Between These Walls (12 page)

They chuckled together. Hunter took their trays to the trash receptacle, got drink refills for Ellen and him, and returned to the table.

“How’s your back?” Ellen asked. “How long did it take for my little napkin with the massage clinic’s phone number to hit the trash can?”

Hunter debated whether to keep his visits a secret, but decided he had no need to do so. Ellen didn’t suspect anything beyond functionality.

“As a matter of fact, I took your advice for once.”

Ellen plopped back in her seat with such force, her brunette hair bounced against her shoulders. “You actually showed up for an appointment?”

“Twice.”

“And?”

“And ...” Hunter sighed. “Okay, fine. It helped. You were right.”

“I knew it!” Ellen beamed. “Gabe is a miracle worker, isn’t he?”

“I feel much better. So I owe you my thanks.”

“Are we talking eternal gratitude here?”

“Don’t push your luck.” Hunter focused on his coffee cup. He jiggled it in his hand and felt the liquid slosh around inside. “I couldn’t believe what a difference the first appointment made, so I went again yesterday.” He sipped his coffee and avoided eye contact. No telling what Ellen might decipher from it. “We got to talking, and as it turns out, our paths crossed at a church youth event, way back when we were teenagers.”

“No kidding?” Ellen crossed her arms as a smirk formed. “It sounds like you got along well with him.”

“We had a good time. We talked and joked around, shooting the breeze while he did his job. We’re as different as night and day but got along real well. Great sense of humor. It made the whole massage concept ... bearable.”

“That Gabe is such a sweet guy. And you know I don’t say that about many people.” She shook her head in disappointment. “I wish I could find him the perfect girl. He’s not seeing anyone.”

At that, Hunter’s ears perked up, but he allowed no outward signs of reaction. Feigning nonchalance, he said, “He’s not?”

“Nope,” she said, then snickered, “I must admit, I’ve wondered at times if Gabe is secretly gay.”

Hunter almost choked as he swallowed his coffee. “Why would you wonder that?”

“I can’t put my finger on it.” Ellen squinted in thought. “A couple of his mannerisms, maybe an inflection in his voice. I don’t know.” She leaned forward. “What do you think, Hunter? You’ve met him. Did you notice what I’m talking about?”

Hunter gave a halfhearted shrug to indicate he didn’t care one way or the other. His heartbeat jack-hammered.

“But then I give it more thought and realize I’m flat-out wrong,” Ellen added. “He can’t be gay.”

“Why not?”

“What do you mean, ‘Why not?’ He’s a Christian. You can’t be a Christian and be gay, right?” Ellen said. “You all seem immune to it.”

Hunter took a long draw on his coffee.

CHAPTER 9

When Hunter asked how Kara wanted to spend her Friday night, she said she wanted nothing but to curl up on her sofa with a movie. So Hunter left work an hour early, picked her up from the airport, and took her to her apartment, where they ordered from a Chinese restaurant around the corner. Now, with nothing but two glasses of wine before them on her coffee table, Kara nestled against him.

At first, she suggested they pick a movie from their streaming rental queue online, a film on which they could agree. But Hunter insisted she pick a movie she wanted to see—her perfect moment to relax after returning from two weeks in Paris.

Kara loved romantic dramas. The more tears, the better. And this film contained plenty of them. Hunter often teased her about her taste in movies because their plots always anchored on a death or illness of some variety. In Hunter’s words,
I can tell you what will happen in this movie: Either someone dies in the beginning, or someone has an illness and dies a slow death through the film, or someone has a sudden death at the end.
And he was seldom wrong.

True to form, he found this particular film a tad too melodramatic for his taste. But what intrigued him was the fact that Kara, effervescent as she was—the young woman who kept Michael Bublé on constant rotation in her car—had such dark taste when it came to the films she watched. Yet when he looked around her apartment and noticed things like decorative flowers and scented candles, jars of bath salts and beads of oil or whatever they were in her bathroom, the fresh vegetables she picked up from a farmer’s market when she stayed in town long enough to shop there, he saw signs of a woman who could probe the simplicity of life and uncover treasures the rest of mankind would overlook.

