21. Malcolm
MALCOLM
T he near murderous look on Ryan’s face has me rushing my next words. “I told you no one hurt me. I wasn’t hurt. There was no touching or molesting or anything like that. I promise this isn’t anything like that.”
“Okay,” he breathes out evenly, a hint of veiled rage still underpinning his tone.
“I promise. I’ve been in therapy since I was eight. Same therapist. I mean, she doesn’t know about this , but she’d know if I was abused or whatever, and I wasn’t. Not like that. Not like anything really. Honestly, this is so fucking embarrassing.”
“Who was the cousin?”
“William. His name was William.”
“Was?”
I shrug. “I haven’t seen him since her funeral.”
And I still remember the hug he gave me that day as he left the graveside to go to his car and disappear. “Hang in there, sweet boy. Remember she loved you so much,” he’d said.
“And he never touched you?” Ryan asks.
“No…I like… It was more that I had a crush on him. He was nice to me. ”
“How nice?”
“Just nice,” I tell Ryan. “He’d hug me and bring me Pokémon cards. He’d pick me up from school sometimes, and we’d throw a football or play catch or whatever. He was just like—my mom’s cousin who I liked, and I wanted him to like me, too.”
“How old was he?”
“Maybe our age. Twenty-five-ish. I don’t remember what he did for a living, but something in healthcare.
He always had scrub pants on when he’d pick me up from school.
He was one of those guys that was good at everything.
He taught me to play chess and cards and all the rules of all the sports. He was at our house a lot.”
“But he didn’t live there?” Ryan asks.
“Honestly, I’m not really sure. He might have for a while. There was definitely a room I thought of as Will’s room.”
“A room, huh?”
I look Ryan in the eyes for the first time since I started talking. “Not the metaphor room. That literally was just a metaphor.”
“Then what does he have to do with anything?”
“I just said. I had a crush on him. Like a crush.”
“You were how old?”
“Young. I was little.”
“How was it a crush?” Ryan asks. “Sounds like hero worship.”
I rub my face. I might be sick. Inhaling deeply, I try to translate all the uncomfortable images in my head into words. A question comes out instead. “How’d you learn about sex?”
He scowls in that way he does when he’s baffled or annoyed or focused. “Um…my mom had the talk with me when I was ten, I think. Around the time they were teaching it in school.”
“You hadn’t run across any porn at that point? No sex scenes in regular movies? ”
“No, and my mom wouldn’t let me anywhere near the internet. You remember how she was.”
“What about from kids at school?”
He scowls at me. “What kids? I didn’t have as many friends as you did. No one who would show me porn for sure. Did you?”
I shake my head. “Not in grade school, no. But I knew about sex.”
“Since when?”
That’s when I come out with it. “I walked in on my mom and Will doing it when I was seven.”
Ryan’s eyes widen. “She was fucking her cousin ?”
I nod.
“Like they were actually related?”
“Yeah. He was her aunt’s son.”
“Oh. Damn.”
Yeah, talking about this is weird. Go figure.
I’ve never been more grateful for the fact that Ryan never met my mother.
“I didn’t understand what was happening the first time I saw it.
They were wearing clothes, mostly, so all I could see looked like a hug.
Like a really good, full-body hug. Anyway, when I saw them like that, I asked if I could have a hug, too.
” I swallow hard, remembering the way they reacted.
Like I’d opened fire on them. I remember Will coming at me, putting his pants together, and guiding me by the shoulder out of the room.
I remember my mom wailing.
I remember Will’s flushed face as he knelt down to talk to me. “Will told me that sometimes adults hug differently, and he was sorry I saw that.”
One might assume that since they’d been caught, they’d stop, or at least be more discreet, but that’s not what happened.
“I watched them a lot,” I tell Ryan.
“It happened more than once?” he asks, shocked.
I nod. “A few times a week. ”
“Why did you watch?”
“I was just trying to understand. You know—what was so different about grown up hugs.”
“It didn’t upset you?” he asks.
“It upset me a lot,” I admit.
“Your dad didn’t know?”
“I don’t know. I never said anything.”
“How could you keep that to yourself, though?”
“I mean, I didn’t. I talked to my mom about it.”
