I was standing at the kitchen counter, trying to open a bottle of wine, when Daniel said it.
“You look really good tonight.”
I looked up. He was leaning against the other side of the counter with a beer in his hand. There were probably fifteen people scattered around the house, most of them people I knew well enough to hug when I arrived but not well enough to call without a reason. Somebody was playing music in the living room. Two women behind me were having an increasingly serious conversation about where to go for brunch the next morning.
Nothing about the moment should have registered.
“Thanks,” I said.
Daniel took a drink. “No, seriously. You do.”
That was it.
I finally got the cork out without breaking it, which had been my primary concern about five seconds earlier. I poured the wine. Daniel moved into the living room when someone called his name, and I stayed in the kitchen talking to a woman I’d dated briefly the year before.
But I remembered exactly how he’d looked at me when he said it. That was the part I couldn’t explain.
Daniel and I weren’t close. We’d met through mutual friends a couple of years earlier and probably saw each other six or seven times a year. Birthdays. Cookouts. Somebody’s Christmas party. Once at a bar when neither of us knew the other was going to be there.
I liked him. Everybody liked him.
He was gay, which I knew because I’d met two of his boyfriends over the years, although not at the same time. He was also good-looking. I’d known that before he told me I looked good. You don’t have to be gay to know when another guy is attractive. Daniel was maybe an inch shorter than me, with dark hair going gray around the temples, broad shoulders, and usually a little stubble. He had the kind of face that seemed to improve when he smiled.
None of that had ever been particularly relevant. Until apparently it was.
I saw him a few more times that night. Once when he passed through the kitchen again. Once across the living room while I was talking to someone. Once when he was standing near the front door putting on his coat.
I clocked him every time. That bothered me more than the compliment. Not bothered, exactly. Curious. I’d spent forty-three years wanting women, and nothing about that had changed. It had just never occurred to me to wonder about anything else.
Still, on the drive home, I thought about Daniel telling me I looked good. When I got home, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror longer than usual.
I’d worn a dark blue shirt that night. Nothing special. It fit me well, though I hadn’t thought much about it when I put it on. I looked at myself from the front and then turned slightly.
Jesus Christ. I laughed, then turned again. I was trying to see what Daniel had seen.
Women had told me I was handsome before. Women I’d dated had complimented my chest, my eyes, my ass, my arms. Once, a woman I’d been seeing told me I had beautiful hands, which I still remember because I’d never considered the possibility that hands could be beautiful.
Those compliments felt good. Of course they did. This felt different.
Daniel hadn’t said, Nice shirt. He’d looked directly at me and said, You look really good. Then, when I’d tried to accept it casually, he’d made sure I understood.
No, seriously. You do.
I took off the shirt and tossed it onto the chair in my bedroom. Then I picked it up and hung it in the closet. I noticed that too.
* * *
A few days later, I was scrolling through Instagram in bed, and Daniel appeared.
It wasn’t even his post. A mutual friend had put up pictures from the party, and there he was in the third one, standing with his arm around somebody I didn’t know.
I stopped, then zoomed in. That was new. I looked at his face first. Then the rest of him.
Nothing particularly sexual about the photograph. He was wearing jeans and a gray sweater. But I found myself looking at his shoulders, his chest under the sweater, the hand resting on the other guy’s shoulder. And his hands. They were bigger than I’d realized.
“Okay,” I said out loud, and put down the phone. A few seconds later I picked it up again and went to Daniel’s profile.
People look at other people’s social media all the time. I knew that. I wasn’t peering through his bedroom window. Still, I hadn’t stumbled across him this time. I’d gone looking.
There were pictures from trips, pictures with friends, a few from the gym. I scrolled farther back than I had any legitimate reason to scroll and found one of him on a beach wearing swim trunks. I stopped there, and this time I didn’t pretend I was looking at his face.
Daniel had a good body. Not extraordinary. He wasn’t twenty-five. Neither was I. There was hair on his chest and a little softness around his stomach. He looked like a man who exercised and also ate dinner.
I liked looking at him. There it was.
Not that I can tell he’s attractive.
Not that he’s a good-looking guy.
I liked looking at him.
That thought should have felt more consequential than it did. Instead, it almost felt like a relief to let it sit there without correcting it. I let myself look.
His chest. His stomach. His legs. The line where the waistband of his swim trunks sat low on his hips. The shape of him under the wet fabric, which I looked at longer than anything else.
