Coda 01 - Promises

been thinking you weren’t really gay, and then you go and use words like ‘motif’ and ‘feng shui.’” I had to laugh at that. “Make yourself at home,” he called over his shoulder as he went into the bedroom to change.
    The cliché sentiment sounded ridiculous; nothing had ever felt less like a home.
    Behind the living room, next to what passed for a kitchen, was a nook that couldn’t quite be called a dining room. It held a rickety card table and another metal folding chair. But I was surprised to see that the entire back wall was taken up by a large book case stuffed full to bursting. I walked over to browse the titles. They were crammed in every which way, but I soon realized that they were sorted by genre and were roughly alphabetical by author. Talk about neat and tidy. One shelf was law-related, police procedurals, and criminal justice textbooks. Then more non-fiction, mostly related to war and the military, but also a few biographies and a huge assortment of fiction—mystery, horror, sci-fi, Westerns, and even a few graphic novels.
    Matt emerged from the bedroom, dressed in his usual jeans and T-shirt. He stood beside me, tall and straight with his hands behind his back, looking at those books. I felt like I had found a tiny window into his heart. Or a shrine, but I didn’t know to what.
    “You never struck me as much of a reader.”

    He was silent for a moment and then said quietly, “I’m alone a lot. Sometimes it’s hard to fill the hours.”
    Those words and the hint of tired resignation in his voice, struck a chord inside me—they echoed my own loneliness so completely. “I know exactly what you mean.”
    And in that moment, something passed between us. We didn’t speak, but I knew we both felt it. It wasn’t anything as trite or romantic as finding one’s soul mate. It was simply a silent recognition that we truly were kindred spirits. That we had both been alone for a long time and maybe we didn’t need to be anymore.
“S O YOUR family doesn’t mind that you’re gay.” It was more a
    statement than a question.
    We were at Tony’s. Matt refused to go to Mamacita’s, where he risked running into Cherie. It wasn’t really much better here. I was sure we were the only table that had two waitresses rushing to serve us. He didn’t seem to notice.
    “It bothered my dad a little. He thought, like you did, that I just hadn’t tried hard enough. He would actually say things like, ‘You just need to take one or two out for a test drive, son.’ My mom took it pretty well. But sometimes it makes her sad, because she knows I’ll be missing out on having kids. And she hates seeing me alone. Brian does his best to be cool with it, although it still freaks him out a bit, I think. Back when I came out, he was the one I was most worried about. I always looked up to him, and I was sure he would hate me. I decided that he had to be the first person I told, and it took me forever to get up the nerve. So, I took him out to a bar—I had just turned twenty-one—and had a couple of drinks to get up my courage, and I finally said, ‘Brian, I’m gay.’ And, he laughed. He actually laughed, and said, ‘No kidding, kid? Did you finally figure it out?’” I laughed again, thinking back on it. Of course Brian, who always kept his eye on me, had figured it out sometime between my Steve Atwater outburst and my infatuation with his best friend and my twenty-first birthday. “It was all rather anticlimactic, but it was also a relief to know that I hadn’t changed in his estimation. I couldn’t have handled that.”
    “Do you have a, you know, a—um— friend ?”
    He seemed to stumble on that word, and I laughed at him. “I have one friend , sort of. His name is Cole. We met in college. He was dating my roommate, actually. But after they broke up, he and I hooked up a couple of times. He lives in Arizona, but his family owns a condo in Vail, and sometimes when he’s up here skiing, he’ll call and we’ll get together. It’s very casual. We’re not really each other’s type. He’s too flamboyant for me, and I’m too small town for him. It is occasionally mutually convenient and with absolutely zero strings attached. But other than that, no. There’s no one.”
    “But how do you meet people? I mean, others like you?”
    “I don’t. Not anymore. I used to go to the clubs sometimes. There’s one in Fort Collins and a couple in Boulder and a bunch in Denver. But, you know,