"The Third Side of the Triangle" by Susan Jameson

Ah, the wonderful life of the third wheel. Or is that fifth wheel?

Doesn't matter.

This is not the life I ever intended to lead, of course. I wound up here accidentally, because I didn't know that the man I loved had already given away the lion's share of himself.

Turnabout really is fair play, isn't it.

Permit me to introduce myself. I'm Lt. Cmdr. Daniel Anthony Reilly, M.D., USN, orthopedic surgeon at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Md. I'm 36 years old, divorced, no kids, and I'm a deeply closeted gay man.

Don't ask, don't tell, don't pursue. Don't believe it.

The man I love is just as deeply in the closet as I am. He's Fox Mulder, an FBI agent, and possibly the most intelligent human being it's ever been my privilege to know. He's witty, he's sharp, he's affectionate, he's passionate, he's truly beautiful, inside and out.

In fact, just about the only thing I would like to say about him, and can't, is that he's as much in love with me as I am with him.

He's not.

He's just as much in love with me as he's capable of being. But then, when I fell in love with him, I fell in love with someone who didn't exist. And I think I almost destroyed myself and my lover because of it.

It was for someone else to save him -- someone who could touch the places in his soul that I was afraid to see or even to acknowledge.

Not that I don't hold an extremely special place in his life: I know, for example, that I'm the first person he's ever had a long-term relationship with of any kind. I also know that makes him a huge risk for someone like me; I prefer stable, monogamous relationships. That's less to do with HIV than with my personality.

I'm sure my desire for stability and commitment was what led me to marry in the first place.

Jill stood by me through so much -- college, medical school, those early years as a junior officer. When we divorced, I lost all the emotional support of being married, all the friends we'd made together, all the things we'd accumulated and -- the gravest loss of all -- her love and her friendship.

I had fought so hard against my natural inclination toward homosexuality, but there is no fighting what you really are.

When we finally called it quits, I realized that the only life I had ever known it was ending. I was stepping out into a new world, one that I barely knew, but that I feared greatly.

As a Naval officer, I had reason to fear it, believe me.

Still, just the fact that I've been married helps me conceal my real self from the brass. They don't know it was a virtually sexless marriage from the start; they don't know that our childlessness isn't from infertility or from any kind of choice but simply because sex was so infrequent -- eventually, nonexistent -- that Jill had virtually no chance of becoming pregnant.

I did love her. I still do. But I could never really be passionately attracted to her. After a while, I could no longer respond to her at all. She, of course, blamed herself.

She didn't know -- not until the very end -- what the real reason was.

Every night when I say my prayers, I ask God to forgive me for what I did to her over the 12 years of our marriage. I ask him to forgive me for all the years I took from her, all the years I fed her boundless love on the leftover scraps of my own, all the passion I forced her to hold inside while I -- well, I eventually went elsewhere.

You can never undo that kind of damage, the kind only women with loving and giving hearts will let you inflict.

Which is part of what I've tried to tell my lover, with virtually no success.

Fox, unlike me, has never had any kind of sexual relationship with a woman. He has, best I can tell, absolutely no sexual interest in women at all, not even enough to try it just once. He says he's always known he was gay, and he learned to live with that early in his life.

That's good. It's good to know who you are, and what you are, and to be able to accept that. I couldn't, for a long time. I'm still not entirely at peace with it.

What's not good is when you fool yourself into believing that just because you're not sleeping with someone, you're not monopolizing their life with your love -- that you're not going to hurt a woman who loves you as long as you don't have sex with her.

Not true. I know at first hand -- a woman who loves a gay man is going to get hurt.

Fox didn't believe me for a long time, but he does now.

That brings me to the second side of this triangle: his FBI partner, Dana Scully.

Dana is a bit of an enigma, even to me. Like me, she's a physician, an Irish Catholic, and comes from a Navy family. All that should make her easy for me to know, but it doesn't.

There's that one truly inexplicable factor about her that I can never comprehend: She knows what Fox is, and yet she is in love with him, and has been for years, and nothing that's ever happened between them has made any dent in that.

One thing we need to get settled before I even think about telling you the rest of this story: Dana is not Fox's `fish,' to use the crude vernacular, or his "fag hag." She's his partner, and his friend, and his emotional mainstay at work.

In fact, Dana is in very much of a two-way relationship with Fox; in many ways, much more so than I am, and I believe she's got her eyes wide open where he's concerned. She's not trying to turn him, nor, I think, does she use him as a barrier against other men. I know, although it's none of my business, that Dana has an active sex life.

I strongly suspect Fox would rather not think about that.

He keeps telling me he's got no interest whatsoever in her sexually, and I guess I believe him, but I also know that it's more of a possibility than he's willing to admit. After all, I did manage some kind of sex life with Jill, based partly on my affection for her, and partly on pure physiology -- to be blunt, when you love a person and want to respond sexually, and that person touches your sexual organs, you'll quite often respond.

Of course, that wasn't enough after a while. The real attraction, the desire, just wasn't there for me, not with her. Fantasy worked for a time, but that made me feel more than a little sick, fantasizing about men while making love with my wife.

