The Other Guy by Attwell Cary

Author:Attwell, Cary [Attwell, Cary]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Published: 2012-10-26T05:00:00+00:00

***

After that, there were movies, a Cubs vs. Astros game and another concert, an African fusion thing, featuring a kora player he kind of knew from San Francisco. We cycled through every single meal of the day, even the portmanteau ones, I taking him to the hidden gems I hoped the mainstream crowd never discovered, he taking me to places that proved exactly why they'd earned the adoration of the mainstream crowd.

Autumn blew in on a cool, golden breeze, painting the town red and yellow. We swapped out short sleeves for long, missing nary a beat in our exploits, some meticulously planned and others cobbled together in a capricious minute. When icicles started decorating the city's eaves, we added scarves and jackets to the mix and continued on, bumping shoulders as we forged furrows in the snow on our way to the next great thing.

They weren't always supremely exciting, these next great things; we revisited several places multiple times -- the beer garden, for example, housed a roaring fireplace inside during the cold months and still served the best burgers money could buy -- well on our way to earning regular status. What made the next great things great was simply that we were doing them together, that we were finding such ease and understanding in each other's company.

I had, by this time, succumbed to classical conditioning with my ringtone as well, involuntarily smiling to myself whenever my cell phone shrilled, involuntarily smiling even more when it lit up with Nate's picture, always happy to hear him tell me what we were going to do on any given day, even if it was just to grab a quick lunch together in the middle of the work week. I didn't ask, though I wondered if he was as behaviorally modifiable as I was, but he seemed equally happy when the shoe was on the other foot, whenever I was the one to ring him up and ask him to gallivant somewhere with me.

It could be that I was imagining it, or projecting something of my own onto him that wasn't there, but I couldn't, or didn't want to, make that explanation stick. Something in his voice, an indecipherable timbre of fondness, when he spoke with me seemed absent with anyone else; something in his face, a subtle softness in the curve of his smile, seemed reserved only for me. And I knew I wasn't imagining the way I was around him, brimming with tightly lidded affection, meticulous about never letting it spill, but never happier than when we got to spend hours doing anything or nothing together.

How dangerous exactly was this game we were playing?

We flirted, madly, with each other and with the careless expectation that anything could happen again, even though we never let it.

Before, it had been something of a moot point, as there was a professional code of ethics that wouldn't have allowed anything between us anyway. But I had discharged Abby several months ago -- her esses

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