Dangerously Happy (23 page)

I was taken aback. And I couldn’t have been less in the mood. “It’s okay if we take a night off. It’s been a rough one.” I put my arms around him. Kissed his forehead.

“
Please.” I’d never heard him like that. Needy. It broke my heart. “I’m afraid if I fall asleep like this, that story the freshest thing in my mind, I’ll have nightmares about it. I want to fall asleep with my body remembering yours. Not theirs. Please.”

The awful, nauseating realization. “Love, is that what you've been dreaming when you scream in your sleep?”

The frightened, vulnerable look on his face answered my question.

He wanted me to top. He wanted me to take him from behind. It was the first time with him I had trouble getting hard. But finally a kind of sad, wounded urgency caught us in its pull, and we made love clinging to each other desperately, and finished obliterated, both of us, because we’d had to fight so hard for it we’d worn ourselves out completely.

I was almost asleep when he said, “Now that you know, you can tie me up.”

“
What?”

I must have sounded as confused as I felt because he laughed and said, “I don’t mean tonight. I mean, sometime.”

“
I told you, I don’t need that. It’s okay.”

“
Maybe I do need it. I know I said I didn’t. But I think I wasn’t being honest with you. Or with myself.”

I still didn’t understand. “You feel safer with me now? Because I know?”

“
I know it doesn’t make sense, but yes.”

“
But . . .”

“
What?”

“
You let Jared tie you up, and he didn’t know?”

“
Yes.”

“
Because you trusted him more than you trust me.”

He was quiet for a long time. Then he said, “Yes.”

Fuck, that hurt. I stayed quiet for a while, because I didn’t want to punish his honesty. And I didn’t want to say anything to hurt him after how brave he’d been, telling me about the rape. Finally he said, “I didn’t realize it until recently.”

“
That you don’t trust me?” I asked, trying to keep the hurt, the fact that I was trying not to cry, out of my voice.

He propped himself up, caressed my face as me gazed down at me. “I’m not an expert in psychology, but there’s a connection between what those men did to me, and their fear. Seeing me and David kiss scared them. I don’t understand why. How seeing two kids kissing can scare three grown men. But it did. So they hurt me. And I guess . . .”

I waited. Losing my fucking mind, I lay there waiting for minute after minute.

Finally he said, “You’re a wonderful lover. Partner. I’ve never felt so in sync, so meant to be with anyone in my life. I’m happy with you, just as we are. But you’re still scared.”

“
Dario—”

“
You’re scared, Aidan. And you’re allowed to be scared. I understand it. I do. But I realize now that for me, in a way, your fear is connected to theirs.”

“
How can you say that?” My pain, my sadness was turning into anger.

“
You’re not a hundred percent okay with this, with what we are. With what you are. I know you love me. I know you love what we have together. But there’s a part of you that wishes you weren’t a man who fucks another man. And that shame, that fear . . . I guess it scares me.”

“
So I scare you.”

“
After Vera, you understand. That kind of play, when you take it to a certain level, it taps into real things inside of you. Dark things. I think I’ve always been just a little afraid that if we played like that, I might see a shadow of that fear, that hate in your eyes. The fear and hate that I saw in the eyes of those men. That you might have me tied up, that you’d be fucking me, and I would realize that your fear, your . . . hate was feeding the things you were doing to me.”

“
Hate?” I was having trouble breathing, It was hard to get that one word, that one syllable out.

“
Yes. It sounds trite, but that’s what it is. When you don’t accept yourself. I know it’s a small part of what you feel, and I see it getting smaller and smaller, week by week. But in a way, you hate what you are. You hate yourself for loving me.”

“
That’s not true.”

“
Don’t try to convince me. Don’t try to convince yourself. I know it hurts, but just give the idea, the possibility a little room for a few days. Don’t push it away.”

I never fell asleep that night. I listened to him breathing. I looked at the contours of his shoulders in the faint glow from the streetlights, the shape of his body under the covers. I endured the torment of the jumble of thoughts crashing around in my head, the churning confluence of conflicting feelings—the acid bile of hatred for the three men in the woods, the urge to cry for the young man Dario had been then, just on the cusp of that precious, one-time joy of discovering sex and love for the first time, and the suffocating, crushing pressure of my resentment. How could he say that to me? Now? A few weeks earlier, after that awful night, after I’d made an ass of myself with Melissa, yes. But now? When I’d just told him I wanted to live with him? Share my life with him?

And, little by little, the chill as shame leaked in and cooled my anger at Dario. I’d never been as happy with anyone as I was with him. Never so excited about my future with someone. Never felt so unfairly blessed, so unbelievably lucky that the person I was with was giving their time, their energy, their love to me, me out of all the people who sought him out, fawned over him, wanted him. And I hadn’t told one single person. Not my mom. Not Clara. Not Tom and the guys. Not my friends from work. For weeks I’d been hiding my happiness. Hiding him. Hiding us. Even though I knew none of the people that really mattered to me would be disappointed that I was bi. That I’d chosen a man. Surprised, yes. But so was I, so who cared? Dario was right. It was my problem. My pointless, poisonous shame.

