I find myself torn a lot of times, between wishing I was a normal person with that invisibility that comes with being one of the crowd, and appreciating the power that fame gives me. It was like being a superhero with no secret identity. If there were no Clark Kent, how would Superman ever be able to grab lunch? I often tried to imagine what it must be like to be someone who worked an office job, someone without a legion of admirers, but in my imagination, I always somehow kept the ability to order people around. I wasn’t sure what I would do if that particular superpower was denied to me.

I’d picked Cassandra’s for our dinner with Nat and Owen. At first, I’d been surprised that it still existed--it was the sort of place your parents would take everyone to if your dad got a promotion, the restaurant kids went to before prom to show that they were trying to be fancy. For my purposes, though, it was a restaurant with plenty of privacy, and an event room with no windows for fans to peek through.

That brought Giselle to mind, sitting at the vast open window, sun filtering through her plumes of smoke. A painful irony, that all the curtains in the world could be open, as long as I was lying about myself. The truth had to be hidden away.

I hoped she didn’t hate me.

“Why so glum?” asked Cave. We were alone in the backseat, thanks to his mother taking Jojo for the evening. She thought it was because Cave had to meet a deadline for work. No sense dragging her into all this just yet.

“Lost in thought, I suppose,” I said.

“Don’t worry about Nat and Owen. They’re some of my best friends. They aren’t going to want to ruin your life by telling everyone the horrible truth about my existence.”

My smile was lopsided. “Thank god. The world must never know about the evils of Cave Mathis. But...does Nat talk as much as Owen?”

“I should probably have warned you about that,” I said. “Some people find them a bit exhausting.”

They were waiting for us at the restaurant. I was getting pretty good at the switching-cars trick, so there was no one there on the sidewalk to mob us as my driver escorted us in.

“How exciting!” said Owen. “We haven’t been here since before our wedding!”

Nat gave me a knowing look and reached out to shake Ransom’s hand. “I don’t know what I’m allowed to say, but I’m pleased to finally meet you.”

The maître d’ led us back to a private room. I hadn’t reserved the entire restaurant to ourselves--it suddenly seemed like a bad idea to call that much attention to myself--and so we passed patrons who, in the dim light, studied their menus and fluffed their hair. No one looked my way. No one snapped a picture.

It was like being invisible. It was wonderful.

By the time we were seated, I was in a much better mood.

“How does it feel to be back in town?” asked Nat.

“No, no,” said Owen, “that’s the driest possible interview question. Answer this one instead: When did you two know you were...fated mates?”

I scrunched my brow. “Fated what?”

Nat sighed and patted Owen’s hand. “You’ll have to forgive him. We’re hate-watching last season’s Shifter Street Mysteries, and there’s this whole thing about how these two guys discover they were meant for each other all along, except one of them is in possession of half a million dollars in stolen diamonds--”

“The alpha guy bites the omega guy on the shoulder!” said Owen.

I nodded as one might do when a child explains a fact to you. “That’s...both interesting and completely inapplicable to the current situation.”

Cave turned to me and said, “Do you watch anything on TV? Is it strange that I have no idea?”

The question caught me off-guard. Another normal-people thing that I’d missed out on, sitting on the couch with Cave at the end of the day, watching a favorite show, keeping up with the characters, yelling curses at the ones we didn’t like. I shook my head. “I don’t really have time,” I said. “Most of it is such dreck anyway.”

Owen gasped. “Haven’t you heard, it’s the New Golden Age of Television!”

“I will say, I got offered a cameo last year for Empire Hospital. I didn’t end up taking it thanks to a schedule conflict, but I could’ve been on a show!”

Cave said, “What would you have played?”

“Um...a famous pop singer.”

“Typecast!” he said, nudging against me.

“Of course,” said Nat, “if you count music videos, you have been on television, quite a lot. Between that, and Owen and I appearing on a home renovation show, Cave is really the only one of us who has never been on TV!”

“Aw, that’s tragic!” I said, putting my arm around Cave. “We’ll find something for you to do on the screen. Do you have any talents?”

“I can edit website code and change a diaper at the same time, does that count?”

“The Changing Table, With Cave Mathis,” said Owen in a breathy announcer voice. “Nat would watch that, with his new baby obsession.”

Cave peered at Nat. “What’s this?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t call it an obsession,” said Nat.

