Chapter 11
CHAPTER 11
W hen Charlie came out of the bedroom, Jared could tell at once that something serious had happened, though he couldn’t quite tell whether it was good or bad.
His mother, however, wasn’t one to stand on ceremony. The minute she saw that someone looked like they might be hurting, she swooped in.
“Charlie, dear, is everything okay?” she asked.
“Yes, I’m fine. Or, well, I think I will be, eventually. I just had a rather difficult conversation with my mother.” He laughed nervously. “But it went better than I thought. Things haven’t always been easy between the two of us.”
“Oh sweetie, I’m sorry to hear that,” Joyce said, sweeping in for a hug. Jared tried not to feel jealous, reminding himself not to be ridiculous.
“Thank you,” Charlie said as Joyce drew away from him, reaching up to flick a stray strand of hair out of his eyes. “I really appreciate that.”
“You’ll always have a home here,” she went on, “and not just because no one has made Jared smile like you have in a long time.”
“Mother,” he said warningly, but she just kept talking.
“Sometimes mothers, well, they don’t always want to accept that their children are their own people with their own minds and hearts and desires. Give her time. She’ll come around.”
And there was that folksy country wisdom his mother was so very happy to dish out.
“Thank you for that…Joyce,” Charlie said. “I think my mother and I finally understand one another a bit better. Perhaps better than we have in a long time.”
As Charlie spoke, it seemed like a weight lifted off his shoulders, and Jared found himself grinning like a fool at seeing it. When Charlie’s eyes met his, he started grinning, too, and Jared felt that familiar flush start creeping up his neck.
His mother, instincts sharp as always, sensed the brewing tension between the two of them.
“Now then,” she said, “I hope that the two of you aren’t going to just loiter around the house all day. Since everyone is here already, I decided to throw a little dinner for the family. Might as well make the most of it, right?”
“Mom, I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” he began, but Charlie interrupted him.
“That’s so sweet of you, Joyce,” he said, flashing her his megawatt smile. “Is there anything we can do to help?”
Joyce gave him a mock-stern look. “We don’t ask company to help cook here. Jared, why don’t you take Charlie around and show him the property while your father and I get dinner ready?”
“If you’re sure,” Charlie started to say, but this time it was Jared’s turn to interrupt him. Grabbing Charlie’s hand he pulled him outside, calling out to his mom over his shoulder.
“We’ll be back soon!”
They walked for a bit in silence, and it was only when they were several steps away from the house Jared realized that he was still holding Charlie’s hand. He dropped it like a hot potato.
What were you thinking?
To distract himself from what was almost an intimate moment, he took the time to point out all of the rustic pleasures his parents’ place afforded: the small flock of chickens and ducks pecking near their little house (“they call it the Taj McDuck,” he told Charlie with a little chagrin), the garden (now faded and filled with corn husks at this time of year), and the numerous Halloween decorations that his father insisted on putting up around the property (including, much to his mother’s chagrin, those giant blow-up dolls in the shapes of black cats, pumpkins, and ghosts). As he did so, he found himself feeling a bit reflective about his relationship with his family and with West Virginia as a whole.
“ You know,” he said into the silence that had settled around them, “I talk a big game about loving it here, but sometimes I’m more than a little ashamed of being from West Virginia. I even broke up with a boyfriend because he called my parents rednecks.”
This got a laugh out of Charlie. “Your parents might be simple country people, but they’re definitely not rednecks. And neither are you, for that matter.”
“I’m glad that you understand the difference. You’d be surprised how many people don’t.”
“Oh, believe me, I wouldn’t.”
He was surprised to see sadness on Charlie’s face, and he almost reached out and touched his cheek, to see if he could coax a smile out of him. Something still held him back, some fear that doing that would be a step too far.
“They must be pretty awful to you in Hollywood,” he said instead. “I can’t imagine them welcoming someone from West Virginia with open arms.”
