I was exhausted. It had been a busy week, and Fridays always seemed like the days when multiple clients had urgent matters pop up. By the time Stacia had called to ask us to babysit, we barely had time to wolf down a sandwich at the deli outside our office before we had to go to Rachel’s… Charlie’s apartment. After that, well, I think “unexpected” is an understated way of describing the rest of our day. Yet, despite being tired, both physically and mentally, I couldn’t sleep.
“Adan?”
“Uh-huh.”
“You sleeping?”
He rolled over and faced me. There was enough light in the room for me to see his expression. He looked tired, which was expected, but he also looked petrified.
“So, I’m guessing you want to talk about tonight,” he said.
“Right now, I want to talk about what happened between you and Charlie.” I tried to keep my tone and expression even, but I couldn’t fool Adan.
“You’re pissed, right?” he said.
We always prided ourselves on having an honest-to-a-fault relationship. That was critical professionally, and it ensured any problem in our personal lives didn’t fester. It was safe to say we had just experienced the biggest obstacle we’d faced as a couple, and I decided sugar-coating things at that point wouldn’t serve us well.
“Well, I guess it depends. Did I get an accurate picture of how things were between you two?”
“From what we said tonight, you mean?” He shrugged. “It probably wasn’t completely accurate.”
I breathed out a sigh of relief. Nobody would accuse Adan of being particularly sensitive or demonstrative or affectionate outside of the bedroom, but the way Charlie had described him, the way he had described himself, was like hearing about a stranger. A piece-of-shit stranger I wanted to deck.
“I was actually much worse,” Adan said. “But you know Chase. He’s very forgiving.” At first, I thought he was kidding. Then I hoped he was kidding. Then he said, “I’m not kidding, hon. I was a real dick to Chase.”
“Charlie,” I growled.
“What?”
“His name is Charlie! Chase Rhodes is a stage name or something.” It felt good to yell, to be mad. Even if it wasn’t about what was actually upsetting me. “We’re not fans, we’re family! That means we call him Charlie.”
“Okay,” he said gently. “I was a real dick to Charlie.”
“Don’t push me, Adan. Not tonight. I’m not too happy with you right now as it is.”
“That makes two of us.” He rolled onto his back and took in a deep breath. “I’ve always wished I would have done things differently with him, always hated myself a little for the way I treated him. I know you’re pissed, Scott, but I doubt you could be any more upset with me than I’ve been with myself for a lot of years now.”
It was hard to hold on to my anger when he sounded so remorseful, and it was impossible to beat him up when he was already doing a fine job of it himself.
“Why did you do it?” I asked, a hint of anger creeping into my tone.
“Why did you leave him?” he said to me.
“I didn’t leave him! I moved to be close to my sister and my dad.”
“Did you ask him to come with you?”
I scoffed and rolled my eyes. “Adan, I was twenty-one years old. Come on. But it wasn’t like I broke up with him. We were too young to do the long-distance thing, so we drifted apart.”
“Well, it sounds like neither of us was mature enough to make things work with him back then.”
My jaw dropped. “How can you compare me moving away to you making him feel like you were embarrassed by him and like he wasn’t good for anything but sex?”
“I’m not trying to keep score here, Scott. But you asked me a question. You want to know why I did it, and I’m telling you. I was twenty-seven when I met him. I’d only been out to my family for a couple of years, and they were even worse back then than they are now, if you can imagine that. All I could focus on was proving that I was as macho as my dad, that I could outearn every one of my straight cousins, and that all the shit they said about gay people wasn’t true. At the time, Charlie seemed like an impediment to every one of those goals, but I wanted him too much to walk away.”
“So you dated him but treated him like shit?” I asked incredulously. “That was your compromise?”
“It wasn’t like I set out to do that, it wasn’t a conscious decision, but, yeah, that’s what happened.” When I didn’t respond, he said, “I know it might be asking too much to be forgiven for what I did to him, but I hope you know me well enough to realize I learned from those mistakes and I would never, ever treat him that way again.”