So were Andy’s. “Never. I love you.”
“I love you.” Victor’s voice was husky, but not in the way that signaled arousal. Neither of them moved.
Andy cleared his throat, taking a moment to call up the thoughts he’d had recently. “We never talked much about my history. Maybe we should have. But we have time to deal with it now so here we go. I was with a lot of people. Not an egregious number of people, but from fourteen to forty-six is a lot of years. I left all those people, or they left me, for a lot of different reasons. When I left it was because I knew that person wasn’t right for me.
That’s exactly what’s supposed to happen.” He thought Victor didn’t quite understand. “Hang on.” Andy went to the room phone, called down for a bottle of rum, and then leaned on the wall to wait for it. “Okay, case in point.
Alonzo. We hooked up after I left someone I’d lived with for a while. I left that guy because he cheated.” Victor’s eyes narrowed. “Yeah, fuck him. Al and I never lived together, we weren’t even in the same city for the whole time we were hooking up. He went back to Miami – we never knew each other there, we met in New York – and he wanted me to move there so we could be together. I didn’t want to live there again. Whenever I had to stop dancing, I wanted to be somewhere no-one knew me as a dancer.”
“Honey,” Victor said, suppressing a smile, “you fucked that up.”
“Jesus, I know. It’s all your fault, and thanks for that by the way.”
“You’re welcome. I left people too. I left them the way I left you, after one fuck.”
Andy gave him a look. “That wasn’t one fuck.”
“No, okay. That was a whole night, the best night of my life. I hated walking out of your place. I sat in my car and thought, I have to go back up, would he even let me in, how the fuck do I excuse that. Explain that. I couldn’t think of a way. There was my mother, dying back in Mexico, and she didn’t know.”
“I understand. I truly do.” They gazed at each other for half a minute.
Then the knock came, and the rum. Andy thanked the person delivering it,
and double-locked the door again. He poured them each a couple ounces and handed a glass to Victor. “Salud.”
“Salud.” Victor sipped, grimaced, sipped again.
“So sweetheart.” Andy sat cross-legged on the bed, staring at Victor. “I understand why you weren’t out. You had a family reason, you had a cultural reason, and you had a career reason. You were eighteen years in and starting to get noticed. Not only fully-employed, which is rare enough for someone like us, but noticed. When we first met I thought Jesus, what a fox, but I didn’t even consider trying to vibe you because I was there to do a job and so were you.”
“You didn’t have to vibe me. I was looking at you with those lights in my eyes thinking, you know, why now. Why this one. I might never see him again. It was a horrible thought.”
“And then you decided to get that tattoo.”
“Somebody referred me to Lola, and there you were.”
“At a funeral for a fucking cat.” That event had been a community send-off for a respected adversary, rather than a beloved pet.
Victor almost laughed. “Standing there in those shorts. Looking the way you do, with that floodlight from the side of the building. It should have looked like a prison yard and instead it was like you were in a spotlight. I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t resist. I had to try.”
“And because I’m a tramp I took you right upstairs.”
“You took me all right.” Victor sucked in a breath at the memory. Then, because if they kept going this way they were going to be in bed again and they still had words to say, he tracked back. “Okay. So the reason I never had a relationship was because I put my career and my family first. I only fucked people I didn’t care about, people who didn’t know me. I felt like I couldn’t risk getting to know someone, letting someone know too much about me.”
Except by the time he’d left he’d handed Andy his whole life. “Until you.”
Andy remembered that too. “I told you you shouldn’t sign that photo release.”
“Maybe I thought if you blew it open, I deserved it. Maybe I wanted you to, so I would have to face it once and for all.” Victor saw in Andy’s face that he’d already thought of that.
“You were under a lot of stress. It’s a very rare person who can be
celibate. I couldn’t.” Not until I had a reason to be.
“How often,” Victor began, then stopped.
Andy read his mind. “How often was I with someone only for sex?”
Victor nodded. “A lot. It was always out in the open. Like, I can’t stand doing this for myself for another day, are you okay with that. And sometimes the guy would say no, fuck off. But a lot of times the guy would say that’s fine, me too. These were mostly guys I already knew. I wasn’t finding a new guy every time.”
“I never went back to anyone. I was afraid if I did that, it would turn into a relationship, and it would blow open.” Victor sighed.
There was something Andy thought he needed to suggest, even though he really hoped the suggestion would be rejected. “Do you want to open it up?” Victor looked startled. “I mean, if I live as long as Pop that’s twenty-eight more years
