I SPENT THE WEEKEND SEQUESTERED in my studio, curled onto either the couch or bed. Every sound, real or imagined, made me jump. I found myself glancing at the door or out the window or testing the lock repeatedly. I was terrified to leave. If my father was the one that had left the note, then he knew where I lived. If he knew that, it wasn’t a stretch to wonder if he was watching my comings and goings. I had no idea how he had found me. Granted, I lived in the same general part of town that I had lived in as a child, but I had gone to great lengths to ensure I was as under the radar as possible. And yet, somehow, he had found me.
It had to be him. That was the only thing that made sense. I remember the call I had received from the corrections officials a few weeks previous. Then the mystery call at the shop and the lights on in my studio when I got home, knowing I had turned them off. Everything added up to added up, and I had never seen it. Why hadn’t I considered the possibility that he would come for me? Why hadn’t I prepared for this? Why had I allowed myself to get distracted by Adam? I knew better.
He had made his intentions perfectly clear in the note. It wasn’t just about doing bodily harm to me, but also to toy with me, to frighten me, and to make me realize he was still in control after all these years. He also wanted to prove the same point to me that he often made when I was younger; I was unworthy of being loved. And he’d accomplished that by including Adam in the threat. Anyone remotely connected to me could be a target, and because of my relationship to Adam, and, by extension, his family, they were all easy prey.
Lucas’s face swam through my mind repeatedly. The kid had already been through enough, and was well on his way to complete health. The last thing he needed was to be threatened by the likes of my father. He was too young and too innocent to have to deal with that.
And there was Adam himself.
Adam had been texting me since Thursday night, but every one of them went unanswered. Every time my phone chirped, I knew it was a message from him. He was the only one that ever called or texted. And every time I heard that chirp, a tiny piece of my heart broke off. I would never be able to explain it to him. Not without him looking at me with pity in his eyes. If I knew Adam the way I thought I knew him, he would look for a way to fix it. And it was unfixable. I had to protect him from this. He could never know about my father or what I was responsible for. And the only way I could do that was to cut off all communication with him.
I hated it. I hated every second I was in that studio that weekend. I wanted nothing more than to call Adam, have him wrap me in his arms and make the entire nightmare go away. I wished he could take me somewhere far away and never come back. Just me and him. He would protect me, and I so desperately wanted that. For the first time in my life, I truly felt that there was someone out there for me that would cherish and protect me. I felt safe when I was with him, like nothing could ever hurt me again. I knew he would never hurt me. I could feel it. And I would never hurt him either. Yet, that was exactly what I had to do, hurt him to protect him.
I couldn’t let my father anywhere near him or his family.
I would rather die first.
Adam came by the studio Sunday, I knew it was him even before I heard the knock on my door. I could tell it was him by the sound of his truck engine. It’s funny, really, how in tune you become to certain smells and sounds. I had learned to recognize the sounds of his engine. On reflex, I went to the door to open it. My hand was on the knob when the knock came, soft and gentle, like he knew that I was on the other side, scared.
Three gentle raps, followed by, “David, it’s me.”
I looked out the peephole, for no other reason than to look at him. To see the beauty that he had brought to my life for that brief period of time.
“Please let me in. Let me talk to you.” He looked so…broken, defeated. I had done that to him.
My heart was shattering, I could feel it, and there was nothing I could do about it. I had to follow through, I had to cut him out of my life, I had to protect him, and it was breaking me to do it. Tears streamed down, but I didn’t utter a sound. If he heard me, he would do everything in his power to get to me, and I couldn’t have that. He couldn’t be around me. I was toxic. And I couldn’t allow my poison to infect him. I cared for him too much to allow it to happen. He couldn’t be hurt because of me.
“David, please talk to me. I don’t know what I did. Please tell me what I did.”
He was begging. I was responsible for that too. He was the strongest, gentlest soul I knew, and I was forcing him to grovel. I kept telling myself, over and over, that it was for his own good. But regardless how often I repeated it in my head, I couldn’t convince myself.
He’d knocked one last time. I watched him do it, and I mentally screamed for him to continue, keep fighting, knock down my defenses, understand why I was doing that. Help me, please.
He didn’t take his hand off of the door. He simply stood there, hand pressed to metal as if he was willing it to open. I could see the tears on his cheeks. I pressed my hand to the door, and I swear I felt him, like something, some energy, was connecting us, binding us, through the metal of the door.