Hunter wrapped his arm around her and she nuzzled against him further. He listened to her breathing as it slowed. She reached such a point of relaxation, he couldn’t help but check to see if she still had her eyes open.

On the screen before them, a married woman had wound up in an affair with a chef. It had started with an exchange of glances on a subway in New York. Before she knew it, she had created excuse after excuse to stop by his restaurant. In fact, she took many people in her life along with her. They knew she had met the chef. They themselves had met the chef, partaken of his cuisine, recommended his restaurant to their friends and family. Whenever the woman visited the restaurant, the chef would stop by the table to greet her fellow patrons, charming them with his wit and anecdotes of training in Paris. Upon closer examination, they might have noticed the chef had stopped by their table while ignoring all others in the dining room. They might have observed how close the chef stood to the woman.

The indicators were obvious. Yet no one suspected the woman and the chef had succumbed to their desires. Least of all, the woman’s husband.

Now, as her husband searched for a specific necktie in their walk-in closet, the woman listened to his voice as he spoke from the other side of the closet wall. Torn between the shame she felt and the hefty price honesty would require, she vacillated on how to approach the subject with her husband. Hunter could see the angst in her eyes, in the way she pursed her lips, in the way she rubbed her temples. Despite his disinterest in the film, Hunter noticed he had clung to every detail in the scene before him.

Hunter sipped his wine. For the sake of his male ego, he decided to give Kara a little tease about her movie. He gestured toward the actress. “That woman’s tormenting herself night after night. Why doesn’t she get it over with and tell him the truth?”

“It’s not that simple, Hunter,” Kara replied in innocence. “She’s conflicted. Her secret has spun out of her control.”

“I don’t know what she sees in the chef anyway. The two of them are polar opposites.”

“It’s not a matter of similarity. She has emotional needs that are rooted from when her twin brother ran a red light and got killed in an intersection on Prom Night. Remember that from the opening scene?”

“Yeah, but that was thirty years ago.”

“It still scarred her. It was her
twin,
Hunter. A piece of her went missing after that night. She didn’t simply lose her brother; she lost her best friend, her closest confidante.”

“He was her brother, not her lover.”

Kara released a playful sigh. “I
know
that, but it left her with unresolved issues and feelings of abandonment. So when she perceives that her husband loves his career more than he loves her, she feels like her closest confidante has started to abandon her all over again. So, now, she has these emotional needs that she wishes her husband could fulfill, but the chef has fulfilled instead. She’s in a worse pickle than when she started, but she can’t find her way out. All because of one critical mistake.”

“Which was?”

“She thought she could solve her issue with sex. One night of intimacy. Forbidden fruit. But it solved nothing and created a slew of new problems for her.”

Hunter hadn’t read into the character’s motivations the way Kara had. Then again, she was used to these films. His preferences veered toward movies that involved explosions in cars or skyscrapers. Now that he thought about it, Kara’s and his preferences both involved people clinging for their lives. In Hunter’s case, however, the characters clung in a literal sense—from a building hundreds of feet above rush-hour traffic in Manhattan.

As Kara grew absorbed in the film again, Hunter ran his fingers through her blond hair. He nuzzled his nose and mouth in her hair for a moment, inhaled the scent of jasmine. Kara didn’t seem to notice, other than the absentminded response of running her thumb along the palm of his hand as she kept her eyes glued to the television, listening to every word.

Moving his head lower, Hunter twice brushed the nape of her neck with the tip of his nose, then planted a kiss on that spot. Closing his eyes, he tried to imagine himself in love with her. And although, considering his faith, he wasn’t sure whether he should do this, he pictured her without clothes on. He had seen her in a bathing suit but had never caught a glimpse of what hid underneath. He relaxed, envisioned himself exploring the shapes and textures of what might exist beneath her layers of clothing.

Hunter wished he could arouse a sexual attraction toward her. Though he found women attractive, its foundation rested in outward appearance—the pretty factor—rather than a sexual desire.

Despite his attractions to the same gender, however, Hunter found peace in the fact that he hadn’t
deceived
Kara. He had focused on her the way an attentive boyfriend should and had made an honest investment in their relationship. His distractions came by way of little tugs toward other men, temptations that tried to lull him into complicity.

