by Quinn Ward
“No, we weren’t at a party. Remember, homework. I have a paper due Monday morning and I’d assume he was doing the same.”
Guilt soured in my stomach. I didn’t outright lie to my parents. Sure, I’d kept things from them, but I’d always been taught that there was more trouble to be had when you lied than there was when you were honest. Lies had a way of compounding; you know, sort of like not telling them about my sexuality led to me not telling them I was attracted to Gabe, which meant I had to come up with a reason for attending UNCW when I’d always dreamed of going to Duke, and now I was lying about what had Gabe so exhausted this morning. I was a crappy son.
“Maybe we can let him sleep for a bit and go to breakfast. We could bring back something for him,” Gwen suggested. I Could have kissed her for stepping in to help with my mom. I wondered how panicked I must’ve looked for her to have such an abrupt change from insisting Gabe get his lazy butt out of bed.
When my mom turned to assess our accommodations, Gwen winked at me to tell me she knew something. But was she speculating or did she know about us? I wasn’t sure which I feared more.
“Actually, how about I run this upstairs. I’ll write him a note to text us when he gets up, and then we can take off. Maybe we can head down to the beach or something.” Playing tour guide wasn’t my idea of a fun Saturday morning when I’d been promised a weekend filled with sexual exploration, but it was light-years better than letting them walk into our room while it stank.
“Sure, honey.” Gwen patted my cheek and told me she and mom would wait for me out front. I loved that woman hard.
I hammered on the call button for the elevator, willing it to hurry the hell up. As soon as the doors opened, I stepped inside and waited close enough to the door that I’d scare anyone who was waiting in the hall when they opened.
The door opened and I sprinted to our suite, tossing the tray of food on top of our nightstand dresser. “Babe, you gotta get up.”
“Go ’way,” Gabe grumbled, tucking the blanket over his head. “Too early.”
“I’m not playing, Gabe. You have to get your butt out of bed. I went down to grab breakfast since we skipped dinner, and I had an unpleasant surprise.”
Gabe shot upright. “What’s wrong? Are you okay? No one tried fucking with you, did they?”
“No, my knight in shining armor, nothing so pleasant,” I teased. Eventually, his incessant need to take care of me would grow old. I was totally capable of taking care of myself if I felt threatened. I didn’t need to call my boyfriend to my rescue. “The moms are here.”
“What do you mean they’re here?” He rubbed the sleep from his eyes, reaching for the coffee he’d gotten used to me having ready for him when he woke up if I wasn’t already in class. I shook my head and crossed the room to start the brew as I explained the surprise attack this morning.
“They think you’re still asleep, so I’m going to go to breakfast with them and then maybe head down to the beach for a bit.”
“Why do you get to go for breakfast on their dime and I have to stay here?”
“Because while they complain to me about how we forget that we promised to visit, you’re going to clean the room. It stinks and we need to make sure there’s nothing we don’t want them to see. If they had their way, they’d have come up here with me.”
Without even turning on the light, I knew there was a bottle of lube, a box of condoms, and the small butt plug Gabe had teased me with last night sitting on the dresser. If they’d come up, our only hope of holding onto our dignity would have been them being too distracted by the mess to notice.
Gabe looked around the room as he sipped his coffee. “It’s not that bad in here.”
“No, but it stinks. Cleaning everything to make sure it passes a white glove test will make the room smell more like responsible adults and less like horny teenagers.”
“But we are horny teenagers,” Gabe argued.
“Yeah, but are you ready to tell your mom we’re screwing around?”
Gabe shrugged. Crap. Was he thinking about telling them the truth? No, he would have told me if he was going to do anything like that. “We’re going to have to break it to them at some point.”
“Yeah, but do you want that to be what we do this weekend? Because you know they’re going to have plenty to say about it. My mom will cry because I didn’t tell her I was gay as soon as I knew, then she’ll lose her shit because I’m with you.”
“Hey, I’m not that bad.” Gabe tossed a pillow at me and I threw it back, nearly dumping his cup of coffee all over the bed.
“You know they’re not going to accept us being together. Even if both families are cool with us being gay, being gay together is totally different.” If I wasn’t careful, I was going to work myself into a full-blown panic attack. Every fear I had about our families finding out about our relationship came spewing out of my mouth.
Gabe set down his coffee and wrapped his arms around my waist, pulling me into the bed with him. He held me tightly, letting me vent all my anxiety. When I was done, he rubbed my back and kissed my shoulder. “Feel better. Now?”
“A little, yeah,” I admitted. Giving a voice to everything that’d been running through my mind should have compounded my fear, but instead, I realized partway through how ridiculous I sounded. Some of my worries were completely justified, but I knew, deep down, that Gabe would be there to help me face whatever came our way. “I’m sorry. I know you want us to say screw it to what everyone else thinks and do our own thing, but I’m not wired that way. As much as I care about you, I do worry about the family turning their backs on us because they think we’re freaks.”
“We’re not freaks, perverts, deviants, or anything else,” he said with conviction. “If anyone thinks that, that’s a failing on their part. Is our situation ideal? No. But you know what? Every relationship has hurdles to jump. Ours just happen to be a bit higher and more complicated. But we’re worth it.”
