Page 11 of The Uncut Wood

“Aww, Bailey.” I felt a little emotional that he’d gone to so much trouble for us. “He’s such a sweetheart.”

“This looks awesome. Oh, and look!” Gunner found a box of tea lights tucked into the paper sack of dinner rolls. “Candlelight, as promised.”

Using a splinter of kindling, Gunner lit the candles and arranged them carefully in the center of the low coffee table. He sat cross-legged on the floor, sipping beer and watching me set the table with paper plates and plastic cutlery.

“This is all so fucking thoughtfully romantic,” he said, “but forgive me, I’m starving.”

We dug in. For a few minutes we ate in relative silence, except for occasional slurps, groans of pleasure, and the faint, high-pitched whine of the damp logs releasing moisture as they began to burn.

There was a brief negotiation about saving the dessert for later and switching to bourbon and Coke. We sat awkwardly smiling at each other over the remains of dinner and passing a plastic cup back and forth. I found myself back in the limbo between choosing a random meaningful topic of conversation and blurting out truths I couldn’t hold onto any longer.

“I don’t want to fuck up our friendship.” My voice came out low. It sounded too serious. “I don’t want to make it weird between us, but… I can’t stand it anymore.”

Gunner’s dark eyes were bright with alarm. “Stand what?”

“I can’t handle seeing you with other men. Or even thinking about you with anybody else. I was lying the whole time last summer, acting like I was cool with it, but I’m not.”

“You were just pretending.” He said it as a statement not a question.

“Going through the motions, I guess. I thought you wanted somebody who could be open. I wanted to be whatever you wanted.”

“Aww, Hank.” Gunner’s expression was pained. “Why the fuck didn’t you say something? Didn’t you notice I wasn’t adding any notches to that bedpost? You were new to the environment. You’re twenty-four… I assumed you might still have some exploring to do. I’ve had five more years to figure my shit out. The whole hookup competition was”—he waved his hand vaguely—“my attempt to support you and encourage you to be as free as you needed to be.”

“So you were pretending too?”

Gunner slowly blinked once. “Yeah.”

I let out a sigh of relief. “I don’t want to be free. I know that’s probably heteronormative, socio-conforming whatever-the-fuck, but it’s the way I feel. I do see things differently because of you. You don’t just cut wood; you count the tree’s rings. You trace the roots underground. You see the way things become what they are. Just listening to you makes me feel smarter. It’s like you’re teaching me some secret code that unlocks the world and makes even the simplest everyday stuff… extraordinary.”

“Wow.” Gunner’s eyes widened. “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know how much credit I can claim for that, but if you’ve discovered any piece of it because of me… that’s pretty fucking amazing. And humbling. Thank you.”

“I have explored all my options. I’ve dissected the complexity of what I want, but I’ve come to a pretty simple conclusion. I want to be with one person. My person.”

He nodded. “That’s cool. As long as it’s authentic, not some untested virtue or whatever.”

This was it. I was going to say it as bluntly as I could. “The truth is, you’re my person. When I’m with you, it’s obvious. I don’t need to explore anything, other than maybe this. Us. I don’t want to expand my horizons anymore. I want to feel the way I do about you.”

“You know,” Gunner paused, grinning so hard for a moment he couldn’t speak. “You have a way of making me feel like the coolest person in the world.”

I felt my cheeks heating up. “You are the coolest person in the world. Everybody thinks so.”

Gunner scooted closer to me on the floor until our knees were touching. “No, Hank. They don’t. They don’t see me like you do. You need to understand… all those men I don’t kiss… I don’t really talk to them either. They definitely don’t listen to me the way you do. They tune out what I’m saying and… get lost in my fashion statements. They don’t really get me. Don’t think I don’t know what that means.”

“What does it mean?”

“That you make me feel special because you’re special. I withhold the kissing because it represents a level of intimacy I can only have with someone I treasure as much as you. I think maybe everyone before you was just an experiment.”

I wasn’t expecting the tears that welled up. I’d forgotten that you could feel so happy it made you cry or that it could happen so suddenly. “I would have asked you months ago. Years.”

Gunner shrugged. “So you asked me today. Things have a way of working out in their own perfect time. We’re here. It’s all good.”

“But we’ve lost all that time we could’ve been—” A fat tear rolled down my cheek.

Gunner squeezed my knee. “We haven’t lost anything. We’ve been building a relationship for two and a half years. A real friendship. Isn’t that supposed to be the heart of everything?”

I swiped the tears away and nodded. “So, then…” My voice was thick. “The only thing we’re missing is… a kiss?”

“Not just a kiss, silly boy. A lot of kissing.” He reached out to squeeze my thighs, leaning toward me, his face coming closer. He growled. “And an incredible amount of fucking, I hope.”

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