Men Who Love Men Read Online Free PDF Page A

candle. Joey came in, towel drying his hair, the smell of Ivory soap lingering around his body. His straight black Asian hair, electrified, fell into his eyes. He flipped on the television.

    “Just for the news, okay?” he asked, seeming to want to keep conversation at a minimum. I nodded.

    We talked little during dinner. Afterward, Joey washed the dishes. Usually if I cooked, he cleaned up. This time, I helped, scraping the plates.

    Then we settled down to watch Jeopardy . It was just like any night. After the show was over, I expected that we’d have sex, and then maybe head out to the Wave bar to see who was around. Maybe we’d have a cocktail. Or maybe two, given Joey’s mood. But before the game show ended, Joey suddenly flicked off the set with the remote control. The abrupt silence in the room choked me. My toes curled up in my sneakers.

    “I can’t go on,” he said, and I knew instantly what he meant. He didn’t mean his job, he didn’t mean this place, he didn’t mean anything but me—he couldn’t go on with me . It was as if, the whole time we’d been together, I’d just been waiting for this moment. It always came. It was inevitable.

    Still, I tried to reason my way out of it. “Shouldn’t this be something we decide together?” I asked. In my first reaction to Joey’s decision, I was calm, rational, mature.

    But all Joey did was shake his head and tell me he had fallen out of love with me, the cruelest phrase in the universe.

    “So,” I said, my rationality beginning to crumble, “you want me just to pack my things and go?”

    “You can stay here if you want,” he said, his eyes closed against me. “For tonight.”

    He headed off to bed. I watched him walk down the hall. Then I placed myself stubbornly in front of the television set, snapping it back to life, refusing to turn it off until the early hours of the morning. It was as if by keeping the night going I could keep the relationship from ending. When I finally gave up and joined Joey in the bedroom, his eyes were closed, but his breathing didn’t have the usual rhythm of sleep.

    Crawling into bed next to him, as I’d done so many times before, I knew I’d never fall asleep that night. I just lay there, feeling his warmth and watching the changing moonlight on the ceiling. I dreaded the sun, because then it would be over. All of this—our time together—over. When the first slivers of orange slipped between the Venetian blinds, making horrible stripes across the bed, I wanted to run outside, like a cartoon I’d once seen, and push the sun back down behind the horizon like a basketball.

    Without a word, Joey got up. I reached over and pressed his pillow against my face, savoring his smell. I thought maybe that I’d just get up as usual, grind the coffee beans, bring in the paper, pour our juices. I’d pretend he never said what he did. Let him throw me out! But instead I rose, scuffed over to the closet, and gathered a few shirts and a pair of pants.

    Joey cried only once. I stood in front of him, slowly removing his keys from my key ring. One by one I handed them to him. The apartment key, the downstairs door key, the laundry room key. When he had them all, he began to sob. I walked out.

    For a moment, I was afraid I’d handed him my car key, but then I found it, still safely on the ring. The ignition started my tears again, and I drove back here, to Nirvana, and let myself in. I expected Lloyd, but I found Jeff, and I made sure I’d dried my eyes when he saw me. Still, I never could fool Jeff.

    “What’s wrong, Henry?” he asked.

    I told him it was over with Joey. His face wrinkled in compassion for me.

    “Are most of your things still back there?” Jeff asked.

    “My whole life is still back there,” I told him.

    He scolded me for being melodramatic. But still he wrapped his arms around me, and I was grateful for them.

    And so I moved back in above the guesthouse. When I found one of Clara’s toys