Chapter 19
Austin
The snow had piled even higher overnight, and after I’d gotten Jeremy motivated enough to clean up, we bundled up and went outside. In a way, I felt like a big kid again. All I wanted to do was to make new memories with him.
That was how we found ourselves rolling a giant snowball around the yard.
Leah watched from the porch, a cup of hot cocoa in her hands, no doubt thinking we were crazy for doing this.
Let’s build a snowman. It’ll be fun, they said.
It’s all fun and games until you're stuck shoving a huge, heavy pile of snow around, trying to figure out how the next part is supposed to be lifted on top of it. We did this as kids? How?
By the time we decided the base of the snowman was big enough, our faces stung from the cold and our hands were numb.
Leah was one step ahead of us holding up two mugs and a thermos.
We climbed the steps to the house, gratefully taking the cups from her as she poured us each some of the hot chocolate. We sat on the stairs and drank it down.
“So what brought this on?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. We have a while until dinner, and there wasn’t anything else to do.”
She nodded, her long brown hair sliding over her shoulders as she sat next to Jeremy. The hostility between them finally seemed to vanish.
“It’s the small things. I didn’t get to do stuff like this growing up. To say I was a little jealous? That might be an understatement.” Jeremy lifted his mug to his mouth, taking another sip. Like an idiot, I sat there and watched him, but after the morning, it was hard not to.
Leah looked on, watching the two of us, if she suspected anything, she didn’t let on.
She didn’t seem too upset by my sudden interest in her ex.
If anything, she seemed curious. When things eventually came out, I hoped that meant that she would be all right with things.
The last thing I wanted was to cause problems with my sister. She deserved the world.
Leah rested her chin on her hand, propping it on her knee. “You never talk about your childhood much.”
Jeremy tensed for a moment before he took a deep breath. His shoulders lifted, lowered with much effort, and then he looked between me and my sister like he knew this was a subject might be a deal-breaker for people.
“I don’t know. It’s not that my parents were bad people. I grew up in San Francisco, for crying out loud, but they had their opinions on things.”
I let the statement wash over me because I had an idea of what he was talking about.
“We went to church every Sunday, sometimes other nights of the week as well. There were a lot of expectations placed on me and what my parents wanted...”
Leah gasped. “So they don’t know about you being bisexual?”
He laughed a little. “No. And I want to keep it that way. We don’t talk very often anymore, it’s their loss. I made an effort for a lot of years, but that was part of why I moved to New York. I needed to separate myself from my toxic upbringing without the risk of their interfering.”
That caught my attention because it was the biggest question I’d had for years.
It made perfect sense why he’d packed up and left.
If you’d spent your whole life being told that how you felt was wrong or dirty, you needed to remove yourself from that situation.
Not that everyone had that opportunity, and I couldn’t fault him for taking the chance to get away.
My only wish was that he’d said something to me before he left.
We hadn’t been together for very long, and a transfer like that had to have been in motion well before we met.
The issue came when he hadn’t felt like he could tell me about it.
“I’m sorry you felt like you had to leave. That’s one thing that I think Austin and I were blessed with. Mom and Dad didn’t even blink when he came out. Not that he hid it very well.”
I shoved Leah’s shoulder as she giggled, but she wasn’t wrong.
I’d been pretty open about my attraction to boys from the beginning.
While most boys seemed interested in sports because of their skills, I was interested because I liked their looks.
And I made that obvious. Not to mention my infatuation with boy bands.
They weren’t as popular when I was a teen, but I looked back to the good ol’ days and worshiped groups like the Backstreet Boys and N’SYNC wishing that I’d been born earlier so that I could have enjoyed their glory days.
But what had that been like? I couldn’t imagine having to hide how I felt from those closest to me.
That was something I’d taken for granted.
There were a lot of people who were in the same position as Jeremy who needed to hide their sexuality from their families.
It wasn’t right because these were people who should have been hard-wired to love you unconditionally, and sometimes it didn’t matter. That love always came with conditions.
“I’m—I’m sorry you felt that way.” I placed my hand on his knee.
Jeremy gave me a weak smile, and it was in that moment that some sort of understanding seemed to pass between us.
Like I knew what he was trying to convey without needing a one-on-one conversation.
We didn’t need to drag the hurt out all over again.
But that was enough dwelling on all of that.
We’d been warmed by our hot chocolate, and there was a partially finished snowman calling our names.
I stood from the porch going back to the yard, starting another snowball for the middle and started pushing it around.
Instead of just Jeremy, Leah joined us this time, which made completing the work go that much faster.
Before we knew it, we had the requisite three parts of a snowman. Bottom, middle, and top.
Leah went in search of some twigs as Jeremy and I grabbed a few pieces of charcoal from the bag my dad had on the porch from the summer bar-b-ques.
We layered the buttons, made eyes and a smile before my sister showed back up with a few branches that worked to make sufficient spindly arms and hands.
At the last moment, my mother emerged on the front porch with a carrot, something that we’d all forgotten.
I went up to her and grabbed it, bringing it back to our man of snow completing his face.
He wasn’t the prettiest thing to look at, but the three of us draped our arms over each other's shoulders looking on with pride. It was a lot of work to put it together but we’d done it.