“You don’t know what I put him through.”
“No, I don’t. Tell me.”
We walked the entire length of the golf course. I talked. Danial listened, stopping me here and there to ask questions, but otherwise letting me talk without commentary. I told him about the New Year’s Eve party, the brutal assault that was still so vivid in my mind, the weeks in the hospital healing physically, and the months that followed when I struggled so hard to heal emotionally. Dodging calls from my therapist, trying desperately to pretend everything was okay when it was anything but. Facing my dad and my classmates and their stupid, flippant, inconsiderate comments that sucked the soul out of me. Being deposed by my attorney about the most intimate details of my relationship with Adam in front of my mom. And then the trial. God, the trial. That had broken me.
Chapter 35
Last March 17
The trial
In the fourth-floor hallway of the criminal courthouse, on the northern edge of downtown Houston, I huddled with Adam and a small group of friends. Adam held firmly to the back of my neck, kneading the muscles there with his thumb, trying to relax me as Mike urged me to stay strong. Beyond that, no one seemed to have much to say.
My mom reached an arm into our circle to get my attention. “The prosecutor needs to meet with us.”
“Okay.” I took a ragged breath and stood tall. “I guess this is it.” I acknowledged their pats on the shoulder with a wan smile and turned to go. That’s when I saw my dad. What little courage I had managed to amass from our group bonding ran down my leg.
“Nate,” he said stonily. He nodded his head once, but there was no encouraging hand on the shoulder, no hug, no nothing that would connect this man to me beyond a mere acknowledgment of my existence. His eyes flicked to Adam’s tight grip on my hand as the others melted into the background.
I swallowed hard. “Dad, this is Adam.”
“I know who he is.”
Adam stayed with me, always with a steadying hand on my elbow or my shoulder or my knee, until the bailiff called for everyone to rise and announced the judge. Only then did he take his seat behind me in the gallery.
Andrew Cargill was seated with his attorney at the table across the aisle, dressed in a suit like some kind of choir boy. I avoided looking at him, opting instead to keep my head down and my eyes on my hands, trembling in my lap. My stomach turned over. Mr. Maldonado, my attorney, looked over his notes, then leaned over to speak to me in a low voice. “Relax, Nate. It will be hours before you have to take the stand.”
But those hours that followed were like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. Witnesses were called and questioned. My face burned with shame when friends testified as to what they saw that night in the moments immediately following the attack.
But it wasn’t until the defense attorney questioned Adam that the most intimate details of our lives were laid bare for everyone to gawk at. I was grateful that my family and friends were sitting behind me. I could feel my dad’s humiliation and disgust mounting. I didn’t have to look at his face to know it was there.
Adam answered every question with a calm and confidence that I envied. When the prosecutor asked him to describe his relationship with me, he looked at me and smiled before answering. “I love Nate,” he said simply. The defense attorney tried to twist the details of our relationship and make it seem perverted. He tried to twist the events of that night to make us look like consensual partners in the crime. But Adam dismissed all as nonsense and repeatedly laid out the facts as if he were talking to a mentally challenged child.
When the judge dismissed Adam, I was sure the worst was behind me. What was left to say?
But I was wrong. Sensing I was the weak one, the defense attorney had saved his best for me. He hammered me with questions about our sex life. When did I last have sex? How many times? Where? Did I enjoy anal sex? Did we ever insert objects into each other’s anuses? Had I ever looked at gay porn? He was relentless with his questions. Maldonado objected repeatedly, but the questions were allowed more often than not. The more the prosecutor pushed, the more I stammered and fumbled my way through near incoherent answers. It was everything Maldonado had tried to prepare me for, and more, and while I knew Adam was right, I wasn’t on trial here, it didn’t feel that way. I shook so hard my teeth chattered. Maldonado, seeing what was happening, made a motion for a recess.
The judge granted us fifteen minutes, and I fled the courtroom.
