Author's Note: This chapter contains graphic sexual content, as well as mention of past sexual assault and allusions to self-injury.
"I know God won't give me anything I can't handle. I just wish He didn't trust me so much." -Mother Teresa
18 days sober
When the pounding on the door begins, my first instinct is to bury my head under a pillow to block out the noise. It’s only my second instinct to look around to see where I am. That probably says a lot about my life choices. I roll over and find myself facing Ben’s shoulder. Relaxing somewhat, I bury my face in the crook of his neck; he shoves me off and mumbles, “Go the fuck away, it’s early and you’re being loud.”
“I haven’t made a sound, you twat. That’s your idiot roommate,” I say.
Out in the hall, Alex lets out a pitiful whine.
“I should’ve gotten a fucking studio by myself,” Ben says, rolling his eyes and hauling himself off the bed. He yanks the topmost blanket off the bed, burrows into it, and unlocks the door. He’s already tumbling back onto the bed and curling up against my side by the time the door swings open.
Alex joins us on the bed without seeking permission, but Jamie hovers in the doorway, all too aware of the fact that he’s unlikely to be welcome in Ben’s room. “Sorry ‘bout him. I tried to distract him with morning sex, but he wants breakfast instead.”
“There is no ‘instead.’ We had morning sex, I’m just too hungover to go again anytime soon. Now I want pancakes,” Alex says.
I reach over to card my fingers through Ben’s wildly messy hair and contemplate asking if he’d be up for some morning sex, too. But he still seems barely awake, so instead, I say, “You live in a city now, Al, not in Lakewood. You can get pancakes from a diner. There are like, three on this block alone.”
“Yeah, but none of those places will be as good as Ben’s,” Alex protests, and I don’t really have an argument for that. Ben’s cooking is fantastic. I shrug, and Alex turns his attention back to his best friend. “Will you make me pancakes?”
“Sure,” Ben yawns.
“And bacon?”
He shoots Alex a warning look. “Don’t push it, drunk boy.”
Near the door, Jamie straightens up. “What, that’s your version of ‘pushing it’? Pancakes and bacon?” He throws his hands up and walks out of the room, muttering, “You fuckin’ people have no idea how to do breakfast up here.”
Alex and Ben share a bewildered glance, and I fling myself off the bed, only belatedly deciding I should probably put some clothes on. I locate my jeans and shirt, pull them on, and say, “Come on, you don’t want to miss this. His accent gets so much thicker when he starts ranting about why Northerners suck. Ask him about traditional Southern breakfasts, see if you can get him to say ‘grits.’ He actually manages to turn it into two syllables, I have no idea how.”
“You guys go, I’ll be along in a few minutes,” Ben says, not moving from the bed. “I have to call my dad and see what time he wants me at the bookstore today.”
I roll my eyes at him—he has no idea how much amusement he’s about to miss out on—but drag Alex from the bedroom without further comment. By the time we get out to the kitchen, Jamie has already settled comfortably into the task of transferring most of the food from the cabinets and refrigerator to the counter. Seeing us enter, he announces, “Waffles. Eggs. Bacon. Toast. Ham. Do you know how to make biscuits and gravy, or do I have to show you? This is still only half of it, there should be so much more. Y’all need to go shopping.”
“What are they missing?” I prompt immediately, crowding up against Jamie and digging my fingers into his side until he squirms away. “What else would be part of your ideal breakfast? Something that reminds you of home, perhaps?”
“Shut up and sit down,” Jamie says, shoving me off him. I take a seat in one of the two chairs at the table, but I don’t stop grinning at him.
Alex rolls his eyes and begins to move all of the food back where it came from. “Sorry, but people north of the Mason-Dixon line don’t usually start their days with binge-eating. Ben’s going to make us pancakes, and that’s it.” He pauses on his third trip between the counter and the fridge and says, “Jesus, Jamie. If you think this counts as breakfast for four people, how much is your grocery bill every week at your apartment?”
I snort. “What, like he cooks? I mean, he can. I’m pretty sure that’s the great divide among kids who grow up with too much money. Some of them end up like me, and I can—”
“—barely work a fuckin’ microwave, it’s pathetic,” Jamie informs me. He turns to Alex, flashes him a smile, “And then there are some like me. I spent most of my childhood hanging around the kitchen with our cook, just so my mom wouldn’t have to put up with me. I picked up quite a bit. But in Manhattan, I’m so busy doing other things that it’s just… easier to get food delivered. And you know something? For a city that prides itself on being so culturally diverse and having cuisine from all over the world, I have yet to find a single goddamn restaurant in New York that can make shrimp and grits the way my—” He stops speaking the moment I collapse over the table, unable to hold back my laughter any longer. His eyes narrow into slits and he hisses, “Don’t you dare say it, Anderson.”
But I’m already slumped over and practically howling, “Did you hear it? Hear how he turned it from ‘grits’ to ‘gree-uts’? It’s a fucking five-letter word, and he managed to make it into two sylla—”
“It’s been four fuckin’ years! When are you going to stop finding the way I talk funny?” he says. There’s a slightly dangerous glint in his eyes when he adds, “Especially since people from Ohio don’t know how to pronounce a double-oh.”
At first, I think he’s saying it just to mess with me, but when I catch sight of Alex, I notice that he’s trying to hide a grin. I squint. “What’s wrong with the way I say a double-oh?”
“Say ‘bedroom,” Jamie orders. “Or ‘root beer.’ Or ‘roof.’ Oh my Lord, please say ‘roof.’”
“Roof,” I echo, and Alex snorts. I shove him off his chair. “What? How am I supposed to say it?”
“Uh, you’re sure as shit not supposed to say it ‘ruff,’ like you’re a fucking cartoon dog,” he says. “A double-oh that follows an ‘r’ is supposed to be pronounced the same almost every time, like when you say ‘choose.’ And you say that fine, but you say ‘ruff’ instead of ‘roof’—”
“—and ‘rut beer’ instead of ‘root beer’—”
“—and ‘rum’ instead of ‘room.’”
It continues like that for nearly ten minutes. People from Ohio can’t say ‘dad’. People from Connecticut can’t say ‘coffee.’ People from Cleveland don’t know enough to pronounce the ‘d’ at the end of their own city. People from the South can’t say fucking anything. It’s all fairly good-natured, until we get to the discussion of pop. Pop. Because that’s what it’s fucking called.
“It’s definitely not,” Alex protests. “It’s called soda.”
I bury my face in my hands and groan, “No, it’s not. It’s pop.”
“We call it coke,” Jamie says, shrugging as he digs through the refrigerator and surfaces with an apple.
I round on him. “That’s stupid. Every time I’ve come to visit you in Savannah, we go out to eat and I order a coke, and the waiter asks, ‘What kind?’ Uh, fucking coke. You know, Coca-Cola. That’s what coke means. Well, either that or cocaine. But it’s not just a catch-all term for every kind of pop in existence.”
“Garen, it’s not called pop, it’s—”
“Your opinion is invalid,” I say fiercely, rounding on Alex, “because you think that a sub is called a grinder.”
That catches Jamie’s attention once more. He turns to me, baffled, and says, “They call it a what?”
“A grinder. Like, ‘I’m going to Subway to buy a grinder.’”
“That… but that sounds perverted.”
“I know.”
“It sounds gross.”
“I know.”
“Alright, I have to be at work in an hour and a half, so you guys need to decide whether you want regular pancakes, blueberry ones, or chocolate chip,” Ben announces, finally joining us in the kitchen. Rather than pull on his clothes from the night before or bother to shower so he can get ready for work, he has dressed himself in a long-sleeved gray henley and a pair of black sweatpants that ride low on his hips. A half-inch strip of skin is visible between the two articles of clothing, and I can see the edge of one of the bite marks I left on his hip. Not, of course, as clearly as I can see the three on his neck.
Jamie hitches his chin at Ben. “Nice hickies.”
“Nice screaming,” Ben retorts. “If you’re always that loud during sex, I’m either moving out or buying you a ball-gag.”
“So that’s why I don’t recall hearing anything from you last night. Tell me: when you come, do you moan in monotone, too?” He turns his eyes on me and quirks a brow. “Or did Garen decide not to reciprocate?”
I shrug. “He doesn’t make much noise when he comes, to tell you the truth. It’s pretty hot to watch. He just sort of tenses up, and his mouth kinda falls open a little bit, and the very tip of his tongue comes out to touch his top two front teeth—”
“Chocolate chip, blueberry, or plain?” Ben says, banging a pan down on the stove and yanking open the refrigerator door.
“Plain,” I say, half a second before Alex demands, “Blueberry.”
Jamie narrows his eyes and says, just to be a contrary little cunt, “Chocolate chip.”
Ben points to each of us in the order we’ve spoken and says, “Fine, okay, go fuck yourself.”
But he makes all three kinds anyway. I’m not usually a breakfast person, but I’ll eat pretty much anything Ben cooks. Plus, he buys the good syrup, the kind that comes in weird, short jugs. Once I’ve finished, I push my empty plate away and say, “We should probably get going. Dude, did I leave my phone in your room?”
Ben shrugs. “Probably.”
“Want me to go get it?” Jamie offers, smirking at me. “I doubt Ben wants me to go into his room, but I’m fairly certain that if I let you two go in there together, you’ll just end up touching each other in all the most sinful places, and I’d rather not have you get struck down by the Lord while you’re driving me back to your place.”
I open my mouth to make a snide comment right back at him, but before I can speak, Ben explodes, “Can you just shut the fuck up for five seconds? Jesus fucking Christ!” Then, looking more furious than ever, he shoves his plate off the counter into the sink and storms out of the kitchen, down the hall, and into his room.
The second the door has slammed shut behind him, James turns to stare at me with wide eyes. “What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He… Ben’s not usually the one who blows up like that. I mean, I do, all the time. Travis has an even worse temper than I do, he’s the one who yells at people and throws shit and storms out. But Ben doesn’t—”
“It was the God comment,” Alex interrupts, poking at his pancakes with the tip of his fork. At our blank stares, he adds, “The thing you said about getting struck down, or whatever. It pissed him off. And then he got more pissed at himself for blaspheming afterward.”
Jamie actually looks a bit ashamed of himself. “I didn’t realize he’d be that offended by it. I was just joking.”
“I know you were. He’s just not a fan of jokes about that.” He rolls his eyes and makes a vague gesture with his fork. “He doesn’t talk about it much, but his whole family is really, really Catholic. Like, they’re crazy into the whole Jesus thing, it’s ridiculous.”
As the resident Jew, I can completely relate to his feelings about the Jesus thing being ridiculous, but I also have known Jamie for four years. I know that for all his sinning, he’s still a true Southern boy at heart, which means he is obliged to love—in no particular order—his mother, his country, and his God. His eyes narrow. “What’s so ridiculous about being into Jesus?”
“Uh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that it’s fucking stupid?” Alex suggests, shrugging. “There’s no evidence to support any of it, but his family bases their entire lives on it. It’s insane. I don’t need some invisible dude in the sky telling me what’s the right thing to do. And Ben sure as fuck doesn’t need to keep hearing about how he’s going to go to Hell because he likes guys. The entire concept of organized religion disgusts me.”
“I’m going to go talk to him,” I mutter, slipping out of my chair before I can be sucked into the impending ‘Baptist versus atheist’ argument. Down the hall, Ben’s door remains closed, but unlocked. I slip inside, expecting to see him pouting, or pacing, or something, but he’s just standing near the foot of the bed, unmoving except for his hands. His shirt sleeve is pushed halfway up his forearm, and he’s repeatedly snapping a rubber band against his wrist, like the world’s least comfortable bracelet. He looks up when I enter, forces a smile, but doesn’t stop snapping the band. I cock my head to the side. “You alright?”
“I’m fine,” he says. Snap.
“I know it sounds hard to believe, but Jamie wasn’t trying to be an ass. He didn’t mean to upset you.” Snap.
“I’m not upset.” Snap, snap, snap--
I reach out and cover the band with my fingers, halting the movement. The skin beneath my hand is hot from the friction, and I can feel the slightly raised areas where welts from the rubber are starting to form. I tow him closer, and he moves willingly enough, though he resists when I try to wrap an arm around him. That’s not surprising—Ben’s ability to let himself be taken care of only goes so far. I sigh and settle for squeezing his shoulder as I admit, “My best friend is kind of a dick sometimes. It’s a trait we share, I think we bonded over it when we first met.”
“Not terribly surprised to hear that,” Ben says.
I stick my tongue out at him, and he grins. It’s the closest I think I’m going to be able to get to an acknowledgment of his discomfort with the conversation in the kitchen, and pushing him to talk isn’t going to help. I do, however, pull him a little closer and use one finger to carefully brush his hair away from his eyes. He doesn’t look away, which is… surprising. Surprising, but nice. Before I can think better of it, I find myself saying, “You and me… we had a good thing together, didn’t we? Last fall, when I first moved here.”
His forehead creases. “What do you mean?”
I hesitate. This conversation has the potential to go so horribly wrong that things could end up being uncomfortable for days—maybe even weeks. I have such a low threshold for rejection, and Ben has such a low bullshit tolerance; him denying my attempts to initiate anything he thinks is pointless or a waste of energy could leave both of us incredibly pissed off. But I can’t stop staring at the purple-red bruises on his throat, mirroring the shape of my mouth, disappearing just below the collar of his shirt. Without really deciding to move, I raise a hand to brush the tips of my fingers across one of the bite marks. The abused skin there must still be sensitive, because Ben shivers a little and cranes his neck slightly, allowing me better access.
All at once, I’m crowding him back against the door, curving my hand over his throat—not tight enough to really choke him, but enough that he can feel the pressure on his bruises—and kissing him. He grabs the hem of my shirt and rucks it halfway up my torso so that he can run his palms down my chest, over my abs. I shove his hands down another few inches until they’re resting at the top of my jeans, and once he has started to unbutton them, I break away from the kiss to mouth over the marks on his neck. I whisper against his skin, “When we first met, those weeks where all we did was hang out and play music together and—” I bite down right over one of the already existing marks, and he actually lets out a little cry and grinds his erection harder into my thigh. I release his throat and shift up so that my next words ghost hot across his ear, “--and I fucked your brains out every chance we got. You remember that?”
“God, like I could forget it,” he breathes, hooking his thumbs over the waistband of my jeans but hesitating long enough to ask, “Can I?”
“Go for it,” I say, grinning, and then he’s on his knees in front of me, yanking the denim halfway down my thighs and sliding his mouth down onto me. I brace a hand against the door and stare down at him, momentarily losing my train of thought while I watch his mouth bobbing on my dick. It’s an understandable distraction, but eventually, I manage to make myself say, “We should—that. Or, this, I guess.” He doesn’t take my piece out of his mouth, but he does tilt his head back slightly so that he can shoot me a questioning look. That shouldn’t be hot, but it so is. My eyes roll shut and I say, “That thing—whatever it was that we had going on last fall, that whole friendship-plus-fucking thing. I want to do that, I want to go back to that.”
He pulls off for about three seconds to say, “Please tell me this isn’t you trying to ask me out. Because I will literally shove your cock so far back into my throat that I choke to death, just to avoid having to have that conversation.”
“Oh my god, that would be the best way to die. Like, if I can’t go out in a drug-induced haze, choking on cock is my second choice,” I say, knotting a hand in his hair and guiding his mouth back onto me. “But dude, no, I’m not trying to ask you out. I don’t want to be your boyfriend, but I-I don’t think I wanna be just your friend, either. Isn’t there like, some sort of middle ground we can settle for? One where we have all the awesome parts of our friendship that we have now—like, where I get to come over here and dick around on the xbox, and we go to shows together, and you proofread my English essays, and I correct you when your guitar fingering sucks—”
“My fingering is flawless,” Ben says between licks at the head of my dick.
“We’re talking about your musical skills, not your masturbation technique,” I say, hissing a little when he scrapes his teeth ever so gently over my shaft, presumably as a warning for me to shut up. I card my fingers through his hair and say, “I’m serious, though. We should do this. We should do all the cool friend stuff, but then also, we should make out. And suck each other off. And fuck. We should fuck a lot. Like, as much as possible, probably.”
From out in the hallway, I hear Jamie say, “Seriously, can you two stop touching each other so we can go?”
Before I can react, the door swings open—or, as far open as it can before it cracks into the back of Ben’s head, forcing him forward so that he’s suddenly sucking me right down to the base. And that feels amazing, except for how I can feel Ben’s throat spasming around the head of my cock, and I can tell it’s choking him. I shove the door shut so that there’s enough space for him to reel back, coughing and gagging.
“What the hell just happened?” Jamie demands from the other side of the door.
“You broke Ben!” I accuse. “For Christ’s sake, Jamie, you can’t just go around opening doors that people are hooking up against, you cock-blocking little shit.”
Ben gives one last cough and rasps out, “I’m fine. He didn’t break me, I’m fine.”
His voice is completely wrecked, and the fact that he sounds like that because he was just deepthroating me is almost too much for me to handle. It shouldn’t be funny or sexy, but it’s both. I sink to my knees in front of him and clasp his face between my hands, drawing him into a deep, desperate kiss. I pull back and say, “I have to go, or Jamie’s going to—” Ben interrupts me with another, shorter kiss, “—to keep being a bitch. And you have—” I’m the one to initiate the next kiss, “—work. You have to get ready. And go to work.”
“Fuck me,” he practically growls, and I’m already nodding my agreement by the time he finishes, “I’m working from noon to six. I’m picking you up after I leave the shop, and we’re going to come back here, and you’re going to fuck me until I come so hard I pass out, okay?”
“So, that’s a ‘yes,’ then? To my whole idea of us being friends who wreck each other’s shit at every available opportunity?” I slip a hand up the back of his shirt and dig my nails into his skin; he silences his groan by kissing me again.
When I finally pull back, though, his upper lip curls a bit and he says, “You’re not going to make this weird again, are you?”
“What do you mean?” I say. “When did I make this weird the first time?”
“Uh, when we were sleeping together last October and you tried to break up with me even though we weren’t dating?” he says, laughing. I shove him over.
Admittedly, it had been a pretty awkward conversation. I had come up to him while he was at his locker before homeroom and said, So, you and I have been fucking for a while now, but we’re not dating, right? Like, I’m not supposed to be your boyfriend or anything? He had stared at me like I was completely retarded and said, Uh, no? Why the hell would we be dating, dude? I had just sort of shrugged and said, Awesome. ‘Cause I think I’m in love with someone, and he seems like he’s the monogamy sort of guy. So, I think I’m supposed to stop having sex with you. He had burst out laughing and walked away, and that had been that.
