Page 21 of On the Ropes
Tabitha
Once outside the bar, my body greeted the wisp of a breeze with open arms. From the second I’d landed in Dean’s lap, I’d been blushing from the ends of my hair to the tips of my toes. I had been on the prowl for a summer-fling candidate. I just wasn’t expecting to be pressed against Dean’s powerful legs or stunned stupid by his brooding, dark-and-stormy good looks.
And that deep voice of his was carved from granite, with the kind of low, rough edges that turned romantic words, dirty and sweet promises into filthy acts. Dean was as tall as he’d been in school, but all that rangy, teenaged-boy energy had transformed into a big man with a thrum of intensity beneath dense boxer muscle.
We had a two-grade age difference, but I was always friendly with Dean. Like everything here, we’d been connected in a myriad of ways—my aunt lived on his block, and Alexis and I grew up three streets over. Our parents went to the same church. Midge and Maria ate at my dad’s diner every Saturday morning. I walked to school with Dean and his friend Rowan a couple times a week. We’d cross paths at whatever teenage hangout was cool over the summer—FDR Park, the public pool, the Wawa parking lot.
But of all those many connections, the strongest one was the monthly support groups we’d attended together at a nonprofit called the Lavender Center—a group for LGBTQ teens, families, and their allies.
“I thought you were in Los Angeles,” Dean said. “Working with movie stars.”
It took me a moment to surface from my memories. “Sorry…what did you say?”
“All this time,” he continued. “We all heard you went to UCLA to pursue film. I always thought you were, like, a producer or someone kinda famous.”
“Oh, nope, not me,” I said, stepping over a jagged crack in the sidewalk. “I did go to UCLA but became pretty disenchanted with the Hollywood scene almost immediately. I knew I wanted to tell stories about people, about communities and art and all the things that make us feel human. I’m a freelance videographer and photographer now, and I go wherever the business takes me. I can usually piece together enough corporate or tourism contracts to pay my living expenses. But I use social media and my website to share videos I make that are more like passion projects.”
“About what?” he asked, brow furrowed.
“Neighbors helping neighbors,” I explained. His lips quirked up at that. As we waited for a car to pass before crossing the street, I toed a cluster of purple violets that had sprung up through a fracture in the cement. “I like to tell stories about wildflowers growing through sidewalks, basically. All the things that take up space, demanding attention and justice in the face of larger forces trying to make them silent or invisible.”
Dean was watching me closely, that dark gaze of his causing all the hair to stand up on the back of my neck. Given his success in a sport I thought of as being violent, I hadn’t expected him to be the same person I’d grown up with—a little shy and a lot serious, thoughtful and deliberate, like he knew his words mattered. Though I’d glimpsed the look he’d given Flailing Guy, noticed the clench of his thick fingers and how his body’s movements seemed restrained in some way. Like he was holding back from doing what he really wanted.
“So yeah…” I continued, laughing. “I’m not working with movie stars.”
“And you’re always on the move?” he asked.
“Pretty much. It depends on who I’m working for. I’ve stayed in cities for as long as six months sometimes if I’m getting interesting stories or acquiring contracts that pay well. But mostly?” I grinned. “I go where the stories are. And the slightly cheesy tourism videos. What about you? Is there anything calling you away from here? Traveling or exploring or taking spontaneous road trips with no destination in mind?”
He shook his head. “Maybe when I was pro, fighting matches in different cities. But I always came home. Always wanted to come home in the end.” We turned down Emily Street. “Don’t you miss Philly?”
Now it was my turn to scoff. “There’s too much to see, too many people to meet. Besides, my job requires it, and that makes me a very lucky lady indeed. It’s only me, my pack, my camera and mic, and the editing software on my laptop. I travel light, but it lets me go pretty far.”
“But do you miss it?” he repeated.
I swept the hair from my neck and contemplated blowing off his question. But I was surrounded with sounds that pulsed with nostalgia—the neighbors to our left laughing on their stoop, the buzz of people passing by, the window units humming, the distant jingle of the same ice cream truck we had as kids. And then there was Dean, surprising me with something like tenderness in his expression.
My throat squeezed shut. “Of course I miss Philly and my family. I love it here.”
It also holds all my very worst and most confusing memories.
I lightly tapped his arm and decided to change the subject. “Do you remember our support group at the Lavender Center? I was thinking about them the other day.”
His shoulders relaxed. “I kept going after you graduated. Rowan came with me a lot. And you know Mom and Midge still talk to some of the other gay parents they met there.”
There was a pinch in my chest. It wasn’t often that Dean spoke up in our group. When he did, he talked about what it was like growing up with two moms. The homophobic things said to him and his parents in school and out in public.
“I remember how scary it was, sharing in that giant chair circle with a whole bunch of people staring at you,” I said. “I always felt so nervous and sweaty afterward.”
“It made my sparring matches seem like a fucking picnic in comparison.”
I laughed softly. “That’s an apt description. I appreciated every time you shared. I didn’t have any queer friends when I started going, and I looked up to your parents so much. Looked up to you. It was like glimpsing a future I wasn’t sure was possible. No matter how awful or challenging things got, your mothers seemed so in love.”
He nodded. “They are very happy together.” He paused, cleared his throat. “I, uh…didn’t see many families in South Philly that looked like mine. After you came out, I felt like my world expanded. If that makes sense.”
“It makes total sense,” I said firmly. “We all want to be seen. But we also want to know there are others like us out there. Sitting in those support groups on those creaky chairs, it was the first time I ever saw my own story.”
Those nights taught me a lot about the connected threads of storytelling. I saw how my story was both wildly different and incredibly similar to others. It was such a powerful feeling of coming alive. And I noticed the spinning of those same threads whenever I was behind a camera.