“They all weren’t so bad,” Charlie said, with a peculiar intensity in his voice. “In fact there were quite a few of them who came from backgrounds similar to mine. And a lot of them were gay, too. They told me that it was better to just go along to get along. That it was better to stay as ‘circumspect’ as possible.
“I guess you took that advice to heart.”
Jared could have kicked himself for saying that outloud but, rather than getting mad about it, Charlie shook his head.
“To you it must look like I left all of this behind, while you’ve stayed here to fight the good fight.”
Jared started to interrupt, to insist that it wasn’t like that at all, but Charlie kept talking.
“I should tell you that I don’t blame you for feeling resentful. For a long time I did give up on West Virginia. I didn’t care about the people back here, and I wanted to forget where I came from. It just seemed like it would be easier that way, rather than trying to make peace among the different parts of my life. It took talking to some of my friends back here–who didn’t give up on me, even though I’d largely given up on them–to convince me that I might not have as much of the right idea as I thought I did. They convinced me that I was being exactly the kind of person that I’d always said I wouldn’t be.”
He chuckled sadly and softly. “It also took some long hard looks in the mirror for me to see the truth of things, and I didn’t always like what was looking back at me.”
Well, at least some of my suspicions have been confirmed, Jared thought smugly, but then felt bad about it.
“So, I ended up coming back home for a few weeks at a time in between shoots. I had to do it privately, or at least that’s what I thought at the time, because I didn’t want to make a big deal about it. I’d done a lot of work to make sure that people didn’t know that much about me. In Hollywood it’s usually a lot easier to keep parts of your private life private so that everyone else can project what they want onto you.”
While Jared was of course quite flattered and honored that Charlie was sharing this part of himself, he was also a little strange having someone who was still basically a stranger be so open about his life and his feelings.
“It wasn’t long before I was sending donations and trying to build up some sort of infrastructure for young queer people in the state, Charlie went on. “This would have been…in the mid-2000s, I guess? I was still getting my feet in the business and trying to figure out just what it was that I was going to do with my career. The Romance Network was grooming me to be a part of their regular lineup, and this seemed like a good way to spend all of that money that was coming in.”
This time the urge to caress Charlie’s face was even stronger, but still he resisted.
Jared, you’re going to have to either pull the trigger on this or let it go, he thought, followed quickly by, I’m not imagining this, am I?
Then Charlie shot him a knowing little look, and he realized that no, he wasn’t imagining it. For the moment, though, Charlie was intent on telling the rest of his story, clearly trying to get through it as quickly as possible.
“So, it just kept growing. I was able to do at least some good, but this was in the lead-up to the 2008 election, and that’s when things started getting ugly. There were a lot of groups that faced some backlash and pressure. Public libraries started telling me that they didn’t want to get in any sort of trouble. And stopped returning my calls. It was the same with a lot of the other nonprofits that I’d been involved in. They just didn’t want to have to try to grapple with the vitriol that always came with being publicly seen associating with anything even remotely resembling gayness.”
He sighed. “So, I finally just decided that enough was enough. If I wasn’t going to make any headway in West Virginia, then I could at least try to make a difference where I was in California. That didn’t always work out either, but at least I felt more in control there.”
“So…you just gave up on West Virginia?”
“Jared, come on, give me some credit, huh? I didn’t just give up, and it didn’t happen right away. I tried again a couple of years ago, but things had gotten even uglier in the intervening years. I finally got tired of having doors slammed in my face and gave up. I know that’s probably not what you wanted to hear. But then again, maybe it is, because it confirms what you thought you knew about me all along, but I thought you deserved the truth.”
Jared took a deep breath, because there were a lot of things that he wanted to say, a lot of pieces of the puzzle that he was still trying to fight together. Charlie was right, at least to an extent. This did confirm what he’d thought, but also it didn’t. So much of what he’d thought about Charlie Garrett had been built out of his own assumptions, rather than the truth, and if he was being perfectly honest with himself, it was also about jealousy.
It was time to put all of that away and try something new.