Anyway, just about the time I would get into that fantasy, she would say something in her soft female voice, or she would ask me to touch her breast, which she liked and which I avoided doing because my fantasy lovers didn't have breasts.

Any active response from her was the end of my fantasy and, fairly often, the end of my erection and the end of sex.

God, Jill, I'm sorry. I hate remembering how you used to cry, how bewildered you were, how unattractive I made you feel. I am so god-damned sorry.

I'm apologize. I know I'm getting off the subject. But you can't imagine how much guilt I carry around because of Jill.

To get back to the subject: I'm not saying that Fox has been unfaithful to me, with Dana or anyone else, or even that I think he wants to be. His body, his desire, his romantic inclinations, his intense physical passion, all that belongs to me, and I believe him when he says there hasn't been anyone else since we met.

Yet there is a huge chunk of his soul that rests forever in the slender hands of that redheaded partner of his.

Let me tell you how this mess got started.

~~~~~

I met Fox on a Sunday morning at a pick-up basketball game. I was jogging around my neighborhood, as I usually do -- I haven't set foot in a church for years, and I won't as long as the Church maintains that making love with my partner is "intrinsically disordered."

Missing Mass is part of my ongoing project to rid myself of as much homophobia as possible, while still living in the closet.

I have a long way to go -- but not as long as I did back then. I didn't even know then just how bad my problem was.

Anyway, I saw him on the court, leaping up with the grace of a dancer to sink a three-point shot. He was tall, and lean, a nd muscular without being beefy, and the self-assured, easy way he moved really caught my eye. He seemed so perfectly in control of himself; so much at home in his own body.

I had no idea, no hope, even, that he was gay; I'm ashamed now to admit it, but I thought he was just too masculine to be gay.

So I wasn't planning to hit on him when I joined the game -- I just wanted to get a closer look at him.

Right away, I noticed the absence of a wedding ring. No kids hanging around, either, which most divorced men would have had on a Sunday morning.

All right -- my age and, maybe, never married. I began to hope, just a little.

When one of the other players dropped out, I got in on the game.

He was even more attractive up close. Hazel eyes, the kind that seem to change color, and longish dark hair. Kind of a big nose, but it worked -- it kept him from being too much of a pretty boy.

And that mouth -- I could create an entire library out of the fantasies that mouth was inspiring in me. It was full, lush, soft -- and I was reasonably certain he knew how to use it just as well as he used the rest of his body.

Then I noticed him looking at me, and I felt my breath stop. You see, he wasn't just looking; he was scoping me out, in a way that only gay men do. I'm not sure I can really describe it, but like the judge said about pornography, I know it when I see it.

At least, I was beginning to know it. I thought I knew it.

I sure hoped I was right.

I wanted to introduce myself, but the game was getting intense, and I was just a little out of breath.

Then, as luck would have it, he got fouled by another player, twisted his ankle and fell, came down hard on the blacktop court. Thank you, God -- such a gift to a horny, lonely orthopedist.

When he limped over to the sidelines, I left the game, introduced myself and asked if I could check out his ankle.

He said yes. He continued to size me up with those beautiful eyes the whole time. When I was done, and satisfied that he had no serious injuries, I gathered my courage and just sort of stroked his calf. Not overtly; I wanted to leave him room to believe that it was an inadvertent touch, just in case I really was mistaken about him.

But that touch was an invitation, and when I looked up at him, I knew he'd gotten the message; not only that, he'd accepted the invitation.

It was almost too much to believe. My entire adult life was spent trying to avoid just this kind of relationship, this kind of feeling, and now I was breathless and giddy because this beautiful man was letting me know that he found me attractive, too.

It took me about 15 minutes to gather my courage again to ask him to go for coffee. He accepted so quickly that I wondered why the hell I had hesitated so long.

We took his car. I was sweating like a pig, whether from exertion or nerves, I don't know. But then, so was he. He asked me to grab a handkerchief from his gym bag, which was on the seat between us.

Whoa. When I unzipped the bag, the first thing I saw was what looked to me like a very large gun. I'm qualified with an officer's sidearm, of course, but as a medical officer I never carry one, so this one looked very large and very scary to me.

I wondered if I hadn't just climbed into a car with a homicidal maniac, a charming but utterly ruthless psychopath.

The look on my face must have been priceless, because he laughed.

"It's all right," he said. "I'm an FBI agent."

"You are?" I asked, a bit dubiously, I suppose.

"My badge is right there, under my gun," he said, nodding toward the bag. "Go on, look, if it'll make you feel better."

I reached in and pulled out a leather case that, sure enough, was embossed with FBI and a seal on the outside. Inside was a badge, a photograph and an ID card.

Fox William Mulder, special agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation.

I was impressed. Actually, I suppose I was star-struck. And I felt that way even though I knew how immature it was.

I remember years ago treating a shore patrolman who'd been shot in the leg by a jealous wife. He was cheating on her, and she didn't like it, to say the least.

The chaplain came by to see the SP, and on the way out he told me, with a sad shake of his head, just how common this kind of thing was among police officers.

"It's the badge and the gun," the chaplain said. "Women are attracted to those symbols of authority, and they tend to target the men who carry them. They're powerful signals that say `this is an alpha male, worth pursuing.'"

The chaplain was right, it seemed. Knowing that Fox carried a badge and a gun did nothing to lessen his desirability in my eyes; if anything, it increased it. He was tough. He had authority.

He was even a little bit dangerous.

And I definitely found him worth pursuing.

