I woke up with no idea where I was. The ceiling was white and smooth, no water stain, no mitten. The sheets were soft and the pillow was thick. Something smelled clean and nothing like my basement room. I thought it was a dream, and I settled down and let the mattress cradle me.
At some point later, the smell of bacon woke me from whatever this was. My eyes opened, and there was still no water stain. I was dressed in clothes from the office. My phone was on a table with pills and water. Advil. My mouth was weird, and my head hurt, so I took two and grabbed the water and my phone and followed my nose out the door, down the stairs.
I saw Graham in a t-shirt and lounge pants, at a kitchen island over a stove.
Flashes: A pretty rainbow drink. Bathroom. A hand. Laughter. A purple umbrella. A phone call. Going out. A car ride.
I shook my head. The room spun.
Before I hit the ground, Graham was already around the island and grabbed me. He half-carried, half-pulled me to the table and put me in a chair. I tried to sit up straight – he's my boss – but I couldn't, and I just slumped in the chair.
"Are you going to be okay?"
I nodded, and I forced myself to look up.
He looked at me, and this thing went across his face, and all I could think of was how he smelled, and I still hated myself for that.
"Okay. I'll be right over here, just finishing up breakfast."
I didn't even nod. The glass of water was spilled on the floor, and after flipping a pancake, he got me another and cleaned up the water before going back to the stove.
I nursed it. I watched him. I hated myself for watching him. The way his pecs flexed under the thin shirt, the way his thinner skin still strained with light, tight muscle as he shifted the bacon and mopped up extra grease and then put a little in the eggs for flavor, the way the smell of the eggs overlaid with other scents of breakfast emanating from the stove but still carried an undercurrent that screamed "Graham!"
I couldn't ... I just, I couldn't do this anymore. I couldn't deny whatever was going on, what I was feeling. And whatever that meant. Fuck it.
When Graham set the plate in front of me he paused, and I looked up at him and then down at the table and saw the drips of water on the table below my eyes, staining the wood. It was just a second, but he put the plate down and didn't say anything, putting another plate on the opposite side of the table. He returned with syrup, butter, and forks, and then sat.
"Try to eat. Slowly."
I picked up a piece of bacon and crunched on it. He watched. I took another piece, and I watched him watching me and when I was done, a tenseness in his shoulders I didn't realize was there released, and his form slumped just a little.
He put his fork in his eggs and asked, "What do you remember?" Then brought it up to his mouth and ate.
I'd never seen him like this. Not just the clothes, but not ... prepared? Not formal? Almost deflated but relieved and ... nervous? The T-shirt was old and soft and I could see the shape of him underneath it, his shoulders and chest. He was solid, and it still showed even though his muscles weren't moving anymore like when he was cooking. Gray hair on his forearms. Bare feet on the tile. This was Graham without the office, without the glass walls and the Macallan and the credenza and the authority that I thought came naturally but maybe it was situational, maybe it was an act hiding something underneath. And now, Graham was just a man eating eggs barefoot in his kitchen on a Saturday morning.
I thought about what he'd said in his office on Thursday, gripping the edge of his desk. "I'm not good at this. I'm good at buildings." And now here he was.
"I went drinking with some of them. Jett invited me." It was so subtle, but Graham went tense for just a moment.
"How did you drink?"
"They didn't card me."
He looked at me, like he was trying to ask something but couldn't.
"I remember a tequila shot, a colorful drink Jett got me, tequila, talking ..." I wracked my brain, and my face felt cold. "I remember Jett's hands. And ... whispering in my ear?" I tried, there was nothing else until "I remember you were there, and your car, and ..."
I looked at him.
"It's okay Drew. It's okay."
"I owe you an apology," I said.
"You don't."
"I don't know what I said in the car."
"It's okay."
"And I've been trying to stay away from you the last two weeks."
"Drew."
"And I don't want to get fired I really like this job and I think I like you and I don't know what that means and please don't fire me."
Graham stood up and handed me tissues.
When I was done, he simply said, "I'm not firing you. Never. Don't even think that."
"But I've been aw—"
"Drew."
"—ful."
