Jeremy
It started right after he was kidnapped. Well…almost kidnapped. My brother and I had always been close in a wrestle-it-out, not-tattle-to-Mom kind of way, but not much more than that. We didn’t hang out because there was a two-year age difference.
Our parents didn’t think it was that much of a gap, but in kid years, it was a lifetime. At six and eight, it wasn’t so noticeable. But by the time I was fourteen and he was twelve, we didn’t have much in common. We didn’t hate each other like some brothers I knew; we just didn’t relate to each other.
Everything changed one afternoon the year Kevin turned fourteen. He’d been walking home from school—started out with a big group of friends, but gradually everyone else had wandered off on their own. By the time he’d turned the corner to our block, he was alone. It should have been fine; he should have been safe. He wasn’t.
From what he said later, he’d stopped because the strap on his backpack had broken, and he was trying to see if he could fix it. When he’d paused, he noticed the van that pulled up beside him. It turned out it had actually been following him since he left the school, but in typical teenage fashion, he’d been paying more attention to the other kids than anything else around him.
It was always a jumble in his mind at that point, but evidently, the man in the van got out to “help” him. The guy’s version of help was to try and pull Kevin into the vehicle. Kevin was a short, skinny little kid, and the kidnapper thought he was younger than he was. So he hadn’t expected Kevin to fight back. Kevin had swung the broken backpack as hard as he could at him and started screaming for all he was worth.
That’s where I’d come in.
I’d heard Kevin from the backyard, and something in his voice scared the hell out of me. It felt like it’d taken forever to get to the front yard, but Kevin later said that it was only seconds before I reached him. Between Kevin’s unexpected aggression and me coming around the side of the house, the kidnapper decided to make a break for it.
He didn’t get far.
Now I wasn’t very strong, but at sixteen, I’d finally started getting some muscle, and I’d sprouted up a good six inches in about six months. My parents said it was probably the baseball or basketball I played that gave me the power—I always thought it was probably playing too many violent video games that gave me unrealistic expectations of my own strength—but seeing the fear in Kevin’s face and the man running away, something snapped.
It’s always been kind of hazy for me—like it happened to someone else, but from what I can remember, I tackled the guy, and with one lucky punch had him knocked out cold on the ground. That’s when the police came, and the questions started.
My parents never told us what the police learned or much about the investigation. Kevin was too traumatized to ask, and something about the looks on their faces told me knowing would be devastating. There were questions and closed-door meetings, but there was soon a quiet plea deal, and the guy ended up with life in prison.
It’s been four years, and I still don’t have any desire to know what the cops discovered. After seeing so many police and lawyer shows on TV, whatever they found out about the man had to have been more disturbing than I ever needed to hear. I’ve never wanted to really understand what would have happened to Kevin.
I’ve always thought that Kevin was the hero in it all because he’d fought back and had done everything he could to save himself. Kevin saw it differently. In his mind, I’d saved him. He hadn’t said anything right away, but later he told me that when he closed his eyes and remembered it, he didn’t see the guy coming after him; he saw me running to protect him.
Maybe that’s why—or maybe it was meant to happen—things changed after that. It started with the nightmares. In typical teenage boy fashion, Kevin hadn’t wanted to tell my parents how bad they were. But he’d told me.
When he’d woken up scared and crying in the middle of the night, he’d come to me. He’d snuck into my bed, and I’d held him and made the fears go away. I was his hero; of course, I’d chase the bad dreams away.
In the beginning, he ended up in my bed almost every night. Eventually, my parents made him talk to a therapist, and the nightmares subsided somewhat. Kevin went from crawling into bed with me every night to just a couple of times a week. He never stayed away completely, and to be honest, I hadn’t wanted him to—because I had nightmares as well.
Only in mine, I hadn’t made it in time to save him.
Once he’d started sleeping in his own bed the entire night through, there were times I’d woken up in the middle of the night, petrified. That’s when I’d go to find him. I would stand in the doorway of his room and watch him sleep; I never crawled into bed with him.
I think in my mind, it was probably because I was supposed to be strong for him. Sometimes I could go back to sleep after checking on him for a few minutes; sometimes I ended up watching him most of the night.
Kevin never said anything when he would find me in his room in the morning. He’d just smile, and the next night I’d wake up to find him crawling into bed with me. We would both pretend he’d had a bad dream, and that I was there to keep him safe.
This went on for almost a year. At first, my parents hadn’t been concerned. But after a while, they’d talked to the therapist. It was decided Kevin and I should share a room, and that being in closer proximity would make the need to share a bed go away. So they’d moved his little twin bed in and pushed my double bed up against the wall, and we started living together.
By that time, I was beginning to understand that something about how tight Kevin and I had gotten was making them nervous, but I was still too absorbed in my own fears to figure it out.
I can still remember hiding at the top of the stairs one night, listening to their whispered conversation a few weeks after we’d started sharing a room. There was a concern in their voices I couldn’t understand.
They’d been so relieved when Kevin’s nightmares lessened that I was baffled. If I’d have taken the time to think things through, I might have caught on—I wasn’t as innocent as they thought—but all I could think in that moment was that they wanted to take Kevin away from me.
Little comments kept floating up the stairs—“Wrong…too close…dependent…not healthy”—and the fear had been mind-numbing. Kevin’s nightmares had faded, but mine hadn’t. If anything, on the nights he wasn’t with me, they’d gotten worse.
Being able to wake up at night and turn to see him had allowed me to relax and get more sleep than I’d had in months. Even better, reaching over and being able to touch him was soothing and helped me fall right back to sleep. Feeling his heartbeat and the warmth of his body let me know everything was okay.
The first night he slept in my room—our room—something settled in me; it was like I could finally breathe. It should have felt weird because we’d never shared a room, but instead of seeming like he was intruding in my space, it was like he’d finally come home.
