Do You Trust Me? Read online

  And now?

  Why, everything seemed to be going right to hell!

  “I don’t care what you believe,” he replied. “It’s true.”

  True? What was true? That he didn’t have AIDS, or that he hadn’t been with another man in two years?

  Two years….

  The same amount of time as….

  How could it have been two years since he’d had sex? I’d read the articles. I’d read Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask). I’d snuck my mother’s copy and read it with a flashlight under the covers the way most guys my age read comic books, or looked at Penthouse and jerked off. But what I’d read horrified me instead of got me off. That chapter on homosexuality was all about how promiscuous gay men were always looking for the next cock to suck. The next man to fuck them.

  If that wasn’t true…. “Then what’s this about?” I asked, waving back and forth between us. “You say you haven’t been with anyone in two years, but you come on to me, someone you’ve just met? What was all this ‘you can get naked in the hot tub and I’ll keep you company’ business?”

  Cole’s mouth did that open-and-shut thing again, and the ice seemed to melt. Something else took over. He looked sad.

  “I-I don’t know, Mr. Baxter.” He looked away. “I’m sorry. It’s just…. There was something… I mean… I looked at you and… I thought you were….” He stopped, turned back to me, but didn’t meet my eyes. “I thought you wanted….” He stopped again. Cole visibly swallowed. “I made a mistake, Mr. Baxter. I’ll leave. If you need to talk to Mrs. Clark, I’ll understand.” He turned and walked away, leaving me standing there. Alone.

  To my surprise, I realized I didn’t want him to leave. One minute I was angry and incensed, and the next I was feeling his absence like a newly missing tooth, and he wasn’t even gone yet.

  I had no idea why.

  “Cole?” My mouth froze up before I could say anything more.

  Say something! But what?

  He stopped. “Yes?” he replied, his back—his broad muscular back—to me.

  And what did I say? “We can be friends,” I offered weakly.

  “Sure,” he said, then left without another word.

  “Cole?” I whispered to the air.

  He was gone.

  I felt it. I could actually feel the lack of his presence.

  Shit.

  What was happening to me?

  DINNER WAS beyond belief. I could only hope every meal wouldn’t be like it or I’d gain twenty pounds, and no amount of “working ranch” would keep it off of me.

  We had a Cornish hen apiece, plus stuffing to die for—

  “The herbs were picked here in the last day or so,” Amy told me.

  —country-style mashed potatoes and gravy, with bits of peeling mixed in, like my grandmother used to do, green beans—

  “They grow those here as well?” I asked, and Amy nodded.

  —with chunks of ham, and cinnamon rolls the size of a saucer, covered in butter and crunchy goodness and still warm from the oven.

  I avoided looking at Cole. At least in the eye. In the time since he’d left my cabin, I’d played the scene over and over and over in my mind. Guilt, that old enemy of mine, had hit with a vengeance. I only went to dinner reluctantly, sure I wouldn’t be able to eat.

  But the Black Bear Guest Ranch’s food worked its superpowers on me, and I couldn’t resist. Especially when Cole was so bright and cheerful, as if I had never said the things I said to him.

  Then Darla Clark stood on a little stage, welcomed us again, and gave us a rundown of our schedule for the week.

  Next was the entertainment.

  Leo, the pudgy kid with the luggage cart, was first. Seemed he was an amateur ventriloquist, and despite the corny jokes, he had us in stitches.

  “Hey Ernie,” Leo asked his dummy, which was widemouthed and cue-ball bald, “if an athlete gets athlete’s foot, what does an astronaut get?”

  “Why, missile toe!” Ernie responded, rolling his eyes upward.

  To his credit, Leo’s mouth moved hardly at all. And further to his credit, people laughed.

  “If a room is full of married couples, why is it still empty?” came another of Leo’s jokes.

  Now Ernie’s eyes moved back and forth, as if looking around the room. “Because there isn’t a single person in it.”

