Kept Man: Firsts and Forever Stories

As he put a mug of tea and a sugar bowl in front of me, he asked, “Would you like to watch a movie after we have dessert? I tend to stay up late most nights and sleep during the day, so we could even watch a couple of them if you wanted to.”

“Sure. I keep late hours, too. My roommate Ash is a club DJ who usually gets home around two-thirty in the morning, and I’ve adapted to his schedule over the last couple of years. We like to check in with each other after work.”

He said, “You two sound close.”

“We are. I consider him family.”

“That makes me think you’re probably going to turn down my offer, since you wouldn’t want to leave him behind.”

“I’m still deciding, but I wouldn’t turn it down because of Ash. His boyfriend just moved in with us, so it’s not like I’d be leaving him all alone. Plus, six months isn’t forever.”

He pulled two wine glasses out of the refrigerator, which were filled with swirls of chocolate mousse. Then he rummaged around in a drawer, found a pair of little paper umbrellas, and stuck one in each glass. As he put the dessert in front of me, he explained, “It needed a bit of dolling up. Otherwise, it looked like I was serving you a poop emoji.”

I grinned at that. “You’re not wrong.” When he handed me a spoon, I tried a bit of the mousse and told him, “This is absolutely delicious.” That made him happy.

Once we finished dessert, he said, “We have a few movie viewing options. There’s a home theater with recliners, and a game room with a big TV and a sofa. We could also watch a movie from my bed.”

“The last one, please.”

He smiled at me. “That was my first choice, too.”

We took a back staircase to the second floor, and he opened a pair of double doors and led the way into the master suite. Its dark color scheme made it feel like a superhero’s lair, or maybe a supervillain’s, but I liked it. The walls and ceiling were a deep shade of blue, and the king-size bed with its indigo linens looked inviting.

I climbed onto the bed, and he slid back a panel across the room, revealing a huge, wall-mounted TV. “Fancy,” I teased, as I reclined against the thick stack of pillows.

“It used to be fancier, but the mechanism that automatically slides the panel is broken, and I never bothered to have it fixed.”

“It’s still impressive. All of it is. So, which door leads to the Batcave?”

He chuckled and said, “If I’d been just a little stupider with my money, I would have absolutely built myself a Batcave. But all I did was this.” When he turned a dial on a panel built into his nightstand, a luminous image of the Milky Way appeared on the ceiling.

“Epic! It doesn’t even matter that stargazing is crap in San Francisco. We have galaxy-vision!”

He sat on the edge of the mattress and scratched his jaw. After a moment, he said, “There’s something I need to do.”

“Do you need me to step out for a bit, or—”

“No. I just need to get over feeling stigmatized by it. You already know I’m under house arrest and sporting that awesome anklet. This is just another part of it.” He sighed, and after a moment he reached down and picked up a cord, which had been tucked under the bed. “I have to charge the ankle monitor every twelve hours. If I let it die I could get taken to jail, so this is important. But it’s surprisingly embarrassing to have to do this in front of you.”

“Please do what you need to, and know I’ll never judge you—not for that or anything else.”

He crouched down, presumably to plug the cord into the device, and then he raised the edge of the comforter and slid beneath it. As he picked up the TV remote, he muttered, “I don’t even know why I found that so humiliating.”

“Some things just have a way of triggering our embarrassment. For me, it’s the fact that I grew up in a trailer park.” I didn’t particularly want to talk about myself, but it was all I could think of to distract him from his own discomfort.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“Absolutely nothing. But the thing is, my funky, run-down trailer park happened to be in the same school district as the wealthiest part of town. The vast majority of my grade school and high school classmates were rich, and then there was a handful of us from the trailer park and these low-income apartments.

“Every single day, we were made fun of, looked down on, and treated like we were trash. They never let us forget we were different, not for a minute. And even though I knew the rich kids were bullies and assholes, I guess I still internalized those messages. To this day, I feel a twinge of embarrassment whenever I tell someone where I came from.”