Every few months he'd drive to my house just to open up the passenger door and let me sit beside him so he could look at me and tell me that he felt safe with me and that I looked 17. We never did more than that.

For a year he kept driving by. And it's hard to say why he did, and why I kept getting in, but the best explanation is possibility -- the unspoken promise that things might change. Rick was close to 40, and occasionally he could see all the little compartments he'd made of his life. Occasionally, he'd call them ridiculous. He wanted the connective tissue between his family, his friends and his work to be more than secrecy.

I seemed ideal for that. He'd never met anybody like me, he'd say. I was intense and funny and appeared to want only him and not his money. When he asked how I'd managed to stay single for so long, rather than tell him that I'd never found a black man I could actually be with, I said I was waiting for him. He was more flattered than freaked out. I think he wanted to make me a piece of ass, and I think I liked changing his mind. I'd wanted a serious boyfriend for over a year; I guess I kept coming down the stairs all those months and riding shotgun to nowhere because I wanted to know whether he'd ever give me what I knew I deserved.

Sometimes I'd ask what things would be like if he were single. He never knew. Well, he knew he could never be outside with me. And he'd have to sneak me into his apartment. And I could never meet his family or go to his Christmas party at work. In turn, he wouldn't want to come to my parents' for Thanksgiving. Were movies out of the question? (We never went to one.) I imagined him choosing to sit a seat away. Was his actual boyfriend down with that, too? ("Boyfriend" was a word he never used; he didn't have a word for him. Everything about the DL seems to be surreptitious and beyond language; to name is to acknowledge and to communicate. There's a galaxy of appellations that have nothing to do with mainstream homosexual culture.) His sense of shame was robbing him of a normal gay life, but everyone in his life thought he was straight -- including himself, which was an achievement he didn't see the need to tamper with.

Once, I told Rick I didn't want to see him anymore. Our being alone together had devolved into our being together, yet alone. I finally felt ridiculous about sitting parked in longing silence. He looked hurt, but he didn't call for six months. When he did, it was with the news that he was moving back to Chicago. I was at an airport in another city and I wanted to turn around to be with him. What if he'd changed?

We made a plan to see each other. I had never been more excited to see a man. He loved Grace Jones; I'd made a CD with songs that we would play while we did nothing in his car. He picked me up from the train and we drove to his apartment. It was immaculate. He hadn't started packing. We sat around and talked, and he asked me if I wanted a drink. He made something with a lot of rum, and I gave him a massage and he was affectionate. But the whole thing was just a more intense version of what we did in the car. He wanted to "let go," but he held on, mysteriously able to control his arousal.

After a couple of hours of tenacious resistance, the phone rang. While he spoke, I massaged his shoulders, and he pushed me away. When he was done, he started to dress. "You know who that was."

It was the boyfriend. And even though he lived two thousand miles from us, he may as well have been on his way over from up the street. He told me he had to take me home, and something fell inside me.

"Wait, I'm not sleeping here?"

"No, uh-uh. It's not like that, man. Get dressed."

And just like that, a fog had either descended upon him or lifted from him. He'd started talking the way straight men do when another man makes a pass. He was suddenly resolutely monogamous. He had this skill of turning love to shame: I felt stupid and used. He drove me home, and, later, I lay in bed hating myself but thankful I hadn't told him I'd packed an overnight bag.

I replayed our last words to each other as I got out of his car.

Me: "I really feel like this could have been something. You know, if things were different."

Him: "Yeah, it could be."

But it wasn't.

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