I confessed, a bit embarrassed, because he was about to become one of the few people in the world to know my dream. “I want to be a writer. But…no luck so far.”
“Why?”
“Writer’s block. A decade’s worth of writer’s block.”
Ted persisted, and I finally confessed to ninety-seven pages of an uncompleted semiautobiographical manuscript about a young man’s coming of age in Allentown hidden in a desk drawer back at my apartment.
He said he wanted to read it.
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I’ll have sex with you again even if you don’t read it.”
And I did. But late the next morning, while we were still in bed wrapped in each other’s arms, my hand gently caressing his broad, smooth chest, he asked, “So, when do I get to read your novel?”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah. I want to read it. You said that it’s semiautobiographical, right? Well, I want to see what you’re all about.”
And if I was already starting to fall in love, that pushed me over the edge.
Ted, too, seemed to accept the inevitability of our relationship. We’d only known each other for hours, but we both seemed to instinctively know we were meant to be together forever.
We didn’t need to discuss whether or not he’d follow me home the next morning. Of course he did. Together Forever had its roots in Together the Next Day, after all, so there’d been no question about it.
We took the subway to West Eighty-sixth Street, then walked the short block to Amsterdam Avenue, where my bland building anchored one corner of the intersection. We passed under a weathered green canopy jutting from the grimy brick facade and entered the lobby. The elderly doorman nodded vacantly as we passed.
“Top-notch security here, huh?” said Ted as we walked into the tiny elevator.
I pushed the button for my floor. “Nothing but the best for me.”
We reached the seventh floor and I ushered him into my apartment, slightly embarrassed when I realized I’d left newspapers and dirty laundry strewn throughout the room that served jointly as living room, dining room, and, for the most part, kitchen.
“Sorry for the mess,” I apologized, hurriedly collecting an armful of the previous week’s discarded clothes from the faded couch angled in the middle of the room. I opened the door to the bed-sized bedroom and tossed them out of sight.
“Nice place,” he said, looking around and choosing to ignore the disarrayed bookshelves, fraying furniture, dying plants, and worn hardwood floors. “A little cramped, but livable. Which is more than you can say for most apartments in Manhattan.”
I hunted through the refrigerator for a couple of Cokes. “I used to have an apartment in the Village, but I got tired of living in a rabbit warren. This place might be small, but it’s a palace compared to that place.”
“There are just too many people in this city,” he called back.
When I returned with the Cokes, Ted was gazing out the window.
“Not much of a view, I’m afraid,” I said.
“One of the paradoxes of living in New York City. There are a lot of great views, but you need a lot of money to get one. The rest of us get to look at other apartment buildings.”
I handed him his Coke. “Sometimes you sound like you don’t like it here.”
“I survive. But one of these days, Iowa, here I come.”
“Iowa?”
“Or Ohio…Utah…”
“Why?” I asked. “Do you want to get back to the land? Or do you just want to live in a state with four letters?”
He smiled and waited for a blaring car horn to stop. “I wouldn’t mind a little peace and quiet in my life.”
“But you can’t leave New York,” I told him. “I don’t think there are any gay people in Iowa.”
Still framed in the window, Ted leaned forward slightly. “I can see the entrance to your subway station down on Broadway.”
“Really?” I already knew that and didn’t care, but I used it as an excuse to press up against him in the window.
He felt my body rub against his and turned slightly to kiss me. When he did, his striking green eyes—and, to me, they would always be his eyes, not his contact lenses—narrowed to slits, and he moaned softly.
We stood there, framed in the window, for several long minutes.
“I think you’ve got something to show me,” he finally said softly.
“Mmm-hmmm,” I purred. I took a step back and, in one swift and very practiced motion, unsnapped my top button, unzipped my fly, and slid down my briefs. My semierection spilled out.
He laughed. “That isn’t exactly what I meant. I was talking about your book.”
“Oh…” I said, embarrassed.
“But…” He trailed off as his mouth moved down my torso. “This is good, too.”
Half an hour later we were both sprawled on the couch, naked, sweaty, and more than a little sticky. That’s when he said, “Now, about that book…”
Without disentangling myself from him, I blindly reached behind me and patted my hand around until I felt my desk. Then, still operating through sense of touch, I moved my hand around until I felt a drawer handle, slid it open, and pulled out the too-thin manila envelope.
“Voilà,” I said. “Allentown Blues, Chapters one through seven. And please don’t laugh at me.”
Ted took the envelope from me and slid the ninety-seven neatly printed pages of manuscript out of it—along with the title page, which simply read “Allentown Blues by Andrew Westlake”—before tossing the envelope to the floor. Then he started reading.
He was on page twelve or so when I felt myself starting to nod off. I decided to let myself go, exhausted from our lovemaking, and delighted my body was entwined with his. And when I woke up, he was done.
“So?” I craned my neck to see his face. “What did you think?”
He smiled. “Why don’t you finish it?”
“First, tell me what you think.”
He started stroking my hair. “Well, it’s very funny. I love your dialogue.”
“Uh-oh. I feel a ‘but’ coming on.”
“The only ‘but’ is that you left me hanging. I want to know what happens to Grant. Does he come out of the closet in Allentown? Does he escape to New York?”
“I don’t know,” I answered truthfully. “Grant hasn’t decided yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean that, when I started writing, I had everything plotted out. But the more I wrote, the more the characters started taking on lives of their own. That’s why I put the book away. I don’t know what should happen next. They haven’t decided.”
“I don’t get it,” he said with a self-conscious laugh. “Maybe I don’t understand how the creative mind works.”
There. I had a second warning. I had another chance to run away, screaming. Sure, he was intelligent and beautiful and sexy and gave a great blow job. But he didn’t understand the illusions of romance and he didn’t understand why I couldn’t just force my literary creations to follow a one-dimensional plot outline.
But, like the first warning, I ignored it. Just as I would ignore all the subsequent warnings.