"Just kill me and get it over with," I thought as the pounding echoed again. I blinked a couple times, rousing myself awake enough to realize that the pounding was not in my head. I looked at the clock, thinking, "Who the fuck pounds on a man's door at one-thirty in the morning?"
I dragged my ass out of bed and shuffled down the hall toward the front door. Staggering, I hopped to my left as a sharp pain jolted up my leg. "Ow! Shit!" I hobbled to the couch, propping myself against the arm as I grabbed my big toe. "Damn bar chairs!" It was my own damn fault. I should have turned on the light.
The pounding became a bit erratic.
"Yeah, yeah! I'm coming," I yelled, cross the rest of the living room far more awake than I wanted to be at this hour. I yanked open the door. "What?!?"
Dave's bloodshot, blurred, swollen eyes looked back at me from under an unruly mat of auburn hair. His breath stank of a mixture of too many alcohols. "She threw me out..."
That was the only really intelligible sentence he managed until morning. The hour between when he arrived and when he passed out on the couch was a mishmash of blubbering, tears, slurred speech, and a couple return trips of the scotch, gin and vodka he'd had earlier. I sat, listening to my best friend snore, and wondered what the hell I was going to do. "She" must have been Rebecca, his wife. The question that kept me up, waiting for Dave to sleep off the binge was, "why?"
I didn't really get any solid answers when Dave woke up, even after the aspirin had kicked in. Dave was never very good with expressing his emotions. He was also basically clueless about anything that wasn't "in his face obvious." All I knew for sure was that Rebecca had informed him that it was over, was spending the weekend with her mother, and told him that his stuff had better be out of the apartment when she got back. Dave handled it like he'd handled any other emotional upheaval in his life since he turned eighteen; he got drunk.
While Dave tried to shower off the remainder of his hangover, I found Rebecca's mother's phone number in his cell and called. After a few moments, an unfamiliar female voice came on the line.
"Hello?"
"Mrs. Johnson? This is James Andrews. Is Rebecca there?"
There was a pause, and then she seemed to remember me. I didn't expect her to remember who the best man was at her daughter's wedding, but it didn't matter. I wanted to talk to her daughter. "Oh, yes. Just a moment."
I listened to the sound of the shower water, hoping Rebecca would get on the line before Dave got done. After a moment, she picked up the phone. "Hi, Jim."
"Uhm... I've got a hung over man in my shower who seems to think his marriage is over. Could you clarify this for me?"
"Sure."
Ten minutes later, I knew more intimate details of their married life, or lack there of, than I'd ever wanted to know. I heard the shower turn off, and I interrupted Rebecca in mid-rant about Dave's lack of feelings and neglect. "Okay, I get the picture. What stuff do you call 'his'?"
"The clothes, his Xbox, and his school stuff. I'll worry about who get's what of the furniture when I get back."
"Yeah, okay," I grumbled. God she was a bitch. "Thanks." I hung up. Rebecca hadn't always been a bitch, though I'd never liked her. It wasn't her fault we never clicked. I think, unlike Dave, she knew that I was in the closet, and hopelessly in love with my best friend. There was an unspoken kind of adversarial truce between us from the day Dave proposed to her: he belonged to her, but I could be his friend as long as I kept out of their marriage. I did, and stayed in the closet too. At twenty-eight, I was a gay virgin with no prospects for changing that status.
Dave didn't say much on the way to the apartment. I was lucky to get some concrete indication as to what stuff was his and what wasn't as we boxed up or bagged up his clothes, his video system, some of his books, and such. I thought about Rebecca's rant earlier that day, and about Dave, and decided that it was still none of my business. That didn't stop me from looking at what I knew, and coming to my own conclusions. He loved her, or at least had when they got married; but Rebecca was a high-maintenance person, and Dave had always been a "hands off" guy. My guess was he expected a marriage to be sort of like rooming with someone where you shared the same bed and had sex. I didn't know; I was likely never to find out, and I really didn't care. I never thought they were right for each other anyway.
Suffice it to say, I offered him temporary residence on the sofa bed in the spare room. It made using my computer problematic, but I solved that by bringing home my laptop from work and setting up on the bar. Wireless routers made it easy to stay connected. He spent the week in a funk, but then he did the "Dave thing"; he got practical. I arrived home from work on Friday to see him boxing and labeling his stuff.
"Need help," I asked as I hung my coat on the hook near the door.
"Nah," he replied, taping closed a box of books. "Can I use your computer to hunt for a new apartment?"
"Sure," I answered as I patted my briefcase. "I've got the laptop for things I need. Just let me transfer a few files and the desktop is yours."
He smiled at me for a moment, and then turned back to his repacking. "Thanks."
That was it; discussion over. I could see how that would turn off Rebecca; hell, almost any woman was my guess. Most women wanted to discuss things, share in the decision making process, and pay attention to the details. It was a "together thing" and showed that they cared. Guys like Dave didn't work that way. Ask the question, get the answer, and move on; that was his modus operandi. Dave wasn't compatible with "let's discuss everything."
