Maybe that’s part of the mystery for the audience—what happens with us after the cameras stop rolling—but that’s a mystery to me too.
Possibilities crowd my brain. What if we didn’t work together? What if I wasn’t terrified of losing someone I love? What if I didn’t want our show to succeed more than I wanted to get close to him again?
Now, there’s a question—is the show what’s holding us together or keeping us apart?
When Nolan peels away to chat with fans, I seize the chance to quiz Lucía about something other than food. I’m a planner, after all, and I like to do my research. “Is it hard? Working together with your men?”
She scoff-laughs. “So hard. We don’t always get along, honey.”
“And what then?” I’m dying to know.
“We try to work through the problems.”
“But the business . . . mixing it all,” I press. “Do you worry?”
She gives a soft smile. “Only every day,” she says, then pats my hand, squeezes it, and whispers, “Good luck.”
I file that away too—it takes some luck to pull off what she’s got.
When Nolan and I leave, the pride flag in the window jogs my memory about something Jason said that night in San Francisco.
“I keep wanting to ask you something,” I tell Nolan. “What did your brother mean about you being there for him when he was fourteen?”
He turns his head to look at me as we walk. “I was the first person he came out to. When he was fourteen.”
I do the math. When I met his brother, Nolan and I were sophomores in college, and I visited him and his family over break. We were twenty; Jason must have been fifteen then. But I didn’t know he was gay. Nolan never mentioned it, nor did Jason. Not that he needed to, but it’s a contrast to how open Jason is now.
“So, you were nineteen? Was that our freshman year?”
“Yeah, he came out to me when I was home for Christmas break.”
As we pass an organic dry-cleaner on our way to the subway, I put it together. “Ohhh. He was out to you, but no one else?”
“For a long time, yes,” he says easily—the secret he kept is no longer a secret. “At first, he didn’t want anyone else to know because he was worried about what it would mean for him as an athlete. The kid lived and breathed football,” Nolan says, admiration in his tone. “But he wasn’t sure how he was going to manage it all—sports and, well, who he was. And he wasn’t sure how our dad would react. But he needed someone to talk about it with.”
“You were his person,” I say, feeling all sorts of tender for the two of them, thinking of what they meant to each other. What they still mean. “I don’t think I knew he was gay till we graduated from college.”
“Yep. That’s when he was ready for others to know,” Nolan says, matter-of-factly.
That all makes perfect sense. “I’m glad he had you, Nolan. It makes me happy he did, and I’m happy, too, that you never told me. That you waited for him to be ready.”
“You gotta keep your sibling’s secrets,” he says, bumping shoulders with me.
Don’t I know it. “Callie was like that in her own way. She didn’t want to tell Mom and Dad she was making plans for her bucket-list road trip. She didn’t want anyone to know till we were doing it.”
He tilts his head, a line creasing his brow. “Was she afraid they’d talk her out of it?”
I shake my head, absently running a finger over the ladybug necklace as we cross the street. “She just knew it was going to be harder for them to accept what it meant—the road trip, that is. The symbolism of it all,” I say, fighting to keep my tone even. “The reality of it.”
“You’d already accepted it,” he says softly, knowing me so well.
“And I wanted her to have her trip. It was her wild childhood dream. I wanted to give it to her.”
He’s silent for half a block, but it’s a comfortable silence, the kind we both have grown accustomed to over the years. “Did you ever read or see The Last Lecture?”
“I watched it on YouTube,” I answer.
“That reminds me of what Randy Pausch said. ‘And as you get older, you may find that “enabling the dreams of others” thing is even more fun.’”
Yes. So much yes.
That nugget of wisdom is a key turning in a lock. A door opens, and I don’t feel so stupid for what I did. I get, now, what my heart realized back then.
I stop on the corner, grab his arm. “Do you know why I got an extension on my college loan?”
He shakes his head.
“I thought I could pay it off in time. I’d put aside enough to pay it off. I had six months of fashion shoot contracts coming in, and I was going to use that to pay most of the balance,” I say, then begin my confession. “And instead, I used that for the road trip. I told Callie it was money from the makeup gig. Which it was, so I didn’t lie to her. I just didn’t tell her I’d budgeted that cash for something else. I wanted her to have her dream trip.” I swallow around an ache in my throat. “So, I got an extension and used the money that was supposed to pay off my loan for travel expenses.”