Ryan looks even more freaked out. I feel compelled to remind him, “I was seven. Granted, she didn’t know I was sneaking around to watch them every chance I got, she just thought I caught them the one time and they were dressed that time, so…”
“What did she have to say for herself?” he asks.
“She said something along the lines of the way Will loved her was special. I can’t remember exactly how she put it, but I remember how I felt about it.”
“How did you feel about it?”
“Jealous,” I admit, finally. “I was really fucking jealous.”
Ryan’s jaw looks painfully tight, and I want to rub the muscles in it to get it to relax. He says, “I’m really trying hard not to assume or jump to conclusions, so…spell it out if you can.”
“I asked her why Will wouldn’t hug me like that.”
“Jesus.”
“What?” I ask. “What are you thinking?”
“Did you realize what they were doing by the time you asked her that?”
I nod. I realized it the second time when they were naked.
When I saw everything . Will’s naked body, his cock, his ass.
When I heard the way he moaned when he was inside her.
The way he held her and rocked himself against her.
When I wished I were her because she sounded happy.
He could make her laugh and gasp in surprise.
He made her purr with contentment and say things like you feel so good .
And I thought if the kind of hug I got from him felt good—the kind she was getting must be even better. I was so fucking jealous of her.
And I was mad at her because she wouldn’t share.
“I mean, I didn’t know they were engaging in an act of adultery or that it could result in pregnancy, but I saw they were close, and it looked like it felt really good for both of them, and it gave me a funny feeling in my stomach.”
“And now?”
I sigh. “Well, now I think I had to have been a pretty fucked up kid to be looking forward to watching someone fuck my mom.”
“Jesus, Mal.”
“I’ve always cared more about what guys think of me than girls,” I say, moving off the ugly topic that created my reality and had no small part in shoring up my sexual identity.
Ryan narrows his gaze. “I guess that tracks.”
“Does it track with anything else you can think of?”
“You mean me and you?”
I nod.
“Is this what you meant about being inappropriately physical? Because you weren’t.”
“Wasn’t I?” I ask. “Do all preteen boys snuggle together to watch TV? Or wonder what it would feel like naked?”
He gives me a suspicious look. “Is that what you were thinking about? Because you never said anything. Not about sex or porn. Nothing, Mal.”
“Will you hate me if I say I thought about it a lot?”
His eyes widen. “You…? Okay… ”
“Is it?” I ask, not knowing what to make of the incredulous expression on his face.
“I just want to understand,” he says.
“That answer makes me sick to my stomach,” I admit.
“Is Will the reason you say you’re not straight?”
“Partly,” I say. “Will and everything after.”
“Including me?” Ryan asks.
“Yes.”
“But—”
“Listen,” I interrupt him. “You weren’t Will. You were a kid, and he was an adult. It didn’t start out like that for me with you.”
“Was it ever?” He sounds dubious, and I get it.
“It’s always like that for me. By the time I realized what sex actually entailed, it wasn’t long until I heard about how guys could do it with each other, which meant Will lied, and that’s another whole mess of fucked up, but a bunch of the kids I hung out with in junior high all had older siblings with access to porn, and it was kind of all I thought about. ”
Ryan goes from looking troubled, then confused, then annoyed. “So, what the fuck happened?”
“Well, around the time I was regularly getting boners every time you touched me, was about the time my friends started calling guys fags and making being gay sound like it was disgusting and wrong.”
He sighs heavily. “What the fuck am I supposed to do with this?”
I think it’s a rhetorical question, so I don’t answer. I start to move off his lap, but he holds me in place. “Wait,” he mutters, but doesn’t tell me what I’m waiting for.
I pretend he’s piecing together the room metaphor, hoping he remembers it well enough for any of this to start making sense. For me to make sense.
“What about Kaylin?” he finally asks .
“What about her?”
“Does she know any of this?”
“No. I’ve never told anyone this.”
“Other than your therapist,” he says, like he’s speaking for me.
“No. Not her either.”
“Why not?” he asks.
“Because it’s fucked up?”
“Isn’t that what therapists are for?” he asks.
