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  Though Phel responded with a proper handshake, something seemed to dawn on him after he spent a couple of moments looking at my face with a puzzled expression. Two guesses what that was. “Hugh Dorian,” he said slowly. “I thought you looked kind of familiar, but I’m not great with faces. Plus it’s entirely possible I’m just going crazy.” His mouth snapped shut at this. Hesitantly, he added, “You are Hugh Dorian, right? The writer?”

  Next time I’d ask for a smaller jacket photo or, fuck, a composite sketch that didn’t quite get my nose right. “Got it in one,” I told him instead, trying not to sound bent out of shape. “Here I thought I was undercover.” Please don’t ask me for a fuckin’ autograph, I thought.

  Now that he’d stepped closer and correctly guessed my identity, I was able to get a much clearer look at Phel’s face. He was pretty handsome, I had to admit: scruffy and wild-haired in a rakish way, full lips that probably made a lot of women jealous, huge blue eyes. Not surprisingly, he was shorter than me by a few inches, compact but for his broad shoulders and strong legs. Despite the gruffness of his voice, he was actually pretty young—early thirties was my guess, around Nate’s age.

  The difference was that Phel looked tired, more tired than I could remember having seen a person look, the exception being myself in the mirror the night Nell died. It made me wonder what stories lay behind the shadows under Phel’s eyes, and to be honest, I still wonder. But that day we were just getting our introductions out of the way, and it wouldn’t be another few weeks until I worked up the nerve to ask why he was the most miserable guy in San Diego County.

  “Sorry for spoiling your anonymity,” he apologized. “For what it’s worth, you don’t look a whole lot like your jacket photo—it makes you look short, for one thing, and kind of smug.” At this, I blinked, and Phelan immediately backpedaled. “But you don’t look short or smug here, I mean. You’re tall and kind of stun—”

  “Can I stop you right there?” I interrupted. This was getting ridiculous. The guy spoke like he’d gone to finishing school at Eton but had less tact than Howard Stern. “I think I get the idea.” A regretful look crossed Phel’s face. Nevertheless, I was glad when he didn’t try to apologize again. Instead I surprised us both by asking, “How would you feel about me teaching you how to surf? I wouldn’t charge anything, and I’d sleep a lot better at night knowing you won’t die a watery death on my watch.”

  “I can pay in beer,” said Phel, and that, as they say, was that.

  That first meeting was a little awkward, plagued as it was by Phelan’s enigmatic qualities and tendency to talk about his past life like it’d all happened to someone else, but we’ve been hanging out every day since then, having graduated from early-morning surf lessons to the kind of stuff regular friends do, or at least insofar as I’ve ever had a regular friend. You know: coffee, football games, movies, beer. We also run together a lot, and the first time I saw his fast, steady gait on the beach as he plowed ahead of me despite my much longer strides, I knew how he got those leg muscles. Phel’s kind of a natural athlete, even though he knows nothing about real-people sports like basketball or football, and tons about weird shit like fencing and cricket and polo—and baseball, for some reason, though he dodged the question when I inquired about the source of his info. His knowledge of the Texas Rangers would have made Nate proud. He’s even come around to tolerating Callie’s high-energy canine demands, after enough of her persistent affection.

  While there’s no denying he’s still the weirdest person I know, at least I understand a few more of the reasons behind that. The purpose of Phelan’s visit to Cardiff is so he can rest up and pull himself together before he figures out what he wants to do next with his life—I guess the less polite way to put it is that the dude had a nervous breakdown and retired to Cardiff to recoup.

  I’ve tried to get more of the story out of him, but the most he’ll give me is he made a mistake with the wrong person and had the misfortune of getting caught. There’s nothing to suggest he knows what even happened to the other guy, but from the sounds of it, that doesn’t matter; Phel’s family disowned him either way, being the staunch religious types that don’t much care for gay love affairs. Phel has never used that word—love—but I can tell by the look he gets when he talks about the man in question that there’re still some feelings there, stuff that won’t be cured by a few weeks of R & R. I feel bad for him, but that isn’t why we’re friends. More than anything, I think we understand our mutual need for privacy and a reliable person to have your back.

