Page 32 of Hush

“Is not much longer. I promise.” Vadim waved to his date. His date smiled and waited, coy and eyeing him up and down. The promise of a long, breathless, glorious night lay in that gaze. He was done with this conversation. “I will be in touch. You know what to do until then.”

A Russian curse and a snap, and then the line cut out.

Vadim slipped the phone in his back pocket and headed for his date. “Hello, gorgeous. Are you ready for a great time? I have everything we need to play all night long.” A little cocaine, some poppers, booze, and smokes. They’d watch the sun rise as his date fucked him again.

“I can’t wait,” his date purred, voice low and husky.

Vadim smiled slowly. “What are we waiting for?”

Chapter 10

June 13th

Tom straightened his polo, trying to smooth the pale blue fabric. He turned left and then right, inspecting his khaki shorts, the lay of his shirt. How did his ass look? He’d tried to keep it tight over the years. Were the shorts too baggy? Did he look good? Or old? Or did he just look pathetic?

He didn’t have anything hip to wear, and he’d feel stupid if he tried anyway. He couldn’t even imagine trying to put on a pair of skinny jeans or squeeze his way into a metallic shirt. He had his normal—boring—straight leg jeans, his button-downs, his polos, and his khaki shorts.

He was a regular fashion model for the forgettable mid-forties guy, blending into obscurity.

Tipping his head back, Tom sighed, closing his eyes. Why was he doing this? Why was he even trying? Twenty-five years of solitude, and he’d been… well, not fine. Not great. But not terrible. He’d done twenty-five years of this life already. What was another twenty-five?

He didn’thaveto tiptoe out of his closet. He didn’thaveto change anything.

His empty house seemed to swell around him, silent, eerily so. It felt, suddenly, like a tomb. His coffin, an empty crypt to his empty life. He was going to die in this house one day, and no one would know. Someone, eventually, would complain about the smell, and the last anyone would hear about him was some local headline buried on page seven about a former federal judge dying and decaying alone until he putrefied on his floors.

His bones would be buried and no one would ever know him, truly know him.

He was going to die in this house, and that day would come sooner rather than later if he had to endure this aching loneliness for another twenty-five years. He should never have fantasized. Never let loose the shackles on his dreams. Never tasted hope, or imagined what could have been.

But he had and now he had to make a choice: keep going, keep tiptoeing out, or turn around and slam that closet door shut again.

He took a breath, and then another.

“Etta Mae! Are you ready to go for a walk?”

From fast asleep, lying on her back with her four paws spread wide and limp, Etta Mae leaped to her feet, spinning until she found him. She stared him down, as if challenging whether he was serious or not, while her tail wagged and wagged.

“C’mon. Let’s go get your harness.”

Howling, she took off, bounding down the stairs, her fluffy butt wiggling and tail held high. He heard her paws scratching at the wall below where he kept her leash and harness on a hook. If she could have, she’d have readied herself.

“I’m coming, missy.” He wrangled her into her harness—always a challenge when she was wiggling and excited—and then clipped her leash on. She bolted for the door, unspooling the retractable leash as he slipped into his low-tops. Etta Mae stuck her long nose into the seam of the door and sniffed, exhaling out in long snorts, as if she was counting the seconds he was delaying her by not opening the door immediately.

Finally, they were out, setting off. Etta Mae trotted ahead, wagging her tail, nose high, sniffing the scents of the city. He followed behind, steering her gently toward the National Mall.

Celebrate your fabulous life,the advertisement had said.Come out and party!

He needed to do this. He needed to take this step, at the very least. Be among his people. Be in solidarity with himself. Walk in the sunlight as a gay man—if only to himself—for once in his adult life.

Maybe after, he’d message Doug again. See if he wanted to grab a glass of wine at one of the patio bars. Or take a walk through the monuments, circle the World War II Memorial, or walk up the hill to the Washington Monument. See if they could keep their banter going in person. See if he could be a gay man with another gay man.

But first things first. He had to get there.

What did a celebration of gay life look like? He didn’t even know. He’d carefully excised everything gay from his world, purposely shuttered his eyes and his heart. His last encounter with any of his own people was back in 1991. The memories were still washed in hate, and, to this day, he could taste the tears and cigarette smoke, the future that felt like ash and decay.

He was walking into the unknown, but damn it, he was going to do this.

He could hear the celebration before he got close. Drums, street drums, plastic buckets turned upside down. Music, club pop and pop hits. Britney Spears, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry, all waxing and waning, voices twining together and pulsing to a thrumming bass, far away. He turned east on Constitution Ave and passed the Ellipse, and then ducked onto the hill, jogging with Etta Mae up the grass to the rise around the Washington Monument.