It so figures he would bring that up now.
“I won’t make it weird this time,” I say. “We’ll be doing exactly what we’ve been doing for ages—just the friendship thing—and then also, we’ll—I want to touch you.”
Out in the hall, Jamie smacks his fist against the door and says, “You can touch him later. I want to go.”
“The next time you’re having sex with Alex, I’m going to break into the room and kick you right in the balls, Jamie, I swear to god! You’re my best friend, and I’m trying to talk my way into a friends-with-benefits scenario here, and you’re not helping. You’re hindering. So you’re sleeping on the fucking floor tonight—”
“The fuck I am! Even if you kick me out of your bed, you still have a couch I can—”
“Fuck the couch and fuck you, too. The floor, James.” I turn and flash my brightest, most charming smile to where Ben is still sprawled out on the floor, just as I pushed him. “So, what do you say?”
“I say you’re a fucking idiot,” he says. “But also, okay.”
“Yeah?”
He nods and reaches out to scrape his nails gently down the length of my forearm. “Yeah. As long as you’re sure you can handle it.”
“Cocky little shit, isn’t he?” Jamie says.
“The floor,” I hiss again. I turn my eyes back to Ben and say, quietly enough that only he can hear, “I can handle it. I mean, we might need to—there will still be times when I like, need a minute, or whatever. And some stuff is still going to take a while for me to get used to it. But if that’s cool with you, then I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
He stands, offers me a hand, and hauls me to my feet. I steal one last kiss before I grab my phone from the nightstand and head out into the hall, but before Ben can follow me out, Jamie is shoving past me and shutting them both in the room. Bewildered, I try the handle, but it’s locked. I knock. “Um, sorry. But what the fuck?”
There’s no response. At least, there’s no response to me. I can hear muffled voices from inside, but it’s impossible to make out any specifics. How the hell was Jamie strong-arming his way into our conversation? Was he standing with his ear pressed to the door, or do I just talk really loudly? Since neither of them seem inclined to tell me what’s going on, I wander back out to the kitchen, where Alex is scowling down at his now cold pancakes. He glances up when I enter. “I have got to get a new type, man. First Ben, now James?”
“Uh,” I say, holding one hand three inches above the top of my head and the other ten inches below that—Jamie’s height and Ben’s, respectively. “Because the two of them have so much in common?”
“The God thing,” he groans, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m so over being into guys who have a bunch of Jesus issues. He tore me a new asshole the second you left the room, told me I was being a disrespectful little shit for saying it’s stupid to believe in God. And whatever, I still think it is. But I said he was being a fucking hypocrite, because he didn’t seem to care about ‘respect’ when he was making Ben feel like shit.”
“Is that what they’re talking about now?”
He nods. “Jamie said he wanted to apologize before he left.”
I wrinkle my nose. Jamie having actual feelings is so weird. I’ve got half a mind to cockblock whatever religious, emotional fuckery they’ve got going on now, but before I’ve even managed to take two steps back in the direction of the bedrooms, Jamie is sauntering back into the kitchen, face neutral. “Ready to go?”
“Where’s Ben?” I ask.
He gestures over his shoulder. “Still in his room, he’s going to start getting ready for work. He said to tell you goodbye.”
“Okay,” I say slowly, turning to raise my eyebrows at Alex in what I hope he realizes is an unspoken, I’m going to leave now, but just in case Jamie’s being a sociopath and lying about that, make sure your roommate knows I say bye. He jerks his head a little in acknowledgment, and we depart without another word.
The car ride back to my house is mostly silent, save the music coming from the stereo. Finally, as we’re turning onto my street, Jamie twists to look at me and says, “Are we going to talk about how I just heard you sort-of-ask-Ben-out-but-not-really?”
“Emphasis on ‘not really.’ Are we going to talk about how I just heard you apologize to someone you hate for something I know you don’t really feel guilty over, just because Alex wanted you to?” I ask. He doesn’t say anything. I gnaw on my lip ring for a minute, but by the time we pull into my driveway, the silence is unbearable. I put the car in park, turn to face him, and say, “You really like him, don’t you?”
“Can we please not have this conversation?” Jamie says tightly, his eyes fixed on his hands.
“Jamie, I’m serious. I’ve never seen you this into a guy—”
“I was this into you.”
“That doesn’t count. This is different, okay? And I don’t—” I break off, not knowing how to continue without offending him. But the truth is, Jamie’s one of the smartest people I know. He’s not delusional. He knows what I’m going to say, so there’s no point in resisting. I sigh. “He’s kind of in love with Ben. I know you know that, okay? And I would rather die than see you get hurt, and I’m kind of freaked out about this whole thing, because Alex is my friend, yeah, but you’re so much more than that. I don’t want you to get your heart broken, and I’m worried that that’s where this is headed, because… sometimes you look at him like you’re, you know. Falling for him.”
He turns to face me again, and right there, in his eyes, is everything I need to know. All things that are too new and terrifying for him to verbalize. All the things he thinks I’d make fun of him for. All the things he’s thinking and feeling and craving. All the things I felt last fall, after I met Travis. I don’t need to hear him say it, and I don’t think he’d be able to, even if I asked. So when he repeats, in a softer voice, “Can we please not have this conversation?” I nod.
Once outside the car, I sling an arm over his shoulders and press a rough kiss to his cheekbone. He wrinkles his nose at me, and I grin, dragging him into the house.
“Hey, Dad!” I call once we’ve stepped over the threshold. “You lived in Ohio your whole life, right? I need you to say something for me. Say ‘roof.’”
“Roof,” James repeats, in his own horrible accent. “As in, ‘Santa and his reindeer are on the roof.’”
“No, as in ‘fiddler on the roof.’ Respect my fucking heritage or get out of my house.”
“Can you come into the kitchen, please?” Dad says. I obey. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, his brow furrowed and his eyes focused on what must be a truly fascinating knot in the wood. He asks, “Where have you two been?”
“We went to a show in New Haven with Alex and Ben. I told you about it days ago, and I said goodbye to you before we left,” I say, tossing the spare Benz key onto the table. “We’re going to head downstairs, alright?”
“No, you’re not,” Dad says sharply, and Jamie and I both freeze. Dad still hasn’t looked up from the table. He gestures to the seats across from him and says, “Sit down. Both of you.”
I shoot a nervous glance towards Jamie, who widens his eyes back at me. Dad’s using his disciplinarian voice, which I’m kind of used to—he’s been using that voice with me since I was five—but it’s… different from usual. It’s sharper, firmer. It’s like it was the day he kicked me out. Clearly this isn’t up for debate, so I sink into the chair directly across from him. Jamie sits down next to me and reaches over to squeeze my knee. There’s a beat of silence before I say, “What’s up?”
Dad finally looks up. “Were you drinking last night?”
That must be the moment when all of my blood turns to ice. That’s the only explanation for how cold I suddenly feel. Next to me, Jamie goes tense; his fingertips are digging into my leg. I swallow and stare my father dead in the eyes. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, I’m not,” he says. “I want an honest answer. Were you drinking last night? It’s obvious that James was. He’s hungover right now, I can tell by looking at him. And while I’m not exactly thrilled with that idea, because he’s still only eighteen, he’s neither my child nor an addict. But you are, Garen. It’s clear that you two went to a venue that has no problem serving alcohol to minors. You told me that you were going to a show, yes, but you also told me you’d be home by two, at the latest. It’s eleven thirty now. Where’d you spend the night?”
“Gee, I don’t know, Dad. I guess I must’ve spent it blacked out in an alleyway,” I deadpan.
James turns his head sharply towards me. “Garen, don’t be like that right now.” Then, to my dad, he says, “After the show, we went back to the apartment. It was my idea—Alexander and I are involved, and I wanted to spend the night.”
“Well, the last time Garen spent the night at the apartment without calling to check in with me, he ended up in rehab,” Dad says. “That was less than three weeks ago. I cannot believe you would expect me to be okay with this.”
Part of me is embarrassed, but most of me is livid. “I expected you to be okay with this because it’s the way things have always been. I’ve never been expected to check in with you before. I thought you trusted me.”
“The last time I trusted you, you started using again,” Dad says. I let out a little breath of air that might be a laugh; I still don’t think I can feel most of my body. He sighs. “Garen, give me your phone.”
I stare at him, but he doesn’t yield. It’s not like I can tell him to go fuck himself—the phone was purchased with a credit card that’s technically mine, but is completely paid for by him. He pays the phone bill every month. It’s my phone in name only. I tug it from my pocket and toss it onto the table. He unlocks the screen, not bothering to explain himself as he begins to thumb through it. At first, I think he’s reading my messages—and whatever, if he wants to traumatize himself by reading mine and Jamie’s horrifically explicit sexts, that’s up to him—but then he sets the phone down on the table. The screen is lit up with a dialing message; he’s making a call on speakerphone. It rings three times, then--
“I thought you were supposed to be the kind of guy who doesn’t call the morning after he gets his dick sucked. You know I’m at work right now, why are you bothering me?”
There’s a beat, during which Jamie has to bury his head in his arms to smother his laughter. Dad pinches the bridge of his nose and says, “Ben, this is Bill Anderson, Garen’s father.”
“Um,” Ben says, clearly trying not to panic, and I smirk. “G-Good morning, sir. Please pretend I answered the phone by saying literally anything else.”
“In my experience, ‘hello’ tends to work fairly nicely. Now, I’m sitting here with my son and his friend. I’d like to confirm that they did in fact spend last night at your apartment.”
I cross my arms and say, “I’m sorry, did you miss the dick-sucking comment?”
“Garen, stop talking forever,” Ben says tightly. Then, he continues, “Yes, they both stayed here last night. We all went to a show together, and we got back from the venue around… twelve thirty? Maybe one o’clock? After that, we just—I mean, it was kind of late, so it just made more sense for them to stay here, instead of driving all the way back to Lakewood. They—I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Is there a problem?”
“I’ve yet to determine the answer to that, actually. Was my son drinking or using drugs at any point during your activities last night?” Dad asks.
I am so grateful to hear the sharpness in Ben’s voice when he says, “What? No. Mr. Anderson, Garen is completely sober, he has been for weeks now. The last time he did anything like that was right before his most recent time in rehab. He’s been really good lately, and I wouldn’t—none of us would cover for him if he was relapsing, believe me. None of us want to sit idly by and watch him get hurt.”
“Right. The same way none of you wanted to sit idly by this past spring.”
“Dad, shut the fuck up,” I order, not caring if my harshness gets me in trouble. But it’s too late; the screen goes black as the call cuts off from Ben’s end. I snatch my phone up and try to redial, but my call is sent to voicemail after one ring. I try again. The same. Even as I’m thumbing out a text that says, ben i'm sorry, please ignore my cuntjacket of a dad & call me back asap, I snap, “Are you kidding me right now? Like, was that honestly supposed to be a joke? Because in case you’ve forgotten, Ben is the one who followed me all the way to Ohio to bring me back. Ben’s the one who convinced me I needed help. He’s the one who saved me. And no matter how pissed you are at me, you should at least show him the respect he deserves.”
“This isn’t about Ben,” Dad says. He has no idea how wrong he is. He has no idea how harshly Ben takes criticism like that, he doesn’t realize the sort of things that Ben will do to himself to assuage the guilt he’ll feel if he thinks he’s even remotely responsible for my issues. He doesn’t realize that in a few hours, Ben will be locking himself in his bedroom, and digging out the empty CD case he thinks I don’t know he uses to hide his razors, and dragging a blade across whatever free space he can find on his already shredded and scarred arm.
I dump the phone back on the table and say, “Fine. Then what’s it about?”
“James, can you please go downstairs?” Dad asks, but it’s not really much of a question. I can tell that Jamie wants to protest, but neither of us is really in any position to bargain right now. With one last brush of his palm over my thigh, he stands and slips wordlessly from the kitchen. Dad turns his eyes on me. “I’m done with this.”
“What, are you kicking me out again?” I say. “Cool. Maybe you could save us both some time and call Mom first, though. That way, she can make her two-hour, screaming phone call while I’m on my way there, and then I won’t have to listen from the next room while she tells you how ashamed she is to have ever been married to a man who’d do something like that to his own son. Because that was a really shitty phone call to have to overhear last time.”
Mentioning him kicking me out is a low blow; it’s meant to be. I don’t miss the way the muscles in his face all tighten at that, or the way his eyes dart to the ground, like he’s a little ashamed of himself for having done that, too. But then he says, “I’m not kicking you out. But I am done letting you have free reign around here. I have been trying so goddamn hard to support you for the past few months. I’ve been trying not to smother you, or treat you—”
“—like an addict?” I supply.
He sighs. “No. I’ve been trying not to treat you any differently than I did before. You have to realize how lax the rules have always been for you, and honestly, maybe that’s where your mother and I went wrong. We’ve been treating you like an adult for so long—no rules, no curfew, no punishments. But I can’t do that anymore, Garen. I can’t sit here and pretend that every time you stay out all night, or don’t check in with me, I’m not wondering if you’ve run away again, or if you’ve relapsed again, or if you’re going to decide you want to shoot yourself again.”
The worst part is that there are so many other ‘agains’ he doesn’t even know about. He doesn’t know that he should also be worrying about me selling myself again or getting assaulted again or having my ass beaten at school again. Even now, he still doesn’t get the full extent of the awfulness I have been through and am capable of.
When I don’t speak, he says, “You have no boundaries. You have never had any boundaries. That needs to change.”
“Okay. Fine. I’ll get some boundaries,” I say. Capitulation is always the easiest way to end a lecture, isn’t it?
He shakes his head, so, guess not. “They don’t count as boundaries unless I’m the one setting them. So, effective immediately, we’re going to have some new rules around here. And don’t even think about telling me that you’re eighteen and you can do what you want, because while you’re living here, being supported by me, you’re going to have to put up with a little bit more parenting, whether you want it or not.”
I cross my arms over my chest, but I don’t say anything. Contrary to what he seems to believe, I’m not a fucking toddler. I’m not going to pull any ‘I’m an adult, you can’t run my life, even if you fund it completely’ bullshit. I do, however, roll my eyes a little bit when he goes over to the counter and picks up a yellow legal pad that is covered in writing. Clearly he has been thinking about this a lot today.
“Rule number one: you now have a curfew. You’ll be home by eleven on school nights, one on weekends. No excuses, no exceptions, no extensions. If you have a legitimate reason to spend the night at someone else’s house, I need to hear about it in advance, and I need to speak with whomever it is. Rule number two: if you’re going out, I want to know where you’re going, who you’ll be with, what you’ll be doing, and when I can expect you back. Rule number three: you will be home for dinner every Sunday night by seven o’clock. At this dinner, you will tell me all about the previous week, including details about how school is going, how your sessions with Doctor Howard are going, and how you think you’re handling your sobriety—”
“That’s not fair,” I interrupt, trying to ignore the panic that’s blossoming in my chest. “My sessions are private, that’s the whole point of them. I can talk to her about stuff, she gives me advice about the things I’m not comfortable talking about with my family. I’m not going to tell you what I say to her.”
Dad raises a hand, palm up, like a gesture of surrender. “I’m not asking you to tell me everything, but I am requesting that you keep me informed about how things are going. If you’re having a serious problem, or if there’s something going on that might cause you to feel pressure to use again, I need to be aware of it. Now, moving on… rule number four: you need to greatly improve your behavior at school. We’re still in the first month of classes, and you’ve already received three detentions. It’s unacceptable. From now on, every detention you get equals one weekend you’ll be grounded. Rule number five: those five colleges I told you to pick? I want your applications sent in by Halloween, and I want proof that you’ve met with your guidance counselor about planning for your future. Rule number six: I want a list of all your upcoming tests, projects, that trial law competition—everything. I expect you to put an adequate amount of time into studying and preparing for all of them, because I want your GPA to be at least a three-point-oh. I’d like a three-point-five, if possible.”
I scratch the back of my neck. “I’m not sure a three-point-five is possible, but I’ll do the three-oh. Fine. Is that it?”
“Just one more thing. Rule number seven: you need to get my approval before you decide on a new sleeping arrangement. That means you ask permission before a boy sleeps over here, and you ask my permission before you agree to sleep at his place. If you’re planning to go on a date, I want to know about it. If you’re involved with someone, even though you know your doctor says that you shouldn’t be, I want to know about it. I know that you’re eighteen years old, and I know that you’re sexually active, but you’re still in high school, and you’re still my son. You need to be more appropriate and respectful about the things that you do. And—this isn’t on the list, obviously, but—I asked you two weeks ago if you and Ben were involved. You said no. Clearly, that’s not the truth.”
“You asked me if he was my boyfriend,” I argue, kicking at the leg of the table. “You didn’t ask about being involved, whatever that means, you just asked if he was my boyfriend, and he’s not. Like—okay, yeah. We hooked up last night, obviously. But it’s the first time he and I have done anything since last fall, since before I dated—” Travis. God, I don’t even like thinking his name, let alone saying it. Based on the way Dad blinks away from my face, he knows what I’m talking about, so I switch to saying, “I’m not dating Ben. I was telling you the truth then, I’m telling it now. And I don’t really get how it’s any of your business, but yeah, we screw around. It’s not a relationship, and it’s not a big deal.”
Dad lets out a noise of frustration and bursts out, “It is a big deal, Garen! The last relationship you had landed you in the hospital, and the one before that was with your stepbrother. Your taste in men worries me.”
“You know Ben! You know he’s a good guy, and you didn’t have any problem with Travis banging him last spring—”
“Travis was dating him,” Dad says. “Whether or not they banged, as you so politely put it, is completely beside the point. Travis was respectful enough to agree to specific rules. Ben never slept over here. He had to come to dinner so that Evelyn and I could get to know him—”
“What, you want me to have Ben come over for dinner some night? Hang out with you and Mom, so you can grill him about his intentions with me?” I sneer.
“Yes.”
So not the answer I was expecting. I gape at my dad, but his arms are folded over his chest, and I can tell that he’s actually serious about this. Finally, I manage to force out, “I’m not going to make him come over for an interrogation if he’s not my boyfriend, that’s ri-goddamn-diculous. We’re not dating, I just jerked him off. That’s really not ‘meet the family’ material, especially since you already know him. He’s even met Mom. I am not inviting one of my best friends over so that you can quiz him about all the disgusting, perverted things I do to him in bed. And I promise you that you don’t want to initiate that conversation, because it’ll last about five seconds before I snap and tell you things you’d rather die than hear your only son say.”
