Tattoos & Teacups (11 page)

I
T
TOOK
me a while to get used to the fact that Chris communicated almost exclusively in text messages. Not that I was complaining. It was nice to pick up my phone and find three messages from him. It fell under the category of “yet more things Robert needs to adjust to.”

I would normally keep my phone locked in my office during the day. This was partly so I knew where it was and partly so it wouldn’t go off during my lectures and annoy me. The only people who would regularly call or text me were Luisa and Chloe, anyway. And they knew to call the college if there was an emergency, not my phone.

My life was so sad.

Chris, however, sent me a text when he woke up in the morning. And sometime midmorning, asking me how I was. And again at lunchtime. If I sent a reply to one of his messages, I had a reply almost instantly. Although this was disconcerting at first, I began to anticipate his choice of breakfast cereal update, which was usually formatted in the style of
The Fast Show
:
Today, I will mostly be eating Cheerios.
It made me feel warm and fuzzy inside that he even knew what
The Fast Show
was.

Almost all communication regarding the place and time of our reuniting took place via text message.

Do you want to go to a bar tonight?

It was Friday. So:
Sure. The Ship?

A pause.

No. I was thinking of checking out one of the more exclusive establishments catering to our sinful homosexual desires.

I laughed, out loud, in the quietness of my office.

A gay bar?

While he composed his reply, I couldn’t help but think of how much quicker and easier this conversation would be if we used the mobile telephones for their intended purpose and called each other. For heaven’s sake.

Yeah. I was trying out talking like you. I’ll come over about 8ish. We can get a cab.

For reasons that seemed obvious to me, I rarely frequented gay bars. There were plenty in Boston to choose from, ones that catered to the leather crowd, or the techno, flashy-lights-and-drugged-up-twinks crowd, or the drag queen crowd. I’d never really found my niche in the gay community. My earlier attempts at trying to fit in had failed dismally. When other men found out I had a daughter, I was met with one of two reactions—they either ran for the hills or wanted me to raise pretty babies with them.

Neither of these things were particularly conducive to a relationship.

I knew that if Chris didn’t get on well with Chloe, it would put a serious damper on things between us. I wouldn’t necessarily split us up—she was a teenager and appropriately stroppy due to the fact—but if things went terribly wrong, I would have to seriously consider which way forward things would go. At least he didn’t mind the fact that she existed. And that she had a part of my life that I wasn’t going to be able to give to him.

So, in practice, the activity of dressing for a night in a gay bar was not one I was especially good at.

When Chris knocked on my door at twenty past eight (I wasn’t surprised at his lateness), I was wearing my pair of dark jeans and nothing else. Not even socks.

“Oh, hello,” Chris drawled and wrapped a hand around the back of my neck, drawing me down into a kiss. “Very nice, Professor. Very nice.”

I returned his kiss with a smile on my lips and drew the smell of his cologne into my lungs. He was spicy sweet tonight, delicious in jeans and a blood red T-shirt that he would undoubtedly remove at the first opportunity. I knew his type. And, to be fair, I couldn’t resent the fact that his type like to strip off. If my chest and stomach had looked like his, I would undoubtedly have stripped my shirt off too.

“I don’t know what to wear,” I admitted, feeling like a teenage girl.

“Nothing,” he said emphatically. “Just this. You look
hot
.”

I shrugged awkwardly, probably blushing as well. “You don’t have to flatter me, Chris.” I caught his wrist and tugged him to my room and my dull-as-dishwater wardrobe.

“I’m not flattering you,” he protested as he followed obediently. “If you left your shirt off all night, they’d be beating off the men with a stick. A really, really big stick,” he added because it was Chris, and he couldn’t help but take advantage of any rude innuendo situation.

I found socks and sat on the edge of the bed to pull them on. Chris hummed tunelessly as he flicked through the contents of my wardrobe, wincing at most of it but occasionally making a sound of something like approval.

I reached for my shiny black shoes and found that they’d been put back in the shoe rack and replaced with a pair of shit kickers, as we used to call them back home. Sand-colored desert boots. Chris was clearly the fashion expert in our relationship (and just when had I started thinking of it as a relationship?), so I pulled them on and laced them tight without comment.

