14. Trey
14
Trey
I walk Ben to bed and say good night with sweet kisses and a promise to see him in the morning. I fall asleep quickly, feeling content and satisfied. Unfortunately, it doesn’t last. The morning dawns with a weighty sense of guilt. The reason I don’t do casual sex is because I don’t feel it’s fair to have that kind of intimate contact with someone who doesn’t know my past. And my past isn’t the kind of thing I casually talk about. I have to come clean with Ben and hope that the revelations won’t change how he feels about me. There’s a very real chance that after he’s had a chance to think, he’ll be freaked out about last night and that what I have to tell him will freak him out more.
It’s Sunday, so we have lots of time. I kind of wish I had to rush off to work so I could put it off, but I know that avoidance isn’t the answer. Washing myself in the shower gives me flashbacks of Ben’s face last night. Watching him lose control was amazing. Afterward, the feel of his hand on me put everything that had come before to shame. When I had thought about telling him everything prior to today, I had worried about my place to live and whether he would want me to stay away from Mandy. Now, those seem trivial, next to the fear that I might not be able to hold him again.
The kitchen is filled with the scent of eggs, sausage, and coffee. I intended to get a cup of coffee and sit Ben down for a talk. I walk behind him on the way to the coffee maker, and my feet stop of their own accord. He’s rolling up breakfast burritos on the work surface next to the stove, and I can’t help myself. I wrap my arms around him from behind and bury my face in the cradle between his neck and shoulder. “Good morning,” I mumble into his skin.
Ben lets out a little “eep” noise and a gorgeous full-body shiver. I feel goosebumps break out on his skin. I squeeze him a little tighter and press an open mouth kiss to his neck before I reluctantly let him go in favor of coffee.
“Good morning,” Ben replies belatedly, just a little high and squeaky. “Did you sleep well?”
I lean against the counter and smile at him over my coffee cup. I’m so reluctant to start this conversation, but literally every time I see him, he becomes more important to me. I have to do it right now before a rejection becomes something I can’t recover from. I feel my hands gripping my cup too tight. “I did. I slept great. Can we sit down and talk? Do you have time this morning?”
Ben’s hands make a nervous little kneading gesture, and I watch him take a deep breath before he answers. “Sure, of course. I just made food, we can sit and eat. I mean, obviously, I just made food. It’s not like breakfast burritos fell from the sky. That was a pretty good book, though. Did you ever read it?”
Even with my nerves twisting up my stomach, I have to grin at him. I have no idea what he’s talking about, but the nervous rambling is really, really cute. “I have not read a book about burritos falling from the sky. You’ll have to tell me about it sometime.” I pick up a plate and sit at the table. I’m sure I won’t be able to eat with the way I feel, but doing something together while you talk works with the kids at the shelter, so I might as well try it here.
Ben gets his own plate and sits across from me. As soon as he sits down, he starts apologizing. “I’m sorry if I did something wrong last night,” he begins, but I raise a hand to stop him before he goes any farther.
“Last night was wonderful, Ben. Seriously, look at me,” I coax him to meet my eyes. “It was incredible. You didn’t do anything wrong, and I hope it was as amazing for you as it was for me. However, because it happened and because you asked me about drinking, I need to tell you about my past. It’s not a great story, and I need you to listen and let me get it out before you ask any questions, all right?”
Ben looks concerned. “I’ll try not to interrupt, I promise.”
“Okay, when I was fifteen, I told my parents I was gay. They kicked me out that day with the clothes on my back.”
Ben makes a strangled noise and inhales like he’s going to say something, then physically claps his hand over his mouth and gestures for me to continue. I have to smile at the effort.
“My mom’s mom lived in Denver, and I hitchhiked there from Arizona. I had to give a trucker a handjob, but I told myself it wasn’t that bad because I was gay, right?” At this point, Ben’s face goes dead white and then fire-engine red, but he doesn’t say anything. “My grandma lived in an apartment building, and it took me a couple of days to find which one, but eventually, I managed. She was happy to see me and furious with my mom and dad. I never told her the things I did to eat and sleep until I found her, but they ate me up inside.” Ben starts to say something at this point, and I raise my hand again. I need to get as far as I can in this story before he interrupts me. He needs to hear all of it. “She got my parents to fill out custody papers, and they made me and her promise they would never hear from us again. We were both disowned. She enrolled me in school, and we did okay for a while. I got into some trouble with fighting, smoking weed, and drinking. I know now that I was trying to cope with trauma, but all I knew then was that I was angry and unhappy, and getting high or drinking made me feel better.”
