Chapter 19

The summer disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, September almost a memory. The shop got busier and busier as condo tower after condo tower opened for business, towering cranes replaced by cranes on different lots. People moved into the neighborhood daily, from the suburbs, from other cities, from countries on different continents. People with pets. The kind of people I liked even if I didn't like them. Even demanding, unreasonable clients kept me in business, after all. My loyal customers continued to show their support even as the calendar booked up weeks in advance. Vonnie and I somehow managed to fit them in. At some point, I would have to figure out how to expand, how to accommodate a growing clientele. But for now, I was happy with what we had.

Frank and Daisy still visited every other weekend, and Vonnie kept the shop running when I wasn't around, taking on more responsibility to allow me time to foster this new thing, this new relationship with Matti. After our trip to the mountains, I had to readjust my mindset, allow myself to let go of the past, remind myself to be present, to live in the moment. Success may have been wavering, I may not have been able to heal all the scars, to release all the anger, but I was able to bury it when Matti was around.

We made it a point to go out to dinner twice a week, and the nights that we didn't go out, we cooked at home, his place or mine. Most of our weekends were spent together, sometimes with friends, sometimes on our own, going to a movie or strolling around the park with the dogs. We had a spot—a swing near the lake overlooking the skyline across the water. It served as a mile marker, a rest area on our walks, a respite far enough from the busy streets of Midtown to hush the traffic noise, allowing us to finish our coffee in peace, providing a break for Maestro and Hugo to sniff around, to roll in the grass, to laze in the sun.

I missed Matti when he was at work, thought about him often, sometimes texting him to ask about his day. He stayed busy, meeting with clients and vendors, building out presentations. After work, he usually hit the gym. As to not feel like a bum, I started jogging around the park for a while each day, a way to stay fit, a means of showing him that I cared enough to care. We were in a relationship without ever having had the conversation to define what it was. I was fine with that.

Matti made me see the world in a different light, even made me a better person. He got me out of my head, pushed me to focus on what was right in front of me instead of dwelling on the past. We often traded stories about our days in New York—those days that didn't exist and those nights that lasted forever, laughing about the madness of it all: the music, the grit, the messiness of stumbling out of any given club at ten o'clock on a Sunday morning, bright sunlight blinding us, hundreds of other zombies who'd just had the night of their lives stumbling beside us, still rolling, bleary-eyed and sweaty, desperate for a pair of sunglasses.

We sat on the patio at the Grindhouse one afternoon, extolling our youth. "If I had one wish," I said, "I think it would be to return for one night and do it all again. I don't care where; maybe the Factory, maybe Twilo or the Roxy, maybe even Caffeine when I was a kid, when things seemed easier. Well, most things."

I still hadn't divulged much about my family, about my home life to Matti. He knew about my ma and my sister, that they were back up north. He knew my pops was dead. That was the extent of what I'd shared with him.

I continued reliving my past as I droned on. "Some dirty warehouse party, even. Pilled up. Loved up. Rollin' on Ecstasy all night long. Dancin' and having a blast."

"That would be your wish?" Matti laughed. "Not to bring your father back? Not world peace?"

For a moment, I looked at him, my expression wavering, hands wrapped around my coffee cup, unsure about how to proceed. From his point of view, it would have made sense for me to want another day with my pops. But he didn't know the whole story. He couldn't have known that my pops had faded from my life years ago, long before he died. I hadn't told him. I hadn't trusted Matti with that part of my past. I was fairly certain that he wasn't the type of person to use something like that against me, but I'd been surprised by people before, blindsided by sudden changes of heart, by gaslighting and veering personalities. I wanted to trust Matti. I did trust him. But handing over my entire past to him seemed like a foolish idea. Not yet, I told myself.

Instead of focusing on his former suggestion, I breezed right past it and zeroed in on the latter, musing, "That's just it though, right? For those six or seven hours after you dropped and the music was on point and the club was packed and the crowd was all happy, we had world peace. Even if just for a night."