“Either he comes over for dinner so that I can talk to him, or you’re not allowed over there anymore. It’s as simple as that,” Dad says, shrugging. “Your doctor told you that an important part of your sobriety is emotional sobriety. You shouldn’t be getting intimate with people, emotionally or physically, but you’re disregarding that for him. I think that’s worth discussing.”
“We’re just friends who fuck around! It’s not intimacy,” I say, even though, yeah, it sort of is. Not the act in itself, not the concept of it, but the fact that I’m willing to let him even put his hands on me, the fact that we can do anything without me freaking out… that’s as intimate as I can get these days. But there’s no way in hell I’m going to admit that to my father.
My phone buzzes on the table, and I snatch it up. It’s a text from Jamie. Do you need me to come back up?
no, I type out. but i do need you to call/text alex and ask him if he can convince ben to call me back. i feel like a dick and a half for what my dad said to him.
Dad clears his throat, and I scowl up at him. “What?”
“You’re not leaving this table until you agree to all of these rules,” he says plainly.
“I’m fine with the curfew, I’m fine with you knowing where I am or who I’m with, I’m fine with Sunday dinners, I’m emphatically not fine with telling you what goes on in my therapy sessions, I won’t get any more detentions, I’ll send in the stupid college apps, you can creep on my test schedule as much as you want, I’ll get above a three-oh, I’ll—what was the last one? Oh, right. I’ll ask your permission before I put my dick in anybody. Specifically, I will ask your permission before I put my dick in my friend, Ben. Did I leave anything out?”
“Dinner,” Dad says, completely unfazed by my crudeness. “You’re inviting him over for dinner. Ideally, either this week or next.”
I open my mouth to protest, but my phone begins to buzz with an incoming call. I check the ID; it’s Ben. I stand up. “Fine. I’ll invite him over for dinner, but that doesn’t mean he’s my boyfriend. This conversation’s over, I’m taking this call.”
He doesn’t try to stop me from stomping out into the living room and over to the door that leads to my room. Only once I’m sitting halfway down the stairs do I answer the call, but before I can say anything, Ben says, “Sorry for hanging up like that. It was rude of me.”
“Uh, no, what was rude was my dad saying such stupid shit to you,” I say. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he says, but his tone is too flat for me to believe it.
I sigh. “He was pissed because he didn’t realize that Jamie and I were going to be staying out all night. He kind of freaked when we didn’t come home, I guess, and instead of calling me, like a normal person would, he spent the morning drafting out a list of rules for my behavior.”
That’s enough to earn a snort. “Rules? Has he met you?”
“Guess not,” I say, pinning the phone between my ear and my shoulder so that I can start methodically cracking my knuckles. “He apparently hasn’t met you, either. Because I can’t think of a single other reason why he would want you to come over for dinner.”
“I’ve come over before, that’s not a big—”
“No, dude, he wants you to come over for dinner. Like, you, and me, and him, and my mom, if she can take time to drive in from New York. He wants you to come over so he can question you about like, your intent to steal my virtue, or whatever.”
“He had that exact dinner with me six months ago, when I was dating Travis!” Ben protests. “I’m still the same person I was then—”
“Well, to be fair, you probably never told Evelyn McCall that you sucked off her son and didn’t expect a phone call in the morning.”
“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure you made enough of those comments to cover the rest of us,” he says. There’s a beat, and then he says, “If he’s this pissed about you going out last night, I’m guessing that you coming over tonight isn’t the best idea.”
I sigh and lean my head against the railing. “Yeah, probably not. I have a curfew now, too. One on weekends, eleven on school nights.” I trace the seam on the side of my jeans with my thumbnail. “We’ll hang out, though. Sometime this week, okay?”
“Yeah. Of course. Listen, I have to get back to work. Text me later?”
I make a vague noise of agreement, then hang up and trudge the rest of the way down to my room. Jamie is kicked back on my bed, and though he sits up when I enter, I crawl onto the bed, shove him flat onto his back, and curl up against his side, burying my face in the side of his neck. He curves an arm around my shoulders and drags me closer until I’m sprawled out on top of him. “You alright, G?”
“No,” I say, though my voice is muffled by his shirt. “No, I’m really fucking not.”
He strokes his fingertips across the nape of my neck and kisses the top of my head, but neither of us speaks after that. I want to ask him how he can stand to touch me, when my own dad can barely look at me. I want to ask him how he can treat me the same way he always has. I want to ask him if he trusts me to stay clean, and if he says yes, I want to ask how he can do that, and if he says no, I want to ask what the fucking point of trying is.
Instead, I burrow deeper into his arms and remain completely silent.
20 days sober
My first attempt to fuck Ben goes so badly I actually contemplate cutting my losses and moving to a deserted island, or another planet, or rural Oklahoma, or somewhere else where no one has heard of gay sex.
Everything is set up perfectly; my suddenly-overbearing father knows I’m hanging out at the apartment, and not to expect me home until ten o’clock. Alex is wandering around, trying to find the notebook he needs for the poli-sci class that will keep him out of the apartment from seven to almost eleven. Ben is reading some gigantic, ancient book in his armchair, sitting sideways with his legs draped over the arm of it. He’s got that too-serious expression on his face, and he’s wearing his glasses, and he must realize how fucking cute he looks, because he keeps glancing up and smirking at me every time he catches me watching him instead of either pretending to do my English homework or pretending to watch the House rerun that’s playing on TV right now.
“How’s that essay coming along?” he asks, already knowing the answer.
I blink down at my totally blank notebook, then at the photocopy of the practice AP exam prompt my teacher had passed around and asked us to complete for class tomorrow. I scribble a quick sketch of a pony prancing across the top of the paper and say, “It’s coming along great. English is the best.”
“Have you guys seen my notebook?” Alex asks, pausing at the edge of the living room and frowning at the coffee table.
Ben shrugs. “No, but you can borrow Garen’s, ‘cause he’s sure as shit not using it.”
“I am, don’t be an ass,” I say. Then, to Alex, I add, “I thought I saw some notebooks or whatever on the kitchen counter when I came in. Is it one of those?”
He wanders back out of the room, and I wrap my hands around Ben’s ankles, using them to pull both him and the armchair closer to the edge of the couch where I’m sitting. He kicks at me and says, “You are so annoying, oh my god, go home,” but he’s grinning, so I can’t be in too much trouble.
“I can’t help it if you’re more interesting than my homework. Put down your book and get your hot ass over here,” I demand.
Usually, he’d jerk his feet out of reach and tell me to go fuck myself, but at this point, I think Ben is as wound up as I am. We’ve both been waiting two days for a chance to fuck, and he doesn’t exactly start climbing the walls when he can’t get laid—not like I do—but he does get impatient. He slips an index card between the pages of his book and snaps it shut, setting it down on the edge of the coffee table. The second he’s out of the chair, I hook an arm around his waist and drag him down into my lap. He settles with his knees bracketing my hips and sinks easily into my kiss.
“Alright, I’m headed to class. I’ll—oh, wow. Okay then,” Alex says, turning back around to exit the living room just as swiftly as he entered. Over his shoulder, he says, “Dude, remember our agreement. No sex in the common areas, that’s weird.”
“He’s such a hypocrite, he’s totally fucked Jamie on the kitchen counter,” I mutter against Ben’s lips.
Ben jerks back, eyes wide. “What, seriously? The kitchen counter where I prepare my fucking food? Are you joking?”
“I’m totally joking,” I say, even though I’m not. It happened yesterday, right before Jamie headed to the train station to go back to New York. He texted me about it before his train had even left Union Station. Ben seems to know I’m full of shit, because he narrows his eyes, but then the front door of the apartment clicks shut, and I don’t so much care about conversation anymore.
I tighten my grip on Ben’s thighs and flip him onto his back on the cushions. He grabs a fistful of my t-shirt to pull me down on top of him, but I pause long enough to strip it off and toss it aside before leaning down to kiss him. He remembers my rules from last time—his hands remain above my waist, and he doesn’t scratch me or grab me too hard, even though I know that must be killing him. I reach for the zipper on his sweatshirt.
And suddenly, from somewhere to my right, a terrified voice is screaming, “Help! Help, please! He’s going to rape me, he’s going to kill me, help!”
I jerk back sharply enough that Ben instinctively tightens his hold on my waist to steady me, but that makes it so much worse. I shove his hands off me and scramble to the opposite end of the couch, just out of reach. My heart is hammering in my chest, beating so loudly and so heavily that I can’t seem to focus on anything else. My breath is coming in short little gasps, and I’m not sure why, because no one’s holding my throat, right? No one’s holding me down, or choking me, or touching me, right? Fuck, I’d be okay if I could just figure out where the screaming was coming from, and—oh. I finally manage to focus my eyes on the television, where the House rerun has ended and become an episode of that horrible Law and Order: Special Rape Unit or whatever the fuck it’s called. On screen, the bloodied and beaten corpse of a woman is sprawled out on the floor of a bedroom, while the stone-faced detectives stand over her.
I don’t want to see it, but I can’t look away.
Part of me is vaguely aware of a voice to my left, but I’m unable to make out any of the words. Only when the television screen goes black am I capable of hearing a desperate, nervous voice say, for what might be the twentieth time, “Garen. Are you okay?”
“I’m f-fine,” I say instinctively, looking around. The second I meet Ben’s wide eyes, I remember where I am, what I’m doing, or… what I’m supposed to be doing, at least. I don’t think I’m even hard anymore—it’s really difficult to tell, because I can’t feel the rest of my body—but I still shoot him a lopsided grin and move towards him, saying, “Sorry. Where were we?”
“Uh, okay, no,” Ben says, grabbing my wrist to stop my hand from moving any further up his thigh. I yank my hand away from his, and he raises both of his palms in a gesture of surrender. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—I won’t touch you, alright? It’s okay. You’re safe, I’m not going to—”
“Don’t fucking patronize me,” I spit, standing up and grabbing my shirt from the floor. Now that the numbness is fading, I’m starting to feel a heat creeping into my face. Can’t even fuck a guy without freaking out, can’t even hear some shitty drama on television without practically passing out. What’s wrong with me?
I gather up my schoolbooks and shove them into my backpack, swinging it onto my shoulder and taking a step towards the door. Ben makes another grab for my arm, but immediately thinks better of it and retreats, hands still raised. “Garen, wait. Please don’t leave yet.”
“Ben, this would be humiliating enough if it happened with a stranger. How do you think I feel now that it’s happening with one of my best friends?” I squeeze my eyes shut, rub a palm over my face, then head for the door. “Just don’t, okay? I’ll call you later.”
I manage to cut off his next protest with the slam of the door, and thankfully, he doesn’t follow me out of the building. The repairs on my car won’t be done until the beginning of next week, so I’m still driving the Benz until then. I toss my backpack into the passenger seat and lock myself in behind the wheel, but it takes twenty minutes before I can stop shaking enough to drive.
25 days sober
“Hello?”
“Nice of you to finally pick up my call, you douche,” is Ben’s selected greeting. He really needs to work on his phone etiquette. In the background, I hear a small voice ask, “Benji, what’s a douche?” He sighs and says, to the other person, “It’s a mean thing adults call each other when one of them ignores the other one for five days. That’s what Garen is being right now. And you can call him it later, but only if Mom and Dad aren’t around, alright?”
I snort. “You’re the worst big brother ever.”
“Whatever. What time are you coming over?” he asks.
“I’m… not?” I say slowly, flicking my turn signal on even though I’m still half a dozen cars away from the nearest stoplight. “Did we have plans?”
“No, we didn’t. And apparently we’re never going to, because this is the first time you’ve even bothered to answer the phone since Monday night. I’ve called you a dozen times, G,” he says. His voice is as flat as ever, but I don’t think I’m imagining the slight edge of hurt in it.
The light turns green, and I edge forward to make my turn into the parking lot of the Daily Grind. Ben doesn’t seem inclined to break the silence, so I pull into the first available space, kill the engine, and say, “Look, I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”
“This isn’t really something I want to discuss over the phone while my sisters are hanging all over me,” he says. “I’m at my parents’ house today. My mom needed my help with prepwork for a big job her catering company is doing. Will you come over?”
“I’m not fucking you if your sisters are in the next room,” I say. I’m possibly not fucking him at all, ever, because I’m too much of a bitch to get my shit together long enough to do anything more than accept a blowjob.
“It’s about eleven months too late to make that rule, isn’t it?” he asks, and I can’t help but grin. He, however, remains unamused. “You said we’d still be friends. You said this wouldn’t change anything. If that’s true, you’ll get in your car and come over here.”
I open my mouth to protest, but the call is already cutting out. Rolling my eyes, I drop my phone on the passenger seat and get out. The Grind is the only place I go for coffee, and I’ve been pretty careful about making sure I don’t stop by during the hours when Travis might be working. Either his schedule has changed, or I’m finally starting to forget the details of him, because when I push open the coffee shop door, he’s sitting on a stool behind the counter, reading the Hemingway novel we’ve just been assigned in AP English. He looks up when I enter, and for a long moment, we just blink at each other. Finally, I step up to the counter, and he flips the book shut. “What can I get for you?”
I haven’t heard his voice in a week and a half; it still sort of gets to me. I shove my hands in the pockets of my jacket and say, “Two coffees, black, in whatever the biggest size you’re legally allowed to give me is.”
He squints. “Wait, that’s you?” At my blank stare, he clarifies, “One of the guys who works the early morning weekday shifts talks about you. You always order your coffee that way, he thinks it’s hilarious. I didn’t realize—”
“Travis, your phone is buzzing again,” one of the other baristas calls from the back room.
Travis pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment before he moves to the machines to pour my coffees and says, “Just put it in the fucking bean grinder, alright?”
The back room door bangs open, and Jerry, the owner of the Grind, steps out, Travis’ cell phone dangling between his fingertips. “McCall, this is the fourth time this morning. It’s getting old.”
“Believe me, I know,” Travis says, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling and setting the two coffees down in front of me. “I told her not to call while I’m at work, but she—”
“Well, dump her,” Jerry orders, and I almost snort out the sip of coffee I’ve just taken. Jerry finally seems to realize that I’m standing at the counter, because he reaches over to clap me on the shoulder. “Garen, buddy. How’ve you been?”
“Fine,” I say.
“You still off the blow?” he asks genially. I blink at him. It’s actually a fair question, considering the fact that I was high as balls the last time he saw me, during my last musical performance here. Travis freezes with a finger poised above the buttons on the cash register. I’m not sure I trust myself to speak, so I settle for nodding and giving Jerry a tight smile, which earns me another clap on the shoulder. “Good to hear it. Got too much talent to waste your life getting fucked up, right?” I allow another nod. He points at me, but his next words are directed towards Travis. “See that? Silence. It’s a beautiful quality for a partner to have when you’re working. If you ask me, you should go back to dating this kid instead of that girl who’s always hanging around here. I never had to put up with him calling you every twenty minutes during every shift. Worst thing I ever had to worry about was the two of you sneaking off to make out in the service alley during open mic nights—”
“Okay,” Travis says loudly, face burning red, “and on that note, have a great day.”
“Uh, you didn’t tell me how much this—”
“They’re on me, as long as you’re willing to leave now, before my boss has any more time to embarrass me.”
It’s sort of impossible for me to turn down free coffee, so I nod my thanks, head out to the car, and crank my music back up. Just before pulling out of the lot, I chance a glance back through the front window of the Grind. Still standing behind the counter, still holding his cell phone, Travis is watching me. He raises one hand in a brief wave and gives what might be a smile. I look away.
And alright, it’s not like I’m supposed to care about how Travis’ disgusting little relationship with Joss is going, but except for how I do care. At least, I care enough to be glad that it’s not going well. But that particular train of thought leads to hope and madness, so it’s better—easier, maybe—to just bury it.
When I arrive at Ben’s parents’ house, there are already two cars in the driveway; his and his mom’s. I park behind the CR-V and head up to the front door, knocking twice before opening it and calling inside, “I’m letting myself in, because I’m rude like that.”
“We’re used to it,” Ben’s voice says from the kitchen.
I manage to take three steps in his direction before a tiny pair of arms is being flung around my waist, followed by another pair around my left leg, a third around my right. I pretend to struggle away from them, but they continue to cling. “I swear, there are more of you every time I come over here.”
“Garen, you haven’t come here in forever,” Jane says fiercely.
“I know, I’m a terrible person,” I agree, ruffling her hair. She finally releases her hold on my waist so that she can bat my hand away. Following her lead, Izzy releases me as well, but Madison keeps on clinging. I scoop her up and sling her over my shoulder. “Hey, kid. Where’s your brother?”
“Which one?” Izzy asks.
I roll my eyes. “Asher, obviously. I don’t like the other one.”
“Yeah, none of us do,” I hear Rosie say from the next room over.
I follow the sound of her voice into the living room; she’s sprawled out on the couch, reading. Apparently book obsessions are a McCutcheon family trait. She looks up when I enter, and I spread the arm not holding Madison. “What, you’re too good to say hi to me? Man. Leave town for a couple months and everybody forgets how much they love you.”
“Almost a year,” she says, frowning at me. “You haven’t been over since Christmas Eve. Where did you go?”
I dump Madison on the couch next to her sister and say, “I had to go back to New York for a while.”
“Why?”
“I just did, Ro,” I say.
She folds down the corner of her page—definitely not a McCutcheon family trait, considering Ben practically had a seizure the one time he saw me do that—and flings the book onto the coffee table. There is more than a bit of accusation in her voice when she says, “I heard Mommy and Benji talking last spring. They said you were back.”
I hesitate. “Yeah. I came back in the spring. But I wasn’t ready to come over just yet.”
“They said you were sick.”
“I was,” I say carefully. “I’m better now, though. That’s why I can come over now.”
“Okay,” she says simply. For a long minute, we just stare at each other. Her eyes are the exact same shade of blue as her brother’s, and sometimes, she looks almost as old. Almost as mature as him—definitely more mature than me. Finally, she says, “Well, don’t go away again, at least not without warning us first. It was mean. You’re an ass.”
I burst out laughing, and of course that’s the moment that Ben chooses to come in from the kitchen, saying, “Rosie! You’re only eleven, you’re not allowed to say that word. And you’re definitely not allowed to call my friend that. Say you’re sorry.”
