Between Boyfriends by Michael Salvatore Page B

confident, take-charge kind of guy, I couldn’t mask the fact that this was an important meet ’n’ greet. It couldn’t simply be coincidence that Brian should round the corner at the exact moment I was contemplating my future; I tossed my request for a boyfriend into the universe and the universe responded by tossing me Brian. Universally speaking, this meeting could end in one of three ways and only one of those ways would ensure my future as a fulfilled, nonbitter, and chronically happy adult gay man. Either Brian would gulp down his Starbucks and flee once he realized I was unworthy of nonstop thought; we would go back to his place and have incredible, porn-worthy nonstop one-night-stand sex; or he would ask me out on a date so we could begin our passionate, nonstop miniseries-worthy love affair. Feeling much more like a chaste Richard Chamberlain from The Thornbirds than the take-charge Richard Chamberlain of Shōgun , I decided that my whirling stomach was an indication that this encounter would turn into something heartfelt and not heartless.
    “So why don’t we start at the very beginning,” I said.
    “That’s a very good place to start,” Brian replied.
    “What’s your full name?”
    “Brian Patrick Oldsboro. And you?”
    “Steven Bartholomew Ferrante. Age?”
    “Thirty-two.”
    “I’m thirty-three.”
    “Perfect, I like older men.”
    “I’m Italian Catholic from Jersey.”
    “Lapsed Baptist from Alabama.”
    “Really?” I said, not hiding my disappointment very well.
    “Is that a problem?” Brian asked.
    “You know something, it’s actually a good thing,” I replied. “My mother is going to have to find a flaw in you anyway. It might as well be religion.”
    “You have one of those mothers too?”
    “Anjanette is the president of the club.”
    “Oh, I don’t know about that. My mother’s held that position for years.”
    “No, seriously, my mother’s the president of the tenants’ group in her senior citizens’ building. Or as I like to call it, the insane asylum.”
    Brian stared at me intently and then said, “I can’t wait to meet her. And the rest of the inmates.”
    With that one sentence I knew that Brian wouldn’t be chugging his coffee and that we wouldn’t be having passionate yet meaningless sex within the hour; we would have a relationship. Sometimes you get the vibe and the vibe, like Brian’s vibrantly blue eyes, cannot be ignored. And so I didn’t ignore them, but held his gaze as Brian filled me in on some of the major moments of his life that I had missed. His family’s move to Alabama from New York when Brian was two courtesy of his father’s employer, his move to New York from Alabama when he was twenty-two courtesy of his first employer, his move up the corporate ladder to his current position as Senior Editor at Upgrade , the men’s magazine unofficially targeted to men of confused sexual orientation whose official tagline is “For men who want to be on top,” and his move downtown from a long-term sublet on the Upper East Side.
    “Now that I live in Chelsea I finally feel like a gay man,” Brian declared.
    “Seriously?”
    “Well, yeah. I can walk around and be who I am. If I feel like wearing a too-tight T-shirt I can and I don’t have to worry that some breeder couple with two kids is going to roll their eyes at me as I strut by. I know the area can be a gay cliché, but it really is freeing. Where do you live?”
    “Hell’s Kitchen. Forty-seventh between Ninth and Tenth,” I said. “Not very glamorous, but I can walk to work. And I’m close to Port Authority so when my mother has a crisis, and you have been warned, Anjanette—that’s her name—is Italian for panic , I can be at her place in roughly twenty-five minutes. Twenty if I catch the express bus.”
    “You’re close with your mother?”
    “Well, she’s a widow. My younger brother, Paulie, lives over an hour away in Sparta—wife, two cars, his own dental practice, he’s