  More laughter. Especially the kids, who I wasn’t convinced got the joke. I think they just liked the comical movement of those big eyes.

  “How do you know carrots are good for your eyes?”

  “Because you never see rabbits wearing glasses!”

  This time the kids did laugh. They squealed in delight. That one they got.

  “Why did the man sleep under the car?”

  “So he could wake up oily in the morning.”

  And so on.

  Even I laughed, although the jokes were pretty simple. But this was a family place. Dirty jokes wouldn’t be appropriate, and the one about the married couples was about as racy as he got. The laughter felt good and relieved the tension from my incident with Cole. I’d avoided looking at him during the meal but dared look now. He was laughing at the jokes he’d surely heard dozens of times before, and his laughter was contagious. Those eyes of his, that mouth, lit up the table. I had to keep myself from staring.

  Gay.

  He was gay. He was proudly gay. He was indignantly gay! I looked around and saw several women staring at him. His looks spared no age as a girl of no more than thirteen or fourteen and a woman old enough to be Darla’s mother were all but ogling him. The old lady was even waving and giggling.

  Cole could have almost any woman he wanted. I even caught Amy giving him a long, appreciative look. Why would he choose men when he so obviously could be with women? Did he want to have a life where he was ostracized? Hated? Sneered at? A life where he was unable to have a romantic dinner with his lover (lover!) without people staring or pointing or even threatening him? Didn’t he want a normal life? Stability? Acceptance? A wife and home and children?

  My daughter claimed that some people were just gay. Like she would know. Eighteen and she thought she knew everything. “Pop, it’s the way it is.” She said some people couldn’t help it. But I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t believe it.

  Cole did have a choice.

  I believed that.

  I had to!

  Or had the more liberal and indulgent culture that had arisen since I was Cole’s age seduced him into thinking otherwise?

  Unbidden, an image of Jack, a friend from high school, came to mind.

  And George. Oh, George too—

  Hey, Neil, do you ever play with it?

  —and I pushed their memories away.

  When Leo was done, a small group took the stage—including Cassie, the curly-headed blonde wrangler—and did a couple of square dance routines. Darla’s husband, Vincent, played a mean fiddle, calling out moves while he did so.

  “Now, ’member, folks,” he said gleefully between numbers, “to pay attention. Cuz y’all are doin’ this Tuesday night!”

  My eyes went wide. Had Darla mentioned square dancing? How had I missed that? Nightmares of elementary school and me messing up and the kids making fun of me rushed back.

  First horseback riding and now this?

  Was this place designed to torture me?

  Of course, riding Mystic hadn’t been as bad as I’d thought it would be. In fact, it had been wonderful.

  But square dancing? That was something else again!

  I looked to Amy, who laughed, then reached out and took my hand. “You’ll be fine,” she said loudly to be heard over Vincent’s resumed fiddling. “You’ll have fun. I’ll protect you.”

  When Vincent and his group finished, our wranglers brought out dessert.

  “But we had those cinnamon buns,” I protested, but I shut up when I saw what Cole had brought. It was huge pieces of pie, our choice of apple or pecan.
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  “Let me guess,” I said. “Grown on the ranch?”

  “Sure is!” Cole said. He gave me a strange, quirky smile and refused to meet my eyes. “Both the apples and the pecans. And we’ve got home-churned vanilla ice cream.”

  After one bite, I knew I’d never get in my jeans by next Sunday. I couldn’t say no. It was all just too enticing. Delicious beyond words. We dug in, but to my surprise, Cole didn’t join us. He let Leo take over our table, and Cole headed for the stage.

  That’s when I saw Cole had a guitar. Where had it come from? He sat on the edge of a stool, propped one booted heel on a rung, fussed for a second tuning his instrument… and then he began to play.

  Well. Really well.

  He had a nice voice too. Reminded me a bit of Michael Bublé, but a tad rougher. But kind. A weird word to use, but it fit. Kind and strong and deep. He did maybe three, four songs. That many before the next performer, but he didn’t bore any of us from the expressions I saw on people’s faces.

