I miss u so damn much. I want to hold u, touch u. I want to run my tongue all over ur body, feel u inside me.
I blushed at that one. Danial cleared his throat and shivered violently.
I rolled my eyes.
I luv u, baby.
I luv u too.
“Oh, God.” Danial groaned. “I hope they blow up something soon cause all this sweetness and love is making my teeth hurt.”
He took one more look over me at Juliet, then slunk down in his seat.
I grinned and threw my arm over his shoulder.
He leaned into me and pressed his mouth close to my ear and said in a low breathy voice, “I want to feel you inside me.” Then he snorted, causing Ma and Pa Jones in front of us to turn around again. Danial gave them a little finger wave. The Missus huffed and turned back to the movie.
I sneered at Danial and took my arm back.
A man sitting behind us leaned forward. “You boys need to take that homo crap some other place. We don’t want to see you queers touching each other while we’re watching a movie. There are kids in this theater.”
My face flushed in anger, and I started to my feet, but Danial placed a firm hand on my arm and shook his head. I reluctantly settled down. He calmly turned to the man behind us. “Keep your eyes on the movie, asshole, and off my boyfriend.” Then he put his arm around me again and muttered, “And it’s staying here for the rest of the movie even if I get a fucking cramp in my shoulder.”
The guy behind us didn’t say another word. Danial shifted uncomfortably a couple of times, but he refused to put his arm down even after I whispered he’d made his point. I wasn’t complaining though. I kinda liked his arm around me.
“What the hell is going on?” Juliet asked.
“Nothing,” I told her, then smiled so she’d get that worried look off her face. Mike whispered something to her and she turned back to him.
Later in the movie, some redneck stumbled on his way back up the stairs, splashing some of his soda on Danial. It didn’t look like an accident.
When the movie was over, Danial finally retrieved his arm and rubbed his shoulder, presumably to get his circulation going again. I laughed. “Serves you right.” The jerk behind us left before the credits ran. The couple in front of us was quick to exit as well.
We took a few minutes to stretch before following Juliet and Mike down the steps. About halfway down someone stepped on my heel. “Move, faggot.” I lurched forward and grabbed the handrail for balance.
But Danial had already whipped around and grabbed the guy by the collar, forcing him to back up several steps. I didn’t hear what he said, but when he released him, the guy stumbled backward and landed on his ass. Danial’s face was dark when he turned back and grabbed my arm. “Come on. Let’s go.”
The night was cool. We walked for a bit on Market Street, had a Starbucks, then sat on a park bench on the green and people watched. I hadn’t heard from Adam in an hour or so, even though I’d texted several more times. That bugged me. I didn’t like not knowing what he was doing, and I didn’t like not liking not knowing. Finally, annoyed, Danial had taken my phone and stuck it in his pocket.
The party had gone out of me. Adam. The jerk in the theater. I’d had enough. “I’m gonna head home,” I said. “Mike, you’ll take Jules?”
I couldn’t help notice that Juliet looked a little disappointed.
Danial left with me. We sauntered back toward the movie theater and our cars, not talking much. “I’m on the second floor of the garage,” I said when we got there.
“I’m out in the lot, so I guess I’ll see you Monday,” he said, clapping me on the back.
I gave him a fist bump. “Yeah. Oh, hey, can you clean up a virus? My, uh, grandmother has picked up something on my mom’s computer. It’s causing all these pop-ups.”
“Sure. Bring it over tomorrow afternoon. I’ll text you directions a little later.”
I headed to the garage, then up a flight of stairs. Other than a young couple getting into their SUV, the second floor was empty. I hit the unlock button on my keypad and honed in on the flashing taillights.
