At my own door, I thrust my hand in my pocket and came up empty, trying the other; still nothing. The panicky feeling overpowered the hangover, and I began pounding on my door. Mike appeared in the hallway in his jeans, his hair in complete disarray. Without a word, he grabbed me around the waist and pulled me back to his room. I fought, my feet coming off the floor in my attempts to break free of his grasp.
When we were in his room, he put me down and closed the door, then turned back around, looking at me as if I’d lost my mind.
“What the hell is wrong with you? You’re going to wake up the whole house,” Mike said, reaching down to pick up his T-shirt off the floor and put it on. He grabbed mine and threw it to me, and I pulled it on so I didn’t feel quite as exposed, though by that point it didn’t really matter.
“I betrayed him. I gave up everything to come out here and be with him, and I threw away everything we meant to each other by sleeping with some random guy,” I blurted without thinking. Mike flinched, and I felt sick at the look of pain that crossed his face.
“Look, I get that you’re upset,” he said evenly. “But I am not some random guy. I thought we were friends, Brian.”
“I didn’t mean that. I’m sorry. We are friends. Please, I’m sorry. I’m just… I’m….”
“Freaking out,” Mike supplied, and I nodded, seriously considering crawling back under the covers and never coming back out again. “There’s nothing to freak out about, Brian; it’s just sex.” He reached over, grabbed his phone, opened it, and sent a message.
“I just sent Kenny a text telling him we weren’t going to be in,” he said casually.
“Oh my God, Kenny,” I said, and my stomach lurched again. Damn it. Mike and I were supposed to be at work. The day was just getting worse and worse.
“As much as I’m sure he’d love to hear you saying that in a slightly different context…,” Mike started with a smirk.
“This isn’t funny, Mike. If I lose this job…. If I can’t…. God, my head hurts.” I felt the bed dip as I sat with my head in my hands, trying desperately not to throw up again.
“Relax, kid,” he said and began to rub my back lightly. “This is why we took you out last night in the first place. You’re so uptight, so wound up all the time, so… so serious. You’re eighteen years old; it’s okay to relax a little. Everyone in this house: me, Leo, Andy, Em, we’re all your friends, and friends look out for each other.” I heard a loud beep, and Mike checked his phone. “Kenny said it’s a light day and he hopes you feel better.”
Mike sat on the bed and leaned back against the headboard as I lay with my head on the pillow next to his hip. Reaching down, he ran his fingers through my hair, pulling it back out of my eyes. It was soothing, easing the ache in my head.
“I haven’t had very many friends,” I admitted quietly.
“What do you mean?” The hand stroking my hair paused for a moment before resuming, and I closed my eyes, trying to will the room to stop spinning.
“My parents were killed during a home invasion when I was three years old. I went into foster care, and until age eleven, I moved from home to home. See, I was there when my… when it happened, and I had some trouble dealing with it. Some of the homes I got placed in had other kids, and they couldn’t deal with my… problems.”
“What kind of problems?” Mike asked, pulling me over so my head was resting on his leg instead of the pillow. I’m not sure if he realized how being touched by someone I trusted comforted me, because I’d been without that almost my whole life.
“Nightmares, mostly. I woke up in so many different places growing up that I woke up screaming almost every night. It wasn’t until I was placed with the Schreibers when I was eleven that I began to get over it. When… when I met Jamie.” I wrapped my arms tighter around his leg, and he lightly rubbed my back.
“You told us that your last name is Schreiber. Did you take their name or something when you came out here?”
“My last name is Schreiber. When I was in school all of the kids thought of me as the foster kid. They figured my parents didn’t want me, so there must be something wrong with me. The only one who looked past that was Jamie. When his parents took him away just before the start of our senior year, I had no one. My secret had come out, and everyone knew I was gay. Soon after the school year started, one of my classmates… he and a couple of his friends put me in the hospital with a broken jaw, broken ribs, and a broken leg. During the two months I stayed home to recover from it, the state investigated the Schreibers, and I was almost taken from them and placed somewhere else. I don’t know if Richard and Carolyn just didn’t realize how much I meant to them or if they just assumed that I wouldn’t want to be adopted, but when the state investigated, it scared them, so they adopted me.” I couldn’t help the smile that came to my face at the thought. Even if I never found Jamie, I would always have two people in my life who loved me without limit. They had chosen me to be their son.
