“It said he’d understand if I couldn’t love him that way. He’d be okay with my decision. We kissed the night before. I held him as he confessed how he’d felt for me. He admitted he was in love with me.”
“And, you?”
“I couldn’t admit it. I wanted to but I couldn’t,” I said. “His note was to protect me, to protect our friendship. He wanted to make sure that I knew he would be fine with whatever I wanted.”
“Why didn’t you admit your feelings when he did?” she asked.
“Fear,” I quickly responded. “I had a girlfriend then, and I was confused about my feelings for him.”
“That’s natural. You both were what, seventeen? Eighteen?”
“We’d just turned eighteen. We shared the same birthday,” I said.
“But you already knew that Cooper was gay, correct?”
I nodded.
“He understood that you were not?”
“Yes, but we were close. We hugged and stuff like that.”
She gazed at me thoughtfully before proceeding. “But something happened that night? The two of you took things to a different level?”
I picked at the bottom edge of my T-shirt, hesitating to explain what had happened. “He asked if I would kiss him. You know, guy stuff, teasing and shit like that. I think he wanted to see if I would be grossed out if we kissed.”
“And were you?”
“Actually, no. I let him slide under my arm afterward and we fell asleep holding each other. That was the last time I saw him alive.”
“What do you wish you could have done differently, Mike?” she asked. She held her hand up in pause. “Hang on a second. Let me rephrase that question.” She pursed her lips and looked past me, deep in thought. “Here’s a better question for you instead,” she began. “Let’s imagine that Cooper hadn’t died and you were able to see him later that day. What would you have told him then?”
She knew what she was asking and I had to finally admit the truth to someone. “I probably wouldn’t have told him. At least not right away,” I confessed.
“He died and you never had the chance, so now you’ve spent ten years wondering why that matters? Does that sound correct?”
“Sort of,” I admitted. “I’ve wondered my entire life what would’ve happened had I admitted I felt the same way about him.”
“Have you ever been with a man, Mike?” The question came out of left field.
“I have not.”
“Why is that?”
I knew what the answer to that question was. Hell, I’d married a woman because of the answer to her question. “Because he’d never be Cooper.”
CHAPTER EIGHT: Mike
Ipulled the rental car into the driveway of my childhood home. Not much had changed. Mom’s flowers weren’t nearly as abundant as usual due to her declining health. The lawn needed mowing because I’d arrived home on a Saturday and the lawn service came on Mondays. All the blinds were down and hid the interior of the house from where I sat. Mom loved to have the windows open so a summer breeze could fill the house, so I was surprised.
Stepping out of the rental I turned to look at Cooper’s house. His folks had sold three years ago and moved to South Carolina for a job opportunity that Charla had. After going away to college, I didn’t stop by their house anymore because the heartbreaking memories were too much for me.
My eyes went to the second story where Cooper’s old bedroom window faced mine. If we weren’t crashing at each other’s houses, we always waved goodnight after turning out the lights. I laughed at the memory of him baring his ass to me from his bedroom one night about a month before he died. I think that was the first time that I had seen Cooper as someone sexual, someone that was appealing to me. The feeling scared me and I tapped it down as quickly as it had arrived in my mind. A cat stared at me from the windowsill of his old bedroom. Maybe I’d tell Mom in case she thought it could be a sign from the beyond. Maybe that was who was visiting her lately.
The front door was unlocked when I tried the handle. You could leave doors unlocked in a town like ours. Even though Idaho Falls was the second largest town in Idaho after Boise, there were only about sixty-five-thousandinhabitants. The town was big enough to have strip malls full of dining options and a decent theater for viewing the latest Hollywood blockbusters, but as a kid growing up, it was too small and too boring for us desperate-to-get-away teenagers.
Cooper and I wanted out when we turned eighteen. We’d both applied to Washington State University across the border and both of us were accepted. The university had over thirty thousand students in attendance every year, and was located in Pullman, Washington, a town with just over thirty-two thousand residents. The ironic thing about it was that the combo of the college and the town had less folks than the town we were eager to leave. Pullman’s population doubled every September when college began, swelling the local business and available rentals.
After Cooper died I accepted another offer to attend The University of Washington in Seattle instead. He hadn’t wanted to attend Seattle’s home university so I decided to choose WSU as well so we could remain together. But after his death, I joined Jennifer at her first choice.
