Platonic (5 page)

And Patrick is not the kind of guy who’d be okay with not knowing. Mark sighs and signals the barman for another of his usual. He winces, and then dives right in: “He’s in New York now.”

Patrick makes a noise that sounds as if he’s choking on a surprised laugh. Everyone knows New York is where
Mark
wants to be. It’s where Mark did his internship last summer, working in one of the big firms because his father got him the position, and it is the whole point of law school. It’s where Mark will probably spend the coming summer, in another big firm or possibly the district attorney’s office. The latter would be much to the chagrin of his parents but also within their demands for his academic and career progression.

Patrick is a big supporter of the D.A. option and, Mark suspects, penned an exemplary letter of reference, then persuaded one of Mark’s more impressive professors to sign it.

Patrick settles in and doesn’t say anything. Instead he waits until Mark has thrown his head back, swallowed the shot and sucked on the straw in his soda before he asks: “You ready to tell me all about him?”

Mark sighs and grumbles something incomprehensible. He’s got his jacket off the back of the chair and is halfway to the door before Patrick realizes he’s invited, too. They don’t talk about anything else that night, and in the morning Mark leaves early to go for a long run on his own.

He runs for over an hour, as fast as he can without running out of air, challenging himself with the hilliest routes he knows. He goes over his story with Daniel again and again, checks to see if he stills remembers all the details, if it still hurts the same, and wonders if telling Patrick will change that. He wonders if Patrick—so clever and so perceptive—will realize the enormity of this story in Mark’s life, justified or not.

When he gets back to Patrick’s apartment he’s dripping sweat from the tip of his nose and in rivulets down his back, panting as he helps himself to a bottle of water from the fridge.

“Daniel,” is all he says as he walks through the living area, past where Patrick is typing at his desk. “His name was Daniel O’Shea, and if it’ll make you happy and you promise to stop asking, I’ll tell you about him after I’ve had a shower.”

“I’m not going to promise that,” Patrick warns, but Mark is already closing the bathroom door and turning on the water.

***

Mark met Daniel when they were both twelve years old. Mark was the lanky, skinny kid with greasy black hair and pimples; Daniel was a year ahead of him, a foot shorter, his floppy hair the same cardboard brown as the most boring cereals and shaped, fittingly, into a bowl cut. His eyes, though, had always been beautiful: light brown flecked with gold and green. Daniel was pudgy at twelve and still pudgy when he left for college five years later. It never bothered Mark because Daniel’s skin was always so warm, and the night Daniel agreed to be his boyfriend was the best night of his life.

In the beginning they disliked each other. That lasted a few weeks, just as most things do when you’re twelve; then they became best friends and some time after that they fell in love with each other. They didn’t start dating until partway through Daniel’s junior year, when Mark was sixteen and finding his feet as a sophomore.

The night it fell apart—and it wasn’t really one night, it was months and months—was the worst.

***

“The jazz band can’t have two pianists.” It was the first time Daniel had ever spoken to him, even though they’d been seated together for all the band meetings since school started and they caught the same bus.

“Well, it can,” Mark said carefully, staring down at his nails quickly when Daniel glared at him. “Why can’t it?”

“We can’t both play at the same time,” he snapped.

“Well, we could take turns?” Mark tried.

Daniel raised an eyebrow and pushed his long bangs away from his eyes. “I’m older and I’ve been here longer.”

“Are you asking me to quit?”

Daniel pouted and shrugged. “It would be the right thing to do.”

Mark giggled so loudly at him that Daniel ended up in detention for punching him—hard—in the arm.

***

Over a year later, at their last sleepover before Christmas, Daniel paused the movie, crossed his arms, raised his chin and did the bravest thing Mark had ever seen anyone do.

“I’m gay, Mark.” He was defiant until Mark pulled him into a hug that wasn’t hesitant. Daniel melted, so much tension slipping out of him as he mumbled something thankful and relieved against Mark’s neck.

Mark should have told him in that moment that he thought he was gay as well, but he wasn’t as brave as his best friend, and his brain hurt every time he tried to think about it. So he didn’t.