“He literally used the phrase biological clock the other day,” said Owen.

“Now that we’re an old married couple, it makes sense to think about the future, doesn’t it?” said Nat. “Look at you, Cave, you’re so good with Jojo. He’s brought a lot to your life.”

Cave shrugged. “I’ve said this before, I know, but you’ve got to think about the trade-offs too. No more running off to Sao Marcos for big resort trips, if you’ve got a baby.”

Nat took Owen’s hand. “I think we got that out of our system during the wedding. No more tropical islands for us!”

I stared, maybe for a moment too long, at them holding hands. They were so comfortable together. So open. Of course, I still had my arm around Cave, but once we were in public, that arm would be right back by my side. Touching the man I loved was not allowed, except in these private places, hidden from sight.

Something else I was noticing was Cave’s demeanor with his friends. He was relaxed, happy. Even back at the lodge, with all his needs taken care of, I hadn’t seen him be this comfortable.

Was I jealous? Obviously not. That would be a foolish reaction to seeing my boyfriend happily talking to his friends. But they had something that I didn’t. All my friends were industry people. If Toby weren’t my manager, would I have ever been friends with him? Would our personalities have meshed, or would I have found him off-putting, too business-minded, too busy, to be a potential friend?

What was it like, to just have friends?

Maybe having a relationship should have been enough for me. A great victory over the artificiality of my world, reaching out and grabbing the chance to be with Cave.

So why was it that once I’d reached out to him, I saw more of life I couldn’t have, just an arm’s length away?

I didn’t even think there was anyone in my life I could explain this to. Cave wouldn’t grasp it because, in his mind, the situation was clear: I should come out of the closet and be free. Toby would see it in just such simple terms, though the opposite of Cave’s point of view: Friendships like this weren’t compatible with my goals as an artist.

Giselle would probably get it, but I’d pissed her off and now she was gone.

Sometimes my life feels really claustrophobic. My arm slipped off Cave’s shoulders as menus and drinks were delivered.

“Oh!” said Owen. “I have a treat for you.” He reached down to his backpack, which was on the floor beside him. I wondered if my guards had searched it. I could almost sense them, outside the private room, bristling with alarm in case Owen came up with a weapon.

In a sense, the book he had in his hands was a weapon. Nostalgia sharpened to a fine point. Our high school yearbook.

“You’re kidding,” said Cave, taking it from him. “I haven’t seen this in a decade.”

I’d always hated school, and never got a yearbook. “Is that the one you designed?” I asked Cave.

He was gazing down at the cover. “Yeah, that’s the one. That was the year I worked on it.” He didn’t have to say it: The year you and I met. The year you ran away.

“Look at all the hair!” said Owen.

Cave eagerly flipped through the book. There was our class. “Oh my god,” he said. “I can’t believe my mom let me get frosted tips.”

My heart felt squeezed, gripped by the force of memory, looking down at that picture of him. Young Cave, fresh-faced and innocent, yet the beginning of worry-lines on his brow. So much responsibility for a kid, taking care of his mom and sister. Hope mixed with the premature knowledge that sometimes things don’t work out. I wanted to reach back in time and pick him up, hold him close, let him know that it would all work out okay. Wait for me, I would have told him. I’ll be back for you.

They didn’t feel the pain like I did, that was clear. They were laughing, pointing. “You were wearing so much gel, you were flammable!”

Cave turned the page. We weren’t that far apart, the Ms and the Ps. There I was, halfway down. Ransom Pope.

“I hope this isn’t a weird thing to say about 16-year-old you, but wow, you were hot,” Nat said.

“I couldn’t stop looking at him, ever,” said Cave. His shoulder brushed mine, as he put the book closer to me. “Look how cute you were back then.”

“Back then?” I said, laughing.

But it was a hollow laugh. Don’t spoil the mood. I looked so angry in that picture. The look you get when you’re born to be defiant, but you suspect the world has already won.

“What was that little patch of hair on your chin?” joked Cave.

“If you were really up on your Ransom Pope trivia,” said Nat, “you would know that the little patch reappeared several times in his career.”

I touched the picture, as though I could trace the line of my jaw, as though I could reach back into the past. Had I always been that angry, so upset with how the world closed me in? Even back then I’d felt trapped, all the time.

What was it like to feel free? To be unmarked by the world?

