L.A. Affairs: We stopped pretending we were just friends. But was it too late?
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I still think about the night before I left Los Angeles — the way Matt and I finally stopped pretending we were just friends and how his pit bull, Jesus, slept curled at the edge of the bed while we held each other, fully clothed, knowing we were out of time. It wasn’t a grand ending. There were no fireworks, no cinematic declarations. Just the quiet hum of the city outside and two people trying to stretch a single night into forever.
I had met Matt years earlier, back when I first moved to Los Angeles and the city seemed determined to break me. I’d been apartment hunting for months, a process that had devolved into a series of small humiliations. Landlords’ smiles would fade the instant they saw my brown face. The decent apartments — ones with working showers or a refrigerator — were always “just rented.” The ones I could actually get were dark, smelly or unsafe.
Our meet-cute was perfect. Our longtime L.A. friends introduced us. I brought snacks, and he saved us seats.
I was starting to think I’d made a mistake leaving New York. Then my friend Shannon sent me a Craigslist listing that looked —miraculously — normal. “Hollywood/Little Armenia,” she read. “Centrally located. Two blocks from the 101.” The rent wasn’t outrageous. The photos didn’t make me shudder. I pulled out my Thomas Guide, traced the route to Lexington Avenue and drove there with more hope than I wanted to admit.
The building exceeded my expectations. It was white, mid-century, with quirky castle-like touches that gave it personality. The street was alive with Armenian markets and mom-and-pop bakeries. For the first time since arriving in L.A., I could picture myself living somewhere that felt like a community.
Then Matt appeared.
He was tall, clean-shaven, reddish-haired, with warm brown eyes that made you feel immediately seen. “You’re here about the apartment?” he asked. I braced myself for the usual letdown. Instead, he smiled and said, “Let me show you around.”
How did our date go? It involved lots of candles and an after-work shower before a home-cooked meal. But then there was the fire that changed our evening plans.
He was the building’s superintendent, but that felt too small a word for him. He was also a documentary filmmaker who’d studied at UCLA, was fluent in three languages and had an easy charisma that drew people in. His dog, Jesus, a striking black-and-white pit bull, followed him everywhere, tail wagging like a punctuation mark.
The apartment itself wasn’t perfect, but it was a palace compared to what I’d been through. It was a studio with a big kitchen and actual sunlight. I signed the lease that week. Shannon warned me, only half-joking, “Don’t fall for your building super.” I promised I wouldn’t.
That promise lasted about two weeks.
The first night I moved in, I realized my bedroom window was broken — not just cracked, but open enough to make me feel unsafe. I knocked on Matt’s door, probably sounding sharper than I meant to. I’d been through too many slumlords to expect much. But he listened patiently, nodded and had it fixed the next day. That small act — his professionalism, his steadiness — disarmed me. It was the first time in months that someone in this city had made me feel cared for.
We were both smokers then. The building had a little patio where residents would gather, and before long, Matt and I started running into each other there. Those encounters turned into conversations about film, queerness, art and the strange loneliness of being transplants in a city obsessed with dreams. He told me about Costa Rica, where he grew up, and about how he loved and resented Los Angeles for its contradictions. I told him about New York, about how it shaped me and why I had to leave it.
I was on the hunt to have sex with two other people. What I ended up finding were three women — my new best friends — who loved me for me.
Our connection deepened slowly, marked by cigarettes and laughter, and those long, suspended silences when neither of us wanted to say goodnight.
By the time the holidays rolled around, I’d stopped pretending that I didn’t look forward to seeing him. As a thank-you for all his help that first year, I bought him two bottles of Grey Goose: lemon- and orange-flavored because I’d noticed he liked citrus. He invited me to help him drink them on New Year’s Eve.
We spent the night talking about everything and nothing: music, travel, ambition. Midnight came. We hugged. And in that long, lingering embrace, I felt the spark we’d been trying to ignore. But we let go, careful not to cross the boundary that had quietly become sacred between us.
For years, we danced around it. We’d share a beer, a smoke, a late-night talk and retreat again to our corners. I respected his professionalism; he respected my space. But under all that restraint was something undeniably alive.
Then came the accident. A driver T-boned my Volvo on my way home from work at E! Networks, and I was left with two herniated cervical discs and a terrifying warning from my doctor: one wrong move, and I could be paralyzed. I decided to move back to New York to recover.
The night before I left, Matt came by to say goodbye. We knew it was our last chance to stop pretending.
“I love you,” he said quietly.
“I love you too,” I told him.
We kissed, finally, with the kind of tenderness born from years of self-restraint. But we didn’t take it further. We just lay there, spooned together, holding on as if stillness could save us.
For a long time, marriage wasn’t something my boyfriend and I needed. We’d already built a home, a life, a circle of friends and a level of trust. But then I made a big career shift and needed medical coverage.
After I moved back east, we kept in touch for a while, then drifted apart. He eventually married a Frenchman and moved to Europe to make films. I stayed in New York and wrote my stories.
Sometimes I think about that broken window — the one he fixed the day after my first night in the building — and how it set the tone for everything that followed. Love doesn’t always announce itself with drama. Sometimes it’s in the quiet repair of something broken, the small acts of care that build into something profound.
Matt taught me that. He made a city that once felt hostile finally feel like home. And even now, years later, when I think of Los Angeles, I don’t think of the rejection or the struggle. I think of him.
The author is a freelance writer. He lives in New York City and is working on a memoir. He’s also on Instagram: @thebohemiandork.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
