1
Evan Ruiz
On a windy night last week I took the deepest breath of my life and pressed publish on the single most personal thing I’d ever written. At the time, I didn’t know what else to do, and the letter was one final plea for advice before I officially just called it a day and checked myself into the looney bin. I sat down, poured my fucking soul into a Word doc, and hoped for the best.
What I got was the biggest disaster of my life. And it is still unfolding.
I expected a few responses, maybe ten or twelve. A few came in as I lay in bed, wracked with tension, but I was too nervous to read them. When I did glance at the page here or there, most people seemed supportive, with a few giving me tips on how I could come clean to Tom while still maintaining the friendship. I fell asleep sometime after twelve and then woke up unusually late. And when I checked my phone, the battery had died overnight because of the amount of messages and notifications that were suddenly pouring in.
I couldn’t believe it – my post exploded, literally overnight. When I woke up, forty-four people had shared it, and three hundred had commented. And then it grew from there. And when Buzzfeed linked to the post with a headline that said This Heartfelt Confession of Secret Gay Love Will Melt Your Heart, I knew things had jumped the shark and gotten out of control.
My first instinct was to delete the post and pretend it had never happened. Tom had no idea about any of it, obviously, and if someone shared it across his feeds, he’d recognize our story in an instant. I never should’ve mentioned all those factoids about us. The hot sauce, the roommate timeline, the thing about pickles – he’d recognize us in the story instantly, and I’d look like a crazy person pulling a prank or something.
But at the same time, it felt like a train that had already left the station. Commenters who had been touched by the story said they felt invested already, too, and yanking away the post without explanation would be weird and kind of rude.
I never wanted any of this to happen. I mean, if anything, I wanted the opposite – I wanted to shrink away and hide until my love for Tom faded away. But it didn’t, so I had to go seek help somewhere, and I guess all my lovey-dovey gooiness just flowed out. It just resonated with people, I guess. But now, I am faced with the messiest truth of my life: my love for my roommate is now a national story, and he has no earthly idea that I even like him.
The only good thing about all this is that when I wrote the post, Tom had just left for his family’s annual trip to the North Carolina mountains and probably isn’t too tuned into social media. But he will be back tonight, and I am horrified by the prospect of him finding the article before I see him. That would ruin everything.
This is something I’m going to have to explain by myself, on my own terms. If he learns my secret in a public way, he might think it was a joke or a prank or something, and get mad. It would make no sense. Or he might just get mad that I told some random website instead of him. Or he might just reject me and move out. But as soon as I woke up that first day, I knew I’d plunged myself past a point of no return without even knowing it. And since then the story has only grown. I am out of time.
Today is New Year’s Eve. Tom texted me this morning that he’ll be home later tonight, and asked about my party plans. A few hours ago I made the decision: I’m not making any party plans, because tonight I am going to sit Tom down and have the most difficult conversation of my life. If I wait another day, he could find the article, and that would complicate everything even further.
I know this is a mess, but back up for a second. This is how I got here.
When you get to know Tom Carlile, you won’t blame me for falling in love with him. After all, you would have, too.
~
It actually started due to disaster – maybe that was an omen. Anyway, it was right at the beginning of the summer, and tons of people were moving in and out that day. I was just leaving my apartment at my off-campus student housing building when I heard a huge ruckus and then saw someone in a heap at the bottom of the stairs – that’s right, someone had fallen down the entire staircase.
So I rushed down to help, and leaned down – and I remember jumping back a little when our eyes first met. He was beautiful, almost in the way women are beautiful. I’d never seen a man with such a symmetrical face, such delicate eyes, such full lips. And instantly, I was entranced.
“Oh God,” he said in a voice I felt like I had known my whole life, even if we were just meeting for the first time. “How embarrassing, I’m sorry…”
“Hey, you’re good, don’t be embarrassed,” I said as he started pushing himself out of the mess of books and trinkets from his box.
“I was trying to carry too much, and I slipped on my shoes – ugh. Thanks.”
“Are you okay?” I asked as he stood up.
“Yeah, yeah, it was only a few steps, thankfully. I wasn’t even halfway up the stairs, but then again, I’ve never met something that didn’t make me trip. Anyway, I’m looking for unit 2401 – I’m moving in today.”
I paused. “Wait, I’m 2401. I’m Evan. You’re Tom?”
For some reason, he suddenly seemed horrified. He looked down and started patting his pockets for his phone. “You’re Evan? I knew it was random assignments, I just…my move was so sudden, I guess I forgot to check for a photo…and my childhood best friend was a girl named Evangeline, so for some reason I thought I’d been matched with a girl…”
“Well…I’m him,” I said, aghast at his disappointment. “I’m your roommate. Let me help you get all this stuff...”