I wanted to try Adam again. I reached for my phone; it wasn’t there. “Shit.” Maybe if I hurried I could still catch Danial. I was so wrapped up in my thoughts that the sound of slapping feet on concrete hadn’t registered in my brain until I turned. I stumbled backward into the trunk of my car as something whooshed mere inches from my face. “You didn’t think I was just going to let that go, did you?” a dark figure spat. He reared back again, and I considered the possibility that this was how I was going to die—alone, in a parking garage. This time the damage might not be fixable. I braced myself for the blow. Then a shout—“Hey!”—and Danial was there. A ninja kick sent the guy flying. He smacked the ground, rolled, and fled.
Danial hauled me up by the arm. “Let’s get out of here. Come on. Go. Go.” He had the driver’s side door open and shoved me in and over the console, then got behind the wheel. “Keys!” Numbly, I handed them over. “Goddamn motherfucker. He had a fucking tire iron.”
He cranked the engine and slammed the car in reverse, squealing the tires.
“You okay?”
I didn’t answer. Because, no, I wasn’t okay. I was most definitely not okay.
Danial looked over at me, concern in his eyes. He reached into his pocket and handed me my cell phone. “I forgot about your phone,” he said. “Right after you walked off, you got a call.”
I took the phone and shoved it in my pocket.
“Shit. I should have seen this coming,” he said. “It was that jerk from the theater.”
He pulled up alongside his car. “Can you drive?”
I nodded.
“I’ll follow you home. You sure you’re okay?” he asked again, but all I heard was the umph Adam had exhaled when Cargill kicked him in the gut.
Chapter 27
Last New Year’s Eve
The party’s over
Adam, doubled over, his face contorted in pain, blood dribbling from a busted lip. The big dirty-looking one gripped him in a stranglehold and forced him upright again. “NO!” I sprang forward. Cargill kicked him in the groin an instant before my shoulder connected with his chest, and Adam dropped to his knees.
We went down, rolled, and immediately scrambled to regain our footing. A pain shot through my shoulder. I hesitated just a fraction of a second, but it was enough to give Cargill the advantage. He was on his feet and kicked me in the head. I went down again. I squinted, struggling to focus and fighting back the blackness closing in around the edges of my vision. I got to my knees, but I was too dizzy and nauseated to get to my feet.
“Nate, get out of here,” Adam called hoarsely to me.
“This little faggot’s not going anywhere. You like it on your knees, don’t you, Schaper?” Cargill nudged me with the toe of his shoe.
“Leave him alone,” Adam begged. Then I heard him vomit.
The big kid forced Adam back to his feet but held him fast. “Looks like your little homo friend wants to play in somebody else’s sandbox,” he sneered.
Adam twisted and snarled, but he was no match for the Neanderthal.
I tried again to get a foot underneath me, but just as the sole of my shoe met the flagstone, Cargill grabbed a fistful of my hair and dragged me backward. I yelped out at the sudden pain.
I was off balance, unable to brace myself. I sank my nails into his hand, and he released my hair, spewing a string of curses. I fell backward and rolled to my stomach, but before I could get to my knees another blinding pain exploded from the back of my head. I heard a sickening crack, and everything went fuzzy.
I was facedown on the flagstone when Cargill yanked my hips up.
Chapter 28
I undressed in the dark and climbed under the sheets, still shaking, my cell phone clutched in my hand. I speed-dialed Adam’s number, but all I got was some bullshit cell-customer-you-are-trying-to-reach-is-unavailable message. There
was a missed call and a voice mail. I didn’t recognize the number, but I most definitely recognized the voice.
“Hey, baby! Sorry I missed you. It’s crazy here.” In the background, horns honked and voices stumbled through some drunken version of Adam Lambert’s tribute to gay sex: You thought an angel swept you off your feet. Adam shushed them, but no one shushed. “Another blackout. Can you believe it? The cell towers are down too. I’m borrowing a friend’s landline.” Laughter in the background. Someone calling Adam’s name—Come on, sing with us. “They canceled the museum party, so we’ve just been hanging out on the stoop, having drinks.” He giggled and said in a low voice, “Quit it.” Then, “I’ll call again as soon as we get power back. Gotta go. Love you.”
