With or Without You (20 page)

“Smile!”

An incandescent flash punctures my vision. The Chasers mill around Sable’s room. Mark and Del hunch over Sable’s laptop. Will and Davis graze on the motley assortment of chips and snacks everyone brought. When I arrived at sundown, I was greeted with smiles, claps on the back, friendship. Like when they saw me at the Darkroom. I should feel like I belong here. But tonight, belonging doesn’t matter. Protecting Davis does.

We’re two fewer tonight; Danny and Micah must have been spooked by the fight.

Sable checks the picture he just took of me on Mark’s digital camera. He nods, then says, “Okay, lose the shirt.”

Everyone else has just gone through this, so I don’t hesitate to doff my polo. Sable raises an eyebrow and whistles. “Nice. Would never have guessed you had that much tone.”

Wolf whistles all around and I flush. Yoga’s been very good to me. Even Davis can’t hide his surprise. I growl, “Just take the damn picture.”

Another flash and then Sable commandeers the laptop, uploading the photos.

“Why are we doing this?” This from Will, whose skeletal shirtless photo rivals Davis for Scrawniest Guy in the Room. I’m surprised Will is still with us. He asks this at least once every meeting.

“It’s like paying dues in a club,” Sable says. He logs on to a website:
MadCityEscorts.com
. He starts by posting Mark’s photos—two very cheesy torso shots, biceps flexed, bare-chested—and creating a profile. Mark’s the only one of us who can really claim having a “bod.” I’m betting that his ad gets the first reply. “This is how you’re contributing to our operating expenses.”

Nobody asks, and I suspect I’m the only one curious, what operating expenses we have.

“It’s also,” Sable continues, typing away, “how we’re learning about the next stage in gay history: the Seventies, or, as I like to call it, the liberation movement. Before Stonewall, the gay community was cowering, hiding in the shadows. But once we stood up for ourselves, we realized just how much we’d been oppressed. Then, we knew we could have sex with whoever we wanted, whenever we wanted.”

“Sex?” Will can’t hide his alarm anymore. “I thought we were just being, you know, escorts. Taking guys out for dinner or whatever.”

Sable shoots Mark and Del a look and all three laugh. Davis joins them. Sable turns and says with forced innocence, “That’s right, Will. Because paying for sex would be prostitution. And that’s illegal. But what these guys are paying for isn’t sex. Your time is valuable, right? They’re paying for your time. That’s all.”

A few keystrokes later and we all have profiles on Mad City Escorts. None of us looks like the other guys on the site, who are all ripped, seductive. But Sable assures us that, by the end of the week, someone will have put in a request to spend time with each of us at two hundred dollars an hour. We split it fifty-fifty; we each keep one hundred and Sable gets the rest for the “operating expenses.”

We split up for the night. Davis and I disappear into his room. Once the door is closed, he throws a couple playful punches at my gut.

“So when did you get so buff?” he asks, a wicked glint in his eye.

“Shan,” I say quickly. “She’s teaching me yoga. It’s nothing.”

Davis plops down on his bed. “Yoga, huh? Maybe you could teach me. Gotta turn these pipe cleaners into pipes.” He flexes his right arm and absolutely nothing happens.

“Hey, listen.” I lower my voice and cast a quick look at the door. “The police came to my house the other night. Asking questions about the Darkroom. And Pete.”

The Davis I grew up with would be terrified at the mention of cops. This Davis, with a posse of new friends, this Davis is angry.

“Son of a bitch. Big Pete’s a badass when he’s picking on the fags, but turn the tables on him and he runs to the cops—”

I shake my head. “He didn’t run anywhere. He’s in a coma.”

I want—need—him to react. Shock. Fear.

No go.

Davis mulls this over; he’s unconsciously pounding the mattress with his fist. “So it must have been one of the other trogs who talked to the cops. We gotta figure out who—”

“Does it matter? Don’t you think … we’re in over our heads here? Sable is—”

“This isn’t Cicada’s fault!” The force in his voice is startling. “He’s looking out for us. Nobody else is doing that. Cicada’s giving us what we always wanted. We’re not scared little kids anymore. I wish we’d known Cicada a long time ago. Pete would have gotten what was coming to him a lot sooner.”

