Prospects by Scott Pomfret
Careful, frugal, boring tax lawyer Jeremy is baffled at how he has attracted a beautiful Lebanese boyfriend half his age.
Jeremy was old. Jeremy was out past his bedtime. There was no chance in hell this gorgeous, willowy, bearded twenty-something maybe-Lebanese dervish with the percussive laugh could possibly have any interest in acquiring the digits of a chubby forty-nine-year-old corporate tax attorney spastically shuffling all alone in the southwest corner of Club Fascination. Jeremy had trouble remembering his number. He had trouble spelling his name. To the dervish, watching Jeremy fumble with his cell was probably like watching an animal lacking opposable thumbs manipulating a pair of pliers. Humiliated, Jeremy returned the phone.
The dervish glanced at what Jeremy had entered. He flashed a thousand-watt smile. "See ya later, Jeremy."
"Wait! Wait! What's your name?"
The dervish vanished. Shirtless dancers converged on the space where he'd been.
Jeremy wilted. He'd blown his last and only chance of connecting with someone impossibly hot in real life. His destiny? Solo jerkoff sessions with his fleshlight. Endless conversations with his cat Rumi. The tax code. His penis felt like it had shed a skin.
Then, a buzz in Jeremy's pocket. A one-word text: Gibran.
Jeremy clutched his phone to his chest. A second later: paralyzing doubt. What was the protocol for acknowledging the text? Offer Gibran a drink? Reference the famous Lebanese writer Khalil Gibran to demonstrate that Jeremy was culturally sensitive? Perhaps just a thumbs-up?
Jeremy opted for the latter but, in his haste, inadvertently sent Gibran a big red heart.
Torn between the urgency of his middle-aged bladder and burning self-consciousness, Jeremy remained steadfastly awake long after Gibran was softly snoring. He still couldn't quite fathom that this criminally handsome younger man had come home with him. Indeed, had actually had sex with him. Twice. Which appalled Jeremy. It felt like he'd helped himself to something that didn't belong to him, and he kept expecting Gibran to vaporize like the masturbatory mirage he obviously was.
An hour passed. Two. When the first shafts of dawn light slanted through the windows, Jeremy eased out of bed. He padded to the bathroom. He did his best to muffle his old-man dribbling with the sound of the vent fan. By the time Jeremy summoned the courage to risk exposing himself to complete humiliation when Gibran woke and realized what sort of dinosaur had dragged him home, Gibran was already sitting up in bed, poking at his phone, stroking Rumi, and being irredeemably gorgeous.
"Sorry," Jeremy mumbled.
Gibran looked up and smiled. "For what?"
For me, Jeremy thought. For this gut. For slack muscles. For an only average cock.
"Com'ere, handsome." Gibran pulled back the flat sheet and bedspread. He patted the fitted sheet next to him and shooed Rumi aside.
Jeremy stepped toward the bed.
"Wait! Stop! Stop right there," Gibran said.
Jeremy froze. Clearly, he'd reached his use-by date for this particular one-night stand.
"The way the morning light hits your chest," Gibran said. "Fucking fire, man."
Risking a hamstring tear, Jeremy hopped into the bed before Gibran could change his mind.
Later that morning, as an Uber whisked Gibran away, Jeremy's neighbor Paul called down from his second-story balcony, "Who's your friend?"
Paul was a seventy-something former flight attendant turned life coach, whose world had at some point gone drastically sideways on account of his addictive personality. Having recently gotten sober and acquired a life partner with piles of money and a frequent travel schedule, Paul had leisure to sit on the porch of his East Cambridge townhouse, from which he had a bird's eye view into every last aspect of Jeremy's personal business.
Shielding his eyes from the low September sun, Jeremy admitted, "He's my midlife crisis. Name of Gibran. Twenty-three years old."
"Like Khalil Gibran, the writer?"
"Exactly."
"Oh, come tell me everything."
Normally, Jeremy would have brushed Paul off with some non-committal, eminently appropriate neighborly pleasantry. He and Paul didn't know each other that well. But Jeremy felt like a big game hunter who'd bagged some rare and fearsome beast. He longed metaphorically to stand with his foot on its dead body and take reprehensible pictures. Until that moment, his trophies had primarily consisted of previously undiscovered tax deductions in his clients' finances.
Jeremy bounded up the external stairs to the covered porch. Paul was sitting in a chrome wheelchair and nursing a strangely pungent chamomile tea. It was only 7:00am, but he had a pocket square tucked into the breast of a freshly pressed white linen suit that was impervious to September's humidity.
"You're so... dapper," Jeremy exclaimed, acutely conscious of the lack of underwear under the stained Suffolk Law School sweatpants he'd pulled on to escort Gibran to his Uber.
"Thank you, my dear. If I could, I'd do better." Paul turned to his tea service, offering a second steaming cup on a saucer and apologizing for its quality. "But the biscotti?" He kissed his fingertips and flung the kiss skyward. "Flawless. Now tell me what happened. I want to hear everything."
Settling into a wicker chair, Jeremy happily described the unexpected encounter at Club Fascination, where well-meaning lawyer friends had taken Jeremy for his forty-ninth birthday. The first kiss. His grunting and wheezing in bed. "The whole time, I was conscious there was some non-zero chance I'd end up flat on my back, staring at the ceiling, nursing a broken hip."
Paul chuckled. With his fingertips, he teased a quahog ashtray that showed no sign of use. "That's a relatively benign sort of midlife crisis. More virtuous and less harmful to the environment than, say, a Maserati."
"These days it's Teslas, not Maseratis," Jeremy said, helping himself to a biscotti, "so someone like me can both surrender his dignity and save the world." He washed the biscotti down with a gulp of hot tea, which he sniffed at suspiciously. "Is there booze in this?"
Over the next few weeks, Gibran took to spending his nights off at Jeremy's place. His cheerful caterwauling from the shower brightened the apartment, through which he ranged nude, sitting on the armrest of the leather sofa with his balls dangling, while Jeremy made a mental note to wipe down the armrest later with bleach. Jeremy couldn't take his hands off him. There was just so damn much of Gibran - full beard, coconut pecs, gangly legs, wide open mouth, big cock, door-knocker knees, and sharp elbows. Slipping up behind him and pressing his crotch against Gibran's ass, Jeremy fingered the beads of the teakwood bracelet on Gibran's right wrist as if he were saying a rosary.
"This is beautiful," he murmured. He meant Gibran. He meant the whole glorious situation. He still couldn't fathom why a guy like Gibran would have anything to do with him. When Jeremy was Gibran's age, his older self would have held as much sexual allure as an abacus.
"My mother gave it to me. For my twenty-first birthday. She has one just like it." Gibran stared at the bracelet as if he were coming up with a story for it. A legend. "It sort of marked the moment when she was first okay with me coming out. She even asked to meet my boyfriend. Turns out he and my mother went to rival high schools on the North Shore back in the Nineties."
"Oh. So, he was, what, my age?"
"Yeah." Gibran grinned sheepishly. "I kind of have a type."
"Got a pic?" Jeremy asked, forcing himself to sound nonchalant. Gibran scrolled through his phone. To his relief, Jeremy judged himself to be marginally better looking than the ex. And thinner. Small blessings. "You close to your mother?"
"Oh, hell yeah. She's my bestie. We go on dates together, just the two of us. We like to speak Arabic. Neither of us is any good."
Gibran laughed. He almost made it sound like it was all right not to be that good at something. Which wasn't Jeremy's experience. Neither his mother nor his father was or would ever be his best friend. They were stern. Cold. Disapproving. If a thing was worth doing, it must be done well. Otherwise, it was an embarrassment to all involved. Be a credit to the family, his father used to say.
Gibran clasped Jeremy's hands just over his heart and leaned back against him. He murmured, "This place. I can't get over this place." His eyes roamed greedily over the tidy apartment that was punctuated with a tasteful riot of Cuban art that Jeremy had personally brought back from Havana. "It's so quiet. So calm."
Jeremy blushed. He'd taken uncharacteristic risks with the art. It was full of vibrant color, a bit subversive, with a whiff of forbidden imports, though Jeremy had of course carefully vetted the legalities. It felt like he had done so precisely for this moment. For Gibran.
"You should see my place. Total chaos. Roommates. Dirty dishes. Unopened mail. Competing Spotify accounts. Fighting over what series we stream. It's a mess."
Jeremy tried but failed to imagine the chaos. All the could think of was burning wreckage after a drone strike.
"Thank God for work," Gibran added. "I'm hardly ever there."
"What do you do for work again?"
Gibran shivered with pride as he name-dropped a well-known high-end seasonal seafood restaurant on the North Shore, famous for its eye-watering prices. "I'm the floor manager. I started as a busboy, then server, bartender, host. Now I kind of do everything. Sometimes I even pitch in in the back of the house if a prep cook calls in sick."
"I'll have to check it out."
"Bet," Gibran promised. "All the daddies do."
"Daddies?"
"My type, remember?" Gibran herded Jeremy toward the bedroom, where he extinguished every doubt from Jeremy's head.
The next morning, Jeremy could hardly wait to get Gibran out the door so he could dish with Paul. He gushed, "Gibran's so smart. So mature. So... furry. I may be fetishizing him a little."
Paul nodded. "Falafel. Tabouleh. That kind of thing."
"Beef shawarma," Jeremy agreed.
"He Muslim?"
"Leb-Christian. Catholic, actually."
"How old are you again?"
"I know. Totally age-inappropriate."
Resisting the label inappropriate, Paul proposed, "Mismatched. Or age-divergent. Jesus, give yourself a break. I get the feeling this is the first time you've ever done anything inappropriate in your whole life."
"I ought to know better. When did I become so susceptible to affection and good looks?"
"Might even think you were human."
"You think I should worry?"
"Don't be ridiculous. I'm all for having fun wherever you can get it. But one thing that's guaranteed about a twenty-three-year-old? At some point, however mature, he's going to start acting twenty-three."
"Oh, I know," Jeremy said gloomily. "He'll probably ghost me. Or start asking for money. Or talk about getting married. I'm just hoping to hang on to a shred of dignity." As a tax lawyer - a logical, parsimonious weigher of risks - Jeremy calculated that the odds were that any connection with someone as young and hot as Gibran would be brief. Yet because Gibran seemed like his last chance at any sort of happiness or redemption before fifty, Jeremy couldn't do the adult thing - classify their connection as a lucky extended one-night stand and move on. No, he enthusiastically climbed onto the train knowing it was about to wreck.
"Toot! Toot!" Paul said, pulling on an imaginary train whistle. "All aboard!"
Jeremy hadn't gone on a genuine date since he turned forty, when, in a short-lived bout of aggressive self-improvement and unwarranted hopefulness, he'd speed-dated with disappointing results through the entire forty-something gay populations of greater Cambridge and Somerville and a significant portion of Boston as well. Nevertheless, toward the end of September, in an effort to move their relationship to the next level, Jeremy finally mustered the courage to invite Gibran to a dinner. He prepared five topics ahead of time to avoid awkward silences. He planned precisely how the conversations on each topic would go. Global news. Pop culture. Family history. Risqué banter. Some winking acknowledgment of the difference in their ages and financial circumstances. Not necessarily in that order.
He considered secretly recording Gibran's answers for later extended analysis (perhaps to play for Paul) because he knew he was going to be too nervous to actually listen. He'd be busy preparing his next brilliant riposte. He'd be concentrating on keeping food from getting stuck in his teeth. He'd be sucking in his gut.
"Tell me more," Paul said, patting Jeremy on the knee. His eyes were as prominent as a pug's. "Now that I'm sober and married and in a chair, I need to live vicariously. So, it's not just sexual? You're actually dating now?"
