Across the room, Briggs turned to face me. Brown eyes twinkling, he crossed the kitchen slowly, carrying a big red tray of bacon and waffles.
He was painfully handsome the first time he did this, when he was twenty-five and launching his own landscaping business. Today, after ten years of planting bouganvilla and laying sprinkler pipe, there's a gray strand or two in that generous mop of brown hair and a little more meat around the middle -- but he's still sexier than a man in a pair of sweat pants has a right to be.
What caught my eye, though, was not the breakfast or the man behind it. Instead, I saw only this: around Brigg's neck was a bright green Ted Baker tie, lying flat against the smooth brown skin of his perfect chest.
He put the tray down in front of me. Grinning from ear to ear, he yanked off the tie, lassoed my neck with it, pulled me forward, and gave me a big, wet, sloppy kiss. As he withdrew, he brushed my ear with his soft lips and whispered, "Happy anniversary."
I went from half-asleep to wide awake in less than a second. "Anniversary?"
Briggs nodded.
You don't know me, so I need to tell you this: I am an incredibly skilled straight-faced liar. Here's how it started: when I was in eighth grade, my mother, slurring her words only slightly, looked up from her morning glass of milk and Kahlua and asked, "You're some kind of faggot, aren't you?"
I was fourteen at the time -- extremely conscious of my pale, hairy, Irish-influenced body and how different it was from the lean, tan, wiry, bodies of the other guys in gym class -- and terrified that someone could tell, strictly from looking at me, that I was a lot more interested in seeing those guys naked than I ought to be.
My cheeks went red. My lower lip trembled. "No."
Mother burst out laughing. "Baby girl, you gotta learn to suck that shit up. You turn scarlet every time someone calls you the f-word, you're gonna spend high school being called Tommy Tomato." She poked me, hard, on the chest. "Let me tell you something only a mother would. You're a faggot, and it's oblivious."
My cheeks burned. "You mean it's obvious."
She toasted me, sloshing sticky white liquid over the rim of her glass. "That, too."
Right then and there, I decided to prove Mother wrong ... and I dedicated the bulk of my teenage years to learning to lie.
I lied in word: reeling off heterosexual fantasies I never had, boasting about back-seat conquests that never happened, and trash-talking the other faggots who didn't have the skills to blend in. I lied in deed: asking Jenna Barnesworth out, telling her that I loved her, and fantasizing about her brother, Dennis, in order to get Mr. Jiggles to rise to the occasion.
Instead of crossing my legs when sitting down, I learned to sprawl. Instead of squealing, "Oh, excuse me!" when I farted, I learned to adopt an expression of supreme self-satisfaction. Instead of keeping my own saliva in my mouth where it belongs, I learned to snort and spit.
Well, that's not entirely true. I gave up on the spitting. For reasons I could never determine, I was never able to get the trajectory right. While straight guys are impressed by someone who can hawk something up and launch it three or four feet away, they aren't particularly impressed when you hawk something up and send it sliding off your chin and onto your shirt.
But the point is this: I manned up so I could pass myself off. Spend years lying about the most intimate aspects of your life, and you develop a poker face that not even Stu Unger could penetrate.
So I put on my best poker face, waggled my eyebrows at Briggs, and said, "Yeah. Um. You, too."
Briggs sat down opposite me, passed out plates, and started serving waffles. "You forgot our anniversary."
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