***

Three months later, though, Mark was sure he was gay. He had kissed a boy he met at the mall. It was only on the cheek, but he giggled and felt something unfurl deep in his gut: the warmth of excitement and feeling right. He never saw the boy again, but it didn’t matter: For the first time, Mark believed that he knew himself.

Telling Daniel was hard, though. So Mark waited and waited, waited a whole year, and then suddenly it seemed as though he was lying to his best friend. He blurted it out while they were lying across Daniel’s bed playing video games and waiting for the heat of a summer’s day to break.

He shocked himself into crying—he’d never said it out loud before and didn’t realize how it would feel—big ugly sobs that made snot run out of his nose and stained his cheeks splotchy red. And he had no idea how long he had lain there on his belly, game controller still in his hands, crying to himself. It was probably only a few seconds, because then Daniel was against him, pulling him tight into his arms and hugging him close.

Daniel shushed him and kissed his hair and then kissed his mouth and that shocked Mark into laughing, pulling back and staring at Daniel, who seemed just as shocked by it all.

“Shit, sorry, I should not have… that was a weird, purely physical reaction to… gay… boy… or something. I don’t… shit.” Daniel rambled. It was one of the few times that Mark had seen him blush. They ended up laughing until they were on their backs struggling to breathe.

Mark said he was sorry and Daniel told him that there was nothing to be sorry for.

***

Only a few months later, Mark asked the big question. “Do you wanna be my boyfriend?”

He immediately felt stupid, but this wasn’t just an afterschool hangout and a request on a whim, this was a plan.

This was his parents out of the house; his and Daniel’s favorite movie playing quietly with their favorite snacks out and mood lighting.

This was a week before his sixteenth birthday because he wanted, desperately, a sweet sixteenth birthday kiss, and he wanted it from his best friend.

He swallowed his fears and waited.

Daniel tackle-hugged him back onto the sofa and held him tight, laughing. “Oh my goodness, I have been waiting for you to ask me that for months!”

“Can I kiss you now?”

***

“You guys were adorable,” Patrick concedes, interrupting the story for the first time because Mark has paused too long to stare at the backs of his hands, recalling exactly how sweet and messy that first, proper kiss had become. “I went through boys—and girls actually—in high school so fast… I never had anything like that.” He doesn’t sounds jealous, just curious.

“Are you saying you no longer go through boys and girls as fast as you used to? Getting old?” Mark quips.

Patrick waggles his eyebrows because they both know he does.

***

It was wonderful for nearly two years. They were the only ones in their group of friends to go steady so easily. And then in the spring of Daniel’s senior year, it all began to fall apart. Neither of them realized it at the time, but it began with a day that Daniel would tell people was arguably the best day of his life so far.

Mark’s phone rang just as he pulled into his driveway after another long day of school. He took the call in the car and was glad that he did because he was reversing and leaving skid marks on the asphalt even as he fumbled with his phone, trying to hang up. The letter had been waiting for Daniel in his mailbox when he got home from school, and he’d called Mark before he even went inside. He needed Mark there when he opened it, and would wait for him.

Mark pulled into Daniel’s driveway, behind his dad’s truck, less than twenty minutes later. He half-fell out of his car and was breathless by the time he knocked on the front door. As Daniel stared at the envelop, Mark babbled: “Daniel, whatever happens, whether it’s good or bad or…anything! You’re going to be
amazing
. You’re going to get to New York and blow everyone out of the water and in ten years we’ll be...“

Daniel pushed his hair back out of his eyes and grinned at every little bit of hope in Mark’s voice. “How fast were you driving?” he asked, but Mark just shook his head and brushed past him into the house. His fingertips found the back of Daniel’s hand as he passed and he pressed them there for reassurance even though he knew Daniel would be able to feel him shaking.

Sure enough, “Calm down,” Daniel admonished, but then he grinned as though the excitement radiating between them was catching.

“Come on.” Daniel led him up the stairs to his room, and Mark followed, grabbing and squeezing his hand and wondering why Daniel hadn’t just ripped open the damned envelope already.

