Chapter Thirteen
They didn’t awaken to morning-after awkwardness. In fact, they remained happily in bed for a long time, joking and whispering and fooling around as the sunlight bathed them through gaps in the curtains. This lovemaking wasn’t needy and goal-directed like the night before but was playful instead. Still, they stroked each other to completion, gasping their climaxes with lips pressed to the other’s skin.
“I should let you get going with your day.” Elliott splayed across the mattress with his head nestled on Simon’s shoulder.
“I have that PT appointment later. I have time to make you breakfast, though.”
It was tempting, but Elliott had work to catch up on, and some superstitious part of him worried that if he spent too long with Simon, something would go wrong. They’d have a terrible fight. Simon would discover something despicable about him. Simon’s parents would suddenly show up at the door, possibly right as Simon and Elliott were going at it atop the oversized and fairly ugly coffee table.
“Thanks. But I have to go.”
“When can I see you next? Shit. That sounded stalkery and desperate.”
“No, it sounded sweet. Tomorrow?” Also possibly desperate.
Simon squeezed him gently. “Yeah. I’ll make some plans.”
“Remember, we agreed to suspend the dating arms race. We could just hang out. Watch a movie or something.”
Simon considered this. “Tell you what: I’ll get takeout from the Pita Palace and bring it to your place for dinner. If you don’t mind. I like your furniture better.”
“Your parents chose yours?”
“Yeah,” Simon said with a small laugh. “Could you tell? The bedroom’s all mine, though.”
That made Elliott curious to see more of it. He peeled himself away from Simon and the bed and, conscious of Simon’s steady gaze on his naked body, prowled around the room. The furniture was clearly different from that in the living room. A platform bed, probably from Ikea, a plain but serviceable dresser with matching nightstands, sage-green walls and a beige carpet. No bookshelves, but Elliott smiled when he recognized two of his own books beside the bed. The room held little in the way of ornamentation, although there was a formal photo of a younger, unbearded Simon in a police uniform, receiving some kind of certificate.
“Boring, huh?” Simon lay on his back, his head pillowed on crossed arms. He’d kicked the blankets off so Elliott saw the entirety of him. And although his knee was knotted with scars, he was breathtaking.
“You don’t spend a lot of time thinking about decorating. That’s okay.”
“It’s not that. I think . . . I guess I’m afraid if I do much, it’ll magically signal to my parents that I’m gay. This feels safer.”
“Hmm.” Elliott leaned back against the dresser. “I’m gay—”
“I noticed.”
“—and you’ve seen my place. Someone who broke in might be horrified by my book addiction, but I don’t think they’d jump to conclusions about my sexuality.”
“I know. But still.”
What was it like to keep such an essential part of yourself so locked away? It must be exhausting. “Do you get tired of policing yourself?” Elliott asked.
The answer came on a sigh. “Yeah.”
***
They walked to the front door and stood for a minute or two, enjoying an embrace. Elliott couldn’t explain why, but somehow he felt stronger wrapped in those big arms than when he stood alone.
It was a short drive home through the chilly morning, and although blue sky stretched overhead, gray clouds loomed to the west. Sometimes he missed the eternal gloominess of the Pacific Northwest sky, so he was glad to see the potential for an overcast day. Besides, unpleasant weather was always a good excuse to curl up with a book and a big mug of tea. And he’d much rather run when it was cold than scorching hot.
Today, though, he decided to take a day off from running. He’d spend a little time with weights instead, then grade papers and have soup and a sandwich for dinner. And he’d think about how lovely his night with Simon had been.
When Elliott pulled into the driveway, however, he saw that the rainbow flag was missing. At first he thought it might have fallen over, but when he got out of the car and went to investigate, the flag was gone, pole and all. Great. He knew that people sometimes stole lawn decorations from his neighborhood; the previous year, one family’s large carved wooden bear was taken from near their front door. Elliott had always assumed the culprits were teenagers. If so, he hoped some kid was enjoying his stolen pride.
While he was outside, Elliott checked the library—and swore. When he’d left the previous day to pick up Simon, the shelves had been crammed full. Now they bore nothing but an old newspaper and a flyer for yard services.
He hoped the teenagers were at least reading the books and not throwing them away.
Of course, he had no problem restocking. The children’s books had arrived the previous morning, so he put those out, together with an assortment of gay history texts and several novels. That cheered him up. Even better, when he went inside and got on the laptop, he didn’t order more books as replacements. After all, it wasn’t as if he was in danger of running out anytime soon. However, he did order a new rainbow flag, this one bigger than the first and with a few purple cartoon hearts emblazoned on the stripes.
Since he was already online, he fielded student emails. This one wanted to take the class for credit/no credit instead of a grade, and that one, who’d already missed about half the work, wanted to withdraw from the course completely. Another one inquired about the possibility of extra credit. God, if they were this bad now, what would they be like when the end of the semester drew closer?
After twenty minutes with his weights and a quick shower—he was sorry to wash away the remains of his night with Simon—Elliott ate a light brunch. He spent some time staring out the living room window. The clouds had arrived, but an occasional person still came by on foot or bicycle. Three of them stopped at his library, each choosing one book and leaving another. He loved watching that. One older lady with a tiny fluffy dog must have spent ten minutes examining the options, taking each volume out and reading the back before making her decision. It was hard to tell from inside the house, but Elliott thought she took a book about the history of gay men and women in New York City.
What he should have done next—what he’d originally planned to do—was work on an article he’d begun some months before about Tito’s efforts as a leader of the Non-Aligned Movement. But all those Serbo-Croatian words seemed to squiggle before his eyes, and he suddenly found himself completely disinterested in the topic. “I don’t care about the Declaration of Brijuni,” he said out loud. Let someone else dig around in those documents.
As Elliott sat in front of his laptop and closed his eyes, he didn’t see a stout Slavic man in a military uniform. Instead, he saw a tall, bearded man with dark hair and a bright smile. He wore a dark nineteenth-century suit—well-worn and not fancy—with a wide-brimmed hat. He held a pickax and shovel. Another man stood next to him, lighter complected, slightly shorter and considerably more slender, dressed similarly but with a book in one hand. The closeness of their bodies and the angles of their stances suggested they were more than just acquaintances or business partners. A dirt road ran beneath their boots, while a white clapboard bungalow stood behind them, its wide porch holding a pair of rocking chairs.
“What would it have been like?” he mused out loud. Those same streets he and Simon had walked in Sacramento and Columbia—what if they’d walked them a hundred fifty years earlier? Even today, well into the twenty-first century, finding and maintaining a loving relationship was a struggle. Could they have managed it back then?
Abandoning Tito to his fate—a long life into his late eighties and an important place in history—Elliott began to delve into works about homosexuality during the gold rush.
At least at first glance, he couldn’t find much. But he knew something was out there. After all, gay people hadn’t magically burst into fabulous existence a few decades before Elliott was born. When Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, Columbia was at its peak and critics back East were spreading rumors about Whitman’s sexual orientation. So people knew about gay men back then and even wrote occasionally on the topic. The hard part was unearthing those little nuggets of truth from the bedrock of history. He was going to have to do some prospecting of his own.
Again, Elliott found his entire academic trajectory shifting, but this time it was his own choice. He smiled as he worked.