14. Samuel
SAMUEL
WHAT IF THIS WERE REAL LIFE?
My eyes needed a moment to adjust when Benji turned on the lights in his room. He jumped past the unmade twin bed on the right and went straight for the white closet door.
Even though he’d already been without a shirt for more than twenty minutes, I still couldn’t take my eyes off him. He had the nicest chest I had ever seen—not that I’d seen many in real life. His necklace nestled between his pecs, pulling my attention right to it.
I didn’t want to think about Benji this way; nothing would ever come of it.
But how was I supposed to turn off these thoughts?
He had defended me from this guy, Pete. He had openly told me that he thought about what it was like to kiss a man.
He had been holding me in his arms, breathing down my neck.
How could I not read something into that?
He yanked the closet door open, rummaging through the mess in the shelves behind it like he wanted to show off his tanned shoulder blades.
It was hard to tell if he worked out or if it was just the farm work.
He wasn’t overly defined, yet still enough, to make my thoughts drift to places I wouldn’t have allowed myself before tonight.
With a groan, he punched the clothes on the shelves and turned toward the dresser on the left.
The stacks of comics on top wobbled as he yanked the second drawer from the top open.
Shirts spilled out like they hadn’t seen the room in years, finally able to catch some air.
He rummaged through them, checking several as if he had one exact shirt in mind. And I still stared at his chest.
“If you want to take pictures, that’ll cost ya,” Benji said, without looking up.
“Sorry, I was…” I tore my eyes off him and forced them out the window on the left that overlooked the corn field. “…lost in my thoughts.”
“Sure.” Benji handed me a blue shirt, his head tilting back as his grin grew wider.
“Had to catch up with all those stories you came up with so you wouldn’t spin the web too far, huh?
” He pulled a black tank top over his head and walked past me, scooping up the clothes from the brown armchair by the window and tossing them onto his bed. “Sorry for the mess.”
“No worries.” I unrolled the shirt Benji had handed me and found a big print of a blue cartoon elephant giving a thumbs up.
It was dumb because elephants neither had thumbs nor were they blue, but I certainly wasn’t going to point that out.
I turned away—as if he hadn’t already seen my bare chest—and pulled the shirt over my head.
“Thank you for the—” I said as I turned around, but stopped mid-sentence when I found Benji staring at me.
He had made himself comfortable on the floor between the armchair and the tube TV with a GameTube console hooked up to it, his bare feet digging into the carpet.
His eyes pierced through me as if I were a piece of meat and he, a hungry lion.
“What?” I asked.
“Nothing,” Benji said with a smirk. “I just still can’t believe you came up with a story like that so quickly. Didn’t you pride yourself earlier on being a terrible liar?”
I blushed. “I was surprised myself, to be honest.” I took a step toward him and sat down on the floor beside him, cross-legged.
“You can have the chair.”
“I’m good. Thank?—”
“Stop thanking me so much. It makes me want to stop being nice to you.” Benji propelled his head against the wall, but gasped right away.
His left hand rushed to his crown, tapping over the spot; luckily, there was no red when he brought them back before him.
“Shouldn’t have done that,” he chuckled, his eyes sparkling at me.
I shook my head in agreement.
He stretched out his legs and let out a deep sigh, leaning back against the wall, carefully this time, closing his eyes.
“What a day.”
He wasn’t wrong. If this day had already been out of the ordinary for him, what should I say? I’d never been involved in a fight like this, not to speak of dealing with all the aftermath.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
Benji opened his eyes. “Sure.”
“Who was that guy, the one you fought with?” I had seen him before. He was the one Benji had clashed with when my dad and I drove past the pharmacy.
“You mean Pete?” Benji leaned his head back. “He’s my stupid, useless cousin from my good-for-nothing uncle on my father’s side. He can’t stand that I don’t put up with his shit.”
“What shit?”
“Shit like the shit you experienced? Have you already forgotten what he called you?” Benji pulled his legs in and rested his arms on his knees.
“Sorry, you had to hear that, by the way. It probably wouldn’t have happened if he hadn’t caught you with me.