The hallway spun as I stumbled toward the stairwell past people on cell phones and attorneys speaking to clients in tense little huddles. I slammed into the bar on the door, releasing the latching mechanism, and fell onto the landing inside. From there I made my way quickly down the three flights of stairs to the lobby below, then out into the city. I expected someone to grab my elbow at any second or to suddenly block my path, but no one did, and once I was free of the claustrophobia of the courthouse, I just kept going. I yanked the knot loose on my tie and trailed it on the sidewalk, then abandoned it altogether. When my cell phone vibrated in my pocket, I turned it off.
I wandered for hours, maybe. No plan. I was completely lost in the city, and soon I was, literally, completely lost. Not that I noticed or cared. When I was too tired to walk anymore, I slid down the wall of a brick building in what appeared to be an older part of the city—a building that seemed to be held up by only the collection of homeless men leaning against it. I closed my eyes. What I couldn’t do in my own bed without pills anymore, I did well holding up that wall. I slept. Or maybe I just passed out.
“Are you Nathan Schaper?”
I opened my eyes. On the sidewalk in front of me was a pair of shiny black shoes. I closed my eyes again, confused and too tired to care. He repeated the question, and this time when I opened my eyes the police officer was stooped down in front of me. I nodded my assent and realized my cheek was resting on the concrete.
“Your family’s pretty worried about you, son. Are you okay?”
I sat up, and answered him dully.
“Let’s go,” he said, standing and offering me his hand. “I’m going to take you home.”
I didn’t get all the pieces put together until we were in the police cruiser and well on our way. The policeman was talking to someone on his radio. I searched my pants pockets for my phone, but it was gone. In fact, my suit jacket was gone as well. Mom was going to be pissed. Without warning, tears blurred my vision and spilled down my grimy cheeks.
“Rough day?” the cop said, passing a travel pack of tissues through the bars that protected him from nut jobs in his backseat.
I took the tissues without answering.
It was dark when he pulled up in front of my house. The front door opened before he got the car in park, and Adam sprinted out, Mom and Grandma right on his heels. He pulled me from the car and crushed me to him and the tears started all over again. He let me go long enough for Mom and Grandma to check me over.
“Let me talk to him,” Adam said to Mom in a low voice when she finally let me go.
She nodded and turned her attention to the police officer, and Adam ushered me inside.
I don’t know what I expected, but I didn’t expect to be roughed up. Still, that’s what it felt like when Adam pulled out a dining room chair and none too gently told me to sit. I sat. He pulled out a second chair and turned it to face me and sat down. He propped his elbows on his knees, fisted his hands together, and pressed his chin into them. When his eyes met mine, they were hard. He didn’t say anything, just looked at me for a long time, and when I couldn’t stand it anymore, I started babbling.
“I know you’re mad,” I said wearily. I tried to explain that I just needed to get out of there, that I didn’t know what the protocol was and that maybe I’d have to go to jail, or maybe they’d declare a mistrial, but I did what I had to do and then my cell phone—I patted my pockets. No phone—no harm was done and—
He cut me off midsentence. “Shut up. Just SHUT UP.”
I winced and shut up.
He scrubbed his face with his hands and then resumed his chin-to-fist position. I braced myself for whatever was coming.
“This ends right here, right now, Nate. You have an appointment with Dr. Parkerson tomorrow morning and—”
“No.”
“You’re going if I have to drag your ass there kicking and screaming,” he said angrily. And then almost to himself, “God, I blame myself for this.”
“You didn’t—”
“You have to deal with this, Nate. I’ve tried to respect your feelings, but this isn’t going to just go away or get better on its own. I can see that now. I should have seen it a long time ago. Do you have any idea how scared I was when we didn’t know where you were? How scared we all were? Anything could have happened out there. Anything! I won’t lose you.” His voice cracked and he paused a moment to compose himself. “You’re going, and I’m going with you. And you’re going to keep going, as often and as long as necessary, until you beat back this thing that’s eating you up. Do you understand me?”
