He was the kind of man who never gave up until he got what he was working for.
Including my mother. He saw, he came and he conquered. He swept her off her feet and in turn, she helped him improve his English. Together they created a home and a family.
But, in the end, he worked himself to death.
A heart attack killed him when he was only forty-one during a double-shift at the factory where he had worked his way up into management.
Even though his life was cut short, I wouldn’t be where I was if I hadn’t learned from him. I wouldn’t let his goal to live the American dream go unfulfilled. My brother and I wanted to make him proud even if he was no longer around to see it.
We wanted to make our mother proud, too. Between the two of us, we bought her a newly-built home in a fifty-five-plus community in a much warmer climate than Pennsylvania and moved her out of our cramped childhood home. Declan and I both continued to make sure she was taken care of.
My brother gave her grandchildren. I didn’t. My brother made sure the family name lived on. I didn’t.
My father didn’t know I was gay when he died. My mother didn’t find out until after I graduated high school. She found out by accident. A slip of the tongue on my part. Thankfully, she was supportive. So was my brother and his family.
They still were.
I loved and missed them. I thought many times about moving closer to them in South Carolina.
Even beyond college, I’d worked damn hard to get where I was currently. I sacrificed, I scrimped, I saved. I studied successful investors very closely. I learned, I emulated, I manifested.
Because of that, I was no longer poor. I had built a quickly growing, very successful empire. It also helped that I surrounded myself with good, trustworthy people.
But that was in my business life.
In my personal life, I was alone.
Money couldn’t buy me love or companionship.
Well, it could buy me the second, but for the most part, that was illegal.
Anyway, I preferred someone willing to spend time with me because it was their choice, not someone who was obligated to because I was paying them with money or gifts.
That choice meant I stood alone in front of the stretch of windows with a bottle of Penn Pilsner dangling from between two fingers, while looking out over a city chocked full of people. None of them belonging to me.
Tonight was tougher than normal. Loneliness ate at me. Normally, I didn’t let it bother me, but I currently struggled to tuck away that emptiness. Actually, it wasn’t just tonight, it started the moment I first saw Tate checking his mailbox in the vestibule. Him living a few floors below didn’t help, either.
Because now he was constantly on my mind.
I needed to do something about the void inside me. Filling it with alcohol until I fell asleep wasn’t an acceptable solution.
I tipped the bottle to my lips and the smooth pale lager slid easily down my throat. It pooled in my gut to join the previous bottle I drank earlier while eating cold, leftover beef bibimbap from a local take-out joint.
My favorite Korean meal now sat like a brick at the bottom of my stomach.
I needed to find something, or someone, to distract me from Tate being so close. From being so accessible.
I sank onto the sectional that faced the night-time view of the city, balanced my beer on my thigh and swiped my phone from the black marble coffee table in front of me. Sighing in disgust at my own self-loathing, I propped my bare feet on the table and crossed my ankles, then stared at my phone for a few heartbeats.
After unlocking it, I stared at it for a few more heartbeats, contemplating whether I was making a mistake or not and already knowing full-well I was.
But of course, I opened the app, anyway, and began to check out Grindr and the vast menu of men available.
I quickly swiped past the twink I brought home the other night and continued to search with mounting dissatisfaction.
Nobody was catching my eye tonight.
I continued through pages and pages of profile pics, available men all within a close radius, finding one reason or another to skip over them. Some reasons valid, some of them not. Some with profile photos that showed their faces, some not.
I kept mindlessly scrolling and exploring the various photos, unable to find even one to make me pause. My finger moved in a constant repetitive motion.
Swipe. Swipe. Swipe.
I paused.
What the…
I scrolled back, thinking I imagined it.
I didn’t.
I stared at the picture, then squinted my eyes and dropped my head enough to inspect the profile photo even closer. I checked to see if this man was in the vicinity. The app said he was only a hundred feet away.