“This is hard,” Chris muttered.

“Really, really hard?”

“Shut up,” he said, but smirked. I could play the innuendo game too. “I don’t want you to feel not like you, but I don’t want you to wear what you usually wear to work or whatever.”

After a few moments, he threw a shirt at me. It was a white one, washed so many times that it was now thin and incredibly soft to touch. I could never bear to throw it away, even though really, it was only an inexpensive white cotton shirt. It was what I had been wearing the day Chloe was born.

It was slightly tighter now than it had been fourteen years ago but still fitting. I buttoned it, feeling smug with myself. Not all was yet lost.

“Aha,” he muttered and pulled one of my suit bags out, hanging it from the door and extracting a pinstriped, dark grey waistcoat. “This too.”

“Are you sure?” I asked dubiously. He nodded.

I pulled it on and let Chris do the buttons. His fingers then went to my throat and slipped the first three buttons on the shirt back through so it hung open at my throat. Then he leaned in and pressed his lips to the little hollow there.

My hair was yet to be styled, and he did that for me too, locating the gel that I so rarely used and playing with it until he was satisfied that it looked right. I was sat back down on the edge of the bed, Chris standing between my knees, when I smiled and told him, “Thank you.”

“You don’t see yourself in the same way other people see you,” Chris said. He was gently running his hand through the soft hair at the nape of my neck.

I frowned and shook my head silently.

“It’s true,” he insisted.

“There’s no need to flatter me,” I said, smiling. “I like you already.”

He huffed and pulled himself to his feet, taking my hand and hauling me up too. “Come here.”

We moved out to the hall, where I kept a mirror I never looked in. Chris took my chin, stood behind me, and forced me to look up. Unsurprisingly, I was blushing.

“You’re adorable,” he started. I went to interrupt him, and he pressed his fingers to my lips. “Shh. You have gorgeous eyes. And a very masculine jaw, for a queer.” He winked at me in the mirror. “It looks nice like this… all stubbled.”

I rarely looked at myself. Really looked, you understand. I saw my face every day, shaving, dressing, but I never took stock of myself the way Chris was doing.

“I think,” he continued, “that you are perfect. And I should know. I have great taste in men.”

“In which case,” I said, turning to him, “I definitely should not argue with you.”

“Come on,” he said. “We should get going.”

I surprised myself by not being nervous when we got to the club. There was a line, but not a particularly long one due to the early hour, and I didn’t mind waiting outside in the cold because Chris snuggled up close to me to share our body heat.

The doorman looked from Chris to me, then demanded, “ID.”

Even as a little warm ball of delight lodged itself beneath my ribs, I worried that I wouldn’t have any identification on me. I didn’t carry it routinely. Chris found his easily, but I fumbled for my wallet before thankfully locating my driver’s license. I handed it over to the rather burly bearded gentleman, who scrutinized it for a moment too long before handing both back.

“Mr. Ford,” he said. “Mr. McKinnon. Have a good evening.”

Chris wore a cheeky smirk as we checked our jackets at the door before finding our way to the almost half-f bar.

“You’re trouble,” I said without malice. “Beer and a whiskey, please.”

The music wasn’t too loud yet, and we stayed at the bar for a while, drinking and generally enjoying being in each other’s presence. As the night crept on and the room filled to bursting point, Chris stripped off his T-shirt (as I’d known he would) and tucked it into his back pocket, kissed me deeply, and bounced off to join the throbbing pulse of people—
men
—on the dance floor. He’d asked me if I wanted to join him, but I was decidedly not drunk enough to dance, and I liked watching him. And I had no issues with staying at the bar and drinking.

When I was offered, “Can I get you a drink?” my initial response was a polite but distanced “No, thank you.”

Then I turned and was faced with an old friend.

“Elias!” I laughed, accepting his hug. “How are you?”

Elias and I had met at college. He was a languages student while I obviously took Literature. I hadn’t known that he was gay at the time, and even if I had, I would have considered him so far out of my league it wasn’t worth mentioning.