I pressed the End button and flung the phone across the room.
My cell rang early the next morning—a miracle in itself, in that the battery hadn’t popped out when it hit the wall night before. It was pathetic the way I sprang out of bed and groped around on the floor for it, like a junky needing a fix. I think I could have forgiven anything that morning just to hear his voice. I caught the call on the fourth ring, but it wasn’t his voice on the other end.
“Hey, man. You okay?” Danial said.
Okay? That was an interesting word. Were all my body parts still attached? Yes. Was I bleeding from any orifice? No. Were there any empty pill bottles lying around? No. But okay? “Yeah. I’m fine.”
“Good. Bring your mom’s computer over this afternoon, and I’ll take a look.”
“Sure.”
I jotted down directions, then ended the call and rolled over onto my back. I ran my thumb across the keys on my phone, my eyes fixed to the ceiling. After a moment, I brought the phone to my face and located the two, placed my thumb on it, then dropped my arm back to my side. Don’t think about it; just do it. Don’t think about it. I pressed the two and counted to three, then brought the phone to my ear. The towers were back up, and the phone rang one, two, three times. I was just about to hang up when Adam answered.
“Hey, you,” he croaked, the words barely distinguishable.
“Hey. You sound terrible.”
“I feel worse.” He groaned. “God, I think I’m going to throw up. Hold on.”
I held on. A few minutes later he was back. “I’m dying.”
“That must have been some party on the stoop last night.”
“Mmm. You got my message. Good.” His voice was soft, breathy. “How was your date?”
My date. Wow. That rolled off his tongue way too easily, I thought. “It was okay.”
He didn’t respond.
“Adam?”
“Hmph.”
“I really need to talk to you.”
“Mmm. I’m listening.”
No, he wasn’t. I held the phone to my forehead. Shit.
“Adam?” It was quiet on the other end, and I knew there’d be no talking to him now.
“Go back to sleep. I’ll call you later.”
He disconnected with neither an acknowledgment nor a good-bye.
Chapter 29
“All right, let’s see what you’ve got,” Danial said, lifting the screen and pressing the power button. I stared at the screen as it booted up, but I could feel Danial watching me. It was uncomfortable.
“Where do you work?” I asked to divert his attention from the train wreck next to him.
“Geek Squad.”
Best Buy. Figured.
I knew what was coming, but the pop-ups took Danial totally by surprise.
“Whoa,” he said when the first one hit the screen. He had only a moment to take in the boy-on-boy action before a second pop-up overlaid it, then a third, then a fourth.
I grinned. I don’t know how he did it, but things always seemed just a little less grim when Danial was around. He was like Lil Wayne, but without the dreads or the body art or the prison record. “Uh, as you can see, we have a problem.”
“What the hell have you been looking at on this computer, Natey?”
“Not me, Danial-son. My grandmother.”
He looked at me, his mouth agape. I watched the pop-ups. “She wanted to know what gay men did.” I shrugged and laughed a little. “I guess she knows now. But, uh, TMI for my mom, if you know what I mean.”
“Uh, yeah.” He tapped a few keys to stop the pop-ups, then started closing them one at a time. With just a few left open, he stopped and peered more closely at the remaining pictures. “So, uh, does this stuff turn you on?”
I grinned sheepishly. “Yeah. Doesn’t it turn you on?”
“Uh, not really.” He gave me a sideways glance. “So ... do you and your boyfriend do that?”
“My boyfriend has a name, you know. And, yeah, we do that.” I pointed to the other pictures. “And that, and that.”
He cleared his throat and shook his head violently. “Now that is TMI!”
“You asked.”
He closed the rest of the pop-ups. “So what is it about guys that turns you on?”
“You’re kidding right?”
He raised his eyebrows. “Not kidding. Okay, your boy—I mean, Adam. What is it about him that makes you all gooey inside?”
