CHAPTER 10
Gary's Confession
Gary’s Confession
GARY
I have rehearsed the truth a hundred times. Not one rehearsal prepared me for the way she is looking at me now.
We sit at the stern where the wake unspools behind the ship. The waves are louder than my heartbeat, but only barely.
“I’m sorry. Please let me explain.”
“It was so sudden. So unexpected.”
“It wasn’t sudden for me. I was terrified.” I take a breath. “You shocked me. You made me doubt my identity as a gay man, and I was not ready for that.”
She goes very still.
“And I was intimidated. By how successful you are. By what kind of mother you are. Your book about John is a powerful thing, Dee, and it’s full of love, and I read it and thought: there is no room in that woman’s life for me.”
I look at the water and make myself keep going, because half a truth is just a better-dressed lie.
“No. That’s only part of it. Seeing you sitting at that table knocked the wind out of me. That’s the part I couldn’t say.”
#
DEE
“Do you remember what I asked you? After that cruise, in one of those late-night messages. The carefully crafted question.”
“Word for word.”
“Then say it.”
“Is there a higher-stakes game here? What’s your choice — play it safe, or play the odds? Or is there even a game at all?”
“And you answered that you wanted an old-fashioned friendship.”
“I did.”
“And I worked very hard at being that.” My voice comes out with an edge I don’t try to sand off. “So what did I do wrong? It can’t be that I loved a good man before you, and that I’m a successful woman.”
I turn my back to him. I need a second.
“You were fine,” he says. “We were fine. I wasn’t.”
I turn back around.
“Every time you texted, I wanted to answer. Every time I started typing, I imagined hurting you, and I convinced myself that disappearing was kinder. It wasn’t kindness. It was cowardice.”
He stands up and walks to the rail. Comes back. Sits.
“I failed a marriage to a woman. I came to understand myself as a gay man. I failed a marriage to a man. And then I met you, and I was attracted to a woman again, for the first time since my wife. I have women friends. None of them take my breath away.” He looks at me. “You challenged everything I had decided about who I was.”
“And suddenly that’s resolved?”
“Not suddenly. Not at all. I tried to forget you. I wanted to. And your words and your face followed me around my own house. Alcohol didn’t erase you; it just made the wanting louder.”
“And yet you were silent.”
“I wasn’t ready to accept anything but friendship from a woman. So I dug in. I looked harder for a man. I started drinking again. And I still couldn’t close the door — I never blocked you. I lurked on your posts at two in the morning knowing you’d be awake, because our conversations were always late, and I could see you were online, and I could almost feel you waiting.”
“You watched me wait.”
He does not flinch away from it. “Yes.”
That is the moment something shifts. Not forgiveness — nothing so tidy. But this is a man who could have softened that and didn’t.
“So what is it you want now?”
He looks straight at me.
“I can’t deny what happens in my body when I see you. I’ve thought about you every week for five years and practiced what I’d say. I want to play the game and see where it goes. I’m willing to go all in.”
“Then I need something. If I’m going to get past what this did to me, I need you open and transparent. About everything. Including the things that make you look bad.”
“Done.”
“Don’t say ‘done’ so fast.”
“Fair.” He nods slowly. “Then: I’ll tell you the truth even when the truth costs me you. That’s the promise. It’s the only one I know how to keep.”
#
DEE
“I have to be honest about my side of it too,” I say. “I’ve fantasized about this moment. And I’m terrified you’ll toss me aside at the end of the week. I’ve lost so much these last years — every man who mattered to me. My husband. My father.”
“You have the choice this time. I’m here, and I’ll wait.”
We sit in silence looking at each other.
He reaches for my hand.
I hesitate.
He withdraws it — immediately, completely, without a flicker of resentment.
I once took away her choice by disappearing, I can see him thinking. I will not take another one.
“Too soon,” I say.
“Thank you for telling me.”
“Gary. I need slow.”
He smiles. “Good.”
“Good?”
“I’ve spent five years running from you.”
“And this time?”
“This time I’ll walk.”
A pack of teenagers goes past, howling at some private joke. One of them is doing an impression of somebody’s mother and it’s evidently the funniest thing that has ever happened. I feel about that age myself.
“I have more questions,” I say, when they’ve gone. “And I have to decide whether I want the answers. I’m afraid that if I ask the wrong one, I’ll scare you off.”
“Ask. What’s the biggest one?”
“I don’t want to pry.”
“I’d rather be uncomfortable than dishonest.”
So I ask. About the one relationship I saw on social media. He tells me it ended six months ago and was over long before, and that the man deserved someone who was all in.
“Weren’t you?”
He looks at the deck for a while.
“I hate this question. Not because I don’t want you to know — because the answer embarrasses me.” A breath. “I spent that whole relationship comparing him to someone I lost.”
“Me?”
He nods.
I ask about his ex-wife. Thirty-five years ago; a good friend before she was a wife; a good mother; no fire.
“Did you love her?”
“Absolutely.”
“Then why leave?”
“Because loving someone isn’t the same as wanting them. She deserved a husband who wanted her the way a husband should. I wanted to. I couldn’t.”
I ask about Kenny.
“Kenny.” He stops. “You know, they built this deck wrong. Look at the way the rail—“
“Gary.”
“Yeah.” He puts both hands over his face and drags them down. “Sorry. That one’s got a whole exit ramp built onto it. I’ve had thirty years to install it.”
He gets up and goes to the rail, and I follow.
“Kenny and I had sparks flying everywhere. I felt loved for the first time in my life. We were both drinking, hard, and the feelings were enormous. Then I got sober.” He watches the water. “Kenny loved the man alcohol made me. Sober, I wasn’t that man anymore. And I’d finally met the real one and had no interest in going back.”
“And now?”
“He tried to come back. Right around the time I met you, actually. That was part of the confusion.” He turns to face me. “I can be in a room with him. I avoid the room.”
I nod. “I’m not sure I can believe in tomorrow yet.”
He moves his chair beside mine and reaches out.
“May I?”
I nod.
He takes my hand and just — looks at it.
“What?”
“I’ve imagined this hand for five years.” He turns it over. “It’s smaller than I pictured.”
“I have questions of my own to answer,” I tell him. “And I’m not sure you can hear them either.”