Not Safe for Work(50)

“For me more than him, yeah.” Rick shook himself and broke eye contact. “We’d been stringing each other along for ages, and I thought we were trying to make it work, but apparently he was just putting in the work so he’d have some security.”

I cocked my head. “I thought you said he didn’t like the idea of being bought.”

“Oh, I think he liked the idea right up until it became clear we weren’t going to make it. Then he was suddenly too noble to even discuss money.” Laughing bitterly, he rolled his eyes. “Anyway. It’s in the past. Thank God.”

I raised my wine. “I know exactly what you mean.”

He clinked his glass against mine. “Been there?”

“Well, not with shitloads of money involved, but I have my share of relationships in my past, and they’re welcome to stay there.”

“Here, here.” He sipped his wine. “Seems like you and your ex-wife are on good terms, though.”

“My first wife, yes. Both of my marriages and divorces were about as different as they could get. With Karen, we just drifted apart. At some point, we realized we didn’t even know each other anymore. When we tried to get to know each other again, we realized we had virtually nothing in common except the kids. So we split up, but we’ve always stayed friends. My second wife, though.” I whistled. “That whole fiasco was a mistake on so many levels.”

“How so?”

I thumbed the stem of my wineglass. “I honestly can’t even tell you what we were thinking. She wanted kids, and I didn’t want more. We…well, we just didn’t see eye to eye on much of anything. Really, the only thing we got right was the sex.”

“Which doesn’t carry a relationship very far.”

“No, it does not. So that went downhill fast, and the divorce got nasty.”

“As they do.”

“As they do.” I absently swirled my wine. “The third time I almost got married…” I swallowed.

He slipped his hand into mine. “You don’t have to tell me.”

“No, it’s…it’s okay.” I watched our hands clasped together. “We had a fifteen-year age gap, which in itself was fine. But there was a generation gap of sorts.” I met Rick’s gaze. “On one side of that gap was me. On the other, a kid who didn’t want to be with a closet case.”

Rick’s eyebrows flicked up, but then he nodded. “I had the same problem with my ex, too.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Literally everything was fine except for that. He did not like me being closeted, and as he put it, ‘Either you come out of the closet, or I walk out the front door.’”

“That’s more or less the conversation we had. In not so many words.” I picked up the bottle off the coffee table and topped off both our glasses. Then I twisted toward him, pulling my knee up so I could rest my glass on it. “So your ex was…older or younger?”

“Younger. When we split up, he was thirty and I was forty-one.” Rick sighed. “You wouldn’t think eleven years would make that much of a difference, but I guess times are changing pretty fast.”

“Tell me about it. My kids may as well be on a different planet than the one I grew up on.”

“Do they know you’re… Are you bi or gay?”

“Bi. And yes, they do.” I laughed softly. “It’s kind of crazy how it played out, actually. I wasn’t going to tell the kids until they were older because I was afraid they wouldn’t understand, or they’d be ostracized by other kids. But then when the twins were about twelve, my younger daughter started behaving horribly. She acted out every chance she got, she was falling behind in school even though she’s ridiculously smart. Her brother and her older sister were doing fine, and we didn’t think it was the divorce since that had happened a long time ago, but she was just…” I shook my head. “We didn’t know what to do, so Karen took her to a counselor. And one day the counselor said Brooke wanted Karen to join her for an appointment. That there was something she needed to talk about.”

Rick sipped his wine but kept his gaze fixed on me.

I went on. “Brooke explained that she’d been depressed and distracted because she’d figured out she was a lesbian, but was scared because a friend of our older daughter’s had been kicked out of his house for being gay. So she was afraid to tell anyone—especially me—and just started acting out because she was angry all the time. All the time.”

“My God.” Rick shuddered. “That poor kid.”

“Seriously. I knew how she felt too.”

“Yeah. Ditto. So what happened?”

“Karen promised her I wouldn’t be upset, and when the three of us sat down to talk, and my daughter was so—” I paused, the memory still choking me up even after all this time. “She was so nervous and scared. This was a kid who didn’t cry for anything, and she was just bawling when she tried to tell me. And I thought, my God, I’ve completely failed these kids if they’re afraid to come to me about this. What kind of parent am I if my kids are genuinely afraid they’ll be kicked out on the street if they come out to me?” I exhaled hard. “Man, you’ve never seen a kid look as shocked as she did when I said, ‘It’s okay. I’m gay too.’” I cleared my throat. “Once she’d calmed down, I explained that I was bisexual, so I understood, and that I’d been afraid to come out at her age for the same reasons, but that she had nothing to be afraid of. And it was like this huge weight came off her shoulders. I mean, you could see it. One conversation, and my kid was back to the way she’d been a year before.”