“Why? You call him that all the time, when you’re on the phone with him and think we can’t hear,” she insists. She has a completely valid point, and I’m about to say so, but something on the coffee table catches my eye. Ben realizes what I’ve seen, and we both dive for it, but I manage to wrestle the photo album away from him.
“Put that down. That’s private,” he demands.
I plant the sole of my boot in the middle of his chest to keep him at least a leg’s length away as I begin to flip through the pictures, but he gives up and stalks back to the kitchen, leaving me to happily peruse the photographs. There are hundreds, and most of them are of him in horrible, awkward stages of growing up. It makes sense; he’s almost nineteen, and the next oldest of his siblings is Rosie. Obviously there won’t be as many pictures of the rest of them as there are of him. I flip the page and freeze, because for half a second, I think I’m convinced that I’m looking at a picture of James. Most of the basic facial features are almost identical—the prominent cheekbones, the perfectly straight nose. His eyes are the same shade of golden brown, his skin almost as tan. His hair is much shorter, but it’s just as dark. Wide, white smile. He’s even wearing a black polo shirt with the collar popped up, a pair of dark, fitted jeans. But he’s not Jamie, and honestly, I think the only reason I know that is because I know Jamie’s face and body and everything as well as I know my own. If I were anyone else, I might not even be able to tell them apart.
I shove the photo album onto Rosie’s lap, tap the picture, and say, “Who’s this?”
“That’s—” She’s clearly a little baffled to find a picture of someone who’s not a family member, so she squints a bit before she says, “I’m not sure what his name is, but he was a boy from our church. Same age as Benji, they were in the same youth group. Hang on a minute.” She turns and calls over her shoulder, “Benji, come here. Who’s this?”
Ben strolls back out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel as he comes. His face is pretty neutral, but the second he leans over his sister’s shoulder to look at the picture, his expression hardens for just an instant. “I think his name,” he says, slipping a finger beneath the cuff of his sleeve, hooking it around a rubber band I hadn’t noticed there before, and letting the band snap against his skin, “was Ethan.”
Ethan. The youth group kid. The person Ben lost his virginity to when he was sixteen. The guy who fucked him a few times, freaked out, and never spoke to him again. Oh, shit.
“Oh, right. Ethan,” Rosie agrees. She twists around to look at Ben again. “You guys were friends, weren’t you?”
“No,” Ben says flatly. “We hung out a couple of times. But we were never friends.”
“He looks just like James,” I can’t stop myself from saying. At Rosie’s questioning look, I clarify, “James Goldwyn. My best friend from military school.”
Ben turns and heads back to the kitchen, but I can tell from the set of his shoulders that he’s lying when he says, “I never noticed.”
No longer trapped under the weight of the photo album, I stand and follow him. He’s standing at the counter, furiously cranking the handle on the pasta press. I crowd up behind him and wrap an arm around his shoulders to pull him more properly upright against me. “You’re such a little liar. Of course you noticed, how could you not? They could be twins.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says tightly. “And in case you’ve forgotten, you came over so we could talk about your problems, not mine.”
I tighten my grip around his chest. “You know what my problems are, Ben. Don’t pretend I didn’t warn you that that was a possibility before we ever—”
“And I said it was okay,” Ben interrupts, his hands going still on the pasta. “I told you it was fine, and that I’d stop, and we’d figure it out. That was supposed to be the whole point of this thing. I was supposed to be someone you were comfortable enough to work through this with, not somebody you’d totally bail on and not speak to for days at a time.”
I shift back just enough to rest my forehead against the top of his head. He lets me stay silent, which is almost worse. I’d know how to handle this so much better if he was yelling at me, or kicking me out, or telling me he didn’t want to bother being fuck buddies with a guy who might not be able to fuck him. His understanding just makes this harder. My voice is unwilling to come out as anything other than a whisper when I say, “Part of me thought it would be easier, once I found someone I was really comfortable with. I thought I’d be able to do it, because you’re my friend, and you’re gorgeous, and I already know that sex with you is so, so good. But then I heard… that. On the TV, I heard screaming, and I heard what they were saying, and it just—I panicked. I knew I couldn’t do it, not after hearing that, and you have no idea how embarrassing that is, alright? Sex is supposed to be instinct, and I can’t do it like I used to, and that sucks. I thought it would be easier if I just left.”
“It would have been easier if you had stayed. That’s the sort of thing you need to talk about, G,” he says.
“Like how we need to talk about the fact that the first guy you ever slept with looks really goddamn similar to my best friend?” I say. He tenses up a little in my arms, but says nothing. I sigh. “Ben, they’re almost identical. Is that why you get so mad every time I make you hang out with Jamie? Is that why you hate him so—”
“Yes,” he hisses, spinning around and shoving me off of him. The movement leaves two floury handprints on the black fabric of my t-shirt. “Yes, that’s why I don’t like hanging out with him, okay? Because he looks like Ethan, and the things he says are just like the things Ethan used to say, and he treats guys the same fucking way Ethan treated me.”
“You can’t hate my best friend just because he looks like someone who hurt you once,” I say. “That would be like me hating you just because you go to Yale, like Dave does.”
Ben shrugs and says, “Maybe. But tell me you don’t cringe just a little every time you set foot on my campus.”
“If I do, it’s because I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to turn a corner in one of those buildings, looking to meet you after class, and find myself staring down the guy who used to beat me.”
“And I hate looking at someone who is almost identical to the guy who fucked me in the backseat of my car a couple of times and then never spoke to me again. I hate it almost as much as I hate knowing that that’s exactly what James is going to do to Alex. He’s going to sleep with him and then disappear, because that’s what guys like them do—”
“And what about guys like me?” I interrupt, refusing to even blink. Ben’s eyebrows flick just a tiny bit upward, like he’s prompting me to continue. “Jamie and I have grown up together, we’re practically the same person. If you think that about Jamie, you must think it about me, too. You think I’m the type of guy who fucks somebody and leaves.”
“Well, you’re sure as hell not the type of guy who fucks somebody and stays. Just ask Travis.”
His words hit me like a punch to the heart. I reel back, stunned, and he’s already widening his eyes, closing the gap between us, saying, “Shit, shit, shit. I’m sorry. Garen, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
If only to avoid looking him in the eyes, I blink up at the ceiling. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” Ben says. I hear the snap of the rubber band against his wrist again, and again, and again. “I’m sorry. I’m an asshole. That was a totally fucked thing to say, I shouldn’t—”
“There’s a difference,” I say slowly, “between people who leave because they want to, and people who leave because they have to. Last winter, when I got kicked out, I had to leave. And last summer, when I tried to bail, when I tried to go to Ohio, and you came to get me… I had to leave then, too.” I let my eyes roll back down to meet his. “Please tell me you understand that.”
“I do,” he says, punctuating the words with another snap of the band on his skin. And honestly, if anyone in this town understands that need to disappear for a while, it’s got to be Ben. There’s another band snap, and it’s like all of the tension is leaving my body. I just don’t have the energy to be mad at him, not for this. I sigh and open my arms, hoping to fold him into an embrace, if only to prevent him from snapping another welt into his skin, but just as he steps forward, all of his sisters come barreling into the kitchen.
“Benji, how much longer until you can come play with us?” Jane asks.
Ben moves to rake a hand through his hair, though he stops short when he remembers that his hands are coated in flour. He makes a face at them, then turns back to the pasta press. “I don’t know. A while. This is taking longer than I thought it would.”
“Mommy should just do it herself. They’re her ravioli, for her company,” Rosie says.
“Mommy doesn’t have time, alright? She’s got a lot of other stuff to do,” Ben says. “This would go a lot faster if Garen would stop distracting me, though.”
“Why, what’s he doing?” Rosie asks, blinking up at me.
I shrug. “I was being mean to him. But I’m done now.” Ben glances over his shoulder at me, and I offer him a small smile. It’s the only way I can think to say, We don’t have to talk about it anymore. I’m sorry. He returns the smile and looks back at his pasta.
Rosie, however, is unimpressed. “Whatever. I bet he deserved it. He’s a loser.”
I shrug again and say, “Yeah, well, I think he’s a cute loser.” For good measure, I duck down and press a quick kiss to his hair.
He flinches away, and I’m already opening my mouth to berate him for not properly appreciating my love when the girls all squeal, and Jane says, “Ew, Garen, that’s gross. You’re both boys.”
I already know what is going on, but my mind seems to be refusing to process it. I look around at them, and all of the girls give me a look like I’m an idiot when I say, “So?”
“So, boys can’t think other boys are cute. And they definitely can’t kiss them,” Rosie says. She blinks up at her brother and prods him in the ribs. “Tell him, Benji.”
Ben turns his attention to me, and there’s a warning in his eyes. Somehow managing to enunciate every single syllable, he says, “They’re right, Garen. Boys can’t kiss other boys. It’s a rule here.”
Jane snorts. “It’s a rule everywhere, you dork.”
“Really?” I say, trying so hard not to let myself snap at her, even though I’m absolutely shaking with anger. “Because, in my house, boys are definitely allowed to kiss other boys. Boys can kiss boys, boys can kiss girls, girls can kiss girls. Everybody can kiss whoever they want to kiss, and nobody gives a shit, because—”
“We’re going to go hang out in the basement for a while,” Ben interrupts loudly, barely pausing to wipe off his hands before grabbing my wrist so tightly it might end up leaving a bruise. “If Mom asks, tell her we’ll be up in time for dinner.” He drags me out of the kitchen, and we’ve barely made it down the stairs to the basement before he’s shoving me hard against the wall and hissing, “First of all, don’t fucking swear in front of my sisters. They’re little girls, and they don’t need to hear you talk like that, and if it happens again, I’ll punch you in the mouth. Second of all, don’t you dare try to judge my family for what my parents have chosen to raise them to believe.”
“They’re raising them to be homophobes, Ben. Why didn’t you tell me you’re still in the closet?” I demand.
“Because I’m not. My parents know I’m gay, and they don’t care, but they don’t want me to talk about my lifestyle in front of the girls. There’s nothing wrong with that, okay? They shouldn’t have to change their entire belief system just because their first kid turned out to be gay—”
“And what if one of your sisters turns out to be a lesbian?” I ask. “What then? Because let me fucking tell you something: if you start them off believing that being queer is a bad thing, it’s going to seriously screw them up if any of them ever like someone of the same sex. What if, ten years from now, when Izzy’s in high school, she gets a crush on a girl in her class? When you’re fucking thirty and off in another city, still pretending you like girls whenever someone asks about your love life during holiday dinners, what if Asher is off in middle school and realizes he wants a boyfriend, not a girlfriend? What—”
“No,” Ben forces out the word, shaking his head almost violently back and forth. “No, that’s not going to happen, because it’s fucking bad enough that I turned out to be a faggot. My parents cannot handle another one of their kids doing this to them. That’s not happening, I won’t let it.”
I stare at him, stunned. “Please tell me you didn’t really just say that. There’s… Ben, there’s nothing for them to ‘handle.’ You’re gay, big deal. If—”
“Why do you do that?” Ben demands, voice breaking a little in his desperation. “Why do you act like this isn’t something people are bothered by? Why do you act like they’re the ones with the problem—because they’re not, Garen. I’m sorry, but not everybody has a family like yours, okay? I can’t take my little sisters out for ice cream and tell them about a guy I like. They don’t even know I dated Travis. He was over here all the time, he had dinner with my family, he hung out with my sisters, and my parents are the only ones who knew he was my boyfriend, because I wasn’t allowed to talk about it in front of the girls. I’m not you, I can’t sit down at the dinner table and tell my entire family how many guys I’ve slept with. They still think I’m a virgin. They think I’m always going to be a virgin, because th-that’s what people like us are supposed to do. It’s—what we do, what we want, it’s not okay. Especially me, and the things I want, but you already know that, because you’ve experienced it. You know exactly how sick I am, you know the disgusting things I want men to do to me, you know how wrong—”
I kiss him. I kiss him because sometimes my body is better at communicating the things that my brain is too chickenshit to say, and because he’s in pain, and I don’t know how to make it better. One arm wrapped tight around his neck and the other reaching past him to open the door, I walk him backwards until we’re in his old bedroom. It’s completely empty now, except for a few boxes and one shelving unit, but there’s privacy, and that’s all I need right now. I nudge him back against the closed door and say against his lips, “Ben, when I kiss you, when I touch you like this, it doesn’t feel wrong. Not to me.”
“It’s supposed to,” he mutters. He refuses to meet my gaze, but he does let me kiss him again, slotting his lower lip between mine. I slip a hand up the front of his shirt to touch the tiny gold crucifix I know he wears most of the time. The truth is, I had no idea he had this much trouble reconciling his religion with his sexuality. I didn’t realize that he thought of losing his virginity as a betrayal to his family and his faith; I didn’t realize that he’s all but waiting for a bolt of lightening to strike him down every time he touches another boy. I’ve never been so glad that the Star of David hidden away under my shirt doesn’t hang as heavy against my chest as that cross seems to be against his.
I brush his hair away from his face and say, “This thing between us. This—learning how to believe that it’s okay to let a guy touch you. You need it just as much as I do, don’t you?”
He drags a hand through his hair, and as he moves, I catch a glimpse of what I think is a recently healed cut across his wrist. He looks up at me, blue eyes blank, and says quietly, “Sometimes, I think I might need it more.”
This isn’t what we had agreed upon. We’d agreed on experimentation, and kink, and just a little bit of violence, but the last thing he needs right now is to think that he should be feeling pain every time he wants to get off. He doesn’t need to be punished right now, he needs to be fucking worshiped, and I don’t care if his entire family is upstairs right now, he needs this. I swallow hard and reach for the buckle of his studded belt. “Let me touch you.”
“I thought you were supposed to be figuring out how to have conversations without getting your dick out,” he snipes.
“That’s not what this is,” I say, even if it maybe is. Belt unbuckled, I push his jeans over his hips and halfway down his thighs. I hesitate with my fingers at the waistband of his boxers and repeat, “Let me.”
Wordlessly, he kicks his jeans the rest of the way off and nods. He’s barely half-hard right now, but a few decent strokes are enough to change that. I slip a hand into one of the inside pockets of my leather jacket to remove the small travel-size bottle of lube I’m just enough of a slut to carry around. I nudge Ben’s jaw with my nose and say, “Turn around.”
He does so without objection. I’m not sure how long it’s really been since anyone has fingered him, or since he’s done it to himself, or whatever, but when I press one lubed finger into him, he lets out a moan that sounds practically tortured. I pause to allow him some time to adjust, but he shakes his head and rocks back against me. I wrap my free arm around his waist and scrape my teeth over the back of his neck, one of the few places available to me that can be easily concealed when we go back up to his family. Another finger, and he lets out one more of those beautiful noises. By the time I’m able to get a third in, his knees are starting to buckle. Seemingly forgetting the earlier above-the-waist rule, he reaches back and rubs me through my jeans. My eyes flutter shut, and I rock forward into his hand. He twists his head around to kiss me over his shoulder, then asks, “Do you think you can—”
“Yeah,” I say, nodding jerkily enough that our foreheads knock together. I don’t know how I can be so sure that I can do this—maybe it’s being in Ben’s high school bedroom, maybe it’s the desperate look in his eyes, maybe it’s all down to the way my hands are shaking as I step away from him to unbutton my jeans and push them down to my knees. All I know is that it’s actually going to work this time; I’m going to be okay. I snag the condom from the inner pocket of my jacket and roll it on. Ben presses back against me, but I grab his waist and turn him around so his back is to the door once again.
“Up,” I murmur against his jaw, and he gives a tiny jump, just enough for me to catch his legs and wind them around my waist. One of his arms is wrapped tight around my neck, and his other hand drops between us, giving me a few rough strokes before he lines me up with his entrance, and then I’m pushing inside and we’re both scrambling to kiss each other to silence our groans. He’s so tight, so hot that I need to take a minute to get used to the sensation, but Ben makes no complaint. Only the first few inches of me are in him, but I still ease almost completely out before I push back in, bottoming out and making him shake.
“Garen,” he murmurs, “can you—”
“If you’re about to ask me to hurt you, the answer is no,” I say, and his eyes snap open again. I press a quick, dry kiss to his lips and say, “It’s not going to be like that this time, alright? This is—I just want to make you feel good. I’m not going to hurt you, it’s just going to be good.” Another kiss. “Trust me.”
There’s another second of hesitation, but then he nods. I shift again so that his knees are hooked over my elbows now, and this new position is spreading him wider and allowing me to thrust deeper. His head falls back against the door with a loud thunk, and I might be worried about the noise, but that’s sort of a lost cause; the door rattles loudly every time I press back into him, and I’m finding it harder and harder to keep myself silent.
It takes effort to remember to make this as good for him as it is for me; usually, finding a guy’s prostate, or remembering to jerk him off, or switching up positions to get the best angle—it’s always been second nature to me, just as it’s always Ben’s instinct to scratch and bite and give as good as he gets. That’s not what this is. This is graceless, and desperate, and it’s exactly what we both need.
When Ben comes, it’s as sudden and silent as always, but when I join him a minute or so later, it’s… not. The kiss I give him can barely even be called a kiss—it’s open-mouthed, and sloppy, and more a moment of sharing each other’s breath than any real display of skill. He swallows up my cries and lets me grip him painfully tight. My knees are starting to buckle, and the second I’ve finished coming, I spin around to brace my back against the door. I’d sort of hoped that the movement might make it easier to stay upright, but it doesn’t, so I give up and allow myself to slump to the ground, Ben in my lap, my dick still buried inside him. That’s going to start being uncomfortable for both of us soon, but right now, I don’t care. I hook my chin over his shoulder as we both try to calm our breathing.
There should probably be some big moment right about now, some profound declaration about how much this means, but instead, Ben drags his fingers through my hair and whispers, laughing a little, “I’m pretty sure there’s cum all over your shirt.”
I snort. “I’m pretty sure it was worth it.” He sighs against my neck, and I run my palm down the length of his spine. “You alright?” He nods, then makes a questioning noise I can only interpret to mean, Are you? I tangle both hands in his hair so that I can ease his head back. His face is flushed and his lips swollen from kissing, but his eyes are bright and searching mine. Without him ever really having to ask it, I nod, then duck back in to kiss the smile off his mouth.
