It was hard to tell what was worse, the humiliation or the pain.

Maybe there wasn’t a difference between the two. They could melt together into this anguish that ached inside Burns’ heart.

“Do you want to talk?” said Delia.

He ignored her and went upstairs. In his bedroom, he propped a chair under the doorknob to keep people out.

He couldn’t see Karl from his window. Maybe Karl had started running the minute the front door closed. Maybe he had disappeared into the shadows, the way he did last night when the headlights passed by.

I really fucked things up. I destroyed everything. I’m such an asshole.

The angry part of him, the part that still wanted to lash out at the pain he felt, countered: Why did he have to do that? Why couldn’t he leave it alone?

That was simple enough. Because he was Karl, and he couldn’t leave anything alone, if he thought it was wrong. Because somehow he was more moral than Burns, even though they usually acted like those roles were reversed, like he was the godless heathen and Burns was the big role-model.

Holy shit this hurts.

He didn’t even have anyone to talk to about it, because his best friend, the very person he wanted to talk to, was the one who had walked out the door.

This is why you don’t get involved with your friends.

It sounded wise enough now, but it was too late to help.

A soft knock at his door. “Burns?” It was Delia.

He didn’t want to see her. She was tainted with all the history that had brought him down. Yet she was the closest thing he had to a friend right now. He moved the chair out from under the doorknob.

She looked so worried, he suddenly wondered if he’d been crying without realizing it. He touched his cheek. Still dry. Didn’t make any sense, he felt like crying, but his body couldn’t seem to settle on any one reaction.

“If you came to gloat—”

“You know I didn’t,” she said. She swept past him, taking in at a glance the entire room, the trophy shelf, the yellowed and faded sports posters, the strange mix of ancient boy-history and modern man-belongings. “I’m sorry if I made things worse.”

He sat on the foot of the bed. “It was inevitable. What’s that saying, an irresistible force meets an immovable object?”

“When I hinted around at you being gay—”

“You did more than hint, Delia.”

“I didn’t mean to put pressure on you. A lot of guys are open about it, if you ask.”

Couldn’t she see that he didn’t want to talk about this? All that was gone, it was water under the bridge. All that mattered now was the pain he felt.

“Did your dad put you up to this?” he asked.

“Coming up to your room? God no, he’ll probably yell at me when we get home.”

“No, earlier. Did he put you up to meeting me? Asking a bunch of probing questions?”

“I don’t understand.”

“See, this is the pattern of my whole life. I start to approach the moment of truth, the moment when I finally have to admit what I am, and it’s like my family senses it, like we’ve got some kind of immune system to it. My mom calls your dad, suddenly I’m whisked off to Bible camp. Or, this time, suddenly I’m whisked off to a date with you.”

“You don’t think I have anything to do with all this, surely.”

“Christ, I don’t know! Doesn’t the timing seem suspicious to you?”

She sighed. “Dude, you’re hurting. It’s blinding you to logic. My dad wasn’t like, Hey go date this gay guy, maybe you can get him back on the team. No, it was, Your sinful urban lifestyle has come to an end, now you must date the upstanding offspring of my most moral parishioners. It was just the usual bullshit where I don’t fit in with my family,” she said.

“Yeah, I’m sorry,” Burns said. “I don’t mean to accuse you of anything. I just didn’t see this coming. I didn’t think he would leave me. You don’t know Karl, but he’s… He’s got the best heart of anyone I know. He’s generous and kind, beneath that know-it-all exterior. If he has given up on me, then seriously, there’s nothing left for me in this world.”

She knelt beside him and took his hands. “Burns, that sounds like dangerous talk. Promise me you’re not thinking of doing anything stupid.”

His laugh was cold. “What, like kill myself? That would give them all the last laugh, wouldn’t it? Death of a Golden Boy. They could make a fucking documentary of my troubled, tragic life. I’m not going to kill myself. No, I’m just going to sit here and fucking rot in this little boy bedroom, living with my parents the rest of my life, because to do otherwise takes courage that I obviously don’t have. I never realized I was a coward, Delia. It’s a hard thing to learn about yourself.”

“You’re not a coward.”

“I let the man I love walk out of my life, rather than risking my parents’ good opinion of me.”

There wasn’t anything she could say to that. He was right. Of course I’m right. For once I get to be the one who’s right.

She offered to stick around, but her father was calling up the stairs. A quiet goodbye, a promise to talk later, and she was gone.

Burns lay back on the bed. He couldn’t cry. If he cried, his mother would hear him, and she’d come up, knocking, interrupting, intruding.

He couldn’t not cry, either. The pain was too much. It was unbearable.

He grabbed his jacket and went out the back, where she couldn’t see him.

The night was cold. His breath fogged in front of him. But he wasn’t here at all; the air couldn’t touch him.

In his mind, he was back at the quarry. Karl’s strong arms pulling him from the water. Saving him.

Karl pressing him against the tree. His first kiss. The moment everything in his life changed. Later, Karl’s hands again, touching, exploring.

How had Burns managed to give that up? Why should anyone’s fucking opinion about him get in the way of his love for Karl? Fucking Grover Pelham and his talk about sissies, who the fuck cared? He was just an old man with stupid opinions, and in twenty years he’d be dead in the ground. He couldn’t touch Burns. He couldn’t do anything to him. Why did it matter?

Reverend Ron? Was there something about his look of disappointment, his moral judgment, that would be so deadly that Burns couldn’t withstand it? Would Burns just drop dead if Ron thought he was gay?

Karl had been willing to go toe-to-toe with Ron. He hadn’t cared about manners, or being a polite guest, or anything. They were always talking about how Karl blew up when he was stressed out…but Karl had been defending him, like a guard dog ready to clamp his fangs down on an intruder’s arm.

You gave up someone who could have protected you from the world, if you needed that protection.

But Karl couldn’t protect Burns from his parents. He loved them, but they would never understand. In their dull incomprehension of anything that wasn’t part of their tiny white-bread suburban world, they couldn’t fathom how a son of theirs could be gay. It would destroy them.

Karl couldn’t protect him from that, because it wasn’t Burns who needed protection. His parents did. Karl couldn’t understand that. Maybe he never would. There was a fragility to his parents; that’s why they clung so hard to their rock-solid pastor. A fear of change, a fear of difference.

So that’s your story? You broke Karl’s heart, to protect your parents…because they’re fragile.

Why did they get to be fragile? Why did they get to be protected, at the cost of their son’s sanity?

In the end, though, this wasn’t about his parents. It was about his choice. On the one hand, silence and lies and the dubious comfort of people’s good regard; on the other, someone who loved him so much it felt like it could shake the world.

The tears came then, in the shadows, far away from everyone else.

Because he’d made the wrong choice, and he knew that now.