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Sickness roiled in my gut. If I’d ended things back then? If I hadn’t been selfish and addicted to my first all-consuming love?
Maybe everything would have gone differently for Leslie.
Or maybe not.
Since, despite Adam telling me he’d chosenme, that he’d broken things off with Leslie for me and told hereverything, there was some guy named Sammy in the picture. So maybe things were always going to end in heartbreak for Leslie. Who knew?
I hoped there was a universe where it had played out in another way, and she’d gotten her happy ending. Because there were so many what-ifs that could have changed things. What if I hadn’t switched to Kingsley? What if I hadn’t let Adam convince me to go to Tilt-a-Whirl that first time? What if we’d never met Renée?
It was endless.
So many possible places an alternate universe could break off, and each would have changed everything. For all of us.
It didn’t matter though, I thought, as I headed back home again.
In the end, none of us were together anymore, and all of us were hurt and damaged. Possibly forever.
At least by taking responsibility for my part of it, by facing Leslie, I could start to heal that wound in myself. If nothing else, I could say I respected myself again. I’d owned up to my part of the mess. I’d expressed my regret to the victim. I would never do anything like it again.
I wondered if Adam was out there right now struggling with the same horrible guilt and self-loathing that I’d labored under whenever I thought of him or Leslie or what we’d done.
In one way I hoped not, because I didn’t like the idea of him suffering. But in another way, I hoped he wasachingwith guilt, because only if he had a conscience and real self-awareness would he ever be able to change and find a way to treat people right.
To do love right.
Milky Way greeted me again as I opened the front door. I bent to let her lick my cheek before petting her and saying, “Today was a hard day, but it’s over now. It’s done.”
And it was.
My part in Leslie’s pain was finally, truly finished.
Chapter Thirty-Five
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Christmas Eve waswhen our family celebrated the holiday my father called Secular Winter Fest. As a kid, I’d always called it Santa Night. I’d grown out of that, of course, though my dad still stuffed a stocking for me, and my mom always put a few wrapped gifts under the tree. Last year there hadn’t been any, but then last year they’d bought me the Volvo. It’d been too big to fit.
Over the last week, I’d added to the small stack of presents with gifts I’d bought for them. I’d found three early 1980s Johanna Lindsey romance books in like-new shape. The covers were some of her most racy and yet beautiful, and I’d had them framed for my mom’s office.
For Dad, I’d also gone down the framing route with two photos of him at his university desk, taken earlier this semester during one of the lunches I’d shared with him. I loved both shots. He looked amused in one and patient in the other, peering up at me from behind reading glasses in both. I could imagine those were the expressions his students saw most often during his office hours, too.
I also had Daniel’s presents tucked under the tree. A bootleg of one of Sting’s performances, the mixtape I’d prepared, and the framed photo of the two of us.
I wanted to get him something even more special as a thank-you for the darkroom. I was considering having some of our more intimate—but not graphic—photos framed for his bedroom walls.
He still hadn’t put anything up in there, having decided all the stuff from his old room—aside from the photo of his family before his father’s death—needed to go to the trash with the rest of his stuff from his past. He’d even gotten rid of theDanny, Are You Okay?banner, which had made me a little sad. It might’ve been a gift from his ex, but it was such a cute story, and the reminder of it always made me smile.
But I’d had no time to accomplish that. It was Christmas Eve now and the stores would be closed on Christmas Day, and Daniel was returning in the afternoon of the twenty-sixth. I couldn’t wait to see him, hold him, and go back to the new house with him. I planned to take a box or two of my stuff so that I could “move in” without alerting my parents to the situation.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want them to know. I just wanted to ease them into it. They might not have paid a ton of attention to me over the years, but I was an only child. I figured telling them I was moving in with my new boyfriend would trigger a bunch oftalksandemotionsthat could just simmer on the back burner instead.
Eventually, I’d achieve a tipping point of things at Daniel’s versus things at home, and I could just say, “Mom, Dad, I already live there anyway,” and they couldn’t dispute it.
I’d spent more time in the new darkroom Daniel had put together for me. He really had thought of everything, and the photos I’d developed out there were good, but not great. I needed to keep working. Going from my old self-portraits of misery to new ones of joy was a bigger change than I’d expected, but I knew I could do it. I didn’t want my art to resonate because it was sad. I wanted it to resonate because it was happy. Gay joy. It was possible, and I wanted to prove it.
“Peter!” Mom called from downstairs. “Come set the table!”
I put a few photos I’d been considering sending to Harold into a file and shoved it into my backpack to take to Daniel’s. I’d start a new filing cabinet over there, and this would be the first file in it.
