Total pages in book: 96
Estimated words: 90899 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 90899 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 454(@200wpm)___ 364(@250wpm)___ 303(@300wpm)
I love my hometown and hope to spend at least part of the summer there for as long as I’m lucky enough to be alive, but this city…
I could get used to pillars and art and public transportation and restaurants featuring food from every part of the world. For breakfast, I had a delicious Chai-spiced porridge at an Iranian café around the corner from my hotel. For lunch, I grabbed a bowl of noodles from a vendor in Bryant Park and found a chair near the ice rink, fantasizing about the evening to come, while I watched the skaters spin beneath the skyscrapers of Midtown Manhattan.
But I wasn’t thinking about what I was going to have for dinner, the way I usually would on a trip to the city…
I’m a foodie for life, but tonight, other appetites are top of mind.
All day, I’ve done my best to talk myself down from the ridiculously giddy state Anthony left me in last night.
There has to be something wrong with the man.
No one can be that perfect, that sexy and clever and gracious and insanely gorgeous. He was probably putting on a show for a new client, or I’m simply projecting my dreamy fantasies of a thrilling first lover onto an ordinary man.
Brains do things like that. They’re unpredictable. Dangerous. When they really want something, they have a habit of seeing what they want to see, not what’s actually standing in front of them.
I learned that firsthand, watching my sister fall hard for loser after loser, no matter how many times we all told her that the guy she’d brought home to “meet the family” had fallen short of our dreams for her. But she wanted to be in love so badly, she refused to listen.
She had to learn all her love lessons the hard way.
The thought makes me pause on the wide, paved path leading toward the employee entrance to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
I’m sure there are lessons I’ll have to learn the hard way, too, but in order to do that, I have to stay alive long enough to learn them.
Is this really safe?
Meeting a man I barely know down a dark path beside the closed garden on a night when there’s no one around to hear me scream?
“He’s been thoroughly vetted,” I whisper, curling my fingers into fists inside my mittens. It’s a relatively warm winter evening, but I’m glad I brought my wool mittens and matching scarf. Wandering around a garden is bound to get chilly after a while. “Background check and routine physical and…everything else.”
Everything else, including an STD test Twyla emailed me this morning along with the other paperwork and my receipt for payment…
It was six months old, but the results were all negative and Twyla assured me that Anthony had taken some time off and hasn’t had a “client” since last summer.
Of course, that doesn’t mean he hasn’t been with a woman since then, during his “off the clock” time.
Or a man…
Maybe it’s the rural Maine girl in me, but it’s hard to imagine a man like Anthony being completely straight. He’s too polished, too fit and toned and perfectly pulled together. His suit was clearly a bespoke, custom fit creation and his shoes probably cost more than every item in my wardrobe, a fact I’m aware of only because my friend, Elaina, has a thing for clothes. Without her, I would be too backwoods to recognize Italian leather or the fact that normal suits don’t hug a set of broad shoulders like that.
The only men who dress like Anthony back home are Ken, the hairdresser my cousins trust with their highlights, who has a boyfriend in Portland, and Larry and Fritz, two insanely hot lobstermen who have been denying their love while drunkenly making out behind the pub every other Friday night for years. But the rest of the dock workers turn a blind eye to it, as long as Larry and Fritz are back to pretending to be “just good friends” come Monday morning.
Even in this modern age, being gay or bisexual isn’t something the people of my hometown are comfortable with. They aren’t actively judgmental, but it’s obvious most prefer a “don’t ask, don’t tell, and please don’t be too gay in public, okey dokey?” policy in Sea Breeze
It’s just another reason that I’m starting to feel like I belong somewhere else. I hate that my two gay friends from high school didn’t feel safe or welcome in our town. And I hate that so many people, especially in the older generation, see change as something to be fought, tooth and nail.
As far as I can tell, change is the only thing you can count on in the world. Change is inevitable. You can either accept that, and lean into the excitement of transformation, or resist it and be dragged, kicking and screaming, into whatever the future holds.