Dreamspinner Press Year Three Greatest Hits

by Jenna Hilary Sinclair

  “Exactly,” I said, but my voice was hollow. The entire day rolled in on me in one giant wave, and I’d rarely been so tired. I wanted to sleep forever, to have good dreams, to wake up next to Kevin and have it be an everyday occurrence. “This is impossible. We’re impossible. I want… I wish I could do this, but I can’t. I’m a coward.”

  “No, you’re not, you’re—”

  “Yes, I am,” I said calmly, and admitting the truth to him was eerily easy. “I used to think the opposite, but not anymore. Do you think I want to send you away? You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. You think I don’t want a life like everybody else has, with somebody to talk with, somebody to share with, somebody to love? I do. But I can’t.”

  He walked over to me again but stopped before taking that one step up to the foyer that would have put us on equal ground. He looked up to me and asked the one important question.

  “Why?”

  For a few trembling seconds I let the question hang. Surely I wasn’t going to….

  “I already told you,” I grated out.

  “That’s labeling, not explaining. Why? Why can’t we be together?”

  “Because of….”

  “What? What?” Kevin grabbed my arms, and I didn’t resist when he shook me. “Tell me!”

  I broke away from him and stumbled down onto the shag carpet I hated, across the room and through the door into the little area where I kept the kitchen table. I leaned on it, exhausted, my head hanging down, and I began to tremble. I’d never told anyone….

  “Because of graduation night.”

  He’d come up behind me. “What? I didn’t hear. What?”

  “I said, because of graduation night. And this.” I turned around and held my left arm out.

  He looked at my arm, clothed in the black sports coat I’d worn for the meeting, from my shoulder down to my wrist. He took my hand and held on, his fingers bearing down hard on me. “Tell me,” he said intensely, looking into my eyes.

  “I’ve never told the truth. Not even to….”

  I collapsed down onto the chair I used to eat dinner and breakfast. Kevin followed me without letting go of my hand, onto the chair that only Grant had ever sat in.

  With my arm stretched out on the table between us, I looked over at him. I should have known. I should have known months ago that this man would require everything of me.

  “You never told who?” Kevin asked quietly.

  “The cops,” I said. “Grant.” Nausea rolled up in me. I swallowed, but I couldn’t force it down. It was an old feeling and an old taste. “It happened….”

  “When you graduated from college?”

  I nodded, a monumental effort because I was dizzy with the memories. “I had a boyfriend in college. Sean Harrison. I loved him.” My mouth twisted. “Or I thought I did.”

  “You were, what, twenty-one? Twenty-two? We all make—”

  “No,” I said clearly. “This was more than a breakup. This was….” The night everything broke.

  In a moment my queasiness turned into full-blown vomit, heaving up from my stomach. I ran for the kitchen and spewed my guts out into the sink. I’d tried so hard to put that night behind me, to forget, but I hadn’t. It was all still there, rotting inside me, poisoning my heart and my brain. The filth burned my mouth. I heaved some more, clutching the edge of the sink, choking and wanting it all out of me, out of me, oh, God, out of me.

  Finally there was nothing more that I could spit out, but I didn’t move. I couldn’t. Hanging on seemed as much as I could do. A minute later Kevin reached past my head to turn on the water. I watched my puke wash down the garbage disposal, only inches away. Kevin rubbed the back of my neck.

  “Just breathe,” he said. “Breathe.”

  If he’d said one more thing, I felt as if I would disappear too, swirled around and around and down. But he didn’t. After a while I opened my mouth, and words I’d never said out loud were finally said.

  “I hate him!” I gasped. “God, I hate him.”

  “Tom….” I felt Kevin embrace my shoulders, and a moment later lips brushed the back of my head. “It’s okay, it’s—”

  I shrugged him away. “No, it’s not! Don’t patronize me.” I got myself up onto my good elbow, leaned on the counter, and wiped at my eyes with my other hand, but they were dry. “I hate him for being a coward, and I’ve become the exact same thing, haven’t I?” I turned just my head and looked through blurry eyes at Kevin. “Look at what you’ve done to me.”