"Drew. Look at me."
I tried to get my eyes to stop watering, but I couldn't. I just held the tissue there like a drop cloth over my food.
"I did not get to where I am by firing people because they tried to avoid me. And I would never fire you – fire anyone – for saying 'no' to me. The thought has never entered my mind. And the fact that you spent weeks operating under that assumption makes me sick, Drew. Really. Because that means every time you stayed late, every time you came with me to a site or a dinner, there was a part of you that thought you had to. That it wasn't optional. That's horrible." He quickly corrected: "That's horrible that I put you in a situation where you thought that, I'm genuinely sorry."
I looked at the table. At a scratch in the wood shaped like a duck.
"And that means," he was quieter now, "that I don't know which parts were real. I thought you were there because you wanted to be. If some of that was because you were afraid of losing your job, then I was ... I don't know. Taking advantage of something I didn't even see." He looked away from me, at the floor.
That landed hard. Not because he was wrong. Had I done it all because I was afraid of being fired? Or had I done it because I wanted to but I told myself it was because I was afraid of being fired?
Fuck.
"It wasn't all fear," I finally said. "That's ... that's the problem. I couldn't tell which parts were fear and which parts were just ... just me."
He looked back at me and nodded, slowly.
I took a deep breath. "Let's ... I don't know, come back to it?"
"Okay."
That left the other elephant to be dealt with. I looked at my plate, the words not really forming.
He looked at me confused and then his eyebrows did that thing of recognition. "Jett."
I didn't look up.
Graham was quiet. He picked up his coffee. And he put it back down without drinking. "Jett and I had a 'situation' about seven months ago. I noticed him. I'll be honest about that. He's attractive, he's sharp, and I paid attention to him in a way that went past professional. I took him to sites. I spent time with him. I can see how it looked from his side."
"He said you bought him a suit."
"I didn't buy him a suit." He looked at me steadily. "I took him to sites because it was his job, that's what he was hired for, he had to go to sites to make sure work was progressing right. I spent time with him because he was good at his work and I thought I could make him even better. The attention was real. The interest was ... I don't know. Surface. I liked the look of him. But when he pushed for more, I said no, because there wasn't more. Not on my end. I need to be clear here, Drew: I said no to him because I didn't want something that he did. And I didn't fire him. He's still there. Or, was on Friday. He wanted something that I didn't."
"But you did those things. The sites. The late nights. The 'stay.' You did them with him and then you did them with me and they looked the same."
"They weren't the same."
"How am I supposed to know that?"
"Because I bought you a suit." He said it simply. Without drama. Like it was a fact, which it was. "I bought you a suit because I wanted to see you in something that fit you. Because watching you walk around in that other shirt when I knew what you'd look like in something real was making me lose my mind. I didn't do that for Jett. I didn't do that for anyone. If Jett told you I bought him a suit, he's lying. I'll have Dina pull up the expense receipts for the last eight months if that will prove it to you."
He paused. Looked at his hands. Breathed heavily in a sigh, and it shuddered. Just slightly. I wanted so hard to believe him.
"And because ... when I touched the drywall dust in your hair at Morrison I had to walk 10 feet away from you before I could talk again. That hadn't happened to me in over two decades."
The kitchen was quiet. The eggs were getting cold. He wrapped his hands tighter around the mug, and I think the Jett conversation was over.
"The thing you couldn't finish before?" Graham was gentle. Like opening a door and waiting to see if I'd walk through.
I stared at the one pancake left on my plate. At the surface of it, dark and mottled with what used to be air pockets. The baking powder, the incorporated air, the entire dynamic chemical system now frozen in that surface. So unlike what was going on inside of me.
He told me things, and he answered questions. I could do the same.
"I had a girlfriend in high school. Sarah. Like, five months. It was fine. Normal. And that was the whole thing. It was fine, really. I liked her, and I did what everyone says to do and stuff. But, I wasn't up at night thinking about her. I wasn't counting the seconds I spent looking at her. I wasn't memorizing the way she smelled or tracking how close her hand was to mine. It was just ... fine." I swallowed. "I've never been with a guy. Ever. In college there was a thing. A roommate. Nothing happened. Almost something, once, at a party, but I was drunk and I filed it away and didn't look at it again. I watched the same porn every guy watches. I had the same assumptions about myself that every guy has. And then I met you and everything I thought I knew about what I want just ..." I stopped. "It's not fine. What I feel when I look at you is not fine. It's the opposite of fine. It's everything I never felt with Sarah or anyone and I don't know what that makes me."
