Page 63 of Over the Line

I nodded. “Yeah. I am.”

“Oh.” He laughed, all the tension suddenly vanishing. “Must run in the family, then.”

It was my turn to sit bolt upright. “It does?” But then the piece clicked into place. “You’re… Are you also…?”

Face reddening, Chris nodded. “Yeah. I mean it doesn’t really matter now because I’m with Jasmine, but before her…”

“It still matters,” I said softly. “You don’t become straight just because you’re with a woman.”

“True, I guess. I went out with a couple of guys, but…” He gestured at the stairs Jasmine had gone up earlier.

“Oh. Wow. I had no idea.”

Chris shrugged. Then he shifted, narrowing his eyes just slightly. When he spoke, there was a subtle edge to his voice that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Did you know you were bi when you were with Mom?” I got the sense he was digging for something, though I couldn’t be sure what. Maybe for something else I should’ve told my kids a long time ago?

Honesty. I owed him honesty.

“I figured it out later,” I said. “I was so young when we got married, and I hadn’t really figured myself out yet.”

He inclined his head. “Is, um… Is that… Is that why you cheated on her? To be with a man?

Sighing, I broke eye contact. “No. That had nothing to do with it.”

I didn’t think a silence had ever been more loaded. The questions hung in the air as if the arena announcer had blared them into Chris’s living room.

I took a deep breath. “First, that was with a woman. Just… just to put that out there. I wasn’t…” I paused. “Listen, I’m not going to make any excuses for what I did. It was stupid. It was wrong to do it to your mom and to you kids. I…” Shaking my head, I rubbed the back of my neck. “I was angry and vindictive, and I handled it in the worst possible ways.” I steeled myself and met his gaze. “I will never be able to say I’m sorry enough for that. To you or your mom.”

Chris swallowed. His features were taut, but not hard. He was guarded, but not defensive.

“I’m sorry,” I said again. “It—I own everything I did and all the fallout from it. Trust me, I haven’t gone a day without wishing I could go back and do a lot of things differently.”

He stared down at his hands as he gnawed his lip.

“And it really had nothing to do with me being bi. ‘Bisexual’ isn’t synonymous with ‘cheater.’”

“No, no, I know.” He waved that away. “I’m bi and I would never cheat.” The sharpness of the words made me wince, as if I could hear the unspoken “unlike my fucking dad.”

“Good,” was all I said.

We were both silent for a long, uncomfortable moment.

“If you, um… How did you figure out you were bi? If you were already married to Mom?”

“Even when you’re monogamous with someone, you’re still human. You still notice people. And at some point I realized that I noticed men in ways straight guys didn’t.”

Chris’s eyes lost focus as he seemed to digest that. “When did you know?”

I thought about it. “I think I was thirty, maybe thirty-one?”

“You’ve known all this time? Like, most of my life?” Again, there was a slight edge to his voice that I couldn’t quite read.

I shifted nervously. “I… suspected, I guess?” Sighing, I shook my head. “I was so overwhelmed with life and trying to navigate my career, being a dad, being a husband, trying to make my marriage work—I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about my sexuality, you know? I kind of tucked it in the back of my mind.”

“Oh.” Something in him relaxed ever so slightly. “So you were still figuring it out.”

“Along with everything else, yeah. I think I thought about it a little like you said—I was married, so it didn’t matter.”

“Even after you knew you and Mom weren’t going to stay married?”