  “Tom, I’m—”

  “Shut up,” I snapped at him, and then I stood up. “You want to know what happened? I’ll tell you, and then you’ll know why I’m not the man you need.” I reached for a glass I kept on the counter, ran water, and rinsed out my mouth. I dumped out what I hadn’t used and deliberately set it back where it’d been, delaying yet another second or two. I suddenly saw that I’d been doing more than keeping Kevin at arm’s length with my constant demands to conduct our relationship anywhere it couldn’t be real. Somehow I’d seen this moment of confession creeping up on me, and I’d been pushing it away and away…. Well, I couldn’t do that anymore.

  I turned and faced him. In the fluorescent light from overhead, his face was drawn as if he’d been kept awake for days.

  “They ran over my arm,” I said bluntly. Maybe I wanted him to be so horrified he’d leave me alone, or not want to hear any more. I watched while he drew in a quick breath, as the look in his eyes changed. “With a pickup truck. I was lucky with the way I was laying in the street that it was only my arm.”

  Kevin didn’t go. He stayed. “Jesus. Who?”

  “The group of guys who jumped me outside the bar.” I was shocked to hear myself. I sounded calm, but inside I was shattered glass.

  “A group?”

  “I couldn’t get Sean to go with me. His family was having a big celebration dinner for him, and then he was going out with some friends. We’d kept our relationship a secret, and we ran with separate crowds.” My mouth still tasted foul. I licked my lips. “So I went alone up to Austin. It’s not even half an hour away. I knew there was a gay bar there, and I wanted to go. It was my own personal celebration.”

  My gaze had drifted away from Kevin’s; I forced myself back to confront his distress. Already he looked gutted, and I hadn’t even…. My lips kept moving. “It didn’t matter that I did it without Sean. He wouldn’t have cared. We’d see each other a lot over the summer, and then we were going to meet in Dallas in the fall, where we’d each gotten teaching jobs. I thought we’d find an apartment together.”

  “But….” I could see Kevin didn’t understand the connection. “But you didn’t do that with him?”

  “No,” I said wearily. “I wasn’t able to work in the fall because I was still all messed up. I didn’t come here until the year after. That whole year Grant propped me up. He made me fit for working again. He made sure I applied for this job at Gunning and shoved me out the door when the time came, patting me on the back the whole time. He thought I was healed enough by then.”

  Kevin came closer and put his hand on my bad arm, the one that always felt cold. “You’re not healed yet, are you?”

  “No,” I whispered, and I hated the tears that washed into my eyes. Hated that Kevin understood that when I hadn’t until now. Angrily, I held back the tears.

  “Being gay-bashed, run over…. Tom, anybody would take that kind of violence hard, it’s no wonder—”

  “That’s not it.”

  “That’s not what?” He frowned at me.

  I turned away from him in my narrow galley kitchen. The refrigerator was to my left, the sink with its curtained window hiding the world was to my right. With Kevin behind me, I was trapped where I was.

  That was okay. I could talk. It would only be telling a story. I looked at the clock on the wall, feet in front of me. Almost one o’clock. The second hand moved, the minutes would pass, and the years, they had passed behind me, hadn’t they? Sti
ll, I remembered the attack like it was yesterday.

  “I came out of the bar around one o’clock. Like a fool, I’d parked on the street, blocks away. No lights, no other people, but footsteps behind me, a bunch of them. I tried to pretend they didn’t mean anything. I’d just got to my car when they came up behind me and knocked me to the ground.”

  It sounded so simple to say knocked to the ground. Nothing like how it’d really been: my racing heart, reaching for the car door, the fist coming out of nowhere pounding my face, the crunch of my nose blooming blood, another punch in the gut and doubling over, calls of that got him, what a pansy, can’t even fight, hey look, it’s that guy from history class, he’s been pretending he’s normal and then the roar of anger from all of them. Almost all of them. Five of them against me. I’d never been a fighter. Never been punched seriously. Never felt the shock of sudden pain that robbed me of thought.

