Then there’d been driving he shouldn’t have done, parking that’d been a miracle of mechanics and straight lines, getting through the door, and sitting at the bar with Reason and Better Sense, who made piss-poor companions. He had no defense. Sometimes the urge to escape beat him down so hard that there was no other option but to curl into the fetal position and promise anything if only it would stop tearing open his insides.
He hated himself for giving in, but he hated the hatred too. Being crazy felt like the real Nathan. The Nathan who went to work Monday through Friday, sat in his office, took meetings, went to the gym with his friends, and waded through the bullshit of the mundane—that guy was a pussy. That guy was an illusion built on habit and practice, and he was getting more indistinct by the day.
The Nathan curled up between a stall wall and a toilet in some club while high and recently fucked by a kid who might or might not have been even legal? Now
that
guy was obviously the better man. Nothing said upstanding, righteous citizen like emotional repression, illegal drugs, and meaningless sex.
Nathan spat, shivering now. Someone banged on the door, and Nathan ignored it as he wiped his mouth on the shoulder of his too-tight T-shirt. His ass felt raw and his dick sticky. His body ached, and his stomach churned. He could always lie down right here and sleep forever. They could mount a sign on the wall over his head:
HERE LIES NATHAN THE ASSHOLE. LAST FAKE STRAIGHT MAN STANDING
Yeah, well, more like crawling, but maybe they’d give him the benefit of the doubt. Nathan weakly chuckled and got his clothing together. He snorted when he thought about how Laura would kill him for taking such risks. Nathan’s laughter became manic as he unlocked the door and wove his way through the bathroom and beyond. He staggered through the rippling tide of bodies. The youth in the faces startled him. God, when had they all turned into children?
Nathan got past the bouncer and greeter at the front door, and a chilly, autumn breeze licked his skin once he stepped into the after-midnight air. It took him entirely too long to find his black Corvette coupe, longer still to make the key work. He had no idea how long he sat in the seat with the doors locked, fogging the glass with his breathing.
The panic started to set in. That swift wave of,
Oh God, what have I done
always followed Nathan’s anonymous nights on the town. He was getting less and less careful. Sure, he was in another city, but Nathan remembered when he used to do this shit only after a flight out of state. His job often sent him alone and packing for long weekends, and Nathan would take advantage. He’d lose control once every quarter, not once a month, and never so close to his own turf. If there was one thing Nathan knew for sure, it was that the world was always a smaller place than one thought, especially if one had something to hide.
Nathan gulped and thanked God that he had no idea who’d just fucked him. If a strange kid cornered Nathan on the street and tried to say anything to Nathan at all, Nathan could be genuinely confused. Say
I don’t know you
and mean it.
Because Nathan didn’t get wasted, lose control, or fuck guys.
Oh no. That wasn’t like Nathan Hunt at all.
* * * *
Nathan’s cell phone started to ring at almost the exact same time as the alarm clock started to screech. To add insult to injury, the hotel phone lit up and clanged with his scheduled wake-up call, and Nathan flailed at the sheets and got tangled in the covers. He was naked, his belly was splattered in dried patches marking masturbation of yesternight, and the adrenaline rush sent him straight across the hotel’s floor and into the cubicle of a bathroom to dry heave.
“Awesome,” Nathan croaked to the porcelain god.
Mercifully, the ringing noises stopped after a couple of minutes, and Nathan sat sprawled on the tiles until he could stand. His head felt like it’d been repeatedly clubbed with a spiky board, and everything hurt like he had the flu. Sweet baby Jesus. What the hell had Duke given him this time?
Not wanting to contemplate the trickster tendencies of drug dealers, Nathan began the second phase of his morning-after routine: the shower. He climbed into the tub, shivering, and took a deep breath. He turned on the water, leaving it icy cold, and let out a whispered scream of protest. He endured, cock and balls trying to sprint to warmer climes, and slowly but surely, he warmed the temperature until it was scalding. He tore open two bars of hotel soap and used up both of them, scrubbing his skin. He paid particular attention to his hind end, trying to wash away both any microscopic traces of guilt as well as the haunting memory of how good the guilt had felt in its making.
When the scouring was finished, Nathan gave himself another blast of frozen water and got out of the bathtub entirely too awake. He dried off, threw on clean clothes, and was shoving his feet into his shoes when his cell rang again.
