“Trust me, neither Sylvia nor I want to be owned. We're too old for that. And she's a lot healthier than you give her credit for. If she walked away from her husband of twenty years without a backward glance, she's not going to be hanging around my neck like an albatross, trying to get her claws into me. If anyone walks, she's a lot more likely to do it first.”
“Is she commitment phobic? If she is, you could get seriously hurt.”
“And I haven't been hurt before? Charlie, be serious, life is about getting hurt. We get hurt every day when people we scarcely know won't take our calls. I've probably had more women walk out on me than any guy in New York. I survived it. I will again, if that happens. And yes, she probably is commitment phobic, so am I. Christ, I don't even want to meet her kids. I'm scared to death to get hurt or too attached, but this is the first time I've actually felt that the upside of the ride just might be worth a little pain, or even a lot of risk. No one's made any promises. No one's talking about marriage. All we're saying to each other right now is, where do you want to have dinner tonight? For the moment, we're both still safe.”
“You're never safe once you get involved,” Charlie said with a worried frown. “I just don't want you to get hurt.” But he had tipped his hand about how he felt about relationships. It wasn't just about the fatal flaws he found in his debutantes, it was about the pain he had been trying to avoid ever since his entire family died. Charlie was terrified to take a risk. Gray no longer was. It was a major milestone for him. And the fact that he was doing so was a huge threat to Charlie. It was as though an alarm bell had gone off somewhere. One of the members of the Bachelors' Army had defected. Gray saw everything in Charlie's eyes that Sylvia had feared, not only distrust and disapproval, but total panic. She was smarter than Gray knew, about people anyway, and she had Charlie pegged. Maybe Adam too. What Gray didn't like about it was that Charlie's reaction to his situation with Sylvia made him feel not only disloyal to him, but as though he was a total fool for feeling as he did. It was an unpleasant feeling, and put a pall on things, as Charlie signed the check. From Gray's perspective, it hadn't been an easy lunch, to say the least.
“Sylvia and I were hoping that you would come down to the loft for dinner one night.” Charlie put the pen down and stared at him.
“Do you realize what you sound like?” Charlie said with a grim look, as Gray shook his head. He wasn't sure he wanted to hear. “A married man, for God's sake. And don't forget you're not.”
“Is that the worst thing that could happen to me?” Gray finally snapped back. He was disappointed by Charlie's reaction. Severely so, in fact. He hadn't wanted Sylvia to be right. And she was. Dead on. “Somehow, I think colon cancer would be worse.”
“Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference,” Charlie said cynically. “Committing yourself to that extent can be a very insidious thing. You have to give up who you are to do it, and become someone no sane man would ever want to be.” He said it with total conviction, as Gray sighed and looked at him. Who had they become in all these years? How high a price had they paid for the freedom they were hanging on to so desperately? Maybe too high a price. In the end, after defending their independence for a lifetime, they were all going to wind up alone. And suddenly since he'd met Sylvia, it had occurred to Gray that that might not be such a worthy goal. He had said it to her only days before. He had finally realized that one day, when it came to that, he didn't want to die alone. One day the crazy, needy women, and the debutantes and Adam's bimbos, would stop hanging on, or even coming around. They would be at home with someone else. The paradise of freedom wasn't looking quite so good to Gray as it had till then.
“Do you really want to spend your old age with me?” Gray asked Charlie, looking him dead in the eye. “Is that what you want? Or would you like a better-looking pair of legs than mine across the table from you when you're floating around on the
“What's happening to you? What's she feeding you? Ecstasy? Why the hell are you worrying about your old age now? You're fifty years old. You don't have to worry about that for another thirty years, and God knows what'll happen to us between now and then.”
