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Damon moved away from me to sit at the table next to the kitchen and I followed, sitting next to him. We held hands, and in that moment, connected again, as our fears and surprise came to the surface. “Burke, he’s sweet as pie, funny, sexy. He’s just about everything I ever wanted for us. You?”
“Yeah,” I said, unable to keep from admitting it. “I’m scared, man. He could break us into pieces.”
“Yeah, he really could.” Damon and I sat silent for a few moments, then Damon laughed and I asked what he could possibly be laughing about. His answer was simple, “For being big tough guys, that little bit of man could hurt us, but I don’t think he would. Crazy?”
“No. I think, maybe, this is what he wants. A good place to just be himself. He’s searching, and that is clear from his crazy spying, but I think we might fit him too. How do we proceed with this? I’m frankly at a fucking loss.”
“Me too! I’m never at a loss,” he admitted, and it was true. Damon went through life like a bull, never cautious, never easy. He plowed through it, mostly because of how subdued he’d had to be as a kid.
See, Damon was raised on a farm in Nebraska, as I’ve mentioned. What I didn’t say was that it was a difficult life for him.
He was raised with conservative parents, and that part wasn’t always bad. I had parents that had strict morals and believed in the Pope like he was their personal friend and savior from the sins of the world. That was the difference, though. Mine accepted me when I came out. Sure, there was hand wringing, there were tears. But, in the end, they loved me enough to support me.
Damon wasn’t so lucky, and when he was sixteen, was caught with an email from a boy he liked. He was beaten and thrown out of his house, and never returned.
But he didn’t dwell on it. Surprisingly enough, he moved on from that and it made him stronger. He was determined from the moment he ran out of his parents’ house, bloodied, sporting a black eye, that he’d make it in spite of them. I secretly thought that was it, his spite had driven him to move to a city where he’d never been, sleeping in homeless shelters until social services caught him and placed him with a good family. From there, he worked his ass off to get good grades that got him through high school and that had gotten him full ride scholarships to any college of his choice.
He'd learned computers and started using that to strike back, maybe at the parents that had lost their farm in a flood, or maybe at the world. I didn’t know, but he made it and led a happy life.
We were very happy, yes, but with Joel…
“I think, yeah, I think we want him,” I admitted.
“We do. But you were right. We can’t rush this. I mean, sure, we miss him, Burke, but he’s going to be gone sometimes with this stupid bull riding shit.”
“Don’t say it that way, not to him, ever.”
“You know he could get hurt,” he countered. “Like…bad hurt.”
“Yeah. I’ve been looking stuff up too.”
His hand in mine tightened and I smiled weakly. Damon’s voice was usually deep, but in that moment, it was deeper, filled with emotion that Damon didn’t like to show. “If anything happened to him, whether he’s with us or not, at this point, I’d lose it.”
“Me too, but we can’t forbid him to do it. No matter what.”
“I’ll try. I’m not promising.”
We licked our wounds that day and went to eat dinner with Noah and Eli that evening. Their eyes cut to us in turn every few seconds, and I knew why. They had questions that he had no answers to.
Finally, I broke that heavy tension. “We’re still working on it.”
Eli gave us his best innocent voice, which was a full octave higher than his normal voice. “Working on what?”
Noah chuckled and told his partner, “Give it up, babe.”
“Fine,” Eli sighed, getting back to his usual voice. “What’s going on with you guys and Joel? Does he call you when he’s gone?”
He didn’t, in fact, call us, but he did text. A lot. “We hear from him,” was all I admitted to.
Damon, however, the forever honest one, laughed first, then told them, “He sends us dirty texts. All spelled right, too, except for the words he means to spell wrong, like big’uns.”
“I knew it.” Eli did a doubletake and asked, “Big’uns?”
I laughed as I explained, “Damon didn’t say he didn’t use his colorful vocabulary. He still calls Damon and me y’all , and he asked if, when he got home, if we were going to, and I quote, give him the big’uns .”
They had a laugh over that. Noah drawled, “Can’t help it. I was raised here, not in the south or anything, and I get caught in it too. Joel, he was raised in Oklahoma.”
I didn’t know that. He didn’t speak about his past. “Oklahoma?”