That had been his destiny in every relationship, regardless of who his girlfriend was. Regardless of his fervency when his relationships began, his inner tugs would, in time, sabotage them.

Hunter
wanted
to be normal. He just couldn’t find a way to get there.

With all his heart, Hunter wanted to be attracted to Kara. He wanted not only to find her attractive, but to
desire
her the way he knew she desired him. The way other men desired the woman with whom they shared a relationship. Though Hunter had tried to kindle that sort of desire on countless occasions, he wound up frustrated each time. His roots had anchored themselves so deep, not even sex could eliminate them.

Of that, Hunter was certain.

He had tried it once already.

It happened his junior year in high school, a few weeks after Hunter turned seventeen years old.

By that point, he had wrestled with doubts about his sexual identity for five years. He’d given it little thought at first. Growing up, he’d assumed he would get married and have kids. He’d had crushes on girls his age. As a young boy, he’d had girlfriends of the elementary-school type, where they would eat lunch together on occasion or dance together at the school’s Valentine’s Day party. Nothing had caused him concern.

Until the day curiosity hit. Hunter couldn’t pinpoint when it happened; it camouflaged itself in a blur as it crept into his life. But at some point, he found himself wondering about the anatomy of other boys his age. By no means a fixation, it distracted Hunter, taking the form of images on which his mind would linger for a minute before he returned his attention to other matters. It seemed akin to a gnat weaving around his head on a hot summer day.

But his curiosity grew year after year. And by age seventeen, the notion of potential attraction to other males had caused him alarm. Yet he hadn’t told a soul.

Hunter had given his life to Christ the year before. He’d heard stories of how some people, upon becoming Christians, experienced freedom from physical issues: a miracle healing or deliverance from alcohol or cigarette addiction. Hunter himself knew a classmate who’d had a penchant for vodka on the weekends but, upon receiving Christ, had lost the desire to touch another bottle. Hunter believed those testimonies were genuine and, in the case of the classmate, he’d witnessed firsthand the tangible evidence and the change in behavior.

So Hunter had wondered why, upon giving
his
life to Christ,
he
hadn’t lost his curiosity toward the same gender. Not only hadn’t he lost that curiosity, but he’d wondered whether God frowned upon him for experiencing the same attractions he’d experienced
before
becoming a Christian. He knew his conversion had brought significant change to other areas of his life—mental, physical, the way he treated other people—so he didn’t doubt the impact of his faith. Instead, he concluded he faced a struggle that wouldn’t end any time soon.

Nobody suspected he wasn’t a red-blooded male. By his junior year in high school, Hunter had played baseball for years, and had dabbled in basketball, cross-country and other sports at leisure. He’d found his place with the jocks, the popular crowd at school, and had benefitted from the abundance of masculine connotations and assumptions that accompanied his status. Girls found his personality charming. They whispered about his brown hair and the golden specks in his green eyes. In the hallways, freshmen girls giggled when they found themselves the focus of his unintentional eye contact. Cheerleaders—even the gorgeous ones perched at the highest rungs on the slippery social ladder of adolescence—flirted with him, hinted at his taking them out. They wanted to be seen with him. They wanted a reputation as Hunter Carlisle’s girlfriend.

No one suspected anything awry about Hunter Carlisle.

And Hunter did nothing to suggest otherwise. When it came to hiding his secret, he treated it like a baseball game, playing through an injury. Hunter laughed with the guys and flirted with the girls. When a beautiful girl sought physical contact, he would often oblige, within the boundaries he’d set for himself. Once he became a Christian, his confidence soared higher than it already had.

Jenna Coltrane was his first real girlfriend. A cheerleader Hunter’s age, Jenna looked like a Barbie doll, with long, blond hair that shined on sunny days. Her bosom caught the attention of many teenaged guys. Yet Jenna possessed a down-to-earth nature which Hunter found appealing. Though she wasn’t a Christian, she treated people with kindness. Hunter knew she didn’t seek a relationship with him to build her reputation or to land herself a fairy-tale picture in the high school yearbook. In their time alone together, she asked him questions about life and held genuine curiosity about his views.