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“I can’t stand the thought of anyone hurting you,” he said, petting my hair. “I want to kill everyone who ever laid a hand on you.”
Looking into his fierce eyes, I didn’t have the heart to tell him that punches and broken bones hurt a hell of a lot less than the things he couldn’t punish people for.
I leaned in and kissed him, kissed the salt from his lips. He was holding my arms hard enough to bruise, but I didn’t pull away.
“It’s okay,” I said and kissed him again, trying to soothe him.
“It’s not okay, Matty!”
“No, I know, I just meant . . . I didn’t mean it like that. Just meant I’m okay, I guess.”
“But . . . you’re not. You’re not okay, are you? And you didn’t want me to know.” His voice broke, and I wished for some magic word I could say to erase my past.
“I’m . . . a lot better with you.”
I pulled Rhys off his knees and went to taste the applesauce. “Needs more sugar,” I said.
“You think everything needs more sugar.” But he added more, turned the heat to low, stirred it, then left it to simmer as we went to sit in the living room.
“So that’s when you met Grin? When you got to St. Jerome’s.”
“Yeah. He was there for two years before me. I met him on my first day.” I’d told Rhys all about Grin. He was the only consistently good thing in my life, really, before I met Rhys. I’d just never told him how we met because I hadn’t wanted him to hold it against Grin.
“These kids convinced Grin to trip me at dinner. He was small for his age, got picked on a bit, so he did it to make them like him or whatever. My food went everywhere. In my hair, on the floor, all over me. And I had my left arm in a cast, so I kinda twisted and rolled when I fell. The other kids at his table thought it was hilarious. Grin hadn’t seen my cast when he tripped me. He felt awful. Instead of giving me shit and laughing like the other kids, he helped me clean up the food. Gave me his mashed potatoes since mine were all splattered. He said he took one look at me and knew I needed a friend.”
“I’m glad you had him.”
I nodded. I was pretty sure without Grin I wouldn’t have made it out of St. Jerome’s alive. I was pretty sure my own mind would’ve turned on me in ways I couldn’t take back.
“You, um . . .” Rhys rubbed his mouth, uncharacteristically reticent. “You always told me Grin went to Florida because of a job, but the other night you said he went to Florida because of you. Were you two . . . ?”
“No. No, I fucked up.”
I felt my ears go hot at the thought of that horrible day. For years, Grin and I had been inseparable. In St. Jerome’s and after. And I’d never thought of him that way. I’d noticed he was cute—how could I not? But I thought of him like a brother, really. He knew I was gay and seemed fine with it. I knew he never talked about sex or crushing on anyone, and I was fine with that.
“I hate thinking about it. It was about a year after St. Jerome’s. We were living together with three other guys in this tiny walk-up in Chinatown. It was an awful apartment, and I was working this shit copy-shop job that took forever to walk to. Grin couldn’t get a job. Two of our other housemates didn’t have jobs. We scrambled every month to scrape together rent. It wasn’t a great time.”
The thrill of being free of St. Jerome’s, of being on our own, had been intoxicating for the first few months, but as the reality of what our lives were going to be like set in, the thrill had worn off.
“One night I had a bad day at work. Stupid shit, but by the time I got home I was in such a foul mood. I grabbed a book and went to go read in Columbus Park. Grin came and found me, and he bought me an ice cream cone. A vanilla soft serve. He was so broke, man, but he bought it for me, and he wouldn’t take even a bite. We walked around, shooting the shit, whatever.”
It was dark and Grin had smiled at me and I felt so impossibly grateful that I had him in my life, that I’d met him, that he’d befriended me.
“I don’t know. I was upset and he said, ‘It’s gonna be fine. It’s all gonna be fine.’ And I . . . I kissed him. It was so stupid. He was horrified. I ran away. Like actually ran. I apologized a hundred times and then I ran and I walked all night so I didn’t have to go home and see him.”
