Well-Loved Leather

“Dan, I can’t.”  

“Why not, baby? You know I love you. You know I do.”  

Ted fiddled with the fraying thread on the cuff of his jacket. He couldn’t bear to look into the swimming eyes of the man across from him.  

The eyes he had spent so few nights memorizing the contours of; the way they creased in the corners when he was sleepy or smiling, the most gorgeous shade of brown, like a well-loved leather or the bubbles atop a black coffee. He could wax poetic about the way Dan’s lashes framed his eyes in a way that made Ted want to spill every single secret he’d accumulated in his twenty-something years on this planet.  

Those gorgeous brown eyes were currently begging him to stay.  

Dan reached across the key-scratched table, grasping for Ted’s hands.  

“Come on, Ted. I know you love me back, all you have to do is say it and I’ll--”  

“Keep your voice down!” Ted hissed. An older couple at the table next to them twinged slightly. They hadn’t heard Dan’s words, but they’d heard Ted’s. So much for not being overheard. He could only be grateful that they hadn’t heard the first bit.  

He’d said that the steak joint uptown wasn’t the place for this. Dan had insisted on doing it properly. Doing what properly, Ted had asked over the phone, inescapable smile on his face. You’ll see, his lover’s voice rasped through the line. He hadn’t thought that Dan was going to say this at all. Let alone in public.  

The silence was thick and deafening. The bossa nova on the speakers and the clinking of plates around them was drowned out by the drowning static between their lips. Ted watched as Dan licked his dry lips, preparing to explain what they both knew needed no explanation. Because it was so inherent, and so hopeless.  

“Look,” his voice shook, the words unsteady on his tongue after two beers, “I love you, and I want to have a life with you, and I don’t care who knows it.”  

Ted reached across the table to where Dan’s hand lay flat and helpless against the sticky varnish. Then he remembered where they were.  

He put his hand back in his lap.  

“I do.”  

Ted and Dan had met in a bookstore. How romantic. Dan was searching for a copy of some Jane Austen novel and Ted, scratched nametag reading Edward, had helped him find it – it was his job, after all. They became fast friends. Then fast lovers, after one too many drunken hand brushes and surreptitiously sliding sighs about their singleness into the conversation.  

They both lied. They both had wives. They both knew it. 

The truth was that it wasn’t safe to be whatever they were. Men just didn’t get with other men, no matter how badly they wanted to. This was as close as they could ever be. Secret meetings in the park late at night, telling their wives they were ‘shooting pool’ down at the local dive. They couldn’t see each other too often. Dan’s wife knew what team he batted for, Ted’s didn’t, so they couldn’t be too careful.  

And yet, Ted had memorized every inch of Dan’s frame. The way his back rippled like the ocean; his hands were carved like Michelangelo himself had pulled them from marble. His own personal David, down to the Roman nose. He’d spent so many, yet still too few, hours with his cheek pressed to his chest that he was certain he’d be able to pull his heartbeat out of a lineup. 

He’d spent this time committing Dan’s details to memory because he knew that their time was short, secret, and would eventually come to an end. He just didn’t think it would have to be so soon. Once he walked out of this restaurant, if it was without Dan, he'd be without Dan for the rest of his days. He'd have to. People talked.

“We could run away, Teddy.”  

The pet name snapped him back to reality. He met those earthen eyes with a sad smile, matching the desperate tone in Dan’s drawl.  

“We could, couldn’t we?”  

Dan’s freckled face lit up from within, like a match had been struck. The same way it did when they talked of Jane Austen, Sylvia Plath, Mary Shelley -- any woman from the past with her own mind and a pen. And for just a second, Ted let himself consider what Dan was proposing.  

If he told May, his wife, what had been going on the past eight months, she would never speak to him again. But, she’d almost certainly never tell her family. Being married to a man who worked in a bookstore was bad enough, but being married to a homo who worked in a bookstore was unfathomable. She’d die of shame, and that secret would die with her.  

But if she did tell someone.  

If she did tell someone, they could tell someone else. Word could get around the small town the couple had lived their whole lives in. Ted would be worried about his family, but he didn’t have anyone left that was worth worrying about hearing. Depending on who she told, like her sister Betty who was married to the county sheriff, he could go to jail.  

They weren’t too kind to jailed gays in this town. It was like caging a wounded deer. They considered it a mercy killing.  

At least, they did to Bobby Mills, and James Ridgeway, and countless others that the deputy's office labeled suicides.  

Dan picked up his hands, cool signet ring and callouses familiar but dangerous at the same exact time. Ted’s eyes darted around the table nervously. No one could see this. No one could hear this.  

No one could hear this.  

Bobby Mills. James Ridgeway.  

Ted whipped his hands back, careful not to draw attention from the now-suspicious elders sat next to them. They were practically breathing down their necks, even from ten feet to the left. Everyone in this restaurant was staring at them, or at least it felt that way. 

Even if May didn’t talk, there’d be whispers once they all realized Dan’s or Ted’s car wasn’t in their driveway, that they’d left their wives – permanently, on business, it didn’t matter. 

But as Ted looked across the dimly lit, beer-sticky table into Dan’s black-coffee eyes, he thought about how safe he felt in his arms. Nothing could touch them there. The law, the whispers, the mobs with their torches and pitchforks. He was safe from everything in his Daniel’s embrace. 

“Teddy.”  

“Danny.”  

“If we go far enough, they’ll never catch us.”  

“That’s pretty damn far, Danny.” 

“Then I’ll buy the gas.”