“Wait… what? You’re telling me that your foster parents found out that you were gay and they adopted you anyway?” Mike asked, and his voice sounded choked and hoarse. I sat up slowly and looked at him.
“Richard and Carolyn knew before Jamie left that I was gay. Richard kind of found out by accident because I’d done a search on his computer, but he sat down and talked to me about it. He’s a doctor, so it was more about staying safe and keeping myself protected than feelings and stuff. Carolyn seemed to just know, and she’s the one I talked to about….” Mike’s face had gone hard, colder than I had ever seen his normally jovial expression. “What?”
“You had parents that loved you, adopted you even after they found out that you were gay, and you gave that up to chase after some guy?” He looked sick, and I wondered if he was going to need that wastebasket too, but then he pushed me away and stood up.
“I don’t understand,” I said, frightened by his abrupt change in mood. Something must have shown in my face, because he softened a little.
“I’m going to go get us some breakfast. Why don’t you lie back down for a while? I’ll be back in a few minutes.” Without another word, he turned and walked out the door.
For the next twenty minutes, I lay on his bed with the scent of him surrounding me and stared at the door. Mike was my best friend, even closer than Adam and I had been, and I’d just screwed that up.
When he returned holding a fast-food bag, an orange sports drink, and a coffee cup, he looked like his normal laid-back self. Smiling at me as he set the food on his desk, he turned and closed the door behind him.
“I’m sorry that I made you mad,” I said quickly. Handing me the sports drink, he kept the coffee for himself and threw the bag on the bed between us.
“Baby, I wasn’t mad at you,” he said quietly, reaching into the bag. “Sausage or bacon?”
I took the sausage sandwich and set it on my leg. It was still warm, and the smell made my stomach turn. He set a greasy little bag on top of the sandwich, and I saw hash browns inside.
“You’re dehydrated, you need to drink that,” he said around a mouthful of his own sandwich. I popped open the sports drink and took a small sip, waiting to see if it came back up, relieved when it didn’t. After I’d sipped my way through about half the drink, I tried a bite of the hash browns, and my stomach snarled with hunger. Mike grinned as I started on the sandwich, and he threw his garbage into the can by his bed. Grimacing at the contents I had deposited earlier, he took the can and left the room for a few minutes.
Returning, he set it back down by his bed and started getting his stuff together to go take a shower. Where I had a mesh bag on the back of my door with my stuff, his was scattered all over his dresser. I watched him, finishing my sandwich and the drink.
“Mike, uhm, why did you get upset earlier? What bugs you about me being here?” I asked him tentatively. I didn’t want to argue with him, but if there was a subject we should avoid discussing, I wanted to know. His shoulders sagged, and he stood motionl
ess in front of the dresser for a minute before turning around.
“I like that you’re here, Brian. It’s been a long time since I’ve had someone that I clicked with. The other guys and I get along fine, but you and I have fun together, you know?” He came over to the bed and sat sideways with one leg hanging off the side. He sighed sadly. “I guess since you told me your sob story, it’s only fair that I tell you mine. The only one who knows the whole story is Leo, so I’d like to keep this between us, okay?”
“I’m not going to talk about you,” I said quietly.
“I know, kid. When I was fourteen, I had a friend named Derrick. We were buddies. We played football together, hung out at each other’s houses, stuff like that. One night his parents went out of town, and my parents said he could stay at our house. Now, I’d dated a couple of girls, and so had Derrick. We’d fooled around a little with them, but we were still really just kids. Well, that night we’d started talking about stuff we’d done, and we got kinda horny. We started messin’ around and were jerking each other off when my dad came in to tell us that dinner was ready. It was around that time that I’d started to wonder if maybe I was gay, and that make-out session with Derrick kind of confirmed it because it was a helluva lot hotter than I’d had with any girl. My dad and I got into it, and he threw me out.” He shrugged, but the pain in his face told me much more than his forced casualness.
