He flinches. “I would never—”
“Did you ever fuck her?”
His mouth tightens. “Don’t say that.”
I sneer. “What was it, making love?”
“No.” He looks at me like I’ve grown three heads. “What’s the matter, Vance? You look—”
“Like you just wrecked my shit.” I can’t breathe. It’s so sudden. I’m panting, and I can see him realize.
He steps closer. “Vance—”
“Don’t come any closer to me!”
His face transforms. Confused. Anguished.
“I don’t want you near me. Can you leave?” I manage.
His eyes widen. My chest heaves. I shut my eyes and just say the damn words. The ones that scar my heart. “We both know you’ll never pick me.”
I wait for him to say it’s not true. To say he loves me. That’s what he said. He said that he loved me.
A tear spills from my eye, then another. “I made a mistake. I’m not…” Everything blurs. I should never have come here. I hear myself say, “I can’t do this. I don’t want to do this bullshit with you anymore. I’m fucking out, Luke.”
I can’t see his face when I say that. After I blink, his face is hard and still. His eyes hold mine, and they don’t seem like his eyes. They’re so cold.
“Are you sure about it?” His voice is low, an octave lower than normal.
I swallow hard, so I can whisper, “Yes.”
At that word, he takes a step back. He turns toward the door, then stops and looks back at me.
“Vance?”
I’m so conditioned—such an animal—that hearing my name from his lips makes my heart beat harder.
His face falls apart for just a second. It’s so fast that afterwards, I question whether it happened. His face twists like he’s going to sob—and then it locks down. “You need to avoid me at the church.”24VanceI call Pearl and tell her that my cousin died and I’ll be going home for several days. Then I take the Prius and drive up to Napa, planning to stay with Tia and Liz, my college friends who run a B&B beside some vines. I don’t get that far, though. I stop at a little country store to get a drink and something to eat. As I eat my cashews in the parking lot, I notice that behind the store, by a little trail that winds into a lush, green valley, there’s a sign: Tiny House Hotel.
I don’t know why, but I like those tiny house Travel Channel shows. Tia and Liz don’t know I’m coming, and I don’t know how I’d talk to them without screaming something’s wrong.
I rent a tiny house—and for the next three days, I barely leave it. There’s a bed up in the top, reminding me of a nest. You can sit up in it, but you can’t stand. On each side of the bed—punched into the short walls—are three vertical windows.
Every morning, the owners come by with fresh eggs and produce. Every morning, I have breakfast since it’s brought to my door. It’s the only meal that I can bring myself to eat.
I sit in the bed. It’s queen sized, just a mattress on a wood floor in what amounts to the tiny house’s tiny attic. I look down into the tiny living space, and out the tiny bedroom windows at the grass. Try to shower every day and move down to the hard couch for a little while, so I can say I left the bed.
I’m not moving around much—but my thoughts are. I replay the whole thing, mapping out the space between right now and our first meeting on his yacht the way I might map out a mural on a sheet of paper before getting started.
I think on the two of us, and all our actions. Everything he said and who he is, and what kind of motherfucker I am. And I find, no matter how much I don’t want to, just one logical conclusion: Luke did love me. Maybe he still does.
But he’s so fucking stuck. So locked in his life…that he can’t follow through on any feelings. Not even those most important ones. The worst thing? I know why. He told me his whole life’s story—with respect to being gay and a McDowell. The conversion weekend at Tahoe with his father’s friends dumping ice water on him if they showed him pictures of men and his dick got partway hard. All the comments and the implications and omissions and manipulation—well-intentioned, I think—from both his parents, who knew and didn’t condemn him, but also never accepted him.
Affirming. Even that word haunts me. Affirmation was never offered to him. In the last year, he said everything got a lot worse for him. In Tokyo on that night he called me—it was day for him—he got so paranoid that he had looked at some dude’s dick as the guy walked past, he skipped a speech and shut himself into one of those pod hotels, and he even thought of taking his life.