We were assigned to the same dorm building in our first year and bonded over being outsiders, immigrants in America, as it was. Elias had both the body and the looks of a privileged European upbringing. He was from Switzerland, a small town not far outside Zurich. We’d made promises that one summer I’d take him back to Edinburgh and act as his tour guide around the city and he’d do the same for me in his hometown. The trip had never happened. Chloe had arrived instead.

Now, close to six or seven years since I’d seen him last, time had treated my old friend well. He still wore his dark blond hair long, to his shoulders in impossibly shiny, thick waves. His eyes, piercing blue, now had a few laughter lines around them. He wore a grey shirt with plenty of buttons undone and dark leather pants, which cleared up my last few questions regarding his sexuality.

Maybe Chris had helped me refine my “gaydar”, or at least have some confidence in it.

“I thought you went back to Switzerland,” I said after accepting his offer of a drink, now I knew who he was.

“I did,” he said, “for a couple of years. My mama was sick for a while. She passed back in the spring.”

“I’m sorry,” I said. He nodded.

“Thank you. My sisters are still there, but I decided to come back for a while. I was going to look you up, but then I run into you here, of all places.”

I laughed. “Yes. It’s not one of my usual haunts, I’ll admit.”

“You’re looking good, Robert,” he said, unashamedly looking at me. “Time has treated you well.”

Through the crowds of men (hot, sweaty, some nearly naked men), I could see Chris bopping around on the dance floor looking happy as anything, so I led Elias over to one of the booths at the other end of the bar and sat opposite him.

He asked about Chloe, remembering her by name, which pleased me endlessly. He was theatrically dismayed to learn that she was a teenager now.

“A little lady?” he asked.

“A little madam is more like it,” I said. “She takes after her mother rather than me, which is an endless relief to all three of us.”

“Are you wanting more?”

His halting English served to remind me that he had been out of the country for a long time.

“Children?” I asked. “No.”

Elias nodded knowingly. “She was a blessing, no, but an unexpected one.”

“Exactly.” I laughed. “I wouldn’t change her for the world. But I’m done with raising children. Luisa has another daughter now, though, and she’s pregnant with her third.”

He pouted and tilted his head to the side. “Lucky Luisa.”

When our conversation found a natural dip, I offered to buy the next round of drinks. Accepting, he offered to keep the table for us while I went back to the bar via the men’s room.

Chris was in there, washing his hands as I passed him.

“Are you having a good night?” I asked, placing my hand on his sweaty lower back and kissing his shoulder.

“Yeah,” he said, smiling broadly. “Come dance with me.”

“Later, maybe,” I said. “I’ve just found an old college friend, and we’re catching up. You can come join us if you like.”

He made a face. “Nah. I’m gonna keep dancing. Burn some calories. Do you mind that I’ve ditched you?”

“Not at all,” I said. “I’m glad you’re having a good night. I’ll see you later.”

When he kissed me again, it lingered long enough to elicit several wolf whistles from the room’s other occupants.

“Later,” he said and patted my cheek as he left.

I ordered our drinks and was offered table service from an alarmingly hairless young man wearing naught but a pair of silver shorts (very tight silver shorts) and a lot of glitter. All I could think was that I hoped he didn’t get any in my whiskey.

My conversation with Elias turned to our careers. He was somewhat surprised to learn that I was still in Boston after all this time. I’d had a dream, a long time ago, to return to the U.K. to teach there. As much as I’d wanted to—and the opportunity had been there had I wanted to take it—I found plenty of excuses to stay. They were obvious ones, and things that I could have easily worked around should I have so wished.

But the university in Bath had remained without a Professor McKinnon while I continued to grace the halls of the college with my presence.

Elias, I learned, had taken his five languages and taught them all over the world. I knew that there was a strong need for intelligent, committed people to teach English as a foreign language, and he’d done it in places from Jakarta in Indonesia to Shanghai in China and Hanoi in Vietnam, and back again. Of course I was jealous. This man had taken all the ideals and plans we’d made at eighteen and fulfilled them.