Dave started looking for a place to stay that night. His needs were simple: a comfortable place, one bedroom, in town, with resident parking, and not in a questionable neighborhood. He also needed it to be priced such that he didn't require a roommate.
I just left the computer to him; it wasn't like I had anything important to do on it anyway. I worked on computers all day, so I really found no enjoyment in them at home; all I ever used mine for was to surf porn and email. I didn't even enjoy instant messaging.
Dave went to see a few places during the weekend and the following week. I met him at the gym after he'd visited the latest place on Thursday.
"How's it going," I asked as I pulled on my sweatpants.
"There are a few I like," Dave commented as he pulled his workout clothes out of his bag, "But none of the places I can afford have anything available until March."
"That's okay. You can stay as long as you need, Dave." I pulled on my sweatshirt. "Really." I smiled at him before heading for the cardio area. "I'm enjoying the company."
"Cool, thanks." That was it. No "me too" or "you aren't such bad company yourself." If I didn't know him so well, I'd have been annoyed. But I'd caught a glimpse of the small curl of his lips as he pulled off his shirt while I left the locker room. Understanding Dave was all about subtle clues, even though he never seemed to pick up on anything that wasn't spelled out in neon himself.
I shook my head and thought about Dave as I got onto the stair climber. He had never been a very demonstrative kind of guy. He was solid, reserved, and deeply personal. Any call for public displays of emotion shook him to the core. I'd been amazed he'd been able to make it through the wedding when he married Rebecca. I was sure the fact that he was too hung over from his bachelor's party to even think about the wedding was the only thing that allowed him to say, "I do." It was one of the reasons Rebecca kicked him to the curb; he wasn't good at the whole "express your feelings" thing. It took extreme measures to get him to open up; usually requiring a lot of alcohol.
"The usual," Dave asked as he stepped onto the machine beside me.
"Yep," I replied, keeping my eye on the climbing rate indicator.
Neither of us were big conversationalists, and we were an unusual pair at the gym. Although we were workout partners, we seldom did any exercises together. We met in the locker room, warmed up on the stair climbers or tread mills, and that was where our joint workouts ended until the cool down. I went for cardio burn and a low weight, high repetition routine. Dave was always pumping the max he could. It didn't seem to matter what we did, as we never achieved what we wanted. I wanted to get the roundness out of my shape and be cut like Dave; he wanted my size.
I stayed on the climber for a couple extra minutes to let Dave synch his workout to mine, and then got off the machine as he finished his warm-up. "See you for cool down," I commented before losing myself in my routine, listening to my Ipod workout playlist.
* * * * *
Dave spent the weekend apartment hunting. It wasn't until Monday that I realized I was of two minds about the whole thing. He'd been in the apartment only a couple of weeks, and I realized I didn't want him to leave. Asking him to stay was ridiculous. Dave was as WASP as they came, and I had no idea what he thought of gay people. It had never been a topic of conversation, not once in fifteen years, and I was afraid to ask.
I had to beg off from our normal workout on Tuesday because of work, and I picked up Chinese for us on the way home as an apology for breaking our routine. Dave loved Chinese. I found a card when I got home. It'd been left on the kitchen table with "Jim" scrawled on the envelope. I opened the envelope and pulled out an embossed card; the simple, straightforward style said it all. "To my best friend," was embossed on the cover. Inside was printed, "Thank you for being who you are," and was finished off with a nearly illegible, "Dave."
I just looked at the card, dumbfounded, for the longest time. I had no idea what inspired it. In the fifteen years we'd been friends, Dave had never bought me a card. Sure, his mom did for my birthdays and Christmas and had him sign them when we were younger, but we all knew that teen-aged guys didn't buy cards for their friends. I was certain Rebecca had taken over that duty after they got married; his signature on my birthday and Christmas cards had been a lot cleaner back then.
I must have given him a funny look when he got back from the gym. He had taken off his sweat soaked shirt, and was swabbing down his pits as I tried to figure out what seemed off. Seeing Dave's body was anything but new; I'd known the guy since we were thirteen. We'd been working out together for longer than he had been married. I finally realized that he'd changed his hair; he'd had the same hairstyle since we went off to college. He'd also gotten new glasses. Dave was so slow to "change" that glaciers moved faster, yet he'd made two fairly radical changes in just a twenty-four hour period of time.
He shot me a frown. "What?"
I grinned. "I'm getting used to the new look."
His frown deepened; he didn't buy it. "Uh huh, right."
I shrugged. "I don't know; you've been working out six days a week since you moved in. It just seems like you're trying really hard for something you just can't have." Of course, I was one to talk; I'd been in love with a straight, white guy since I was sixteen. I pushed aside that thought and gestured at his ripped abs and chorded arms. "You've got definition that most guys would kill for and you're always trying to put on weight and size." I smiled. "Go with what you've got, man." This was an old argument.
