Taking Chances (18 page)

But still, a bomb in your foot?

I stood at the windows watching his flight taxi toward the runway. His phone kept going to voice mail while I watched him leave my life, probably forever. Linda was right—I was just a chickenshit. I always had, in the back of my mind, a tried-and-true escape clause. I’d do something to push him away so I never had to actually face the fact that I was gay and wanted to spend my life with a guy. A small, thin voice inside my head kept telling me if I just waited, someday I’d be normal. I’d used the voice’s logic to escape in high school, I used it with Riley, and I was using it at that moment in the airport.

Except—

When I saw his plane take off, returning Matt to San Francisco and me to Alone, I realized I didn’t want to be normal.

“Fuck this,” I said to myself while I dialed Linda’s number.

“Tyler? Where did you go?’ she asked, clearly worried.

“Dallas. Can you check on Brad, he’s taking over the shop for a while?” I said, digging through my wallet.

“I can, but where are you going?” She sounded as confused as I felt.

I handed my credit card to the girl behind the ticket counter. “Next flight to San Francisco, please,” I said to her before going back to Linda. “I’m going to go get him. The keys to the shop are on my key chain. Would you mind asking Brad and Kyle to make sure the shop’s taken care of while I’m gone? Brad knows what to do.”

“Tyler,” she cautioned. “Slow down a second.”

The ticket agent handed me my card and boarding pass. “I’m tired of slowing down. I’m tired of being scared. I’m sick of being like this. Linda, I need to get him back.”

I had to sound like a lunatic to the people around me and to Linda as well.

“What if he doesn’t want to come back?” she asked quietly.

“Then I sit outside his house until he decides to take me back.” The TSA guy gestured for me to put my phone into the plastic tub before I walked through the metal detector. “I have to go, Linda. Wish me luck.”

I could hear the smile in her voice. “Go get him, then.”

I hung up the phone and vowed to do just that.

T
HERE
is a bone-crushing sorrow that happens in airports.

If anything in the world can drive home the fact you are alone, it’s watching other people walking off an airplane, down a Jetway, and through a terminal until they spot a cheering crowd of loved ones. At first they walk slowly, stretching out tight muscles and hauling in un-canned air. Then, after a pause to figure out which way the exit is, they start toward the people who are waiting for them. By the time those folks are visible, the new arrival is practically running and smiling from ear to ear.

We walk through life with these social walls that keep people out of our lives the best we can. We keep our voices down, our expressions of emotion muted in respect for the strangers around us.

Those walls come crumbling down at airports for some reason.

A soldier, no older than twenty-two, had been a few people ahead of me as we disembarked the plane. He had an Army-green bag in one hand as he tried to push past or eel around people in the most respectful way he could manage. The moment he broke free of the crowd, he dropped the bag and dashed into the arms of a blonde girl who had been cleared as far as the gate and who was openly crying at just the sight of him. He lifted and spun her around as if she weighed nothing. I seriously doubted if anything this side of a nuclear war could part their lips.

It was such an unabashed expression of love that it affected everyone who saw it. People smiled; I saw some sigh in longing. I felt the hole in the center of my soul grow larger as the fact no one was here for me settled in, instantly coupled with the realization no one would ever be waiting for me like that. Ever.

I looked away from the young couple and tried not to resent their love too much as I walked to baggage claim.

While I waited for our flight’s luggage to be unloaded, I stared around, puzzled by something that was hard to identify at first. The entire world seemed different to me. The light looked harsher than normal, my limbs weighed more than they usually did, and I felt as if I had just run a marathon and was at the end of my endurance. The people looked flat, expressionless, two-dimensional to me. As I scanned the crowd in apathy, my world was painted with varying shades of sadness. Nothing caught my attention except that grayness; nothing, not even the color, mattered.

Was this what the rest of my life was going to be like?

I grabbed my bags and caught a taxi to my place. The city blurred by me. Part of me looked for something that would trigger my interest, bring back a memory. But everything kept on looking the same—gray, lifeless, and foreign to me. I honestly didn’t recognize my apartment when we pulled up in front of it. It took the driver calling out “Hey!” twice to get my attention. “We’re here,” he said when I looked back at him.