I wasn't looking at him. I was looking at the oak tree through the window and my eyes were hot and I was not going to cry again. I'd cried enough in the last 12 hours to last me through my 20s.
"Okay," Graham said.
"That's it?"
"What do you want me to say?"
"I don't know. Something. Anything!"
"Drew." His voice was warm and level and patient. "You're 20. You don't have to know what you are. You don't need a word for it. You're attracted to who you're attracted to, and you'll figure out what that means in your own time. There's no deadline. People are too obsessed with labels – straight, gay, whatever – and they don't give enough thought to what they want as opposed to what they think a label means they need to be." His hands shifted, like they wanted to grab mine, but they stopped. He kept his eyes directly on mine. "Drew: Take it from someone who's much older and possibly a little wiser: Labels don't mean shit." It was the second time I'd heard him use a swear word. "Whatever you are or aren't feeling, that's for you to figure out regardless of what anyone or any label says."
He looked away, towards the window, and after maybe a minute he continued. "I've been with women. And men. I was married, briefly. A woman. It didn't work, but not because of my sexuality. Because we weren't right. I don't think about it in categories. I don't need a label to know what I feel."
"What do you feel?"
He looked back to me from across the table. Bare feet. Uncombed hair. No suit, no office, no glass walls. "You're the first person in a very long time who's made me feel something I wasn't performing. And that scares me, because everything I did in the early weeks, the attention, the time, the proximity, that was calculated. I knew what I was doing – yes, I admit it, I'm being honest. I was interested in you and I created opportunities to be near you. And now that the interest has turned into something that might be real from you, those early moves look different. They look like manipulation, and I can't undo them." He looked down. "And I'm sorry. I really am. But I'm too old to lie and say I don't like you in a way that goes beyond you being a good employee."
That connected to something he'd said in his office, gripping his desk: "I'm not good at this." He'd meant it. He was good at the moves. He wasn't good at the part where the moves stopped being moves and started being real.
We talked for a long time. Through the cold coffee and cold eggs and the morning turning into afternoon. He told me about the marriage, a little. About the men he'd been with. About what it was like to be 52 and pansexual and not interested in labels and not interested in pretending.
I told him about the roommate in college. About the party. About the few moments on my first day watching him through the glass and knowing something without knowing it. About standing in the copy room with his belt at my eye level and telling myself the room was warm, that's why my face was red.
By Saturday evening the conversation had slowed into something comfortable. He made dinner. Pasta, garlic, and olive oil. I never knew that olive oil smelled like something real, I guess because I always bought the blends in those little bottles that were as much as a box of breakfast burritos. And I sat on a stool at the island and watched his hands and I wanted him so badly I had to grip the edge of the counter.
But he didn't make a move. Not once. Not a touch, not a loaded look. He was giving me space to be sober and clear and certain, and I knew that's what he was doing, and it made me want him more. Now that everything was out.
He walked me to the guest room, and I was still in my clothes from yesterday and he put a glass down. "Same drill. Water's on the nightstand."
"Graham."
"Yeah."
I wanted to kiss him. I could have, I'm positive I could've. He was right there. But I knew that if I kissed him tonight, there'd be a part of me that wondered if it was gratitude or momentum or the raw emotion of the day. And there'd be a part of him that wondered if I was sure. I wanted there to be no question.
"Goodnight," I said.
"Goodnight, Drew."
I lay in the guest bed and I didn't sleep for a long time, but it wasn't like the other sleepless nights. It wasn't the ache or the confusion or the fear. It was anticipation. Like standing at the top of the Belmont staircase looking at the golden sky through the hole in the roof with the sun streaming through like it was doing something magical just for us. Knowing what was up there. Ready to go.
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