  “Blackbird,” by the Beatles—which struck me, because it had been a haunting favorite of mine since I’d first heard it way back in high school. Then a country song—which I am not a big fan of, but Cole made it work. Followed by the classic “Home on the Range,” of all things. And finally something, he informed us, by someone named Christine Cain… or Kane? I found myself falling into the song and knew I’d have to look her up when I got home.

  The lyrics drew me in.

  “And all the poets taught me,” he told us in song, “that there’s a difference between free, and just pretending not to see.”

  Whoa. For some reason the words hit me hard.

  “How will you go,” he continued, “the long, long journey, if you’re always about to begin?”

  Strange song to pick for a last number, but Cole finished to a loud round of applause, which freed me from the world his singing had taken me to.

  I shook my head. The lyrics had shaken me up, and I didn’t even know why.

  And was he looking at me as he came down from the stage?

  Into me?

  Afterward, I hung back a bit with Amy. And hell, keeping her company was what I was supposed to be doing in the first place. We had coffee, which I knew would keep me up, but I did it anyway. Amy loved ending an evening with her coffee. The caffeine never kept her from sleeping when she wanted to. At home, I had to make sure I had some Bailey’s in mine or I’d be up half the night.

  “I miss him, Neil,” she said, looking around the room. “He’d have had so much fun tonight.”

  I had no idea what to say. There was no reason for me to ask who “he” was. I’d wondered why she wanted to come here. I wouldn’t have. Couldn’t, if our positions were reversed. I missed Emily—every day. And I hid from her, as much as I could. Even now. And here was Amy, facing the very ghosts I’d worried she’d have to confront. What was there to say? I still hadn’t dealt with Em after two years. How could I offer sage advice for my friend when her husband had died less than two months ago?

  But then I remembered that advice wasn’t something I’d wanted. All I really wanted was company. I wanted someone to listen to me.

  So that was what I gave Amy. My ear, and no advice.

  “I look at Robin, and she worries me.”

  I nodded. I knew about Amy’s worries in that department. Robin had cried for an afternoon and then seemed to bounce right back. She hadn’t shown any grief since then. She was bright and positive and told everyone that she was okay.

  “At least Todd is quiet. I can tell he misses Owen fiercely. He’s using that whole ‘now I’m the man of the house’ to get through. I want to tell him to fuck that. To cry. To really cry! Or at least, I did. A few weeks ago I was passing his room on my way to the kitchen to get some water one night, and I heard him crying. For a minute I almost knocked on the door, but then the relief—the pure relief that he at least was letting it out—stopped me from doing it. That and the fact that being the man of the house is so important to him.”

  She went silent.

  Then she talked about the first time they came here. Owen was a huge Western fan—had read the books by Louis L’Amour, Zane Grey, and Max Brand since he was a kid. He loved the movies, too, and had infected both Todd and Robin.

  Amy gave me a laugh. It was a little one, but a laugh all the same. “Robin was like you at first,” Amy told me. “Not so excited about bugs and dust and the heat.”

  But it was the horses that drew her in. She was the little girl who always wanted a pony.

  “I hadn’t been all that excited either, but Owen never expressed a preference for any of our vacations—not once. So who was I to say no? As it turned out, we all had a wonderful time, even the night we slept on the ground, learning what it was like to rough it like in the Old West.”

  She smiled, her eyes going to a far different time and place.

  “We went back the very next year, and brought Crystal, as you know, and continued every year after that.”

  She looked at me, her eyes coming back to the present. Sighed. She smiled, but I could tell it was forced. “This just might be the very last year,” she said. She shrugged. “I don’t know if I’ll want to come back after I say….” Her voice faded again. “Good-bye.”

  It didn’t take long after that for her to decide she was ready to turn in.

  “Want me to walk you?” I asked as we stepped out onto the porch.

