Marie Sexton - Promises

“Oh.” He actually sounded disappointed. “Well, maybe another time….”

“Hey!” Lizzy interrupted, grinning ear to ear. “Why don’t you come? We’re just having dinner up at the house. We would love to have you.”

He agreed, and we arranged for him to come back by the shop shortly after we closed at five.

Once he was gone, I studiously tried not to look at Lizzy, who was standing next to me with the goofiest smile I’d seen in a long time. She has blonde hair that seems to fly all over the place when she moves and blue eyes, which at the moment were shining with excitement. I suppose she falls somewhere between “lovely” and “cute as a button,” and I swear she could charm the stars down out of the sky if she tried.

“Well?” she finally asked.

“Well, what?” I knew I was blushing and hated myself for it.

“You know what.” She smacked me on the arm. “He’s hot! And he asked you out. Aren’t you excited?” The fact was, I didn’t have many friends. Most of my buddies from high school were married with kids. The ones who weren’t married were all troublemakers who spent their nights drinking at the bar. Lizzy was probably the best friend I had in the world, and I knew that she was always hoping I would find somebody.

“I don’t think he meant it as a date.”

Her smile faltered a little. “You don’t?”

“Does he look gay to you?”

“Well, no. But neither do you, so that obviously doesn’t mean anything and you know it. He wanted to take you out and was disappointed that he wasn’t going to have you alone. I think he’s interested.” The smile was back in its full glory now.

I felt a grin breaking out on my face. “I’m not going to get my hopes up, but I sure wouldn’t mind if you were right.”

PEOPLE always ask me when I knew that I was gay. I guess they think I had some epiphany—lights flashing and horns blaring—but it wasn’t like that for me. It was more of a culmination of events.

I suppose the first clues came early in puberty as I compared myself to my brother Brian, two years my elder. While he was hanging up posters of Cindy Crawford and Samantha Fox, I was putting up only cars and the Denver Broncos. I was aware of the fact that he found girls enticing and fascinating in a way I did not understand, but I didn’t think too much of it.

One weekend when I was fifteen, my dad went to a Broncos game and brought a poster back for me that showed the whole team with the cheerleaders arrayed around them in various provocative poses. Brian helped me hang it up, and then we stood there for a few minutes looking at it.

“Which one do you think is the best looking?” Brian asked me.

“Steve Atwater,” I said without even thinking about it.

He laughed, but it was a nervous kind of laugh, like he wasn’t sure if I was pulling his leg or not. When I turned to look at him, I found him staring at me with a look on his face that would eventually become very familiar to me: part humor, part confusion, part concern. I was embarrassed. I knew my answer was wrong, and yet, I wasn’t really sure why.

“No,” he said, “I meant which one of the cheerleaders?” In truth, I had barely noticed them.

Soon my friends were swapping skin magazines with shaking hands and boastful laughs. I wasn’t exactly sure what they felt when they looked at them, but it was pretty clear it wasn’t the same as the mild embarrassment I was feeling.

It wasn’t until I met Tom that I realized exactly how different I was. Tom played football with my brother Brian. They were best friends. I was sixteen; they were eighteen. From the moment he walked in our front door behind my brother, I was infatuated with him. I could barely speak to him but couldn’t keep my eyes off him. His laugh was enough to elicit physical responses that caused me to always have a school book in my hand when he was in the house—not because I was such a good student, but because I needed to be able to cover myself quickly. I walked a fine line between wanting to see him as much as possible and wanting to stay out of his sight. I knew Brian was watching me again with the same looks he had given me the day I blurted out Steve Atwater’s name: concern, bemusement, embarrassment. It was something of a relief when the two of them finally graduated and went off to college.

After that, I was pretty sure, although I never said anything to anybody. I faked my way through high school. I never tried out for football because I was afraid of the complications that could arise in the locker room, if only in my imagination. I had a few dates with girls, but they were mostly group dates; we held hands a few times and a couple of them even kissed me. The kisses were, for me at least, completely uninspiring, bordering on disturbing, and it never went further than that.

Once I made it to college, away from home, I finally allowed myself to experiment. I met guys at the club or at the gym and had a few brief but meaningless affairs. Never found anything I would have called love, but I knew after that, without a doubt, that I was gay.