“What about your mom?” I asked. Of course, I knew it happened, parents throwing away their kids. Tossing them out like garbage for something they couldn’t control. But I never understood it. That’s not what I thought being a parent was about.
“She just stood back and let him do it. God’s wrath, burning in hell, and all that crap. All I heard from her was ‘Micah, how could you turn away from God?’ Then the God-fearing people turned their fourteen-year-old son out in the street with no job, no money, nothing. I thought those Christian freaks were supposed to be loving and charitable,” he said savagely.
“Micah? I figured your name was Michael.”
“Yeah, we covered that last night,” he said, the ghost of a smile reappearing on his lips.
“So, after you left, what did you do?” I asked, unable to imagine how he had survived.
“My big brother Elijah was at college here in San Diego. So I hitched down the coast to where he was. I got pretty good at trading blow jobs for rides with lonely, pervy truckers.” He looked out the window, shocking me with the casual way he talked about prostituting himself just to get a ride to someone who could help. My heart ached for him.
“But when I got down here, he couldn’t help me. I mean, he was just eighteen himself, living in a dorm. His roommate was on spring break, so I stayed in his dorm and ate on his meal card while we tried to figure out what to do. At first, he tried talking to my parents, but they threatened to disown him too. Then he asked around campus and found out about the gay and lesbian center. That’s where I met Leo. I lived and worked at a youth shelter until I turned eighteen. By then I’d saved up enough to try and start my life. Leo helped me get my GED and hooked me up with Kenny. I’ve survived the last nine years, no thanks to my parents,” he finished quietly. “My brother graduated and went to work at my dad’s firm in Northern California. We e-mail, but I haven’t seen him in a long time.”
“So when I said that my parents were okay with me being gay and I left anyway, you thought I’d given up all the wrong things,” I guessed, and he nodded. “I didn’t give up my parents, Mike. I talk to them all the time. They weren’t thrilled with the idea of me chasing after Jamie, but they accepted it.”
“Until today, I thought you were a runaway,” he admitted.
“No, I’m not a runaway. I just thought I’d be running to something, and so far I’ve found nothing,” I said with a sigh.
“Okay, before we both get depressed, let’s go take a shower. I can’t stand the bar grime anymore,” Mike said, getting up and grabbing his shower stuff. “Oh, I found your keys; they were on the floor of the Jeep.” He tossed the keys to me, and I threw my garbage from breakfast into the empty can by his bed. In my room, I grabbed my stuff off the back of the door while Mike waited in the hall. Something in our friendship had changed. It was either because we’d had sex, which I still couldn’t remember, or revealed our pasts. Either way, I felt closer to him. It didn’t feel like a romantic kind of closeness like the one I’d felt with Jamie, or the strictly platonic friendship I had with Adam.
We had found a true and lasting friendship, something I didn’t think I’d ever had.
I felt better as we walked back down the hall after showering, in separate stalls despite Mike’s joking protest. He stopped me as I put my hand on my door.
“Hey, come back to my room for a few. I want to talk to you about something,” he said and pulled me down the hall.
As I sat down on the bed, he sat down next to me and got right to the point.
“Brian, why were you so upset when you woke up? Last night…. Well, last night you were so sad, talking about how alone you felt. You said that he left you and hasn’t even tried to find you like you’re trying to find him. It broke my heart, so I tried to give you what you needed. I know I was drunk too, but I thought it would make you happy,” Mike said, looking a little sheepish.
