Chapter 13
MARK
“Where have you been, man?” Keith asks.
Sitting across from me at the Starbucks we usually meet up at, he pulls his laptop from his bag and sets it on the table beside his hot cup.
“Just school and work,” I say.
He eyes me suspiciously. “Come on. Don’t play like you haven’t been slung up with some man all this time.”
“Nope,” I say quickly, hoping we can change the subject and move on.
I’m terrible for not telling him about Tim. At first, it was such an easy thing to keep from him. There was no reason to hurt him, but now every time he asks about what I’m up to or why I’m not free to hang out, I feel like a dick for lying.
It’s not any of his business, I keep telling myself. But I know he’ll be pissed when he finds out.
Not when, if.
All this time with Tim has been confusing as fuck.
The other morning, the first night he stayed over in the two months we’ve been doing this, I woke up and he had his arm wrapped around me.
I should have said something, but it felt so good—so right—that I just lay still so he wouldn’t wake up and realize I was awake.
I was perfectly still for an hour, enjoying the sensation of his arm around me and his nose pressed up against the back of my neck.
I kept hoping he wouldn’t wake up, and if I hadn’t needed to go to the bathroom so fucking bad after an hour of my performance, I wouldn’t have caved.
But when I shook him off, we both acted like nothing weird had just happened.
Maybe he’s used to holding a pillow like that.
Maybe that’s why he doesn’t sleep in the same bed with guys…
because he knows that’s a possibility. Whatever the reason, I enjoyed it way too much.
Just like I enjoy all the time we’ve been spending together recently.
God, I knew what I was getting into. I can’t think like this.
It doesn’t get me anywhere. And it’s going to complicate things... and scare him away.
Keith eyes me skeptically as he opens his laptop. “If you insist,” he says. “You know, Morgan is already seeing someone.”
“I don’t know that I want to hear about it.”
I won’t say anything to Keith since he’s Greg’s friend more than mine, but truth is, I reveled in their breakup. Morgan reached out to me via a Facebook message, which I haven’t read. That’s a big step that I’m not ready for. Not while I’m still feeling the sting of his betrayal.
“What about you?” I ask, trying to change the subject. “Are you seeing anyone?”
“No. I think I needed some time after you-know-who fucked me over real bad.”
“Yeah.”
“But don’t get me wrong. I’ve been having fun. Getting a lot of action on Grindr. Evidently, there’s a lot of demand for a wildly attractive, young, twenty-something bottom.”
“I have no doubt about that,” I say.
He keys away on his laptop for a minute. “Just one second. I need to send this file to Greg for a presentation we’re giving tomorrow for one of our lab classes. Speaking of school, how’s the bio class going?”
“It’s good. Just a lot of fucking studying right now. It’s all memorization.”
“You mention the whole pre-med thing to your parents yet?”
“No.”
“Isn’t it about time?”
“I don’t have a reason to tell them. They’re not paying for me to go to school. They don’t get a say in what I major in.”
“Fair enough.”
Another secret to keep.
“Just one more thing I need to send, and I’ll be done,” he says, continuing to type on his laptop.
“No, no. Go ahead,” I insist. My phone vibrates in my pocket.
Probably Mom. I’m heading to the mansion after I finish up with Keith to get ready for a fundraiser the family’s attending tonight.
I pull it out and see it’s from Tim: Gonna miss that ass tonight.
I snicker.
“What’s so funny?” Keith asks.
I can’t believe he even noticed, but he eyes me curiously. I must have made some sort of weird-ass expression or something to make him look at me like that.
“It’s just…something Mom said reminded me of an episode of RuPaul’s Drag Race.”
Another lie.
They’re really starting to stack up now.
When we finish up, I drive to the mansion.
“Mark, you’ll wear the Timberland suit we had tailored for you last week,” Mom says.
She sits across from me at the dining table, Dad in the chair adjacent to her.
Wearing a dark blue dress and a pair of pearls, she’s dressed like a mother would be if she were planning to go out to a nice restaurant, but she isn’t leaving the house in that dress.
It’s an outfit she wouldn’t mind a reporter catching her in if there was a fire and she had to make a quick escape from the house.
Her hair—a vibrant blonde from a recent coloring appointment—curls around her face.
“The blue one. I bought a striped tie to go with it,” she adds. “Tammy said that one is more fashionable for kids your age, so you’ll like it.”
She thinks because I’m gay, I want to look hip and trendy.
Or perhaps more aptly, she thinks I need to look like a good little gay boy who cares about those sorts of things.
Tammy is Mom’s fashion designer. She comes up with everything we wear to events.
Tonight we have a fundraiser where Mom will be speaking about cancer research for juveniles.
I resent that she’s turned a subject that’s very personal for our family into a way of connecting with the public. Her public.
But she’s my mother, and despite how hard she can be…
on me…on Dad…I know that she has a heart—and that she loves me.
But it’s been hard to see that ever since Becky passed…
when her passion for politics heightened.
She became obsessed. And sometimes, it seems like Dad and I lost her to her constituents.
Still, I feel like I have a responsibility to help her whenever she wants me to make an appearance.
Even though it can be a pain when she needs me to behave and look a certain way, I can do those things for a couple of hours.
Mom takes a sip of chardonnay before saying, “If anyone from the press asks you about school—”
“I’ll tell them I’m just dicking around and doing drugs.”
She glares at me. It’s the first time she’s looked at me since we sat down for dinner. It’s her quiet disapproval she banks on to win my compliance. I concede.
“I signed up to help out with the Habitat for Humanity group at school,” I say, “and I’m doing well in all my classes this semester.”