Unmarked. When I took my hand away from the picture, I saw that I’d left my fingerprint on the page. Maybe everything marks you. Maybe no one escapes from it.

“You have the most serious look on your face,” said Cave.

For a second I thought he was talking about my picture, but he was looking at me, not the book. I blinked and smiled. “Do I? Just getting caught up in memories, I guess. You remember how rough high school was for me.”

“I have a theory,” said Nat, “but it’s not like a super-happy one, so I don’t know if I should even say it.”

“Ransom looks like he’s in the mood for a really gloomy theory,” Cave said. He was leaning against me now, as though offering me his body for support. I think he understood some of what I was feeling right now. He couldn’t address it, not in front of his friends, but he was telling me he knew.

It made me love him so much.

“So, Dr. Nat’s Theory of High School,” said Nat. “Owen got this yearbook from the newspaper. They have all the years of them, in case they ever need to grab a picture. And I’ve noticed this weird similarity between all the gay kids.”

“Overdone hair?” said Cave.

“Unwrinkled clothes?” I offered.

“They’re all worried. I mean, it’s subtle. But look at the both of you. Owen has one from a couple of years later, when our friend Marcus was in high school, and it’s the same story, and when I got mine from my parents’ house, same thing. We all look a little hunted.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said Cave. “There are plenty of depressed-looking straight kids in here. Check out Morris Shaver there. He was deep in his goth phase back then, and he clearly was suffering all the exquisite pains that life offers.”

Owen said, “Morris Shaver the banker? He was a goth?”

“He married Nancy Hudson and they have five kids now.”

Nat shook his head. “I don’t mean that straight kids couldn’t have a rough time in school, that’s not really what I’m talking about.”

“I see it,” I said.

Nat looked at me hopefully. “You do?”

“It’s the burden of having a secret. Not having someone to talk to about things. Having to think every little thing through, all by yourself, because if the world finds out, you’re going to be punched and thrown into somebody’s locker.”

“That’s not how it was for me,” insisted Cave.

“Of course not for you,” I said. “You were born out of the closet. You were telling people you were gay as soon as you could talk. It’s one of the things that drew me to you back then. No doubt in your mind about yourself, and no doubt that the world would just have to deal with it.”

Owen shook his head. “It wasn’t the easiest thing, growing up gay in Oceanside. I kind of admire that Cave was open about it.”

“I don’t even know if it was a conscious decision exactly,” Cave said. “Maybe it was because when my dad left, I felt pretty much at war with the world anyway. Why should I care what anyone thought?”

“Sometimes it matters what the world thinks,” I said...but then regretted it. The table went quiet, as everyone looked at me.

“We weren’t going to say anything about it,” Nat said finally. “But it was kind of puzzling.”

“I said you were bi,” said Owen proudly. “It was the only explanation that made sense, what with you dating all the girls but kissing Cave.”

I shook my head. “Gay. Completely gay. Uninterested in women. It’s...an act. All of it.” How awful it sounded to have to explain it yet again.

“We don’t have to talk about it,” said Cave.

Nat and Owen had looks of sympathy on their faces...but that sympathy was clearly directed at Cave.

“I don’t mind,” I said. “In for a penny, in for a pound. It’s all between friends, right?”

“Friends who sign statements legally swearing never to talk about it,” said Nat.

“What’s it like?” asked Owen.

“What’s what like?” I asked him back.

“Pretending to be something you’re not.”

“That’s a really negative way of putting it,” began Cave. I could see him bristling, wanting to defend me.

“I think we’re just worried about you,” said Nat. “Please, Ransom, don’t take this the wrong way. But Cave is very dear to us, and closets hurt people. We just don’t want him to be hurt.”

I knew I was going to have to talk about it. Cave was agitated, on the verge of saying something angry to his friends, but of course, he had exactly the same concerns.

“This will sound self-serving, I know,” I said, “but I don’t think of what I’m doing as lying. When I’m up on stage, I’m trying to connect with the audience. Trying to give them something real. I mean, I know plenty of people who get up there and lip-sync, and I won’t do that. It’s the real me, every bad note and missed cue. I know what the critics think of me, and I’ve heard all the complaints about my albums being over-produced and too slick and artificial and all that, but you know, I give those songs my all, no matter what. But there comes a point where you need to draw a line between you and the world, where you have to say, I gave you 90% of my soul for these songs...but I want to keep 10% just for myself. So much of my personal life is out there for everybody to see. Everybody knows when I go out for a coffee or visit a sick fan in the hospital. Twenty-thousand people liked a picture of me where I accidentally tore the elbow in one of my shirts. They get so much of me. I give them so much. But I don’t want to share everything with the world.”