In the morning, after lying awake all night with my disappointment in myself, I expected Dario to be cool. Angry. But as soon as he opened his eyes, as soon as he saw me gazing over at him he moved close, put his arms around me, gave me one of his encompassing, cradling smiles. “I’m going to cook you something special for dinner tonight. Unless you have plans after work.”

“
I can’t tonight. I have something I need to do.” His face froze. His smile didn’t change, except that somehow all the life had gone out of it. As if he’d woken up worried that he’d risked scaring me off again. Either with his confession or his accusation. And I’d just confirmed his worst fear.

“
I’ll be home by ten at the latest.” I said
home
on purpose. It was the first time. His frozen smile seemed to thaw a little. “Make me your special dinner tomorrow instead?” I kissed him.

Now he’d come back to life. “It’s a date.”

When I got back to the loft,
home
, at first I thought the place was empty. But eventually Dario emerged onto the staircase and told me he’d been taking measurements of the space upstairs.

“
I missed my practice slot,” I said after our ritual reunion kiss. “Maybe I could play you one song. A new one.” I wanted it to be an evocation of that first night we’d ended up alone, by chance, and I’d played him the piece that became the seed of my solo adventure, and the seed of what we had now. The new one, though, was unabashedly a love song, a song about him, about us, and playing it for him really was the serenade that we’d joked the first one had been. I loved it, almost floated away on the incredible feeling it gave me, seeing what those words—all metaphor and innuendo—and those notes did to him. And the way he kissed me, after. And the way he made love to me, after.

When we’d calmed, when my heart had slowed to a normal pace, I drew back just enough to meet his gaze. “I had dinner with my mom tonight.”

“
Yeah? Is everything okay?”

“
She wants to meet you.”

Dario went still. Said quietly, as if he was afraid of disturbing some incredibly precarious equilibrium, “You told her?”

“
I told her.”

“
About me? About us?”

“
I told her that I’m in love with you and that we’re moving in together.”

“
How’d she take it?”

“
She was silent. For, like, a minute. I think it was the longest minute of my life. Then she said she never liked Avalyn, and she hoped that unlike her you were good enough for me.”

“
Seriously? That was it?”

I laughed. “Obviously she was going out of her way to be cool. Not to make a big deal. So I had to come out and ask her if she had anything more to say. She actually seemed to think the whole thing was kind of funny. She said that when I was born, when Clara was born, while we were growing up, she’d thought all about what she’d do if one of us was gay, how she’d handle it, how to help us find community, support. But then Clara’d been so boy crazy, and I’d been so girl crazy that she’d figured that was that. And that I’d played a mean trick on her dropping this on her now that her guard was completely down.”

“
She’s awesome. When can I meet her?”

“
She’s so eager to be supportive we could probably drop in right now and she’d make us all Aidanis.”

“
No fucking way. I’m not going to ruin my first impression on the best mom-in-law ever. I’m going to keep my edge over Avalyn.”

“
My dad’s going to be another story.”

“
Yeah? Are you going to tell him?”

“
Mom’s going to tell him.”

“
Okay.” He sounded slightly disappointed.

“
I’m not being a coward.”

“
I didn’t say you were being a coward. I didn’t even think it.”

“
I just know my dad. If I tell him, he’ll be embarrassed, and for the rest of his life he’ll regret not handling it right. If my mom tells him, he can process in his own time, and decide what he wants to say to me.”

“
Sounds like the right plan, love.”

“
I say we give him a week, then invite them over for dinner.”

“
Alright.”

“
Maybe with Clara and Tom. So it’s less of an audition for you, and more of a family dinner.”

“
You’re going to tell Clara and Tom?”

“
I’m going to tell everyone. If that’s okay with you.” The way he smiled, I felt like an absolute masochist for depriving myself of the pleasure of seeing him like that. However big my stupid shame and embarrassment over coming out had been, it was a speck of dust next to that happiness.

Dario and I met Clara and Tom for beers a few nights before the dinner. I waited until we’d polished off our first round and the waitress and brought round two, then said, “I’m going to tell you something that’s probably going to come as a pretty big surprise.”

Tom thought he was being hilarious. “You two are getting married.”

I think just our expressions wiped the smile off Tom’s face. I said, “Well, we don’t want to rush into anything, so we’re starting off by just moving in together.”

Clara looked pretty much exactly how my mom had looked. A clone twenty-eight years younger, quietly conjuring the proper, supportive response. Meanwhile, Tom’s smile came back bigger than ever. “Haha. I mean, you guys do make a cute couple, but . . .” He was waiting for us to rescue him from his escalating confusion and embarrassment, I think.