I say it the way I would if she were a reporter asking me about the year.
Her lip curls upward with satisfaction.
She cuts the salmon on her plate and then takes a bite.
I wonder what she would think if she knew about the sort of vile things I let Tim do to me. Or if somehow one of our recordings leaked online. It would be devastating, but something about how much it would piss Mom off excites me. It’s one of the reasons I think I enjoy them so much.
My phone vibrates in my pocket.
Tim?
I don’t check it, though. Mom has a weird thing about checking phones while we’re eating at the table, and if she has a weird thing about something, Dad and I sure as fuck better comply or face the consequences, which range from her silence to all-out screaming matches.
As I take the last bite of my salmon, I’m thinking of how hungry I am. A meal of salmon, steamed vegetables, and rice isn’t the most filling thing in the world. But I assume there’ll be food at the fundraiser.
When we finish dinner, I head upstairs to my room and check my phone.
It’s Tim again.
HIM: Sucks that my dick is lonely tonight.
ME: The problem is that it doesn’t suck. ;)
HIM: Skip this thing. Get back to the apartment, so I can come.
ME: Can’t.
HIM: Wish I could pull you aside into a room and fuck the shit out of you in front of everyone.
ME: Then why don’t you?
I’m not joking, either. But I doubt he’ll take me seriously.
HIM: Where’s it at?
My interest is piqued, and I guess so is his.
Dad adjusts my tie as we stand in the back room of the Marriott auditorium where Mom will be delivering her speech.
I can’t believe I asked Tim to meet me here.
There’s no way we can mess around. Too many people. And Mom isn’t going to let me escape for a second, but I doubt he’s really going to come.
It was a bluff. He wouldn’t even be able to get in.
Mom stands in the corner of the room, reading from a sheet of paper as she moves her mouth to the words, rehearsing her speech.
I’ve already read it—seen how she’s milking Becky’s death.
I think about the little girl with blue eyes and blonde hair as bright as the fake color Mom now has.
I get sad as I remember her sitting in a cushioned chair with an IV tube stuck in her.
Even then, Mom put on a tough performance.
She took Becky to every appointment. Every treatment.
She yelled at the doctors and nurses when they fucked up something on my sister’s chart or nearly gave her the wrong meds.
But despite how cold she can appear, she’s also the mom I would hear crying in her room when Becky was at her worst. The mom who I watched shake to the floor in a fit of tears in a room at the hospital, gripping me like she needed support from me, even though I desperately needed the same from her.
I never doubted Mom’s sincerity back then.
But now that Becky’s gone, she just cares about how it can further her career.
It kills me knowing she can take something that created such a deep wound within me—something that hurt our family so much—and put it on display for the whole fucking state because she sees how good it is for her career.
Can’t she tell she’s not just desecrating our memory of Becky, but destroying me every time she turns it into a performance?
I’d ask her not to go through with it, but this is just one of many similar performances. I thought I’d get used to them after a while, but I never do.
The door opens and Kendra Blake enters.
Kendra is Greg’s mother—the link that will always tie me to Greg.
She’s Mom’s attorney, and how Greg and I met initially three years ago.
It started as a crush. I was a senior in high school and he was a freshman at Emory, majoring in computer science.
He was great with computers but sucked with science.
Needed some help with his chemistry homework, and I was eager for an opportunity to win him over, which I did.
The connection between our mothers hasn’t been too much of an issue since we broke up because I only see them occasionally, but I’ve been dreading this particular event because I knew she would be coming.
My greatest fear is realized when Greg steps through the door, entering behind her.
I still see him around school all the time, but I manage to avoid him. He hasn’t tried to approach me since that day he showed up at my apartment uninvited.
Now here we are, stuck in the same room.
He chats up Kendra and Mom before he meanders over and offers a friendly, “Hey, man.”
His expression is filled with guilt, as it fucking should be.
“Hey,” I say, and even though I’m trying to sound harsh, I can tell that fucking around with Tim has helped me heal because confronting him now is easier than it used to be. Also helps knowing he and Morgan are having issues right now.
Since this is Mom’s night, I’ll be cordial.
“How’ve you been?” he asks. “Haven’t seen you around the usual places.”
“I’ve been busy. School. Work.”
Getting plowed by Tim.
He nods. “Yeah. School’s been kind of a pain recently. That web development class I’ve been taking has been kicking my ass. It’s got a fucking lab unit in it, and I pretty much spend every night coding.”
How can I look like I give fewer shits about his fucking classes?
“So,” he adds, “I guess that thing with you and you-know-who kind of just…”
“Not really any of your fucking business what happened with that.”
I use the past tense to throw him off. No reason to give him anything he can start a rumor about.
“Well, it’s good seeing you. You look like you’re doing good.”
He’s got his charm set to ten. That tone that’s so trustworthy. This facade he’s always been so good at putting on to make me think he might really be a decent person. Although, after what happened with Morgan, I know better, and he’ll never fool me again.
“I don’t know if you heard about me and Morgan?” he asks.
“I did. Sorry it didn’t work out,” I say, my tone dripping with sarcasm.
Mom checks her watch.
“Almost time, boys,” she says.
“Well, I’ve gotta get ready for the performance,” I tell Greg.
He smiles.
“Good seeing you, man.”
He heads out with Kendra.
And there’s something sad about him leaving again. Regardless of how much better I’m doing now, he’ll always be my first big heartbreak. The first time I let someone in and was truly deceived. And that hurts. It stings to my core.
I hope Tim comes tonight.
It’s strange thinking that with Tim, it’s really possible he might arrive. Although, the idea of us being able to do anything is absurd.