When the pounding on the door begins, my first instinct is to bury my head under a pillow to block out the noise. It’s only my second instinct to look around to see where I am. That probably says a lot about my life choices. I roll over and find myself facing Ben’s shoulder. Relaxing somewhat, I bury my face in the crook of his neck; he shoves me off and mumbles, “Go the fuck away, it’s early and you’re being loud.”
“I haven’t made a sound, you twat. That’s your idiot roommate,” I say.
Out in the hall, Alex lets out a pitiful whine.
“I should’ve gotten a fucking studio by myself,” Ben says, rolling his eyes and hauling himself off the bed. He yanks the topmost blanket off the bed, burrows into it, and unlocks the door. He’s already tumbling back onto the bed and curling up against my side by the time the door swings open.
Alex joins us on the bed without seeking permission, but Jamie hovers in the doorway, all too aware of the fact that he’s unlikely to be welcome in Ben’s room. “Sorry ‘bout him. I tried to distract him with morning sex, but he wants breakfast instead.”
“There is no ‘instead.’ We had morning sex, I’m just too hungover to go again anytime soon. Now I want pancakes,” Alex says.
I reach over to card my fingers through Ben’s wildly messy hair and contemplate asking if he’d be up for some morning sex, too. But he still seems barely awake, so instead, I say, “You live in a city now, Al, not in Lakewood. You can get pancakes from a diner. There are like, three on this block alone.”
“Yeah, but none of those places will be as good as Ben’s,” Alex protests, and I don’t really have an argument for that. Ben’s cooking is fantastic. I shrug, and Alex turns his attention back to his best friend. “Will you make me pancakes?”
“Sure,” Ben yawns.
“And bacon?”
He shoots Alex a warning look. “Don’t push it, drunk boy.”
Near the door, Jamie straightens up. “What, that’s your version of ‘pushing it’? Pancakes and bacon?” He throws his hands up and walks out of the room, muttering, “You fuckin’ people have no idea how to do breakfast up here.”
Alex and Ben share a bewildered glance, and I fling myself off the bed, only belatedly deciding I should probably put some clothes on. I locate my jeans and shirt, pull them on, and say, “Come on, you don’t want to miss this. His accent gets so much thicker when he starts ranting about why Northerners suck. Ask him about traditional Southern breakfasts, see if you can get him to say ‘grits.’ He actually manages to turn it into two syllables, I have no idea how.”
“You guys go, I’ll be along in a few minutes,” Ben says, not moving from the bed. “I have to call my dad and see what time he wants me at the bookstore today.”
I roll my eyes at him—he has no idea how much amusement he’s about to miss out on—but drag Alex from the bedroom without further comment. By the time we get out to the kitchen, Jamie has already settled comfortably into the task of transferring most of the food from the cabinets and refrigerator to the counter. Seeing us enter, he announces, “Waffles. Eggs. Bacon. Toast. Ham. Do you know how to make biscuits and gravy, or do I have to show you? This is still only half of it, there should be so much more. Y’all need to go shopping.”
“What are they missing?” I prompt immediately, crowding up against Jamie and digging my fingers into his side until he squirms away. “What else would be part of your ideal breakfast? Something that reminds you of home, perhaps?”
“Shut up and sit down,” Jamie says, shoving me off him. I take a seat in one of the two chairs at the table, but I don’t stop grinning at him.
Alex rolls his eyes and begins to move all of the food back where it came from. “Sorry, but people north of the Mason-Dixon line don’t usually start their days with binge-eating. Ben’s going to make us pancakes, and that’s it.” He pauses on his third trip between the counter and the fridge and says, “Jesus, Jamie. If you think this counts as breakfast for four people, how much is your grocery bill every week at your apartment?”
I snort. “What, like he cooks? I mean, he can. I’m pretty sure that’s the great divide among kids who grow up with too much money. Some of them end up like me, and I can—”
“—barely work a fuckin’ microwave, it’s pathetic,” Jamie informs me. He turns to Alex, flashes him a smile, “And then there are some like me. I spent most of my childhood hanging around the kitchen with our cook, just so my mom wouldn’t have to put up with me. I picked up quite a bit. But in Manhattan, I’m so busy doing other things that it’s just… easier to get food delivered. And you know something? For a city that prides itself on being so culturally diverse and having cuisine from all over the world, I have yet to find a single goddamn restaurant in New York that can make shrimp and grits the way my—” He stops speaking the moment I collapse over the table, unable to hold back my laughter any longer. His eyes narrow into slits and he hisses, “Don’t you dare say it, Anderson.”
But I’m already slumped over and practically howling, “Did you hear it? Hear how he turned it from ‘grits’ to ‘gree-uts’? It’s a fucking five-letter word, and he managed to make it into two sylla—”
“It’s been four fuckin’ years! When are you going to stop finding the way I talk funny?” he says. There’s a slightly dangerous glint in his eyes when he adds, “Especially since people from Ohio don’t know how to pronounce a double-oh.”
At first, I think he’s saying it just to mess with me, but when I catch sight of Alex, I notice that he’s trying to hide a grin. I squint. “What’s wrong with the way I say a double-oh?”
“Say ‘bedroom,” Jamie orders. “Or ‘root beer.’ Or ‘roof.’ Oh my Lord, please say ‘roof.’”
“Roof,” I echo, and Alex snorts. I shove him off his chair. “What? How am I supposed to say it?”
“Uh, you’re sure as shit not supposed to say it ‘ruff,’ like you’re a fucking cartoon dog,” he says. “A double-oh that follows an ‘r’ is supposed to be pronounced the same almost every time, like when you say ‘choose.’ And you say that fine, but you say ‘ruff’ instead of ‘roof’—”
“—and ‘rut beer’ instead of ‘root beer’—”
“—and ‘rum’ instead of ‘room.’”
It continues like that for nearly ten minutes. People from Ohio can’t say ‘dad’. People from Connecticut can’t say ‘coffee.’ People from Cleveland don’t know enough to pronounce the ‘d’ at the end of their own city. People from the South can’t say fucking anything. It’s all fairly good-natured, until we get to the discussion of pop. Pop. Because that’s what it’s fucking called.
“It’s definitely not,” Alex protests. “It’s called soda.”
I bury my face in my hands and groan, “No, it’s not. It’s pop.”
“We call it coke,” Jamie says, shrugging as he digs through the refrigerator and surfaces with an apple.
I round on him. “That’s stupid. Every time I’ve come to visit you in Savannah, we go out to eat and I order a coke, and the waiter asks, ‘What kind?’ Uh, fucking coke. You know, Coca-Cola. That’s what coke means. Well, either that or cocaine. But it’s not just a catch-all term for every kind of pop in existence.”
“Garen, it’s not called pop, it’s—”
“Your opinion is invalid,” I say fiercely, rounding on Alex, “because you think that a sub is called a grinder.”
That catches Jamie’s attention once more. He turns to me, baffled, and says, “They call it a what?”
“A grinder. Like, ‘I’m going to Subway to buy a grinder.’”
“That… but that sounds perverted.”
“I know.”
“It sounds gross.”
“I know.”
“Alright, I have to be at work in an hour and a half, so you guys need to decide whether you want regular pancakes, blueberry ones, or chocolate chip,” Ben announces, finally joining us in the kitchen. Rather than pull on his clothes from the night before or bother to shower so he can get ready for work, he has dressed himself in a long-sleeved gray henley and a pair of black sweatpants that ride low on his hips. A half-inch strip of skin is visible between the two articles of clothing, and I can see the edge of one of the bite marks I left on his hip. Not, of course, as clearly as I can see the three on his neck.
Jamie hitches his chin at Ben. “Nice hickies.”
“Nice screaming,” Ben retorts. “If you’re always that loud during sex, I’m either moving out or buying you a ball-gag.”
“So that’s why I don’t recall hearing anything from you last night. Tell me: when you come, do you moan in monotone, too?” He turns his eyes on me and quirks a brow. “Or did Garen decide not to reciprocate?”
I shrug. “He doesn’t make much noise when he comes, to tell you the truth. It’s pretty hot to watch. He just sort of tenses up, and his mouth kinda falls open a little bit, and the very tip of his tongue comes out to touch his top two front teeth—”
“Chocolate chip, blueberry, or plain?” Ben says, banging a pan down on the stove and yanking open the refrigerator door.
“Plain,” I say, half a second before Alex demands, “Blueberry.”
Jamie narrows his eyes and says, just to be a contrary little cunt, “Chocolate chip.”
Ben points to each of us in the order we’ve spoken and says, “Fine, okay, go fuck yourself.”
But he makes all three kinds anyway. I’m not usually a breakfast person, but I’ll eat pretty much anything Ben cooks. Plus, he buys the good syrup, the kind that comes in weird, short jugs. Once I’ve finished, I push my empty plate away and say, “We should probably get going. Dude, did I leave my phone in your room?”
Ben shrugs. “Probably.”
“Want me to go get it?” Jamie offers, smirking at me. “I doubt Ben wants me to go into his room, but I’m fairly certain that if I let you two go in there together, you’ll just end up touching each other in all the most sinful places, and I’d rather not have you get struck down by the Lord while you’re driving me back to your place.”
I open my mouth to make a snide comment right back at him, but before I can speak, Ben explodes, “Can you just shut the fuck up for five seconds? Jesus fucking Christ!” Then, looking more furious than ever, he shoves his plate off the counter into the sink and storms out of the kitchen, down the hall, and into his room.
The second the door has slammed shut behind him, James turns to stare at me with wide eyes. “What the fuck was that?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “He… Ben’s not usually the one who blows up like that. I mean, I do, all the time. Travis has an even worse temper than I do, he’s the one who yells at people and throws shit and storms out. But Ben doesn’t—”
“It was the God comment,” Alex interrupts, poking at his pancakes with the tip of his fork. At our blank stares, he adds, “The thing you said about getting struck down, or whatever. It pissed him off. And then he got more pissed at himself for blaspheming afterward.”
Jamie actually looks a bit ashamed of himself. “I didn’t realize he’d be that offended by it. I was just joking.”
“I know you were. He’s just not a fan of jokes about that.” He rolls his eyes and makes a vague gesture with his fork. “He doesn’t talk about it much, but his whole family is really, really Catholic. Like, they’re crazy into the whole Jesus thing, it’s ridiculous.”
As the resident Jew, I can completely relate to his feelings about the Jesus thing being ridiculous, but I also have known Jamie for four years. I know that for all his sinning, he’s still a true Southern boy at heart, which means he is obliged to love—in no particular order—his mother, his country, and his God. His eyes narrow. “What’s so ridiculous about being into Jesus?”
“Uh, I don’t know, maybe the fact that it’s fucking stupid?” Alex suggests, shrugging. “There’s no evidence to support any of it, but his family bases their entire lives on it. It’s insane. I don’t need some invisible dude in the sky telling me what’s the right thing to do. And Ben sure as fuck doesn’t need to keep hearing about how he’s going to go to Hell because he likes guys. The entire concept of organized religion disgusts me.”
“I’m going to go talk to him,” I mutter, slipping out of my chair before I can be sucked into the impending ‘Baptist versus atheist’ argument. Down the hall, Ben’s door remains closed, but unlocked. I slip inside, expecting to see him pouting, or pacing, or something, but he’s just standing near the foot of the bed, unmoving except for his hands. His shirt sleeve is pushed halfway up his forearm, and he’s repeatedly snapping a rubber band against his wrist, like the world’s least comfortable bracelet. He looks up when I enter, forces a smile, but doesn’t stop snapping the band. I cock my head to the side. “You alright?”
“I’m fine,” he says. Snap.
“I know it sounds hard to believe, but Jamie wasn’t trying to be an ass. He didn’t mean to upset you.” Snap.
“I’m not upset.” Snap, snap, snap--
I reach out and cover the band with my fingers, halting the movement. The skin beneath my hand is hot from the friction, and I can feel the slightly raised areas where welts from the rubber are starting to form. I tow him closer, and he moves willingly enough, though he resists when I try to wrap an arm around him. That’s not surprising—Ben’s ability to let himself be taken care of only goes so far. I sigh and settle for squeezing his shoulder as I admit, “My best friend is kind of a dick sometimes. It’s a trait we share, I think we bonded over it when we first met.”
“Not terribly surprised to hear that,” Ben says.
I stick my tongue out at him, and he grins. It’s the closest I think I’m going to be able to get to an acknowledgment of his discomfort with the conversation in the kitchen, and pushing him to talk isn’t going to help. I do, however, pull him a little closer and use one finger to carefully brush his hair away from his eyes. He doesn’t look away, which is… surprising. Surprising, but nice. Before I can think better of it, I find myself saying, “You and me… we had a good thing together, didn’t we? Last fall, when I first moved here.”
His forehead creases. “What do you mean?”
I hesitate. This conversation has the potential to go so horribly wrong that things could end up being uncomfortable for days—maybe even weeks. I have such a low threshold for rejection, and Ben has such a low bullshit tolerance; him denying my attempts to initiate anything he thinks is pointless or a waste of energy could leave both of us incredibly pissed off. But I can’t stop staring at the purple-red bruises on his throat, mirroring the shape of my mouth, disappearing just below the collar of his shirt. Without really deciding to move, I raise a hand to brush the tips of my fingers across one of the bite marks. The abused skin there must still be sensitive, because Ben shivers a little and cranes his neck slightly, allowing me better access.
All at once, I’m crowding him back against the door, curving my hand over his throat—not tight enough to really choke him, but enough that he can feel the pressure on his bruises—and kissing him. He grabs the hem of my shirt and rucks it halfway up my torso so that he can run his palms down my chest, over my abs. I shove his hands down another few inches until they’re resting at the top of my jeans, and once he has started to unbutton them, I break away from the kiss to mouth over the marks on his neck. I whisper against his skin, “When we first met, those weeks where all we did was hang out and play music together and—” I bite down right over one of the already existing marks, and he actually lets out a little cry and grinds his erection harder into my thigh. I release his throat and shift up so that my next words ghost hot across his ear, “--and I fucked your brains out every chance we got. You remember that?”
“God, like I could forget it,” he breathes, hooking his thumbs over the waistband of my jeans but hesitating long enough to ask, “Can I?”
“Go for it,” I say, grinning, and then he’s on his knees in front of me, yanking the denim halfway down my thighs and sliding his mouth down onto me. I brace a hand against the door and stare down at him, momentarily losing my train of thought while I watch his mouth bobbing on my dick. It’s an understandable distraction, but eventually, I manage to make myself say, “We should—that. Or, this, I guess.” He doesn’t take my piece out of his mouth, but he does tilt his head back slightly so that he can shoot me a questioning look. That shouldn’t be hot, but it so is. My eyes roll shut and I say, “That thing—whatever it was that we had going on last fall, that whole friendship-plus-fucking thing. I want to do that, I want to go back to that.”
He pulls off for about three seconds to say, “Please tell me this isn’t you trying to ask me out. Because I will literally shove your cock so far back into my throat that I choke to death, just to avoid having to have that conversation.”
“Oh my god, that would be the best way to die. Like, if I can’t go out in a drug-induced haze, choking on cock is my second choice,” I say, knotting a hand in his hair and guiding his mouth back onto me. “But dude, no, I’m not trying to ask you out. I don’t want to be your boyfriend, but I-I don’t think I wanna be just your friend, either. Isn’t there like, some sort of middle ground we can settle for? One where we have all the awesome parts of our friendship that we have now—like, where I get to come over here and dick around on the xbox, and we go to shows together, and you proofread my English essays, and I correct you when your guitar fingering sucks—”
“My fingering is flawless,” Ben says between licks at the head of my dick.
“We’re talking about your musical skills, not your masturbation technique,” I say, hissing a little when he scrapes his teeth ever so gently over my shaft, presumably as a warning for me to shut up. I card my fingers through his hair and say, “I’m serious, though. We should do this. We should do all the cool friend stuff, but then also, we should make out. And suck each other off. And fuck. We should fuck a lot. Like, as much as possible, probably.”
From out in the hallway, I hear Jamie say, “Seriously, can you two stop touching each other so we can go?”
Before I can react, the door swings open—or, as far open as it can before it cracks into the back of Ben’s head, forcing him forward so that he’s suddenly sucking me right down to the base. And that feels amazing, except for how I can feel Ben’s throat spasming around the head of my cock, and I can tell it’s choking him. I shove the door shut so that there’s enough space for him to reel back, coughing and gagging.
“What the hell just happened?” Jamie demands from the other side of the door.
“You broke Ben!” I accuse. “For Christ’s sake, Jamie, you can’t just go around opening doors that people are hooking up against, you cock-blocking little shit.”
Ben gives one last cough and rasps out, “I’m fine. He didn’t break me, I’m fine.”
His voice is completely wrecked, and the fact that he sounds like that because he was just deepthroating me is almost too much for me to handle. It shouldn’t be funny or sexy, but it’s both. I sink to my knees in front of him and clasp his face between my hands, drawing him into a deep, desperate kiss. I pull back and say, “I have to go, or Jamie’s going to—” Ben interrupts me with another, shorter kiss, “—to keep being a bitch. And you have—” I’m the one to initiate the next kiss, “—work. You have to get ready. And go to work.”
“Fuck me,” he practically growls, and I’m already nodding my agreement by the time he finishes, “I’m working from noon to six. I’m picking you up after I leave the shop, and we’re going to come back here, and you’re going to fuck me until I come so hard I pass out, okay?”
“So, that’s a ‘yes,’ then? To my whole idea of us being friends who wreck each other’s shit at every available opportunity?” I slip a hand up the back of his shirt and dig my nails into his skin; he silences his groan by kissing me again.
When I finally pull back, though, his upper lip curls a bit and he says, “You’re not going to make this weird again, are you?”
“What do you mean?” I say. “When did I make this weird the first time?”
“Uh, when we were sleeping together last October and you tried to break up with me even though we weren’t dating?” he says, laughing. I shove him over.
Admittedly, it had been a pretty awkward conversation. I had come up to him while he was at his locker before homeroom and said, So, you and I have been fucking for a while now, but we’re not dating, right? Like, I’m not supposed to be your boyfriend or anything? He had stared at me like I was completely retarded and said, Uh, no? Why the hell would we be dating, dude? I had just sort of shrugged and said, Awesome. ‘Cause I think I’m in love with someone, and he seems like he’s the monogamy sort of guy. So, I think I’m supposed to stop having sex with you. He had burst out laughing and walked away, and that had been that.
It so figures he would bring that up now.