“So we are,” I mumbled to myself as I tossed some bills at him.

“This is way too much,” he called after me after I got out of the cab.

I didn’t even answer. I carried my bags, which weighed more and more and pulled me toward the floor with each step.

I walked up to the third floor with the same reluctance with which a condemned man walks to the gallows. I wanted to collapse on the stairs and stop moving, but the desire to hide in my bed under the covers and never emerge was stronger. As I opened the door, the stale air of my living room hit me. It didn’t smell the way I remembered the air in my apartment smelling. All signs of my being there had faded over the days I’d been gone. I might as well have been walking into my home for the first time.

This was home now.

The suitcases fell out of my hands as that thought hit the still waters of my mind and slowly sank below the surface. I was never going to go back to Foster again. Seeing Tyler again would be akin to crawling naked through three miles of broken glass just so I could roll around in Tabasco sauce for an hour after. I kicked the door closed behind me and stumbled to my bed. I fell forward, no doubt looking like a great gay tree that had been cut at its roots.

I lay there not moving for a few minutes before I heard the beep. I ignored the sound, but a few minutes later it repeated itself. I looked over to the digital answering machine and saw its one red eye blinking back at me. It would beep every few minutes until I checked the messages. No matter how hard I stared at it, the machine refused to explode. Sighing, I got up off the bed and walked over to the offensive device. I pushed the replay button.

“Matt,” my mom’s voice asked over the machine. “Are you there? You aren’t answering your phone. Call me when you get home, please.” A small beep signaled that the machine had erased the message. The next one chimed in. “Matthew, this isn’t funny. Your mother is worried. Answer your phone!” my father’s voice scolded me as if he could make me hear his command through sheer force of will alone. Another beep and Sophia’s crone-like voice issued from the speaker. “Hey fag, I think you lost your phone somewhere. I just called it and a seriously gay flight attendant answered. Normally I would think you might be getting lucky, but this guy was making Jack from
Will & Grace
look like John Wayne. Anyway, call me when you get this. Unless you
are
doing the flight steward. In that case get an old priest and a young priest and pray.” Her laugh made me shiver with the same revulsion I felt when a fork scraped across a metal skillet. Thankfully the machine cut her off. Another beep.

I cursed to myself as I turned on my computer.

A normal person would have been pissed or, at the very least, annoyed by the loss of a cell phone, but for me, it was relaxing. In a sea of things I had no control over, finding my phone was the one, small piece of wood I could cling to. I opened the browser up and pinged my number.

It was less than a mile away and moving toward me.

“What the—?” I asked out loud as I pinged the phone again.

It was closer.

Something was wrong. Unless it had developed wings and a homing device, my phone couldn’t be coming toward me. Unless someone was bringing it to me. Maybe the airline had a service? I had flown first class and it wasn’t hard to check a smartphone for its home address. The dot on my computer stopped in front of my apartment. Less than a minute later, someone buzzed for me to unlock the entry door downstairs.

I pushed the Admit buzzer so whoever it was could come up and pulled my wallet out to see how much cash I had on me. There was no way the guy who had followed me home from the airport was getting paid enough for the service. I had two ones and a twenty. I thought about it for a few seconds and took the twenty out.

I opened the door on the first knock. “Thanks, you’re a lifesaver…,” I said holding out the money.

Tyler stood there, my phone in his hand.

A
S
SOON
as we landed in Colorado, I tried to find a faster connecting flight. Matt had complained that he couldn’t get a direct flight out of Dallas home; he was going to have to stop twice and change planes once. So I had a small chance of catching him.

Normally, I am not one to lean on my looks, but in times of crisis, I have found that my smile can open a few doors. It had no effect on the ladies at the Delta and Southwest counters, but the guy at the American terminal was a whole different story. He had glanced up and gave me a perfunctory nod before going back to his computer.

I thought I was screwed until his head popped back up to give me a second look.

