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“Honestly, I don’t know. You’re the puzzle piece I didn’t even know was missing.”

We went back to studying the ducks in companionable silence.

Saturday, October 6, 2018, St. Jude—“So what’s up with Rio?” MJ asked me.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s been six months.”

“So?”

“So, are you in love with him?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t know. I know I really, really like him. I think he’s sexy as hell. Sometimes I think, if I can’t be with Jackson, it doesn’t really matter who I’m with as long as he’s nice. You know?”

She just shook her head. She is as baffled by our affair as I am.

Maybe I’d been seduced by Rio’s near-constant declarations of love. Until him, only Jackson had told me he loved me. He’d rarely said the words, but love was in his eyes when he looked at me, was in his touch when he held me, was piled high on the plate of coq au vin he made for dinner on a winter’s night, wasstacked between the ice cubes in the negroni he’d meet me at the door with every night after work.

“Do you think, it’s just because he needs a place to stay?”

I looked at her in surprise.

She blushed slightly. “Sorry. I’m just worried that he might be using you—”

“Everybody uses everybody, don’t they?”

MJ laughed, and the moment passed. “Oh, no, Miss Thing, you didnotjust quote Tony Manero to me.”

The truth is I don’t feel used by Rio, any more than I feel I’m using him. My hunger to feel him inside me is genuine, but it’s more than just lust, for he is the little Dutch boy, and I am the leaky dike; his cock, the boy’s finger plugging up the hole in me, causing my waters to rise and teem again with life. And with each orgasm he pulls from me, I feel as if I’ve won a pair of silver skates.

Maybe loving me has enabled Rio to express a side of himself he hadn’t been comfortable with before. I worry that he will tire of this adventure and go back to loving women, withdrawing his cock and causing my waters and the life they sustain to ebb away. Again.

“So…back to Rio,” MJ said, pulling me out of my thoughts.

“What about him?”

“Ishe gay?”

I shrugged. “He says he’s not. He insists I’m the only man he’s ever been attracted to.”

“So, he’s like only gay for you?”

I shrugged. “I guess…”

“But what do you think?”

“It doesn’t matter what I think. I can’t decide his orientation for him.

“I still don’t get it.”

“It’s not as unheard of as you may think. There’s even a trope in gay romance—mostly written by women for other women—known as ‘gay for you only.’ It’s quite controversial. A lot of people don’t believe such a thing exists. Like a lot of people claim bisexuality isn’t real.”

“But that’s just it. Rio isn’t even claiming he’s bisexual.”

“No. I actually don’t think he is. Bisexual, I mean. Orientation is simply a pattern of attraction. His attraction has only been to women. For whatever reason, that pattern broke when we reconnected and got to know each other.”

In truth, neither Rio nor I can explain his attraction to me. The closest way to explain it, I think, is still as Michel de Montaigne wrote: “Because it was he; because it was I.”