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Say fuck it and leave it all behind, maybe find a man and…
I swallowed hard and picked up my glass again.
Jesus Christ, I was fucked.
“Hey.” He put a hand on my thigh, stilling it. I hadn’t even noticed I’d been bouncing my legs like Noa. My little drummer. He could never sit still. “Are you really going back to her?”
I didn’t want to. I felt like I was going to suffocate. At the same time, I could already hear my mother if I came home for Sunday dinner and told her I was single.
“The rumors aren’t true, are they? You need to find a wife, Kyle. You need children, a family, a woman to come home to. God—imagine the shame if… I can’t even say it.”
I stared down at my drink and tried to take a calming breath.
My crime? I’d roughhoused with a neighbor when I was nine years old. We’d been tumbling around on the lawn in swim trunks, and I’d been more concerned about getting back my goddamn toy truck than whatever the fuck my sexuality was. But the only people worse than my extremist parents were the fundamentalists next door. They’d run over to our backyard, torn their son out of my grasp, and dragged him away.
Weeks later, he’d been sent to a Christian summer camp for “troubled youth,” and the women in our community had started talking. My mother had started talking. Rumors here, rumors there.
I closed my eyes, almost wishing I still believed their threats about hell and damnation. Being scared was legit. Being scared forced you to act a certain way. Now…? I was just a fucking coward.
My life wouldn’t end if I came out. If anything, it would begin.
And yet…
I couldn’t.
Lucian had once told me he hated nicknames. It was back in high school, if I remembered correctly. Not long after we’d first met. He’d called nicknames childish. Scott was Scott, not Scotty. Kyle was Kyle, not KC.
That had lasted about a week. Then I’d almost lost my shit on him, and I’d told him I hated my name. It’d taken years to tell him why, but maybe he’d understood. It made my skin crawl every time I heard my mother and father summon me.
Lucian had never tried to call me Kyle again after my burst of anger. In fact, he often used nicknames today.
Knowing him, he’d understood that a name could be more than a name. A name could be part of your identity. It could bring forth memories that haunted you. You could associate it with a part of you that you wanted to kill off.
I threw back my drink, glad he’d bought a whole bottle.
“Since when do I have the balls to do what I want?” I asked him.
There was my answer.
Lucian was frustrated with me. I could tell.
“And it’s all because of Noa,” he pressed.
Fuck no. It was partly him, but my cowardice came from the fear of facing my parents. My father was the worst. No, I was the worst, because I couldn’t fucking understand the hold they had on me. I knew how goddamn wrong they were, with every fiber of my being, and yet, I flinched at the thought of seeing shame and disappointment in his eyes. Judgment. Disgust.
I supposed that was the hold—and I hated myself for it. I shouldn’t give a fuck.
The disgust was the most painful because it would overshadow everything I’d done that they were proud of.
I was their only son, their only child, and they had invested a lot in me.
To Lucian, all I said was, “I can’t leave him.”
Noa was my best excuse.
* * *
“Fuck me sideways, this is good,” I groaned.