I take a deep breath and a drink of my coffee, and Ben watches me over our untouched breakfast, obviously making an effort to give me space to talk. Now for the hard part. “I don’t know if I would have outgrown that and graduated high school if Grandma had lived, but she didn’t. Halfway through my junior year, I came home to find she was dead on the floor. She had a heart attack, and no one was around. Social services called my parents, and they said I wasn’t their problem anymore, so I went into foster care. The first house I was in was fine. The people were nice, but it was only short-term. The next house was a religious couple, and there was lots of going to church and praying. That would have been fine, but the foster dad kept coming into my room at night. I’d wake up to him watching me sometimes. Then, one night, I woke up, and I was awake, but I couldn’t move, and he had his hands on my junk. I’m pretty sure he put something in my dinner. I wasn’t there the next night. I packed a backpack, stole some cash from her purse, and ran. I don’t know what the foster parents told social services because I never got caught. I lived on the street from just before my seventeenth birthday until I was twenty-two.”
“Jesus!” Ben exclaims, finally losing his control.
“Just let me finish, please,” I beg him. “This is hard, and it gets worse. I needed money and a place to stay. You can’t just be outside in Denver in the winter. I couldn’t go to a shelter because they had to report to social services. There are pretty much two choices when you’re on the street at sixteen. I chose sex work over dealing drugs, but the drugs got me anyway. It just didn’t seem like a big deal at first. A lot of the customers want to get high with you, and the pimps like addicts because they’re easier to control. At about twenty or twenty-one, though, my addiction got out of hand, and I got too big to make much money. Too intimidating for johns. I was just scrambling from one fix to another any way I could. Eventually, the only way I could get money or drugs was stealing or violence, and I hated myself for that. Even if I was ‘only’ beating up dealers, I hated using my size against someone. I only hit a few dealers before one of the gangs came around and beat me up bad enough to hospitalize me. They said it was the only warning I’d get, that they’d kill me next time.”
I take another quick drink of my coffee. This is the first time I’ve ever told the whole story from start to finish like this. Even Mandy got pieces over time. Ben is leaning back in his chair now like he’s trying to get away from me. My heart sinks in my chest, but I’m determined to finish it.
“They kicked me out of the hospital as soon as they were sure I wouldn’t die immediately, with a set of crutches and a painkiller prescription. I had no money to fill the prescription and no place to go. I was making a plan to rob a convenience store for the money to fill the script and then sell what pills I didn’t take right away, but someone kicked one of my crutches, and I fell flat on my face right in front of the shelter I work at now. Somebody who worked there picked me up and got me inside. They filled the prescription for me, but they would only give me the amount it said on the bottle. It was a long road back to being human, and there were some stumbles, but by the time I was twenty-three, I had twelve months of sobriety and my GED. I needed a lot of therapy to deal with the trauma of the sexual assaults and sex work in general, as well as the worthless feeling that living on the streets gives you. One of my counselors asked what I wanted to do with my life, and all I could think of was helping other people make their way back from where I’d been. They helped me navigate college admission and scholarships, and here I am.”
I scrub my hands over my face, simultaneously relieved to have it told and scared of Ben’s reaction. When I finally look at him, I’m not prepared for what I see. Ben is livid. His hands are clenched, his face is red, and his voice shakes when he finally talks.
“Does Mandy know about this?” is the first thing out of his mouth. He keeps going, though, and his voice gets louder with every question. “How could that happen? I don’t see how things could get so out of control. How did it get so bad?”
Every question feels like a blow. This is not the reaction I expected from the kind man I thought I knew. I get up from the table abruptly, needing to escape from the accusations I can hear in his questions.
Ben calls out to me as I stumble out the front door past two very concerned, whining dogs. “Trey, where are you going?” But it doesn’t even slow me down.
