lachambers oneshots

chapter 2

I didn’t call him the next week or the two weeks after. The first day I walked to class after what had happened, I felt as if I must look different. That something about my appearance must have changed and people might guess from just looking at me what was going on. It made me feel haunted, like people might start throwing stones and bottles at me any second.

I started doing some discreet research into the legal and social status of homosexual men in Maine. Which – on top of what I already knew from merely having listened to and observed the people around me all my life – didn’t make me feel better. If one was relatively independent in choosing where to live and work, one could probably move to a thinly populated area and hope to live in relative quiet. As a lawyer, Chris wouldn’t have that option. He would have to stay close to where the clients and the courts were, in the cities … pretty much under the public’s eye.

I had meant what I had said to Chris, I didn’t want to live two lives, having a wife and kids on one side and a secret relationship with him on the other. Though that seemed to be what most men in this sort of situation did, judging from an article I found in a magazine’s special edition on the civil rights movement of the African-American community, featuring also pieces on the demands of women and homosexuals for equality and anti-discrimination laws.

The law declared relations between men as “detestable” and “abominable”. An “act against nature”. There were reports of arrests. There were stories I had heard over the years and more I came across now of “men like that” getting harassed and beaten, of not getting a decent place to rent, of not getting a job...

It took me several days to overcome the nausea. Some days, I could barely get out of bed, staring endlessly at shadows moving on my wall, my heart aching. When one or two of my friends asked what was wrong, I mumbled something about headaches. Which wasn’t entirely a lie.

I wrote and rewrote two short stories for my creative writing class and even considered submitting them to our campus magazine. Sorrow makes for a willing muse, I guess.

I didn’t want to lose him. But I couldn’t bring myself to pick up the phone and call him.

At night I had dreams about him though. Mostly of him drowning again, a dream I had not had in a while and that now seemed to have returned with a vengeance. Sometimes – more often than I care to admit – I dreamed of the kiss. Of his hands on me and of losing myself in the sensations. From both dreams I woke bathed in sweat, yet with utterly different feelings coursing through my body.

After a month had come and gone, I found him standing on my doorstep. I stared at him for ten whole seconds before my brain processed his haggard look. He hadn’t shaved for a few days.

I wordlessly opened the door a little wider to let him in. Robert, the aspiring journalist I shared the two bedroom flat with, was gone for a couple of days, so I led the way to the kitchen and started clearing the small table of the books and notes I had abandoned there.

“Please, sit. You want anything? Coffee? Water?” It felt like I was playing host to a complete stranger but my heart was thumping hard against my ribcage.

Chris had remained in the doorway, watching me rummage. “Gordie, cut the crap.”

I stopped in my tracks. He walked over to me and took the books from my hands, putting them back on the kitchen table. Before I could protest, he maneuvered me into one of the chairs and took the seat opposite.