Chapter 2
On Sunday, I was feeling better than I had in weeks. While debating whether I needed to bite the bullet and go visit my mom, my cell phone rang. When a quick glance told me it was Nicholas, I silently thanked God for an excuse to put my mother off another week.
“Hey, Nick. What’s up?” I answered, rubbing a towel over my hair.
Nicholas let out an exaggerated sigh. “They had a docent call off, and they need me to cover for her.”
I already knew where this was going.
“I’d be glad to give you a ride,” I told him before he could ask, dropping my towel and starting to rifle through my dresser for something to wear. Nicholas’s car was at the mechanic, again, for God knew what, and he wasn’t expecting to have it back until Tuesday.
“You are a life saver. See you in ten?” he asked, and as much as he tried to hide it, I could hear his excitement through the phone. It was a job he had coveted for more than three years.
“Ten,” I confirmed before ending the call.
I quickly pulled on a pair of old jeans and slipped into my favorite shirt, a soft cotton tee, now faded to a blue that all the women at work said matched my eyes. It was comfortable and just starting to fit snug enough in the chest and arms to make me feel proud of all the work I had been putting in with the weights.
Fuck you, Jason.
After pulling on my socks and my worn brown leather shoes, I grabbed my keys and wallet and headed for the door. Nicholas had always hated the way I dressed. Said I looked like I didn’t really care, though he claimed a well-tailored jacket would go a long way to cleansing me of my fashion sins. I figured today he would be too thankful for the ride to give me much grief about it.
I had met Nicholas my second year at CCAD, the local art college. He was a freshman and regularly modeled for my Friday morning figure drawing class. He wasn’t a nude model— those were all hired from outside the school— but a student working to help pay his tuition. I had modeled my freshman year as well and had hated it. I’d been thrilled the following year when I'd managed to pull a position working a couple of hours a week in the bursar’s office.
I was a photography major with no real interest in drawing and even less aptitude for it, but it was required, so there I was. Three whole hours. Every week. Nicholas was the highlight.
While everyone liked that he could sit still for what seemed like forever and, after a break, was somehow able to magically return to the exact same position, what I loved was that when he did take a break, he would wander around the room, looking at everyone’s work, chatting happily with the girls and flirting shamelessly with the guys. He was entertaining as hell. Several inches shorter than my own six foot, with blond hair, gold-brown eyes, and pretty, pink lips, he wasn’t half bad to look at either, if a little full of himself.
When, after already having sat for my class on more than one occasion, he walked over to peek at my work for the first time, I wanted to groan.
“You’re not very good, are you?” he asked quietly, an almost apologetic look on his face.
I studied my easel a few moments. The too short limbs. The slightly elongated torso. The proportion from forehead to nose, nose to lips, lips to chin. None of them quite right.
“I think perhaps the model was in a horrible train wreck,” I whispered back. “It’s rather tragic. He would have been quite lovely otherwise.”
Nicholas had let out a delighted laugh, all heads turning our way.
We had eaten lunch in the cafeteria after that and had become fast friends.
We had never dated. Nicholas was attracted to big men with even bigger muscles. I preferred my men to come with far less drama. Nicholas would never be that. And me? Well, I was tall, but not outrageously so, and while I had always been in shape, my muscles were not the hulking kind my friend preferred, more the kind developed from playing soccer and being active as a rule. And I was happy with just the companionship after the isolation of having grown up gay in rural Ohio, before moving north to Columbus.
When I pulled up to the apartment that we had shared (before I had moved out to “shack up”, as my mother had put it, with Jason) Nicholas was already waiting outside.
“God, thanks so much,” he said, climbing into the passenger seat. “Hope I’m not interrupting anything important.”
“Not really. I just was thinking of driving down to see my mom.”
Nicholas grimaced. “Well, good luck with that.”
I couldn’t help but laugh.
“If you can put it off for another couple of weeks, I’ll go with you.” The offer was more than appreciated.