~~~~~

We spent about two hours in a friendly, gay-oriented coffee shop near my apartment. I told him about Jill, and how I was still kind of new at the gay dating game; he told me about his Oxford education, and his years as a profiler, and that he was now involved in some rather secret investigations.

I was even more impressed. A profiler, just like in the movies, and a secret agent, of a kind, anyway. He just kept getting more attractive by the moment.

I was just working up my nerve to ask him to come home with me when his cell phone rang.

"Mulder," he said as he answered it. "Oh, hey, Scully -- you ready to leave?"

There was a brief pause while he listened.

"Yeah, I can be there in 10 minutes. Wait for me outside." And he hung up.

"You have to go?" I said, trying to hide my disappointment.

"Yeah, I have to get my partner back to D.C.," he said, so off-handedly that I was shocked. He was in a relationship and hadn't mentioned it? Had all this been just a friendly interlude?

He must have read my thoughts because he shook his head firmly. "My law-enforcement partner," he said. "Dana Scully. She had a family gathering to attend and her car's on the fritz."

Oh. That was a relief. A woman partner couldn't be a threat to me. There was still hope that something would happen; it just wasn't going to happen right now.

I stood up, unsure how to say goodbye under these circumstances. As I've noted, I'm still somewhat new at all this. I offered him my hand, but he smiled and shook his head, just slightly. He took my hand, all right, but then he leaned across the table and kissed me.

It wasn't much of a kiss, but coming from him, with that mouth, under those circumstances, it was more than enough. I told him I wanted to see him again, which was a huge understatement.

I gave him my number and went home, hoping like hell that he would actually call.

Which he did. We talked for hours. I was falling for him at near terminal velocity.

~~~~~

The following Saturday, Fox called me early in the morning and invited me to his place for dinner.

I would have said he was nervous, if I thought it was possible for him. But of course, I accepted.

His apartment wasn't anything like what I had expected. No cliche' decorating -- no track lighting, no beige carpet, no statuary -- just your basic D.C. bachelor pad, and that pleased me.

I know -- it's more of my internalized, closet-case homophobia, but I can't stand to be around gay men who camp it up, swish around and act faggy. I know it stems from all my years in the closet -- hell, I'm still in the closet -- but it just makes me cringe.

I know I'm not the only one -- read the personal ads sometime, and tell me how many of the men-seeking-men ads specify "straight-acting" respondents only.

When dinner was over, we moved back to the couch, and I was nervous as hell. All my previous gay experiences had begun at a bar somewhere; this had more serious overtones, and I wasn't sure exactly how to proceed.

Fortunately for me, Fox was as sure of what he wanted from me as he was of everything else in his life. He moved next to me, put his arm around my shoulders and then that beautiful mouth was on mine, and his tongue was in my mouth; my head started spinning, and I got so hard I thought I might break.

We were in bed in less than five minutes, and it was ... well, it was perfect. I think I'll leave it at that -- except to say that I was right about what he could do with that mouth of his. God ...

I stayed there until early Monday morning, when we both had to go to work. In between, we spent a lot of time making love and almost as much time talking.

There was one thing that Fox decided for us, without any hesitation. He wanted us both to be tested for HIV.

OK, so it's dumb for a doctor to think that way, but I couldn't help it; I thought he meant he didn't trust me.

"Don't you believe me when I tell you I'm negative?" I asked him, a little hurt.

He looked at me curiously. "Of course I believe you," he said, almost dismissing me. "But six months from now, if we still test negative, then we can stop using condoms. And I really want that."

And then it hit me -- six months from now? He was talking about an exclusive relationship -- for the next six months? Longer?

"Are you saying you think you'll still want to be with me in six months?" I asked him. I couldn't have heard him right -- could I?

"Oh, God, Daniel," he said, laughing and shaking his head. "Six months -- six years -- forever. I don't know. Whatever time we've got." He stopped laughing then, and took my hand. "Yeah, I want to be with you. Is that okay with you?"

"I can't begin to tell you how okay it is," I said, and then I was laughing too, and he hugged me, hard. I could almost believe there were tears in his eyes -- almost.

We weren't kidding ourselves about the harsh realities of our relationship -- we knew we couldn't live together, no matter how much we both wanted it. Neither the Navy nor the FBI was going to take that, excuse the expression, lying down.

Being outed was a risk, a real one, but Fox seemed ready to take that risk; he didn't even seem to be afraid of it, although he acknowledged he'd never spent enough time with anyone for that to be a factor.

"I haven't wanted that kind of relationship before, Daniel," he said, and he held me close. "I want it now."

I couldn't think of a thing to say. I kissed him, plundering that gorgeous mouth with my tongue until we were both hard as hell and breathing way too fast. We made love more gently this time; I held him as close as I could, letting my hands touch him everywhere I could reach, whispering his name in his ear.

I think he understood what I was trying to say.