Ever since I started standing up to him, he’s provoking me and everyone who’s around me every chance he gets. ”
“Oh, it’s nothing. I heard stuff like that before. It’s easy to ignore,” I replied, but only earned myself another of Benji’s piercing gazes.
“Do people give you a hard time often because of... you know?”
“Sometimes, but mostly not.” I shrugged, like Pete’s words hadn’t stung. “As I said, I’m pretty good at ignoring it. I just lay low, and it mostly works.”
“You said the word mostly twice now.”
“Well, not everybody’s as understanding as you.”
We locked eyes with each other. A shy smile tugged at my mouth. If Benji hadn’t told me to stop thanking him all the time, I would’ve said it now.
Even though I tried to play it off, being gay in this town wasn’t always easy to bear.
I had always been an outsider for several reasons.
Even as a child, I was always reading—novels, non-fiction, whatever I could get my hands on.
Reading doesn’t make you friends. A nerd, that’s what everyone called me, including Dad, when he thought I couldn’t hear him.
Things got easier when I got a smartphone.
Everyone constantly stared at theirs, so no one noticed me using mine to read.
But even hiding behind a screen didn’t fix it.
I still felt like I didn’t belong. Most of my birthday parties had been just my parents and me.
I hadn’t gone to town with pretty much anyone, let alone been at someone’s house, ever since the one friend I had, Mateo, moved away after we graduated.
So when I figured out that I wasn’t like the others in more than one way, I decided to keep that part to myself—not hide it, but not force it onto anyone either.
Mateo was the only one who knew, not because I told him, but because one night after our graduation, when I stayed over at his place, we ended up in bed together.
It wasn’t planned. He had never given me any vibes in that direction. It just happened.
That night felt like the best night of my life—until he told me he was moving away in two weeks, the next morning.
I tried to keep in touch with him, texted him now and then, clinging to whatever scraps of connection I could, but after a few weeks, he stopped replying.
The silence turned the whole night into a joke I no longer found funny.
All I could think about was how easily he left me behind, like I had never been worth the effort, not even as a friend.
Ever since then, I’d been waiting it out, counting the days to the not-yet-set date when I could move too. Why waste the effort on people who wouldn’t like the real me, or who I had to leave behind eventually if I finally got into college?
But the closer summer got, the more obvious it became that the dream of college was dying, too. I wouldn’t move anytime soon, probably not ever. I started the job at the farm and, without meaning to, overheard Benji and Gordy talking.
Benji became a silver lining within seconds.
He didn’t have a problem with the real me.
He was so different from me, but in some ways, we were similar.
From everything I knew, Benji also had trouble fitting in—be it for very different reasons—with the slight difference that instead of hiding like I did, he chose to fight.
And I couldn’t deny that with everything we’ve already been through since we met, the urge to grow that connection with him grew rapidly, not necessarily as a romantic partner, but as a friend.
“Well,” I said and took a deep breath. “I know you don’t want me to say it, but I appreciate that you stood up for me. No one has done that before.”
He stared at me, his lips pulling together, breathing slowly, and after three seconds, he forced his gaze to the ground.
“Of course,” he said, bringing his hand to the back of his head.
“I... I appreciate your help, too. Sorry that my stubborn attitude didn’t allow me to show that.
” He opened his mouth again, but this time didn’t say anything.
He pressed his lips together and tilted his head back to look at the ceiling for a moment before meeting my eyes again.
“Tell me if anyone ever gives you a hard time for being yourself.”
“And then you’ll beat them up?”
“If words don’t help, yeah.”
“You sure do enjoy fighting,” I laughed. “But you don’t have to beat up anyone for my sake. That doesn’t make this world any better.”
Benji’s expression darkened. “I don’t like hurting people. But sometimes, people don’t seem to understand others. Or they don’t want to on purpose.”
The muscles in his arms tensed, his biceps almost doubling in size. He clenched his right hand into a fist, then released it four times in a row, like he was squeezing an invisible stress ball. “Don’t you ever get the urge to just punch reason into people?”
“Not really, no.”
“I also don’t randomly punch people because they annoy me?—”
“That’s also not what I meant to imply?—”
“Don’t worry,” Benji cut in and paused before going on. “I know.”