  I took a breath and went on, but it wasn’t as easy this time as I got closer to the truth. “They were all drunk. Hell, I was drunk too. I had a hard time seeing who they were, but every time I got one of their faces in focus, I saw that it was somebody I knew from school. They must’ve been out in downtown Austin celebrating too. I guess one of them had the bright idea to go razz the gays. I don’t know how they found the bar. When I was in rehab, sometimes I dreamed that Sean told them.”

  “He wouldn’t have,” Kevin soothed from behind me, senselessly. He didn’t know, did he? But his hands were on me, flat on my back, on my shoulder blades, caring, and when did anybody touch me because he cared?

  “They were out to beat up a faggot. The fact that they’d found somebody they all knew just made it sweeter.”

  I was in the gym locker room with him last month! God, disgusting! Get him, Andy, get him good.

  “I tried to fight back, but I didn’t have a chance. Every time I got back to my feet, they knocked me down. And kicked.” I wanted to protect my side as I remembered how that had felt, to be helplessly flat with the concrete against my back, to see one of them draw back his foot and know I couldn’t roll away before it got my ribs. “A lot of kicking when I was down, and it wasn’t long before I wasn’t in very good shape. I…. ”

  I wouldn’t throw up again, I wouldn’t. I could tell Kevin this, but not too much. Not that I’d choked on the taste of my own blood, and how I’d panicked when more of it dripped down into my eyes. But I could tell him this much. “I’d never hurt like that before.”

  I’d moaned there on the ground, rolling from side to side and praying they’d stop or that I’d die. But they’d kept at it and at it, going on and on…. And when they finally had stopped, it was only because they’d thought of something worse than beating me up.

  “They hauled me up onto my knees and I couldn’t stay up. They were saying something I couldn’t make any sense of, because it was hard to hear anything, there was this ringing…. I fell down, but they got me on my knees again, with two of them holding me up by my arms. ‘Somebody stick it in’, they said, and I knew what they meant. Later on, I was grateful it wasn’t rape.”

  Kevin pressed against me. “My God, Tom. That was rape, of course it was.”

  I barely heard him. I was back in that moment, what I’d tried to forget. It wasn’t a story I was telling. This was real. This had happened to me. My tongue was thick in my mouth but I kept going. “They argued about it, who would do the deed, and then they stopped and there was this bare dick in front of me. Somebody grabbed my hair and pulled my head back, and I saw who it was. It was… it was Sean.”

  He’d been there all along. That pair of Adidas sneakers I’d seen when I’d rolled over onto my side, retching—those were Sean’s. That voice I’d heard shouting, “You make me sick, fag!”—that had been Sean’s.

  “No!” Kevin choked out.

  “He looked down at me, and it was like we didn’t even know each other. He said…. He said….”

  “It’s all right, you don’t have to tell anymore. Tom, don’t.”

  But I had to get it all out. The things Sean had said to me. “He said, ‘I thought you were my friend. But you’re a homo. You’re disgusting. Take it, bitch.’ It was like we’d never… never….” I couldn’t keep my tears in anymore. They spilled over my cheeks. “He used to love sixty-nining with me. That was his favorite thing. On Saturday night, we’d get drunk and pass out in his room, and when we woke up we’d—”

  “Damn him!”

  Even with tears flowing down my face, it was Kevin who was feeling it, not me. My anger from minutes before was gone. I was numb, transparent, without any substance of my own. It was better this way; had I waited all this time for someone to feel for me? “Yeah. Damn him. He just… shoved it… shoved it… in my mouth.”

  “Tom….” Kevin laid his head on my shoulder now, and he was practically holding me up with his arms around me from behind. “Honey, please don’t.”

  I couldn’t stop now. “Everybody was shouting and making bets… on how long it would take. I couldn’t…. I kept seeing him over me, the look on his face, and I thought it couldn’t be true. It couldn’t be him fucking my mouth, but it was.”

  “He’s the coward,” Kevin spit out. “He was running with the crowd and got caught in it, didn’t he? And he didn’t know how to get himself out of it, even when it was you they found to bash. Oh, Tom, oh, hell….”

