AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“I’m straight. I want a wife and kids and a fucking white picket fence with a dog. I don’t want to live as a gay man.”
“Well, let me tell you something, Charlie—you don’t get to fucking choose.” The pain was written all over his face. The same pain that scarred my heart, and the same pain I chose to ignore on a daily basis. “I didn’t get to choose how I feel about you. How I feel about going to sleep next to you and waking up next to you. I don’t get to choose the dreams I have about you, or the fantasies. None of it was my choice. But it all happened. We happened. And I fell in love.”
A bomb dropping into the room and shattering windows. Austin even seemed surprised by the confession, but he didn’t take it back.
He couldn’t.
I couldn’t.
I wasn’t gay.
I fucked up because I was so deep in denial. The repression took work to construct, making me self-police every little thing I did. I remembered moments of forcing my voice deeper or quickly uncrossing my legs after realizing how it might have looked. Quick flashes of times I would force myself to act straight, all so I could uphold the expectation my dad had placed on me: be straight, find a wife, give him grandkids, keep the cycle going. He never had to say those things aloud; I just understood through the way he raised me.
I turned, prying my gaze up from the floor and meeting Austin’s. He looked so different from the boy he’d been when I broke his heart, and yet I could still see him in the places that hadn’t changed. His warm eyes, his soft smile, his softer lips.
“I’m so sorry, Austin. Everything I said to you back then, it was coming from such an angry place. I’m so—” A cry choked me off. I swallowed down the rest, balling a hand into a fist, feeling my nails dig into my palm. “I’m so sorry.”
“I’m not sorry,” I said, seeing Austin’s expression flip from shock to something closer to grief. “I’m not a faggot, Austin.”
I hated myself in that moment. Fucking despised my twisting guts.
And still, I didn’t take it back. I said it. I wanted to throw up. I wanted to curl up into a ball and just go the fuck to sleep.
But still, I said it. I did it to hurt Austin, because I was hurting. So bad. Unexplainably so. And I used that pain to stab outward. This needed to end before Austin said anything else. Before I said anything else.
Three years, and in those three years, Austin became my best friend, my confidant, we had unbelievable sex, and we made endless memories.
But I wasn’t gay. We had gotten close, but I couldn’t be in a relationship with him. Not out and in the open. I couldn’t.
“I love you, Char. Please, listen to—”
“I don’t. I never loved you, and I never will.” Worse than the slur. This might as well have been a thousand physical stabs into Austin’s chest. With the way he reeled back, I knew that it was done. It had been a direct hit straight through the heart.
Things only got worse from there.
“It’s okay, Char.”
Austin’s pebble-smooth voice was like a pump of aloe vera gel straight onto a burn. I chewed on my lip, then switched to the inside of my cheek, not understanding how I could have ever hurt him the way I had.
“Why couldn’t I just tell you the fucking truth?”
“You have told me—it just took a little while.”
I shook my head, bit my cheek harder. Blood tinged my tongue. I stopped the biting. “I hate myself. I know this happened years ago, but it feels like it happened yesterday for me, and that makes me really hate myself.”
“I understand why you reacted the way you did. We were kids, and life was a complicated mess.”
“It wasn’t that long ago, Austin.”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is now. Today. Everything we’ve been through, and how even with all the time and bullshit between us, we still found our way back. Fuck, we had two first times. Not a lot of people can say that.”
I looked up into Austin’s eyes, like looking into a collection of stars and galaxies. I could stare into those eyes for hours on end, always finding new flecks of honey golds or bright greens. I swallowed. My heart pounding, my blood rushing, my guilt still present.
“Why would you ever want to be with someone who did that to you?”
“Because of everything else he did first.” There was truth in Austin’s eyes, along with the gem-like refractions of greens and golds. The same truth I had tried to suppress for all of my childhood. I wasn’t denying it anymore, and I’d never deny it again.