Eventually I realized I was imagining him looking at me the same way. That was when I put the phone down.
* * *
I saw him again two weeks later. I knew he’d be there. That became relevant around six-thirty, when I was getting dressed.
I put on a gray button-down, looked at myself in the mirror, and took it off. I tried a black sweater. Better. Then I stood there staring at myself. “What the fuck are you doing?”
I put the gray shirt back on. Then I changed again. I wore the blue one. Of course I wore the blue one.
As I drove over, I briefly considered turning around and changing just to prove some point to myself. I wasn’t sure what the point would have been, so I kept driving.
Daniel was already there. I knew that before I saw him because I heard his laugh from the dining room. My body registered that information immediately. Nothing dramatic happened. My heart didn’t start pounding. No cinematic rush of blood anywhere interesting.
I simply became aware of myself. My shirt. My posture. The fact that I’d shaved. The way I was standing.
I walked into the dining room, and Daniel looked over. His eyes met mine. Then they moved down. Briefly. Back to my face.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He smiled. That was all. And I felt absurdly pleased.
For the next hour, I knew where he was in the room more often than I should have.
Around nine, our host asked him to grab a serving platter from the top of the china cabinet, and Daniel reached up for it with both hands. His shirt came untucked and rode up.
Not much. A few inches. Enough to show a strip of skin above his jeans, his navel with a little dark hair around it, and a line of hair running down from there and disappearing under the waistband of his underwear.
I’d seen men’s stomachs my whole life. Locker rooms. Beaches. My own, every morning in the mirror. None of it had ever meant anything. This did.
It was such an ordinary thing, a few inches of a man’s stomach, and I couldn’t look away. It felt almost private, like I’d seen something I wasn’t supposed to, and I wanted to see more. That trail of hair seemed less like a detail than a direction. I knew exactly where it went, and I wanted to follow it.
Then he brought the platter down, his shirt fell back into place, and it was over.
I took a drink I didn’t need and looked anywhere else. My mouth had gone dry.
At one point I was talking to a woman named Claire when Daniel came over and joined us. He stood beside me, close enough that our arms touched when he shifted his weight.
I felt it. The warmth of his arm through my sleeve. Whatever he was wearing, something clean and slightly woody. His shoulder was almost level with mine.
Claire was telling us something about her sister’s divorce, which probably deserved more attention than I was giving it.
Daniel said something that made her laugh. I laughed too, although I hadn’t entirely heard it.
He looked at me. I wondered if he found me attractive. Then a second thought arrived right behind it.
I hoped he did.
* * *
Later that night, we ended up alone in the kitchen. Not truly alone. Everyone else was twenty feet away in the living room. I was getting another drink when Daniel came in carrying two empty bottles.
He looked at me. Then at the shirt. “You wore it again.”
I looked down as though I’d forgotten what I had on. “Apparently.”
He smiled. “So you remembered.”
There was no good answer. “I remembered.”
He put the bottles on the counter. Neither of us said anything for a moment.
I could hear people talking in the other room. Someone laughed loudly. A glass hit a table. All the ordinary sounds of a party continued while something distinctly less ordinary was happening three feet away from me.
Daniel looked at me again. Not glanced. Looked.
“You do look good in it,” he said.
Heat rose up my neck. “Thanks.”
He was still looking at me. I could have made a joke. Normally I would have. Something to make the moment less naked.
I didn’t. “I liked it when you said that last time.”
His expression changed. Just slightly. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He didn’t say anything. Neither did I. Then he stepped toward me.
The recycling bin was behind me, and he’d picked the bottles back up. I moved aside, but not quite enough, and when he reached past me his hand touched my waist.
Maybe it was to steady himself. Maybe it wasn’t.
His palm landed just above my hip. For one second, perhaps two.
His body was close enough that I could feel heat from him. I could smell him again. His face was near mine.
And my body responded. Not dramatically. Not enough for him to notice unless he’d been looking for it.
But I felt myself beginning to get hard. The realization hit me so quickly that I stopped breathing.
Daniel dropped the bottles into the bin. His hand left my waist.
He looked at me. I looked back.
There was no way to pass this off as enjoying a compliment. What surprised me most was that I didn’t want to. For one strange second, I wanted him to put his hand back.
I looked at his mouth. Actually looked at it. At his lips. His jaw. The few inches of space between us.
I had never kissed a man. I’d never seriously wanted to kiss one.
