Commitment

by C.M. Green

After the wedding ceremony, and after the cocktail hour, when Beck sat down at table sixteen in the back of the crowded reception hall, he finally checked his phone and saw the text from Michael: Look, I’m sorry, can you just call me tonight and we’ll talk? Beck would gladly call Michael tonight and talk, or rather, he would gladly call Michael tonight and yell. They were good at that, lately.

Michael was at home in Boston, and Beck, to his own revulsion, was in suburban Maryland, just outside DC, at a wedding venue thirty minutes from the high school where he and Esther had been best friends. Her life path had led her here: a millennial-core barn with burlap and mason jar accents on every table, a Catholic wedding to a man named Bradley whom everyone seemed to call Skip, and one-hundred and fifty people cheering her on as she and Skip entered the hall, elegant cream lace hugging her curves then trumpeting to the floor. It was a trajectory that made sense, and it was a trajectory Beck himself might have followed, had he not learned at nineteen that womanhood was not his final destination.

“How do you know Esther?” asked the guest on Beck’s left. Her name card said Mia. She wore a floor-length gown with golden flowers overlaid on navy blue silk, by far the nicest dress in the room besides Esther’s. Her pale skin was caked in beauty-pageant makeup and her chestnut hair was arranged in an updo that confused Beck in its defiance of gravity without the apparent aid of pins or clips. 

“We were friends in high school,” Beck said. “We were in the orchestra together. Clarinet section. She was always one chair ahead of me, all four years.” In high school this had been a chief source of Beck’s envy of Esther. Her proficiency at the clarinet had seemed to stand in for her ease in performing femininity. Before he transitioned, Beck had tried so hard to achieve what other girls seemed to come by naturally. He would study the ways they walked and talked and dressed and imitate it all until he fooled everyone. Then, Esther’s acceptance and approval had meant everything.

Mia said, “That’s so cute. I forgot she used to play the clarinet. We were sorority sisters, in college. Honestly,” she lowered her voice, “I was shocked to be invited. We’ve hardly spoken since we graduated, and that was eight years ago. But it looks like she invited everyone and their mother.”

Beck laughed, a little surprised and a little relieved to be in on something with someone else at this wedding. “Yeah, we haven’t been close in forever.”

“But you must know a lot of people here, right?” Mia craned her neck to scan the crowd. “The Alpha Chi girls are mostly at those two tables over there. I guess when you don’t have a plus-one you get pushed to the back. But Esther was always talking about her friends from high school. Are any of your classmates here?”

“Some, but no one I’m still friends with.” Beck had spotted a handful of people he recognized from St. Mary’s, and most of them had done a double take when they saw him, then looked away again. They probably just didn’t recognize him, or didn’t know he had transitioned. Probably. The paranoid part of him that was always surveilling for negative reactions to his transness had other ideas. 

That was why he’d needed Michael to come to this wedding. They could be the transmasc losers together, scoffing at the very idea of monogamous marriage as they got lightly drunk and enjoyed as much cake and decaf as they could stomach. Three months ago, when Beck RSVPed, Michael had just moved into his apartment and they hadn’t started fucking yet. Both men thought it sounded fun to go to a wedding together as roommates and good friends. Three days ago, when Beck was packing, Michael asked him to please for the love of God define what they were to each other, which resulted in their longest and loudest argument ever, and in Michael declaring that he couldn’t possibly go to Esther’s wedding. They hadn’t spoken since.

“Who’s meant to be sitting next to you?” Mia asked, leaning closer to Beck. “Michael? Do you know him?”

“My plus-one,” Beck said. “Worst friend ever. He bailed at the last minute for a family emergency.” 

Beck and Mia’s conversation wandered as they ate the salad and the entrée. He learned that she was a physician’s assistant, and that she lived in Williamsburg, Virginia but was hoping to move soon, and that she read poetry, and that her first celebrity crush had been Prince. Beck shared about his own life, that he was in his fifth year of his history PhD, and that he lived just outside of Boston, and that he didn’t understand contemporary anglophone poetry but was a sucker for some Pushkin, and that his first celebrity crush had been Anne Hathaway.

When dinner was over, Esther and Skip had their first dance to a cheesy pop number from high school, something that would have been a slow dance at prom in 2013. Memory assaulted Beck, not a specific moment but a category of moments: every time Esther or any of their other friends shared a look or a kiss or a touch with a boy in their class, and the way it always made Beck feel alien, estranged from their reality for reasons he couldn’t comprehend. Esther had always needled Beck endlessly, asking who he wanted to go out with and insisting she would help him, and every crush he admitted to her was a boy who was taken. Anyone inaccessible would do.

Beck didn’t want to feel glum and aggrieved, so he turned to Mia when the first dance ended and the DJ invited everyone to the dance floor. “Shall we?” he asked her.