Matti smiled as he watched my face light up. I loved watching his features soften as he listened to me go on and on about nothing. He got a kick out of it. The same way Patrick got a kick out of Alex. And just as Matti got a kick out of me, I got a kick out of Matti; not just his sharp features and deep-set eyes and body that turned me into a puddle, but his ability to see light in the darkness, his subtle sense of humor and adventurous spirit. He had a love for the past but a zest for the present. I wished I could see things from his point of view sometimes. He inspired me to do better.

"That's a good way of looking at it," he agreed, then countered, "We had a lot of fun then. There was a lot of freedom. But we were younger, no? And there are still fun times to be had. It may not feel the same. But we can still dance, no?"

He knew just how to pull me back to reality. Sure, we could still dance. It was just that nothing felt the same as it did. How could it? Ten, maybe twelve, years had passed since I felt inspired enough to dance, to really dance like the world was on fire and the sweat dripping from my frame was the only way to extinguish the flames. Since I'd ingested any drugs that made the colors around me seem more vivid, made me feel more alive, made me feel like dancing. How was I supposed to get that feeling back?

It was my own fault for doing so much shit back in the day. But we all did. It was part of the scene, part of what made a party a party. I should have known that it would have taken the fun out of everything eventually. But how could I? How could any of us have known? It was new. We were kids. We were having the time of our fucking lives.

"Yeah. I suppose so."

"Hey," Matti continued. "I heard about an event at the Back Door. It's supposed to be all freestyle music from the eighties and nineties. It might be fun. Why don't we go?"

"Yeah?" I was surprised. The Back Door was fine for a casual drink with friends, but where would people dance? It was just a bar off the beaten path with pool tables and dartboards and big-screen TVs dotting the walls. "That could be fun. Like Club MTV, KTU freestyle music?"

Matti laughed. "Yes. Like real freestyle music. It's on Friday."

"Yeah." I smiled. "Let's do it."

We stumbled into the Back Door around ten o'clock that Friday to find it busy but not packed, a top-forty song with auto-tuned female vocals blasting its way through the speakers, too loud for the venue, for the limited space it offered.

They called it the Back Door because you entered through the back door from the parking lot. It was situated in the back building of a strip mall on the other side of Cedar Grove Park. The front of the bar faced another parking lot and was nondescript, no name, no number, a padlock latching it to the structure. The back, however, housed a huge, covered patio complete with string lights and fans, necessary for those hot, humid summer days. Next to the bar was a dog daycare center and a gym. There were two other large structures dotting the parking lot that housed restaurants and a few galleries. The place was technically in Midtown but a couple of miles away from the gay village.

I asked my friends to join us, but they were busy with work, with life. Matti did the same, but his friends had all made other plans for the night as well, so it was just us. That was fine with me. I loved my friends. I liked Matti's as well. But it was nice to be out by ourselves.

Disappointment must have riddled my face the moment we walked in. I didn't hear a decent beat or see a dance floor. Matti looked at me and chuckled. "Have you never been here?"

"Yeah," I answered. "A few times. For a drink on the patio and a game of pool."

"Follow me." He smiled, grabbing my hand and leading me toward the long, dark hallway that housed the bathrooms. Had it been littered with graffiti and empty baggies, crowded by sweaty, shirtless guys, it would have felt like we were pushing through the line for the bathroom at Avenue.

Where was he taking me? There was nothing at the end of the hallway but what looked like a service entrance for delivery trucks, industrial steel doors completely sealed off for the night. The black walls were scuffed and scratched from what appeared to be hand truck mishaps and ill-advised, drunken attempts at settling scores. But just before we got to the service entrance, I saw another black door on the left, painted the same shade as the walls, making it all but invisible in the dimly lit space. I'd never ventured past the bathrooms, so I'd never noticed it.

As we approached, I heard the familiar sound of a muffled kick drum at a much more pleasing tempo than the one we initially encountered when walking in. It reminded me of walking down Twenty-Seventh Street again, approaching Twilo, the bass vibrating through what should have been a soundproof brick wall. Was there some kind of underground speakeasy in this strip mall? And if so, how had I never heard about it? I'd stopped paying attention to anything new long ago, assuming I'd be dissatisfied with the results of venturing out. But the fact that Matti knew about something like this when I didn't made me the slightest bit ashamed of myself.