I helped him collect his junk. I showed him around the small, two-bedroom apartment. And then my life changed.
It really did start happening all at once. I’m usually distant with roommates, probably because of my mom’s horror stories from her college days when she’d befriend them, and then they’d turn out to be crazy drunks or emotional disasters and the whole thing would blow up and get awkward. I started chatting and offered him a beer, which he politely refused, saying he preferred “white lady wine,” whatever that meant. And then I did something that confused me even more: I canceled my plans and spent the entire day helping him move in.
I’d never been that helpful to anyone before, but something about being around him just made me…well, kind of happy. As we chatted that first day, I got to know that he was funny and carefree in a casual way that I’d always envied in people. I’d always seen myself as being too serious, too dour, too boring. But instantly I saw that Tom was everything I’d always wanted to be. He was easy with his words, he was happy-go-lucky, he was full of stories and gossip and jokes.
And that night, after he’d moved most of his things upstairs, we ordered Domino’s and ended up talking until midnight. I told him about my dad’s death, which shocked me, because I never talked about that with anyone – not even my mom. I told him about my past, hoping a tiny hope that he’d be a part of my future. And I loved his reaction: he didn’t make a big deal of it, and he talked to me about it like I was simply a normal person with a tragic incident in their past, and not some kind of victim.
That night he fell asleep on the couch, and I slid a throw blanket over him without even thinking about it. As I stared down at him, watching him drooling onto the blanket, I got the first glimpse that I was in real trouble.
Up until then, I’d always seen myself as being straight. Honestly, I was probably too straight – I dated too many women, and it wasn’t fair to them. But I never wanted relationships for some reason. Even though I loved a good hookup, I’d never been in love, or even said “I love you” to anyone, not even while drunk. I always felt like there was something missing in my life, but I never knew what it was. Sometimes I just figured it was the product of never having had a father. My mom said it was just some form of low-grade depression, and that I womanized to distract myself – but I’d always wondered if it was something more.
I’d never been mystical or spiritual or anything, but one weekend I went with my friends to Boone, this hippie-dippie little mountain town, and as a joke we drunkenly wandered into a psychic’s office. I held back at the rear of the crowd, but my friends forced me to get a reading, and I never forgot when she looked me in the eye and said, “You’re hiding.”
I felt her words so viscerally, it made me gasp – I had no idea what she was talking about, but at the same time, I knew exactly what she meant. I’d always known I was hiding, I just didn’t know what I was hiding from. Somehow I just felt like I was living as half of myself.
And eventually, Tom Carlile started feeling like that other half, as crazy as that sounds.
I found that I really, really liked my conversations with him. I’d never known anyone like him before. My social circle was all men, and all straight, so I’d never been exposed to all this before. Tom fell out of the sky from a world I didn’t even know existed, a world full of sparkles and drag queens and Technicolor hues I’d never seen.
I remember the third or fourth night, he was carrying in a framed poster of A Star is Born featuring Lady Gaga. I asked him about it, and he insisted that we watch it OnDemand – and I absolutely loved it. I never would’ve let myself be interested in something like that before. In my friend group, you would only ever see those movies on dates. Seeing them alone would be seen as suspect and “girly” and all that.
But everything changed with Tom. As the days went on, everything he said started to seem fascinating – even banal talk about his classes or job started to rivet me. I started asking him more about his life, and he’d tell me about things like daddy tops and bears and poppers. I couldn’t get enough of those details. Gay culture was like an entire invisible world that had existed right under my nose all along. He seemed fascinated about my life, too – he always wanted to know what I’d do with my straight friends, for example.
“You really mean you actually enjoy football games?” he’d ask, and I’d tell him about the plays and players and positions.
“Great,” he’d say. “But what do you actually do while watching them? You just…sit there? Every single Sunday?”
That was when I realized how boring my life had been before him. So I started to change it. Soon I realized I looked forward to seeing him, and whenever he’d go with his friends to the gay bars across town, I’d sometimes wait up until he got home. I didn’t understand why, and I just told myself that a curiously intense friendship was forming. My mom once explained that she would “sync up” with her female roommates, and I assumed it was something like that – it was just that weird juju that happens when two people live under the same roof.
Right?
But soon, I think he started noticing.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asked me one rainy morning when we were eating cereal. I realized I’d been leering at him, but who wouldn’t leer at him? He was beautiful and perfect and dazzling.
“Oh, sorry,” I said, turning away.
“No, seriously. Are you mad about something?”
“No, I was just…never mind.”