  After all, those things aren’t exactly easy to come by, not even in sunny Cardiff-by-the-Sea. I just wish we’d known enough to appreciate them before they got swept away with the tide.

  1

  Phel

  MY DAYS at the Palermo Springs Centre for Addiction and Mental Health all start the same: I wake up around seven, shower, go to yoga, shower, have an uninspiring breakfast of fresh fruit and oatmeal, dress to meet Hugh at the beach for a few hours before lunch, shower, then go to my afternoon session with Willa, my counselor. Evenings I have to myself. For the record, I don’t have OCD—it’s just necessary to bathe several times a day to keep from smelling pervasively like seawater or sweat in this climate. Growing up, I split my time between the East Coast and the Midwest, so with the exception of New York in August, I’m not exactly built for these kinds of temperatures. No one wants to be the sweaty guy in group therapy, not with all that hugging.

  Hugh is fond of mocking the predictability of my days, but Willa says routine can be grounding in times of chaos. There’s not much chaos in my life—more like a void—but if a routine can feel like a tranquil island in stormy seas (Willa’s words, not mine), I don’t see why it can’t serve the same purpose if the water around you is totally becalmed and empty. Besides, I kind of like yoga and having nothing else to do each day besides surf and hang out with Hugh and think about why I’m here. I don’t just mean here in the philosophical sense, though that’s part of it. Mostly I mean this slip of a town called Cardiff-by-the-Sea.

  I came to Palermo on the recommendation of my sister, Aurelia. Turns out she spent some time here while I was away at college, when her drinking got just a little too out of control. Our parents thought she went to Bali for a month, when really they were the reason she needed rehab in the first place. Not hard to see how that could happen, since dealing with our mother and father can be intense on a good day, but I’m the first to report that not dealing with them isn’t necessarily better. We all hate our families until they’re gone, or they ask us not to come back, and suddenly we realize why Donne went on about how no man is an island. Woe betide the poor asshole who discovers he is an island after all. Which is to say, I’m that asshole.

  It took being disowned at thirty-two to realize how little I had going for me besides my family and my job. The other incident I don’t like to talk about, the one that put me here, was a rash and ill-advised way to break out of my dull existence in the Midwest. Gay love affairs, especially poorly planned ones with married men, never go over well when your family is oppressively Catholic. Turns out there’s a reason I’ve never been known as “the spontaneous one,” because all spontaneity had to offer was a broken heart, some frozen bank accounts, and a big fat nothing in place of the life I used to have. Probably not even Nate—that’s his name, the asshole—would take my calls anymore, were I to actually pick up the phone and dial.

  Willa tells me I don’t show enough appreciation for the little things, like the fact that I’m alive and healthy and in full control of my mental faculties, but as much as I like the woman, sometimes I think Willa is full of shit. She has a family, and a gorgeous one at that—I’ve seen her husband at the pool enough times. Rumor has it she had an Oxy addiction before becoming a counselor, but now she’s all about the Zen and the Eat, Pray, Love. Elizabeth Gilbert she’s not.

  But I’m not bitter, honest. I’m getting better.

  However morbid this might sound, I wish I�
�d come to Palermo with a substance abuse problem—at least I would have stood the risk of having a little fun beforehand, or damaged enough brain cells to keep me from remembering everything in living color. Instead I’m stuck in the independent living program with all the other depressives and anger-management cases—talk about the amateur ward. It’s somewhere between an outpatient program and a retirement home, with my own private residence on the Palermo compound and the freedom to come and go as I please outside of my mandatory counseling schedule. I guess I’m kind of a sorry excuse for a crazy person—I barely even attempted suicide. Sure, a nervous breakdown is nothing to sneeze at, but I know the other patients probably look at me and think I’m just some melodramatic rich kid who can’t get over losing his trust fund. Maybe I am. Maybe I also have a bit of paranoia thrown into the mix.