"Dating? Of course not," Jeremy lied brazenly and instinctively, suddenly conscious he'd been overly free and open with this virtual stranger who was his neighbor. "My entire bag of romantic tricks consists of being able to legally reduce Gibran's gross adjusted income for tax purposes. For me, it's all about the sex."
In fact, as Paul undoubtedly knew, Jeremy's growing affection terrified him. The sun was dimmer during the hours Gibran's texts didn't light up his phone. On his Notes app, he kept a running list of things to say that he'd learned made Gibran laugh. He made bargains with himself and the world: If he fastidiously opened every one of the half-dozen memes Gibran messaged daily, then, Gibran's compliments would turn out to be genuine and his snuggling the real deal. If he joined a gym, shedding a couple rolls of backfat would earn him the right to keep Gibran's company. Instead of drafting tax disclosures for private investment fund clients at work, Jeremy instead calculated the odds that, in return for allowing Gibran in his life, the universe would deliver something equally unexpected but thoroughly unpleasant to balance out his good fortune. Perhaps a bit of space debris falling from the sky and impaling his left foot? Or an actual Tesla or Maserati bouncing up from the street to the sidewalk and pinning Jeremy's smashed and broken pelvis to a brick wall?
After the modestly successful dinner date, Jeremy mustered the courage to ask, "Why do you keep coming back? What is it about daddies? Don't you have prospects your own age?"
Gibran smiled. "My age? They're all flakes. When I walk through your door, Jeremy, I feel safe and protected. You know what I mean?" Gibran scooped up Rumi in his big shovel hands and kissed him. There was a throaty purr, but Jeremy wasn't sure which of the three of them it came from.
"Tell me all about it, Jeremy," Paul cooed the next morning. "Tell me everything."
Standing naked before his bedroom mirror, Jeremy cocked his head, raised his eyebrows, and mouthed, "Daddy?" The word fit like a pair of beltless oversize jeans. It fell and pooled around his ankles, leaving his spindly legs exposed. Unlike his predecessors, he hadn't been issued the Daddy Code of Conduct. He didn't know how to fulfill its requirements. Or whether he wanted to. Jeremy wasn't dom. Wasn't a big spender. Didn't possess ass-destroying sexual equipment. If he was going to have any chance of keeping Gibran for the long haul, he was going to have to improve his daddy game where he could.
He started by going long on safety and protection. He casually dropped details about his over twenty years' experience as a tax lawyer, all at the same firm. He mentioned his 401k, his long-term disability policy, his ambition for an LTR, his diamond medallion status on Delta, and the fact that his mortgage on the townhouse was nearly paid off.
When Gibran showed scant interest in, or even comprehension of, these things, Jeremy concluded that a proper daddy might make up for other shortcomings by providing Gibran with novel experiences - the Orient Express, say, or kite-surfing lessons, or strategies to structure his finances to take advantage of tax loopholes. Accordingly, one Tuesday after fucking, Jeremy cautiously proposed a trip to St. Lucia. He mentioned a modest hotel a few blocks from the beach. "Maybe around Thanksgiving, before high-season pricing kicks in."
Gibran was sprawled across the kitchen counter ass-up, dipping raw baby carrots straight from the bag into a plastic supermarket hummus container and gobbling them with the compulsive aggression of a messy teen. He exclaimed, "Oh, I love St. Lucia! My daddy Andy - that was two daddies ago - brought me there for New Years last year. We stayed at the Stolen Time Resort and Spa and drank Dom Perignon at midnight. It was pretty amazing." Holding a hummus-laden carrot in his left hand, Gibran nuzzled up against Jeremy. "But maybe it'd be better to go somewhere, you know, new. Our place."
Jeremy jumped to the conclusion that, by new, Gibran meant expensive. He promised, "If I can make it happen, I will."
"Oh. Okay." Gibran eased away from him. He was holding the still-uneaten carrot about three inches from his lips, as if deciding whether he still wanted it. Rumi - who'd been lolling on the counter - dropped to the floor, as if he, too, was ashamed of Jeremy's stinginess.
Fearing his frugality had made Gibran feel less safe, Jeremy hurriedly expanded on what he meant. "I just mean, you know, trying to get the best value, I set a budget every year, you know, trying to be smart, and my firm doesn't pay my bonus until Christmas, so I don't really know what I'm working with, and in my experience, shoulder season is really the best season anyhow - fewer crowds, more chance to get bumped to first class." The more words Jeremy spoke, the less persuasive he was. There was simply no plausible way of making being a cheapskate romantic. It was conduct unbecoming of a daddy. But old pinch-penny habits died hard.
"We could go to Malta," he proposed. He was scheduled to attend an international tax conference there in December anyhow, giving him the opportunity to combine business and pleasure in a way that would ensure the fare for his business class flight would be reimbursed by his law firm.
"I've never been to Malta," Gibran said brightly, which sounded like a mild endorsement. "But you know you don't have to bring me anywhere, Jeremy. I'm so happy right here. With you."
"Haha. Right. Tropical East Cambridge. What every boy dreams of."
"I'm serious." Gibran withdrew his hand, obviously wounded. "I'm not looking to be spoiled. You should know that by now. I have a job." He righteously resealed the carrot bag and virtuously snapped the lid back on the hummus container. He placed them very forcefully and correctly back in the vegetable drawer in the fridge. Then took a deep breath. "All you need to do is be present, Jeremy. To notice me. Which you do. It's like a fucking oasis here, compared to the restaurant or my roommates. And that's all you."
Jeremy wanted to believe him, but he couldn't help sensing that Gibran was practicing lines. Like an actor. Seeing how they sounded. Whether they sounded authentic. Whether they sounded true. And Jeremy wanted so badly for them to be true. "What exactly am I to you, Gibran? Just one more daddy in the daddy train?"
Toot-toot, he thought wryly.
"You're different, Jeremy."
And suddenly, Jeremy knew that Gibran really believed that Jeremy was different. At least for now. Based on some metric Jeremy couldn't quite discern. Maybe Gibran had developed an appreciation for the virtues of caution and deliberation. For the wisdom of paying off your mortgage early. For the benefits of traveling on a budget, ideally on your employer's dime. Against his better judgment, Jeremy suddenly thought of himself as exempt from the laws of physics, exempt from all the rules, the unlikely king of the daddies, the one who'd really last.
Gibran kissed Jeremy on the lips. "But I'm not gonna say no to Malta. I love trying new things. With you."
Ever so grateful, Jeremy gave Gibran a leather-bound gilt-edged edition of The Prophet to celebrate their two-month anniversary, which he dated from their encounter at Club Fascination. In bed, he read aloud to Gibran from the book and imagined he was being romantic. Later, in Malta, he learned that Gibran already had three copies, the gifts of other, prior, seasonal daddies.
Jeremy had never been the most daring kid in the world. He'd been about careful calibration. Safe spaces. Well-trodden roads. All his life, he'd made decisions based on whatever option was least likely to make him look like a complete ass.
But Gibran? He dragged Jeremy outside his comfort zone. He wheedled and cajoled Jeremy to do what he didn't want to: Wear a Speedo. Return to Fascination on a Friday night and dance shirtless. Attend a Lorde concert at TD Garden, which, according to Gibran, was to worship her. Slog out to the gay nude beach in Provincetown. Attend drag brunch, where the aging queen clocked Jeremy's discomfort the minute he sat down and subjected him to an hour of relentless unwanted attention and good-natured abuse, which had Gibran in stitches.
And guess what? It fucking worked. All those unlikely field trips, all Gibran's goofy teasing, the silly voices, the wacky emojis, the weird memes, and the deft unexpected compliments, softened Jeremy's reserve.
"You do," Paul observed, "look like you've removed the stick from your asshole."
Jeremy drew the line only at the entrance to the dark room at Club Fascination, where, he said, old people were not allowed to survive, like Logan's Run. Gibran didn't get the reference, but he proposed they pretend to have their own dark room in Jeremy's apartment, where they could be intimate strangers all over again. Afterward, Gibran spooned Jeremy, his long arms and legs wrapped what seemed like twice around Jeremy's body. Did the Daddy Code of Conduct permit daddy to be spooned instead of doing the spooning? Jeremy tilted his head back and watched the play of television images over Gibran's high cheekbones, his beard, and the green eyes that were his mother's legacy - little explosions of light, a kind of electronic confetti.
He tallied up the costs of an age-inappropriate relationship. Forever having to explain. Forever enduring the knowing and disapproving looks. Forever conscious that if anything went south in their relationship, Gibran would be given a pass for being young. Jeremy? No fool like an old fool. He extended himself upward and bit Gibran's neck.
"What is it you want from this relationship?" Paul asked the next day.
"A husband," Jeremy blurted. "You know, so I can get a bigger standard deduction on my tax return."
The joke fell flat. Jeremy looked Paul full in the face. He kept hearing only that one word: forever. Which was the only word he wasn't permitted to utter. Because, if Jeremy ever publicly acknowledged his affection or said I love you, a cold and cruel world that couldn't abide a loser like Jeremy ever achieving genuine happiness would extinguish his chances with Gibran forthwith.
"Truth is, I've never been in a relationship that lasted more than three months."
"Ever?"
"After that, they figure out who I really am and dump me."
Paul squinted at Jeremy over his tea cup. "Maybe you're just not very good at dating."
Jeremy was overwhelmed suddenly by the familiar weight of his parents' chronic disappointment. If you're not good at something, stop doing it. Stop humiliating yourself and the innocent bystanders who have to endure your flailing.
"Never mind," he said. "I don't wanna talk about it."
Mid-October, Gibran invited Jeremy to feast like a king at the restaurant where he worked before it closed for the season. Jeremy arrived early. From behind a potted palm at the entrance, Jeremy spied on Gibran, who defused hostile guests with the skill of a bomb squad - redirecting their demands, informing them what they actually wanted, and seating them at the table of Gibran's choosing that he somehow convinced them was more satisfactory than what they'd originally and unreasonably demanded. It was as if Gibran had personally given himself as a gift to each of the now-docile diners. Which made Jeremy feel oddly lonely.
"Gibran!" he called out to break the spell.
Gibran's face lit up. He bounded the five steps between them and wrapped Jeremy in his arms. Then stepping back and readopting his formal floor-manager pose, he addressed Jeremy by his last name. "Come, sir, your table is waiting."
Just before Halloween, Paul explained to Jeremy that for many years, age had been gentle to him. Year after year, he'd never appeared older. His friends hadn't understood or appreciated his dispensation from age's ravages, especially considering his dissolute lifestyle. They loathed it - and sometimes him - and were thrilled when age (and pills and booze) had clamped down on Paul at last.
"Oh, for God's sake, you look better at seventy than I ever have," said Jeremy.
"Please," Paul drawled, "allow a gentleman to retain a little humility."
"I'm the one who's got something to be humble about. Time's never been kind to me. I looked middle-aged at twenty-five."
"You're fine."
"Shut up."
"Perfectly acceptable."
Jeremy leaned over and put his index finger to Paul's lips to shush him. He couldn't afford to let himself believe good things about himself, only to have the truth crush him.
Paul looked at the finger cross-eyed. "Sorry to share the bad news. You're not as ugly as you think, Jeremy." He swatted the finger away. "Lots of guys would kill for a guy like you. More tea?"
Though he wanted to hear more about these guys, Jeremy sat back and nodded.
"So, it's been a few months," Paul observed, pouring a fresh cup. "What do you actually know about Gibran so far?"
"His mother's family's Irish, like mine. His dad was her driver. Lebanese immigrant. They fell in love. Gibran's their only child. Except for the green eyes, he got none of her genes. Which I like."