He pulled the heavy door open and led me inside, the music suddenly much louder, much clearer. I felt immediately transported back to my heyday, the excitement of the bass rattling my insides, the flashing, spinning, strobing lights pulling my focus, that sweet, smoky scent of the fog machine filling the dark space with a mist of clandestine proportion. The sensory overload of people and sounds and colors forced my attention to everything and nothing. There was an effervescence to that environment. It was dark and jovial and perfect in its hedonism.

Of course, it was all a memory. But the scene in front of me sat closer to any memory than anything I'd found since Avenue, since Twilo, since the storm raves. The music was more melodic and vocal, but the beats were still heavy and fierce.

Matti took notice of the trance I was in as I examined the space beyond. My eyes must have lit up. He smiled as he pulled me further in, placing us on the line behind maybe six other people waiting to pay their admission. Once it was our turn, Matti handed two twenty-dollar bills to the disaffected girl working the door, probably too young to have ever heard any of the music the DJ would play, maybe not even born when it was played on the radio. The guy standing next to her was closer to our age and seemed a bit happier. A friendly smile appeared on his face as he placed paper bands around our wrists. "Have fun," he said.

It seemed like we might.

The thumping of the percussion grew more pronounced as we entered the main space. A large rectangular bar stood to the right, a decent-sized dance floor sat to the left, and a couple of bathrooms nestled themselves around the corner. They were being used to do coke, if the wide-eyed and oddly ecstatic patrons erratically thumbing at their noses as they exited were any indication. What appeared to be a small outdoor patio sat behind a glass door at the far end of the bar, occupied by maybe ten people smoking cigarettes. Flashbacks of that night with Neil at Caffeine rushed back to my brain, my dick jerking slightly at the thought of getting a blowjob behind a busted old fence in a parking lot.

A DJ booth perched itself in the corner a few feet above the dance floor, a guy in his fifties manning the decks. The dance floor housed probably fifty or sixty people, all of them dancing, none of them holding phones above their heads, trying to catch video of the DJ doing his job. Most everyone appeared to be in their forties and fifties, with a few younger people mingling in.

The bar itself was packed with much of the same demographic, and two overworked bartenders took drink orders and mixed cocktails. A third appeared to be getting ready to jump in, hopefully taking some pressure off the two that were desperately trying to appease a thirsty crowd of jaded old club kids. Had we still been able to handle drugs like we'd been able to when we were younger, the bartenders would have hardly been necessary. The space was sparsely decorated, but décor isn't so important when the music is good, when the lights are being executed expertly, when everyone seems happy.

"What the hell is this place?" I shouted to Matti as we approached the bar.

"It's the Back Door," he laughed. "This is an event space they only open for parties. I've only been a few times."

"This freestyle night has been going on for a while?"

"I think this is the first one. But if it does well, maybe they will do more. Before, I was here for a cocktail party, an office party, things like that."

I grabbed Matti's face and kissed him. He knew I needed this. It would never be like it was before, but we could still have our fun. I could still find pieces of my past in the world in which we lived.

Matti smiled as I pulled my lips from his. "You like it?"

I laughed. "Yeah, I like it. And I like you."

The DJ began to mix a different track into the one that was currently playing, a beat that sounded familiar, fading between the two only to bring an occasional lyrical riff from the new track over an extended drumbeat of the old one. A few more people, people that had been hanging out by the bar, made their way to the dance floor, moving, shaking, singing. Those already dancing began to echo the lyrical riff the DJ mixed in. Every sixteen bars, the crowd would sing out, "Here I come!"; the next time around, "Made for fun!"

Eventually, the DJ threw the vocals in every eight bars, then every four, getting everyone worked up about the song they knew was about to drop. And all at once, he flung the fader all the way over and let the new track start without missing a beat, the crowd erupting, "Jumpin' music… Slick DJs… Fog machines and laser rays!" People had their hands in the air as they danced to Debbie Deb, some trying hard not to spill their drinks. "Look out, weekend 'cause here I come… because weekends were made for fun!"

