The Beach House by Jane Green

that aroused him most always featured boys and, more specifically, his best friend at school.
    He would lie there, trying to push the fantasies aside, terrified of being different, terrified of anyone finding out, trying to convince himself that he was interested in girls, that as long as he had a girlfriend, stayed around women, he would be like all the other boys, he would be normal.
    And he loved women. Surely that must mean something, he would tell himself. He had always been so much more comfortable with women so surely he must be straight, like everyone else, even if he never developed a fascination with breasts the way the other boys did, even if the girls he dated were, well, boyish.
    Then, at college, he remembers trying to date a girl who didn’t seem to know they were dating. The night he first attempted to kiss her she had pulled back in surprise.
    “But I thought you were gay,” she said, and he had recoiled in horror.
    “Why?” he demanded. “Why would you think that?”
    “I just assumed,” she said, and she never gave him the reasons.
    He built himself up. If he looked masculine, macho, there would be no doubt, for he assumed she had thought he was gay because he was skinny.
    He made sure he always had girlfriends. Lovers. Women around him all the time. Long-term relationships. Being with a woman meant he didn’t have to think about it, didn’t have to think about the hard bodies that he felt so drawn to in the gym, the men who occasionally gave him searching looks, the men he tried to ignore.
    Until Steve.
    Friends for years, they had gone to Amagansett the summer he met Bee, and the night before they met Bee, he and Steve had got drunk together, and, despite thinking about every detail, every second of that night for years, despite thinking of it still, he is not sure how it happened, but he and Steve ended up sleeping together.
    What he remembers most about that night is how every bone and every fiber of his body felt as if it was on fire. This is what I’ve been missing, he remembers thinking. This is what it feels like to be turned on. This is what I’ve been waiting for my entire life.
    And it didn’t feel unnatural, or strange, or wrong. It felt like he had come home. It felt like the most wonderful, thrilling, incredible night of his life.
    In the morning they could barely look at each other, and when they did Daniel found himself announcing he wasn’t gay, and Steve agreed. They said it wouldn’t happen again.
    Daniel noticed Bee later that day. A woman. Safety. Bee meant not having to travel down a path Daniel wasn’t ready to travel down. Bee meant security. She meant not having to think about his night with Steve, what it really meant, not having to shock his parents, tell his friends, live a life that Daniel didn’t want.
    Because he didn’t want to be gay, and he thought if he didn’t want to enough, then he wouldn’t be.
    For years it was easy to keep running. At night he would replay that one night with Steve, and the temptation to find it again was sometimes overwhelming. On an overnight trip in Boston to inspect a building the company was thinking of buying, he walked past a gay bar with a few men standing outside, eyeing him up and down, giving him that look that he doesn’t know, but he knows . . . oh how he knows.
    In many ways it would be so easy to go inside, he thought, to be led into a back room, to have a nameless, faceless encounter that might put some of these fantasies to rest, might allow him to put it behind him. No one would know, no one would be hurt. But he’s married now, he has his beautiful girls, and if he started down that path there is a part of him that knows there would be no going back.
    Secrets become harder to keep the older you get. The things you think you can suppress, those idiosyncrasies and fantasies you hope no one will ever discover, become harder and harder to hide as the years advance.
    Partly it is maturity—the fear of discovery