But when the boys pushed through the half-open door, Mark saw that Daniel’s parents, Greg and Molly, were sitting on the bed. Mark stared as Daniel’s mom pushed off the mattress and muttered, “Finally.”

They stalled then, Mark still breathing loudly through his mouth, Daniel’s dad crossing his arms, still in his jeans and boots from work, and Daniel, fingernails scratching at the corner of the flimsy paper in his hands, weighing it in his palm as though it suddenly felt heavy.

“This is it,” Daniel breathed, but didn’t move.

“Come on,” Mark told him.

Daniel sighed as if preparing himself for the worst and looked to his mom, whose eyes were wide; to his dad, on the edge of the bed; and to Mark, who was beaming and nodding.

Daniel ripped into the envelope, unfolded the paper and paused, just for a second, with his eyes closed. Then he opened them slowly and read.

And that was the moment New York became a reality for Daniel, when art became his reality, and Mark got to watch it happen. Daniel’s face split into a grin, and he started to shake even harder in his excitement. Daniel’s first-choice school had not only accepted him, it had also awarded him the scholarship he needed. Every fantasy they had ever had suddenly seemed real, and Mark could see that Daniel was dizzy with it.

And then Daniel’s family and Mark were wrapping around him, hugging the breath out of him and talking and laughing, and Mark was sure that Daniel had never, ever been so happy.

***

“So you lost your boy to New York and you were stuck in butt-fuck nowhere for a year?” Patrick interrupts again, hazarding a guess. He pushes his chair back from the little table in his kitchen and starts rummaging through his pantry.

“Not exactly,” Mark concedes, yawning and flexing his shoulders.

“You tried long distance?”

“Not exactly.”

Patrick sits back down. “You guys were so young, though and the… excuse my stereotyping, but you
were
the only gays in the village, right?”

Mark just shrugs, suddenly tired. The story still aches, but sharing it out loud is no worse than keeping it to himself and thinking about it late at night when he runs out of other things to think of. And everything that Patrick is saying makes sense. Mark had wondered, especially after Antonio and the empty, lonely months that followed, whether Daniel and what they’d had, how it had fallen apart, made any sense at all—or if what Mark remembered, what he went through, was just nonsense. But Patrick follows the story, offers no objection, just listens; it’s strangely helpful in a way that doesn’t actually improve anything in Mark’s mind or his life. It’s helpful in that it doesn’t make anything feel worse.

But it’s a Saturday, and he’d rather do something fun, or at least productive, with his morning.

“So did you see him when you were in New York last year?”

Mark shakes his head and is sure Patrick had already guessed the answer.

“That bad, huh?”

“It got really messy.”

“I don’t understand how, though. You either break up or you don’t, and if you loved each other so much”—he’s mocking, but only a little—“surely you’d just get back together when the time was right.” He pauses. “Except you’re in Stanford and he’s in NYC.”

Mark decides he will make Patrick wait, let the story take them there, but admits, “I was gonna follow him.”

“Really?”

“Sure. Columbia, NYU, I even applied to Fordham.”

“You got into Stanford.”

“I got in everywhere. I started filling out the paperwork to accept the offer from Columbia. When I applied here it was only to keep my father happy.”

Patrick whistles through his teeth at that. “At eighteen you would have pissed off Whitman Savoy that much to follow a boy?”

This, Mark thinks, is perhaps the best way to explain the seriousness of Mark’s high school love so that Patrick can understand. Patrick knows Mark’s father both by reputation as a big shot lawyer and also through the unending anecdotal evidence provided by Mark and others; he’s a hard-ass, emotionally devoid, and he gets what he wants. Patrick doesn’t look surprised that Mark would stand up to him, though, that Mark even could, and that heats Mark’s cheeks with pride.

“I fought with him a lot while I was with Daniel. I negotiated.”

“I’ve heard stories about people who try to negotiate with your father.”

“Yeah, well, he wanted me to go to law school, and Daniel was an artist who just wanted to draw things and paint things and find his bliss. My dad was terrified of him—that was a pretty good card to hold. I agreed to complete an appropriate undergraduate degree that would roll directly into a top-ten law school, and he agreed it didn’t
have
to be Stanford.”