“I’m awful at dancing,” she said, but she was already standing up.

“Perfect, so am I.” They laughed, trading a look that made Beck suddenly desirous and curious if Mia felt it, too. She grabbed his hand and led him to the center of the room, where they danced to all the most recognizable hits of the last thirty years, until Beck was dizzy. 

“I’m going to get another drink,” he said to her, pointing to the open bar. “Do you want one?”

“Yes, please.” 

Without second-guessing himself, Beck grabbed Mia’s hand and led her through the crowd. He couldn’t help but compare her hands to Michael’s. They were similar in size, both with long, delicate fingers, and they both kept their nails cut to the quick. As Beck walked forward, he could almost pretend it was Michael following behind him. Did he want that? Or was he happier with Mia? He needed more alcohol before deciding.

“Let’s go outside,” he said to her when they had their specialty cocktails in hand. They escaped through the double doors of the barn onto a small porch. One other pair stood at the far end, whispering to each other, and Beck and Mia studiously avoided looking at them as they leaned on the railing and watched the autumn sunset. 

“This is kind of depressing,” Beck said after a moment of silence.

“You’re telling me.” Mia didn’t sound depressed, just arch humor in her voice, but when Beck glanced at her, there was something grim in the set of her mouth.

“What’s depressing about it for you?” he asked, suddenly ravenously curious. She was getting prettier and prettier the longer he talked to her, and nothing excited Beck more than swift intimacy with no threat of commitment.

“You first.”

He thought about Michael, begging him to be serious for once in his life. He thought about the string of short-term lovers who had asked the same. “It’s odd to see Esther settle down,” he finally said. “I don’t go to a lot of weddings, so maybe this is normal, but it’s so stiflingly monogamous and straight and traditional. They literally had to vow to be fruitful and multiply, how fucked is that? What if she doesn’t want kids, she just has to do it anyway? Catholics are so crazy.”

“Weren’t you Catholic?” Mia asked. “If you went to St. Mary’s with her?”

“No, my parents just liked the school.” Beck’s parents were vaguely and indifferently Methodist, but he didn’t have much in the way of religious baggage. “But a few of my friends from there were so, so Catholic, it was creepy. And disingenuous, I think.”

“‘Straight and monogamous and traditional.’ Guessing you aren’t any of those things, huh?” Mia tapped her fingers on the railing and sipped her drink, a nervous, anticipatory energy to her movements.

“Are you?”

Mia laughed. “That’s a loaded question. I am, I guess. I don’t know.” It was what Beck had expected, but disappointment still cast its shadow on him. 

“Well, why’s it depressing for you?”

“I’m just jealous.”

“Of Esther?”

“Of her and Skip. You and Michael. Everyone in there with a plus one.”

“I’m not together with Michael.” Beck worried he said it too fast, and he felt a flash of guilt for saying it when, if Michael had his way, it wouldn’t even be true. “He’s just my friend.”

“Yeah. I could use one of those.” Mia finished her drink, looked appraisingly at Beck, then said, “I was married when I was twenty-two. Right out of college. It was a lot like this wedding, just Baptist, not Catholic. Esther was in my bridal party, you know what she said to me then? She said, ‘You’re the luckiest girl I know, marrying so young. You’ll have it all figured out before I even know who I am.’”

“Shit.” Beck wasn’t sure what else to say. It surprised him that Mia had been married, and he hoped he was right in assuming she no longer was. “What happened?”

Mia’s shoulders were hunched as she leaned forward and watched the clouds drift by. “I wish I had something to smoke.”

“You don’t strike me as the type to smoke anything.”

She laughed, cradled her forehead in her hand. “I wish you were wrong. I’ve never smoked a thing in my life.” 

Beck smoked weed often enough, but Michael was the only person he knew who smoked cigarettes. When they were just friends, it seldom came up, but when they moved in together, Michael would sit out on the stoop to smoke American Spirits while Beck would give him shit for the health implications. When they started sleeping together, Beck admitted to Michael that he hated the smell, hated the taste, but found the aesthetics of a cigarette in Michael’s lips to be a tremendous turn-on. 

To Mia, he said, “You avoided my question.” He wanted to push her, just a little, because he sensed that she was ready to crack. He doubted it had anything to do with him, but she seemed like a woman at her breaking point, and Beck wanted to know why.

“What happened? I was about to turn thirty, I hadn’t been able to conceive, and I started watching deconstructed Evangelicals online. I don’t know. What happened? I got sick of it. I got terrified. I didn’t want to waste my life with him.” Mia was emphasizing her words by hitting her palm against the deck railing, and as she grew louder, the other pair out there kept looking at her. “God, that sounds mean. I’m sorry. He’s not a bad person.”