Needless to say, I never planned to be in my thirties and still alone. And being gay in a town this small isn’t easy. Colorado isn’t exactly a gay Mecca; it’s not the Bible belt, but it’s not San Francisco either. Most of the town knows about me, and most of them even accept me, but a few still look the other way when I pass them in the grocery store or refuse to deal with me when they come into the shop. Chances of finding a partner in Coda were almost nonexistent, and chances of me ending up alone seemed depressingly high.

SO THAT night, Matt met my family. Lizzy went home from work early, ostensibly to get a head start on dinner, but I think the real reason was so she could fill in Brian and Mom before we arrived. Brian, of course, was courteous. Mom was sizing him up but seemed to approve.

“Are you into mountain biking too?” she asked him at one point.

“I sold my bike before I moved here. I liked riding, but in Oklahoma, there aren’t really any mountains to bike in. Why?”

“Jared’s up there every time he has a day off. He goes alone. I keep telling him he shouldn’t. What if he got hurt?”

“Mom, cool it. Have I ever been hurt?”

“You get hurt every time!”

Oh boy, here we go. I was resisting the urge to roll my eyes at her. “Mom, bumps and bruises don’t count.”

“But you don’t even wear a helmet!”

She was starting to whine now. I hate the guilt trip, but I hate helmets more. “I do if it’s a hard trail. I wish you wouldn’t worry about it so much.”

“But there’s nobody with you, in case you need help.”

“Talk to your other son, Mom,” I said teasingly. “He’s the one who won’t ride with me anymore.”

“I can’t keep up!” Brian said, throwing his hands up like he was surrendering.

“Anyway,” Lizzy cut in, “it’s not the trails I worry about. It’s here in town that scares me. Crazy drivers talking on their cell phones and never watching where they’re going.” She was shaking her finger in my direction. It was not the first time I had heard that speech. “You ride to and from work every day, and you never wear your helmet. It’s not safe. I bet Matt can tell you about all kinds of terrible accidents involving bicyclists who weren’t wearing helmets, right Matt?”

He looked amused. “I know better than to get in the middle of a family argument.”

“Brian,” I entreated, “save me from your wife!”

Brian laughed but took pity on me and changed the subject. “So Matt, are you a football fan?”

“Of course.”

“You’re from Oklahoma? Are you a Cowboys fan?”

He actually grinned a little, and I could tell he was getting ready to let some big cat out of the bag. “I’m a Chiefs fan.”

“Oh no!” The whole table erupted. Lizzy started throwing rolls at him. We are a hardcore Broncos family, and declaring allegiance for our division rival, the Chiefs, was tantamount to heresy in our household.

Brian yelled gleefully, “Jared, you know better than to bring a Chiefs fan into my house! I should throw both of you out on your asses!”

“And you seemed like such a nice boy too,” Mom said mournfully but with a twinkle in her eye.

I was laughing. “Hey, I didn’t know! I assumed anybody smart enough to live in Colorado would know who the better team was!”

“All right,” Matt said. “Everybody calm down. You Broncos fans are so high strung!” That got him another round of razzing, and Lizzy threw another roll at him. He saw it coming, caught it, and turned to throw it at me. “You know, it could be worse. At least I’m not a Raiders fan!” And of course we all had to agree on that.

Right after dinner, Mom went home. I sent Matt out onto the patio while I went to fetch beer from the kitchen. When I walked in, Lizzy was beaming at me.

I tried to ignore that look and asked, “You coming outside with us?”

“Sure,” Brian started to say, “as soon as—”

“No!” Lizzy cut him off, slapping his arm playfully. “No. We’re going to give you boys some time alone.”

“Ah.” Brian looked a little troubled by that. I had a sudden Steve Atwater flashback.

Obviously, knowing I was gay was one thing, but this was the first time he had ever really had to think about me with a potential suitor. I hadn’t ever had a boyfriend serious enough to introduce to my family.

“Lizzy, I don’t think that’s necessary. I’m pretty sure that’s not what he has in mind.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. You two couldn’t take your eyes off each other all through dinner. I’ll just go upstairs, and Brian will clean up.”