“I can’t say that I agree with everything that you did in the past,” he said, choosing his words with care, “But I can also see that it was quite a difficult and treacherous path that you had to walk. My real question is: why didn’t you just tell me all of this before? Or anyone else, for that matter? I’d think that it would be good for your brand to have everyone know that you were trying to do good things for your home state but that a bunch of religious jackasses were standing in the way.”
Charlie shook his head. “It’s not like that. I have a very specific fan base, and they…well, they don’t like it when their favorite gay star does anything that’s not squeaky clean and nonconfrontational. It’s why Sheri has a fulltime job just keeping my name out of the gossip sites, because she knows that if my fans get too much of a whiff of just how much I’ve been involved in any kind of gay politics, they’re not going to be happy. They like their stars to be the good kind of gays, the ones that look pretty on-screen and not much else.
“And as for why I didn’t tell you before…well, you can be a bit prickly. And besides, every time I’d get close to getting there you’d change the subject.” He shrugged. “I’m glad it’s all out in the open. Now you’ve gotten to see the real Charlie Garrett beneath all of the hype.”
This was all a lot to absorb, and it didn’t help that Charlie looked even sexier and more handsome in the afternoon sunlight, which hit his hair in just such a way as to bring out its darker golden hues. The fact that it also highlighted his biceps didn’t hurt.
Behave yourself.
“I can see that,” he said, because it was the only thing he could think to say at the moment. “It…it must be difficult to always be on and to perform for someone else. It must be even harder to feel like you can never be your authentic self.”
“I’m guessing you know something about that too.”
Damn Charlie Garrett and his ability to read other people like a book.
“I guess you could say that. It was hard enough to be a gay kid around here without also being the creative type.” He snorted. “I think my parents were more concerned about the fact that I wanted to take up such a precarious profession than they were about who I slept with.”
“Did they just look at it as a hobby?”
Jared took a moment to consider his words.
“I suppose you could say that. I think it’s probably more accurate to say that they just didn’t see how that could ever possibly be a way to make money. It turns out they were right.”
It hurt to say those words, but there was also something liberating about being able to say them aloud.
“We sometimes have to do what we want despite what our parents have to say about it,” Charlie said. “No matter what, though, you should always follow your heart. If there’s a book in you that you think needs to be written, if there’s a story that you know only you can tell, then you should do it.”
Jared almost told him then about his secret plan to write a memoir of what it was like growing up gay in Appalachia. He didn’t, though, because he wasn’t yet ready to share that particular dream with anyone.
Instead, he settled for just drinking in the beauty that was Charlie Garrett. As he caught glimpses of him out of the corner of his eye, Jared found himself imagining him in one of the movies that he was trying to break into: some brooding hero from a Jane Austen novel, perhaps, or a cold baron with a heart of gold that just needs the right lady, or lord, to melt his heart and open him to a new world of erotic and amorous experiences.
Before he could think about what he was doing, Jared reached out and put his hand on Charlie’s, even as that little voice in his mind was screaming at him to stop, demanding to know what he thought he was doing. He steadfastly ignored it, though. Hannah had been right; it was time to seize some of his own happiness, and let the chips fall where they may.
He’d secretly been dreading that Charlie would ask him what he was doing, or that he would be turned off by his presumption. What he didn’t expect was for Charlie to turn his smile on him and then, before Jared could say or do anything else, lean over and kiss him.
At first Jared didn’t know what to do. It’d been so long since anyone had kissed him, and also up until a few hours ago he’d resented the guy who was sitting next to him as nothing but a poser and a fake. But also this was Charlie Garrett and he was kissing him and, though he would never admit it to anyone else, he suddenly felt light as a feather.
The writerly part of his mind was already trying to fit this whole experience into something that he could write about later, or that he could try to make sense of once he had time to collect himself. The more that the kiss went on, however, the more comfortable he felt just abandoning himself to the pleasure of it, savoring the way that Charlie smelled and the way he tasted, the way that his skin felt brushing against his own.
Just enjoy this, he thought. Don’t overthink it.
So he didn’t.