After that, I tried to keep my reactions to him under wraps. But it was hard. All I wanted to do was be around him. His grandma died in the summer, and when he left for a week, I missed him every day. I’d light up whenever he’d text me updates, and my friends even started noticing that I was acting loopy and dazed. I told them I’d found a hookup who was giving me mind-blowing sex, but I was lying. Tom was the reason behind every distracted smile, every spontaneous laugh. And nobody knew it but me.
The first time I saw him after the funeral, he did something I can still remember so vividly: he hugged me. It was what my friends call a “bro hug,” and it didn’t last very long, but I can still feel his body against mine. If I could have stopped time and made that moment last forever, I would have.
One night soon after he returned from the funeral, I got curious about our initial meeting.
“Can I ask you something?” I said when we were eating butter-free popcorn (his favorite) and watching some home renovation show. “Why were you so shocked to meet me?”
“What do you mean?”
“When you fell down the stairs and I came down, you seemed almost…disappointed, or something.”
“Oh, it wasn’t that,” he laughed, blushing for some reason. “And sorry, I guess I made a face. It’s hard to hide my feelings.”
“I noticed. What was it, then?”
“Can I be honest?” he said, and I nodded. “It was because you were straight.”
“Um. Straight? I…I don’t get it.”
He sighed. “Look, many straight guys are uncomfortable around me, since I’m openly gay and everything. They won’t be outwardly mean, necessarily, but I’ll still get the message: they view me as being sort of different from them.”
“I had no idea. How can you tell?”
“Oh, all of us gays can tell, honey. Sometimes they won’t make eye contact if they speak to me; sometimes they’ll keep a distance in group conversations, glancing over at me and smirking. Sometimes it even seems like they see my sexuality as a disease that can be caught, or something. So I just…initially, I was a little uneasy. But you’re totally cool with me, obviously. Which is so fucking refreshing…”
Another disaster struck one day when I walked in from a session at the gym, and he was just exiting the bathroom after a shower, totally naked.
“Fuck,” he said as he darted across the hall, “I didn’t bring my towel to the bathroom and thought you weren’t home, sorry…”
But the shocking thing was how I’d admired his lean legs, his bubble ass, the way his dick swung when he walked. I’d taken a million naked showers with other guy after practices, with nothing sexual to ever report. I wouldn’t even glance at them – penises seemed odd and foreign and kind of ugly. But the moment my eyes landed on his dick, my entire body ignited in a way I’d never felt before.
He seemed totally weirded out that I’d seen him naked. For some reason he acted awkward for days. Then things started getting even more complicated. I knew something was going on inside me, and the naked sighting was proof of it, but I still didn’t understand my own reactions to things. I started hanging onto his every word, and if he’d maybe say something a little harsh or sarcastic, my heart would break.
But at the same time I was falling deeper into my own feelings. One time, I brought Tom to trivia night with my straight friends, and I guess we acted overly familiar or something. Afterward, my friend Robbie sort of pulled me aside, all uncomfortable and confused.
“What’s the deal with that kid you brought?” he asked me. “Isn’t he…um….”
“Yes? Isn’t he what?”
“Well, gay?”
I never forgot the way Robbie said that word – he said it in such a harsh, almost violent way, like it was the worst thing anyone could ever be.
“Yes, he is. Why?” I asked, and he shrugged.
“Because, um…why would you bring him around, then?”
Needless to say, I never spoke to Robbie again.
About three months into the…friendship, or whatever you call this, I stayed home all night waiting for Tom to come home. He’d gotten me into watching RuPaul’s Drag Race, and out of nowhere I fell in love with the show. The colors, the joy – I’d never seen anything like it. Our viewing party became a little tradition, and we’d have some drinks and talk about which girls we liked and which ones we wanted to get sent home.
For the finale I stayed in on a Friday, waiting for Tom and expecting him to just show up like he normally did. But he never came, and I didn’t want to text him and act clingy and hurt. He wouldn’t understand, since we’d never even verbally agreed on watching it together, anyway. But that night, I missed him so much I felt physically sick.
I fell asleep on the couch, and after midnight he stumbled in, drunk, with some date. I was instantly irate, and I didn’t understand why. When they had drinks in the kitchen they weren’t loud at all, but I still stomped around the house, making distractions for no reason at all. Who did Tom think he was, anyway, parading some guy around in front of his friend like this?
And his new date was totally wrong for him. He just looked…well, wrong, and I didn’t know why.
As I got ready for bed, I heard Tom approach me from behind. “Hey, is something wrong?” he asked, totally nervous. “I tried to introduce Matt and you…well, you totally ignored him, actually.”
I turned to him halfway. “I watched the show alone. Fantasia LaRue won the season, for your information.”
