Page 37 of We Could Be So Good
“Excuse me?”
“You’re not thinking straight. You’ve had a rough couple of weeks. We’ll forget this happened,” he says with an attempt at a smile. “I’m going for a walk and you can let yourself into the apartment. When I get back, we’ll pretend this never happened, okay?”
Andy knows he ought to be grateful to be let off the hook so easily, but it’s so out of character for Nick, who’s always digging and asking and looking for more. Nick is willing to sweep thiswhole situation under the rug and Andy hates it. It took so much effort for Andy to say something approaching the truth, to say out loud something he hadn’t admitted even to himself until recently, and now Nick wants to pretend he never heard it?
Andy doesn’t usually get angry. There aren’t that many things worth alienating people over. But now his heart is racing. “That’s insulting.”
“It’swhat?”
“I told you what I told you, and you—” He stops himself as an alternate explanation for Nick’s behavior belatedly occurs to him. Nick is letting him down gently. He doesn’t want Andy to—he doesn’t want Andy. And that’s fine. It has to be fine. Andy’s behaving like a child denied a toy, when Nick is a human being who’s allowed not to want to do—whatever—with his friend. Jesus. He scrubs a hand across his face. “I’m sorry. I’ve ruined your evening. I’ll head home and I’ll see you later, all right?”
He turns and begins walking away before Nick can be the one who leaves.
“Wait!”
Andy turns at the sound of Nick’s voice, a horrible swell of hope in his chest.
“That street up there is Seventh Avenue.” Nick points in the opposite direction of where Andy was walking. “Turn left and you’ll be at Sheridan Square. You can get home from there, right?”
“Yeah,” Andy says. “Thanks.” He drops his cigarette in a subway grate, because he never wants the things anyway. As he walks in the direction Nick pointed him, he tries to tell himself that he hasn’t lost the only person in the world who really cares about him.
Part III
Nick
Chapter Eight
Nick isn’t prepared for any of this. He’s barely—barely—been managing to keep his own reactions to Andy under lock and key.
Hearing Andy suggest that he could, what—jerk Nick off as a favor? Jesus. That was enough to send all Nick’s marbles scattering down Tenth Street.
He shudders at the idea of a pity jerk-off from Andy. Or, not even a pity jerk-off. A safety jerk-off. Nick laughs out loud. Two women in fur coats shoot him a baleful glance and quickly cross the street.
Nick tries to imagine how very much he would lose his mind if he let Andy touch him. He’d certainly lose his dignity. He’d probably say all kinds of soft and stupid things and it would be so embarrassing for both of them that they’d never be able to look one another in the eye again.
Hearing Andy suggest that he actuallywantedNick was even worse, but that wasn’t Andy’s fault. He wanted to do Nick a favor; Nick understands that much. Andy doesn’t mean any harm, of course. He never does. Nick’s done a decent job of hiding hisfeelings, he hopes, and so it isn’t Andy’s fault that he doesn’t realize how cruel he’s being.
Nick’s usually perfectly content to take strangers to bed, men whose last names he doesn’t know and doesn’t want to know. Tonight, though, when he was talking to that man, all he could think about was Andy sitting a few yards away, drinking a drink he didn’t want, reading a pulp detective story. The man Nick was talking to was good-looking and seemed nice enough, but Nick would rather have gone home with Andy and watched second-rate television. He should have just told Andy so and avoided the entire mess, but admitting that he’d rather watch the ten-o’clock news with Andy than have sex with virtually anybody was too close to admitting the truth.
Nick’s past Fourteenth Street now, with nowhere to go, so he keeps walking.
***
It’s about ten o’clock when Nick crosses East Sixtieth Street, and it’s half past ten when he realizes where he’s heading. And by then he’s in such a state that knocking on Emily Warburton’s door doesn’t even seem like such a bad idea.
Jeanne answers.
“Nick?” she asks, obviously surprised. She’s wearing a sparkly black dress and has probably just gotten home.
“I was in the neighborhood,” he lies. “Is Emily in?”
“She is.” Jeanne makes no move to get her sister, nor to ask Nick in. “You always seemed like a nice man, Nick, so if you’re thinking of trying your luck with Emily—”
He almost laughs. “Jesus Christ, Jeanne, no.”
“—then you’d better not. She’s not in a good way.”
“I’m definitely not going to put any moves on her or try to date her or take advantage of her or anything else. And she knows that I’m not—” Nick sighs. He supposes he ought to be glad Emily didn’t gossip about him with her sister, but at that moment he almost announces that he’s queer, right on the doorstep of the Warburton town house, just to make sure Jeanne doesn’t hate him for the wrong reason. “She knows that I already have someone, all right?”
