Talker

Brian was going to have
    a hard enough time doing what he needed to without facing the
    smell of another man’s semen in the damned toilet stall.
    He watched the people for a little while, wondering what was
    wrong with him that he couldn’t participate in the dance. He just
    liked things simple, he thought, eyeing the crowd dispassionately.
    He liked his simple apartment (although he wouldn’t have minded a
    slightly better quality of simple). He liked the routine of going to
    school and working. He liked that his passions were things that kept
    him alone or with the one or two people who mattered. In fact, the
    only thing in his life that was complicated was Tate Walker, and he
    liked that al this simplicity gave him the strength to be exactly what
    Talker needed.
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    With a sigh, he turned from the crowd to his dinner. When he
    was done with that, he gave the bartender his plates and borrowed
    a pen, then turned his attention to the stack of napkins in front of
    him. He spent an hour trying to write out what he wanted to say, but
    he had never been good with words. Al he could manage to scrawl
    was I love you, and he was pretty sure he’d already proven that
    simple truths were not going to do it.
    He’d catch glimpses of Tate, trotting through the crowd. At one
    point he ran by without his ever-present tub of glasses or stack of
    dishes in his arms and a number of people sort of shanghaied him
    onto the dance floor. Tate spent a few moments there, lost in
    Neutral Milk Hotel and “Song Against Sex.” F or a time he
    disappeared, al owing his body to move with theirs, surrounded by
    other people grinding up against him, and while Brian thought it
    might have been something he would have enjoyed before the
    “date,” his face was strained when he finally fought himself clear.
    O h, Talker—no wonder you’re exhausted.
    Brian had thought his friend was fearless from the first time
    Tate sat down next to him on a bus and started to talk about
    Placebo and Rufus Wainwright and The Doves. Now he knew the
    true extent of Talker’s bravery, and his own cowardice dug claws in
    his chest and shrieked.
    I’m sorry, Tate. I should have been more like you.
    But he was going to make up for that tonight.
    He worked in a restaurant—he recognized the rhythm of
    finishing your shift, fil ing your condiments, cleaning the nooks and
    crannies that were expressly the ownership of employee X in
    station Y. Brian stopped his fruitless rough drafts and watched as
    Tate performed his closing duties with the efficiency of a Roomba.
    He zombied from place to place, cleaning what he was supposed
    to, but… but the music was missing, Brian thought with an ache in
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    his chest. Tate, who used to hear music in his head in the silence of
    the shower, now couldn’t hear the music pounding through his feet
    in a club dedicated to music.
    He watched Tate disappear behind the bar, watched him
    come back without his apron, watched him walk into the bathroom.
    He didn’t need to watch Jed as he stepped in front of the swinging
    door with a “C losed for C leaning” sign to know that was his cue.
    Nobody had noticed him sitting in the corner, and he didn’t
    notice anybody as he crossed the dance floor to the bathrooms like
    a fletched pink arrow, but apparently there were people, because
    when he got to the bathroom, Jed was glaring at phantoms behind
    his back and shaking his head.
    “Man,” Jed muttered as he walked up, “we have got to get you
    out of here, straight boy—everybody wants a piece of you tonight.”
    “Jed?” Brian said with a quirk of his lips.
    “Yeah?”
    “You know I ain’t straight.”
    Jed nodded his head. “Now go prove it,” he said, bowing Brian
    into the bathroom like it was the grand bal room of the F antabulous
    Kingdom of G ay.
    It was a bathroom. Bright lights made him blink after the dark
    strobe rainbow of the club, but other than that? Tiny beige tiles, four
    stal s, and a long trough: they were men, they’d seen the
    equipment, hiding it was silly—and made certain aspects of flirting
    a little more difficult.
    Brian looked down and saw Tate’s combat boots in the far
    stall, the one next to the handicapped stall. He parked himself in
    the stall next door and waited for the farce to begin.
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    “Hey, brother,” Tate said, next to him. His voice, stripped of
    the makeup and the tattoos and the attitude, sounded