He shrugged. “Yeah. Hookup site. What about it?”
“I put a profile on there a few weeks after we broke up.”
“You mean, after you dumped me.”
I ignored that. “I said that I was pretty much into anything. And men started contacting me. There are some kinky guys out there, I’ll tell you.”
I drank a little more beer. “I’ve always been a romantic about sex,” I said, settling back against the sofa. “But after…you know…I just wanted to get laid. Now that I think about it, I guess I was punishing myself.”
“Getting laid as punishment? That’s a new one.”
“It wasn’t just the sex. It was like I wanted guys to treat me badly. I was angry at myself for not giving you the chance to explain, for throwing away a relationship that had real potential. I felt like I was a loser. And when guys treated me badly that just reinforced that idea.”
I drank some beer. We sat there.
Mike said, “I treated you pretty badly, too. I shouldn’t have cheated on you. And I should have ‘fessed up, instead of infecting you.”
“We were both at fault. And I think we’ve both been beating ourselves up over it.”
Mike looked at the beer can in his hand. “I used to drink a lot in college, I ever tell you that?”
I shook my head.
“I’d go to these frat parties, and guys would be hooking up with girls, and I knew I didn’t want that, so I just drank. I’d pass out and wake up the next morning on some strange floor, massive hangover. A couple of times I was lucky I didn’t choke on my own vomit. Sounds a lot like the other night, huh? Except you were nicer to me than the guys in those frats.”
“When we were going out, you weren’t drinking, were you?” I asked. “I mean, did I miss something?”
He shook his head. “I cleaned up my act when I came back from college. Partly, it was fear of my dad. I was living at home, after all. He wanted me to do something stable, something with a future, and I started taking these fire management courses at the community college. Right away, it was like, I don’t know, I fell in love.”
He looked at me, and I could see the old Mike coming through, his eyes shining, his mustache curving up at the ends with his smile. I got chicken skin just looking at him-what mainlanders call goose bumps.
“I wanted to be the best damn fireman I could be. I started taking these one- and two-week courses at the National Fire Academy in Maryland, so that I could get promoted and move into fire inspection. That was all I thought about. I shoved being gay back into the closet. I didn’t see any way I could be gay in that environment, so I just wasn’t.”
“I did the same thing with the police,” I said. “Until I couldn’t anymore.”
“It’s like I was asleep. Then you came out, and you were all over the papers and the TV. The gay cop. I had such a major crush on you, and I thought, well, maybe if you could do it, I could.”
He smiled wryly. “You know the next part. I wasn’t as together as I thought. I started to resent you, that you could be out, that you could go places and tell the truth to people and not be ashamed. And I couldn’t.”
“That takes time, you know,” I said.
“Yeah. I’ve had a lot of time to think about it. The stupid thing is, I got drunk in San Francisco, because I was so pissed off at the way things had worked out-that I was too much of a pansy to face up to the guys at the conference and bring you along. When this guy made a play for me at the bar, I just went along with it.”
“I don’t blame you, you know. I mean, yeah, you hurt my feelings, and I was totally pissed off that you gave me gonorrhea. But I should have listened to your side of the story. I shouldn’t have been so quick to kick you out of my life.”
“You think we can be friends again?” Mike asked.
“I don’t know.” What was friendship, after all? A warm feeling for someone else? Harry and Terri were my friends, had been since high school. I knew I could count on them, and I’d walk over broken glass for them. But Mike? Could I be just a friend, when every time he touched me electric charges shot to my dick and I wanted to kiss him and rub my body against his?
He looked at me, his eyes wide like a child’s, his mouth set in a straight line beneath his mustache. I sighed. “I still have major hots for you. But there’s a part of me that’s pissed off, too, and doesn’t know if I can trust you. Especially not…” I waved my hand around his house. “I mean, you’re kind of a loser now.”
“Man, you know how to dish out the tough love,” Mike said, but the ends of his lips snuck upward into a smile. He was quiet for a minute, then said, “So where do we go from here?”
I looked around the living room. “I am absolutely not going to start up with you again until you get your shit together,” I said, and I knew I was saying that as much for my own benefit as his. “But it took my brothers and Harry to give me a hand to get over my own problems. Maybe I can do the same for you.”
“I’m up for it.”
“Are you?” I stood up. “Let’s get started, then. First thing, pick up your dirty clothes and run a load of wash. I’ll help you clean up this place.”
He smiled. “I wish I had one of those French maid costumes you could wear.”
“Don’t fuck with me, brah. I’m serious here. And you’ve got to go to a meeting or something.”
“A meeting?”
“AA. Face it, Mike, you’ve got a problem with alcohol. You’re not going to get over it on your own.”
“I can stop drinking. Right now.”
I just looked at him, resisting the urge to cross my arms. Finally, he said, “I’ll go to a meeting.”
“You got recycling?” I stood and picked up the pile of papers.
“Bin’s in the kitchen.” He stood up, too, and began collecting the dirty clothes.
It felt like we’d already ventured too far into emotional territory, so I said, “We’re stalled on the arson homicide. Ray and I have been focusing on identifying the kid who died. We handed the sketch out to all the beat cops, and we canvassed the stores and offices in the area. It’s like he was hiding under a rock or something.”
“I checked out all those other clinics you gave me,” Mike said, as he put a load of clothes in the washing machine. “No suspicious fires at any of them.”
We worked together for nearly two hours, sometimes in silence, sometimes tossing ideas around. “Any leads on the arsonist?” I asked, as I scrubbed caked food off the dishes in the sink and loaded the dishwasher.
He shook his head. “Whoever he is, the guy’s a pro. There wasn’t much evidence beyond what we found that morning. I’ve been looking for other cases using the same MO but I haven’t found any that fit.”
He took the vacuum from a cabinet and dragged it to his bedroom. As he ran it there, in the hall, and the living room, I mopped the kitchen floor.
“We’ve looked at the boy, and we’ve looked at the arsonist, and we’re looking at gambling,” I said, as I helped him make his bed with fresh sheets, though I knew I wasn’t getting in it myself, at least not for a while. “What aren’t we looking at?”
“The owners of the center have no motive. None of the other tenants do, either,” he said, tucking in the sheet at the foot of the bed. For a minute, I thought about what it would be like to be nestled under those sheets with Mike.
“If I can get a line on Norma Ching from my aunt, that’ll give us a new direction.”
“We could use one of those.” He laid a pair of decorative pillows at the head of the bed, then stood back, looking satisfied. We walked back out to the living room, where Mike lit a vanilla candle someone had given him, and between it and the furniture polish and the kitchen cleanser, the house started to smell better. “You never did tell me what you came over here for,” he said.
I collapsed on the sofa. “My truck wouldn’t start.” I told him about lunch with Arleen and Harry and seeing their new house.
“So they’ll be my neighbors.” He looked over at me. “You think you’ll be coming by to visit them now and then?”
“I might. I might have other reasons to come up here, too. You never know.”
“You want me to drive you home?” he asked.
“That’d be cool. But I’ve got to call the tow truck first.”
I called and arranged to meet the truck down in front of Arleen and Harry’s new house. We walked out to his truck and Mike said, “My parents are still out. My dad’s going to freak when he sees how clean my house is.”
“I thought your dad didn’t freak,” I said.
