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Chester showed up fifteen minutes early, and Nick was an hour late.
To be fair, this wasn’t exactly out of the ordinary. They made plans three times a week and he was lucky if Nick showed up for one, as if even the implied promise of something more to come after wasn’t enough to prime the situation. It should have been humiliating to have to reach out to this man day after day as if he didn’t have any other options.
Chester didn’t want the other options. He liked Nick. And that was the worst part of it all.
“Sorry,” Nick said before even saying hello. He settled down on one of the tiny cafe chairs. The sounds of city traffic outside the wide glass pane of the window covered his voice in a dull, rumbling blanket, and it all vibrated through Chester’s skull as he tilted his head against the window. He smiled just a bit to himself as Nick explained, “I had trouble getting out of work on time. And then the rain...”
Chester, as relaxed in his chair as he had been for more than an hour, simply shrugged and slipped a paper menu over the mosaic table and toward Nick.
“That’s fine,” he said, because it was always fine by him. As long as Nick ended up back at his table. “Sorry to make you come out in it. I thought it would be nice to meet while the sun was up for once.” He twisted his napkin in his lap, hidden by the table. “Even if we can’t see it.”
Nick had been reading the drink menu while Chester spoke, but his eyes locked in place after just a couple lines. His hair was wet with rain and a drop of it rolled from the dark locks stuck to his forehead, down his skin, to drop onto the paper menu before he finally snapped out of it.
“I...didn’t realize you asked me to a coffee shop.”
“What do you mean?” Chester asked, even if he knew. He looked down at the napkin where it had crumpled in his pale hands. “Is something wrong with that? We’ve...we’ve had coffee at my place before.” Albeit after a night of roughhousing, before the final sendoff. Chester shifted to sit forward on his chair. “I thought you liked it.”
“I...I do, Chester.” Nick sniffled a little and flipped the menu over as if he expected to see more than pastries on the back. “I like coffee. It’s just...”
The warm backdrop of coffee shop conversation and the faint pop music playing over the speakers sat between them like a tangible wall for several seconds. Nick didn’t finish his sentence and Chester couldn’t bear to ask where it would go. Where they would go from there.
The indecipherable mush of everyone else’s lives quieted for a moment, giving Nick room to say in a soft, low sort of way, “It’s different. That’s all.”
Chester let his eyes drop away from where he’d been watching Nick avoid eye contact.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. “It’s different. Is that a bad thing?”
“No,” Nick answered, just a little too soon.
Chester couldn’t deny how his heart crumpled at that. He’d never admit it out loud, though. He shifted in his chair to level his green gaze across the table at Nick as the man avoided looking at him in return.
“Alright.” Chester drummed his fingers on the table. “I mean, that’s fine. How was work?”
“Fine.”
“Good.” Chester barely resisted the urge to chew a hole in his bottom lip. He reapplied his chapstick instead. “I took some really good photos of this lady in the park today.”
Nick’s phone vibrated on the table between them. Nick glanced down at it, then back to Chester, having pretty clearly not registered what Chester had said at all.
“And I’m entering talks with the Daily News,” Chester continued. He flinched ever so slightly as Nick’s phone vibrated again. “They’re really interested—”
“That’s great,” Nick said as he flipped his phone over to read the notification. He flipped it back over, but not before Chester could glimpse the contact name for the text. It started with a J.
The two sat in silence for several awkward seconds before Chester took a deep breath in and said, “Y’know, Nick, if you’ve got somewhere to be, that’s fine. We can just put in a rain check. Meet up another time.”
Nick nodded with visible relief. “That’s probably for the best, actually. I—” He rose from his seat in a rush and looked at Chester for a moment in silence before admitting, softer, more genuinely, “I’m sorry.”
Chester peered up at him.
“Yeah.” He stayed seated. “No problem.”
Nick stood there on his side of the table, all the way out the door in every sense except physical. He at least had the decency to ask, “When can we meet up again?”
Chester took a deep breath in and opened his calendar on his phone as heartache edged back into his focus. He blinked it away just as his eyes began to sting.
“Um, I don’t really have any mornings for the next couple of weeks,” Chester said, sounding somewhat defeated. “But—“
“Well, what about the jazz bar on Mary-Ann street? Like we’ve done before.” And then, as if it were some sort of compromise: “They serve lunch, too.”
Chester stared down at his phone screen, determined not to make this a thing, because they hadn’t actually gone for that lunch Nick had promised him. It was always the bar or a party or a late night walk in the park, and it always led to the same place. His place...or worse, Nick’s car.
Maybe he wanted something more than a casual fling. It didn’t matter, though. He could already see Nick running out the door if he stepped too far over the line they’d drawn together in silence.
He couldn’t keep quiet about what he wanted forever, though. He’d done that with Lucille for far too long.
Finally, he said, “...can’t we just do coffee? I mean...”
“What’s wrong with grabbing a drink?”
“Nothing. I just...”
“It’s not like this can go anywhere, Chester. You have a wife.”
And there it was.
He’d explained it to Nick once before. He and Lucille were about as romantically and physically incompatible as a married couple could be...they’d never gotten married because they wanted to marry each other. They weren’t committed. It was just yet another place where Chester had put himself aside for somebody else.
Nick was watching out the window. Chester wasn’t even sure if he’d be heard if he spoke again, or if it would even matter.
It took until Nick pulled out his phone again to read a message before Chester finally just gave in.
“Yeah,” he said dully. “That’s fine. The park or the bar or whatever.”
“Yeah,” Nick repeated back to him, still looking out the window and across the sidewalk. A beautiful cream-colored Rolls-Royce, brand new for the year and shimmering with drops of rain, had pulled up to the curb. The windows were tinted so dark that Chester couldn’t see the driver.
Nick was already heading to the door as he continued, “I’ll text you.”
Chester didn’t say a thing in response. There was no one to respond to. Nick fled from the coffee shop and into that unknown car, leaving Chester to sit there alone, without having ever even ordered coffee at all.