You Should Be So Lucky

by Cat Sebastian

Mark is . . . fine: he paid his taxes on time and he went to the dentist when his tooth hurt. He isn’t in any danger of throwing himself out of windows or acquiring interesting new habits of self-destruction. It’s just that when he tries to figure out what the point is in getting out of bed every morning, he doesn’t have the answer.

Eddie wonders if Mark stares at his ceiling, too, counting the cracks, trying to decide if it’s the mattress or the noise or the unsatisfactory contents of his mind that’s keeping him awake.

Maureen and Lilian send one another synchronized glances, and Mark remembers years of exchanging identical glances with William. There’s something so comforting in the ability to be wordlessly petty with someone, in knowing that as soon as you have a closed door between the two of you and the rest of the world, you can share all your least attractive thoughts.

That casual we bounces off Mark’s consciousness, a pebble against the windshield, but the trick is to keep driving. He’s happy for Nick and Andy, just like he’s happy for Maureen and Lilian, but every easy we they utter makes him think of a we he never got the chance to say, and now never will.

What I can tell you is that whatever calamity you’re imagining? There’s a day after that.”

“Only two things in the world people count by months. How old a baby is, and how long since something awful happened.”

“But I want to kiss you, and I thought you ought to know.” “You thought I ought to know.” Eddie shrugs. “I’m an honest guy.”

“Look at that, I was sincere, you didn’t die—good work, team.”

But this is a game where hitting the ball a third of the time is a job well done, and hitting it half the time is practically unheard of. With everything else, it’s even more confusing. I mean, I’m never going to get married and have kids. Some people will look at that and feel bad for me, right? But if I did get married, it would mean something went wrong. So the fact that I’m not married with a family of my own is a good thing, you know? It’s a win. It means that I’m still able to be myself.”

He feels like an idiot, but Mark’s laughing, and he’d be okay with feeling like an idiot all the time as long as it made Mark laugh like that.

Until now, he thought of being queer as something both dangerous and trivial, something that he kept to one corner of life, safely contained, like an embarrassing health condition. But now that truth seems to have seeped out into everything else, and he doesn’t see how he can possibly be known without that essential fact.

“I told her that you made a really half-assed attempt to break my heart,” Eddie says, “but that I’m not having any of it.”

“I like when you tell me things.”

“I really love you,” Eddie says without exactly planning to. He half expects Mark to become extremely busy somewhere else in the apartment or to start a fight about why Eddie is wrong, but instead Mark’s face goes a mottled red. “What, like that’s news?” Eddie asks, trying not to laugh. But he hasn’t actually told Mark before, not in so many words. “It’s not news,” Mark says, scathing and fond, and starts filling an old milk crate with record albums.

“I think I like making people happy,” Eddie says, and it’s probably something he ought to have figured out years ago, not just as the words leave his mouth. It could be a stadium full of fans, or a city full of people who need someone to root for, or it could just be the man standing next to him, and maybe that’s enough.

“I’m just glad you were loved.”

“I’m going to keep loving you,” Mark says, and that’s much better.