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I blink hard to get my focus off the couch.
“Coffee,” I say to Finn. “You promised me coffee.”
“So I did,” he says, clapping me on the back. “This way, my friend.”
He steers me down the street to a tiny coffee shop just up the street, the logo of which I recognize.
“Oh, this place is good,” I say without thinking. It’s the same coffee Raleigh picked up earlier.
Finn gives me a weird look.
“Somebody mentioned it at the bar last night,” I mumble, turning to stare up at the menu behind the counter like it’s the most riveting thing I’ve seen in my life.
“Oh yeah, I saw you talking to that Raleigh kid,” says Finn. “I met him yesterday; his folks own that cafe on Market Street back in New Haven.”
I’d never asked Raleigh about his parents; he’d never mentioned them. I’d just assumed he was friends with the bride or one of the grooms. It dawns on me that his parents might have been at the bar last night, and my eyes go wide before I can school my features.
“Were they out with the party last night?” I ask as casually as I can fake. “I don’t remember meeting them.”
“Oh, no,” says Finn, missing my reaction and knee-weakening relief as he scopes out the treats under the deli-style glass display. Thank God. The last thing I need is some poor old couple coming down on me for corrupting their kid.
I might have played a role in said corruption, but Raleigh jumped into it with both feet and a smile on his face. And I never laid a hand on the kid.
He’s not a kid. The voice in the back of my mind is insistent. He’s a grown man, obviously. Just out of college, if I had to guess. Maybe still a little unformed, but he’d get there. He knows what he wants.
Well, sort of. He talked about pushing his boundaries last night. After that little scene on the lobby couch this morning, I suspect his boundaries have shifted somewhat.
“Was he that bad?” Finn says, glancing up at me before returning to the dessert counter options. “The kid. Raleigh.”
“Not bad at all,” I say, off guard. “He’s a good kid.”
That word again.
“I mean, he’s not a kid. He’s twenty-four.”
“Huh,” says Finn absently.
The first time I ever drummed up the nerve to touch another guy, I’d been fifteen years old. He was a senior class whiz kid my mom hired to tutor me for English class. I spent five weeks shaking with nerves, convinced I was dying of lust every time he came to our house, thankful the table we studied at was low enough to hide my near-constant hard-ons, and thankful too that nobody bothered us. I could see the pity and humor all over his face the first time he kissed me, and I didn’t care. I was so relieved to have my curiosity satisfied, I thought I’d die on the spot.
Of course, study sessions got a lot more satisfying after that.
I aced English for the first time since starting high school. My mother had been so pleased, she gave my tutor an envelope stuffed with cash as a bonus.
I never saw him again after that semester.
At the time, it never occurred to me that wanting to screw around with both girls and guys was a big deal. It didn’t alter my personality; nothing else changed. If I dated a girl it was casual, and everybody knew it: I did, she did, my parents did, people at school. It never occurred to me to try to date boys at the time; screwing around was much simpler.
As we got older, Finn would bring his girlfriends around and ask me about my dates, and we’d shoot the shit and brag about our conquests like the assholes we were. But he never mentioned boys at all, and I’d just push those experiences out of my mind whenever I was with him. It didn’t matter, it just wasn’t who we were, Finn and me. Senior year of high school, one of the guys we knew came out as gay. Finn cracked jokes about it, as did almost everybody else we knew at the time, and it dawned on me that it might as well be me.
It dawned on me that I couldn’t tell him. Not then, not ever.
Finn’s no homophobe. Hell, most of those people who were cracking on that gay kid back then grew up and learned not to be assholes about sexuality. Mostly. That’s just how things went back then. I probably would have been laughing right along with those people, except by then I’d figured out that the gay kid was no different than I was. But since I still liked girls, it was easier for me to hide.
I’m not proud of it. It still pisses me off to think about that guy, to think about my own chickenshit behavior, laughing right along with the rest of them. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop being angry about that.
But that’s not Finn’s fault. If it’s anybody’s fault, it’s mine—for sitting on this secret so long.
So I can’t tell him all the good things about Raleigh, about just how grown he can be. I tamp it down and focus on the menu again and chuck the anger onto the burning pyre in the back of my mind with all the rest of the mistakes I’ve made. One more hurt won’t make a difference; eventually the fire will burn itself out.
