The Sweet Side Of The Ropes: Enthralling Tales Of Male-Male Romance (11 page)

"I know what I feel, Dimi."

"Do you? How can you be so sure so soon?"

"Look, I'm not like you, Dimi. I don't want any more one-night stands. I want permanency. Stability. A family."

"You think that because I'm gay I don't want a family someday? That I want to spend my entire life whoring around? Did you ever think that maybe I'm looking for the right person, too?"

"I didn't mean that,” I said, trying to smooth his ruffled feathers. Damn it! I always managed to say the wrong thing to him lately. “I'm just nervous, and I need your support, Dimi."

Dimi nodded, then smiled, although his grin looked a little too wide, as if he were forcing it. “Holy shit! My best friend is getting married!” he cried. Then, before I could blink, he had me in a hug that left absolutely no space between us. It wasn't one of those stiff, uncomfortable man-hugs, the ones you get from your dad once you pass puberty, or from your uncle at Christmas, where you both sort of lean in and pat each other's backs. No, I felt every inch of Dimi pressed up against me, felt every hard plane and sharp angle of his body from his feet to his forehead.

Suddenly I broke out into a cold sweat.

Because for just an instant, only the space of a heartbeat or two, I'd
liked
the way he'd felt, and my body had responded accordingly.

I broke away in a flash, backing up as though I was a dried-up piece of kindling and he was a lit match.

"What's wrong?” Dimi asked, frowning.

"Nothing, nothing at all. I'm just excited. About Holly—excited about asking her to marry me,” I stammered.

And that's all it was, I convinced myself afterwards. It was only misplaced excitement, a bad case of nerves on one of the biggest days of my life.

I caught Dimi looking at me oddly a few times after that, but I didn't have the balls to ask him what he was thinking. I wasn't sure I would like his answer.

The wedding was set for a Friday afternoon at the courthouse downtown. Holly and I had both agreed that waiting was unnecessary, and that a big wedding would be a waste of perfectly good money. We were both anxious to get our own place and play house; a quick trip to whichever judge was available, and the deed would be done.

On the night before my wedding Dimi threw me a bachelor party—of sorts. He and at least a half-dozen of his friends showed up after my last class and hijacked me in broad daylight.

Our first stop was my favorite restaurant, a country-themed, hokey establishment that served huge steaks and five-dollar pitchers of beer. It was the sort of place that gave you a bowl of peanuts for the table, and let you chuck the shells onto the floor. Dimi used to say that my love of that restaurant proved that somewhere deep inside me the little kid who loved to make a mess was still alive and well. I just thought it was cool; I liked the music, and the sound the peanut shells made when they crunched underfoot. I loved it, but Holly hated it. She thought it was uncouth, so I rarely got to eat there anymore.

Dimi's friends were a friendly, funny bunch who drank like fish and knew the words to every song ever written. Or so it seemed as they sang along to the jukebox, everything from Patsy Cline's
Crazy
to Toby Keith's
Who's Your Daddy
.

By the time we'd finished dinner, we'd gone through three full pitchers of beer, the last with shots of Jack back. I was having a ball, feeling more than fine, and my head was buzzing pleasantly when we left the restaurant.

It was a good thing I was halfway to a full drunk, because we ended up next in
The Blue Moon
, Dimi's favorite gay bar. If I'd been sober, I'm sure I would have objected. As it was I wasn't really certain where we were until after we'd taken seats at a table and had bent our elbows a few more times. Then something in my liquored-up brain clicked and I realized that for a club, there were surprisingly few women.

And the men were dancing with one another.

Slow dancing.

Then it dawned on me that the women weren't really women at all.

Oh
.

Dimi ordered another round, shots of something blue that smelled like cotton candy, burned like hell going down, and made the room spin until my eyes crossed.

After that, things got a little blurry.

The only thing I remember from that point on was Dimi supporting my drunken ass (quite a feat since he was none too steady himself), climbing the stairs to our dorm room. He propped me against the wall as he fished for his keys. That I remember, because I couldn't seem to stand up straight, even with the wall behind me. I kept tilting to the left, and Dimi had to keep grabbing my arm to keep me from falling over.