“Can I help you?” he asked with more emphasis on the word “help” than he probably intended. He cleared his throat and added quickly, “I mean, did you need some assistance?”

I smiled at him and saw him swallow slightly. He had just been clocked and worse, he knew he had been clocked. “I need to get to San Francisco,” I said, walking closer to the counter. “I need to be there as soon as possible.”

He slowly looked away from me as he began to push keys on the computer in front of him. “So… family emergency?” he asked, looking down at the screen for a few seconds and then back at me.

I thought about leading this guy on to find a flight, but it just wasn’t in me. I sighed and leaned into the counter. “Look, I met this great guy and I completely screwed it up and he’s on his way to San Francisco and I need to get there to beg him to take me back. Can you please help me?” I will admit, I gave him puppy dog eyes, but I was truly desperate.

I could hear his typing slow down as I admitted I was chasing a guy.

“Please,” I began to babble. “You have to know how hard it is to find a real guy in this world and if you found one and screwed it up… wouldn’t you want someone like you to help me out?”

We held eye contact, neither one of us even drawing a breath, like two gay gunslingers staring each other down. Finally he sighed and looked back at the computer. “If I had a guy looking like you running after me, I would make sure to trip and let you catch up.” He pushed a few more buttons. “There’s a nonstop leaving in about ten minutes from gate twenty-two,” he said, gesturing with this head. “If you hurry, I am sure you can exchange your ticket. They have room.”

“Bless you!” I said resisting the urge to lean over the counter and give him a kiss.

“Whatever,” he said, smiling. “But my name is Shawn and if he turns you down, I work here Tuesday through Saturday every week.”

I gave him a wink. “Thanks.” I ran as fast as I could to gate twenty-two.

The lady at the gate began to hassle me about the flight until I mentioned Shawn had sent me. She gave me a glance from head to toe and then scoffed quietly. “That figures.” She pushed a few buttons herself. “Okay, I can get you on. But I only have first class. Credit card?”

I handed it over to her and a few minutes and several hundred dollars later, I sat in a seat in the back of first class. My heart was racing so fast I thought there was no way I would even close my eyes on the flight, but somewhere over Oklahoma, I passed out. I had a dream I was talking to Matt, but every time I tried to answer his questions my mouth refused to work and I struggled to speak. He finally shook his head in disgust and turned away from me. I tried to grab at him but something was holding me back. I looked down and saw a mass of people pulling at me, at my clothes, dragging me away from Matt. Everyone I knew in Foster, the entire town, was bent on dragging me down into the ground. Matt got farther and farther away. I sank into nothing.

I woke up screaming.

That doesn’t sound so bad, but inside a locked airplane at 33,000 feet, it is considered kind of a thing. There were two attendants and the air marshal standing by me when I finally came out of my delirium. I had a very strong feeling I was a couple of minutes away from being tazed. “Problem?” I asked, realizing I had been drooling in my sleep.

The air marshal looked at me, his hand still by his stun gun. “You tell us, son.”

“You were yelling in your sleep,” the lady next to me said to me in a concerned voice.

“We going to have a problem?” the marshal asked, sounding more like an Old West cowboy than a twenty-first century law officer.

I resisted the urge to ask him whether or not we’d step outside if I did have a problem. Instead I just shook my head. “Bad dream, I’m sorry.”

He gave me that lingering eye all cops seem to learn somewhere along the line. Like he was going to spin back and catch me rubbing my hands and laughing manically when I thought he was looking away. “We land in thirty minutes,” he said to me. “Make sure I don’t have to walk up here again.”

Again, I forced down the sarcastic comeback and watched him walk away.

Since there was no way I could sleep after that, I sat up and tried to compose my thoughts a little. The plan in my mind had consisted of three simple steps. Step one, get to California as fast as I could. Step two, get Matt back. Step three, Matt and I live happily ever after. Step one was about to become a reality, which left step two. Let me assure you, I may have a bit of an inflated estimate of my looks, but I knew there was no way in hell I could just smile my way back into Matt’s life. I had screwed up, and that meant more than a cocky grin was going to be required to clean up the mess