Page 11 of The Fireman and the Flirt

“You were watching him that closely?”

I nodded in the most unfortunate manner.

“There were never any rumors about him, and I’ve never heard of him hooking up with a guy, so it was in my head. It was my subconscious willing him to bat for my team. I told myself that all he needed was a little nudge, a secret signifier to know that he wasn’t alone.” The nerves raged up my spine as acutely as they’d done all those years ago.

“He was getting ready to graduate. It was the end of my sophomore year,” I continued. “The night before the last day of school, I could not fall asleep. My brain was wired. It was one of those nights where in the height of exhaustion, your mind gets clear and comes up with a brilliant idea. And so my brilliant idea was to slip a note into his locker giving him that nudge.”

Instinctively, I clutched my legs into my chest, hugging myself tight, braving the choppy waters of mortification.

“What did the note say? ‘I’m gay, you’re gay, let’s talk?’”

Oh, Hannah. Despite having gay friends, she had no idea how the mind of a gay man worked.

“It was slightly more explicit.”

She full on gasped, eyes bugged out like she was in a cartoon.

“I wrote him a letter telling him about how hot I thought he was, how every time I saw him in school or at Cal’s house, I stopped breathing. I said that if he were curious about being with a guy, he could use me to experiment. And then I detailed all the things I wanted him to do to me during said experimentation.” I pinched my ankle, hoping that maybe this was a dream, and I would wake up screaming.

That did not happen, except for the screaming part, which came from Hannah.

Hannah was usually cool as a cucumber, but my story had reduced her to a hyper teenage girl high on gossip. She slapped a hand over her mouth as soon as the scream left her body, followed by a tear-filled laugh that she was trying to hold in to no avail.

“Cary,” she said through her hand. The hope that I was fucking with her was very much implied.

“I shot my shot. And I was sleep deprived. Don’t forget that part. Teenagers need like nine hours of sleep to properly function. Go big or go home, right?” I dipped my head into the crevice between my chest and my knees. Could I physically burrow into myself?

Hannah began cackling again. There was something sweet about it. I had a friend I could finally laugh about this with.

“Teenage Cary was a horndog,” she said.

Being a horny virgin compounded on itself. The more action one wasn’t getting, the more obsessed one was with getting it. And being a closeted horny virgin compounded that even further because one couldn’t even talk about the action one wasn't getting. There was a whole life that my teenage peers got to lead that I couldn’t. At the time, the only person I had been out to was Cal, but I couldn’t talk to him about wanting to offer every hole in my body to his brother as if I were a mini-golf course.

It was repression cubed.

Hannah slapped my knee. “Don’t stop now. What did he say?”

“Nothing! He had no reaction. He never mentioned it. He didn’t look at me any different.” That was the worst part. I was still invisible to him.

“Maybe he never got the letter.”

“But I put it in his locker.”

“Are you sure it was his?”

I shot her a look that equated toGirl, are you serious with that shit?“You think I didn’t know my crush’s locker?” I leapt out of my chair, hit with a sudden urge to pace around. “Did he read the letter and just not care? Did he laugh it off as Cal’s friend being weird? Or did he not even open it? What if he saw it was from me, shrugged, and tossed it into the trash?”

“He wouldn’t do that. He’d be curious enough to read it. Nobody is chill enough to ignore a personal letter written to them.”

She had a point, which only added more confusion.

“The next year is when the whole gearhead shit started up, so maybe he was going to say something, but he was scared off.” In my junior year, I decided to shoot my shot with another closeted athlete, one who I thought liked me back. It backfired horribly. He cast me aside, outed me, and turned me into a big joke. Fortunately, Derek was already in Alaska before I got unfairly pegged as a car-fucking weirdo and had my social status ruined. Even though the nickname followed me for the rest of high school and then some, I chose to believe that the story never made it to him. Cal said Derek worked on an oil rig in the ocean. Gossip couldn’t travel over water, right?

“Maybe he didn’t want to embarrass you. He’s most likely straight, and rather than make a big deal out of it, which would put his brother in an uncomfortable spot, he might’ve thought it was easiest to just let it go.”

“So he was kind of being chivalrous?”

“In a way,” Hannah said. “Or maybe he never got it.”

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