I raise up my hands defensively. “Okay, I’m not saying
anything about Sable. We just don’t have a lot of experience picking fights. Or following through.”

Now Davis is excited. It’s like he’s come from a revival meeting, full of joy and the Word. “There’s so much we didn’t have experience with. Until Cicada came along. Can’t you feel it? How great it feels to walk down the street with your head up?”

I’ve been doing that for a while. Ever since Erik.

Davis is just getting started. “Okay, I wasn’t sure about this escort service thing at first either. But it’s part of our heritage. I want to be just like the guys who lived through Stonewall. And came into their own. Those guys don’t take shit from anyone. They live out loud and proud. I didn’t realize any of that until Cicada. For Christ’s sake, isn’t this what we always talked about?”

It’s exactly what we always talked about. Fitting in. But fitting in never involved putting people in comas.

We sit quietly for a few more minutes as Davis comes off his buzz. Then he says, “So … what did you say to the cops?”

I groan. “Shan vouched for me. Said I was at home with her that night.”

Davis, who I thought would be relieved, frowns. “Evan, that could seriously screw us up. The whole reason we didn’t tell you about this beforehand was that you were supposed to be our alibi. We needed someone who
wasn’t there when we smashed up those cars to say we’d been with him the entire time.”

I bite back my anger at being used that way. I need to reason with Davis. “Sorry. I’m new to this covering-for-guys-with-baseball-bats thing you’ve got going.” I avoid anger. I’m okay with sarcasm.

Davis is on his feet. “We have to tell Cicada.”

“Look,” I say, standing between him and the door, “I’m the only one they talked to. If they suspected anyone else, they’d have stopped by here. Or Mark’s house. Or Del’s or …” I’m struck by my own words as the implication kicks me in the stomach. How did the police know to come to me? Why was I singled out for questions? Why do they think I helped with all this?

“I think you’re in the clear,” I assure him, although I question how assuring I sound. “Just … lie low. Don’t get in any more fights for a while. It’ll blow over.”

Davis keeps eyeing the door but, for now, he sits back on his bed. “I dunno,” he says. “Whatever. I’m kinda tired.”

“Sure thing. G’night.” And I’m out the door. Before I hit the bottom of the stairs, I hear a door open, a knock, another door open, and Sable’s unmistakable “Hey.”

Erik, in his purple yoga pants and glistening with a patina of fresh sweat, is surprised when I drop by unannounced. Surprised, but pleased.

“I’d hug you but—” He indicates the sweat. But I grab him anyway and hold him tight. Tighter and longer than I maybe should.

“Something up, babe?” The question is soft, inviting.

We move to the love seat and he stays close, never losing contact, making sure I have an anchor. We’re quiet for a long time and then Erik throws his arms up into the air, holding that invisible boom box. I smile and rest my head on his shoulder.

“I’m happy to sit here all night,” he whispers, rubbing my leg. “But if there’s something on your mind …”

All at once, I know it was a mistake to have come here. We still need to talk about Milwaukee. That should be my reason for being here. But I’m too scared to talk about that. And I can’t say anything that’s on my mind without unraveling everything I’ve worked so hard to hide for the past year.

“Davis?”

The name jolts me. Because Erik seldom mentions Davis, it’s like the report of a cannon when he does.

I look into his eyes, and his square-egg-shaped face is oddly expressionless.

“Evan, I know I’ve got my broody moments. And you get me through those. But there are times when you get all distant and I can’t do anything about it. And I suspect—though I can’t prove—that it’s about Davis.” Then he sighs,
bracing himself. “I gotta ask: Are you sleeping with him?”

Sleeping with Davis? I was felt up by Sable and got a woody. I just went live as a paid escort. But sleep with Davis? Hell, no.

I don’t know whether to laugh, be insulted, or beg him to understand how much he means to me. I settle for taking his hand in both of mine and looking him directly in the eye.

“There is nothing going on between me and Davis. Never has been. Never will be.”

Before Milwaukee, that would have been enough. This is after Milwaukee.

“Well, there’s something there. I know it, Ev. I don’t know what it is because you won’t tell me. He’s your ‘best friend.’ That’s all you ever say. That is, until you figured out it was making me uncomfortable to hear about him and then you never mentioned Davis again … I’m guessing so I wouldn’t insist on meeting him.”