“I know.” I sighed, wishing I didn’t have to get back downstairs to head out for breakfast. Even if we didn’t do anything else, laying here with Gabe was my idea of a perfect Saturday morning.
“But to answer the question that started this entire spiral, no, I’m not thinking about coming out to them anytime soon. I’m not stupid enough to think I’ll be able to hide the way I feel about you forever, but maybe by the time we’re ready to admit what’s been going on, they’ll have their suspicions and it won’t be a shock. They’ll see how we treat one another and they’ll eventually agree we’re what they always hoped for in partners for their kids.”
“Well, except the whole part where we’re guys. I don’t know about Gwen and Joel, but my mom and dad weren’t dreaming of me falling in love with a man.” I decided against telling him I had a hunch his mom knew something was up.
“Is that your way of admitting you do love me?” His voice was more uncertain than I’d ever heard it.
“Did you doubt that I do?”
“Well, every time I brought it up, you changed the subject as quickly as possible, so I wasn’t sure.” This raw vulnerability from Gabe was new. Unnerving. But also reassuring, because it proved the one thing I’d been on the fence about; there was no longer any doubt he was as serious about us as I was.
“I’ve loved you since before I knew how to put a name to the emotion. When other kids at school started talking about the girls they liked, I wished I could tell them I felt that way about you.”
“Damn, it’s too early for this many heavy conversations.” I glanced back and noticed Gabe’s eyes looked suspiciously shiny in the low light peeking between our curtains. “I’m glad you finally told me. That’s part of why I hadn’t wanted to do more than fool around with you. I told myself it’d be easier that way if you decided you wanted to see other people.”
“Never,” I assured him, nearly adding a quip about how I didn’t have time to date anyone who wasn’t sleeping in the same room as me to break the tension. I stopped m
yself, because I was beginning to see how fragile Gabe’s ego was when it came to us.
“As nice as this is, you should probably head back downstairs before your mom comes up to see if you got lost,” he told me, playfully pushing me out of bed. “I’ll clean up, open the window, maybe find one of those air freshener things Seth sticks everywhere, and then I’ll text you.” He seemed determined to not let me down on this. He understood now just how much it’d messed with my head to think about our families finding out what we’d been getting up to since moving away from home, and I had faith he’d do everything in his power to help me keep us a secret until we were both ready to make a big announcement.
8
Gabe
Trevor grew withdrawn in the weeks following the great mom visit. Staying in Wilmington on the weekends wasn’t an option, lest they start piecing together what had kept us there that one weekend. And even when we were at school during the week, he buried himself in his projects, always having an excuse when I invited him to chill with me for a movie.
I made it until early November before I snapped and called him out on it. It was my short day, which meant I’d had hours alone in our room to rehearse what I wanted to say to him. It wasn’t cool that he’d told me he loved me and then pulled away. I never thought of myself as the clingy boyfriend, but I was desperately trying to hold onto what I thought we had.
Knowing confronting him the minute he walked through the door wasn’t the approach that’d get me the results I wanted, I snatched my keys off the rack and made a run to the market about an hour before he got home from class. I picked up all his favorite junk foods, the crap we always bought when we were going fishing for the weekend when we were in high school. I wanted to remind him of simpler times, prove to him he was making this thing between us more complicated than it needed to be. By the time he got home, I had everything laid out in the commons area on the old sleeping bag Mom had sent home last weekend in case I got cold. The only person home tonight was Seth, and when I’d warned him I was taking over the room with a real TV, he’d promised to steer clear.
“What’s all this?” Trevor asked, already starting to pull books and binders out of his backpack.
“I thought we could have a mini date night,” I told him, feeling heat rise in my cheeks. Maybe this was a stupid idea. I rushed to explain myself before he could reject me. “I know you’re buried in shit for school, but I miss spending time with you. I miss us, Trev.”
“I’m right here. I’m sorry I can’t blow off my classes to make out, but you knew this would happen eventually.” Trevor crossed his arms tightly over his chest, backing away from me. When I reached out for him, he shook his head. Tonight was going sideways in a hurry.
“I know. I’m not trying to say you’re to blame for anything, only that I miss the time we used to spend together.” Before our moms came and spooked you, was left unsaid. This had seemed like a foolproof plan earlier, but he was defensive and I worried we’d be in a full-on spat before long.
I walked slowly across the room, not wanting him to feel cornered or smothered, and placed a hand on his hip. “I know this semester’s nuts for you. That’s why I figured we could chill for a little while, maybe I could give you a massage because your neck’s gotta be killing you, and then you can get your work done. I’m trying to help us find a balance here, Trev.”
“I know. And I’m sorry if you think I’m ignoring you.”
“It’s not about that,” I lied. I did feel cast aside, but I held out this long by reminding myself I knew how Trevor’s mind worked and how frustrated he was about everything he had going on. Still, it stung to hear him talking about all his new friends in his study groups while I spent most of my time sitting alone in this fucking room.