“I don’t understand.” He hung his head low as he spoke, defeat finally sinking in.
I heard his fingertips slide down the door, and I felt the loss of that connection. He turned to walk down the stairs.
“I’m not giving up on you. On us.”
I watched him descend to the parking lot, climb into his truck, and pull away.
I don’t know how long I stood at the door, staring out of the peephole. I prayed he would come back, that he meant what he said. I’m not giving up on you. On us. But I wasn’t giving him a choice. He would have to. It was for the best.
I told myself that over and over as I slid down the door and onto the floor. I repeated it to myself as I pulled my knees to my chest and sank my head down, and sobbed.
It was for the best.
I had to return to work on Monday. I had little choice. I literally couldn’t afford any more time off. I still had to support myself, regardless of personal drama.
I raced down the stairs from my studio and into the back door of the shop, all the while glancing from side to side. I fully expected someone to be lying in wait for me, either my father or Adam.
It didn’t happen.
Mondays were slow, only requiring two people to work, and thankfully, Greg was there. I knew that there would be no risk of talking. Greg and I didn’t talk. We weren’t friends, we were coworkers. Business didn’t mix with pleasure where he was concerned, and at that point, I was perfectly fine with that. At least I was trying to convince myself of that.
I was still feeling raw from my “visit” from Adam and the decision I had made. I knew I was taking the coward’s way out by avoiding him, but I also knew that I would never be able to tell him face-to-face. I would crumble and tell him everything. Part of me believed he deserved to know the truth, and that same part knew once he heard the truth, he would leave anyway. The other part believed I was doing the right thing by keeping him in the dark. He would want to fix whatever was broken, which would be impossible. I had wrestled with the two notions all weekend.
Greg and I spent the day in virtual silence. The occasional customer would come in, and he took care of them all. I would catch him periodically looking in my direction as I worked, an odd expression that I had never seen before was on his face. But when I’d caught him, he would turn away. I thought it was a fluke the first time I saw it, but the more it happened, the more uncomfortable it made me.
Finally, the last customer left, and Greg followed him to the door to lock it. I made my way back to the office to clock out when he came in with that odd expression again and said, “We need to talk.”
My mind raced through the past eight hours, trying to find something that I had done wrong, and came up empty. He motioned for me to sit in the empty chair and he sat on the desk.
“Adam was here yesterday.”
The mention of Adam’s name drove a dagger through my soul. He had probably gone to the store first looking for me, and when he found out I wasn’t there, the next logical place to look was my studio. Memories from the day before flooded my brain, and I felt myself sinking further into the chair. The last thing I wanted to talk about was Adam.
“Greg, I really don’t want to—”
He cut me off with a dismissive wave of his hand. “I don’t want to talk about him either. I want to talk about you.”
“I really don’t want to do that either. I’d rather just go home.”
“I don’t think you do. I think something has you spooked. You stayed at the back of the store all day and watched the door like you were expecting an armed militia. You jumped every time someone walked through the door. You’ve missed the last three days of work, and you never miss work. Tell me.”
“Greg, I can’t.”
“You need to talk to someone. I know Adam didn’t do anything.”
“How? Did the two of you talk? What did he say?”
The faintest of grins twisted at the corner of Greg’s lips. He knew he had me. “Nothing really. I jumped him as soon as he came in. I thought he had done something to you. But when I asked…well, no, accused him of hurting you, he denied it. He said he hadn’t heard from you in days. He’d been texting you with no response. He’s scared. D, I could see it in his eyes. He was telling the truth.”
I could feel the anger and hurt surging. I had to fight to keep it under control. If I let it loose, everything that I had been feeling for the past three days would come rushing out, and I would be a sobbing mess. So, instead, I said, “You and I have never been friends, Greg. We’ve worked together for a little over a year and we’ve never had a real conversation. Why the sudden interest? What’s changed?”
Greg let out an exasperated sigh and scrubbed his hand over his face. “I’m doing this wrong.”
He went behind the desk and grabbed the rolling chair by its back, wheeled it around to the front of the desk until it was right in front of me, and sat. “What’s changed is you, David. You’ve changed since you met Adam. You’ve become more confident, more relaxed. Something happened a few days ago, though, that has you running scared.”
He was right, of course. But I couldn’t tell him that.