  She shook her head. “No. I think I want a few minutes to be alone before facing the kids.” She kissed my cheek, thanked me for coming, and headed into the night.

  Unexpectedly, I found Cole and Leo leaning against my golf cart, and it looked like they were passing a flask. I cleared my throat, and they spun, obviously surprised at being caught.

  “Good night, Leo,” Cole said.

  Leo looked at Cole, me, then back at Cole.

  Oh, for goodness sake, I thought, recognizing Leo’s expression almost instantly. Women had been giving Cole that very same look all evening.

  Shit.

  Leo too?

  “Go on,” Cole said.

  The shorter boy looked stricken and turned to me, nodded, then ran off into the night.

  “Did I interrupt something?” I asked.

  Cole shrugged. “He’s got a crush on me.”

  I felt my stomach clench. “Maybe I should’ve been the one to get lost,” I said, trying to be casual. Had I stopped some homosexual liaison?

  Cole shook his head. “He’s not my type…. Too young.”

  “How old is he?” Eighteen, maybe? Was Cole giving liquor to a minor?

  “He’s twenty-one,” Cole answered.

  “He is?” I was surprised. “He sure doesn’t look it.”

  “Nope, and that’s the problem. He’s a nice guy. He’ll make some guy a great lover one day. But I can’t be attracted to someone who I’m not attracted to, you know?”

  I guess I had assumed differently. Had I thought all a gay man needed from his partner for the evening was a penis? Maybe I had. Probably.

  “I imagine you’d like someone a little closer to your age? Em and I were only a few months apart in—”

  “I like older men,” Cole said and looked away.

  Older men? How old? Older as in…. My stomach fluttered, and I refused to let my thoughts go where his words threatened to take me. I needed to change the subject. Fast.

  “You were good in there,” I told him. After all, it was true.

  He looked at me, those dark eyes all but lost in the shadows of the porch. “Thanks.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  We stood there for a minute, neither of us saying anything.

  The conversation we had earlier—the very ugly one—began to play in my mind again. The guilt came back. I looked away.

  I need to get to my cabin. I need to get out of here.

  Now.

  Cabin. Sleep. But, hell, I was going to be up for hours. I could feel the caffeine zinging through me like
electricity. Maybe the hot tub? But that reminded me of Cole’s little pass.

  Shit.

  Cole looked away again, started to take a drink from his flask, then stopped. “Want some?”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Does it matter?” he replied and laughed.

  I shrugged. “I guess not.” Hell, I thought, it might help me sleep. I reached for the flask, and when he handed it to me, our fingers touched for a second.

  I almost jumped.

  It was like one of those static zings that happens when you rub your stockinged feet on a carpet and then touch something metal. But that wasn’t what happened. There hadn’t been a static discharge. It had all been in my imagination. In my head.

  But then when he looked at me the way he did, shadows or not, I wondered if that was true.

  I paused for a moment before drinking, the fear of AIDS suddenly rising to the surface like noxious swamp gas. And then something I did know about the virus rose upward as well. Even if Cole did have AIDS, I couldn’t get it by drinking out of the flask.

  I looked at Cole.

  Beautiful Cole.

  Beautiful?

  I trembled. Geez. Yes. He was beautiful.

  “I do not have AIDS, Mr. Baxter,” he had told me. “I haven’t been with a man in two years. And I’ve been tested. Regularly. Trust me.”

  I wanted to trust him.

  With an uncomfortable abruptness, I remembered the hateful words of the guys from the dock I worked during the summers between my high school years.

  “Never pass a bottle with a queer. You might as well kiss the buttfucker. Think where his goddamned lips have been! Sucking cock for one thing. Eating some shit-covered ass! Fucking death-germs, man! It’s no wonder they all got AIDS.”

  “I do not have AIDS, Mr. Baxter. I haven’t been with a man in two years.”

  Dammit!

  Was I being like those hateful, ugly people?