“I won’t make it weird this time,” I say. “We’ll be doing exactly what we’ve been doing for ages—just the friendship thing—and then also, we’ll—I want to touch you.”
Out in the hall, Jamie smacks his fist against the door and says, “You can touch him later. I want to go.”
“The next time you’re having sex with Alex, I’m going to break into the room and kick you right in the balls, Jamie, I swear to god! You’re my best friend, and I’m trying to talk my way into a friends-with-benefits scenario here, and you’re not helping. You’re hindering. So you’re sleeping on the fucking floor tonight—”
“The fuck I am! Even if you kick me out of your bed, you still have a couch I can—”
“Fuck the couch and fuck you, too. The floor, James.” I turn and flash my brightest, most charming smile to where Ben is still sprawled out on the floor, just as I pushed him. “So, what do you say?”
“I say you’re a fucking idiot,” he says. “But also, okay.”
“Yeah?”
He nods and reaches out to scrape his nails gently down the length of my forearm. “Yeah. As long as you’re sure you can handle it.”
“Cocky little shit, isn’t he?” Jamie says.
“The floor,” I hiss again. I turn my eyes back to Ben and say, quietly enough that only he can hear, “I can handle it. I mean, we might need to—there will still be times when I like, need a minute, or whatever. And some stuff is still going to take a while for me to get used to it. But if that’s cool with you, then I’m sure I’ll be fine.”
He stands, offers me a hand, and hauls me to my feet. I steal one last kiss before I grab my phone from the nightstand and head out into the hall, but before Ben can follow me out, Jamie is shoving past me and shutting them both in the room. Bewildered, I try the handle, but it’s locked. I knock. “Um, sorry. But what the fuck?”
There’s no response. At least, there’s no response to me. I can hear muffled voices from inside, but it’s impossible to make out any specifics. How the hell was Jamie strong-arming his way into our conversation? Was he standing with his ear pressed to the door, or do I just talk really loudly? Since neither of them seem inclined to tell me what’s going on, I wander back out to the kitchen, where Alex is scowling down at his now cold pancakes. He glances up when I enter. “I have got to get a new type, man. First Ben, now James?”
“Uh,” I say, holding one hand three inches above the top of my head and the other ten inches below that—Jamie’s height and Ben’s, respectively. “Because the two of them have so much in common?”
“The God thing,” he groans, rubbing the back of his neck. “I’m so over being into guys who have a bunch of Jesus issues. He tore me a new asshole the second you left the room, told me I was being a disrespectful little shit for saying it’s stupid to believe in God. And whatever, I still think it is. But I said he was being a fucking hypocrite, because he didn’t seem to care about ‘respect’ when he was making Ben feel like shit.”
“Is that what they’re talking about now?”
He nods. “Jamie said he wanted to apologize before he left.”
I wrinkle my nose. Jamie having actual feelings is so weird. I’ve got half a mind to cockblock whatever religious, emotional fuckery they’ve got going on now, but before I’ve even managed to take two steps back in the direction of the bedrooms, Jamie is sauntering back into the kitchen, face neutral. “Ready to go?”
“Where’s Ben?” I ask.
He gestures over his shoulder. “Still in his room, he’s going to start getting ready for work. He said to tell you goodbye.”
“Okay,” I say slowly, turning to raise my eyebrows at Alex in what I hope he realizes is an unspoken, I’m going to leave now, but just in case Jamie’s being a sociopath and lying about that, make sure your roommate knows I say bye. He jerks his head a little in acknowledgment, and we depart without another word.
The car ride back to my house is mostly silent, save the music coming from the stereo. Finally, as we’re turning onto my street, Jamie twists to look at me and says, “Are we going to talk about how I just heard you sort-of-ask-Ben-out-but-not-really?”
“Emphasis on ‘not really.’ Are we going to talk about how I just heard you apologize to someone you hate for something I know you don’t really feel guilty over, just because Alex wanted you to?” I ask. He doesn’t say anything. I gnaw on my lip ring for a minute, but by the time we pull into my driveway, the silence is unbearable. I put the car in park, turn to face him, and say, “You really like him, don’t you?”
“Can we please not have this conversation?” Jamie says tightly, his eyes fixed on his hands.
“Jamie, I’m serious. I’ve never seen you this into a guy—”
“I was this into you.”
“That doesn’t count. This is different, okay? And I don’t—” I break off, not knowing how to continue without offending him. But the truth is, Jamie’s one of the smartest people I know. He’s not delusional. He knows what I’m going to say, so there’s no point in resisting. I sigh. “He’s kind of in love with Ben. I know you know that, okay? And I would rather die than see you get hurt, and I’m kind of freaked out about this whole thing, because Alex is my friend, yeah, but you’re so much more than that. I don’t want you to get your heart broken, and I’m worried that that’s where this is headed, because… sometimes you look at him like you’re, you know. Falling for him.”
He turns to face me again, and right there, in his eyes, is everything I need to know. All things that are too new and terrifying for him to verbalize. All the things he thinks I’d make fun of him for. All the things he’s thinking and feeling and craving. All the things I felt last fall, after I met Travis. I don’t need to hear him say it, and I don’t think he’d be able to, even if I asked. So when he repeats, in a softer voice, “Can we please not have this conversation?” I nod.
Once outside the car, I sling an arm over his shoulders and press a rough kiss to his cheekbone. He wrinkles his nose at me, and I grin, dragging him into the house.
“Hey, Dad!” I call once we’ve stepped over the threshold. “You lived in Ohio your whole life, right? I need you to say something for me. Say ‘roof.’”
“Roof,” James repeats, in his own horrible accent. “As in, ‘Santa and his reindeer are on the roof.’”
“No, as in ‘fiddler on the roof.’ Respect my fucking heritage or get out of my house.”
“Can you come into the kitchen, please?” Dad says. I obey. He’s sitting at the kitchen table, his brow furrowed and his eyes focused on what must be a truly fascinating knot in the wood. He asks, “Where have you two been?”
“We went to a show in New Haven with Alex and Ben. I told you about it days ago, and I said goodbye to you before we left,” I say, tossing the spare Benz key onto the table. “We’re going to head downstairs, alright?”
“No, you’re not,” Dad says sharply, and Jamie and I both freeze. Dad still hasn’t looked up from the table. He gestures to the seats across from him and says, “Sit down. Both of you.”
I shoot a nervous glance towards Jamie, who widens his eyes back at me. Dad’s using his disciplinarian voice, which I’m kind of used to—he’s been using that voice with me since I was five—but it’s… different from usual. It’s sharper, firmer. It’s like it was the day he kicked me out. Clearly this isn’t up for debate, so I sink into the chair directly across from him. Jamie sits down next to me and reaches over to squeeze my knee. There’s a beat of silence before I say, “What’s up?”
Dad finally looks up. “Were you drinking last night?”
That must be the moment when all of my blood turns to ice. That’s the only explanation for how cold I suddenly feel. Next to me, Jamie goes tense; his fingertips are digging into my leg. I swallow and stare my father dead in the eyes. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
“No, I’m not,” he says. “I want an honest answer. Were you drinking last night? It’s obvious that James was. He’s hungover right now, I can tell by looking at him. And while I’m not exactly thrilled with that idea, because he’s still only eighteen, he’s neither my child nor an addict. But you are, Garen. It’s clear that you two went to a venue that has no problem serving alcohol to minors. You told me that you were going to a show, yes, but you also told me you’d be home by two, at the latest. It’s eleven thirty now. Where’d you spend the night?”
“Gee, I don’t know, Dad. I guess I must’ve spent it blacked out in an alleyway,” I deadpan.
James turns his head sharply towards me. “Garen, don’t be like that right now.” Then, to my dad, he says, “After the show, we went back to the apartment. It was my idea—Alexander and I are involved, and I wanted to spend the night.”
“Well, the last time Garen spent the night at the apartment without calling to check in with me, he ended up in rehab,” Dad says. “That was less than three weeks ago. I cannot believe you would expect me to be okay with this.”
Part of me is embarrassed, but most of me is livid. “I expected you to be okay with this because it’s the way things have always been. I’ve never been expected to check in with you before. I thought you trusted me.”
“The last time I trusted you, you started using again,” Dad says. I let out a little breath of air that might be a laugh; I still don’t think I can feel most of my body. He sighs. “Garen, give me your phone.”
I stare at him, but he doesn’t yield. It’s not like I can tell him to go fuck himself—the phone was purchased with a credit card that’s technically mine, but is completely paid for by him. He pays the phone bill every month. It’s my phone in name only. I tug it from my pocket and toss it onto the table. He unlocks the screen, not bothering to explain himself as he begins to thumb through it. At first, I think he’s reading my messages—and whatever, if he wants to traumatize himself by reading mine and Jamie’s horrifically explicit sexts, that’s up to him—but then he sets the phone down on the table. The screen is lit up with a dialing message; he’s making a call on speakerphone. It rings three times, then--
“I thought you were supposed to be the kind of guy who doesn’t call the morning after he gets his dick sucked. You know I’m at work right now, why are you bothering me?”
There’s a beat, during which Jamie has to bury his head in his arms to smother his laughter. Dad pinches the bridge of his nose and says, “Ben, this is Bill Anderson, Garen’s father.”
“Um,” Ben says, clearly trying not to panic, and I smirk. “G-Good morning, sir. Please pretend I answered the phone by saying literally anything else.”
“In my experience, ‘hello’ tends to work fairly nicely. Now, I’m sitting here with my son and his friend. I’d like to confirm that they did in fact spend last night at your apartment.”
I cross my arms and say, “I’m sorry, did you miss the dick-sucking comment?”
“Garen, stop talking forever,” Ben says tightly. Then, he continues, “Yes, they both stayed here last night. We all went to a show together, and we got back from the venue around… twelve thirty? Maybe one o’clock? After that, we just—I mean, it was kind of late, so it just made more sense for them to stay here, instead of driving all the way back to Lakewood. They—I’m sorry, I don’t understand. Is there a problem?”
“I’ve yet to determine the answer to that, actually. Was my son drinking or using drugs at any point during your activities last night?” Dad asks.
I am so grateful to hear the sharpness in Ben’s voice when he says, “What? No. Mr. Anderson, Garen is completely sober, he has been for weeks now. The last time he did anything like that was right before his most recent time in rehab. He’s been really good lately, and I wouldn’t—none of us would cover for him if he was relapsing, believe me. None of us want to sit idly by and watch him get hurt.”
“Right. The same way none of you wanted to sit idly by this past spring.”
“Dad, shut the fuck up,” I order, not caring if my harshness gets me in trouble. But it’s too late; the screen goes black as the call cuts off from Ben’s end. I snatch my phone up and try to redial, but my call is sent to voicemail after one ring. I try again. The same. Even as I’m thumbing out a text that says, ben i'm sorry, please ignore my cuntjacket of a dad & call me back asap, I snap, “Are you kidding me right now? Like, was that honestly supposed to be a joke? Because in case you’ve forgotten, Ben is the one who followed me all the way to Ohio to bring me back. Ben’s the one who convinced me I needed help. He’s the one who saved me. And no matter how pissed you are at me, you should at least show him the respect he deserves.”
“This isn’t about Ben,” Dad says. He has no idea how wrong he is. He has no idea how harshly Ben takes criticism like that, he doesn’t realize the sort of things that Ben will do to himself to assuage the guilt he’ll feel if he thinks he’s even remotely responsible for my issues. He doesn’t realize that in a few hours, Ben will be locking himself in his bedroom, and digging out the empty CD case he thinks I don’t know he uses to hide his razors, and dragging a blade across whatever free space he can find on his already shredded and scarred arm.
I dump the phone back on the table and say, “Fine. Then what’s it about?”
“James, can you please go downstairs?” Dad asks, but it’s not really much of a question. I can tell that Jamie wants to protest, but neither of us is really in any position to bargain right now. With one last brush of his palm over my thigh, he stands and slips wordlessly from the kitchen. Dad turns his eyes on me. “I’m done with this.”
“What, are you kicking me out again?” I say. “Cool. Maybe you could save us both some time and call Mom first, though. That way, she can make her two-hour, screaming phone call while I’m on my way there, and then I won’t have to listen from the next room while she tells you how ashamed she is to have ever been married to a man who’d do something like that to his own son. Because that was a really shitty phone call to have to overhear last time.”
Mentioning him kicking me out is a low blow; it’s meant to be. I don’t miss the way the muscles in his face all tighten at that, or the way his eyes dart to the ground, like he’s a little ashamed of himself for having done that, too. But then he says, “I’m not kicking you out. But I am done letting you have free reign around here. I have been trying so goddamn hard to support you for the past few months. I’ve been trying not to smother you, or treat you—”
“—like an addict?” I supply.
He sighs. “No. I’ve been trying not to treat you any differently than I did before. You have to realize how lax the rules have always been for you, and honestly, maybe that’s where your mother and I went wrong. We’ve been treating you like an adult for so long—no rules, no curfew, no punishments. But I can’t do that anymore, Garen. I can’t sit here and pretend that every time you stay out all night, or don’t check in with me, I’m not wondering if you’ve run away again, or if you’ve relapsed again, or if you’re going to decide you want to shoot yourself again.”
The worst part is that there are so many other ‘agains’ he doesn’t even know about. He doesn’t know that he should also be worrying about me selling myself again or getting assaulted again or having my ass beaten at school again. Even now, he still doesn’t get the full extent of the awfulness I have been through and am capable of.
When I don’t speak, he says, “You have no boundaries. You have never had any boundaries. That needs to change.”
“Okay. Fine. I’ll get some boundaries,” I say. Capitulation is always the easiest way to end a lecture, isn’t it?
He shakes his head, so, guess not. “They don’t count as boundaries unless I’m the one setting them. So, effective immediately, we’re going to have some new rules around here. And don’t even think about telling me that you’re eighteen and you can do what you want, because while you’re living here, being supported by me, you’re going to have to put up with a little bit more parenting, whether you want it or not.”
I cross my arms over my chest, but I don’t say anything. Contrary to what he seems to believe, I’m not a fucking toddler. I’m not going to pull any ‘I’m an adult, you can’t run my life, even if you fund it completely’ bullshit. I do, however, roll my eyes a little bit when he goes over to the counter and picks up a yellow legal pad that is covered in writing. Clearly he has been thinking about this a lot today.
“Rule number one: you now have a curfew. You’ll be home by eleven on school nights, one on weekends. No excuses, no exceptions, no extensions. If you have a legitimate reason to spend the night at someone else’s house, I need to hear about it in advance, and I need to speak with whomever it is. Rule number two: if you’re going out, I want to know where you’re going, who you’ll be with, what you’ll be doing, and when I can expect you back. Rule number three: you will be home for dinner every Sunday night by seven o’clock. At this dinner, you will tell me all about the previous week, including details about how school is going, how your sessions with Doctor Howard are going, and how you think you’re handling your sobriety—”
“That’s not fair,” I interrupt, trying to ignore the panic that’s blossoming in my chest. “My sessions are private, that’s the whole point of them. I can talk to her about stuff, she gives me advice about the things I’m not comfortable talking about with my family. I’m not going to tell you what I say to her.”
Dad raises a hand, palm up, like a gesture of surrender. “I’m not asking you to tell me everything, but I am requesting that you keep me informed about how things are going. If you’re having a serious problem, or if there’s something going on that might cause you to feel pressure to use again, I need to be aware of it. Now, moving on… rule number four: you need to greatly improve your behavior at school. We’re still in the first month of classes, and you’ve already received three detentions. It’s unacceptable. From now on, every detention you get equals one weekend you’ll be grounded. Rule number five: those five colleges I told you to pick? I want your applications sent in by Halloween, and I want proof that you’ve met with your guidance counselor about planning for your future. Rule number six: I want a list of all your upcoming tests, projects, that trial law competition—everything. I expect you to put an adequate amount of time into studying and preparing for all of them, because I want your GPA to be at least a three-point-oh. I’d like a three-point-five, if possible.”
I scratch the back of my neck. “I’m not sure a three-point-five is possible, but I’ll do the three-oh. Fine. Is that it?”
“Just one more thing. Rule number seven: you need to get my approval before you decide on a new sleeping arrangement. That means you ask permission before a boy sleeps over here, and you ask my permission before you agree to sleep at his place. If you’re planning to go on a date, I want to know about it. If you’re involved with someone, even though you know your doctor says that you shouldn’t be, I want to know about it. I know that you’re eighteen years old, and I know that you’re sexually active, but you’re still in high school, and you’re still my son. You need to be more appropriate and respectful about the things that you do. And—this isn’t on the list, obviously, but—I asked you two weeks ago if you and Ben were involved. You said no. Clearly, that’s not the truth.”
“You asked me if he was my boyfriend,” I argue, kicking at the leg of the table. “You didn’t ask about being involved, whatever that means, you just asked if he was my boyfriend, and he’s not. Like—okay, yeah. We hooked up last night, obviously. But it’s the first time he and I have done anything since last fall, since before I dated—” Travis. God, I don’t even like thinking his name, let alone saying it. Based on the way Dad blinks away from my face, he knows what I’m talking about, so I switch to saying, “I’m not dating Ben. I was telling you the truth then, I’m telling it now. And I don’t really get how it’s any of your business, but yeah, we screw around. It’s not a relationship, and it’s not a big deal.”
Dad lets out a noise of frustration and bursts out, “It is a big deal, Garen! The last relationship you had landed you in the hospital, and the one before that was with your stepbrother. Your taste in men worries me.”
“You know Ben! You know he’s a good guy, and you didn’t have any problem with Travis banging him last spring—”
“Travis was dating him,” Dad says. “Whether or not they banged, as you so politely put it, is completely beside the point. Travis was respectful enough to agree to specific rules. Ben never slept over here. He had to come to dinner so that Evelyn and I could get to know him—”
“What, you want me to have Ben come over for dinner some night? Hang out with you and Mom, so you can grill him about his intentions with me?” I sneer.
“Yes.”
So not the answer I was expecting. I gape at my dad, but his arms are folded over his chest, and I can tell that he’s actually serious about this. Finally, I manage to force out, “I’m not going to make him come over for an interrogation if he’s not my boyfriend, that’s ri-goddamn-diculous. We’re not dating, I just jerked him off. That’s really not ‘meet the family’ material, especially since you already know him. He’s even met Mom. I am not inviting one of my best friends over so that you can quiz him about all the disgusting, perverted things I do to him in bed. And I promise you that you don’t want to initiate that conversation, because it’ll last about five seconds before I snap and tell you things you’d rather die than hear your only son say.”