“You don’t have to apologize to me,” Beck said. “I’m never going to meet the guy, what do I care what you say about him?”

“It’s bad form,” Mia said drily. “That’s what everyone’s telling me. Well, everyone who will still give me the time of day. I left him. I was the problem. He did nothing wrong.”

“When did you leave?”

“Three months ago.”

Beck winced at the freshness of it. “Hence, this wedding being depressing?”

Turning to look through the glass doors at everyone inside, dancing together, Mia seemed defeated. “It always seemed easier, for gay people. Like you aren’t bound by the same clock as straight people. You are gay, right?”

“I don’t really label it,” Beck said. “I mean, I do like men, but not more than any other gender.” Then, because he kind of wanted to take her back to his hotel room, he added, “I guess you could say queer, and trans.” He hated himself for slipping it in like that, like a warning sign. Like, If you’re going to be weird about it, tell me now. 

“Lucky,” she repeated. She didn’t change her posture, or her tone, or anything to indicate that his transness was a problem. She did, after a moment of silence, say, “Sorry if that’s insensitive, to say you’re lucky for being trans. I know it’s like, hard, or whatever.”

“Or whatever.” Beck finished his own drink. “Do you want to go back in and dance some more?”

“Honestly? I want to get out of here. Is seven-thirty too early to leave a wedding for someone you barely talk to, who put you at the worst table, away from anyone you know, just because you left your husband?” 

“It’s pretty early for most situations, but for that exact situation I think it’s right on time.”

“Well, I don’t want to abandon you,” Mia said. She nudged Beck with her shoulder. “Where are you staying? Can I drive you?” That was a good sign.

“I have a rental car,” he said. “But I might head out too. I’m at the Hampton Inn in Gaithersburg.” That sentence alone was grim enough, but then Beck added, “Do Hampton Inns have hotel bars, or do you think I’ll just have to buy a bottle of wine and drink alone in my room?”

Mia laughed, which was good, even though Beck was only half joking, and then she said, “Buy a bottle of wine, but don’t drink alone. I’m at the same hotel. You can come to my room, if you want.”

Beck did want that. The way Mia looked at him sent kinetic energy all through his body, but he wasn’t completely sure that this flirtation amounted to anything but talk. Usually, Beck got into bed with queer people by one of them saying Do you want to go to bed with me or some variation on the theme. Straight people, in his experience, were less direct. They treated seduction like a game with unspoken rules. It was infuriating; if the rules were unspoken, how were you supposed to know how to play? “What do you prefer?” he asked. “Red or white?”

Thirty minutes later, Beck, with a bottle of pinot noir under his arm, knocked on Mia’s door. She opened it and stood back to let him in, a nervous grin on her face. She had changed into a pair of dark skinny jeans and a grey sweater; Beck had not changed, and felt self-conscious with his tie and blue blazer. As he walked into her room, where her suitcase lay open on the bed and a tremendous amount of makeup lined the desk, Beck finally considered the fact that Mia had probably never slept with a trans man before, and he was annoyed with himself for feeling embarrassed about it. 

She, too, seemed either annoyed or embarrassed as she moved her suitcase and sat on the edge of her bed, and neither of them spoke for a moment that stretched into discomfort. Beck hated awkwardness. It always felt like a punishment. Mia adjusted her earrings, released a small laugh, and looked away from Beck, who suddenly wanted to leave. He wanted to go smoke a bowl, or return to the wedding and dance with Esther, or be back in Boston, in the library, reading about the Silver Age of Russian poetry, or go home to his apartment and pretend he and Michael had never fought. 

“Do you have glasses for the wine?” Beck finally asked.

At the same time, Mia said, “You’re really hot.” As soon as she said it, she stood, not looking at Beck, and said, “Oh, yeah, I think there’s plastic cups somewhere.” Above the minifridge she pulled out two small clear plastic cups, made for late night water, and took the wine from Beck. She poured them both generous portions and handed him his glass, and then sat back on the edge of the bed. “Don’t just stand there,” she said, “Sit down.”

Beck sat next to her. People sometimes told Beck he was hot, but it surprised him from Mia. She seemed to want to act like she hadn’t said it. Beck considered allowing her that gift, but instead, he knocked her knee with his, and said, “You’re really hot, too.”

She took Beck’s glass and set it and hers on the side table, and then inched her face towards his. In the moment before they kissed, Beck could almost hear Michael’s voice telling him he was a child, an immature commitment-phobe with gross emotional problems. Instead of listening, Beck closed the distance between himself and Mia and met her mouth with his. They were mismatched, somehow, first Beck moving too slowly, then Mia probing around with her tongue too much, then Beck moving too quickly, but finally they settled into a rhythm that suited them both.