Gooey? I guess that was a pretty apt word. “You really want to know?”
Danial gestured that he did.
“It’s a lot of little things. The way he feels when I hold him—all hard and muscled. But not too muscled, you know. Just ... solid. I like the way his stubble scratches me when we kiss. The way he can’t hide it when he’s turned on.”
Danial winced.
I laughed. “You did ask. What I don’t get is what you see in girls. They’re so ... squishy.”
“Yes, they are.” He grinned, shaking his head. He inserted a flash drive in a USB port and looked at me sideways. “So, are you one of those guys who thinks he should have been born a girl?”
“What? No, I don’t want to be a girl.” I rolled my eyes. “Look, idiot, the only difference between you and me is what makes our dicks hard. That, and I’m a better guitar player.”
“I have a better tan.”
I laughed. “Yeah, you do. It’s kinda sexy.”
“Down, boy.” He palmed the back of his neck and seemed like he wanted to say something else, but then dropped it. “Let’s see if we can clean this up for Grandma.”
I watched him work for a while, then let my eyes wander around his room. Stuck in the plastic outer sleeve on a one-inch binder lying on the floor was a strip of four black-and-white photos, the kind that you get in those booths in the mall or at Chuck E. Cheese’s. I picked up the binder. I recognized Danial, but not the little kid. “You have a little brother?” I asked.
He glanced at the photos. “Nope. That’s me. I was nine, I think. That’s my big brother. He was ten years older than me.”
Was? He looked so much like Danial. “Where is he?”
Danial took a deep breath and let it out slowly, keeping his eyes on the computer screen. “Dead.”
He removed the flash drive and changed the subject. “Done. Tell your grandmother either ixnay on the Internet porn or she’s going to need some better security on this thing.”
“I’ll tell her you said that.”
“So, how’s the blog coming along?”
“Pretty good if it weren’t for all the whack jobs out there informing me with each post that I’m going to burn in hell.”
“Oh, yeah?” He pulled up the blog and had me log in. “Wow!” he said, looking at the stats. “You’ve had some traffic, here. Pretty impressive.”
He scrolled through some of the blog entries and comments as if he were reading them for the first time, which I knew he wasn’t. “It sure didn’t take long for the self-appointed moral police to set up camp, did it? My, my, my. I’d love to be standing at the pearly gates when these ambassadors of love try to check in. ‘He that loveth not, knoweth not God.’ ”
I studied Danial’s face as he read. He was something of an enigma to me. I had other
guy friends, but we didn’t hang out like this together. Being gay seemed to preclude close male friendships, even with guys who claimed to be perfectly okay with gay. There always seemed to be an emotional distance with other guys that I didn’t feel so much with Danial. I didn’t know if that was because guys in general were emotional wastelands or because subconsciously they feared I might want more than just friendship. Not that Danial and I were close close. But we were getting close. He didn’t seem at all threatened by or awkward around me. I respected him for that.
“Did you read this?” he said, taping the screen with his finger. It was another comment by Xyz123 posted just last night in response to a post I’d titled “That’s Disgusting!”
Thanks for another great blog, Nate! I agree totally!! I don’t understand why people would think that it’s disgusting when cute boys make out, but not when Donald Trump does the dirty with a girl 30 years younger than him. I mean, have you seen that hair? What’s up with that? Anyway, all that should matter is that the two people kissing (or whatever ) are attracted to each other. Keep writing. Maybe someday I’ll have the courage to come out too. Did you know October 11 is National Coming Out Day? BTW, I really liked the Sexy Bitch T. I hope you’ll wear it again.
“Xyz123 has posted a comment to every blog you’ve written. Did you notice that?”
“Yeah. Apparently he’s a sophomore at school.”
“Do you have any idea who he is?”
“Uh-uh. But I really feel for him. He seems afraid of what his parents will do if they find out he’s gay.”
Don't Let Me Go Page 14