Standing there, I wondered what it would be like to kiss Daniel. The scrape of his jaw against mine. Whether he’d wait for me or take over.
Daniel’s eyes stayed on mine. Something moved across his face, quick and unguarded, like he was deciding how far to let this go. Then it was gone.
“You okay?” he asked.
I laughed softly. “I’m not sure.”
That made him smile. He stepped back. “Fair enough.”
Then he walked back into the living room.
I stayed in the kitchen. I looked down at myself. “Jesus Christ,” I whispered. I waited another minute before going back to the party.
* * *
I thought about his hand on my waist in bed that night. There wasn’t much to think about. A hand. A hip. Two seconds. Apparently two seconds was plenty. I replayed it anyway.
Each time, I tried to figure out whether he’d done it deliberately. Each time, I landed on whichever answer I wanted in that moment.
Yes, definitely. No, of course not. Maybe.
The maybe was the one that kept me awake.
Eventually my hand moved down my stomach. I hesitated at the waistband of my shorts. Not for long.
I was already hard. I’d been half-hard since the kitchen, if I was honest, and I was finally being honest.
I wrapped my hand around myself and reached for the usual images, women I’d wanted and had. They were still there. Tonight they simply couldn’t compete. Instead, his palm came above my hip. The heat of him. The few inches between our mouths.
I let it come.
I imagined his hand where mine was, bigger, a man’s hand, sure of what it was doing. Imagined him leaning in, stubble rough against my jaw, telling me I looked good in that low voice while he stroked me. Imagined pulling his shirt up the rest of the way, following that trail of hair with my fingers, feeling the hair on his chest, the softness of his stomach, the waistband of his underwear, and what was under it.
That image finished me. I came harder than I had in months, his name half out of my mouth before I could stop it.
Afterward I lay there in the dark, sticky and stunned, and admitted something.
I wanted Daniel to want me. There was no clever way around that anymore.
Fantasy was one thing. What I kept circling back to was what it would actually be like. The weight of a man on top of me. His mouth. Being wanted that way by someone who knew exactly what he was doing.
I didn’t have answers to any of that. But I didn’t need them to understand that something about him had become sexual for me.
Maybe it had been sexual from the moment he looked at me across that kitchen counter, and the compliment had only given me permission to notice.
I reached for my phone. For a second I considered looking at his Instagram again. I didn’t need to. I could see him perfectly well.
* * *
A week later, I saw him at a coffee shop. Pure accident. I was waiting for my order when he came through the door. He saw me immediately.
“Blue shirt guy.”
I looked down at my jacket. “You can’t even see my shirt. And it isn’t the blue one.”
“I have a good memory.”
That little current again. He came over and hugged me.
We’d hugged before. Lots of men hug now. There was nothing unusual about it.
Except this time I noticed everything. His hand between my shoulder blades. My chest against his, flat and solid where I was used to softness. The pressure of his body. His stubble grazing my cheek, a roughness I’d never felt against my face before. That clean, woody smell again, close enough this time that I breathed it in. A pulse of heat went low in my stomach, and I hoped to God it stayed there.
The hug lasted no longer than any other hug we’d ever exchanged. It felt considerably longer.
When we separated, I looked at him. “You look good too, you know.” It came out before I could decide whether I was going to say it.
Daniel’s eyebrows went up. “Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
He looked slightly caught off guard. I liked that.
“Thanks,” he said.
I almost said, No, seriously. You do. I didn’t. It would have been too obvious. Then again, we’d passed obvious a while ago.
His coffee was ready, and we talked for another couple of minutes about work and mutual friends and nothing I remembered afterward.
Then he picked up his cup. “I’ll see you around.”
“Yeah.”
He started toward the door. I watched him go, and I didn’t bother hiding it.
I watched his jacket pull across his shoulders. I watched his legs as he walked. I watched his ass and thought, without apology, about getting my hands on it. That one made me smile.
At the door, Daniel turned around. He caught me. For half a second I felt embarrassed. Then I realized he was looking at me too. Neither of us looked away immediately.
Daniel smiled. Not the broad smile he gave everybody. Something smaller. I smiled back. Then he left.
I stood there holding my coffee, still feeling that charge between us even though he was already on the other side of the glass.
A man had looked at me. I’d liked it. Then I’d looked back.
I still didn’t know exactly what I wanted from Daniel. For the first time in my life, though, I didn’t need to.
Forty-three years, and all it had taken was one sentence.
You look really good tonight. I would never hear it the same way again.
