How to Say I Do

by Tal Bauer

I murmured quiet nonsense, my lips moving in not-quite-kisses against his hair. He huffed me in like I could sedate him, drawing deep lungfuls of me inside him. I was doing the same thing, taking h...

I wouldn’t still be standing, that’s for sure. I held him as tight as I could, my eyes closed like I could push reality off if I just didn’t look at it. I’m here, I wanted to say. I’m here, if you want me to be. Eventually, wrapped around each other, we pitched over the edge into an exhausted unconsciousness.

Those worries are for tomorrow, though.

I slung my arm around him. He shifted closer. My heart was still rabbiting. I held Noël until my breathing leveled out, and he stayed glued to me, his fingers looped together behind my back.

When he spoke, his voice was as soft a feather against my skin. “Will you show me the stars? The ones your dad took you to see?”

It was like Cancun all over again. How could one man know me so well? How did he know what to say and what to do to banish that nightmare? I wanted to weep. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to fast-forward to the end of whatever this was and know how it was all going to turn out because I c...

We watched the sunrise on my front porch, still holding hands. We weren’t saying much. Talking had gotten us twisted up, and words didn’t seem trustworthy anymore. I wanted to believe in him and me and what we were to each other in the quiet moments and the silent spaces, when our hands were locked together and he leaned into me.

We were so close, touching from our calves to our hips to our shoulders. It was easy to turn to him and drop a kiss on his hair. We stayed like that, not moving, not letting time roll forward—

What would Noël think if he saw me holding on so tightly to my past? I’m a chicken. I didn’t want him to see.

It wasn’t the same as when I was a boy—there were no collections of dinosaur stickers on the bottom of my dresser, and all my Little League trophies were gone—but it still had a time-capsule feel, like I’d bottled up a part myself and had never let go.

I’d never had a man in my house, or in this room. Having Noël here felt like I’d unzipped my adult self and was revealing my inner baby boy, still hidden inside my bones.

Yesterday, I’d said I wasn’t going to let Noël hurt me anymore, and now he was in my bedroom...

He took my hand and threaded our fingers together. I curled an arm beneath his neck and pressed my lips to his forehead. What did it mean that he was here? What did he want from me? What did I want from him? What were we doing to each other?

Were we doomed to collide and part ways until we bounced so hard off each other we’d never meet again?

We should have talked about all of it, but we didn’t. He closed his eyes, and I closed mine. Right before I fell asleep, I heard him whisper, “And I wanted to see you again.”

This was the leap forward I’d wanted to take myself, but I hadn’t been able to work up the courage to tackle it.

When he took a breath, I reached across the center console for him. He powered off his cell and relaxed into the seat, and we held hands for the last hour of the drive.

Not long enough, certainly, for a meaningful goodbye, or to ask him the questions I’d been scraping off the inside of my skull. Will you be back? Are we doing anything here? What do I mean to you?

Then I saw a line of sea turtles marching around the middle. I’d put that ring on his hand. I reached for it, my fingers brushing the hollow of Noël’s throat. “You still have it.” He froze, halfway out of his seatbelt. “I never take it off.” “Noël—”

“You should read my emails. You should read all of them. You should know—” His voice cut out, and he pressed his lips together until they went white. “I peeked at the end,” I admitted. “You never finished. You didn’t sign off. You—” He was shaking his head. “No, never—”

Send me emails because you want me to read them. I want to get them, Noël. I want to hear from you. I want to hear from you all the time, every day—”

I thought about calling to him. Maybe we’d have a movie moment, where he’d turn around and come back to me, and I’d jog out to meet him, and then we’d kiss like we had in Mexico when I thought he was going to be my whole entire future. But I didn’t call his name, and he didn’t turn back. And once again, we were apart.

read his emails. I read them once, twice, three times, the words blurring, then melting into each other. While I read, I had to hold on to the edge of my desk and root my boots to the floor so I wouldn’t grab my keys, fly out of my house, and point my truck east, drive straight through the night all the way to New York. I had so much I wanted to tell him.

