“Okay, so tell me the truth: why couldn’t I get a hold of you last night?”
Samir folds his arms and stares at Peter across the little round table in the bar. “I know you have class on Tuesday nights, but you get breaks. And it’s not like you couldn’t answer a text from class,” Samir says. He has not yet taken one sip of his martini. “So. Where were you really?”
Peter feels a red rush of shame. He never meant to lie to Samir. At first, he rationalized not telling his boyfriend on the basis that he was just trying it out, experimenting, curious. Maybe he wouldn’t even like it. Maybe he’d only do it once—in which case, it would hardly be worth mentioning, right? But he had done it eight times. Eight wasn’t experimenting. He did like it. And he didn’t want to stop. So now it was time to come clean.
Peter glances at the tables near them. It’s just before midnight, and the gastropub is filling up with Chicago’s young professional crowd: carefully tousled hair, sleek bodies, explosive laughs. This bar runs a happy hour special on weekdays from 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. to bring in the after-work crowd just off their second shifts. Samir likes this place, but it makes Peter’s head swim. His eyes keep getting pulled away by the twelve screens affixed above the bar and on the walls, which show a football game, music videos, a series of amateur clips in which people try to do a backflip and fall down.
Peter doesn’t think anyone is near enough to hear them, but still, he lowers his voice and hunches over the shiny, fauxonyx tabletop so that his nose is almost in his beer stein when he says, “I was sleeping.”
Samir’s stony face gives no reaction except for a hot flare behind his dark eyes—or maybe Peter imagines that. After almost a year together, he is still not very good at reading Samir.
“Look, I wanted to tell you, but I—”
Samir holds up a palm to stop him. “I’m not going to talk about this here. Let’s just finish our drinks.”
They drink in their painful bubble of silence, sealed off from the commotion of the bar. Peter has never downed a beer faster.
When the revolving door spits them out, Samir marches down the avenue of shops and restaurants with long, quick strides. Peter has to jog to catch up. His health implant pings his phone to tell him he’s reached .07 BAC, and it will now release an alcohol antagonist. He had drunk two swift beers before he came to the bar, trying to muster the courage to confess.
“Was it the first time?” Samir asks.
“No.”
Samir opens his mouth but closes it again when he spots the couple with a toddler approaching on the tree-lined sidewalk. The little girl picks up burnt red maple leaves that just began to fall this week, collecting them. The incandescent street lamps bathe everything in a metallic white (they redid the lamps on this street last month, upping the wattage even more). Samir turns down