  That could be why I like Hugh so much, because he’s got his own issues and isn’t constantly on my case to talk about my feelings, or even about his. Occasionally I’m struck by the urge to ask him about his family and his dead girlfriend and anything else he’ll tell me, but Hugh keeps that stuff locked up tighter than Fort Knox. I know he has a brother somewhere at the opposite end of the country, and their parents are dead, but that’s about it. Part of Hugh’s reluctance to divulge information has to do with his celebrity, which I understand, and part of it has to do with not being ready, which I also understand. He’ll have to have it out with that stuff eventually, though. He’s too smart not to realize that.

  The same goes for me. But I don’t feel judged around him. He knows all about what happened in Columbus—the short version, with names withheld to protect the guilty—and his first response was “The guy sounds like an asshole. I probably would have freaked out too, if a girl treated me like that. You were lucky you got out.”

  Got out, yes. Came out—not so much, though I more or less agree with Willa that a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. Still, it meant a lot that Hugh took my side without question, without even knowing the other half of the story. I have Willa to make rational arguments about how I should have seen the break-up coming, should have predicted it’d blow up in my face. Hugh is there to teach me surfing and be my friend and tell me that everyone bets on the wrong horse sometimes.

  The whole thing with Nate started off in what I thought was a completely innocuous way. And if innocuous isn’t the right word, because affairs so rarely are, then at least it wasn’t anything sinister. I thought I had my money on Secretariat, and instead found myself with a Phar Lap. After the arsenic poisoning.

  I was splitting my time between Chicago and Columbus, managing the Midwest offices of my family’s advertising business. For the obvious reasons, I liked Chicago a lot better, especially since that’s where Aurelia lives, but my attention was most often needed in Columbus, where the biggest number of things seemed to go wrong without someone to oversee the process. That the responsibility fell to me was just family obligation and bad luck.

  It’s not a bad town, Columbus, just a little boring for anyone who isn’t a student or into tailgate parties, or who doesn’t start hyperventilating every time the Buckeyes come up in conversation. (No, I’m not one of those people.) My time in the city was spent either at our offices downtown or my apartment on Parkview Ave., not including places like the gym or the grocery store.

  On that one particular Friday, I was actually getting ready to drive to Illinois the next day, happy to leave Ohio behind. I considered Chicago home; it’s where my friends were. There weren’t many people I hung out with socially in Columbus—nor in Chicago, being honest—and in retrospect, that was part of the problem. Desperation and boredom can make a fool of anyone. One-night stands were a common occurrence for me, because even lapsed Catholic ad men have needs, and I didn’t have much time for dating. Too much effort involved trying to keep my personal tastes hidden from my family. Honestly, Columbus was the last place I thought any of this would happen.

  So of course, that’s where it did.

  Sexual orientation isn’t something I ever had to think too hard about. I knew from a young age I was queer, and if my ultrareligious upbringing wasn’t enough to shake it out of me, probably nothing would. Disguising my lack of interest in women became second nature early on, and I bore the blind dates and family-arranged meetings with as much equanimity as you’d expect. Never was I anything but polite and friendly to those women. A few of them even figured out I wasn’t interested in them not because of their clothes or hair or personality, but for another fundamental reason—the lack of dick, for one.

  My point is that, when I decided to go out for a couple of drinks and unwind after work that night, it wasn’t to some random breeder bar, but rather a gay local called Foxley’s. Their meal service was decent, but the real attraction was the down-to-earth crowd that flocked there on weekends. It encompassed neighborhood gays, businessmen, and the odd tourist in search of a quiet, old-timey pub atmosphere not overwhelmingly populated by OSU students, which was hard to come by in Columbus. In other words, Foxley’s was a place for gay men to paw at each other in a civilized way, without concern for straight judgment or public decency laws. I might like dick, but straight men have never interested me. Although I know plenty of guys who go in for the excitement of feeling they’ve “turned” someone, that’s not for me—I don’t want ambiguity about who’s checking me out and whether they might be a sexual tourist. The night before a short road trip seemed a perfect time to take someone home, since I could truthfully say I had to be up early the next morning. No muss, no fuss. Or so I thought.

