“Would you like something to drink?”

The question roused him from his thoughts. He looked up into the face of the smiling steward.

“I can’t make you a Cosmo, but how about coffee or a soda?” the flight attendant asked, flashing a smile that Hudson interpreted, correctly, as the recognition of one gay man of another.

“Tomato juice?” Hudson asked.

“Regular or spicy?” the steward inquired.

“Spicy,” Hudson answered.

“Spicy it is,” the man said, popping open the top of a can and pouring it over ice. “Here you go. One virgin Bloody Mary.”

He handed Hudson the drink and moved on. Hudson sipped at the juice, enjoying the slight burn on his lips. It vaguely crossed his mind that the steward was cute, in a blond, twinky kind of way. But that had never really been his taste in men. He preferred them more—he hated the description “straight acting,” but that’s what always came to mind. It was, Marty teased him, just his internalized homophobia talking.

“You try growing up in rural Maine,” Hudson had said once in response. “Up there you’re either normal or a limp-wristed fairy who wants to wear women’s clothes.”

It was true. The notion of a masculine gay man had yet to penetrate Edelson’s collective consciousness, despite reruns of Will & Grace airing nightly on the Bangor affiliate. Or maybe things had changed since he was a boy there. But probably they hadn’t. Edelson seemed to pride itself on being a good thirty years behind the rest of the country.

At any rate, it had taken him long enough to admit his own gayness. Well into his third year at the university, in fact. Practically speaking, he was still a gay adolescent, figuring out what he liked and what he needed. That he was doing it at twenty-four was just another resentment to nurse in moments of self-pity.

He had to admit, too, that it bothered him a little that the flight attendant had pegged him as one of his own. He was horrible at identifying other gay men; inevitably at parties he gravitated to men whose girlfriends or wives showed up moments before he worked up the nerve to ask them out. “What do you expect,” Marty had told him after one such incident. “You didn’t even know you were gay until you woke up in some guy’s bed.”

This was one of Marty’s favorite stories to tell, usually loudly and to people whom Hudson would rather didn’t hear it, and Hudson frequently regretted ever having told it to him. But that was, more or less, the way it had happened. Because copious quantities of alcohol had been involved, the details were a matter for debate, but what everyone involved could agree on was that Hudson had gone out drinking with some friends one Saturday night and had awakened Sunday morning in an unfamiliar room with a decidedly masculine arm thrown across his torso and a soreness in his nether regions that cause him to recall, dimly and with no small amount of embarrassment, burying his face in a pillow and gritting his teeth. The presence of a condom, clearly used, on the floor beside the bed confirmed his suspicions.