“Um, thanks for spoiling it! And ugh, I wanted Natasha to win, Fantasia was such a bully. But I’ve been avoiding Twitter so I wouldn’t see!”
“Maybe you should’ve watched it with me, then,” I said, unable to stop myself.
“Hey, what?” he asked, sounding hurt. “I didn’t even know…did you want to watch it with me, Evan?”
I tried to stay casual. “I don’t know. I kind of thought we had a little thing going…I stayed in and waited.”
“You should’ve texted, then! I had no idea. I, um, I met this guy from Tinder, and we hit it off pretty well…”
“Oh, I noticed.”
“What does that mean?” he asked, anxious, and I didn’t respond. “Look, what’s the problem? Do you not want me to bring guys here?”
“I don’t care about what you do.”
“You don’t like him, then? He seems totally normal. What’s wrong with him?”
I smirked. “He looks…nice. I don’t know. Doesn’t really seem like your type.”
He seemed mystified. “And what is my type, then?”
“I don’t know. You just need someone on your level. He seems…well, kind of like a loser.”
“You literally exchanged zero words with him!”
“It’s not that. It’s…nothing. You wouldn’t understand.”
“You’re right. I don’t. Have a good night.”
I slammed my door and tried to fall asleep, but the next thing I knew, my worst nightmares were coming true: the sounds I heard from his bedroom next door became quieter, then changed in tone.
I couldn’t believe it: Tom was about to hook up with his date, and there was nothing I could do about it.
I contemplated flicking the fire alarm, then decided to just put on some John Mayer and ignore it. But I couldn’t. I kept listening in, just to torture myself. The idea of Tom hooking up with someone under our roof felt like a betrayal – I was horrified and disgusted and also really, really turned on for some reason.
But mostly I was just fucking jealous.
Part of me, really deep down, wanted to get up and throw open the door and stop the whole thing. Part of me wanted to confess, to tell him he was the only thing I could ever think about, to tell him I was addicted to his face, to beg him to stop in his tracks and take me instead. But I couldn’t. That would’ve ruined everything.
As I listened to the delicious and horrifying sounds of his moans and groans and whispers, I took my dick in my hand and started imagining other things:
What if was me?
Why had he chosen this random guy instead of me?
And what if I was the one doing those things to him?
I imagined my lips on his lips, his lips on my dick, my cock going in places it had never gone before. I imagined our bodies writhing together, kissing and sucking and touching. Would I ever do that? Would I ever want to do that?
I stroked myself and imagined looking down and seeing his eyes in that position as he sucked me. It made me feel confused and stressed and also hornier than I had ever been in my life.
But at the same time I didn’t even know where to begin. How did gay sex work? Who was on top? Who was in charge? The dynamics were so confusing to me, but at the same time, I was obsessed like nothing in my life before.
That night I realized I couldn’t deny at least one part of this mess: I was sexually interested in him. As their chattering turned to steamier sounds, it hit me like a summer gust of wind: I was probably bisexual.
~
I tossed and turned until four in the morning. That evening Tom went to his sister’s birthday dinner, and I got lonely and Googled the phrase what to do if you think you might be sexually confused. It led me to a twenty-four-hour hotline for LGBT+ youth, and I took a deep breath and dialed the number. But it turned out I had nothing to worry about. The person who answered turned out to be one of the funniest people I’d ever met, a real “character.”
In a molasses-think Southern accent he told me his name was Alton Lawton, Junior, and that he had escaped a Mississippi childhood to live through the turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s in gay San Francisco. Since his husband died last year, he’d given his time to charity work. After he regaled me with a series of his stories, he asked me why I’d called, and I told him the basis of my conflict.
“I ain’t got a thing to offer you on the friendship front, young man,” he began. “See, my Joseph and I were lovers from day one, so I never saw anything like that back in my day. But with the whole gay issue, I can tell you to chill the fuck out.”
I blinked. “Um. Excuse me?”
“It’s easy. Chill the fuck out,” he repeated in a hilariously frank tone. “Sometimes guys like guys. Sometimes girls like girls. Sometimes guys like girls. Ain’t nothing special to any of it. It is what it is, and that’s it.”
“Well, thank you,” I smiled, “but…if this thing is real, I want to just make sure I get it out of my head that it’s…you know. A bad thing.”
“Tell me, then. When did you decide heterosexual love was a bad thing?”
“Oh, I didn’t.”
“Exactly. Because the world never told you it was. So why should gay love be any damn different?”
I was stunned into silence for a few moments. “Wow. That really…kind of helped.”
“Yes, sir. And along the same lines, when did you decide to love the first girl you ever dated?”