"Of course you do."
"He's just my type. Only younger."
"I do love a good love story."
"Oh, his parents are divorced now."
Paul winked. "I wasn't talking about his parents. He good in bed?"
"Gibran says that for him, it's not about the sex."
Paul raised his eyebrows in alarm.
"Not just with me," Jeremy added hastily. "He says for him it's never about the sex. You know, like with the other daddies. He says it's more about intimacy."
"I see."
"And security. Security, too. And, you know, an escape from chaos. Like, his restaurant, his family, his roommates. All that stuff goes away when he's with me."
"I see."
"No, really." Jeremy's voice rose an octave. Maybe two. Paul had touched on a sore spot. Being a good tax lawyer, Jeremy had done the math. During the second half of October, the frequency of his sexual encounters with Gibran had started diminishing, from precisely two orgasms three times a week to an average of 1.5 orgasms but only twice a week. "It's fine. Not a big deal to have less sex after the honeymoon period. Perfectly natural. Doesn't mean anything. These things go in cycles."
"Cycles?" From the tone of the question Jeremy could tell Paul thought the relationship was headed one direction only - toward the cliff's edge.
"Cycles," he confirmed.
"You should introduce me to Gibran some time."
"Sure," Jeremy said without conviction. "Sometime."
Feeling he'd disappointed Paul, Jeremy sought some way to reassure his neighbor that theirs was a love story still worth paying attention to, but the truth was, if he was honest with himself, Gibran had started to display the determined passivity in the sack of someone trying to sleep through turbulence on a plane.
The next time Jeremy visited Paul, he discovered Rumi rubbing himself up against Paul's chair.
Paul admitted, "Yeah, he comes here sometimes when you're not here."
Jeremy frowned. "He's kind of a whore."
"Like his step-daddy," Paul said, chuckling, regarding Rumi affectionately.
Jeremy scooped Rumi up and sat, but Rumi refused to stay put.
Paul handed him a cup of tea. "Something on your mind?"
"No, not really." Aside from the diminishing sex, everything else with Gibran was going great. They'd just celebrated their three-month anniversary. It almost felt like Jeremy's personal invitation to meet Gibran's mom was just around the corner. Which terrified him a little. Mom was Jeremy's age. She'd know what Logan's Run was. "It's just, sometimes I feel like Gibran is this tiny little woodland creature that I've lured home with the makings of a picnic basket and trapped in my back garden. And if I make one false move, he'll flee."
"A six-foot-four woodland creature."
"Well, yeah. Maybe not so tiny." By this time, his and Gibran's comings and goings under Paul's benevolent eye was like living life under an ongoing Papal benediction. Jeremy could say anything. Even confess that he still didn't quite believe what Gibran said or even fully understand it and all the subtexts. "Sometimes, Gibran watches television, and I watch Gibran. And what goes through my head is: I don't know who you are I don't know who you are I don't know who you are."
"Do you know who you are?" Paul asked. He bobbed his tea bag up and down in the steaming water. "Does any of us?" he added, clearly to soften the question's sting. "Maybe give him a little more space to flourish? A little more leeway."
Jeremy nodded, but his mind shrieked, No! I can't give him space, or he'll run off to the Folsom Street Fair to get tagteamed by a half dozen leather daddies wearing rhinestone leather jockstraps and polished silver nipple studs.
"It's just, you know, Gibran's outlook is so different. Even optimistic. Like he expects that, yeah, things aren't perfect right now, but something's going to improve or change. Like the arc of history's bent any particular way but not down the shitter. Like love is real and immediate and shiny and forever, but at the same time, everything's temporary."
"A new forever tomorrow."
"Exactly." Jeremy touched the tip of his nose and pointed at Paul. "That's what I'm talking about. I guess that's what it's like to be young."
"You're fetishizing again."
"About being young?"
"Dew-kissed skin. Wide eyes." Paul's dramatic hand gestures conjured up an unblemished and vacuous innocent, like Bambi. "He's a real person, you know."
"How do you know? He been coming to see you, too? Like Rumi?"
The question was out in the wild before he had a chance to restrain it. Paul raised his perfectly penciled brows.
"Sorry," Jeremy said.
"Look, you have this thing. It's unprecedented. It's what you want, though you don't want to admit it to yourself. You think you don't deserve it. So you think you gotta, you know, figure it out. Unpack it. Like it's some tax loophole." Paul patted him on the knee. "He chose you, Jeremy. He asked for your digits first."
"So what? First in, first out. That's the general rule in tax accounting. FIFO, we call it."
"Take the leap. You fall? I'll be here. Rumi'll be here. You can always just hang out with us in paradise."
Jeremy laughed.
Paul's pug eyes twinkled. "So, is it exclusive?"
"I-I-I don't know. We haven't talked about it. It seems a little self-defeating to insist a horny twenty-three-year-old be exclusive."
"You're just afraid to ask. Bet he'd appreciate it if you asked."
"He has Scruff on his phone. He says he's just chatting to kill time. When he's bored."
"There's no such thing as 'just chatting.' It's always going somewhere. Like a shark."
"Aren't you and I just chatting?"
Paul thrust his tongue into his own cheek until it bulged as if he were giving head. Jeremy drew back in his chair, startled, spilling half his tea.
Paul burst out laughing. "Just kidding. But nice to know I've still got enough game to make boys like you nervous."
A week before the trip to Malta, Jeremy mentioned Paul's suggestion that the three of them get together some time.
Gibran's response was immediate and enthusiastic. "I'd love to! The way you talk about him? Hell, yeah. He sounds super interesting. Like he's the oracle of East Cambridge, or something."
Jeremy wished he'd made Paul sound like a snoozefest. But he didn't want to disappoint Gibran, so they trooped up to the porch on Gibran's next day off. The weather had gotten decidedly wintry. Paul was snuggled into an enormous white fur coat with matching earmuffs and stole. Like a mastermind movie villain, he was stroking Rumi with the tawny leather glove that covered his tea-drinking hand. He extended his bare hand, palm down, to Gibran, who bent and gave it a kiss.
"I've heard so much about you," Gibran exclaimed.
"All lies," Paul said modestly. "Sit, sit. Jeremy, would you do the honors while your man and I get to know each other better?" He indicated the tea service. Jeremy heard nothing but your man, your man, your man echoing in his head. He felt dizzy.
Paul reminisced about his dissolute days. He said he, too, used to make bargains with himself and establish curbs and guardrails. "My goal was to plunge my hands and arms up to the elbows into the steaming entrails of life, but it got so crazy that I actually had to set down some guidelines to live by. Just for discipline and dignity's sake. I wrote them on a whiteboard on my bedroom wall, divided into two columns - a 'to do' list for the short term on the left and long-term goals and aspirations on the right."
"Like, what kind of goals?" Gibran asked.
Paul released Rumi. "Well, I was a bit of a slut, so I made a rule that I was allowed to fuck on the first date. But I actually had to go on a date first, not just hop into the sack."
Gibran's seal bark laugh nearly ripped off the roof. "That's fire, bro."
Paul's tea-drinking glove fell to the ground from his wheelchair tray. "Would you be a dear and help an old man?" Paul asked.
When Gibran obediently stooped to retrieve it, Paul winked at Jeremy to let him know he'd dropped the glove on purpose. Great ass, Paul didn't have to say.
Back at Jeremy's condo, Gibran enthused, "That guy's feral, bro."
Bro? Jeremy thought. Was bro an upgrade from daddy?
"That's what I wanna be when I'm his age," Gibran added.
"You'll never be that way. That's not you."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Oh, baby. That's not an insult. I just mean, you don't do chaos well. Paul thrives on it. Guy like him enlarges everything he encounters. Gives it with more drama and excitement than it's necessarily meant to contain. To him, everything's delicious." Jeremy flung a mocking kiss skyward.
"Or fabulous," Gibran agreed, seeming to recognize what Jeremy was saying, but with less enthusiasm, as if he were still thinking about whether Jeremy had insulted him.
"Or scandalous. Also, he's a bit of a professional shit stirrer." Jeremy pulled Gibran close. "Let's go to bed."
Gibran yawned. "Yeah, I'm wiped out. We can just cuddle tonight."
The next morning, Paul said gently, "You know, Jeremy, all this talking yourself down is, well, too much. Taking yourself too seriously is just a form of egoism."
"What are you talking about?"
"There once was an emperor who surrounded himself with guards and lived behind high walls and had three different men taste his food before he ate. It seemed he was impregnable. But his assassin crafted a bust of the emperor and gave it to him as a gift. It was loaded with explosives, but they knew the emperor would never turn an image of himself away."
"Are you saying Gibran is my bust? Or my assassin?"
"It seems like he makes you happy, but you don't question him much. Like you're worried if you look too close or learn too much, you'll find something... amiss."
"Happy?" Jeremy tested the idea that Gibran made him happy. He was surprised to find it rang true. "Maybe I don't know what happy is. I've never really been that good at it."
"I had a lover once," Paul said. "I wanted him to understand me without being told. So sometimes I'd play a cassette tape in the next room, you know, with a typical Seventies-porn-sounding jam. I really needed him to listen and read into what the cassette was saying and come into my room wearing nothing but tube socks, a jockstrap, and a mustache. He never did, so I broke up with him. Only later did I realize he was speaking his own language - that every meal he'd ever cooked for me was a secret love letter expressing all the humiliating things he wanted me to do to him."
"That's tragic."
"I don't know what was wrong with me. I didn't get it." Paul blew into the fist of his ungloved hand. "Just young, I guess."
"Paul, do you think Gibran's trying to tell me something I can't hear?"
"Or don't want to hear." He drew in his breath as if taking a drag on an imaginary cigarette and tipped the quahog shell ashtray with his fingertips. "You've got a martyr's instinct, Jeremy. You condemn yourself to the worst possible take on events without thinking of other, better ways of understanding what's happening to you."
"I do like to throw myself on a good sword. Usually of my own making."
"See?" Paul grinned and patted Jeremy's knee as if Jeremy had just managed his first potty by himself. "That's what I'm talking about."
"Do you think Gibran and I should keep seeing each other? Tell me the truth."
"That's what you gotta ask yourself. What exactly were you doing in that club - Fascination? - in the first place? Were you hoping to find someone young to improve your self-image?"
"My friends brought me for my birthday, but then they went -"
"Don't justify it to me. It's you that matters. And him."
Jeremy took a deep breath. Thoughts raced through his head: If a thing's worth doing, do it well. Put on the best show. Don't go out on a limb unless strictly necessary (and it's never necessary). Be a credit to the family. He said, "I think I've got to accept the fact that this relationship is going nowhere. Gibran can't be what I want him to be. There, I said it."
For the briefest moment, he felt relief. And then an ugly, harrowing hollowness.
Paul's expression darkened. He tossed the tea-drinking glove at Jeremy's face. "You're chickenshit, Jeremy. No offense, but it doesn't take courage to find a way not to soldier on."
Jeremy knew he was supposed to say, None taken. Instead, he stood with what he judged to be perfect dignity. But when he stepped toward Paul to return the glove, he slipped on what might have been mud or shit or a banana peel and performed an inadvertent half-split that tore his pants at the crotch.
In Malta, Gibran was the picture of determined equanimity. He accepted what came with good humor. He said please and thank you. He listened attentively to Jeremy's every word, even when Jeremy waxed pedantic about the island's critical role in the Allies' air defense during World War II. After watching Jeremy give his presentation at the tax conference, Gibran greeted him at the foot of the stage.
"You slayed it, bro!"
"I did?"
