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: : : PAUL HASN'T SEEN LYDIA IN a couple of months. He doesn't seem to have a lot of free time, these days. He's still working nights doing telephone support for PITS (although about half of his coworkers are now gone—a large portion of the company's support needs are now handled by a call center in India). He gets home at around three in the moring, and so during the day he mostly sleeps, and then when he wakes up (noon) he has a few hours to clean, or to try to catch up on errands, or to surf the Web for recipes, and then before you know it it's time to go back to work.
He has two free nights a week, of course, same as every other working slob, but he's mostly been spending them with Scott. Things with Scott are—well, they're amazing. He's never really had a sex life before. Never spent time with anyone who he could reasonably expect to end up in bed with at the end of the evening. The effect is like beginning to relax after a lifetime spent clenched. Amazing is the only way he can put it. They watch the news, and see the footage of same-sex couples getting married, and Paul feels like every fag in the country is celebrating his incredible dumb luck.
Sometimes he doesn't believe it. That this boy could want him. He will look over at Scott and, flattened by the beauty of what he sees, he'll think it outright: I don't believe it. Sometimes his mind spins like a burning motor, restlessly trying to settle on a plausible explanation: maybe it's all a trick, some sadistic straight-boy trick, like on that stupid Boy Meets Boy show he made the mistake of watching over the summer, like those guys who beat up Mark Wahlberg in Boogie Nights—
Every evening they spend together he comes to believe it a little bit more, and a little bit more, and a little bit more. But it takes time, learning to trust someone. It feels like trying to trust deep water if you don't know how to swim. Trying to believe that all you have to do is float. Trying to resist the temptation to thrash.
This is where his free evenings have been going.
He has some time at work, though—sometimes, inbetween calls, he surfs the Web, or writes some e-mails.
He writes to Lydia:
Sorry about the other night, I really would have liked to have talked to you. You mentioned something about a guy? Daniel? What's the story there?
Lydia responds:
I think you mean Dennis? Dennis is… Dennis was a bad idea. It was New Year's Eve, I was at this party at Anita's place. Probably had one shot too many and then one thing led to another. You know how it goes. We tried to see each other a couple of times after that but I think I just basically had the wrong idea about what he wanted from the whole thing. Whatever, it's over.
What about you? How's your thing with Scott?
Paul writes:
Things with Scott are great.
He pauses at the keyboard, considering whether he needs to add some qualifier. He is surprised to find that he doesn't.
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