Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
FOREST
Breathe. Just breathe.
It was a mantra I’d been using for a while now. Months—maybe longer. I stared at my hands as they shook, then looked over at my phone. The screen protector was cracked. Again. I’d probably be out thousands of dollars on new phones if I hadn’t started putting those on.
“It’s gotta be carpal tunnel,” a colleague had said right before I moved. “That same shit happened to me, and I was out for an entire semester after surgery.”
I didn’t believe he was right, even though I wanted to.
Everyone in the department had carpal tunnel syndrome.
We were all chained to our desks, lesson planning, researching for our never-ending publications that might someday end up on obscure syllabi in random community colleges, typing responses to irate parents of freshman students, who thought they could get away with the same helicopter-mom bullshit they did in high school.
But I knew my problem wasn’t that. My hands would be fine for a while, and then all of a sudden, they would just…stop working. Like every muscle from my elbows to my fingertips would give up. Anything I was holding would be on the ground, and when I tried to regain control, the tremors would begin.
Sometimes, they didn’t stop for hours. And every now and again, days.
I told myself it was stress. Hell, I’d been saying that for a while. It had to be. I mean, what other reason was there for all the stuff going on because it wasn’t just my hands giving me trouble.
The fatigue appeared a little while after the tremors, and then the dizzy spells came. I fainted twice in my office after just barely making it past the door last semester on a very hot day after having a run-in with a student pissed off about failing his final.
And it hadn’t helped my stress that I’d been living in a tiny town in the Bible Belt. As a queer history professor getting constant side-eyes, the fear of looking at the wrong man twice had gotten to be a bit much for me.
I’d needed a change. I’d needed to get the hell out of there before everything got worse, and I stopped being able to get out of bed. Not that I’d been afraid that would happen except…I kind of was. Because whatever was happening to my hands was also starting to happen to my feet.
The day I fell walking to my office, tripping on nothing except floppy toes, I knew it was time to go.
So I’d drafted my resignation, called up Creek, and told him I was on my way.
He and Nash had given me an open-ended offer to stay at Nash’s house, and hell, some sea air could really do me some good.
Living on the West Coast had always been kind of a dream of mine, anyway. I knew San Francisco was no longer the epic queer hub of the eighties and nineties, but it was still better than where I’d been living.
And the fact that Creek had settled here after getting discharged felt like…
Well, kismet, maybe?
I’d left Creek alone for a while. I knew he needed to heal. It was more than just his leg. There were plenty of veterans who had sat in my classes over the last couple of years, and I’d seen it in their eyes.
Haunted. Scarred. Afraid.
The idea that he was feeling all of those things gutted me, but the fact that he wasn’t alone allowed me to sleep at night.
The truth of the matter was, Creek and I had never really been taught how to love in a way that wasn’t smothering.
Before he was deployed—back when I first came out—he took it upon himself to fight all of my battles for me.
And every time I complained about something, he would swoop in with his vicious glare and inability to care whether or not there were consequences to his actions to try and save me.
I loved him for loving me that much, but I also realized I couldn’t tell him everything that was going on with me.
He was the kind of man who’d attempt to fist-fight my stress if he could, and that only made it worse.
Going to the West Coast to be near him and getting some space from the life that had been weighing me down came with a cost: cutting him out.
Not entirely, but I knew I couldn’t talk to him about the way I was feeling.
Or the worry that was sitting heavy on my chest.
I had to figure this out on my own, and take comfort in the fact that he was nearby and if—or when—I needed him, he’d be here.
It felt like a fair compromise, though, even if life became a bit of a whirlwind after deciding to pack up and go. I didn’t have much, and since I would be moving in with Nash, I didn’t need to bring much either.
Just my clothes, myself, the pieces of home that made me feel like me, and the hope that this would fix my problems because I wasn’t sure how long I could go on while everything was deteriorating.
The biggest risk I took was being out of a job. I thought, if I were lucky, I might get an interview or two over the next couple of semesters for positions I didn’t want. But then Bayview Community College put an offer on the table I couldn’t refuse.
