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Greg’s ears rang as he emerged onto the sidewalk. Despite the traffic and the crowds, it seemed infinitely quieter outside and left Greg’s mind free to wander. Of course, the first place it went was to Wes, the guy who’d infected him three years before, but Greg shut that down pretty quickly, only to have his brain offer up every other fucked-up relationship he’d ever tried to have. The list wasn’t long, but there wasn’t much on the other side of the column to balance it out.
Frustrated, Greg pulled out his phone to call for a Lyft. Even though the condo was within walking distance, Greg was tired, and the night was warm with a building Santa Ana. The rush of adrenaline he’d felt walking out of Neon had faded, and the ups and downs of his evening were catching up to him.
His phone buzzed with confirmation of a ride, and Greg took note of the car’s make and license plate. Before he closed down his phone, he opened up his text messages from Micah and scrolled through their most recent conversation. He envied his friend for finally getting the relationship he wanted with the guy he’d loved almost his entire life. The romantic heart that beat inside his chest warmed as he came across a message from Micah telling Greg not to worry because there was a guy out there for him, someone who wouldn’t freak out about his HIV status or think he was defective because he was asexual or feel as if Greg came with too much baggage for them to deal with.
As his Lyft arrived, Greg sent up a silent prayer that Micah was right and got in the car to go home to an empty apartment.
Chapter two
Holden
SixMonthsLater:February
“…and I think that wraps things up for now.”
Holden breathed a sigh of relief as the projector turned off and the lights in the room came back up. The meeting had been interminable, the final one in a week of briefings and presentations from the Lockheed and DOD boys about the new modules for the F-35, and the flight simulator programs the company he worked for, Far Sight International, was bringing online.
The attentive silence broke as people began to shuffle papers and push back from the table. Conversations switched from a few discreet whispers to full volume. Most of it was a jumble of words that melded together, everyone keeping their voices to a reasonable level for the room. Everyone except Brody who’d already grabbed a couple of his ex-pilot buddies and was loudly making plans to visit an LA strip club, his vocabulary punctuated with words Holden knew shouldn’t be used in a workplace conversation, even without their annual diversity and harassment trainings.
Even if he didn’t already have plans for the evening, Holden wouldn’t have been interested in joining them. While he could throw back beers with the best of them and would have tolerated a visit to a bar in order to preserve his straight-guy persona, he couldn’t pretend to enjoy lap dances or tits shoved in his face.
He packed up as quickly as he could, aware of how he moved, just like he was always aware of how he spoke, the way he styled his hair, and the clothes he wore. Two decades in the Navy and nearly another one at Far Sight had honed the act to perfection. Holden slipped out of the room before any of Brody’s gang had a chance to ask him to join them.
The club Holden was heading for later that evening was not a place in which Brody—or any of his coworkers, for that matter—would be caught dead as far as Holden knew. For one thing, Brody’s views onfaggots, as he insisted on calling them, were well-known, just as Brody’s views on anyone who wasn’t cis, straight, white, male, and American were well-known. For another, being seen at a gay club could have serious repercussions. Depending on the administration, it wasn’t illegal for Far Sight to fire people for being gay because the government offered few to no protections against discrimination based on sexual orientation for federal contractors.
Ordinarily, Holden would take a couple of days’ vacation at the end of a trip like this, but he hadn’t been able to get approval for the days off this time. He was leaving the next morning for Virginia. Which meant his only chance at going out was this night. He figured LA was big enough to keep him from running into anyone from his company, plus he’d told them all he was booked on the earliest flight he could manage to get back home. All he had to do now was return to his hotel room, grab his bags, check out, and head to the hotel he’d booked in West Hollywood. The club he had in mind was within walking distance of the hotel.
He walked down the hall to the bank of elevators and pulled out his phone to check for messages while he waited for the doors to open.
“Hey, H-man! Mercer!”
Holden looked up from his phone and immediately schooled his features so he wouldn’t betray his irritation that Brody had followed him.
“I already told you, I’m on a flight out this evening.”
Brody lounged against the wall and grinned at Holden. He was a big guy, taller than Holden by several inches, and liked to stand close so Holden had to look up at him. He also never missed an opportunity to point out that not only had he flown the F-35 as a test pilot, but he outranked Holden, who’d only been a “tech guy.” Never mind that Holden had been allowed to retire at commander; he’d served as a lieutenant commander, and that’s all Brody cared about.
While Holden hated to admit it, they made a good training team. With Brody in the sim’s cockpit and Holden putting the program through its paces so they could demonstrate new capabilities, the pilots they trained consistently scored higher on their evals than those trained by other teams. Which was why Far Sight paired them up as frequently as possible, much to Holden’s chagrin.
“Come on, man, change the flight. How long’s it been since you got your dick wet?”
“Too long,” Holden answered, which was the truth. It had been several months since he’d had a hookup, let alone something that lasted longer than a couple of dates. Most guys weren’t interested in closet cases, especially one who was going to turn fifty in another two years, and Holden couldn’t say he blamed them.
“Tell the suits you missed your flight and come with us.” Brody flashed him a devil-may-care smile, the one that made people say yes to his craziest ideas and got him out of any fuckups with his superiors.
“Nah, man. I’ve been on the road for three weeks straight. I’m looking forward to getting reacquainted with my own bed.”
Brody winked. “You’ve got someone waiting at home, don’t ya?”
The elevator dinged, and Holden tried not to show his relief that escape was imminent. He cocked a finger at Brody and smirked. “You know it.”
“All right, H-man!” Brody held his hand up for a high five, which Holden gave him, then stepped into the elevator as Brody curled his fingers into a fist and pumped his arm. “Give her a good one for me when you get home.”
The doors closed before Holden could come up with a response to that, and he sagged against the far wall, grateful he was alone for the ride up to the fifteenth floor.
Even though he’d already packed, Holden waited about half an hour to give his coworkers a chance to clear out of the conference rooms and hotel lobby. It wasn’t that he didn’t like the people with whom he worked. Brody and his gang aside, most of them were decent, friendly, and good at their jobs, but after nearly three decades of keeping his true self under wraps, Holden was tired of the façade. The less time he had to spend pretending to be straight, the happier he was, especially since he was so close to retirement.
After packing up his laptop and notes from the final meeting, he scrolled through his phone. This was hispersonalphone, the one he paid for out of his own pocket so the company wouldn’t know about his Grindr account, or the messages he exchanged with guys he’d hooked up with in various cities, or his searches for gay clubs in Los Angeles, Las Vegas, Phoenix, or any of the other cities he’d visited in the past seven years that were large enough to keep the risk of running into any coworkers to a minimum. He kepthisphone in the hotel room when he was traveling and hid it before he left for meetings just in case someone needed to accompany him back to the room for something.
