Jason dropped to one knee. Long Point lighthouse flashed green. Across the harbor, the sun dipped behind Telegraph Hill. On the Truro side of the bay, the sunset’s reflection set fires in the windows of the mansions on the bluffs.

Stranded on the beach, Colby’s skin burned. There was no shelter. No hiding place. Just sand, beach grass, beached seals, and ocean. Plus, of course, thirty of their closest friends and a professional photographer, who had hiked out on the breakwater and ambushed Jason and Colby with tiki torches, bug spray, Cava, and a carefully orchestrated photo shoot planned months in advance with Instagram in mind.

Jason’s mouth opened and closed. Colby heard nothing on account of the surf crashing in his brain. But he could read lips, and the proposal was the prose of some detested novel Colby would force himself to finish, solely because he’d started it and because it was the sort of novel everyone was expected to have read at some point in their lives, like Jonathan Franzen’s Corrections.

Colby was on a train. He had missed his stop, and the train was rocketing off toward some strange frontier, where Colby would neither know the language nor have a proper passport or visa, and the conductor wouldn’t listen to his pleas to stop at the next station. 

He said yes.

Their friends cheered. 

To Colby’s horror, tears streaked his cheeks. Everybody misinterpreted them. Even his best friend later told Colby, I’ve never seen you so happy.

Jason and Colby paddled a tandem kayak back across the harbor. Their strokes were hopelessly out of sync, and the kayak nearly capsized every time Jason leaned back for a kiss. Which he did with breathtaking frequency, solely for the admiration of their friends on shore.

That night, Colby hardly slept. When he had said yes, he hadn’t actually meant yes. He’d meant, That’s certainly something to think abouot. He’d meant, I’m not saying no, but don’t hold your breath. 

He suspected the proposal was a trap, designed to compel Colby to confront the truth that their relationship was going nowhere. It was just like Jason to force the issue, but hold in reserve some hope of a miracle. Jason liked shiny things and miraculous endings.

Still, the notion that Jason could possibly have thoughts different from Colby’s own was inconceivable. Didn’t everyone fear being forever paired with the same person like some bad sequel to a Beckett play?

At dawn, Colby wriggled out of Jason’s embrace. He set out on foot for Herring Cove to clear his head. As low pockets of fog drifted off the moors, Colby promised himself he’d blurt out his secret to the first person fate put in his way.

In no time, a man rode out of the fog on an ancient, creaking bicycle. He was white-haired, tanned like leather, and naked, except for a fox loin cloth and fox fur wrist cuffs. 

Maybe the second person, Colby decided.

But when the sensible lesbian walking her dog said good morning as aggressively as if she’d spat at him, Colby lost his nerve. He was, he realized, a cowardly person. Having seen this Long Point proposal coming from a thousand miles away, Colby had tried to head it off at the pass and avoid a scene. He’d told Jason he wasn’t into gifting jewelry. He’d said, Don’t let’s be hasty. He’d treated Jason badly enough so that he ought to have dumped Colby, but not so badly that Jason could ever after assemble their friends to discuss what a spineless piece of shit Colby had been.

Later that morning over breakfast, Jason sang praises of the future house they were to move into, outfitted with the finest appliances, a pair of matching pugs, and Keith Herring prints on the walls.

Everything Jason described seemed tawdry, undesirable, and even crass, like a Gucci bag, the kind of thing a person without class thinks is classy. 

“When should we do it?” Jason asked. 

“What?”

“Get married, you idiot!”

Colby thought, How’s never? Does never work for you?

            Desperate to be alone, Colby winked and announced that he was going shopping, which successfully conveyed that he was shopping specifically for a gift for Jason, ensuring that his fiancé—Colby could barely think the word--wouldn’t offer to accompany him.

Once on his own, Colby stumbled across Brett, a former student of his, on Commercial Street. Though Brett was now an end-stage PhD candidate, he exuded cheerful banality, throwing shade and flirting mercilessly and breezing into stores and sampling wares but buying nothing more than water. Full of admiration for Brett’s effortless show of vacuousness, Colby blurted out the truth.

Brett seized his hand, dragged him to a bar, cried out, “Two martinis,” and found seats at a hightop in the back. “Tell me everything.”

Colby did. Long Point. The inner horror. The tandem kayak. The closed eyes. The half-naked man with the fox-fur cuffs. 

Brett nodded, but he was frowning. “So, what’s the problem, exactly? Jason’s bad in bed? Too earnest? Wants monogamy?”

“I just don’t believe in him.”

“You don’t believe him?” 

“Don’t believe in him. The proposal--his feelings for me--they don’t seem quite ... genuine. You know what I mean?”

“No.”

Colby sighed and took a long drink from his martini. “Or maybe I don’t believe in me. I don’t know how I feel.”

Brett nodded very seriously. “Not that I know a damn thing about it, but I think a groom needs a little deliberate suspension of disbelief, or no one would ever go through with getting hitched. It’s just too fucking terrifying!” Then he slapped Colby gently on the forearm and guffawed. “Oh my god, don’t listen to me. I’m so happy for you. I always thought you were so hot. And now you’re a free agent.”

Brett grasped Colby’s hand and looked into his eyes.