I drive for a while, aimlessly, then direct my car to the shelter. If I’m not going to relax, I might as well help someone somehow. I end up on dish and mop duty, and I’m relieved. I don’t have to talk to anyone, and the menial work reminds me of when I first ended up at the shelter. At the end of the day, I’ve settled and grounded if still hurt. I head back to Ben’s late, deliberately missing dinner and the awkwardness that another meal together would surely cause.
Ben is in the living room when I come through the door. I have to steady myself before going over to talk to him. “Look. Ben, I don’t… Now that you know all of that, if you’re uncomfortable having me stay, I get it. I can be packed and out by tomorrow night.”
“Out?” he asks. “That’s not necessary, Trey, unless you’ve found a better place.” He reaches for me, but his hand drops halfway like he can’t bring himself to touch me.
“I haven’t,” I answer. “I didn’t know I needed to, but I can look.”
I’m not sure now which is more painful, the questions about whether Mandy knew, like she must not, if she is friends with me, the implication that I should have done something better to keep myself out of the whole situation, or that he couldn’t bear to touch me. It all served to underscore why I didn’t do relationships. Too much risk and too much pain.
I shower after I get upstairs and get undressed, and if I allow myself a little extra time under the water to wash away some of that hurt, I am not ashamed of it.
I do my meditation app once I am out of the bathroom and dressed in flannel pants and a sleeveless undershirt. The gratitude journal mocks me for a few minutes until I think further back, remembering Dr. Carlton’s praise from last night. It reminds me of how fortunate I am to be getting the experience I’m getting and how I’m actually making a real difference in people’s lives right now.
That lifts my spirits somewhat, and I fall asleep to a visual meditation of a long walk near a stream.
The next morning I head into my paying job and put in my time, then call Mandy on my lunch break. I wavered all morning, but I have to get it out.
“Hello? How’s work?” Mandy asks when she answers the phone.
“It’s fine, it’s been quiet,” I reply, already thinking about how to bring up what I’m calling about, but Mandy beats me to it.
“How was the party with Daddy? Did you have fun?”
“Yeah, it was great, for the most part,” I say.
“For the most part? Did someone say something about your date being a man?” Mandy sounds instantly offended.
“No, everyone was fine with that. There were a few other same-sex couples there. Since it felt like a date, though, I wanted to tell the truth about my past, and that didn’t go very well.”
I can picture the frown. “Didn’t go very well with Daddy?” She sounds like she can’t even imagine that.
“Yeah, with your dad. I gave him the shortest version possible, but he got really mad and asked how that could happen and if you knew.”
“Okay…” Mandy says, drawing the word out.
“So it felt like he was asking if you knew because either you wouldn’t be friends with me if you did or if I was hiding it from you.” I don’t like feeling like a dirty secret.
“Oh, Trey,” Mandy says, her voice laced with sympathy. “You have nothing to be ashamed of. I doubt Daddy meant either of those things, either. He is the least judgemental person I’ve ever met. Look how he took to Mitch and everything.”
I hum. “He seems like the best guy ever. That’s why this hurt so much. On second thought, I don’t know many men who would approve of their little girl getting close to a former drug addict and sex worker.”
Mandy makes a frustrated little huff. “When you say things like that, I want to wash your mouth out with soap.”
I laugh. Normally, I don’t feel shame about my past any longer. I overcame it, and I know I am enough just as I am, and I’m bettering myself every day. Sometimes, though, something makes me question myself, like Ben’s anger. I have a bevy of resources at my disposal that I’ve compiled to keep myself safe and healthy. Mandy can be depended upon to add to it, too, although sometimes her additions take the form of proverbial slaps upside my head.
“The only thing I’ve ever seen my dad get truly angry about is when someone, especially a child, is being mistreated. What did he actually say? Also, I think the most likely reason he would ask you if I knew is to find out if this was something that was between the two of you. He probably didn’t want to break your confidence. When I’d come to him with something, he would always ask me if he could talk to anybody else about it, and the few times it was something that needed to be brought to someone else, he’d tell me that was what had to happen and make sure that I was okay.”