He found his keys and opened the door, half-dragging my sorry ass inside.

I remember Dimi helping me to my bed, lying me down and removing my shoes. The whole room was spinning, and I think I might have been singing
YMCA
. No, wait ... it might have been
In the Navy
. In any case, it was some song by the Village People that I vaguely remembered dancing to earlier.

Then suddenly Dimi's handsome face was hovering inches from mine. Damn, but the man was beautiful. The thought kept repeating over and over in my mind like a mantra, except that now I think I might have said it out loud, too.
Beautiful Dimi. Beautiful Dimi.

That's when he kissed me.

Full on the mouth, lips, teeth, tongue and all.

Everything up until that moment may have been a drunken blur, but
that
I remember very clearly.

Just as I remember that I kissed him back.

Where in the blue hell is he? I'm wet and now I'm cold, and my ass is going numb from sitting on the hard concrete curb for so long. Knowing Dimi, he's probably lost, even though he's been to my house a thousand times. Dimi never did have a very good sense of direction. I remember teasing him about it when he got his first car. I told him he'd better have a map and a compass with him at all times, or he'd never make it from his driveway to the street.

Holly used to wish that he'd get lost permanently. She truly disliked Dimi, did from the first moment she'd met him. Thinking back, Holly was the only woman I'd ever known who didn't take an instant shine to Dimi. The only one, in fact, who didn't want to get into his pants. I didn't know what it was about him that rubbed her the wrong way, but she hated him on sight. I called her homophobic; she called me every synonym for asshole ever invented. We had a huge to-do over the fact that he was to be my best man at our wedding. It was almost bad enough to make us reconsider the whole thing. Taking into account how things worked out, we would have been better off if we had.

But she caved in eventually. I think she figured that once she was my wife she could put her foot down, force me to end my friendship with him.

Yeah, fat chance. The day I'd set my best friend aside would be the day they put me on the wrong side of the grass.

Kill me.

That's what went through my mind when I woke the morning after my bachelor party and the memory of what had happened exploded into my brain along with one of the worst hangovers on record.

Just kill me now.

"Don't even go there,” Dimi said from across the room the minute I sat up and groaned. He waved a dismissive hand at me, then walked over and handed me a glass of water and three aspirin. “I know that look. You're getting ready to have a full-fledged panic attack. I was drunk, you were drunk, and it didn't mean a fucking thing. Don't read into it. Don't blow it out of proportion. Just forget it ever happened."

Forget it? Forget that my best friend nearly sucked my face right off my skull? Not freaking likely.

Oh, God, it ranked right up there with the memory of seeing him naked and fucking the linebacker. Worse, because this time it involved
me
.

I could feel panic rising along with bile, and I barely made it into the bathroom in time to kiss the porcelain. Wracked by dry heaves, I spent an hour with my head in the toilet, wondering what in the hell I was supposed to do now. How was I ever supposed to look Dimi in the eye again and
not
think about it? What about Holly? Would she know just by looking at me? Or by the way I looked at Dimi or he looked at me?

Maybe I should just tell her, laugh it off. It wasn't as if I'd kissed another woman. It didn't qualify as cheating, right? She'd understand.

Yeah, and maybe I should just feed my nuts into a wood chipper. The result would be the same.

Forget it, I told myself. Take Dimi's advice and put it behind you. It was just a fucking kiss, after all. A stupid, meaningless, drunken kiss between two people who'd stopped drinking just short of full-blown alcohol poisoning. Put it out of your head right now.

But I couldn't.

Dimi's lips had been so soft, so warm. His tongue had felt like velvet fire against mine, his taste sweeter than the Godiva chocolates he'd bought me for my birthday. I remembered the way his bristly five o'clock shadow scratched my cheeks and sent shivers racing across my skin. His stupid, meaningless, drunken kiss had scorched me right down to my toes, branded itself into my mind.

I'd
liked
it.

What the fuck was wrong with me? I wasn't gay. I was as far from being gay as a man could possibly get. I was the
antithesis
of gay. The only thing I felt for Dimi was love of the brotherly variety.

Right?