  The dinner crowd had mostly cleared out by the time I got there, replaced by those more interested in cruising than the nightly special. It was barely June, and during the summer months, Foxley’s always did good business. Things were starting to get busy at the front of the restaurant, which was crammed with men chatting in groups or more intimate couples, a familiar mating dance in full swing. I looked around and smiled at a few people I knew, particularly shy Adam, who was mixing up martinis and pouring wine behind the bar. By no means did I spot Nate right away—it was he, in fact, who spotted me, though not until much later. I settled myself a respectable distance away from the throng of people and ordered a Scotch on the rocks, something I didn’t really like but had grown up watching my father drink.

  Three or four men paused to say hello or offered to buy me a beer, but for one reason or another, they didn’t compel me—this time because of their hair or clothes or personality. I started to think about leaving after I’d been there less than an hour. Either no one really appealed to me, or I wasn’t as motivated to cruise as I thought. But then this guy sat down a few seats away and ordered the same thing, except he drank his Scotch neat and didn’t seem to care whether it was top-shelf.

  Now, I consider myself a man of restraint, for the most part. No doubt a lifetime of checking my flamboyance at the door saved me from acting like one of those silly fags who faints at the first sign of a hot body or a gorgeous smile. But the minute I saw Nate’s face, I would have done a striptease on the bar just to get his attention. After a few minutes, it became clear that wasn’t necessary, because Nate cast a lingering glance my way, holding eye contact when I returned his look. I remember thinking he didn’t seem altogether comfortable in this environment, then quickly dismissing the thought because he was hot, for one thing, and he was here. No one walked into Foxley’s without knowing exactly what he’d signed up for.

  “All-American” was the first thing that popped into my head when I saw Nate. Tall, athletic, and so beautiful I actually started to feel insecure about my own appearance, Nate looked too much the meat-and-potatoes jock type for a place like Foxley’s. And yet, he still managed to turn every head in the place. On the one hand, I was flattered to have caught his eye, but knew I cut a fine figure of my own in my tailored gray Armani. (Seriously, Mom and Dad—how did you not figure it out sooner?) Nate’s own suit seemed plain by comparison, but it was dark and he’d already manag
ed to lose the tie and jacket, anyway. All I cared about was getting him to stop staring and come talk to me, so I tilted my head and gave him my best come-hither smile, which Aurelia says could charm the panties off a nun. Or a priest. Whatever. Ducking his head as though to hide a blush, Nate smiled to himself and pushed away from the bar to wander over.

  “Hey,” he said easily. With his arms on the bar, he leaned forward and met my gaze. Green, green eyes, like a cat’s, and no less sharp. His eyelashes were so thick they gave the appearance of eyeliner. Up close he was even more enchanting, tall and freckled and with the most voluptuous lips I’d ever seen. True, my own lips draw plenty of comments from interested parties, but Nate’s were as red and shapely as a Dürer portrait, all sharp Cupid’s bow and upturned corners. I noticed his fingers drumming a rapid tattoo against his glass and, sensing his nervousness, I smiled a little wider. He cleared his throat. “Can I buy you another drink?”

  As far as pickup lines went, it was classic but effective, and I appreciated his directness. “You can,” I told him. “We’re more or less drinking the same thing anyway.” He signaled to Adam for another round, and I propped myself on my elbows against the bar, matching his stance. Allowing myself the opportunity to rake my eyes down his body and ending on a smile to show I liked what I saw, I added, “I haven’t seen you around here before.”

  This drew a laugh, and in spite of myself, I blushed at the brilliance of his smile. Where did you even see teeth that white and perfect, outside of a fucking Abercrombie catalogue? I found myself wondering where the hell this guy had come from and what had taken him so long to find me. “I didn’t take you for the type that recycles tired pickup lines,” he chuckled.

  “Coming from the man who opened with ‘Buy you a drink?’” I shot back.

  Nate bit his lip around another smile and sighed in resignation, but didn’t argue.