It was better money, better hours, better classes. It was everything I’d ever hoped to get after walking across the stage for my doctorate in ancient history, looking out across the sea of people and seeing no one but my mother and sister there to watch me.
I couldn’t blame Creek for being absent. He’d been deployed at the time.
But it was lonely without his intense energy that helped me feel like I deserved all of this.
And now…
Well. Now, he was nearby, but he was changed. And so was I. It was nothing like I’d pictured and as much as I’d hoped that the breezy fog off the Pacific might help set me right again. It hadn’t.
Things were the same.
And sometimes, now, they were worse. The weakness, the tremors, the fainting—they were happening weekly, if not daily. I could keep it mostly to myself, but it was getting harder, and at some point, I was going to have to tell someone.
And I was going to need to see a doctor because at this point, I couldn’t keep blaming it on stress.
But that was a problem for future Forest. Right now, I had shit to do.
I was almost done uploading my lesson plans for the day.
Summer sessions were easy, and the online classrooms were intuitive even for someone as technologically inept as I was.
I would have to scan their group chats to make sure they were following the rules, read over one- and two-page papers they had to turn in weekly, then throw the multiple-choice quizzes into the scanner for grading.
The ease of it all meant I could take more naps because the fatigue wasn’t any better here either.
Fighting back a yawn, I hit save. My hands had mostly stopped shaking, and I could stand without the room swaying back and forth, which was something.
Driving was starting to get a little scary.
I had no idea when these little spells were going to hit, and the last thing I wanted was to careen off one of the impossibly steep San Francisco streets and roll my car to death.
My left hand began to tremor again, and I shook it out before taking another breath. “God, what is wrong with me?” I whispered to myself.
The words felt like ash against the back of my throat, threatening to choke me. Something was going on with my body, and I didn’t know what, and the prospect of finding out had me so scared I was shaking in my boots.
Literally.
I was wearing Creek’s old pair of Doc Martens that he’d left behind when he was sent to Texas for basic training. I offered to give them back once, and he’d laughed and said if I’d grown big enough to keep them on my feet, they were mine.
They were a size too big, which made walking with uncooperative feet complicated, but I loved them anyway.
Hitching my bag over my shoulder, I made my way to the door. The more I walked, the steadier I felt, which meant I could get home and enjoy the quiet, soothing vibe of Nash’s place.
Living with Creek’s former NCO presented its challenges.
The worst being the fact that he was an absurdly hot older man who was pretty much every fantasy I’d ever had about another human being.
And he was also completely untouchable. He was gay, yes, but he was my brother’s best friend… and eleven years older than me.
He was sweet and attentive in ways I was wholly unused to, but it became obvious almost immediately that he was like that with everyone.
He wasn’t shy with physical affection either.
That was something I would have to get used to.
Casual touches just didn’t happen where I was from.
And they were not present when I was growing up.
The occasional hair-ruffle from Creek when I did something that made him happy was his version of a bear hug.
So the way Nash just kind of…touched me? The way he’d help steady me if I were ever off balance, or the way he’d sit close enough that our knees would brush together?
It was almost too much. It was a buffet for a starving man, except I wasn’t allowed to have as much as I wanted. I could only take what little I was given. But I was used to that, so it wasn’t difficult to accept.
I was a master at control. And so what if I’d been dreaming a few nights a month—well, a week—okay, every night—about him cornering me, pinning me to the wall, and having his way with me.
But that’s all they were: dreams. They didn’t mean anything.
Every single crush I’d ever had in my life was on someone I had no business wanting. And sure, some of them worked out for short periods, but all of them had been closeted, and they never went anywhere.
So I allowed myself this. A quiet fantasy of a man who would never be mine, and I hoarded the little bits and pieces of affection and attention Nash offered me.
It wasn’t like this crush was going to last forever…
Right?
Everything was fine that afternoon until it wasn’t.