Jeremy hugged him and whispered in his ear, "You know what's hot? Watching someone who knows exactly what he's doing. The way your clients and colleagues respect you. I admire that."
"You do?"
Gibran nodded.
"But it's boring," Jeremy objected. "I basically did it because it was the safe career path, and my father told me to."
"Oh, Jeremy." Gibran stroked his cheek. "You really gotta stop beating yourself up. One of these days I'm gonna start believing all the bad stuff you say about yourself."
"I take myself too seriously, don't I?"
Gibran kissed Jeremy on the forehead. "You're fine. I'm just a little tense. I always am when I'm first out of work. That's half the reason I need a daddy."
He laughed. He didn't seem bored. Or itching to escape. Or looking to end it. It all felt normal, until Jeremy asked Gibran why he wouldn't allow Jeremy to post any of the hundred thousand pics Gibran was taking every second of the day.
Gibran reminded Jeremy that his restaurant had laid Gibran and the rest of its staff off for the winter. "To get unemployment, I'm supposed to be looking for work. If the state sees me with you on vacation, they'll cut me off."
"Do you really think the Commonwealth of Massachusetts goes around trolling IG accounts of aging tax lawyers for possible unemployment scofflaws?" Jeremy teased. And then he suddenly realized Gibran, too, didn't believe any such thing. "Wait, are you embarrassed to be seen with me?"
Flashing his dazzling smile, Gibran said, "Of course not. Dude, I brought you to my work! Remember?"
Jeremy seized Gibran's right hand and squeezed it hard. Gibran gently and affectionately hip-checked Jeremy. He looked off into the distance, as if toward some possible shared future for them that Gibran, for one, God bless him, could quite easily visualize.
Three days before their flight back home, Gibran lost the teakwood bracelet.
"Fuuuuccckkk!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. "Fuuuuccckkk!"
Jeremy tried to get him to lower his voice, but, still cursing, Gibran flung aside the sofa cushions, stripped the entire bed, emptied out their luggage and shook the empty bags as if he could jar the bracelet loose. "I can't believe I agreed to come to this shithole. Fuck. Something like this was bound to happen. The staff probably stole it. Fuck-fuck-fuck." He glared at Jeremy as if he were to blame. "Fucking Malta. I wasn't looking to go to Malta. I wasn't necessarily looking to go anywhere. That was on you. Trying to prove something. Daddies are supposed to be fearless. That's the point."
The maelstrom was stunning. Appalling. Not just because of the blame and ingratitude but because of the unbridled emotion. Maybe Gibran had some of Paul's chaos in him after all.
Jeremy stifled an expensive and un-daddy-like urge to book Gibran an immediate flight back home.
"I'll take care of this," he promised. He banged out messages to the restaurants they'd visited and to the hotel manager, but to no avail. For the next two days, Gibran was withdrawn, preoccupied, and moody. Retreating into his phone, he was quick to swat away notifications of incoming messages, so Jeremy couldn't discern the content over his shoulder (not that he was looking).
All this over a fucking bracelet, Jeremy thought uncharitably, and then immediately worried that Gibran could read his mind. Afterward, in late December, after Jeremy had returned to Cambridge, he told Paul that he'd been too afraid to challenge Gibran or push him to open up about what was really wrong, for fear the answers spelled doom. "In retrospect," he said, "a little hug wouldn't have hurt."
Jeremy had expected Paul to call him out on his cowardice, but Paul only looked thoughtful. After a minute, he corrected, "Too discreet, not too afraid, Jeremy. You wanted to be respectful."
"This is what I never told Gibran but sure wanted to: I deserve a Purple Heart for putting up with him after he lost the fucking bracelet."
Paul raised his eyes to gaze at something distant in the next block. Perhaps virtue. At last, he said, "But you didn't say that to him, did you, Jeremy? You took a different approach. You did the right thing."
"I did the right thing," Jeremy repeated mechanically.
"The grown-up thing," Paul emphasized.
"The grown-up thing. Sure." He straightened. "Damn right I did. I bought him a new bracelet."
"How'd that go?"
"Not well."
The open-air market in Marsaxlokk, thirty minutes south of Malta's capital city, Valletta, was a dazzling array of carts and tables set up on sawhorses right along the harbor. The fish barely stank, because they were so fresh. Brilliant blue hulls bobbed along the quay. Scattered cubes of melting ice littered the ground among wires that snaked from generators to portable radios and phone chargers. Unoccupied vendors chattered in a guttural language Jeremy took to be Maltese. They were a rough-looking lot, as if they had just stepped off the fishing boats, even though they were selling knock-off Barbies.
A vendor held up two bangles like giant zeroes. With a vague notion that if he could just correct this situation with the bracelet, things with Gibran would advance to a higher plane of connectedness, Jeremy lunged for a bracelet that seemed to be an absolutely adequate replacement for what Gibran had lost, which his mother could ratify so it was just like the original.
His triumphant cry made the vendor's eyes gleam. He wrote an outrageous price on a scrap of paper and slid it across the table, tapping the figure with a gnarled finger. Full of scorn, Jeremy took a pen from his fanny pack, crossed out the number, and wrote down one twice as large beneath, because, he told the vendor defiantly, he was buying it for the love of his life.
Frowning, the vendor indicated that he didn't understand. He tapped the number with a fingertip. "Is more."
Jeremy tried again to explain. The vendor held his finger and thumb close and said, "Small English."
Jeremy flushed. He repeated what he'd said into Google Translate. The vendor and two others listened, looked at one another, and laughed. They regarded Jeremy with a mix of admiration and envy. Somehow, through the app, they managed to convey that they wanted to see a picture of Jeremy's woman because, they said, she must be an incredible specimen to cause him to spend so lavishly.
The morning before their flight home, he told Gibran at breakfast, "Your last full day in Malta should be magical." He wanted Gibran to understand that he had really enjoyed spending time with him. That he aimed to do it all over again in Santorini. And Ibiza. And the Amalfi Coast. That he wanted Gibran to remember Malta as being so goddamn safe, he'd never want to leave. "What do you want to do today? We could charter a boat or see the Blue Grotto. Or maybe tour the old city at Mdina. Whatever you like."
"If you don't mind, Jeremy, I want to be on my own, just for a bit. There's some, uh, shopping I want to do."
The tile floor dropped out beneath Jeremy. "I see. Well, yes, of course. Go for it."
The moment Jeremy was alone, it seemed like a great gust of wind had hollowed out the hotel room. Not knowing what else to do with himself, Jeremy packed Gibran's bags for him, because that's what a good husband would do. Halfway through packing, he found the original bracelet, which had fallen behind the ironing board in the bedroom closet. He weighed it in his hand as if it were bullion. Shifting gears, he hopped in the shower. He got a fresh haircut in the hotel barbershop. When Gibran returned mid-afternoon, Jeremy greeted him at the door wearing a fabulous - even Paul would have said so - short-sleeved linen shirt unbuttoned to his navel, painted toenails, and a couple of bangles the vendors at Marsaxlokk had thrown in for free.
"I found your bracelet!"
Removing the replacement, he slipped the original on Gibran's wrist. Gibran nodded gravely. He gave Jeremy a lazy one-armed hug, sprawled on the sofa and started thumbing at his phone. Jeremy's little vanities - fresh haircut, painted toenails, and jewelry - had previously seemed like playful innocence itself. Now, they were ridiculous. Even grotesque.
Trying to muster some dignity, he asked cheerfully, "So, wadja buy?"
Gibran looked up from the sofa. He obviously had no idea what Jeremy was talking about.
"You said you were going shopping."
"Oh," Gibran said. "I didn't find anything."
Jeremy blinked. Then staggered as the truth became obvious: what Gibran had shopped for was a Scruff hookup. A fresh daddy.
Jeremy let the silence stretch. Unembarrassed, Gibran got up, stretched, and laid a beach towel out on the chaise longue on their hotel room balcony (which had cost extra).
Jeremy suddenly doubted himself. Gibran had never showed the least sign that he was cheating (if that was the word, since Jeremy had never raised the obligations of exclusivity). And yet, something wasn't right. Jeremy stood on the threshold of the sliding doors. The words poured out of his mouth before he was aware of the thought behind them. "You don't love me, do you?"
Gibran examined him with a look that was both blank and somehow skeptical and ungenerous. It lasted only a second before he stuck out his tongue playfully. "How could you ask such a thing?"
How could I not, Jeremy thought. But he forced himself to take Gibran's response at face value, which was giving the words the best read they were susceptible to. Paul would have been proud.
After their final dinner, Jeremy proposed they get a drink at Café Society, a queer bar with outdoor tables set precariously on ancient marble steps on either side of a pitched pedestrian staircase that ran down to Valetta Harbor. The cocktails were good and inventive, and the staff was gregarious and nonjudgmental. One of them, a Colombian native who seemed to be fluent in four or more languages, brought them blankets because the night was chilly and damp. Jeremy slid his right hand under the blanket into Gibran's crotch. Gibran removed Jeremy's hand and placed it in Jeremy's lap.
"Cheers," Gibran said, downing his cocktail. "Maybe one more?"
They sat in silence. Jeremy realized that he and Gibran would never speak to each other again after Malta. Without discussion or agreement, they would simply stop communicating, hoping the other had the tact not to call attention to their estrangement.
When they got back to Boston, events unfolded precisely as Jeremy had predicted.
"I guess Gibran was right," Jeremy said glumly to Paul. "It wasn't sexual, after all. It wasn't anything."
Resolutely maintaining his post on the covered porch despite the frigid weather, with the aid only of a small space heater, Paul nodded. Then he caught himself. "There doesn't have to be a wrong and a right, Jeremy."
"You know, I don't think his going crazy on me was about the bracelet."
"You think?"
"Is it that obvious?"
"What's a bracelet, my friend, but one side of a pair of handcuffs? Got any new prospects?"
Cirrhosis killed Paul a couple years later. Within a week of his death, as if Paul were stirring shit from a celestial covered balcony for his own post-mortem entertainment, Jeremy ran into Gibran at a Cuban art opening in Boston's Seaport district. Gibran was with a middle-aged white man he didn't introduce.
Fortunately, Jeremy was with his boyfriend, a handsome thirty-something fellow lawyer whom Jeremy had recklessly chatted up at a bar association event with no prompting except from a brisk and lethal tequila-soda. He'd approached his now-boyfriend the way Gibran would have. The way Paul would have. The way any sane undamaged human would have. And now, Jeremy and his boyfriend were celebrating their three-month anniversary, a small redemption that proved at a minimum that Jeremy wasn't unlovable and - Jeremy sometimes allowed himself to think - a great deal more. Maybe even that - as Jeremy approached his fiftieth birthday - he was finally getting better at dating.
"Good to see you," Gibran said, but his tone conveyed the opposite of good. Afflicting to see you, perhaps. Or, I can't believe my new daddy has to endure your tedious presence.
That tone - had he imagined it? - reawakened in Jeremy the aching need to make sense of what had happened with Gibran. Why it hadn't worked out.
"It seems like you'd be happier elsewhere," Jeremy said aloud. Or thought. He wasn't sure which.
Gibran blinked twice, as if it was a safe signal on which they'd agreed, so they could put an end to consensual bondage.
"How's Paul?" Gibran asked.
"Dead."
"Oh. I'm sorry. That's too bad. What about Rumi? He good?"
"He died, too," Jeremy said.
It was a baldfaced lie. Jeremy's boyfriend gave him a quizzical look, which Jeremy knew meant they would spend some time later that evening unpacking the whole dynamic.