It was Laura. Shit. This likely wasn’t good. Nathan answered the phone. “Hi, honey.”
“Don’t you fucking
honey
me,” Laura snarled.
“Would you prefer sugar?”
“Where are you?” Laura demanded, ignoring Nathan’s poor humor. She usually did.
“Running errands,” Nathan said in case Laura was standing in his empty apartment and noting his absence.
“Errands? You have got to be— Look, drop whatever it is you’re doing and get over to— Oh, is our table ready, Daddy?” Laura’s voice changed midstride from Satan Woman to Angelic Cherub.
“Yes, this is Nate. He says he’s not feeling well.” A pause and then Laura’s tinkling laughter scraped Nathan’s raw nerves. “Daddy says you’d better be in top shape by Monday morning for your meeting.”
“Tell him I’ll try to explain to my guts that they can’t slither out my asshole while I’m on the clock.”
“Aw,” Laura cooed. “He says, ‘Yes, sir!’” Laura reported to her father, and Nathan knew Gregory Moore had moved out of earshot and on to the readied table because Laura’s voice regained its normal, cut-the-nonsense tone. “You owe me, bitch.”
“Usually,” Nathan said, but Laura had hung up. Nathan flopped onto the bed. He stared at the ceiling trying to connect the dots and finally gave up. He picked up his phone, slid through screens to get to his schedule, saw an alert, an alarm, and a notation. It read: LUNCH WITH FAMILY MOORE, RIDGES CLUB, SUNDAY, NOON.
“Well…shit.” Nathan covered his eyes with his hands. He pressed the heels into the sockets until he saw white, and then he got up. There was no way to make good on his mistake today, and the fact that he’d made such a grave oversight was more disturbing than he wanted to contemplate. It occurred to him that he might not be
coming
unhinged. He might already be unscrewed, taken out back, and set on the burn pile waiting for the match.
Checkout was a breeze, and Nathan opted to keep the radio and his iPod off and make the drive in silence. He stopped and got himself a ginger ale to soothe his guts, and as the miles flew by, the urge to rush back to his other life dwindled. A flashback of the night before rose like bile to haunt him, but it wasn’t of the sex or the dance or the drugs or drink. He remembered being curled up and dying to be at home with someone who wanted to take care of him. With someone for whom Nathan wanted to return the favor.
Did all men secretly want that, or was it only his sorry ass?
It wasn’t exactly the desire expressed in locker rooms or road trips with the buddies. No, those wants had less to do with the cuddle and more to do with the cock. Nathan wasn’t immune to those demands either, as the evidence definitely would show, but damn did feeding that beast sometimes feel shallow.
That was probably the come-down talking.
Nathan wasn’t even sure what he meant by “take care of” anyway. He knew it involved holding. Beyond that, though, Nathan was at a loss. All those chick flicks he’d watched over the years, and none of the lessons had stuck.
Nathan had never been the closet queer who dreamed of weddings. He had a hard enough time admitting he was gay at all. Thirty-one years of living, and he had no idea how to deal. Most days he tried to ignore it; the tactic had worked for a long time. Sure there were battles with depression and anger, but didn’t everybody have those? In Nathan’s experience, most people were pretending to be something they weren’t. Hence the rising demand for Prozac.
Mood-altering drugs hadn’t done anything for Nathan, though. His self-hatred had gotten worse and worse. It was especially bad after he finally caved in to the inevitable man-on-man fuck, and Nathan had read enough self-help manuals to know succumbing to his needs made him angry because it reminded him that he couldn’t meet them all the time. Or, maybe even worse, that he was choosing not to meet them all the time. Talk about a recipe for feeling powerless and weak.
The whole nasty spiral was responsible for the wreckage Nathan had made out of his life, but the longing he’d been feeling lately wasn’t like the one that came with wishing for the probably-not-simpler straight, clean life. It wasn’t a straight-versus-gay thing. Maybe all people craved a kind of forgiving affection. The kind that wouldn’t condemn anybody for making mistakes, even if someone made them over and over again. Every time a person would swear he’d learn, and the person who loved him would believe it.
Nathan’s mama had been like that on her good days. When Mama had found Nathan and a boy from Sunday school at First Revival Baptist Church in the bathroom with their cocks out, but not for pissing, she’d hauled him out by the scruff of his neck and shaken him until he promised never to do anything like that again. Nathan had sworn, his mother had hugged him, and she said they wouldn’t bother Nathan’s dad about the incident.
