Read Taking Chances for Free Online Page B

either trying to get me to move or set me up with a hookup.”
    I found no humor in that statement at all, but Linda seemed to find an endless vein of humor as she began to laugh louder than the music.
    “Knock it off,” I said, trying to quiet her as I looked around the small bar nervously. “You’re going to attract attention.”
    She wiped tears from her eyes as she swallowed her next round of mirth. “You do know it’s bad when your mom’s trying to get you laid for Christmas. A sure sign you are wound up too tight.”
    “I am not wound up too tight,” I protested, but we both knew I was lying through my teeth.
    I had tried going out with a total of three men in my life, each one worse than the last. I tended to end up being attracted to other men who were confused or in the closet or confused and in the closet, which made the already frustrating process of dating a complete and total car wreck of an experience.
    When my parents moved away and left me the store, I hid behind the responsibility so I could give up on dating altogether. There was a small gay bar out of town, which brought up a whole series of memories I don’t want to get into, so let me say after a while, I just stopped going and gave up on the idea of dating someone and leave it at that for right now.
    My mother, it seems, never did.
    “So then meet him,” the woman who was quickly becoming my ex-best friend said to me from across the table. “What’s the worst that can happen?”
    “I am pretty sure that every single bad idea in the world started with those words.”
    I drank the rest of my beer and tried to push the thoughts about Matt from my mind, but they refused to budge. I spent the next few days in a daze as I worked the oncoming Christmas rush, trying to figure out how I could have missed the fact one of the Wallace brothers was gay all this time.
    From the time I reached junior high, I realized that most of Foster, Texas’s school population looked on the Wallace brothers as living legends. By high school, I figured out that a lot of the adult population felt the same way. They were three of the biggest, strongest, and most athletic guys anyone knew. They always seemed to be together, which gave them the illusion of being bigger than any normal guys I knew; and though no single one of them was stunningly handsome, the three of them together somehow brought their best features out and practically eliminated any weaknesses, so each of them became even better looking. On the field, they were the very models of a modern day jock. Off the field, they were an erotic distraction I didn’t need.
    I remember Matt was the youngest of the three and the one who made me the most nervous.
    When I was a teenager, I had a bad habit of losing my keys no matter how hard I tried to hold onto them. The space in my brain was finite, and a majority of it was occupied with keeping up my straight pretense, or at least that’s how I saw it. Because of that, it was no wonder that other things, like house keys, tended to fall through the cracks.
    Sometimes literally.
    After the fourth time, my dad refused to make another copy, complaining that there were now more sets of keys to our house wandering around Foster than there were doors to and inside our house. My mother had taken to helping him in the afternoons with the uniform rentals, which meant if I got home and realized I was locked out, I had to wait for someone to come home. It was frustrating at first, but after a while I tried to make the best of it.
    I stashed some books under the back porch and, when my keys went missing, I just leaned against the back door and read until someone came home. It was relaxing in a way my teenage mind couldn’t process at the time. Being alone was the only time I could be myself, even if it just meant reading a book with my shoes off. I’m not sure when he started doing it, but about a month into my reading, I noticed Matt peeking through my back fence.
    At first I