His boyfriend determinedly introduced himself to Gibran and his daddy. While the three of them chatted, Jeremy ransacked his brain for the right words to fix what was awkward between him and Gibran. But being so far apart in age - and maybe in what each had sought from a relationship - he and Gibran had never really spoken the same language. Like Jeremy and the vendor in Marsaxlokk, they had been two foreigners barking excitedly into cell phone apps and thrusting the half-assed translations at each other with glee and impatience and a futile hope for some genuine and meaningful connection.
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The dervish glanced at what Jeremy had entered. He flashed a thousand-watt smile. "See ya later, Jeremy."
"Wait! Wait! What's your name?"
The dervish vanished. Shirtless dancers converged on the space where he'd been.
Jeremy wilted. He'd blown his last and only chance of connecting with someone impossibly hot in real life. His destiny? Solo jerkoff sessions with his fleshlight. Endless conversations with his cat Rumi. The tax code. His penis felt like it had shed a skin.
Then, a buzz in Jeremy's pocket. A one-word text: Gibran.
Jeremy clutched his phone to his chest. A second later: paralyzing doubt. What was the protocol for acknowledging the text? Offer Gibran a drink? Reference the famous Lebanese writer Khalil Gibran to demonstrate that Jeremy was culturally sensitive? Perhaps just a thumbs-up?
Jeremy opted for the latter but, in his haste, inadvertently sent Gibran a big red heart.
Torn between the urgency of his middle-aged bladder and burning self-consciousness, Jeremy remained steadfastly awake long after Gibran was softly snoring. He still couldn't quite fathom that this criminally handsome younger man had come home with him. Indeed, had actually had sex with him. Twice. Which appalled Jeremy. It felt like he'd helped himself to something that didn't belong to him, and he kept expecting Gibran to vaporize like the masturbatory mirage he obviously was.
An hour passed. Two. When the first shafts of dawn light slanted through the windows, Jeremy eased out of bed. He padded to the bathroom. He did his best to muffle his old-man dribbling with the sound of the vent fan. By the time Jeremy summoned the courage to risk exposing himself to complete humiliation when Gibran woke and realized what sort of dinosaur had dragged him home, Gibran was already sitting up in bed, poking at his phone, stroking Rumi, and being irredeemably gorgeous.
"Sorry," Jeremy mumbled.
Gibran looked up and smiled. "For what?"
For me, Jeremy thought. For this gut. For slack muscles. For an only average cock.
"Com'ere, handsome." Gibran pulled back the flat sheet and bedspread. He patted the fitted sheet next to him and shooed Rumi aside.
Jeremy stepped toward the bed.
"Wait! Stop! Stop right there," Gibran said.
Jeremy froze. Clearly, he'd reached his use-by date for this particular one-night stand.
"The way the morning light hits your chest," Gibran said. "Fucking fire, man."
Risking a hamstring tear, Jeremy hopped into the bed before Gibran could change his mind.
Later that morning, as an Uber whisked Gibran away, Jeremy's neighbor Paul called down from his second-story balcony, "Who's your friend?"
Paul was a seventy-something former flight attendant turned life coach, whose world had at some point gone drastically sideways on account of his addictive personality. Having recently gotten sober and acquired a life partner with piles of money and a frequent travel schedule, Paul had leisure to sit on the porch of his East Cambridge townhouse, from which he had a bird's eye view into every last aspect of Jeremy's personal business.
Shielding his eyes from the low September sun, Jeremy admitted, "He's my midlife crisis. Name of Gibran. Twenty-three years old."
"Like Khalil Gibran, the writer?"
"Exactly."
"Oh, come tell me everything."
Normally, Jeremy would have brushed Paul off with some non-committal, eminently appropriate neighborly pleasantry. He and Paul didn't know each other that well. But Jeremy felt like a big game hunter who'd bagged some rare and fearsome beast. He longed metaphorically to stand with his foot on its dead body and take reprehensible pictures. Until that moment, his trophies had primarily consisted of previously undiscovered tax deductions in his clients' finances.
Jeremy bounded up the external stairs to the covered porch. Paul was sitting in a chrome wheelchair and nursing a strangely pungent chamomile tea. It was only 7:00am, but he had a pocket square tucked into the breast of a freshly pressed white linen suit that was impervious to September's humidity.
"You're so... dapper," Jeremy exclaimed, acutely conscious of the lack of underwear under the stained Suffolk Law School sweatpants he'd pulled on to escort Gibran to his Uber.
"Thank you, my dear. If I could, I'd do better." Paul turned to his tea service, offering a second steaming cup on a saucer and apologizing for its quality. "But the biscotti?" He kissed his fingertips and flung the kiss skyward. "Flawless. Now tell me what happened. I want to hear everything."
Settling into a wicker chair, Jeremy happily described the unexpected encounter at Club Fascination, where well-meaning lawyer friends had taken Jeremy for his forty-ninth birthday. The first kiss. His grunting and wheezing in bed. "The whole time, I was conscious there was some non-zero chance I'd end up flat on my back, staring at the ceiling, nursing a broken hip."
Paul chuckled. With his fingertips, he teased a quahog ashtray that showed no sign of use. "That's a relatively benign sort of midlife crisis. More virtuous and less harmful to the environment than, say, a Maserati."
"These days it's Teslas, not Maseratis," Jeremy said, helping himself to a biscotti, "so someone like me can both surrender his dignity and save the world." He washed the biscotti down with a gulp of hot tea, which he sniffed at suspiciously. "Is there booze in this?"
Over the next few weeks, Gibran took to spending his nights off at Jeremy's place. His cheerful caterwauling from the shower brightened the apartment, through which he ranged nude, sitting on the armrest of the leather sofa with his balls dangling, while Jeremy made a mental note to wipe down the armrest later with bleach. Jeremy couldn't take his hands off him. There was just so damn much of Gibran - full beard, coconut pecs, gangly legs, wide open mouth, big cock, door-knocker knees, and sharp elbows. Slipping up behind him and pressing his crotch against Gibran's ass, Jeremy fingered the beads of the teakwood bracelet on Gibran's right wrist as if he were saying a rosary.
"This is beautiful," he murmured. He meant Gibran. He meant the whole glorious situation. He still couldn't fathom why a guy like Gibran would have anything to do with him. When Jeremy was Gibran's age, his older self would have held as much sexual allure as an abacus.
"My mother gave it to me. For my twenty-first birthday. She has one just like it." Gibran stared at the bracelet as if he were coming up with a story for it. A legend. "It sort of marked the moment when she was first okay with me coming out. She even asked to meet my boyfriend. Turns out he and my mother went to rival high schools on the North Shore back in the Nineties."
"Oh. So, he was, what, my age?"
"Yeah." Gibran grinned sheepishly. "I kind of have a type."
"Got a pic?" Jeremy asked, forcing himself to sound nonchalant. Gibran scrolled through his phone. To his relief, Jeremy judged himself to be marginally better looking than the ex. And thinner. Small blessings. "You close to your mother?"
"Oh, hell yeah. She's my bestie. We go on dates together, just the two of us. We like to speak Arabic. Neither of us is any good."
Gibran laughed. He almost made it sound like it was all right not to be that good at something. Which wasn't Jeremy's experience. Neither his mother nor his father was or would ever be his best friend. They were stern. Cold. Disapproving. If a thing was worth doing, it must be done well. Otherwise, it was an embarrassment to all involved. Be a credit to the family, his father used to say.
Gibran clasped Jeremy's hands just over his heart and leaned back against him. He murmured, "This place. I can't get over this place." His eyes roamed greedily over the tidy apartment that was punctuated with a tasteful riot of Cuban art that Jeremy had personally brought back from Havana. "It's so quiet. So calm."
Jeremy blushed. He'd taken uncharacteristic risks with the art. It was full of vibrant color, a bit subversive, with a whiff of forbidden imports, though Jeremy had of course carefully vetted the legalities. It felt like he had done so precisely for this moment. For Gibran.
"You should see my place. Total chaos. Roommates. Dirty dishes. Unopened mail. Competing Spotify accounts. Fighting over what series we stream. It's a mess."
Jeremy tried but failed to imagine the chaos. All the could think of was burning wreckage after a drone strike.
"Thank God for work," Gibran added. "I'm hardly ever there."
"What do you do for work again?"
Gibran shivered with pride as he name-dropped a well-known high-end seasonal seafood restaurant on the North Shore, famous for its eye-watering prices. "I'm the floor manager. I started as a busboy, then server, bartender, host. Now I kind of do everything. Sometimes I even pitch in in the back of the house if a prep cook calls in sick."
"I'll have to check it out."
"Bet," Gibran promised. "All the daddies do."
"Daddies?"
"My type, remember?" Gibran herded Jeremy toward the bedroom, where he extinguished every doubt from Jeremy's head.
The next morning, Jeremy could hardly wait to get Gibran out the door so he could dish with Paul. He gushed, "Gibran's so smart. So mature. So... furry. I may be fetishizing him a little."
Paul nodded. "Falafel. Tabouleh. That kind of thing."
"Beef shawarma," Jeremy agreed.
"He Muslim?"
"Leb-Christian. Catholic, actually."
"How old are you again?"
"I know. Totally age-inappropriate."
Resisting the label inappropriate, Paul proposed, "Mismatched. Or age-divergent. Jesus, give yourself a break. I get the feeling this is the first time you've ever done anything inappropriate in your whole life."
"I ought to know better. When did I become so susceptible to affection and good looks?"
"Might even think you were human."
"You think I should worry?"
"Don't be ridiculous. I'm all for having fun wherever you can get it. But one thing that's guaranteed about a twenty-three-year-old? At some point, however mature, he's going to start acting twenty-three."
"Oh, I know," Jeremy said gloomily. "He'll probably ghost me. Or start asking for money. Or talk about getting married. I'm just hoping to hang on to a shred of dignity." As a tax lawyer - a logical, parsimonious weigher of risks - Jeremy calculated that the odds were that any connection with someone as young and hot as Gibran would be brief. Yet because Gibran seemed like his last chance at any sort of happiness or redemption before fifty, Jeremy couldn't do the adult thing - classify their connection as a lucky extended one-night stand and move on. No, he enthusiastically climbed onto the train knowing it was about to wreck.
"Toot! Toot!" Paul said, pulling on an imaginary train whistle. "All aboard!"
Jeremy hadn't gone on a genuine date since he turned forty, when, in a short-lived bout of aggressive self-improvement and unwarranted hopefulness, he'd speed-dated with disappointing results through the entire forty-something gay populations of greater Cambridge and Somerville and a significant portion of Boston as well. Nevertheless, toward the end of September, in an effort to move their relationship to the next level, Jeremy finally mustered the courage to invite Gibran to a dinner. He prepared five topics ahead of time to avoid awkward silences. He planned precisely how the conversations on each topic would go. Global news. Pop culture. Family history. Risqué banter. Some winking acknowledgment of the difference in their ages and financial circumstances. Not necessarily in that order.
He considered secretly recording Gibran's answers for later extended analysis (perhaps to play for Paul) because he knew he was going to be too nervous to actually listen. He'd be busy preparing his next brilliant riposte. He'd be concentrating on keeping food from getting stuck in his teeth. He'd be sucking in his gut.
"Tell me more," Paul said, patting Jeremy on the knee. His eyes were as prominent as a pug's. "Now that I'm sober and married and in a chair, I need to live vicariously. So, it's not just sexual? You're actually dating now?"
"Dating? Of course not," Jeremy lied brazenly and instinctively, suddenly conscious he'd been overly free and open with this virtual stranger who was his neighbor. "My entire bag of romantic tricks consists of being able to legally reduce Gibran's gross adjusted income for tax purposes. For me, it's all about the sex."
