Page 52 of Engineering a Love Story

But Seth uses his hand to part my legs and says, “It’s definitely very good.”

“I’m not talking about the sex—”

“But the sex … the sex really is tremendous.” Seth moves closer, his mouth below my earlobe, and then I know we’re no longer having a serious conversation.

And even with a little frustration, I respond. My body is sore, but I’ll take the soreness any day, and as we move together again, I wonder if there is some action, some line we’ll cross or thing we’ll do that will allow me to be relieved of him. Is sated the word? It seems overdone but I do feel it sometimes, after all the sex. Then we doze or he changes his shirt or gives me a sideways glance with that dimple and it funnels back in again; I’m full to the brim with need for him. I give up on pulling any answers from him and release myself into it.

He’s gone in the morning with a brush of his lips across my temple.

Twenty-Eight

Travis appears in my cube a few hours later. He leans casually against my frizzy wall and asks in an earnest voice if I’d like to get noodles for lunch. I slowly spin my chair to face him, my cheeks and forehead reddening. “I might be a little tired of noodles.”

“Burritos then,” he says, making it clear we’ll be eating together today, and I’ll be talking. We meet in front of the building a few hours later. I keep my voice low as we walk down First Street, since Gilroy people come and go constantly on this block, but I do not stop telling Travis everything until we reach the burrito shop. He’s a good listener, humming and laughing in all the right spots. My mouth is dry by the time I pull open the restaurant’s door and say, “This is so high school, but you can’t tell anyone at Gilroy.”

Travis acknowledges this with a quick bob of his head.

Once we have our tinfoil-wrapped lunches, we walk behind Gilroy’s building and find a grassy spot not far from the river.

“Well. You’ve done it,” he says. “I suppose that’s good. Didn’t expect you to go right to having him in your place for the weekend. But you looked more than smitten when I saw you on Saturday.”

“You know what else?” I explain about Seth’s politics.

“Damn. How’s that going?”

I take a final bite of my burrito and fold the tinfoil over the other half. “Honestly? It might make him sexier.”

Travis laughs softly. “Ooh. You’re sunk.”

I put the wad of food in the grass beside me and tilt back on my elbows. “Though that’s only one of a half dozen reasons it doesn’t work. Right? I mean, I’m not even divorced. There’s the Gilroy thing. And he lives so far away. What do his politics matter?” I go on to explain the frustrating, open-ended conversation Seth and I had the evening before. “Maybe he sees this as a fling. Or he knows I’m not ready yet. I can’t say for sure he’s even going to call again,” I say, though it pains me to say this out loud.

Travis polishes off his own lunch and rolls the empty tinfoil into a ball, which he throws with perfect aim into a nearby trashcan. “When I saw you outside of the noodle place on Saturday, I thought maybe you were intoxicated,” he says. “That you both were.” I laugh, remembering that drunken feeling. “And that’s not nothing. You know that, right?” Travis stretches his legs out long. The sun pokes through the clouds and catches the silver rims of his glasses. “Five or six years ago, I saw this therapist,” he says. “I had all this … guilt, I guess. That I had skulked through unscathed.”

From previous conversations with Travis, I know he’s talking about the fears he had coming of age as a gay man, just as the AIDS crisis was wreaking such devastation in the community. Now he says that therapist encouraged him to come clean with his parents about his sexuality. And the fact that he’ll never attend law school, which had been his parents’ dream—and their expectation when he moved to Boston; they don’t understand what he does at Gilroy at all.

“So, I told them. All of it. They were more upset about law school, honestly. My dad wanted me to know there’s a gay partner at his firm.”

“That’s actually kind of sweet,” I say. Travis agrees.

That same therapist coaxed him toward an acknowledgment that there’s more to life than being angry and scared. “He wanted to know how I was seeking joy. I might have laughed out loud when he said that,” Travis says, laughing again now.

I laugh too, remembering the story Bethany told me about our old roommate Gretchen. How Gretchen was leaving her husband and moving to India because she refused to live without joy. That sounded so silly then, though it sounds much less silly coming from Travis, who goes on to tell me that his therapist insisted he try to look beyond the fears and everyday concerns about staying afloat in the world. To recognize that we too often discount the need for joy in our lives, even though this is an essential human thing and more than acceptable to pursue.

“We’re always so busy, worrying about the day-to-day,” Travis says. “This guy convinced me to take the blinders off and not shut out the good stuff, the real stuff, when it comes.” With his parents’ blessing, Travis became more adventurous romantically. The nineties progressed, AIDS treatments became more accessible and effective. There was a serious heartbreak, a relationship he was still recovering from when he decided to travel solo to Tokyo. “Falling in love with someone on the other side of the world didn’t make any sense,” he reminds me. “But we can’t control the what, when, or why of most things.”

We’re quiet as we watch a speed boat putter toward the locks and the harbor beyond.

“Your secret is safe with me,” Travis continues. “But be careful, right? I can’t recall this exact situation at Gilroy, but you know it won’t fly. And I mean, this guy, the risk, your job. And a Republican? It is possible that you’re not thinking straight. Still, the joy thing. You can’t ignore that.” Travis taps his foot against mine. “That shit is big time with therapists. I just saved you a hundred bucks.”

I laugh, but Travis suddenly jumps to standing, peering at his watch. He has a call in two minutes. We take off running to the office.

October

Twenty-Nine

After speaking with Travis, I have a new confidence going forward with Seth. But for several days, I hear nothing from him, and I’m frantic his call won’t come. I become convinced he’s reconsidered and is determined to cool things off. Or maybe he’s simply moved on to another city, the novelty of sneaking around with me faded.

So I’m weak with relief when Seth phones at the end of the week. “I forgot my credit card in a coffee shop at Logan,” he reports. “That means I’ve been traveling, DC and then Atlanta, without it.” He’s back in San Francisco now after more than three weeks on the road. “It’s so good to be home.”