SULLIVAN #3
“A few months, and then that summer, before my senior year he wanted me to stay with him so he could give me more intensive lessons.”
Knight breathes again. “Did you want that?”
“Anything was better,” I say. “I couldn’t stand being around my mom.
My dad was so fucked up, and every time I saw him, I thought it’d be the last time, and I wanted it to be.
I wanted him to just fucking go ahead and die and my sister, she—” And here’s where the shame takes on a new shade of color.
A deeper, darker shade. “I wanted her to go to. To give my mom some fucking peace because she seemed like such a burden, and no one saw me. No one saw me but him and I was being so fucking selfish.”
“You were just a kid.”
“Don’t make excuses for me.”
He does anyway. “You were alone, and you were scared, and you were looking for a way out.”
“I was selfish. I was stupid. I was naive and—” I cut myself off.
“Desperate,” he finishes for me with the word I didn’t want to use.
I sob again before wiping my face with both hands.
I blurt out the rest, or most of it. “You know, I never really had to do anything. He just wanted to like—touch me or—blow me or whatever. He didn’t ever ask me to do anything to him.
He wouldn’t even want me to touch him, which was good because I had no idea what I was doing anyway, and I didn’t even know if I wanted a man doing that stuff to me.
I’d always pictured being with a girl before that, and it was confusing the way I got turned on, and you know like—basically was asking for it. ”
Knight is quiet enough to make me go quiet. I gulp down air because I said way too much, and I don’t even force his hands to stay on me anymore, but they do anyway. He gives my shoulders a firm rub.
“But you know now he was hurting you?” he finally asks.
I don’t answer that. Instead, I say, “He was married. He is married. To another man. And I don’t know what their dynamic is or if they have sex or what, but the deal sort of shifted when the husband really came into the picture.”
“Shifted how?” Knight asks in a low, deadly voice.
“The husband wanted more than what I was giving Adrian.”
“Adrian?”
Oh fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I whirl around, my vision having adjusted in the dark tunnel, and I can see the look on Knight’s face clearly enough. He’s memorizing this. Every word I’m saying. He’s taking mental notes, and he’ll remember, he’ll—“Knight, please, please, forget I said that. Forget everything I said.”
His head ticks once, twice, almost mechanically from side to side. “What did the husband want?”
“What do you think he wanted?” I ask, angry now, at myself for letting the name slip, refusing to say any more.
“And this is what you’re going to Detroit for? More violin lessons? Will the husband be there?”
I shrug.
“You don’t know?” he demands.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I don’t know who’s gonna be there. I don’t get to know those things. It’s his house. I’m a guest. I’m his protégé, and I take what I’m given.”
Knight’s hand flies up to cover his mouth, and he takes a step away. The shame now feels like it’s the shape of my body, coating me in something ugly and vile, something contagious. “What does that mean?” he asks, barely dropping his hand.
I shake my head violently. “I need to go. I don’t want to be here.”
“Sullivan,” he says sharply as I move to walk around him. I don’t stop until he takes hold of my arm, dropping it as quickly as he stops me in my tracks. “Thank you for telling me.”
A bitter laugh barks out of me, and the tears dry up because all the gut deep emotion is gone, replaced with a numb tingling in all my limbs.
“Can I ask you one more question?”
“What?” I snap.
“How does it end?”
“End?”
“How does this whole thing with them—when does it stop? You’re a grown man now. You’re strong, and you’re fast, and you could get your own scholarship at this point. When does it stop? Do you just say something?”
“It’s not that simple. If it was—”
“What if it is?”
“It’s cute that you think that,” I say. “Like it’s really adorable that you think he’s just what? Some rich old violin teacher who saw me at a show and took me home to play with? That’s not who Adrian is.”
Knight takes a few deep breaths. I’ve stopped trying to leave because he’s my ride, and I can find my way back to the dorm and call an Uber, I guess, but something deep inside me is telling me not to leave like that. That I might never see him again if I leave like that.
“Don’t go,” he says.
“I’m standing right here.”
“I mean don’t go to Detroit.”
I shake my head. “You don’t get it. I don’t have a choice.
” And right now, I’m thinking about that kid Adrian showed me the video of.
The next in line. The kid who might be as lonely and touch-starved as I was when Adrian put his hand on my lower belly and told me to control my breathing while his finger traced a line behind my waistband and got me hard.
“You have choices,” he says. “You just don’t like the consequences, so what are they? Besides the money?”
“He’s just gonna do it to someone else,” I blurt.
Knight blinks rapidly. “Can you go to the police?”
“Just because he’s disgusting doesn’t mean he’s a criminal. Unfortunately.”
“I can’t believe that. None of this—what he did—was against any law?”
I huff. “I don’t think so. Not in Michigan.”
“That’s fucking unbelievable. Not even what his husband did?”
I shake my head. “I let it happen. Maybe I’m the person you want to be pissed off at.”
He exhales the entire tunnel’s worth of air. “No. No, I’m not mad at you. I’m fucking worried about you. You said they hurt you.”
“And I let them.”
“Well, what the fuck else were you supposed to do?” he cries out, and he sounds as helpless as I’ve felt for years.
The answer to his question, though? It was to not be so selfish.
To be okay with getting a job in Sunrise Point.
Help out with my sister. Send off homemade demos to music producers and cross my fingers they wouldn’t get lost in their email.
Hope for better days like normal people do instead of taking advantage of a situation that I knew on every single level was wrong because of this dumb belief that Adrian put in my head that I deserved more. Better. Everything.
Only to be left feeling like nothing.
I start crying again as I sink down to the train tracks, my legs folded beneath me and my head in my hands.
Knight is there with me in a heartbeat, and his arms are around me.
I put mine around him and sob into his shirt, the wall of muscle utterly unforgiving against my nose. It’s an ugly cry and a long one.
When it’s finally tapering off, Knight presses a kiss against the side of my head. He says, “I need you to do something for me.”
I nod, waiting for it.
“I need you to ask him how he’d like to wrap this arrangement up. At least then you’ll know his end game.”
I don’t say anything, and he finally speaks again.
“You don’t think I spent this whole semester training you to be strong and fit just to let you go get yourself hurt again, do you?
I need you to look in the mirror, Sullivan.
I need you to see what I see. And then go there and be the man they thought they could keep down. ”
I clutch at his shirt. “Don’t let go,” I whisper.
“I won’t if you won’t.”
“I won’t,” I say. Not ever.
I’ll love him forever.