Volley after volley finds its mark and I can sense everything rending apart. How long have I thought I was getting away with things I was never getting away with? How many omissions were really admissions? And then, the killing blow.

“Does he even know we’re dating?”

It takes all I have to steel myself for this.

“What are you talking about? You’re the best thing
that’s ever happened to me, Erik. Of course he knows about you. In fact … he was just ragging on me, too. Going on about how all I talk about is this ‘Erik guy’ and ‘when do I get to meet him.’” I change my tone, trying to make it funny. Please let it be funny. “I suppose I’ve kept you to myself for too long. So, yeah, let’s get together with him. I mean, it can’t go worse than dinner with Shan, right?”

I remember the look on Erik’s face when we fought in Milwaukee, when he finally gave in to all the suspicions he’d accumulated over a year and confronted me. That look is back. I can feel time running out.

“No, really, we just have to coordinate our schedules. Davis is totally psyched. He can’t wait to meet you.”

I smile but my stomach lurches. In our year together, these are my only outright lies to Erik. I’ve always placated myself, thinking my omissions were innocent. A lie was a deliberate, articulated untruth. But these half truths, my evasions, have become as poisonous as the lie I just spoke.

Arranging dinner with Shan gave me a Get Out of Jail Free card once. The pressure to learn about my life stopped for a while. Will the mere promise of meeting Davis be enough to satisfy him? Nothing he says or does right now will let me in on his thoughts. The DictionErik is a bust.

All that follows are tepid agreements that we’ll arrange a meeting soon. Erik is clearly drained; I can’t tell what he hates more—being suspicious or that he feels I’ve given him reasons to be. Well, I have. And it sickens me. I keep my eyes on the cool, gray cement on the walk home. I don’t deserve the colors that State Street affords.

I don’t deserve Erik.

More, he doesn’t deserve me.

Dad, newly freed from his cast, insists on driving to the airport when we drop off Shan. In the backseat, Shan and I regress to children again, screaming “We’re gonna die!” every time Dad charges through a yellow/red light.

“Next person who says ‘We’re gonna die’ gets thrown out,” Dad snarls, looking at us in the rearview mirror with an almost playful look.

Through the next yellow/red, Shan and I look at each other and yell, “We’re gonna pass away!”

Mom shakes her head.

Casual observers of our family wouldn’t think anything had changed since Shan’s Great M and D Smack-down. Mom still rides my ass about doing cold-case inventory. Dad still nods when I talk and asks me what I said once I’m done. For the most part, casual observers would be right. Nothing’s really changed.

Much. You’d have to be a Weiss to see the difference.
We don’t have family game nights or talk about how our days went at the dinner table. But there’s a hint of global warming going on; a few ice caps have dissolved. With any luck, I’ll be far from Madison before things get too touchy-feely. Not sure I could handle that.

At the airport, Mom is at her Momest. “I want updates,” she insists to Shan. “Regular baby updates. Sonograms, checkups … Tell me everything.”

Dad goes on about how he’s too young to be a grandfather but hints that maybe now there’s an heir to his great grocery store empire. He wouldn’t be Dad unless he reminded both Shan and me what disappointments we are for not picking up that particular torch.

“Help me with my bags, Spud?”

I grab her luggage and after an assault of parental hugs and kisses, I walk her to the baggage check.

“There’s a spare room in New York,” she says. “It’s the size of your bedroom closet, but it’s free.”

“I’ll remember that.”

We hug.

“Say good-bye to Erik,” she says, and I’m paranoid enough to wonder if there’s double meaning. Then she gets really serious and says, “Stay out of trouble.”

Of course, we both know it’s too late for that. She gives a wave before disappearing in the security line.

Back in the car, the parental détente takes an uncomfortable turn.

“When do you and Davis move away again?”

“Move-in is Labor Day weekend,” I say. It’s not a lie. I just don’t confirm that’s still what I’m doing.

“Chicago, right?”

She says it slowly. I know she knows it’s Chicago. She’s fishing for something.

“Chicago,” I confirm.

She doesn’t say anything else, doesn’t look back at me.

Dad grunts. “Christ, Joan. Even
I
know it’s Chicago.”

Almost a week after Sable first created our online profiles, I get an e-mail from Davis:
Saddle up. We’ve got dates tonight.
I close my eyes and focus.