Chapter 4: Corner Tap
1202 Words
The place was exactly what Damon said it would be.
Small. Corner unit on Bridle Street, the kind of establishment that had been there long enough to stop trying to impress anyone. Four tables. A bar with six stools. A chalkboard menu with nine items, three of which were crossed out. Marcus arrived at 7:58 and sat with his back to the wall because he needed to see the door and he did not examine why.
He ordered black coffee.
He sat with it.
At 8:04 Damon walked in.
He was in a grey long-sleeve and dark jeans and he looked exactly like he had looked on Friday night, which Marcus had been hoping would not be the case. He had been quietly banking on the possibility that memory had exaggerated something. That Friday night had been low lighting and good wine and the kind of social pressure that makes everything slightly more than it is, and that Damon in the blunt honest light of a Saturday morning would just be a person. A regular person. Someone Marcus could shake hands with again and feel absolutely nothing.
Damon saw him and came over without hesitating.
He sat down.
He said nothing for a moment, just looked at the table like it had questions he was trying to answer, and then the server came and he ordered coffee, and then they were alone.
"You came," Damon said.
"So did you."
"I wasn't sure you would."
"I wasn't sure either," Marcus said.
That used up about forty seconds of the silence. Fifty more remained, sitting between them with considerable weight.
Damon wrapped both hands around his mug. "So."
"So."
"We should probably talk about what we're doing here."
"Probably," Marcus agreed.
Neither of them said anything.
Marcus looked at the chalkboard. Damon looked at the door. Someone in the back of the kitchen dropped something metal and the sound cracked through the room and they both looked at each other at the same moment and something almost like a smile happened. Not quite. Close.
"I'm not gay," Damon said. Straightforward. Not defensive. The same tone you would use to state your postcode.
"Neither am I," Marcus said.
"I know. I'm not saying it as an accusation."
"I know you're not."
"I'm saying it because I need to say it out loud in front of another person and have it mean something."
Marcus looked at him. "Does it? Still mean something?"
Damon was quiet for a beat. "I don't know. I've been straight my entire life. I have not once looked at a man and felt anything I needed to think about."
"Same."
"And then Friday happened."
"And then Friday happened," Marcus agreed.
Damon picked up his mug and put it down without drinking. "I've been trying to find the explanation. Like a logical one. Maybe it was the wine. Maybe it was the context, meeting as a pair, some kind of social mirroring. I read something once about proximity and shared experience creating false emotional connection."
Marcus looked at him. "You googled it."
"I did not google it."
"Damon."
A pause. "I may have googled it."
Marcus said nothing for a moment. Then, because he could not help it: "What did you search?"
Damon's jaw tightened. "I'm not telling you that."
"That bad?"
"The search history is cleared."
Marcus laughed. It came out louder than he intended and he pressed his fist to his mouth and got it under control and when he looked up Damon was watching him with that expression again. The one with no name. The one that filed things.
Marcus stopped laughing.
"I looked some things up too," he said.
"And?"
"And I don't have a clean diagnosis either." He turned his mug in a slow circle on the table. "I've been thinking about what I know about myself. What I've always known. And it all still holds. I am attracted to women. I have only ever been attracted to women. That is a fact with twenty-six years of evidence behind it."
"And yet," Damon said.
"And yet," Marcus said.
The two words landed between them and neither man moved to pick them up.
Outside, Bridle Street was starting its slow Saturday morning. A woman walked past with a dog. A delivery bike rattled over the kerb. The world proceeding at its ordinary pace, oblivious.
"So what do we do," Marcus said.
"Nothing," Damon said. "We do nothing. We came here to talk. We talked. Now we understand it slightly better than we did and we go home and we live our lives."
"Right."
"This doesn't have to become anything."
"I agree."
"We are adults."
"Fully," Marcus said.
"With people who trust us."
"Yes."
Damon held his gaze. "Say it like you mean it."
Marcus looked back at him steadily. "We are adults with people who trust us and this doesn't have to become anything."
Silence.
"Better," Damon said, but something in his voice said it wasn't.
They stayed for another forty minutes. That was the part Marcus had not planned for and could not account for afterward when he tried to reconstruct where the morning went wrong. They were supposed to talk, resolve, leave. That was the agenda. But the coffee was good and the place was quiet and Damon mentioned something about a project he was working on, a restructuring deal that was held together by what he described, with magnificent blankness, as optimism and legal ambiguity. And Marcus told him about the bridge in Halton Grove and the client who kept changing specifications and acting like physics was a suggestion.
Damon said: "Some people think the rules are for everyone else."
Marcus said: "Every client I have ever had."
It was nothing. It was small ordinary conversation between two people who happened to be good at talking to each other, and that was the most dangerous thing Marcus had discovered all morning. Not the charge, not the confusion, not the thing from Friday night that still had no name. This. The ease of it. The way the time went without either of them pushing it. The way Marcus did not once look for a gap in the conversation to escape through.
At 9:22 Damon's phone lit up on the table. He glanced at it. Something moved through his face briefly. "Jade," he said.
"Go," Marcus said.
Damon picked up the phone and typed back and pocketed it. He stood, pulled on his jacket, left cash on the table.
He looked at Marcus.
"This helped," he said. "The talking."
"Yeah."
"We should probably not do it again."
"Definitely not," Marcus said.
Damon nodded. He turned toward the door.
Stopped.
Turned back.
"For the record," he said. "The parking space thing. I don't think it was a sign."
Marcus looked up at him. "No?"
"I think you just got lucky."
He left.
Marcus sat with his cold coffee and watched the door settle shut behind him and thought about luck, and signs, and the very thin and mostly imaginary line between the two.
He sat there for another ten minutes.
Then he took out his phone and saved Damon's number.
He did not think about what he named it.
- Writer
