For The Gun Fairy.

.x. Tequila .x.

He looked down at the ring of dark brown liquid that his chipped mug had formed on the tiled table, mesmerized. He couldn’t believe that it had happened again – again – when he had sworn to himself that the last time was the end of it all. The end of everything. He had said it to himself, he had said it to Mateo, he had written it a hundred times just to burn it into his rebellious subconscious: he was never going back. Of course, he said this every time, and every so often he ended up here, staring blankly and still trembling in a way his wife could never make him tremble. That was what he hated most. He hated how all of their many one night stands rolled into a relationship, a real, barely thriving relationship with emotional connections and unconscious needs to be with each other. He hated that each time he went home to his wife their many relationship flaws and ineptitudes seemed to be magnified that much more. He hated the way that each morning after they accidentally crossed star-crossed paths, Mateo would walk into the kitchen with a pair of slouching pajama bottoms and a baggy shirt, just as he was doing now, nonchalantly pour a cup of coffee, and lean back on the counter and stare at him, his slate eyes boring holes as he tried to understand exactly what was running through Evan’s mind.

Almost ritualistically they drank in silence, Mateo grimacing every now and then at the cheap blend. “Serves me right for buying the off-brand, ‘eh?” he asked, smiling that dangerous smile that ensnared him time and time again before seeing the dull, concerned look on his paramour’s face. His muscles relaxed slightly. “You regret it again?” Mateo set the mug down with a muffled clank and crossed his arms, leaning back even further so that his head hit the middle of the cabinets. Mateo was tall, his skin dark, his hair short, and his eyes, those lustrous, burning eyes, always so calm and collected. He was irresistible, and Evan hated him. He nodded. “Evan…you came to me. It was you.”

“I know that,” he snapped. He was frustrated about everything; he was angry that he was here, he was angry that he had broken his vow to himself, he was angry that he had, once again, been adulterous, and, most of all, he was angry that Mateo was simply standing there, looking cocky, eyeing at him like a newly conquered territory. Veni vidi vici. That was how it had begun. Both of them in a bar, wives away with family and friends, each had had one drink too many, and then, somehow, it had turned into this. A magnetic attraction, a deadly sin. Mateo’s tendrils had wrapped around him, around his head and his heart, trapping him and containing him, making him Mateo’s forever, and each meeting was the same. They would see each other from opposite ends of a crowded bar, the air hazy with cigarette smoke and thick with the scent of tequila, and, try as hard as he may to resist, somehow they always ended up in a tight embrace, lips moving rhythmically, and then, realizing where they were and why there were there, they would make their way as fast as they could to Mateo’s beaten-up blue ’81 Honda, sometimes not even making it out of the parking lot before animal instinct took over and the form of rhythmic motions changed. Evan shook his head and sighed. “This isn’t right.”

“How do you mean?”

“We have wives…we have children…we have lives.”

Mateo walked forward and looked down at Evan, his salacious lips uncharacteristically thin. “You use your wife as an excuse, a reason to not see me. Why, then, do you come to me and not her?”

Evan glared up, his stubborn pride sparking with Mateo’s comment. “Don’t you ever talk about my wife,” he hissed, his eyes narrowed, his defenses up. “She is a good woman, and I…I don’t deserve her. She deserves more than this.”

“More than what?”

“She deserves more than a husband who waits until she leaves for the weekend and then goes off to fuck some man whom he hardly knows, apart from the fact that he’s in the same position I’m in, only he’s not ashamed like he should be! She deserves someone honest, faithful – ”

“Then tell her, and don’t look for me. If you don’t do that, you can’t complain.”

Evan bristled, standing up so fast that the spindle-legged chair he had been seated in flew out from beneath him and landed with a loud crash on the floor behind him, one of the back legs snapping in two. Mateo cocked his eyebrows, asking Evan why he was wrong in saying what he had, and Evan knew that Mateo was right. His face was red; the fine hairs on the back of his neck were standing up slightly, his hands clenched around the chipped mug that read “World’s Greatest Dad” in rounded, colorful letters. “I think it’s time for me to leave,” he said, stalking up the stairs to gather his belt and tie.

“I’ll go and start the car,” Mateo mumbled, grabbing the keys from where he had tossed them on the counter that night and walking out the door.

Three months later, Evan Adams sat alone at a bar, a half drunk martini in front of him. All around him he could hear the loud, drunken conversations of men winding down from long workdays, the clattering of plates and glasses, strings of English and Spanish and Spanglish. He finished the drink in one last, large gulp and was going to rise when a body slid into the seat next to him, grinning at him with a twinkle in his eye. He was tall, his skin dark, and his eyes, twinkling and gleaming with mischief and lust, were staring into Evan’s own.

“I was afraid you weren’t going to show up, Mateo,” he said.

“Anything for you.”

Evan smirked and looked at the bartender. “Two tequilas, please.”