In fact, as Paul undoubtedly knew, Jeremy's growing affection terrified him. The sun was dimmer during the hours Gibran's texts didn't light up his phone. On his Notes app, he kept a running list of things to say that he'd learned made Gibran laugh. He made bargains with himself and the world: If he fastidiously opened every one of the half-dozen memes Gibran messaged daily, then, Gibran's compliments would turn out to be genuine and his snuggling the real deal. If he joined a gym, shedding a couple rolls of backfat would earn him the right to keep Gibran's company. Instead of drafting tax disclosures for private investment fund clients at work, Jeremy instead calculated the odds that, in return for allowing Gibran in his life, the universe would deliver something equally unexpected but thoroughly unpleasant to balance out his good fortune. Perhaps a bit of space debris falling from the sky and impaling his left foot? Or an actual Tesla or Maserati bouncing up from the street to the sidewalk and pinning Jeremy's smashed and broken pelvis to a brick wall?
After the modestly successful dinner date, Jeremy mustered the courage to ask, "Why do you keep coming back? What is it about daddies? Don't you have prospects your own age?"
Gibran smiled. "My age? They're all flakes. When I walk through your door, Jeremy, I feel safe and protected. You know what I mean?" Gibran scooped up Rumi in his big shovel hands and kissed him. There was a throaty purr, but Jeremy wasn't sure which of the three of them it came from.
"Tell me all about it, Jeremy," Paul cooed the next morning. "Tell me everything."
Standing naked before his bedroom mirror, Jeremy cocked his head, raised his eyebrows, and mouthed, "Daddy?" The word fit like a pair of beltless oversize jeans. It fell and pooled around his ankles, leaving his spindly legs exposed. Unlike his predecessors, he hadn't been issued the Daddy Code of Conduct. He didn't know how to fulfill its requirements. Or whether he wanted to. Jeremy wasn't dom. Wasn't a big spender. Didn't possess ass-destroying sexual equipment. If he was going to have any chance of keeping Gibran for the long haul, he was going to have to improve his daddy game where he could.
He started by going long on safety and protection. He casually dropped details about his over twenty years' experience as a tax lawyer, all at the same firm. He mentioned his 401k, his long-term disability policy, his ambition for an LTR, his diamond medallion status on Delta, and the fact that his mortgage on the townhouse was nearly paid off.
When Gibran showed scant interest in, or even comprehension of, these things, Jeremy concluded that a proper daddy might make up for other shortcomings by providing Gibran with novel experiences - the Orient Express, say, or kite-surfing lessons, or strategies to structure his finances to take advantage of tax loopholes. Accordingly, one Tuesday after fucking, Jeremy cautiously proposed a trip to St. Lucia. He mentioned a modest hotel a few blocks from the beach. "Maybe around Thanksgiving, before high-season pricing kicks in."
Gibran was sprawled across the kitchen counter ass-up, dipping raw baby carrots straight from the bag into a plastic supermarket hummus container and gobbling them with the compulsive aggression of a messy teen. He exclaimed, "Oh, I love St. Lucia! My daddy Andy - that was two daddies ago - brought me there for New Years last year. We stayed at the Stolen Time Resort and Spa and drank Dom Perignon at midnight. It was pretty amazing." Holding a hummus-laden carrot in his left hand, Gibran nuzzled up against Jeremy. "But maybe it'd be better to go somewhere, you know, new. Our place."
Jeremy jumped to the conclusion that, by new, Gibran meant expensive. He promised, "If I can make it happen, I will."
"Oh. Okay." Gibran eased away from him. He was holding the still-uneaten carrot about three inches from his lips, as if deciding whether he still wanted it. Rumi - who'd been lolling on the counter - dropped to the floor, as if he, too, was ashamed of Jeremy's stinginess.
Fearing his frugality had made Gibran feel less safe, Jeremy hurriedly expanded on what he meant. "I just mean, you know, trying to get the best value, I set a budget every year, you know, trying to be smart, and my firm doesn't pay my bonus until Christmas, so I don't really know what I'm working with, and in my experience, shoulder season is really the best season anyhow - fewer crowds, more chance to get bumped to first class." The more words Jeremy spoke, the less persuasive he was. There was simply no plausible way of making being a cheapskate romantic. It was conduct unbecoming of a daddy. But old pinch-penny habits died hard.
"We could go to Malta," he proposed. He was scheduled to attend an international tax conference there in December anyhow, giving him the opportunity to combine business and pleasure in a way that would ensure the fare for his business class flight would be reimbursed by his law firm.
"I've never been to Malta," Gibran said brightly, which sounded like a mild endorsement. "But you know you don't have to bring me anywhere, Jeremy. I'm so happy right here. With you."
"Haha. Right. Tropical East Cambridge. What every boy dreams of."
"I'm serious." Gibran withdrew his hand, obviously wounded. "I'm not looking to be spoiled. You should know that by now. I have a job." He righteously resealed the carrot bag and virtuously snapped the lid back on the hummus container. He placed them very forcefully and correctly back in the vegetable drawer in the fridge. Then took a deep breath. "All you need to do is be present, Jeremy. To notice me. Which you do. It's like a fucking oasis here, compared to the restaurant or my roommates. And that's all you."
Jeremy wanted to believe him, but he couldn't help sensing that Gibran was practicing lines. Like an actor. Seeing how they sounded. Whether they sounded authentic. Whether they sounded true. And Jeremy wanted so badly for them to be true. "What exactly am I to you, Gibran? Just one more daddy in the daddy train?"
Toot-toot, he thought wryly.
"You're different, Jeremy."
And suddenly, Jeremy knew that Gibran really believed that Jeremy was different. At least for now. Based on some metric Jeremy couldn't quite discern. Maybe Gibran had developed an appreciation for the virtues of caution and deliberation. For the wisdom of paying off your mortgage early. For the benefits of traveling on a budget, ideally on your employer's dime. Against his better judgment, Jeremy suddenly thought of himself as exempt from the laws of physics, exempt from all the rules, the unlikely king of the daddies, the one who'd really last.
Gibran kissed Jeremy on the lips. "But I'm not gonna say no to Malta. I love trying new things. With you."
Ever so grateful, Jeremy gave Gibran a leather-bound gilt-edged edition of The Prophet to celebrate their two-month anniversary, which he dated from their encounter at Club Fascination. In bed, he read aloud to Gibran from the book and imagined he was being romantic. Later, in Malta, he learned that Gibran already had three copies, the gifts of other, prior, seasonal daddies.
Jeremy had never been the most daring kid in the world. He'd been about careful calibration. Safe spaces. Well-trodden roads. All his life, he'd made decisions based on whatever option was least likely to make him look like a complete ass.
But Gibran? He dragged Jeremy outside his comfort zone. He wheedled and cajoled Jeremy to do what he didn't want to: Wear a Speedo. Return to Fascination on a Friday night and dance shirtless. Attend a Lorde concert at TD Garden, which, according to Gibran, was to worship her. Slog out to the gay nude beach in Provincetown. Attend drag brunch, where the aging queen clocked Jeremy's discomfort the minute he sat down and subjected him to an hour of relentless unwanted attention and good-natured abuse, which had Gibran in stitches.
And guess what? It fucking worked. All those unlikely field trips, all Gibran's goofy teasing, the silly voices, the wacky emojis, the weird memes, and the deft unexpected compliments, softened Jeremy's reserve.
"You do," Paul observed, "look like you've removed the stick from your asshole."
Jeremy drew the line only at the entrance to the dark room at Club Fascination, where, he said, old people were not allowed to survive, like Logan's Run. Gibran didn't get the reference, but he proposed they pretend to have their own dark room in Jeremy's apartment, where they could be intimate strangers all over again. Afterward, Gibran spooned Jeremy, his long arms and legs wrapped what seemed like twice around Jeremy's body. Did the Daddy Code of Conduct permit daddy to be spooned instead of doing the spooning? Jeremy tilted his head back and watched the play of television images over Gibran's high cheekbones, his beard, and the green eyes that were his mother's legacy - little explosions of light, a kind of electronic confetti.
He tallied up the costs of an age-inappropriate relationship. Forever having to explain. Forever enduring the knowing and disapproving looks. Forever conscious that if anything went south in their relationship, Gibran would be given a pass for being young. Jeremy? No fool like an old fool. He extended himself upward and bit Gibran's neck.
"What is it you want from this relationship?" Paul asked the next day.
"A husband," Jeremy blurted. "You know, so I can get a bigger standard deduction on my tax return."
The joke fell flat. Jeremy looked Paul full in the face. He kept hearing only that one word: forever. Which was the only word he wasn't permitted to utter. Because, if Jeremy ever publicly acknowledged his affection or said I love you, a cold and cruel world that couldn't abide a loser like Jeremy ever achieving genuine happiness would extinguish his chances with Gibran forthwith.
"Truth is, I've never been in a relationship that lasted more than three months."
"Ever?"
"After that, they figure out who I really am and dump me."
Paul squinted at Jeremy over his tea cup. "Maybe you're just not very good at dating."
Jeremy was overwhelmed suddenly by the familiar weight of his parents' chronic disappointment. If you're not good at something, stop doing it. Stop humiliating yourself and the innocent bystanders who have to endure your flailing.
"Never mind," he said. "I don't wanna talk about it."
Mid-October, Gibran invited Jeremy to feast like a king at the restaurant where he worked before it closed for the season. Jeremy arrived early. From behind a potted palm at the entrance, Jeremy spied on Gibran, who defused hostile guests with the skill of a bomb squad - redirecting their demands, informing them what they actually wanted, and seating them at the table of Gibran's choosing that he somehow convinced them was more satisfactory than what they'd originally and unreasonably demanded. It was as if Gibran had personally given himself as a gift to each of the now-docile diners. Which made Jeremy feel oddly lonely.
"Gibran!" he called out to break the spell.
Gibran's face lit up. He bounded the five steps between them and wrapped Jeremy in his arms. Then stepping back and readopting his formal floor-manager pose, he addressed Jeremy by his last name. "Come, sir, your table is waiting."
Just before Halloween, Paul explained to Jeremy that for many years, age had been gentle to him. Year after year, he'd never appeared older. His friends hadn't understood or appreciated his dispensation from age's ravages, especially considering his dissolute lifestyle. They loathed it - and sometimes him - and were thrilled when age (and pills and booze) had clamped down on Paul at last.
"Oh, for God's sake, you look better at seventy than I ever have," said Jeremy.
"Please," Paul drawled, "allow a gentleman to retain a little humility."
"I'm the one who's got something to be humble about. Time's never been kind to me. I looked middle-aged at twenty-five."
"You're fine."
"Shut up."
"Perfectly acceptable."
Jeremy leaned over and put his index finger to Paul's lips to shush him. He couldn't afford to let himself believe good things about himself, only to have the truth crush him.
Paul looked at the finger cross-eyed. "Sorry to share the bad news. You're not as ugly as you think, Jeremy." He swatted the finger away. "Lots of guys would kill for a guy like you. More tea?"
Though he wanted to hear more about these guys, Jeremy sat back and nodded.
"So, it's been a few months," Paul observed, pouring a fresh cup. "What do you actually know about Gibran so far?"
"His mother's family's Irish, like mine. His dad was her driver. Lebanese immigrant. They fell in love. Gibran's their only child. Except for the green eyes, he got none of her genes. Which I like."
"Of course you do."
"He's just my type. Only younger."
"I do love a good love story."
"Oh, his parents are divorced now."
Paul winked. "I wasn't talking about his parents. He good in bed?"
"Gibran says that for him, it's not about the sex."
Paul raised his eyebrows in alarm.