“It might not seem like it at the moment, but I do have some dignity I’d like to keep intact. Telling my therapist I wanted my mom’s cousin to satisfy me sexually isn’t exactly the kind of thing that would reassure her I’m adjusting well.”
“You couldn’t possibly have understood that at the time.”
“No,” I agree. “But I understood enough. And I definitely understood it with you.”
He blushes. Full on, red cheeks, blushes. I don’t take it as necessarily positive.
“So what was the problem?” he asks. “What stopped you?”
“I thought I was vile, Ryan. I thought I’d lose you if you knew.”
“But…” he trails off, and I have a feeling he’s thinking about what he told me that day. When he had the flu.
“Fantasy and reality were two different things. I was old enough to understand that, too. I could want something—but if what I wanted was unacceptable, then it couldn’t become a reality.”
He presses his lips together and looks down. I can’t see his eyes anymore. His hair falls to obscure his face.
“I don’t want to fight this anymore,” I say quietly. “I don’t want to fight anymore, period.”
“So, you’re gay.”
There’s not much room to argue it. “Yeah. I’m gay. ”
His hair flips back, and I get the annoyed look again. “Then what the fuck was the deal with Kaylin?”
“I can’t possibly be the first gay teenager who tried like hell not to be.”
“And then what?” he asks. “I showed up with a decent haircut, and it all clicked?”
“Yeah,” I say simply. And I wish it really were that simple.
He scoffs at that. Understandably.
“I might need some time with this,” he says.
It’s the last thing I want to hear, but it doesn’t come as a surprise. “You want me to go?”
“No…not really.”
I climb off his lap, and he allows it this time. I sit beside him so he doesn’t have to look at me if he doesn’t want to.
He turns my way anyway, lying sideways in the chair and sighing heavily. “Listen. I wanna be honest with you. I’m not planning to stay in San Francisco,” he says. “This is a sublet. The plan is to leave at the end of summer. The end of the internship.”
I take this in without reacting immediately. I let each word settle as they pelt me. My eyes start blinking beyond my control. My stomach takes a very unpleasant turn. He’s speaking in present tense. “Why?” I ask, but it comes out as a whisper.
“There’s someone I’ve been interested in. She lives in Seattle. I thought I’d take a chance. See what happens.”
“You said you didn’t have a girlfriend.”
“I don’t. It’s not like that yet.”
The “yet” is excruciating. I rub my face, covering my mouth for a few seconds to make sure nothing’s going to come up. “Okay,” I finally say.
“Is it?” he asks.
“If that’s what you want.” Props to internal screams. They’re super quiet .
“You broke the fuck out of me,” he says quietly.
I clench my jaw and nod, taking it.
He goes on to say, “I’ve never wanted anyone the way I want you.”
“If you want me to cry, you’re getting pretty close to making that happen.”
“No, Mal, that’s not what I want. But when I said we needed to talk, I meant both of us.”
Swallowing hard, I say, “You’ve been acting like you wanted to win the challenge. Like you want a job at the firm.”
“At the Seattle branch,” he says.
“Oh.” I forgot there were other branches.
“But as a reminder,” he says, “You do have a girlfriend.”
I shut my eyes. “It’s over,” I say weakly.
“Does she know that?”
“What difference does it make?” I ask, feeling truly hopeless.
“I mean, nothing’s written in stone,” he says.
“But you don’t trust me,” I say.
“I want to.”
My head shakes. “Not the same thing.”
“No,” he says. “I know it’s not.”
“So, what do you want me to do?” I ask.
“I like the honesty.”
“Really? Because it feels like it totally backfired for me.”
“It’s only July, Mal.”
“Are you saying—what are you saying?”
“I don’t want to fight anymore either,” he says.
I don’t want to hear what he doesn’t want, but maybe his inability to tell me what he actually wants is a relic of the way I broke him. “You’re not kicking me out, right?”
“No.”
“Then let’s go to bed,” I say. I don’t know if I can talk anymore .
“Are you sure?” he asks.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I’m on the verge of pouting.
I get up and take the two steps to the bed, throwing back the covers and getting in.
It takes Ryan a minute, but he joins me.
Pants on and everything. I hate it, and I’m more than ready to escape to sleep now that the perfect day is so obviously fucking over.