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Jonah
“A mechanic?” As Mom’s voice gets all choked up, I realize just how much I wanted my parents to yell at me for dropping out of school, not for wanting to work on engines. I’d rather hearhow could youall day long than oneyou can’t.
“I already told you, bud. I’m selling the business to Carl when I retire,” Dad chimes in. They always share the landline like parents from a ‘40s movie, Mom in the living room because her joints aren’t good, and Dad in the phone cubby in the upstairs hall. “You don’t need to worry about it staying in the family.”
“But I want it, Dad. Uncle Carl doesn’t have a business degree. Why are you guys so much more hung up on the mechanic thing than the lawyer thing? Was that all just an excuse to keep me from ever doing anything dangerous?”
He goes quiet. People where I grew up aren’t used to communicating under pressure. If it’s not passive aggressive silence or throwing beer bottles at each other’s heads, the good folk of Hollow Creek are out of their depth. “Jonah, I know you can’t stand to hear this but there are some things you just can’t do, and if you don’t own up to that, you’ll get hurt again. What are you gonna do then? What are we gonna do? If you hurt the other arm, you’ll never be able to work. No one will want to marry you, and you’ll have no family except some nurse to feed you.”
There’s more I need to tell them, a lot more. I need to stay calm. But at those words, the razor edge of all my worst fears, I lose it. “That’s not fair; you know it’s not. It’s my fucking arm. It doesn’t belong to you. Damn it, if that’s how you’re going to be then I can’t talk to you about this right now.”
It’s the closest I’ve ever come to outright screaming at my parents. I’m supposed to do this when I’m sixteen, not twenty-four. Maybe if it had happened then, if I hadn’t built my whole life around making them happy, it wouldn’t be happening now. Gray shoves open the door to the bedroom, eyes worried.
I hang up my phone and throw it not particularly hard, since I can’t afford any more cracks in the screen.
“What happened?” he asks, hesitating like he’s not sure if I want him to touch me. I don’t know what I want. I pull on the Rick’s Auto Body t-shirt I’m supposed to wear to my first day of probationary training and flop on my back on the bed.
“I messed it up. In the middle of getting ready for work I just thoughtwhat if I get everything off my chest at once, right now, like ripping off a band-aid? That went about as well as you’d expect, and I didn’t even get to the important parts.”
“I’m sorry,” he says, sitting down next to me. “I’ve never seen you this angry.” He slides his hand soothingly along the strip of skin between my t-shirt and my jeans, lingering on the ridges of my hips.
The anger’s already wearing off, because I can’t stay mad for more than five minutes, but everything has this grimy coating of guilt now, the shine worn off. “They have the right to be mad at me for lying to them or dropping out of school, but not for doing what I love. Of course that’s the one thing they choose. By the way,” I add, “before we got into a fight, they asked if I was coming home for Thanksgiving.”
His hand goes still, his expression startled. “I completely lost track. It’s next week, isn’t it? I can get you a last-minute ticket home, if that’s what you want; I feel like it’s my fault that we didn’t think of it sooner.”
“What do you do on Thanksgiving?”
Leaning over, he brushes his lips across my skin. “Sometimes I visit my foster sister and her family in San Diego, but they’re abroad this year. I planned to drink plenty of wine and go to bed early.” He slides the shirt up higher, nosing at the curve of my ribcage as I lace my fingers in his hair and grip tight.
Something tells me if I can sit down at a table across from my parents, in person, we can patch this up. And I miss them. We did everything together growing up, a little team of three against the world. I open my mouth to ask Gray if he’ll come home with me, but as soon as I try to imagine him standing there in my farmhouse with the old wallpaper and slouchy furniture, his head brushing the ceiling, the picture starts to fragment. He wouldn’t want to eat beer-can turkey or sled on the hill behind the school or listen to Uncle Carl talk about his thrilling vacation to the Mall of America.
“I could stay here with you. I don’t have to go home.”
He sits up, brow furrowing. “Are you sure?”
“Yeah. Let’s do our own thing, screw it.” Noticing the clock on the dresser, I scramble to my feet. “I’m gonna be late.” When I get to the kitchen, there’s shit all over the counters, bits of bread and cheese, a thermos. “What’s all this?”
Gray grabs my shoulders and propels me to the front door. “Put on your shoes.”
We stopped on our way home yesterday and picked up some sturdy boots for my new job, so I sit on the floor and start the slow-as-dirt process of loosening them up, getting my foot in, and tightening them again. When I finally finish, Gray hands me a thermos and hangs a bag over my shoulder. “I made you lunch.”
“Really?” I fumble excitedly with the zipper. “What is it? Hot dog octopi?”
Shaking his head, he bats my hand away. “Don’t open it until I’m not around to see your reaction to how underwhelming it is.”
I straighten up with a deep breath. I’ve had first days at new jobs and first days at new schools, but this one feels different—proving I can build my own life, showing my parents they’re wrong, earning the right to stand next to Gray. “Thanks, Stepford wife. Now send your man off to his job where he earns all the money needed to fund your lavish lifestyle.”
“Of course, dear.” He kisses me slow and easy. “I’ll have the house clean and dinner in the oven when you get back, and my ass prepped so you can fuck away all your heteronormative frustrations before preparing to do it all again tomorrow.”
“You’d better.”
He melts into the sweetest of his smiles, and I kiss him again. Then he smacks my ass on my way out the door, which is good because I’m scared shitless. Part of me wants him to go get that fucking plug, make me wear it to work so that every time I moved, I'd feel him right there with me and believe in myself even half as much as he believes in me. There's something beautiful about the idea, like a line out of Gray's poetry books.
Except for the part where I'd come over and over in my jeans until I couldn't walk anymore.
Gray
Oliver should be back from the lake by now, so I call him right after Jonah leaves. We need to regroup today and talk over our strategy for tomorrow, the next week, the rest of this long battle. He doesn’t answer. Maybe it’s nothing, but my instincts are screaming that something’s wrong and even though they’ve let me down before, they’re all I have.
