“Thanks for coming,” he says. And the fact that he feels the need to thank me makes me sad. It should be understood that I would be here, that I will always be here.
“I know it’s ridiculous,” he goes on. “The timing, I mean. For fuck’s sake, there are only two days left in school. You would have thought I could’ve stayed in the closet for two more days. But no. That, apparently, was not the plan.”
“So this is it?” I ask. “Today’s the day?”
He pats a space next to him on the bed, then clutches a pillow to his chest. I sit down where he’s gestured me to sit, facing him.
“Today has been the day for a very long time,” he tells me. “Today has been something I’ve told myself often without ever really believing it. But this week—today actually became today. No more looking at a wall and pretending it was a mirror. No more shelving the fiction in the nonfiction section. No more thinking I could get away with it. I know you don’t want to hear it, but it was Taylor who called my bluff. With you and me, the secrecy was part of the story—at least the way I was writing it. I know you would have written it differently. But with me and him—I had to leave the world I’d created. I had to walk into the world that really was. The feelings I’m feeling—they are not tomorrow feelings. They’re today feelings. With you and me—it’s just so…”
“Complicated?” I volunteer.
“Yeah. Complicated. Can I tell you another thing you don’t want to hear?”
“Sure.”
“If I hadn’t seen you up there on that bar—I never would have had the courage to talk to Taylor. To dance with him. To let all this happen. You gave me the inspiration I needed. Part of it was competition, I’m sure—you did that thing so I had to do something even riskier. But part of it was sheer admiration. So I flirted with him so openly—and doing that made me realize what open felt like. I got to that point. I’m at that point. Now I just have to figure out the other ninety-nine percent of it. And you know what? That other ninety-nine percent is fucking scary.”
I nod. It is.
I see how truly terrified he is. In a twisted way, I am glad that I am part of it. And in an equally twisted way, I am sad that I am only a part of it and not all of it.
But that is not what this is about.
I know that is not what this is about.
My heart goes out to him, but in a different way from before. It used to want affection. Attention. Recognition.
Now it just wants for him to find his way. And it knows that his way and mine might not be the same.
I know him well. There was a blind spot in my knowing. But now I’m looking around it. I am knowing him more truthfully.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and what he’s apologizing for is the fact that he’s upset, that I am seeing him upset. He knows me well, too.
“There’s no need to be,” I assure him.
Now he says something else—another kind of apology. “I really like him.”
“That’s okay. Really, it is.”
I look at him in his Star Wars T-shirt and anchor-print boxers, clutching a pillow on this bed we have spent so much of our time in, and what I realize is that somehow, without even knowing it, I have stepped out of love with him, and where I’ve stepped instead may end up being the better place. I have to step out of love with him, because the ground I’ve always wanted to be there was never really there. He is capable of giving that ground, but I am not the one he wants to give it to. Instead I have the ground we’ve grown all these years. I love him indestructibly, and I care about him at a root level, but in this three-breath-long moment I can understand that the two of us will never be boyfriends, never be husbands, never be everything to each other in that way. I can let that go, and hold tight to everything else.
It should feel like a retreat. It should feel like my love is diminishing and my feelings are contracting. But instead I have a sense that they’re expanding. And they are doing it because they have to.
I am sure that later on I will doubt this. I know that I will regret it, that I will wonder if this sudden understanding was just a trick of the light. But there are no illusions here. Today is finally today. We are no longer what we were. We are now what we’re going to be.
“I know you’re not ready,” I tell him. “I’m not ready, either. But you know what? It’s happening anyway. And we’re going to be okay. We’ll risk the good thing for the better thing. We’re really, truly going to be okay.”
I feel nearly empty as I finish this sentence. I’ve pulled out as much of myself as I can, and I am offering it to him now, no longer a part of me but not entirely relinquished. And in return, he lets go of the pillow. He opens his arms and says my name over and over, as if at long last he’s found me, as if at long last we understand that this is what we needed to learn.
* * *
Katie is still waiting for me outside.
Of course she is.
I get into the passenger seat, but I don’t close the door. I don’t want her to drive away.
“How’d it go?” she asks.
“I don’t think either Mark or I will be going to school today.”
“Oh wow. Meaning…?”
“Meaning that although for some reason National Coming Out Day is not, in fact, a part of Pride Week, we are rearranging the calendar so Ryan can have his own Coming Out Day. Movies like Pride and old episodes of Glee will be watched. Ice cream will be eaten. There may be some wild dancing to Robyn and Rihanna. You never know.”