Page 33 of After His Eulogy
“I’m not going to assume anything with you,” he says. “Not now. Not with this. I’ve been deciding things because somebody had to, and you weren’t in a position to. This is different. What we just did is different. I don’t want to be the only person deciding what we do here. I didn’t want to fuck you tonight without knowing whether you wanted to fuck me.”
“Okay.”
“Are you…“
“What.”
“Is there. What about next time.”
“What about it.”
“What do you want next time.”
I look at him. The question is the easiest one he has asked me all night. I have known the answer to it for two years.
“I want both. I want what we did tonight and I want to do it the other way too. Sometimes.”
“Okay.”
“Like before.”
“Like before.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“And we figure it out.”
“And we figure it out.”
He puts his hand on my face. He looks at me. His eyes are doing a thing they have not done all night, which is that they are wet. They are not crying. They are just wet. He is letting me see them be wet.
“Okay,” he says.
“Okay.”
He closes his eyes. We lie there.
I leave at one in the morning.
I do not want to leave. He doesn’t ask me to. I leave because I’m the one who knows I should. The one who’s not supposed to be here. The longer I stay the more this becomes a thing — and the more it becomes a thing, the more I’m letting it become one without having called Mendez.
And I am still not going to call Mendez tonight. I have known that since I started walking over here. I am making the decision knowing what it means.
He walks me to the door. He puts his hand on the side of my face. He kisses me, brief.
“Tuesday,” he says.
“Tuesday.”
“At seminar.”
“Yes.”
“And before.”
“Okay.”