His right eye was slightly swollen, the skin around it purple. How did I not notice that before?
“Who hit you?”
“Your dad,” he said offhandedly. “He coldcocked me when I tried to follow you out of the courtroom.”
“My dad?” I pondered that a moment, then felt heat rising in my veins. “Did you hit him back?”
He shook his head slightly. “Your mom beat me to it.”
“Mom?”
He smiled a little, but his eyes still flashed with resolve. “She used some words that made me blush. Man, she’s got a right hook. She could really give you some lessons.”
“Mom?”
“It took two of the guards to pull her off your dad.”
I tried to imagine my mom as a fighter, the look on my dad’s face when his passive ex turned grizzly. “Where is he now ... my dad?”
“I don’t know.”
He damn sure wasn’t here, I noted.
“Look,” he said, taking my hands in both of his and gripping so tightly my knuckles ground together, “you don’t have to do this alone, but you do have to do this. And you will, or I swear to God ...”
He didn’t finish, and I had no idea what he was swearing to do, but whatever it was, I believed him. He talked for a while, and I half listened, but mostly I just watched his face contort as he struggled to tell me what this was doing to him and everyone else who loved me. Mom and Grandma came in sometime during his speech, and he gave them a “He’s going to be okay,” and I knew a lot had been discussed while I was on the lam. When Mom placed a bowl of tomato soup and a grilled cheese sandwich on the table next to me, I pushed it away, but Adam pushed it right back and told me to eat. When I said I wasn’t hungry, he picked up a wedge and practically forced it into my mouth with an “Eat, goddammit.” I took it from him and choked down a few bites.
“Is this your idea of tough love?” I asked, dunking the wedge into the soup to prolong having to actually eat it.
“Any way you want it, baby.”
When I’d managed to eat half the sandwich and a few bites of soup, Adam hustled me up the stairs and turned on the shower, but I was too tired to do anything more than curl up on the bed. “Not yet,” he said, dragging me to my feet again. “You smell like a homeless person.”
Chapter 36
I didn’t tell Danial that when I’d protested, Adam had stripped me down himself and told me to get in. I didn’t tell Danial that when I did and hugged the wall, Adam had muttered something, then got undressed and climbed in with me. I didn’t tell Danial that Adam had peeled me off the wall, and when my eyes drifted over him, had said, “Don’t even think about it.”
“I can’t look at you naked and not think about it,” I’d said.
Adam had rolled his eyes, and the corners of his mouth twitched up just slightly. “Then don’t look.” He spun me around and the shower spray hit me in the face. I adjusted the showerhead, then braced my forearms against the wet tile and rested my forehead against my arms, allowing the spray to clear my head and pound into my shoulders as Adam got busy with the shower gel. It smelled like mango and oranges, and when I closed my eyes, the scent and Adam’s hands moving over my body and the hot water began to loosen the knots in my muscles. By the time he toweled me off and got me into some sleep pants, I was ready to collapse. From the bed, I watched him pull on a pair of my boxers and then turn off the light.
“Scooch over, handsome,” he said in the dark.
“You’re staying? Mom—”
“It was your mom’s idea.”
I thought about that as he rolled me to the wall and wrapped himself around me. “You’re my warden?”
“Yep.”
“I don’t suppose it would be ethical for the warden to cavort with the prisoner?”
“Nope.”
“I promise I won’t tell,” I’d said sleepily.
He’d scoffed, and the last thing I remembered was him saying, “Not tonight, baby. You need your sleep.”
I held on to Danial, but I kept that memory to myself. There were some things that belonged to Adam and me alone.
Adam called again during our walk, but Danial assured him I was okay and that I’d call back soon. I couldn’t explain why I wouldn’t take the phone. I just knew I needed him, and he wasn’t here.