“I didn’t. I just…dated her.”
“Yup. Hearts didn’t decide gay love was bad. Humans did. And those are two totally separate things. So all you have to do is go back to the first moment the world told you gay people were bad, and just tell that voice to shut the fuck up.”
We talked a little longer, but I left the call looking at sexuality with brand new eyes. But when Tom got home, our fight flared up again. I was still so hurt, and I didn’t know how to put it into words.
“You were up late last night,” I said as Tom foraged through the freezer looking for the vodka, unable to stop myself. His face turned white, and in that moment I felt like an absolute dick for embarrassing him. I wanted to rush over and hug him, but obviously I couldn’t.
“Oh…fuck. Don’t tell me…don’t tell me the walls are that thin. I wasn’t sure…”
I didn’t respond.
“I’m sorry,” he said soon. “I’m really, really sorry. That is…excuse me, I’m gonna go shut my head in a hole, I can never look at you again.”
“Tom,” I said, and he turned to me. I wanted so desperately to tell him – that I was falling for him, that he’d turned my whole world upside down, that every single night I only dreamed of him. The words burned on my lips, and yet I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t make myself.
So I turned away instead. “It is absolutely fine. Live your life. I’ll just get a noise machine soon.”
“It’s okay,” he said. “If you want me to move out, I will.”
My whole body clenched up. “Tom? What?”
“You want me to move out, right? No straight guy wants to hear that.”
My heart broke for him, right then and there. But I was also confused. “No, I would never do that. Do you want to move out, though?”
“No. Never. I just…I thought you wanted me to…”
“Not at all. Like I said, I’ll get a noise machine, and we’ll be good to go.”
But I knew the truth: no noise machine in the world would overpower the growing chorus in my mind, the chorus screaming Tom Carlile’s name.
~
When I was eighteen or nineteen I had this friend, Katherine. Except she wasn’t a friend – not in her mind, at least. We were in the same study group, and I never even really noticed anything until we all went to a bar one night and she got drunk, broke down, and told me she had developed feelings for me and didn’t know what to do anymore. I watched her heart break on her face, because the truth was that I didn’t love her. And I couldn’t make myself. I let her down as gently as I could, but she was devastated, and our friendship never really recovered.
That’s what I was certain I was heading toward with Tom. I started acting gruff and moody around him. We had our first knock-down, drag-out fight a few weeks after the date incident. A new guy came to the door asking for Tom, and I have no idea what came over me, but I lied and said he was out of town, and sent the guy on his way.
Tom found out, of course, and didn’t understand why I had meddled in his life like that. The shit really hit the fan when I told him to stop hooking up altogether. It wasn’t because he was gay, it was because I wanted to be the one hooking up with him, but clearly he didn’t know that.
“Well maybe you shouldn’t be doing this,” I said, making him gasp.
“What?” he asked, and I didn’t say anything. “Come on,” he said. “Say that again. I dare you.”
“You heard me. Maybe you should slow down your whole dating life. Maybe it’s too much. A distraction. I don’t know, just my two cents.”
“And maybe you shouldn’t fucking shame me for being gay,” he said with a viciousness I’d never heard before.
“What?”
“You know exactly what I’m talking about. When straight men are sexually active, they’re patted on the back and called the big guy on campus. But if I dare to try to go find a hookup, I’m treated like some disease-ridden whore, and it’s the biggest double standard in the world.”
I turned away. “I’m…I’m sorry. I’ll stop.”
But the fight didn’t end. We kept going at it. I was so jealous, I didn’t know what to do with myself. We screamed it out in the hallway, and didn’t talk for two days.
Every day was hell, and then on the third day I got a text from him that made my heart drop:
Hey. I got in a little accident on Third Street by the Taco Bell. Do you happen to have a AAA membership I can use?
But I didn’t help him with calling AAA. I instantly ran to my car and rushed to the scene. Every moment felt like a new nightmare – if something happened to Tom, anything at all, I would lose my fucking mind. I saw horrendous visions of his body on a gurney, of me sobbing by the hospital bed…
I showed up in a rush and found that it was a fender bender, and that Tom was absolutely fine, and was just trying to get his car towed for free.
“Geez,” he said afterward. “I know they say it’s good to have friends in bad times, but when you ran up, I thought someone had died, or something…”
I cried myself to sleep that night, and the truth hit me like a truck: no matter how hard I’d been trying to push back, to run and deny and lie, I was in love, and there could be no turning back. It wasn’t just a fleeting sexual obsession – it was the kind of love that was taking over my whole life.
And I knew there was only one person who could help me, one person who’d had a more disastrous love life than mine:
My mother.