I wanted to tell him that I, too, thought about him constantly. That I dreamed about him, and that I had to hold a pillow tight and pretend it was him so I could fall asleep. That I would talk to his memory while walking through the blocks, or washing dishes, or staring at the sunrise, asking him what he thought about thinning out the tempranillo a few weeks early, or telling him that Jason had gotten his first talking-to about being a chatterbox at school, and he was really taking after Uncle Wyatt, much to Liam’s consternation. Sometimes I imagined Noël next to me, so vibrant and there—

Reading his emails, at least, helped me understand a few things. I hadn’t been wrong in Mexico, but I hadn’t been right, either. I’d gotten swept away with my feelings, and I’d taken for granted that he was falling in love alongside me. But I was the first man he’d been with, which was a big enough shock to t...

I’d been not just over the moon, but miles and miles above it. When it came to Noël, I was gone. The way he’d written, it seemed like mayb...

I was waiting for his text and imagining all the things I’d tell him. What to say first? How much I thought of him—still—and how deeply, how intricately, I remembered our week?

All of my favorite memories were looping: how he’d listened to me ramble that first night about the ranch, and how his eyes had lit up at his first sip of wine. That time we’d bobbed in the ocean and held hands while we bronzed beneath the sun.

The cay, and him watching those baby sea turtles, and how I’d held him inside the shelter of my arms on ...

His carefree laughter when he’d popped up from the water after his first...

Noël had been a dream, someone who seemed to have walked out of my deepest, most cherished, and most fragile hopes. I couldn’t believe it. I just couldn...

Did I tell him that I was already in love with him, as ridiculous as that was? Six days together, six weeks apart, and h...

Did I tell him I was willing to try for a future together if he was? I wanted the emails and the texts and the long distance flights, if all that meant we could be together. I wanted to miss him every day, and I wanted to dream about him and hold a pillow that smelled like him against my face when he wasn’t there if that meant I got the chance to be his man.

I was still sitting on my hands. I waited. And I waited. And I waited. Maybe he was in the subway. And airports were crowded, even here, so it was surely a zoo in New York. Maybe he couldn’t text right after he landed. I’d be patient. But the night passed, and I spent nearly all of it staring at my silent phone.

My sheets smelled like Noël. I buried my face in the pillow he’d used that afternoon and wondered—again—where it had all gone wrong. My despairing thoughts were grim and relentless. I felt like I was being pulled apart from the inside.

The sun rose and fell, and Noël didn’t call or text or email. A second day passed. The silence between us felt alive, growing, deepening, thickening.

His life was so remarkably different from mine, so full of glamour it seemed astounding that he’d even notice me.

He’d dated supermodels. He was about to become a partner in his global superstar firm. What delusion was I clinging to where I believed Noël would choose me over all of that?

I reread his emails again, hunting for the thing I missed. There had to be something, some line I’d missed about how he wasn’t ready or he didn’t want to be with a man. Or he did want to be with a man, but not me.

I heard, finally, how deeply lost he was, and how unbearably alone he felt.

I barely know myself. Most of the time, I don’t feel like a real person. I feel like I’m this puppet or this robot, expected to follow some script that I wasn’t given the lines for. Why does everyone around me seem to know what’s going on? Why can’t I be excited about this future? Isn’t a partnership the pinnacle of my professional aspirations?

If I could have, I would have taken apart the world and rebuilt it until everything was knowable to Noël again. But I couldn’t, and so I felt uselessly helpless. No, more than that: I felt personally responsible for Noël’s precarious spiral into this startling place he hadn’t asked to be dragged into.

Given the choice, would he wipe me from his past? It was a hard place to sit in, holding on to the realization that you loved a man who might wish to forget you ever existed.

Noël was in a maze, and he had to find his own way out. He had to learn himself, and discover his own truth, and the meaning he was searching for.

His life and his future were somewhere out there, waiting for him, and maybe that included me, but maybe it didn’t. I couldn’t do anything to rush him or push him. If he wanted me, he had to find me himself. So I was waiting.

“Noël…” I imagined he could hear me all the way in New York, where it was an hour later and his night would be in full swing.

Wouldn’t it be easier for him to put his wonderings away? Why should he spare a thought for a man alone on his ranch with nothing but grapes and ghosts for company?

Noël could have anyone. Why would he choose me? I scraped the bottom of my boot against the step and tried to empty my head.

“I was just thinking about you,” he said, his voice suddenly higher, lighter, faux ease I could see through because I played that game, too. “And I…” He was retreating. Backing away like a scared animal, even though he’d picked up the phone and dialed tonight for some reason. “I’ve been thinking about you, too.”

“Yeah?” “All the time, yeah. Constantly since you left.” I cleared my throat. “Tell me about your day?”