“Next time I go to DC, I won’t spend half my time having meetings with Republicans through glory holes!”
Mother shrieked, hitting herself in the cheek with the hand that flew up to cover her mouth. Then she dropped it and asked Father, “What’s a glory hole?”
“I’m very certain we don’t want to know.” Father turned to Tierney. “What are you saying?”
“I’m saying, if you think there aren’t any queers running this country, you’re dead wrong.” Tierney waited for his mother’s shriek, but it appeared she’d hit her shock limit. Or didn’t know what “queer” meant, either.
“But they aren’t out, Tierney. If they were, you wouldn’t be meeting them at holy places would you?”
“Father, here’s the deal: If they aren’t out, it’s not my problem. All I can worry about is me. As for my job, I think you need to let me show you whether or not I can still do it before you make assumptions.”
“I suppose you have a point,” Father said after a moment. “We’ll revisit this topic in the future if necessary.” With that, he picked up his fork to resume eating. Mother grabbed her wine glass and chugged it.
Apparently, the discussion was over.
Tierney sat there, staring at his food, drained. He’d done it. Nothing had been decided, it hadn’t gone as horribly as he’d expected, but he’d won his first showdown with his parents.
He felt kind of let down by the whole thing.
The fun wasn’t over, however. At the end of the evening, Tierney stood at the front door, hand on the knob, presenting his parents with his fakest smile after saying his good-byes. Father stepped forward, picking up something from behind a ridiculous vase that stood on the table in the entryway.
“Until this is, um, resolved, I want you to take precautions against any lasting ill effects.” In his outstretched hand, he held . . . a box of condoms.
Tierney blinked. “I can buy my own— I mean, I really don’t—”
“Just take them,” his father barked, shoving it into Tierney’s chest.
“It will make Arthur feel better,” Mother whispered, as if they could have a private conversation. Tierney jerked around to look at her, and she winked.
He opened his mouth to say . . . something, but just then Agatha tottered in, carrying his jacket. “Here you go, young man,” she said.
Jesus Christ. Tierney took the box, grabbed his coat, and then fled into the night.
When Dalton’s phone rang late that evening, it was Tierney, calling from his car, sounding as dried out as a crusty sponge and so relieved to talk to someone “normal.” Already in bed and reading, Dalton set down his book and curled up with his blankets and pillows, content to let Tierney talk it all out. Tell Dalton how his parents didn’t think he could do his job, and how he hadn’t even begun to think about apologizing to them, and how generally bizarre his family was.
Dalton said, “Mm-hmm” and soothing things like that a lot.
After about ten minutes, Tierney finally began to run out of steam. “Father’s hoping I’ll, like, grow out of this or something. He wants to send me to an ex-gay thing now. As if two weeks at Dunthorpe wasn’t enough? Christ.” Something thumped over the line, as if he’d hit his steering wheel or dashboard.
A pang of alarm made Dalton ask, “But you aren’t going, right?”
“Fuck no.” Tierney snorted. “He can’t make me.” A rhythmic clicking that sounded like a blinker started up as he said, “This fitting back into my life thing, it’s stressful.”
“That’s not surprising.” It was a pretty sad attempt at comfort. Dalton swallowed, because what he was about to offer would be the ultimate test of just friendship. “Would it help if I came over?”
Tierney hesitated. He wants me to come over.
“You don’t have to,” he finally responded. “It’s late.”
“Did you ever have sleepovers as a kid?” Dalton asked quickly, pushing out of bed—he was doing this. Tierney needed him. “When your friends would come over and you’d hang out and talk all night?”
Tierney huffed. “I never had any slumber parties when I was a kid because Grandfather thought they were unseemly. Except they were only unseemly for me. Chase gotta have ’em.”
The man’s grandfather was an A number one dickhead. “You can have them now.” Dalton reached for his backpack on the upper shelf of his closet. “All the sleepovers you want.”
“With you?”
“Yeah,” Dalton responded softly, matching Tierney’s tone. “A friendly sleepover,” he added, in case Tierney was worried about that.
“When?”
“It starts in twenty minutes,” Dalton said, searching for a shirt to wear to work in the morning. “As soon as I get there.”
“Oh thank God,” Tierney said in a rush.
Tierney was standing at his door waiting when Dalton got off the elevator. His hair was standing up in spots again—he must have been finger-combing it—and his cheeks seemed hollow. But his eyes were still that mixture of brown and green, and he still had that jaw and the scruff and he was looking at Dalton like he was the last lifeboat on the Titanic.
Scrumptious.
I’m in. So. Much. Trouble.
Forget any fears Dalton had about repeating his past mistakes, there were a million other reasons why Dalton shouldn’t want the man—he was just coming out of the closet, he’d had a personality transformation, he’d gotten most of his sexual experience through a hole in the wall, he was (as Tierney put it himself) a serious fixer-upper, and to top it all off, beginning a relationship could actually jeopardize all the remodeling work he’d begun.
But the bones are good. The structural elements of this man were as solid as midcentury wood-frame construction. Solid enough for Dalton to ignore all those warning signs, and simply trust his gut.
Not that it mattered, because this was just platonic, right?
“Hi,” he said, after standing in front of Tierney for what had to have been five seconds of silence.
“Hi.” Tierney sighed, reaching to place a hand on the ball of Dalton’s shoulder. He squeezed once and let it drop. “Thank you.”
Dalton let the warm glow in his chest infuse his smile. “Let’s get this party started.”
It wasn’t much of a party, but it seemed to be what Tierney needed. Once they were in his living room, he fell onto the couch, lounging in his old, nearly threadbare T-shirt and pajama pants.