My name is JD and I work out of the Denver office for an IT consulting firm. We have had a couple of our consultants from out of town in on a major project. One of them is Wade, who is an excellent consultant from our Atlanta office. I have worked with him often over the last couple of years and I consider him a good friend. He has a long-term relationship with a guy back home, and while working together on projects we often find ourselves sharing relationship problems with each other. It is amazing how similar the issues are between my wife and me and his 'life partner' and him.
We like to give each other a hard time. I often make good-natured cracks about him being a queen, and he is always telling me that I am closeted and how he would be happy to show me what life is like on "the other side".
It was Thursday afternoon and Wade had checked out of his hotel and was supposed to be flying home that afternoon. But the production rollout for the client had been delayed until Saturday evening, and the project manager had asked Wade to stay and fly out Sunday morning. He agreed and started calling to get a room at his hotel for the extra days. The problem was that with three major conferences in town, everything was booked solid. He found one motel for one night, another for another night, but still hadn't found one for that night.
He was continuing to go through the phone book when I stopped him.
"Look, don't kill yourself trying to find some fleabag hotel with vacancies. You can crash at my place if you need to."
"I appreciate that, but I wouldn't to intrude on your family life" he replied.
"No intrusion, I'm a bachelor right now, my wife took the kids to her mom's for about 10 days. Anyways, we have a spare room and you would be welcome in any case."
Wade accepted and then threw in a little comment, "Be careful though, one night alone with me and you might tell your wife not to come back!"
I laughed and shot right back "Sorry Wade, you'll just have to keep fantasizing about me; I'll be sleeping with the door locked tonight."
We finished up the work for the day and went out for dinner with the project team. After dinner a few of us stayed around for a couple of drinks. One of the other consultants was cracking us up with stories about some of his previous jobs before he got into IT consulting. The list was long and diverse; paperboy, car dryer at the car wash, guy in a chicken suit in front of a fast food place, toll booth worker, etc.
I took my turn and regaled them with the highlights of my early professional career in the lucrative field of waste removal.
Then Wade gave had us in stitches talking about his days as a masseur at a country club with middle-aged women (and occasionally men) would try and tip him to get "extra services". He had a talent for telling stories and mimicking voices and we were laughing uncontrollably.
One of the consultants asked him if he ever took them up on their offers.
"Of course not!" he stated defiantly "...well...rarely..." he added with a grin.
After settling up the bill Wade followed me back to my house in his rental car. On arriving I showed him the guest room and he dropped his bag there and then we headed downstairs to the living room. He plopped down on the sofa and told me to mix us a few rum and cokes.
"Well, aren't you just the queen in her castle?" I said with a laugh.
"You're damn right baby!" he said with a smirk on his face.
I went to mix a couple of drinks and he grabbed the remote to turn on the TV. As he clicked through a few channels he said "There is something wrong with your TV!"
I brought his drink out and said, "No, Wade, that is what TV looks like when you just have an antenna and no cable or satellite. We don't watch much TV, mostly just use it for the kid's cassettes and to rent movies."
"Wow, I feel like I am in the Middle Ages", he mocked.
"Like I said, a Queen in her castle!"
We ended up just chatting on the sofa for a while and adding a couple of rum and cokes to those we drank at the restaurant.
He asked me if I wanted to play a board game or card game, so I challenged him to a game called Abalone, kind of an Othello type game with marbles.
He had never played it before, but he said "So what do you say, should we play 'strip abalone'?"