Hell, I’d gotten so bored at one point I’d knocked on Seth’s door and asked if he wanted to hang out for a bit one night when Trev wasn’t coming home until late. As it turned out, Seth was a pretty cool kid. He was just having a hard time acclimating to his newfound freedom. If I thought DeeDee was a helicopter mom, hovering over Trevor to make sure he didn’t get hurt, Seth’s parents sounded more like hot air balloon parents. Not the type who soared freely around the countryside in the early morning hours, but the kind at the fair, tethered to a leash that’d only allow them to drift so far in any direction.
I pulled Trevor down onto the sleeping bag and ripped open a bag of his favorite chips. Just the smell of the salt and vinegar made me want to hurl, but today, it was a scent I associated with Trevor, a reminder that I hadn’t lost him, no matter what my insecurities said. Speaking of insecurity…. “Trev, can I ask you something?”
“Anything.” He positioned himself between my legs and relaxed against my chest. I started rubbing his arms, noticing how tense he was. I kneaded harder, loving the way he moaned as the tension fled his body, hoping it wouldn’t return once the conversation turned heavy.
“Do you wish we’d taken time to get to know other people before jumping into this relationship?”
“No. Why would you even think that?” He sounded genuinely offended. His voice was much smaller when he asked the next question. “Do you want that?”
“Not at all, but you’re hanging out more with your other friends, so I wasn’t sure.”
“Babe, those aren’t so much my friends as they are study partners. I’d love it if I had an easy course load and could be here with you, but that’s not always possible.” He sat up and I missed his heat, the cold feeling like he was pulling away in more ways than physically.
I yanked him back, unwilling to let him escape until we resolved this issue. He wiggled when I tightened my arms around his chest, but eventually settled. “Would it be totally selfish of me to ask that we figure out a time when we could be together and have that be our time?”
“I’d like that,” he responded, starting to relax again. “There may be times when I have to ask to reschedule, but I think it’d do both of us a lot of good to make a concerted effort here. The further we get into our studies, the harder everything’s going to be, and I don’t want to lose you. Not over something stupid like this.”
“I like the sounds of that. And you swear you’re not trying to find a way to let me down easy? You’ve been acting funny ever since your mom came down to visit.” I buried my face against Trevor’s neck, soaking up the smell of him. Yes, I even missed that.
“I’ll admit it messed with my head,” he told me, opening a can of Pringles and handing them to me as I surfed through the TV listings to find something short we could watch together before I sent him into the other room to work on the paper he’d been freaking out about. “When they came up to see the room, my mom kept looking at the beds. It was like she somehow knew the loft hadn’t been slept in. I’m probably being stupid, but I’ll try to do better.”
“You’re not stupid,” I assured him. “I know how much you hate not being honest with people, and your parents aren’t just anyone. It’s gotta be eating you alive.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean you should be punished for it.”
I didn’t see it as punishment, exactly, but we were in a good place, so I let it drop. Finding an episode of Mythbusters, I set down the remote and leaned back against the couch so I could properly snuggle with Trevor. It felt like such an unmanly thing to do, but I loved it. I loved feeling him in my arms, which was probably why I never felt pressure to ask if he was ready to take that final leap.
No, we still hadn’t had anal sex. Ass play, sure, but there was something about penetrating him that made me nervous. I’d never done it before, so I worried that even with the abundant research he’d done on how to make it less painful, I’d hurt him. Then there was the standard fear that I’d love it so much I’d come before I fully entered him. No one wanted to be known as a one-stroke wonder. He deserved more.
A while later, I woke to Trevor straddling me, wiping away a string of drool from the corner of my mouth. Not my sexiest moment. “This has really b
een bugging you, huh?”
“A bit.” The truth was, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a good night of sleep. Every night, I held Trevor until he crashed, then watched him, wondering if he was right and we were going to fuck up nineteen years of friendship, all because we couldn’t keep our hands to ourselves. Eventually, I’d pass out, but then he’d wake up and I’d pretend to sleep while I watched him get ready for the day. After he left, I buried my face in his pillow, wishing anything about college was like the fantasies I’d built up for the past year.
“Weren’t you the one who said we needed to talk when we got into our own heads?” he reminded me, standing before extending a hand to help me off the ground. When we were chest to chest, he pulled me into a tight hug, breathing against my neck. “I know things are different than how you expected, but we’ll get through this. We always do.”
“I know.”
An alarm went off on his phone and Trevor winced. “Crap. So, this is really bad timing, but I forgot I’m supposed to meet a few guys from my history class at the union. Are you going to be okay if I take off?”
“Yeah. I didn’t bring this up to guilt you into bailing on your study groups,” I told him, packing a sandwich, some of the chips, and a Cheerwine.
“I know you didn’t. Maybe we can pick this up where we left off later? I shouldn’t be gone past nine.”
“That works,” I said, trying to come across cool and unaffected.
“Cool.” Trevor kissed me, thanked me for packing him something to eat, and was almost to the door when he turned back. “You know, it might do you some good to get out of the suite from time to time. I don’t like knowing you’re holing yourself up in here whenever I’m not around.”
“I’ll think about it,” I told him, not willing to make any promises.