It was funny; I could have sworn I recognized some faces, some old acquaintances from the Avenue days, faces I hadn't seen in over ten years. But everything was such a blur back then, and the faces had aged. I'm sure some of those characters we used to run into weren't even around anymore, had moved away or passed away. I shuddered at the thought, but we'd all lived hard lives, fast and carefree. At that age, anything felt possible at four in the morning. Death was inevitable. Some of us just did a better job of reaching it sooner than others. I shook those thoughts the best I could, catapulting myself back into the moment.

Matti and I bounced to the music, finally making it to the bar, shouting our drink orders to the bartender, who returned seconds later with two beers, accepting Matti's credit card. "Open or close?" she asked.

"Open," Matti replied, ensuring we'd return for at least one more round. He then turned to me as we removed ourselves from the path of those on the line behind us. "Would you like to dance?"

He didn't really need to ask. It was all I wanted to do. The place had filled up fast. A line of people snaked its way out the door, and the dance floor was packed, but we carved out a space for ourselves anyway. A giant screen hung at the end of the dance floor just next to the DJ booth, broadcasting music video clips of the songs being played shuffled in with advertisements for upcoming parties.

Matti and I danced for a while, breaking only once to use the bathroom and grab a couple more beers, then we were right back out there along with everyone else, moving and singing along with the Cover Girls, Exposé, Judy Torres. It hadn't been my favorite style of music growing up. Hip-hop and techno seemed better suited for the angst of an adolescent boy. They had to be. It's what my friends were into. But freestyle was straight up club music—as New York as it could get—and I couldn't deny that it made me happy, especially now. The whole scene reminded me of Gina and her friends on Dance Party all those years ago. She'd love this. I made a mental note to call her.

Sweat was pouring by midnight, from everyone and everything. So many people had packed in that trying to get to the bar was like shoving my way through Twilo back in the day, brushing shoulders, inadvertently grinding with everyone I passed. The music was loud, and everyone seemed to be having a good time. A few people stood around on their phones, flipping this way and that, but most everyone was present, involved in the night, a part of the scene. The more people had to drink, the friendlier they became. Soon, it would be messy.

I had to open the shop in the morning, so I had no intention of hanging around for that.

As I pushed my way to the bathroom, Matti veered off to the bar to get us one last round and close the tab. The men's room was a mess: used paper towel toppling over the edge of the garbage can, water splashed all over the sink, empty plastic cups littering the tiled floor. Two guys crammed themselves into a stall together to snort a line off the lid of the toilet tank. I laughed to myself, remembering all the times I'd done the same thing. Key bumps would have been a smarter choice for them. Judging by their appearance, they were pushing fifty. They'd have a hard time getting any sleep if they kept putting lines up their noses. It would be a rough Saturday for them. But who was I to judge?

I rinsed my hands, doing my best to place the dampened, crumpled paper towel on top of the mountain that was already growing from the garbage can, hoping it wouldn't tumble to the floor. I then rounded the corner, stepping back out into the heat and the music and the vibe, a packed dance floor and crowded bar. Spotting Matti with a beer in each hand, carefully shoving through the crowd in my direction, made feel good. He was heading toward me, only me, unconcerned with everyone else. It made me smile. Until it didn't.

Out of nowhere, an attractive guy swooped in and grabbed one of the bottles from his hand, pretending to put it to his lips and take a drink. He smiled and laughed as Matti's surprise faded, the annoyed, confused look on his face replaced by one of knowing congeniality. I fell back as the interaction played out in front of me. I didn't know the guy, had never seen him before. I'd met Matti's friends. He wasn't one of them. But Matti seemed to know him, and well.

They leaned in for a hug, one that came naturally, even though I could detect discomfort. Then, a kiss. Not a romantic kiss but not a friendly, nice-to-see-you European kiss on the cheek either. It was deeper than that, a weight behind it that I couldn't decipher. That kiss had held meaning at one time.

It took every ounce of restraint I possessed to not shove through the crowd, punch the guy in his stupid, condescending face, grab him by the shirt, and heave him over the bar. Put on a show for the crowd. An epic get-your-hands-off-of-my-man! moment. What would such an outbreak accomplish though? It would simply draw attention to something I didn't want to be happening in the first place.

