“You should see what I do to a date.” I huffed.
“Oh, yeah, our date,” he said slowly.
“Oh, I… uh…”
“Dinner, right? What night?”
“I’m… God, I don’t know.”
“Fridays are bad for me right now, but I could make the… Well, every other weekend, too, would be kind of hard since I have the kids then.”
“I’m… I didn’t mean that…” I stammered, feeling like an idiot.
“You didn’t. That’s too bad.” He smiled. “I think I did. Give me your phone.”
I handed it over to him, and he punched his number before sending himself a text.
“Got yours now. I really am glad that you moved back to town.”
“I guess we’re all filled with surprises.” I almost walked out of the store without paying. Did Tim really ask me out on a date? What did any of that even mean? Was he… No… He was married and had kids and… I could not be a daddy right now. Who would have time for that?
I was putting the cart before the horse, and that had always been my problem.
I did have a little extra pep in my step for the rest of the day.
4
Ben
What did I expect?
I had run away from this place as soon as I graduated and never looked back. In the last ten years, I’ve come home twice for Christmas and made my family come to San Fransisco the rest of the time. I hated it here. It reminded me of that twisted-up feeling in the pit of my gut while I lived in Foggy Basin. I had ulcers and an unhealthy addiction to smoking pot all alone behind the bleachers when I could get away from myself. I hid behind my popularity and my ability to throw a fucking pigskin. All of the girls wanted to date me, and all of the guys wanted to be me.
What did I want?
I wanted to leave and finally feel free to be myself. Whoever that was. I was so confused and scared back then that I… I treated people fucking horribly. Not to mention, I hated playing football. But it was my ticket to the façade I had created, and every fucking person bought into it. Even I did – for a while. But I never forgot the truth that I tried to bury.
Maybe that’s why I never wanted to come home. I didn’t want to be faced with the ghosts of my past – the ghost of the person I had pretended to be. I pretended until I no longer had to. So, I stayed away from this place as I became someone else – someone I was actually proud of, for the most part. I worked hard and earned absolutely everything that I had, unlike that boy who paraded through high school with a smile and a pumped-up chest.
Well…
I still had a very pumped-up chest. My seventeen-year-old football body had become the body of a man who went to the gym very often and worked hard to keep himself fit. I went to the gym a lot—maybe more than a person should who was watching life pass them by as they worked way too hard. The gym kept me sane.
Work – gym – sleep. It was my routine most of the time. Therapy helped me grow and admit to myself who I really was and why I was so angry. The gym kept the anger from coming back.
A date? Rarely did I actually have a date. I would have to stop and put down roots of some kind instead of galivanting all over the country, helping another person stay filthy rich to ever have more than a one-night stand. It hadn’t hurt my own bank account either, so I had nothing to complain about. Even without being a partner, I got paid an obscene amount of money to oversee the building of luxurious resorts for other people to use.
I wasn’t always happy with the things I did, though. Yes, we made these small towns grow. Sometimes, we even saved them from slowly dying. But sometimes, we changed the landscape, and that was not always a good thing. Now, I was back home in my own small town, about to throw myself on the sword of Damocles. Was I here to help or to change the town for theworse? Time would tell, and I would have to live with whatever it was I did here.
If people would even listen to me.
I checked into a room above the Pints’ n Pool. A hot lumberjack named Nate checked me in and I will admit to a few fantasies as he took me upstairs to the small room I would call home for the next few weeks. I may have been a total top, but Nate could have gotten it.
Things I hid while I was here – my attraction to boys was one of those things. Hell, it was the main thing. What would have happened if I had just been myself back then? I was too scared of not being normal myself. Being the G in LGBT wasn’t quite as popular here in the basin back then. Now, Pride flags flew from businesses, and that meant a lot. Things had changed. I had changed.
Maybe it was time I told my family the truth about me so they would quit bothering me about meeting the right girl or boy and giving them grandchildren. I had softened the blow of my being gay by telling them I was bi when I first came out. It was stupid. Another lie for the great Ben Fitzgerald’s books.
Maybe it was time to forgive myself and put the past behind me. Maybe that’s what this was? Maybe it was retribution? It didn’t matter. The person I wanted to see wouldn’t be here. There’s no way he would ever come back to the Basin. He had hated it more than me, and part of that was my own fault.