I’d never managed to express it before. It wasn’t just fear of being out of the closet. It was fear of having to share everything. But how would it look through their eyes? Nat and Owen hadn’t experienced the crowds lingering outside their door, the way Cave had. He understood, a little better than them, what it was like to have the fans waiting for you, begging for a peek inside, just a look. Just give us a little more of you, Ransom. A little bit more. More.

“You can’t imagine what it’s like to live like that,” Cave said to his friends. “Surely at the end of the day, you’d want a little bit of your life for yourself, right?”

He was so quick to agree. That should have satisfied me. So why did I have this niggling doubt? Shouldn’t he have questioned why it was that the one little bit of my life I wanted for myself was the same part that trapped him into silence? He wasn’t ashamed of himself. He didn’t care who knew he’d fallen in love with me.

Was all this talk of keeping a little bit to myself just a rationalization, a way to say I don’t want to pay the price for coming out of the closet?

Did Cave feel the same doubts about it I did? If so, he didn’t let on. There was pure allegiance in his voice. He believed every word I said about how I felt.

Didn’t he?

I didn’t want to think about it anymore. I didn’t want to talk about it, certainly. Except that part of me really did. I wanted to talk it out. I wanted someone to challenge me for being selfish. To force me out of my cover.

But maybe the relationship was too new for that kind of conversation. Maybe Cave would feel weird drilling into me about it when what he really wanted to do was just hang out and spend happy, relaxed time with me. Or maybe he was afraid of starting a fight, scared that, given the choice between my career and him, I’d choose my career.

That was a bad thought. Not the sort of thing you really want to think about a person.

“Anyway,” he said, “do we really have to talk about this right now, because I’m starving, and I was thinking about getting one of these massive steaks.”

“Typical dad choice!” said Nat.

We talked food, and the earlier tension melted away. Nat and Owen trusted Cave’s ability to make his own decisions, and he’d clearly decided to stand by me even though things were strange. If they could relax, then so could I. I began to study the menu.

When my phone buzzed, I ignored it. I wasn’t interested in talking about work right now. I wanted to lose myself in friendship, in the feeling of being normal.

It buzzed again, and I silenced it. Cave glanced at me, a question in his eyes, and I shook my head.

Then it began vibrating with text messages. I rolled my eyes and finally took it out.

Call me immediately, said the text from Toby.

“Can you excuse me a second?” I said, rising. I went over to a corner of the room and dialed Toby.

“Jesus, Ransom,” said Toby. “They know.”

“Who knows? Know what?”

“Everybody,” he said. “Dude, somebody leaked pictures from the lodge. You and Cave. They’re all over the internet.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “The whole point of the lodge was to get away from prying eyes.”

While he was still on the line, I flipped over to my web browser and pulled up one of the gossip sites. Ransom Pope With Mysterious Mountain Man. The picture was grainy, hard to make out unless you knew what you were looking at. I knew. It was me and Cave, lying in the sun, our clothes wet from the lake.

I flipped back to the phone app. “When the fuck did this happen?”

“In the past half hour. It’s moving fast, Ransom. We’ve already logged 60 calls from the media about it. You need to get over here, now. I’ve got the PR crew flying back in.”

“Okay, okay...but Toby, who took the pictures?”

“Who do you think?” he said, before hanging up.

My steps were slow back to the table, as though my thoughts were chains around my legs.

Cave reached up a hand to my arm. A protective hand, his instinct. He’d probably saved Jojo from all kinds of emergencies, with that fatherly reaction time.

He knew something was wrong. Still, he had to ask. “Is everything okay?”

I couldn’t find the words at first, and I just stared at him silently, willing him to understand. Maybe he did. Maybe my silence was all that he needed, as realization dawned on his face.

“They know,” I said. “The whole world knows. Someone leaked pictures of us, pictures from the lodge. I’m sorry, Cave, I’ve got to go.”

“I can go with you. Let me call my mom--”

“No time. I have to get with Toby right now.”

“You don’t have to do this alone,” he said.

“I’ll call you,” I said.