After a few minutes, Mia broke off the kiss, keeping her forehead against Beck’s. “I’ve never, you know.”

“Yeah, I know,” he said, and he wondered if he was an oddity to her, an experience to collect. “Just tell me what you want,” he said.

She released a small breath of confusion. “What do you mean?”

“What you like,” he said. “What you want me to do.”

“I don’t know,” she said, pulling away farther, now uncomfortable and showing it. “What kind of question is that?”

“No one’s ever asked you that before?” The fate of straight Christian women was brutal.

“Not really,” she said. “I mean, I like sex. I like what everyone likes. I don’t know.”

“You’re thirty,” Beck said. “You’re thirty and you think everyone likes the same things?”

“Well, Jesus, you don’t have to be a jerk about it.” Mia angled her body away from his, suddenly rigid and cold.

“Sorry,” he said, unsure how to recover this, unsure now if he wanted to. If it was worth it. “Mia, I’m sorry. Hey. Look at me.” She did, and he felt exhausted at the task ahead. He composed himself. “I don’t have a dick,” he said, as matter-of-factly as he might to a trans partner because he didn’t know how else to do it. “And I didn’t exactly bring a strap-on to Esther’s wedding. So it’s not going to be like fucking your Christian husband, okay? I just want to know what you want.”

Mia stood up, walked to the window where the shades were drawn, and peeked out at the night with her back to Beck. It was a minute before he realized she was crying. He floundered, unsure how they had gone from hotel room seduction to emotional breakdown so fast, and unsure what the hell he was supposed to do about it. Beck didn’t go to comfort her immediately, but when her shoulders began to shake, he felt duty-bound to approach. “Hey,” he said. “What’s wrong?” He put a hand on her back, and she leaned into it.

“I’m so fucking lonely,” she said. “Do you have any idea—do you know how hard it is?” She released an unruly sob, then stepped away from Beck and wrapped her arms around herself, manicured nails digging into each shoulder blade. 

Beck was ill-equipped for this, for any kind of emotional support of another person and especially someone he didn’t know at all. “Hey,” he said. “Do you want to sit? We can, I don’t know, we can talk about it.” He did not want to talk about it. He wanted her to tell him to leave. 

“I don’t think I’ve ever had really good sex,” she said. “Blake was—I mean, he wasn’t bad to me. But he wasn’t very good to me. And he’s the only guy I ever slept with. So you ask me what I like, what I want you to do, and I don’t even know where to start.”

“Okay,” Beck said. He was ready to make his excuses. He was not the man to address a recovering Evangelical woman’s sex hang ups. He was not the man for anything but easy, casual, simple. “Well, I don’t know, is it a bad idea to hook up with a stranger at a wedding? When you feel this way?”

“No shit, it’s a bad idea. Everything I do lately is a bad idea.”

“Then maybe I should go,” Beck said, taking a step away from Mia.

“Wait, don’t,” she said, wiping her face and then cursing when she saw all the makeup coming off on her hands. “Do you want to watch TV? Or just talk? Please don’t go.” She was still crying, and Beck wasn’t sure if he was enough of an asshole to leave her in this state. She sniffed, looked away from Beck, and added, “I can’t be alone tonight. You’re the nicest person I’ve talked to in months.”

That couldn’t mean anything good about Mia’s social circle. Beck didn’t reply right away as he warred with himself over the right thing to do here. Mia was a stranger and one he’d never see after tonight. That either meant he owed her nothing, or it meant he could dispense with his usual avoidance and instead experience genuine emotion. When Mia’s shoulders slumped, and she went to pick up her wine, and she said, “It’s okay, you can go,” Beck made up his mind.

“No way,” he said. “I’m not leaving you alone tonight.” The relief on her face was so intense that Beck wanted to step away from her, but instead, he said, “We definitely shouldn’t have sex, though.”

It was only after midnight, when he finally left Mia’s room after hours of wine and conversation, that Beck checked his phone. He had a missed call, and Michael had texted him and said, for fuck’s sake, we can’t avoid each other forever. Beck, still a little tipsy, texted back: I’m sorry, wedding was fun, I’ll see you tomorrow at home, okay, we’ll talk then. He wanted to add something else, something stupidly close to I love and miss you, but instead he found his way back to his hotel room and got ready for bed. There was no escaping the self’s worst tendencies and there was no creation or pretension he could hold that would allow him to forget what he was. Michael would have to learn that lesson eventually, too.

C.M. Green (he/they) is a Boston-based writer. Their writing has been published in Full House Literary, beestung, and elsewhere, and they are a 2025 Pushcart nominee. Their debut hybrid chapbook, I Am Never Leaving Williamsburg, is available for now from fifth wheel press. You can find C.M.'s writing at cmgreenwrites.com.