He sighed again, and his expression changed. The look of stone he normally wore was replaced with something softer, more vulnerable.
He took a minute to gather his thoughts. “I told you I had a little brother, right?”
I nodded, having no idea where he was headed with the sudden change of subject.
“We got along, I guess. At least as well as brothers could. I gave him shit all the time, because that’s what you do when you’re the oldest, right? He was a good kid, whip smart and nice, and I guess there was a part of me that was jealous of that. I was the meathead jock that partied too much and always got into trouble.”
I leaned forward in my chair, suddenly feeling uncomfortable. “Greg, I—”
“No,” he said, raising a hand to stop me. “I need to do this. I need to talk to somebody.
“So, I guess I wasn’t the best brother out there, right. I mean, I didn’t look out for him. I teased him mercilessly. I let other guys at school pick on him, and I never stopped it.
“Home wasn’t much better, either. He wasn’t like my dad or me. My dad was the typical man’s man, hunted and fished. Total grease monkey. And, like I said, Bennie was smart and I was the jock. He was the odd man out.”
“Bennie?”
“My brother. Benjamin, Ben. He hated it when I called him Bennie. Said it made him feel like a little kid. So, I kept doing it, just to get a rise outta him. I was a total dick to him. I see that now.”
Greg paused for a moment as if he were reliving a memory.
“For someone as smart as he was, he could really do some stupid shit. He was always forgetting to clear out the search history on his computer. I mean, that’s Porn Search 101, you always clear that shit out.
“He was sixteen, I think, when my dad ran across something Bennie.” He stopped. “Ben had been looking at. Wasn’t even porn, either. It was pages about questioning your sexuality and advice columns about coming out, but my dad didn’t care. He went ballistic. He stormed up to Ben’s room and threw the door open so hard I thought it was going to come off the hinges. I remember I went into the hallway to see what the ruckus was over. My dad had Ben lifted up by the shirt, just holdin’ him there, and screaming at him. Ben’s face was pale, and tears streamed down his face. My dad kept telling him that no son of his was going to be a fag, over and over.”
Greg stopped again, lost in the memory. His eyes filled with tears, but he wiped them away with the back of his hand. He dipped his head down and sucked in a deep breath, chewing on his lower lip before continuing. “He slugged Ben in the jaw. I mean, fully cocked his arm back and belted him. Ben fell back onto the bed. Then he stood over him, and…God, I’ll never forget this. He waved his fist in Ben’s face and Ben tried pulling away, but he only made it as far as the wall. My dad said, ‘whatever you do, never ruin my name.’”
Greg looked up at me. His eyes were red and his lips pulled together. I reached out on instinct, and squeezed his hand. We may not have been friends, at least not before, but he was sharing something with me so personal and painful that I had to.
“You have to understand, D. My dad never hit either of us. Seeing him punch Ben like that…it scared me. If he was able to do that, what else was he able to do? The hatred he had in his voice at that second wasn’t anything I’d ever heard before. He truly hated my brother, or at least, who my brother was.
“My dad stood over him for another second, then stormed out of the room, right past me like I wasn’t even there. I could have done something. I should have gone in to check on Ben. But I didn’t. He saw me standing in the hall, and he was begging me for help without saying a word. But I turned around and went back into my room.
“I know now how that looked. God knows, if I could do it different, I would, I’d go in there and hold him. I could hear him crying through the walls, and I didn’t do anything. He had to have felt abandoned, like everyone had turned their back on him, but I wasn’t thinking about that at the time. The only thing I could think about was my dad punching one of us.
“I spent that night in my room. I kept seeing that punch over and over and the look of terror when Ben was thrown onto the bed. How could my father hate my brother so much that he would hit him and throw him around? My entire opinion of the man changed. I promised myself that I would go to Ben and be the kind of brother I should have been all along.
“I woke up the next morning and went right to his room, but he was gone. His bed hadn’t been slept in, his backpack was gone, and his window was open. No note, nothing. Just…vanished. I haven’t seen him since.”
He stared off in the distance for a while, not speaking. I could see his thoughts spinning in his eyes, and I wished there was something I could do for him. He was obviously reliving one of the most painful moments of his life, and there wasn’t a thing I could do.
Finally, he turned to me and said, “He cares about you, you know. Probably more than he realizes.”
