and considered. “You ever hear of MenSayHi?” I asked.
He shrugged. “Yeah. Hookup site. What about it?”
“I put a profile on there a few weeks after we broke up.”
“You mean, after you dumped me.”
I ignored that. “I said that I was pretty much into anything. And men started contacting me. There are some kinky guys out there, I’ll tell you.”
I drank a little more beer. “I’ve always been a romantic about sex,” I said, settling back against the sofa. “But after…you know…I just wanted to get laid. Now that I think about it, I guess I was punishing myself.”
“Getting laid as punishment? That’s a new one.”
“It wasn’t just the sex. It was like I wanted guys to treat me badly. I was angry at myself for not giving you the chance to explain, for throwing away a relationship that had real potential. I felt like I was a loser. And when guys treated me badly that just reinforced that idea.”
I drank some beer. We sat there.
Mike said, “I treated you pretty badly, too. I shouldn’t have cheated on you. And I should have ‘fessed up, instead of infecting you.”
“We were both at fault. And I think we’ve both been beating ourselves up over it.”
Mike looked at the beer can in his hand. “I used to drink a lot in college, I ever tell you that?”
I shook my head.
“I’d go to these frat parties, and guys would be hooking up with girls, and I knew I didn’t want that, so I just drank. I’d pass out and wake up the next morning on some strange floor, massive hangover. A couple of times I was lucky I didn’t choke on my own vomit. Sounds a lot like the other night, huh? Except you were nicer to me than the guys in those frats.”
“When we were going out, you weren’t drinking, were you?” I asked. “I mean, did I miss something?”
He shook his head. “I cleaned up my act when I came back from college. Partly, it was fear of my dad. I was living at home, after all. He wanted me to do something stable, something with a future, and I started taking these fire management courses at the community college. Right away, it was like, I don’t know, I fell in love.”
He looked at me, and I could see the old Mike coming through, his eyes shining, his mustache curving up at the ends with his smile. I got chicken skin just looking at him-what mainlanders call goose bumps.
“I wanted to be the best damn fireman I could be. I started taking these one- and two-week courses at the National Fire Academy in Maryland, so that I could get promoted and move into fire inspection. That was all I thought about. I shoved being gay back into the closet. I didn’t see any way I could be gay in that environment, so I just wasn’t.”
“I did the same thing with the police,” I said. “Until I couldn’t anymore.”
“It’s like I was asleep. Then you came out, and you were all over the papers and the TV. The gay cop. I had such a major crush on you, and I thought, well, maybe if you could do it, I could.”
He smiled wryly. “You know the next part. I wasn’t as together as I thought. I started to resent you, that you could be out, that you could go places and tell the truth to people and not be ashamed. And I couldn’t.”
“That takes time, you know,” I said.
“Yeah. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. The stupid thing is, I got drunk in San Francisco, because I was so pissed off at the way things had worked out-that I was too much of a pansy to face up to the guys at the conference and bring you along. When this guy made a play for me at the bar, I just went along with it.”
“I don’t blame you, you know. I mean, yeah, you hurt my feelings, and I was totally pissed off that you gave me gonorrhea. But I should have listened to your side of the story. I shouldn’t have been so quick to kick you out of my life.”
“You think we can be friends again?” Mike asked.
“I don’t know.” What was friendship, after all? A warm feeling for someone else? Harry and Terri were my friends, had been since high school. I knew I could count on them, and I’d walk over broken glass for them. But Mike? Could I be just a friend, when every time he touched me electric charges shot to my dick and I wanted to kiss him and rub my body against his?