Oh, get a grip, I told myself as I splashed ice-cold water over my face and tried to brush a night's worth of excess out of my mouth. It was just a kiss. What you're suffering from is a textbook case of pre-marital jitters, and nothing more.

Walking out of the bathroom, I did what any self-respecting straight guy would do in my situation. I smiled at Dimi, got dressed, went down to the courthouse, and got married.

The ceremony was brief, a judge performing the honors. No music, no procession up the aisle by flower girls strewing rose petals. Holly wore a simple pale pink suit, and I wore a serious case of nerves.

To make matters worse, Dimi stood close by me, and his mere presence was making me want to hyperventilate. I thought that everybody must know what happened between us. The clerk, the judge, the three women who were in line waiting to renew their driver's licenses ... weren't they all looking at us out of the corners of their eyes, smirking?

Oh, God. I was losing my mind.

"It's not too late,” he whispered as I stood shaking near the judge, waiting for Holly to show up with her maid of honor. She was late, probably stuck in the downtown traffic. Well, that was her fault, not mine. She'd insisted that we couldn't drive in together, saying that the groom couldn't see the bride before the wedding. It would have been bad luck.

Yeah, seeing the bride before the wedding would have been a helluva lot worse than the groom making out with the best man the night before the wedding.

"Are you okay?” Dimi asked.

"I'm getting married,” I replied, wincing. I'd tried to sound convincing, but I sounded more like I was getting convicted. I might as well have said,
"I'm getting the electric chair,"
instead.

Then Holly had arrived, blowing me a kiss and shooting Dimi a black look, and someone hit the fast-forward button. Before I knew it, I had a ring on my finger and a wife on my arm.

Goddamn, but the curb under my ass is as cold as Holly was during the last months of our marriage.

I never knew a woman could be so nasty, so bitter. Then again, according to her she had every right to be pissed off. I was a jackass. A totally self-indulgent, uncaring, unfeeling, lying sack of shit who'd ruined her life.

Sad thing was, she was right.

Not that I hadn't tried. I had, and with every ounce of resolve I could muster. I'd struggled to give her everything she wanted, never argued, never once said no to anything she asked. Except for saying goodbye to Dimi. On that I wasn't budging, and I knew it galled her that I wouldn't give up my friendship with him.

One year almost to the day after the wedding, right after graduation, we bought the house together, settled in, and decorated it according to Holly's tastes. There was really nothing of me in the house, except for the imprint of my ass on the sofa, and my signature on the mortgage payments.

I dedicated all of my free time to Holly, spending every waking moment that I wasn't at work with her. Except for Wednesday nights—Wednesdays were
my
time. Not even a weekend night—I claimed a single, unimportant weekday evening as my own, so that my plans wouldn't interfere with entertaining and hobnobbing with her friends on the weekends.

Wednesday nights I spent with Dimi. He'd come to the house and we'd watch a movie or shoot a game of pool, or else we'd go to the movies or to a bar for a few hours.

Holly snidely referred to Wednesday as my ‘date night with the Fag.’ I can't recall ever hearing her refer to Dimi by name. He was always just
'the Fag
.’ I could actually hear the capital “F” when she said it, as if it were his name. After a while it began to really grate on my nerves.

For over four years we had the same tired argument every Tuesday night. Holly would snarl, scream, and threaten, trying to get me to cancel my plans with Dimi, and I would firmly but kindly tell her to mind her own fucking business.

The beginning of the end came one bright Sunday afternoon two months before our fifth wedding anniversary. Holly had been planning a big do, a formal affair at a classy, expensive restaurant downtown.

As usual, I'd nodded and given her my patented whatever-you-want dear smile—until I'd gotten a look at the guest list. Not surprisingly, Dimi wasn't on it.

"You forgot someone,” I said, trying to keep the malice out of my voice. I knew she hadn't forgotten. She'd like nothing better than for Dimi to drop off the face of the planet.

"No, I haven't,” Holly replied, her eyes narrowed and flashing, daring me to contradict her.

I did more than that. I exploded.

"Goddamn it, Holly! I'm sick and tired of having this same argument all the time! He's my friend—my
best
friend. I've known him all of my life, and it's about time you got used to the fact that he's going to remain my best friend until the day I drop dead!” I screamed.