A small voice whispered that, of course, Mandy would defend her father, but having actually spent time with him, I can absolutely believe that Ben would do that. He had absolutely no guile or artifice that I’d seen. If I thought about his questions from the viewpoint of horror and outrage that those horrible things had happened to a literal child and not through a lens of shame, they made perfect sense. Also, the idea that he was working up to asking me if I had told him that in confidence makes sense, much as I hate to admit it. I might have been so nervous about telling him that I saw his reaction in the worst possible light. Then I ran away instead of having a conversation to be sure what he meant. I sigh.
“He may also have wondered if I knew since he knows I’m your best friend, and he hoped that I knew so I could support you,” Mandy continues. Damn, that hadn’t crossed my mind either. Why did she have so many logical explanations?
“Okay, okay, maybe I jumped to conclusions,” I agree with a sigh.
“A little. Look, sweetie, I know that you like him. I know that a lot of people have been assholes to you. I know sometimes you are prickly as a hedgehog,” Mandy says. “But Daddy isn’t someone you have to prick.”
I am silent as what she just said lands, and then she realizes what she said, too. “Oh my god,” she says, her voice is muffled, and I can picture her with her face in her hands as she giggles. “I mean, if you wanted to, I wouldn’t mind,” she says, still giggling.
My face is flaming. I’m not ready to talk about "pricking" her father, no matter how much I’ve thought about it. My mind is blank as I attempt to come up with some reply that won’t confirm her suspicions, and it is only when it’s too late that I realize that my silence is all the confirmation Mandy needs.
“You do! ” She sounds gleeful. “I knew it! The way you two were dancing around one another at the wedding, and then the way you were acting when we went to Denver, not to mention how Daddy has been acting!” She almost squeals. “Oh my god, this is perfect! You already live together. You should totally ask him out for real! He’s never been with a man before that I know of, but there’s a first time for everything!”
I groan. I’m not going to tell her that I’m sure her father is attracted to men. That’s not my tea to spill. “Yeah, but you do know that for middle-aged men, ‘dating a man’ isn’t usually on their bucket list.”
“Meh. It should be. Just like ‘dating a woman’ should be on more women’s lists.” She huffs, and I assume there is an eye roll with it. “Closets are for coats, not people.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve heard her say that, but I chuckle anyway. The stout way she proclaims it is both endearing and hilarious. Sexuality isn’t a choice, but – according to Mandy, who gets the idea from her mother, apparently the most sex-positive person on the planet – people who were raised in the 1980s and before often either didn’t realize there was a choice or believed that they didn’t have a choice in who they were supposed to be with. I don’t know if that’s true, but I’m sure it was true for some people.
Was Ben one of those people? It would make sense.
“I’ll keep that under advisement, but really, Mandy, I don’t know…” I say. What I want to say is that I don’t know if he still wants me.
“All I’m saying is don’t rule it out. Daddy is a good man, and he deserves to find his person. You might be his person, but you’ll never know if you don’t try, right? You’re interested in him, aren’t you.” The last sentence was not a question.
Fine, fine, I’ll admit it. “I find him very attractive if that’s what you’re asking.”
“That’s part of what I’m asking! That’s perfect! Look, Mom and Daddy got married young. Mom told me that she was Daddy’s only girlfriend, and she doesn’t think he has been on a single date since they divorced. What does that tell you? They broke up because they loved each other, but Mom needed more. She needed a spark– She needed a flame. Mitch is her flame, and she is soooo happy now! I want Daddy to be happy like that, too, and you! You deserve it!”
“How do you know that I’d light a ‘flame’ for your dad?” I ask curiously. I want to know what she’s seen that I might have missed.
“Because I’ve seen how he watches you! He never looked at Mom like that. They would sit on the sofa, and she would sketch or read, and he would watch TV or work on something. One of them would put me to bed and then go back to the sofa. They were friends, but they weren’t… you know.” She growls. “God, I don’t know how to describe what was missing! But there’s a, a, a, God, there’s this energy between you! It’s like when you’re watching a really good romance movie, and you can feel that they belong together, but they’re dancing around it, and you want to scream, ‘Just kiss already!!!’”
I wonder what Ben would do if Mandy just jumped out of her seat at dinner some night and did that. He would probably turn fuchsia and die of embarrassment. It’d be kind of cute.
I picture how adorable Ben is when he blushes and curse silently. Why is Mandy always right?