"Not just with me," Jeremy added hastily. "He says for him it's never about the sex. You know, like with the other daddies. He says it's more about intimacy."
"I see."
"And security. Security, too. And, you know, an escape from chaos. Like, his restaurant, his family, his roommates. All that stuff goes away when he's with me."
"I see."
"No, really." Jeremy's voice rose an octave. Maybe two. Paul had touched on a sore spot. Being a good tax lawyer, Jeremy had done the math. During the second half of October, the frequency of his sexual encounters with Gibran had started diminishing, from precisely two orgasms three times a week to an average of 1.5 orgasms but only twice a week. "It's fine. Not a big deal to have less sex after the honeymoon period. Perfectly natural. Doesn't mean anything. These things go in cycles."
"Cycles?" From the tone of the question Jeremy could tell Paul thought the relationship was headed one direction only - toward the cliff's edge.
"Cycles," he confirmed.
"You should introduce me to Gibran some time."
"Sure," Jeremy said without conviction. "Sometime."
Feeling he'd disappointed Paul, Jeremy sought some way to reassure his neighbor that theirs was a love story still worth paying attention to, but the truth was, if he was honest with himself, Gibran had started to display the determined passivity in the sack of someone trying to sleep through turbulence on a plane.
The next time Jeremy visited Paul, he discovered Rumi rubbing himself up against Paul's chair.
Paul admitted, "Yeah, he comes here sometimes when you're not here."
Jeremy frowned. "He's kind of a whore."
"Like his step-daddy," Paul said, chuckling, regarding Rumi affectionately.
Jeremy scooped Rumi up and sat, but Rumi refused to stay put.
Paul handed him a cup of tea. "Something on your mind?"
"No, not really." Aside from the diminishing sex, everything else with Gibran was going great. They'd just celebrated their three-month anniversary. It almost felt like Jeremy's personal invitation to meet Gibran's mom was just around the corner. Which terrified him a little. Mom was Jeremy's age. She'd know what Logan's Run was. "It's just, sometimes I feel like Gibran is this tiny little woodland creature that I've lured home with the makings of a picnic basket and trapped in my back garden. And if I make one false move, he'll flee."
"A six-foot-four woodland creature."
"Well, yeah. Maybe not so tiny." By this time, his and Gibran's comings and goings under Paul's benevolent eye was like living life under an ongoing Papal benediction. Jeremy could say anything. Even confess that he still didn't quite believe what Gibran said or even fully understand it and all the subtexts. "Sometimes, Gibran watches television, and I watch Gibran. And what goes through my head is: I don't know who you are I don't know who you are I don't know who you are."
"Do you know who you are?" Paul asked. He bobbed his tea bag up and down in the steaming water. "Does any of us?" he added, clearly to soften the question's sting. "Maybe give him a little more space to flourish? A little more leeway."
Jeremy nodded, but his mind shrieked, No! I can't give him space, or he'll run off to the Folsom Street Fair to get tagteamed by a half dozen leather daddies wearing rhinestone leather jockstraps and polished silver nipple studs.
"It's just, you know, Gibran's outlook is so different. Even optimistic. Like he expects that, yeah, things aren't perfect right now, but something's going to improve or change. Like the arc of history's bent any particular way but not down the shitter. Like love is real and immediate and shiny and forever, but at the same time, everything's temporary."
"A new forever tomorrow."
"Exactly." Jeremy touched the tip of his nose and pointed at Paul. "That's what I'm talking about. I guess that's what it's like to be young."
"You're fetishizing again."
"About being young?"
"Dew-kissed skin. Wide eyes." Paul's dramatic hand gestures conjured up an unblemished and vacuous innocent, like Bambi. "He's a real person, you know."
"How do you know? He been coming to see you, too? Like Rumi?"
The question was out in the wild before he had a chance to restrain it. Paul raised his perfectly penciled brows.
"Sorry," Jeremy said.
"Look, you have this thing. It's unprecedented. It's what you want, though you don't want to admit it to yourself. You think you don't deserve it. So you think you gotta, you know, figure it out. Unpack it. Like it's some tax loophole." Paul patted him on the knee. "He chose you, Jeremy. He asked for your digits first."
"So what? First in, first out. That's the general rule in tax accounting. FIFO, we call it."
"Take the leap. You fall? I'll be here. Rumi'll be here. You can always just hang out with us in paradise."
Jeremy laughed.
Paul's pug eyes twinkled. "So, is it exclusive?"
"I-I-I don't know. We haven't talked about it. It seems a little self-defeating to insist a horny twenty-three-year-old be exclusive."
"You're just afraid to ask. Bet he'd appreciate it if you asked."
"He has Scruff on his phone. He says he's just chatting to kill time. When he's bored."
"There's no such thing as 'just chatting.' It's always going somewhere. Like a shark."
"Aren't you and I just chatting?"
Paul thrust his tongue into his own cheek until it bulged as if he were giving head. Jeremy drew back in his chair, startled, spilling half his tea.
Paul burst out laughing. "Just kidding. But nice to know I've still got enough game to make boys like you nervous."
A week before the trip to Malta, Jeremy mentioned Paul's suggestion that the three of them get together some time.
Gibran's response was immediate and enthusiastic. "I'd love to! The way you talk about him? Hell, yeah. He sounds super interesting. Like he's the oracle of East Cambridge, or something."
Jeremy wished he'd made Paul sound like a snoozefest. But he didn't want to disappoint Gibran, so they trooped up to the porch on Gibran's next day off. The weather had gotten decidedly wintry. Paul was snuggled into an enormous white fur coat with matching earmuffs and stole. Like a mastermind movie villain, he was stroking Rumi with the tawny leather glove that covered his tea-drinking hand. He extended his bare hand, palm down, to Gibran, who bent and gave it a kiss.
"I've heard so much about you," Gibran exclaimed.
"All lies," Paul said modestly. "Sit, sit. Jeremy, would you do the honors while your man and I get to know each other better?" He indicated the tea service. Jeremy heard nothing but your man, your man, your man echoing in his head. He felt dizzy.
Paul reminisced about his dissolute days. He said he, too, used to make bargains with himself and establish curbs and guardrails. "My goal was to plunge my hands and arms up to the elbows into the steaming entrails of life, but it got so crazy that I actually had to set down some guidelines to live by. Just for discipline and dignity's sake. I wrote them on a whiteboard on my bedroom wall, divided into two columns - a 'to do' list for the short term on the left and long-term goals and aspirations on the right."
"Like, what kind of goals?" Gibran asked.
Paul released Rumi. "Well, I was a bit of a slut, so I made a rule that I was allowed to fuck on the first date. But I actually had to go on a date first, not just hop into the sack."
Gibran's seal bark laugh nearly ripped off the roof. "That's fire, bro."
Paul's tea-drinking glove fell to the ground from his wheelchair tray. "Would you be a dear and help an old man?" Paul asked.
When Gibran obediently stooped to retrieve it, Paul winked at Jeremy to let him know he'd dropped the glove on purpose. Great ass, Paul didn't have to say.
Back at Jeremy's condo, Gibran enthused, "That guy's feral, bro."
Bro? Jeremy thought. Was bro an upgrade from daddy?
"That's what I wanna be when I'm his age," Gibran added.
"You'll never be that way. That's not you."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
"Oh, baby. That's not an insult. I just mean, you don't do chaos well. Paul thrives on it. Guy like him enlarges everything he encounters. Gives it with more drama and excitement than it's necessarily meant to contain. To him, everything's delicious." Jeremy flung a mocking kiss skyward.
"Or fabulous," Gibran agreed, seeming to recognize what Jeremy was saying, but with less enthusiasm, as if he were still thinking about whether Jeremy had insulted him.
"Or scandalous. Also, he's a bit of a professional shit stirrer." Jeremy pulled Gibran close. "Let's go to bed."
Gibran yawned. "Yeah, I'm wiped out. We can just cuddle tonight."
The next morning, Paul said gently, "You know, Jeremy, all this talking yourself down is, well, too much. Taking yourself too seriously is just a form of egoism."
"What are you talking about?"
"There once was an emperor who surrounded himself with guards and lived behind high walls and had three different men taste his food before he ate. It seemed he was impregnable. But his assassin crafted a bust of the emperor and gave it to him as a gift. It was loaded with explosives, but they knew the emperor would never turn an image of himself away."
"Are you saying Gibran is my bust? Or my assassin?"
"It seems like he makes you happy, but you don't question him much. Like you're worried if you look too close or learn too much, you'll find something... amiss."
"Happy?" Jeremy tested the idea that Gibran made him happy. He was surprised to find it rang true. "Maybe I don't know what happy is. I've never really been that good at it."
"I had a lover once," Paul said. "I wanted him to understand me without being told. So sometimes I'd play a cassette tape in the next room, you know, with a typical Seventies-porn-sounding jam. I really needed him to listen and read into what the cassette was saying and come into my room wearing nothing but tube socks, a jockstrap, and a mustache. He never did, so I broke up with him. Only later did I realize he was speaking his own language - that every meal he'd ever cooked for me was a secret love letter expressing all the humiliating things he wanted me to do to him."
"That's tragic."
"I don't know what was wrong with me. I didn't get it." Paul blew into the fist of his ungloved hand. "Just young, I guess."
"Paul, do you think Gibran's trying to tell me something I can't hear?"
"Or don't want to hear." He drew in his breath as if taking a drag on an imaginary cigarette and tipped the quahog shell ashtray with his fingertips. "You've got a martyr's instinct, Jeremy. You condemn yourself to the worst possible take on events without thinking of other, better ways of understanding what's happening to you."
"I do like to throw myself on a good sword. Usually of my own making."
"See?" Paul grinned and patted Jeremy's knee as if Jeremy had just managed his first potty by himself. "That's what I'm talking about."
"Do you think Gibran and I should keep seeing each other? Tell me the truth."
"That's what you gotta ask yourself. What exactly were you doing in that club - Fascination? - in the first place? Were you hoping to find someone young to improve your self-image?"
"My friends brought me for my birthday, but then they went -"
"Don't justify it to me. It's you that matters. And him."
Jeremy took a deep breath. Thoughts raced through his head: If a thing's worth doing, do it well. Put on the best show. Don't go out on a limb unless strictly necessary (and it's never necessary). Be a credit to the family. He said, "I think I've got to accept the fact that this relationship is going nowhere. Gibran can't be what I want him to be. There, I said it."
For the briefest moment, he felt relief. And then an ugly, harrowing hollowness.
Paul's expression darkened. He tossed the tea-drinking glove at Jeremy's face. "You're chickenshit, Jeremy. No offense, but it doesn't take courage to find a way not to soldier on."
Jeremy knew he was supposed to say, None taken. Instead, he stood with what he judged to be perfect dignity. But when he stepped toward Paul to return the glove, he slipped on what might have been mud or shit or a banana peel and performed an inadvertent half-split that tore his pants at the crotch.
In Malta, Gibran was the picture of determined equanimity. He accepted what came with good humor. He said please and thank you. He listened attentively to Jeremy's every word, even when Jeremy waxed pedantic about the island's critical role in the Allies' air defense during World War II. After watching Jeremy give his presentation at the tax conference, Gibran greeted him at the foot of the stage.
"You slayed it, bro!"
"I did?"
Jeremy hugged him and whispered in his ear, "You know what's hot? Watching someone who knows exactly what he's doing. The way your clients and colleagues respect you. I admire that."
"You do?"
Gibran nodded.
"But it's boring," Jeremy objected. "I basically did it because it was the safe career path, and my father told me to."
"Oh, Jeremy." Gibran stroked his cheek. "You really gotta stop beating yourself up. One of these days I'm gonna start believing all the bad stuff you say about yourself."