The words bulldozed their way into my chest. They matched what I was feeling, what I had been feeling for quite some time, but had been too afraid to admit to myself. There was no way he could feel for me what I felt for him. The idea had danced around at the edges of my brain, but I had never allowed myself to believe it. I had spent so much time questioning my own self-worth, particularly where Adam was concerned, that I never took into account how he might feel. “I don’t see how that’s possible.”
“You’re so full of shit. You can’t tell me you don’t see it. Fuck, I see it and I’m the densest fucker I know. D, if you could have seen him yesterday, you would have seen that look. He seemed…lost and confused.”
The sad fact was, I had seen him and knew the look Greg was talking about. A pang of guilt wormed its way into my gut because I was the one that put it there.
“I can’t fix it.” It came out as a whisper, but the words reverberated across my very being. That was my only course, it was all I had known and would ever know.
“Yes, you can.”
I looked into his eyes and saw something had replaced the sadness. Determination. “Why now?”
“Huh?”
“I mean, why are we talking now? We’ve known each other all this time, and barely spoken two words to each other. Why now?”
He seemed to choose his words carefully before speaking. “I was a shit to Ben his entire life. In the end, he thought that we hated him. I never got the chance to make it right. I never got the chance to tell him that I didn’t care that he was gay, he was still my brother and I loved him. I never got the chance to tell him that I wanted to watch him meet the man of his dreams, fall in love, get married, raise a family. I never got any of that. Because I was an arrogant ass, and because he ran. I’ll regret all of it, every last thing, until the day I die. David, don’t run away from the people that care. Even when everything seems to be at their darkest, those are the people that will stand by you. Whatever is going on, Adam will stand by you.”
And with those words, my resistance crumbled. Days’ worth of anger and fear, years’ worth of guilt and remorse broke through the surface and came pouring out. My body was wracked with sobs, and Greg lurched across the span separating us and held my head to his shoulder as I cried, slowly stroking my hair like a parent does a newborn infant.
Seconds turned to minutes until I finally got myself under control. I pulled away and wiped my eyes. Greg reached behind to the desk and pulled a box of tissues off it. “Talk to me, D. Let me help.”
There was no internal debate. Not after what he had shared with me.
I told him my truth.
All of it.
Every last, painful, bloody detail. I left nothing out, from beginning to end.
Greg listened in rapt attention, never interrupting me, never wavering, never interjecting. Just listening.
I often wondered what people got out of going to a therapist. I had been told that it was far easier to bare your soul to a perfect stranger than it was to your closest confidant. No fear of judgement or recrimination. I never believed it.
Until then.
When I finished, I sat and waited for the judgment that I was sure would follow.
It never happened.
Greg had a look of pure hatred in his eyes, but I sensed it wasn’t directed at me. He channeled that into four simple yet powerful words. “It wasn’t your fault.”
If only I could believe him. But a lifetime of conditioning was impossible to break in a matter of minutes. It would take far more time than that for me to believe it, if I ever did.
I shook my head at him. “I don’t know how you can say that. After everything I just told you.”
He smiled at me and patted me on the knee. “Because it’s the truth. That son-of-a-bitch did all of that to you not because of you. You are no more to blame than Ben was. I know you don’t believe me. At least not yet. But you will, eventually.”
He was right of course. I didn’t believe him. At least not entirely. But on some level, I think I wanted to. I think I wanted to be free from the burden I had carried for so long. And I think that after verbalizing everything, even if it was only to Greg, I was beginning to realize that maybe my truth wasn’t true after all.
“You need to talk to Adam,” Greg stated, as if it were a matter of fact like the sky being blue.
“I can’t do that. He—”
“Cares about you. He would want to know. He should know.”
The idea of telling Adam sent waves of terror coursing through my body. Everything would change once he knew. But then, everything already had.
“D, he’ll stand by you. I promise.”
With my eyes still on Greg, I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and slid my finger across the screen. My thumbs hovered over his contact information and I had to will myself to type out the message. –Can we talk?
Then I turned the phone face down on my lap and counted.
One.
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
My phone rang. Perhaps I should have expected Adam to call instead of text, but I hadn’t. I answered on the first ring, and all he said was, “I’m on my way.”
The sound of his voice alone, soothed my soul in ways I could never have imagined.
I glanced up at Greg and hadn’t realized I had started crying until he reached over and brushed a tear from my cheek.
“It’ll be okay,” he said. “I promise.”