The check-in window at Down Under was the first place I saw him.
I probably heard him coming down the stairs and headed to that window to greet him before he could push the annoying buzzer that even after just three months, I had grown to loathe (it always went off in the middle of some particularly good gossip). When his face appeared in that window, I thought he was simply beautiful. He had these wavy brown curls that hung to his shoulders, framing a face too ethereal for this earth. He was an angel.
I finished my shift a few hours later and he was still checked-in. It’s possibly the fastest I’d ever cashed-out and stripped down, meeting him in the hot tub and almost immediately taking him back to my room where what we did was anything but angelic.
That pattern repeated a few times over the next few months, and in one of my life’s great What If’s, I will always wonder what could have happened had I been single and been able to pursue something more than random bathhouse nights. Even the first night, there was intimate connection that transcended the simply physical, and it wasn’t just in my head. On the third or fourth night together, when we’d brought in a third, he commented on our connection and asked how long we’d been together.
I started to run into him outside the baths, as one does, and he’d never give me the time of day. This earned him the moniker Ice Princess, and I couldn’t help but wonder, was he icy because he just wanted to freeze out bathhouse tricks from real life, or was it because he too wanted something more?
Our lives ran parallel for years, out of sync just enough to never meet. I’d be single, but he wasn’t. He’d be, but I wasn’t. I’d be too high. He’d be too high. Life dragged us both through the ditches of addiction, but that great What If always wandered through my brain whenever we’d see each other. Somewhere, in some other timeline in the Great gay Multiverse of my life, that initial connection evolved into something deep and lasting. In that other timeline, we’re celebrating our anniversary out for a night at the theatre before heading to the home we built together for a night of a passion that never faded from that Friday twenty-five years ago today.
There was one last hook-up, fifteen years after our first, where he messaged my freshly single profile on Grindr, and there was no way I was going to miss that opportunity to re-visit the past. His body, our sex, it had spent a decade and more on a pedestal in my brain, and now that the stars had briefly aligned, I was at his place as fast as I’d towelled-up that long ago Down Under night.
Like so many things on pedestals, the fantasy was better than the reality. The intervening years had featured too much drug use for that distant synchronicity to still be present.
And yet, I saw him last week, in passing, just two bodies passing on a stairwell and exchanging a quick hi. And those icy blue eyes still had the magic.