"I take myself too seriously, don't I?"
Gibran kissed Jeremy on the forehead. "You're fine. I'm just a little tense. I always am when I'm first out of work. That's half the reason I need a daddy."
He laughed. He didn't seem bored. Or itching to escape. Or looking to end it. It all felt normal, until Jeremy asked Gibran why he wouldn't allow Jeremy to post any of the hundred thousand pics Gibran was taking every second of the day.
Gibran reminded Jeremy that his restaurant had laid Gibran and the rest of its staff off for the winter. "To get unemployment, I'm supposed to be looking for work. If the state sees me with you on vacation, they'll cut me off."
"Do you really think the Commonwealth of Massachusetts goes around trolling IG accounts of aging tax lawyers for possible unemployment scofflaws?" Jeremy teased. And then he suddenly realized Gibran, too, didn't believe any such thing. "Wait, are you embarrassed to be seen with me?"
Flashing his dazzling smile, Gibran said, "Of course not. Dude, I brought you to my work! Remember?"
Jeremy seized Gibran's right hand and squeezed it hard. Gibran gently and affectionately hip-checked Jeremy. He looked off into the distance, as if toward some possible shared future for them that Gibran, for one, God bless him, could quite easily visualize.
Three days before their flight back home, Gibran lost the teakwood bracelet.
"Fuuuuccckkk!" he shouted at the top of his lungs. "Fuuuuccckkk!"
Jeremy tried to get him to lower his voice, but, still cursing, Gibran flung aside the sofa cushions, stripped the entire bed, emptied out their luggage and shook the empty bags as if he could jar the bracelet loose. "I can't believe I agreed to come to this shithole. Fuck. Something like this was bound to happen. The staff probably stole it. Fuck-fuck-fuck." He glared at Jeremy as if he were to blame. "Fucking Malta. I wasn't looking to go to Malta. I wasn't necessarily looking to go anywhere. That was on you. Trying to prove something. Daddies are supposed to be fearless. That's the point."
The maelstrom was stunning. Appalling. Not just because of the blame and ingratitude but because of the unbridled emotion. Maybe Gibran had some of Paul's chaos in him after all.
Jeremy stifled an expensive and un-daddy-like urge to book Gibran an immediate flight back home.
"I'll take care of this," he promised. He banged out messages to the restaurants they'd visited and to the hotel manager, but to no avail. For the next two days, Gibran was withdrawn, preoccupied, and moody. Retreating into his phone, he was quick to swat away notifications of incoming messages, so Jeremy couldn't discern the content over his shoulder (not that he was looking).
All this over a fucking bracelet, Jeremy thought uncharitably, and then immediately worried that Gibran could read his mind. Afterward, in late December, after Jeremy had returned to Cambridge, he told Paul that he'd been too afraid to challenge Gibran or push him to open up about what was really wrong, for fear the answers spelled doom. "In retrospect," he said, "a little hug wouldn't have hurt."
Jeremy had expected Paul to call him out on his cowardice, but Paul only looked thoughtful. After a minute, he corrected, "Too discreet, not too afraid, Jeremy. You wanted to be respectful."
"This is what I never told Gibran but sure wanted to: I deserve a Purple Heart for putting up with him after he lost the fucking bracelet."
Paul raised his eyes to gaze at something distant in the next block. Perhaps virtue. At last, he said, "But you didn't say that to him, did you, Jeremy? You took a different approach. You did the right thing."
"I did the right thing," Jeremy repeated mechanically.
"The grown-up thing," Paul emphasized.
"The grown-up thing. Sure." He straightened. "Damn right I did. I bought him a new bracelet."
"How'd that go?"
"Not well."
The open-air market in Marsaxlokk, thirty minutes south of Malta's capital city, Valletta, was a dazzling array of carts and tables set up on sawhorses right along the harbor. The fish barely stank, because they were so fresh. Brilliant blue hulls bobbed along the quay. Scattered cubes of melting ice littered the ground among wires that snaked from generators to portable radios and phone chargers. Unoccupied vendors chattered in a guttural language Jeremy took to be Maltese. They were a rough-looking lot, as if they had just stepped off the fishing boats, even though they were selling knock-off Barbies.
A vendor held up two bangles like giant zeroes. With a vague notion that if he could just correct this situation with the bracelet, things with Gibran would advance to a higher plane of connectedness, Jeremy lunged for a bracelet that seemed to be an absolutely adequate replacement for what Gibran had lost, which his mother could ratify so it was just like the original.
His triumphant cry made the vendor's eyes gleam. He wrote an outrageous price on a scrap of paper and slid it across the table, tapping the figure with a gnarled finger. Full of scorn, Jeremy took a pen from his fanny pack, crossed out the number, and wrote down one twice as large beneath, because, he told the vendor defiantly, he was buying it for the love of his life.
Frowning, the vendor indicated that he didn't understand. He tapped the number with a fingertip. "Is more."
Jeremy tried again to explain. The vendor held his finger and thumb close and said, "Small English."
Jeremy flushed. He repeated what he'd said into Google Translate. The vendor and two others listened, looked at one another, and laughed. They regarded Jeremy with a mix of admiration and envy. Somehow, through the app, they managed to convey that they wanted to see a picture of Jeremy's woman because, they said, she must be an incredible specimen to cause him to spend so lavishly.
The morning before their flight home, he told Gibran at breakfast, "Your last full day in Malta should be magical." He wanted Gibran to understand that he had really enjoyed spending time with him. That he aimed to do it all over again in Santorini. And Ibiza. And the Amalfi Coast. That he wanted Gibran to remember Malta as being so goddamn safe, he'd never want to leave. "What do you want to do today? We could charter a boat or see the Blue Grotto. Or maybe tour the old city at Mdina. Whatever you like."
"If you don't mind, Jeremy, I want to be on my own, just for a bit. There's some, uh, shopping I want to do."
The tile floor dropped out beneath Jeremy. "I see. Well, yes, of course. Go for it."
The moment Jeremy was alone, it seemed like a great gust of wind had hollowed out the hotel room. Not knowing what else to do with himself, Jeremy packed Gibran's bags for him, because that's what a good husband would do. Halfway through packing, he found the original bracelet, which had fallen behind the ironing board in the bedroom closet. He weighed it in his hand as if it were bullion. Shifting gears, he hopped in the shower. He got a fresh haircut in the hotel barbershop. When Gibran returned mid-afternoon, Jeremy greeted him at the door wearing a fabulous - even Paul would have said so - short-sleeved linen shirt unbuttoned to his navel, painted toenails, and a couple of bangles the vendors at Marsaxlokk had thrown in for free.
"I found your bracelet!"
Removing the replacement, he slipped the original on Gibran's wrist. Gibran nodded gravely. He gave Jeremy a lazy one-armed hug, sprawled on the sofa and started thumbing at his phone. Jeremy's little vanities - fresh haircut, painted toenails, and jewelry - had previously seemed like playful innocence itself. Now, they were ridiculous. Even grotesque.
Trying to muster some dignity, he asked cheerfully, "So, wadja buy?"
Gibran looked up from the sofa. He obviously had no idea what Jeremy was talking about.
"You said you were going shopping."
"Oh," Gibran said. "I didn't find anything."
Jeremy blinked. Then staggered as the truth became obvious: what Gibran had shopped for was a Scruff hookup. A fresh daddy.
Jeremy let the silence stretch. Unembarrassed, Gibran got up, stretched, and laid a beach towel out on the chaise longue on their hotel room balcony (which had cost extra).
Jeremy suddenly doubted himself. Gibran had never showed the least sign that he was cheating (if that was the word, since Jeremy had never raised the obligations of exclusivity). And yet, something wasn't right. Jeremy stood on the threshold of the sliding doors. The words poured out of his mouth before he was aware of the thought behind them. "You don't love me, do you?"
Gibran examined him with a look that was both blank and somehow skeptical and ungenerous. It lasted only a second before he stuck out his tongue playfully. "How could you ask such a thing?"
How could I not, Jeremy thought. But he forced himself to take Gibran's response at face value, which was giving the words the best read they were susceptible to. Paul would have been proud.
After their final dinner, Jeremy proposed they get a drink at Café Society, a queer bar with outdoor tables set precariously on ancient marble steps on either side of a pitched pedestrian staircase that ran down to Valetta Harbor. The cocktails were good and inventive, and the staff was gregarious and nonjudgmental. One of them, a Colombian native who seemed to be fluent in four or more languages, brought them blankets because the night was chilly and damp. Jeremy slid his right hand under the blanket into Gibran's crotch. Gibran removed Jeremy's hand and placed it in Jeremy's lap.
"Cheers," Gibran said, downing his cocktail. "Maybe one more?"
They sat in silence. Jeremy realized that he and Gibran would never speak to each other again after Malta. Without discussion or agreement, they would simply stop communicating, hoping the other had the tact not to call attention to their estrangement.
When they got back to Boston, events unfolded precisely as Jeremy had predicted.
"I guess Gibran was right," Jeremy said glumly to Paul. "It wasn't sexual, after all. It wasn't anything."
Resolutely maintaining his post on the covered porch despite the frigid weather, with the aid only of a small space heater, Paul nodded. Then he caught himself. "There doesn't have to be a wrong and a right, Jeremy."
"You know, I don't think his going crazy on me was about the bracelet."
"You think?"
"Is it that obvious?"
"What's a bracelet, my friend, but one side of a pair of handcuffs? Got any new prospects?"
Cirrhosis killed Paul a couple years later. Within a week of his death, as if Paul were stirring shit from a celestial covered balcony for his own post-mortem entertainment, Jeremy ran into Gibran at a Cuban art opening in Boston's Seaport district. Gibran was with a middle-aged white man he didn't introduce.
Fortunately, Jeremy was with his boyfriend, a handsome thirty-something fellow lawyer whom Jeremy had recklessly chatted up at a bar association event with no prompting except from a brisk and lethal tequila-soda. He'd approached his now-boyfriend the way Gibran would have. The way Paul would have. The way any sane undamaged human would have. And now, Jeremy and his boyfriend were celebrating their three-month anniversary, a small redemption that proved at a minimum that Jeremy wasn't unlovable and - Jeremy sometimes allowed himself to think - a great deal more. Maybe even that - as Jeremy approached his fiftieth birthday - he was finally getting better at dating.
"Good to see you," Gibran said, but his tone conveyed the opposite of good. Afflicting to see you, perhaps. Or, I can't believe my new daddy has to endure your tedious presence.
That tone - had he imagined it? - reawakened in Jeremy the aching need to make sense of what had happened with Gibran. Why it hadn't worked out.
"It seems like you'd be happier elsewhere," Jeremy said aloud. Or thought. He wasn't sure which.
Gibran blinked twice, as if it was a safe signal on which they'd agreed, so they could put an end to consensual bondage.
"How's Paul?" Gibran asked.
"Dead."
"Oh. I'm sorry. That's too bad. What about Rumi? He good?"
"He died, too," Jeremy said.
It was a baldfaced lie. Jeremy's boyfriend gave him a quizzical look, which Jeremy knew meant they would spend some time later that evening unpacking the whole dynamic.
His boyfriend determinedly introduced himself to Gibran and his daddy. While the three of them chatted, Jeremy ransacked his brain for the right words to fix what was awkward between him and Gibran. But being so far apart in age - and maybe in what each had sought from a relationship - he and Gibran had never really spoken the same language. Like Jeremy and the vendor in Marsaxlokk, they had been two foreigners barking excitedly into cell phone apps and thrusting the half-assed translations at each other with glee and impatience and a futile hope for some genuine and meaningful connection.
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