Instead, I resigned, submitting to my introversion, abandoning my impulses. I turned my head, closed my eyes, clenched my fists, and swallowed hard. I couldn't help it. An uninvited lump appeared in my throat, and tensing was the only way to stop the pit in my stomach from growing larger and swallowing everything around it. I found it hard to breathe. The air was too thick, too full of scents and sounds. There were too many people. They were everywhere. What were they all doing here? This was just a dream, after all. Couldn't I just push them out?

What the hell? I opened my eyes and found myself in the same place, the music the same, the people the same. Why were they still here? I fell into the wall behind me, leaned against it for support, held myself up by the back of my head. It was spinning, lending me no room for balance. Matti was still locked in an embrace with the stranger, the one who had kissed him. This was real. It was all too real.

I was in danger of doing something I was going to regret. I hated this. All of this. I hated loving someone, hated being in love. There was just too much baggage. Too many feelings and emotions and maybe meaningless but maybe meaningful bullshit to sort through and examine and reexamine and make decisions about.

Every fucking time. Every time I got close to someone, this is what happened. Every time someone who was supposed to be there for me and love me and who I was supposed to be able to trust cheated on me or left me or fucking hit me. My friends were the only people I had ever been able to trust completely, without condition, without exception. They were the only ones that never tried to put one over on me.

I was sick of it, sick of feeling like a punching bag, like a toy to be played with and thrown away. My head kept spinning. I was only a few drinks in, and the room around me spun out of control. In a split second, every betrayal of my past sliced through my brain with such precision, such rigor, leaving me tired and broken and sick. My body was weak, my mind even weaker. I wished I could wring my head out like a washrag, disposing of all the bad memories, keeping only the good, the easy, pleasant, carefree ones.

Turning around, I found my balance and hid myself in the bathroom to regain my composure or slow my thoughts or just not get sick all over the floor. Not that it would have mattered. Spilled drinks and grit carried in on the soles of shoes had given the floor that all-too-familiar sticky, grainy texture that could only be wiped away with a mop full of industrial-strength bleach.

Suddenly, that's what I felt like—trash that someone brought in from the parking lot, from the sidewalk, grit and grime and used chewing gum with the imprint of ruthless teeth, an afterthought of a clenched jaw. Unworthy of love. Unworthy of an ability to trust. What was the point of any of this? I wished someone could tell me and make me believe them for once.

I loved Matti. I fucking loved him. He knew how I felt about cheating. How could he do this to me? How long had he known this guy? How close were they? Was it more than a kiss? Did it matter? I couldn't control my brain, the questions I had, the assumptions and the judgments. They whooshed through my head and disappeared just as quickly, only to be replaced by more questions I couldn't answer and probably didn't want to.

Fuck this. I wouldn't let this happen again. I told myself over and over that I wouldn't. After Nate. After Kenny.

It was time to go. I again pushed myself from the bathroom and directly into Matti, who stood at the entrance, a bottle in each fist again.

"Hey," he began, attempting to say more before I awkwardly interrupted him.

"Hey."

He didn't know that I saw the kiss. He hadn't seen me see him. If he had, he'd have known there wouldn't have been any point in waiting outside the bathroom for me, trying to talk to me. He didn't know much about my past, but he knew that sleeping around was off the table. He didn't seem to care for the idea of me doing it either, so I'm not sure where the confusion came from. Maybe he just liked the games, telling people what they wanted to hear while plotting to get away with the opposite. It would make him no different than most of the guys I knew.

"That took a while," he said.

"Yeah. There was a line," I lied. "Bar looks busy too."

"Yes. It was quite busy. Want to head back to the dance floor?"

Nothing. Not a word about him running into an old friend or a coworker or somebody he used to know from somewhere, anywhere. He could have told me something, made up anything, but he said nothing. I wanted to confront him, to tell him what I saw, berate him for kissing someone else. But I couldn't. I wanted to hate him. But I loved him. Deeply. And the aching in my gut was too strong to say much.