“Either he comes over for dinner so that I can talk to him, or you’re not allowed over there anymore. It’s as simple as that,” Dad says, shrugging. “Your doctor told you that an important part of your sobriety is emotional sobriety. You shouldn’t be getting intimate with people, emotionally or physically, but you’re disregarding that for him. I think that’s worth discussing.”
“We’re just friends who fuck around! It’s not intimacy,” I say, even though, yeah, it sort of is. Not the act in itself, not the concept of it, but the fact that I’m willing to let him even put his hands on me, the fact that we can do anything without me freaking out… that’s as intimate as I can get these days. But there’s no way in hell I’m going to admit that to my father.
My phone buzzes on the table, and I snatch it up. It’s a text from Jamie. Do you need me to come back up?
no, I type out. but i do need you to call/text alex and ask him if he can convince ben to call me back. i feel like a dick and a half for what my dad said to him.
Dad clears his throat, and I scowl up at him. “What?”
“You’re not leaving this table until you agree to all of these rules,” he says plainly.
“I’m fine with the curfew, I’m fine with you knowing where I am or who I’m with, I’m fine with Sunday dinners, I’m emphatically not fine with telling you what goes on in my therapy sessions, I won’t get any more detentions, I’ll send in the stupid college apps, you can creep on my test schedule as much as you want, I’ll get above a three-oh, I’ll—what was the last one? Oh, right. I’ll ask your permission before I put my dick in anybody. Specifically, I will ask your permission before I put my dick in my friend, Ben. Did I leave anything out?”
“Dinner,” Dad says, completely unfazed by my crudeness. “You’re inviting him over for dinner. Ideally, either this week or next.”
I open my mouth to protest, but my phone begins to buzz with an incoming call. I check the ID; it’s Ben. I stand up. “Fine. I’ll invite him over for dinner, but that doesn’t mean he’s my boyfriend. This conversation’s over, I’m taking this call.”
He doesn’t try to stop me from stomping out into the living room and over to the door that leads to my room. Only once I’m sitting halfway down the stairs do I answer the call, but before I can say anything, Ben says, “Sorry for hanging up like that. It was rude of me.”
“Uh, no, what was rude was my dad saying such stupid shit to you,” I say. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he says, but his tone is too flat for me to believe it.
I sigh. “He was pissed because he didn’t realize that Jamie and I were going to be staying out all night. He kind of freaked when we didn’t come home, I guess, and instead of calling me, like a normal person would, he spent the morning drafting out a list of rules for my behavior.”
That’s enough to earn a snort. “Rules? Has he met you?”
“Guess not,” I say, pinning the phone between my ear and my shoulder so that I can start methodically cracking my knuckles. “He apparently hasn’t met you, either. Because I can’t think of a single other reason why he would want you to come over for dinner.”
“I’ve come over before, that’s not a big—”
“No, dude, he wants you to come over for dinner. Like, you, and me, and him, and my mom, if she can take time to drive in from New York. He wants you to come over so he can question you about like, your intent to steal my virtue, or whatever.”
“He had that exact dinner with me six months ago, when I was dating Travis!” Ben protests. “I’m still the same person I was then—”
“Well, to be fair, you probably never told Evelyn McCall that you sucked off her son and didn’t expect a phone call in the morning.”
“Yeah, but I’m pretty sure you made enough of those comments to cover the rest of us,” he says. There’s a beat, and then he says, “If he’s this pissed about you going out last night, I’m guessing that you coming over tonight isn’t the best idea.”
I sigh and lean my head against the railing. “Yeah, probably not. I have a curfew now, too. One on weekends, eleven on school nights.” I trace the seam on the side of my jeans with my thumbnail. “We’ll hang out, though. Sometime this week, okay?”
“Yeah. Of course. Listen, I have to get back to work. Text me later?”
I make a vague noise of agreement, then hang up and trudge the rest of the way down to my room. Jamie is kicked back on my bed, and though he sits up when I enter, I crawl onto the bed, shove him flat onto his back, and curl up against his side, burying my face in the side of his neck. He curves an arm around my shoulders and drags me closer until I’m sprawled out on top of him. “You alright, G?”
“No,” I say, though my voice is muffled by his shirt. “No, I’m really fucking not.”
He strokes his fingertips across the nape of my neck and kisses the top of my head, but neither of us speaks after that. I want to ask him how he can stand to touch me, when my own dad can barely look at me. I want to ask him how he can treat me the same way he always has. I want to ask him if he trusts me to stay clean, and if he says yes, I want to ask how he can do that, and if he says no, I want to ask what the fucking point of trying is.
Instead, I burrow deeper into his arms and remain completely silent.
20 days sober
My first attempt to fuck Ben goes so badly I actually contemplate cutting my losses and moving to a deserted island, or another planet, or rural Oklahoma, or somewhere else where no one has heard of gay sex.
Everything is set up perfectly; my suddenly-overbearing father knows I’m hanging out at the apartment, and not to expect me home until ten o’clock. Alex is wandering around, trying to find the notebook he needs for the poli-sci class that will keep him out of the apartment from seven to almost eleven. Ben is reading some gigantic, ancient book in his armchair, sitting sideways with his legs draped over the arm of it. He’s got that too-serious expression on his face, and he’s wearing his glasses, and he must realize how fucking cute he looks, because he keeps glancing up and smirking at me every time he catches me watching him instead of either pretending to do my English homework or pretending to watch the House rerun that’s playing on TV right now.
“How’s that essay coming along?” he asks, already knowing the answer.
I blink down at my totally blank notebook, then at the photocopy of the practice AP exam prompt my teacher had passed around and asked us to complete for class tomorrow. I scribble a quick sketch of a pony prancing across the top of the paper and say, “It’s coming along great. English is the best.”
“Have you guys seen my notebook?” Alex asks, pausing at the edge of the living room and frowning at the coffee table.
Ben shrugs. “No, but you can borrow Garen’s, ‘cause he’s sure as shit not using it.”
“I am, don’t be an ass,” I say. Then, to Alex, I add, “I thought I saw some notebooks or whatever on the kitchen counter when I came in. Is it one of those?”
He wanders back out of the room, and I wrap my hands around Ben’s ankles, using them to pull both him and the armchair closer to the edge of the couch where I’m sitting. He kicks at me and says, “You are so annoying, oh my god, go home,” but he’s grinning, so I can’t be in too much trouble.
“I can’t help it if you’re more interesting than my homework. Put down your book and get your hot ass over here,” I demand.
Usually, he’d jerk his feet out of reach and tell me to go fuck myself, but at this point, I think Ben is as wound up as I am. We’ve both been waiting two days for a chance to fuck, and he doesn’t exactly start climbing the walls when he can’t get laid—not like I do—but he does get impatient. He slips an index card between the pages of his book and snaps it shut, setting it down on the edge of the coffee table. The second he’s out of the chair, I hook an arm around his waist and drag him down into my lap. He settles with his knees bracketing my hips and sinks easily into my kiss.
“Alright, I’m headed to class. I’ll—oh, wow. Okay then,” Alex says, turning back around to exit the living room just as swiftly as he entered. Over his shoulder, he says, “Dude, remember our agreement. No sex in the common areas, that’s weird.”
“He’s such a hypocrite, he’s totally fucked Jamie on the kitchen counter,” I mutter against Ben’s lips.
Ben jerks back, eyes wide. “What, seriously? The kitchen counter where I prepare my fucking food? Are you joking?”
“I’m totally joking,” I say, even though I’m not. It happened yesterday, right before Jamie headed to the train station to go back to New York. He texted me about it before his train had even left Union Station. Ben seems to know I’m full of shit, because he narrows his eyes, but then the front door of the apartment clicks shut, and I don’t so much care about conversation anymore.
I tighten my grip on Ben’s thighs and flip him onto his back on the cushions. He grabs a fistful of my t-shirt to pull me down on top of him, but I pause long enough to strip it off and toss it aside before leaning down to kiss him. He remembers my rules from last time—his hands remain above my waist, and he doesn’t scratch me or grab me too hard, even though I know that must be killing him. I reach for the zipper on his sweatshirt.
And suddenly, from somewhere to my right, a terrified voice is screaming, “Help! Help, please! He’s going to rape me, he’s going to kill me, help!”
I jerk back sharply enough that Ben instinctively tightens his hold on my waist to steady me, but that makes it so much worse. I shove his hands off me and scramble to the opposite end of the couch, just out of reach. My heart is hammering in my chest, beating so loudly and so heavily that I can’t seem to focus on anything else. My breath is coming in short little gasps, and I’m not sure why, because no one’s holding my throat, right? No one’s holding me down, or choking me, or touching me, right? Fuck, I’d be okay if I could just figure out where the screaming was coming from, and—oh. I finally manage to focus my eyes on the television, where the House rerun has ended and become an episode of that horrible Law and Order: Special Rape Unit or whatever the fuck it’s called. On screen, the bloodied and beaten corpse of a woman is sprawled out on the floor of a bedroom, while the stone-faced detectives stand over her.
I don’t want to see it, but I can’t look away.
Part of me is vaguely aware of a voice to my left, but I’m unable to make out any of the words. Only when the television screen goes black am I capable of hearing a desperate, nervous voice say, for what might be the twentieth time, “Garen. Are you okay?”
“I’m f-fine,” I say instinctively, looking around. The second I meet Ben’s wide eyes, I remember where I am, what I’m doing, or… what I’m supposed to be doing, at least. I don’t think I’m even hard anymore—it’s really difficult to tell, because I can’t feel the rest of my body—but I still shoot him a lopsided grin and move towards him, saying, “Sorry. Where were we?”
“Uh, okay, no,” Ben says, grabbing my wrist to stop my hand from moving any further up his thigh. I yank my hand away from his, and he raises both of his palms in a gesture of surrender. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—I won’t touch you, alright? It’s okay. You’re safe, I’m not going to—”
“Don’t fucking patronize me,” I spit, standing up and grabbing my shirt from the floor. Now that the numbness is fading, I’m starting to feel a heat creeping into my face. Can’t even fuck a guy without freaking out, can’t even hear some shitty drama on television without practically passing out. What’s wrong with me?
I gather up my schoolbooks and shove them into my backpack, swinging it onto my shoulder and taking a step towards the door. Ben makes another grab for my arm, but immediately thinks better of it and retreats, hands still raised. “Garen, wait. Please don’t leave yet.”
“Ben, this would be humiliating enough if it happened with a stranger. How do you think I feel now that it’s happening with one of my best friends?” I squeeze my eyes shut, rub a palm over my face, then head for the door. “Just don’t, okay? I’ll call you later.”
I manage to cut off his next protest with the slam of the door, and thankfully, he doesn’t follow me out of the building. The repairs on my car won’t be done until the beginning of next week, so I’m still driving the Benz until then. I toss my backpack into the passenger seat and lock myself in behind the wheel, but it takes twenty minutes before I can stop shaking enough to drive.
25 days sober
“Hello?”
“Nice of you to finally pick up my call, you douche,” is Ben’s selected greeting. He really needs to work on his phone etiquette. In the background, I hear a small voice ask, “Benji, what’s a douche?” He sighs and says, to the other person, “It’s a mean thing adults call each other when one of them ignores the other one for five days. That’s what Garen is being right now. And you can call him it later, but only if Mom and Dad aren’t around, alright?”
I snort. “You’re the worst big brother ever.”
“Whatever. What time are you coming over?” he asks.
“I’m… not?” I say slowly, flicking my turn signal on even though I’m still half a dozen cars away from the nearest stoplight. “Did we have plans?”
“No, we didn’t. And apparently we’re never going to, because this is the first time you’ve even bothered to answer the phone since Monday night. I’ve called you a dozen times, G,” he says. His voice is as flat as ever, but I don’t think I’m imagining the slight edge of hurt in it.
The light turns green, and I edge forward to make my turn into the parking lot of the Daily Grind. Ben doesn’t seem inclined to break the silence, so I pull into the first available space, kill the engine, and say, “Look, I don’t know what you want me to tell you.”
“This isn’t really something I want to discuss over the phone while my sisters are hanging all over me,” he says. “I’m at my parents’ house today. My mom needed my help with prepwork for a big job her catering company is doing. Will you come over?”
“I’m not fucking you if your sisters are in the next room,” I say. I’m possibly not fucking him at all, ever, because I’m too much of a bitch to get my shit together long enough to do anything more than accept a blowjob.
“It’s about eleven months too late to make that rule, isn’t it?” he asks, and I can’t help but grin. He, however, remains unamused. “You said we’d still be friends. You said this wouldn’t change anything. If that’s true, you’ll get in your car and come over here.”
I open my mouth to protest, but the call is already cutting out. Rolling my eyes, I drop my phone on the passenger seat and get out. The Grind is the only place I go for coffee, and I’ve been pretty careful about making sure I don’t stop by during the hours when Travis might be working. Either his schedule has changed, or I’m finally starting to forget the details of him, because when I push open the coffee shop door, he’s sitting on a stool behind the counter, reading the Hemingway novel we’ve just been assigned in AP English. He looks up when I enter, and for a long moment, we just blink at each other. Finally, I step up to the counter, and he flips the book shut. “What can I get for you?”
I haven’t heard his voice in a week and a half; it still sort of gets to me. I shove my hands in the pockets of my jacket and say, “Two coffees, black, in whatever the biggest size you’re legally allowed to give me is.”
He squints. “Wait, that’s you?” At my blank stare, he clarifies, “One of the guys who works the early morning weekday shifts talks about you. You always order your coffee that way, he thinks it’s hilarious. I didn’t realize—”
“Travis, your phone is buzzing again,” one of the other baristas calls from the back room.
Travis pinches the bridge of his nose for a moment before he moves to the machines to pour my coffees and says, “Just put it in the fucking bean grinder, alright?”
The back room door bangs open, and Jerry, the owner of the Grind, steps out, Travis’ cell phone dangling between his fingertips. “McCall, this is the fourth time this morning. It’s getting old.”
“Believe me, I know,” Travis says, rolling his eyes towards the ceiling and setting the two coffees down in front of me. “I told her not to call while I’m at work, but she—”
“Well, dump her,” Jerry orders, and I almost snort out the sip of coffee I’ve just taken. Jerry finally seems to realize that I’m standing at the counter, because he reaches over to clap me on the shoulder. “Garen, buddy. How’ve you been?”
“Fine,” I say.
“You still off the blow?” he asks genially. I blink at him. It’s actually a fair question, considering the fact that I was high as balls the last time he saw me, during my last musical performance here. Travis freezes with a finger poised above the buttons on the cash register. I’m not sure I trust myself to speak, so I settle for nodding and giving Jerry a tight smile, which earns me another clap on the shoulder. “Good to hear it. Got too much talent to waste your life getting fucked up, right?” I allow another nod. He points at me, but his next words are directed towards Travis. “See that? Silence. It’s a beautiful quality for a partner to have when you’re working. If you ask me, you should go back to dating this kid instead of that girl who’s always hanging around here. I never had to put up with him calling you every twenty minutes during every shift. Worst thing I ever had to worry about was the two of you sneaking off to make out in the service alley during open mic nights—”
“Okay,” Travis says loudly, face burning red, “and on that note, have a great day.”
“Uh, you didn’t tell me how much this—”
“They’re on me, as long as you’re willing to leave now, before my boss has any more time to embarrass me.”
It’s sort of impossible for me to turn down free coffee, so I nod my thanks, head out to the car, and crank my music back up. Just before pulling out of the lot, I chance a glance back through the front window of the Grind. Still standing behind the counter, still holding his cell phone, Travis is watching me. He raises one hand in a brief wave and gives what might be a smile. I look away.
And alright, it’s not like I’m supposed to care about how Travis’ disgusting little relationship with Joss is going, but except for how I do care. At least, I care enough to be glad that it’s not going well. But that particular train of thought leads to hope and madness, so it’s better—easier, maybe—to just bury it.
When I arrive at Ben’s parents’ house, there are already two cars in the driveway; his and his mom’s. I park behind the CR-V and head up to the front door, knocking twice before opening it and calling inside, “I’m letting myself in, because I’m rude like that.”
“We’re used to it,” Ben’s voice says from the kitchen.
I manage to take three steps in his direction before a tiny pair of arms is being flung around my waist, followed by another pair around my left leg, a third around my right. I pretend to struggle away from them, but they continue to cling. “I swear, there are more of you every time I come over here.”
“Garen, you haven’t come here in forever,” Jane says fiercely.
“I know, I’m a terrible person,” I agree, ruffling her hair. She finally releases her hold on my waist so that she can bat my hand away. Following her lead, Izzy releases me as well, but Madison keeps on clinging. I scoop her up and sling her over my shoulder. “Hey, kid. Where’s your brother?”
“Which one?” Izzy asks.
I roll my eyes. “Asher, obviously. I don’t like the other one.”
“Yeah, none of us do,” I hear Rosie say from the next room over.
I follow the sound of her voice into the living room; she’s sprawled out on the couch, reading. Apparently book obsessions are a McCutcheon family trait. She looks up when I enter, and I spread the arm not holding Madison. “What, you’re too good to say hi to me? Man. Leave town for a couple months and everybody forgets how much they love you.”
“Almost a year,” she says, frowning at me. “You haven’t been over since Christmas Eve. Where did you go?”
I dump Madison on the couch next to her sister and say, “I had to go back to New York for a while.”
“Why?”
“I just did, Ro,” I say.
She folds down the corner of her page—definitely not a McCutcheon family trait, considering Ben practically had a seizure the one time he saw me do that—and flings the book onto the coffee table. There is more than a bit of accusation in her voice when she says, “I heard Mommy and Benji talking last spring. They said you were back.”
I hesitate. “Yeah. I came back in the spring. But I wasn’t ready to come over just yet.”
“They said you were sick.”
“I was,” I say carefully. “I’m better now, though. That’s why I can come over now.”
“Okay,” she says simply. For a long minute, we just stare at each other. Her eyes are the exact same shade of blue as her brother’s, and sometimes, she looks almost as old. Almost as mature as him—definitely more mature than me. Finally, she says, “Well, don’t go away again, at least not without warning us first. It was mean. You’re an ass.”
I burst out laughing, and of course that’s the moment that Ben chooses to come in from the kitchen, saying, “Rosie! You’re only eleven, you’re not allowed to say that word. And you’re definitely not allowed to call my friend that. Say you’re sorry.”
