Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

He’d cruised me, that’s what he’d done, he’d cruised me but I hadn’t given him the chance to follow up because I’d been in such a state, and then was working like a fiend. To strike up a conversation now, from nothing, would be awkward. It would lead to facts, which could only get in the way.

I clasped my hands behind my head and stretched my legs. I hadn’t intended for my shirt and sweater to ride up off my jeans and expose an inch of my abdomen, but the mild shamelessness of it quickened my pulse (I boasted no six-pack but in this posture appeared reasonably skinny, and was, after all, younger). With my face to the window I could gaze at him with zero risk of being caught in a mistake.

And that’s what I did for the next few minutes, occasionally sensing the forced warm air of the train car on my strip of bare flesh. He shifted several times in his seat, crossing and uncrossing his legs, transferring his book from one hand to the other, but in his reflection, at least, I detected no spying in my direction, his attention absorbed by his sci-fi novel. Still cloaked in the immunity of facing away from him, I slouched further in my chair, and, feeling my blood move faster through my chest, reached into my pants to adjust myself. Briefly, of course, with all the crude nonchalance of the frat boy I wasn’t, but still a second or two longer than strictly necessary.

And there it was — the darting, avid glance, belying instantly any illusion of indifference. Followed quickly by an exploratory quarter-turn of his head to establish the coordinates of my own head and eyes. And then, most telling of all, imagining me to be ignorant of his inspection as I continued to peer out the window, he blatantly checked me out, head to foot, and rested his stare on the waist of my jeans. My breathing grew shallow, the drug of danger loosed into my veins. He had to see the breathing, the way my stomach and chest rose and fell. There was someone in the seat ahead and behind, making our privacy exquisitely tenuous. Without giving him any sign of acknowledgment, I slid my hand back into my pants and held my hard-on in my fist for several seconds before raising my hand back up again behind my head. That’s when he finally looked up into the window and saw my reflection.

Immediately I closed my eyes, blood racing in my head, trying to sense if it was too late, if my ruse of slovenliness and inattention might still be viable. He wasn’t that cute, after all. I’d guessed right, but had picked a soft target. Which made me pathetic in the eyes of cuter guys — the ones who mattered in the end. This was a flawed and vicious logic, I knew, but I had subscribed to it for so long now that it had a back door past self-forgiveness straight to conviction. I could override my own sneering judgment and keep going — somehow I always did — but the judgment never gave back the share of giddiness and pleasure that it stole. Self-loathing was stingy that way. It kept what it took. But it didn’t matter now. The danger had me in its thrall. The ride had begun.

I slid my hand into my pants a third time and held it there. Our eyes met for an instant on the glass, though it was hard to read his expression in the dim and shifting image. If I turned and looked at him now any vestige of intrigue would vanish. I wasn’t about to proceed to an Amtrak bathroom. We needed to string this out a bit. So I kept my head averted, and watched him gape as I gripped myself and pressed my wrist against the band of my jeans, exposing just the tip of my cock, keeping alive the fantasy that I was drowsily stretching. The window was high and narrow, cutting his reflection off at the chest, but the downward twisting motion of his shoulder told me that he too was touching himself. Game on. I pressed my wrist harder against my jeans, and another bump of adrenaline heated my face. The passengers ahead and behind were too close for either of us to whisper a thing.

When finally I did turn toward him, I avoided his eyes, staring instead at his hand in his pants. I could have been a boy again in England, in the showers at Finton Hall, stealing a glimpse of the upper-form rugby players, terrified I’d be caught, such was the liquidity of time in the press of the moment. Until we acknowledged each other, he could be anyone at all to me.

He leaned into the aisle, checking for passengers wobbling back to their seats from the café car. Seeing none, he slid his right hand onto my thigh. I closed my eyes again for a second and sank further into my seat.

I loved men. Obviously. But it wasn’t just sex. To know for certain, as I did right now, that a man was paying attention to me, to me and no one else — what more was there to want than that? To matter, and know that you mattered.

“Providence, ladies and gentlemen, Providence!”

We jerked our hands out of our pants, leaning away from each other, and the conductor lurched past. I hadn’t even noticed the lights of the city. We were already approaching the station. The older woman in front of us got up and began struggling with her bag in the rack.

“Here, let me,” the guy whose face I still hadn’t really taken in said, leaping up to help her.

“Oh, thank you,” she said. “Grandchildren! So many presents!”

The train slowed beside the platform, and the car woke from its slumber. People gathered luggage, others got up to stretch. Someone began listening to music on a headset. I took a sheaf of papers from my bag and pretended to read.

I kept up the pretense all the way out of Providence and into the darkened scrubland of southeastern Mass., as if I’d hallucinated the last twenty minutes, aware that the guy was doing the same, clutching his open novel but failing to turn the page. We’d slipped across the line but couldn’t get back over it now without one of us declaring himself.

At last, the conductor came on the loudspeaker and announced Route 128.

“This is me,” the guy said, in a quiet, controlled voice. “You?”

“Yeah,” I said, and just like that we were back in the spell of the hunt, my derision for his middling looks once more no match for the thrill.

At the station, I followed him off the train, staying three or so yards behind. Up the steps onto the covered bridge. Across the tracks, down into the parking lot. Then out past the other cars to one of the back rows, where he clicked open the doors of a Mazda sedan, and lifted his suitcase into the trunk before taking a seat behind the wheel. I put my bag in the backseat. Willing my hand not to shake, I opened the passenger-side door, and got in. He’d started the car and turned on the heat.

“I’m Gary,” he said.

“Alec,” I said.

And with that he removed his glasses, leaned over the emergency brake, and, unzipping my jeans, took my dick in his mouth. My head rocked backward against the seat and then quickly forward. He had strands of gray at his temples and the beginnings of a bald spot. I looked away to my left. Across the parking lot families milled at the platform, the disembarking travelers finding their rides in the crosshatch of headlights. I closed my eyes and lasted only a minute longer. He swallowed. I zipped my jeans, opened the door, and, grabbing my suitcase from the back, strode toward the station house, searching for the pay phone. By the time my mother answered, the anesthesia was almost complete.

Spotting me on the bench by the library entrance, my colleague Suzanne breezes over in her miniskirt, rummaging in her bag for a cigarette. She’s wearing red lipstick and too little for the weather. A femme fatale in middle age.

“Filthy me,” she exclaims as she lights a Winston, waving her hand to disperse the smoke, her clutch of silver bracelets jangling. She coils one bare leg around the other, tucking her foot hard against her calf, then, arching her spine, exhales up and away into the gathering dusk. “And so it ends,” she says with gruff languor, as though we had just struck the set of a Broadway musical, rather than come to the end of a workweek.