Adam Haslett - Imagine Me Gone

“No,” Seth said. “Kind of the opposite, actually.”

I got hard again when he said that. I wasn’t thinking about sex, but I was as stiff as I’d been all night.

“It’s too early to say this, too,” he said. “But I think you’re beautiful.”

He reached across me, put a hand under my back, and pulled me on top of him until we were chest to chest.

“I want to keep talking,” he said. “But first I want to fuck you. Is that okay?”

For a moment I thought he was trying to divert us back into the safety of porn, putting on the uniform of machismo to get us out of this jam. But that would require speed — to gin up the scene and keep it moving — and he didn’t speed up. He went as slowly as before, kissing and massaging, as if he’d walked out of some Eden of time, where no one had thought to even measure the stuff. He took me on my back, kissing me as he went, moving at such a gentle pace it seemed to have nothing to do with domination or control, or even orgasm. There was just the sensation of it.

A sudden, fierce pain pulsed at my temples and then let go.

I almost always role-played it, acting the stud giving it to the boy, or playing the shameless boy myself. But Seth wasn’t playing. He didn’t mutter anything in my ear, he didn’t harden into self-regard. He kept his eyes open, his dick firm inside me, but the rest of his body almost lax, as if we were cuddling. It should have turned me off — neither of us being in charge — but the lack of a story set me afloat, leaving me light-headed and close to joy.

For the first few months we kept up the pretense of scheduling dates. It was a way to flirt, to be coy, as if one of us might say no. We’d choose a restaurant, or plan a meal, and at the end of the evening Seth would ask if I’d like to spend the night together, and I’d pretend to consider.

I kept waiting for him to disappoint me, by not calling or texting, or by calling or texting too much, but he didn’t. Which left me trying to disqualify him on other grounds: his apartment was too gayly neat; there weren’t enough books in it; he wasn’t a political junkie; his voice got queeny with his friends; he watched sitcoms, liked animated movies, owned a cat named Penelope. But I actually found the tidiness of his apartment reassuring, and he did in fact read the news, if not all the polls. And when he bantered with his friends he seemed to be having fun.

I’d always pictured myself with someone serious and austere. Someone preoccupied by serious work. His remoteness would captivate me. He’d be handsome, of course, but unselfconscious about it. And he’d love me undemonstratively, with the matter-of-factness of authority. And then there was Seth, who held my hand in public, kissed me in front of his friends, and thought I should wear brighter colors. I’d been looking for a suit who preferred men, not someone who enjoyed himself.

I decided the way we’d met would catch up with us. One of us would get bored on the Internet and decide to hook up with someone else, just for fun, and there would follow an awkward coffee date and that dwindling exchange of e-mails I’d anticipated the first night at the restaurant. It would have been a kind of relief. To get back to normal. But the months went by and it kept not happening.

The journalists and political staffers I spent my days with were mostly single or divorced. They either slept with each other or dragged around convoluted stories of people in other cities who they were trying to figure something out with. On the road, we drank together in hotel bars. It was the communion of diehards I’d dreamed of being invited into four years earlier, leading into the Bush and Gore campaigns, and now had the assignment to join just as the early positioning and fund-raising in advance of the primaries were getting started. And yet whenever I traveled, I found myself making excuses to go to my room early to call Seth.

“I think someone has a boyfriend,” he said when I phoned him for the third night in a row from Des Moines.

I could picture him sitting in bed watching a movie, under the clean pine shelves he’d built and installed himself, his knees raised up under the covers, laptop balanced on top of them, all his laundry folded and put away. I’d never been with a man long enough to yearn not just for sex, or not even for sex, but for the mere presence of him.

“I want to stop using condoms,” I said.

“You make it sound like a heart attack.”

“I’m serious,” I said.

“I can tell.”

Something about his even-tempered nature made me feel like a child, which infuriated me, and meant I had to stay with him to prove that I wasn’t.

“Are you alone?” I asked.

“No, my other boyfriend is here, but he’s very understanding.”

“What if I thought that I might love you?”

“Now there’s a question,” he said. “What if, hypothetically speaking, you thought there was some possibility that you might love me? That’s what you’re asking? Like, what would my advice be?”

“Sorry, that’s unfair.”

“It’s somewhere between unfair and charming, but we can go with charming.”

I didn’t know why I kept getting hard when he said things like that, but I did. I wanted to slap him.

“I think I love you,” I said.

“Are you drunk?”

“No! I’m not drunk. I love you.” Take that, I thought, waiting for his retort.

There was a pause, and then he said, “Can I ask a favor? Will you say that again when you get home?”

“Okay,” I replied, grudgingly.

“Good. Because I love you, too.”

I barely took in what he’d said, wanting so badly to keep going myself, to confess that this was the first time I had ever spoken these words to any man, that I was ashamed to be thirty-one and never have reached this point before, that I was afraid my loneliness was a leprosy, a disfigurement, which, if he ever saw it, would repulse him.

“Lucky me,” I said, instead. “How’s your other boyfriend going to take the news?”

“He’ll be all right. I’ll let him down easy.”

Such lightness. It left me giddy. But right there, riding up the back of that swell of happiness — the thought of Michael. I saw him at his computer, filling out another dating-site questionnaire, trying to choose a picture, disliking every one. My brother — the perfect kill switch. So very reliable. The same switch thrown every time I reached the point of stepping outside myself.

I hadn’t told Michael anything about Seth yet, though it had been six months already. Being single was something he and I had long had in common. Something to commiserate about. Celia was the one who’d been in relationships. Michael and I didn’t want each other to be alone, but the fact that we were had developed over the years into a kind of solidarity. It gave us a means to be close. And to remain loyal, somehow, to the past. Part of me knew that this was a racket, that it fed on gloom. But I didn’t know how to give it up. I could play down what was happening with Seth, suggest that it was still preliminary, and who knew what might come of it. I could even tell Michael that I was in love. He would listen to such a declaration with thirst, at least when he stopped talking about his own predicament long enough to hear it. But that Seth loved me back? That if anything he was the more affectionate? Of course Michael would never be less than polite about it. He’d say he was glad, and yet I would be cutting him off, leaving him more isolated than he already was. And what for, if I could just soft-pedal it, allowing him the sense that nothing had really changed?

One of the things that had recently made it easier to imagine telling Michael at least something about Seth was that after years of trying, he had finally gotten into graduate school. Albeit at the advanced age of thirty-six. We had thought it would never happen. My mother had fretted to Celia and me that he just made himself more miserable by applying fall after fall, only to reap another set of rejection letters each spring. But somehow he’d managed to persevere, and now he had done it. He said he didn’t care about an academic career, he just needed to do his work, and that he would be happy teaching high school if there were no college jobs. It was a plan, at least, a way he might eventually support himself. My mother still helped him with his rent, wrote checks for his therapy, and ran down what little savings she had. Here, at last, was a solution. Only it turned out his stipend didn’t cover everything. He would need to find work, and take out more loans. Because of his lousy credit he needed a co-signer.