Yeah, I should have realized something was off, but it was such a wonderful feeling that there was no way at seventeen I would have questioned something that felt so right. No kid would have.
My parents finally decided to trust the therapist and leave us in the same room, but for me, the damage was done. It took a long time before I could look at them with anything but fear and anger. Knowing they were just more people who could take Kevin away from me hardened something inside me that never thawed.
It made me better at hiding from them how much I needed him, and we both grew more cautious about sharing with anyone how many nights Kevin was in my bed. The truth was, from the first night he’d moved into my room, he might have started out in his own bed, but he always ended up in mine.
There were times over the last couple of years they’d tried to force the issue of separate rooms again, but we’d stood our ground and had refused to cooperate. We’d been careful; there was never anything specific they could say. Just vague references to us needing our own space.
As far as they knew, he hadn’t slept in my bed regularly in years. Occasionally, if they came in before we woke up, we’d say he’d had a nightmare. But setting our alarm early enough that they wouldn’t see took care of most of those issues.
We never acknowledged that hiding what we were doing meant we were doing something. At first, we’d sought each other out because of fear and the need for comfort, but for me, over time, things changed. I don’t know when or how, but at some point, it wasn’t fear that kept me needing to have him in my bed. It simply became our bed. Our room…our bed…our life…there wasn’t another way to see it.
Looking down at his sweet face curled up beside me in bed, my heart ached with the fear that something would change. I was twenty and Kevin had just turned eighteen—I knew things would change, but not knowing how was terrifying.
The pressure of the changes that were coming since I graduated high school was almost suffocating. A great part-time job and a good junior college close by had let me put off conversations about leaving home, but soon I wouldn’t be able to delay them any longer. There were other harder topics that needed to be addressed too, but I wasn’t ready for that yet. I wasn’t ready to know one way or the other if Kevin saw things the same way I did.
We’d made some plans. Our parents assumed Kevin would stay and go to the junior college as I had, but we’d seen things differently. He was coming to college with me in a few weeks. Full scholarships to the state university saw to that. Doing well in school had always been important, but after everything that had happened, studying became something safe.
No one asked why you didn’t go out and party if you were the studious one in the group. No one questioned it if the captain of the baseball team and basketball team and valedictorian didn’t have enough time on his hands to date or chase girls. No one ever asked if he’d even chase girls if he had the chance. Some assumptions were damning, but some made you safer.
If Kevin emulated his big brother and was more focused on his grades than girls, that wasn’t surprising either. Kevin had always been smaller than me. He took more after Mom than Dad, so sports were never his thing. But no one had ever called him a nerd or weak.
I’d made sure everyone knew how he’d fought back and how tough I thought he was. His big eyes and the long bangs he used to hide behind made the girls think he was too cute to put in the geek category. The fact that they thought he was shy made him all the more desirable even if he never dated anyone either.
There was never any discussion between us about why we didn’t date. It was one of those topics we left untouched. We had a few of those. Things like sexuality…why we were really in the same bed…why it was our bed and the “other” bed…why we’d each always let the other know where we were going and when we’d be home…why hugs and touches meant so much more with each other than they did with other people. Some things we understood the answers to; some things we just avoided.
If we’d had better answers, we might have talked about them more. There were so many things I didn’t understand, and I think Kevin felt the same way. I’ve never been much into labels, so I’ve never put one on myself. But even before everything changed, girls and guys were both kind of interesting but nothing I felt the need to chase. After everything happened, there wasn’t a need for labels because there was only Kevin.
He became the center of my world.
I tried not to picture Kevin dating anyone. It was one of those things that made me more frustrated than I could cope with. When I had to, when it turned into a nagging fear that wouldn’t go away, I couldn’t ever see him dating girls. As strong as he was, he needed someone who could chase the demons away and be strong for him. And even in a curious or analytical way, I’d never seen him look at girls like that.
But did he look at me like that?
I should say no; I know that now. But I couldn’t. Because even if I couldn’t admit it to anyone else, I wouldn’t lie to myself. When no one else was watching, and when he thought he was unnoticed, he did look at me another way. But was it as different as I wanted? I didn’t know if he was aware of how I saw him. I didn’t know if I was ready for any of this.
Too many things were changing too quickly, but we couldn’t go to college with this hanging over our heads. I couldn’t let him plan his entire life around us if he didn’t even realize there was an us. That wouldn’t have been fair, and it wouldn’t have been the right way to take care of him. Because I would take care of him—even if it meant leaving him.
Kevin started shifting in his sleep, and I realized more time must have passed than I thought. My watching him wouldn’t have woken him up because he was used to that. But his internal alarm went off like clockwork just before the alarm was set to ring.
As I watched, his shifting turned into stretches, and his eyes opened.
“Morning.” His hushed voice was low and scratchy from sleep.
“Morning.” There was so much more on my mind, but it wasn’t the time.
“Do you have work today?” Kevin already knew the answer to that, but he asked anyway. He always did.
“Yes. Just until mid-afternoon, though. Do you still have that appointment?” I asked the question knowing the answer, but I couldn’t not ask. It was compulsive and probably obsessive, but I needed to hear again what he was going to be doing today.
“Yes.” He frowned, and little lines formed between his brows. “I couldn’t get out of it.”
“If the nightmares are back, you should see someone. I don’t—”
Kevin shook his head. “It’s not about that. Just…just stuff on my mind…that’s all.”
I didn’t know if I should believe him. But if it wasn’t the old nightmares coming back, I wasn’t sure I wanted to know what had been upsetting him. He hadn’t experienced the dreams when we were together, but a couple of times lately, when he’d fallen asleep on the couch, he’d had them again. If it wasn’t old fears coming back, then it was me. And facing that would be more than I could handle.