"Nah. I think I'm ready to head out."

"Okay. Is everything alright?"

"Yeah, I'm just tired. Gotta open the shop in the morning. I'll call an Uber."

"Okay. No problem," he said, tossing the full bottles into the garbage can just outside the bathrooms.

"You can stay," I offered. "If you're having fun."

"Why would I stay without you? It's been fun, but it won't be without you, Brandon."

Sure, Matti. Keep going. Dig deeper.I might have believed him had I not just witnessed him kissing someone else. Surely the night would be just as fun with Sam or Steve or Cedric or whoever the fuck that guy was. But keep pretending like that didn't just happen. Keep acting like everything is fine. Maybe in Matti's mind, it was. Maybe to him, that kiss meant nothing, a handshake. But to me, it looked like more. A lot more. And I didn't have the energy to fight about it. I lacked the strength to continue unaffected.

"Sure."

Now I was the disaffected one. I silently apologized to the girl taking money at the door as we passed her on our way out. Maybe her significant other had just been spied kissing someone else too. It wasn't my place to judge her sour attitude when my mood had just plummeted to depths it rarely traversed.

I was silent as we stood in the parking lot, waiting for our car to arrive. It wasn't surprising that other people were attracted to Matti. He was incredibly attractive. Every time I looked at him, I was overcome with desire to touch him, taste him, claim him. But that was my problem. He wasn't mine to claim. He was a human being with free will and the power to make his own decisions. I'd hoped the outcome of those choices would fall in my favor. What a fool I was. At least I didn't have to live with the outcome of his stupid decision. No. How I handled that shit was in my control.

"Did you have a good time?" he asked, his arm around my shoulder, drawing me in for a hug.

I pulled away, my foot shifting on the curb, not prepared to deal with what I had just witnessed, not ready to handle the consequences, not willing to confront Matti. I tried to correct myself, feigning a laugh. "Sorry. I tripped."

It was believable enough. The concrete was uneven. I was a few drinks in. Fortunately, a black Civic turned the corner around the building and made its way toward us. I flagged it down.

We rode back to Stratus in near silence, the sound of the music from the car stereo the only thing to cut through the awkwardness of the moment. My internal strife made the ride awkward enough as it was. Exactly eight minutes later, we were dropped off at the back entrance to our building.

As we walked into the lobby, I tried to expedite our goodbye. "I gotta run Maestro out. Then I'll probably hit the sack. Gotta get up early."

"Okay. Good night, Brandon," Matti said, instinctively leaning in for a kiss.

I played the part, kissing him back briefly. "Good night."

The terseness of our contact was not lost on him. A confused look appeared on his face as I turned toward the entrance of the South Tower. I caught just a glimpse of it as I shifted, hating myself for not being able to conceal my melancholy, disguise my bitterness, shield my broken heart.

"Brandon." He raised his voice to reach me, a disheveled blend of confusion and directness dancing on his tongue. "I love you."

I turned back to see him where he stood, maneuvering a better attempt to hide any hint of emotion on my face. "You too. We'll talk tomorrow," I replied before swiping my fob on the pad and entering a safe space, one he could probably find a way into but wouldn't out of respect. I knew that much about him.

I'm sure he was confused by my response. It was brusque and cryptic. Had we been in each other's shoes, it would have frustrated me to no end. But it was all I could muster while the hammer of his actions pounded away against my heart. I could barely assemble words at all.

In my condo, I greeted Maestro and grabbed a beer from the fridge, downing half of it in one swig. I had really wanted that last beer at the Back Door, but I needed to get out of there. I purposefully kept the lights off so Matti would think I was asleep if he looked up. Half an hour later, once I was sure he'd already taken Hugo out for his bedtime walk, Maestro and I made our way around the block so he could relieve himself.

I hit my bed like a brick that night, forcing Maestro to sleep in my arms. He didn't seem to mind. Every bad memory I clung to had already run through my brain. There was nothing left to play out, nothing left to analyze or examine. I was exhausted, hardly able to yawn before falling asleep. My only thought before drifting off was blunt and reverberating: What the fuck just happened?