Moodswing - We never did it

My friends and I have lusted after this hot bicycle cop in Virginia-Highland for years. You’ve probably seen him, with his tanned arms like carved marble in his short-sleeved uniform. Upon first sight of him, Grant practically soared from his seat and stuck himself to the window of the coffeehouse like a wet piece of putty. And he wasn’t even gay yet — well, of course, he was always gay — but at that time, he was still stuffed in the back of the closet behind an ex-wife, a present wife, a daughter and a dog named Ellie May. Looking back, it wasn’t just a closet for Grant; it was a cocoon, and when that cop walked by, Grant didn’t just come out, he flew out and flapped around the room on opal-colored wings. He was free!
After that, the only time his feet touched the ground was to get his toenails painted by that poor Korean girl on Ponce de Leon Avenue. (I say “poor” because you should see Grant’s feet — they’re hooves.) So I knew Grant before his bona-fide fag status reared its beautiful face like the feathered headdress that it is, but not by much. His hetero-ness only overlapped our friendship by about a couple of months or so, and during that time our relationship was as chaste as kindergarten paste. It wasn’t until later, when Grant had finally gotten in touch with his fabulous inner evil, that I’d occasionally have to call him and ask, “Was that your tongue in my mouth last night?” But even then it was always forgivable (except maybe that time when he came back from Barcelona and, in front of almost all our friends, handed me a bunch of bestiality porn he bought at a Spanish yard sale and bellowed, “When I saw this I thought, Hollis!”).
But regardless, Grant was always sort of quasi-safe, whatever danger there was not being the sexual kind. Not really; not to me, anyway. He has carried me home blotto drunk a couple of times, and with the free reign that gave him the worst thing he ever did was raid my kitchen and eat all the leftover packs of airplane peanuts I’d planned to hand out at Halloween that year.
So imagine my surprise when he e-mailed me a few days ago to say he was furious at me for forgetting that we once slept together.
“Oh, c’mon!” I have to scream. “We never slept together!”
Grant and I have been communicating via mutual friends’ e-mail ever since he moved to a tiny island off the coast of Cancun. Grant’s e-mails reach me fine, but for some reason I can’t get through to him from my address, so I have to write him from other people’s computers, and sometimes he replies along the same route. So our communication is basically a big party line between all our friends, my husband among them.
So I was at a loss when the above said husband walked up to me the other day and casually, like this would be no big deal if it were true, asked if Grant and I ever slept together.
“HELL no! Where the hell did that come from? Hell no! What in hell are you asking me that for? Me and Grant? Hell no!”
It turns out Grant made some comment, between heralding “manly Mexican marine meat” and the tastiness of dead scorpions soaked in tequila, that could have been construed, if maybe you had eaten a basket of those marinated scorpions or something, to mean that maybe Grant and I have a history that’s more than platonic.
And maybe we do. I miss him so much that sometimes I sit around and just wail like a sick sea cow. I can’t tell you how many times during our friendship Grant and I laughed so hard it felt like we could cough up our own shoes. We cried together, too, and we faced the terror of the truth together, but we never slept together. He’s been on that island too long, he’s getting his memories mixed up.
Either that or he’s taking his inner evil out for a little exercise again. “You mean that wasn’t you? I could have sworn it was you,” Grant tells my husband to tell me. So I tell my husband to tell Grant to come here and tell me that to my face.