“I’d heard things, but I never knew the whole story,” Danial said quietly as we sat on an arched stone bridge that traversed a small stream between the fairway and the green. He looked at me with such pity it made me squirm.
“Quit looking at me. You’re freaking me out.”
He smiled a little, but I could still see the pity. I didn’t want pity. I’d had enough of pity. He reached over and fished the pendant out of my shirt. “You never take this off.” He turned it over and rubbed his thumb across the engraving of Adam’s name. “Did he give it to you?”
“Yeah. He has the other half with my name on it. It was a Christmas gift last year.”
Danial dropped the pendant, and I tucked it back in my shirt. It was warm from his hands.
“Call him.”
I shook my head.
“You’re not going to straighten things out by running away. If you don’t call him, I will.”
“Don’t. Promise you won’t. He’ll just want to come rescue me. Because that’s what he does.”
“What’s wrong with that?”
“That’s not what a relationship should be about.”
“Can I just make an observation here?”
Would it have mattered if I’d said no?
“For such a smart guy, you’re quite a dumbass. Life is too damn short to be playing these games. Tell him how you feel.”
“Like you tell Jules?”
“That’s different.”
“Not so much. She likes you too, you know.”
He drew in a deep breath. “I’m not moving in on some other guy’s girl. Now quit changing the subject. Come on.” He stood up and pulled me to my feet. “I’m taking you home, and when you’re all alone and in your jammies and feeling all gooey again, call him. I know you love him. That’s so obnoxiously obvious. What’s the worst that could happen? Somebody gets hurt? But you gotta think about all the great things you could miss out on if you don’t take a chance. And if worse comes to worst, you can always come on to me again. Who knows? Maybe I’ve got some deep gay tendencies that just haven’t surfaced yet.”
I laughed. “Yeah, right. Trust me, if you had any gay tendencies, we’d be rolling in the grass right now.”
“Would you really have done that?”
I watched a lone cloud make its way across the face of the moon, slowly blotting out the bright moonlight, and realized how chilly it had gotten. I shivered from the cold and then I shivered again because I didn’t like my answer to that question.
“Never mind,” he said. “You didn’t.”
I could feel the muscles in my chi
n start to twitch again.
“Stop it,” Danial said, forcing me to look at him. “You didn’t. That’s all that matters. Don’t beat yourself up.” He gave me a big hug and took me home.
Danial was right—Adam and I, we needed to talk. To really talk, without suspicion and jealousy and anger. On the drive home, I made myself a promise. I would be honest with him. Completely, no-holds-barred honest. About why I’d pushed him to go to New York, about how desperately I hadn’t wanted him to go, about my fears and my flaws and the source of all the pettiness I’d subjected him to. And about how proud I was of him, about what a hero he’d always been for me. He would reassure me, and this time, I would believe him.
It was just past midnight. (One A.M. New York time.) Late. But he was probably still up, I told myself, somewhat sarcastically, and then remembered I wasn’t going to think that way. The plan: I would text, and if he was up, I would call. But then, I decided to check Skype first. While I waited for my computer to boot up, I undressed and tossed my suit on the back of my desk chair. Mom would freak when she saw the grass stain on my slacks. I sat down in my jammies as Danial called them, then decided what the hell and yanked them off. I settled in in my boxers just as Skype loaded. I was only marginally surprised to see Adam’s name with a little green check mark next to it. I clicked the call button thinking I might catch him in his briefs and we could turn on the webcam, and after we talked, maybe we could have one of those sexy conversations that had become all too infrequent.
A familiar voice, not Adam’s, answered, no video. “This must be Nate,” the voice said without even a hello, and I knew instantly I was talking to Justin.
“Where’s Adam?”
“You’ve got some nerve. I don’t know what kind of game you’re playing—”
“I want to talk to him.”
“He’s tired. Verrry tired. Tired, tired, tired,” he said, clearly suggesting that he, Justin, had something to do with that. “And he’s sleeping like a baby now.”
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