“Are you married?”
I laugh and wonder how far the wind carries the sound. “No, definitely not married.”
Mateo chuckles too, but he quiets quickly. “You’ve kissed men.”
“Mmmm.”
“You’ve slept with some, too.”
“Mmmm.”
He stands then, gentle when he drops my hand and gives me all of his blanket. I stare while he stretches, just a sliver of his happy trail visible for a second I won’t forget. I have the eerie sense that our prolonged goodbye is going to hurt no matter what hopeful things we say. When he turns toward the ocean to speak, I don’t feel any better.
“You know, nothing about your life has to get more complicated because you rescued me from a bar fight and bought me tacos.”
“Are tacos your big takeaway from last night?”
“I already told you, I remember everything,” he says.
I fold his blanket to keep myself from reaching for him while I argue a point I think we agree on. “I want it to count.”
“But the sun is up.”
“Yeah. And I think that could be okay.”
Mateo looks at me again. Studies me. Smiles and stays guarded. “Because you’re arrogant, and you’re ready for the whole world to see you?”
It’s not the right time to tell him I never really had a choice. That I was still a child when strangers started to know my name. I’ll be ready to talk about it someday, on this bench or anywhere he’ll agree to meet me, but it’s too much to promise this morning. I can hear decades of locker room slurs, and I'm afraid of my future no matter how long those doors have been closed behind me. I'm not lying about being willing to come out for him, but there's no good way to explain how messy it could get. That conversation will have to wait.
For now, I smile back instead. “You didn’t get to try the wings at Kai’s.”
“No, I didn’t,” Mateo agrees. “And I probably won’t have time to try them for a couple of weeks. It’s a busy time of year for me. But ifyou—”
When he doesn’t go on, I finish the thought I’d started. “I could give you my number. And you could give me yours.”
Mateo takes some time to answer, but when I begin to peel his hoodie over my head, his hand covers mine. “If we’re going to see each other again, you don’t have to return that while you’re still cold.”
“No?”
“No.”
“Do you only want dinner?” I ask, pulling my hand away to tuck it into the pocket he’s let me borrow.
“I want hammocks and frozen lakes.”
Fuck. My stomach turns with need, fear, and something as unfamiliar as hope. I breathe as though I feel nothing, but I’m sure I’m as transparent as I have been since I pinned Mateo to a stucco wall. Maybe he saw through me before that.
“We can figure out a good time to meet at the bar.”
“Because Kai is safer than the whole world,” he says.
I nod slowly and swallow around something that isn’t supposed to hurt. “Kai has always been safe, yeah. But that’s not—we can start at Kai’s and then we can go anywhere.”
“Anywhere?”
“Everywhere.”
I keep waiting for something to hit. Regret or cold feet or a hundred questions about why this one man has made me want to crack open every closed door. How this one man could make me forget years of media training and handling meant to keep the public from spreading rumors too easy to believe. I expect anxiety, or just basic concern for my family and all the castles I’ve built in the sand.