But when his father had caught Nathan and a boy from the basketball team in the driveway out back behind their trailer, forgoing the task of changing the oil in Daddy’s Thunderbird for a little tongue action, he’d put Nathan’s head through the double-wide’s siding.
Mama and Daddy always did have a difference of opinion on what would make Nathan more of a man.
After Nathan’s ears had stopped ringing and the concussion subsided, he’d promised his mother, yet again, that he would stop trespassing into Satan’s garden of temptation. He’d also promised himself he’d stop getting caught by people who’d rather see him dead than see him honest.
Maybe that was the crux of it: truth. The special sauce in the holding, sex, forgiveness thing that Nathan could admit he wanted when drugs and circumstances tore away all his shields and walls and left him bare-ass up to the search light. Scary stuff, truth. All it’d gotten him so far in life was his brains knocked around, his jaw unhinged, and his whole body once very publically fired from a high school fast-food job. Turned out, the manager’s innuendo had been rhetorical in nature. The guy was even farther in the closet than Nathan, and he had made an example out of Nathan in front of a dining room full of Nathan’s classmates.
Perhaps he was doing it wrong, this truth business. Telling it to the wrong damned people. Nathan chuckled. Well, obviously, but in his defense, it wasn’t like he had much by way of recent comparison. Nathan couldn’t remember the last time he’d opted to tell the truth instead of a lie.
Such thoughts led him straight to Laura and Monday’s meetings at the office. Nathan was glad for the drive. It gave him time to get all this crazy thinking out of his system so he could get back to surviving his life.
Nathan came out of the mountains and merged onto the roads toward home, his foot heavy on the accelerator and his radar detector working overtime.
Chapter Two
At eight fifteen on Monday morning, Nathan swung his Corvette into the landscaped business park off Chapman Highway in South Knoxville that housed tiered rows of dusky red brick commercial condominiums. All manner of small companies had offices in the upscale park, including the Moore Agency, the regional branch of Promo Fulfillment, Inc.
Promo Full, as it was called internally, acted as the mediator between companies needing promotional materials and the vendors who could meet the demands. Before the days of buy-anything-you-want on the Internet, the company had regional offices all over the United States, and the company headquarters was in Memphis, Tennessee. Most of the regional offices had closed now, thanks to online competition and economic downturns. The Memphis headquarters had kept up with the changing times and held international contracts. Only two branch offices remained, and one of them was the Moore Agency.
Gregory Moore was the kind of man who knew everybody. Take Greg to a convention in freaking Indonesia, and he’d know every fourth person there. Politicians, businessmen, evangelical leaders, nobody seemed outside of Greg’s circle.
It made sense in a way. Greg’s father, Gregory Moore II, had been an Atlanta businessman. A franchise tycoon, the elder and late Gregory Moore had caught on to the genius of location and boxed products long before anyone else. Greasing business wheels seemed hereditary.
In addition to business acumen, the Moore family seemed to be genetically blessed with a close, personal, and public connection to the Lord, Our Father. Greg had made his branch of Promo Full successful by endearing himself to the major religious denominations, most notably Baptists and Methodists. Every pen, piece of letterhead, pamphlet, and coffee mug in practically every church east of the Mississippi had been fulfilled through the Moore Agency.
Greg ran a tight ship, but he was known to be a pleasure to work with and for. When Nathan had graduated from the University of Tennessee at twenty-four, three years later than usual because he’d paid his own way, he’d applied for the best gig in town—The Moore Agency. They paid more in starting salary than the local competitors, and at the time, Nathan had no funds and no desire to try to move anywhere else. He’d grown up poor white trash, left home at eighteen, and was dying to know what it was like not to have a bank account constantly on the verge of overdrawn.
Imagine Nathan’s shock when there had not only been an interview, but Nathan had gotten to speak with the demigod himself. Greg Moore had liked Nathan’s clean-cut, wholesome look and self-made story, and he’d broken about every right-to-work law on the books by asking about church affiliation and Nathan’s personal life. Nathan hadn’t cared. He’d told a series of half-truths, said that he and his parents were lifelong members of First Revival Baptist, that he was single and still looking for The One, and he’d sworn to work harder, better, faster than anyone Mr. Moore had ever met.