It wasn’t that my mother and I didn’t get along— we did, more and more as I got older— but my mother had had me young. Sixteen years old to the seventeen years of a father I had never met. It always seemed that, though we aged at the same rate, as I got older our age gap grew smaller. She seemed far younger to me now at twenty-eight than she had when I was eighteen. The real problem was that she had never much cared for Jason, nor him for her. Neither afraid to vocalize it when it was just me and them. And even when I told myself that, with a little time, they would learn to love each other, time just seemed to concrete their opinions of one another.
When the two of us decided to move in together, she had not been happy.
So, when Jason and I had parted ways, I just hadn’t wanted to face her. I was still too fragile and heartsore from the breakup, and I hadn’t been up to facing someone who wouldn’t have been able to hide that they were more than a little pleased.
I had avoided her calls for months.
From the one conversation I had been unable to dodge, she knew Jason and I had broken up. She knew he had moved out of the apartment we had shared. But she didn’t know the details. She didn’t know that he had packed his things on an unseasonably warm February morning. That he had wrapped the delicate, cobalt blue, depression glass vase I had given him on our first anniversary in a newspaper sports section he had pilfered from the neighbor’s recycling bin. She didn’t know that as he gathered the rest of his belongings in our small apartment, I had walked down the street to the diner, trying hard not to think about the kid I had kicked out of my own bed not twenty minutes before.
She didn’t know that she had been right.
Even though I knew less than two hours would have found me sitting outside my mother’s house in Jackson, I grabbed onto Nicholas’s offer, and we made loose plans for the last week of June. It would be nice to have Nicholas to hide behind. Him, she liked, if only for the fact that he wasn’t Jason.
With my Sunday now free, after dropping him off, I decided to hit the gym early. I found it hysterical that both Robert and Nicholas, of all people, thought my new gym obsession was verging on unhealthy. That Nicholas, in particular, was concerned about the six pounds I had lost, the ones I was so proud of, actually made me laugh. And Robert? The man could have easily bench pressed his boyfriend. But with melancholy still nipping at my heels, I couldn’t agree. I had yet to skip a workout. And, anytime my mind would flash to the twenty year old with the six-pack that Jason had felt was worth throwing away a two-year relationship on, I would find myself there, running on the treadmill, not a half-hour later.
Well, maybe there was a little bit of unhealthy going on.
Of course, my mom wasn’t the only one who didn’t know all the dirty details of our breakup. I had merely told everyone that Jason had left me, that it was over and I didn’t want to discuss it. Much to my surprise, no one had pushed. I did truly feel I was over my ex, but I still found the whole situation humiliating. I was hard pressed not to think of Jason’s infidelity as a reflection on my own shortcomings.
That evening, I pulled out the photography class flier that Evan had given me. For the first time, I wondered if my persistent dislike of Evan had more to do with Jason’s boy-toy than with Evan himself. Evan had never done anything worse than be young and pretty, and I felt a shot of guilt at being such a hard sell when it came t
o accepting him into our little group. No one had ever said anything, but it was hard for me to imagine it had gone unnoticed, to Evan at the very least.
I thought for a moment about calling him. I knew an apology was in order. But instead, I vowed to buy him lunch and make my apologies in person.
I ended up signing up for a surprisingly expensive Monday night, beginner darkroom refresher course, opting to pay even more for darkroom and studio access on Wednesday and Friday nights. I had little else going on at the moment anyway, and I felt a small jolt of excitement when it was all said and done.
My week sped by after that. The office was swamped, so I worked a lot of extra hours and still managed to grab dinner with Nicholas on Wednesday. Much to his horror, I confessed to having been asked and declining a date with the new sales rep from one of the printing vendors used by my firm, when he had asked about the man who he knew had been flirting with me for weeks.
He couldn’t seem to understand that my decline was not me hiding away from the world, too afraid I’d be hurt again. But it really wasn’t. Okay, maybe there was a bit of that. I knew that putting myself out there would be a risk, but it was a risk I felt I would be more than willing to take when I found the right person.
The fact that I claimed to be looking for something specific, when I couldn’t put that something into words, did not help my case.
As I had left dinner that night, refusing to believe that Nicholas’s hypothesis could be correct, I also wondered at what it was that I was really holding out for and whether I would ever truly find it.