“Why? You call him that all the time, when you’re on the phone with him and think we can’t hear,” she insists. She has a completely valid point, and I’m about to say so, but something on the coffee table catches my eye. Ben realizes what I’ve seen, and we both dive for it, but I manage to wrestle the photo album away from him.
“Put that down. That’s private,” he demands.
I plant the sole of my boot in the middle of his chest to keep him at least a leg’s length away as I begin to flip through the pictures, but he gives up and stalks back to the kitchen, leaving me to happily peruse the photographs. There are hundreds, and most of them are of him in horrible, awkward stages of growing up. It makes sense; he’s almost nineteen, and the next oldest of his siblings is Rosie. Obviously there won’t be as many pictures of the rest of them as there are of him. I flip the page and freeze, because for half a second, I think I’m convinced that I’m looking at a picture of James. Most of the basic facial features are almost identical—the prominent cheekbones, the perfectly straight nose. His eyes are the same shade of golden brown, his skin almost as tan. His hair is much shorter, but it’s just as dark. Wide, white smile. He’s even wearing a black polo shirt with the collar popped up, a pair of dark, fitted jeans. But he’s not Jamie, and honestly, I think the only reason I know that is because I know Jamie’s face and body and everything as well as I know my own. If I were anyone else, I might not even be able to tell them apart.
I shove the photo album onto Rosie’s lap, tap the picture, and say, “Who’s this?”
“That’s—” She’s clearly a little baffled to find a picture of someone who’s not a family member, so she squints a bit before she says, “I’m not sure what his name is, but he was a boy from our church. Same age as Benji, they were in the same youth group. Hang on a minute.” She turns and calls over her shoulder, “Benji, come here. Who’s this?”
Ben strolls back out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on a dish towel as he comes. His face is pretty neutral, but the second he leans over his sister’s shoulder to look at the picture, his expression hardens for just an instant. “I think his name,” he says, slipping a finger beneath the cuff of his sleeve, hooking it around a rubber band I hadn’t noticed there before, and letting the band snap against his skin, “was Ethan.”
Ethan. The youth group kid. The person Ben lost his virginity to when he was sixteen. The guy who fucked him a few times, freaked out, and never spoke to him again. Oh, shit.
“Oh, right. Ethan,” Rosie agrees. She twists around to look at Ben again. “You guys were friends, weren’t you?”
“No,” Ben says flatly. “We hung out a couple of times. But we were never friends.”
“He looks just like James,” I can’t stop myself from saying. At Rosie’s questioning look, I clarify, “James Goldwyn. My best friend from military school.”
Ben turns and heads back to the kitchen, but I can tell from the set of his shoulders that he’s lying when he says, “I never noticed.”
No longer trapped under the weight of the photo album, I stand and follow him. He’s standing at the counter, furiously cranking the handle on the pasta press. I crowd up behind him and wrap an arm around his shoulders to pull him more properly upright against me. “You’re such a little liar. Of course you noticed, how could you not? They could be twins.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says tightly. “And in case you’ve forgotten, you came over so we could talk about your problems, not mine.”
I tighten my grip around his chest. “You know what my problems are, Ben. Don’t pretend I didn’t warn you that that was a possibility before we ever—”
“And I said it was okay,” Ben interrupts, his hands going still on the pasta. “I told you it was fine, and that I’d stop, and we’d figure it out. That was supposed to be the whole point of this thing. I was supposed to be someone you were comfortable enough to work through this with, not somebody you’d totally bail on and not speak to for days at a time.”
I shift back just enough to rest my forehead against the top of his head. He lets me stay silent, which is almost worse. I’d know how to handle this so much better if he was yelling at me, or kicking me out, or telling me he didn’t want to bother being fuck buddies with a guy who might not be able to fuck him. His understanding just makes this harder. My voice is unwilling to come out as anything other than a whisper when I say, “Part of me thought it would be easier, once I found someone I was really comfortable with. I thought I’d be able to do it, because you’re my friend, and you’re gorgeous, and I already know that sex with you is so, so good. But then I heard… that. On the TV, I heard screaming, and I heard what they were saying, and it just—I panicked. I knew I couldn’t do it, not after hearing that, and you have no idea how embarrassing that is, alright? Sex is supposed to be instinct, and I can’t do it like I used to, and that sucks. I thought it would be easier if I just left.”
“It would have been easier if you had stayed. That’s the sort of thing you need to talk about, G,” he says.
“Like how we need to talk about the fact that the first guy you ever slept with looks really goddamn similar to my best friend?” I say. He tenses up a little in my arms, but says nothing. I sigh. “Ben, they’re almost identical. Is that why you get so mad every time I make you hang out with Jamie? Is that why you hate him so—”
“Yes,” he hisses, spinning around and shoving me off of him. The movement leaves two floury handprints on the black fabric of my t-shirt. “Yes, that’s why I don’t like hanging out with him, okay? Because he looks like Ethan, and the things he says are just like the things Ethan used to say, and he treats guys the same fucking way Ethan treated me.”
“You can’t hate my best friend just because he looks like someone who hurt you once,” I say. “That would be like me hating you just because you go to Yale, like Dave does.”
Ben shrugs and says, “Maybe. But tell me you don’t cringe just a little every time you set foot on my campus.”
“If I do, it’s because I don’t want to see him. I don’t want to turn a corner in one of those buildings, looking to meet you after class, and find myself staring down the guy who used to beat me.”
“And I hate looking at someone who is almost identical to the guy who fucked me in the backseat of my car a couple of times and then never spoke to me again. I hate it almost as much as I hate knowing that that’s exactly what James is going to do to Alex. He’s going to sleep with him and then disappear, because that’s what guys like them do—”
“And what about guys like me?” I interrupt, refusing to even blink. Ben’s eyebrows flick just a tiny bit upward, like he’s prompting me to continue. “Jamie and I have grown up together, we’re practically the same person. If you think that about Jamie, you must think it about me, too. You think I’m the type of guy who fucks somebody and leaves.”
“Well, you’re sure as hell not the type of guy who fucks somebody and stays. Just ask Travis.”
His words hit me like a punch to the heart. I reel back, stunned, and he’s already widening his eyes, closing the gap between us, saying, “Shit, shit, shit. I’m sorry. Garen, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that.”
If only to avoid looking him in the eyes, I blink up at the ceiling. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine,” Ben says. I hear the snap of the rubber band against his wrist again, and again, and again. “I’m sorry. I’m an asshole. That was a totally fucked thing to say, I shouldn’t—”
“There’s a difference,” I say slowly, “between people who leave because they want to, and people who leave because they have to. Last winter, when I got kicked out, I had to leave. And last summer, when I tried to bail, when I tried to go to Ohio, and you came to get me… I had to leave then, too.” I let my eyes roll back down to meet his. “Please tell me you understand that.”
“I do,” he says, punctuating the words with another snap of the band on his skin. And honestly, if anyone in this town understands that need to disappear for a while, it’s got to be Ben. There’s another band snap, and it’s like all of the tension is leaving my body. I just don’t have the energy to be mad at him, not for this. I sigh and open my arms, hoping to fold him into an embrace, if only to prevent him from snapping another welt into his skin, but just as he steps forward, all of his sisters come barreling into the kitchen.
“Benji, how much longer until you can come play with us?” Jane asks.
Ben moves to rake a hand through his hair, though he stops short when he remembers that his hands are coated in flour. He makes a face at them, then turns back to the pasta press. “I don’t know. A while. This is taking longer than I thought it would.”
“Mommy should just do it herself. They’re her ravioli, for her company,” Rosie says.
“Mommy doesn’t have time, alright? She’s got a lot of other stuff to do,” Ben says. “This would go a lot faster if Garen would stop distracting me, though.”
“Why, what’s he doing?” Rosie asks, blinking up at me.
I shrug. “I was being mean to him. But I’m done now.” Ben glances over his shoulder at me, and I offer him a small smile. It’s the only way I can think to say, We don’t have to talk about it anymore. I’m sorry. He returns the smile and looks back at his pasta.
Rosie, however, is unimpressed. “Whatever. I bet he deserved it. He’s a loser.”
I shrug again and say, “Yeah, well, I think he’s a cute loser.” For good measure, I duck down and press a quick kiss to his hair.
He flinches away, and I’m already opening my mouth to berate him for not properly appreciating my love when the girls all squeal, and Jane says, “Ew, Garen, that’s gross. You’re both boys.”
I already know what is going on, but my mind seems to be refusing to process it. I look around at them, and all of the girls give me a look like I’m an idiot when I say, “So?”
“So, boys can’t think other boys are cute. And they definitely can’t kiss them,” Rosie says. She blinks up at her brother and prods him in the ribs. “Tell him, Benji.”
Ben turns his attention to me, and there’s a warning in his eyes. Somehow managing to enunciate every single syllable, he says, “They’re right, Garen. Boys can’t kiss other boys. It’s a rule here.”
Jane snorts. “It’s a rule everywhere, you dork.”
“Really?” I say, trying so hard not to let myself snap at her, even though I’m absolutely shaking with anger. “Because, in my house, boys are definitely allowed to kiss other boys. Boys can kiss boys, boys can kiss girls, girls can kiss girls. Everybody can kiss whoever they want to kiss, and nobody gives a shit, because—”
“We’re going to go hang out in the basement for a while,” Ben interrupts loudly, barely pausing to wipe off his hands before grabbing my wrist so tightly it might end up leaving a bruise. “If Mom asks, tell her we’ll be up in time for dinner.” He drags me out of the kitchen, and we’ve barely made it down the stairs to the basement before he’s shoving me hard against the wall and hissing, “First of all, don’t fucking swear in front of my sisters. They’re little girls, and they don’t need to hear you talk like that, and if it happens again, I’ll punch you in the mouth. Second of all, don’t you dare try to judge my family for what my parents have chosen to raise them to believe.”
“They’re raising them to be homophobes, Ben. Why didn’t you tell me you’re still in the closet?” I demand.
“Because I’m not. My parents know I’m gay, and they don’t care, but they don’t want me to talk about my lifestyle in front of the girls. There’s nothing wrong with that, okay? They shouldn’t have to change their entire belief system just because their first kid turned out to be gay—”
“And what if one of your sisters turns out to be a lesbian?” I ask. “What then? Because let me fucking tell you something: if you start them off believing that being queer is a bad thing, it’s going to seriously screw them up if any of them ever like someone of the same sex. What if, ten years from now, when Izzy’s in high school, she gets a crush on a girl in her class? When you’re fucking thirty and off in another city, still pretending you like girls whenever someone asks about your love life during holiday dinners, what if Asher is off in middle school and realizes he wants a boyfriend, not a girlfriend? What—”
“No,” Ben forces out the word, shaking his head almost violently back and forth. “No, that’s not going to happen, because it’s fucking bad enough that I turned out to be a faggot. My parents cannot handle another one of their kids doing this to them. That’s not happening, I won’t let it.”
I stare at him, stunned. “Please tell me you didn’t really just say that. There’s… Ben, there’s nothing for them to ‘handle.’ You’re gay, big deal. If—”
“Why do you do that?” Ben demands, voice breaking a little in his desperation. “Why do you act like this isn’t something people are bothered by? Why do you act like they’re the ones with the problem—because they’re not, Garen. I’m sorry, but not everybody has a family like yours, okay? I can’t take my little sisters out for ice cream and tell them about a guy I like. They don’t even know I dated Travis. He was over here all the time, he had dinner with my family, he hung out with my sisters, and my parents are the only ones who knew he was my boyfriend, because I wasn’t allowed to talk about it in front of the girls. I’m not you, I can’t sit down at the dinner table and tell my entire family how many guys I’ve slept with. They still think I’m a virgin. They think I’m always going to be a virgin, because th-that’s what people like us are supposed to do. It’s—what we do, what we want, it’s not okay. Especially me, and the things I want, but you already know that, because you’ve experienced it. You know exactly how sick I am, you know the disgusting things I want men to do to me, you know how wrong—”
I kiss him. I kiss him because sometimes my body is better at communicating the things that my brain is too chickenshit to say, and because he’s in pain, and I don’t know how to make it better. One arm wrapped tight around his neck and the other reaching past him to open the door, I walk him backwards until we’re in his old bedroom. It’s completely empty now, except for a few boxes and one shelving unit, but there’s privacy, and that’s all I need right now. I nudge him back against the closed door and say against his lips, “Ben, when I kiss you, when I touch you like this, it doesn’t feel wrong. Not to me.”
“It’s supposed to,” he mutters. He refuses to meet my gaze, but he does let me kiss him again, slotting his lower lip between mine. I slip a hand up the front of his shirt to touch the tiny gold crucifix I know he wears most of the time. The truth is, I had no idea he had this much trouble reconciling his religion with his sexuality. I didn’t realize that he thought of losing his virginity as a betrayal to his family and his faith; I didn’t realize that he’s all but waiting for a bolt of lightening to strike him down every time he touches another boy. I’ve never been so glad that the Star of David hidden away under my shirt doesn’t hang as heavy against my chest as that cross seems to be against his.
I brush his hair away from his face and say, “This thing between us. This—learning how to believe that it’s okay to let a guy touch you. You need it just as much as I do, don’t you?”
He drags a hand through his hair, and as he moves, I catch a glimpse of what I think is a recently healed cut across his wrist. He looks up at me, blue eyes blank, and says quietly, “Sometimes, I think I might need it more.”
This isn’t what we had agreed upon. We’d agreed on experimentation, and kink, and just a little bit of violence, but the last thing he needs right now is to think that he should be feeling pain every time he wants to get off. He doesn’t need to be punished right now, he needs to be fucking worshiped, and I don’t care if his entire family is upstairs right now, he needs this. I swallow hard and reach for the buckle of his studded belt. “Let me touch you.”
“I thought you were supposed to be figuring out how to have conversations without getting your dick out,” he snipes.
“That’s not what this is,” I say, even if it maybe is. Belt unbuckled, I push his jeans over his hips and halfway down his thighs. I hesitate with my fingers at the waistband of his boxers and repeat, “Let me.”
Wordlessly, he kicks his jeans the rest of the way off and nods. He’s barely half-hard right now, but a few decent strokes are enough to change that. I slip a hand into one of the inside pockets of my leather jacket to remove the small travel-size bottle of lube I’m just enough of a slut to carry around. I nudge Ben’s jaw with my nose and say, “Turn around.”
He does so without objection. I’m not sure how long it’s really been since anyone has fingered him, or since he’s done it to himself, or whatever, but when I press one lubed finger into him, he lets out a moan that sounds practically tortured. I pause to allow him some time to adjust, but he shakes his head and rocks back against me. I wrap my free arm around his waist and scrape my teeth over the back of his neck, one of the few places available to me that can be easily concealed when we go back up to his family. Another finger, and he lets out one more of those beautiful noises. By the time I’m able to get a third in, his knees are starting to buckle. Seemingly forgetting the earlier above-the-waist rule, he reaches back and rubs me through my jeans. My eyes flutter shut, and I rock forward into his hand. He twists his head around to kiss me over his shoulder, then asks, “Do you think you can—”
“Yeah,” I say, nodding jerkily enough that our foreheads knock together. I don’t know how I can be so sure that I can do this—maybe it’s being in Ben’s high school bedroom, maybe it’s the desperate look in his eyes, maybe it’s all down to the way my hands are shaking as I step away from him to unbutton my jeans and push them down to my knees. All I know is that it’s actually going to work this time; I’m going to be okay. I snag the condom from the inner pocket of my jacket and roll it on. Ben presses back against me, but I grab his waist and turn him around so his back is to the door once again.
“Up,” I murmur against his jaw, and he gives a tiny jump, just enough for me to catch his legs and wind them around my waist. One of his arms is wrapped tight around my neck, and his other hand drops between us, giving me a few rough strokes before he lines me up with his entrance, and then I’m pushing inside and we’re both scrambling to kiss each other to silence our groans. He’s so tight, so hot that I need to take a minute to get used to the sensation, but Ben makes no complaint. Only the first few inches of me are in him, but I still ease almost completely out before I push back in, bottoming out and making him shake.
“Garen,” he murmurs, “can you—”
“If you’re about to ask me to hurt you, the answer is no,” I say, and his eyes snap open again. I press a quick, dry kiss to his lips and say, “It’s not going to be like that this time, alright? This is—I just want to make you feel good. I’m not going to hurt you, it’s just going to be good.” Another kiss. “Trust me.”
There’s another second of hesitation, but then he nods. I shift again so that his knees are hooked over my elbows now, and this new position is spreading him wider and allowing me to thrust deeper. His head falls back against the door with a loud thunk, and I might be worried about the noise, but that’s sort of a lost cause; the door rattles loudly every time I press back into him, and I’m finding it harder and harder to keep myself silent.
It takes effort to remember to make this as good for him as it is for me; usually, finding a guy’s prostate, or remembering to jerk him off, or switching up positions to get the best angle—it’s always been second nature to me, just as it’s always Ben’s instinct to scratch and bite and give as good as he gets. That’s not what this is. This is graceless, and desperate, and it’s exactly what we both need.
When Ben comes, it’s as sudden and silent as always, but when I join him a minute or so later, it’s… not. The kiss I give him can barely even be called a kiss—it’s open-mouthed, and sloppy, and more a moment of sharing each other’s breath than any real display of skill. He swallows up my cries and lets me grip him painfully tight. My knees are starting to buckle, and the second I’ve finished coming, I spin around to brace my back against the door. I’d sort of hoped that the movement might make it easier to stay upright, but it doesn’t, so I give up and allow myself to slump to the ground, Ben in my lap, my dick still buried inside him. That’s going to start being uncomfortable for both of us soon, but right now, I don’t care. I hook my chin over his shoulder as we both try to calm our breathing.
There should probably be some big moment right about now, some profound declaration about how much this means, but instead, Ben drags his fingers through my hair and whispers, laughing a little, “I’m pretty sure there’s cum all over your shirt.”
I snort. “I’m pretty sure it was worth it.” He sighs against my neck, and I run my palm down the length of his spine. “You alright?” He nods, then makes a questioning noise I can only interpret to mean, Are you? I tangle both hands in his hair so that I can ease his head back. His face is flushed and his lips swollen from kissing, but his eyes are bright and searching mine. Without him ever really having to ask it, I nod, then duck back in to kiss the smile off his mouth.