“Run away with me,” he begged. 

Brett was joking of course. But he did seem suddenly more eminently fuckable than he had been just seconds before, so the joke both flattered Colby and gave him a sudden and serious boner.

Colby saw a new future: he and Brett would fuck, date, have wonderful adventures, break up amicably, and engage in easy rebound sex for years. Both of them would look back on the sweaty tumultuous relationship without regret and with some pride at having rescued Colby from marrying the wrong man.

***

Wedding planning consumed them. Jason enthused over endless potential registries. He prodded Colby to bask in the congratulations of Jason’s more distant relatives that Colby had never met. They toured potential venues. They selected rings with a metalworker. They interviewed caterers. They were fitted for matching custom-made suits. They took dance lessons to make sure their wedding dance would be so perfectly well-choreographed that it would almost certainly go viral.

Colby hated himself. He tried to pretend not that Jason was a better person, but that Jason was the same person, and Colby liked him better. Most people would. What was not to like? Aside from the annoying aggressive optimism and the overconfident I-know-how-the-world-works attitude, Jason was eminently eligible: good job, big cock, moderately handsome. Any number of their friends would have gladly fucked Jason and perhaps had. And in many ways, Colby had liked Jason just fine until the ambush. Colby enjoyed having a boyfriend, because he loathed going to parties alone.

But there was zero chance Colby could spend the rest of his life with Jason. It was strictly impossible. It had always been impossible. And if Colby didn’t or couldn’t love Jason, didn’t that say more about Colby than about Jason? Clearly, there was something wrong with Colby. Colby concluded that he was a fatally flawed person, and this pat conclusion initially pleased him. It felt generous to admit his flawedness to himself.

But the more Colby thought it over, his conclusion felt more patronizing than generous. Colby decided he didn’t actually believe the problem lay with him. But that change of heart only brought him back to where he’d started: he was flawed, because he couldn’t truly come to grips with his own shortcomings. Colby was completely confused. How could anyone know what he felt until he saw how he acted?

Colby was asking himself this very question on the subway platform at Green Street. Jason was chattering away about the wedding plans and waving his hands around excitedly. Maybe it was something he said, or maybe he accidentally flailed the guy next to him. The guy gave Jason a little shove and muttered something possibly homophobic, but in any event rude.

Words abandoned Colby. Visions flickered in his brain. He saw only knights and dragons, weapons and blood. Before Colby could register what his body was doing, he hit the offender twice, knocked him down, crouched over him and hit him twice more as he tried to protect his head. All the while, Colby blistered him with insults and threats, ending with, “You don’t fucking touch my fiancé, asshole.” 

Waking from his fury, Colby caught his own craziness in his hands as if it were a live wire twitching or a rattling snake. Staring defiantly at everyone else on the platform, he held fast to his craziness, unwilling to admit to anyone that it had posed any danger or been in any way untoward. Eventually, the other riders turned away, and Colby was overtaken by a sullen sheepishness. 

My fiancé. Holy shit. Colby had uttered the dreaded word. Fiancé.

He glanced at Jason. He wondered if Jason had noticed. Fiancé.

Maybe this marriage would be good for them after all. Maybe he did love Jason. Actions spoke louder than words. The pummeling was less planned than the proposal, and Colby might yet go to jail for it, but it was certainly more genuine.

My fiancé. What the fuck?

“Let’s get outta here,” Colby murmured, “before the cops come.”

“Are you fucking crazy?”

“What?”

“You hurt that guy.”

The guy was sitting up, holding his shirt to stem bleeding from his nose, waving off all offers of help.

“I did it for you.”

“For me? No. Not for me. I don’t want that hyper-masculine ‘roid rage you’ve got burning in you to compensate for the fact that you like to suck cock. No, no thank you. What’s wrong with you?”

Colby restrained the impulse to thrash Jason as well, for fear he’d otherwise be proving Jason’s point. But what he couldn’t restrain was a little pride that, at last, he’d shown some courage. Some gumption. He hadn’t known he had it in him, and he couldn’t help feeling like Jason ought to love him even more. 

            He considered saying, You’re what’s wrong with me, Jason. He considered escalating the incident. He could break off the engagement. This was his big chance. He’d make the split Jason’s fault, because Jason had proposed to someone he didn’t know at all, someone who was a knight, a warrior, a guy with big cojones.

Or else, Colby could take Jason’s arm right now and start to explain. He wondered if it would be futile. It could take all night. In the end, he might just talk Jason into falling in love all over again, just like that. He waited a moment to see how he would act.

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Scott Pomfret is author of Since My Last Confession: A Gay Catholic Memoir; Hot Sauce: A Novel; the Q Guide to Wine and Cocktails, and dozens of short stories published in, among other venues, Ecotone, The Short Story (UK), SmokeLong Quarterly, Post Road, New Orleans Review, Fiction International, and Fourteen Hills. Scott writes from the cramped confines of his Provincetown beach shack, which he shares with his partner of twenty-one years. He is currently at work on a comic queer Know-Nothing alternative history novel set in antebellum New Orleans. www.scottpomfret.com.

Art:
Yuko Kyutoku
The Blue NY Botanical Garden
Mixed media on silkscreen, 23 x 23
2017