I sighed and looked out his small window, wondering how much I should tell him. “I was upset because I felt like I had betrayed Jamie. When he left, the one thing that he told me was never to forget that he loves me. I never have. Even in his letter when he told me to go on with my life, he still made sure to remind me that he loved me,” I explained, and looked back at Mike. I took a deep breath and exhaled slowly. “Aside from last night, which I don’t remember, I’ve only had sex once, and that was with Jamie. Making love for us was an expression of how we felt about each other. Now, I’ve taken that sacred thing that we did together and I’ve done it with someone else.”
Mike was shaking his head. “Sex and love don’t have anything to do with each other, kid,” he said, holding up a finger as I started to protest. “No, really. I mean, yes, people that are in love have sex, but it’s really just a physical release that we all do in one form or another. You said that you’d only had sex once, but you jack off, right?” Stunned, I looked at him, feeling the heat in my face as I started to blush from his question.
“Baby, there’s nothing wrong with yankin’ yer own chain. I do it when I’m tired and can’t sleep, or horny and don’t have anyone to mess around with. We all do it. There’s nothing shameful about it. When you have to sneeze, you sneeze. When you have to cough, you cough. It’s the same premise; it’s just something your body needs,” he reasoned. “As for sex, it’s really just giving your body what it needs and doing the same for someone else at the same time.” I looked at him in disbelief. “No, I mean, really. If you and a friend sit in the same room and jerk off together, maybe doing a little butt play while you do it, the only thing that stops it from being sex is proximity.” He looked rather proud of this argument, and I couldn’t help it; I started to laugh.
“I don’t know,” I said, catching my breath. “I just never saw myself doing that with someone other than Jamie.”
“You have to be realistic, Brian,” he said, suddenly serious. “There are, what, over a million people in San Diego? You’re looking for one. I don’t mean to be harsh, but the chance of you finding that one person is remote at best. What happens if you don’t find him? You’re never going to have sex again? Are you just going to keep your life on hold? It’s been, what, like two years? You need to live your life, baby.”
Deep in my heart, the heart that was breaking more every day that I didn’t find Jamie, I knew Mike was right. Jamie might not even be in California anymore, and there was a chance I would never find him. I’d already wasted one opportunity at life—going to college in Alabama. I had a great life here with a nice place to live, a job, and amazing friends who accepted and genuinely cared about me.
“I’
m not going to give up looking for Jamie,” I told him gravely, “but I do have to start preparing for the possibility that I won’t… that I won’t find him. Everything in my life has been focused on him for the last two years. I think you’re right. Maybe I need to start focusing on me.”
“I think so too. Once you’ve been here a year and established residency, you could try to get a student loan or a scholarship and go to school. You could do anything,” Mike offered, and as I thought about it, lots of possibilities opened up to me for a life in San Diego. I would always continue to look for Jamie, but I could do other things too. The plan that I had come up with in my little bedroom back in Alabama had never dealt with the possibility that I wouldn’t find Jamie. Thinking back, I guess I figured I’d just go back home if things didn’t work out. Even though I missed Richard and Carolyn, going back to Alabama wasn’t something I wanted to do.
“That’s a great idea,” I told him, and he smiled before moving up on the bed so we were lying next to each other.
“Now, with conversation out of the way, let’s get back to this other thing.” He shifted his towel because it had bunched up underneath him, and it drew my attention to the fact that we were still sitting on his bed practically naked.
“What other thing?”
“Aside from the not-so-memorable night with me,” he said, rolling his eyes, and I blushed, “you’ve really only had sex one time?” His tone was incredulous, like it wasn’t possible that at eighteen I’d only had sex once. It made me feel somewhat inadequate, but I had only wanted it to be with Jamie.
“Yes,” I told him honestly. “Jamie and I had done other things, but we only had intercourse once. As for last night, I guess we really did….”
“Twice,” he replied with an arrogant smugness in his voice that almost made me smile. “So, you like to top or bottom better?”
“I don’t know if I like to be on top better. When… when we made love, Jamie was on top,” I admitted, feeling a little shy talking about sex.
Destiny (Waiting for Forever) Page 13