  The salt of my crying had trickled into my mouth. “Afterward…. I’ve never known where the truck came from. I thought they were done with me. I didn’t even know I was lying in the street and not on the sidewalk.”

  “Bastards!”

  “The cops said I shouldn’t assume that whoever attacked me also ran me over, but that never made any sense to me. It was them.”

  He drew back a little “Wait a minute. What do you mean, whoever attacked you?”

  “I couldn’t see them, didn’t you know? It was dark, there were so many of them, and the cops didn’t push me on it. I was just another faggot who got what he deserved, you know?”

  “Fuck! You did that to protect Sean?”

  “I did it to protect myself,” I said harshly. “So I wouldn’t have to testify. I couldn’t do that. By the time I was well enough for them to question me, I’d decided that nobody would ever know what really…. I didn’t want to think about him, didn’t want to think about any of it, and I—”

  “Wait a minute, wait a minute.” Kevin didn’t give me a choice, he turned me around to face him. “You said that you’d never told this to anybody…. So nobody knew about the rape? You mean since then you’ve never told—”

  “Wasn’t being run over enough? I was only another guy from the gay bar bashed in the night, with FAGGOT scraped into the hood of my car with a key. Nobody needed to know anything else. It wasn’t like there was any evidence.”

  His voice shook. “You should have told, should have…. You needed counseling, help, some way to cope—”

  “And then maybe I wouldn’t be so messed up, is that what you’re saying?”

  “You were betrayed by your closest friend, for God’s sake, by your lover. No wonder you—” He stopped abruptly.

  I finished for him. “No wonder I decided that alive in the closet was better than dead on the street. And that I could do just fine going to Houston now and then. It was all I needed, until you came along.”

  “I hate Sean,” Kevin hissed.

  Kevin reflected me again, because I couldn’t dredge up that same hatred, not now, though I knew I’d felt it before. I was too exhausted, too emptied.

  “And now you know why I am the way I am,” I said. “Why you and me together are impossible. I’ve got good reason for how I live. Now, will you leave?”

  Kevin didn’t answer out loud. Instead, he pulled me forward, wrapped his arms around me, and hugged me close.

  I stood stiffly within his hold for a long time as he cried against my neck, because he was here when he shouldn’t be, and he cared about me, and I didn’t know if I could to
lerate his caring, not about this. It was as if I’d have to walk barefoot across the shards of brokenness inside me to get to him, and I’d already been hurt so badly.

  But after a while, sheer tiredness forced me to lean my head against his, and my hand inched up to clutch his shirt. I staggered against him and then rested within his hold. My eyelids drooped.

  He whispered my name and spread his fingers in my hair. Swirls of images, feelings, sounds raced through my mind: the grunt that Sean always made when he came, that all those other guys heard when he gave it up to me on graduation night and flooded my mouth with bitterness; blinking my eyes open for the first time in the hospital, cushioned by the pain meds; the one and only time my parents came to visit me in the rehab facility, and after that Grant awkwardly explaining how busy they were; how empty my house seemed on the day I moved in with not much furniture, and how grateful I was to close the door behind me; the first time I received a thank-you note from a student, and then the time a parent told me I’d made a real difference in her daughter’s life; the last song of the night at Good Times, when a dark-haired stranger came up to me and asked me to dance.

  “God, Tom,” Kevin husked. “I’m so sorry.”

  It was like coming up through water to hear him and to know that he was here with me. I’d told somebody. I’d told Kevin.

  “I’m so sorry that you had to go through that, that it happened to you.” He pulled back and took my face between his hands. “You’ve been alone with this for a long time.”

  “Now you know.”

  He looked so serious. “Thanks for telling me. It explains a lot.”

  I took in a deep breath. “My whole life. Kevin, I can’t change. This is it. This is me now.”

  His hands on my face moved up over my ears, down to my neck, and back to where they’d started. “I love you.”

  God, I wished he’d stop saying that. He cut me each time he did. “It doesn’t matter. We can’t be together.”

  “You’re exhausted.”

  “Awake, asleep, tired or not, it’s always the same thing. I made a big mistake trying to date you. I didn’t mean to lead you on. I thought….”